Excerpt from The Record, Vol. 51: Summer, 1974 Just how far can he be taken as spokesman for the baffled American dream of innocence and promise, and how far must he be understood as a literary manifestation of the very status-striving that he professed to have loathed, of the desire of his age to get rich and genteel quick. It is true that Whitman and Melville, like Twain, lived beyond the chaos and tragedy of the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, but unlike Twain, they were firmly rooted in the pre-war world, it was ...
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Excerpt from The Record, Vol. 51: Summer, 1974 Just how far can he be taken as spokesman for the baffled American dream of innocence and promise, and how far must he be understood as a literary manifestation of the very status-striving that he professed to have loathed, of the desire of his age to get rich and genteel quick. It is true that Whitman and Melville, like Twain, lived beyond the chaos and tragedy of the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, but unlike Twain, they were firmly rooted in the pre-war world, it was their shaping milieu, and they never forsook its more humane and spiritual values. Twain's life, despite all his struggle to shape it otherwise, reflects a morbid fascination with the rank materialism of his age; it was not, certainly, a life given to James' easy-going mood, but in many respects it was built on surfaces, a tragic fact which he seems to have come to realize. The parlors of Twain's day were filled primarily with things; those of Emerson's Concord, with people - some even say free spirits. The Civil War and the industrial revolution following immediately in its wake represent, from a literary point of view at least, a unique evil, marking a watershed in our history. The gap between life before and after the industrial revolution seems often unbridgeable. Man had become dehumanized; individuals, isolated, unrelated. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at ... This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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