Category: Authors

IN 1876, when Paul Leicester Ford was eleven years old, he published ” The Webster Genealogy,” a genealogy of Noah Webster, with notes and corrections of his own. When he was seventeen he published “Websteriana, a catalogue of books by Noah Webster, collated from the library of Gordon L. Ford.” At nineteen he also became […]

AS we write this sketch, we have in mind the familiar picture of Robert Louis Stevenson, stretched out on a couch in his Samoan home, ailing, working. There is a sad sweetness in the sharpened face, and in the eyes is a gleam of bravery or determination. The Scot whom the entire reading world still […]

PROFESSOR Roberts he is still called by his old friends in New Brunswick, and, so far as we know, “Old Man” he is still called by his literary companions. The ‘ Old Man,’ said Richard Hovey a few years ago, he is fondly called by the poets who are his companions, not that he is […]

BRET HARTE has been called the writer of the best short stories in the English language. A literary court of arbitration would doubtless find that the best of his short stories are without superiors. It should not be forgotten that the reading public is still under the magic spell which Mr. Harte wove more than […]

LATE in the year 1900 it suddenly became plain to some of the mystified inhabitants of the literary world that there were two Winston Churchills. It is indeed remarkable how long the error lived which confounded Winston L. S. Churchill, war correspondent and politician, and eldest son of Lord Randolph Churchill, with plain Winston Churchill, […]

MARK TWAIN’S real name is Samuel Langhorne Clemens. There is a story to the effect that one of his ancestors, by name Gregory Clement, an adherent of Cromwell, added his voice to the condemnation of Charles I. and was beheaded for it by Charles II. However, it is neither as Clement nor as Clemens that […]

MR. HOWELLS has reached that point of life and success where he can afford to sit down and look back. But he is not that sort of man. He will probably continue to work and to look forward until, in the words of Hamlet, he shuffles off this mortal coil. William Dean Howells was born […]

ROBERT GRANT leads the American satirists. Many writers, unnamed paragraphers and critics of high degree, have pursued him relentlessly ; but he will not surrender. Contrariwise, it is more likely that they will yet surrender to him. He has Napoleon’s way of turning upon pursuers. The satirist is not always clearly underderstood. For some of […]

SINCE 1893, when he made his first tour through the country as a lecturer, F. Marion Crawford has become a somewhat familiar figure to many Americans, who have noted his athletic form, his handsome face, his melodious voice, his polished deportment. He is easily the best known of the American authors who make their homes […]

A FEW novelists know the world which renews its youth every spring and that dies every autumn, as intimately as Thoreau knew it. One of these novelists is Thomas Hardy, whose description of Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native ” has long been in use as a model in the English Department at […]