Five Minority Groups in Relation to

Contemporary Fiction

The first responsibility of a human being is to live as freely and creatively as possible. The first obligation of a writer is to portray some aspect of life honestly. Almost everyone gives a technical assent to both of these statements, and everyone with any intelligence realizes that both of them are difficult and usually impossible to live up to.

The human feeling is hindered and blocked from birth by his heredity, upbringing and all the social forces which have operated on his ancestors and their neighbors from the beginning of time. Religion, morality, manners, family ties, the advertising industry, limitations of time and energy, the necessity of making a living these are a few of the factors that keep us from finding out what we are and from becoming what we think we ought to be. Even babies are not free: from birth they're made to wear clothing, taught that their most onjoyable functions are dirty and disgusting, and generally shaped into miniature adults qualified to live in a fake world.

The author, being human, has to cope with all the se limitations and with another set of specialized problems relating to his work. He is conditioned by all the facts of his life, like anyone else. Ernest Jones has said that when we read Freud we learn a great deal about upper middle class Jewish family life in Vienna in the late nineteenth century and this is true; whenever we pick up a book, we find that it betrays the writer, his fears and guilts and misconceptions, as well as his loves and commitments.

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The writer is limited by his own ability, his subject matter, and such practical considerations as: what will the public accopt? and what will the publisher buy? If

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