The rise of feminism as a political movement gave many women a sense that their experience too is richly and importantly outside the mainstream; since at least the 1960s, there has been an explosion of women’s fiction, including the much-admired work of Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Tyler, Ann Beattie, Gail Godwin, and Alison Lurie.
Perhaps precisely because so many novelists sought to make their fiction from experiences that were deliberately imagined as marginal, set aside from the general condition of American life, many other writers had the sense that fiction, and particularly the novel, might not any longer be the best way to try to record American life. For many writers the novel seemed to have become above all a form of private, interior expression and could no longer keep up with the extravagant oddities of the United States. Many gifted writers took up journalism with some of the passion for perfection of style that had once been reserved for fiction. The exemplars of this form of poetic journalism included the masters of The New Yorker magazine, most notably A.J. Liebling, whose books included The Earl of Louisiana (1961), a study of an election in Louisiana, as well as Joseph Mitchell, who in his books The Bottom of the Harbour (1944) and Joe Gould’s Secret (1942) offered dark and perplexing accounts of the life of the American metropolis. The dream of combining real facts and lyrical fire also achieved a masterpiece in the poet James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" class="md-crosslink">Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (l941; with photographs by Walker Evans), an account of sharecropper life in the South that is a landmark in the struggle for fact writing that would have the beauty and permanence of poetry.
Let Us Now Praise Famous MenBud Fields and his family, Hale county, Alabama, photograph by Walker Evans, c. 1936–37; from the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) by Evans and James Agee.Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Photograph Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. 8c52407u)
As the century continued, this genre of imaginative nonfiction (sometimes called the documentary novel or the nonfiction novel) continued to evolve and took on many different forms. In the writing of Calvin Trillin, John McPhee, Neil Sheehan, and Truman Capote, all among Liebling’s and Mitchell’s successors at The New Yorker, this new form continued to seek a tone of subdued and even amused understatement. Tom Wolfe, whose influential books included The Right Stuff (1979), an account of the early days of the American space program, and Norman Mailer, whose books included Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), a ruminative piece about the Republican and Democratic national conventions in l968, deliberately took on huge public subjects and subjected them to the insights (and, many people thought, the idiosyncratic whims) of a personal sensibility. During the 1990s autobiography became the focus for a number of accomplished novelists, including Frank McCourt, Anne Roiphe, and Dave Eggers. At the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st, massive, ambitious novels were published by David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest, 1996) and Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections, 2001; Freedom, 2010).
Tom Wolfe.Jim Cooper/AP/REX/Shutterstock.com
As the nonfiction novel often pursued extremes of grandiosity and hyperbole, the American short story assumed a previously unexpected importance in the life of American writing; the short story became the voice of private vision and private lives. The short story, with its natural insistence on the unique moment and the infrangible glimpse of something private and fragile, had a new prominence. The rise of the American short story is bracketed by two remarkable books: J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories (1953) and Raymond Carver’s collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981). Salinger inspired a generation by imagining that the serious search for a spiritual life could be reconciled with an art of gaiety and charm; Carver confirmed in the next generation their sense of a loss of spirituality in an art of taciturn reserve and cloaked emotions.
cover of The Catcher in the RyeReproduction of the cover of the first edition of J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951).Little, Brown and Company/Hachette Book Group USA
Carver, who died in 1988, and the great novelist and man of letters John Updike, who died in 2009, were perhaps the last undisputed masters of literature in the high American sense that emerged with Ernest Hemingway and Faulkner. Yet in no area of the American arts, perhaps, have the claims of the marginal to take their place at the centre of the table been so fruitful, subtle, or varied as in literature. Perhaps because writing is inescapably personal, the trap of turning art into mere ideology has been most deftly avoided in its realm. This can be seen in the dramatically expanded horizons of the feminist and minority writers whose work first appeared in the 1970s and ’80s, including the Chinese American Amy Tan. A new freedom to write about human erotic experience previously considered strange or even deviant shaped much new writing, from the comic obsessive novels of Nicholson Baker through the work of those short-story writers and novelists, including Edmund White and David Leavitt, who have made art out of previously repressed and unnarrated areas of homoerotic experience. Literature is above all the narrative medium of the arts, the one that still best relates What Happened to Me, and American literature, at least, has only been enriched by new “mes” and new narratives. (See also American literature.) Adam Gopnik The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The visual arts and postmodernism
Perhaps the greatest, and certainly the loudest, event in American cultural life since World War II was what the critic Irving Sandler has called “The Triumph of American Painting”—the emergence of a new form of art that allowed American painting to dominate the world. This dominance lasted for at least 40 years, from the birth of the so-called New York school, or Abstract Expressionism, around l945 until at least the mid-1980s, and it took in many different kinds of art and artists. In its first flowering, in the epic-scaled abstractions of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and the other members of the New York school, this new painting seemed abstract, rarefied, and constructed from a series of negations, from saying “no!” to everything except the purest elements of painting. Abstract Expressionism seemed to stand at the farthest possible remove from the common life of American culture and particularly from the life of American popular culture. Even this painting, however, later came under a new and perhaps less-austere scrutiny; and the art historian Robert Rosenblum has persuasively argued that many of the elements of Abstract Expressionism, for all their apparent hermetic distance from common experience, are inspired by the scale and light of the American landscape and American 19th-century landscape painting—by elements that run deep and centrally in Americans’ sense of themselves and their country.