page_674 < previous page page_674 next page > Page 674 sixties resumed writing about history, though with different kinds of argument that required new forms. In Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1913), he presented the imaginative world of the French Middle Ages, seeing the culture that built the great Gothic cathedrals as so strong that it could compel attention despite the violence, cruelty, and suffering of that same past. In The Education of Henry Adams (1907), he dealt with his own time. All the ideas of stability that a nineteenth-century education had given to the young, when put to the test, he found wanting. Disjunction rather than coherence seemed the rule in human affairs: "Chaos is the law of nature, Order is the dream of man." The only demonstrable progress was technological progress, and that was being channeled into military and imperial power more obviously than into the service of peace, security, or freedom; ironically he invited the future to prove him wrong. These two privately printed books steadily gathered readers: in 1911 he allowed the Chartres to be "pirated" for publication; when the Education was published posthumously in 1918, it became a best-seller. He helped create a twentieth-century audience for whom simple, secure, complacent notions of progress were untenable. Of the generation born after the Civil War, one professional historian found a more than academic audience in his own time. W. E. B. Du Bois, a black scholar, taught at the segregated Atlanta University. Beginning with The Suppression of the African Slave Trade (1896), he pursued the study of African-American history, which had been either ignored or warped in conventional historiography. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) he combined chapters on institutional history, folk culture, and individual reflections. While Adams was laying bare the disjunction between consciousness and events, Du Bois was showing the necessity that souls and facts be brought together to create a vital past for those who had largely been banished from white middle-class consciousness. As editor from 1910 to 1934 of Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he published many of the writers who were to create a Harlem Renaissance after World War I. After World War II, having struggled against racism and imperialism over his long life and seen no victory at home, he became an expatriate in Ghana and joined the Communist party. But even such strong gestures of insurgency could not deprive him of his increasingly important place in the American past. The relative uniformity of the reading public of the 1860s slowly gave way under pressures of enlarged scale and unforeseen diversity until, in the second decade of the twentieth century, the "genteel tradition" seemed to cave in. But writing had been changing faster than publicists and scholars were always aware. The later work of Mark Twain, Howells, James, and Adams disclosed forces and ideas that the established norms could not contain. New writers as different as Dreiser, Cather, Frost, and Pound kept coming on the scene. Moreover, once the canons of gentility were dropped, readers began discovering that the older culture was richer and more various than its official spokesmen had surmised. Warner Berthoff, The Ferment of Realism: American Literature 18841919 (1965); Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence: The First Years of Our Own Time, 19121917 (1959); Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (1982). J. C. LEVENSON III American Literature Since 1914 In the second decade of the century the new literary insurgencies on the American scene, however much they may in one particular or another have been uncertain of their aim, knew that at least their mission needed to involve the subversion of what George Santayana in 1911 had called the "genteel tradition." The generation of such writers as Edwin Arlington Robinson and Theodore Dreiser, of Robert Frost and Sherwood Anderson, of H. L. Mencken and William Carlos Williams, was convinced that it needed to distance itself from the timidities and pieties that had for too long subdued and tamed the major voices of American tradition. A milieu increasingly shaped by Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud had to be reckoned with in ways that Harper's and the Atlantic and Scribner's and the  < previous page page_674 next page >