Perhaps one reason for the failure of his message is related to the fact that he has had one. As a novelist his chief concern has been, as he wrote in "The Business of a Novelist" for the New Republic in April, 1934, "to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of history." Yet as a man with a message, his chief concern has been with its recipients; and his characters, despite the sympathy of his portrayal, he has left deliberately underdeveloped. Similarly, he has always aimed at discomforting his readers—at stirring them into fresh thought and action by destroying the stereotypes from which they viewed the world. The great antagonist of U.S.A. is complacency. Probably most of the adverse criticism...