The films of the Coen brothers have become a contemporary cultural phenomenon. Highly acclaimed and commercially successful, over the years their movies have attracted increasingly larger audiences and spawned a subculture of dedicated fans. Shunning fame and celebrity, Ethan and Joel Coen remain maverick filmmakers, producing and directing independent films outside the Hollywood mainstream in a unique style combining classic genres like film noir with black comedy to tell off-beat stories about America and the American Dream. This study provides an overview of the films of the Coen brothers, including multiple-Oscar winning movies like Fargo and No Country for Old Men, as well as cult favorites such as O Brother, Where Art Thou? and The Big Lebowski. Beginning with the 1984 debut Blood Simple, this volume examines the development of the Coens' body of work, identifying and analyzing major themes and generic constructs and offering diverse interpretative approaches to their enigmatic films. Drawing on a wide array of sources, especially the pulp fiction of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler, this study examines the influence of these literary sources as well as key cinematic precursors to reveal how the Coens' intertextual creativity exemplifies the aesthetics of postmodernism.