United States

In the United States after World War II, many writers, in opposition to what they perceived as the bland flattening out of cultural life, made their subject all the things that set Americans apart from one another. Although for many Americans, ethnic and even religious differences had become increasingly less important as the century moved on—holiday rather than everyday material—many writers after World War II seized on these differences to achieve a detached point of view on American life. Beginning in the 1940s and ’50s, three groups in particular seemed to be “outsider-insiders” who could bring a special vision to fiction: Southerners, Jews, and African Americans.

Each group had a sense of uncertainty, mixed emotions, and stifled aspirations that lent a questioning counterpoint to the general chorus of affirmation in American life. The Southerners—William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor most particularly—thought that a noble tradition of defeat and failure had been part of the fabric of Southern life since the Civil War. At a time when “official” American culture often insisted that the American story was one of endless triumphs and optimism, they told stories of tragic fate. Jewish writers—most prominently Chicago novelist Saul Bellow, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in l976, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth—found in the “golden exile” of Jews in the United States a juxtaposition of surface affluence with deeper unease and perplexity that seemed to many of their fellow Americans to offer a common predicament in a heightened form. At the turn of the 21st century, younger Jewish writers from the former Soviet Union such as Gary Shteyngart and Lara Vapnyar dealt impressively with the experience of immigrants in the United States.

Among the immigrant writers who explored the intersection of their old and new cultures at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st were Cuban American writer Oscar Hijuelos, Antigua-born Jamaica Kincaid, Bosnian immigrant Aleksandar Hemon, Indian-born novelist and short-story writer Bharati Mukherjee, and Asian American writers Maxine Hong Kingston and Ha Jin.

Mukherjee, BharatiBharati Mukherjee, 2004.Embassy of the United States, Tel-Aviv, Israel/U.S. Department of State

For African Americans, of course, the promise of American life had in many respects never been fulfilled. “What happens to a dream deferred,” the poet Langston Hughes asked, and many African American writers attempted to answer that question, variously, through stories that mingled pride, perplexity, and rage. African American literature achieved one of the few unquestioned masterpieces of late 20th-century American fiction writing in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man" class="md-crosslink">Invisible Man (l952). Later two African American women, Toni Morrison (the first African American female to win the Nobel Prize for Literature; 1993), and Alice Walker, published some of the most important post-World War II American fiction.

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.