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Turn of the 20thcentury
At the beginning of the 20thcentury, American novelists were expanding fiction's socialspectrum to encompass both high and low life and sometimesconnected to the naturalist school of realism. In her stories andnovels, Edith Wharton (1862–1937) scrutinized the upper-class,Eastern-seaboard society in which she had grown up. One of herfinest books, The Age of Innocence, centers on a man who chooses tomarry a conventional, socially acceptable woman rather than afascinating outsider. At about the same time, Stephen Crane(1871–1900), best known for his Civil War novel The Red Badge ofCourage, depicted the life of New York City prostitutes in Maggie:A Girl of the Streets. And in Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser(1871–1945) portrayed a country girl who moves to Chicago andbecomes a kept woman. Hamlin Garland and Frank Norris wrote aboutthe problems of American farmers and other social issues from anaturalist perspective.
More directly politicalwritings discussed social issues and power of corporations. Somelike Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward outlined other possiblepolitical and social frameworks. Upton Sinclair, most famous forhis muck-raking novel The Jungle, advocated socialism. Otherpolitical writers of the period included Edwin Markham, WilliamVaughn Moody. Journalistic critics, including Ida M. Tarbell andLincoln Steffens were labeled The Muckrakers. Henry Brooks Adams'literate autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams also depicteda stinging description of the education system and modernlife.
Experimentation in style andform soon joined the new freedom in subject matter. In 1909,Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), by then an expatriate in Paris,published Three Lives, an innovative work of fiction influenced byher familiarity with cubism, jazz, and other movements incontemporary art and music. Stein labeled a group of Americanliterary notables who lived in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s as the"Lost Generation".
The poet Ezra Pound(1885–1972) was born in Idaho but spent much of his adult life inEurope. His work is complex, sometimes obscure, with multiplereferences to other art forms and to a vast range of literature,both Western and Eastern. He influenced many other poets, notablyT. S. Eliot (1888–1965), another expatriate. Eliot wrote spare,cerebral poetry, carried by a dense structure of symbols. In TheWaste Land, he embodied a jaundiced vision of post–World War Isociety in fragmented, haunted images. Like Pound's, Eliot's poetrycould be highly allusive, and some editions of The Waste Land comewith footnotes supplied by the poet. In 1948, Eliot won the NobelPrize in Literature.
Stein, Pound and Eliot,along with Henry James before them, demonstrate the growth of aninternational perspective in American literature, and not simplybecause they spend long periods of time overseas. American writershad long looked to European models for inspiration, but whereas theliterary breakthroughs of the mid-19th century came from findingdistinctly American styles and themes, writers from this periodwere finding ways of contributing to a flourishing internationalliterary scene, not as imitators but as equals. Something similarwas happening back in the States, as Jewish writers (such asAbraham Cahan) used the English language to reach an internationalJewish audience. And a small group of Arab American writers knownas the Al-Rabitah al-Qalamiyah (a.k.a. the "New York Pen League")and under the leadership ofKhalil Gibran, were absorbing modernistEuropean influences and thereby introduced innovative forms andthemes into Arabic-language literature.
American writers alsoexpressed the disillusionment following upon the war. The storiesand novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) capture the restless,pleasure-hungry, defiant mood of the 1920s. Fitzgerald'scharacteristic theme, expressed poignantly in The Great Gatsby, isthe tendency of youth's golden dreams to dissolve in failure anddisappointment. Fitzgerald also elucidates the collapse of some keyAmerican Ideals, set out in the Declaration of Independence, suchas liberty, social unity, good governance and peace, features whichwere severely threatened by the pressures of modern early 20thcentury society. Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson also wrotenovels with critical depictions of American life. John Dos Passoswrote about the war and also the U.S.A. trilogy which extended intothe Depression.
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)saw violence and death first-hand as an ambulance driver in WorldWar I, and the carnage persuaded him that abstract language wasmostly empty and misleading. He cut out unnecessary words from hiswriting, simplified the sentence structure, and concentrated onconcrete objects and actions. He adhered to a moral code thatemphasized grace under pressure, and his protagonists were strong,silent men who often dealt awkwardly with women. The Sun Also Risesand A Farewell to Arms are generally considered his best novels; in1954, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Five years before Hemingway,another American novelist had won the Nobel Prize: William Faulkner(1897–1962). Faulkner managed to encompass an enormous range ofhumanity in Yoknapatawpha County, a Mississippian region of his owninvention. He recorded his characters' seemingly unedited ramblingsin order to represent their inner states, a technique called"stream of consciousness". (In fact, these passages are carefullycrafted, and their seemingly chaotic structure conceals multiplelayers of meaning.) He also jumbled time sequences to show how thepast – especially the slave-holding era of the Deep South – enduresin the present. Among his great works are Absalom, Absalom!, As ILay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Light inAugust.
The rise of Americandrama
Although the United States'theatrical tradition can be traced back to the arrival of LewisHallam's troupe in the mid-18th century and was very active in the19th century, as seen by the popularity of minstrel shows and ofadaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin, American drama attainedinternational status only in the 1920s and 1930s, with the works ofEugene O'Neill, who won three Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize.In the middle of the 20th century, American drama was dominated bythe work of playwrights Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, aswell as by the maturation of the American musical, which had founda way to integrate script, music and dance in such works asOklahoma! and West Side Story. Later American playwrights ofimportance include Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, David Mamet, WendyWasserstein and August Wilson.
Depression-eraliterature
Depression era literaturewas blunt and direct in its social criticism. John Steinbeck(1902–1968) was born in Salinas, California, where he set many ofhis stories. His style was simple and evocative, winning him thefavor of the readers but not of the critics. Steinbeck often wroteabout poor, working-class people and their struggle to lead adecent and honest life. The Grapes of Wrath, considered hismasterpiece, is a strong, socially-oriented novel that tells thestory of the Joads, a poor family from Oklahoma and their journeyto California in search of a better life. Other popular novelsinclude Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row, and East ofEden. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.Steinbeck's contemporary, Nathanael West's two most famous shortnovels, Miss Lonelyhearts, which plumbs the life of its eponymousantihero, a reluctant (and, to comic effect, male) advicecolumnist, and the effects the tragic letters exert on it, and TheDay of the Locust, which introduces a cast of Hollywood stereotypesand explores the ironies of the movies, have come to be avowedclassics of American literature.
Henry Miller assumed aunique place in American Literature in the 1930s when hissemi-autobiographical novels, written and published in Paris, werebanned from the US. Although his major works, including Tropic ofCancer and Black Spring, would not be free of the label ofobscenity until 1962, their themes and stylistic innovations hadalready exerted a major influence on succeeding generations ofAmerican writers, and paved the way for sexually frank 1960s novelsby John Updike, Philip Roth, Gore Vidal, John Rechy and WilliamStyron.
Post–World WarII
The postwarnovel
The period in time from theend of World War II up until, roughly, the late 1960s and early1970s saw the publication of some of the most popular works inAmerican history such as To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Thelast few of the more realistic modernists along with the wildlyRomantic beatniks largely dominated the period, while the directrespondents to America's involvement in World War II contributed intheir notable influence.
Though born in Canada,Chicago-raised Saul Bellow would become one of the most influentialnovelists in America in the decades directly following World WarII. In works like The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog, Bellowpainted vivid portraits of the American city and the distinctivecharacters that peopled it. Bellow went on to win the Nobel Prizefor Literature in 1976.
From J.D. Salinger's NineStories and The Catcher in the Rye to Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar,the perceived madness of the state of affairs in America wasbrought to the forefront of the nation's literary expression.Immigrant authors such as Vladimir Nabokov, with Lolita, forged onwith the theme, and, at almost the same time, the beatniks took aconcerted step away from their Lost Generation predecessors,developing a style and tone of their own by drawing on Easterntheology and experimenting with recreationaldrugs.
The poetry and fiction ofthe "Beat Generation", largely born of a circle of intellectsformed in New York City around Columbia University and establishedmore officially some time later in San Francisco, came of age. Theterm Beat referred, all at the same time, to the counterculturalrhythm of the Jazz scene, to a sense of rebellion regarding theconservative stress of post-war society, and to an interest in newforms of spiritual experience through drugs, alcohol, philosophy,and religion, and specifically through Zen Buddhism. Allen Ginsbergset the tone of the movement in his poem Howl, a Whitmanesque workthat began: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed bymadness..." Among the most representative achievements of the Beatsin the novel are Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), the chronicleof a soul-searching travel through the continent, and William S.Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959), a more experimental work structuredas a series of vignettes relating, among other things, thenarrator's travels and experiments with harddrugs.
Regarding the war novelspecifically, there was a literary explosion in America during thepost–World War II era. Some of the best known of the works producedincluded Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948), JosephHeller's Catch-22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'sSlaughterhouse-Five (1969). The Moviegoer (1962), by Southernauthor Walker Percy, winner of the National Book Award, was hisattempt at exploring "the dislocation of man in the modernage."
In contrast, John Updikeapproached American life from a more reflective but no lesssubversive perspective. His 1960 novel Rabbit, Run, the first offour chronicling the rising and falling fortunes of Harry "Rabbit"Angstrom over the course of four decades against the backdrop ofthe major events of the second half of the 20th century, broke newground on its release in its characterization and detail of theAmerican middle class and frank discussion of taboo topics such asadultery. Notable among Updike's characteristic innovations was hisuse of present-tense narration, his rich, stylized language, andhis attention to sensual detail. His work is also deeply imbuedwith Christian themes. The two final installments of the Rabbitseries, Rabbit is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990), were bothawarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Other notable works includethe Henry Bech novels (1970–98), The Witches of Eastwick (1984),Roger's Version (1986) and In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996),which literary critic Michiko Kakutani called "arguably hisfinest."
Frequently linked withUpdike is the novelist Philip Roth. Roth vigorously explores Jewishidentity in American society, especially in the postwar era and theearly 21st century. Frequently set in Newark, New Jersey, Roth'swork is known to be highly autobiographical, and many of Roth'smain characters, most famously the Jewish novelist NathanZuckerman, are thought to be alter egos of Roth. With thesetechniques, and armed with his articulate and fast-paced style,Roth explores the distinction between reality and fiction inliterature while provocatively examining American culture. His mostfamous work includes the Zuckerman novels, the controversialPortnoy's Complaint (1969), and Goodbye, Columbus (1959). Among themost decorated American writers of his generation, he has won everymajor American literary award, including the Pulitzer Prize for hismajor novel American Pastoral (1997).
In the realm ofAfrican-American literature, Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel InvisibleMan was instantly recognized as among the most powerful andimportant works of the immediate post-war years. The story of ablack Underground Man in the urban north, the novel laid bare theoften repressed racial tension that still prevailed while alsosucceeding as an existential character study. Richard Wright wascatapulted to fame by the publication in subsequent years of hisnow widely studied short story, "The Man Who Was Almost a Man"(1939), and his controversial second novel, Native Son (1940), andhis legacy was cemented by the 1945 publication of Black Boy, awork in which Wright drew on his childhood and mostly autodidacticeducation in the segregated South, fictionalizing and exaggeratingsome elements as he saw fit. Because of its polemical themes andWright's involvement with the Communist Party, the novel's finalpart, "American Hunger," was not published until1977.
Perhaps the most ambitiousand challenging post-war American novelist was William Gaddis,whose uncompromising, satiric, and gargantuan novels, such as TheRecognitions (1955) and J R (1975) are presented largely in termsof unattributed dialog that requires almost unexampled readerparticipation. Gaddis's primary themes include forgery, capitalism,religious zealotry, and the legal system, constituting a sustainedpolyphonic critique of the chaos and chicanery of modern Americanlife. Gaddis's work, though largely ignored for years, anticipatedand influenced the development of such ambitious "postmodern"fiction writers as Thomas Pynchon, Joseph McElroy, and Don DeLillo.Another neglected and challenging postwar American novelist, albeitone who writes much shorter works, was John Hawkes, whose oftensurreal, visionary fiction addresses themes of violence anderoticism and experiments audaciously with narrative voice andstyle. Among his most important works is the short nightmarishnovel The Lime Twig (1961).
Short fiction andpoetry
In the postwar period, theart of the short story again flourished. Among its most respectedpractitioners was Flannery O'Connor (b. March 25, 1925 in Georgia –d. August 3, 1964 in Georgia), who renewed the fascination of suchgiants as Faulkner and Twain with the American south, developing adistinctive Southern gothic esthetic wherein characters acted atone level as people and at another as symbols. A devout Catholic,O'Connor often imbued her stories, among them the widely studied "AGood Man is Hard to Find" and "Everything That Rises MustConverge", and two novels, Wise Blood (1952); The Violent Bear ItAway (1960), with deeply religious themes, focusing particularly onthe search for truth and religious skepticism against the backdropof the nuclear age. Other important practitioners of the forminclude Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, John Cheever, RaymondCarver, Tobias Wolff, and the more experimental DonaldBarthelme.
Among the most respected ofthe postwar American poets are John Ashbery, the key figure of thesurrealistic New York School of poetry, and his celebratedSelf-portrait in a Convex Mirror(Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 1976);Elizabeth Bishop and her North & South (PulitzerPrize for Poetry, 1956) and "Geography III" (National Book Award,1970); Richard Wilbur and his Things of This World, winner of boththe Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Poetry in 1957;John Berryman and his The Dream Songs, (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry,1964, National Book Award, 1968); A.R. Ammons, whose CollectedPoems 1951-1971 won a National Book Award in 1973 and whose longpoem Garbage earned him another in 1993; Theodore Roethke and hisThe Waking (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 1954); James Merrill and hisepic poem of communication with the dead, The Changing Light atSandover (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 1977);Louise Glück for her TheWild Iris (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 1993); W.S. Merwin for hisThe Carrier of Ladders (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 1971) and TheShadow of Sirius (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 2009); Mark Strand forBlizzard of One (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 1999); Robert Hass forhis Time and Materials, which won both the Pulitzer Prize andNational Book Award for Poetry in 2008 and 2007 respectively; andRita Dove for her Thomas and Beulah (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry,1987).
In addition, in this sameperiod the confessional, whose origin is often traced to thepublication in 1959 of Robert Lowell's Life Studies, and beatschools of poetry enjoyed popular and academic success, producingsuch widely anthologized voices as Allen Ginsberg, CharlesBukowski, Gary Snyder, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath, among manyothers.
Contemporary Americanliterature
Though its exact parametersremain debatable, from the early 1970s to the present day the mostsalient literary movement has been postmodernism. Thomas Pynchon, aseminal practitioner of the form, drew in his work on modernistfixtures such as temporal distortion, unreliable narrators, andinternal monologue and coupled them with distinctly postmoderntechniques such as metafiction, ideogrammatic characterization,unrealistic names (Oedipa Maas, Benny Profane, etc.), absurdistplot elements and hyperbolic humor, deliberate use of anachronismsand archaisms, a strong focus on postcolonial themes, and asubversive commingling of high and low culture. In 1973, hepublished Gravity's Rainbow, a leading work in this genre, whichwon the National Book Award and was unanimously nominated for thePulitzer Prize for Fiction that year. His other major works includehis debut, V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Mason& Dixon (1997), and Against the Day(2006).
Toni Morrison, the mostrecent American recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature,writing in a distinctive lyrical prose style, published hercontroversial debut novel, The Bluest Eye, to widespread criticalacclaim in 1970. Coming on the heels of the signing of the CivilRights Act of 1965, the novel, widely studied in American schools,includes an elaborate description of incestuous rape and exploresthe conventions of beauty established by a historically racistsociety, painting a portrait of a self-immolating black family insearch of beauty in whiteness. Since then, Morrison hasexperimented with lyric fantasy, as in her two best-known laterworks, Song of Solomon (1977) and Beloved (1987), for which she wasawarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; along these lines, criticHarold Bloom has drawn favorable comparisons to Virginia Woolf, andthe Nobel committee to "Faulkner and to the Latin Americantradition [of magical realism]." Beloved was chosen in a 2006survey conducted by the New York Times as the most important workof fiction of the last 25 years.
Writing in a lyrical,flowing style that eschews excessive use of the comma andsemicolon, recalling William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway in equalmeasure, Cormac McCarthy's body of work seizes on the literarytraditions of several regions of the United States and spansmultiple genres. He writes in the Southern Gothic aesthetic in hisdistinctly Faulknerian 1965 debut, The Orchard Keeper, and Suttree(1979); in the Epic Westerntradition, with grotesquely drawncharacters and symbolic narrative turns reminiscent of Melville, inBlood Meridian (1985), which Harold Bloom styled "the greatestsingle book since Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying," calling the characterof Judge Holden "short of Moby Dick, the most monstrous apparitionin all of American literature"; in a much more pastoral tone in hiscelebrated Border Trilogy (1992–98) of bildungsromans, includingAll the Pretty Horses (1992), winner of the National Book Award;and in the post-apocalyptic genre in the Pulitzer Prize-winning TheRoad (2007). His novels are noted for achieving both commercial andcritical success, several of his works having been adapted tofilm.
Don DeLillo, who rose toliterary prominence with the publication of his 1985 novel, WhiteNoise, a work broaching the subjects of death and consumerism anddoubling as a piece of comic social criticism, began his writingcareer in 1971 with Americana. He is listed by Harold Bloom asbeing among the preeminent contemporary American writers, in thecompany of such giants as Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and ThomasPynchon. His 1997 novel Underworld, a gargantuan work chroniclingAmerican life through and immediately after the Cold Warandexamining with equal depth subjects as various as baseball andnuclear weapons, is generally agreed upon to be his masterpiece andwas the runner-up in a survey asking writers to identify the mostimportant work of fiction of the last 25 years. Among his otherimportant novels are Libra (1988), Mao II (1991) and Falling Man(2007).
Seizing on the distinctlypostmodern techniques of digression, narrative fragmentation andelaborate symbolism, and strongly influenced by the works of ThomasPynchon, David Foster Wallace began his writing career with TheBroom of the System, published to moderate acclaim in 1987. Hissecond and final novel, Infinite Jest (1997), a futuristic portraitof America and a playful critique of the media-saturated nature ofAmerican life, has been consistently ranked among the mostimportant works of the 20th century. In addition to his novels, healso authored three acclaimed short story collections: Girl withCurious Hair (1989), Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) andOblivion (2004). Jonathan Franzen, Wallace's friend andcontemporary, rose to prominence after the 2001 publication of hisNational Book Award-winning third novel, The Corrections. He beganhis writing career in 1988 with the well-received TheTwenty-Seventh City, a novel centering on his native St. Louis, butdid not gain national attention until the publication of his essay,"Perchance to Dream," in Harper's Magazine, discussing the culturalrole of the writer in the new millennium through the prism of hisown frustrations. The Corrections, a tragicomedy about thedisintegrating Lambert family, has been called "the literaryphenomenon of [its] decade" and was ranked as one of the greatestnovels of the past century. In 2010, he published Freedom to greatcritical acclaim.
Other notable writers of theturn of the 20th century include Michael Chabon, whose PulitzerPrize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &Clay(2000) tells the story of two friends, Joe Kavalier and SamClay, as they rise through the ranks of the comics industry in itsheyday; Denis Johnson, whose 2007 novel Tree of Smoke aboutfalsified intelligence during Vietnam both won the National BookAward and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and wascalled by critic Michiko Kakutani "one of the classic works ofliterature produced by [the Vietnam War]"; and Louise Erdrich,whose 2008 novel The Plague of Doves, a distinctly Faulknerian,polyphonic examination of the tribal experience set against thebackdrop of murder in the fictional town of Pluto, ND, wasnominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Michael Cunningham, whose TheHours won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1999, is anotherimportant contemporary American novelist.
Minorityliteratures
One of the key developmentsin late-20th-century American literature was the rise to prominenceof literature written by and about ethnic minorities beyond AfricanAmericans and Jewish Americans, who had already established theirliterary inheritances. This development came alongside the growthof the Civil Rights movements and its corollary, the Ethnic Pridemovement, which led to the creation of Ethnic Studies programs inmost major universities. These programs helped establish the newethnic literature as worthy objects of academic study, alongsidesuch other new areas of literary study as women's literature, gayand lesbian literature, working-class literature, postcolonialliterature, and the rise of literary theory as a key component ofacademic literary study.
After being relegated tocookbooks and autobiographies for most of the 20th century, AsianAmerican literature achieved widespread notice through Maxine HongKingston's fictional memoir, The Woman Warrior (1976), and hernovels China Men (1980) and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book.Chinese-American author Ha Jin in 1999 won the National Book Awardfor his second novel, Waiting, about a Chinese soldier in theRevolutionary Army who has to wait 18 years to divorce his wife foranother woman, all the while having to worry about persecution forhis protracted affair, and twice won the PEN/Faulkner Award, in2000 for Waiting and in 2005 for War Trash. Indian-American authorJhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her debutcollection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), andwent on to write a well-received novel, The Namesake (2003), whichwas shortly adapted to film in 2007. In her second collection ofstories, Unaccustomed Earth, released to widespread commercial andcritical success, Lahiri shifts focus and treats the experiences ofthe second and third generation. Other notable Asian-American (butnot immigrant) novelists include Amy Tan, best known for her novel,The Joy Luck Club (1989), tracing the lives of four immigrantfamilies brought together by the game of Mahjong, and KoreanAmerican novelist Chang-Rae Lee, who has published Native Speaker,A Gesture Life, and Aloft. Such poets as Marilyn Chin and Li-YoungLee, Kimiko Hahn and Janice Mirikitani have also achievedprominence, as has playwright David Henry Hwang. Equally importanthas been the effort to recover earlier Asian American authors,started by Frank Chin and his colleagues; this effort has broughtSui Sin Far, Toshio Mori, Carlos Bulosan, John Okada, HisayeYamamoto and others to prominence.
Latina/o literature alsobecame important during this period, starting with acclaimed novelsby Tomás Rivera (...y no se lo tragó la tierra) and Rudolfo Anaya(Bless Me, Ultima), and the emergence of Chicano theater with LuisValdez and Teatro Campesino. Latina writing became important thanksto authors such as Sandra Cisneros, an icon of an emerging Chicanoliterature whose 1984 bildungsroman The House on Mango Street istaught in schools across the United States, Denise Chavez's TheLast of the Menu Girls and Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/LaFrontera: The New Mestiza. Dominican-American author Junot Díaz,received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his 2007 novel TheBrief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which tells the story of anoverweight Dominican boy growing up as a social outcast inPaterson, New Jersey. Another Domincan author, Julia Alvarez, iswell known for How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and In theTime of the Butterflies. Cuban American author Oscar Hijuelos won aPulitzer for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, and CristinaGarcía received acclaim for Dreaming in Cuban. Well known PuertoRican authors from this period include novelist Nicholasa Mohr,playwright José Rivera, poet Judith Ortiz Cofer, and the NuyoricanPoets Café.
Spurred by the success of N.Scott Momaday's Pulitzer Prize winning House Made of Dawn, NativeAmerican literature showed explosive growth during this period,known as the Native American Renaissance, through such novelists asLeslie Marmon Silko (e.g., Ceremony), Gerald Vizenor (e.g.,Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles and numerous essays on NativeAmerican literature), Louise Erdrich (Love Medicine and severalother novels that use a recurring set of characters and locationsin the manner of William Faulkner), James Welch (e.g., Winter inthe Blood), Sherman Alexie (e.g., The Lone Ranger and TontoFistfight in Heaven), and poets Simon Ortiz and Joy Harjo. Thesuccess of these authors has brought renewed attention to earliergenerations, including Zitkala-Sa, John Joseph Mathews, D'ArcyMcNickle and Mourning Dove.
More recently, Arab Americanliterature, largely unnoticed since the New York Pen League of the1920s, has become more prominent through the work of DianaAbu-Jaber, whose novels include Arabian Jazz and Crescent and thememoir The Language of Baklava. Other important authors includeEtel Adnan and poet Naomi Shihab Nye.
Nobel Prize in Literaturewinners (American authors)
1930:Sinclair Lewis (novelist)
1936:Eugene O'Neill (playwright)
1938:Pearl S. Buck (biographer and novelist)
1948: T.S. Eliot (poet and playwright)
1949:William Faulkner (novelist)
1954:Ernest Hemingway (novelist)
1962:John Steinbeck (novelist)
1976:Saul Bellow (novelist)
1978:Isaac Bashevis Singer (novelist, wrote inYiddish)
1993:Toni Morrison (novelist)
American literaryawards
AmericanAcademy of Arts and Letters
PulitzerPrize (Fiction, Drama and Poetry, as well as various non-fictionand journalist categories)
NationalBook Award (Fiction, Non-Fiction, Poetry and Young-AdultFiction)
AmericanBook Awards
PENliterary awards (multiple awards)
UnitedStates Poet Laureate
BollingenPrize
PushcartPrize
O. HenryAward
Literary theory andcriticism
EdgarAllan Poe: Dark Romanticism, Short-Story Theory
T. S.Eliot: Modernism
HaroldBloom: Aestheticism
SusanSontag: Against Interpretation, On Photography
JohnUpdike: Literary realism/modernism and aestheticistcritic
MichikoKakutani: New York Times critic
M. H.Abrams: The Mirror and the Lamp (study ofRomanticism)
F. O.Mathiessen: originated the concept "AmericanRenaissance"
PerryMiller: Puritan studies
HenryNash Smith: founder of the "Myth and Symbol School" of Americancriticism
Leo Marx:The Machine in the Garden (study of technology andculture)
LeslieFiedler: Love and Death in the American Novel
StanleyFish: Pragmatism
HenryLouis Gates: African American literary theory
GeraldVizenor: Native American literary theory
WilliamDean Howells: Literary realism
StephenGreenblatt: New Historicism
GeoffreyHartman: Yale school of deconstruction
JohnCrowe Ransom: New Criticism
CleanthBrooks: New Criticism
KennethBurke: Rhetoric studies
ElaineShowalter: Feminist criticism
Sandra M.Gilbert: Feminist criticism
SusanGubar: Feminist criticism
J. HillisMiller: Deconstruction
EdwardSaid: Postcolonial criticism
JonathanCuller: Critical theory, deconstruction
JudithButler: Post-structuralist feminism
Gloria E.Anzaldúa: Latina literary theory
EveKosofsky Sedgwick: Queer theory
