Soon after their nation's independence, Americans began remaking Chaucer into their own image. In the 1800s, publishers exploited middle-class desires to appear well informed by including bowdlerized Chaucers in parlor-room anthologies. Before WWI, dramatist Percy MacKaye used Chaucer to promote progressive ideals. After the war, James Hall used his reading of Chaucer to refract his prisoner-of-war experience. Until the Depression, women used Chaucer...