A Philosophy of Solitude by John Cowper Powys

Hardcover. Condition: Good+/Very Good-. 1940. Simon & Schuster. 9th Printing.

<class="p.initialcap">Although usually remembered -- if at all -- for his voluminous and eccentric novels, the Welsh-born John Cowper Powys (1872-1963) created an attractive and congenial meditation in his best non-fiction book: A Philosophy of Solitude.</class="p.initialcap">

Writing in the early 1930's in his adopted United States, where he was living and working as a free-lance lecturer, a popularizer of intellectual themes barnstorming the country, Powys' book is prompted by his experiences, his insights, and his disappointments. He sees the United States as a slave of modern technology -- of megalopolis, pandemonium, noise, of "the Gargantuan monstrosities and Dantesque horrors of our great modern cities."

The situation, he declares, is too far gone for the inspiration of American writers like Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, with their facile optimism and their confidence in the virtues of an American character now lost in the twentieth century.

The only thing that can really help us is a much more definite and drastic philosophy ... a real, hard, formidable, unrhetorical introspection ..."

And this is the philosophy of solitude that Powys sets out of construct.