Literature of the
time shows this in two ways: the rarity of books that give a local
habitation and a name to the familiar, contemporary scene; and a
romantic interest, as of the half-starved, in local color stories
of remote districts where history and tradition still meant
something in the lives of the inhabitants.
It is encouraging to see how rapidly all this is changing. In
poetry the Middle West and New England have been made again to
figure in the imagination. Rural New Hampshire and Illinois are
alive to-day for those who have read Masters, Lindsay, and Frost.
In prose Chicago, New York, New Haven, Richmond, Detroit, San
Francisco, and the ubiquitous Main Street of a hundred Gopher
Prairies have become wayfares for the memory of the reader, as
well as congeries of amusement and trade. In particular our
universities, which in the 'eighties and 'nineties were darkly lit
by a few flaring torches of mawkish romance, have been illumined
for the imagination by a series of stories that already begin to
make the undergraduate comprehend his place in one of the richest
streams of history, and graduates to understand their youth.
Pages:
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142