There was the much
more impressive "Main Street," biographic in form, but with teeth
set on edge in revolt. There was the vivid and ill-controlled sex
novel "Erik Dorn," and Evelyn Scott's "The Narrow House," in which
the miseries of a young girl caught in the squalid and the
commonplace had their airing. There was Stephen Benet's "The
Beginning of Wisdom," where the revolt was a poet's, and the
realist's detail selected from beauty instead of from ugliness;
and Aikman's "Zell," in which youth rubs its sore shoulders
against city blocks instead of university quadrangles. There was
Dos Passos's "Three Soldiers," in which the boy hero is crushed by
the war machine his elders have made. These are type examples,
possibly not the best, certainly not the worst, drawn from the
workshops of the so-called young realists.
What is the biography of this modern youth? His father, in the
romantic 'nineties, usually conquered the life of his elders,
seldom complained of it, never spurned it. His son-in-the-novel is
born into a world of intense sensation, usually disagreeable.
Instead of a "Peter Ibbetson" boyhood, he encounters disillusion
after disillusion.
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