This volume explores the emergence of modernism in the United States. David Minter provides a cultural history of the American novel from World War I to the Great Depression, Rafia Zafar tells the story of the Harlem Renaissance, and Werner Sollors examines canonical as well as hitherto unknown immigrant writing.

Acknowledgments; Introduction Sacvan Bercovitch and Jonathan Fortescue; I. A cultural history of the modern American novel David Minter: Prologue; Part I. A Dream City, Lyric Years, and a Great War: 1. The novel as ironic reflection; 2. Confidence and uncertainty in The Portrait of a Lady; 3. Lines of expansion; 4. Four contemporaries and closing of the west; 5. Chicago's 'Dream City'; 6. Frederick Jackson Turner in the dream city; 7. Henry Adams's Education and the grammar of progress; 8. Jack London's career and popular discourse; 9. Innocence in the 'Lyric Years': 1900–1916; 10. The Armory Show of 1913 and the decline of innocence; 11. The play of hope and despair; Part II. Fiction in a Time of Plenty: 12. When the war was over: the return of detachment; 13. The 'Jazz Age' and the 'Lost Generation' revisited; 14. The perils of plenty, or how the Twenties acquired a paranoid tilt; 15. Disenchantment, flight, and the rise of professionalism in an age of plenty; 16. Class, power, and violence in a new age; 17. The fear of feminization and the logic of modest ambitions; 18. Marginality and authority/race, gender and region; 19. War as metaphor: the example of Ernest Hemingway; Part III. The Fate of Writing During the Great Depression: 20. The discovery of poverty and the return of commitment; 21. The search for 'culture' as a form of commitment; 22. Three responses: the examples of Henry Miller, Djuna Barnes, and John Dos Passos; 23. Cowboys, detectives and other tough-guy antinomians: residual individualism and hedged commitments; 24. The search for shared purpose: struggles on the left; 25. Documentary literature and the disarming of dissent; 26. The southern renaissance: forms of reaction and innovation; 27. History and novels/novels and history: the example of William Faulkner; II. Fictions of the Harlem Renaissance Rafia Zafar: 1. A new Negro?; 2. Black Manhattan; 3. Avatars and Manifestos; 4. At home and homeless in Harlem; 5. New Negro, New Woman; 6. Thurman and Nugent; 7. Minor writers; 8. Hurston and Wright; 9. Black Modernism; III. Ethnic Modernism Werner Sollors: Introduction; 1. Gertrude Stein and 'Negro Sunshine'; 2. Ethnic lives and 'lifelets'; 3. Ethnic themes, modern themes; 4. Mary Antin: progressive optimism against odds; 5. Who is 'American'?; 6. American languages; 7. 'All the past we leave behind'? Ole E. Rølvaag and the immigrant trilogy; 8. Modernism, ethnic labeling; and the quest for wholeness: Jean Toomer's new American race; 9. Freud, Marx, hard-boiled; 10. Hemingway spoken here; 11. Henry Roth: ethnicity, modernity, and modernism; 12. The clock, the salesman and the beast; 13. Was modernism anti-totalitarian; 14. Facing the extreme; 15. Grand central terminal.