• Debate about whether literature
should be entertaining to keep people’s minds off the war or be explicitly
honest to expose the war
• Although it showed a nation that
was united and confident, it also shed light on the bleak side of war and the
effects of nuclear weapons
• Push boundaries of what
literature could be (ex: Naked Lunch
by William S. Boroughs)
• Novelists were more engaged with
the world around them
• A trend of dissent and despair,
frequently experimental in technique
• Echoed the decade’s political
upheavals – “the unraveling of America”
• Realistic war novels (The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer)
• Nonfiction – firsthand accounts
of the war
• Horror of war took awhile to get
published because of works being written in the 20s and 30s
• Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle
by Kurt Vonnegut
• Novels by post war soldiers, such
as The Things They Carried and In the Lake of The Woods by Tim O’Brien
• Characters seems to “search for
their own identities and at odds with a world that tries to dictate that
identity to them”
• Challenged explicit censorship of
language (ex: Sophie’s Choice by
William Styron)
• Wonder Woman was
originally depicted fighting Axis military forces and was a feminist role model
• Hotly discussed writers were
homosexuals or bisexuals
• Baby boom (ex: Dr. Spock’s Baby
& Child Care manual)
• Young writers/ new generation of
writers: children of immigrants (many of them Jews), African Americans (only a
few generations away from slavery), women, etc.
• Inexpensive paperback
• Inexpensive paperback
Source:
Please enjoy our blog...hotly!
