The American Novel 17891939 Author:Carl Van Doren This book is an effort to present the history of the American novel for a hundred and fifty years. It is meant to serve as a record of the national imagination as exhibited in the progress of native fiction. Though it incidentally takes into account poems and plays and short stories, as well as national myths and legends and traditions and asp... more »irations, it concerns itself primarily with novels: here defined simply as long prose narratives in which the element of fact is on the whole less than the element of fiction. Much of what I have written about recent novelists comes from what they themselves have told me. Carl Van Doren December, 1939« less