ABSTRACT
Conspiracy has always loomed large in American culture. Not only was Colonial American rhetoric frequently animated by conspiratorial demonology, but, as numerous scholars have shown, conspiratorial suspicion was a normative feature of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political thought. In his landmark 1964 essay, ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, Richard Hofstadter associated this sort of rhetorical ferment with the tendency to see ‘a “vast” or “gigantic” conspiracy as the motive force in historical events’. While he did not use the phrase ‘conspiracy theory’, his essay helped to establish the modern sense of that term and to delegitimate it as a pathological and dangerous form of mostly right-wing political speech. If American literature has always been engaged in the study of suspicion, it came to the very centre of American letters in the post-Kennedy era. Notable American fiction began to register this idea beginning in the late 1950s in ways that exceeded the general Western literary investment in paranoid reason.
