Leslie A. Fiedler
THE NOVEL AND AMERICA*
Between the novel and America there are peculiar
and intimate connections. A new literary fonn and a new so–
ciety, their beginnings coincide with the beginnings of the mod–
ern era and, indeed, help to define it. Weare living not only in
the Age of America but
also
in the Age of the Novel, at a mo–
ment when the literature of a country without a first-rate verse
epic or a memorable verse tragedy has become the model of half
the world.
The Age of the American Novel,
a French critic calls
a book on contemporary writing; and everywhere in the West
there are authors who quite deliberately tum from their own fic–
tional traditions to pursue ours--or at least something they take
for ours.
We have known for a long time, of course, that our na–
tional literary reputation depends largely upon the achievement
of our novelists. The classical poetic genres revived by the Re–
naissance had lost their relevance to contemporary life before
America entered the cultural scene; and even the lyric has pro–
vided us with occasions for few, and unlimited, triumphs. Whit–
man, Poe, and Dickinson-beyond these three, there are no
major 'American poets before the twentieth century; and even
about their merits we continue to wrangle. It
is
Melville and
Hawthorne and James (together with such latter-day figures as
Faulkner and Hemingway) who possess the imagination of a
*
This essay
will
appear as the introduction to
Love and Death
in
the
American Novel
to be published this spring by Criterion Books.
