Читать книгу Why Authors Go Wrong, and Other Explanations онлайн

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To be brutally frank: Nobody cares what the Critical Court thinks of Whitman or Poe or Longfellow or Hawthorne. Everybody cares what Tarkington does next, what Mary Johnston tackles, what the developments are in the William Allen White case, what becomes of Joseph Hergesheimer, whether Amy Lowell achieves great work in that contrapuntal poetry she calls polyphonic prose. On these things depend the present era in American literature and the possibilities of the future. And these things are more or less under our control.

The people of America not only believe that there is an independent American literature, but they believe that there will continue to be. Some of them believe in the past of that literature, some of them believe in its future; but all of them believe in its present and its presence. Their voice may be stifled in the Critical Court (silence in the court!) but it is audible everywhere else. It is heard in the bookshops where piles of new fiction melt away, where new verse is in brisk demand, where new biographies and historical works are bought daily and where books on all sorts of weighty subjects flake down from the shelves into the hands of customers.