A Companion to Twentieth-Century United States Fiction

Introduction 1
David Seed

Part I Genres, Traditions, and Subject Areas 9

1 U.S. Modernism 11
Susan Hegeman

2 The City Novel 24
James R. Giles

3 The Western 36
Neil Campbell

4 Postmodern U.S. Fiction 48
Hans Bertens

5 Modern Gothic 60
Marilyn Michaud

6 The Short Story 72
Mark Whalan

7 Southern Fiction 84
Sharon Monteith

8 Jewish American Fiction 96
David Brauner

9 "Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me": Modern African American Fiction 109
A. Robert Lee

10 U.S. Detective Fiction 122
Cynthia S. Hamilton

11 Hard-Boiled/Noir Fiction 135
Lee Horsley

12 Chicano Fiction 147
Helen Oakley

13 Black Humor Fiction 159
David Seed

14 Fiction on the Vietnam War 171
Philip Melling and Subarno Chattarji

15 The Rediscovery of the Native American 183
Joy Porter

16 Trash Fiction 195
Stacey Olster

Part II Selected Writers 207

17 Edith Wharton 209
Pamela Knights

18 Willa Cather's Entropology: Permanence and Transmission 219
Guy J. Reynolds

19 Gertrude Stein and Seriality 229
Ulla Haselstein

20 Ernest Hemingway 240
Peter Messent

21 John Dos Passos 251
Andrew Hook and David Seed

22 Thomas Wolfe 261
Anne Ricketson Zahlan

23 F. Scott Fitzgerald 271
William Blazek

24 Zora Neale Hurston 282
Lovalerie King

25 Theodore Dreiser 292
Clare Virginia Eby

26 William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha 302
Charles A. Peek

27 H.D.'s Visionary Prose 313
Rachel Connor

28 John Steinbeck 322
Brian Railsback

29 Raymond Chandler 332
Sean McCann

30 Richard Wright 342
Tara T. Green

31 Ralph Ellison 352
Rachel Farebrother

32 James Baldwin 361
D. Quentin Miller

33 Vladimir Nabokov 369
Barbara Wyllie

34 Norman Mailer 377
Michael K. Glenday

35 William S. Burroughs 386
Davis Schneiderman

36 Saul Bellow 395
Michael Austin

37 Gore Vidal 403
Heather Neilson

38 Joseph Heller 411
David M. Craig

39 Kurt Vonnegut 420
Jerome Klinkowitz

40 Thomas Pynchon 428
Ian Copestake

41 Ishmael Reed: American Iconoclast 436
Darryl Dickson-Carr

42 Joyce Carol Oates 445
Gavin Cologne-Brookes

43 Philip Roth 454
Timothy Parrish

44 The Fiction of John Updike: Timely and Timeless 462
Brian Keener

45 Maxine Hong Kingston 471
Helena Grice

46 Toni Morrison 480
Jennifer Terry

47 Alice Walker 489
Maria Lauret

48 Don DeLillo 497
Mark Osteen

49 Gerald Vizenor: Postindian Gamester 505
A. Robert Lee

50 Bret Easton Ellis 514
James Annesley

51 Amy Tan: "American Circumstances and Chinese Character" 522
Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson

52 Paul Auster: Poet of Solitude 530
Mark Brown

53 Bharati Mukherjee 539
Judie Newman

Index 547