Is it fair to say that (U.S.) intellectual historians have seldom paid much attention to the “novel of ideas?” Fiction—not to mention poetry—exists outside the universe of the Hollinger/Capper anthology.[1] Or rather it exists only as a kind of reference, in essays like Melville’s “Hawthorne and His Mosses” and James Baldwin’s “Everyone’s Protest Novel.” Few intellectual historians deal directly and naturally with fiction as if it contained the same kind of raw material—words and notions, images and visions—as, say, a sermon. I’m not pointing this out to dissent, necessarily; in some ways, I think the lack of interest means that Read more