ABSTRACT
Biography, which claimed to deal with fact and foreground, tended to push original literature into the background. Literary history has always tended to confuse the two orders of experience: foreground, or transitory phenomena, with background, or imaginative work, and by confusing them, to explain the background in terms of the foreground. To the liberal mind of easy good will, the political face of the United States and Western Europe from 1920 to 1932 was deceptive, if observed from the standpoint of the literary arts; the liberal expects liberalism to produce good art and reaction to repress art altogether. The writing of history, often a guide to the intellectual health of a period, flourished within the limits of American historians' tendency to domesticate Ranke's positivism. In reaction against romantic and idealistic history, Charles Beard and his wife, Mary, emphasized economic interpretations in The Rise of American Civilization.
