Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village: Conversing with the Moderns, 1915-1931 (Wisconsin Project on American Writers)

Kenneth Burke set out to live "as a Flaubert" when, as a teenager in 1915, he settled in Greenwich Village. Burke didn't pen another Bovary but he did develop into a valuable critic whose writing on rhetoric, art, and literature defied classification.

Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village explores how Burke's writing helped shape Americans' impressions of art and culture for more than 60 years. In addition to being an invaluable translator of others' work, Burke's early poems, fiction, and essays contributed to the advent of the modernist dialogue that centered in Greenwich Village and included the voices of artists like Alfred Stieglitz and Eugene O'Neill. Jack Selzer's book paints a vibrant portrait of Burke in his environment as he develops from an aesthete to the social critic who lay the foundation for contemporary cultural criticism.