Remembered mainly as a staunch apologist for literary realism, Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen produced a sizable body of his own variety of realistic fiction. William Dean Howells praised Boyesen for his enthusiastic support: "Boyesen indeed out-realisted me, in the polemics of our aesthetic," although Howells goes on to imply that Boyesen had overdone it. Howells also criticized Boyesen for being too prolific, saying he wrote "more and more when he should have written less and less." Boyesen's zeal as a theorist grew from his belief that realism was a new philosophy--not just a literary method--and that realism's job was to demonstrate how scientific law could explain the mystery of life. His zeal led to his writing eight novels, eight short-story collections, and eight other book-length works including children's books. Nearly a hundred stories, essays, poems, and reviews were published in periodicals--an astonishing number for a man who died at...