American Literature: History of American Literature - Chapter 8: American Prose Since 1945: Realism and Experimentation

The Realist Legacy and the Late 1940s

The Affluent But Alienated 1950s

The Turbulent But Creative 1960s

The 1970s and 1980s: New Directions

The New Regionalism

Narrative since World War II resists generalization. It is extremely various and

multifaceted. It has been vitalized by international currents such as European

existentialism and Latin American magical realism, while the electronic era has brought the global

village. The spoken word on television has given new life to oral tradition. Oral genres, media, and

popular culture have increasingly influenced narrative.

In the past, elite culture influenced popular culture through its status and example; the reverse

seems true in the United States today. Serious novelists like Thomas Pynchon, Joyce Carol Oates,

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Alice Walker, and E.L. Doctorow have borrowed from and commented on comics,,movies, fashions, songs, and oral history.

To say this is not to trivialize recent literature. Writers in the United States are asking serious

questions, many of them of a metaphysical nature. Writers have become highly innovative and self-aware, or “reflexive.” Often they find traditional modes ineffective and seek vitality in more widely

popular material. To put it another way: American writers, in recent decades, have developed a

post-modern sensibility. Modernist restructurings of point of view no longer suffice for them;

rather, the context of vision must be made new.

1. Narrative after World War II was

a. conventional and traditional.b. various and multi-faceted.c. unique and innovative.d. bland and sedate.

2. Compare the influence on popular culture that existed in the past to the influence that exists

since 1945.
.

THE REALIST LEGACY AND THE LATE 1940s

As in the first half of the 20th century, fiction in the second half reflects 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 of 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 and The

Children’s Crusade (1969), his antiwar novel about the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied

forces during World War II (which he 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 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 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 senator, Huey Long.

Arthur Miller (1915–2005)

New York–born dramatist-novelist-essayist-biographer Arthur Miller reached his personal

pinnacle in 1949 with Death of a Salesman, the study of a man’s search for merit and worth in his

life and the realization that failure invariably looms. The story of the Loman family, the novel

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.”

Still Death of a Salesman, a landmark work, 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 his son and others. The Crucible depicts the Salem 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 innocent people’s lives.

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 and

unresolved sexuality within families—most of them southern. He was known for incantatory

repetitions, a poetic southern diction, odd Gothic settings, and Freudian exploration of sexual

desire. One of the first American writers to live openly as a homosexual, Williams explained that

the sexuality of his tormented characters expressed their loneliness. His characters live and suffer

intensely.

Williams wrote more than twenty 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 (1947). None of the works he wrote over more than twenty years ever

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

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,” 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 has 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 is more interested in the comic and grotesque. Like the late

Flannery O’Connor, she often takes subnormal, eccentric, or exceptional characters for subjects.

Despite violence in her work, Welty’s wit is essentially humane and affirmative, as, for example,

in her frequently anthologized story, “Why I Work at the P.O.,” 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 focused on a

plantation family in modern times, and The Optimist’s Daughter (1972).

1. Identify two characteristics that were common to Norman Mailer and James Jones.

2. The 1940s saw a flourishing of new writers who focused on the balance between

a. loyalty to self and loyalty to God.

b. personal growth and responsibility to the group.

c. political motivation and philosophical thought.

d. religious faith and freedom of action.

3. All the King’s Men was written by

a. Robert Penn Warren.

b. Arthur Miller.

c. Eudora Welty.

d. Katherine Anne Porter.

4. Explain the content and themes of Death of a Salesman.

5. Arthur Miller’s novel, The Crucible, deals with the controversial historical event known as

a. the Salem Witch Trials.

b. Watergate.

c. World War II.

d. the Vietnam War.

6. Explain the major theme of the work of Tennessee Williams.

7. Katherine Anne Porter’s work about a passenger liner carrying members of the German

upper class and German refugees is titled

a. the S.S. Hindenburg.

b. Noon Wine.

c. Ship of Fools.

d. Pale Horse, Pale Rider.

THE AFFLUENT BUT ALIENATED 1950s

The 1950s saw the delayed impact of modernization and technology in everyday life, left

over from the 1920s—before the Great Depression. World War II brought the United

States out of the depression, and the 1950s provided most Americans with time to enjoy longawaited

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; the faceless corporate man became a cultural

stereotype in Sloan Wilson’s bestselling 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 had created (as seen in Galbraith’s

works).

The 1950s actually was a decade of subtle and pervasive stress. 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 (1956). Some writers went further by following

those who dropped out, as did J.D. Salinger in The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Ralph Ellison in

Invisible Man (1952), and Jack Kerouac in On the Road (1957). And in the waning days of the

decade, Philip Roth arrived with a series of short stories reflecting his own alienation from his

Jewish heritage (Goodbye, Columbus, 1959). His psychological ruminations have provided fodder

for fiction, and later autobiography, into the 1990s.

The fiction of American Jewish writers Saul 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 (1958).

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 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 Baldwin’s

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, 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 youth 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), a novel about racial

issues and homosexuality, and Nobody Knows My

Name (1961), a collection of passionate personal

essays about racism, the role of the artist, and

literature.

Ralph Waldo 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 nothing more. The novel is Invisible Man (1952), the story of a black

man who lives a subterranean existence in a hole brightly illuminated by electricity stolen from a

utility company. The book recounts his grotesque, disenchanting experiences. When he wins a

scholarship to a black college, he is humiliated by whites; when he gets to the college, he witnesses

the black president spurning African-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 with 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.

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)

Flannery O’Connor, a native of Georgia, lived a life cut short by lupus, a deadly blood disease.

Still, she refused sentimentality, as evident in her extremely humorous yet bleak and

uncompromising stories. Unlike Porter, Welty, and 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,” 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,” the story of a girl

seduced by a man who steals her artificial leg.

James Baldwin (center) stands with actors

Marlon Brando (right) and Charlton

Heston (left)

The black humor of O’Connor links her with Nathanael West and Joseph Heller. Her works

include the 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). Her 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 has

expressed a profound debt to Theodore Dreiser for

enabling his openness to a wide range of experience and

his emotional engagement with it. Highly respected, Saul

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).

Bellow’s Seize the Day (1956) is a brilliant novella often used as part of the high school or college

curriculum because of its excellence and brevity. It centers on a failed businessman, Tommy

Wilhelm, who tries to hide his feelings of inadequacy by presenting a good front. The novella begins

ironically: “When it came to concealing his troubles, Tommy Wilhelm was not less capable than the

next fellow. So at least he thought. . . . ” This expenditure of energy ironically helps lead to his

downfall. Wilhelm 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. He

is an example of the schlemiel of Jewish folklore—one to whom unlucky things inevitably happen.

Seize the Day sums up the fear of failure that plagues many Americans.

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

Saul Bellow

(1966), Pictures of Fidelman (1969), and The Tenants (1971). He 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 glimpse

of 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, Yakov 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 (the amalgam of German and Hebrew that was the common

language of European Jewry over the past several centuries) 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 émigrés of the pre–World War II and postwar eras.

Singer’s writings served as bookends for the Holocaust—the destruction of much of European

Jewry at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. 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 those 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. He is best known for his novels, which include the

autobiographical Pnin (1957), about an ineffectual Russian émigré professor, and Lolita (U.S.

edition, 1958), about an educated, middle-aged European who becomes infatuated with an ignorant

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, like the odd love

in Lolita, helped to introduce expressionist 20th-century European currents into the essentially

realist American fictional tradition. His 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 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, in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Updike is best known for his four 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 being 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 mundaneness. In Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Harry has become prosperous

through an inheritance against the landscape of the wealthy self-centeredness of the 1970s as the

Vietnam era wanes. The final volume, Rabbit at Rest (1990), glimpses Angstrom’s reconciliation

with life, and inadvertent death, against the backdrop of the 1980s.

Among Updike’s other novels are The Centaur (1963), Couples (1968), and Bech: A Book (1970).

He 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 and (especially sexual) 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. 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.

1. Why were loneliness and alienation common literary themes during the mid-1950s? Give an

example of a work that manifests these themes.

2. Explain the basic premise of John O’Hara’s novels.

3. Where white American literature reflected a societal problem caused by over-ambition, the

black American experience was reflected in a societal

a. lack of identity.

b. lack of initiative.

c. pressure to conform.

d. pressure to revolt.

4. Explain the content and themes of Ralph Waldo Ellison’s Invisible Man.

5. Many of Flannery O’Connor’s characters exhibited

a. passion for life.

b. violent attitudes.

c. a fear of God.

d. peaceful intentions.

6. Describe the irony present in Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day.

7. Bernard Malamud conveyed, more than any other American-born writer, a sense of

a. patriotism.

b. disloyalty to the government.

c. Jewish history.

d. the American dream.

8. The Yiddish language is a combination of

a. Polish and German.

b. English and Hebrew.

c. German and Hebrew.

d. Polish and Italian.

9. Explain the types of literary achievements and/or contributions for which Vladimir Nabokov

was known.

10. Which of John Cheever’s novels is considered autobiographical?

a. The Housebreaker of Shady Hill

b. The Way Some People Live

c. Falconer

d. Bullet Park

11. Supply an overall summary of the content of Updike’s Rabbit books.

12. Which pervasive literary theme of the mid-1900s was demonstrated in Salinger’s The

Catcher in the Rye?

a. man versus God

b. a loss of childhood innocence

c. a return to basics

d. a feeling of political unrest

13. Choose from below the word closest in meaning to the word in bold-faced type.

The Dharma Bums also focuses on peripatetic counterculture intellectuals and their

infatuation with Zen Buddhism.

a. isolationist

b. communal

c. nomadic

d. psychological

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, anti-war protests, minority

activism, and the arrival of a counterculture whose effects are still being worked through in

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, 1963), and Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night (1968), about a 1967

antiwar march.

The 1960s was marked by a blurring of the line between fiction and fact, novels and reportage,

that has carried through to the present day. Novelist Truman Capote—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 (1966), a riveting analysis of a brutal mass murder in the

American heartland that read like a work of detective fiction.

At the same time, “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. Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

(1968) celebrated the antics of novelist Ken Kesey’s counterculture wanderlust, and Radical Chic

and 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 Richard Brautigan’s whimsical and

fantastic Trout Fishing in America (1967).

The comical and fantastic yielded a new mode, half comic and half metaphysical, in Thomas

Pynchon’s paranoid, brilliant V. (1963) and The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), John Barth’s Giles Goat-

Boy (1966), and the grotesque short stories of Donald Barthelme, whose first collection, Come Back,

Dr. Caligari, was published in 1964.

In a different direction, in drama, Edward Albee produced a series of nontraditional

psychological works—Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), A Delicate Balance (1966), and

Seascape (1975)—that reflected the author’s own soul-searching and his paradoxical approach.

At the same time, the decade saw the belated arrival of a literary talent in his forties—Walker

Percy—a physician by training and an exemplar of southern gentility. In a series of novels, Percy

used his native region as a tapestry on which to play out intriguing psychological dramas. The

Moviegoer (1962) and The Last Gentleman (1966) were among his highly-praised books.

1. How does it appear that people were dealing with the “turbulent 1960s”?

a. with casual abandon

b. by over-spending

c. by writing shorter novels

d. with humor

2. What prevalent literary characteristic marked the work which came out of 1960s? Explain

and name an author and a germane work.

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. 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, 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. 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 Thomas Pynchon deludes the reader by false trails and possible clues out of

detective novels, Barth entices his audience into a carnival funhouse 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), fourteen 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 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.

Norman Mailer (1923–)

Norman Mailer is generally considered the representative author of recent decades, able to

change his style and subject many times. In his appetite for experience, vigorous style, and

dramatic public persona, he follows in the tradition of Ernest Hemingway. His ideas are bold and

innovative. He 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, he 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), he has turned to

writing such ambitious, heavyweight novels

as Ancient Evenings (1983), set in the Egypt

of antiquity, and Harlot’s Ghost (1992),

revolving around the U.S. Central

Intelligence Agency.

1. Who is considered by the author to be the representative author of the past several decades?

a. Norman Mailer

b. Vladimir Nabokov

c. Emily Dickinson

d. Saul Bellow

2. Explain the common trait found in all of Thomas Pynchon’s works.

Norman Mailer

3. Both John Barth and Thomas Pynchon enjoyed creating works that misled the reader.

However, the process of the delusion was different for each. Contrast the way each of the two

deluded their audiences.

THE 1970s AND 1980s: NEW DIRECTIONS

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 the

bicentennial celebration in the United States. Soon the 1980s—the “Me Decade”—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, 1982), 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. Realism, abandoned by

experimental writers in the 1960s, also crept back, often mingling with bold original elements a

daring structure like a novel within a novel, as in John Gardner’s October Light (1976) 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 McInerny (Bright Lights, Big City,

1984), Bret Easton Ellis (Less Than Zero, 1985), and Tama Janowitz (Slaves of New York, 1986).

John Gardner (1933–1982)

John Gardner, from a farming background in New York, was the most important spokesperson

for ethical values in literature until his untimely death in a motorcycle accident. He was a professor

of English, specializing in the medieval period; his most popular novel, Grendel (1971), retells the

Old English epic Beowulf from the monster’s existentialist point of view. The short, vivid, and often

comic novel is a subtle argument against the existentialism that fills its protagonist with selfdestructive

despair and cynicism.

A prolific and popular novelist, Gardner used a realistic approach but employed innovative

techniques—such as flashbacks, stories within stories, retellings of myths, and contrasting

stories—to bring out the truth of a human situation. His strengths are characterization

(particularly his sympathetic portraits of ordinary people) and colorful style. Major works include

The Resurrection (1966), The Sunlight Dialogues (1972), Nickel Mountain (1973), October Light

(1976), and Mickelson’s Ghosts (1982).

Gardner’s fictional patterns suggest the curative powers of fellowship, duty, and family

obligations; in this sense Gardner was a profoundly traditional and conservative author. He

endeavored to demonstrate that certain values and acts lead to fulfilling lives. His book On Moral

Fiction (1978) calls for novels that embody ethical values rather than dazzle with empty technical

innovation. The book created a furor, largely because Gardner bluntly criticized important living

authors for failing to reflect ethical concerns.

Toni Morrison (1931–)

African-American novelist Toni Morrison was born in Ohio to a spiritually-oriented family. She

attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., and has worked as a senior editor in a major

Washington publishing house and as a distinguished professor at various universities.

Morrison’s richly woven fiction has gained her international acclaim. In compelling, largespirited

novels, she treats the complex identities of black people in a universal manner. In her early

work The Bluest Eye (1970), a strong-willed young black girl tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, who

survives an abusive father. Pecola believes that her dark eyes have magically become blue, and that

they will make her lovable. Morrison has said that she

was creating her own sense of identity as a writer

through this novel: “I was Pecola, Claudia, everybody.”

Sula (1973) describes the strong friendship of two

women. Morrison paints African-American women as

unique, fully individual characters rather than as

stereotypes. Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) has

won several awards. It follows a black man, Milkman

Dead, and his complex relations with his family and

community. In Tar Baby (1981), Morrison deals with

black and white relations. Beloved (1987) is the

wrenching story of a woman who murders her children

rather than allow them to live as slaves. It employs the

dreamlike techniques of magical realism in depicting a

mysterious figure, Beloved, who returns to live with

the mother who has slit her throat.

Morrison has suggested that, though her novels are

consummate works of art, they contain political

meanings: “I am not interested in indulging myself in

some private exercise of my imagination . . . yes, the

work must be political.” In 1993, Morrison won the

Nobel Prize for Literature.

Alice Walker (1944–)

Alice Walker, an African American and the child of a sharecropper family in rural Georgia,

graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, where one of her teachers was the politically committed

female poet Muriel Rukeyser. Other influences on her work have been Flannery O’Connor and Zora

Neale Hurston.

A “womanist” writer, as Walker calls herself, she has long been associated with feminism,

presenting black existence from the female perspective. Like Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni

Cade Bambara, and other accomplished contemporary black novelists, Walker uses heightened,

lyrical realism to center on the dreams and failures of accessible, credible people. Her work

underscores the quest for dignity in human life. A fine stylist, particularly in her epistolary dialect

novel The Color Purple, her work seeks to educate. In this she resembles the African-American

novelist Ishmael Reed, whose satires expose social problems and racial issues.

Walker’s The Color Purple is the story of the love between two poor black sisters that survives

a separation over years, interwoven with the story of how, during that same period, the shy, ugly,

and uneducated sister discovers her inner strength through the support of a female friend. The

theme of the support women give each other recalls Maya Angelou’s autobiography, I Know Why the

Caged Bird Sings (1970), which celebrates the mother-daughter connection, and the work of white

feminists such as Adrienne Rich. The Color Purple portrays men as basically unaware of the needs

and reality of women.

Toni Morrison

The close of the 1980s and the beginnings of the 1990s saw minority writing become a major

fixture on the American literary landscape. This is true in drama as well as in prose. August Wilson

(1945–2005)—whose cycle of plays about the 20th-century black experience (including Pulitzer

Prize–winning Fences, 1986, and The Piano Lesson, 1989) continues to be staged—stood alongside

novelists Alice Walker, John Edgar Wideman, and Toni Morrison.

Asian Americans are also taking their place on the scene. Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman

Warrior, 1976) carved out a place for her fellow Asian Americans, among them Amy Tan, whose

luminous novels of Chinese life transposed to post–World War II America (The Joy Luck Club, 1989,

and The Kitchen God’s Wife, 1991) have captivated readers. David Henry Hwang, a California-born

son of Chinese immigrants, has made his mark in drama, with plays such as F.O.B. (1981) and M.

Butterfly (1986).

A relatively new group on the literary horizon are the Hispanic-American writers, including the

Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Oscar Hijuelos, the Cuban-born author of The Mambo Kings Play

Songs of Love (1989); short story writer Sandra Cisneros (Women Hollering Creek and Other

Stories, 1991); and Rudolfo Anaya, author of Bless Me, Ultima (1972), which sold 300,000 copies,

mostly in the western United States.

1. The 1980s were commonly referred to as the

a. decade of enlightenment.

b. “me decade.”

c. decade of brotherly love.

d. altruistic years.

2. Summarize the characteristics of literature that appeared in the 1980s.

3. Which unique literary technique was used by John Gardner to create realistic stories?

a. simile

b. flashbacks

c. repetition

d. mystery

4. In what ways was John Gardner both a traditional and a conservative author?

5. Which author attributes a creation of her own sense of identity through her work, The Bluest

Eyes?

a. Tama Janowitz

b. Alice Walker

c. Katherine Anne Porter

d. Toni Morrison

6. In what way was the subject matter of Beloved shocking as well as politically and

emotionally stirring?

7. Explain the way Alice Walker incorporates the themes of female bonding in her novel, The

Color Purple.

8. Name two Asian-American writers and their respective works that gained attention during

the 1970s and 1980s.

THE NEW REGIONALISM

There is nothing new about a regional tradition in American literature. It is as old as the

Native American legends, as evocative as the works of James Fenimore Cooper and Bret

Harte, as resonant as the novels of William Faulkner and the plays of Tennessee Williams. For a

time, though, during the post–World War II era, tradition seemed to disappear into the shadows—

unless one considers, perhaps correctly, that urban fiction is a form of regionalism. Nonetheless, for

the past decade or so, regionalism has been making a triumphant return in American literature,

enabling readers to get a sense of place as well as a sense of time and humanity. And it is as

prevalent in popular fiction, such as detective stories, as it is in classic literature—novels, short

stories, and drama.

There are several possible reasons for this occurrence. For one thing, all of the arts in America

have been decentralized over the past generation. Theater, music, and dance are as likely to thrive

in cities in the U.S. south, southwest, and northwest as in such major cities as New York and

Chicago. Movie companies shoot films across the United States, on myriad locations. So it also is

with literature. Smaller publishing houses that concentrate on fiction thrive outside of New York

City’s “publishers row.” Writers workshops and conferences are more in vogue than ever, as are

literature courses on college campuses across the country. It is no wonder that budding talents can

surface anywhere. All one needs is a pencil, paper, and a vision.

The most refreshing aspects of the new regionalism are its expanse and its diversity. It

canvasses America, from east to west. A transcontinental literary tour begins in the Northeast, in

Albany, New York, the focus of interest of its native son, one-time journalist William Kennedy.

Kennedy, whose Albany novels—among them Ironweed (1983) and Very Old Bones (1992)—captured

elegaically and often raucously the lives of the denizens of the streets and saloons of New York

capital city.

Prolific novelist, story writer, poet, and essayist Joyce Carol Oates also hails from the

northeastern United States. In her haunting works, obsessed characters’ attempts to achieve

fulfillment within their grotesque environments lead them into destruction. Some of her finest

works are stories in collections such as The Wheel of Love (1970) and Where Are You Going, Where

Have You Been? (1974). Stephen King, the bestselling master of horror fiction, generally sets his

suspenseful page-turners in Maine—within the same region.

Down the coast, in the environs of Baltimore, Maryland, Anne Tyler presents, in spare, quiet

language, extraordinary lives and striking characters. Novels such as Dinner at the Homesick

Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), Breathing Lessons (1988), and Saint Maybe

(1991) have helped to boost her reputation in literary circles and among mass audiences.

A short distance from Baltimore is America’s capital, Washington, D.C., which has its own

literary tradition, if a shrouded one, in a city whose chief preoccupation is politics. Among the more

lucid portrayers of life in and on the fringe of government and power is novelist Ward Just, a former

international correspondent who assumed a second career writing about the world he knows best—

the world of journalists, politicians, diplomats, and soldiers. Some of Just’s most impressive works

are Nicholson at Large (1975), a study of a Washington newsman during and after the John F.

Kennedy presidency of the early 1960s; In the City of Fear (1982), a glimpse of Washington, D.C.,

during the Vietnam era; and Jack Gance (1989), a sobering look at a Chicago politician and his rise

to the U.S. Senate. Susan Richards Shreve’s Children of Power (1979) assesses the private lives of

a group of sons and daughters of government officials, while popular novelist Tom Clancy, a

Maryland resident, has used the Washington, D.C.’s politico-military landscape as the launching

pad for his series of epic suspense tales.

Moving southward, Reynolds Price and Jill McCorkle come into view. Price, Anne Tyler’s

mentor, was once described during the 1970s by a critic as being in the obsolescent post of

“southern-writer-in-residence.” He first came to attention with his novel A Long and Happy Life

(1962), dealing with the people and the land of eastern North Carolina and specifically with a young

woman named Rosacoke Mustian. He continued writing tales of this heroine over the ensuing

years, and then shifted his locus to other themes before focusing again on a woman in his acclaimed

work, Kate Vaiden (1986), his only novel written in the first person. Price’s latest novel, Blue

Calhoun (1992), examines the impact of a passionate but doomed love affair over the decades of

family life.

Jill McCorkle, born in 1958 and thus representing a new generation, has devoted her novels and

short stories—set in the small towns of North Carolina—to exploring the mystiques of teenagers

(The Cheer Leader, 1984), the links between generations (Tending to Virginia, 1987), and the

particular sensibilities of contemporary southern women (Crash Diet, 1992).

In the same region is Pat Conroy, whose bracing autobiographical novels about his South

Carolina upbringing and his abusive, tyrannical father (The Great Santini, 1976; The Prince of

Tides, 1986) are infused with a sense of the natural beauty of the South Carolina lowcountry.

Shelby Foote, a Mississippi native who has lived in Memphis, Tennessee, for years, is an old-time

chronicler of the south whose histories and fictions led to his role on camera in a successful public

television series on the U.S. Civil War.

America’s heartland reveals a wealth of writing talent. Among them are Jane Smiley, who

teaches writing at the University of Iowa. Smiley won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for A

Thousand Acres (1991), which transplanted Shakespeare’s King Lear to a midwestern U.S. farm

and chronicled the bitter family feud unleashed when an aging farmer decides to turn over his land

to his three daughters.

Texas chronicler Larry McMurtry covers his native state in varying time periods and

sensibilities, from the vanished 19th-century west (Lonesome Dove, 1985; Anything For Billy, 1988)

to the vanishing small towns of the postwar era (The Last Picture Show, 1966).

Cormac McCarthy, whose explorations of the American southwest desert highlight his novels

Blood Meridian (1985), All The Pretty Horses (1992), and The Crossing (1994), is a reclusive,

immensely imaginative writer who is just beginning to get his due on the U.S. literary scene.

Generally considered the rightful heir to the southern Gothic tradition, McCarthy is as intrigued

by the wildness of the terrain as he is by human wildness and unpredictability.

Set in the striking landscape of her native New Mexico, Native American novelist Leslie

Marmon Silko’s critically-esteemed novel Ceremony (1977) has gained a large general audience.

Like N. Scott Momaday’s poetic The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), it is a “chant novel” structured

on Native American healing rituals. Silko’s novel The Almanac of the Dead (1991) offers a

panorama of the southwest, from ancient tribal migrations to present-day drug runners and corrupt

real estate developers reaping profits by misusing the land. Bestselling detective writer Tony

Hillerman, who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, covers the same southwestern U.S. territory,

featuring two modest, hardworking Navajo policemen as his protagonists.

To the north, in Montana, poet James Welch details the struggles of Native Americans to wrest

meaning from harsh reservation life beset by poverty and alcoholism in his slender, nearly flawless

novels Winter in the Blood (1974), The Death of Jim Loney (1979), Fools Crow (1986), and The

Indian Lawyer (1990). Another Montanan is Thomas McGuane, whose unfailingly masculine-

focused novels—including Ninety-Two in the Shade (1973) and Keep the Change (1989)—evince a

dream of roots amidst rootlessness. Louise Erdrich, who is part Chippewa, has set a powerful series

of novels in neighboring North Dakota. In works such as Love Medicine (1984), she captures the

tangled lives of dysfunctional reservation families with a poignant blend of stoicism and humor.

Two writers have exemplified the west for some time. One of these is the late Wallace Stegner,

who was born in the Midwest in 1909 and died in an automobile accident in 1993. Stegner spent

the bulk of his life in various locales in the west and had a regional outlook even before it became

the vogue. His first major work, The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), chronicles a family caught

up in the American dream in its western guise as the frontier disappeared. It ranges across

America, from Minnesota to Washington, and concerns, as Stegner put it, “that place of impossible

loveliness that pulled the whole nation westward.” His 1971 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Angle of

Repose, is also imbued with the spirit of place in its portrait of a woman illustrator and writer of

the Old West. Indeed, Stegner’s strength as a writer was in characterization, as well as in evoking

the ruggedness of western life.

Joan Didion—who is as much journalist as novelist and whose mind’s eye has traveled far afield

in recent years—put contemporary California on the map in her 1968 volume of nonfiction pieces,

Slouching Toward Bethlehem, and in her incisive, shocking novel about the aimlessness of the

Hollywood scene, Play It As It Lays (1970).

The Pacific northwest—one of the more fertile artistic regions across the cultural landscape at

the outset of the 1990s—produced, among others, Raymond Carver, a marvelous writer of short

fiction. Carver died tragically in 1988 at the age of 50, not long after coming into his own on the

literary scene. In mirroring the working-class mindset of the inhabitants of his region in collections

such as What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1974) and Where I’m Calling From (1986),

Carver placed them against the backdrop of their scenic surroundings, still largely unspoiled.

The success of the regional theater movement—nonprofit institutional companies that have

become havens of contemporary culture in city after city across America—since the early 1960s

most notably has nurtured young dramatists who have become some of the more luminous imagists

on the theatrical scene. One wonders what American theater and literature would be like today

without the coruscating, fragmented society and tempestuous relationships of Sam Shepard

(Buried Child, 1979; A Lie of the Mind, 1985); the amoral characters and shell-shocking staccato

dialogue of Chicago’s David Mamet (American Buffalo, 1976; Glengarry Glen Ross, 1982); the

intrusion of traditional values into midwestern lives and concerns reflected by Lanford Wilson (5th

of July, 1978; Talley’s Folly, 1979); and the southern eccentricities of Beth Henley (Crimes of the

Heart, 1979).

American literature has traversed an extended, winding path from pre-colonial days to

contemporary times. Society, history, technology all have had telling impact on it. Ultimately,

though, there is a constant—humanity, with all its radiance and its malevolence, its tradition and

its promise.

1. Explain the main reason for the renewed popularity of regionalism.

2. Give two examples of very “regionalistic” authors of the 20th century.

3. Ward Just was best known for his writings, which were centered on

a. Maine tradition.

b. Washington, D.C. politics.

c. Arizona Native American influence.

d. middle America’s “bread-basket” attitudes.

4. Jill McCorkle devoted her novels to all of the following themes except

a. exploring the mystique of teenagers.

b. the links between generations.

c. the sensibilities of contemporary southern women.

d. the encouragement of civil disobedience.

5. Pat Conroy and Shelby Foote both wrote about the

a. northeast.

b. south.

c. west.

d. northwest.

6. Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel, The Almanac of the Dead, is called a “chant novel.” To what

does this term refer and what is her book about?

7. James Welch wrote primarily about the

a. effects the white settlers had on the west.

b. rugged yet dangerous wilderness of Montana.

c. struggles of Native Americans living on reservations.

d. political unrest simmering between the U.S. and the European continent.

8. Give an example of Wallace Stegner’s regional approach to literature.

9. To which state, previously unrecognized in the realm of literature, was novelist Joan Didion

responsible for drawing attention?

a. Montana

b. California

c. Connecticut

d. Texas

10. Identify the three most compelling influences on American literature overall, from precolonial

days to the present. Write one or two summarizing sentences about the influence of

each of the factors.

11. Think back over all the topics covered in this history of American literature. Which of the

literary genres and/or philosophies most appealed to you as you learned about it? What

aspects of it did you find most interesting? Which authors were you most drawn to from that

segment of literary history? Explain your opinions and support them with details from the

passages in this workbook.

American Literature

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

History of American Literature - Chapter 8: American Prose Since 1945: Realism and Experimentation

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