This volume evaluates the lives, work, and the expatriate experience of four of America's most discussed writers -- Henry Adams, Henry James, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. The author traces these writers' conflicted attitudes toward their own country while forging their individual careers abroad, they altered America's literary landscape. All four shared a moral high-mindedness, familial pride and a rage for order that made them temperamentally unsuited...

"The difficulties in a democracy have been a central theme in much of Western literature during the twentieth century--a theme that finds explicit presentation in the writings of W.B. Yeats. In [the author's view], Yeats's involvement in the Irish Independence movement, his interest in myth, religion, and the occult, his praise of aristocratic values, and his participation in Irish public life were all related expressions of the poet's desire to re-establish...