| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Leisure Ethic: Work and Play in American Literature, 1840–1940. By William A. Gleason. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. xx, 446 pp. Cloth, $60.00, isbn 0-8047-3399-6. Paper, $19.95, isbn 0-8047-3434-8.)

By comparing and contrasting a series of works of American literature with the concurrently developing theories of productive leisure, William A. Gleason's monograph analyzes the decay of the work ethic and the emergence of a leisure ethic between 1840 and 1940. Gleason's study examines the fundamental question of how to construct a sense of personal identity during eras of rapid changes in the understanding of work and leisure. Progressive Era play theorists serve as the book's straw men, although the first works examined were written a half century before G. Stanley Hall and Luther Gulick and their colleagues first delivered their strategies and arguments for constructing personal meaning from supervised, active recreation. Gleason's arguments achieve greater clarity with the entrance of the play theorists as the chief foil to demonstrate how the selected writers based their critiques. . . .

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