Books in the Mind and American Literature series

Concentrating on the role of the imagination in Updike's works, this book shows him to be an original and powerful thinker and not the callow sensationalist that he is sometimes accused of being.

Counters the view of the late Emerson's decline by rethinking his engagement with liberal education and his intellectual relation to Whitman, William James, Charles Eliot, and Du Bois.

Innovative study that sees much of twentieth-century American poetry as enacting, in language, pragmatic philosophy.