Studies in Classic American Literature

D.H. Lawrence turned his formidable novelist's eye onto the foundations of American literature, and what he found there disturbed him. These essays, written during his wandering years in the 1920s, dissect Melville's white whale, Hawthorne's scarlet letter, and Twain's river boy with the intensity of a man reading the pulse of a civilization. Lawrence believed that literature reveals the soul of a nation, and he saw America's soul as locked in perpetual civil war between the dead hand of Puritan morality and the wild, elemental life force he prized above all else. His readings are deliberately contrarian, sometimes infuriating, always electrifying. He refuses to let the American classics remain comfortable monuments; he drags them into the light and demands they account for the violence, the contradiction, the yearning that produced them. This is not literary criticism as academic exercise. It is prophecy, accusation, and love letter all at once, from a man who lived in America, was expelled from it, and understood its anxieties better than many who stayed.