Du BOSE HEYWARD
A Critical and Biographical Sketch
By HERVEY ALLEN
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.
It is on these two themes, either that of standardization or of sectional difference in character, that the major utterance of creative literature in America during the past decade or so has busied itself both in poetry and prose.
Mr. Sinclair Lewis may be said to have achieved the characterization par excellence of the standardized America in Main Street and Babbit. Of the studies of sectional and provincial types there have been many poor and a few fine ones in prose. In poetry, Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson have been most distinguished in dealing with New England. In the drama Eugene O'Neil has frequently found his finest métier in the provincial.
Peculiarly tempting, to those artists who have desired to present the more extreme provincial types of character, has been the wide field of the South, "Uncle Sam's Other Country", where the feudal tradition of the plantation, the isolated Mountain Whites, or the realm of the negro have successively, but not always successfully, engaged various pens. A host of names in this connection might be quoted both of authors and of titles, many of which would be familiar.
In the last few years, the negro, owing largely to the fact that his emigration in large numbers northward has suddenly called him to the attention of our metropolitan writers—who now find that he is a reality in their midst instead of a romantic myth or a minstrel character—the negro thus, has become the preoccupation of innumerable writers in prose and poetry, but more especially in music.