This chapter in the manuscript, with some others which were later condensed into the first chapter of the published novel, presents an excellent and bewildering example of the problem in editing Dreiser's manuscripts.

An American Tragedy is by general agreement Theodore Dreiser's major accomplishment. From Stuart Pratt Sherman and Joseph Wood Krutch to Robert Penn Warren and Ellen Moers, reviewers, critics, and scholars have praised its tragic impact, its moral effect, its technical artistry, its psychological depth.

Dreiser seems to have thought for years about the book that eventually became An American Tragedy. For years he had wanted to write about a crime. He kept clippings of various murder cases, and before the Chester Gillette-Grace Brown case in upstate New York in 1906 he had clippings about other murders, including one about a minister who committed a murder.

Newspapers and magazines—the popular print—of any time and place not only provide rich lodes from which profiles of what people read and talk about can be sketched; they also demonstrate how these media must be canvassed and appreciated if one would fully understand the culture, and literature, of the time.

Resistance toward accepting realism and naturalism as major literary terms is lively and will undoubtedly stay so. Though nobody seriously denies that a naturalistic mind or intellectual system had matured by 1900, some insist that realism and naturalism, grounded in the literal and leaning toward the positivistic, are antithetical, to artistic creation or else irrelevant to its unique qualities. Such a view has helped to refine the debate over theory, which recently elicited the brilliant opening chapter of Edwin H. Cady's The Light of Common Day (1971). Of course, this debate is ultimately worthwhile so far as it helps us appreciate specific novels. Only the zealot needs to decide what is the most honorific mode of fiction or to deny that experience radiates inward and outward into both private and social realms—between which different readers and different sides of the same reader will make varying degrees of choice. The private realm may express itself best in symbols, impressionism, or fantasy, but the world that we fitfully share and that is partly the product, as well as a determinant, of our inwardness attracts some novelists toward mimesis. I unabashedly believe that mimesis serves humanistic ends in trying to cope with the outward world and bring it into perspective against the inward and that it fights through to becoming an invaluable mode of discourse.

In a long and turbulent career, Sinclair Lewis met thousands of people. Only rarely, though, did chance meetings develop into more meaningful relationships, and what few friendships Lewis formed were invariably short-lived. Perhaps the stinging rebuffs he met as a child from the “gang” his brother Claude led made him wary of becoming close to people; perhaps the reasons lie elsewhere; but Sinclair Lewis spent much of his life largely friendless. However, the friendship he formed with Walter F. White lasted for nearly a quarter of a century and to some extent was reflected in Lewis' novels.

Subject File: Pulitzer Prizes, Award Winners, transcripts; of correspondence with. Lewis-Frank Fackenthall Correspondence (1926)

What had been good enough for Tennyson's Light Brigade simply would not do for American soldiers in World War II. In 1916, 1.7 million Americans were in high school; in 1940, 7.1 million. In 1916, 400,000 attended college; in 1940, 1.4 million. When the attack on Pearl Harbor came, the Army had to cope with an educational revolution. A radical change was needed in the training methods which had been designed for the barely literate soldier. Unthinking obedience had become a thing of the past. The educated soldier demanded a reason why before he would act.

Readers must have reacted with shock and surprise when in December, 1889, they entered the sixth-century world of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee and found it peopled with familiar nineteenthcentury figures. Sarah Bernhardt, whose exploits had charmed and embarrassed audiences during her 1880 and 1887 American tours, was pictured as a young page who befriends the Yankee, Hank Morgan. The petite actress Annie Russell, whose success in the hit play Esmeralda filled New York theaters in the eighties, appeared “in the pages as Sandy, the heroine” of the novel. One “supercilious young knight was modelled after the ex-Kaiser Wilhelm; the jovial Baron after the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII); and the greedy, grasping merchant after one of the important American capitalists of the eighties,” Jay Gould.

When John J. McGraw, the cocky, colorful manager of the New York Giants in the days of their glory, toured the British Isles with his team in 1924, Arthur Conan Doyle ventured a prediction. He thought that baseball might well sweep England, as it had the United States. Doyle seems, in this instance, to have been less insightful than his beloved Holmes. Baseball, the American version of several English ballgames, never caught on among the British. Why not? The easy answer is that our national game is peculiarly American, fitted to American conditions and to the American character. Allan Nevins has placed his considerable prestige as a historian behind the proposition that baseball is “a true expression of the American spirit,” and Jacques Barzun has urged foreigners to learn about baseball if they want to understand America. While it is unquestionably true that games and sports are cultural phenomena which differ from one society to another, the easy answer is too easy. Baseball long has flourished in a culture as different from ours as Japan, where the first club was organized in 1879, and whose two leagues drew nearly 10 million fans in 1962. If baseball is the peculiar product of a peculiarly American culture, how can it be that the English balk while Latin Americans and Japanese, whose cultures are surely further from our own than England's, flock to the bleachers? Perhaps, if puzzles like this one are ever to be worked out, it is best to ask what there is about baseball which enabled it to enjoy, for nearly a century, an almost undisputed claim to the title “our national game.”

The term “chromo,” a nickname for chromolithography, has come to be synonymous with anything that is “fake” or “cheap” or “false.” The period in America when chromolithography served as a popular technology for reproducing the likenesses of oil paintings and water colors was also the time of the Gilded Age, those decades between the Civil War and the start of the twentieth century, which opened with the scandals of the Grant administration and closed with America's needless involvement in a war with Spain. Historians have written of the cultural backsliding during these years as a retreat from the hey day of the New England writers of 1830–1860 and from the first generation of Hudson River painters. According to conventional wisdom, it was a time of Victorian excess in all the arts of design. It was a time when appearance, not fact or truth, held center stage. It was the time of the “chromo civilization,” as it is called.

Twenty-five years ago an adventurous young expatriate, Art Buchwald, began writing a humor-gossip column for the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune. Today the Washington based columnist is a successful, sometimes brilliant, social and political satirist. Indeed, the thrice weekly column is an important indicator that American humor has emerged from the doldrums of the post-World War II period and has reached a new and respectable, if sometimes bitter and unpleasant, maturity.

By and large, Ralph Adams Cram (1863–1942) is remembered today as the creator of impressive Gothic churches and collegiate buildings. The Cathedral of St. John the Divine and St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in New York, the Princeton Graduate College and Chapel, and a variety of turn-of-the-century buildings at West Point—these are the most prominent, though not necessarily the best, of his works. By the 1920s, with Frank Lloyd Wright in temporary eclipse owing to a personal scandal and the European modernist movement not yet having reached American shores, Cram was quite possibly the most famous architect in the nation and was certainly the arbiter of its Gothic tastes. Yet, neither personal success nor the widespread acceptance of his preferred style of building satisfied Cram. For one thing, he recognized that Gothicism was an anomaly in America, contrasting oddly with its spirit and institutions. He was convinced, moreover, that to achieve and maintain a consistently high level of artistic expression, it was first necessary to achieve a wholesome society. Given this conviction, it is not surprising that Cram devoted himself quite as earnestly to the nation's social reconstruction as he did to its architectural construction.

Only the enthusiast of popular music is likely, these days, to remember the name of Jean Goldkette, and only the few who are familiar with the music of the twenties recognize the importance of his Jean Goldkette Victor Recording Orchestra of 1926–27, the first large swinging dance band. It was this band of which Rex Stewart, who heard it at its first New York opening, wrote, “It was, without any question, the greatest in the world … the original predecessor to any large white dance Orchestra that followed, up to Benny Goodman.” “Even Goodman,” Stewart continued, “did not come close to the tremendous sound of Goldkette….” This is, of course, high praise from one who was himself part of a great musical organization, Fletcher Henderson's, and later of Ellington's. Yet if one listens to their records and assembles the comments made by those who, like Stewart, worked the same clubs and played the same jobs, one tends to agree with latter-day critic Brian Rust, who in speaking of the era called the Goldkette Victor outfit “the greatest band of them all.” It is time, no doubt, that the place of this group and of the organization that Goldkette developed was established in the historical stream of American popular music.

It was no ordinary book, that collection of impassioned essays published on November 12, 1930. In the pitch and stress of the Great Depression, I'll Take My Stand: the South and the Agrarian Tradition, created by twelve Southerners, proved to be a prophetic confrontation, no mere “ineffectual lamentation of some impractical neo-Confederates over the passing of the golden age of slavery.” It represented, as Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Southern literary historian and critic, put it, “the first stages of a widespread revolt against computerized, depersonalized, machine-oriented society and its ruthless exploitation of the environment and its human inhabitants.”

Dime novelist Frederick Whittaker first met George Armstrong Custer in the New York offices of Galaxy magazine, for whom the general was writing a series of articles (later collected as My Life on the Plains). Whittaker had served honorably and well in the Civil War himself; yet despite a serious chest wound received in the Wilderness, his zest for martial glory and his admiration for the glorious had not diminished. He immediately became “The Boy General's” ardent admirer and, after the battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876, was his fallen hero's most ardent apologist. Within two weeks of the first news of the battle, Whittaker had published eighty lines of creditable doggerel in the Army and Navy Journal—“Custer's Last Charge”; a eulogy in Galaxy appeared shortly afterward (in which he compared “The Yellow Hair,” favorably, to Don John of Austria, the Black Prince, Alexander the Great; Custer was as much the beau sabreur as Murat, as brilliant as Seidlitz; he charged like Murat and died like Leonidas); and then the Grand Finale, a six-hundred-plus page biography, The Life of General George A. Custer, written and put into print within six months of Custer's death. As a writer for Beadle and Adams, Whittaker had learned how to roll out his prose with steam press rapidity; but the tone, the fullness of the narrative, and the ardor which blushes every page show that these various works were de amore.

Publication in November, 1974, of the third and final volume of Shelby Foote's magnificent history of the Civil War makes me. think back to the time when he first began it. It was early in 1955, I think, that Random House announced its contract with Foote, who until then had written only fiction. These were the years prior to the Centennial of the war, and the book industry was getting ready for it. Since the 1930s, with the publication of Douglas Southall Freeman's fourvolume biography, R. E. Lee, and then his three-volume sequel, Lee's Lieutenants, there had been a rising demand for Civil War military history, and by the early 1950s, with the Centennial less than ten years away, not only publishers but historians both amateur and professional saw a veritable bonanza in sight. The old saw, to the effect that the ideal recipe for a best-seller would be one entitled “Lincoln's Doctor's Dog,” was being revised; interest in the Great Emancipator was turning into interest in the military events of the war.

In early 1892, Oakland and San Francisco editors began receiving letters suggesting that local newspapers and journals would do well to print the poems of a young Oakland school principal, Charles Edwin Markham. Signed “George Roy Jones,” the letters pointed out that since Markham's work had already been published in Harper's, Scribner's, and the Century, the three leading eastern magazines, it was high time that Californians took notice. The writer of the letters was Markham himself, using Walt Whitman's trick to drum up interest in his own poetry. Markham was fond of pseudonyms, having already toyed with half a dozen noms de plume, but this time he no doubt chose to disguise himself to avoid the appearance of immodesty and to conceal his frustration at the elusiveness of fame. He had published individual poems in some eminently respectable magazines, but he wanted a book to his credit. He was only a few months from his fortieth birthday and was depressed by the recent death of his mother and the collapse of a second marriage. Nothing in his personal life seemed to be going right; he was growing old, and he had failed to achieve his potential as a writer.

That illuminating exchange occurs in “The Explanation,” a short story in Donald Barthelme's City Life (1970). I put it at the beginning of this paper because I hope by the end to have explained it.

A great many critics—Mary McCarthy chief among them—believe that the novel as we have known it is dying in America. I agree and, in the next pages, throw a few clods on its coffin. But while I think that fiction as we have known it is dying, I think fiction itself is being reborn in unlooked-for ways. This paper contends that Donald Barthelme's works—particularly his early works, the short story collections Come Back, Doctor Caligari (1964), and Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), and the minimalist novel Snow White (1967)— analyze the older fiction's failure to come to grips with reality in America as we now experience it and offer us a new kind of fiction.