Remarkably few of the great American writers have displayed anything like a fondness for, or even much interest in, the actualities of urban experience in America. Think of the way city life is depicted or ignored in the work of poets in the main line that leads from Emerson to Frost and Stevens, or in the central tradition in prose that includes Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner. To many critics the seeming anti-urbanism of these writers has been a source of continuing puzzlement They see it as an historical anomaly. From the very beginning, after all, the European occupation of North America has been a process of unrelenting urbanization. We are a city-building, city-dwelling people. As artists and intellectuals, moreover, our writers might have been expected to reaffirm the ancient affinity between city life and the life of the mind. Surely it is reasonable, given all this, to expect the work of the greatest American writers to reflect our national preference for urban living. Or is it?

Now the first thing to be said about this argument is that it posits a banal and finally misleading conception of the relations between that urbanizing America out there in reality and the imagined world we encounter in literature. It assumes that a national literature invariably should “lend expression to,” or “reflect” (as in a sort of copy image), the dominant features of national experience. But that is to universalize the specific aesthetic program of certain writers, especially the modern realistic novelists, whose chief aim indeed has been to create a fictive illusion of social actuality. Think of all those important American writers who in fact did make an effort to render the concrete particulars of urban experience in the United States: Howells, Wharton, Norris, Crane, Dreiser, Dos Passos, Wright, Farrell, Baldwin, Ellison, and Bellow. It is significant that these names, often assigned to the categories of “realism” or “naturalism,” seldom appear in the roster of “classic” American writers. When we stop to think about the tacit criteria for membership in that amorphous literary society, we soon realize that a chief criterion has been a commitment to an essentially non-representational and often expressly anti-realistic method of composition. Nathaniel Hawthorne might have been speaking for most of the other classic American writers when he explicitly repudiated realism or, as he described it, that “form of composition. . . presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience.” Instead, he claimed for himself the artist’s privilege of rearranging everyday experience and presenting it, as he put it, “under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.”

This is an absolutely vital distinction for anyone concerned to discriminate among the various literary treatments of urban life. Granted that no verbal composition actually can provide a mirror image of anything, much less a whole city, there still is an immense difference between a realistic novel aimed at creating some such illusion and an avowed “romance” of the sort Hawthorne defines. To be sure, the line between those two compositional types can become terribly fuzzy or disappear entirely, and yet the usefulness of the distinction,where it is discernible, cannot be exaggerated. In Sister Carrie, for example, Dreiser immediately reveals his documentary purpose. It is apparent in the opening pages that he wants his readers to respond by saying, in effect, “Yes, of course, this is a perfect picture of Chicago, just the way it must have been when Carrie Meeber got off the train on that day in August, 1889.” When a writer manifestly sets out to present us with an exact, detailed, seemingly comprehensive imitation of urban reality, then it certainly makes sense to ask whether he has selected truly significant details and has got them right But such a test is beside the point in reading the work of a writer like Hawthorne, who immediately signals his unconcern with any such accurate, solidly specified rendering of the environment.

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