TLS signed “Sincerely, Wallace Stenger,” one page, 8.5 x 11, December 1, 1979. Letter to Vance Morgan, in part: "I don't know what happened to the heroic virtues. I think they got eroded away along with American optimism, the work ethic, and a lot of our individualism. And I think they got eroded partly because we came to the end of the frontier and the boom. If you've read Walter Webb's The Great Frontier you know his thesis: that the discovery of the Americas, plus some other discoveries, about the year 1500 began what we call modern times, and that modern times, thanks in large part to the wealth provided by the new world, have been almost uninterrupted boom, at least until about the beginning of the 20th century. Four hundred years of boom can get people thinking that boom is the natural state of man. It takes a lot of decelerating to accept shortage, to accept shrinking opportunities (how does a young person now acquire a house, that most basic of commodities? How does he start a business and make a life by his own efforts? He doesn't. He takes a job at wages, submits to a union's or a corporation's rules, and becomes a cog in a machine.) We aren't individuals in the old sense any more, we're digits. And that's hard on the soul and hard on a belief in heroic virtues. Literature began being pessimistic in this country just about 1890, which marked the official closing of the frontier and all the frontier stood for. Since then we've been readjusting, generally painfully, to a shrinking world that becomes more and more like the static medieval world into which the discovery of America came like an armor-piercing shell." In fine condition.
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