included Old Virginia and her Neighbours, The Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America, New France and New England, A Critical Period, The American Revolution, and The Mississippi Valley in the Civil War (1900). He wrote a work on Theodore Parker, A Century of Science, a history of the United States for schools, and with James Grant Wilson edited Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography.

William Dean Howells was born at Martin's Ferry, Belmont County, in the state of Ohio, on 1st March 1837. His father, William Cooper Howells, a busy but not always prosperous printer and journalist, was of Welsh Quaker descent, and

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS.
From a Photograph by Notman.

a Swedenborgian in creed, so that in that form of quasi-theological belief the future novelist was brought up. According to his own statement he was 'self-taught,' which must mean simply that in boyhood he had no regular schooling, since he appears to have been afterwards a student at Harvard and Yale, and at one or other of these colleges took the M.A. degree. From the age of eleven he had worked under his father as a compositor, and ten years later he developed into a journalist, and wrote in the Cincinnati Gazette and the Columbus State Journal. A Life of Abraham Lincoln, written as part of the literature' of the momentous presidential election of 1860, won him the post of consul at Venice, where he lived from 1861 to 1865, acquiring a knowledge of the Italian language and literature, and receiving impressions which were reproduced for the public in 1866 in two volumes on Venetian Life, and were to mould some of his future work. Returning to America

after the expiry of his term of office, he worked as a contributor to the New York Tribune, Times, and Nation, and wrote articles for the Atlantic Monthly, of which he was editor from 1872 to 1881. The year before this appointment he had appeared as a novelist, at the age of thirty-four. Their Wedding Journey, his first venture, had an immediate popularity, well deserved by its brightness and cleverness, and was followed by many other novels, most of them equally successful. A Chance Acquaintance (1873) embodies a dexterous handling of a trivial incident in a Canadian excursion. A Foregone Conclusion (1874) is a pathetic tale of an impossible attachment, with its scene in Venice. In succession to A Counterfeit Presentment (1877) came The Lady of the Aroostook, an amusing variant on the fertile theme of the American girl abroad, which is not quite felicitously sustained throughout. The Undiscovered Country (1880), Dr Breen's Practice (1883), and A Woman's Reason (1884) were followed in 1885 by The Rise of Silas Lapham, which in its description of the prosperity and fall of a parvenu family in Boston shows some of its author's most effective work. His later novels include An Indian Summer (1886), Annie Kilburn (1888), The World of Chance (1893), An Open-Eyed Conspiracy (1898), The Ragged Lady, Their Silver Wedding Journey, and The Kentons (1902). Though not without his faults as an artist in fiction, and chargeable with dwelling on trivial details, Mr Howells has had a wide and well-deserved popularity both in his own country and Great Britain, through his picturesque and amusing stories of New England life. He has written more than seventy books in all, including travels, farces or plays, and many clever essays and criticisms. Notable books were Tuscan Cities (1885), Modern Italian Poets, Criticism and Fiction, Impressions and Experiences, Literary Friends and Acquaintance (1900), and Letters Home (1903).

George Washington Cable was born in New Orleans in 1844 of Virginian and New England stock, and as a slenderly educated clerk at nineteen volunteered into the Confederate service. After the war he earned for some time a precarious living, and, laid up with malarial fever caught at survey work on the Atchafalaya River, became an accountant in a cotton agency, and began to write for the New Orleans papers. His Creole sketches in Scribner made his reputation, revealing as they did an interesting and as yet unexploited phase of American social life. Old Creole Days (1879) was followed by The Grandissimes (1880), perhaps his best book, a tender and sympathetic rendering of the American-French life of Louisiana; as also, in the same key, by Madame Delphine (1881), Dr Sevier, Bonaventure, and Strange True Stories of Louisiana (1889). The Creoles of Louisiana (1884), The Silent South (1885), The Negro Question (1890) are political, social-economic disquisitions. Later novels are John March, Southerner (1895), The

Cavalier (1901), and Bylow Hill (1902). In 1885 he settled in New England-ultimately at Northampton in Massachusetts.

Henry James,

at once an American and an English novelist, was born in New York on 15th April 1843. His father was Henry James (1811-82), a well-known original and theological writer and lecturer, whose doctrine is described by the latest historian of American literature as 'a sort of Ishmaelitish Swedenborgianism,' which only his two sons— 'inheritors of his style'-the novelist and William James, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard, and Gifford Lecturer in 1901 at Edinburgh, are 'capable of analysing.' Yet he has expounded his views in a long series of works (Christianity the Logic of Creation one of them) which are admittedly acute, profound, suggestive, and sometimes entertaining.

Henry, who until his father's death in 1882 was known as Henry James, junior, was educated under the paternal eye in a cosmopolitan fashion at New York, Geneva, Paris, and Boulogne. In 1862 he became a student at the Harvard LawSchool, but his bent was not to jurisprudence, and after the usual preparation of magazine work, he won public notice as a novelist with his Roderick Hudson in 1875. Six years earlier he had gone for good to Europe, where his life has since been spent in England (in the Isle of Wight), with regular periods of sojourn in Italy. His earlier novels dealt mainly with American life and character at home and abroad, and were produced with great fertility and rapidity. In 1878 appeared The American, The Europeans, and Daisy Miller, the last a delightful sketch of the naïveté of the American girl. Even more keen and delicate are some of the shorter stories-The Pension Beaurepas, for example, with its contrasted vignettes of the Ruck family and the Churches mother and daughter, and A Bundle of Letters (1879), describing the experiences of some American maidens in France. Washington Square (1880) has its scene in New York, and its theme in a painful strife between father and daughter over the latter's love affair, the treatment of which shows the author at a higher and more serious mood than ordinary, handling a strong situation and treating it with relentless and even painful rigour. In the following years appeared The Portrait of a Lady (1880), rather spoiled by its prolixity; The Bostonians (1886); The Princess of Casamassima (1886), a study of English society; A London Life (1889); and The Tragic Muse (1890).

In his analytical treatment of character and incident, Mr James seems to have been strongly influenced by the examples of Flaubert and his disciples, and of late he has carried that method to a degree of refinement which sometimes approaches to morbidity. This manner was developed in Terminations (1896), and even more strikingly in What Maisie Knew (1897), a perfectly pitiless

analysis of the thoughts and feelings of an unfortunate child. A dexterous handling of the semisupernatural gives a greater distinction and a stronger interest to the first story in the volume entitled Two Magics (1898). In the Cage, published in the same year, carries the art of abstraction to the farthest limit in the withholding of the heroine's name. In his most recent works, The Turn of the Screw (1898), The Soft Side (1900), The Sacred Fount (1901), The Wing of the Dove (1902), The Better Sort (1903), a volume of short sketches, and The Ambassadors (1903), the method has become superlatively subtle, so that, while

admiring the extreme cleverness of the performance, one is perplexed and irritated by the studious allusiveness of the narrative and the incessant rapier-play of the elliptical dialogue, in which each interlocutor seems to be bent on anticipating the riposte of the other.

Mr James has also distinguished himself as a critic, although in a less degree than as a novelist. His best achievement in this line is the volume of studies on French Poets and Novelists (1878), which displays an exceptional acquaintance and sympathy with modern French literature. Partial Portraits (1888) errs by too amply justifying its title, and the monograph on Hawthorne (1879) in the 'English Men of Letters' series is a dainty piece of work, though perhaps hardly weighty enough for its theme. America has produced many more powerful writers than Henry James, but none perhaps that has attained a greater delicacy of touch or a

more perfect literary finish. In 1903 he published a delightful book on William Wedmore Story and his Friends, from letters, diaries, and recollections.'

William James, son of Henry James, senior, was born in New York in 1843, and, educated at home and in Europe, took the Harvard M.D.; and from 1872 he lectured at Harvard on anatomy, physiology, psychology, and philosophy in succession. He became a professor in 1881. He

is a keen and pregnant thinker, a luminous and attractive writer, defends what have been thought theological paradoxes on non-theological grounds, maintains orthodox positions in an unorthodox and original manner, and combines empirical method with a strongly idealistic body of thought. As an analytical psychologist he has exercised even more influence in America and in Europe than as a metaphysician. His works comprise Principles of Psychology (1900), and a smaller manual (1902); The Will to Believe; Human Immortality; The Varieties of Religious Experience -the last-named work being lectures delivered as Gifford lecturer at Edinburgh University in 18991901. In 1884 he had with filial piety edited his father's Literary Remains.

Richard Watson Gilder, born at Bordentown, New Jersey, in 1844, studied law, served in the army, and did journalistic work on various papers in New Jersey before he became editor of Scribner's Monthly and then of The Century Magazine. He has founded or promoted numerous literary and artistic clubs, leagues, and associations; and he ranks high amongst contemporary American poets in virtue of The New Day (1875), The Celestial Passion, The Great Remembrance, Five Books of Song (1894), In Palestine (1898), Poems and Inscriptions (1901), and other volumes or series of songs and poems.

Edward Noyes Westcott (1846-98), born in Syracuse, New York, was a banker in his native town, and died before his first novel was published-David Harum, a story in which the interest turned on the shrewd, humorous, eccentric character of a country banker; probably no work of American fiction has had such instantaneous success. An unfinished work by him, The Teller, was published in 1901 with a short memoir.

Julian Hawthorne, biographer of his famous father (see page 755), was born at Boston in 1846, studied at Harvard and Dresden, and has done much journalistic work; and in addition to his Saxon Studies, his 'Confessions and Criticisms,' has written a history of the United States and a book on American literature. He has also published a score of novels and stories, longer and shorter, of which Garth (1877), Sebastian Strome, Dust, Beatrix Randolph, Fortune's Fool, Mrs Gainsborough's Diamonds, Prince Saroni's Wife, Archibald Malmaison, A Fool of Nature, One of those Coincidences (1899), have been notable.

Joel Chandler Harris, born in Eatonton, Georgia, in 1848, was in turn printer, lawyer, and journalist. His Uncle Remus (1880), with its thoughts and sayings and doings of 'Brer Rabbit,' as conceived by the negroes of the South, opened a new field in literature, and quickly carried his name to the Old World, at once to children and to students of folklore. Later works are Nights with Uncle Remus (1883), Mingo, Daddy Jake, The Story of Aaron, Tales of the Home Folks, Plantation Pageants, The Chronicles of Aunt Minervy Ann (1899).

James Lane Allen, born in Kentucky in 1849, taught in Kentucky University and elsewhere, but since 1891 has been famous for his novels, tales, and sketches illustrating various aspects of his native Blue Grass region-Flute and Violin, A Kentucky Cardinal (the cardinal bird), Aftermath, A Summer in Arcady, The Choir Invisible, The Reign of Law (1900).

Eugene Field (1850-95), born at St Louis, Missouri, was a journalist at twenty-three, and gave much of his best work to the columns of a Chicago paper, his column of 'Sharps and Flats' being for years a characteristic feature. His work in prose and verse varies from tender pathos and delicate humour to the broadly farcical; he is best known as humourist and as poet of childhood. His best verses for children are those in With Trumpet and Drum (1892); A Little Book of Western Verse may fairly represent another type of work; and his humour is perhaps best illustrated in The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac.

Edward Bellamy (1850-98), born at Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, studied at home and in Germany, and was admitted to the Bar; but most of his life was devoted to journalism and authorship. Looking Backward (1888), an imaginative tour de force, had a prodigious success at home and abroad, and was followed by a less brilliant sequel, Equality (1897). Other novels were Dr Heidenhoff's Process (1879), Miss Ludington's Sister (1884), and The Duke of Stockbridge (1898); and he wrote on sociological subjects.

James Whitcomb Riley, born at Greenfield, Indiana, in 1853, painted signboards, cobbled plays for a theatrical troupe, and in 1875 began contributing verses to the papers-the verses in the local dialect that secured for him the sobriquet of 'the Hoosier poet.' He is equally well known for his poems for and of children. To the first category belong The Old Swimmin' Hole and various other collections; to another, Old-Fashioned Roses, Rhymes of Childhood, and A Child World.

Francis Marion Crawford, son of a famous American sculptor (Thomas Crawford, 1814-57) long resident in Rome, was born at Bagni di Lucca in North Italy in 1854, and studied at Concord in New Hampshire, at Trinity College, Cambridge, at Karlsruhe, and at Heidelberg. At Rome he de

voted himself to the study of Sanskrit, and during 1879-80 was engaged in press work at Allahabad, where he was admitted to the Catholic Church. Of late years his home has been at Sorrento in Italy, though he often spends some part of the year in America. His first novel, Mr Isaacs (1882), a story of Indian life, was succeeded by a long series of tales, including Dr Claudius, A Roman Singer, Zoroaster, Saracinesca, Paul Patoff, Greifenstein, Sant' Ilario, Marzio's Crucifix, A Cigar-maker's Romance, The Witch of Prague, Don Orsino, Pietro Ghisleri, The Ralstons, Casa Braccio, Corleone, Via Crucis, In the Palace of the King, Cecilia, The Heart of Rome (1903). Descriptive or historical works are Constantinople, Ave Roma Immortalis, and The Rulers of the South (a history of Sicily); and in The Novel-What it Is, a brochure, he expounded the view he cherishes of his art. His earlier novels had more mystery or adventure, his later ones more careful character-drawing; and in both series he moves easily to and fro between the sphere of fact and the occult world. His American novels have proved on the whole the least popular; the Italian Saracinesca series comprises his most accomplished and artistic work.

Harold Frederic (1856-98), born in Utica, New York, was bred a journalist, but before his premature death had proved himself a novelist of exceptional gifts and powers, keen insight, rich humour, satirical strength, and constructive skill. Most of his novels, dealing largely with country life in New York State, were written after he

settled in England. Seth's Brother's Wife (1887) was his first important story; The Copperhead (1894) was a tale of the Civil War; and in Marsena (1895) were collected admirably humorous sketches of character. The Damnation of Theron Ware (in England called Illumination; 1896) was a trenchant analysis of religious life; Gloria Mundi (1898), strangely unlike, was equally a human document; In the Market-place and The New Exodus, the latter a realistic study of Russian anti-Semitism, were posthumously published.

Owen Wister, born at Philadelphia in 1860, graduated at Harvard, and had been three years at the Philadelphia Bar when The Dragon of Wantley: his Tail (1892), attracted notice to his literary gifts. Red Men and White, Jim McLean, The Jimmy John Boss succeeded; and The Virginian made his name known in Britain. He wrote a Life of President Grant, besides many contributions to the magazines in prose and verse.

Richard Harding Davis, born at Fliladelphia in 1864, had made a name for himself as a correspondent of the New York papers ere he became known to another world of readers as an original and vigorous novelist by such stories or collections of stories as Soldiers of Fortune, Gallegher, Van Bibber, The Princess Aline, In the Fog, Captain Macklin (1902). He has also

published books on his experiences in Cuba, Venezuela, South Africa, and elsewhere.

Paul Leicester Ford (1865-1902), born in Brooklyn, edited the works of Jefferson, and wrote on Washington, Franklin, and other subjects in American history. But his fiction was even better known-The Honorable Peter Sterling (1894), The Great K. and A. Train Robbery, The Story of an Untold Love, Janice Meredith, Wanted a Matchmaker, Wanted a Chaperon. He was editor of The Bibliographer (which he founded) at the time of his death-by his own hand.

Robert William Chambers, born at Brooklyn in 1865, became a painter, and after studies in Julian's studio in Paris, exhibited in the Salon. His first considerable literary venture, In the Quarter, appeared in 1893; The Red Republic, a tale of the Commune, in 1894; Lorraine (1898) was a romance of the Franco-German War; Cardigan (1901) sought its subject in colonial experiences before the War of Independence; besides a play, Ellangowan, he has written a dozen other stories or collections of stories in various styles; and The Maids of Paradise was the work of 1903.

Stephen Crane (1870-1900), born at Newark, New Jersey, and educated at Lafayette College and Syracuse University, became an active journalist, and showed special gifts as correspondent for a New York paper in the war between Turkey and Greece (1897) and in Cuba. His first essay in fiction was Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1891); but it was The Red Badge of Courage (1895), an episode of the Civil War and a marvellously lifelike study of the mind and thought of a soldier

in action, that made him known to the Englishspeaking world. Neither in The Third Violet, a story in dialogue and dialect, nor in collections such as The Minster and The Little Regiment, did he attain the same level; and his Irish story, The O'Ruddy, was completed by Mr Robert Barr. Bowery Tales, Wounds in the Rain, and Whilomville Stories were published from his manuscripts after his death.

Winston Churchill, born at St Louis in 1871, was educated at the United States Naval Academy. In 1898 he made a success as an author with The Celebrity; even more popular was Richard Carvel (1899), a stirring story of American revolutionary times.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, born at Andover in 1844, was the daughter of a professor, and began to write for the press at thirteen. Besides lecturing and working for social reforms, she became famous by The Gates Ajar (1868), and continued in somewhat the same vein with Beyond the Gates (1883) and The Gates Between (1887). Others of some thirty works are Hedged In and The Silent Partner (1870), The Story of Avis (1877), Doctor Zay (1884). In conjunction with her husband, Rev. Herbert D. Ward, she wrote Come Forth (which to some

appeared a travesty of the story of Lazarus) and The Master of the Magicians. Other works by her are Chapters from a Life, Austin Phelps, The Story of Jesus Christ, and, in 1903, Avery, a slight sketch of married life, with admirable character-drawing.

Sarah Orne Jewett, born in South Berwick, Maine, in 1849, became known for her tales and sketches of New England life and Puritan character on its kindlier side, and was credited with something of Hawthorne's power of interpreting temperaments. Some of her books, like Deephaven, are rather a series of sketches than a story; The Country Doctor is a regular novel. Other titles are Old Friends and New, A Marsh Island, A White Heron, The King of Folly Island and other People, Betty Leicester, The Country of the Pointed Firs.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, born Frances Eliza Hodgson at Manchester in 1849, went with her family to Tennessee in 1865, and had been writing for the magazines for years when in 1873 she married Dr Burnett, whom in 1898 she divorced. In 1900, long since settled in England (though she still counts as in other regards an American author), she married Mr Stephen Townsend. Her reputation was made by That Lass o' Lowrie's (1877), and confirmed by Haworth's, A Fair Barbarian, A Lady of Quality (also dramatised), Through One Administration, Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886; afterwards dramatised), The Making of a Marchioness (1901), and other stories.

Mary Noailles Murfree, born at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in 1850, granddaughter of a revolutionary soldier, became a successful novelist under the pen-name of Charles Egbert Craddock. Of a score of novels and stories, the first notable one was In the Tennessee Mountains (1884); The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains (1885) more fully revealed her power; The Despot of Bromsedge Cove (1889) was equally popular; His Vanished Star, The Mystery of Witchface Mountain, The Young Mountaineers, The Bushwhackers showed unabated invention. Even to her own countrymen she revealed strange depths in the lives of the mountain backwoodsmen of Tennessee, Kentucky, Carolina, and Georgia.

Margaret Deland, whose maiden name was Margaret Wade Campbell, was born at Alleghany, Pennsylvania, in 1857, and in 1880 married Mr L. F. Deland of Boston. In 1886 she published The Old Garden and other Verses. It was her John Ward, Preacher (1888), with its keen analysis of the struggle between a husband's Calvinism and a wife's agnosticism, that made her name generally known. Later works have been Sidney, Philip and his Wife, Mr Tommy Dove, The Wisdom of Fools, and Old Chester Tales (1898).

Kate Douglas Wiggin, born at Philadelphia in 1857, married Mr G. C. Riggs in 1895, but still writes under the name associated with her first triumphs, The Birds' Christmas Carol, The Story

of Patsy, A Summer in a Cañon, Timothy's Quest (1889-90). A Cathedral Courtship, and Penelope's Experiences in England, Scotland, and Ireland respectively, are amusing tourist fiction. Polly Oliver's Problem and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903) are more serious works. Mrs Riggs has promoted education for poor children, and has written on Froebel and on the Kindergarten.

Mary Eleanor Wilkins, born at Randolph, Massachusetts, in 1862, early began to write poems and stories for the magazines, and became specially well known for her convincing pictures of New England life and character, as in the stories collected under the titles A Humble Romance (1887) and A New England Nun. Pembroke is a fuller study of a New England village; Jane Field and Madelon are tragedies with the same Puritan background. Other stories are Jerome, Silence, The Jamesons, The Love of Parson Lord. By marriage Miss Wilkins became Mrs C. M. Freeman.

Gertrude Franklin Atherton, daughter of Mr T. L. Horn and a grand-niece of Benjamin Franklin, was born in San Francisco, and married Mr G. H. B. Atherton. In 1892 she published The Doomswoman, a tale of old California. Other of her books are Patience Sparhawk and her Times, American Wives and English Husbands, The Californians, and in 1902 The Conqueror, a detailed and elaborate romance claiming to give an essentially true account of the personal and public life of Alexander Hamilton.

John Oliver Hobbes is the pen-name of PEARL MARY TERESA RICHARDS, born in 1867 in Boston, U.S.A., who from 1887 bore the name of Craigie; but in 1895 she secured a divorce from an unworthy husband. In 1892 she had entered the Catholic Church, having already made her penname known by Some Emotions and a Moral and The Sinner's Comedy. The Gods, Some Mortals, and Lord Wickenham (1895) confirmed her repute for invention, vivacity, and epigrammatic strength as an author, as did The Herb Moon and The School for Saints (1897). Robert Orange (1900) turned on problems of the soul, and showed power in dealing with questions of creed and faith and religious aspiration. Love and the Soul Hunters (1902) is a lighter production. She has also been successful as author, whole or in part, of several plays, mostly short. Resident in England, she is duly named in the literary year-books both of Britain and of America.

Mary Johnston, born at Buchanan in Virginia in 1870, published a spirited historical romance of Virginian plantation life before the Revolution, Prisoners of Hope (in England called The Old Dominion; 1898); To Have and to Hold (in England, By Order of the Company; 1900) turned on Virginian life in the time of James : Audrey (1901) was a third tale of old Virginia, this time in the early eighteenth century.