When Hamilton Wright Mabie died, the man assigned to write his obituary for the New York Globe dawdled for several days before producing a single unpublishable sentence: "Hamilton Wright Mabie conducted young ladies into the suburbs of culture and left them there." As an oblique reference to a column Mabie had written for the Ladies' Home Journal (1902-1912), as well as to his long list of publications designed to provide spiritual uplift to the general public, this is a valid statement. But in its disregard for Mabie's vital involvement in the literary life of his period, it is fragmentary and unfair. Regrettably, this picture of Mabie as a dispenser of cultural and moralistic pap has persisted for nearly three quarters of a century, obscuring his minor but very real contribution to literary criticism. The books Mabie published on literary subjects, especially during the 1890s, offer a valuable index to the major concerns and strategies of the much maligned Genteel Tradition and provide an essential link between the idealism of Ralph Waldo Emerson's age and the harsher realism of William Dean Howells's.
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