Stephen Wade offers a guide to major writers, their key works, and influential background factors including the postmodern, the master-narrative and metafiction. The themes, issues, and philosophies of writers including Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer are inter-related and wider literary and historical topics are alluded to and explained. Covering women's writing, novels, poetry, and drama, the author offers an informative and highly readable guide to the achievements of a key group of writers in twentieth-century American literature.