This descriptive and critical survey of the American novel up to the year 1820 seems certain to gain recognition as the definitive work on its subject. Prompted by an awareness of how unevenly the predecessors of James Fenimore Cooper have been studied and made accessible to the modern reader, Mr. Petter has completed a work of literary historiography that lucidly and systematically deals with an astonishing amount of information. The novels published in America in the three decades preceding 1821 are marked, above all, by the limited range of their authors, who tamely and unimaginatively...