U.S. Culture

government to create a photographic record of rural America. Walker Evans,

Dorothea Lange, and Arthur Rothstein, among others, produced memorable and

widely reproduced portraits of rural poverty and American distress during

the Great Depression and during the dust storms of the period.

In 1959, after touring the United States for two years, Swiss-born

photographer Robert Frank published The Americans, one of the landmarks of

documentary photography. His photographs of everyday life in America

introduced viewers to a depressing, and often depressed, America that

existed in the midst of prosperity and world power.

Photographers continued to search for new photographic viewpoints. This

search was perhaps most disturbingly embodied in the work of Diane Arbus.

Her photos of mental patients and her surreal depictions of Americans

altered the viewer’s relationship to the photograph. Arbus emphasized

artistic alienation and forced viewers to stare at images that often made

them uncomfortable, thus changing the meaning of the ordinary reality that

photographs are meant to capture.

American photography continues to flourish. The many variants of art

photography and socially conscious documentary photography are widely

available in galleries, books, and magazines.

A host of other visual arts thrive, although they are far less connected

to traditional fine arts than photography. Decorative arts include, but

are not limited to, art glass, furniture, jewelry, pottery, metalwork, and

quilts. Often exhibited in craft galleries and studios, these decorative

arts rely on ideals of beauty in shape and color as well as an

appreciation of well-executed crafts. Some of these forms are also

developed commercially. The decorative arts provide a wide range of

opportunity for creative expression and have become a means for Americans

to actively participate in art and to purchase art for their homes that is

more affordable than works produced by many contemporary fine artists.

Literature

American literature since World War II is much more diverse in its voices

than ever before. It has also expanded its view of the past as people

rediscovered important sources from non-European traditions, such as

Native American folktales and slave narratives. Rediscovering these

traditions expanded the range of American literary history.

American Jewish writing from the 1940s to the 1960s was the first serious

outpouring of an American literature that contained many voices. Some

Jewish writers had begun to be heard as literary critics and novelists

before World War II, part of a general broadening of American literature

during the first half of the 20th century. After the war, talented Jewish

writers appeared in such numbers and became so influential that they stood

out as a special phenomenon. They represented at once a subgroup within

literature and the new voice of American literature.

Several Jewish American novelists, including Herman Wouk and Norman

Mailer, wrote important books about the war without any special ethnic

resonance. But writers such as novelists Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and

Philip Roth, and storytellers Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick wrote most

memorably from within the Jewish tradition. Using their Jewish identity

and history as background, these authors asked how moral behavior was

possible in modern America and how the individual could survive in the

contemporary world. Saul Bellow most conspicuously posed these questions,

framing them even before the war was over in his earliest novel, Dangling

Man (1944). He continued to ask them in various ways through a series of

novels paralleling the life cycle, including The Adventures of Augie March

(1953), Herzog (1964), and Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970). One novel in the

series earned a Pulitzer Prize (Humboldt's Gift, 1975). Bellow was awarded

the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976. Like Bellow, Philip Roth and

Bernard Malamud struggled with identity and selfhood as well as with

morality and fate. However, Roth often resisted being categorized as a

Jewish writer. Playwright Arthur Miller rarely invoked his Jewish

heritage, but his plays contained similar existential themes.

Isaac Bashevis Singer was also part of this postwar group of American

Jewish writers. His novels conjure up his lost roots and life in prewar

Poland and the ghostly, religiously inspired fantasies of Jewish existence

in Eastern Europe before World War II. Written in Yiddish and much less

overtly American, Singer’s writings were always about his own specific

past and that of his people. Singer's re-creation of an earlier world as

well as his stories of adjusting to the United States won him a Nobel

Prize in literature in 1978.

Since at least the time of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, American

writers of African descent, such as Richard Wright, sought to express the

separate experiences of their people while demanding to be recognized as

fully American. The difficulty of that pursuit was most completely and

brilliantly realized in the haunting novel Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph

Ellison. African American writers since then have contended with the same

challenge of giving voice to their experiences as a marginalized and often

despised part of America.

Several African American novelists in recent decades have struggled to

represent the wounded manner in which African Americans have participated

in American life. In the 1950s and 1960s, James Baldwin discovered how

much he was part of the United States after a period of self-imposed exile

in Paris, and he wrote about his dark and hurt world in vigorous and

accusatory prose. The subject has also been at the heart of an

extraordinary rediscovery of the African American past in the plays of

Lorraine Hansberry and the fiction of Alice Walker, Charles Johnson, and

Toni Morrison. Probably more than any American writer before her, Morrison

has grappled with the legacy that slavery inflicted upon African Americans

and with what it means to live with a separate consciousness within

American culture. In 1993 Morrison became the first African American

writer to be awarded a Nobel Prize in literature.

Writers from other groups, including Mexican Americans, Native Americans,

Chinese Americans, Korean Americans, and Filipino Americans, also grappled

with their separate experiences within American culture. Among them, N.

Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich have dealt with

issues of poverty, life on reservations, and mixed ancestry among Native

Americans. Rudolfo Anaya and Sandra Cisneros have dealt with the

experiences of Mexican Americans, and Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston

have explored Chinese American family life.

Even before World War II, writers from the American South reflected on

what it meant to have a separate identity within American culture. The

legacy of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction left the South with a

sense of a lost civilization, embodied in popular literature such as Gone

With the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell, and with questions about how a

Southern experience could frame a literary legacy. Southern literature in

the 20th century draws deeply on distinct speech rhythms, undercurrents of

sin, and painful reflections on evil as part of a distinctly Southern

tradition. William Faulkner most fully expressed these issues in a series

of brilliant and difficult novels set in a fictional Mississippi county.

These novels, most of them published in the 1930s, include The Sound and

the Fury (1929), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom (1936). For

his contribution, Faulkner received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1949.

More recent Southern writers, such as Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor,

Walker Percy, James Dickey, and playwright Tennessee Williams, have

continued this tradition of Southern literature.

In addition to expressing the minority consciousness of Southern

regionalism, Faulkner's novels also reflected the artistic modernism of

20th-century literature, in which reality gave way to frequent

interruptions of fantasy and the writing is characterized by streams of

consciousness rather than by precise sequences in time. Other American

writers, such as Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and E. L. Doctorow

also experimented with different novel forms and tried to make their

writing styles reflect the peculiarities of consciousness in the chaos of

the modern world. Doctorow, for example, in his novel Ragtime juxtaposed

real historical events and people with those he made up. Pynchon

questioned the very existence of reality in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973).

Aside from Faulkner, perhaps the greatest modernist novelist writing in

the United States was йmigrй Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov first wrote in his

native Russian, and then in French, before settling in the United States

and writing in English. Nabokov saw no limits to the possibilities of

artistic imagination, and he believed the artist's ability to manipulate

language could be expressed through any subject. In a series of novels

written in the United States, Nabokov demonstrated that he could develop

any situation, even the most alien and forbidden, to that end. This was

demonstrated in Lolita (1955), a novel about sexual obsession that caused

a sensation and was first banned as obscene.

Despite its obvious achievements, modernism in the United States had its

most profound effect on other forms of literature, especially in poetry

and in a new kind of personal journalism that gradually erased the sharp

distinctions between news reporting, personal reminiscence, and fiction

writing.

20th-Century Poetry

Modern themes and styles of poetry have been part of the American

repertoire since the early part of the 20th century, especially in the

work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Their works were difficult,

emotionally restrained, full of non-American allusions, and often

inaccessible. After World War II, new poetic voices developed that were

more exuberant and much more American in inspiration and language. The

poets who wrote after the war often drew upon the work of William Carlos

Williams and returned to the legacy of Walt Whitman, which was democratic

in identification and free-form in style. These poets provided postwar

poetry with a uniquely American voice.

The Beatnik, or Beat, poets of the 1950s notoriously followed in Whitman’s

tradition. They adopted a radical ethic that included drugs, sex, art, and

the freedom of the road. Jack Kerouac captured this vision in On the Road

(1957), a quintessential book about Kerouac’s adventures wandering across

the United States. The most significant poet in the group was Allen

Ginsberg, whose sexually explicit poem Howl (1956) became the subject of a

court battle after it was initially banned as obscene. The Beat poets

spanned the country, but adopted San Francisco as their special outpost.

The city continued to serve as an important arena for poetry and

unconventional ideas, especially at the City Lights Bookstore co-owned by

writer and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Other modernist poets included

Gwendolyn Brooks, who retreated from the conventional forms of her early

poetry to write about anger and protest among African Americans, and

Adrienne Rich, who wrote poetry focused on women's rights, needs, and

desires.

Because it is open to expressive forms and innovative speech, modern

poetry is able to convey the deep personal anguish experienced by several

of the most prominent poets of the postwar period, among them Robert

Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman.

Sometimes called confessional poets, they used poetry to express

nightmarish images of self-destruction. As in painting, removing limits

and conventions on form permitted an almost infinite capacity for

conveying mood, feeling, pain, and inspiration. This personal poetry also

brought American poetry closer to the European modernist tradition of

emotional anguish and madness. Robert Frost, probably the most famous and

beloved of modern American poets, wrote evocative and deeply felt poetry

that conveyed some of these same qualities within a conventional pattern

of meter and rhyme.

Another tradition of modern poetry moved toward playful engagement with

language and the creative process. This tradition was most completely

embodied in the brilliant poetry of Wallace Stevens, whose work dealt with

the role of creative imagination. This tradition was later developed in

the seemingly simple and prosaic poetry of John Ashbery, who created

unconventional works that were sometimes records of their own creation.

Thus, poetry after World War II, like the visual arts, expanded the

possibilities of emotional expression and reflected an emphasis on the

creative process. The idea of exploration and pleasure through unexpected

associations and new ways of viewing reality connected poetry to the

modernism of the visual arts.

Journalism

Modernist sensibilities were also evident in the emergence of a new form

of journalism. Journalism traditionally tried to be factual and objective

in presentation. By the mid-1970s, however, some of America's most

creative writers were using contemporary events to create a new form of

personal reporting. This new approach stretched the boundaries of

journalism and brought it closer to fiction because the writers were

deeply engaged and sometimes personally involved in events. Writers such

as Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and Joan Didion created a literary

journalism that infused real events with their own passion. In Armies of

the Night (1968), the record of his involvement in the peace movement,

Mailer helped to define this new kind of writing. Capote's In Cold Blood

(1966), the retelling of the senseless killing of a Kansas family, and

Mailer’s story of a murderer's fate in The Executioner's Song (1979)

brought this hyperrealism to chilling consummation. No less vivid were

Didion's series of essays on California culture in the late 1960s and her

reporting of the sensational trial of football star O. J. Simpson in 1995.

Performing Arts

As in other cultural spheres, the performing arts in the United States in

the 20th century increasingly blended traditional and popular art forms.

The classical performing arts—music, opera, dance, and theater—were not a

widespread feature of American culture in the first half of the 20th

century. These arts were generally imported from or strongly influenced by

Europe and were mainly appreciated by the wealthy and well educated.

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