Mobilizing Our Novelists

ONE of big events of literary season ... is that a current best seller concerns a So ran lead in Fortune's October 1947 editorial. That Fortune deemed event big, and joyous to boot, was really because best seller concerned a businessman; year before Fortune had found no joy in Frederic Wakeman's The Hucksters, a best seller about a peculiarly unsavory businessman. The point was that in this present novel, Thomas Costain's The Moneyman, businessman was a hero. Fortune was happy now because at last American people had opportunity to read about a businessman who was not a heel. Why could other American writers deal thus kindly with moneymakers, particularly American moneymakers, writer of editorial inquired. It has always seemed possible that if a novelist really dug into doings of Fisk, Gould, Rockefeller, and elder Morgan ... he might find authentic gold. If American literature is to subsist long it must abandon its concentration on petty characters engaging in petty activities and catch the great character in act of great decisions. Then, shifting briskly from novelist to another figure unpopular with Fortune, editorialist concluded that it may be that American intellectual is hopelessly out of touch with spirit of great events. This was prelude to a series of attacks upon current American novelists. The attacks, which appeared in magazines as diverse as Fortune, Life, Saturday Review of Literature, and New York Times Book Review, were certainly planned to be part of a coordinated campaign. Each was presumably an expression of its writer's considered attitude toward contemporary fiction. But various attitudes had much in common and critics frequently cited each other with approval. In perspective, then, these attacks can be viewed

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