Home-made Genius: Windy McPherson’s Son

Here is another man who hasn’t written the great American novel.

Where did the superstition arise which makes writers, dramatists, painters, feel that the goblins will get them if they don’t hold to American subjects to make American art? It’s as funny as if they should say: let’s use only American-made materials and we’ll have an American art. Landscape and atmosphere effect about the only difference of temperament in nations. At least Art is so universal that the temperament of your nation is the only thing that can stamp your Art. You might write about pink pagodas in China and have American art. The temperament in these American novels would make this country seem all a western plain under a steely sky. It’s the same with their style: it’s like going through underbrush, tough and tangled and scratchy, not like walking through rich old orchards or wandering in terraced gardens.

They all sound as though they had been written in the morning.

These writers want their novels to be strong. They are: strong like an ox, not like a tiger. And they don’t even know about these American things they are writing of. Dreiser doesn’t know what a genius is (I mean, what is a genius), so he makes one: a home-made genius who comes out like home-made clothes.

These writers want their books to be homely—the great American vice: made from the people, by the people, for the people. It’s merely another form of the glorification of sockless senators, etc.

They can’t even name their books:

“Sister Carrie”!

“Jennie Gerhardt”!

“Windy McPherson’s Son”! etc., etc.


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From The Little Review, vol. 3, no. 7, ed. Margaret Anderson, November 1916.