The Spirit of American Literature: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The Spirit of American Literature, credited to John Albert Macy, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of The Spirit of American Literature, by John Albert Macy. THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE is a collection of essays reviewing contemporary authors on the literary scene at the turn of the century and assessing the uniquely American characteristics of their growing body of work. Excerpted from the author’s preface: “In this book something is said about most, if not quite all, of the emergent figures in American literature; an attempt is made to survey the four corners of the national library and to give an impression of its shape and size. If its purpose is approximately realized, this volume will be found to be a little nearer to a collection of appreciative essays than to a formal history or bibliographic manual. …To be sure, the historian avowedly and properly puts emphasis on writers who are dead in the flesh, and finishes off his contemporaries briefly because they are not yet established and are too numerous to mention. But it seems well, in books about literature, not to discuss writers admittedly dead in the spirit, whose names persist by the inertia of reputation...All that I wish to plead is that a living lion is better than a dead mouse...If, as I believe, accepted handbooks and histories of American literature pay too much attention to doubly dead worthies, whose books are not interesting, and miss or but timidly acknowledge contemporary excellence, there is a way of accounting for it.” (Summary by lubee930)

Recording facts

• Recording title: The Spirit of American Literature
• Author credits: John Albert Macy
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 22
• Listed recording duration: 10:45:52

Catalogue topics

• american

Track guide

1. 00 - Preface — 6:44
2. 01 - General Characteristics — 30:20
3. 02 - Irving — 33:37
4. 03 - Cooper — 14:40
5. 04 - Emerson Part 1 — 34:07
6. 05 - Emerson Part 2 — 32:29
7. 06 - Hawthorne — 39:09
8. 07 - Longfellow — 26:19
9. 08 - Whittier — 23:41
10. 09 - Poe, Part 1 — 40:14
11. 10 - Poe, Part 2 — 28:43
12. 11 - Holmes — 33:02
13. 12 - Thoreau — 32:11
14. 13 - Lowell — 39:01
15. 14 - Whitman, Part 1 — 33:24
16. 15 - Whitman, Part 2 — 29:09
17. 16 - Twain, Part 1 — 25:30
18. 17 - Twain, Part 2 — 25:19
19. 18 - Howells — 33:18
20. 19 - William James — 27:42
21. 20 - Lanier — 25:40
22. 21 - Henry James — 31:42

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.