SOURCE: Kazin, Alfred. “The Opening Struggle for Realism.” In On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature, pp. 3-50. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942.

In the following excerpt, Kazin characterizes Boyesen as an important advocate for the broadly-conceived Realist school, although as an author he lacked the necessary talent to achieve greatness within the genre.

Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen was a Norwegian and professor of German at Columbia who had a wide knowledge of the traditions of European realism and endeavored to emulate the most commonplace of them in his three best-known novels of American manners—The Golden Calf, The Social Strugglers, and The Mammon of Unrighteousness. As early as 1886, in a famous essay on “The American Novelist and His Public,” he ridiculed the “boarding-school” standard of the novel-reading public. Though he was Howells's protégé and a passionately admiring friend, he attacked both him and Henry...