SOURCE: Mills, Nicolaus C. “Prison and Society in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction.” Western Humanities Review 24 (1970): 325-31.

In the following essay, Mills uses the works of Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain to discuss the theme of American society as a prison. Mills suggests that Puritan society, Wall Street, and the culture of slavery were all forms of imprisonment in the writings of nineteenth-century American authors.

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“Don't be shocked when I say that I was in prison. You're still in prison. That's what America means—prison.” These words of Malcolm X come as no surprise to anyone familiar with American writing in the 1960's. Equally harsh indictments of American society can be found in the novels of William Burroughs, Peter Matthiessen, and Norman Mailer. The idea of describing American society in terms of prison and imprisonment is not new, however, and if one is going to understand it in perspective...