Sidelights On American Literature
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE PROPHET OF THE LAST FRONTIER 1 From the first year of the new century, when he burst upon the consciousness of the reading world, until the year before America entered the World War, when he as suddenly disappeared, for sixteen years Jack London, like an unheralded comet, shocked and horrified and thrilled the American people. That the majority of them liked to be shocked and thrilled and horrified is shown by the demand for his work. A stream of checks from more than eighty different magazines poured in upon him; six of the foremost publishing houses of America were eager to gamble on the financial coup that might come from his next book, and he gave them forty-eight chances; forty-eight books in sixteen years, some of them heading the list of the best sellers of their period. The sixteen years were h
...is. He was the startling figure in that loud-voiced, Kipling-swayed fin de sitcle decade before the war; the voice crying in the wilderness, "Make ready for the reign of the brute"; the ax laid at the foot of 1 Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa of Ohio Wesleyan University, March 16, 1922. the tree of sickly sentiment and effeminate swashbuckling romance and the "mollycoddle" life. He learned his art of Kipling and of Gogol, and he wrote in the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, in! the era of the strenuous .life. From Jack London learn of Jack Londonism, learn the spirit of the epoch that could make him possible. No other""] American writer has had a career more representa- I tive of his time; none certainly has had one that is more remarkable. To study Jack London is to be impressed first j of all with his (Americanismj He was as indigenous as Mark Twain; the culmination of a century and a half on American soil, a figure impossible save in the California of the op...
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