In the thirty years following Van Wyck Brooks’s blazing of the trail in The Wine of the Puritans (1908), the idea that American literature was worth the sustained attention of serious readers was carried forward in such exciting works as H. L. Mencken’s A Book of Prefaces, D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, and Lewis Mumford’s The Golden Day, as well as in the books that solidified Brooks’s critical leadership, America’s Coming-of-Age and The Ordeal of Mark Twain. By far the most ambitious, though, of all the contributions to the noble cause of rediscovering American literature was V. L. Partington’s Main Currents in American Thought. As Partington projected it, Main Currents would tell the whole story of our literary development, from the Puritans to the present, in three massive volumes. Moreover, he proposed to place his examination of literary texts in a historical context of political, social, and economic ideas and events. For Parrington was a Progressive intellectual whose mind had been shaped by the socially conscious presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. That American literature mirrored a continuing struggle between the business community and the rest of society was his primary article of faith. Beginning his enormous labor in 1913, Parrington brought out two volumes of the trilogy in 1927. Two years later, he suddenly died, leaving the final volume, “The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America,” approximately half finished.
One of the ways in which Alfred Kazin’s newly