Description: "Young America is an important, wide-ranging, and fascinating book. With wit, good sense, and lively prose, Edward L. Widmer recovers the social energy and cultural excitement of New York in the 1840s, when a generation of politico-literary intellectuals, as Emerson disdainfully called them,associated themselves with real politics and serious art. Held together by John O'Sullivan, the bigger-than-life editor of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, Young America sustained a robust discussion of political and cultural democracy, at once nationalist and metropolitan, thatgave intellectual significance to the Democratic Party even as it provided a sustaining and lively literary community for both canonical and forgotten writers. What Widmer describes is the first instance of a modern social type, the literary intellectual committed to democratic politics."--ThomasBender, Dean for the Humanities and Professor of History, New York University

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