cover image The Pilot and the Passenger: Essays on Literature, Technology, and Culture in the United States

The Pilot and the Passenger: Essays on Literature, Technology, and Culture in the United States

Leo Marx. Oxford University Press, USA, $49.95 (384pp) ISBN 978-0-19-504875-9

These essays by one of America's most eminent cultural critics, author of The Machine in the Garden, are the product of an imagination that's as much sociological as literary. Based on the ""dialectical concept'' of American culture, they examine the creative uses to which native writers past and present have been able to put the conflicting and even incompatible interpretations of reality that prevail in the culture at large. The book is divided into three sections: the first dealing with individual writers of the past, principally Twain, Melville and Thoreau; the second with the wider conflicts generated by science, technology and urban industrialization; and the third with writers, themes and problems of our timeNorman Mailer and Susan Sontag, the cultural impact of left-wing thought, the curious mix of pastoralism and revolution in the 1960s. Included also is a perceptive tribute to literary scholar F. O. Matthiessen who committed suicide in 1950. (January)