Art and literature in United States 2st part

As the century continued, this genre of imaginative nonfiction (sometimes called the documentary novel or the nonfiction novel) continued to evolve and took on many different forms. In the writing of Calvin Trillin, John McPhee, Neil Sheehan, and Truman Capote, all among Liebling’s and Mitchell’s successors at The New Yorker, this new form continued to seek a tone of subdued and even amused understatement. Tom Wolfe, whose influential books included The Right Stuff (1979), an account of the early days of the American space program, and Norman Mailer, whose books included Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), a ruminative piece about the Republican and Democratic national conventions in l968, deliberately took on huge public subjects and subjected them to the insights (and, many people thought, the idiosyncratic whims) of a personal sensibility.

Literature in United States

As the nonfiction novel often pursued extremes of grandiosity and hyperbole, the American short story assumed a previously unexpected importance in the life of American writing; the short story became the voice of private vision and private lives. The short story, with its natural insistence on the unique moment and the infrangible glimpse of something private and fragile, had a new prominence. The rise of the American short story is bracketed by two remarkable books: J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories (1953) and Raymond Carver’s collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981). Salinger inspired a generation by imagining that the serious search for a spiritual life could be reconciled with an art of gaiety and charm; Carver confirmed in the next generation their sense of a loss of spirituality in an art of taciturn reserve and cloaked emotions.

Art in USA

Since Carver’s death in 1988, the great novelist and man of letters John Updike has remained perhaps the last undisputed master of literature in the high American sense that emerged with Ernest Hemingway and Faulkner. Yet in no area of the American arts, perhaps, have the claims of the marginal to take their place at the centre of the table been so fruitful, subtle, or varied as in literature. Perhaps because writing is inescapably personal, the trap of turning art into mere ideology has been most deftly avoided in its realm. This can be seen in the dramatically expanded horizons of the feminist and minority writers whose work first appeared in the 1970s and ’80s, including the Chinese American Amy Tan. A new freedom to write about human erotic experience previously considered strange or even deviant shaped much new writing, from the comic obsessive novels of Nicholson Baker through the work of

those short-story writers and novelists, including Edmund White and David Leavitt, who have made art out of previously repressed and unnarrated areas of homoerotic experience. Literature is above all the narrative medium of the arts, the one that still best relates What Happened to Me, and American literature, at least, has only been enriched by new “mes” and new narratives. Britannica enciclopedia