Life & Mortality Quote by Carl Clinton Van Doren

Van Doren is diagramming a cultural retreat and doing it with the cool authority of someone who wants the reader to feel how quietly seismic it was. The line hinges on “too”: fiction didn’t merely mirror America’s post-frontier mood; it participated in it. After Cooper - shorthand for the myth-engine of Leatherstocking, for the national romance of “new borders” - writers stop sprinting toward the edge of the map and start farming the interior.

The phrasing is telling. “Conquest” makes the earlier literary project sound not just adventurous but ideological: expansion as narrative destiny. When that “main tendency” swings “away,” Van Doren implies a collective decision, almost an instinctive recalibration, as if the culture sensed that the old heroic script was wearing thin. “Nearly a generation” gives the shift historical weight: not a fad, a weather system.

Then comes the subtle downgrade disguised as praise: “closer cultivation.” Cultivation suggests refinement, realism, social observation - but also boundedness, a turning inward, a taming of imagination into property lines. “Ground already marked” is the slyest jab. It evokes surveyed plots, settled towns, inherited problems. Fiction becomes less about making new worlds than managing the consequences of the one already claimed.

Context matters: Van Doren is writing as a critic of American literary development, reading the nineteenth century as a movement from frontier romance toward domestic, regional, and psychological terrains. East of the Mississippi isn’t just geography; it’s a metaphor for institutional life taking over, where the drama is no longer discovery but definition: who belongs, who gets to speak, and what gets “cultivated” into art once the myth of endless borders starts to close.