The American novel to-day

The last fifteen years have seen a complete revolution in old American literary ideals. There has been a new efflorescence of poetry known as the “new poetry” movement. On the s...

For twenty-five years America has been the classic country of experimental psychology. The more vague and uncertain metaphysics and ethics became in America, the more rigorous,...

From Hawthorne to the present time, American fiction numbers many masters. Preëminent among them stand Henry James, Edith Wharton and William Dean Howells. They are a group apar...

Few books have been subjected to more discussion and criticism than those of Theodore Dreiser. As a novelist, a short-story writer, an essayist and a playwright, he never has co...

In the preceding chapter I presented the general philosophy of Theodore Dreiser. Let us now survey his novels in their respective order of publication. The first in date was “Si...

In the novels of Sinclair Lewis the Middle West has made another contribution to American literature. He was born in 1885 in Minnesota. It was in this country that he located Go...

Few American authors, since Whitman, have taken literature as seriously or have conceived it as being on so high a level of mysticism as Sherwood Anderson. I mention Whitman adv...

“Poor White,” published in 1920, marked a new turn in Sherwood Anderson’s career and the transition toward a new style. It is now characterized by the obsession of the subconsci...

Amidst the triumph of realism, James Branch Cabell’s romantic works seem at first almost phenomenal in contemporary American fiction. They are interesting as an attempt to resto...

In James Branch Cabell, the genealogist is barely hidden by the philosopher. The author of “Jurgen” is the only philosophical novelist in the United States to-day. At first glan...

I have been up to this as objective as possible, sparing neither praise nor criticism to the present-day American novelists. I confess that the path I have followed has been rat...

The American novelists that I have dealt with so far have been veterans of letters, men and women who have had a long career. Few of the younger writers do not owe them somethin...