Politics & Power Quote by Margaret Anderson

A backhanded compliment sharp enough to draw blood, Anderson’s line treats “sanity” not as a virtue but as a national affliction. The joke lands because it reverses the expected moral: we’re supposed to praise writers for being “balanced,” “reasonable,” fit for polite society. Anderson suggests the opposite - that American literature is too well-adjusted to its surroundings, too eager to make sense, too ready to behave.

The adverb “hopelessly” does most of the work. It implies not just that American writers are sane, but that they can’t imagine being otherwise; their imaginations have been domesticated. Coming from an editor who helped shape modernism (and who fought censors and middlebrow respectability), this reads like an editorial manifesto disguised as a quip. Anderson isn’t diagnosing individual authors so much as a cultural climate: a young, self-confident nation that rewards clarity, pragmatism, and uplift, then wonders why its art so often feels timid.

The subtext is also a jab at American moral hygiene - the Puritan residue and the businesslike demand that everything justify itself. “Sane” becomes code for market-compatible, socially legible, not likely to scandalize the neighbors or confuse the reviewers. Anderson is arguing for the writer as necessary deviant: someone permitted, even obligated, to be neurotic, unruly, sexually frank, formally strange. Her sentence flatters European decadence and avant-garde risk-taking without naming them, while indicting an American literary culture that mistakes normalcy for truth.