Kazin takes his title from a quotation in which Whitman refers to Emerson as the "beginner of the whole procession" of American poets and writers. Kazin then quotes from his own journal entry of 1976, written while working on this book:

How they straggle in, the members of my procession, my American Congregation. How they fall in around my typewriter to show themselves a family. (Kazin ix)

It was precisely these images of the unifying structures of procession, congregation, and family that first drew me to Kazin's book. This review was to be my little experiment, perhaps even my small rebellion, which would question the unavoidability of narrow specialization in academic criticism. I wanted to step back from distinctions and take a moment to look at what unites American literature, to question if any commonalities constitute the category of "American literature" beyond the author's citizenship, to wonder why, if we as postmodern readers have destabilized all unities, we still feel a need to gather this heterogenous congregration together.

Emerson, of course, is not situated at the chronological beginning of the procession of American literature. Thus, Kazin's adoption of Whitman's pronouncement already implies that American literature is not simply a collection of writings by American citizens, but rather posits that some kind of thematic, rather than merely geographic, unity exists which distinguishes a tradition within the literature of the United States that has come to be called American literature. Unfortunately, Kazin never examines the unity which he implies in his choice of metaphors and choice of Emerson as founding father of his literary "family". He makes little effort to demonstrate the connections and interactions between the members of this family, and his descriptions of the family character, the components of the thematic unity he assumes, are left off after the first five writers he discusses. Instead of delivering the promised relatedness, even if dysfunctional, of the American writers he chooses as representative of this thematic tradition, Kazin treats them as an almost random succession of incongruous celebrities. Kazin's procession is closer to a Macy's Day Parade than a March on Washington.

In a few instances, Kazin attempts a cursory comparison of authors, such as the sentence which notes that both Dreiser and Whitman were interested in sex, but the book merely names these juxtapositions and fails to achieve any measure of depth. The closest Kazin comes to exploring the relations between his stars, apart from these brief asides, is a chapter on Theodore Dreiser, Henry Adams, and Mark Twain which is somewhat unifed by the historical event of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Kazin catalogues the three writers disparate reactions to the Fair: fascination for Dreiser, disdain for Adams, and irrelevant to Twain who never saw the Fair, entangled as he was by the Panic of 1893 in efforts to hold off personal financial ruin.

This kind of personal history of the writers, intertwined with larger historical events and broader social change, is Kazin's best offering to the reader. The strength of this book is in the sheer amount of biographical detail which Kazin collects and, at times, connects with a text. In discussing Dreiser's background as the son of an immigrant father, Kazin writes:

Few writers with Dreiser's power had such crude verbal habits ...A writer brought up with the 'proper' English of a middle-class family ...would not have introduced Carrie as possessing 'four dollars in money.' (Kazin 242)

Kazin emphasizes the individual writer's experience of history as well as his accounts of the personal histories of the writers. For example, his chapter on Walt Whitman stresses the intense identification which Whitman felt in relation to the events which were shaping American history: "An essential quality of Whitman's Civil War 'memoranda' is Whitman's libidinous urge to associate himself with the great, growing, ever more powerful federal cause" (Kazin 121).

Where the book's strength of narrating the effects of public history on the writer becomes it's weakness is in the chapter on Emily Dickinson, the infamously private observer of a history of mental states and not states' rights. Most of Kazin's accounts of personal history seem so factual and his sweeping statements so benign and empty of controversy that I found few specifics statements with which to disagree. His reading of Emily Dickinson, however, necessarily based on a certain amount of conjecture, seems a bit inaccurate. Kazin writes that, for Dickinson, "Words were not transcriptions of experience; they often invented it. Words were roles" (Kazin 163). Dickinson's precision seems to be an irrefutable counter to the idea that her words invented her reality. It seems much more plausible to assert that her painfully economic choice of words was exactly the kind of "transcription" of her inner experience which Kazin denies. The Dickinson chapter seems weaker than the others because Kazin must rely on speculation and not documented social fact.

The "retrospect" offered at the end of the book is simply not one. It is rather an occasion to pack more figures into this procession of individuals that keeps pushing onward like Whitman's endless journey of the soul. Emerson is briefly mentioned in one of the last paragraphs of the book in a sort of pseudo-conclusion which fails to deliver a final argument or thematic unity. The irony is that my attempt to deny the inevitability of specialization in criticism in choosing a broader approach to literature led to the forfeit of the coherence which I was seeking.

Kazin's book is to be enjoyed for its breadth and attention to biography, and criticized for its deficiency of depth and lack of attention to texts. The book has its best moments when personal history is used to illuminate textuality, such as the above example in which Dreiser's background is shown as creating the language of Sister Carrie. The problem with a book that attempts as broad a topic as American literature from 1830 to 1930 is that it sacrifices continuity for coverage. Breadth is not the same as, and here apparently prohibits, the construction of unity. Due to the fragmented nature of the book, it is best read as a series of separate articles, with a chapter on a particular author used as a biographical complement to a more textual study. Kazin portrayal of Whitman seems to echo my ultimate dissatisfaction with An American Procession; "Whitman's greatest longing was for 'unity'" (Kazin 109), "There is a longing somehow not to be fulfilled" (Kazin 108).