Brian Lee's study of American fiction from 1865 to 1940 draws on a wealth of material by, amongst others, Twain, James, Dreiser, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner. Though the works of these writers have been closely scrutinised by postwar critics in Europe and America, few attempts have yet been made to utilise the new critical approaches and theories in the service of literary history. Brian Lee does so in this book, relating the writers of the period - both major and minor - to its patterns of immense economic, social and intellectual change.