Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s

As in previous years, modern fiction writers continue to generate much critical debate. Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Eudora Welty, and Vladimir Nabokov are the subjects of book-length studies. Welty and Nabokov are also featured in collections of their correspondence, and the works of Margaret Mitchell and the Weird Tales writers are discussed in essay collections. Baldwin and the American modernist novel are treated in Cambridge Companion volumes, Saul Bellow and Nabokov are the subject of biographical commentary, and Ralph Ellison is the focus of a special journal issue. Three volumes on Edward Abbey and related writers such as Wallace Stegner attest to the resurgence of interest in the American West. In addition to the continued treatment of popular topics like sexuality, gender, intertextuality, race, death, love, place, religion, film studies, and ecocritical concerns, scholars increasingly turn to transatlantic and global issues and the way modernism continues to play a role in the 21st century.

i General

A number of writers germane to this chapter are treated in Cambridge Companion to the American Modernist Novel, which contains 14 chapters by scholars in the field who consider the global nature of U.S. modernism. "Designed to supplement and extend Walter Kalaidjian's Cambridge Companion to American Modernism (2005) by focusing on narrative experimentation during the half-century-plus between the 1890s and the 1940s," the volume is divided into three parts—movements, methodologies, and textualities—"each of which highlights a particular domain of research: historical, methodological, and generic." Modernist topics studied include regionalism, ethnicity, transpacific concerns, black literary modernism, borderlands modernism, sexuality, geomodernisms and gender, science, visual culture, blues and jazz, new media, translation, and global dimensions. "Rather than treating literary domains as separate silos," editor Joshua L. Miller explains, "the chapters in this Companion draw different implications from some of the same critical terms or authors." African American modernists, for instance, appear in a variety of chapters, and those chapters that focus in more depth on one or two texts still make diverse connections with other writers of the era. Appropriately, the volume concludes with Gayle Rogers's demonstration of "the manifold ways in which globalist thematics—empire, travel, slavery, Marxism, translation, im/migration, Classicism, and so on—complicate the Americanisms of U.S. modernism."

ii Proletarians

a. John Steinbeck

In "Dust Bowl Iconography: Populist Translations of The Grapes of Wrath" (JPC 48: 198–208) Gabriel Sealey-Morris examines the ways Steinbeck's novel is amplified through film and folk song. "While Steinbeck's novel retains a certain authority," Sealey-Morris contends, "his story reaches apotheosis through the greater audience identification in [John] Ford's film, through the manipulation of folk tradition in [Woody] Guthrie's songs, and through the emergence of Tom Joad as a populist, spiritually resonant hero in both." Roy H. Williams's "John Steinbeck's Unfinished Quixote: 'Don Keehan, the Marshal of Manchon'" (Cervantes 35, i: 111–36) considers Steinbeck's adaptation of Don Quixote in his unfinished 1957 manuscript. Steinbeck restages the character of Dulcinea throughout his works as a prostitute, beginning with Suzy in his 1954 novel Sweet Thursday, which preceded Dale Wasserman's figure Aldonza/Dulcinea in the teleplay I, Don Quixote and the Broadway play Man of La Mancha. John J. Han's "Quick and Long-Lasting: Death and Dying in John Steinbeck's Fiction," pp. 207–20 in John J. Han and C. Clark Triplett, eds., The Final Crossing: Death and Dying in Literature (Peter Lang), takes a thanatological approach to Steinbeck's work. Discussing texts such as Cup of Gold, Tortilla Flat, East of Eden, Of Mice and Men, and "Flight," among others, Han demonstrates that Steinbeck was especially interested in issues of death, dying, and euthanasia, as well as deathbed conversion, concerns, and rituals. In "The Missing John Steinbeck Portrait" (Brick 94: 97–98) John Bell Smithback relates the story behind the mutual exercise that Ellwood Graham and Barbara Stevenson engaged in with Steinbeck. While Graham and Stevenson painted Steinbeck's portrait, Steinbeck worked on the short story that he turned into Tortilla Flat.

b. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin

Wright enthusiasts will...