SOURCE: "Comment on 'Hamlin Garland's "Decline" from Realism'," in American Literature, Vol. XXVI, No. 3, November, 1954, pp. 427-32.

Koerner is an American critic and educator. Here, he presents a rebuttal to Bernard Duffey's 1953 argument regarding Garland's sincerity as realist and a writer of protest fiction. Koerner maintains that Garland's social consciousness was evident prior to the beginning of his publishing career and that the author's "honestness of purpose" was affirmed by many of his contemporaries.

Bernard I. Duffey's paper, "Hamlin Garland's 'Decline' from Realism," in the March, 1953, issue of American Literature seems to me unreasonable in its basic inference and in its lack of solid support. Briefly stated, Duffey's position is that Garland was from the beginning the complete literary opportunist who pretended admiration for such men as Howells and Benjamin Orange Flower only so far as they were useful in getting him on as a writer, blithely rejecting...