Harry Emerson Fosdick

This volume examines the persuasive ministry of the Reverend Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, analyzing his delivery, style, invention, and persuasion strategies. It is the first book to review Fosdick's oratory and explain his process of creating persuasive, effective sermons. It combines speech texts and an extensive bibliography with a critical interpretation of his famous homilies and addresses and it brings together in one concise text a definitive alphabetical calendar of speeches, a chronology of sermons keyed to his numerous books, and a detailed bibliography of works by and about Fosdick. This fascinating study provides a valuable new research tool in the study of rhetoric.

From Puritan times to the present, religious rhetoric has played an important role in the political and social life of the United States and has occasionally revealed the highest and lowest attainments of Americans. This volume, the second in a series of book-length studies on great American orators, examines the persuasive ministry of the Reverend Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick and analyzes his delivery, style, invention, and persuasive strategies. It is the first book to review Fosdick's oratory and explain his process of creating persuasive, effective sermons. It combines speech texts and an extensive bibliography with a critical interpretation of his famous homilies and addresses and it brings together in one concise text a definitive alphabetical calendar of speeches, a chronology of sermons keyed to his numerous books, and a detailed bibliography of works by and about Fosdick. Of special note is the inclusion of the famous Shall the Fundamentalists Win? sermon, with never-before-published additions and subtractions, and the ad lib additions and deletions from speech text and recordings of the Handling Life's Second-Bests sermon.

This fascinating study provides a valuable new research tool in the study of rhetoric.

HALFORD R. RYAN is Professor of Public Speaking at Washington and Lee University, Virginia. He is the author of American Rhetoric from Roosevelt to Reagan: A Collection of Speeches and Critical Essays, and Franklin D. Roosevelt's Rhetorical Presidency (Greenwood Press,1988). He has contributed extensively to the Quarterly Journal of Speech, the Presidential Studies Quarterly, and Speaker and Gavel.