An American novelist; born in Orange County, N. Y., March 7, 1838; died at Cornwall, N. Y., July 19, 1888. He has written a great number of very popular novels, which have been republished in England and other countries. His first novel, “Barriers Burned Away” (1872), met with immediate success, and was followed by “What Can She Do?” (1873); “The Opening of a Chestnut Burr” (1874); “From Jest to Earnest” (1875); “Near to Nature’s Heart” (1876); “A Knight of the Nineteenth Century” (1877); “A Face Illumined” (1878); “A Day of Fate” (1880); “Without a Home” (1880); “His London Rivals” (1883); “A Young Girl’s Wooing” (1884); “Nature’s Serial Story” (1884); “An Original Belle” (1885); “Driven Back to Eden” (1885); “He Fell in Love with his Wife” (1886); “The Earth Trembled” (1887); “A Hornet’s Nest” (1887); “Found, Yet Lost” (1888); “Miss Lou” (1888); and “Taken Alive, and Other Stories.”

Personal

  None … could have loved him more than I did. The telegram which to-day told me of his death, has made my own life less interesting to me. He was so good a man that no one can take his place with those who knew him. It is the simple truth that he cared for his friends more than for himself: that his greatest happiness was to see others happy: that he would have more rejoiced in the literary fame of one of his friends than in any such fame of his own winning. All his leisure was spent in making plans for the pleasure and profit of other people. I have seen him laugh with delight at the success of these plans. As I write, so many generous, sweet, noble deeds of his throng in my memory,—deeds done so unobtrusively, delicately and heartily,—that I feel the uselessness of trying to express his value and our loss. He was at once manly and childlike: manly in honor, truth and tenderness; childlike in the simplicity that suspects no guile and practices none. He had in him that rare quality of loving sympathy that prompted sinners to bring their confessions to him, and ask help and counsel of him,—which he gave, and human love into the bargain. Among his million readers, thousands wrote to thank him for good that his books had awakened in their souls and stimulated in their lives. He knew the human heart, his own was so human and so great; and the vast success of his stories, however technical critics may have questioned it, was within his deserts, because it was based on this fact. No one could have had a humbler opinion of Roe’s “art” than he had: but an author who believes that good is stronger than evil, and that a sinner may turn from his wickedness and live, and who embodies these convictions in his stories, without a trace of cant or taint of insincerity,—such an author and man deserves a success infinitely wider and more permanent than that of the skilfullest literary mechanic: and it is to the credit of our nation that he has it.

  One need not go abroad for an estimate of his character. At Cornwall-on-the-Hudson you will find friends who delight to praise. Mr. Roe was loved there because he deserved to be. It may not be generally known that all profits from his earlier novels and writings were given to the payment of debts contracted by another. And yet such is the fact. Mr. Roe was not a rich man, though he might have been. While yet unknown to fame his endorsement of certain notes threw him into bankruptcy. Soon after, his reputation was made; but every dollar earned was given to the creditors who legally could not have collected a cent. The money was given cheerfully; and it amounted to a large sum…. In his family Mr. Roe was the ideal husband and father,—the very personification of kindness and generosity…. Next to his love of Nature was his love of mankind. I never heard from his lips an unkind word concerning the many men of whom he spoke. If he ever felt resentment I failed to know it. He enjoyed visiting and receiving friends, and was never so happy as when in their company. Those who so lately passed the day at Cornwall will remember the welcome extended them; and the open-handed and open-hearted hospitality.

  Financially he is a giant among lilliputians as to manuscript-making. It sounds incredible; but I am authoritatively informed that the royalty from his works for the last fiscal year reached forty thousand dollars…. Not since Cooper, probably, has any native author’s works found such a host of readers.

  He was methodical in his work. He had his hours for labor, and never changed them while at his home. The early morning was given to farming, the bulk of the day to writing, and the evenings to recreation. It was his custom to write out the chapters of his novels on slips and then have them copied on typewriters. The original slips look much like the slips on which Dickens wrote his copy. They are almost illegible owing to the great number of erasions, corrections, etc. Mr. Roe was a believer in Ben Jonson’s saying: “Easy writing makes hard reading.” He carried his corrections even into the composing department of his publisher, often taking the proof-reader’s place and making changes just before the type was sent to the press-room.

  The relations between Mr. Roe and myself were those of intimate friendship. Originally associated with him in his papers on “Small Fruits,” I first met him at his home and was charmed, as all were, by his winning personality. Beneath this mere kindliness I soon found the tender, noble heart, the beautiful Christian manhood, the sympathetic and truly lovable friend. In our later collaboration on “Nature’s Serial Story,” I reaped my richest harvest from his friendship. The happy memories crowd thick and fast upon me as I write, and yet I am helpless to convey by words what that companionship was to me…. His noble manhood has brought me many lessons for which I am grateful. I have seen him patient and sweet and courageous and equitable under circumstances which would have soured most men. I have seen him dignified, tolerant and forgiving at sharp critical censure which I knew cut more deeply into his heart than he would admit, and to which his forbearing reply would be, “Why find fault with the song-sparrow because it can not sing like a thrush? Each has its appointed place and does its duty.”

General

  I had little idea then how long the story would be. We all supposed that a few more chapters would finish it; but it grew from week to week and from month to month. Sometimes I would make a “spurt” in writing, and get well ahead of the journal, and again interruptions and various duties would prevent my touching the work for weeks, and the paper would catch up and be close at my very heels. The evolution of the story in my mind, and the task of writing out the pages, occupied about a year, and just fifty-two installments appeared in the “Evangelist.” The serial publication was of much assistance in procuring a publisher for this novel in book form, for the story gradually began to attract attention and secure friends. At some period during the summer of 1872, Messrs. Dodd & Mead (Mr. Van Wagener had not yet become a member of the firm) offered to publish the story, and a 12mo edition at one dollar seventy-five cents per volume was issued about the 1st of December. Much to the surprise of others, and more to me than to any one else, the thirteenth thousand was reached by the following March. Of late years the sale of this book has been steadily increasing, and my publishers have already paid royalty on over one hundred and thirty thousand copies, including a cheap edition.

  Mr. Roe accomplished the first elementary duty of an author—he secured a hearing. He was like the great popular orators, Beecher, Gough, and the rest, in that there was no trouble about collecting his audiences. But his books, like their speeches, have a vast service to render—the translation into simple language for a million readers of the first principles of social ethics, of personal rectitude, of an industrious and innocent life. These they render into plain words without any harmful influence, and with no alloy but commonplaceness: indeed, commonplaceness is not an alloy, it is only a dilution. Every manufacturing town is the better, for instance, for having a set of Roe’s novels on the shelves of its public library; they may not be a literary diet so good as Scott or Thackeray, but the advantage is that the factory girls will read Roe, while they will leave Thackeray and Scott upon the shelves.

  He never tried to reach men and women of great intellect, and wisely refused to change his style and work from that which appealed to the mass of struggling men and women. But the underlying motive with him was always the desire to help people. There are many instances of severe literary critics, who have violently censured his writings, being completely captivated by him upon personal acquaintance. The charm of simple great-heartedness was eminently his. No one could charge him with sensationalism or affectation. His modesty admitted deficiencies in his work, but the bushels of letters that poured into his hands from total strangers and the unprecedented sale of his books proved that he was vitally in accord with the heart of his fellow-men, and that he knew how to minister to them as no other American writer has done.

  As to the value of his literary work, Mr. Roe would from the very first have been content to leave the verdict to the critics and to the American public. But the critics differed so widely that their judgment was merely confusing, and the American public took him to its heart. When critics like George Ripley and Julian Hawthorne praised his books, when men and women all over the United States found comfort and guidance in them, it was difficult for the humblest-minded author to believe they were the trash that they were often proclaimed to be by young people addicted to being clever,—especially as Mr. Roe’s good sense helped him to see that this proclamation was often due to the fact that the clever people in question had never read his books, and often to the fact that the books had run through a provokingly large number of editions. Of course it was also true that many unprejudiced critics honestly believed the books to be trash, and said so, and that their opinions were not lightly to be set aside. But, again, it showed no conceit in an author to recognize that critics always differ, that they are often wrong, that if the people at large liked his books the critics who praised them were at least as likely to be right as the critics who condemned them, and that at all events he was giving innocent amusement if not something higher and better, to the large number of American and English readers, who constituted his audience.

  I have no close acquaintance with Mr. Roe’s novels, but I know them well enough to despair of discovering why they were found to be so eminently welcome to thousands of readers. So far as I have examined them, they have appeared to me to be—if I may speak frankly—neither good enough nor bad enough to account for their popularity. It is not that I am such a prig as to disdain Mr. Roe’s honourable industry; far from it. But his books are lukewarm; they have neither the heat of a rich insight into character, nor the deathly coldness of false or insincere fiction. They are not ill-constructed, although they certainly are not well-constructed. It is their lack of salient character that makes me wonder what enabled them to float where scores and scores of works not appreciably worse or better than they have sunk.

  So the Rev. E. P. Roe is your favourite novelist there; a thousand of his books are sold for every two copies of the works of Henry Fielding? This appears to me to speak but oddly for taste in the Upper Mississippi Valley.

  The late Rev. E. P. Roe never attracted much attention from the newspapers (and the more authoritative journals ignored him altogether); and yet he rejoiced in a popularity which threw all his competitors into the shade.

  Roe is the novelist of the great middle class which constitutes the reading majority. His novels are singularly fitted to appeal to the class for which they were written. Their author was a clergyman who wrote his books with a moral almost a religious purpose, a fact that disarmed the suspicious; he dwelt with domestic scenes and with characters in humble life, and he mingled sentiment and sensation with a judicious hand. His novels have no high literary merit; their style is labored, often pretentious, and their plots and situations are conventional to a degree. “Through struggle to victory” might be given as the motto of them all, the victory in each being celebrated with the chiming of wedding bells. But despite their artistic defects these novels cannot be overlooked by the literary historian. They have retained their popularity to a wonderful degree, and they have exerted no small influence for good on a large audience that cares little for more classic literature.