Unlike. many European writers, the American novelist rarely speaks of class. As Lionel Trilling once observed, "the great characters of American fiction, such, say, as Captain Ahab and Natty Bumppo, tend to be mythic.. .and their very freedom from class gives them a large and glowing generality." In the United States, he believed, "the real ba- sis of the [English] novel has never ex- isted-that is, the tension between a middle class and an aristocracy."
American novelists...