Is there such a thing as society? Was the mid-twentieth century an antisocial moment in U.S. history? Theodore Martin [1] describes what happened to the idea of society in the wake of the New Deal and World War II, and argues that sociopolitical changes fueled the emergence of a new kind of antisocial novel, examples of which include Richard Wright’s “The Outsider,” Patricia Highsmith’s “Strangers on a Train,” and Jim Thompson’s “The Getaway.”

Kennan Ferguson, ed., The Big No [2] University of Minnesota Press, 2022

Theodore Martin, Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present [3] Columbia University Press, 2017

[1] https://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=6268

[2] https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-big-no

[3] https://cup.columbia.edu/book/contemporary-drift/9780231181921