Literature of the United States

Post-World War II

There were a number of major American war novels written in the wake of World War II. Some of the most well known included Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948), novels by Irwin Shaw and James Jones, and later Joseph Heller (Catch-22) and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Slaughterhouse-Five).
In the 1950s the West Coast spawned a literary movement, the poetry and fiction of the «Beat Generation,» a name that referred simultaneously to the rhythm of jazz music, to a sense that post-war society was worn out, and to an interest in new forms of experience through drugs, alcohol, and Eastern mysticism. Poet Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) set the tone of social protest and visionary ecstasy in Howl, a Whitmanesque work that begins: «I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness….». Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) celebrated the Beats' rollicking, spontaneous, and vagrant life-style in his masterful and vibrant novel On the Road.
Other writers of the period like J.D. Salinger and Sylvia Plath were starkly individual and cannot be easily classified.

Postmodernism

From the early 1960s through the late 1980s, an important literary movement was postmodernism. Important writers, here, are Thomas Pynchon, author of V. and Gravity's Rainbow, among other things, and Don Delillo, who wrote White Noise. Postmodern writers dealt directly with the way that popular culture and mass media influence the average American's perception and experience of the world. They would set scenes in fast food restaurants, on subways, or in shopping malls; they wrote about drugs, plastic surgery, and television commercials. Sometimes, these depictions look almost like celebrations. But simultaneously, writers in this school take a knowing, self-conscious, sarcastic, and (some critics would say) condescending attitude towards their subjects.

Modern humorist literature

From Irving and Hawthorne to the present day, the short story has been a favorite American form. One of its 20th-century masters was John Cheever (1912–1982), who brought yet another facet of American life into the realm of literature: the affluent suburbs that have grown up around most major cities. Cheever was long associated with The New Yorker, a magazine noted for its wit and sophistication. John Updike also continued Cheever's tradition and is best known for his Rabbit series which began with Rabbit Run.