Chapter Chapter 7 of Index by Simonds History of American Literature

these, three, constituting the Saracinesca series, are the best. Mr. Crawford died at his villa in Sorrento, at the age of fifty-five.

Gertrude Franklin Atherton (born 1859), a Californian by birth, has lived a cosmopolitan life here and abroad. Her early novels were written in the nineties; of her later works The Aristocrats (1901), The Conqueror (1902), Ancestors (1907), and The Tower of Ivory (1910) are prominent.

Perhaps the best known of our writers from the South is Francis Hopkinson Smith (1838-1915), a native of Baltimore. A versatile master of several arts, including the substantial one of building lighthouses, his first success in fiction was the fine character sketch, Colonel Carter of Cartersville (1891). Tom Grogan (1896), Caleb West (1898), and The Tides of Barnegat (1906) are all realistic studies of the people whom the author may have known when living the practical business life of a building contractor and mechanical engineer. The Fortunes of Oliver Horne (1902) is said to be reminiscent of that period in Mr. Smith's life when he was an art student in New York. His later stories, The Romance of an Old- Fashioned Gentleman (1907) and Peter (1908), indicate a return to the more sentimental manner of his earliest success. Albion W. Tourgée (1838-1905), a native of Ohio and an officer in the Union army throughout the Civil War, lived in North Carolina from 1865 to 1881, and during this period wrote three or four novels dealing with political conditions in the South. Of these, A Fool's Errand (1879) and Bricks Without Straw (1880) aroused widespread interest. Tourgée afterward served as United States Consul at Bordeaux and at Halifax, and was the author of numerous stories and novels. Winston Churchill (born at St. Louis, 1871) has taken a conspicuous place among writers of historical romance with his impressive series dealing with great epochs in American history: Richard Carvel (1899), The Crisis (1901), and The Crossing (1904). To these novels must be added his first story, The Celebrity (1898), and his later novels: Coniston (1906), Mr. Crewe's Career (1908), A Modern Chronicle (1910), The Inside of the Cup (1913), and A Far Country (1915).

The Indiana Novelists.

The promise of the West as a field for the writer of fiction came with the publication of The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871). This book was a realistic study of character in southern Indiana of the early fifties. Its author, Edward Eggleston (1837-1902), was born in the pioneer days of the state at the little town of Vevay, on the Ohio River. He entered the ministry of the Methodist Church, and became what was then known as a "circuit rider," ministering to a parish which required a four weeks' itinerary, involving both hardship and peril. In six months his health broke down, and he removed to Minnesota. In 1886, he engaged in editorial work at Chicago, and in 1874 became pastor of a church in Brooklyn, New York, to which he gave the name of the Church of Christian Endeavor. The Hoosier Schoolmaster met with wide popularity and was translated into several languages. It was followed by The Mystery of Metropolisville (1873), with its setting in Minnesota, and The Circuit Rider (1874), the scene of which is laid in Ohio. Roxy (1878) and The Graysons (1887) are again portrayals of Hoosier types.

The state of Indiana has made a remarkable record in the literary history of the middle West. Lew Wallace (1827-1905), the author of Ben Hur, was a native of the state and made his home at Crawfordsville, the "Hoosier Athens." He served in the Mexican War, and later in the Civil War, receiving the rank of Major-General, for gallantry in the field. His first romance, The Fair God (1873), was an Aztec story, the inspiration of which came from the reading of Prescott's histories. Ben Hur, a Tale of the Christ (1880) was the result of a conscientious study of the foundations of the Christian faith. The author's treatment of his difficult subject is scholarly and reverent. The popularity of the work has fairly rivaled that of Uncle Tom's Cabin. General Wallace was appointed governor of New Mexico in 1878; and it was while living at Santa Fé that he wrote the larger part of the romance. A later story, The Prince of India (1893), was an outcome of Wallace's residence at Constantinople as minister to Turkey.

Maurice Thompson (1844-1901), also a resident of Crawfordsville, has been mentioned already as a writer of verse. He was a novelist as well, the author of several popular stories, of which A Tallahasse Girl (1882) and Alice of Old Vincennes (1900) are noteworthy. Among more recent writers who have