In the second half of this century, the United States became a more mobile society, as citizens first shifted from urban to suburban settings and then began transposing their lives more readily from one part of the country to another. Writers, like other Americans, naturally have been part of this shift. This article speaks to that development and its relationship to "place."

"The strengths of American literature," writes English critic George Steiner, "have, characteristically, revealed themselves in regional clusters and local constellations." Steiner means, I suspect, that given the nature of our history -- the colonization, the slow movement westward -- the artistic traditions of the United States are bound up significantly with locale.

Looking back, he offers the example of what he calls the "Hawthorne-Melville-Emerson-James grouping." Never mind that Nathaniel Hawthorne set work in Italy, Herman Melville wrote vibrantly of the South Seas, and Henry James arranged most of his high-toned trysts in the capital cities of Europe -- Steiner's point stands. American writers, like all writers, write about what they know best, and one of the things they know best is the world around them. Our literature is suffused with place, and places -- From James Agee's Knoxville, Tennessee, and Louise Erdrich's Dakota plains to John Steinbeck's Salinas, California, and Mark Twain's Mississippi River.

But times have changed. We find ourselves, quite suddenly, living in a watershed period, when all basic terms and traditions are being revised by the ubiquity and instantaneousness of electronic communications. Fewer and fewer people now grow up with roots deep in a community, a region, and with a grounding in local lore. Population studies show that we have become increasingly multiregional; like Bedouins, we are accustomed to breaking camp and moving on. That a writer might nowadays live out a long life in one place -- as Eudora Welty has in Jackson, Mississippi -- is almost unthinkable. More in keeping with the spirit of our times is the experience of Richard Ford, also from Jackson, who moves steadily from place to place and fills his work with a shifting array of settings.

Moreover, place itself seems to be changing. We are now deep in the era of the homogenous. The architecture of our shopping malls and housing developments obliterates particularity and helps insure that wherever we go we will find, as Gertrude Stein put it, no there there. Our neighbors are now mainly people who have come in from elsewhere, and when we communicate with our soulmates and our kin it is less and less often in person and more often by telephone and electronic mail. Whatever the benefits of electronic communications, they do not foster a sense of geographic rootedness.

We might expect, then, that American literature would mirror this epochal transition, with characters coming unrooted and circumstances manifesting estrangement and blandness. And so, to a degree, it does, though rarely in works by writers of the literary mainstream. Looking to the minimalism of the 1970s and 1980s, or the postmodern novels of Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, Richard Powers and David Foster Wallace, we could easily theorize a dissolution of the immediacies of place. When DeLillo writes, in White Noise, "...we walked across two parking lots to the main structure in the Mid-Village Mall, a ten-story building arranged around a center court of waterfalls, promenades and gardens," we realize that we could be anywhere in the United States. And that's the point.

But we also find a striking and powerful countervailing trend: Writers and readers alike appear to be bewitched by place and, to an only slightly lesser degree, by the past. Indeed, the two are very often in combination. Consider the enormous recent popularity of David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars, Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, Robert James Waller's The Bridges of Madison County and, in an adjacent genre -- autobiography -- Mary Karr's The Liars' Club. The three novels, all looking back some decades, are place-saturated -- Puget Sound, the Great Western Plains and rural Iowa are as essential as any characters or narrative turns. We could not imagine Mary Karr's memoirs unfolding anywhere but in East Texas.

Alongside those works from our more recent best-seller lists, we find a number of arguably more estimable examples -- Cormac McCarthy's All The Pretty Horses and The Crossing, William Kennedy's Albany (New York) books, Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, Toni Morrison's Sula and Beloved, and the works of E. Annie Proulx.

Proulx, more than most, seems possessed by the possibilities of regional proteanism. Where her prize-winning novel, The Shipping News, inhabited the rocky promontories and eccentric inlets of the Maritime Provinces, her latest novel, Accordion Crimes, spans a period from the 1890s to the present and traverses, with authoritative detailing, American locales as different from each other as New Orleans, rural Maine, Montana and Missouri.

Proulx works her sentences with the keenest specificity, feeding the appetitive senses. "Through the rain-streeled windshield," she writes,

Maine appeared as alternating plats of spruce, slash and clear-cut, withered acres of poplar and cherry, rolled-up leaves like charred scraps of paper on the defoliated trees, dark, too, with rain, and roadside moose the shade of old butternut husks, darkness unrelieved by whatever pale strip the sky unrolled, the crippled rivers and chains of lakes bordered by tattered horizons.

He dimly remembered standing beside someone, a man, not his father, in the tangled fragrance of guajillo, black mimosa,huisache, in the cedar elms and the ebonies, watching a dark blue snake twine among the tiny leaves.

Proulx worked for some time as a journalist, and in an interview with Amanda Bichsell she describes how she is always researching, filling notebooks with her observations about landscape, regional customs and the like. "That's usually the part I do first," Proulx explains, "construct the surroundings. The weather, the shape of the land, the kinds of streets and roads, the food we eat...the climate, the wind, the rock. All of those things are incredibly important in our lives, so when those things are established in a novel, for me, the characters literally step out of the landscape."

Some might object that this is place researched, not lived; that these are details seized by an outsider -- an anthropologist -- and arranged to make a literary effect. But it would be an objection to a practice that goes back to the beginnings of the art, and remains the norm today. Richard Ford, recently the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for Independence Day, by his own tally has lived in 14 homes in nine states and has set his deeply observed "realist" stories and novels in most of the time zones. Then there is William Vollmann, prolific enfant terrible of contemporary letters, who thrusts himself into exotic locales in his frenzied research missions. Thus far, he has "done" Afghanistan, Vietnam, the Canadian tundra and San Francisco's Tenderloin district -- as he is not yet 40.

Obviously, then, there is a range -- different kinds of immersions practiced by different kinds of writers for different reasons. Proulx is nothing like Ford, Ford is nothing like Vollmann. And none of these relative outsiders is like, say, Andre Dubus, the New Hampshire writer who has put in a long career studying the fraying blue-collar world of his Merrimack Valley; or Larry Brown, who lives in Faulkner's own Oxford, Mississippi, and writes about that region with an insider's special center of gravity.

But what exactly is the distinction between the rendition of places visited and places known profoundly? Moreover, if there is a distinction, who will discern it? Not only are most readers themselves outsiders to what they are reading about, but reader and writer alike are subject to the age-old variability of perception. Subjectivity rules this art as it rules every other. No two, or ten, writers will ever see the same Paris, or New York, or Tuscaloosa. Unless the artist commits some egregious misstep -- adorning a northern facade with bougainvillea, say -- few will arch the skeptical eyebrow.

The purist disagrees. Sure, craft and imagination can go a long way, and ignorance on the part of the reader can excuse a great deal, but nothing can feel as right, as natural, as possession from within. When an author knows a world in his or her very fiber, the difference is clear. It's like listening to real blues after a diet of well-intentioned imitators. Welty, Peter Taylor, John Updike, Rudolfo Anaya -- here are writers who know their people and locales absolutely. Reading them, we feel that knowing. Not just through this or that detail of setting, but on every level. We sense the author's confidence from the rhythm and the diction. We note the rightness, the ease of characters in their settings. They belong.

Cormac McCarthy is one writer who puts these notions of insider/outsider to an interesting test. Raised mainly in eastern Tennessee, he set all of his early novels in his native region. Here was locale reflected from the inside by a writer overtly interested in the particularities of place. A passage from his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, illustrates this:

In late summer the mountain bakes under a sky of pitiless blue. The red dust of the orchard road is like powder from a brick kiln. You can't hold a scoop of it in your hand. Hot winds come up the slope from the valley like a rancid breath, redolent of milkweed, hoglots, rotting vegetation. The red clay banks along the road are crested with withered honeysuckle, pea vines dried and sheathed in dust. By late July the corn patches stand parched and sere, stalks askew in defeat. All greens pale and dry. Clay cracks and splits in endless microcataclysm and the limestone lies about the eroded land like schools of sunning dolphin, gray channeled backs humped at the infernal sky.

The creek was clear and green with trailing moss braided over the gravel bars. They rode slowly up through the open country among scrub mesquite and nopal. They crossed from Tom Green County into Coke County. They crossed the old Schoonover road and they rode up through broken hills dotted with cedar where the ground was cobbled with traprock and they could see snow on the thin blue ranges a hundred miles to the north.

There is, finally, no way to generalize about the presence of place in contemporary writing except to say that it is, against expectations, vividly prominent.

This prominence is no great mystery. The changes in the world we live in -- the estranging velocities, the electronic infiltration of the most basic transactions -- are one thing. Our psychological responsiveness is quite another. The outer and inner experiences are in disequilibrium. We patrol the Internet, but what we crave are the simple pleasures of a good face-to-face talk. "Only connect," wrote E.M. Forster, and we know exactly what he meant.

Here literature takes on its compensatory role. If the daily round finds us strung out and distracted, we are not likely to pick up a novel looking for more of the same. And if we feel -- as I believe we increasingly do -- that we have come unmoored in space and time, that we are not claimed by community or a sense of historical participation as our forbears were, then we will find ways to remedy that lack.

Fiction is our supreme sense-making enterprise, our way of entering other lives while processing our own experience at the same time. What it seems to be offering us in the United States now, in happy abundance, is a chance to understand the terms of the trade we are making - giving up geographical rootedness for mobility and electronic reach - and to reap some of the satisfactions of a prior way of life, if only by proxy.

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Sven Birkerts is the author of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading In An Electronic Age. He has recently edited Tolstoy's Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse, for Graywolf Press. His literary criticism appears in numerous journals and newspapers.