Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s

Scholarly publications on modern fiction decline overall this year, although a number of writers, including John Steinbeck, James Agee, Zora Neale Hurston, Djuna Barnes, Richard Wright, Flannery O'Connor, and Vladimir Nabokov, receive book-length studies or a wealth of individual essays. James Baldwin and Wallace Stegner are the focus of substantial biographies, while Ralph Ellison and Nabokov inspire pedagogical studies. Thomas Wolfe's apprentice works receive two volumes, and William Burroughs's Latin American Notebook appears for the first time. As in recent years, proletarian and Southern authors elicit the most scholarly work, while the Beats and science and detective fiction writers receive less attention. In addition to such usual topics as gender, race, and religion, also popular are explorations of cold war politics, censorship, and global concerns.

i General

A substantial addition to modernist scholarship is Werner Sollors's Ethnic Modernism (Harvard), a study of the global and multicultural dimensions frequently overlooked in American modernism. Sollors discusses how the new vocabulary that emerged during the four decades between 1910 and 1950 "reflected, and helped to shape, a new emphasis on ethnic identity and on cultural pluralism in modern democratic societies, which were, after World War II and the Holocaust, more unambiguously defined against the fascist trajectory from racist stereotype to genocide." Drawing from texts by authors such as Mary Antin, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry Roth, Richard Wright, Pietro di Donato, Meyer Levin, Gertrude Stein, Ole E. Rølvaag, and Ludwig Lewisohn, Sollors shows how a variety of ethnic writers—from minorities to Europeans to immigrants to African Americans—contributed to the multicultural changes inherent in the U.S. during this era. Among their influences were Ernest Hemingway, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, sociology, anthropology, the Federal Writers' Project, Paris, music, art, totalitarianism, socialist realism, and the American dream.

ii Proletarians

a. John Steinbeck and Ann Petry

Steinbeck scholars will appreciate Rick Wartzman's Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" (PublicAffairs), the story of the censorship of that novel. Though focused around the events of a single week, Wartzman's text goes far beyond those seven days to chart the national state of affairs in 1939, when the board of supervisors in Kern County, California, voted to ban Steinbeck's novel, and in the ensuing four decades. Wartzman provides an interesting and informative chronicle of the Depression years, the Dust Bowl, and the Great Migration, highlighting the many central figures, organizations, and events that played an integral part in the conflict over Steinbeck's book, including Kern County librarian Gretchen Knief, Wofford B. "Bill" Camp, the Associated Farmers, Emory Gay Hoffman, Carey McWilliams, Ruth Comfort Mitchell, the Ku Klux Klan, Ralph Lavin, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Sacramento Conspiracy Trial, "the anti-okie law," Nazi book burnings in Europe, Clell and Mace Pruett, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Marshall Valentine Hartranft, Darryl Zanuck, and Steinbeck himself.

Steinbeck is also the subject of several individual articles. In "John Steinbeck's Sweetheart: The Cosmic American Bus" (CollL 35, i: 82–99) Cathryn Halverson looks at the significance of the mode of transportation in The Wayward Bus: Steinbeck's choice "makes the bus a potent stage for American conflict while also limning a poetics of the bus." Raymond-Jean Frontain, "McNally and Steinbeck" (ANQ 21, iv: 43–51), discusses Steinbeck's relationship with playwright Terrence McNally, whom Steinbeck mentored. In "Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat" (Expl 66: 133–37) Arthur F. Bethea takes issue with previous readings of the novel that classify it a comedy, considering it instead a work of nihilism. Bradley Stephens, "Jean-Paul Sartre, John Steinbeck and the Liability of Liberty in the Post-War Period" (JES 38: 177–92), studies Sartre's L'Âge de raison and Steinbeck's East of Eden in light of Cold War politics. According to Stephens, Sartre and Steinbeck's "mutual emphasis on man's indeterminism as an autonomous subject inevitably dissolves the foundation of any normative political ethos" and "emphasize[s] the complexities of freedom." In "We're on a Road to Nowhere: Steinbeck, Kerouac, and the Legacy of...