1 INTRODUCTION
2 POLITICA, SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC EVOLUTION OF THE USA SINCE 1945
2.1 The peak cold war years, 1945-60
2.2 1961 – 1968: The Kennedy and Johnson administrations
2.3 1969 – 1981: Nixon, Ford and Carter
2.4 1981 – 1993: The Reagan and Bush administrations
2.5 The USA since 1993: The Clinton administration
2.6 Bush´s administration
3 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE USA IN THE INTERNATIONAL POLICY
4 CURRENT LITERARY OVERVIEW IN THE USA
4.1 Narrative
A The Southern Writers
B Saul Bellow
C J.D. Salinger
D Ralph Ellison
E Norman Mailer
F The Beat Generation: Jack Kerouac
G John Updike
H Joseph Heller
I Kurt Vonnegut
J Toni Morrison
4.2 Drama
A Tennessee Williams
B Arthur Miller
C Edward Albee
4.3 Poetry
A The Beat Generation
B Silvia Plath
5 STUDY GUIDE
6 BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 INTRODUCTION
Following World War II, the United States emerged as one of the two dominant superpowers. The post-war era in the United States was defined internationally by the beginning of the Cold War, in which the United States and the Soviet Union attempted to expand their influence at the expense of the other, checked by each side’s massive nuclear arsenal and the doctrine of mutual assured destruction. The result was a series of conflicts during this period including the Korean War and the tense nuclear showdown of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In the decades after World War II, the United States became a global influence in economic, political, military, cultural and technological affairs. At the center of middle-class culture since the 1950s has been a growing obsession with consumer goods.
The Cold War continued through the 1960s and 1970s, and the United States entered the Vietnam War, whose growing unpopularity fed already existing social movements, including those among women, minorities and young people. President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society social programs and the judicial activism of the Warren Court added to the wide range of social reform during the 1960s and 1970s. Feminism and the environmental movement became political forces, and progress continued toward civil rights for all Americans. The Counterculture Revolution swept through the nation and much of the western world in the late sixties, dividing the already hostile environment but also bringing forth more liberated social views.
In the early 1970s, Johnson’s successor, President Richard Nixon was forced by Congress to bring the Vietnam War to a close, and the American-backed South Vietnamese government subsequently collapsed. Ronald Reagan produced a major realignment with his 1980 and 1984 landslides. In 1980, the Reagan coalition was possible because of Democratic losses in most social-economic groups.
In foreign affairs, bipartisanship was not in evidence. The Democrats doggedly opposed the president’s efforts to support the Contras of Nicaragua. When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in Moscow, many conservative Republicans were dubious of the friendship between him and Reagan. Gorbachev tried to save Communism in Russia first by ending the expensive arms race with America, then in 1989 by shedding the East European empire. Communism finally collapsed in Russia in 1991, ending the US-Soviet Cold War. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States emerged as the world’s sole remaining superpower and continued to involve itself in military action overseas, including the 1991 Gulf War.
With regards to literature, the period in time from the end of World War II up until, roughly, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw to the publication of some of the most popular works in American history. The last few of the more realistic Modernists along with the wildly Romantic Beatniks largely dominated the period, while the direct respondents to America’s involvement in World War II contributed in their notable influence.
From J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories and The Catcher in the Rye to Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, America’s madness was placed to the forefront of the nation’s literary expression.
The poetry and fiction of the “Beat Generation,” largely born of a circle of intellects formed in New York City around Columbia University and established more officially some time later in San Francisco, came of age. The term, Beat, referred, all at the same time, to the countercultural rhythm of the Jazz scene, to a sense of rebellion regarding the conservative stress of post-war society, and to an interest in new forms of spiritual experience through drugs, alcohol, philosophy, and religion, and specifically through Zen Buddhism. At the same time, his good friend Jack Kerouac celebrated the Beats’ rollicking, spontaneous, and vagrant life-style in, among many other works, his masterful and most popular novel On the Road.
Regarding the war novel specifically, there was a literary explosion in America during the post-World War II era. Some of the most well known of the works produced included Norman Mailer‘s The Naked and the Dead (1948), Joseph Heller‘s Catch-22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.‘s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).
2 POLITICA, SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC EVOLUTION OF THE USA SINCE 1945
2.1 The peak cold war years, 1945-60
After the war America entered an age of anxiety influenced by two great fears.
First there was the fear of the Bomb; many Americans thought that there would be a war with the Soviet Union using atomic bombs.
The other fear was the fear of Communism, which became a national sickness in the late forties and early fifties. It was the famous witch hunt, inspired by Senator McCarthy, who told Americans that the Communists were destroying the nation.
After World War II the relations between the US and the Soviet Union deteriorated giving rise to the Cold War which had its peak in the 40s and in the 50s. US armed forces remained the world’s strongest with the monopoly of atomic weapons, but in 1949 the Soviets exploded their own atomic device opening nuclear competition. US policy for limiting Soviet expansion, known as containment, resulted in the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan.
In 1947 Britain retired from the eastern Mediterranean leaving Greece and Turkey about to fall under Soviet influence. Truman asked Congress to aid those countries asserting that the US should help free peoples resist communist aggression, a policy known as the Truman Doctrine. The culmination of this policy was the creation in 1949 of the NATO.
However, the United States fought the Soviet influence mainly through economic assistance. Secretary of State Marshall organised the European Recovery Program, the Marshall Plan, to bring Europe back to economic vitality and undermine communism.
However, US politics in Latin America and in Asia were less successful. USA’s hegemony in Latin America was put in question by revolutions, the most important one being the Cuban Revolution. But the US kept a strong policy and intervened directly or indirectly in most countries supporting dictatorial governments or intervening as in Cuba in the 60s, Grenada and Nicaragua in the 80s and Panama in the 90s.
US policy was less successful in Asia where the Communist controlled China. The War of Korea was the first great failure of US foreign policy. The war against North Korean and Chinese forces started in 1950 and ended in 1953 after great losses with the same division.
At home the post-war era was a period of reconstruction. After 15 years of depression and war the economy was re-established. With the return to normality the younger generation could marry and have children, so this became the age of the baby boom, the housing boom and the television boom. Truman’s liberal programme of reforms, the Fair Deal, could not get many measures passed in a Congress controlled by the Republicans.
The Korean War, inflation and the Red Scare led to the election in 1952 of the first Republican President for over 20 years, General Eisenhower. He secured an unprecedented prosperity. Furthermore, political tensions eased. When Senator McCarthy began in 1954 to investigate the administration Congress decided to investigate McCarthy’s own activities, and this was the end of his career.
In foreign affairs Stalin’s death in 1953 opened better relations with the Soviet Union, in spite of two world crises, the Hungarian revolt and the Israeli invasion of Egypt.
However, during Eisenhower’s second term some social problems that would mark politics in the 60s began to arise. Civil Rights for the blacks and desegregation demanded by Martin Luther King’s non-violent Civil Rights Movement became a central concern, but also the violent reactions within the blacks with the “black power”, a movement led by Malcolm X.
2.2 1961 – 1968: The Kennedy and Johnson administrations
The 60s saw the greatest changes in morals since the 20s. A “counterculture” that legitimised radical standards sprang up. Young people rebelled against the repressed conformist society of their parents. They advocated a sexual revolution, aided by the birth control pill and the legalisation of abortion,
and drugs were increasingly used. Opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam promoted the rise of the left. Feminism was also reborn. Except for feminism, most expressions of the counterculture did not long survive, but they changed American life. The sexual revolution changed attitudes toward traditional sexual roles: people began marrying later and having fewer children, the divorce rate accelerated, the number of abortions rose, as did the illegitimacy rate, and more women entered the work force.
In the 1960 campaign Kennedy said that America was “on the edge of a New Frontier” and he took government in a new direction. The Kennedy staff was young and wanted to revitalise the nation.
But in 1961 a failed invasion of Cuba worsened relations with the Soviet Union, which hit bottom in 1962 when the Soviets began to install offensive missiles in Cuba. But Kennedy succeeded in forcing the removal of the missiles.
Kennedy’s domestic policies tried to stimulate trade, reduce unemployment, provide medical care for the aged and promote desegregation and the civil rights of blacks. Federal troops were employed to assure the admission of blacks in Southern universities.
In 1963 Kennedy was assassinated and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson took office.
Johnson carried on the New Frontier bills, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which abolished literacy tests and other voter restrictions. But the Civil Rights movement was increasingly challenged by black power violence and race riots took place in large cities. Malcolm X was killed in 1965 by a rival group and Martin Luther King was killed in 1968.
Johnson’s domestic program continued with his war on poverty. His plan for achieving a “Great Society” was the most radical legislative program since the New Deal. However, the most decisive event of this period was the outbreak of the Vietnam War. In 1964 after an attack on US warships by North Vietnam Congress passed a resolution for American action. Despite massive US bombing, many people saw that the war could not be ended at a bearable price and protests started to appear.
2.3 1969 – 1981: Nixon, Ford and Carter
Opposition to US involvement in Vietnam and violence within the United States were key issues in 1968 when the Republican Richard Nixon was elected. The economic crisis was evident with a rising cost of living and high unemployment. Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger changed US foreign policies improving relations with the Soviet Union and China. Fighting continued in Vietnam and antiwar demonstrations were continuous. A cease-fire was finally signed in 1973 ending the war as the greatest American failure, after 12 years with 58,000 American casualties.
The situation deteriorated further with the Watergate scandal. It had its origin in 1972 when five burglars were arrested in the Democratic national headquarters. In 1973, after Nixon’s re-election, it was revealed that an attempt to avoid investigation on the connection of the affair with the Republicans involved members of the White House Staff. Finally Nixon admitted in 1974 that he had directed FBI inquiries away from the White House and resigned.
Nixon was succeeded by Vice President Ford. Ford’s government followed the same policies established by Nixon. His main concern was the economy, since the Arab oil embargo worsened the recession, with high inflation and unemployment.
In 1976 the Democrat Jimmy Carter was elected. Carter’s main achievement was the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, but he had a great defeat in Iran, where the Islamic Republic was proclaimed in 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini. The US embassy was attacked and its occupants were held hostage. An attempt to rescue them in 1980 failed, and they were not released until 1981. He was also unable to make front to the severe recession at home.
2.4 1981 – 1993: The Reagan and Bush administrations
In the 1980 election Ronald Reagan won offering to recover the economy reducing taxes and cutting federal spending and was very popular for the economic recovery. His measures succeeded, but he solved short-term problems with borrowed money and whereas spending for social programs fell military spending continued to rise. In foreign affairs his effort against the leftist regime in Nicaragua was unsuccessful and in 1983 he launched an invasion of the Caribbean nation of Grenada, where Cuban influence was growing. At first US-Soviet relations were the chilliest since the height of the Cold War, but they improved radically with the new Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev.
His successor, George Bush, won on the record of peace and prosperity inherited from Reagan. His leadership was tested by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. With the declining power of the Soviet Union the war emphasised the role of the United States as the world’s single military superpower. This war was popular while it lasted but it stimulated a recession that ruined Bush’s approval.
2.5 The USA since 1993: The Clinton administration
In the 1992 presidential election the Democrat Bill Clinton won promising change. The country was plagued by a decaying economy, violent crime, poverty and deteriorating race relations. One of his highest priorities was a reform of the nation’s health-care system. In foreign relations the United States faced additional pressure as the sole superpower.
2.6 Bush´s administration
Although he lost the popular vote, meaning that more people voted for Gore than for him, the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore gave Bush the required number of electoral votes with a 537-vote margin in the state of Florida in a highly debated election. As President, Bush pushed through a $1.3 trillion tax cut program and the No Child Left Behind Act, the largest unfunded Federal Mandate in the history of the United States, and has also pushed for socially conservative efforts such as the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act and faith-based welfare initiatives.
After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Bush declared a global War on Terrorism and ordered an invasion of Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban, destroy Al-Qaeda and to capture Osama bin Laden in October 2001. In March 2003, Bush received a mandate from the U.S. Congress to lead an invasion of Iraq, asserting that Iraq was in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1441.
Running as a self-described “war president” in the midst of the Iraq War, Bush won re-election in 2004 and his presidential campaign against Senator John Kerry was successful despite controversy over Bush’s prosecution of the Iraq War and his handling of the economy. After his re-election, Bush received increasingly heated criticism, even from former allies. His domestic popularity decreased due to the war and other issues such as the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy and record budget deficits affecting the administration.
By 2006, rising prices saw Americans become increasingly conscious of the nation’s extreme dependence on steady supplies of inexpensive petroleum for energy, with President Bush admitting a U.S. “addiction to oil.” The possibility of serious economic disruption, should conflict overseas or declining production interrupt the flow, could not be ignored, given the instability in the Middle East and other oil-producing regions of the world. Many proposals and pilot projects for replacement energy sources, from ethanol to wind power and solar power, received more capital funding and were pursued more seriously in the 2000s than in previous decades.
3 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE USA IN THE INTERNATIONAL POLICY
As the two greatest powers on the world scene, the relationship between the EU and the US is central and irreplaceable. It has a long, mutually beneficial history based on shared and strong fundamental beliefs in democratic government, human rights and market economies.
Since its very inception, the process of European Integration has been strongly supported by the US. Without US vision and assistance, the European founding fathers would have had enormous difficulties. Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic believe that the relationship is valuable at all levels — for European and American business, civil societies and citizens — and that it is the task of governments to promote the building of bridges across the Atlantic. Its importance is reflected in trade relations, the fight against terrorism and the handling of crisis and conflicts.
This joint commitment of the EU and the US has found clear expression in the New Transatlantic Agenda of 1995 and the Transatlantic Economic Partnership of 1998. This partnership was further reinforced at the EU-US Summit of 2002 through the launching of a “Positive Economic Agenda.”
Bilateral trade between the EU and US amounts to over $1 billion a day; investment links are even more substantial, totalling over $1.8 trillion a year. Each partner creates jobs for about 6 million workers on each side of the Atlantic, and EU-US trade accounts for almost 40% of world trade. But the EU-US economic partnership goes way beyond pure trade matters: it is supported by a number of institutionalized dialogues and regulatory cooperation between the partners.
Through continued dialogue and cooperation the EU and US also work together to promote global peace, stability and democracy.
On a global level, the EU and US are major powers and as such have a global responsibility. Exercising that power and responsibility effectively inevitably means working together. In that respect the EU and US are jointly promoting democracy, freedom, stability and prosperity throughout the world. Whether it is in the Middle East, Afghanistan or the Balkans, Europe and the US can only succeed in advancing these values if they act together. Together the EU and US are committed to the challenge of alleviating poverty and disease and provide almost 80% of global development assistance.
To respond to global threats and protect their citizens, intensive EU-US discussions have taken place since 9/11 which have yielded strengthened cooperation and coordination in the fields of counter-terrorism and domestic security. As a result, an Enhanced Security Dialogue on transport and border security was established in 1994, yet another example of the willingness to tackle challenges together.
4 CURRENT LITERARY OVERVIEW IN THE USA
4.1 Narrative
In narrative at first this was not a period of experiments in style, but the authors rather tried to develop new themes, looking for new answers to the question “Who am I?”. The 60s and 70s were decades of experimentation in new forms of fiction: one direction was the factualised novel where the author used the facts of history, the other post-realism, which reflects the belief that we can no longer be sure if there is a real world outside our own heads.
A The Southern Writers
The central theme of their work is loneliness and the search for the self. Although their writing seems realistic, there is another world behind the one described.
An example of this is Flannery O’Connor, whose stories are filled with horrible events and grotesque characters typical of the “Southern gothic”. The events and people she depicts are often part of a religious allegory. In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” all the members of a family are murdered by criminals. Before being killed the grandmother talks to one of them about God and she sees that he is also one of the children of God.
Another author in the Southern gothic tradition is Carson McCullers. The horrors of life are a major theme in her work, but the coolness and lack of emotion with which they are described emphasise the tragedy of lonely lives. This is the case of her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), where a mute tries to make friends with other lonely people but ends up killing himself. She also paints the Southern towns filled with race hatred and lovelessness, as in The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951).
Truman Capote began in the Southern gothic tradition with Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) and The Grass Harp (1951) but in the 60s he wrote the most famous of the non-fiction novels, In Cold Blood (1966), the terrifying story of the murder of a whole family.
B Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec, a suburb of Montreal, in 1915, and was raised in Chicago. He attended the University of Chicago, received his Bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University in 1937, with honors in sociology and anthropology, did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, and served in the Merchant Marine during World War II.
Mr. Bellow’s first novel, Dangling Man, was published in 1944, it is about a man waiting to be called into the army in World War II. He is confused about his purpose, until he decides that the world is meaningless, so he is happy when he is called into the army, because there he will have orders to obey. His second, The Victim, was written in 1947. In 1948 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and spent two years in Paris and traveling in Europe, where he began The Adventures of Augie March, which won the National Book Award for fiction in 1954. Later books include Seize The Day (1956), Henderson The Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), Mosby’s Memoirs and Other Stories (1968), and Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970). His most recent work of fiction, Humboldt’s Gift (1975), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Both Herzog and Mr. Sammler’s Planet were awarded the National Book Award for fiction. Mr. Bellow’s first non-fiction work, To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account, published on October 25,1976, is his personal and literary record of his sojourn in Israel during several months in 1975.
In 1965 Mr. Bellow was awarded the International Literary Prize for Herzog, becoming the first American to receive the prize. In January 1968 the Republic of France awarded him the Croix de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, the highest literary distinction awarded by that nation to non-citizens, and in March 1968 he received the B’nai B’rith Jewish Heritage Award for “excellence in Jewish literature”, and in November 1976 he was awarded the America’s Democratic Legacy Award of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, the first time this award has been made to a literary personage.
A playwright as well as a novelist, Saul Bellow is the author of The Last Analysis and of three short plays, collectively entitled Under the Weather, which were produced on Broadway in 1966. He has contributed fiction to Partisan Review, Playboy, Harper’s Bazaar, The New Yorker, Esquire, and to literary quarterlies. His criticism has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Horizon, Encounter, The New Republic, The New Leader, and elsewhere. During the 1967 Arab-lsraeli conflict, he served as a war correspondent for Newsday. He has taught at Bard College, Princeton University, and the University of Minnesota, and is a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. In 1976 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Saul Bellow created a new hero who searches for answers in his mind rather than for things in the outside world. His characters face the existential problem, the problem of the man who feels alone in a world without God or absolute moral laws and cannot find a purpose for his life.
C J.D. Salinger
J.D. Salinger was born and grew up in the fashionable apartment district of Manhattan, New York. In his celebrated story For Esmé – With Love and Squalor Salinger depicted a fatigued American soldier. He starts a correspondence with a thirteen-year-old British girl, which helps him to get a grip of life again. Salinger himself was hospitalized for stress according to his biographer Ian Hamilton. After serving in the Army Signal Corps and Counter-Intelligence Corps from 1942 to 1946, he devoted himself to writing.
Salinger’s early short stories appeared in such magazines as Story, where his first story was published in 1940, Saturday Evening Post and Esquire, and then in the New Yorker, which published almost all of his later texts. In 1948 A Perfect Day for Bananafish appeared, which introduced Seymour Glass, who commits suicide. It was the earliest reference to the Glass family, whose stories would go on to form the main corpus of his writing. The ‘Glass cycle’ continued in the collections Franny and Zooey (1961), Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (1963) and Seimour: An Introduction(1963). Several of the stories are narrated by Buddy Glass.
Salinger’s first novel, The Catcher in the Rye, became immediately a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and won huge international acclaim. The first reviews of the work were mixed, although most critics considered it brilliant. The novel took its title from a line by Robert Burns, in which the protagonist Holden Caulfied misquoting it sees himself as a ‘catcher in the rye’ who must keep the world’s children from falling off ‘some crazy cliff’. The story is written in a monologue and in lively slang. The 16-year old restless hero – as Salinger was in his youth – runs away from school during his Christmas break to New York to find himself and lose his virginity. He spends an evening going to nightclubs, has an unsuccessful encounter with a prostitute, and the next day meets an old girlfriend. After getting drunk he sneaks home. Holden’s former schoolteacher makes homosexual advances to him. He meets his sister to tell her that he is leaving home and has a nervous breakdown. The humour of the novel places it in the tradition of Mark Twain‘s classical works, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but its world-view is more disillusioned. Holden describes everything as ‘phoney’ and is constantly in search of sincerity. Holden represents the early hero of adolescent angst, but full of life, he is the great literary opposite of Goethe’s young Werther.
D Ralph Ellison
Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Ellison has been compared to such writers as Melville and Hawthorne. He has used racial issues to express universal dilemmas of identity and self-discovery but avoided taking a straightforward political stand. “Literature is colourblind,” he once said. Many artists of the Black Arts movement rejected Ellison for his insistence that America be a land of cultural exchange and synergy. Talented in many fields, Ellison also was an accomplished jazz trumpeter and a free-lance photographer.
Ellison moved to New York City where he started to write essays, reviews and short stories for various periodicals. Ellison’s stories appeared in New Masses and other publications. He became an editor of the Negro Quaterly and started to work on his novel.
During WW II Ellison served from 1943 to 1945 in the Merchant Marines as a cook, and wrote the first line of Invisible Man after the war ended. The early version started with a story about a black American pilot who is in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, but soon Ellison found a more complex theme. After this work, Ellison published two collections of essays. His pieces on jazz drew on his experience as a musician and advocated the idea that in modern society musical traditions blend rapidly with each other. In a writing published in High Fidelity (1955) Ellison remarked that “The step from the spirituality of the spirituals to that of the Beethoven of the symphonies or the Bach of the chorales is not as vast as it seems”.
Invisible Man (1952) tells a story of a nameless Afro-American man, who is losing his sense of identity in a world of prejudice and hostility. He has an underground cellar to solve his relationship with the rest of the society. In the dark there is no colours and to fill the space with light he burns 1,369 bulbs. Before becoming free from all illusions, the narrator makes a feverish, Dantesque journey through his experiences in a segregated community in South to the North. With the prologue’s theme song, ‘What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue’, Ellison suggests that jazz might represent a fusion of different cultural influences in American society, but it also serves as a key to the mind of the narrator. Education and class consciousness do not help him in his despair but adds to his difficulties. Finally he is ready to enter the world and says: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” Invisible Man was rewarded with National Book Award in 1953.
Ellison’s second novel, Juneteenth (1999), was planned as a trilogy, but was left unfinished at his death. Ellison’s short stories were collected in Flying Home and Other Stories (1996). Ellison died in New York on April 16, 1994 of pancreatic cancer.
E Norman Mailer
Mailer was just 25 years old when he burst on the literary scene with his first novel, The Naked And The Dead. The World War II tale is universally recognized as one of the best war novels to emerge from that conflict. Published in 1948, it is all the more remarkable because Mailer wrote so realistically of combat, despite having seen little action during his two years as a U.S. Army rifleman in the Philippines at the end of the war.
Many critics saw flashes of Ernest Hemingway in the young Mailer’s novel. A recurring theme in his writing, as in Hemingway’s, was man testing his masculinity. Even as an author, Norman Mailer considered himself a battler, a fighter. He closely identified himself with boxing champions such as Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, just as Hemingway identified himself with hunters and bullfighters.
Mailer acknowledged that he modelled himself publicly after Hemingway, that he tried to become the all-around male symbol. But Hemingway observed that becoming a public figure clouds a writer’s sharpness, and Mailer agreed.
With the publication of The Naked and the Dead, Mailer became a celebrity, and he basked in the attendant publicity. His second novel, Barbary Shore, was a critical and financial failure. Mailer had trouble finding a publisher for his third effort, The Deer Park, because it was considered too overtly sexual. Reviewers dismissed it and wondered whether mailer was a one-book author who would never again write anything as good as The Naked and The Dead. But today critics have reassessed The Deer Park, and many believe it to be Mailer’s best work.
Mailer became the articulate voice of the 1960s with writing such as his novel Why Are We In Vietnam? and his eyewitness account of the 1968 presidential nominating conventions, “Miami and the Siege of Chicago.” He won the prestigious National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Armies Of The Night – a personal account of the 1967 march on the Pentagon by anti-war activists. He was awarded a second Pulitzer in 1979 for The Executioner’s Song, the true story of self-confessed murderer Gary Gilmore.
In 1984, Mailer wrote his first mystery novel, Tough Guys Don’t Dance. As the author readily admitted, he was again dealing with the Mailer theme of man testing himself. In addition to his novels, creative non-fiction, short stories and essays, Mailer wrote, produced, directed and acted in several films. His first new novel in a decade was published earlier in 2007. The Castle in the Forest is a fictional chronicle of Adolf Hitler’s boyhood, and explores themes of good and evil. In October, as he was recovering from surgery to remove scar tissue from around his lungs, On God: An Uncommon Conversation was released.
F The Beat Generation: Jack Kerouac
The Beat Generation is a term used to describe both a group of American writers who came to prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the cultural phenomena that they wrote about and inspired (later sometimes called beatniks though this is considered by many to be a pejorative term).
The major works of Beat writing are Allen Ginsberg‘s Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs‘s Naked Lunch (1959) and Jack Kerouac‘s On the Road (1957). Both Howl and Naked Lunch were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize what could be published in the United States. On the Road transformed Kerouac’s friend Neal Cassady into a youth-culture hero. The members of the Beat Generation quickly developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity.
The adjective beat had the connotations of “tired” or “down and out,” but as used by Kerouac it included the paradoxical connotations of “upbeat”, “beatific”, and the musical association of being “on the beat.” The Beat writers emphasized a visceral engagement in worldly experiences combined with a quest for deeper spiritual understanding (e.g. many of them developed a strong interest in Buddhism).
The Beat Generation was originated in the artist communities of San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. Its members expressed their alienation from conventional society adopting shabby dress and manners. Generally apolitical and indifferent to social problems, they advocated personal release, purification, and illumination induced by drugs, jazz or sex.
Jean-Louis Kerouac is best exponent of the Beat Generation. He is known for his book, On the Road, which romanticized hitchhiking and the American road to readers and travelers around the world. Though the book was not published until 1957, much of the autobiographical story took place from the mid 1940s to 50s. Jack portrayed himself through the watching eyes of Sal Paradise, and his friend and beat muse, Neal Cassady, was forever immortalized as the character Dean Moriarty.His love of authors like Thomas Wolfe and even Hemingway helped funnel some of his raw energy into writing. Though Kerouac dropped out of school and took a stint in the military, he maintained this circle of friends (which now included Cassady) that would inspire him to write more than a few travel-prose books. Kerouac would call his writing style spontaneous prose.
Kerouac considered himself the chronicler of this free-wheeling gang, and as a result of his literary success he had become the spokesman of a very real movement of writers, musicians and artists. Friends -Allen Ginsberg, most notably- called him The Great Rememberer for his ability to recall a subject or situation years after the fact and write like it was yesterday.
Much of the book, On the Road was written about his travels years before in the 40s. During that time he would take great leaps across America- hitchhiking, hopping trains and driving balls-out through the night with Cassady. They fuelled themselves on benzadrine, jazz music and a righteous indignation against the conformist culture popping up around them after the war.
The late 50s were spent entertaining and toying with media after the release of his book. From talk shows to radio to recording projects, he would amble from one event to the next, often with a bottle of whisky not far off. Keouac’s second most influential book, Dharma Bums would go on to become a talisman to later Hippies.
Kerouac mostly isolated himself in the 60’s, drinking cheap wine, playing solitaire and writing lesser known tomes. He lived with his mother and third wife, Stella Sampras, in Lowell, and later, St. Petersberg, Florida. During this time, as most Beat figures were blending seamlessly into the Hippie movement and psychedelic drug culture, Kerouac ridiculed their ideals by supporting the Viet Nam war and leading a somewhat orthodox lifestyle.
G John Updike
John Updike was born in Reading in Pennsylvania. From the age of 23, Updike supported himself by writing. In 1958 Updike made his debut as a poet with the volume The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures. Updike’s first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), was about the residents of an old people’s home.
The Centaur (1963) used a mythological framework to explore the relationship of a schoolmaster father and his son. The Coup (1979) was an exotic first-person narration by an ex-dictator of a fictitious African state. In 2000 appeared Updike’s prequel to Hamlet, in which the moody prince is not the central character but the story focuses on his mother Queen Gertrude, her husband, and Claudius, her husband’s younger brother. Terrorist, Updike’s 22nd novel, was about an 18-year-old Islamic extremist, whose critique of American culture is literally deadly.
The first book about Updike’s famous hero, Harry Angstrom, the natural athlete, a sexually magnetic, blue-eyed Swede, ended with the verb “Runs.” Updike wrote the book in the present tense, giving it a sort of cinematic quality. In Rabbit, Redux – Redux is Latin for brought back – Harry is a middle-aged bourgeois, who finds his life shattered by the infidelity of his wife. Updike leaves the reader with a question — O.K.? The last word in Rabbit Is Rich was ‘His.’ Rabbit at Rest, set in the late 1980s, paralleled the decay of society, AIDS-plagued America, and Rabbit’s swollen body, his chest pains, and his feeling that there is “nothing under you but black space…” After leaving Rabbit in 1990, Updike published in 2000 a 182-page novella called Rabbit Remembered in Licks of Love, a collection of short stories.
Updike has lived in New England, where most of his fiction is set, and in Massachusetts, about twenty miles from Boston. He has become one of the most successful American writers. As an essayist Updike is a gentle satirist, poking fun at American life and customs, without any mean-spirited nihilism. He observes the ordinary life he sees around him, and frequently asks the reader to recognize and reconsider preconceptions. In The Bankrupt Man (1983) Updike turns upside-down the common views of a bankrupt and proves that there is an afterlife. His novels Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest have won Pulitzer Prizes. After Updike laid Rabbit Angstrom to rest, his alter ego, Jewish American novelist Harry Bech, is still on the literary scene.
H Joseph Heller
Joseph Heller was born on May 1, 1923. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and from an early age, he aspired to be a writer. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Air Force as a bombardier in Italy and flew sixty missions. These experiences later became the basis for his first novel, Catch-22. When he was discharged from the Air Force in 1945, he pursued a degree in English at New York University. Heller went on to earn his M.A. from Columbia University in 1949 and study at the University of Oxford as a Fulbright Scholar for the next two years. He became a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University (1950-1952) and instructed the feminist playwright Wendy Wasserstein.
In 1961, Heller published his first novel Catch-22, which tells the story of Captain Joseph Yossarian and his attempt to avoid serving in World War II by feigning insanity. However, Yossarian is thwarted by the doctor’s argument that if he were truly mad then he would endanger his life and seek to fight more missions. On the other hand, if he were sane, he would be capable of following orders, in which case he would be sent to fight more missions. Thus the phrase “catch-22” has come to mean “a proviso that trips one up no matter which way one turns.” The novel was an immediate success despite a very acrid review by the New Yorker, and a popular film adaptation of the novel was produced in 1970.
His next work, a play titled, We Bombed New Haven (1968), had many of the same themes as Catch-22 but failed on Broadway. His subsequent novels were also not very successful. Something Happened (1974) describes the life of a fast-track corporate executive and his fears and dreams. Tan Bueno Como Oro, or Good as Gold, (1979) recounts the life of a middle-aged English professor Dr. Bruce Gold and his encounter with White House politics. It satirizes the leading politicians such as Henry Kissinger and delves into the Jewish experience in contemporary America. God Knows (1984) is a hilarious, ribald modern account of King David’s life in the Old Testament and serves as an allegory for a Jewish person’s life in the real, often antagonistic world.
In 1986, Heller developed a neurological disease. After his recovery, he wrote the novel No Laughing Matter with Speed Vogel. This novel is an optimistic and autobiographical account of his personal battle against this illness. Heller’s last novel, Closing Time (1994), is a sequel to Catch-22 that updates the lives of the characters from Heller’s first novel. However, it was nowhere near as successful as its predecessor.
As a member of the Beat Generation and the post-World War II era, Heller developed a very satirical approach towards institutions, particularly the national government and the military. He was deeply cynical of war, which was best exemplified by the “black humour” of Catch-22, and he explored the Jewish-American experience in the post-war era in an often hostile world.
I Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut emerged as one of the most influential and provocative writers in the United States, during the 1960’s. His writing was an ongoing protest against what he felt were the horrors of the 20th Century. He wrote of an unending sequence of disastrous wars, the destruction of the environment and the dehumanization of the individual, in a society dominated by science and technology.
Vonnegut’s themes were by no means unique to contemporary literature. It was rather the way he expressed his protest that made his works so forceful and popular. Fantasy, science fiction, humour, a keen sense of the absurd, and despair were the ingredients of his satires. In his fantastic tales, he would show the frustrations of average people with their burdens and boredom.
Kurt Vonnegut was a self-proclaimed pessimist. In his novel Breakfast of Champions, about a middle-aged American car salesman, Vonnegut wrote that hard work, intelligence, and perseverance do not guarantee anything in a changing America. He believed the individual was not the controller of his own destiny, but the subject to many uncertainties.
Slaughterhouse-Five is considered by many to be Vonnegut’s most powerful novel. It was about his experience, during World War Two, as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany, when he witnessed the firebombing of that city.
Kurt Vonnegut became a freelance writer in 1950 and, two years later, published his first novel, Player Piano. This futuristic story takes place in a city where the industry has been fully mechanized. The people of the city, aware they are being phased out, revolt and destroy all the machinery. They soon realize they have destroyed the technological devices they depend upon for their existence. Another of Vonnegut’s well-known works, Cat’s Cradle, is the story of two families – one of them black, the other white – who struggle to live in an icy, empty environment.
In his novels, Vonnegut’s heroes are unexceptional characters. The author’s popularity can be linked to his use of ordinary people whose frustrations force them to work together to correct the ills of their society. He saw personal satisfaction as inconceivable in a fragmented world. Some thought of him as counter-culture and angry.
J Toni Morrison
As far as black writers are concerned, Toni Morrison has created a strikingly original fiction with different aspects, from lyrical recollection to magic realism. Growing up in Lorain, Ohio, which was “an escape from stereotyped black settings — neither plantation nor ghetto,” Morrison, the second of four children, immersed herself in the close-knit community spirit and the folklore, myth, and supernatural beliefs of her culture. A common practice in her family was storytelling; after the adults had shared their stories, the children told their own. The importance of listening to stories and of creating them complemented Morrison’s profound love of reading.
After many rejections, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston accepted The Bluest Eye for publication in 1970. During this time, Morrison mentored African American women writers, including Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones and compiled and anthologized the works and histories of African-Americans. The next novel was Sula (1973). It depicted two black woman friends and their community of Medallion, Ohio. It follows the lives of Sula, a free spirit, who is considered a threat against the community, and her cherished friend Nel, from their childhood to maturity and to death. The novel won the National Book Critics Award. With the publication of Song of Salomon (1977), a family chronicle compared to Alex Haley‘s Roots, Morrison gained an international attention. Written from a male point of view, the story dealt with Milkman Dead’s efforts to recover his “ancient properties”, a cache of gold.
In 1988 Morrison received the Pulitzer Prize for the novel Beloved (1987). It was inspired by the true story of a black American slave woman, Margaret Garner. She escaped with her husband Robert from a Kentucky plantation, and sought refuge in Ohio. When the slave masters overcame them, she killed her baby, in order to save the child from the slavery she had managed to escape.
In Jazz (1992) Joe, the unfaithful husband of Violet, kills Dorcas in a fit of passion. The fragmented narrative follows the causes and consequences of the murder. Morrison’s first novel since the Nobel Prize was Paradise (1998). Again Morrison set story in a small community, this time in Ruby, Oklahoma. Nine men attack a former girls’ school nicknamed “the Convent,” now occupied by unconventional women fleeing from abusive husbands or lovers, or otherwise unhappy pasts.
4.2 Drama
The period from 1945 to 1960 was the richest era of American theatre. Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller were responsible for bringing new life to American drama. In the 30s American plays often showed individuals as types, but in the 40s the individual began to be shown in a different way. The typical character is an alienated person separated from society who has the feeling of not belonging to any group.
A Tennessee Williams
Playwright, poet, and fiction writer, Tennessee Williams left a powerful mark on American theatre. At their best, his twenty-five full-length plays combined lyrical intensity, haunting loneliness, and hypnotic violence. He is widely considered the greatest Southern playwright and one of the greatest playwrights in the history of American drama.
Williams went back to school and graduated from the University of Iowa in 1938. He then moved to New Orleans, where he changed his name to Tennessee. Having struggled with his sexuality all through his youth, he now fully entered gay life, with a new name, a new home, and promising talent. That same year, he won a prize for American Blues, a collection of one-act plays. In 1940, Battle of Angels (later rewritten as Orpheus Descending), his first full-length and professionally produced play, failed miserably. Tennessee Williams continued to struggle. 1944-1945 brought a great turning point in his life and career: The Glass Menagerie was produced in Chicago to great success, and shortly afterward was a smash hit on Broadway. While success freed Williams financially, it also made it difficult for him to write. He went to Mexico to work on a play originally titled The Poker Night. This play eventually became one of his masterpieces, A Streetcar Named Desire. It won Williams a Pulitzer Prize in 1947.
The next years were some of Williams most productive. His plays were a great success in the United States and abroad, and he was able to write works that were well-received by critics and popular with audiences: The Rose Tattoo (1950), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Night of the Iguana (1961), among many others. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof won Williams his second Pulitzer Prize.
He gave American theatregoers unforgettable characters, an incredible vision of life in the South, and a series of powerful portraits of the human condition. He was deeply interested in something he called “poetic realism,” the use of everyday objects, which, seen repeatedly and in the right contexts, become imbued with symbolic meaning. His plays, for their time, also seemed preoccupied with the extremes of human brutality and sexual behaviour: madness, rape, incest, nymphomania, as well as violent and fantastic deaths. Williams himself often commented on the violence in his own work, which to him seemed part of the human condition; he was conscious, also, of the violence in his plays being expressed in a particularly American setting.
B Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller was born in Manhattan in 1915 to Jewish immigrant parents. By 1928, the family had moved to Brooklyn, after their garment manufacturing business began to fail. Witnessing the societal decay of the Depression and his father’s desperation due to business failures had an enormous effect on Miller. After graduating from high school, Miller worked a number of jobs and saved up the money for college. In 1934, he enrolled in the University of Michigan and spent much of the next four years learning to write and working on a number of well-received plays.
In 1945, Miller published a novel, Focus, and two years later had his first play on Broadway. All My Sons,” a tragedy about a manufacturer who sells faulty parts to the military in order to save his business, was an instant success. Concerned with morality in the face of desperation, All My Sons appealed to a nation having recently gone through both a war and a depression.
Only two years after the success of All My Sons, Miller came out with his most famous and well-respected work, Death of a Salesman. Dealing again with both desperation and paternal responsibility, this work focused on a failed businessman as he tries to remember and reconstruct his life. Eventually killing himself to leave his son insurance money, the salesman seems a tragic character out of Shakespeare or Dostoevsky.
Overwhelmed by post-war paranoia and intolerance, Miller began work on the third of his major plays. Though it was clearly an indictment of the McCarthyism of the early 1950s, The Crucible was set in Salem during the witch-hunts of the late 17th century. The play, which deals with extraordinary tragedy in ordinary lives, expanded Miller’s voice and his concern for the physical and psychological wellbeing of the working class. Within three years, Miller was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and convicted of contempt of Congress for not cooperating. A difficult time in his life, Miller ended a short and turbulent marriage with actress Marilyn Monroe. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he wrote very little of note, concentrating at first on issues of guilt over the Holocaust, and later moving into comedies.
It was not until the 1991 productions of his The Ride Down Mount Morgan and The Last Yankee that Miller’s career began to see a resurgence. Both plays returned to the themes of success and failure that he had dealt with in earlier works. Concerning himself with the American dream, and the average American’s pursuit of it, Miller recognized a link between the poverty of the 1920s and the wealth of the 1980s. Encouraged by the success of these works, a number of his earlier pieces returned to the stage for revival performances.
More than any other playwright working today, Arthur Miller has dedicated himself to the investigation of the moral plight of the white American working class. With a sense of realism and a strong ear for the American vernacular, Miller has created characters whose voices are an important part of the American landscape. His insight into the psychology of desperation and his ability to create stories that express the deepest meanings of struggle, have made him one of the most highly regarded and widely performed American playwrights. In his eighty-fifth year, Miller remains an active and important part of American theater.
C Edward Albee
Born on March 12, 1928, in Washington, D.C., Edward Albee was adopted as an infant by Reed Albee, the son of Edward Franklin Albee, a powerful American Vaudeville producer. Brought up in an atmosphere of great affluence, he clashed early with the strong-minded Mrs. Albee who attempted to mold him into a respectable member of the Larchmont, New York social scene. But the young Albee refused to be bent to his mother’s will, choosing instead to associate with artists and intellectuals whom she found, at the very least, objectionable.
At the age of twenty, Albee moved to New York’s Greenwich Village where he held a variety of odd jobs including office boy, record salesman, and messenger for Western Union before finally hitting it big with his 1959 play, The Zoo Story. Originally produced in Berlin where it shared the bill with Samuel Beckett‘s Krapp’s Last Tape, The Zoo Story told the story of a drifter who acts out his own murder with the unwitting aid of an upper-middle-class editor. Along with other early works such as The Sandbox (1959) and The American Dream (1960), The Zoo Story effectively gave birth to American absurdist drama. Albee was hailed as the leader of a new theatrical movement and labelled as the successor to Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O’Neill. He is, however, probably more closely related to the likes of such European playwrights as Beckett and Harold Pinter. Although they may seem at first glance to be realistic, the surreal nature of Albee’s plays is never far from the surface. In A Delicate Balance (1966), for example, Harry and Edna carry a mysterious psychic plague into their best friends’ living room, and George and Martha’s child in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) turns out to be nothing more than a figment of their combined imagination, a pawn invented for use in their twisted, psychological games. In Three Tall Women (1994), separate characters on stage in the first act turn out to be, in the second act, the same character at different stages of her life.
4.3 Poetry
A The Beat Generation
Just like in narrative, the Beats were also very influential in the 50’s in order to renew the poetic expression. For the Beats creating literature was a kind of performance, it showed other people how deeply they felt. They often shouted out their poetry in coffee houses, with jazz in the background. “Howl”, by Allen Ginsberg is a clear example of this. Ginsberg is the main representative of the poetry of the Beats. He is often called a modern Walt Whitman, because he uses free-form poetry to praise the free life-style. His poetry almost always has a message: defending drug-taking and homosexuality or attacking American society and politics. He was also interested in Zen Buddhism. He used the Zen idea of “spontaneity” in his poetry. This spontaneity can give emotional power to this poems, but it often causes carelessly written poetry.
B Silvia Plath
Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 27, 1932. Her mother, Aurelia Schober, was a master’s student at Boston University when she met Plath’s father, Otto Plath, who was her professor. They were married in January of 1932. Otto taught both German and biology, with a focus on apology, the study of bees.
In 1940, when Sylvia was eight years old, her father died as a result of complications from diabetes. He had been a strict father, and both his authoritarian attitudes and his death drastically defined her relationships and her poems—most notably in her elegiac and infamous poem, Daddy.
Even in her youth, Plath was ambitiously driven to succeed. She kept a journal from the age of 11 and published her poems in regional magazines and newspapers. Her first national publication was in the Christian Science Monitor in 1950, just after graduating from high school.
In 1950, Plath matriculated at Smith College. She was an exceptional student, and despite a deep depression she went through in 1953 and a subsequent suicide attempt, she managed to graduate summa cum laude in 1955.
After graduation, Plath moved to Cambridge, England, on a Fulbright Scholarship. In early 1956, she attended a party and met the English poet, Ted Hughes. Shortly thereafter, Plath and Hughes were married, on June 16, 1956.
Plath returned to Massachusetts in 1957, and began studying with Robert Lowell. Her first collection of poems, Colossus, was published in 1960 in England, and two years later in the United States. She returned to England where she gave birth to the couple’s two children, Freida and Nicholas Hughes, in 1960 and 1962, respectively.
In 1962, Ted Hughes left Plath for Assia Gutmann Wevill. That winter, in a deep depression, Plath wrote most of the poems that would comprise her most famous book, Ariel.
In 1963, Plath published a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Then, on February 11, 1963, during one of the worst English winters on record, Plath wrote a note to her downstairs neighbor instructing him to call the doctor, then she committed suicide using her gas oven.
Plath’s poetry is often associated with the Confessional movement, and compared to poets such as her teacher, Robert Lowell, and fellow student Anne Sexton. Often, her work is singled out for the intense coupling of its violent or disturbed imagery and its playful use of alliteration and rhyme.
Although only Colossus was published while she was alive, Plath was a prolific poet, and in addition to Ariel, Hughes published three other volumes of her work posthumously, including The Collected Poems, which was the recipient of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize. She was the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize after death.
5 STUDY GUIDE
The central theme of their work is loneliness and the search for the self. Although their writing seems realistic, there is another world behind the one described.
An example of this is Flannery O’Connor, whose stories are filled with horrible events and grotesque characters typical of the “Southern gothic”. The events and people she depicts are often part of a religious allegory. In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” all the members of a family are murdered by criminals. Before being killed the grandmother talks to one of them about God and she sees that he is also one of the children of God.
Another author in the Southern gothic tradition is Carson McCullers. The horrors of life are a major theme in her work, but the coolness and lack of emotion with which they are described emphasise the tragedy of lonely lives. This is the case of her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), where a mute tries to make friends with other lonely people but ends up killing himself. She also paints the Southern towns filled with race hatred and lovelessness, as in The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951).
Truman Capote began in the Southern gothic tradition with Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) and The Grass Harp (1951) but in the 60s he wrote the most famous of the non-fiction novels, In Cold Blood (1966), the terrifying story of the murder of a whole family.
Another important novelist of this period is Saul Bellow, representative of the Jewish-American novel. Saul Bellow created a new hero who searches for answers in his mind rather than for things in the outside world. His characters face the existential problem, the problem of the man who feels alone in a world without God or absolute moral laws and cannot find a purpose for his life. His first novel, Dangling Man (1944), is about a man waiting to be called into the army in World War II. He is confused about his purpose, until he decides that the world is meaningless, so he is happy when he is called into the army, because there he will have orders to obey. In 1976 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
J.D. Salinger became very famous for his only novel, The Catcher in the Rye (1951). The protagonist, an unhappy teenager, runs away from the private school where he lives. For him the school and his teachers are part of the world of adults to which he refuses to adapt. The novel ends with him under medical treatment.
The black writer Ralph Ellison is also famous for one single novel, Invisible Man (1952), the most famous novel in black American literature. The protagonist is a nameless black man who is “invisible” because the people around him cannot see him. Invisibility in this novel shows the incapability of the whites to see blacks as what they really are because they have a wrong idea of what black is.
Norman Mailer started writing social protest novels. His first novel, The Naked and The Dead (1948), is a pessimistic novel about the war. Barbary Shore (1951) and The Deer Park (1955) describe the post-war world, where fear of communism and the movie dreams of Hollywood make it difficult for people to see the reality of their lives. In the 60s his style changed. Feeling the limitations of realism first he used surreal fantasy in An American Dream (1965) and Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967). With The Armies of the Night (1968), about an actual anti-war demonstration, he turned to the non-fiction novel.
The Beat Generation was a social and literary movement originating in the 50s in the artist communities of San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. Its members expressed their alienation from conventional society adopting shabby dress and manners. Generally apolitical and indifferent to social problems, they advocated personal release, purification, and illumination induced by drugs, jazz, sex, or Buddhism. Jack Kerouac, poet and novelist, was the spokesman of this generation and On the Road (1957) was the first product of the new style. A formless book, it deals with the frenetic trips across the country of penniless young people who have contempt for American materialism. The book drew the attention of the public to this underground culture of poets, folksingers, mystics and eccentrics.
Some writers that began to write in the 60s and 70s continued to examine American values in the line of the psychological studies of the 50s. John Updike is concerned with how individuals live their lives. The characters in his novels are not satisfied with their everyday lives in modern society. The protagonist of his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run [1960], Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit At Rest [1990]), cannot forget his success as a high school basketball star.
Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 (1961) was very influential in the 60s. He satirises the military mentality with surreal black comedy. The hero is a pilot in World War II who tries to prove that he is crazy so that he does not have to fight, but an Air Force rule says that anyone who tries to get out of combat is not really crazy. The novel shows the darkness and absurdity in human life. The only characters who escape destruction are those who are more absurd than the world around them.
Another direction of the novel in the 60s was experimentation. Kurt Vonnegut started writing in the 50s popular fiction such as science fiction and spy stories to present modern myths, but with a great deal of black humour. However, his most famous novel is Slaughterhouse Five (1969), an experiment of post-realism. Real time is broken up into little bits that reflect the character of the book as something written. The protagonist is an American prisoner in Dresden during World War II who becomes “unstuck in time” after the bombing of the city, so that he goes back and forth between different times in his life.
As far as black writers are concerned, Toni Morrison has created a strikingly original fiction with different aspects, from lyrical recollection to magic realism. Morrison drew on diverse literary and folk influences and dealt with important phases of black history, such as slavery in Beloved (1987) and the Harlem renaissance in Jazz (1992). She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.
The period from 1945 to 1960 was the richest era of American theatre. Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller were responsible for bringing new life to American drama. In the 30s American plays often showed individuals as types, but in the 40s the individual began to be shown in a different way. The typical character is an alienated person separated from society who has the feeling of not belonging to any group.
Tennessee Williams was brought up in the South and in his work there are elements of the Southern literary tradition.
The first of these elements is the complex feelings about the past, looked upon with sadness, guilt or fear.
Like many other Southern writers he describes his society as a kind of hell of brutality and race hatred.
But although at first his plays may appear to be realist, their language is close to poetry and reality is distorted by the imagination, showing the horrors of the soul. That is the case in The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, where the protagonists live in a world of unreality.
Furthermore, situations and characters are also distorted, they are made “larger than life”, that is, they are symbolic. In his plays he presents life as a game that cannot be won, all his characters are defeated.
Many of his plays have become very famous both in theatre productions and through Hollywood adaptations, such as The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Sweet Bird of Youth, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, etc.
Whereas the world of Tennessee Williams is ruled by irrational forces, the world of Arthur Miller is quite rational. Unlike Williams he believes that things happen for a reason and that life has a meaning. In his plays the past has a direct influence on the present, so characters have to learn to take responsibilities for their past actions. Furthermore, his plays show the belief that moral truth can be found in the human world and they often set up a dramatic situation in order to prove an intellectual point.
In Death of a Salesman the protagonist, an ageing salesman, cannot understand his lifetime of failure. The play shows that his failure is caused by false dreams, among them the American Dream of financial success.
The Crucible is set in 17th century New England during the time of public fear caused by the witch trials. Its theme is that social evil is caused by individuals who do not take responsibility for the world they live in. This play was symbolic of McCarthyism.
Theatre started its decline in the late 50s when the successful years of Williams and Miller were over. Away from commercial theatre the most outstanding figure in the 60s was Edward Albee. He was influenced by the European Theatre of the Absurd which considers that traditional realism shows what life seems to be, but for the absurdist playwrights life is actually meaningless. Albee is at the same time a social critic and satirist.
The American Dream (1961) is an attack on the false values which have destroyed the real values in American society.
His most famous work, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962), is also about how people are afraid of living without false illusions.
In the 40’s and 50’s there were several important traditional poets who began their careers with a great common experience: the war. Afterwards, however, they went on to develop their own highly personal kinds of poetic expression. Some of these powts are Roethke, Jarrel, Shapiro and Lowell.
Just like in narrative, the Beats were also very influential in the 50’s in order to renew the poetic expression. For the Beats creating literature was a kind of performance, it showed other people how deeply they felt. They often shouted ourt their powtry in coffee houses, with jazz in the background. “Howl”, by Allen Ginsberg is a clear example of this. Ginsberg is the main repesentative of the poetry of the Beats. He is often called a modern Walt Whitman, because he uses free-form poetry to praise the free life-style. His poetry almost always has a message: defending drug-taking and homosexuality or attacking American society and politics. He was also interested in Zen Budhism. He used the Zen idea of “spontaneity” in his poetry. This spontaneity can give emotional power to this poems, but it often causes carelessly written poetry.
Silvia Plath was also one of the most important American poets in the late 50’s and early 60’s, when she killed herself at the age of thirty-one. Because she often wrote about aloneness, pain and death many critics like to compare her to Emily Dickinson, but Plath’s pain seems to be stronger and more terrible.
6 BIBLIOGRAPHY
J.D. Salinger and the Critics, ed. by William F. Belcher and James E. Lee (1962);
Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait, ed. by Henry A. Grunwald (1962
A Casebook on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, ed. by Joseph A Trimmer (1972);
A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by John Hersey (1974);
John Updike Revisited by James A. Schiff (1998);
John Updike’s Rabbit at Rest by Dilvo I. Ristoff (1998);
Updike and the Patriarchal Dilemma by Mary O’Connell (1996);
John Updike; A Study of the Short Fiction by Robert M. Luscher (1993
Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Tony Morrison by T. Harris (1993);
Toni Morrison’s World of Fiction by Karen Carmean (1993);
Tony Morrison’s Fiction by J. Furman (1966); Tony Morrison, ed. by N.J. Peterson (1997)