SOURCE: Fredrickson, Robert S. “Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen: Howells ‘Out-Realisted.’” Markham Review 3, no. 5 (February 1973): 93-97.

In the following essay, Frederickson argues that Boyesen has been both misinterpreted and under-appreciated by critics.

When Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen died suddenly and unexpectedly in October, 1895, at the age of 47, the elite of American letters served as his pallbearers.¹ Boyesen was an ambitious literary man who appeared to have made it. His collected works would fill forty volumes. Many of his novels had been popular, going through several editions, and he had influenced such important literary figures as William Dean Howells and George Washington Cable. He counted among his literary friends and acquaintances such internationally important men as Turgenev, Georg Brandes and Henrik Ibsen. Certainly Boyesen would have reason for surprise had he been told how quickly he was to be forgotten. Yet in the excitement of the literary generation which followed, naturalists, like...