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When I was in this country for the first time, some time in 1928, I read Van Wyck Brooks' America's Coming-of-Age and admired his penetrating observations on the literary conditions of America and his trenchant criticisms of many of the main authors of nineteenth-century America. I, as a Czech, relished the strongly critical attitude of Mr. Brooks to his own literature, as I myself had grown up in a similar critical atmosphere, which reacted against the idols and ideals of the nineteenth century and had begun a process of severe self-scrutiny which tried to discover the limitations of the existing literary tradition, the secrets of its vitality and the possibilities of its further development. (p. 292)
When I returned to this country in 1939. I read The Flowering of New England which had been praised by an admirable critic as "not only the best history of American literature, but one of...
This section contains 2,724 words (approx. 10 pages at 300 words per page) |
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