Nobody's Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to Delillo

Focuses on some of the deepest instincts of American life and culture -- individual liberty, freedom of speech, constructing a life -- Arnold Weinstein brilliantly sketches the remarkable career of the American self over the past one hundred fifty years in major works by authors as Herman Melville and Mark Twain to contemporary authors such as Toni Morrison and Robert Coover.