Christopher E. G. Benfey

A history of American art from the colonial period to the twentieth century draws on the author's family story as the descendant of colonial craftsmen through his mother's line, and as the son and nephew of exiled artists from Berlins' Bauhaus school.

Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival

Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay

A surprising and scandalous story of how the interaction within a group of exceptional and uniquely talented characters shaped and changed American thought at the close of the Civil War. Benfey takes the seemingly arbitrary image of the hummingbird and t

Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade

A Summer of Hummingbirds

Argues that, as both the United States and Japan attempted to adjust to massive internal changes in the late nineteenth century, they engaged in a reciprocal historical and cultural relationship.

Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan

The Great Wave

A renowned critic pens this surprising and scandalous story of how the interaction within the lives of some of the nation's most noted writers, poets, and artists shaped and changed American thought.

A reassessment of the the quintessential nineteenth-century American writer chronicles Crane's life and literary work and argues that the writer, successful at a young age, attempted to live the life his works portrayed

The Double Life of Stephen Crane

The American novelist-journalist Stephen Crane was born in 1871, six years after the war he memorialized in his acclaimed The Red Badge of Courage, and died of tuberculosis at the age of 28. Recounting Crane's brief life, this book identifies a curious pattern: Crane tried to live what he had already written. Barely 22 when he wrote his major work, he later became the leading war correspondent of his time - in order to see, he told Joseph Conrad, whether The Red Badge of Courage was all right. He took as his common-law wife the madam of a Jacksonville brothel and made a life with her in England, where their circle of friends included Conrad, Henry James, Ford Madox Ford and H.G. Wells.

Stephen Crane

An anthology of definitive works includes "The Black Riders," "War Is Kind" and top-selected, previously uncollected poems, in a treasury that offers insight into Crane's modernist views and avoidance of typical Victorian styles.

Complete Poems

Penguin Classics Introduction to The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura (Penguin Classics)

Christopher Benfey

00 Edgar Degas traveled from Paris to New Orleans during the fall of 1872 to visit the American branch of his mother's family, the Mussons. This war-torn, diverse, and conflicted city elicited from Degas some of his finest paintings. He arrived at a key moment in the cultural history of this most exotic of American cities, still recovering from the agony of the Civil War. This decisive period of Reconstruction, in which his American relatives were importantly involved, was also the time when the American writers Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable were beginning to mine the resources of New Orleans culture and history. Edgar Degas traveled from Paris to New Orleans during the fall of 1872 to visit the American branch of his mother's family, the Mussons. This war-torn, diverse, and conflicted city elicited from Degas some of his finest paintings. He arrived at a key moment in the cultural history of this most exotic of American cities, still recovering from the agony of the Civil War. This decisive period of Reconstruction, in which his American relatives were importantly involved, was also the time when the American writers Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable were beginning to mine the resources of New Orleans culture and history.

Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable

Degas in New Orleans

The vivid story of a tightly knit group of travelers--connoisseurs, collectors, scientists--who dedicated themselves to exploring and preserving what they referred to as Old Japan and Old Japan's lasting influence on the culture of Gilded Age America. After the Civil War, the United States--as cultural historian and critic Christopher Benfey argues--lost its philosophical moorings and looked eastward, to Old Japan and its seemingly untouched indigenous culture, for balance and perspective. Japan, meanwhile, was trying to reinvent itself as a more cosmopolitan, modern state, transforming in the space of twenty-five years from a feudal backwater to an international power. It was the parallel rise of these two young nations that initiated some of the major power struggles--both military and economic--of the twentieth century. This great wave of historical and cultural reciprocity brought with it some larger-than-life personalities, and this is their story as well. The lure of unknown foreign cultures played out on both sides of the Pacific, in the lives of Herman Melville, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Adams, John La Farge, Kakuzo Okakura (the author of The Book of Tea), Isabelle Gardner, and Lafcadio Hearn, among others. The Great Wave is a beautifully rendered meditation on the subject of cultural identity and on the consequences--both good and bad--of cultural cross-pollonation. Above all, like Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, it proves that what important history does at its best is transform our worldview.

Christopher E. G. Benfey

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