The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973

In careful, thoughtful, and elegant prose reminiscent of Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson, Greif gives a brilliant exploration of the a philosophical field that developed in the middle decades of the 20th century and echoes even up to our own time. In the 1930s and 1940s, public intellectuals became preoccupied with the belief that the rapid development of technology and bureaucracy posed a threat to human individuality, calling this the "crisis of man." Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr asserted that "man has always been his own most vexing problem," while philosophers called for a "new humanism." By the 1950s, American novels had taken up the theme of the individual search for identity in a society facing challenges like war and racial tension. In the book's central, exceptional chapters, Greif looks at how four novelists%E2%80%94Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, and Thomas Pynchon%E2%80%94depicted the "crisis of man" against the social realities of race (Ellison and Bellow), religion (O'Connor), and technology (Pynchon). He then shows that in the 1970s the focus on "universal man" devolved into an anti-humanism that called into question the idea of any shared human nature. Greif's dazzling, must-read analysis offers luminous insights into mid-century American understandings of humanity and its relevance to the present. (Jan.)