After Paradise: Essays on the Fate of American Writing lays bare the richness of classic American texts and their fraught relationship with what Jon Thompson sees as a culture of violence and war. Focusing on William Bradford's 'Of Plymouth Plantation', Herman Melville's 'Bartleby the Scrivener', Walt Whitman's 'Specimen Days', Emily Dickinson's 'Letters' and Michael Herr's 'Dispatches', 'After Paradise' offers a series of moving, interconnected...