AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THE AMERICAN EMPIRE: From Political Fiction to Faction to Fact
AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THE AMERICAN EMPIRE: From Political Fiction to Faction to Fact

Summary/Abstract: In 1961 a first novel by an unknown writer won the National Book Award, edging another first novel by a then unknown writer. But while few today remember the winner, Walker Percy’s "Moviegoer", the runner-up looms bigger than ever before. With tens of millions copies sold worldwide, with translations from Finnish to Chinese, "Catch-22" boasts entries in English- language dictionaries from "Webster’s" to the "OED". A modern classic and a staple of college curricula, it is also—despite its pacifist tenor—a required reading at the US Air Force Academy (which in 1986 even sponsored an academic symposium to mark the quarter-centenniary of its publication).This last accolade is less odd when you consider that, for the 1970 blockbuster film adaptation, Hollywood assembled not only a cast led by Alan Arkin, Orson Welles, Martin Sheen, Martin Balsam, John Voight, and Bob Newhart, but a bomber fleet ranked twelfth largest in the world. Much of this enduring success owes to Heller’s reader-friendly aesthetics: acerbic humour, immaculate if complex plotting, a pleiade of oddball characters, and an almost counter-cultural iconoclasm. But, at the end of the day, the even weightier reasons have do with history than with aesthetics.

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