American Literature: Prose

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Beat Generation

After the war a group of American writers referred to as the Beat Generation communicated their profound disaffection with contemporary society through their unconventional writings and lifestyle. Notable writers associated with the group included novelists Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs and poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. Their writing was characterized by a raw, improvisational quality as they liberated writing from formal concerns and plot, often drawing on personal experience. Perhaps the best-known Beat novel is Kerouac’s semiautobiographical On the Road (1957), which celebrates direct sensory experience and freedom from everyday responsibilities.

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Experimentation

The works of Vladimir Nabokov, J. D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Norman Mailer, and Don DeLillo represent the experimentation in style and form that began in the 1950s and has continued to the present. Nabokov, although Russian-born, became one of the greatest masters of English prose. Lolita (1955) and Pale Fire (1962), novels with American settings, are remarkable examples of tragicomedy that make readers question the standard categories for prose. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is at once humorous and terrifying in its precise portrayal of rebellious adolescence; written in 1951, it remains enormously popular. So too does Catch-22 (1961), a darkly comic and wildly inventive novel by Joseph Heller about the insanity of war and the absurdity of military authority.

In The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Pynchon leads his characters (and his readers) on a wild goose chase, marking the path with seemingly significant, but actually irrelevant, clues to an impossible mystery. Vonnegut based his novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) on his experiences in a German prison camp during World War II. The setting of this multilevel narrative alternates between the camp and a fictional planet, incorporating elements of science fiction in the process. Mailer's The Armies of the Night (1968), about his experiences at peace marches, explicitly challenges the presumed distinction between history and fiction by giving actual events the drama of a novel. DeLillo’s work draws on a broad range of topics, from the world of American football players to the role of the media in society, to explore the effects of popular culture on the psychology of the individual. His White Noise (1985) is a complex and often humorous study of nuclear age America—from its new family structures to its new academic disciplines.

Novelists John Cheever and John Updike exhibited similar concerns and approaches in their somewhat detached, sometimes satirical explorations of upper-middle-class suburban life in the Northeast. Cheever's novels range from a relatively benign story of an eccentric family in The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) to a bleak tale of fratricide in Falconer (1977). Updike is perhaps best known for his series of four novels written between 1960 and 1990. The series begins with Rabbit, Run (1960), which is about a man fleeing from life’s responsibilities and his own disillusion.

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Joyce Carol Oates, who first received widespread notice in the 1960s, remained one of the most prolific American writers in the ensuing decades. Many of her novels combine strong naturalism with Gothic horror, including A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Bellefleur (1980), and What I Lived For (1994).

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Diversity

The Jewish tradition in American fiction, which dates to the 1920s and 1930s, remained strong in later decades. This is evident in the works of Bernard Malamud; Canadian-born Saul Bellow, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976; and Philip Roth. Malamud’s The Fixer (1966) tells of the suffering of a Russian Jew who is accused of ritual murder of a child but refuses to succumb to bitterness. Many of Bellow’s works revolve around Jewish intellectuals and their quest for self-knowledge. His novel Herzog (1961) portrays a middle-aged man’s existential crisis after his wife leaves him. Roth’s first success came with Goodbye, Columbus (1959). His American Pastoral (1997) follows the psychological deterioration of an American family over several generations, and comments more broadly on the ills of American society in the late 20th century.

After the 1970s several African American female writers appeared at the forefront of American literature. From her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), through Beloved (1988) and Paradise (1998), Toni Morrison cast an unblinking eye on slavery and its legacies while also offering hope, particularly in the strength of bonds among women. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993. Other African American women whose prose enriched late 20th-century literature were Alice Walker, best known for The Color Purple (1982), and Gloria Naylor, who received a National Book Award for her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place (1982).

In the second half of the century Native American novelists began reassessing the experience of their cultures. House Made of Dawn (1968) by N. Scott Momaday was one of the first 20th-century works to discuss the contemporary Native American experience. Ceremony (1977) by is the story of a young man of mixed Native American and white ancestry who seeks to recover from the terrifying violence of his world. James Welch's Fools Crow (1986) returns to 1870, a time of catastrophic change for the Blackfeet Native Americans of Montana. Louise Erdrich, whose novels include Love Medicine (1984) and Tales of Burning Love (1996), was another writer who took a hard look at Native American culture in the late 20th century.

Hispanic American and Asian American authors brought strong voices to American literature after the 1960s. Mexican American literature had informed the earliest American Westerns, and Hispanic folk ballads and legends of the vaquero (cowboy) had been staples in the tall tales of the frontier. More recently, Rudolfo Anaya, author of the novels Bless Me, Ultima (1972) and Alburquerque (1994), and Sandra Cisneros, author of the novel The House on Mango Street (1983), have written about language, identity, cultural change, and other struggles of Hispanic American life.

Much of Asian American literature deals with the inevitable conflicts experienced by those who bridge two cultures. Modernity and Americanization are typically the realm of youth, while traditional culture and history remain the dying province of their elders. Woman Warrior (1976) and China Men (1980), by Maxine Hong Kingston, blend the old and new in an interweaving of legend and narration. The Joy Luck Club (1989) and The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), by Amy Tan, dramatize conflicts between Chinese immigrants and their American-born children.

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Nonfiction

Twentieth-century American nonfiction included so many varied and profound contributions to current affairs, history, and science that it is impossible to touch on more than a few. What American writers had long sought came true in the 1900s: America’s literary traditions had fully matured.

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Public Affairs and History

Theodore Roosevelt, United States president from 1901 to 1909, left a long record of his personal philosophy in The Rough Riders (1899) and in other writings such as travel adventures, history, biography, and politics. Roosevelt’s narratives emphasize the strength of nature and of humans and reflect the influence of the scientific theories of British scientist Charles Darwin.

Magazines and newspapers, whose arrival had represented a great achievement for the young colonies, proliferated in the 20th century, in multiple languages. Foreign language publications addressed specific communities, especially immigrant communities, which usually shared political interests as well as language. Some journals, such as The Masses (founded in 1911) and The Liberator (founded in 1918), were voices of radicalism. The Crisis, a journal published from 1910 to 1934, was dedicated to racial equality and edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, an influential intellectual and a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. His finest nonfiction prose includes the essay collection The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and his autobiographical Dusk of Dawn (1940).

Much American political reporting and analysis achieved brilliance in the 1930s. Among the books that helped prepare perplexed Americans for World War II were Inside Europe (1936) by journalist John Gunther, The Life and Death of a Spanish Town (1937) by novelist Elliot Harold Paul, and Not Peace but a Sword (1939) by foreign correspondent Vincent Sheean. After the war, John Hersey's landmark report Hiroshima (1946; reissued with an update in 1985) described the devastation brought by the first atomic bomb (see Hiroshima).

Traditional views of American history were presented by historians Charles Austin Beard and Mary Ritter Beard in The Rise of American Civilization (1927), Samuel Eliot Morison in The Oxford History of the American People (1965), and Henry Steele Commager in The Search for a Usable Past (1967). Accounts of specific trends and eras include Anti-Intellectualism in America (1963) by Richard Hofstadter, a study of the effects of conservatism, and The Guns of August (1962) by Barbara Tuchman, about the beginnings of World War I.

A political issue that became the subject of extensive analysis by American writers during and after the 1960s was the Vietnam War (1959-1975). My Lai 4 (1970) by Seymour M. Hersh details a massacre of Vietnamese civilians by American troops in 1968. Frances FitzGerald wrote Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (1972).

Some writers of fiction turned to nonfiction during the postwar period. Truman Capote invented what he called the “nonfiction novel” with In Cold Blood (1966), a harrowing account of the murder of a Kansas family based on interviews with the murderers. Norman Mailer's books The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago, both published in 1968, vividly describe and interpret headline-making political protest.