The Anthropology of Influence is a perfectly cut jewel of evocative writing, one that articulates the many fine distinctions of the dialogue between anthropology and the novel within the three decades of the Cold War. Marked by lucidity and fluency, Francis X. Altomare's fine-grained unpacking of five prominent authors vindicates “literary anthropology” as an indispensable interdisciplinary field. The result is a rare and unexpected intervention that arrestingly reveals the conditions of possibility for artistic creation, delving into the multifaceted ties between human culture and imaginative expression in literature.

Alan M. Wald, H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus, English Literature and American Culture, University of Michigan, USA

While literature's influence on midcentury anthropologists like Lévi-Strauss, Mead, and Geertz is widely recognized, few readers or critics have seen how the ideas flowed the other way. Through highly original readings of familiar authors like Vonnegut, Bellow, and Didion, Francis Altomare makes it clear that there was also a “tradition of anthropological novelists who turn the discipline's enthnographic techniques inward upon their own culture.” Altomare also recovers surprising traces of anthropology in non-canonical authors, such as Ursula K. Le Guin and William Burroughs. The Anthropology of Influence is a crucial contribution to American literary studies, reminding us of how central anthropology was to intellectual and creative life in the U.S. in the twentieth century.

Greg Barnhisel, Professor of English, Duquesne University, USA