A poet, an aphorist, a novelist, a mythographer, an astute and caustic critic, a literary cult figure, an astounding autobiographer, Edward Dahlberg has proven himself a writer on diverse subjects in protean forms. His daring originality and personality mark his treatment of the mythic and personal, the political and spiritual sides of the American experience. Dahlberg brought his own approach to the modernist goal of recreating a historical tradition through his works. His chief formal innovations are directed toward a recasting of the genres of poetry, fiction, and autobiography to include elements of one another. An expatriate writer of the 1920s, a proletarian novelist of the 1930s, a prophetic spokesman for a fundamental humanism in the 1940s, he worked anthropological, autobiographical, and classical roots in later years, making a radical shift from naturalist to classicist, from Marxist to humanist. Dahlberg is a rare American poet of mythography as...