1 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
shootings. Nikki Giovanni honored the thirty-two people killed in a 2007 mass
shooting at the institution where she teaches with a chant poem beginning “We
Are Virginia Tech.”
Writers in the contemporary period also try to capture the tones of presi-
dential administrations—usually to point out their limitations and highlight
their more absurd characteristics. Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1976) is
narrated by Nixon; although focused on events before 1970, it also satirizes the
Watergate era. Joan Didion’s Political Fictions (2001) plays on Reagan’s previ-
ous occupation as a Hollywood actor when she describes his “performances”
in office as “almost always flawless.” Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990) takes
place in 1984, the year of Reagan’s reelection, and shows how policies such as the
war on drugs curtail American civil liberties. Other works criticize the material
consumption associated with Reagan’s presidency; David Mamet’s play Glen-
garry Glen Ross (1982) and Bret Easton Ellis’s novels Less than Zero (1985) and
American Psycho (1991) take up darker aspects of American entrepreneurship.
Clinton’s rise to the presidency is addressed in Joe Klein’s Primary Colors: A Novel
of Politics (1996), originally published anonymously while Klein was a columnist
for Newsweek. Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000) begins in 1998 with the
Clinton-Lewinsky affair, setting the context for an exploration of the boundaries
between truth and fiction.
Literature of this period also reflects the activism of the times and the social
changes it brought about. Attention to, and new perspectives on, issues of race,
ethnicity, gender, and the environment were key elements in both American
politics and the American consciousness. These issues also formed some of the
most significant concerns of writers; discussions of them can be found in Part II
of this volume in the essays “Feminism and Women’s Writing,” “Multicultural-
ism and Globalization,” “Literature and the Environment,” “African American
Literature,” and “The Native American Renaissance.”
The gay and lesbian literary movement included a proliferation of news-
papers, magazines, journals, and bookshops; SeaHorse Press, New York’s first
gay publishing house, was founded in 1977. Gay experience was not a new
phenomenon in literature, but its expression had been limited, muted, or coded
in earlier works. Writers have tried to document the reflections and attitudes of
earlier eras. Sarah Schulman’s Shimmer (1998) imagines the life of a white lesbian
in the McCarthy era of the 1950s. Early “out” writers in the contemporary era
were located on the two coasts, with large gay and lesbian communities in New
York and San Francisco. Several New York gay writers formed the Violet (or
Lavender) Quill, which included Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, and Robert
Ferro. On the West Coast, Armistead Maupin’s multivolume series, which takes
its name from the first installment, Tales of the City (1978), began as a series of
daily columns in the San Francisco Chronicle and focuses on the gay and lesbian
community around 28 Barbary Lane. Other writers depicted gay experience in
other parts of the country. Lanford Wilson’s play 5th of July (1979), for example,
features a gay couple at the center of a family in Lebanon, Missouri. Lesbian
works such as Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1974) and poetry by Adrienne
Rich found a large readership.