SOURCE: Mengham, Roderick. “American Novel of Manners.” In Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vol. 130, edited by Scott Darga and Linda Pavlovski. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group, 2002.

In the following original essay, Mengham provides an overview of the American Novel of Manners, focusing on its history, representative writers, hallmark works, and critical response.

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Overview of the Novel of Manners

In The Writing of Fiction, Edith Wharton praises the French novelist Balzac, whom she greatly admired, for the ability “to draw his dramatic action as much from the relation of his characters to their houses, streets, towns, professions, inherited habits and opinions, as from their fortuitous contacts with each other” (8). She might have applied the same description to her own fiction. She adds that his “viewing each character first of all as a product of particular material and social conditions …” (9) establishes him as breaking new ground for the novel, for he...