Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Americana
Americana
PURITANS- 1620-1720
Puritans arrive in America
1620- Mayflower, Plymouth MA about 100 people
1630- Massachusetts Bay Colony
Puritanism- a form of Christianity that was not accepted in Catholic England. Lasted 100 years in
America
Life is hard and many die, but they establish a culture in America with help from the American
Indians.
Their religion believes in:
Graceo an experience where you are forgiven of the sins of envy, vanity & lust.
o You love God with all of your heart.
o You cant make grace happen through your own work. It is a miracle from God
and only some people are chosen.
Plainness
o simple worship in simple churches without stained glass windows or statues
o plain clothing without decorations
Divine Mission
o God has given America to the Puritans to be an example to the world
o ethics
o government
This spirit supported the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783)
Art in this time was
paintings of people and historic events
realistic style
ROMANTICISM 1800-1860
Industrial Revolution- 1790-1850
machines are invented to make work easier and faster on farm
production of goods moves to cities where machines make them
many Americans move to crowded cities for work
1803- Louisiana Purchase- America grows to the west.
Some people react against the logic of The Age of Reason to create philosophy of Romanticism.
Romanticism
Individual is more important than the group
Past- interest in past events, mythology and folk tales
Nature
o beautiful and mysterious and always changing
o connected to humans
o We should study nature to learn about ourselves.
o Religion of Nature
God is in nature
in nature we learn about imagination and morals, similar to Native American
religions
Intuition- understanding something from feeling, not from facts
o interested in intuition, not logic
o best knowledge comes from within, not from studying
o human imagination can solve problems
Romanticism in literature
Emotional
Focus on individuals & internal thought
Focus on nature
Imagination, not all stories are realistic
Romanticism in music
Uses folk music
Strongly emotional
Beethoven & Mozart (in Europe) http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=YAOTCtW9v0M&feature=related Beethovens 9th Symphony
represented the New England scene. Turning to journalism, he had a long career as a
fighting liberal editor of The Evening Post. He himself was overshadowed, in renown at
least, by a native-born New Yorker, Washington Irving.
Irving, the youngest member of a prosperous merchant family, joined with ebullient
young men of the town in producing the Salmagundi papers (180708), which satirized
the foibles of Manhattans citizenry. This was followed by A History of New York(1809),
by Diedrich Knickerbocker, a burlesque history that mocked pedantic scholarship and
sniped at the old Dutch families. Irvings models in these works were obviously
Neoclassical English satirists, from whom he had learned to write in a polished, bright
style. Later, having met Sir Walter Scott and having become acquainted with
imaginative German literature, he introduced a new Romantic note in The Sketch
Book (181920),Bracebridge Hall (1822), and other works. He was the first American
writer to win the ungrudging (if somewhat surprised) respect of British critics.
James Fenimore Cooper won even wider fame. Following the pattern of Sir Walter
Scotts Waverley novels, he did his best work in the Leatherstocking tales (182341),
a five-volume series celebrating the career of a great frontiersman named Natty
Bumppo. His skill in weaving history into inventive plots and in characterizing his
compatriots brought him acclaim not only in America and England but on the continent
of Europe as well.
Edgar Allan Poe, reared in the South, lived and worked as an author and editor in
Baltimore, Philadelphia, Richmond, and New York City. His work was shaped largely by
analytical skill that showed clearly in his role as an editor: time after time he gauged the
taste of readers so accurately that circulation figures of magazines under his direction
soared impressively. It showed itself in his critical essays, wherein he lucidly explained
and logically applied his criteria. His gothic tales of terror were written in accordance
with his findings when he studied the most popular magazines of the day. His
masterpieces of terrorThe Fall of the House of Usher (1839), The Masque of the
Red Death (1842), The Cask of Amontillado (1846), and otherswere written
according to a carefully worked out psychological method. So were his detective stories,
such as The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), which historians credited as the first
of the genre. As a poet, he achieved fame with The Raven (1845). His work, especially
his critical writings and carefully crafted poems, had perhaps a greater influence in
France, where they were translated by Charles Baudelaire, than in his own country.
Two Southern novelists were also outstanding in the earlier part of the century: John
Pendleton Kennedy and William Gilmore Simms. In Swallow Barn (1832), Kennedy
wrote delightfully of life on the plantations. Simmss forte was the writing of historical
novels like those of Scott and Cooper, which treated the history of the frontier and his
native South Carolina. The Yemassee (1835) and Revolutionary romances show him at
his best.
The authors who began to come to prominence in the 1830s and were active until about
the end of the Civil Warthe humorists, the classic New Englanders, Herman
Melville, Walt Whitman, and othersdid their work in a new spirit, and their
achievements were of a new sort. In part this was because they were in some way
influenced by the broadening democratic concepts that in 1829 triumphed in Andrew
Jacksons inauguration as president. In part it was because, in this Romantic period of
emphasis upon native scenes and characters in many literatures, they put much of
America into their books.
richly symbolic work, complex but brilliantly integrated. Only in short stories, Benito
Cerenoa masterpiece of its genreand others, in the psychological
novel Pierre (1852), and in the novelette Billy Budd (written 1890?) was Melville later to
show sporadic flashes of the genius that created Moby Dick.
LITERARY COMEDIANS
century, short stories (and a relatively small number of novels) in patterns set by these three
continued to appear. In time, practically every corner of the country had been portrayed in localcolour fiction. Additional writings were the depictions of Louisiana Creoles by George W. Cable,
of Virginia blacks by Thomas Nelson Page, of Georgia blacks by Joel Chandler Harris, of
Tennessee mountaineers by Mary Noailles Murfree (Charles Egbert Craddock), of tight-lipped
folk of New England by Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, of people of New
York City by Henry Cuyler Bunner and William Sydney Porter (O. Henry). The avowed aim of
some of these writers was to portray realistically the lives of various sections and thus to promote
understanding in a united nation. The stories as a rule were only partially realistic, however,
since the authors tended nostalgically to revisit the past instead of portraying their own time, to
winnow out less glamorous aspects of life, or to develop their stories with sentiment or humour.
Touched by romance though they were, these fictional works were transitional to realism, for
they did portray common folk sympathetically; they did concern themselves with dialect and
mores; and some at least avoided older sentimental or romantic formulas.
writers. He was a very funny man. He had more skill than his teachers in selecting evocative
details, and he had a genius for characterization.
Born and raised in Ohio, William Dean Howells was an effective advocate of a new realistic
mode of fiction writing. At the start, Howells conceived of realism as a truthful portrayal of
ordinary facets of lifewith some limitations; he preferred comedy to tragedy, and he tended to
be reticent to the point of prudishness. The formula was displayed at its best in Their Wedding
Journey (1872), A Modern Instance (1882), and The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). Howells
preferred novels he wrote after he encountered Tolstoys writings and was persuaded by them, as
he said, to set art forever below humanity. In such later novels as Annie Kilburn (1888) andA
Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), he chose characters not only because they were commonplace
but also because the stories he told about them were commentaries upon society, government,
and economics.
Other American authors of the same period or slightly later were avowed followers of French
naturalists led by mile Zola. Theodore Dreiser, for instance, treated subjects that had seemed
too daring to earlier realists and, like other Naturalists, illustrated his own beliefs by his
depictions of characters and unfolding of plots. Holding that mens deeds were chemical
compulsions, he showed characters unable to direct their actions. Holding also that the race
was to the swift and the battle to the strong, he showed characters defeated by stronger and
more ruthless opponents. His major books included Sister Carrie (1900), Jennie
Gerhardt (1911), The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), andmuch laterAn American
Tragedy (1925).
Dreiser did not bother withor did not care forniceties of style or elaborate symbolism such
as were found in French naturalistic works; but Stephen Crane andFrank Norris were attentive to
such matters. In short novels, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of
Courage (1895), and in some of his short stories, Crane was an impressionist who made his
details and his setting forth of them embody a conception of man overwhelmed by circumstance
and environment. Frank Norris, who admired Cranes aptitude for making phrasessparks that
cast a momentary gleam upon whole phases of life, himself tried to make phrases, scenes, and
whole narratives cast such gleams in McTeague (1899), The Octopus (1901), andThe Pit (1903).
Both Crane and Norris died young, their full abilities undeveloped but their
experiments foreshadowing later achievements in the 20th-century novel.
HENRY JAMES
Bellamys Looking Backward (1888) was both an indictment of the capitalistic system and an
imaginative picturing of a utopia achieved by a collectivist society in the year 2000.
Howellss Traveler from Altruria (1894) pleaded for an equalitarian state in which the
government regimented mens lives. The year 1906 saw the publication of Upton Sinclairs The
Jungle, first of many works by him that criticized U.S. economic and political life and
urged socialism as the remedy.
Two poets embodied criticisms in songs. Edwin Markhams Man with the Hoe (1899) was a
protest against the exploitation of labour and vaguely threatened revolution; it immediately
stimulated nationwide interest. A year later William Vaughn Moodys Ode in Time of
Hesitation denounced growing U.S. imperialism as a desertion of earlier principles; his On a
Soldier Fallen in the Philippines (1901) developed the same theme even more effectively.
HENRY ADAMS
One of the most devastating and most literate attacks on modern life was an autobiography of a
scion of an ancient New England family, the Adamses. Educated at Harvard and abroad, Henry
Adams was a great teacher and historian (History of the United States [188991] andMont-SaintMichel and Chartres [1904]). The Education of Henry Adams (printed privately 1906; published
1918), however, complained that a lifelong hunt for some sort of order in the world, some sort of
faith for man, left him completely baffled. The quiet, urbane style served well to underline, in an
ironic way, the message of this pessimistic book.
Important movements in drama, poetry, fiction, and criticism took shape in the years
before, during, and after World War I. The eventful period that followed the war left its
imprint upon books of all kinds. Literary forms of the period were extraordinarily varied,
and in drama, poetry, and fiction the leading authors tended toward radical technical
experiments.
EXPERIMENTS IN DRAMA
Although drama had not been a major art form in the 19th century, no type of writing
was more experimental than a new drama that arose in rebellion against the glib
commercial stage. In the early years of the 20th century, Americans traveling in Europe
encountered a vital, flourishing theatre; returning home, some of them became active in
founding the Little Theatre movement throughout the country. Freed from commercial
limitations, playwrights experimented with dramatic forms and methods of production,
and in time producers, actors, and dramatists appeared who had been trained in college
classrooms and community playhouses. Some Little Theatre groups became
commercial producersfor example, the Washington Square Players, founded in 1915,
which became the Theatre Guild (first production in 1919). The resulting drama was
marked by a spirit of innovation and by a new seriousness and maturity.
legendary lore and native oratory in irregular odelike forms was well adapted to oral
presentation, and his lively readings from his works contributed to the success of such books
as General William Booth Enters into Heaven, and Other Poems (1913) and The Congo, and
Other Poems (1914). Sandburg wrote of life on the prairies and in Midwestern cities in
Whitmanesque free verse in such volumes as Chicago Poems (1916) and The People, Yes (1936).
Masterss very popular Spoon River Anthology (1915) consisted of free-verse monologues by
village men and women, most of whom spoke bitterly of their frustrated lives.
patron and impresario of other writers. His most controversial work remained The Cantos, the
first installment of which appeared in 1926 and the latest in 1959 (Thrones: 96109 de los
cantares), with a fragmentary addendum in 1968 (Drafts & Fragments of Cantos CXCXVII).
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, TheLike Pound, to whom he was much indebted, T.S. Eliot lived
abroad most of his life, becoming a British subject in 1927. His first volume,Prufrock and Other
Observations, was published in 1917. In 1922 appeared The Waste Land, the poem by which he
first became famous. Filled with fragments, competing voices, learned allusions, and deeply
buried personal details, the poem was read as a dark diagnosis of a disillusioned generation and
of the modern world. As a poet and critic, Eliot exercised a strong influence, especially in the
period between World Wars I and II. In what some critics regard as his finest work, The Four
Quartets (1943), Eliot explored through images of great beauty and haunting power his own past,
the past of the human race, and the meaning of human history.
Eliot was an acknowledged master of a varied group of poets whose work was indebted to 17thcentury English Metaphysical poets, especially to John Donne. Eliots influence was clear in the
writings of Archibald MacLeish, whose earlier poems showed resemblances to The Waste Land.
A number of Southern poets (who were also critics) were influenced by EliotJohn Crowe
Ransom, Donald Davidson, and Allen Tate. Younger American Metaphysicals who emerged later
included Louise Bogan, Lonie Adams, Muriel Rukeyser, Delmore Schwartz, and Karl Shapiro.
But there were several major poets strongly opposed to Eliots influence. Their style and subjects
tended to be romantic and visionary. These included Hart Crane, whose long poem The
Bridge (1930) aimed to create a Whitmanesque American epic, andWallace Stevens, a lush and
sensuous writer who made an astonishing literary debut with the poems collected
in Harmonium (1923). Another opponent of Eliot wasWilliam Carlos Williams, who invested his
experimental prose and magically simple lyricsin works such as Spring and All (1923)with
the mundane details of American life and wrote about American myth and cultural history with
great sweep in In the American Grain (1925).
FICTION
Fitzgerald, William Faulkner,Henry Roth, and Nathanael West, continued to explore the
Modernist vein of the previous decade.
CRITICS OF SOCIETY
Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money [193036]), employed various narrative innovations such as
the camera eye and newsreel, along with a large cast of characters, to attack society from the
left. Nathanael Wests novels, including Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), A Cool Million (1934),
and The Day of the Locust (1939), used black comedy to create a bitter vision of an inhuman and
brutal world and its depressing effects on his sensitive but ineffectual protagonists. West evoked
the tawdry but rich materials of mass culture and popular fantasy to mock the pathos of the
American Dream, a frequent target during the Depression years.
pioneer Modernist, especially in such works of hers as Three Lives(1909). His own
great impact on other writers came from his deceptively simple, stripped-down prose,
full of unspoken implication, and from his tough but vulnerable masculinity, which
created a myth that imprisoned the author and haunted the World War II generation.
Hemingways great rival as a stylist and mythmaker was William Faulkner, whose writing was as
baroque as Hemingways was spare. Influenced by Sherwood Anderson, Herman Melville, and
especially James Joyce, Faulkner combined stream-of-consciousness techniques with rich social
history. Works such as The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in
August (1932), and The Hamlet (1940) were parts of the unfolding history of Yoknapatawpha
County, a mythical Mississippi community, which depicted the transformation and the decadence
of the South. Faulkners work was dominated by a sense of guilt going back to the American
Civil War and the appropriation of Indian lands. Though often comic, his work pictured the
disintegration of the leading families and, in later books such as Go Down, Moses (1942)
and Intruder in the Dust (1948), showed a growing concern with the troubled role of race in
Southern life.
including the simply written but ambiguous strike novel In Dubious Battle (1936) and his flawed
masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The latter, a protest novel punctuated by prose-poem
interludes, tells the story of the migration of the Joads, an Oklahoma Dust Bowl family, to
California. During their almost biblical journey, they learn the necessity for collective action
among the poor and downtrodden to prevent them from being destroyed individually.
LYRIC FICTIONISTS
An interesting development in fiction, abetted by Modernism, was a shift from naturalistic to
poetic writing. There was an increased tendency to select details and endow them with symbolic
meaning, to set down the thought processes and emotions of the characters, and to make use of
rhythmic prose. In varied waysStephen Crane, Frank Norris, Cabell, Dos Passos, Hemingway,
Steinbeck, and Faulkner all showed evidence of thisin passages, in short stories, and even in
entire novels. Faulkner showed the tendency at its worst in A Fable (1954), which, ironically,
won a Pulitzer Prize.
Horse, Pale Rider (1939) had the complexity, the irony, and the symbolic sophistication
characteristic of these poets, whose work the Modernists had brought into fashion.
Two of the most intensely lyrical works of the 1930s were autobiographical novels set in
the Jewish ghetto of New York Citys Lower East Side before World War I:Michael Golds
harsh Jews Without Money (1930) and Henry Roths Proustian Call It Sleep (1934), one of the
greatest novels of the decade. They followed in the footsteps of Anzia Yezierska, a prolific writer
of the 1920s whose passionate books about immigrant Jews, especially Bread Givers (1925),
have been rediscovered by contemporary feminists.
Another lyrical and autobiographical writer, whose books have faded badly, wasThomas Wolfe,
who put all his strivings, thoughts, and feelings into works such asLook Homeward, Angel (1929)
and Of Time and the River (1935) before his early death in 1938. These Whitmanesque books, as
well as posthumously edited ones such as The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Cant Go Home
Again (1940), dealt with a figure much like Wolfe, echoing the authors youth in the South,
young manhood in the North, and eternal search to fulfill a vision. Though grandiose, they
influenced many young writers, including Jack Kerouac.
Walter BlairMorris DicksteinEB Editors
LITERARY CRITICISM
Some historians, looking back over the first half of the 20th century, were inclined to think that it
was particularly noteworthy for its literary criticism. Beyond doubt, criticism thrived as it had
not for several generations. It was an important influence on literature itself, and it shaped the
perceptions of readers in the face of difficult new writing.
The period began with a battle between two literary groups, one that called its movement New
Humanism and stood for older values in judging literature and another group that urged that old
standards be overthrown and new ones adopted. The New Humanists, such as Irving Babbitt,
a Harvard University professor, and Paul Elmer More, were moralists whose work found an echo
in neotraditionalist writers such as T.S. Eliot, who shared their dislike of naturalism,
Romanticism, and the liberal faith in progress. The leader of the opposition, hardly a liberal
himself, was the pugnacious H.L. Mencken, who insisted that the duty of writers was to present
the unvarnished truth about life. His magazine articles and reviews gathered in A Book of
Prefaces (1917) and the six volumes of Prejudices (191927) ushered in the iconoclasm of the
1920s, preparing the ground for satiric writers such as Sinclair Lewis. Mencken was a tireless
enthusiast for the work of Joseph Conrad and Theodore Dreiser, among other modern writers.
With his dislike of cant and hypocrisy, Mencken helped liberate American literature from its
moralistic framework.
SOCIO-LITERARY CRITICS
In this period of social change, it was natural for critics to consider literature in relationship
to society and politics, as most 19th-century critics had done. The work of Van Wyck
Brooks and Vernon L. Parrington illustrated two of the main approaches. In Americas Comingof-Age (1915), Letters and Leadership (1918), and The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920), Brooks
scolded the American public and attacked the philistinism, materialism, and provinciality of the
Gilded Age. But he retreated from his critical position in the popular Makers and Finders series,
which included The Flowering of New England (1936), New England: Indian
Summer (1940), The World of Washington Irving (1944), The Times of Melville and
Whitman (1947), and The Confident Years (1952). These books wove an elaborate cultural
tapestry of the major and minor figures in American literature. In Main Currents in American
MORAL-AESTHETIC CRITICS
Wilson and Burke, like Cowley, Morton D. Zabel, Newton Arvin, and F.O. Matthiessen, tried to
strike a balance between aesthetic concerns and social or moral issues. They were interested both
in analyzing and in evaluating literary creationsi.e., they were eager to see in detail how a
literary work was constructed yet also to place it in a larger social or moral framework. Their
work, like that of all critics of the period, showed the influence of T.S. Eliot. In essays and books
such as The Sacred Wood(1920) and The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), Eliot
drew close attention to the language of literature yet also made sweeping judgments and large
cultural generalizations. His main impact was on close readers of poetrye.g., I.A.
Richards, William Empson, and F.R. Leavis in England and the critics of the New
Criticism movement in the United States, many of whom were also poets besides being political
and cultural conservatives. Along with Eliot, they rewrote the map of literary history, challenged
the dominance of Romantic forms and styles, promoted and analyzed difficult Modernist writing,
and greatly advanced ways of discussing literary structure. Major examples of their style of close
reading can be found in R.P. Blackmurs The Double Agent (1935), Allen Tates Reactionary
Essays on Poetry and Ideas (1936), John Crowe Ransoms The Worlds Body (1938), Yvor
Winterss Maules Curse (1938), and Cleanth Brookss The Well Wrought Urn (1947). Though
they were later attacked for their formalism and for avoiding the social context of writing, the
New Critics did much to further the understanding and appreciation of literature.
1960s, Henry Millers 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.
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, Barths 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 formsthe historical novel in The
Sot-Weed Factor(1960), Greek and Christian myths in Giles Goat-Boy (1966), and the epistolary
novel in LETTERS (1979). Similarly, Donald Barthelme mocked the fairy tale in Snow
White(1967) and Freudian fiction in The Dead Father (1975). Barthelme was most successful in
his short stories and parodies that solemnly caricatured contemporary styles, especially the richly
suggestive pieces collected in Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), City Life (1970),
and Guilty Pleasures (1974).
Thomas Pynchon emerged as the major American practitioner of the absurdist fable. His novels
and stories were elaborately plotted mixtures of historical information, comic-book fantasy, and
countercultural suspicion. Using paranoia as a structuring device as well as a cast of mind,
Pynchon worked out elaborate conspiracies in V.(1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966),
and Gravitys Rainbow (1973). The underlying assumption of Pynchons fiction was the
inevitability of entropyi.e., the disintegration of physical and moral energy. Pynchons
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 addicts consciousness to depict a hideous modern landscape.
Vonnegut, Terry Southern, and John Hawkes were also major practitioners of black humour and
the absurdist fable.
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. Paleys 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 Portnoys
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, Sabbaths Theater(1995). Returning to realism, but without his former
self-absorption, Roth won new readers with his trilogy on 20th-century American history
American Pastoral (1997),I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000)and
with The Plot Against America (2004), a counter-historical novel about the coming of fascism in
the United States during World War II. The Polish-born Singer won the Nobel Prize
forLiterature in 1978 for his stories, written originally in Yiddish. (See also Yiddish literature.)
They evolved from fantastic tales of demons and angels to realistic fictions set in New York
Citys 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.
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 Updikes 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 Americas urban homosexual subculture
in City of Night (1963). As literary and social mores were liberalized, Cheever himself dealt with
homosexuality in his prison novel Falconer (1977) and even more explicitly in his personal
journals, published posthumously in 1991.
SOUTHERN FICTION
William Styrons 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 Sophies 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) andThe 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).
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), andParadise (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 historyi.e., slavery in Beloved and theHarlem Renaissance in Jazz. She was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.Alice Walker, after writing several volumes of
poetry and a novel dealing with thecivil 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 Ellisons; 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).
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 thepostmodern 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
voicegrandiose yet personal, comic yet shrewdly intellectual. He refined this approach into a
new objectivity in the Pulitzer Prize-winning true life novel The Executioners Song(1979).
When he returned to fiction, his most effective work was Harlots Ghost(1991), about the Central
Intelligence Agency. His final novels took Jesus Christ (The Gospel According to the Son [1997])
and Adolf Hitler (The Castle in the Forest [2007]) as their subjects.
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 novels 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 Beatties account of the post-1960s generation in Chilly Scenes of Winter (1976)
and many short stories, Gail Godwins highly civilized The Odd Woman (1974), Mary Gordons
portraits of Irish Catholic life in Final Payments (1978), and the many social comedies of Alison
Lurie and Anne Tyler.
MULTICULTURAL WRITING
During the
1990s some of the best energies of fiction writers went into autobiography, in works such as
Mary Karrs The Liars Club (1995), about growing up in a loving but dysfunctional family on
the Texas Gulf Coast; Frank McCourts Angelas Ashes (1996), a vivid portrayal of a Dickensian
childhood amid the grinding conditions of Irish slum life; Anne Roiphes bittersweet
recollections of her rich but cold-hearted parents and her brothers death from AIDS in 1185
Park Avenue (1999); and Dave Eggerss 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 Wallaces Infinite Jest (1996), an encyclopaedic mixture of arcane lore,
social fiction, and postmodern irony; Jonathan Franzens The Corrections(2001, National Book
Award) and Freedom (2010), both family portraits; and Don DeLillos Underworld (1997), a
brooding, resonant, oblique account of the Cold War era as seen through the eyes of both
fictional characters and historical figures. All three novels testify to a belated convergence of
Social Realism and Pynchonesque invention. Pynchon himself returned to form with sprawling,
picaresque historical novels: Mason & Dixon (1997), about two famous 18th-century surveyors
who explored and mapped the American colonies, and Against the Day (2006), set at the turn of
the 20th century.
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 Wearys 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 Audens strong personal voice.
including Charles Olson,Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Edward Dorn, andDenise Levertov,
treated the poem as an unfolding process rather than a containing form. OlsonsMaximus
Poems (195368) showed a clear affinity with the jagged line and uneven flow of
PoundsCantos and Williamss Paterson. Allen Ginsbergs 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
Ginsbergs 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 ofLife Studies (1959)
and For the Union Dead (1964). Lowells new work influenced nearly all American poets but
especially a group of confessional writers, includingAnne 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. Lowells influence can still be discerned in the elegant quatrains and
casually brutal details of Frederick Seidels Life on Earth(2001), as in the crisp elegiac poems of
his award-winning Sunrise (1980).
Through
his personal charisma and his magazine The Fifties (later The Sixties and The Seventies), Robert
Blyencouraged 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 Garca Lorca, Juan Ramn Jimnez, Csar Vallejo, and Pablo Neruda, especially
their surreal association of images, as well as by the greenhouse poems (194648) 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 Wrights 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 Ignatowwrote 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 OHara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and John Ashbery. Whether OHara
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. Kochs comic voice swung effortlessly
from the trivial to the fantastic. Strongly influenced by Wallace Stevens, Ashberys 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.
Bishop, Elizabeth: first four stanzas of Manuelzinho 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
DRAMA
MILLER, WILLIAMS, AND ALBEE
Two post-World War II playwrights established reputations comparable to Eugene
ONeills. 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. Millers 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 Albees reputation, based on
short plays such as The Zoo Story (1959) and The American Dream (1960), was secured by the
stunning power of Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?A master of absurdist theatre who assimilated
the influence of European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett and Eugne 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 ONeill, he eventually returned to favour with a complex
autobiographical drama, Three Tall Women (1994).
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
193233; he won Broadway fame with his epically ambitious two-part drama Angels in
America (199192), 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 asSome Americans Abroad (1989) and Two Shakespearean Actors (1990), while Richard
Greenberg depicted Jewish American life and both gay and straight relationships inEastern
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 asSight Unseen (1992) and Collected
Stories (1998).
THEORY
The major New Critics and New York critics were followed by major but difficult academic
critics, who preferred theory to close reading. European structuralismfound 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 andGeoffrey 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) andPhilosophy and Social Hope (1999). Other academic
critics also took a more-political turn. Stephen Greenblatts work on Shakespeare and other
Elizabethan writers andEdward Saids essays in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983) were
influential in reviving historical approaches to literature that had long been neglected.
SaidsOrientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993) directed attention to the effects of
colonialism on the arts and society. His essays were collected inReflections 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.