II • The Realistic Small Town and the New Naturalism
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Parrington, Vernon Louis
The work of the younger intellectuals, more disciplined than the muckrakers, with wider culture and severer standards. Concerned for civilization, the things of the spirit, a free creative individualism, rather than political liberalism. A searching criticism of the triumphant middle class, its ideals and its habitat, the town and city; the repressive tyrannies of its herd mind; the futility of its materialism. Back of the novelists is a group of essayists, young critics of established ways: Van Wyck Brooks, Ludwig Lewisohn, Randolph Bourne, H. L. Mencken. They embody a reaction from:
(1) The acquisitive ideal of a machine civilization. (2) “The great illusion of American civilization, the illusion of optimism”—the staple of middle-class business morale.
(3) The sentimentalism of “comfortable literature,” that evades reality and weakens the intellectual fiber.
(4) The inhibitions of a Puritanism that has lost its sanctions.
(5) The White-Tarkington doctrine of the “beautiful people” and “folksy village.”
The movement began with Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915). An earlier work is E. W. Howe’s Story of a Country Town (1883):—stark, grim, unrelieved, revealing the “smoldering discontent of an inarticulate frontier.”