Though writers such as Barth, Barthelme, and Pynchon rejected the novel’s traditional function as a mirror reflecting society, a significant number of contemporary novelists were reluctant to abandon Social Realism, which they pursued in much more personal terms. In novels such as The Victim (1947), The Adventures of Augie March" class="md-crosslink">The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Herzog" class="md-crosslink">Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler’s Planet" class="md-crosslink">Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), and Humboldt’s Gift" class="md-crosslink">Humboldt’s Gift (1975), Saul Bellow tapped into the buoyant, manic energy and picaresque structure of black humour while proclaiming the necessity of “being human.” Though few contemporary writers saw the ugliness of urban life more clearly than Bellow, his central characters rejected the “Wasteland outlook” that he associated with Modernism. A spiritual vision, derived from sources as diverse as Judaism, Transcendentalism, and Rudolph Steiner’s cultish theosophy, found its way into Bellow’s later novels, but he also wrote darker fictions such as the novella Seize the Day" class="md-crosslink">Seize the Day (1956), a study in failure and blocked emotion that was perhaps his best work. With the publication of Ravelstein (2000), his fictional portrait of the scholar-writer Allan Bloom, and of Collected Stories (2001), Bellow was acclaimed as a portraitist and a poet of memory.
Four other major Jewish writers—Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Philip Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer—treated the human condition with humour and forgiveness. Malamud’s gift for dark comedy and Hawthornean fable was especially evident in his short-story collections The Magic Barrel" class="md-crosslink">The Magic Barrel (1958) and Idiots First (1963). His first three novels, The Natural" class="md-crosslink">The Natural (1952), The Assistant" class="md-crosslink">The Assistant (1957), and A New Life (1961), were also impressive works of fiction; The Assistant had the bleak moral intensity of his best stories. Paley’s stories combined an offbeat, whimsically poetic manner with a wry understanding of the ironies of family life and progressive politics. While Roth was known best for the wild satire and sexual high jinks of Portnoy’s Complaint" class="md-crosslink">Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), a hilarious stand-up routine about ethnic stereotypes, his most-lasting achievement may be his later novels built around the misadventures of a controversial Jewish novelist named Zuckerman, especially The Ghost Writer (1979), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), and, above all, The Counterlife (1987). Like many of his later works, from My Life as a Man (1974) to Operation Shylock (1993), The Counterlife plays ingeniously on the relationship between autobiography and fiction. His best later work was his bitter, deliberately offensive story of a self-destructive artist, Sabbath’s Theater (1995). Returning to realism, but without his former self-absorption, Roth won new readers with his trilogy on 20th-century American history—American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000)—and with The Plot Against America (2004), a counter-historical novel about the coming of fascism in the United States during World War II. The Polish-born Singer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978 for his stories, written originally in Yiddish. (See also Yiddish literature.) They evolved from fantastic tales of demons and angels to realistic fictions set in New York City’s Upper West Side, often dealing with the haunted lives of Holocaust survivors. These works showed him to be one of the great storytellers of modern times.
Another great storyteller, John Cheever, long associated with The New Yorker magazine, created in his short stories and novels a gallery of memorable eccentrics. He documented the anxieties of upper-middle-class New Yorkers and suburbanites in the relatively tranquil years after World War II. The sexual and moral confusion of the American middle class was the focus of the work of J.D. Salinger and Richard Yates, as well as of John Updike’s Rabbit series (four novels from Rabbit, Run [1960] to Rabbit at Rest [1990]), Couples (1968), and Too Far to Go (1979), a sequence of tales about the quiet disintegration of a civilized marriage, a subject Updike revisited in a retrospective work, Villages (2004). In sharp contrast, Nelson Algren (The Man with the Golden Arm" class="md-crosslink">The Man with the Golden Arm [1949]) and Hubert Selby, Jr. (Last Exit to Brooklyn [1964]), documented lower-class urban life with brutal frankness. Similarly, John Rechy portrayed America’s urban homosexual subculture in City of Night (1963). As literary and social mores were liberalized, Cheever himself dealt with homosexuality in his prison novel Falconer (1977) and even more explicitly in his personal journals, published posthumously in 1991. Southern fiction
Post-World War II Southern writers inherited Faulkner’s rich legacy. Three women—Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Carson McCullers, specialists in the grotesque—contributed greatly to Southern fiction. O’Connor, writing as a Roman Catholic in the Protestant South, created a high comedy of moral incongruity in her incomparable short stories. Welty, always a brilliant stylist, first came to prominence with her collections of short fiction A Curtain of Green (1941) and The Wide Net, and Other Stories" class="md-crosslink">The Wide Net, and Other Stories (1943). Her career culminated with a large family novel, Losing Battles (1970), and a fine novella, The Optimist’s Daughter" class="md-crosslink">The Optimist’s Daughter (1972), which was awarded the 1973 Pulitzer Prize. McCullers is best remembered for her first book, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" class="md-crosslink">The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), an intricate gothic novel set in a small town in the Deep South. She also published Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), The Member of the Wedding (1946), and The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951), all later adapted to the stage or screen. Other fine storytellers in the Southern tradition include Elizabeth Spencer, whose short fiction was collected in The Southern Woman (2001), and Reynolds Price, whose best novels were A Long and Happy Life (1961) and Kate Vaiden (1986). Initially known for his lyrical portraits of Southern eccentrics (Other Voices, Other Rooms [1948]), Truman Capote later published In Cold Blood (1965), a cold but impressive piece of documentary realism that contributed, along with the work of Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer, to the emergence of a “new journalism” that used many of the techniques of fiction.