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This book discusses how Theodore Dreiser and F. Scott Fitzgerald alongside other novelists enforced in their usage and interpretation of the term "personality" a newly emerging vision of self in American society. This vision was other-directed : many Americans meant to impress their social surroundings through consciously cultivating personality as a social stimulus value, which they hoped would ceaselessly further their social station.
Anticipating the discourses in other cultural forms, the early twentieth-century American novelists warned that individuals' repeated endeavors to define themselves outwardly would inevitably lead to identity loss and depression.