"Find a writer who is indubitably an American in every pulse-beat, snort and adenoit, an American who has something new and peculiarly American to say and who says it in an unmistakable American way and nine times out of ten you will find that he has some sort of connection with that gargantuan and inordinate abattoir by Lake Michigan."

Borrowing a line from the acerbic H.L.Mencken, writer James Atlas sets the stage for the literary milieu in which end text