America has no literary capi- cesses) every ambitious talent. tal. Its great writers have It was not ever thus. In the late 19th and come from every region and early 20th centuries, some of America's often spent their adult lives greatest writers fled their own country, in in locales hardly known as part at least to get away from what they saw cultural meccas-Oxford, as its provincialism. For the literary expatri- Mississippi, or Amherst, Massachusetts, or ates of that time-Henry James, Edith...