The nearer we come to the present, the more we notice the inability of American writers to imitate Hawthorne’s admirable realism in psychology. It was James Branch Cabell’s ambition to restore romanticism to its former rights, by ridding it of exaggerated realism on the one hand, and of Puritanism on the other. From this point of view his work is most significant. The attempt to give to American literature a new romantic form of fiction could succeed only if the ground were cleared. Cabell’s work presents itself in a double aspect; first as a revolt against realism, secondly as an anti-Puritan Declaration of Independence. This effort was doubly heroic and it has been amply compensated for by its success. On one hand, it was necessary to defend and maintain the rights of imagination in a period of overflowing realism, and on the other to claim for that very imagination all the rights usurped by the realists in a Puritan country. That, then, is what the novelist has been able to accomplish. James Branch Cabell is of Southern origin. From an old local stock, he was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1879. He was educated at William and Mary College, where he taught Greek and French. Like most contemporary American writers, he went through the journalistic mill and then began doing literary work. He traveled in France, Ireland and England. Like Anatole France, he is a genealogist and an antiquarian. His taste for legends, for folklore and heraldry, turned him into an explorer of archives. He began with short stories and poems, followed by two or three novels whose scene is laid in his native land. Though his first chronologically, these early books have been relegated to the background by the author. He took them up again and revised them to make them fit into the cycle of Dom Manuel and Jurgen, the most recent form of epic cycles.