Lecture 8

American Literature of the Second Half of the XXth Century

Introduction to the unit: Mixture of Realism and Fantasy

Among the highly acclaimed novelists of the time is Saul Bellow who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. His novel Herzog, about an average man seeking truth in a world that overwhelms him, shows clear parallels with James Joyce's Ulysses. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, about a young black man searching for identity, parallels Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man^

Other contemporary novelists of stature include Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, John Updike, Flannery O'Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Tyler, and Alice Walker. Many of these novelists have written short stories as well. John Cheever (1912-1982), a respected novelist, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1979 for his collected short stories, many of which concern suburban life. Cheever's major story collections are The Way Some People Live (1943), The Enormous Radio (1953), The Housebreaker of Shady Hill (1958), Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel (1961), The Brigadier and the Golf Widow (1964), and The World of Apples (1973). These collections of stories comprise a running social history of suburbia. Cheever won the National Book Award for The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), a comic saga of a New England family. His other novels, which show less attention to realism and more to the fantastic, include Bullet Park (1969), and Falconer (1977). One of the most well-known political fiction writers is Gore Vidal (b.1925), the author of political novels Washington DC (1967), Burr (1973), and 1876 (1985). Just as realism and romanticism have tended to merge in recent literature, so have fiction and non-fiction. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood used fictional techniques to analyse a real and seemingly senseless crime. E.L.Doctorow in his novel Ragtime combined historical figures with purely fictional characters.

Increasing attention has been paid recently to the place of non- fiction in the literary hierarchy. The essay has always "been considered an important literary form. James Baldwin and John McPhee are accomplished essayists. Among the many notable longer works of non-fiction are Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar, N.Scott Momaday's The Names, and Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams.

A number of the famous prewar poets continued to publish extensively after the war. Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, E.E.Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound all produced major collections of their works.

One of the most respected contemporary poets is Robert Lowell, a great nephew of the poet James Russell Lowell. Robert Lowell's poetry is traditional in form, but its range in theme, method, tone is breathtaking. Theodore Roethke is a master of poetic rhythm and James Dickey is a poet and novelist whose southern heritage is of great importance in his work. The other poets of note are Elizabeth Dishop and Gwendolyn Brooks.

A number of small literary movements have developed since World War II. These movements are often referred to as Postmodernism. Some writers have continued to develop the fragmentary approach of the Modernists. Others have tried blending realism and fantasy in their works, and still others have experimented with radically different fictional forms and techniques. The poetry has varied dramatically in form, style, and content. Free verse has remained a dominant poetic form.