A wide-ranging study of American writers' entanglements with, dependence on, and resistance to institutions such as universities, courts, libraries, the military, media, this book offers a reappraisal of the necessity and limitations of 'institutional knowledge.'

From the writings of Emerson to Dickinson, Hawthorne to Melville, American literature has been suffused with a preoccupation with, and challenge to, institutionalist gatekeeping. Kicked off by a rallying call from Ralph Waldo Emerson to his contemporaries and successors to write about and write against cultural institutions, he charged his compatriots with displacing prevailing assumptions and the rhetoric that sustained dominant institutions. This book frames and historicizes relationships between a broad range of writers, digging into how they took up this call and why the result requires a new neologism: 'institutionism.'

The book explores a huge range of key theoretical ideas, applying them to the prose, poetry, song lyrics and letters by the great U.S writers, including James Baldwin, Colson Whitehead, Toni Morrison, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nella Larsen, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Flannery O'Connor, James McBride, Percival Everett, Joan Didion, Chester Himes, Henry James, Philip Roth, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Eudora Welty, Don DeLillo, Washington Irving, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bob Dylan, and Stephen Sondheim. Pairing an irreverent, slyly humorous tone with carefully considered close readings and an autobiographical account of the author himself becoming an 'institutionist', the book considers how the U.S might not have been blindsided by the MAGA crusade against knowledge bases had they taken heed from it's writers' assessment of institutional knowledge.