At a moment in which America seems simultaneously more closed and more open to change than ever before Sons and Daughters of SelfMade Men Improvising Gender Place Nation in American Literature reexamines a defining national discourse. Exploring the dilemmas of U.S. subjects positioned as inheritorsand thus as childrenof the archetypal selfmade FounderFather the author offers a critical reevaluation of the trope of selfmaking as it is expressed in modern and contemporary American literature. She views selfmaking as a mode of simultaneous constriction and possibility where the compulsion to perform to the national script leads to critical and creative forms of improvisation. In texts by Toni Morrison William Faulkner Ralph Ellison Sandra Cisneros John Edgar Wideman and others she finds selfmaking rearticulated with improvisational differences that suggest possibilities for an improvisational nation.