Post-War American Literature: Context, Styles & Writers

Contemporary Literature (1945-Present)

Historical Context

• Media-Saturated Culture: People observe life as media presents it rather than experiencing life directly.
• Value Relativity: Insistence that values are not permanent but only "local" or "historical"; media culture interprets values.
• Post-WWII Prosperity: The economic boom following the Second World War.
• New Era: People beginning a new century and a new millennium.
• Social Protest: Increased movements advocating for social change.

Genre and Style Characteristics

• Blurred Reality: Lines between reality and fantasy are blurred; mix of fantasy and nonfiction.
• Anti-Heroes: Absence of traditional heroes, featuring anti-heroes instead.
• Individual Isolation: Concern with the individual in isolation.
• Tone: Often detached, unemotional, and usually humorless.
• Diverse Voices: Emergence of prominent ethnic and women writers.

Major Writers and Movements

Beat Writers

• Characteristics: Pre-hippie, highly intellectual, anti-tradition. They countered the hidden despair of the 1950s with wildly exuberant language and behavior.
• Key Figures:
  • William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch)
  • Jack Kerouac (On the Road)
  • Allen Ginsberg (Howl)

Confessional Poets

• Characteristics: Used the anguish of their own lives to explore America's hidden despair.
• Key Figures:
  • Sylvia Plath (Most famous; committed suicide)
  • Anne Sexton (Pulitzer Prize winner; committed suicide)
  • Robert Lowell (Authored 10 volumes of brilliant, anguished work)

Other Notable Authors

• J. D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye became the symbol for a generation of disaffected youth.
• Flannery O'Connor: Known for Southern Gothic style.
• James Thurber: America's most popular humorist in the 1930s & 1940s (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty).

Multicultural Literature

Jewish American Voices

• Elie Wiesel (born 1928): Holocaust survivor, author of Night.

African American Literature

• Context: Influenced by the rise of Black militancy and the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
• Key Figures:
  • Ralph Ellison (1914-1994): Invisible Man (Theme: Society willfully ignores Black people).
  • Gwendolyn Brooks (born 1917): First Black female poet to win the Pulitzer Prize (We Real Cool).
  • Maya Angelou (born 1928): I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Focus on strong African-American women).
  • Alice Walker (born 1944): The Color Purple (Depicts poor, oppressed Black women in the early 1900s).