Sympathy for the Devil

American novelists of the sixties' era predicted the rise of a new sociopathic personality type on the American social and cultural scene that they warned would become an important expression of human behaviour by the turn of the next century and new millennium.

By means of this widely misread central claim of much of the controversial writing of the time, said novelists attempted the literary portrayal of a disturbing new social trend and created an artistic tradition that has been flourishing ever since.

This study focuses on how a generation of American writers reinvented the traditional novel to depict a new kind of human experience in a modern social environment of 'perpetual warfare' and 'institutionalised violence' to gain cultural bearing for this anti-social character type they felt was on the rise.

This work offers the first literary history of the origins and early development of the psychopath figure and genre in American literature and art.