Makers and Finders is a romantic history shaped according to the familiar liberal analysis that divides American society between the progressive, democratic values best represented by Thomas Jefferson and the aristocratic reaction represented by Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists. That interpretation has been influential during much of this century, and Brooks might have had it most directly from Vernon L. Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought (1927–1930), among any number of other sources. As the patriarchal symbolism suggests, the history is not concerned exclusively with literature, but rather with broad developments in all aspects of the nineteenth-century American culture that grew from and extended the values of the American Revolution. Literature, for Brooks, was the most sensitive and powerful expression of that culture.

Although their jeers have been unwarranted, Brooks's detractors have thus generally been right to question the genre of Makers and Finders. Brooks was not really a...