The concept that informs this study is that proposed by twentieth century, literary theorist M. M. Bakhtin, author of The Dialogic Imagination. While Bakhtin limited his interpretation of characters and meaning in fiction (and, by implication, to nonfiction) to the accumulation of actions over time in a single scene or place (i.e., a "chronotope"), this dissertation expands the territory to include the entire United States and its actions around the globe. In this light, the most persistent and pervasive quality about place in the United States is its idea about itself. Even in the twentieth century, the country's founders' expectations of living in a New Eden on the American continent, i.e., the American dream and its adaptation to an increasingly industrialized and capitalistic society, is a tacit assumption among the authors, a motivation of the people whose lives they feature, and an atavistic concept of American readers. As this dissertation demonstrates, Hersey, Capote, Baldwin, and Didion filter this national belief into their commentaries to contrast a chaotic present. While the reader's consolation is that the place still exists and time has not run out, these works of literary nonfiction remain not merely as myths or as the news of the past, but they resonate as lived and witnessed cautionary tales for the present.