Release date is 2026-04-16

Sean (@parchmentglow)

"The American novel to-day" by Régis Michaud is a work of literary criticism written in the early 20th century. It offers a social and psychological reading of modern American fiction, arguing that contemporary novels form a realist, often pessimistic critique of American civilization shaped by Puritan legacies and illuminated by new psychology, especially Freud. The study surveys major writers and trends to show how individual desire, repression, and social pressure drive American storytelling.

The opening of the book explains its origin in Sorbonne lectures and its limited aim: not a full history, but a focused inquiry into how contemporary American novels satirize society and defend individual rights. Michaud frames the field through realism’s rise and the spread of psychoanalysis, portraying Puritanism as a powerful source of inhibition behind America’s paradox of mass prosperity and private discontent, and he contrasts an embattled elite with the mass mind. He then assembles the “case against the Puritans” via critics like Waldo Frank (Puritan repression and expansionism), H. L. Mencken (moral policing and respectability), and Theodore Dreiser (cultural barrenness under Puritan constraint), alongside psychologists who diagnose repression, “floating anxiety,” and a pervasive “mother complex” in American life. Next he sketches the intellectual toolkit for his readings—William James’s stream of consciousness and multiple “selves,” behaviorism’s stimulus–response lens, and Freudian psychoanalysis—before applying it to Hawthorne, recasting The Scarlet Letter as a drama of inhibition and release: Hester’s unapologetic passion, Dimmesdale’s crippling repression, and Chillingworth’s probing as a kind of proto-psychoanalysis, with confession as cure. The narrative then turns to Henry James (exile to Europe, “undervitality” and inhibition in Americans), Edith Wharton (precise society novels that indict respectability and expose shallow behaviorism in love and morals), and begins a portrait of William Dean Howells as a genial realist of ordinary life. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1928