Topic Clusters

American Prose and Drama since 1945:
The Atomic Age to the Information Age

In the years after the defeat of Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire, a dizzying affluence spread through the United States, while a tense, protracted, and dangerous global Cold War against the Soviet empire and Maoist China took shape. The competition with the Soviets gave an added boost to the technological and scientific revolution; and American universities expanded immensely as centers for defense research, for the education of a vast new public, and as employers of creative writers and as arbiters of taste.

The postwar GI Bill sent millions of ex-soldiers to college—often to campuses that had never before been available to students of their means and ethnicity. The literary world of the early 1950s was energized by a confident and diverse new generation. As a result, the authors in Volume E of NAAL represent an unprecedented variety of national origins and social backgrounds. African Americans, Irish Americans, Polish Americans, Jews from Eastern Europe, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanic Americans gained large audiences and won prestigious literary prizes. As the doors of higher education opened up, the population of the United States grew. In 1960 it reached about 165 million; by 1980 it was 200 million; and by 1995 it was more than 240 million. This rapid growth meant tens of millions more readers—and colleges and universities began to encourage the reading of writers and literary movements outside of “the canon” that had been established decades before. Political and civil rights movements promoted stronger awareness of minority identity and voices.

Amid this unprecedented opportunity, however, American writers faced new and complex challenges with regard to originality, authenticity, and social worth. The interstate highways that spread across the continent in the late 1960s, the electronic media that by the mid-1950s could bounce television and radio signals from coast to coast, brought on waves of consolidation and conformity in popular and literary culture: the same TV shows, music, food, consumer goods, and housing. With ease and abundance and fast communications came an erosion of regional differences, an amalgamated culture that many artists saw as a threat.

As the automated and incorporated American book publishing industry churned out 100 new titles every day; as bookstores grew as big as old-time department stores, or deliquesced into the vastness of the World Wide Web, and as the attention of young and old shifted inexorably from the printed page to the video and the stereo, American literary culture found itself lost in a wilderness. New questions influenced the writing of novels, poems, plays, and essays; they transformed the teaching of American literature courses, and even the creation and reading of literary anthologies:

• With all this diversity and rapid change, can we still conceive of American literature as a coherent body of imaginative work?
  
• What valid relationships and continuities can we observe among the new voices?
  
• In a culture overwhelmed with media—radio, television, computers, video games, cell phones, and pocket devices that pour out information and demand attention—what can “literature” become, and what is it for?

General Issues and Questions

1. Begin with the dramatists: the plays of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and David Mamet in your anthology are all to some degree dark meditations on what it means to grow older, and to become irrelevant. The disasters that befall Blanche, Willy, and Levene are more than biological aging. The works imply that cultural, social, and economic changes bring about cultural and economic obsolescence, and that these characters then no longer have anything valuable to offer. Do the authors present them as responsible, somehow, for their fates? How would you describe the encompassing “new” world of each play? If you compare the elaborate opening stage directions of Death of a Salesman to Mamet’s terse instructions for Glengarry Glen Ross, what occurs to you? Are these plays nostalgic for a more comprehensible America of the past?
   
2. Considering Williams, Miller, and Mamet as a group, compare their works to Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play as a different way of seeing the past, a different kind of response to bewilderment and uncertainty. If The America Play can be disorienting to read or watch, is that confusion uncomfortable? If not knowing what we are and where we are going is a source of tragedy in the plays of the three white male authors, is it the same in Parks’s work? Where in the American literary past have we seen this controversy before, between authors who view uncertainty as disaster and those who view it as a source of possibility, even joy?
   
3. Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman and Ralph Ellison’s “Cadillac Flambé” and Invisible Man selections present people who, with regard to the culture they live in, feel superfluous or expendable. How would you compare the condition of these protagonists to the situation faced by the aging white businessmen in the plays by Miller and Mamet and to Blanche’s predicament in A Streetcar Named Desire?
   
4. Consider together John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” Grace Paley’s “Conversation with My Father,” John Updike’s “Separating,” and Bernard Malamud’s “The Magic Barrel.” How do these works address a struggle against anonymity? In each story, how do older individuals or a collective past help or fail characters as they try to handle the present? Do some of these characters seem to have no past at all? Does that detachment help them navigate through the personal hardship of daily life?
   
5. Several of the stories by minority women writers in this collection experiment with literary form and ways of telling a story. Think about Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif,” Toni Cade Bambara’s “Medley,” Diane Glancy’s “Polar Breath,” Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Lullaby,” Louise Erdrich’s “Fleur,” and the short narratives by Gloria Anzaldúa and Sandra Cisneros. Are these innovations appropriate to the themes of these stories, or to the challenge of being a minority writer in America? In this group, which variations on convention engage you, and why?
   
6. Along with social and technological change, theoretical science has undergone frequent revolutions in the past fifty years, and new formulations about the universe and the forces at play in it have fascinated many writers. Contrast Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and Richard Powers, as writers responding to these new formulations and a transformed scientific reality.

American Poetry after World War II

Verse in America underwent changes as dramatic as those that befell other literary genres. In the journals, younger critics like Randall Jarrell called for new voices to speak for new times and to displace the “old fathers” of modernist verse. The larger culture, an unstable postwar landscape rocked by social, political, and moral upheavals transformed the poetry of the era.

Although all aspects of the arts felt these changes, poets in the 1950s and after faced special circumstances. Academic culture, hungry to acquire professors of creative writing and high-profile visiting artists, transformed the way poets made a living and interacted with audiences. Poets before World War II generally had to keep their day jobs or rely on family resources to make ends meet. When the poet became a permanent presence on the campus, something was gained, certainly, but something perhaps was given up.

With regard to the careers of American poets since World War II, paradoxes abound: in his novel Pictures from an Institution, Randall Jarrell satirizes colleges and literature departments, but he accepted salaries from them throughout most of his career; Charles Olson, whose passionate verse might suggest a Bohemian in the Whitman tradition, was for a while the president of a small college. But such paradoxes take us only so far. The larger question is to whom, and for what purpose, is postwar American verse directed?

Over the past forty years there have been periodic attempts to reconnect poetry to the broader American public, resisting declining sales and diminished visibility in American culture. The Beat coffeehouses of the 1950s, the poetry “teach-ins” and street readings of the 1960s, the “poetry slams” in clubs and makeshift venues of the present moment—these all suggest that poetry is uneasy about following other arts into museums, literature departments, and places set apart from the everyday world. Michael S. Harper, Robert Pinsky, Simon Ortiz, Billy Collins, Rita Dove, and other younger poets have often come down out of the Ivory Tower to present their verse to larger audiences, and they have worked to achieve a style that can speak to a diverse America.

General Issues and Questions

1. First, consider the question of audience. Without getting caught up in interpretation, review selections from several of the following poets: Mary Oliver, Stanley Kunitz, Richard Wilbur, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Creeley. What kinds of readers and audiences do these poems seem to speak to?
2. In the mid-nineteenth century, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill set forth the proposition that poetry is “overheard” rather than “heard”—that as readers we eavesdrop on the poet-speaker addressing himself or herself. Do some of the postwar American poets seem more declamatory, or outwardly oriented than others? What levels of education and sophistication are required to enter the world of those poets who catch your attention? How “closely” are we expected to read? Do some of these poets seek an instantaneous effect, reaching us directly without careful interpretation? Which poets resist an easy or immediate connection with readers?
3. Poetry has felt the impact of politics throughout this century. What kinds of risks, compromises, and avoidances do you see with regard to politics in the selections from the following poets: Robert Pinsky, Cathy Song, Li-Young Lee, Rita Dove, Simon J. Ortiz, and Michael S. Harper?
4. Reviewing the postwar poets in NAAL, it becomes apparent that the generalization about the “death of form” in contemporary verse has been greatly exaggerated. Traditional rhyme schemes and metrical patterns turn up frequently in these selections—but why? Wright, Lowell, Jarrell, Wilbur, Bishop, Dove, Plath, Pinsky, and other contemporary poets use traditional forms in some works and not in others. Other poets such as Ginsberg, Snyder, Ortiz, and Harjo prefer open, unpredictable forms. Review the selections from some of these poets. What relationships do you see among the forms, temperaments, and subjects? Think about specific poems in which the shape and structure of the work are particularly appropriate to the mood and theme, then speculate more broadly about the ways in which contemporary poets echo or break from various traditions in American verse.