/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.23294816]

Who here has read any of the midcentury "popular" American writers? I mean from the period after Hemingway but before the 1990s, the guys who were kind of a household name at the time. Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, John Updike, Philip Roth, guys like that. They were about as famous as a writer can get in their heyday, but these days I can't think of anyone who actually reads them. Cormac McCarthy came from that period too but it seems like he wound up outshining all of them.

[Anonymous No.23294829]

>>23294816
I read Roth, Bellow, Matthiessen, Yates, Mailer and James Jones.

[Anonymous No.23294837]

>>23294829
Did you like them?

[Anonymous No.23294952]

>>23294816
I reckon these guys are just as popular among Americans who read literary fiction, particularly Vidal and Updike. I know millennials who've read a great deal of all four, and I've been in Uni classes that taught Mailer using "The White Negro" as a point of departure. (McCarthy's first novel appeared nearly 20 years after Vidal's and Mailer's firsts - a closer cohort/peer for him would be Pynchon.)

There's certainly been a decline in their fame, but I imagine it is relative to the decline of literary fame per se. I myself could not name most of the people currently winning Pulitzers and MacArthur Fellowships.

I have read each of these writers excluding Roth. It helped that the generation immediately succeeding this group - I am thinking of authors like Martin Amis - always praised and referred to them. They were the first American writers who mastered TV as well, so clips like these tend to periodically pop up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb1w_qoioOk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQdApeYOv-A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsYk316Q23o

[Anonymous No.23294974]

>Gore Vidal
Fed.
>Norman Mailer
Fed.
>John Updike
Fed.
>Philip Roth
Fed.

>Cormac McCarthy
Not a Fed.

[Anonymous No.23295007]

>>23294837
Mixed for all of them
Mailer I liked Ancient Evenings but thought The Naked and the Dead was a slog
Bellow: I enjoyed The Adventures of Augie March but thought Seize the Day was meh.
James Jones: I enjoyed From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line but I thought Go to the Widow Maker was embarrassingly bad.
Roth: I thought The Ghost Writer was brilliant. I thought Sabbath’s Theater was brilliant but made my skin crawl at times. I thought Operation Shylock was entertaining. Portnoy’s Complaint started out funny but after a while I got tired of his schtick and just wanted it to end.
Yates I loved Revolutionary Road, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, and The Easter Parade. A Good School was well written but unpleasant.
Matthiessen: The Snow Leopard is one of my favorite books. I also really enjoyed Shadow Country and Far Tortuga. Wildlife in America was good but depressing. He wrote a book about Antarctica towards the end of his life that was really disappointing. He spent a lot of it ranting about eco-tourists while essentially on an eco-tourist expedition.
So mixed bag on all of them which I could say of Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald as well.

[Anonymous No.23295024]

>>23294816
They've been due for a review, right about now. I think >>23295007 has a decent assement, especially about their predecessors. Eventually we're going to have to read the whole of the 70s because I think the better works are in the back catalogs or with contemporaries to who were popular.

Stylists don't get any immediate recognition so I expect Updike to be the first for review with his less accessible works.

[Anonymous No.23296742]

>>23294816
I've read Saul Bellow. After two questionable attempts he freed himself from the constraints of the traditional novel. The prblem is that this freedom came with a price. His novels are in constant danger of being dissolved in chatter. Maybe he allowed himself a little too much freedom.

[Anonymous No.23298052]

>>23294816
>>23294816
>>23294816
I've read most of them, and consider the 50's one of the high points of American literature. The only thing comparable is the earlier generation, because of Faulkner, Hemingway, Dos Passos and Wolfe. But seriously, who writing today is on a par with Updike or Bellow? Even the writers of the 60's, Vonnegut, Pynchon and Barth, had their roots and took their cues from the Fifties writers.
And let's not forget the sub-canonical writers, either, figures like Philip K. Dick or Ayn Rand, who /lit/ snobs will befoul, but who very likely will still be read a century; or some of the enduring titles, like Catcher In The Rye, On The Road, Lolita, Catch 22, Fahrenheit 451.
Going farther afield, there were the Soviet writers of the Thaw, or the French New Novelists.
The Fifties are way overdue for a reconsideration.Till then, Required Reading:
Updike: the Rabbit novels
Bellow: Mr. Sammler's Planet
Roth: the Zuckerman novels
Vidal: Lincoln, Burr
Mailer: Advertisements for Myself, An American Dream
Vance Bourjaily: Confessions of a Spent Youth, Now Playing at Canterbury
Gaddis: The Recognitions

[Anonymous No.23298086]

>>23294816
The great thing about writers from the Fifties, and the important thing, is that by and large they weren't interested in experimentation. Dos Passos and Faulkner before, and Barthelme and Burroughs after, were trying to break the rules and see what would happen. Good stuff, sometimes, but at other times just garbled wankery, leaving a tradition in whose footsteps plod the 20,000-footnote non-novels of DFW.
Vidal, Bellow, Mailer, on the other hand, wanted to write straight classic novels along the lines of Thomas Mann or Anna Karenina. A high bar. But Herzog or From Here to Eternity speak for themselves.

[Anonymous No.23298137]

They are all mostly still in print and selling, especially Updike, Bellow and Roth. Seize the Day the best single novel by them I'd say. Roth has the best overall body of work. Updike better in short stories.
Cormac, like Pynch, appeals to the kind of online litbro common in spaces like this so a bit of selection bias is going on viz a viz their actual popularity in the world at large - by the same token, staying with that generation, Joyce Carol Oates and Joan Didion are much more popular than /lit/ or r/truelit would lead you to believe.

[Anonymous No.23298376]

>>23298137
>Joyce Carol Oates and Joan Didion
They're the other side of the same coin and do have some traction on here. It's hard to judge with how far /lit/ has fallen from talking about literature, but they come up when appropriate. More the essays, but that's also to be expected here.

[Anonymous No.23299238]

Gore and Updike (and I guess Nabokov though he doesn't really count) are the only American writers I still have any interest in.

Roth is occasionally brilliant but mostly dull.
Mailer has written two good books in an ocean of mediocrity.
Bellow is quite fun but his street wise gangsters get too tiresome after a while
Morrison is just too simple to care about
And Cheever is just a few short stories in an ocean of crap

Oddly enough for all the noise thunder American literature was kind of a dud.