1 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
William Gass (1924– )
Novelist, short-story writer, and essayist known especially for his linguistic and
narrative experimentation and metafictional tendencies (he coined the term
metaf iction). His most acclaimed works are the novels Omensetter’s Luck (1966)
and The Tunnel (1995) and the essay collections Habitations of the Word (1985),
Finding a Form (1997), and Tests of Time (2003). Among his many awards are the
American Book Award for The Tunnel, the PEN/Nabokov Lifetime Achieve-
ment Award, and the Lannon Lifetime Achievement Award; he has received the
National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism three times.
Fredric Jameson (1934– )
Marxist theorist, best known for Sartre: The Origins of Style (1961), Marxism
and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971), The Politi-
cal Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), Postmodernism; or, The
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), and Valences of the Dialectic (2009).
Thomas Pynchon (1937– )
Much-admired but reclusive novelist and short-story writer best known for V.
(1963); The Crying of Lot 49 (1966); Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), winner of the 1974
National Book Award; Slow Learner (1984), a collection of short stories with an
autobiographical essay; Mason & Dixon (1997); and Inherent Vice (2009).
Ishmael Reed (1938– )
Prolific African American fiction writer, poet, anthologist, and recipient of a
MacArthur Fellow grant noted for his satire and unrelenting critique of contem-
porary intellectual life. His best-known novels are Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down
(1969), Mumbo Jumbo (1972), and The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974). His
poetry is collected in New and Collected Poems (1988).
Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007)
Novelist and essayist known particularly for his satire and blending of science-
fiction elements into his fiction. His novels include Player Piano (1952), Mother
Night (1961), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), Slaughterhouse-Five; or, the
Children’s Crusade (1969), Breakfast of Champions (1973), and Hocus Pocus (1990).
His essays and occasional writing are collected in A Man without a Country (2005)
and Armageddon in Retrospect (2008).
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008)
Novelist, short-story writer, and essayist whose works include the novels The
Broom of the System (1987) and Inf inite Jest (1996), the short-story collection Brief
Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), and the essay collection A Supposedly Fun
Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997). He received a MacArthur Foundation Fellow-
ship Award in 1997.
Colson Whitehead (1969– )
African American novelist and MacArthur Fellow known for his Postmodernist
sensibility in The Intuitionist (1999), John Henry Days (2001), and Apex Hides the
Hurt (2006).
—Kathryn West