Includes bibliographical references and index.

Critical contexts. The rise and fall of the American dream: from the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin to Death of a salesman / Donna Packer-Kinlaw -- "To go into partnership": gender, class, ethnicity, and the American dream in Edith Wharton's The house of Mirth / Linda Kornasky -- Meaningful work and self-determination: the American dream for women / Carol S. Loranger -- Why speak of American stories as dreams? / Cara Elana Erdheim -- Critical esays. The American dream, the Western frontier, and the literature of expansion / Steven Frye -- Dreiser and the Dream / Roark Mulligan -- The great Gatsby and the American dream / James Nagel -- Survival and transcendence: the Jewish American immigrant and the American dream / James R. Giles -- Blurring the color line: race and the American dream in The autobiography of an ex-coloured man, passing, and Cane / Andrew Vogel -- After Auschwitz, Connecticut?: dreams and disappointments in mid-twentieth-century American literature / Tiffany Gilbert -- The assimilated and unassimilated in Bernard Malamud's The assistant / Quentin Martin -- American Indians and the American dream: "a world in which we had no part" / Lee Schweninger -- Mexican Americans encounter the American dream: George Washington Gomez / Ramon J. Guerra.