noon
The cities of New England have been almost passed over by the local colorists ; Boston , the capital of the Puritans , has singularly to depend upon the older Holmes or the visiting Howells of Ohio for its reputation in fiction . Ever since Hawthorne , the romancers and novelists of his native province have taken , one may say , to the fields , where they have worked much in the mood of Rose Terry Cooke , who called her best collection of stories _ Huckleberries _ to emphasize what she thought a true resemblance between the crops and characters of New England -- `` hardy , sweet yet spicy , defying storms of heat or cold with calm persistence , clinging to a poor soil , barren pastures , gray and rocky hillsides , yet drawing fruitful issues from scanty sources . '' Alas that as time goes on the issues of such art seem less fruitful than once they seemed ; that even Mrs. Freeman 's _ Pembroke _ , one of the best novels of its class , lacks form and structure , and seems to encroach upon caricature in its study of the progress and consequences of Yankee pride . After a fecund generation of such stories Edith Wharton in _ Ethan Frome _ has surpassed all her native rivals in tragic power and distinction of language ; Robert Frost has been able to distil the essence of all of them in three slender books of verse ; Edwin Arlington Robinson in a few brief poems has created the wistful Tilbury Town and has endowed it with pathos at once more haunting and more lasting than that of any New England village chronicled in prose ; it has remained for the Pennsylvanian Joseph Hergesheimer in _ Java Head _ to seize most artfully upon the riches of loveliness that survive from the hour when Massachusetts was at its noon of prosperity ; and local color of the orthodox tradition now persists in New England hardly anywhere except around Cape Cod , of which Joseph C. Lincoln is the dry , quaint , amusing laureate . Through the influence , in important measure , of Howells and the _ Atlantic Monthly _ the modes of fiction which were practised east of Albany extended their example to other districts also : to northern New York in Irving Bacheller ; to Ohio in Mary S. Watts and Brand Whitlock ; to Indiana in Meredith Nicholson ; to Wisconsin in Zona Gale ; to Iowa and Arkansas in Alice French -LRB- `` Octave Thanet '' -RRB- ; to Kansas in William Allen White ; to the Colorado mines in Mary Hallock Foote ; to the Virginias in Ellen Glasgow and Henry Sydnor Harrison ; to Georgia in Will N. Harben ; and to other neighborhoods in other neighborly chroniclers whose mere names could stretch out to a point beyond which critical emphasis would be lost . New York City clung to less tender and more incisive habits of fiction ; that city 's pace for local color was set by the deft , bright Richard Harding Davis , Henry Cuyler Bunner , Brander Matthews , O. Henry -- all well known figures ; by the late Herman Knickerbocker Vielé , too little known , in whose novels , such as _ The Last of the Knickerbockers _ , affectionate accuracy is mated with smiling , graceful humor ; and by David Gray , too little known , whose _ Gallops _ , concerned with the horsy parish of St. Thomas Equinus near New York City , contains the most amusing stories about fashionable sports which this republic has brought forth . In the Middle West Edgar Watson Howe and Hamlin Garland , and in the Far West Frank Norris and Jack London , broke with the customary tendency by turning away from pathos toward tragedy , and away from discreet benevolence toward emphatic candor .