  Santayana was among the leaders in transforming the American literary canon, dislodging the dominant Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Holmes, Bryant canon. Santayana’s essay “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy” (presented to the Philosophical Union of the University of California in 1911) greatly affected Van Wyck Brooks’s America’s Coming-of-Age, a book that set the tone for modernism. Brooks drew on Santayana’s essay, adapting Santayana’s idea of two Americas to fit his notion of an America split between highbrow and lowbrow culture.