HISTRORICAL BACKGROUND

The United States emerged from World War II as the most powerful nation on Earth
.Soldiers came home, the rationing of scarce goods ended, and the nation prospered.
the dawn of the nuclear age and the dominance of the Soviet Union through out
Eastern Europe meant that nothing would be the same again.
In 1945, the United Nations was created amid high hopes that it would prevent future
wars.
the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West began as soon as World War II
ended.
In 1950, President Harry S. Truman sent American troops to help anticommunist
South Korean forces turn back a North Korean invasion.

From Quiet Pride to Activism

Americans of the 1950s are sometimes referred to as "the Silent Generation." - lived
through both the Great Depression and World War II - They greatly admired President
Dwight D. Eisenhower, one of America's wartime heroes.
In October 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to
orbit Earth.
President John F Kennedy, elected in 1960, promised to "get the nation moving
again." He had little time to do so, however, before his assassination in 1963.
greater "relevance" in education, more progress on civil rights, an immediate end to
the Vietnam War. It was a time of crisis and confrontations
Segregation in the public schools was outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1954.
Tragedy struck in 1968, however, when civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was
assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.

A Quest for Stability

The upheavals of the 1960s brought a conservative reaction. Many Americans longed
for a return to "the good old days."
President Richard M. Nixon, elected in 1968, promised to end the Vietnam War and to
restore order in the nation - soon overshadowed by the Watergate affair-the
burglarizing of Democratic Party headquarters under the direction of Nixon
government officials
1970s -the women's liberation movement. Although women had earned the right to
vote in 1920, discrimination still existed. received lower pay than men did for the
same jobs
Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, called for change. The
women's movement grew steadily throu2hout the 1970s.
After Jimmy Carter's one-term presidency in the late 1970s, the nation sent Ronald
Reagan to the White House. A former film star and governor of California, Reagan
proved a popular and persuasive president.
His reelection in 1984 was one of the biggest landslide victories in American history.
In 1988, George Bush, Reagan's vice president, was elected to the presidency.
Democrat Bill Clinton and his running mate, Al Gore-the youngest ticket in American
history-won the election.
Despite the 1994 elections that voted many Democratic Congress members out of
office, Clinton won reelection in 1996.

The Changing Scene

The postwar period was a time of explosive suburban growth, made possible by the
automobile.
. Then, major corporations began establishing suburban headquarters, and workers
could live nearby or commute short distances from one suburb to another.
Even more recently, advanced technology has allowed people to "telecommute," or
work in home offices and stay connected by Internet, phone, and fax.
. One of the most dramatic examples is the development of the Internet in a few
short years from a military and scientific communication system to a global
information network.

Authors for a New Era

Although contemporary writers have produced a wide variety of impressive works,

it is all but impossible to predict which writ ers will achieve lasting fame and which
will not.
Every writer owes a debt to those writers who have gone before. In that sense,
literature is cumulative.
The earliest American literature, except for that of the Native Americans, was based
on European models.
Writers in the United States today can look to a rich heritage of their own.
Contemporary novelists are well aware of Nathaniel Hawthome, Mark Twain, Ernest
Hemingway, and William Faulkner.
Short-story writers know Edgar Allan Poe, Willa Cather, and Eudora Welty. Poets study
Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Langston Hughes. Playwrights are familiar with
Eugene O'Neill and Thornton Wilder.
Renowned contemporary novelists include Carson McCullers
Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Polish-born New Yorker who wrote in Yiddish, was fam ous for
both his novels and his short stories. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978.
John Cheever, a respected novelist, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1979 for his
collected short stories, many of which concern suburban life.
Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, published in 1966, was billed as a "nonfiction novel."
Capote, primarily a novelist and short-story writer, used fictional techniques to
analyze a real andseemingly senseless crime.
Later authors, such as E. L. Doctorow in his novel Ragtime, combined historical
figures with purely fictional characters. This technique has aroused some controversy.
James Baldwin and John McPhee are accomplished essayists. Among the many
notable longer works of nonfiction are Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar, N.
Scott Momaday's The Names, and Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams.

Poetry Within the Tradition

. Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos

Williams, and Ezra Pound all produced major collections of their works.
, poets like Theodore Roethke and Elizabeth Bishop created important and
memorable work.
Roethke, a master of poetic rhythm, was deeply influenced by his father, a strongwilled greenhouse owner in Saginaw, Michigan.
In poetry, as in fiction, these changes inspired a movement that encouraged the
proud assertion and passionate exploration of personal, eth nic, and racial identity.
Robert Lowell, a great nephew of the poet James Russell Lowell, began his career in
the postwar years as a creator of powerful, though traditional, poems. However, in

the late 1950s, he began to reread William Carlos Williams. The result was Life
Studies, a breakthrough book in which Lowell abandoned tight, traditional
Robert Hayden and to Gwendolyn Brooks, who in 1950, became the first African
American writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for her book Annie Allen.

Beyond the Horizon

The novel is not dead, as some were proclaiming in the 1950s and 1960s. Poetry is
not dead, nor is the short story. Literature has great resilience. y influenced by other
media-radio, television, film-it has not been replaced by them.