Anxieties of Experience offers a new interpretation of US and Latin American literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Revisiting longstanding debates in the hemisphere, the book charts a widening gap between how modern US and Latin American writers defined their literary authority. It traces the development of two distinct literary strains in the Americas: the "US literature of experience" and the "Latin American literature of the reader." Reinterpreting a range of canonical works from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass to Roberto Bolano's 2666, Anxieties of Experience shows how this hemispheric literary divide fueled a series of anxieties, misunderstandings, and "misencounters" between US and Latin American authors. By excavating the foundations of these misencounters, it questions the emphasis on commonality that has typified much work in hemispheric or inter-American studies. In the wake of recent calls to rethink the "common grounds" approach to literature across the Americas, the narrative advocates a comparative approach that highlights the distinct logics of production and legitimation in the US and Latin American literary fields. Finally, the book's epilogue reveals the convergence of the literature of experience and the literature of the reader in the first decades of the twenty-first century, arguing that the post-Bolano moment has produced the strongest signs of a truly reciprocal literature of the Americas in more than a century.