“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you,” runs the famous line – repeated everywhere from bumper stickers to Nirvana lyrics – from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, the story, in Heller’s words, of a “sane man in an insane world.” American fascination with conspiracies – real and imagined – runs through the country’s history from eighteenth-century Illuminati paranoia to today’s truthers and birthers, and finds plenty to satisfy it in fiction, film, television, and even sensationalist news coverage. Conspiracy theories and their defenders frequently invoke American ideals of democracy, justice, and free thought but also often reflect the nation’s ugliest legacies of nativism, racism, and cynical self-interest.The texts we will examine in this course entertain, to differing degrees, the possibility that American historical events and sociopolitical power dynamics are the products of unseen and unknown forces, sinister machinations, carefully arranged nets that are pulled tight at the right moment. Examining a range of fiction from around 1800 to the present, we will explore conspiracy narratives from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Thomas Pynchon. Why does the notion of one’s own manipulation in the hands of shadowy puppet-masters hold such enduring appeal and sway in the American imagination?