The search for some single myth or hypothesis to explain American character and history has informed much of our recent criticism. Within the last decade at least seven authors have devoted complete books to the subject. And from Emerson's “American Scholar” of a century ago, through Turner's “Significance of the Frontier,” to Matthiessen's American Renaissance, earlier critics had invoked the myth in passing. But now the old, vague “myth of the common man” has been imagined more concretely and in greater detail.