DOES THE WORLD have any more need for the Young Man from the Provinces? That figure, as aptly defined by the critic Lionel Trilling, describes a plethora of characters who populated nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, from Stendhal’s Julien Sorel and Flaubert’s Frederic Moreau to Dickens’s Pip and Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby. He (and it is almost always a “he”) “stands outside life and seeks to enter,” according to Trilling; possessed of talent and ambition but devoid of money or pedigree, he relies on his cunning and wit to ascend the social ladder. The fortunes of the Young Man from the