This book began as an extended essay commissioned as part of the Cambridge History of American Literature, and some of it will appear in that history. In accord with my original assignment, the focus is on “canonical” novelists from roughly 1890 to 1940. Like other contributors to the project, however, I was given considerable latitude in defining my task; and as I began thinking historically about novels of the period, I began reaching back in time and out in several directions, trying to trace two sets of reciprocal relations – one among novels that seemed to me crucial (from Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady [1881] to William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses [1942]) and another between novels and a series of cultural events (Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, Chicago's Columbian Exposition, and New York's Armory Show, to cite a few early examples) that seemed to me to function as cultural texts in which questions having to do with history, culture, society, art, and literature, and thus with class, race, ethnicity, gender, family, and nationality, were being reflected upon and acted out. I hope to show that we can clarify the social, cultural meanings of novels by examining them in the contexts from which they emerged as “stories” worth telling and retelling, and that these contexts are broadly cultural rather than exclusively literary – that novels belong to and remain parts of the extended process that embraces everything we do to nature by asserting ourselves as expressive creatures and everything we do to ourselves by engaging in this transformative process.