An American Procession: the Major American Writers from 1830 to 1930 - the Crucial Century

Table of Contents
Preface, 1996

Prologue, 1918: Old Man in a Dry Month

Part One. The Self as Power: America When Young, 1830-1865

1. The Priest Departs, the Divine Literatus Comes: Emerson

2. Things Are in the Saddle and Ride Mankind: Emerson

3. A Lover and His Guilty Land: Thoreau

4. The Ghost Sense: Hawthorne and Poe

5. A More Perfect Union: Whitman to Lincoln

Part Two. Modern Times, 1865-1900

6. "Melville Is Dwelling Somewhere in New York"

7. Wrecked, Solitary, Here: Dickinson's Room of Her Own

8. Creatures of Circumstance: Mark Twain

9. The James Country

10. Chicago and "the East": Dreiser, Adams, Mark Twain

11. The Youth: Stephen Crane

Part Three. Ruling Style: History and the Moderns, 1900-1929

12. A Postponed Power: Henry Adams

13. Going to Europe: Eliot and Pound

14. An American Tragedy and The Sound and the Fury

15. Hemingway the Painter

Retrospect, 1932: The Twenties and the Great American Thing