Excerpt from The Personal Equation It is, of course, in fiction that his work has been most fully carried out; and, therefore, chiefly from his fiction one obtains the truest insight into all his intellectual processes, and the best examples also of his critical felicities and his fundamental limitations. The circum stance that fiction is his chosen field of effort gives the subject a peculiar interest, because it involves a glance at the question of the American Novel - the question whether there has yet been written, or whether there is ever to be written, a kind of fiction that Americans shall recognize as essentially national, not only in its theme and color, but in its external form and literary technique. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.