Lawrence's essays on American writers--including Franklin, Hawthorne, and Whitman--are inventive, illuminating, brilliant, and decidedly eccentric. While they were in progress, he described them to a friend as "a thrilling blood-and-thunder, your-money-or-your-life kind of thing: hands up America!" They were published in the English Review in 1918 and 1919 and appeared in book form in 1923.