The Flowering of New England by Van Wyck Brooks
Published 1936 · 190,000 words · about 11 hours at an average pace · History, Essays & Criticism, Biography
How hard is The Flowering of New England to read?
The Flowering of New England scores 34 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
- Brooks writes in clear, polished 1930s prose and sprinkles in period terms such as Transcendentalism, Unitarian and Brook Farm. Nothing is obscure for a general reader. It sits near The Great Gatsby in accessibility but draws on more nineteenth-century idiom.
- Sentence structure: 42 out of 100
- Sentences are mostly balanced and moderate in length, with occasional long lists of names and places. The anecdotal flow is easy to follow and far easier than a theoretical text.
- Abstraction: 38 out of 100
- Brooks anchors his picture in concrete scenes: Emerson's lectures, Hawthorne's Salem years, Thoreau's cabin. Ideas like Transcendentalism and reform appear through people and events rather than argument.
- Information density: 62 out of 100
- Dozens of writers, towns, books and quarrels pass through every chapter, and the book covers fifty years of New England life. The density comes from names and facts, though the storytelling pace keeps it manageable.
How The Flowering of New England is regarded
The Flowering of New England holds a literary regard score of 66 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.