Excerpt from Leading American Novelists IT is always a daring thing to name the leaders among men of genius. No matter how wisely the choice is made, there will be advocates of the rejected and assailants of the elect. The present choice of the leading American novelists is offered with a proper sense of critical frailty, but in the belief that time has already sifted out these names for special remembrance. The death of F. Marion Crawford, for example, is so recent that it has not seemed wise here to attempt either a biographical or a critical account of his work. In the critical portions of each biography I have at temped to make the novels more intelligible to the general reader, who, I take for granted, will have made himself familiar with the particular book under discussion. In so far as each biography pronounces any final judgment on the writer, I have tried to render the opinion of the best critics of to-day, rather than my own impression. 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.