Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 233, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 September 1913 — What Novel Readers Like. [ARTICLE]

What Novel Readers Like.

That old question whether the poor prefer to read stories .about themselves rather than about the rich has been revived in England and discussed by serial writers. Some believe that most readers, whether poor or rich, prefer novels ■ dealing with a class different from their own, and some maintain that the majority of readers are more interested in their own class. Nobody knows. But something undoubtedly depends upon the novelist himself. Dickens had no difficulty in interesting everybody in the poor. Thackeray made the well-to-do and the rich interesting. So does Mrs. Wharton. And innumerable otfters. * , On the other hand, Jack London, Kauffman, James Oppenheim and possibly two or three Others have sketched wonderful pictures of lowly and obscure lives. The "great American novel,” which may have been written, but is still awaiting publication, will deal neither with the rich nor with the poor exclusively, nor with the middle class, but with all sorts and conditions of men. It will be a novel of democracy—neither aristocratic nor proletarian.