Telling America's Story to the World

Harilaos Stecopoulos is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa. He earned his doctorate at the University of Virginia and is a renowned scholar in the field of US literature and culture. Stecopoulos's books include: A History of the Literature of the US South (2021), Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and US Imperialisms (2008), and Race and the Subject of Masculinities (1997).

Telling America's Story to the World is a superb work ... At the heart of Stecopoulos's story lie questions of power and agency that link the U.S. state agencies that sent writers abroad for propaganda purposes and the writers themselves, who rightly viewed themselves as ambassadors of their own endeavors, and who used their travels to carry out their own initiatives -- often, in the process, reconfiguring their own relationship to the United States. Stecopoulos elegantly unpacks these competing agendas while also tracing how they factored into the development of U.S. literature and its place on the international stage since the late 1940s ... Telling America's Story to the World is a must-read that shows how knowledge of cultural diplomacy is indispensable to the study of U.S. literary history.

• Preface Introduction 1: The Good Neighbor Theory of American Literature: Archibald MacLeish and "the New World" of the United Nations 2: "Chau-vin-ism! Con-form-ity! Self-de-termi-nation! Freeeeeeeeee-dom!" Ralph Ellison, Robert Lowell, and Occupied Salzburg 3: People to People, Writers to Writers: William Faulkner, the Snopes Problem, and Middlebrow Internationalism 4: Diasporic Diplomacy: Langston Hughes, the Africa Propaganda Campaign, and Black Literary Internationalism 5: Republic of Letters, Cockpit of Controversy: Arthur Miller, PEN International, and Literary Détente 6: "A Harvest of Conversations Among Multitudes": Maxine Hong Kingston, Wittman Ah Sing, and the US-China Writers' Conferences Coda: Multicultural Diplomacy Bibliography