Research Guide to American Literature

with opposition and criticism, Many liberals are disappointed that he has not
pushed his programs more vigorously, while conservatives fear that he will push
them too far.
In his 1961 essay “Writing American Fiction” Philip Roth declared: “The
American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in
trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the
American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind
of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually
outdoing our talents and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the
envy of any novelist.” Actual events have often been so outrageous as to seem
more likely fictional than real. The Polish American author Jerzy Kosinski, for
example, plays on the absurdity of media culture in his novel Being There (1971).
Despite lacking any noteworthy characteristics or ideas, an illiterate gardener
is propelled to fame by the media and becomes a political adviser and heir to a
fortune. Joyce Carol Oates chronicles two specific media events in her young-
adult novels Freaky Green Eyes (2003) and My Sister, My Love (2008). The first
takes its cue from the 1995 case in which the former football star O. J. Simpson
was charged with murdering his former wife and her friend. Televised for 134
days, it was the most publicized criminal trial in U.S. history. The second novel
revisits the murder of six-year-old beauty-pageant contestant JonBenét Ramsey
and the extensive media coverage it generated. By presenting the perspectives
of the victims’ family members, Oates critiques the sensationalized coverage of
these crimes.
In addition to attempting to capture the unreality of media culture, writers
also tried to make sense of war. Early in the contemporary period the Vietnam
War was addressed by novelists Tim O’Brien, Lan Cao, and Bobbie Ann Mason,
poets Kevin Bowen, Michael S. Herr, and Yusef Komunyakaa, and playwrights
David Rabe and Stephen Metcalfe, who described combat experiences, antiwar
protests, and the effects of war on soldiers, veterans, and those left at home. More
recently, writers have used fragmented and multiple perspectives in an attempt to
capture the confusion, fear, anger, and sadness experienced by Americans during
and after the attacks of 11 September 2001. Novels that deal with those events
include William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003), Art Spiegelman’s In the
Shadow of No Towers (2004), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incred-
ibly Close (2005), Julia Glass’s The Whole World Over (2006), Jay McInerney’s The
Good Life (2006), Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), and Paul Auster’s Man in
the Dark (2008). Poets also address 11 September, mostly to commemorate those
who were lost and to promote personal and national healing. Martin Espada’s
“Alabanza” (“praise” in Spanish) remembers the people from many nations who
worked at the World Trade Center. Robert Pinksy’s “9/11” and Billy Collins’s
“The Names” were commissioned to memorialize the victims one year after the
attacks. Works by Tess Gallagher, Joy Harjo, Lucille Clifton, and other poets are
included in September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond (2002). The victims
of more-localized acts of violence that captured the attention of Americans
were also remembered in literature. Events in Francine Prose’s After (2004) and
Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes (2007) echo the 1999 Columbine High School

Historical and Social Context 1