ABSTRACT
John W. DeForest (1826-1906) of New Haven has attracted more at tention than many of the writers in this collection because of his early realism in Miss RavenaVs Conversion (1867). James F. Light, in John William DeForest (New York, 1965), has described him as desperately seeking a style and consistent subject matter in a career tipping am bivalently from realism to romance writing, but the series of comic writings in the late 1860s and early 1870s is marked by a boldly de fined sarcastic style that welds Miltonic allusions to democratic rhet oric. Flonest John Vane-published in 1875 after running serially in the Atlantic Monthly in the fall of 1873-depicted a corruptible con gressman with the moral sensitivity of a sparerib, a guerrilla fighter for the special interests, which DeForest saw as threatening the overthrow of democracy in the face of capitalists’ demands for easy profits. “As the mountain brigands of Greece and the municipal highwaymen of New York can both testify-it is not the custom of some communities to execute justice upon criminals.”
