Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s

Modernist writers continue to be attractive to scholars, with a wealth of materials appearing this year. Many authors relevant to this chapter are the subjects of books, essays, and special journal issues. John and Carol Steinbeck, J. D. Salinger, and Saul Bellow are the focus of biographical studies, and Robert Penn Warren and Eudora Welty are featured in collections of letters. Zora Neale Hurston, Bellow, Ray Bradbury, and H. P. Lovecraft are the subjects of essay collections, Hurston and James Agee of bibliographies, and Welty and Katherine Anne Porter of substantial critical studies. James Baldwin is featured in a special issue of AAR, Carson McCullers in a special topic issue of ANQ, and Flannery O’Connor in a special issue of Renascence. The writings of Richard Wright, Baldwin, O’Connor, and Vladimir Nabokov inspire substantial critical debate. In addition to such usual topics as gender, race, class, religion, genre, and culture, explorations of the modernist spirit, political approaches, film studies, and science fiction are also popular.

i General

A number of writers germane to this chapter are treated in Cambridge Companion to American Novelists, which devotes 11 chapters to individual authors central to the modernist era. Hana Wirth-Nesher writes on Henry Roth, Alex Goody on Djuna Barnes, Lovalerie King on Hurston, William Dow on Wright, Leonard Cassuto on Raymond Chandler, David Yaffe on Ralph Ellison, Sarah Graham on Salinger, Joan Schenkar on Patricia Highsmith, Julian W. Connolly on Nabokov, Joshua Kupetz on Jack Kerouac, and Victoria Aarons on Bellow. The narrative innovations of the authors covered in the volume, comments Timothy Parrish, “helped to define the history of the form, while their stories have remained persistently relevant to readers and would-be writers of new versions of the American literary and cultural tradition their works embody.”

ii Proletarians

a. John Steinbeck and Nelson Algren

Steinbeck is the subject of one book this year. In Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage (Nevada) Susan Shillinglaw “considers the ecology of Carol Henning and John Steinbeck: their shared roots, cultural moment, friends, travels—and art.” Shillinglaw demonstrates that Henning was a main source of inspiration for much of Steinbeck’s writing when they were together in the 1930s, when Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath, the book that Shillinglaw notes “would be both the monument to their marriage and shared creativity and also the cause of their undoing.” This joint biography documents not only the publication of Steinbeck’s major works but also the childhoods, courtship, and marriage of the couple; their friendships with Edward F. Ricketts and Joseph Campbell; their move to Los Gatos, California; their road trip to Mexico; the Sea of Cortez journey; their mutual work on The Grapes of Wrath; the disruptive influence of Gwen Conger; the disintegration of their marriage; and their subsequent postdivorce lives and marriages to other people. Shillinglaw relies on Steinbeck’s phalanx analogy of mutualism to describe the couple’s union, “larger than both individually, with art the ‘keying mechanism’ of their mutual bond,” which “had, in many ways, defined their lives.”

Steinbeck also attracts the attention of several essayists. In “‘They Ain’t Human’: John Steinbeck, Proletarian Fiction, and the Racial Politics of ‘The People’” (MFS 59: 107–34) Mollie Godfrey argues that in The Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck uses humanism as “a pragmatic tool designed not to mask but to address and oppose conservative and racist ideologies and reading practices.” In “John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath: A Call to Action” (Expl 71: 255–58) Kristine R. Yee focuses on “the parallelism of ‘results not causes’ … used by Steinbeck” in that novel to call the reader to act as a community with “a single voice” so that the injustices faced by migrant workers like the Joads could be eliminated. In “American Georgics and Globalization: Literary and Economic Co-evolution in Three Enclosure Movements” (ISLE 20: 71–84) Jeffrey Wagner examines Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath along with John Elder’s The Frog Run to demonstrate the importance of the American georgic mode in these novels, which “synthesize economic and literary concepts in compelling ways...