As “American dream” became a cliché in the twentieth century, the contrary refrain of American nightmare was probably inevitable. This book adopts the phrase “nightmare envy” to capture an atmosphere of transatlantic disparity, projection, recrimination, and longing. But the phrase’s ambiguity is deliberate: it isn’t always clear who is envying whom, or for what reason. Examples from Margaret Mead, David Potter, Mary McCarthy, Simone de Beauvoir, and William Faulkner offer variations on the theme. Nightmare Envy and Other Stories proposes an “Americanist century” that stands in curious tension with the American Century heralded by Henry Luce in 1941. The protagonists are the Americanists who negotiated the imperatives of military occupation and cultural diplomacy in Europe, as well as Japan. The introduction closes with one of the paradigmatic figures of the Americanist century, Ralph Ellison, and offers an interpretation of his European fictions, as well as previously unpublished manuscripts.