The American Adam by R W B Lewis
Intellectual history is viewed in this book as a series of "great conversations"—dramatic dialogues in which a culture's spokesmen wrestle with the leading questions of their times. In nineteenth-century America the great argument centered about De Crèvecoeur's "new man," the American, an innocent Adam in a bright new world dissociating himself from the historic past. Mr. Lewis reveals this vital preoccupation as a pervasive, transforming ingredient of the American mind, illuminating history and theology as well as art, shaping the consciousness of lesser thinkers as fully as it shaped the giants of the age. He traces the Adamic theme in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, and others, and in an Epilogue he exposes their continuing spirit in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, J. D. Salinger, and Saul Bellow.
R.W.B. Lewis, professor of English and American studies at Yale University, is the author of Edith Wharton: A Biography, which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Bancroft Prize. His other books include The City of Florence, The Jameses, and American Characters. He most recently was given the award for lifetime achievement as a biographer by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780226476810 |
| ISBN 10 | 0226476812 |
| Title | The American Adam |
| Author | R W B Lewis |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | The University of Chicago Press |
| Year published | 1959-09-15 |
| Number of pages | 208 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |