America's Sketchbook

Book excerpt: In her comprehensive study of American sketch writing, Kristic Hamilton gives new insight into the powers of mass-market intimacy more personal and home-like than home - and into leisure, which as a component of middle-class identity is quite as imperative in its achievement as disciplined morality. Here, also, is a more complex story of the aesthetic, as a class-inflected realm, in which factory women and rural and urban middle-class authors debate the shape of literature and life.