The American Academy of Arts and Letters says a word for the Older Generation now and then by choosing new academicians from its ranks. No one else for a long while now has been so poor as to do it reverence. Indeed, the readers of some of our magazines must have long since concluded that there are no fathers and mothers in the modern literary world, but only self-created heralds of the future who do not bother even to be rebellious against a generation they condemn. The older generation is in a difficult situation, because, apparently, no one knows precisely who and what it is. The younger generation, of course, is made up of every one who dislikes Tennyson, believes in realism, reads De Gourmont, and was not responsible for the war. That is perfectly definite. We are somewhat puzzled by the uncounted hordes of the youthful in appearance who support the movies, are stolidly conservative in the colleges, never heard of De Gourmont, and have forgotten the war. But perhaps that is some other younger generation which no one has taken the trouble to write about--yet. As for the older generation, what actually is it, and who in reality are they? The general impression seems to be that they are the Victorians, they are Howells and his contemporaries, they are the men and women who created the family magazine, invented morality, revived Puritanism, and tried to impose evolution on a society that preferred devolution by international combat. But these men are all dead, or have ceased writing. They are not _our_ older generation. It is true that they are famous and so convenient for reference, but it is not accurate nor fair to drag them from their graves for purposes of argument. The true older generation, of which one seldom hears in current criticism except in terms of abuse, remains to be discovered, and we herewith announce its personnel, so that the next time the youthful writer excoriates it in the abstract all may know just whom he means. Among the older generation in American literature are H. L. Mencken and Mrs. Edith Wharton, Booth Tarkington and Stuart P. Sherman, Miss Amy Lowell and Mr. Frank Moore Colby, Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson, Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg, Mrs. Gerould and Professor William Lyon Phelps, Edgar Lee Masters, Joseph Hergesheimer, and most of the more radicaleditors of New York. Here is this group of desiccated Victorians, upholders of the ethics of Mr. Pickwick, and the artistic theories of Bulwer-Lytton. Here are the bogies of outworn conservatism, numbered like a football team. Mark their names, and know from now on that most of the books that you have supposed were solid in artistry and mature in thought, though perhaps novel in tone or in method, were written by the older generation.