"We need wide and accurate knowledge, calm and well-directed earnestness. The first enables us to see the world as it is; the second gives the power to 'write the vision and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it.' Such a vision, so written, is no unimportant thing.... It is a lay sermon, with the impulse of genius to back it. The world as it is, things as they really exist, are more interesting, more various, more dramatic, more poetical, than visionary things." With this and many another bold declaration, twenty-seven-year-old Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer diagnosed the inability of the United States to produce truly great fiction and set forth the terms on which such fiction must be written. She would, considerably later in her career, write a series of short stories about life in New York City, which fairly well met her...