About this title: Lawrence's essays on American writers--including Franklin, Hawthorne, and Whitman--are inventive, illuminating, brilliant, and decidedly eccentric. While they were in progress, he described them to a friend as "a thrilling blood-and-thunder, your-money-or-your-life kind of thing: hands up America!" They were published in the English Review in 1918 and 1919 and appeared in book form in 1923.
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Description: Fair. 0670001473 A lot of good reading left in this one, significant wear on cover and/or pages but all pages in tact. ** Satisfaction Guaranteed ** Orders ship same or next business day. read more
Description: Acceptable. Former Library book. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very Good. 0140033009 Condition: VERY GOOD. (Book may have one or a combination of the following characteristics: former library book, cover wear, name written inside cover, light underlining/highlighting, remainder mark, etc. Overall, the book is in solid shape. This is a blanket description. Please email us if you require a specific, detailed description of the book condition. We will typically respond within one week of your request). read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: The Viking Press, NY
Date Published: 1971
ISBN-13:9780670001477ISBN:0670001473
Description: VG- in na jacket. Rubbing & some edgewear; few small creases; erasure mark in corner of 1st page; inside overall clean & tight. 177 pages. read more
Edition: Ninth Printing
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: The Viking Press, New York NY
Date Published: 1970
ISBN-13:9780670001477ISBN:0670001473
Description: Very Good. Not Issued With Dustjacket. 177 Numbered Pages. The textblock of this quite good-looking trade paperback is remarkably clean, tight, square and unmarked but for light pencil underlining and marginalia. The covers, bound askew as issued, are very clean, bright and show only minor finish rubbing, handling crease to the fore edges of both covers, a tiny superficial crease to the upper corner of the rear cover and the most minor sunning to the spine. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated, New York, NY
Date Published: 1969
ISBN-13:9780670001477ISBN:0670001473
Description: VG. 177 pgs. Previous owner's name on first page. Slight edge and corner wear to cover, otherwise book is in fine condition. 5x7.5. read more
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Viking Press, New York
Date Published: 1966
Description: Good. No Jacket. 12mo-over 6¾"-7¾" tall. 177 pp. Pages are mostly unmarked. Some comments in margin on a couple of pages. Binding tight. Cover show shelfwear and slight soiling. Fascinating interpretation of important classic American books and novels by a leading British novelist of the time. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Penguin
Date Published: 1971
ISBN-13:9780140033007ISBN:0140033009
Description: Very Good. 12mo-over 6¾"-7¾" tall 0140033009 Mass Market Paperback very good clean but pages and cover insides beginning to tan....Lawrence's essays on American writers--including Franklin, Hawthorne, and Whitman--are inventive, illuminating, brilliant, and decidedly eccentric. While they were in progress, he described them to a friend as "a thrilling blood-and-thunder, your-money-or-your-life kind of thing: hands up America! " They were published in the English Review in 1918 and 1919 and ... read more
Edition: (3rd printing)
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Viking (#C-147, NY
Date Published: 1966
Description: FINE. Tight, bright, clean for age, slight curl. No markings. D.H. Lawrence's interpretation of what were for him the significant American books; often startling, sometimes extreme, never dull. Written in 1923. read more
"A wonderfully strange book. Lawrence teeters on a fruitful bough hanging over the wall that divides brilliance from madness. I suppose one might call this a neopagan, and specifically Dionysian, critique of American bourgeois hopes and conventions. It veers occasionally into misogyny and racism -- while also attacking hidden forms of both in American culture -- and often descends into general abyss-gazing.
Taken as a whole, it argues for individuality and positive (spiritual) liberty, and against prosperity and negative liberty. Politically, it is unsettling because parts of it could be appropriated just as easily by ultramontanism, the New Left, anticolonialism, and fascism -- almost anyone opposed to liberalism, really -- but I'd say that Lawrence is actually antipolitical and antieconomic. He is urging an antipolitical and antieconomic understanding of national and personal identity."
"An entertaining and, at times, insightful read. However, Lawrence's three page misogynistic rant during the Hawthorne section put a serious damper on my reading experience.
I can certainly see the influence this work had on Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark."
"Probably the most serious-minded penetration into the American creative consciousness. Even when Lawrence is wrong-headed he brings more depth to his subject than any of his predecessors. This a very far-reaching work. Kind of a post WWI, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, thing going on here but immensely creative in its own right. This effectively enshrined "Moby Dick" as a serious work. Fascinating and condescending views on Whitman and Poe. Brutal and righteous take-down of Benjamin Franklin. Engrossing assessment of Fennimore-Coopers unconscious meanings. Emerson is treated disparagingly."
"D. H. Lawrence, one of the great iconoclasts of his time, aims his black wit at America in this highly opinionated study of various American authors: Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville. Lawrence spares none.
You don't need to have much familiarity with the authors themselves, as the focus is on the American spirit.
Here's a sample from the chapter on Benjamin Franklin:
"Education! Which of the various me's do you propose to educate, and which do you propose to suppress ?
Anyhow, I defy you. I defy you, oh society, to educate me or to supress me, according to your dummy standards.
The ideal man! And which is he, if you please? Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln? The ideal man! Roosevelt or Porfirio D¡az?
There are other men in me, besides this patient ass who sits here in a tweed jacket. What am I doing, playing the patient ass in a tweed jacket? Who am I talking to? Who are you, at the other end of this patience?
Who are you? How many selves have you? And which of these selves do you want to be?""
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