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CHAPTER8AMERICAN PROSE,1945-1990:REALISM ANDEXPERIMENTATIONNarrative in the decades following WorldWar II resists generalization: It wasextremely various and multifaceted. Itwas vitalized by international currents such asEuropean existentialism and Latin Americanmagical realism, while the electronic era broughtthe global village. The spoken word on televisiongave new life to oral tradition. Oral genres,media, and popular culture increasingly influencednarrative.In the past, elite culture influenced popularculture through its status and example; thereverse seems true in the United States in thepostwar years. Serious novelists like ThomasPynchon, Joyce Carol Oates, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,Alice Walker, and E.L. Doctorow borrowed fromand commented on comics, movies, fashions,songs, and oral history.To say this is not to trivialize this literature:Writers in the United States were asking seriousquestions, many of them of a metaphysicalnature. Writers became highly innovative andself-aware, or reflexive. Often they found traditionalmodes ineffective and sought vitality inmore widely popular material. To put it anotherway, American writers in the postwar decadesdeveloped a postmodern sensibility. Modernistrestructurings of point of view no longer sufficedfor them; rather, the context of vision had to bemade new.THE REALIST LEGACY ANDTHE LATE 1940sAs in the first half of the 20th century, fictionin the second half reflected the characterof each decade. The late 1940s saw theaftermath of World War II and the beginning ofthe Cold War.World War II offered prime material: NormanMailer (The Naked and the Dead, 1948) andJames Jones (From Here to Eternity, 1951) weretwo writers who used it best. Both of thememployed realism verging on grim naturalism;both took pains not to glorify combat. The samewas true for Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions(1948). Herman Wouk, in The Caine Mutiny(1951), also showed that human foibles were asevident in wartime as in civilian life.Later, Joseph Heller cast World War II in satiricaland absurdist terms (Catch-22, 1961), arguingthat war is laced with insanity. ThomasPynchon presented an involuted, brilliant caseparodying and displacing different versions ofreality (Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973). Kurt Vonnegut,Jr., became one of the shining lights of the countercultureduring the early 1970s following publicationof Slaughterhouse-Five: or, The Children’sCrusade (1969), his antiwar novel about the firebombingof Dresden, Germany, by Allied forcesduring World War II (which Vonnegut witnessedon the ground as a prisoner of war).The 1940s saw the flourishing of a new contingentof writers, including poet-novelist-essayistRobert Penn Warren, dramatists Arthur Miller,Lillian Hellman, and Tennessee Williams, andshort story writers Katherine Anne Porter andEudora Welty. All but Miller were from the South.All explored the fate of the individual within thefamily or community and focused on the balancebetween personal growth and responsibility tothe group.97