NP much but a little. Chicago World's Fair

[Mark Kohut]

Some might find this not uninteresting.

Guy named Edward O'Brien,
who seemed to be the founder, or at least first editor for the annual
American
Best Short Stories of the Year for a long while, made his bones with
a book on the American short story to that publication time, which was 1931,
it seems.

in this book's preface, one learns that he was friends with Robert Graves
(!)
and his vision of the story is, when it is art, it is the presentation of a
new 'form of life'
on the page. It offers a formed richness of emotions outside of
standardized ways of
feeling. Almost Lawrentian, I'd say.

It is THE American art form literarily, he argues.
America's  novelists ain't like them great English writers, with an
exception or two, such as Moby Dick which ain't like them English writers
as well.

Anyway, he argues that it is around the time of the Chicago World's Fair
that
the short story in the US changed and deepened in the aggregate enough to
produce a few most important Artists of the genre, of the real and new
forms of life.
>From the Fair thru the next 20 years
of all the new immigrants which produced the seedbed for those richness of
emotions to overcome the standard US 'frontier' sensibility (in general).

I send this re Pynchon as another example of his artistic finding of
seminal events
to frame his novels around.
When you go for the King (of Achievements), you better not miss--
and he doesn't.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20170108/3dc3d307/attachment.html>