The rise of the novel trilogy in the United States, 1890-1940

The novel trilogy, virtually nonexistent in the U.S. before the 1890's, had become by the 1930's the nation's preeminent literary genre, garnering both wide popularity and critical acclaim as a distinctly 20th-century epic form. The best-selling novel from 1931 through 1934 was either a volume of a trilogy (The Good Earth) or a trilogy-in-one-volume (Anthony Adverse); canonical authors who attempted trilogies include Norris, Dreiser, Faulkner, Dos Passos, William Carlos Williams, Ellen Glasgow, Upton Sinclair, Booth Tarkington, James Branch Cabell, James T. Farrell, Josephine Herbst, and Henry Miller. By the late Forties, however, largely because of a New Critical disdain for "the big, the inclusive, the epic," the genre had fallen into desuetude outside science fiction, and in the succeeding period of highbrow neglect no one has attempted a systematic theory or history of the genre.;I argue that the trilogy constitutes a distinct genre in theory because of what Dreiser's editor Ripley Hitchcock described as its "cumulative effect," a rhetorical effect of summation, perfection, and unity achieved largely through careful publishing practices and paratextual apparati. Hitchcock's theory, which I dub "consumer-response," successfully differentiates the novel trilogy from single novels and from longer series which seem endlessly to defer closure. In practice, the novel trilogy constitutes a distinct genre because writers of trilogies defined their own trilogic projects in the context of earlier attempts at the form. I show how the genre arose in this country in conscious imitations of Sienkiewicz's Polish trilogy; I suggest the implications for traditional separations among romance, naturalism, and modernism of Dreiser's borrowing the form from romancer Churchill; and I show how Faulkner and Phil Stone initially planned Snopes as a sustained parody of Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga. Where appropriate, I identify significant new sources and contexts for individual trilogies--for example, the source of Norris's tripartite allegory of production, distribution and consumption--and I characterize the tradition as a whole as a sustained and often ambivalent response to recurring cultural calls for epics of middle-class, professedly "Anglo-Saxon" male hegemony.