AN AMERICAN PROCESSION

Front Cover
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Oct 2, 2013 - Literary Criticism - 408 pages
An American Procession is a study, on the largest scale, of the major American writers at work during the historically and literarily crucial century that began in the early 1830s, when Ralph Waldo Emerson founded a national literature on the basis of a metaphysical revolution, and ended on the eve of the 1930s with the triumph of modernism and the critical recognition of the “postponed power” of those who had been modern before their time.
 
These one hundred years encompassed a period of unprecedented expansion and promise in the United States, and the work of our novelists, essayists, poets, and historians was the mirror of the nation’s spirit. The thirty years preceding the Civil War produced the transcendental idealism of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman and the dark romanticism of Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville. In the years just after World War I, modernism reached its exemplary form in the work of Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Fitzgerald, and between the two wars emerged the great realists: Mark Twain, Henry James, Crane, and Dreiser. It is through an exploration of the lives and works of these writers—together with Emily Dickinson, William James, Henry Adams, and Faulkner—that Kazin maps out a great literary procession shaped by individual genius, by history, and by the implacable American sense of self.  
 
With each writer, Alfred Kazin illuminates for us the work, the influences that informed it, and its influence on the work of others. Each figure seems revitalized for us by Kazin’s acuity and powerful sympathy for his subject. An American Procession, with its intellectual energy, its clarity and breadth, is the brilliantly executed capstone of Kazin’s already illustrious career and will stand as the most important study of American literature in our time.
 

Contents

Cover
Old Man in a Dry Month
Emerson
Emerson
Thoreau
Hawthorne and
Whitman to Lincoln
PART
Mark Twain
The James Country
Dreiser Adams Mark Twain
Stephen Crane
HISTORY AND THE MODERNS 1 9001 929
Henry Adams
Eliot and Pound
An American Tragedy and The Sound and the Fury

Melville Is Dwelling Somewhere in New York
Dickinsons Room of Her
Hemingway the Painter
Copyright

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About the author (2013)

ALFRED KAZIN was born in Brooklyn in 1915. His first book of criticism, On Native Grounds (1942), was a groundbreaking study of American literature that changed radically our way of looking at it, and established him overnight as a major figure. In a series of books of his own since then, and in many critically edited texts of classic American literary works, he established himself as our preeminent man of letters. He taught widely at Harvard, Smith, Amherst, Hunter College, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and elsewhere. In 1996 he received from the Truman Capote Literary Trust its first Lifetime Achievement Award in Literary Criticism (in memory of Newton Arvin). He died in 1998.

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