Henry Sydnor Harrison

Most people nowadays, always excepting the awarders of the Nobel prize and the somewhat garrulous literary celebrity to whom they awarded it, have observed rather rapid waning of the cult for the fiction which exploited, in its comparatively recent vogue, defiance of good English, good taste and legitimate human interest. Yet even that period of barren story-telling had its other side. The stories of Henry Sydnor Harrison were neither satirical nor defiant nor decadent; they were simply sketches of every day human experience of ordinary human beings, but their vogue was readily established.

His first two books, “Queed” and “V. V.’S Eyes,” were characterized by high spirits, slowly-developed humor, and a vein of humanity and sentiment that reminded many critics of De Morgan and Dickens. But Harrison’s two years of services with the Volunteer Ambulance during 1915 and 1916 had an effect on his sensitive temperament which resembled shell-shock. Thereafter he lived a brooding life; his stories became pervaded with a strain of bitterness. There is said to be now in press a short posthumous novel which has been thought, by some who have read the manuscript, to show that Harrison had found himself again.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1931 Century Association Yearbook