A dream of order: Hemingway -- Secret f the South: Faulkner to Percy -- Decline of war: Mailer to Vonnegut -- Professional observers: Cozzens to Updike -- Earthly city of the Jews: Bellow to Singer -- Cassandras: Porter to Oates -- Imagination of fact: Capote to Mailer -- Absurdity as a contemporary style: Ellison to Pynchon -- A personal sense of time: Nabokov and other exiles.