American Literature after World War II

American literature becomes increasingly more regional post 1920s – the center of American literature shifts from the East to the Midwest and the South

World War II had enormous impact on American writing, as did many of the other events of mid and late twentieth-century America (explosion of the Atomic bomb in 1945, the emergence of television as a cultural force, the invention and growing dominance of computers, the McCarthyism of the 50s, the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s, Korean and Vietnam wars, the feminist movement of the 60s and 70s)

The literature that emerges from the experience of World War II is distinctly different from that of WWI – it shows a nation that was united and confident in its powers to endure and to lead – though it isn’t without its sense of the bleak side of war and war’s effects esp with respect to nuclear weapons

Returning veterans and the women who had occupied jobs formerly held by men were among those who found post war America less hospitable that war time America

A deep conservatism ran through American culture post WWII and the result was evident in the conformist culture of 50s

For black Americans, WWII proved a modest, but significant turning point. From 1947 to 1957 the march towards full civil rights began – the US Army was integrated in 1948; the Supreme Court struck down segregation in public school in 1954 in the landmark case Brown v Board of Education; Martin Luther King launched the bus boycott in Montgomery Alabama in 1957. The movement accelerated in the 1960s, with landmark Civil Rights legislation passed in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965

The 50s did see the rise of a counterculture in literature, notably the Beat Generation. This group of writers – Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti – made San Francisco’s City Lights Book Store a new centre of American literature

The 50s saw an amazing growth in American literature of all sorts: Eudora Welty from Mississippi; Saul Bellow from Chicago; Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, and Bernard Malamud from Brooklyn; James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison from Harlem; Flannery O’Connor from Georgia; and many others

One of the chief characteristics of these emerging novelists was their engagement with the world around them. Regardless of where their work is set, their protagonists are fiercely involved with their world, frequently at odds with it, and always in search for their own identities and at odds with a world that tries to dictate that identity to them. It is literature of dissent, sometimes of despair, and frequently it is experimental in technique.

The literature of the 60s echoes the decade’s political upheavals – it is a decade that has been characterized as “the unraveling of America.” It is a decade marked by Civil Rights marches and the arrests and assassination of Black American leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X; it is a decade in which two progressive Democrats - President John F Kennedy and his brother Bobby Kennedy - were assassinated, and in which a Southern racist governor - George Wallace- survived an assassination attempt. It is also the decade in which the Vietnam War drove a wedge through American culture which still haunts the country. Feminism emerges in the 60s as a powerful emancipatory movement for women – its leaders used the written word as their weapon with Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (1963) leading things off.

The literature of the 60s sees the rise of nonfiction with 50s novelists like Norman Mailer and James Baldwin combining fiction and non fiction. Others also followed this move with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood being one of the most famous examples of the blurring of the lines between fiction and non fiction. Writers attempted to push the boundaries of what literature could be – William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959) challenged tacit and explicit censorship of language, John Barth blurs the line between myth and reality, Donald Bartheleme’s advice “only trust the fragments” has come to epitomize the formal experiments of post 1960s writers