Realism is not a new factor in American fiction. From Edward Eggleston to Theodore Dreiser, the American novel has tended more and more to become a precise account of American society. However, realism has never been as prevalent and as outspoken as it is to-day. As the United States increased in number and in population, the conflict between the ideals of the individual and those of the mass became more and more acute. Meanwhile the progress of experimental psychology afforded the American novelist a new means of explaining and revealing the motives of the individual. In my book I have made reference to psychoanalysis in particular. Current literary criticism cannot afford to ignore Doctor Freud. Some masters of American literature, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Margaret Fuller and Amy Lowell have lately been subjected to a successful psychoanalysis. The new psychology permits a more exact diagnosis of several important phases of our consciousness which have their origin in the deepest recesses of our soul, and which, though not literary in themselves, are often manifest in literature. Freudian psychology is the natural ally of the sociologist. It shifts the largest part of the responsibility for many of the moral diseases and idiosyncrasies of the individual upon social institutions. By presenting Puritanism as a form of moral inhibition it throws a new light upon it. Moral and psychological duplicity have been the subjects of several European investigations before the ascendancy of Doctor Freud. One of the most suggestive was presented in a book called “Le Bovarysme” by the French philosopher, Jules de Gaultier. He chose Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as being the most typical case of romantic inhibition. He showed that after all romanticism was nothing but a psychological disease and the attempt of an individual under social pressure to appear in a double light in his own eyes. A more pathetic example can scarcely be conceived than that of Flaubert’s heroine, Emma Bovary, and her attempt to lead an imaginary life as a compensation for her monotonous environment. It is obvious from a perusal of American novels of to-day that Emma Bovary has many brothers and sisters in this country. A normal society cannot exist without normal people and the latter cannot be imagined without a certain amount of personal freedom and felicity. Standardization, the tyranny of public opinion and morals, the leveling of the exceptional to the mass ideal, petty persecutions, blue laws, Comstockery and so forth, had a part to play in Emma Bovary’s slow but sure moral and spiritual starvation, and in her ultimate suicide. Social welfare rests on a harmonious balance of give and take between the upper and lower classes. An excess of freedom produces anarchy; an excess of tyranny, inhibitions, despair and crime. No life is worth living wherein action is not a sister to dreams to some extent, to use Baudelaire’s saying.