■ James, Doubleday, $28
If the whole of philosophy is a footnote to Plato, as someone once quipped, then the whole of American literature might be deemed a footnote to. Ernest Hemingway certainly thought so: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called,” he once famously said. “There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” In 1959, the intellectual Norman Podhoretz wrote that “no other American novel (with the possible exception of) has been so thoroughly ransacked for motives
