1878-1899: The Arts: Publications

William Malone Baskervill, Southern Writers: Biographical and Critical Studies, 2 volumes (Nashville, Tenn.: Publishing House of the M.E. Church, South, 1897, 1903)—an important book on the southern literary awakening of the 1850s, which contributed to a critical reassessment of southern writing;

John Bernard, Retrospections of America, 1797-1811 (New York: Harper, 1887)—a British comedian’s impressions of the American stage;

J. W. Buel, The Magic City (Saint Louis: Historical Publishing, 1894)—a portfolio of photographic views of the World’s Columbian Exposition;

Mrs. J. T. Fields, Life andLetters ofHarriet Beecher Stowe (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1897)—a biography published just one year after the death of the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852); written by Annie Adams Fields, widow of Stowe’s sometime publisher James T. Fields;

Hamlin Garland, Crumbling ldols: Twelve Essays Dealing Chiefly with Literature, Painting, and the Drama (Chicago & Cambridge, Mass.: Stone & Kimball, 1894)—an attack on the conservative, eastern tradition in the arts by one of the midwestern, realist writers who became popular in the 1880s and 1890s;

Edwina Booth Grossman, Edwin Booth: Recollections by His Daughter and Letters to Her and to His Friends (New York: Century, 1894)—a collection of correspondence compiled by the daughter of the great tragic actor;

Sadakichi Hartmann, Conversations with Walt Whitman (New York: E. P. Coby, 1895)—memoirs of visits to Whitman made during 1884—1891 by a naturalized American poet and art critic, the son of a German father and Japanese mother;

Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife 2 volumes (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1884)—a biography of Hawthorne by his son, himself a prominent author and journalist;

William Dean Howells, Criticism and Fiction (New York: Harper, 1891)—a collection of essays by a prominent author and influential editor who champions realism in fiction and suggests that because in America there are “so few shadows and inequalities in our broader level of prosperity,” American novelists “concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American, and seek the universal in the individuai rather than the social interests”;

Howells, My Literary Passions (New York: Harper, 1895)—a literary memoir by the “Dean of American Realism”;

Henry James, The Art of Fiction (Boston: Cupples, Upham, 1884)—published with an essay by British novelist Walter Besant, James’s essay, which has been recognized as a major manifesto for realism, takes is-sue with Besant’s claim that a novel should always have “a conscious moral purpose” and argues that the province of any artist should be “ali feeling, ali life, ali observation” and that the novelist should “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost”;

James, Hawthorne (New York: Harper, 1879)—a biography of the author of The Scarlet Letter (1850), which serves as tribute to James’s literary forebear as well as a forum for a Jamesian critique of nineteenth-century American society;

Noah Ludlow, Dramatic Life as I Foundlt (Saint Louis: G. I. Jones, 1880)—a memoir by a Shakespearean actor with descriptions of American dram in the West and the South;

Max Maretzek, Sharps and Flats (New York: American Musician Publishing, 1890)—a memoir by a nineteenth-century musical impresario;

Frederic E. McKay and Charles E. L. Wingate, eds., Famous American Actors of To-Day (New York: Crowell, 1896)—a directory of leading nineteenth-century thespians;

Harriet Monroe, John Wellborn Root: A Study ofHis Life and Work (Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1896)—a biography of an influential Chicago archi-tect by his sister-in-law, who later founded Poetry: A Magaz in e of Verse (1912- ) ;

George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (New York: Scribners, 1896)—a groundbreaking study of aesthetics and the first philosophical treatise by a Spanish-born, American-educated philosopher-poet;

Montgomery Schuyler, American Architecture (New-York: Harper, 1892)—studies of the Brooklyn Bridge, Gilded Age mansions, and the Chicago School by an outspoken architectural critic;

Horace E. Scudder, Men and Letters (Boston & NewYork: Houghton, Mifflin, 1887)—essays by the influential literary editor at Houghton, Mifflin, who went on to edit The Atlantic Monthly in 1890-1898;

Edmund Clarence Stedman, Poets of America (Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1885)—an introduction to American verse by an influential New York-based poet and literary critic;

Stedman and Ellen M. Hutchinson, eds., A Library of American Literature from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time, 11 volumes (New York: Charles L. Webster, 1888-1890)—an important collection that influenced the formation of the American literary canon for several generations;

Moses Coit Tyler, A History of American Literature, 1607-1765, 2 volumes (New York: Putnam, 1878)—a definitive survey of early American literature;

Mrs. Schuyler (Mariana Griswold) Van Rensselaer, Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works (Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1888)—a tribute to the recently deceased architect, illustrated with architectural plans;

Barrett Wendell, Cotton Mather: The Puritan Priest (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1891)—the first major work by a longtime Harvard professor, this biography of a wellknown Puritan writer helped to establish the legitimacy of American literature within the academy.