Although Metalious is not normally thought to be a novelist who wrote out of the mainstream of American literature, many of the themes contained in her books do exhibit concerns usually thought of as traditional. This is true of her last novel, No Adam in Eden, which by its very title announces an anti Edenic theme. From its very beginnings the literary traditions of this country have played with the notions of America as having an Eden-like environment in which it might be possible to recapture an innocence long associated with humankind before the biblical expulsion from the garden. Metalious, like many other American writers before her, called such possibilities into question and explored a world devoid of conventional notions of redemption.

Her rejection of the very idea of an Edenic America was formed from her own duality of perspective as both ethnic and economic outsider...