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Blake Nevius's Robert Herrick: The Development of a Novelist offers a rigorously contextualized reassessment of an American realist whose reputation straddles the interregnum between Howells and the moderns. Eschewing formal biography, Nevius reconstructs Herrick's artistic formation through a dense weave of memoir variants, archival traces (municipal and university records, correspondence), and close readings that track the transmutation of lived incident into narrative design. The study's throughline is methodological: Nevius demonstrates how Herrick's compulsive recourse to autobiographical matter—family psychodramas, Chicago's academic and commercial milieus, and a gallery of recognizably roman-à-clef portraits—both powered and constrained his fiction. Chapters align compositional problems with career stages, returning to the acknowledged masterworks—*The Common Lot* (1904), *The Memoirs of an American Citizen* (1905), and *Together* (1908)—to show how Herrick's documentary impulse, liberal reform commitments, and formal pragmatics coalesced into an unusually capacious social canvas.
For scholars of American realism, Nevius's contribution is twofold: a clarified textual genealogy and a reframed critical history. He reconstructs the early reception (from Howells's championship to the 1910 collapse of *A Life for a Life* and the long eclipse) and parses the interwar reassessments (Van Doren, Hicks, Arvin, Kazin), situating Herrick as a diagnostician of upper-middle-class ethos and Progressive-era institutions rather than a mere period "documentarian." The book is equally attentive to ethics and craft: it probes Herrick's habitual redeployment of private lives, the aesthetic liabilities of "fact-tyranny," and the oscillation between sociological breadth and imaginative invention across the late autobiographical novels (*Waste*, *Chimes*, *The End of Desire*) and the Virgin Islands turn. Nevius thus restores Herrick to the cultural and institutional center of early twentieth-century U.S. fiction, mapping the feedback loop between personality, professional life, and novelistic practice with a precision that invites renewed archival, editorial, and theoretical work.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1962.
