New York:
George Braziller,
1955.
In this book
Santayana offers a general view of
American life and
culture. He coined the widely used expression "
the genteel tradition" as a description of certain inadequacies in American literary culture. It referred to a detachment which he thought
American writers had from the real forces at work in American life. For him a country had not acquired a genuine culture until its
poetry and
philosophy expressed ideals which were the implicit goals of the truly active forces in its
social,
political and
industrial life.