The books in the series deal with many of the major writers known as American realists, modernists, and post-modernists from 1880 to the present. This category of writers will also include less known ethnic and minority writers, a majority of whom are African American, some are Native American, Mexican American, Japanese American, Chinese American, and others. (James Dickey, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, John Barth, John Updike, and Joyce Carol Oates).

intervenes in current critical debates in American literary realism by showing how realism functions as a mode of narration for fictive constructions of marriage and the race, gender, and class upheavals these depictions of marriage represent.