T he 1950s saw the delayed impact of modernization and technology
in everyday life, left over from the 1920s -- before the Great
Depression. World War II brought the United States out of the
Depression, and the 1950s provided most Americans with time to
enjoy long-awaited material prosperity. Business, especially in the
corporate world, seemed to offer the good life (usually in the
suburbs), with its real and symbolic marks of success -- house,
car, television, and home appliances.
Yet loneliness at the top was a dominant theme; the faceless
corporate man became a cultural stereotype in Sloan Wilson's
best-selling novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955).
Generalized American alienation came under the scrutiny of
sociologist David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd (1950). Other
popular, more or less scientific studies followed, ranging from
Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders (1957) and The Status Seekers
(1959) to William Whyte's The Organization Man (1956) and C. Wright
Mills's more intellectual formulations -- White Collar (1951) and
The Power Elite (1956). Economist and academician John Kenneth
Galbraith contributed The Affluent Society (1958). Most of these
works supported the 1950s' assumption that all Americans shared a
common lifestyle. The studies spoke in general terms, criticizing
citizens for losing frontier individualism and becoming too
conformist (for example, Riesman and Mills), or advising people to
become members of the "New Class" that technology and leisure time
created (as seen in Galbraith's works).
The 1950s actually was a decade of subtle and pervasive stress.
Novels by John O'Hara, John Cheever, and John Updike explore the
stress lurking in the shadows of seeming satisfaction. Some of the
best work portrays men who fail in the struggle to succeed, as in
Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Saul Bellow's novella Seize
the Day (1956). Some writers went further by following those who
dropped out, as did J.D. Salinger in The Catcher in the Rye (1951),
Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man (1952), and Jack Kerouac in On the
Road (1957). And in the waning days of the decade, Philip Roth
arrived with a series of short stories reflecting his own
alienation from his Jewish heritage (Goodbye, Columbus, 1959). His
psychological ruminations have provided fodder for fiction, and
later autobiography, into the 1990s.
The fiction of American Jewish writers Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and
Isaac Bashevis Singer -- among others prominent in the 1950s and
the years following -- are also worthy, compelling additions to the
compendium of American literature. The output of these three
authors is most noted for its humor, ethical concern, and portraits
of Jewish communities in the Old and New Worlds.
John O'Hara (1905-1970)
Trained as a journalist, John O'Hara was a prolific writer of
plays, stories, and novels. He was a master of careful, telling
detail and is best remembered for several realistic novels, mostly
written in the 1950s, about outwardly successful people whose inner
faults and dissatisfaction leave them vulnerable. These titles
include Appointment in Samarra (1934), Ten North Frederick (1955),
and From the Terrace (1958).
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison mirror the African-American
experience of the 1950s. Their characters suffer from a lack of
identity, rather than from over-ambition. Baldwin, the oldest of
nine children born to a Harlem, New York, family, was the foster
son of a minister. As a youth, Baldwin occasionally preached in the
church. This experience helped shape the compelling, oral quality
of Baldwin's prose, most clearly seen in his excellent essays, such
as "Letter from a Region Of My Mind," from the collection The Fire
Next Time (1963). In this, he argued movingly for an end to
separation between the races.
Baldwin's first novel, the autobiographical Go Tell It On the
Mountain (1953), is probably his best known. It is the story of a
14-year-old youth who seeks self-knowledge and religious faith as
he wrestles with issues of Christian conversion in a storefront
church. Other important Baldwin works include Another Country
(1962), a novel about racial issues and homosexuality, and Nobody
Knows My Name (1961), a collection of passionate personal essays
about racism, the role of the artist, and literature.
Ralph Waldo Ellison (1914-1994)
Ralph Ellison was a midwesterner, born in Oklahoma, who studied at
Tuskegee Institute in the southern United States. He had one of the
strangest careers in American letters -- consisting of one highly
acclaimed book, and nothing more. The novel is Invisible Man
(1952), the story of a black man who lives a subterranean existence
in a hole brightly illuminated by electricity stolen from a utility
company. The book recounts his grotesque, disenchanting
experiences. When he wins a scholarship to a black college, he is
humiliated by whites; when he gets to the college, he witnesses the
black president spurning black American concerns. Life is corrupt
outside college, too. For example, even religion is no consolation:
A preacher turns out to be a criminal. The novel indicts society
for failing to provide its citizens -- black and white -- with
viable ideals and institutions for realizing them. It embodies a
powerful racial theme because the "invisible man" is invisible not
in himself but because others, blinded by prejudice, cannot see him
for who he is. Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)
Flannery O'Connor, a native of Georgia, lived a life cut short by
lupus, a deadly blood disease. Still, she refused sentimentality,
as evident in her extremely humorous yet bleak and uncompromising
stories. Unlike Porter, Welty, and Hurston, O'Connor most often
held her characters at arm's length, revealing their inadequacy and
silliness. The uneducated southern characters who people her novels
often create violence through superstition or religion, as we see
in her novel Wise Blood (1952), about a religious fanatic who
establishes his own church.
Sometimes violence arises out of prejudice, as in "The Displaced
Person," about an immigrant killed by ignorant country people who
are threatened by his hard work and strange ways. Often, cruel
events simply happen to the characters, as in "Good Country
People," the story of a girl seduced by a man who steals her
artificial leg.
The black humor of O'Connor links her with Nathanael West and
Joseph Heller. Her works include short story collections (A Good
Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge
(1965); the novel The Violent Bear It Away (1960); and a volume of
letters, The Habit of Being (1979). Her Complete Stories came out
in 1971.
Saul Bellow (1915- )
Born in Canada and raised in Chicago, Saul Bellow is of
Russian-Jewish background. In college, he studied anthropology and
sociology, which greatly influence his writing even today. He has
expressed a profound debt to Theodore Dreiser for his openness to a
wide range of experience and his emotional engagement with it.
Highly respected, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1976.
Bellow's early, somewhat grim existentialist novels include
Dangling Man (1944), a Kafkaesque study of a man waiting to be
drafted into the Army, and The Victim (1947), about relations
between Jews and Gentiles. In the 1950s, his vision became more
comic: He used a series of energetic and adventurous first-person
narrators in The Adventures of Augie March (1953) -- the study of a
Huck Finn-like urban entrepreneur who becomes a black marketeer in
Europe -- and in Henderson the Rain King (1959), a brilliant and
exuberant serio-comic novel about a middle-aged millionaire whose
unsatisfied ambitions drive him to Africa. Bellow's later works
include Herzog (1964), about the troubled life of a neurotic
English professor who specializes in the idea of the Romantic self;
Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970); Humboldt's Gift (1975); and the
autobiographical The Dean's December (1982).
Bellow's Seize the Day (1956) is a brilliant novella often used as
part of the high school or college curriculum because of its
excellence and brevity. It centers on a failed businessman, Tommy
Wilhelm, who tries to hide his feelings of inadequacy by presenting
a good front. The novella begins ironically: "When it came to
concealing his troubles, Tommy Wilhelm was not less capable than
the next fellow. So at least he thought...." This expenditure of
energy ironically helps lead to his downfall. Wilhelm is so
consumed by feelings of inadequacy that he becomes totally
inadequate -- a failure with women, jobs, machines, and the
commodities market, where he loses all his money. He is an example
of the schlemiel of Jewish folklore -- one to whom unlucky things
inevitably happen.
Seize the Day sums up the fear of failure that
plagues many Americans.
Bernard Malamud (1914-1986)
Bernard Malamud was born in New York City to Russian-Jewish
immigrant parents. In his second novel, The Assistant (1957),
Malamud found his characteristic themes -- man's struggle to
survive against all odds, and the ethical underpinnings of recent
Jewish immigrants.
Malamud's first published work was The Natural (1952), a
combination of realism and fantasy set in the mythic world of
professional baseball. Other novels include A New Life (1961), The
Fixer (1966), Pictures of Fidelman (1969), and The Tenants (1971).
He also was a prolific master of short fiction. Through his
stories, in collections such as The Magic Barrel (1958), Idiots
First (1963), and Rembrandt's Hat (1973), he conveyed -- more than
any other American-born writer -- a sense of the Jewish present and
past, the real and the surreal, fact and legend.
Malamud's monumental work -- for which he was awarded the Pulitzer
Prize and National Book Award -- is The Fixer. Set in Russia around
the turn of the 20th century, it is a thinly veiled glimpse at an
actual case of blood libel -- the infamous 1913 trial of Mendel
Beiliss, a dark, anti-Semitic blotch on modern history. As in many
of his writings, Malamud underscores the suffering of his hero,
Yakov Bok, and the struggle against all odds to endure.
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991)
Nobel Prize-winning novelist and short story master Isaac Bashevis
Singer -- a native of Poland who immigrated to the United States in
1935 -- was the son of the prominent head of a rabbinical court in
Warsaw. Writing in Yiddish (the amalgam of German and Hebrew that
was the common language of European Jewry over the past several
centuries) all his life, he dealt in mythic and realistic terms
with two specific groups of Jews -- the denizens of the Old World
shtetls (small villages) and the ocean- tossed 20th-century emigré
of the pre-World War II and postwar eras.
Singer's writings served as bookends for the Holocaust -- the
destruction of much of European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis and
their collaborators. On the one hand, he described -- in novels
such as The Manor (1967) and The Estate (1969), set in 19th-century
Russia, and The Family Moskat (1950), focused on a Polish-Jewish
family between the world wars -- the world of European Jewry that
no longer exists. Complementing that were his writings set after
the war, such as Enemies, A Love Story (1972), whose protagonists
were survivors of the Holocaust seeking to create new lives for
themselves.
Vladimir Nabokov (1889-1977)
Like Singer, Vladimir Nabokov was an Eastern European immigrant.
Born into an affluent family in Czarist Russia, he came to the
United States in 1940 and gained U.S. citizenship five years later.
From 1948 to 1959 he taught literature at Cornell University in
upstate New York; in 1960 he moved permanently to Switzerland. He
is best known for his novels, which include the autobiographical
Pnin (1957), about an ineffectual Russian emigre professor, and
Lolita (U.S. edition 1958), about an educated, middle-aged European
who becomes infatuated with an ignorant 12-year-old American girl.
Nabokov's pastiche novel, Pale Fire (1962), another successful
venture, focuses on a long poem by an imaginary dead poet and the
commentaries on it by a critic whose writings overwhelm the poem
and take on unexpected lives of their own.
Nabokov is an important writer for his stylistic subtlety, deft
satire, and ingenious innovations in form, which have inspired such
novelists as John Barth. Nabokov was aware of his role as a
mediator between the Russian and American literary worlds; he wrote
a book on Gogol and translated Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. His daring,
somewhat expressionist subjects, like the odd love in Lolita,
helped introduce expressionist 20th-century European currents into
the essentially realist American fictional tradition. His tone,
partly satirical and partly nostalgic, also suggested a new
serio-comic emotional register made use of by writers such as
Pynchon, who combines the opposing notes of wit and fear.
John Cheever (1912-1982)
John Cheever often has been called a "novelist of manners." He is
known for his elegant, suggestive short stories, which scrutinize
the New York business world through its effects on the businessmen,
their wives, children, and friends. A wry, melancholy and never
quite quenched but seemingly hopeless desire for passion or
metaphysical certainty lurks in the shadows of Cheever's finely
drawn, Chekhovian tales, collected in The Way Some People Live
(1943), The Housebreaker of Shady Hill (1958), Some People, Places
and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel (1961), The
Brigadier and the Golf Widow (1964), and The World of Apples
(1973). His titles reveal his characteristic nonchalance,
playfulness, and irreverence and hint at his subject matter.
Cheever also published several novels -- The Wapshot Scandal
(1964), Bullet Park (1969), and Falconer (1977) -- the last of
which was largely autobiographical.
John Updike (1932- )
John Updike, like Cheever, is also regarded as a writer of manners
with his suburban settings, domestic themes, reflections of ennui
and wistfulness, and, particularly, his fictional locales on the
eastern seaboard, in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Updike is best
known for his four Rabbit books, depictions of the life of a man --
Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom -- through the ebbs and flows of his
existence across four decades of American social and political
history. Rabbit, Run (1960) is a mirror of the 1950s, with Angstrom
an aimless, disaffected young husband. Rabbit Redux (1971) --
spotlighting the counterculture of the 1960s -- finds Angstrom
still without a clear goal or purpose or viable escape route from
mundaneness. In Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Harry has become prosperous
through an inheritance against the landscape of the wealthy
self-centeredness of the 1970s, as the Vietnam era wanes. The final
volume, Rabbit at Rest (1990), glimpses Angstrom's reconciliation
with life, and inadvertent death, against the backdrop of the
1980s.
Among Updike's other novels are The Centaur (1963), Couples (1968),
and Bech: A Book (1970). He possesses the most brilliant style of
any writer today, and his short stories offer scintillating
examples of its range and inventiveness. Collections include The
Same Door (1959), The Music School (1966), Museums and Women
(1972), Too Far To Go (1979), and Problems (1979). He has also
written several volumes of poetry and essays.
J.D. Salinger (1919- )
A harbinger of things to come in the 1960s, J.D. Salinger has
portrayed attempts to drop out of society. Born in New York City,
he achieved huge literary success with the publication of his novel
The Catcher in the Rye (1951), centered on a sensitive 16-year-old,
Holden Caulfield, who flees his elite boarding school for the
outside world of adulthood, only to become disillusioned by its
materialism and phoniness.
When asked what he would like to be, Caulfield answers "the catcher
in the rye," misquoting a poem by Robert Burns. In his vision, he
is a modern version of a white knight, the sole preserver of
innocence. He imagines a big field of rye so tall that a group of
young children cannot see where they are running as they play their
games. He is the only big person there. "I'm standing on the edge
of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody
if they start to go over the cliff." The fall over the cliff is
equated with the loss of childhood and (especially sexual)
innocence -- a persistent theme of the era. Other works by this
reclusive, spare writer include Nine Stories (1953), Franny and
Zooey (1961), and Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters (1963), a
collection of stories from The New Yorker. Since the appearance of
one story in 1965, Salinger -- who lives in New Hampshire -- has
been absent from the American literary scene.
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)
The son of an impoverished French-Canadian family, Jack Kerouac
also questioned the values of middle-class life. He met members of
the "Beat" literary underground as an undergraduate at Columbia
University in New York City. His fiction was much influenced by the
loosely autobiographical work of southern novelist Thomas
Wolfe.
Kerouac's best-known novel, On the Road (1957), describes
"beatniks" wandering through America seeking an idealistic dream of
communal life and beauty. The Dharma Bums (1958) also focuses on
peripatetic counterculture intellectuals and their infatuation with
Zen Buddhism. Kerouac also penned a book of poetry, Mexico City
Blues (1959), and volumes about his life with such beatniks as
experimental novelist William Burroughs and poet Allen Ginsberg.
THE AFFLUENT BUT ALIENATED 1950s
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