Martin Bucco

The Serialized Novels of Sinclair Lewis

Contrary Sinclair Lewis owed much of his phenomenal literary success and failure to popular American magazine fiction. As far back as 1910, while hacking in the dream factories of the East, this raw Middle Westerner brooded over his hometown and his alma mater—Sauk Centre, Minnesota, and Yale University—and yearned for fame and fortune. Restless and tormented, he seemed always out of tune with people and places. When not playing the role of medieval lyricist or prairie euphuist, he contributed to the slow displacement of good fiction in magazines by cynically turning out, as he once confessed, “a swell piece of cheese to grab off some easy gravy.”1 But what editors of the big slicks balked at, many xThe Intim ate Notebooks of George Jean Nathan (New York, 1932), p. 16. literary critics admired; and what the critics denounced, magazine editors praised.

Taming the chaos : English poetic diction theory since the Renaissance

Alone among artists, poets are at once blessed and burdened by the inherent semantic component and the tarnishing social employment of their linguistic medium. In an effort to define the mysterious and attractive power of poetic discourse, Emerson Marks undertakes a comparison of successive attempts to explain the phenomenon. TAMING THE CHAOS is an ambitious study of poetic language.

The Western Literature Association

Ann Ronald (1981) University of Nevada Gerald Haslam (1980) California State University, Sonoma Beatrice Morton (1982) Bowling Green State University David Stouck (1980) Simon Fraser University, Canada Fred Erisman (1982) Texas Christian University Joseph Flora (-1981) University of North Carolina Harold Simonson (1981) University of Washington Frederick Manfred (1982) Luverne, Minnesota Barbara Meldrum (1982) University of Idaho Kenneth B. Hunsaker Utah State University

Shifting World: Social Change and Nostalgia in the American Novel by David C. Stineback (review)

Yet there is no mistaking where McPhee stands, either. His recent New Yorker articles on the St. John River in Maine and on the Salmon River in Alaska, the latter a kind of microcosm of the whole Alaskan wilderness question, are two of the most persuasive conservation essays ever written. McPhee works by narrative involvement. We float the river (in The John McPhee Reader, it’s the Colorado, with “archdruid” David Brower and dam-builder Floyd Dominy in a raft together), and we talk with the representatives of various human uses or choices for the river, seeing the water and the rock and the sandbars and the fish and the weather overhead, camping out (awake a lot at night, because McPhee is a light sleeper) ; we learn the personalities of our partners, and are filled in on both the natural and political history of the river in asides by McPhee, and suddenly we realize the whole situation has jelled. We are there, in it. We know the river, as far as language can stretch anyway, and to know it is to respect it.

The East-West Theme in Dreiser's An American Tragedy

Westering in literature suggests a more or less continuous movement W hatever hardships or obstacles stand in the way, the westering indi vidual or group presses on. Often in serious fiction the travelers finally realize that a higher value adheres to the journey rather than to the journey’s end. To make this outcome tenable the writer develops his plot and selects his details in the light of process instead of progress. But such is not the case in Theodore Dreiser’s pessimistic An American Tragedy (1925). Dreiser’s massive Naturalistic trium ph consists of three unsymmetrical books of 19, 47, and 34 chapters — a classic one hundred in all. The first chapter opens:

Shadow of Thunder by Max Evan (review)

hurricanes,” and close by, at night, you could see the sharks. During the day, the sharks stayed away, but “if they did come in you could see their shadows a long way away.” The islands of the title are profane—a home that is temporal though built with love and care, a summer vacation with your three sons, a time in the past in Paris remembered now as an act of devotion— but the stream of the title is primordial; and the stream is alive with sharks and with an evil that casts no warning shadow.