Arnold Beichman's comprehensive study of the writings of Herman Wouk, one of America's leading writers, shows how Wouk's plays and novels exemplify an extraordinary and often highly perceptive preoccupation with American society in war and in peace. Situating Wouk in the same literary tradition as Cervantes, Richardson, Balzac, and Dickens, Beichman demonstrates that Wouk's novels have strong plots, moralist outcomes, and active-essentially positive-characters. The new introduction serves to bring Wouk's work over the past two decades into the reckoning. Making extensive use of Wouk's...

In his probing new introduction to Anti-American Myths, which was initially published twenty years ago as Nine Lies About America, Arnold Beichman notes a powerful fact: what makes the United States unique is not only its military power nor its huge economy, nor even its great technological innovations. Rather, what differentiates the nation from virtually all others is that there is no large-scale territorial movement whose sponsors seek to secede from the country and to establish a new nation.

And yet, anti-Americanism has characterized a small portion of...