This volume analyzes how political movements, ideas, and events shaped the American novel.

Offers an authoritative overview of American fiction from 1900-1950 focusing on the literature that developed out of the social, cultural, and political changes, which occurred in the first part of 20th century. This title examines the period's formative events, such as the Depression and the two World Wars, and their representation in literature.

Unique in its scope of coverage, this reference work provides students and scholars interested in researching modern American leftist and working-class culture with a convenient starting place for examining American leftist and working-class novels of the past century. The book begins with a brief historical survey of the development of this cultural phenomenon. It then offers brief descriptions of selected critical, historical, and theoretical works that are a useful background to the novels. The bulk of the book comprises detailed alphabetically arranged discussions of more than 170 modern American novels of the Left, along with brief considerations of more than 240 other works. The novels discussed in detail include a number of works by major American authors, including John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, and Upton Sinclair. Also covered are works by a number of other writers in the rich but neglected tradition of American leftist literature. These writers naturally include 1930s proletarian novelists such as Mike Gold, Agnes Smedley, Myra Page, Josephine Herbst, Tillie Olsen, Meridel Le Sueur, Jack Conroy, and Thomas Bell. But they also include figures ranging from early twentieth-century socialists such as I. K. Friedman and Leroy Scott, to African American novelists such as Richard Wright and Toni Morrison, to Chicano writers such as Alejandro Morales and Americo Paredes.

Stacey Margolis rethinks a key chapter in American literary history, challenging the idea that nineteenth-century American culture was dominated by an ideology of privacy that defined subjects in terms of their intentions and desires. She reveals how writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Henry James depicted a world in which characters could only be understood—and, more importantly, could only understand themselves—through their public actions. She argues that the social issues that nineteenth-century novelists analyzed—including race, sexuality, the market, and the law—formed integral parts of a broader cultural shift toward understanding individuals not according to their feelings, desires, or intentions, but rather in light of the various inevitable traces they left on the world. Margolis provides readings of fiction by Hawthorne and James as well as Susan Warner, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and Pauline Hopkins. In these writers’ works, she traces a distinctive novelistic tradition that viewed social developments—such as changes in political partisanship and childhood education and the rise of new politico-legal forms like negligence law—as means for understanding how individuals were shaped by their interactions with society. The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature adds a new level of complexity to understandings of nineteenth-century American culture by illuminating a literary tradition full of accidents, mistakes, and unintended consequences—one in which feelings and desires were often overshadowed by all that was external to the self.

Critiques such stories as "The House of Mirth" and "Ethan Frome," while providing biographical information about this talented author.