“The Indian boom” in American culture ceased by the 1970s, when the process of “rooting in”, realized as an urgent need for the moral recovery of the nation, found an additional channel – Native American fiction – and the so-called Indian Renaissance began.
In the 1960s – the years of the highest flowering of postmodernism – the general spirit of experiment has captured a number of writers-realists, which affected in two ways: some authors created one or two clearly experimental novels and, as if paying tribute to their temporary passion, returned to the old path. The most striking example is the work of John Updike, who suddenly wrote a technically complex text that used modernist techniques – the novel Centaur (1963).
Later Updike, as the creator of the famous epic about the “average American” Rabbit Engstrom and numerous other moral and descriptive novels until the 80s, confirmed his reputation as a brilliant writer-realist. It was only in his “New England” books (“Let’s get married,” 1976; “The Witches of Eastwick,” 1984; a collection of short stories, “Trust Me”, 1986, and later works) clearly demonstrated a new quality of realism.
A second manifestation of the writers’ propensity for experimentation was the formation within realism of a new line, the so-called literature of fact, an organic fusion of document and fiction prose. Literature of fact became an additional channel into which the work of such realist writers as N. Mailer (“The Army of the Night”; “Miami, or the Siege of Chicago”, 1968), T. Capote (“In Cold Blood”, 1965) rushed. The “new journalism” (Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion, and others) was the ultimate expression of the American literary impulse for reportage and fact. It reached a particular heyday in the 1970s, developing in parallel with the literature of fact.
A great contribution to the development of fact literature was made by African-American writers: James Baldwin (“Nobody Knows My Name”, “Next Time – Fire”), Alex Haley (“Autobiography of Malcolm X”) and many others. J. Baldwin (1924-1987) was one of the few African American authors to call for nonviolence even during the “Negro Revolution. Both in his journalism and in his fiction prose (The Other Country, 1962; Tell Me When the Train Gone, 1968; If Beale Street Could Talk, 1974) he denounced separatism: “We, blacks and whites, need each other deeply if we are to become a real country. Baldwin was one of the few African Americans who, as early as the 1960s, was able to find a gap in the walls of a kind of “ghetto” black prose and step out into the eternal collisions of human existence.
One of the most extreme and aggressive black activists in the arts was the poet and playwright Leroy Jones, who in the 1960s adopted Islam and the new Muslim name Imamu Amiri Baraka and turned his later work into an instrument of political separatist activity. More promising, however, was a quieter and more moderate movement in African-American literature of the 1960s – the “new wave” (in the terms of our critics), or “new black literature” (in the definition of U.S. critics). They were Ernest Gaines, John Williams, Lorraine Hansberry, and others. They raised questions of historical black self-determination in America, touched on their African roots, and explored life in the Negro ghettos. Aesthetically, the “new black literature” drew heavily on the experience of the Harlem Renaissance. It spoke for those who could not speak for themselves, but not just for them, but for all who would listen.
By the 1970s, the ghetto walls of African American literature had opened up, and it turned out that the work of black authors could be very different. It could include postmodern experiments (Yellow-Black Radio Broken (1969), Mambo Jumbo (1972), Escape to Canada (1976) by Ishmael Reed) and the entirely traditional “big American novel” in form (Roots: The American Family Saga (1976) by Alex Haley). It was in the ’70s that a whole cohort of gifted black women writers entered literature: Gail Jones, Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelov, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. The latter two became central figures not only of African literature, but of late-century American literature as a whole.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, U.S. literature entered a changed, diverse and multicolored world, filled with a sense of its own scale and its unconditional significance in the global artistic process.
