Sean McCann studies late-nineteenth and twentieth century American literature and its relation to contemporaneous political developments. He is the author of Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (2000), which received honorable mention for the America Studies Association's John Hope Franklin Prize for the best book in American Studies. He is currently working on a book titled, The Anti-Liberal Imagination: American Literature and Presidential Government.
Articles
Training and Vision: Roth, DeLillo, Banks, Peck, and the Postmodern Aesthetics of Vocation, Twentieth Century Literature (2007)
Do You Believe in Magic? Literary Thinking after the New Left (with Michael Szalay), The Yale Journal of Criticism (2005)
Toward the end of the 1960s, the New Left and the counterculture developed a libertarian...
Introduction: Paul Potter and the Cultural Turn (with Michael Szalay), The Yale Journal of Criticism (2005)
In 1965, Paul Potter designated "the system" as the principle antagonist of the fledgling New...