Many articles are available that reveal Frederic’s and his
contemporaries’ views on writing. The first section below
cites articles and interviews in which Frederic comments on his
writing; the second, articles in which Frederic discusses Henry
James and Stephen Crane; and the third, editorials and articles
in which a range of writers comment on Frederic’s work.
The following articles contain insights into Frederic’s
writing methods and habits as revealed by the author himself.
The interviews with Arthur Warren and Robert Sherard are most
informative. The July 1896 article in Bookman quotes
liberally from the Warren interview; the article in Current
Literature is simply a reprinted excerpt of the same interview.
The March 1897 article in Bookman is primarily a brief
response to Robert Barr’s view of the length of a short
story.
Warren, Arthur. “An American Journalist in London. A Chat
with Mr. Harold Frederic.” The Sketch. March 13,
1895. Rpt. in Morace, Robert A. “Arthur Warren’s and
Robert Sherard’s Interviews with Harold Frederic.”
American Literary Realism 11.1 (1978): 52-70.
Warren observes that Frederic “seem[s] to have more leisure
than a member of the House of Peers, and yet [. . . turns] out
a prodigious amount of ‘copy.’” When asked how
he manages it, Frederic responded, “System, my boy, system”
(59). Frederic’s mornings and evenings are spent writing—certain
days are dedicated to his newspaper writing while other days are
devoted to his novel writing. A portion of every day is reserved
for reading. On the subject of how he prepares to write a novel,
Frederic responded that he starts by getting to know his characters
“through and through. They make the story ‘off their
own bat’ once they have been started.” He is also
a thorough researcher. For In the Valley, a story of
“American life during the colonial period,” Frederic
claims to have “made eleven years’ study of the domestic
and political history of that time, the records, the ‘costumes
and properties.’” Referring to his work-in-progress,
The Damnation of Theron Ware, Frederic stated,
I am now writing a novel, the people of which I have been carrying
about with me, night and day, for fully five years. After I
had got them grouped together in my mind, I set myself the task
of knowing everything they know. As four of them happen to be
specialists in different professions, the task has been tremendous.
For instance, one of them is a biologist, who, among many other
things, is experimenting on Lubbock’s and Darwin’s
lines. Although these pursuits are merely mentioned, I have
got up masses of stuff on bees and the cross-fertilization of
plants. I have had to teach myself all the details of a Methodist
minister’s work, obligations, and daily routine, and all
the machinery of his Church. Another character is a priest,
who is a good deal more of a pagan than a simple-minded Christian.
He loves luxury and learning. I have studied the arts he loves
as well as his theology; I have waded in Assyriology and Schopenhauer;
pored over palimpsests and pottery; and, in order to write understandingly
about a musician who figures in the story, I have bored a professional
friend to death getting technical musical stuff from him. I
don’t say this is the right way to build novels; only,
it is my way.
According to Frederic, his novels shape themselves: “It
[the novel] shapes itself as I go along. Then I write as I go
along an elaborate sketch of what is just before me, chapter by
chapter, noting down the incidents, leading bits of conversation,
descriptions of characters and localities, straight up to the
finish” (60). “[W]hen it’s finished,”
stated Frederic, “I’m sorry. The pleasure of a novelist’s
life is living with his characters. [. . .] Then the people go
out into the world, and he loses sight of them, and has to begin
all over again, and create a new set of friends” (60-61).
“Chronicle and Comment.” Bookman (New York)
3 (July 1896): 383-84.
Most of the material is borrowed from the Warren interview in
The Sketch. “Mr. Frederic takes great pains with
his manuscript,” the writer paraphrases. “The penmanship
is very minute and clear, and as fine as copperplate” (384).
“Harold Frederic: Author of Theron Ware.”
Current Literature 20 (July 1896): 14.
Warren’s interview with Frederic is excerpted. No new material
is presented.
“How to Write a Short Story: A Symposium.” The Bookman
5 (Mar. 1897): 42-46. With Robert Barr, Harold Frederic, Arthur
Morrison, and Jane Barlow. Rpt. in “On Historical Novels,
Past and Present.” The Bookman (New York) 8 (Dec.
1898): 330-33.
Frederic’s comments are a polite response to Robert Barr’s
view that short stories should be short, less than 6,000 words:
“The term ‘short story’ is used now to cover
indiscriminately the small novel of fifteen thousand words and
the yarn of twenty-five hundred. Somewhere in this wide range,
after hunting about a good deal, the individual writer finds the
sort of thing that he is most effective and at home in.”
Speaking for himself and his own practices, Frederic writes, “I
may say that for a number of years I have declined to accept any
commission for a short story under five thousand words. This means
simply that I cannot turn myself round inside narrower limits,
with results at all satisfactory to my conception of what I ought
to be doing. It may be answered very logically that this shows
I cannot write short stories, but I should have an equal right
to retort that short stories begin at five thousand words, and
that under that limit of length they are yarns.” (45)
Sherard, Robert H. “Harold Frederic.” The Idler.
November 1897. Rpt. in Morace, Robert A. “Arthur Warren’s
and Robert Sherard’s Interviews with Harold Frederic.”
American Literary Realism 11.1 (1978): 52-70.
Sherard writes that Frederic “was an extraordinarily precocious
child” who taught himself to “read by studying the
tradesmen’s signboards” (64). His earliest recollections
are about the Civil War, and these recollections inform his books
The Copperhead and Marsena. Erckmann, Chatrian,
and Hawthorne are described as Frederic’s literary parents:
“It was they,” Frederic explained, “who made
me determine that I too would write” (66). After throwing
out more than fifty thousand words that represent numerous false
starts to In the Valley, Frederic realized that he “did
not know how to make a book, how to cover a canvas.” He
wrote Seth’s Brother’s Wife “off-hand,
and purely as an experiment” (67). On poetry, Frederic refers
to “that passage in Meredith’s Emilia in England
where it [poetry] is compared to the Polar bear, who walks up
and down his cage, and is brought to a halt every time he has
taken a few paces ahead.” Frederic claims to have “never
written two lines of poetry” in his life, but in fact he
did write at least two poems. According to Frederic, “the
author’s responsibility is becoming greater day by day,
and it is his duty, such is my firm conviction, to do nothing
which is not better than the things among which people live, to
write nothing which does not suggest thought and tell them the
truth, and bear their minds cleanly and honest good company”
(68).
In addition to being a journalist and a writer of fiction, Frederic
was also a literary critic. Below are some examples of Frederic’s
comments on works written by his contemporaries.
“European Gossip.” The New-York Times, 3
July 1887: 10.
“Some years ago, when a caustic pen first sketched ‘Daisy
Miller’ for the public gaze and Americans were in the early
flush of their indignation at what they regarded as a cruel caricature,
I remember having shared very keenly the almost national indignation
of the period. Nobody was able to believe that the picture of
the Millers was other than a biting burlesque. Yet we all said
to ourselves or in print: ‘Even if it were true to the letter,
no American should have written it. Let the Dickenses and Mrs.
Trollopes and Lepel Griffins lampoon us if they like; it is their
nature to. But the American himself should have too much pride
to say such things about his countrymen, even if they seem to
him to be true.’ I dare say this still represents very fairly
the general American view about ‘Daisy Miller’ and
kindred books of satire, humorous or sorrowful, upon the American
abroad. And there may be some risk in making the confession that
the longer one lives over here [in England] the more he finds
mingled amazement and pain in the character which the tourist
Americans, as a whole, contrive to give to Brother Jonathan in
European eyes.”
“Old World Gossip.” The New-York Times, 23
Oct. 1887: 13.
“Henry James’s new novel, ‘The Princess Casamassima,’
appears to have attracted more attention here than has been given
it in the United States. There is the general reason for this
that the book is cheaper here than it is on the other side, where
people pay cast iron publishers’ prices. Here it is published
nominally at 6s. ($1.30) but nobody dreams of paying that price
for it, when at every other bookstall he can get the quarter discount,
which puts it down to $1.10. Then, again, there are the facts
of the circulating libraries, and of the cheap paper editions
of Mr. James’s other novels, which have given him thirty
readers in Europe to one in his own country. They know our chief
writers—that is, the ones who are supposed to be worth pirating—vastly
better here than we do at home. The average leader writer in an
English paper points his articles with quotations from ‘The
Biglow Papers’ and ‘The Autocrat of the Breakfast
Table’ every other day. He knows his Lowell as well almost
as he does his Shakespeare, and is surprised to find that the
casual American scarcely knows him at all. But if the Englishman
had to pay $2 for his Lowell instead of 9 cents, perhaps he wouldn’t
know him so well.
“But the chief interest in Mr. James’s new story
here is in the admirable sketches of out-of-door London it contains.
Some of these have never been equaled, I think, by any other hand,
and the slightest of them has the stamp of a master’s touch.
In human interest perhaps the book will not appeal to readers
as does, for example, Walter Besant’s ‘Children of
Gibeon.’ Both books deal with people who are engaged with
more or less success and sincerity in the task of ameliorating
the condition of London’s poor. Mr. Besant is tremendously
in earnest over this task; he is eager to see it carried forward,
and every line in his picture is made to end toward this object.
His good people are almost lay figures, so engrossed is their
creator in the work he makes them do, and so little does he care
for their personalities outside this work of theirs. Mr. James,
on the other hand, displays not a vestige of enthusiasm for the
humanitarian aims which his chief characters profess and discuss.
His heart may all the time be throbbing as vehemently as Mr. Besant’s
itself over the miseries and wrongs of this great modern Babylon,
but if that were the case, he dissembles his emotions with perfect
skill. He takes a group of these philanthropists and agitators,
and puts them under a microscope. We get a startling sense not
only of the sharp differences of mind, nature, and soul which
separate them, but of deformities existing side by side with the
good traits which dictate their general reforming tendencies.
Each of them had seemed to be on the whole a beneficent creature,
upon casual inspection. Thrown together on the disc and studied
through the pitiless magnifying glass, they become terrible and
hideous—playing a drama which now repels, now attracts,
and is never really comprehensible, and ending with a central
tragedy only a little more painful than the suggestion of broken
hearts which form it all about. It seems to me as if ‘The
Princess Casamassima’ had been written under the influence
of a prolonged course of reading in Russian novels. It is as vivid
and comprehensive as Tolstoi—as hopeless and badly cynical
as Dostoieffsky. As I have said, it is the novel of the year here.
“One figure in the book, the simple spinster daughter of
an Earl, who devotes her whole life to doing good, is particularly
fine as a realistic study. I say this because to most American
readers she will doubtless seem the closest approach in the novel
to a caricature. It is natural enough for us at home, brought
up in an atmosphere which is too rarified to support an aristocracy,
to assume that people of noble birth must at least have mastered
the trick of self-possession in their carriage and manners; that
whatever else they may be, they will surely have learned how to
manage their hands and feet and appear at their ease. Nothing
has interested me more about the British aristocrat—whom
I like very much to study when chance affords, much as a wild
monkey would enjoy studying a cage-bred cousin—than the
fact that he is not, as a rule, easy in his bearing, and is apt
to be highly self-conscious. The Lady Angela in Mr. James’s
novel is a perfect picture, so far as her diffident ways, her
awkward twitching of shoulders and wagging of head go, of a large
number of her class. The inward fire of devotion to humanity which
glorifies her shambling gait and plain face is not quite so common.
“Yet the aristocracy, as a whole, do a great deal for the
poor. There is such a prodigious mass of acute poverty here that
one gets easily into the habit of giving. I should think that
the ordinary family with an annual income of $5,000 counts upon
giving away $200 or $300 each year, partly in subscriptions to
organized charities, partly in donations to relieve individual
cases of suffering. It is not that the Englishman is a softer
hearted man than any other, but he has a semi-feudal state of
society about him of which alms-giving is a natural and necessary
part. The poor charwoman or sweep who is taken ill or falls into
difficulties applies at once for charity to the big houses which
give them sporadic employment, quite as the unlucky negro in the
South looks to the ‘big house’ for help in his troubles.
There is no feeling of degradation about it—no sense of
a loss of independence or self-respect. There has never been any
assumption of independence in the first place. The sweep touches
his hat to you; it is quite a matter of course that when he gets
into trouble you should recognize your responsibility toward him
in return, and give him half a crown. It is the price you pay
for belonging to your class.
“As I have said, the English nobility, as a rule recognize
this obligation cordially, and give away large sums of money.
But there are not many among their women who engage in personal
philanthropic work, like the character in Mr. James’s novel,
and there seems no successor to Lord Shaftenbury among the men
of the peerage. Lord William Compton is indeed a very distinguished
and estimable young worker in the slums, and the recent death
of his brother has made him the heir to the title and property
of his father, the Marquis of Northampton. But he seems to have
strayed off into socialistic sympathies which cannot but militate
against his success in organizing any great and lasting good for
the wretched of London.”
The New-York Times, 12 Jan. 1896.
(Two weeks before Frederic reviewed Stephen Crane’s The
Red Badge of Courage, the following short note appeared among
other general news in Frederic’s weekly dispatch from London.)
“The general reader, however, is talking a hundred times
more about ‘The Red Badge of Courage,’ written by
Stephen Crane, who is presumably an American, but is said to be
quite young and unknown, though he is understood to be living
here. I have never known any other book to make its own way among
the critics so absolutely swiftly. Everybody who reads it talks
of nothing else. The Saturday Review gives it nearly two pages
at the head of its list today, and everywhere else it is getting
exceptional attention.”
“Stephen Crane’s Triumph.” The New-York
Times, 26 Jan. 1896: 22.
“Who in London knows about Stephen Crane? This question
is one of genuine interest here. It happens, annoyingly enough,
that the one publishing person who might throw some light on the
answer is for the moment absent from town. Other sources yield
only the meagre [sic] information that the name is believed to
be real, and not an assumed, one, and that its owner is understood
to be a very young man, indeed. That he is an American, or, at
least, learned to read and write in America, is obvious enough.
The mere presence in his vocabulary of the verb ‘loan’
would settle that, if the proof were not otherwise blazoned on
every page of his extraordinary book. For this mysteriously unknown
youth has really written an extraordinary book.
“‘The Red Badge of Courage’ appeared a couple
of months ago, unheralded and unnoticed, in a series which, under
the distinctive label of ‘Pioneer,’ is popularly supposed
to present fiction more of less after the order of ‘The
Green Carnation,’ which was also of that lot. The first
one who mentioned in my hearing that his ‘Red Badge’
was well worth reading happened to be a person whose literary
admirations serve me generally as warnings what to avoid, and
I remembered the title languidly from that standpoint of self-protection.
A little later others began to speak of it. All at once, every
bookish person had it at his tongue’s end. It was clearly
a book to read, and I read it. Even as I did so, reviews burst
forth in a dozen quarters, hailing it as extraordinary. Some were
naturally more excited and voluble than others, but all the critics
showed, and continue to show, their sense of being in the presence
of something not like other things. George Wyndham, M. P., has
already written of it in The New Review as ‘a remarkable
book.’ Other magazine editors have articles about it in
preparation, and it is evident that for the next few months it
is to be more talked about than anything else in current literature.
It seems almost equally certain that it will be kept alive, as
one of the deathless books which must be read by everybody who
desires to be, or to seem, a connoisseur of modern fiction.
“If there were in existence any books of a similar character,
one could start confidently by saying that it was the best of
its kind. But it has no fellows. It is a book outside of all classification.
So unlike anything else is it, that the temptation rises to deny
that it is a book at all. When one searches for comparisons, they
can only be found by culling out selected portions from the trunks
of masterpieces, and considering these detached fragments, one
by one, with reference to the ‘Red Badge,’ which is
itself a fragment, and yet is complete. Thus one lifts the best
battle pictures from Tolstoi’s great ‘War and Peace,’
from Balzac’s ‘Chouans,’ from Hugo’s ‘Les
Miserables,’ and the forest fight in ‘'93,’
from Prosper Merimee’s assault of the redoubt, from Zola’s
‘La Debacle’ and ‘Attack on the Mill,’
it is strange enough that equivalents in the literature of our
own language do not suggest themselves, and studies them side
by side with this tremendously effective battle painting by the
unknown youngster. Positively they are cold and ineffectual beside
it. The praise may sound exaggerated, but really it is inadequate.
These renowned battle descriptions of the big men are made to
seem all wrong. The ‘Red Badge’ impels the feeling
that the actual truth about a battle has never been guessed before.
“In construction the book is a original as in its unique
grasp of a new grouping of old materials. All the historic and
prescribed machinery of the romance is thrust aside. One barely
knows the name of the hero; it is only dimly sketched in that
he was a farm boy and had a mother when he enlisted. These facts
recur to him once or twice; they play no larger part in the reader’s
mind. Only two other characters are mentioned by name—Jim
Conklin and Wilson; more often even they are spoken of as the
tall soldier and the loud soldier. Not a word is expended on telling
where they come from, or who they are. They pass across the picture,
or shift from one posture to another in its moving composition
with the impersonality of one’s chance fellow-passengers
in a railroad car. There is a lieutenant who swears new oaths
all the while, another officer with a red beard, and two or three
still vaguer figures, revealed here and there through the smoke.
We do not know, or seek to know, their names, or anything about
them except what, staring through the eyes of Henry Fleming, we
are permitted to see. The regiment itself, the refugees from other
regiments in the crowded flight, and the enemy on the other side
of the fence, are differentiated only as they wear blue or gray.
We never get their color out of our mind’s eye. This exhausts
the dramatis personae of the book, and yet it is more vehemently
alive and heaving with dramatic human action than any other book
of our time. The people are all strangers to us, but the sight
of them stirs the profoundest emotions of interest in our breasts.
What they do appeals as vividly to our consciousness as if we
had known them all our life.
“The central idea of the book is of less importance than
the magnificent graft of externals upon it. We begin with the
young raw recruit, hearing that at last his regiment is going
to see some fighting, and brooding over the problem of his own
behavior under fire. We follow his perturbed meditations through
thirty pages, which cover a week or so of this menace of action.
Then suddenly, with one gray morning, the ordeal breaks abruptly
over the youngster’s head. We go with him, so close that
he is never out of sight, for two terribly crowded days, and then
the book is at an end. This cross-section of his experience is
made a part of our own. We see with his eyes, think with his mind,
quail or thrill with his nerves. He strives to argue himself into
the conventional soldier’s bravery; he runs ingloriously
away; he excuses, defends, and abhors himself in turn; he tremblingly
yields to the sinister fascination of creeping near the battle;
he basely allows his comrades to ascribe to heroism the wound
he received in the frenzied ‘sauve qui peut’ [stampede]
of the fight; he gets at last the fire of combat in his veins,
and blindly rushing in, deports himself with such hardy and temerarious
valor that even the Colonel notes him, and admits that he is a
‘jim-hickey.’ These sequent processes, observed with
relentless minutiae, are so powerfully and speakingly portrayed
that they seem the veritable actions of our own minds. To produce
this effect is a notable triumph, but it is commonplace by comparison
with the other triumph of making us realize what Henry saw and
heard as well as what he felt. The value of the former feat has
the limitation of the individual. No two people are absolutely
alike; any other young farm boy would have passed through the
trial with something different somewhere. Where Henry fluttered,
he might have been obtuse; neither the early panic nor the later
irrational ferocity would necessarily have been just the same.
But the picture of the trial itself seems to me never to have
been painted as well before.
“Oddly enough, The Saturday Review and some other of the
commentators take it for granted that the writer of the ‘Red
Badge’ must have seen real warfare. ‘The extremely
vivid touches of detail convince us,’ says The Review, ‘that
he has had personal experience of the scenes he depicts. Certainly,
if his book were altogether a work of imagination, unbased on
personal experience, his realism would be nothing short of a miracle.’
This may strike the reader who has not thought much about it as
reasonable, but I believe it to be wholly fallacious. Some years
ago I had before me the task of writing some battle chapters in
a book I was at work upon. The novel naturally led up to the climax
of a battle, and I was excusably anxious that when I finally got
to this battle, I should be as fit to handle it as it was possible
to make myself. A very considerable literature existed about the
actual struggle, which was the Revolutionary battle of Oriskany,
fought only a few miles from where I was born. This literature
was in part the narratives of survivors of the fight, in part
imaginative accounts based on these by later writers. I found
to my surprise that the people who were really in the fight gave
one much less of an idea of a desperate forest combat than did
those who pictured it in fancy. Of course, here it might be that
the veterans were inferior in powers of narration to the professional
writer. Then I extended the test to writers themselves. I compared
the best accounts of Franco-German battles, written for the London
newspapers by trained correspondents of distinction who were on
the spot, with the choicest imaginative work of novelists, some
of them mentioned above, who had never seen a gun fired in anger.
“There was literally no comparison between the two. The
line between journalism and literature obtruded itself steadily.
Nor were cases lacking in which some of these war correspondents
had in other departments of work showed themselves capable of
true literature. I have the instance of David Christie Murray
in mind. He saw some of the stiffest fighting that was done in
his time, and that, too, at an early stage of his career, but
he never tried to put a great battle chapter into one of his subsequent
novels, and if he had I don't believe it would have been great.
“Our own writers of the elder generation illustrate this
same truth. Gen. Lew Wallace, Judge Tourgée, Dr. Weir Mitchell,
and numbers of others saw tremendous struggles on the battlefield,
but to put the reality into type baffles them. The four huge volumes
of The Century’s ‘Battles and Leaders of the Civil
War’ are written almost exclusively by men who took an active
part in the war, and many of them were in addition men of high
education and considerable literary talent, but there is not a
really moving story of a fight in the whole work. When Warren
Lee Goss began his ‘Personal Recollections of a Private,’
his study of the enlistment, the early marching and drilling,
and the new experiences of camp life was so piquant and fresh
that I grew quite excited in anticipation. But when he came to
the fighting, he fell flat. The same may be said, with more reservations,
about the first parts of Judge Tourgée’s more recent
‘Story of a Thousand.’ It seems as if the actual sight
of a battle has some dynamic quality in it which overwhelms and
crushes the literary faculty in the observer. At best, he gives
us a conventional account of what happened; but on analysis you
find that this is not what he really saw, but what all his reading
has taught him that he must have seen. In the same way battle
painters depict horses in motion, not as they actually move, but
as it has been agreed by numberless generations of draughtsmen
to say that they move. At last, along comes a Muybridge, with
his instantaneous camera, and shows that the real motion is entirely
different.
“It is this effect of a photographic revelation which
startles and fascinates one in ‘The Red Badge of Courage.’
The product is breathlessly interesting, but still more so is
the suggestion behind it that a novel force has been disclosed,
which may do all sorts of other remarkable things. Prophecy is
known of old as a tricky and thankless hag, but all the same I
cannot close my ears to her hint that a young man who can write
such a first book as that will make us all sit up in good time.”
(For electronic versions of the short note that appeared in
Frederic’s regular New York Times column and the full-length
review that appeared two weeks later under the title “Stephen
Crane’s Triumph,” see http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/CRANE/reviews/frederic.html.
)
Frederic earned accolades both as a journalist and as a writer
of fiction. Below is a sampling of what his contemporaries had
to say on the subject of his journalism, his fiction, and his
abilities as a writer. All citations in this section are quoted
in Thomas F. O’Donnell, Stanton Garner, and Robert H. Woodward,
eds., A Bibliography of Writings By and About Harold Frederic
(Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1975).
Editorial. Boston Post. 22 Nov. 1881.
Frederic is “the leading editorial writer” for the
Utica Observer and “one of the brightest political
writers in the country” (206).
Syracuse Herald. 11 July 1882.
Written on the occasion of Frederic’s leaving the Utica
Observer to take the position of Editor at the Albany
Evening Journal, this article states that Frederic is “a
journalist of high attainments” who will be difficult to
replace (207).
Editorial. Utica Observer. 31 Aug. 1882.
Frederic is described as “an editorial writer, [. . .
who] is direct, buoyant and aggressive, with a choice vocabulary
and a bright humor adorning all his lines” (207).
Albany Argus. 3 Sept. 1882.
Frederic “is a stout friend, an effective enemy, and a
charming companion. Journalism stands to him for creed, both in
politics and religion, and his conduct in it has been as candid
and courteous as it has been instinct [sic] with strength and
tact” (207).
Editorial. New York Star. 29 Apr. 1884.
Frederic “is well acquainted with European politics, and
has keen powers of observation, excellent judgment, a rare literary
sense, and a delightful style” (211).
Albany Union. 6 Feb. 1886.
Edmund J. Moffat observes that, “[a]mong the notables of
London [. . . Frederic] is equally popular, and is the best informed
man in Great Britain on the Irish question, and one to whom we
all look for pointers” (213).
“Say, That Reminds Me.” Auburn Dispatch
[New York]. 12 Apr. 1886.
Frederic’s “letters to the Times are brim-ful
[sic] of interest, gossipy and decidedly entertaining” (214).
“Notes.” Critic N. S. 9 (31 Mar. 1888):
159.
Frederic intends, “[o]n the strength of his first novel’s
success, a literary, rather than a journalistic, career”
(219).
Droch [Robert Bridges]. “Bookishness. Middle-State Realism.”
Life 12 (22 Nov. 1888): 288.
Droch credits Frederic as being one among a group of writers
in the Middle States who is “doing careful work in the study
of local character and tradition” (220).
Wardwell, M. E. “Harold Frederic.” Citizen
3 (Sept. 1897): 152-53.
Wardwell acknowledges that Frederic has the potential to write
“the great American novel,” but he contends that Frederic
“should come back to his native soil” to write the
novel. Frederic is “more a worker with the brush,”
whereas William Dean Howells “is ‘photographic,’
a dealer in ‘dogged realism.’” Wardwell concludes
that Frederic succeeds “where Howells frequently fails,
in creating atmosphere which is altogether a different thing from
local color” (227).
“Frederic as a Novelist.” Utica Morning Herald.
21 Oct. 1898: 3.
Written two days after Frederic’s death, this article
suggests that Frederic maintained “a thorough Americanism
of thought and view in his novels of American life” (231).
Barr, Robert. “Harold Frederic, the Author of The
Market-Place.” Saturday Evening Post 171 (17
Dec. 1898): 396-97.
Barr notes that Frederic “researched his books thoroughly,
outlined them chapter by chapter, and then wrote with ‘considerable
rapidity,’ following which he read passages aloud before
revising” (243).
Howells, William Dean. “Problems of Existence in Fiction.”
Literature 4 (10 Mar. 1899): 193-94.
Howells describes
Frederic as a writer who could handle “the problems of existence”
without “staggering around or stuttering” (245).
McCarthy, Justin, M. P. Reminiscences. 2 vols. London:
Chatto & Windus, 1899, II, 78-81; New York and London: Harper,
1900, II, 67-70.
Member of Parliament Justin McCarthy recalls meeting Frederic
before Frederic had written any novels: “[A]nybody might
have seen that he was born to be a teller of stories, and of stories
that should find their material alike in the heart of humanity
and in the hard, prosaic realities of human life” (205).
