American literature

Table of Contents

Introduction

The 17th century

The 18th century

The 19th century

The 20th century

American literature, the body of written works produced in the English language in the United States.

Like other national literatures, American literature was shaped by the history of the country that produced it. For almost a century and a half, America was merely a group of colonies scattered along the eastern seaboard of the North American continent�colonies from which a few hardy souls tentatively ventured westward. After a successful rebellion against the motherland, America became the United States, a nation. By the end of the 19th century this nation extended southward to the Gulf of Mexico, northward to the 49th parallel, and westward to the Pacific. By the end of the 19th century, too, it had taken its place among the powers of the world�its fortunes so interrelated with those of other nations that inevitably it became involved in two world wars and, following these conflicts, with the problems of Europe and East Asia. Meanwhile, the rise of science and industry, as well as changes in ways of thinking and feeling, wrought many modifications in people�s lives. All these factors in the development of the United States molded the literature of the country.

This article traces the history of American poetry, drama, fiction, and social and literary criticism from the early 17th century through the turn of the 21st century. For a description of the oral and written literatures of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, see Native American literature. Though the contributions of African Americans to American literature are discussed in this article, see African American literature for in-depth treatment. For information about literary traditions related to, and at times overlapping with, American literature in English, see English literature and Canadian literature: Canadian literature in English. The 17th century

This history of American literature begins with the arrival of English-speaking Europeans in what would become the United States. At first American literature was naturally a colonial literature, by authors who were Englishmen and who thought and wrote as such. John Smith, a soldier of fortune, is credited with initiating American literature. His chief books included A True Relation of�Virginia�(1608) and The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1624). Although these volumes often glorified their author, they were avowedly written to explain colonizing opportunities to Englishmen. In time, each colony was similarly described: Daniel Denton�s Brief Description of New York (1670), William Penn�s Brief Account of the Province of Pennsylvania (1682), and Thomas Ashe�s Carolina (1682) were only a few of many works praising America as a land of economic promise.

Smith, John: VirginiaMap of Virginia from John Smith's The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles, 1624.Image courtesy of Documenting the American South, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries

Such writers acknowledged British allegiance, but others stressed the differences of opinion that spurred the colonists to leave their homeland. More important, they argued questions of government involving the relationship between church and state. The attitude that most authors attacked was jauntily set forth by Nathaniel Ward of Massachusetts Bay in The Simple Cobler of Aggawam in America (1647). Ward amusingly defended the status quo and railed at colonists who sponsored newfangled notions. A variety of counterarguments to such a conservative view were published. John Winthrop�s Journal (written 1630�49) told sympathetically of the attempt of Massachusetts Bay Colony to form a theocracy�a state with God at its head and with its laws based upon the Bible. Later defenders of the theocratic ideal were Increase Mather and his son Cotton. William Bradford�s History of Plymouth Plantation (through 1646) showed how his pilgrim Separatists broke completely with Anglicanism. Even more radical than Bradford was Roger Williams, who, in a series of controversial pamphlets, advocated not only the separation of church and state but also the vesting of power in the people and the tolerance of different religious beliefs.

The utilitarian writings of the 17th century included biographies, treatises, accounts of voyages, and sermons. There were few achievements in drama or fiction, since there was a widespread prejudice against these forms. Bad but popular poetry appeared in the Bay Psalm Book of 1640 and in Michael Wigglesworth�s summary in doggerel verse of Calvinistic belief, The Day of Doom (1662). There was some poetry, at least, of a higher order. Anne Bradstreet of Massachusetts wrote some lyrics published in The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650), which movingly conveyed her feelings concerning religion and her family. Ranked still higher by modern critics is a poet whose works were not discovered and published until 1939: Edward Taylor, an English-born minister and physician who lived in Boston and Westfield, Massachusetts. Less touched by gloom than the typical Puritan, Taylor wrote lyrics that showed his delight in Christian belief and experience.

The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in AmericaTitle page of Anne Bradstreet's The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, 1650.From The Works of Anne Bradstreet in Prose and Verse, edited by John Harvard Ellis, 1867

All 17th-century American writings were in the manner of British writings of the same period. John Smith wrote in the tradition of geographic literature, Bradford echoed the cadences of the King James Bible, while the Mathers and Roger Williams wrote bejeweled prose typical of the day. Anne Bradstreet�s poetic style derived from a long line of British poets, including Spenser and Sidney, while Taylor was in the tradition of such Metaphysical poets as George Herbert and John Donne. Both the content and form of the literature of this first century in America were thus markedly English. The 18th century

In America in the early years of the 18th century, some writers, such as Cotton Mather, carried on the older traditions. His huge history and biography of Puritan New England, Magnalia Christi Americana, in 1702, and his vigorous Manuductio ad Ministerium, or introduction to the ministry, in 1726, were defenses of ancient Puritan convictions. Jonathan Edwards, initiator of the Great Awakening, a religious revival that stirred the eastern seacoast for many years, eloquently defended his burning belief in Calvinistic doctrine�of the concept that man, born totally depraved, could attain virtue and salvation only through God�s grace�in his powerful sermons and most notably in the philosophical treatise Freedom of Will (1754). He supported his claims by relating them to a complex metaphysical system and by reasoning brilliantly in clear and often beautiful prose.

But Mather and Edwards were defending a doomed cause. Liberal New England ministers such as John Wise and Jonathan Mayhew moved toward a less rigid religion. Samuel Sewall heralded other changes in his amusing Diary, covering the years 1673�1729. Though sincerely religious, he showed in daily records how commercial life in New England replaced rigid Puritanism with more worldly attitudes. The Journal of Mme Sara Kemble Knight comically detailed a journey that lady took to New York in 1704. She wrote vividly of what she saw and commented upon it from the standpoint of an orthodox believer, but a quality of levity in her witty writings showed that she was much less fervent than the Pilgrim founders had been. In the South, William Byrd of Virginia, an aristocratic plantation owner, contrasted sharply with gloomier predecessors. His record of a surveying trip in 1728, The History of the Dividing Line, and his account of a visit to his frontier properties in 1733, A Journey to the Land of Eden, were his chief works. Years in England, on the Continent, and among the gentry of the South had created gaiety and grace of expression, and, although a devout Anglican, Byrd was as playful as the Restoration wits whose works he clearly admired.

The wrench of the American Revolution emphasized differences that had been growing between American and British political concepts. As the colonists moved to the belief that rebellion was inevitable, fought the bitter war, and worked to found the new nation�s government, they were influenced by a number of very effective political writers, such as Samuel Adams and John Dickinson, both of whom favoured the colonists, and loyalist Joseph Galloway. But two figures loomed above these�Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine.

Franklin, born in 1706, had started to publish his writings in his brother�s newspaper, the New England Courant, as early as 1722. This newspaper championed the cause of the �Leather Apron� man and the farmer and appealed by using easily understood language and practical arguments. The idea that common sense was a good guide was clear in both the popular Poor Richard�s almanac, which Franklin edited between 1732 and 1757 and filled with prudent and witty aphorisms purportedly written by uneducated but experienced Richard Saunders, and in the author�s Autobiography, written between 1771 and 1788, a record of his rise from humble circumstances that offered worldly wise suggestions for future success.

Title page for Poor Richard's almanac for 1739, written, printed, and sold by Benjamin Franklin.Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Franklin�s self-attained culture, deep and wide, gave substance and skill to varied articles, pamphlets, and reports that he wrote concerning the dispute with Great Britain, many of them extremely effective in stating and shaping the colonists� cause.

Thomas Paine went from his native England to Philadelphia and became a magazine editor and then, about 14 months later, the most effective propagandist for the colonial cause. His pamphlet Common Sense (January 1776) did much to influence the colonists to declare their independence. The American Crisis papers (December 1776�December 1783) spurred Americans to fight on through the blackest years of the war. Based upon Paine�s simple deistic beliefs, they showed the conflict as a stirring melodrama with the angelic colonists against the forces of evil. Such white and black picturings were highly effective propaganda. Another reason for Paine�s success was his poetic fervour, which found expression in impassioned words and phrases long to be remembered and quoted.

Title page from Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense, 1776.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.The new nation

In the postwar period some of these eloquent men were no longer able to win a hearing. Thomas Paine and Samuel Adams lacked the constructive ideas that appealed to those interested in forming a new government. Others fared better�for example, Franklin, whose tolerance and sense showed in addresses to the constitutional convention. A different group of authors, however, became leaders in the new period�Thomas Jefferson and the talented writers of the Federalist papers, a series of 85 essays published in 1787 and 1788 urging the virtues of the proposed new constitution. They were written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. More distinguished for insight into problems of government and cool logic than for eloquence, these works became a classic statement of American governmental, and more generally of republican, theory. At the time they were highly effective in influencing legislators who voted on the new constitution. Hamilton, who wrote perhaps 51 of the Federalist papers, became a leader of the Federalist Party and, as first secretary of the treasury (1789�95), wrote messages that were influential in increasing the power of national government at the expense of the state governments.

Thomas Jefferson was an influential political writer during and after the war. The merits of his great summary, the Declaration of Independence, consisted, as Madison pointed out, �in a lucid communication of human rights�in a style and tone appropriate to the great occasion, and to the spirit of the American people.� After the war he formulated the exact tenets of his faith in various papers but most richly in his letters and inaugural addresses, in which he urged individual freedom and local autonomy�a theory of decentralization differing from Hamilton�s belief in strong federal government. Though he held that all men are created equal, Jefferson thought that �a natural aristocracy� of �virtues and talents� should hold high governmental positions. Notable works of the periodPoets and poetry

Poetry became a weapon during the American Revolution, with both loyalists and Continentals urging their forces on, stating their arguments, and celebrating their heroes in verse and songs such as �Yankee Doodle,� �Nathan Hale,� and �The Epilogue,� mostly set to popular British melodies and in manner resembling other British poems of the period.

The most memorable American poet of the period was Philip Freneau, whose first well-known poems, Revolutionary War satires, served as effective propaganda; later he turned to various aspects of the American scene. Although he wrote much in the stilted manner of the Neoclassicists, such poems as �The Indian Burying Ground,� �The Wild Honey Suckle,� �To a Caty-did,� and �On a Honey Bee� were romantic lyrics of real grace and feeling that were forerunners of a literary movement destined to be important in the 19th century. Drama and the novel

In the years toward the close of the 18th century, both dramas and novels of some historical importance were produced. Though theatrical groups had long been active in America, the first American comedy presented professionally was Royall Tyler�s Contrast (1787). This drama was full of echoes of Goldsmith and Sheridan, but it contained a Yankee character (the predecessor of many such in years to follow) who brought something native to the stage.

William Hill Brown wrote the first American novel, The Power of Sympathy (1789), which showed authors how to overcome ancient prejudices against this form by following the sentimental novel form invented by Samuel Richardson. A flood of sentimental novels followed to the end of the 19th century. Hugh Henry Brackenridge succeeded Cervantes�s Don Quixote and Henry Fielding with some popular success in Modern Chivalry (1792�1815), an amusing satire on democracy and an interesting portrayal of frontier life. Gothic thrillers were to some extent nationalized in Charles Brockden Brown�s Wieland (1798), Arthur Mervyn (1799�1800), and Edgar Huntly (1799). The 19th century Early 19th-century literature

After the American Revolution, and increasingly after the War of 1812, American writers were exhorted to produce a literature that was truly native. As if in response, four authors of very respectable stature appeared. William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe initiated a great half century of literary development.

Bryant, a New Englander by birth, attracted attention in his 23rd year when the first version of his poem �Thanatopsis� (1817) appeared. This, as well as some later poems, was written under the influence of English 18th-century poets. Still later, however, under the influence of Wordsworth and other Romantics, he wrote nature lyrics that vividly represented the New England scene. Turning to journalism, he had a long career as a fighting liberal editor of The Evening Post. He himself was overshadowed, in renown at least, by a native-born New Yorker, Washington Irving.

Irving, the youngest member of a prosperous merchant family, joined with ebullient young men of the town in producing the Salmagundi papers (1807�08), which satirized the foibles of Manhattan�s citizenry. This was followed by A History of New York (1809), by �Diedrich Knickerbocker,� a burlesque history that mocked pedantic scholarship and sniped at the old Dutch families. Irving�s models in these works were obviously Neoclassical English satirists, from whom he had learned to write in a polished, bright style. Later, having met Sir Walter Scott and having become acquainted with imaginative German literature, he introduced a new Romantic note in The Sketch Book (1819�20), Bracebridge Hall (1822), and other works. He was the first American writer to win the ungrudging (if somewhat surprised) respect of British critics.

Irving, WashingtonWashington Irving, 19th-century print.Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

James Fenimore Cooper won even wider fame. Following the pattern of Sir Walter Scott�s �Waverley� novels, he did his best work in the �Leatherstocking� tales (1823�41), a five-volume series celebrating the career of a great frontiersman named Natty Bumppo. His skill in weaving history into inventive plots and in characterizing his compatriots brought him acclaim not only in America and England but on the continent of Europe as well.

Edgar Allan Poe, reared in the South, lived and worked as an author and editor in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Richmond, and New York City. His work was shaped largely by analytical skill that showed clearly in his role as an editor: time after time he gauged the taste of readers so accurately that circulation figures of magazines under his direction soared impressively. It showed itself in his critical essays, wherein he lucidly explained and logically applied his criteria. His gothic tales of terror were written in accordance with his findings when he studied the most popular magazines of the day. His masterpieces of terror��The Fall of the House of Usher� (1839), �The Masque of the Red Death� (1842), �The Cask of Amontillado� (1846), and others�were written according to a carefully worked out psychological method. So were his detective stories, such as �The Murders in the Rue Morgue� (1841), which historians credited as the first of the genre. As a poet, he achieved fame with �The Raven� (1845). His work, especially his critical writings and carefully crafted poems, had perhaps a greater influence in France, where they were translated by Charles Baudelaire, than in his own country.

Two Southern novelists were also outstanding in the earlier part of the century: John Pendleton Kennedy and William Gilmore Simms. In Swallow Barn (1832), Kennedy wrote delightfully of life on the plantations. Simms�s forte was the writing of historical novels like those of Scott and Cooper, which treated the history of the frontier and his native South Carolina. The Yemassee (1835) and Revolutionary romances show him at his best. American Renaissance

The authors who began to come to prominence in the 1830s and were active until about the end of the Civil War�the humorists, the classic New Englanders, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and others�did their work in a new spirit, and their achievements were of a new sort. In part this was because they were in some way influenced by the broadening democratic concepts that in 1829 triumphed in Andrew Jackson�s inauguration as president. In part it was because, in this Romantic period of emphasis upon native scenes and characters in many literatures, they put much of America into their books.

Particularly full of vivid touches were the writings of two groups of American humorists whose works appeared between 1830 and 1867. One group created several down-east Yankee characters who used commonsense arguments to comment upon the political and social scene. The most important of this group were Seba Smith, James Russell Lowell, and Benjamin P. Shillaber. These authors caught the talk and character of New England at that time as no one else had done. In the old Southwest, meanwhile, such writers as Davy Crockett, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson J. Hooper, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, Joseph G. Baldwin, and George Washington Harris drew lively pictures of the ebullient frontier and showed the interest in the common man that was a part of Jacksonian democracy. New England Brahmins

Although Lowell for a time was one of these writers of rather earthy humour, his lifelong ties were to a group of New England writers associated with Harvard and Cambridge, Massachusetts�the Brahmins, as they came to be called�at an opposite extreme. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Lowell were all aristocrats, all steeped in foreign culture, all professors at Harvard. Longfellow adapted European methods of storytelling and versifying to narrative poems dealing with American history, and a few of his less didactic lyrics perfectly married technique and subject matter. Holmes, in occasional poems and his �Breakfast Table� series (1858�91), brought touches of urbanity and jocosity to a perhaps oversober polite literature. Lowell, in poems descriptive of the out-of-doors in America, put much of his homeland into verse. His odes�particularly the �Harvard Commemoration Ode� (1865)�gave fine expression to noble sentiments.

Holmes, Oliver WendellOliver Wendell Holmes.Prints and Photographs Division/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. LC-USZ61-1761)The Transcendentalists

Concord, Massachusetts, a village not far from Cambridge, was the home of leaders of another important New England group. The way for this group had been prepared by the rise of a theological system, Unitarianism, which early in the 19th century had replaced Calvinism as the faith of a large share of the New Englanders. Ralph Waldo Emerson, most famous of the Concord philosophers, started as a Unitarian minister but found even that liberal doctrine too confining for his broad beliefs. He became a Transcendentalist who, like other ancient and modern Platonists, trusted to insights transcending logic and experience for revelations of the deepest truths. His scheme of things ranged from the lowest objects and most practical chores to soaring flights of imagination and inspired beliefs. His Essays (1841�44), Representative Men (1850), and English Traits (1856) were thoughtful and poetic explanations of his beliefs; and his rough-hewn lyrics, packed with thought and feeling, were as close to 17th-century Metaphysical poems as any produced in his own time.

An associate of Emerson with a salty personality of his own and an individual way of thinking, Henry David Thoreau, a sometime surveyor, labourer, and naturalist, was closer to the earthy and the practical than even Emerson was. He also was more of a humorist�a dry Yankee commentator with a flair for paradoxical phrases and sentences. Finally, he was a learned man, widely read in Western classics and books of the Orient. These qualities gave distinction to A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and to Walden (1854). The latter was a record of his experiences and ponderings during the time he lived in a hut by Walden Pond�a defense of his belief that modern man should simplify his demands if need be to �suck out all the marrow of life.� In his essay �Civil Disobedience� (1849; originally titled �Resistance to Civil Government�), Thoreau expounded his anarchistic views of government, insisting that if an injustice of government is �of such a nature that it requires injustice to another [you should] break the law [and] let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.�

Thoreau, Henry David: Walden Pond hutHenry David Thoreau's hut, illustration from the title page of an edition of his Walden, which was first published in 1854.From Walden; or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau, 1854

Associated with these two major figures were such minor Transcendentalists as Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, Orestes Brownson, Margaret Fuller, and Jones Very. Fuller edited The Dial, the chief Transcendental magazine, and was important in the feminist movement. New England reformers and historians

A worldwide movement for change that exploded in the revolutions of 1848 naturally attracted numerous Americans. Reform was in the air, particularly in New England. At times even Brahmins and Transcendentalists took part. William Lloyd Garrison, ascetic and fanatical, was a moving spirit in the fight against slavery; his weekly newspaper, The Liberator (1831�65), despite a small circulation, was its most influential organ. A contributor to the newspaper�probably the greatest writer associated with the movement�was John Greenleaf Whittier. His simple but emotional poems on behalf of abolition were collected in such volumes as Poems Written During the Progress of the Abolition Question�(1837), Voices of Freedom (1846), and Songs of Labor, and Other Poems (1850). The outstanding novelist of the movement�so far as effect was concerned�was Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her Uncle Tom�s Cabin (1852) combined the elements of contemporary humour and sentimental fiction in such a powerful manner that it, according to some, helped to precipitate the Civil War.

Stowe, Harriet BeecherHarriet Beecher Stowe, c. 1880.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (neg. no. LC-USZ62-11212)

One other group of writers�and a great novelist�contributed to the literature of New England in this period of its greatest glory. The group consisted of several historians who combined scholarly methods learned abroad with vivid and dramatic narration. These included George Bancroft, author of History of the United States (completed in 12 volumes in 1882), and John Lothrop Motley, who traced the history of the Dutch Republic and the United Netherlands in nine fascinating volumes (1856�74). The leading member of the group was Francis Parkman, who, in a series of books (1851�92), wrote as a historian of the fierce contests between France and England that marked the advance of the American frontier and vividly recorded his own Western travels in The Oregon Trail (1849). Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman

History also figured in tales and romances of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the leading New England fictionist of the period. Many tales and longer works�for example, his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter (1850)�were set against a background of colonial America with emphasis upon its distance in time from 19th-century New England. Others, such as The House of the Seven Gables (1851), dealt with the past as well as the present. Still others, such as The Marble Faun (1860), were set in distant countries. Remote though they were at times from what Hawthorne called �the light of common day,� they showed deep psychological insight and probed into complex ethical problems.

Another great American fiction writer, for a time a neighbour and associate of Hawthorne, was Herman Melville. After relatively little schooling, Melville went to sea; a whaling ship, as he put it, was his �Yale College and his Harvard.� His first books were fiction in the guise of factual writing based upon experiences as a sailor�Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847); so were such later works as Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850). Between 1846 and 1851, however, Melville�s reading in philosophy and literary classics, as well as in Hawthorne�s allegorical and symbolic writings, gave him new interests and aims. The first sign of this interest was Mardi (1849), an uneven and disjointed transitional book that used allegory after the model of Rabelais to comment upon ideas afloat in the period�about nations, politics, institutions, literature, and religion. The new techniques came to fruition in Moby Dick; or, The Whale (1851), a richly symbolic work, complex but brilliantly integrated. Only in short stories, Benito Cereno�a masterpiece of its genre�and others, in the psychological novel Pierre (1852), and in the novelette Billy Budd (written 1890?) was Melville later to show sporadic flashes of the genius that created Moby Dick.

An ardent singer of the praise of Manhattan, Walt Whitman saw less of the dark side of life than Melville did. He was a believer in Jacksonian democracy, in the splendour of the common man. Inspired by the Romantic concept of a poet as prophet and also by the Transcendental philosophy of Emerson, Whitman in 1855 published the first edition of Leaves of Grass. As years passed, nine revised and expanded editions of this work were published. This autobiography in verse was intended to show the ideas, beliefs, emotions, and experiences of the common man in a great period of American individualism. Whitman had a hard time winning a following because he was frank and unconventional in his Transcendental thinking, because he used free verse rather than rhymed or regularly metred verse, and because his poems were not conventionally organized. Nevertheless, he steadily gained the approval of critics and in time came to be recognized as one of the great poets of America.

Whitman, WaltWalt Whitman, c. 1870.Feinberg-Whitman Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (reproduction no. LC-USZ62-82781)From the Civil War to 1914

Like the Revolution and the election of Andrew Jackson, the Civil War was a turning point in U.S. history and a beginning of new ways of living. Industry became increasingly important, factories rose and cities grew, and agrarian preeminence declined. The frontier, which before had always been an important factor in the economic scheme, moved steadily westward and, toward the end of the 19th century, vanished. The rise of modern America was accompanied, naturally, by important mutations in literature. Literary comedians

Although they continued to employ some devices of the older American humorists, a group of comic writers that rose to prominence was different in important ways from the older group. Charles Farrar Browne, David Ross Locke, Charles Henry Smith, Henry Wheeler Shaw, and Edgar Wilson Nye wrote, respectively, as Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. (for Vesuvius) Nasby, Bill Arp, Josh Billings, and Bill Nye. Appealing to a national audience, these authors forsook the sectional characterizations of earlier humorists and assumed the roles of less individualized literary comedians. The nature of the humour thus shifted from character portrayal to verbal devices such as poor grammar, bad spelling, and slang, incongruously combined with Latinate words and learned allusions. Most that they wrote wore badly, but thousands of Americans in their time and some in later times found these authors vastly amusing.

(From left) Josh Billings, Mark Twain, and Petroleum V. Nasby, 1868.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (neg. no. LC-USZ62-57976)Fiction and local colourists

The first group of fiction writers to become popular�the local colourists�took over to some extent the task of portraying sectional groups that had been abandoned by writers of the new humour. Bret Harte, first of these writers to achieve wide success, admitted an indebtedness to prewar sectional humorists, as did some others; and all showed resemblances to the earlier group. Within a brief period, books by pioneers in the movement appeared: Harriet Beecher Stowe�s Oldtown Folks (1869) and Sam Lawson�s Oldtown Fireside Stories (1871), delightful vignettes of New England; Harte�s Luck of Roaring Camp, and Other Sketches (1870), humorous and sentimental tales of California mining camp life; and Edward Eggleston�s Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871), a novel of the early days of the settlement of Indiana. Down into the 20th century, short stories (and a relatively small number of novels) in patterns set by these three continued to appear. In time, practically every corner of the country had been portrayed in local-colour fiction. Additional writings were the depictions of Louisiana Creoles by George W. Cable, of Virginia blacks by Thomas Nelson Page, of Georgia blacks by Joel Chandler Harris, of Tennessee mountaineers by Mary Noailles Murfree (Charles Egbert Craddock), of tight-lipped folk of New England by Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, of people of New York City by Henry Cuyler Bunner and William Sydney Porter (�O. Henry�). The avowed aim of some of these writers was to portray realistically the lives of various sections and thus to promote understanding in a united nation. The stories as a rule were only partially realistic, however, since the authors tended nostalgically to revisit the past instead of portraying their own time, to winnow out less glamorous aspects of life, or to develop their stories with sentiment or humour. Touched by romance though they were, these fictional works were transitional to realism, for they did portray common folk sympathetically; they did concern themselves with dialect and mores; and some at least avoided older sentimental or romantic formulas.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) was allied with literary comedians and local colourists. As a printer�s apprentice, he knew and emulated the prewar sectional humorists. He rose to prominence in days when Artemus Ward, Bret Harte, and their followers were idols of the public. His first books, The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It (1872), like several of later periods, were travel books in which affiliations with postwar professional humorists were clearest. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), his best works, which re-created the life of the Mississippi valley in the past, were closest to the work of older humorists and local colourists. Despite his flaws, he was one of America�s greatest writers. He was a very funny man. He had more skill than his teachers in selecting evocative details, and he had a genius for characterization.

Twain, Mark: The Adventures of Huckleberry FinnTitle page from the 1885 edition of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.Project Gutenberg (Text 76)

Born and raised in Ohio, William Dean Howells was an effective advocate of a new realistic mode of fiction writing. At the start, Howells conceived of realism as a truthful portrayal of ordinary facets of life�with some limitations; he preferred comedy to tragedy, and he tended to be reticent to the point of prudishness. The formula was displayed at its best in Their Wedding Journey (1872), A Modern Instance (1882), and The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). Howells preferred novels he wrote after he encountered Tolstoy�s writings and was persuaded by them, as he said, to �set art forever below humanity.� In such later novels as Annie Kilburn (1888) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), he chose characters not only because they were commonplace but also because the stories he told about them were commentaries upon society, government, and economics. The naturalists

Other American writers toward the close of the 19th century moved toward naturalism, a more advanced stage of realism. Hamlin Garland�s writings exemplified some aspects of this development when he made short stories and novels vehicles for philosophical and social preachments and was franker than Howells in stressing the harsher details of the farmer�s struggles and in treating the subject of sex. Main-Travelled Roads (1891) and Rose of Dutcher�s Coolly (1895) displayed Garland�s particular talents. These and a critical manifesto for the new fiction, Crumbling Idols (1894), were influential contributions to a developing movement.

Other American authors of the same period or slightly later were avowed followers of French naturalists led by �mile Zola. Theodore Dreiser, for instance, treated subjects that had seemed too daring to earlier realists and, like other Naturalists, illustrated his own beliefs by his depictions of characters and unfolding of plots. Holding that men�s deeds were �chemical compulsions,� he showed characters unable to direct their actions. Holding also that �the race was to the swift and the battle to the strong,� he showed characters defeated by stronger and more ruthless opponents. His major books included Sister Carrie (1900), Jennie Gerhardt (1911), The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and�much later�An American Tragedy (1925).

Dreiser did not bother with�or did not care for�niceties of style or elaborate symbolism such as were found in French naturalistic works; but Stephen Crane and Frank Norris were attentive to such matters. In short novels, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895), and in some of his short stories, Crane was an impressionist who made his details and his setting forth of them embody a conception of man overwhelmed by circumstance and environment. Frank Norris, who admired Crane�s �aptitude for making phrases�sparks that cast a momentary gleam upon whole phases of life,� himself tried to make phrases, scenes, and whole narratives cast such gleams in McTeague (1899), The Octopus (1901), and The Pit (1903). Both Crane and Norris died young, their full abilities undeveloped but their experiments foreshadowing later achievements in the 20th-century novel. Henry James

In the books of Henry James, born in New York but later an expatriate in England, fiction took a different pathway. Like realists and naturalists of his time, he thought that fiction should reproduce reality. He conceived of reality, however, as twice translated�first, through the author�s peculiar experiencing of it and, second, through his unique depicting of it. Deep insight and thorough experience were no more important, therefore, than the complicated and delicate task of the artist. The Art of Fiction" class="md-crosslink">The Art of Fiction (1884), essays on novelists, and brilliant prefaces to his collected works showed him struggling thoroughly and consciously with the problems of his craft. Together, they formed an important body of discussion of fictional artistry.

James, HenryHenry James, glass plate negative, c. 1910.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-ggbain-04703)

An excellent short-story writer, James nevertheless was chiefly important for novels in which his doctrines found concrete embodiment. Outstanding were The American (1877), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Spoils of Poynton (1897), What Maisie Knew (1897), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). The earliest of these were international novels wherein conflicts arose from relationships between Americans and Europeans�each group with its own characteristics and morals. As time passed, he became increasingly interested in the psychological processes of his characters and in a subtle rendering of their limited insights, their perceptions, and their emotions. Critics of the gilded age

Writers of many types of works contributed to a great body of literature that flourished between the Civil War and 1914�literature of social revolt. Novels attacked the growing power of business and the growing corruption of government, and some novelists outlined utopias. Political corruption and inefficiency figured in Henry Adams�s novel Democracy (1880). Edward Bellamy�s Looking Backward (1888) was both an indictment of the capitalistic system and an imaginative picturing of a utopia achieved by a collectivist society in the year 2000. Howells�s Traveler from Altruria (1894) pleaded for an equalitarian state in which the government regimented men�s lives. The year 1906 saw the publication of Upton Sinclair�s The Jungle, first of many works by him that criticized U.S. economic and political life and urged socialism as the remedy.

Two poets embodied criticisms in songs. Edwin Markham�s �Man with the Hoe� (1899) was a protest against the exploitation of labour and vaguely threatened revolution; it immediately stimulated nationwide interest. A year later William Vaughn Moody�s �Ode in Time of Hesitation� denounced growing U.S. imperialism as a desertion of earlier principles; his �On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines� (1901) developed the same theme even more effectively.

With the rise of journalistic magazines, a group of journalists became notable as critics of America�the group dubbed �the muckrakers� by Theodore Roosevelt. Ida M. Tarbell�s The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904) and Lincoln Steffens�s The Shame of the Cities (1904) were typical contributions by two members of a large group of journalistic crusaders.

Ida M. Tarbell, 1904.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; neg. no. LC USZ 62 68572Henry Adams

One of the most devastating and most literate attacks on modern life was an autobiography of a scion of an ancient New England family, the Adamses. Educated at Harvard and abroad, Henry Adams was a great teacher and historian (History of the United States [1889�91] and Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres [1904]). The Education of Henry Adams (printed privately 1906; published 1918), however, complained that a lifelong hunt for some sort of order in the world, some sort of faith for man, left him completely baffled. The quiet, urbane style served well to underline, in an ironic way, the message of this pessimistic book. Poets of the era

The later 19th century and early years of the 20th century were a poor period for American poetry; yet (in addition to William Vaughn Moody) two poets of distinction wrote songs that survived long after scores of minor poets had been forgotten. One was Southern-born Sidney Lanier, a talented musician who utilized the rhythms of music and the thematic developments of symphonies in such fine songs as �Corn� (1875), �The Symphony� (1875), and �The Marshes of Glynn� (1878). Distressed, like many of his contemporaries, by changes in American life, he wove his doubts, fears, and suggestions into his richest poems.

The other poet was a New Englander, Emily Dickinson. A shy, playful, odd personality, she allowed practically none of her writings to be published during her lifetime. Not until 1890, four years after her death, was the first book of her poems published, to be followed at intervals by other collections. Later poets were to be influenced by her individual techniques�use of imperfect, or eye, rhymes, avoidance of regular rhythms, and a tendency to pack brief stanzas with cryptic meanings. Like Lanier, she rediscovered the value of conceits for setting forth her thoughts and feelings. Such poems as �The Snake,� �I Like to See It Lap the Miles,� �The Chariot,� �Farther in Summer than the Birds,� and �There�s a Certain Slant of Light� represented her unusual talent at its best.

Dickinson, EmilyEmily Dickinson, daguerreotype, c. 1847.Amherst College Archives & Special Collections (Public Domain) The 20th century Writing from 1914 to 1945

Important movements in drama, poetry, fiction, and criticism took shape in the years before, during, and after World War I. The eventful period that followed the war left its imprint upon books of all kinds. Literary forms of the period were extraordinarily varied, and in drama, poetry, and fiction the leading authors tended toward radical technical experiments. Experiments in drama

Although drama had not been a major art form in the 19th century, no type of writing was more experimental than a new drama that arose in rebellion against the glib commercial stage. In the early years of the 20th century, Americans traveling in Europe encountered a vital, flourishing theatre; returning home, some of them became active in founding the Little Theatre movement throughout the country. Freed from commercial limitations, playwrights experimented with dramatic forms and methods of production, and in time producers, actors, and dramatists appeared who had been trained in college classrooms and community playhouses. Some Little Theatre groups became commercial producers�for example, the Washington Square Players, founded in 1915, which became the Theatre Guild (first production in 1919). The resulting drama was marked by a spirit of innovation and by a new seriousness and maturity.

Eugene O�Neill, the most admired dramatist of the period, was a product of this movement. He worked with the Provincetown Players before his plays were commercially produced. His dramas were remarkable for their range. Beyond the Horizon (first performed 1920), Anna Christie (1921), Desire Under the Elms (1924), and The Iceman Cometh (1946) were naturalistic works, while The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1922) made use of the Expressionistic techniques developed in German drama in the period 1914�24. He also employed a stream-of-consciousness form of psychological monologue in Strange Interlude (1928) and produced a work that combined myth, family drama, and psychological analysis in Mourning Becomes Electra (1931).

Eugene O'Neill, 1938.� Bettmann/Corbis

No other dramatist was as generally praised as O�Neill, but many others wrote plays that reflected the growth of a serious and varied drama, including Maxwell Anderson, whose verse dramas have dated badly, and Robert E. Sherwood, a Broadway professional who wrote both comedy (Reunion in Vienna [1931]) and tragedy (There Shall Be No Night [1940]). Marc Connelly wrote touching fantasy in an African American folk biblical play, The Green Pastures (1930). Like O�Neill, Elmer Rice made use of both Expressionistic techniques (The Adding Machine [1923]) and naturalism (Street Scene [1929]). Lillian Hellman wrote powerful, well-crafted melodramas in The Children�s Hour (1934) and The Little Foxes (1939). Radical theatre experiments included Marc Blitzstein�s savagely satiric musical The Cradle Will Rock (1937) and the work of Orson Welles and John Houseman for the government-sponsored Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Theatre Project. The premier radical theatre of the decade was the Group Theatre (1931�41) under Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg, which became best known for presenting the work of Clifford Odets. In Waiting for Lefty (1935), a stirring plea for labour unionism, Odets roused the audience to an intense pitch of fervour, and in Awake and Sing (1935), perhaps the best play of the decade, he created a lyrical work of family conflict and youthful yearning. Other important plays by Odets for the Group Theatre were Paradise Lost (1935), Golden Boy (1937), and Rocket to the Moon (1938). Thornton Wilder used stylized settings and poetic dialogue in Our Town (1938) and turned to fantasy in The Skin of Our Teeth (1942). William Saroyan shifted his lighthearted, anarchic vision from fiction to drama with My Heart�s in the Highlands and The Time of Your Life (both 1939). The new poetry

Poetry ranged between traditional types of verse and experimental writing that departed radically from the established forms of the 19th century. Two New England poets, Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost, who were not noted for technical experimentation, won both critical and popular acclaim in this period. Robinson, whose first book appeared in 1896, did his best work in sonnets, ballad stanzas, and blank verse. In the 1920s he won three Pulitzer Prizes�for his Collected Poems (published 1921), The Man Who Died Twice (1925), and Tristram (1927). Like Robinson, Frost used traditional stanzas and blank verse in volumes such as A Boy�s Will (1913), his first book, and North of Boston (1914), New Hampshire (1923), A Further Range (1936), and A Masque of Reason (1945). The best-known poet of his generation, Frost, like Robinson, saw and commented upon the tragic aspects of life in poems such as �Design,� �Directive,� and �Provide, Provide.� Frost memorably crafted the language of common speech into traditional poetic form, with epigrammatic effect.

Robert Frost, 1954.Ruohomaa/Black Star

Just as modern American drama had its beginnings in little theatres, modern American poetry took form in little magazines. Particularly important was Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, founded by Harriet Monroe in Chicago in 1912. The surrounding region soon became prominent as the home of three poets: Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, and Edgar Lee Masters. Lindsay�s blend of legendary lore and native oratory in irregular odelike forms was well adapted to oral presentation, and his lively readings from his works contributed to the success of such books as General William Booth Enters into Heaven, and Other Poems (1913) and The Congo, and Other Poems (1914). Sandburg wrote of life on the prairies and in Midwestern cities in Whitmanesque free verse in such volumes as Chicago Poems (1916) and The People, Yes (1936). Masters�s very popular Spoon River Anthology (1915) consisted of free-verse monologues by village men and women, most of whom spoke bitterly of their frustrated lives.

Writing traditional sonnets and brief, personal lyrics, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sara Teasdale were innovative in being unusually frank (according to the standard of their time) for women poets. Amy Lowell, on the other hand, experimented with free verse and focused on the image and the descriptive detail. Three fine black poets�James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen�found old molds satisfactory for dealing with new subjects, specifically the problems of racism in America. The deceptively simple colloquial language of Hughes�s poetry has proved especially appealing to later readers. While Conrad Aiken experimented with poetical imitations of symphonic forms often mingled with stream-of-consciousness techniques, E.E. Cummings used typographical novelties to produce poems that had surprisingly fresh impact. Marianne Moore invented and brilliantly employed a kind of free verse that was marked by a wonderfully sharp and idiosyncratic focus on objects and details. Robinson Jeffers used violent imagery and modified free or blank verse to express perhaps the most bitter views voiced by a major poet in this period.

Hughes, LangstonLangston Hughes, photograph by Jack Delano, 1942.Jack Delano�OWI/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-USZ62-43605)

Except for a period after World War II, when he was confined in St. Elizabeth�s Hospital in Washington, D.C., Ezra Pound lived outside the United States after 1908. He had, nevertheless, a profound influence on 20th-century writing in English, both as a practitioner of verse and as a patron and impresario of other writers. His most controversial work remained The Cantos, the first installment of which appeared in 1926 and the latest in 1959 (Thrones: 96�109 de los cantares), with a fragmentary addendum in 1968 (Drafts & Fragments of Cantos CX�CXVII).

Like Pound, to whom he was much indebted, T.S. Eliot lived abroad most of his life, becoming a British subject in 1927. His first volume, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917. In 1922 appeared The Waste Land" class="md-crosslink">The Waste Land, the poem by which he first became famous. Filled with fragments, competing voices, learned allusions, and deeply buried personal details, the poem was read as a dark diagnosis of a disillusioned generation and of the modern world. As a poet and critic, Eliot exercised a strong influence, especially in the period between World Wars I and II. In what some critics regard as his finest work, The Four Quartets" class="md-crosslink">The Four Quartets (1943), Eliot explored through images of great beauty and haunting power his own past, the past of the human race, and the meaning of human history.

Eliot was an acknowledged master of a varied group of poets whose work was indebted to 17th-century English Metaphysical poets, especially to John Donne. Eliot�s influence was clear in the writings of Archibald MacLeish, whose earlier poems showed resemblances to The Waste Land. A number of Southern poets (who were also critics) were influenced by Eliot�John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, and Allen Tate. Younger American Metaphysicals who emerged later included Louise Bogan, L�onie Adams, Muriel Rukeyser, Delmore Schwartz, and Karl Shapiro. But there were several major poets strongly opposed to Eliot�s influence. Their style and subjects tended to be romantic and visionary. These included Hart Crane, whose long poem The Bridge (1930) aimed to create a Whitmanesque American epic, and Wallace Stevens, a lush and sensuous writer who made an astonishing literary debut with the poems collected in Harmonium (1923). Another opponent of Eliot was William Carlos Williams, who invested his experimental prose and magically simple lyrics�in works such as Spring and All (1923)�with the mundane details of American life and wrote about American myth and cultural history with great sweep in In the American Grain (1925). Fiction

The little magazines that helped the growth of the poetry of the era also contributed to a development of its fiction. They printed daring or unconventional short stories and published attacks upon established writers. The Dial (1880�1929), Little Review (1914�29), Seven Arts (1916�17), and others encouraged Modernist innovation. More potent were two magazines edited by the ferociously funny journalist-critic H.L. Mencken�The Smart Set (editorship 1914�23) and American Mercury (which he coedited between 1924 and 1933). A powerful influence and a scathing critic of puritanism, Mencken helped launch the new fiction.

Mencken�s major enthusiasms included the fiction of Joseph Conrad and Theodore Dreiser, but he also promoted minor writers for their attacks on gentility, such as James Branch Cabell, or for their revolt against the narrow, frustrated quality of life in rural communities, including Zona Gale and Ruth Suckow. The most distinguished of these writers was Sherwood Anderson. His Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and The Triumph of the Egg (1921) were collections of short stories that showed villagers suffering from all sorts of phobias and suppressions. Anderson in time wrote several novels, the best being Poor White (1920).

In 1920 critics noticed that a new school of fiction had risen to prominence with the success of books such as F. Scott Fitzgerald�s This Side of Paradise and Sinclair Lewis�s Main Street, fictions that tended to be frankly psychological or modern in their unsparing portrayals of contemporary life. Novels of the 1920s were often not only lyrical and personal but also, in the despairing mood that followed World War I, apt to express the pervasive disillusionment of the postwar generation. Novels of the 1930s inclined toward radical social criticism in response to the miseries of the Great Depression, though some of the best, by writers such as Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Henry Roth, and Nathanael West, continued to explore the Modernist vein of the previous decade. Critics of society

F. Scott Fitzgerald�s This Side of Paradise" class="md-crosslink">This Side of Paradise (1920) showed the disillusionment and moral disintegration experienced by so many in the United States after World War I. The book initiated a career of great promise that found fruition in The Great Gatsby" class="md-crosslink">The Great Gatsby (1925), a spare but poignant novel about the promise and failure of the American Dream. Fitzgerald was to live out this theme himself. Though damaged by drink and by a failing marriage, he went on to do some of his best work in the 1930s, including numerous stories and essays as well as his most ambitious novel, Tender Is the Night (1934). Unlike Fitzgerald, who was a lyric writer with real emotional intensity, Sinclair Lewis was best as a social critic. His onslaughts against the �village virus� (Main Street [1920]), average businessmen (Babbitt" class="md-crosslink">Babbitt [1922]), materialistic scientists (Arrowsmith" class="md-crosslink">Arrowsmith [1925]), and the racially prejudiced (Kingsblood Royal [1947]) were satirically sharp and thoroughly documented, though Babbitt is his only book that still stands up brilliantly at the beginning of the 21st century. Similar careful documentation, though little satire, characterized James T. Farrell�s naturalistic Studs Lonigan" class="md-crosslink">Studs Lonigan trilogy (1932�35), which described the stifling effects of growing up in a lower-middle-class family and a street-corner milieu in the Chicago of the 1920s.

Fitzgerald, F. ScottF. Scott Fitzgerald.Public Domain

The ironies of racial identity dominate the stories and novels produced by writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including harsh portraits of the black middle class in Nella Larsen�s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) and the powerful stories of Langston Hughes in The Ways of White Folks (1934), as well as the varied literary materials�poetry, fiction, and drama�collected in Jean Toomer�s Cane (1923). Richard Wright�s books, including Uncle Tom�s Children" class="md-crosslink">Uncle Tom�s Children (1938), Native Son" class="md-crosslink">Native Son (1940), and Black Boy" class="md-crosslink">Black Boy (1945), were works of burning social protest, Dostoyevskian in their intensity, that dealt boldly with the plight of American blacks in both the old South and the Northern urban ghetto. Zora Neale Hurston�s training in anthropology and folklore contributed to Their Eyes Were Watching God" class="md-crosslink">Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), her powerful feminist novel about the all-black Florida town in which she had grown up.

Hurston, Zora NealeZora Neale Hurston, photograph by Carl Van Vechten, 1938.Carl Van Vechten Estate/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-van-5a52142)

A number of authors wrote proletarian novels attacking capitalist exploitation, as in several novels based on a 1929 strike in the textile mills in Gastonia, N.C., such as Fielding Burke�s Call Home the Heart and Grace Lumpkin�s To Make My Bread (both 1932). Other notable proletarian novels included Jack Conroy�s The Disinherited (1933), Robert Cantwell�s The Land of Plenty (1934), and Albert Halper�s Union Square (1933), The Foundry (1934), and The Chute (1937), as well as some grim evocations of the drifters and �bottom dogs� of the Depression era, such as Edward Anderson�s Hungry Men and Tom Kromer�s Waiting for Nothing (both 1935). The radical movement, combined with a nascent feminism, encouraged the talent of several politically committed women writers whose work was rediscovered later; they included Tillie Olsen, Meridel Le Sueur, and Josephine Herbst.

Particularly admired as a protest writer was John Dos Passos, who first attracted attention with an anti-World War I novel, Three Soldiers (1921). His most sweeping indictments of the modern social and economic system, Manhattan Transfer (1925) and the U.S.A. trilogy (The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money [1930�36]), employed various narrative innovations such as the �camera eye� and �newsreel,� along with a large cast of characters, to attack society from the left. Nathanael West�s novels, including Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), A Cool Million (1934), and The Day of the Locust (1939), used black comedy to create a bitter vision of an inhuman and brutal world and its depressing effects on his sensitive but ineffectual protagonists. West evoked the tawdry but rich materials of mass culture and popular fantasy to mock the pathos of the American Dream, a frequent target during the Depression years. Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck

Three authors whose writings showed a shift from disillusionment were Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck. Hemingway�s early short stories and his first novels, The Sun Also Rises" class="md-crosslink">The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms" class="md-crosslink">A Farewell to Arms (1929), were full of the existential disillusionment of the Lost Generation expatriates. The Spanish Civil War, however, led him to espouse the possibility of collective action to solve social problems, and his less-effective novels, including To Have and Have Not" class="md-crosslink">To Have and Have Not (1937) and For Whom the Bell Tolls" class="md-crosslink">For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), embodied this new belief. He regained some of his form in The Old Man and the Sea" class="md-crosslink">The Old Man and the Sea (1952) and his posthumously published memoir of Paris between the wars, A Moveable Feast (1964). Hemingway�s writing was influenced by his background in journalism and by the spare manner and flat sentence rhythms of Gertrude Stein, his Paris friend and a pioneer Modernist, especially in such works of hers as Three Lives (1909). His own great impact on other writers came from his deceptively simple, stripped-down prose, full of unspoken implication, and from his tough but vulnerable masculinity, which created a myth that imprisoned the author and haunted the World War II generation.

Hemingway, ErnestErnest Hemingway with a dead Cape buffalo, on safari in Kenya, 1953.Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library

Hemingway�s great rival as a stylist and mythmaker was William Faulkner, whose writing was as baroque as Hemingway�s was spare. Influenced by Sherwood Anderson, Herman Melville, and especially James Joyce, Faulkner combined stream-of-consciousness techniques with rich social history. Works such as The Sound and the Fury" class="md-crosslink">The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying" class="md-crosslink">As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August" class="md-crosslink">Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and The Hamlet" class="md-crosslink">The Hamlet (1940) were parts of the unfolding history of Yoknapatawpha County, a mythical Mississippi community, which depicted the transformation and the decadence of the South. Faulkner�s work was dominated by a sense of guilt going back to the American Civil War and the appropriation of Indian lands. Though often comic, his work pictured the disintegration of the leading families and, in later books such as Go Down, Moses" class="md-crosslink">Go Down, Moses (1942) and Intruder in the Dust" class="md-crosslink">Intruder in the Dust (1948), showed a growing concern with the troubled role of race in Southern life.

William Faulkner, photograph by Carl Van Vechten, c. 1954. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., Carl Van Vechten Collection (Digital file no. 5a51970)

Steinbeck�s career, marked by uneven achievements, began with a historical novel, Cup of Gold (1929), in which he voiced a distrust of society and glorified the anarchistic individualist typical of the rebellious 1920s. He showed his affinity for colourful outcasts, such as the paisanos of the Monterey area, in the short novels Tortilla Flat (1935), Of Mice and Men (1937), and Cannery Row (1945). His best books were inspired by the social struggles of migrant farm workers during the Great Depression, including the simply written but ambiguous strike novel In Dubious Battle (1936) and his flawed masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath" class="md-crosslink">The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The latter, a protest novel punctuated by prose-poem interludes, tells the story of the migration of the Joads, an Oklahoma Dust Bowl family, to California. During their almost biblical journey, they learn the necessity for collective action among the poor and downtrodden to prevent them from being destroyed individually.

First-edition dust jacket of The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939); artwork by Elmer Hader.Viking Press/Penguin Group; Between the Covers Rare Books, Inc., Merchantville, NJLyric fictionists

An interesting development in fiction, abetted by Modernism, was a shift from naturalistic to poetic writing. There was an increased tendency to select details and endow them with symbolic meaning, to set down the thought processes and emotions of the characters, and to make use of rhythmic prose. In varied ways Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Cabell, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Faulkner all showed evidence of this�in passages, in short stories, and even in entire novels. Faulkner showed the tendency at its worst in A Fable (1954), which, ironically, won a Pulitzer Prize.

Lyricism was especially prominent in the writings of Willa Cather. O Pioneers!" class="md-crosslink">O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark" class="md-crosslink">The Song of the Lark (1915), and My �ntonia" class="md-crosslink">My �ntonia (1918) contained poetic passages about the disappearing frontier and the creative efforts of frontier folk. A Lost Lady" class="md-crosslink">A Lost Lady (1923) and The Professor�s House (1925) were elegiac and spare in style, though they also depicted historic social transformations, and Death Comes for the Archbishop" class="md-crosslink">Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) was an exaltation of the past and of spiritual pioneering. Katherine Anne Porter, whose works took the form primarily of novelettes and stories, wrote more in the style of the Metaphysical poets, though she also wrote one long, ambitious novel, A Ship of Fools (1962). Her use of the stream-of-consciousness method in Flowering Judas (1930) as well as in Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) had the complexity, the irony, and the symbolic sophistication characteristic of these poets, whose work the Modernists had brought into fashion.

Cather, WillaWilla Cather.Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

Two of the most intensely lyrical works of the 1930s were autobiographical novels set in the Jewish ghetto of New York City�s Lower East Side before World War I: Michael Gold�s harsh Jews Without Money (1930) and Henry Roth�s Proustian Call It Sleep" class="md-crosslink">Call It Sleep (1934), one of the greatest novels of the decade. They followed in the footsteps of Anzia Yezierska, a prolific writer of the 1920s whose passionate books about immigrant Jews, especially Bread Givers (1925), have been rediscovered by contemporary feminists.

Another lyrical and autobiographical writer, whose books have faded badly, was Thomas Wolfe, who put all his strivings, thoughts, and feelings into works such as Look Homeward, Angel" class="md-crosslink">Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and Of Time and the River" class="md-crosslink">Of Time and the River (1935) before his early death in 1938. These Whitmanesque books, as well as posthumously edited ones such as The Web and the Rock" class="md-crosslink">The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can�t Go Home Again" class="md-crosslink">You Can�t Go Home Again (1940), dealt with a figure much like Wolfe, echoing the author�s youth in the South, young manhood in the North, and eternal search to fulfill a vision. Though grandiose, they influenced many young writers, including Jack Kerouac. Walter Blair Morris Dickstein The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Literary criticism

Some historians, looking back over the first half of the 20th century, were inclined to think that it was particularly noteworthy for its literary criticism. Beyond doubt, criticism thrived as it had not for several generations. It was an important influence on literature itself, and it shaped the perceptions of readers in the face of difficult new writing.

The period began with a battle between two literary groups, one that called its movement New Humanism and stood for older values in judging literature and another group that urged that old standards be overthrown and new ones adopted. The New Humanists, such as Irving Babbitt, a Harvard University professor, and Paul Elmer More, were moralists whose work found an echo in neotraditionalist writers such as T.S. Eliot, who shared their dislike of naturalism, Romanticism, and the liberal faith in progress. The leader of the opposition, hardly a liberal himself, was the pugnacious H.L. Mencken, who insisted that the duty of writers was to present �the unvarnished truth� about life. His magazine articles and reviews gathered in A Book of Prefaces (1917) and the six volumes of Prejudices (1919�27) ushered in the iconoclasm of the 1920s, preparing the ground for satiric writers such as Sinclair Lewis. Mencken was a tireless enthusiast for the work of Joseph Conrad and Theodore Dreiser, among other modern writers. With his dislike of cant and hypocrisy, Mencken helped liberate American literature from its moralistic framework. Socio-literary critics

In this period of social change, it was natural for critics to consider literature in relationship to society and politics, as most 19th-century critics had done. The work of Van Wyck Brooks and Vernon L. Parrington illustrated two of the main approaches. In America�s Coming-of-Age (1915), Letters and Leadership (1918), and The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920), Brooks scolded the American public and attacked the philistinism, materialism, and provinciality of the Gilded Age. But he retreated from his critical position in the popular Makers and Finders series, which included The Flowering of New England (1936), New England: Indian Summer (1940), The World of Washington Irving (1944), The Times of Melville and Whitman (1947), and The Confident Years (1952). These books wove an elaborate cultural tapestry of the major and minor figures in American literature. In Main Currents in American Thought (1927�30), Parrington, a progressive, reevaluated American literature in terms of its adherence to the tenets of Jeffersonian democracy.

The growth of Marxian influence upon thinking in the 1920s and �30s manifested itself in several critical works by V.F. Calverton, Granville Hicks, Malcolm Cowley, and Bernard Smith, as well as numerous articles in journals such as Modern Quarterly, New Masses, Partisan Review, and The New Republic. Though the enthusiasm for communism waned, Marxism contributed to the historical approach of outstanding critics such as Edmund Wilson and Kenneth Burke and to the entire school of New York intellectuals that formed around Partisan Review and included critics such as Lionel Trilling and Philip Rahv. Moral-aesthetic critics

Wilson and Burke, like Cowley, Morton D. Zabel, Newton Arvin, and F.O. Matthiessen, tried to strike a balance between aesthetic concerns and social or moral issues. They were interested both in analyzing and in evaluating literary creations�i.e., they were eager to see in detail how a literary work was constructed yet also to place it in a larger social or moral framework. Their work, like that of all critics of the period, showed the influence of T.S. Eliot. In essays and books such as The Sacred Wood (1920) and The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), Eliot drew close attention to the language of literature yet also made sweeping judgments and large cultural generalizations. His main impact was on close readers of poetry�e.g., I.A. Richards, William Empson, and F.R. Leavis in England and the critics of the New Criticism movement in the United States, many of whom were also poets besides being political and cultural conservatives. Along with Eliot, they rewrote the map of literary history, challenged the dominance of Romantic forms and styles, promoted and analyzed difficult Modernist writing, and greatly advanced ways of discussing literary structure. Major examples of their style of close reading can be found in R.P. Blackmur�s The Double Agent (1935), Allen Tate�s Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas (1936), John Crowe Ransom�s The World�s Body (1938), Yvor Winters�s Maule�s Curse (1938), and Cleanth Brooks�s The Well Wrought Urn (1947). Though they were later attacked for their formalism and for avoiding the social context of writing, the New Critics did much to further the understanding and appreciation of literature. After World War II

The literary historian Malcolm Cowley described the years between the two world wars as a �second flowering� of American writing. Certainly American literature attained a new maturity and a rich diversity in the 1920s and �30s, and significant works by several major figures from those decades were published after 1945. Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Katherine Anne Porter wrote memorable fiction, though not up to their prewar standard; and Frost, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, E.E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Gwendolyn Brooks published important poetry. Eugene O�Neill�s most distinguished play, Long Day�s Journey into Night, appeared posthumously in 1956. Before and after World War II, Robert Penn Warren published influential fiction, poetry, and criticism. His All the King�s Men" class="md-crosslink">All the King�s Men, one of the best American political novels, won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize. Mary McCarthy became a widely read social satirist and essayist. When it first appeared in the United States in the 1960s, Henry Miller�s fiction was influential primarily because of its frank exploration of sexuality. But its loose, picaresque, quasi-autobiographical form also meshed well with post-1960s fiction. Impressive new novelists, poets, and playwrights emerged after the war. There was, in fact, a gradual changing of the guard.

Not only did a new generation come out of the war, but its ethnic, regional, and social character was quite different from that of the preceding one. Among the younger writers were children of immigrants, many of them Jews; African Americans, only a few generations away from slavery; and, eventually, women, who, with the rise of feminism, were to speak in a new voice. Though the social climate of the postwar years was conservative, even conformist, some of the most hotly discussed writers were homosexuals or bisexuals, including Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Paul Bowles, Gore Vidal, and James Baldwin, whose dark themes and experimental methods cleared a path for Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac. The novel and short storyRealism and �metafiction�

Two distinct groups of novelists responded to the cultural impact, and especially the technological horror, of World War II. Norman Mailer�s The Naked and the Dead" class="md-crosslink">The Naked and the Dead (1948) and Irwin Shaw�s The Young Lions (1948) were realistic war novels, though Mailer�s book was also a novel of ideas, exploring fascist thinking and an obsession with power as elements of the military mind. James Jones, amassing a staggering quantity of closely observed detail, documented the war�s human cost in an ambitious trilogy (From Here to Eternity [1951], The Thin Red Line [1962], and Whistle [1978]) that centred on loners who resisted adapting to military discipline. Younger novelists, profoundly shaken by the bombing of Hiroshima and the real threat of human annihilation, found the conventions of realism inadequate for treating the war�s nightmarish implications. In Catch-22" class="md-crosslink">Catch-22 (1961), Joseph Heller satirized the military mentality with surreal black comedy but also injected a sense of Kafkaesque horror. A sequel, Closing Time (1994), was an elegy for the World War II generation. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., in Slaughterhouse-Five" class="md-crosslink">Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), described the Allied firebombing of the German city of Dresden with a mixture of dark fantasy and numb, loopy humour. Later this method was applied brilliantly to the portrayal of the Vietnam War�a conflict that seemed in itself surreal�by Tim O�Brien in Going After Cacciato (1978) and the short-story collection The Things They Carried (1990).

In part because of the atomic bomb, American writers turned increasingly to black humour and absurdist fantasy. Many found the naturalistic approach incapable of communicating the rapid pace and the sheer implausibility of contemporary life. A highly self-conscious fiction emerged, laying bare its own literary devices, questioning the nature of representation, and often imitating or parodying earlier fiction rather than social reality. Russian-born Vladimir Nabokov and the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges were strong influences on this new �metafiction.� Nabokov, who became a U.S. citizen in 1945, produced a body of exquisitely wrought fiction distinguished by linguistic and formal innovation. Despite their artificiality, his best novels written in English�including Lolita" class="md-crosslink">Lolita (1955), Pnin" class="md-crosslink">Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire" class="md-crosslink">Pale Fire (1962)�are highly personal books that have a strong emotional thread running through them.

In an important essay, �The Literature of Exhaustion� (1967), John Barth declared himself an American disciple of Nabokov and Borges. After dismissing realism as a �used up� tradition, Barth described his own work as �novels which imitate the form of the novel, by an author who imitates the role of Author.� In fact, Barth�s earliest fiction, The Floating Opera (1956) and The End of the Road (1958), fell partly within the realistic tradition, but in later, more-ambitious works he simultaneously imitated and parodied conventional forms�the historical novel in The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), Greek and Christian myths in Giles Goat-Boy (1966), and the epistolary novel in LETTERS (1979). Similarly, Donald Barthelme mocked the fairy tale in Snow White (1967) and Freudian fiction in The Dead Father (1975). Barthelme was most successful in his short stories and parodies that solemnly caricatured contemporary styles, especially the richly suggestive pieces collected in Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), City Life (1970), and Guilty Pleasures (1974).

Thomas Pynchon emerged as the major American practitioner of the absurdist fable. His novels and stories were elaborately plotted mixtures of historical information, comic-book fantasy, and countercultural suspicion. Using paranoia as a structuring device as well as a cast of mind, Pynchon worked out elaborate �conspiracies� in V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity�s Rainbow" class="md-crosslink">Gravity�s Rainbow (1973). The underlying assumption of Pynchon�s fiction was the inevitability of entropy�i.e., the disintegration of physical and moral energy. Pynchon�s technique was later to influence writers as different as Don DeLillo and Paul Auster. In The Naked Lunch (1959) and other novels, William S. Burroughs, abandoning plot and coherent characterization, used a drug addict�s consciousness to depict a hideous modern landscape. Vonnegut, Terry Southern, and John Hawkes were also major practitioners of black humour and the absurdist fable.

Gravity's RainbowCover of an edition of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow published in 2013 to celebrate the novel's 40th anniversary.Vintage Publishing Press Office/The Random House Group

Other influential portraits of outsider figures included the Beat characters in Jack Kerouac�s On the Road (1957), The Dharma Bums (1958), Desolation Angels (1965), and Visions of Cody (1972); the young Rabbit Angstrom in John Updike�s Rabbit, Run" class="md-crosslink">Rabbit, Run (1960) and Rabbit Redux (1971); Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger�s The Catcher in the Rye (1951); and the troubling madman in Richard Yates�s powerful novel of suburban life, Revolutionary Road (1961).

Though writers such as Barth, Barthelme, and Pynchon rejected the novel�s traditional function as a mirror reflecting society, a significant number of contemporary novelists were reluctant to abandon Social Realism, which they pursued in much more personal terms. In novels such as The Victim (1947), The Adventures of Augie March" class="md-crosslink">The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Herzog" class="md-crosslink">Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler�s Planet" class="md-crosslink">Mr. Sammler�s Planet (1970), and Humboldt�s Gift" class="md-crosslink">Humboldt�s Gift (1975), Saul Bellow tapped into the buoyant, manic energy and picaresque structure of black humour while proclaiming the necessity of �being human.� Though few contemporary writers saw the ugliness of urban life more clearly than Bellow, his central characters rejected the �Wasteland outlook� that he associated with Modernism. A spiritual vision, derived from sources as diverse as Judaism, Transcendentalism, and Rudolph Steiner�s cultish theosophy, found its way into Bellow�s later novels, but he also wrote darker fictions such as the novella Seize the Day" class="md-crosslink">Seize the Day (1956), a study in failure and blocked emotion that was perhaps his best work. With the publication of Ravelstein (2000), his fictional portrait of the scholar-writer Allan Bloom, and of Collected Stories (2001), Bellow was acclaimed as a portraitist and a poet of memory.

Four other major Jewish writers�Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Philip Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer�treated the human condition with humour and forgiveness. Malamud�s gift for dark comedy and Hawthornean fable was especially evident in his short-story collections The Magic Barrel" class="md-crosslink">The Magic Barrel (1958) and Idiots First (1963). His first three novels, The Natural" class="md-crosslink">The Natural (1952), The Assistant" class="md-crosslink">The Assistant (1957), and A New Life (1961), were also impressive works of fiction; The Assistant had the bleak moral intensity of his best stories. Paley�s stories combined an offbeat, whimsically poetic manner with a wry understanding of the ironies of family life and progressive politics. While Roth was known best for the wild satire and sexual high jinks of Portnoy�s Complaint" class="md-crosslink">Portnoy�s Complaint (1969), a hilarious stand-up routine about ethnic stereotypes, his most-lasting achievement may be his later novels built around the misadventures of a controversial Jewish novelist named Zuckerman, especially The Ghost Writer (1979), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), and, above all, The Counterlife (1987). Like many of his later works, from My Life as a Man (1974) to Operation Shylock (1993), The Counterlife plays ingeniously on the relationship between autobiography and fiction. His best later work was his bitter, deliberately offensive story of a self-destructive artist, Sabbath�s Theater (1995). Returning to realism, but without his former self-absorption, Roth won new readers with his trilogy on 20th-century American history�American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000)�and with The Plot Against America (2004), a counter-historical novel about the coming of fascism in the United States during World War II. The Polish-born Singer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978 for his stories, written originally in Yiddish. (See also Yiddish literature.) They evolved from fantastic tales of demons and angels to realistic fictions set in New York City�s Upper West Side, often dealing with the haunted lives of Holocaust survivors. These works showed him to be one of the great storytellers of modern times.

Another great storyteller, John Cheever, long associated with The New Yorker magazine, created in his short stories and novels a gallery of memorable eccentrics. He documented the anxieties of upper-middle-class New Yorkers and suburbanites in the relatively tranquil years after World War II. The sexual and moral confusion of the American middle class was the focus of the work of J.D. Salinger and Richard Yates, as well as of John Updike�s Rabbit series (four novels from Rabbit, Run [1960] to Rabbit at Rest [1990]), Couples (1968), and Too Far to Go (1979), a sequence of tales about the quiet disintegration of a civilized marriage, a subject Updike revisited in a retrospective work, Villages (2004). In sharp contrast, Nelson Algren (The Man with the Golden Arm" class="md-crosslink">The Man with the Golden Arm [1949]) and Hubert Selby, Jr. (Last Exit to Brooklyn [1964]), documented lower-class urban life with brutal frankness. Similarly, John Rechy portrayed America�s urban homosexual subculture in City of Night (1963). As literary and social mores were liberalized, Cheever himself dealt with homosexuality in his prison novel Falconer (1977) and even more explicitly in his personal journals, published posthumously in 1991. Southern fiction

Post-World War II Southern writers inherited Faulkner�s rich legacy. Three women�Eudora Welty, Flannery O�Connor, and Carson McCullers, specialists in the grotesque�contributed greatly to Southern fiction. O�Connor, writing as a Roman Catholic in the Protestant South, created a high comedy of moral incongruity in her incomparable short stories. Welty, always a brilliant stylist, first came to prominence with her collections of short fiction A Curtain of Green (1941) and The Wide Net, and Other Stories" class="md-crosslink">The Wide Net, and Other Stories (1943). Her career culminated with a large family novel, Losing Battles (1970), and a fine novella, The Optimist�s Daughter" class="md-crosslink">The Optimist�s Daughter (1972), which was awarded the 1973 Pulitzer Prize. McCullers is best remembered for her first book, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" class="md-crosslink">The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), an intricate gothic novel set in a small town in the Deep South. She also published Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), The Member of the Wedding (1946), and The Ballad of the Sad Caf� (1951), all later adapted to the stage or screen. Other fine storytellers in the Southern tradition include Elizabeth Spencer, whose short fiction was collected in The Southern Woman (2001), and Reynolds Price, whose best novels were A Long and Happy Life (1961) and Kate Vaiden (1986). Initially known for his lyrical portraits of Southern eccentrics (Other Voices, Other Rooms [1948]), Truman Capote later published In Cold Blood (1965), a cold but impressive piece of documentary realism that contributed, along with the work of Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer, to the emergence of a �new journalism� that used many of the techniques of fiction.

Eudora Welty, 1992.� Philip Gould/Corbis

William Styron�s overripe first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951), clearly revealed the influence of Faulkner. In two controversial later works, Styron fictionalized the dark side of modern history: The Confessions of Nat Turner" class="md-crosslink">The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) depicted an antebellum slave revolt, and Sophie�s Choice" class="md-crosslink">Sophie�s Choice (1979) unsuccessfully sought to capture the full horror of the Holocaust. Inspired by Faulkner and Mark Twain, William Humphrey wrote two powerful novels set in Texas, Home from the Hill (1958) and The Ordways (1965). The Moviegoer (1961) and The Last Gentleman (1966) established Walker Percy as an important voice in Southern fiction. Their musing philosophical style broke sharply with the Southern gothic tradition and influenced later writers such as Richard Ford in The Sportswriter (1986) and its moving sequel, Independence Day (1995). Equally impressive were the novels and stories of Peter Taylor, an impeccable Social Realist, raconteur, and genial novelist of manners who recalled a bygone world in works such as The Old Forest (1985) and A Summons to Memphis (1986). African American literature

Black writers of this period found alternatives to the Richard Wright tradition of angry social protest. James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, both prot�g�s of Wright, wrote polemical essays calling for a literature that reflected the full complexity of black life in the United States. In his first and best novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain" class="md-crosslink">Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Baldwin portrayed the Harlem world and the black church through his own adolescent religious experiences. Drawing on rural folktale, absurdist humour, and a picaresque realism, Ralph Ellison wrote a deeply resonant comic novel that dealt with the full range of black experience�rural sharecropping, segregated education, northward migration, ghetto hustling, and the lure of such competing ideologies as nationalism and communism. Many considered his novel Invisible Man" class="md-crosslink">Invisible Man (1952) the best novel of the postwar years.

Ellison, RalphRalph Ellison, 1952.Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

Later two African American women published some of the most important post-World War II American fiction. In The Bluest Eye" class="md-crosslink">The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula" class="md-crosslink">Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved" class="md-crosslink">Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1998), Toni Morrison created a strikingly original fiction that sounded different notes from lyrical recollection to magic realism. Like Ellison, Morrison drew on diverse literary and folk influences and dealt with important phases of black history�i.e., slavery in Beloved and the Harlem Renaissance in Jazz. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. Alice Walker, after writing several volumes of poetry and a novel dealing with the civil rights movement (Meridian [1976]), received the Pulitzer Prize for her black feminist novel The Color Purple" class="md-crosslink">The Color Purple (1982). African American men whose work gained attention during this period included Ishmael Reed, whose wild comic techniques resembled Ellison�s; James Alan McPherson, a subtle short-story writer in the mold of Ellison and Baldwin; Charles Johnson, whose novels, such as The Oxherding Tale (1982) and The Middle Passage (1990), showed a masterful historical imagination; Randall Kenan, a gay writer with a strong folk imagination whose style also descended from both Ellison and Baldwin; and Colson Whitehead, who used experimental techniques and folk traditions in The Intuitionist (1999) and John Henry Days (2001).

Morrison, ToniToni Morrison, 1993.Don Emmert�AFP/Getty ImagesNew fictional modes

The horrors of World War II, the Cold War and the atomic bomb, the bizarre feast of consumer culture, and the cultural clashes of the 1960s prompted many writers to argue that reality had grown inaccessible, undermining the traditional social role of fiction. Writers of novels and short stories therefore were under unprecedented pressure to discover, or invent, new and viable kinds of fiction. One response was the postmodern novel of William Gaddis, John Barth, John Hawkes, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, Paul Auster, and Don DeLillo�technically sophisticated and highly self-conscious about the construction of fiction and the fictive nature of �reality� itself. These writers dealt with themes such as imposture and paranoia; their novels drew attention to themselves as artifacts and often used realistic techniques ironically. Other responses involved a heightening of realism by means of intensifying violence, amassing documentation, or resorting to fantasy. A brief discussion of writers as different as Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates may serve to illustrate these new directions.

In his World War II novel, The Naked and the Dead" class="md-crosslink">The Naked and the Dead (1948), Mailer wrote in the Dos Passos tradition of social protest. Feeling its limitations, he developed his own brand of surreal fantasy in fables such as An American Dream (1965) and Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967). As with many of the postmodern novelists, his subject was the nature of power, personal as well as political. However, it was only when he turned to �nonfiction fiction� or �fiction as history� in The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago (both 1968) that Mailer discovered his true voice�grandiose yet personal, comic yet shrewdly intellectual. He refined this approach into a new objectivity in the Pulitzer Prize-winning �true life novel� The Executioner�s Song (1979). When he returned to fiction, his most effective work was Harlot�s Ghost (1991), about the Central Intelligence Agency. His final novels took Jesus Christ (The Gospel According to the Son [1997]) and Adolf Hitler (The Castle in the Forest [2007]) as their subjects.

In her early work, especially A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967) and them" class="md-crosslink">them (1969), Joyce Carol Oates worked naturalistically with violent urban materials, such as the Detroit riots. Incredibly prolific, she later experimented with Surrealism in Wonderland (1971) and Gothic fantasy in Bellefleur (1980) before returning in works such as Marya (1986) to the bleak blue-collar world of her youth in upstate New York. Among her later works was Blonde: A Novel (2000), a fictional biography of Marilyn Monroe. While Mailer and Oates refused to surrender the novel�s gift for capturing reality, both were compelled to search out new fictional modes to tap that power.

Joyce Carol Oates, 1992.AP/REX/Shutterstock.com

The surge of feminism in the 1970s gave impetus to many new women writers, such as Erica Jong, author of the sexy and funny Fear of Flying (1974), and Rita Mae Brown, who explored lesbian life in Rubyfruit Jungle (1973). Other significant works of fiction by women in the 1970s included Ann Beattie�s account of the post-1960s generation in Chilly Scenes of Winter (1976) and many short stories, Gail Godwin�s highly civilized The Odd Woman (1974), Mary Gordon�s portraits of Irish Catholic life in Final Payments (1978), and the many social comedies of Alison Lurie and Anne Tyler. The influence of Raymond Carver

Perhaps the most influential fiction writer to emerge in the 1970s was Raymond Carver. He was another realist who dealt with blue-collar life, usually in the Pacific Northwest, in powerful collections of stories such as What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) and Cathedral (1983). His self-destructive characters were life�s losers, and his style, influenced by Hemingway and Samuel Beckett, was spare and flat but powerfully suggestive. It was imitated, often badly, by minimalists such as Frederick Barthelme, Mary Robison, and Amy Hempel. More-talented writers whose novels reflected the influence of Carver in their evocation of the downbeat world of the blue-collar male included Richard Ford (Rock Springs [1987]), Russell Banks (Continental Drift [1984] and Affliction [1989]), and Tobias Wolff (The Barracks Thief [1984] and This Boy�s Life [1989]). Another strong male-oriented writer in a realist mode who emerged from the 1960s counterculture was Robert Stone. His Dog Soldiers (1974) was a grimly downbeat portrayal of the drugs-and-Vietnam generation, and A Flag for Sunrise (1981) was a bleak, Conradian political novel set in Central America. Stone focused more on the spiritual malaise of his characters than on their ordinary lives. He wrote a lean, furious Hollywood novel in Children of Light (1986) and captured some of the feverish, apocalyptic atmosphere of the Holy Land in Damascus Gate (1998). In leisurely, good-humoured, minutely detailed novels, Richard Russo dealt with blue-collar losers living in decaying Northeastern towns in The Risk Pool (1988), Nobody�s Fool (1993), and Empire Falls (2001), but he also published a satiric novel about academia, Straight Man (1997). Some women writers were especially impressive in dealing with male characters, including E. Annie Proulx in The Shipping News (1993) and Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999) and Andrea Barrett in Ship Fever (1996). Others focused on relationships between women, including Mary Gaitskill in her witty satiric novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991), written under the influences of Nabokov and Mary McCarthy. Lorrie Moore published rich, idiosyncratic stories as densely textured as novels. Deborah Eisenberg, Amy Bloom, Antonya Nelson, and Thom Jones also helped make the last years of the 20th century a fertile period for short fiction. Multicultural writing

The dramatic loosening of immigration restrictions in the mid-1960s set the stage for the rich multicultural writing of the last quarter of the 20th century. New Jewish voices were heard in the fiction of E.L. Doctorow, noted for his mingling of the historical with the fictional in novels such as Ragtime (1975) and The Waterworks (1994) and in the work of Cynthia Ozick, whose best story, Envy; or, Yiddish in America (1969), has characters modeled on leading figures in Yiddish literature. Her story The Shawl (1980) concerns the murder of a baby in a Nazi concentration camp. David Leavitt introduced homosexual themes into his portrayal of middle-class life in Family Dancing (1984). At the turn of the 21st century, younger Jewish writers from the former Soviet Union such as Gary Shteyngart and Lara Vapnyar dealt impressively with the experience of immigrants in the United States.

Novels such as N. Scott Momaday�s House Made of Dawn, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, James Welch�s Winter in the Blood (1974) and Fools Crow (1986), Leslie Marmon Silko�s Ceremony (1977), and Louise Erdrich�s Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), and The Antelope Wife (1998) were powerful and ambiguous explorations of Native American history and identity. Mexican Americans were represented by works such as Rudolfo A. Anaya�s Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Richard Rodriguez�s autobiographical Hunger of Memory (1981), and Sandra Cisneros�s The House on Mango Street (1983) and her collection Woman Hollering Creek, and Other Stories (1991).

Some of the best immigrant writers, while thoroughly assimilated, nonetheless had a subtle understanding of both the old and the new culture. These included the Cuban American writers Oscar Hijuelos (The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love [1989]) and Cristina Garcia (Dreaming in Cuban [1992] and The Ag�ero Sisters [1997]); the Antigua-born Jamaica Kincaid, author of Annie John (1984), Lucy (1990), the AIDS memoir My Brother (1997), and See Now Then (2013); the Dominican-born Junot D�az, who won acclaim for Drown (1996), a collection of stories, and whose novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) won a Pulitzer Prize; and the Bosnian immigrant Aleksandar Hemon, who wrote The Question of Bruno (2000) and Nowhere Man (2002). Chinese Americans found an extraordinary voice in Maxine Hong Kingston�s The Woman Warrior (1976) and China Men (1980), which blended old Chinese lore with fascinating family history. Her first novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), was set in the bohemian world of the San Francisco Bay area during the 1960s. Other important Asian American writers included Gish Jen, whose Typical American (1991) dealt with immigrant striving and frustration; the Korean American Chang-rae Lee, who focused on family life, political awakening, and generational differences in Native Speaker (1995) and A Gesture Life (1999); and Ha Jin, whose Waiting (1999; National Book Award), set in rural China during and after the Cultural Revolution, was a powerful tale of timidity, repression, and botched love, contrasting the mores of the old China and the new. Bharati Mukherjee beautifully explored contrasting lives in India and North America in The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), Jasmine (1989), Desirable Daughters (2002), and The Tree Bride (2004). While many multicultural works were merely representative of their cultural milieu, books such as these made remarkable contributions to a changing American literature.

Kincaid, JamaicaJamaica Kincaid, 1999.MDCarchives

During the 1990s some of the best energies of fiction writers went into autobiography, in works such as Mary Karr�s The Liar�s Club (1995), about growing up in a loving but dysfunctional family on the Texas Gulf Coast; Frank McCourt�s Angela�s Ashes (1996), a vivid portrayal of a Dickensian childhood amid the grinding conditions of Irish slum life; Anne Roiphe�s bittersweet recollections of her rich but cold-hearted parents and her brother�s death from AIDS in 1185 Park Avenue (1999); and Dave Eggers�s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), a painful but comic tour de force, half tongue-in-cheek, about a young man raising his brother after the death of their parents.

Dave Eggers, 2006.Davide Lanzilao�Contrasto/Redux

The memoir vogue did not prevent writers from publishing huge, ambitious novels, including David Foster Wallace�s Infinite Jest (1996), an encyclopaedic mixture of arcane lore, social fiction, and postmodern irony; Jonathan Franzen�s The Corrections (2001, National Book Award) and Freedom (2010), both family portraits; and Don DeLillo�s Underworld (1997), a brooding, resonant, oblique account of the Cold War era as seen through the eyes of both fictional characters and historical figures. All three novels testify to a belated convergence of Social Realism and Pynchonesque invention. Pynchon himself returned to form with sprawling, picaresque historical novels: Mason & Dixon (1997), about two famous 18th-century surveyors who explored and mapped the American colonies, and Against the Day (2006), set at the turn of the 20th century. Poetry

The post-World War II years produced an abundance of strong poetry but no individual poet as dominant and accomplished as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, or William Carlos Williams, whose long careers were coming to an end. The major poetry from 1945 to 1960 was Modernist in its ironic texture yet formal in its insistence on regular rhyme and metre. Beginning in the late 1950s, however, there were a variety of poets and schools who rebelled against these constraints and experimented with more-open forms and more-colloquial styles. Formal poets

The leading figure of the late 1940s was Robert Lowell, who, influenced by Eliot and such Metaphysical poets as John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins, explored his spiritual torments and family history in Lord Weary�s Castle (1946). Other impressive formal poets included Theodore Roethke, who, influenced by William Butler Yeats, revealed a genius for ironic lyricism and a profound empathy for the processes of nature in The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948); the masterfully elegant Richard Wilbur (Things of This World [1956]); two war poets, Karl Shapiro (V-Letter and Other Poems [1944]) and Randall Jarrell (Losses [1948]); and a group of young poets influenced by W.H. Auden, including James Merrill, W.S. Merwin, James Wright, Adrienne Rich, and John Hollander. Although they displayed brilliant technical skill, they lacked Auden�s strong personal voice. Experimentation and Beat poetry

By the mid-1950s, however, a strong reaction had developed. Poets began to turn away from Eliot and Metaphysical poetry to more-romantic or more-prosaic models such as Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, and D.H. Lawrence. A group of poets associated with Black Mountain College in western North Carolina, including Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Edward Dorn, and Denise Levertov, treated the poem as an unfolding process rather than a containing form. Olson�s Maximus Poems (1953�68) showed a clear affinity with the jagged line and uneven flow of Pound�s Cantos and Williams�s Paterson. Allen Ginsberg�s incantatory, prophetic �Howl� (1956) and his moving elegy for his mother, �Kaddish� (1961), gave powerful impetus to the Beat movement. Written with extraordinary intensity, these works were inspired by writers as diverse as Whitman, the biblical prophets, and English poets William Blake and Christopher Smart, as well as by the dream-logic of the French Surrealists and the spontaneous jazz aesthetic of Ginsberg�s friend the novelist Jack Kerouac. Other Beat poets included Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder, a student of Eastern religion who, in Turtle Island (1974), continued the American tradition of nature poetry.

The openness of Beat poetry and the prosaic directness of Williams encouraged Lowell to develop a new autobiographical style in the laconic poetry and prose of Life Studies (1959) and For the Union Dead (1964). Lowell�s new work influenced nearly all American poets but especially a group of �confessional� writers, including Anne Sexton in To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) and All My Pretty Ones (1962) and Sylvia Plath in the posthumously published Ariel (1965). In her poetry Plath joined an icy sarcasm to white-hot emotional intensity. Another poet influenced by Lowell was John Berryman, whose Dream Songs (1964, 1968) combined autobiographical fragments with minstrel-show motifs to create a zany style of self-projection and comic-tragic lament. Deeply troubled figures, Sexton, Plath, and Berryman all took their own lives. Lowell�s influence can still be discerned in the elegant quatrains and casually brutal details of Frederick Seidel�s Life on Earth (2001), as in the crisp elegiac poems of his award-winning Sunrise (1980). �Deep image� poets

Through his personal charisma and his magazine The Fifties (later The Sixties and The Seventies), Robert Bly encouraged a number of poets to shift their work toward the individual voice and open form; they included Galway Kinnell, James Wright, David Ignatow, and, less directly, Louis Simpson, James Dickey, and Donald Hall. Sometimes called the �deep image� poets, Bly and his friends sought spiritual intensity and transcendence of the self rather than confessional immediacy. Their work was influenced by the poetry of Spanish and Latin American writers such as Federico Garc�a Lorca, Juan Ram�n Jim�nez, C�sar Vallejo, and Pablo Neruda, especially their surreal association of images, as well as by the �greenhouse poems� (1946�48) and the later meditative poetry of Roethke, with their deep feeling for nature as a vehicle of spiritual transformation. Yet, like their Hispanic models, they were also political poets, instrumental in organizing protest and writing poems against the Vietnam War. Kinnell was a Lawrentian poet who, in poems such as �The Porcupine� and �The Bear,� gave the brutality of nature the power of myth. His vatic sequence, The Book of Nightmares (1971), and the quieter poems in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980) are among the most rhetorically effective works in contemporary poetry. New directions

James Wright�s style changed dramatically in the early 1960s. He abandoned his stiffly formal verse for the stripped-down, meditative lyricism of The Branch Will Not Break (1963) and Shall We Gather at the River (1968), which were more dependent on the emotional tenor of image than on metre, poetic diction, or rhyme. In books such as Figures of the Human (1964) and Rescue the Dead (1968), David Ignatow wrote brief but razor-sharp poems that made their effect through swiftness, deceptive simplicity, paradox, and personal immediacy. Another poet whose work ran the gamut from prosaic simplicity to Emersonian transcendence was A.R. Ammons. His short poems in Briefings (1971) were close to autobiographical jottings, small glimpses, and observations, but, like his longer poems, they turned the natural world into a source of vision. Like Ignatow, he made it a virtue to seem unliterary and found illumination in the pedestrian and the ordinary.

Both daily life and an exposure to French Surrealism helped inspire a group of New York poets, among them Frank O�Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and John Ashbery. Whether O�Hara was jotting down a sequence of ordinary moments or paying tribute to film stars, his poems had a breathless immediacy that was distinctive and unique. Koch�s comic voice swung effortlessly from the trivial to the fantastic. Strongly influenced by Wallace Stevens, Ashbery�s ruminative poems can seem random, discursive, and enigmatic. Avoiding poetic colour, they do their work by suggestion and association, exploring the interface between experience and perception.

Other impressive poets of the postwar years included Elizabeth Bishop, whose precise, loving attention to objects was reminiscent of her early mentor, Marianne Moore. Though she avoided the confessional mode of her friend Lowell, her sense of place, her heartbreaking decorum, and her keen powers of observation gave her work a strong personal cast. In The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), James Merrill, previously a polished lyric poet, made his mandarin style the vehicle of a lighthearted personal epic, in which he, with the help of a Ouija board, called up the shades of all his dead friends, including the poet Auden. In a prolific career highlighted by such poems as Reflections on Espionage (1976), �Blue Wine� (1979), and Powers of Thirteen (1983), John Hollander, like Merrill, displayed enormous technical virtuosity. Richard Howard imagined witty monologues and dialogues for famous people of the past in poems collected in Untitled Subjects (1969) and Two-Part Inventions (1974). Autobiographical approaches

With the autobiographical knots and parables of Reasons for Moving (1968) and Darker (1970), Mark Strand�s paradoxical language achieved a resonant simplicity. He enhanced his reputation with Dark Harbor (1993) and Blizzard of One (1998). Other strongly autobiographical poets working with subtle technique and intelligence in a variety of forms included Philip Levine, Charles Simic, Robert Pinsky, Gerald Stern, Louise Gl�ck, and Sharon Olds. Levine�s background in working-class Detroit gave his work a unique cast, while Gl�ck and Olds brought a terrific emotional intensity to their poems. Pinsky�s poems were collected in The Figured Wheel (1996). He became a tireless and effective advocate for poetry during his tenure as poet laureate from 1997 to 2000. With the sinuous sentences and long flowing lines of Tar (1983) and Flesh and Blood (1987), C.K. Williams perfected a narrative technique founded on distinctive voice, sharply etched emotion, and cleanly observed detail. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Repair (2000). Adrienne Rich�s work gained a burning immediacy from her lesbian feminism. The Will to Change (1971) and Diving into the Wreck (1973) were turning points for women�s poetry in the wake of the 1960s.

Rich, AdrienneAdrienne Rich, 1980.K. Kendall

That decade also enabled some older poets to become more loosely autobiographical and freshly imaginative, among them Stanley Kunitz, Robert Penn Warren, and W.S. Merwin. The 1960s invigorated gifted black poets such as Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Michael S. Harper. It formed the background for the work of the young poets of the 1980s, such as Edward Hirsch, Alan Shapiro, Jorie Graham, Cathy Song, and Rita Dove, whose sequence about her grandparents, Thomas and Beulah, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. Graham�s increasingly abstract and elusive work culminated in The Dream of the Unified Field (1995), selected from five previous volumes. The AIDS crisis inspired My Alexandria (1993) by Mark Doty, The Man with Night Sweats (1992) by Thom Gunn, and a superb memoir, Borrowed Time (1988), and a cycle of poems, Love Alone (1988), by the poet Paul Monette. With razor-sharp images and finely honed descriptive touches, Louisiana-born Yusef Komunyakaa emerged as an impressive African American voice in the 1990s. He wrote about his time as a soldier and war correspondent in Vietnam in Dien Cai Dau (1988) and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his volume of new and selected poems Neon Vernacular (1993). His poems were collected in Pleasure Dome (2001). Billy Collins found a huge audience for his engagingly witty and conversational poetry, especially that collected in Sailing Alone Around the Room (2001), published the year he became poet laureate.

Rita Dove in front of Thomas Jefferson's home, Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia, 1993.Eduardo Montes-BradleyDramaMiller, Williams, and Albee

Two post-World War II playwrights established reputations comparable to Eugene O�Neill�s. Arthur Miller wrote eloquent essays defending his modern, democratic concept of tragedy; despite its abstract, allegorical quality and portentous language, Death of a Salesman" class="md-crosslink">Death of a Salesman (1949) came close to vindicating his views. Miller�s intense family dramas were rooted in the problem dramas of Henrik Ibsen and the works of the socially conscious ethnic dramatists of the 1930s, especially Clifford Odets, but Miller gave them a metaphysical turn. From All My Sons" class="md-crosslink">All My Sons (1947) to The Price (1968), his work was at its strongest when he dealt with father-son relationships, anchored in the harsh realities of the Great Depression. Yet Miller could also be an effective protest writer, as in The Crucible" class="md-crosslink">The Crucible (1953), which used the Salem witch trials to attack the witch-hunting of the McCarthy era.

Though his work was uneven, Tennessee Williams at his best was a more powerful and effective playwright than Miller. Creating stellar roles for actors, especially women, Williams brought a passionate lyricism and a tragic Southern vision to such plays as The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). He empathized with his characters� dreams and illusions and with the frustrations and defeats of their lives, and he wrote about his own dreams and disappointments in his beautifully etched short fiction, from which his plays were often adapted.

Tennessee Williams.Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

Miller and Williams dominated the post-World War II theatre until the 1960s, and few other playwrights emerged to challenge them. Then, in 1962, Edward Albee�s reputation, based on short plays such as The Zoo Story (1959) and The American Dream (1960), was secured by the stunning power of Who�s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? A master of absurdist theatre who assimilated the influence of European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett and Eug�ne Ionesco, Albee established himself as a major figure in American drama. His reputation with critics and audiences, however, began to decline with enigmatic plays such as Tiny Alice (1964) and A Delicate Balance (1966), but, like O�Neill, he eventually returned to favour with a complex autobiographical drama, Three Tall Women (1994). The Off-Broadway ascendancy

The centre of American drama shifted from Broadway to Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway with works such as Jack Gelber�s The Connection (1959). American playwrights, collaborating with the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, and other adventurous new companies, were increasingly free to write radical and innovative plays. David Rabe�s The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971) and Sticks and Bones (1972) satirized America�s militaristic nationalism and cultural shallowness. David Mamet won a New York Drama Critics� Circle Award for American Buffalo" class="md-crosslink">American Buffalo (1976). In plays such as Glengarry Glen Ross" class="md-crosslink">Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), he showed brilliantly how men reveal their hopes and frustrations obliquely, through their language, and in Oleanna (1992) he fired a major salvo in the gender wars over sexual harassment.

Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Ed Bullins inspired an angry black nationalist theatre. Baraka�s Dutchman and The Slave (1964) effectively dramatized racial confrontation, while Bullins�s In the Wine Time (1968) made use of �street� lyricism. Maria Irene Forn�s�s Fefu and Her Friends (1977) proved remarkable in its exploration of women�s relationships. A clear indication of Off-Broadway�s ascendancy in American drama came in 1979 when Sam Shepard, a prolific and experimental playwright, won the Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child. Shepard�s earlier work, such as The Tooth of Crime (1972), was rooted both in the rock scene and counterculture of the 1960s and in the mythic world of the American West. He reached his peak with a series of offbeat dramas dealing with fierce family conflict, including Curse of the Starving Class (1976), True West (1980), Fool for Love (1983), and A Lie of the Mind (1986).

Amiri Baraka.AP/REX/Shutterstock.com

Other important new voices in American drama were the prolific Lanford Wilson, Pulitzer winner for Talley�s Folly (1979); John Guare, who created serious farce in The House of Blue Leaves (1971) and fresh social drama in Six Degrees of Separation (1990); and Ntozake Shange, whose �choreopoem� For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf moved to Broadway in 1976. Other well-received women playwrights included Marsha Norman, Beth Henley, Tina Howe, and Wendy Wasserstein. In a series of plays that included Ma Rainey�s Black Bottom" class="md-crosslink">Ma Rainey�s Black Bottom (1984), Fences" class="md-crosslink">Fences (1987), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and Joe Turner�s Come and Gone" class="md-crosslink">Joe Turner�s Come and Gone (1986), August Wilson emerged as the most powerful black playwright of the 1980s. Devoting each play to a different decade of life in the 20th century, he won a second Pulitzer Prize, for The Piano Lesson (1990), and completed the 10-play cycle in 2005, shortly before his death.

The anguish of the AIDS epidemic proved a dark inspiration to many gay playwrights, especially Tony Kushner, who had gained attention with A Bright Room Called Day (1991), set in Germany in 1932�33; he won Broadway fame with his epically ambitious two-part drama Angels in America (1991�92), which combined comedy with pain, symbolism with personal history, and invented characters with historical ones. A committed political writer, Kushner often focused on public themes. His later plays included Slavs! (1996) and the timely Homebody/Kabul (2001), a brilliant monologue followed by a drama set in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. After writing several Off-Broadway plays about Chinese Americans, David Henry Hwang achieved critical and commercial success on Broadway with his gender-bending drama M. Butterfly (1988). Richard Nelson found an enthusiastic following in London for literate plays such as Some Americans Abroad (1989) and Two Shakespearean Actors (1990), while Richard Greenberg depicted Jewish American life and both gay and straight relationships in Eastern Standard (1989), The American Plan (1990), and Take Me Out (2002), the last about a gay baseball player who reveals his homosexuality to his teammates. Donald Margulies dealt more directly with Jewish family life in The Loman Family Picnic (1989). He also explored the ambitions and relationships of artists in such plays as Sight Unseen (1992) and Collected Stories (1998).

David Henry Hwang, 2008. Lia Chang

The 1990s also saw the emergence of several talented women playwrights. Paula Vogel repeatedly focused on hot-button moral issues with humour and compassion, dealing with prostitution in The Oldest Profession (1981), AIDS in The Baltimore Waltz (1992), pornography in Hot �n� Throbbing (1994), and the sexual abuse of minors in How I Learned to Drive (1997). A young African American playwright, Suzan-Lori Parks, gained increasing recognition with her surreal pageant The America Play (1993), an adaptation of The Scarlet Letter called In the Blood (1999), and Topdog/Underdog (2001), a partly symbolic tale of conflict between two brothers (named Lincoln and Booth) that reminded critics of Sam Shepard�s fratricidal True West. She later adapted George and Ira Gershwin�s Porgy and Bess in 2012, and her Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3), produced in 2014, placed Homer�s Odyssey in the context of the American Civil War. Other well-received works included Heather McDonald�s An Almost Holy Picture (1995), a one-man play about the spiritual life of a preacher; poet Naomi Wallace�s One Flea Spare (1995), set in London during the Great Plague of 1665; and Margaret Edson�s Wit (1995), about the slow, poignant cancer death of a literary scholar whose life has been shaped by the eloquence and wit of Metaphysical poetry.

Parks, Suzan-LoriSuzan-Lori Parks, 2006.Eric SchwabelLiterary and social criticism

Until his death in 1972, Edmund Wilson solidified his reputation as one of America�s most versatile and distinguished men of letters. The novelist John Updike inherited Wilson�s chair at The New Yorker and turned out an extraordinary flow of critical reviews collected in volumes such as Hugging the Shore (1983) and Odd Jobs (1991). Gore Vidal brought together his briskly readable essays of four decades�critical, personal, and political�in United States (1993). Susan Sontag�s essays on difficult European writers, avant-garde film, politics, photography, and the language of illness embodied the probing intellectual spirit of the 1960s. In A Second Flowering (1973) and The Dream of the Golden Mountains (1980), Malcolm Cowley looked back at the writers between the world wars who had always engaged him. Alfred Kazin wrote literary history (An American Procession [1984], God and the American Writer [1997]) and autobiography (Starting Out in the Thirties [1965], New York Jew [1978]), while Irving Howe produced studies at the crossroads of literature and politics, such as Politics and the Novel (1957), as well as a major history of Jewish immigrants in New York, World of Our Fathers (1976). The iconoclastic literary criticism of Leslie Fiedler, as, for example, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), was marked by its provocative application of Freudian ideas to American literature. In his later work he turned to popular culture as a source of revealing social and psychological patterns. A more-subtle Freudian, Lionel Trilling, in The Liberal Imagination (1950) and other works, rejected Vernon L. Parrington�s populist concept of literature as social reportage and insisted on the ability of literature to explore problematic human complexity. His criticism reflected the inward turn from politics toward �moral realism� that coincided with the Cold War. But the cultural and political conflicts of the 1960s revived the social approach among younger students of American literature, such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who emerged in the 1980s as a major critic, theorist, and editor of black writers in studies such as Figures in Black (1987) and The Signifying Monkey (1988). In the 1990s Gates evolved into a wide-ranging essayist, along with Cornel West, Stanley Crouch, bell hooks, Shelby Steele, Stephen Carter, Gerald Early, Michele Wallace, and other black social critics.

Edmund Wilson.Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.Literary biography and the �new journalism�

The waning of the New Criticism, with its strict emphasis on the text, led not only to a surge of historical criticism and cultural theory but also to a flowering of literary biography. Major works included Leon Edel�s five-volume study of Henry James (1953�72), Mark Schorer�s Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (1961), Richard Ellmann�s studies of James Joyce (1959) and Oscar Wilde (1988), R.W.B. Lewis�s revealing biography of Edith Wharton (1975), Joseph Frank�s five-volume biography of Dostoyevsky (1976�2002), Paul Zweig�s brilliant study of Walt Whitman (1984), and Carol Brightman�s exhaustive life of Mary McCarthy (1992).

One positive result of the accelerating complexity of post-World War II life was a body of distinguished journalism and social commentary. John Hersey�s Hiroshima (1946) was a deliberately controlled, unemotional account of atomic holocaust. In Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), and The Fire Next Time (1963), the novelist James Baldwin published a body of the most eloquent essays written in the United States. Ralph Ellison�s essays on race and culture in Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986) were immensely influential. Norman Mailer�s �new journalism� proved especially effective in capturing the drama of political conventions and large protest demonstrations. The novelist Joan Didion published two collections of incisive social and literary commentary, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979). The title essay of the first collection was an honest investigation of the forces that gave colour and significance to the counterculture of the 1960s, a subject also explored with stylistic flourish by journalists as different as Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. The surreal atmosphere of the Vietnam War, infused with rock music and drugs, gave impetus to subjective journalism such as Michael Herr�s Dispatches (1977). The mood of the period also encouraged strong works of autobiography, such as Frank Conroy�s Stop-Time (1967) and Lillian Hellman�s personal and political memoirs, including An Unfinished Woman (1969) and Scoundrel Time (1976). Robert M. Pirsig�s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) defied all classification. Pirsig equated the emotional collapse of his central character with the disintegration of American workmanship and cultural values.

Didion, JoanJoan Didion, 2008.David ShankboneTheory

The major New Critics and New York critics were followed by major but difficult academic critics, who preferred theory to close reading. European structuralism found little echo in the United States, but poststructuralist theorists such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida found a welcome in the less-political atmosphere, marked by skepticism and defeat, that followed the 1960s. Four Yale professors joined Derrida to publish a group of essays, Deconstruction and Criticism (1979). Two of the contributors, Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller, became leading exponents of deconstruction in the United States. The other two, Harold Bloom and Geoffrey H. Hartman, were more interested in the problematic relation of poets to their predecessors and to their own language. Bloom was especially concerned with the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson on modern American poets. After developing a Freudian theory of literary influence in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and A Map of Misreading (1975), Bloom reached a wide audience with The Western Canon (1994) and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), both of which explored and defended the Western literary tradition.

Philosophers Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell and critic Richard Poirier found a native parallel to European theory in the philosophy of Emerson and the writings of pragmatists such as William James and John Dewey. Emulating Dewey and Irving Howe, Rorty emerged as a social critic in Achieving Our Country (1998) and Philosophy and Social Hope (1999). Other academic critics also took a more-political turn. Stephen Greenblatt�s work on Shakespeare and other Elizabethan writers and Edward Said�s essays in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983) were influential in reviving historical approaches to literature that had long been neglected. Said�s Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993) directed attention to the effects of colonialism on the arts and society. His essays were collected in Reflections on Exile (2000). Other critics deflected this historical approach into the field of cultural studies, which erased the lines between �high� (elite) and �low� (popular) culture and often subsumed discussion of the arts to questions of ideology. Meanwhile, a wide range of feminist critics, beginning with Kate Millett, Ellen Moers, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Elaine Showalter, gave direction to new gender-based approaches to past and present writers. Critics who came to be known as queer theorists, such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, produced innovative work on texts dealing with homosexuality, both overt and implicit.

All these methods yielded new dimensions of critical understanding, but in less-adept hands they became so riddled with jargon or so intensely political and ideological that they lost touch with the general reader, with common sense itself, and with any tradition of accessible criticism. This drew the ire of both conservatives, such as Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind (1987), and writers on the left, such as Russell Jacoby in The Last Intellectuals (1987) and Dogmatic Wisdom (1994). Reactions against theory-based criticism set in during the 1990s not only with attacks on �political correctness� but also with a return to more informal and essayistic forms of criticism that emphasized the role of the public intellectual and the need to reach a wider general audience. There was a revival of interest in literary journalism. Both older critics, such as Frank Lentricchia in The Edge of Night (1994) and Said in Out of Place (1999), and younger critics, including Alice Kaplan in French Lessons (1993), turned toward autobiography as a way of situating their own intellectual outlook and infusing personal expression into their work. James R. Giles Morris Dickstein The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica