The American Writer and the European Tradition
Potpourri
edited by and. University of Minnesota Press $2.75.
These twelve essays by different hands add up to an unusually dispassionate and generally enlightening appraisal of the American writer’s relationship to the European tradition. The volume as a whole brings into bold relief “the force and persistence in America of European ideas,” but it also points up the creative role of an indigenously American way of thinking — radical, exploratory, and pragmatic — which has “naturalized” its European source material. The over-all conclusion is that the European tradition has been an inevitable and invigorating strain in American culture, and that the literary chauvinist who seeks to achieve a simon-pure Americanism is really cutting himself off from a precious part of the American heritage.