THE AMERICAN DREAM: A Half-Century View from American Magazine

A former fiction editor of the now defunct American Magazine, John McCaffery was collected non-fiction and fiction from fifty years of publication, the bulk being from World War I to the close of World War II. The success stories that characterized the writing of the thirties then gave way to more realistic work, under the hand of Summer Blossom, with World War II's call to arms and a portrait of Joseph P. Kennedy following. In fiction, romance was the key, with values predominantly rural to Midwest middle class: here are short stories by O. Henry, Octavus Roy Cohen, MacKinlay Kantor, Kathleen Norris, Clarence Budington Kelland; short novels by Zane Grey, Pearl Buck, Booth Tarkington, Margaret Banning. Mystery writers are represented by S.S. Van Dine with the rules, Leslie Charteris, Erle Stanley Gardner, Philip Wylie, Kenneth Pearing. For former readers, this book has a memorial value; it is hard to place it otherwise in today's modus vivendi.