For any outsider, the literature of a place is the key to understanding it. The work of the most respected writers taken over a long period of time represents a history of a culture that historians could never hope to document. There are no facts, no dates, no actual events, just imagined lives lived in print for the purpose of describing a culture with a subtlety that facts and reasoning could never reveal.

There is an added benefit. Fiction can be crafted in an artistic way that real life could never be, using old literary devices of metaphor and symbolism to elevate the ordinary to the extraordinary. A story about whaling becomes a tale of man's obsession with the domination of nature, a story about a woman's loving innocence becomes a national critique of the morality of religion, and the setting of a story in a particular time or place does not restrict it to that time or place. Fiction allows the author the freedom to travel time and place as he likes and take the reader on journeys he could never imagine, but those journeys have the potential to add to understanding. The very act of imagining an alternate life is to expand one's own, and the very best of literature, the canon that survives over long periods, allows a diligent reader to experience wisdom in many forms, something that is rare and hard to find in real life.

The writers leave us with a cultural record in the same way that the painters leave a pictorial record, and just as our understanding of ancient Greece is based on the historians, that culture is given its flesh and colour, its humour and drama, by its writers of fiction.

The essays in this collection focus in on works of the American literary canon in an endeavour to allow those people to explain themselves. Three other works from across the Atlantic are also included because of their particular relevance, and the discussion even expands to include important cinema works that have been crafted with obvious literary techniques.
Australians feel after the last seventy years, that we have an interest in this nation we have respected and admired, but we have always struggled to understand why a nation of people who are so similar to us in many ways are also so different. Differences in origins is not enough. Historians with all their dates and facts can describe a society in great detail, but they struggle to explain the culture that inhabits it. It is the contention of these pages that it is the literary canon that does this.