A History of American Literature

The American Century: Literature since 1945 727

“Wind sweeps over the wheat / mist-mask on woods.” “Sleet whips the page / flying

leaves and fugitive,” that same poem continues later; “Earth of ancient ballad / earth

as thought of the sea / water’s edge to say goodbye.” A feeling of dissolution marks

out these lines, a perpetual erasing inherent in the endless ebb and flow of human

language, conscioussness, and history. It is a characteristic of her poetry that makes

Howe one of the most exceptional poets of her generation.

Signs and scenes of crime, science fiction, and fantasy

Language poetry remains very much the literature of a small community, one that

began by being alternative but then later – as, for instance, many language poets

took up posts at universities – became mainstream and, within limits, influential. As

postmodernists, though, language poets are inclined to resist the traditional division

of culture into minority and mass, elite and popular. In their turn, writers of detective

stories, thrillers, hardboiled and science fiction have shown or encouraged the same

resistance over the past forty years, producing work so powerful or pervasive in its

influence that it has helped erase the line of demarcation between genre fiction and

literature. As far as hardboiled and detective tales are concerned, the period from

roughly the 1940s to the 1960s was notable for the development of paperback

original series and mystery magazines. Publishers like Fawcett, Avon, and Dell

produced brand-new, easy-to-read novels in a convenient pocket-size format. They

adapted the pulp formula of the 1930s and 1940s for postwar American society, with

all its changes in lifestyle, its looser attitudes to sex and violence, and its newfound

sophistication. They paid writers reasonably well, with initial payment in advance of

royalties that were up to four times as much as hardcover publishers were paying,

They relied on printing hundreds of thousands of copies of many titles to reach

every possible outlet and buyer. And they were committed to rapid turnover: very

few of these paperback originals ever got beyond an initial printing unless they were

extraordinarily popular. In just the same way as the pulp magazines had engineered

the decline of dime novels, so these paperbacks brought about the end of the pulps.

All major pulp titles were finished by the middle of the 1950s. The new setting for

shorter fiction was the digest-size detective story or thriller magazine. These

magazines, too, were phenomenally successful until the late 1960s: one of the first,

Manhunt, sold half a million copies on its first issue.

Two very different writers who benefited from these new means of literary

production and distribution were Mickey Spillane (1918–2006) and Jim Thompson

(1906–1976). Spillane leaped to success in 1947 when he created the private eye

Mike Hammer for I, the Jury. Hammer is a veteran of World War II who sets out to

avenge the murder of an old army buddy who once saved his life. Assisted by his

loyal, sexy secretary, Velda, he vows to let nothing stand in his way. And, at the climax

of the story, he shoots his naked fiancée in the abdomen when he finds out that she

has killed his buddy and five others. An untrammelled id who is constantly exploding

in messianic rage – against intellectuals and homosexuals, or anyone who oppresses

the “little guy,” from the Mafia to the Communist Party – Hammer continued his

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