It isn’t often that one is asked, in a volume of literary criticism, a question on the order of: what is the most important event in modern history? But this is precisely what Martin Green asks toward the end of his newest book, The Great American Adventure.[1]1 shall return to his question in due course, but first let me say that this book, which the publisher describes as dealing with “action stories from Cooper to Mailer and what they reveal about American manhood,” is not a work of historical analysis. It is instead a study of a dozen American adventure books seen as a reflection of America’s “caste system” and her “imperialism,” as these have shaped American “manliness.”
In subjecting these cultural phenomena to a moral and political critique, Green offers a pretense of historical coverage by organizing his carefully selected books into the following triadic scheme: THREE FROM PHILADELPHIA—Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823), Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies (1832), and Robert Bird’s Nick of the Woods (1837); THREE FROM BOSTON—Richard Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840), Melville’s Typee (1846), and Parkman’s The Oregon Trail (1849); THREE ANOMALIES—Kit Carson’s Autobiography (1856), Twain’s Roughing It (1872), and Theodore Roosevelt’s Autobiography (1913); and THREE AESTHETES—Hemingway’s The Green Hills of Africa (1935), Faulkner’s “The Bear” (1942), and Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967). What do these tales reveal to him?
According to Green, these stories disclose a common type of protagonist
