QUOTE : In fact, every American that Dickens shows in the book is a homicidal idiot, except one--and he wanted to live abroad! Well! You can't tell me that a degenerate bunch like that could have taken the very river- bottom swamps that Dickens describes, and in three generations have turned 'em into the prosperous cement-paved powerful country that they are today! Yet Europe goes on reading hack authors who still steal their ideas from 'Martin Chuzzlewit' and saying, 'There, I told you so!' Say, do you realize that at the time Dickens described the Middlewest--my own part of the country--as entirely composed of human wet rags, a fellow named Abe Lincoln and another named Grant were living there; and not more than maybe ten years later, a boy called William Dean Howells (I heard him lecture once at Yale, and I notice that they still read his book about Venice IN Venice) had been born? Dickens couldn't find or see people like that. Perhaps some European observers today are missing a few Lincolns and Howellses!