Perry Miller
An Excerpt from Errand into the Wilderness /1
R. W. B. Lewis
An Excerpt from The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy,
and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century /27
D. H. Lawrence
An Excerpt from Studies in Classic American Literature /71
Henry Nash Smith
An Excerpt from Virgin Land: The American West as
Symbol and Myth /107
A. N. Kaul
An Excerpt from The American Vision: Actual and Ideal Society
in Nineteenth-Century Fiction /158
Leslie Fiedler
An Excerpt from Love and Death in the American Novel /197
Richard Chase
An Excerpt from The American Novel and Its Tradition /282
F. O. Matthiessen
An Excerpt from American Renaissance: Art and Expression in
the Age of Emerson and Whitman /314
Charles Feidelson
An Excerpt from Symbolism and American Literature /352
Daniel Hoffman
An Excerpt from Form and Fable in American Fiction /1
Van Wyck Brooks
An Excerpt from America’s Coming of Age /59
Frederick John Hoffman
An Excerpt from The Twenties: American Writing in the
Postwar Decade /67
Richard Bridgman
An Excerpt from The Colloquial Style in America /101
Daniel Aaron
An Excerpt from Writers on the Left /146
Alfred Kazin
An Excerpt from On Native Grounds /172
Charles Burt Harris
An Excerpt from Contemporary American Novelists of the
Absurd /234
APPENDICES
Kenneth Burke
“Psychology and Form” /259
Newton Arvin
“Individualism and the American Writer” /272
Edmund Wilson
“Marxism and Literature” /279
Lionel Trilling
“Freud and Literature” /297
William Barrett
“The End of Modem Literature: Existentialism
and Crisis” /321
David Perkins
Contemporary American Poetry /332
C. W. E. Bigsby
Twentieth-Century American Drama /358
Modem American Drama /379