Unbought Spirit a John Jay Chapman Reader
- List Price: $44.95
- Binding: Hardcover
- Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr
- Publish date: 10/01/1998
Chapman "should be studied more carefully and at full length", Edmund Wilson wrote in 1929, "but in the meantime, what is most important is to have his essays made accessible.... If his books were reprinted and read, we should recognize that we possess in John Jay Chapman -- by reason of the intensity of the spirit, the brilliance of the literary gift and the continuity of the thought which they embody -- an American classic".
Jacques Barzun has observed, "We have produced very few great critics, but John Jay Chapman equals any of his foreign contemporaries". An American original, Chapman is a tonic to cynicism and an antidote to a society gone flaccid and complacent.