Lawrence reads the American classics as a European looking for the true American beneath the respectable surface. In short, combative chapters he takes on Benjamin Franklin and Crèvecœur, Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels, Poe, The Scarlet Letter and The Blithedale Romance, Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, Melville’s South Seas books and Moby Dick, and finally Whitman.
Eccentric, funny and often brilliant, this 1923 book helped convince the world that American literature had its own classics. Download the free EPUB.