Though destined to be thwarted, even defeated, the pilgrim is our deepest and purest American self.
Our greatest 19th-century prose writers from Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville through Henry James and Mark Twain took it for granted that “American” is an identity fraught with ambiguity, as in those allegorical parables by Hawthorne in which “good” and “evil” are mysteriously conjoined to be an “American” is to be a kind of pilgrim, an archetypal seeker after truth. Is there a distinctly American experience? “The American,” by Henry James “An American Tragedy,” by Theodore Dreiser “The Quiet American,” by Graham Greene “The Ugly American,” by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral” and Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho” - each suggests, in its very title, a mythic dimension in which fictitious characters are intended to represent national types or predilections.
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