Eudora Welty, 1992.© Philip Gould/Corbis
William Styron’s overripe first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951), clearly revealed the influence of Faulkner. In two controversial later works, Styron fictionalized the dark side of modern history: The Confessions of Nat Turner" class="md-crosslink">The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) depicted an antebellum slave revolt, and Sophie’s Choice" class="md-crosslink">Sophie’s Choice (1979) unsuccessfully sought to capture the full horror of the Holocaust. Inspired by Faulkner and Mark Twain, William Humphrey wrote two powerful novels set in Texas, Home from the Hill (1958) and The Ordways (1965). The Moviegoer (1961) and The Last Gentleman (1966) established Walker Percy as an important voice in Southern fiction. Their musing philosophical style broke sharply with the Southern gothic tradition and influenced later writers such as Richard Ford in The Sportswriter (1986) and its moving sequel, Independence Day (1995). Equally impressive were the novels and stories of Peter Taylor, an impeccable Social Realist, raconteur, and genial novelist of manners who recalled a bygone world in works such as The Old Forest (1985) and A Summons to Memphis (1986). African American literature
Black writers of this period found alternatives to the Richard Wright tradition of angry social protest. James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, both protégés of Wright, wrote polemical essays calling for a literature that reflected the full complexity of black life in the United States. In his first and best novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain" class="md-crosslink">Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Baldwin portrayed the Harlem world and the black church through his own adolescent religious experiences. Drawing on rural folktale, absurdist humour, and a picaresque realism, Ralph Ellison wrote a deeply resonant comic novel that dealt with the full range of black experience—rural sharecropping, segregated education, northward migration, ghetto hustling, and the lure of such competing ideologies as nationalism and communism. Many considered his novel Invisible Man" class="md-crosslink">Invisible Man (1952) the best novel of the postwar years.
Ellison, RalphRalph Ellison, 1952.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Later two African American women published some of the most important post-World War II American fiction. In The Bluest Eye" class="md-crosslink">The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula" class="md-crosslink">Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved" class="md-crosslink">Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1998), Toni Morrison created a strikingly original fiction that sounded different notes from lyrical recollection to magic realism. Like Ellison, Morrison drew on diverse literary and folk influences and dealt with important phases of black history—i.e., slavery in Beloved and the Harlem Renaissance in Jazz. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. Alice Walker, after writing several volumes of poetry and a novel dealing with the civil rights movement (Meridian [1976]), received the Pulitzer Prize for her black feminist novel The Color Purple" class="md-crosslink">The Color Purple (1982). African American men whose work gained attention during this period included Ishmael Reed, whose wild comic techniques resembled Ellison’s; James Alan McPherson, a subtle short-story writer in the mold of Ellison and Baldwin; Charles Johnson, whose novels, such as The Oxherding Tale (1982) and The Middle Passage (1990), showed a masterful historical imagination; Randall Kenan, a gay writer with a strong folk imagination whose style also descended from both Ellison and Baldwin; and Colson Whitehead, who used experimental techniques and folk traditions in The Intuitionist (1999) and John Henry Days (2001).
Morrison, ToniToni Morrison, 1993.Don Emmert—AFP/Getty Images
New fictional modes
The horrors of World War II, the Cold War and the atomic bomb, the bizarre feast of consumer culture, and the cultural clashes of the 1960s prompted many writers to argue that reality had grown inaccessible, undermining the traditional social role of fiction. Writers of novels and short stories therefore were under unprecedented pressure to discover, or invent, new and viable kinds of fiction. One response was the postmodern novel of William Gaddis, John Barth, John Hawkes, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, Paul Auster, and Don DeLillo—technically sophisticated and highly self-conscious about the construction of fiction and the fictive nature of “reality” itself. These writers dealt with themes such as imposture and paranoia; their novels drew attention to themselves as artifacts and often used realistic techniques ironically. Other responses involved a heightening of realism by means of intensifying violence, amassing documentation, or resorting to fantasy. A brief discussion of writers as different as Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates may serve to illustrate these new directions.
In his World War II novel, The Naked and the Dead" class="md-crosslink">The Naked and the Dead (1948), Mailer wrote in the Dos Passos tradition of social protest. Feeling its limitations, he developed his own brand of surreal fantasy in fables such as An American Dream (1965) and Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967). As with many of the postmodern novelists, his subject was the nature of power, personal as well as political. However, it was only when he turned to “nonfiction fiction” or “fiction as history” in The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago (both 1968) that Mailer discovered his true voice—grandiose yet personal, comic yet shrewdly intellectual. He refined this approach into a new objectivity in the Pulitzer Prize-winning “true life novel” The Executioner’s Song (1979). When he returned to fiction, his most effective work was Harlot’s Ghost (1991), about the Central Intelligence Agency. His final novels took Jesus Christ (The Gospel According to the Son [1997]) and Adolf Hitler (The Castle in the Forest [2007]) as their subjects.