There is some hubris in daring to define the key features of a century’s worth of novels, but Edwin Frank admits his book isn ...

Great writers in the Trump years need to open up their eyes to take in all of America — not just echo the literary and ...

An ambitious new book sees hidden currents linking writers as disparate as Colette, Thomas Mann, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, and Chinua Achebe.

Ironic, given so much of the 20th-century political agenda was focused on dismantling the threat of communism. The reality of the Great American Novel is that it puts the country and all its flaws ...

Surveying the relationship between American politics and the twentieth-century novel, this volume analyzes how political movements, ideas, and events shaped the American novel. It also shows how those ...

Highlights among the year’s novels, short-story collections and works in translation, as selected by the staff of The Washington Post’s Book World.

In her 1937 novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Zora Neale Hurston tells the story of Janie, a woman trying to define ...

This is the second volume in Christopher Bigsby's critical history of the important American dramatists and theatrical movements in the twentieth-century. Volume 1 brought the story to 1940 and ...