SOURCE: “Avoiding the Abbey,” in Reviewer, Vol. 2, No. 1, October, 1921, pp. 30-36.

In the following essay, Newman discusses the critical reaction to Mackenzie's work.

When Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald was twenty-one and his literary taste was yet unformed, he had a marked admiration for Sinister Street: the title of his second novel—The Beautiful and Damned—would seem to indicate that his maturer taste has turned from the smooth octavos of Mr. Martin Secker to the more fragile volumes of Messrs. Street and Smith. When Mr. Henry James was seventy-one and his literary taste was presumably definitive, he wrote his famous article on the younger generation which set a few hearts beating and so many burning, and wherein he suggested that this interesting young novelist positively cared for his phrase as a fondly foreseeing parent for a child, and that he was even then uncontrollably on his way to...