Beginning in the 1890s when American literature was still regarded as an offshoot of its British counterpart, Malcolm Brabury traces the development of modernism in the works of James, Crane and Dreiser; he shows how in the 1920s with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, the American vel came into its own; and he points to the emergence after the was of black and Jewish writers and to recent experiments in the vel form: Heller, Pynchon, Vonnegut, Roth, and others. Challenging the widely held view that the American vel was formed on native grounds , the author emphasizes its continuing links with European fiction.