Volume 8, Number 9 · May 18, 1967
Shook-up Generation
By Ellen Moers
Harvests of Change: American Literature 1865-1914
by Jay Martin
Prentice-Hall, 400 pp., $7.50
Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
by Donald Pizer
Southern Illinois, 176 pp., $4.50
The Novels of Frank Norris
by Donald Pizer
Indiana, 209 pp., $6.75
The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation
by Larzer Ziff
Viking, 416 pp., $7.50
Although there is little question about the importance of the period between the Civil War and the Great War, that half-century contains the greatest hazards for the American literary historian. 'Our modern literature,' Alfred Kazin pointed out twenty-five years ago, 'was rooted in nothing less than the transformation of our society in the great seminal years after the Civil War…in those dark and still little-understood years of the 1880s and 1890s when all America stood suddenly, as it were, between one society and another….' But Kazin himself despaired of telling 'the whole story,' and apologized at the beginning of On Native Grounds for making only a tentative intrusion on the rhythms, the landscapes, the sensibilities that make up 'what it has meant to be a modern writer in America.'
Review, 2319 words
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