The early 1960s saw the publication of a number of fictional works that indicated that American fiction was heading in some very different directions than it had been during the preceding 25 years. Signaling this change in aesthetic sensibility was the appearance within a relatively short period of time (1960-1965) of a number of major works that decisively broke with the traditions of conventional realism. These key works included John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) and Giles Goat-Boy (1966), Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961), Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), Thomas Pynchon's V. (1963), Donald Barthelme's Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964), and Robert Coover's The Origin of the Brunists (1965). These works were all produced by young, obviously ambitious writers (Nabokov is an exception, in terms of age). This fiction owed its unusual effects to a wide variety of sources, such as the absurdist theater (which had been flourishing in New York's Off-Broadway scene during the late...