The kitchen -- "Beyond!" -- Mrs. Solovey -- Yeshua -- Brownsville : 1931 -- The new republic : 1934 -- At V.F. Calverton's : 1936 -- Preface to On native grounds -- The opening struggle for realism -- Two educations : Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser -- An insurgent scholar : Thorstein Veblen -- The new realism : Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis -- Willa Cather's elegy -- All the lost generations : F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.E. Cummings, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos -- Provincetown, 1940 : Bertram Wolfe, Mary McCarthy, Philip Rahv -- Delmore Schwartz -- Saul Bellow and Lionel Trilling -- The fascination and terror of Ezra Pound -- William Faulkner : The sound and the fury -- Southern isolates : Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy -- Arthur Schlesinger Jr. : the historian at the center -- President Kennedy and other intellectuals -- Professional observers : Cheever, Salinger, and Updike -- The earthly city of the Jews : Bellow, Malamud, and Roth -- The imagination of fact : Capote and Mailer -- The "single voice" of Ralph Ellison -- Two cassandras : Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates -- James Wright : the gift of feeling -- The intoxicating sense of possibility : Thomas Jefferson at Monticello -- Emerson : the priest departs, the divine literatus comes -- Thoreau and American power -- Hawthorne: the ghost sense -- "Melville is dwelling somewhere in New York" -- Walt Whitman : I am the man -- Lincoln : the almighty has his own purposes -- Emily Dickinson : called back -- Creatures of circumstance : Mark Twain -- William and Henry James : our passion is our task -- The death of the past : Henry Adams and T.S. Eliot -- Edmund Wilson at Wellfleet -- Hannah Arendt : the burden of our time -- The directness of Josephine Herbst -- Saving my soul at the plaza -- A parade in the rain -- To be a critic.
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