Contemporary American Literature

 Mushroom cloud of 1945 casts a shadow over the entire generation  Gallows humor  The madness is funny  Catch 22  Dr. Strangelove

Historical Events  The Cold War  Atomix anxiety  JFK Assassination  MLK assassination  Veitnam War  Watergate scandal  1980’s – ME generation  1990’s  Time of rapid development  9/11  War in Iraq

Writers of the Time  Edward Albee  Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf  Truman Capote  In Cold Blood  Harper Lee  To Kill a Mockingbird  James Dickey  Deliverance  Arthur Haley  Roots  Alice Walker  The Color Purple  Tim O’Brien  The Things They Carried

Post-Modernism  Our own age  Sees contemporary culture as a change from modernism  Use tools from modernists  Make our own literature different

Post-Modernism  Often multiple narrators  Self-conscious of efforts  Self awareness of writing  Blends fiction and non-fiction  The Things They Carried  A Million Little Pieces  To the writers, modernism feels played out

Beat Writers  Praised individuality  Speak out against  Social injustice  Conventional middle class conformity  Declared mainstream American morally bankrupt  Planted seeds of protest that continued in the rebellious youth culture of the 1960’s

Allen Ginsberg  Jailed, censored, homosexual  Beatnik writer  “Howl”  “America”  Cry of outrage against conformity

Jack Kerouac  On The Road  Novel  A bible for young non- conformists

Tim O’Brien  Best writer on Vietnam  Created vivid pictures  Allowed Americans to feel as soldiers felt  Jumps between fact and fiction

Vietnam War  1961 – JFK sends in 400 “military advisors”  By 1973 – 58,000 young men are dead  Over 100,000 wounded  At home during the war  Mass protests  Country dangerously divided  Kent State Massacre