SOURCE: "James Huneker's Criticism of American Literature," in American Literature, Vol. 29, No. 1, March, 1957, pp. 64-78.

In the following essay, Schwab surveys Huneker's critical writings on American authors, including Walt Whitman, Henry James, and Theodore Dreiser.

American critics and literary historians have generally accepted the notion that James Gibbons Huneker was largely indifferent to the literature of his own country. He was, to be sure, primarily interested in writers whose ideas and methods were of world-wide significance or whose temperaments appealed to him; many of these happened to be European. To maintain, however, that he was oblivious to the literary scene at home and to the talents of American authors is to perpetuate an injustice that disturbed Huneker and has long deserved correction.

Since he reprinted in his numerous collections a total of only six essays on American writers of belles lettres, one article on the American novel, and...