The Crimson Bookshelf

"THE Great Tradition" is a Marxist interpretation of American literature since the Civil War, written by a Communistic professor of English at Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute. The first book to judge American literature on the basis of its recognition and treatment of the class struggle, it is a not unimportant addition to the more sober literature of the Revolution.

Mr. Hicks is by no means an inspired critic; but by treating his subject from a single point of view, without deviation, he builds up an imposing structure, perfectly logical, perfectly convincing--provided one accepts his major premise, that no American author can write adequately unless he interprets the American scene from the standpoint of the proletarian oppressed by a capitalist society. Throughout the book Mr. Hicks reasons from this premise, not toward it. That literature can have any other attributes which gives it a right to live he will not admit. Consequently Mark Twain, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, Willa Cather, Eugene O'Neill are, though grudgingly praised for artistry or insight, consigned to limbo for inadequacy.

The book begins with the end of the Golden Day of Emerson, Thoreau, and Melville, and the start of the new world of industrialism brought to a sudden birth by the Civil War. How was this new world to be interpreted in literature, and who was to do it? One by one the post-war men of letters are held up for scrutiny and found wanting. Each failed to realize the task before him, or realizing it, fled from it. The sectionalists, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Eggleston and Cable, did not comprehend the whole. The fugitives, Sarah, Orne Jewett, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, sought sanctuary in trifling worlds of their own. William Dean Howells sounded the right note, but was too limited in experience and ability to be successful. The genteel writers of the nineties merely catered to bourgeois prejudices. Then came the years of hope, the years of progressivism and the muckrakers; but journalism was not literature, and recognition of evils was no substitute for recognition of fundamental problems.

With the twentieth century and the war came a closer approach to comprehension. Sinclair Lewis, Dreiser, Mencken, furnished blocks for the building; but none was sufficient architect to complete the edifice. Others were sidetracked, as Irving Babbitt to Humanism, Thornton Wilder to Catholicism, Krutch, Jeffers, and Faulkner to Pessimism. Hemingway tried to dodge the problem of values in bullfights and drink without success.

But one man kept a clear head, and brought to the task requisite powers. That man was John Dos Passos, and he, believes Mr. Hicks, has pointed the way to the New Literature. He has seen the kaleidoscope of American life, and has reduced it to terms of the class struggle. He has built the building, and it remains for the coming generation only to refine upon it. The book ends with a note of optimism, and a challenge to youth to carry out the Great Tradition by recognizing the reality of the Revolution. One cannot help feeling that, despite his idea fixe, Mr. Hicks is a true prophet of the course of American literature for the next twenty years. T.B. O'C.