Desire and Disillusionment

Lawrence E. Hussman is Professor Emeritus of English at Wright State University. He is the author of numerous scholarly essays and influential, highly acclaimed books focusing on the fiction of Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris. Moreover, he has written two works of popular nonfiction, Counterterrorist and Danger’s Disciple. He holds a doctorate in English from the University of Michigan and, in addition to his academic career in the United States, he has taught American literature in Europe as a Fulbright scholar and as a visiting professor.

Contents: The Provenance of Longing – Preamble: American Desire and Literary Naturalism – Writers: Stephen Crane (1871–1900), Frank Norris (1870–1902), Kate Chopin (1851–1904), Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945), Jack London (1876–1916), Edith Wharton (1862–1937), Willa Cather (1873–1947), Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941), Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) Carson McCullers (1917–1967), Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980), F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), William Faulkner (1897–1962), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), John Steinbeck (1902–1968), John Dos Passos (1896–1970) Nathanael West (1903–1940), James T. Farrell (1904–1979), Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), Richard Wright (1908–1960), Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964), E. B. White (1899–1985), Walker Percy (1916–1990), Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977), J.D. Salinger (1919–2010), Truman Capote (1924–1984), Saul Bellow (1915–2005), Evan S. Connell (1924–2013), James Baldwin (1924–1987), Richard Yates (1926–1992), John Updike (1932–2009), Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Philip Roth (*1933), John Cheever (1912–1982), Wallace Stegner (1909–1993), William Styron (1925–2006), Toni Morrison (*1931), Cormac McCarthy (*1933), N. Scott Momaday (*1934), Annie Proulx (*11935), Don DeLillo (*1936), Raymond Carver (1938–1988), Joyce Carol Oates (*1938), Bharati Mukherjee (*1940), John Irving (*1942), Lee Smith (*1944), Jane Smiley (*1949), Jay McInerney (*1955), Elizabeth Strout (*1956), Junot Díaz (*1968) – Conclusion: Past as Future – Afterword: A Call to Contentment.