Gertrude Atherton 's literary reputation may rest as much on her severe criticism in the early 1900s of William Dean Howells's leadership of the "littleistic" school of American literature as on her story chronicle of California that appeared in her novels and short fiction from 1892 to 1942. An admirer of Bret Harte and Mark Twain as original, imaginative writers expressing the energy and unique spirit of the relatively new American nation, California-born Atherton confronted the eastern literary establishment and British literary circles with her provocative personality and literary rendering of what she called the most "original and audacious country the world has ever known" ("Why Is American Literature Bourgeois"," North American Review, May 1904). In contrast to Harte's and Twain's characterizations of western miners and other adventurers, Atherton in the 1890s began to depict realistically the daily life and romantic aspirations of the early Californians--Spanish-Mexican landowners--and the inhabitants of San...