America is a country of characters, many of them larger than life, many of them shrinking from life, and many tenaciously asserting their individuality even as they succumb to the weight of life. As the author observes, Asserting one's identity...

America is a country of characters, many of them larger than life, many of them shrinking from life, and many tenaciously asserting their individuality even as they succumb to the weight of life. As the author observes, Asserting one's identity obviously has its penalties, but to do so is infinitely greater than proceeding to one's grave without having achieved the fullest of self-realization. As an extraordinary American lyric poet, arguably the best at her art, Emily Dickinson created an enduring place for herself not only in American letters but in world literature. Notwithstanding, her grave is behind a Mobil filling station in Amherst, Massachusetts. This is a broad-spectrum, academically oriented book, an historical, sociological and ideological examination of the continuing acrimonious mutual conflict waged between America's loners and joiners.  Divided into five chapters, it is generously researched, provocatively iconoclastic, contrarian and comical. The initial chapter defines and copiously illustrates the plight of individuality and its collision with collaboration in American life. It then moves from classical and renaissance culture and philosophy into the subject as it is tellingly, abundantly and amusingly illustrated in American literature from Franklin through Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Whitman and Twain. The second chapter advances into the 20th and 21st centuries, exploring the essence of the conflict as illustrated biologically, socially and anecdotally'the object being to elucidate the causes of division between the minority who function well as hermits and the majority that inexorably forms itself into insidious herds. Chapter 3, 'What Price Affiliation?'� examines such nefarious matters as Group Think, the rise of corporate culture and trade unionism. The fourth chapter examines even more intensively the intellectual and emotional costs of fraternal life. The fifth, final chapter looks closely at the American intellectual as loner and outcast.  It's all good stuff, and an exceedingly provocative good read.

Joiners are joiners on the tenuous assumption that they can function better in a mob than as individuals. If they are uncertain, unimaginative, unoriginal, unmotivated and unassertive, then they have ostensibly made the correct procedural choice. They can always be under the thumb of someone who is certain, imaginative, original, motivated and assertive. Most joiners travel in packs and are remarkably other-directed. Without human support from all sides, they are lost. There is nothing wrong...

Joiners are joiners on the tenuous assumption that they can function better in a mob than as individuals. If they are uncertain, unimaginative, unoriginal, unmotivated and unassertive, then they have ostensibly made the correct procedural choice. They can always be under the thumb of someone who is certain, imaginative, original, motivated and assertive. Most joiners travel in packs and are remarkably other-directed. Without human support from all sides, they are lost. There is nothing wrong with this, providing that consent to living their lives as followers. ...Living alone tends to reinforce and protect oneself against virulent invitations to occasions that one would just as soon avoid, nay, desperately avoid. Garbo, incidentally, reportedly said, 'I vant to be alone,'� whereas she actually said, 'I vant to be let alone.'� This was merely a throwaway line in a film called Grand Hotel (1932); Miss Garbo may have meant neither one. She also said, 'Give me a viskey,'� but she may not have meant that, either. Whether Miss Garbo was a loner, we may never know; at least she portrayed one in the movies. But when true lone wolves say they want to be alone, by George, they mean it. Consequently, they evade such trying occasions as dinner parties, weddings and funerals. Dinner parties are particularly difficult, because they place more pressure upon one's sociability and time. Dinner parties demand about six labor-intensive hours, roughly distributed between the pre-prandial, prandial, and post-prandial. It can be, and usually is, an enervating six hours. One is pressed into the company of people who do not interest him on any of multiple levels. Lone wolves understand that it is far better to beg off or even ignore the invitation, rather than to be the first guest to vanish at a convenient moment. If one decides to leave the occasion when everyone else does, he is in danger of sentencing himself to more dinner parties.Another tactic, and a last ditch one at that, is not to live up to one's advance billing as a dinner guest. That is a regrettable way to have one's name deleted from guest lists, but it is at least effective. One can accept a dinner invitation and then suffer through all six programmed hours of it; one can accept the invitation and leave undetected after ten minutes; one can simply ignore the invitation; one can invent some excuse for not accepting it; one can explain to the hostess that he has, alas, no social life (something that Max Beerbohm in Zuleika Dobson (1911) called 'that admirable fidelity to social engagements which is one of the virtues implanted in the members of our aristocracy'�) and has furthermore no contemplated any immediate plans to create one. Should worse come to worst, one must remember never to wear a coat or other outer garment to a dinner party, for fear that it will be carried for safe keeping to a room and will later be awkward to find in order to effect a hasty but surgically precise exit. Hosts have been known to raise a sort of good-natured fuss for an early departer who tries to find his coat in a room littered with other coats. One slightly amusing activity for a reluctant guest is to vanish in such a way that the other guests are unaware of his departure for minutes, hours, or possibly ever. In the meantime, the departed one is quite far down the road, so to speak.