The Book _Porgy_* (the "g" is hard as in "gate") may be said to have combined or expanded the highly wrought technique of the best type of realistic dramatic short story with the more ponderable bulk of the novel, and from the standpoint of diction to have attained with a natural felicity all the dignity and beauty of a highly-wrought style. Its early appearance was greeted with acclaim, and the first glow of enthusiasm was sustained and enhanced by the more judicious and pondered praise of careful critics. _Porgy_, indeed is the first American novel about the American negro which depicts him faithfully, as he exists in a particular place, and yet presents him as a purely artistic but faithfully realistic study of a phase of human life. Mr. Heyward and his first novel were thus a nice example of a particular environment producing an artist peculiarly capable of exploiting the intriguing differences of his province in universal terms. * "Porgy", the name given to Mr. Heyward's hero by the colored fishermen who lived in and about Cat-fish Row and plied their trade by sailing out of Charleston harbor to the black-fish banks, is the local name for black-fish, hence the derivation of the nickname. The author was born and raised in Charleston, S.C. He first saw the light in August, 1885, inheriting from a long line of Revolutionary and Colonial ancestry the essential American traditions and the philosophy of aristocratic planters nurtured upon almost feudal plantations. In the late 1880's and throughout the 1890's the South as a whole, particularly the "Carolina Low Country" about Charleston, was still in the throes of the aftermath of Reconstruction. Mr. Heyward's family, like thousands of others, had lost their property as a result of the Civil War, and he was from the first forced to confront not only an extreme private poverty but the then all but hopeless economic condition of his section. At an early age he became the sole support of his widowed mother and struggled manfully and hopefully against "a sea of troubles". Yet there was a fortunate side to all this, one then difficult to see, but present nevertheless. The very difficulties of the place into which he had been born forced the future chronicler of its charms and grotesqueness into an intimate contact with the life of the locality, and permitted him to drink it in through understanding eyes. The aftermath of the Civil War had put a premium upon living for being rather than living for possession. One did not of necessity appear in the latest fashions in Charleston ball rooms, yet the balls and the traditions of the society which they represented went on. The old city continued in her old ways. To a visitor it seemed as if time had been arrested. Mr. Heyward was intimately familiar with it all. The place, indeed, became a part of him, yet it did not too entirely possess him.