Mark Edmundson

Edmundson reflects on his own rite of passage as a high school football player to get to larger truths about the ways America's Game shapes its men.

Why write when it sometimes feels that so few people really read--read as if their lives might be changed by what they're reading? Why write, when the world wants to be informed, not enlightened; to be entertained, not inspired? Writing is backbreaking, mindbreaking, lonely work. So why? Because writing, as celebrated professor Mark Edmundson explains, is one of the greatest human goods. Real writing can do what critic R. P. Blackmur said it could:...

"Mark Edmundson finds in Walt Whitman's Song of Myself the evolution of a democratic spirit, for the individual and the nation. Breaking from the past literature he saw as "feudal"-obsessed with the noble and great-Whitman created a story of commonplace egalitarian selfhood, a story he lived as a hospital volunteer during the Civil War"--