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THIS book is intended as a tool for students and studious readers of Contemporary British literature. If the demand warrants, it will be followed by a similar book for American authors, and perhaps by a third on Continental literature.

Our aim in making it is neither to reproduce the information available in books of the Who's Who type and in indexes to periodical literature nor to provide criticisms of authors and discussions of literary schools and movements. It is to suggest materials, outlines, and methods of work, which will enable students to form intelligent judgments of individual authors and to discover and appraise for themselves the outstanding literary tendencies. In this way we hope to aid individual students in working out and applying their own standards of criticism—without which extensive reading is an injury rather than a benefit-and to leave the field clear for constructive criticism by teachers giving courses in the subject.

The difficulties involved in making a book of this kind scarcely need explanation. A recent list of poets who have published in England since 1912 contains more than a thousand names; and the compiler says that he has omitted as many more. The number of works of fiction (excluding translations) published in the United Kingdom in 1920 is nearly one thousand. With all the help of periodical criticism it is impossible to be sure of including the best and only the best. We have tried to list all authors of possible importance to any student of current tendencies in literature, taking too many rather than too few. Some living writers whose work belongs entirely to the Victorian period have been excluded. Some writers who have died since 1914 have been included because their work is still a living influence. Samuel Butler