Author Description

Leo Marx is one of the major critics of American culture, technology, and literature, and his widely influential The Machine in the Garden (Oxford, 1964) is a classic of American literary criticism. In The Pilot and the Passenger, he brings together essays written over four decades that explore the interplay among literature, technology, and political ideology in the United States. Grouping the essays into three sections, Marx first examines major American writers, providing brilliant analyses of Melville, Thoreau, Twain, and Frost, which reveal the ways in which these writers defined the conflicts of our culture. The second section considers the larger controversies generated by science, technology, and urban industrialism. Marx concludes with a thought-provoking section on modern criticism, including a moving reminiscence of F.O. Matthiessen and a study of Susan Sontag's account of the Vietnam War, in which Marx analyzes the incompatible mix of pastoral and revolutionary fantasies that characterized the New Left of the 1960s. A provocative and insightful contribution to American studies, this book elucidates some of the chief paradoxes and conflicts that define the special quality of America's literature, politics, and people.