Birth, heyday, and seeming decline Reborn from the critical ashes The reluctant master text : the making and remakings of Hawthorne's The scarlet letter "Success" stories from Benjamin Franklin to the dawn of modernism Belated ascendancy : Fitzgerald to Faulkner, Dreiser to Wright and Bellow Up-from stories in hyphenated America : Ellison, Roth, and beyond Uncle Tom's cabin and its aftermaths The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and its others Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the wind, and literary interracialism North and South Toni Morrison's Beloved as culmination and augury Melville's Moby-Dick : from oblivion to great American novel The great American novel of early twentieth century breakdown : Dos Passos's U.S.A. or Steinbeck's The grapes of wrath? Late twentieth-century maximalism : Pynchon's Gravity's rainbow and its rainbow
