It marked a return of the American mind to the natural line of American migration, from frontier to frontier, across the continent. The writers took the path of the missionaries, the pioneers and the captains of industry, the path of the covered wagon. This was a challenge to the ideals of their predecessors. Classic American writers leaned more on the East than on the West, more on Europe than on their own country. Their literary taste and ideals, if not always their programme, were European, or if you prefer, Victorian. The new literature is strictly indigenous. It is crude and in many ways primitive. It is no longer manufactured in drawing-rooms or in studios, but in immediate contact with life. The great American novel of the nineteenth century was exotic and retrospective. It was sentimental and romantic. Its ethical and social background was traditional. Sentimentality and romance, the search after the picturesque, have gone by the boards. They have passed to the “movies” or to the popular magazines, the latter almost as backward to-day as they used to be fifty years ago and as harmless. The novel of adventure has been extinct, as a _genre littéraire_ in America, since the death of Jack London. Even the social novel has suffered a radical change. It is no longer written from the outside, from the point of view of society, as in the days of Frank Norris or Upton Sinclair. It is now written from the inside, from the point of view of the individual. It is more psychological than social. In fact, while the American novel became more realistic, it also began to be beset by moral problems. It ceased to be an epic to become a satire. From this point of view, however, despite their cynicism, the new masters of American fiction show themselves true to the old ideal. Their books are fraught with idealism, with the spirit of reform and amelioration. Even when they fight Puritanism, the American literary insurgents show themselves more puritanic than the Puritans. They are haunted by the dream of a better world and of a better humanity.