What Is American Literature

The distinguished cultural critic Ilan Stavans explores the nation's identity through the prism of its books, from the indigenous past to the early settlers, the colonial period, the age of independence, its ascendance as a global power, and its shallow, fracturing response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The central motives that make the United States a flawed experiment-its celebration of do-it-yourself individualism, its purported exceptionalism, and its constitutional government based on chec...