Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. CONTENTS ix
3. Preface xi
4. Acknowledgments xix
5. Introduction A Mirror in the Roadway 1
6. American Realism: The Sense of Time and Place
7. The City as Text: New York and the American Writer 17
8. The Second City (Chicago Writers) 36
9. Upton Sinclair and the Urban Jungle 41
10. A Radical Comedian (Sinclair Lewis) 51
11. The Magic of Contradictions: Willa Cather’s Lost Lady 60
12. A Different World: From Realism to Modernism
13. The Authority of Failure (F. Scott Fitzgerald) 77
14. Edmund Wilson: Three Phases 89
15. A Glint of Malice (Mary McCarthy) 96
16. Silence, Exile, Cunning 104
17. Hope against Hope: Orwell and the Future 126
18. Magical Realism 137
19. Postwar Fiction in Context: Genealogies
20. Sea Change: Céline in America 153
21. The Complex Fate of the Jewish American Writer 168
22. The Face in the Mirror: The Eclipse of Distance in Contemporary Fiction 184
23. Ordinary People: Carver, Ford, and Blue-Collar Realism 199
24. Textures of Memory 209
25. READING AND HISTORY
26. Damaged Literacy: The Decay of Reading 223
27. Finding the Right Words (Irving Howe) 234
28. The Social Uses of Fiction (Martha Nussbaum) 243
29. The Limits of Historicism: Literary Theory and Historical Understanding 248
30. Sources 259
31. Index 271