Chapter Thirteen: The Forties and Fifties

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Chapter Thirteen The Forties and Fifties
Social Background of This Period When World
War ?started in Europe in 1939, people felt that
America should worry about its own problems and
forget the rest of the world. The Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor changed all that. By 1945,
America was a world power with huge international
responsibilities. This made Americans both proud
and extremely uncomfortable. After the war,
America entered an Age of Anxiety. The politics
of America were influenced by two great fears.
First, there was the fear of the Bomb many
Americans were sure there would be a war with the
Soviet Union using atomic bombs. Also, in the
late forties and early fifties, fear of Communism
became a national sickness. American authors in
the fifties show that they are very uncomfortable
in the post-war world. The new political fears
are less important to them than their own
psychological problems in the new American
society. It is not a period of important
experiments in style. Rather, the most
interesting authors are developing new and
important themes. Many black American and
Jewish-American writers try to express their
opions by looking at their own cultural and
racial backgrounds. Others explore the ideas of
modern philosophy and psychology. The new writers
of the South, however, seem s little less modern.
In their work, we still feel the sad, heavy
weight of the past. The central theme of their
work, however, is often loneliness and the search
for the self. This makes their work deeply
interesting to modern readers everywhere.
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The Major writers
Eudora Welty (1909-2001)
Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi.
As the title of her most recent book suggests,
One Writers Beginnings (1983) describes the
significant roles played by her family and home
in shaping Weltys artistic sensibility. Her
formal education included attendance at
Mississippi State College for Women, the
University of Wisconsin, and the Columbia
University School of Business.
Weltys first short story appeared in 1936 and,
with the help of Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth
Brooks, Welty published six other stories over
the next three years. A Curtain of Green, Weltys
first collection of stories, was published in
1941 with an excellent preface by Katherine Anne
Porter.
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The forties also saw publication of Weltys first
short novel (The Robber Bridegroom, 1942), a
second collection of stories (The Wide Net,
1943), a second novel (Delta Wedding, 1946), and
a collection of interrelated stories (The Golden
Appeals, 1949). The Ponder Heart, a short novel,
appeared in 1954, and a collection entitled The
Bride of the Innesfallen was published the
following year. In 1970, Weltys longest novel,
Losing Battles, was published, and her
WPA-inspires photographs, One Time, One Place,
appeared in 1971. The Optimists Daughter, a
novel awarded the Pulitzer Price in 1972, was
followed by a collection of essays, The Eye of
the Story (1978), The Collected Stories of Eudora
Welty (1980), and One Writers Beginning (1983).
In as much as she grew up listening to and
reading fairy tale, legend ,and myth, Weltys
narrative technique owes as much to an oral as to
a written tradition.
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A Brief Analysis of the Authors Important Work
About Death of a Travelling Salesman Death of a
Travelling Salesman is a powerful and almost
mystical account of a stranded salesman who seeks
refuge in the home of two hillbillies, only to
meet his death - remains one of Welty's best
known, a small masterpiece. The short story
Death of a Travelling Salesman is about a
salesman who losses his way on a road without
sigh posts in backwoods Mississippi. He spends
the night with some simple country people. The
description of one of these people suggests that
they belong to another world.The next morning,
Bowman leaves them. Standing all alone on the
road, he dies of a heart attack. Many of Weltys
characters live and die alone. They dont
understand either life or themselves.
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Flannery O Connor(1925-1964)
Mary Flannery OConnor grew up in the South in
Georgia. The only child of Edward Francis
OConnor and Regina Cline OConnor, she lived in
Savannah her first thirteen years. Then the
family moved to Milledgeville, to the house where
OConnors mother had grown up. OConnors father
died three years later. The following year, when
OConnor was seventeen, she entered Georgia State
College for women, now Georgia College.
In 1945 OConnor left Georgia to study creative
writing at the Writers Workshop of the State
University of Iowa, where she wrote a series of
short stories and earned a masters degree in
fine arts. She then embarked on her first novel,
working on it at Yaddo, an artists colony in
upstate New York, in an apartment in New York
City, and while boarding with friends in
Ridgefield, Connecticut. In 1950, OConnor
suffered an attack of lupus, the disease that had
killed her father. During the next thirteen years
she hobbled about with a cane or crutches, raised
peafowl, and wrote for two or three hours a day.
Sometimes she was well enough to travel within or
beyond Georgia to give a speech or a reading or
to accept an honorary degree. But mostly she
lived quietly on the farm until surgery in
February 1964 reactivated the lupus she died in
August, at the age of 39.
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OConnor completed two novels, Wise Blood and The
Violent Bear It Away, but is better remembered
for her two volumes of short stories, A Good Man
Is Hard to Find and the posthumous Everything
That Rises Must Converge. Several other volumes
have been published since her death a complete
collection of stories and also collections of
essays (Mystery and Manners), letters (including
The Habit of Being), and book reviews (including
The Presence of Grace).
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A Brief Analysis of the Authors Important Work
 A Simple Analysis on A Good Man Is Hard to
Find OConnors apocalyptic fiction attempts to
show her readers their limitless need for Gods
mercy. In A Good Man is Hard to Find, she does
this through the interaction of a prim little old
lady and a serial killer, known as the
Misfit.  We would normally expect that a
grandmother should represents goodness while a
serial killer should represent evil. OConnor,
however, seems to hold precisely the reverse in
this case. Similarly, we would expect the old
woman to represent life and the Misfit death
again, OConnor suggests the opposite, believing
that life without spirituality is a living death,
and through meeting the Misfit -- even though the
meeting is fatal -- the old woman gains a chance
of attaining salvation.  This fateful meeting
occurs when the car occupied by the old woman and
her dysfunctional family takes a wrong turn, and
breaks down on the way to visit an old family
homestead. The old woman has insisted that they
visit this place because she identifies it with
the sort of Southern gentility that her
wishy-washy son Bailey, his insipid wife, and
their bratty children lack. This not-so-wise
woman is under the mistaken opinion that being
well-dressed and respectable is next to
Godliness, when in fact there is no relationship
whatsoever. Nothing is next to Godliness,
OConnor argues there is only Godliness. Either
one is a believer, or one is not -- and the old
woman is not. 
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Because God wants to draw his strayed sheep back
to himself, one way or the other, He causes this
misguided family to cross paths with someone who
will bring them back to Him -- forcibly. One by
one, the entire family is killed by the Misfit.
The grandmother, the last to go, is the only one
to recognize the Misfit's cosmic function. Like
the old womans children, the Misfit has been
raised without spirituality and without
spirituality. In effect, the Misfit has said that
if a person is not willing to accept God, then he
or she might as well throw propriety to the
winds, and go out and become a serial killer. In
OConnors view, to reject Gods love in small
ways is just as sinful as rejecting his love in
big ones, because without God there is no value
system left. 
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Carson McCullers(1917-1967)
Lula Carson Smith was born in Columbus, Georgia.
From the age of five she took piano lessons, and
at the age of 15 she received a typewriter from
her father. Two years later she moved to New York
to study piano at Juilliard School of Music, but
never attended the school - she managed to lose
the money set aside for her tuition. McCullers
worked in menial jobs and devoted herself to
writing.
She studied creative writing at Columbia and New
York universities and published in 1936 an
autobiographical piece, Wunderkind in Story
magazine. It depicted a musical prodigy's failure
and adolescent insecurity. In 1937 she married
Reeves McCullers, a failed author. They moved to
North Caroline, living there for two years.
During this time she wrote The Heart is a Lonely
Hunter. McCullers's marriange turned out to be
unlucky. They both had homosexual relationships
and separated in 1940. She moved to New York to
live with George Davis, the editor of Harper's
Bazaar. McCullers became a member of the art
commune February House in Brooklyn. After World
War II McCullers lived mostly in Paris. Her close
friends during these years included Truman Capote
and Tennessee Williams.
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In 1945 McCullers remarried with Reeves, and in
1948 under depression she attempted suicide.
McCullers's bitter-sweet play The Square Root of
Wonderful (1958) was an attempt to examine these
traumatic experiences. The Member of the Wedding
(1946) described the feelings of a young girl at
her brother's wedding. The Broadway production of
the novel had a successful run in 1950-51.
Carson McCullers suffered throughout her life
from several illnesses. She died in New York on
September 29, 1967, after a stroke and a
resultant brain haemorrhage. Her last book,
Illumination and Night Glare (1999), McCullers
dictated during her final months.
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A Brief Analysis of the Authors Important Work
About The Ballad of the Sad Café The Ballad of
the Sad Café is a fable about love's power to
transform and destroy, choosing lovers and
beloved with seemingly malevolent whimsy.
Brusque, tomboyish spinster Miss Amelia, who
doctors the locals and makes moonshine in her
swamp-hidden still, virtually runs her sad-sack
Depression-era mill town. Miss Amelia would be an
odd duck in any burg.
With her short, blond hair, severely androgynous
features, towering bearing and awkward gait, she
bears a disconcerting resemblance to David Bowie.
The local laborers are loafing as usual on
Amelia's porch one moonlit, moonshine-soaked
night, when a very strange stranger shows up --
he's a hunchbacked dwarf, and he claims to be
Miss Amelia's distant Cousin Lymon. To everyone's
amazement, antisocial Amelia takes him in. And
falls in love with him. Soon Lymon has invited
the gawkers and gapers into Amelia's
long-darkened home, and the place blossoms into a
bustling cafe. Lymon amuses the locals with his
capers and screeching jokes, and Miss Amelia even
puts on her mother's red dress!
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Seems that years earlier, rangy Marvin Macy fell
in love with Amelia, and she married him for some
reason, remaining stoically impassive behind her
wedding veil. But Amelia refused to sleep with
Macy, tossing him down the stairs, then making
him sleep in the barn when he dared to suggest
his marital privilege. Humiliated and emotionally
shattered, he left town and wound up in the
penitentiary. When Macy returns to town bent on
revenge, malevolent Cousin Lymon is instantly
infatuated by this Marlboro man, the only person
immune to Amelia's steely power. This sets up a
torturous love triangle that culminates in a
fistfight between Amelia and Macy.
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Saul Bellow(1915-)
The son of immigrant parents from Russia, Saul
Bellow grew up in a Jewish ghetto of Montreal,
Canada, where he learned Yiddish, Hebrew, and
French. In 1924 his family moved to Chicago, a
city that often appeared in his fiction. After
earning a bachelors degree from Northwestern
University, in 1937 he entered the University of
Wisconsin at Madison to study anthropology but
left there in December to become a writer. After
World War ?, he taught at the University of
Minnesota in Europe, and lived in Paris for a
period of time. Since 1963 he has been a
professor at the University of Chicago.
Bellow published his first novel, The Dangling
Man, in 1944. Three years later, Bellow published
The Victim. With The Adventures of Augie March
(1935), Bellow broke free from the modernist
chains that bound him. Bellows much-anthologized
Seize the Day (1956) is certainly a more somber
novel than Augie March, yet it is not a return to
the largely humorless pessimism of his novels of
the 1940s. Henderson the Rain King (1959) also
possesses some of the dark comedy of Seize the
Day. Herzog (1946) was an enormous critical and
financial success. The next two novels, Mr.
Sammlers Planet (1970) and Humboldts Gift
(1975), strengthened Bellows reputation.
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In The Deans December (1982) Bellow confronts
more directly than in any of his other novels,
political and social problems. Bellow has also
written short stories, some of which are
collected in Mosbys Memoirs and Other Stories
and Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other
Stories, a non-fiction book on Israel, To
Jerusalem and Back, several plays, and a number
of essays. During his career, Bellow has received
many awards for his writing, including the Noble
Prize for Literature in 1976.
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A Brief Analysis of the Authors Important Work
About The Dangling Man Bellow transformed his
own frustrating experiences with the draft board
into The Dangling Man, a novel presented as a
rambling series of journal entries in which
Joseph, the protagonist, futilely attempts to
withstand the regimentation of the modern world.
From the opening paragraphs, Joseph's
self-pitying voice attacks the Hemingway model of
manly restraint. Joseph uses his confessional
style to confront the world of limits, but in the
end he must resign himself to the regimentation
of army life. Joseph, the protagonist of The
Dangling Man, grapples with a sense of personal
disintegration and self-betrayal as he awaits his
call-up for the Army during the Second World War.
We see how, in that context, his ongoing struggle
to attain a firm sense of who he is and what he
stands for as an individual is related to his
marginality as a Jew in American society. For
example, Joseph's attempt to define his
commitment to his brother's family is shaped by
his inability to reconcile their crass
materialism with his sense of their forebears'
more spiritual existence.
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About Herzog Herzog, Bellow's major novel from
the 1960s, centers on a middle-aged Jewish
intellectual, Moses E. Herzog, whose life had
come to a standstill. He is on the brink of
suicide, he writes long letters to Nietzsche,
Heidegger, ex-wife Madeleine, Adlai Stevenson,
and God. As Augie March, Moses Herzog is
introspective and troubled, but he finally also
finds that he has much reason to be content with
his life. Moses Herzog's rambling account of his
effort to move from the emotionally charged
personal life that has caused him so much
suffering to a calmer, more rational existence is
interspersed with a stunning series of eccentric
letters written to a broad range of public
figures. The epistolary method permits Bellow to
blend the public and the private in a way that
enriches the historical relevance of his
fiction. In Herzog the protagonist's awareness
of his marginality plays a central role in his
struggle to come to terms with himself during a
severe emotional and intellectual crisis. Moses
Herzog is strongly attached to his Jewish past.
He cherishes the memories of growing up in an
observant home, and is aware that he owes his
idealism, his moralism, and his desire to be a
decent person largely to his Jewish upbringing.
Yet, on the other hand, he feels that precisely
these aspects of his upbringing have been a
source weakness in his relationships with other
people and in his work as a philosopher and
historian. Many critics consider Herzog one of
the major literary achievements of the post-War
period.
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Issac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991)
Isaac Bashevis Singer was born on July 24, 1904
in Radzymin, Poland. In 1921 he enrolled in
Rabbinical School, but left only two years later
to work for a Yiddish literary magazine. By 1935
he had published his first book, Satan in Goray
(1935). That same year, Singer followed his
brother, Isaac Joshua Singer to America. In New
York, Isaac Bashevis Singer began working for The
Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish newspaper. During
the 1940s Singer published his work in a number
of journals as well as serially in the The
Forward.
Throughout the 1940s, Singers reputation began
to grow among the many Yiddish-speaking
immigrants. In 1950 Singer produced his first
major work, The Family Moskat. He followed this
novel with a series of well-received short
stories, including his most famous, "Gimpel, The
Fool."
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Throughout the 1960s Singer continued to write on
questions of personal morality. One of his most
famous novels was Enemies A Love Story.
Throughout the 1970s he wrote dozens of stories
that were eventually collected into books, and
published in Yiddish and English as well as many
other languages. He branched out, writing memoirs
and childrens books as well as two other major
novels set in the twentieth century, The Penitent
(1974) and Shosha (1978). The same year as his
publication of Shosha, Singer won the Nobel Prize
in literature. After being awarded the Nobel
Prize, Singer continued to write during the last
years of his life, often returning to Polish
history which so entranced him throughout his
early life. In 1988 he published The King of the
Fields and three years later, Scum, a story of a
man living in an early-twentieth-century Polish.
That same year, Isaac Bashevis Singer died at the
age of eighty-seven in Surfside, Florida.
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A Brief Analysis of the Authors Important Work
About The Magician of Lublin The Magician of
Lublin tells the story of Yasha, a talented
magician who performs throughout Poland in the
late 1800s. He has the talent to pick any lock,
escape any barrier. A non-observant Jew, Yasha
finds that his abilities to juggle before an
audience extend to the lives he must juggle
off-stage. While his religious, dutiful wife
waits for him at home, his many mistresses
eagerly await his next trip to the city.
Yasha Mazur, is a Jewish Don Juan, consumed with
restlessness and expressing it through a myriad
of affairs. Caught between shtetl values and
theatrical sophistication, Yasha is confronted
with the greatest challenge of his life. How he
escapes, and ultimately finds his own true self,
is a parable of man's ongoing search for personal
meaning.
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Bernard Malamud (1914-1986)
Malamud was born in Brooklyn, New York, to
Russian Jewish immigrants. His parents were not
highly educated and knew very little about
literature or the arts. Malamud attended high
school in Brooklyn. His first writing was for the
literary magazine at Erasmus Hall, from which he
graduated in 1932. In the middle of the
Depression, he spent four relatively unhappy
years at the City College of New York where he
obtained a B.A. degree from Columbia University
in English.
After graduation, he worked in a factory and as a
clerk at the Census Bureau in Washington, D. C.
Although he wrote in his spare time, Malamud did
not begin writing seriously until the advent of
World War II and the subsequent horrors of the
Holocaust. He questioned his religious identity
and started reading about Jewish tradition and
history. In 1949, Malamud joined the faculty of
Oregon State University, where he taught for
twelve years while completing his first four
books. In 1949, Malamud joined the faculty of
Oregon State University, where he taught for
twelve years while completing his first four
books. He left this post in 1961 to teach
creative writing at Bennington College in
Vermont. He remained there until shortly before
his death in 1986.
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A Brief Analysis of the Authors Important Work
About The Fixer The Fixer won the Pulitzer Prize
and the National Book Award in 1967. In a search
for a suffering Everyman plot, Malamud had
thought of several subjects--the trial of Alfred
Dreyfus and the Sacco-Vanzetti case, among
others--before deciding on a story he had heard
from his father as a boy, that of the trial of
Mendel Beiliss for ritual bloodletting and murder
in 1913 in Russia. Through this story, Malamud
also tried to answer the question of how the
death camps in Germany had been possible. Hero
Yakov Bok's last name suggests a scapegoat, and
also the goat mentioned in the song chanted for
the end of the Passover Seder as a symbol of
Jewish survival.
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Introduction of the novel The character of Bok
is in many ways similar to that of Morris Bober
in The Assistant, but the initial passive
suffering of Bok is transformed into an active,
deliberate suffering so that Bok adds Frank
Alpine's commitment to Boberlike endurance.
Unlike Bober's, Bok's prison is real, not
metaphoric, and Malamud lets his readers know it.
He grimly records the physical torment, mental
suffering, and spiritual degradation. There is no
relief from the insects, the pails of excrement,
the beatings, and particularly the humiliating
body searches in which each of Bok's orifices is
probed, first two, and then six times a day.
Through it all, Bok maintains his innocence,
first from stubbornness, but later from a
gradually emerging sense of principle. As with
Bober, Bok's life is an endurance test whose only
activity is suffering, but unlike Bober, Bok's
actual imprisonment allows him to attain a
spiritual freedom that eludes Bober. Bober
finally learns to accept Frank Alpine's struggles
in his behalf, but for Bok there is no one to
carve some meaning out of the absolute absurdity
of his existence except himself. The technique
of the novel is heavily influenced by the
earthiness and mysticism of Isaac Bashevis
Singer, Sholom Aleichem and I. L. Peretz, who
made the Yiddish folktale into an art form.
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The style validates the hero's philosophic
musings, which are spoken in the simplest
language possible, and also accomodates the dream
visions, particularly the appearance to Bok of
Tsar Nicholas II, who tries to defend his realm's
treatment of Jews. Although the style comes from
the literate folktale, the philosophy itself
often comes from Dostoevsky, particularly The
Brothers Karamazov. Bok attempts to escape his
unpromising future as well as his self-pitying
condition by leaving the Russian ghetto in which
he was born and going to Kiev. He passes for a
Christian, gets a good job, and lives in a sector
forbidden to Jews, all of which only makes him
the likely scapegoat when the murdered child is
found. While he is imprisoned Bok learns that he
cannot escape his fate or his history--that he is
not only a Jew, but the symbol of all Russian
Jews. Although it is not clear whether or not Bok
believes in God at the close of the novel, it is
clear he understands that the possibility of
retaining his human dignity requires belief.
Like Frank Alpine, Bok must discover the meaning
of the suffering that seems to be the central
factor in the condition of being Jewish. In order
to release himself from suffering, Bok is about
to goad the guards into killing him. When he
thinks of his father-in-law Shmuel, however, he
realizes that his suicide scheme might be taken
as a tacit admission of his guilt and the cause,
therefore, of a wave of pogroms. Having
understood that even isolated in his cell, he is
part of the human race, he chooses to go on with
his suffering.
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Bok extends his commitment when his wife Raisl
comes to ask him to give her illegitimate child
his name. He accedes to her wishes, deliberately
branding himself a willing cuckold, because he
realizes that her unfaithfulness was caused
largely by his self-centeredness and self-pity.
In acknowledging his complicity in her actions he
gives up part of the guiltless-victim persona
which helps most martyrs face their torments. Far
from undermining his strength, however, the act
of legitimizing his wife's son makes him for the
first time both father and husband. Bok spends
much of his imprisonment questioning the justice
of his universe and the existence of a God who
rules over it. Unlike Job, however, Bok finds no
voice out of the whirlwind to give form to
absurdity. No matter what the state does, Bok
will not admit to the trumped-up charge of ritual
murder--that he has killed a Christian boy to use
his blood in the manufacture of matzos. Bok is
offered all kinds of deals up to a complete
pardon and physical freedom itself, if he will
just sign a confession, but he insists on coming
to trial. When he is given a confession to sign,
he writes instead the document giving his
paternity to Raisl's son, Chaim. Bok's heroism
proves that human dignity can be maintained even
at the most minimal levels of existence and among
the most brutal examples of mankind.
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Philip Roth (1933-)
Philip Milton Roth was born in Newark, New
Jersey, in 1933, the son of American-born parents
and the grandson of European Jews who were part
of the nineteenth-century wave of immigration to
the United States.  He grew up in the city's
lower-middle-class section of Weequahic and was
educated in Newark public schools.  He later
attended Bucknell University, where he received
his B.A., and the
University of Chicago, where he completed his M.
A. and taught English. Afterwards, at both Iowa
and Princeton, he taught creative writing, and
for many years he taught comparative literature
at the University of Pennsylvania.  He retired
from teaching in 1992. His first book was
Goodbye, Columbus (1959), a  novella and five
stories that use wit, irony, and humor to depict
Jewish life in post-war America. The book won him
critical recognition, including the National Book
Award for fiction, and along with that,
condemnation from some within the Jewish
community for depicting what they saw as the
unflattering side of cotemporary Jewish American
experience.  His first full-length novel was
Letting Go (1962), a Jamesian realistic work that
explores many of the societal and ethical issues
of the 1950s.  This was followed in 1967 by When
She Was Good, another novel in the realistic mode
that takes as its focus a rare narrative voice in
Roth's fiction a young Midwestern female.
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He is perhaps best known--notoriously so, to
many--for his third novel, Portnoy's Complaint
(1969), a wildly comic representation of his
middle-class New York Jewish world in the
portrait of Alexander Portnoy, whose possessive
mother makes him so guilty and insecure that he
can seek relief only in elaborate masturbation
and sex with forbidden shiksas.  For readers of
that hilarious novel, eating liver would never be
the same (read the book and you'll understand). 
Portnoy's Complaint was not only the New York
Time's best seller for the year 1969, it also
made a celebrity out of Roth. . . an
uncomfortable position that he would later
fictionalize in such novels as Zuckerman Unbound
(1981) and Operation Shylock (1993).  Following
the publication of Portnoy Complaint, Roth
experimented with different comic modes, at times
outrageous, as illustrated in the works Our Gang
(1971), a parodic attack on Richard Nixon The
Breast (1972), a Kafkaesque rendering of sexual
desire The Great American Novel (1973), a wild
satire of both Frank Norris's novelistic quest
and the great American pastime, baseball  and
the short story "On the Air." 
27
In My Life As a Man (1974), Roth not only
introduces his most developed protagonist, Nathan
Zuckerman, but but for the first time his fiction
becomes highly self-reflexive and postmodern. 
One of his most significant literary efforts is
the Zuckerman trilogy The Ghost Writer (1979),
Zuckerman Unbound, and The Anatomy Lesson (1983)
and wrapped up with an epilogue, The Prague Orgy
(1985) These novels trace the development of
Roth's alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, from an
aspiring young writer to a socially compromised,
and psychologically besieged, literary
celebrity.  In The Counterlife  (1986), perhaps
his most ambitious and meticulously structured
novel, Roth brings a temporarily end to his
Zuckerman writings.  It is also the first time
that the author engages in a sustained
examination of the relationship between American
and Israeli Jews. 
28
His next four books--The Facts (1988), Deception
(1990), Patrimony (1991), and Operation
Shylock--explore the relationship between the
lived world and the written world, between "fact"
and "fiction."  Through his protagonist in these
works, also named Philip Roth, the author
questions the genres of autobiography and
fiction, and he mischievously encourages the
reader to become caught up in this literary
game.  Of these four books, only one, Deception,
is billed as a novel.  The other three are
subtitled as an autobiography (The Facts), a
memoir or "true story" (Patrimony), or a
confession (Operation Shylock).  The most
elaborate of these, Operation Shylock, is
arguably Roth's finest work, leading fellow
writer Cynthia Ozick to call it in one of her
interviews, "the Great American Jewish Novel" and
Roth "the boldest American writer alive."
29
Roth's next novel, Sabbath's Theater (1995), is
a return to the outrageous psycho-sexual (and
tragicomic) form that entertained and outraged so
many in Portnoy's Complaint.  Its "hero," the
over-the-hill puppeteer Mickey Sabbath, is
nothing if not a character portrait of
transgressive behavior.  However in his next
three novels, what some critics call his American
Trilogy, Roth relies once again on Nathan
Zuckerman as his agent of focus.  American
Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998),
and The Human Stain (2000) can be read as novels
that reflect key moments in late
twentieth-century American experience--in the
1960s, 1950s, and 1990s, respectively--and each
is chronicled by an older Zuckerman, no longer
the mischievous and sexually-adventurous young
writer he once was.  In this later trilogy, the
aged writer has become somewhat of a recluse who
devotes himself exclusively to his writing, and
through this writing reveals the stories of
memorable individuals who, in many ways,
represent the social, political, and
psychological conflicts that define post-war
America.
30
In his latest novel, The Dying Animal (2001),
Roth revisits the life of David Kepesh, the
protagonist of The Breast and The Professor of
Desire (1977).  As in the earlier novels, Kepesh
is concerned with the erotic side of existence
and, as he puts it, "emancipated manhood."  Yet
even though its focus in explicitly sexual, this
novel, like almost all of Roth's other works, has
as its theme the ways in which individuals--specif
ically men--live with desire in the larger sense
of the word.  One of the hallmarks of Roth's
fiction is the ways in which sexual, communal,
familial, ethnic, artistic, and political
freedoms play themselves out on the field of
contemporary existence. In addition to his
novels and short stories, Roth has also proven to
be an accomplished essayist.  In collections such
as Reading Myself and Others (1975) and the more
recent Shop Talk (2001), his focus is on the act
of writing, both his own and that of other
authors.  The lengthy interviews that make up
Shop Talk first appeared in such publications as
the New York Times Book Review, the New York
Review of Books, the New Yorker, and the London
Review of Books.  The pieces themselves are a
testament to Roth's unwavering and ongoing
admiration of some of the most significant
writers in the last half of the
twentieth-century.  Until 1989 he was the General
Editor of the Penguin book series "Writers from
the Other Europe," which he inaugurated in 1974. 
The series helped to introduce American audiences
to, among others, Milan Kundera, Primo Levi,
Aharon Appelfeld, and Ivan Klima. 
31
Unlike many aging novelists, whose productive
qualities wane over time, Roth has demonstrated a
unique ability not only to sustain his literary
output, but even surpass the scope and talent
inherent in his previous writings.  His latter
fiction is arguable his best work, as
demonstrated by the succession of awards he
received in the 1990s (and the fact that he's on
the short list for the Nobel Prize).  He has
lived in Rome, London, Chicago, and New York.  He
currently lives in Connecticut.  His awards and
honors include
32
Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (1959)
Letting Go (1962) When She Was Good (1967)
Portnoy's Complaint (1969) The Breast (1972)
The Great American Novel (1973) My Life As a
Man (1974) The Professor of Desire (1977) The
Ghost Writer (1979) Zuckerman Unbound (1981)
The Anatomy Lesson (1983) The Counterlife
(1986) Operation Shylock (1993) Sabbath's
Theater (1995) American Pastoral (1997) The
Human Stain (2000) The Dying Animal (2001)
Reading Myself and Others (2001)
33
Goodbye, Columbus(1959) "Goodbye, Columbus"
first appeared in the autumn-winter 1958-59 issue
of the Paris Review and shortly thereafter in
Goodbye, Columbus, and Five Short Stories (1959).
This collection brought Philip Roth recognition
as one of America's most important fiction
writers. "Goodbye, Columbus" treats many of the
themes for which Roth is best known
acculturation and assimilation of second and
third generation Jews into American life their
attempts to fulfill the American dream their
relationship to their heritage, both American and
European and the tension between wealth and
intellect. The story's central character and
narrator, Neil Klugman, embodies all of these
themes. Living with his Aunt Gladys in the Jewish
section of Newark, he meets and falls in love
with Brenda Patimkin, daughter of Ben Patimkin,
who made a fortune in kitchen and bathroom sinks.
The Patimkins live in Short Hills, New Jersey, an
affluent suburb. As Neil drives there, he feels
that he is approaching heaven. When he arrives,
he is struck not only by the Patimkins' affluence
but also by their athletic prowess and their
eating ability as they all sit at one table and
gorge themselves. Neil contrasts this meal to the
meals in his aunt's home, where Gladys feeds each
person separately, one after the other.
34
The title of the story derives from a record Ron
Patimkin, Brenda's brother, owns. It recounts the
events of his senior year at Ohio State
University in Columbus, Ohio, and it ends with
the words, "goodbye, Columbus ... goodbye,
Columbus ... goodbye ..." Yet the story's title
also refers to Christopher Columbus. Neil too is
a discoverer of a new world, the world of the
Patimkins, one that promises fulfillment for all
Neil's worldly dreams. But it demands a sacrifice
in return to become a part of that world, he
must, he feels, become a Patimkin. When Ron
decides to marry, Ron abandons his dream of being
a physical education teacher to meet his
"responsibilities" by entering the Patimkin
business. At Ron's wedding, Ben says to Neil and
Brenda, "There's no business so big it can't use
another head," implying that if Neil marries
Brenda, he too will enter the business. But Neil
ultimately rejects the Patimkin world.
35
Neil connects his trips to Short Hills with a
little black boy's coming to the library to look
at a book of Gauguin's paintings of Tahiti. In a
key dream, Neil pictures himself and the child on
a ship moving inexorably away from an island in
the Pacific. The female natives on the island
throw leis at them and say the concluding words
of Ron's record. Neither the child nor Neil wants
to leave, but neither can do anything about it.
In the dream, Neil is Columbus, and the land he
must leave is the world of Brenda. He ultimately
decides that he is unwilling to become a
Patimkin, and he realizes the truth of what he
thinks earlier "No sense carrying dreams of
Tahiti in your head, if you can't afford the
fare."
36
When Neil spends his two-week vacation just
before Labor Day at the Patimkin household, he
realizes that he has fallen in love with Brenda,
but he also gets a taste of what life as a
Patimkin would be. Shortly after moving in, he
sees the hostility between Brenda and her mother
as they argue concerning Neil's visit, which
occurs just after Ron has announced that he is
getting married in two weeks. As Brenda runs from
her mother, Neil finds himself sitting on his one
Brooks Brothers shirt and pronouncing his own
name aloud. Neil's last name, Klugman, is a
Yiddish word for clever or smart one, but it also
means cursed one. In fact, the story's title
inevitably connects Neil's name with a saying
ubiquitous in Jewish immigrant neighborhoods in
east coast cities around the turn of the 20th
century a klug tzu Columbus, a curse on
Columbus, the discoverer of the land in which the
immigrants found themselves suffering so much.
Ben's brother Leo assumes Neil will marry Brenda.
At Ron's wedding, Leo tells Neil that Neil is "a
smart boy" who will "play it safe" and not "louse
things up." But after Neil apparently decides to
ask Brenda to marry him, he discovers that he
cannot.
37
Towards the end of his stay at the Patimkin
house, Neil asks Brenda to buy a diaphragm. She
initially refuses, indicating, Neil feels, her
lack of commitment to their relationship. Then,
she relents, but when she goes back to Radcliffe
at the beginning of the school year, she leaves
her diaphragm in a drawer at home, where her
mother finds it. Neil visits her in Cambridge,
where she tells him what happened. Neil feels,
with what seems justification, that Brenda left
the diaphragm on purpose to hurt her mother. He
apparently feels that Brenda has been using him
all along. He tells her, "I loved you, Brenda, so
I cared." She responds, "I loved you." Then, both
realize what tense they have used, and Neil
leaves. Before he calls a cab to take him to the
train station, he looks through a window into the
Harvard University library, where he knows
Patimkin sinks have been installed. He sees his
own reflection in the window and beyond sees the
stacks with their "imperfectly shelved" books. He
returns to Newark in time to go to work the next
morning. Ultimately, Neil is unable to stay in
the New World that Brenda represents. He is
unwilling or unable to pay the fare. Instead, he
returns to the imperfect world of Newark and his
job at the Newark Public Library, with its own
"imperfectly shelved" books.
38
Portnoy's Complaint (1969) Portnoy's Complaint
is a satiric novel which describes a Jewish man's
futile struggle for freedom from his past,
specifically the guilt, restrictions, and taboos
imposed upon him by his parents and religion
during childhood, and his sense of alienation in
the present. The story is told in monologue form
by the main character, Alexander Portnoy, who is
relating the personal details of his life to his
psychiatrist, Dr. Spielvogel. Portnoy, in his
early thirties, presents a highly moral exterior,
displayed in his job as Assistant Commissioner of
the New York Commission on Human Opportunity. In
his private life, however, he uses obscenity and
promiscuous sexual behavior in order to rebel
against his upbringing and the unsympathetic and
predominately gentile society in which he lives.
We learn that as a child, when frustrated by his
ineffectual father, Jake, and his smothering,
melodramatic, and domineering mother, Sophie,
Portnoy released his anger and frustration in
excessive masturbation. Outwardly an obedient
child and outstanding student, his childhood
sexual fantasies always involved gentile girls
whose homes he envied because he perceived them
to be serene and normal, much like that depicted
in the popular 1950s television show, Ozzie and
Harriet. As an adult, Portnoy acts out his
fantasies with gentile girls of various origins,
acknowledging that his actions are directed less
against the women themselves than their
backgrounds.
39
Portnoy, recognizing that his rebellious behavior
is destructive and only leads to more feelings of
guilt and frustration, makes a trip to Israel
where, because everyone there is Jewish, he hopes
to feel a sense of belonging. Here he meets
Naomi, a woman in the Israeli army who reminds
him of his mother. While attempting to rape her,
Portnoy finds himself impotent. His flight to
Israel demonstrates that he is as alienated there
as at home. More to the point, the values and
taboos that Portnoy ran away from and rebelled
against were so ingrained within him that his
hopes for escape are futile. As in most of his
fiction Roth explores the effect of culture on an
individual's search for identity with humor and
satire. The use of the monologue technique
enables Roth to present his protagonist--confessin
g, exaggerating and accusing others--in a
disjointed, fragmented narrative style.
40
J.D.Salinger (1919----)
Jerome David Salinger is an American author best
known for writing The Catcher in the Rye,
considered one of the best books of the 20th
century.Born in 1919 in New York City, Salinger
began his writing career writing short stories
for magazines in New York. While a lot of his
writing was written with a view of making money,
a few stories - most notably A Perfect Day for
Bananafish, which starred Seymour Glass, stood
out.
He also published two episodes from what would
become The Catcher in the Rye before he had to
leave America to join the War and I'm Crazy and
Slight Rebellion Off Madison. Some people
speculate that Salinger was afraid that his death
in the war might mean the end of the story he'd
been thinking about since the early 1940s. His
writing was interrupted for a few years by World
War II, where he saw combat action in some of the
fiercest fighting in World War II. This
emotionally scarred him, and he wrote a number of
books about war, most notably For Esme----With
Love and Squalor, which draws on his wartime
experience and is narrated by a traumatized
soldier.
41
His first novel, The Catcher in the Rye, was
published in 1951 and became hugely popular both
among critics and young readers. It is a classic
coming-of-age novel told by a disturbed, immature
but insightful teenager named Holden Caulfield.
J.D. Salinger also wrote Franny and Zooey (1961)
and Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters and
Sevmour----An Introduction (the two being
published together in 1963) as well as other
short stories (collected in the book Nine
Stories). A major theme in Salinger's work is
the agile but powerful mind of disturbed young
men, and the redemptive capacity of children in
the lives of such men. After the literary fame
and notoriety of The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger
became a recluse. He moved from New York to
Cornish, New Hampshire where he continues to
write novels but not to publish them.
42
Salinger has tried to escape public exposure and
attention as much as possible ("A writer's
feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second
most valuable property on loan to him."
Salinger). But he constantly struggles with the
unwanted attention he gets as a cult figure. On
learning of an author's intention to publish J.
D. Salinger A Writing Life, a biography
including letters Salinger had written to other
authors and friends, Salinger sued to stop the
book's publication. The book was finally
published with the letters' contents paraphrased
the court ruled that though a person may own a
letter physically the language within it belongs
to the author. An unintended result of the
lawsuit was that many details of Salinger's
private life, including that he had written two
novels and many stories but left them
unpublished, became public in the form of court
transcripts. In 1999, Salinger released his
first new novel in thirty-four years Hapworth
16, 1924, first published in The New Yorker as a
short story in 1965. The novel will eventually be
published by Orchises Press, a small publishing
company. It has not appeared in print yet.
43
The Catcher in the Rye (1951) Nine Stories
(1953) Franny and Zooey (1961) Raise High the
Roof-Beam, Carpenters (1963)
44
The Catcher in the Rye (1951) Holden Caulfield,
the narrator of The Catcher in the Rye, begins
with the novel with an authoritative statement
that he does not intend for the novel to serve as
his life story. Currently in psychiatric care,
this teenager recalls what happened to him last
Christmas, the story which forms the narrative
basis for the novel. At the beginning of his
story, Holden is a student at Pencey Prep School,
irresponsible and immature. Having been expelled
for failing four out of his five classes, Holden
goes to see Mr. Spencer, his History teacher,
before he leaves Pencey. Mr. Spencer advises him
that he must realize that "life is a game" and
one should "play it according to the rules," but
the sixteen-year-old boy, who has already left
four private schools, dismisses much of what
Spencer says. Holden returns to his dormitory
where he finds Robert Ackley, an obnoxious
student with a terrible complexion who will not
leave Holden alone, and Ward Stradlater, Holden's
roommate. Stradlater is conceited and arrogant,
and he asks Holden to write an English
composition for him. Stradlater prepares for a
date with Jane Gallagher, a friend of Holden from
several summers before, while Holden goes with
Ackley and Mal Brossard into New York City to see
a movie. When he returns, Holden does write the
composition for Stradlater about his brother's
baseball mitt. Holden tells about how Allie died
of leukemia several years before and how he broke
all of the windows in his garage out of anger the
night that he died.
45
When Stradlater returns, he becomes upset at
Holden for writing what he thinks is a poor
essay, so Holden responds by tearing up the
composition. Holden asks about his date with
Jane, and when Stradlater indicates that he might
have had sex with her, Holden becomes enraged and
tries to punch Stradlater, who quickly overpowers
him and knocks him out. Soon after, Holden
decides to leave Pencey that night and not to
wait until Wednesday. He leaves Pencey to return
to New York City, where he will stay in a hotel
before actually going home. On the train to New
York City, Holden sits next to the mother of a
Pencey student, Ernest Morrow. Claiming that his
name is actually Rudolf Schmidt (the name of the
Pencey janitor), Holden lies to Mrs. Morrow about
how popular and well-respected her son is at
Pencey, when he is actually loathed by the other
boys, and even invites her to have a drink with
him at the club car. When Holden reaches New
York, he does not know whom he should call,
considering his younger sister, Phoebe, as well
as Jane Gallagher and another friend, Sally
Hayes. He finally decides to stay at the Edmond
Hotel. From his window he can see other guests at
the hotel, including a transvestite and a couple
who spit drinks back at each other, which makes
him think about sex.
46
He decides to call Faith Cavendish, a former
burlesque stripper and reputed prostituted, but
she rejects his advances. Instead, he goes down
to the Lavender Room, a nightclub in the Hotel,
where he dances with Bernice Krebs, a blonde
woman from Seattle who is vacationing in New York
with several friends. Holden thinks that these
tourists seem pathetic because of their
excitement over the various sights of the city.
After leaving the Lavender Room, Holden decides
to go to Ernie's, a nightclub in Greenwich
Village that his brother, D.B., would often
frequent before he moved to Hollywood. However,
he leaves almost immediately after he arrives,
because he sees Lillian Simmons, one of D.B.'s
former girlfriends, and wishes to avoid her
because she is a phony.' He walks back to the
hotel, where Maurice, the elevator man, offers
him a prostitute for the night. When this
prostitute arrives, Holden becomes too nervous
and refuses her. She demands ten dollars, but
Holden believes that he only owes five. Sunny
(the prostitute) and Maurice soon return,
however, and demand an extra five dollars. Holden
argues with them, but Maurice threatens him while
Sunny steals the money from him. Maurice punches
him in the stomach before he goes. Holden then
imagines shooting Maurice in the stomach and even
jumping out of the window to commit suicide.
47
Holden calls Sally Hayes to meet her for a
matinee and leaves his bags at a locker at Grand
Central Station so that he will not have to go
back to the hotel where he might face Maurice. At
Grand Central he talks with two nuns about Romeo
and Juliet and insists on giving them a donation.
Before meeting Sally, Holden shops for a record
for Phoebe and feels depressed when he hears
children singing the song "If a body catch a body
coming through the rye." He and Sally go to see a
show starring the Lunts, which he knows Sally
will enjoy because it seems sophisticated. When
Holden sees Sally, he immediately wants to marry
her, even though he does not particularly like
Sally. After the show, Sally keeps mentioning
that she sees a boy from Andover whom she knows,
and Holden responds by telling her to go over and
give the boy "a big soul kiss." When she talks to
the boy, who goes to Andover, Holden becomes
disgusted at how phony the conversation is.
Holden and Sally go ice-skating and then have
lunch together. During lunch, Holden complains
that he is fed up with everything around him and
suggests that they run away together to New
England, where they can live in a cabin in the
woods. When she dismisses the idea, Holden calls
her a "royal pain in the ass," causing her to
cry.
48
After the date, Holden calls Carl Luce, a friend
from the Whooton School who goes to Columbia and
meets him at the Wicker Bar. Carl soon becomes
annoyed at Holden for having a "typical Caulfield
conversation" that is preoccupied with sex, and
suggests that Holden see a psychiatrist. Holden
remains at the Wicker Bar, where he gets drunk,
then leaves to wander around Central Park. He
nearly breaks down when he breaks Phoebe's
record, and thinks he may die of pneumonia.
Thinking that he may die soon, Holden returns
home to see Phoebe, attempting to avoid his
parents. He awakens her, but she soon becomes
distressed when she hears that Holden has failed
out of Pencey, and tells him that their father
will kill him. He tells her that he might go out
to a ranch in Colorado, but she dismisses his
idea as foolish. When he complains about the
phoniness of Pencey, Phoebe asks him if he
actually likes anything. He claims that he likes
Allie, and he thinks about how he likes the nuns
at Grand Central and a boy at the Elkton Hills
school who committed suicide. He tells Phoebe
that he would like to be "a catcher in the rye,"
and he imagines himself standing at the edge of a
cliff as children play around him. He would catch
them before they ran too close to the cliff.
49
When his parents come home, Holden sneaks out to
stay with Mr. Antolini, his former English
teacher at Elkton Hills. Mr. Antolini tells
Holden that he is headed for a serious fall and
that he is the type who may die nobly for a
highly unworthy cause. He quotes Wilhelm Stekel
"The mark of an immature man is that he wants to
die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the
mature man is that he wants to live humbly for
one." Holden falls asleep on the couch, and when
he awakens he finds Mr. Antolini with his hand on
Holden's head. Holden immediately interprets this
as a homosexual advance, and decides to leave. He
tells Mr. Antolini that he has to get his bags
from Grand Central Station and that he will
return soon. Holden spends the night at Grand
Central Station, and then sends a note to Phoebe
at school, telling her to meet him for lunch. He
becomes increasingly distraught and delusional,
believing that he will die every time he crosses
the street and falling unconscious after
suffering from diarrhea. When he meets Phoebe,
she tells him that she wants to go with him and
becomes angry when he refuses. He buys Phoebe a
ticket for the carousel at the nearby zoo, and as
he watches her, he begins to cry. Holden ends
his story here. He refuses to tell what happened
next and how he got sick, and tells how people
are concerned about whether or not he will apply
himself next year. He ends the story by telling
that he misses Stradlater and Ackley and even
Maurice.
50
Norman Mailer (1923----)
Norman Mailer was born in 1923 in Long Branch,
N.J. Mailer grew up in Brooklyn and began
attending Harvard University in 1939, it was
while at university that he became interested in
writing, he published his first story when he was
18. He graduated from Harvard with a degree in
aeronautical engineering in 1943.
Drafted into the army in 1944, he served in the
Philippines, as a rifleman in a reconnaissance
outfit with the Twelfth Armored Cavalry regiment
from Texas until 1946. Just before enrolling in
the Sorbonne, in Paris, he wrote The Naked and
the Dead (1948) based on his personal experiences
in World War II, it was both a critical and
commercial success and hailed by many as one of
the finest American novels to come out of WWII.
Other highlights in a long and distinguished
career include The White Negro , a sociological
and semi-autobiographical essay, one of his best
pieces, in the authors own opinion.
Advertisements for Myself, a collection of the
best of Mailer's essays, stories, interviews and
journalism from the 40's and 50's. Why Are We in
Vietnam, a soul-searching novel on the place of
violence in the Vietnam Years.
51
Mailer's dramatic journalistic style can be best
appreciated in the superb Armies of the Night,
(Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award
recipient), a recollection of his own experiences
at the Washington peace rallies of 1968, during
which he was jailed. Mailer won 6 of the vote in
a five man primary to become Mayor of New York.
He documented the 1968 Republican and Democratic
Conventions in Miami and the Siege of Chicago and
the first manned landing on the Moon in Of a Fire
on the Moon. Mailer returned to examine violence
in society in The Executioner's Song a novel
based on the true life story of convicted murder
Gary Gilmore. More recently, Harlot's Ghost an
epic tour-de-force about the lifetime's of two
generations in the CIA. Oswald's Tale gets behind
the stereotypical view of Oswald and traces his
journey from a disastrous childhood to the
Marines to Minsk and onto his death in Dallas. A
major figure in post-war American literature,
Mailer's other credits include writing, directing
and appearing in a number of motion pictures.
Mailer's latest novel is entitled The Gospel
According to the Son, a first-person account of
the life of a very human Jesus Christ. He is
currently rumored to be working on the highly
anticipated sequel to "Harlot's Ghost".
52
Norman Mailer won the National Book Award for
Arts and Letters in 1969 and the Pulitzer Prize
twice, once in 1969 and again in 1980. The Deer
Park has been adapted into a play and was
successfully produced off-Broadway. In 1955
Mailer co-founded the Village Voice, and he was
editor of Dissent from 1952 until 1963. For his
role in demonstrations against the war in Vietnam
he was jailed in 1967. He was President of PEN
(US Chapter) from 1984 to 1986. Norman Mailer
has been married six times and has nine children.
The Naked and The Dead (1948), Barbary Shore
(1951), The Deer Park (1955), The White Negro
(1957), Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) The Armies
of the Night (1968), A Fire on the Mon (1970),
The Executioners Song (1978, Ancient Evenings
(1983)
53
The Naked and The Dead (1948) In the Pacific
during World War II, the officers live a
comfortable life with good food, good drink and
good quarters. To them, war is a game which they
know they will win and the common soldiers are
the pawns on the board. When the campaign slows
down, the Commander sends a squad to the top of a
mountain behind enemy lines to report on the
Japanese troop movements. The squad is commanded
by a tough cynical Sergeant who takes no
prisoners and even takes the gold from the teeth
of the enemy dead. Before the mission starts, the
lieutenant, who has had a cushy job due to a life
of wealth and privilege, criticizes the Commander
over his attitude towards the common soldier and
is re-assigned to lead the squad. The veteran
Sergeant wants to complete this mission as
ordered, and he will do everything he can do to
see that it is successful. What is truly
brilliant about this book is the fact that Norman
gets into the heads of such a diverse group of
people, from all walks of life and all corners of
the United States and all of them, no matter how
stupid, no matter how narrow-minded, no matter
how inarticulate, all of them, in their thoughts,
teeter on the edge of profundity. An existential
thread weaves its way through these characters
and makes the novel, despite its bleakness and
pointlessness, truly hopeful. Even if most of
what these men say is mean and narrow-minded, in
their thoughts they are capable of greatness.
54
Norman is in fact so exact about human nature,
there is such insight into our condition, that
it's almost as if God wrote the book. Examples
abound Gallagher's spirits rose. He would be
seeing his wife. But Mary was dead this time his
mind did not retreat quite so far. He sat there
thinking of how pleasant the sunlight had been
that morning as he climbed on the truck, and
dumbly he understood that he wanted to go back to
that moment. Back at 2d Battalion, Wyman had
just wounded an insect. It was a long hairy
caterpillar with black and gold coloring, and he
had jabbed a twig into its body. The caterpillar
began to run about in circles and then flopped
over on its back. It was struggling desperately
to right itself until Wyman held his burning
cigarette near the insect's back. The insect
writhed, and lay prostrate again, its back curled
into an L and its legs thrashing helplessly in
the air. It looked as if it were trying
desperately to breathe. The entire book--the
entire course of human existence--seems one long
train of men inflicting pain and other men
feeling pain and the caboose is nowhere in sight.
55
Robert Lowell (1917----1977)
Robert Lowell was born in 1917 into one of
Boston's oldest and most prominent families. He
attended Harvard College for two years before
transferring to Kenyon College, where he studied
poetry under John Crowe Ransom and received an
undergraduate degree in 1940. He took graduate
courses at Louisiana State University where he
studied with Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth
Brooks.
His first and second books, Land of Unlikeness
(1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (for which he
received a Pulitzer Prize in 1946, at the age of
thirty), were influenced by his conversion from
Episcopalianism to Catholicism and explored the
dark side of America's Puritan legacy. Under the
influence of Allen Tate and the New Critics, he
wrote rigorously formal poetry that drew praise
for its exceptionally powerful handling of meter
and rhyme. Lowell was politically involvedhe
became a co