In the first volume of his Promised Land trilogy John Iggulden concisely enunciates the basis of an uncompromising program for financial and literary endeavor: "You cannot manage anything effectively unless you first decide on, and define, the exact purpose of the thing to be managed." Approximately the same sentiment is expressed by the central protagonists of Iggulden's earliest novels. This belief was only announced as a distinctly literary program, however, in the 1966 introduction to the short-story collection Summer's Tales 3. In this introduction, Iggulden seeks to define "the qualities and the direction of development" he hopes to see "emerging from the present transitions in the main stream of indigenous creative writing." Foremost among these qualities are "directness," "clarity of meaning," and "clear communication of recognisable human realities and experienced human situations, which are utterly basic in making a work of fiction readable, and without which the finest writing must...