American Women writers after World War II

American literature after World War II

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). 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, have a strong emotional thread running through them, including Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962). 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). ⁵ 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 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 Catcher in the Rye (1951), and the troubling madman in Richard Yates's powerful novel of suburban life, Revolutionary Road (1961). ⁶
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. In such novels 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" 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 late novels, but he also wrote darker fictions like the novella Seize the Day (1956), a study in failure and blocked emotion that was perhaps his best work. Four other 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).
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 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. Updike's mentor, 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. 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. Post-World War II Southern writers inherited Faulkner's rich legacy. Three women, specialists in the grotesque--Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Carson McCullers--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 (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. Initially known for his lyrical portraits of Southern eccentrics ( Other Voices, Other Rooms [1948]), Truman Capote 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" using 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 Gothic tradition, influencing later writers such as Richard Ford in The Sportswriter (1986). Equally impressive were the novels and stories of Peter Taylor, an impeccable Social Realist, raconteur, and genial novelist of manners, bringing back a bygone world in works such as "The Old Forest" (1985) and A Summons to Memphis (1986).