American Prose, 1945-1990: Realism and Experimentation

Robert Penn Warren (© AP Images)	Tennessee Williams (© AP Images)
Eudora Welty (© AP Images)	James Baldwin (© AP Images)
Ralph Ellison (© AP Images)	John Cheever (© AP Images)
John Updike (© AP Images)	Norman Mailer (© AP Images)
Philip Roth (© AP Images)	Toni Morrison (© AP Images)
Amiri Baraka (© AP Images)	David Mamet (© AP Images)

Narrative in the decades following World War II resists generalization: It was extremely various and multifaceted. It was vitalized by international currents such as European existentialism and Latin American magical realism, while the electronic era brought the global village. The spoken word on television gave new life to oral tradition. Oral genres, media, and popular culture increasingly influenced narrative.

In the past, elite culture influenced popular culture through its status and example; the reverse seems true in the United States in the postwar years. Serious novelists like Thomas Pynchon, Joyce Carol Oates, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Alice Walker, and E.L. Doctorow borrowed from and commented on comics, movies, fashions, songs, and oral history.

To say this is not to trivialize this literature: Writers in the United States were asking serious questions, many of them of a metaphysical nature. Writers became highly innovative and self-aware, or reflexive. Often they found traditional modes ineffective and sought vitality in more widely popular material. To put it another way, American writers in the postwar decades developed a postmodern sensibility. Modernist restructurings of point of view no longer sufficed for them; rather, the context of vision had to be made new.

The Realist Legacy and the Late 1940s

As in the first half of the 20th century, fiction in the second half reflected the character of each decade. The late 1940s saw the aftermath of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War.

World War II offered prime material: Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead, 1948) and James Jones (From Here to Eternity, 1951) were two writers who used it best. Both of them employed realism verging on grim naturalism; both took pains not to glorify combat. The same was true for Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions (1948). Herman Wouk, in The Caine Mutiny (1951), also showed that human foibles were as evident in wartime as in civilian life.

Later, Joseph Heller cast World War II in satirical and absurdist terms (Catch-22, 1961), arguing that war is laced with insanity. Thomas Pynchon presented an involuted, brilliant case parodying and displacing different versions of reality (Gravity's Rainbow, 1973). Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., became one of the shining lights of the counterculture during the early 1970s following publication of Slaughterhouse-Five: or, The Children's Crusade (1969), his antiwar novel about the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces during World War II (which Vonnegut witnessed on the ground as a prisoner of war).

The 1940s saw the flourishing of a new contingent of writers, including poet-novelist-essayist Robert Penn Warren, dramatists Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, and Tennessee Williams, and short story writers Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty. All but Miller were from the South. All explored the fate of the individual within the family or community and focused on the balance between personal growth and responsibility to the group.

Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)
Robert Penn Warren, one of the southern Fugitives, enjoyed a fruitful career running through most of the 20th century. He showed a lifelong concern with democratic values as they appeared within historical context. The most enduring of his novels is All the King's Men (1946), focusing on the darker implications of the American dream as revealed in this thinly veiled account of the career of a flamboyant and sinister southern politician, Huey Long.

Arthur Miller (1915-2005)
New York-born dramatist Arthur Miller reached his personal pinnacle in 1949 with Death of a Salesman, a study of man's search for merit and worth in his life and the realization that failure invariably looms. Set within the family of the title character, Willy Loman, the play hinges on the uneven relationships of father and sons, husband and wife. It is a mirror of the literary attitudes of the 1940s, with its rich combination of realism tinged with naturalism; carefully drawn, rounded characters; and insistence on the value of the individual, despite failure and error. Death of a Salesman is a moving paean to the common man -- to whom, as Willy Loman's widow eulogizes, "attention must be paid." Poignant and somber, it is also a story of dreams. As one character notes ironically, "a salesman has got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory."

Death of a Salesman, a landmark work, still is only one of a number of dramas Miller wrote over several decades, including All My Sons (1947) and The Crucible (1953). Both are political -- one contemporary and the other set in colonial times. The first deals with a manufacturer who knowingly allows defective parts to be shipped to airplane firms during World War II, resulting in the death of several American airmen. The Crucible depicts the Salem (Massachusetts) witchcraft trials of the 17th century in which Puritan settlers were wrongfully executed as supposed witches. Its message, though -- that "witch hunts" directed at innocent people are anathema in a democracy -- was relevant to the era in which the play was staged, the early 1950s, when an anti-Communist crusade led by U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy and others ruined the lives of innocent people. Partly in response to The Crucible, Miller was called before the House (of Representatives) Un-American Activities Committee in 1956 and asked to provide the names of persons who might have Communist sympathies. Because of his refusal to do so, Miller was charged with contempt of Congress, a charge that was overturned on appeal.

A later Miller play, Incident at Vichy (1964), dealt with the Holocaust -- the destruction of much of European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. In The Price (1968), two brothers struggle to free themselves from the burdens of the past. Other of Miller's dramas include two one-act plays, Fame (1970) and The Reason Why (1970). His essays are collected in Echoes Down the Corridor (2000); his autobiography, Timebends: A Life, appeared in 1987.

Lillian Hellman (1906-1984)
Like Robert Penn Warren, Lillian Hellman's moral vision was shaped by the South. Her childhood was largely spent in New Orleans. Her compelling plays explore power's many guises and abuses. In The Children's Hour (l934), a manipulative girl destroys the lives of two women teachers by telling people they are lesbians. In The Little Foxes (1939), a rich old southern family fights over an inheritance. Hellman's anti-fascist Watch on the Rhine (1941) grew out of her trips to Europe in the l930s. Her memoirs include An Unfinished Woman (l969) and Pentimento (1973).

For many years, Hellman had a close personal relationship with the remarkable scriptwriter Dashiell Hammett, whose streetwise detective character, Sam Spade, fascinated Depression-era Americans. Hammett invented the quintessentially American hard-boiled detective novel: The Maltese Falcon (l930); The Thin Man (1934).

Hellman, like Arthur Miller, had refused to "name names" for the House Un-American Activities Committee, and she and Hammett were blacklisted (refused employment in the American entertainment industry) for a time. These events are recounted in Hellman's memoir, Scoundrel Time (1976).

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)
Tennessee Williams, a native of Mississippi, was one of the more complex individuals on the American literary scene of the mid-20th century. His work focused on disturbed emotions within families -- most of them southern. He was known for incantatory repetitions, a poetic southern diction, weird gothic settings, and Freudian exploration of human emotion. One of the first American writers to live openly as a homosexual, Williams explained that the longings of his tormented characters expressed their loneliness. His characters live and suffer intensely.

Williams wrote more than 20 full-length dramas, many of them autobiographical. He reached his peak relatively early in his career -- in the 1940s -- with The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1949). None of the works that followed over the next two decades and more reached the level of success and richness of those two pieces.

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980)
Katherine Anne Porter's long life and career encompassed several eras. Her first success, the short story "Flowering Judas" (1929), was set in Mexico during the revolution. The beautifully crafted short stories that gained her renown subtly unveil personal lives. "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" (1930), for example, conveys large emotions with precision. Often she reveals women's inner experiences and their dependence on men.

Porter's nuances owe much to the stories of the New Zealand-born story writer Katherine Mansfield. Porter's story collections include Flowering Judas (1930), Noon Wine (1937), Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), The Leaning Tower (1944), and Collected Stories (1965). In the early 1960s, she produced a long, allegorical novel with a timeless theme -- the responsibility of humans for each other. Titled Ship of Fools (1962), it was set in the late 1930s aboard a passenger liner carrying members of the German upper class and German refugees alike from the Nazi nation.

Not a prolific writer, Porter nonetheless influenced generations of authors, among them her southern colleagues Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor.

Eudora Welty (1909-2001)
Born in Mississippi to a well-to-do family of transplanted northerners, Eudora Welty was guided by Robert Penn Warren and Katherine Anne Porter. Porter, in fact, wrote an introduction to Welty's first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green (1941). Welty modeled her nuanced work on Porter, but the younger woman was more interested in the comic and grotesque. Like fellow southerner Flannery O'Connor, Welty often took subnormal, eccentric, or exceptional characters for subjects.

Despite violence in her work, Welty's wit was essentially humane and affirmative, as, for example, in her frequently anthologized story "Why I Live at the P.O." (1941), in which a stubborn and independent daughter moves out of her house to live in a tiny post office. Her collections of stories include The Wide Net (1943), The Golden Apples (1949), The Bride of the Innisfallen (1955), and Moon Lake (1980). Welty also wrote novels such as Delta Wedding (1946), which is focused on a plantation family in modern times, and The Optimist's Daughter (1972).

The 1950s

The 1950s saw the delayed impact of modernization and technology in everyday life. Not only did World War II defeat fascism, it brought the United States out of the Depression, and the 1950s provided most Americans with time to enjoy long-awaited material prosperity. Business, especially in the corporate world, seemed to offer the good life (usually in the suburbs), with its real and symbolic marks of success -- house, car, television, and home appliances.

Yet loneliness at the top was a dominant theme for many writers; the faceless corporate man became a cultural stereotype in Sloan Wilson's best-selling novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955). Generalized American alienation came under the scrutiny of sociologist David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd (1950).

Other popular, more or less scientific studies followed, ranging from Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders (1957) and The Status Seekers (1959) to William Whyte's The Organization Man (1956) and C. Wright Mills's more intellectual formulations -- White Collar (1951) and The Power Elite (1956). Economist and academician John Kenneth Galbraith contributed The Affluent Society (1958).

Most of these works supported the 1950s assumption that all Americans shared a common lifestyle. The studies spoke in general terms, criticizing citizens for losing frontier individualism and becoming too conformist (for example, Riesman and Mills) or advising people to become members of the "New Class" that technology and leisure time created (as seen in Galbraith's works).

The 1950s in literary terms actually was a decade of subtle and pervasive unease. Novels by John O'Hara, John Cheever, and John Updike explore the stress lurking in the shadows of seeming satisfaction. Some of the best work portrays men who fail in the struggle to succeed, as in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Saul Bellow's novella Seize the Day. African-American Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) revealed racism as a continuing undercurrent in her moving 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, in which a black family encounters a threatening "welcome committee" when it tries to move into a white neighborhood.

Some writers went further by focusing on characters who dropped out of mainstream society, as did J.D. Salinger in The Catcher in the Rye, Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man, and Jack Kerouac in On the Road. And in the waning days of the decade, Philip Roth arrived with a series of short stories reflecting a certain alienation from his Jewish heritage (Goodbye, Columbus). His psychological ruminations provided fodder for fiction, and later autobiography, into the new millennium.

The fiction of American-Jewish writers Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Isaac Bashevis Singer -- among others prominent in the 1950s and the years following -- are also worthy, compelling additions to the compendium of American literature. The output of these three authors is most noted for its humor, ethical concern, and portraits of Jewish communities in the Old and New Worlds.

John O'Hara (1905-1970)
Trained as a journalist, John O'Hara was a prolific writer of plays, stories, and novels. He was a master of careful, telling detail and is best remembered for several realistic novels, mostly written in the 1950s, about outwardly successful people whose inner faults and dissatisfaction leave them vulnerable. These titles include Appointment in Samarra (1934), Ten North Frederick (1955), and From the Terrace (1959).

James Baldwin (1924-1987)
James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison mirror the African-American experience of the 1950s. Their characters suffer from a lack of identity, rather than from over-ambition.

Baldwin, the oldest of nine children born to a Harlem, New York, family, was the foster son of a minister. As a youth, Baldwin occasionally preached in the church. This experience helped shape the compelling, oral quality of his prose, most clearly seen in his excellent essays such as "Letter From a Region of My Mind," from the collection The Fire Next Time (1963). In this work, he argued movingly for an end to separation between the races.

Baldwin's first novel, the autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), is probably his best known. It is the story of a 14-year-old boy who seeks self-knowledge and religious faith as he wrestles with issues of Christian conversion in a storefront church. Other important Baldwin works include Another Country (1962) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961), a collection of passionate personal essays about racism, the role of the artist, and literature.

Ralph Ellison (1914-1994)
Ralph Ellison was a Midwesterner, born in Oklahoma, who studied at Tuskegee Institute in the southern United States. He had one of the strangest careers in American letters -- consisting of one highly acclaimed book and little more.

The novel is Invisible Man (1952), the story of a black man who lives a subterranean existence in a cellar brightly illuminated by electricity stolen from a utility company. The book recounts his grotesque, disenchanting experiences. When he wins a scholarship to an all-black college, he is humiliated by whites; when he gets to the college, he witnesses the school's president spurning black American concerns. Life is corrupt outside college, too. For example, even religion is no consolation: A preacher turns out to be a criminal. The novel indicts society for failing to provide its citizens -- black and white -- with viable ideals and institutions for realizing them. It embodies a powerful racial theme because the "invisible man" is invisible not in himself but because others, blinded by prejudice, cannot see him for who he is.

Juneteenth (1999), Ellison's sprawling, unfinished novel, edited posthumously, reveals his continuing concern with race and identity.

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)
Flannery O'Connor, a native of Georgia, lived a life cut short by lupus, a blood disease. Still, she refused sentimentality, as is evident in her extremely humorous yet bleak and uncompromising stories.

Unlike Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, and Zora Neale Hurston, O'Connor most often held her characters at arm's length, revealing their inadequacy and silliness. The uneducated southern characters who people her novels often create violence through superstition or religion, as we see in her novel Wise Blood (1952), about a religious fanatic who establishes his own church.

Sometimes violence arises out of prejudice, as in "The Displaced Person" (1955), about an immigrant killed by ignorant country people who are threatened by his hard work and strange ways. Often, cruel events simply happen to the characters, as in "Good Country People" (1955), the story of a girl seduced by a man who steals her artificial leg.

The black humor of O'Connor links her with Nathanael West and Joseph Heller. Her works include short story collections A Good Man Is Hard To Find (1955), and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965); the novel The Violent Bear It Away (1960); and a volume of letters, The Habit of Being (1979). The Complete Stories came out in 1971.

Saul Bellow (1915-2005)
Born in Canada and raised in Chicago, Saul Bellow was of Russian-Jewish background. In college, he studied anthropology and sociology, which greatly influenced his writing. He once expressed a profound debt to Theodore Dreiser for his openness to a wide range of experience and his emotional engagement with it. Highly respected, Bellow received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976.

Bellow's early, somewhat grim existentialist novels include Dangling Man (1944), a Kafkaesque study of a man waiting to be drafted into the army, and The Victim (1947), about relations between Jews and Gentiles. In the 1950s, his vision became more comic: He used a series of energetic and adventurous first-person narrators in The Adventures of Augie March (1953) -- the study of a Huck Finn-like urban entrepreneur who becomes a black marketeer in Europe -- and in Henderson the Rain King (1959), a brilliant and exuberant serio-comic novel about a middle-aged millionaire whose unsatisfied ambitions drive him to Africa.

Bellow's later works include Herzog (1964), about the troubled life of a neurotic English professor who specializes in the idea of the romantic self; Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970); Humboldt's Gift (1975); and the autobiographical The Dean's December (1982).

In the late 1980s, Bellow wrote two novellas in which elderly protagonists search for ultimate verities, Something To Remember Me By (1991) and The Actual (1997). His novel Ravelstein (2000) is a veiled account of the life of Bellow's friend Alan Bloom, the best-selling author of The Closing of the American Mind (1987), a conservative attack on the academy for a perceived erosion of standards in American cultural life.

Bellow's Seize the Day (1956) is a brilliant novella centered on a failed businessman, Tommy Wilhelm, who is so consumed by feelings of inadequacy that he becomes totally inadequate -- a failure with women, jobs, machines, and the commodities market, where he loses all his money. Wilhelm is an example of the schlemiel of Jewish folklore -- one to whom unlucky things inevitably happen.

Bernard Malamud (1914-1986)
Bernard Malamud was born in New York City to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. In his second novel, The Assistant (1957), Malamud found his characteristic themes -- man's struggle to survive against all odds, and the ethical underpinnings of recent Jewish immigrants.

Malamud's first published work was The Natural (1952), a combination of realism and fantasy set in the mythic world of professional baseball. Other novels include A New Life (1961), The Fixer (1966), Pictures of Fidelman (1969), and The Tenants (1971). Malamud also was a prolific master of short fiction. Through his stories in collections such as The Magic Barrel (1958), Idiots First (1963), and Rembrandt's Hat (1973), he conveyed -- more than any other American-born writer -- a sense of the Jewish present and past, the real and the surreal, fact and legend.

Malamud's monumental work -- for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award -- is The Fixer. Set in Russia around the turn of the 20th century, it is a thinly veiled look at an actual case of blood libel -- the infamous 1913 trial of Mendel Beiliss, a dark, anti-Semitic blotch on modern history. As in many of his writings, Malamud underscores the suffering of his hero, Yakob Bok, and the struggle against all odds to endure.

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991)
Nobel Prize-winning novelist and short story master Isaac Bashevis Singer -- a native of Poland who immigrated to the United States in 1935 -- was the son of the prominent head of a rabbinical court in Warsaw. Writing in Yiddish all his life, he dealt in mythic and realistic terms with two specific groups of Jews -- the denizens of the Old World shtetls (small villages) and the ocean-tossed 20th-century emigrés of the pre-World War II and postwar eras.

Singer's writings served as bookends for the Holocaust. On the one hand, he described -- in novels such as The Manor (1967) and The Estate (1969), set in 19th-century Russia, and The Family Moskat (1950), focused on a Polish-Jewish family between the world wars -- the world of European Jewry that no longer exists. Complementing these works were his writings set after the war, such as Enemies, A Love Story (1972), whose protagonists were survivors of the Holocaust seeking to create new lives for themselves.

Vladimir Nabokov (1889-1977)
Like Singer, Vladimir Nabokov was an Eastern European immigrant. Born into an affluent family in Czarist Russia, he came to the United States in 1940 and gained U.S. citizenship five years later. From 1948 to 1959, he taught literature at Cornell University in upstate New York; in 1960 he moved permanently to Switzerland.

Nabokov is best known for his novels, which include the autobiographical Pnin (1957), about an ineffectual Russian emigré professor, and Lolita (U.S. edition, 1958), about an educated, middle-aged European who becomes infatuated with a 12-year-old American girl. Nabokov's pastiche novel, Pale Fire (1962), another successful venture, focuses on a long poem by an imaginary dead poet and the commentaries on it by a critic whose writings overwhelm the poem and take on unexpected lives of their own.

Nabokov is an important writer for his stylistic subtlety, deft satire, and ingenious innovations in form, which have inspired such novelists as John Barth. Nabokov was aware of his role as a mediator between the Russian and American literary worlds; he wrote a book on Gogol and translated Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. His daring, somewhat expressionist subjects helped introduce 20th-century European currents into the essentially realist American fictional tradition. Nabokov's tone, partly satirical and partly nostalgic, also suggested a new serio-comic emotional register made use of by writers such as Thomas Pynchon, who combines the opposing notes of wit and fear.

John Cheever (1912-1982)
John Cheever often has been called a "novelist of manners." He is also known for his elegant, suggestive short stories, which scrutinize the New York business world through its effects on the businessmen, their wives, children, and friends.

A wry melancholy and never quite quenched but seemingly hopeless desire for passion or metaphysical certainty lurks in the shadows of Cheever's finely drawn, Chekhovian tales, collected in The Way Some People Live (1943), The Housebreaker of Shady Hill (1958), Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel (1961), The Brigadier and the Golf Widow (1964), and The World of Apples (1973). His titles reveal his characteristic nonchalance, playfulness, and irreverence, and hint at his subject matter.

Cheever also published several novels -- The Wapshot Scandal (1964), Bullet Park (1969), and Falconer (1977) -- the last of which was largely autobiographical.

John Updike (1932- )
John Updike, like Cheever, is also regarded as a writer of manners with his suburban settings, domestic themes, reflections of ennui and wistfulness, and, particularly, his fictional locales on the eastern seaboard of the United States, in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.

Updike is best known for his five Rabbit books, depictions of the life of a man -- Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom -- through the ebbs and flows of his existence across four decades of American social and political history. Rabbit, Run (1960) is a mirror of the 1950s, with Angstrom an aimless, disaffected young husband. Rabbit Redux (1971) -- spotlighting the counterculture of the 1960s -- finds Angstrom still without a clear goal or purpose or viable escape route from the banal. In Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Harry has become a prosperous businessman during the 1970s, as the Vietnam era wanes. The final novel, Rabbit at Rest (1990), glimpses Angstrom's reconciliation with life, before his death from a heart attack, against the backdrop of the 1980s. In Updike's 1995 novella Rabbit Remembered, his adult children recall Rabbit.

Among Updike's other novels are The Centaur (1963), Couples (1968), A Month of Sundays (1975), Roger's Version (1986), and S. (l988). Updike creates an alter ego -- a writer whose fame ironically threatens to silence him -- in another series of novels: Bech: A Book (l970), Bech Is Back (1982), and Bech at Bay (1998).

Updike possesses the most brilliant style of any writer today, and his short stories offer scintillating examples of its range and inventiveness. Collections include The Same Door (1959), The Music School (1966), Museums and Women (1972), Too Far To Go (1979), and Problems (1979). He has also written several volumes of poetry and essays.

J.D. Salinger (1919- )
A harbinger of things to come in the 1960s, J.D. Salinger has portrayed attempts to drop out of society. Born in New York City, he achieved huge literary success with the publication of his novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), centered on a sensitive 16-year-old, Holden Caulfield, who flees his elite boarding school for the outside world of adulthood, only to become disillusioned by its materialism and phoniness.

When asked what he would like to be, Caulfield answers "the catcher in the rye," misquoting a poem by Robert Burns. In his vision, he is a modern version of a white knight, the sole preserver of innocence. He imagines a big field of rye so tall that a group of young children cannot see where they are running as they play their games. He is the only big person there. "I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff." The fall over the cliff is equated with the loss of childhood innocence -- a persistent theme of the era

Other works by this reclusive, spare writer include Nine Stories (1953), Franny and Zooey (1961), and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (1963), a collection of stories from The New Yorker magazine. Since the appearance of one story in 1965, Salinger -- who lives in New Hampshire -- has been absent from the American literary scene.

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)
The son of an impoverished French-Canadian family, Jack Kerouac also questioned the values of middle-class life. He met members of the Beat literary underground as an undergraduate at Columbia University in New York City. His fiction was much influenced by the loosely autobiographical work of southern novelist Thomas Wolfe.

Kerouac's best-known novel, On the Road (1957), describes beatniks wandering through America seeking an idealistic dream of communal life and beauty. The Dharma Bums (1958) also focuses on peripatetic counterculture intellectuals and their infatuation with Zen Buddhism. Kerouac also penned a book of poetry, Mexico City Blues (1959), and volumes about his life with such beatniks as experimental novelist William Burroughs and poet Allen Ginsberg.

The Turbulent But Creative 1960s

The alienation and stress underlying the 1950s found outward expression in the 1960s in the United States in the civil rights movement, feminism, antiwar protests, minority activism, and the arrival of a counterculture whose effects are still being worked through American society. Notable political and social works of the era include the speeches of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the early writings of feminist leader Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique), and Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night (1968), about a 1967 antiwar march.

The 1960s were marked by a blurring of the line between fiction and fact, novels and reportage that has carried through the present day. Novelist Truman Capote (1924-1984) -- who had dazzled readers as an enfant terrible of the late 1940s and 1950s in such works as Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) -- stunned audiences with In Cold Blood (1965), a riveting analysis of a brutal mass murder in the American heartland that read like a work of detective fiction.

At the same time, the New Journalism emerged -- volumes of nonfiction that combined journalism with techniques of fiction, or that frequently played with the facts, reshaping them to add to the drama and immediacy of the story being reported. In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), Tom Wolfe (1931- ) celebrated the counterculture wanderlust of novelist Ken Kesey (1935-2001); Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970) ridiculed many aspects of left-wing activism. Wolfe later wrote an exuberant and insightful history of the initial phase of the U.S. space program, The Right Stuff (1979), and a novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), a panoramic portrayal of American society in the 1980s.

As the 1960s evolved, literature flowed with the turbulence of the era. An ironic, comic vision also came into view, reflected in the fabulism of several writers. Examples include Ken Kesey's darkly comic One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), a novel about life in a mental hospital in which the wardens are more disturbed than the inmates, and the whimsical, fantastic Trout Fishing in America (1967) by Richard Brautigan (1935-1984).

The comical and fantastic yielded a new mode, half comic and half metaphysical, in Thomas Pynchon's paranoid, brilliant V and The Crying of Lot 49, John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy, and the grotesque short stories of Donald Barthelme (1931-1989), whose first collection, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, was published in 1964.

This new mode came to be called metafiction -- self-conscious or reflexive fiction that calls attention to its own technique. Such "fiction about fiction" emphasizes language and style, and departs from the conventions of realism such as rounded characters, a believable plot enabling a character's development, and appropriate settings. In metafiction, the writer's style attracts the reader's attention. The true subject is not the characters, but rather the writer's own consciousness.

Critics of the time commonly grouped Pynchon, Barth, and Barthelme as metafictionists, along with William Gaddis (1922-1998), whose long novel JR (l975), about a young boy who builds up a phony business empire from junk bonds, eerily forecasts Wall Street excesses to come. His shorter, more accessible Carpenter's Gothic (1985) combines romance with menace. Gaddis is often linked with midwestern philosopher/novelist William Gass (1924- ), best known for his early, thoughtful novel Omensetter's Luck (1966), and for stories collected in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968).

Robert Coover (1932- ) is another metafiction writer. His collection of stories Pricksongs & Descants (1969) plays with plots familiar from folktales and popular culture, while his novel The Public Burning (1977) deconstructs the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of espionage.

Thomas Pynchon (1937- )
Thomas Pynchon, a mysterious, publicity-shunning author, was born in New York and graduated from Cornell University in 1958, where he may have come under the influence of Vladimir Nabokov. Certainly, his innovative fantasies use themes of translating clues, games, and codes that could derive from Nabokov. Pynchon's flexible tone can modulate paranoia into poetry.

All of Pynchon's fiction is similarly structured. A vast plot is unknown to at least one of the main characters, whose task it then becomes to render order out of chaos and decipher the world. This project, exactly the job of the traditional artist, devolves also upon the reader, who must follow along and watch for clues and meanings. This paranoid vision is extended across continents and time itself, for Pynchon employs the metaphor of entropy, the gradual running down of the universe. The masterful use of popular culture -- particularly science fiction and detective fiction -- is evident in his works.

Pynchon's work V (1963) is loosely structured around Benny Profane -- a failure who engages in pointless wanderings and various weird enterprises -- and his opposite, the educated Herbert Stencil, who seeks a mysterious female spy, V (alternatively Venus, Virgin, Void). The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), a short work, deals with a secret system associated with the U.S. Postal Service. Gravity's Rainbow (1973) takes place during World War II in London, when rockets were falling on the city, and concerns a farcical yet symbolic search for Nazis and other disguised figures.

In Pynchon's comic novel Vineland (l990), set in northern California, shadowy forces within federal agencies endanger individuals. In the novel Mason & Dixon (1997), partly set in the wilderness of 1765, two English explorers survey the line that would come to divide the North and South in the United States. Again, Pynchon sees power wielded unjustly. Dixon asks: "No matter where...we go, shall we find all the World Tyrants and Slaves?" Despite its range, the violence, comedy, and flair for innovation in his work inexorably link Pynchon with the 1960s.

John Barth (1930- )
John Barth, a native of Maryland, is more interested in how a story is told than in the story itself, but where Pynchon deludes the reader by false trails and possible clues out of detective novels, Barth entices his audience into a carnival fun house full of distorting mirrors that exaggerate some features while minimizing others.

Realism is the enemy for Barth, the author of Lost in the Funhouse (1968), 14 stories that constantly refer to the processes of writing and reading. Barth's intent is to alert the reader to the artificial nature of reading and writing and to prevent him or her from being drawn into the story as if it were real. To explode the illusion of realism, Barth uses a panoply of reflexive devices to remind his audience that they are reading.

Barth's earlier works, like Saul Bellow's, were questioning and existential, and took up the 1950s themes of escape and wandering. In The Floating Opera (1956), a man considers suicide. The End of the Road (1958) concerns a complex love affair. Works of the 1960s became more comical and less realistic. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) parodies an 18th-century picaresque style, while Giles Goat-Boy (1966) is a parody of the world seen as a university.

Chimera (1972) retells tales from Greek mythology, and Letters (1979) uses Barth himself as a character, as Norman Mailer does in The Armies of the Night. In Sabbatical: A Romance (1982), Barth uses the popular fiction motif of the spy; this is the story of a woman college professor and her husband, a retired secret agent turned novelist. Later novels -- The Tidewater Tales (1987), The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991), and Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera (1994) reveal Barth's "passionate virtuosity" (his own phrase) in negotiating the chaotic, oceanic world with the bright rigging of language.

Norman Mailer (1923- )
Norman Mailer made himself the most visible novelist of the l960s and l970s. Co-founder of the anti-establishment New York City weekly The Village Voice, Mailer publicized himself along with his political views. In his appetite for experience, vigorous style, and a dramatic public persona, Mailer follows in the tradition of Ernest Hemingway. To gain a vantage point on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Vietnam War protests, black liberation, and the women's movement, he constructed hip, existentialist, macho male personae (in her book Sexual Politics, Kate Millett identified Mailer as an archetypal male chauvinist). The irrepressible Mailer went on to marry six times and run for mayor of New York.

Mailer is the reverse of a writer like John Barth, for whom the subject is not as important as the way it is handled. Unlike the invisible Thomas Pynchon, Mailer constantly courts and demands attention.

A novelist, essayist, sometime politician, literary activist, and occasional actor, Mailer is always on the scene. From such New Journalism exercises as Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), an analysis of the 1968 U.S. presidential conventions, and his compelling study about the execution of a condemned murderer, The Executioner's Song (1979), Mailer has turned to writing such ambitious, if flawed, novels as Ancient Evenings (1983), set in the Egypt of antiquity, and Harlot's Ghost (1991), revolving around the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

Philip Roth (1933- )
Like Norman Mailer, Philip Roth has provoked controversy by mining his life for fiction. In Roth's case, his treatments of sexual themes and ironic analysis of Jewish life have drawn popular and critical attention, as well as criticism.

Roth's first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), satirized provincial Jewish suburbanites. In his best-known novel, the outrageous, best-selling Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a New York City administrator regales his taciturn psychoanalyst with off-color stories of his boyhood.

Although The Great American Novel (1973) delves into baseball lore, most of Roth's novels remain resolutely, even defiantly, autobiographical. In My Life As a Man (1974), under the stress of divorce, a man resorts to creating an alter-ego, Nathan Zuckerman, whose stories constitute one pole of the narrative, the other pole being the different kinds of readers' responses. Zuckerman seemingly takes over in a series of subsequent novels. The most successful is probably the first, The Ghost Writer (1979). It is told by Zuckerman as a young writer criticized by Jewish elders for fanning anti-Semitism. In Zuckerman Bound (1985), a novel has made Zuckerman rich but notorious. In The Counterlife (1986), the fifth Zuckerman novel, stories vie with stories, as Nathan's supposed life is contrasted with other imaginable lives. Roth's memoir The Facts (1988) twists the screw further; in it, Zuckerman criticizes Roth's own narrative style.

Roth continues wavering on the border between fact and fiction in Patrimony: A True Story (1991), a memoir about the death of his father. His recent novels include American Pastoral (1997), in which a daughter's 1960s radicalism wounds a father, and The Human Stain (2000), about a professor whose career is ruined by a racial misunderstanding based on language.

Roth is a profound analyst of Jewish strengths and weaknesses. His characterizations are nuanced; his protagonists are complex, individualized, and deeply human. Roth's series of autobiographical novels about a writer recalls John Updike's recent Bech series, and it is master-stylist Updike with whom Roth -- widely admired for his supple, ingenious style -- is most often compared.

Despite its brilliance and wit, some readers find Roth's work self-absorbed. Still, his vigorous accomplishment over almost 50 years has earned him a place among the most distinguished of American novelists.

Southern Writers

Southern writing of the l960s tended, like the then still largely agrarian southern region, to adhere to time-honored traditions. It remained rooted in realism and an ethical, if not religious, vision during this decade of radical change. Recurring southern themes include family, the family home, history, the land, religion, guilt, identity, death, and the search for redemptive meaning in life. Like William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel, 1929), who inspired the "southern renaissance" in literature, many southern writers of the 1960s were scholars and elaborate stylists, revering the written word as a link with traditions rooted in the classical world.

Many have been influential teachers. Kentucky-born Caroline Gordon (1895-1981), who married southern poet Allen Tate, was a respected professor of writing. She set her novels in her native Kentucky. Truman Capote was born in New Orleans and spent part of his childhood in small towns in Louisiana and Alabama, the settings for many of his early works in the elegant, decadent, southern gothic vein.

African-American writing professor Ernest Gaines (1933- ), also born in New Orleans, set many of his moving, thoughtful works in the largely black rural bayou country of Louisiana. Perhaps his best known novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), reflects on the sweep of time from the end of the Civil War in 1865 up to 1960. Concerned with human issues deeper than skin color, Gaines handles racial relations subtly.

Reynolds Price (1933- ), a long-time professor at Duke University, was born in North Carolina, which furnishes the scenes for many of his works, such as A Long and Happy Life (1961). Like William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren, he peoples his southern terrain with interlinked families close to their roots and broods on the passing of time and the imperative to expiate ancient wrongs. His meditative, poetic style recalls the classical literary tradition of the old South. Partially paralyzed due to cancer, Price has explored physical suffering in The Promise of Rest (1995) about a father tending his son who is dying of AIDS. His highly regarded novel Kate Vaiden (1986) reveals his ability to evoke a woman's life.

Walker Percy (1916-1990), a resident of Louisiana, was raised as a member of the southern aristocracy. His very readable novels -- by turns comic, lyrical, moralizing, and satirical -- reveal his awareness of social class and his conversion to Catholicism. His best novel is his first, The Moviegoer (l961). This story of a charming but aimless young New Orleans stockbroker shows the influence of French existentialism transplanted to the booming and often brash New South that burgeoned after World War II.

The 1970s and 1980s: Consolidation

By the mid-1970s, an era of consolidation had begun. The Vietnam conflict was over, followed soon afterward by U.S. recognition of the People's Republic of China and America's bicentennial celebration. Soon the 1980s -- the "Me Decade" in Tom Wolfe's phrase -- ensued, in which individuals tended to focus more on personal concerns than on larger social issues.

In literature, old currents remained, but the force behind pure experimentation dwindled. New novelists like John Gardner, John Irving (The World According to Garp, 1978), Paul Theroux (The Mosquito Coast, 1981), William Kennedy (Ironweed, 1983), and Alice Walker (The Color Purple, 1982) surfaced with stylistically brilliant novels to portray moving human dramas. Concern with setting, character, and themes associated with realism returned, along with renewed interest in history, as in works by E.L. Doctorow.

Realism, abandoned by experimental writers in the 1960s, also crept back, often mingled with bold original elements -- a daring structure like a novel within a novel, as in John Gardner's October Light, or black American dialect as in Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Minority literature began to flourish. Drama shifted from realism to more cinematic, kinetic techniques. At the same time, however, the Me Decade was reflected in such brash new talents as Jay McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City, 1984), Bret Easton Ellis (Less Than Zero, 1985), and Tama Janowitz (Slaves of New York, 1986).

E.L. Doctorow (1931- )
The novels of E.L. Doctorow demonstrate the transition from metafiction to a new and more human sensibility. His critically acclaimed novel about the high human cost of the Cold War, The Book of Daniel (1971), is based on the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage, told in the voice of the bereaved son. Robert Coover's The Public Burning treats the same topic, but Doctorow's book conveys more warmth and emotion.

Doctorow's Ragtime (1975) is a rich, kaleidoscopic collage of the United States beginning in 1906. As John Dos Passos had done several decades earlier in his trilogy U.S.A., Doctorow mingles fictional characters with real ones to capture the era's flavor and complexity. Doctorow's fictional history of the United States is continued in Loon Lake (1979), set in the 1930s, about a ruthless capitalist who dominates and destroys idealistic people.

Later Doctorow novels are the autobiographical World's Fair (1985), about an eight-year-old boy growing up in the Depression of the 1930s; Billy Bathgate (l989), about Dutch Schultz, a real New York gangster; and The Waterworks (1994), set in New York during the 1870s. City of God (2000) -- the title referencing St. Augustine -- turns to New York in the present. A Christian cleric's consciousness interweaves the city's generalized poverty, crime, and loneliness with stories of people whose lives touch his. The book hints at Doctorow's abiding belief that writing -- a form of witnessing -- is a mode of human survival.

Doctorow's techniques are eclectic. His stylistic exuberance and formal inventiveness link him with metafiction writers like Thomas Pynchon and John Barth, but his novels remain rooted in realism and history. His use of real people and events links him with the New Journalism of the l960s and with Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and Tom Wolfe, while his use of fictional memoir, as in World's Fair, looks forward to writers like Maxine Hong Kingston and the flowering of the memoir in the 1990s.

8/10 on 1 vote

No comments