Volume 15, Number 8 · November 5, 1970
A Pinch of Saltus
By Eric L. McKitrick
Edgar Saltus
by Claire Sprague
Twayne, 154 pp., $4.50
In the murky and uncertain era of American letters between the mid-1880s and the mid-Nineties there arose and declined the equally murky and uncertain talent of Edgar Saltus. True, Saltus continued for another twenty-five years after that to turn out novels (his Daughters of the Rich was even made into one of the early movies), together with verse, essays, and a good deal of magazine hack work. But from about 1900 on, when anything of his appeared, newspaper reviewers tended to treat him as a relic out of the past, referring indulgently to the time, now no more, when the wickedness of both his writings and his doings had made his name something of a perfumed scandal. It was only after his death in 1921 that the Village avant-gardists awoke to the possibility that in Edgar Saltus they may have had a kind of spiritual precursor.
Review, 1720 words
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