A History of American Literature

1950 to the Present

Linda Wagner-Martin

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781119062523, 9781405192323
• eBook ISBN: 9781118329160
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 1950 TO THE PRESENT

Featuring works from notable authors as varied as Salinger and the Beats to Vonnegut, Capote, Morrison, Rich, Walker, Eggers, and DeLillo, A History of American Literature: 1950 to the Present offers a comprehensive analysis of the wide range of literary works produced in the United States over the last six decades and a fascinating survey of the dramatic changes during America's transition from the innocence of the fifties to the harsh realities of the first decade of the new millennium. Author Linda Wagner-Martin - a highly acclaimed authority on all facets of modern American literature - covers major works of drama, poetry, fiction, non- fiction, memoirs, and popular genres such as science fiction and detective novels. Viewing works produced during this fertile literary period from a wide-ranging perspective, Wagner-Martin considers literature in relation to such issues as the politics of civil rights, feminism, sexual preferences, and race- and gender-based marketing. She also places a special emphasis on works produced during the twenty-first century, and writings influenced by recent historic events such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and the global financial crisis. With its careful balance of scholarly precision and accessibility, A History of American Literature: 1950 to the Present provides readers of all levels with rich and revealing insights into the diversity of literary forms and influences that characterize postmodern America.

"A monumental distillation of an enormous range of material, Wagner-Martin's rich book should be required reading for anyone grappling with making sense of the prolific, broad-spectrum, and diverse writing in the US since 1950."
Thadious M. Davis, University of Pennsylvania "Linda Wagner-Martin's history impressively and judiciously surveys all fields of American writing over the past sixty years, taking full account of significant cultural and historical contexts and the major critical commentaries that have helped shape our understanding of developments in the second half of the last century and the dozen years following the millennium. Balanced, informative, and always highly readable there is much here for general readers, students, and specialists alike."
Christopher MacGowan, the College of William and Mary

Chapter 1

Locating Contemporary Literature

Literature in the second half of the twentieth century in the United States bears only a faint resemblance to the writing accomplished between 1900 and 1950. Early in the century, arguments as to what distinguished American literature from British led to the emphasis on plain character and plain language that marked the writing done in both realism and naturalism. Then, with the modernist sweep to overthrow most existing literary traditions (always using Ezra Pound's rationale that making it new was to be primary), the innovation that made American poetry, fiction, and drama of keen interest to the world settled in.

By 1950, however, traditional aesthetic innovation was wearing thin. The United States had endured the Great Depression, a long decade of hardship that not only dampened the promise of the American dream but changed literary methods to a surprising extent. The amalgam of cryptic modernist innovation and almost sentimental proselytizing that characterized the collective, proletarian novel and the speech-lined poems of the Depression gave rise to incredible variety: despite the paper shortages of World War II, published writing in the United States continued to be influential. It is in the aftermath of the war, once people had righted their perceptions about causation and blame, and had admitted again the atrocity of war itself (as well as of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb), that literature—whether called contemporary or postmodern—began to change.

Modernism's heavy seriousness gave way at times to a strangely comic irony. The power of United States bombs to destroy cities and families instantly had taught readers the risks of too placid a belief system: even without the Second World War, the Cold War remained. European existentialism crept into works by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, J. D. Salinger, John Barth, Thomas Berger, and later Donald Barthelme, Terry Southern, Joseph Heller, and others. Even as writers as distinguished as Flannery O'Connor, Nathanael West, and Vladimir Nabokov had separately approached those tones, the congruence of a number of writers—working in both serious fiction and the more experimental genre of science fiction—made the advent of the ironic and the irreligious a dominant strain. With this attitudinal turn, established canons of texts faltered. On college campuses, courses in science fiction, as well as mystery and detective novels, made their appearance: what was to be known as genre writing usurped the popularity of courses that included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and William Faulkner.

The marketing of books also played a role in what happened to writing at mid-century. Categories that would have seemed contrived during the 1920s, and certainly during the 1930s, came into existence: black literature, Jewish literature, women's writing, and—with James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room—the literature of sexual difference. Descriptive markers created new kinds of demands in that publishers couldn't feature just one novel by an African American writer; instead, they opted for several on that part of their list. Currents began almost by accident. The comedy inherent in Ralph Ellison's 1952 Invisible Man, for instance, linked this first novel by an African American with the mid-century production of white male writers (indeed, the advertising for Invisible Man did not mention Ellison's race). Once the category of black writing—or, in that period, “Negro” writing—was introduced, work by Margaret Walker, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Paule Marshall, and others found publication.

It is, of course, a commonplace that United States literature changed dramatically during the 1960s. No one would deny that the revolutionary spirit of that decade modified the practice of writing, and it can easily be said that with the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr, an abstract concept of political and personal loss becomes figured in literary loss. (The same kind of dynamic in the relationship between a set of horrifying events in culture and writing occurs after 9-11-2001.) But what becomes clearer now in retrospect is that many of the styles and themes that writers used during and after the 1960s were already incipient during the 1950s.

United States literature has always been somewhat critical of its home culture. The questioning critical responses to the United States in this period of study are best illustrated in the poetry, fiction, and prose poem production of the writers that came to be known as the Beats. Grouped around Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights publishing and book store in San Francisco, a myriad of such writers as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Diane de Prima, Anne Waldman, Richard Brautigan, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Paul Blackburn, and others signaled the legitimacy of turning away from the dominance of Western civilization. In their search for other ways of living, for new kinds of sexual and physical experiences, these writers' beatific power impressed readers with a willingness to change. To write impressionistically, as Kerouac did in his novel On the Road, to include the autobiographical as a legitimate part of “art,” to expose all kinds of personal motivation—these qualities were, at first, rejected. Later, recognition of what Kerouac and Ginsberg were achieving changed the nature of United States aesthetic principles. The outgrowth of mid-century poetry—Robert Lowell's mid-career change, for example—followed. The so-called Confessional poets took courage from the often ridiculed Beats.

As publishers acknowledged this change and therefore searched for interesting representatives of the Other, writers who were culturally or philosophically different from the mainstream (though still white, still heterosexual, and still male), the established writers from earlier in the twentieth century died away. Beginning in the early 1960s, the world lost Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, Dashiell Hammett, William Faulkner, e.e. cummings, Robinson Jeffers, Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams, Clifford Odets, T. S. Eliot, Randall Jarrell, Flannery O'Connor, Carl Sandburg, and Langston Hughes, among others. It was a clearing out of possible production that made readers nostalgic for the great accomplishments of modernism—but also ready to accept new kinds of writing. These losses, coupled with the searing political changes of the 1960s, opened publishers' doors to writers who might well have been rejected a decade earlier. Joan Didion's Run River, along with her Play It as It Lays, represented the new interest in women's lives, no matter how disturbing; just as Sylvia Plath's only novel, The Bell Jar, brought a kind of comedy to that subject. The plethora of 1960s and 1970s novels by women, most of them still in print today, included Marilyn French's The Women's Room, Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, Mary McCarthy's The Group, Joyce Carol Oates' With Shuddering Fall, Judith Rossner's Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Marge Piercy's Small Changes, Lois Gould's Such Good Friends, Diane Johnson's The Shadow Knows, Alix Kates Shulman's Memoirs of an ex-Prom Queen, and others. In 1970 Toni Morrison published her first novel, The Bluest Eye; in 1982 Alice Walker's The Color Purple (and the film made from it) polarized the literary world in terms of not only race and gender, but also sexual preference and class.

The vitality of American letters between 1950 and the mid- to late 1960s argued against one current of critical opinion, that literature at the midpoint of the twentieth century was staid. What was staid then was the academic response to the writing being done. According to the heavy critical studies appearing, a monolithic development of “pre-war” writing and “post-war” might have existed for a time: it was difficult not to take seriously Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950) as well as, earlier, F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) and his studies of Henry James, and a bit later, R. W. B. Lewis's The American Adam (1955). Always retrospective, these acclaimed books about United States literature were bent, implicitly, on proving the difference (and the superiority, or at least the equality) of American writing. The specter of the 400 years of British texts, and that more formal British language, still haunted American letters.

Despite the emergence of that new field of academic study—called “American Studies” so as to present the worlds of United States art and music in the company of its literature—few English department courses in United States writing even existed. When students wanted to study “twentieth century” literature, they read works written by the British and the Irish rather than by United States writers. (Looming large over the canon were T. S. Eliot and Henry James, both of whom had become British citizens and were soon placed on reading lists as British writers.)

So long as scholars who were at all interested in American texts were boxed into that pervasive argument—that there was such an entity as American literature, something separate from the English and focused on defining itself differently—few observers had the time or energy to learn the varieties of the new existing in American art, writing included.

As early as 1960, Leslie Fiedler had assessed the problem: that codified critical views had created the straight jacket students found themselves enduring. In his Love and Death in the American Novel, a survey that was considered outrageous, as well as unduly subjective, he insisted:

Though it is necessary, in understanding the fate of the American novel, to understand what European prototypes were available when American literature began,…it is even more important to understand the meaning of that moment in the mid-eighteenth century which gave birth to Jeffersonian democracy and Richardsonian sentimentality alike: to the myth of revolution and the myth of seduction. (Fiedler 12)

For all the interest in United States individualism, no other critic is on record in 1960 for mentioning seduction, and very few negotiated with the concept of revolution. Fiedler's book provoked readers, and it provoked them healthily. It showed them that the literary world was not completely humorless, and it called directly for readers to mount arguments and counter-arguments. For perhaps the first time, a critic was taunting his readers, and he seemed poised to accept responses that challenged his own.

The world according to Fiedler here was a precarious one. Boundaries were not circumspect (in some cases, they were not even drawn), and acknowledging the influence of British letters on American did not mean that Fiedler deified Anglo traditions. Love and Death in the American Novel also solidified a movement that had been previously unacknowledged—that United States fiction was becoming the dominant genre, at the expense of poetry, drama, and non-fiction. All eyes—internationally as well as nationally—followed American fiction. Perhaps a reflection of the dominance of the novel form during modernism, this emphasis seemed to crystallize when William Faulkner won the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. Unlike Hemingway, who was to win that accolade in 1954, Faulkner was not famous for either his stories or his plays. The apex of modernist writing may have occurred with James Joyce's Ulysses but other outstanding modernist novels were American—John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer (1925) and his USA Trilogy (1938); Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929), Light in August (1931), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and others; Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans (1925); F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934); Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1939), and The Old Man and the Sea (1952); Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel (1929); Djuna Barnes's Nightwood (1936); John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle (1936) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939); Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925); Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920); Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground (1925), and countless novels by Sinclair Lewis, beginning with Main Street and Babbitt (1920 and 1922). Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930. The American novel had become synonymous with a window into the land of financial—and artistic—supremacy, and its world readership benefited from an interest that was as much cultural as aesthetic.

For a time, United States drama ran a close second to this pervasive interest in the novel, but by World War II (following as it did on the heels of the depressed 1930s), the economies of scarcity (outright depression, poverty coupled with the myriad wartime shortages) curbed the production of theatrical art. Even if plays were staged in New York or Cincinnati or Baltimore or San Diego, patrons could not afford to spend their limited gas ration—or the tread on their tires—to attend.

---

A Mid-Century Sampler: The Catcher in the Rye and Invisible Man

To scrutinize the years at the middle of the twentieth century is to unearth a clearly dominant focus on the novel. Even though readers found Ernest Hemingway's Across the River and into the Trees (1950) disappointing, its action tamed for the most part to slow scenes of dialogue, they still bought the book. What they bought more copies of, however, were Ray Bradbury's provocative The Martian Chronicles (1950), one of the first acceptable science fiction novels (interlinked stories) and (though less academically noticed) Mickey Spillane's My Gun Is Quick (1950). Mass marketing of the highly readable crime novel, replete with blondes who were not always victims, and the availability of these genre novels in paper covers (and therefore cheap) made their purchases acceptable. Along with the supermarkets' romance novel sections, crime and science fiction tested the boundaries for educational acceptability. Reading was becoming a way of escaping the stresses of the highly competitive existence that postwar culture spawned.

What was happening literarily in 1950 was less a reflection of the tensions of the Korean War or, in the States, of the McCarthy investigation into possible ties with either the American Communist Party or the international Communist Party. Readers were experiencing an appreciation for a materialism not rooted in a belief in capitalism but more of a denial of both these situations—the war and the influence of communism. Yet, in an unexpected move even for the highly educated literary community, Annie Allen (1949), Gwendolyn Brooks's second poem collection, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. (It would be decades before another African American writer would receive that honor.) And on Broadway, audiences managed to get in to see William Inge's first play, the all too poignant heterosexual drama, Come Back, Little Sheba (1950). Inge, a white playwright from Kansas, avoided the existentialist influence from France (this was also the year of Ionesco's The Bald Soprano) and instead reified much of the sexualized theater which audiences had come to expect in the work of Tennessee Williams. With that Southern playwright, however, East Coast audiences could pretend a distance from the behavior of Williams's Southern characters—a distance that, in reality perhaps, did not exist.

The years 1950 and 1951 created a moment of calm in the literary landscape. Readers expected writers to be fascinated with the politics of both war and political beliefs: immersed in the tensions of the Cold War, pointed toward achieving excellence in science and technology, the United States culture barely noticed when William Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature, or when Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us (1951) helped to create public awareness for the spoilage on-going in the natural world: few readers knew what the word ecology even meant. The kind of disdain most readers felt for Samuel Beckett's Molloy or even for Albert Camus' The Rebel extended in the United States to Carson McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Café (1952). Like Faulkner's often difficult fiction, these writings plainly privileged the need for readers to interpret language. For the United States book-lover who had never gone to college—and until World War II brought GI benefits to thousands of veterans, that included many of America's readers—asking so much effort was unreasonable, and as could have been predicted, the year's big novels became James Jones's From Here to Eternity (1951), a book that reprised Norman Mailer's 1948 The Naked and the Dead, and The Catcher in the Rye (1951), a first novel by the largely unknown J. D. Salinger (whose short stories had appeared in The New Yorker and had created a following for him there).

The Catcher in the Rye

In the midst of the Korean War, Jones's novel was legitimate heavy reading. An informed United States population worried about the Atomic Energy Commission's announcement about the hydrogen bomb (which had been tested first in October, 1951), and the McCarren-Walters Act which tried to improve the policies governing immigration. Conditions were exacerbated by steadily rising unemployment, especially when one of the visible credos for returning servicemen and women had been the promise that the United States would reward them for their sacrifices. The postwar milieu, despite visible suburban prosperity, was increasingly tinged with irony. That irony became the narrative voice of Salinger's ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for A History of American Literature
• Wiley-Blackwell Histories of American Literature
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Locating Contemporary Literature
• Chapter 2: The Sixties and the Necessities of Change
• Chapter 3: Conventions and Eruptions
• Chapter 4: New Ages and Old
• Chapter 5: The 1980s, Ethnicity and Change
• Chapter 6: The 1990s and the Sexual
• Chapter 7: The Twenty-First Century
• References
• Index
• Wiley End User License Agreement