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way and the upsurge of regional theater in the sixties. Collective
activities require money, advanced training, special working
conditions, and a sophisticated audience. A culture can't pro–
duce art but it can create conditions hospitable to it: it can't
create a Balanchine but it can enable him to work. The perva!)ive
philistinism of American society, which was accurately reflected
in the government's neglect of the arts, insured that good
training and survivable working conditions would exist only in
a few cities, especially New York, and usually under the pa–
tronage of wealth. Still, Europe beckoned, even for writers.
The writer, of course, pursues a more solitary career than
the performing artist, yet American writers also gravitated from
the small towns to the great cities: to make temporary careers in
journalism, to seek out publishers, to live among like-minded
artists in communities where identity was more fluid and
malleable. Writers came to New York as Balzac's Young Man
from the Provinces came to Paris-to gain money, status, and
fame, but also because the city was the face of the future, where
the pressures of modernity, industry, technology, and communi–
cations were altering the character of American life. The career
of William Dean Howells is a famous paradigm of the culture as
a whole-of the last phase of the primacy of Boston, where a self–
educated young man from rural Ohio could become editor of
The Atlantic Monthly,
and then of the shift to New York as a
literary center, which coincided with a heightening of social
consciousness in Howell's thought and writing.
Yet it took a special writer, programmatic in his realism, to
try to "do" the new urban milieu. More often the writer lived off
a rich fund of early experience, and, writing half in anger and
half out of homesickness, endlessly recreated the world he had
abandoned. (Even Faulkner went off to Europe, and only in his
third novel, at the prompting of Sherwood Anderson, did he
begin to write about the world he knew best.) As the Brahmin
literary language of New England lost its grip, America began to
produce a vigorous, colloquial, regional, but often an expatriate
literature, which combined realism with satire, nostalgia, fan–
tasy, and even expose, yet also testified to the survival of regional
mores within and beyond the new urbanization. The writer
