THE TURBULENT BUT CREATIVE 1960s
T he alienation and stress underlying
the 1950s found outward expression in the 1960s in the United States in the
Civil Rights Movement, feminism, antiwar protests, minority activism, and the
arrival of a counterculture whose effects are still being worked through
American society. Notable political and social works of the era include the
speeches of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the early
writings of feminist leader Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique,
1963), and Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night (1968), about a 1967
antiwar march.
The 1960s was marked by a blurring of the line between fiction and fact,
novels and reportage, that has carried through the present day. Novelist
Truman Capote -- who had dazzled readers as an enfant terrible of the late
1940s and 1950s in such works as Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) --
stunned audiences with In Cold Blood (1966), a riveting analysis of a
brutal mass murder in the American heartland that read like a work of
detective fiction. At the same time, the "New Journalism" emerged --
volumes of nonfiction that combined journalism with techniques of fiction, or
that frequently played with the facts, reshaping them to add to the drama and
immediacy of the story being reported. Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid
Acid Test (1968) celebrated the antics of novelist Ken Kesey's
counterculture wanderlust, and Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak
Catchers (1970) ridiculed many aspects of left-wing activism. Wolfe later
wrote an exuberant and insightful history of the initial phase of the U.S.
space program, The Right Stuff (1979), and a novel, The Bonfire of
the Vanities (1987), a panoramic portrayal of American society in the
1980s.
As the 1960s evolved, literature flowed with the turbulence of the era. An
ironic, comic vision also came into view, reflected in the fabulism of several
writers. Examples include Ken Kesey's darkly comic One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest (1962), a novel about life in a mental hospital in which the
wardens are more disturbed than the inmates, and Richard Brautigan's
whimsical, fantastic Trout Fishing in America (1967). The comical and
fantastic yielded a new mode, half comic and half metaphysical, in Thomas
Pynchon's paranoid, brilliant V (1963) and The Crying of Lot 49 (1966),
John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy (1966), and the grotesque short stories of
Donald Barthelme, whose first collection, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, was
published in 1964.
In a different direction, in drama, Edward Albee produced a series of
nontraditional psychological works -- Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
(1962), A Delicate Balance (1966), and Seascape (1975) -- that
reflected the author s own soul-searching and his paradoxical approach.
At the same time, the decade saw the belated arrival of a literary talent
in his forties -- Walker Percy -- a physician by training and an exemplar of
southern gentility. In a series of novels, Percy used his native region as a
tapestry on which to play out intriguing psychological dramas. The
Moviegoer (1962) and The Last Gentleman (1966) were among his
highly-praised books.
Alice Walker (1944- )
Alice Walker, an African-American and the child of a sharecropper family in
rural Georgia, graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, where one of her
teachers was the politically committed female poet Muriel Rukeyser. Other
influences on her work have been Flannery O'Connor and Zora Neale Hurston.
A "womanist" writer, as Walker calls herself, she has long been
associated with feminism, presenting black existence from the female
perspective. Like Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Cade Bambara, and other
accomplished contemporary black novelists, Walker uses heightened, lyrical
realism to center on the dreams and failures of accessible, credible people.
Her work underscores the quest for dignity in human life. A fine stylist,
particularly in her epistolary dialect novel The Color Purple, her work
seeks to educate. In this she resembles the black American novelist Ishmael
Reed, whose satires expose social problems and racial issues.
Walker's The Color Purple is the story of the love between two poor
black sisters that survives a separation over years, interwoven with the story
of how, during that same period, the shy, ugly, and uneducated sister
discovers her inner strength through the support of a female friend. The theme
of the support women give each other recalls Maya Angelou's autobiography, I
Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), which celebrates the mother-daughter
connection, and the work of white feminists such as Adrienne Rich. The
Color Purple portrays men as basically unaware of the needs and reality of
women.
The close of the 1980s and the beginnings of the 1990s saw minority writing
become a major fixture on the American literary landscape. This is true in
drama as well as in prose. August Wilson who is continuing to write and see
staged his cycle of plays about the 20th-century black experience (including
Pulitzer Prize-winners Fences, 1986, and The Piano Lesson, 1989) --
stands alongside novelists Alice Walker, John Edgar Wideman, and Toni
Morrison.
Asian-Americans are also taking their place on the scene. Maxine Hong
Kingston (The Woman Warrior, 1976) carved out a place for her fellow
Asian-Americans, among them Amy Tan, whose luminous novels of Chinese life
transposed to post-World War II America (The Joy Luck Club, 1989, and The
Kitchen God's Wife, 1991) have captivated readers. David Henry Hwang, a
California- born son of Chinese immigrants, has made his mark in drama, with
plays such as F.O.B. (1981) and M. Butterfly (1986).
A relatively new group on the literary horizon are the Hispanic-American
writers, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Oscar Hijuelos, the
Cuban-born author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989); short
story writer Sandra Cisneros (Women Hollering Creek and Other Stories,
1991); and Rudolfo Anaya, author of Bless Me, Ultima (1972), which sold
300,000 copies, mostly in the western United States.
THE NEW REGIONALISM
T here is nothing new about a regional
tradition in American literature. It is as old as the Native American legends,
as evocative as the works of James Fenimore Cooper and Bret Harte, as resonant
as the novels of William Faulkner and the plays of Tennessee Williams. For a
time, though, during the post-World War II era, tradition seemed to disappear
into the shadows -- unless one considers, perhaps correctly, that urban
fiction is a form of regionalism. Nonetheless, for the past decade or so,
regionalism has been making a triumphant return in American literature,
enabling readers to get a sense of place as well as a sense of time and
humanity. And it is as prevalent in popular fiction, such as detective
stories, as it is in classic literature -- novels, short stories, and drama.
There are several possible reasons for this occurrence. For one thing, all
of the arts in America have been decentralized over the past generation.
Theater, music, and dance are as likely to thrive in cities in the U.S. South,
Southwest, and Northwest as in major cities such as New York and Chicago.
Movie companies shoot films across the United States, on myriad locations. So
it is with literature. Smaller publishing houses that concentrate on fiction
thrive outside of New York City's "publishers row." Writers
workshops and conferences are more in vogue than ever, as are literature
courses on college campuses across the country. It is no wonder that budding
talents can surface anywhere. All one needs is a pencil, paper, and a vision.
The most refreshing aspects of the new regionalism are its expanse and its
diversity. It canvasses America, from East to West. A transcontinental
literary tour begins in the Northeast, in Albany, New York, the focus of
interest of its native son, one-time journalist William Kennedy. Kennedy,
whose Albany novels -- among them Ironweed (1983) and Very Old Bones
(1992) -- capture elegaically and often raucously the lives of the denizens of
the streets and saloons of the New York State capital city.
Prolific novelist, story writer, poet, and essayist Joyce Carol Oates also
hails from the northeastern United States. In her haunting works, obsessed
characters' attempts to achieve fulfillment within their grotesque
environments lead them into destruction. Some of her finest works are stories
in collections such as The Wheel of Love (1970) and Where Are You
Going, Where Have You Been? (1974). Stephen King, the best-selling master
of horror fiction, generally sets his suspenseful page-turners in Maine --
within the same region.
Down the coast, in the environs of Baltimore, Maryland, Anne Tyler
presents, in spare, quiet language, extraordinary lives and striking
characters. Novels such as Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The
Accidental Tourist (1985), Breathing Lessons (1988), and Saint
Maybe (1991) have helped boost her reputation in literary circles and
among mass audiences.
A short distance from Baltimore is America's capital, Washington, which has
its own literary tradition, if a shrouded one, in a city whose chief
preoccupation is politics. Among the more lucid portrayers of life in and on
the fringe of government and power is novelist Ward Just, a former
international correspondent who assumed a second career writing about the
world he knows best -- the world of journalists, politicians, diplomats, and
soldiers. Just's Nicholson at Large (1975), a study of a Washington
newsman during and after the John F. Kennedy presidency of the early 1960s; In
the City of Fear (1982), a glimpse of Washington during the Vietnam era;
and Jack Gance (1989), a sobering look at a Chicago politician and his
rise to the U.S. Senate, are some of his more impressive works. Susan Richards
Shreve's Children of Power (1979) assesses the private lives of a group
of sons and daughters of government officials, while popular novelist Tom
Clancy, a Maryland resident, has used the Washington politico-military
landscape as the launching pad for his series of epic suspense tales.
Moving southward, Reynolds Price and Jill McCorkle come into view. Price,
Tyler's mentor, was once described during the 1970s by a critic as being in
the obsolescent post of "southern-writer- in-residence." He first
came to attention with his novel A Long and Happy Life (1962), dealing
with the people and the land of eastern North Carolina, and specifically with
a young woman named Rosacoke Mustian. He continued writing tales of this
heroine over the ensuing years, then shifted his locus to other themes before
focusing again on a woman in his acclaimed work, Kate Vaiden (1986),
his only novel written in the first person. Price's latest novel, Blue
Calhoun (1992),examines the impact of a passionate but doomed love affair
over the decades of family life.
McCorkle, born in 1958 and thus representing a new generation, has dev oted
her novels and short stories -- set in the small towns of North Carolina -- to
exploring the mystiques of teenagers (The Cheer Leader, 1984), the
links between generations (Tending to Virginia, 1987), and the
particular sensibilities of contemporary suthern women (Crash Diet,
1992).
In the same region is Pat Conroy, whose bracing autobiographical novels
about his South Carolina upbringing and his abusive, tyrannical father (The
Great Santini, 1976; The Prince of Tides, 1986) are infused with a
sense of the natural beauty of the South Carolina low country. Shelby Foote, a
Mississippi native who has lived in Memphis, Tennessee, for years, is an
old-time chronicler of the South whose histories and fictions led to his role
on camera in a successful public television series on the U.S. Civil War.
America's heartland reveals a wealth of writing talent. Among them are Jane
Smiley, who teaches writing at the University of Iowa. Smiley won the 1992
Pulitzer Prize in fiction for A Thousand Acres (1991), which
transplanted Shakespeare's King Lear to a midwestern U.S. farm and chronicled
the bitter family feud unleashed when an aging farmer decides to turn over his
land to his three daughters.
Texas chronicler Larry McMurtry covers his native state in varying time
periods and sensibilities, from the vanished 19th- century West (Lonesome
Dove, 1985; Anything For Billy, 1988) to the vanishing small towns
of the postwar era (The Last Picture Show, 1966).
Cormac McCarthy, whose explorations of the American Southwest desert limn
his novels Blood Meridian (1985), All The Pretty Horses (1992),
and The Crossing (1994), is a reclusive, immensely imaginative writer
who is just beginning to get his due on the U.S. literary scene. Generally
considered the rightful heir to the southern Gothic tradition, McCarthy is as
intrigued by the wildness of the terrain as he is by human wildness and
unpredictability.
Set in the striking landscape of her native New Mexico, Native American
novelist Leslie Marmon Silko's critically esteemed novel Ceremony
(1977) has gained a large general audience. Like N. Scott Momaday's poetic The
Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), it is a "chant novel" structured
on Native American healing rituals. Silko's novel The Almanac of the Dead
(1991) offers a panorama of the Southwest, from ancient tribal migrations to
present-day drug runners and corrupt real estate developers reaping profits by
misusing the land. Best-selling detective writer Tony Hillerman, who lives in
Santa Fe, New Mexico, covers the same southwestern U.S. territory, featuring
two modest, hardworking Navajo policemen as his protagonists.
To the north, in Montana, poet James Welch details the struggles of Native
Americans to wrest meaning from harsh reservation life beset by poverty and
alcoholism in his slender, nearly flawless novels Winter in the Blood
(1974), The Death of Jim Loney (1979), Fools Crow (1986), and The
Indian Lawyer (1990). Another Montanan is Thomas McGuane, whose
unfailingly masculine-focused novels -- including Ninety-Two in the Shade
(1973) and Keep the Change (1989) -- evince a dream of roots amidst
rootlessness. Louise Erdrich, who is part Chippewa Indian, has set a powerful
series of novels in neighboring North Dakota. In works such as Love
Medicine (1984), she captures the tangled lives of dysfunctional
reservation families with a poignant blend of stoicism and humor.
Two writers have exemplified the Far West for some time. One of these is
the late Wallace Stegner, who was born in the Midwest in 1909 and died in an
automobile accident in 1993. Stegner spent the bulk of his life in various
locales in the West and had a regional outlook even before it became the
vogue. His first major work, The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943),
chronicles a family caught up in the American dream in its western guise as
the frontier disappeared. It ranges across America, from Minnesota to
Washington State, and concerns, as Stegner put it, "that place of
impossible loveliness that pulled the whole nation westward." His 1971
Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Angle of Repose, is also imbued with the
spirit of place in its portrait of a woman illustrator and writer of the Old
West. Indeed, Stegner's strength as a writer was in characterization, as well
as in evoking the ruggedness of western life.
Joan Didion -- who is as much journalist as novelist and whose mind's eye
has traveled far afield in recent years -- put contemporary California on the
map in her 1968 volume of nonfiction pieces, Slouching Toward Bethlehem,
and in her incisive, shocking novel about the aimlessness of the Hollywood
scene, Play It As It Lays (1970).
The Pacific Northwest -- one of the more fertile artistic regions across
the cultural landscape at the outset of the 1990s -- produced, among others,
Raymond Carver, a marvelous writer of short fiction. Carver died tragically in
1988 at the age of 50, not long after coming into his own on the literary
scene. In mirroring the working-class mindset of the inhabitants of his region
in collections such as What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
(1974) and Where I'm Calling From (1986), he placed them against the
backdrop of their scenic surroundings, still largely unspoiled.
The success of the regional theater movement -- nonprofit institutional
companies that have become havens of contemporary culture in city after city
across America -- since the early 1960s most notably has nurtured young
dramatists who have become some of the more luminous imagists on the
theatrical scene. One wonders what American theater and literature would be
like today without the coruscating, fragmented society and tempestuous
relationships of Sam Shepard (Buried Child, 1979; A Lie of the Mind,
1985); the amoral characters and shell-shocking staccato dialogue of Chicago's
David Mamet (American Buffalo, 1976; Glengarry Glen Ross, 1982);
the intrusion of traditional values into midwestern lives and concerns
reflected by Lanford Wilson (5th of July, 1978; Talley's Folly,
1979); and the Southern eccentricities of Beth Henley (Crimes of the Heart,
1979).
American literature has traversed an extended, winding path from
pre-colonial days to contemporary times. Society, history, technology all have
had telling impact on it. Ultimately, though, there is a constant -- humanity,
with all its radiance and its malevolence, its tradition and its promise.