In the postwar era, American urban fiction was dominated by the imagery of containment. Across the fictional landscape, the city was divided into segregated zones, marked by the threat of inevitable violence. In Uncontained, Elizabeth A. Wheeler offers a critiQue of this familiar story -- evident in the noir narratives of James M. Cain and in work by Ellison, Roth, Salinger, Percy, Capote, and others -- and challenges its link to the postwar city.Discussing film, short stories, and novels from many American cities, Wheeler integrates these stories of containment into a shared pattern and reads them across a broad spectrum of works by men and women of various ethnic and literary traditions to reveal a larger vision of postwar America.Knowing that containment is never the entire story, Wheeler shows how the uncontained has shaped the historical moment as well. She places these literary counterstories in dialogue with those of the alienated man, the war veteran, and noir detective, and revives the idea of urban space as a place of openness. By bringing Ann Bannon's lesbian pulp fiction, or the work of Hisaye Yamamoto, Chester Himes, Jo Sinclair, and others to bear on more canonical texts, Wheeler offers a more complete understanding of this period of American fiction.