Postwar Fiction, 1945–1975

This is Unit Sixteen of American Literature, part one of two: the fiction of the exam's largest period, which is the twenty-five percent from nineteen forty-five to now. Unit fifteen closed on writers who no longer trusted the words they inherited. This unit's writers inherit that distrust and add a new problem, which is the governing idea part two pays off: a self that cannot find its place inside a system it did not build. The material conditions were new. The witness records thousands of returning soldiers entering college for the first time on the GI Bill, many of them in creative writing classes, while Iowa and Stanford piloted the first graduate writing programmes, and prosperity moved readers into suburbs with a house, a car and a television. The writing changed with it: postwar writers are described as highly innovative and self-aware, finding traditional modes ineffective and borrowing from comics, movies, songs and oral history, so that where elite culture had shaped popular culture the traffic now ran the other way. We take the conditions, then Ellison, then Baldwin, then the Southern writers, then Salinger and the novelists of Jewish-American life. By the end you will be able to say what changed and who was reading. To account for *Invisible Man* and its title. To place Baldwin as an essayist first. To describe O'Connor's method. And to place Salinger, Bellow, Malamud and Roth.

Two entries on the conditions: a reversal between elite and popular culture, and the institutions that made a new reading public.

The traffic reversed between high and popular.

AML 1501 What Changed in American Fiction After 1945

The witness describes postwar writers as highly innovative and self-aware, finding traditional modes ineffective and borrowing from comics, movies, songs and oral history. Where elite culture had shaped popular culture, the witness says the reverse now held, and that the context of vision itself had to be remade. Borrowing from popular material is not triviality.

Soldiers into classrooms, families into suburbs.

AML 1502 The GI Bill, the Suburb, and the Reader

The witness records thousands of returning soldiers entering college for the first time on the GI Bill, many of them enrolling in creative writing classes, while Iowa and Stanford piloted the first graduate writing programmes. Prosperity moved readers to suburbs with a house, a car and a television. The writing programme is a postwar institution.

Three entries on the period's great first novel: one book, its three famous episodes, and a title that states its own argument.

One novel, and a lifetime after.

AML 1503 Ralph Ellison and *Invisible Man*

Ellison was born in Oklahoma City, named for Ralph Waldo Emerson, studied music at Tuskegee and read the modernists. His nineteen fifty-two novel won the National Book Award and was the only novel he published in his lifetime, though he worked on a successor for decades. A house fire consumed the second book's drafts.

A cellar, a humiliation, a college.

AML 1504 The Prologue, the Battle Royal, the Campus

The unnamed narrator lives underground in a cellar lit by electricity stolen from a utility company. "Battle Royal", the opening chapter, has him humiliated while accepting a scholarship from a local civic organization, and at the all-black college he sees the president turning away from Black concerns. The narrator is never given a name.

Invisible because others will not look.

AML 1505 Invisibility as the Book's Argument

The witness states the point exactly: the invisible man is invisible not in himself but because others, blinded by prejudice, cannot see him for who he is. The novel indicts a society for failing to give its citizens, Black and white, workable ideals and the institutions to reach them. The blindness belongs to the viewers.

Five entries on Baldwin: a preacher's cadence carried into essays, a story about two brothers, and the older writer who helped him.

A preacher's cadence, in prose.

AML 1506 James Baldwin: Essayist First

Baldwin was the eldest of nine children in Harlem and preached in his stepfather's church at fourteen, and the witness credits that experience for the oral quality of his prose. He is read first as an essayist, and the anchor treats the essays as his most characteristic achievement. The novels came after the essay voice.

A funeral, a birth, and a riot.

AML 1507 *Notes of a Native Son*

The nineteen fifty-five collection takes its occasion from his stepfather's death in nineteen forty-three, buried on Baldwin's nineteenth birthday, which was also the day his youngest brother was born and the day of the Harlem riot. The book made his reputation as an essayist. Two of this course's sources print the title with the wrong preposition.

The hidden trouble is the narrator's.

AML 1508 "Sonny's Blues"

Two brothers, one a mathematics teacher and one a musician recently out of jail, barely know each other. The anchor notes that Sonny's troubles are explicit while the narrator's are implicit, so the story's real movement is the teacher's slow admission of his own. The teacher is the story's subject as much as Sonny is.

A storefront church, then an argument.

AML 1509 *Go Tell It on the Mountain* and *The Fire Next Time*

His first novel of nineteen fifty-three follows a fourteen-year-old boy seeking self-knowledge and faith in a storefront church, and the witness calls it his best known. *The Fire Next Time*, of nineteen sixty-three, argued for an end to separation between the races and made him internationally famous. The novel is closely autobiographical.

A hero, a fellowship, a departure.

AML 1510 Baldwin and Wright: Mentor and Exile

The witnesses call Wright Baldwin's literary hero, record that Wright helped him win the Eugene Saxton fellowship in nineteen forty-five, and note that Baldwin followed Wright and other expatriates to Paris in nineteen forty-eight, disillusioned as a Black gay man in America. These sources carry the help rather than any later break.

Seven entries on the South: violent comedy with a theology behind it, and two writers grouped beside her.

A farm, a disease, violent comedy.

AML 1511 Flannery O'Connor and the Southern Grotesque

O'Connor was born in Savannah, raised Catholic, trained at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and returned to the family farm in Milledgeville after a lupus diagnosis in nineteen fifty-one. Her fiction is known for Southern gothic settings, dark humour, and violence arising out of superstition, religion or prejudice. She died of lupus at thirty-nine.

A family, a wrong road, a killer.

AML 1512 "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"

The anchor calls it her most anthologized and one of her most violent stories. A family of six on holiday to Florida meets an escaped killer the story names the Misfit, and the encounter ends the family. The collection of the same title appeared in nineteen fifty-five, and the comedy runs right up to the violence.

A killer with a theological objection.

AML 1513 The Misfit and the Question of Belief

The anchor describes the Misfit as pensive yet troubled, and states that his trouble centres on Christ's claim to have raised the dead. That makes the story's argument theological rather than psychological: the killer has thought about belief and settled the question the wrong way. His reason is stated in the text rather than implied.

A stolen leg, and a posthumous book.

AML 1514 "Good Country People" and the Later Collection

In "Good Country People", of nineteen fifty-five, a girl is seduced by a man who steals her artificial leg. *Everything That Rises Must Converge* is the second collection, published in nineteen sixty-five after her death, and *The Violent Bear It Away* is the novel of nineteen sixty. The second collection appeared after she had died.

Belief, delivered without sympathy.

AML 1515 O'Connor's Catholicism and Her Method

The anchor names her orthodox Catholicism among her recurring themes, and the witness observes that unlike Porter, Welty and Hurston she held her characters at arm's length, showing their inadequacy and silliness. The belief and the coldness of the handling are the same method, and the distance is deliberate.

Violence in the stories, warmth in the wit.

AML 1516 Eudora Welty and "A Worn Path"

Welty was guided by Robert Penn Warren and Katherine Anne Porter, who introduced her first collection, and the witness calls her wit humane and affirmative despite the violence in her work. She won back-to-back O. Henry awards, one of them for "A Worn Path". She is grouped with O'Connor rather than being identical to her.

A first novel at twenty-three.

AML 1517 Carson McCullers and *The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter*

The witness calls McCullers the literary wunderkind of the second wave of the Southern renaissance, who arrived in the national spotlight at twenty-three with her first novel, *The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter*, in nineteen forty. Her subject is isolation inside a community. Wunderkind is the witness's own word for her.

Nine entries: a boy who walks out of a boarding school, a writer who stopped publishing, and three novelists of Jewish-American life.

A boy leaves school, finds phoniness.

AML 1518 J. D. Salinger and *The Catcher in the Rye*

The nineteen fifty-one novel follows a sensitive sixteen-year-old, Holden Caulfield, who leaves his elite boarding school for the adult world and is disillusioned by its materialism and phoniness. The witness calls Salinger a harbinger of the dropping out that defined the following decade. The book anticipates the nineteen sixties.

A cliff, a field, a catcher.

AML 1519 Holden Caulfield and the Title

Asked what he would like to be, Caulfield answers the catcher in the rye, misquoting a poem by Robert Burns. He imagines himself at the edge of a cliff, catching children before they go over, and the fall is the loss of childhood innocence. The phrase that gives the book its title is a misquotation.

Three books, and then nothing.

AML 1520 Salinger's Later Books and His Silence

*Nine Stories* appeared in nineteen fifty-three, *Franny and Zooey* in nineteen sixty-one, and *Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters* in nineteen sixty-three, a gathering of magazine stories. The witness records that after one story in nineteen sixty-five he was absent from the literary scene. The withdrawal is part of his public story.

An urban Huck Finn with a voice.

AML 1521 Saul Bellow and *The Adventures of Augie March*

Bellow was born in Canada, raised in Chicago, of Russian-Jewish background, and studied anthropology and sociology. The witness describes the nineteen fifty-three novel as the study of an urban entrepreneur like Huckleberry Finn who becomes a black marketeer in Europe, told by an energetic first-person narrator. The earliest novels are grimmer than this one.

A professor, a failure, a Nobel.

AML 1522 *Herzog*, *Seize the Day*, and the Nobel

*Herzog*, of nineteen sixty-four, follows a neurotic English professor who specializes in the romantic self. *Seize the Day* centres on Tommy Wilhelm, a failed businessman the witness calls a schlemiel of Jewish folklore. Bellow received the Nobel Prize for Literature in nineteen seventy-six. Wilhelm loses everything in the commodities market.

Survival against odds, and an ethic.

AML 1523 Bernard Malamud and *The Assistant*

Malamud was born in New York to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, and the witness says he found his characteristic themes in his second novel of nineteen fifty-seven: a man's struggle to survive against all odds, and the ethical underpinnings of recent Jewish immigrants. *The Fixer* won him the Pulitzer, and *The Natural* mixes realism with fantasy.

A first book that satirized his own.

AML 1524 Philip Roth and *Goodbye, Columbus*

Roth's first book, of nineteen fifty-nine, is a set of stories the witness says satirized provincial Jewish suburbanites, and it arrived in the waning days of the decade carrying a certain alienation from his own heritage. Controversy over his treatment of Jewish life followed him for fifty years, and it began with this book.

A patient talking, an analyst silent.

AML 1525 *Portnoy's Complaint* and Alexander Portnoy

In the nineteen sixty-nine best-seller, a New York City administrator named Alexander Portnoy tells a silent psychoanalyst off-colour stories of his boyhood. The witness calls it outrageous, and it is the novel most often used to identify Roth on an examination. The whole book is one side of a session.

An alter ego who took the shelf.

AML 1526 Roth's Later Novels and *The Human Stain*

Roth invented an alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, who narrates a long run of novels beginning with *The Ghost Writer*. *American Pastoral*, of nineteen ninety-seven, has a daughter's radicalism wound a father, and *The Human Stain*, of two thousand, ruins a professor over a misheard word. Some readers find the work self-absorbed.

That is half the period. Part two takes the suburb, the Beats, the absurd war and the postmodernists. You can say what changed after the war, a reversal in which popular culture began shaping the elite, and name the institutions that made a new reading public: the GI Bill, the first graduate writing programmes, and a suburb with a house and a car and a television. You can account for a novel whose narrator is never named, who lives in a cellar lit by stolen electricity, and whose invisibility belongs to the people refusing to see him. You can place Baldwin as an essayist before a novelist, carrying a preacher's cadence, and describe the help Wright gave him and the exile they shared. You can describe O'Connor's violent comedy with an orthodox Catholicism behind it and a killer whose objection is theological, with Welty and McCullers beside her. And you can place a boy misquoting Burns, a writer who stopped publishing, and three novelists of Jewish-American life.