Contents: Introduction. 1. T.S. Eliot and Wharton's Modernist Gothic/Monica Elbert. 2. Willa Cather's Waste Land/Bernard Baum. 3. The Waste Land of F. Scott Fitzgerald/John W. Bicknell. 4. The Waste Land and The Sound and the Fury: to apprehend the human process moving in time/Mary E. McGann. 5. Hemingway's Waste Land: the controlling water symbolism of the sun also rises/George D. Murphy. 6. Wolfe and the wastelanders: T.S. Eliot's Influence on the Hound of Darkness/Joseph Bentz. 7. Steinbeck's American Waste Land/Donna  Gerstenberger. 8. Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts: the waste land rescripted/Miriam Fuchs. 9. Lawd Today and the example of the waste land/Don B. Graham. 10. Invisible man: Ralph Ellison's wasteland/Mary Ellen William Walsh. 11. The heart is a lonely hunter: a southern waste land/Horace Taylor. 12. "The Owl and the Nightingale": Flannery O' Connor's wasteland/Sally Fitzgerald. 13. The American waste land--brought to you by John Cheever's "Radio"/William P. Keen. 14. Bellow, Herzog and the waste land/Dan Vogel. 15. Eliot and Salinger: quest for mystic enlightenment/Vanashree. 16. Rewriting the American wasteland: John Updike's the Centaur/Sukhbir Singh. 17. The waste land of Thomas Pynchon's V/Peter O'Connor. 18. Assessments of the urban experience: Toni Morrison's Jazz and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land/Sylvia Mayer. Twentieth century American fiction: anthology.

"T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land is known to be epic of the twentieth century in its spirit and subject matter. It offers a new idiom to the whole generation of readers, writers and researchers in crystallizing how to capture in words the submerged psychic currents of a fractured sensibility. In America it surprisingly turns out to be the most popular poem among the novelists and short story writers, perpetually used as a model for the reflection of American experience in a world ravaged by the two world wars. Eliot's intellectual rigor and vast erudition however has not been easy to emulate. The American novelists nevertheless have been continuously inspired by Eliot's innovative use of language, myths, metaphors, objective correlatives, allusions, symbols, images and several other poetic short hands."