Later Modern Writers - Post World War II
Note: The list of wonderful writers is long as are the years after 1945 to the present. All I can do is present these possibilites as some of the good writing which captures the post atomic age persona developed in the last half of the 20th century. If you are interested in expanding your reading visit PAL, Perspectives in American Literature.
Choose two to read before March 30th:
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, 1952
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is the story of a young black man whose name
the reader never learns. He is a young man from the South who is haunted by
his grandfather's deathbed warning against conforming to the wishes of white
people because the young man sees that as the way to be successful.http://www.bookrags.com/notes/inv/SUM.html
Jakc Kerouac's On the Road , 1957
Let the book speak for itself: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the
ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything
at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but
burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders
across the stars..." -- On The Road
Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, 1963
In this autobiographical novel, Plath's protagonist, Esther Greenwood, sinks
into a profound depression during the summer after her third year of college.
Esther spends the month of June interning at a ladies' fashion magazine in
Manhattan, but despite her initial expectations, is uninterested in the work
and increasingly unsure of her own prospects. Esther grows disenchanted with
her traditional-minded boyfriend, Buddy Willard, a medical student who "had
won a prize for persuading the most relatives of dead people to have their
dead ones cut up, whether they needed it or not . . . . " Returning home to
a New England suburb, Esther also discovers that she's been rejected from
a Harvard summer school fiction course. Her relationship with her mother is
painfully strained.http://endeavor.med.nyu.edu/lit-med/lit-med-db/webdocs/webdescrips/plath1085-des-.html
J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, 1951.
This book has been steeped in controversy since it was banned in America after
it's first publication. John Lennon's assassin, Mark Chapman, asked the former
Beatle to sign a copy of the book earlier in the morning of the day that he
murdered Lennon. Police found the book in his possession upon apprehending
the psychologically disturbed Chapman. However, the book itself contains nothing
that could be attributed with leading Chapman to act as he did - it could
have been any book that he was reading the day he decided to kill John Lennon
- and as a result of the fact that it was The Catcher in the Rye, a book describing
a nervous breakdown, media speculated widely about the possible connection.
This gave the book even more notoriety. So what is The Catcher in the Rye
actually about? http://www.tmtm.com/sides/catcher.html
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr's Slaughterhouse Five, 1970.
Slaughterhouse Five, -- Or the Children's Crusade, Vonnegut finally delivers
a complete treatise on the World War II bombing of Dresden. The main character,
Billy Pilgrim, is a very young infantry scout* who is captured in the Battle
of the Bulge and quartered in a Dresden slaughterhouse where he and other
prisoners are employed in the production of a vitamin supplement for pregnant
women. During the February 13, 1945, firebombing by Allied aircraft, the prisoners
take shelter in an underground meat locker. When they emerge, the city has
been levelled and they are forced to dig corpses out of the rubble. The story
of Billy Pilgrim is the story of Kurt Vonnegut who was captured and survived
the firestorm in which 135,000 German civilians perished, more than the number
of deaths in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Robert Scholes
sums up the theme of Slaughterhouse Five in the New York Times Book Review,
writing: 'Be kind. Don't hurt. Death is coming for all of us anyway, and it
is better to be Lot's wife looking back through salty eyes than the Deity
that destroyed those cities of the plain in order to save them.' http://www.vonnegutweb.com/sh5/
Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, 1952
The novel has been described as Southern Gothic in its portrayal of the bizarre
and the grotesque, as well as in its depiction of scenes of horror and violence.
O’Connor also has a strong concern with questions of religious faith. Major
themes of her novels include: the individual’s search for vocation; the search
for justification and redemption; the conflict of good and evil; the conflict
of faith and doubt. In Wise Blood, Hazel Motes seems trapped by his destiny
to become a preacher. Though he denies that Jesus exists, Hazel is driven
to seek some form of redemption. O'Connor describes the necessity of faith,
as revealed the individual’s inability to deny that God exists. Even when
an individual attempts to deny the existence of God, the individual is confronted
by the presence of God. Hazel’s attempt to run away from God transforms the
novel from bizarre comedy to an intense and searching study of the problem
of redemption in the modern world. http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/wiseblood.html
