The dream of the great American novel

Birth, heyday, and seeming decline

Reborn from the critical ashes

The reluctant master text : the making and remakings of Hawthorne's The scarlet letter

"Success" stories from Franklin to the dawn of modernism

Belated ascendancy : Fitzgerald to Faulkner, Dreiser to Wright and Bellow

Up-from narrative to hyphenated America : Ellison, Roth, and beyond

Uncle Tom's cabin and its aftermaths

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and its others

Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Mitchell's Gone with the wind, and literary interracialism North and South

Morrison's Beloved as culmination and augury

Moby-Dick : from oblivion to great American novel

The great American novel of twentieth-century breakdown : Dos Passos's U.S.A.

or Steinbeck's Grapes of wrath?

Late twentieth-century maximalism : Pynchon's Gravity's rainbow

and its rainbow.