Bergson, Eliot, and American Literature

Until now, Bergson's widely acknowledged impact on American literature has never been comprehensively mapped. Author Paul Douglass explains and evaluates Bergson's meaning for American writers, beginning with Eliot and moving through Ransom, Penn Warren, and Tate to Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, Henry Miller, William Carlos Williams, and others. It will be a standard point of reference.

Bergson was the continental philosopher of the early 1900s, a celebrity, as Sartre would later be. Profoundly...