This astute guide to the literary achievements of American novelists in the twentieth century places their work in its historical context and offers detailed analyses of landmark novels based on a clearly laid out set of tools for analyzing narrative form. * Includes a valuable overview of twentieth- and early twenty-first century American literary history * Provides analyses of numerous core texts including The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man, The Sound and the Fury, The Crying of Lot 49 and Freedom * Relates these individual novels to the broader artistic movements of modernism and postmodernism * Explains and applies key principles of rhetorical reading * Includes numerous cross-novel comparisons and contrasts