SOURCE: Pinsker, Sanford. “A Land Where Jollity and Gloom Still Contend.” Virginia Quarterly Review 76, no. 4 (autumn 2000): 744-49.

In the following review, Pinsker asserts that One Nation, Two Cultures is a scholarly and engaging book that highlights the important differences continuing to divide American society.

“The May Pole of Merry Mount,” Nathaniel Hawthorne's brooding tale about the opposition between Puritan rigor and sexual license, contains this striking sentence: “Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire.” In Merry Mount, “jollity” takes the form of sexual orgy, with participants garbed as animals and a phallic May Pole at the ceremony's center. The resulting frenzies have more than a few touches of what we now associate with films directed by Federico Fellini. By contrast, the Puritan world, embodied in the stern, fun-busting Reverend Endicott, is defined by moral gravitas and a tragic sensibility. Genuine love, as the Lord and Lady of...