3 Review(s)

In this illuminating study of the "crucial century" (1830-1930), Alfred Kazin views the major figures in American writing, beginning in the 1830s when Ralph Waldo Emerson founded a national literature on the basis of a religious revolution, and ending on the eve of the 1930s with modernism-Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Fitzgerald-and with the revelation of the "postponed power" of those who had been modern before their time-Henry Adams, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson.