One of the intellectual industries that has flourished as the economic barometer has fallen is the study of American social character: the enterprise of generalizing about American culture in a way that focuses on psychological tendencies: on character, attitude, and personal values. Ten years ago, most readers, I believe, would have accepted this topic as a distinctive part of American intellectual history, but as something which more or less went out after the concerns of the 1950s that made such a market for David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd and William Whyte's The Organization Man. We now know that it did not go out; it merely receded in the centrifugal sixties and resumed in the seventies. Yet despite the industry's resurgence and its long antecedents, it has never been fully analysed and explained.

The prospect of being taken captive by Indians was one of the greatest terrors for pioneers on the American frontier. From seventeenth-century Massachusetts to twentieth-century Hollywood, Indian captivity has been regarded as a fate worse than death, and western frontiersmen advocated saving the last bullet for oneself to prevent it. Whites inhabiting the trans-Mississippi west in the nineteenth century had in fact every reason to dread falling into Indian hands and a good idea of what was in store for them: among the nomadic tribes of the Great Plains, male captives were tortured (before being put to death), female captives were invariably subjected to sexual and physical abuse and generally condemned to a life of drudgery, while captive children might be killed out of hand or taken into the tribe. In the northeastern woodlands, however, the fate in store for whites captured by Indians was by no means so certain. A study of the experiences and narratives of captives on the upper Connecticut River during the era of Indian raids from Canada suggests that to be captured by Indians in northern New England was a terrifying and traumatic experience, but was certainly no guarantee of death, torture, abuse, or even mistreatment.

From 1815 until about 1840 Sir Walter Scott was America's favorite novelist and much the most important model for her own budding fictionalists – Irving, Cooper, Paulding, Simms, Kennedy, Hawthorne, and others. Yet although fairly accurate estimates of Scott's American sales and circulation have been available for several decades, our understanding of his impact on American fiction has made only modest advances since the 1930s. While echoes of the Waverley novels can be discovered everywhere in American Romantic fiction, usually the louder they sound the more they signal merely the borrower's failure of inspiration or nerve. Scott's example was most fruitful where it was comparatively unobtrusive – partly because the best writers were best able thoroughly to adapt Scott's European scenes, characters, and conflicts to American experience, but also because at its best Scott's influence was of the self-effacing kind that helped Cooper, Hawthorne, and their contemporaries find their own true bent as American writers.

On one occasion, however, Scott provoked a more revealing response by invading American home territory.

Writing somewhat sceptically of “recent experimental fiction” in 1975, Morris Dickstein saw a great deal of it as “ebulliently parricidal and cannibalistic,” but detected at the same time “the celebrated ‘cool’ tone…, a cleanness of manner that partly redeems the pervasive irony and emotional distance.” In the case of Walter Abish, the “hot” is the high-spirited inventiveness which grows out of the self-set limitations of a predetermined system; it is part of his own response to the craft of writing: “I was crossing the parade ground in Ramle during my second year in the Tank Corps when quite suddenly the idea of becoming a writer flashed through my mind. A moment of pure exhilaration.”

Abish, who was born in Vienna in 1931, spent the formative years of childhood and adolescence in Shanghai, then eight years in Israel, and finally settled in New York City, where in 1960 he became an American citizen. In his writing (a collection of poems, two novels, and two books of short fiction) he has retained an affinity for things European and for the literature of the German-speaking world.