Many Minds

LITERARY HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES (three vols., 2,239 pp.)--Edited by Robert E. Spiller, Willard Thorp, Thomas H. Johnson, Henry Seidel Canby--Macmillan ($20).

It took one year to plan, three years to write, and two more to edit this ambitious literary history of the U.S. The first two volumes consist of essays by 55 scholars; the third is a valuable bibliography. Here, presumably, is everything most readers could possibly want to know about American writing.

And as a source book, it is a success. Its authors have retold the story of U.S. literature--from Cotton Mather's desire to "fill this Countrey with devout and useful Books" written by himself to a description of how Gone With the Wind was garbled in Japanese. Only occasionally slipping into literary jargon, the authors have written short essays--a few brilliant, the rest solidly competent--that are good introductions for the ordinary reader, and quick once-overs for lazy students.

But if readers want literary criticism in addition to encyclopedia-style knowledge, the History will prove less satisfying. Too often it discusses writers as examples of "trends" or "forces" rather than judging them by the pleasure they can still yield to readers. What the History lacks most is individuality. Either because many academic writers employ the same rather soggy prose, or because the editors have pressed the essays into one stylistic mold, most of them read as if written by one man: a learned but conventional professor. (One happy exception: the chapter on "American Language," in which the gay, strong hand of H. L. Mencken quickly shows itself.) What a reader misses here is what he finds in Vernon Louis Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought: one mind in command of a subject, sometimes pulling a boner but more often arousing excitement and curiosity, and always leaving on the reader the sharp stamp of an individual point of view.

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