There has been a tendency, perhaps now beginning to change, for American drama to find itself marginalised in academe. The novel, a form virtually coterminous with America's development and a principal mechanism for investigating its amorphous nature, has been seen as central. The Great American Novel shared a national hubris. It was large, all-encompassing, because the nation itself was expanding and expansive, itself an imaginative enterprise that seemed to require a form commensurate with its ambition. Its achievements, meanwhile, have been acknowledged by a cluster of Nobel prizes, some more explicable than others.

Theatre, however, seemed not quite at the centre of the culture. Its history lay outside the country while for several centuries the principal lament was its failure to engage American talents, the American mind or American reality. To many, indeed, it seemed principally a twentieth-century invention and hence curiously unrooted. In fact, America's hunger for theatre, at the popular no less than the elite level, was strikingly apparent from the earliest days. For much of its history, indeed, it was precisely to the theatre, in its many forms, that Americans turned for an understanding of a society whose changing nature was both its central promise and the cause of anxiety (see Richard Nelson's The General from America). If that is less true today, when the popular dimension of theatre has been ceded to Hollywood and television, drama remains not only a sensitive barometer of social change, reponding to shifting moral and intellectual pressures, but also an internationally respected aspect of American cultural life.

Nonetheless, even in the present century the canon has proved remarkably restricted.