Kennedy Obsession

John Hellmann is professor of English at the Ohio State University at Lima and the author of American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam and Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction.

Hellmann understands that reading involves more than the consumption of ideas--it is a theater of the mind, in which the reader imaginatively tests a range of roles, voices, identities. Hellmann shows how Kennedy's own early reading (in combination with family lore) provided him with the language of myth, his sense of identity and role. He then analyzes the complex ways in which this private myth-making interacted with the process of social myth-making (in mass media and politics) to shape 'The Kennedy Obsession.' -- Richard Slotkin American University

• Prologue: A Bedside Visit 1: How Kennedy Awoke: Jack's Reading and Why England Slept 2: John Hersey's "Survival": A Literary Experiment and Its Political Adaptation 3: The Old Man and the Boy: Papa Hemingway and Profiles in Courage 4: The Hollywood Screen and Kennedy's Televised Showdown with Truman 5: The Erotics of a Presidency 6: An Assassination and Its Fictions