Anarchy and individualism in American Literature: from Walden Pond to the rise of the New Left

Abstract

This dissertation tells the story of--or, rather, unfolds one intellectual history of--American individualism on the left. In it, I argue that Emerson and Thoreau belong to a tradition of American anarchism that included Emma Goldman and other Gilded Age anarchists, Beat poets like Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen, and New Leftists in the politics of the 1960s.