Perry Miller

Quotes

• “American capitalism of 1830 to 1860 was a riot of extravagance. Hundreds of those who glistened in New York and Boston in the 1840's are forgotten. A few families—, —managed to maintain continuity, but they were few. The number who went down to ruin invited a chronicler equal to Dickens.”
• “Later practitioners improved upon Mitchell and Stoughton only by extending the list of sins, by going into greater detail. Year by year the stock enumeration grew, and once a new sin was added to the series it kept its place in subsequent editions.”
• “By the middle of the twentieth century, the world had accepted Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, published in 1851, as an indubitable masterpiece of the nineteenth, even though that world became aware of it only a generation ago.”
• “deserves credit for his courageous advocacy of the of Ohio, probably more than for his contributions to literature: his trade monthly, published from 1854 t0 1861, Cozzens' Wine Press, is a neglected classic which provides a charming insight into the amenities of the table in a society which devoted considerable care to that department.”

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA