American Studies

Louis Menand

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9780374706012
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Literature

Essays that represents "the heart" of the Pulitzer Prize–winning author's work and "demonstrate his status as his generation's premier critical talent" ( Los Angeles Times).
At each step of this journey through American cultural history, Louis Menand has an original point to make: he explains the real significance of William James's nervous breakdown, and of the anti-Semitism in T. S. Eliot's writing. He reveals the reasons for the remarkable commercial successes of William Shawn's New Yorker and William Paley's CBS. He uncovers the connection between Larry Flynt's Hustler and Jerry Falwell's evangelism, between the atom bomb and the Scholastic Aptitude Test. He locates the importance of Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, Pauline Kael, Christopher Lasch, and Rolling Stone magazine. And he lends an ear to Al Gore in the White House as the Starr Report is finally presented to the public.
Like his critically acclaimed bestseller, The Metaphysical Club, American Studies is intellectual and cultural history at its best: game and detached, with a strong curiosity about the political underpinnings of ideas and about the reasons successful ideas insinuate themselves into the culture at large. From one of our leading thinkers and critics, known both for his "sly wit and reportorial high-jinks [and] clarity and rigor" ( The Nation), these essays are incisive, surprising, and impossible to put down.
"Brilliant.. . . [Menand's] intellectual range is limitless." — Kirkus Reviews
"Reaffirms Menand's position as a preeminent historian of American liberalism's cultural incarnations." — Publishers Weekly

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• William James and the Case of the Epileptic Patient
• The Principles of Oliver Wendell Holmes
• T. S. Eliot and the Jews
• Richard Wright: The Hammer and the Nail
• The Long Shadow of James B. Conant
• The Last Emperor: William S. Paley
• A Friend Writes: The Old New Yorker
• Norman Mailer in His Time
• Life in the Stone Age
• The Popist: Pauline Kael
• Christopher Lasch’s Quarrel with Liberalism
• Lust in Action: Jerry Falwell and Larry Flynt
• Laurie Anderson’s United States
• The Mind of Al Gore
• The Reluctant Memorialist: Maya Lin
• ALSO BY LOUIS MENAND
• NOTES
• Copyright Page