Robert Herrick (1868-1938) was a novelist born in Cambridge, Massachusetts who was part of a new generation of American realists. His novels deal with the turbulence of industrialized society and the turmoil it can create in sensitive, isolated people. While a professor of literature at the University of Chicago (1893-1923) he wrote thirteen novels. Among those considered to be his finest was Web of Life (1900). Praised by William James for his frank and clear-eyed views, his work can also be compared to that of England's George Gissing. Both writers developed themes of social malcontent, the changing role of women, and the effects of social isolation. While seeing his world with a critical eye, Herrick escaped the shrill tone of muckraking writers like Upton Sinclair. His art was free of dogmatic "isms", and achieves its power from a melancholic fatalism. He dreaded the brutality and ignorance of a mob as much as he despised the avarice and jaded ennui of the upper class. Herrick was suspicious of political doctrines and utopian legislation, feeling that true progress for human happiness must always lie in individuals making moral choices.
Herrick has concerned himself with the status of women in the republic which has prided itself upon nothing more than upon its attitude toward their sex, and he has regularly insisted upon carrying his researches beyond that period of green girlhood which appears.
Other novelists may be content to show her glittering in her maiden plumage; he advances to the point where it becomes clear that the qualities ordinarily exalted in her are nothing but signs of an arrested spiritual and moral development.
Herrick has not confined himself to Chicago for his scene; indeed, he is one of the least local of American novelists, ranging as he does, with all the appearances of ease, from New England to California, from farm to factory, from city to suburb, and along the routes of pleasure which Americans take in Europe.
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