Traditions, voices, and dreams

Traditions, Voices, and Dreams offers the interested reader ample testimony that the American Novel is alive, well, and steadily breaking new ground. These collected essays also provide a new text for Contemporary American Novel classes. Teachers and students should find useful and stimulating a book that puts into perspective such contemporary masters as John Barth, Saul Bellow, E. L. Doctorow, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, Flannery O'Connor, Cynthia Ozick, Walker Percy, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, William Styron, John Updike, and Kurt Vonnegut and the strikingly sectarian John Kennedy Toole. Also discussed are such recent and important ethnic and women writers as Maya Angelou, Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, Marilyn Robinson, Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughan, and Alice Walker. . Wishing to be as inclusive and varied as possible, editors Melvin J. Friedman and Ben Siegel invited fourteen outstanding critic/scholars of contemporary American fiction to place in literary and cultural perspective their novelists and themes of choice. The resulting volume's one true predecessor would be Joseph J. Waldmeir's Recent American Fiction: Some Critical Views (1963), in which this volume