In Nobody's Home, Arnold Weinstein defies the current trends of cultural studies and postmodern criticism to create a sweeping account of American fiction. From Hawthorne's "Wakefield" to Don deLillo's novels, the book pursues the idea of freedom of speech in the work of American writers. Though many contemporary critics emphasize the ways in which we are bound by the limitations of culture, history and language, Weinstein sees the issue of freedom (to speak, to create a self, to overcome repression) as central to the enterprise of American fiction in the past two centuries. Weinstein brings together canonical American texts by Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Twain, Anderson, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway with contemporary fiction by John Hawkes, Toni Morrison, Robert Coover and Don deLillo. This broad historical continuum is charted in a critical style that is lucid and engaging. The book's superb readings of individual texts, together form a coherent and inspiring vision of the great achievements of American fiction.

Focuses on some of the deepest instincts of American life and culture -- individual liberty, freedom of speech, constructing a life -- Arnold Weinstein brilliantly sketches the remarkable career of the American self over the past one hundred fifty years in major works by authors as Herman Melville and Mark Twain to contemporary authors such as Toni Morrison and Robert Coover.

New life is breathed into novels and stories which in most cases have been elaborately examined by a succession of earlier critics....Weinstein not only has a masterful command of the texts he deals with, but also of the criticism which has accumulated about them....Nobody's Home is a stimulating, ambitious book which fulfills virtually all one's expectations about how a comparatist should go about assessing a century and a half of American fiction.