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Show The Literary Mountains Tt was not so very long ago that London was the literary center of the universe. The great publishing houses were there; the greatest accolade an American writer could receive was acclaim from the English En-glish critics. As a result, American literature took to apine its foreign cousin, and for a while the "fashionable" "fa-shionable" American authors were more English than the English. All that has chn""d. England still has her great Vt-a'ure bin the highest literary '"""itains are to be found in this vrn'ry. The American book n'"v' l"ad- th" world not merr'-- ' promotion promo-tion of sales, b"t :n h-'nTing before be-fore an audirn-" n-"v talents, new ideas, new air! vi'al experiments. experi-ments. Much of this he does without hope of i?in. knowin" iium exjjui wu--' 'i-ti nnniis are almost inevifahlv 'hi -"quit of adventuring ad-venturing of this kind. We need not. horPV"- fr-el sorry sor-ry for the American ryiWs'ier because be-cause of that. He "qrned a very definite reward. T is to th" presses of Amc-! th-t mnoh the world now liW-q fo- n'mTnt volumes of critifiim srl n-ilUica1 philosophy: for the frnf"st biographies; bio-graphies; for the rtT-wt important fiction. America hns n-'.diieed a native literature and in it are names which are almost a familiar fam-iliar in Paris and Vienna and Leningrad and Cracow, as in San Francisco and New 0-Ifans and Sauk Center. It is a literature which, because it is fundamentally native to a land, is really international interna-tional in spirit. And the better American publishers pub-lishers who have given so much of time effort and hard-earned money to aiding that development, when more profitable, if les commendable, com-mendable, enterprises beckoned, deserve more of the credit than they generally receive. |