The Machine in the Garden

Über

The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America is a 1964 work of literary criticism written by Leo Marx and published by Oxford University Press. The title of the book refers to a trope in American literature representing the interruption of pastoral scenery by technology due to the industrialization of America during the 19th and 20th century. For example, the trope notably appears in Henry David Thoreau's Walden when the whistling sound of a steam locomotive disrupts the natural landscape of Walden Pond. Marx uses this literary metaphor to illustrate the relationship between culture and technology in the United States as depicted in the work of American authors such as Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Frank Norris, Henry Adams, Henry James, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.