Richard Kostelanetz
- Preambles
- All Along the Edge
- Choice Bits
- Las Vegas Performance
- Book of Kostis
- Contemporary American Literacy
- Modern Polyartistry
- End of Intelligent Writing, reprint
- More On Innovative Music(ian)s
- Autobiogaphies at 50 & 60
- Book-Art & Alternative Publishing
- A Literary Life in America
- Animated Music
- Artists in America
- Arts & Artists in America
- Master Minds, rev. ed.
- The Maturity of American Thought
- Great American Comedians
- Continuing Tradition of the New
- Charles Ives and the American Imagination
- Special Sounds: The Art of Radio in North America
- Great Jewish Cemetery of Berlin
- Sports & Sportsmen
- Elizabeth Streb
- More Crimes of Culture
- The Fall and Rise of the Rockaways
- Home & Away: Tavel Essays
- American Composers in Their Own Words
- The Art of Literary Demolition
- Possibilities of Longer Poetry
- Alternative American Autobiographies
- The American Tradition in Poetry
- John Cage's Poetry
- Foster Damon's Uncollected Writings
- Libertarian Tradition: American Anarchist Thought
- E.E. Cummings ReConSidered
- Conceptual Dance: Choreographic Comedies
- An Emma Goldman Reader
- American Composers as Writers
- AnOther Ogden Nash
- Classic Essays on Rock
- New American Radio Plays
- Second Anthology of Merce Criticism
Proposal for the publication of The Maturity of American Thought
Begun in the late 1960s, with the help of a Guggenheim Fellowship, this was meant to be a comprehensive history of post-WWII American thought (1945-68). Its thesis was that only in the post-War period did American thinking in many fields achieve first-rank importance and major international influence. My strategy in writing this book was not to prove this thesis, which he took to be virtually self-evident to those who knew (and cared), but to identify and summarize what this major thinking was. I completed several chapters before putting the project aside to complete something else; it was never resumed. The chapters finished beyond the introduction covered "Historiography," "Sociology," "Social Philosophy," "Government," "Anthropology," "Esthetics," "Architecture," "Literary Criticism," "Theater," "Fiction," "Poetry." Some of them have appeared in such U.S. cultural periodicals as Bennington Review, Sun & Moon, Western Humanities Review, and Boston University Journal; some were even reprinted in books. Since most of these essays are not conveniently available, while readers of one often ask about the others and, most important, no other comprehensive book on post-WWII American thought has since appeared, may I propose that these chapters now appear as a single volume sub-titled "An Unfinished History.†Since many other books of mine have appeared since this was drafted, there are advantages to publishing it now.