In The American Adam R.W.B. Lewis reminds us that during the nineteenth century many serious writers pictured America as a new Garden of Eden and saw the American as a new Adam, "a figure of heroic innocence and vast potentialities, poised at the start of a new history." The experience of the past century, however, has shattered the validity of such a myth. The serious American of today is more likely to see himself as a tainted anti-hero whose potentialities have been dissipated by imperialist expansion, racial discord, economic catastrophe, and a seemingly interminable series of wars.

If anything, our attitude today has swung too far in the direction of despair. The contemporary writer, rather than having to bridle excessive optimism, must seek a limited solution to the waste-land conditions of modern life. In All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren forthrightly confronts such a bleak...