The Contemporary

Period
(1945 to Present)
Introduction
• The 1950s saw the delayed impact of modernization
and technology in everyday life left over before the
Great Depression. World War II brought the United
States out of the Depression, and the 1950s provided
most Americans with time to enjoy long-awaited
material prosperity.
Introduction
• The United States, which emerged from World War II
confident and economically strong, entered the Cold
War in the late 1940s. This conflict with the Soviet
Union partially influences in shaping American literature
during the 1950s.
Theme
• Loneliness at the top was a dominant theme. The
1950s actually was a decade of subtle and pervasive
stress. Novels by John O'Hara, John Cheever, and John
Updike explore the stress lurking in the shadows of
seeming satisfaction. Some of the best works portray
men who fail in the struggle to succeed, as in
Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Saul Bellow's
novella Seize the Day.
Theme
• By the turn of the 21st century, American literature has
become broad and varied in terms of theme, mode,
and purpose. It had become a much more complex and
inclusive story grounded on a wide-ranging body.
• The 1950s and ’60s brought significant cultural shifts
within the United States driven by the civil rights
movement and the women’s movement.
Origin
• Literature written by African Americans during the
contemporary period was shaped in many ways by
Richard Wright, whose autobiography “Black Boy”
was published in 1945. He left the United States for
France after World War II, repulsed by the injustice
and discrimination he faced as a black man in
America.
Major Writers in
Contemporary Era
• Ralph Waldo Ellison – His novel Invisible Man
(1952) which is a story of a black man who lives a
subterranean existence in a hole brightly illuminated by
electricity stolen from a utility company. The book
recounts his grotesque, disenchanting experiences.
• Toni Morrison – won the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1993 for her skillful rendition of complex identities of
black people in a universal manner. Her first novel, The
Bluest Eye (1970), launched a writing career that
would put the lives of black women at its center.
Major Writers in
Contemporary Era
• Alice Walker – She is an African-American who uses
lyrical realism in her epistolary dialect novel The Color
Purple where she exposes social problems and racial
issues.
• Katherine Anne Porter – She created fiction
organized around a single narrator telling the story
from a consistent point of view. Her first success, the
story Flowering Judas, was set in Mexico during the
revolution.
Major Writers in
Contemporary Era
• J.D. Salinger – He achieved huge literary success with
the publication of his novel The Catcher in the Rye
(1951). The novel centers on a sensitive 16-year-old,
Holden Caulfield, who flees his elite boarding school for
the outside world of adulthood, only to become
disillusioned by its materialism and phoniness.
American Novels
• The American novel took on a dizzying number of forms
after World War II. Realist, metafictional,
postmodern, absurdist, autobiographical, short,
long, fragmentary, feminist, stream of
consciousness. Little holds them together beyond
their chronological proximity and engagement with
contemporary American society.
Major Short Story Writers in
Contemporary Era
• Norman Mailer: He was a novelist, essayist, poet,
playwright, screenwriter, and film director. He is famous
for The Executioner's Song, Ancient Evenings, and
Harlot's Ghost.
• John Barth: He is more interested in how a story is
told than in the story itself. Barth entices his audience
into a carnival fun-house full of distorting mirrors that
exaggerate some features while minimizing others. In
Lost in the Funhouse, he collects 14 stories that
constantly refer to the processes of writing and reading.
Major Short Story Writers in
Contemporary Era
• Eudora Welty: she is more interested in the comic and
grotesque characters like the stubborn daughter in her
short story Why I Work at the P.O., who moves out
of her house to live in a tiny post office.
• Saul Bellow: received the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1976. Bellow's Seize the Day is a brilliant novella
noted for its brevity. It centers on a failed businessman,
Tommy Wilhelm, who tries to hide his feelings of
inadequacy by presenting a good front. Seize the Day
sums up the fear of failure that plagues many
Americans.
The Beat Movement
• The Beat Movement was short-lived—starting and
ending in the 1950s — but had a lasting influence on
American poetry during the contemporary period. Allen
Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) pushed aside the formal,
largely traditional poetic conventions that had come to
dominate American poetry.
The Beat Movement
• Raucous, profane, and deeply moving, Howl reset
Americans’ expectations for poetry during the second
half of the 20th century and beyond. Among the
important poets of this period are Anne Sexton, Sylvia
Plath, John Berryman, Donald Hall, Elizabeth Bishop,
James Merrill, Nikki Giovanni, & Robert Pinsky.
American Drama
• In the early decades of the contemporary period,
American drama was dominated by three men: Arthur
Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee.
Stories like Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949)
questioned the American Dream through the
destruction of its main character, while Williams’s A
Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof (1955) excavated his characters’ dreams and
frustrations.
American Drama
• Other notable dramatists include David Mamet, Amiri
Baraka, Sam Shepard, August Wilson, Ntozake
Shange, Wendy Wasserstein, Tony Kushner, David
Henry Hwang, Richard Greenberg, and Suzan-Lori
Parks.
Summary of Death of a
Salesman
By: Arthur Miller
Summary of Death of a Salesman
By: Arthur Miller
• Willy Loman returns home exhausted after a business
trip he has cancelled. Worried over Willy's state of mind
and recent car accident, his wife Linda suggests that he
ask his boss Howard Wagner to allow him to work in his
home city so he will not have to travel. Willy complains
to Linda that their son, Biff, has yet to make good on
his life. Despite Biff's promising showing as an athlete
in high school, he failed in mathematics and was unable
to enter a university.
Summary of Death of a Salesman
By: Arthur Miller
• Biff and his brother Happy, who is temporarily staying
with Willy and Linda after Biff's unexpected return from
the West, reminisce about their childhood together.
They discuss their father's mental degeneration, which
they have witnessed in the form of his constant
indecisiveness and daydreaming about the boys' high
school years. Willy walks in, angry that the two boys
have never amounted to anything. In an effort to pacify
their father, Biff and Happy tell their father that Biff
plans to make a business proposition the next day.
 Summary of Death of a Salesman
By: Arthur Miller
• The next day, Willy goes to ask his boss, Howard, for a job in town
while Biff goes to make a business proposition, but both fail. Willy
gets angry and ends up getting fired when the boss tells him he
needs a rest and can no longer represent the company. Biff waits
hours to see a former employer who does not remember him and
turns him down. Biff impulsively steals a fountain pen. Willy then
goes to the office of his neighbor Charley, where he runs into
Charley's son Bernard (now a successful lawyer); Bernard tells him
that Biff originally wanted to do well in summer school, but
something happened in Boston when Biff went to visit his father
that changed his mind. Charley gives the now-unemployed Willy
money to pay his life-insurance premium; Willy shocks Charley by
remarking that ultimately, a man is "worth more dead than alive."
Summary of Death of a Salesman
By: Arthur Miller
• Happy, Biff, and Willy meet for dinner at a restaurant,
but Willy refuses to hear bad news from Biff. Happy
tries to get Biff to lie to their father. Biff tries to tell him
what happened as Willy gets angry and slips into a
flashback of what happened in Boston the day Biff came
to see him. Willy had been having an affair with a
receptionist on one of his sales trips when Biff
unexpectedly arrived at Willy's hotel room. A shocked
Biff angrily confronted his father, calling him a liar and a
fraud. From that moment, Biff's views of his father
changed and set Biff adrift.
Summary of Death of a Salesman
By: Arthur Miller
• Biff leaves the restaurant in frustration, followed by
Happy and two girls that Happy has picked up. They
leave a confused and upset Willy behind in the
restaurant. When they later return home, their mother
angrily confronts them for abandoning their father while
Willy remains outside, talking to himself. Biff tries
unsuccessfully to reconcile with Willy, but the discussion
quickly escalates into another argument. Biff conveys
plainly to his father that he is not meant for anything
great, insisting that both of them are simply ordinary
men meant to lead ordinary lives.
 Summary of Death of a Salesman
By: Arthur Miller
• The feud reaches an apparent climax with Biff hugging Willy
and crying as he tries to get Willy to let go of the unrealistic
expectations. Rather than listen to what Biff actually says,
Willy appears to believe his son has forgiven him and will
follow in his footsteps, and after Linda goes upstairs to bed
(despite her urging him to follow her), lapses one final time
into a hallucination, thinking he sees his long-dead brother
Ben, whom Willy idolized. In Willy's mind, Ben approves of
the scheme Willy has dreamed up to kill himself in order to
give Biff his insurance policy money. Willy exits the house.
Biff and Linda cry out in despair as the sound of Willy's car
blares and fades out.
Summary of Death of a Salesman
By: Arthur Miller
• The final scene takes place at Willy's funeral, which is
attended only by his family, Charley and Bernard. The
ambiguities of mixed and unaddressed emotions
persist, particularly over whether Willy's choices or
circumstances were obsolete. At the funeral Biff retains
his belief that he does not want to become a
businessman like his father. Happy, on the other hand,
chooses to follow in his father's footsteps, while Linda
laments her husband's decision just before her final
payment on the house.
End of Presentation