This book explores how the contemporary American novel has revived a long literary and political tradition of imagining male friendship as interlinked with the promises and paradoxes of democracy in the United States. In the last decades of the twentieth century, not only novelists, but philosophers, critical theorists, and sociologists rediscovered the concept of friendship as a means of scrutinising bonds of national identity. Long exiled from serious political philosophy, this book reveals how friendship returned as a crucial term in late twentieth-century communitarian debates about citizenship while, at the same time, becoming integral to continental philosophy's exploration of the roots of democracy, and, in a different guise, to histories of sexuality. Moving innovatively between disciplines, this important study brings into dialogue the work of authors rarely discussed together - including Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Dinaw Mengestu, and Teju Cole - and advances a compelling new account of the political and intellectual fabric of the contemporary American novel.