The old fashioned novel is really dead, and nothing can revive it nor make anybody care for it again. What is to follow it?…A clever German who is here suggested to me last night that the literature of the future might turn out to be the daily exchange of ideas of men of genius—over the everlasting telephone of course—published every morning for the whole world….

—From a letter to Isabella Stewart Gardner from novelist F. Marion Crawford, August 23, 1896, found by Kristin Parker, archivist at the museum