SOURCE: Fredrickson, Robert S. “The Major Phase” and “Conclusion.” In Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, pp. 128-63. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980.

In the following excerpts, Frederickson defends his assertion that Boyesen produced his best work in the last five years of his life and discusses the author's place in American intellectual and literary history.

The Major Phase

During the last five years of his life, Boyesen's talent and theory coalesced. He was ready to create novels which had the complexity necessary to make them vital and the intellectual authority to command respect. Boyesen had wanted to write a novel which was a Kulturroman, the quality he had appreciated in George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes.¹ Now that he had a well-developed evolutionary overview of American culture, he was able to identify the larger forces which contended in the struggle for survival. But he also had enough novelistic flair to give characters in...