When Achilles dons his armor, gods and readers alike know the outcome, as does the hero himself. But when the commoner becomes the hero, when, as Dr. Johnson remarked in 1750, the heroes of modern fiction are "leveled with the rest of the world"--now that's a different story. In this ambitious work, Stewart Justman ranges across Western literature from the Iliad and the Odyssey through Cervantes and Shakespeare to Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky to show how such a leveling not only changed the appearance of literature, but made possible new ways of constructing a tale.

Stewart Justman is a professor in the Liberal Studies Program at the University of Montana. He is the author of Fool's Paradise: The Unreal World of Pop Psychology (Ivan R. Dee, 2005), Seeds of Mortality (Ivan R. Dee, 2003), and The Springs of Liberty (1999) and The Psychological Mystique (1998), both published by Northwestern University Press. He is the recipient of the 2004 PEN Award for the Art of the Essay.