Thomas Janvier was a journalist, prolific short-story writer, and novelist who is best remembered for his fictionalized accounts of bohemian and middle-class life in nineteenth-century New York City. Much of his most interesting fiction chronicles the artistic enclave of Greenwich Village and the French Quarter with its eccentric, cosmopolitan inhabitants. Janvier attempted to capture the spirit and times of New York when farmlands still rimmed the city and recently arrived immigrants sought to make their way in a new country. In his portrayals of the manners, dialects, and mores of New Yorkers he can be regarded as a local colorist, one of the dozens of regionalist writers who flourished at the end of the nineteenth century. In addition to his New York fiction the well-traveled Janvier wrote both fiction and nonfiction set in exotic Mexico and the south of France.

Like his contemporary Henry James, Janvier was interested...