SOURCE: Freese, Peter. “‘Rising in the World’ and ‘Wanting to Know Why’: The Socialization Process as Theme of the American Short Story.”¹ Archiv fur das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 218, no. 2 (1981): 286-302.

In the following essay, Freese examines three American initiation stories, including Nathaniel Hawthorne's “My Kinsman, Major Molineaux,” Sherwood Anderson's “I Want to Know Why,” and Robert Penn Warren's “Blackberry Winter.”]

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Leafing through Erasmus of Rotterdam's Colloquia (1522), which went through more than 130 printings and remained in use as a popular textbook for teaching Latin till the eighteenth century, one finds, for example, the dialogue of a youth with a prostitute or the detailed description of the effects of syphilis in the story of a diseased rake's marriage with a sixteen-year-old innocent girl. Such surprising topics make one realize that a collection of texts which today would stand a fair chance of being indexed as harmful to...