In this illuminating study of the “crucial century” (1830–1930), Alfred Kazin views the major figures in American writing, beginning in the 1830s when Ralph Waldo Emerson founded a national literature on the basis of a religious revolution, and ending on the eve of the 1930s with modernism—Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Fitzgerald—and with the revelation of the “postponed power” of those who had been modern before their time—Henry Adams, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson.