An American Procession

Alfred Kazin

  • Alfred Kazin was Awarded the First Truman Capote Literary Trust Lifetime Achievement Award in Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin

Preface, 1996

Prologue, 1918: Old Man in a Dry Month

Part One. The Self as Power: America When Young, 1830-1865

1. The Priest Departs, the Divine Literatus Comes: Emerson

2. Things Are in the Saddle and Ride Mankind: Emerson

3. A Lover and His Guilty Land: Thoreau

4. The Ghost Sense: Hawthorne and Poe

5. A More Perfect Union: Whitman to Lincoln

Part Two. Modern Times, 1865-1900

6. "Melville Is Dwelling Somewhere in New York"

7. Wrecked, Solitary, Here: Dickinson's Room of Her Own

8. Creatures of Circumstance: Mark Twain

9. The James Country

10. Chicago and "the East": Dreiser, Adams, Mark Twain

11. The Youth: Stephen Crane

Part Three. Ruling Style: History and the Moderns, 1900-1929

12. A Postponed Power: Henry Adams

13. Going to Europe: Eliot and Pound

14. An American Tragedy and The Sound and the Fury

15. Hemingway the Painter

Retrospect, 1932: The Twenties and the Great American Thing

Index

  • Cover: An American Procession
  • A photo of the author

Alfred Kazin is Distinguished Professor of English, Emeritus, at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author and editor of many books, including, most recently, A Writer's America: Landscape in American Literature.