A prolific critic, author, essayist and journalist, "America and the Young Intellectual" is the book that launched Harold Stearns as a public figure. The message in this book could not have come at a better time, and even now, a century later, it is still timely. Frustrated by the state of the American society and what he saw as America's oppression of its free spirit, Stearns wrote this book as a motivation to young American intellectuals to break away from the status quo. In this book, Stearns ask a crucial question, "How can democracy, as we understand it today, with its iron repression of the free spirit, its monotonous standardisation of everything, learn to cherish an intellectual aristocracy without which any nation runs the risk of becoming a civilisation of the commonplace and the second-rate?" After reading this book, you'll find that the answer to this question lies in the heart of every young and intellectual American.