SOURCE: A review of An American Procession, in World Literature Today, Vol. 71, No. 2, Spring, 1997, p. 393.

[In the following review, Brown offers a highly laudatory assessment of An American Procession.]

The original edition of An American Procession appeared in 1984. It has now been reissued as a paperback by Harvard, with no additions to the original text except for a brief preface. An American Procession forms the second part of a projected trilogy ("yes, I love trilogies") of which the first was On Native Grounds (1942), an interpretation of American prose literature from 1890 to 1940. The preface of the reedition quotes a passage from Kazin's journal of 1976, when he was working on Procession: "How they struggle in, the members of my American procession." He mentions Willa Cather, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Hemingway, and Ring Lardner, of whom only Twain and Hemingway make their way into the parade as featured marchers. The third...