A New Literary History of America

America is a nation making itself up as it goes along--a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history.

In more than two hundred original essays, A New Literary History of America brings together the nation's many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what "Made in America" means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoric--cultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape.

The meeting of minds is extraordinary as T. J. Clark writes on Jackson Pollock, Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Sarah Vowell on Grant Wood's American Gothic, Walter Mosley on hard-boiled detective fiction, Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison, Gerald Early on Tarzan, Bharati Mukherjee on The Scarlet Letter, Gish Jen on Catcher in the Rye, and Ishmael Reed on Huckleberry Finn. From Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop to Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, from Alexander Graham Bell and Stephen Foster to Alcoholics Anonymous, Life, Chuck Berry, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ronald Reagan, this is America singing, celebrating itself, and becoming something altogether different, plural, singular, new.

Author: Greil Marcus
Publisher: Belknap Press
Published: 09/01/2009
Pages: 1128
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 3.90lbs
Size: 10.00h x 7.00w x 2.10d
ISBN: 9780674035942


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/20/2009 pg. 133
Library Journal 08/15/2009 pg. 81
Booklist 09/15/2009 pg. 18
Vanity Fair 10/01/2009 pg. 136
Chronicle of Higher Education 10/02/2009 pg. 17
Entertainment Weekly 10/09/2009 pg. 8
New York Review of Books 11/05/2009 pg. 52
Chronicle of Higher Education 11/06/2009 pg. 13
Entertainment Weekly 12/25/2009 pg. 108
Choice 05/01/2010
BookPage 12/01/2009

About the Author
Marcus, Greil: - Greil Marcus is the author of The Doors, Mystery Train, and other books.Sollors, Werner: - Werner Sollors is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

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