U.s.a. Is The Speech Of The People

Life Is To Be Used, Not Just Held In The Hand Like A Box Of Bonbons That Nobody Eats.

A Set Of Ideas, A Point Of View, A Frame Of Reference Is In Space Only An Intersection, The State Of Affairs At Some Given Momentin The Consciousness Of One Man Or Many Men, But In Time It Has Evolving Form, Virtually Organic Extension. In Time Ideas Can Be Thought Of As Sprouting, Growing, Maturing, Bringing Forth Seed And Dying Like Plants.

It Was The Ponderous Battering Ram Of His Novels That Opened The Way Through The Genteel Reticences Of American Nineteenth-century Fiction. . . Without [theodore] Dreiser's Treading Out A Path For Naturalism None Of Us Would Have Had A Chance To Publish.

One Of The Most Extraordinary Things About Industrial Society Of The Present Day Is Its Idiot Lack Of Memory. Tabloids And Movies Take The Place Of Mental Processes And Revolts, Crimes, Despairs Pass Off In A Dribble Of Vague Words And Rubber Stamp Phrases Without Leaving A Scratch On The Mind Of The Driven Instalment-paying, Subway-packing Mass.

The Only Excuse For A Novelist, Aside From The Entertainment And Vicarious Living His Books Give The People Who Read Them, Is As A Sort Of Second-class Historian Of The Age He Lives In. The "reality" He Missed By Writing About Imaginary People, He Gains By Being Able To Build A Reality More Nearly Out Of His Own Factual Experience Than A Plain Historian Or Biographer Can.