From Native Son to King's Men: The Literary Landscape of 1940s America (Contemporary American Literature) - Hardcover

McParland, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1538105535 ISBN 13: 9781538105535

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2017

Synopsis

In FromNative Son to King’s Men: The Literary Landscape of 1940s America, Robert McParland examines notable works published throughout the decade. Among the authors covered are James Baldwin, Pearl S. Buck, James Gould Cozzens, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Hersey, Norman Mailer, Ann Petry, Irwin Shaw, John Steinbeck, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright. McParland explores how popular novels, literary fiction, and even short stories by these authors represented this pivotal period in American culture.

From Native Son to King’s Men will appeal to anyone interested in the cultural climate of the 1940s and how this period was depicted in American literature.

About this title

About the Author

Robert McParland is professor of English and chair of the Department of English at Felician College. His books include Charles Dickens’s American Audience (Lexington, 2010); Beyond Gatsby: How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American Culture (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015); and Citizen Steinbeck: Giving Voice to the People (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).

Review

McParland skillfully analyzes a wide range of American writers and their works and how they collectively displayed ‘the dreams, hopes, anxieties, and cultural imagination’ of the 1940s. Combining biography and criticism, McParland shows how American literature written between the Great Depression and the Cold War depicted a general age of ‘transition, recovery, and expectation’ but also addressed issues such as ‘war, the problem with racism, the struggles and dreams of daily life in a changing world.’ The heart of the book is five chapters covering authors and novels by theme: accounts of war by writers including Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck; a look at ‘home’ in the South by William Faulkner and Carson McCullers; depictions of American racial strife by Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, and Richard Wright; novels of WWII by Normal Mailer and John Hersey; and studies of developing domestic issues by a new cadre of postwar writers such as Saul Bellow and John O’Hara. He also examines such books as Richard Wright’s Native Son (‘We still have Bigger Thomas among us... [he] could not easily embrace the American dream’). McParland delivers an insightful look at writers who help shape a decade. (Publishers Weekly)

About this edition

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1538105535
• ISBN 13: 9781538105535
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256