ALL the schools, styles, and fashions in literature,
in other times as well as today, have come into existence
through the particular relationship of an author or a group
of authors to objective reality. Howsoever these schools and
fashions in literature may designate themselves, they can
be quite adequately understood through an investigation of
the writer's relationship to reality; the application of any other
set of standards can only lead to confusion, and very often to
the erection of a philosophical structure wherein obscurity is
enthroned and ignorance deified.

Then, indeed, a strange and shoddy piece of cloth is
woven, the unraveling of which becomes a task of some conse-
quence; yet unless that particular cloth is taken apart, unless
each shoddy thread of it is exposed to the light of day, we are
bound to witness a steady destruction of standards, a process
of corruption which is all too evident today. Literature has
always been a most precise reflection of the society which
produced it, and in a society rent by contradictions, strangling
in its own economic chaos, and looking fearfully to a hideous
world war as a possible solution, a great deal of that society's
literature will quite naturally be far from healthy. The litera-
ture, creative and critical, of America is sick, deeply sick; only
a great progressive upsurge can cure it. While it may be cer-
tainly stated that the progressive upsurge is on its way, one of
the immediate steps to be undertaken is an examination of the

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