Mr. Coale's long interviews and conversations with John Cheever, John Gardner, William Styron, and others have provided insights and perspectives that make this book particularly valuable to students of contemporary American literature. Coale links contemporary writers to an on-going American romantic tradition, represented by such earlier authors as Melville, Harold Frederic, Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Carson McCullers. He explores the distinctly Manichean matter of much American romance, linking it to America's Puritan past and to the almost schizophrenic dynamics of American culture in general. Finally, he reexamines the post-modernist writers in light of Hawthorne's "shadow" and shows that, however similar they may be in some ways, they differ remarkably from the previous American romantic tradition.