: James Lane Allen: A Sketch of his Life and Work by Unknown - Allen James Lane 1849-1925; Authors American 19th century Biography

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James Lane Allen

A SKETCH OF HIS LIFE AND WORK

WITH PORTRAIT

The Macmillan Company 66 Fifth Avenue, New York

NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.

JAMES LANE ALLEN

A SKETCH OF HIS LIFE AND WORK

"There are two chief reasons why Mr. Allen seems to me one of the first of our novelists to day. He is most exquisitely alive to the fine spirit of comedy. He has a prose style of wonderful beauty, conscientiousness and simplicity.... He has the inexorable conscience of the artist, he always gives us his best; and that best is a style of great purity and felicity and sweetness, a style without strain and yet with an enviable aptness for the sudden inevitable word.... And yet that care, that deliberation is never tedious."

The two chief characters of the story are a young man and a young woman. The young man sprung from the lowest stratum of Southern society, and the young woman from the highest. The story of the intermingling of their lives must be left for the reader to discover.

As was so often the case during the political reconstruction of the South, the heroine passed from the sphere of the high social organization which existed at her birth to the humblest and most obscure hard manual work, while the hero rose from the lowest social condition to the highest intellectual plane, finding his development along the lines of religious and scientific thought. When they finally meet, the latter half of the story shows their influences on each other.

The involved social and political conditions, the play and interaction of phases of life, so utterly different as those which form the experiences of these two people, have allowed Mr. Allen a wide scope for the subtle analysis of character of which in his exquisitely delicate art he is such a master.

The trend of the book, and the religious crisis through which its hero passes, give the story its title; while an important part in the development of the hero's character is played by his passionate love story.

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