The novelist as witness to history [Thomas Wolfe] -- Knockers and boosters [Sinclair Lewis] -- The pleasure domes of West Egg and Tarmes [F. Scott Fitzgerald] -- The decay of Yoknapatawpha County [William Faulkner] -- Lethal gases in Altamont and Libya Hill [Thomas Wolfe] -- The lost paradise [John Steinbeck] -- The rebels [John Dos Passos] -- The world of Fifty-eighth Street [James T. Farrell] -- The volcano of anger [Richard Wright] -- Fiction as history.
