AMERICAN LITERATURE

American Literature: 1865-1914

American Literature: 1865-1914

One of the sustaining ideologies of the United States is that America is a home for the homeless, a nation built on immigration and migration. Therefore, it is not surprising that the mythology of the homeless figure is a significant part of the American cultural imagination, and that prominent images of displacement, exile, and drifting exist in every period of American literature. Homelessness is a central theme in some of the canonical works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, including the writings of Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, ...