AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1945

(1945-Present)

By: Khairil Amalia

Toni Morisson
Born: Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison
February 18, 1931
Lorain, Ohio, U.S.
Died: August 5, 2019 (aged 88)
New York City, New York, U.S.
Occupation: novelist, essayist, children's writer, professor
Alma mater: Howard University (BA)
Cornell University (MA)
Notable works: Beloved
Song of Solomon
Tar Baby
The Bluest Eye
Notable awards: Presidential Medal of Freedom
National Humanities Medal
Nobel Prize in Literature
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Spouse: Harold Morrison
 • What Toni Morrison's works is about?
The central theme of Morrison's novels is the black American
experience; in an unjust society, her characters struggle to
find themselves and their cultural identity. Her use of fantasy,
her sinuous poetic style, and her rich interweaving of the
mythic gave her stories great strength and texture.

• What is Toni Morrison best known for?

Her novels are known for their epic themes,
exquisite language and richly detailed African American
characters who are central to their narratives.
Why Morisson use “Recitatif” as her title on one of the
only short story she wrote?

• "Recitatif" is the French form of recitative, a style of

musical declamation that hovers between song and
ordinary speech, particularly used for dialogic and
narrative interludes during operas and oratories.

• "Recitatif" is a story in racial writing, as the race of

Twyla and Roberta are debatable. Though the
characters are clearly separated by class, neither is
affirmed as African-American or Caucasian. Morrison
has described the story as "the removal of all racial
codes from a narrative about two characters of
different races for whom racial identity is crucial".
Sylvia Plath

Born: October 27, 1932

Boston, Massachusetts, US
Died: February 11, 1963 (aged 30)
London, England, UK
Pen name: Victoria Lucas
Occupation: Poet, novelist, short story writer
Notable works: The Bell Jar and Ariel
Notable awards: Fulbright Scholarship
Glascock Prize
1955 Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the
Real Sea Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
1982 The Collected Poems
Spouse: Ted Hughes
• Sylvia Plath’s importance in American history is derived from the literary excellence of her writing, and
her works show the plight of mid-twentieth century women. Plath's significance comes from her role as
a poet and the ways in which her writing opened the door for exploration of a feminist-martyr to
patriarchal society, as well as the treatment of psychiatric patients.

• Plath had her first poem published in The Boston Herald in 1940 when she was only eight, and this
would be the beginning of her career as a poet. Also in November of that year, Plath’s father died from
surgical complications related to his late-diagnosed diabetes. The poet's paternal struggles appear in
many of her poems such as “The Colossus,” “The Beekeeper’s Daughter,” and “Daddy,” where Plath
writes, saying, “I have always been scared of you.”1 Plath did not attend the funeral, and the poet only
visited Otto Plath's grave once nineteen years after his death.

• Sylvia Plath was described as “different” from the typical Smith girl of the time. Describing her own
feelings in comparison to her peers, Plath said she did not plan to fill a “role,” or would not change for
marriage, but would “go on living as an intelligent, mature human being,” mockingly pointing out the
wrongful practice of woman’s “vicarious experience” lifestyle in marriage.

• On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath killed herself when she put her head into a gas oven. After closing off
her children’s rooms and leaving a note for the man on the floor below her that said to call her doctor,
the poet committed suicide. The last full poem Plath wrote, Edge , can be considered the poet's suicide
note. It flows with a sense of being finished. With the use of phrases such as “We have come so far, it is
over,”17 and words like “dead,” “Stiffens,” and “empty,”18 the entire poem feels like it had been written
by a dead poet. Sadly, Sylvia Plath is more often recognized for her suicide than for her work.
Don DeLillo

Born: Donald Richard DeLillo

November 20, 1936
New York City, U.S.
Pen name: Cleo Birdwell
Occupation: Novelist
Alma mater: Fordham University
Literary movement: Postmodernism
Notable works: The Names (1982)
White Noise (1985)
Libra (1988)
Mao II (1991)
Underworld (1997)
The Angel Esmeralda (2011)
• DeLillo was born on November 20, 1936 and grew up in a working-
class Italian Catholic family, from Molise, in an Italian-American
neighborhood of the Bronx in New York City, not far from Arthur
Avenue. Reflecting on his childhood in The Bronx, DeLillo later
described how he was "...always out in the street. As a little boy I
whiled away most of my time pretending to be a baseball
announcer on the radio. I could think up games for hours at a time.
There were eleven of us in a small house, but the close quarters
were never a problem. I didn't know things any other way. We
always spoke English and Italian all mixed up together. My
grandmother, who lived in America for fifty years, never learned
English.”

• DeLillo's work displays elements of both modernism and

postmodernism. (Though it is worth noting that DeLillo himself
claims not to know if his work is postmodern
• Does the fact that you grew up in an Italian-American household
translate in some way, does it show up in the novels you’ve
published?

“It showed up in early short stories. I think it translates to the novels

only in the sense that it gave me a perspective from which to see
the larger environment. It’s no accident that my first novel was
called Americana. This was a private declaration of independence, a
statement of my intention to use the whole picture, the whole
culture. America was and is the immigrant’s dream, and as the son
of two immigrants I was attracted by the sense of possibility that
had drawn my grandparents and parents. This was a subject that
would allow me to develop a range I hadn’t shown in those early
stories—a range and a freedom. And I was well into my twenties by
this point and had long since left the streets where I’d grown up.
Not left them forever—I do want to write about those years. It’s
just a question of finding the right frame.”
Alice Walker

Born: February 9, 1944

Eatonton, Georgia, U.S.
Occupation: Novelist, short story writer, poet,
political activist
Alma mater: Spelman College
Sarah Lawrence College
Period: 1968–present
Notable works: The Color Purple
Notable awards: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1983
National Book Award 1983
Spouse: Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal
(married 1967, divorced 1976)
• Her most famous novel, The Color Purple, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize
and the National Book Award in 1983.

• Alice Walker: Poet and author of the famous novel, 'The Color Purple' is
also activist in the 1960s Civil Rights movement. Created the term
'Womanist' to give Black women distinction from inapplicable White
feminist issues.

• In 2003 Alice Walker was arrested along with 26 others while protecting
outside the White House in an anti-war rally.

• Alice Walker and her husband became the first legally married interracial
couple living in Mississippi. Her husband Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal is a
civil rights lawyer. They were married until 1976 when they divorced. They
had one daughter together.

• Alice and her husband were threatened by the Ku Klux Klan when they
moved to Jackson, Mississippi in 1967.
What was The Color Purple about?

A feminist work about an abused and

uneducated African American woman's
struggle for empowerment, The Color Purple
was praised for the depth of its female
characters and for its eloquent use of Black
English Vernacular.
Leslie Marmon Silko

Born: Leslie Marmon

March 5, 1948
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Occupation: Writer, educator, film maker
Nationality: Laguna Pueblo
Alma mater: University of New Mexico
Genre: Fiction
Literary movement: Native American Renaissance
Notable work: Ceremony (1977)
Storyteller (1981)
The Delicacy and Strength of Lace:
Letters between Leslie Marmon Silko
and James Wright (1986)
 Leslie Marmon Silko is considered one of the great
masters of Native American literature. She grew up
near a Native American reservation but was never
allowed to participate in the rituals of her people
because of her mixed heritage. She has always
identified herself more strongly with her Laguna
Pueblo roots than with her European ones. Though
Silko has published many nonfiction works, including
scathing criticisms of other writers’ works, she’s most
famous for her first novel, Ceremony. Still widely read
and studied in colleges across the United States today,
Ceremony emphasizes the importance of reintegrating
older traditions and knowledge into our lives—exactly
what Silko herself has been doing since she was a
young girl.
David Foster Wallace
Born: February 21, 1962
Ithaca, New York, U.S.
Died: September 12, 2008 (aged 46)
Claremont, California, U.S.
Occupation: Writer, University Professor
Alma materl: Amherst College (BA)
University of Arizona (MFA)
Period: 1987–2008
Genre: Literary fiction
non-fiction
Literary movement: Postmodern literature
post-postmodernism
hysterical realism
New Sincerity
Notable works: Infinite Jest (1996)
This is Water (2005)
 • Firstly, it must be said that Wallace was a great
maximalist with an extra-ordinary, awe-inspiring
vocabulary. Additionally, his writing transcends
older styles because it is not only beautifully
descriptive, but also self-descriptive.

• David Foster Wallace became a regionally ranked

tennis player while growing up in Illinois.

• David Foster Wallace covered the September 11

attacks in the United States for the magazine
Rolling Stone.
 What’s the topic of “This is Water” and what’s
the messages we actually could find in it
• The meaning we construct out of life is a matter of personal, intentional choice. It’s a conscious
decision.
• You have to choose what you pay attention to and choose how you construct meaning from
experience.
• Most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at
life. If you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have
other options.
• Everybody worships. We just get to choose what to worship.
• The trick is to keep truth up front in daily consciousness.
• The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and
effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in
myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. That is being taught how to think.
The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the “rat race” — the constant, gnawing
sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
• The real value of education has nothing to do with grades or degrees and everything to do with
simple awareness—awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around
us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves of it over and over.
And don’t ask difficult question cz I didn’t study the material that deeply lol