Novelists' America [antikvár]

Preface During the summer of 1963, I delivered the Charles E. Merrill Lectures on American Studies before kind and tolerant audiences at Stetson University, DeLand, Florida. I am grateful to my friends Professors John Hague and Gerald Critoph of the Stetson University American Studies Department for this opportunity to formulate some of my ideas about the use of novels as sources of social history. Other friends, Professor Rubin Weston of the North Carolina College at Durham and Professor William Askew of Colgate University, provided me with audiences for further exploration of the subject. The lectures prepared for these occasions, however, constitute but a small part of the present text. I am indebted to Syracuse University for granting me the leave of absence necessary to extend my reading and prepare my manuscript. The book, I hope, explains itself. Particularly in the first and last chapters, I tell what I have tried to do and why it seems worthwhile to me. I would only add that I make no pretension of being a literary critic. Let those who have the proper taste and training assess the artistic worth of these novels. I write always as a historian, searching for the information and insight that the novels provide for the understanding of the recent past, the prologue to our troubled present. N. M. B. Syracuse, New York February, 1^68