The Complete American Fantasies

“Fantasies to me, as I wrote in an earlier 1983 edition of American Fantasies, are the active, visionary links between reality and imagination as my characters pursue their destinies. Although we pretend to be a pragmatic, materialistic country, our fantasies, once suppressed by tradition, peer increasingly through the media into our private and public behavior. In this sense fantasies are not daydreams—they are the invisible and visible strands of our lives, the dramatic, often incredible images that dominate us, whose actions we pursue.

As a playwright, too, I have largely struggled to restore dramatic characters to poetry, people who have largely disappeared as fiction, nonfiction and drama have usurped from poetry its narrative function. To fit the wide–ranging subjects of this sequence, I have employed a variety of traditional and experimental forms. If the sequence is the major narrative form of our time, it requires an unusual range of forms to project the special rhythms and unique quality of the character’s lives.

In the United States, as our fantasies move to condition us, we must move to separate the creative from the destructive fantasies, and I hope this book will help to focus that necessity in these critical times.”

—James Schevill, from the Preface to The Complete American Fantasies