Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920 by Vernon Louis Parrington

Description

Vernon Louis Parrington taught generations of Americans to see their literature as the record of a conflict of ideas, and this is the book that made his reputation — one of the most influential works of American literary history ever written. It opens in the colonies clustered about Massachusetts Bay, asking why the American mind took the particular stubborn turn it did, and follows that mind through two and a half centuries of its travellers: the Puritans and their stewards, Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin, the Tories and Whigs of the Revolution, the agrarian and capitalist parties, and the long debate between them that shaped the national literature.

Parrington’s gift was biography in the service of argument — each chapter a figure, each figure a current in the great stream of American thinking, from the older plantation mind of the South to the dramatic entry of a new century after 1870. The book won the first Pulitzer Prize awarded in history, and its breadth, clarity, and moral seriousness have kept it in print for a century. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how America read itself.

Why readers still come back to it

• The classic intellectual history of American literature, Pulitzer-winning
• From Puritan New England to the twentieth century in one grand argument
• Brilliant character studies of Edwards, Franklin, Adams, and many more

About this DodaBooks edition

This edition gives you the complete text with clean, professional typesetting, a working table of contents, and careful chapter navigation — designed for comfortable reading on phones, tablets, and e-readers. Instant download after purchase.