MAKERS OF AMERICAN THOUGHT : ; Introduction to Seven American Writers

Through critical introductions to seven important American thinkers and critics, this book presents a significant view of the cultural history of the nation in the late nineteenth and early and mid-twentieth centuries. The writers who are discussed and the authors of the chapters on each of them are "Henry Adams" by Louis Auchincloss, "William James" by Gay Wilson Allen, "H.L. Mencken" by Philip Wagner, "Randolph Bourne" by Sherman Paul, "Van Wyck Brooks" by William Wasserstrom, "Kenneth Burke" by Merle E. Brown, and "Reinhold Niebuhr" by Nathan A. Scott, Jr. Like the other volumes in the Minnesota Library on American Writers, this volume is based on a collection of pamphlets from the series of University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers. In a perceptive introduction to the volume, Professor Ross comments on the mainstreams of thought that characterized this country during its coming of age after the Civil War. He contrasts the ebullience of those who looked forward with the despair of those who looked back, as represented, respectively, by William James and Henry Adams. "The similarity of their backgrounds obscures the enormous difference between them," he writes. "The differences are guideposts in American thought." After considering the contributions and influences of the other writers discussed in the book Professor Ross "Even those American thinkers whose concerns are essentially literary and rhetorical are likely to reveal the social or philosophical attitude of James or Adams in their choice of words."