"New York hasn't the puzzles and adventures and surprises that Georgia has. Everybody knows about apartment-houses and skyscrapers and subways and elevators and dumb-waiters--there's nothing new to say about them. "I sometimes think that the reason why the modern novel about New York City is so uninteresting is because everybody tries to write about New York City. And their novels are all of one pattern--necessarily, because life in New York City is all of one pattern. "In bygone days this was not true of New York. For instance, Mr. Howells's novels about New York City were about a community in which people lived in real houses and had families and friends. In those days life in New York had its problems and surprises and adventures; it was not lived mechanically and according to a set pattern. "What I have said about the advisability of an author's leaving the scenes about which he is to write is not universally true. There are writers who do better work by staying in the place where the scenes of their stories are laid. For instance, Joel Chandler Harris did better work by staying in the South than he would have done if he had gone away." "But wasn't that because his negro folk-tales were a sort of 'glorified reporting' rather than creative work?" I asked. "No," said Mr. Harben; "they were creative work. Joel Chandler Harris remembered just the bare skeleton of the stories as the negro had told them to him. And he developed them imaginatively. That was creative work. And he did most of his writing, and the best of his writing, in the office of _The Constitution_." "In view of what you said about the difficulty of absorbing New York life," I suggested, "I suppose that, in your opinion, the great American novel will not be written about New York." "What do you mean by the great American novel?" asked Mr. Harben. "So far as I know there is no great English novel or great Russian novel." "I suppose that the term means a novel inevitably associated with the national literature," I said. "You cannot think of English literature without thinking of _Vanity Fair_, for instance. Certainly there is no American novel so conspicuously a reflection of our national life as that novel is of English life." "Well," said Mr. Harben, "it is difficult to think of American literature or of American life without thinking of the novels of William Dean Howells. But the great American novel, to use that term, would be less likely to come into being than the great English novel. "You see, the United States is not as compact as England. London, it may be said, is England; it has all the characteristics of England, and in the season all England may be met there." Mr. Harben is not in sympathy with the theories of some of our modern realists.