Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers, by Edward Mendelson
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Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers, by Edward Mendelson
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A deeply considered and provocative new look at major American writers—including Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and W.H. Auden—Edward Mendelson’s Moral Agents is also a work of critical biography in the great tradition of Plutarch, Samuel Johnson, and Emerson. Any important writer, in Mendelson’s view, writes in response to an idea of the good life that is inseparable from the life the writer lives. Fusing biography and criticism and based on extensive new research, Moral Agents presents challenging new portraits of eight writers—novelists, critics, and poets—who transformed American literature in the turbulent twentieth century. Eight sharply distinctive individuals—inspired, troubled, hugely ambitious—who reimagined what it means to be a writer. There’s Saul Bellow, a novelist determined to rule as a patriarch, who, having been neglected by his father, in turn neglected his son in favor of young writers who presented themselves as his literary heirs. Norman Mailer’s extraordinary ambition, suppressed insecurity, and renegade metaphysics muddled the novels through which he hoped to change the world, yet these same qualities endowed him with an uncanny sensitivity and deep sympathy to the pathologies of American life that make him an unequaled political reporter. William Maxwell wrote sad tales of small-town life and surrounded himself with a coterie of worshipful admirers. As a powerful editor at The New Yorker, he exercised an enormous and constraining influence on American fiction that is still felt today. Preeminent among the critics is Lionel Trilling, whose Liberal Imagination made him a celebrity sage of the anxiously tranquilized 1950s, even as his calculated image of Olympian reserve masked a deeply conflicted life and contributed to his ultimately despairing worldview. Dwight Macdonald, by contrast, was a haute-WASP anarchist and aesthete driven by an exuberant moral commitment, in a time of cautious mediocrity, to doing the right thing. Alfred Kazin, from a poor Jewish émigré background, remained an outsider at the center of literary New York, driven both to escape from and do justice to the deepest meanings of his Jewish heritage. Perhaps most intriguing are the two poets, W.H. Auden and Frank O’Hara. Early in his career, Auden was tempted to don the mantle of the poet as prophet, but after his move from England to America he lived and wrote in a spirit of modesty and charity born out of a deeply idiosyncratic understanding of Christianity. O’Hara, tireless partygoer and pioneering curator at MoMA, wrote much of his poetry for private occasions. Its lasting power has proven to be something different from its avant-garde reputation: personal warmth, individuality, rootedness in ancient traditions, and openness to the world.
Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers, by Edward Mendelson- Amazon Sales Rank: #561514 in Books
- Brand: Mendelson, Edward
- Published on: 2015-03-10
- Released on: 2015-03-10
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.52" h x .70" w x 5.79" l, 1.25 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 224 pages
Review “In Moral Agents Edward Mendelson has written an original and unsettling group portrait of the literary generation just past. These essays are rich in quotation, precise in judgment, and unified by a premise they test in detail: that literature is most invigorating when it teaches us how to live. Mendelson is rare among contemporary critics in his treatment of writing as a form of personal action." —David Bromwich, Yale University"Edward Mendelson’s observations about literature are among the best I have read: deeply knowledgeable, appreciate and attentive, and expressed with the affinity of a scholar and critic who is himself an excellent writer." —Shirley Hazzard“Each chapter contains a biographical profile and an assessment of the writer based on his response to some of the burning issues of the day, from the rise of communism to the sexual revolution. Mendelson’s focus on “the conflicts between the inward, intimate private lives of the eight authors and the lives they led in public” ties the essays together…Those interested in the role these writers played as public intellectuals—and in the larger issue of the relationship of literature to politics—will welcome this engaging read.” —Library Journal“Drawing on unique familiarities, Mendelson, like his subjects, becomes a public intellectual, offering insightful, well-crafted sketches that will entertain and edify a broad audience.” —R. Mulligan, CHOICEPraise for Edward Mendelson's The Things That Matter:"Filled with sage insights into literature and life…A joy to read." —The Wall Street Journal"Thrilling…[Mendelson’s] readings will send you hungrily to these classics." —Newsday"Elegant…Enlightening…Mendelson is an ideal companion…[The book] reminds us that criticism of the sort that Mendelson practices is one of the things that matter." —Los Angeles Times"Heartfelt…illuminating." —The New York Review of Books"Great works of fiction not only tell a story but also reveal how we are to live our lives. This sympathetic, profound, and very readable work by one of the finest literary scholars of our time shows us how seven novels can help us with the stages through which we all must pass. Edward Mendelson’s insights into the meaning of the novels he considers are acute. He reveals dimensions to these works that most of us will never have guessed at, showing, with grace and courtesy, both their deeper significance and the wisdom they contain about life’s challenges. Reading this book places one in the company of an urbane, erudite, and sure-footed guide." —Alexander McCall Smith"Written with clarity and grace, these essays serve as an essential guide to an era when literary powerbrokers set the cultural agenda.” —Jane Ciabattari, “Ten books to read in March,” BBC
About the Author
Edward Mendelson is the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and the literary executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden. His books include The Things That Matter—about seven novels by Mary Shelley, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf—and Early Auden and Later Auden. He has edited novels by Arnold Bennett, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, Anthony Trollope, and H. G. Wells, and has written for The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, and many other publications.
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful. Boy's Club By Charlus Edward Mendelson gathers eight previously published essays on American cultural figures of the twentieth century and revises them for the present publication. This appears to be their chief qualification for inclusion. Only some subjects could claim Public Intellectual status, although all could claim either fame and/or influence. However, many other figures with those qualifications might have been included (Lillian Hellman, Susan Sontag, Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt to mention just some women who could have a place in this all-male fraternity).The strength of these essays lies in Mendelson's insightful and often witty writing. In the space of a handful of pages, one is given a clear sense of who these men were, what drove them, what are the themes they come back to repeatedly. What you less frequently get is a sense of the work itself, and why it is still felt to be important.Most of the writers considered come off as at least eccentric but usually extremely unpleasant and posturing people that undermines their role as sources of wisdom. Mendelson can be quite dry in puncturing egos:'Today, when "hipster" means a submissive herd-follower attuned to the latest gadgets, it is hard to remember Mailer, only slightly exaggerating its meaning at the time, popularized an image of the hipster as a lonely knight of the spirit attuned to archetypal currents undetectable by the square, like an exiled Obi-Wan Kenobi sensing a deep disturbance in the Force.' (p.137)Mailer, Trilling, Maxwell and Kazin probably come off the worst. Auden, for whom Mendelson is literary executor, comes off best although he has kind words for Frank O'Hara and Dwight Macdonald as well. But this isn't a popularity contest. Each man is analyzed for how their accomplishments arose out of the limitations that they had to struggle against, both externally and self-imposed.This is not some impartial Augustan assessment, which is what supplies the juice, although Mendelson's judgments are well supported by quote and incident. The book is entertaining, enlightening and well-argued. I only wish he explained more thoroughly why any of them still mattered.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful. Perceptive Criticism, but not Always the Focus Promised in the Title. By NRL I'm torn between four and five stars on this one. Edward Mendelson is best known as an Auden scholar. He has edited the major collections of Auden's poetry and written a two-volume biography, His knowledge and love of Auden's work shows in the essay in this collection, which argues persuasively that Auden's religious beliefs were centered on a notion of agape, of spirituality as a commitment to love others as yourself. But this collection of essays is uneven in its focus, albeit always interesting. When Mendelson likes a writer such as Auden, he focuses on his or her work as a moral statement. When he is less kindly disposed toward someone, as in the case of Lionel Trilling, his focus is less on moral positions and more on strongly delineated personal conflicts and contradictions. The book is more convincing as a partially revised collection of previously published essays than as a thematic examination of the eight authors under consideration. These authors are Lionel Trilling, Dwight McDonald, William Maxwell, Alfred Kazin, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, W.H. Auden and Frank O'Hara. In my view, the best essays are those on Bellow and the two poets, Auden and O'Hara. The book as a whole suffers in part from being a collection after the fact.
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful. Sort of good. By B. Wolinsky I’m not a fan of Saul Bellow, but this book is probably the best study of the writer that I’ve read so far. In fact, Edward Mandelson’s portrait of him is greater than anything Bellow ever wrote himself. He portrays Bellow as maturing from a liberal parent to a seriously non-liberal old patriarch, browbeating his kids. Strange, how he went from practicing what he preached to being one of the mean old cranks he’d write about in his books.Mandelson’s portrayal of Norman Mailer is not flattering, probably because there isn’t much about Mailer to flatter. Okay, Bellow was a bit of an Archie Bunker type in his later life, but Mailer just comes off as nasty. Never mind the incident where he attacked his wife; Mandelson portrays Mailer as being so overindulged by his mother that he grew to expect indulgence throughout his lie. If you expect the author of this book to trash Mailer over the issue of Jack Henry Abbott, you will find that he doesn’t. However, he doesn’t forgive either. Mandelson argues that mailer was conned; Abbott was ratting out the other prisoners, and it was the warden and US Attorney who pushed for the release in order to be rid of him. The “radical chic” element comes into play too, as Mailer was a hypocrite, easily conned by Abbott’s eloquent rhetoric.I have to wonder if maybe Mandelson has picked a poor example. These writers are all from an earlier era, and there have been more great American writers making their debut in the decades since. What about Steven King, Amy Tan, and Toni Morrison? What about David Sedaris, Mary Karr, and Sandra Cisneros? The writers from the Baby Boom generation had their own unique contributions, and it doesn’t seem fair to leave them out.
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