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Axis/Axes to Grind studies various political themes in American World War II novels of three decades. These themes include “big picture” novels that interpret the war's meaning and predict the postwar political climate (The Naked and the Dead, The Young Lions) and novels that dramatize rebellions against military authority (From Here to Eternity, The Caine Mutiny and Catch-22). “Political” also includes conflicts between various minorities and the dominant socio-political culture (White, Christian and heterosexual). Racial conflicts appear in If He Hollers Let Him Go, And Then We Heard the Thunder and Guard of Honor); subversive gay themes inform The Gallery; anti-Semitic conflicts appear in several novels, particularly the Holocaust novel Point of No Return. War novels written well after the war tend to see the war through the lens of the author's own times. Thus, the 1960s protests against the Vietnam war inform the pacifism in Slaughterhouse-Five. And in Gravity's Rainbow, the transnational cartels that enable the V-2 rocket attacks against England prefigure the military-industrial complex of Pynchon's time.

In this book, a gay literary critic evaluates a half-century of fictional works'by, for, and about'homosexual men and situates them in the context of an emerging American gay culture. Reed Woodhouse shows how the best gay fiction of the period, like all good literature, not only reflected but anticipated social changes that were afoot - from the founding of the first enduring gay rights organizations through the Stonewall riots to the ambiguous mainstreaming of homosexuality that continues today.

Since the opening of Vassar College in 1865, objections to higher education for women have ranged from charges that females were mentally and physically incapable of learning to the belief that educating women would destroy society. Underlying all arguments was the folk wisdom which declared that women could not live and work together. To counteract such beliefs, women's colleges tried to create a special kind of space and new role models that would allow women to exist for a short time in idyllic (or, at least, idealized) conditions. The debate over women's education, for the good or ill of society, generated a great deal of'print,'including short stories and novels. Shirley Marchalonis guides us through the history of this fiction, its depiction of the complexities of the college experience, and the conflicting attitudes that teetered between fascination and fear, celebration and regret. Using novels, short stories, and some juvenile fiction from 1865 to 1940 - all of it specifically about college'girls'--She examines these ideas, the way they developed over time, and their significance in understanding women's education and women's history. The debate over separate colleges for women continues to this day and can be better understood in the context of this informative and entertaining look at the past.