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1Author:  Brawley, BenjaminAdd
 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.
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