Summary
The more American fiction remains the same, the more it changes. (The reverse is of course equally true.) From the birth of our republic through years of world wars, independent and hardy souls as dissimilar as Cooper's Natty Bumppo, Hawthorne's Hester Prynne, Cather's Antonia Shimerda and Hemingway's Robert Jordan have presented iconic images of courage and survival.
But global conflict brought clearer apprehensions of fragmentation and peril, and postwar generations wrote accordingly - in Kurt Vonnegut's wry deconstructions of equilibrium and heroism, Thomas Pynchon's flamboyant dramatizations of paranoia and dehumanization and Ralph Ellison's reimagining of second-class citizenship as literal invisibility.See the full content of this document
Extract
The Warming of the Cool
Still, there was more than a hint of Mark Twain's avuncular charm in Vonnegut's pessimism. And even the devilish Pynchon has shown alarming signs of mellowing, in the family-inflected tragicomedy of "Against the Day," perhaps in the mellow nostalgia that tempers the mordant poetics of his current private eye cap...
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