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{{Template}}'''American literature''' refers to written or [[literature|literary work]] produced in the area of the [[United States]] and [[Colonial America]]. It owes a debt to [[European literature]] and [[British literature]] but has a [[unique American style]] and its own [[epic]], the [[Great American Novel]]. {{Template}}'''American literature''' refers to written or [[literature|literary work]] produced in the area of the [[United States]] and [[Colonial America]]. It owes a debt to [[European literature]] and [[British literature]] but has a [[unique American style]] and its own [[epic]], the [[Great American Novel]].
 +
 +== History ==
 +
 +The '''literature of the United States''' may be considered as belonging to [[English literature]] or as a distinct body of literature.
 +
 +Much early [[United States|American]] [[literature]] is derivative: [[Europe]]an forms and styles transferred to new locales. For example, Wieland and other [[novel]]s by [[Charles Brockden Brown]] ([[1771]]-[[1810]]) are energetic imitations of the [[Gothic novel]]s then being written in [[England]]. Even the well-wrought tales of [[Washington Irving]] ([[1783]]-[[1859]]), notably ''[[Rip Van Winkle]]'' and ''[[The Legend of Sleepy Hollow]]'', seem comfortably European despite their New World settings.
 +
 +Perhaps the first American writer to produce boldly new fiction and poetry was [[Edgar Allan Poe]] ([[1809]]-[[1849]]). In [[1835]], Poe began writing short stories -- including ''[[The Masque of the Red Death]]'', ''[[The Pit and the Pendulum]]'', ''[[The Fall of the House of Usher]]'', and ''[[The Murders in the Rue Morgue]]'' -- that explore previously hidden levels of human psychology and push the boundaries of fiction toward mystery and fantasy.
 +
 +Meanwhile, in [[1837]], the young [[Nathaniel Hawthorne]] ([[1804]]-[[1864]]) collected some of his stories as ''[[Twice-Told Tales]]'', a volume rich in symbolism and occult incidents. Hawthorne went on to write full-length "romances," quasi-allegorical novels that explore such themes as guilt, pride, and emotional repression in his native [[New England (U.S.)|New England]]. His masterpiece, [[The Scarlet Letter]], is the stark drama of a woman cast out of her community for committing adultery.
 +
 +Hawthorne's fiction had a profound impact on his friend [[Herman Melville]] ([[1819]]-[[1891]]), who first made a name for himself by turning material from his seafaring days into exotic novels. Inspired by Hawthorne's example, Melville went on to write novels rich in philosophical speculation. In ''[[Moby Dick]]'', an adventurous whaling voyage becomes the vehicle for examining such themes as obsession, the nature of evil, and human struggle against the elements. In another fine work, the short novel ''[[Billy Budd]]'', Melville dramatizes the conflicting claims of duty and compassion on board a ship in time of war. His more profound books sold poorly, and he had been long forgotten by the time of his death. He was rediscovered in the early decades of the 20th century.
 +
 +In [[1836]], [[Ralph Waldo Emerson]] ([[1803]]-[[1882]]), an ex-minister, published a startling nonfiction work called ''Nature'', in which he claimed it was possible to dispense with organized religion and reach a lofty spiritual state by studying and responding to the natural world. His work influenced not only the writers who gathered around him, forming a movement known as [[Transcendentalism]], but also the public, who heard him lecture.
 +
 +Emerson's most gifted fellow-thinker was [[Henry David Thoreau]] ([[1817]]-[[1862]]), a resolute nonconformist. After living mostly by himself for two years in a cabin by a wooded pond, Thoreau wrote ''[[Walden]]'', a book-length memoir that urges resistance to the meddlesome dictates of organized society. His radical writings express a deep-rooted tendency toward individualism in the American character.
 +
 +[[Mark Twain]] (the pen name of Samuel Clemens, 1835-1910) was the first major American writer to be born away from the East Coast -- in the border state of [[Missouri]]. His regional masterpieces were the memoir ''[[Life on the Mississippi]]'' and the novel ''[[Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]]''. Twain's style -- influenced by journalism, wedded to the vernacular, direct and unadorned but also highly evocative and irreverently funny -- changed the way Americans write their language. His characters speak like real people and sound distinctively American, using local dialects, newly invented words, and regional accents.
 +
 +[[Henry James]] ([[1843]]-[[1916]]) confronted the Old World-New World dilemma by writing directly about it. Although born in [[New York City]], he spent most of his adult years in [[England]]. Many of his novels center on Americans who live in or travel to Europe. With its intricate, highly qualified sentences and dissection of emotional nuance, James's fiction can be daunting. Among his more accessible works are the novellas ''[[Daisy Miller]]'', about an enchanting American girl in Europe, and ''[[The Turn of the Screw]]'', an enigmatic ghost story.
 +
 +America's two greatest 19th-century poets could hardly have been more different in temperament and style. [[Walt Whitman]] ([[1819]]-[[1892]]) was a working man, a traveler, a self-appointed nurse during the [[American Civil War]] ([[1861]]-[[1865]]), and a poetic innovator. His magnum opus was ''[[Leaves of Grass]]'', in which he uses a free-flowing verse and lines of irregular length to depict the all-inclusiveness of American democracy. Taking that motif one step further, the poet equates the vast range of American experience with himself -- and manages not to sound like a crass egotist. For example, in ''[[Song of Myself]]'', the long, central poem in Leaves of Grass, Whitman writes: "These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me...."
 +
 +Whitman was also a poet of the body -- "the body electric," as he called it. In Studies in Classic American Literature, the English novelist [[D.H. Lawrence]] wrote that Whitman "was the first to smash the old moral conception that the soul of man is something `superior' and `above' the flesh."
 +
 +[[Emily Dickinson]] ([[1830]]-[[1886]]), on the other hand, lived the sheltered life of a genteel unmarried woman in small-town [[Massachusetts]]. Within its formal structure, her poetry is ingenious, witty, exquisitely wrought, and psychologically penetrating. Her work was unconventional for its day, and little of it was published during her lifetime.
 +
 +Many of her poems dwell on death, often with a mischievous twist. "Because I could not stop for Death," one begins, "He kindly stopped for me." The opening of another Dickinson poem toys with her position as a woman in a male-dominated society and an unrecognized poet: "I'm nobody! Who are you? / Are you nobody too?"
 +
 +At the beginning of the 20th century, American novelists were expanding fiction's social spectrum to encompass both high and low life. 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]]), best known for his Civil War novel ''[[The Red Badge of Courage]]'', depicted the life of New York City prostitutes in ''[[Maggie: A Girl of the Streets]]''. And in ''[[Sister Carrie]]'', [[Theodore Dreiser]] ([[1871]]-[[1945]]) portrayed a country girl who moves to [[Chicago, Illinois|Chicago]] and becomes a kept woman.
 +
 +Experimentation in style and form soon joined the new freedom in subject matter. In [[1909]], [[Gertrude Stein]] ([[1874]]-[[1946]]), by then an expatriate in [[Paris]], published ''[[Three Lives]]'', an innovative work of fiction influenced by her familiarity with cubism, jazz, and other movements in contemporary art and music.
 +
 +The poet [[Ezra Pound]] ([[1885]]-[[1972]]) was born in [[Idaho]] but spent much of his adult life in Europe. His work is complex, sometimes obscure, with multiple references to other art forms and to a vast range of literature, both Western and Eastern. He influenced many other poets, notably [[T.S. Eliot]] ([[1888]]-[[1965]]), another expatriate. Eliot wrote spare, cerebral poetry, carried by a dense structure of symbols. In "The Waste Land" he embodied a jaundiced vision of post-World War I society in fragmented, haunted images. Like Pound's, Eliot's poetry could be highly allusive, and some editions of ''[[The Waste Land]]'' come with footnotes supplied by the poet. In [[1948]], Eliot won the [[Nobel Prize in Literature]].
 +
 +American writers also expressed the disillusionment following upon the war. The stories and novels of [[F. Scott Fitzgerald]] ([[1896]]-1940) capture the restless, pleasure-hungry, defiant mood of the 1920s. Fitzgerald's characteristic theme, expressed poignantly in The Great Gatsby, is the tendency of youth's golden dreams to dissolve in failure and disappointment.
 +
 +[[Ernest Hemingway]] ([[1899]]-[[1961]]) saw violence and death first-hand as an ambulance driver in [[World War I]], and the senseless 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 courage 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]].
 +
 +In addition to fiction, the 1920s were a rich period for drama. There had not been an important American dramatist until [[Eugene O'Neill]] ([[1888]]-[[1953]]) began to write his plays. The [[1936]] winner of the [[Nobel Prize in Literature]], O'Neill drew upon classical mythology, the Bible, and the new science of psychology to explore inner life. He wrote frankly about sex and family quarrels, but his preoccupation was with the individual's search for identity. One of his greatest works is ''[[Long Day's Journey Into Night]]'', a harrowing drama, small in scale but large in theme, based largely on his own family.
 +
 +Another strikingly original American playwright was [[Tennessee Williams]] ([[1911]]-[[1983]]), who expressed his southern heritage in poetic yet sensational plays, usually about a sensitive woman trapped in a brutish environment. Several of his plays have been made into films, including ''[[A Streetcar Named Desire]]'' and ''[[Cat on a Hot Tin Roof]]''.
 +
 +Five years before Hemingway, another American novelist had won the Nobel Prize: [[William Faulkner]] ([[1897]]-[[1962]]). Faulkner managed to encompass an enormous range of humanity in Yoknapatawpha, a [[Mississippi]] county of his own invention. He recorded his characters' seemingly unedited ramblings in order to represent their inner states -- a technique called "[[stream of consciousness]]." (In fact, these passages are carefully crafted, and their seeming randomness is an illusion.) He also jumbled time sequences to show how the past -- especially the slave-holding era of the South -- endures in the present. Among his great works are ''[[The Sound and the Fury]]'', ''[[Absalom, Absalom!]]'', ''[[Go Down, Moses]]'', and ''[[The Unvanquished]]''.
 +
 +Faulkner was part of a southern literary renaissance that also included such figures as [[Truman Capote]] ([[1924]]-[[1984]]) and [[Flannery O'Connor]] ([[1925]]-[[1964]]). Although Capote wrote short stories and novels, fiction and nonfiction, his masterpiece was ''[[In Cold Blood]]'', a factual account of a multiple murder and its aftermath, which fused dogged reporting with a novelist's penetrating psychology and crystalline prose. Other practitioners of the "nonfiction novel" have included [[Norman Mailer]] ([[1923]]- ), who wrote about an antiwar march on [[The Pentagon]] in ''[[Armies of the Night]]'', and [[Tom Wolfe]] ([[1931]]- ), who wrote about American astronauts in ''[[The Right Stuff]]''.
 +
 +Flannery O'Connor was a [[Catholic]] -- and thus an outsider in the heavily Protestant [[U.S. Southern States|South]] in which she grew up. Her characters are Protestant fundamentalists obsessed with both [[God]] and [[Satan]]. She is best known for her tragicomic short stories.
 +
 +The 1920s had seen the rise of an artistic [[African American|black]] community in the New York City neighborhood of [[Harlem, Manhattan|Harlem]]. The period called the [[Harlem Renaissance]] produced such gifted poets as [[Langston Hughes]] ([[1902]]-[[1967]]), [[Countee Cullen]] ([[1903]]-[[1946]]), and [[Claude McKay]] ([[1889]]-[[1948]]). The novelist [[Zora Neale Hurston]] ([[1903]]-[[1960]]) combined a gift for storytelling with the study of anthropology to write vivid stories from the African-American oral tradition. Through such books as the novel ''[[Their Eyes Were Watching God]]'' -- about the life and marriages of a light-skinned African-American woman -- Hurston influenced a later generation of black women novelists.
 +
 +After [[World War II]], a new receptivity to diverse voices brought black writers into the mainstream of American literature. [[James Baldwin]] ([[1924]]-[[1987]]) expressed his disdain for racism and his celebration of sexuality in ''[[Giovanni's Room]]''. In ''[[Invisible Man]]'', [[Ralph Ellison]] ([[1914]]-[[1994]]) linked the plight of African Americans, whose race can render them all but invisible to the majority white culture, with the larger theme of the human search for identity in the modern world.
 +
 +In the 1950s the West Coast spawned a literary movement, the poetry and fiction of the "[[Beat Generation]]," a name that referred simultaneously to the rhythm of jazz music, to a sense that post-war society was worn out, and to an interest in new forms of experience through drugs, alcohol, and Eastern mysticism. Poet [[Allen Ginsberg]] ([[1926]]-[[1997]]) set the tone of social protest and visionary ecstasy in ''[[Howl]]'', a Whitmanesque work that begins with this powerful line: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...." [[Jack Kerouac]] ([[1922]]-[[1969]]) celebrated the Beats' carefree, hedonistic life-style in his episodic novel ''[[On the Road]]''.
 +
 +From Irving and Hawthorne to the present day, the short story has been a favorite American form. One of its 20th-century masters was [[John Cheever]] ([[1912]]-[[1982]]), who brought yet another facet of American life into the realm of literature: the affluent suburbs that have grown up around most major cities. Cheever was long associated with ''[[The New Yorker]]'', a magazine noted for its wit and sophistication.
 +
 +Although trend-spotting in literature that is still being written can be dangerous, the recent emergence of fiction by members of minority groups has been striking. Here are only a few examples. [[Native American]] writer [[Leslie Marmon Silko]] ([[1948]]- ) uses colloquial language and traditional stories to fashion haunting, lyrical poems such as ''[[In Cold Storm Light]]''. [[Amy Tan]] ([[1952]]- ), of Chinese descent, has described her parents' early struggles in [[California]] in ''[[The Joy Luck Club]]''. [[Oscar Hijuelos]] ([[1951]]- ), a writer with roots in [[Cuba]], won the 1991 [[Pulitzer Prize]] for his novel ''[[The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love]]''. In a series of novels beginning with ''[[A Boy's Own Story]]'', [[Edmund White]] ([[1940]]- ) has captured the anguish and comedy of growing up [[gay]] in America. Finally, African-American women have produced some of the most powerful fiction of recent decades. One of them, [[Toni Morrison]] ([[1931]]- ), author of ''[[Beloved]]'' and other works, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, only the second American woman to be so honored.
 +
==Minority focuses in American literature== ==Minority focuses in American literature==

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American literature refers to written or literary work produced in the area of the United States and Colonial America. It owes a debt to European literature and British literature but has a unique American style and its own epic, the Great American Novel.

Contents

History

The literature of the United States may be considered as belonging to English literature or as a distinct body of literature.

Much early American literature is derivative: European forms and styles transferred to new locales. For example, Wieland and other novels by Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) are energetic imitations of the Gothic novels then being written in England. Even the well-wrought tales of Washington Irving (1783-1859), notably Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, seem comfortably European despite their New World settings.

Perhaps the first American writer to produce boldly new fiction and poetry was Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). In 1835, Poe began writing short stories -- including The Masque of the Red Death, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Murders in the Rue Morgue -- that explore previously hidden levels of human psychology and push the boundaries of fiction toward mystery and fantasy.

Meanwhile, in 1837, the young Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) collected some of his stories as Twice-Told Tales, a volume rich in symbolism and occult incidents. Hawthorne went on to write full-length "romances," quasi-allegorical novels that explore such themes as guilt, pride, and emotional repression in his native New England. His masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, is the stark drama of a woman cast out of her community for committing adultery.

Hawthorne's fiction had a profound impact on his friend Herman Melville (1819-1891), who first made a name for himself by turning material from his seafaring days into exotic novels. Inspired by Hawthorne's example, Melville went on to write novels rich in philosophical speculation. In Moby Dick, an adventurous whaling voyage becomes the vehicle for examining such themes as obsession, the nature of evil, and human struggle against the elements. In another fine work, the short novel Billy Budd, Melville dramatizes the conflicting claims of duty and compassion on board a ship in time of war. His more profound books sold poorly, and he had been long forgotten by the time of his death. He was rediscovered in the early decades of the 20th century.

In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), an ex-minister, published a startling nonfiction work called Nature, in which he claimed it was possible to dispense with organized religion and reach a lofty spiritual state by studying and responding to the natural world. His work influenced not only the writers who gathered around him, forming a movement known as Transcendentalism, but also the public, who heard him lecture.

Emerson's most gifted fellow-thinker was Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), a resolute nonconformist. After living mostly by himself for two years in a cabin by a wooded pond, Thoreau wrote Walden, a book-length memoir that urges resistance to the meddlesome dictates of organized society. His radical writings express a deep-rooted tendency toward individualism in the American character.

Mark Twain (the pen name of Samuel Clemens, 1835-1910) was the first major American writer to be born away from the East Coast -- in the border state of Missouri. His regional masterpieces were the memoir Life on the Mississippi and the novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain's style -- influenced by journalism, wedded to the vernacular, direct and unadorned but also highly evocative and irreverently funny -- changed the way Americans write their language. His characters speak like real people and sound distinctively American, using local dialects, newly invented words, and regional accents.

Henry James (1843-1916) confronted the Old World-New World dilemma by writing directly about it. Although born in New York City, he spent most of his adult years in England. Many of his novels center on Americans who live in or travel to Europe. With its intricate, highly qualified sentences and dissection of emotional nuance, James's fiction can be daunting. Among his more accessible works are the novellas Daisy Miller, about an enchanting American girl in Europe, and The Turn of the Screw, an enigmatic ghost story.

America's two greatest 19th-century poets could hardly have been more different in temperament and style. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was a working man, a traveler, a self-appointed nurse during the American Civil War (1861-1865), and a poetic innovator. His magnum opus was Leaves of Grass, in which he uses a free-flowing verse and lines of irregular length to depict the all-inclusiveness of American democracy. Taking that motif one step further, the poet equates the vast range of American experience with himself -- and manages not to sound like a crass egotist. For example, in Song of Myself, the long, central poem in Leaves of Grass, Whitman writes: "These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me...."

Whitman was also a poet of the body -- "the body electric," as he called it. In Studies in Classic American Literature, the English novelist D.H. Lawrence wrote that Whitman "was the first to smash the old moral conception that the soul of man is something `superior' and `above' the flesh."

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), on the other hand, lived the sheltered life of a genteel unmarried woman in small-town Massachusetts. Within its formal structure, her poetry is ingenious, witty, exquisitely wrought, and psychologically penetrating. Her work was unconventional for its day, and little of it was published during her lifetime.

Many of her poems dwell on death, often with a mischievous twist. "Because I could not stop for Death," one begins, "He kindly stopped for me." The opening of another Dickinson poem toys with her position as a woman in a male-dominated society and an unrecognized poet: "I'm nobody! Who are you? / Are you nobody too?"

At the beginning of the 20th century, American novelists were expanding fiction's social spectrum to encompass both high and low life. 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), best known for his Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, depicted the life of New York City prostitutes in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. And in Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) portrayed a country girl who moves to Chicago and becomes a kept woman.

Experimentation in style and form soon joined the new freedom in subject matter. In 1909, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), by then an expatriate in Paris, published Three Lives, an innovative work of fiction influenced by her familiarity with cubism, jazz, and other movements in contemporary art and music.

The poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was born in Idaho but spent much of his adult life in Europe. His work is complex, sometimes obscure, with multiple references to other art forms and to a vast range of literature, both Western and Eastern. He influenced many other poets, notably T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), another expatriate. Eliot wrote spare, cerebral poetry, carried by a dense structure of symbols. In "The Waste Land" he embodied a jaundiced vision of post-World War I society in fragmented, haunted images. Like Pound's, Eliot's poetry could be highly allusive, and some editions of The Waste Land come with footnotes supplied by the poet. In 1948, Eliot won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

American writers also expressed the disillusionment following upon the war. The stories and novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) capture the restless, pleasure-hungry, defiant mood of the 1920s. Fitzgerald's characteristic theme, expressed poignantly in The Great Gatsby, is the tendency of youth's golden dreams to dissolve in failure and disappointment.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) saw violence and death first-hand as an ambulance driver in World War I, and the senseless 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 courage 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.

In addition to fiction, the 1920s were a rich period for drama. There had not been an important American dramatist until Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) began to write his plays. The 1936 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, O'Neill drew upon classical mythology, the Bible, and the new science of psychology to explore inner life. He wrote frankly about sex and family quarrels, but his preoccupation was with the individual's search for identity. One of his greatest works is Long Day's Journey Into Night, a harrowing drama, small in scale but large in theme, based largely on his own family.

Another strikingly original American playwright was Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), who expressed his southern heritage in poetic yet sensational plays, usually about a sensitive woman trapped in a brutish environment. Several of his plays have been made into films, including A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Five years before Hemingway, another American novelist had won the Nobel Prize: William Faulkner (1897-1962). Faulkner managed to encompass an enormous range of humanity in Yoknapatawpha, a Mississippi county of his own invention. He recorded his characters' seemingly unedited ramblings in order to represent their inner states -- a technique called "stream of consciousness." (In fact, these passages are carefully crafted, and their seeming randomness is an illusion.) He also jumbled time sequences to show how the past -- especially the slave-holding era of the South -- endures in the present. Among his great works are The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses, and The Unvanquished.

Faulkner was part of a southern literary renaissance that also included such figures as Truman Capote (1924-1984) and Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). Although Capote wrote short stories and novels, fiction and nonfiction, his masterpiece was In Cold Blood, a factual account of a multiple murder and its aftermath, which fused dogged reporting with a novelist's penetrating psychology and crystalline prose. Other practitioners of the "nonfiction novel" have included Norman Mailer (1923- ), who wrote about an antiwar march on The Pentagon in Armies of the Night, and Tom Wolfe (1931- ), who wrote about American astronauts in The Right Stuff.

Flannery O'Connor was a Catholic -- and thus an outsider in the heavily Protestant South in which she grew up. Her characters are Protestant fundamentalists obsessed with both God and Satan. She is best known for her tragicomic short stories.

The 1920s had seen the rise of an artistic black community in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem. The period called the Harlem Renaissance produced such gifted poets as Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Countee Cullen (1903-1946), and Claude McKay (1889-1948). The novelist Zora Neale Hurston (1903-1960) combined a gift for storytelling with the study of anthropology to write vivid stories from the African-American oral tradition. Through such books as the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God -- about the life and marriages of a light-skinned African-American woman -- Hurston influenced a later generation of black women novelists.

After World War II, a new receptivity to diverse voices brought black writers into the mainstream of American literature. James Baldwin (1924-1987) expressed his disdain for racism and his celebration of sexuality in Giovanni's Room. In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) linked the plight of African Americans, whose race can render them all but invisible to the majority white culture, with the larger theme of the human search for identity in the modern world.

In the 1950s the West Coast spawned a literary movement, the poetry and fiction of the "Beat Generation," a name that referred simultaneously to the rhythm of jazz music, to a sense that post-war society was worn out, and to an interest in new forms of experience through drugs, alcohol, and Eastern mysticism. Poet Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) set the tone of social protest and visionary ecstasy in Howl, a Whitmanesque work that begins with this powerful line: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...." Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) celebrated the Beats' carefree, hedonistic life-style in his episodic novel On the Road.

From Irving and Hawthorne to the present day, the short story has been a favorite American form. One of its 20th-century masters was John Cheever (1912-1982), who brought yet another facet of American life into the realm of literature: the affluent suburbs that have grown up around most major cities. Cheever was long associated with The New Yorker, a magazine noted for its wit and sophistication.

Although trend-spotting in literature that is still being written can be dangerous, the recent emergence of fiction by members of minority groups has been striking. Here are only a few examples. Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko (1948- ) uses colloquial language and traditional stories to fashion haunting, lyrical poems such as In Cold Storm Light. Amy Tan (1952- ), of Chinese descent, has described her parents' early struggles in California in The Joy Luck Club. Oscar Hijuelos (1951- ), a writer with roots in Cuba, won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. In a series of novels beginning with A Boy's Own Story, Edmund White (1940- ) has captured the anguish and comedy of growing up gay in America. Finally, African-American women have produced some of the most powerful fiction of recent decades. One of them, Toni Morrison (1931- ), author of Beloved and other works, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, only the second American woman to be so honored.


Minority focuses in American literature

Additional genres

See also


Notes

Related: Dalkey Archive Press - the beat generation (1950s literary movement) - the lost generation (American expatriates in Paris of the 1920s and 1930s) - black science fiction - American literary criticism - Partisan Review

Titles: Native Son (1940) - Junkie (1953) - Candy (1958) - The Great Gatsby (1925) - Catcher in the Rye (1951) - Naked Lunch (1959)

In the 1950s: Beatniks and the beat generation, an anti-materialistic literary movement that began with Kerouac in 1948 and stretched on into the 1960s, was at its zenith in the 1950s. Such groundbreaking literature as William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, William Golding's Lord of the Flies, Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye were published.


People: Ambrose Bierce - Paul Bowles - William S. Burroughs - James Cain - Dennis Cooper - Allen Ginsberg - Kenneth Goldsmith - Jack Kerouac - Ernest Hemingway - Stephen King - Jack London - H.P. Lovecraft - David Markson - Herman Melville - Chuck Palahniuk - Edgar Allan Poe - Ezra Pound - Thomas Pynchon - Terry Southern - Mark Twain - Edmund Wilson - George Lippard



Maria Jolas, Woman of Action: A Memoir and Other Writings (2004) - Mary Ann Caws


   Maria Jolas, born Maria McDonald on January 12, 1893, Louisville, Kentucky, United States - died March 4, 1987 in Paris, France, was one of the founding members of transition in Paris, France with her husband Eugene Jolas.
   Jolas also translated many works including Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space.
   Maria Jolas, Woman of Action - A Memoir and Other Writings was edited and introduced in 2004 by City University of New York professor Mary Ann Caws. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Jolas [Feb 2005]

Brooklyn Follies (2005) - Paul Auster


"I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn, and so the next morning I traveled down there from Westchester to scope out the terrain. I hadn't been back in fifty-six years, and I remembered nothing. My parents had moved out of the city when I was three, but I instinctively found myself returning to the neighborhood where we had lived, crawling home like some wounded dog to the place of my birth. A local real estate agent ushered me around to six or seven brownstone flats, and by the end of the afternoon I had rented a two-bedroom garden apartment on First Street, just half a block away from Prospect Park. I had no idea who my neighbors were, and I didn't care. They all worked at nine-to-five jobs, none of them had any children, and therefore the building would be relatively silent. More than anything else, that was what I craved. A silent end to my sad and ridiculous life."


Absalom, Absalom! (1936) - William Faulkner


   Multiple narrators, see Rashomon.
   see also: 1936 - unreliable narrator

The End of the Story: A Novel (1995) - Lydia Davis

   The End of the Story: A Novel (1995) - Lydia Davis
   [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
       "The last time I saw him, though I did not know it would be the last, I was sitting on the terrace with a friend and he came through the gate sweating, his face and chest pink, his hair damp, and stopped politely to talk to us." 
   More on the first sentence of novels here.
   Biography
       Lydia Davis (born 1947) is a contemporary American author and translator of French. She is the daughter of Robert Gorham Davis and Hope Hale Davis. From 1974 to 1978 Davis was married to Paul Auster, with whom she has a son.
       She has published six collections of short stories, including The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories (1976) and Break It Down (1986). Her most recent collection is Samuel Johnson is Indignant, published by McSweeney's in 2002. Her stories are acclaimed for their brevity and humour. Many are only one or two sentences. In fact some of her stories are considered poetry or somewhere between philosophy, poetry and short story.
       Davis has also translated Proust, Blanchot, Foucault, Michel Leiris, and other French writers. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Davis [Oct 2006] 




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