Neglected for two decades after his death, he was rediscovered in the 1920s by poets and novelists (such as Amy Lowell, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, and Joseph Hergesheimer) who recognized in his experiments with new subjects, themes, and forms something of the spirit of their own literary aims.
Although these aims were derived originally from such nineteenth-century realists as Hamlin Garland, William Dean Howells, Rudyard Kipling, Leo Tolstoy, and others of perhaps more indeterminant influence, he radically altered their principles and methods to serve his own unique vision and purposes. He eschewed the conventional plot, shifting the focus from the drama of external event or situation to the drama of thought and feeling in the mental life of his subjects. He substituted for the conventional expository, descriptive style a highly metaphorical, imagistic representation of psychological effects. And he denied, in his most telling work, assumptions about norms of reality, often depicting unfolding experience as gradual revelation of its ultimate mystery. A relativist, ironist, and impressionist, he anticipated the modernism of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anderson, and William Faulkner by thirty years. Like Hemingway, he was preoccupied with violence, finding in the reaction of his hero under the stress of ultimate crisis the mystery and poignancy of the hero's character and fate.
