Unit 5: American Literature

New American Voices

Toni Morrison

Alice Walker

The feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s fueled creative energies for many women writers. Some poets, with their personal poetry, revealed the pain and joy of being a woman. As the women' movement gained more acceptance, however, women wrote less in protest and more in affirmation—particularly black women writers, such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, who portrayed strong black women as the source of continuity, the preservers of values, in black culture. Only in the 1970s did other ethnic groups begin to find their literary voice. Magazines and anthologies were dedicated to the works of American Hispanics, who had come largely from Mexico and the Caribbean. Chinese-American Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston

Amy Tan

wrote about her ancestors in the books The Woman Warrior (1975) and China Men (1980). And writers from foreign ethnic backgrounds did not occupy the fringe of American literature—they were very much in the mainstream. Amy Tan, a Chinese-American writer, told of her parents' early struggles in China and in the United States in The Joy Luck Club (1989), which quickly climbed to the top of the best-selling book list.

Toni Morrison(1931- ), a professor at Princeton University, has published seven novels up to now, of which Song of Solomon (1977) and Beloved (1987) are considered her best works. Although they are descriptions of African-American experience, her novels are widely read all over the world by people of all colors, ages and creeds. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, the first African-American writer to receive this honor.

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