Secret Histories claims that the history of the nation is hidden -- in plain sight -- within the pages of twentiethcentury American literature. David Wyatt argues that the nation's fiction and nonfiction expose a ''secret history'' that cuts beneath the ''straight histories'' of our official accounts. And it does so by revealing personal stories of love, work, family, war, and interracial romance as they were lived out across the decades of the twentieth century. Wyatt reads authors both familiar and neglected, examining ''double consciousness'' in the postCivil War era through works by Charles W. Chesnutt, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington. Aspects of the Depression are revealed in the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anzia Yezierska, and John Steinbeck. Period by period, Wyatt's nuanced readings recover the felt sense of life as it was lived, revealing surprising dimensions of the critical issues of a given time. The rise of the women's movement, for example, is revivified in new appraisals of works by Eudora Welty, Ann Petry, and Mary McCarthy.Running through the examination of individual works and times is Wyatt's argument about reading itself. Reading is not a passive activity but an empathetic act of cocreation, what Faulkner calls ''overpassing to love.'' Empathetic reading recognizes and relives the emotional, cultural, and political dimensions of an individual and collective past. And discovering a usable American past, as Wyatt shows, enables us to confront the urgencies of our present moment.
To the Reader Acknowledments 1. The Body and the Corporation 2. Double Consciousness 3. Pioneering Women 4. Performing Maleness 5. Colored Me 6. The Rumor of Race 7. The Depression 8. The Second World War 9. Civil Rights 10. Love and Separateness 11. Revolt and Reaction 12. The Postmodern 13. Studying War 14. Slavery and Memory 15. Pa Not Pa 16. After Innocence A Personal Note Notes Works Cited Index
""The secret history his book truly tells is one of the remarkable readers's engagement with the diversity of American literature. Wyatt testifies to the power that strong novels have to transform the reader's sense of the world and his or her place in it... The works of fifty-six American novelists with different historical and aesthetic perspectives, novelists who are men and women, novelists who are brown, black, and white, come alive and speak to the ongoing richness and variety of American literature in the twentieth century. It is a remarkable achievement, especially given the current critical context of American literary studies.""
