It is now almost twenty years since Henry Kitchell Webster and Samuel Merwin began their writing careers in collaboration. Together they wrote “The Short Line War” (1899), “Calumet K” and “Comrade John.” All these were well-told tales, and the later years, when each man has been working alone, have shown that neither one carried an undue share of the burden. Mr. Webster’s books include “The Whispering Man,” “A King in Khaki,” “The Ghost Girl,” “The Butterfly” and “The Real Adventure.” Mr. Merwin’s work has been unusual in the variety of its themes. Washington and the Constitution of the United States were ingredients of “The Citadel.” The adventures of an American girl in China were narrated in “The Charmed Life of Miss Austen.” Musical theories, the segregated district of Yokohama, and incidents in Chinese hotels went to the making of “Anthony the Absolute.” “The Honey Bee” is the story of a woman whose life has been in an American department store, who makes a trip to Paris, and there falls in love with one Blink Moran, of the prize-ring.
There is no questioning the force that Hamlin Garland has been in the literature of our time. He has told his story of his own life and literary activities in “A Son of the Middle Border” (1917), a volume that was at once accepted as one of the foremost of American literary autobiographies. In no way detracting from the quality of Mr. Garland’s later work is the ventured opinion that he has never surpassed some of his earlier stories. His writing career began about 1890, when the first of the tales of “Main-Traveled Roads” struck a fresh note in fiction. Between 1895 and 1898 he wrote “Rose of Dutcher’s Cooley,” and, in 1902, “The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop.” These, with “Main-Traveled Roads” are still probably his most popular books. In 1900 “The Eagle’s Heart” appeared, and later “Hesper,” “The Tyranny of the Dark,” “The Long Trail,” “The Shadow World” and “Cavanagh, Forest Ranger.”
[Illustration: HARRY LEON WILSON’S BUNGALOW IN THE OZARK MOUNTAINS, MO.]
Writing men of our generation have begun under the magic spell of Stevenson. To Lloyd Osbourne it was given to serve his apprenticeship to R. L. S., as Maupassant served his apprenticeship to Flaubert, and, while yet an apprentice, to be accepted as a collaborator. Together the stepfather and the stepson worked out “The Wrong Box” (1889), “The Wrecker” (1892), and “The Ebb Tide” (1894). Then Stevenson passed on into Shadow Land, and some years later Osbourne began alone with “The Queen Versus Billy” and “Love the Fiddler.” In the first decade of the present century the motor-car was still something of a novelty, and as such almost a virgin field for fiction. It was of its then baffling problems and incomprehensible moods that Lloyd Osbourne told in “The Motor-maniacs,” “Three Speeds Forward,” and “Baby Bullet.” Later books are “Wild Justice,” “The Adventurer,” and “A Person of Some Importance.”