SOURCE: "In Praise of Huneker," in The University of Windsor Review, Vol. IX, No. 1, Fall, 1973, pp. 100-12.

In the following essay, Frank commends Huneker for his devotion to the arts and intuition about significant artists.

For the first two decades of this century, James Huneker was probably America's most prolific critic of the European and American creative scene. Although his early training was in music, Huneker's interests ranged over all the arts and led to his becoming a critic for New York's major magazines and newspapers and, between 1899 and 1921, to his publishing the remarkable total of sixteen volumes—one novel, two collections of short stories, biographies of Liszt and Chopin, and eleven collections of critical essays. His judgments won praise from many, including William Butler Yeats, Bernard Berenson, and Bernard Shaw, and one admirer, Edmund Wilson, acknowledged Huneker's influence on his own work. At the height of Huneker's...