Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Adventures in Reading
We have been hearing for a long time about the great Ameri can novel. Its coming has been heralded time and again by false prophets. It has become as cheap as a chewing gum ad, and as mythical as the forgotten verses of the Star-spangled Banner. But it remained for Clyde Brion Davis to use the catchphrase as an ironical title for a novel, and thus to double that irony back upon himself by almost succeeding in doing the thing he halfway mocked. For his The Great American Novel is as rich a cyclo rama Of American life for the late nineties and early nineteen hundreds as we have had in many a year. Rich is the first word that comes to mind, and yet it is a richness carefully disciplined, well-controlled within a difficult self-imposed pattern. The author has set himself the task of writing throughout like a mediocre newspaper man who never found time to write the novel he intended. Yet within this pattern he succeeds in giving such a history as only a newspaper man could write. One who has lived through this period reads it with a pleasure Similar to that evoked by looking through an Old kodak album, or by read ing Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.