The American Writer: Shaping a Nation's Mind [Hardcover]

Jack Cady (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0312202741 | ISBN-13: 978-0312202743 | Publication Date: October 30, 1999 | Edition: 1st

Having considered the subject for more than sixty years, Jack Cady shares his knowledge of the American Writer in this wonderful and provocative book. The American Writer is both an open letter to young writers and a lovely overview for anyone interested in reading.

Cady traces with insight and passion the threads of sin and original good in American literature, examines the thorny question of race, and explores the fantastic in modern fiction. He looks anew at familiar writers like Hemingway and Steinbeck, and repeatedly focuses on storytellers who have fallen out of favor today.

Decidedly non-canonical and definitely not Politically Correct, The American Writer celebrates the nation's whole literary history from its roots to its crowning achievements. It sees the New World through experienced eyes. It is passionate, honest, and powerfully inspiring. It will be read and treasured for years to come.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With the lusty, slightly stumbling zest of an aging hipster, novelist Cady gives his own highly opinionated, occasionally off-putting account of the history of American literatureAan attempt, the author says, to tell "things I wish someone had told me." Written in a jazzy, finger-snapping style, the book races erratically through the great writers and themes of the nation's history. The longest consideration given to an author is to John Dos Passos's USA trilogy (12 pages dense with quotations), while Whitman, Melville, Hemingway and Bellow are confined to a half paragraph or, at most, two pages. Cady asserts that American literature shares more with Russian and Japanese literature than with our European counterparts owing to an emphasis on the concept of sin and an absence of Roman influence. Much is then made of the familiar thesis that American writing stems from "three great ideas: Original Sin, Original Possibility, Original Good." The "new mythology" of the 19th centuryAfeminism, race, economicsAis superseded in the 1920s by an obsession with automobiles, Prohibition, Freud, evolution and jazz. Cady sees much cultural anxiety and social instability arising from an inadequate mythology, that of the cowboy and of individualism. What's required, he believes, is a mythology "that allows people of many cultures to live happily cheek by jowl." It is characteristic of both the book's strengths and faults that Cady provides no sense of how this task could be accomplished. He cautions against America's affinity for easy answers but then amasses a series of hackneyed notions about American culture and history, as if the sum total of simplicity were complexity. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Cady, a retired English professor and author of a dozen novels and short story collections, here examines the issues that have engaged American writers from Colonial days through the 1970s. In a nonscholarly manner, he guides young writers and readers through the themes, concerns, and techniques of the masters of U.S. literature. Cady has many enthusiasms and opinions: he hates political correctness, television, and advertising and loves idealistic authors who try to correct prejudices such as racism and sexism. This lively study is filled with humor and many provocative insights. Though geared to new writers, it will also be useful for general readers looking for analysis of unfamiliar American classics (Meridel Le Sueur's The Girl, Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker, etc.). For larger public libraries.AMorris Hounion, New York City Technical Coll. Lib., Brooklyn
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (October 30, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312202741
• ISBN-13: 978-0312202743
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,850,737 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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