To observe this trend is not to assault individual authors (although some of them may well deserve It) who write about the so-called negative aspects of life, or to suggest that POLLYANNA is the archetype for worthwhile literature; it is to challenge a philosophy which is faddish and misleading. The possible causes of this trend cannot be analyzed here. Perhaps it is enough to say that the life we may write about is many many things good, bad, and in between--as Hamlet says, '...more things...than are dreamt of in your philosophy.' And when we presume to insist that the sum of reality is either this or that we merely qualify ourselves to join the blind men groping at the elephant. Our writers may as readily describe the glow on the horizon as the darkness of the abyss. Surely, if we can think of no other reason, the former endeavor should prove somewhat refreshing. Whatever our viewpoint, it will do no harm to ponder the following words of Faulkner: 4 '...the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself, which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old 'verities; and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of of value, of victories without hope and worst of all without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.' 5