"A powerful, severe, and harshly comic portrayal of Irish immigrant life in lower New York exactly a century ago."—Alfred Kazin. Although fellow novelists William Dean Howells and Hamlin Garland immediately recognized genius in the twenty-one-year-old a
Through his writing and his own personal philosophy, Ralph Waldo Emerson unburdened his young country of Europe's traditional sense of history and showed Americans how to be creators of their own circumstances. His mandate, which called for harmony with,