In recent decades the novel especially, but also poetry, has
drifted toward biography and autobiography. The older poets, who
yesterday were the younger poets, such men as Masters, Robinson,
Frost, Lindsay, have passed from lyric to biographic narrative;
the younger poets more and more write of themselves. In the novel
the trend is even more marked. An acute critic, Mr. Wilson
Follett, has recently noted that the novel of class or social
consciousness, which only ten years ago those who teach literature
were discussing as the latest of late developments, has already
given way to a vigorous rival. It has yielded room, if not given
place, to the novel of the discontented person. The young men, and
in a less degree the young women, especially in America, where the
youngest generation is, I believe, more vigorous than elsewhere,
have taken to biographical fiction. Furthermore, what began as
biography, usually of a youth trying to discover how to plan his
career, has drifted more and more toward autobiography--an
autobiography of discontent.
There is, of course, nothing particularly new about biographical
fiction. There is nothing generically new about the particular
kind of demi-autobiographies that the advanced are writing just
now.
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