AN AMERICAN PROCESSION

An American Procession is a study, on the largest scale, of the major American writers at work during the historically and literarily crucial century that began in the early 1830s, when Ralph Waldo Emerson founded a national literature on the basis of a metaphysical revolution, and ended on the eve of the 1930s with the triumph of modernism and the critical recognition of the “postponed power” of those who had been modern before their time.

These one hundred years encompassed a period of u...