Publisher's Synopsis
From the INTRODUCTORY.
AS the years pass it is becoming generally understood that the great American novel, of which we have heard so much and for which we have been waiting so long, must be in every sense free from provincialism and localism. For instance, it cannot be distinctively a story of the Creoles of Louisiana, or of Georgia plantation life, or of the Crackers of North Carolina, or of the ranch, the mining-camp, the chaparral, or of the people of Maine, or of the people of Western New York. There must be a broad canvas: it must deal with the great common principles of our national life; its characters must be Americans, not Virginians or Texans or Kansans or Georgians. The many novels of recent years which have been hailed as the great American novel - King Noanett and Hugh Wynne and, of late, Richard Carvel and Janice Meredith and To Have and to Hold - all have dealt with periods when American life was confined to a region that extended only a few hundred miles inland from the Atlantic coast. The vastness, the complexity of modern life, were absent. The Civil War is to all practical purposes a virgin literary field. The stories that we have had of it have been almost entirely tales of the battlefield, the camp, the bivouac, - all trumpet call and smoke and cannon glare; the life behind we have not seen, nor the wide and tremendous moral and geographical sweep of that struggle, nor its influence on homely destinies, on obscure lives. For instance, to take up a tale that is old and yet ever new, the marvel of Vanity Fair is in the manner in which Thackeray bound up the life of an insignificant little English girl, living quietly by Bloomsbury Square, in the last fateful rush of the Imperial eagles. Indeed, an American novelist might do worse than boldly to take a few ideas from the Waterloo chapters and paint for us the rout of senators, congressmen, lobbyists, adventuresses - the pageant of frills and furbelows and champagne hampers moving out gaily from Washington to the battlefield of Bull Kun, which was to be a spectacle, a sort of opera bouffe - with just enough of carnage and bloodshed to stimulate properly the emotions; then, later, the horror, the grim humour of that frenzied flight.
