Excerpt from Henry Is Twenty, Vol. 1: A Further Episodic History of Henry Calverly, 3rd It would be ungracious to let this book go out into a preoccupied world without some word of gratitude to those who have written regarding the young Henry as he has appeared from month to month in a magazine. The letters have been the kindliest and most stimulating imaginable; and have surprised me, for I have never found it easy to picture Henry as a popular hero of fiction. He isn't, of course, a hero at all. His weaknesses are too plain - the little evidences of vanity in him, his self centred moments, his errant susceptibilities - and heroes can't have weaknesses. And heroes - in any well-regulated pattern-story - must turn out well.' Henry, in this book, doesn't really turn out at all. His success in Episode X is a rather alarming accident. I think he'll do well enough, when he's forty or so. At twenty, no. He has huge doses of life's medicine yet to swallow. And all his prob lems are complicated by the touch of genius that is in him. Another thing: there couldn't have been a Mamie Wilcox in our pattern-story; And certainly not a Corinne. Hardly even a Martha. For a 'divided love interest' destroys your pattern. Yet Marthas, Corinnes, Mamies occur everywhere. So I can't very well apologise for their presence here. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.