Publisher's Synopsis
This book looks at the American literary Canon as the record of the Culture of the Nation, a way of describing the founding standards and how they have changed over two centuries to arrive at the America we see today. In a series of essays on important works of mainly American literature expanding into the visual media, these essays draw out the consistent threads that explain this group of people who are dominant in the world media, continuously throwing up conflicting moral and social standards to the consternation of outsiders. The literature traces social change in an artistic way that historians fail to see and gives some indication of the social movements and tensions that lie behind twentieth century America. In the writings of some of the nation's greatest literary artists, America is exposed for all to see.The contents include: ForewordThe Puritan Base and Nathaniel HawthorneThe Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorn - 1850Moby Dick - Herman Melville - 1851Sister Carrie - Theodore Dreiser - 1900Babbitt - Sinclair Lewis - 1922The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - 1926Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - 1932Long Day's Journey Into Night - Eugene O'Neill - 1940A Matter of Liberty Anthem - Ayn Rand - 1937The Descent into the BizarreHenderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow - 1959Catch 22 - Joseph Heller - 1961Dr Strangelove - Peter George - 1963Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut - 1963Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S Thompson - 1973Dogville - A film by Lars von Trier - 2003Dude, Where's My Car - Screenplay Philip Stark - 2001Afterword - New York - October 2018Epilogue - That Statue of LibertyMost of the writers selected had close links to New York, and a visit to New York with all these writers in attendance explained links back into the layers of the past. It is the literary past that explains America's attitudes to important social issues. This is a book of American books; the reading of an interested, and sometimes astonished outsider.
