• Chapter One: Chance, Narrative, and the Logic of the Cold War


• Chapter Two: Aesthetic Responses to Political Fictions: Pynchon and the


• Violence of Narrative Chance


• Chapter Three: The Zemblan Who Came in from the Cold: Nabokov's Cold War


• Chapter Four: Accidents Going Somewhere to Happen: African-American


• Self-Definition at Mid-Century


• Chapter Five: The Game Theory Narrative and the Myth of the


• National Security State


• Chapter Six: Their Country, Our Culture: The Persistence of the Cold War


• Coda: Cold War Meaning


• Bibliography


• Index

Steven Belletto is assistant professor of English and chair of the American Studies program at Lafayette College.

No Accident, Comrade argues that chance became a complex yet conflicted cultural signifier during the Cold War, when a range of thinkers--politicians, novelists, historians, biologists, sociologists, and others--contended that totalitarianism denied the very existence and operation of chance in the world.