Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
American Writers of the Present Day, 1890 to 1920

American Writers of the Present Day, 1890 to 1920

Rankin, Thomas Ernest

Paperback

General World History

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 115130980X
ISBN13: 9781151309808
Publisher: General Books
Pages: 42
Weight: 0.21
Height: 0.09 Width: 7.44 Depth: 9.69
Language: English
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1920. Excerpt: ... Prose The Challenge of a Century.--One hundred years ago, in January, 1820, Sydney Smith, wise and witty English essayist, asked in The Edinburgh Review, Who reads an American book? Now, why the Edinburgh editor happened to have overlooked at that date such writers as Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Tom Paine, and Washington Irving, is difficult to surmise. And yet, only one year earlier, in 1819, aUnhyP an able American, Joseph Story, Associate Justice of ago the Supreme Court, wrote, So great is the call for talents of all sorts in the active use of professional and other business in America, that few of our ablest men have leisure to devote exclusively to literature or the fine arts, or to composition on abstract science. This obvious reason will explain why we have few professional authors and those not among our ablest men. Precisely the same situation pertains now, one hundred years after this eminent jurist courteously explained the state of letters in his day. The call for talent in the varied activities of a public character never was greater in the world's history than it is today, and the greater abilities and energies of men are being devoted rather to affairs of state and of business than to the production of literature. America, perhaps, is both too young and too old for a deeply thoughtful and powerfully original literature of her own. America is too young as yet for successful contemplation of her own experience as a nation; also too old, or developed beyond the warrant of her years, because of her rich inheritance of literature from the older civilizations from which she has directly sprung. And then it may be true that the phenomenal successes of Poe, Emerson, Whittier, Longfellow, and Lowell after the first quarter of the nin...

1 different editions

Also available

Also in

General World History

View All