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 story Realism 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).