At each step of this journey through American cultural history, Louis Menand has an original point to make: he explains the real significance of William James's nervous breakdown, and of the anti-Semitism in T. S. Eliot's writing. He reveals the reasons for the remarkable commercial successes of William Shawn's New Yorker and William Paley's CBS. He uncovers the connection between Larry Flynt's Hustler and Jerry Falwell's evangelism, between the atom bomb and the Scholastic Aptitude Test. He locates the importance of Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, Pauline Kael, Christopher Lasch, and Rolling Stone magazine. And he lends an ear to Al Gore in the White House as the Starr Report is finally presented to the public. Like his critically acclaimed bestseller, The Metaphysical Club, American Studies is intellectual and cultural history at its best: game and detached, with a strong curiosity about the political underpinnings of ideas and about the reasons successful ideas insinuate themselves into the culture at large. From one of our leading thinkers and critics, known both for his "sly wit and reportorial high-jinks [and] clarity and rigor" (The Nation), these essays are incisive, surprising, and impossible to put down.

PrefaceWilliam James and the Case of the Epileptic PatientThe Principles of Oliver Wendell HolmesT.S. Eliot and the JewsRichard Wright: the Hammer and the NailThe Long Shadow of James B. ConantThe Last Emperor: William S. PaleyA Friend Writes: The Old New YorkerNorman Mailer in His TimeLife in the Stone AgeThe Popist: Pauline KaelChristopher Lasch's Quarrel with LiberalismLust in Action: Jerry Falwell and Larry FlyntLaurie Anderson's United StatesThe Mind of Al GoreThe Reluctant Memorialist: Maya LinNotes