All by Myself

An acclaimed historian and extraordinary storyteller braids together the story of an emotion—loneliness—with the story of our nation.

From acclaimed historian and extraordinary storyteller David E. Shi comes All by Myself: Loneliness in American Culture. Spanning four centuries of migration, war, industrialization, and digital transformation, this groundbreaking work reveals how loneliness shaped the American experience as a persistent cultural inheritance that has become a civic problem as much as a personal one.

With reverent prose and meticulous insight, Shi explores how emotional isolation is embedded in the myths of self-reliance, the rituals of suburban conformity, and the illusions of digital age. The book traces that tension through the lives and works of figures as varied as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, Dorothea Lange, May Sarton, Edward Hopper, Walker Evans, Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, and David Foster Wallace. Their stories illuminate the emotional undercurrents of American life while revealing loneliness not solely as personal weakness, but as a quiet form of endurance and spur to creativity.