"The scientific achievements of the modern world failed to impress the leading writers of the twentieth century, leaving them instead profoundly disturbed by a sense of lost values and of the insignificance of the individual in a universe seemingly indifferent to human concerns. In The Search for Selfhood in Modern Literature Murray Roston explores the various strategies employed by authors such as Greene, Salinger, Osborne, Roth and Baldwin in their attempt to grapple with the negative implications inherent in the new theories, strategies including the emergence of the anti-hero and of literary existentialism. It is now timely to review their work, to see it in perspective as an attempt to reassert human dignity within a spiritual wasteland." "The result is a study that offers some fascinatingly new insights into the literature of the mid-century. This book offers a close analysis of the impact of Darwinism, the effects upon religion of the anthropological work of James Frazer, the psychological theories of Freud and Jung, and the social materialism of Marx, tracing the response of leading writers to these elements and the changes they produced by their writings."--Jacket.