Cappy Ricks and the Monk in the Garden

Extract

In the study of American culture one of the most significant figures to examine may well be the American popular novelist—the writer who appeals to the trade instead of the class market. He is also one of the most neglected. In spite of the approval with which he is read by the public, he is usually either castigated or dismissed by the strictly literary critic. And with justice, from the point of view of belles-lettres. Yet when this novelist has been dead long enough he is apt to emerge even in the learned journals. The scholar of the future may then leaf through an annotated article on “Primitivism in a Forgotten ‘Western’ Writer, Zane Grey” or “Theological Patterns in the Fiction of Lloyd Douglas.” The place of the popular novelist, the people's novelist if you will, in the study of American culture over and above literary history is also apt to become officially more important with the passage of time. The longer such a novelist has been dead, the better it seems is his claim to attention in, for example, courses in American civilization.