Background
Crunden, Robert Morse was born on December 23, 1940 in Jersey City. Son of Allan Bernard and Marjorie (Morse) Crunden.
(In American Salons, Robert Crunden provides a sweeping ac...)
In American Salons, Robert Crunden provides a sweeping account of the American encounter with European Modernism up to the American entry into World War I. Crunden begins with deft portraits of the figures who were central to the birth of Modernism, including James Whistler, the eccentric expatriate American painter who became the archetypal artist in his dress and behavior, and Henry and William James, who broke new ground in the genre of the novel and in psychology, influencing an international audience in a broad range of fields. At the heart of the book are the American salons--the intimate, personal gatherings of artists and intellectuals where Modernism flourished. In Chicago, Floyd Dell and Margery Currey spread new ideas to Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, and others. In London, Ezra Pound could be found behind everything from the cigars of W. B. Yeats to the prose of Ford Madox Hueffer. In Paris, the salons of Leo and Gertrude Stein, and Michael and Sarah Stein, gave Picasso and Matisse their first secure audiences and incomes; meanwhile, Gertrude Stein produced a new writing style that had an incalculable impact on the generation of Ernest Hemingway. Most important of all were the salons of New York City. Alfred Stieglitz pioneered new forms of photography at the famous 291 Gallery. Mabel Dodge brought together modernist playwrights and painters, introducing them to political reformers and radicals. At the salon of Walter and Louise Arensberg, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia rubbed shoulders with Wallace Stevens, Man Ray, and William Carlos Williams. By 1917, no art in America remained untouched by these new institutions. From the journalism of H. L. Mencken to the famous 1913 Armory Show in New York, Crunden illuminates this pivotal era, offering perceptive insights and evocative descriptions of the central personalities of Modernism.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195065697/?tag=2022091-20
(Albert Jay Nock was the eccentric and almost legendary ed...)
Albert Jay Nock was the eccentric and almost legendary editor of the Freeman (1920-24), and a well-known biographer and essayist. Living the life of a wandering intellectual and gadfly, he wrote some of the finest essays in the English language, on subjects ranging from education and politics to religion, criticism, and morals. Beginning his public career as a single taxer and a muckraker on The American Magazine, Nock built a philosophy on Jeffersonian principles. His opposition to American participation in both world wars, his defense of classical, liberal education, and his barbed assaults on the New Deal made him a figure of controversy. Relying on unpublished letters, interviews, and Nock's many published essays and books, Mr. Cruden portrays Nock's mind as it slowly discovers itself through thirty-five years of history. He indicates that Nock's true greatness lay in his ability as a critic to irritate people into thinking for themselves. As a critic, Nock conceived his role as similar to that of Isaiah: as a cultivator of a small remnant of people capable of intellectual growth. While perverters of the democratic dogma aimed subintellectual slogans at the masses, Nock talked only to the few who were capable of education. Like Voltaire, he believed that a man who cultivated his own garden knew the greatest happiness. In showing how Nock's ideas fit into the mainstream of American thought, the book sheds significant light on America's intellectual development from the turn of the century to the end of World War II. Throughout this period, Nock's only substantial change of mind was his rejection of the Spencerian notion of infinite progress and perfectable man. Yet, depending on the period under discussion, Nock was ranked as first a liberal, then a radical, and finally a conservative. His story provides a key to the mind of modern America.
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(The roots of today's "culture wars" can be found in the m...)
The roots of today's "culture wars" can be found in the molding tensions of an American character, one that wasn't handed down by tradition or enforced by a government, but one that was shaped out of the mire of individuals, religious beliefs, communities, a newly formed democracy, capitalism and freedom, art and literature all prominently influencing the vast and uncharted young nation. The important cultural centers from 1630-1815 - Boston, Philadelphia, and Virginia - are highlighted through figures like Benjamin Franklin, "the rustic sage." An early America, "the playground of the European imagination, " began to form its own intellectual, artistic, and political culture, where fresh ideas about democracy, rationality, nature, a benign God, flourished and America became the place where "it could happen." As the country expanded westward, from 1815-1901, a revival of conservative religion burst upon the scene. Protestantism, Presbyterianism, Methodism, Baptists, even groups like the Episcopalians and Roman Catholics saturated the culture and profoundly influenced its institutions, especially education. Reformers like Horace Mann and Charles Finney, Transcendentalists like Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker and Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, all blazed the path toward abolitionism and supplied much of the energy to American cultural activity. The Civil War became a dividing point in American culture in ways that transcended its social and political impact. Social development went through profound changes; Darwinism, progressivism, and pragmatism secularized the prevailing thought and religious energies were channeled into economic activity and then into a political faith. In the early 1900s, cosmopolitanism turned American eyes to Europe, where many Americans experimented in art, literature, and philosophy: Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Pound, and Eliot. And America initiated its own indigenous cultural growth: jazz, George Gershw
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1557787050/?tag=2022091-20
(A very good hardcover copy with gilt spine lettering. Tig...)
A very good hardcover copy with gilt spine lettering. Tight binding. Clean, unmarked pages. Very good jacket; price-clipped; some fading and chipping. NOT ex-library. Shipped Weight: Under 1 kilogram. Category: Biography; Inventory No: 017846.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004BJPX3A/?tag=2022091-20
Crunden, Robert Morse was born on December 23, 1940 in Jersey City. Son of Allan Bernard and Marjorie (Morse) Crunden.
Crunden graduated from Yale University magna cum laude in 1962, and then attended Harvard University where he received his Doctor of Philosophy in 1967.
From assistant to full professor history and American studies University Texas, Austin, 1967-1999. Director American Studies Research Center, Hyderabad, India, 1982-1984. Director program in American studies University Texas, Austin, 1985-1990.
Guest professor department English, Universität Würzburg, Germany, 1979, 82. Senior Fulbright lecturer department history La Trobe University, Australia, 1978. Bicentennial professor American studies University Helsinki, Finland, 1976-1977, 91-92.
Lecturer in field.
(The roots of today's "culture wars" can be found in the m...)
("The discussion of each period is wide-ranging, analyzing...)
(In American Salons, Robert Crunden provides a sweeping ac...)
(Albert Jay Nock was the eccentric and almost legendary ed...)
(A very good hardcover copy with gilt spine lettering. Tig...)
Progressivism.
While at Yale he was a member of Saint Elmo, a secret society. He was a professor at the University of Texas, director of American Studies Department, 1985–1990, and a member of the History Department.
Children: Evelyn Anne, Rebecca Jane.