covering the music, art, and theater scene of New York. A voracious reader, he also became a prolific and entertaining book reviewer. In the history of American journalism, Huneker is principally associated with the New York Sun, a lively, respected New York daily which prided itself on its opinionated political commentary and extensive coverage of the arts. He was the paper's music critic from 1900–1902 and its art critic from 1906–1912. He also published in a range of high-circulation and small-press journals, both mainstream and avant-garde, over a thirty-year period: e.g., Harper's Bazaar, M'lle. New York, Metropolitan Magazine, North American Review, Puck, Reedy's Mirror, Scribner's Magazine, The Smart Set, Theatre and Town Topics. His reviews, columns, and interviews with major artistic figures from various magazines and newspapers were reprinted in several books published by Charles Scribner between 1904 and 1920. Yearly trips to Europe throughout his life also afforded James Gibbons Huneker the opportunity to report to Americans on new developments in the visual and performing arts. In an age of largely parochial criticism, he was more sophisticated and knowledgeable about modern art and music than many of his colleagues, and he saw himself as a someone who was explicitly working for America's cultural coming-of-age. Huneker was known for his passionate enthusiasms, self-taught erudition, and sometimes extravagant prose style. Gustave Moreau's art "recalls an antique chryselephantine statue, a being rigid with precious gems, pasted with strange colors...yet charged with the author's magnetism...possessing a strange feverish beauty." A critic was one who "sits down to a Barmecide feast, to see, to smell, but not to taste the celestial manna vouchsafed by the gods." At other times, Huneker wrote with admirable brevity and acuity: Ernest Lawson's landscapes were created with "a palette of crushed jewels," and the Ash can painter George Luks was "the Charles Dickens of the East Side." At a time when conservative tastes dominated American cultural life, he stated his credo boldly in a New York Sun column in 1908: "Let us try to shift the focus when a new man comes into our ken. Let us study each man according to his temperament and not ask ourselves whether he chimes in with other men's music. The giving of marks in schoolmaster's fashion should have become obsolete centuries ago. To miss modern art is to miss all the thrill and excitement our present life holds." Part of Huneker's notoriety