This book is kind of goofy. There’s some funny flexing and cockiness that you might expect from DH Lawrence, and there’s a careful and interesting analysis of American literature. He takes a very cross section and survey perspective on things here: spending time with Benjamin Franklin, Puritan literature, James Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne etc). It’s not all that different from books by Edmund Wilson later on. What really strikes me as interesting here is the ways in which American literature is framed in terms of being […]