Contents

About This Volume, Keith Newlin

Critical Contexts

The Rise and Fall of the American Dream: From The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin to Death of a Salesman, Donna Packer-Kinlaw

“To Go into Partnership”: Gender, Class, Ethnicity, and the American Dream in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Linda Kornasky

Meaningful Work and Self-Determination: The American Dream for Women, Carol Loranger

Why Speak of American Stories as Dreams?, Cara Erdheim

Critical Essays

The American Dream, the Western Frontier, and the Literature of Expansion, Steven Frye

Dreiser and the Dream, Roark Mulligan

The Great Gatsby and the American Dream, James Nagel

Survival and Transcendence: The Jewish American Immigrant and the American Dream, James R. Giles

Blurring the Color Line: Race and the American Dream in The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Passing, and Cane, Andrew Vogel

After Auschwitz, Connecticut?: Dreams and Disappointments in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Literature, Tiffany Gilbert

The Assimilated and Unassimilated in Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant, Quentin Martin

American Indians and the American Dream: “A World in Which We Had No Part,” Lee Schweninger

Mexican Americans Encounter the American Dream: George Washington Gómez, Ramón J. Guerra

Resources

Additional Works on the American Dream

Bibliography

About the Editor

Contributors

Index