This chapter reads Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad as a Janus-faced text in American literary history that looks back toward the persistent political conundrums illuminated by twentieth-century American fiction and reconfigures them in generative ways for the twenty-first century. Like earlier twentieth-century neo-slave narratives by Ishmael Reed, Octavia E. Butler, and Toni Morrison, Whitehead’s novel critiques a naïve historical story of inevitable Black progress, and it even flirts with the notion that American democracy and African American oppression are inextricable. But Whitehead rejects fatalistic narratives of inevitable injustice by showing how American normative myths can still be politically efficacious. Establishing himself as a key literary figure in contemporary Black political thought, Whitehead uses the speculative fiction genre to transform celebrated concepts in American political theory – e.g., individual freedom, legal equality, constitutional rights, representative democracy, popular sovereignty – by contextualizing them within Black experiences across time. Ultimately, his political vision amounts to a wary optimism, which Whitehead himself has called a politics of “impossible hope.”

This Introduction surveys the long, inextricable relationship between American politics and the American novel in the twentieth century. After defining twentieth-century “politics” broadly as the theoretical intersection between power, freedom, and justice within the framework of American liberalism, it explains why the American novel is a unique aperture through which to view political conflict and change, arguing that the novel form illuminates how official power relations overlap with personal power relations. While surveying previous scholarship on American politics and the novel, it explains why the volume does not restrict itself to the narrow subgenre of “political fiction.” The Introduction then addresses the rationale for each major section: “Ideologies and Movements,” “The Politics of Genre and Form,” and “Case Studies.” It concludes by considering how a robust engagement with the politics of the twentieth-century American novel can help us make sense of our political present.

This chapter investigates how and why the cultural capital of literary fiction increasingly became aligned with liberalism and the Left in the 1970s and 1980s. It introduces a unique historical perspective that moves away from well-trodden narratives about how modern progressive liberalism, the sixties counterculture, or the New Left altered the landscape of literary fiction, and toward a broader political narrative that interrogates the impact of conservatism as an ideological force on American fiction after the 1960s. This shift in conservative literary taste was a historical contingency, a largely unintended byproduct of arguments between three strains of the post-sixties American Right: the triptych of William F. Buckley’s movement conservatism, Irving Kristol’s neoconservatism, and the reactionary populist New Right. To advance its argument, this chapter concentrates primarily on the writings of Saul Bellow and Thomas Pynchon, two major postwar novelists who wrote several of the most critically acclaimed works of the era, but who were eventually seen as occupying very different positions in the political literary fields: Bellow’s literary prestige declining as he was aligned with neoconservativism and the American Right, and Pynchon’s literary prestige increasing as he was aligned with various strands of the New Left and the broader counterculture.

This brief coda examines the curious case of Marilynne Robinson, one of the most decorated living American novelists who seems like she would easily be aligned with American conservatism, but is not, for reasons that are intertwined with the perceived anti-intellectualism of the political Right. In short, Robinson epitomizes the prevailing, though flawed, assumption within the literary field that the cultural capital associated with highbrow literature is inevitably aligned with progressive liberalism.