In the American Grain

The essential purpose of this book was to reconfigure American History into a sort of usable and understandable mythology from which to build a canon of sorts. It takes traditional figures and events in the American Mythology, such as George Washington, Christopher Colombus, and Abraham Lincoln and recasts their identities. For example, in the concluding section of the book he refigures Lincoln as a mother figure giving birth to the new union of America, and washington is given a harder edged appearance than before.

Noble for what it tried to do, In the American Grain grew out of the Modernist Movement, which found the existing canon of Myth and European literature lacking, especially to describe the American ethos.