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One of the most gifted literary essayists of his generation defends stylistic boldness and intellectual daring in American letters.Over the last decade William Giraldi has established himself as a charismatic and uncompromising literary essayist, "a literature-besotted Midas of prose" (Cynthia Ozick) . Now, American Audacity gathers a selection of his most powerful considerations of American writers and themes -- a "gorgeous fury of language and sensibility" (Walter Kirn) -- including an introductory call to arms for twenty-first-century American literature, and a new appreciation of James Baldwin's genius for nonfiction.With potent insights into the storied tradition of American letters, and written with a "commitment to the dynamism and dimensions of language," American Audacity considers giants from the past (Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Harper Lee, Denis Johnson) , some of our most well-known living critics and novelists (Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, Katie Roiphe, Cormac McCarthy, Allan Gurganus, Elizabeth Spencer) , as well as those cultural-literary themes that have concerned Giraldi as an American novelist (bestsellers, the "problem" of Catholic fiction, the art of hate mail, and his viral essay on bibliophilia) .