How can literature and art make social worlds? In this survey, we will look at select geographies of 20th-century U.S. literature, considering writers and writing in context. We will engage important works of fiction, poetry, and art and highlight the role of community in establishing, sustaining, and disseminating culture. In addition to close-reading texts, we will explore questions of friendship, correspondence, space, and place—in short, the role of the “scene” in cultivating new ideas and forms of expression. We will consider: the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s, the post-WWII poetic avant-garde, the confluence of poetry and performance in 1980s L.A., and Internet collectives of the 1990s and 2000s.