In 1959, after touring the United States for two years, Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank published The
Americans, one of the landmarks of documentary photography. His photographs
of everyday life in America introduced viewers to a depressing, and often
depressed, America that existed in the midst of prosperity and world power.
Photographers continued to
search for new photographic viewpoints. This search was perhaps most
disturbingly embodied in the work of Diane Arbus. Her photos of mental patients
and her surreal depictions of Americans altered the viewer’s relationship to
the photograph. Arbus emphasized artistic alienation and forced viewers to
stare at images that often made them uncomfortable, thus changing the meaning
of the ordinary reality that photographs are meant to capture.
American photography continues
to flourish. The many variants of art photography and socially conscious
documentary photography are widely available in galleries, books, and
magazines.
A host of other visual arts
thrive, although they are far less connected to traditional fine arts than
photography. Decorative arts include, but are not limited to, art glass,
furniture, jewelry, pottery, metalwork, and quilts. Often exhibited in craft
galleries and studios, these decorative arts rely on ideals of beauty in shape
and color as well as an appreciation of well-executed crafts. Some of these
forms are also developed commercially. The decorative arts provide a wide range
of opportunity for creative expression and have become a means for Americans to
actively participate in art and to purchase art for their homes that is more
affordable than works produced by many contemporary fine artists.
Literature
American literature since World
War II is much more diverse in its voices than ever before. It has also
expanded its view of the past as people rediscovered important sources from
non-European traditions, such as Native American folktales and slave
narratives. Rediscovering these traditions expanded the range of American
literary history.
American Jewish writing from
the 1940s to the 1960s was the first serious outpouring of an American
literature that contained many voices. Some Jewish writers had begun to be
heard as literary critics and novelists before World War II, part of a general
broadening of American literature during the first half of the 20th century.
After the war, talented Jewish writers appeared in such numbers and became so
influential that they stood out as a special phenomenon. They represented at
once a subgroup within literature and the new voice of American literature.
Several Jewish American
novelists, including Herman Wouk and Norman Mailer, wrote important books about
the war without any special ethnic resonance. But writers such as novelists
Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth, and storytellers Grace Paley and
Cynthia Ozick wrote most memorably from within the Jewish tradition. Using
their Jewish identity and history as background, these authors asked how moral
behavior was possible in modern America and how the individual could survive in
the contemporary world. Saul Bellow most conspicuously posed these questions,
framing them even before the war was over in his earliest novel, Dangling
Man (1944). He continued to ask them in various ways through a series of
novels paralleling the life cycle, including The Adventures of Augie March (1953),
Herzog (1964), and Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970). One novel in the
series earned a Pulitzer Prize (Humboldt's Gift, 1975). Bellow was
awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976. Like Bellow, Philip Roth and
Bernard Malamud struggled with identity and selfhood as well as with morality
and fate. However, Roth often resisted being categorized as a Jewish writer.
Playwright Arthur Miller rarely invoked his Jewish heritage, but his plays
contained similar existential themes.
Isaac Bashevis Singer was also
part of this postwar group of American Jewish writers. His novels conjure up
his lost roots and life in prewar Poland and the ghostly, religiously inspired
fantasies of Jewish existence in Eastern Europe before World War II. Written in
Yiddish and much less overtly American, Singer’s writings were always about his
own specific past and that of his people. Singer's re-creation of an earlier
world as well as his stories of adjusting to the United States won him a Nobel
Prize in literature in 1978.
Since at least the time of the
Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, American writers of African descent, such as
Richard Wright, sought to express the separate experiences of their people
while demanding to be recognized as fully American. The difficulty of that
pursuit was most completely and brilliantly realized in the haunting novel Invisible
Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison. African American writers since then have
contended with the same challenge of giving voice to their experiences as a
marginalized and often despised part of America.
Several African American
novelists in recent decades have struggled to represent the wounded manner in
which African Americans have participated in American life. In the 1950s and
1960s, James Baldwin discovered how much he was part of the United States after a period of self-imposed exile in Paris, and he wrote about his dark
and hurt world in vigorous and accusatory prose. The subject has also been at
the heart of an extraordinary rediscovery of the African American past in the
plays of Lorraine Hansberry and the fiction of Alice Walker, Charles Johnson,
and Toni Morrison. Probably more than any American writer before her, Morrison
has grappled with the legacy that slavery inflicted upon African Americans and
with what it means to live with a separate consciousness within American
culture. In 1993 Morrison became the first African American writer to be
awarded a Nobel Prize in literature.
Writers from other groups,
including Mexican Americans, Native Americans, Chinese Americans, Korean
Americans, and Filipino Americans, also grappled with their separate
experiences within American culture. Among them, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie
Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich have dealt with issues of poverty, life on
reservations, and mixed ancestry among Native Americans. Rudolfo Anaya and Sandra
Cisneros have dealt with the experiences of Mexican Americans, and Amy Tan and
Maxine Hong Kingston have explored Chinese American family life.
Even before World War II,
writers from the American South reflected on what it meant to have a separate
identity within American culture. The legacy of slavery, the Civil War, and
Reconstruction left the South with a sense of a lost civilization, embodied in
popular literature such as Gone With the Wind (1936) by Margaret
Mitchell, and with questions about how a Southern experience could frame a
literary legacy. Southern literature in the 20th century draws deeply on
distinct speech rhythms, undercurrents of sin, and painful reflections on evil
as part of a distinctly Southern tradition. William Faulkner most fully
expressed these issues in a series of brilliant and difficult novels set in a
fictional Mississippi county. These novels, most of them published in the
1930s, include The Sound and the Fury (1929), Light in August
(1932), and Absalom, Absalom (1936).For his contribution,
Faulkner received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1949. More recent Southern
writers, such as Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, James
Dickey, and playwright Tennessee Williams, have continued this tradition of
Southern literature.
In addition to expressing the
minority consciousness of Southern regionalism, Faulkner's novels also
reflected the artistic modernism of 20th-century literature, in which reality
gave way to frequent interruptions of fantasy and the writing is characterized
by streams of consciousness rather than by precise sequences in time. Other
American writers, such as Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and E. L.
Doctorow also experimented with different novel forms and tried to make their
writing styles reflect the peculiarities of consciousness in the chaos of the
modern world. Doctorow, for example, in his novel Ragtime juxtaposed
real historical events and people with those he made up. Pynchon questioned the
very existence of reality in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Gravity’s
Rainbow (1973).
Aside from Faulkner, perhaps
the greatest modernist novelist writing in the United States was йmigrй Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov
first wrote in his native Russian, and then in French, before settling in the
United States and writing in English. Nabokov saw no limits to the
possibilities of artistic imagination, and he believed the artist's ability to
manipulate language could be expressed through any subject. In a series of
novels written in the United States, Nabokov demonstrated that he could develop
any situation, even the most alien and forbidden, to that end. This was
demonstrated in Lolita (1955), a novel about sexual obsession that
caused a sensation and was first banned as obscene.
Despite its obvious achievements,
modernism in the United States had its most profound effect on other forms of
literature, especially in poetry and in a new kind of personal journalism that
gradually erased the sharp distinctions between news reporting, personal
reminiscence, and fiction writing.
20th-Century Poetry
Modern themes and styles of
poetry have been part of the American repertoire since the early part of the
20th century, especially in the work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Their works
were difficult, emotionally restrained, full of non-American allusions, and
often inaccessible. After World War II, new poetic voices developed that were
more exuberant and much more American in inspiration and language. The poets
who wrote after the war often drew upon the work of William Carlos Williams and
returned to the legacy of Walt Whitman, which was democratic in identification
and free-form in style. These poets provided postwar poetry with a uniquely
American voice.
The Beatnik, or Beat, poets of
the 1950s notoriously followed in Whitman’s tradition. They adopted a radical
ethic that included drugs, sex, art, and the freedom of the road. Jack Kerouac
captured this vision in On the Road (1957), a quintessential book about
Kerouac’s adventures wandering across the United States. The most significant
poet in the group was Allen Ginsberg, whose sexually explicit poem Howl
(1956) became the subject of a court battle after it was initially banned as
obscene. The Beat poets spanned the country, but adopted San Francisco as their
special outpost. The city continued to serve as an important arena for poetry
and unconventional ideas, especially at the City Lights Bookstore co-owned by
writer and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Other modernist poets included
Gwendolyn Brooks, who retreated from the conventional forms of her early poetry
to write about anger and protest among African Americans, and Adrienne Rich,
who wrote poetry focused on women's rights, needs, and desires.
Because it is open to
expressive forms and innovative speech, modern poetry is able to convey the
deep personal anguish experienced by several of the most prominent poets of the
postwar period, among them Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Anne
Sexton, and John Berryman. Sometimes called confessional poets, they used
poetry to express nightmarish images of self-destruction. As in painting,
removing limits and conventions on form permitted an almost infinite capacity
for conveying mood, feeling, pain, and inspiration. This personal poetry also
brought American poetry closer to the European modernist tradition of emotional
anguish and madness. Robert Frost, probably the most famous and beloved of
modern American poets, wrote evocative and deeply felt poetry that conveyed
some of these same qualities within a conventional pattern of meter and rhyme.
Another tradition of modern
poetry moved toward playful engagement with language and the creative process.
This tradition was most completely embodied in the brilliant poetry of Wallace
Stevens, whose work dealt with the role of creative imagination. This tradition
was later developed in the seemingly simple and prosaic poetry of John Ashbery,
who created unconventional works that were sometimes records of their own
creation. Thus, poetry after World War II, like the visual arts, expanded the
possibilities of emotional expression and reflected an emphasis on the creative
process. The idea of exploration and pleasure through unexpected associations
and new ways of viewing reality connected poetry to the modernism of the visual
arts.
Journalism
Modernist sensibilities were
also evident in the emergence of a new form of journalism. Journalism
traditionally tried to be factual and objective in presentation. By the
mid-1970s, however, some of America's most creative writers were using
contemporary events to create a new form of personal reporting. This new
approach stretched the boundaries of journalism and brought it closer to
fiction because the writers were deeply engaged and sometimes personally
involved in events. Writers such as Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and Joan
Didion created a literary journalism that infused real events with their own
passion. In Armies of the Night (1968), the record of his involvement in
the peace movement, Mailer helped to define this new kind of writing. Capote's In
Cold Blood (1966), the retelling of the senseless killing of a Kansas family, and Mailer’s story of a murderer's fate in The Executioner's Song (1979)
brought this hyperrealism to chilling consummation. No less vivid were Didion's
series of essays on California culture in the late 1960s and her reporting of
the sensational trial of football star O. J. Simpson in 1995.
Performing Arts
As in other cultural spheres,
the performing arts in the United States in the 20th century increasingly
blended traditional and popular art forms. The classical performing arts—music,
opera, dance, and theater—were not a widespread feature of American culture in
the first half of the 20th century. These arts were generally imported from or
strongly influenced by Europe and were mainly appreciated by the wealthy and
well educated. Traditional art usually referred to classical forms in ballet
and opera, orchestral or chamber music, and serious drama. The distinctions
between traditional music and popular music were firmly drawn in most areas.
During the 20th century, the
American performing arts began to incorporate wider groups of people. The
African American community produced great musicians who became widely known
around the country. Jazz and blues singers such as Bessie Smith, Louis
Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday spread their sounds to black and
white audiences. In the 1930s and 1940s, the swing music of Benny Goodman,
Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller adapted jazz to make a unique American music
that was popular around the country. The American performing arts also blended
Latin American influences beginning in the 20th century. Between 1900 and 1940,
Latin American dances, such as the tango from Argentina and the rumba from Cuba, were introduced into the United States. In the 1940s a fusion of Latin and jazz
elements was stimulated first by the Afro-Cuban mambo and later on by the
Brazilian bossa nova.
Throughout the 20th century,
dynamic classical institutions in the United States attracted international
talent. Noted Russian-born choreographer George Balanchine established the
short-lived American Ballet Company in the 1930s; later he founded the company
that in the 1940s would become the New York City Ballet. The American Ballet
Theatre, also established during the 1940s, brought in non-American dancers as
well. By the 1970s this company had attracted Soviet defector Mikhail
Baryshnikov, an internationally acclaimed dancer who served as the company’s
artistic director during the 1980s.
In classical music, influential
Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, who composed symphonies using innovative
musical styles, moved to the United States in 1939. German-born pianist,
composer, and conductor Andrй Previn, who started out as a
jazz pianist in the 1940s, went on to conduct a number of distinguished
American symphony orchestras. Another Soviet, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich,
became conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., in 1977.
Some of the most innovative
artists in the first half of the 20th century successfully incorporated new
forms into classical traditions. Composers George Gershwin and Aaron Copland,
and dancer Isadora Duncan were notable examples. Gershwin combined jazz and
spiritual music with classical in popular works such as Rhapsody in Blue
(1924) and the opera Porgy and Bess (1935). Copland developed a unique
style that was influenced by jazz and American folk music. Early in the
century, Duncan redefined dance along more expressive and free-form lines.
Some artists in music and
dance, such as composer John Cage and dancer and choreographer Merce
Cunningham, were even more experimental. During the 1930s Cage worked with
electronically produced sounds and sounds made with everyday objects such as
pots and pans. He even invented a new kind of piano. During the late 1930s,
avant-garde choreographer Cunningham began to collaborate with Cage on a number
of projects.
Perhaps the greatest, and
certainly the most popular, American innovation was the Broadway musical, which
also became a movie staple. Beginning in the 1920s, the Broadway musical
combined music, dance, and dramatic performance in ways that surpassed the
older vaudeville shows and musical revues but without being as complex as
European grand opera. By the 1960s, this American musical tradition was well
established and had produced extraordinary works by important musicians and
lyricists such as George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard
Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern, and Oscar Hammerstein II. These productions
required an immense effort to coordinate music, drama, and dance. Because of
this, the musical became the incubator of an American modern dance tradition
that produced some of America's greatest choreographers, among them Jerome
Robbins, Gene Kelly, and Bob Fosse.
In the 1940s and 1950s the
American musical tradition was so dynamic that it attracted outstanding
classically trained musicians such as Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein composed the
music for West Side Story, an updated version of Romeo and Juliet
set in New York that became an instant classic in 1957. The following year,
Bernstein became the first American-born conductor to lead a major American
orchestra, the New York Philharmonic. He was an international sensation who
traveled the world as an ambassador of the American style of conducting. He
brought the art of classical music to the public, especially through his
"Young People's Concerts," television shows that were seen around the
world. Bernstein used the many facets of the musical tradition as a force for
change in the music world and as a way of bringing attention to American
innovation.
In many ways, Bernstein
embodied a transformation of American music that began in the 1960s. The
changes that took place during the 1960s and 1970s resulted from a significant
increase in funding for the arts and their increased availability to larger
audiences. New York City, the American center for art performances, experienced
an artistic explosion in the 1960s and 1970s. Experimental off-Broadway
theaters opened, new ballet companies were established that often emphasized
modern forms or blended modern with classical (Martha Graham was an especially
important influence), and an experimental music scene developed that included
composers such as Philip Glass and performance groups such as the Guarneri
String Quartet. Dramatic innovation also continued to expand with the works of
playwrights such as Edward Albee, Tony Kushner, and David Mamet.
As the variety of performances
expanded, so did the serious crossover between traditional and popular music
forms. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, an expanded repertoire of traditional
arts was being conveyed to new audiences. Popular music and jazz could be heard
in formal settings such as Carnegie Hall, which had once been restricted to
classical music, while the Brooklyn Academy of Music became a venue for
experimental music, exotic and ethnic dance presentations, and traditional
productions of grand opera. Innovative producer Joseph Papp had been staging
Shakespeare in Central Park since the 1950s. Boston conductor Arthur Fiedler
was playing a mixed repertoire of classical and popular favorites to large
audiences, often outdoors, with the Boston Pops Orchestra. By the mid-1970s the
United States had several world-class symphony orchestras, including those in
Chicago; New York; Cleveland, Ohio; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Even
grand opera was affected. Once a specialized taste that often required
extensive knowledge, opera in the United States increased in popularity as the
roster of respected institutions grew to include companies in Seattle, Washington; Houston, Texas; and Santa Fe, New Mexico. American composers such as John
Adams and Philip Glass began composing modern operas in a new minimalist style
during the 1970s and 1980s.