During her lifetime Agnes Repplier, a thin, angular, chain-smoking writer of genteel essays, was considered one of the "Big Four" American women writers--along with Edith Wharton, Amy Lowell, and Willa Cather. She consorted with poets such as Walt Whitman and Robert Lowell and with President Theodore Roosevelt. One of the most honored Roman Catholics in American letters, she was awarded honorary degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (1902), Yale University (1925), Columbia University (1927), Marquette University (1928), and Princeton University (1935). She received the Laetare Medal from the University of Notre Dame (1911) and a gold medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1935) for a lifetime of literary achievement. Yet, Repplier lived and wrote during the tumultuous period in which the United States was transformed from an insular state to a world power, a time in which the values and literary tastes of the nation underwent a parallel change. By the end...