Brander Matthews, who had come from New Orleans to Columbia and was admitted to the bar in 1873 in New York, turned to literature immediately thereafter. Alone comparable to Mr. Howells in the volume of his literary output, his association with Columbia as one of the professors of literature from 1892 gave him a formative influence as great as Mr. Howells exerted through his editorships. Although his original works might fall short of those of either Howells or Matthews, if measured on a five foot shelf, Rossiter Johnson, who had been associate editor of the Rochester "Democrat" before coming to New York was destined to become New York's foremost editor of books and encyclopedias. In 1869 he was made associate editor of the American Cyclopaedia, and he has been responsible for more sets of books ranging up to forty volumes than any other American.

But while the commanding position of New York as a publishing center eventually made it as attractive to authors as the candle to the moth, not all were content to look upon it as an abiding place. Bret Harte, greatest master of the short story after Poe, preferred to live in London. Mark Twain, although a resident of the city off and on for many years, liked Hartford, Connecticut, best of the many places in which he lived and worked. In spite of all temptations, James Branch Cabell remains a Virginian. On the other hand, Theodore Dreiser has lived in New York by choice for more than half his life, and could not be pried away.

It is not possible to list all the authors who have regarded New York as their home, or who have tried, with more or less success, to limn in words certain phases of its teeming life. Among the writers who made New York their home in the early eighties were Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, George Cary Eggleston, Edwin Lawrence Godkin, Parke Goodwin, John R. G. Hassard, Charlton C. Lewis, Jonas M. Libbey, William S. Mayo, Richard Grant White, Edward L. Youmans, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Henry James, Henry A. Beers, George H. Booker, Charles Dudley Warner, Frank R. Stockton, Irving Bacheller, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Laurence Hutton, Bronson Howard, Samuel S. Conant, Hamilton Wright Mabie, John Hay, General Horace Porter, Charles de Kay, Edward Eggleston.

Among the more recent authors who have sought to portray New York life are to be noted H. C. Bunner, long one of the editors of the now defunct "Puck"; Robert Chambers, Richard Harding Davis, David Graham Phillips, Ray Stannard Baker, Kathleen Norris, Burgess Johnson, Edith Wharton, Arthur Train, Ernest Poole, Abraham Cahan, O. Henry (Sidney Porter), Anne Nichols.

The two most important literary organizations in New York in 1927 were the Authors' League of America, an offshoot of the Incorporated Society of Authors, Playwrights and Composers, founded in London by Sir Walter Besant; and the Authors' Club. The Authors' League, which has a membership of several thousand, devoted itself to the problems arising between author and
publisher, ethical matters, and copyright. It had made continuous efforts for several years to force the enactment of a copyright law which would enable the United States to enter the Berne Convention, by extending to foreign authors the rights sought for American authors abroad, and to correct other defects in the faculty copyright law of 1909. The Authors' Club, founded in 1882, with a membership of nearly 300 in 1927 established itself in that year in its own home. It is custodian of an endowment of $250,000 created by Andrew Carnegie, the income of which is devoted to the relief of needy authors of their dependents. In 1927 the president was John Erskine, professor of literature at Columbia, poet and author of "The Private Life of Helen of Troy," and "Sir Galahad."

The Periodical Press

In daily and weekly newspapers, most of the best work of New York's authors appeared prior to book publication. It is also well to bear in mind that a majority of the editors named in connection with these magazines were also authors, and often journalists as well. The first attempt at periodical literature in New York was that of Charles Brockden Brown, in 1799, who then issued the "New York Monthly Magazine." Its life was brief, but in 1822 the "New York Monthly Review" made its appearance, under conditions more favorable to success. Its early issues were called the "Atlantic Magazine," a title which was to be made use of later in Boston. Both Robert C. Sands and William Cullen Bryant were contributors to the "New York Monthly Review," which soon found lively competition from "The New York Mirror," of which Nathaniel P. Willis was editor from 1823 until 1842. C. F. Hoffman founded the "Knickerbocker Magazine" in 1833, which continued until 1860.

The oldest New York magazine, which has survived is "Harper's Monthly," which began publication in 1850. From 1869 until his death in 1919, this magazine was dominated by Henry Mills Alden. Mr. Alden, who was a descendant of John Alden, had been managing editor of " Harper's Weekly" from 1863 until he accepted well earned promotion. Of the thousands of literary men and women with whom his life's work brought him into intimate contact, it is probable that his wisdom and his kindliness were never questioned save by one, Lafcadio Hearn.

"Scribner's Monthly" was first issued in 1870, but upon a disagreement between the editors and publishers, quickly became " The Century, " and as such prospered under the joint editorship of Richard Watson Gilder and Robert Underwood Johnson for many years. In 1887 Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons revived the title of " Scribner's Magazine," and these three publications with the "Atlantic Monthly, " edited by William Dean Howells, in Boston, known in the publishing trade as "the Big Four," probably did more to encourage authorship and to inculcate a love for good reading in the American public than any of their epoch. All were profusely and expensively illustrated except the "Atlantic," giving rise to a school of engraving referred to in the chapter on Art and Architecture. All in the New York group were, because of their liberality toward art, severely injured for a time by the invention of the photo-engraving process for reproducing illustrations.