Sure you’re romantic about American history … it is the most romantic of all histories. It began as myth and has developed through three centuries of fairy stories. Whatever the time is in America it is always, at every moment, the mad and wayward hour when the prince is finding the little foot that alone fits into the slipper of glass.… Ours is a story mad with the impossible, it is by chaos out of dream, it began as dream and has continued as dream down to the last headline you read in a newspaper.… The simplest truth you can ever write about our history will be charged and surcharged with romanticism, and if you are afraid of the word you had better start practicing seriously on your fiddle.

—Bernard DeVoto to Catherine Drinker Bowen

Three centuries of fairy stories, DeVoto says. But the fairy stories go back far deeper into time than three hundred years. As Atlantis, as Brazile or Antillia or Groenland or the Fortunate Isles, as the Earthly Paradise or the Garden of the World, as something for nothing, as escape from history or authority or oppression or the grind of poverty, as the promise of social justice, freedom, or the ideal society, America is Europe’s oldest dream. “The Atlantic,” says Howard Mumford Jones in O Strange New World, “hid in its misty vastness many wonderful islands, and these island images, compounded of wonder, terror, wealth, religious perfection, communism, utopianism, or political power, conditioned the European image of America. They floated on the maps of the Ocean Sea like quicksilver globules, now here, now there, now nowhere at all, some of them remaining on British Admiralty charts into the nineteenth century.”

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