On Writing Literary History

Abstract

FIRST BECAME interested in studying western American writers when I considered them from the vantage point of Oxford University right after the First World War. Three years of student life in England, accompanied by extensive travel on the Continent, had lent to my home environment-California and Arizona-a strangeness and significance which I had not fully realized as a boy. My Rhodes Scholarship, which had taken me to Oxford at the end of my sophomore year, had eventually changed my focus of interest from mining engineering to English language and literature. Thus, I abandoned Herbert Hoover in my growing preference for Geoffrey Chaucer. Though my final examinations at Oxford dealt principally with writers who had done their work before the end of the