The American Monomyth, first named and described by Lawrence and Jewett, has woven its way through American popular culture. This pervasive structure, with roots in Puritan captivity narratives, American westward expansion, and the creation and serialization of superhero comics and radio programs, has entertained generations of consumers and altered how they conceive of and interact with the world around them. But this structure has also had negative effects on audiences, and Jewett and Lawrence, after analyzing this monomythic framework and its effects in their 1977 and 2002 books, called for its replacement.