ABSTRACT
Stylistic considerations, intellectual assumptions, and market preferences always shaped the nature of these works. But by the 1970s one form had crowded to the head of the best-seller lists in the United States in response to the insatiable appetite of a public hungry for a taste of the past. American local-color novelists and, later, Edith Wharton and Henry James relied heavily on that method; and various forms of realism-Thomas Hardy and Emile Zola in Europe, Frank Norris and William Dean Howells in the United States-lent the technique additional emphasis. The most important cultural and social forces of the 1960s and 1970s pressed novelists away from depictions of reality, toward mythical expression. Not truth, but the appearance of truth, mattered, for it legitimized the qualities most salable in a sensate society. Every culture had its myths, one as good as another. The myth chosen after 1960 accorded with the temper of the times.
