Making Americans

What links the hopes of Communist fellow travelers in the 1930s to the work of Emerson a century earlier? Why do we give so much attention to celebrities? And why have we virtually erased the distinction between public and private affairs? Quentin Anderson shows that American individualism goes deeper than we admit. Only in America did writers and thinkers make the claim that a life worth living must subordinate family ties and social obligations to the visionary powers of the self. Drawing on the work of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, John Dewey, and Henry James - all of whom reacted strongly to…