The last one hundred years of American literature have witnessed the development of three elemental movements: naturalism, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, represented by such authors as Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser; nihilism, predominant in the 1920's and 1930's, represented best by Ernest Hemmingway; and the post-World War II literature which will be called literature of the quest, represented by such authors as Saul Bellow, William Styron, Philip Roth, John Updike, and others. The first chapter will show briefly the historical development of these three movements in American literature, their distinctive features, and their relationship to American moral and social values. Chapters Two through Four will analyze in detail the three distinctive aspects of this emerging literary form--the literature of the quest. The last chapter will focus on one novel, Letting Go, by Philip Roth, as an example of this literature.