Суродейкіна Тетяна Валеріївна

СУЧАСНА ЛІТЕРАТУРА
АНГЛОМОВНИХ КРАЇН:
КОНСПЕКТ ЛЕКЦІЙ
Навчальний посібник

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2020
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 CONTENTS

Modernism and cultural revivals: 1901–1945 …………….. 5

First world war …………………………………………….. 12
Poetry: 1901–1945 ………………………………………… 15
Cultural revival ……………………………………………. 17
Modernism in the 1920s and 1930s ……………………….. 22
British drama: 1901–45 …………………………………… 25
Early 20th-century genre literature ………………………... 26
Second world war …………………………………………. 29
Late modernism: 1946–2000 ……………………………… 31
Drama after world war two ………………………………... 40
Radio drama ……………………………………………….. 42
Poetry after world war two ………………………………... 43
Late 20th-century genre literature ………………………… 48
Science fiction …………………………………………….. 50
Literature for children and young adults ………………….. 51
Fantasy and horror ………………………………………… 52
British recipients of the Nobel prize in literature …………. 53
American literature
Realism and naturalism (1870 to 1910) …………………… 54
Turn of the 20th century and growth of modernism ………. 61
The modernist period (1910 to 1945) …………………….. 62
A lost generation …………………………………………... 63
A modern nation …………………………………………... 63
Modernist literature ……………………………………….. 66
Poetry ……………………………………………………… 66
Prose ………………………………………………………. 70
Drama …………………………………………………….. 80
Depression-era literature ………………………………….. 85
The harlem renaissance …………………………………… 87
Post-world war ……………………………………………. 94
Southern literary renaissance – second wave (1945-1965) .. 99
Beat generation ……………………………………………. 108
The novel and short story
Realism and “metafiction” ………………………………… 113
African American literature ………………………………. 117

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New fictional modes ………………………………………. 118
Multicultural writing ………………………………………. 121
Formal poets ………………………………………………. 124
Experimental poetry ………………………………………. 125
“Deep image” poets ……………………………………….. 127
New directions …………………………………………….. 128
The Off-Broadway ascendancy …………………………… 129
Science fiction …………………………………………….. 132
Children’s literature ………………………………………. 139
American Nobel prize in literature ……………………….. 145
American literary awards ………………………………….. 145
Appendix ………………………………………………….. 146
Selected poems

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 The purpose of this course is to encourage students to gain
an awareness of, and insight into, the evolution of modern
English literature.
The lectures form but the tip of the iceberg, providing you
with a door to your own research and study. You are
encouraged to share the results of your studies, helping not
only your fellow students, but teachers as well.
English literature is a huge field, and we can obviously only
try to open a few windows for you, or at least loosen the locks,
with apologies to the many superb writers who have been
omitted. So here we go!

20TH CENTURY
MODERNISM AND CULTURAL REVIVALS:
1901–1945
The 20th century opened with great hope but also with
some apprehension, for the new century marked the final
approach to a new millennium. For many, humankind was
entering upon an unprecedented era, giving expression to a
common conviction that science and technology would
transform the world in the century ahead. To achieve such
transformation, outmoded institutions and ideals had to be
replaced by ones more suited to the growth and liberation of
the human spirit. The death of Queen Victoria in 1901 and the
accession of Edward VII seemed to
confirm that a franker, less inhibited era
had begun.
In a series of wittily plays, of
which Man and Superman (performed
1905, published 1903) and Major
Barbara (performed 1905, published
1907) are the most substantial, George
Bernard Shaw turned the Edwardian
theatre into an arena for debate upon the

5
principal concerns of the day: the question of political
organization, the morality of armaments and war, the function
of class and of the professions, the validity of the family and of
marriage, and the issue of female emancipation.
Nor was he alone in this, even if he
was alone in the brilliance of his
comedy. John Galsworthy made use of
the theatre in Strife (1909) to explore the
conflict between capital and labour, and
in Justice (1910) he lent his support to
reform of the penal system.
Many Edwardian novelists were
similarly eager to explore the short
comings of English social life. Thus, in
The Man of Property (1906), the first volume of The Forsyte
Saga, Galsworthy described the destructive possessiveness of
the professional bourgeoisie; and, in Where Angels Fear to
Tread (1905) and The Longest Journey (1907), E.M. Forster
portrayed with irony the insensitivity, self-repression, and
philistinism of the English middle classes; in Howards End
(1910), Forster showed how little the rootless and self-
important world of contemporary commerce cared for the more
rooted world of culture, although he acknowledged that
commerce was a necessary evil.
Nevertheless, even as they perceived the difficulties of the
present, most Edwardian novelists, like their counterparts in the
theatre, held firmly to the belief not only that constructive
change was possible but also that this change could in some
measure be advanced by their writing.
Other writers, including Thomas Hardy and Rudyard
Kipling, who had established their reputations during the
previous century, and G.K. Chesterton, and Edward
Thomas, who established their reputations in the first decade
of the new century, were less confident about the future and

6
sought to revive the traditional forms—the ballad, the narrative
poem, the satire, the fantasy, the topographical poem, and the
essay—that in their view preserved traditional sentiments and
perceptions.
The American exponent of Naturalism Theodore Dreiser's
(1871–1945) Sister Carrie was also published in 1900.
Beautifully written, T. Hardy’s novels can be quite
pessimistic: ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ ends with the heroine’s
execution for stabbing her husband to death, a husband whom
she was emotionally pressurised into marrying, although she
loved another. ‘Jude the Obscure’ ends with three children
hanging dead behind a door, on clothes hooks. His stories often
bring out what he saw as the injustice of the divorce laws,
especially for women who had married the wrong man, and
were then trapped in their marriage, and how they and their
lovers were then ostracized by society. His writing was
sensitive, and some of his descriptions of nature in his beloved
Wessex are touching.
On the other hand, another significant
transitional figure between Victorians and
modernists, the late-19th-century
novelist, Henry James (1843–1916),
continued to publish major works into the
20th century. James, born in the US, lived
in Europe from 1875, and became a
British citizen in 1915. Great Britain had
become indistinguishable from the other
nations of the Old World, in which an
ugly rapacity had never been far from the surface. James’s
dismay at this condition gave to his subtle and compressed late
fiction, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors
(1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904), much of its gravity and
air of disenchantment.

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 James’s awareness of crisis affected the very form and style
of his writing, for he was no longer assured that the world
about which he wrote was either coherent in itself or
unambiguously intelligible to its inhabitants. His fiction still
presented characters within an identifiable social world, but he
found his characters and their world increasingly elusive
and enigmatic and his own grasp upon them, as he made clear
in The Sacred Fount (1901), the questionable consequence of
artistic will.
Another expatriate novelist, Joseph Conrad (pseudonym
of Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, born in the Ukraine of
Polish parents), shared James’s sense of crisis but attributed it
less to the decline of a specific civilization than to human
failings. Man was a solitary, romantic creature of will who at
any cost imposed his meaning upon the
world because he could not endure a
world that did not reflect his central place
within it. In Lord Jim (1900), he had
seemed to sympathize with this
predicament; but in Heart of Darkness
(1902), Nostromo (1904), The Secret
Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes
(1911), he detailed such imposition, and
the psychological pathologies he
increasingly associated with it, without
sympathy. He did so as a philosophical novelist whose concern
with the mocking limits of human knowledge affected not only
the content of his fiction but also its very structure. His writing
itself is marked by gaps in the narrative, by narrators who do
not fully grasp the significance of the events they are retelling,
and by characters who are unable to make themselves
understood.
James and Conrad used many of the conventions of 19th-
century realism but transformed them to express what are

8
considered to be peculiarly 20th-century preoccupations and
anxieties.
From 1908 to 1914 there was a remarkably productive
period of innovation and experiment as novelists and poets
undertook, in anthologies and magazines, to challenge the
literary conventions not just of the recent past but of the entire
post-Romantic era. For a brief moment, London, which up to
that point had been culturally one of the dullest of the
European capitals, boasted an avant-garde to rival those of
Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, even if its leading personality, Ezra
Pound, and many of its most notable figures were American.
The spirit of Modernism—a radical and utopian spirit
stimulated by new ideas in anthropology, psychology,
philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysis—was in the
air, expressed rather mutedly by the pastoral and often anti-
Modern poets of the Georgian movement (1912–22) and more
authentically by the English and American poets of the Imagist
movement, to which Pound first drew attention
in Ripostes (1912), a volume of his own poetry, and in Des
Imagistes (1914), an anthology. Prominent among the
Imagists were the English poet Richard Aldington and the
Americans Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and Amy Lowell.
The Imagists wrote succinct verse of dry clarity and hard
outline in which an exact visual image made a total poetic
statement. Imagism was a successor to the French Symbolist
movement, but, whereas Symbolism had an affinity with
music, Imagism sought analogy with sculpture. In 1914 Pound
turned to Vorticism, and Amy Lowell largely took over
leadership of the group.
Hilda Doolittle, byname H.D., (born September 10, 1886,
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died September 27, 1961,
Zürich, Switzerland), American poet, known initially as an
Imagist. She was also a translator, novelist-playwright, and
self-proclaimed “pagan mystic.”

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 She entered college in 1904 and, while a
student there, formed friendship with Ezra
Pound (to whom she was briefly engaged).
Ill health forced her to leave college in
1906. Five years later she traveled to
Europe for what was to have been a
vacation but became a permanent stay,
mainly in England and Switzerland. Her
first published poems, sent to Poetry
magazine by Pound, appeared under the
initials H.D., which remained thereafter her nom de plume.
Other poems appeared in Pound’s anthology Des
Imagistes (1914) and in the London journal The Egoist, edited
by Richard Aldington, to whom she was married from 1913 to
1938.
Evening
BY H. D.
The light passes The cornel-buds are still white,
from ridge to ridge, but shadows dart
from flower to flower— from the cornel-roots—
the hepaticas, wide-spread black creeps from root to root,
under the light each leaf
grow faint— cuts another leaf on the grass,
the petals reach inward, shadow seeks shadow,
the blue tips bend then both leaf
toward the bluer heart and leaf-shadow are lost.
and the flowers are lost.
H.D.’s first volume of verse, Sea Garden (1916),
established her as an important voice among the radical young
Imagist poets. The Collected Poems of H.D. (1925 and 1940),
Selected Poems of H.D. (1957), and Collected Poems 1912–
1944 (1983) secured her position as a major 20th-century poet.
H.D. is sometimes considered first among the Imagists, though
her work goes far beyond Imagism. She also helped define

10
what came to be called free verse and was among the early
users of a stream-of-consciousness narrative.
Ezra Pound and other important 20th-century poets
considered themselves artistically indebted to her.
Amy Lowell, (born Feb. 9,
1874, Brookline, Mass., U.S.—died May
12, 1925, Brookline), American critic,
lecturer, and a leading poet of
the Imagist school.
Lowell came from a prominent
Massachusetts family (her brothers were
Abbott Lawrence Lowell, later president
of Harvard, and astronomer Percival
Lowell). 1913 Lowell met Ezra Pound
and discovered his circle, the Imagists. He included one of her
poems in his anthology Des Imagistes (1914), and in that year
she published her second book, Sword Blades and Poppy Seed,
which includes her first experimentation with free verse and
“polyphonic prose.”
A Fixed Idea
BY AMY LOWELL
What torture lurks within a single thought
When grown too constant; and however kind,
However welcome still, the weary mind
Aches with its presence. Dull remembrance taught
Remembers on unceasingly; unsought
The old delight is with us but to find
That all recurring joy is pain refined,
Become a habit, and we struggle, caught.
You lie upon my heart as on a nest,
Folded in peace, for you can never know
How crushed I am with having you at rest
Heavy upon my life. I love you so
You bind my freedom from its rightful quest.
In mercy lift your drooping wings and go.

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 Lowell edited the three numbers of Some Imagist Poets
(1915–17). Subsequent volumes of her own work include Men,
Women, and Ghosts (1916), which contains her well-known
poem “Patterns”; Can Grande’s Castle (1918); and
Legends (1921). What’s O’Clock (1925), East Wind (1926),
and Ballads for Sale (1927) were published posthumously.
Other early modernists were Dorothy
Richardson (1873–1957), whose novel
Pointed Roof (1915), is one of the earliest
example of the stream of consciousness
technique and D. H. Lawrence (1885–
1930), who wrote with understanding about
the social life of the lower and middle
classes, and the personal life of those who
could not adapt to the social norms of his
time. Sons and Lovers 1913, is widely
regarded as his earliest masterpiece. There followed The
Rainbow 1915, though it was immediately seized by the police
and its sequel Women in Love published 1920. Lawrence
attempted to explore human emotions more deeply than his
contemporaries and challenged the boundaries of the
acceptable treatment of sexual issues, most notably in Lady
Chatterley's Lover, which was privately published in Florence
in 1928. However, the unexpurgated version of this novel was
not published until 1959.

FIRST WORLD WAR

World War I brought this first period of the Modernist
revolution to an end and, while not destroying its radical and
utopian impulse, made the Anglo-American Modernists all too
aware of the gulf between their ideals and the chaos of the
present. Novelists and poets parodied received forms and
styles, in their view made redundant by the immensity and
horror of the war, but with a note of anguish and with the wish

12
that writers might again make form and style the bearers of
authentic meanings.
The experiences of the First World War were reflected in
the work of war poets such as Wilfred Owen, Rupert
Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg, Edmund Blunden and Siegfried
Sassoon.
Rupert Brooke, (born Aug. 3,
1887, Rugby, Warwickshire, Eng.—died
April 23, 1915, Skyros, Greece), English
poet, a wellborn, gifted, handsome youth
whose early death in World War
I contributed to his idealized image in
the interwar period.
Brooke’s wartime sonnets, 1914
(1915), brought him immediate fame.
They express idealism in the face of death that is in strong
contrast to the later poetry of trench warfare. One of his most
popular sonnets, “The Soldier,” begins with the familiar lines:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.
Siegfried Sassoon is best
remembered for his angry and
compassionate poems about
World War I, which brought
him public and critical
acclaim. Avoiding the
sentimentality and jingoism of
many war poets, Sassoon
wrote of the horror and brutality of trench warfare and
contemptuously satirized generals, politicians, and churchmen
for their incompetence and blind support of the war. He was
also well known as a novelist and political commentator. In
1957 he was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Poetry.

13
 Born into a wealthy Jewish family, sometimes called the
“Rothschilds of the East” because the family fortune was made
in India, Sassoon lived the leisurely life of a cultivated country
gentleman before the World War I, pursuing his two major
interests, poetry and fox hunting.
Public reaction to Sassoon’s poetry was fierce. Some
readers complained that the poet displayed little patriotism,
while others found his shockingly realistic depiction of war to
be too extreme. Even pacifist friends complained about the
violence and graphic detail in his work (see Appendix). But the
British public bought the books because, in his best poems,
Sassoon captured the feeling of trench warfare and the
weariness of British soldiers for a war that seemed never to
end.
After the war, Sassoon became involved in Labour Party
politics, lectured on pacifism, and continued to write.
Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna was a Scottish Gaelic poet who
served in the First World War, and as a war poet described the
use of poison gas in his poem Òran a' Phuinnsuin ("Song of
the Poison"). His poetry is part of oral literature, as he himself
never learnt to read and write in his native language.
Welsh poet Hedd Wyn, who was killed in World War I
although producing comparatively few war poems as such, was
later the subject of an Oscar-nominated Welsh film.
In Parenthesis, an epic poem by David Jones first published
in 1937, is a notable work of the literature of the First World
War, that was influenced by Welsh traditions, despite Jones
being born in England.
In non-fiction prose T. E. Lawrence's (Lawrence of Arabia)
autobiographical account in Seven Pillars of Wisdom of
the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire is important.

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 POETRY: 1901–1945
Though not a modernist, Thomas Hardy was an important
transitional figure between the Victorian era and the 20th
century. A major novelist of the late 19th century, Hardy, after
the adverse criticism of his last novel, Jude the Obscure,
concentrated on publishing poetry.
The most significant writing of the period,
traditionalist or modern, was inspired by
neither hope nor apprehension but by bleaker
feelings that the new century would witness
the collapse of a whole civilization. The new
century had begun with Great Britain
involved in the South African War (the Boer
War; 1899–1902), and it seemed to some that
the British Empire was as doomed to
destruction, both from within and from without, as had been
the Roman Empire. In his poems on the South African
War, Hardy (whose achievement as a poet in the 20th century
rivaled his achievement as a novelist in the 19th) questioned
simply and sardonically the human cost of empire building and
established a tone and style that many British poets were to use
in the course of the century, while Kipling, who had done
much to engender pride in empire, began to speak in his verse
and short stories of the burden of empire and the tribulations it
would bring.
Free verse and other stylistic
innovations came to the forefront in this
era, with which T. S. Eliot and Ezra
Pound were especially associated.
T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) was born
American, migrated to England in 1914,
at the age of 25, and was naturalised as a
British subject in 1927 at the age of 39.
He was "arguably the most important

15
English-language poet of the 20th century." He produced some
of the best-known poems in the English language, including
"The Waste Land" (1922) and Four Quartets (1935–1942). He
is also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the
Cathedral (1935). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 1948.
In his most innovative poetry, Prufrock and Other
Observations (1917) and The Waste Land (1922), he traced the
sickness of modern civilization—a civilization that, on the
evidence of the war, preferred death or death-in-life to life—to
the spiritual emptiness and rootlessness
of modern existence.
Eliot's friend Ezra Pound (1885–
1972), an American expatriate, made
important contributions of British
literature during his residence in
London. He was responsible for the
publication in 1915 of Eliot's "The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", but more
important was the major editing that he did on the "The Waste
Land".
Eliot (whose influence as a literary critic now rivaled his
influence as a poet) announced that he was a “classicist in
literature, royalist in politics and anglo-
catholic in religion” and committed
himself to hierarchy and order. Elitist
and paternalistic, he did not, however,
adopt the extreme positions of Pound
(who left England in 1920 and settled
permanently in Italy in 1925) or Lewis.
Drawing upon the ideas of the left and
of the right, Pound and Lewis dismissed
democracy and argued that economic
and ideological manipulation was the

16
dominant factor. For some, the antidemocratic views of the
Anglo-American Modernists simply made explicit the
reactionary tendencies inherent in the movement from its
beginning; for others, they came from a tragic loss of balance
occasioned by World War I. This issue is a complex one, and
judgments upon the literary merit and political status of
Pound’s ambitious but immensely difficult Imagist epic The
Cantos (1917–70) are sharply divided.
In the 1930s the Auden Group, sometimes called simply
the Thirties poets, was an important group of politically left-
wing writers, that included W. H. Auden (1907–73), Louis
MacNeice (1907–63), Cecil Day-Lewis (1904–72, Poet
Laureate from 1968), and Stephen Spender (1909–95). For
Auden especially, sexual repression was the enemy, and here
the writings of Sigmund Freud and D.H. Lawrence were
valuable. Whatever their individual preoccupations, these poets
produced in the very play of their poetry, with its mastery of
different genres, its rapid shifts of tone and mood, and its
strange juxtapositions of the colloquial and esoteric, a blend of
seriousness and high spirits irresistible to their peers. Auden
was a major poet who had a similar influence on subsequent
poets as W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot had had on earlier
generations.
CULTURAL REVIVAL
In the late 19th century and early 20th century, Welsh
literature began to reflect the way the Welsh language was
increasingly becoming a political symbol. Two important
literary nationalists were Saunders Lewis (1893–1985)
and Kate Roberts (1891–1985),
both of whom began publishing
in the 1920s.
Saunders Lewis was above
all a dramatist. His earliest
published play was Blodeuwedd

17
(The woman of flowers) (1923–25, revised 1948). Other
notable plays include Buchedd Garmon (The life of Germanus)
(radio play, 1936) and several others after the war. Lewis also
published two novels, Monica (1930) and Merch Gwern Hywel
(The daughter of Gwern Hywel) (1964) and two collections of
poems. In addition he was a historian, literary critic, and a
founder of the Welsh National Party in 1925 (later known
as Plaid Cymru).
Kate Roberts' first volume of short stories, O gors y
bryniau ("From the swamp of the
hills"), appeared in 1925 but perhaps
her most successful book of short
stories is Te yn y grug ("Tea in the
heather") (1959), a series of stories
about children. As well as short
stories Roberts also wrote novels,
perhaps her most famous being Traed mewn cyffion ("Feet in
chains") (1936) which reflected the hard life of a slate
quarrying family.
Kate Roberts' and Saunders Lewis's careers continued after
World War II and they both were among the foremost Welsh-
language authors of the twentieth century.
James Pittendrigh MacGillivray (1856–1938) and Lewis
Spence (1874–1955) looked back to what they regarded as a
Golden Age of Middle Scots literature, partly as a political
gesture to revive the style that prevailed when Scotland was a
sovereign nation under the Stuarts. Such experimentation with
archaising language for poetic effect did not found a new
direction for literature in Scots, but their willingness to play
with Mediaeval poetic language had an influence by
stimulating debate and stimulating new ways of experimenting
with Scots as a literary language.
A duality of character in the literature of Scotland came to
be characterised as Caledonian Antisyzygy –a self-imposed

18
critical discourse about how to forge a model of homogenous
national Scottish culture out of a heterogenous patchwork of
language communities and national loyalties. In the early 20th
century in Scotland, a renaissance in the use
of Lowland Scots occurred, its most vocal
figure being Hugh MacDiarmid whose A
Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), is
widely regarded as one of the most
important long poems in 20th-century
Scottish literature.
With the revival of Cornish there have
been newer works written in the language.
In the first half of the 20th century poetry was the focus of
literary production in Cornish. The epic poem Trystan hag
Isolt by A. S. D. Smith `(1883–1950) reworked the Tristan and
Iseult legend. Peggy Pollard's 1941 play Beunans Alysaryn was
modelled on the 16th-century saints' plays. John Hobson
Matthews wrote several poems, such as the patriotic "Can
Wlascar Agam Mamvro" ("Patriotic Song of our
Motherland"). Robert Morton Nance (1873–1959) created a
body of verse, such as "Nyns yu Marow Myghtern Arthur"
("King Arthur is not Dead").
Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, and
Eliot were the principal male figures
of Anglo-American Modernism, but
important contributions also were
made by the Irish poet and
playwright William Butler Yeats.
By virtue of nationality, residence,
and, in Yeats’s case, an unjust reputation as a poet still steeped
in Celtic mythology, he had less immediate impact upon the
British literary heritage in the late 1910s and early 1920s than
Pound, Lewis and Eliot, although by the mid-1920s his
influence had become direct and substantial. Many critics

19
today argue that Yeats’s work as a poet is the most important
Modernist achievements of the period.
In his early verse and drama, Yeats evoked a legendary and
supernatural Ireland in language that was often vague and
grandiloquent. As an adherent of the cause of Irish nationalism,
he had hoped to instill pride in the Irish past. The poetry of The
Green Helmet (1910) and Responsibilities (1914), however,
was marked not only by a more concrete and colloquial style
but also by a growing isolation from the nationalist movement.
The grandeur of his mature reflective poetry in The Wild
Swans at Coole (1917) (see Appendix), The Tower (1928),
and The Winding Stair (1929) derived in large measure from
the way in which (caught up by the violent discords of
contemporary Irish history) he accepted the fact that his
idealized Ireland was illusory. At its best his mature style
combined passion and precision with powerful symbol, strong
rhythm, and lucid diction; and even though his poetry often
touched upon public themes, he never ceased to reflect upon
the Romantic themes of creativity, selfhood, and the
individual’s relationship to nature, time, and history.
Novelists who are not considered modernists
While modernism was to become an important literary
movement in the early decades of the new century, there were
also many fine writers who, like Thomas Hardy, were not
modernists. Novelists include: Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936),
who was also a successful poet; H. G. Wells (1866–1946);
John Galsworthy (1867–1933), (Nobel Prize in Literature,
1932), whose novels include The Forsyte Saga (1906–21);
Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) author of The Old Wives' Tale
(1908); G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936); E.M. Forster (1879–
1970).
The most popular British writer of the early years of the
20th century was arguably Rudyard Kipling, a highly
versatile writer of novels, short stories and poems, and to date

20
the youngest ever recipient of the Nobel
Prize for Literature (1907). Kipling's
works include The Jungle Books (1894–
95), The Man Who Would Be King and
Kim (1901), while his inspirational poem
"If—" (1895) (see Appendix) is a
national favourite and a memorable
evocation of Victorian stoicism,
regarded as a traditional British virtue.
Kipling's reputation declined during his
lifetime but more recently postcolonial studies has "rekindled
an intense interest in his work, viewing it as both symptomatic
and critical of imperialist attitudes".
H. G. Wells was a highly prolific
author who is now best known for his
work in the science fiction genre. His
most notable science fiction works
include The War of the Worlds, The Time
Machine, The Invisible Man and The
Island of Doctor Moreau, all written in the
1890s. Other novels include Kipps (1905)
and Mr Polly (1910).
Strongly influenced by
his Christian faith, G. K.
Chesterton was a prolific
and hugely influential
writer with a diverse
output. His best-known
character is the priest-
detective Father Brown,
who appeared only in short stories, while The Man Who Was
Thursday published in 1908 is arguably his best-known novel.
Of his nonfiction, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906) has
received some of the broadest-based praise.

21
 However, unlike these other authors, Forster's work is
"frequently regarded as containing both modernist and
Victorian elements". Forster's A Passage to India 1924,
reflected challenges to imperialism, while his earlier works
such as A Room with a View (1908) and Howards End (1910),
examined the restrictions and hypocrisy of Edwardian society
in England.

MODERNISM IN THE 1920s AND 1930s

Writing in the 1920s and 1930s Virginia Woolf was an
influential feminist, and a major stylistic innovator associated
with the stream-of-
consciousness technique. Her
novels include Mrs Dalloway
1925 (greatly influenced by J.
Joyce), To the Lighthouse
1927, Orlando 1928, The
Waves 1931, and A Room of
One's Own 1929, which contains her famous dictum; "A
woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to
write fiction". She is said to have had mental problems. At any
rate, she drowned herself in the Thames.
Her eminence as a literary critic
and essayist did much to foster an
interest in the work of other
female Modernist writers of the period,
such as Katherine Mansfield. In Bliss
and Other Stories (1920) and The
Garden Party and Other Stories (1922),
Mansfield (who went to England at age 19) revolutionized
the short story by rejecting the mechanisms of plot in favour of
an impressionistic sense of the flow of experience, punctuated
by an arresting moment of insight.

22
 V. Woolf and E. M. Forster were members of
the Bloomsbury Group, an enormously influential group of
associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and
artists. Setting themselves against the humbug and hypocrisy
that, they believed, had marked their parents’ generation in
upper-class England, they aimed to be uncompromisingly
honest in personal and artistic life.
James Joyce (1882-1942) was another of those linguists
who chose Paris. His most well-known work is ‘Ulysses’, an
example of his so-called ‘stream of consciousness’ writing,
which tries to catch one’s deepest thoughts and imagination on
paper, a kind of interior monologue. As such, it is naturally
unstructured. ‘Ulysses’ deals with a day in Dublin, and a whole
gaggle of characters. Joyce certainly pushes written language
to its limits. In contrast, his ‘Dubliners’, a series of short stories
about life in Dublin, is surprisingly prosaic in style. He
influenced another Irishman, the playwright Samuel Becket
(1906-1989), another linguist residing in Paris, best known for
‘ En attendant Godot’, written originally in French. The
gripping play ends without Godot arriving.
Joyce, who spent his adult life on the continent of Europe,
expressed in his fiction his sense of the
limits and possibilities of the Ireland he
had left behind. In his largely
autobiographical novel A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man (1916), he
described in fiction at once realist and
symbolist the individual cost of the
sexual and imaginative oppressiveness of
life in Ireland. As if by provocative contrast, his panoramic
novel of urban life, Ulysses (1922), was sexually frank and
imaginatively profuse. (Copies of the first edition were burned
by the New York postal authorities, and British customs
officials seized the second edition in 1923.) Employing

23
extraordinary formal and linguistic inventiveness, including
the stream-of-consciousness method, Joyce depicted the
experiences and the fantasies of various men and women in
Dublin on a summer’s day in June 1904. Yet his purpose was
not simply documentary, for he drew upon an encyclopaedic
range of European literature to stress the rich universality of
life buried beneath the provincialism of pre-independence
Dublin, in 1904 a city still within the British Empire.
In his even more experimental Finnegans Wake (1939),
extracts of which had already appeared as Work in
Progress from 1928 to 1937, Joyce’s commitment to cultural
universality became absolute. By means of a strange,
polyglot idiom of puns and portmanteau words, he not only
explored the relationship between the conscious and the
unconscious but also suggested that the languages and myths of
Ireland were interwoven with the languages and myths of many
other cultures.
An essayist and novelist, George
Orwell's works are considered important
social and political commentaries of the
20th century, dealing with issues such as
poverty in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
and Down and Out in Paris and
London (1933), the exploration of
colonialism in Burmese Days (1934), and
in the 1940s his satires of totalitarianism
included Animal Farm (1945). Orwell's
works were often semi-autobiographical and in the case
of Homage to Catalonia, wholly.
Evelyn Waugh satirised the "bright young things" of the
1920s and 1930s, notably in A Handful of Dust, and Decline
and Fall, while Brideshead Revisited 1945, has a theological
basis, aiming to examine the effect of divine grace on its main
characters.

24
 In the wake of the war the dominant
tone, at once cynical and bewildered,
was set by Aldous Huxley’s
satirical novel Crome Yellow (1921).
Drawing upon Lawrence and Eliot, he
concerned himself in his novels of
ideas with the fate of the individual in
rootless modernity. His pessimistic
vision found its most complete
expression in the 1930s, however, in his most famous and
inventive novel, the anti-utopian fantasy Brave New World
(1932), and his account of the anxieties of middle-
class intellectuals of the period, Eyeless in Gaza (1936).
In 1938 Graham Greene's (1904–91)
first major novel Brighton Rock was
published. It’s a Battlefield (1934) and
Brighton Rock (1938) are desolate studies, in
the manner of Conrad, of the loneliness and
guilt of men and women trapped in a
contemporary England of conflict and decay.

BRITISH DRAMA: 1901–45

Irish playwrights George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
and J. M. Synge (1871–1909) were influential in British
drama. Shaw's career as a playwright began in the last decade
of the nineteenth century, while Synge's plays belong to the
first decade of the twentieth century. Synge's most famous
play, The Playboy of the Western World, "caused outrage and
riots when it was first performed" in Dublin in 1907. George
Bernard Shaw turned the Edwardian theatre into an arena for
debate about important political and social issues, like
marriage, class, "the morality of armaments and war" and the
rights of women.

25
 In the 1920s and later Noël Coward (1899–1973) achieved
enduring success as a playwright, publishing more than 50
plays from his teens onwards. Many of his works, such as Hay
Fever (1925), Private Lives (1930), Design for Living (1932),
Present Laughter (1942) and Blithe Spirit (1941), have
remained in the regular theatre repertoire.
In the 1930s W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood
co-authored verse dramas, of which The Ascent of F6 (1936) is
the most notable, that owed much to Bertolt Brecht.
T. S. Eliot had begun this attempt to revive poetic drama
with Sweeney Agonistes in 1932, and this was followed by The
Rock (1934), Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and Family
Reunion (1939). There were three further plays after the war.
The writing of the interwar period had great breadth
and diversity, from Modernist experimentation to new
documentary modes of realism and from art
as propaganda (particularly in the theatre) to conventional
fiction, drama, and poetry produced for the popular market.
Two trends stand out: first, the impact of film on the writing of
the decade, not least on styles of visual realization
and dialogue, and, second, the ubiquitous preoccupation with
questions of time, on the psychological, historical, and even
cosmological levels. As the world became less stable, writers
sought both to reflect this and to seek some more-fundamental
grounding than that provided by contemporary circumstances.
EARLY 20TH-CENTURY GENRE LITERATURE
Emma Orczy (Baroness Orczy)'s The
Scarlet Pimpernel was originally a highly
successful play in 1905. The novel The
Scarlet Pimpernel was published soon after
the play opened and was an immediate
success. Orczy gained a following of
readers in Britain and throughout the world.
The popularity of the novel, which

26
recounted the adventures of a member of the English gentry in
the French Revolutionary period, encouraged her to write a
number of sequels for her "reckless daredevil" over the next 35
years. The play was performed to great acclaim in France,
Italy, Germany and Spain, while the novel was translated into
16 languages. Subsequently, the story has been adapted for
television, film, a musical and other media. Her stories about
Lady Molly of Scotland Yard were an early example of a
female detective as main character. Her character The Old Man
in the Corner was among the earliest armchair detectives to be
created.
John Buchan wrote adventure novels Prester John (1910)
and four telling the adventures of Richard Hannay, of which
the first, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) is the best known.
Novels featuring a gentleman adventurer were popular
between the wars, exemplified by the series of H. C. McNeile
with Bulldog Drummond 1920, and Leslie Charteris, whose
many books chronicled the adventures of Simon Templar,
alias The Saint.
We now look at three childrens’ writers, Lewis Carroll
(real name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an Oxford
mathematician, non-practising Anglican deacon, and
photographer, 1832-1898), Kenneth Graham (1859-1932), and
Beatrix Potter (1866-1943). Few have not heard of Carroll’s
‘Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘Through the Looking-Glass and
what Alice found there’, both of which are intriguing fantasies,
almost making imagination real.
From Alice’s fantasy world, the Scotsman Kenneth
Graham takes us to the fantasy world of little animals, with
‘The Wind in the Willows’, written to his son. We see the daily
lives of the toad, the badger, rat and mole in a typical English
country setting.
Beatrix Potter also wrote short books about animals,
illustrating them herself. Of note are ‘The Tale of Peter Rabbit’

27
and the ‘Tale of Mrs.Tittlemouse. She spent most of her later
life in the Lake District, the most beautiful part of England.
This had a kind effect on her writing.
In 1908 the Scouts founder Robert Baden-Powell's first
book Scouting for Boys was published. Classics of children's
literature include A. A. Milne's collection of books about a
fictional bear he named Winnie-the-Pooh, who
inhabits Hundred Acre Wood.
Prolific children's author Enid Blyton chronicled the
adventures of a group of young children and their dog in The
Famous Five.
T. H. White wrote the Arthurian fantasy The Once and
Future King, the first part being The Sword in the Stone 1938.
Mary Norton wrote The Borrowers, featuring tiny people
who borrow from humans. Hugh Lofting created the
character Doctor Dolittle who appears in a series of twelve
books, while Dodie Smith's The Hundred and One
Dalmatians featured the villainous Cruella de Vil.
This was called the Golden Age of Detective
Fiction. Agatha Christie, a writer of crime novels, short
stories and plays, is best remembered for her 80 detective
novels and her successful West End theatre plays. Christie's
works, particularly those featuring the detectives Hercule
Poirot or Miss Marple, made her one of the most important and
innovative writers in the development of the genre. Her most
influential novels include The Murder of Roger Ackroyd 1926
(one of her most controversial novels, its innovative twist
ending had a significant impact on the genre), Murder on the
Orient Express 1934, Death on the Nile 1937 and And Then
There Were None 1939.
A major work of science fiction, from the early 20th
century, is A Voyage to Arcturus by Scottish writer David
Lindsay, first published in 1920. It combines fantasy,
philosophy, and science fiction in an exploration of the nature

28
of good and evil and their relationship with existence. It has
been described by critic and philosopher Colin Wilson as the
"greatest novel of the twentieth century", and was a central
influence on C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy.
From the early 1930s to late 1940s, an informal literary
discussion group associated with the English faculty at the
University of Oxford, were the "Inklings". Its leading members
were the major fantasy novelists; C. S. Lewis and J. R. R.
Tolkien. Lewis is known for The Screwtape Letters 1942, The
Chronicles of Narnia and The Space Trilogy, while Tolkien is
best known as the author of The Hobbit 1937, The Lord of the
Rings, and The Silmarillion.

SECOND WORLD WAR

It was anticipated that the outbreak of war in 1939 would
produce a literary response equal to that of the First World
War. The Times Literary Supplement went so far as to pose the
question in 1940: "Where are the war-poets?"
The outbreak of war in 1939, as in 1914, brought to an end
an era of great intellectual and creative exuberance. Individuals
were dispersed; the rationing of paper affected the production
of magazines and books; and the poem and the short story,
convenient forms for men under arms, became the favoured
means of literary expression. It was hardly a time for new
beginnings, although the poets of the New Apocalypse
movement produced three anthologies (1940–45) inspired by
Neoromantic anarchism. No important new novelists or
playwrights appeared.
Only three new poets (all of whom died on active service)
showed promise: Alun Lewis, Sidney Keyes, and Keith
Douglas, the latter the most gifted and distinctive, whose eerily
detached accounts of the battlefield revealed a poet of potential
greatness. Lewis’s haunting short stories about the lives of
officers and enlisted men are also works of very great
accomplishment.
29
 Keith Castellain Douglas, (born
Jan. 20, 1920, Royal Tunbridge
Wells, Kent, Eng.—died June 9,
1944, Normandy, Fr.), British poet who
is remembered for his irony, eloquence,
and fine control in expressing the
misery and waste of war, to which he
was to fall victim. Douglas’ education
at Oxford University was cut short by the outbreak of war. By
1941 he was serving as a tank commander in North Africa,
where some of his most powerful poems were written (Alamein
to Zem-Zem, 1946). He was moved back to Britain in 1944 to
take part in the D-Day invasion; he fell in combat in Normandy
on his third day there. His posthumous Collected Poems (1951)
enhanced his reputation as a war poet, but in 1964 Ted
Hughes’s edition of Douglas’ Selected Poems established him
as a poet of universal significance.
Simplify Me When I'm Dead
Remember me when I am dead the opinions I held, who was my foe
and simplify me when I'm dead. and what I left, even my appearance
but incidents will be no guide.
As the processes of earth
strip off the colour of the skin: Time's wrong-way telescope will show
take the brown hair and blue eye a minute man ten years hence
and by distance simplified.
and leave me simpler than at birth,
when hairless I came howling in Through that lens see if I seem
as the moon entered the cold sky. substance or nothing: of the world
deserving mention or charitable
Of my skeleton perhaps, oblivion,
so stripped, a learned man will say
"He was of such a type and not by momentary spleen
intelligence," no more. or love into decision hurled,
leisurely arrive at an opinion.
Thus when in a year collapse
particular memories, you may Remember me when I am dead
deduce, from the long pain I bore and simplify me when I'm dead

30
 Unlike such earlier war poets as Wilfred Owen and
Siegfried Sassoon, Douglas avoided moral judgments in his
works. Detached and sometimes ironic, his battle poems are
characterized by a visual sensibility that critics attribute to his
training as an artist, notably in the three-poem sequence,
“Landscape with Figures.”
Fair Stood the Wind for France was a 1944 novel by
H. E. Bates who was commissioned into the RAF solely to
write short stories as the Air Ministry realised that the populace
was less concerned with facts and figures about the war than it
was with reading about those who were fighting it.
Put Out More Flags (1942) by Evelyn Waugh is set during
the "Phoney War", and follows the wartime activities of
characters introduced in Waugh's earlier satirical novels.
The Second World War has remained a theme in British
literature. Later works of note include: Atonement, Ian
McEwan's Booker Prize shortlisted 2001 novel; Charlotte
Gray, a 1999 novel by Sebastian Faulks; and Empire of the
Sun, J. G. Ballard's 1984 novel drawing extensively on his
wartime experiences.

LATE MODERNISM: 1946–2000

Though some have seen modernism ending by around
1939, with regard to English literature, "When (if) modernism
petered out and postmodernism began has been contested
almost as hotly as when the transition from Victorianism to
modernism occurred". In fact a number of modernists were still
living and publishing in the 1950s and 1960, including T. S.
Eliot and Dorothy Richardson.
Among British writers in the 1940s and 1950s was Dylan
Thomas; Evelyn Waugh and W.H. Auden continued publishing
significant works. In 1947 Malcolm Lowry published Under
the Volcano.

31
 George Orwell's satire of totalitarianism, Nineteen Eighty-
Four, was published in 1949. An essayist and novelist, Orwell's
works are important social and political commentaries of the
20th century. One of the most influential novels of the
immediate post-war period was William Cooper's naturalistic
Scenes from Provincial Life, a conscious rejection of the
modernist tradition.
Graham Greene's works span the 1930s to the 1980s. He
was a convert to Catholicism and his novels explore the
ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world. He
combined serious literary acclaim with broad popularity in
novels such as Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory
(1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948) and A Burnt-Out Case
(1961), The Human Factor 1978).
Other novelists writing in the 1950s and later
were: Anthony Powell whose twelve-volume cycle of novels A
Dance to the Music of Time, is a comic examination of
movements and manners, power and passivity in English
political, cultural and military life in the mid-20th
century; Kingsley Amis who is best known for his academic
satire Lucky Jim 1954; Nobel Prize
laureate William Golding whose
allegorical novel Lord of the Flies
1954, shows how culture created by
man fails, using, as an example, a
group of British schoolboys
marooned on a deserted island who
try to govern themselves with
disastrous results. In Golding’s
words, “man produces evil as a bee
produces honey.” Concentrating on
small communities, Golding transfigures them into
microcosms. Allegory and symbol set wide resonances
quivering, so that short books make large statements. In

32
Golding’s novel schoolboys cast away on a Pacific island
reenact humanity’s fall from grace as their relationships
degenerate from innocent
camaraderie to totalitarian butchery.
Edward Blishen whose first best-
selling book Roaring Boys 1955, is
an honest account of teaching in a
London secondary modern school in
the 1950s (followed by a sequel This
Right Soft Lot 1969), and whose most
famous work is The God Beneath the
Sea, a children's novel based on
Greek mythology, written in
collaboration with Leon Garfield and
published in 1970; philosopher Iris Murdoch who was a
prolific writer of novels dealing
with sexual relationships, morality,
and the power of the unconscious,
including Under the Net 1954. A
philosopher as well as a novelist,
she ran antiliberal risks in its
preference for allegory, pattern,
and symbol over the social
capaciousness and realistic
rendition of character at which the
great 19th-century novels excelled.
Murdoch’s own fiction, typically
engaged with themes of goodness,
authenticity, selfishness, and altruism, oscillates between these
two modes of writing. A Severed Head (1961) is the most
incisive and entertaining of her elaborately artificial works; The
Bell (1958) best achieves the psychological and emotional
complexity she found so valuable in classic 19th-century
fiction.

33
 Scottish novelist Muriel Spark pushed
the boundaries of realism: her first
novel, The Comforters (1957) concerns a
woman who becomes aware that she is a
character in a novel; The Ballad of
Peckham Rye (1960) has a character who,
in line with a tradition of Scottish
literature, is literally the devil incarnate.
The narrator of her most famous
novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), at times takes
the reader briefly into the main action's distant future, to see the
various fates that befall its characters. It makes events in a
1930s Edinburgh classroom replicate in miniature the rise of
fascism in Europe.
Anthony Burgess is especially remembered for his
dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange 1962, set in the not-too-
distant future, which was made into a film (1971) by Stanley
Kubrick.
One of Penguin Books' most successful publications in the
late 20th century was Richard Adams's heroic fantasy
Watership Down (1972). Evoking epic themes, it recounts the
odyssey of a group of rabbits seeking to establish a new home.
John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) played
with the nature of fiction, with its narrator who freely admits
the fictive nature of the story he relays, and its alternative
endings.
From the late 1960s onward, the outstanding trend in fiction
was enthrallment with empire. Three half-satiric, half-elegiac
novels by J.G. Farrell (Troubles [1970], The Siege of
Krishnapur [1973], and The Singapore Grip [1978]) likewise
spotlighted imperial discomfiture. Then, in the 1980s,
postcolonial voices made themselves audible.
Salman Rushdie is among a number of post Second World
War writers from former British colonies who permanently

34
 settled in Britain. Salman Rushdie’s
crowded comic saga about the generation
born as Indian independence dawned,
Midnight’s Children (1981), boisterously
mingles material from Eastern fable,
Hindu myth, Islamic lore, Bombay
cinema, cartoon strips, advertising
billboards, and Latin American magic
realism. (Such eclecticism, sometimes
called “postmodern,” also showed itself
in other kinds of fiction in the 1980s.
Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in
101/2 Chapters [1989], for example, inventively mixes fact and
fantasy, reportage, art criticism, autobiography, parable, and
pastiche in its working of fictional variations on the Noah’s
Ark myth).
For Rushdie, as Shame (1983), The Satanic Verses (1988),
The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), and The Ground Beneath Her
Feet (1999) further demonstrate, stylistic miscellaneousness—a
way of writing that exhibits the vitalizing effects of cultural
cross-fertilization—is especially suited to conveying
postcolonial experience. (The Satanic Verses, his
most controversial novel inspired in part by the life of
Muhammad, was understood differently in the Islamic world,
to the extent that the Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini pronounced a fatwa, in effect a death sentence [later
suspended], on Rushdie.) However, not all postcolonial authors
followed Rushdie’s example.
Doris Lessing from Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe),
published her first novel The Grass is Singing in 1950, after
immigrating to England. She initially wrote about her African
experiences. Lessing soon became a dominant presence in the
English literary scene, publishing frequently, and won the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. Other works by her include

35
 a sequence of five novels collectively
called Children of Violence (1952–69),
The Golden Notebook (1962), The Good
Terrorist (1985), and a sequence of five
science fiction novels the Canopus in
Argos: Archives (1979–1983).
V. S. Naipaul (1932– ) was another
immigrant, born in Trinidad, who
wrote A House for Mr Biswas (1961)
and A Bend in the River (1979). Naipaul
also chronicled aftermaths of empire around the globe and
particularly in his native Caribbean.Naipaul won the Nobel
Prize in Literature.
Also from the West Indies is George Lamming (1927– )
who wrote In the Castle of the Skin (1953), while from
Pakistan came Hanif Kureshi (1954–), a playwright,
screenwriter, filmmaker, novelist and short story writer. His
novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) won the Whitbread
Award for the best first novel, and was also made into a BBC
television series.
Kazuo Ishiguro (1954– ) was born in Japan, but his parents
immigrated to Britain when he was six. Ishiguro wrote
historical novels in the first-person narrative style. His works
include, The Remains of the Day 1989, Never Let Me Go 2005.
His spare, refined novel An Artist of the Floating World (1986)
records how a painter’s life and work became insidiously
coarsened by the imperialistic ethosof 1930s Japan.
Just as some postcolonial novelists used myth, magic, and
fable as a stylistic throwing-off of what they considered the
alien supremacy of Anglo-Saxon realistic fiction, so numerous
feminist novelists took to Gothic, fairy tale, and fantasy as
countereffects to the “patriarchal discourse” of rationality,
logic, and linear narrative.

36
 The most gifted exponent of this
kind of writing, which sought
immediate access to the realm of
the subconscious, was Angela
Carter, whose exotic and erotic
imagination unrolled most eerily in
her short-story collection The
Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979). She had moderate
success with her novels Shadow Dance (1966; also published
as Honeybuzzard) and The Magic Toyshop (1967; filmed
1986). Her other novels include Several Perceptions (1968),
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), The
Passion of New Eve (1977), and Wise Children (1991).
Carter’s fiction gained new popularity in the 1980s, notably
after the release of the motion picture The Company of Wolves
(1984), which she cowrote; the film was based on a story from
The Bloody Chamber (1979), a collection of her adaptations of
fairy tales. Her interest in the macabre and the sensual was
reflected in The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural
History (1979), a polemical study of the female characters in
the writings of the marquis de Sade. She also wrote radio plays,
children’s books, and essays.
Jeanette Winterson also wrote in
this vein. Her first novel, Oranges Are
Not the Only Fruit (1985), won a
Whitbread Award as that year’s best
first novel. It concerns the relationship
between a young lesbian and her
adoptive mother, a religious fanatic. The
Passion (1987), her second work, is a
historical novel that chronicles the adventures of Villanelle, an
enslaved Venetian woman who is rescued by Henri, a cook
from Napoleon’s army. Attempting to reach Venice, the two
travel through Russia in winter.

37
 Winterson’s subsequent novels included Sexing the Cherry
(1989); Written on the Body (1992); Art and Lies (1994), about
dehumanization and the absence of love in society; Gut
Symmetries (1997); and The PowerBook (2000). She later
published Lighthousekeeping (2004), an exploration of the
nature of storytelling told through the tale of an orphaned girl
sent to live in a Scottish lighthouse; The Stone Gods (2007), a
foray into science fiction; and The Daylight Gate (2012), set
amid witch trials in 17th-century Lancashire. The Gap of
Time (2015) is a modernized retelling of William
Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. It was part of a project
initiated by Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing
Group, in which various authors reworked a play by
Shakespeare to honour the 400th anniversary of the dramatist’s
death. Winterson’s later novels included Frankissstein: A Love
Story (2019), which was inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley’s Frankenstein and was long-listed for the Booker
Prize. Winterson produced a collection of short stories, The
World and Other Places (1998); the vivid memoir Why Be
Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011); and several
children’s books and screenplays for television. She was
named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in
2006.
Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary 1996, and its
sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason 1999, chronicle the
life of Bridget Jones, a thirty-something single woman in
London.
Scotland has in the late 20th
century produced several
important novelists, including
James Kelman who like Samuel
Beckett can create humour out of
the most grim situations. How
Late it Was, How Late, 1994,

38
won the Booker Prize that year; A. L. Kennedy whose 2007
novel Day was named Book of the Year in the Costa Book
Awards. In 2007 she won the Austrian State Prize for European
Literature; Alasdair Gray whose Lanark: A Life in Four
Books (1981) is a dystopian fantasy set in his home town
Glasgow.
Highly anglicised Lowland Scots is often used in
contemporary Scottish fiction, for example, the Edinburgh
dialect of Lowland Scots used in Trainspotting by Irvine
Welsh to give a brutal depiction of the lives of working class
Edinburgh drug users. But'n'Ben A-Go-Go is a
2000 cyberpunk novel entirely in Scots by Matthew Fitt,
notable for using as many of the different varieties of Scots as
possible, including many neologisms – imagining how Scots
might develop by 2090. In Northern Ireland, James Fenton's
poetry, at times lively, contented, wistful, is written in
contemporary Ulster Scots. The poet Michael Longley (born
1939) has experimented with Ulster Scots for the translation of
Classical verse, as in his 1995 collection The Ghost
Orchid. Philip Robinson's (born 1946) writing has been
described as verging on "post-modern kailyard". He has
produced a trilogy of novels, as well as story books for
children, and two volumes of poetry.
Martin Amis (1949) is one of the most prominent British
novelists of the end of the 20th, beginning
of the 21st century. His best-known novels
are Money (1984) and London Fields
(1989).
In addition to the interest in remote and
recent history, a concern with tracing
aftereffects became dominatingly present
in fiction. Most subtly and powerfully
exhibiting this, Ian McEwan (1948– ) —
who came to notice in the 1970s as an unnervingly emotionless

39
observer of contemporary decadence—grew into imaginative
maturity with novels set largely in Berlin in the 1950s (The
Innocent [1990]) and in Europe in 1946 (Black Dogs [1992]).
These novels’ scenes set in the 1990s are haunted by what
McEwan perceives as the continuing repercussions of World
War II.
English novelist and screenwriter is a highly regarded writer
whose works include The Cement Garden (1978) and Enduring
Love (1997), which was made into a film. In 1998 McEwan
won the Man Booker Prize with Amsterdam. Atonement (2001)
was made into an Oscar-winning film. This was followed
by Saturday (2005), and Solar (2010). McEwan was awarded
the Jerusalem Prize in 2011.

DRAMA AFTER WORLD WAR TWO

An important cultural movement in the British theatre that
developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s was Kitchen sink
realism (or kitchen sink drama), art (the term itself derives
from an expressionist painting by John Bratby), novels, film,
and television plays. The term angry young men was often
applied to members of this artistic movement. It used a style
of social realism which depicts the domestic lives of the
working class, to explore social issues and political issues.
The drawing room plays of the post war period, typical of
dramatists like Terence Rattigan and Noël Coward were
challenged in the 1950s by these Angry Young Men, in plays
like John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956). .
Again in the 1950s the Theatre of the Absurd profoundly
affected British dramatists, especially Irishman Samuel
Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, which premiered in London
in 1955 (originally En attendant Godot, 1952). Among those
influenced were Harold Pinter (1930–2008), (The Birthday
Party, 1958), and Tom Stoppard (1937– ) (Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern are Dead,1966). Pinter's works are often

40
characterised by menace or claustrophobia, while those of
Stoppard are notable for their high-spirited wit and the great
range of intellectual issues which he tackles. Both Pinter and
Stoppard continued to have new plays produced into the 1990s.
The Theatres Act 1968 abolished the system of censorship
of the stage that had existed in Great Britain since 1737. In
Jersey, public entertainment, including stage works, continues
to be licensed by the Bailiff (advised by the Bailiff's Panel for
the Control of Public Entertainment). The new freedoms of the
London stage were tested by Howard Brenton's The Romans
in Britain, first staged at the National Theatre during 1980, and
subsequently the focus of an unsuccessful private prosecution
in 1982.
The most prolific comic playwright from the 1960s onward
was Alan Ayckbourn, whose often virtuoso feats of stagecraft
and theatrical ingenuity made him one of Britain’s most
popular dramatists. Ayckbourn’s plays showed an increasing
tendency to broach darker themes and were especially scathing
(for instance, in A Small Family Business [1987]) on the topics
of the greed and selfishness that he considered to have been
promoted by Thatcherism, the prevailing political philosophy
in 1980s Britain.
One of the more-durable talents to emerge was Caryl
Churchill, whose Serious Money (1987) savagely encapsulated
the finance frenzy of the 1980s.
David Edgar developed into a dramatist of impressive
span and depth with plays such as Destiny (1976)
and Pentecost (1994), his masterly response to the collapse of
communism and rise of nationalism in eastern Europe.
David Hare similarly widened his range with confident
accomplishment; in the 1990s he completed a panoramic
trilogy surveying the contemporary state of British
institutions—the Anglican church (Racing Demon [1990]), the
police and the judiciary (Murmuring Judges [1991]), and the

41
Labour Party (The Absence of War [1993]). Hare also wrote
political plays for television, such as Licking Hitler (1978)
and Saigon: Year of the Cat (1983).
Trevor Griffiths, author of dialectical stage plays
clamorous with debate, put television drama to the same use
(Comedians [1975] had particular impact).
Dennis Potter, best known for his teleplay The Singing
Detective (1986), deployed a wide battery of the medium’s
resources, including extravagant fantasy and sequences that
sarcastically counterpoint popular music with scenes of
brutality, class-based callousness, and sexual rapacity. Potter’s
works transmit his revulsion, semireligious in nature, at what
he saw as widespread hypocrisy, sadism, and injustice in
British society.
Alan Bennett excelled in both stage and television drama.
Bennett’s first work for the theatre, Forty Years On (1968),
was an expansive, mocking, and nostalgic cabaret of cultural
and social change in England between and during the two
World Wars. His masterpieces, though, are dramatic
monologues written for television—A Woman of No
Importance (1982) and 12 works he called Talking Heads
(1987) and Talking Heads 2 (1998). In these television plays,
Bennett’s comic genius for capturing the rich waywardness of
everyday speech combines with psychological acuteness,
emotional delicacy, and a melancholy consciousness of life’s
transience. The result is a drama, simultaneously hilarious and
sad, of exceptional distinction. Bennett’s 1991 play, The
Madness of George III, took his fascination with England’s
past back to the 1780s and in doing so matched the widespread
mood of retrospection with which British literature approached
the end of the 20th century.

42
 RADIO DRAMA
During the 1950s and 1960s many major British playwrights
either effectively began their careers with the BBC, or had
works adapted for radio. Most of playwright Caryl Churchill's
early experiences with professional drama production were as a
radio playwright and, starting in 1962 with The Ants, there
were nine productions with BBC radio drama up until 1973
when her stage work began to be recognised at the Royal Court
Theatre.
Joe Orton's dramatic debut in 1963 was the radio play The
Ruffian on the Stair, which was broadcast on 31 August 1964.
Tom Stoppard's "first professional production was in the
fifteen-minute Just Before Midnight programme on BBC
Radio, which showcased new dramatists".
John Mortimer made his radio debut as a dramatist in
1955, with his adaptation of his own novel Like Men
Betrayed for the BBC Light Programme. But he made his
debut as an original playwright with The Dock Brief,
starring Michael Hordern as a hapless barrister, first broadcast
in 1957 on BBC Radio's Third Programme, later televised with
the same cast, and subsequently presented in a double bill
with What Shall We Tell Caroline? at the Lyric
Hammersmith in April 1958, before transferring to the Garrick
Theatre. Mortimer is most famous for Rumpole of the
Bailey a British television series which starred Leo McKern as
Horace Rumpole, an ageing London barrister who defends any
and all clients. It has been spun off into a series of short stories,
novels, and radio programmes. Other notable radio dramatists
included novelist Angela Carter.
Novelist Susan Hill also wrote for BBC radio, from the
early 1970s.
Among the most famous works created for radio, are Dylan
Thomas's Under Milk Wood (1954), Harold Pinter's A Slight
Ache (1959) and Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons (1954).

43
 POETRY AFTER WORLD WAR TWO
The last flickerings of New Apocalypse poetry—the flamboyant,
surreal, and rhetorical style favoured by Dylan Thomas and David
Gascoyne died away soon after World War II. In its place emerged
what came to be known with characteristic understatement as The
Movement.
While poets T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas
were still publishing after 1945, new poets started their careers
in the 1950s and 1960s including Philip Larkin (1922–85)
(The Whitsun Weddings,1964) and Ted Hughes (1930–98,
Poet Laureate from 1984) (The Hawk in the Rain, 1957).
In Larkin’s poetry (The Less
Deceived [1955], The Whitsun Weddings
[1964], High Windows [1974]), a melancholy
sense of life’s limitations throbs through
lines of elegiac elegance. Suffused with acute
awareness of mortality and transience,
Larkin’s poetry is also finely responsive to
natural beauty, vistas of which open up even
in poems darkened by fear of death or
sombre preoccupation with human solitude.

Days
BY PHILIP LARKIN
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

44
 John Betjeman, poet laureate from
1972 to 1984, shared both Larkin’s intense
consciousness of mortality and his
gracefully versified nostalgia for 19th- and
early 20th-century life (see Appendix).
In contrast to the rueful traditionalism
of their work is the poetry of Ted Hughes,
who succeeded Betjeman as poet laureate
(1984–98). Ted Hughes remains one of the most divisive
English poets of the second half of the twentieth century, and
not just because of the controversy surrounding his marriage to
Sylvia Plath. In extraordinarily vigorous verse, beginning with
his first collection, The Hawk in the Rain (1957), Hughes
captured the ferocity, vitality, and splendour of the natural
world. In works such as Crow (1970), he added a mythic
dimension to his fascination with savagery. Much of Hughes’s
poetry is rooted in his experiences as a farmer in Yorkshire and
Devon (as in his collection Moortown [1979]). It also shows a
deep receptivity to the way the contemporary world is
underlain by strata of history. This realization, along with
strong regional roots, is something Hughes had in common
with a number of poets writing in the second half of the 20th
century.
Snowdrop - Ted Hughes
Now is the globe shrunk tight
Round the mouse’s dulled wintering heart.
Weasel and crow, as if moulded in brass,
Move through an outer darkness
Not in their right minds,
With the other deaths. She, too, pursues her ends,
Brutal as the stars of this month,
Her pale head heavy as metal.
The closing years of the 20th century witnessed a
remarkable last surge of creativity from Ted Hughes. In
Birthday Letters (1998), Hughes published a poetic chronicle
45
of his much-speculated-upon relationship with Sylvia Plath, the
American poet to whom he was married from 1956 until her
suicide in 1963. With Tales from Ovid (1997) and his versions
of Aeschylus’s Oresteia (1999) and Euripides’ Alcestis (1999),
he looked back even further. These works—part translation,
part transformation—magnificently reenergize classic texts
with Hughes’s own imaginative powers and preoccupations.
Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts (1966) celebrates his native
Northumbria.
Northern Ireland has produced a
number of significant poets, the most
famous being Nobel prize
winner Seamus Heaney (1939–
2013), however, Heaney regarded
himself as Irish and not British.
There are many others who question
whether the Literature of Northern
Ireland is Irish or British.
Born into a Roman Catholic
farming family in County Derry, he began by publishing
verse—in his collections Death of a Naturalist (1966)
and Door into the Dark (1969)—that combines a tangible,
tough, sensuous response to rural and agricultural life,
reminiscent of that of Ted Hughes, with meditation about the
relationship between the taciturn world of his parents and his
own communicative calling as a poet. Since then, in
increasingly magisterial books of poetry—Wintering Out
(1972), North (1975), Field Work (1979), Station Island
(1984), The Haw Lantern (1987), Seeing Things (1991), The
Spirit Level (1996)—Heaney has become arguably the greatest
poet Ireland has produced, eventually winning the Nobel Prize
for Literature (1995).

46
 Glanmore Sonnets
BY SEAMUS HEANEY
VI
He lived there in the unsayable lights.
He saw the fuchsia in a drizzling noon,
The elderflower at dusk like a risen moon
And green fields greying on the windswept heights.
‘I will break through,’ he said, ‘what I glazed over
With perfect mist and peaceful absences’—
Sudden and sure as the man who dared the ice
And raced his bike across the Moyola River.
A man we never saw. But in that winter
Of nineteen forty-seven, when the snow
Kept the country bright as a studio,
In a cold where things might crystallize or founder,
His story quickened us, a wild white goose
Heard after dark above the drifted house.
Having spent his formative years amid the murderous
divisiveness of Ulster, he wrote poetry particularly
distinguished by its fruitful bringing together of opposites.
Sturdy familiarity with country life goes along with delicate
stylistic accomplishment and sophisticated literary
allusiveness. Present and past coalesce in Heaney’s verses: Iron
Age sacrificial victims exhumed from peat bogs resemble
tarred-and-feathered victims of the atrocities in contemporary
Belfast; elegies for friends and relatives slaughtered during the
outrages of the 1970s and ’80s are embedded in verses whose
imagery and metrical forms derive from Dante. Surveying
carnage, vengeance, bigotry, and gentler disjunctions such as
that between the unschooled and the cultivated, Heaney made
himself the master of a poetry of reconciliations.
Heaney impressively effected a similar feat in his fine
translation of Beowulf (1999).
In the 1960s and 1970s Martian poetry aimed to break the
grip of 'the familiar', by describing ordinary things in
47
unfamiliar ways, as though, for example, through the eyes of a
Martian. Poets most closely associated with it are Craig
Raine and Christopher Reid. In especially ambitious exercise
in the narrative genre was Craig Raine’s History: The Home
Movie (1994), a huge semifictionalized saga, written in three-
line stanzas, chronicling several generations of his and his
wife’s families. Before this, three books of dazzling virtuosity
(The Onion, Memory [1978], A Martian Sends a Postcard
Home [1979], and Rich [1984]) established Raine as the
founder and most inventive exemplar of what came to be called
the Martian school of poetry. The defining characteristic of this
school was a poetry rife with startling images, unexpected but
audaciously apt similes, and rapid, imaginative tricks of
transformation that set the reader looking at the world afresh.
Martin Amis, an important novelist in the late twentieth
and twentieth centuries, carried into fiction this drive to make
the familiar strange.
Geoffrey Hill (1932– ) has been considered to be among the
most distinguished English poets of his generation, and on his
80th birthday was described in the House of Commons by
Education Secretary as the United Kingdom's "greatest living
poet". Although frequently described as a "difficult" poet, Hill
has retorted that poetry supposed to be difficult can be "the
most democratic because you are doing your audience the
honour of supposing they are intelligent human beings".
Charles Tomlinson (1927–) is another important English
poet of an older generation, though "since his first publication
in 1951, has built a career that has seen more notice in the
international scene than in his native England; this may
explain, and be explained by, his international vision of
poetry". The critic Michael Hennessy has described Tomlinson
as "the most international and least provincial English poet of
his generation". His poetry has won international recognition
and has received many prizes in Europe and the United States.

48
 LATE 20TH-CENTURY GENRE LITERATURE
In thriller writing, Ian Fleming created the character James
Bond 007 in January 1952, while on holiday at his Jamaican
estate, Goldeneye. Fleming chronicled Bond's adventures in
twelve novels, including Casino Royale 1953, Live and Let Die
1954, Dr. No 1958, Goldfinger 1959, Thunderball 1961, The
Spy Who Loved Me 1962, and nine short story works.
In contrast to the larger-than-life spy capers of Bond, John
le Carré was an author of spy novels who depicted a shadowy
world of espionage and counter-espionage, and his best known
novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold 1963, is often
regarded as one of the greatest in the genre.
Frederick Forsyth writes thriller novels, including The Day
of the Jackal 1971, The Odessa File 1972, The Dogs of
War 1974 and The Fourth Protocol 1984.
Ken Follett writes spy thrillers, his first success being Eye
of the Needle 1978, followed by The Key to Rebecca 1980, as
well as historical novels, notably The Pillars of the Earth 1989,
and its sequel World Without End 2007.
Elleston Trevor is remembered for his 1964 adventure
story The Flight of the Phoenix, while the thriller novelist
Philip Nicholson is best known for Man on Fire.
Peter George's Red Alert 1958, is a Cold War thriller.
War novels include Alistair MacLean thriller's The Guns of
Navarone 1957, Where Eagles Dare 1968, and Jack Higgins'
The Eagle Has Landed 1975.
The "father of Wicca" Gerald Gardner began propagating
his own version of witchcraft in the 1950s. Having claimed to
have been initiated into the New Forest coven in 1939, Gardner
published his books Witchcraft Today 1954 and The Meaning
of Witchcraft 1959, the foundational texts for the religion of
Wicca.
Ronald Welch's Carnegie Medal winning novel Knight
Crusader is set in the 12th century and gives a depiction of the

49
Third Crusade, featuring the Christian leader and King of
England Richard the Lionheart.
In crime fiction, the murder mysteries of Ruth Rendell and
P. D. James are popular.
Nigel Tranter wrote historical novels of celebrated Scottish
warriors; Robert the Bruce in The Bruce Trilogy, and William
Wallace in The Wallace 1975, works noted by academics for
their accuracy.
SCIENCE FICTION
John Wyndham wrote post-apocalyptic science fiction, his
most notable works being The Day of the Triffids 1951,
and The Midwich Cuckoos1957.
Science fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space
Odyssey, is based on his various short stories, particularly The
Sentinel. His other major novels include Rendezvous with
Rama 1972, and The Fountains of Paradise 1979.
Michael Moorcock, 1962) is a writer, primarily of science
fiction and fantasy, who has also published a number of literary
novels. He was involved with the 'New Wave' of science
fiction writers "part of whose aim was to invest the genre with
literary merit".
Similarly J. G. Ballard (1930– ) "became known in the
1960s as the most prominent of the 'New Wave' science fiction
writers".
A later major figure in science fiction is Iain M. Banks who
created a fictional anarchist, socialist, and utopian society the
Culture. The novels that feature in it include Excession 1996,
and Inversions 1998. He also publishes mainstream novels,
including the highly controversial The Wasp Factory in 1984.
Nobel prize winner Doris Lessing also published a
sequence of five science fiction novels the Canopus in Argos:
Archives between 1979 and 1983.

50
 LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN AND YOUNG
ADULTS
Roald Dahl rose to
prominence with his
children's fantasy novels, often
inspired from experiences from
his childhood, with often
unexpected endings, and
unsentimental, dark humour.
Dahl was inspired to write
Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory 1964, featuring the eccentric candymaker Willy
Wonka, having grown up near two chocolate makers in
England who often tried to steal trade secrets by sending spies
into the other's factory. His other works include James and the
Giant Peach 1961, Fantastic Mr. Fox 1971, The Witches 1983,
and Matilda 1988.
Boarding schools in literature are centred on older pre-
adolescent and adolescent school life, and are most commonly
set in English boarding schools. Popular school stories from
this period include Ronald Searle's St Trinian's and his
illustrations for Geoffrey Willans's Molesworth series, Jill
Murphy's The Worst Witch, the Jennings series by Anthony
Buckeridge (1912–2004).
Ruth Manning-Sanders collected and retold fairy tales,
and her first work A Book of Giants contains a number of
famous giants, notably Jack and the Beanstalk. Susan Cooper's
The Dark Is Rising is a five-volume fantasy saga set in England
and Wales.
Raymond Briggs' children's picture book The Snowman
1978 has been adapted as an animation, shown every Christmas
on British television, and for the stage as a musical. The
Reverend. W. Awdry and son Christopher's The Railway Series
features Thomas the Tank Engine.

51
 Margery Sharp's series The Rescuers is based on a heroic
mouse organisation.
The third Children's Laureate Michael Morpurgo published
War Horse in 1982.
The prolific children's author Dick King-Smith's novels
include The Sheep-Pig 1984, and The Water Horse.
Diana Wynne Jones wrote the young adult fantasy
novel Howl's Moving Castle in 1986.
Anthony Horowitz's Alex Rider series begins with
Stormbreaker 2000.
J. K. Rowling's Harry
Potter fantasy series is a
sequence of seven novels that
chronicle the adventures of the
adolescent wizard Harry Potter.
The series began with Harry
Potter and the Philosopher's
Stone in 1997 and ended with
the seventh and final book
Harry Potter and the Deathly
Hallows in 2007; becoming
the best selling book-series in history. The series has been
translated into 67 languages, placing Rowling among the most
translated authors in history. J.K. Rowling took part in a
sequence of the 2012 Summer Olympics opening
ceremony which celebrated British children's literature.

FANTASY AND HORROR

Terry Pratchett is best known for his Discworld series of
comic fantasy novels, that begins with The Colour of Magic
1983, and includes Mort 1987, Hogfather 1996, and Night
Watch 2002. Pratchett's other most notable work is the 1990
novel Good Omens.

52
 Philip Pullman's fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials
comprises Northern Lights 1995, The Subtle Knife 1997, and
The Amber Spyglass 2000. It follows the coming-of-age of two
children as they wander through a series of parallel
universes against a backdrop of epic events.
Neil Gaiman is a writer of science fiction, fantasy short
stories and novels,whose notable works include Stardust 1998,
Coraline 2002, The Graveyard Book 2009, and The
Sandman series.
Alan Moore's works include Watchmen, V for Vendetta set
in a dystopian future UK, The League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen, and From Hell, speculating on the identity and
motives of Jack the Ripper.
Douglas Adams wrote the five-volume science fiction
comedy series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and also
wrote the humorous fantasy detective novel Dirk Gently's
Holistic Detective Agency.
Clive Barker horror novels include The Hellbound Heart
1986, and works in fantasy, Weaveworld 1987, Imajica and
Abarat 2002.

BRITISH RECIPIENTS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN

LITERATURE
British recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature include
Rudyard Kipling (1907)
John Galsworthy (1932)
T. S. Eliot (1948)
Bertrand Russell (1950)
Winston Churchill (1953)
William Golding (1983)
V. S. Naipaul (2001)
Harold Pinter (2005)
Doris Lessing (2007).

53
 AMERICAN LITERATURE

REALISM AND NATURALISM (1870 TO 1910)

The human cost of the Civil War in the United States was
immense: more than 2.3 million soldiers fought in the war, and
perhaps as many as 851,000 people died in 1861–65. Walt
Whitman claimed that “a great literature will…arise out of the
era of those four years,” and what emerged in the following
decades was a literature that presented a detailed and
unembellished vision of the world as it truly was. This was the
essence of realism. Naturalism was an intensified form of
realism. After the grim realities of a devastating war, they
became writers’ primary mode of expression.
Samuel Clemens was a
typesetter, a journalist, a riverboat
captain, and an itinerant laborer
before he became, in 1863 at age
27, Mark Twain. He first used that
name while reporting on politics in
the Nevada Territory. It then
appeared on the short story “The
Celebrated Jumping Frog of
Calaveras County,” published in
1865, which catapulted him to
national fame. There he experiments with early versions of
meta-fiction, embedding a story within a story. Twain’s story
was a humorous tale, but its characters were realistic depictions
of actual Americans. Twain deployed this combination of
humor and realism throughout his writing. Some of his notable
works include
Major novels: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876),
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).
Travel narratives: The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing
It (1872), Life on the Mississippi (1883).

54
 Naturalism, like realism, was a literary movement that drew
inspiration from French authors of the 19th century who sought
to document, through fiction, the reality that they saw around
them, particularly among the middle and working classes living
in cities.
The generation of writers that followed rejected
Romanticism as a literary style. Frank Norris, Stephen Crane,
Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Harold Frederic, Hamlin
Garland, Ellen Glasgow and Kate Chopin, to name a few,
rejected the limitations of Realism in terms of subject matter.
While they all, to some extent, embraced the Realist style of
writing with its attention to detail and authenticity, they
rejected Realism’s tendency not to offend the sensibilities of
readers in the genteel classes.
The new writers were not afraid of provocative subject
matters and wrote about the human condition in grimmer
contexts. They all, to some extent, were influenced by not only
scientific ideas of the day, including Charles Darwin’s views
on evolution, but also European writers experimenting with
this new style: Naturalism. Émile Zola, a prominent French
novelist, had articulated a theory of Naturalism in Le Roman
Expérimental (1880). Zola had argued for a kind of intense
Realism, one that did not look away from any aspects of life,
including the base, dirty, or ugly. Also influenced by Darwin,
Zola saw the human in animal terms, and he argued that a
novel written about the human animal could be set up as a kind
of scientific experiment, where, once the ingredients were
added, the story would unfold with scientific accuracy. He was
particularly interested in how hereditary traits under the
influence of a particular social environment might determine
how a human behaves.
The American writers Norris, Crane, and London, similarly
characterize humans as part of the evolutionary landscape, as
beings influenced—and even determined—by forces of

55
heredity and environment beyond their understanding or
control.
With Darwin’s and Zola’s influence apparent, the naturalists
sought to push Realism even further, or as Frank Norris argued
in his essay “A Plea for Romantic Fiction,” to go beyond the
“meticulous presentation of teacups, rag carpets, wall paper,
and hair-cloth sofas”—or beyond Realism as mere
photographic accuracy— and to embrace a kind of writing that
explores the “unplumbed depths of the human heart, and the
mystery of sex, and the black, unsearched penetralia of the
souls of men.” Norris is calling for a grittier approach in
examining the human being as essentially an upright animal, a
kind of walking complex combination of inherited traits,
attributes, and habits deeply affected by social and economic
forces.
Naturalistic works went where Realistic works did not go,
dealing with taboo subjects for the time, subjects such as
prostitution, alcoholism, domestic violence, violent deaths,
crime, madness, and degeneration.
Sometimes defined as pessimistic materialistic determinism,
Naturalism sought to look at human nature in a scientific light,
and the author often took on the role of scientist, coolly
observing the human animal in a variety of plights, at the
mercy of forces beyond his control or understanding,
compelled by instinct and determined by cause and effect to
behave in certain, often self-destructive, ways as a result of
heredity and environment.
In the Naturalistic works, nature is depicted as indifferent,
sometimes even hostile, to humans, and humans are often
depicted as small, insignificant, nameless losers in battles
against an all-powerful nature. Characters may dream of heroic
actions in the midst of a battle to survive extreme conditions,
but they are most often trapped by circumstances, unable to
summon the will to change their determined outcome.

56
Characters rarely exhibit free will at all; they often stumble
through events, victims of their own vices, weaknesses,
hereditary traits, and grim social or natural environments.
A male character in a Naturalistic novel is often
characterized as part “brute,” and he typically exhibits strong
impulses, compulsions, or instinctive drives, as he attempts to
satiate his greed, his sexual urges, his decadent lusts, or his
desire for power or dominance. Female characters also
typically exhibit subconscious drives, acting without knowing
why, unable to change course.
Naturalistic works are not defined by a region; the
characters’ action may take place in the frozen Alaska
wilderness, on the raging sea, or within the slums of a city.
Stylistically, Naturalistic novels are written from an almost
journalistic perspective, with narrative distance from action and
the characters. Often characters are not given names as a way
to reinforce their cosmic insignificance. The plot of the story
often follows the steady decline of a character into
degeneration or death (known as the “plot of decline”).
Theodore Dreiser was foremost among American writers
who embraced naturalism. His Sister Carrie (1900) is the most
important American naturalist novel portraying a country girl
who moves to Chicago and becomes a kept woman.
In her stories and novels, Edith Wharton (1862–1937)
scrutinized the upper-class, Eastern-seaboard society in which
she had grown up. One of her finest books, The Age of
Innocence, centers on a man who chooses to marry a
conventional, socially acceptable woman rather than a
fascinating outsider.
At about the same time, Stephen Crane (1871–1900)
secured work as a freelance journalist, eventually accepting an
assignment as a war correspondent in Cuba during the
Spanish-American War.

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 His first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, published in
1893, offered a raw exploration of a young woman’s struggle
to thrive in the slums of New York amid poverty and
prostitution, and it represented a distinct departure from
mainstream Realist works to a new literary style known as
Naturalism. Crane next turned his attention to the
psychological experience of war in The Red Badge of Courage
(1895), his second novel. Praised by audiences and critics
alike, the novel about a young Union soldier in the Civil War,
secured Crane’s reputation as an important new writer on the
scene and became his signature work.
Jack London (1876 - 1916) “Let us
be very humble,” Jack London once
wrote to no less a reader than American
President Teddy Roosevelt. “We who are
so very human are very animal.”
Committed to producing 1000 words a
day, London authored before his death at
the age of forty over 400 works of non-
fiction, twenty novels, and almost 200
short stories in numerous genres ranging
from journalistic social criticism to juvenile, adventure,
dystopian, and science fiction. As a teenager in Oakland,
California, London was a voracious reader but received only a
sporadic and mostly informal education. Throughout his youth
he supported his family by working in mills and canneries,
upon sailing boats, and even as an oyster pirate. Before he was
twenty-two, he had spent time in jail for vagrancy, lectured
publicly on socialism, attended one semester at the University
of California, and ventured to the Canadian Yukon in search of
gold.
He saw his writing as a business, his ticket out of poverty,
and, he hoped, a means of beating the wealthy at their own
game. On returning to California in 1898, London began

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working to get published, a struggle described in his
novel, Martin Eden. The prolific and adventurous London soon
found great success as a writer, authoring many books while
sailing around the world in his private yacht, and eventually
becoming America’s first millionaire author.
From the time of his youth, London was swept up in the
intellectual and political movements of his day. He was
especially influenced by the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche,
Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx. The theme that unites these
three great thinkers—and that appealed to London—is
struggle: Marx saw history as a struggle between classes;
Darwin saw nature as a struggle for survival between species;
and Nietzsche saw society as a struggle between brilliant
individuals and social institutions. London’s jobs and
adventures at the bottom of the work force, in the arctic, and at
sea combined with the ideas of these thinkers to become the
subjects of his popular literature.
A literary naturalist, London is arguably best known today
for his stories about dogs, most notably the novels Call of the
Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906).
Frank Norris wrote about the problems of American
farmers and other social issues from a
naturalist perspective.
Frank Norris greatly admired the
French novelist Émile Zola, whose
emphasis on the power of nature and
the environment over individual
characters inspired the composition of
McTeague in particular. Returning to
San Francisco, Norris wrote over 150
articles as a journalist, traveling to
remote nations such as South Africa and Cuba as a war reporter
for McClure’s Magazine.

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 He then moved to New York to work in publishing, where
he is credited with discovering Theodore Dreiser’s Sister
Carrie (1900) for Doubleday & McClure Company. Before his
untimely death from illness at the age of thirty-two, Norris
published less than half a dozen novels, most notably the first
two novels in his unfinished “Epic of Wheat” trilogy, The
Octopus: A Story of California (1901) and (posthumously) The
Pit (1903), both of which explore the brutality of the business
world.
Like fellow naturalist Jack London, Norris was more
interested in the raw, violent human animal than in the polite,
civilized human being. In his most memorable stories, he
sought to combine the scientific sensibilities of naturalism with
the melodrama of romantic fiction.
Norris puts his theory of naturalism into practice in his
novel McTeague, crafting a titular protagonist—a “poor crude
dentist of Polk Street, stupid, ignorant, vulgar” with “enormous
bones and corded muscles”—who is more animal than man.
The novel traces the upward trajectory of McTeague, from
the grim poverty of life in the mining camp to the middle class
life of a practicing dentist in San Francisco. However,
McTeague, for all his apparent human striving, ultimately ends
up where he started: in a mining camp, poor, uneducated,
alone, and in trouble. He ends up a victim of instinctive,
hereditary, and environmental influences and forces beyond his
knowledge or his control.
Political writings discussed social issues and the power of
corporations. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward outlined
other possible political and social orders, and Upton Sinclair,
most famous for his muck-raking novel The Jungle,
advocated socialism.
Other political writers of the period included Edwin
Markham and William Vaughn Moody. Journalistic critics,
including Ida M. Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens, were labeled

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"The Muckrakers". Henry Brooks Adams's literate
autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams also depicted a
stinging description of the education system and modern life.
Race was a common issue as well, as seen in the work of
Pauline Hopkins, who published five influential works from
1900 to 1903. Similarly, Sui Sin Far wrote about Chinese-
American experiences, and Maria Cristina Mena wrote about
Mexican-American experiences.
Paul Laurence Dunbar was an African American writer
who wrote poetry in black dialect—“Possum,” “When de Co’n
Pone’s Hot”—that were popular with his white audience and
gave them what they believed was reality for black Americans.
Dunbar also wrote poems not in dialect—“We Wear the
Mask,” “Sympathy”—that exposed the reality of racism in
America during Reconstruction and afterward.
Henry James shared the view of the realists and naturalists
that literature ought to present reality, but his writing style and
use of literary form sought to also create an aesthetic
experience, not simply document truth. He was preoccupied
with the clash in values between the United States and Europe.
His writing shows features of both 19th-century realism and
naturalism and 20th-century modernism. Some of his notable
novels are The American (1877), The Portrait of a
Lady (1881), What Maisie Knew (1897), The Wings of the
Dove (1902), The Golden Bowl (1904).

TURN OF THE 20TH CENTURY AND GROWTH OF

MODERNISM
In the twenty-one years between the World’s Columbian
Exposition (also known as the Chicago World’s Fair) in 1893
and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the economic,
political, and social landscape changed forever. Unprecedented
immigration irrevocably changed both the American landscape
and American politics, and the colonial powers of nineteenth-

61
century Europe began to lose their grip on their possessions
and territories. American literature of the period reflected these
changes.
In the West, waves of migration were rapidly filling in the
plains and prairies; this population boom set up a clash of
cultures that continues to have repercussions in contemporary
politics.
Many immigrants to the United States in this period were
fleeing from the collapse of the ancient European monarchies
and empires.
These two decades were also remarkable for American
literature. F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Ernest
Hemingway were born within three years of each other, and
they would collectively reshape the American literary
landscape in the twentieth century. Literary contributions were
not, however, restricted to white males. Although Mark Twain
continued to hold court as the most famous author in the
country, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, Kate Chopin, Edith
Wharton, and Willa Cather were also making literary and
social headlines.

THE MODERNIST PERIOD (1910 TO 1945)

The biggest driver for Modernism was World War I, also
known as the Great War, and the social and political turmoil
that ensued. Much of the innovative work of the Modernist
period seemed to follow writer Ezra Pound’s credo of “Make
It New!” Whether it was technology, art, architecture, or
poetry, Modernism sought to reinvent the world. Uninhibited
by the past, the Modernist era redefined America’s political,
religious, economic, and social values. From areas of women’s
suffrage to the invention of the assembly line, from Harlem to
the Deep South, Modernism was a time of social upheaval,
extraordinary growth, and accelerated change for America.

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 A sense of disillusionment and loss pervades much
American modernist fiction. That sense may be centered on
specific individuals, or it may be directed toward American
society or toward civilization generally. It may generate a
nihilistic, destructive impulse, or it may express hope at the
prospect of change.
A LOST GENERATION
If the mantra of Modernism was Pound’s “Make it New,”
then the defining characteristic for the generation comes from
Gertrude Stein’s comment to young Ernest Hemingway that
you are all a lost generation. With the economy at an all-time
high—due to the increased industrial manufacturing and
development of so many new industries—came an increase in
wealth in America; indeed, the Modernist period is
characterized by the boom of a growing economy before the
bust of the Great Depression. While overall wealth increased,
dissatisfaction with America also increased and a growing
number of young people, artists and veterans alike lived as
expatriates outside the country—largely taking up residence in
France and Spain. Most notable among these expatriates were
writers T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway.
This movement is depicted in Hemingway’s novel, The Sun
Also Rises.
A MODERN NATION
The industrial revolution and the meteoric rise of factories
helped shift the nation’s economy from its agricultural roots to
an industry based economy. World War I (which began in
1914) along with America’s entrance into the war (1917) put
pressure on all of the citizens to ration goods and supplies. To
meet demand, more factories began to experiment with mass
production. This boom led to more jobs and a stronger
economy, often referred to as the Boom years. Furthermore,
while live music led to the prevalence of nightclubs,
Prohibition created an underground industry of bootlegging to

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supply alcohol for these entertainment and music venues. This
instant wealth led to a greater population of the newly rich and
encouraged growth throughout the country. Often called “The
Jazz Age,” this era of wealth was written about by many
different Modernists, but made famous by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
However, the Boom years did not last forever. This age of
prosperity came to a sudden halt in October 1929, when the
sudden stock market collapse led to the Great Depression. The
economic downturn led to more than 10,000 banks shutting
down and more than 15 million workers becoming
unemployed. Worse still, a series of droughts in the early
1930s, known as the “Dust Bowl,” left 500,000 people
homeless, as many of these families moved to California,
looking for work.
The Great Depression became a major literary theme
chronicled, most notably, by John Steinbeck in his novel, The
Grapes of Wrath.
The election of Franklin Roosevelt (1932) ushered in the
age of “The New Deal.”
During the New Deal era, Roosevelt created the Works
Progress Administration (WPA) which used Federal funds to
put more people to work, building America’s infrastructure.
The WPA was responsible for roads, various public buildings,
and other projects, most notably the Hoover Dam, using
Federal funds. The WPA provided employment for millions,
including writers and artists who were sponsored by the
Federal Writers’ Project.
At the same time, more and more people started migrating
out of small rural agricultural areas into cities. Most notable
among this time period is the Great Migration, during which
African-Americans left the South to escape poverty moved to
larger cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and
New York. The Great Migration included as many as 1.5

64
million African-Americans and represents the greatest
population shift in American history.
These cultural and population shifts, along with the freedom
of transportation, caused cultural cross-pollination, as people
brought their old customs to new places.
These shifts helped spark regional cultural revolutions, such
as the Harlem Renaissance in Harlem—which brought many
important African-American artists to the forefront and is
captured in works like Zora Neal Huston’s Their Eyes Were
Watching God or Jean Toomer’s Cane—as well the Southern
Literary Renaissance, also referred to by Southern Writers as
the Southern Literary Renascence—which foregrounded the
creativity of the South and brought authors like William
Faulkner and Eudora Welty to national prominence.
Technology
New technologies were changing the face of modern life.
The Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883, was a giant
suspension bridge which connected Brooklyn with Manhattan.
Although it pre-dates Modernism, it was seen as one of
America’s greatest technological achievements and was the
subject of Hart Crane’s famous Modernist poem The Bridge.
The invention of the automobile by inventors like Henry
Ford and the development of the assembly line in the early
1920s not only created an industry, but also spurred
investments in America’s infrastructure, that is, its roads,
highways. Suddenly, all of America was connected and
personal travel was more readily available. The mass
production of phonographs, projection reels, and telephones
made these technologies more accessible to the public and
allowed for more recording, making mass culture possible.
The same could be said about the publishing industry, which
flourished during this time. The paperback book made books
more affordable, and the development of Book-of-the-Month

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clubs and subscription reading programs allowed for mass
audiences, giving rise to the modern day “best seller.”
The affordability of magazines also made them a popular
venue for many writers, as F. Scott Fitzgerald regularly
published in The Saturday Evening Post, while many famous
Modernist writers, such as Ezra Pound, held editorial positions
for magazines, and literary magazines, such as The Dial,
became popular venues for Modernist writers to publish.
MODERNIST LITERATURE
The term Modernism as a literary term is largely used as a
catchall for a global movement that was centered in the United
States and Europe, for literature written during the two wars,
which is said to be the first industrialized modern period.
In another sense, Modernism refers to the general theme:
much of the literature of the period is written in reaction to
these accelerated times. After World War I, many writers felt
betrayed by the United States, but even more than that, there
was a general feeling of change, of progress, of questioning the
ways of the past.
Throughout the art of this time period, whether it is painting,
sculpture, poetry, fiction, or non-fiction, all question the truths
of the past. Largely, this attitude goes hand-in-hand with the
disaffection with politics caused by World War I.
POETRY
There is no single style that would encompass all of
Modernist poetry; rather, a lot of Modernist poetry could be
separated as High Modernism and Low Modernism. These
terms are not meant to serve as an aesthetic judgment about the
quality of the work, but rather help us understand the range of
experimentation occurring during this period.
High Modernism features poets who are much more formal,
such as T. S. Eliot with his “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock,” and who look at the modern era as a period of loss,

66
in some ways, looking at how much America has changed and
fearing that the change might be for the worse.
Essentially, in high modernist works, the authors realize that
society has shifted so much, it will never be possible to return
to the old ways, so they often represent the world as
fragmented, disjointed, or chaotic. High Modernist poetry also
maintains a traditional structure and form and often contains
explicit allusions to history, myth, or religion, such as the
epigraph from Dante’s Inferno which begins T. S. Eliot’s “The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
Low Modernism is much less formal, experimenting with
form. The poetry of William Carlos Williams, the doctor
turned poet, is a great example of Low Modernism.
With Ezra Pound and H.D., Williams was a leading poet of
the Imagist movement and often wrote of American subjects
and themes. Though his career was initially overshadowed by
other poets, he became an inspiration to the Beat generation in
the 1950s and 60s.
Yet in comparison to artists of his
own time who sought a new
environment for creativity as expatriates
in Europe, Williams lived a remarkably
conventional life.
Williams's friendship with Pound
marked a watershed in the young poet's
life: he later insisted, "before meeting
Pound is like B.C. and A.D." "Under
Pound's influence and other stimuli," reported John Malcolm
Brinnin, "Williams was soon ready to close the door on the
'studied elegance of Keats on one hand and the raw vigor of
Whitman on the other.'" Aside from the poetic influences,
Pound introduced Williams to a group of friends, including
poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)

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 His poetry—like “This is Just to Say” and “The Red
Wheelbarrow”—often plays with the traditional structure of a
poem. According to Williams himself, his own special gift to
the new poets was his "variable foot—the division of the line
according to a new method that would be satisfactory to an
American."
This Is Just To Say
I have eaten Forgive me
the plums they were delicious
that were in so sweet
the icebox and so cold

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Robert Frost (1874 - 1963)

When Robert Frost was asked to
recite “The Gift Outright” at the
inauguration of President John F.
Kennedy in 1961, he was not only the
first poet to be invited to participate in a
presidential inauguration, he was also
an American icon. Frost’s poems reflect
a rapidly changing cultural landscape in
which the warm glow of memory was
tinted by the cold reality of a highly
mechanized, and often cruel, world.
Frost was no passive megaphone for a comfortable past; like
other Modernists, Frost melded traditional forms to the
American vernacular to produce poetry that was strikingly
American and contemporary.

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 Thus, poems like “The Road Not Taken,” are often recited
at high school graduation ceremonies as a way to encourage
students to take risks and celebrate life.
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And both that morning equally lay In
And sorry I could not travel both And leaves no step had trodden black. Oh,
be one traveler, long I stood And I kept the first for another day! Yet
looked down one as far as I could knowing how way leads on to way,
To where it bent in the undergrowth; I doubted if I should ever come back.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted
wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and
I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

“Mending Wall,” a poem written around the time of Frost’s

fortieth birthday in 1914, is a strong introduction to his use of
this alter ego. A dramatic monologue in forty-five lines of
iambic pentameter, the poem opens with the vague
pronouncement, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,”
and proceeds to spell out the conditions for this seasonal
activity, that of mending the fence that separates two farms. As
the speaker and his neighbor proceed to rebuild the wall, each
one responsible for the stones that have fallen onto his own
side, the first farmer pauses to reflect on how it is that every
year the wall requires new attention even though no one, save
for a few hunters, has been observed disturbing the stones. This
annual cycle of decay and reconstruction is at the heart of this
poem, and the need for annual maintenance occurs not only in
the world of fences, but in the world of human relationships as
well.
This idea of continual decay and maintenance in human
relationships provides a useful frame for understanding “Home
Burial,” a longer narrative poem that describes the apparently
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divergent responses of a husband and wife to the death of one
of their children.
PROSE
Experimentation was not limited to Modernist poetry, as
prose (fiction and non-fiction) writers were also challenging
form, style, and content, that is, what you could or could not
write about.
Modernist prose was much more than just experimentation,
though, in that it also introduced new subject matter. Writers
no longer felt the need to veil their opinions; instead, many
were explicit in their political critiques. The Great Depression
gave rise to Communism among many artists, especially in the
works of Ellison and Baldwin, while the Women’s Suffrage
Movement highlighted early feminism. Furthermore, the
widespread distribution of easily affordable magazines and
paperbacks meant that these writers were reaching a wider
audience with a more radical message.
Authors such as William
Faulkner (1897–1962)
experimented with how to tell a
story, especially by using a rotating
cast of characters often set in the
same county of Yoknapatawpha.
His first novel, Soldiers’ Pay
(1926), given a Southern though not
a Mississippian setting, was an
impressive achievement, stylistically
ambitious and strongly evocative of
the sense of alienation experienced
by soldiers returning from World
War I to a civilian world of which
they seemed no longer a part. A second novel, Mosquitoes
(1927), launched a satirical attack on the New Orleans literary
scene, including identifiable individuals, and can perhaps best

70
be read as a declaration of artistic independence. Back in
Oxford—with occasional visits to the Gulf Coast—Faulkner
again worked at a series of temporary jobs but was chiefly
concerned with proving himself as a professional writer. None
of his short stories was accepted, however, and he was
especially shaken by his difficulty in finding a publisher for
Flags in the Dust (published posthumously, 1973), a long,
leisurely novel, drawing extensively on local observation and
his own family history, that he had confidently counted upon to
establish his reputation and career. When the novel eventually
did appear, severely truncated, as Sartoris in 1929, it created in
print for the first time that densely imagined world of Jefferson
and Yoknapatawpha County—based partly on Ripley but
chiefly on Oxford and Lafayette county and characterized by
frequent recurrences of the same characters, places, and
themes—which Faulkner was to use as the setting for so many
subsequent novels and stories.
Faulkner had meanwhile “written [his] guts” into the more
technically sophisticated The Sound and the Fury, believing
that he was fated to remain permanently unpublished and need
therefore make no concessions to the cautious commercialism
of the literary marketplace. The novel did find a publisher,
despite the difficulties it posed for its readers, and from the
moment of its appearance in October 1929 Faulkner drove
confidently forward as a writer, engaging always with new
themes, new areas of experience, and, above all, new technical
challenges.
In successive “stream-of-consciousness” monologues the
three brothers of Candace (Caddy) Compson—Benjy the idiot,
Quentin the disturbed Harvard undergraduate, and Jason the
embittered local businessman—expose their differing
obsessions with their sister and their loveless relationships with
their parents. A fourth section, narrated as if authorially,
provides new perspectives on some of the central characters,

71
including Dilsey, the Compsons’ black servant, and moves
toward a powerful yet essentially unresolved conclusion.
Faulkner’s next novel, the brilliant tragicomedy called As I
Lay Dying (1930), is centred upon the conflicts within the
“poor white” Bundren family as it makes its slow and difficult
way to Jefferson to bury its matriarch’s malodorously decaying
corpse. Entirely narrated by the various Bundrens and people
encountered on their journey, it is the most systematically
multi-voiced of Faulkner’s novels and marks the culmination
of his early post-Joycean experimentalism.
Greater, if more equivocal, prominence came with the
financially successful publication of Sanctuary, a novel about
the brutal rape of a Southern college student and its generally
violent, sometimes comic, consequences.
Complexly structured and involving several major
characters, Light in August revolves primarily upon the
contrasted careers of Lena Grove, a pregnant young
countrywoman serenely in pursuit of her biological destiny,
and Joe Christmas, a dark-complexioned orphan uncertain as to
his racial origins, whose life becomes a desperate and often
violent search for a sense of personal identity, a secure location
on one side or the other of the tragic dividing line of colour.
In 1942 appeared Go Down, Moses, yet another major work,
in which an intense exploration of the linked themes of racial,
sexual, and environmental exploitation is conducted largely in
terms of the complex interactions between the “white” and
“black” branches of the plantation-owning McCaslin family,
especially as represented by Isaac McCaslin on the one hand
and Lucas Beauchamp on the other.
Faulkner’s American reputation—which had always lagged
well behind his reputation in Europe—was boosted by The
Portable Faulkner (1946), an anthology skillfully edited
by Malcolm Cowley in accordance with the arresting if
questionable thesis that Faulkner was deliberately constructing

72
a historically based “legend” of the South.
Faulkner’s Collected Stories (1950), impressive in both
quantity and quality, was also well received, and later in 1950
the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature catapulted the
author instantly to the peak of world fame and enabled him to
affirm, in a famous acceptance speech, his belief in the survival
of the human race, even in an atomic age, and in the
importance of the artist to that survival.
The Nobel Prize had a major impact on Faulkner’s private
life. Confident now of his reputation and future sales, he
became less consistently “driven” as a writer than in earlier
years and allowed himself more personal freedom, drinking
heavily at times and indulging in a number of extramarital
affairs—his opportunities in these directions being
considerably enhanced by a final screenwriting assignment
in Egypt in 1954 and several overseas trips (most notably
to Japan in 1955) undertaken on behalf of the U.S. State
Department. He took his “ambassadorial” duties seriously,
speaking frequently in public and to interviewers, and also
became politically active at home, taking positions on major
racial issues in the vain hope of finding middle ground between
entrenched Southern conservatives and interventionist
Northern liberals.
The quality of Faulkner’s writing is often said to have
declined in the wake of the Nobel Prize. In The Town (1957)
and The Mansion (1959) Faulkner not only brought the
“Snopes” trilogy to its conclusion, carrying his Yoknapatawpha
narrative to beyond the end of World War II, but subtly varied
the management of narrative point of view. Finally, in June
1962 Faulkner published yet another distinctive novel, the
genial, nostalgic comedy of male maturation he called The
Reivers and appropriately subtitled “A Reminiscence.”

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 The period of peace and debt-
fueled economic expansion that
followed WWI was the setting for
many of the stories and novels of
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940).
Fitzgerald's work captured the
restless, pleasure-hungry, defiant
mood of the 1920s, a decade he
named the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald's
characteristic theme, expressed
poignantly in his masterpiece The
Great Gatsby, is the tendency of youth's golden dreams to
dissolve in failure and disappointment. Fitzgerald also dwells
on the collapse of long-held American Ideals, such as liberty,
social unity, good governance and peace, features which were
severely threatened by the pressures of modern early 20th
century society.
In November 1917 he left to join the army after losing all
the positions he coveted and in July 1918, while he was
stationed near Montgomery, Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, the
daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge. They fell deeply
in love, and, as soon as he could, Fitzgerald headed for New
York determined to achieve instant success and to marry Zelda.
What he achieved was an advertising job at $90 a month. Zelda
broke their engagement, and, after an epic drunk, Fitzgerald
retired to St. Paul, Minnesota, to rewrite for the second time a
novel he had begun at Princeton. In the spring of 1920 it was
published, he married Zelda, and This Side of Paradise was a
revelation of the new morality of the young; it made Fitzgerald
famous.
This fame opened to him magazines of literary prestige,
such as Scribner’s, and high-paying popular ones, such as The
Saturday Evening Post. This sudden prosperity made it
possible for him and Zelda to play the roles they were so

74
beautifully equipped for, and Ring Lardner called them the
prince and princess of their generation. Though they loved
these roles, they were frightened by them, too, as the ending of
Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922),
shows. The Beautiful and Damned describes a handsome
young man and his beautiful wife, who gradually degenerate
into a shopworn middle age while they wait for the young man
to inherit a large fortune. Ironically, they finally get it, when
there is nothing of them left worth preserving.
To escape the life that they feared might bring them to
this end, the Fitzgeralds (together with their daughter, Frances,
called “Scottie,” born in 1921) moved in 1924 to the Riviera,
where they found themselves a part of a group of American
expatriates whose style was largely set by Gerald and Sara
Murphy; Fitzgerald described this society in his last completed
novel, Tender Is the Night, and modeled its hero on Gerald
Murphy. Shortly after their arrival in France, Fitzgerald
completed his most brilliant novel, The Great Gatsby (1925).
All of his divided nature is in this novel, the naive
Midwesterner afire with the possibilities of the “American
Dream” in its hero, Jay Gatsby, and the compassionate
Yale gentleman in its narrator, Nick Carraway. The Great
Gatsby is the most profoundly American novel of its time; at
its conclusion, Fitzgerald connects Gatsby’s dream, his
“Platonic conception of himself,” with the dream of the
discoverers of America.
The next decade of the Fitzgeralds’ lives was disorderly
and unhappy. Fitzgerald began to drink too much, and Zelda
suddenly, ominously, began to practice ballet dancing night
and day. In 1930 she had a mental breakdown and in 1932
another, from which she never fully recovered. Through the
1930s they fought to save their life together, and, when the
battle was lost, Fitzgerald said, “I left my capacity for hoping
on the little roads that led to Zelda’s sanitarium.” He did not

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finish his next novel, Tender Is the Night, until 1934. It is the
story of a psychiatrist who marries one of his patients, who, as
she slowly recovers, exhausts his vitality until he is, in
Fitzgerald’s words, “a man used up”. This is Fitzgerald’s most
moving book, though it was commercially unsuccessful.
With its failure and his despair over Zelda, Fitzgerald was
close to becoming an incurable alcoholic. By 1937, however,
he had come back far enough to become a scriptwriter in
Hollywood, and there he met and fell in love with Sheilah
Graham, a famous Hollywood gossip columnist. For the rest of
his life—except for occasional drunken spells when he became
bitter and violent—Fitzgerald lived quietly with her.
In October 1939 he began a novel about Hollywood, The
Last Tycoon. This is Fitzgerald’s final attempt to create his
dream of the promises of American life and of the kind of man
who could realize them. In the intensity with which it is
imagined and in the brilliance of its expression, it is the equal
of anything Fitzgerald ever wrote, and it is typical of his luck
that he died of a heart attack with his novel only half-finished.
He was 44 years old.
Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson also wrote novels
with critical depictions of American life.
Sinclair Lewis was best as a social
critic. His onslaughts against the
“village virus” (Main Street [1920]),
average businessmen (Babbitt [1922]),
materialistic scientists (Arrowsmith
[1925]), and the racially prejudiced
(Kingsblood Royal [1947]) were
satirically sharp and thoroughly
documented, though Babbitt is his
only book that still stands up brilliantly at the beginning of the
21st century.

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 Sherwood Anderson, (1876 –
1941), author who strongly influenced
American writing between World
Wars I and II, particularly the
technique of the short story. His
writing had an impact on such notable
writers as Ernest
Hemingway and William Faulkner,
both of whom owe the first publication
of their books to his efforts. His prose
style, based on everyday speech and
derived from the experimental writing of Gertrude Stein, was
markedly influential on the early Hemingway—who parodied
it cruelly in Torrents of Spring (1926) to make a clean break
and become his own man.
Encouraged by Theodore Dreiser—a leader of the Chicago
literary movement—he began to contribute experimental verse
and short fiction to The Little Review, The Masses, the Seven
Arts, and Poetry.
Winesburg, Ohio (1919) was his first mature book and made
his reputation as an author. Its interrelated short sketches and
tales are told by a newspaper reporter-narrator who is as
emotionally stunted in some ways as the people he describes.
His novels include Many Marriages (1923), which stresses the
need for sexual fulfillment; Dark Laughter (1925), which
values the “primitive” over the civilized; and Beyond
Desire (1932), a novel of Southern textile mill labour struggles.
His best work is generally thought to be in his short stories,
collected in Winesburg, Ohio, The Triumph of the
Egg (1921), Horses and Men (1923), and Death in the
Woods (1933). Also valued are the autobiographical sketches A
Story Teller’s Story (1924), Tar: A Midwest Childhood (1926),
and the posthumous Memoirs (1942; critical edition 1969).

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 Sherwood Anderson, one of the most influential U.S. writers
of the early 20th century, observed that the common belief in
his day was that stories had to be built around a plot, a notion
that, appeared to poison all storytelling.
His own aim was to achieve form, not plot, although form
was more elusive and difficult. The record of the short story in
the 20th century is dominated by this increased sensitivity to—
and experimentation with—form. Although the popular writers
of the century (like O. Henry in the U.S.) may have continued
to structure stories according to plot, the greater artists turned
elsewhere for structure, frequently eliciting the response from
cursory readers that “nothing happens in these stories.”
John Dos Passos wrote a famous
anti-war novel, Three Soldiers,
describing scenes of blind hatred,
stupidity, and criminality; and the
suffocating regimentation of army
life. He also wrote about the war in
the U.S.A. trilogy which extended into
the Depression. Experimental in form,
the U.S.A. trilogy weaves together
various narrative strands, which alternate with contemporary
news reports, snatches of the author's autobiography, and
capsule biographies of public figures including Eugene Debs,
Robert La Follette and Isadora Duncan.
His most sweeping indictments of the modern social and
economic system employed various narrative innovations such
as the “camera eye” and “newsreel,” along with a large cast of
characters, to attack society from the left.

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 Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) saw
violence and death first-hand as an
ambulance driver in World War I, and
the carnage persuaded him that abstract
language was mostly empty and
misleading. He cut out unnecessary
words from his writing, simplified the
sentence structure, and concentrated on
concrete objects and actions. He adhered
to a moral code that emphasized grace
under pressure, and his protagonists were
strong, silent men who often dealt awkwardly with
women. The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms are
generally considered his best novels; in 1954, he won
the Nobel Prize in Literature.
When Hemingway returned to the States after World War I,
living ultimately in Chicago, he fell under the mentorship of
fellow modernist, Sherwood Anderson, who encouraged
Hemingway to move to Paris. In 1920, Hemingway married
Hadley Richardson; soon afterwards, the couple left for Paris.
Surrounded by other writers of the period, such as F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Hemingway used these connections to
help develop his own writing career. With F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
help, Hemingway published his first novel The Sun Also Rises
(1926) to great acclaim.
The novel established Hemingway’s simplistic writing style
while expressing the frustration that many felt about World
War I. His second novel, A Farewell to Arms (1929), another
critical success, once again, captured the disillusionment of the
modernist period.
While Hemingway had a turbulent personal life, filled with
divorces and failed relationships, he continued to write
successful works including several collections of short fiction,
for which he was well known, as well as novels and non-

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fiction. Some of his many works are Death in the Afternoon
(1932), bringing bullfighting to a larger audience; To Have and
Have Not (1937); and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a
classic novel on the Spanish Civil War.
In 1952, Hemingway wrote what many consider to be his
finest work, Old Man and the Sea, which was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize and led to his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
In 1961, after struggling with depression for years, Ernest
Hemingway took his own life in Ketchum, Idaho.
Narratives like Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-
Lighted Place” (1933) may seem to have no structure at all, so
little physical action develops; but stories of this kind are
actually structured around a psychological, rather than
physical, conflict. In several of Hemingway’s stories (as in
many by D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and others),
physical action and event are unimportant except insofar as the
actions reveal the psychological underpinnings of the story.
Hemingway’s writing was well known stylistically for its
short declarative sentences and lack of detail. Hemingway
often said this style based on his iceberg approach to narrative,
where, like an iceberg, ten percent of the story was on the
surface and ninety percent was under the water. Hemingway
attributes this style to his time spent as a journalist. Due to his
distinctive style, Hemingway remained an immensely popular
writer and his novels were not only critically acclaimed but
also best sellers.
DRAMA
The Modernist period was perhaps the birth of the American
playwright. Before Modernism, theater consisted of largely
vaudeville or productions of European works. American drama
attained international status only in the 1920s and 1930s, with
the works of Eugene O'Neill, who won four Pulitzer Prizes and
the Nobel Prize.However, the success of Eugene O’Neil paved

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the way for several other successful American playwrights,
such as Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.
Eugene O’Neill, the most admired
dramatist of the period, was a product of
this movement. He worked with the
Provincetown Players before his plays
were commercially produced. His
dramas were remarkable for their range.
Beyond the Horizon (first performed
1920), Anna Christie (1921), Desire
Under the Elms (1924), and The Iceman
Cometh (1946) were naturalistic works,
while The Emperor Jones (1920) and The
Hairy Ape (1922) made use of the Expressionistic techniques
developed in German drama in the period 1914–24. He also
employed a stream-of-consciousness form of psychological
monologue in Strange Interlude (1928) and produced a work
that combined myth, family drama, and psychological analysis
in Mourning Becomes Electra (1931).
In the middle of the 20th century, American drama was
dominated by the work of playwrights Tennessee Williams
and Arthur Miller, as well as by the maturation of the
American musical, which had found a way to integrate script,
music and dance in such works as Oklahoma! and West Side
Story.
Arthur Miller (1915 - 2005) Known
best for his ironic commentaries on the
American dream, Arthur Miller’s plays
capture the disillusionment, the emptiness,
and the ambivalence of individual
Americans in the twentieth century. His
most famous plays, Death of a Salesman
(1949) and The Crucible (1953), are
staples in American literature courses

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from high school through university, and his precise
excoriation of the American experience of freedom continues
to captivate audiences.
From All My Sons (1947) to The Price (1968), his work was
at its strongest when he dealt with father-son relationships,
anchored in the harsh realities of the Great Depression. Yet
Miller could also be an effective protest writer, as in The
Crucible (1953), which used the Salem witch trials to attack
the witch-hunting of the McCarthy era.
Miller believed that playgoers responded to drama because
they experienced examples of acting throughout their daily
lives. In his remarks upon receiving the 2001 National
Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Medal, Miller
observed:
The fact is that acting is inevitable as soon as we walk out
our front doors into society. . . and in fact we are ruled more
by the arts of performance, by acting in other words, than
anybody wants to think about for very long.
But in our time television has created a quantitative change
in all this; one of the oddest things about millions of lives now
is that ordinary individuals, as never before in human history,
are so surrounded by acting.
Twenty-four hours a day everything seen on the tube is
either acted or conducted by actors in the shape of news
anchor men and women, including their hairdos. It may be that
the most impressionable form of experience now, for many if
not most people, consists of their emotional transactions with
actors which happen far more of the time than with real
people.
In this way, Miller may be said to democratize theatre.
Building on the work of the Scandinavian playwrights of the
nineteenth century, Miller, along with his contemporaries
Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, wrote plays that
featured ordinary persons who were tortured to the point of

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madness by ordinary life. In doing so, Miller, O’Neill, and
Williams captured the confusion, despair, and hopelessness of
modern life and assured themselves a place in the American
national conversation.
Tennessee Williams (1911—1983)
Though his work was uneven,
Tennessee Williams at his best was a
more powerful and effective playwright
than Miller. Creating stellar roles for
actors, especially women, Williams
brought a passionate lyricism and a
tragic Southern vision to such plays as
The Glass Menagerie (1944), A
Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on
a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). He
empathized with his characters’ dreams and illusions and with
the frustrations and defeats of their lives, and he wrote about
his own dreams and disappointments in his beautifully etched
short fiction, from which his plays were often adapted.
Williams’ major play, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947),
won a Pulitzer Prize. It is a study of the mental and moral ruin
of Blanche Du Bois, another former Southern belle, whose
genteel pretensions are no match for the harsh realities
symbolized by her brutish brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski.
In 1953, Camino Real, a complex work set in a mythical,
microcosmic town whose inhabitants include Lord Byron and
Don Quixote, was a commercial failure, but his Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof (1955), which exposes the emotional lies governing
relationships in the family of a wealthy Southern planter, was
awarded a Pulitzer Prize and was successfully filmed, as was
The Night of the Iguana (1961). Suddenly Last Summer (1958)
deals with lobotomy, pederasty, and cannibalism, and in Sweet
Bird of Youth (1959), the gigolo hero is castrated for having
infected a Southern politician’s daughter with venereal disease.

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 Williams was in ill health frequently during the
1960s, compounded by years of addiction to sleeping pills and
liquor, problems that he struggled to overcome after a severe
mental and physical breakdown in 1969. His later plays were
unsuccessful, closing soon to poor reviews. They include
Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980), centring on Zelda
Fitzgerald, wife of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, and on the
people they knew.
Miller and Williams dominated the post-World War II
theatre until the 1960s, and few other playwrights emerged to
challenge them. Then, in 1962, Edward Albee’s reputation,
based on short plays such as The Zoo Story (1959) and The
American Dream (1960), was secured by the stunning power of
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The action takes place in the
living room of a middle-aged
couple, George and Martha, who
have come home from a faculty
party drunk and quarrelsome. When
Nick, a young biology professor,
and his mousy wife, Honey, stop by
for a nightcap, they are enlisted as
fellow fighters, and the battle begins. A long night of malicious
games, insults, humiliations, betrayals, painful confrontations,
and savage witticisms ensues. The secrets of both couples are
laid bare, and illusions are viciously exposed. When, in a
climactic moment, George decides to “kill” the son they have
invented to compensate for their childlessness, George and
Martha finally face the truth and, in a quiet ending to a noisy
play, stand together against the world, sharing their sorrow.
A master of absurdist theatre who assimilated the influence
of European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Albee
established himself as a major figure in American drama. His
reputation with critics and audiences, however, began to

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decline with enigmatic plays such as Tiny Alice (1964) and A
Delicate Balance (1966), but, like O’Neill, he eventually
returned to favour with a complex autobiographical drama,
Three Tall Women (1994).

DEPRESSION-ERA LITERATURE
Depression era literature was blunt and direct in its social
criticism.
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) was
born in Salinas, California, where he
set many of his stories. His style was
simple and evocative, winning him
the favor of the readers but not of the
critics.
Steinbeck’s career, marked by
uneven achievements, began with
a historical novel, Cup of Gold
(1929), in which he voiced a distrust
of society and glorified the
anarchistic individualist typical of the rebellious 1920s.
He showed his affinity for colourful outcasts, such as the
paisanos of the Monterey area, in the short novels Tortilla Flat
(1935), Of Mice and Men (1937), and Cannery Row (1945).
His best books were inspired by the social struggles of
migrant farm workers during the Great Depression, including
the simply written but ambiguous strike novel In Dubious
Battle (1936) and his flawed masterpiece, The Grapes of
Wrath (1939). The latter, a protest novel punctuated by prose-
poem interludes, tells the story of the migration of the Joads, an
Oklahoma Dust Bowl family, to California. During their almost
biblical journey, they learn the necessity for collective action
among the poor and downtrodden to prevent them from being
destroyed individually.

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 He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.
Steinbeck's contemporary, Nathanael West's two most
famous short novels, Miss Lonelyhearts, which plumbs the life
of its eponymous antihero, a reluctant (and, to comic effect,
male) advice columnist, and the effects the tragic letters exert
on it, and The Day of the Locust, which introduces a cast of
Hollywood stereotypes and explores the ironies of the movies,
have come to be avowed classics of American literature.
Henry Miller assumed a unique
place in American Literature in the
1930s when his semi-autobiographical
novels, written and published in Paris,
were banned from the US. Although
his major works, including Tropic of
Cancer and Black Spring, would not
be free of the label of obscenity until
1962, their themes and stylistic
innovations had already exerted a
major influence on succeeding
generations of American writers, and
paved the way for sexually frank 1960s novels by John Updike
and Philip Roth.
Lyric fictionists
An interesting development in fiction, abetted by
Modernism, was a shift from naturalistic to poetic writing.
There was an increased tendency to select details and endow
them with symbolic meaning, to set down the thought
processes and emotions of the characters, and to make use of
rhythmic prose. In varied ways Stephen Crane, Frank Norris,
Dos Passos, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Faulkner all showed
evidence of this—in passages, in short stories, and even in
entire novels. Faulkner showed the tendency at its worst in A
Fable (1954), which, ironically, won a Pulitzer Prize.

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 Lyricism was especially
prominent in the writings of Willa
Cather. O Pioneers! (1913), The
Song of the Lark (1915), and My
Ántonia (1918) contained poetic
passages about the disappearing
frontier and the creative efforts of
frontier folk. A Lost Lady (1923)
and The Professor’s House (1925)
were elegiac and spare in style,
though they also depicted historic social transformations, and
Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) was an exaltation of
the past and of spiritual pioneering.
Katherine Anne Porter, whose works took the form
primarily of novelettes and stories, wrote more in the style of
the Metaphysical poets, though she also wrote one long,
ambitious novel, A Ship of Fools (1962). Her use of the stream-
of-consciousness method in Flowering
Judas (1930) as well as in Pale Horse,
Pale Rider (1939) had the complexity, the
irony, and the symbolic sophistication
characteristic of these poets, whose work
the Modernists had brought into fashion.
Two of the most intensely lyrical works
of the 1930s were autobiographical novels
set in the Jewish ghetto of New York
City’s Lower East Side before World War
I: Michael Gold’s harsh Jews Without
Money (1930) and Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934), one of
the greatest novels of the decade.

THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

The early years of the twentieth century transformed the
United States from a nation of agrarian settlers into a nation of

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industrial immigrants. With the collapse of the plantation
economy and the closing of the western frontier, the United
States suddenly became a nation of city-dwellers. The urban
economies of the north thrived during this period, and internal
migration brought about significant changes in cultural
production. While these migratory patterns often reinforced
regional identities, they also provided the conditions for the
creation of new identities.
For African-Americans of the early twentieth century, the
Harlem Renaissance was the most significant period of cultural
formation since the end of the Civil War.
The Harlem Renaissance is commonly defined as a period
of cultural activity by African-American artists that began in
Harlem, a New York City neighborhood in northern
Manhattan, in the 1920s and ended in the years leading up to
World War II.
Yet that short span of approximately fifteen years neither
accurately describes the period, nor indicates the lasting
influence that the Harlem Renaissance continues to have on
American literature. In order to locate the roots of the Harlem
Renaissance, we need to go back at least as far as 1910 and the
founding of The Crisis, the journal of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Many
members of the Harlem Renaissance, including early
luminaries such as Countee Cullen and Jessie Redmon Fauset,
were closely associated with The Crisis and with the high
ideals of its editorial page “[to] stand for the right of men,
irrespective of color or race, for the highest ideals of American
democracy” (Du Bois, November 1910). This dedication to the
idealized principles of American democracy and a celebration
of the achievements of African-Americans had a direct
influence on the early members of the Harlem Renaissance.
Many, like Cullen and Fauset, were highly and traditionally
educated, and their poetry and fiction descend directly from the

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English literary traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. While other African-American writers of the time
embraced folklore traditions, Cullen and many others
celebrated their association with the highest forms of English
literature.
From the very beginnings of the Harlem Renaissance, the
movement lacked unity. Although some members embraced
the high language of Du Bois and those closest to him, others
argued for a literature that responded to the writers’ African
heritage instead of their European connection.
Alain Locke’s The New Negro
(1925) is often regarded as the
manifesto of this pan-Africanism.
Having studied African culture and
traced its influences upon Western
civilization, he urged black painters,
sculptors, and musicians to look to
African sources for identity and to
discover materials and techniques
for their work. He encouraged black authors to seek subjects in
black life and to set high artistic standards for themselves. He
familiarized American readers with the Harlem Renaissance by
editing a special Harlem issue for Survey Graphic (March
1925), which he expanded into The New Negro , an anthology
of fiction, poetry, drama, and essays.
Writers like Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Zora
Neale Hurston, are often considered to
be part of this second branch of the
Harlem Renaissance.
Richard Wright
Wright first came to the general
public’s attention with a volume of
novellas, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938),
based on the question: How may a black

89
man live in a country that denies his humanity? In each story
but one the hero’s quest ends in death. His fictional scene
shifted to Chicago in Native Son. Its protagonist, a poor black
youth named Bigger Thomas, accidentally kills a white girl,
and in the course of his ensuing flight his hitherto meaningless
awareness of antagonism from a white world becomes
intelligible. The book was a best seller and was staged
successfully as a play on Broadway (1941) by Orson Welles.
Wright himself played Bigger Thomas in a motion-picture
version made in Argentina in 1951.
In 1944 Wright left the Communist Party because of
political and personal differences. His Black Boy is a moving
account of his childhood and young manhood in the South. The
book chronicles the extreme poverty of his childhood, his
experience of white prejudice and violence against blacks, and
his growing awareness of his interest in literature.
After World War II, Wright settled in Paris as a permanent
expatriate. The Outsider (1953), acclaimed as the first
American existential novel, warned that the black man had
awakened in a disintegrating society not ready to include him.
Three later novels were not well received. Among his
polemical writings of that period was White Man,
Listen! (1957), which was originally a series of lectures given
in Europe. Eight Men, a collection of short stories, appeared in
1961.
The autobiographical American Hunger, which narrates
Wright’s experiences after moving to the North, was published
posthumously in 1977. Some of the more candid passages
dealing with race, sex, and politics in Wright’s books had been
cut or omitted before original publication. Unexpurgated
versions of Native Son, Black Boy, and his other works were
published in 1991, however. A novella, Rite of Passage (1994),
and an unfinished crime novel, A Father’s Law (2008), were
also released posthumously.

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 Langston Hughes Not
Without Laughter (1930),
his first prose volume, had a
cordial reception. In the
1930s he turned his poetry
more forcefully toward
racial justice and political
radicalism. He traveled in
the American South in 1931;
he then traveled widely in the Soviet Union, Haiti, Japan, and
elsewhere and served as a newspaper correspondent (1937)
during the Spanish Civil War.
He published a collection of short stories, The Ways of
White Folks (1934), and became deeply involved in theatre.
His play Mulatto, adapted from one of his short stories,
premiered on Broadway in 1935, and productions of several
other plays followed in the late 1930s. He also founded theatre
companies in Harlem (1937) and Los Angeles (1939). In 1940
Hughes published The Big Sea, his autobiography up to age 28.
A second volume of autobiography, I Wonder As I Wander,
was published in 1956.
Hughes documented African American literature and
culture in works such as A Pictorial History of the Negro in
America (1956) and the anthologies The Poetry of the
Negro (1949) and The Book of Negro Folklore (1958).
He continued to write numerous works for the stage,
including the lyrics for Street Scene, an opera that premiered in
1947.
Black Nativity (1961; film 2013) is a gospel play that uses
Hughes’s poetry, along with gospel standards and scriptural
passages, to retell the story of the birth of Jesus. It was an
international success, and performances of the work—often
diverging substantially from the original—became a Christmas
tradition in many black churches and cultural centres.

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Where are we going? And the doors are locked.
Bethlehem Is anyone out there?
Bethlehem. Does anyone care?
The place where Christ was Is anyone listening?
born. Is anyone there?
Bethlehem. This girl's about to give birth!
The special city We got no place to go!
where Joseph brought Mary... I need help.
...to bring Lunch Money.
the Savior of the world. Is that you?
Oh, Bethlehem Langston!
Oh, Bethlehem He's going to help us.
Help! Sleep in...
Hey, hey! My girl, she's in labor! ...heavenly peace.
A little help, please. Just come in here.
Right now? Just relax. Just relax.
Yes, right now. Lay down here.
Are you all right? Please.
We got it. Joseph!
We have to find somewhere to Fear not.
go. For behold, I bring you
It was difficult times then. good tidings of great joy...
They couldn't find anyplace... ...which shall be
...to take them in. to all people.
They couldn't even For unto you, a Savior is born.
find a place to stay! Sweet...
There was no Holiday Inn! ...little Jesus boy
No Hampton Inn, They made Him born in a
no Ramada, no Motel Six! manger
No room in all Sweet little...
the great city of Bethlehem. ...holy child
No room for Mary anywhere. They didn't know...
The night is late,
the air is cold.
He also wrote poetry until his death; The Panther and the
Lash, published posthumously in 1967, reflected and engaged

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with the Black Power movement and, specifically, the Black
Panther Party, which was founded the previous year.
Zora Neale Hurston
Mules and Men, a study of
folkways among the African
American population of Florida, Their
Eyes Were Watching God (1937), a
novel, Tell My Horse (1938), a blend
of travel writing and anthropology
based on her investigations of voodoo
in Haiti, and Moses, Man of the
Mountain (1939), a novel, firmly
established her as a major author.
By the time of her death Hurston was little remembered by
the general reading public, but there was a resurgence of
interest in her work in the late 20th century.
In addition, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black
Cargo” was released in 2018. Although completed in 1931, the
nonfiction work was originally rejected by publishers because
of its use of vernacular. It tells the story of Cudjo Lewis, who
was believed to be the last survivor of the final slave ship that
brought Africans to the United States.
By the 1930s, the Harlem Renaissance no longer signified a
unified artistic ideal, and its many voices and members were
scattered around the globe by evolving racial tensions in the
United States. Beyond Harlem, African-American communities
were thriving in cities like Chicago, Memphis, Detroit,
Baltimore, Washington, and Pittsburgh; furthermore, the wars
in Europe were redrawing political boundaries worldwide.
Almost as quickly as it began, the Harlem Renaissance faded,
but it left behind a legacy of independence in literature, music,
and heart that can be traced directly to jazz, the blues, Motown,
rock, rap, and hip-hop.

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 POST-WORLD WAR
Since the end of the Second World War to the present day,
the people of the United States of America have witnessed the
incredible economic and technological growth of their nation
into a global cultural and military superpower. These years of
growth also have often been times of radical cultural
transformation, during which the nation reassessed its
traditions. Americans in this period lived through times of war
and times of peace, decades of cultural conformity and decades
of social revolt.
For the first two decades of this period, Americans lived in a
racially segregated nation; they now live in a multicultural
nation that has twice elected a black president.
For much of this period, Americans lived in a world of
ideologically warring superpowers poised on the brink of
nuclear annihilation; they now live in a world intimately
connected by massive computer networks and a complex
global economy, yet one still riven by dangerous religious and
economic disputes. In popular culture, Americans’ tastes in
music have moved from jazz and rock and roll to hip-hop and
electronic music. In the visual arts, Americans have seen the
explosive canvases of abstract expressionists such as Jackson
Pollock become the Campbell’s Soup cans of pop artists such
as Andy Warhol and then the video screens of cable
television’s MTV and multimedia artists on YouTube. Their art
and entertainment have come to them increasingly through
technologies, starting with film and radio, then television, and
now the Internet. In the literature of this amazingly
transformative era, we find a record of how the nation has
known, questioned, and even redefined itself.
When the United States ended the Second World War by
dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, the nation was well positioned to assume a role
of global leadership. While the cities and factories of both its

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enemies Germany and Japan and its allies Britain and the
Soviet Union were destroyed in the war, the continental U.S.
was never attacked. The American industries that won the war
quickly retooled to win the peace, selling cars, radios, and
washing machines within an increasingly global economy and
ushering in an era of unparalleled American prosperity. The
United States government spent tens of billions of dollars in
foreign aid to rebuild its former enemies Germany and Japan,
ensuring that they would be both economic and military allies
in the future.
The decade and a half following the Second World War is
often called the age of conformity, as the nation’s large,
college-educated middle class embraced the values of the
nuclear family and sought happiness, after years of desperate
war, in their society’s newfound abundance of consumer
goods.
Yet the peace was short lived, and there was dissent at
home. In the midst of this postwar era of prosperity, Allen
Ginsberg composed his great poem “Howl,” in which he
lambasted the nation’s conformist culture for destroying its
best and brightest citizens. Authors of the Beat movement of
the 1950s such as Ginsberg celebrated America’s
countercultures and sought to free literature from traditional
formalism and align it more closely with the improvisatory
musical solos of jazz, the spontaneous drips and splashes of
abstract expressionist action painting, and the everyday
utterances of the American street. Storytellers of the second
wave of the Southern Renaissance resisted America’s culture
of conformity and embraced their distinctive regionality, with
Georgia author Flannery O’Connor lamenting in her essay,
“The Fiction Writer and His Country,” that the traditional
American South was “getting more and more like” the rest of
the materialistic, money-hungry nation. Poets during this
period, such as Theodore Roethke and Sylvia Plath, began

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sharing intimate, sometimes disturbing details from their lives
in a newly confessional mode of poetry that showed how the
nuclear family could be a source of stress as well as stability,
ultimately showing the nation how the personal situation of the
writer could represent the politics of the nation as a whole.
On the world stage, the Soviet Union organized the Eastern
European nations it had conquered during the Second World
War into a political bloc dedicated to Russian-led state
socialism under which the state owns all businesses and
administers all social services as opposed to American-led free-
market capitalism, under which private individuals own all
businesses. The former allies found themselves competing for
the hearts and minds of the world over the value of their
respective social systems. When the Soviet Union tested its
own atomic bomb in 1949, the U.S. and the Soviet Union
entered into a conflict called the Cold War. The two enemies
proceeded to build tens of thousands of nuclear weapons over
the following decades to deter each from attacking the other,
accumulating enough atomic bombs to destroy human
civilization many times over. The U.S. committed itself to a
policy of Soviet containment, checking the influence of the so-
called red menace abroad through foreign aid and limited
military action, and prosecuting American artists and activists
with leftist sympathies at home through such venues as the
House Un-American Activities Committee.
In addition to grappling with the threats of nuclear war and
the red menace, Americans at this time were also grappling
with the homegrown injustice of racial segregation. Up until
1965, Americans in many states lived under Jim Crow laws
that disenfranchised African-Americans, keeping black
American citizens socially separate from and legally inferior to
white citizens.
The civil rights and black power movements of the 1950s
and 60s, led by Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X,

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increasingly showed the nation that the experience of its
prosperous, college-educated white middle class was not the
experience of all Americans. The often-violent struggle to
desegregate America was televised across the nation, unifying
the country within a new television culture in the very act of
displaying its deep ideological divisions.
In 1963, American President John F. Kennedy was
assassinated. In 1974, another American president, Richard M.
Nixon, resigned from office in disgrace. The tumultuous
decade in between these two events is known as the Sixties.
During this decade, America was fighting a seemingly endless
war of containment in Vietnam.
Students on college campuses protested the war and the
policies of their own government. Urban populations rioted
against racism and economic disparity.
Artists and intellectuals radically reassessed America’s
prosperous postwar era as a culture of one-dimensional
organization men trapped in skyscrapers and servile women
trapped by what feminist critic Betty Friedan called the
feminine mystique.
Led by author-activists such as Betty Friedan and Gloria
Steinem, women in the 1960s and ’70s launched a second wave
of feminist political activity, demanding full social and
economic equality with men. Poets such as Adrienne Rich
embodied the radical politics of their era, composing feminist
poems.
America returned to a Cold War culture of conformity in the
decade preceding the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Yet
the changes the Sixties had wrought in the nation’s culture
were permanent. From the time of the civil rights movement to
the present day, American writers have increasingly come to
see the U.S. as being home to several different kinds of
Americans—African-Americans, Native Americans, Asian
Americans, Straight Americans, Queer Americans—each with

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their own unique experience of life in America. The civil rights
and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s were followed
by the gay rights and multicultural movements of the 1980s,
1990s, and early twenty-first century. Western culture itself
became more welcoming of difference after the fall of the
Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War as the nations of
Europe cast aside millennia of enmities and joined in a
European Union, sharing a common currency, the Euro, and a
common economic fate. While the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001 illustrated how economically and
technologically connected the world had become, they also
drove home how socially and ideologically divided it remains
in the early twenty-first century.
America’s growing multicultural sensibility and tolerance of
diversity has been both empowering and challenging, reflecting
new kinds of political identity that often conflict with
Americans’ senses of who they are. Beholding the diversity
within America, authors of the 1960s once worried about the
“death of the novel.” It no longer felt possible for a single story
to represent the American experience as a whole.
The changes that the nation has undergone since 1945 have
often been disorienting.
The United States has remained an economic and cultural
global superpower since 1945, but the politics of both the
nation and the world during this time have been radically in
flux, seeing the rise and fall of global empires, the emergence
of new social justice movements, and the creation of new
senses of national identity. Science and technology, so
important to winning the Second World War, have penetrated
more and more parts of American society. The computer has
been the most influential invention of the era, changing the
way Americans both work and play. The media of the book,
radio, and film have been joined by the new media of the
television and computer screen, giving Americans since 1945
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an overwhelming variety of often contradictory ways to know
themselves, their fellow citizens, and their world.
American literature since 1945 has seen the rise of
countercultural Beats and the confessional poets. It contains the
voices of radical feminists, conservative regionalists, and proud
multiculturalists. It presides over the reinvention of America as
its modernist storytellers of one American experience now
stand beside the postmodernist storytellers of many American
experiences. In all these ways and more, the American writers
who lived through the extraordinary era since 1945 present us
with an insightful record of what their nation and its people
once were, of what they are, and of what they may become.

SOUTHERN LITERARY RENAISSANCE – SECOND

WAVE (1945-1965)
While the first wave of Southern writers were writing with
an agenda, in reaction to H.L. Menken’s claims that the South
could not produce great art, the Post-1945 Southern writers
came of age under the spell of the a group of writers studying
at Vanderbilt University who named themselves the Agrarians
(John Crow Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Andrew
Lytle, etc) as well as several commercially successful Southern
writers such as William Faulkner. In turn, they internalized a
story telling tradition that was already on-going. These Second
Wave writers had concerns of their own, as the South, along
with the rest of the World, entered the Cold War, in the post
World War II period. Yet, while the South tried to keep pace
with a changing world, Southern literature continued to
produce some of the most innovative, critically acclaimed work
of the time period.

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 Eudora Welty (1909—2001)’s debut
novel, The Robber Bridgegroom
(1942), gained national attention for her
as a short story writer who had already
won back-to-back O. Henry awards,
including one for her well anthologized
short story, “A Worn Path.”
Her work is mainly focused with
great precision on the regional manners
of people inhabiting a small Mississippi
town that resembles her own birthplace
and the Delta country.
Her readership grew steadily after the publication of A
Curtain of Green (1941; enlarged 1979), a volume of short
stories that contains two of her most anthologized stories—
“The Petrified Man” and “Why I Live at the P.O.” In 1942 her
short novel The Robber Bridegroom was issued, and in 1946
her first full-length novel, Delta Wedding. Her later novels
include The Ponder Heart (1954), Losing Battles (1970),
and The Optimist’s Daughter (1972), which won a Pulitzer
Prize. The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943), The Golden
Apples (1949), and The Bride of Innisfallen and Other
Stories (1955) are collections of short stories, and The Eye of
the Story (1978) is a volume of essays. The Collected Stories of
Eudora Welty was published in 1980.
Welty’s main subject is the intricacies of human
relationships, particularly as revealed through her characters’
interactions in intimate social encounters. Among her themes
are the subjectivity and ambiguity of people’s perception of
character and the presence of virtue hidden beneath an
obscuring surface of convention, insensitivity, and
social prejudice. Welty’s outlook is hopeful, and love is viewed
as a redeeming presence in the midst of isolation and
indifference. Her works combine humour and

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psychological acuity with a sharp ear for regional speech
patterns.
Carson McCullers (1917 —
1967) was the literary
“wunderkind” who exploded onto
the national spotlight at the age of
twenty-three with her debut novel,
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
(1940). The novel concerns four
inhabitants of a small town in
Georgia—an adolescent girl with a
passion to study music, an
unsuccessful socialist agitator, a black physician struggling to
maintain his personal dignity, and a widower who owns a café.
Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941; filmed 1967), a shorter
work set in a Southern army post that chronicles the unhappy
life of a captain (a latent homosexual) and his wife (a
nymphomaniac), confirmed McCullers’s earlier success.
During the 1940s McCullers met American
playwright Tennessee Williams, and they became friends.
Williams encouraged her to make a play of her novel The
Member of the Wedding (1946), a sensitive portrayal of a
lonely adolescent whose attachment to her brother precipitates
a crisis at his wedding. The novel proved to be her most
popular work, and it was equally successful as a play, heralded
by some as a new form of American theatre because of its
emphasis on character interaction and psychology. The
Broadway version ran for more than a year and was made into
a movie in 1952.
McCullers’s fictional characters endure various physical
and psychological handicaps that complicate their natural but
often bizarre searches for compassion. Her novels and stories
demonstrate a Southern gothic embrace of the eccentric and
combine examinations of relationships between people,

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reflections on such subjects as the inherent incompatibility of
the lover and the beloved, and a profound sense of the human
longing to connect with others. She felt her characters
powerfully, once stating that “I live with the people I create
and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.”
Her other works include The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951),
the drama The Square Root of Wonderful (1958), and the
novel Clock Without Hands (1961).
Flannery O’Connor
(1925—1964) emerged as the
super star of the Iowa Writer’s
Workshop, winning multiple
accolades, including two
O. Henry Awards, as her short
story “A Good Man Is Hard to
Find” (1955) became widely anthologized. Her other works of
fiction are a novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and the
short-story collection Everything That Rises Must
Converge (1965).
Flannery O’Connor’s fiction was particularly noteworthy for
its marriage of violence, humor, and religious themes, a
mixture that amused and baffled readers.
The Southern Literary Renaissance remained strong well
after 1945.
***
The years between the two world wars were described as a
“second flowering” of American writing. Certainly American
literature attained a new maturity and a rich diversity in the
1920s and ’30s, and significant works by several major figures
from those decades were published after 1945. Faulkner,
Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Katherine Anne Porter wrote
memorable fiction, though not up to their prewar standard; and
Frost, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams
published important poetry. Eugene O’Neill’s most

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distinguished play, Long Day’s Journey into Night, appeared
posthumously in 1956.
Before and after World War II,
Robert Penn Warren (1905 –1989)
published influential fiction, poetry,
and criticism. An American novelist,
poet, critic, and teacher, best-known for
his treatment of moral dilemmas in a
South beset by the erosion of its
traditional, rural values. He became the
first poet laureate of the United States
in 1986.
Warren’s first novel, Night
Rider (1939), is based on the tobacco
war (1905–08) between the independent growers in Kentucky
and the large tobacco companies. It anticipates much of his
later fiction in the way it treats a historical event with tragic
irony, emphasizes violence, and portrays individuals caught in
moral quandaries.
His best-known novel, All the King’s Men (1946), is based
on the career of the Louisiana demagogue Huey Long and tells
the story of an idealistic politician whose lust for power
corrupts him and those around him. This novel won the
Pulitzer Prize in 1947 and, when made into a film, won the
Academy Award for best motion picture of 1949.
Warren’s other novels include At Heaven’s Gate (1943);
World Enough and Time (1950), which centres on a
controversial murder trial in Kentucky in the 19th century;
Band of Angels (1956); and The Cave (1959).
His long narrative poem, Brother to Dragons (1953),
dealing with the brutal murder of a slave by two nephews of
Thomas Jefferson, is essentially a versified novel, and
his poetry generally exhibits many of the concerns of his
fiction.

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 His other volumes of poetry include Promises: Poems,
1954–1956; You, Emperors, and Others (1960); Audubon: A
Vision (1969); Now and Then; Poems 1976–1978; Rumor
Verified (1981); Chief Joseph (1983); and New and Selected
Poems, 1923–1985 (1985). The Circus in the Attic (1948),
which included “Blackberry Winter,” considered by some
critics to be one of Warren’s supreme achievements, is a
volume of short stories, and Selected Essays (1958) is a
collection of some of his critical writings.
Besides receiving the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Warren
twice won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (1958, 1979) and, at the
time of his selection as poet laureate in 1986, was the only
person ever to win the prize in both categories. In his later
years he tended to concentrate on his poetry.
The period in time from the end of World War II up until,
roughly, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw the publication of
some of the most popular works in American history such as
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper
Lee (1926 —2016), the daughter of
Amasa Coleman Lee, a lawyer who
was by all accounts apparently rather
like the hero-father of her novel in
his sound citizenship and
warmheartedness. The plot of To
Kill a Mockingbird is based in part
on his unsuccessful youthful defense
of two African American men
convicted of murder.
The novel is told predominately
from the perspective of a young girl, Jean Louise (“Scout”)
Finch (who ages from six to nine years old during the course of
the novel), the daughter of white lawyer Atticus Finch, and
occasionally from the retrospective adult voice of Jean Louise.
Scout and her brother, Jem, learn the principles of racial justice

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and open-mindedness from their father, whose just and
compassionate acts include an unpopular defense of a black
man falsely accused of raping a white girl. They also develop
the courage and the strength to follow their convictions in their
acquaintance and eventual friendship with a recluse, “Boo”
Radley, who has been demonized by the community. To Kill a
Mockingbird received a Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and has sold
more than 30 million copies worldwide. Criticism of its
tendency to sermonize has been matched by praise of its insight
and stylistic effectiveness. It became a memorable film in 1962
and was filmed again in 1997.
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.
Though born in Canada, Chicago-raised Saul Bellow would
become one of the most influential novelists in America in the
decades directly following World War II. In works like The
Adventures of Augie March and Herzog, Bellow painted vivid
portraits of the American city and the distinctive characters that
peopled it. Bellow went on to win the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1976.
In contrast, John Updike approached
American life from a more reflective but
no less subversive perspective. His 1960
novel Rabbit, Run, the first of four
chronicling the rising and falling fortunes
of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom over the
course of four decades against the
backdrop of the major events of the
second half of the 20th century, broke
new ground on its release in its
characterization and detail of the American middle class and
frank discussion of taboo topics such as adultery.

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 Notable among Updike's characteristic innovations was his
use of present-tense narration, his rich, stylized language, and
his attention to sensual detail. His work is also deeply imbued
with Christian themes. The two final installments of the Rabbit
series, Rabbit is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990), were
both awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Frequently linked with Updike is the
novelist Philip Roth. Roth vigorously
explores Jewish identity in American
society, especially in the postwar era and
the early 21st century. Frequently set in
Newark, New Jersey, Roth's work is
known to be highly autobiographical, and
many of Roth's main characters, most
famously the Jewish novelist Nathan
Zuckerman, are thought to be alter egos of
Roth. With these techniques, and armed
with his articulate and fast-paced style, Roth explores the
distinction between reality and fiction in literature while
provocatively examining American culture. His most famous
work includes the Zuckerman novels, the controversial
Portnoy's Complaint (1969), and Goodbye, Columbus (1959).
Among the most decorated American writers of his generation,
he has won every major American literary award, including the
Pulitzer Prize for his major novel American Pastoral (1997).
In the realm of African-American literature, Ralph Ellison's
1952 novel Invisible Man was instantly recognized as among
the most powerful and important works of the immediate post-
war years.
The story of a black Underground Man in the urban north,
the novel laid bare the often repressed racial tension that still
prevailed while also succeeding as an existential character
study.

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 Richard Wright was catapulted to fame by the publication
in subsequent years of his now widely studied short story, "The
Man Who Was Almost a Man" (1939), and his controversial
second novel, Native Son (1940), and his legacy was cemented
by the 1945 publication of Black Boy, a work in which Wright
drew on his childhood and mostly autodidactic education in the
segregated South, fictionalizing and exaggerating some
elements as he saw fit. Because of its polemical themes and
Wright's involvement with the Communist Party, the novel's
final part, "American Hunger", was not published until 1977.
Perhaps the most ambitious and
challenging post-war American novelist
was William Gaddis, whose
uncompromising, satiric, and large
novels, such as The Recognitions (1955)
and J R (1975) are presented largely in
terms of unattributed dialog that requires
almost unexampled reader participation.
Gaddis's primary themes include forgery,
capitalism, religious zealotry, and the
legal system, constituting a sustained
polyphonic critique of modern American life. Gaddis's work,
though largely ignored for years, anticipated and influenced the
development of such ambitious "postmodern" fiction writers
as Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Joseph
McElroy, William H. Gass, and Don DeLillo.
Another neglected and challenging postwar American
novelist, albeit one who wrote much shorter works, was John
Hawkes, whose surreal visionary fiction addresses themes of
violence and eroticism and experiments audaciously with
narrative voice and style. Among his most important works is
the short nightmarish novel The Lime Twig (1961).
From J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories and The Catcher in the
Rye to Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, the perceived madness of

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the state of affairs in America was brought to the forefront of
the nation's literary expression.

BEAT GENERATION
Not only did a new generation come out of the war, but its
ethnic, regional, and social character was quite different from
that of the preceding one. Among the younger writers were
children of immigrants, many of them Jews; African
Americans, only a few generations away from slavery; and,
eventually, women, who, with the rise of feminism, were to
speak in a new voice. Though the social climate of the postwar
years was conservative, even conformist, some of the most
hotly discussed writers were homosexuals or bisexuals,
including Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Paul Bowles,
Gore Vidal, and James Baldwin, whose dark themes and
experimental methods cleared a path for Beat writers such as
Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac.
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.
Allen Ginsberg set the tone of the
movement in his poem Howl, a
Whitmanesque work that began: "I saw the
best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness...". Dithyrambic and prophetic,
owing something to the romantic
bohemianism of Walt Whitman, it also

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dwells on homosexuality, drug addiction, Buddhism, and
Ginsberg’s revulsion from what he saw as the materialism and
insensitivity of post-World War II America.

HOWL
BY ALLEN GINSBERG
I
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up
smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats
floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw
Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs
illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the
scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,…
Among the most representative
achievements of the Beats in the novel
are Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957),
the chronicle of a soul-searching travel
through the continent.
In 1940 Kerouac enrolled
at Columbia University, where he met
two writers who would become lifelong
friends: Allen Ginsberg and William S.
Burroughs. Together with Kerouac, they

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are the seminal figures of the literary movement known as
Beat, a term introduced to Kerouac by Herbert Huncke,
a Times Square junkie, petty thief, hustler, and writer. It meant
“down-and-out” as well as “beatific” and therefore signified
the bottom of existence (from a financial and an emotional
point of view) as well as the highest, most spiritual high.
By the time Kerouac and Burroughs met in 1944, Kerouac
had already written a million words.
In 1944 Kerouac also wrote a novella about his childhood in
Massachusetts. He left it unfinished, however, and then lost the
manuscript, which was eventually sold at auction for nearly
$100,000 in 2002, having been discovered years earlier in a
Columbia University dorm. It was published, along with some
of Kerouac’s notes on the book and some letters to his father,
as The Haunted Life, and Other Writings in 2014. That novella
was just one expression of Kerouac’s boyhood ambition to
write “the great American novel.”
Yet Kerouac was unhappy with the pace of his prose. The
music of jazz artists began to drive Kerouac toward his
“spontaneous bop prosody,” as Ginsberg later called it, which
took shape in the late 1940s through various drafts of his
second novel, On the Road. The original manuscript, a scroll
written in a three-week blast in 1951, is legendary: composed
of approximately 120 feet (37 metres) of paper taped together
and fed into a manual typewriter, the scroll allowed Kerouac
the fast pace he was hoping to achieve. He also hoped to
publish the novel as a scroll so that the reader would not be
encumbered by having to turn the pages of a book. Rejected for
publication at first, it finally was printed as a book in 1957.
Kerouac found himself a national sensation after On the
Road received a rave review from The New York Times critic
Gilbert Millstein. While Millstein extolled the literary merits of
the book, to the American public the novel represented a
departure from tradition. Kerouac, though, was disappointed

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with having achieved fame for what he considered the wrong
reason: little attention went to the excellence of his writing and
more to the novel’s radically different characters and its
characterization of hipsters and their nonconformist celebration
of sex, jazz, and endless movement.
The character Dean Moriarty was an American archetype,
embodying “IT,” an intense moment of heightened experience
achieved through fast driving, talking, or “blowing” (as a horn
player might) or in writing. In On the Road Sal Paradise
explains his fascination with others who have “IT,” such as
Dean Moriarty and Rollo Greb as well as jazz performers: “The
only ones for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to
live, mad to talk, mad to be saved.” These are characters for
whom the perpetual now is all.
Readers often confused Kerouac with Sal Paradise, the
amoral hipster at the centre of his novel. The critic Norman
Podhoretz famously wrote that Beat writing was an assault
against the intellect and against decency. This misreading
dominated negative reactions to On the Road.
Despite the success of the “spontaneous prose” technique
Kerouac used in On the Road, he sought further refinements to
his narrative style. Kerouac sought visual possibilities in
language by combining spontaneous prose with sketching “like
a painter, but with words”.
As he continued to experiment with his prose style, Kerouac
also bolstered his standing among the Beat writers as a poet
supreme. With his sonnets and odes he ranged across Western
poetic traditions. He also experimented with the idioms of
blues and jazz in such works as Mexico City Blues (1959), a
sequential poem comprising 242 choruses. He began to show
the influence of the haiku, unknown to Americans at that time.
While Ezra Pound had modeled his poem “In a Station of the
Metro” (1913) after Japanese haiku, Kerouac, departing from
the 17-syllable, 3-line strictures, redefined the form and created

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an American haiku tradition. In the posthumously published
collection Scattered Poems (1971), he proposed that the
“Western haiku” simply say a lot in three short lines:
Above all, a Haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic
trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and
graceful as a Vivaldi Pastorella.
In his pocket notebooks, Kerouac wrote and rewrote haiku,
revising and perfecting them. He also incorporated his haiku
into his prose.
One flower Birds singing Nightfall,
On the cliffside In the dark boy smashing dandelions
Nodding at the canyon Rainy dawn with a stick.

Morning sun - You’d be surprised Nightfall,

The purple petals, how little I knew too dark to read the page
Four have fallen Even up to yesterday too cold.

Following each other Alone, in old Looking for my cat

my cats stop clothes, sipping wine In the weeds,
when it thunders. Beneath the moon I found a butterfly

Kerouac turned to Buddhist study and practice from 1953 to

1956.
In 1969 Kerouac was broke, and many of his books were out
of print. An alcoholic, he was living with his third wife and his
mother in St. Petersburg, Florida. He spent his time at the
Beaux Arts coffeehouse in nearby Pinellas Park and in local
bars, such as the Wild Boar in Tampa. A week after he was
beaten by fellow drinkers whom he had antagonized at the
Cactus Bar in St. Petersburg, he died of internal hemorrhaging
in front of his television
William S. Burroughs (1914 —1997), American writer of
experimental novels that evoke, in deliberately erratic prose, a
nightmarish, sometimes wildly humorous world. His sexual
explicitness (he was an avowed and outspoken homosexual)

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and the frankness with which he dealt with his experiences as a
drug addict won him a following among writers of the Beat
movement.
Burroughs first took
morphine about 1944, and he
soon became addicted to
heroin.
In 1949 he moved with his
second wife to Mexico, where
in 1951 he accidentally shot
and killed her in a drunken
prank. Fleeing Mexico, he wandered through the Amazon
region of South America, continuing his experiments with
drugs, a period of his life detailed in The Yage Letters, his
correspondence with Ginsberg written in 1953 but not
published until 1963. Between travels he lived
in London, Paris, Tangier, and New York City.
The Naked Lunch was completed after his treatment for drug
addiction. All forms of addiction, according to Burroughs, are
counterproductive for writing, and the only gain to his own
work from his 15 years as an addict came from the knowledge
he acquired of the bizarre in which the drug taker is preyed
upon as victim. The grotesqueness of this world is vividly
satirized in Naked Lunch, which also is much preoccupied with
homosexuality and police persecution

THE NOVEL AND SHORT STORY

REALISM AND “METAFICTION”
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,

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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-Fiv (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) and
the short-story collection The Things They Carried (1990).
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,

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his best novels written in English—including Lolita (1955),
Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962)—are highly personal books
that have a strong emotional thread running through them.
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).
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

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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.
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, which they pursued in
much more personal terms.
In novels such 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” that he associated with Modernism. A
spiritual vision, derived from sources a diverse as Judaism,
Transcendentalism, found its way into Bellow’s later novels,
but he also wrote darker fictions such as the novella Seize the
Day (1956), a study in failure and blocked emotion that was
perhaps his best work. With the publication
of Ravelstein (2000), his fictional portrait of the scholar-writer
Allan Bloom, and of Collected Stories (2001), Bellow was
acclaimed as a portraitist and a poet of memory.
Other major Jewish writers—Bernard Malamud, Grace
Paley, and Isaac Bashevis Singer—treated the human
condition with humour and forgiveness.

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 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). His
first three novels, The Natural (1952), The
Assistant (1957), and A New Life (1961),
were also impressive works of fiction; The
Assistant had the bleak moral intensity of
his best stories.
Paley’s stories combined an offbeat, whimsically poetic
manner with a wry understanding of the ironies of family life
and progressive politics.
The Polish-born Singer
won the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1978 for his
stories, written originally in
Yiddish. They evolved from
fantastic tales of demons and
angels to realistic fictions set
in New York City’s Upper
West Side, often dealing with
the haunted lives of Holocaust survivors. These works showed
him to be one of the great storytellers of modern times.

AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Two African American women published some of the most
important post-World War II American fiction. In The Bluest
Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved
(1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1998), Toni Morrison
created a strikingly original fiction that sounded different notes
from lyrical recollection to magic realism. Like Ellison,
Morrison drew on diverse literary and folk influences and dealt
with important phases of black history—i.e., slavery in Beloved

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and the Harlem Renaissance in Jazz. She was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.
Alice Walker, after writing several volumes of poetry and a
novel dealing with the civil rights movement
(Meridian [1976]), received the Pulitzer Prize for her black
feminist novel The Color Purple (1982).
African American men whose work gained attention during
this period included Ishmael Reed, whose wild comic
techniques resembled Ellison’s; James Alan McPherson, a
subtle short-story writer in the mold of Ellison and Baldwin
Charles Johnson, whose novels, such as The Oxherding
Tale (1982) and The Middle Passage (1990), showed a
masterful historical imagination; Randall Kenan, a gay writer
with a strong folk imagination whose style also descended
from both Ellison and Baldwin; and Colson Whitehead, who
used experimental techniques and folk traditions in The
Intuitionist (1999) and John Henry Days (2001).

NEW FICTIONAL MODES

The horrors of World War II, the Cold War and the atomic
bomb, the bizarre feast of consumer culture, and the cultural
clashes of the 1960s prompted many writers to argue that
reality had grown inaccessible, undermining the traditional
social role of fiction. Writers of novels and short stories
therefore were under unprecedented pressure to discover, or
invent, new and viable kinds of fiction. One response was the
postmodern novel of William Gaddis, John Barth, John
Hawkes, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover,
Paul Auster, and Don DeLillo—technically sophisticated and
highly self-conscious about the construction of fiction and the
fictive nature of “reality” itself. These writers dealt with
themes such as imposture and paranoia; their novels drew
attention to themselves as artifacts and often used realistic
techniques ironically.

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 In his World War II novel, The Naked
and the Dead (1948), Mailer wrote in the
Dos Passos tradition of social protest.
Feeling its limitations, he developed his own
brand of surreal fantasy in fables such as An
American Dream (1965) and Why Are We in
Vietnam? (1967). As with many of the
postmodern novelists, his subject was the
nature of power, personal as well as political.
However, it was only when he turned to “nonfiction fiction” or
“fiction as history” in The Armies of the Night and Miami and
the Siege of Chicago (both 1968) that Mailer discovered his
true voice—grandiose yet personal, comic yet
shrewdly intellectual. He refined this approach into a new
objectivity in the Pulitzer Prize-winning “true life novel” The
Executioner’s Song (1979). When he returned to fiction, his
most effective work was Harlot’s Ghost (1991), about
the Central Intelligence Agency. His final novels took Jesus
Christ (The Gospel According to the Son [1997]) and Adolf
Hitler (The Castle in the Forest [2007]) as their subjects.
In her early work, especially A Garden of
Earthly Delights (1967) and them (1969), Joyce
Carol Oates worked naturalistically with
violent urban materials, such as the Detroit
riots. Incredibly prolific, she later experimented
with Surrealism in Wonderland (1971) and
Gothic fantasy in Bellefleur (1980) before
returning in works such as Marya (1986) to the
bleak blue-collar world of her youth in upstate
New York. Among her later works was Blonde:
A Novel (2000), a fictional biography of Marilyn Monroe.
While Mailer and Oates refused to surrender the novel’s gift
for capturing reality, both were compelled to search out new
fictional modes to tap that power.

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 The surge of feminism in the 1970s gave impetus to many
new women writers, such as Erica Jong, author of the sexy
and funny Fear of Flying (1974), and Rita Mae Brown, who
explored lesbian life in Rubyfruit Jungle (1973). Other
significant works of fiction by women in the 1970s included
Ann Beattie’s account of the post-1960s generation in Chilly
Scenes of Winter (1976) and many short stories, Gail
Godwin’s highly civilized The Odd Woman (1974), Mary
Gordon’s portraits of Irish Catholic life in Final Payments
(1978), and the many social comedies of Alison Lurie and
Anne Tyler.
Perhaps the most influential fiction writer
to emerge in the 1970s was Raymond
Carver. He was another realist who dealt
with blue-collar life, usually in the Pacific
Northwest, in powerful collections of stories
such as What We Talk About When We Talk
About Love (1981) and Cathedral (1983). His
self-destructive characters were life’s losers,
and his style, influenced by Hemingway
and Samuel Beckett, was spare and flat but powerfully
suggestive. It was imitated, often badly, by minimalists such as
Frederick Barthelme, Mary Robison, and Amy Hempel. More-
talented writers whose novels reflected the influence of Carver
in their evocation of the downbeat
world of the blue-collar male included
Richard Ford (Rock Springs [1987]),
Russell Banks (Continental Drift
[1984] and Affliction [1989]), and
Tobias Wolff (The Barracks Thief
[1984] and This Boy’s Life [1989]).
Another strong male-oriented writer
in a realist mode who emerged from the
1960s counterculture was Robert

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Stone. His Dog Soldiers (1974) was a grimly downbeat
portrayal of the drugs-and-Vietnam generation, and A Flag for
Sunrise (1981) was a bleak, political novel set in Central
America. Stone focused more on the spiritual malaise of his
characters than on their ordinary lives. He wrote a lean, furious
Hollywood novel in Children of Light (1986) and captured
some of the feverish, apocalyptic atmosphere of the Holy Land
in Damascus Gate (1998).
In leisurely, good-humoured, minutely detailed novels,
Richard Russo dealt with blue-collar losers living in decaying
Northeastern towns in The Risk Pool (1988), Nobody’s Fool
(1993), and Empire Falls (2001), but he also published a satiric
novel about academia, Straight Man (1997).
Some women writers were especially impressive in dealing
with male characters, including E. Annie Proulx in The
Shipping News (1993) and Close Range: Wyoming
Stories (1999) and Andrea Barrett in Ship Fever (1996).
Others focused on relationships between women, including
Mary Gaitskill in her witty satiric novel Two Girls, Fat and
Thin (1991), written under the influences of Nabokov and
Mary McCarthy.

MULTICULTURAL WRITING
The dramatic loosening of immigration restrictions in the
mid-1960s set the stage for the rich multicultural writing of the
last quarter of the 20th century. New Jewish voices were heard
in the fiction of E.L. Doctorow, noted for his mingling of the
historical with the fictional in novels such as Ragtime (1975)
and The Waterworks (1994) and in the work of Cynthia Ozick,
whose best story, Envy; or, Yiddish in America (1969), has
characters modeled on leading figures in Yiddish literature.
Her story The Shawl (1980) concerns the murder of a baby in a
Nazi concentration camp.

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 David Leavitt introduced homosexual themes into his
portrayal of middle-class life in Family Dancing (1984).
At the turn of the 21st century, younger Jewish writers from
the former Soviet Union such as Gary Shteyngart and Lara
Vapnyar dealt impressively with the experience of immigrants
in the United States.
Novels such as N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn,
which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, James Welch’s Winter
in the Blood (1974) and Fools Crow (1986), Leslie Marmon
Silko’s Ceremony (1977), and Louise Erdrich’s Love
Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), and The Antelope
Wife (1998) were powerful and ambiguous explorations of
Native American history and identity.
Mexican Americans were represented by works such as
Rudolfo A. Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Richard
Rodriguez’s autobiographical Hunger of Memory (1981), and
Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1983) and her
collection Woman Hollering Creek, and Other Stories (1991).
Some of the best immigrant writers, while thoroughly
assimilated, nonetheless had a subtle understanding of both the
old and the new culture. These included the Cuban American
writers Oscar Hijuelos (The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
[1989]) and Cristina Garcia (Dreaming in Cuban [1992] and
The Agüero Sisters [1997]); the Antigua-born Jamaica
Kincaid, author of Annie John (1984), Lucy (1990), the AIDS
memoir My Brother (1997), and See Now Then (2013); the
Dominican-born Junot Díaz, who won acclaim for Drown
(1996), a collection of stories, and whose novel The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) won a Pulitzer Prize; and
the Bosnian immigrant Aleksandar Hemon, who wrote The
Question of Bruno (2000) and Nowhere Man (2002).
Chinese Americans found an extraordinary voice in Maxine
Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) and China Men
(1980), which blended old Chinese lore with fascinating family

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history. Her first novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book
(1989), was set in the bohemian world of the San Francisco
Bay area during the 1960s.
Other important Asian American writers included Gish Jen,
whose Typical American (1991) dealt with immigrant striving
and frustration; the Korean American Chang-rae Lee, who
focused on family life, political awakening, and generational
differences in Native Speaker (1995) and A Gesture Life
(1999); and Ha Jin, whose Waiting (1999; National Book
Award), set in rural China during and after the Cultural
Revolution, was a powerful tale of timidity, repression, and
botched love, contrasting the mores of the old China and the
new.
Bharati Mukherjee beautifully explored contrasting lives
in India and North America in The Middleman and Other
Stories (1988), Jasmine (1989), Desirable Daughters (2002),
and The Tree Bride (2004). While many multicultural works
were merely representative of their cultural milieu, books such
as these made remarkable contributions to a changing
American literature
During the 1990s some of the best energies of fiction writers
went into autobiography, in works such as Mary Karr’s The
Liar’s Club (1995), about growing up in a loving but
dysfunctional family on the Texas Gulf Coast; Frank
McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996), a vivid portrayal of a
Dickensian childhood amid the grinding conditions of Irish
slum life; Anne Roiphe’s bittersweet recollections of her rich
but cold-hearted parents and her brother’s death from AIDS in
1185 Park Avenue (1999); and Dave Eggers’s A
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), a painful
but comic tour de force, half tongue-in-cheek, about a young
man raising his brother after the death of their parents.
The memoir vogue did not prevent writers from publishing
huge, ambitious novels, including David Foster Wallace’s

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Infinite Jest (1996), an encyclopaedic mixture of arcane lore,
social fiction, and postmodern irony; Jonathan Franzen’s The
Corrections (2001, National Book Award) and Freedom
(2010), both family portraits; and Don DeLillo’s Underworld
(1997), a brooding, resonant, oblique account of the Cold War
era as seen through the eyes of both fictional characters and
historical figures. All three novels testify to a belated
convergence of Social Realism and Pynchonesque invention.
Pynchon himself returned to form with sprawling, picaresque
historical novels: Mason & Dixon (1997), about two famous
18th-century surveyors who explored and mapped the
American colonies, and Against the Day (2006), set at the turn
of the 20th century.

FORMAL POETS
The leading figure of the late 1940s was Robert Lowell,
who, influenced by Eliot and such Metaphysical poets as John
Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins, explored his spiritual
torments and family history in Lord Weary’s Castle (1946).
Other impressive formal poets
included Theodore Roethke, who,
influenced by William Butler Yeats,
revealed a genius for ironic lyricism and a
profound empathy for the processes of
nature in The Lost Son and Other Poems
(1948); the masterfully elegant Richard
Wilbur (Things of This World [1956]);
two war poets, Karl Shapiro (V-Letter
and Other Poems [1944]) and Randall Jarrell (Losses [1948]);
and a group of young poets influenced by W.H. Auden,
including James Merrill, W.S. Merwin, James Wright,
Adrienne Rich, and John Hollander. Although they displayed
brilliant technical skill, they lacked Auden’s strong personal
voice.

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 EXPERIMENTAL POETRY
The openness of Beat poetry and the prosaic directness of
Williams encouraged Lowell to develop a new
autobiographical style in the laconic poetry and prose of Life
Studies (1959) and For the Union Dead (1964). Lowell’s new
work influenced nearly all American poets but especially a
group of “confessional” writers, including Anne Sexton in To
Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) and All My Pretty
Ones (1962) and Sylvia Plath in the posthumously
published Ariel (1965). In her poetry Plath joined an icy
sarcasm to white-hot emotional intensity.
Sylvia Plath (1932 - 1963)
From a young age, Plath was a high
achiever, showing an early talent as a
writer and poet. She received a
scholarship to Smith College and, after
graduating, was awarded a Fulbright
Scholarship to Cambridge University. In
spite of a history of depression and one
suicide attempt, Plath excelled at
academics and worked diligently on her writing, periodically
publishing her work. At Cambridge, Plath met the young,
upcoming British poet Ted Hughes; the two shared an intense
and immediate attraction, marrying only a few months later.
Plath and Hughes enjoyed their first years together as writing
partners, encouraging each other as poets. The two lived for a
time in America, travelled broadly, and eventually returned to
England to live. Plath gave birth to two children and engaged
in domestic routines while still working on poems which would
eventually be included in her posthumous collection, Ariel
(1965). She continued to struggle with depression, and after
discovering Ted Hughes’s affair with a mutual friend, Assia
Wevill, Plath’s depression worsened. She eventually separated
from Hughes and moved to London with her children in an

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attempt to start over on her own. Most of the poems that
comprise Ariel were written while she lived in London. During
a particularly difficult winter where she saw her novel The Bell
Jar published to less than enthusiastic reviews in January 1963,
Plath’s mental state deteriorated. She committed suicide in
February 1963, leaving her children behind, as well as the new
collection of poems that would eventually make her famous
after her death.
Plath’s most critically acclaimed poems are those that
appeared in her posthumous collection, Ariel. In these last
poems composed before her suicide, Plath appears to have
reached a new level of creative complexity in imagery and
theme. Her poems exhibit a raw power and anger, as she battles
with despair and attempts to find the fortitude to endure her
psychic pain. Within the postmodern milieu and contributing to
its innovations, Plath does not create a distinct persona through
which she filters these intense, private emotions.
Poetic form and tradition become less significant with
postmodern poets, and the poet’s voice achieves primacy,
especially in the school of poetry termed “Confessional.” Poets
such as Allen Ginsberg,
Anne Sexton, and Plath in the 1950s were willing to probe
their psyches in very private, personal ways, “confessing” their
deepest, most private, even disturbing feelings. In the time
period, this kind of psychological probing of the self was new
and provocative. From a feminist perspective, Plath in the Ariel
poems openly explores her feelings of rage against the men in
her life and against patriarchal authority in general. Plath also
explores her feelings of ambivalence about being a mother, the
cultural pressures she experienced of becoming a wife and
mother, the pain she endured as a result of her husband’s
infidelity, and her battle with depression that culminated in
suicide attempts.

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 In “Daddy,” (see Appendix) the prevalent Nazi imagery is
not autobiographical but is used to depict the extreme emotions
at work in the narrative voice’s desperate, raging attempt to cut
the cord of paternalistic domination. The narrative voice
urgently and angrily wants to break from daddy’s control,
domination, and influence in order to forge her own identity as
a woman and as a person.
Another poet influenced by Lowell was John Berryman,
whose Dream Songs (1964, 1968) combined autobiographical
fragments with minstrel-show motifs to create a zany style of
self-projection and comic-tragic lament. Deeply troubled
figures, Sexton, Plath, and Berryman all took their own lives.

“DEEP IMAGE” POETS

Through his personal charisma and his magazine The
Fifties (later The Sixties and The Seventies), Robert
Bly encouraged a number of poets to shift their work toward
the individual voice and open form; they included Galway
Kinnell, James Wright, David Ignatow, and, less
directly, Louis Simpson, James Dickey, and Donald Hall.
Sometimes called the “deep image” poets, Bly and his
friends sought spiritual intensity and transcendence of the self
rather than confessional immediacy. Their work was influenced
by the poetry of Spanish and Latin American writers such as
Federico García Lorca, Juan Ramón Jiménez, César
Vallejo, and Pablo Neruda, especially their surreal
association of images, as well as by the “greenhouse poems”
and the later meditative poetry of Roethke, with their deep
feeling for nature as a vehicle of spiritual transformation. Yet,
like their Hispanic models, they were also political poets,
instrumental in organizing protest and writing poems against
the Vietnam War. Kinnell was a Lawrentian poet who, in
poems such as “The Porcupine” and “The Bear,” gave the
brutality of nature the power of myth. His vatic sequence, The

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Book of Nightmares (1971), and the quieter poems in Mortal
Acts, Mortal Words (1980) are among the most rhetorically
effective works in contemporary poetry.

NEW DIRECTIONS
James Wright’s style changed dramatically in the early
1960s. He abandoned his stiffly formal verse for the stripped-
down, meditative lyricism of The Branch Will Not Break
(1963) and Shall We Gather at the River (1968), which were
more dependent on the emotional tenor of image than on metre,
poetic diction, or rhyme. In books such as Figures of the
Human (1964) and Rescue the Dead (1968), David
Ignatow wrote brief but razor-sharp poems that made their
effect through swiftness, deceptive simplicity, paradox, and
personal immediacy.
Another poet whose work ran the gamut from prosaic
simplicity to Emersonian transcendence was A.R. Ammons.
His short poems in Briefings (1971) were close to
autobiographical jottings, small glimpses, and observations,
but, like his longer poems, they turned the natural world into a
source of vision. Like Ignatow, he made it a virtue to seem
unliterary and found illumination in the pedestrian and the
ordinary.
Both daily life and an exposure to French Surrealism helped
inspire a group of New York poets, among them Frank
O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and John
Ashbery. Whether O’Hara was jotting down a sequence of
ordinary moments or paying tribute to film stars, his poems had
a breathless immediacy that was distinctive and unique. Koch’s
comic voice swung effortlessly from the trivial to the fantastic.
Strongly influenced by Wallace Stevens, Ashbery’s ruminative
poems can seem random, discursive, and enigmatic. Avoiding
poetic colour, they do their work by suggestion and

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association, exploring the interface between experience and
perception.
Other impressive poets of the postwar years included
Elizabeth Bishop, whose precise, loving attention to objects
was reminiscent of her early mentor, Marianne Moore. Though
she avoided the confessional mode of her friend Lowell, her
sense of place, her heartbreaking decorum, and her keen
powers of observation gave her work a strong personal cast.
In The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), James Merrill,
previously a polished lyric poet, made his mandarin style the
vehicle of a lighthearted personal epic, in which he, with the
help of a Ouija board, called up the shades of all his dead
friends, including the poet Auden.
In a prolific career highlighted by such poems as Reflections
on Espionage (1976), “Blue Wine” (1979), and Powers of
Thirteen (1983), John Hollander, like Merrill, displayed
enormous technical virtuosity.
Richard Howard imagined witty monologues
and dialogues for famous people of the past in poems collected
in Untitled Subjects (1969) and Two-Part Inventions (1974).

THE OFF-BROADWAY ASCENDANCY

The centre of American drama shifted from Broadway to
Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway with works such as Jack
Gelber’s The Connection (1959).
American playwrights, collaborating with the Living
Theatre, the Open Theatre, and other adventurous new
companies, were increasingly free to write radical and
innovative plays. David Rabe’s The Basic Training of Pavlo
Hummel (1971) and Sticks and Bones (1972) satirized
America’s militaristic nationalism and cultural shallowness.
David Mamet won a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award
for American Buffalo (1976). In plays such as Glengarry Glen
Ross (1984), he showed brilliantly how men reveal their hopes

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and frustrations obliquely, through their language, and
in Oleanna (1992) he fired a major salvo in the gender wars
over sexual harassment.
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Ed Bullins inspired an
angry black nationalist theatre. Baraka’s Dutchman and The
Slave (1964) effectively dramatized racial confrontation, while
Bullins’s In the Wine Time (1968) made use of “street”
lyricism.
Maria Irene Fornés’s Fefu and Her Friends (1977) proved
remarkable in its exploration of women’s relationships.
A clear indication of Off-Broadway’s ascendancy in
American drama came in 1979 when Sam Shepard,
a prolificand experimental playwright, won the Pulitzer
Prize for Buried Child. Shepard’s earlier work, such as The
Tooth of Crime (1972), was rooted both in the rock scene and
counterculture of the 1960s and in the mythic world of the
American West. He reached his peak with a series of offbeat
dramas dealing with fierce family conflict, including Curse of
the Starving Class (1976), True West (1980), Fool for Love
(1983), and A Lie of the Mind (1986).
Other important new voices in American drama were the
prolific Lanford Wilson, Pulitzer winner for Talley’s
Folly (1979); John Guare, who created serious farce in The
House of Blue Leaves (1971) and fresh social drama in Six
Degrees of Separation (1990); and Ntozake Shange, whose
“choreopoem” For Colored Girls Who Have Considered
Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf moved to Broadway in
1976.
Other well-received women playwrights included Marsha
Norman, Beth Henley, Tina Howe, and Wendy Wasserstein.
In a series of plays that included Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
(1984), Fences (1987), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1986), August Wilson emerged
as the most powerful black playwright of the 1980s. Devoting

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each play to a different decade of life in the 20th century, he
won a second Pulitzer Prize, for The Piano Lesson (1990), and
completed the 10-play cycle in 2005, shortly before his death.
The anguish of the AIDS
epidemic proved a dark inspiration to
many gay playwrights, especially Tony
Kushner, who had gained attention
with A Bright Room Called Day (1991),
set in Germany in 1932–33; he won
Broadway fame with his epically
ambitious two-part drama Angels in
America (1991–92), which combined
comedy with pain, symbolism with
personal history, and invented characters
with historical ones. A committed political writer, Kushner
often focused on public themes. His later plays included Slavs!
(1996) and the timely Homebody/Kabul (2001), a brilliant
monologue followed by a drama set in Taliban-controlled
Afghanistan.
After writing several Off-Broadway plays about Chinese
Americans, David Henry Hwang achieved critical and
commercial success on Broadway with his gender-bending
drama M. Butterfly (1988).
Richard Nelson found an enthusiastic following in London
for literate plays such as Some Americans Abroad (1989) and
Two Shakespearean Actors (1990), while Richard Greenberg
depicted Jewish American life and both gay and straight
relationships in Eastern Standard (1989), The American
Plan (1990), and Take Me Out (2002), the last about a gay
baseball player who reveals his homosexuality to his
teammates.
Donald Margulies dealt more directly with Jewish family
life in The Loman Family Picnic (1989). He also explored the

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ambitions and relationships of artists in such plays as Sight
Unseen (1992) and Collected Stories (1998).
The 1990s also saw the emergence of several talented
women playwrights. Paula Vogel repeatedly focused on hot-
button moralissues with humour and compassion, dealing with
prostitution in The Oldest Profession (1981), AIDS in The
Baltimore Waltz (1992), pornography in Hot ’n’ Throbbing
(1994), and the sexual abuse of minors in How I Learned to
Drive (1997).
A young African American playwright, Suzan-Lori Parks,
gained increasing recognition with her surreal pageant The
America Play (1993), an adaptation of The Scarlet Letter called
In the Blood (1999), and Topdog/Underdog (2001), a partly
symbolic tale of conflict between two brothers (named Lincoln
and Booth) that reminded critics of Sam Shepard’s
fratricidal True West. She later adapted George and Ira
Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in 2012, and her Father Comes
Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3), produced in 2014,
placed Homer’s Odyssey in the contextof the American Civil
War.
Other well-received works included Heather McDonald’s
An Almost Holy Picture (1995), a one-man play about the
spiritual life of a preacher; poet Naomi Wallace’s One Flea
Spare (1995), set in London during the Great Plague of 1665;
and Margaret Edson’s Wit (1995), about the slow,
poignant cancer death of a literary scholar whose life has been
shaped by the eloquence and wit of Metaphysical poetry.

SCIENCE FICTION
After World War II, publishers largely abandoned the pulps
in favour of paperback books and paperback-like “digests.” By
that time, however, science fiction had inspired such passionate
devotion that it moved with ease into small specialty presses.
Two new digest magazines in particular—The Magazine of

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Fantasy and Science Fiction (1949– ) and Galaxy Science
Fiction (1950–80)—prospered. Science fiction also grew in
popular esteem after the advent of the atomic bomb (1945) and
the launch of Sputnik (1957).
Under the editorial guidance of the new SF digests,
American science fiction of the 1950s became more
sophisticated, urbane, and satiric, with raw technophilia waning
in favour of more anthropologically based speculation about
societies and cultures. Many books (and film adaptations) from
the decade were rife with Cold War-induced fear and paranoia.
Perhaps the most representative novel is Walter M. Miller’s A
Canticle for Leibowitz (1960; first serialized, 1955–57), which
describes the postnuclear holocaust efforts of a Catholic
religious order to preserve knowledge. Another work, Invasion
of the Body Snatchers (1955; films 1956 and 1978), in a clear
case of communist paranoia, relates the story of ordinary
people being replaced by look-alikes who operate as part of
a collective body.
Science fiction films of the period, with a few notable
exceptions—such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The
War of the Worlds (1953), and Forbidden Planet (1956)—
tended to be cheaply produced, juvenile, formulaic films about
alien invasions and monstrous mutants. (It was during this era
that the Japanese produced numerous Godzilla movies.) In the
genre’s fiction, however, the American trio of Robert
Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury—later joined by
Briton Arthur C. Clarke—enjoyed worldwide fame and
unmatched popularity during the 1940s, ’50s, and early ’60s. In
fact, Anglophone science fiction was dominant during the
1950s and ’60s, though authors from other countries—such as
the Polish fantastyka writer Stanisław Lem and the literary
Italian Italo Calvino, with his fantascienza—also advanced
the genre.

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 Isaac Asimov (1920—1992), American author and
biochemist, a highly successful and prolific writer of science
fiction and of science books for the layperson. He wrote or
edited about 500 volumes, of which the most famous are those
in the Foundation and robot series.
“Nightfall” (1941), about
a planet in a multiple-star system
that only experiences darkness
for one night every 2,049 years,
brought him to the front rank of
science-fiction writers and is
regarded as one of
the genre’s greatest short stories.
In 1940 Asimov began writing
his robot stories (later collected
in I, Robot [1950]). In the 21st
century, “positronic” robots operate according to the Three
Laws of Robotics:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through
inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings
except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such
protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
By developing (with Campbell) a set of ethics for robots and
rejecting previous conceptions of them as marauding metal
monsters, Asimov greatly influenced other writers’ treatment
of the subject.
“The Encyclopedists” (1942) was the beginning of
Asimov’s popular Foundation series. Loosely modeled on the
fall of the Roman Empire, the Foundation series begins in the
last days of the Galactic Empire. Hari Seldon devises
a discipline, “psychohistory,” that allows prediction of future
historical currents. He sets into motion a plan to reduce the

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predicted 30,000-year galactic dark ages to 1,000 years by
gathering the brightest minds on the planet Terminus to form
the Foundation of a new Galactic Empire. Seldon also
establishes a mysterious Second Foundation in an unknown
location. The Foundation struggles to keep civilization alive,
while, at moments of acute crisis predicted by psychohistory,
recordings of the long-dead Seldon dispense advice. The
stories, written between 1942 and 1949, were collected as the
Foundation trilogy: Foundation (1951), Foundation and
Empire (1952), and Second Foundation (1953). The trilogy
won a special Hugo Award in 1966 for best science-fiction
series of all time.
Asimov’s first novels (Pebble in the Sky [1950], The Stars,
Like Dust [1951], and The Currents of Space [1952]) were set
during and before the Galactic Empire but had no relation to
the Foundation series. Under the pseudonym Paul French, he
wrote the children’s Lucky Starr series (1952–58), each
volume of which took place on a different world of the solar
system. He returned to the positronic robots with two novels
that blended mystery with science fiction. Three thousand
years hence, humanity is divided between those who live
on Earth in overpopulated underground cities and the wealthy
Spacers, who live on worlds around nearby stars. The human
policeman Lije Baley and the Spacer “humaniform” robot
detective R. Daneel Olivaw solve murders in New York City
in The Caves of Steel (1954) and on a Spacer planet in The
Naked Sun (1957). During the 1950s, Asimov also wrote some
of his finest short stories: “The Martian Way” (1952),
an allegory about McCarthyism; “The Dead Past” (1956),
about a device that can see into history; and “The Ugly Little
Boy” (1958, original title “Lastborn”), about a nurse’s
attachment to a Neanderthal child accidentally brought forward
to the future.

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 Asimov returned to science fiction with The Gods
Themselves (1972, winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards)
concerned contact with advanced aliens from a parallel
universe. “The Bicentennial Man” (1976, Hugo and Nebula for
best novelette), about a robot’s quest to become human is one
of Asimov’s most beloved short stories.
In the 1980s Asimov tied together the robot, Empire, and
Foundation series in the same fictional universe. The characters
in Foundation’s Edge (1982, Hugo Award for best novel)
begin to suspect that a third, concealed power has emerged in
the galaxy that is even more powerful than the two
Foundations. Baley and Olivaw reunited in The Robots of
Dawn (1983), in which they investigate the destruction of a
robot identical to Olivaw. In Robots and Empire (1985), set
200 years after Baley’s death, Olivaw battles a threat to
humanity that culminates in the diaspora from Earth that leads
to the galactic Empire. Foundation and Earth (1986) centers on
a search for the forgotten planet Earth and how its
early history as depicted in the robot series affected the
galaxy’s history. Two prequels to the Foundation
trilogy, Prelude to Foundation (1988) and Forward the
Foundation (1993), Asimov’s final novel, follow Hari Seldon’s
development of psychohistory and the Foundation plan.
Among Asimov’s late novels were expansions of previous
short stories, written with Robert Silverberg, such
as Nightfall (1990) and Child of Time (1991, based on “The
Ugly Little Boy”). He published three volumes of
autobiography: In Memory Yet Green: The Autobiography of
Isaac Asimov, 1920–1954 (1979); In Joy Still Felt: .The
Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1954–1978 (1980); and I,
Asimov: A Memoir (1994, Hugo Award for best nonfiction
book).
Ray Bradbury, (1920 —2012), American author best
known for his highly imaginative short stories and novels that

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blend a poetic style, nostalgia for childhood, social criticism,
and an awareness of the hazards of runaway technology.
Bradbury’s earliest stories, with their elements
of fantasy and horror, were published in Weird Tales. Most of
these stories were collected in his first book of short
stories, Dark Carnival (1947). Bradbury’s style, with its rich
use of metaphors and similes, stood out from the more
utilitarian work that dominated pulp magazine writing.
In the mid-1940s Bradbury’s
stories started to appear in major
magazines such as The American
Mercury, Harper’s, and McCall’s,
and he was unusual in publishing
both in pulp magazines such as
Planet Stories and Thrilling
Wonder Stories and “slicks” (so-
called because of their high-quality
paper) such as The New Yorker and
Collier’s without leaving behind
the genres he loved. The Martian
Chronicles (1950), a series of short stories,
depicts Earth’s colonization of Mars, which leads to the
extinction of an idyllic Martian civilization. However, in the
face of an oncoming nuclear war, many of the settlers return to
Earth, and after Earth’s destruction, a few surviving humans
return to Mars to become the new Martians. The short-story
collection The Illustrated Man (1951) included one of his most
famous stories, “The Veldt,” in which a mother and father are
concerned about the effect their house’s simulation of lions on
the African veldt is having on their children.
Bradbury’s next novel, Fahrenheit 451 (1953), is regarded
as his greatest work. In a future society where books are
forbidden, Guy Montag, a “fireman” whose job is the burning
of books, takes a book and is seduced by reading. Fahrenheit

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451 has been acclaimed for its anti-censorship themes and its
defense of literature against the encroachment of electronic
media. An acclaimed film adaptation was released in 1966.
One of Bradbury’s most personal works, Dandelion
Wine (1957), is an autobiographical novel about a magical but
too brief summer of a 12-year-old boy in Green Town, Illinois
(a fictionalized version of his childhood home of Waukegan).
His next collection, A Medicine for Melancholy (1959),
contained “All Summer in a Day,” a poignant story of
childhood cruelty on Venus, where the Sun comes out only
every seven years. The Midwest of his childhood was once
again the setting of Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962),
in which a carnival comes to town run by the mysterious and
evil Mr. Dark.
He received many honours for his work including
an Emmy for his animated adaptation of The Halloween
Tree (1994) and the National Medal of Arts (2004). In 2007
the Pulitzer Prize Board awarded Bradbury a Special Citation
for his distinguished career.
In Britain and the United States, the editorial polemics
of Michael Moorcock (associated for many years with New
Worlds and its anthologies) and Harlan Ellison (Dangerous
Visions [1967] and Again, Dangerous Visions [1972]) led a
rebellious New Wave movement that facilitated the genre’s
move in fresh directions.
Sporting a countercultural disregard of taboos (particularly
with regard to morals and sexuality), a fascination with mind-
altering drugs and Eastern religions, and an interest in
experimental literary styles, the movement pushed the
boundaries of traditional science fiction until the genre was
almost unrecognizable. Most avant-garde experimentalism had
vanished by the late 1970s, but by then the New Wave had
vastly expanded the subgenre of “soft” science fiction. (“Soft”
SF is typically more concerned with exploring social aspects of

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the near future and of “inner space,” while “hard” science
fiction features technology-for-technology’s-sake.)

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
In certain important fields, the United States pioneered.
These include everyday-life books for younger readers. One
might maintain that American children’s literature, particularly
that since World War II, is bolder, more experimental, more
willing to try and fail, than England’s. Moreover, it set new
standards of institutionalization, “packaging,” merchandising,
and publicity, as well as mere production, especially of fact
books and “subject series.”
Appropriately the new century opened with a novelty: a
successful American fairy tale. The Wonderful Wizard of
Oz (1900) is vulnerable to attacks on its prose style, incarnating
mediocrity. But there is something in it, for all its doctrinaire
moralism that lends it permanent appeal: a prairie freshness, a
joy in sheer invention, the simple, satisfying characterization
of Dorothy and her three old, lovable companions. Several of
the sequels—but only those bearing L. Frank Baum’s name—
are not greatly inferior.
The century underwent for the next two decades a rather
baffling decline. Some institutional progress was made in
library development, professional education, and the reviewing
of children’s books. Much useful work was also accomplished
in the field of fairy-tale and folktale collections. But original
literature did not flourish.
In the field of comic verse and pictures for children of
almost all ages, Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel), starting with And
to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937), continued to
lead, turning out so many books that one tended to take him for
granted. His talent is of a very high order.
The “junior novel” came to the fore in the following
decade, together with an increase in books about foreign lands,

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minority groups, and a boom in elaborate picture books.
Children’s verse was well served by such able practitioners as
Dorothy Aldis and Rosemary and Stephen Vincent Benét, with
their stirring, hearty ballad-like poems collected in A Book of
Americans (1933). But the only verse comparable to that of
Stevenson or de la Mare was the exquisite Under the
Tree (1922), by the novelist Elizabeth Madox Roberts, a
treasure that should never be forgotten.
At least three other writers produced work of high and
entirely original quality. Two of them—Florence and Richard
Atwater—worked as a pair. Their isolated effort, Mr. Popper’s
Penguins (1938), will last as a masterpiece of deadpan humour
that few children or adults can resist.
The third writer is Laura Ingalls Wilder. Her Little House
books, nine in all, started in 1932 with The Little House in the
Big Woods. The entire series, painting an unforgettable picture
of pioneer life, is a masterpiece of sensitive recollection and
clean, effortless prose.
Work of quality was contributed during these two lively
decades by authors too numerous to list. Among the best of
them are Will James, with his horse story Smoky (1926);
Rachel Field, whose Hitty (1929) is one of the best doll stories
in the language; Elizabeth Coatsworth, with her fine New
England tale Away Goes Sally (1934); and the well-loved story
of a New York tomboy in the 1890s, Roller Skates (1936), by
the famous oral storyteller Ruth Sawyer.
Since the 1930s the quality and weight of American
children’s literature were sharply affected by the business of
publishing, as well as by the social pressures to which children,
like adults, were subjected. Intensified commercialization and
broad-front expansion had some good effects and some bad
ones as well.
For any book of interest to adults, publishers constructed a
corresponding one scaled to child size. The practice of

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automatic miniaturization stimulated a pullulation of fact
books—termed by an unsympathetic observer “the information
trap”—marked by a flood of subject series and simplified
technology. Paperbacks and cheap reprints of juvenile
favourites enlarged the youthful reading public, just as the
multiplication of translations widened its horizon.
More science fiction was published, a field in which the
stories of Robert Heinlein and A Wrinkle in Time (1962),
by Madeleine L’Engle, stood out. An increase was also
noticeable in books for the disadvantaged child and in work of
increasingly high quality by and for blacks. In the early 1950s,
children’s book clubs flourished, though they appeared to be on
the wane little more than a decade later. Simple narration using
“scientifically determined vocabulary” also seemed to decrease
in popularity. There was a marked tendency to orient titles,
fiction and nonfiction, to the requirements of the school
curriculum.
Another trend was toward collaborative “international”
publishing. This had the double effect of cutting colour-plate
costs and promoting blandness, since it was important that no
country’s readers be offended or surprised by anything in text
or illustration. Still another alteration took place in the
conventional notion of age and grade levels. Teenagers reached
out for adult books; younger children read junior novels.
Teenage fiction as well as nonfiction dealt mercilessly with
ethnic exploitation, poverty, broken homes, desertion,
unemployment, adult hypocrisy, drug addiction, sex (including
homosexuality), and death. A whole new “problem” literature
became available, with no sure proof that it was warmly
welcomed. The aesthetic dilemmas posed by this literature are
still to be faced and resolved. The new social realist story often
had the look of an updated moraltale: the dire consequences of
nondiligence were replaced by those of pot smoking.

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 Nevertheless such original works as Harriet the Spy (1964)
and The Long Secret (1965), by Louise Fitzhugh, showed how
a writer adequately equipped with humour and understanding
could incorporate into books for 11-year-olds subjects—even
menstruation—ordinarily reserved for adult fiction. Similarly
trailblazing were the semidocumentary novels of Joseph
Krumgold: And Now Miguel (1953), Onion John (1958),
and Henry 3 (1967), the last about a boy with an I.Q. of 154
trying to get along in a society antagonistic to brains.
The candid suburban studies of E.L. Konigsburg
introduced a new sophistication. Her 1968 Newbery Medal
winner, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E.
Frankweiler, was original in its tone and humour.
As for the more traditional genres, a cheering number of
high-quality titles rose above the plain of mediocrity. The
nonfantastic animal story Lassie Come Home (1940), by Eric
Knight, survived adaptation to film and television. In the
convention of the talking animal, authentic work was produced
by Ben Lucien Burman, with his wonderful “Catfish Bend”
tales (1952–67).
The American-style, wholesome, humorous family story
was more than competently developed by Eleanor Estes, with
her “Moffat” series (1941–43) and Ginger Pye (1951);
Elizabeth Enright, with her Melendy family (1941–44); and
Robert McCloskey, with Homer Price (1943)—to name only
three unfailingly popular writers.
Text-and-picture books for the very young posed
an obdurate challenge: to create literature out of absolutely
simple materials. That challenge, first successfully met
by Beatrix Potter, attracted Americans. The modern period
produced many enchanting examples of this tricky genre: The
Happy Lion (1954) and its sequels, the joint work of the writer
Louise Fatio and her artist husband, Roger Duvoisin; the
“Little Bear” books, words by Else Holmelund Minarik,

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pictures by Maurice Sendak; and several zany tours de force by
Dr. Seuss, including his one-syllable revolution The Cat in the
Hat (1957). The picture books of Sendak, perhaps one of the
few original geniuses in his restricted field, were assailed by
many adults as frightening or abnormal. The children did not
seem to mind.
Fiction about foreign lands boasted at least one modern
American master in Meindert De Jong, whose most sensitive
work was drawn from recollections of his Dutch early
childhood. A Hans Christian Andersen and Newbery winner,
he is best savoured in The Wheel on the School (1954), and
especially in the intuitive Journey from Peppermint
Street (1968). The historical novel fared less well in America
than in England.
Johnny Tremain (1943), by Esther Forbes, a beautifully
written, richly detailed story of the Revolution, stood out as
one of the few high points, as did The Innocent
Wayfaring (1943), a tale of Chaucer’s England by the equally
scholarly Marchette Chute.
Poetry for children had at least two talented representatives.
One was the eminent poet-critic John Ciardi, the other David
McCord, a veteran maker of nonsense and acrobat of
language.
In fantasy, the farcical note was struck with agreeable
preposterousness by Oliver Butterworth in The Enormous
Egg (1956) and The Trouble with Jenny’s Ear (1960).
The prolific writer-illustrator William Pène Du Bois has given
children nothing more uproariously delightful than The
Twenty-one Balloons (1947), merging some of the appeals
of Jules Verne with those of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and
adding a sly humour all his own.
Two renowned New Yorker writers, James Thurber and
E.B. White, developed into successful fantasists, Thurber with
an elaborate series of ambiguous literary fairy tales such as The

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Thirteen Clocks, White with his pair of animal stories Stuart
Little and Charlotte’s Web that for their humanity and
uninsistent humour stand alone.
The vein of “high fantasy” of the more traditional variety,
involving magic and the construction of a legendary secondary
world, was represented by the five highly praised volumes of
the Prydain cycle (1964–68) by Newbery Medal winner Lloyd
Alexander.
Two other works of pure imagination gave the 1960s some
claim to special notice. The first was The Phantom
Tollbooth (1961) by Norton Juster, a fantasy about a boy
“who didn’t know what to do with himself.” Not entirely
unjustly, it has been compared to Alice.
The second received less attention but is more
remarkable: The Mouse and His Child (1969), by Russell
Hoban, who had been a successful writer of gentle tales for
small children. But here was a different affair altogether: a
flawlessly written, densely plotted story with quiet
philosophical overtones. It involved a clockwork mouse, his
attached son, and an unforgettable assortment of terribly real,
humanized animals.
Like Alice and The Borrowers—indeed like all major
children’s literature—it offered as much to the grown-up as to
the young reader. With this moving, intellectually demanding
fantasy the decade ended on a satisfactory note.

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 AMERICAN NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

1930: Sinclair Lewis (novelist)

1936: Eugene O'Neill (playwright)
1938: Pearl S. Buck (biographer and novelist)
1948: T. S. Eliot (poet and playwright)
1949: William Faulkner (novelist)
1954: Ernest Hemingway (novelist)
1962: John Steinbeck (novelist)
1976: Saul Bellow (novelist)
1978: Isaac Bashevis Singer (novelist, wrote in
Yiddish)
1987: Joseph Brodsky (poet and essayist, wrote in
English and Russian)
1993: Toni Morrison (novelist)
2016: Bob Dylan (songwriter)

AMERICAN LITERARY AWARDS

American Academy of Arts and Letters

Pulitzer Prize (Fiction, Drama and Poetry, as well as
various non-fiction and journalist categories)
National Book Award (Fiction, Non-Fiction, Poetry and
Young-Adult Fiction)
American Book Awards
PEN literary awards (multiple awards)
United States Poet Laureate
Bollingen Prize
Pushcart Prize
O. Henry Award

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 APPENDIX
SELECTED POEMS
If—
BY RUDYARD KIPLING

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

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If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

COUNTER-ATTACK
BY S IEGFR IED SASSOON

We’d gained our first objective hours before

While dawn broke like a face with blinking eyes,
Pallid, unshaven and thirsty, blind with smoke.
Things seemed all right at first. We held their line,
With bombers posted, Lewis guns well placed,
And clink of shovels deepening the shallow trench.
The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs
High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps
And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,
Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled;
And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,
Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime.
And then the rain began,—the jolly old rain!

A yawning soldier knelt against the bank,

Staring across the morning blear with fog;
He wondered when the Allemands would get busy;
And then, of course, they started with five-nines
Traversing, sure as fate, and never a dud.
Mute in the clamour of shells he watched them burst
Spouting dark earth and wire with gusts from hell,
While posturing giants dissolved in drifts of smoke.
He crouched and flinched, dizzy with galloping fear,

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Sick for escape,—loathing the strangled horror
And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead.

An officer came blundering down the trench:

“Stand-to and man the fire step!” On he went ...
Gasping and bawling, “Fire-step ... counter-attack!”
Then the haze lifted. Bombing on the right
Down the old sap: machine-guns on the left;
And stumbling figures looming out in front.
“O Christ, they’re coming at us!” Bullets spat,
And he remembered his rifle ... rapid fire ...
And started blazing wildly ... then a bang
Crumpled and spun him sideways, knocked him out
To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him; he choked
And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom,
Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans ...
Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned,
Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed.

The Wild Swans at Coole

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

The trees are in their autumn beauty,

The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me

Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount

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And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,

And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,

They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,

Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY
BY JOHN BETJEMAN

Let me take this other glove off

As the vox humana swells,
And the beauteous fields of Eden
Bask beneath the Abbey bells.
Here, where England's statesmen lie,
Listen to a lady's cry.

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Gracious Lord, oh bomb the Germans,
Spare their women for Thy Sake,
And if that is not too easy
We will pardon Thy Mistake.
But, gracious Lord, whate'er shall be,
Don't let anyone bomb me.

Keep our Empire undismembered

Guide our Forces by Thy Hand,
Gallant blacks from far Jamaica,
Honduras and Togoland;
Protect them Lord in all their fights,
And, even more, protect the whites.

Think of what our Nation stands for,

Books from Boots' and country lanes,
Free speech, free passes, class distinction,
Democracy and proper drains.
Lord, put beneath Thy special care
One-eighty-nine Cadogan Square.

Although dear Lord I am a sinner,

I have done no major crime;
Now I'll come to Evening Service
Whensoever I have the time.
So, Lord, reserve for me a crown,
And do not let my shares go down.

I will labour for Thy Kingdom,

Help our lads to win the war,
Send white feathers to the cowards
Join the Women's Army Corps,
Then wash the steps around Thy Throne
In the Eternal Safety Zone.

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Now I feel a little better,
What a treat to hear Thy Word,
Where the bones of leading statesmen
Have so often been interr'd.
And now, dear Lord, I cannot wait
Because I have a luncheon date.

DADDY
BY SYLVIA PLATH

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time—
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic

Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town

Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

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Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.

Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna

Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—

Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
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You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,

And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.

And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two—

The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

153
There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

154
NOTES

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 Навчальне видання

СУЧАСНА ЛІТЕРАТУРА
АНГЛОМОВНИХ КРАЇН:
КОНСПЕКТ ЛЕКЦІЙ

Навчальний посібник
(англійською мовою)

Укладач: Суродейкіна Тетяна Валеріївна

Відповідальна за випуск Єсипенко Надія Григорівна

Папір офсетний. Формат 60х84/16.

Ум. друк. арк. 9,07. Зам. № 14. Тираж 100 прим.
Виготівник: Яворський С. Н.
Свідоцтво суб’єкта видавничої справи ЧЦ №18 від 17.03.2009 р.
58000, м. Чернівці, вул. І. Франка, 20, оф.18, тел. 099 73 22 544

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