Like many American writers, Miller both loved an idealized conception of "America" which he had drawn from the work of nineteenth century writers like Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and was appalled by the social structure of life in the United States which he saw around him. Almost instinctively a kind of outsider, Miller celebrated an earlier version of a more positive society (especially in Black Spring [1938], which recalls a world in which "the foam was on the lager and people stopped to chat with one another") which he felt was receding into a dim past, replaced by the mechanical, mercenary world of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company. In Sexus, he begins with the same kind of anger that shielded him from the worst features of the corporate monster but in the course of trying to discover the nature of his true self, removes all of...