Studies in Classic American Literature

To judge this book is difficult. You have to ask yourself if Lawrence is being fair or unfair in his weird and wild strikes at some of the authors he covers: Benjamin Franklin, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, among others. I think he hits more than he mi......more

More about D.H. Lawrence than Classic American Literature. And more of an examination of his own personal spiritual precepts than the inner-workings of novels and stories by Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, etc. He dissects Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" not for its literary values, but for the ethical princi......more

Lawrence was always magnificent when he wrote fiction. However, he was more than magnificent when he wrote critical essays. In this collection, he theorises and summarises some of the best American Literature. A good and ideal critical book for anyone who wants to understand the classic American lit......more

Reading Lawrence's critical views is like standing in the middle of a cherished old building as a wrecking ball comes hurling through. You sort of want to weep to see all those famous walls being knocked away, but the noise is so consuming, and then the clearing made is breath-taking, ravishing, life-a......more

Much of this book is more about Lawrence's views than about the authors and books he was discussing. I did not expect that, but am just as glad of it as if he had stuck to the Americans. Still, when he gets to it, he has good things to say about us. In his chapter, Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking N......more