Beginning in the 1890s, when American literature was still regarded as an offshoot of its British counterpart, Malcolm Bradbury traces the development of modernism in the works of James, Crane and Dreiser; he shows how in the 1920s, with Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner, the American novel came into its own; and he points to the emergence after the war of Black and Jewish writers and to recent experiments in the novel form: Heller, Pynchon, Vonnegut, Roth and others. Challenging the widely held view that the American novel was formed 'on native grounds', Professor Bradbury emphasizes always its continuing links with European fiction. His is the first book to offer an up-to-date critical account which students of the novel and of American culture will find indispensable.