In this coherent, intense study, Naomi Lebowitz defines and explores what she calls "the philosophy of literary amateurism." With persuasive readings of the works of major international writers of the Western tradition, Lebowitz passionately argues that all great writing is guided by a moral and temperamental complexity and richness.

Lebowitz defines literary amateurism as an attitude of anti-professionalism that allows a writer to engage and represent experience with a vulnerable subtlety and imagination.

Citing Montaigne as the father of this philosophy, Lebowitz uncovers the moral implications of aesthetic postures in those who have used his patterns - Emerson, Balzac, Dickens, Henry James, Conrad, William James, Santayana, Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, and Italo Svevo - comparing their work to that of more self-consciously professional writers, wary of seductive adulterations of art by life, like Flaubert, Taine, Rousseau, and Proust.

In a hyper-professional age of criticism marked by formulaic and political diction and syntax, Lebowitz tries to recover the amateur perspective naturally carried by great literature's form and play. The Philosophy of Literary Amateurism makes a lasting contribution to the recovery of more generous relations between life and literature.