Philip F. Gura is the William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of American Transcendentalism: A History, which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction, Truth's Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel, as well as many other books of American cultural history.
American fiction was once inseparable from proselytizing. How did it become the anticlerical, ego-theistic literature of today? Cultural historian Philip F. Gura, whose new book, Truth's Ragged Edge, traces the early history of the first American novels, looks at the evolution.
