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Daniel Aaron - The Americanist - 9780472115778 - V9780472115778
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The Americanist

€ 52.85
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Description for The Americanist Hardcover. Num Pages: 199 pages. BIC Classification: 1KBB; BGA; DSB. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 231 x 162 x 22. Weight in Grams: 463.

“I have read all of Daniel Aaron’s books, and admired them, but in The Americanist I believe he has composed an intellectual and social memoir for which he will be remembered. His self-portrait is marked by personal tact and admirable restraint: he is and is not its subject. The Americanist is a vision of otherness: literary and academic friends and acquaintances, here and abroad. Eloquently phrased and free of nostalgia, it catches a lost world that yet engendered much of our own.”

—Harold Bloom

The Americanist is the absorbing intellectual autobiography of Daniel Aaron, who is the leading proponent and practitioner of ... Read more

—David Herbert Donald, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University

The Americanist is author and critic Daniel Aaron’s anthem to nearly a century of public and private life in America and abroad. Aaron, who is widely regarded as one of the founders of American Studies, graduated from the University of Michigan, received his Ph.D. from Harvard, and taught for over three decades each at Smith College and Harvard.

Aaron writes with unsentimental nostalgia about his childhood in Los Angeles and Chicago and his later academic career, which took him around the globe, often in the role of America’s accidental yet impartial critic. When Walt Whitman, whom Aaron frequently cites as a touchstone, wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes,” he could have been describing Daniel Aaron—the consummate erudite and Renaissance individual whose allegiance to the truth always outweighs mere partisan loyalty.

Not only should Aaron’s book stand as a resplendent and summative work from one of the finest thinkers of the last hundred years, it also succeeds on its own as a first-rate piece of literature, on a par with the writings of any of its subjects. The Americanist is a veritable Who’s Who of twentieth-century writers Aaron interviewed, interacted with, or otherwise encountered throughout his life: Ralph Ellison, Robert Frost, Lillian Hellman, Richard Hofstadter, Alfred Kazin, Sinclair Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge, John Crowe Ransom, Upton Sinclair, Edmund Wilson, Leonard Woolf, and W. B. Yeats, to name only a few.

Aaron’s frank and personal observations of these literary lights make for lively reading. As well, scattered throughout The Americanist are illuminating portraits of American presidents living and passed—miniature masterworks of astute political observation that offer dazzlingly fresh approaches to well-trod subjects.

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Product Details

Format
Hardback
Publication date
2007
Publisher
University of Michigan Press
Condition
New
Number of Pages
208
Place of Publication
Ann Arbor, United States
ISBN
9780472115778
SKU
V9780472115778
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-15

About Daniel Aaron
Daniel Aaron is Victor S. Thomas Professor of English and American Literature, Emeritus, Harvard University. His many books include Men of Good Hope: A Story of American Progressives, Writers on the Left, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War, Studies in Biography, and The Inman Diary: A Public and Private Confession.

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