Unit 5: American Literature

Postwar Voices and the"Beat Generation"

Richard Wright

Ralph Ellison

James Baldwin

The new receptivity of American society to a diversity of voices incorporated black writers and black protest into the mainstream of American literature. Richard Wright's (1908-1960) disturbing novel Native Son, published in 1940, revealed a new black hero, whose character had been warped by this violent and cruel society. The hero of Ralph Ellison's (1914-1994) Invisible Man (1952), is also driven underground by the values of white society. James Baldwin's characteristic themes, hatred of racism and celebration of sexuality, were expressed in novels like Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and in essays like Nobody Knows My Name (1961), The Fire Next Time (1963).

American Jews also began to raise their literary voices at this time. Writers such as Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March, 1953), Bernard Malamud (The Assistant, 1957), and Philip Roth (Good-bye, Columbus,1959) not only focused upon Jewish characters and social questions, but brought a distinctively Jewish sense of humor to their novels. Their prose often carried echoes of Yiddish, the language used by European Jews, which had helped preserve Jewish culture, isolated but intact, until the early 20th century. Another Jewish writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was born in Poland but had emigrated to the United States in 1935, continued to write in Yiddish, though his stories were quickly translated into English and became part of the national literature. Both Singer and Bellow won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Street Car Named Desire

In the theater, Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), beginning with The Glass Menagerie (1945), expressed his southern heritage in poetic yet sensational plays, usually about a sensitive woman trapped in an insensitive environment. Street Car Named Desire is considered his best play. Arthur Miller portrayed the common man pressured by society; his greatest play, Death of a Salesman (1947), turned a second-rate traveling salesman, Willy Loman, into a quasi-tragic hero. When this play was staged in china, it was a big success.

Allen Ginsberg

The San Francisco writers were part of a large group called the "Beat Generation," a name that referred simultaneously to the rhythm of jazz music, to their sense that society was worn out, and to their interest in new forms of experience, through drugs, alcohol or Eastern mysticism. Poet Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956) set for them a tone of social protest and visionary ecstasy, in elaborate language reminiscent of Whitman.

While other writers did not espouse the life style of the Beats, they also viewed the world on a comic, absurd light. In J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951), a sardonic teenage boy resists the hypocrisies of adult society. Funny as the novel is, there is something tragic in the boy's hopelessness about his world.

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