Excerpt from Stories of Writers and Artists How little characteristic it was of him to view his problems grimly is borne out by the tone of this story, where the situation is the reverse of James' own, that of the sudden fame of a heretofore unsuccessful writer. The whole is shot through with Flaubert's refrain about the hatred of literature, as the admiring young critic who tells the story reflects that now Neil Paraday's rare talent is to be squeezed into his horrible age. But though the lion is soon exhausted and thus killed by the violence with which he is taken up by Mrs. Weeks Wimbush, the handling of the theme is on a comic plane. No one at the country house where they are so ardently dismissing his new book, while he lies sick upstairs, may have read beyond its twentieth page, and his hostess may end by losing his last manuscript, but still he has had the unique privilege of being brought into the sphere of his popular contemporaries, Guy Walsingham, the lady-author of Obsessions, and Dora Forbes, of The Other Way Round, who turns out to be a man with a big red moustache. 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.