Recovers a forgotten and short-lived form of American fiction: the midcentury minor novel Identifies for the first time an important strain of mid-twentieth century American writing: the midcentury minor novel Explores how this distinctive project for the novel was shared by a group of critically neglected writers, including Eleanor Clark, Lionel Trilling, Jean Stafford, Richard Stern, and John Williams Situates the emergence of the minor novel in relation to a number of significant midcentury intellectual discourses and literary movements, including liberalism, anti-Stalinism, regionalism, existentialism, and the New Criticism Places the work of 'minor writers' in dialogue with well-known authors of the period, including Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, and Carson McCullers The Midcentury Minor Novel brings to light a distinctive mode of the American novel emergent in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It explains how a group of neglected writers reimagined the novel as a minor form, defined by its constraints rather than its possibilities. Reflecting a broadly held view among critics that midcentury fiction was in crisis or decline, these 'minor writers' sought to make a virtue of what were taken to be the novel's bleak prospects, crafting fictions of modest proportions and seemingly attenuated ambition that reflexively explored their own aesthetic limitations. Ironically, the book argues, midcentury anxieties about the 'death of the novel' breathed new life into it. Blending literary criticism and intellectual history, the book offers close readings of five writers who shared this curious project for the novel, an account of which adds texture to our understanding of the aesthetic diversity of midcentury American literature.