"In the late 1950s, Random House editor Jason Epstein would talk jazz with authors like Ralph Ellison while pouring drinks in his office. By the late 1960s, he was poring over profit-and-loss statements. What happened? Beginning in 1965 after RCA bought Random House and then with subsequent purchases of publishing companies by multinational conglomerates, the business of publishing started to change. With more of an emphasis on rationalization, many...

"With novels by Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead, Philip Roth, Julia Alvarez, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, historical fiction has become a, if not the dominant genre in literary fiction. In the 1980s and 1990s, the American literary field fundamentally reorganized itself around historical fiction and the cultural, pedagogical, and political value of history. This decisive turn toward the past has both motivated, and been motivated by, the increasing recognition...

"Many of the heralded writers of the 20th century--including Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner--first made their mark in the 1920s, while established authors like Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis produced some of their most important works during this period. Classic novels such as The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, Elmer Gantry, and The Sound and the Fury not only mark prodigious advances in American fiction,...

In Writing After War, John Limon develops a theory of the relationship of war in general to literature in general, in order to make sense of American literary history in particular. Applying the work of war theorists Carl von Clausewitz and Elaine Scarry, John Limon argues that The Iliad inaugurates Western literature on the failure of war to be duel-like, to have a beautiful form. War's failure is literature's justification. American literary history...