A preface in two parts; Acknowledgements; A note on sources, citations and bibliography; Part I. A Dream City, Lyric Years and a Great War: 1. The novel as ironic reflection; 2. Confidence and uncertainty in The Portrait of a Lady; 3. Lines of expansion; 4. Four contemporaries and the closing of the West; 5. Chicago's 'dream city'; 6. Frederick Jackson Turner in the dream city; 7. Henry Adam's Education and the grammar of progress; 8. Jack London's career and popular discourse; 9. Innocence and revolt in the 'lyric years': 1900-1916; 10. The Armory show of 1913 and the decline of innocence; 11. The play of hope and despair; 12. The Great War and the fate of writing; Part II. Fiction in a Time of Plenty: 13. When the war was over: the return of detachment; 14. The 'jazz age' and the 'lost generation' revisited; 15. The perils of plenty, or how the twenties acquired a paranoid tilt; 16. Disenchantment, flight and the rise of professionalism in an age of plenty; 17. Class, power and violence in a new age; 18. The fear of feminisation and the logic of modest ambition; 19. Marginality and authority/race, gender and region; 20. War as metaphor: the example of Ernest Hemingway; Part III. The Fate of Writing during the Great Depression: 21. The discovery of poverty and the return of commitment; 22. The search for 'culture' as a form of commitment; 23. Three responses: the examples of Henry Miller, Djuna Barnes and John Dos Passos; 24. Cowboys, detectives and other tough-guy antinomians: residual individualism and hedged commitments; 25. The search for shared purpose: struggles on the Left; 26. Documentary literature and the disarming of dissent; 27. The Southern Renaissance: forms of reaction and innovation; 28. History and novels/novels and history: the example of William Faulkner; Notes; Bibliographical notes; Bibliography; Index.