Philip F. Guras Truths Ragged Edge is perhaps the first comprehensive study of the early American novel since Richard Chases 1957 classic, The American Novel and Its Tradition. Gura opens with the first truly homegrown genre of fiction: religious tracts, which were parables intended to instruct the Christian reader. He then turns to the city novels of the 1840s, which depicted with mixed feelings the rapid growth and modernization of American society. He concludes with fresh interpretations of the introspective novels that appeared before the Civil War, such as those by Hawthorne and by Melville, from whom Gura takes his title. The grand narrative sweep of the book is balanced by Guras great insight that the early novel never fully left its origins behind, even as it evolved—it remained a means of theological and philosophical dispute, and reflected the oldest and deepest divisions in American Christianity, politics, and culture.