From its beginnings in the Naturalism of Dreiser and Wharton, through the Modernism of William Faulkner and the Lost Generation, the emergence of new voices in African-American, Native, and other minority writing, to more recent developments in the commercialisation of publishing houses, the growth of creative writing departments in colleges across North America, and the giving way of Hugh Kenner’s Pound Era to Mark McGurl’s Program Era, the dramatic history of North America in the twentieth century has been reflected in its literature.