Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v2.djvu/421

The Revolt Against Information 405 Civil War present in story form perhaps the best short histories of the campaigns they cover; Noah Brooks's Boy Emigrants exhibits frontier life accurately; John Bennett's Master Sky- lark belongs to the highest type of historical juvenile. The informational path trod first by Goodrich and Abbott grew to be the main road for future juveniles. Today the How To Make books are perhaps the most distinctive, as they are among the best-seUing. What probably remains the most distinguished treatment for young children of foreign life and scenes and of nature was given by Jane Andrews (1833-87) in her Se:ven Little Sisters (1861) and Stories Mother Nature Told. She was the pioneer of the great crowd of present-day nature writers for children and still compares in dignity and interest of treatment with all her successors. Of these, those who steer wkrily between the scientific and lifeless and the sentimental and the superficial are still living. In less philo- sophical or imaginative setting, the books of actual adventure by Paul du Chaillu deserve mention. The revolt from Goodrich and Abbott took not only the form of stories of unmixed action but also of the novel assertion that innocent pranks are a legitimate subject for children's books. These J. T. Trowbridge (1827-1916) and James Otis Kaler (1846- ), authors respectively of the delightful Cud- jo's Cave (1864) and Toby Tyler (1867), ventured to exploit with no uneasy eye on the moral effect. Thomas Bailey Aldrich' made a notable success artistic as well as popular with his Story of a Bad Boy. A semi-idealized record of his own New England childhood, its only intention was to record zestfuUy what had really been the life of a boy engaged in no adventurous actions other than ordinary escapades. It was a departure when published in 1869. A half-dozen years later appeared another masterpiece of pranks regarded at the time as by no means innocent. Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel Huckleberry Finn (1884), by Samuel L. Clemens,' raised a tempest in the cambric-teapot world and are even yet looked at askance in some children's libraries. But in spite of moral- ists they immediately took the foremost place as stories of the American boy, and in a surprisingly short while became world classics. They are not explicitly treated as boy's stories ' See also Book III, Chaps, vi and x. , ' See also Book III, Chap. viii.