Lytle sees this myth embedded in the heart of every American yearning for the prelapsarian state of mankind, a yearning which, historically, actuated the impossible dream of the Old World to begin history anew on a continent free of Adam's sin. In a series of ``historical'' novels, he shows what became of this dream of innocence and renewal: its original corruption through the lust and greed of the conquerors, its subsequent degeneration as waves of pioneers deflowered the Garden and consumed themselves in Faustian self-apotheosis.
Thus Hernando de Soto, the hero of At the Moon's Inn (1941), stands out as the precursor of those generations of conquerors and settlers who brought the Western World and their own souls to spiritual ruin. Fearful examples of the settlers' degeneration are given in The Long Night (1936), in which Lytle proposes his earliest Edenic images of the forest and the night, both metonymic and metaphoric of the Golden West. These ``controlling images'' then cluster around sixteenth century Florida (in At the Moon's Inn -italiques) with its synecdochic reduction to the Indian Paradise of Cutifichiqui. In A Name for Evil (1947), however, they transcend history and geography proper to emerge in the full mythic metaphor of the Garden, whereas the fate of the novel's hero is made to exemplify the true meaning of the pioneers' Edenic dream.
In the light of his readings in Jungian psychology, Lytle then shows that man's yearning for Eden is a search for wholeness, the mythic state of an androgynous Adam or, still deeper into the ages of the world, the lethargic slumber of uncreated, undifferentiated matter. In The Velvet Horn (1957), all the heroes's longing is for their lost androgynous unity, whose symbol, the incestuous circle, orders the very structure of the novel.
The penultimate chapter considers Eve's precarious position in the Garden; and the dissertation ends on Lytle's views on history and art. Literature steeped in myth, he feels, transcends the topical to partake of the sacred.