The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope

A close and passionate reader of American literature, Delbanco (The Death of Satan, etc.) believes that contemporary American culture has lost its once vital sense of the transcendent. This book is, with very little alteration, a transcript of Delbanco's William E. Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization, which he delivered at Harvard in 1998. ""We live in an age of unprecedented wealth,"" he writes, ""but in the realm of narrative and symbol, we are deprived."" In three sections--""God,"" ""Nation"" and ""Self""--Delbanco sketches a broad history of American narrative and symbolic meaning, the nexus of ideas and stories ""by which Americans have tried to save themselves from the melancholy that threatens all reflective beings."" According to this scheme, from Puritan times through the early 19th century, the dominant idea was God. Sometime around the Civil War, the idea of the nation became the transcendent value. The third part of the book becomes a lament as Delbanco posits that, since roughly the 1960s, ""hope has narrowed to the vanishing point of the self alone."" Delbanco acknowledges that his conceit presents a ""too neat division of American history into two phases of coherent belief followed by a third phase of incoherent and nervous waiting."" But his profoundly insightful readings of William Bradford, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln and other American writers, stretching from early colonial times to the present, should succeed in prodding readers to think deeply about how the idea of the nation intersects--or doesn't--with their deepest desires and hopes. (Sept.)