Yet, criticism is unleashed in the United States nowadays and it spares nothing. If the French are critical by birth, one would say, judging from the mass of evidence, that the modern American was born fussy. In a country where the standards of life change overnight, critical revaluations in literature are fatal. The American Hall of Fame could not escape the law of perpetual transformation. Until recently, the United States was the last country in the world which continued to take for granted the optimism of the eighteenth-century encyclopedists. Americans have not yet lost their faith in automatic progress. Despite the “fundamentalists” they have evolution in their blood. May I suggest, on the threshold of this book, that a European observer may be better located, ideally speaking, to render American literature full justice than even native critics? He has less illusions and also less prejudices. He views the literary revolution in the recent years in America as a result of the moral and social advance. In the last twenty years a new class of writers has invaded American literature. The spirit of the pioneers never died in America. The young writers wanted to conquer new fields in an entirely new way. Their originality was a challenge to the old order. More than any other country since the War, literary America has struggled to find a new heaven and a new earth. Modern writers are conscientiously and deliberately insurgents. They turn a cold shoulder to traditions. In fact, they belong, socially, to a new class. Few of them are well-to-do bourgeois educated in expensive colleges and depending for their writing upon leisure and incomes. American literature is no longer the monopoly of gentlemen and scholars. The great majority of American writers to-day are self-made men, born from the people, without any blue blood and entirely democratic in their lives if not in their ideals. Most of them wear the chevrons not of the universities but of journalism. A great many, and the most noted among them, were reporters before becoming authors. This throws not a little light on their literary achievements. Most of them adhere to no church. The American literary “Who’s Who” includes indiscriminately all creeds, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and free thinkers. American literature has shunned respectability. It jumped from the right to the left and even to the extreme left. From aristocratic or bourgeois it became revolutionary and proletarian. Even the geographical positions were altered. American literature had, up to the most recent years, been largely manufactured in the eastern States, a country conservative by tradition. As opportunities for adventure became rare in the East, Boston, Philadelphia and even New York ceased to be literary Meccas. The new literature developed in the Middle West. This fact is not without its historical significance.