In this feminist rereading, Pamela A. Boker examines the prolonged adolescence of the American male in the works of three quintessential American male authors, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Ernest Hemingway, through a highly original psychoanalytic inquiry. Challenging conventional interpretations, Boker argues that failing to mourn loss and repressing one's true emotions do not demonstrate a heroic capacity, but rather, a damaging inability to work through psychological wounds that have not healed.

Boker locates in the lives and fiction of Melville, Twain, and Hemingway the...