Delbanco explains how writers from the previous three centuries have described evil and attempted to defy and conquer it in a spiritual biography of America. He demonstrates how writers like Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln, Emerson and Melville, Thoreau and Whitman, Niebuhr and Trilling, Rachel Carson, and Susan Sontag recognized and combated evil. One way of discussing evil is to demonize and satanize it, viewing evil as a distant entity. However, Satan can be a representation of our own lack of love, as well as our tendency for jealously and hostility toward creation. We've always been torn between these two approaches to comprehending evil. ( )

In this highly acclaimed work of intellectual history, Andrew Delbanco, professor at Columbia University, argues that Americans, who once pictured their history as an epic struggle against the devil, have become indifferent to the reality of evil. Notes, index

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