{"product_id":"9780520366534","title":"Robert Herrick : The Development of a Novelist","description":"\u003cp\u003eBlake Nevius’s Robert Herrick: The Development of a Novelist offers a rigorously contextualized reassessment of an American realist whose reputation straddles the interregnum between Howells and the moderns. Eschewing formal biography, Nevius reconstructs Herrick’s artistic formation through a dense weave of memoir variants, archival traces (municipal and university records, correspondence), and close readings that track the transmutation of lived incident into narrative design. The study’s throughline is methodological: Nevius demonstrates how Herrick’s compulsive recourse to autobiographical matter—family psychodramas, Chicago’s academic and commercial milieus, and a gallery of recognizably roman-à-clef portraits—both powered and constrained his fiction. Chapters align compositional problems with career stages, returning to the acknowledged masterworks—*The Common Lot* (1904), *The Memoirs of an American Citizen* (1905), and *Together* (1908)—to show how Herrick’s documentary impulse, liberal reform commitments, and formal pragmatics coalesced into an unusually capacious social canvas. For scholars of American realism, Nevius’s contribution is twofold: a clarified textual genealogy and a reframed critical history. He reconstructs the early reception (from Howells’s championship to the 1910 collapse of *A Life for a Life* and the long eclipse) and parses the interwar reassessments (Van Doren, Hicks, Arvin, Kazin), situating Herrick as a diagnostician of upper–middle-class ethos and Progressive-era institutions rather than a mere period “documentarian.” The book is equally attentive to ethics and craft: it probes Herrick’s habitual redeployment of private lives, the aesthetic liabilities of “fact-tyranny,” and the oscillation between sociological breadth and imaginative invention across the late autobiographical novels (*Waste*, *Chimes*, *The End of Desire*) and the Virgin Islands turn. Nevius thus restores Herrick to the cultural and institutional center of early\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of California Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49817623232760,"sku":"00000_00000_00000_00000","price":186.04,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0789\/8208\/6904\/files\/9780520366534-1.jpg?v=1785367745","url":"https:\/\/kinokuniya.com.au\/products\/9780520366534","provider":"Books Kinokuniya Australia","version":"1.0","type":"link"}