Text in 1925: A Literary Encyclopedia
Local color or regionalist literature was so popular from 1890 into the first decade of the 20th century that Henry James pined after the popularity (and sales figures) of Mary Wilkins Freeman. Local color stories continued to have a strong presence in magazine fiction and the novel in 1925. Many people who might be seen as local color writers have their own entries—Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, James Lane Allen, Lorna Doon Beers, Alice Brown, Octavus Roy Cohen, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Walter J. Muilenburg, Martha Ostenso, Herbert Quick, O.E. Rølvåg, and Ruth Suckow. And we could add to that any number of urban local color texts, like Anzia Yezierska’s, for instance.
The size of this list alone testifies to its importance as a genre. Other local color publications included Joseph Crosby Lincoln’s Queer Judson (1925), set in Cape Cod; John Jones Sharon’s Grey Gander (1925) in the Mississippi River valley; Elias Tobenkin’s God of Might (1925),set among Russian immigrants in Chicago; and Anita Pettibone’s Bitter Country (1925), set among the Finnish immigrants in the Northwest. In Lynn Montross’s East of Eden (1925), farmers near Chicago fight the Board of Trade and lose. George Shively represented Indiana in Initiation (1925). E. Earl Sparling’s Under the Levee (1925) is a collection of 13 short stories about New Orleans. Elsie Singmaster’s Bred in the Bone (1925) is a story of the Pennsylvania Dutch. Marshall Edison’s books—like the two he published in 1925, Ocean Gold and Sleeper of the Moonlit Ranges—are a cross between adventure stories and Alaskan local color. Alaska was also represented in Barrett Willoughby’s Rocking Moon: A Romance of Alaska (1925).
John Frederick added The Bronze Collar: A Romance of Southern California (1925) to the books about California. (Frederick was no relation to John T. Frederick; without the T. it was a pseudonym for Frederick Schiller Faust, best known by another pseudonym, Max Brand, who, as that name suggests, primarily wrote Westerns; in 1925 he also published the Western Beyond the Outpost under the name Peter Henry Morland.)
