60s – Prose

The alienation and stress underlying the 1950s found outward expression in the 1960s in the USA in the civil rights movement, feminism, antiwar protests, minority activism, and the arrival of a counterculture whose effects are still being worked through American society. Notable political and social works of the era include the speeches of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the early writings of feminist leader Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique), and Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night (1968), about a 1967 antiwar march.

The 1960s were marked by a blurring of the line between fiction and fact, novels and reportage that has carried through the present day. Novelist Truman Capote (1924-1984), who had dazzled readers as an enfant terrible of the late 1940s and 1950s in such works as Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958), stunned audiences with In Cold Blood (1965), a riveting analysis of a brutal mass murder in the American heartland that read like a work of detective fiction.

At the same time, the New Journalism emerged - volumes of nonfiction that combined journalism with techniques of fiction, or that frequently played with the facts, reshaping them to add to the drama and immediacy of the story being reported. In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), Tom Wolfe (1931- ) celebrated the counterculture wanderlust of novelist Ken Kesey (1935-2001); Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970) ridiculed many aspects of left-wing activism.

As the 1960s evolved, literature flowed with the turbulence of the era. An ironic, comic vision also came into view, reflected in the fabulism of several writers. Examples include Ken Kesey's darkly comic One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), a novel about life in a mental hospital in which the wardens are more disturbed than the inmates, and the whimsical, fantastic Trout Fishing in America (1967) by Richard Brautigan (1935-1984).

Irony and so-called black humor were the weapons of authors like Roth, Joseph Heller, and Jules Feiffer. Some other writers, notably Donald Barthelme (in his collection of grotesque short stories Come Back, Dr. Caligari), John Barth (with his Giles Goat-Boy), Thomas Pynchon (in his paranoid, brilliant V and The Crying of Lot 49), and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Slaughterhouse Five), expressed their view of the world as unreal, as mad, by writing fantasies that were by turns charming, obscure, exciting, profound, and terrifying. Many of these writers have been called postmodern, but the term encompasses a number of characteristics, including multiculturalism, self-reflection, and attention to new means of communication.

This new mode came to be called metafiction - self-conscious or reflexive fiction that calls attention to its own technique. Such "fiction about fiction" emphasizes language and style, and departs from the conventions of realism such as rounded characters, a believable plot enabling a character's development, and appropriate settings. In metafiction, the writer's style attracts the reader's attention. The true subject is not the characters, but rather the writer's own consciousness.

Critics of the time commonly grouped Pynchon, Barth, and Barthelme as metafictionists, along with William Gaddis (1922-1998), whose long novel JR (l975), about a young boy who builds up a phony business empire from junk bonds, eerily forecasts Wall Street excesses to come. Gaddis is often linked with Midwestern philosopher/novelist William Gass (1924- ), best known for his early, thoughtful novel Omensetter's Luck (1966), and for stories collected in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968).

Robert Coover (1932- ) is another metafiction writer. His collection of stories Pricksongs & Descants (1969) plays with plots familiar from folktales and popular culture, while his novel The Public Burning (1977) deconstructs the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of espionage.