Talking bugs, electricity, the founding of empires, hobos, Nazis, whores, violence, drugs, murder, secret cabals, Heaven, Hell—William T. Vollmann is a writer of enormous novels that are stuffed with entire worlds of creation and destruction. This first ever book-length critical study traces his career to date with chapters devoted to each of his novels, as well as his short stories and major nonfiction. Vollmann is a writer of obsessions, and this study concentrates on three of them—freedom, redemption, and prostitution—while arguing that the author that dwells on them is worthy of being called one of our greatest living American writers. Also included are seven interviews spanning the years 1991-2007 that reinforce the persistence of Vollmann's attraction to these themes.