Gary Stephens
HAUNTED AMERICANA:
The Endurance of American Realism
In 1917 Sherwood Anderson wrote an essay on Theodore Dreiser
which began:
For a long time I have believed that crudity is an inevitable quality
in the production of a really significant present-day American litera–
ture . How indeed is one
to
escape the obvious fact that there is
as
yet
no native subtlety of thought or living among us ?And ifwe are a crude
and childlike people how can our literature hope
to
escape the influ–
ence of that fact? Why indeed should we want it
to
escape?
The moment at which Anderson was writing was pivotal , and his state–
ment, though an apology for his own literary aspirations , seems to look
both ways from that moment. It is both the expression of a new experimen–
tal primitivism and an illumination of the condition under which the
literature of Dreiser , Howells, Twain, and others in the previous three
decades had been written . And although the assertion that "crudity is an
inevitable quality in the production of a really significant present-day
American literature" is problematic , it is one which now sounds provoca–
tive.
For although contemporary writing in America is technically refined
and intellectually advanced, this development has not led
to
a correspond–
ing increase in the appeal , power, or vitality of our literature . Indeed, as the
technical skills of writers of fiction have increased in disproportionate
relation to the simple power of literature to hold an audience and move it
with a new imaginative vision, technique
per se
has begun
to
seem more and
more insistent . Too many works seem reducible
to
attempts
to
see how far
an idea or a technical gimmick will go . To this extent our literary urbanity
threatens
to
become something deadening and oppressive , and in this
