American Elegy

Before there was the United States, there was America. The former is a country, but the latter is an idea which signified a revolutionary ideal of freedom, liberty, equality, and justice, what Thomas Paine in Common Sense meant when he wrote that “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” American society and culture have always existed within the gulf of our stated aspirations and the actual reality, which has necessitated the forging of prophetic voices from Walt Whitman to Toni Morrison, Herman Melville to James Baldwin.

Now, as we prepare for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the United States is succumbing to authoritarianism and a noxious blood-and-soil nationalism which curses the faith in the universal and indispensable America. In response to this moment, noted cultural critic Ed Simon offers a rejoinder in American Elegy: Reflections on 250 Years of the Dis-United States of America. Compiling an assemblage that’s less a canon than a cultural mixtape, Simon presents fifty short chapters that are asynchronously organized works of flash criticism, meant to draw connections across time periods, which each celebrating an aspect of the “America” that’s larger, deeper, and broader than the mere United States. As cynical politicians deny the diversity, complexity, and actual beauty of American culture in favor of myths about the nation being made great again, Simon provides not just an elegy, but a challenge and celebration, as well as a repository, an archive, and a call to start over.

Ed Simon is the author of over a dozen books, including The Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain, named one of the best books of 2024 by The New Yorker. His essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review Daily, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Poetry, McSweeney’s, Aeon, Jacobin, The New Republic and The New York Times, among others. Simon is the Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University and the founding editor of The Pittsburgh Review of Books. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of Belt Magazine, and Creative Nonfiction Editor at Carnegie Mellon University Press.