"For more than thirty years, Lewis P. Simpson, Boyd Professor Emeritus of English at Louisiana State University, has been writing graceful and incisive essays about the modern literary consciousness. His numerous publications, including The Man of Letters in New England and the South, The Dispossessed Garden, and The Brazen Face of History, constitute an ambitious project of philosophical and critical understanding, directed at nothing less than a comprehensive vision of the human fall into history and the ascendancy of the secular, rational mind."--Book Jacket.