Volume 26, Number 2 · February 22, 1979
Classics and Commercials
By Richard Poirier
Democracy and the Novel: Popular Resistance to Classic American Writers
by Henry Nash Smith
Oxford University Press, 204 pp., $13.95
In 1895, about a month after the humiliating jeers and boos that greeted his play Guy Domville, Henry James made an entry in his notebooks that epitomizes the plight of most of the American novelists discussed in Henry Nash Smith's new book. 'The idea of a poor man, the artist, the man of letters, who all his life is trying—if only to get a living—to do something vulgar, to take the measure of the huge, flat foot of the public: isn't there a little story in it possibly…?'
Review, 3847 words
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