"American Characteristics," the collection of Wilder essays (a few of them reconstructed from notes or newly published), contains no startling personal revelations, but it does suggest the extent and diversity of an intellectual or mental terrain still not fully explored by his biographers…. These observations about writers and art and books—"bookishness" in its best sense he defined as "loving great books as though they were people"—disclose the breadth and catholicity of his reading, his lucidity and acuteness. More to the point, they define his conception of himself: the friendly guide and admonisher of his own special America, the preacher-entertainer attuned to the Goethean World Spirit receptive to all human experience. The Wilder of the essays is steeped in his country, its history and geography, and he continually seeks ways of compensating for its deficiencies, less by submerging himself in its culture or escaping from it than by incorporating into it the best of other literatures and artistic traditions. (p. 9)
The lectures on American language, American loneliness and Emily Dickinson, which owe so much to Gertrude Stein, examine the emergence of the American mind in literature. His theme is the "complex fate" of our classic writers in a fluid culture, living in a "turbulence of unrelated phenomena" and deprived of "the immemorial repetitions" who nonetheless converted "an American difficulty into an American triumph." American language for Wilder (here his example is Melville) is less a matter of new works and idioms than what resulted when insular English was reshaped in ways to apprehend the American sense of space and time and self. The American writer, unsure of his identity in a vast, unlicensed environment, acquired the ability to specify and catalogue the amorphous—and in the process modified the language.
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