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This article examines the American literary tradition, specifically early American writing, to understand the roots of the concept of Manifest Destiny. It examines literature in America as well as literature and nature during colonialism in the Americas and on into the United States as it expanded westward. The article also has links, books, ebooks, and ebook readers as well as other academic resources available.

This article examines America, Americans history and the relationship between it and indigenous tribes and native American peoples like the Lakota, a member of which is John Lame Deer who wrote Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions a novel about American Indian religion and Native American rituals from the point of a genuine Lakota Cowboy. The book looks at religion and beliefs as does this article. It also has pictures, links to academic article on similar topics and to copies of the book, ebooks, and ebook readers for college students like the kindle.

When Kurt Vonnegut published his first novel, "Player Piano," in 1952, he wrote about corporate culture taking over in America. It was the end of WWII and Vonnegut, as a young novelist, wrote about a distant future where the corporate powers that were beginning to dominate the American landscape seized the opportunities presented by the fragile post-war economy. Today, 57 years later, Vonnegut's vision is much closer to reality than anyone browsing the "new fiction" section in 1952 would accept. Vonnegut is a visionary. This article examines the lasting value and effect of Vonnegut's ever-true vision and work.

When William Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, his works in the United States had been out of print for almost a decade. While writers like Steinbeck and Hemingway dominated the American literary landscape, Faulkner was, at best, an afterthought. This article examines how someone who was out of print in their own country could win a Noble Prize years and years before his American contemporaries.

Kurt Vonnegut, one of the most prolific if not best American writers of the second half of the twentieth century, first earned a reputation for himself as a science-fictionist with his early works, The Sirens of Titan and Cat's Cradle. This reputation, however much it vastly underestimates and misunderstands Vonnegut's work and its significance to the modern era, has been difficult for Vonnegut to escape. It does, however, provide insight into the aspects of the modern situation that Vonnegut sees as central and meaningful. Bluebeard, which trades a more traditionally Vonnegut mad scientist for a retired, eccentric expressionist painter, the same painter from Breakfast of Champions, tackles the issues which have traditionally blurred Vonnegut's role in the literary and popular fiction traditions. This article explores these issues within Vonnegut's version of the fairytale, Bluebeard.