Abstract

The Art of American Fiction
van Doren, Mark | April 25, 1934 issue

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Five or six years ago it was the fashion to explain the popularity of novelist Thornton Wilder's "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" by saying that it was short, that it was beautiful, and that it was not American. The country, if one were to believe our contemporary chroniclers, had all at once grown tired of social epics in homely prose, of the unwieldy Dreiser and the too baldly accurate Sinclair Lewis. One may be sick of reading about ourselves; one wanted wit, form, grace, and a radical change of scene. Hence, it was said, the rage for Wilder, who was talking back and away to seventeenth-century South America and who, incidentally, was even then engaged upon a still shorter work about a lady of ancient Greece.

See Also:

WILDER, Thornton; POPULARITY; BRIDGE of San Luis Rey, The (Book); NOVELISTS; BOOKS & reading; FICTION
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