New Voices

Use the timeline above to explore writing in the late 20th century. Clicking the link under a writer’s picture will show you more about that writer, and buttons will help you explore the era. You can also scroll down the page to read about all the writers in this time period.

A New Generation of Writers

After the second world war, the literary landscape in the United States changed. While political and social values remained relatively conservative, the leading writers of the day were often radical and forward-thinking, paving the way for the Beat generation and for the political activism of the 1960s. Learn more about American literature after World War II from Encyclopædia Britannica here.

Click the buttons below for more information about different aspects of writing in the late 20th century.

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Tennessee Williams

1911-1983

Playwright

Tennessee Williams wrote poignant plays about people who won’t accept reality–and how reality ultimately shatters their delusions. For example, Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) maintains a fragile veneer of snobbery and flirtation that masks a multitude of insecurities and anxieties. The play earned Williams his first Pulitzer Prize. He won a second for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955).

New York Times theater critic Frank Rich praised the playwright’s “extraordinarily fecund and lyrical poetry, his mastery of dramatic moments and effects, and his ability to raise lowly characters to almost mythic size.”

Williams was haunted by the disastrous results of the prefrontal lobotomy performed on his beloved sister, Rose, who suffered from schizophrenia. Echoes of her story appear in many of Williams’s plays, most directly in the character of Laura Wingfield from The Glass Menagerie (1945). Near the end of the play, the character of Tom (Williams’s birth name) laments, “Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!”

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Ralph Ellison

1914-1994

Novelist, Essayist

Named for philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ralph Ellison was perhaps destined to delve deeply into the human condition. While his namesake was white, Ellison was African-American, and therefore grappled with what W.E.B. Du Bois termed “double consciousness”: the psychological challenge of looking at oneself through the perspective of white culture.

Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) features a nameless protagonist, an educated African-American man who realizes that his black skin renders him “invisible” in white society. Part epic, part myth, and written in a free-flowing style reminiscent of jazz, Invisible Man became the first work by an African-American author to win the National Book Award.

Barack Obama has cited Invisible Man (1952) as a favorite book. In his own memoir, Obama recalled relating to the struggle over identity that Ellison described:

“I would sit and wrestle with words, locked in sudden desperate argument, trying to reconcile the world as I’d found it with the terms of my birth. But there was no escape to be had. In every page of every book, in Bigger Thomas and invisible men, I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed able to deflect.”

– Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father (1995)

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Arthur Miller

1915-2005

Playwright

Arthur Miller began writing plays at the University of Michigan and, after graduation, moved back to his hometown of New York City to pursue his calling. He found success on Broadway with All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949). Both plays won Tony Awards, while Salesman earned a Pulitzer–firmly establishing Miller as one of the major playwrights of the 20th century.

Miller ultimately wrote more than 30 plays, all finely crafted meditations on morality and justice. Death of a Salesman exposes the human toll exacted by capitalism. The Crucible (1953) is a call to resist censorship. “The job is to ask questions,” he said. “And to ask them as inexorably as I can.”

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Kurt Vonnegut

1922-2007

Novelist

In 1945, Kurt Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in an underground meat locker in Dresden, Germany, while Allied planes pummeled the city with thousands of bombs. An account of this horrific event is the centerpiece of Vonnegut’s irreverent, vernacular, and darkly funny Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), which blends science fiction, autobiography, traditional fiction, and philosophy.

In Slaughterhouse-Five and in many of his other 13 novels, Vonnegut questioned the meaning of existence, depicted the madness of war, and saw kindness as humanity’s only redeeming quality: these perspectives resonated with a country torn apart by military involvement in the Vietnam War. Vonnegut’s works, which also included essays, plays, and short stories, became classics of the counterculture.

The expression “So it goes”–flip, defeatist, hilarious–appears again and again in Vonnegut’s magnum opus, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969):

“They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in the war. Rosewater, for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old fireman, mistaking him for a German soldier. So it goes. And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the fire-bombing of Dresden. So it goes.”

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Flannery O’Connor

1925-1964

Fiction Writer

Although shy, Flannery O’Connor was nonetheless ambitious. Once she determined fiction, not journalism, was her métier, she decided to attend the now world-famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop. From then on, she wrote prodigiously. Even as she struggled with lupus–the disease that killed her father and would cause her own death at 39–she remained prolific.

Informed by the community surrounding her Georgia hometown and her Catholic faith, O’Connor’s short fiction is rich with complex antiheroes and ironic moral turns. “I write,” she said, “because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”

O’Connor’s best known story is “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1953). A grandmother, innocent of any law-breaking but not actually innocent at all–she romanticizes slavery, she lies, and she eagerly offers her family’s life in exchange for her own– meets The Misfit, an escaped murderer who understands grace.

“‘She would of been a good woman,’ The Misfit said, ‘if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.'” This line epitomizes O’Connor’s insight and dark wit.

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Vine Victor Deloria Jr.

1933-2005

Essayist, Activist

A Standing Rock Sioux, Vine Deloria Jr. was a dedicated advocate for the rights of American Indians. He founded the country’s first master’s degree program in American Indian Studies, served as executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, and made many appearances before the U.S. Congress to testify in civil rights cases.

In terms of raising public awareness about the challenges face by contemporary Indians, Deloria made his biggest impact with Custer Died for Your Sins (1969), a collection of 11 bitingly humorous essays. He wrote many more books, including God is Red: A Native View of Religion (1973).

Deloria took the title for Custer Died for Your Sins from a bumper sticker popular in “Indian Country” during the 1960s. As he explains in “Indian Humor,” one of the book’s 11 essays, humor is an essential aspect of Indian culture. “When a people can laugh at themselves and laugh at others … that people can survive.”

Other essays upend stereotypes, previous anthropological research on Native Americans, and existing colonial narratives. The book inspired anthropologists to rethink their approach to studying and teaching about American Indian cultures.

“But the Indian task of keeping an informed public available to assist the tribes in their efforts to survive is never ending, and so the central message of this book, that Indians are alive, have certain dreams of their own, and are being overrun by the ignorance and the mistaken, misdirected efforts of those who would help them, can never be repeated too often.”

–Vine Deloria Jr., preface to Custer Died for Your Sins (1988 edition)

Modernism (1919-1945)

Exhibit Overview

A New Generation of Writers

Jump to Featured Writers:

Tennessee Williams

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Ralph Ellison

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Arthur Miller

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Kurt Vonnegut

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Flannery O’Connor

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Vine Victor Deloria Jr.

Cold War, Boom Times

Social Activism

Counterculture