SOURCE: "James Huneker's Criticism of American Literature," in American Literature, Vol. 29, No. 1, March, 1957, pp. 64-78.

American critics and literary historians have generally accepted the notion that James Gibbons Huneker was largely indifferent to the literature of his own country. He was, to be sure, primarily interested in writers whose ideas and methods were of world-wide significance or whose temperaments appealed to him; many of these happened to be European. To maintain, however, that he was oblivious to the literary scene at home and to the talents of American authors is to perpetuate an injustice that disturbed Huneker and has long deserved correction.

Since he reprinted in his numerous collections a total of only six essays on American writers of belles lettres, one article on the American novel, and a few passages dealing with American literature, one must examine the New York newspapers and magazines in which much of his writing is buried to learn the full extent of Huneker's interest in that literature. Especially revealing are the files of the Musical Courier from February, 1889, to October, 1902, during which period he wrote a weekly column of miscellaneous criticism headed "The Raconteur." The newspapers on which he worked for thirty years—the Recorder, Morning Advertiser, Sun, Times, and World—also contain a sizable body of opinion on American literature, as does his department, "The Seven Arts," in Puck (1914-1917).

The gentility of the 1890's was regnant when Huneker, something of a Bohemian in private life and a sophisticate in literary taste, attacked "morality yowlers" such as Elbridge Gerry and Anthony Comstock, whom he ridiculed, for example, in the Morning Advertiser on April 3, 1896. On September 8, 1897, he poked fun at moralistic critics like Maurice Thompson (Musical Courier), and on December 19, 1900, he protested against the "simpering attenuations and Miss Nancy reticences" of American novelists (MC). "The eradication of the Puritan microbe will be no easy task," he wrote on October 5, 1996, "taught as we are in our arid schools and universities that the entire man ends at his collar bone" (Times). But Huneker was not always pessimistic; on August 21, 1895, for example, he remarked that "artists like Henry Fuller, Mary Wilkins and a few others [were] pointing the way to one of the richest literary finds in the world, for remember the United States is yet undiscovered" (MC).

It appears that Huneker was thoroughly familiar with the work of Poe, Whitman, Clemens, Howells, and Henry James. He was always proud that Poe, an acquaintance of Huneker's father and his first literary idol, had played so important a part in European letters. On December 21, 1892, Huneker compared Poe and Chopin at length, deplored the waste of Poe's talent in the commercial America of his time, commented on the lack of impurity or licentiousness in his writings, described his personality and temperament, and briefly traced his influence on Continental literature (MC). On November 1,1893, five months after the publication of the results of a poll sponsored by the Critic, which revealed that no book by Poe had been included among the ten greatest books published in America, nor among the thirty-nine which received the highest number of votes, Huneker wished that America would appreciate Poe as much as France did (MC). On February 27.1901, he stated that Poe was "the victim of Yankee college professors who found him lacking the patriotism of Whittier, the humor of 0. W. Holmes, the sanity of Lowell and the human qualities of Longfellow!" (MC). On May 8 of the same year he exulted that Emerson's "jingle man" was the "best known… abroad of any American author, his works the most translated" (MC), while on September 17.1902, he lauded James A. Harrison's important edition of Poe (MC), whom he discussed again on December 29, 1906 (Times, Book Review).

As a young man, Huneker was so impressed by Leaves of Grass that he once called on Whitman in Camden in 1878; later he occasionally encountered the poet outside Philadelphia's Academy of Music after a concert and escorted him to the Camden ferry street-car. In 1887 Huneker publicly praised Whitman's frankness, though he had reservations about the poems. On May 13, 1891, he listed Whitman among the great personalities then living in America. "[He] represents a primal force," Huneker wrote, "but in the best of [his] work, despite its rugged sincerity, there is always an unfinished quantity" (MC). On the following November 1 a long, complimentary article on Whitman by Huneker appeared in the Recorder; here he condemned America's neglect of Whitman, deprecated the "violently unfair" attacks made against him, praised his "peculiar magnetic qualities," and briefly discussed his poetry. Whitman, he concluded, was "one of the greatest natural forces in American literature". It was essentially this article, I believe, that Huneker referred to when he recalled in 1911 that he had written Whitman's obituary for the New York Home Journal; a search in the latter publication—for which Huneker occasionally wrote about the time he was on the Recorder—reveals no such obituary that can be identified as his. (The Huneker Collection at Dartmouth College contains an unlabeled clipping of what seems to be the Recorder article, with marginal corrections and additions in Huneker's handwriting, one of which reads: "The poet lies at death's door in Camden, N. J." This suggests that he revised the November I piece—perhaps when Whitman was critically ill in late December, 1891—intending to use it as an obituary; it may have been put aside when the poet lingered on for several months. The unsigned obituary which appeared in the Recorder on March 27, 1892, is probably not Huneker's).

By July 13, 1898, however, Huneker had reacted against Whitman. He still felt that some of the poems—"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," "Rise 0 Days from Your Fathomless Deeps," "0 Captain! My Captain!," "Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun," and certain passages from "Song of Myself "—were "the finest things America has given to the nations"; but he now believed that the "slush, trash, nonsense, obscenity, morbid eroticism, vulgarity and preposterous mouthings well nigh spoil one's taste for what is really great in Leaves of Grass. …" He called Whitman "a poseur of gigantic… proportions" and maintained that "despite his roaring masculinity, [Whitman] had a streak of the effeminate in him" (MC).

The remark about Whitman's sexuality suggests that Huneker had become convinced by his reading of studies by various writers that Whitman was an invert. The eccentricities of the artistic personality had long fascinated Huneker, and he had steeped himself in the literature of abnormal psychology. As far as I can discover, he was the first American critic to refer openly to Whitman's homosexual leaning. He was more explicit on November 21, 1914—after the publication of monographs by Bertz and Rivers—when he observed that passages in Leaves of Grass "fully warrant unprejudiced psychiatrists in styling this book the bible of the third sex" (Puck). It was this side of Whitman—together with the latter's optimistic faith in the masses, which Huneker thought naive—that seemed to antagonize the generally tolerant critic. The exact nature of Whitman's sexuality is still, of course, a major crux, but though Huneker probably implied more about the poet's habits than the evidence supports, he undoubtedly helped to focus attention on an aspect of Whitman which subsequent American critics, following the work of Continental scholars like Catel and Schyberg, have not been able to ignore.

A far more representative American than Whitman, Huneker thought, was Mark Twain, most of whose best work had been completed before Huneker began to criticize American literature. Though he frequently quoted the humorist's quips and anecdotes, he realized that Twain was more than a mere funny-man. "Mr. Clemens is one of the most original writers that America has produced and more of an artist than is generally believed," he remarked on June 28, 1899. "The public was slow to recognize his power in fields [other than humor]. I pin my faith to Huckleberry Finn. For me it is the great American novel, even if it is written for boys" (MC).

Huneker frequently mentioned or quoted William Dean Howells. On January 30, 1901, for example, he heartily seconded Howells's attack on historical romancers and echoed the older critic's plea for realistic fiction (MC). "There are only two schools of writers," Huneker wrote on the following May 29th, "—those who know how to write and those who do not. Mr. Howells belongs to the former" (MC). By this time Huneker had forgotten that on January 22, 1896, he had wistfully recalled the "love, lust and cruelty … and power" in Howells's early international novel, A Foregone Conclusion, written, Huneker said, when Howells's world was not "bounded by back-yards" (MC).

On April 5, 1903, however, in one of his most important uncollected essays on American literature, Huneker took issue with Howells's famous statement concerning the tragic note in American fiction. American life was full of tragedy, Huneker maintained, but our novelists and dramatists were avoiding the dark issues. Yet Howells himself, Huneker explained, was not

strait-laced, prudish, narrow in his views, but he puts his foot down on the expression of the tragic, the unusual, the emotional. With him, charming artist, it is a matter of temperament.… Mr. Howells, with his jewelled art, his miniatures of men and women, his delicate phrasing of elemental truths, has influenced his juniors more than he knows. But where he is reticent, they are flabby, where he paints with sure though dainty touches, their pictures are faded, insincere.

(Sun)

Though Howells seemed old-fashioned to the younger generation—which, to be sure, was encouraged by Huneker to expect stronger meat in fiction—Huneker continued to admire him:

Compare the so-called "realistic" novels of Mr. Howells … with the fiction of the moment [he wrote on August 12, 1910]. What a falling off.… To the Jack Londons who are carrying off the sweepstakes of fiction Mr. Howells is no doubt a superannuated writer. Would that there were more like Mr. Howells in the continence of his speech, in the nobility of his ideals, wholesomeness of his judgment, and delicacy of perception of character.

(Sun)

On January 2, 1915, Huneker advised readers and writers to "return to the fiction of Mr. Howells and there learn sense of proportion, continence of expression, the art of exquisitely simple prose, and vital characterization." "It will be to his novels," Huneker added, "that the historians will go for a truthful study of men and women and manners during the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century in New England and elsewhere and not to the vermillion prose of the present crowd of melodramatists between covers …" (Puck). On July 16, 1916, he again paid his respects to Howells in an article on "The Great American Novel," which brought him a letter from Howells, who had discussed the same subject four years earlier. (Huneker came to the same conclusion: there could be no such thing as the great American novel; it would be "in the plural—thousands perhaps." "Native talent, subtle and robust, we possess in abundance," he wrote. "Thus far it has cultivated with success its own parochial garden—which is as it should be" [Times].)

Huneker probably put his finger on the most important reason for the decline of Howells's reputation as a novelist when he gently disagreed with him on the question of tragedy in this country. "Years ago," Huneker remarked on August 29, 1915, "Mr. Howells said we could never write of America as Dostoievsky did of Russia, and it was true enough at the time; nor, would we ever tolerate the nudities of certain Gallic novelists. Well, we have, and I am fain to believe that the tragic issues of American life should be given fuller expression…" (Times). Today the concern with the tragic vision and the obsession with evil have operated against Howells. Huneker seems to have foreseen something of this trend, just as he emphasized those qualities which may eventually produce a Howells revival: the comprehensiveness and faithfulness of his portrait of America.

Another American, whose revival is one of the most remarkable facts of our literary history, outranked Howells in Huneker's estimation. More than forty years before the rediscovery of Henry James, Huneker was proclaiming him America's greatest contemporary novelist and perhaps her keenest critic. He devoted more space to James than to any other American writer, and probably quoted him more often than any novelist except Flaubert.

By the mid-nineties the popularity James had won with Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady had practically vanished, leaving him only a small cult of readers. Yet on September 25,1895, Huneker wrote that "our greatest artist lives in London. When he publishes we poke fun at his exquisite style and cadenced prose. I mean, of course, Henry James" (MC). On the following January 1 Huneker, who, despite his antipathy to socialism, had hobnobbed with East Side radicals and was exceedingly well-read on the subject of anarchy—he later wrote editorials on it for the Sun—singled out the poorly received The Princess Casamassima as James's masterpiece thus far (MC). On March 17, 1896, Huneker remarked that The Spoils of Poynton was "full of humanity and delicate strokes of art and observation," although its theme was "caviare to the general reader" (MC). On the following December 9 Huneker defended the expatriated novelist against charges of "un-Americanism":

It is so convenient [he wrote] to say of Henry James that… American men interest him not, American women delight him not. Yet what American writer has given us such absolutely tempting and truthful national types? … The master of living American novelists, I am tempted to say the greatest of American fictionists until I remember Hawthorne, sits serenely at his desk in London and writes perfect prose and carves for us the Americans at home and abroad.

(MC)

Year after year Huneker reviewed James's novels. What Maisie Knew was the "masterpiece of the season," he wrote on December 1, 1897, "surely the most remarkable analysis of a child's soul the world has ever enjoyed" (MC). Mentioning James's The Other House in the same article, he disagreed with those who deprecated James's choice of subject rather than criticizing the execution of the work. On October 19, 1898, Huneker noted that "In the Cage" was "a miracle of workmanship" though slight in theme and curiously involved in style (MC). Two months later The Two Magics won his unqualified praise; frankly admitting, on December 14, that he did not fully understand the allegory in "The Turn of the Screw," he commented: "Never in the history of the supernatural has such a story been written.… Anything more morbid would be hard to conceive. Yet the treatment is never morbid; it is uplifting, almost comforting, and comfort the reader needs…" (MC). On February 26, 1902, Huncker stated that James took "the purely physical point of view" for his thesis in The Sacred Fount, and that the reviewers of the book feared to look the "Jamesian proposition squarely in the eye" (MC).

On September 24 of the same year, Huneker wrote at length on The Wings of the Dove, indicating his awareness of James's accomplishments in technique:

All the old time conventional chapter endings are dispensed with; many are suspended cadences. All barren modulations from event to event are swept away—unprepared dissonances are of continual occurrence. There is no descriptive padding—that bane of second class writers; nor are we informed at every speech of a character's name. The elliptical method Mr. James has absorbed from Flaubert.… Nothing is forestalled, nothing is obvious and one is forever turning the curves of the unexpected; yet while the story is trying in its bareness, the situations are not abnormal.

He acknowledged, entertainingly, that the novel was not easy to read: "The style is crackjaw—a jungle of inversions, suspensions, elisions, repetitions, echoes, transpositions, transformations, neologisms, in which the heads of young adjectives gaze despairingly and from afar at verbs that come thundering in Teutonic fashion at the close of sentences leagues long." But Huneker believed that the reward was eminently worth the effort, and he concluded prophetically: "It is fiction of the future: it is a precursor of the book our children and grandchildren will enjoy when all the hurly-burly of noisy adventure, of cheap historical tales and still cheaper drawing-room struttings shall have vanished from fiction" (MC).

After James's death, Huneker eulogized him on June 24, 1916, commented on the influence of his fiction, lamented his neglect in America, and again predicted that time would right the injustice (Puck). Though Huneker maintained here that "a Puritan tempered by European culture" lurked in James, he decided, by the following December 17, that James did not possess the New England conscience, that he should not be identified with the cases he studied, and that he was actually our "first great unmoralist" (Sun). Less than a year before his own death, Huneker twice reviewed James's posthumously published letters.

Of the American writers of his own generation, Huneker gave most attention to Edgar Saltus, Henry B. Fuller, and Edith Wharton. Judging from their present reputation, he seems to have overrated the once popular Saltus and Fuller. On May 10, 1899, he reviewed Mrs. Wharton's first book, The Greater Inclination, noticing her indebtedness to Henry James but finding also in these short stories a "very neat, telling style of her own" and a delicate sense of humor; he thought that some day she would write a "strong novel" (MC). He was disappointed by her first novelette, The Touchstone; her characterization, formal sense, and psychology were at fault, he observed on May 2,1900, and her style too much like James's (MC). In 1905 Huneker seemed to like The House of Mirth, though ten years later, on May 8, 1915, he called it her "least artistic work" (Puck). A section of an essay in Ivory Apes and Peacocks deals with Undine Spragg, the disagreeable heroine of The Custom of the Country (1913). And on November 7, 1920, Huneker praised Mrs. Wharton's evocation of the New York of the 1870's in The Age of Innocence (World).

As for the younger writers, Huneker knew Stephen Crane for some years, but a careful search has failed to uncover any evidence that he reviewed Crane's books. Yet their friendship did not prevent the critic from publishing—on August 3, 1898—what he identified as a reprint from the Buffalo Enquirer but what may actually be an original parody (it could not be found in the newspaper) of Crane's colorful war correspondence (MC). On June 13, 1900, shortly after Crane's death, Huneker described his friend as "a good fellow and a promising writer. Without the sustained power or formal gifts of Frank Norris, [he] would nevertheless have made a strong book some day." Huneker did Crane a service by recommending here an Evening Sun article by Acton Davies as the most authoritative account of Crane's much-maligned personality (MC).

Huneker greeted Frank Norris's McTeague more cordially than most American critics did. Norris, he observed on July 12, 1899, was

a realist and employs the Zola tonality, but he will grow away from the note-taking bird's-eye view school and touch the hem of higher issues. Of all the young American writers he has the keenest vision and a strong, natural style.… The book has its shocking, even its coarse pages, but the humor, so grim, so hearty, so Rabelaisian, redeems them.… Norris is bound to make a stir.

(MC)

On April 10, 1901, Huneker remarked that Moran of the Lady Letty, Blix, and A Man's Woman were all clever but unfinished sketches, but with The Octopus Norris had "partially fulfilled" his promise. It was the "biggest novel of the purely American type" since The Rise of Silas Lapham, he said, and indeed Norris had "a temperamental force, an exuberance of imagination, a swing that Mr. Howells never possessed." Despite its faults—too much blood-spilling, an ending marred by political polemics, unnecessary length, and obvious traces of Hardy, Tolstoy, and Zola—Huneker believed that the book placed its author in the front rank of fiction writers (MC). He corresponded with Norris and continued to laud his work.

Although I have not been able to find it, Huneker claimed that he wrote a favorable review of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, which, he said, had been sent to him by Norris. For "sheer similitude," Huneker remarked on June 27, 1914, the novel had "no equal in American fiction" (Puck, LXXV, 21), and on November 5, 1916, he stated that Dreiser had not excelled his portrait of Carrie (Sun). At Dreiser's request, Huneker read the manuscript of Jennie Gerhardt in 1911 and suggested various changes:

It's a big book [he wrote Dreiser].… I'm not yet certain whether I like it better than Sister Carrie.… What made me happy while reading it was the fact that it attempted to prove nothing … A moving and vivid picture of life, nothing else.… Your story is very human, simply conceived, probable, sympathetic—though not invariably well-told. Your prose style is still opaque, moves too slowly, lacks rhythmic variety; and is too "literary".… Despite this handicap the story shines through; the characterization is masterly—hard to beat—the sequence of events logical. Your fashionable women are not well realized. I like Lester's brother—the real, cold American business man, hard as nails.… To make an essentially weak girl sympathetic, without pulling out all the lachrymose stops of pity and indignation, is a difficult undertaking. Of course, there will be a yowl of woe from the dyspeptic moral critics. With a few exceptions you have kept your hands off the girl and not disfigured the book by moralic reflections. But these exceptions spring to the eye and they made me groan.… It interrupts the swing of the narrative.… Another bad thing, perhaps the most offensive (to me, understand) in the book is your epilogue. Again, in the name of Flaubert and Maupassant, why? Your ending, on what musicians would call a suspended harmony, is superb.… Don't spoil [it] for the sake of moralizing no matter how symmetrical or ethical that moralizing may be. Your story ends there. Let it end there.… There is page after page in Jennie that recalls the best of the Russians. I admire your courage in tackling such a purely American theme, and giving it such a dreary setting.… Local color is perfect.… Again I say a big book, eloquent in its humanity, too long; too many repetitions (you ride certain words to death, such as big), and the best fiction I have read since that of Frank Norris.

Dreiser said that he followed some of Huneker's suggestions, though he retained part of the epilogue; when the novel was eventually reprinted, however, the epilogue was dropped.

Huneker apparently wrote no notice of Jennie Gerhardt, and he was living in Europe when Dreiser's third novel, The Financier, was published. But on June 3, 1914, he informed Dreiser that he had just read The Titan—which Dreiser had sent Huneker at the latter's request—and that he had reviewed the "powerful book" for Puck. "I find Frank C. Y. [sic] a bit older," he wrote Dreiser, "a little heavier in the going—but that's a tribute to your time sense and the atmosphere of characterization. I look for the no. 3 of the trilogy. Emilie-Berenice promises a rare development. Keep it up old man! You've won, even if you will 'do' those terrible epilogues and moral codas!" "Before he sails," Huneker added, "I shall get The Titan and The Financier to Georg Brandes …" (then visiting America). The review of The Titan appeared on June 27:

Dreiser is a master of numbers, crowds, confusion, and swarming cities.… [He] captured the precise air of Philadelphia, and in his new book he suggests the raw Chicago of the seventies and eighties with exactitude.… He dots his i's and crosses his t's; yet with all the crass realism, there is a bigness about the work which overshadows its petty faults. The height, depth, breadth, and mass of this ugly, but very significant and modern fictional architecture may repel at first, but in the end impresses by sheer sincerity

(Puck).

Huneker thought much less of Dreiser's next novel, The "Genius. "It was far too long, he maintained on February 12,1916, and its hero a "shallow bore" and a "wooden Indian as to character after he leaves the Middle West to settle in New York" (Puck). Dreiser was "without an ear for prose or an eye for form," Huneker wrote their mutual friend Mencken on the following April 11. After Mencken had urged him, several months later, to defend Dreiser against charges of obscenity, Huneker responded on November 5 by remarking that The "Genius" was "moral to the sermonizing point" (Sun). Believing that the only immoral book was a badly written one, he could not whole heartedly join Mencken's crusade despite his dislike of censorship. This may have led to a coolness between Huneker and Dreiser, for a passage printed in the serialized version of Steeplejack, but omitted in the book, was rather sharp:

Dreiser we must accept with his faults full-blown. He is dull yet powerful at times. Israel Zangwill was right when he called Sister Carrie the best fiction of that year over here. Jennie Gerhardt is more individual.… Since then his uncompleted Trilogy … and The "Genius" have not put Jennie Gerhardt in the background, though The Titan is potentially big. I agree with H. L. Mencken that Dreiser's A Hoosier Holiday is the most readable of his books. Nevertheless the Zola influence is not to be denied, it has mortised his work with materialism. Theodore Dreiser has a ponderous style and he lacks vision.

[Philadelphia Press]

Huneker's criticism of many minor American short-story writers, essayists, and especially novelists was extensive, if usually brief. On December 9, 1896, for example, he found fault with the style of the veritists and disagreed with their delineation of the American type; (MC); novels dealing with rural characters and written in dialect had little attraction for him. Yet on April 28, 1897, he praised Mary Hartwell Catherwood's The Spirit of an Illinois Town (MC). Distrusting reformers, indifferent to politics except for his aversion for socialism, and opposed to polemic tracts in the guise of fiction, Huneker naturally had little sympathy for the Muckrakers, and his attack on Upton Sinclair, Jack London, and others of this group, printed in the Sun on September 23, 1908, is one of his most outspoken articles on American literature:

The "new" novelists [he wrote] may write more carefully than the Beadle school—though we doubt it—but they still deal with the same raw material, the material of cheap melodrama. Their handling of love episodes has much of the blaring brass band quality—and quantity—of old fashioned Italian opera.… Our gay mud slingers only think of raising an immediate row. Success for them means a vilely written book of socialistic farrago, full of the crimes of the rich and the virtues of the poor.

On August 12,1910, he again ridiculed the fiction of popular "lay preachers" (Sun).

If Huneker did not criticize American verse at length during the nineties, he nevertheless directed his readers to some of the best poets of a rather barren period, chiefly by reprinting poems in "The Raconteur." On December 9, 1891, for example, he reprinted Emily Dickinson's "I'm Nobody! Who Are You?" with the comment that she had "a delicacy of expression like Chopin's … and her soul, timidly ardent and coy in color, repressed itself within the bounds of a few shyly passionate phrases that are as fragmentary as Sappho's, but nearly as precious" (MC). Edwin Arlington Robinson's "Luke Havergal" headed Huneker's column as early as June 8, 1898 (MC), and poems by Richard Hovey, Lizette Woodward Reese, and William Vaughn Moody appeared there around the turn of the century. Later, however, Huneker, whose taste in poetry was formed in the heyday of Swinburne and the Pre-Raphaélites, was not sympathetic toward the free verse movement. Whitman's "jigsaw jingle," he stated on January 2, 1921, "the speech of a man with the hiccoughs, … is imitated the land over by the younger, hoarser choir, with the result… that a new school of poetry and prose (?) has been founded in which epilepsy and sterility are the dominating characteristics" (World).

Huneker's important criticism of American playwrights is far too extensive to be discussed here; as a New York drama critic for at least eight years—on the Recorder, Morning Advertiser, Sun, and the Metropolitan Magazine (with occasional comments on the theater in Puck)—he wrote countless columns on Herne, Gillette, Thomas, Fitch, Belasco, Moody, and lesser-known American dramatists. Likewise, I can only mention as evidence of his interest in American literary criticism his friendship with and praise of many of his colleagues—Percival Pollard, Vance Thompson, Brander Matthews, William C. Brownell, George Jean Nathan, and H. L. Mencken.

I do not wish to exaggerate the scope of Huneker's criticism of American literature. The best of it was generally restricted to novelists flourishing around the turn of the century; a systematic approach to the major figures in the entire range of our literature is not to be discovered in his essays. Moreover, his prejudice against some New England writers—salutary as it may have been when Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, and Lowell were considered the equals of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau—disqualified him as an objective critic of the main stream of the American literary tradition. And his aristocratic bias and generally conservative taste in poetry prevented him from doing full justice to Whitman and the free-verse school.

Within his limits, however, and particularly in his special province, the contemporary novel, Huneker was remarkably perceptive and prophetic. Very few of his American swans turned out to be geese; recent criticism has largely confirmed his judgment of Howells, James, Norris, and Dreiser. This, I submit, is no mean achievement for a critic—and especially for one allegedly oblivious to the writings of his countrymen. Surely it is time that our literary historians dispelled the legend of James Huneker's indifference to American literature.