This book is a valuable and innovative contribution both to masculinity studies and to the understanding of American fiction. It is a book that encourages us to look again at canonical authors from a fresh perspective, and to pay better attention to novels that have been unduly neglected. The ideas about masculinity here have a strong contemporary resonance, while being grounded in excellent close readings of the fiction of the 1970s.-- Dr Kenneth Millard, The University of Edinburgh This is a politically sophisticated study of the cultural production of American masculinities in a time of social and political turbulence and rapid change. This book offers a fresh perspective on the development of masculinities in the American 1970s, and the post-Sixties, post-Vietnam, and ultimately post-Fordist shocks that the United States experienced during that decade. Considering key writers and texts from the period, this study offers a timely analysis of the constructions of masculinity during a period of social and economic upheaval.-- Dr Brian Baker, Lancaster University, UK