Essays on Modern Novelists

A Yale professor reads his own contemporaries: William De Morgan, Hardy, Howells, Björnson, Mark Twain, Sienkiewicz, Sudermann, Stevenson, Mrs Humphry Ward, Kipling and the perennial Lorna Doone. William Lyon Phelps taught the first American university course on the modern novel and was attacked for it. His enthusiasms have dated interestingly, and his account of what an educated reader in 1910 had actually read is invaluable. Fifty-eight plates, from Whistler to a portrait of Phelps himself, trace the faces and quiet rooms behind the reading life this book records.