Failure and The American Writer

The “American dream” is one of triumph, of hard work and earned success. Iconic authors like Herman Melville and Mark Twain have embodied the dream from a distance, writing their way up from obscurity and into the American literary canon. But in a compelling twist, their most celebrated works tend to focus obsessively on failure.

Failure and the American Writer traces the paradox of the drive for success and depiction of failure in nineteenth-century American writing. By examining the lives and works of authors like Melville, Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and Sarah Orne Jewett against the backdrop of a turbulent nineteenth century and the attempt to create a new literary movement, Gavin Jones reveals the difficulties American writers faced in their faltering search for new styles, coherent characters, and satisfactory endings. Ultimately, he uncovers their experiences of blunder and inadequacy that were hidden in the culture at large.

These celebrated and misunderstood American writers emerge as the great theorists of failure who discovered ways to translate their own social insecurities into complex portrayals of a modern self, founded in moral fallibility, precarious knowledge, and negative feelings.