Du Bose Heyward: A Critical and Biographical Sketch

There was a fashion amongst a certain school of critics and literati of former years to go about the country with dark lanterns ready to flash their microscopic spot lights upon this or that author, as he emerged for a brief moment from the great North American obscurity, and to proclaim that he had or certainly would or could write the great American novel. It was then the custom to say that in poem or story he had caught the essential verities of the great universal American type. For a while the little spotlights would play hopefully upon someone, and then be turned elsewhere. At last, like the gentleman from Athens who searched with a lantern for another equally mythical person, the critics, who were looking for the great American novelist and his novel, passed away with the hope which animated them, and were seen and heard no more.

Through the 1890's and 1900's the steam-roller of an industrial democracy continued its leveling and standardizing processes which few outstanding literary personalities were able to resist. Then the American writers and critics at large, especially since the World War, may be said to have suddenly realized, indeed to have discovered, two startling but paradoxical facts, i.e., that at last there was a typical and very standard American type, but that he or she was not altogether a desirable person, and secondly and by contrast, that the country was not just one level, usual United States, but in reality a union of many different localities with varying backgrounds, traditions, and philosophies. Out of these provincial cultures might be expected to come the variants from the standardized types, variants whose differences were not only picturesquely or quaintly interesting, but of essential human value.