The "great American novel," for which prophetic critics yearned so fondly twenty years ago, is appearing in sections.

I may claim for this book the distinction, such as it is, of being the first of the dialect stories that depict a life quite beyond New England influence.

Some of Mr.Bret Harte's brief and powerful tales had already foreshadowed this movement toward a larger rendering of our life.

But the romantic character of Mr.Harte's delightful stories and the absence of anything that can justly be called dialect in them mark them as rather forerunners than beginners of the prevailing school.

For some years after the appearance of the present novel, my own stories had to themselves the field of provincial realism (if, indeed, there be any such thing as realism) before there came the succession of fine productions which have made the last fourteen years notable.
Though it had often occurred to me to write something in the dialect now known as Hoosier--the folk-speech of the southern part of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois of forty years ago--I had postponed the attempt indefinitely, probably because the only literary use that had been made of the allied speech of the Southwest had been in the books of the primitive humorists of that region.