Masters of American Lit (except Pynchon)

[Keith]

Would Nabokov have said he was 'an American writer?'

"I am as American as April in Arizona. The flora, the fauna, the
air of the western states, are my links with Asiatic and Arctic
Russia. Of course I owe too much to the Russian language and
landscape to be emotionally involved in, say, American regional
literature, or Indian dances, or pumpkin pie on a spiritual plane;
but I do feel a suffusion of warm, lighthearted pride when when I
show my green USA passport at European frontiers."

    --Nabokov in Paris Review, 1967

http://bit.ly/9nTLSh

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“[...] one night, at a Russian restaurant on the Kurfürstendamm, he  
saw Mira again. They exchanged a few words, she smiled at him in the  
remembered fashion, from under her dark brows, with that bashful  
slyness of hers; and the contour of her prominent cheekbones, and the  
elongated eyes, and the slenderness of arm and ankle were unchanged,  
were immortal, and then she joined her husband who was getting his  
overcoat at the cloakroom, and that was all—-but the pang of  
tenderness remained, akin to the vibrating outline of verses you know  
you know but cannot recall.”
       --Pnin, p. 134

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