Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village - Jack Selzer

Capturing the lively modernist milieu of Kenneth Burke's early career in
Greenwich Village, where Burke arrived in 1915 fresh from high school
in Pittsburgh, this book discovers him as an intellectual apprentice
conversing with "the moderns." Burke found himself in the midst of an
avant-garde peopled by Malcolm Cowley, Marianne Moore, Jean Toomer,
Katherine Anne Porter, William Carlos Williams, Allen Tate, Hart Crane,
Alfred Stieglitz, and a host of other fascinating figures.

Burke himself, who died in 1993 at the age of 96, has been hailed as
America's most brilliant and suggestive critic and the most significant
theorist of rhetoric since Cicero. Many schools of thought have claimed
him as their own, but Burke has defied classification and indeed has
often been considered a solitary, eccentric genius immune to
intellectual fashions. But Burke's formative work of the 1920s, when he
first defined himself and his work in the context of the modernist
conversation, has gone relatively unexamined.

Here we see Burke living and working with the crowd of poets,
painters, and dramatists affiliated with Others magazine, Stieglitz's
"291" gallery, and Eugene O'Neill's Provincetown Players; the leftists
associated with the magazines The Masses and Seven Arts;
the Dadaists; and the modernist writers working on literary journals
like The Dial, where Burke in his capacity as an associate
editor saw T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" into print for the first time
and provided other editorial services for Thomas Mann, e.e. cummings,
Ezra Pound, and many other writers of note. Burke also met the
iconoclasts of the older generation represented by Theodore Dreiser and
H. L. Mencken, the New Humanists, and the literary nationalists who
founded Contact and The New Republic. Jack Selzer shows how
Burke's own early poems, fiction, and essays emerged from and
contributed to the modernist conversation in Greenwich Village. He draws
on a wonderfully rich array of letters between Burke and his modernist
friends and on the memoirs of his associates to create a vibrant
portrait of the young Burke's transformation from aesthete to social
critic.