In American Trajectories Warner Berthoff argues that even in the broadest cultural and historical perspective, imaginative literature (like all the arts) is a matter of individual signatures and differences, but that there are also recognizable patterns and continuities marking off what is distinctively American, what both reflects and speaks for a shared national experience.

Discussions of Emily Dickinson and Twain, Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, Kate Chopin, Theodore Dreiser, and Edmund Wilson focus on the provenance and central character of writing by mainstream figures in our literary past. The essays on Charles Brockden Brown, Nathan Asch, O. Henry, Frank O'Hara, and Lewis Mumford and Van Wyck Brooks take up marginal, neglected, forgotten, or not yet fully acknowledged contributors to American writing