ABSTRACT
American political independence, declared in 1776, was followed by decades of American cultural dependence on Great Britain. Sydney Smith's famous taunt in 1820, “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture…?” evoked small response, for in truth even Americans were reading British books and going to British plays. American cultural dependence on Great Britain may be explained by the influence of three generations, from 1607 and 1620, of American-born Englishmen, by the influx of English immigrants who formed 75% of the population at the time of the Revolution, by a century and a half of British-oriented cultural life and of salutary British rule, by all the elements of cultural interaction which, for instance, make Australia and other Commonwealth countries the cultural outposts of Great Britain today.
