Philipp Löffler explores the contemporary historical novel in conjunction with three cultural shifts that have crucially affected political and intellectual life in the United States during the 1990s and 2000s: the end of the Cold War, the decline of postmodernism, and the re-emergence of cultural pluralism. Contemporary historical fiction – from Don DeLillo’s Underworld and Philip Roth’s American Trilogy to Richard Powers’s Plowing the Dark and Toni Morrison’s A Mercy – relates and authorizes these developments by imagining the writing of history as a powerful form of world-making.