The American Mystery

A collection of essays by the late Tony Tanner on a wide range of key American authors.

Foreword Edward Said; I. Introduction A. F. Bell; 1. 'Lustres and condiments': Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Essays; 2. 'A summer in the country': Nathaniel Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance; 3. 'Nothing but cakes and ale': Herman Melville's White-Jacket; 4. 'All interweavingly working together': Herman Melville's Moby-Dick; 5. Melville's counterfeit detector: The Confidence Man; 6. Henry James: the story in it - and the story without it; 7. Henry James's 'saddest story': The Other House; 8. Henry James and Shakespeare; 9. 'Feelings of middle life': William Dean Howells's Indian Summer; 10. 'The story of the moon that never rose': F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby; 11. Don DeLillo and 'the American mystery': Underworld; 12. 'The rubbish-tip for subjunctive hopes': Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon.