The Stammering Century
Gilbert Seldes, Greil Marcus (introduction)Gilbert Seldes, the author of The Stammering Century, writes:
This book is not a record of the major events in American history during
the nineteenth century. It is concerned with minor movements, with the
cults & manias of that period. Its personages are fanatics, & radicals,
& mountebanks. Its intention is to connect these secondary movements
& figures with the primary forces of the century, & to supply a
background in American history for the Prohibitionists & the Pentecostalists;
the diet-faddists & the dealers in mail-order Personality; the play censors
& the Fundamentalists; the free-lovers & eugenists; the cranks &
possibly the saints. Sects, cults, manias, movements, fads, religious
excitements, & the relation of each of these to the others & to the
orderly progress of America are the subject.
The subject is of course as timely at the beginning of the twenty-first century as when the book first appeared in 1928. Seldes’s fascinated and often sympathetic accounts of dreamers, rogues, frauds, sectarians, madmen, & geniuses from Jonathan Edwards to the messianic murderer Matthias have established The Stammering Century not only as a lasting contribution to American history but as a classic in its own right.