In his exploration of the ways in which writers have tried to make sense of the Vietnam experience, Philip D. Beidler brings to light a whole literature that in its moments of fullest achievement quite literally creates a Vietnam more real than reality. Beidler turns his attention to a wide variety of literary texts: novels, plays, poems, memoirs, oral histories, documentaries, and reportage. Perceptive and evocative, American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam is a comprehensive discussion of the literature of the war and a study of literary consciousness relative to the larger process of cultural myth-making.