Page:The American Novel - Carl Van Doren.djvu/254

 quaint or homely touches may be found in two other novels of the period which both exploit elderly, eccentric, charming heroes: F. Hopkinson Smith's Colonel Carter of Cartersville (1891), displaying the type of old school Virginia gentleman now firmly fixed in the popular imagination; and Edward Noyes Westcott's David Harum (1898), a novel dominated by a shrewd, racy-tongued upstate New Yorker who holds a comfortable place in the long American tradition of the unlettered philosopher and humorist.

In the eighties began the career of that later American writer who gave to the novel his most complete allegiance, undeflected by the vogue of briefer narratives, which he only barely attempted, or by other forms of imaginative literature. Francis Marion Crawford, descendant of the Revolutionary general and son of the sculptor, Thomas Crawford, was born at Bagni di Lucca, Tuscany, in 1854. Though the father lived in Rome, he sent his son to prepare for college at St. Paul's School, New Hampshire, and then to Harvard; but Crawford soon left Cambridge to study successively at the English Cambridge, Heidelberg, and Rome. Having become interested in Sanskrit, and having lost the expectation of a fortune, he went to India and there edited The Indian Herald at Allahabad. But he shortly returned to America, spent another year upon Sanskrit with Professor Lanman of Harvard, and wrote his first novel, Mr. Isaacs (1882), on the advice of an uncle who had been struck by Crawford's oral account