The Intellectual Identity of James Branch Cabell

Author

Tom Towers

Publication Date

10-17-1958

Abstract

The literary career of James Branch Cabell is as strange as any in the entire history of American letters; certainly it is unparalleled in the twentieth century. The nation's most famous critics, within a single decade, lionized and anathematized Cabell to extents seldom matched in the criticism of this century. For a time, every American with any intellectual ambitions read eagerly each new Cabell novel; and then, almost at the moment of Cabell's greatest popularity, the very critics who had made him an international literary figure suddenly saw in him a villain responsible for the appalling emptiness of American literature, possibly for the great depression itself. But all the adulation as well as the condemnation took place in a brief fifteen-year period; before his popularity and after his damnation most critics and most readers neglected Cabell with what seems almost purposeful thoroughness.

Degree Name

English

Level of Degree

Masters

Department Name

English

First Committee Member (Chair)

George Warren Arms

Second Committee Member

Ernest Warnock Tedlock Jr

Third Committee Member

Cecil Vivian Wicker

Language

English

Document Type

Thesis

Recommended Citation

Towers, Tom. "The Intellectual Identity of James Branch Cabell." (1958). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds/219