During his lifetime Harry Leon Wilson was praised by such notable writers as Mark Twain, Jack London, William Dean Howells, Booth Tarkington, and H. L. Mencken. They praised the comic inventiveness which created such original types as Ma Pettengill of the Ma Pettengill stories and Ruggles, the impeccable English valet of Ruggles of Red Gap, and commended Wilson for his sure-handed craftsmanship. Tarkington went even further in his praise, for he saw in Wilson's novels a humanity which most writers and most novel forms cannot reach; of Wilson's comedies Tarkington wrote, they "are harder to write than tragedies; they needed a rarer talent than do searchingly realistic explorations into toughness...." A friend and confidant as well as his collaborator on plays, Tarkington probably credited Wilson with too much skill; yet the fact remains that, in their time, Wilson's comic novels touched most Americans in ways that Howells and...