First published in 1926, this somewhat avant-garde, semi-autobiographical novel is about Atlantan Katharine Faraday, who, after numerous anguishing relations with men, chooses a career and independence over marriage and motherhood.

"A somewhat satirical account of a southern girl's first encounters with men." Cf. Hanna, A. Mirror for the nation

Modern Sentimentalism examines how American female novelists reinvented sentimentalism in the modernist period. Just as the birth of the modern woman has long been imagined as the death of sentimental feeling, modernist literary innovation has been understood to reject sentimental aesthetics. Modern Sentimentalism reframes these perceptions of cultural evolution. Taking up icons such as the New Woman, the flapper, the free lover, the New Negro woman, and the divorcée, this book argues that these figures embody aspects of a traditional sentimentality while also recognizing sentiment as incompatible with ideals of modern selfhood. These double binds equally beleaguer the protagonists and shape the styles of writers like Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Anita Loos, and Jessie Fauset. 'Modern sentimentalism' thus translates nineteenth-century conventions of sincerity and emotional fulfillment into the skeptical, self-conscious modes of interwar cultural production. Reading canonical and under-examined novels in concert with legal briefs, scientific treatises, and other transatlantic period discourse, and combining traditional and quantitative methods of archival research, Modern Sentimentalism demonstrates that feminine feeling, far from being peripheral to twentieth-century modernism, animates its central principles and preoccupations.

Late one summer evening in Atlanta, a 20-year-old man walked into a suburban superette and paused to examine the magazine rack. When the store's only other customer made her purchase and left, the youth strolled to the checkout counter, pulled a .357 revolver out of his jacket, pointed it at the clerk and ordered the frightened boy to lie down on the floor. He grabbed the $87 that was in the cash register and ran for the door, where he collided with an elderly woman trying to enter. At the sight of his weapon she fainted to the sidewalk. Her next week would be spent in Grady Hospital recovering from what was called a slight heart attack. The robber reached his car parked beside the curb, but even before he could get it started the police had been flagged down by an onlooker and were in the parking lot. Their quarry surrendered meekly; he was handcuffed and carried downtown. In a darkened apartment, the lights turned off for nonpayment, his wife and child were left without support. It was almost a routine event. An armed robbery occurs every few hours in Atlanta. The damage was relatively slight in this case: a woman temporarily hospitalized, a trembling store clerk vowing that he will quit his job as soon as he can find another way to pay his college tuition. The "suspect in custody" received 10 years in prison, but he had been there before. He was nine years old the first time he got busted, for stealing a baseball bat, and he spent three months in a Dekalb County juvenile facility waiting for the court to find him a foster home. Now his record, as the police say, is as long as your arm.