in its regional and ethnic flavors.
Outside of the original Anglo-Saxon base of the New England states and the colony states such as Virginia, the novels and non-fiction of the vast other parts of America always have reflected the environment and various racial elements of the writers. Willa Cather and Sherwood Anderson had their beginnings in the Midwest. William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell made their reputations with the Southern background. Kenneth Roberts utilized the Northwest, and writers like George Stewart of Berkeley had used the Caifornia scene. J. Frank Dobie knew Texas like the back of his own hand, and wrote as intimately about it. Although he recorded the social agony of the depression with Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck really made the readers of America familiar with the Monterey country through Red Pony, Tortilla Flats, East of Eden and his other earlier works.
Because writers in their overt expressions really reflect their social milieu as well as their sense of semantics, it is not surprising that it is claimed that most "first novels" really are thinly disguised autobiographies, or are composite biographies. After all, the stuff of which literature is created is life itself. A scientist can experiment with an impersonal formula.
Life is a little more personal.
Thanks to the struggles and emotional outpourings of the writers who use their own racial backgrounds richly, an old-line New England blue-blood through the pages of a book has romped through the Armenian adventures of William Saroyan, the Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. A Texas cowhand learns something a-bout San Francisco Chinatown through C. Y. Lee, the Flower Drum Song man. And a California small town housewife dodges through the excitement of fast New York Jewish life following the pen of Jerome Weidman, who says I Can Get It For You Wholesale. Dante Pietro wrote about the New York Italians in a stirring Christ In Concrete. Before he faded into the big money as a screen writer, John Fante wrote some charming things about the Telegraph Hill (Continued on Page 35)
CHINATOWN NEWS, NOV. 18, 1964
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