ABSTRACT
Each person is the product of his home, his environment, and his early experiences. The five novelists (Michael DeCapite, Jerre Mangione, Thomas Bell, Vera Lebedeff, and Ben Field) did not escape from these influences even though they were able to go through the looking glass of imagination and shape people and events in the kaleidoscope of creativity. These five novelists were concerned with maturation, and they looked out at adulthood from the childhood experience they had, as everyone does, but they also looked out at American society from within an ethnic group. Lebedeff stood on the margin, seeing her ethnic group as marginal, and then seeing what choices were available to members of that group. DeCapite looked out at America as one of the poor, but he saw middle-class affluence as an American ideal. Field looked at America, especially at the working poor, but he looked through the lenses of group identity, not solving his marginality.
