There are minds which insist on literature as pure artifice, and there are
minds which see in literature a reflection not only of literary tradition but
also of history and sociology. Louis Harap belongs -- has long belonged
-- to this latter company. Literary merit is not the sole value he seeks when
he confronts a work of the imagination. He looks for social value as well.
It is important to discern and appreciate in him an accomplished social
analyst of literary effort, a scholar who tends to concentrate unfailingly on
the (not always so clearly discernible) nexus between a work of literature
and the social or psychosocial context in which it was composed.

Dr. Harap is not a literary critic or literary theorist. He is an historian
and draws on literature for his work as an historian. He is, more emphat-
ically, a social historian, an historian devoted to the study of social reality
with literary expression as a major instrument for his research.

Now to say this is not to suggest the lack in Dr. Harap work of a
Tendenz or ideological preference. His work does evince bias and offers a
left-of-center perspective -- but he is certainly not to be thought of as a
ideologue in his judgments. It is Dr. Harap's sensitivity to social experience,
not any ideological commitment he may have, that gives his thought a large
interest for those concerned, as I am, to find in American-Jewish literary
expression some index to how Jews have found their way through the
labyrinths of American life.

What Dr. Harap offers in these three new volumes are erudite, forthright,
incisive discussions of fiction, discussions which are consistently "sociolit-
erary" -- that is, art-for-the-sake-of-art, the purely esthetic, is never his
goal or preoccupation. No, it is something else, awareness of the socioec-
onomic and psychic context, which governs his understanding of the stories
and novels he examines so intelligently.

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