In her examination of women characters created by American novelists from the 1940s through the 1980s, Thelma Shinn traces the emergence of new definitions of self and society as reflected in both the fictional characters she considers and in society as a whole. She argues that the social dislocation resulting from American involvement in World War II and the repercussions from that dislocation in American society initiated a cycle of growth in women that is accurately mirrored in the fiction of the period. Selecting more than 125 works of fiction, she examines the images of women and their lives created by both men and women writers. Particular attention is paid to the female self-images that have come to us through the writing of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Ann Petry, Jean Stafford, Hortense Calisher, Shirley Jackson, and Joyce Carol Oates.