Includes bibliographical references and index.

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 to the chaotic experiment of American democracy. Common scorn of native provincialism, alarm at the influx of non-English-speaking immigrants, loathing of the new plutocracy and (except for James) blatant anti-Semitism were matched with a corresponding conviction (except for Pound) of "Anglo-Saxon" cultural superiority. This work is a synthesis of biography with literary, social and political history, an account of the creative freedom that expatriation allows and the high price it exacts.

Also issued online.

SACFinal081324