FIVE MINORITY GROUPS IN RELATION TO CONTEMPORARY FICTION

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loves the neighbor's wife. This is supposed to be a very moral ending: if the "guilty" couple had run away together and the abandoned wife and husband had made the sort of eventual adjustments that most people do make in actual life, the book probably wouldn't have been published. Dreiser's SISTER CARRIE was regarded as a shooker in its day because Carrie thrived and became famous, even though the moralists were appeased by having Hurstwood, who deserted his cold and loveless life, end as a penniless beggar.

Few attempts, if any, have been made by novelists to discover why the subject of the story is disappointed and disappointing even though the psychologists all the way from Freud to Caprio have pointed out that an unconscious or unconfessed attraction to the same sex is at the root of much marital frigidity. On a popular level, I tried to deal with this in STRANGER ON LESBOS. There would probably be a large and sympathetic market for books based on this problem; it's probably the real reason for the sort of conflict that is analyzed in a superficial way by newspaper and magazine columns such as "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" in the Ladies' Home Journal; and such analyses must often fail because they don't go to the root of the matter.

Fourth is the group with which all of us are basically concerned: the homophile, whether active or unconscious. Here the history of literature in the last 60 years is full of splendid name s: Andre Gide, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Carson McCullers (whose THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER is underlaid from start to finish by the love of the two deaf mutes, an attachment so strong that when Antanapoulos dies, Singer commits suicido). Biff Brannon, in the same book, is a prototype of the unconscious or unconfessed homosexual who sublimates his needs more or less successfully.

We also have such books as Charles Jackson's THE FALL OF VALOR and THE LOST WEEKEND, which deal with the consternation of young men discovering their true nature; THE LOST WEEKEND is often described as a study of alcoholism, but the cause of the alcoholism is explicit: the inability