James Gibbons Huneker

Abstract It is astonishing that James Gibbons Huneker has become the forgotten man of American letters; none of his nearly two dozen volumes of essays,fiction, biography, travel, parodies, memoirs, and letters is presently offered by a commercial publisher. Yet he dominated American arts criticism between 1890 and 1920 to a degree unmatched before or since. An impressionistic polymath of extraordinary zeal and perspicacity, he focused on music but also introduced a broad range of European culture to the New WorldincludingVermeer, Chopin, Liszt, Wagner, R. Strauss, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Conrad, who wrote of him, “What mental agility! What a flexible liveliness of style!” Yet it was his style-jaunty, volatile, occasionally purple, always sensuous-that dated him when a new generation of writers, as represented by H L. Mencken and Edmund Wilson, both of whom idolized Huneke,; introduced a more tempered, economical, and sober prose. Still, his writing offers plenary delights to the modern reader, not least in his once-controversial.fiction, including the neglected masterpiece, “Dusk of the Gods,” and the most Wildean of American novels, Painted Veils.