This hasn’t been a good century for heroes. After the First World War, serious American fiction turned instead to figures like Jay Gatsby, Willy Loman, Dreiser’s helpless victims, Faulkner’s exemplars of decline, and Hemingway’s scarred personalities. Unable to believe in the possibility of rising above circumstance and mastering fate, our national authors came to see the human condition as a matter of being buffeted by social and historical forces far beyond an individual’s control.