二战后的美国文学

二战后的美国文学 研究型美国文学学习资料 二战后的美国文学 American Poetry Since 1945: The Anti-Tradition A shift away from an assumption that traditional forms, ideas, and history can provide meaning and continuity to human life has occurred in the contemporary literary imagination throughout many parts of the world, including the United States. Events since World War II have produced a sense of history as discontinuous: Each act, emotion, and moment is seen as unique. Style and form now seem provisional, makeshift, reflexive of the process of composition and the writer's self-awareness. Familiar categories of expression are suspect; originality is becoming a new tradition. It is not hard to find historical causes for this disassociated sensibility in the United States. World War II itself, the rise of anonymity and consumerism in a mass urban society, the protest movements of the 1960s, the decade-long Vietnam conflict, the Cold War, environmental threats -- the catalog of shocks to American culture is long and varied. The change that has most transformed American society, however, has been the rise of the mass media and mass culture. First radio, then movies, and now an all-powerful, ubiquitous television presence have changed American life at its roots. From a private, literate, elite culture based on the book, the eye, and reading, the United States has become a media culture attuned to the voice on the radio, the music of compact discs and cassettes, film, and the images on the television screen. American poetry has been directly influenced by mass media and electronic technology. Films, videotapes, and tape recordings of poetry readings and interviews with poets have become available, and new inexpensive photographic methods of printing have encouraged young poets to self-publish and young editors to begin literary magazines -- of which there are now well over 2,000. From the late 1950s to the present, Americans have been increasingly aware that technology, so useful in itself, presents dangers through the wrong kinds of striking images. To Americans seeking alternatives, poetry seems more relevant than before: It offers people a way to express subjective life and articulate the impact of technology and mass society on the individual. A host of styles, some regional, some associated with famous schools or poets, vie for attention; contemporary American poetry is decentralized, richly varied, and impossible to summarize. For the sake of discussion, however, it can be arranged along a spectrum, producing three overlapping camps -- the traditional on one end, the idiosyncratic in the middle, and the experimental on the other end. Traditional poets have maintained or revitalized poetic traditions. Idiosyncratic poets have used both 1 traditional and innovative techniques in creating unique voices. Experimental poets have courted new cultural styles. TRADITIONALISM T raditional writers include acknowledged masters of traditional forms and diction who write with a readily recognizable craft, often using rhyme or a set metrical pattern. Often they are from the U.S. Eastern seaboard or from the southern part of the country, and teach in colleges and universities. Richard Eberhart and Richard Wilbur; the older Fugitive poets John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren; such accomplished younger poets as John Hollander and Richard Howard; and the early Robert Lowell are examples. They are established and frequently anthologized. The previous chapter discussed the refinement, respect for nature, and profoundly conservative values of the Fugitives. These qualities grace much poetry oriented to traditional modes. Traditionalist poets are generally precise, realistic, and witty; like Richard Wilbur (1921- ), they are often influenced in these directions by 15th- and 16th-century British metaphysical poets brought to favor by T.S. Eliot. Wilbur's most famous poem, "A World Without Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness" (1950), takes its title from Thomas Traherne, a metaphysical poet. Its vivid opening illustrates the clarity some poets have found within rhyme and formal regularity: The tall camels of the spirit Steer for their deserts, passing the last groves loud With the sawmill shrill of the locust, to the whole honey of the arid Sun. They are slow, proud... Traditional poets, unlike many experimentalists who distrust "too poetic" diction, welcome resounding poetic lines. Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) ended one poem with the words "To love so well the world that we may believe, in the end, in God." Allen Tate (1899-1979) ended a poem, "Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!" Traditional poets also at times use a somewhat rhetorical diction of obsolete or odd words, using many adjectives (for example, "sepulchral owl") and inversions, in which the natural, spoken word order of English is altered unnaturally. Sometimes the effect is noble, as in the line by Warren; other times, the poetry seems stilted and out of touch with real emotions, as in Tate's line: "Fatuously touched the hems of the hierophants." Occasionally, as in Hollander, Howard, and James Merrill (1926- ), self-conscious diction combines with wit, puns, and literary allusions. Merrill, who is innovative in his urban themes, unrhymed lines, personal subjects, and light conversational tone, shares a witty habit with the traditionalists in "The Broken Heart" (1966), writing about a marriage as if it were a cocktail: 2 Always that same old story - Father Time and Mother Earth, A marriage on the rocks. Obvious fluency and verbal pyrotechnics by some poets, like Merrill and John Ashbery, make them successful in traditional terms, although their poetry redefines poetry in radically innovative ways. Stylistic gracefulness makes some poets seem more traditional than they are, as in the case of Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) and A.R. Ammons (1926- ). Ammons creates intense dialogues between humanity and nature; Jarrell steps into the trapped consciousness of the dispossessed -- women, children, doomed soldiers, as in "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" (1945): From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose. Although many traditional poets use rhyme, not all rhymed poetry is traditional in subject or tone. Poet Gwendolyn Brooks (1917- ) writes of the difficulties of living -- let alone writing -- in urban slums. Her "Kitchenette Building" (1945) asks how: Could a dream send up through onion fumes Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes And yesterday's garbage ripening in the hall... Many poets, including Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Richard Wilbur, Robert Lowell, and Robert Penn Warren began writing traditionally, using rhyme and meters, but abandoned these in the 1960s under the pressure of public events and a gradual trend toward open forms. Robert Lowell (1917-1977) The most influential recent poet, Robert Lowell, began traditionally but was influenced by experimental currents. Because his life and work spans the period between the older modernist masters like Ezra Pound and the contemporary writers, his career places the later experimentalists in a larger context. Lowell fits the mold of the academic writer: white, male, Protestant by birth, well-educated, and linked with the political and social establishment. He was a descendant of the respected Boston Brahmin family that included the famous 19th-century poet James Russell Lowell and a recent president of Harvard University. Robert Lowell found an identity outside his elite background, however. He went not to Harvard but to Kenyon College in Ohio, where he rejected his Puritan ancestry and converted to Catholicism. Jailed for a year as a conscientious objector in World War II, he later publicly protested the Vietnam conflict. 3 Lowell's early books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (1946), which won a Pulitzer Prize, revealed great control of traditional forms and styles, strong feeling, and an intensely personal yet historical vision. The violence and specificity of the early work is overpowering in poems like "Children of Light" (1946), a harsh condemnation of the Puritans who killed Indians and whose descendants burned surplus grain instead of shipping it to hungry people. Lowell writes: "Our fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones / And fenced their gardens with the Redman's bones." Lowell's next book, The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951), contains moving dramatic monologues in which members of his family reveal their tenderness and failings. As always, his style mixes the human with the majestic. Often he uses traditional rhyme, but his colloquialism disguises it until it seems like background melody. It was experimental poetry, however, that gave Lowell his breakthrough into a creative individual idiom. On a reading tour in the mid-1950s, Lowell heard some of the new experimental poetry for the first time. Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Gary Snyder's Myths and Texts, still unpublished, were being read and chanted, sometimes to jazz accompaniment, in coffee houses in North Beach, a section of San Francisco. Lowell felt that next to these, his own accomplished poems were too stilted, rhetorical, and encased in convention; when reading them aloud, he made spontaneous revisions toward a more colloquial diction. "My own poems seemed like prehistoric monsters dragged down into a bog and death by their ponderous armor," he wrote later. "I was reciting what I no longer felt." At this point Lowell, like many poets after him, accepted the challenge of learning from the rival tradition in America -- the school of William Carlos Williams. "It's as if no poet except Williams had really seen America or heard its language," he wrote in 1962. Henceforth, Lowell changed his writing drastically, using the "quick changes of tone, atmosphere and speed" that Lowell most appreciated in Williams. Lowell dropped many of his obscure allusions; his rhymes became integral to the experience within the poem instead of superimposed on it. The stanzaic structure, too, collapsed; new improvisational forms arose. In Life Studies (1959), he initiated confessional poetry, a new mode in which he bared his most tormenting personal problems with great honesty and intensity. In essence, he not only discovered his individuality but celebrated it in its most difficult and private manifestations. He transformed himself into a contemporary, at home with the self, the fragmentary, and the form as process. Lowell's transformation, a watershed for poetry after the war, opened the way for many younger writers. In For the Union Dead (1964), Notebook 1967-69 (1970), and later books, he continued his autobiographical explorations and technical innovations, drawing upon his experience of psychoanalysis. Lowell's confessional poetry has been 4 particularly influential. Works by John Berryman, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath (the last two his students), to mention only a few, are impossible to imagine without Lowell. IDIOSYNCRATIC POETS P oets who have developed unique styles drawing on tradition but extending it into new realms with a distinctively contemporary flavor, in addition to Plath and Sexton, include John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, Richard Hugo, Philip Levine, James Dickey, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich. Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) Sylvia Plath lived an outwardly exemplary life, attending Smith College on scholarship, graduating first in her class, and winning a Fulbright grant to Cambridge University in England. There she met her charismatic husband-to-be, poet Ted Hughes, with whom she had two children and settled in a country house in England. Beneath the fairy-tale success festered unresolved psychological problems evoked in her highly readable novel The Bell Jar (1963). Some of these problems were personal, while others arose from repressive 1950s attitudes toward women. Among these were the beliefs -- shared by most women themselves -- that women should not show anger or ambitiously pursue a career, and instead find fulfillment in tending their husbands and children. Successful women like Plath lived a contradiction. Plath's storybook life crumbled when she and Hughes separated and she cared for the young children in a London apartment during a winter of extreme cold. Ill, isolated, and in despair, Plath worked against the clock to produce a series of stunning poems before she committed suicide by gassing herself in her kitchen. These poems were collected in the volume Ariel (1965), two years after her death. Robert Lowell, who wrote the introduction, noted her poetry's rapid development from the time she and Anne Sexton had attended his poetry classes in 1958. Plath's early poetry is well-crafted and traditional, but her late poems exhibit a desperate bravura and proto-feminist cry of anguish. In "The Applicant" (1966), Plath exposes the emptiness in the current role of wife (who is reduced to an inanimate "it"): A living doll, everywhere you look. It can sew, it can cook. It can talk, talk, talk. It works, there is nothing wrong with it. You have a hole, it's a poultice. You have an eye, it's an image. My boy, it's your last resort. Will you marry it, marry it, marry it. 5 Plath dares to use a nursery rhyme language, a brutal directness. She has a knack for using bold images from popular culture. Of a baby she writes, "Love set you going like a fat gold watch." In "Daddy," she imagines her father as the Dracula of cinema: "There's a stake in your fat black heart / And the villagers never liked you." Anne Sexton (1928-1974) Like Plath, Anne Sexton was a passionate woman who attempted to be wife, mother, and poet on the eve of the women's movement in the United States. Like Plath, she suffered from mental illness, and ultimately committed suicide. Sexton's confessional poetry is more autobiographical than Plath's and lacks the craftedness Plath's earlier poems exhibit. Sexton's poems appeal powerfully to the emotions, however. They thrust taboo subjects such as sex, guilt, and suicide into close focus. Often they daringly introduce female topics such as childbearing, the female body, or marriage seen from a female point of view. In poems like "Her Kind" (1960), Sexton identifies with a witch burned at the stake: I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind. The titles of her works indicate their concern with madness and death. They include To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), Live or Die (1966), and the posthumous book The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975). John Berryman (1914-1972) John Berryman's life parallels Robert Lowell's in some respects. Born in Oklahoma, he was educated in the Northeast -- at prep school and at Columbia University, and later was a fellow at Princeton University. Specializing in traditional forms and meters, he was inspired by early American history and wrote self- critical, confessional poems in his Dream Songs (1969), which feature a grotesque autobiographical character named Henry and reflections on his own teaching routine, chronic alcoholism, and ambition. Like his contemporary, Theodore Roethke, Berryman developed a supple, playful, but profound style enlivened by phrases from folklore, children's rhymes, clichés, and slang. Berryman writes, of Henry, "He stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back." Elsewhere, he wittily writes, "Oho alas alas / When will indifference come, I moan and rave." Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) The son of a greenhouse owner, Theodore Roethke evolved a special language 6 evoking the "greenhouse world" of tiny insects and unseen roots: "Worm, be with me. / This is my hard time." His love poems in Words for the Wind (1958) celebrate beauty and desire with innocent passion: One poem begins "I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, / When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them." Sometimes his poems seem like nature's shorthand or ancient riddles: "Who stunned the dirt into noise? / Ask the mole, he knows." Richard Hugo (1923-1982) Richard Hugo, a native of Seattle, Washington, studied under Theodore Roethke. He grew up poor in dismal urban environments and excelled at communicating the hopes, fears, and frustrations of working people against the backdrop of the northwestern United States. Hugo wrote nostalgic, confessional poems in bold iambics about shabby, forgotten small towns in his part of the United States; he wrote of shame, failure, and rare moments of acceptance through human relationships. He focused the reader's attention on minute, seemingly inconsequential details in order to make more significant points. "What Thou Lovest Well, Remains American" (1975) ends with a person carrying memories of his old hometown as if they were food: in case you're stranded in some odd empty town and need hungry lovers for friends, and need feel you are welcome in the street club they have formed. Philip Levine (1928- ) Philip Levine, born in Detroit, Michigan, deals directly with the economic sufferings of workers through keen observation, rage, and painful irony. Like Hugo, his background is urban and poor. He has been the voice for the lonely individual caught up in industrial America. Much of his poetry is somber and reflects an anarchic tendency amid the realization that systems of government will endure. In one poem, Levine likens himself to a fox who survives in a dangerous world of hunters through his courage and cunning. In terms of his rhythmic pattern, he has traveled a path from traditional meters in his early works to a freer, more open line in his later poetry as he expresses his lonely protest against the evils of the contemporary world. James Dickey (1923- ) James Dickey, a novelist and essayist as well as poet, is a native of Georgia. By his own reflection, he believes that the major theme in his work is the continuity that exists -- or must exist -- between the self and the world. Much of his writing is rooted in nature -- rivers and mountains, weather patterns, and the perils lurking within. 7 In the late 1960s, Dickey began working on a novel, Deliverance, about the dark side of male bonding, which, when published and later filmed, increased his renown. His recent collections of verse deal with such varied themes as the landscape of the South (Jericho: The South Beheld, 1974) and the influence of the Bible on his life (God's Images, 1977). Dickey is often concerned with effort: "Outdoing, desperately / Outdoing what is required." Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) and Adrienne Rich (1929- ) Among women poets of the idiosyncratic group, Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich have garnered the most respect in recent years. Bishop's crystalline intelligence and interest in remote landscapes and metaphors of travel appeal to readers for their exactitude and subtlety. Like her mentor Marianne Moore, Bishop, who never married, wrote highly crafted poems in a cool, descriptive style that contains hidden philosophical depths. The description of the ice-cold North Atlantic in "At the Fishhouses" could apply to Bishop's own poetry: "It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: / dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free." With Moore, Bishop may be placed in a "cool" female poetic tradition harking back to Emily Dickinson, in comparison with the "hot" poems of Plath, Sexton, and Adrienne Rich. Though Rich began by writing poems in traditional form and meter, her works, particularly those written after she became an ardent feminist in the 1960s, embody strong emotions. Her special genius is the metaphor, as in her extraordinary work "Diving Into the Wreck" (1973), evoking a woman's search for identity in terms of diving down to a wrecked ship. The wreck is like the wreckage of women s selfhood, the speaker suggests; women must find their way through male-dominated realms. Rich's poem "The Roofwalker" (1961), dedicated to poet Denise Levertov, imagines poetry writing, for women, as a dangerous craft. Like men building a roof, she feels "exposed, larger than life, / and due to break my neck." Experimental poetry T he force behind Lowell's mature achievement and much of contemporary poetry lies in the experimentation begun in the 1950s by a number of poets. They may be divided into five loose schools, identified by Donald Allen in his The New American Poetry (1960), the first anthology to present the work of poets who were previously neglected by the critical and academic communities. Inspired by jazz and abstract expressionist painting, most of the experimental writers are a generation younger than Lowell. They have tended to be bohemian, counter-culture intellectuals who disassociated themselves from universities and outspokenly criticized "bourgeois" American society. Their poetry is daring, original, and sometimes shocking. In its search for new values, it claims affinity with the archaic world of myth, legend, and traditional societies such as those of the American Indian. The forms are looser, more spontaneous, organic; they arise from the subject matter and the feeling of the poet as the poem is written, and from the natural pauses 8 of the spoken language. As Allen Ginsberg noted in "Improvised Poetics," "first thought best thought." The Black Mountain School The Black Mountain School centered around Black Mountain College an experimental liberal arts college in Asheville, North Carolina, where poets Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley taught in the early 1950s. Ed Dorn, Joel Oppenheimer, and Jonathan Williams studied there, and Paul Blackburn, Larry Eigner, and Denise Levertov published work in the school's magazines, Origin and the Black Mountain Review. The Black Mountain School is linked with Charles Olson's theory of "projective verse," which insisted on an open form based on the spontaneity of the breath pause in speech and the typewriter line in writing. Robert Creeley (1926- ), who writes with a terse, minimalist style, was one of the major Black Mountain poets. In "The Warning" (1955), Creeley imagines the violent, loving imagination: For love -- I would split open your head and put a candle in behind the eyes. Love is dead in us if we forget the virtues of an amulet and quick surprise The San Francisco School The work of the San Francisco School -- which includes most West Coast poetry in general -- owes much to Eastern philosophy and religion, as well as to Japanese and Chinese poetry. This is not surprising because the influence of the Orient has always been strong in the U.S. West. The land around San Francisco -- the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the jagged seacoast -- is lovely and majestic, and poets from that area tend to have a deep feeling for nature. Many of their poems are set in the mountains or take place on backpacking trips. The poetry looks to nature instead of literary tradition as a source of inspiration. San Francisco poets include Jack Spicer, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Duncan, Phil Whalen, Lew Welch, Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, Joanne Kyger, and Diane diPrima. Many of these poets identify with working people. Their poetry is often simple, accessible, and optimistic. At its best, as seen in the work of Gary Snyder (1930- ), San Francisco poetry evokes the delicate balance of the individual and the cosmos. In Snyder's "Above Pate 9 Valley" (1955), the poet describes working on a trail crew in the mountains and finding obsidian arrowhead flakes from vanished Indian tribes: On a hill snowed all but summer A land of fat summer deer, They came to camp. On their Own trails. I followed my own Trail here. Picked up the cold-drill, Pick, singlejack, and sack Of dynamite. Ten thousand years. Beat Poets The San Franciso School blends into the next grouping -- the "Beat" poets, who emerged in the 1950s. Most of the important Beats (beatniks) migrated to San Francisco from the East Coast, gaining their initial national recognition in California. Major Beat writers have included Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. Beat poetry is oral, repetitive, and immensely effective in readings, largely because it developed out of poetry readings in underground clubs. Some might correctly see it as a great-grandparent of the rap music that became prevalent in the 1990s. Beat poetry was the most anti-establishment form of literature in the United States, but beneath its shocking words lies a love of country. The poetry is a cry of pain and rage at what the poets see as the loss of America's innocence and the tragic waste of its human and material resources. Poems like Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956) revolutionized traditional poetry: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night... The New York School Unlike the Beat and San Franciso poets, the poets of the New York School are not interested in overtly moral questions, and, in general, they steer clear of political issues. They have the best formal educations of any group. The major figures of the New York School -- John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch -- met while they were undergraduates at Harvard University. They are quintessentially urban, cool, nonreligious, witty with a poignant, pastel sophistication. 10 Their poems are fast moving, full of urban detail, incongruity, and an almost palpable sense of suspended belief. New York City is the fine arts center of America and the birthplace of Abstract Expressionism, a major inspiration of this poetry. Most of the poets worked as art reviewers or museum curators, or collaborated with painters. Perhaps because of their feeling for abstract art, which distrusts figurative shapes and obvious meanings, their work is often difficult to comprehend, as in the later work of John Ashbery (1927- ), perhaps the most influential poet writing today. Ashbery's fluid poems record thoughts and emotions as they wash over the mind too swiftly for direct articulation. His profound, long poem, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), which won three major prizes, glides from thought to thought, often reflecting back on itself: A ship Flying unknown colors has entered the harbor. You are allowing extraneous matters To break up your day... Surrealism and Existentialism In his anthology defining the new schools, Donald Allen includes a fifth group he cannot define because it has no clear geographical underpinning. This vague group includes recent movements and experiments. Chief among these are surrealism, which expresses the unconscious through vivid dreamlike imagery, and much poetry by women and ethnic minorities that has flourished in recent years. Though superficially distinct, surrealists, feminists, and minorities appear to share a sense of alienation from white, male, mainstream literature. Although T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Ezra Pound had introduced symbolist techniques into American poetry in the 1920s, surrealism, the major force in European poetry and thought in Europe during and after World War II, did not take root in the United States. Not until the 1960s did surrealism (along with existentialism) become domesticated in America under the stress of the Vietnam conflict. During the 1960s, many American writers -- W.S. Merwin, Robert Bly, Charles Simic, Charles Wright, and Mark Strand, among others -- turned to French and especially Spanish surrealism for its pure emotion, its archetypal images, and its models of anti- rational, existential unrest. Surrealists like Merwin tend to be epigrammatic, as in lines such as: "The gods are what has failed to become of us / If you find you no longer believe enlarge the temple." 11 Bly's political surrealism harshly criticized American values and foreign policy during the Vietnam era in poems like "The Teeth Mother Naked at Last": It's because we have new packaging for smoked oysters that bomb holes appear in the rice paddies The more pervasive surrealist influence has been quieter and more contemplative, like the poem Charles Wright describes in "The New Poem" (1973): It will not attend our sorrow. It will not console our children. It will not be able to help us. Mark Strand's surrealism, like Merwin's, is often bleak; it speaks of an extreme deprivation. Now that traditions, values, and beliefs have failed him, the poet has nothing but his own cavelike soul: I have a key So I open the door and walk in. It is dark and I walk in. It is darker and I walk in. WOMEN AND MULTIETHNIC POETS W omen's literature, like minority literature and surrealism, first became aware of itself as a driving force in American life during the late 1960s. It flourished in the feminist movement initiated in that era. Literature in the United States, as in most other countries, was long based on male standards that often overlooked women's contributions. Yet there are many women poets of distinction in American writing. Not all are feminists, nor do their subjects invariably voice women's concerns. More often than not, they are humanists. Also, regional, political, and racial differences have shaped their work and given them food for thought. Distinguished women poets include Amy Clampitt, Rita Dove, Louise Gl乧k, Jorie Graham, Carolyn Kizer, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Audre Lorde, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, May Swenson, and Mona Van Duyn. The second half of the 20th century has witnessed a renaissance in multiethnic literature. Beginning with the 1960s, following the lead of African-Americans, ethnic writers in the United States began to command public attention. During the 1970s, ethnic studies programs were begun. In the 1980s, a number of academic journals, professional organizations, and literary magazines devoted to ethnic groups were 12 initiated. By the 1990s, conferences devoted to the study of specific ethnic literatures had begun, and the canon of "classics" had been expanded to include ethnic writers in anthologies and course lists. Important issues included race versus ethnicity, ethnocentrism versus polycentrism, monolingualism versus bilingualism, and coaptation versus marginalization. Deconstruction, applied to political as well as literary texts, called the status quo into constant question. Minority poetry shares the variety and occasionally the anger of women's writing. It has flowered recently in Hispanic- Americans such as Gary Soto, Alberto Rios, and Lorna Dee Cervantes; in Native Americans such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Simon Ortiz, and Louise Erdrich; in African-American writers such as Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Michael Harper, Rita Dove, Maya Angelou, and Nikki Giovanni; and in Asian-American poets such as Cathy Song, Lawson Inada, and Janice Mirikitani. Chicano/Hispanic/Latino Poetry Spanish-influenced poetry encompasses works by many diverse groups. Among these are Mexican-Americans, known since the 1950s as Chicanos, who have lived for many generations in the southwestern U.S. states won from Mexico in the Mexican-American War ending in 1848. Among Spanish Caribbean populations, Cuban- Americans and Puerto Ricans maintain vital and distinctive literary traditions. For example, the Cuban-American genius for comedy sets it apart from the elegiac lyricism of Chicano writers such as Rudolfo Anaya. Recent immigrants from Mexico, Central and South America, and Spain constantly replenish and enlarge this literary realm. Chicano, or Mexican-American, poetry has a rich oral tradition in the corrido, or ballad, form. Recent works stress traditional strengths of the Mexican community and the discrimination it has sometimes met with among whites. Sometimes the poets blend Spanish and English words in a poetic fusion, as in the poetry of Alurista and Gloria Anzaldúa. Their poetry is much influenced by oral tradition and is very powerful when read aloud. Some poets write largely in Spanish, in a tradition going back to the earliest epic written in the present-day United States -- Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá's Historia de la Nueva México, commemorating the 1598 battle between invading Spaniards and the Pueblo Indians at Acoma, New Mexico. A central text in recent Chicano poetry, Rodolfo Gonzales's (1928- ) I Am Joaquin (1972), laments the plight of Chicanos: Lost in a world of confusion Caught up in a whirl of a gringo society, Confused by the rules, Scorned by attitudes, Suppressed by manipulations, And destroyed by modern society. 13 Nonetheless, many Chicano writers find sustenance in their ancient Mexican roots. Thinking of the grandeur of ancient Mexico, Lorna Dee Cervantes (1954- ) writes that "an epic corrido" chants through her veins, while Luis Omar Salinas (1937- ) feels himself to be "an Aztec angel." Much Chicano poetry is highly personal, dealing with feelings and family or members of the community. Gary Soto (1952- ) writes out of the ancient tradition of honoring departed ancestors, but these words, written in 1981, describe the multicultural situation of all Americans today: A candle is lit for the dead Two worlds ahead of us all In recent years, Chicano poetry has achieved a new prominence, and works by Cervantes, Soto, and Alberto Rios have been widely anthologized. Native American Poetry Native Americans have written fine poetry, most likely because a tradition of shamanistic song plays a vital role in their cultural heritage. Their work excels in vivid, living evocations of the natural world, which become almost mystical at times. Indian poets also voice a tragic sense of irrevocable loss of their rich heritage. Simon Ortiz (1941- ), an Acoma Pueblo, bases many of his hard-hitting poems on history, exploring the contradictions of being an indigenous American in the United States today. His poetry challenges Anglo readers because it often reminds them of the injustice and violence at one time done to Native Americans. His poems envision racial harmony based on a deepened understanding. In "Star Quilt," Roberta Hill Whiteman (1947 - ), a member of the Oneida tribe, imagines a multicultural future like a "star quilt, sewn from dawn light," while Leslie Marmon Silko (1948 - ), who is part Laguna Pueblo, uses colloquial language and traditional stories to fashion haunting, lyrical poems. In "In Cold Storm Light" (1981), Silko achieves a haiku-like resonance: out of the thick ice sky running swiftly pounding swirling above the treetops The snow elk come, Moving, moving white song storm wind in the branches. Louise Erdrich (1954- ), like Silko also a novelist, creates powerful dramatic monologues that work like compressed dramas. They unsparingly depict families coping with alcoholism, unemployment, and poverty on the Chippewa reservation. 14 In "Family Reunion" (1984), a drunken, abusive uncle returns from years in the city. As he suffers from a heart disease, the abused niece, who is the speaker, remembers how this uncle had killed a large turtle years before by stuffing it with a firecracker. The end of the poen links Uncle Ray with the turtle he has victimized: Somehow we find our way back, Uncle Ray sings an old song to the body that pulls him toward home. The gray fins that his hands have become screw their bones in the dashboard. His face has the odd, calm patience of a child who has always let bad wounds alone, or a creature that has lived for a long time underwater. And the angels come lowering their slings and litters. African-American Poetry Contemporary black Americans have produced many poems of great beauty and considerable range of themes and tones. It is the most developed ethnic writing in America and is extremely diverse. Amiri Baraka (1934- ), the best known African-American poet, has also written plays and taken an active role in politics. Maya Angelou's (1928- ) writings have taken various literary forms, including drama and her well-known memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), in addition to her collection of verse, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (1971). Angelou was selected to write a poem for the inauguration of President Bill Clinton in 1993. Another recently honored African-American poet is Rita Dove (1952- ), who was named poet laureate of the United States in 1993. Dove, a writer of fiction and drama as well, won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Thomas and Beulah, in which she celebrates her grandparents through a series of lyric poems. She has said that she wrote the work to reveal the rich inner lives of poor people. Michael Harper (1938- ) has similarly written poems revealing the complex lives of African-Americans faced with discrimination and violence. His dense, allusive poems often deal with crowded, dramatic scenes of war or urban life. They make use of surgical images in an attempt to heal. His "Clan Meeting: Births and Nations: A Blood Song" (1971), which likens cooking to surgery ("splicing the meats with fluids"), begins "we reconstruct lives in the intensive / care unit, pieced together in a buffet...." The poem ends by splicing together images of the hospital, racism in the early American film Birth of a Nation, the Ku Klux Klan, film editing, and X-ray technology: We reload our brains as the cameras, the film overexposed in the x-ray light, locked with our double door 15 light meters: race and sex spooled and rung in a hobby; we take our bundle and go home. History, jazz, and popular culture inspire many African- Americans, from Harper (a college professor) to West Coast publisher and poet Ishmael Reed (1938- ), known for spearheading multicultural writing through the Before Columbus Foundation and a series of magazines such as Yardbird, Quilt, and Konch. Many African-American poets, such as Audre Lorde (1934-1992), have found nourishment in Afrocentrism, which sees Africa as a center of civilization since ancient times. In sensuous poems such as "The Women of Dan Dance with Swords in Their Hands to Mark the Time When They Were Warriors," she speaks as a woman warrior of ancient Dahomey, "warming whatever I touch" and "consuming" only "What is already dead." Asian-American Poetry Like poetry by Chicano and Hispanic writers, Asian-American poetry is exceedingly varied. Americans of Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino descent may have lived in the United States for seven generations, while Americans of Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese heritage are likely to be fairly recent immigrants. Each group grows out of a distinctive linguistic, historical, and cultural tradition. Recent developments in Asian-American literature have included an emphasis on the Pacific Rim studies and women's writing. Asian-Americans generally are resisting the orientalizing racial stereotype as the "exotic" and "good" minority. Aestheticians are beginning to compare Asian and Western literary traditions -- for example comparing the concepts of tao and logos. Asian-American poets have drawn on many sources, from Chinese opera to zen, and Asian literary traditions, particularly zen, have inspired numerous non-Asian poets, as can be seen in the 1991 anthology Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry. Asian-American poets span a spectrum, from the iconoclastic posture taken by Frank Chin, co- editor of Aiiieeeee! (an early anthology of Asian-American literature), to the generous use of tradition by writers such as novelist Maxine Hong Kingston (1940- ). Janice Mirikitani, a sansei (third-generation Japanese-American) evokes Japanese- American history and has edited several anthologies such as Third World Women, Time to Greez, and Ayumi: Four Generations of Japanese in America. Chinese-American Cathy Song's (1955- ) lyrical Picture Bride (1983) also dramatizes history through the lives of her family. Many Asian-American poets explore cultural diversity. In Song's "The Vegetable Air" (1988), a shabby town with cows in the plaza, a Chinese restaurant, and a Coca-Cola sign hung askew become an emblem of rootless multicultural contemporary life made bearable by art, in this case an opera on cassette: then the familiar aria, rising like the moon, 16 lifts you out of yourself, transporting you to another country where, for a moment, you travel light. NEW DIRECTIONS R ecent directions in American poetry include the "language poets" loosely associated with Temblor magazine. Among them are Bruce Andrews, Lyn Hejinian, Douglas Messerli [editor of "Language" Poetries: An Anthology (1987)], Bob Perelman, and Barret Watten, author of Total Syntax(1985), a collection of essays. They stretch language to reveal its potential for ambiguity, fragmentation, and self-assertion within ideologies, dogmas, chaos. Ironic and postmodern, they reject "metanarratives" -- conventions -- and doubt the existence of transcendent reality. Michael Palmer writes: This is Paradise, a mildewed book left too long in the house Bob Perelman's "Chronic Meanings" begins: The single fact is matter. Five words can say only. Black sky at night, reasonably. I am, the irrational residue... Viewing art and literary criticism as inherently ideological, they oppose modernism's closed forms, hierarchies, ideas of epiphany and transcendence, categories of genre and canonical texts (accepted literary works). Instead they propose open forms and multicultural texts. They appropriate images from popular culture, the media, and fashion and refashion them. Like performance poetry, language poems often resist interpretation and invite participation. Performance-oriented poetry (associated with chance operations such as those of composer John Cage), jazz improvisation, mixed media work, and European surrealism have influenced many U.S. poets. Well-known figures include Laurie Anderson, author of the international hit United States (1984), which uses film, video, acoustics and music, choreography, and space-age technology. Sound poetry, emphasizing the voice and instruments, is practiced by poets David Antin (who extemporizes his performances) and New Yorkers George Quasha (publisher of Station Hill Press), Armand Schwerner, and Jackson MacLow. MacLow has also performed visual or concrete poetry, which makes a visual statement using placement and typography. Ethnic performance poetry entered the mainstream with rap music, while across the United States "poetry slams" -- open poetry reading contests that are held in alternative art galleries and literary bookstores -- have become inexpensive, high-spirited participatory entertainments. 17 At the opposite end of the theoretical spectrum are the self-styled "New Formalists," who champion a return to form, rhyme, and meter. All groups are responding to the same problem - - a perceived middle-brow complacency with the status quo, a careful and overly polished sound, often the product of poetry workshops, and an overemphasis on the personal lyric as opposed to the public gesture. The formal school is associated with Story Line Press; Dana Gioia (a businessman-poet); Philip Dacey, and David Jauss, poets and editors of Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms (1986); Brad Leithauser; and Gjertrud Schnakenburg. Robert Richman's The Direction of Poetry: Rhymed and Metered Verse Written in English Since 1977 is a recent anthology. Though these poets have been accused of retreating to 19th-century themes, they often draw on contemporary stances and images, along with musical language and traditional, closed forms. 二战后小说,现实主义与实验主义 American Prose Since 1945: Realism and Experimentation N arrative since World War II resists generalization: It is extremely various andmultifaceted. It has been vitalized by international currents such as European existentialism and Latin American magical realism, while the electronic era has brought the global village. The spoken word on television has given new life to oral tradition. Oral genr, media, and popular culture have increasingly influenced narrative. In the past, elite culture influenced popular culture through its status and example; the reverse seems true in the United States today. Serious novelists like Thomas Pynchon, Joyce Carol Oates, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Alice Walker, and E.L. Doctorow have borrowed from and commented on comics, movies, fashions, songs, and oral history. To say this is not to trivialize recent literature: Writers in the United States are asking serious questions, many of them of a metaphysical nature. Writers have become highly innovative and self-aware, or "reflexive." Often they find traditional modes ineffective and seek vitality in more widely popular material. To put it another way: American writers, in recent decades, have developed a post-modern sensibility. Modernist restructurings of point of view no longer suffice for them: Rather, the context of vision must be made new. THE REALIST LEGACY AND THE LATE 1940s A s in the first half of the 20th century, fiction in the second half reflects the character of each decade. The late 1940s saw the aftermath of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. 18 World War II offered prime material: Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead, 1948) and James Jones (From Here to Eternity, 1951) were two writers who used it best. Both of them employed realism verging on grim naturalism; both took pains not to glorify combat. The same was true for Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions (1948). Herman Wouk, in The Caine Mutiny (1951), also showed that human foibles were as evident in wartime as in civilian life. Later, Joseph Heller cast World War II in satirical and , 1961), arguing that war is laced with insanity. Thomas absurdist terms (Catch-22 Pynchon presented an involuted, brilliant case parodying and displacing different versions of reality (Gravity's Rainbow, 1973); and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., became one of the shining lights of the counterculture during the early 1970s following publication of Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children's Crusade (1969), his antiwar novel about the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces during World War II (which he witnessed on the ground as a prisoner of war). The 1940s saw the flourishing of a new contingent of writers, including poet-novelist-essayist Robert Penn Warren, dramatists Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, and short story writers Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty. All but Miller were from the South. All explored the fate of the individual within the family or community and focused on the balance between personal growth and responsibility to the group. Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) Robert Penn Warren, one of the southern Fugitives, enjoyed a fruitful career running through most of the 20th century. He showed a lifelong concern with democratic values as they appeared within historical context. The most enduring of his novels is All the King's Men (1946), focusing on the darker implications of the American dream -- as revealed in this thinly veiled account of the career of a flamboyant and sinister southern senator, Huey Long. Arthur Miller (1915- ) New York-born dramatist-novelist-essayist-biographer Arthur Miller reached his personal pinnacle in 1949 with Death of a Salesman, a study of man's search for merit and worth in his life and the realization that failure invariably looms. Set within the Loman family, it hinges on the uneven relationships of father and sons, husband and wife. It is a mirror of the literary attitudes of the 1940s -- with its rich combination of realism tinged with naturalism; carefully drawn, rounded characters; and insistence on the value of the individual, despite failure and error. Death of a Salesman is a moving paean to the common man -- to whom, as Willy Loman's widow eulogizes, "attention must be paid." Poignant and somber, it is also a story of dreams. As one character notes ironically, "a salesman has got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory." Death of a Salesman, a landmark work, still is only one of a number of dramas Miller wrote over several decades, including All My Sons (1947) and The Crucible (1953). Both are political -- one contemporary, and the other set in colonial times. The first deals with a manufacturer who knowingly allows defective parts to be shipped to 19 airplane firms during World War II, resulting in the death of his son and others. The Crucible depicts the Salem (Massachusetts) witchcraft trials of the 17th century in which Puritan settlers were wrongfully executed as supposed witches. Its message, though -- that "witch hunts" directed at innocent people are anathema in a democracy -- was relevant to the era in which the play was staged, the early 1950s, when an anti- Communist crusade led by U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy and others ruined innocent people s lives. Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) Tennessee Williams, a native of Mississippi, was one of the more complex individuals on the American literary scene of the mid- 20th century. His work focused on disturbed emotions and unresolved sexuality within families -- most of them southern. He was known for incantatory repetitions, a poetic southern diction, weird Gothic settings, and Freudian exploration of sexual desire. One of the first American writers to live openly as a homosexual, Williams explained that the sexuality of his tormented characters expressed their loneliness. His characters live and suffer intensely. Williams wrote more than 20 full-length dramas, many of themautobiographical. He reached his peak relatively early in his career -- in the 1940s -- with The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). None of the works that followed over the next two decades and more reached the level of success and richness of those two pieces. Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) Katherine Anne Porter's long life and career encompassed several eras. Her first success, the story "Flowering Judas" (1929), was set in Mexico during the revolution. The beautifully crafted short stories that gained her renown subtly unveil personal lives. "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," for example, conveys large emotions with precision. Often she reveals women's inner experiences and their dependence on men. Porter's nuances owe much to the stories of the New Zealand- born story writer Katherine Mansfield. Porter's story collections include Flowering Judas (1930), Noon Wine (1937), Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), The Leaning Tower (1944), and Collected Stories (1965). In the early 1960s, she produced a long, allegorical novel with a timeless theme -- the responsibility of humans for each other. Titled Ship of Fools (1962), it was set in the late 1930s aboard a passenger liner carrying members of the German upper class and German refugees alike from the Nazi nation. Not a prolific writer, Porter nonetheless has influenced generations of authors, among them her southern colleagues Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. Eudora Welty (1909- ) Born in Mississippi to a well-to-do family of transplanted northerners, Eudora Welty was guided by Warren and Porter. Porter, in fact, wrote an introduction to Welty's first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green (1941). Welty modeled her 20 nuanced work on Porter, but the younger woman is more interested in the comic and grotesque. Like the late Flannery O'Connor, she often takes subnormal, eccentric, or exceptional characters for subjects. Despite violence in her work, Welty's wit is essentially humane and affirmative, as, for example, in her frequently anthologized story "Why I Work at the P.O.," in which a stubborn and independent daughter moves out of her house to live in a tiny post office. Her collections of stories include The Wide Net (1943), The Golden Apples (1949), The Bride of the Innisfallen (1955), and Moon Lake (1980). Welty has also written novels such as Delta Wedding (1946), which is focused on a plantation family in modern times, and The Optimist's Daughter (1972). THE AFFLUENT BUT ALIENATED 1950s T he 1950s saw the delayed impact of modernization and technology in everyday life, left over from the 1920s -- 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. Business, especially in the corporate world, seemed to offer the good life (usually in the suburbs), with its real and symbolic marks of success -- house, car, television, and home appliances. Yet loneliness at the top was a dominant theme; the faceless corporate man became a cultural stereotype in Sloan Wilson's best-selling novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955). Generalized American alienation came under the scrutiny of sociologist David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd (1950). Other popular, more or less scientific studies followed, ranging from Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders (1957) and The Status Seekers (1959) to William Whyte's The Organization Man (1956) and C. Wright Mills's more intellectual formulations -- White Collar (1951) and The Power Elite (1956). Economist and academician John Kenneth Galbraith contributed The Affluent Society (1958). Most of these works supported the 1950s' assumption that all Americans shared a common lifestyle. The studies spoke in general terms, criticizing citizens for losing frontier individualism and becoming too conformist (for example, Riesman and Mills), or advising people to become members of the "New Class" that technology and leisure time created (as seen in Galbraith's works). 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 work portrays 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 (1956). Some writers went further by following those who dropped out, as did J.D. Salinger in The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man (1952), and Jack Kerouac in On the Road (1957). And in the waning days of the decade, Philip Roth arrived with a series of short stories reflecting his own alienation from his Jewish heritage (Goodbye, Columbus, 1959). His psychological ruminations have provided fodder for fiction, and later autobiography, into the 1990s. 21 The fiction of American Jewish writers Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Isaac Bashevis Singer -- among others prominent in the 1950s and the years following -- are also worthy, compelling additions to the compendium of American literature. The output of these three authors is most noted for its humor, ethical concern, and portraits of Jewish communities in the Old and New Worlds. John O'Hara (1905-1970) Trained as a journalist, John O'Hara was a prolific writer of plays, stories, and novels. He was a master of careful, telling detail and is best remembered for several realistic novels, mostly written in the 1950s, about outwardly successful people whose inner faults and dissatisfaction leave them vulnerable. These titles include Appointment in Samarra (1934), Ten North Frederick (1955), and From the Terrace (1958). James Baldwin (1924-1987) James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison mirror the African-American experience of the 1950s. Their characters suffer from a lack of identity, rather than from over-ambition. Baldwin, the oldest of nine children born to a Harlem, New York, family, was the foster son of a minister. As a youth, Baldwin occasionally preached in the church. This experience helped shape the compelling, oral quality of Baldwin's prose, most clearly seen in his excellent essays, such as "Letter from a Region Of My Mind," from the collection The Fire Next Time (1963). In this, he argued movingly for an end to separation between the races. Baldwin's first novel, the autobiographical Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953), is probably his best known. It is the story of a 14-year-old youth who seeks self-knowledge and religious faith as he wrestles with issues of Christian conversion in a storefront church. Other important Baldwin works include Another Country (1962), a novel about racial issues and homosexuality, and Nobody Knows My Name (1961), a collection of passionate personal essays about racism, the role of the artist, and literature. Ralph Waldo Ellison (1914-1994) Ralph Ellison was a midwesterner, born in Oklahoma, who studied at Tuskegee Institute in the southern United States. He had one of the strangest careers in American letters -- consisting of one highly acclaimed book, and nothing more. The novel is Invisible Man (1952), the 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. When he wins a scholarship to a black college, he is humiliated by whites; when he gets to the college, he witnesses the black president spurning black American concerns. Life is corrupt outside college, too. For example, even religion is no consolation: A preacher turns out to be a criminal. The novel indicts society for failing to provide its citizens -- black and white -- with viable ideals and institutions for realizing them. It embodies a powerful racial theme because the "invisible man" is invisible not in himself but because others, blinded by prejudice, cannot see him for who he is. 22 Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) Flannery O'Connor, a native of Georgia, lived a life cut short by lupus, a deadly blood disease. Still, she refused sentimentality, as evident in her extremely humorous yet bleak and uncompromising stories. Unlike Porter, Welty, and Hurston, O'Connor most often held her characters at arm's length, revealing their inadequacy and silliness. The uneducated southern characters who people her novels often create violence through superstition or religion, as we see in her novel Wise Blood (1952), about a religious fanatic who establishes his own church. Sometimes violence arises out of prejudice, as in "The Displaced Person," about an immigrant killed by ignorant country people who are threatened by his hard work and strange ways. Often, cruel events simply happen to the characters, as in "Good Country People," the story of a girl seduced by a man who steals her artificial leg. The black humor of O'Connor links her with Nathanael West and Joseph Heller. Her works include short story collections (A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965); the novel The Violent Bear It Away (1960); and a volume of letters, The Habit of Being (1979). Her Complete Stories came out in 1971. Saul Bellow (1915- ) Born in Canada and raised in Chicago, Saul Bellow is of Russian-Jewish background. In college, he studied anthropology and sociology, which greatly influence his writing even today. He has expressed a profound debt to Theodore Dreiser for his openness to a wide range of experience and his emotional engagement with it. Highly respected, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. Bellow's early, somewhat grim existentialist novels include Dangling Man (1944), a Kafkaesque study of a man waiting to be drafted into the Army, and The Victim (1947), about relations between Jews and Gentiles. In the 1950s, his vision became more comic: He used a series of energetic and adventurous first-person narrators in The Adventures of Augie March (1953) -- the study of a Huck Finn-like urban entrepreneur who becomes a black marketeer in Europe -- and in Henderson the Rain King (1959), a brilliant and exuberant serio-comic novel about a middle-aged millionaire whose unsatisfied ambitions drive him to Africa. Bellow's later works include Herzog (1964), about the troubled life of a neurotic English professor who specializes in the idea of the Romantic self; Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970); Humboldt's Gift (1975); and the autobiographical The Dean's December (1982). Bellow's Seize the Day (1956) is a brilliant novella often used as part of the high school or college curriculum because of its excellence and brevity. It centers on a failed businessman, Tommy Wilhelm, who tries to hide his feelings of inadequacy by presenting a good front. The novella begins ironically: "When it came to concealing his troubles, Tommy Wilhelm was not less capable than the next fellow. So at least he thought...." This expenditure of energy ironically helps lead to his downfall. Wilhelm 23 is so consumed by feelings of inadequacy that he becomes totally inadequate -- a failure with women, jobs, machines, and the commodities market, where he loses all his money. He is an example of the schlemiel of Jewish folklore -- one to whom unlucky things inevitably happen. Seize the Day sums up the fear of failure that plagues many Americans. Bernard Malamud (1914-1986) Bernard Malamud was born in New York City to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. In his second novel, The Assistant (1957), Malamud found his characteristic themes -- man's struggle to survive against all odds, and the ethical underpinnings of recent Jewish immigrants. Malamud's first published work was The Natural (1952), a combination of realism and fantasy set in the mythic world of professional baseball. Other novels include A New Life (1961), The Fixer (1966), Pictures of Fidelman (1969), and The Tenants (1971). He also was a prolific master of short fiction. Through his stories, in collections such as The Magic Barrel (1958), Idiots First (1963), and Rembrandt's Hat (1973), he conveyed -- more than any other American-born writer -- a sense of the Jewish present and past, the real and the surreal, fact and legend. Malamud's monumental work -- for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award -- is The Fixer. Set in Russia around the turn of the 20th century, it is a thinly veiled glimpse at an actual case of blood libel -- the infamous 1913 trial of Mendel Beiliss, a dark, anti-Semitic blotch on modern history. As in many of his writings, Malamud underscores the suffering of his hero, Yakov Bok, and the struggle against all odds to endure. Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) Nobel Prize-winning novelist and short story master Isaac Bashevis Singer -- a native of Poland who immigrated to the United States in 1935 -- was the son of the prominent head of a rabbinical court in Warsaw. Writing in Yiddish (the amalgam of German and Hebrew that was the common language of European Jewry over the past several centuries) all his life, he dealt in mythic and realistic terms with two specific groups of Jews -- the denizens of the Old World shtetls (small villages) and the ocean- tossed 20th-century emigrés of the pre-World War II and postwar eras. Singer's writings served as bookends for the Holocaust -- the destruction of much of European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. On the one hand, he described -- in novels such as The Manor (1967) and The Estate (1969), set in 19th-century Russia, and The Family Moskat (1950), focused on a Polish-Jewish family between the world wars -- the world of European Jewry that no longer exists. Complementing that were his writings set after the war, such as Enemies, A Love Story (1972), whose protagonists were survivors of the Holocaust seeking to create new lives for themselves. 24 Vladimir Nabokov (1889-1977) Like Singer, Vladimir Nabokov was an Eastern European immigrant. Born into an affluent family in Czarist Russia, he came to the United States in 1940 and gained U.S. citizenship five years later. From 1948 to 1959 he taught literature at Cornell University in upstate New York; in 1960 he moved permanently to Switzerland. He is best known for his novels, which include the autobiographical Pnin (1957), about an ineffectual Russian emigre professor, and Lolita (U.S. edition 1958), about an educated, middle-aged European who becomes infatuated with an ignorant 12-year-old American girl. Nabokov's pastiche novel, Pale Fire (1962), another successful venture, focuses on a long poem by an imaginary dead poet and the commentaries on it by a critic whose writings overwhelm the poem and take on unexpected lives of their own. Nabokov is an important writer for his stylistic subtlety, deft satire, and ingenious innovations in form, which have inspired such novelists as John Barth. Nabokov was aware of his role as a mediator between the Russian and American literary worlds; he wrote a book on Gogol and translated Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. His daring, somewhat expressionist subjects, like the odd love in Lolita, helped introduce expressionist 20th-century European currents into the essentially realist American fictional tradition. His tone, partly satirical and partly nostalgic, also suggested a new serio-comic emotional register made use of by writers such as Pynchon, who combines the opposing notes of wit and fear. John Cheever (1912-1982) John Cheever often has been called a "novelist of manners." He is known for his elegant, suggestive short stories, which scrutinize the New York business world through its effects on the businessmen, their wives, children, and friends. A wry, melancholy and never quite quenched but seemingly hopeless desire for passion or metaphysical certainty lurks in the shadows of Cheever's finely drawn, Chekhovian tales, collected in The Way Some People Live (1943), The Housebreaker of Shady Hill (1958), Some People, Places and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel (1961), The Brigadier and the Golf Widow (1964), and The World of Apples (1973). His titles reveal his characteristic nonchalance, playfulness, and irreverence and hint The Wapshot Scandal at his subject matter. Cheever also published several novels -- (1964), Bullet Park (1969), and Falconer (1977) -- the last of which was largely autobiographical. John Updike (1932- ) John Updike, like Cheever, is also regarded as a writer of manners with his suburban settings, domestic themes, reflections of ennui and wistfulness, and, particularly, his fictional locales on the eastern seaboard, in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Updike is best known for his four Rabbit books, depictions of the life of a man -- Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom -- through the ebbs and flows of his existence across four decades of American social and political history. Rabbit, Run (1960) is a mirror of the 1950s, with Angstrom an aimless, disaffected young husband. Rabbit Redux (1971) -- 25 spotlighting the counterculture of the 1960s -- finds Angstrom still without a clear goal or purpose or viable escape route from mundaneness. In Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Harry has become prosperous through an inheritance against the landscape of the wealthy self-centeredness of the 1970s, as the Vietnam era wanes. The final volume, Rabbit at Rest (1990), glimpses Angstrom's reconciliation with life, and inadvertent death, against the backdrop of the 1980s. Among Updike's other novels are The Centaur (1963), Couples (1968), and Bech: A Book (1970). He possesses the most brilliant style of any writer today, and his short stories offer scintillating examples of its range and inventiveness. Collections include The Same Door (1959), The Music School (1966), Museums and Women (1972), Too Far To Go (1979), and Problems (1979). He has also written several volumes of poetry and essays. J.D. Salinger (1919- ) A harbinger of things to come in the 1960s, J.D. Salinger has portrayed attempts to drop out of society. Born in New York City, he achieved huge literary success with the publication of his novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), centered 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. When asked what he would like to be, Caulfield answers "the catcher in the rye," misquoting a poem by Robert Burns. In his vision, he is a modern version of a white knight, the sole preserver of innocence. He imagines a big field of rye so tall that a group of young children cannot see where they are running as they play their games. He is the only big person there. "I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff." The fall over the cliff is equated with the loss of childhood and (especially sexual) innocence -- a persistent theme of the era. Other works by this reclusive, spare writer include Nine Stories (1953), Franny and Zooey (1961), and Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters (1963), a collection of stories from The New Yorker. Since the appearance of one story in 1965, Salinger -- who lives in New Hampshire -- has been absent from the American literary scene. Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) The son of an impoverished French-Canadian family, Jack Kerouac also questioned the values of middle-class life. He met members of the "Beat" literary underground as an undergraduate at Columbia University in New York City. His fiction was much influenced by the loosely autobiographical work of southern novelist Thomas Wolfe. Kerouac's best-known novel, On the Road (1957), describes "beatniks" wandering through America seeking an idealistic dream of communal life and beauty. The Dharma Bums (1958) also focuses on peripatetic counterculture intellectuals and their infatuation with Zen Buddhism. Kerouac also penned a book of poetry, Mexico City 26 Blues (1959), and volumes about his life with such beatniks as experimental novelist William Burroughs and poet Allen Ginsberg. THE TURBULENT BUT CREATIVE 1960s T he alienation and stress underlying the 1950s found outward expression in the 1960s in the United States in the Civil Rights Movement, feminism, antiwar protests, minority activism, and the arrival of a counterculture whose effects are still being worked through American society. Notable political and social works of the era include the speeches of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the early writings of feminist leader Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique, 1963), and Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night (1968), about a 1967 antiwar march. The 1960s was marked by a blurring of the line between fiction and fact, novels and reportage, that has carried through the present day. Novelist Truman Capote -- who had dazzled readers as an enfant terrible of the late 1940s and 1950s in such works as Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) -- stunned audiences with In Cold Blood (1966), a riveting analysis of a brutal mass murder in the American heartland that read like a work of detective fiction. At the same time, the "New Journalism" emerged -- volumes of nonfiction that combined journalism with techniques of fiction, or that frequently played with the facts, reshaping them to add to the drama and immediacy of the story being reported. Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) celebrated the antics of novelist Ken Kesey's counterculture wanderlust, and Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970) ridiculed many aspects of left-wing activism. Wolfe later wrote an exuberant and insightful history of the initial phase of the U.S. space program, The Right Stuff (1979), and a novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), a panoramic portrayal of American society in the 1980s. As the 1960s evolved, literature flowed with the turbulence of the era. An ironic, comic vision also came into view, reflected in the fabulism of several writers. Examples include Ken Kesey's darkly comic One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), a novel about life in a mental hospital in which the wardens are more disturbed than the inmates, and Richard Brautigan's whimsical, fantastic Trout Fishing in America (1967). The comical and fantastic yielded a new mode, half comic and half metaphysical, in Thomas Pynchon's paranoid, brilliant V (1963) and The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy (1966), and the grotesque short stories of Donald Barthelme, whose first collection, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, was published in 1964. In a different direction, in drama, Edward Albee produced a series of nontraditional psychological works -- Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), A Delicate Balance (1966), and Seascape (1975) -- that reflected the author s own soul-searching and his paradoxical approach. 27 At the same time, the decade saw the belated arrival of a literary talent in his forties -- Walker Percy -- a physician by training and an exemplar of southern gentility. In a series of novels, Percy used his native region as a tapestry on which to play out intriguing psychological dramas. The Moviegoer (1962) and The Last Gentleman (1966) were among his highly-praised books. Thomas Pynchon (1937- ) Thomas Pynchon, a mysterious, publicity-shunning author, was born in New York and graduated from Cornell University in 1958, where he may have come under the influence of Vladimir Nabokov. Certainly, his innovative fantasies use themes of translating clues, games, and codes that could derive from Nabokov. Pynchon's flexible tone can modulate paranoia into poetry. All of Pynchon's fiction is similarly structured. A vast plot is unknown to at least one of the main characters, whose task it then becomes to render order out of chaos and decipher the world. This project, exactly the job of the traditional artist, devolves also upon the reader, who must follow along and watch for clues and meanings. This paranoid vision is extended across continents and time itself, for Pynchon employs the metaphor of entropy, the gradual running down of the universe. The masterful use of popular culture -- particularly science fiction and detective fiction -- is evident in his works. Pynchon's work V is loosely structured around Benny Profane -- a failure who engages in pointless wanderings and various weird enterprises -- and his opposite, the educated Herbert Stencil, who seeks a mysterious female spy, V (alternatively Venus, Virgin, Void). The Crying of Lot 49, a short work, deals with a secret system associated with the U.S. Postal Service. Gravity's Rainbow (1973) takes place during World War II in London, when rockets were falling on the city, and concerns a farcical yet symbolic search for Nazis and other disguised figures. The violence, comedy, and flair for innovation in his work inexorably link Pynchon with the 1960s. John Barth (1930- ) John Barth, a native of Maryland, is more interested in how a story is told than in the story itself, but where Pynchon deludes the reader by false trails and possible clues out of detective novels, Barth entices his audience into a carnival fun- house full of distorting mirrors that exaggerate some features while minimizing others. Realism is the enemy for Barth, the author of Lost in the Funhouse (1968), 14 stories that constantly refer to the processes of writing and reading. Barth's intent is to alert the reader to the artificial nature of reading and writing, and to prevent him or her from being drawn into the story as if it were real. To explode the illusion of realism, Barth uses a panoply of reflexive devices to remind his audience that they are reading. Barth's earlier works, like Saul Bellow's, were questioning and existential, and took up the 1950s themes of escape and wandering. In The Floating Opera (1956), a man considers suicide. The End of the Road (1958) concerns a complex love affair. Works 28 of the 1960s became more comical and less realistic. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) parodies an 18th-century picaresque style, while Giles Goat-Boy (1966) is a parody of the world seen as a university. Chimera (1972) retells tales from Greek mythology, and Letters (1979) uses Barth as a character, as Norman Mailer does in The Armies of the Night. In Sabbatical: A Romance (1982), Barth uses the popular fiction motif of the spy; this is the story of a woman college professor and her husband, a retired secret agent turned novelist. Norman Mailer (1923- ) Norman Mailer is generally considered the representative author of recent decades, able to change his style and subject many times. In his appetite for experience, vigorous style, and dramatic public persona, he follows in the tradition of Ernest Hemingway. His ideas are bold and innovative. He is the reverse of a writer like Barth, for whom the subject is not as important as the way it is handled. Unlike the invisible Pynchon, Mailer constantly courts and demands attention. A novelist, essayist, sometime politician, literary activist, and occasional actor, he is always on the scene. From such "New Journalism" exercises as Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), an analysis of the 1968 U.S. presidential conventions, and his compelling study about the execution of a condemned murderer, The Executioner's Song (1979), he has turned to writing such ambitious, heavyweight novels as Ancient Evenings (1983), set in the Egypt of antiquity, and Harlot's Ghost (1992), revolving around the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. THE 1970s AND 1980s: NEW DIRECTIONS B y the mid-1970s, an era of consolidation began. The Vietnam conflict was over, followed soon afterward by U.S. recognition of the People's Republic of China and America's Bicentennial celebration. Soon the 1980s -- the "Me Decade" -- ensued, in which individuals tended to focus more on more personal concerns than on larger social issues. In literature, old currents remained, but the force behind pure experimentation dwindled. New novelists like John Gardner, John Irving (The World According to Garp, 1978), Paul Theroux (The Mosquito Coast, 1982), William Kennedy (Ironweed, 1983), and Alice Walker (The Color Purple, 1982) surfaced with stylistically brilliant novels to portray moving human dramas. Concern with setting, character, and themes associated with realism returned. Realism, abandoned by experimental writers in the 1960s, also crept back, often mingled with bold original elements a daring structure like a novel within a novel, as in John Gardner's October Light (1976) or black American dialect as in Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Minority literature began to flourish. Drama shifted from realism to more cinematic, kinetic techniques. At the same time, however, the "Me Decade" was reflected in such brash new talents as Jay McInerny (Bright Lights, Big City, 1984), Bret Easton Ellis (Less Than Zero, 1985), and Tama Janowitz (Slaves of New York, 1986). 29 John Gardner (1933-1982) John Gardner, from a farming background in New York State, was the most important spokesperson for ethical values in literature until his death in a motorcycle accident. He was a professor of English specializing in the medieval period; his most popular novel, Grendel (1971), retells the Old English epic Beowulf from the monster's existentialist point of view. The short, vivid, and often comic novel is a subtle argument against the existentialism that fills its protagonist with self- destructive despair and cynicism. A prolific and popular novelist, Gardner used a realistic approach but employed innovative techniques -- such as flashbacks, stories within stories, retellings of myths, and contrasting stories -- to bring out the truth of a human situation. His strengths are characterization (particularly his sympathetic portraits of ordinary people) and colorful style. Major works include The Resurrection (1966), The Sunlight Dialogues (1972), Nickel Mountain (1973), October Light (1976), and Mickelson's Ghosts (1982). Gardner's fictional patterns suggest the curative powers of fellowship, duty, and family obligations, and in this sense Gardner was a profoundly traditional and conservative author. He endeavored to demonstrate that certain values and acts lead to fulfilling lives. His book On Moral Fiction (1978) calls for novels that embody ethical values rather than dazzle with empty technical innovation. The book created a furor, largely because Gardner bluntly criticized important living authors for failing to reflect ethical concerns. Toni Morrison (1931- ) African-American novelist Toni Morrison was born in Ohio to a spiritually oriented family. She attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., and has worked as a senior editor in a major Washington publishing house and as a distinguished professor at various universities. Morrison's richly woven fiction has gained her international acclaim. In compelling, large-spirited novels, she treats the complex identities of black people in a universal manner. In her early work The Bluest Eye (1970), a strong-willed young black girl tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, who survives an abusive father. Pecola believes that her dark eyes have magically become blue, and that they will make her lovable. Morrison has said that she was creating her own sense of identity as a writer through this novel: "I was Pecola, Claudia, everybody." Sula (1973) describes the strong friendship of two women. Morrison paints African-American women as unique, fully individual characters rather than as stereotypes. Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977) has won several awards. It follows a black man, Milkman Dead, and his complex relations with his family and community. In Tar Baby (1981) Morrison deals with black and white relations. Beloved (1987) is the wrenching story of a woman who murders her children rather than allow them to 30 live as slaves. It employs the dreamlike techniques of magical realism in depicting a mysterious figure, Beloved, who returns to live with the mother who has slit her throat. Morrison has suggested that though her novels are consummate works of art, they contain political meanings: "I am not interested in indulging myself in some private exercise of my imagination...yes, the work must be political." In 1993, Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Alice Walker (1944- ) Alice Walker, an African-American and the child of a sharecropper family in rural Georgia, graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, where one of her teachers was the politically committed female poet Muriel Rukeyser. Other influences on her work have been Flannery O'Connor and Zora Neale Hurston. A "womanist" writer, as Walker calls herself, she has long been associated with feminism, presenting black existence from the female perspective. Like Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Cade Bambara, and other accomplished contemporary black novelists, Walker uses heightened, lyrical realism to center on the dreams and failures of accessible, credible people. Her work underscores the quest for dignity in human life. A fine stylist, particularly in her epistolary dialect novel The Color Purple, her work seeks to educate. In this she resembles the black American novelist Ishmael Reed, whose satires expose social problems and racial issues. Walker's The Color Purple is the story of the love between two poor black sisters that survives a separation over years, interwoven with the story of how, during that same period, the shy, ugly, and uneducated sister discovers her inner strength through the support of a female friend. The theme of the support women give each other recalls Maya Angelou's autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), which celebrates the mother-daughter connection, and the work of white feminists such as Adrienne Rich. The Color Purple portrays men as basically unaware of the needs and reality of women. The close of the 1980s and the beginnings of the 1990s saw minority writing become a major fixture on the American literary landscape. This is true in drama as well as in prose. August Wilson who is continuing to write and see staged his cycle of plays about the 20th-century black experience (including Pulitzer Prize-winners Fences, 1986, and The Piano Lesson, 1989) -- stands alongside novelists Alice Walker, John Edgar Wideman, and Toni Morrison. Asian-Americans are also taking their place on the scene. Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior, 1976) carved out a place for her fellow Asian-Americans, among them Amy Tan, whose luminous novels of Chinese life transposed to post-World War II America (The Joy Luck Club, 1989, and The Kitchen God's Wife, 1991) have captivated readers. David Henry Hwang, a California- born son of 31 Chinese immigrants, has made his mark in drama, with plays such as F.O.B. (1981) and M. Butterfly (1986). A relatively new group on the literary horizon are the Hispanic-American writers, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Oscar Hijuelos, the Cuban-born author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989); short story writer Sandra Cisneros (Women Hollering Creek and Other Stories, 1991); and Rudolfo Anaya, author of Bless Me, Ultima (1972), which sold 300,000 copies, mostly in the western United States. THE NEW REGIONALISM T here is nothing new about a regional tradition in American literature. It is as old as the Native American legends, as evocative as the works of James Fenimore Cooper and Bret Harte, as resonant as the novels of William Faulkner and the plays of Tennessee Williams. For a time, though, during the post-World War II era, tradition seemed to disappear into the shadows -- unless one considers, perhaps correctly, that urban fiction is a form of regionalism. Nonetheless, for the past decade or so, regionalism has been making a triumphant return in American literature, enabling readers to get a sense of place as well as a sense of time and humanity. And it is as prevalent in popular fiction, such as detective stories, as it is in classic literature -- novels, short stories, and drama. There are several possible reasons for this occurrence. For one thing, all of the arts in America have been decentralized over the past generation. Theater, music, and dance are as likely to thrive in cities in the U.S. South, Southwest, and Northwest as in major cities such as New York and Chicago. Movie companies shoot films across the United States, on myriad locations. So it is with literature. Smaller publishing houses that concentrate on fiction thrive outside of New York City's "publishers row." Writers workshops and conferences are more in vogue than ever, as are literature courses on college campuses across the country. It is no wonder that budding talents can surface anywhere. All one needs is a pencil, paper, and a vision. The most refreshing aspects of the new regionalism are its expanse and its diversity. It canvasses America, from East to West. A transcontinental literary tour begins in the Northeast, in Albany, New York, the focus of interest of its native son, one-time among them Ironweed journalist William Kennedy. Kennedy, whose Albany novels -- (1983) and Very Old Bones (1992) -- capture elegaically and often raucously the lives of the denizens of the streets and saloons of the New York State capital city. Prolific novelist, story writer, poet, and essayist Joyce Carol Oates also hails from the northeastern United States. In her haunting works, obsessed characters' attempts to achieve fulfillment within their grotesque environments lead them into destruction. Some of her finest works are stories in collections such as The Wheel of Love (1970) and Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? (1974). Stephen King, the 32 best-selling master of horror fiction, generally sets his suspenseful page-turners in Maine -- within the same region. Down the coast, in the environs of Baltimore, Maryland, Anne Tyler presents, in spare, quiet language, extraordinary lives and striking characters. Novels such as Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), Breathing Lessons (1988), and Saint Maybe (1991) have helped boost her reputation in literary circles and among mass audiences. A short distance from Baltimore is America's capital, Washington, which has its own literary tradition, if a shrouded one, in a city whose chief preoccupation is politics. Among the more lucid portrayers of life in and on the fringe of government and power is novelist Ward Just, a former international correspondent who assumed a the world of journalists, second career writing about the world he knows best -- politicians, diplomats, and soldiers. Just's Nicholson at Large (1975), a study of a Washington newsman during and after the John F. Kennedy presidency of the early 1960s; In the City of Fear (1982), a glimpse of Washington during the Vietnam era; and Jack Gance (1989), a sobering look at a Chicago politician and his rise to the U.S. Senate, are some of his more impressive works. Susan Richards Shreve's Children of Power (1979) assesses the private lives of a group of sons and daughters of government officials, while popular novelist Tom Clancy, a Maryland resident, has used the Washington politico-military landscape as the launching pad for his series of epic suspense tales. Moving southward, Reynolds Price and Jill McCorkle come into view. Price, Tyler's mentor, was once described during the 1970s by a critic as being in the obsolescent post of "southern-writer- in-residence." He first came to attention with his novel A Long and Happy Life (1962), dealing with the people and the land of eastern North Carolina, and specifically with a young woman named Rosacoke Mustian. He continued writing tales of this heroine over the ensuing years, then shifted his locus to other themes before focusing again on a woman in his acclaimed work, Kate Vaiden (1986), his only novel written in the first person. Price's latest novel, Blue Calhoun (1992),examines the impact of a passionate but doomed love affair over the decades of family life. McCorkle, born in 1958 and thus representing a new generation, has dev oted her novels and short stories -- set in the small towns of North Carolina -- to exploring the mystiques of teenagers (The Cheer Leader, 1984), the links between generations (Tending to Virginia, 1987), and the particular sensibilities of contemporary suthern women (Crash Diet, 1992). In the same region is Pat Conroy, whose bracing autobiographical novels about his South Carolina upbringing and his abusive, tyrannical father (The Great Santini, 1976; The Prince of Tides, 1986) are infused with a sense of the natural beauty of the South Carolina low country. Shelby Foote, a Mississippi native who has lived in Memphis, 33 Tennessee, for years, is an old-time chronicler of the South whose histories and fictions led to his role on camera in a successful public television series on the U.S. Civil War. America's heartland reveals a wealth of writing talent. Among them are Jane Smiley, who teaches writing at the University of Iowa. Smiley won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for A Thousand Acres (1991), which transplanted Shakespeare's King Lear to a midwestern U.S. farm and chronicled the bitter family feud unleashed when an aging farmer decides to turn over his land to his three daughters. Texas chronicler Larry McMurtry covers his native state in varying time periods and sensibilities, from the vanished 19th- century West (Lonesome Dove, 1985; Anything he Last Picture For Billy, 1988) to the vanishing small towns of the postwar era (T Show, 1966). Cormac McCarthy, whose explorations of the American Southwest desert limn his novels Blood Meridian (1985), All The Pretty Horses (1992), and The Crossing (1994), is a reclusive, immensely imaginative writer who is just beginning to get his due on the U.S. literary scene. Generally considered the rightful heir to the southern Gothic tradition, McCarthy is as intrigued by the wildness of the terrain as he is by human wildness and unpredictability. Set in the striking landscape of her native New Mexico, Native American novelist Leslie Marmon Silko's critically esteemed novel Ceremony (1977) has gained a large general audience. Like N. Scott Momaday's poetic The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), it is a "chant novel" structured on Native American healing rituals. Silko's novel The Almanac of the Dead (1991) offers a panorama of the Southwest, from ancient tribal migrations to present-day drug runners and corrupt real estate developers reaping profits by misusing the land. Best-selling detective writer Tony Hillerman, who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, covers the same southwestern U.S. territory, featuring two modest, hardworking Navajo policemen as his protagonists. To the north, in Montana, poet James Welch details the struggles of Native Americans to wrest meaning from harsh reservation life beset by poverty and alcoholism in his slender, nearly flawless novels Winter in the Blood (1974), The Death of Jim Loney (1979), Fools Crow (1986), and The Indian Lawyer (1990). Another Montanan is Thomas McGuane, whose unfailingly masculine-focused novels -- including Ninety-Two in the Shade (1973) and Keep the Change (1989) -- evince a dream of roots amidst rootlessness. Louise Erdrich, who is part Chippewa Indian, has set a powerful series of novels in neighboring North Dakota. In works such as Love Medicine (1984), she captures the tangled lives of dysfunctional reservation families with a poignant blend of stoicism and humor. Two writers have exemplified the Far West for some time. One of these is the late Wallace Stegner, who was born in the Midwest in 1909 and died in an automobile 34 accident in 1993. Stegner spent the bulk of his life in various locales in the West and had a regional outlook even before it became the vogue. His first major work, The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), chronicles a family caught up in the American dream in its western guise as the frontier disappeared. It ranges across America, from Minnesota to Washington State, and concerns, as Stegner put it, "that place of impossible loveliness that pulled the whole nation westward." His 1971 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Angle of Repose, is also imbued with the spirit of place in its portrait of a woman illustrator and writer of the Old West. Indeed, Stegner's strength as a writer was in characterization, as well as in evoking the ruggedness of western life. Joan Didion -- who is as much journalist as novelist and whose mind's eye has traveled far afield in recent years -- put contemporary California on the map in her 1968 volume of nonfiction pieces, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, and in her incisive, shocking novel about the aimlessness of the Hollywood scene, Play It As It Lays (1970). The Pacific Northwest -- one of the more fertile artistic regions across the cultural landscape at the outset of the 1990s -- produced, among others, Raymond Carver, a marvelous writer of short fiction. Carver died tragically in 1988 at the age of 50, not long after coming into his own on the literary scene. In mirroring the working-class mindset of the inhabitants of his region in collections such as What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1974) and Where I'm Calling From (1986), he placed them against the backdrop of their scenic surroundings, still largely unspoiled. The success of the regional theater movement -- nonprofit institutional companies that have become havens of contemporary culture in city after city across America -- since the early 1960s most notably has nurtured young dramatists who have become some of the more luminous imagists on the theatrical scene. One wonders what American theater and literature would be like today without the coruscating, fragmented society and tempestuous relationships of Sam Shepard (Buried Child, 1979; A Lie of the Mind, 1985); the amoral characters and shell-shocking staccato dialogue of Chicago's David Mamet (American Buffalo, 1976; Glengarry Glen Ross, 1982); the intrusion of traditional values into midwestern lives and concerns reflected by Lanford Wilson (5th of July, 1978; Talley's Folly, 1979); and the Southern eccentricities of Beth Henley (Crimes of the Heart, 1979). American literature has traversed an extended, winding path from pre-colonial days to contemporary times. Society, history, technology all have had telling impact on it. Ultimately, though, there is a constant -- humanity, with all its radiance and its malevolence, its tradition and its promise. 35 36