The Complete American Fantasies — (1996)

By James Schevill

“The Complete American Fantasies is a poet-playwright James Schevill’s most compelling and encompassing volume. The work of years, it mirrors his own and the country’s most vital experience at all level: love and marriage, war service, street life, the predations of industrial power and political manipulation. The book is filled with the sounds of American speech, piercing lyrics, telling satire, surprising insights into every aspect of our lives, and sheer human understanding.”

M. L. Rosenthal

“This book covers each decade from 1920 to 1990. spanning the poet’s lifetime thus far. In poetry and prose entwining his personal history with crucial episodes of American history during that period, Schevill seeks to create an epical design in which one dimension dramatically mirrors the other.

"In effect the design follows the various probing progress of Melville, Poe, Whitman, and Twain, where fables and desires experienced in their lives were measured against those of the nation. Schevill’s aims document the politics and history, including wars and depressions, of an America foundering in attempts to fulfill its promise and find its identity in the modern world. Strong dramatist and poet that he is, Schevill’s American Fantasies stakes out a claim for our time… upon that vast precipitious terrain which his admired masters differently traversed.”

Edwin Honig