Literature in the making, by some of its makers

by Joyce Kilmer

A collection from 23 authors about their points of view about the labor of writing literature. Some of the writers are William Dean Howells, Kathleen Norris, Booth Tarkington, Montague Glass, Rex Beach, Robert W. Chambers, James Allen, Harry Wilson, Arthur Guiterman, Frank H. Spearman, John Erskine, John Burroughs, Amy Lowell, Kathleen Norris, Will Harben, Fanny Hurst, Ellen Glasgow, and others.Alfred Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918), he never used the first name, was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1886. He was educated at Rutgers College and Columbia University, and had a brief career as a teacher before moving into journalism. He worked on the staff of The Standard Dictionary from 1909 to 1912, and then became a special writer on the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

319 pages, Hardcover

First published October 6, 2003

About the author

People best know " Trees " (1913), work of American poet Alfred Joyce Kilmer, whom World War I killed.

Works of this prolific journalist, literary critic, lecturer, and editor celebrated the common beauty of the natural world as well as his religious faith; people remember him most for this short poem, published in the collection Trees and Other Poems in 1914.
Despite his mostly unknown works, anthologies publish frequently a select few of his popular poems. Several contemporary critics of Kilmer and modern scholars disparaged his too simple, overly sentimental work and suggested his far too traditional, even archaic style.

Critics often compared Kilmer, considered the leading Catholic poet and lecturer of his generation in America to British contemporaries Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936) and Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953). Army of the United States deployed him to Europe at the time during the First World War as a sergeant in the 165th United States infantry regiment; the second battle of the Marne in 1918 killed Kilmer at 31 years of age.