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Irving Bacheller |
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Copies of Irving Bacheller's novels, especially his popular Eben Holden: A Tale of the North Country (1900), can be found on the shelves of almost any antiquarian or used bookshop, but few people recognize his name or are familiar with his work. These books are a testament to Bacheller's widespread popularity between approximately 1900 and 1920 but also to the rapid decline of his reputation. Like so many of his contemporaries who rejected literary modernism, he and his works were long ago relegated to the shadows of American literary history. This does not mean, though, that they deserve to remain there. While Bacheller's writing is often marred by deficiencies in authorial technique, several of his novels are good specimens of twentieth-century regionalist writing. Further, the novels in which he is critical of the moral and social decay of America are representative of the type of middle-brow culture described in Joan Shelley Rubin's The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992).
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