This volume offers an intimate history of the '20s, when a new generation of intellectuals and artists, spared by the Armistice of 1918, reacted in jubiliation and reaffirmed the spirit of Whitman and Melville. Munson brings to life the nation's literary history in the '20s and recreates a time when magazines like the New Republic, Dial, Little Review and Vanity Fair published the works of John Dos Passos, Kenneth Burke, Sherwood Anderson and Hart Crane, as well those of the more established T.S. Eliot, H.L. Mencken and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He also offers unique images of three leading figures -- Hart Crane, Robert Frost and A.R. Orage -- and of the times they flourished. He recounts the rise and tragic descent of Hart Crane, how he came to write by invitation from the poet, the first critical study of Frost and how the Orage/Gurdjieff movement toward spiritual and intellectual harmony affected the literary scene. ISBN 0-8071-1201-1: $19.95.