Du Bose Heyward - A Critical and Biographical Sketch

There was a fashion amongst a certain school of critics and literati of former years to go about the country with dark lanterns ready to flash their microscopic spot lights upon this or that author, as he emerged for a brief moment from the great North American obscurity, and to proclaim that he had or certainly would or could write the great American novel.

Mr. Sinclair Lewis may be said to have achieved the characterization par excellence of the standardized America in Main Street and Babbit. Of the studies of sectional and provincial types there have been many poor and a few fine ones in prose. In poetry, Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson have been most distinguished in dealing with New England. In the drama Eugene O'Neil has frequently found his finest métier in the provincial.