_The Descendant_, 1897. _Phases of an Inferior Planet_, 1898. _The Voice of the People_, 1900. _The Freeman and Other Poems_, 1902. _The Battleground_, 1902. _The Deliverance_, 1904. _The Wheel of Life_, 1906. _The Ancient Law_, 1908. _The Romance of a Plain Man_, 1909. _The Miller of Old Church_, 1911. _Virginia_, 1913. _Life and Gabriella_, 1916. _The Builders_, 1919. _One Man in His Time_, 1922. _Miss Glasgow’s first two books were brought out by Harper & Brothers, New York; all the rest are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York._ CHAPTER IV GERTRUDE ATHERTON Gertrude Atherton has been the subject of more controversy than any other living American novelist. It is one of the best evidences of her importance. England, we are told, regards her as the greatest living novelist of America. Many Americans so rate her. Abroad, the opinion of her work approaches something like unanimity and it is very high. At home unanimity is nowhere. Prophets are not the only ones who occasionally suffer a lack of honor in their own countries. A good deal of it comes out of Mrs. Atherton’s long-standing and vigorous assault on the literary schools of William Dean Howells and Henry James. Pick up her novel _Patience Sparhawk and Her Times_, written over twenty years ago, and you will find a trace of that feeling in her delineation of Patience’s schoolteacher, who read these literary gods. But Mrs. Atherton seldom speaks her mind by indirection; all who cared have known her opinions as fast as she reached them. She has no use for commonplace people in life or fiction; and by commonplace people we mean not everyday people, but people about whom there is no distinction of thought or sensibility, who have no sharpness, no individuality however simple, no gift however slight. Henry James Forman says that Mrs. Atherton is the novelist of genius, but this is one of those brilliantly epigrammatic characterizations which convey the truth by bold exaggeration. She has not always written of geniuses, but always she has written of men and women who had backbone, courage, distinct and recognizable selves, ambition, wit, daring, not merely flash but fire. She really writes about herself in dozens of reincarnations. Nothing daunts her that is alive--vulgarity, wickedness, weakness and bold sin she can understand and portray as accurately as the shining virtues. The only thing she cannot endure is the dead-alive. Mr. Forman was in essentials right when he said of her in the New York _Evening Post_ of June 15, 1918: “Genius has a particular fascination for her, and with a rare boldness she would rather face difficulties of creating or re-creating genius in her fiction than to waste time on mediocre protagonists. With the newer school of English and American novelists, with the Frank Swinnertons, the J. D. Beresfords, or the Mary Wattses, she has nothing in common, unless it be their patience. But she will not expend that patience on the drab or the colorless.