Contemporary American Literature

By Kathryn VanSpanckeren
The United States is one of the most diverse nations in the world. Its dynamic population of about 300
million boasts more than 30 million foreign-born individuals who speak numerous languages and
dialects. Some one million new immigrants arrive each year, many from Asia and Latin America.
Literature in the United States today is likewise dazzlingly diverse, exciting, and evolving. New voices
have arisen from many quarters, challenging old ideas and adapting literary traditions to suit changing
conditions of the national life. Social and economic advances have enabled previously underrepresented
groups to express themselves more fully, while technological innovations have created a fast-moving
public forum. Reading clubs proliferate, and book fairs, literary festivals, and "poetry slams" (events
where youthful poets compete in performing their poetry) attract enthusiastic audiences. Selection of a
new work for a book club can launch an unknown writer into the limelight overnight.
On a typical Sunday the list of best-selling books in the New York Times Book Review testifies to the
extraordinary diversity of the current American literary scene. In January, 2006, for example, the list of
paperback best-sellers included "genre" fiction steamy romances by Nora Roberts, a new thriller by
John Grisham, murder mysteries alongside nonfiction science books by the anthropologist Jared
Diamond, popular sociology by The New Yorker magazine writer Malcolm Gladwell, and accounts of
drug rehabilitation and crime. In the last category was a reprint of Truman Capote's groundbreaking In
Cold Blood, a 1965 "nonfiction novel" that blurs the distinction between high literature and journalism
and had recently been made into a film.
Books by non-American authors and books on international themes were also prominent on the list.
Afghan-American Khaled Hosseini's searing novel, The Kite Runner, tells of childhood friends in Kabul
separated by the rule of the Taliban, while Azar Nafisi's memoir, Reading Lolita in Teheran, poignantly
recalls teaching great works of Western literature to young women in Iran. A third novel, Arthur
Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha (made into a movie), recounts a Japanese woman's life during World War
II.
In addition, the best-seller list reveals the popularity of religious themes. According to Publishers
Weekly, 2001 was the first year that Christian-themed books topped the sales lists in both fiction and
nonfiction. Among the hardcover best-sellers of that exemplary Sunday in 2006, we find Dan Brown's
novel The DaVinci Code and Anne Rice's tale Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt.
Beyond the Times' best-seller list, chain bookstores offer separate sections for major religions including
Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and sometimes Hinduism.
In the Women's Literature section of bookstores one finds works by a "Third Wave" of feminists, a
movement that usually refers to young women in their 20s and 30s who have grown up in an era of
widely accepted social equality in the United States. Third Wave feminists feel sufficiently empowered
to emphasize the individuality of choices women make. Often associated in the popular mind with a

return to tradition and child-rearing, lipstick, and "feminine" styles, these young women have reclaimed
the word "girl" some decline to call themselves feminist. What is often called "chick lit" is a flourishing
offshoot. Bridget Jones's Diary by the British writer Helen Fielding and Candace Bushnell's Sex and the
City featuring urban single women with romance in mind have spawned a popular genre among young
women.
Nonfiction writers also examine the phenomenon of post-feminism. The Mommy Myth (2004) by Susan
Douglas and Meredith Michaels analyzes the role of the media in the "mommy wars," while Jennifer
Baumgardner and Amy Richards' lively ManifestA: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (2000)
discusses women's activism in the age of the Internet. Caitlin Flanagan, a magazine writer who calls
herself an "anti-feminist," explores conflicts between domestic life and professional life for women. Her
2004 essay in The Atlantic, "How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement," an account of how
professional women depend on immigrant women of a lower class for their childcare, triggered an
enormous debate.
It is clear that American literature at the turn of the 21st century has become democratic and
heterogeneous. Regionalism has flowered, and international, or "global," writers refract U.S. culture
through foreign perspectives. Multiethnic writing continues to mine rich veins, and as each ethnic
literature matures, it creates its own traditions. Creative nonfiction and memoir have flourished. The
short story genre has gained luster, and the "short" short story has taken root. A new generation of
playwrights continues the American tradition of exploring current social issues on stage. There is not
space here in this brief survey to do justice to the glittering diversity of American literature today.
Instead, one must consider general developments and representative figures.
POSTMODERNISM
"Postmodernism" suggests fragmentation: collage, hybridity, and the use of various voices, scenes, and
identities. Postmodern authors question external structures, whether political, philosophical, or artistic.
They tend to distrust the master-narratives of modernist thought, which they see as politically suspect.
Instead, they mine popular culture genres, especially science fiction, spy, and detective stories,
becoming, in effect, archaeologists of pop culture.
Don DeLillo's White Noise, structured in 40 sections like video clips, highlights the dilemmas of
representation: "Were people this dumb before television?" one character wonders. David Foster
Wallace's gargantuan (1,000 pages, 900 footnotes) Infinite Jest mixes up wheelchair-bound terrorists,
drug addicts, and futuristic descriptions of a country like the United States. In Galatea 2.2, Richard
Powers interweaves sophisticated technology with private lives.
Influenced by Thomas Pynchon, postmodern authors fabricate complex plots that demand imaginative
leaps. Often they flatten historical depth into one dimension; William Vollmann's novels slide between
vastly different times and places as easily as a computer mouse moves between texts.
Creative Nonfiction: Memoir and Autobiography

Many writers hunger for open, less canonical genres as vehicles for their postmodern visions. The rise of
global, multiethnic, and women's literature works in which writers reflect on experiences shaped by
culture, color, and gender has endowed autobiography and memoir with special allure. While the
boundaries of the terms are debated, a memoir is typically shorter or more limited in scope, while an
autobiography makes some attempt at a comprehensive overview of the writer's life.
Postmodern fragmentation has rendered problematic for many writers the idea of a finished self that
can be articulated successfully in one sweep. Many turn to the memoir in their struggles to ground an
authentic self. What constitutes authenticity, and to what extent the writer is allowed to embroider
upon his or her memories of experience in works of nonfiction, are hotly contested subjects of writers'
conferences.
Writers themselves have contributed penetrating observations on such questions in books about
writing, such as The Writing Life (1989) by Annie Dillard. Noteworthy memoirs include The Stolen
Light(1989) by Ved Mehta. Born in India, Mehta was blinded at the age of three. His account of flying
alone as a young blind person to study in the United States is unforgettable. Irish American Frank
McCourt's mesmerizing Angela's Ashes (1996) recalls his childhood of poverty, family alcoholism, and
intolerance in Ireland with a surprising warmth and humor. Paul Auster's Hand to Mouth (1997) tells of
poverty that blocked his writing and poisoned his soul.
The Short Story: New Directions
The story genre had to a degree lost its luster by the late l970s. Experimental metafiction stories had
been penned by Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, John Barth, and William Gass and were no longer on
the cutting edge. Large-circulation weekly magazines that had showcased short fiction, such as
theSaturday Evening Post, had collapsed.
It took an outsider from the Pacific Northwest a gritty realist in the tradition of Ernest Hemingway to
revitalize the genre. Raymond Carver (l938-l988) had studied under the late novelist John Gardner,
absorbing Gardner's passion for accessible artistry fused with moral vision. Carver rose above alcoholism
and harsh poverty to become the most influential story writer in the United States. In his collectionsWill
You Please Be Quiet, Please? (l976), What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (l981),Cathedral
(l983), and Where I'm Calling From (l988), Carver follows confused working people through dead-end
jobs, alcoholic binges, and rented rooms with an understated, minimalist style of writing that carries
tremendous impact.
Linked with Carver is novelist and story writer Ann Beattie (1947- ), whose middle-class characters often
lead aimless lives. Her stories reference political events and popular songs, and offer distilled glimpses of
life decade by decade in the changing United States. Recent collections are Park City (l998) and Perfect
Recall (2001).
Inspired by Carver and Beattie, writers crafted impressive neorealist story collections in the mid-l980s,
including Amy Hempel's Reasons to Live (1985), David Leavitt's Family Dancing (l984), Richard
Ford'sRock Springs (l987), Bobbie Ann Mason's Shiloh and Other Stories (1982), and Lorrie Moore's Self-

Help(l985). Other noteworthy figures include the late Andre Dubus, author of Dancing After Hours
(l996), and the prolific John Updike, whose recent story collections include The Afterlife and Other
Stories(l994).
Today, as is discussed later in this chapter, writers with ethnic and global roots are informing the story
genre with non-Western and tribal approaches, and storytelling has commanded critical and popular
attention. The versatile, primal tale is the basis of several hybridized forms: novels that are constructed
of interlinking short stories or vignettes, and creative nonfictions that interweave history and personal
history with fiction.
The Short Short Story: Sudden or Flash Fiction
The short short is a very brief story, often only one or two pages long. It is sometimes called "flash
fiction" or "sudden fiction" after the l986 anthology Sudden Fiction, edited by Robert Shapard and James
Thomas.
In short short stories, there is little space to develop a character. Rather, the element of plot is central: A
crisis occurs, and a sketched-in character simply has to react. Authors deploy clever narrative or
linguistic patterns; in some cases, the short short resembles a prose poem.
Supporters claim that short shorts' "reduced geographies" mirror postmodern conditions in which
borders seem closer together. They find elegant simplicity in these brief fictions. Detractors see short
shorts as a symptom of cultural decay, a general loss of reading ability, and a limited attention span. In
any event, short shorts have found a certain niche: They are easy to forward in an e-mail, and they lend
themselves to electronic distribution. They make manageable in-class readings and models for writing
assignments.
Drama
Contemporary drama mingles realism with fantasy in postmodern works that fuse the personal and the
political. The exuberant Tony Kushner (l956- ) has won acclaim for his prize-winning Angels in
Americaplays, which vividly render the AIDS epidemic and the psychic cost of closeted homosexuality in
the 1980s and 1990s. Part One: Millennium Approaches (1991) and its companion piece, Part Two:
Perestroika (1992), together last seven hours. Combining comedy, melodrama, political commentary,
and special effects, they interweave various plots and marginalized characters.
Women dramatists have attained particular success in recent years. Prominent among them is Beth
Henley (1952- ), from Mississippi, known for her portraits of southern women. Henley gained national
recognition for her Crimes of the Heart (l978), which was made into a film in l986, a warm play about
three eccentric sisters whose affection helps them survive disappointment and despair. Later plays,
including The Miss Firecracker Contest (1980), The Wake of Jamey Foster (l982), The Debutante
Ball(l985), and The Lucky Spot (l986), explore southern forms of socializing beauty contests, funerals,
coming-out parties, and dance halls.

Wendy Wasserstein (1950-2006), from New York, wrote early comedies including When Dinah Shore
Ruled the Earth (l975), a parody of beauty contests. She is best known for The Heidi Chronicles (l988),
about a successful woman professor who confesses to deep unhappiness and adopts a baby.
Wasserstein continued exploring women's aspirations in The Sisters Rosensweig (l991), An American
Daughter (1997), and Old Money (2000).
Younger dramatists such as African-American Suzan-Lori Parks (1964- ) build on the successes of earlier
women. Parks, who grew up on various army bases in the United States and Germany, deals with
political issues in experimental works whose timelessness and ritualism recall Irish-born writer Samuel
Beckett. Her best-known work, The America Play (1991), revolves around the assassination of President
Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth. She returns to this theme in Topdog/Underdog(2001), which
tells the story of two African-American brothers named Lincoln and Booth and their lifetime of sibling
rivalry.
REGIONALISM
A pervasive regionalist sensibility has gained strength in American literature in the past two decades.
Decentralization expresses the postmodern U.S. condition, a trend most evident in fiction writing; no
longer does any one viewpoint or code successfully express the nation. No one city defines artistic
movements, as New York City once did. Vital arts communities have arisen in many cities, and electronic
technology has de-centered literary life.
As economic shifts and social change redefine America, a yearning for tradition has set in. The most
sustaining and distinctively American myths partake of the land, and writers are turning to the Civil War
South, the Wild West of the rancher, the rooted life of the midwestern farmer, the southwestern tribal
homeland, and other localized realms where the real and the mythic mingle. Of course, more than one
region has inspired many writers; they are included here in regions formative to their vision or
characteristic of their mature work.
The Northeast
The scenic Northeast, region of lengthy winters, dense deciduous forests, and low rugged mountain
chains, was the first English-speaking colonial area, and it retains the feel of England. Boston,
Massachusetts, is the cultural powerhouse, boasting research institutions and scores of universities.
Many New England writers depict characters that continue the Puritan legacy, embodying the middleclass Protestant work ethic and progressive commitment to social reform. In the rural areas, small,
independent farmers struggle to survive in the world of global marketing.
Novelist Joyce Carol Oates sets many of her gothic works in upstate New York. Richard Russo (1949- ), in
his appealing Empire Falls (2001), evokes life in a dying mill town in Maine, the state where Stephen King
(1947- ) locates his popular horror novels.
The bittersweet fictions of Massachusetts-based Sue Miller (1943- ), such as The Good Mother (1986),
examine counterculture lifestyles in Cambridge, a city known for cultural and social diversity, intellectual

vitality, and technological innovation. Another writer from Massachusetts, Anita Diamant (1951- ),
earned popular acclaim with The Red Tent (1997), a feminist historical novel based on the biblical story
of Dinah.
Russell Banks (1940- ), from poor, rural New Hampshire, has turned from experimental writing to more
realistic works, such as Affliction (1989), his novel about working-class New Hampshire characters. For
Banks, acknowledging one's roots is a fundamental part of one's identity. In Affliction, the narrator
scorns people who have "gone to Florida, Arizona, and California, bought a trailer or a condo, turned
their skin to leather playing shuffleboard all day and waited to die." Banks's recent works
includeCloudsplitter (1998), a historical novel about the 19th-century abolitionist John Brown.
The striking stylist Annie Proulx (1935- ) crafts stories of struggling northern New Englanders in Heart
Songs (1988). Her best novel, The Shipping News (1993), is set even further north, in Newfoundland,
Canada. Proulx has also spent years in the West, and one of her short stories inspired the 2006 movie
"Brokeback Mountain."
William Kennedy (1928- ) has written a dense and entwined cycle of novels set in Albany, in northern
New York State, including his acclaimed Ironweed. The title of his insider's history of Albany gives some
idea of his gritty, colloquial style and teeming cast of often unsavory characters: O Albany! Improbable
City of Political Wizards, Fearless Ethnics, Spectacular Aristocrats, Splendid Nobodies, and Underrated
Scoundrels (1983). Kennedy has been hailed as an elder statesman of a small Irish-American literary
movement that includes the late Mary McCarthy, Mary Gordon, Alice McDermott, and Frank McCourt.
Three writers who studied at Brown University in Rhode Island around the same time and took classes
with British writer Angela Carter are often mentioned as the nucleus of a "next generation." Donald
Antrim (1959- ) satirizes academic life in The Hundred Brothers (1997), set in an enormous library from
which one can see homeless people. Rick Moody (1961- ) is best known for his novel The Ice Storm
(1994). The novels of Jeffrey Eugenides (1960- ) include Middlesex (2002), which narrates the experience
of a hermaphrodite. Impressive stylists with off-center visions bordering on the absurd, Antrim, Moody,
and Eugenides carry further the opposite traditions of John Updike and Thomas Pynchon. Often linked
with these three younger novelists is the exuberant postmodernist David Foster Wallace (1962- ).
Wallace, who was born in Ithaca, New York, gained acclaim for his complex serio-comic novel The Broom
of the System (1987) and the pop culture-saturated stories in Girl With Curious Hair (1989).
The Mid-Atlantic
The fertile Mid-Atlantic states, dominated by New York City with its great harbor, remain a gateway for
waves of immigrants. Today the region's varied economy encompasses finance, commerce, and
shipping, as well as advertising and fashion. New York City is the home of the publishing industry, as well
as prestigious art galleries and museums.
Don DeLillo (1936- ), from New York City, began as an advertising writer, and his novels explore
consumerism among their many themes. Americana (1971) concludes: "To consume in America is not to
buy, it is to dream." DeLillo's protagonists seek identities based on images. White Noise (1985) concerns

Jack Gladney and his family, whose experience is mediated by various texts, especially advertisements.
One passage suggests DeLillo's style: "...the emptiness, the sense of cosmic darkness. Mastercard, Visa,
American Express." Fragments of advertisements that drift unattached through the book emerge from
Gladney's media-parroting subconscious, generating the subliminal white noise of the title. DeLillo's
later novels include politics and historical figures: Libra (1988) envisions the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy as an explosion of frustrated consumerism; Underworld(1997) spins a web of
interconnections between a baseball game and a nuclear bomb in Kazakhstan.
In multidimensional, polyglot New York, fictions featuring a shadowy postmodern city abound. An
example is the labyrinthine New York trilogy City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), and The Locked
Room(1986) by Paul Auster (1947- ). In this work, inspired by Samuel Beckett and the detective novel, an
isolated writer at work on a detective story addresses Paul Auster, who is writing about Cervantes. The
trilogy suggests that "reality" is but a text constructed via fiction, thus erasing the traditional border
between reality and illusion. Auster's trilogy, in effect, self-deconstructs. Similarly, Kathy Acker (19481997) juxtaposed passages from works by Cervantes and Charles Dickens with science fiction in
postmodern pastiches such as Empire of the Senseless (1988), a quest through time and space for an
individual voice.
New York City hosts many groups of writers with shared interests. Jewish women include noted essayist
Cynthia Ozick (1928- ), who hails from the Bronx, the setting of her novel The Puttermesser
Papers(l997). Her haunting novel The Shawl (1989) gives a young mother's viewpoint on the Holocaust.
The droll, conversational Collected Stories (l994) of Grace Paley (1922- ) capture the syncopated
rhythms of the city.
Younger writers associated with life in the fast lane are Jay McInerney (1955- ), whose Story of My
Life(1988) is set in the drug-driven youth culture of the boom-time 1980s, and satirist Tama Janowitz
(1957- ). Their portraits of loneliness and addiction in the anonymous hard-driving city recall the works
of John Cheever.
Nearby suburbs claim the imaginations of still other writers. Mary Gordon (1949- ) sets many of her
female-centered works in her birthplace, Long Island, as does Alice McDermott (l953- ), whose
novelCharming Billy (1998) dissects the failed promise of an alcoholic.
Mid-Atlantic domestic realists include Richard Bausch (1945- ), from Baltimore, author of In the Night
Season (1998) and the stories in Someone to Watch Over Me (l999). Bausch writes of fragmented
families, as does Anne Tyler (1941- ), also from Baltimore, whose eccentric characters negotiate
disorganized, isolated lives. A master of detail and understated wit, Tyler writes in spare, quiet language.
Her best-known novels include Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982) and The Accidental
Tourist(1985), which was made into a film in l988. The Amateur Marriage (2004) sets a divorce against a
panorama of American life over 60 years.
African Americans have made distinctive contributions. Feminist essayist and poet Audre Lorde's
autobiographical Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (l982) is an earthy account of a black woman's
experience in the United States. Bebe Moore Campbell (l950- ), from Philadelphia, writes feisty domestic

novels including Your Blues Ain't Like Mine (l992). Gloria Naylor (l950- ), from New York City, explores
different women's lives in The Women of Brewster Place (1982), the novel that made her name.
Critically acclaimed John Edgar Wideman (l941- ) grew up in Homewood, a black section of Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania. His Faulknerian Homewood Trilogy Hiding Place (1981), Damballah (1981), and Sent for
You Yesterday (1983) uses shifting viewpoints and linguistic play to render black experience. His bestknown short piece, "Brothers and Keepers" (1984), concerns his relationship with his imprisoned
brother. In The Cattle Killing (l996), Wideman returns to the subject of his famous early story "Fever"
(l989). His novel Two Cities (l998) takes place in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
David Bradley (1950- ), also from Pennsylvania, set his historical novel The Chaneysville Incident (l981)
on the "underground railroad," a network of citizens who provided opportunity and assistance for
southern black slaves to find freedom in the North at the time of the U.S. Civil War.
Trey Ellis (1962 - ) has written the novels Platitudes (1988), Home Repairs (1993), and Right Here, Right
Now (1999), screenplays including "The Tuskegee Airmen" (1995), and a l989 essay "The New Black
Aesthetic" discerning a new multiethnic sensibility among the younger generation.
Writers from Washington, D.C., four hours' drive south from New York City, include Ann Beattie (1947- ),
whose short stories were mentioned earlier. Her slice-of-life novels include Picturing Will
(1989),Another You (l995), and My Life, Starring Dara Falcon (1997).
America's capital city is home to many political novelists. Ward Just (1935- ) sets his novels in
Washington's swirling military, political, and intellectual circles. Christopher Buckley (1952- ) spikes his
humorous political satire with local details; his Little Green Men (1999) is a spoof about official
responses to aliens from outer space. Michael Chabon (1963- ), who grew up in the Washington suburbs
but later moved to California, depicts youths on the dazzling brink of adulthood in The Mysteries of
Pittsburgh (1988); his novel inspired by a comic book, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
(2000), mixes glamour and craft in the manner of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The South
The South comprises disparate regions in the southeastern United States, from the cool Appalachian
Mountain chain and the broad Mississippi River valley to the steamy cypress bayous of the Gulf Coast.
Cotton and the plantation culture of slavery made the South the richest section in the country before
the U.S. Civil War (1860-1865). But after the war, the region sank into poverty and isolation that lasted a
century. Today, the South is part of what is called the Sun Belt, the fastest growing part of the United
States.
The most traditional of the regions, the South is proud of its distinctive heritage. Enduring themes
include family, land, history, religion, and race. Much southern writing has a depth and humanity arising
from the devastating losses of the Civil War and soul searching over the region's legacy of slavery.
The South, with its rich oral tradition, has nourished many women storytellers. In the upper South,
Bobbie Ann Mason (1940- ) from Kentucky, writes of the changes wrought by mass culture. In her most

famous story, "Shiloh" (1982), a couple must change their relationship or separate as housing
subdivisions spread "across western Kentucky like an oil slick." Mason's acclaimed short novel In Country
(1985) depicts the effects of the Vietnam War by focusing on an innocent young girl whose father died
in the conflict.
Lee Smith (1944- ) brings the people of the Appalachian Mountains into poignant focus, drawing on the
well of American folk music in her novel The Devil's Dream (l992). Jayne Anne Phillips (1952- ) writes
stories of misfits Black Tickets (1979) and a novel, Machine Dreams (1984), set in the hardscrabble
mountains of West Virginia.
The novels of Jill McCorkle (1958- ) capture her North Carolina background. Her mystery-enshrouded
love story Carolina Moon (1996) explores a years-old suicide in a coastal village where relentless waves
erode the foundations from derelict beach houses. The lush native South Carolina of Dorothy Allison
(1949- ) features in her tough autobiographical novel Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), seen through the
eyes of a dirt-poor, illegitimate 12-year-old tomboy nicknamed Bone. Mississippian Ellen Gilchrist (1935) sets most of her colloquial Collected Stories (2000) in small hamlets along the Mississippi River and in
New Orleans, Louisiana.
Southern novelists mining male experience include the acclaimed Cormac McCarthy
(l933- ), whose early novels such as Suttree (1979) are archetypically southern tales of dark emotional
depths, ignorance, and poverty, set against the green hills and valleys of eastern Tennessee. In l974,
McCarthy moved to El Paso, Texas, and began to plumb western landscapes and traditions. Blood
Meridian: Or the Evening of Redness in the West (1985) is an unsparing vision of The Kid, a 14-year-old
from Tennessee who becomes a cold-hearted killer in Mexico in the 1840s. McCarthy's best-selling epic
Border Trilogy All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998) invests
the desert between Texas and Mexico with mythic grandeur.
Other noted authors are North Carolinian Charles Frazier (1950- ), author of the Civil War novel Cold
Mountain (1997); Georgia-born Pat Conroy (1945- ), author of The Great Santini (1976) and Beach Music
(1995); and Mississippi novelist Barry Hannah (1942- ), known for his violent plots and risk-taking style.
A very different Mississippi-born writer is Richard Ford (1944- ), who began writing in a Faulknerian vein
but is best known for his subtle novel set in New Jersey, The Sportswriter (1986), and its
sequel,Independence Day (l995). The latter is about Frank Bascombe, a dreamy, evasive drifter who
loses all the things that give his life meaning a son, his dream of writing fiction, his marriage, lovers
and friends, and his job. Bascombe is sensitive and intelligent his choices, he says, are made "to deflect
the pain of terrible regret" and his emptiness, along with the anonymous malls and bald new housing
developments that he endlessly cruises through, mutely testify to Ford's vision of a national malaise.

Chang-rae Lee ( AP Images)

Many African-American writers hail from the South, including Ernest Gaines from Louisiana, Alice Walker
from Georgia, and Florida-born Zora Neale Hurston, whose 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God,
is considered to be the first feminist novel by an African American. Hurston, who died in the 1960s,
underwent a critical revival in the 1990s. Ishmael Reed, born in Tennessee, set Mumbo Jumbo (1972) in
New Orleans. Margaret Walker (1915-1998), from Alabama, authored the novel Jubilee (1966) and
essays On Being Female, Black, and Free (1997).
Story writer James Alan McPherson (l943- ), from Georgia, depicts working-class people in Elbow Room
(1977); A Region Not Home: Reflections From Exile (2000), whose title reflects his move to Iowa, is a
memoir. Chicago-born ZZ Packer (1973- ), McPherson's student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, was
raised in the South, studied in the mid-Atlantic, and now lives in California. Her first work, a volume of
stories titled Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (2003), has made her a rising star. Prolific feminist writer bell
hooks (born Gloria Watkins in Kentucky in 1952) gained fame for cultural critiques including Black Looks:
Race and Representation (l992) and autobiographies beginning with Bone Black: Memories of a Girlhood
(1996).
Experimental poet and scholar of slave narratives (Freeing the Soul, l999), Harryette Mullen (1953- )
writes multivocal poetry collections such as Muse & Drudge (1995). Novelist and story writer Percival
Everett (1956- ), who was originally from Georgia, writes subtle, open-ended fiction; recent volumes are
Frenzy (l997) and Glyph (1999).
Many African-American writers whose families followed patterns of internal migration were born
outside the South but return to it for inspiration. Famed science-fiction novelist Octavia Butler (l947- ),
from California, draws on the theme of bondage and the slave narrative tradition in Wild Seed (l980);
herParable of the Sower (l993) treats addiction. Sherley Anne Williams (l944- ), also from California,
writes of interracial friendship between southern women in slave times in her fact-based historical novel
Dessa Rose (l986). New York-born Randall Kenan (l963- ) was raised in North Carolina, the setting of his
novelA Visitation of Spirits (l989) and his stories Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (l992). His Walking on
Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (1999) is nonfiction.
The Midwest
The vast plains of America's midsection much of it between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi
River scorch in summer and freeze in scouring winter storms. The area was opened up with the
completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, attracting Northern European settlers eager for land. Early 20thcentury writers with roots in the Midwest include Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis,
and Theodore Dreiser.
Midwestern fiction is grounded in realism. The domestic novel has flourished in recent years, portraying
webs of relationships between kin, the local community, and the environment. Agribusiness and
development threaten family farms in some parts of the region, and some novels sound the death knell
of farming as a way of life.

Domestic novelists include Jane Smiley (1949- ), whose A Thousand Acres (1991) is a contemporary,
feminist version of the King Lear story. The lost kingdom is a large family farm held for four generations,
and the forces that undermine it are a concatenation of the personal and the political. Kent Haruf (1943) creates stronger characters in his sweeping novel of the prairie, Plainsong (1999).
Michael Cunningham (1952- ), from Ohio, began as a domestic novelist in A Home at the End of the
World (1990). The Hours (1998), made into a movie, brilliantly interweaves Virginia Woolf's Mrs.
Dalloway with two women's lives in different eras. Stuart Dybek (1942- ) has written sparkling story
collections including I Sailed With Magellan (2003), about his childhood on the South Side of Chicago.
Younger urban novelists include Jonathan Franzen (1959- ), who was born in Missouri and raised in
Illinois. Franzen's best-selling panoramic novel The Corrections (2001) titled for a downturn in the
stock market evokes midwestern family life over several generations. The novel chronicles the physical
and mental deterioration of a patriarch suffering from Parkinson's disease; as in Smiley's A Thousand
Acres, the entire family is affected. Franzen pits individuals against large conspiracies in The TwentySeventh City (1988) and Strong Motion (1992). Some critics link Franzen with Don DeLillo, Thomas
Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace as a writer of conspiracy novels.
The Midwest has produced a wide variety of writing, much of it informed by international influences.
Richard Powers (1957- ), from Illinois, has lived in Thailand and the Netherlands. His challenging
postmodern novels interweave personal lives with technology. Galatea 2.2 (1995) updates the mad
scientist theme; the scientists in this case are computer programmers.
African-American novelist Charles Johnson (1948- ), an ex-cartoonist who was born in Illinois and moved
to Seattle, Washington, draws on disparate traditions such as Zen and the slave narrative in novels such
as Oxherding Tale (1982). Johnson's accomplished, picaresque novel Middle Passage (1990) blends the
international history of slavery with a sea tale echoing Moby-Dick. Dreamer (1998) re-imagines the
assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Robert Olen Butler (1945- ), born in Illinois and a veteran of the Vietnam War, writes about Vietnamese
refugees in Louisiana in their own voices in A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain (1992). His stories in
Tabloid Dreams (1996) inspired by zany news headlines were enlarged into the humorous novelMr.
Spaceman (2000), in which a space alien learns English from watching television and abducts a bus full
of tourists in order to interview them on his spaceship.
Native-American authors from the region include part-Chippewa Louise Erdrich, who has set a series of
novels in her native North Dakota. Gerald Vizenor (1935- ) gives a comic, postmodern portrait of
contemporary Native-American life in Darkness at Saint Louis Bearheart (1978) and Griever: An
American Monkey King in China (1987). Vizenor's Chancers (2000) deals with skeletons buried outside of
their homelands.
Popular Syrian-American novelist Mona Simpson (1957- ), who was born in Wisconsin, is the author
ofAnywhere But Here (1986), a look at mother-daughter relationships.

The Mountain West

The western interior of the United States is a largely wild area that stretches along the majestic Rocky
Mountains running slantwise from Montana at the Canadian border to the hills of Texas on the U.S.
border with Mexico. Ranching and mining have long provided the region's economic backbone, and the
Anglo tradition in the region emphasizes an independent frontier spirit.
Western literature often incorporates conflict. Traditional enemies in the 19th-century West are the
cowboy versus the Indian, the farmer/settler versus the outlaw, the rancher versus the cattle rustler.
Recent antagonists include the oilman versus the ecologist, the developer versus the archaeologist, and
the citizen activist versus the representative of nuclear and military facilities, many of which are housed
in the sparsely populated West.
One writer has cast a long shadow over western writing, much as William Faulkner did in the South.
Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) records the passing of the western wilderness. In his masterpiece Angle of
Repose (1971), a historian imagines his educated grandparents' move to the "wild" West. His last book
surveys his life in the West as a writer: Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs(1992). For a
quarter century, Stegner directed Stanford University's writing program; his list of students reads like a
"who's who" of western writing: Raymond Carver, Ken Kesey, Thomas McGuane, Larry McMurtry, N.
Scott Momaday, Tillie Olsen, and Robert Stone. Stegner also influenced the contemporary Montana
school of writers associated with McGuane, Jim Harrison, and some works of Richard Ford, as well as
Texas writers like McMurtry.
Novelist Thomas McGuane (1939- ) typically depicts one man going alone into a wild area, where he
engages in an escalating conflict. His works include The Sporting Club (1968) and The Bushwacked Piano
(1971), in which the hero travels from Michigan to Montana on a demented mission of courtship.
McGuane's enthusiasm for hunting and fishing has led critics to compare him with Ernest Hemingway.
Michigan-born Jim Harrison (1937- ), like McGuane, spent many years living on a ranch. In his first novel,
Wolf: A False Memoir (1971), a man seeks to view a wolf in the wild in hopes of changing his life. His
later, more pessimistic fiction includes Legends of the Fall (1979) and The Road Home (1998).
In Richard Ford's Montana novel Wildlife (1990), the desolate landscape counterpoints a family's
breakup. Story writer, eco-critic, and nature essayist Rick Bass (1958- ), born in Texas and educated as a
petroleum geologist, writes of elemental confrontations between outdoorsmen and nature in his story
collection In the Loyal Mountains (1995) and the novel Where the Sea Used To Be (1998).
Texan Larry McMurtry (1936- ) draws on his ranch childhood in Horseman, Pass By (1961), made into the
movie Hud in 1963, an unsentimental portrait of the rancher's world. Leaving Cheyenne (1963) and its
successor, The Last Picture Show (1966), which was also made into a film, evoke the fading of a way of
life in Texas small towns. McMurtry's best-known work is Lonesome Dove (1985), an archetypal western
epic novel about a cattle drive in the 1870s that became a successful television miniseries. His recent
works include Comanche Moon (1997).

The West of multiethnic writers is less heroic and often more forward looking. One of the best-known
Chicana writers is Sandra Cisneros (1954- ). Born in Chicago, Cisneros has lived in Mexico and Texas; she
focuses on the large cultural border between Mexico and the United States as a creative, contradictory
zone in which Mexican-American women must reinvent themselves. Her best-selling The House on
Mango Street (1984), a series of interlocking vignettes told from a young girl's viewpoint, blazed the trail
for other Latina writers and introduced readers to the vital Chicago barrio. Cisneros extended her
vignettes of Chicana women's lives in Woman Hollering Creek (1991). Pat Mora (1942- ) offers a Chicana
view in Nepantla: Essays From the Land in the Middle (1993), which addresses issues of cultural
conservation
Native Americans from the region include the late James Welch, whose The Heartsong of Charging
Elk(2000) imagines a young Sioux who survives the Battle of Little Bighorn and makes a life in France.
Linda Hogan (l947- ), from Colorado and of Chickasaw heritage, reflects on Native-American women and
nature in novels including Mean Spirit (1990), about the oil rush on Indian lands in the 1920s, andPower
(1998), in which an Indian woman discovers her own inner natural resources.
The Southwest
For centuries, the desert Southwest developed under Spanish rule, and much of the population
continues to speak Spanish, while some Native-American tribes reside on ancestral lands. Rainfall is
unreliable, and agriculture has always been precarious in the region. Today, massive irrigation projects
have boosted agricultural production, and air conditioning attracts more and more people to sprawling
cities like Salt Lake City in Utah and Phoenix in Arizona.
In a region where the desert ecology is so fragile, it is not surprising that there are many
environmentally oriented writers. The activist Edward Abbey (1927-1989) celebrated the desert
wilderness of Utah in Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (1968).
Trained as a biologist, Barbara Kingsolver (1955- ) offers a woman's viewpoint on the Southwest in her
popular trilogy set in Arizona: The Bean Trees (1988), featuring Taylor Greer, a tomboyish young woman
who takes in a Cherokee child; Animal Dreams (1990); and Pigs in Heaven (1993). The Poisonwood Bible
(1998) concerns a missionary family in Africa. Kingsolver addresses political themes unapologetically,
admitting, "I want to change the world."
The Southwest is home to the greatest number of Native-American writers, whose works reveal rich
mythical storytelling, a spiritual treatment of nature, and deep respect for the spoken word. The most
important fictional theme is healing, understood as restoration of harmony. Other topics include
poverty, unemployment, alcoholism, and white crimes against Indians.
Native-American writing is more philosophical than angry, however, and it projects a strong ecological
vision. Major authors include the distinguished N. Scott Momaday, who inaugurated the contemporary
Native-American novel with House Made of Dawn; his recent works include The Man Made of
Words(1997). Part-Laguna novelist Leslie Marmon Silko, the author of Ceremony, has also published

Gardens in the Dunes (1999), evoking Indigo, an orphan cared for by a white woman at the turn of the
20th century.
Numerous Mexican-American writers reside in the Southwest, as they have for centuries. Distinctive
concerns include the Spanish language, the Catholic tradition, folkloric forms, and, in recent years, race
and gender inequality, generational conflict, and political activism. The culture is strongly patriarchal,
but new female Chicana voices have arisen.
The poetic nonfiction book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), by Gloria Anzalda (1942), passionately imagines a hybrid feminine consciousness of the borderlands made up of strands from
Mexican, Native-American, and Anglo cultures. Also noteworthy is New Mexican writer Denise Chavez
(1948- ), author of the story collection The Last of the Menu Girls (l986). Her Face of an Angel(1994),
about a waitress who has been working on a manual for waitresses for 30 years, has been called an
authentically Latino novel in English.
California Literature
California could be a country all its own with its enormous multiethnic population and huge economy.
The state is known for spawning social experiments, youth movements (the Beats, hippies, techies), and
new technologies (the "dot-coms" of Silicon Valley) that can have unexpected consequences.
Northern California, centered on San Francisco, enjoys a liberal, even utopian literary tradition seen in
Jack London and John Steinbeck. It is home to hundreds of writers, including Native American Gerald
Vizenor, Chicana Lorna Dee Cervantes, African Americans Alice Walker and Ishmael Reed, and
internationally minded writers like Norman Rush (1933- ), whose novel Mating (1991) draws on his years
in Africa.
Northern California houses a rich tradition of Asian-American writing, whose characteristic themes
include family and gender roles, the conflict between generations, and the search for identity. Maxine
Hong Kingston helped kindle the renaissance of Asian-American writing, at the same time popularizing
the fictionalized memoir genre.
Another Asian-American writer from California is novelist Amy Tan, whose best-selling The Joy Luck Club
became a hit film in 1993. Its interlinked story-like chapters delineate the different fates of four motherand-daughter pairs. Tan's novels spanning historical China and today's United States includeThe
Hundred Secret Senses (1995), about half-sisters, and The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001), about a
daughter's care for her mother. The refreshing, witty Gish Jen (1955- ), whose parents emigrated from
Shanghai, authored the lively novels Typical American (1991) and Mona in the Promised Land (1996).
Japanese-American writers include Karen Tei Yamashita (1951- ), born and raised in California, whose
nine-year stay in Brazil inspired Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990) and Brazil-Maru (1992).
HerTropic of Orange (1997) evokes polyglot Los Angeles. Japanese-American fiction writers build on the
early work of Toshio Mori, Hisaye Yamamoto, and Janice Mirikitani.

Southern California literature has a very different tradition associated with the newer city of Los
Angeles, built by boosters and land developers despite the obvious problem of lack of water resources.
Los Angeles was from the start a commercial enterprise; it is not surprising that Hollywood and
Disneyland are some of its best-known legacies to the world. As if to counterbalance its shiny facade, a
dystopian strain of Southern California writing has flourished, inaugurated by Nathanael West's
Hollywood novel, The Day of the Locust (1939).
Loneliness and alienation stalk the creations of Gina Berriault (1926-1999), whose characters eke out
stunted lives lived in rented rooms in Women in Their Beds (1996). Joan Didion (1934- ) evokes the freefloating anxiety of California in her brilliant essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968). In 2003, Didion
penned Where I Was From, a narrative account of how her family moved west with the frontier and
settled in California. Another Angelino, Dennis Cooper (1953- ), writes cool novels about an underworld
of numb, alienated men.
Thomas Pynchon best captured the strange combination of ease and unease that is Los Angeles in his
novel about a vast conspiracy of outcasts, The Crying of Lot 49. Pynchon inspired the prolific
postmodernist William Vollmann (l959- ), who has gained popularity with youthful, counterculture
readers for his long, surrealistic meta-narratives such as the multivolume "Seven Dreams: A Book of
North American Landscapes," inaugurated with The Ice-Shirt (1990), about Vikings, and fantasies likeYou
Bright and Risen Angels: A Cartoon (1987), about a war between virtual humans and insects.
Another ambitious novelist living in Southern California is the flamboyant T. Coraghessan Boyle (1948- ),
known for his many exuberant novels including World's End (1987) and The Road to Wellville (1993),
about John Harvey Kellogg, American inventor of breakfast cereal.
Mexican-American writers in Los Angeles sometimes focus on low-grade racial tension. Richard
Rodriguez (1944- ), author of Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982), argues
against bilingual education and affirmative action in Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican
Father (l992). Luis Rodriguez's (1954- ) memoir of macho Chicano gang life in Los Angeles, Always
Running (1993), testifies to the city's dark underside.
The Latin-American diaspora has influenced Helena Maria Viramontes (1954- ), born and raised in the
barrio of East Los Angeles. Her works portray that city as a magnet for a vast and growing number of
Spanish-speaking immigrants, particularly Mexicans and Central Americans fleeing poverty and warfare.
In powerful stories such as "The Cariboo Caf" (1984), she interweaves Anglos, refugees from death
squads, and illegal immigrants who come to the United States in search of work.
The Northwest
In recent decades, the mountainous, densely forested Northwest, centered around Seattle in the state
of Washington, has emerged as a cultural center known for liberal views and a passionate appreciation
of nature. Its most influential recent writer was Raymond Carver.

David Guterson (1956- ), born in Seattle, gained a wide readership when his novel Snow Falling on
Cedars (1994) was made into a movie. Set in Washington's remote, misty San Juan Islands after World
War II, it concerns a Japanese American accused of a murder. In Guterson's moving novel East of the
Mountains (1999), a heart surgeon dying of cancer goes back to the land of his youth to commit suicide,
but discovers reasons to live. The penetrating novel Housekeeping (1980) by Marilynne Robinson (1944) sees this wild, difficult territory through female eyes. In her luminous, long-awaited second novel,
Gilead (2004), an upright elderly preacher facing death writes a family history for his young son that
looks back as far as the Civil War.
Although she has lived in many regions, Annie Dillard (1945- ) has made the Northwest her own in her
crystalline works such as the brilliant poetic essay entitled "Holy the Firm" (1994), prompted by the
burning of a neighbor child. Her description of the Pacific Northwest evokes both a real and spiritual
landscape: "I came here to study hard things rock mountain and salt sea and to temper my spirit on
their edges." Akin to Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dillard seeks enlightenment in
nature. Dillard's striking essay collection is Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). Her one novel, The
Living(1992), celebrates early pioneer families beset by disease, drowning, poisonous fumes, gigantic
falling trees, and burning wood houses as they imperceptibly assimilate with indigenous tribes, Chinese
immigrants, and newcomers from the East.
Sherman Alexie (1966- ), a Spokane/Coeur dAlene Indian, is the youngest Native-American novelist to
achieve national fame. Alexie gives unsentimental and humorous accounts of Indian life with an eye for
incongruous mixtures of tradition and pop culture. His story cycles include Reservation Blues (1995) and
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), which inspired the effective film of reservation
life Smoke Signals (1998), for which Alexie wrote the screenplay. Smoke Signals is one of the very few
movies made by Native Americans rather than about them. Alexie's recent story collection is The
Toughest Indian in the World (2000), while his harrowing novel Indian Killer (1996) recalls Richard
Wright's Native Son.
Global Authors: Voices From the Caribbean and Latin America
WWriters from the English-speaking Caribbean islands have been shaped by the British literary
curriculum and colonial rule, but in recent years their focus has shifted from London to New York and
Toronto. Themes include the beauty of the islands, the innate wisdom of their people, and aspects of
immigration and exile the breakup of family, culture shock, changed gender roles, and assimilation.
Two forerunners merit mention. Paule Marshall (1929- ), born in Brooklyn, is not technically a global
writer, but she vividly recalls her experiences as the child of Barbadian immigrants in Brooklyn in Brown
Girl, Brownstones (1959). Dominican novelist Jean Rhys (1894-1979) penned Wide Sargasso Sea(1966), a
haunting and poetic refiguring of Charlotte Bront's Jane Eyre. Rhys lived most of her life in Europe, but
her book was championed by American feminists for whom the "madwoman in the attic" had become
an iconic figure of repressed female selfhood.
Rhys's work opened the way for the angrier voice of Jamaica Kincaid (1949- ), from Antigua, whose
unsparing autobiographical works include the novels Annie John (1985), Lucy (1990), and The

Autobiography of My Mother (1996). Born in Haiti but educated in the United States, Edwidge Danticat
(l969- ) came to attention with her stories Krik? Krak! (1995), entitled for a phrase used by storytellers
from the Haitian oral tradition. Danticat evokes her nation's tragic past in her historical novel The
Farming of the Bones (1998).
Many Latin American writers diverge from the views common among Chicano writers with roots in
Mexico, who have tended to be romantic, nativist, and left wing in their politics. In contrast, CubanAmerican writing tends to be cosmopolitan, comic, and politically conservative. Gustavo Prez Firmat's
memoir, Next Year in Cuba: A Chronicle of Coming of Age in America (1995), celebrates baseball as much
as Havana. The title is ironic: "Next year in Cuba" is a phrase of Cuban exiles clinging to their vision of a
triumphant return. The Prez Family (1990), by Christine Bell (1951- ), warmly portrays confused Cuban
families at least half of them named Prez in exile in Miami. Recent works of novelist Oscar Hijuelos
(1951- ) include The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien (1993), about Cuban Irish Americans, and
Mr. Ives' Christmas (1995), the story of a man whose son has died.
Writers with Puerto Rican roots include Nicholasa Mohr (1938- ), whose Rituals of Survival: A Woman's
Portfolio (1985) presents the lives of six Puerto Rican women, and Rosario Ferr (1938- ), author ofThe
Youngest Doll (1991). Among the younger writers is Judith Ortiz Cofer (1952- ), author of Silent Dancing:
A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood (1990) and The Latin Deli (1993), which combines
poetry with stories. Poet and essayist Aurora Levins Morales (1954- ) writes of Puerto Rico from a
cosmopolitan Jewish viewpoint.
The best-known writer with roots in the Dominican Republic is Julia Alvarez (1950- ). In How the Garca
Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), upper-class Dominican women struggle to adapt to New York City.
!Yo!(1997) returns to the Garca sisters, exploring identity through the stories of 16 characters. Junot
Diaz (1948- ) offers a much harsher vision in the story collection Drown (1996), about young men in the
slums of New Jersey and the Dominican Republic.
Major Latin American writers who first became prominent in the United States in the 1960s
Argentina's Jorge Luis Borges, Colombia's Gabriel Garca Mrquez, Chile's Pablo Neruda, and Brazil's
Jorge Amado introduced U.S. authors to magical realism, surrealism, a hemispheric sensibility, and an
appreciation of indigenous cultures. Since that first wave of popularity, women and writers of color have
found audiences, among them Chilean-born novelist Isabel Allende (1942- ). The niece of Chilean
president Salvador Allende, who was assassinated in 1973, Isabel Allende memorialized her country's
bloody history in La casa de los espritus (l982), translated as The House of the Spirits (1985). Later
novels (written and published first in Spanish) include Eva Luna (1987) and Daughter of Fortune(1999),
set in the California gold rush of 1849. Allende's evocative style and woman-centered vision have gained
her a wide readership in the United States.
GLOBAL AUTHORS: VOICES FROM ASIA AND THE MIDDLE EAST
Many writers from the Indian subcontinent have made their home in the United States in recent years.
Bharati Mukherjee (1940- ) has written an acclaimed story collection, The Middleman and Other
Stories(1988); her novel Jasmine (1989) tells the story of an illegal immigrant woman. Mukherjee was

raised in Calcutta; her novel The Holder of the World (1993) imagines passionate adventures in 17thcentury India for characters in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Leave It to Me (1997) follows
the nomadic struggles of a girl abandoned in India who seeks her roots. Mukherjee's haunting story "The
Management of Grief" (1988), about the aftermath of a terrorist bombing of a plane, has taken on new
resonance since September 11, 2001.
Indian-born Meena Alexander (1951- ), of Syrian heritage, was raised in North Africa; she reflects on her
experience in her memoir Fault Lines (1993). Poet and story writer Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (1956- ),
born in India, has written the sensuous, women-centered novels The Mistress of Spices(1997) and Sister
of My Heart (1999), as well as story collections including The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (2001).
Jhumpa Lahiri (1967- ) focuses on the younger generation's conflicts and assimilation in Interpreter of
Maladies: Stories of Bengal, Boston, and Beyond (1999) and her novel The Namesake (2003). Lahiri
draws on her experience: Her Bengali parents were raised in India, and she was born in London but
raised in the United States.
Southeast Asian-American authors, especially those from Korea and the Philippines, have found strong
voices in the last decade. Among recent Korean-American writers, pre-eminent is Chang-rae Lee (1965). Born in Seoul, Korea, Lee's remarkable novel Native Speaker (1995) interweaves public ideals,
betrayal, and private despair. His moving second novel, A Gesture Life (1999), explores the long shadow
of a wartime atrocity the Japanese use of Korean "comfort women."
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982), born in Korea, blends photographs, videos, and historical
documents in her experimental Dictee (l982) to memorialize the suffering of Koreans under Japanese
occupying forces. Malaysian-American poet Shirley Geok-lin Lim, of ethnic Chinese descent, has written
a challenging memoir, Among the White Moon Faces (l996). Her autobiographical novel is Joss and
Gold(2001), while her stories are collected in Two Dreams (l997).
Philippines-born writers include Bienvenido Santos (1911-1996), author of the poetic novel Scent of
Apples (1979), and Jessica Hagedorn (l949- ), whose surrealistic pop culture novels are Dogeaters(l990)
and The Gangster of Love (1996). In very different ways, they both are responding to the poignant
autobiographical novel of Filipino-American migrant laborer Carlos Bulosan (1913-1956),America Is in
the Heart (1946).
Noted Vietnamese-American filmmaker and social theorist Trinh Minh-Ha (1952- ) combines storytelling
and theory in her feminist work Woman, Native, Other (1989). From China, Ha Jin (1956- ) has authored
the novel Waiting (1999), a sad tale of an 18-year separation whose realistic style, typical of Chinese
fiction, strikes American ears as fresh and original.
The newest voices come from the Arab-American community. Lebanese-born Joseph Geha (1944- ) has
set his stories in Through and Through (1990) in Toledo, Ohio; Jordanian-American Diana Abu-Jaber
(1959- ), born in New York, has written the novel Arabian Jazz (1993).

Poet and playwright Elmaz Abinader (1954- ), is author of a memoir, Children of the Roojme: A Family's
Journey From Lebanon (1991). In "Just Off Main Street" (2002), Abinader has written of her bicultural
childhood in 1960s small-town Pennsylvania: "...my family scenes filled me with joy and belonging, but I
knew none of it could be shared on the other side of that door."
American literature has traversed an extended, winding path from pre-colonial days to contemporary
times. Society, history, technology all have had telling impact on it. Ultimately, though, there is a
constant humanity, with all its radiance and its malevolence, its tradition and its promise.
[Kathryn VanSpanckeren, professor of English at the University of Tampa, has lectured in American
literature widely abroad, and is former director of the Fulbright-sponsored Summer Institute in
American Literature for international scholars. Her publications include poetry and scholarship. She
received her Bachelors degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and her Ph.D. from Harvard
University.]
KEYWORDS:

American Literature
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