This Concise Companion is a guide to the creative output of the United States in the postwar period, in its diverse energies, shapes and forms.

• Embraces diversity, covering Vietnam literature, gay and lesbian literature, American Jewish fiction, Italian American literature, Irish American writing, emergent ethnic literatures, African American writing, jazz, film, drama and more.
• Shows how different genres and approaches opened up creative possibilities and interacted in the postwar period.
• Portrays the postwar United States split by differences of wealth and position, by ethnicity and race, and by agendas of left and right, but united in the intensity of its creative drive.

Josephine G. Hendin is Professor of English and Tiro A. Segno Professor of Italian American Studies at New York University. Her novel The Right Thing to Do won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1988–9 and was reprinted by the Feminist Press in 1999. Her critical works include The World of Flannery O'Connor (1970), Vulnerable People: A View of American Fiction Since 1945 (1978), and Heartbreakers: Women and Violence in Contemporary Culture and Literature (2004).