American Ambivalence: The Limitations of the Writer in the US

Speaking of Daniel Aaron, this graf from Writers on the Left is pretty great:

Paradoxically, the American writer’s running quarrel with his society, his natural inclination to admonish and to castigate in the guise of entertainment, may have sprung as much or more from his identity with that society as from his alienation. He has never been easy during his rebellious moods, never able to divorce himself from the cowards, scoundrels, and vulgarians he attacks. Indeed, the very intensity with which insurgent generations of rebels have assaulted the unkillable beliefs of the bourgeoisie suggests an attachment to their enemy the rebels themselves have hardly been aware of. Made bitter by rejection, and despising a milieu so uncongenial for the creative artist, the aberrant or misfit writer still yearns to be reabsorbed into his society, to speak for it, to celebrate it. And the history of rebellious literary generations, which is in one sense the history of the writer in America, is a record of ambivalence, of divided loyalties, of uneasy revolt.