The Anti-Hero in the American Novel rereads major texts of the 1960s such as Catch-22, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, and Slaughterhouse-Five to offer an innovative re-evaluation of a set of canonical novels that moves beyond entrenched post-modern and post-structural interpretations towards an appraisal which emphasizes the specifically humanist and idealist elements of these works, and in the process reasserts the important social impetus that lies behind them.