Tocsin of Revolt, and other Essays

In the wake of the Great War, with old certainties in ruins, Brander Matthews sounds an alarm. These fifteen essays, written in 1922 by the Columbia professor and pioneer of American literary criticism, grapple with a world suddenly unmoored: the shock of the Russian Revolution, the fragility of democracy, the purpose of art in an age of mass destruction. But this is not mere despair. Matthews writes with the accessible, probing style that made him one of his era's most respected essayists, turning from contemporary history to literature to philosophy with restless curiosity. He asks what survives when civilization admits its own fragility, and what new forms of thought might emerge from the ashes. For readers fascinated by how earlier generations made sense of modernity's violent arrival, these essays offer a window into the anxious, generative spirit of early 1920s America.