of tremendous import to civilization". Atherton claimed that American civilization had been created by the "Nordic" or "Anglo-Saxon" race, and that this was now threatened by an influx of "Alpine" and "Mediterranean" immigrants, who Atherton regarded as inferior to Nordics. Atherton argued that "The old Nordic-American stock is being rapidly bred out by the refuse of Europe." Atherton cited works such as Main Street by Sinclair Lewis and Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos as signs of a decline in American literature brought about by the rejection of "Nordic" themes. Atherton's views on race were praised by Thomas Dixon Jr., but strongly criticized by both H. L. Mencken and Horace Kallen. Following the Russian Revolution, Atherton developed a hostility to Communism. In 1919, Atherton wrote an article for The New York Times, (entitled "Time as a cure for Bolshevism") which condemned both the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the Americans who sympathized with it. When asked by the League of American Writers which side she supported in the Spanish Civil War, she stated that she supported the Spanish Nationalists-the only author of the 418 the League surveyed who did. In the League pamphlet Writers Take Sides (collecting the authors' responses), Atherton stated that although she disliked both fascism and communism, she considered communism the greater evil and added, "Although I have no love for Franco, I hope he will mop up the Communists, and send home, with tails between legs, all those gullible Americans who enlisted to save Spanish 'Democracy'". Atherton attended the Democratic National Convention in 1928. In a poll carried out by the Saturday Review of Literature asking writers which Presidential candidate they endorsed in the 1940 election, Atherton was among the writers who endorsed Wendell Willkie. Legacy Atherton's autobiography, Adventures of a Novelist (New York: Horace Liveright, 1932), is an account of her life and the people she knew, including Ambrose Bierce and James Phelan. It includes historical reminiscences of San Francisco in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She is buried in Cypress Lawn cemetery in Colma, California. In 2009, The Library of America selected Atherton's story "The Striding Place" for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American Fantastic Tales. Selected works Literature What Dreams May Come (1888), as Frank Lin Hermia Suydam (1889) Los Cerritos, a Romance of the Modern Times (1890) A Question of Time (1891) The Doomswoman (1893) Before the Gringo