Page:The Borzoi 1920.djvu/50

 WILLA CATHER

By H. L. Mencken

If the United States ever becomes civilized and develops a literature, no doubt the Middle West will be the scene of the prodigy. The two coasts are washed by too many paralysing and distracting waves. Boston, after three hundred years, remains a mere suburb of London, timorous, respectable and preposterous—a sort of ninth-rate compound of Putney and Maida Vale. New York is simply a bawdy free port, without nationality or personality. As for San Francisco, New Orleans, Philadelphia and Baltimore, once so saliently individual, they scarely exist any longer, save for banking, political and census purposes. But in the Middle West the authentic Americano is still a recognizable mammal, and shows all his congenital spots, particularly upon the psyche. More, he has become introspective and a bit conscience-stricken, and so begins to analyse and anatomize himself. The fruits are "The Spoon River Anthology," the novels of Norris and Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson's terrific tales, the Little Theatre business, Lindsay and his uneasy college yells, George Ade and his murderous satire, Willa Cather and her poignant evocation of the drama of the prairie. Count out Hergesheimer and Cabell and you will scarcely find an imaginative writer doing genuinely sound work—that is, an imaginative writer of the generation still squarely on its legs—who is not from beyond the Alleghenies. Chicago is the centre of the new writing fever, as it is the centre of nearly all other native fevers. 28