Bliss Perry was a much admired teacher of oratory and composition at Williams College and of literature at Princeton and Harvard Universities. In his thirties he also gained some renown as a writer of fiction. During the next decade he gained further recognition and substantial influence as editor of the Atlantic Monthly and principal literary adviser to the Houghton, Mifflin publishing house. He was a polite critic whose graceful essays on literature and nature were gathered into several volumes, and most of his decorously composed books, both fiction and nonfiction, reached a wide audience. Throughout his career he was in demand as a public lecturer. Together with Henry Van Dyke and Hamilton Wright Mabie, Perry represented the last glow of New England's Indian summer, the continuance into the early twentieth century of what George Santayana disapprovingly termed the Genteel Tradition. At a time when many new American writers...