Includes bibliographical references and index.

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 Benjamin Franklin to the dawn of modernism -- Belated ascendancy : Fitzgerald to Faulkner, Dreiser to Wright and Bellow -- Up-from stories in 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!, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the wind, and literary interracialism North and South -- Toni Morrison's Beloved as culmination and augury -- Melville's Moby-Dick : from oblivion to great American novel -- The great American novel of early twentieth century breakdown : Dos Passos's U.S.A. or Steinbeck's The grapes of wrath? -- Late twentieth-century maximalism : Pynchon's Gravity's rainbow and its rainbow.

Taking in the full sweep of national fiction, this title explains why this supposedly antiquated idea continues to thrive. It shows that four G A N "scripts" are keys to the dynamics of American literature and identity - and to the myth of a nation perpetually under construction