Mr. George Haven Putnam has received the cross of the Legion of Honor from the French government in recognition of his services in behalf of international copyright. The International Literary Congress is to meet at Milan in September. Its object is to consider the rights of authors in Italy, and to bring about the enactment of protective laws for their works. The offices of the Forum have been removed to the new Jackson Building, 31 East 17th street, New York. Professor Arthur Shelburne Hardy has gone abroad for a year's travel, it being possible that the world may be included in his trip, which indicates another book in the future. a few of the odd words in "Julien Gordon's" "A Puritan Pagan." It would be a difficult task to define the laws of literary composition. Lowell's "Vision of Sir Launfal," which gave such an impetus to his early fame, was composed in forty-eight hours, while Gray struggled for seven years over his famous "Elegy." Goldsmith wrote his "Vicar of Wakefield " with a rush while a bailiff stood at the door and Dr. Johnson looked over his shoulder. Among the more recent novelists Marion Crawford is one of the most rapid writers. His "Mr. Isaacs," which established his rank as an author, was produced in one month. He frequently writes five newspaper columns in a day, while Stockton composes only a tenth as much. Amélie Rives dashes off her work at great speed, and Mrs. Cruger writes under high pressure, barring the door to all intruders. The Literary Society of Paris, presided over by Emile Zola, has just decided to erect a monument in memory of the novelist, Balzac. A. B. Starey, editor of Harper's Young People, is taking a vacation in England, and will be absent until October. Kirk Munroe will edit the magazine during his absence. The number of Harper's Weekly published August 19 contains full-page portraits, with biographical sketches, of the late George Jones, of the New York Times, and of James Russell Lowell. The sketch of Mr. Lowell is by his life-long friend, George William Curtis. An etching of "The Morning after the Ball,” by the American painter, A. A. Anderson, is the frontispiece to the September number of the Magazine of Art, New York. The whole number is a good one. Despite the pressure of his literary work on the Chicago Tribune, Major Joseph Kirkland has two histories on his hands, both of which must be completed before January 1. One is a history of Chicago from the earliest existence of the place; the other is also a history of Chicago, but only to the time of the Indian massacre. A new edition of Major Kirkland's "The Captain of Company K," will soon story, appear. Mr. Bartlett, who, thirty-six years ago, made his first "attempt at a collection" of familiar quotations, is about to issue a ninth and final edition of his well-known book. The New York Recorder will give twenty dollars in gold to the writer of the best story of adventure by land or sea sent in before September 27, tales of personal experience preferred. The spot which was selected for Lowell's grave, and which, it is understood, was of his own choosing, is under two large horn-bean trees, one of which is directly at the foot of the grave and the other on the right of its head. These trees are never trimmed, and their chief charm is their natural and weird growth. The lot is in a valley in the rear part of Mt. Auburn cemetery, directly in the shadow of the Longfellow lot, on Indian Ridge avenue. Thus the two poets, who were neighbors in life, may be said to occupy the same relation in death. THE WRITER: A MONTHLY MAGAZINE TO INTEREST AND HELP ALL LITERARY WORKERS. No. 10. field of wonderful richness, and as yet almost wholly untilled. Whatever the temptations that seemed to lead away from it to more prompt and profitable results, they were put aside, not as temptations to be resisted, but as obstacles in the way to that success he was determined to achieve and felt that he could achieve. When the author, at the age of twenty-three, dropped down in Boston from the Dakotan prairies, with only his brains and his pen to make his way among a multitude of others with the same ambition, his prospects of a Future with a large F were not, to say the least, brilliant. But Mr. Garland had the audacity of a man who knew he had something to say and believed he could say it. He had no respect for conventionalities in life or in literature. Coming fresh from the fields, he brought with him the flavor of the soil and the strength of the tiller. And he sat down to work. Or, rather, he stood up to work; always with the same faith in himself, and with the unfaltering belief that he was there to win. And he has won. To-day he holds a first place among American short-story writers. There is nothing in that department of current literature more virile or truer in atmosphere and detail than some of his studies of Western life and character. The people we meet in his stories are real people; the scenes he paints for us are real scenes. Who, for instance, that has read "Main-Travelled Roads" can ever make How and Grant McLean figures in fiction, or Will Hannan other than an old acquaintance, or the Ripleys as anything other than real folks remembered in the far away past? And the bits of description, which come into his stories like accidental lights in a painting, are oftentimes as perfect as a picture by Millet, Copyright, 1891, by WILLIAM H. HILLS. All rights reserved. A farm in the valley. Over the mountains swept jagged, gray, angry, sprawling clouds, sending a freezing, thin drizzle of rain as they passed, upon a man following a plough. The horses had a sullen and weary look, and their manes and tails streamed sideways in the blast. The ploughman, clad in a ragged gray coat, with uncouth, muddy boots upon his feet, walked with his head inclined toward the sleet to shield his face from the cold and sting of it. The soil rolled away, black and sticky, with a dull sheen upon it. Near by, a boy with tears on his cheeks was watching cattle, a dog seated near, his back to the gale. And this, from that most pathetic of all the author's stories for it tells of the home-coming of his own father from the war - "The Return of the Private." Sick and emaciated, he had crawled home to his little Wisconsin farm, after three years' absence, to find wife and babies. In the evening hush they stand together in the little garden: : Oh, that mystic hour! The pale man with big eyes, standing there by the well with his young wife by his side. The vast moon swing ing above the eastern peaks; the cattle winding down the pasture slopes with jangling bells; the crickets singing; the stars blooming out sweet and far and serene; the katydids rhythmically calling; the little turkeys crying gurrulously as they settle to roost in the poplar tree near the open gate. The common soldier of the American volunteer army had returned. His war with the South was over, and his fight, his daily running fight with nature and against the injustice of his fellow-men was begun again. A great deal of Mr. Garland's power lies in his intense earnestness. There is no uncertainty about his creed, whether it touches religion, politics, art, literature, or social reform. What he believes he believes all through, and it is not always what other people believe. As is well known, Mr. Garland is a strenuous apostle of what is called the realistic school in literature, and yet no idealist is a more passionate lover of the beautiful. His quick sympathies and an intolerance of all forms of social and political oppression have given most of his stories a painful tinge. "Under the Lion's Paw" is a powerful and indignant protest against man's legalized injustice to man; and his plays, "Under the Wheel" and "A Member of the Third House," deal with living questions which cry out for settlement. Two other plays, "Major Mullins" and "Business," are yet unpublished. Besides "Main-Travelled Roads," Mr. Garland has three novels ready for publication, one of which, "A Boy's Ideal," will appear this fall. The Century Magazine announces three novelettes to be published the coming year, and the author is now hard at work on a series of studies of life in Western Wisconsin. BOSTON, Mass. Charles E. Hurd. HAMLIN GARLAND'S CAREER. Perhaps Hamlin Garland would not admit Mr. Howells' claim to be called a Western man. Mr. Howells was born in Ohio, and reared among the comparatively easternized scenes of Chillicothe and Hamilton. Mr. Garland is what may be called a full-blooded Western man in every sense. Born in the La Crosse Valley in Wisconsin, in 1860, he spent his early boyhood on a farm in one of those Western coulés, or deep, dry ravines, where, in the long winter evenings, he listened to his father's thrilling stories of rough life in the Wisconsin pineries; then the father moved out into Iowa and took the boy with him; then he moved again, still in Iowa; there the boy picked up a very good education in the Cedar Valley Seminary, in the intervals of farm work; and later, after some wandering on his own account, he joined a "land boom" out in McPherson county, Dakota, and "held down a claim," as they say, for a |