Representations of the City in 20th-Century American Fiction

The city has been, since Theodore Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie,” one of the important loci of American fiction. As the city landscape developed, the relationship between city-dwellers and their urban practices has evolved and produced a narrative that attempts to fictionalize the experience of living and moving in the city, as well as inscribing the self in the frame of the emerging polis. Authors include Thomas Pynchon, Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Steven Millhauser, E.L. Doctorow, and others.