James Branch Cabell was born at Richmond, Virginia, April 14, 1879. He taught French and Greek for two years at William and Mary College (1896-7), worked in the pressroom of the Richmond Times (1898), was on the staff of the New York Herald (1899-1901) and began contributing to the magazines in 1902, writing over sixty short stories as well as scattered essays, translations and papers on historical and biographical subjects.

Although Cabell likes to describe himself as a genealogist, he is the author of some of the most exquisite prose in contemporary literature. But it is a prose that rises high above its own beauty of style. In books like The Certain Hour (1916), The Cream of the Jest (1917), Jurgen (1919) and the poetry-crammed “comedy of appearances,” Figures of Earth (1921), the composite Cabell hero emerges, triumphant in the midst of his defeats—the eternally disillusioned, eternally hopeful Jurgen-Charteris-Kennaston: a symbol of the human soul seeking some sort of finality, some assurance in a world of illimitable perplexities.

Though Cabell is best known as a novelist, his books are liberally dotted with original verses that do duty as chapter-headings, mottoes, tail-pieces, interpolated songs and epilogues. A complete volume of his verse, From the Hidden Way (1916), bore the subtitle “Being Seventy-Five Adaptations.” It purported to be paraphrases from forgotten troubadours like Allesandro de Medici, Antoine Riczi, Charles Garnier and half a dozen other obscure Parnassians. Cabell even quoted the first lines of each of their poems in the original Latin, French or ProvenÇal. Even after the hoax was exposed, it was difficult for most readers to believe that the entire collection—names, references, first lines in the “original” and all—were the creation of Cabell, the masquerader.

In From the Hidden Way, the romancer has added another story to that gem-studded ivory tower in which Cabell lives and escapes the modern world. Whether he echoes the mediÆval ballata or the more modern rondeau, roundel and sonnet, his is an artifice solidly erected upon art.