Literary Criticism

American Audacity by Christopher Benfey

American Audacity: Literary Essays North and South

Christopher Benfey

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

Although the author's interests range from art to literature to social history, this collection focuses on particular American writers and the various ways in which an American identity and culture informs their work. Broken into three sections, "Northerners," "Southerners," and "The Union Reconsidered," the volume explores a range of canonical works, both old (Emerson, Dickinson, Millay, Whitman), modern (Faulkner, Dos Passos) and more contemporary (Gary Snyder, Doctorow).

As Jay Parini notes in his series editor recommendation, Christopher Benfey's prominence, and the "deeply learned, and—above all—remarkably lucid and accessible" nature of these pieces will be sure to make this first collection of the author's work a classic.

Author Christopher Benfey is one of the premier critics in contemporary American letters. A regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and The Times Literary Supplement, Benfey is also the author of numerous highly-regarded works of nonfiction, including Emily Dickinson: Lives of a Poet, (Georges Brazilier 1986), The Double Life of Stephen Crane, (Knopf 1992), and Degas in New Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable, (Knopf 1997), and The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and The Opening of Old Japan (Random House 2003). Benfey's poems have appeared in the Paris Review, Pequod, and Ploughshares. He has held fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Currently he is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College.

September 2008
288 Pages