Read more
Poet, social scientist, and literary essayist, Reuel Denney is best known perhaps as co-author of
The Lonely Crowd with David Riesman and Nathan Glaser. These selected essays and poems, edited by Tony Quagliano, span a wide range of topics and more than a half century of American cultural history.
The topics range from international finance to leisure, from Greek mythology to Disney, from American poetry to the great oral tradition of Polynesian poetry. Woven throughout is Denney's fascinating memoir Experience in the World, an autobiographical meditation on America in the twentieth century. This unique collection presents one poet and scholar's encounter with the complexities of American life. American culture, Denney shows us, is the product of the many cultures of the world; it is indeed a Feast of Strangers. This is a work for scholars, students, and other researchers of American literature and culture studies.
List of contents
Foreword by David Riesman
Editor's Introduction by Tony Quagliano
Experience in the World 1913-1947Household Words
A Little Learning
For My Girl's Birthday
Shuttle Island--Largo
McSorley's Bar
Excerpt from The Portfolio of Benjamin Latrobe--"When Spelling Bees"
The Invisible HandThe Battle of Bretton Woods
The Leisure Society
Excerpt from The Portfolio of Benjamin Latrobe--"My Grandfather"
Experience in the World 1947-1961It's a Wonderful Town
"Wind in the Sycamore"
"A Requiem"
"To an Old Friend"
Feast of StrangersFeast of Strangers: Varieties of Sociable Experience in America
What the Animals Are Saying about Us
A Tale of Two Studios: Artist Jean Charlot in Walt Disney's Atelier
"Ravenna"
"A Wine For Li Po's Picture"
Excerpt from The Portfolio of Benjamin Latrobe--"Here at Stairways
Experience in the World 1961-1995Excerpt From "The Animal Cartel"
West
Modernity and MythWilliam Carlos Williams
A Portable Pagoda: Asia and America in the Work of Gary Snyder
Merwin and Myth
Hawaiian Heritage
Birdman, Myth, and Technology
"The Laboratory Midnight"
"Portrait of the Old Poet as a Used Car"
"Pele Poem"
Excerpt from The Portfolio of Benjamin Latrobe--"I Dedicate to Benjamin Henry Latrobe"
Works by Reuel Denney
Index
About the author
REUEL DENNEY was one of the leading analysts of American culture, a scholar, author, teacher, journalist, and poet. His first collection of poetry
The Connecticut River and Other Poems won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1939. The author of numerous studies of American culture, including
The Astonished Muse, he may be best known as a co-author, with David Riesman and Nathan Glazer, of
The Lonely Crowd. He taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Hawaii. He was at work on this collection at the time of his death in 1995.
TONY QUAGLIANO is Professor of American Culture and Society at the Japan-America Institute in Honolulu. A widely published poet and essayist whose works have appeared in
New Directions and
Rolling Stone, he is a contributing editor to the annual anthology
The Pushcart Prize-Best of the Small Presses and is editor of
KAIMANA (Diamond), the journal of the Hawaii Literary Arts Council.
