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1900-1920
1922
To
The American Novel, published last year, undertook to trace theprogress of a literary type in the United States from its beginnings tothe end of the nineteenth century; Contemporary American Novelistsundertakes to study the type as it has existed during the first twodecades of the twentieth century. Readers of both volumes may note thatin this later volume criticism has tended to supplant history. Only inwriting of dead authors can the critic feel that any considerableportion of his task is done when he has arranged them in what he thinkstheir proper categories and their true perspective. In the case ofliving authors he has regularly to remember that he works with shiftingmaterials, with figures whose dimensions and importance may be changedby growth, with persons who may desert old paths for new, revealunsuspected attributes, increase or fade with the mere revolutions oftime. All he can expect to do in dealing with any current type as fluidas the novel, is, seizing upon it at some specific moment, to examinethe intentions and successes of outstanding or typical individuals andto make the most accurate report possible concerning them. Whatevergeneral tendency there may be ought to appear from his examination.
The general tendency appearing most clearly among the novelists herestudied is, of course, the drift of naturalism: initiated a fullgeneration ago by several restless spirits, of whom E.W. Howe and HamlinGarland are the most conspicuous survivors; continued by those younggeniuses Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, all dead before theirtime, and by Theodore Dreiser, Robert Herrick, Upton Sinclair, happilystill alive; given a fresh impulse during the shaken years of the warand of the recovery from war by such satirists as Edgar Lee Masters andSinclair Lewis and their companions in the new revolt. The intelligentAmerican fiction of the century has to be studied—so far as the novelis concerned—largely in terms of its agreement or its disagreement withthis naturalistic tendency, which has been powerful enough to drawWinston Churchill and Booth Tarkington into an approach to itspractices, to drive James Branch Cabell and Joseph Hergesheimer intoexplicit dissent, and to throw into strong relief the balancedindependence of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. The year 1920, marking apeak in the triumph of one or two species of naturalism and in some waysclosing a chapter, affords an admirable occasion to take stock. Thisbook, indeed, was planned and begun at the close of that year and hasfirmly resisted the temptation to do more than glance at most of thework produced since then—even at the price of giving what must seeminsufficient notice to The Triumph of the Egg and Three Soldiersand of giving none at all to that still more recent masterpieceCytherea. While criticism pauses to take stock, creation steadily goeson.
Acknowledgments are due The Nation for permission to reprint from itspages those portions of the volume which have already been publishedthere.
March, 1922.
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