1 Locating Contemporary Literature Literature in the second half of the twentieth century in the United States bears only a faint resemblance to the writing accomplished between 1900 and 1950. Early in the century, arguments as to what distinguished American literature from British led to the emphasis on plain character and plain language that marked the writing done in both realism and naturalism. Then, with the modernist sweep to overthrow most existing literary traditions (always using Ezra Pound’s rationale that making it new was to be primary), the innovation that made American poetry, fiction, and drama of keen interest to the world settled in. By 1950, however, traditional aesthetic innovation was wearing thin. The United States had endured the Great Depression, a long decade of hardship that not only dampened the promise of the American dream but changed literary methods to a surprising extent. The amalgam of cryptic modernist innovation and almost sentimental proselytizing that characterized the collective, proletarian novel and the speech- lined poems ofCOPYRIGHTED the Depression gave rise to incredibleMATERIAL variety: despite the paper shortages of World War II, published writing in the United States continued to be influential. It is in the aftermath of the war, once people had righted their perceptions about causation and blame, and had admitted again the atrocity of war itself (as well as of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb), that literature – whether called contemporary or postmodern – began to change. A History of American Literature: 1950 to the Present, First Edition. Linda Wagner-Martin. © 2013 Linda Wagner-Martin. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2 Locating Contemporary Literature Modernism’s heavy seriousness gave way at times to a strangely comic irony. The power of United States bombs to destroy cities and families instantly had taught readers the risks of too placid a belief system: even without the Second World War, the Cold War remained. European existentialism crept into works by Kurt Von- negut, Jr, J. D. Salinger, John Barth, Thomas Berger, and later Donald Barthelme, Terry Southern, Joseph Heller, and others. Even as writers as distinguished as Flannery O’Connor, Nathanael West, and Vladimir Nabokov had separately approached those tones, the congruence of a number of writers – working in both serious fiction and the more experimental genre of science fiction – made the advent of the ironic and the irreligious a dominant strain. With this attitudinal turn, estab- lished canons of texts faltered. On college campuses, courses in science fiction, as well as mystery and detective novels, made their appearance: what was to be known as genre writing usurped the popularity of courses that included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and William Faulkner. The marketing of books also played a role in what happened to writing at mid-century. Categories that would have seemed contrived during the 1920s, and certainly during the 1930s, came into exis- tence: black literature, Jewish literature, women’s writing, and – with James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room – the literature of sexual differ- ence. Descriptive markers created new kinds of demands in that pub- lishers couldn’t feature just one novel by an African American writer; instead, they opted for several on that part of their list. Currents began almost by accident. The comedy inherent in Ralph Ellison’s 1952 Invisible Man, for instance, linked this first novel by an African Ameri- can with the mid-century production of white male writers (indeed, the advertising for Invisible Man did not mention Ellison’s race). Once the category of black writing – or, in that period, ‘‘Negro’’ writing – was introduced, work by Margaret Walker, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Paule Marshall, and others found publication. It is, of course, a commonplace that United States literature changed dramatically during the 1960s. No one would deny that the revolu- tionary spirit of that decade modified the practice of writing, and it can easily be said that with the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr, an abstract concept of political and personal loss becomes figured in literary loss. (The same kind of dynamic in the relationship between a set of horrifying events in culture and writing occurs after 9-11-2001.) But what becomes Locating Contemporary Literature 3 clearer now in retrospect is that many of the styles and themes that writers used during and after the 1960s were already incipient during the 1950s. United States literature has always been somewhat critical of its home culture. The questioning critical responses to the United States in this period of study are best illustrated in the poetry, fiction, and prose poem production of the writers that came to be known as the Beats. Grouped around Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights publishing and book store in San Francisco, a myriad of such writers as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Diane de Prima, Anne Waldman, Richard Brautigan, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Paul Blackburn, and others signaled the legit- imacy of turning away from the dominance of Western civilization. In their search for other ways of living, for new kinds of sexual and physical experiences, these writers’ beatific power impressed readers with a willingness to change. To write impressionistically, as Kerouac did in his novel On the Road, to include the autobiographical as a legit- imate part of ‘‘art,’’ to expose all kinds of personal motivation – these qualities were, at first, rejected. Later, recognition of what Ker- ouac and Ginsberg were achieving changed the nature of United States aesthetic principles. The outgrowth of mid-century poetry – Robert Lowell’s mid-career change, for example – followed. The so- called Confessional poets took courage from the often ridiculed Beats. As publishers acknowledged this change and therefore searched for interesting representatives of the Other, writers who were culturally or philosophically different from the mainstream (though still white, still heterosexual, and still male), the established writers from earlier in the twentieth century died away. Beginning in the early 1960s, the world lost Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, Dashiell Hammett, William Faulkner, e.e. cummings, Robinson Jeffers, Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams, Clifford Odets, T. S. Eliot, Randall Jarrell, Flannery O’Connor, Carl Sandburg, and Langston Hughes, among others. It was a clearing out of possible production that made readers nostalgic for the great accomplishments of modernism – but also ready to accept new kinds of writing. These losses, coupled with the searing political changes of the 1960s, opened publishers’ doors to writers who might well have been rejected a decade earlier. Joan Didion’s Run River, along with her Play It as It Lays, represented the new interest in women’s lives, no matter how disturbing; just as Sylvia Plath’s only novel, The Bell Jar, brought a kind of comedy to that subject. The plethora of 1960s and 1970s novels by 4 Locating Contemporary Literature women, most of them still in print today, included Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, Mary McCarthy’s The Group, Joyce Carol Oates’ With Shuddering Fall, Judith Rossner’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Marge Piercy’s Small Changes, Lois Gould’s Such Good Friends, Diane Johnson’s The Shadow Knows, Alix Kates Shulman’s Memoirs of an ex-Prom Queen, and others. In 1970 Toni Morrison published her first novel, The Bluest Eye; in 1982 Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (and the film made from it) polarized the literary world in terms of not only race and gender, but also sexual preference and class. The vitality of American letters between 1950 and the mid- to late 1960s argued against one current of critical opinion, that literature at the midpoint of the twentieth century was staid. What was staid then was the academic response to the writing being done. According to the heavy critical studies appearing, a monolithic development of ‘‘pre-war’’ writing and ‘‘post-war’’ might have existed for a time: it was difficult not to take seriously Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950) as well as, earlier, F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941) and his studies of Henry James, and a bit later, R. W. B. Lewis’s The American Adam (1955). Always retrospective, these acclaimed books about United States literature were bent, implicitly, on proving the difference (and the superiority, or at least the equality) of American writing. The specter of the 400 years of British texts, and that more formal British language, still haunted American letters. Despite the emergence of that new field of academic study – called ‘‘American Studies’’ so as to present the worlds of United States art and music in the company of its literature – few English department courses in United States writing even existed. When students wanted to study ‘‘twentieth century’’ literature, they read works written by the British and the Irish rather than by United States writers. (Looming large over the canon were T. S. Eliot and Henry James, both of whom had become British citizens and were soon placed on reading lists as British writers.) So long as scholars who were at all interested in American texts were boxed into that pervasive argument – that there was such an entity as American literature, something separate from the English and focused on defining