Virtually every year he came back to New York to write in a penthouse above the Macmillan Company offices. In Sorrento he lived a luxurious life, and in his last years he turned to writing the history of Venice, Sicily, and Rome, the last left incomplete at his death on 9 April 1909. In his own day he was acclaimed as the leading man of letters in America. Admired for his personal charm, his cosmopolitanism, and his learning, he was a celebrity and the constant source of feature articles in newspapers and literary periodicals. His popular reputation far surpassed that of Howells and James. When Crawford spoke about literary matters he enjoyed a wide audience of not only his readers but also his peers.
During the decade of the 1890s American writers were very much alert to the differing literary principles underlying the production of fiction. Actually the debate had begun in the 1880s when such novelists as Howells, James, and Crawford began to crystallize their writing practices into literary doctrine. Howells, for example, had moved steadily away from the romances of his early years toward realism. In The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) he had explicated his ideas in fictional form while advocating realism in a series of essays in the "Editor's Study," his regular column in the Atlantic Monthly.
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