We know who the Founding Fathers were economically and politically, but who founded America culturally and spiritually? For John Gardner, it was not until the generation after Jefferson and Adams that the revolutionary principles of American spiritual life were laid down. For him, Emerson, Melville, and Whitman speak for the spirit as it lives in America.This is not so much a work of literary criticism as a meditative attempt to allow the ideas of these founding fathers to be thought anew. The result is that we hear these heralds of the spirit as if for the first time. Their words, presented with uncanny directness, become prophetic of America today.