A Critical
and Biographical Sketch
By
HERVEY ALLEN
INCLUDING CONTEMPORARY ESTIMATES
OF HIS WORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
NEW YORK Publishers TORONTO
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Du Bose Heyward
CAROLINA CHANSONS
(with Hervey Allen), 1922
SKYLINES AND HORIZONS, 1924
PORGY, 1925
ANGEL, 1926
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
"his unforgettable characters move
. . . in a lavish, yet reticent,
magnificence of highly organized prose."
—NEW YORK TIMES.
Du BOSE HEYWARD
A Critical and Biographical Sketch
By HERVEY ALLEN
There was a fashion amongst a certain schoolof critics and literati of former years to goabout the country with dark lanterns ready toflash their microscopic spot lights upon this or thatauthor, as he emerged for a brief moment from thegreat North American obscurity, and to proclaim thathe had or certainly would or could write the greatAmerican novel. It was then the custom to say thatin poem or story he had caught the essential veritiesof the great universal American type. For a whilethe little spotlights would play hopefully uponsomeone, and then be turned elsewhere. At last, like thegentleman from Athens who searched with a lanternfor another equally mythical person, the critics, whowere looking for the great American novelist and hisnovel, passed away with the hope which animatedthem, and were seen and heard no more.
Through the 1890's and 1900's the steam-roller ofan industrial democracy continued its leveling andstandardizing processes which few outstanding literarypersonalities were able to resist. Then the Americanwriters and critics at large, especially since the WorldWar, may be said to have suddenly realized, indeed tohave discovered, two startling but paradoxical facts,i.e., that at last there was a typical and very standardAmerican type, but that he or she was not altogether adesirable person, and secondly and by contrast, that thecountry was not just one level, usual United States,but in reality a union of many different localities withvarying backgrounds, traditions, and philosophies. Outof these provincial cultures might be expected to comethe variants from the standardized types, variantswhose differences were not only picturesquely orquaintly interesting, but of essential human value.
It is on these two themes, either that of standardizationor of sectional difference in character, that themajor utterance of creative literature in America duringthe past decade or so has busied itself both in poetryand prose.
Mr. Sinclair Lewis may be said to have achievedthe characterization par excellence of the standardizedAmerica in Main Street and Babbit. Of the studiesof sectional and provincial types there have been manypoor and a few fine ones in prose. In poetry, RobertFrost and Edwin Arlington Robinson have been mostdistinguished in dealing with New England. In thedrama Eugene O'Neil has frequently found his finestmétier in the provincial.
Peculiarly tempting, to those artists who havedesired to present the more extreme provincial types ofcharacter, has been the wide field of the South, "UncleSam's Other Country", where the feudal