American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam

In his exploration of the ways in which writers have tried to make sense of the Vietnam experience, Philip D. Beidler brings to light a whole literature that in its moments of fullest achievement quite literally ""creates"" a Vietnam more real than reality. Beidler turns his attention to a wide variety of literary texts: novels, plays, poems, memoirs, oral histories, documentaries, and reportage. Perceptive and evocative, ""American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam"" is a comprehensive discussion of the literature of the war and a study of literary consciousness relative to the larger process of cultural myth-making.