Between 1700 and the outbreak of the Revolution over 800 travellers left accounts of their American experiences. After 1750 the value and variety of their information increases considerably as colonial society develops and matures, while opportunity and interest grows in the observation of a scene marked by its diversity and rapidity of change. Travel had become easier and journeys more ambitious. When in 1708, Dame Knight ventured overland from Boston to New York her trip proved difficult and unusual, and her comments on the standards of hospitality she encountered were blistering. By the 1760s travellers found that the journey from Virginia to Maine presented no enormous problems. Taverns might be dirty and inadequate, ferries could prove expensive and temperamental, but the discomforts to be endured were limited to occasional misfortunes of this kind. Further south, it was true, the roads deteriorated sharply, particularly along the less used route between North and South Carolina. Here horses were difficult to obtain, and a guide was advisable, or at least a compass. Inland in New England the road between Boston and Albany was new and presented some difficulties, but despite this a commissioner of customs and his wife were able, in 1772, to travel by coach from Boston to Canada and back. As travel became less of an adventure, diaries and letters dwell increasingly on picturesque detail rather than practical hazards; there was security and leisure to admire scenery, for which the highest term of praise was ‘romantic’, and to linger in cities whose buildings and social life could be considered truly ‘elegant’.

Historical analogies are often misleading, but the character of John F. Kennedy's administration can be usefully illuminated by consideration of the points of resemblance which it bears to the peacetime administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Superficially of course the influx of intellectuals into the federal capital in the winter of 1960–1961 recalls the gathering of the brain-trusters in Washington in 1933. But there are two more fundamental aspects of the Kennedy presidency which remind the observer of the Roosevelt period. These are the philosophy of the New Frontier, with its conscious overtones of the New Deal and its radical challenge to the traditions of laissez faire; and the political problem inherent in the composition of the Democratic party.

Tocqueville once made the extremely penetrating observation that the American mind tends to oscillate between ideas that ‘are all either extremely minute and clear or extremely vague’ and with a view to illustrating the relevance of this remark to American literature I want to start by juxtaposing two quotations from writers separated by almost a century. First, Margaret Fuller, a leading female transcendentalist; ‘Are the stars too distant, pick up that pebble that lies at thy feet, and from it learn the ALL.’ Second, some lines from the end of Sherwood Anderson's novel entitled Poor White. There Hugh McVey, disillusioned by and alienated from the industrial society which hems him in, breaks one of his business journeys and goes down to the beach at Sandusky where he picks up some pebbles from the sands. He renews his journey and as the train passes through depressingly ugly factory towns, he plays with the stones. ‘There was relief for his mind in the stones. The light continually played about them, and their colour shifted and changed. One could look at the stones and get relief from thoughts.’ Those little stones, as Anderson explained in his A Story Teller's Story, gave comfort because they could be seen to ‘glisten and shine outside the muddle of life.’

James T. Farrell was born in 1904 in Chicago, a city which has produced such characteristic American writers as Carl Sandburg, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Meyer Levin and Nelson Algren. Like several of his fellow–citizens he has become known, not altogether unjustly, as a ‘one-book writer’. But if there is Justice in the label which has thus been applied to Farrell his ‘one book’ has been less fairly treated and has suffered in reverse much the same wrong-headed fate as that which has over-taken some of the typical English novels of the last decade. While certain novels like John Braine's Room at the Top have been absurdly over-praised because apparent virtues of ‘realism’ and ‘toughness’ have obscured even more apparent literary shortcomings, Studs Lonigan has been under-praised because an extreme aversion to Farrell's undeniable ‘realism’ and ‘toughness’ has resulted in his equally undeniable literary merits being obscured. Studs Lonigan is not a novel to which can be applied R. P. Blackmur's phrase: “one of those books in which everything is undertaken with seriousness except the writing”.

This list follows that published in this Bulletin, New Series No. 5, December 1962, and should be used with the same reservations: space does not allow the detail given in the Guide; few of these reports have been compiled by direct inspection, nor have proper names and life-dates been checked. So this is part, as it were, of a “first draft” of some speculative Second Edition of the Guide. Two years after the Guide appeared I wrote to all major libraries, archives and other repositories asking to be notified of addenda; this type of enquiry is no longer practical, both on grounds of expense and of “diminishing returns”. So future lists of addenda will be more infrequent and will depend upon scholars themselves notifying me of new finds. Perhaps this will be a chance to recoup academic honour. For in compiling the Guide we all found that, with some few fine exceptions, scholars were the least helpful of all people, often having surprisingly little knowledge of related materials in their own field outside one particular library or archive – certainly compared to librarians or archivists; and also many scholars seem absurdly secretive about and jealous of papers they are working on – once again it is archivists who do most to maintain free trade in the Republic of Learning. I hope this aside causes some offence; for I have been mildly smarting for some years under the observation that those who are the most helped by guides to sources are commonly the most reluctant to help each other.