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American
Fiction, American Myth Essays by Philip Young David Morrell and Sandra Spanier
September 2000 | 6 x 9 inches
Literature - American
Hardback: $41.00 SH
ISBN: 978-0-271-02036-5
Few
experts in American literature have written as insightfully and brilliantly
as did Philip Young, renowned Hemingway critic and scholar at large.
His unique work bursts with a joy in the humanities, with a sensibility,
a humor, and a style that communicate to academics and general readers
alike. Although Young died in 1991, he survives in his remarkable
prose.
American Fiction, American Myth features nineteen groundbreaking
essays in which Young masterfully reveals the "so what?" that he
insisted all literary studies ought to have. In the first section,
he demonstrates his fascination with such American myths as Pocahontas
and Rip Van Winkle, reaching powerful conclusions about America
and its people. In the second section, he becomes "Our Hemingway
Man," explaining his germinal and still provocative theory that
Hemingway's severe wounding in World War I so traumatized the novelist
that his fiction was to a great degree unwitting self-psychoanalysis.
Young's book on Hemingway was the first of its kind, but Young was
more than a one-author critic, as his essays demonstrate in the
third section, exploring such diverse topics as Hawthorne's secret
love, the Lost Generation that was never lost, F. Scott Fitzgerald's
debt to T. S. Eliot, and the relationship between American fiction
and American life.
What Hemingway once said about himself can be equally applied to
Young: "I am a very serious but not a solemn writer." The reader
comes away from these essays dazzled by the power of Young's observations
and the grace with which he expresses them.
David
Morrell, a former professor of American Literature at the
University of Iowa, has published sixteen novels, including First
Blood,The Brotherhood of the Rose, The Fifth
Profession, and Extreme Denial. His critical study, John Barth: An Introduction, was published by Penn State
Press.
Sandra Spanier is Professor of English at Penn
State University. Her previous books are Kay Boyle: Artist and
Activist and two edited volumes, Life Being the Best and
Other Stories by Kay Boyle and Love Goes to Press: A Comedy
in Three Acts by Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Cowles. Both
she and Morrell were graduate students of Professor Young
