Chronicles of the West
Wallace Stegner
Only subscribers may read this in its entirety. What follows is a free preview, truncated midway through.
American Years. By Harold Sinclair. New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company. $2.50. Free Land. By Rose Wilder Lane. New York: Longmans, Green and Company. $2.50. What People Said. By W. L. White. New York: The Viking Press. $2.75.
It is probably safe to say that literature in America has not, since the days of Nathaniel Willis, been a leisure art in the sense of being practiced by the leisure class as a form of relaxation and enjoyment. The persistently close relationship of fiction and social history has been natural for Americans from early nationalist times, perhaps because what V. F. Calverton calls the "colonial complex" has forced our writers to appraise and evaluate the peculiar differences of their country. We have been like a setting hen with a nest full of duck eggs—extravagantly hopeful in the beginning, amazed and sometimes critical at sight of the result. Call the hen's anticipations the American Dream; call her duckings and rustlings and long sessions over the warm eggs the pioneer period; call the ducklings whatever you will: industrial war, class struggle, debt, depression, deforestation, the Dust Bowl. As hens, we look those ducklings over with a good deal of dubious curiosity. We are not quite sure we like them. Certainly they are not what we expected. And if we are hens of sensibility, we may go back and sit on the cold and empty nest, where we can recreate our original anticipations in peace, undisturbed by our unnatural offspring now quacking in the horse-trough.
The latter tendency is evidenced in Harold Sinclair's "American Years" and in Rose Wilder Lane's "Free Land"; the amazed bitterness of disillusion is the driving force behind W. L. White's "What People Said," The first two novels chronicle different chapters in the pioneering of the Middle West. The last views with a kind of pitying despair the stale end of the dream.
