American Audacity: Literary Essays North and South (Writers on Writing) - Hardcover

"A gifted literary historian and critic." - The New York Review of Books"

One of the premier critics in contemporary American letters, Christopher Benfey has long been known for his incisive, probing essays appearing in such magazines as "The New York Review of Books", "The New Republic", and "The Times Literary Supplement", which together have helped to re-imagine the American literary canon. In "American Audacity", Benfey has gathered together his best writings on great American authors (including Emerson, Dickinson, Whitman, Millay, Faulkner, Frost, and Welty), bringing to his subjects - as "The New York Times Book Review" has said of his earlier work - "a scholar's throughness, a critic's astuteness and a storyteller's sense of drama."