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James Naughtie presents the first of four personal essays exploring America's 'wild search for meaning' in the run-up to November's presidential election.

From the freezing waters of Nantucket Sound in Moby Dick, via sunken levees of the Mississippi and the railroad blues of New Orleans, to the ‘raucous expeditions into an underworld of…richly wounded humanity’ in contemporary crime novels, James contemplates this moment in the United States through its fiction.

Producer: Adele Armstrong
Sound: Peter Bosher
Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman
Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith