Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/438

420 ; science humanized, so that the child can live in an environment of reality, tenanted by the creatures of his imagination—into such classes do the books for children now chiefly fall. Most of these assist in the real education of the child in accordance with principles which were anathema to our fathers. Some of them, as George Madden Martin's Emmy Lou, belong to the school. Myra Kelly's stories of the East Side New York schoolchild, Little Citizens and Aliens, have introduced to literature a new type, the children of the immigrant, with their humour, pathos, promise. In Lucy Pratt's Ezekiel the negro schoolchild of the South finds utterance. On the borderland of the literature of the school are the stories Seventeen and Penrod, by Booth Tarkington, revealing the experience of the adolescent schoolboy and girl on its obverse and reverse side its tragic seriousness to them, its humour and irritation to the adult. Literature for children has now become so voluminous in quantity, so varied in character, so rich in content, that it can no longer be considered merely as a class of educational literature. However, it performs more efficiently than ever before a genuine educational function through the happy union of humanitarian sentiment, scientific psychological knowledge, and attractive literary form. One type of literature is peculiar to America, the literature of the immigrant. Much of this is educational, for the whole process of making the immigrant into the citizen of the adopted country is an educational one of scarcely realized importance. Of fascinating interest also are the literary accounts of the process. First among these was The Making of an American (1901) by Jacob Riis, a newspaper reporter and social reformer, of Danish birth. The Reminiscences (1907) of Carl Schurz, the soldier, statesman, and liberal political leader, of German birth, are quite the most voluminous and important of these books from the general, though not from the educational, point of view. The numerous volumes of Edward A. Steiner, of Bohemian origin, cover the experience of a successful educator, lecturer, and sociologist in a variety of phases of American life. Chief among his works are From Alien to Citizen and Confessions of a Hyphenated American. Mary Antin's Promised Land (1912) contains much that is of interest to the educator, for it gives a detached and yet intimate or personal view of many of