The American suburbs are not what they were. Since the late 1960s, economic deregulation, the decentralisation of employment and shifts in immigration policy have been reshaping the nation's metropolitan areas. Demographic and social change, from African American suburbanisation to the rise of dual-income households, has made anachronisms of many commonplace assumptions about the suburbs. Much of suburbia today resembles a vast, bewildering patchwork. Closer scrutiny of its quotidian operations, however, reveals complexes of nodes, conduits and territories, and interactions taking place at local, regional and global scales. The dynamism and diversity of suburban spatiality has licensed a neologising zeal: terms such as ‘technoburbs’, ‘edge cities’ and ‘ethnoburbs’ jostle for attention as commentators attempt to make sense of emergent forms and processes. This proliferating nomenclature arguably describes a post-suburban – or even post-metropolitan – present in which the traditional polarities of city and suburb no longer serve as useful paradigms, whether for planners and developers or activists for social justice.

Several official metrics, however, continue to recognise ‘suburban’ as a category, and register that an ever-increasing proportion of the nation's population live and work in suburbs. Further, in the US, suburbs usually designate discrete political entities that are fiscally independent from nearby urban municipalities. Authoritative definitions of place, of course, do not always correspond with local perceptions and practices. Nevertheless, the boundaries between cities and suburbs, as well as an appreciation of the distinct qualities of different kinds of settlement, undoubtedly inform the everyday stories that people tell about the places they inhabit. Such stories, in turn, help reify place. Where there is social conflict, rival claims to places generate competing stories. Thus in metropolitan areas in the US, place-making is so often predicated on a sense of the suburban, though both within particular and across different communities that sense is rarely unitary. One thing, though, is certain: no one trying to narrate a broader story about the American suburbs will be able to make much sense of these places without first appreciating their composite, interconnected, evolving and contested nature.

This book examines literary and cultural material produced after 1960 which responds to the socio-spatial transformations that have been taking place across metropolitan America. Despite the repeated claims of geographers, economists and environmentalists about its obsolescence both as a concept and as a way of life, the suburb continues to provide American literature a principal setting and narrative framework.