The Pilot and the Passenger: Essays on Literature, Technology, and Culture in the United States

For over forty years, Leo Marx has studied American culture as a dialectical process, a fruitful contest between conflicting ways of seeing the world and expressing its meaning. The Pilot and the Passenger, a collection of essays spanning Marx's career, explores the meaning of this contest as it makes itself felt in America's literature, technology, and cultural politics.
Marx first examines such major writers as Melville, Thoreau, Mark Twain, and Frost, revealing how each responded to the contraries of American culture. He then considers certain larger controversies generated by science, technology, and urban industrialism. He concludes with a section on modern criticism, including a moving reminiscence of F.O. Matthiessen and a study of Susan Sontag's account of the Vietnam War.