"The American Quest for a Supreme Fiction analyzes the essential characteristics and central forces in the development of this mode. James E. Miller, one of America's foremost Whitman scholars, divides his study into three parts corresponding to the growth of the American epic. He first explores its philosophical "Roots and Trunk" in the poetry and critical works of Whitman (with reference to how this philosophy appears in the work of Berryman, Lowell, and Stevens); in the second part he traces the "Branches" of Pound, Eliot, Williams, and Crane; and, in his first section, "Leaves," Miller examines the contemporary work of Olson, Berryman, and Ginsberg"--Back cover.