The Responsibilities Of The Novelist

Author : Frank Norris
Publisher : Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN 13 : 9781539545279
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (452 download)

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Download or read book The Responsibiilities of the Novelists written by Frank Norris and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-10-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The late Frank Norris's literary essays, marshaled handsomely between covers, under the title "The Responsibilities of the Novelist," impress one, on the first browsing, with a sense of vague regret. Here is something that should not have been; yet one knows not at first exactly what nor why. But, as you read, the feeling grows that this book would never have appeared had the author lived to decide the question for himself. The essays are good-amazingly good, some of them; their sanity never fails; their simplicity and force lack nothing; they are fresh, leisurely, progressive, healthy. But they are young and uneven. Norris was a man who grew fast. There are five years between some of these essays, written, according to the bibliography in the back of the volume, only a few months apart. The book's entire contents was dashed off within two years, and in that time Norris grew ten. We venture the prediction that none of the essays in the present volume would have passed muster of this growing author for admission to his ranks of books. Already, had he lived till now, would the best and latest of them have seemed trivial and partial in his eyes. And yet, considered apart from the personality and rapid development of their writer, these essays are profitable. If they solve no problems, if they open no new fields, if they add nothing to the sum or the statement of truth, they at least restate familiar facts and conditions with singular clearness and force, delightful freshness, unerring selection, and complete sanity. And not the least of the pleasure they give is the melancholy contemplation of a mind that, had it survived, would inevitably have been in front of the literary movement the beginnings of which are already, in the opinion of many, at hand. We quote, as an example of Frank Norris's character and quality as a man of letters, the final paragraphs of his essay on the responsibilities of the novelist: "The Pulpit, the Press, and the Novel-these indisputably are the great moulders of public morals to-day. But the Pulpit speaks but once a week; the Press is read with lightning haste, and the morning news is waste-paper by noon. But the Novel goes into the home to stay. It is read word for word; is talked about, discussed; its influence penetrates every chink and corner of the family. "Yet novelists are not found wanting who write for money. I do not think this is an unfounded accusation. I do not think it asking too much of credulity. This would not matter if they wrote the Truth. But these gentlemen who are 'in literature for their own pocket every time' have discovered that for the moment the People have confounded the Wrong with the Right, and prefer that which is a lie to that which is true. 'Very well, then, ' say these gentlemen. 'If they want a lie, they shall have it'; and they give the People a lie in return for royalties.... -The Book Buyer: A Monthly Review of American and Foreign Literature, Volume 27