It was not uncommon during the early twentieth century for publishers to issue a volume by recently deceased authors, titled along the lines of “Last Words” or “A Final Gathering,” which collected the author's late work, published and unpublished, that had not previously appeared in book form. (Both Stephen Crane and Joseph Conrad, for example, had volumes of this kind appear not long after their deaths.) Although I am still alive as I write this preface, the present collection of my essays is intended to serve a similar purpose by issuing in convenient form a collection of my late and previously uncollected essays on both American literary naturalism in general and specific naturalist authors.

Over a long career (it began in the mid-1950s), I have published three previous collections of essays on American naturalists: Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (1966; 2nd rev. ed., 1984); The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism (1993); and American Literary Naturalism: Recent and Uncollected Essays (2002). In addition, I have published during this past decade five collections of my essays on individual naturalist writers: Writer in Motion: The Major Fiction of Stephen Crane (2009); Toward a Modernist Style: John Dos Passos. A Collection of Essays (2013); “The Game as It Is Played”: Essays on Theodore Dreiser (2013); The Significant Hamlin Garland: A Collection of Essays (2014); and Frank Norris and American Naturalism (2018). Of the ten essays collected in this volume, two were initially published in the 1990s, eight since the turn of the century, and none, with the exception of “The Study of American Naturalism,” which served as the introduction to my The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism, has appeared in any of my previous essay collections.

As in my other essay collections on naturalism, the essays in this volume have been divided into sections consisting of those on naturalism in general and of those on specific naturalist writers. It is not surprising that most of the latter section is devoted to essays on Theodore Dreiser. His career and work have been one of my principal concerns ever since I began writing about him in the mid-1960s.