In her travelogue America Day by Day (1947), Simone de Beau-voir recounts an argument over literature she had with Dwight MacDonald, Lionel Abel, William Phillips, and possibly Philip Rahv, key members of the New York Intellectuals. Since the mid-1930s, a handful of American novelists had been in vogue in France, prominent among them William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, Dashiell Hammett, and Richard Wright. Rahv had already complained in 1940 that “[t]he intellectual is the only character missing in the American novel, which contains everything except ideas” (414), and this seems to have been the central complaint as Beauvoir tells it.... read online.
Article published in Contemporary Literature, vol. 62, n°4, Winter 2021, p. 501-526.
In her travelogue America Day by Day (1947), Simone de Beau-voir recounts an argument over literature she had with Dwight MacDonald, Lionel Abel, William Phillips, and possibly Philip Rahv, key members of the New York Intellectuals. Since the mid-1930s, a handful of American novelists had been in vogue in France, prominent among them William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, Dashiell Hammett, and Richard Wright. Rahv had already complained in 1940 that “[t]he intellectual is the only character missing in the American novel, which contains everything except ideas” (414), and this seems to have been the central complaint as Beauvoir tells it.... read online.
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