On Native Grounds: An Interpretation Of Modern American Prose Literature

Follow the tumultuous rise of modern American literature from late-nineteenth-century realism to the eve of the Second World War.

A classic interpretation of literature from America's golden age-including the work of Howells, Wharton, Lewis, Cather, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner.

Alfred Kazin opens his inquiry with William Dean Howells in New York and follows the agrarian dissenters across the Middle Border. The volume traces the emergence of a native realism from the industrial upheavals of the eighteen-nineties.

Across the Chicago renaissance and the lost generation, the study charts the decisive transformation of American prose through the insurgent social crises of the twentieth century. New Preface by the Author; Index.

• Historical Criticism: Examines how Stephen Crane forged an unprecedented psychological portrait of battlefield fear in The Red Badge of Courage before ever seeing combat.
• Social Protest: Analyzes Thorstein Veblen's satirical exposure of the leisure class and the clash between productive engineering skill and the predatory profit motive.
• Case Studies: Traces Frank Norris's ambitious transition from frontier romance to the brutal naturalism of McTeague and his sweeping, multi-continent epic of wheat.
• 20th Century Literature: Captures the pre-war Little Renaissance through Mabel Dodge's Fifth Avenue salon, the staging of modern drama on MacDougal Street, and the raucous satire of The Masses.
• Also by This Author: A Walker in the City, Alfred Kazin's America and The Inmost Leaf.