ABSTRACT
Ernest Hemingway once said that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” 1 In the same large sense, one might say that all American novelists nurse a secret ambition (and if they do not, they should): to create a modern Huck Finn, or even a Tom Sawyer, a novel of boyhood about life on the frontier whether in ninteenth-century Mississippi America or in twentieth-century Bronx urban sprawl. 2
