It is hard to explain why the American, except in his exhortatory and passionately argumentative moods, has not struck deep into American life, why his stories and verses are, for the most part, only pretty things, nicely unimportant. Anthony Trollope had a theory that the absence of international copyright threw our market open too unrestrictedly to the British product, that the American novel was an unprotected infant industry; we printed Dickens and the rest without paying royalty and starved the domestic manufacturer. This theory does not explain.
Wait a second. No. That's not right. My review is of a book called The Magicians. It's about, uhm, Magicians. College age kids. Anyway, read it. What else do you have to do?
(The above quote, by the way, comes from "American Literature" an essay written in 1921 by John Macy).
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