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.
Robert Penn
Warren
Robert Penn Warren, (b. April 24, 1905,
Guthrie, Ky., U.S.—d. Sept. 15, 1989,
Stratton, Vt.), American novelist, poet,
critic, and teacher, best-known for his
treatment of moral dilemmas in a South
beset by the erosion of its traditional,
rural values. He became the first poet
laureate of the United States in 1986.
In 1921 Warren entered Vanderbilt
University, Nashville, Tenn., where he
joined a group of poets who called
themselves the Fugitives. Warren was
among several of the Fugitives who
joined with other Southerners to publish
the anthology of essays I’ll Take My
Stand (1930), a plea for the agrarian
way of life in the South.
After graduation from Vanderbilt in
1925, he studied at the University of
California, Berkeley (M.A., 1927), and
at Yale. He then went to the University
of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. From 1930
to 1950 he served on the faculty of
several colleges and
universities—including Vanderbilt and
the University of Minnesota. With
Cleanth Brooks and Charles W. Pipkin, he
founded and edited The Southern Review
(1935–42), possibly the most influential
American literary magazine of the time.
He taught at Yale University from 1951
to 1973. His Understanding Poetry (1938)
and Understanding Fiction (1943), both
written with Cleanth Brooks, were
enormously influential in spreading the
doctrines of the New Criticism.
Warren’s first novel, Night Rider
(1939), is based on the tobacco war
(1905–08) between the independent
growers in Kentucky and the large
tobacco companies. It anticipates much
of his later fiction in the way it
treats a historical event with tragic
irony, emphasizes violence, and portrays
individuals caught in moral quandaries.
His best-known novel, All the King’s Men
(1946), is based on the career of the
Louisiana demagogue Huey Long and tells
the story of an idealistic politician
whose lust for power corrupts him and
those around him. This novel won the
Pulitzer Prize in 1947 and, when made
into a film, won the Academy Award for
best motion picture of 1949. Warren’s
other novels include At Heaven’s Gate
(1943); World Enough and Time (1950),
which centres on a controversial murder
trial in Kentucky in the 19th century;
Band of Angels (1956); and The Cave
(1959). His long narrative poem, Brother
to Dragons (1953), dealing with the
brutal murder of a slave by two nephews
of Thomas Jefferson, is essentially a
versified novel, and his poetry
generally exhibits many of the concerns
of his fiction. His other volumes of
poetry include Promises: Poems,
1954–1956; You, Emperors, and Others
(1960); Audubon: A Vision (1969); Now
and Then; Poems 1976–1978; Rumor
Verified (1981); Chief Joseph (1983);
and New and Selected Poems, 1923–1985
(1985). The Circus in the Attic (1948),
which included “Blackberry Winter,”
considered by some critics to be one of
Warren’s supreme achievements, is a
volume of short stories, and Selected
Essays (1958) is a collection of some of
his critical writings.
Besides receiving the Pulitzer Prize for
fiction, Warren twice won the Pulitzer
Prize for poetry (1958, 1979) and, at
the time of his selection as poet
laureate in 1986, was the only person
ever to win the prize in both
categories. In his later years he tended
to concentrate on his poetry.
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Henry Miller
American author
born Dec. 26, 1891, New York City
died June 7, 1980, Pacific Palisades, Calif., U.S.
Main
U.S. writer and perennial Bohemian whose autobiographical novels achieve
a candour—particularly about sex—that made them a liberating influence
in mid-20th-century literature. He is also notable for a free and easy
American style and a gift for comedy that springs from his willingness
to admit to feelings others conceal and an almost eager acceptance of
the bad along with the good. Because of their sexual frankness, his
major works were banned in Britain and the United States until the
1960s, but they were widely known earlier from copies smuggled in from
France.
Miller was brought up in Brooklyn, and he wrote about his childhood
experiences there in Black Spring (1936). In 1924 he left his job with
Western Union in New York to devote himself to writing. In 1930 he went
to France. Tropic of Cancer (published in France in 1934, in the United
States in 1961) is based on his hand-to-mouth existence in
Depression-ridden Paris. Tropic of Capricorn (France, 1939; U.S., 1961)
draws on the earlier New York phase.
Miller’s visit to Greece in 1939 inspired The Colossus of Maroussi
(1941), a meditation on the significance of that country. In 1940–41 he
toured the United States extensively and wrote a sharply critical
account of it, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945), which dwelt on the
cost in human terms of mechanization and commercialization.
After settling in Big Sur on the California coast, Miller became the
centre of a colony of admirers. Many of them were writers of the Beat
generation who saw parallels to their own beliefs in Miller’s
whole-hearted acceptance of the degrading along with the sublime. At Big
Sur, Miller produced his Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, made up of Sexus,
Plexus, and Nexus (U.S. edition published as a whole in 1965). It covers
much the same period of Miller’s life as Tropic of Capricorn and,
together with that book, traces the stages by which the hero-narrator
becomes a writer. The publication of the “Tropics” in the United States
provoked a series of obscenity trials that culminated in 1964 in a
Supreme Court decision rejecting state court findings that the book was
obscene.
Other important books by Miller are the collections of essays The
Cosmological Eye (1939) and The Wisdom of the Heart (1941). He was also
a watercolourist; he exhibited internationally and wrote about art in To
Paint Is To Love Again (1960). Various volumes of his correspondence
have been published: with Lawrence Durrell (1963), to Anaïs Nin (1965),
and with Wallace Fowlie (1975).
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Truman Capote
Truman Capote, original name Truman
Streckfus Persons (b. Sept. 30, 1924,
New Orleans, La., U.S.—d. Aug. 25, 1984,
Los Angeles, Calif.), American novelist,
short-story writer, and playwright. His
early writing extended the Southern
Gothic tradition, but he later developed
a more journalistic approach in the
novel In Cold Blood (1965), which
remains his best-known work.
His parents were divorced when he was
young, and he spent his childhood with
various elderly relatives in small towns
in Louisiana and Alabama. (He owed his
surname to his mother’s remarriage, to
Joseph Garcia Capote.) He attended
private schools and eventually joined
his mother and stepfather at Millbrook,
Conn., where he completed his secondary
education at Greenwich High School.
Capote drew on his childhood experiences
for many of his early works of fiction.
Having abandoned further schooling, he
achieved early literary recognition in
1945 when his haunting short story
“Miriam” was published in Mademoiselle
magazine; it won the O. Henry Memorial
Award the following year, the first of
four such awards Capote was to receive.
His first novel, Other Voices, Other
Rooms (1948), was acclaimed as the work
of a young writer of great promise. The
book is a sensitive portrayal of a
homosexually inclined boy’s search for
his father and his own identity through
a nightmarishly decadent Southern world.
The short story “Shut a Final Door” (O.
Henry Award, 1946) and other tales of
loveless and isolated persons were
collected in A Tree of Night (1949). The
quasi-autobiographical novel The Grass
Harp (1951) is a story of nonconforming
innocents who retire temporarily from
life to a tree house, returning renewed
to the real world. One of Capote’s most
popular works, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
(1958; filmed 1961), is a novella about
a young, fey Manhattan playgirl.
Capote’s increasing preoccupation with
journalism was reflected in the
“nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood, a
chilling account of a multiple murder
committed by two young psychopaths in
Kansas. Capote spent six years
interviewing the principals in the case,
and the critical and popular success of
his novel about them was the high point
of his dual careers as a writer and a
celebrity socialite. For though a
serious writer, Capote was also a
party-loving sybarite who became a
darling of the rich and famous of high
society. Endowed with a quirky but
attractive character, he entertained
television audiences with outrageous
tales recounted in his distinctively
high-pitched Southern drawl.
Capote’s later writings never approached
the success of his earlier ones. In the
late 1960s he adapted two short stories
about his childhood, “A Christmas
Memory” and “The Thanksgiving Visitor,”
for television. The Dogs Bark (1973)
consists of collected essays and
profiles over a 30-year span, while the
collection Music for Chameleons (1980)
includes both fiction and nonfiction. In
later years Capote’s growing dependence
on drugs and alcohol stifled his
productivity. Moreover, selections from
a projected work that he considered to
be his masterpiece, a social satire
entitled Answered Prayers, appeared in
Esquire magazine in 1975 and raised a
storm among friends and foes who were
harshly depicted in the work (under the
thinnest of disguises). He was
thereafter ostracized by his former
celebrity friends. Answered Prayers
remained unfinished at his death.
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Paul
Bowles
Paul Bowles, in full Paul Frederic
Bowles (b. December 30, 1910, New York,
New York, U.S.—d. November 18, 1999,
Tangier, Morocco), American-born
composer, translator, and author of
novels and short stories in which
violent events and psychological
collapse are recounted in a detached and
elegant style. His protagonists are
often Europeans or Americans who are
maimed by their contact with powerful
traditional cultures.
Bowles began publishing Surrealist
poetry in the Parisian magazine
transition at the age of 16. After
briefly attending the University of
Virginia, he traveled to Paris, where
his interests turned to music. In 1929
he returned to New York and began
studying musical composition under Aaron
Copland. Bowles became a sought-after
composer, writing music for more than 30
theatrical productions and films. During
this time, he also became a member of
the loose society of literary
expatriates in Europe and North Africa
and started writing short stories. In
1947 he and his wife, writer Jane
Bowles, settled in Tangier, Morocco, a
city that became his most potent source
of inspiration. There, he wrote his
first novel, The Sheltering Sky (1949;
film, 1990), a harsh tale of death,
rape, and sexual obsession. It became a
best-seller and made Bowles a leading
figure in the city’s expatriate artistic
community.
Bowles’s later novels include Let It
Come Down (1952), The Spider’s House
(1955), and Up Above the World (1966).
His Collected Stories, 1939–1976 (1979)
and his subsequent short-story
collections, which include Midnight Mass
(1981) and Call at Corazón (1988), also
depict human depravity amid exotic
settings. Bowles recorded Moroccan folk
music for the U.S. Library of Congress,
wrote travel essays, translated works
from several European and Middle Eastern
languages into English, and recorded and
translated oral tales from Maghribi
Arabic into English. Without Stopping
(1972) and Two Years Beside the Strait:
Tangier Journal 1987–1989 (1990; U.S.
title, Days) are autobiographical.
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James Baldwin
James Baldwin, (b. Aug. 2, 1924, New
York City—d. Dec. 1, 1987, Saint-Paul,
Fr.), American essayist, novelist, and
playwright whose eloquence and passion
on the subject of race in America made
him an important voice, particularly in
the late 1950s and early 1960s, in the
United States and, later, through much
of western Europe.
The eldest of nine children, he grew up
in poverty in the black ghetto of Harlem
in New York City. From 14 to 16 he was
active during out-of-school hours as a
preacher in a small revivalist church, a
period he wrote about in his
semiautobiographical first and finest
novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain
(1953), and in his play about a woman
evangelist, The Amen Corner (performed
in New York City, 1965).
After graduation from high school, he
began a restless period of ill-paid
jobs, self-study, and literary
apprenticeship in Greenwich Village, the
bohemian quarter of New York City. He
left in 1948 for Paris, where he lived
for the next eight years. (In later
years, from 1969, he became a
self-styled “transatlantic commuter,”
living alternatively in the south of
France and in New York and New England.)
His second novel, Giovanni’s Room
(1956), deals with the white world and
concerns an American in Paris torn
between his love for a man and his love
for a woman. Between the two novels came
a collection of essays, Notes of a
Native Son (1955).
In 1957 he returned to the United States
and became an active participant in the
civil-rights struggle that swept the
nation. His book of essays, Nobody Knows
My Name (1961), explores black–white
relations in the United States. This
theme also was central to his novel
Another Country (1962), which examines
sexual as well as racial issues.
The New Yorker magazine gave over almost
all of its Nov. 17, 1962, issue to a
long article by Baldwin on the Black
Muslim separatist movement and other
aspects of the civil-rights struggle.
The article became a best-seller in book
form as The Fire Next Time (1963). His
bitter play about racist oppression,
Blues for Mister Charlie (“Mister
Charlie” being a black term for a white
man), played on Broadway to mixed
reviews in 1964.
Though Baldwin continued to write until
his death—publishing works including
Going to Meet the Man (1965), a
collection of short stories; and the
novels Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been
Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk
(1974), and Just Above My Head (1979);
and The Price of the Ticket (1985), a
collection of autobiographical
writings—none of his later works
achieved the popular and critical
success of his early work.
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Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg, (b. June 3, 1926,
Newark, N.J., U.S.—d. April 5, 1997, New
York, N.Y.), American poet whose epic
poem Howl (1956) is considered to be one
of the most significant products of the
Beat movement.
Ginsberg grew up in Paterson, N.J.,
where his father, Louis Ginsberg,
himself a poet, taught English. Allen
Ginsberg’s mother, whom he mourned in
his long poem Kaddish (1961), was
confined for years in a mental hospital.
Ginsberg was influenced in his work by
the poet William Carlos Williams,
particularly toward the use of natural
speech rhythms and direct observations
of unadorned actuality.
While at Columbia University, where his
anarchical proclivities pained the
authorities, Ginsberg became close
friends with Jack Kerouac and William
Burroughs, who were later to be numbered
among the Beats. After leaving Columbia
in 1948, he traveled widely and worked
at a number of jobs from cafeteria floor
mopper to market researcher.
Howl, Ginsberg’s first published book,
laments what he believed to have been
the destruction by insanity of the “best
minds of [his] generation.” Dithyrambic
and prophetic, owing something to the
romantic bohemianism of Walt Whitman, it
also dwells on homosexuality, drug
addiction, Buddhism, and Ginsberg’s
revulsion from what he saw as the
materialism and insensitivity of
post-World War II America.
Empty Mirror, a collection of earlier
poems, appeared along with Kaddish and
Other Poems in 1961, followed by Reality
Sandwiches in 1963. Kaddish, one of
Ginsberg’s most important works, is a
long confessional poem in which the poet
laments his mother’s insanity and tries
to come to terms with both his
relationship to her and with her death.
In the early 1960s Ginsberg began a life
of ceaseless travel, reading his poetry
at campuses and coffee bars, traveling
abroad, and engaging in left-wing
political activities. He became an
influential guru of the American youth
counterculture in the late 1960s. He
acquired a deeper knowledge of Buddhism,
and increasingly a religious element of
love for all sentient beings entered his
work.
His later volumes of poetry included
Planet News (1968); The Fall of America:
Poems of These States, 1965–1971 (1972),
which won the National Book Award; Mind
Breaths: Poems 1972–1977 (1978); and
White Shroud: Poems 1980–1985 (1986).
His Collected Poems 1947–1980 appeared
in 1984. Collected Poems, 1947–1997
(2006) is the first comprehensive
one-volume collection of Ginsberg’s
published poetry. The Letters of Allen
Ginsberg was published in 2008, and a
collection edited by Bill Morgan and
David Stanford that focuses on
Ginsberg’s correspondence with Kerouac
was published as Jack Kerouac and Allen
Ginsberg: The Letters in 2010.
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William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs, in full William
Seward Burroughs (b. February 5, 1914,
St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.—d. August 2,
1997, Lawrence, Kansas), American writer
of experimental novels that evoke, in
deliberately erratic prose, a
nightmarish, sometimes wildly humorous
world. His sexual explicitness (he was
an avowed and outspoken homosexual) and
the frankness with which he dealt with
his experiences as a drug addict won him
a following among writers of the Beat
movement.
Burroughs was the grandson of the
inventor of the Burroughs adding machine
and grew up in St. Louis in comfortable
circumstances, graduating from Harvard
University in 1936 and continuing study
there in archaeology and ethnology.
Having tired of the academic world, he
then held a variety of jobs. In 1943
Burroughs moved to New York City, where
he became friends with Jack Kerouac and
Allen Ginsberg, two writers who would
become principal figures in the Beat
movement. Burroughs first took morphine
about 1944, and he soon became addicted
to heroin. That year Lucien Carr, a
member of Burroughs’s social circle,
killed a man whom Carr claimed had made
sexual advances toward him. Before
turning himself in to the police, Carr
confessed to Burroughs and Kerouac, who
were both arrested as material
witnesses. They were later released on
bail, and neither man was charged with a
crime; Carr was convicted of
manslaughter but was later pardoned. In
1945 Burroughs and Kerouac collaborated
on a fictionalized retelling of those
events entitled And the Hippos Were
Boiled in Their Tanks. Rejected by
publishers at the time, it was not
published until 2008.
In 1949 he moved with his second wife to
Mexico, where in 1951 he accidentally
shot and killed her in a drunken prank.
Fleeing Mexico, he wandered through the
Amazon region of South America,
continuing his experiments with drugs, a
period of his life detailed in The Yage
Letters, his correspondence with
Ginsberg written in 1953 but not
published until 1963. Between travels he
lived in London, Paris, Tangier, and New
York City but in 1981 settled in
Lawrence, Kansas.
He used the pen name William Lee in his
first published book, Junkie:
Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict
(1953, reissued as Junky in 1977), an
account of the addict’s life. The Naked
Lunch (Paris, 1959; U.S. title, Naked
Lunch, 1962; filmed 1991) was completed
after his treatment for drug addiction.
All forms of addiction, according to
Burroughs, are counterproductive for
writing, and the only gain to his own
work from his 15 years as an addict came
from the knowledge he acquired of the
bizarre, carnival milieu in which the
drug taker is preyed upon as victim. The
grotesqueness of this world is vividly
satirized in Naked Lunch, which also is
much preoccupied with homosexuality and
police persecution. In the novels that
followed—among them The Soft Machine
(1961), The Wild Boys (1971),
Exterminator! (1973), Cities of the Red
Night (1981), Place of Dead Roads
(1983), Queer (1985), The Western Lands
(1987), and My Education: A Book of
Dreams (1995)—Burroughs further
experimented with the structure of the
novel. Burroughs (1983), by filmmaker
Howard Brookner, is a documentary on the
artist’s life.
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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).
Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer, in full Norman Kingsley
Mailer (b. Jan. 31, 1923, Long Branch,
N.J., U.S.—d. Nov. 10, 2007, New York,
N.Y.), American novelist and journalist,
best known for using a form of
journalism—called New Journalism—that
combines the imaginative subjectivity of
literature with the more objective
qualities of journalism. Both Mailer’s
fiction and his nonfiction made a
radical critique of the totalitarianism
he believed inherent in the centralized
power structure of 20th- and
21st-century America.
Mailer grew up in Brooklyn and graduated
from Harvard University in 1943 with a
degree in aeronautical engineering.
Drafted into the army in 1944, he served
in the Pacific until 1946. While he was
enrolled at the Sorbonne, in Paris, he
wrote The Naked and the Dead (1948),
hailed immediately as one of the finest
American novels to come out of World War
II.
Mailer’s success at age 25 aroused the
expectation that he would develop from a
war novelist into the leading literary
figure of the postwar generation. But
Mailer’s search for themes and forms to
give meaningful expression to what he
saw as the problems of his time
committed him to exploratory works that
had little general appeal. His second
novel, Barbary Shore (1951), and The
Deer Park (1955) were greeted with
critical hostility and mixed reviews,
respectively. His next important work
was a long essay, The White Negro
(1957), a sympathetic study of a
marginal social type—the “hipster.”
In 1959, when Mailer was generally
dismissed as a one-book author, he made
a bid for attention with the book
Advertisements for Myself, a collection
of unfinished stories, parts of novels,
essays, reviews, notebook entries, or
ideas for fiction. The miscellany’s
naked self-revelation won the admiration
of a younger generation seeking
alternative styles of life and art.
Mailer’s subsequent novels, though not
critical successes, were widely read as
guides to life. An American Dream (1965)
is about a man who murders his wife, and
Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) is about a
young man on an Alaskan hunting trip.
A controversial figure whose egotism and
belligerence often antagonized both
critics and readers, Mailer did not
command the same respect for his fiction
that he received for his journalism,
which conveyed actual events with the
subjective richness and imaginative
complexity of a novel. The Armies of the
Night (1968), for example, was based on
the Washington peace demonstrations of
October 1967, during which Mailer was
jailed and fined for an act of civil
disobedience; it won a Pulitzer Prize
and a National Book Award. A similar
treatment was given the Republican and
Democratic presidential conventions in
Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968)
and the Moon exploration in Of a Fire on
the Moon (1970).
In 1969 Mailer ran unsuccessfully for
mayor of New York City. Among his other
works are his essay collections The
Presidential Papers (1963) and Cannibals
and Christians (1966); The Executioner’s
Song (1979), a Pulitzer Prize-winning
novel based on the life of convicted
murderer Gary Gilmore; Ancient Evenings
(1983), a novel set in ancient Egypt,
the first volume of an uncompleted
trilogy; Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1984),
a contemporary mystery thriller; and the
enormous Harlot’s Ghost (1991), a novel
focusing on the Central Intelligence
Agency. In 1995 Mailer published
Oswald’s Tale, an exhaustive
nonfictional portrayal of U.S. Pres.
John F. Kennedy’s assassin. Mailer’s
final two novels intertwined religion
and historical figures: The Gospel
According to the Son (1997) is a
first-person “memoir” purportedly
written by Jesus Christ, and The Castle
in the Forest (2007), narrated by a
devil, tells the story of Adolf Hitler’s
boyhood.
In 2003 Mailer published two works of
nonfiction: The Spooky Art, his
reflections on writing, and Why Are We
at War?, an essay questioning the Iraq
War. On God (2007) records conversations
about religion between Mailer and the
scholar Michael Lennon.
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Irwin Shaw
Irwin Shaw, original name Irwin Gilbert
Shamforoff (b. Feb. 27, 1913, New York,
N.Y., U.S.—d. May 16, 1984, Davos,
Switz.), prolific American playwright,
screenwriter, and author of critically
acclaimed short stories and best-selling
novels.
Shaw studied at Brooklyn College (B.A.,
1934) and at age 21 began his career by
writing the scripts of the popular Andy
Gump and Dick Tracy radio shows. He
wrote his pacifist one-act play Bury the
Dead for a 1935 contest; though it lost,
the play appeared on Broadway the next
year, the first of his 12 plays that
were professionally produced. He wrote
the first of his many screenplays, The
Big Game, in 1936. Throughout the later
1930s popular magazines such as The New
Yorker and Esquire published his short
stories; they were praised for their
plotting, their naturalness of
narration, and especially their
characterization.
Shaw’s experiences in the U.S. Army in
Europe during World War II led to his
writing The Young Lions (1948; filmed
1958), a novel about three young
soldiers—one German and two Americans—in
wartime; it became a best-seller, and
thereafter Shaw devoted most of the rest
of his career to writing novels. Among
the best known of his 12 novels are Two
Weeks in Another Town (1960), Evening in
Byzantium (1973), and Beggarman, Thief
(1977). Probably his most popular novel,
though it was derided by critics, was
Rich Man, Poor Man (1970), which was the
source of the first television
miniseries. Shaw’s novels and stories
were the basis of several movies,
including Take One False Step (1949),
Tip on a Dead Jockey (1958), and Three
(1969).
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Joseph Heller
Joseph Heller, (b. May 1, 1923,
Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.—d. Dec. 12, 1999,
East Hampton, N.Y.), American writer
whose novel Catch-22 (1961) was one of
the most significant works of protest
literature to appear after World War II.
The satirical novel was a popular
success, and a film version appeared in
1970.
During World War II, Heller flew 60
combat missions as a bombardier with the
U.S. Air Force in Europe. After
receiving an M.A. at Columbia University
in 1949, he studied at the University of
Oxford (1949–50) as a Fulbright scholar.
He taught English at Pennsylvania State
University (1950–52) and worked as an
advertising copywriter for the magazines
Time (1952–56) and Look (1956–58) and as
promotion manager for McCall’s
(1958–61), meanwhile writing Catch-22 in
his spare time.
Released to mixed reviews, Catch-22
developed a cult following with its dark
surrealism. Centring on the antihero
Captain John Yossarian, stationed at an
airstrip on a Mediterranean island
during World War II, the novel portrays
the airman’s desperate attempts to stay
alive. The “catch” in Catch-22 involves
a mysterious Air Force regulation that
asserts that a man is considered insane
if he willingly continues to fly
dangerous combat missions; but, if he
makes the necessary formal request to be
relieved of such missions, the very act
of making the request proves that he is
sane and therefore ineligible to be
relieved. The term catch-22 thereafter
entered the English language as a
reference to a proviso that trips one up
no matter which way one turns.
Heller’s later novels, including
Something Happened (1974), an
unrelievedly pessimistic novel, Good as
Gold (1979), a satire on life in
Washington, D.C., and God Knows (1984),
a wry, contemporary-vernacular monologue
in the voice of the biblical King David,
were less successful. Closing Time, a
sequel to Catch-22, appeared in 1994.
Heller also wrote an autobiography, Now
and Then: From Coney Island to Here
(1998), and his dramatic work includes
the play We Bombed in New Haven (1968).
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Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut, in full Kurt Vonnegut,
Jr. (b. Nov. 11, 1922, Indianapolis,
Ind., U.S.—d. April 11, 2007, New York,
N.Y.), American novelist noted for his
pessimistic and satirical novels that
use fantasy and science fiction to
highlight the horrors and ironies of
20th-century civilization.
Vonnegut studied at Cornell University
before serving in the U.S. Air Force in
World War II. Captured by the Germans,
he was one of the survivors of the fire
bombing of Dresden, Ger., in February
1945. After the war he studied
anthropology at the University of
Chicago. In the late 1940s he worked as
a reporter and as a public relations
writer.
Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano
(1952), visualizes a completely
mechanized and automated society whose
dehumanizing effects are unsuccessfully
resisted by the scientists and workers
in a New York factory town. The Sirens
of Titan (1959) is a
quasi-science-fiction novel in which the
entire history of the human race is
considered an accident attendant on an
alien planet’s search for a spare part
for a spaceship. In Cat’s Cradle (1963),
some Caribbean islanders adopt a new
religion consisting of harmless
trivialities in response to an
unforeseen scientific discovery that
eventually destroys all life on Earth.
In Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The
Children’s Crusade (1969), Vonnegut drew
on his Dresden experience; the book uses
that bombing raid as a symbol of the
cruelty and destructiveness of war down
through the centuries.
Vonnegut also wrote several plays,
including Happy Birthday, Wanda June
(1970); several works of nonfiction,
such as Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons
(1974); and several collections of short
stories, chief among which was Welcome
to the Monkey House (1968). His other
novels include Mother Night (1961), God
Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965),
Breakfast of Champions (1973), Slapstick
(1976), Jailbird (1979), Deadeye Dick
(1983), Galápagos (1985), Bluebeard
(1987), Hocus Pocus (1990), and
Timequake (1997). In 2005 he published A
Man Without a Country, a collection of
essays and speeches. Vonnegut’s
Armageddon in Retrospect (2008), a
collection of fiction and nonfiction
that focuses on war and peace, and Look
at the Birdie (2009), previously
unpublished short stories, appeared
posthumously.
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John Barth
John Barth, in full John Simmons Barth,
Jr. (b. May 27, 1930, Cambridge, Md.,
U.S.), American writer best known for
novels that combine philosophical depth
and complexity with biting satire and
boisterous, frequently bawdy humour.
Much of Barth’s writing is concerned
with the seeming impossibility of
choosing the right action in a world
that has no absolute values.
Barth grew up on the eastern shore of
Maryland, the locale of most of his
writing, and studied at Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore, where he
graduated with an M.A. in 1952. The next
year, he began teaching at Pennsylvania
State University; he moved in 1965 to
the State University of New York at
Buffalo as professor of English and
writer in residence. He was a professor
of English and creative writing at Johns
Hopkins University from 1973 to 1995.
Barth’s first two novels, The Floating
Opera (1956) and The End of the Road
(1958), describe characters burdened by
a sense of the futility of all action
and the effects of these characters upon
the less self-conscious, more active
people around them. Barth forsook
realism and modern settings in The
Sot-Weed Factor (1960), a picaresque
tale that burlesques the early history
of Maryland and parodies the
18th-century English novel. All three
novels appeared in revised editions in
1967.
Giles Goat-Boy (1966) is a bizarre tale
of the career of a mythical hero and
religious prophet, set in a satirical
microcosm of vast, computer-run
universities. His work Lost in the
Funhouse (1968) consists of short,
experimental pieces, some designed for
performance, interspersed with short
stories based on his own childhood. It
was followed by Chimera (1972), a volume
of three novellas, and Letters (1979),
an experimental novel. The novels
Sabbatical (1982) and The Tidewater
Tales (1987) are more traditional
narratives. Once Upon a Time: A Floating
Opera (1994) combined the genres of
novel and memoir in the form of a
three-act opera. The novel Coming
Soon!!! (2001) revisits The Floating
Opera and is arguably Barth’s most
conspicuously self-conscious work. The
Book of Ten Nights and a Night (2004)
and The Development (2008) are
collections of interconnected short
stories.
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Donald Barthelme
Donald Barthelme, (b. April 7, 1931,
Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.—d. July 23,
1989, Houston, Texas), American
short-story writer known for his
modernist “collages,” which were marked
by technical experimentation and a kind
of melancholy gaiety.
A one-time journalist, Barthelme was
managing editor of Location, an art and
literature review, and director
(1961–62) of the Contemporary Arts
Museum in Houston. In 1964 he published
his first collection of short stories,
Come Back, Dr. Caligari. His first
novel, Snow White (1967), initially was
published in The New Yorker, a magazine
to which he was a regular contributor.
Other collections of stories include
City Life (1970), Sadness (1972), Sixty
Stories (1981), and Overnight to Many
Distant Cities (1983). He wrote three
additional novels: The Dead Father
(1975), Paradise (1986), and The King
(1990). His children’s book, The
Slightly Irregular Fire Engine or the
Hithering Thithering Djinn (1971), won
the National Book Award in 1972. He was
distinguished visiting professor of
English (1974–75) at the City College of
the City University of New York. Flying
to America: 45 More Stories, a
posthumous collection of previously
unpublished or uncollected stories, was
published in 2007.
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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.
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon, (b. May 8, 1937, Glen
Cove, Long Island, N.Y., U.S.), American
novelist and short-story writer whose
works combine black humour and fantasy
to depict human alienation in the chaos
of modern society.
After earning his B.A. in English from
Cornell University in 1958, Pynchon
spent a year in Greenwich Village
writing short stories and working on a
novel. In 1960 he was hired as a
technical writer for Boeing Aircraft
Corporation in Seattle, Wash. Two years
later he decided to leave the company
and write full-time. In 1963 Pynchon won
the Faulkner Foundation Award for his
first novel, V. (1963), a whimsical,
cynically absurd tale of a middle-aged
Englishman’s search for “V,” an elusive,
supernatural adventuress appearing in
various guises at critical periods in
European history. In his next book, The
Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Pynchon
described a woman’s strange quest to
discover the mysterious, conspiratorial
Tristero System in a futuristic world of
closed societies. The novel serves as a
condemnation of modern
industrialization.
Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) is a
tour de force in 20th-century
literature. In exploring the dilemmas of
human beings in the modern world, the
story, which is set in an area of
post-World War II Germany called “the
Zone,” centres on the wanderings of an
American soldier who is one of many odd
characters looking for a secret V-2
rocket that will supposedly break
through the Earth’s gravitational
barrier when launched. The narrative is
filled with descriptions of obsessive
and paranoid fantasies, ridiculous and
grotesque imagery, and esoteric
mathematical and scientific language.
For his efforts Pynchon received the
National Book Award, and many critics
deemed Gravity’s Rainbow a visionary,
apocalyptic masterpiece. Pynchon’s next
novel, Vineland—which begins in 1984 in
California—was not published until 1990.
Two vast, complex historical novels
followed: in Mason & Dixon (1997), set
in the 18th century, Pynchon took the
English surveyors Charles Mason and
Jeremiah Dixon as his subject, while
Against the Day (2006) moves from the
World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893
through World War I. Inherent Vice
(2009), Pynchon’s rambling take on the
detective novel, returns to the
California counterculture milieu of
Vineland.
Of his few short stories, most notable
are “Entropy” (1960), a neatly
structured tale in which Pynchon first
uses extensive technical language and
scientific metaphors, and “The Secret
Integration” (1964), a story in which
Pynchon explores small-town bigotry and
racism. The collection Slow Learner
(1984) contains “The Secret
Integration.”
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J.D. Salinger
J.D. Salinger, in full Jerome David
Salinger (b. Jan. 1, 1919, New York,
N.Y., U.S.—d. Jan. 27, 2010, Cornish,
N.H.), American writer whose novel The
Catcher in the Rye (1951) won critical
acclaim and devoted admirers, especially
among the post-World War II generation
of college students. His entire corpus
of published works consists of that one
novel and 13 short stories, all
originally written in the period
1948–59.
Salinger was the son of a Jewish father
and a Christian mother, and, like Holden
Caulfield, the hero of The Catcher in
the Rye, he grew up in New York City,
attending public schools and a military
academy. After brief periods at New York
and Columbia universities, he devoted
himself entirely to writing, and his
stories began to appear in periodicals
in 1940. After his return from service
in the U.S. Army (1942–46), Salinger’s
name and writing style became
increasingly associated with The New
Yorker magazine, which published almost
all of his later stories. Some of the
best of these made use of his wartime
experiences: “For Esmé—With Love and
Squalor” (1950) describes a U.S.
soldier’s poignant encounter with two
British children; “A Perfect Day for
Bananafish” (1948) concerns the suicide
of the sensitive, despairing veteran
Seymour Glass.
Major critical and popular recognition
came with the publication of The Catcher
in the Rye, whose central character, a
sensitive, rebellious adolescent,
relates in authentic teenage idiom his
flight from the “phony” adult world, his
search for innocence and truth, and his
final collapse on a psychiatrist’s
couch. The humour and colourful language
of The Catcher in the Rye place it in
the tradition of Mark Twain’s Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn and the stories of
Ring Lardner, but its hero, like most of
Salinger’s child characters, views his
life with an added dimension of
precocious self-consciousness. Nine
Stories (1953), a selection of
Salinger’s best work, added to his
reputation.
The reclusive habits of Salinger in his
later years made his personal life a
matter of speculation among devotees,
while his small literary output was a
subject of controversy among critics.
Franny and Zooey (1961) brought together
two earlier New Yorker stories; both
deal with the Glass family, as do the
two stories in Raise High the Roof Beam,
Carpenters; and Seymour: An Introduction
(1963).
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Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow, (b. June 10, 1915, Lachine,
near Montreal, Quebec, Canada—d. April
5, 2005, Brookline, Massachusetts,
U.S.), American novelist whose
characterizations of modern urban man,
disaffected by society but not destroyed
in spirit, earned him the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1976. Brought up in a
Jewish household and fluent in
Yiddish—which influenced his energetic
English style—he was representative of
the Jewish American writers whose works
became central to American literature
after World War II.
Bellow’s parents emigrated in 1913 from
Russia to Montreal. When he was nine
they moved to Chicago. He attended the
University of Chicago and Northwestern
University (B.S., 1937) and afterward
combined writing with a teaching career
at various universities, including the
University of Minnesota, Princeton
University, New York University, Bard
College, the University of Chicago, and
Boston University.
Bellow won a reputation among a small
group of readers with his first two
novels, Dangling Man (1944), a story in
diary form of a man waiting to be
inducted into the army, and The Victim
(1947), a subtle study of the
relationship between a Jew and a
Gentile, each of whom becomes the
other’s victim. The Adventures of Augie
March (1953) brought wider acclaim and
won the National Book Award (1954). It
is a picaresque story of a poor Jewish
youth from Chicago, his
progress—sometimes highly comic—through
the world of the 20th century, and his
attempts to make sense of it. In this
novel Bellow employed for the first time
a loose, breezy style in conscious
revolt against the preoccupation of
writers of that time with perfection of
form.
Henderson the Rain King (1959) continued
the picaresque approach in its tale of
an eccentric American millionaire on a
quest in Africa. Seize the Day (1956), a
novella, is a unique treatment of a
failure in a society where the only
success is success. He also wrote a
volume of short stories, Mosby’s Memoirs
(1968), and To Jerusalem and Back (1976)
about a trip to Israel.
In his later novels and novellas—Herzog
(1964; National Book Award, 1965), Mr.
Sammler’s Planet (1970; National Book
Award, 1971), Humboldt’s Gift (1975;
Pulitzer Prize, 1976), The Dean’s
December (1982), More Die of Heartbreak
(1987), A Theft (1989), The Bellarosa
Connection (1989), and The Actual
(1997)—Bellow arrived at his most
characteristic vein. The heroes of these
works are often Jewish intellectuals
whose interior monologues range from the
sublime to the absurd. At the same time,
their surrounding world, peopled by
energetic and incorrigible realists,
acts as a corrective to their
intellectual speculations. It is this
combination of cultural sophistication
and the wisdom of the streets that
constitutes Bellow’s greatest
originality. In Ravelstein (2000) he
presented a fictional version of the
life of teacher and philosopher Allan
Bloom.
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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 recent 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. 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.
Bernard Malamud
Bernard Malamud, (b. April 26, 1914,
Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.—d. March 18, 1986,
New York, N.Y.), American novelist and
short-story writer who made parables out
of Jewish immigrant life.
Malamud’s parents were Russian Jews who
had fled tsarist Russia. He was born in
Brooklyn, where his father owned a small
grocery store. The family was poor.
Malamud’s mother died when he was 15
years old, and he was unhappy when his
father remarried. He early on assumed
responsibility for his handicapped
brother. Malamud was educated at the
City College of New York (B.A., 1936)
and Columbia University (M.A., 1942). He
taught at high schools in New York City
(1940–49), at Oregon State University
(1949–61), and at Bennington College in
Vermont (1961–66, 1968–86).
His first novel, The Natural (1952;
filmed 1984), is a fable about a
baseball hero who is gifted with
miraculous powers. The Assistant (1957)
is about a young Gentile hoodlum and an
old Jewish grocer. The Fixer (1966)
takes place in tsarist Russia. The story
of a Jewish handyman unjustly imprisoned
for the murder of a Christian boy, it
won Malamud a Pulitzer Prize. His other
novels are A New Life (1961), The
Tenants (1971), Dubin’s Lives (1979),
and God’s Grace (1982).
Malamud’s genius is most apparent in his
short stories. Though told in a spare,
compressed prose that reflects the terse
speech of their immigrant characters,
the stories often burst into emotional,
metaphorical language. Grim city
neighbourhoods are visited by magical
events, and their hardworking residents
are given glimpses of love and
self-sacrifice. Malamud’s short-story
collections are The Magic Barrel (1958),
Idiots First (1963), Pictures of
Fidelman (1969), and Rembrandt’s Hat
(1973). The Stories of Bernard Malamud
appeared in 1983, and The People and
Uncollected Stories was published
posthumously in 1989. The People, an
unfinished novel, tells the story of a
Jewish immigrant adopted by a
19th-century American Indian tribe. One
critic spoke of “its moral sinew and its
delicacy of tone.”
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Philip
Roth
Philip Roth, in full Philip Milton Roth
(b. March 19, 1933, Newark, N.J., U.S.),
American novelist and short-story writer
whose works are characterized by an
acute ear for dialogue, a concern with
Jewish middle-class life, and the
painful entanglements of sexual and
familial love. In Roth’s later years his
works were informed by an increasingly
naked preoccupation with mortality and
with the failure of the aging body and
mind.
Roth received an M.A. from the
University of Chicago and taught there
and elsewhere. He first achieved fame
with Goodbye Columbus (1959; film 1969),
whose title story candidly depicts the
boorish materialism of a Jewish
middle-class suburban family. Roth’s
first novel, Letting Go (1962), was
followed in 1967 by When She Was Good,
but he did not recapture the success of
his first book until Portnoy’s Complaint
(1969; film 1972), an audacious
satirical portrait of a contemporary
Jewish male at odds with his domineering
mother and obsessed with sexual
experience. Several minor works,
including The Breast (1972), My Life As
a Man (1974), and The Professor of
Desire (1977), were followed by one of
Roth’s most important novels, The Ghost
Writer (1979), which introduced an
aspiring young writer named Nathan
Zuckerman. Roth’s two subsequent novels,
Zuckerman Unbound (1981) and The Anatomy
Lesson (1983), trace his
writer-protagonist’s subsequent life and
career and constitute Roth’s first
Zuckerman trilogy. These three novels
were republished together with the
novella The Prague Orgy under the title
Zuckerman Bound (1985). A fourth
Zuckerman novel, The Counterlife,
appeared in 1993.
Roth was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for
American Pastoral (1997), a novel about
a middle-class couple whose daughter
becomes a terrorist. It is the first
novel of a second Zuckerman trilogy,
completed by I Married a Communist
(1998) and The Human Stain (2000; film
2003). In The Dying Animal (2001; filmed
as Elegy, 2008), an aging literary
professor reflects on a life of
emotional isolation. The Plot Against
America (2004) tells a counterhistorical
story of fascism in the United States
during World War II. With Everyman
(2006), a novel that explores illness
and death, Roth became the first
three-time winner of the PEN/Faulkner
Award for Fiction, which he had won
previously for Operation Shylock (1993)
and The Human Stain. Exit Ghost (2007)
revisits Zuckerman, who has been
reawoken to life’s possibilities after
more than a decade of self-imposed exile
in the Berkshire Mountains. Indignation
(2008) is narrated from the afterlife by
a man who died at age 19. The novella
The Humbling (2009) revisits Everyman’s
mortality-obsessed terrain, this time
through the lens of an aging actor who,
realizing that he has lost his talent,
finds himself unable to work.
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Isaac Bashevis Singer
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Yiddish in full
Yitskhok Bashevis Zinger (b. July 14?,
1904, Radzymin, Pol., Russian Empire—d.
July 24, 1991, Surfside, Fla., U.S.),
Polish-born American writer of novels,
short stories, and essays in Yiddish. He
was the recipient in 1978 of the Nobel
Prize for Literature. His fiction,
depicting Jewish life in Poland and the
United States, is remarkable for its
rich blending of irony, wit, and wisdom,
flavoured distinctively with the occult
and the grotesque.
Singer’s birth date is uncertain and has
been variously reported as July 14,
November 21, and October 26. He came
from a family of Hasidic rabbis on his
father’s side and a long line of
Mitnagdic rabbis on his mother’s side.
He received a traditional Jewish
education at the Warsaw Rabbinical
Seminary. His older brother was the
novelist I.J. Singer and his sister the
writer Esther Kreytman (Kreitman). Like
his brother, Singer preferred being a
writer to being a rabbi. In 1925 he made
his debut with the story “Af der elter”
(“In Old Age”), which he published in
the Warsaw Literarishe bleter under a
pseudonym. His first novel, Der Sotn in
Goray (Satan in Goray), was published in
installments in Poland shortly before he
immigrated to the United States in 1935.
Settling in New York City, as his
brother had done a year earlier, Singer
worked for the Yiddish newspaper
Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward), and as
a journalist he signed his articles with
the pseudonym Varshavski or D. Segal. He
also translated many books into Yiddish
from Hebrew, Polish, and, particularly,
German, among them works by Thomas Mann
and Erich Maria Remarque. In 1943 he
became a U.S. citizen.
Although Singer’s works became most
widely known in their English versions,
he continued to write almost exclusively
in Yiddish, personally supervising the
translations. The relationship between
his works in these two languages is
complex: some of his novels and short
stories were published in Yiddish in the
Forverts, for which he wrote until his
death, and then appeared in book form
only in English translation. Several,
however, later also appeared in book
form in the original Yiddish after the
success of the English translation.
Among his most important novels are The
Family Moskat (1950; Di familye Mushkat,
1950), The Magician of Lublin (1960; Der
kuntsnmakher fun Lublin, 1971), and The
Slave (1962; Der knekht, 1967). The
Manor (1967) and The Estate (1969) are
based on Der hoyf, serialized in the
Forverts in 1953–55. Enemies: A Love
Story (1972; film 1989) was translated
from Sonim: di geshikhte fun a libe,
serialized in the Forverts in 1966.
Shosha, derived from autobiographical
material Singer published in the
Forverts in the mid-1970s, appeared in
English in 1978. Der bal-tshuve (1974)
was published first in book form in
Yiddish; it was later translated into
English as The Penitent (1983). Shadows
on the Hudson, translated into English
and published posthumously in 1998, is a
novel on a grand scale about Jewish
refugees in New York in the late 1940s.
The book had been serialized in the
Forverts in the 1950s.
Singer’s popular collections of short
stories in English translation include
Gimpel the Fool, and Other Stories
(1957; Gimpl tam, un andere
dertseylungen, 1963), The Spinoza of
Market Street (1961), Short Friday
(1964), The Seance (1968), A Crown of
Feathers (1973; National Book Award),
Old Love (1979), and The Image, and
Other Stories (1985).
Singer evokes in his writings the
vanished world of Polish Jewry as it
existed before the Holocaust. His most
ambitious novels—The Family Moskat and
the continuous narrative spun out in The
Manor and The Estate—have large casts of
characters and extend over several
generations. These books chronicle the
changes in, and eventual breakup of,
large Jewish families during the late
19th and early 20th centuries as their
members are differently affected by the
secularism and assimilationist
opportunities of the modern era.
Singer’s shorter novels examine
characters variously tempted by evil,
such as the brilliant circus magician of
The Magician of Lublin, the 17th-century
Jewish villagers crazed by messianism in
Satan in Goray, and the enslaved Jewish
scholar in The Slave. His short stories
are saturated with Jewish folklore,
legends, and mysticism and display his
incisive understanding of the weaknesses
inherent in human nature.
Schlemiel Went to Warsaw, and Other
Stories (1968) is one of his best-known
books for children. In 1966 he published
In My Father’s Court, based on the
Yiddish Mayn tatns besdn shtub (1956),
an autobiographical account of his
childhood in Warsaw. This work received
special praise from the Swedish Academy
when Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize.
More Stories from My Father’s Court,
published posthumously in 2000, includes
childhood stories Singer had first
published in the Forverts in the 1950s.
His memoir Love and Exile appeared in
1984.
Several films have been adapted from
Singer’s works, including The Magician
of Lublin (1979), based on his novel of
the same name, and Yentl (1983), based
on his story “Yentl” in Mayses fun
hintern oyvn (1971; “Stories from Behind
the Stove”).
Sheva Zucker
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John Cheever
John Cheever, (b. May 27, 1912, Quincy,
Massachusetts, U.S.—d. June 18, 1982,
Ossining, New York), American
short-story writer and novelist whose
work describes, often through fantasy
and ironic comedy, the life, manners,
and morals of middle-class, suburban
America. Cheever has been called “the
Chekhov of the suburbs” for his ability
to capture the drama and sadness of the
lives of his characters by revealing the
undercurrents of apparently
insignificant events. Known as a
moralist, he judges his characters from
the standpoint of traditional morality.
Cheever himself was born into a
middle-class family, his father being
employed in the shoe business then
booming in New England. With the
eventual failure of the shoe industry
and the difficulties of his parents’
marriage, he had an unhappy adolescence.
His expulsion at age 17 from the Thayer
Academy in Massachusetts provided the
theme for his first published story,
which appeared in The New Republic in
1930. During the Great Depression he
lived in New York City’s Greenwich
Village. Cheever married in 1941 and had
three children. In 1942 he enlisted in
the army to train as an infantryman, but
the army soon reassigned him to the
Signal Corps as a scriptwriter for
training films. After the war Cheever
and his wife moved from New York City to
the suburbs, whose culture and mores are
often examined in his subsequent
fiction.
Cheever’s name was closely associated
with The New Yorker, a periodical that
published many of his stories, but his
works also appeared in The New Republic,
Collier’s, Story, and The Atlantic. A
master of the short story, Cheever
worked from “the interrupted event,”
which he considered the prime source of
short stories. He was famous for his
clear and elegant prose and his careful
fashioning of incidents and anecdotes.
He is perhaps best-known for the two
stories “The Enormous Radio” (1947) and
“The Swimmer” (1964; filmed 1968). In
the former story a young couple
discovers that their new radio receives
the conversations of other people in
their apartment building but that this
fascinating look into other people’s
problems does not solve their own. In
“The Swimmer” a suburban man decides to
swim his way home in the backyard pools
of his neighbours and finds on the way
that he is a lost soul in several
senses. Cheever’s first collection of
short stories, The Way Some People Live
(1943), was followed by many others,
including The Enormous Radio and Other
Stories (1953) and The Brigadier and the
Golf Widow (1964). The Stories of John
Cheever (1978) won the Pulitzer Prize
for fiction.
Cheever’s ability in his short stories
to focus on the episodic caused him
difficulty in constructing extended
narratives in his novels. Nonetheless,
his first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle
(1957)—a satire on, among other
subjects, the misuses of wealth and
psychology—earned him the National Book
Award. Its sequel, The Wapshot Scandal
(1964), was less successful. Falconer
(1977) is the dark tale of a
drug-addicted college professor who is
imprisoned for murdering his brother. Oh
What a Paradise It Seems (1982) is an
elegiac story about a New Englander’s
efforts to preserve the quality of his
life and that of a mill town’s pond. The
Letters of John Cheever, edited by his
son Benjamin Cheever, was published in
1988, and in 1991 The Journals of John
Cheever appeared. The latter is deeply
revealing of both the man and the
writer.
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Raymond Douglas "Ray" Bradbury is an American
fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery
writer. Best known for his dystopian novel
Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and for the science fiction
stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles
(1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951), Bradbury is
one of the most celebrated among 20th and 21st
century American writers of speculative fiction.
Many of Bradbury's works have been adapted into
television shows or films.
Isaac Asimov was an American author and
professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best
known for his works of science fiction and for his
popular science books. Asimov was one of the most
prolific writers of all time, having written or
edited more than 500 books and an estimated 9,000
letters and postcards. His works have been published
in nine of the ten major categories of the Dewey
Decimal System.
Robert Anson Heinlein was an American science
fiction writer. Often called "the dean of science
fiction writers", he was one of the most popular,
influential, and controversial authors of the genre.
He set a high standard for science and engineering
plausibility and helped to raise the genre's
standards of literary quality. He was one of the
first writers to break into mainstream, general
magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, in the
late 1940s, with unvarnished science fiction. He was
among the first authors of bestselling, novel-length
science fiction in the modern, mass-market era. For
many years, Heinlein, Isaac Asimov,
and
Arthur
C. Clarke
were known as the "Big Three" of science fiction.
Ray
Bradbury
Ray
Bradbury, in full Ray Douglas Bradbury
(b. Aug. 22, 1920, Waukegan, Ill.,
U.S.), American author best known for
highly imaginative science-fiction short
stories and novels that blend social
criticism with an awareness of the
hazards of runaway technology.
Bradbury published his first story in
1940 and was soon contributing widely to
magazines. His first book of short
stories, Dark Carnival (1947), was
followed by The Martian Chronicles
(1950), which is generally accounted a
science-fiction classic in its depiction
of materialistic Earthmen exploiting and
corrupting an idyllic Martian
civilization. Bradbury’s other important
short-story collections include The
Illustrated Man (1951), The Golden
Apples of the Sun (1953), The October
Country (1955), A Medicine for
Melancholy (1959), The Machineries of
Joy (1964), I Sing the Body Electric!
(1969), and Quicker Than the Eye (1996).
His novels include Fahrenheit 451 (1953;
filmed 1966); Dandelion Wine (1957) and
its sequel, Farewell Summer (2006);
Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962;
filmed 1983); and Death Is a Lonely
Business (1985). He wrote stage plays,
television scripts, and several
screenplays, including Moby Dick (1956;
in collaboration with John Huston). In
the 1970s Bradbury wrote several volumes
of poetry, and in the 1970s and ’80s he
concentrated on writing children’s
stories and crime fiction. His short
stories have been published in more than
700 anthologies. In 2007 the Pulitzer
Prize Board awarded Bradbury a Special
Citation for his distinguished career.
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Isaac
Asimov
Isaac
Asimov, (b. January 2, 1920, Petrovichi,
Russia—d. April 6, 1992, New York, New
York, U.S.), American author and
biochemist, a highly successful and
prolific writer of science fiction and
of science books for the layperson. He
published about 500 volumes.
Asimov
was brought to the United States at age
three. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York,
graduating from Columbia University in
1939 and taking a Ph.D. there in 1948.
He then joined the faculty of Boston
University, with which he remained
associated thereafter.
Asimov
began contributing stories to
science-fiction magazines in 1939 and in
1950 published his first book, Pebble in
the Sky. His trilogy of novels,
Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and
Second Foundation (1951–53), which
recounts the collapse and rebirth of a
vast interstellar empire in the universe
of the future, is his most famous work
of science fiction. In the short-story
collection I, Robot (1950; filmed 2004),
he developed a set of ethics for robots
and intelligent machines that greatly
influenced other writers’ treatment of
the subject. His other novels and
collections of stories included The
Stars, like Dust (1951), The Currents of
Space (1952), The Caves of Steel (1954),
The Naked Sun (1957), Earth Is Room
Enough (1957), Foundation’s Edge (1982),
and The Robots of Dawn (1983). His
“Nightfall” (1941) is thought by many to
be the finest science-fiction short
story ever written. Among Asimov’s books
on various topics in science, written
with lucidity and humour, are The
Chemicals of Life (1954), Inside the
Atom (1956), The World of Nitrogen
(1958), Life and Energy (1962), The
Human Brain (1964), The Neutrino (1966),
Science, Numbers, and I (1968), Our
World in Space (1974), and Views of the
Universe (1981). He also published two
volumes of autobiography.
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Robert
Anson Heinlein
Robert A. Heinlein, (b. July 7,
1907, Butler, Mo., U.S.—d. May 8, 1988,
Carmel, Calif.), prolific American
writer considered to be one of the most
literary and sophisticated of
science-fiction writers. He did much to
develop the genre.
After
graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy
in 1929 and serving in the Navy for five
years, Heinlein pursued graduate studies
in physics and mathematics at the
University of California at Los Angeles.
Except for engineering service with the
Navy during World War II, he was an
established professional writer from
1939.
His
first story, “Life-Line,” was published
in the action-adventure pulp magazine
Astounding Science Fiction. He continued
to write for that publication—along with
other notable science-fiction
writers—until 1942, when he began war
work as an engineer. Heinlein returned
to writing in 1947, with an eye toward a
more sophisticated audience. His first
book, Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), was
followed by a large number of novels and
story collections, including works for
children and young adults. After the
1940s he largely avoided shorter
fiction. His popularity grew over the
years, probably reaching its peak after
the publication of his best-known work,
Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). His
broad interests and concern for
characterization as well as technology
brought him a considerable number of
admirers among general-interest readers.
Among his more popular books are The
Green Hills of Earth (1951), Double Star
(1956), The Door into Summer (1957),
Citizen of the Galaxy (1957), and
Methuselah’s Children (1958).
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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 (1966), 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.
Later two African American women published some
of the most important post-World War II American
fiction. In The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song
of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and
Paradise (1998), Toni Morrison created a strikingly
original fiction that sounded different notes from
lyrical recollection to magic realism. Like Ellison,
Morrison drew on diverse literary and folk
influences and dealt with important phases of black
history—i.e., slavery in Beloved and the Harlem
Renaissance in Jazz. She was awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1993. Alice Walker, after writing
several volumes of poetry and an interesting novel
dealing with the civil rights movement (Meridian
[1976]), received the Pulitzer Prize for her black
feminist novel The Color Purple (1982). African
American men whose work gained attention during this
period included Ishmael Reed, whose wild comic
techniques resembled Ellison’s; James Alan
McPherson, a subtle short-story writer in the mold
of Ellison and Baldwin; Charles Johnson, whose
novels, such as The Oxherding Tale (1982) and The
Middle Passage (1990), showed a masterful historical
imagination; Randall Kenan, a gay writer with a
strong folk imagination whose style also descended
from both Ellison and Baldwin; and Colson Whitehead,
who used experimental techniques and folk traditions
in The Intuitionist (1999) and John Henry Days
(2001).
New 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), the first
volume of a projected long novel about the Central
Intelligence Agency.
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.
Raymond Carver
Raymond
Carver, in full Raymond Clevie Carver
(b. May 25, 1938, Clatskanie, Ore.,
U.S.—d. Aug. 2, 1988, Port Angeles,
Wash.), American short-story writer and
poet whose realistic writings about the
working poor mirrored his own life.
Carver
was the son of a sawmill worker. He
married a year after finishing high
school and supported his wife and two
children by working as a janitor,
gas-station attendant, and delivery man.
He became seriously interested in a
writing career after taking a
creative-writing course at Chico State
College (now California State
University, Chico) in 1958. His short
stories began to appear in magazines
while he studied at Humboldt State
College (now Humboldt State University)
in Arcata, Calif. (B.A., 1963). Carver’s
first success as a writer came in 1967
with the story “Will You Please Be
Quiet, Please?,” and he began writing
full-time after losing his job as a
textbook editor in 1970. The highly
successful short-story collection Will
You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976)
established his reputation.
Carver
began drinking heavily in 1967 and was
repeatedly hospitalized for alcoholism
in the 1970s, while continuing to turn
out short stories. After conquering his
drinking problem in the late 1970s, he
taught for several years at the
University of Texas at El Paso and at
Syracuse University, and in 1983 he won
a literary award whose generous annual
stipend freed him to again concentrate
on his writing full-time. His later
short-story collections were What We
Talk About When We Talk About Love
(1981), Cathedral (1984), and Where I’m
Calling From (1988). While his short
stories were what made his critical
reputation, he was also an accomplished
poet in the realist tradition of Robert
Frost. Carver’s poetry collections
include At Night the Salmon Move (1976),
Where Water Comes Together with Other
Water (1985), and Ultramarine (1986). He
died of lung cancer at age 50.
In his
short stories Carver chronicled the
everyday lives and problems of the
working poor in the Pacific Northwest.
His blue-collar characters are crushed
by broken marriages, financial problems,
and failed careers, but they are often
unable to understand or even articulate
their own anguish. Carver’s
stripped-down, minimalist prose style is
remarkable for its honesty and power. He
is credited with helping revitalize the
genre of the English-language short
story in the late 20th century.
However, controversy arose over the
nature of Carver’s writing—and even his
lasting literary reputation—in the early
21st century. It was revealed that his
long-time editor, Gordon Lish, had
drastically changed many of Carver’s
early stories. While Lish’s significant
involvement in Carver’s writing had long
been suspected, the extent of his
editing became public knowledge when, in
2007, Carver’s widow, the poet Tess
Gallagher, announced that she was
seeking to publish the original versions
of the stories in What We Talk About
When We Talk About Love (which appeared
in the U.K. as Beginners in 2009). Lish
was shown to have changed characters’
names, cut the length of many stories
(over 75 percent of the text in two
cases), and altered the endings of some
stories. However, most of Carver’s
famously terse sentences were his own,
as was the hallmark bleak, working-class
milieu of the short stories.
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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).
E.L. Doctorow
E.L.
Doctorow, in full Edgar Lawrence
Doctorow (b. Jan. 6, 1931, New York,
N.Y., U.S.), American novelist known for
his skillful manipulation of traditional
genres.
Doctorow graduated from Kenyon College
(B.A., 1952) and then studied drama and
directing for a year at Columbia
University. He worked for a time as a
script reader for Columbia Pictures in
New York City. In 1959 he joined the
editorial staff of the New American
Library, leaving that post five years
later to become editor in chief at Dial
Press. He subsequently taught at several
colleges and universities, including
Sarah Lawrence College from 1971 to
1978. He was a visiting senior fellow at
Princeton University in 1980–81 and the
following year became Glucksman
Professor of English and American
Letters at New York University.
Doctorow was noted for the facility with
which he appropriated genre conceits to
illuminate the historical periods in
which he set his novels. His first
novel, Welcome to Hard Times (1960; film
1967), is a philosophical turn on the
western genre. In his next book, Big As
Life (1966), he used science fiction to
explore the human response to crisis.
Doctorow’s proclivity for harvesting
characters from history first became
apparent in The Book of Daniel (1971;
film 1983), a fictionalized treatment of
the execution of Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg for espionage in 1953. In
Ragtime (1975; film 1981), historical
figures share the spotlight with
characters emblematic of the shifting
social dynamics of early 20th-century
America.
Doctorow then turned to the milieu of
the Great Depression and its aftermath
in the novels Loon Lake (1980), World’s
Fair (1985), and Billy Bathgate (1989;
film 1991). The Waterworks (1994)
concerns life in 19th-century New York.
City of God (2000), consisting of what
are ostensibly the journal entries of a
writer, splinters into several different
narratives, including a detective story
and a Holocaust narrative. The March
(2005) follows a fictionalized version
of the Union general William Tecumseh
Sherman on his infamously destructive
trek through Georgia, aimed at weakening
the Confederate economy, during the
American Civil War. Doctorow trained his
sights on historical figures of less
eminence in Homer and Langley (2009), a
mythologization of the lives of the
Collyer brothers, a pair of reclusive
eccentrics whose death in 1947 revealed
a nightmarish repository of curiosities
and garbage in their Harlem, New York
City, brownstone.
Doctorow’s essays were collected in
several volumes, including Reporting the
Universe (2003) and Creationists:
Selected Essays, 1993–2006 (2006), which
contrasts the creative process as it
manifests in literature and in science.
Additionally, Doctorow wrote the play
Drinks Before Dinner (1979) and
published the short-story collections
Lives of the Poets (1984) and Sweet Land
Stories (2004).
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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),
and an AIDS memoir, My Brother (1997); 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), and Desirable Daughters
(2002). 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), an
affecting, scathingly satiric family portrait; 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 a sprawling, picaresque historical novel,
Mason & Dixon (1997), about two famous 18th-century
surveyors who explored and mapped the American
colonies.
Poetry
The post-World War II years produced an abundance of
strong poetry but no individual poet as dominant and
accomplished as
T.S. Eliot,
Ezra Pound, Wallace
Stevens,
Robert Frost, or
William Carlos Williams,
whose long careers were coming to an end. The major
poetry from 1945 to 1960 was Modernist in its ironic
texture yet formal in its insistence on regular
rhyme and metre. Beginning in the late 1950s,
however, there were a variety of poets and schools
who rebelled against these constraints and
experimented with more-open forms and
more-colloquial styles.
Formal poets
The leading figure of the late 1940s was Robert
Lowell, who, influenced by
Eliot and such
Metaphysical poets as
John Donne and
Gerard Manley Hopkins, explored his spiritual torments and family
history in Lord Weary’s Castle (1946). Other
impressive formal poets included Theodore Roethke,
who, influenced by William Butler Yeats, revealed a
genius for ironic lyricism and a profound empathy
for the processes of nature in The Lost Son and
Other Poems (1948); the masterfully elegant Richard
Wilbur (Things of This World [1956]); two war poets,
Karl Shapiro (V-Letter and Other Poems [1944]) and
Randall Jarrell (Losses [1948]); and a group of
young poets influenced by
W.H.
Auden, including
James Merrill, W.S. Merwin, James Wright, Adrienne
Rich, and John Hollander. Although they displayed
brilliant technical skill, they lacked
Auden’s
strong personal voice.
Experimentation and Beat poetry
By the mid-1950s, however, a strong reaction had
developed. Poets began to turn away from
Eliot and
Metaphysical poetry to more-romantic or more-prosaic
models such as
Walt Whitman,
William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, and D.H. Lawrence. A group of
poets associated with Black Mountain College in
western North Carolina, including Charles Olson,
Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Edward Dorn, and
Denise Levertov, treated the poem as an unfolding
process rather than a containing form. Olson’s
Maximus Poems (1953–68) showed a clear affinity with
the jagged line and uneven flow of Pound’s Cantos
and Williams’s Paterson. Allen Ginsberg’s
incantatory, prophetic Howl (1956) and his moving
elegy for his mother, Kaddish (1961), gave powerful
impetus to the Beat movement. Written with
extraordinary intensity, these works were inspired
by writers as diverse as
Whitman, the biblical
prophets, and English poets
William Blake and
Christopher Smart, as well as by the dream-logic of
the French Surrealists and the spontaneous jazz
aesthetic of Ginsberg’s friend the novelist
Jack
Kerouac. Other Beat poets included Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder, a
student of Eastern religion who, in Turtle Island
(1974), continued the American tradition of nature
poetry.
The openness of Beat poetry and the prosaic
directness of
Williams encouraged Lowell to develop
a new autobiographical style in the laconic poetry
and prose of Life Studies (1959) and For the Union
Dead (1964). Lowell’s new work influenced nearly all
American poets but especially a group of
“confessional” writers, including Anne Sexton in To
Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) and All My Pretty
Ones (1962) and Sylvia Plath in the posthumously
published Ariel (1965). In her poetry Plath joined
an icy sarcasm to white-hot emotional intensity.
Another poet influenced by Lowell was John Berryman,
whose Dream Songs (1964, 1968) combined
autobiographical fragments with minstrel-show motifs
to create a zany style of self-projection and
comic-tragic lament. Deeply troubled figures,
Sexton, Plath, and Berryman all took their own
lives. Lowell’s influence can still be discerned in
the elegant quatrains and casually brutal details of
Frederick Seidel’s Life on Earth (2001), as in the
crisp elegiac poems of his award-winning Sunrise
(1980).
“Deep image” poets
Through his personal charisma and his magazine The
Fifties (later The Sixties and The Seventies),
Robert Bly encouraged a number of poets to shift
their work toward the individual voice and open
form; they included Galway Kinnell, James Wright,
David Ignatow, and, less directly, Louis Simpson,
James Dickey, and Donald Hall. Sometimes called the
“deep image” poets, Bly and his friends sought
spiritual intensity and transcendence of the self
rather than confessional immediacy. Their work was
influenced by the poetry of Spanish and Latin
American writers such as
Federico García Lorca, Juan
Ramón Jiménez, César Vallejo, and
Pablo Neruda,
especially their surreal association of images, as
well as by the “greenhouse poems” (1946–48) and the
later meditative poetry of Roethke, with their deep
feeling for nature as a vehicle of spiritual
transformation. Yet, like their Hispanic models,
they were also political poets, instrumental in
organizing protest and writing poems against the
Vietnam War. Kinnell was a Lawrentian poet who, in
poems such as The Porcupine and The Bear, gave the
brutality of nature the power of myth. His vatic
sequence, The Book of Nightmares (1971), and the
quieter poems in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980)
are among the most rhetorically effective works in
contemporary poetry.
New directions
James Wright’s style changed dramatically in the
early 1960s. He abandoned his stiffly formal verse
for the stripped-down, meditative lyricism of The
Branch Will Not Break (1963) and Shall We Gather at
the River (1968), which were more dependent on the
emotional tenor of image than on metre, poetic
diction, or rhyme. In books such as Figures of the
Human (1964) and Rescue the Dead (1968), David
Ignatow wrote brief but razor-sharp poems that made
their effect through swiftness, deceptive
simplicity, paradox, and personal immediacy. Another
poet whose work ran the gamut from prosaic
simplicity to Emersonian transcendence was A.R.
Ammons. His short poems in Briefings (1971) were
close to autobiographical jottings, small glimpses,
and observations, but, like his longer poems, they
turned the natural world into a source of vision.
Like Ignatow, he made it a virtue to seem unliterary
and found illumination in the pedestrian and the
ordinary.
Both daily life and an exposure to French
Surrealism helped inspire a group of New York poets,
among them Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, James
Schuyler, and John Ashbery. Whether O’Hara was
jotting down a sequence of ordinary moments or
paying tribute to film stars, his poems had a
breathless immediacy that was distinctive and
unique. Koch’s comic voice swung effortlessly from
the trivial to the fantastic. Strongly influenced by
Wallace Stevens, Ashbery’s ruminative poems can seem
random, discursive, and enigmatic. Avoiding poetic
colour, they do their work by suggestion and
association, exploring the interface between
experience and perception.
Other impressive poets of the postwar years
included Elizabeth Bishop, whose precise, loving
attention to objects was reminiscent of her early
mentor, Marianne Moore. Though she avoided the
confessional mode of her friend Lowell, her sense of
place, her heartbreaking decorum, and her keen
powers of observation gave her work a strong
personal cast. In The Changing Light at Sandover
(1982), James Merrill, previously a polished lyric
poet, made his mandarin style the vehicle of a
lighthearted personal epic, in which he, with the
help of a Ouija board, called up the shades of all
his dead friends, including the poet Auden. In a
prolific career highlighted by such poems as
Reflections on Espionage (1976), Blue Wine (1979),
and Powers of Thirteen (1983), John Hollander, like
Merrill, displayed enormous technical virtuosity.
Richard Howard imagined witty monologues and
dialogues for famous people of the past in poems
collected in Untitled Subjects (1969) and Two-Part
Inventions (1974).
Autobiographical approaches
With the autobiographical knots and parables of
Reasons for Moving (1968) and Darker (1970), Mark
Strand’s paradoxical language achieved a resonant
simplicity. He enhanced his reputation with Dark
Harbor (1993) and Blizzard of One (1998). Other
strongly autobiographical poets working with subtle
technique and intelligence in a variety of forms
included Philip Levine, Charles Simic, Robert
Pinsky, Gerald Stern, Louise Glück, and Sharon Olds.
Levine’s background in working-class Detroit gave
his work a unique cast, while Glück and Olds brought
a terrific emotional intensity to their poems.
Pinsky’s poems were collected in The Figured Wheel
(1996). He became a tireless and effective advocate
for poetry during his tenure as poet laureate from
1997 to 2000. With the sinuous sentences and long
flowing lines of Tar (1983) and Flesh and Blood
(1987), C.K. Williams perfected a narrative
technique founded on distinctive voice, sharply
etched emotion, and cleanly observed detail. He
received the Pulitzer Prize for Repair (2000).
Adrienne Rich’s work gained a burning immediacy from
her lesbian feminism. The Will to Change (1971) and
Diving into the Wreck (1973) were turning points for
women’s poetry in the wake of the 1960s.
That decade also enabled some older poets to
become more loosely autobiographical and freshly
imaginative, among them Stanley Kunitz, Robert Penn
Warren, and W.S. Merwin. The 1960s invigorated
gifted black poets such as Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn
Brooks, and Michael S. Harper. It formed the
background for the work of the young poets of the
1980s, such as Edward Hirsch, Alan Shapiro, Jorie
Graham, Cathy Song, and Rita Dove, whose sequence
about her grandparents, Thomas and Beulah, was
awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. Graham’s
increasingly abstract and elusive work culminated in
The Dream of the Unified Field (1995), selected from
five previous volumes. The AIDS crisis inspired My
Alexandria (1993) by Mark Doty, The Man with Night
Sweats (1992) by Thom Gunn, and a superb memoir,
Borrowed Time (1988), and a cycle of poems, Love
Alone (1988), by the poet Paul Monette. With
razor-sharp images and finely honed descriptive
touches, Louisiana-born Yusef Komunyakaa emerged as
an impressive African American voice in the 1990s.
He wrote about his time as a soldier and war
correspondent in Vietnam in Dien Cai Dau (1988) and
received the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his volume
of new and selected poems Neon Vernacular (1993).
His poems were collected in Pleasure Dome (2001).
Billy Collins found a huge audience for his
engagingly witty and conversational poetry,
especially that collected in Sailing Alone Around
the Room (2001), published the year he became poet
laureate.
Drama
Miller, Williams, and Albee
Two post-World War II playwrights established
reputations comparable to
Eugene O’Neill’s.
Arthur
Miller wrote eloquent essays defending his modern,
democratic concept of tragedy; despite its abstract,
allegorical quality and portentous language, Death
of a Salesman (1949) came close to vindicating his
views.
Miller’s intense family dramas were rooted in
the problem dramas of
Henrik Ibsen and the works of
the socially conscious ethnic dramatists of the
1930s, especially Clifford Odets, but
Miller gave
them a metaphysical turn. From All My Sons (1947) to
The Price (1968), his work was at its strongest when
he dealt with father-son relationships, anchored in
the harsh realities of the Great Depression. Yet
Miller could also be an effective protest writer, as
in The Crucible (1953), which used the Salem witch
trials to attack the witch-hunting of the McCarthy
era.
Though his work was uneven, Tennessee Williams at
his best was a more powerful and effective
playwright than
Miller. Creating stellar roles for
actors, especially women, Williams brought a
passionate lyricism and a tragic Southern vision to
such plays as The Glass Menagerie (1944), A
Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(1955), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). He
empathized with his characters’ dreams and illusions
and with the frustrations and defeats of their
lives, and he wrote about his own dreams and
disappointments in his beautifully etched short
fiction, from which his plays were often adapted.
Miller and
Williams dominated the post-World War
II theatre until the 1960s, and few other
playwrights emerged to challenge them.
Then, in
1962, Edward Albee’s reputation, based on short
plays such as The Zoo Story (1959) and The American
Dream (1960), was secured by the stunning power of
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? A master of
absurdist theatre who assimilated the influence of
European playwrights such as
Samuel Beckett and
Eugène Ionesco,
Albee established himself as a major
figure in American drama. His reputation with
critics and audiences, however, began to decline
with enigmatic plays such as Tiny Alice (1964) and A
Delicate Balance (1966), but, like
O’Neill, he
eventually returned to favour with a complex
autobiographical drama, Three Tall Women (1994).
Arthur
Miller
American playwright
in full Arthur Asher Miller
born
October 17, 1915, New York, New York,
U.S.
died February 10, 2005, Roxbury,
Connecticut
Main
American playwright, who combined social
awareness with a searching concern for
his characters’ inner lives. He is best
known for Death of a Salesman (1949).
Miller
was shaped by the Depression, which
spelled financial ruin for his father, a
small manufacturer, and demonstrated to
the young Miller the insecurity of
modern existence. After graduation from
high school he worked in a warehouse.
With the money he earned he attended the
University of Michigan (B.A., 1938),
where he began to write plays. His first
public success was with Focus (1945), a
novel about anti-Semitism. All My Sons
(1947), a drama about a manufacturer of
faulty war materials that strongly
reflects the influence of Henrik Ibsen,
was his first important play. Death of a
Salesman became one of the most famous
American plays of its period. It is the
tragedy of Willy Loman, a small man
destroyed by false values that are in
large part the values of his society.
Miller received a Pulitzer Prize for the
play, which was later adapted for the
screen (1951).
The Crucible (1953) was based on the
witchcraft trials in Salem,
Massachusetts, in 1692, a period Miller
considered relevant to the 1950s, when
investigation of subversive activities
was widespread. In 1956, when Miller was
called before the House Un-American
Activities Committee, he refused to name
people he had seen 10 years earlier at
an alleged communist writers’ meeting.
He was convicted of contempt but
appealed and won.
A Memory of Two Mondays and another
short play, A View from the Bridge (a
story of an Italian-American
longshoreman whose passion for his niece
destroys him), were staged on the same
bill in 1955. After the Fall (1964) is
concerned with failure in human
relationships and its consequences. The
Price (1968) continued Miller’s
exploration of the theme of guilt and
responsibility to oneself and to others
by examining the strained relationship
between two brothers. He directed the
London production of the play in 1969.
The Archbishop’s Ceiling, produced in
Washington, D.C., in 1977, dealt with
the Soviet treatment of dissident
writers. The American Clock, a series of
dramatic vignettes based on Studs
Terkel’s Hard Times (about the Great
Depression), was produced at the 1980
American Spoleto Festival in Charleston,
South Carolina. Later plays include The
Ride Down Mount Morgan (1991), Mr.
Peters’ Connections (1998), and
Resurrection Blues (2002).
Miller also wrote a screenplay, The
Misfits (1961), for his second wife, the
actress Marilyn Monroe (1926–62); they
were married from 1956 to 1961. The
filming of The Misfits served as the
basis for the play Finishing the Picture
(2004). I Don’t Need You Any More, a
collection of his short stories,
appeared in 1967 and a collection of
theatre essays in 1977. His
autobiography, Timebends, was published
in 1987.
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Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams, original name Thomas
Lanier Williams (b. March 26, 1911,
Columbus, Miss., U.S.—d. Feb. 25, 1983,
New York City), American dramatist whose
plays reveal a world of human
frustration in which sex and violence
underlie an atmosphere of romantic
gentility.
Williams became interested in
playwriting while at the University of
Missouri (Columbia) and Washington
University (St. Louis) and worked at it
even during the Depression while
employed in a St. Louis shoe factory.
Little theatre groups produced some of
his work, encouraging him to study
dramatic writing at the University of
Iowa, where he earned a B.A. in 1938.
His
first recognition came when American
Blues (1939), a group of one-act plays,
won a Group Theatre award. Williams,
however, continued to work at jobs
ranging from theatre usher to Hollywood
scriptwriter until success came with The
Glass Menagerie (1944). In it, Williams
portrayed a declassed Southern family
living in a tenement. The play is about
the failure of a domineering mother,
Amanda, living upon her delusions of a
romantic past, and her cynical son, Tom,
to secure a suitor for Tom’s crippled
and painfully shy sister, Laura, who
lives in a fantasy world with a
collection of glass animals.
Williams’ next major play, A Streetcar
Named Desire (1947), won a Pulitzer
Prize. It is a study of the mental and
moral ruin of Blanche Du Bois, another
former Southern belle, whose genteel
pretensions are no match for the harsh
realities symbolized by her brutish
brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski.
In
1953, Camino Real, a complex work set in
a mythical, microcosmic town whose
inhabitants include Lord Byron and Don
Quixote, was a commercial failure, but
his Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), which
exposes the emotional lies governing
relationships in the family of a wealthy
Southern planter, was awarded a Pulitzer
Prize and was successfully filmed, as
was The Night of the Iguana (1961), the
story of a defrocked minister turned
sleazy tour guide, who finds God in a
cheap Mexican hotel. Suddenly Last
Summer (1958) deals with lobotomy,
pederasty, and cannibalism, and in Sweet
Bird of Youth (1959), the gigolo hero is
castrated for having infected a Southern
politician’s daughter with venereal
disease.
Williams was in ill health frequently
during the 1960s, compounded by years of
addiction to sleeping pills and liquor,
problems that he struggled to overcome
after a severe mental and physical
breakdown in 1969. His later plays were
unsuccessful, closing soon to poor
reviews. They include Vieux Carré
(1977), about down-and-outs in New
Orleans; A Lovely Sunday for Crève Coeur
(1978–79), about a fading belle in St.
Louis during the Great Depression; and
Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980),
centring on Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of
novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, and on the
people they knew.
Williams also wrote two novels, The
Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950) and
Moise and the World of Reason (1975),
essays, poetry, film scripts, short
stories, and an autobiography, Memoirs
(1975). His works won four Drama
Critics’ awards and were widely
translated and performed around the
world.
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Edward Albee
Edward
Albee, in full Edward Franklin Albee (b.
March 12, 1928, Washington, D.C., U.S.),
American dramatist and theatrical
producer best known for his play Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), which
displays slashing insight and witty
dialogue in its gruesome portrayal of
married life.
Albee
was the adopted child of a father who
had for a time been the assistant
general manager of a chain of vaudeville
theatres then partially owned by the
Albee family. At the time of Albee’s
adoption, though, both his parents were
involved with owning and showing saddle
horses. He had a difficult relationship
with his parents, particularly with his
mother, whom he saw as distant and
unloving. Albee grew up in New York City
and nearby Westchester county. He was
educated at Choate School (graduated
1946) and at Trinity College in
Hartford, Connecticut (1946–47). He
wrote poetry and an unpublished novel
but turned to plays in the late 1950s.
Among
Albee’s early one-act plays, The Zoo
Story (1959), The Sandbox (1959), and
The American Dream (1961) were the most
successful and established him as an
astute critic of American values. But it
is his first full-length play, Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (film 1966),
that remains his most important work. In
this play a middle-aged professor, his
wife, and a younger couple engage one
night in an unrestrained drinking bout
that is filled with malicious games,
insults, humiliations, betrayals, savage
witticisms, and painful, self-revealing
confrontations. Virginia Woolf won
immediate acclaim and established Albee
as a major American playwright.
It was
followed by a number of full-length
works—including A Delicate Balance
(1966; winner of a Pulitzer Prize),
which was based in part on his mother’s
witty alcoholic sister, and Three Tall
Women (1994; Pulitzer Prize). The latter
play deals with Albee’s perceptions and
feelings about his mother and is a
remarkable portrait achieved by
presenting the interaction of three
women, who resemble each other, at
different stages of life. Among his
other plays are Tiny Alice (1965), which
begins as a philosophical discussion
between a lawyer and a cardinal;
Seascape (1975; also winner of a
Pulitzer Prize), a poetic exploration of
evolution; and The Play About the Baby
(1998), on the mysteries of birth and
parenthood.
Albee
continued to dissect American morality
in plays such as The Goat; or, Who Is
Sylvia? (2002), which depicts the
disintegration of a marriage in the wake
of the revelation that the husband has
engaged in bestiality. In Occupant
(2001), Albee imagines the sculptor
Louise Nevelson being interviewed after
her death. Albee also expanded The Zoo
Story into a two-act play, called Peter
and Jerry (2004). The absurdist Me,
Myself, & I (2007) trenchantly analyzes
the relationship between a mother and
her twin sons.
In
addition to writing, Albee produced a
number of plays and lectured at schools
throughout the country. He was awarded
the National Medal of Arts in 1996. A
compilation of his essays and personal
anecdotes, Stretching My Mind, was
published in 2005. That year Albee also
received a Tony Award for lifetime
achievement.
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The Off-Broadway ascendancy
The centre of American drama shifted from Broadway
to Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway with works such
as Jack Gelber’s The Connection (1959). American
playwrights, collaborating with the Living Theatre,
the Open Theatre, and other adventurous new
companies, were increasingly free to write radical
and innovative plays. David Rabe’s The Basic
Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971) and Sticks and Bones
(1972) satirized America’s militaristic nationalism
and cultural shallowness. David Mamet won a New York
Drama Critics’ Circle Award for American Buffalo
(1976). In plays such as Glengarry Glen Ross (1984),
he showed brilliantly how men reveal their hopes and
frustrations obliquely, through their language, and
in Oleanna (1992) he fired a major salvo in the
gender wars over sexual harassment.
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Ed Bullins
inspired an angry black nationalist theatre.
Baraka’s Dutchman and The Slave (1964) effectively
dramatized racial confrontation, while Bullins’s In
the Wine Time (1968) made use of “street” lyricism.
Maria Irene Fornes’s Fefu and Her Friends (1977)
proved remarkable in its exploration of women’s
relationships. A clear indication of Off-Broadway’s
ascendancy in American drama came in 1979 when Sam
Shepard, a prolific and experimental playwright, won
the Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child. Shepard’s
earlier work, such as The Tooth of Crime (1972), was
rooted both in the rock scene and counterculture of
the 1960s and in the mythic world of the American
West. He reached his peak with a series of offbeat
dramas dealing with fierce family conflict,
including Curse of the Starving Class (1976), True
West (1980), Fool for Love (1983), and A Lie of the
Mind (1986).
Other important new voices in American drama were
the prolific Lanford Wilson, Pulitzer winner for
Talley’s Folly (1979); John Guare, who created
serious farce in The House of Blue Leaves (1971) and
fresh social drama in Six Degrees of Separation
(1990); and Ntozake Shange, whose “choreopoem” For
Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the
Rainbow Is Enuf moved to Broadway in 1976. Other
well-received women playwrights included Marsha
Norman, Beth Henley, Tina Howe, and Wendy
Wasserstein. In a series of plays that included Ma
Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984), Fences (1987), for
which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and Joe Turner’s Come
and Gone (1986), August Wilson emerged as the most
powerful black playwright of the 1980s. Devoting
each play to a different decade of life in the 20th
century, he won a second Pulitzer Prize, for The
Piano Lesson (1990), and completed the 10-play cycle
in 2005, shortly before his death.
The anguish of the AIDS epidemic proved a dark
inspiration to many gay playwrights, especially Tony
Kushner, who had gained attention with A Bright Room
Called Day (1991), set in Germany in 1932–33; he won
Broadway fame with his epically ambitious two-part
drama Angels in America (1991–92), which combined
comedy with pain, symbolism with personal history,
and invented characters with historical ones. A
committed political writer, Kushner often focused on
public themes. His later plays included Slavs!
(1996) and the timely Homebody/Kabul (2001), a
brilliant monologue followed by a drama set in
Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. After writing
several Off-Broadway plays about Chinese Americans,
David Henry Hwang achieved critical and commercial
success on Broadway with his gender-bending drama M.
Butterfly (1988). Richard Nelson found an
enthusiastic following in London for literate plays
such as Some Americans Abroad (1989) and Two
Shakespearean Actors (1990), while Richard Greenberg
depicted Jewish American life and both gay and
straight relationships in Eastern Standard (1989),
The American Plan (1990), and Take Me Out (2002),
the last about a gay baseball player who reveals his
homosexuality to his teammates. Donald Margulies
dealt more directly with Jewish family life in The
Loman Family Picnic (1989). He also explored the
ambitions and relationships of artists in such plays
as Sight Unseen (1992) and Collected Stories (1998).
The 1990s also saw the emergence of several
talented women playwrights. Paula Vogel repeatedly
focused on hot-button moral issues with humour and
compassion, dealing with prostitution in The Oldest
Profession (1981), AIDS in The Baltimore Waltz
(1992), pornography in Hot ’n’ Throbbing (1994), and
the sexual abuse of minors in How I Learned to Drive
(1997). A young African American playwright,
Suzan-Lori Parks, gained increasing recognition with
her surreal pageant The America Play (1993), a
ghetto adaptation of The Scarlet Letter called In
the Blood (1999), and Topdog/Underdog (2001), a
partly symbolic tale of conflict between two
brothers (named Lincoln and Booth) that reminded
critics of Sam Shepard’s fratricidal True West.
Other well-received works included Heather
McDonald’s An Almost Holy Picture (1995), a one-man
play about the spiritual life of a preacher; poet
Naomi Wallace’s One Flea Spare (1995), set in London
during the Great Plague of 1665; and Margaret
Edson’s Wit (1995), about the slow, poignant cancer
death of a literary scholar whose life has been
shaped by the eloquence and wit of Metaphysical
poetry. Feminism helped free these writers to
develop a rich range of subjects rarely seen on the
American stage.
Literary and social criticism
Until his death in 1972, Edmund Wilson solidified
his reputation as one of America’s most versatile
and distinguished men of letters. The novelist John
Updike inherited Wilson’s chair at The New Yorker
and turned out an extraordinary flow of critical
reviews collected in volumes such as Hugging the
Shore (1983) and Odd Jobs (1991). Gore Vidal brought
together his briskly readable essays of four
decades—critical, personal, and political—in United
States (1993). Susan Sontag’s essays on difficult
European writers, avant-garde film, politics,
photography, and the language of illness embodied
the probing intellectual spirit of the 1960s. In A
Second Flowering (1973) and The Dream of the Golden
Mountains (1980), Malcolm Cowley looked back at the
writers between the world wars who had always
engaged him. Alfred Kazin wrote literary history (An
American Procession [1984], God and the American
Writer [1997]) and autobiography (Starting Out in
the Thirties [1965], New York Jew [1978]), while
Irving Howe produced studies at the crossroads of
literature and politics, such as Politics and the
Novel (1957), as well as a major history of Jewish
immigrants in New York, World of Our Fathers (1976).
The iconoclastic literary criticism of Leslie
Fiedler, as, for example, Love and Death in the
American Novel (1960), was marked by its provocative
application of Freudian ideas to American
literature. In his later work he turned to popular
culture as a source of revealing social and
psychological patterns. A more-subtle Freudian,
Lionel Trilling, in The Liberal Imagination (1950)
and other works, rejected Vernon L. Parrington’s
populist concept of literature as social reportage
and insisted on the ability of literature to explore
problematic human complexity. His criticism
reflected the inward turn from politics toward
“moral realism” that coincided with the Cold War.
But the cultural and political conflicts of the
1960s revived the social approach among younger
students of American literature, such as Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., who emerged in the 1980s as a major
critic, theorist, and editor of black writers in
studies such as Figures in Black (1987) and The
Signifying Monkey (1988). In the 1990s Gates evolved
into a wide-ranging essayist, along with Cornel
West, Stanley Crouch, bell hooks, Shelby Steele,
Stephen Carter, Gerald Early, Michele Wallace, and
other black social critics.
John
Updike
John
Updike, in full John Hoyer Updike (b.
March 18, 1932, Reading, Pennsylvania,
U.S.—d. January 27, 2009, Danvers,
Mass.), American writer of novels, short
stories, and poetry, known for his
careful craftsmanship and realistic but
subtle depiction of “American,
Protestant, small-town, middle-class”
life.
Updike
grew up in Shillington, Pennsylvania,
and many of his early stories draw on
his youthful experiences there. He
graduated from Harvard University in
1954. In 1955 he began an association
with The New Yorker magazine, to which
he contributed editorials, poetry,
stories, and criticism throughout his
prolific career. His
poetry—intellectual, witty pieces on the
absurdities of modern life—was gathered
in his first book, The Carpentered Hen
and Other Tame Creatures (1958), which
was followed by his first novel, The
Poorhouse Fair (1958). About this time,
Updike devoted himself to writing
fiction full-time, and several works
followed. Rabbit, Run (1960), which is
considered to be one of his best novels,
concerns a former star athlete who is
unable to recapture success when bound
by marriage and small-town life and
flees responsibility. Three subsequent
novels, Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is
Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest
(1990)—the latter two winning Pulitzer
Prizes—follow the same character during
later periods of his life. Rabbit
Remembered (2001) returns to characters
from those books in the wake of Rabbit’s
death. The Centaur (1963) and Of the
Farm (1965) are notable among Updike’s
novels set in Pennsylvania.
Much of
Updike’s later fiction is set in New
England (in Ipswich, Massachusetts),
where he lived from the 1960s. Updike
continued to explore the issues that
confront middle-class America, such as
fidelity, religion, and responsibility.
The novels Couples (1968) and Marry Me
(1976) expose the evolving sexual
politics of the time in East Coast
suburbia. Updike set Memories of the
Ford Administration: A Novel (1992) in
the 1970s, infusing the tale of a
professor’s research on President James
Buchanan with observations on sexuality.
In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) draws
parallels between religion and popular
obsession with cinema, while Gertrude
and Claudius (2000) offers conjectures
on the early relationship between
Hamlet’s mother and her brother-in-law.
In response to the cultural shifts that
occurred in the United States after the
September 11 attacks, Updike released
Terrorist in 2006.
Updike
often expounded upon characters from
earlier novels, eliding decades of their
lives only to place them in the middle
of new adventures. The Witches of
Eastwick (1984; filmed 1987), about a
coven of witches, was followed by The
Widows of Eastwick (2008), which trails
the women into old age. Bech: A Book
(1970), Bech Is Back (1982), and Bech at
Bay (1998) humorously trace the
tribulations of a Jewish writer.
Updike’s several collections of short
stories include The Same Door (1959),
Pigeon Feathers (1962), Museums and
Women (1972), Problems (1979), Trust Me
(1987), and My Father’s Tears, and Other
Stories (2009), which was published
posthumously. He also wrote nonfiction
and criticism, much of it appearing in
The New Yorker. It has been collected in
Assorted Prose (1965), Picked-Up Pieces
(1975), Hugging the Shore (1983), and
Odd Jobs (1991). Still Looking: Essays
on American Art (2005) examines both art
and its cultural presentation, and Due
Considerations (2007) collects later
commentary spanning art, sexuality, and
literature. Updike also continued to
write poetry, usually light verse.
Endpoint, and Other Poems, published
posthumously in 2009, collects poetry
Updike had written between 2002 and a
few weeks before he died; it takes his
own death as its primary subject.
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Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal, original name Eugene
Luther Vidal (b. Oct. 3, 1925, West
Point, N.Y., U.S.), prolific American
novelist, playwright, and essayist,
noted for his irreverent and
intellectually adroit novels.
Vidal graduated from Philips Exeter
Academy in New Hampshire in 1943 and
served in the U.S. Army in World War II.
Thereafter he resided in many parts of
the world—the east and west coasts of
the United States, Europe, North Africa,
and Central America. His first novel,
Williwaw (1946), which was based on his
wartime experiences, was praised by the
critics, and his third novel, The City
and the Pillar (1948), shocked the
public with its direct and unadorned
examination of a homosexual main
character. Vidal’s next five novels,
including Messiah (1954), were received
coolly by critics and were commercial
failures. Abandoning novels, he turned
to writing plays for the stage,
television, and motion pictures and was
successful in all three media. His
best-known dramatic works from the next
decade were Visit to a Small Planet
(produced for television, 1955; on
Broadway, 1957; for film, 1960) and The
Best Man (play, 1960; film, 1964).
Vidal returned to writing novels with
Julian (1964), a sympathetic fictional
portrait of Julian the Apostate, the
4th-century pagan Roman emperor who
opposed Christianity. Washington, D.C.
(1967), an ironic examination of
political morality in the U.S. capital,
was the first of a series of several
popular novels known as the Narratives
of Empire, which vividly re-created
prominent figures and events in American
history—Burr (1974), 1876 (1976),
Lincoln (1984), Empire (1987), Hollywood
(1990), and The Golden Age (2000).
Lincoln, a compelling portrait of
President Abraham Lincoln’s complex
personality as viewed through the eyes
of some of his closest associates during
the American Civil War, is particularly
notable. Another success was the comedy
Myra Breckinridge (1968; film 1970), in
which Vidal lampooned both
transsexuality and contemporary American
culture. In Rocking the Boat (1962),
Reflections upon a Sinking Ship (1969),
The Second American Revolution (1982),
United States: Essays, 1952–1992 (1993;
National Book Award), Imperial America:
Reflections of the United States of
Amnesia (2004), and other essay
collections, he incisively analyzed
contemporary American politics and
government. He also wrote two
autobiographies: Palimpsest: A Memoir
(1995) and Point to Point Navigation: A
Memoir, 1964 to 2006 (2006). Vidal was
noted for his outspoken political
opinions and for the witty and satirical
observations he was wont to make as a
guest on talk shows.
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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.
James R. Giles
Morris Dickstein
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