“The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.”[1]American novelists have long depicted ambivalent or even terrifying parts of our national experience, most often loneliness and isolation, that dark twin of individualism, or with only a little less frequency, the specter of authority and authoritarianism, the sinister companion to a mass democracy. In his book Writing the Republic: Liberalism and Morality in American Political Fiction (2007) Anthony Hutchison has identified the latter as a central theme of the American political novel after 1945. As he shows, Melville struck the mold with Read more