This collection provides crucial contexts for interpreting the literature of the 1940s, showing how writers intervened in the global struggles of the decade.

Part I. The United States in the World: 1. Why We Fight: contending narratives of the Second World War Christopher Vials; 2. Human rights in American political discourse Glenn Mitoma; 3. Fictions of anti-semitism and the beginning of Holocaust literature Josh Lambert; 4. The fatal machine: the postwar imperial state and the radical novel Benjamin Balthaser; 5. Antifascism as a political grammar and cultural force Christopher Vials; 6. From confession to exposure: transitions in anticommunist literature Alex Goodall; 7. The contested origins of the Atomic Age and the Cold War Christian Appy; Part II. Emergent Publics: 8. Cross currents: WWII and the increasing visibility of race Bill Mullen; 9. Good Asian/bad Asian: Asian American racial formation Floyd Cheung; 10. Social realism, the Ghetto, and African American literature James Smethurst; 11. From factory to home? The crisis in the gendered division of labor Julia L. Mickenberg; 12. Public excursions in fierce truth-telling: literary cultures and homosexuality Aaron Lecklider; 13. Resurgence: conservatives organize against the new deal Kathy Olmsted; Part III. Media and Genre: 14. Late modernisms, latent realisms: the politics of literary interpretation Sarah Ehlers; 15. The city in the literary imagination Sean McCann; 16. Noir and the ebb of radical hope Alan Wald; 17. Narrating the war Philip Beidler; 18. Paperbacks and the literary marketplace Erin Smith; 19. Literary radicals in Radio's public sphere Judith Smith; 20. The state cultural apparatus: federal funding of arts and letters Joan Saab.