The massive, clumsy, but forcible and convincing Theodore Dreiser, the genial and yet embittered Sinclair Lewis, the mystic and intuitive Sherwood Anderson, the ironic and quixotic James Branch Cabell, accompanied by a galaxy of talented writers like Willa Cather, Zona Gale, Floyd Dell, Joseph Hergesheimer, Waldo Frank,--all of them, since Hawthorne, through Henry James, William Dean Howells and Edith Wharton, show themselves obsessed by the problems of Puritan inhibitions and their influence on human conduct. More recently still, a host of younger writers has appeared in American fiction, all of them fascinated by the question of psychological behavior. The wanderings of Ulysses, in James Joyce’s Freudian epic, through the mazes of subconsciousness, had many American followers. Several of them have been included in this volume. This book has no pretensions at being complete and it is not ashamed of being systematic. It deals chiefly with those American writers who explored the field of psychology and psychoanalysis and it happens to include most of the greatest. All writers of American fiction to-day could not be marshaled in line but the most famous are here. The author is not a professional pessimist, but it is not his fault if the good half-dozen of original talents to-day, in American literature, are adepts in disillusion. There is no reason to be dismayed by this fact. Great art has always been pessimistic; the more pessimistic, it seems, the greater. The fact that an optimistic country like America has a gloomy literature to-day must not be a deterrent. Art, in its highest forms, is not a mere imitation of life. It is rather a reaction and a protest against it. It lives and works in the sphere of aspirations. The later generation of American writers is bent toward introspection and realism. In art these writers want truth. Between them and the past there is a gap. The time seems past for descriptive and objective literature. Subjectivism prevails. Novelists to-day want to share the lives of their characters. This new method of literary expression has been called in France _monologue intérieur_. The intimacy between reality and fiction has never been closer than now. The new writers also are revolutionists and iconoclasts. They swore allegiance to no master. Among foreign influences the Russian seems to be particularly prevalent with them. The American novel to-day would not be what it is without Dostoievski, Andreiev or Tchekhov. Neither does it deny its debt to Balzac, Flaubert, Zola or Marcel Proust. D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce also sponsored it. In ethics and sociology the aloofness of the newcomers is complete. Psychology, not morals, is their chief interest. They are indifferent to rhetorics. The questions of style are alien to them. The password nowadays is spontaneous and original expression. Any means to this end is style.