High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Anthropology of an American Girl is the first novel by American author Hilary Thayer Hamann. It is the story of a search for authenticity told in the first-person voice of teenaged protagonist Eveline Auerbach. The semi-autobiographical literary novel contains an examination of the social and cultural pressures that prevent individuals from living meaningfully. It was independently published in 2003, and re-released in 2010 by Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House, both times to critical praise. The novel has been compared to J.D. Salinger`s The Catcher in the Rye.