Es war einmal Amerika

American literature is considered particularly vivid. American novels have repeatedly served as the basis for films. Why shouldn't the story of this literature also be told in images? And doesn't such a literary history particularly compellingly narrate the story of the country? A vital, brutal, yet sensitive and consequently torn country, a male-dominated land where women played a very minor role for a long time. French specialists in American literature Oliver Gallmeister and François Guérif have conceived this literary history, Catherine Mory has skillfully translated it into language without losing its scholarly character, and the successful comic artist Jean-Baptiste Hostache has been engaged to illustrate it all.

Content of Volume I: James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans and the genocide of the Native Americans - Nathaniel Hawthorne and the witches of Salem - Edgar Allan Poe and the invention of the detective novel - Henry David Thoreau, the invention of nature writing and the fight against slavery - Walt Whitman, the birth of American poetry and the Civil War - Herman Melville, Moby Dick and the conquest of the oceans - Emily Dickinson and Puritanism - Mark Twain and the humor of the West - Henry James and the contrast between the old and the new world - Jack London and the Gold Rush.

Volume II will be released in fall 2025 with contributions on Truman Capote, Henry Miller, Dashiell Hammett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Tennessee Williams, Jack Kerouac, and Flannery O’Connor. Volume III will cover American literature from the second half of the 20th century.