1945 -- 1963

The United Statesand World Power

• Victory in WWII is complete and total.

• Yet distribution of power is startling amongst allies.

• Britain is beleaguered from bombings, etc.

• Soviets suffer worst casualties and war leaves them at economic disadvantage in coming cold war. Become US greatest foe.

U.S. emerges as a world power and reshapes American culture for the balance of 20th century.

Great social effort in fight against Hitler reorganized American economy and lifestyle.

Postwar existence revealed new kinds of men and women with different aspirations.

New possibilities empowered millions of Americans.

With 3 million men in uniform, the war effort was built by woman, who, after working, were reluctant to return to domesticity.

This pattern expanded to other groups as well:

African Americans who served in war were unwilling to return to US as second-class citizens; nor could a majority culture aware of their contribution go back to segregation and racism.

The Cold War• Two atomic bombs used to end the war

with Japan.

• So horrific that “containment” became US military policy.

• When Communist N. Korea invaded S. Korea in 1950, US rejects response with A-bomb. Moves to “police action” with conventional warfare.

• Hot war was out! Cold war was in!

• Military strength was built for deterrence rather than combat.

• USSR had, since war’s end, assumed an extreme adversarial position.

• The West (Europe, its satellites, and US) perceived a threat in the 1948 attainment of nuclear weapons in USSR.

• When in 1949, Communists took over China, the cold war moved beyond Europe and into Asia and Southeast Asia.

The 1950s and early 1960s

Shaped by perception of stable conformity to American life, a dedication to an increasingly materialistic standard of living.

American stability proved to be delusory(deceptive, causing one to believe in what is not true)...

White males benefited from GI Bill -- after WWII more than 50% of Americans would be collge educated.

World markets opened to American products.

The rise of the the alphabet soup of American corporations:IBM, GE, RCA, IT&T, etc.

Higher incomes created great wealth. suburbs born...westward shift...highways headed everywhere...

“People never notice anything,” Holden Caulfield, Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger (1951).

Estate, Robert Rauschenberg, 1963

Reflects social and aesthetic nature of the times.

Painting makes use of everyday images and yet makes them abstract.

What’s most startling is the everyday being obscured.

What’s Rauschenberg’s purpose in making the recognizable obscured?

By 1960 the average American family was moving to a new place of residence at the rate of once every five years.

Pushes on the very idea and stability of “home” in America.

“Look at us. We're just like everyone else. We've bought into the same, ridiculous delusion,” April Wheeler, Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates (1962).

“I want to feel things. Really feel them,” Frank Wheeler,

Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates (1962).

“It was probably the first time in his adult life that he had ever cried, certainly the first time in his life that he had ever felt so miserable,

cold, tired, and bewildered,” from “The Swimmer,” John Cheever.

Conflicts Between Conformity and Individualism

•This new way of life could not stay consonant with the new atmosphere of American wealth and power.

•Passage from 1950s to 1960s marks the great watershed moment of Post WWII America.

•Conformity/individuality, Tradition/innovation, stability/disruption were new tensions

Earliest harbinger was 1960 election of John Kennedy as president.

While mainstream society had become complacent with material success and had neglected the less fortunate, Kennedy offered a new energy to American life.

“The New Frontier”

The birth of peace corps.

Effort to conquer space.

Activist approach towards desegregation, sending federal troops into the South to enforce the law.

Cultural grace to Kennedy’s grew America’s mystique ... idea of Camelot...

The end of the 1950s, some critics believe, comes on November 22, 1963.

Moment in American cultural history when America metaphorically lost its innocence.

The phenomenon known as “the sixities” was born...

JFK moments before...Dallas, TX, Nov. 22, 1963

Literary Developments

Prose

•Writers reexamine both what literature is meant to accomplish and how to accomplish it.

•Conflicts between conformity/individuality, stability/disruption characterize literature of the period.

•At first, cultural homogeneity was the ideal in the 1950s, patriotically so in terms of of building up the foundations of American society to resist and contain Communism.

•The idea of homogeneity led many writers to assume that a single work could represent the experiences of an entire people, that there existed a common national essence.

•Literary world between 1945 and 1963 often let readers believe that there could be such a thing as a representative American short story.

•Novels followed this trend more in-depth.

•Hence the desire to write “the Great American Novel” was born.

PoetryThe standard was short lyric meditation: reflection on object, landscape or encounter to epitomize or clarify a feeling.

Poets acquired a new visibility in American life

Robert Frost, Time, 1950

for example...

Cardinal, Franz Kline, 1950

Mark Rothko

Both Rothko and Kline, as poets do, take an object or landscape and break it down to epitomize a feeling.

Primacy of feeling over form...

After war, writers conferences, workshops, recordings, and interviews became commonplace.

A network of poets traveling to give readings or becoming poets-in-residence at universities was also common.

second from left: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and

William Burroughs

•Decade saw publication of grounbreaking books as various as Gwendolyn Brooks’s A Street in Bronzeville (1945) (evocation of Black life in America) toAllen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956) (evocation of post-war alienation and free-spiritedness).

•Poets diverge from the ideal of homogeneity and possess a “longing to lose the gift of order [...]”

•Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and John Berryman begin careers as well mannered and formal; yet their work grows wild and taking advantage of a disquieting form of lyric exploration.

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”

Allen Ginsberg

“In a single stroke, [in 1956] with the energy of a reborn Walt Whitman [Ginsberg] made poetry one of the rallying points for underground protest and prophetic denunciation of the complacent, gray-spirited Eisenhower years.”

Ginsberg, etc.

•“Howl” came to be associated with San Francisco Renaissance.

•Challeneged the literary traditions of the East Coast.

•Its experimental form sounded a departure from well-shaped lyric.

The Giants Who Loom...

•J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye, (1951)

•Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, (1952)

•Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March, (1953)

“I am an American, Chicago Born”

“I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.”

“I am an invisible man.”