| | 1 | Author: | Brawley, Benjamin | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Negro in American Fiction  | | | | Published: | 1998 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | Ever since Sydney Smith sneered at American books a hundred years ago, honest critics
have asked themselves if the literature of the United States was not really open to the charge of
provincialism. Within the last year or two the argument has been very much revived; and an
English critic, Mr. Edward Garnett, writing in "The Atlantic Monthly," has pointed out that with
our predigested ideas and made-to-order fiction we not only discourage individual genius but
make it possible for the multitude to think only such thoughts as have passed through a sieve.
Our most popular novelists, and sometimes our most respectable writers, see only the sensation
that is uppermost for the moment in the mind of the crowd, — divorce, graft, tainted meat or
money, — and they proceed to cut the cloth of their fiction accordingly. Mr. Owen Wister, a
"regular practitioner" of the novelist's art, in substance admitting the weight of these charges,
lays the blame on our crass democracy which utterly refuses to do its own thinking and which is
satisfied only with the tinsel and gewgaws and hobbyhorses of literature. And no theme has
suffered so much from the coarseness of the mob-spirit in literature as that of the Negro. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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