Poet and soldier, lawyer and politician, novelist and sportsman, Maurice Thompson stirred American interest in archery, but he hoped to be remembered for his poetry or at least for his most popular romance, Alice of Old Vincennes (1900). It is rather as a Don Quixote of romance, "tilting at windmills of literary pessimism" and other devilish companions of realism, as Robert Falk puts it, that Thompson claims attention here. The arch archer critic--who, one obituary claimed, would "sooner aim his barbed arrow at an adulterous novel than at a shrike"--kept his targets of Zolaism, debauchery, illicit love, Henry James, and Thomas Hardy steadily in sight over a career of a quarter century of defending romance, defying what he saw as creeping lewdness. A champion of the Genteel Tradition, a defender of romance like the critical idealists as described by John Rathbun and Harry H. Clark, he preferred the...