REVISIONS

Virginia and ventures into the wilderness with a sense that
the world exists only as she perceives it. Kentucky is in her
mind. There it takes the shape and color it was to have in
Elizabeth Roberts's imagination when she wrote her first
novel The Time of Man (1926), in which Ellen Dresser
lives in a timeless folk-world localized in a Kentucky which is
another Arcadia. Compared with James Lane Allen, who also
had seen Kentucky as Arcadian, Miss Roberts was intelligent
not sentimental, poetical not rhetorical. Her version of Ken-
tucky superseded his and promised to endure much longer.
She had not merely used Kentucky materials; she had trans-
muted them. Besides these and other novels she wrote verse
in Under the Tree (1922) and short stories in The Haunted
Mirror (1932).

North of the Ohio there were fewer regional novels of dis-
tinction after 1929, Zona Gale added little and Glen way
Westcott nothing to their Wisconsin cycles. Harold Sinclair
in American Years (1938) traced the rise of a typical Illinois
town. Don Marquis in the uncompleted posthumous Sons of
the Puritans (1938) dealt ironically, compassionately with
another Illinois town at the end of the past century, with
comic episodes which local color would have expurgated The
favorite state of Middle Western local fiction ceased to be
Indiana and became Iowa, across the Mississippi, Herbert
Quick's trilogy of the migration and settlement—VancJo-
marfc's Folly (1921), The Hawfeeye (1923), The Invisible
Woman (1924)—had set a fashion, Ruth Suckow, beginning
with Country People (1924), studied contemporary life with
honest realism, and in her long The Folks (1934) came nearer
than any other writer has done to representing the whole of
American life on farms and in small towns. Phil Stong's more
pungent State Fair (1932) became at once a rural classic*
In Missouri Josephine Johnson wrote the finished, somewhat
mannered Now in November (1934). George Milburn in his
short stories No More Trumpets (1933) and his novel Cata*