6. Postwar Literature （1945–1970）

The twenty-five years between 1945 and 1970 mark a fruitful era in American literature, and protest is the defining element in the work of its writers. For writers, the establishment was being run by the Colonel Cathcarts of Catch-22 （1961）, the Nurse Ratcheds of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest （1962）, and the Boss Godfreys of Cool Hand Luke （1965）, but these tyrants were being confronted by the Randle P. McMurphys, John Yossarians, and Luke Jacksons of the younger generation, whose defiance was sometimes their only weapon.

Dominant Genres and Literary Forms

Out of the dissidence and unrest of this quarter century blossomed many literary movements, some of which overlap, and most of which can be viewed as varieties of the predominant aesthetic movement, Postmodernism. World War II jarred the foundations of civilization, and the Postmodernists responded by subverting the foundations of its art to an even greater extent than their post–World War I Modernist predecessors. The Modernists had experimented with new approaches to writing to reflect more-complex views of mankind and its relationship to the universe. They often employed disjointed plotlines and stream-of-consciousness points of view. Like the Modernist Ezra Pound, Postmodernists were eager to “make it new” and to some extent took experimentation to a new extreme; they also opposed the now-rigid expectations of High Modernism, with its emphasis on erudition and authorial detachment. Postmodernist literature tends to be highly subjective, often self-conscious of its own form, and open-ended. Genres are frequently blended and high and popular culture fused. The Postmodern author can become a character in his fiction, as in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five （1969）, or the title of the novel can suddenly appear as a major character, as in Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America （1967）. The composition of the work can also become the subject, as it does in both of these novels or in self-reflexive poetry such as Brautigan’s “April 7, 1969”, which reads, “I feel so bad today / that I want towrite a poem / I don’t care: any poem, this poem.”

The most influential movement of the postwar period was the Beat movement, which began in New York City through the friendship of Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and, later, Gregory Corso, but it blossomed in San Francisco where the East Coast Beats befriended West Coast writers such as Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen. The Beats shared a rejection of the establishment, which they perceived as conformist, materialistic, and hypocritical. Many sought liberation in Eastern religion, drug use, and jazz music. Their writing tended to be intuitive and spontaneous rather than intellectual and contrived, and it was marked by honesty and urgency. Connected with the Beat movement is the less aesthetically and philosophically cohesive San Francisco Renaissance, a group of experimental writers, who also emerged after the war, writing what its founder Kenneth Rexroth called “elegiac” poetry in response to a changing America. An interest in Asian language and poetry characterized many of the members of this movement, such as Brautigan, whose understated poems often resemble haiku. Many of the West Coast Beats, such as Snyder, who moved to Japan at the end of the 1950s, are included in this artistic movement, out of which grew the hippie culture of the 1960s and such psychedelic rock bands as The Grateful Dead, The Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the novels of Ken Kesey and Brautigan.

While poets produced some of the most enduring books of the period, such as Ginsberg’s

Howl and other Poems （1956）, Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind （1958）, and Dickey’s Poems 1957–1967 （1967）, fiction writers also dominated the era with works characterized by social and spiritual alienation. Unlike many of the movies produced during the war years, novels by writers who served in the war, such as Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, and Vonnegut, tended to expose the horrors rather than the honors of combat. Western writers such as Kesey and Edward Abbey produced novels that often lament the destruction of the Western frontier by developers.

Four dramatists dominated the postwar years, particularly during the late 1940s and 1950s, writing some of the best plays of the century: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman （1949）, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night （1956）, and Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire （1947） and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof （1955） are all modern Realist tragedies. Tennessee Williams, too, set his work in the South and often dealt with the changing social structure, though his themes have universal resonance. Edward Albee’s plays The Zoo Story （1958） and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? （1962） are more closely linked to the theatreof the absurd; yet, like his contemporaries, Albee is concerned with the conflict between honesty and the need for self-deception.