Will you let me go for Christ's sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?

An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.

Whoever is writing in the United States is using the American Dream as an ironical pole of his story. People elsewhere tend to accept, to a far greater degree anyway, that the conditions of life are hostile to mans pretensions.

The American Dream is the largely unacknowledged screen in front of which all American writing plays itself out,