Heresy and Modern Culture

In recent years there has been a marked interest in what may be called “literary sociology,” and a good many books and articles on “the situation” of the American writer and of American literature have appeared. To judge by the perplexity and despair of their authors, they have been inspired by a sense that unprecedented dilemmas face the serious novelist, poet, and critic of our time.

Although Walt Whitman and Henry Adams were concerned with the relation of the writer to society and with the social value and function of his work, the genre of literary sociology in its modern form stems from Van Wyck Brooks’s Three Essays on America (the first essay, “America’s Coming-of-Age,” was w...