Out of this era brought the Beat culture as well as an environmental awareness. Salinger, concerns the journey of a troubled adolescent youth, Holden Caulfield as he roams the streets of New York looking for a purpose to his life. Though not technically considered a piece of Beat literature, it contains similar themes as well as an insight into the life of a teenager after the war. Both of these novels reflect an age of American history where cultural changes were beginning to take place in a post-war society.
They long for adventure as well as a meaningful life and are constantly in search for it, constantly traveling to find what they are looking for in life. On the Road by Jack Kerouac, gives an inside look into the mind of a member of the Beat society and his struggle to find his place in the universe by traveling and examining his relationships to other people.
The protagonist of the novel, Sal Paradise, is based on Jack Kerouac himself and his experiences and relationships to those around him, which are all based on his real life.
Sal longs for the open road and travels to San Francisco, stopping at Denver along the way and attending parties.
Upon arriving at his final destination, he is offered a job as a night watchman for a boarding camp. However, he decides to move again, this time traveling with a girl he met on the bus back to her hometown where he attempts a job working in the fields.
Realizing he wants more than this sort of lifestyle, he travels, yet again, to New York. The next year, Dean and Sal meet again and decide to travel west together, first landing in New Orleans, where they partake in the nightlife, such as jazz nightclubs, however, Sal is overwhelmed by the frantic nature of this lifestyle and returns to New York. A few months later, Sal decides to travel to San Francisco again to visit Dean and his new wife, but after a fight with her, they both return back to New York, yet they begin to grow apart on the journey back.
The next year, Sal begins to want to travel again, this time descending into Mexico City with Dean. After their last wild party and Sal becoming ill, Dean abandons Sal in Mexico City like he had with his three previous wives. After recovering, Sal returns to New York and meets Laura and they decide to move together to San Francisco and Dean agrees to take them there. However, Dean arrives too early and Sal does not have the money to go with him and Dean must return alone.
Sal later reminisces about the open road and his friendship with Dean and imagines the ongoing path that the road led him down. The characters of On the Road are constantly in travel, journey across the country to see where life takes them.
They are always searching for a higher purpose in life, wanting more than a steady job and home life. This is typical of people of the Beat culture who lived life from party to party, simply looking to find their way. Sal Paradise gives us an inside look into the journey to discover himself as well as the people who accompany him. Throughout the novel, Sal is traveling the country, looking for parties, friends, music, and anything that will give him a purpose in life.
He has no sense of identity and longs for a sense of community through other cultures. At first, he longs to be like Dean, who is adventurous and free-spirited, but as the novel progresses, he realizes that Dean is unreliable and does not long to wander around the way Dean has for as long as he has known him.
Over the course of the novel, Dean has a total of three wives, Marylou, Camille, and Inez, and has multiple children between them, sometimes impregnating another wife while another was already pregnant. He cannot stay faithful to any of them, constantly leaving them only to return later on in the novel. He is unable to take responsibility for any of his actions, under the cover of the Beat culture.
He also talks about the Beat generation rising from the war and how they have grown accustomed to the horrors of human cruelty in the face of war and they are the first who must live with the fear of a nuclear attack wiping out humanity.
Out of this fear rose the Beat generation, looking for peace, yet living by extremes and fueled by curiosity while recovering from the horrors of war. On the Road provides a look into the life of a younger adult that has been affected by the war and is now recovering through partying and attempting to live a nomadic lifestyle, searching for a meaning to his life and exploring the relationships with those around him.
A year later, Maynard auctioned off a series of letters Salinger had written her while they were still together. The buyer, a computer programmer, later returned them to Salinger as a gift. In , Salinger's daughter Margaret wrote an equally negative account of her father that like Maynard's earlier book was met with mixed reviews. For Salinger, other relationships followed his affair with Maynard. For some time he dated the actress Elaine Joyce.
Later, he married a young nurse named Colleen O'Neill. The two were married up until his death on January 27, , at his home in Cornish. Despite the lack of published work over the last four decades of his life, Salinger continued to write. Those who knew him said he worked every day and speculation swirled about the amount of work that he may have finished. One estimate claims that there may be as many as 10 finished novels locked away in his house.
In , new light was shed on Salinger's life and work. Shane Salerno and David Shields published a biography of the famed writer entitled Salinger. One of its revelations was that there were about five unpublished works by Salinger that are scheduled to be released over the next few years.
Salerno also created a film documentary on Salinger, which debuted around the same time as his book with Shields. We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives. Ralph Ellison was a 20th century African American writer and scholar best known for his renowned, award-winning novel 'Invisible Man.
Langston Hughes was an African American writer whose poems, columns, novels and plays made him a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the s. Allen Ginsberg is one of the 20th century's most influential poets, regarded as a founding father of the Beat Movement and known for works like "Howl. Celebrated American author Herman Melville wrote 'Moby-Dick' and several other sea-adventure novels before turning to poetry later in his literary career. Romare Bearden is considered one of the most important American artists of the 20th century.
He depicted aspects of Black culture in a Cubist style. American short-story writer and novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald is known for his turbulent personal life and his famous novel 'The Great Gatsby. As part of this seriality we find the consumerist patterns followed by the main character, a serial killer called Patrick Bateman, who consumes in all possible ways: buying, eating and destroying.
The three forms of consumption are produced in series, the text thus building a close link between the seriality of the serial killer and the seriality of mass culture, a link that may account for the interest aroused by the figure of the serial killer in Western societies, and especially in US society. Bret Easton Ellis's most controversial and representative work is American Psycho , a novel which clearly illustrates this influence of mass culture in blank fiction literature.
American Psycho's subject- matter is taken from popular literature. Its main character is a rich white heterosexual yuppie called Patrick Bateman. Although Bateman seems to be a successful man perfectly integrated in society, he is actually a sexist, racist, and xenophobic serial killer. Bateman himself narrates all the events portrayed in the novel, deploying the same flat tone to describe both his daily routine and his horrific killings.
In a narration overcharged with details we learn of his favourite television talk shows, magazines, films, cosmetic products and preferred ways of torturing people. Genre of fiction in which characters feel limited by the expectations and norms of society.
The protagonists seek ways to break from those boundaries past the limit of social acceptability, which often leads to them appearing mentally ill, anti-social, or nihilistic. Most books of the genre explore taboo subjects such as drugs, violence, sex, incest, crime, pedophilia, or highly dysfunctional family relationships.
Inspired by authors like Kurt Vonnegut and his openly satirical approach, they provide social criticism in a manner that is accessible and attractive to the audience, using the writing techniques similar to the ones used famously by the authors like Ernest Hemingway or Jack Kerouac. A merican drama imitated English and European theater until well into the 20th century.
Often, plays from England or translated from European languages dominated theater seasons. An inadequate copyright law that failed to protect and promote American dramatists worked against genuinely original drama.
So did the "star system," in which actors and actresses, rather than the actual plays, were given most acclaim. Americans flocked to see European actors who toured theaters in the United States. In addition, imported drama, like imported wine, enjoyed higher status than indigenous productions.
During the 19th century, melodramas with exemplary democratic figures and clear contrasts between good and evil had been popular. Plays about social problems such as slavery also drew large audiences; sometimes these plays were adaptations of novels like Uncle Tom's Cabin. Not until the 20th century would serious plays attempt aesthetic innovation. Popular culture showed vital developments, however, especially in vaudeville popular variety theater involving skits, clowning, music, and the like.
Minstrel shows, based on African-American music and folkways -- performed by white characters using "blackface" makeup -- also developed original forms and expressions. Eugene O'Neill is the great figure of American theater.
His numerous plays combine enormous technical originality with freshness of vision and emotional depth. O'Neill's earliest dramas concern the working class and poor; later works explore subjective realms, such as obsessions and sex, and underscore his reading in Freud and his anguished attempt to come to terms with his dead mother, father, and brother.
His play Desire Under the Elms recreates the passions hidden within one family; The Great God Brown uncovers the unconsciousness of a wealthy businessman; and Strange Interlude , a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, traces the tangled loves of one woman. These powerful plays reveal different personalities reverting to primitive emotions or confusion under intense stress.
O'Neill continued to explore the Freudian pressures of love and dominance within families in a trilogy of plays collectively entitled Mourning Becomes Electra , based on the classical Oedipus trilogy by Sophocles. His later plays include the acknowledged masterpieces The Iceman Cometh , a stark work on the theme of death, and Long Day's Journey Into Night - - a powerful, extended autobiography in dramatic form focusing on his own family and their physical and psychological deterioration, as witnessed in the course of one night.
This work was part of a cycle of plays O'Neill was working on at the time of his death. O'Neill redefined the theater by abandoning traditional divisions into acts and scenes Strange Interlude has nine acts, and Mourning Becomes Electra takes nine hours to perform ; using masks such as those found in Asian and ancient Greek theater; introducing Shakespearean monologues and Greek choruses; and producing special effects through lighting and sound. He is generally acknowledged to have been America's foremost dramatist.
In he received the Nobel Prize for Literature -- the first American playwright to be so honored. Williams established himself as a recognized playwright in the wake of World War II, during which Modernist deconstructions of literature were flourishing. Streetcar served as a somewhat monumental contribution to American theater: following a Modernistic trend, in which the laws and conventions of literature are bent and questioned, Streetcar eschewed a generic restriction, and served simply to reflect American habits and motivations.
An eloquently symbolic poet of the theater, Williams is noted for his scenes of high dramatic tension and for his brilliant, often lyrical dialogue.
Williams is perhaps most successful in his portraits of the hypersensitive and lonely Southern woman, such as Blanche in Streetcar, clutching at life, particularly at her memories of a grand past that no longer exists.
Theatrical movement, originating in France with the lays of Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Eugene Ionesco, that portrayed characters grasping futilely for meaning and order in a seemingly senseless world. Much of the work of the American playwright Edward Albee can be classified as part of this movement. Albee is supposed to be one of the greatest absurdist playwrights after the Second World War in American literature. By the early s, Albee was widely considered to the successor of Williams and Miller.
Audiences never know the situation and the place where things are happening in play. This is the important feature of absurdist drama. Most of the characters presented by Albee in his works are restless and uncomfortable in their own self. Love is also presented in his plays but not in the way of romantic situation but in the way of lost, decay, fall and failure. The character in the drama like George and Martha are husband and wife; whose life is very much frustrated.
They only argue all the time.
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