The Americanist | 
| Author: Daniel Aaron
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 877735
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 208
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 0472115774
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.07202
EAN: 9780472115778
ASIN: 0472115774
Publication Date: February 26, 2007
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Product Description
“I have read all of Daniel Aaron’s books, and admired them, but in The Americanist I believe he has composed an intellectual and social memoir for which he will be remembered. His self-portrait is marked by personal tact and admirable restraint: he is and is not its subject. The Americanist is a vision of otherness: literary and academic friends and acquaintances, here and abroad. Eloquently phrased and free of nostalgia, it catches a lost world that yet engendered much of our own.”
—Harold Bloom
“The Americanist is the absorbing intellectual autobiography of Daniel Aaron, who is the leading proponent and practitioner of American Studies. Written with grace and wit, it skillfully blends Daniel Aaron’s personal story with the history of the field he has done so much to create. This is a first-rate book by a first-rate scholar.”
—David Herbert Donald, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University
The Americanist is author and critic Daniel Aaron’s anthem to nearly a century of public and private life in America and abroad. Aaron, who is widely regarded as one of the founders of American Studies, graduated from the University of Michigan, received his Ph.D. from Harvard, and taught for over three decades each at Smith College and Harvard.
Aaron writes with unsentimental nostalgia about his childhood in Los Angeles and Chicago and his later academic career, which took him around the globe, often in the role of America’s accidental yet impartial critic. When Walt Whitman, whom Aaron frequently cites as a touchstone, wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes,” he could have been describing Daniel Aaron—the consummate erudite and Renaissance individual whose allegiance to the truth always outweighs mere partisan loyalty.
Not only should Aaron’s book stand as a resplendent and summative work from one of the finest thinkers of the last hundred years, it also succeeds on its own as a first-rate piece of literature, on a par with the writings of any of its subjects. The Americanist is a veritable Who’s Who of twentieth-century writers Aaron interviewed, interacted with, or otherwise encountered throughout his life: Ralph Ellison, Robert Frost, Lillian Hellman, Richard Hofstadter, Alfred Kazin, Sinclair Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge, John Crowe Ransom, Upton Sinclair, Edmund Wilson, Leonard Woolf, and W. B. Yeats, to name only a few.
Aaron’s frank and personal observations of these literary lights make for lively reading. As well, scattered throughout The Americanist are illuminating portraits of American presidents living and passed—miniature masterworks of astute political observation that offer dazzlingly fresh approaches to well-trod subjects.
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| Customer Reviews:
-The cheerful and welcoming democratic collective- October 29, 2007
A friend mentioned the book to me. He thought I would like it. And he was right.
In substance and soul,there is a meaning and depth to, 'The
Americanist', beyond its 199 pages.
I knew nothing about the author and professor, Daniel Aaron, and his remarkable and fascinating personal and professional background. A life and carrer that covered teaching the combined fields of American literary history, politics, and cultural development in the 20th century and before-at Smith College in western, Massachusetts, and Harvard University, as well as teaching and lecturing in Europe and Latin America. No matter where, it was a challenge explaining America's ever evolving roaring diversity and confusing intensity, its huff and puff, its weeds with the wheat, its 'Big Shoulders' and proud posturing for the world to see what we as a nation have done and are capable of doing.
American, the promise land, as it came to be mystically called; open to the tired, the poor, and the outcasts of the world-to be reborn with a new idenity. The American personality. A definition we are still trying to figure out just what it is, and what it is meant to mean. There is a lingering beauty to this ongoing search.
In Daniel Aaron's, 'Americanist', with its mosaic literay structure of his personal and professional life-a life experience that is still going on for this vibrant man in his 90's who loves America with its scuffling bellicose history, its, "Heroes and Clowns", its vitrues and vices; its mystifying meaning, and that always potential greatness yet to be reached. With a mind and heart, in a some stranage and confusing way, that is open to the world.
Professor Daniel Aaron's life reflects the history of America. He lived and lives what he taught and teahces. And with a faith, believes.
An American Memoir May 28, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Daniel Aaron - The Americanist
"He lives!" That was my happy reaction when, at my 50th Smith College reunion, a classmate showed me Michael Dirda's review of Daniel Aaron's The Americanist. He is alive at 95 and has produced another book. That in itself is a wonder. I am now 72 and was one of his students, one of those who majored in American Studies, then a newish, interdisciplinary major. Aaron pioneered the major which tried to deepen our understanding of our own culture through the optics of literature, history and art. His enthusiasm for his subject was contagious. Physically he was one of the most attractive figures on the Smith faculty.
The Americanist is a memoir centered on lively recollections of the greats of mid-century Academia, a remarkable number of whom taught or lectured at Smith College. These included Alfred Kazin, Newton Arvin, W. H. Auden, Mary Ellen Chase and Katherine Anne Porter. The memoir is also studded with choice morsels about long gone and almost forgotten progressive and left-wing writers that he interviewed and hung out with in the course of researching Men of Good Hope and Writers of the Left.
Aaron was also sent abroad by USIS as a visiting professor to bring the cultural and political history of the United States to students in both Western European and Soviet bloc countries. He says that he "paused at academic way stations to speak on contemporary American writers, but not long enough to get at the root causes" of whatever disorders (Hamburg in 1969) or apathy (China in 1980) were then characterizing those places. He is too modest. His observations of foreign cultures are telling ones. Because he so avidly pursed a deeper understanding of our own culture, he was also a keen observer of what was going on in foreign places.
He concludes by saying that he now feels he is a citizen of two Americas, one reckless and predatory and the other a cheerful and welcoming collective and that it is to the second that he is more culturally attuned. I don't see America in quite such a polarizing light. I think we may be more of a spectrum. But wherever my personal America may be I'm fortunate that Daniel Aaron is a part of it.
Aaron's America May 6, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
A concise, highly literate look back on the long and interesting career of a left-liberal univeristy professor. Sharp, insightful sketches of U.S. presidents--from Woodrow Wilson to Bill Clinton-- are placed throughout Daniel Aaron's main text. These are not a distraction to this memoir: instead they provide a common thread underscoring the author's main academic interest over a lifetime of study--the idea of the United States.
I have never heard, much less read anything by Dr. Aaron, but now appreciate his life as being a positive part of our country's generous intellectual hisory.
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