A s in the first half of the 20th century, fiction in the second
half reflects the character of each decade. The late 1940s saw the
aftermath of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War.
World War II offered prime material: Norman Mailer (The Naked and
the Dead, 1948) and James Jones (From Here to Eternity, 1951) were
two writers who used it best. Both of them employed realism verging
on grim naturalism; both took pains not to glorify combat. The same
was true for Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions (1948). Herman Wouk, in
The Caine Mutiny (1951), also showed that human foibles were as
evident in wartime as in civilian life. Later, Joseph Heller cast
World War II in satirical and absurdist terms (Catch-22, 1961),
arguing that war is laced with insanity. Thomas Pynchon presented
an involuted, brilliant case parodying and displacing different
versions of reality (Gravity's Rainbow, 1973); and Kurt Vonnegut,
Jr., became one of the shining lights of the counterculture during
the early 1970s following publication of Slaughterhouse-Five; or,
The Children's Crusade (1969), his antiwar novel about the
firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces during World War
II (which he witnessed on the ground as a prisoner of war).
The 1940s saw the flourishing of a new contingent of writers,
including poet-novelist-essayist Robert Penn Warren, dramatists
Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, and short story writers
Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty. All but Miller were from
the South. All explored the fate of the individual within the
family or community and focused on the balance between personal
growth and responsibility to the group.
Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)
Robert Penn Warren, one of the southern Fugitives, enjoyed a
fruitful career running through most of the 20th century. He showed
a lifelong concern with democratic values as they appeared within
historical context. The most enduring of his novels is All the
King's Men (1946), focusing on the darker implications of the
American dream -- as revealed in this thinly veiled account of the
career of a flamboyant and sinister southern senator, Huey
Long.
Arthur Miller (1915- )
New York-born dramatist-novelist-essayist-biographer Arthur Miller
reached his personal pinnacle in 1949 with Death of a Salesman, a
study of man's search for merit and worth in his life and the
realization that failure invariably looms. Set within the Loman
family, it hinges on the uneven relationships of father and sons,
husband and wife. It is a mirror of the literary attitudes of the
1940s -- with its rich combination of realism tinged with
naturalism; carefully drawn, rounded characters; and insistence on
the value of the individual, despite failure and error. Death of a
Salesman is a moving paean to the common man -- to whom, as Willy
Loman's widow eulogizes, "attention must be paid." Poignant and
somber, it is also a story of dreams. As one character notes
ironically, "a salesman has got to dream, boy. It comes with the
territory."
Death of a Salesman, a landmark work, still is only one of a number
of dramas Miller wrote over several decades, including All My Sons
(1947) and The Crucible (1953). Both are political -- one
contemporary, and the other set in colonial times. The first deals
with a manufacturer who knowingly allows defective parts to be
shipped to airplane firms during World War II, resulting in the
death of his son and others.
The Crucible depicts the Salem
(Massachusetts) witchcraft trials of the 17th century in which
Puritan settlers were wrongfully executed as supposed witches. Its
message, though -- that "witch hunts" directed at innocent people
are anathema in a democracy -- was relevant to the era in which the
play was staged, the early 1950s, when an anti- Communist crusade
led by U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy and others ruined innocent
people s lives.
Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)
Tennessee Williams, a native of Mississippi, was one of the more
complex individuals on the American literary scene of the mid- 20th
century. His work focused on disturbed emotions and unresolved
sexuality within families -- most of them southern. He was known
for incantatory repetitions, a poetic southern diction, weird
Gothic settings, and Freudian exploration of sexual desire. One of
the first American writers to live openly as a homosexual, Williams
explained that the sexuality of his tormented characters expressed
their loneliness. His characters live and suffer intensely.
Williams wrote more than 20 full-length dramas, many of them
autobiographical. He reached his peak relatively early in his
career -- in the 1940s -- with The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A
Streetcar Named Desire (1947). None of the works that followed over
the next two decades and more reached the level of success and
richness of those two pieces.
Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980)
Katherine Anne Porter's long life and career encompassed several
eras. Her first success, the story "Flowering Judas" (1929), was
set in Mexico during the revolution. The beautifully crafted short
stories that gained her renown subtly unveil personal lives. "The
Jilting of Granny Weatherall," for example, conveys large emotions
with precision. Often she reveals women's inner experiences and
their dependence on men.
Porter's nuances owe much to the stories of the New Zealand- born
story writer Katherine Mansfield. Porter's story collections
include Flowering Judas (1930), Noon Wine (1937), Pale Horse, Pale
Rider (1939), The Leaning Tower (1944), and Collected Stories
(1965). In the early 1960s, she produced a long, allegorical novel
with a timeless theme -- the responsibility of humans for each
other. Titled Ship of Fools (1962), it was set in the late 1930s
aboard a passenger liner carrying members of the German upper class
and German refugees alike from the Nazi nation.
Not a prolific writer, Porter nonetheless has influenced
generations of authors, among them her southern colleagues Eudora
Welty and Flannery O'Connor.
Eudora Welty (1909- )
Born in Mississippi to a well-to-do family of transplanted
northerners, Eudora Welty was guided by Warren and Porter. Porter,
in fact, wrote an introduction to Welty's first collection of short
stories, A Curtain of Green (1941). Welty modeled her nuanced work
on Porter, but the younger woman is more interested in the comic
and grotesque. Like the late Flannery O'Connor, she often takes
subnormal, eccentric, or exceptional characters for subjects.
Despite violence in her work, Welty's wit is essentially humane and
affirmative, as, for example, in her frequently anthologized story
"Why I Work at the P.O.," in which a stubborn and independent
daughter moves out of her house to live in a tiny post office. Her
collections of stories include The Wide Net (1943), The Golden
Apples (1949), The Bride of the Innisfallen (1955), and Moon Lake
(1980). Welty has also written novels such as Delta Wedding (1946),
which is focused on a plantation family in modern times, and The
Optimist's Daughter (1972).
THE REALIST LEGACY AND THE LATE 1940s
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