more radical school of art followed another in the pre-World War I period, though, Huneker's openness was sorely tested. The famous Armory Show of 1913, America's first large-scale introduction to modernism, presented him with formidable challenges; he did not find much to praise in Paul Cézanne or the Cubists, Futurists, or Dadaists. Picasso always remained a mystery to him, and he felt that his friend Alfred Stieglitz had made a grave mistake in exhibiting the work of the modern primitive Henri Rousseau, whose work he found "pathetically ludicrous.Literary critic Huneker's support of the new realism of Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris put him in the forefront of literary critics c. 1900-1910; he was on particularly friendly terms with Dreiser, having praised Sister Carrie and helped Dreiser with his revisions of Jennie Gerhardt. A reader of eclectic tastes, he also wrote in praise of Friedrich Nietzsche, Anatole France, Thomas Hardy, George Moore, Maxim Gorky, Joseph Conrad, Edith Wharton, and Jules Laforgue. Forty years before the Henry James revival, he proclaimed James the greatest American novelist. He was the first American literary critic to review, in 1917, James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He was energetically outspoken about literary censorship and the failure of American publishers to provide readers with the sophisticated publications literate Europeans took for granted. He was uncomfortable on the subject of homosexuality, however, which left him in the end feeling skeptical about the merits of Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde. (Huneker was a fiction writer himself, publishing two volumes of short stories, Melomaniacs and Visionaries, and in the last year of his life published a racy novel, Painted Veils.) Theater critic Huneker's tastes in drama were particularly modern. He recommended Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw (intermittently), Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler, and Frank Wedekind to American audiences long before most theatergoers were ready to accept their works. Wedekind's Spring's Awakening especially appealed to him as "a milestone in the modern theater's fight against sexual taboos." He took particular pleasure in describing and praising the talented actresses of the day (e.g., Sarah Bernhardt, Eleanora Duse, Alla Nazimova, Julia Marlowe, Minnie Fiske) when they took on challenging roles. He deplored the fact that the American stage was largely given up to "eye and ear tickling" while a dramatic renaissance was taking place abroad. Edith Wharton, who regularly read his reviews,