Although he is largely forgotten today, Robert Herrick was regarded in the decade before World War I as an important inheritor of the realist tradition and a controversial critic of American materialism. Herrick was one of a number of middle-class, generally "progressive" novelists, frequently midwestern by birth or adoption, whose indictments of American society were more detailed and comprehensive than those of Howells, but whose tentative, usually nostalgic analyses of social and economic causation were overwhelmed in their own time by such writers as Dreiser, and who were later eclipsed by the writers of the 1920's.

Robert Welch Herrick was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the fourth of six children and third son of William Augustus and Harriet Peabody Emory Herrick. He was descended through both parents from old, established New England families. Herrick characterized the New England of his childhood as "strenuously intellectual," a culture in which traditional...