Introduction: a short history of macho criticism -- "Healthy nerves and sturdy physiques": remaking the male body of literary culture in the 1930s -- Doughfaces, eggheads, and softies: gendered epithets and American literary culture in the 1940s -- Highbrows and lowbrows: squares, beats, hipsters, white negroes, new critics, and American literary culture in the 1950s -- Reforming the hard body: the old left, the counterculture, and the masculine kulturkampf of the 1960s -- The gender upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s: the Black Panthers, gay liberation, and radical feminism -- Epilogue: the end of innuendo.