American literature
F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the carefree mood of the 1920s, but John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, who became famous with The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, and William Faulkner, adopted experimental forms.
[10] Of the second generation of New England settlers, Cotton Mather stands out as a theologian and historian, who wrote the history of the colonies with a view to God's activity in their midst and to connecting the Puritan leaders with the great heroes of the Christian faith.
The diary of planter William Byrd and his The History of the Dividing Line (1728) described the expedition to survey the swamp between Virginia and North Carolina but also comments on the differences between American Indians and the white settlers in the area.
In 1832, he began writing short stories, such as "The Masque of the Red Death", "The Pit and the Pendulum", and "The Fall of the House of Usher", that explore hidden depths of human psychology and push the boundaries of fiction.
Humorous writers were also popular and included Seba Smith and Benjamin Penhallow Shillaber in New England and Davy Crockett, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson J. Hooper, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, and George Washington Harris writing about the American frontier.
The political conflict surrounding abolitionism inspired the writings of William Lloyd Garrison and his paper The Liberator, along with poet John Greenleaf Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe in her world-famous Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).
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.
[40] 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.
While the Korean war was a source of trauma for the protagonist of The Moviegoer (1962), by Southern author Walker Percy, winner of the National Book Award; his attempt at exploring "the dislocation of man in the modern age.
The term Beat referred 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 (specifically Zen Buddhism).
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.
Thomas Pynchon, a seminal practitioner of the form, drew in his work on modernist fixtures such as temporal distortion, unreliable narrators, and internal monologue and coupled them with distinctly postmodern techniques such as metafiction, ideogrammatic characterization, unrealistic names (Oedipa Maas, Benny Profane, etc.
Toni Morrison, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, writing in a distinctive lyrical prose style, published her controversial debut novel, The Bluest Eye, to critical acclaim in 1970.
Since then, Morrison has experimented with lyric fantasy, as in her two best-known later works, Song of Solomon (1977) and Beloved (1987), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; along these lines, critic Harold Bloom has drawn favorable comparisons to Virginia Woolf,[48] and the Nobel committee to "Faulkner and to the Latin American tradition [of magical realism].
[50] Writing in a lyrical, flowing style that eschews excessive use of the comma and semicolon, recalling William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway in equal measure, Cormac McCarthy seizes on the literary traditions of several regions of the United States and includes multiple genres.
He writes in the Southern Gothic aesthetic in his Faulknerian 1965 debut, The Orchard Keeper, and Suttree (1979); in the Epic Western tradition, with grotesquely drawn characters and symbolic narrative turns reminiscent of Melville, in Blood Meridian (1985), which Harold Bloom styled "the greatest single book since Faulkner's As I Lay Dying", calling the character of Judge Holden "short of Moby Dick, the most monstrous apparition in all of American literature";[51] in a much more pastoral tone in his celebrated Border Trilogy (1992–98) of bildungsromans, including All the Pretty Horses (1992), winner of the National Book Award; and in the post-apocalyptic genre in the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road (2007).
Don DeLillo, who rose to literary prominence with the publication of his 1985 novel, White Noise, a work broaching the subjects of death and consumerism and doubling as a piece of comic social criticism, began his writing career in 1971 with Americana.
Seizing on the distinctly postmodern techniques of digression, narrative fragmentation and elaborate symbolism, and strongly influenced by the works of Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace began his writing career with The Broom of the System, published to moderate acclaim in 1987.
He began his writing career in 1988 with the well-received The Twenty-Seventh City, a novel centering on his native St. Louis, but did not gain national attention until the publication of his essay, "Perchance to Dream", in Harper's Magazine, discussing the cultural role of the writer in the new millennium through the prism of his own frustrations.
[54][55][56] Other notable writers at the turn of the century include Michael Chabon, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) tells the story of two friends, Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, as they rise through the ranks of the comics industry in its heyday; Denis Johnson, whose 2007 novel Tree of Smoke about falsified intelligence during Vietnam both won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was called by critic Michiko Kakutani "one of the classic works of literature produced by [the Vietnam War]";[57] and Louise Erdrich, whose 2008 novel The Plague of Doves, a distinctly Faulknerian, polyphonic examination of the tribal experience set against the backdrop of murder in the fictional town of Pluto, North Dakota, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and her 2012 novel The Round House, which builds on the same themes, was awarded the 2012 National Book Award.
"[66] American poetry arguably reached its peak in the early-to-mid-20th century, with such noted writers as Wallace Stevens and his Harmonium (1923) and The Auroras of Autumn (1950), T. S. Eliot and his The Waste Land (1922), Robert Frost and his North of Boston (1914) and New Hampshire (1923), Hart Crane and his White Buildings (1926) and the epic cycle, The Bridge (1930), Ezra Pound, The Cantos (1917–1969).
In addition, in this same period the confessional, whose origin is often traced to the publication in 1959 of Robert Lowell's Life Studies,[70] and beat schools of poetry enjoyed popular and academic success, producing such widely anthologized voices as Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, Gary Snyder, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath, among many others.
The most ambitious attempt at bringing modern realism into the drama was James Herne's Margaret Fleming (1890), which addressed issues of social determinism through realistic dialogue, psychological insight, and symbolism.
The second half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of American Jewish writers such as Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, Chaim Potok, and Bernard Malamud.
After being relegated to cookbooks and autobiographies for most of the 20th century, Asian American literature achieved widespread notice through Maxine Hong Kingston's fictional memoir, The Woman Warrior (1976), and her novels China Men (1980) and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book.
Hispanic literature also became important during this period, starting with acclaimed novels by Tomás Rivera (...y no se lo tragó la tierra) and Rudolfo Anaya (Bless Me, Ultima), and the emergence of Chicano theater with Luis Valdez and Teatro Campesino.
Latina writing became important thanks to authors such as Sandra Cisneros, an icon of an emerging Chicano literature whose 1983 bildungsroman The House on Mango Street is taught in schools across the United States, Denise Chavez's The Last of the Menu Girls and Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.
Dominican-American author Junot Díaz received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which tells the story of an overweight Dominican boy growing up as a social outcast in Paterson, New Jersey.
More recently, Arab American literature, largely unnoticed since the New York Pen League of the 1920s, has become more prominent through the work of Diana Abu-Jaber, whose novels include Arabian Jazz and Crescent and the memoir The Language of Baklava.
