When Winter Comes to Main Street

Says his American contemporary, Joseph Hergesheimer, in an appreciation of Hugh Walpole: "Mr. Walpole's courage in the face of the widest scepticism is nowhere more daring than...

Half-smiles and gestures! There is always a younger generation but it is not always articulate. The war may not have changed the face of the world, but it changed the faces of v...

"Stewart Edward White," says George Gordon in his book _The Men Who Make Our Novels_, "writes out of a vast self-made experience, draws his characters from a wide acquaintance w...

Scarcely anyone is there, now writing mystery stories, who, with the combination of ingenuity--or perhaps I should say originality--dependableness, and a sufficient atmosphere c...

Whether Rebecca West is writing reviews of books or dramatic criticism or novels she is an artist, above everything. I have been reading delightedly the pages of her new novel,...

Some dull day in the office. We look up and whom should we see standing right there before us but Nina Wilcox Putnam! Falling over backwards, that being what our swivel chair is...

"The total result ... after twelve years is that I have learned to sit down at my desk and begin work simultaneously," wrote Mrs. Rinehart in 1917. "One thing died, however, in...

If people will write memoirs, they must expect to suffer. They have only themselves to blame if life becomes almost intolerable from the waves of praise and censure. I am going...

Mr. Bennett's audacity has always been evident. One might say that he began by daring to tell the truth about an author, continued by daring to tell the truth about the Five Tow...

I know of only one book which really aids parents and others who have to oversee children's reading. That is Annie Carroll Moore's invaluable _Roads to Childhood_. The author, a...

As a three-dimensional writer, Irvin S. Cobb has long been among the American literary heavy-weights. Now that he has acquired a fourth dimension, the time has come for a new me...

"The most disconcerting question that an author can be asked, and often is asked, is: 'Why did you write that book?' The questioners do not want an answer to that immediate ques...

The problems of literary personality are strange. Some time after the Boer War a woman who had been in newspaper work in London and who had even, at one time, been on the stage...

I have read the book called _Civilization in the United States_, a collection of essays by various Americans, and count the time well spent chiefly because, at the end of the ch...

I do not say this because his fame was achieved at a bound with _Nocturne_, but because all his novels show a natural preoccupation with the theme of love between the sexes. Usu...

"The quiet, the calm, the extreme individualism, and the easy-going self-content of my birthplace and early habitat--the Eastern Shore of Maryland, have been, I fear, the domina...

Now, I don't know where to begin. Probably I shall not know where to leave off, either. That is my usual misfortune, to write a chapter at both ends. It is a fatal thing, like t...

_The Parallel New Testament_ is by Dr. James Moffatt, whose _New Translation of the New Testament_ has excited such wide admiration and praise. _The Parallel New Testament_ pres...

"You had a great gift as a literary artist and you spoiled it. For some reason or other, I don't know what, but I suppose there was more money in the other thing, you wrote down...

Each of these five is a book which, either from its subject, its authorship, or its handling, is _sui generis_. I call such books "uniquities"; it sounds a little less trite tha...

In a sense, all of Stephen McKenna's writing has been a confession. More than any other novelist now actively at work, this young man bases fiction on biographical and autobiogr...

I have to tell about a number of poets and, regarding poets, I agree with a very clever woman I know who declares that poetry is the most personal of the arts and who further sa...

"Thank you very much for the May Bookman," writes Hugh Walpole (June, 1922). "I have been reading The Bookman during the last year and I congratulate Mr. Farrar most strongly up...