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INTERVIEWER
Do you feel that there are certain themes which are basic to the American experience, even though a body of writing in a given period might ignore or evade them?
WARREN
First thing, without being systematic, what comes to mind without running off a week and praying about it, would be that America was based on a big promise—a great big one: the Declaration of Independence. When you have to live with that in the house, that’s quite a problem—particularly when you’ve got to make money and get ahead, open world markets, do all the things you have to, raise your children, and so forth. America is stuck with its self-definition put on paper in 1776, and that was just like putting a burr under the metaphysical saddle of America—you see, that saddle’s going to jump now and then and it pricks.
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| Authors Mentioned |
| Nelson Algren, T. S. Eliot, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, Delmore Schwartz, Eugene Walter, Eudora Welty, R. P. Blackmur, William Blake, Kenneth Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hart Crane, Donald Davidson, Charles Dickens, Theodore Dreiser, Adam De Gurowski, Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, L. C. Knights, André Malraux, F. O. Matthiessen, Merrill Moore, Marcel Proust, John Crowe Ransom, William Shakespeare, Theodore Spencer, Jonathan Swift, Allen Tate, John Webster, W. B. Yeats, Émile Zola |
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