American literature in the 20th century

Writing from 1914 to 1945

Important movements in drama, poetry, fiction, and criticism took shape in the years before, during, and after World War I. The eventful period that followed the war left its imprint upon books of all kinds. Literary forms of the period were extraordinarily varied, and in drama, poetry, and fiction the leading authors tended toward radical technical experiments.

Experiments in drama

Although drama had not been a major art form in the 19th century, no type of writing was more experimental than a new drama that arose in rebellion against the glib commercial stage. In the early years of the 20th century, Americans traveling in Europe encountered a vital, flourishing theatre; returning home, some of them became active in founding the Little Theatre movement throughout the country. Freed from commercial limitations, playwrights experimented with dramatic forms and methods of production, and in time producers, actors, and dramatists appeared who had been trained in college classrooms and community playhouses. Some Little Theatre groups became commercial producers-for example, the Washington Square Players, founded in 1915, which became the Theatre Guild (first production in 1919). The resulting drama was marked by a spirit of innovation and by a new seriousness and maturity.

Eugene O'Neill, the most admired dramatist of the period, was a product of this movement. He worked with the Provincetown Players before his plays were commercially produced. His dramas were remarkable for their range. Beyond the Horizon (first performed 1920), Anna Christie (1921), Desire Under the Elms (1924), and The Iceman Cometh (1946) were naturalistic works, while The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1922) made use of the Expressionistic techniques developed in German drama in the period 1914-24. He also employed a stream-of-consciousness form of psychological monologue in Strange Interlude (1928) and produced a work that combined myth, family drama, and psychological analysis in Mourning Becomes Electra (1931).

No other dramatist was as generally praised as O'Neill, but many others wrote plays that reflected the growth of a serious and varied drama, including Maxwell Anderson, whose verse dramas have dated badly, and Robert E. Sherwood, a Broadway professional who wrote both comedy (Reunion in Vienna [1931]) and tragedy (There Shall Be No Night [1940]). Marc Connelly wrote touching fantasy in an African American folk biblical play, The Green Pastures (1930). Like O'Neill, Elmer Rice made use of both Expressionistic techniques (The Adding Machine [1923]) and naturalism (Street Scene [1929]). Lillian Hellman wrote powerful, well-crafted melodramas in The Children's Hour (1934) and The Little Foxes (1939). Radical theatre experiments included Marc Blitzstein's savagely satiric musical The Cradle Will Rock (1937) and the work of Orson Welles and John Houseman for the government-sponsored Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Theatre Project. The premier radical theatre of the decade was the Group Theatre (1931-41) under Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg, which became best known for presenting the work of Clifford Odets. In Waiting for Lefty (1935), a stirring plea for labour unionism, Odets roused the audience to an intense pitch of fervour, and in Awake and Sing (1935), perhaps the best play of the decade, he created a lyrical work of family conflict and youthful yearning. Other important plays by Odets for the Group Theatre were Paradise Lost (1935), Golden Boy (1937), and Rocket to the Moon (1938). Thornton Wilder used stylized settings and poetic dialogue in Our Town (1938) and turned to fantasy in The Skin of Our Teeth (1942). William Saroyan shifted his lighthearted, anarchic vision from fiction to drama with My Heart's in the Highlands and The Time of Your Life (both 1939).

Fiction

The little magazines that helped the growth of the poetry of the era also contributed to a development of its fiction. They printed daring or unconventional short stories and published attacks upon established writers. The Dial (1880-1929), Little Review (1914-29), Seven Arts (1916-17), and others encouraged Modernist innovation. More potent were two magazines edited by the ferociously funny journalist-critic H.L. Mencken-The Smart Set (editorship 1914-23) and American Mercury (which he coedited between 1924 and 1933). A powerful influence and a scathing critic of puritanism, Mencken helped launch the new fiction.

Mencken's major enthusiasms included the fiction of Joseph Conrad and Theodore Dreiser, but he also promoted minor writers for their attacks on gentility, such as James Branch Cabell, or for their revolt against the narrow, frustrated quality of life in rural communities, including Zona Gale and Ruth Suckow. The most distinguished of these writers was Sherwood Anderson. His Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and The Triumph of the Egg (1921) were collections of short stories that showed villagers suffering from all sorts of phobias and suppressions. Anderson in time wrote several novels, the best being Poor White (1920).

In 1920 critics noticed that a new school of fiction had risen to prominence with the success of books such as F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise and Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, fictions that tended to be frankly psychological or modern in their unsparing portrayals of contemporary life. Novels of the 1920s were often not only lyrical and personal but also, in the despairing mood that followed World War I, apt to express the pervasive disillusionment of the postwar generation. Novels of the 1930s inclined toward radical social criticism in response to the miseries of the Great Depression, though some of the best, by writers such as Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Henry Roth, and Nathanael West, continued to explore the Modernist vein of the previous decade.

Critics of society

F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise (1920) showed the disillusionment and moral disintegration experienced by so many in the United States after World War I. The book initiated a career of great promise that found fruition in The Great Gatsby (1925), a spare but poignant novel about the promise and failure of the American Dream. Fitzgerald was to live out this theme himself. Though damaged by drink and by a failing marriage, he went on to do some of his best work in the 1930s, including numerous stories and essays as well as his most ambitious novel, Tender Is the Night (1934). Unlike Fitzgerald, who was a lyric writer with real emotional intensity, Sinclair Lewis was best as a social critic. His onslaughts against the "village virus" (Main Street [1920]), average businessmen (Babbitt [1922]), materialistic scientists (Arrowsmith [1925]), and the racially prejudiced (Kingsblood Royal [1947]) were satirically sharp and thoroughly documented, though Babbitt is his only book that still stands up brilliantly at the beginning of the 21st century. Similar careful documentation, though little satire, characterized James T. Farrell's naturalistic Studs Lonigan trilogy (1932-35), which described the stifling effects of growing up in a lower-middle-class family and a street-corner milieu in the Chicago of the 1920s.

The ironies of racial identity dominate the stories and novels produced by writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including harsh portraits of the Black middle class in Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) and the powerful stories of Langston Hughes in The Ways of White Folks (1934), as well as the varied literary materials-poetry, fiction, and drama-collected in Jean Toomer's Cane (1923). Richard Wright's books, including Uncle Tom's Children (1938), Native Son (1940), and Black Boy (1945), were works of burning social protest, Dostoyevskian in their intensity, that dealt boldly with the plight of American Blacks in both the old South and the Northern urban ghetto. Zora Neale Hurston's training in anthropology and folklore contributed to Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), her powerful feminist novel about the all-Black Florida town in which she had grown up.

A number of authors wrote proletarian novels attacking capitalist exploitation, as in several novels based on a 1929 strike in the textile mills in Gastonia, N.C., such as Fielding Burke's Call Home the Heart and Grace Lumpkin's To Make My Bread (both 1932). Other notable proletarian novels included Jack Conroy's The Disinherited (1933), Robert Cantwell's The Land of Plenty (1934), and Albert Halper's Union Square (1933), The Foundry (1934), and The Chute (1937), as well as some grim evocations of the drifters and "bottom dogs" of the Depression era, such as Edward Anderson's Hungry Men and Tom Kromer's Waiting for Nothing (both 1935). The radical movement, combined with a nascent feminism, encouraged the talent of several politically committed women writers whose work was rediscovered later; they included Tillie Olsen, Meridel Le Sueur, and Josephine Herbst.

Particularly admired as a protest writer was John Dos Passos, who first attracted attention with an anti-World War I novel, Three Soldiers (1921). His most sweeping indictments of the modern social and economic system, Manhattan Transfer (1925) and the U.S.A. trilogy (The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money [1930-36]), employed various narrative innovations such as the "camera eye" and "newsreel," along with a large cast of characters, to attack society from the left. Nathanael West's novels, including Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), A Cool Million (1934), and The Day of the Locust (1939), used black comedy to create a bitter vision of an inhuman and brutal world and its depressing effects on his sensitive but ineffectual protagonists. West evoked the tawdry but rich materials of mass culture and popular fantasy to mock the pathos of the American Dream, a frequent target during the Depression years.

Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck

Three authors whose writings showed a shift from disillusionment were Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck. Hemingway's early short stories and his first novels, The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), were full of the existential disillusionment of the Lost Generation expatriates. The Spanish Civil War, however, led him to espouse the possibility of collective action to solve social problems, and his less-effective novels, including To Have and Have Not (1937) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), embodied this new belief. He regained some of his form in The Old Man and the Sea (1952) and his posthumously published memoir of Paris between the wars, A Moveable Feast (1964). Hemingway's writing was influenced by his background in journalism and by the spare manner and flat sentence rhythms of Gertrude Stein, his Paris friend and a pioneer Modernist, especially in such works of hers as Three Lives (1909). His own great impact on other writers came from his deceptively simple, stripped-down prose, full of unspoken implication, and from his tough but vulnerable masculinity, which created a myth that imprisoned the author and haunted the World War II generation.

Hemingway's great rival as a stylist and mythmaker was William Faulkner, whose writing was as baroque as Hemingway's was spare. Influenced by Sherwood Anderson, Herman Melville, and especially James Joyce, Faulkner combined stream-of-consciousness techniques with rich social history. Works such as The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and The Hamlet (1940) were parts of the unfolding history of Yoknapatawpha County, a mythical Mississippi community, which depicted the transformation and the decadence of the South. Faulkner's work was dominated by a sense of guilt going back to the American Civil War and the appropriation of Indian lands. Though often comic, his work pictured the disintegration of the leading families and, in later books such as Go Down, Moses (1942) and Intruder in the Dust (1948), showed a growing concern with the troubled role of race in Southern life.

Steinbeck's career, marked by uneven achievements, began with a historical novel, Cup of Gold (1929), in which he voiced a distrust of society and glorified the anarchistic individualist typical of the rebellious 1920s. He showed his affinity for colourful outcasts, such as the paisanos of the Monterey area, in the short novels Tortilla Flat (1935), Of Mice and Men (1937), and Cannery Row (1945). His best books were inspired by the social struggles of migrant farm workers during the Great Depression, including the simply written but ambiguous strike novel In Dubious Battle (1936) and his flawed masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The latter, a protest novel punctuated by prose-poem interludes, tells the story of the migration of the Joads, an Oklahoma Dust Bowl family, to California. During their almost biblical journey, they learn the necessity for collective action among the poor and downtrodden to prevent them from being destroyed individually.

Lyric fictionists

An interesting development in fiction, abetted by Modernism, was a shift from naturalistic to poetic writing. There was an increased tendency to select details and endow them with symbolic meaning, to set down the thought processes and emotions of the characters, and to make use of rhythmic prose. In varied ways Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Cabell, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Faulkner all showed evidence of this-in passages, in short stories, and even in entire novels. Faulkner showed the tendency at its worst in A Fable (1954), which, ironically, won a Pulitzer Prize.

Lyricism was especially prominent in the writings of Willa Cather. O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918) contained poetic passages about the disappearing frontier and the creative efforts of frontier folk. A Lost Lady (1923) and The Professor's House (1925) were elegiac and spare in style, though they also depicted historic social transformations, and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) was an exaltation of the past and of spiritual pioneering. Katherine Anne Porter, whose works took the form primarily of novelettes and stories, wrote more in the style of the Metaphysical poets, though she also wrote one long, ambitious novel, A Ship of Fools (1962). Her use of the stream-of-consciousness method in Flowering Judas (1930) as well as in Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) had the complexity, the irony, and the symbolic sophistication characteristic of these poets, whose work the Modernists had brought into fashion.

Another lyrical and autobiographical writer, whose books have faded badly, was Thomas Wolfe, who put all his strivings, thoughts, and feelings into works such as Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and Of Time and the River (1935) before his early death in 1938. These Whitmanesque books, as well as posthumously edited ones such as The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940), dealt with a figure much like Wolfe, echoing the author's youth in the South, young manhood in the North, and eternal search to fulfill a vision. Though grandiose, they influenced many young writers, including Jack Kerouac.

Literary criticism

Some historians, looking back over the first half of the 20th century, were inclined to think that it was particularly noteworthy for its literary criticism. Beyond doubt, criticism thrived as it had not for several generations. It was an important influence on literature itself, and it shaped the perceptions of readers in the face of difficult new writing.

The period began with a battle between two literary groups, one that called its movement New Humanism and stood for older values in judging literature and another group that urged that old standards be overthrown and new ones adopted. The New Humanists, such as Irving Babbitt, a Harvard University professor, and Paul Elmer More, were moralists whose work found an echo in neotraditionalist writers such as T.S. Eliot, who shared their dislike of naturalism, Romanticism, and the liberal faith in progress. The leader of the opposition, hardly a liberal himself, was the pugnacious H.L. Mencken, who insisted that the duty of writers was to present "the unvarnished truth" about life. His magazine articles and reviews gathered in A Book of Prefaces (1917) and the six volumes of Prejudices (1919-27) ushered in the iconoclasm of the 1920s, preparing the ground for satiric writers such as Sinclair Lewis. Mencken was a tireless enthusiast for the work of Joseph Conrad and Theodore Dreiser, among other modern writers. With his dislike of cant and hypocrisy, Mencken helped liberate American literature from its moralistic framework.

Socio-literary critics

In this period of social change, it was natural for critics to consider literature in relationship to society and politics, as most 19th-century critics had done. The work of Van Wyck Brooks and Vernon L. Parrington illustrated two of the main approaches. In America's Coming-of-Age (1915), Letters and Leadership (1918), and The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920), Brooks scolded the American public and attacked the philistinism, materialism, and provinciality of the Gilded Age. But he retreated from his critical position in the popular Makers and Finders series, which included The Flowering of New England (1936), New England: Indian Summer (1940), The World of Washington Irving (1944), The Times of Melville and Whitman (1947), and The Confident Years (1952). These books wove an elaborate cultural tapestry of the major and minor figures in American literature. In Main Currents in American Thought (1927-30), Parrington, a progressive, reevaluated American literature in terms of its adherence to the tenets of Jeffersonian democracy.

The growth of Marxian influence upon thinking in the 1920s and '30s manifested itself in several critical works by V.F. Calverton, Granville Hicks, Malcolm Cowley, and Bernard Smith, as well as numerous articles in journals such as Modern Quarterly, New Masses, Partisan Review, and The New Republic. Though the enthusiasm for communism waned, Marxism contributed to the historical approach of outstanding critics such as Edmund Wilson and Kenneth Burke and to the entire school of New York intellectuals that formed around Partisan Review and included critics such as Lionel Trilling and Philip Rahv.

Moral-aesthetic critics

Wilson and Burke, like Cowley, Morton D. Zabel, Newton Arvin, and F.O. Matthiessen, tried to strike a balance between aesthetic concerns and social or moral issues. They were interested both in analyzing and in evaluating literary creations-i.e., they were eager to see in detail how a literary work was constructed yet also to place it in a larger social or moral framework. Their work, like that of all critics of the period, showed the influence of T.S. Eliot. In essays and books such as The Sacred Wood (1920) and The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), Eliot drew close attention to the language of literature yet also made sweeping judgments and large cultural generalizations. His main impact was on close readers of poetry-e.g., I.A. Richards, William Empson, and F.R. Leavis in England and the critics of the New Criticism movement in the United States, many of whom were also poets besides being political and cultural conservatives. Along with Eliot, they rewrote the map of literary history, challenged the dominance of Romantic forms and styles, promoted and analyzed difficult Modernist writing, and greatly advanced ways of discussing literary structure. Major examples of their style of close reading can be found in R.P. Blackmur's The Double Agent (1935), Allen Tate's Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas (1936), John Crowe Ransom's The World's Body (1938), Yvor Winters's Maule's Curse (1938), and Cleanth Brooks's The Well Wrought Urn (1947). Though they were later attacked for their formalism and for avoiding the social context of writing, the New Critics did much to further the understanding and appreciation of literature.

After World War II

The literary historian Malcolm Cowley described the years between the two world wars as a "second flowering" of American writing. Certainly American literature attained a new maturity and a rich diversity in the 1920s and '30s, and significant works by several major figures from those decades were published after 1945. Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Katherine Anne Porter wrote memorable fiction, though not up to their prewar standard; and Frost, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, E.E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Gwendolyn Brooks published important poetry. Eugene O'Neill's most distinguished play, Long Day's Journey into Night, appeared posthumously in 1956. Before and after World War II, Robert Penn Warren published influential fiction, poetry, and criticism. His All the King's Men, one of the best American political novels, won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize. Mary McCarthy became a widely read social satirist and essayist. When it first appeared in the United States in the 1960s, Henry Miller's fiction was influential primarily because of its frank exploration of sexuality. But its loose, picaresque, quasi-autobiographical form also meshed well with post-1960s fiction. Impressive new novelists, poets, and playwrights emerged after the war. There was, in fact, a gradual changing of the guard.

Not only did a new generation come out of the war, but its ethnic, regional, and social character was quite different from that of the preceding one. Among the younger writers were children of immigrants, many of them Jews; African Americans, only a few generations away from slavery; and, eventually, women, who, with the rise of feminism, were to speak in a new voice. Though the social climate of the postwar years was conservative, even conformist, some of the most hotly discussed writers were homosexuals or bisexuals, including Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Paul Bowles, Gore Vidal, and James Baldwin, whose dark themes and experimental methods cleared a path for Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac.

The novel and short story

Realism and "metafiction"

Two distinct groups of novelists responded to the cultural impact, and especially the technological horror, of World War II. Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948) and Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions (1948) were realistic war novels, though Mailer's book was also a novel of ideas, exploring fascist thinking and an obsession with power as elements of the military mind. James Jones, amassing a staggering quantity of closely observed detail, documented the war's human cost in an ambitious trilogy (From Here to Eternity [1951], The Thin Red Line [1962], and Whistle [1978]) that centred on loners who resisted adapting to military discipline. Younger novelists, profoundly shaken by the bombing of Hiroshima and the real threat of human annihilation, found the conventions of realism inadequate for treating the war's nightmarish implications. In Catch-22 (1961), Joseph Heller satirized the military mentality with surreal black comedy but also injected a sense of Kafkaesque horror. A sequel, Closing Time (1994), was an elegy for the World War II generation. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), described the Allied firebombing of the German city of Dresden with a mixture of dark fantasy and numb, loopy humour. Later this method was applied brilliantly to the portrayal of the Vietnam War-a conflict that seemed in itself surreal-by Tim O'Brien in Going After Cacciato (1978) and the short-story collection The Things They Carried (1990).

In part because of the atomic bomb, American writers turned increasingly to black humour and absurdist fantasy. Many found the naturalistic approach incapable of communicating the rapid pace and the sheer implausibility of contemporary life. A highly self-conscious fiction emerged, laying bare its own literary devices, questioning the nature of representation, and often imitating or parodying earlier fiction rather than social reality. Russian-born Vladimir Nabokov and the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges were strong influences on this new "metafiction." Nabokov, who became a U.S. citizen in 1945, produced a body of exquisitely wrought fiction distinguished by linguistic and formal innovation. Despite their artificiality, his best novels written in English-including Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962)-are highly personal books that have a strong emotional thread running through them.

In an important essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion" (1967), John Barth declared himself an American disciple of Nabokov and Borges. After dismissing realism as a "used up" tradition, Barth described his own work as "novels which imitate the form of the novel, by an author who imitates the role of Author." In fact, Barth's earliest fiction, The Floating Opera (1956) and The End of the Road (1958), fell partly within the realistic tradition, but in later, more-ambitious works he simultaneously imitated and parodied conventional forms-the historical novel in The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), Greek and Christian myths in Giles Goat-Boy (1966), and the epistolary novel in LETTERS (1979). Similarly, Donald Barthelme mocked the fairy tale in Snow White (1967) and Freudian fiction in The Dead Father (1975). Barthelme was most successful in his short stories and parodies that solemnly caricatured contemporary styles, especially the richly suggestive pieces collected in Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), City Life (1970), and Guilty Pleasures (1974).

Thomas Pynchon emerged as the major American practitioner of the absurdist fable. His novels and stories were elaborately plotted mixtures of historical information, comic-book fantasy, and countercultural suspicion. Using paranoia as a structuring device as well as a cast of mind, Pynchon worked out elaborate "conspiracies" in V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity's Rainbow (1973). The underlying assumption of Pynchon's fiction was the inevitability of entropy-i.e., the disintegration of physical and moral energy. Pynchon's technique was later to influence writers as different as Don DeLillo and Paul Auster. In The Naked Lunch (1959) and other novels, William S. Burroughs, abandoning plot and coherent characterization, used a drug addict's consciousness to depict a hideous modern landscape. Vonnegut, Terry Southern, and John Hawkes were also major practitioners of black humour and the absurdist fable.

Other influential portraits of outsider figures included the Beat characters in Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), The Dharma Bums (1958), Desolation Angels (1965), and Visions of Cody (1972); the young Rabbit Angstrom in John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960) and Rabbit Redux (1971); Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951); and the troubling madman in Richard Yates's powerful novel of suburban life, Revolutionary Road (1961).

Though writers such as Barth, Barthelme, and Pynchon rejected the novel's traditional function as a mirror reflecting society, a significant number of contemporary novelists were reluctant to abandon Social Realism, which they pursued in much more personal terms. In novels such as The Victim (1947), The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), and Humboldt's Gift (1975), Saul Bellow tapped into the buoyant, manic energy and picaresque structure of black humour while proclaiming the necessity of "being human." Though few contemporary writers saw the ugliness of urban life more clearly than Bellow, his central characters rejected the "Wasteland outlook" that he associated with Modernism. A spiritual vision, derived from sources as diverse as Judaism, Transcendentalism, and Rudolph Steiner's cultish theosophy, found its way into Bellow's later novels, but he also wrote darker fictions such as the novella Seize the Day (1956), a study in failure and blocked emotion that was perhaps his best work. With the publication of Ravelstein (2000), his fictional portrait of the scholar-writer Allan Bloom, and of Collected Stories (2001), Bellow was acclaimed as a portraitist and a poet of memory.

Four other major Jewish writers-Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Philip Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer-treated the human condition with humour and forgiveness. Malamud's gift for dark comedy and Hawthornean fable was especially evident in his short-story collections The Magic Barrel (1958) and Idiots First (1963). His first three novels, The Natural (1952), The Assistant (1957), and A New Life (1961), were also impressive works of fiction; The Assistant had the bleak moral intensity of his best stories. Paley's stories combined an offbeat, whimsically poetic manner with a wry understanding of the ironies of family life and progressive politics. While Roth was known best for the wild satire and sexual high jinks of Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a hilarious stand-up routine about ethnic stereotypes, his most-lasting achievement may be his later novels built around the misadventures of a controversial Jewish novelist named Zuckerman, especially The Ghost Writer (1979), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), and, above all, The Counterlife (1987). Like many of his later works, from My Life as a Man (1974) to Operation Shylock (1993), The Counterlife plays ingeniously on the relationship between autobiography and fiction. His best later work was his bitter, deliberately offensive story of a self-destructive artist, Sabbath's Theater (1995). Returning to realism, but without his former self-absorption, Roth won new readers with his trilogy on 20th-century American history-American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000)-and with The Plot Against America (2004), a counter-historical novel about the coming of fascism in the United States during World War II. The Polish-born Singer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978 for his stories, written originally in Yiddish. (See also Yiddish literature.) They evolved from fantastic tales of demons and angels to realistic fictions set in New York City's Upper West Side, often dealing with the haunted lives of Holocaust survivors. These works showed him to be one of the great storytellers of modern times.

Another great storyteller, John Cheever, long associated with The New Yorker magazine, created in his short stories and novels a gallery of memorable eccentrics. He documented the anxieties of upper-middle-class New Yorkers and suburbanites in the relatively tranquil years after World War II. The sexual and moral confusion of the American middle class was the focus of the work of J.D. Salinger and Richard Yates, as well as of John Updike's Rabbit series (four novels from Rabbit, Run [1960] to Rabbit at Rest [1990]), Couples (1968), and Too Far to Go (1979), a sequence of tales about the quiet disintegration of a civilized marriage, a subject Updike revisited in a retrospective work, Villages (2004). In sharp contrast, Nelson Algren (The Man with the Golden Arm [1949]) and Hubert Selby, Jr. (Last Exit to Brooklyn [1964]), documented lower-class urban life with brutal frankness. Similarly, John Rechy portrayed America's urban homosexual subculture in City of Night (1963). As literary and social mores were liberalized, Cheever himself dealt with homosexuality in his prison novel Falconer (1977) and even more explicitly in his personal journals, published posthumously in 1991.

Southern fiction

Post-World War II Southern writers inherited Faulkner's rich legacy. Three women-Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Carson McCullers, specialists in the grotesque-contributed greatly to Southern fiction. O'Connor, writing as a Roman Catholic in the Protestant South, created a high comedy of moral incongruity in her incomparable short stories. Welty, always a brilliant stylist, first came to prominence with her collections of short fiction A Curtain of Green (1941) and The Wide Net, and Other Stories (1943). Her career culminated with a large family novel, Losing Battles (1970), and a fine novella, The Optimist's Daughter (1972), which was awarded the 1973 Pulitzer Prize. McCullers is best remembered for her first book, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), an intricate gothic novel set in a small town in the Deep South. She also published Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), The Member of the Wedding (1946), and The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951), all later adapted to the stage or screen. Other fine storytellers in the Southern tradition include Elizabeth Spencer, whose short fiction was collected in The Southern Woman (2001), and Reynolds Price, whose best novels were A Long and Happy Life (1961) and Kate Vaiden (1986). Initially known for his lyrical portraits of Southern eccentrics (Other Voices, Other Rooms [1948]), Truman Capote later published In Cold Blood (1965), a cold but impressive piece of documentary realism that contributed, along with the work of Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer, to the emergence of a "new journalism" that used many of the techniques of fiction.

William Styron's overripe first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951), clearly revealed the influence of Faulkner. In two controversial later works, Styron fictionalized the dark side of modern history: The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) depicted an antebellum slave revolt, and Sophie's Choice (1979) unsuccessfully sought to capture the full horror of the Holocaust. Inspired by Faulkner and Mark Twain, William Humphrey wrote two powerful novels set in Texas, Home from the Hill (1958) and The Ordways (1965). The Moviegoer (1961) and The Last Gentleman (1966) established Walker Percy as an important voice in Southern fiction. Their musing philosophical style broke sharply with the Southern gothic tradition and influenced later writers such as Richard Ford in The Sportswriter (1986) and its moving sequel, Independence Day (1995). Equally impressive were the novels and stories of Peter Taylor, an impeccable Social Realist, raconteur, and genial novelist of manners who recalled a bygone world in works such as The Old Forest (1985) and A Summons to Memphis (1986).

African American literature

Black writers of this period found alternatives to the Richard Wright tradition of angry social protest. James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, both protégés of Wright, wrote polemical essays calling for a literature that reflected the full complexity of Black life in the United States. In his first and best novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Baldwin portrayed the Harlem world and the Black church through his own adolescent religious experiences. Drawing on rural folktale, absurdist humour, and a picaresque realism, Ralph Ellison wrote a deeply resonant comic novel that dealt with the full range of Black experience-rural sharecropping, segregated education, northward migration, ghetto hustling, and the lure of such competing ideologies as nationalism and communism. Many considered his novel Invisible Man (1952) the best novel of the postwar years.

fictional modes

The horrors of World War II, the Cold War and the atomic bomb, the bizarre feast of consumer culture, and the cultural clashes of the 1960s prompted many writers to argue that reality had grown inaccessible, undermining the traditional social role of fiction. Writers of novels and short stories therefore were under unprecedented pressure to discover, or invent, new and viable kinds of fiction. One response was the postmodern novel of William Gaddis, John Barth, John Hawkes, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, Paul Auster, and Don DeLillo-technically sophisticated and highly self-conscious about the construction of fiction and the fictive nature of "reality" itself. These writers dealt with themes such as imposture and paranoia; their novels drew attention to themselves as artifacts and often used realistic techniques ironically. Other responses involved a heightening of realism by means of intensifying violence, amassing documentation, or resorting to fantasy. A brief discussion of writers as different as Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates may serve to illustrate these new directions.

In his World War II novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), Mailer wrote in the Dos Passos tradition of social protest. Feeling its limitations, he developed his own brand of surreal fantasy in fables such as An American Dream (1965) and Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967). As with many of the postmodern novelists, his subject was the nature of power, personal as well as political. However, it was only when he turned to "nonfiction fiction" or "fiction as history" in The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago (both 1968) that Mailer discovered his true voice-grandiose yet personal, comic yet shrewdly intellectual. He refined this approach into a new objectivity in the Pulitzer Prize-winning "true life novel" The Executioner's Song (1979). When he returned to fiction, his most effective work was Harlot's Ghost (1991), about the Central Intelligence Agency. His final novels took Jesus Christ (The Gospel According to the Son [1997]) and Adolf Hitler (The Castle in the Forest [2007]) as their subjects.

In her early work, especially A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967) and them (1969), Joyce Carol Oates worked naturalistically with violent urban materials, such as the Detroit riots. Incredibly prolific, she later experimented with Surrealism in Wonderland (1971) and Gothic fantasy in Bellefleur (1980) before returning in works such as Marya (1986) to the bleak blue-collar world of her youth in upstate New York. Among her later works was Blonde: A Novel (2000), a fictional biography of Marilyn Monroe. While Mailer and Oates refused to surrender the novel's gift for capturing reality, both were compelled to search out new fictional modes to tap that power.

The surge of feminism in the 1970s gave impetus to many new women writers, such as Erica Jong, author of the sexy and funny Fear of Flying (1974), and Rita Mae Brown, who explored lesbian life in Rubyfruit Jungle (1973). Other significant works of fiction by women in the 1970s included Ann Beattie's account of the post-1960s generation in Chilly Scenes of Winter (1976) and many short stories, Gail Godwin's highly civilized The Odd Woman (1974), Mary Gordon's portraits of Irish Catholic life in Final Payments (1978), and the many social comedies of Alison Lurie and Anne Tyler.

The influence of Raymond Carver

Perhaps the most influential fiction writer to emerge in the 1970s was Raymond Carver. He was another realist who dealt with blue-collar life, usually in the Pacific Northwest, in powerful collections of stories such as What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) and Cathedral (1983). His self-destructive characters were life's losers, and his style, influenced by Hemingway and Samuel Beckett, was spare and flat but powerfully suggestive. It was imitated, often badly, by minimalists such as Frederick Barthelme, Mary Robison, and Amy Hempel. More-talented writers whose novels reflected the influence of Carver in their evocation of the downbeat world of the blue-collar male included Richard Ford (Rock Springs [1987]), Russell Banks (Continental Drift [1984] and Affliction [1989]), and Tobias Wolff (The Barracks Thief [1984] and This Boy's Life [1989]). Another strong male-oriented writer in a realist mode who emerged from the 1960s counterculture was Robert Stone. His Dog Soldiers (1974) was a grimly downbeat portrayal of the drugs-and-Vietnam generation, and A Flag for Sunrise (1981) was a bleak, Conradian political novel set in Central America. Stone focused more on the spiritual malaise of his characters than on their ordinary lives. He wrote a lean, furious Hollywood novel in Children of Light (1986) and captured some of the feverish, apocalyptic atmosphere of the Holy Land in Damascus Gate (1998). In leisurely, good-humoured, minutely detailed novels, Richard Russo dealt with blue-collar losers living in decaying Northeastern towns in The Risk Pool (1988), Nobody's Fool (1993), and Empire Falls (2001), but he also published a satiric novel about academia, Straight Man (1997). Some women writers were especially impressive in dealing with male characters, including E. Annie Proulx in The Shipping News (1993) and Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999) and Andrea Barrett in Ship Fever (1996). Others focused on relationships between women, including Mary Gaitskill in her witty satiric novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991), written under the influences of Nabokov and Mary McCarthy. Lorrie Moore published rich, idiosyncratic stories as densely textured as novels. Deborah Eisenberg, Amy Bloom, Antonya Nelson, and Thom Jones also helped make the last years of the 20th century a fertile period for short fiction.

Multicultural writing

The dramatic loosening of immigration restrictions in the mid-1960s set the stage for the rich multicultural writing of the last quarter of the 20th century. New Jewish voices were heard in the fiction of E.L. Doctorow, noted for his mingling of the historical with the fictional in novels such as Ragtime (1975) and The Waterworks (1994) and in the work of Cynthia Ozick, whose best story, Envy; or, Yiddish in America (1969), has characters modeled on leading figures in Yiddish literature. Her story The Shawl (1980) concerns the murder of a baby in a Nazi concentration camp. David Leavitt introduced homosexual themes into his portrayal of middle-class life in Family Dancing (1984). At the turn of the 21st century, younger Jewish writers from the former Soviet Union such as Gary Shteyngart and Lara Vapnyar dealt impressively with the experience of immigrants in the United States.

Novels such as N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, James Welch's Winter in the Blood (1974) and Fools Crow (1986), Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977), and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), and The Antelope Wife (1998) were powerful and ambiguous explorations of Native American history and identity. Mexican Americans were represented by works such as Rudolfo A. Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Richard Rodriguez's autobiographical Hunger of Memory (1981), and Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street (1983) and her collection Woman Hollering Creek, and Other Stories (1991).

Some of the best immigrant writers, while thoroughly assimilated, nonetheless had a subtle understanding of both the old and the new culture. These included the Cuban American writers Oscar Hijuelos (The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love [1989]) and Cristina Garcia (Dreaming in Cuban [1992] and The Agüero Sisters [1997]); the Antigua-born Jamaica Kincaid, author of Annie John (1984), Lucy (1990), the AIDS memoir My Brother (1997), and See Now Then (2013); the Dominican-born Junot Díaz, who won acclaim for Drown (1996), a collection of stories, and whose novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) won a Pulitzer Prize; and the Bosnian immigrant Aleksandar Hemon, who wrote The Question of Bruno (2000) and Nowhere Man (2002). Chinese Americans found an extraordinary voice in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976) and China Men (1980), which blended old Chinese lore with fascinating family history. Her first novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), was set in the bohemian world of the San Francisco Bay area during the 1960s. Other important Asian American writers included Gish Jen, whose Typical American (1991) dealt with immigrant striving and frustration; the Korean American Chang-rae Lee, who focused on family life, political awakening, and generational differences in Native Speaker (1995) and A Gesture Life (1999); and Ha Jin, whose Waiting (1999; National Book Award), set in rural China during and after the Cultural Revolution, was a powerful tale of timidity, repression, and botched love, contrasting the mores of the old China and the new. Bharati Mukherjee beautifully explored contrasting lives in India and North America in The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), Jasmine (1989), Desirable Daughters (2002), and The Tree Bride (2004). While many multicultural works were merely representative of their cultural milieu, books such as these made remarkable contributions to a changing American literature.

During the 1990s some of the best energies of fiction writers went into autobiography, in works such as Mary Karr's The Liar's Club (1995), about growing up in a loving but dysfunctional family on the Texas Gulf Coast; Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes (1996), a vivid portrayal of a Dickensian childhood amid the grinding conditions of Irish slum life; Anne Roiphe's bittersweet recollections of her rich but cold-hearted parents and her brother's death from AIDS in 1185 Park Avenue (1999); and Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), a painful but comic tour de force, half tongue-in-cheek, about a young man raising his brother after the death of their parents.

The memoir vogue did not prevent writers from publishing huge, ambitious novels, including David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996), an encyclopaedic mixture of arcane lore, social fiction, and postmodern irony; Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (2001, National Book Award) and Freedom (2010), both family portraits; and Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997), a brooding, resonant, oblique account of the Cold War era as seen through the eyes of both fictional characters and historical figures. All three novels testify to a belated convergence of Social Realism and Pynchonesque invention. Pynchon himself returned to form with sprawling, picaresque historical novels: Mason & Dixon (1997), about two famous 18th-century surveyors who explored and mapped the American colonies, and Against the Day (2006), set at the turn of the 20th century.

Literary biography and the "new journalism"

The waning of the New Criticism, with its strict emphasis on the text, led not only to a surge of historical criticism and cultural theory but also to a flowering of literary biography. Major works included Leon Edel's five-volume study of Henry James (1953-72), Mark Schorer's Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (1961), Richard Ellmann's studies of James Joyce (1959) and Oscar Wilde (1988), R.W.B. Lewis's revealing biography of Edith Wharton (1975), Joseph Frank's five-volume biography of Dostoyevsky (1976-2002), Paul Zweig's brilliant study of Walt Whitman (1984), and Carol Brightman's exhaustive life of Mary McCarthy (1992).

One positive result of the accelerating complexity of post-World War II life was a body of distinguished journalism and social commentary. John Hersey's Hiroshima (1946) was a deliberately controlled, unemotional account of atomic holocaust. In Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), and The Fire Next Time (1963), the novelist James Baldwin published a body of the most eloquent essays written in the United States. Ralph Ellison's essays on race and culture in Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986) were immensely influential. Norman Mailer's "new journalism" proved especially effective in capturing the drama of political conventions and large protest demonstrations. The novelist Joan Didion published two collections of incisive social and literary commentary, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979). The title essay of the first collection was an honest investigation of the forces that gave colour and significance to the counterculture of the 1960s, a subject also explored with stylistic flourish by journalists as different as Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. The surreal atmosphere of the Vietnam War, infused with rock music and drugs, gave impetus to subjective journalism such as Michael Herr's Dispatches (1977). The mood of the period also encouraged strong works of autobiography, such as Frank Conroy's Stop-Time (1967) and Lillian Hellman's personal and political memoirs, including An Unfinished Woman (1969) and Scoundrel Time (1976). Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) defied all classification. Pirsig equated the emotional collapse of his central character with the disintegration of American workmanship and cultural values.

Theory

The major New Critics and New York critics were followed by major but difficult academic critics, who preferred theory to close reading. European structuralism found little echo in the United States, but poststructuralist theorists such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida found a welcome in the less-political atmosphere, marked by skepticism and defeat, that followed the 1960s. Four Yale professors joined Derrida to publish a group of essays, Deconstruction and Criticism (1979). Two of the contributors, Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller, became leading exponents of deconstruction in the United States. The other two, Harold Bloom and Geoffrey H. Hartman, were more interested in the problematic relation of poets to their predecessors and to their own language. Bloom was especially concerned with the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson on modern American poets. After developing a Freudian theory of literary influence in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and A Map of Misreading (1975), Bloom reached a wide audience with The Western Canon (1994) and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), both of which explored and defended the Western literary tradition.

Philosophers Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell and critic Richard Poirier found a native parallel to European theory in the philosophy of Emerson and the writings of pragmatists such as William James and John Dewey. Emulating Dewey and Irving Howe, Rorty emerged as a social critic in Achieving Our Country (1998) and Philosophy and Social Hope (1999). Other academic critics also took a more-political turn. Stephen Greenblatt's work on Shakespeare and other Elizabethan writers and Edward Said's essays in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983) were influential in reviving historical approaches to literature that had long been neglected. Said's Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993) directed attention to the effects of colonialism on the arts and society. His essays were collected in Reflections on Exile (2000). Other critics deflected this historical approach into the field of cultural studies, which erased the lines between "high" (elite) and "low" (popular) culture and often subsumed discussion of the arts to questions of ideology. Meanwhile, a wide range of feminist critics, beginning with Kate Millett, Ellen Moers, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Elaine Showalter, gave direction to new gender-based approaches to past and present writers. Critics who came to be known as queer theorists, such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, produced innovative work on texts dealing with homosexuality, both overt and implicit.

All these methods yielded new dimensions of critical understanding, but in less-adept hands they became so riddled with jargon or so intensely political and ideological that they lost touch with the general reader, with common sense itself, and with any tradition of accessible criticism. This drew the ire of both conservatives, such as Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind (1987), and writers on the left, such as Russell Jacoby in The Last Intellectuals (1987) and Dogmatic Wisdom (1994). Reactions against theory-based criticism set in during the 1990s not only with attacks on "political correctness" but also with a return to more informal and essayistic forms of criticism that emphasized the role of the public intellectual and the need to reach a wider general audience. There was a revival of interest in literary journalism. Both older critics, such as Frank Lentricchia in The Edge of Night (1994) and Said in Out of Place (1999), and younger critics, including Alice Kaplan in French Lessons (1993), turned toward autobiography as a way of situating their own intellectual outlook and infusing personal expression into their work.