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Since we discovered that, in Tocqueville's words, "the incomplete joys of this world will never satisfy the heart," how have we Americans made do? In The Real American Dream one of the nation's premier literary scholars searches out the symbols and stories by which Americans have reached for something beyond worldly desire. A spiritual history ranging from the first English settlements to the present day, the book is also a lively, deeply learned meditation on hope.

Andrew Delbanco tells of the stringent God of Protestant Christianity, who exerted immense force over the...

The abolitionists of the mid-nineteenth century have long been painted in extremes--vilified as reckless zealots who provoked the catastrophic bloodletting of the Civil War, or praised as daring and courageous reformers who hastened the end of slavery. But Andrew Delbanco sees abolitionists in a different light, as the embodiment of a driving force in American history: the recurrent impulse of an adamant minority to rid the world of outrageous evil.

Delbanco imparts to the reader a sense of what it meant to be a thoughtful citizen in nineteenth-century America, appalled by slavery...

As the commercialization of American higher education accelerates, more and more students are coming to college with the narrow aim of obtaining a preprofessional credential. The traditional four-year college experience--an exploratory time for students to discover their passions and test ideas and values with the help of teachers and peers--is in danger of becoming a thing of the past.

In College, prominent cultural critic Andrew Delbanco offers a trenchant defense of such an education, and warns that it is becoming a privilege reserved for the relatively rich. In describing...

The story of New England writing begins some 400 years ago, when a group of English Puritans crossed the Atlantic believing that God had appointed them to bring light and truth to the New World. Over the centuries since, the people of New England have produced one of the great literary traditions of the world--an outpouring of poetry, fiction, history, memoirs, letters, and essays that records how the original dream of a godly commonwealth has been both sustained and transformed into a modern secular culture enriched by people of many backgrounds and convictions.

"Writing New...

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun mingles fable with fact in a mysterious tale of American artists liberated from New England mores in Rome. In his introduction, Andrew Delbanco remarks that Hawthorne's novel is ultimately less about freedom than its costs. It is a book "that invites us to observe people in the grip of guilt, passion, or a naive faith in God or...

Celebrate the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth with this new edition of his greatest speeches and writings
Abraham Lincoln endowed the American language with a vigor and moral energy that has all but disappeared from today's public rhetoric. Lincoln's writings are testaments of our history, windows into his enigmatic personality, and resonant examples of the writer's art. The Portable Abraham Lincoln contains the great public speeches - the first debate with Stephen Douglas, the "House Divided" speech, the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural Address - along...

"At first reading, Representative Men seems the most alien of Emerson's books. First published in 1850 (having taken form over the five preceding years as a series of lectures intended as 'winter evening entertainments'), it was inspired by the romantic belief that there exists a 'general mind' that expresses itself with special intensity through certain individual...