Is it strange, then, that in a literature so concerned with realism and with personal liberation this refusal and impoverishment of the life of the spirit have always nourished the screamers, the eccentrics, the pseudo-Whitmans, the calculating terrorists?

On Native Grounds: An Interpretation Of Modern American Prose Literature (ed. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) - ISBN: 9780544263741