In this illuminating study of the "crucial century" (1830-1930), Alfred Kazin views the major figures in American writing, beginning when Ralph Waldo Emerson left the church and inspired a national literature on the basis of a religious revolution, and ending with the triumph of modernism - Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Fitzgerald - and with the revelation after World War I of the "postponed power" of those who had been modern before their time: Henry Adams, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson.