American Literature

C

The Depression Years

Ending the glitter and excess of the Jazz Age, the catastrophe of the 1929 stock-market crash ushered in the “angry decade” of the 1930s. Many novels of Neo-Naturalism and social protest were produced, inspired by the rigours of the Great Depression.

During the 1930s, and into the decade 1940-1949, the novelists Zora Neale Hurston, author of Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Arna Bontemps, author of God Sends Sunday (1931) and Black Thunder (1936), dealt realistically with social issues. The works of John Steinbeck, including Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939) exude despair; Steinbeck was to win a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. Class conflict is the underlying theme of the most important work by the prolific John O’Hara, the novel Appointment in Samarra (1934). Two monumental trilogies, James Thomas Farrell’s Studs Lonigan (1932-1935) and U.S.A. (1930-1936) by John Dos Passos, are suffused with bitterness and rage. The intense, often poignant, and unstructured novels of Thomas Clayton Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and The Web and the Rock (1939), express personal torment, as well as a mystical optimism about America. The intricately narrated novels of William Faulkner in this period, The Sound and the Fury (1929), Sanctuary (1931), and The Hamlet (1940), combine dark violence and earthy humour in their vision of the tragically contorted, wounded society of the post-Civil War South. His superb short stories have been issued in Go Down, Moses (1942) and Collected Stories (1950). Faulkner, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, was a leader of the group who kept southern regional writing alive through the next three decades.

D

World War II and After: Fiction

The extensive fictional literature that arose out of World War II can be divided into two distinct groups: the Realistic-Naturalistic writers, and authors who used black humour and absurdist fantasy to describe the full, technological horror of the war. Two of the most impressive novels of World War II, all hard-edged and all concerned with the adaptation of the individual to restrictive military life, were From Here to Eternity (1951) by James Jones, and The Naked and the Dead (1948) by Norman Mailer. Two popular novelists began their successful careers with war books: James A. Michener, with a collection of short stories, Tales of the South Pacific (1947); and Irwin Shaw, with his novel about the war in Europe, The Young Lions (1948). Humour, a persistently recurring strain in American writing, appeared in such novels as A Bell for Adano (1944), in which John Hersey dealt with the occupation of an Italian town by US Army forces; and Mr Roberts (1946), a bittersweet story about the US Navy (later dramatized for stage and screen), by Thomas Heggen.

Just as the novels of World War II seemed to emphasize individuality, the novels written in the decades following continued that emphasis. Authors, determined to assert their individuality, worked in a wide range of styles and dealt with an even wider range of material. A few uniquely original writers, however, can be distinguished. Vladimir Nabokov, born in Russia, became one of the greatest masters of English prose style. His novels with American settings, such as Lolita (1955) and Pale Fire (1962), written many years after he became an American citizen, are remarkable examples of tragicomedy. J. D. Salinger is famed for his novel of rebellious adolescence, The Catcher in the Rye, which is both a humorous and a terrifyingly precise observation; written in 1951, it remains enormously popular. So too does Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller, a satire on the military mentality in World War II. A statement about authority, it employs a sardonic, wildly imaginative style that has come to be known as black humour. Another very popular novelist in this vein, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., based one of his several innovative novels, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), on his experiences in a German prison camp during the war. Alternating surrealistically between this setting and a fictional planet, the multilevel narrative brilliantly combines elements of science fiction, a genre that became increasingly popular in the decades after World War II.

Two of the major novelists of the later 20th century, John Cheever and John Updike, share a similar concern and approach in their somewhat detached, rueful, or more openly satirical ruminations on upper middle-class suburban life in the North-East. Cheever’s career as a novelist ranges from the relatively benign The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), the story of an eccentric family, to the bleak tale of a fratricide, Falconer (1977). His last work, the novella Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982), was more hopeful in tone. Updike is perhaps best known for his books begun in 1960 about a man fleeing disillusion. Two in the series, Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990) won Pulitzer prizes. Another fine critic and teacher of writing, Joyce Carol Oates remains one of the most prolific of more recent writers. A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967) and Them (1969) are major examples of her Gothic fiction, a genre she continued in the multi-generational family saga Bellefleur (1980). Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984) is a re-creation of the traditional Victorian mystery story.

American writers have also been attracted to opportunities afforded them by Postmodernism, a phenomenon that has dominated many areas of contemporary culture, and which emphasizes hybridity and stylistic confusion, and self-conscious playfulness, and whose textual manifestations constantly defy the reader’s ability to interpret fictional events in realistic ways. Thomas Pynchon, despite remaining a recluse during the past 40 years, is the preeminent figure here. Both V (1964) and The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) deal with a quest for revelation and explanation that is constantly deferred and frustrated, while the sheer amount of information and number of characters in the lengthy Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) exemplifies the point made by Malcolm Bradbury that American Postmodernist fiction is characterized by “data in excess of system”. More recently in Mason and Dixon (1997), Pynchon produced a fictionalized biography of the 18th-century scientists responsible for mapping pre-Revolutionary America. William Gaddis in The Recognitions (1955) and JR (1975) creates similarly complex fictional worlds, as does John Barth in Giles Goat-Boy (1966), Lost in the Funhouse (1968), and Chimera (1972).

The preference for long, sprawling, and stylistically complex novels waned during the 1980s and 1990s, although the tradition is carried on by David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest (1996). Instead, new forms of consumer culture and technology have exercised the imagination of American writers since the 1980s. Jay McInerney in Bright Lights, Big City (1984), Bret Easton Ellis in American Psycho (1990), and Tama Janowitz in Slaves of New York (1986) all dramatize the rise of affluent yuppie culture in New York, while Don DeLillo in White Noise (1984) assesses the impact of living in a 24-hour culture where life is constantly experienced through the mediated visual cultures of film and television. William Gibson reinvented the science-fiction genre and christened a new virtual world of cyberspace in his novel Neuromancer (1984), while Douglas Coupland described a new group of disillusioned and frustrated but knowledgeable consumers in Generation X (1992), as well as providing a new lexicon—“McJob”, “Boomer Envy”—with which to think about contemporary experience.

E

Ethnic and Regional Writing

Concern about their ethnic heritage and role in American society has characterized the work of a large number of Jewish and black writers.

Examining their lives as Jews in urban 20th-century America, sometimes with despair and sometimes with humour, several writers created a remarkable body of introspective fiction from the immediate post-war period on. Chief among them were Saul Bellow, author of The Adventures of Augie March (1953) and Herzog (1964), who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976; Bernard Malamud, who wrote The Assistant (1957) and several collections of haunting short stories, including Idiots First (1963); and Philip Roth, author of Goodbye, Columbus (1959), the very popular Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), and the trilogy Zuckerman Bound (1985). During the 1990s Roth enjoyed something of a renaissance with a series of award-winning novels that looked back with an iconoclastic eye over the course of United States post-war history: American Pastoral (1997; Pulitzer Prize); The Human Stain (2000; PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction); Sabbath's Theater (1995; National Book Award for Fiction).

Against the background of the transition from the Great Depression to involvement in World War II may be set several novels that deal on a personal level with the long-standing American problem of racial prejudice. Native Son (1940) and the autobiographical Black Boy (1945), by Richard Wright, are powerful statements, written in a starkly realistic manner. Passionate indignation about the black experience was voiced again in Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison and in Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), by James Baldwin, as well as in the latter’s essays such as Nobody Knows My Name (1961). This tradition is carried on by writers like John Edgar Wideman, Philadelphia Fire (1990), while Walter Mosley has become a bestselling novelist with his books featuring detective Easy Rawlins, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), and ex-convict Socrates Fortlow, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (1998), while retaining his avocation of African-American political struggle.

The long tradition of American regional writing continued into the later part of the 20th century. Among the post-war southern writers who continued the tradition of Faulkner—sometimes referred to as “southern Gothic”—were Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, 1946), Truman Capote (Other Voices, Other Rooms, 1947), Eudora Welty (The Ponder Heart, 1954), and Flannery O’Connor (The Violent Bear It Away, (1960). Best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the King's Men (1946), a powerful characterization of a southern politician, Kentucky-born Robert Penn Warren was also a noted poet, critic, and literary historian. Richard Ford, although somewhat reluctant to be described a southern writer, was compared to Faulkner with A Piece of My Heart (1976), and the southern line of fiction is carried on by writers like Barry Hannah, High Lonesome (1996), and Bobbie Ann Mason, In Country (1988).

Baltimore is the specific setting of the novels and stories of Anne Tyler. She was much praised for her Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), the story of the members of a broken home coming to terms with their lives. Alice Walker, poet and novelist, first won attention for Meridian (1976). In the highly acclaimed The Color Purple (1982), which won the Pulitzer Prize and was also made into a film, she evokes by the structure of the dialogue the speech of rural southern blacks; she weaves a multilayered narrative of their lives much in the manner of Faulkner.

Writing from their special vantage point as black women, many other talented novelists have re-created the settings and lives with which they are intimately familiar in fiction that speaks to a wide audience. Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye (1969) and her Song of Solomon (1977) deals largely with the black experience in the south. Her novel Beloved (1987) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, and she received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. Gloria Naylor, in The Women of Brewster Place (1982), a series of short fictions, gives a realistic picture of women’s lives in a northern urban housing project.

There are also many new voices in American literature representing the variety of ethnic experiences in the contemporary multicultural United States. Gloria Anzaldua’s groundbreaking and hugely influential Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) is a mixture of fiction, poetry, and autobiography written in both English and Spanish that uses the concept of the border to represent ethnic, gender, and sexual identity. The problems of Asian assimilation in American culture are dominant themes in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) and Tripmaster Monkey (1989), Gish Jen’s Typical American (1991), and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995). Sherman Alexie’s short stories and novels, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993) and Reservation Blues (1995), deal with the legacy of the Native American confrontation with white settlers.

F

20th-Century Poetry

The founding by the poet and editor Harriet Monroe of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (1912) signalled an extraordinary poetic renaissance after a long fallow period. The first phase of the revival was Imagism, a movement initiated by the poets Amy Lowell (Men, Women, and Ghosts, 1916) and Ezra Pound (Ripostes, 1912). Imagists set out to revolutionize poetic style, but two other phases of the poetic revival of the early 20th century were more popular: the work of an Illinois group, including the poets Vachel Lindsay (The Congo and Other Poems, 1914), Edgar Lee Masters (Spoon River Anthology, 1915), and Carl Sandburg (Chicago Poems, 1915); and the work of a New England group, including Edwin Arlington Robinson (The Town Down the River, 1910) and Robert Frost (North of Boston, 1914). The works of Frost and Sandburg, during their long careers, became especially beloved and were regarded as the authentic expression of an American poetic spirit. Outside these literary groups, but widely popular and influential, was Edna St Vincent Millay (The Ballad of the Harp Weaver, 1922).

The publication of The Waste Land (1922) by the American-English poet T. S. Eliot marked a turning point. The tendency to the esoteric in verse forms, language, and symbolism was augmented by Pound’s Cantos (pub. between 1925 and 1960). Both Eliot and Pound, through their poetry as well as their critical writings, had an immense influence on the course of 20th-century poetry. So did the work of William Carlos Williams, whose 40 volumes of prose and poetry, among them Paterson (Books I-V, 1946-1958), affected the writing of generations of poets.

Experiments with verse employing complex, often difficult imagery and symbolism were also carried on by Hart Crane, best known for his epic The Bridge (1930), Wallace Stevens (The Man with the Blue Guitar, 1937), and Marianne Moore (Collected Poems, 1951). The highly inventive work of e. e. cummings, from Is 5 (1926) to 73 Poems (1963), played with typographical form and aural imagery.

Other poets who established a more direct communication with the reader include Robinson Jeffers, whose eloquent lines, as in Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems (1925), express his reverence for non-human forms of life; Randall Jarrell, whose poetry, for example, Losses (1948), was formed by grief over World War II; and Archibald MacLeish (Collected Poems, 1917-1952, 1952) and Richard Wilbur (Things of This World, 1956), who in their lyrical, contemplative verse express humanist concerns. The protest poetry of the Beat Generation certainly communicates directly, and with great impact. Far different in tone is the strain of southern black oral narrative tradition that can be detected in some of the work of Gwendolyn Brooks (Annie Allen, 1949), Nikki Giovanni (Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgement, 1970), and Maya Angelou (Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Die, 1971). Theodore Roethke managed two styles: free-form for the expression of Surrealistic ideas, and a simpler, lyrical form for the expression of more rational modes of thought; both styles are exemplified in his collection The Far Field (posthumously pub. 1964).

With Robert Lowell (Lord Weary's Castle, 1946), there began what has been termed the “confessional” mode in poetry, explicit references to personal anxieties and disabilities. The verse of Sylvia Plath (Ariel, 1965) and Anne Sexton (Live or Die, 1967, and The Awful Rowing Toward God, 1975) is similarly informed by images of personal torment.

A resurgence of poetry manifested itself from the late 1960s on, as a proliferation of literary magazines provided outlets for work and colleges and universities sponsored poetry workshops and offered courses taught by poets in residence. Among the many contemporary poets—encompassing a wide variety of forms and styles—May Swenson, Robert Bly, and Galway Kinnellare are notable for their clearly defined imagery, often based on the close observation of nature. In contrast, the use by James Merrill of highly personal images, often inspired by the occult, and the notoriously convoluted syntax employed by John Ashbery make their verse very difficult to apprehend. Ashbery won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror; Merrill won the Pulitzer the following year for his Divine Comedies. Mona Van Duyn, the nation’s sixth Poet Laureate (1992) and author of seven volumes of verse, including Near Changes (1991; Pulitzer Prize), is noted for the warmth and intellect, the wit and the emotions of her poetry about parents and children, married life, and love.

Despite pronouncements to the contrary, American poetry continues to flourish, with a new generation constantly exploring formal and emotional complexities. Jorie Graham shows her European roots in her poetry while asking fundamental questions about the boundaries of the self and the body. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for The Dream of the Unified Field (1996). The Hispanic poet Gary Soto draws on childhood and ethnic origins and sets much of his work in his hometown of Fresno, California, and writes books and poems for children and young adults. The Elements of San Joaquín won the 1976 United States Award of the International Poetry Forum.

G

20th-Century Nonfiction

A traditional view of American history was presented by the historians Charles Austin Beard and Mary Ritter Beard, in The Rise of American Civilization (1927), and by Samuel Eliot Morison (The Oxford History of the American People, 1965) and Henry Steele Commager (The Search for a Usable Past, 1967). Accounts of specific trends and eras include Anti-Intellectualism in America (1963) by Richard Hofstadter, a study of the effects of conservatism; and The Guns of August (1962), about the beginnings of World War I, and A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (1978), by Barbara Tuchman.

Much brilliant political reporting and analysis was done in the 1930s. Such books as Inside Europe (1936), by the journalist John Gunther; The Life and Death of a Spanish Town (1937), by the novelist Elliot Harold Paul; and Not Peace but a Sword (1939), by the foreign correspondent Vincent Sheean, helped prepare perplexed Americans for World War II. After the war, the landmark report Hiroshima (1946; reissued with an update in 1985) by novelist John Hersey described the effects of the first atomic bomb.

Other writers of fiction frequently turned to non-fiction during the post-war period. Truman Capote invented what he called the “non-fiction novel” with In Cold Blood (1966), a harrowing account of the murder of a Kansas family. Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago (both 1968) vividly describe and interpret headline-making contemporary political protest.

Out of the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s came writers whose works reveal the experiences of black Americans. Among these was the dramatist and poet Amiri Baraka (originally named LeRoi Jones), who also probed the situation in his Home: Social Essays (1966) and Raise, Race, Rays, Raze: Essays Since 1965 (1971). Eldridge Cleaver contributed significant essays on American society in Soul on Ice (1967). More subjective accounts were contributed by several writers. The black nationalist leader Malcolm X (originally named Malcolm Little) wrote his influential Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) with Alex Haley, who later became famous as the author of the bestselling Roots (1976), a semi-fictional account of Haley’s family history from its African beginnings to the present. Maya Angelou, the poet-novelist and children’s author, wrote a powerful memoir of her own growing up in the South, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970).

Other serious concerns addressed by American writers from the 1960s on have been the war in Indochina, the pollution of the environment, and women’s rights. The Vietnam War has been the subject of extensive, often highly critical analysis. The lengthier reports include My Lai 4 (1970), detailing the massacre of Vietnamese civilians by American troops in 1968 (see My Lai Massacre). For this book, Seymour M. Hersh won a Pulitzer Prize, as did Frances Fitzgerald for Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (1972). A pioneering work on women’s role in society was Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), an analysis of the reasons for the failure of women to achieve the goals promised by earlier women’s rights efforts.

During the 1990s a group of African-American public intellectuals, including Cornell West, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Houston Baker, Jr. became increasingly influential. West’s book, Race Matters (1993), addressed the problem of how black Americans could be more engaged with mainstream American political, economic, and social life while still retaining their own cultural traditions.