x INTRODUCTION

Just as the growth and development of America are rapid, so literary history moves quickly in this country, and in the space of five years the writer who was an innovator, an isolated figure, is now Bwntfid 8S 0H6 Of a school of what is called the new American fiction. When Sherwood Anderson be- gan there was only one novelist who could be seri- 011813’ ‘regarded as an original figure in modern American realistic fiction, and that was Theodore Dreiser. The latter was still the subject of vitu- peration and dispute, the single hope of those who believed that the purveyors of cheerful sentimen- talities and of red-blooded adventures, were not the beginning and end of the national impulse towards a native American literature Then there were but a few places in which such writers could obtain a hearing; now the weekly and monthly reviews of "the adult type in New York can easily stand com- parison with those of London. These years of destruction in Europe, by some law of compensa- "tion, have been years of creation and development in this country. The rise of a serious periodical literature, whose virtue is neither the eternal nega- tion of conservatism nor the mere success of immense circulation, is part of what seems to be a genuine rliterary renascence in America.

Sherwood Anderson's work is typical of this renascence, this expression of America to-day in a literature which is no longer provincial but has its roots in the soil. In fiction this movement of independence has taken the form of realism, a resolute insistence upon the fundamentals of life,