American Character and Other Essays

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice. IT gives me pleasure to know that the selections from my essays are to be read by members of the Chautauqua Institution. For a number of years I have been saying in essay form things about life and literature which recently I have tried to dramatize and illustrate in novels. Because I believe in the importance of these ideas, I am grateful to every serious reader who gives them his attention. The essay on American Character was originally delivered as an address at Bedford College, University of London, in December, 1918. Just after the Armistice our allies showed a flattering curiosity about the American people, their habits and their ideas, and a number of us who happened to be on the ground at the time were invited, both in France and in England, to give addresses on this general topic before audiences intellectually keen and hospitably disposed. My own experience was, I am sure, not unlike that of other lecturers—I had to examine myself closely to find out whether there was such a thing as an American character. In the lecture, which is here reproduced, I suggested reasons for peculiarities in us which foreigners notice, and ways in which we might offset certain inevitable consequences of our history. We are all immigrants, for example, and therefore we lack a local tradition, a rooted sense of the past. Such a sense will come of itself with time, but meanwhile we can perhaps supply the lack of it by a more conscious study of human nature, and a more resolute attempt to manage our lives intelligently.