During the 1980’s, three immigrant authors—Czes-
uaw Miuosz, Joseph Brodsky, and Elie Wiesel—
received Nobel Prizes (Wiesel’s was for peace, not
literature). Writing by social outsiders, including Af-
rican Americans, Latinos, Asian Amerians, Native
Americans, and gays and lesbians, gained promi-
nence. Women, who constituted the majority of
readers, became more conspicuous as authors. How-
ever, as personal computers began to be marketed
and videocassette recorders penetrated half the
American market, the sustained reading of printed
texts seemed a beleaguered cultural activity. Never-
theless, so many noteworthy novels were published
in the decade that it is difficult to find any common
trait with which to unify them.
Fine poets also continued to write and to prolifer-
ate, and it is equally difficult to single out qualities
common to such disparate but talented 1980’s poets
as A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Rita Dove, Robert
Duncan, Carolyn Forch, Allen Ginsberg, Jorie Gra-
ham, Donald Hall, Joy Harjo, Richard Howard, Don-
ald Justice, Galway Kinnell, Stanley Kunitz, Audre
Lorde, James Merrill, W. S. Merwin, Sharon Olds,
Alicia Ostriker, Adrienne Rich, Charles Simic, and
Richard Wilbur. However, poetry had become an art
for connoisseurs and students more than for the
general reading public, and it receded to the mar-
gins of American culture. Throughout the decade,
winners of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, such as James
Schuyler, Mary Oliver, Carolyn Kizer, and Henry
Taylor, were little more than names to even the most
sophisticated readers. No living poet possessed the
authority that Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace
Stevens had exerted for an earlier generation; the
most influential contemporary American poet was
perhaps Sylvia Plath, who died, notoriously, by sui-
cide in 1963, but whoseCollected Poemswon a Pulitzer
Prize in 1982.
In drama, David Mamet, Wendy Wasserstein, and
August Wilson made important contributions to the
theatrical repertoire, and monologists such as
Spalding Gray, Eric Bogosian, Laurie Anderson, and
Anna Deavere Smith pioneered performance art.
Commercial theaters, however, were more inclined to
invest in accessible musicals and familiar revivals than
in original American drama. Raymond Carver, Ann
Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, Grace Paley, and others
sparked a revival of the short story, but genre novelists
such as Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum, and Danielle
Steele were more likely to show up on best seller lists
than were more challenging writers such as Don
DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, and Gilbert Sorrentino.
Especially after the publication of Jean Baudril-
lard’sSimulacres et simulation(1981;Simulations, 1983)
and Jean-François Lyotard’sLa Condition postmoderne:
Rapport sur le savoir(1979;The Postmodern Condition: A
Report on Knowledge, 1984), thoughtful American writ-
ers and readers sensed that the basis of the culture
had changed from production to consumption, from
homogeneity to hybridity, and from originality to sim-
ulation. In a postmodern world saturated by dispa-
rate media, including television, radio, recordings,
and film, everything was being recycled into self-
conscious hybrid texts. Leslie Fiedler’sWhat Was Liter-
ature?(1983) challenged the culture to reexamine
the nature and function of reading. A belief in the
grand master narrative, the single story that would ex-
plain everything for all, was subverted, and if the
novel, the poem, and the play were not dead, they re-
mained in urgent need of reinvention.Social Observers In 1981, withRabbit Is Rich, his
third novel tracing the life of Harry “Rabbit” Ang-
strom, John Updike continued his project of chroni-
cling the experiences of small-town, middle-class,
Protestant Americans. InBech Is Back(1982), he re-
vived a fictional Jewish novelist he had introduced in
1970 inBech: A Book. The very successfulThe Bonfire of
the Vanities(1987) by Tom Wolfe—a leading figure
within the nonfiction movement known as New Jour-
nalism—examined greed and corruption in contem-
porary New York City. In the short stories collected in
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love(1981),
Cathedral(1983),Where I’m Calling From(1988), and
Elephant, and Other Stories(1988), Raymond Carver
employed a spare, flat style to depict the bleak lives
of contemporary working-class characters. Carver’s
work popularized minimalism, sometimes called “K-
Mart realism,” a style that was shared in varying de-
grees by Beattie, inThe Burning House(1982); Mason,
inShiloh, and Other Stories(1982),In Countr y(1985),
Spence + Lila(1988), andLove Life(1989); Jayne Anne
Phillips, inMachine Dreams(1984) andFast Lanes
(1987); and David Leavitt, inFamily Dancing(1984).
Richard Ford, whoseRock Springs(1987) was an-
other minimalist collection, began, withThe Sports-
writer(1986), to create a trilogy that, like Updike’s
Rabbit novels, followed closely a single character,
Frank Bascombe, throughout a lifetime of disap-
pointments. WithLincoln(1984) andEmpire(1987),592 Literature in the United States The Eighties in America