Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now

In his deeply felt new book, the author of the highly acclaimed Death of Satan shows why classic American writers remain indispensable in our age of uncertainty over what constitutes our common heritage. In superb chapters touching on Thoreau, Melville, Wharton, Richard Wright, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, and others, Delbanco shows how each writer has enlarged the expressive range of the American language, as well as our imagined sense of American possibilities.

Andrew Delbanco, Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, is the author of The Puritan Ordeal and The Death of Satan. He lives in New York City.