Books and Beyond

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Books and Beyond
The Greenwood Encyclopedia
of New American Reading

VOLUME 1: A–D

Edited by
KENNETH WOMACK

GREENWOOD PRESS
Westport, Connecticut • London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Books and beyond : the Greenwood encyclopedia of new American reading / edited by Kenneth Womack.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-0-313-33738-3 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0-313-33737-6 (v. 1 : alk. paper) — ISBN:
978-0-313-33740-6 (v. 2 : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0-313-33741-3 (v. 3 : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0-
313-33742-0 (v. 4 : alk. paper)
1. Books and reading—United States—Encyclopedias. 2. Reading interests—United States—Encyclo-
pedias. 3. Popular literature—United States—Encyclopedias. 4. Fiction genres—Encyclopedias. 5.
American literature—History and criticism. 6. English literature—History and criticism. I. Womack,
Kenneth.
Z1003.2B64 2008
028’.9097303—dc22 2008018703

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.

Copyright © 2008 by Kenneth Womack

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be

reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008018703

ISBN: 978–0–313–33738–3 (set)
978–0–313–33737–6 (vol. 1)
978–0–313–33740–6 (vol. 2)
978–0–313–33741–3 (vol. 3)
978–0–313–33742–0 (vol. 4)

First published in 2008

Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881

An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www.greenwood.com

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the

Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents

Preface ix

Introduction: Reading in America Today xi

Entries
Academic Fiction 1
Adventure Fiction 13
African American Literature 26
Arab American Literature 40
Arthurian Literature 53
Asian American Literature 66
Autobiography and Memoir 87
Beat Poetry 97
Biography 112
Chick Lit 137
Children’s Literature 162
Christian Fiction 185
Comedic Theatre 195
Comic Books 209
Coming of Age Fiction (Bildungsroman) 222
Contemporary Mainstream American Fiction 249
Cyberpunk 274
Dramatic Theatre 289
Dystopian Fiction 312
Ecopoetry 325
Erotic Literature 338
vi CONTENTS

Fantasy Literature 351

Film Adaptations of Books 366
Flash Fiction 385
GLBTQ Literature 401
Graphic Novels 416
Historical Fantasy 427
Historical Fiction 440
Historical Mysteries 455
Historical Writing (Nonfiction) 468
Holocaust Literature 483
Humor 498
Inspirational Literature (Nonfiction) 511
Jewish American Literature 521
Language Poetry 537
Latino American Literature 552
Legal Thrillers 561
Literary Journalism 571
Magical Realism 587
Manga and Anime 600
Military Literature 612
Musical Theatre 625
Mystery Fiction 638
Native American Literature 663
New Age Literature 682
Occult/Supernatural Literature 699
Parapsychology 717
Philological Thrillers 732
Poetry 740
Regional Fiction 767
Road Fiction 782
Romance Novels 796
Science Fiction 805
Science Writing (Nonfiction) 833
Sea Literature 848
Self-Help Literature 862
Series Fiction 880
Space Opera 894
Speculative Fiction 917
Sports Literature 930
Spy Fiction 954
Suspense Fiction 962
Sword and Sorcery Fiction 971
 CONTENTS vii

Terrorism Fiction 995

Time Travel Fiction 1012
Transrealist Fiction 1025
Travel Writing 1034
True Crime Literature 1047
Urban Fiction 1065
Utopian Literature 1078
Vampire Fiction 1091
Verse Novels 1119
Western Literature 1131
Young Adult Literature 1147
Zines 1163

Contemporary Authors by Genre 1177

Suggestions for Further Reading 1191

About the Editor and Contributors 1195

Index 1205
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Preface

Books and Beyond: The Greenwood Encyclopedia of New American Reading offers
a multivolume reference work expressly designed to address the shape and nature of
contemporary American literature in all of its postwar, print, and post-print cultural
manifestations.
Books and Beyond is written to serve the educated general reader, as well as a
broad array of high school, college, and university students. The encyclopedia is
arranged alphabetically, with more than 70 chapters, or entries, devoted to a wide
range of literary areas.
Individual chapters in the encyclopedia provide readers with broad overviews of
the topic area, with specific attention and detail afforded to works associated with
contemporary popular American literature and culture. Although the chapters often
give a historical overview of the genre’s development, these entries devote special
attention to works published from 1980 to the present.
In addition to establishing a definition of the literary area with attention to its
relation to other literary forms, each chapter also offers discussion of major trends
and themes, as well as the principal contexts and issues associated with the area.
Additional attention is usually given to the genre’s reception, including, when pos-
sible, criticism, film adaptations, and the relation of the area of literary interest to
popular culture in a broader sense.
Each entry provides readers with a discussion of the major authors active in each
area, as well as brief analyses of many authors’ major works. Helpful cross-
references are provided through bolded words in the text, and chapters conclude
with bibliographies comprising print and electronic sources related to each rubric;
in many cases, a secondary bibliography with suggested works for further reading
is provided. At the end of the book, a number of useful features will help users find
more about authors and reading in America, with a list of authors active (or
recently active) in the field today, arranged by genres, and a list of “Suggestions for
Further Reading,” which provides material, including Web sites, for more general
x PREFACE

information about genres and reading. The encyclopedia is fully indexed to afford
readers greater ease of use and flexibility.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editor would like to thank Anne Thompson and George Butler of Greenwood
Press for their advice, patience, and steadfast encouragement and professionalism.
Special debts of thanks are owed to Amy Mallory-Kani and Susan Yates for their
superlative editorial efforts on behalf of the encyclopedia, as well as to Jacki
Mowery, Judy Paul, and Aaron Heresco for their good-natured assistance and
unflagging generosity of spirit. I am especially grateful to Jeanine Womack for her
unerring love and support throughout this project.
Introduction:
Reading in America Today

On any given day, the vast majority of American consumers share in the common
language of a popular culture. Whether it be via the latest fast-food craze, video
games, hip-hop music, reality-based television, Barbie, and action films, we possess
a ready, easily discernible, and shared form of cultural discourse that allows us to
converse with one another in an instant. Although the social power of our popular
culture clearly has generational boundaries, it often succeeds in transcending the
margins of space and time through a perhaps even more powerful and affecting
sense of shared nostalgia. Anyone who thinks wistfully of the days of malt shops,
big-finned cars, and Marilyn Monroe understands this notion implicitly.
In academic circles, cultural critics have only recently begun to comprehend the
significant role of popular culture in our lives and in our systems of social organi-
zation, as well as in the evolution of our reading practices. During the early 1950s,
for example, we were content simply to understand popular culture as a “low” form
of art in contrast with its more austere and presumably more important counterpart,
the “high” culture of classical music, ballet, literature, and fine French cuisine. But,
of course, that was before the explosion of television, and perhaps even more
notably, the advent of cable television and the Internet. Now we commune with one
another in a remarkably different fashion. Where once we gathered together on
front porches and at summer picnics and spring festivals, we now assemble, many
of us, in front of the glowing screens that transport us to Deal or No Deal, eBay,
and the latest Sony PlayStation. Add to that our vast consumption of communica-
tion technologies such as text-messaging, instant-messaging, and e-mail, and the
convoluted nature of our language usages and reading experiences becomes even
more murky and complex.
The tone of my commentary thus far might suggest the beginnings of a critique of
technology and its impact upon our culture—social, economic, reading, or other-
wise. This, I shall reassure you, is not that kind of introduction. Technology is
xii INTRODUCTION

merely the means of contemporary popular culture’s massive, and nearly instanta-
neous, dissemination. Perhaps a more interesting and revealing question involves
what happens when one nation’s popular culture—the popular culture of the United
States, for example—is transmitted around the world, erasing and homogenizing
the particularities of other cultures across the globe. Although there is little doubt
that we import various aspects of other popular cultures into our own—sushi, the
River dancing phenomenon, and Harry Potter immediately come to mind—the
exportation of Americana exists on profound levels that few of us ever genuinely
consider.
By any measure, we live in an age of rampant textual instability, and our con-
sumption of popular culture has become inextricably bound with our reading
appetites and experiences. There is widespread belief—and ample statistical and
anecdotal evidence in support of this notion—that the act of reading itself is on the
wane. Yet in an era that demands highly competent reading skills in order to nego-
tiate nearly every avenue of our highly technology oriented contemporary lives,
excellence in reading could not be any more significant. As Dana Gioia, chairman
of the National Endowment for the Arts, notes in his prefatory remarks for To Read
or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence (2007): “Regular reading not
only boosts the likelihood of an individual’s academic and economic success—facts
that are not especially surprising—but it also seems to awaken a person’s social and
civic sense. Reading correlates with almost every measurement of positive personal
and social behavior surveyed. It is reassuring, though hardly amazing,” Gioia adds,
“that readers attend more concerts and theatre than non-readers, but it is surprising
that they exercise more and play more sports—no matter what their educational
level. The cold statistics confirm something that most readers know but have mostly
been reluctant to declare as fact—books change lives for the better” (6).

WHAT IS A “BOOK”?
But what constitutes a book in our age of rapid textual convolution? And what
accounts for “high” and “low” culture in an era in which everyone has access—
by virtue of technology and the Internet—to nearly every possible text, as well as
the means of producing text on an unheard of scale? The very notion of what
makes up a text is under reconsideration, and, as the chapters in this encyclope-
dia demonstrate—with their wide disparity of focuses and disparate textual
natures—this is a worthy issue indeed. In truth, we are only just beginning to for-
mulate a critical vocabulary for describing—much less comprehending—the
increasingly fluid nature of textuality. How, indeed, do we even begin to understand
our cultural artifacts, their popularization, and their reception into the cultural and
critical main—especially in a rapidly shifting marketplace in which text, more often
than not, does not find its materiality in the pages of a book? As cultural studies
continues to challenge our conceptions of the borders of literary and textual stud-
ies, issues regarding the nature of what constitutes a text have become increasingly
significant in our post-print culture. In addition to involving such controversial sub-
jects as the interrelationships between high and low culture and the component dif-
ferences between material and nonmaterial texts, the chapters in this encyclopedia
explore the manner in which we receive and interpret a wide variety of texts—from
works of popular serial fiction and the transhistorical literary imagination to film
adaptation and popular music.
 INTRODUCTION xiii

As an encyclopedia of contemporary literatures and reading practices in all of their

attendant forms, Books and Beyond merges conventional forms of text with uncon-
ventional ones in a myriad of innovative ways. Attention is devoted to a number of
well-honed literary areas, including Adventure Fiction; Children’s Literature;
Contemporary Fiction; Fantasy Literature; Historical Fiction; Humor; Mystery
Novels; Poetry; Romance Fiction; Science Fiction; Spy Fiction; Suspense Novels;
Travel Writing; and Western Literature. At the same time, a wide variety of ethnici-
ties and cultures is represented, including Arab American Literature and Native
American Literature, to name but a few. Contemporary reading trends are also
explored, as evinced by wide-ranging chapters devoted to such areas as Autobiogra-
phy and Memoir; Biography; Chick Lit; Christian Fiction; Coming of Age Fiction;
Erotic Literature; Historical Nonfiction; Inspirational Literature; Legal Thrillers; Lit-
erary Journalism; Magical Realism; Military Literature; New Age Literature;
Occult/Supernatural Literature; Regional Fiction; Road Fiction; Science Nonfiction;
Sea Literature; Self-Help Literature; Series Fiction; Sports Literature; True Crime;
Urban Fiction; Utopian Fiction; Vampire Fiction; and Young Adult Literature. Yet in
order to demonstrate the breadth and scope of contemporary American literature,
attention to a vast range of transcultural and transhistorical forms is also necessary,
including chapters devoted to Arthurian Literature; Beat Poetry; Comic Books;
Cyberpunk; Dystopian Fiction; Ecopoetry; Film Adaptation; Flash Fiction; GLBTQ
Literature; Graphic Novels; Historical Mysteries; Language Poetry; Manga and
Anime; Speculative Fiction; Sword and Sorcery Fiction; Terrorism Fiction; Time
Travel Fiction; Transrealist Fiction; Verse Novels; and Zines.
But how do we account for the textuality of such a wide array of authorial (and,
in some cases, nonauthorial) forms, particularly in terms of the Byzantine nature of
their construction, production, and dissemination? Perhaps even more significant,
how do educators approach the act of teaching this important aspect of textual the-
ory to new generations of students for whom textuality has become an increasingly
diffuse and convoluted concept—a generation for whom textual stability is becom-
ing progressively more irrelevant? For many contemporary “readers,” the concept
of narrative-driven works of art, whether they be artifacts of high or low culture,
concerns the nature and rapidity of its systems of distribution, its value determined
almost entirely by the end-user’s capacity for negotiating its acquisition, its storage,
and the ease of its consumption. A century ago, the textuality of narrative, whether
fiction, nonfiction, or news, was delivered to users almost universally via the physi-
cal properties of the traditional book, magazine, and newspaper forms. Within a
scant few decades, books were joined by the radio airwaves as principal means of
textual distribution, to be followed, in short order, by movies and television. The
advent of computer technology transformed, in rapid and radical fashion, existing
forms of distribution while acting as the catalyst for new eras of textuality as wit-
nessed by the evolution of digital storage media that have irrevocably altered the
ways in which we consume not only books, but all manner of music and video in
the process.

WHAT IS TEXT?
This incredible shift in the production, distribution, and consumption of our cul-
tural artifacts—our popular textualities, if you will—necessitates an ongoing inter-
rogation of text and its multiplicities of variation. The ideology of text, in and of
xiv INTRODUCTION

itself, is deceptively simple. Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s working definition of text includes

“any coherent complex of signs” (1986, 103). For Roland Barthes, the text exists as
a locus of meaning, as a form of discourse rather than as a concrete object. “The
text is experienced only as an activity, a production,” he writes (1977, 157). Texts
ask readers to participate in the act of meaning-making, while books take up phys-
ical space on a shelf. In this way, readers actively participate in the processes asso-
ciated with textual production. Yet our post-print theories of textuality must be
increasingly enabled to account for the nonphysicality and nonmateriality of
digitally-inscribed texts. In Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and
Practice, Peter L. Shillingsburg defines text as “the actual order of words and punc-
tuation as contained in any one physical form, such as a manuscript, proof or
book.” Shillingsburg astutely recognizes that “text (the order of words and punctu-
ation) has no substantial or material existence, as it is not restricted by time and
space.” Indeed, even in terms of the traditional book format—with its spine, its
pages, and its inky print—“the text is contained and stabilized by the physical form
but is not the physical form itself” (1996, 46). Hence, textuality enjoys an intrinsi-
cally fluid quality, the nature of which can be manipulated by authors, editors, pub-
lishers, distributors, and the like with veritable ease, given the relative pliability of
electronic storage devices and digital redistribution.
These new ways of thinking about textuality—about the representation of text in
our post-print age—mandates a revisioning of our understanding of materiality.
Once defined almost exclusively by the brute physicality of the book, text has
emerged as an increasingly imaginative and unstable construct. As N. Katherine
Hayles shrewdly asks, “What are the consequences of admitting an idea of textual-
ity as instantiated rather than dematerialized, dispersed rather than unitary, proces-
sual rather than object-like, flickering rather than durably instantiated?” The
answer, Hayles points out, involves a revaluation of text, particularly in terms of
what we consider to be its material aspects. “The specter haunting textual criti-
cism,” Hayles writes, “is the nightmare that one cannot then define a ‘text’ at all,
for every manifestation will qualify as a different text. Pervasive with electronic
texts, the problem troubles notions of print texts as well, for as physical objects they
would also differ from one another. But this need not be a catastrophe if we refine
and revise our notion of materiality” (2003, 276).
The result of so much variation, as evinced throughout our postwar, post-print
culture, is an ongoing and increasingly complex sense of textual instability, particu-
larly as new forms of electronic storage and digital distribution replace earlier stor-
age and delivery methods with a vexing and dislocating rapidity. Philip Cohen
describes this concatenation of circumstances as a form of “textual instability” in
which “the essence of texts may be their ability to be re-ontologized and re-interpreted
endlessly as different textual versions and contexts are employed.” Textual instabil-
ity entails the manner in which “texts are not immune from the flow of history,”
Cohen writes, as well as the ways in which “they are composed, revised, expur-
gated, improved, defaced, restored, emended, and circulated as a matter of course”
(1997, xxii). As the chapters in this encyclopedia so clearly demonstrate, the analy-
sis of material and nonmaterial texts under these strictures offers prescient
reminders about the ways in which we need to approach popular works of litera-
ture in our rapidly shifting and expanding digital age. It is nearly impossible to
imagine a world in which the formerly conventional strictures of authorship and
textual hegemony, or domination, will be restored. As J. Hillis Miller points out, it
 INTRODUCTION xv

is always “beneficial to the health of our society to have an abundance of good read-
ers” (1998, 100). Robert Coles takes this notion a step further, writing that
“students need the chance to directly connect books to experience.” Literary texts,
Coles adds, allow educators to “address our humanity with subtlety—conveying the
willingness to do justice to our variousness and to the complexities, ironies, and
ambiguities that shape our lives” (1994, A64). Indeed, what teachers in society can
do is provide students with the analytical tools to become experts at getting to the
heart of the textual matter, at learning how to sift among the competing texts that
they encounter, and to begin establishing a sense of cultural unity and interpersonal
growth for themselves. With its wide-ranging emphasis upon the proliferation of
material and nonmaterial texts in our increasingly uncertain textual era, Books and
Beyond: The Greenwood Encyclopedia of New American Reading is one of the first
steps in this important direction.

Bibliography
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. “The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human
Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis.” In Speech Genres and Other Late
Essays. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press, 1986, 103–131.
Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
Cohen, Philip. “Textual Instability, Literary Studies, and Recent Developments in Textual
Scholarship.” In Texts and Textuality: Textual Instability, Theory, and Interpretation.
Philip Cohen, ed. New York: Garland, 1997, xi–xxxiv.
Coles, Robert. “Putting Head and Heart on the Line.” The Chronicle of Higher Education
41 (26 Oct. 1994): A64.
Goodrich, Diana Sorensen. The Reader and the Text: Interpretive Strategies for Latin American
Literatures. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1986.
Hayles, N. Katherine. “Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality.” Yale Journal
of Criticism 16.2 (2003): 263–290.
Miller, J. Hillis. “Is There an Ethics of Reading?” In Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology.
James Phelan, ed. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1988, 79–101.
National Endowment for the Arts. To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Conse-
quence. Research Report #47. Washington, DC, 2007.
Shillingsburg, Peter L. Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice. 3rd ed.
Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996.
Worthen, W. B. “Disciplines of the Text: Sites of Performance.” In The Performance Studies
Reader. Henry Bial, ed. London: Routledge, 2004, 10–24.
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A

ACADEMIC FICTION
Definition. The campus novel enjoys a long and distinguished history in the annals
of literary studies. A review of academic fiction’s emergence as a literary form, par-
ticularly during the nineteenth century, accounts for its archly satirical manifesta-
tions during the latter half of the twentieth century, the era in which academic satire
enjoyed its most fruitful period, with forays into a variety of creative spheres,
including fiction, poetry, drama, and film. The analysis of exemplary works by
Kingsley Amis, Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, A.S. Byatt, and Jane Smiley
demonstrates the nature of campus fiction’s abiding influence.
History. “As a literary genre,” Mortimer R. Proctor writes in The English Uni-
versity Novel, the academic novel “has always reflected conditions within Oxford
and Cambridge far more closely than it has followed any literary trends or move-
ments” (1957, 185). The universal conception of Oxford and Cambridge as unique
intellectual societies—in short, the fictive terrain of “Oxbridge”—inspired centuries
of fictions devoted to university life, from Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxford through the
romanticized academic novels of the early nineteenth century. While these narratives
poked occasional fun at the ineffectuality of university faculty or the unreality of
college life, their plots generally involved sentimental, often melodramatic, portray-
als of Oxford and Cambridge. The genre of English university fiction finds its more
satiric origins, however, in the various educational reform movements of the mid-
nineteenth century, as well as in the admission of women to the sacred groves of
Oxford and Cambridge in the latter half of the nineteenth century. During this era,
Oxford and Cambridge witnessed a decline in the hegemony of their influence upon
English society and culture. Their fictional portrayals, once predicated upon more
lofty elements of esteem and erudition, now languished in narratives about
“university lecturers who did not lecture, and undergraduates who freely enjoyed all
the pleasures of depravity” (Proctor, 11).
The acts of reform experienced by Oxford and Cambridge found their roots in
the 1850s, when a series of reports commissioned by the English government
2 ACADEMIC FICTION

revealed a set of institutions that operated on an outmoded classical curriculum and

blatantly catered to the needs of the socially privileged. In “From Narragonia to
Elysium: Some Preliminary Reflections on the Fictional Image of the Academic,”
Richard Sheppard notes that for universities this era in English history also marks
the shift from their function as clerical institutions devoted to producing educated
priests to their emergence as the precursors of our modern research institutions
(Bevan 1990, 11). While a set of statutes during the 1870s virtually redesigned the
governance of both institutions, reform acts in 1854 and 1856 abolished religious
tests at Oxford and Cambridge, respectively, thus providing access to the universi-
ties for students outside of the Church of England (Proctor 1957, 56–57). This
movement against exclusion ultimately resulted in the momentous events of 1879,
when Somerville College first opened its doors to female students at Oxford. As
Janice Rossen observes in The University in Modern Fiction: When Power Is Acad-
emic (1993), the exclusion of women from the university community continues to
resonate within the pages of academic fiction. “There has been nothing else like the
wholesale resistance to the admission of a particular, coherent group to the Univer-
sity in Britain, and this is part and parcel of the subject,” Rossen writes. “The two
facts are inextricable—women got into the University, and women were bitterly
opposed in their efforts to do so. The powerful initial resistance to their inclusion in
the University would certainly have affected how they saw themselves and their
place in that community for some time to come” (34).
In addition to increasing the public’s interest in the business of higher education,
the nineteenth-century reform acts at Oxford and Cambridge succeeded in estab-
lishing a social landscape ripe for narrative consideration. “Reform,” Proctor
observes, “brought new causes to urge, and a new cast of characters to add to the
traditional rakes. With reform, it became more plausible to take an interest in the
success of scholars; examination halls became the scenes of triumphs and disasters
in which good very nearly always triumphed over evil” (1957, 59). As with their
English antecedents, American novels about academic life find their modern origins
in the nineteenth century, an intense era of social change and industrial growth that
destabilized the prodigious cultural influences of privileged institutions of higher
learning such as Oxford and Cambridge and, in America, Harvard. The emergence
of the American academic novel can be traced to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Fanshawe,
published in 1828. Set in Harley College in the wilderness of New England during
the eighteenth century, Hawthorne’s novel—which he later attempted to suppress—
explores a number of themes endemic to modern academic fictions, including
Hawthorne’s depiction of the eccentric Dr. Melmoth, an absent-minded and inef-
fectual scholar who later becomes the institution’s president. In his examination of
the American evolution of the academic novel, John Lyons (1962, 4) remarks:

The advance of industrial capitalism during the nineteenth century is another cause for
the popular suspicion of the academy. The mechanical sciences which fathered and
made this advance possible were eminently practical ones. It was engineering which
laid the rails and built the bridges and designed the mills, not philosophy. And the
money which engineering made possible was used to buy and sell engineers, so it was
unlikely that the capitalist businessman should even respect the engineer when his
knowledge brought him so little power.

The “popular suspicion of the academy” that Lyons ascribes to the industrialized
societies of the latter nineteenth century underscores the emergence of the brand of
 ACADEMIC FICTION 3

satire endemic to the Anglo-American novels about university life. Satire, by its tra-
ditional definition, functions as a critique of the follies of humankind. Yet Lyons
astutely differentiates the modern incarnations of satire in university fiction from the
texts of the great satirists of the Augustan Age, who invariably situated themselves
on the side of “Reason, . . . tempered by humanity and common sense.” The satirists
of the Augustan era, Lyons notes, often hinted at solutions to the dilemmas depicted
in their narratives. Satiric novels of academic life, however, provide no such answers
(162–63). Further, in his essay, “Inside Jokes: Familiarity and Contempt in
Academic Satire,” Brian A. Connery observes that academic satire—in contrast to
neoclassical satire, which only attacks the vices and follies of an absent or unknow-
ing target—also aims its satiric barbs at the reader. In this way, he argues, academic
novelists deny their readers the ironic, self-congratulatory pleasures of neo-classical
satire because the readers themselves, often academics, function as the texts’
ultimate targets (Bevan 1990, 124–26).
Trends and Themes. A thematic analysis of various works of postwar academic
fiction sheds considerable light on the remarkable rise of the campus novel during
the latter half of the twentieth century. Rossen identifies a “dynamics of power” that
undergirds postwar manifestations of English and American academic novels dur-
ing this era. “We should begin to read these novels less in terms of their actual bril-
liance or success,” she argues, “and more in terms of what they reveal about the
dynamics of power between the contemporary novelist and his audience” (1993,
188). Rossen’s paradigm for interpreting academic fiction’s vast output reveals the
various structures of power that simultaneously manipulate both the life of the indi-
vidual scholar and that of the university community. These power structures, she
argues, ultimately problematize campus life through their creation of a philosophi-
cal paradox that scholars ultimately cannot escape. As Rossen observes, “The schol-
arly life inevitably consists of life in community, though it is fundamentally
predicated on a principle of individualism” (9). Modern universities, by virtue of
their tenure and research requirements, maintain, at least in regard to their non-
tenured members, the explicit threat of expulsion. The ominous power of this
vestige of professional affiliation creates “an imposing façade” in favor of the
university, Rossen writes, “which suggests a powerful presence through its ability to
exclude potential members” (30).
The politics of exclusion—the threat of ultimate severance from the community—
functions as a menacing obstacle in the path to institutional success for the individ-
ual scholar. For this reason, the nature of academic scholarship receives particular
attention in university fictions. As Rossen observes, “All novels about academic life
and work exploit the tension between these two poles of idealism and competition,
or scholarship as a means to an end and as an end in itself” (140). This tension pres-
ents scholars with an emotional dilemma of staggering proportions: in one sense,
campus life purports to offer them an arena to engage their colleagues in free intel-
lectual discourse, while in another sense it necessitates that they confront their col-
leagues in a high-stakes competition based upon the quality and proliferation of
their intellectual exertions in order to ensure their professional security. “The emo-
tional dimension of such work can lead to heightened battles between scholars,”
Rossen remarks, “and in a way which brings their powerful intellectual abilities and
skills to bear on what is fundamentally an emotional issue” (145). Rossen’s con-
tentions regarding the highly competitive nature of contemporary academic life can
be ascribed to the experiences of students as well. Through entrance requirements
4 ACADEMIC FICTION

and performance standards, students endure similar threats of expulsion from the
university community. Undergraduates must also conform to a form of communal
disruption each term as their lives redefine themselves around new course schedules
and holiday breaks. “What undergraduates in all of these novels seem to experience
primarily is an intensely intimate, private world with their peers—and one in which
they suffer from either ambitions to be included . . . or yearning to find love and
acceptance,” Rossen observes. “The unique feature of community life for under-
graduates is that the small world which they create for themselves vanishes when
the students disperse at the end of their University terms” (118). Thus, a number of
novels explore the undergraduate experiences of students in the academy, including
Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers (1973), Clare Chambers’s Uncertain Terms
(1992), and Bret Easton Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction (1987), among others.
Marion Rosen’s Death by Education (1993) explores student life in a secondary
educational institution.
Contexts and Issues. Academic fictions’ nostalgia for the ivory towers of their pre-
nineteenth-century cultural and social supremacy prevents them from positing solu-
tions in a pragmatic world where the idealism of the academy lacks viability and
significance. In the first half of the twentieth century, then, when the world
demanded answers to even more complicated social and political predicaments—
from the calamities of the First and Second World Wars to the Great Depression and
beyond—the academy once again lacked practical answers to the human commu-
nity’s vexing problems. Hence, the interconnections between the satiric ambitions of
the Menippean writers and the motivations of twentieth-century academic novelists
merit particular attention. As W. Scott Blanchard notes in Scholar’s Bedlam: Menip-
pean Satire in the Renaissance (1995), “Menippean satire is a genre both for and
about scholars; it is an immensely learned form that is at the same time paradoxi-
cally anti-intellectual,” he writes. “If its master of ceremonies is the humanist as wise
fool, its audience is a learned community whose members need to be reminded . . .
of the depravity of their overreaching intellects, of the limits of human understand-
ing” (14). In short, modern academic satire began to share in a richly developed and
lengthy satiric tradition. And academic novels flourished as never before.
The genre’s evolving presence in contemporary British fiction finds its origins in
the proliferation of provincial “redbrick” universities, which, like the reform acts of
the nineteenth century, undermined the formerly exalted influence of Oxford and
Cambridge and expanded appreciably the public’s access to institutions of higher
education in England. For the first time, academic novels—through their explicit use
of satire—seemed to offer solutions for the problems that confront modern readers
far beyond the hallowed walls of the university. As Ian Carter remarks in Ancient
Cultures of Conceit: British University Fiction in the Post-War Years, the answers

THE PROFESSORROMANE
Campus novels have seen an enormous output in England and the United States since the
1950s. Richard G. Caram usefully describes these works as Professorromane, “a term of my
own coining, in the tradition of slightly-pompous Germanic scholarship,” he writes.“The Pro-
fessorroman has distinctive features that qualify it as a subgenre of literature similar to the
Künstlerroman or the Bildungsroman” (42).
 ACADEMIC FICTION 5

lie in “taking culture seriously, and taking universities to be important bastions of

culture. But the notion of what constitutes culture,” he cautions, “must be trans-
formed from that typical of British university fiction” (1990, 277). In this way, the
academic novel proffers—through its satiric depiction of the institutional states of
malaise inherent in its fictive representations of contemporary universities—a means
for both implicitly and explicitly advocating positive value systems. In short, con-
temporary academic novels, by postulating a kind of anti-ethos in their narratives,
ultimately seek to enhance the culture and sustain the community through a more
ethically driven system of higher education. This anti-ethos, which Kenneth
Womack describes as a “pejorative poetics” in Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire,
Ethics, Community (2001), underscores the satirical motivations of the authors of
academic fiction and the manner in which their narrative ambitions function as
self-conscious ethical correctives.
Reception. There is little question that the campus novel will continue to resound
as one of literature’s most satirical genres. While their forebears in the academic fic-
tions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries languished under the
specter of “Oxbridge,” contemporary academic characters must contend with the
whimsy of global economic slumps and university budget cuts, the fashionable
nature of structuralist and poststructuralist literary criticism, growing social and
racial divisions on college campuses, and an increasingly hostile academic job mar-
ket, among a range of other issues. Indeed, there seems to be no end to the ways in
which the practitioners of Anglo-American university fiction can utilize academic
characters and institutional themes as a means for exploring, through the deliber-
ately broad strokes of their satirical prose, the ethical and philosophical questions
endemic to their genre that impinge upon such enduringly significant issues as cul-
ture, morality, romance, knowledge, and commitment.
Selected Authors. Many scholars attribute the origins of postwar academic fiction
to the landmark publication of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim in 1954. In addition to
its widely acknowledged place as the quintessential campus novel of the twentieth
century, Lucky Jim illustrates the peculiar dilemmas experienced by young scholars
in their efforts to achieve selfhood and find acceptance within the larger academic
community. Often characterized as an unabashedly comic novel, Lucky Jim offers a
moral landscape that confronts the novel’s protagonist, Jim Dixon, with a variety of
ethical predicaments. Amis utilizes the métier of comedy in the novel for delivering
his judgments regarding the problematic moral state of academic life during the
remarkably fractious era in which his novel first appeared. His satiric attacks on the
university community find their targets in those privileged individuals who endeavor
to maintain the academic status quo in their favor through the exploitation of jun-
ior colleagues, and, ultimately, through the threat of expulsion from the seemingly
sacred groves of campus life. As Amis’s novel so stridently reveals, the very threat
of severance from the scholarly community poses as a powerful obstacle in the
young academic’s path to self-knowledge.
Lucky Jim finds its textual roots in Amis’s 1946 visit to the Senior Common
Room at Leicester University, although it also owes its genesis to the confluence of
three historic moments in twentieth-century British social and literary history: the
passage of the Education Act of 1944, the advent of the redbrick university in
England during that same era, and the subsequent apotheosis of Lucky Jim as the
master text of the Angry Young Man movement in the 1950s. In 1946, Amis visited
Philip Larkin at Leicester University, where Larkin, Amis’s friend from their
6 ACADEMIC FICTION

scholarship days at Oxford, worked as an assistant librarian. “He took me into the
Common Room there,” Amis later remarked, “and after about a quarter of an hour I
said, ‘Christ, someone ought to do something about this lot’” (McDermott 1989, 17).
Amis’s experiences during the late 1940s as a junior lecturer at University College,
Swansea, only served to confirm his initial impressions about the ethical inequalities
of academic life. In addition to his personal observations of the university community,
Amis found the inspiration for his novel in the social and political turmoil that fol-
lowed the passage of the Education Act of 1944, an article of legislation that, for the
first time since the landmark educational acts of the mid-nineteenth century, attempted
to undermine the place of university education as an exclusive privilege of the upper
classes. The Education Act required students to pursue their primary education to at
least the age of 15, while also creating a two-tiered system of free secondary education
that consisted of “Grammar Schools” and “Secondary Modern Schools.”
During the decades that followed, the Education Act accomplished its intended
goal of producing a greater quantity of college-bound working-class students.
Accommodating this influx of postsecondary students likewise necessitated the
wholesale expansion of the English university system and resulted in the construc-
tion of an assortment of provincial redbrick institutions and “new” universities
across Great Britain. Despite the Act’s intention of assimilating a larger working-
class student population into English university life, Philip Gardner observes that
the Education Act of 1944 “gave rise to a significant number of deracinated and
disoriented young men, no longer at home in their working- or lower-middle-class
attitudes and environments, but at the same time not feeling accepted by the social
system into which their education appeared to be pushing them” (1981, 24). This
culture of alienation in the 1950s ultimately produced the “angry young man,” that
peculiar social manifestation of cultural angst and intellectual derision depicted in
such works as John Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953), Lucky Jim, and John Osborne’s
Look Back in Anger (1956), among others. The figure of the angry young man as a
fictive persona reveals himself as a literary character simultaneously oppressed by
the hypocritical value system of the same society whose standards and traditions he
so desperately strives to oblige.
In Lucky Jim, Amis traces the life and times of Jim Dixon, a fledgling academic
who must negotiate his way through a maze of ethical choices. In addition to his
satiric characterizations of Dixon’s senior colleagues, particularly the unforgettable
Professor Welch, Amis addresses the perils of scholarly research and publication, as
well as the peculiar, unforgiving nature of university politics. Focalizing the narra-
tive through Dixon’s working-class eyes allows Amis to dramatize the uneasy rela-
tionships that develop between the privileged upper-class denizens of the university
community and their disoriented and insecure junior counterparts. A graduate of
Leicester University, Dixon secures a temporary adjunct position at an unnamed
provincial redbrick university after besting an Oxford candidate at his job interview.
Like the other angry young working-class men who struggle to find acceptance and
self-sufficiency in the groves of academe, Dixon hungers for job security amidst a
world that both bores and bewilders him. A probationary junior lecturer in
medieval history—a subject that he detests, yet that seems to offer him the promise
of secure employment that he so covets—Dixon confesses in the novel that his pol-
icy “was to read as little as possible of any given book” (16–17). He harbors little
regard for academic research and scholarly publication, although he realizes their
esteemed places in the competitive campus arena.
 ACADEMIC FICTION 7

As one of the most notorious figures in the genre of campus fiction, Professor
Welch serves as Dixon’s primary nemesis in Lucky Jim, as well as the target of many
of the novel’s satiric barbs. In Welch, Amis proffers a blistering portrayal of aca-
demic pretension and indifference, what Gardner calls “a devastating portrait, inci-
dentally, of a certain type of British academic” (1981, 27). For Dixon, Welch
represents everything that he finds troubling about academic life—from snobbery
and cultural affectation to vocational ineffectuality and self-indulgence. “No other
professor in Great Britain,” Dixon muses, “set such store by being called Professor”
(Amis 1954, 7). Dixon finds himself equally perplexed by the disparity between
Welch’s academic standing and his vague qualifications: “How had he become
Professor of History, even at a place like this?” Dixon wonders. “By published
work? No. By extra good teaching? No in italics” (8). Yet, because Welch possesses
the power to decide Dixon’s ultimate fate at the university, he remains unable to
express his dismay at the inequities of his precarious position as a probationary lec-
turer. For this reason, he accedes to all of the professor’s demands for his service,
while secretly imagining the violent acts to which he would subject Welch.
When Dixon prods Welch for reassurance regarding the state of his uncertain
position in the department, moreover, the professor refuses to show any compassion
for his adopted “protégé” and nervously avoids Dixon’s glance while stammering
unintelligibly. Despite all of his efforts to curry favor with Welch, Dixon essentially
lacks any palpable identity in the professor’s eyes, for Welch frequently refers to him
as Faulkner, the name of a previous temporary assistant lecturer. Counseled by
Welch that an effective public lecture on behalf of the department might save his job
at the university, Dixon’s discourse on “Merrie England” functions as the novel’s
hilarious climax, as well as Dixon’s supreme, inebriated moment of ethical judg-
ment. Well fortified with alcohol, Dixon delivers a protracted and forceful parody
of the academy, scholarship, and his senior colleagues. During his “Merrie England”
speech, Dixon effects a series of cartoonish faces along with drunken imitations of
the voices of Welch, the university principal, and, finally, a Nazi stormtrooper. In
this way, he posits his final, blistering attack upon the untenable foundations of the
academic world of his experience. When Dixon effects his own expulsion from uni-
versity life at the novel’s conclusion, his sense of humanity soars when he finds sol-
ace and acceptance in a bona fide community of genuine friends and truly
conscientious mentors. “It is no accident,” Rossen argues, “that many of the best
University novels are about someone leaving academe at the end of the book”
(1993, 188).
Malcolm Bradbury’s Eating People Is Wrong (1959) provides a tragicomic look
at the interpersonal conundrums inherent in academic life. The novel traces the
experiences of the inexorably earnest Professor Stuart Treece, the head of an English
department at a provincial, redbrick university located—ironically enough—in the
city’s former lunatic asylum. Through Treece, Bradbury’s novel asks complex
questions about the nature of liberalism as a philosophy connoting tolerance,
decency, and moral liberty. Bradbury complicates this issue via Treece’s relationships
with two students, including an older, mentally disturbed man, Louis Bates, and
Mr. Eborabelosa, an African student who violates academic—indeed, social—
decorum at nearly every turn. The manner in which Treece responds to their diffi-
culties leads to disastrous results, especially when he considers his liberal impulses
in comparison with the choices that he must inevitably make when confronted with
Bates and Eborabelosa’s convoluted interpersonal issues. Treece’s love affair with
8 ACADEMIC FICTION

Emma Fielding, a postgraduate student at the university, also suffers from the
dichotomy between his liberal ideals and the vexing ethical realities of contempo-
rary life. As the novel comes to its disheartening close, Treece feels utterly betrayed
by his value systems—especially his ethical devotion to the precepts of responsibil-
ity and goodness—and ends up in a mental hospital with little hope for the future.
In this way, Bradbury postulates a damning critique of the academy’s capacity for
engendering genuine educational and social change when its most cherished princi-
ples evince little practical application.
Scholars of academic fiction often identify novelist and critic David Lodge as the
genre’s most significant practitioner. Lodge’s trilogy of academic novels—Changing
Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: An Academic Romance (1984),
and Nice Work (1988)—satirizes academe’s convoluted nuances with playful aban-
don. In Changing Places, Lodge traces the intellectual and sexual lives of Philip
Swallow and Morris Zapp, the academic characters whose professional and social
intersections grace each of the narratives in Lodge’s academic trilogy. An introverted
and ambitionless lecturer at an English redbrick university, Swallow distinguishes
himself among his peers at the University of Rummidge because of his superior skills
as an examiner, not because of his reputation as a literary scholar. “He is a mimetic
man,” Lodge writes, “unconfident, eager to please, infinitely suggestible” (1975,
10). In sharp contrast with Swallow’s ineffectual scholarly career, Zapp enjoys con-
siderable scholarly renown for his numerous well-received studies of Jane Austen. A
full professor of English at the State University of Euphoria in the United States,
Zapp plans to embark upon an ambitious critical project that would treat each of
Austen’s novels from every conceivable hermeneutic perspective: “historical, biog-
raphical, rhetorical, mythical, Freudian, Jungian, existentialist, Marxist, structural-
ist, Christian-allegorical, ethical, exponential, linguistic, phenomenological,
archetypal, you name it” (44). In this way, Zapp plans to exhaust Austen’s canon of
novels for future critical study. “There would be simply nothing further to say,”
Lodge remarks, “periodicals would fall silent, famous English Departments [would]
be left deserted like ghost towns” (44–45). Swallow and Zapp’s lives collide in 1969
when they agree to participate in an annual professorial exchange scheme that exists
between their respective institutions. During their transatlantic experiences, the two
scholars not only exchange their students and colleagues, but their wives and fami-
lies as well. How they literally swap their entire worlds with one another underscores
Lodge’s satiric critique of his academic characters and the ease and alacrity with
which they exchange the emotional and sexual discourses of their respective lives.
As the narrative of Small World (1984) unfolds, we find Zapp and Swallow once
again ensconced in the comfortable scholarly and interpersonal inroads of their
respective worlds. While their private lives seem to follow a rather predictable
course—Swallow returns to married life with Hilary and Désirée delivers on her
promise to divorce Zapp—the worldwide reinvigoration of their profession in the
late 1970s irrevocably alters their academic experiences through the auspices of
international conferences and global scholarly trends. “The day of the single, static
campus is over,” Zapp triumphantly announces in Small World, and with its
demise arrives a new generation of globe-trotting scholars equally beset by the pro-
fessional and interpersonal contradictions inherent in academic life (72). In Small
World, Lodge traces the international scholarly and romantic exploits of Zapp,
Swallow, and a wide range of other intellectuals bent on exerting their professional
and erotic wills upon one another. A rousing keynote address delivered by Zapp at
 ACADEMIC FICTION 9

a conference hosted by Swallow at the University of Rummidge inaugurates the

novel’s thematic exploration of erotic love and its narrative possibilities for inter-
personal fulfillment. Entitled “Textuality as Striptease,” Zapp’s lecture discusses
the inadequacy of language and scholarship as mechanisms for communication.
Because it fundamentally encourages the act of interpretation, language necessarily
denies itself the capacity to articulate any singular meaning with precision and
exactitude. Scholarship suffers from a similar interpretive malady. As Zapp astutely
remarks, “Every decoding is another encoding” (29). As with the text, which con-
tains so many convoluted layers of unattainable meaning, the striptease, Zapp
argues, entices the viewer with elements of curiosity and desire while ultimately
defying possession. This struggle for erotic authority motivates the quests for love
embarked upon by Lodge’s academics in Small World, and its consummate elu-
siveness challenges their capacity for finding self-satisfaction in the competitive
community of scholars.
In addition to detailing once again the sexual and professional exploits of
Swallow and Zapp, Lodge traces in Small World the erotic quests of such fictive crit-
ical luminaries as Arthur Kingfisher and Fulvia Morgana, as well as the romantic
experiences of the naïve lover and scholar, Persse McGarrigle, a fledgling young aca-
demic from University College, Limerick. In the novel, Persse’s search for the elusive
independent scholar, Angelica Pabst, functions as a framing device for the erotic
quests of Lodge’s other intellectual characters. He crisscrosses the globe, exhausting
his savings in a wild international pursuit of the evasive Angelica while sporadically
encountering Lodge’s other protagonists in such disparate locales as Rummidge,
Amsterdam, Geneva, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Honolulu, Jerusalem, and finally, New
York, where Lodge’s entire coterie of academics reconvenes for the annual meeting
of the Modern Language Association. Perhaps even more important, Kingfisher acts
as Lodge’s most corrosive example of academic dysfunctionality. Secluded in his
penthouse suite high above Chicago, Kingfisher lies naked in bed with a scattered
selection of critical quarterlies and his delectable Korean research assistant, Song-
Mi Lee, by his side. An emeritus professor of Columbia and Zürich Universities,
Kingfisher spends his days writing reviews of the latest monographs of hermeneu-
tics while watching pornographic movies on television. “A man who has received
more honorary degrees than he can remember, and who has at home, at his house
on Long Island, a whole room full of the (largely unread) books and offprints sent
to him by disciples and admirers in the world of scholarship,” Kingfisher, Lodge
writes, can unfortunately no longer “achieve an erection or an original thought”
(105). Lodge’s unsavory depiction of Kingfisher consuming pornography while
simultaneously engaging in the act of literary criticism underscores Lodge’s exacting
critique of the academy via one of its most cherished mechanisms for professional
advancement.
As the final installment in Lodge’s academic trilogy, Nice Work (1988) examines
the uneasy relationship that often exists between the academy and the “real world,”
between the competitive forces of the intellect and the free-market forces of indus-
try. In addition to questioning the relevance of literary theory to the problems that
plague the world beyond the halls of the academy, the novel attempts to provide
readers with a sense of reconciliation regarding the tenuous relationship between
industry and academe through the medium of an erotic affair between the novel’s
protagonists, Victor Wilcox, the managing director of an engineering firm, and
Robyn Penrose, a temporary lecturer at the University of Rummidge. The dramatic
10 ACADEMIC FICTION

consummation of their relationship seems to offer the possibility of mutual under-

standing between these remarkably disparate characters, yet the instability of love
and language depicted in the novel’s closing pages ultimately undermines their gen-
uine attempts at ideological compromise. In the novel, Robyn agrees to participate
in the “Shadow Scheme” that eventually draws her into Vic’s orbit on the advice of
Swallow, still chair of the department at Rummidge, although he is beginning to suc-
cumb to incipient deafness. The brainchild of the university’s vice-chancellor, the
shadow scheme endeavors to enhance the university’s understanding of the com-
mercial world by requiring a faculty member to “shadow” a senior managerial
figure in the local manufacturing industry. Swallow believes that Robyn’s participa-
tion in the exercise might allow her to keep her Rummidge lectureship beyond her
current three-year allotment. A gifted and well-published scholar, Robyn remains
unable to secure a position in England’s depressed academic job market, despite her
extraordinary professional credentials.
Vic, Robyn’s industrial counterpart and the marketing director of J. Pringle and
Sons Casting and General Engineering, harbors disdain for the value of higher edu-
cation and views the university as a “small city-state” characterized by its “air of
privileged detachment from the vulgar, bustling city in which it is embedded”
(Lodge 1988, 14–15). Robyn possesses a similar distrust for members of the private
sector and their commercial activities. Her ideological and social differences with
Vic likewise manifest themselves on a number of occasions throughout their associ-
ation during the shadow scheme. Robyn reacts in horror, for example, when she vis-
its the factory’s dark, inner recesses: “It was the most terrible place she had ever
been in her life,” Lodge writes. “To say that to herself restored the original mean-
ing of the word ‘terrible’: it provoked terror, even a kind of awe” (90). Her revul-
sion at the squalid conditions in the factory later results in a spontaneous strike after
she warns one of the laborers of his imminent dismissal.
The Shadow Scheme reaches its dramatic climax when Robyn agrees to accom-
pany Vic on a business trip to Frankfurt, where her knowledge of German allows
Vic to negotiate the purchase of a machine for the factory at an exceptional price.
Absorbed with the success of their cooperative effort as business negotiators, Robyn
and Vic retire to her suite for a sexual encounter: “The captain of industry at the
feet of the feminist literary critic—a pleasing tableau,” Robyn muses (207). Back in
England, their relationship deteriorates rapidly. “When Wilcox screwed you, it was
like the factory ravished the university,” Robyn’s friend Penny observes (212).
Robyn and Vic achieve reconciliation only after he visits the university as her
“shadow” and after the factory discharges him from his position as managing direc-
tor. Using the proceeds of her inheritance from the estate of a recently deceased rel-
ative in Australia, Robyn salvages their relationship when she good-naturedly offers
to invest in Vic’s plans to design a revolutionary spectrometer. In this manner, Vic
and Robyn opt for a working relationship over the semiotic and interpersonal strug-
gles of romance. Robyn’s own professional fortunes eventually soar after Zapp for-
tuitously arrives in Rummidge—about to embark upon his annual European
conference tour, of course—and negotiates the American rights of her second mono-
graph for Euphoric State’s university press. The novel’s deus ex machina conclusion
reaches its fruition when Swallow finally, almost predictably, locates the funding to
extend Robyn’s contract for another year at the University of Rummidge. In this
manner, Nice Work’s hopeful dénouement allows Lodge to establish a state of
reconciliation between industry and academe.
 ACADEMIC FICTION 11

A.S. Byatt’s acclaimed Possession: A Romance (1990) adopts the detective form
in a labyrinthine campus novel about the complicated nature of love and possession,
as well as about the primacy of the text in academic circles. In the novel, Byatt nar-
rates the interconnected stories of two, historically disparate couples—Roland
Mitchell and Maud Bailey, a pair of contemporary literary scholars on a quest to
authenticate a love affair between two Victorian poets; and the poets themselves,
Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. As a postmodern pastiche, Posses-
sion features a panoply of textual voices, ranging from scholarly articles and auto-
biographical texts to Ash and LaMotte’s correspondence and verse. While Christine
Brook-Rose draws upon the textual nuances of postmodern pastiche in her novel
Textermination (1991), the result hardly compares to the quality and nuance of
Byatt’s achievement. With Possession, Byatt succeeds in both satirizing academic life
and yet managing to venerate its capacity for generating viable textual research—
and engendering romance, no less—at the same time. Byatt’s most exacting critique
of the scholarly world emerges via her treatment of Professor James Blackadder,
Roland’s avaricious employer and the curator of a vast museum of holdings related
to Ash’s life and work. Byatt similarly derides the unchecked ambitions of two caus-
tic American characters, rival collectors Mortimer Cropper, the representative of a
wealthy New Mexico foundation, and Leonora Stern, an influential feminist scholar
who longs for Maud’s affections, as well as for the fruits of her latest research about
LaMotte’s clandestine relationship with Ash. In many ways, the most effective
aspect of Byatt’s satire involves the manner in which Roland and Maud become so
obsessed with their subject that they can hardly begin to consummate the romantic
feelings that blossom during their time together. Although Possession ends by sug-
gesting that they might eventually enjoy a fulfilling romantic connection, Roland
and Maud conclude their quest by only solving the mystery of Ash and LaMotte’s
affair. The novel’s sad irony is that they fail to unravel the equally complex and
intriguing mystery about the bond that has come to exist between them. The rigors
and demands of scholarship, it seems, have established barriers rather than foment-
ing the interpersonal bridges that the university champions in workaday life.
While Amis’s and Lodge’s narratives illustrate the vexing world of British
higher education, Jane Smiley’s Moo (1995) focuses a sharp, satiric eye upon the
political machinations and ambitions of the administration and faculty of Moo
U., a large midwestern university well known for its agricultural department. Rife
with social and scholarly intrigue, Smiley’s novel admonishes the bankrupt value
systems of a powerful American institution of higher learning obsessed with its
agenda for technological and financial superiority. Smiley allots conspicuous
attention to all of the competing voices comprised in Moo U.’s political mael-
strom—from the contentious professoriate in the horticulture and English
departments to the institution’s dubious administration, an often bemused and
vacant student population, and a giant hog named Earl Butz who resides in an
abandoned building in the middle of Moo U.’s campus. In addition to her pene-
trating critique of university life’s economic circle—an endlessly negating system
of consuming and being consumed—Smiley addresses the interpersonal motiva-
tions exhibited by an array of administrative, professorial, and undergraduate
characters. Smiley’s self-conscious retelling of consumerism’s cautionary tale—of
what happens when a beast like Moo U. is permitted to gorge itself at the trough
of other, ethically dubious creatures—affords us with one of academic fiction’s
most compelling narratives.
12 ACADEMIC FICTION

In addition to the aforementioned paradigmatic campus novels by Amis,

Bradbury, Lodge, Byatt, and Smiley, the tragicomic world of academic literature
increasingly includes works of detective fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, film,
and textual experimentation. Academic novels frequently employ the conventions
of the murder mystery, as evidenced by such texts as Amanda Cross’s Death in a
Tenured Position (1981), P.D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972),
D.J.H. Jones’s Murder at the MLA (1993), and Estelle Monbrun’s Meurtre chez
Tante Léonie (1995). In the nonfictional Masterpiece Theatre: An Academic
Melodrama (1995), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar consider the ethical
implications of the “culture wars” of the early 1990s by fashioning a loosely
veiled account of the political machinations by a host of international academic
and political figures. With Recalcitrance, Faulkner, and the Professors: A Critical
Fiction (1990), Austin M. Wright offers one of the genre’s more innovative works.
In his quasi-nonfictional study, Wright satirizes contemporary literary criticism
through his reproduction of two imaginary essays on Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying
(1930) by a pair of feuding instructors whose students subsequently meet at
“Phil’s Pub” in order to critique the quality of their professors’ divergent argu-
ments. In addition to poet Galway Kinnell’s satirical look at literary studies in
“The Deconstruction of Emily Dickinson” (1994), the academy receives attention
in such plays as Susan Miller’s experimental Cross Country (1977) and David
Mamet’s controversial Oleanna (1992). Produced as a film in 1994, Oleanna con-
cerns a professor and his student’s inability to communicate with each other on
any genuinely meaningful level. Their utter incapability of comprehending the
nature of their obligations and responsibilities, both to each other and to higher
education, predicates Mamet’s brutal musings on sexual harassment and political
correctness. The academic novel reaches its experimental apex in Alexander
Theroux’s Darconville’s Cat (1981), a work that features stylistic forays into such
genres as blank-verse drama, the sermon, the diary, the fable, poetry, the essay,
and formal oration, among a host of others.

Bibliography
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Blanchard, W. Scott. Scholar’s Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renaissance. Lewisburg, PA:
Bucknell University Press, 1995.
Bradbury, Malcolm. Eating People Is Wrong. Chicago, IL: Academy Publishers, 1959.
Byatt, A. S. Possession: A Romance. New York: Vintage International, 1990.
Caram, Richard G. “The Secular Priests: A Study of the College Professor as Hero in Selected
American Fiction (1955–1977).” Diss. Saint Louis University, 1980.
Carter, Ian. Ancient Cultures of Conceit: British University Fiction in the Post-War Years.
London: Routledge, 1990.
Gardner, Philip. Kingsley Amis. Boston, MA: Twayne, 1981.
Inness, Sherrie A. Intimate Communities: Representation and Social Transformation in
Women’s College Fiction, 1895–1910. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State
University Popular Press, 1995.
Johnson, Lisa. “The Life of the Mind: American Academia Reflected through Contemporary
Fiction.” Reference Services Review 23 (1995): 23–44.
 ADVENTURE FICTION 13

Kramer, John E., Jr. The American College Novel: An Annotated Bibliography. New York:
Garland, 1982.
Leonardi, Susan J. Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville College
Novelists. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989.
Lodge, David. Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses. New York: Penguin, 1975.
———. Nice Work. New York: Penguin, 1988.
———. Small World: An Academic Romance. New York: Penguin, 1984.
Lyons, John. The College Novel in America. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1962.
———. “The College Novel in America, 1962–1974.” Critique 16 (1974): 121–128.
Marchalonis, Shirley. College Girls: A Century in Fiction. New Brunswick: Rutgers Univer-
sity Press, 1995.
McDermott, John. Kingsley Amis: An English Moralist. London: Macmillan, 1989.
Proctor, Mortimer R. The English University Novel. Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1957.
Rossen, Janice. The University in Modern Fiction: When Power Is Academic. London:
Macmillan, 1993.
Siegel, Ben, ed. The American Writer and the University. Newark: University of Delaware
Press, 1989.
Womack, Kenneth. Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics, Community. London: Palgrave,
2001.

Further Reading
Bevan, David, ed. University Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990; Carter, Ian. Ancient Cul-
tures of Conceit: British University Fiction in the Post-War Years. London: Routledge, 1990;
Johnson, Lisa. “The Life of the Mind: American Academia Reflected through Contemporary
Fiction.” Reference Services Review 23 (1995): 23–44; Rossen, Janice. The University in
Modern Fiction: When Power Is Academic. London: Macmillan, 1993; Showalter, Elaine.
Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents. Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2005; Womack, Kenneth. Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics,
Community. London: Palgrave, 2001.
KENNETH WOMACK
ADVENTURE FICTION
Definition. What makes an adventure? An adventure is an experience of a situa-
tion in which one cannot predict the outcome. It can sometimes be dangerous and
chancy, but it can also be thrilling, exciting and fun. The adventures one seeks can
also be life-changing events, learning experiences, and good stories to tell. A good
adventure story leaves the reader wondering what will happen next. Adventure sub-
genres include adventurous science fiction stories, and children’s adventures like the
Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, although these novels, originally meant as chil-
dren’s stories, became favorites with adults as well. The Western genre is full of Wild

Many contemporary novels and stories of action adventure often leave any depth of charac-
ter or plot structure out of the main text.The focus is on action and adventure that involves
physical, often violent activity, which is emphasized more than character development, moti-
vation, and overall theme. Fiona Waters says this of Willard Price’s adventure series that is
also true of many adventure novels and stories:“Nothing gets in the way of the narration, of
the boy’s exploits and the constant stream of information—no time is wasted on philoso-
phizing or theorizing, all is action and very successful” (Rubinstein 2007).
14 ADVENTURE FICTION

West adventures, but very seldom do they involve true accounts by the authors who
write about them. Spy, thriller, and mystery adventure fall under the same heading,
but all belong to different genres because adventure is only a part of the whole story.
History. Traveling the world meant exploration for expanding empires, conquer-
ing civilizations, and acquiring new trade routes for new resources. Herodotus in
mid-400 B.C.E traveled to Greece, Italy, and northern Africa to learn about its inhab-
itants and their religions, the native flora and fauna, and the geography. Herodotus
is considered one of the first travel writers, and he often gave lectures about his trav-
els. The Vikings may have been adventure seekers and discovered new lands, but
their travels also resulted in destruction, as did the different European empires.
Colonies of different countries were established around the world, as adventurers
claimed new unexplored land in order to acquire their untapped resources such as
gold, spices, rubber, and slaves.
Christopher Columbus is one of the world’s most famous explorers. He traveled
with Marco Polo’s journals, convinced that he could find a route to Asia by going
west instead of taking the only known route to the East that sailed south of Africa
and around India via the Indian Ocean. He failed to find the route he was looking
for, but he did succeed in finding what is today known as Cuba, setting European
sights on new land and resources. He also succeeded in inspiring other explorers to
seek their own adventures. Although the accounts of his travels are not always accu-
rate or factual, his stories contain the key elements of traveling: excitement, intrigue,
wonder and amazement, and most important, adventure.
Taking the grand tour began in the 1600s and gained in popularity through the
1800s and 1900s. Termed as the le grand tour by the French, the grand tour was
especially popular with young men, and eventually young women, of wealthy fam-
ilies. The voyage was for many a rite of passage, signaling their transformation from
school-aged children to young adults. At first, the mode of transportation was the
steamships that sailed across the oceans, until the arrival of the steam train in the
mid-1800s that enabled passengers to travel over land. The young traveler was
accompanied by a tutor or other adult guardian and was taught the history of the
countries visited, as well as their cultural aspects, such as fencing, language, danc-
ing, horseback riding, manners, and fashion. These lessons helped shape the travel-
ers in their everyday life, preparing them for the social life that was expected of
persons of their class and wealth; often, these experiences gave young men the foun-
dation for leadership positions in the military.
Writings of these voyages came by letter to family and friends at home.
The destination of these journeys was often the colonies of the empires of which
they were citizens. Subjects of the colonizing empires were guaranteed entry with-
out special passports or visas. The presence of English travelers was extremely com-
mon in India from the early 1600s until the World War II in 1945. One example of
the grand tour novel is A Passage to India, published in 1924, by author E.M.
Forster. The novel captures the sense of adventure of a British woman traveling to
India to meet her fiancé who works for the British raj, a form of British government
in India. In 1908, Forster also published A Room with a View about a young
woman traveling through Italy, and in 1905, his other Italian novel, Where Angels
Fear to Tread, was published. Forster, a traveler in his own right and a British sub-
ject, used his experiences of traveling to both India and Italy to provide the back-
ground scenes and ideas for many of his novels. Another example is
Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s novel Journey to the End of the Night, published in 1934.
 ADVENTURE FICTION 15

It is the story of a young French man who travels to the different French colonies of
Africa and, ultimately, to America. The characters reflect their society; they were
able persons with financial means traveling and experiencing the adventure of other
countries and cultures. Both novels, Journey to the End of Night and A Passage to
India, explore the racial tensions between colonizer and colonized, bringing depth
to the characters and providing political commentary while creating excitement for
the reader.
Other adventure novels that emerged in the beginning of the century told a story
of travel, but they dealt with the characters’ development as a reflection of mankind.
Mark Twain is another novelist who used his personal travels as the basis for
his narratives. His classic novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and his nonfiction book Old Times on the
Mississippi (1876), are taken from Twain’s experience on the steamboats of the
Mississippi River.
Trends and Themes. Outdoors adventures are real stories about real people creat-
ing their adventures by traveling the world and beyond. Some examples of outdoor
adventures are Heinrich Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet (1953), Norman MacLean’s
Young Men and Fire (1992), Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory (1981), travel writer Bill
Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods (1998), Alexandra David-Neel’s My Journey to
Lhasa (1927), Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989), Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki (1950),
Joe Kane’s Running the Amazon (1989), Bernard Moitessier’s The Long Way
(1971), Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958), journalist Jon
Krakauer’s Into Thin Air (1997) and Into the Wild (1996), journalist Tim Cahill’s
Jaguars Ripped My Flesh (1987), Piers Paul Read’s Alive (1974), Sebastian Junger’s
The Perfect Storm (1997), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand, and Stars
(1939), Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard (1978), novelist Graham Greene’s
Journey Without Maps (1936), James Tobin’s To Conquer the Air (2003), Nathaniel
Philbrink’s Sea of Glory (2003), Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins’s autobiogra-
phy Carrying the Fire (1974), naturalist John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra
(1911), F.A. Worsley’s Endurance (1931), Ernest Shackleton’s autobiography South
(1919), and mountaineer Reinhold Messner’s The Crystal Horizon (1982). Maurice
Herzog’s Annapurna (1952) inspired many mountain climbers such as Reinhold
Messner and Ed Veisters who chronicled his own adventures of climbing all 14 of
the world’s highest peaks in his 2006 autobiography No Shortcuts to the Top.
Apsley Cherry-Gerrard’s The Worst Journey in the World (1922) is considered to be
the National Geographic’s number one adventure book, followed by Meriwether
Lewis and William Clark’s Journals (1814). Women also played the role of adventur-
ers, detailed in such accounts as Osa Johnson’s I Married Adventure (1940); Arlene
Blum’s Annapurna: A Woman’s Place (1980), an autobiography of the ascent of
Annapurna, by a team of women, two of whom died; Isabella L. Bird’s A Lady’s Life
in the Rocky Mountains (1879); and Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa (1897).
Alive and The Perfect Storm were both made into blockbuster movies in 1993
and 2000, respectively, as was Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet in 1997 starring Brad
Pitt. Isak Dinesen’s novel Out of Africa (1937) was also made into a movie starring
Robert Redford and Meryl Streep in 1985. The movie won seven Academy Awards,
including Best Picture in 1986. Endurance, based on Ernest Shackleton’s journey to
Antarctica, was developed in 2002 as an A&E Channel miniseries entitled Shackleton
starring British actor Kenneth Branagh. Mountaineer Joe Simpson’s Touching the
Void (1988) was made into a documentary film in 2003.
16 ADVENTURE FICTION

Context and Issues. In nonfiction adventure, the author as the main character
usually comments on ideas and experiences that contribute to their personal iden-
tity, as well as developing skills of travel and survival through the adventure. Often
authors, or their critics, describe their writings as outlets for their personal and spir-
itual development, as can be seen Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard (1978).
Many nonfictional accounts of adventure begin as a quest, as the author develops a
route of travel that has a purpose, either of exploration, self-discovery, sport, or a com-
bination of all three. Jon Krakauer utilized all three of these aspects when he was first
propositioned for a journey to Mt. Everest in 1996. A mountaineer and a journalist,
Krakauer has written several articles and books about his experiences at a high alti-
tude. His experience on Everest in the spring of 1996 also became a soul-searching
endeavor, as he witnessed one of the worst death tolls on the mountain. Eventually
adventure becomes a commodity—adventure for a price. Armchair travelers have, at
their advantage, movies and television that takes them to places they have never been,
doing things they may never do. Average people do not need to go anywhere to expe-
rience the beauty of a different country, but they do miss out on the true culture, the
true nature of people. Essentially, they miss out on the experience, the thrill and the
excitement. “Without the possibility of death,” said mountaineer and author Reinhold
Messner, “adventure is not possible” (Alexander 2006, 44).
Messner is first a mountaineer, and second a writer. He penned the story of his
adventures in The Crystal Horizon (1982), which is filled with danger, excitement,
life, death, and rebirth. He embodies the real-life hero of adventure, knowing the
risks involved with climbing mountains, sometimes alone and without bottled
oxygen. But when Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world, has been con-
quered, explorers look to what is beyond the planet and explore the stars as Apollo
11 Command Module Pilot Michael Collins details in his autobiography Carrying
the Fire (1974). In a 1923 interview with The New York Times, mountaineer
George Mallory made famous, , the phrase “because it’s there” (Knowles 2001),
meaning that the mountain was there to climb, the moon was there to explore, and
adventure is all around for us to experience.
Reception. Action novels are becoming increasingly popular, and many movies
have been made because of the theatrical success of the original action adventure
films, such as Star Wars (1977–2005), the Indiana Jones trilogy (1981–1989), the
Mummy trilogy (1999–2005), The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003), The
Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy (2003–2007), and The Harry Potter films (which
began in 2002). Other adventure movies include The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
(1948), The Crimson Pirate (1952), The African Queen (1951), Romancing the
Stone (1984), The Goonies (1985), National Treasure (2004), multiple remakes of
King Solomon’s Mines (1937, 1950, and 1985), The Lord of the Flies (1963 and
1990) based on the novel by William Golding, and Sahara (2005) based on the
novel by Clive Cussler.
Many successful action and adventure films are based on best-selling thriller
novels. Both The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter movies were originally
based on best sellers. The second book in C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia
series, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), was developed into a highly
successful film in 2005. The popularity of the film version of adventure books has
been overwhelming. The films are easily accessible, and the visual effects are often
elaborately planned and well executed. Examples of movies based on such novels
include John Grisham’s The Pelican Brief (1992), The Client (1994), The Firm
 ADVENTURE FICTION 17

(1991), and The Rainmaker (1995); Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity (1980),
The Bourne Supremacy (1986) and The Bourne Ultimatum (1990); and Michael
Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990) and The Andromeda Strain (1969). Each movie
contains a popular actor or actress to enhance the film’s marketability, along with
special effects and continuous action throughout the film. Other novels that were
turned into popular films include Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes (1921),
which spawned numerous movies and television shows; Forster’s novels A Room
with a View (1908) and A Passage to India (1924); and Ian Fleming’s famous char-
acter James Bond, also known as 007, originally created in 1952 and turned into
such movies as Dr. No (1962), Goldfinger (1964), and Live and Let Die (1973).
After Fleming’s death, other authors have kept the Bond name alive with new adven-
tures in novels and such blockbuster movies as The World Is Not Enough (1999)
and Die Another Day (2002). Casino Royale, based on Fleming’s 1953 novel, was
released in 2006.
Authors and Their Adventures. Adventure travel writers differ from adventure fiction
writers in that the travel writers write about their own adventures, whereas fiction
adventure writers write about an adventure that happened to fictional characters
that has been embellished to create a sense of heightened excitement and intense
anticipation. Adventure travel writers, however, have written harrowing adventures
that are based in reality; and, for the reader, knowing that the story is true creates
a different kind of excitement. The reader usually experiences anxiety and concern
for the characters, who are often the authors themselves, and because they know
that the story is true, they often experience empathy for the author, the people
involved in the story, and the land and the culture as well. Not every adventure turns
out fine, as it does in adventure fiction. Examples are Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne
Identity (1980) and Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990).

Selected Authors
Mark Twain (1835–1910). Mark Twain was one of the first American authors to be
considered a travel writer, basing most of his work throughout his life on the jour-
neys he had taken in the United States and Europe. Born Samuel Langhorne
Clemens, Mark Twain began his writing career writing articles for local newspapers
and magazines about his traveling experiences. As a young man in 1851, he worked
as a typesetter at the Hannibal Journal, owned by his brother Orion Clemens, in his
hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. There he was given the opportunity to contribute
articles to the paper. Twain also worked as a printer in various cities including
Cincinnati, St. Louis, New York, and Philadelphia, but it was the steamboats of the
Mississippi River that he loved. Twain studied the maps of the Mississippi River’s
2,000-plus miles over the course of several years, earning his steamboat piloting
license in 1959, and he continued to work on the ships until 1861 when the Civil
War began, which immediately halted the travel and the trade of the steamboats
along the river.
In 1863, he and his brother Orion traveled for two weeks across the Great Plains
and the Rocky Mountains, finally settling in Virginia City, Nevada. These travels
would become the basis for his nonfiction book Roughing It (1872) and his short
story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, published in the New
York Saturday Press on November 18, 1865, and finally as a novel in 1867. Twain
was also given the opportunity to travel to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) to write
18 ADVENTURE FICTION

about his experience for the Sacramento Union newspaper based in California. In
the summer of 1867, Twain took a trip on the cruise ship Quaker City. His compi-
lation of travel letters, published as Innocents Abroad in 1869, was written during
this time as he traveled though Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. A
Tramp Abroad, published in 1880, is based on a second trip to Europe. In 1875,
Twain published a series of essays titled Old Times on the Mississippi in the Atlantic
Monthly, which he eventually turned into a nonfiction book titled Life on the
Mississippi in 1883.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published in 1876, was one of Twain’s first works
of fiction. It was closely based on Twain’s own life as a boy in Hannibal, Missouri.
Another novel to follow took Tom Sawyer’s friend, Huckleberry Finn, on his own
adventures with a runaway slave named Jim. The story was set during the 1850s
when slavery was still legal. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884,
became more successful than Tom Sawyer. The book was well received with the
public, cheering Huck’s sense of rightness and his refusal to conform to the preju-
dices of society just because they were the popular belief. Although the book was
banned in many schools in the latter half of the 1900s because of language consid-
ered by today’s standards as vulgar, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn proved that
adventure novels can have depth; instead of just exploring the landscape. The
character, too, can grow to reflect society.
Willard Price: The Adventure Series (1887–1983). Willard DeMille Price wrote many
stories based on his travels around the world, including his work editing for the
journals Survey and World Outlook. From 1920 to 1967, Price traveled for the
National Geographic Society and for the American Museum of Natural History. In
1949, he wrote a series of children’s adventure novels.

My aim in writing the ‘Adventure’ series for young people was to lead them to read by
making reading exciting and full of adventure. At the same time I want to inspire an
interest in wild animals and their behavior. Judging from the letters I have received
from boys and girls around the world, I believe I have helped open to them the worlds
of books and natural history. (Rubinstein 2005)

Price wrote 14 Adventure Series books from 1949 until 1980: Amazon Adventure
(1949), South Sea Adventure (1952), Underwater Adventure (1954), Volcano
Adventure (1956), Whale Adventure (1960), African Adventure (1963), Elephant
Adventure (1964), Safari Adventure (1966), Lion Adventure (1967), Gorilla Adven-
ture (1969), Diving Adventure (1970), Cannibal Adventure (1972), Tiger Adventure
(1979), and Arctic Adventure (1980).
Fellow children’s author Fiona Waters said of Price’s novels: “The exploits may
be fiction, but the facts and settings could only have come from real life; Price’s tales
are based on his own tumultuous and action-packed life” (Rubinstein 2005).
His passion was for traveling and learning about different cultures and geography.
His travel books Rivers I Have Known (1965), Key to Japan (1946), Adventures in
Paradise, Tahiti and Beyond (1955), and The Amazing Amazon (1952), all contain
photos, maps, and sketches made by Price during his travels.
Price also wrote nonfiction stories based on his own life adventures, such as
Ancient Peoples at New Tasks (1918, for the Missionary Education Movement),
Japan Rides the Tiger (1952), Japan’s Island of Mystery (1944), The Japanese
Miracle and Peril (1971), and My Own Life of Adventure: Travels in 148 Lands
 ADVENTURE FICTION 19

(1982). Price also wrote articles for Harper’s Magazine from 1935 to 1942, explor-
ing territorial expansion of the islands of the Pacific as well as military policy and
the political situations of Japan, Korea, and China.
Enid Blyton 1897–1968. In contrast to Price, Enid Blyton wrote several children’s
books for the British Publications Adventure Series. Blyton also wrote many tales of
adventure for television and movie production. Her adventure series consists of the
novels The Island of Adventure (1944), The Castle of Adventure (1946), The Valley
of Adventure (1947), The Sea of Adventure (1948), The Mountain Adventure
(1945), The Ship of Adventure (1950), The Circus of Adventure (1952), and The
River of Adventure (1955). Two of these novels were made into movies for British
television: The Island of Adventure in 1982 and The Castle of Adventure in 1990
(IMDb.com 2007).
Blyton also wrote many other novels for children, about 300 titles in all, but later
in life, she was accused of having a limited vocabulary, even for younger readers and
it was said that her stories were rife with sexism, racism, and English snobbishness
(Stoney 2006). Unlike Price who had really had adventures, Blyton had stayed for
most of her life in England, writing stories from her imagination rather than from
real travel experience.
National Geographic Society (1888–). Started in 1888 by 33 explorers and scientists,
the National Geographic Society began as a way to learn more about the geography
of the world. The first president of the society was Gardiner Greene Hubbard. Upon
his death in 1897, Hubbard’s son-in-law, Alexander Graham Bell, became his suc-
cessor. In turn, Bell’s son-in-law, Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor, became the first editor
of the National Geographic magazine in 1889. Grosvenor incorporated photo-
graphs and stories of travel and adventure to add to the intrigue of geography, and
published studies of the people and cultures of different countries. The magazine
also features maps, is published quarterly, and has been translated into 31 different
languages. From 1919 until 1975, the National Geographic Society distributed a
monthly newsletter for schools. The school newsletter’s title was changed to
National Geographic World in 1975 and again in 2001 to National Geographic
Kids. Other publications include National Geographic Traveler, created in 1984,
and National Geographic Adventure in 1999. The society also publishes many
atlases, maps, travel guidebooks, and other larger photography books about specific
travel destinations.
In 1964, the society began a television program in conjunction with CBS. The
program moved to ABC in 1973, and in 1975 made its final move to PBS. In
1997, National Geographic launched its own cable channel, appropriately titled
the National Geographic Channel. The channel gives viewers 24-hour access to
the programs that originated in the 1970s and continues to make groundbreak-
ing discoveries on Earth and in space exploration. The society also produces
feature-length films and documentaries such as the adventure film K-19: The
Widowmaker (2002) and March of the Penguins (2005), which won an Academy
Award in 2006.
The National Geographic Society also awards grants for research. Among the
more famous recipients of these grants are Lewis Leakey and his wife Mary, who
in the latter half of the twentieth century spearheaded primate research in Africa
and Indonesia. His researchers included Jane Goodall who studied chimpanzees
in northern Africa, Dian Fossey who studied mountain gorillas in Rwanda and
Uganda, and Biruté Galdikas who studied the orangutan in Indonesia. Leakey,
20 ADVENTURE FICTION

along with his wife Mary and son Richard, made a name for his family and for
the society as a physical anthropologist, uncovering many of the historical arche-
ological digs in British East Africa, Nairobi, and Kenya and at the now-famous
Olduvai gorge, where Mary Leakey made her most important discovery of an
early hominid skull that she named Zinganthropus, which was dated at from 1 to
1.75 million years old.
Leakey helped create the growing interest in the National Geographic Society,
filming many television specials that ran in the 1970s in prime time. In addition to
the famous Leakey projects, the National Geographic Society also funded expedi-
tions Ian Baker’s exploration of the legendary “hidden waterfalls” of the Tsangpo
Gorge in Tibet in 1998 and 1999, Robert Bartlett’s arctic exploration from 1925 to
1945, Hiram Bingham’s 1911 excavation of Machu Picchu in Peru, and Jacques-
Yves Cousteau’s many underwater explorations and television specials.
Tim Cahill (1943–), Road Fever (1991) and Lost in My Own Back Yard (2004). Tim Cahill
is considered one of the foremost adventure writers by Outside magazine, the
National Geographic Society, and fellow travel writer Bill Bryson, who said, “Partly
the reason Tim Cahill is adventurous is because he’s an adventurous kind of guy.
He’s more inclined than the rest of us to do adventurous and brave things, partly
because he knows he can write it very skillfully, but also because he’s drawn to those
types of things. He’s in his element in those situations” (Shapiro 2004, 135). Cahill
became a journalist for the San Francisco Examiner and Rolling Stone magazine in
the early 1970s. In 1976, he started Outside magazine with friends Michael Rogers
and Harriet Fier. Today it is one of the leading outdoors adventure magazines.
Cahill has been around the world collecting sources for his stories, often includ-
ing more than one continent in a book. For example, in Road Fever: A High Speed
Travelogue (1991), Cahill and friend Garry Sowerby drive 15,000 miles, starting at
the southernmost tip of Tierra del Fuego, the main island south of Chile in South
America, and ending at Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, a trip made in only 231⁄2 days.
“Adventure is physical or emotional discomfort recollected in tranquility. An adven-
ture is never an adventure when it’s happening. An adventure is only an adventure
when you’ve had time to sit back and think about it” (Shapiro 2004, 10). This
adventure includes humor juxtaposed alongside their everyday troubles, which
include the weather conditions, revolution, and stale food.
Cahill’s other books include Jaguars Ripped My Flesh: Adventure Is a Risky Busi-
ness (1987), A Wolverine is Eating My Leg (1989), and Pass the Butterworms:
Remote Journeys Oddly Rendered (1997). In 2004, Cahill was given the opportu-
nity to explore one of his favorite spots, Yellowstone National Park. Lost in My
Own Back Yard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park, published in 2004, was
written with permission from his editors, even though an abundance of travel books
about that area had been written in previous years. Cahill claims that he must have
had “the capacity to see it with fresh eyes” (Shapiro 2004, 12).
Peter Matthiessen (1927–), The Snow Leopard (1978) and In the Spirit of Crazy Horse
(1983). Peter Matthiessen is a naturalist and author of historical nonfiction as well
as fiction. He was one of the founding fathers of a literary journal called The Paris
Review in 1953; some claim the journal was just a cover for his involvement in the
CIA. Besides writing for The Paris Review, Matthiessen also wrote for The New
Yorker magazine and for the Atlantic Monthly. His novel At Play in the Fields of
the Lord (1965) was nominated for a National Book Award and in 1991 was made
into a film of the same name.
 ADVENTURE FICTION 21

His first two novels Race Rock (1954) and Partisans (1955) were published to lit-
tle acclaim, and it wasn’t until his nonfiction environmental piece Wildlife in
America (1959) that Matthiessen discovered what his real passion.

My earliest nonfiction book, Wildlife in America, was about wildlife and the environment,
and I’ve always been concerned with it. A parallel concern was traditional people who are
also threatened, their languages and their culture, and they too show up in Wildlife in
America. One cannot really separate those concerns, the environment and biodiversity and
social justice. They’re all tied in very closely together. (Shapiro 2004, 347)

Matthiessen’s 1983 nonfiction story, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, shows his passion
for the environment, native culture, and social justice. The main story is about Leonard
Peltier, a member of the 1970s American Indian Movement (AIM), who was allegedly
involved in the deaths of two FBI agents during a standoff between several members of
AIM and the FBI near Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1975. Of the four members
of AIM that were indicted, Peltier was the only one to be convicted and is currently
serving several consecutive life sentences. Matthiessen delves into the controversy sur-
rounding the case as well as the overall treatment of Native Americans on the Pine
Ridge reservation in South Dakota, the poorest reservation in the United States.
Adventure novels were once written without much character development, but as
the authors of such novels started to do more exploring and research for their
works, the criteria for the characters of the books also changed. One such example
lies within the text of Matthiessen’s nonfiction book The Snow Leopard (1978),
which won the contemporary thought category of the National Book Award in
1979. In 1995, freelance writer Amanda Jones was stranded in Calcutta, India,
when she was given a copy of Matthiessen’s book as a gift from her Sherpa. She was
drawn to the book because it mirrored much of her own travel at the time, but she
was also drawn to the personal journey Matthiessen experienced that helped form
the thesis of his book.

A year prior to the trip, the writer’s wife had died of cancer. The Snow Leopard is an
excruciatingly beautiful and honest account of what turned into a tough spiritual and
physical journey. With the energy that great travel writers have coursing through their
veins, Matthiessen walked me, pace by pace, over those mountain passes, through the
precepts of Buddhism and the valleys of his soul. (Jones 2007)

Inspired by his travels, Matthiessen devoted his life to the study of Zen Buddhism.
For him, travel is a spiritual journey, and the evidence is found throughout The Snow
Leopard. Matthiessen began this journey at the invitation of naturalist and zoologist
George Schaller to join him in his study of the Himalayan blue sheep in the Dolpo
region of the Nepalese Himalayas. This expedition would give Matthiessen, who was
studying Buddhism at the time, a prime opportunity to visit with ancient Tibetan
Buddhist monks living in a remote and isolated area of Nepal, and to “possibly
glimpse the most elusive of all great cats, the ice-eyed snow leopard” (Jones 2007).
Matthiessen did not see a snow leopard, but he did meet with his Buddhist mentors
and continued his practice, becoming a Buddhist teacher in the late 1990s.
Jon Krakauer (1954–), Into the Wild (1996), Into Thin Air (1997). Jon Krakauer
received a degree in environmental studies at Hampshire College in Massachusetts.
He began his writing career with articles in magazines such as the American Alpine
22 ADVENTURE FICTION

Journal and later Outside and Playboy. He began mountain climbing in 1974,
which helped give him an edge in outdoor adventure journalism. His familiarity
with the Brooks Range in Alaska, and later the Stikine Icecap region of Alaska,
would help him develop articles leading to the publication of Eiger Dreams (1990),
a compilation of articles detailing his success and failures with mountain climbing.
He was also able to identify with the subject of his book Into the Wild (1996), a
story about Christopher McCandless, who, after graduating from Emory Univer-
sity, gave away all of his money and possessions, changed his name, and set out to
live alone in the Alaskan wilderness. Krakauer could understand McCandless’s
need for isolation because he has searched for isolation in the mountains. Several
months after McCandless’s disappearance, his body was discovered near an aban-
doned bus. His only possessions were a .22 caliber rifle, a camera, and literature by
authors Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, and Jack London.
Krakauer’s best-known work is the 1997 book Into Thin Air, a nonfiction work
about his experience climbing Mount Everest in May 1996 and the tragedy that
occurred. He found that, with travel to high places more reachable, the top of the
world became more quickly accessible. The summit of Mount Everest was once an
exclusive club for only the most experienced and adventurous climbers, but now it
could be bought for the right price:

The slopes of Everest did not lack for dreamers in the spring of 1996; the credentials
of many who’d come to climb the mountain were as thin as mine, or thinner. When it
came time for each of us to assess our own abilities and weigh them against the formi-
dable challenges of the world’s highest mountain, it sometimes seemed as though half
the population at Base Camp was clinically delusional. But perhaps this shouldn’t come
as a surprise. Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless
romantics, and others with a shaky hold on reality. (88)

Krakauer describes the ascent and descent of two of the climbing parties that ven-
tured to the summit on May 10, 1996, led by Rob Hall and Scott Fischer. Krakauer
was sent to the mountain on assignment for Outside magazine in March of the same
year, slated to be on New Zealander Rob Hall’s team. Around 1 P.M. on May 10, a
storm approached the mountain, but as Krakauer noted, teams were still heading up
the mountain to the summit rather than heading back down to shelter. “Why did
veteran Himalayan guides keep moving upward, ushering a gaggle of relatively inex-
perienced amateurs—each of whom had paid as much as $65,000 to be taken safely
up Everest—into an apparent death trap?” (6). Six people would lose their lives that
day because of the storm. On record as one of the worst climbing tragedies in
Everest history, the season itself went on record with 15 deaths, making it the dead-
liest year ever for climbers.
Bill Bryson (1951–), A Walk in the Woods (1998). Prior to becoming a travel writer,
Bryson wrote columns for a British newspaper, often resubmitting the same travel
story to several papers in both England and the United States, but his adventures were
what people were to read about. Michael Shapiro claims that “Reading one of
(Bryson’s) books feels like visiting with an old friend who spins the most amazing
tales; you laugh, you learn, you long for more” (Shapiro 2004, 130).
Bryson didn’t originally set out to be a travel writer, but when he started to write
with a humorous twist about the places he had been, he found that he had a talent
for writing about these experiences and adventures. In an interview with Michael
 ADVENTURE FICTION 23

Shapiro, Bryson said: “I had no desire to become a travel writer, in fact it never
occurred to me to think of myself as that” (Shapiro 2004, 134). His first book, The
Palace Under the Alps and Over 200 Other Unusual, Unspoiled, and Infrequently
Visited Spots in 16 European Countries (1985), was written about one of his many
trips to Europe. Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe (1991) also documented
his early travels in Europe.
After returning to the United States, with his wife whom he met in England on
one of his first journeys through Europe, Bryson wrote The Lost Continent: Travels
in Small-Town America (1989). In 1989, Bryson returned to the United States after
living in England for many years, settling in New Hampshire. Of this experience
Bryson wrote I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After
Twenty Years Away (1998) and A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on
the Appalachian Trail (1998). In I’m a Stranger Here Myself, he describes how, even
though he was born in the United States, he still felt out of place returning to this
country after being away for so long. “It’s weird in the United States because it’s all
changed—three years later it’s not recognizable . . . It’s so hard in the States to find
anything the way it used to be. In Europe it’s exactly the opposite—you can go back
and nothing has changed. It’s the same café and still the same old waiter” (Shapiro
2004, 139–140).
His most popular travel book is A Walk in the Woods, which spent many weeks
on The New York Times best-seller list in 1998 and again in 1999 when the paper-
back edition was released. When he told his family and friends that he had decided
to walk the greater part of the Appalachian Trail from New Hampshire to Georgia,
not everyone was enthusiastic about his new adventure:

Nearly everyone I talked to had some gruesome story involving a guileless acquaintance
who had gone off hiking the trail with high hopes and new boots and come stumbling
back two days later with a bobcat attached to his head or dripping blood from an arm-
less sleeve and whispering in a hoarse voice, ‘Bear!’ before sinking into a troubled
unconsciousness. (5)

The story relates the adventures of Bryson and his friend Stephen Katz, who
had made an appearance in Bryson’s earlier book Neither Here nor There. Katz,
as he is called, provides much of the entertainment for the trip as Bryson
describes hiking across miles of trails, though rain, sleeping out in tents, and find-
ing salvation in a gas station convenience store. Bryson also describes the scenery
in detail, expressing his concern about the trees that are disappearing due to cli-
mate change and the garbage people leave along the trail. He also explores how
Americans can become more environmentally conscious about their national
parks and nature in general.
Paul Theroux (1941–), The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). Adventure novelist Paul
Theroux traveled the world for inspiration and stories for his many novels and travel
essays. As a contributor to The Smithsonian magazine, The New Yorker, and Time
Asia, Theroux gained experience writing about his travels for scholarly journals, giv-
ing him the freedom to be honest about his discoveries, even if he found things to be
unpleasant. In an interview with Theroux, author Michael Shapiro asked him what
his worst experience traveling was, to which Theroux replied: “There are no ‘worst’
in the negative sense. There are only experiences which are the very stuff of my
24 ADVENTURE FICTION

books” (Shapiro 2004, 158). His travel experience fed his passion for writing, and as
a result he authored many fictional and nonfictional books about traveling and
adventure. “Even if I were not a writer I would be a traveler” (Shapiro 2004, 154).
In reference to the travel narrative of The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), Shapiro
claimed, “(Theroux) eschewed florid prose in favor of unvarnished observations,
peppered with abundant dialog” (Shapiro 2004, 150). Theroux loved overland travel
as can be seen in his two other railroad-themed novels, The Old Patagonian Express
(1979) and Riding the Iron Rooster (1988), but The Great Railway Bazaar would
become his best known work, detailing Theroux’s trip by train through Great
Britain, western and eastern Europe, the Middle East, south and southeast Asia and
Japan, and Russia. “The only worthwhile trip is what you call a challenging trip”
(Shapiro 2004, 154). Theroux’s other nonfiction books include Sunrise with Sea-
monsters (1985), The Happy Isles of Oceania (1992), and The Pillars of Hercules
(1995). His fiction novels include Waldo (1967), Sinning with Annie (1972), The
London Embassy (1982), My Other Life (1996), and Blinding Light (2006).
Theroux was also a part of the Peace Corps in Malawi, Africa, from 1963 to
1965, and he later moved to Uganda to teach at Makerere University, basing his
novel Dark Star Safari (2002) on his experiences there. Theroux comments: “Travel
is a form of autobiography. This book is not about Africa—this is a book about my
trip through Africa—this book is, I suppose, about me” (Shapiro 2004, 151).
Theroux gives rich descriptions of the people and places that he experiences, giving
them almost larger-than-life characteristics in his books, which also made them
perfect for film adaptation. Theroux’s 1973 novel Saint Jack was made into a movie
by director Peter Bogdanovich in 1979; the novel Doctor Slaughter (1984) was
adapted to become the film Half Moon Street, released in 1986; and The Mosquito
Coast (1981) was made into a film in 1986, starring Harrison Ford, Helen Mirren,
and River Phoenix.

Bibliography
Adams, P.G. Travelers and Travel Liars 1600–1800. New York: Dover, 1962.
Adler, J. “Origins of Sightseeing.” Annals of Tourism Research 16 (1989): 7–29.
Alexander, Caroline. “Murdering the Impossible.” National Geographic Magazine
5 (November 2006): 42–67
Ashworth, G.J., and Tunbridge, J.E. The Tourist—Historic City. London: Belhaven Press,
1990.
Bassett, Jan, ed. Great Southern Landings: An Anthology of Antipodean Travel. Melbourne:
Oxford University Press, 1995.
Broc, Numa. La géographie des philosophes: Géographes et voyageurs français au XVIIIe
siècle. Thèse: Université de Montpellier, 1972.
Bryson, Bill. A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail. New
York: Broadway Books, 1998.
Burgess, Anthony, and Haskell, Francis, Le Grand Siècle du Voyage (1967). Paris: Albin
Michel, 1968.
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand. Journey to the End of the Night. New York: New Directions, 1934.
Colins, Michael. Carrying the Fire. New York: Ballantine, 1974.
Coupland, Douglas. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. New York: St. Martin’s,
1991.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York:
Zone, 1995.
Devitt, Amy J. Writing Genres. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004.
 ADVENTURE FICTION 25

Forster, E.M. A Passage to India. London: Arnold, 1924.

Fussell, Paul, ed. The Norton Book of Travel. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1987.
Hanbury-Tenison, Robin. The Oxford Book of Exploration. Oxford University Press, 1993.
Ghose, Indira. Memsahibs Abroad: Writings by Women Travelers in Nineteenth Century
India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Helterman, Jeffrey, and Lyman, Richard. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit, MI:
Gale, 1978.
Hibbert, Christopher. The Grand Tour. London: Thames Methuen, 1987.
IMDb. “Enid Blyton.” March 16, 2007. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0090067/.
Jones, Amanda. “Wander Lust, Peter Matthiessen.” Salon.com. 8 July 1997.
http://www.salon.com/july97/wanderlust/matthiessen970708.html.
Knowles, Elizabeth. “World of Words: A Quote from George Leigh Mallory.” Ask Oxford.com.
2007. http://www.askoxford.com/worldofwords/quotations/quotefrom/mallory/
?view=uk.
Krakauer, Jon. Into Thin Air. New York: Random House, 1997.
Leed, Eric J. The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism. New York:
Basic Books, 1991.
MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999.
Matthiessen, Peter. In The Spirit of Crazy Horse. New York: Penguin, 1983.
———. The Snow Leopard. New York: Penguin Nature Classics, 1987.
Messner, Reinhold. The Crystal Horizon. Seattle, WA: Mountaineers, 1982.
Pettinger, Alasdair. Always Elsewhere: Travels of the Black Atlantic. London: Cassell, 1999.
Poole, Robert M. Explorers House: National Geographic and the World It Made. New York:
Penguin, 2004.
Price, Willard. Adventures in Paradise, Tahiti and Beyond. New York: John Day Co., 1955.
———. The Amazing Amazon. New York: John Day Co., 1952.
———. Key to Japan. New York: John Day Co., 1946.
———. Odd Way Around the World. New York: John Day Co., 1969.
———. Rivers I Have Known. New York: John Day Co., 1965.
Robinson, Keith. “Enid Blyton.” Enid Blyton.net. 2004. http://www.enidblyton.net/index.html.
Rojek, Chris, ed. Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory. New York:
Routledge, 1997.
Rubinstein, Matt. “Adventure Adventure.” June 11 2005. http://mattrubinstein.com.au/?p=78.
Shapiro, Michael. A Sense of Place. Berkeley: Publishers Group West, 2004.
Smith, Valene L. Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism. University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1989.
Stoney, Barbara. Enid Blyton: The Biography. London: NPI Media Group, 2006.
Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Webster, 1884.
———. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. New York: American, 1876.
———. Innocents Abroad. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1869.
———. Life on the Mississippi. Boston, MA: Osgood, 1883.
———. Old Times on the Mississippi. Toronto: Belford, 1876.
———. Roughing It. New York: Harper, 1872.
———. A Tramp Abroad. London: Chatto & Windus, 1880.

Further Reading
Adams, P.G. Travelers and Travel Liars 1600–1800. New York: Dover, 1962; Fussell, Paul, ed.
The Norton Book of Travel. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1987; Hanbury-Tenison, Robin.
The Oxford Book of Exploration. Oxford University Press, 1993; Ghose, Indira. Memsahibs
Abroad: Writings by Women Travelers in Nineteenth Century India. New Delhi: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1998; Hibbert, Christopher, The Grand Tour, London: Thames Methuen, 1987;
26 AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Leed, Eric J. The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism. New York: Basic
Books, 1991; MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. University
of California Press, 1999; Pettinger, Alasdair. Always Elsewhere: Travels of the Black Atlantic.
London: Cassell, 1999; Smith, Valene L. Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism.
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.
ANNE BAHRINGER

AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Definition. African American literature is the verbal organization of experiences
into oral forms, such as spirituals, work songs, blues, and sermons; and into written
forms, such as autobiography, poetry, fiction, drama, essay, and letter (Henderson
1973, 4). Produced by writers of African descent, the oral and written genres are
closely tied to African Americans’ ways of life, their needs, their aspirations, and
their history—in short, their culture (Henderson 1973, 4). Since the mid-twentieth
century, African American literature has gained an ever-increasing celebratory and
scholarly status in the United States. As editors and critics contend, it is rare to find
a library that does not collect or a bookstore that does not market literary works by
African Americans. Even in the academy, African American writers, particularly
those who have earned the prestigious honors of the National and American Book
Awards, the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the Pulitzer Prize are increasingly
included in newly reconstituted curricula in American literature, American studies,
women studies, and ethnic studies. What must not be lost in this literary paean for
African American arts and letters is that African American writing as literature has
been a long time coming in the United States (Andrews, Foster, Harris 1997), and
today’s writers stand on the shoulders of writers from ages beyond, whose roles
have been complexly accommodating, apologetic, and experimental.

History
Accommodation and Protest. During the Slave and Reconstruction eras in the United
States, African American writers produced accommodating works that said what
seemed acceptable to their largely white audiences (Davis and Redding 1971, 5). The
most notable accommodating writers of the eighteenth century include Lucy Terry,
Jupiter Hammon, Phyllis Wheatley, and George Moses Horton. In 1746, with the bal-
lad “Bar’s Fight,” Lucy Terry published the first literary work in African American arts
and letters. As an exemplary genre, “Bar’s Fight” (1997), however, does not emulate a
structural form from African American culture. Instead of relying on multiple meters,
improvisation, or call and response that are found in African American spirituals or
work songs, Terry’s work preserves the standard rhymed tetrameter couplet:

The Indians did in ambush lay,

Some very valiant men to slay, (Stanza 1, lines 3–4)

The content of Terry’s ballad also reflects the accommodating trend in African
American arts and letters in the eighteenth century. Set in 1745, in the regional
meadows of Deerfield, Massachusetts, the African American writer’s work focuses
on an Indian ambush of two notable white, New England families.
Some 20 years after Terry’s “Bar’s Fight,” writer Jupiter Hammon emerges as yet
another accommodating artist of the eighteenth century. Throughout his lifetime,
with support largely from Quaker abolitionists, Hammon publishes a number of
 AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE 27

essays, including “A Winter Piece: Being a Serious Exhortation, With a Call to the
Unconverted”; “A Short Contemplation on the Death of Jesus”; “An Evening’s
Improvement, Showing the Necessity of Beholding the Lamb of God”; and “An
Address to the Negroes of the State of New York.” Appearing first in anti-slavery
periodicals also are Hammon’s essays that understandably promote an anti-slavery
sentiment: “An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ, with Penetential (sic) Cries”
and “Salvation Comes by Christ Alone.” Critics cannot agree on what makes the
works of Jupiter Hammon African American. Enthusiasts such as Sandra O’Neale
argue that when using choice words such as “my brethren,” “Africans by nation,”
and/or “Ethiopians,” Hammon is coding his writings with protest of African
American life in the 1800s (Hammon, 72–73). Earlier critics such as Arthur P. Davis
and Sterling Brown, however, are adamant in their critiques of Hammon’s protest
writings. Both contend Hammon’s protest comes in the form of subtle irony that is
overshadowed by his use of “common-metre hymn doggerel” (Davis and Redding, 5):

Lord turn our dark benighted Souls;

Give us a true Motion,
And let the Hearts of all the World,
Make Christ their Salvation. (Stanza 1, lines 45–48)

The sermonic language of Hammon’s “An Evening Thought” and “Salvation

Comes by Christ Alone” suggests the role of the writer in his works is that of folk
preacher. Expectantly, he is to help move African American life toward a sense of
spiritual wholeness (Hubbard 1994, 383). But, after close scrutiny, Hammon’s per-
formance seems reminiscent of evangelical preachers of the Great Awakening in
early history in the United States. Undeniably, Hammon counsels fellow slaves to
expect “salvation,” “freedom,” and “equality” after death.
Phyllis Wheatley publishes her first poem “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin” in 1767.
Six years later, she publishes Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the first
collection of writings by an African American. Unlike her African American literary
peers of the eighteenth century, Wheatley’s style is sophisticated in meter and elegant
in control. Like her literary peers, however, as a writer, Wheatley is accommodating to
her audience. She models her work after neoclassical writer Alexander Pope who
insisted on displaying respect for structure and rules by way of his structural use of the
heroic couplet; his admiration for reason and judgment via his classical allusions; and
his striving for desirable human qualities that are intimated in his achievement of neat-
ness and precision (Cuddon 1991, 578). Like the neoclassical writer in general, in her
poetry, Wheatley models being intensely moralistic and religious, and she maintains
lyrical restraint that is regarded as one of the highest of virtues (Davis 1971, 4).
A number of critics who have looked beyond Wheatley’s accommodating poet-
ics recognize in her poems a subversive tone of protest via her duality of meaning.
For instance, the masking of protest in “To Maecenas” is reminiscent of multiplic-
ity of meaning often demonstrated in the spirituals and work songs. In African
American oral genres such as the spirituals and work songs, creators drew atten-
tion to their circumstances via repeated personal situations. Wheatley saturates her
poem with personable situations while simultaneously she draws attention to her
questioning of her situations as “partial grace.” She asks why she is unable to suc-
ceed as a serious poet, or why the African American race is unable to succeed as a
group? In “On Imagination,” Wheatley offers her work to literary scrutiny. The
28 AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

poet allows her imagination to wonder in order to question the inhumanity of slav-
ery in the eighteenth century. Ironically, attention is drawn to Wheatley’s protest
when her lines invoke Samuel Johnson’s warning to classical writers to avoid “let-
ting the imagination run away with one” (Cuddon 1991, 578).
George Moses Horton is perhaps the most versatile of the accommodating writ-
ers of the eighteenth century. Like his literary peers, Horton’s poetry is predeter-
mined: It is formulaic (Davis 1971, 4). But, unlike his peers, Horton’s poetry is
influenced by varied personal experiences other than slavery. For instance, for a time
at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Horton was a servant to sev-
eral college students. The students often commissioned him to write lyrical verses of
love. For a time, Horton also traveled in North Carolina with the Union Army. For
his patron, William H. S. Banks, Horton commemorated in writing a number of
northern and southern leaders.
Because of Horton’s associations with abolitionists, it was easier for him to get
into print many of his anti-slavery poems such as “Liberty and Slavery,” “The
Slave’s Complaint,” and “On Hearing of the Intention of a Gentlemen to Purchase
the Poet’s Freedom.” Like his literary peer Hammon, Horton’s freedom comes in his
unbridled opportunity to write and to publish poetry. Horton’s style, however, is far
superior as demonstrated in “The Slave’s Complaint” (1998):

Must I dwell in Slavery’s night,

And all pleasure take its flight,
Far beyond my feeble sight,
Forever? (Stanza 2, lines 5–8)
Or, in “On Liberty and Slavery”:
Say unto foul oppression, Cease:
Ye tyrants rage no more,
And let the joyful trump of peace,
Now bid the vassal soar. (Stanza 5, lines 17–20)

Writing in the introduction to The Norton Anthology of African American

Literature (1997), editors Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay summarize best
the legacy left by the eighteenth century writers: Their “mastery of language, the
essential sign of a civilized mind to the European, implicitly qualified [the] black
writer, and by analogy those whom he or she represented, for self-mastery . . . ” (128).
Critic Sterling Brown, writing in The American Negro (1969) has called poet Paul
Laurence Dunbar and fiction writer Charles Waddell Chesnutt pioneering writers of
the nineteenth century (78–79). In their respective genres, Dunbar and Chesnutt
lead the way in adapting aspects of African American life to purposes of an African
American literary tradition (Brown 1969, 78–79). Both writers consciously intro-
duce a range of “matter and mood” of African American culture, particularly at a
time in American history when African American life had become largely
disenfranchised and stereotyped. Following the Civil War, known also as Recon-
struction, African Americans made significant political, economic, and social gains,
particularly in the South. These gains, however, were short-lived and forcefully
reversed. In what would be called the Plantation Tradition of the nineteenth century,
largely white southern writers such as Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page,
Thomas Dixon, and Irwin Russell, sought to recover forms of power and racial
order that had been dismantled by the war. Created by these writers were idealized
African Americans who wished to return to the southern days when whites
 AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE 29

provided, among other things, housing, work, clothing, and food in exchange for
servitude. Created by the writers of the plantation school are stereotypical sketches of
African Americans who were content with their status or happy-go-lucky slaves.
Writers of the plantation school also created sketches of African Americans who
objected to returning to an idealized world of servitude: the wretched freedman, the
brute, or the tragic mulatto. The dialect of all of these characters in plantation lit-
erature solidified a perception of the African American as incapable of reasoning
and of self-governance (Brown 1969, 78–79). Adapted by mainstream America dur-
ing Reconstruction are these ideological constructs of plantation literature.
The challenge for the nineteenth century writers Paul Laurence Dunbar and
Charles Chestnutt was how to portray the humanity of African Americans and to
express an African American literary tradition of perseverance and survival, espe-
cially when the largely white patrons preferred the characterization of African
American as contented slave, tragic mulatto, and brute, to name a few. In Dunbar’s
poem “Worn Out,” he insists on conveying to his largely white patrons that the
African American had become weary of his disempowered status in the United
States. Unlike several of Dunbar’s African American literary predecessors from the
eighteenth century whose protest was very subtle, Dunbar is direct and detailed. He
uses sophisticated meters in his lyrical expressions to convey his protest on behalf
of disenfranchised African Americans in the 1900s:

You bid me hold my peace

And dry my fruitless tears,
Forgetting that I bear
A pain beyond my years. (Stanza 1, lines 1–4)

Dunbar also exceeds his predecessors Hammon and Horton in style and language
when in poems such as “Ere Sleep Comes Down to Soothe the Weary Eyes,”
“Sympathy,” and “Negro Love Song,” he skillfully emulates the unnamed creators of
the spirituals and uses repetition “to personalize” the African American experience.
Intimated in several of Dunbar’s poems, particularly “Ode to Ethiopia,” are also
vertical movements of the African American folk sermon. Performing like an
African American folk preacher, Dunbar regenerates the spirits of a downtrodden
and conveys their sense of endurance and survival through his lyrics (Hubbard
1994, 383). In general, the folk sermon moves from complication, rising action,
denouement, and cathartic release. Dunbar begins the “Ode” with complication: “I
know the pangs which thou didst feel,/When slavery crushed thee with its heel/With
they dear blood all gory” (Stanza 1; lines 4, 5, 6). His poem then rises in action:
“The forests flee before their stroke,/Their hammers ring, their forges smoke . . . ”
(Stanza 3, lines 16–17). As the poem moves toward its end, Dunbar tells his sub-
jects, the slaves of Africa, that, “Thou has the right to noble pride./Those spotless
robes were purified/By blood’s severe baptism.” (Stanza 6, lines 33–35). Unlike
Hammon in “An Evening Thought” or “On Salvation,” who tells his audience that
happiness or freedom for the slave comes after death, in “Ode to Ethiopia,” Dunbar
allows his audience to release pent-up emotions and to achieve a spiritual connec-
tion to an ontological life force here on earth:

Go on and up! Our souls and eyes

Shall follow the continuous rise;
Our ears shall list thy story
30 AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

From bards who from the root shall spring,

And proudly tune their lyres to sing
Of Ethiopia’s glory. (Stanza 8, lines 44–48)

Dunbar’s experimentations with African American oral structures such as spiri-

tuals and sermon, of free verse, and of conventional dialect convey a versatile style.
But, in the nineteenth century, the art of capturing African American life via, for
instance, dialect and music, proved to be liabilities for the writer and for African
American literature. Regrettably, Dunbar’s realism of African American life is
overshadowed by his audiences’ desire to be entertained by the familiar sketches of
the plantation tradition. In his own reflections of this turn of events in his career in
“The Poet,” Dunbar laments that while “he sang of life/ serenely sweet,/ With, now
and then, a deeper note,” (Stanza 1, lines1–2) his audience preferred “A jingle in a
broken tongue” (Stanza 2, lines 8).
Conventional dialect poetry of the nineteenth century is popularized by the writ-
ers of the plantation school and by Dunbar in poems such as “Negro Love Song,”
“When Malindy Sings, or “Little Brown Baby.” Criticism of dialect in African
American literature in the 1900s is found in James Weldon Johnson’s Preface to The
Book of American Negro Poetry (1921), the first anthology of African American lit-
erature complied by an African American. In this work, Johnson (1969) calls for
poets who follow Dunbar to refrain from the use of conventionalized dialect. His
regrets are as follows:

[It] is based upon the minstrel traditions [or fictionalized plantation traditions] of
Negro life that had but slight relation—often no relation at all—to actual Negro life,
or is permeated with artificial sentiment. It is now realized both by the poets and by
their public that as an instrument for poetry the dialect has only two main stops: humor
and pathos. (4)

Southern writers of the plantation school reinforced their sketches of the con-
tented slave, the primitive, or the wretched freeman via tales narrated by African
Americans who speak in conventionalized dialect. Unlike African or African
American lore that draw from African American experiences and is intended to
instruct, to protect, to entertain, or, as Zora Neale Hurston writes, “to laugh to keep
from crying” (Hemenway 1977, 157), stories by Thomas Page, Joel Chandler Har-
ris, or Irwin Russell help to retain “the good Negro” and to reserve other vital
markers of a nurturing slave culture.
In his 1899 collection The Conjure Woman, Charles Chesnutt sets out to revise the
African American stereotypes of plantation lore. The writer introduces a trickster
figure from African lore whose role is to outmaneuver foes of the African American
community with guile, wit, and charm (Smith 1997, 736–737). There is a duality in
the language of the trickster figure. Within his story there is always an inner plot that
provides subversive opportunities to redress a power imbalance or neglect to basic
human needs (Smith 1997, 736–737). In the Conjure stories, Chesnutt’s trickster
figure is Uncle Julius McAdoo. The McAdoo character is intended to counterbalance
the likes of the stereotypical Uncle Remus from Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus:
His Songs and His Sayings or the likes of Sam from Thomas Nelson Page’s “Mar’s
Chan.” The fact that Uncle Julius is a descendent of Africa’s Yoruba’s trickster, who
would demonstrate an art of multiplicity in language and performance, gets lost in
Chesnutt’s familiar expressions of dialect, superstitions, and free-wheeling lifestyle of
 AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE 31

his freedmen. The above are core elements of plantation literature. Also, because
Chesnutt’s Uncle Julius shares the inner plot of his stories with his white patron John,
critics claim Uncle Julius and Chesnutt too often limit the abilities of author and
character to affirm African American life.
Widely anthologized is Chesnutt’s short story “The Goophered Grapevine” that
first appeared in The Conjure Woman. The structural presence of Uncle Julius in the
short story is to intimate his power and control over his white patrons John and
Annie, and over his own fate, but in this story and others, audiences of the nineteenth
century fail to recognize Uncle Julius’ cultural distinction. The strength of the trickster
figure is overshadowed by the degrading weaknesses of familiar sketches of African
Americans from plantation literature and by audiences’ expectations of the sketches.
Like Dunbar, Chestnutt attempts to adapt African American life to an African Ameri-
can cultural tradition and purpose in his literature, but his efforts are compromised.
The largely white audiences of the nineteenth century expect a continuation of senti-
mental African American life and characters, institutionalized by the school of planta-
tion literature (Johnson, 1969, 9). The legacy left by Dunbar and Chesnutt is the actual
attempt by writers to return to the folk culture for poetic symbols.

Trends and Themes

Modernism and Postmodernism. Writing in Modernism and The Harlem
Renaissance (1987), Critic Houston Baker calls attention to the seminal moments
of “Afro-American modernism” presented in the works of Harlem Renaissance
writers Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, and Sterling Brown. He reminds critics
and readers that because the southern African American life had been distorted in
nineteenth century plantation literature by Thomas Dixon and his school, writers
such as Toomer, Hughes, and Brown transformed sentimental characters in order
to reveal the realistic, modern conditions of “black sufferers of marginalization
and dispossession” (Baker 1987, 95)—that is, alienation, fragmentation, a lack of
social identity, and a lack of historical continuity. In particular, Toomer’s Cane,
which “embodies the tensions of modern science and folk tradition, of psychoan-
alytic technique and Afro-American music, [and] of mysticism and Afro-American
spirituality” (Bell 1987, 96), focuses on the psychology of the characters Ralph
Kabnis, Bona, and even Karintha who attempt throughout their journeys “to rec-
oncile [themselves] . . . to the blood and soil that symbolize [their] ethnic and
national identities” (Bell 1987, 99). In Langston Hughes’ autobiography Big Sea,
particularly in the early pages, the writer focuses on dealing with his search for lit-
erary and racial identities against the backdrops of three continents. In Southern
Road, Sterling Brown gives voice to the displaced traveling blues man and blues
woman of rural America who redefine their fragmented identities by overcoming
limiting circumstances.
In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s major writers, such as Richard Wright in Native
Son, Ann Petry in The Street, Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man, and Melvin Tolson in
Harlem Gallery, communicate in their works concerns “[about] the plight of the indi-
vidual in the modern world” (Hogue 2003, 30). As W. Lawrence Hogue, writing in
Race, Modernity, and Postmodernity points out, pervading the fiction and non-fiction
of these writers, in particular, are existentialism, secularism, rationalism, and individ-
ualism (Hogue, 30). Although these writers experiment with cultural forms in their
works—circularity, improvisation, call and response—they consciously move beyond
32 AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

the values of wholeness, transcendence, and historical continuity (Hogue 31) that were
evident in a number of the general works of Hughes and Hurston. Instead, Bigger
Thomas in Native Son and Lutie Johnson in Ann Petry’s The Street succumb to their
environments or, as in Ellison’s Invisible Man, the individual succumbs to invisibility.
The shift from modernity to postmodernity in African American literature is
marked by works such as James Baldwin’s Another Country, Toni Morrison’s Sula
and Song of Solomon, David Bradley’s The Chaneyville, Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo
Jumbo, Clarence Major’s All-Night Visitors, John Edgar Wideman’s A Glance
Away, Doris Jean Austin’s After the Fall, and Andrea Lee’s Sarah Phillips. Not only
is there the “blurring of the boundary between history and fiction and the cross of
the line from modern to postmodern aesthetics, but these writers, Morrison in par-
ticular, are concerned also with the atypical aspects of postmodern aesthetics. They
are concerned with the ‘collective’ that existed before African Americans were inte-
grated into the American modernization process” (Hogue). These writers, Morrison
in particular, are concerned with reintroducing African Americans, and readers in
general, to an African American collective and historical past—a past where reju-
venation of the spirit toward wholeness and other racial traditions become solutions
to alienation and fragmentation. Central to the individual or to the community is a
sense of spiritual survival. In the twenty-first century, there are a number of contem-
poraries who stand on the shoulders of postmodern writers like Morrison, Lee, Wide-
man, Reed and others. Like their predecessors, these writers revisit the cultural values
and norms of the racial past that existed before African Americans were integrated
into the American modernization process. Among others, included in this group are
Edward P. Jones and his Pulitzer Prize winning fiction The Known World and his col-
lection of short stories Lost in the City and All Aunt Hager’s Children; James McBride
and his Song Yet Sung; and Albert French and his Billy.

Context and Issues

Apology and Propaganda. In 1921, in the Preface to The Book of American Negro
Poetry (1969), the first anthology of African American literature compiled by an
African American editor, James Weldon Johnson instructs African American writers
on what to retain from the legacies of nineteenth century writers Paul Laurence
Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt: “form[s] that [would] express the racial spirit [of
African Americans] . . . from within” (41–42). Johnson also instructs writers on
what to abandon from the period writers: conventionalized dialect and any symbols
“from without” that had become reminiscent of the degrading stereotypes found in
the Plantation literature of the century (41–42). African American writers of the
early twentieth century comply, but they also initiate a challenge to the national
mental attitude regarding the African American by creating what Sterling Brown
called apologetic or propagandistic literature that suggest genteel African Americans
are not so vastly different from any other American, just distinctive (Brown 1969,
105). Examples of apologetic literature include W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the
Silver Fleece, Jesse Fauset’s There Is Confusion and Plum Bun, and even James
Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. In general, these
writers revise earlier stereotypes, focusing on the psychology of individual charac-
ters, their choices in life, and the ideology of gender and class. For instance, in The
Quest of the Silver Fleece (1969), an allegorical novel, Du Bois portrays characters
that are consumed by their economic survival—that is, cotton or the fleece.
 AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE 33

Eventually, Du Bois’s characters such as Elspeth and Zora learn that “without intel-
ligence and training and some capital it is the wildest nonsense to think you can lead
your people out of slavery” (137). In There is Confusion (Fauset, 1989) rewrites the
tragic mulatto character. Her characters Joanna Marshall and Peter Bye in Confusion
overcome color prejudice and achieve success by committing themselves to educa-
tion, hard work, respectability, and each other (Bell 1987, 107). Thematically,
Confusion explores middle-class attitudes, and it stresses the significance of family
and origin. In The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1960), Johnson also
rewrites the tragic mulatto. He confronts his narrator’s double consciousness or
sense of two-ness (American and African American) as he attends college, travels
abroad, and even passes for white. In the end, the narrator permanently adopts a
white American identity. His explanation is that he deservedly should have “every
possible opportunity to make a white man’s success” (147).
While the nineteenth century southern white writers of the plantation school use
literature to effect change in national politics, African American writers of the early
twentieth century use literature to challenge the national mental attitude regarding
African American life and characters. Aesthetically, the role of the writer as apolo-
gist and the function of literature as propagandistic equate to what Sterling Brown,
writing in The American Negro, calls “race-glorification”(1969, 103). As Brown
concludes in the same work, “it was natural that [African American] novelists [of
the early twentieth century] . . . should write as apologists. His objection is, how-
ever, that writers such as Du Bois, Johnson, Fauset, and others kept the charge
instead of a story to be told (105).

Reception
Contemporary African American Literature and Pop Culture. In 1990, Terry McMillan
published the best-selling Breaking Ice: An Anthology of [African American]
Contemporary Fiction. According to McMillan, the writers of her collection are a
“new breed,” standing on the shoulders of past African American writers: “We are
a new breed, free to write as we please, in part because of our predecessors . . . ”
(1990, xxi). As Trey Ellis reminds us in “The New Black Aesthetics,” important also
to remember is that unlike their predecessors, the present generation of “new black
artists [are no longer] shocked by racism as were those of the Harlem Renaissance,
nor are [they] preoccupied with it as were those of the Black Arts Movement. For
[this group of contemporary writers] racism is a hard and little-changing constant
that neither surprises nor enrages” (1989, 234). With all said, the publications of
the “new breed” of African American writers are “personal response[s]. What
[writers] want to specify. What [writers] see. What [writers] feel” (McMillan 1990,
xxi). In essence, contemporary writers are individuals “trying to make sense of our-
selves to ourselves” (McMillan, xxi). With such criteria for the writer, the role of the
writer and the function of African American literature become exhaustive.
In the preface to Breaking Ice, John Wideman reminds the contemporary writer
of James Weldon Johnson’s charge of 1921. He reminds the writer of the following
within African American arts and letters:

A long-tested view of history is incorporated in the art of African-American people,

and our history can be derived from careful study of forms and influences that enter
our cultural performances and rituals. In spite of and because of marginal status, a
powerful, indigenous vernacular tradition has survived, not unbroken, but unbowed, a
34 AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

magnet, a focused energy, something with its own logic, rules, and integrity connecting
current developments to the past. An articulate, syncretizing force our best artists have
drawn upon, a force sustaining both individual talent and tradition.
If what a writer wants is freedom of expression, then somehow that larger goal must be
addressed implicitly/explicitly in our fictions. A story should somehow contain clues that
align it with tradition and critique tradition, establish the new space it requires, demands,
appropriates, hint at how it may bring forth other things like itself, where these others
have, will, and are coming from. This does not mean defining criteria for admitting stories
into some ideologically sound, privileged category, but seeking conditions, mining terri-
tory that maximizes the possibility of free, original expression. (1990, vi–vii)

For the contemporary writer, free and original expressions have translated into an
exhaustive list of memoirs, short and long fiction, and independent films that are, to
pull from Susanne B. Dietzel’s “The African American Novel and Popular Culture,”
relatively unexplored terrain[s] in African American literary history and criticism
(2003, 100). Reasons for this exclusion or oversight range from academic practices
and aesthetic standards that qualify a text for inclusion in the African American lit-
erary canon—practices and standards that are traceable over the centuries to ances-
tral African American writers who strived to keep in place a division between
literary and commercial forms of literature that rendered expressions of African
American life and culture.

Selected Authors
Experimentations with Form. Regarded as an architect of the Harlem Renaissance,
James Weldon Johnson reprints in his collection The Book of American Negro
Poetry (1969) a number of writers who published in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. In the preface to this collection, Johnson instructs writers to
experiment with form in their works and to express a “racial flavor” of African
American life “from within” (41–42). After all, Johnson firmly believes the follow-
ing: “The status of the [African American] in the United States is more a question
of national mental attitude toward the race than of actual condition. And nothing
will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstra-
tion of intellectual parity by the [African American] through the production of lit-
erature and art (41–42). With such directives, Johnson refocuses discussions of
African American arts and letters, particularly the role of the African American
writer and the function of African American literature. In the 1920s, Alain Locke,
writing in the introduction to The New Negro, and Langston Hughes, writing in his
1926 essay, “Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” embrace the idea of experi-
menting with form, but they go a step further. Unlike the apologists who preferred
to portray the most genteel of African Americans, Locke and Hughes want writers
to return to the masses and to create “an art of the people.” They urge writers to
use inherent expressions of African American life for “themes and treatment of
[structure]” (qtd. in Ervin 1999, 50). These themes include identity, dreams,
journey, freedom, endurance, and survival. The inherent structures were to be found
in the culture’s spirituals, blues, jazz, and so forth. (qtd. Ervin 1999, 131).
Major writers of the 1920s, who returned to the African American masses for
their themes and to African American musical traditions, such as the spirituals and
blues for their structural forms, include, among others, Jean Toomer, Langston
Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Sterling Brown. In a number of
 BEAT POETRY 105

volume on the beatniks was Francis J. Rigney and L. Douglas Smith’s. The Real
Bohemia: A Sociological and Psychological Study of the “Beats,” which saw a range
of human behavior rather than just the stereotypical behavior. By the late 1960s, the
Beats’ popular reception was entrenched, as Baby Boomers strained against institu-
tional conformism. In the early 1970s, the emphasis was on hagiography, as repre-
sented by books such as John Tytell’s Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of the
Beat Generation and Bruce Cook’s The Beat Generation. With volumes such as
Lee Bartlett’s The Beats: Essays in Criticism, the academy slowly started to catch up
with the public in the 1980s, although popular books by far outpaced their aca-
demic counterparts. During this period, some of the Beat poets (Ginsberg, Snyder,
Ferlinghetti) entered mainstream anthologies and started to receive serious critical
attention. Many others, however, including di Prima, Joans, and Waldman lingered
on the edge of both the canon and the Beat myth, and even some of the acknowl-
edged figures lacked much sustained criticism. As a result, many critics in the 1990s
and beyond began to reevaluate the Beat myth and explore both some of the more
marginalized poets and the more “central” figures. Such critics often noted that race
and gender were often at play in this marginalization, although such white males as
Corso and Welch fared little better in terms of poetic evaluation (although they were
constantly present in the biographical and cultural analysis of the Beats). Examples
of this trend include Ronna C. Johnson and Nancy M. Grace’s Girls Who Wore
Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation, Brenda Knight’s 1996 anthology
Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of a
Revolution, and Richard Peabody’s A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat
Generation. Recent anthologies, articles, and books have somewhat rectified the sec-
ondary status of many of the Beat poets, but a clear caste system in the criticism and
especially in undergraduate anthologies such as the Norton Anthology of American
Literature and Anthology of Modern American Poetry still exists. Despite lacking the
critical attention of contemporaries such as Plath and Brooks, Ginsberg is clearly the
most studied of the Beat poets, and his reputation shows no sign of falling since his
death in 1997. Most articles, however, focus on Ginsberg’s early career, particularly
“Howl,” and his later work is still awaiting extended debate. The rise of ecocriticism
in the 1990s and beyond has led to increased attention for Snyder, but with the
possible exceptions of Rexroth, Whalen, and Ferlinghetti, few of the Beats receive
substantial individual attention. Jones/Baraka, of course, does receive attention, but
not primarily for his Beat phase, and Kerouac’s poetry is not nearly as studied as his
fiction. An occasional article appears on poets such as McClure or Welch, but it
hardly constitutes a trend. In sum, much critical work remains to be done on the
Beats, particularly on “peripheral” figures and the later poetry. Many collections of
esoteric primary material, as well as Beat “encyclopedias” have appeared in the last
two decades, but largely, the Beat myth continues to overshadow much of the poetry,
and the criticism reflects this.

Selected Authors
Gregory Corso (1930–2001). Although Corso did not take part in the famous Six
Gallery reading, he is now regarded as one of the “core” Beat poets. Combining
humor with biting social commentary, in poems such as “Marriage” and “Bomb,”
Corso reveals fundamental paradoxes in the American way of life and respectively
challenges both uncritical romanticism and apocalyptic paranoia. Rarely inventive
106 BEAT POETRY

as a stylist, Corso eschews subtlety for attempts to jolt his readers out of their com-
placency with violent juxtapositions, such as in “Power,” where at one point he
alternates between love and howitzers, suggesting that power is, at its core,
motivated by love. Corso’s definitive collection is Mindfield: New and Selected
Poems (1989).
Diane di Prima (1934–). Along with Waldman, di Prima is among the two most
influential female Beats. In collections such as This Kind of Bird Flies Backward
(1958) and Seminary Poems (1991), di Prima feminized Beat poetry by commenting
on subjects, such as abortion, female mythology, and pregnancy, ignored or under-
played by her male contemporaries. Poems such as “The Quarrel,” “The Practice of
Magical Evocation” (a response to Snyder’s “Praise for Sick Women”), and “The
Killing” intermingle tenderness, humor, and pain in exploring what it means to be
a talented female in a world controlled by men. A practicing Buddhist, di Prima
also, like many of the Beats, used hallucinogens, at one point living in the notorious
Timothy Leary’s Millbrook commune. In the 1970s and beyond, di Prima tried her
hand at a feminist epic, the Loba sequence (16 parts as of 1998), which investigates
the experience of women via an archetypal, mythological strategy that plumbs the
depths and scales the heights of feminine (un)consciousness. Formerly editing the
important Beat periodical Floating Bear with Jones, di Prima has also written sev-
eral plays.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919–). Poet, publisher, cultural spokesman, Ferlinghetti has
published over three dozen collections, some of which are A Coney Island of the
Mind (the title of which alludes to a line from Henry Miller’s Black Spring),
Tyrannus Nix?, and These Are My Rivers: New and Selected Poems, 1955–1993.
Founder of the City Lights bookstore, an influential Beat hangout, Ferlinghetti pub-
lished many books of Beat poetry, most famously Ginsberg’s Howl and other Poems
in 1956. Ferlinghetti, like Ginsberg, valued the oral elements in poetry, and his style
owes much to the improvisational quality of jazz. A ferocious wit, Ferlinghetti
employed satire to tackle the most pressing issues of his day, including nuclear anni-
hilation, anti-communist jingoism, and pollution. In poems such as “A Nation of
Sheep,” “No. 25” (from Coney Island), and “Christ Climbed Down,” Ferlinghetti
indicts the “blather” that arises from an inability to distance one’s self from
American materialism. The stylistic stamp of e.e. cummings is unmistakable, as is
Ferlinghetti’s debt to surrealism. Nevertheless, his allusive, boisterous voice is a sin-
gular achievement.
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997). Founding Beat poet and a giant of twentieth-century
poetry, Ginsberg was influenced by, among others, Whitman, William Blake, east-
ern spirituality (especially Buddhism), Henry Miller, Arthur Rimbaud, surrealism,
and W.C. Williams. In contrast to the strict formalism that he saw taking root in the
1940s and 1950s, Ginsberg was at his best when employing long enjambed lines
packed full of startling images and juxtapositions, as seen in poems ranging from
“Howl” and “Wichita Vortex Sutra” to “White Shroud” and “Reverse the Rain of
Terror.” In writing collections such as Kaddish and Other Poems, Planet News, and
Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986–1992, he critiqued the repressive and con-
formist attitudes of the Cold War era and took on an activist’s role during the
Vietnam War and beyond, proudly exhibiting his open, experimental approach to
life and literature. Although his poetry eventually became highly popular, Ginsberg
rejected materialism in favor of visionary, ecstatic spiritualism that alternated
between the violent and the sublime. Like many Beats, he drew on autobiography,
 BEAT POETRY 107

but he placed it in a radically altered context. From his epic performance at the Six
Gallery to the end of his life, Ginsberg considered the performable, public aspect of
poetry crucial.
Ted Joans (1928–2003). In collections such as Beat Poems, Funky Jazz Poems, and
Afrodisia: New Poems, Joans infused a jazz sensibility with a vigorous sense of
social justice. Joans was inspired foremost by the musicality of Langston Hughes,
whose work motivated him to pay particular attention to rhythm, and dramatic ten-
sion, as in poems like “.38,” “It Is Time,” and “Think Twice and Be Nice.” Joans
was renowned for his live performances, which greatly impressed Hughes. Like
Jones/Baraka, Joans became disenchanted with the Beat movement, and the politi-
cal engagement of the Black Arts movement attracted him, resulting in poems such
as “Home,” “God Blame America,” and “To Every Free African.”
LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) (1934–). Later renowned for his seminal poetic and theo-
retical work with the Black Arts movement, Jones was initially an influential Beat
poet, supporter, and editor. With di Prima, Jones edited Floating Bear, and he estab-
lished Totem Press, an important alternative publishing venue for several of his Beat
contemporaries. He also wrote a blistering retort to Podhoretz’s dismissal of the
Beat aesthetic. His Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note . . . is a key Beat col-
lection that unveils Jones’s restless spirit, anticonformism, and unorthodox line.
Poems such as “The Bridge” and “In Memory of Radio” underscore his improvisa-
tional bent, while “To a Publisher . . . cut-out” and “Notes for a Speech” anticipate
Jones’s growing social concerns. Dead Lecturer shows growing tensions within
Jones that would ultimately lead to his new, more polemical, aesthetic, with poems
such as “An Agony. As Now” and “Short Speech to My Friends” problematizing
the self-absorption (as opposed to transcendent spiritualism) evident in many of the
Beats. Disgusted both with Beat poetry’s commercialization and its racial indiffer-
ence, Jones spearheaded the Black Arts movement and became one of its leading
writers, arguing not for individual transcendence but for collective action and true
street poetry (i.e., poetry comprehensible for nonspecialists and designed to raise
racial and class consciousness). Jones changed his name to Amiri Baraka in 1968.
Lenore Kandel (1932–). Aiming for thematic and linguistic authenticity, Kandel’s most
famous poems, such as “To Fuck with Love,” “Hard Core Love,” and “Love-Lust
Poem,” merge raw sexuality, ecstatic self-awareness, and (eastern) metaphysical con-
templation, although she did not limit herself to erotica. Subjects such as modern
alienation, drug use, circuses, and mental anguish emphasize Kandel’s connection to
the Beat aesthetic, and her style is influenced by bop and jazz. Kandel never collected
her work, which remains accessible only in chapbooks such as The Love Book and A
Passing Dragon, A Passing Dragon Seen Again, and in the small volume Word
Alchemy, which contained a variety of her lyric poems. Following a devastating
motorcycle accident, Kandel vanished from the literary scene in 1967, her small out-
put an everlasting testimony to her potential.
Bob Kaufman (1925–1986). A wide-ranging stylist, Kaufman drew on traditions as
diverse as the African griot, Whitman, bop, and surrealism, and he thrived on the
live recital of his poetry. He initially eschewed publication in favor of improvisa-
tional performances. In works such as Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness and The
Golden Sardine, Kaufman announced his presence as an innovative social critic and
jazz appropriator. He also helped found Beatitude Magazine, an important Beat
periodical. Like Lenore Kandel, Kaufman underwent a self-imposed silence and
published virtually nothing in the last part of his life.
108 BEAT POETRY

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969). Primarily noted for his “spontaneous prose” novels,
Kerouac ventured into poetry in works such as Mexico City Blues, Scattered Poems,
and the final section of Big Sur. Although he did write haiku, Kerouac, perhaps pre-
dictably, preferred the more epic style visible in the choruses of Mexico City Blues,
wherein he riffs on metaphysical topics in a sort of cosmic dialectic. Many of the
elements of his “spontaneous prose” (for example: “submissive to everything, open,
listen”; “Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition”) are echoed in the
poetry. Hyperdynamic and formally challenging, the choruses in Mexico City Blues
engage subjects as diverse as bop, time (and Proust), and alienation. Kerouac’s haiku
extended from the writer’s investigation of Buddhism and were often composed “on
the spot” as a jazzy barrage of sound and crystallized metaphysics. Although
Kerouac’s poetic output pales with that of Ferlinghetti, Jones, Corso, and his other
Beat contemporaries, many critics note that his prose is highly poetic and that its
rhythms are similar to the open form of the best Beat poetry.
Joanne Kyger (1934–). A poet with an epic sensibility but a lyrical form, Kyger, as
H.D. and Adrienne Rich, infuses classical myths with a distinctly feminist view.
Challenging the rough-and-ready ethos of many of her male Beat peers, Kyger mar-
ries a multifaceted spiritualism with an interrogation of feminine archetypes. Unlike
the more transparent autobiographical approach of some of her contemporaries,
Kyger employs a “deep” approach to self-examination in collections such as The
Tapestry and the Web, The Wonderful Focus of You, and Patzcuaro. In the former,
for example, Kyger reworks The Odyssey and subverts Penelope’s role as a loyal, if
limited, helpmeet by imbuing her with the power to control Odysseus’s destiny and
in other ways expanding her role. Kyger is also very interested in revealing the
importance, humor, and energy inherent in everyday life. Her most recent work has
been highly critical of U.S. involvement in Iraq.
Michael McClure (1932–). As both poet and playwright, McClure explores the nexus
of the physical and the spiritual, often employing the former as a conduit for the lat-
ter. Reveling in the body, seeking synergy with nature, McClure’s poetry emphasizes
an awareness that leads to unrestrained joy, even amid viciousness and hypocrisy. A
prolific poet, McClure, in such books as Hymns to St. Geryon and Other Poems,
Dark Brown, September Blackberries, and Simple Eyes, makes ample use of animal
imagery, ecstatic visions, and physical candor. McClure’s style ranges widely, but it
frequently accentuates the pictorial elements of poetry (capitalization, alternation
between long lines and single words, visual symmetry/asymmetry, parentheses,
dashes, etc.). Other pervasive features, as seen in such poems as, “Love Lion,” “For
the Death of 100 Whales,” “Rant Block,” and “Plum Stones,” include mantralike
repetition, catalogs, and surprising imagery.
Janine Pommy Vega (1942–). Employing her private pain as a catalyst for tran-
scendence, Pommy Vega investigates how loss can crystallize one’s experience of
love, self, and spirituality. A teen when she turned her back on middle-class con-
formity, Pommy Vega became an autodidact, soaking up influences such as
Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams, and William Blake, yet she managed to develop
a strong individual voice. From early collections such as Poems to Fernando and
Journal of a Hermit to later books such as Mad Dogs of Trieste: New and
Selected Poems, 1975–2000 and The Green Piano: New Poems, Pommy Vega
documents her ability to withstand both personal (deaths of her husband and
parents, abortion, automobile accident, etc.) and political (Cold War, Sarajevo,
Iraq, etc.) trauma while expanding her spiritual horizons. Pommy Vega typically
 BEAT POETRY 109

uses a plain, direct style that juxtaposes simple, yet often terrifying, images with
emblems of survival.
Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982). A mentor for both many Beat and San Francisco
Renaissance poets, Rexroth was himself influenced by Chicago’s socialist and avant-
garde scene in the 1920s, although he avoided being overly dogmatic. Rexroth’s
anti-establishment poetics clearly attracted the Beats, though, and although Rexroth
later rejected the commercialization of the Beats, he has many similarities with
them. Among these are Rexroth’s jazzlike rhythms, contemplative themes, and col-
loquial specificity. In collections such as The Signature of All Things, In Defense of
the Earth, and The Love Poems of Marichiko, Rexroth reveals a growing interest in
Asian philosophy and technique, directly presenting his images and revealing a quiet
passion reminiscent of some of Snyder’s less polemical work. Common Beat themes
such as sexuality, anticapitalism, and the environment are present, but Rexroth
eschews the explosive rhetoric of a Ginsberg or Sanders, adopting a more restrained
poetics that presents sharpened emotions on the verge of release rather than the
release itself, a technique evident in poems such as “VII” (from The Love Poems of
Marichiko), “Fish Peddler and Cobbler,” and “Married Blues,” although exceptions
such as “Thou Shalt Not Kill” appear with fair regularity.
Ed Sanders (1939–). Editor of the important Beat periodical Fuck You: A Magazine
of the Arts and member of the avant-garde poet-rock band the Fugs (“Swinburne
Stomp,” “Carpe Diem”), Sanders is a classically trained poet who produces highly
unorthodox, colloquial, and confrontational verse. Politically conscious from the
start, Sanders has employed derisive, feverish wit in satirizing the destructive pow-
ers of war and unrestrained capitalism from Vietnam to Iraq. In such Dionysian
books as Peace Eye, 20,000 A.D., Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century: Selected
Poems, 1961–1985, and America: A History in Verse (this latter an example of what
Sanders calls “investigative poetry”), Sanders combines serious themes with irrever-
ent poetics, playful images, and sexual language.
Gary Snyder (1930–). Somewhat younger than the original Beats, Snyder is never-
theless one of the most influential of the movement, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1974
for Turtle Island, a collection that cemented his reputation as an environmental
activist. Snyder’s early work in Riprap and Myths and Texts contrast materialist
societies with the harder, but ultimately more spiritually rewarding, aboriginal cul-
tures. As with Robinson Jeffers, Snyder could at times appear misanthropic, but like
Jeffers, he reserved his most stinging rebukes for those individuals and societies that
had lost touch with the land and its spiritual lessons. In poems such as “Ripples on
the Surface” and “Straight-Creek—Great Burn,” Snyder merges precise environ-
mental detail with human possibilities and losses. Some critics, however, fault
Snyder for an overly moralizing, judgmental tone in some of his nature poetry, such
as “Mother Earth: Her Whales” or “Smokey the Bear Sutra.” Apart from his con-
cern for the environment, Snyder is best known for his spiritual themes. Unlike some
of the Beats, Snyder studied Zen Buddhism systematically and strived to avoid a
diluted, “Americanized” strain of the lifestyle. His poetry tends to integrate this
meditative approach to existence, as in “What Happened Here Before” and “The
Blue Sky.”
A.B. Spellman (1935–). A student of Sterling A. Brown, who encouraged him to
explore the artistic and social possibilities of music, Spellman developed an ency-
clopedic knowledge of jazz, which helped him to craft an aesthetic that veers
between the understated and explosive in his sole book of poetry, The Beautiful
110 BEAT POETRY

Days. In The Beautiful Days, Spellman also has made sporadic poetic contributions
to various periodicals and anthologies.
Anne Waldman (1945–). Two decades younger than the original Beats, Waldman
nevertheless held important roles in later Beat ventures, such as the Jack Kerouac
School of Disembodied Poetics. A prolific poet, Waldman’s early works revealed an
affinity with ur-Beats such as Ginsberg and Corso. In volumes such as Baby Break-
down and Fast Speaking Woman, Waldman displays a Whitmanesque open line and
a fondness for pastiche. In poems such as “All of My Kingdoms” and “Miles
Above,” Waldman bursts with vibrant energy as she subverts rigid patriarchal insti-
tutions and thinking. In recent years, Waldman has turned to the epic, with her mul-
tivolume sequence, Iovis, which contains both her familiar collage technique and a
sweeping, mythic range that interrogates both individual transcendence and collec-
tive impediments. Additionally, Waldman, in the anti-academic tradition of the ear-
liest Beats, is a performance artist of the first water and avails herself of a variety of
media in her dynamic public events. A practicing Buddhist, Waldman offers feminist
spiritual insight lacking in many of her Beat peers.
Lew Welch (1926–1971[?]). A classmate of Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen, Welch
was something of a tragic enigma, what Snyder called a “casualty.” A talented poet,
Welch suffered from both depression and alcoholism, severely limiting his published
output. Nevertheless, Welch, influenced by such writers as Robert Service, Gertrude
Stein, and William Carlos Williams, transformed his poetic voice from a fairly tra-
ditional one to a tight, crisp style that avoided “literary” allusion. In his collection
On Out and chapbooks such as Hermit Poems and The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings,
Welch combined an economical vocabulary with a brisk rhythm to explore his trou-
bled life honestly and directly.
Philip Whalen (1923–2002). Although often labeled a Beat, Whalen, as with many of
the western Beats, was also a driving force in the San Francisco Renaissance. In col-
lections such as Like I Say, On Bear’s Head, and Every Day, Whalen offers a gen-
tle, playful contrast to some of his more exuberant contemporaries among the Beats.
Whalen experimented, like many of the Beats, with open typographical forms, but
his subject matter is generally more self-deprecating and quotidian. A Buddhist
monk, Whalen’s commitment to spiritual matters is unparalleled among the Beats,
and his poetry reflects this concern in poems such as “The Dharma Youth League,”
“Sourdough Mountain Lookout,” and “The Expensive Life,” although he rarely
employs hyperserious rhetoric, preferring to juxtapose metaphysical principles with
a variety of earthly pursuits.

Bibliography
Baraka, Amiri. Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note. New York: Totem Press, 1961.
Barlett, Lee, ed. The Beats: Essays in Criticism. Jefferson: McFarland, 1981.
Burroughs, William S. Junky. New York: Ace, 1953.
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.
Charters, Ann. “Panel Discussion with Women Writers of the Beat Generation.” Beat Down
to Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation?. Ann Charters, ed. New York: Penguin,
2001, 611–632.
Cook, Bruce. The Beat Generation. New York: Scribner, 1971.
Corso, Gregory. Mindfield: New and Selected Poems. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press,
1989.
di Prima, Diane. Freddie Poems. Point Reyes, CA: Eidolon Editions, 1974.
 BEAT POETRY 111

———. Seminary Poems. Point Reyes, CA: Floating Island, 1991.

———. This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards. New York: Totem Press, 1958.
Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. “Note on Poetry in San Francisco.” Beat Down to Your Soul: What
Was the Beat Generation?. Ann Charters, ed. New York: Penguin, 2001, 169.
———. A Coney Island of the Mind. New York: New Directions, 1968.
———. These Are My Rivers: New and Selected Poems, 1955–1993. New York: New
Directions, 1993.
———. Tyrannus Nix? New York: New Directions, 1969.
Gates, Henry Louis, and McKay, Nellie Y. The Norton Anthology of African American
Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004.
Gifford, Barry, and Lee. Lawrence. Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. New
York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, eds. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women.
New York: W.W. Norton, 2007.
Ginsberg, Allen. Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness. Gordon Bell,
ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974.
———. Howl and Other Poems. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1956.
———. Kaddish and Other Poems. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1961.
———. “Prologue.” Beat Culture and the New America: 1950–1965. Lisa Phillips, ed. New
York: Whitney Museum/Flammarion, 1995, 17–19.
Ginsberg, Allen. Reality Sandwiches. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1963.
Ginsberg, Allen, and Daurer, Greg. “The High Times Interview.” High Times. February
(1992): 13–16. Holmes, John Clellon. “This Is the Beat Generation.” Beat Down to
Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation?. Ann Charters, ed. New York: Penguin,
2001, 222–228.
Joans, Ted. Afrodisia: New Poems. New York: Hill & Wang, 1970.
———. Jazz Poems: Beat Funky. New York: Rhino Review, 1959.
Johnston, Allan. “Consumption, Addiction, Vision, Energy: Political Economies and Utopian
Visions in the Writings of the Beat Generation.” College Literature 32.2 (2005):
103–126.
Kandel, Lenore. The Love Book. San Francisco, CA: Stolen Paper, 1966.
Kaufman, Bob. Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness. New York: New Directions, 1965.
———. The Golden Sardine. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1967.
Kerouac, Jack. Big Sur. New York: Penguin, 1962.
———. Mexico City Blues. New York: Grove Press, 1959.
———. On the Road. New York: Viking, 1957.
———. Scattered Poems. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1961.
Knight, Brenda, ed. Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the
Heart of a Revolution. 2nd ed. San Francisco, CA: Conari, 1998.
Kyger, Joanne. Pátzcuaro. Bolinas, CA: Blue Millenium, 1999.
———. The Tapestry and the Web. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1965.
———. The Wonderful Focus of You. Calais: Z Press, 1979.
Lipton, Lawrence. The Holy Barbarians. New York: Messner, 1959.
McClure, Michael. Hymns to St. Geryon and Other Poems and Dark Brown. San Francisco,
CA: Grey Fox, 1980.
McClure, Michael. September Blackberries. New York: New Directions, 1974.
———. Simple Eyes. New York: New Directions, 1994.
Peabody, Richard. A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation. London:
Serpent’s Tail, 1997.
Podhoretz, Norman. “The Know-Nothing Bohemians.” In Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was
the Beat Generation?. Ann Charters, ed. New York: Penguin, 2001, 481–493.
Raskin, Jonah. American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat
Generation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004.
112 BIOGRAPHY

Rigney, Francis J., and Smith, L. Douglas. The Real Bohemia: A Sociological and Psycholog-
ical Study of the “Beats.” New York: Basic Books, 1961.
Rexroth, Kenneth. The Love Poems of Marichiko. Santa Barbara, CA: Christopher’s Books,
1978.
Sanders, Ed. America: A History in Verse. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 2000.
Skerl, Jennie. Introduction. In Reconstructing the Beats. Jennie Skerl, ed. London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004, 1–7.
Snyder, Gary. Myths and Texts. New York: Totem, 1960.
———. “Note on the Religious Tendencies.” In The Portable Beat Reader. Ann Charters, ed.
New York: Viking, 1992; 305–306.
———. Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1965.
———. Turtle Island. New York: New Directions, 1974.
Spellman, A.B. The Beautiful Days. New York: Poets’ Press, 1968.
Tytell, John. Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1976.
van Elteren, Mel. “The Subculture of the Beat: A Sociological Revisit.” Journal of American
Culture 22.3 (1999): 71–99.
Vega, Janine Pommy. Poems to Fernando. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1968.
———. Journal of a Hermit. Cherry Valley, NY: Cherry Valley Editions, 1974.
Waldman, Anne. Baby Breakdown. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970.
———. Fast Speaking Woman. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1975.
———. Iovis. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1997.
Watson, Steven. The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters,
1944–1960. New York: Pantheon, 1995.
Whalen, Philip. Every Day. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1965.
———. Like I Say. New York: Totem, 1960.
———. On Bear’s Head. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1969.

Further Reading
Barlett, Lee, ed. The Beats: Essays in Criticism. Jefferson: McFarland, 1981; Charters, Ann.
Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation? New York: Penguin, 2001;
Johnson, Ronna, and Nancy M. Grace, eds. Girls who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat
Generation. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002; Knight, Brenda, ed. Women of
the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution. 2nd ed.
San Francisco: Conari, 1998; Lee, Robert A., ed., The Beat Generation Writers. London:
Pluto, 1996; Phillips, Lisa. Beat Culture and the New America: 1950–1965. New York:
Whitney Museum/Flammarion, 1995; Raskin, Jonah. American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s
Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
2004; Skerl, Jennie, ed. Reconstructing the Beats. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004;
Stephenson, Gregory. The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation.
Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990; Tytell, John. Naked Angels: The
Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.
JAMES M. DECKER

BIOGRAPHY
Definition. In everyday usage, the term biography is generally understood to refer
to an account of an individual’s life. Attempts to define the proper aim, form, and
scope of such accounts, however, have provided ample fodder for heated debates
among biographers, their subjects, their readers, and their critics, the reasons and
rationales for writing and reading biographies being diverse enough that there exist
multiple standards for evaluating the success of a work. These include whether the
biographer sought to be definitive or “of the moment” in his account of the subject’s
 BIOGRAPHY 113

life; whether the account purports to be comprehensive or focused on a specific

aspect of the subject’s achievements; and whether the biographer sees his primary
role to be that of an entertainer, an educator, a reporter, or a historian. Although
these roles are not mutually exclusive—and, indeed, the most well-received biogra-
phies are often a hybrid of historical writing and literary journalism—the biogra-
pher’s perception of his responsibilities affects the style, format, content, and
marketing of the published account, including whether it is reviewed and catalogued
as history, fiction, or general nonfiction. The term biography encompasses scholarly
monographs with hundreds of footnotes; glossy coffee-table books consisting pri-
marily of anecdotes and photographs; gossip-spiced chronicles of a celebrity’s rise to
fame; extended speculation about the subject’s inner life, based on clues derived
from the subject’s artistic output; novelistic portraits with invented scenes and dia-
logue; and other combinations of textual and visual narrative.
Also referred to as life writing, the genre attracted enough academic interest dur-
ing the twentieth century to merit the establishment of an interdisciplinary Center for
Biographical Research (CBR) at the University of Hawaii in 1976. The center and the
University of Hawaii Press began publication of a quarterly journal in 1978; other
periodicals devoted to the genre include a/b: Auto/Biography Studies (first issue
1985), the Journal of Historical Biography (first issue 2007), the Journal of Medical
Biography (first issue 1993), Life Writing (first issue 2004), and Lifewriting Annual:
Biographical and Autobiographical Studies (first issue 2006). Other programs
devoted to development, discussion, and promotion of the genre include the Center
for the Study of Lives (University of Southern Maine, founded 1988) and the Inter-
national Auto/Biography Association (founded 1999), the latter a sponsor of bien-
nial conferences. Genealogical and historical organizations that coordinate
biographical programs, publications, and resources include the New York Genealog-
ical and Biographical Society (founded 1869). Support groups for professional biog-
raphers include the Biography Seminar at New York University (founded 1980) and
Women Writing Women’s Lives (City University of New York, founded 1990).
There are many issues for scholars of the genre to examine and explore. The range
of narrative forms available to biographers raises associated questions about the
methods of research and interpretation they elect to pursue; many biographers
choose to address this by detailing the parameters and scope of their specific proj-
ects in a remarks or acknowledgments section. For example, in his biography of
John Wilkes (1726–1797), published by a university press, retired English professor
Arthur Cash (b. 1922) signals his awareness of the different types of readers likely
to peruse his book:

I have written this book for a general audience of well-read, intelligent people. I hope
scholars will approve of it, but I did not have them in mind as I wrote. I seldom say “it
seems” or “the evidence suggests,” and I seldom call attention to the quality of the evi-
dence. On the other hand, the notes, which will be of little help to the general reader, are
made for the scholar. My view of Wilkes is so different from that usually held by histori-
ans, it will certainly be challenged. I want the challengers to have no doubt of the primary
evidence I have used, or from what secondary sources I have taken facts. (2006, 395)

In his biography of Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), published by a commercial

press, history professor David Nasaw begins with his evaluations of earlier portray-
als of Carnegie, taking pains to note the constraints imposed upon his predecessors
114 BIOGRAPHY

and highlighting his access to archives that had been closed or unknown to them. At
878 pages, Nasaw’s version of Carnegie’s life is clearly intended to serve as a defini-
tive reference work, and he emphasizes his role in judging the evidence presented in
older volumes: “My account of Carnegie’s life leaves out several of the familiar sto-
ries told in the Autobiography and retold by his biographers, because I could not
independently confirm their validity” (ix). At the same time, Nasaw had previously
demonstrated his ability to write popular books with his biography of William
Randolph Hearst (1862–1951); consequently, Andrew Carnegie was featured in hol-
iday gift catalogs and heavily reviewed in general-interest newspapers and magazines,
including two separate assessments in The New York Times (Gordon 2006; Hitchens
2006; Parker 2006; Stiles 2006; Yardley 2006). It reached The New York Times best-
seller list and was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography (the other final-
ist was Cash’s biography of Wilkes).
Its success notwithstanding, several of the book’s reviewers expressed dissatisfac-
tion with Nasaw’s handling of his resources. Salon reviewer T.J. Stiles, himself an
award-winning biographer, lauded Nasaw’s effort as “the most thorough, accurate
and authoritative biography of Carnegie to date . . . I came away convinced that he
has read everything Carnegie ever wrote.” However, Stiles also opined that Nasaw
had fallen short in other areas. In Stiles’s view of the genre, he noted:

Researcher . . . is only one of three roles played by a good biographer. Just as impor-
tant are the parts of historian and writer—the first to explain the times, the second to
craft a purposeful narrative. To put it another way, the researcher provides depth, the
historian breadth, the writer life. (2006)

Stiles’s conclusion—that Nasaw had concentrated too much on depth—was

voiced by another well-regarded biographer, book critic Jonathan Yardley (b. 1939),
who declared that:

Andrew Carnegie would be a better book had it been pared down from 800 pages of
text to, say, 650, because Nasaw is in love with his research and cannot let go of it even
when it becomes redundant, but only readers laboring under constraints of time are
likely to complain; this is biography on the grand scale, and on the whole it lives up to
its author’s ambitions. (2006)

Yardley’s prediction of Andrew Carnegie’s welcome among other readers suggests a

set of universal expectations regarding biographical narratives, but his claim is better
treated as a reflection of an individual’s personal definition of the genre—one with
which other biographers and readers do not necessarily concur. Yardley’s belief in an
ideal balance of research and exposition informs his reviews of other biographies. For
instance, in an appraisal of a study of H.L. Mencken (1880–1956), Yardley simulta-
neously praises the author’s “refusal to get bogged down in quotidian biographical
minutiae” and casts it as a weakness, seeing it as the reason several topics were not
given the attention he felt they merited (2002). Yardley’s preference for “serious
inquiry” over the mere “accumulation and recording of facts” colors his use of the
term “biography,” as does his open disdain for gossip and ideological message mon-
gering. At the same time, Yardley acknowledges that his notions of what constitutes
a “biography” are more conservative and idealistic than those espoused by career
biographer Nigel Hamilton (b. 1944), who argues that the term “needs to be redefined
 BIOGRAPHY 117

of Random House has attracted notice for consistently promoting authors who
become Pulitzer finalists or winners (Rich 2007).
At the same time, Web sites are easier and cheaper to update than printed volumes
and permit the storage of immense quantities of information at relatively little cost.
Likewise, readers of Brotherhood of the Bomb are encouraged to visit
www.brotherhoodofthebomb.com to download copies of the “much longer and
more comprehensive set of endnotes” (Herken 2002, 335).
Additional issues arise when one considers the popularity of autobiography.
These issues are discussed in a separate entry in this encyclopedia.
History. In surveys and discussions about the history of biography, the author
most frequently named from classical times is Plutarch (c. 46–c. 120), although
Xenophon (c. 431–355 B.C.E) and Suetonius (c. 71–c. 135) are also considered
major figures (Whittemore 1988, 11–12). James Boswell (1740–1795) called
Plutarch “the prince of ancient biographers” (23). Plutarch’s most influential
work has been Bioi Paralleloi (Parallel Lives), which includes his study of
Alexander the Great (356 B.C.E.–323 B.C.E.). Its strategy of analyzing the charac-
ters of famous individuals in pairs—for instance, that of Alexander and Julius
Caesar (100 B.C.E–44 B.C.E), Theseus and Romulus (c. 771 B.C.E.–c. 717 B.C.E.),
and Demosthenes (384 B.C.E.–322 B.C.E.) and Cicero (106 B.C.E.–43 B.C.E.)—can
be seen in countless contemporary works, including Phyllis Rose’s study of five
Victorian marriages, also titled Parallel Lives (1983); other titles include To Kill
a Black Man: The Shocking Parallel in the Lives of Malcolm X and Martin
Luther King Jr. (Lomax 1968); Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (Bullock 1992),
Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington (Epstein 2004),
and Jesus and Paul: Parallel Lives (Murphy-O’Connor 2007). Rose’s book, in its
turn, has been acknowledged by Katie Roiphe (b. 1968) as one of the inspirations
for Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Liter-
ary Circles 1910–1939 (Winner 2007).
The popularity of Plutarch’s Lives helped preserve it for later generations as it
caused many copies of the manuscript to be made, thereby increasing the odds of
several of them lasting through the centuries (McCutchen 1998). The Lives
proved to be immensely popular during the Renaissance era in western Europe;
according to Robert Lamberton, “only Aristotle and Plato, among writers of
Greek prose, were better represented in the collections of Italian libraries of the
fifteenth century,” and over 50 Latin translations had been made of sections from
Lives by 1450 (2001, 190). During this era, editions of the Lives also appeared
in Italian, Spanish, German, French, and English (McCutchen 1998). Of these,
the 1559 French translation by Jacques Amyot (1513–1593) is regarded as especially
important because it was the version used by Thomas North (c. 1535–c. 1601) to
create the first English translation. North’s rendition of Plutarch’s Lives was in
turn actively consulted by William Shakespeare (1564–1616) during the writing
of plays such as Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. The next major trans-
lation of the Lives into English was produced by a team of translators led by poet
and playwright John Dryden (1631–1700). This translation was updated by poet
Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861) and republished in 1859. The Dryden-Clough
edition is still in active circulation among twenty-first century readers. There is
one other “complete” English edition (that is, of the texts pieced together from
the various surviving manuscripts; these texts make reference to other sections
that have not been found) that was produced by classicist Bernadotte Perrin
118 BIOGRAPHY

(1847–1920), as well as assorted selected Lives by other translators. Poet and

critic Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) favored North’s version and asserted that:

. . . .like the Bible and Shakespeare, Parallel Lives is a desert-island book. Classical lit-
erature contains a good many greater works of art, and many truer pictures of the ways
of men. But Plutarch never palls. He is always engaging, interesting, and above all else,
to use a word that will provoke smiles today, elevating. (1968)

Depending on one’s definition of the genre, practitioners of “biography” during

the Renaissance include Italian architect and painter Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574),
best known for Le vite delle più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori [com-
monly known in English as Lives of the Artists] (1550); English antiquarian John
Aubrey (1626–1697), whose irreverent style animates his Brief Lives (organized and
published after his death by assorted editors); Protestant clergyman John Foxe
(1516–1587), whose Actes and Monuments of These Latter and Perillous Dayes
(1563) became known as the Book of Martyrs; ironmonger and fisherman Izaak
Walton (1593–1683), who wrote about such poets as Herny Wotton (1568–1639),
John Donne (1572–1631), and George Herbert (1593–1633); and Thomas Fuller
(1608–1661), another clergyman, whose History of the Worthies of Britain
appeared the year after his death.
Selected Authors. Reed Whittemore observes that “Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
could not have been the first interesting biographical subject who ever lived, but we
have so much information about him that it is easy to think the genre began with
him” (1988, 101). Johnson’s biographer was Scottish lawyer James Boswell
(1740–1795), whose name has become synonymous with “a person who records in
detail the life of a usually famous contemporary (Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dic-
tionary, 11th edition); a famous literary example of such usage is Sherlock Holmes’s
claim, “I am lost without my Boswell” (Doyle 1891, 12). Johnson was a lexicogra-
pher, editor, and writer; his output included Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to
the Works of the English Poets, which became known as Lives of the Poets (1781)
(Lynch n.d.). Boswell was not Johnson’s only biographer, or even the first, but his
exhaustive efforts to document Johnson’s conversation set a new standard for the
genre. Whittemore states:

Never before had so much had material been amassed in the way of actual conver-
sation with a great mind. Never had there been a loyal disciple so industrious in
walking about with pen and paper and dutifully collecting his subject’s pearls. And,
therefore, never before had wholeness in biography been so strenuously reached for.
(1988, 129)

Scholar Leon Edel (1907–1997) likewise labels Boswell’s Life of Johnson “the
first great modern biography” (1984, 55). In the eyes of Edel, Harold Nicolson
(1886–1968), and other major biographers, Boswell (with significant assistance
from Edmond Malone) transformed expectations for biographical writing with his
1,400-page tribute to Johnson and its plethora of “fine everyday details which make
Johnson come alive” (Edel 1984, 54–56). According to www.samueljohnson.com,
Johnson ranks behind only Shakespeare as the most-quoted English author, and
interest in both Johnson and Boswell will likely surge with the 300th anniversary of
 BIOGRAPHY 119

Johnson’s birth in 2009. Boswell’s tactics to steer Johnson’s conversation, Johnson’s

awareness of Boswell’s literary ambitions, and other points of debate continue to
fascinate contemporary readers, with modern biographies such as Peter Martin’s
Life of James Boswell (2000) striving to assess their achievements anew.
The next landmark biographical work in English literature is widely considered to
be Eminent Victorians (1918) by (Giles) Lytton Strachey (1880–1932). Strachey was
an admirer of Aubrey and a disciple of Freud (Whittemore 1989, 105–106), and his
understanding of psychological self-sabotage informs his profiles of Roman Catholic
cardinal Henry Edward Manning (1808–1892), nurse Florence Nightingale
(1820–1910), educator Thomas Arnold (1795–1842), and general Charles George
Gordon (1833–1885), as well as his books Queen Victoria (1921) and Elizabeth and
Essex (1928). Strachey was a member of the Bloomsbury group of writers and artists
famed for their eccentricities and defiance of conventional manners, and his antisen-
timental style is frequently described as “sardonic” and “mocking” (cf. Hamilton
2007, 151–52), even though Strachey also regarded biography as “the most delicate
and humane of all the branches of writing” (qd. by Edel 1984, 33). Katie Roiphe,
herself known among cultural critics for her rejection of conventional wisdom on
feminist issues, cites Eminent Victorians as one of the books that led her to consider
the study of relationships “as a way of looking at a culture” (Winner 2007).
Michael Holroyd says, “We do not imitate Strachey, but it was he who liberated the
form for all of us. He was the enfant terrible” (2002, 26). Victorian scholar Richard
Altick (b. 1915) concludes that Strachey effectively triggered a fad for “book-length
debunking of reputations” that resulted in “brightly written, studiously irreverent
biographies by the hundreds” (qtd. by Hamilton 2007, 152–153). This post-Strachey
period of life writing is sometimes characterized by scholars as the era of “New
Biography” (cf. Edel 1984, 31).
Of this era, Paula Backscheider states that “most people would agree with Park
Honan’s judgment that Richard Ellmann is the best literary biographer to have writ-
ten in English in the twentieth century” (1999, 12), an opinion reportedly shared by
novelist and reviewer Anthony Burgess (1917–1993). Honan is himself regarded as
one of the top biographers of Jane Austen (1987), William Shakespeare (1999), and
Christopher Marlowe (2005), all of whom perennially attract new efforts to interpret
both the facts and the gaps of their lives (Burgess wrote on Shakespeare as well in
1970). Ellmann (1918–1987) specialized in Irish literature and wrote about William
Butler Yeats (1865–1939), James Joyce (1882–1941), and other luminaries; his 1989
biography of Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) won the Pulitzer Prize. Ellmann dominates
the biographical landscape for anyone wishing to offer new material on these indi-
viduals. As one reviewer observed:

Biographers of James Joyce have a simple choice: tussle with Richard Ellmann or don’t
try to compete. Ellmann’s huge biography, published in 1959 and reissued in a thor-
oughly revised and expanded 1983 edition, relied not only on the biographer’s pro-
found familiarity with primary sources, but interviews, chance encounters, gossip and
a whole world of acquaintanceship that no other writer will ever be able to rival.
(Lacey 2004)

Another landmark work of biography in the twentieth century was Portrait of a

Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson (1973), which featured three
chapters composed by their son, Nigel Nicolson (1917–2004), and two penned by
120 BIOGRAPHY

Sackville-West (1892–1962), using text from a notebook Nigel Nicolson had

discovered after her death. In his own memoir, Long Life, Nicolson describes can-
vassing family members and friends to determine whether to pursue publication of
his mother’s manuscript and the strong reaction to the book (ranging from enthusi-
astic to “pained”) once it saw print (1998). In addition to becoming a best seller, it
inspired additional studies of Sackville-West’s life and relationships, including
Victoria Glendinning’s Vita (1983), which tied for the Whitbread Biography Award.
Nicolson wryly observed that his mother had “posthumously become more central
to my life than when she was alive because of the books that I and others have writ-
ten about her” (1998). In his history of biography, Nigel Hamilton lauds the book
for its candid portrayal of nonheterosexual relationships and asserts that it “broke
yet another taboo in biographical portraiture,” effectively leading the way for biog-
raphers to focus more intensely on details previously considered inappropriate for
public consumption (2007, 235–39).
Journalist Janet Malcolm’s analysis of the fallout from a less successful marriage,
that of poets Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) and Ted Hughes (1930–1998), also created
a commotion when it appeared (Seligman 2000, 3). Its portrayal of the decades-long
antagonism between Plath’s survivors and her would-be biographers was viewed by
some observers as a “brilliant exposé of the workings of modern biography, as well
as an eloquent attack on biography’s ghoulish popularity” (Hamilton 2007, 276),
whereas others judged Malcolm’s defense of Ted Hughes to be suspect and her atti-
tude toward Plath less than charitable (cf. Seligman 2000; Nehring 2004). As
English professor Christina Nehring observes, “The history of biographical writing
on Plath is vexed; her biographers have had their names made, their health wrecked
(Anne Stevenson), and their hearts broken (Emma Tennant) in their endeavors”
(2004). Given Plath and Hughes’s stature as twentieth-century poets, their outsize
personalities, and the unresolvable questions inherent in the tragedy of Plath’s sui-
cide and Hughes’s destruction of her papers, as well as Malcolm’s own tendency to
attract controversy, The Silent Woman will likely remain essential reading both for
individuals fascinated by the Plath-Hughes drama and those interested in contem-
plating the larger questions of biographical practice and ethics.
Trends and Themes. English professor Paula Backscheider states:

Until very recently, readers of biographies seemed to have strong preferences, most
notably the quest, the marked ambition and achievement of same, the adventures of a
hero or dedicated public servant, ‘the man of destiny,’ and the difficult, misunderstood,
often impoverished life of the great literary artist whom we now appreciate more than
his contemporaries did. (1999, 103–104)

Elsewhere in her study, Backscheider argues that “each generation asks new
things from its writers and new questions about the people who shaped the world
we live in” (39). She also observes that:

biographers, like their readers, are drawn to the culture’s favourite stories and kinds of
achievement. Many times the choice of a subject is born in a complex desire to answer
lingering questions about a particular kind of life story and in the hope of better under-
standing it—or even sharing in it by recording or celebrating it. (46)

This perhaps articulates the public’s abiding interest in books about the Founding
Fathers. In spite of the dozens of books already published on the early presidents and
 BIOGRAPHY 121

other statesmen, new ones continue to sell extremely well and win major prizes. For
example, professor Joseph J(ohn) Ellis (b. 1943) won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in History
for Founding Brothers, a group biography of John Adams (1735–1826), Aaron Burr
(1756–1836), Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804),
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), James Madison (1751–1836), and George Washington
(1732–1799). After the Pulitzer, Ellis’s 1993 biography of Adams was reprinted, and
His Excellency: George Washington (2004) reached the best-seller lists.
Historian David McCullough (b. 1933), who had won a Pulitzer for his 1992 biog-
raphy of Harry S. Truman, won a second Pulitzer for John Adams (2001). McCullough
had originally intended to write a book focusing on both Adams and Jefferson but
decided to focus on Adams once his research was under way, realizing that “The prob-
lem with Adams is that most Americans know nothing about him”; McCullough said
that he himself hadn’t truly recognized Adams’s heroic qualities until writing the book.
In the same interview, McCullough responded to a dissenting reaction to his charac-
terization of Adams’s colleagues by stressing that “these men are not perfect. . . . If they
were marble gods, what they did wouldn’t be so admirable. The more we see the
founders as humans the more we can understand them. Imagine starting out to create
a country—at the risk of their lives” (Leopold 2001).
The widespread interest in the imperfection of the Founding Fathers—and in the
imperfect efforts to interpret aspects of their lives—is especially visible in the case
of Benjamin Franklin, about whom over 75 biographies have been registered with
the Library of Congress since 2000. This figure includes books for children but does
not include the additional dozens of “in his own words” collections in which selec-
tions from Franklin’s own Autobiography and other writings have been repackaged
into “new” books. The high volume of activity can be attributed in part to the 300th
anniversary of Franklin’s birth, which was celebrated in 2006. Interest in Franklin
was also heightened by a 2002 PBS documentary that won an Emmy Award, a 2004
History Channel documentary, and an assortment of other television productions
centered around the principal actors and events of the American Revolution (includ-
ing a filmed adaptation of Ellis’s Founding Brothers).
Franklin also attracts attention because his life was long, complex, and multifac-
eted, with many elements that can strike a potential author as exaggerated, mythi-
cal, or misunderstood by the general public. The urge to investigate such elements
has proved irresistible to numerous biographers, including seasoned scholars such
as Gordon S. Wood (b. 1933), who had won a history Pulitzer for The Radicaliza-
tion of the American Revolution (1992). In The Americanization of Benjamin
Franklin, Wood set out:

to penetrate beneath the many images and representations of Franklin that have accu-
mulated over the past two hundred years and recover the historic Franklin who did not
know the kind of massively symbolic folk hero he would become. At the same time
[Wood’s book] hopes to make clear how and why Franklin acquired these various
images and symbols. (Wood 2004, ix)

Put another way, Wood is fascinated not just by the life of Franklin, but by the
history of reactions to Franklin’s life. He declares that “the criticism that Franklin
has aroused over the past two centuries has been as extraordinary as the praise”
(4) and later reviews the mythologization of Franklin by Parson Mason Weems
(1756–1825) and other admirers (235–246).
122 BIOGRAPHY

Walter Isaacson (b. 1952), another prominent writer, explicitly connects attitudes
toward Benjamin Franklin to his biographers’ own environments, stating that “each
new look at him reflects and refracts the nation’s changing values. He has been vil-
ified in romantic periods and lionized in entrepreneurial ones. Each era appraises
him anew, and in doing so reveals some assessments of itself” (2003, 3). Isaacson
sees such assessments as barometers of the writers’ own attitudes toward upward
mobility, middle-class utilitarianism, and other socioeconomic movements. Isaacson
observes that, while nineteenth-century transcendentalists and early twentieth-
century Marxists railed against Franklin’s unromantic, bourgeois sensibilities,
Franklin was honored as “the most popular subject of American biography” during
the decades following the Civil War—an era of industrial revolution—and likewise
a figure of admiration following the Great Depression, when Franklin’s values again
seemed relevant (477–484). He finds current attitudes toward Franklin similarly
indicative of early twenty-first–century concerns, citing David Brooks’s characteri-
zation of Franklin as America’s “Founding Yuppie” and dissecting the extent to
which the actual details of Franklin’s life bear out his reputation (485–493). As the
president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, Isaacson heads an institution created as
a retreat for executives, intellectuals, professional artists, and other high-powered
individuals to consider “the meaning of the good life, leadership, and sound public
policy” (2007a). The institute’s mission mirrors the questions Isaacson uses to frame
his biography of Franklin:

Whatever view one takes, it is useful to engage anew with Franklin, for in doing so we
are grappling with a fundamental issue: How does one live a life that is useful, virtu-
ous, worthy, moral, and spiritually meaningful? For that matter, which of these attrib-
utes is most important? These are questions just as vital for a self-satisfied age as they
were for a revolutionary one. (2003, 4)

Stacy Schiff (b. 1961) centers her 400-page profile of Franklin (2005) on the last
decade of his life, which he spent primarily in France. Schiff’s style, notable for its
blend of factual detail and memorable characterizations, has helped her earn her sta-
tus as an elite biographer; her study of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) was named
the 2000 Pulitzer Prize winner in biography, and an earlier book on Antoine
Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944) was a finalist for the 1995 prize. Schiff’s preoccupation
with the play of personalities is evident from the start of A Great Improvisation,
which she begins with a detailed cast of characters: John Adams (1735–1826) is
introduced as “brilliant Massachusetts writer, orator, lawyer, statesman; austere,
thin-skinned, fretful. . . . Trailed through Paris a reputation for vanity and grace-
lessness” (xi). Schiff concludes her capsule resumé for statesman Arthur Lee
(1740–1792) with a series of pithy observations: “Like Franklin, a youngest son of
a vast family. Unlike Franklin, a man of bilious temperament. Never married, as no
woman could be found who met his standards” (xvi). Another individual, Paul
Wentworth (d. 1793), is summed up with “Audacious, artful master spy. With
20 aliases, assorted disguises, and a host of invisible inks, eluded even the peerless
Paris police. Highly cultivated; in Beaumarchais’s nervous opinion, ‘one of the
cleverest men in England’” (xvii).
Schiff’s account of Franklin’s adventures in France likewise feature significant
attention paid to character-defining details. For instance, in discussing playwright
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’s correspondence with the French minister
 BIOGRAPHY 123

of foreign affairs, she notes that “Beaumarchais signed his name only when he
feared that distress, or fatigue, had disfigured his handwriting. It never did. And his
inimitable style was signature enough” (69). Schiff’s epilogue casts Franklin’s diplo-
matic achievements as a triumph of his personal traits:

He was indeed a man of frightening versatility, more difficult to embrace for his very
breadth. He was a natural American in only one respect: He proved that there is no
such thing. He was willing at all times to put practice before theory, especially in
France, when his country’s fate hung in the balance. To the end he favored modest
experience over grandiose hypotheses. The latter were all too pleasing “till some exper-
iment comes and unluckily destroys them,” he observed, proof that he was not a
Frenchman after all. He was no less the revolutionary for being a congenial and cool-
headed late bloomer. (412)

Schiff’s supplementary materials similarly display her flair for mixing lively assess-
ment with scholarly organization. Her chronology of Franklin’s life includes entries
such as, “1716: Serves as his father’s assistant; dislikes the business” (413) and
“1789: Bastille falls on July 14. Franklin submits first three parts of Autobiography
to French friends. Subsists on diet of laudanum” (417). In the “Notes” section, Schiff
offers candid assessments of the sources she consulted with judgments such as “All
of Benjamin Franklin’s letters combined do not pack the descriptive punch of a sin-
gle Abigail Adams missive” (424), “The Letters of Richard Henry Lee (ed. Ballagh)
and Letters of William Lee (ed. Ford) make for spellbinding reading; the diary of
Arthur Lee less so” (439), and “Andrew Stockley’s Britain and France at the Birth of
America (2001) makes for a useful corrective to years of lopsided French and
American accounts” (447).
Other recent biographers have found it profitable to concentrate on Franklin’s sci-
entific endeavors. Historian Joyce E. Chaplin felt that, prior to her own book, most
biographies of Franklin had failed to “make sense of the connections between the
public life and the life in science” (2006, 5). Chaplin voices grave concerns about
present-day scientific illiteracy, presenting Franklin as a model she clearly wishes
twenty-first–century policy makers would strive to emulate (357–359). Science
writer Tom Tucker, for his part, sees Franklin’s penchant for hoaxes as a trait “not
fully explored by scholars until the mid-twentieth century and ever since then has
remained curiously beyond mainstream notice” (2003, xvii). Convinced that
Franklin never flew the famous kite, Tucker is as invested as his historian counter-
parts in separating Franklin’s purported achievements from his actual accomplish-
ments (which, in Tucker’s view, include manipulating the myth of his experiments
with electricity into diplomatic leverage).
The desire to educate the general public about an individual’s true personality, as
opposed to the persona developed by that individual or that perpetuated by his or
her contemporaries, can also be witnessed in the biographies produced of living
political figures such as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (b. 1947). Clinton’s cam-
paign for the U.S. presidency, her complex marriage, the rumors of corruption dog-
ging both her career and that of her husband (former president Bill Clinton,
b. 1946), and her status as a role model for other women (cf. Broder 1997) are
among the controversial elements of her life that make her a highly marketable subject,
such that the on-sale dates of two recent biographies on her (Gerth and Natta 2007,
and Bernstein 2007) caused high-profile jockeying for sales advantage by the books’
124 BIOGRAPHY

publishers. The strong credentials of the books’ authors (all three of them having
won Pulitzer Prizes for investigative reporting) also fueled interest in their content.
The authors were taken to task by some of their reviewers for excessive bias, insuf-
ficient insight, or both (cf. Dallek 2007 and Kakutani 2007), but this has become
inevitable with virtually any noteworthy book published on Clinton; journalist
Christopher Andersen’s American Evita (2004) drew similar heat during its stint on
the best-seller lists.
Another woman whose marital woes were widely publicized during her lifetime
was Diana, Princess of Wales (1961–1997). The tenth anniversary of her death
prompted a renewal of magazine and television attention to her story, including
reviews of Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles, which drew particular attention not
only because of the timing but because of Brown’s own status as a glamorous media
executive (cf. Maslin 2007; Kimmelman 2007; and Weber 2007). However, interest
in Diana’s life and death had remained substantial through the decade since her
passing, sustained by high-profile motion pictures such as The Queen (2006), by the
combination of romance and tragedy shaping the trajectory of her life, and by the
charisma that had elicited near-worship from thousands of admirers during her life-
time. As of 2007, the Library of Congress listed over 40 separate subject headings
for “Diana, Princess of Wales”; recent titles include The Way We Were (Burrell
2006) and A Royal Duty (Burrell 2003), books by a former servant; and Diana
(2006) by Sarah Bradford, an aristocrat and historian whose earlier book on Queen
Elizabeth II (1996) had caused a sensation in her native Britain; the front cover on
one of the paperback editions of Diana proclaims, “Finally, the complete story.”
The members of the Kennedy family, often described as the U.S. equivalent to roy-
alty, have also continued to interest biographers and their readers. Bradford titled
her book on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929–1994) America’s Queen (2000);
Andersen, too, has written about both the British royal family (The Day Diana
Died, 1998; Diana’s Boys, 2001; and After Diana, 2007) and the Kennedys (The
Day John Died, 2001; Sweet Caroline, 2003); and writer Jay Mulvaney compared
the two in Diana and Jackie (2002). Newer books about the Kennedys include
Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (Talbot 2007), The Kennedy
Mystique (Goodman 2006), The Private Passion of Jackie Kennedy Onassis (Moon
2005), Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House (Smith
2004), and Mrs. Kennedy: The Missing History of the Kennedy Years (Leaming
2001). As the titles suggest, the Kennedys continue to be alluring subjects in part
because the general public perceives an ongoing disconnect between the images they
projected and the realities of their lives, and in part because a number of readers are
specialists or collectors for whom the minutiae of the Kennedys’ lives are as fasci-
nating as their major accomplishments (The Private Passion, for instance, is actu-
ally about Onassis’s love of horses). Nigel Hamilton sees the focus on “fragments”
of people’s lives (including entire books on the aftermaths of their deaths) as part of
a trend that has been building since the 1960s (2007, 215–16).
The urge to reassess a famous person’s life against his or her reputation—
particularly if any of the evidence hints at conditions formerly considered shameful,
such as mental illness or homosexuality—can be witnessed in books such as
Lincoln’s Melancholy (Shenk 2005), which examines Abraham Lincoln’s (1814–1882)
battles with depression, and The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (Tripp 2005),
which argued that Lincoln’s deepest attachments were to men. Although Tripp’s book
was generally deemed weak and unconvincing, its publication prompted reviewers to
 BIOGRAPHY 125

produce thoughtful commentary on trends in historical scholarship, the provability

(or lack thereof) of hidden traits, and the relevance of sexuality-based theses (cf.
Capozzola 2005; Greenberg 2005; O’Hehir 2005; Stansell 2005; and Shenk 2005,
34–37). Lincoln’s Melancholy, which was named a “best book” of its year by the
New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
impressed its readers in part because the author had taken pains to document trends
in interpretations of Lincoln’s inner life, noting shifts in critical perception over the
twentieth century and how they affected the types of evidence historians were will-
ing to evaluate (Shenk 2005, 4–8, 221–43). Shenk observes that “works on Lincoln
in recent years bear the mark of increased appreciation for the firsthand observa-
tions of his life. At the same time, we’ve seen an increase in narrowly focused stud-
ies, some of which pluck out bits and pieces from the Lincoln record to assemble a
cartoon portrait of modern fantasies” (242–43). Writing several years after
Lincoln’s Melancholy, essayist Adam Gopnik (b. 1956) echoes a similar theme, hav-
ing followed a reading list of “the recent Lincoln literature” provided to him by an
acquaintance:

There’s a lot to read. In books published in the past two years alone, you can read
about Lincoln’s “sword” (his writing) and about his “sanctuary” (the Soldiers’ Home
just outside Washington, where he spent summers throughout the war). You can read
a book about Lincoln’s alleged love affair with a young officer, and one about Lincoln’s
relations, tetchy but finally triumphant, with Frederick Douglass. There is no part of
Lincoln, from manhood to death, that is not open and inscribed. You can learn that
some of Lincoln’s intimates believed his melancholy was rooted in extreme constipa-
tion (“He had no natural evacuation of bowels,” a friend explained) and also what for-
mula was used to embalm him, a gruesome but far from trivial point. (2007)

Efforts to debunk popular myths and opinions of Lincoln also appear to be on the
rise, leading to titles such as Lincoln Legends: Myths, Hoaxes, and Confabulations
Associated with Our Greatest President (Steers 2007) and Lincoln Unmasked:
What You’re Not Supposed To Know About Dishonest Abe (DiLorenzo 2006).
The awareness that interpretations shift with time plays a role in the development
of series such as “The American Presidents,” which debuted in 2002, featuring each
chief executive of the United States in a new book about his life and career. Accord-
ing to its Web site (www.americanpresidentsseries.com), each book is designed to be
“compact enough for the busy reader, lucid enough for the student and authorita-
tive enough for the scholar”; as such, the books are uniform in size and each less
than 200 pages long. The stature of the editor-in-chief, historian Arthur M.
Schlesinger Jr. (1917–2007), helped attract prominent contributors such as con-
victed Watergate counsel John Dean (b. 1938) on Warren G. Harding (1865–1923),
former Harper’s editor Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935) on William Howard Taft
(1857–1930), and retired senator Gary Hart (b. 1936) on James Monroe
(1758–1831), which in turn sparked interest in readers who might have otherwise
bypassed the volumes on these men.
Biographies on active politicians are inherently nondefinitive, given their subjects’
ongoing activities, and inevitably subject to accusations of bias, no matter how neu-
tral a stance the author may strive to maintain. They range from glossy photo-heavy
narratives on Barack Obama (Dougherty 2007) to behind-the-scenes accounts such
as Ambling into History (Bruni 2002), presented by a reporter who covered George
W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. Because one of the unique features of the
126 BIOGRAPHY

Bush presidencies is the father-son connection between George H.W. Bush (b. 1924)
and George W. Bush (b. 1946), many of the books produced during George W.’s
terms in office have focused on the family and its hold on power, with titles such as
American Dynasty (Phillips 2004); Secrecy and Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty
from Watergate to Iraq (Parry 2004); The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty (Schweizer
and Schweizer 2004); and The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty (Kelley
2004). Books about individual members of the family tend to refer to “dynasty” as
well, including Barbara Bush: Matriarch of a Dynasty (Kilian 2002); First Son:
George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty (Minutaglio 1999); and W: Revenge
of the Bush Dynasty (Mitchell 2003).
In general, traditional biographies for adults—even those concentrating on a specific
trait or era of the subject’s life—currently tend to average between 300 and 500 pages.
Among nontraditional formats, graphic novels have appeared on the lives of Danish
physicist Niels Bohr (Ottaviani and Purvis 2004), American activist Malcolm X (Helfer
and DuBurke 2006), and French Canadian revolutionary Louis Riel (Brown 2006),
with “graphic biographies” of Ronald Reagan, Nelson Mandela, and Fidel Castro for-
mally scheduled for publication in the near future as well.
Context and Issues. In the introduction to her biography of Rockwell, Laura
Claridge asserts that:

. . . most readers nowadays hold truth to be a complicated achievement, and few

among us believe anyone’s telling of a life to be the final word, the only way of its
telling. Because those of us in the twenty-first century are close to Rockwell’s times—
seeing them, quite rightly, as the context from which our own lives emerge—we mine
such lives as a means to understand the families that spawned us and the selves we’ve
become. (2001, xx)

Although many other writers have voiced perspectives similar to Claridge’s, the
degree to which biographers present themselves as experts on the lives of other indi-
viduals remains one of the most contentious aspects of the genre. A biographer’s
assumption of such authority—particularly if the subject did not or could not
authorize or condone his or her decision—may be considered flattering or judged
presumptuous. The biographer’s determination to ascertain and confirm the details
of another individual’s life may be seen as a worthy quest to obtain and present the
truth, but even when biographers enjoy “authorized” status, conflicts may arise
when their interpretations of events fail to match the recollections of the subjects or
their heirs. As Webb wryly notes, “There are many people over whose feelings the
author can clodhop, and they will all have a different view of the person from the
one offered. Some of those views will appear not to refer to the same person at all”
(2003, xiii-xiv). Backscheider asserts that:

. . . good biography must be collaboration—even with a dead subject, there must be

empathy and a real or developed understanding of the social, emotional, and historical
world. But good biography is always at his its heart somewhat adversarial. The biog-
rapher must ferret out the hidden, the buried, the most shameful secrets. (1999, 45)

Some biographies are produced when a writer feels compelled to investigate dis-
crepancies or gaps in their family histories. In her prologue to A Thousand Miles of
Dreams (2006), Sasha Su-Ling Welland (b. 1969) outlines some of the cultural, lin-
guistic, and philosophical issues she wrestled with in attempting to reconcile her
 BIOGRAPHY 127

grandmother and great-aunt’s conflicting accounts of their lives: “What I often mis-
interpreted as dishonest hiding behind [the Chinese] language is a cultivated ability
to move between formal and informal registers. . . . Suppressing my American desire
for exposé and working toward an understanding of these equally meaningful lev-
els of language, I moved beyond the quest for a single immutable truth” (12). An
anthropology and women’s studies professor, Welland presents her interpretation of
the lives of Amy Shuhao Ling Chen (1904–2006) and Ling Shuhua (1900–1990)
both as an academic study, with formal bibliographic citations, and as a memoir,
interweaving the details of Shuhao and Shuhua’s lives with her own adventures in
China, delineating her interactions with her grandmother and questioning her
motives in reading her great-aunt’s short stories, asking “Can I learn to approach
them as literature rather than clues to a family I understand too little?” (174).
In a similar vein, Jennet Conant’s interest in the lives of atomic physicists was
fueled by her “peculiar legacy” (xviii) and her family’s reluctance to discuss her
grandfather’s involvement with the Manhattan Project, a mystery compounded by
the myths surrounding a great-uncle’s suicide during the bomb’s development. As
Nigel Nicolson had with Portrait of a Marriage, Conant wrestled with her aware-
ness that her airing of long-held secrets would be regarded in some circles as
unseemly and even disloyal:

I . . . struggled with the problem of prying into what many of my grandfather’s friends
and colleagues might regard as a dark corner of his illustrious career. James Conant
was a very private, proud, and tidy man and placed a premium on appearances. He
would have loathed seeing his family’s mess tipped onto the page. There were also gap-
ing holes in the story. My grandmother was acutely aware that graduate students
would one day paw her private papers, and she set about methodically destroying any-
thing incriminatingly personal in the record, ripping pages out of diaries and burning
most of her mother’s and brother’s letters. (2002, xvii)

Biographies written by members or friends of the subject’s family command inter-

est in part because such individuals frequently do have access to sources not avail-
able to the general public. However, their direct participation in their subjects’ lives
also means that these writers’ versions of events must be treated with additional
caution. Screenwriter Gavin Lambert (1924–2005), a friend of Natalie Wood
(1938–1981), characterized her sister Lana’s 1984 memoir (Wood 1984) as
“remarkably untruthful” (2004, 326) and credits the existence of his own account
to Wood’s surviving spouse, Robert Wagner, whom Lambert quotes as saying,
“When you tell the truth about Natalie as you see it, I shall be at peace” (355). The
multiple biographies about Wood highlight the issue of competing agendas among
family members: Lambert wrote his account with the blessing and cooperation of
Natalie Wood’s widower and daughters, whereas Suzanne Finstad (b. 1955) con-
sulted Lana Wood for Natasha (2001), later stating that Wood had provided her
with “insight and intimate information she had not revealed in her own memoirs”
(Finstad 2001a). Although the San Francisco Chronicle named Finstad’s account the
best film book of its year, Lambert cites it sparingly in his notes.
Other biographers may view their projects as complementary rather than com-
peting, such as Nick Webb and M.J. Simpson, whose biographies of science fiction
author Douglas Adams (1952–2001) both appeared within a few years of Adams’s
untimely death. Webb was a friend of Adams and his family as well as a professional
colleague; as the official biographer, he had access to Adams’s papers, and his aim
128 BIOGRAPHY

was to produce a book that was “good company—like the man himself” (2003,
xiv). His style is wry and informal, with phrasings such as “Two minor digressions
from this period . . .” (in order to relate anecdotes about Adams’s personal gen-
erosity to the author and another friend, 268–270) and pronouncements such as,
“Of course it would be lovely for any chap if the woman in his life gave him uncon-
ditional support and admiration for every notion, no matter how daft, but in the
long term she would not be doing him a favour at all” in describing the ruthless
intelligence of Adams’s wife (227). In a similar vein, Webb calls Adams’s family tree
“something I will not attempt to describe. What with infant mortality, marriage
between distant cousins, and age disparities it looks as if someone quite disturbed
had tried to draw the Tube map from memory” (23).
Simpson, a journalist specializing in science fiction criticism, completed a book of
similar length that focused on Adams’s career, supporting his detailed examination
of Adams’s history with almost 30 pages of references (2003). Although Webb was
the biographer formally commissioned by Adams’s heirs, Simpson had been one of
the most prominent fans of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, to the extent that
he was entrusted with updating and expanding Don’t Panic, a much-revered guide
to the series often regarded as an Adams biography in its own right (Gaiman 2002).
Simpson’s pocket volume on The Hitchhiker’s Guide (2001) was praised in Webb’s
acknowledgments as “very useful” and “essential reading” (xi). Thus, the majority
of Adams’s friends and colleagues were happy to assist his project as well as Webb’s.
In the words of one reviewer:

Ultimately, I find myself unwilling to recommend either book at the exclusion of

another. As with most people, Douglas Adams is too complex for a single interpreta-
tion. While Webb and Simpson don’t offer very different views, there are facets covered
in one work that aren’t covered in the other. Read both in close succession (preferably
right after The Salmon of Doubt, which could be called Douglas’ own fragmented
autobiography) and you’ll get the idea. (Sauvé 2005)

In Adams’s case, his biographers all also agree that he was not fully trustworthy
where specifics of his life were concerned. Webb noted Adams’s tendency to offer
biographical revelations that had evolved into “suspiciously polished artifacts”
(xiv). Gaiman elaborates upon the same theme:

The other thing that fascinates me now [in addition to “accidental” elements of the Hitch-
hiker series], especially looking at some of the biographies that are coming out now, is how
much of Douglas’ story has been invented post–1987 when I did the first draft of the
book. There are major Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy antidotes [sic] that cannot be
found in Don’t Panic because Douglas hadn’t made them up yet. (Huddleston 2003)

Simpson, whose efforts to debunk Adams’s invented anecdotes garnered both

praise and scorn, included a lament in his introduction to the American edition of
Hitchhiker. Speaking of Adams’s underproductive collaboration with comedian
Graham Chapman, Simpson writes that “trying to determine the accuracy of con-
flicting stories told by two notoriously inaccurate raconteurs after more than two
decades is a thankless and ultimately pointless task” (xix). Simpson also used
the introduction to include information about Adams’s life that had surfaced since
the publication of the first British edition, rather than attempting to “shoehorn” the
new material into the original text (xvii).
 BIOGRAPHY 129

The drama of conflicting, irreconcilable stories and personality clashes helps

drive the sales of biographies on nuclear physicists. Some of the major storylines in
the saga of twentieth-century atomic energy research include a secret meeting
between Niels Bohr (1885–1962) and Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) in 1941
that came to be seen as the end of their friendship; a series of arguments between
Bohr and Albert Einstein (1879–1955) regarding Bohr’s interpretation of quantum
mechanics; and the 1953 government hearing on J. Robert Oppenheimer
(1904–1967). The Bohr-Heisenberg meeting inspired Michael Frayn’s play
Copenhagen (1998), which won the 2000 Tony Award for best play and was later
adapted for television with renowned actors Stephen Rea, Daniel Craig, and
Francesca Annis. The play, in turn, generated so much interest that Bohr’s family
decided to release unpublished documents related to the meeting in 2002, 10 years
ahead of schedule, the better “to accommodate the present interest and to avoid
undue speculation about the contents” (NBA 2002). The Oppenheimer hearing,
which resulted in Oppenheimer’s security clearance being revoked, created perma-
nent rifts in the scientific community between his defenders and his detractors
(cf. Conant 2002, 291–92; Herken 2002, 316).
At the turn of the millennium, some of the participants and witnesses to these
conflicts were still alive and available to discuss their perception of these events. At
the same time, most of the central figures had passed away. As individuals become
incapacitated or die, researchers lose direct access to those individuals as sources of
oral history; on the other side of the coin, out of consideration for the other partic-
ipants in their activities, some individuals or their heirs stipulate that their archives
remain sealed for a given period after their deaths. Thus, the total range of source
material for books on the atomic era will remain in flux for several decades to come,
triggering fresh interpretations of familiar stories as letters, notes, and other mate-
rials become known and available to biographers. In Einstein, which reached the
top of the New York Times best-seller list in 2007, Walter Isaacson notes that he
received “early and complete access to the wealth of new Einstein papers that
became available in 2006” (2007, xv). In Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma,
Jeremy Bernstein described the incidents and concerns that had caused 40 years to
elapse before he felt ready to write about the man:

Things are both easier and more difficult—for the same reason. Nearly all the actors
in this drama are dead. There are still a few of Oppenheimer’s California students left,
and a few of the people who were at Los Alamos with him, but nearly every week I
read a new obituary. This means that I am no longer constrained by their presence, but
it also means that I can no longer get their advice. (xi)

Science historian Abraham Pais (1918–2000) died before finishing his own book
on Oppenheimer. Robert P. Crease, who completed the manuscript, was charged
with adding only enough material to make the biography publishable, thus restrict-
ing him from “addressing topics that Pais himself clearly intended to discuss” or
that would otherwise have been expected in a biography of Oppenheimer (Pais
2006, xvii–xviii). In contrast, American Prometheus (Bird and Sherwin 2005) was
widely lauded upon its publication as the most ambitious book on Oppenheimer to
date and received the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in biography.
The attitudes of subjects and their families toward biographical subjects vary
widely, ranging from cheerful cooperation to active hostility. In his biography of
130 BIOGRAPHY

Bohr, Pais noted that Bohr’s sons declined to review his manuscript, “essentially
because they felt that mine should be an independent view and assessment” (1991, vi).
Andrew Wilson says that his subject, novelist Patricia Highsmith, “was adamant a
biography should not be written while she was alive—indeed, she blocked several
attempts—but secretly quite proud that one might be written when she was no
longer around to witness the result” (2003, 9). When the children of businessman
Joseph P. Kennedy (1888–1969) asked Nasaw to write his biography, Nasaw ini-
tially refused the opportunity, accepting it only after the family made it clear that
they would not demand final approval of Nasaw’s manuscript (Mehegan 2006).
Regarding her biography of Aristotle Onassis, Bradford indicated that she had noti-
fied Onassis’s children of the project but that they were under strict orders from
their mother not to authorize or collaborate with any biographers; at the same time,
she believed her track record as a reputable biographer helped her obtain interviews
with other individuals who seldom granted them (CNN 2000).
Some biographers, such as Hamilton, Rollyson, and Kitty Kelley, revel in their unau-
thorized status, believing that it frees them to tell unflattering truths that an authorized
biographer would be pressured to suppress. Their methods are both deplored and
admired by their colleagues; Backscheider, for instance, notes that Hamilton’s obsessive
collection of nontraditional evidence allowed him to craft an unprecedentedly detailed
portrait of John F. Kennedy’s early years, but that Hamilton’s style was self-centric
enough “to trigger the testing and doubting of evidence” (1999, 75–76); the same can
be said of reactions to Rollyson and Kelley’s works (cf. Brown 2004). A New Republic
editor concluded, “The real shame here isn’t that Kitty Kelley resorts to shoddy jour-
nalistic methods to uncover some basic truths. It’s that so few others have used scrupu-
lous journalistic methods to find them” (Crowley 2004).
Reception. The 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner, The Most Famous Man in America,
attracted praise both for its vivid portrayal of a nineteenth-century sex scandal and
the writer’s ability to highlight its relevance to modern concerns:

One cannot view Beecher’s career without thinking of the many charismatic men who
were driven to heady heights by their unquenchable longing for approbation and who
risked their legacies by letting this longing shade into lust—men of indisputable stature
such as Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Bill Clinton. (Applegate 2006, 471)

Major prizes such as the Pulitzer automatically result in publicity for a book, raising
its profile and often its sales. According to a Knopf representative, sales of American
Prometheus doubled after it was named the 2006 Pulitzer winner (Rich 2007).
Columbia University administers both the Pulitzer Prizes (via its Graduate School
of Journalism) and the Bancroft Prizes (via its trustees). The Bancroft Prizes reward
outstanding work in the fields of American history and diplomacy; recent Bancroft
winners include works on Jonathan Edwards (Marsden 2003) and William
Randolph Hearst (Nasaw 2000). The Lambda Literary Foundation, which supports
gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender literature, administers an annual biography
prize; recent winners include February House: The Story of W.H. Auden, Carson
McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under
One Roof in Wartime America (Tippins 2005); Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre
Lorde (De Veaux 2004); Ridiculous! The Theatrical Life and Times of Charles
Ludlam (Kaufman 2002); and The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin—A Literary
Life Shattered by Scandal (Werth 2001).
 BIOGRAPHY 131

PULITZER PRIZES IN BIOGRAPHY OR AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The most recent Pulitzer prizes in biography or autobiography have included:

2007 The Most Famous Man in America:The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher by Debby
Applegate (Doubleday)
2006 American Prometheus:The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird
and Martin J. Sherwin (Alfred A. Knopf)
2005 de Kooning: An American Master by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan (Alfred A.
Knopf)
2004 Khrushchev:The Man and His Era by William Taubman (W.W. Norton)
2003 Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro (Alfred A. Knopf)
2002 John Adams by David McCullough (Simon & Schuster)
2001 W.E.B. Du Bois:The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 by David
Levering Lewis (Henry Holt and Company)
2000 Vera (Mrs.Vladimir Nabokov) by Stacy Schiff (Random House)
Source: Pulitzer Prize Web site, http://www.pulitzer.org/.

Milestones such as deaths can also revive interest in a biography (cf. Bosman
2007), as can “biopics” (movies based on the lives of real people). Some motion-pic-
ture directors buy the rights to popular biographies to use as their primary sources;
films produced from specific books include Marie Antoinette (based on Fraser
2001), A Beautiful Mind (based on Nasar 1998), and The Life and Death of Peter
Sellers (based on Lewis 1997).
Many of the authors named above (Bradford, Isaacson, and Nasaw among them)
have developed a substantial following among readers of nonfiction. Other estab-
lished authors in the genre include Robert Caro (b. 1935), Robert Dallek (b. 1934),
Victoria Glendinning (b. 1937), David Levering Lewis (b. 1936), Diane Middle-
brook (b. 1939), Arnold Rampersad (b. 1941), and Claire Tomalin (b. 1933).
In her essay on the art and appeal of biography, Selma G. Lanes observes that the
genre exerts a special hold on its readers because it is “a socially and intellectually
acceptable form of voyeurism. It can be instructive, even spiritually or morally
uplifting for us with regard to our own lives in flux” (Lanes 2004, 28). The first
decade of the twenty-first century saw many rules and customs in transition as the
United States sought to cope with the events of September 11, 2001; with advances
in technology; and with emotionally charged debates among both policy makers and
the general public about issues such as gay marriage and the war in Iraq. As society
adjusts to new realities, the expectations of mainstream readers regarding biogra-
phers’ choices of approach, method, and style will likewise shift. Biographers will
continue to offer stories about the Kennedys, the Windsors, and other charismatic
celebrities, as well as strive to do justice to new subjects, but their interpretations
will inevitably reflect the concerns of the era in which they themselves are living,
rather than that of the subject or those of earlier biographers.

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Schweizer, Peter, and Rochelle Schweizer. The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty. New York:
Doubleday, 2004.
Scott, Janny. “For Unauthorized Biographers, the World Is Very Hostile.” New York Times
6 Oct. 1996. http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/22/specials/welty-unauthorized.html.
Seligman, Craig. “Brilliant Careers: Janet Malcolm.” Salon 29 Feb. 2000. http://archive.
salon.com/people/bc/2000/02/29/malcolm/index.html.
Shenk, Joshua Wolf. Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and
Fueled His Greatness. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. www.lincolnsmelancholy.com.
Simpson, M.J. Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams. 1st American ed. Boston: Justin,
Charles & Company, 2003.
Smith, Sally Bedell. Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House. New
York: Random House, 2004.
Stansell, Christine. “What Stuff!” New Republic (9 Jan. 2005 online; 17 January 2005 print).
Republished at Powell’s Books “Review-a-Day” Web site 13 Jan. 13 2005.
Steers, Edward, Jr. Lincoln Legends: Myths, Hoaxes, and Confabulations Associated With
Our Greatest President. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2007.
Stiles, T.J. “Man of Steel—and Ink.” Salon 25 Oct. 2006. http://www.salon.com/books/
review/2006/10/25/nasaw/index.html.
Talbot, David. Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years. New York: Free Press, 2007.
136 BIOGRAPHY

Tippins, Sherrill. February House: The Story of W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and
Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime
America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.
Tripp, C.A. The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln. Lewis Gannett, ed. New York: Free
Press, 2005.
Tucker, Tom. Bolt of Fate: Benjamin Franklin and His Electric Kite Hoax. New York: Public
Affairs, 2003.
Webb, Nick. Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams. New York:
Ballantine, 2003.
Weber, Caroline. “Tabloid Princess.” New York Times 10 June 2007. http://www.nytimes.
com/2007/06/10/books/review/Weber-t.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/
People/D/Diana,%20Princess%20Of%20Wales.
Welland, Sasha Su-Ling. A Thousand Miles of Dreams: The Journeys of Two Chinese Sisters.
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.
Werth, Barry. The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin—A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal.
New York: Talese, 2001.
Whittemore, Reed. Pure Lives: The Early Biographers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1988.
———. Whole Lives: Shapers of Modern Biography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1989.
Wilson, Andrew. Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith. New York: Bloomsbury,
2003.
Winner, Lauren. “Creative Marriage, British Style: PW Talks With Katie Roiphe.” Publisher’s
Weekly 23 April 2007. http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6434983.html.
Wood, Gordon S. The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. New York: Penguin, 2004.
Wood, Lana. Natalie: A Memoir by Her Sister. New York: Putnam, 1984.
Yardley, Jonathan. “The Sage of Baltimore.” Atlantic Monthly Dec. 2002. Republished at
Powell’s Books “Review-a-Day” Web site (17 Dec. 2002). http://www.powells.com/
review/2002_12_17.html.
———. “How an Ambitious Scottish Immigrant Rose from Hardscrabble Roots to the Pinnacle
of Industry.” Washington Post 15 Oct. 2006. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/
content/article/2006/10/12/AR2006101201097.html.
———. “Why Are We So Fascinated by the Lives of Others?” Washington Post 25 Mar. 2007.
h t t p : / / w w w. w a s h i n g t o n p o s t . c o m / w p - d y n / c o n t e n t / a r t i c l e / 2 0 0 7 / 0 3 / 2 2 /
AR2007032201670.html.

Further Reading
Backscheider, Paula R. Reflections on Biography. New York: Oxford, 1999, www.biogra-
phy.com; Hamilton, Nigel. Biography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2007; Holroyd, Michael.
Works On Paper. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2002; Rollyson, Carl. A Higher Form of
Cannibalism? Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005; Shenk, Joshua Wolf. “Afterword: ‘What Every-
body Knows.’” In Lincoln’s Melancholy, 221–243. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003; Whit-
temore, Reed. Whole Lives: Shapers of Modern Biography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1988;
Zarnowski, Myra. History Makers: A Questioning Approach to Reading and Writing Biogra-
phies. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003.
PEGGY LIN DUTHIE
C

CHICK LIT
Definition. Much of the fiction written by American women in the twenty-first
century can be termed “popular,” owing to its sustained engagement with an
expansive but clearly defined readership. Since the 1990s, popular women’s fiction
has been dominated by “chick lit,” a term that has come to signify a particular
brand of commercial fiction. In her article “Who’s Laughing Now? A Short History
of Chick Lit and the Perversion of a Genre,” novelist Cris Mazza credits herself
with inventing the taxonomy in her capacity as co-editor of an anthology of new
women’s writing. The stories in Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction sought “not to
embrace an old frivolous or coquettish image of women but to take responsibility
for our part in the damaging, lingering stereotype” (Mazza 2000, 18). Mazza
coined the term hoping that critics would recognize its “ironic intention”; as she
observes, the ironic inflection of the term evaporated with the inception of the
“second incarnation” of chick lit (2000, 18). It is this second incarnation that
became a publishing phenomenon in the 1990s and continues to thrive in the
twenty-first century.
Arguably, tone is the defining characteristic of the genre. The signature tone of
chick lit is humorous, irreverent, and journalistic. Many writers of chick lit novels
began their careers as columnists and use their social commentaries as source
material for their fictional worlds. Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) evolved from
British writer Helen Fielding’s newspaper columns for the Independent and later
the Daily Telegraph. Candace Bushnell’s column “Sex and the City” provided the
material for her first novel and the hugely influential HBO television series
(1998–2004).
From its inception, chick lit secured the readership of the younger demographic
through its engagement with contemporary issues and popular culture. Over the
past decade, chick lit has sprouted a variety of subgenres. Although commentators
on the genre regularly announce its decline, it continues to expand and attract a
wider range of women readers.
138 CHICK LIT

“IT’S ABOUT YOU!”

Today’s chick lit is written by, about, and for women. When asked to explain the popularity
of the genre, readers emphasize the importance of identification. The epigram of the Web
site “chicklitbooks.com” reflects this appetite for the familiar: “It’s hip. It’s smart. It’s fun. It’s
about you!” (Ferriss and Young 2005, 1). For many readers, chick lit provides an antidote to
the unrealistic images of women’s lives presented by the media. As women’s choices seem
to proliferate, the media continues to fixate on issues of female identity and to debate
women’s place and function in contemporary society. Many chick lit novels privilege multiple
viewpoints, enabling readers to experience vicariously the narratives of women who chose
differently from them.

History. Chick lit entered the public’s consciousness as a generic term after the
publication of Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary in 1996. In her introduction to The
Feminist Bestseller, Imelda Whelehan observes that Fielding’s novel “facilitated a
shift in the way contemporary young women’s lives were discussed and described”
and “spoke to a new generation of women about the complexities of their lives”
(Whelehan 2005, 4).
Writers of the genre trace its roots as far back as the nineteenth century, claiming
parentage in Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Edith Wharton. Reviewers register
these affinities while recognizing the relative frivolity of chick lit: the Sunday Tele-
graph’s image of Bushnell as “Jane Austen with a martini” graces the covers or
opening pages of her novels. Bushnell has identified herself as a postmodern Edith
Wharton. Regarding the heroine of Trading Up (2003), her third novel, Bushnell
states: “If anything, Janey. . . is like Lily Bart from The House of Mirth” (“Lipstick
Jungle”). In “Hypotext in the City: The House of Mirth at the Millennium,” Pamela
Knights examines Wharton’s presence in contemporary American women’s fiction;
her illuminating essay includes an analysis of Bushnell’s engagement with Wharton’s
narratives. In “Mothers of Chick Lit?” Juliette Wells compares Wharton’s represen-
tation of New York society in The House of Mirth with postmodern depictions.

THE CHICK-LIT BRAND

Bridget Jones’s Diary sparked a publishing boom in Great Britain and the United States. A
multitude of novels chronicling the daily struggles of single women followed in its wake.
Chick lit became an instantly recognizable brand, which, a decade later, continues to sell itself.
The packaging of chick lit novels testifies to its status as a distinct genre: readers scan the
pastel covers for the familiar motifs of chick lit as much as they seek out individual authors:
shoes, lipsticks, cocktails, and handbags are prevalent.
Publishing houses have created imprints to cater solely to this burgeoning market.
“Strapless,” an imprint of Kensington Publishers, and “Red Dress Ink,” a division of Harlequin
Publishing, dedicate themselves entirely to the production of chick lit. “Red Dress Ink”
identifies itself in this way:“a women’s fiction program that depicts young, single, mostly city-
dwelling women coping with the pressures that accompany a career, the dating scene, and all
the other aspects of modern life in America” (Ferriss 2005, 194). Web sites dedicated to
chick lit assert its credentials as a distinct genre: they offer definitions, forums, bibliographies,
and dictionaries of chick lit slang, as well as advertising the novels themselves.
 CHICK LIT 139

Plum Sykes, a British-born chick lit writer who lives in and writes about Manhattan,
also claims parallels with Wharton: “Honestly, if Edith Wharton published The
Custom of the Country now, it would be considered chick lit” (Solomons 2004).
Bridget Jones’s Diary shared some of the plot of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice,
including the lead male character named Darcy, who initially shuns and insults the
female lead character. To further cement the connection, Colin Firth, the actor who
played Mr. Darcy in the acclaimed 1995 BBC television production of Pride
and Prejudice, also played the Mark Darcy character in the 2001 movie of Bridget
Jones’ Diary.
Publishers have attempted to capitalize on these broad, thematic parallels by re-
marketing nineteenth-century literary classics. In 2006, Bloomsbury and Headline
published editions of Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and the novels of Jane Austen with
pastel covers sporting silhouettes of the young heroine. Reviewers have identified
young adults as the primary market for these editions; the Guardian includes the
repackaged Bloomsbury classics in its recommendations for teenage readers
(“Teenage Picks”). However, Bloomsbury clearly issued these new editions with the
readers of chick lit in mind. American popular fiction writers such as Meg Cabot
have been chosen to write brief prefaces to the novels, entitled “Why You Should
Read . . .”
Literary critics continue to dispute these lines of descent. Many acknowledge the
parity in basic subject matter but argue that the similarity ends there. In “Mothers
of Chick Lit?” Juliette Wells illuminates the stylistic differences between nineteenth-
century literary texts and today’s popular women’s fiction. She compares Fielding’s
description of the hero in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason with Charlotte
Brontë’s rendering of Rochester in Jane Eyre, emphasizing the richness of Brontë’s
prose:

While Helen Fielding supplies us only with a succinct declarative statement about Mark
Darcy’s looks, Charlotte Brontë captures in words the features of Mr. Rochester’s
face, relates them to the qualities of his personality, convincingly explains why Jane
should be so drawn to a man who would not usually be considered handsome, and
tantalizes our interpretive skills by insistently using language of mastery and enslave-
ment. Fielding’s sentence, immediately comprehensible, passes by almost without our
noticing it; Brontë’s sentences invite us to savor and ponder her choice of words.
(Wells 2005, 65)

Twentieth-century touchstones open up the most fertile line of enquiry into the
history of the genre. Modern paradigms for today’s chick lit include Rona Jaffe’s
The Best of Everything (1958), Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl
(1962), Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963), Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the
Dolls (1966), and, more recently, Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (1983). Indeed chicklit
Web sites have begun to identify such novels as models for the genre (Skurnik 2006).
Written on the brink of second-wave feminism, these mid-century novels broke new
ground with their candid representations of female sexuality and the issues that
informed women’s everyday lives. In The Best of Everything, Jaffe explores taboos
such as abortion, infidelity, and sexual harassment. The novel’s epigram comes from
an advertisement in the New York Times: “You Deserve the Best of Everything,” in
many ways the mantra of today’s chick lit. The Best of Everything was reissued in
2005 in recognition of its contemporary relevance. Speaking with Renée Montagne
140 CHICK LIT

in 2005, Jaffe registers parallels with Sex and the City (1996). She recalls writing the
novel to engage with the covert narratives of women living in the “hypocritical” and
“secretive” atmosphere of the fifties. She credits her novel’s enduring success to its
identifiable narratives: “people saw themselves reflected in it . . . they realized that . . .
they weren’t alone and it made them feel great.” In her foreword to the 2005 edi-
tion of the novel, Jaffe asserts, “The honesty of The Best of Everything paved the
way for other authors” (Jaffe 2005, ix).
The heroines in The Best of Everything have come to the city seeking the best
career, the best man, and the best apartment. The novel opens with the image of the
hundreds of women who navigate the city every morning:

You see them every morning at a quarter to nine, rushing out of the maw of the sway
tunnel, filing out of Grand Central Station, crossing Lexington and Park and Madison
and Fifth avenues, the hundreds and hundreds of girls . . . Some of them are wearing
chic black suits (maybe last year’s but who can tell?) and kid gloves and are carrying
lunches in their violet-sprigged Bonwit Teller bags. None of them has enough money.
(Jaffe 2005, 1)

This opening paragraph launches the predominant themes and images of today’s
chick lit: the frenzy of the city, the career girl working to support herself, the pre-
occupation with acquisition and aesthetics. Jaffe’s representation of New York
anticipates chick lit’s preoccupation with urban spaces. She presents the city as an
arena attuned to the demands of the single woman. The heroines’ emotional trajec-
tories are mirrored by the city’s seasonal changes, and their demands are catered to
by New York’s social calendar: “Some girls know that there is a fifth season in New
York, the season of the Summer Bachelor” (Jaffe 2005, 243).
Jaffe’s primary heroine, 20-year-old Caroline Bender, serves as a model for the
chick lit heroine. Having lost her fiancé, she seeks work at a publishing firm, a
popular line of work for the postmodern heroine. Caroline’s initiation into a
treacherous work environment foreshadows novels such as Lauren Weisberger’s
The Devil Wears Prada (2003) and The Nanny Diaries (2002) by Emma
McLaughlin and Nicola Krause. On her first day at the office, Caroline realizes
that “the working world was more complicated than she had ever dreamed” (Jaffe
2005, 14).
Although chick lit writers distinguish their narratives from romance novels, the
undeserving suitor masquerading as the hero remains a staple of their fiction.
Caroline’s fiancé reappears, but it takes her most of the novel to understand that he
is not worthy of her. The satellite heroines pursue narrative lines that have retained
their place as subsidiary stories in today’s chick lit: the narrative of the divorced,
single mother and the struggling, doomed actress.
Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl undoubtedly paved the way for writers of chick
lit, not only by foregrounding the single woman’s narrative but also by contesting
generic boundaries. Brown’s text is a generic hybrid: part autobiography, part jour-
nalism, part survival guide. Formally and thematically, Sex and the Single Girl antic-
ipates Bushnell’s Sex and the City, another taboo-defying text that resists generic
categorization. In 2003, Barricade Books reissued Brown’s novel with a prefatory
title, announcing it as the prototype for Bushnell’s text; the cover of the latest edition
reads, Before There Was Sex and the City, There Was Sex and the Single Girl.
Brown’s defiant tone and journalistic technique set the standard for contemporary
 CHICK LIT 141

chick lit writers: the rallying cries of independence, the cataloguing of masculine
types, and emphatic rejection of the “singleton” stigma echo throughout today’s
chick lit. Chapter titles such as “Where to Meet Them,” “Money Money Money”
and “The Apartment” would not look out of place in a twenty-first-century chick
lit novel. Brown’s opening characterization of the single girl as sassy, tough, and
desirable prefigures the heroines of today’s chick lit:

the single woman, far from being a creature to be pitied and patronized, is emerging as
the newest glamour girl of our times. She is engaging because she lives by her wits. She
supports herself. She has had to sharpen her personality and mental resources to a
glitter in order to survive in a competitive world and the sharpening looks good.
Economically she is a dream . . . Why else is she attractive? Because she isn’t married,
that’s why! She is free to be The Girl in a man’s life or at least his vision of The Girl,
whether he is married or single himself. (Brown 2003, 6)

Another notable model for contemporary American chick lit is Mary McCarthy’s
The Group (1963). Bushnell observes that The Group tells “the same story” as her
latest novel, Lipstick Jungle (2005), and Susann’s Valley of the Dolls: “It has lousy
men, crappy apartments, birth control, lesbian friends” (“Lipstick Jungle”). The
Group follows the lives of eight Vassar graduates; each chapter presents a different
center of consciousness. Again, McCarthy’s novel engages frankly with the taboo
subjects of the day: lesbian relationships, contraception, the breast/bottle debate.
Although the controversy surrounding some of these subjects has diminished, the
reflections of McCarthy’s heroines remain relevant. One heroine, Polly, discovers
that she can feel “quite happy and self-sufficient” without a man and wonders
whether “it might be almost a deprivation to get married” (McCarthy 1966, 245).
Polly later marries but believes that her married classmates secretly covet the lives
of resolutely single women, such as Helena: “It was felt that they at least had ‘done
something’” (McCarthy 1996, 284). As the single girl determined to establish her-
self in the male-dominated publishing world, Libby MacAusland is clearly another
paradigm for the twenty-first–century chick lit heroine.
The term gossip surfaces frequently in association with popular women’s fiction:
in her introduction to Valley of the Dolls Julie Burchill describes the text as “three
decades of gossip columns distilled into one fat novel” (Burchill 2005, x); Michiko
Kakutani (1989) of the New York Times characterizes McCarthy’s The Group as “a
chatty gossip sheet” (Bushnell’s novels have been categorized as ‘Gossip Lit’; Mark
Goldblatt (2003) describes Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada as “the most
gossipy novel in recent years.” However, McCarthy’s text differs from chick lit in
several ways. Literary critics stress the disposability of chick lit, but The Group con-
tinues to resonate with a wide readership. Unlike many chick lit writers, McCarthy
does not segregate women’s preoccupations from broader social issues. The third-
person narrator of The Group casts a satirical eye over America’s privileged classes.
The novel opens on the familiar image of single women assembling in New York,
but the appreciation of the city’s plurality is captured with a tinge of irony that is
rare in today’s chick lit:

They were in the throes of discovering New York, imagine it, when some of them had
actually lived there all their lives, in tiresome Georgian houses full of waste space in the
Eighties or Park Avenue apartment buildings, and they delighted in such out-of-the-
way corners as this . . . (McCarthy 1966, 5)
142 CHICK LIT

Where today’s chick lit heroines wrangle over designer labels, McCarthy’s Vassar
graduates argue over political affiliations and worry about the effects of privilege:
“Great wealth was a frightful handicap; it insulated you from living” (McCarthy
1966, 26). The influence of the feminist movement on the group is clear. The women
insist that they are a “different breed . . . from the languid buds of the previous
decade” and that they will work in the fall, “at a volunteer job if need be”
(McCarthy 1966, 12). One heroine, Priss, regrets relinquishing her “job and social
ideals” for her husband and suspects that he would be “far happier himself if she
were where she longed to be—in Washington, as a humble cog in the New Deal,
which he hated—and he could boast of ‘my Bolshevik wife’” (McCarthy 1966, 325).
Susann’s Valley of the Dolls is often cited as the best-selling novel of all time. In
the television series Sex and the City, a reformed New York party girl who has
moved to the suburbs insists on the redundancy of Susann’s narratives: “Life isn’t a
Jacqueline Susann novel, ‘four friends looking for life and love in the big city’”
(“The Baby Shower”). At the end of the episode, the suburban housewife returns to
New York in a desperate attempt to recuperate this narrative. This nod to Susann
testifies to the novel’s relevance for the single heroines of American chick lit.
Spanning three decades, Valley of the Dolls charts the lives of three friends striving
to climb the ladder of the entertainment industry. Like Jaffe, Susann opens her novel
with the most sympathetic character, Anne Welles, securing her position as primary
heroine. The novel begins in 1945 with a moment that has become a staple of the
chick lit plot: the arrival of the heroine in New York: “The temperature hit ninety
degrees the day she arrived. New York was steaming—an angry concrete animal
caught unawares in an unseasonable hot spell. But she didn’t mind the heat or the
littered midway called Times Square. She thought New York was the most exciting
city in the world” (Susann 2003, 1). For chick lit heroines, the city, usually New
York, is a site for reinvention, adventure, and enterprise: “There was an acceptance
at face value in New York, as if everyone had just been born, with no past heritage
to acknowledge or hide” (Susann 2003, 6).
Valley of the Dolls is undoubtedly darker than contemporary chick lit. The “dolls”
of the title signify the red or black pills that the heroines come to rely on as rela-
tionships begin to founder. In this world, even female friendship—often the only
anchor for the chick lit heroine—is tainted by betrayal. Like Jaffe and McCarthy,
Susann admits the reader into uncharted territory, tackling taboos such as birth
control, breast cancer, sexual experimentation, and prenuptial agreements. The novel
also dramatizes the alienation experienced by women who seem to “have it all”—a
theme that Bushnell in particular would explore toward the end of the century.
In Heartburn, Ephron gives voice to the woman scorned. Wells speculates that
this narrative is “too wrenching” for chick lit but notes that this subject takes cen-
ter stage in British writer Elizabeth Buchan’s Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman
(2002) (Wells 2005, 68). One is more likely to encounter this narrative in “hen lit,”
a subgenre for more mature readers. However, Ephron’s heroine ends up pursuing
the narrative line of the single women of chick lit. It is well documented that the
novel is a thinly veiled account of the breakdown of Ephron’s marriage. Heroine
Rachel Samstat, a Jewish American food writer, is seven months pregnant with her
second child when she discovers that her husband has been having an affair. She
leaves Washington and heads for New York where she will claim her identity as a
single woman. Through Rachel, Ephron presents the single woman’s narrative as
one of mobilization: “Things happen to you when you’re single. You meet new
 CHICK LIT 143

men, you travel alone, you learn new tricks, you read Trollope, you try sushi, you
buy nightgowns, you shave your legs. Then you get married and the hair grows in”
(Ephron 1983, 14). Rachel’s evaluation recalls Brown’s account of the single life
and reads like a commentary on the lives of today’s chick lit heroines. On the plane
to New York, she recognizes: “part of me was secretly relieved to be done with
swatches and couches . . . and that part of me was thinking: Okay, Rachel Samstat,
finally something is happening to you” (Ephron 1983, 16). Upon arriving, her
“heart does a little dance” at the sight of “people on the street rushing around
looking for action, love, and the world’s greatest chocolate chip cookie” (Ephron
1983, 35).
Contemporary chick lit writer Jennifer Weiner recalls reading Ephron’s novels and
“being completed taken” by her “frank, funny, wry voice” (“Snarkspot”). Through
Rachel’s voice, Ephron addresses the questions that continue to dominate women’s
fiction today. She wonders why women view marriage as their ultimate destination
and unveils the secret longings of the married woman: “It seemed to me that the
desire to get married—which, I regret to say, I believe is fundamental and primal in
women—is followed almost immediately by an equally fundamental and primal
urge, which is to be single again” (Ephron 1983, 84). Such speculation is echoed by
one of the heroines in the television series Sex and the City: “Married people just
want to be single again” (“The Chicken Dance”).
Rachel narrates with the signature irreverence of the chick lit heroine, satirizing
the hypocrisy of men and Washington’s social scene. Some of her humor is directed
at herself. Intertextual references acknowledge the hold of fictional narratives over
women. Rachel scoffs at the myths that shape women’s aspirations—the “Lillian
Hellman fantasy” that “the big man and the big woman march into the sunset
together and live happily ever after” (Ephron 1983, 134, Ephron’s italics)—but con-
cedes that she has capitulated to a particular stereotype, exemplified by a heroine in
an earlier popular novel: “I felt like a character in a trashy novel; I even knew which
trashy novel I felt like a character in, which made it worse: The Best of Everything”
(Ephron 1983, 153). The metatextual dimension of Heartburn foreshadows twenty-
first century chick lit; as the conventions of the genre become ever more familiar,
chick lit has become increasingly self-referential. In her metatextual commentary
Rachel anticipates one of the conventions of contemporary chick lit—the need for
the happy ending. Halfway through the novel, she assures the reader that her story
will end happily because she “insist[s] on happy endings” (Ephron 1983, 99). A
happy ending for Rachel constitutes self-assertion rather than union with a new
man; she throws a key lime pie at her husband’s face before leaving him for good.
Popular women’s fiction has undergone significant changes over the past 50 years.
Mid-century incarnations confronted the possibility of death, illness, suicide, and
depression. In The Best of Everything, Gregg, the would-be actress, dies after trying
to escape a man she mistakes for a rapist. The Group opens where many chick lit
novels leave off and refuses to reward all its heroines with a happy ending. At the
beginning of the novel, “pairs and trios of young women” arrive at the wedding of
one of their classmates, the beautiful Kay (McCarthy 1966, 5). It takes Kay’s death,
a probable suicide, to reunite “the group” in the final chapters. Valley of the Dolls
registers the dearth of plotlines for women in the fifties and sixties: marriage, mother-
hood, and beauty are finite. By the end of the novel, the women’s ideals are in tatters.
Jennifer, the beautiful “actress,” seeks self-definition beyond her body but kills
herself after a mastectomy; Neely is locked into the narrative of the self-destructive
144 CHICK LIT

movie star; Anne wins the man she loves but capitulates to the lure of the “dolls”
when he is unfaithful. At the end of the novel she looks forward only to a time when
there would be “nothing left—no hurt, no love” (Susann 2003, 467).
Trends and Themes. In its formative years, chick lit centered on the preoccupa-
tions of the single, young female. The genre has since expanded to incorporate many
aspects of women’s lives, such as marriage, motherhood, careers, and self-image.
Not all chick lit trades on the identification factor by presenting readers with the
world of their everyday lives. The comedy of manners, a different but equally popular
strain of chick lit, transports readers into the glamorous worlds captured on the cov-
ers of women’s magazines. By satirizing the modeling or entertainment industries,
these novels offer escapism while reassuring the reader that the image belies the real-
ity. In some of the most popular chick lit novels, the two worlds collide—hapless,
neurotic, single women are let loose among the princesses of the social elite. In
Bergdorf Blondes (2004), Plum Sykes places the dowdy English girl in the company
of New York’s platinum blondes: young women who “work” only to sustain the
impression that their lives “are fabulous beyond belief” (Sykes 2005, 1). In Every-
one Worth Knowing (2005), Weisberger drops an English 20-something into the
heady world of Manhattan’s hot spots.
For many chick lit heroines, financial status is the most significant identity cate-
gory. As the beneficiaries of feminism, these professional, independent, urban hero-
ines flaunt their credentials as consumers. Consumerism is frequently presented as a
bonding experience that connects the most estranged chick lit heroines. The sisters
in Weiner’s In Her Shoes (2004) have only one thing in common: their love of
footwear. Chick lit novels abound with references to brand names, signaling the pre-
dominance of the “must have” mentality. Even heroines on limited salaries equate
acquisition with success. Moments of personal triumph are usually accompanied by
material gain of some kind. In The Nanny Diaries, Mrs. X gives Nan a pair of old
Prada shoes. For Nan, this offering represents a victory over Manhattan’s most con-
spicuous consumers: “PRADA! P-R-A-D-A. As in Madonna. As in Vogue. As in,
watch me walk off in style, you khaki-wearing, pager-carrying, golf-playing, Wall
Street Journal toting . . . arrogant jerk-offs!” (Krause and McLaughlin 2002, 67).
HBO’s adaptation of Sex and the City continues to exert its influence on chick
lit in many ways, but its celebration of consumerism has had perhaps the most
enduring effect. Every week viewers tuned in to find out what designer labels the
heroines were brandishing. At times, shopping is presented as a means of over-
coming boredom, loneliness, or sexual frustration. In one episode, Carrie, the
primary heroine, reports: “With no man in sight I decided to rescue my ankles from
a life of boredom by purchasing too many pairs of Jimmy Choo shoes” (“Where
There’s Smoke,” 1998).
Much popular women’s fiction celebrates female community and presents friend-
ship groups as a form of surrogate family. Most heroines are single at the beginning
of the chick lit novel and rely on urban networks for support. Emulating Jaffe,
Susann, and McCarthy, contemporary women writers often privilege plural per-
spectives and voices to reflect the relational sensibility of their heroines. The titles of
chick lit often announce friendship or community as their dominant theme: Rebecca
Wells’s Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (1996) and Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s
The Dirty Girls’ Social Club (2003). The forms of some chick lit novels reflect this
theme. The Dirty Girls’ Social Club is a sequence of stories, each focusing on an
individual heroine. Elissa Schappell’s acclaimed novel Use Me (2000) is composed
 CHICK LIT 145

of linked but self-contained stories, two of them narrated by the primary heroine’s
best friend. Bushnell’s Four Blondes (2000) is a sequence of stories and novellas. The
heroines do not know each other, but their stories of alienation are linked by strong
thematic resonances.
Many heroines of contemporary women’s fiction work in the same fields as their
creators: publishing, journalism, or advertising. Novels, such as Sex and the City,
The Nanny Diaries, and The Devil Wears Prada have been read as coded autobi-
ographies. Chick lit heroines often favor “confessional form[s]” such as diary
entries, e-mails, and newspaper columns: spaces where they are licensed to address
taboo subjects and express self-doubt (Whelehan 2005, 5).
One of the most prevalent conventions of contemporary chick lit is the happy
ending. Where Susann and McCarthy spurned neat, upbeat resolutions, contem-
porary writers rarely leave readers worrying about the futures of their heroines;
marriage usually beckons. Exceptions include The Devil Wears Prada, in which the
heroine begins the novel with the apparently perfect boyfriend and ends it single.
She is rewarded, however, with a burgeoning career in writing.
Sensing perhaps the saturation of the market for tales of the singleton in the city,
some writers have begun to test the boundaries of the genre. One of the fastest-
growing subgenres is “mystery lit,” a hybrid that interweaves the paradigmatic nar-
ratives of chick lit and crime novels. Janet Evanovich’s immensely popular Stephanie
Plum stories cross generic and formal boundaries: the detective heroine appears in
novels, novellas, and short stories. Helen Fielding’s latest novel, Olivia Joules and
the Overactive Imagination (2003), has a spy for its heroine. In these generic
hybrids, narratives begin to overlap. As they delve into the secret histories of their
neighbors, the sleuthing heroines start to question their own choices. The appeal of
this trend is reflected in the popularity of the television series Desperate Housewives,
which first aired in the United States in 2004 on ABC. Created by Marc Cherry, the
series is a dark comedy about the lives of suburban housewives. The themes of
the series resonate strongly with chick lit; the characters are immediately recogniz-
able types: the mother who has foregone her career to raise her hyperactive children;
the bored ex-model who is having an affair; the single mother seeking love; and the
control freak obsessed with the art of housekeeping. Generic suburban narratives
are offset by the murder mystery that brings the housewives together. When fellow
housewife Mary Alice commits suicide, the women unite to solve the mystery of her
death. A tale of abduction, murder, and blackmail unfolds. Multiple murders follow
in the second season.
“Ethnic lit” is a particularly popular subgenre that addresses the standard themes
of chick lit alongside broader social issues. Race and class ideology shape the lives
of these heroines as much as gender politics. The success of Terry McMillan’s novel,
Waiting to Exhale (1992), alerted publishers to a gap in the market. Until this point,
most chicklit depicted and targeted white, middle-class women. McMillan’s novel
centers on four African-American women who support each other through rela-
tionship difficulties. Like most ensembles in popular women’s fiction, the characters
follow different trajectories—the single mother, the mistress, and the betrayed wife
all feature—but are empowered by their connections with each other. As Lisa A.
Guerroro notes, romance and career trajectories in Waiting to Exhale are circum-
scribed by race and gender ideology; each of McMillan’s heroines must counter the
potency of the “Ideal of White Womanhood” in their daily lives (McMillan 1993,
177). The only forum for self-actualization is friendship.
146 CHICK LIT

In 2001, Latina journalist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez earned an advance of

$475,000 for her first novel, The Dirty Girls’ Social Club. Following the publi-
cation of the novel, Time magazine hailed Valdes-Rodriguez as “the Godmother
of chica lit.” Reviews noted strong affinities with McMillan’s novel and praised
Valdes-Rodriguez for fusing light fiction with political commentary. The novel
follows the experiences of six Boston University graduates who assemble twice
a year to catch up on each other’s lives. Friendship is the one constant in the lives
of the sucias (Spanish for “dirty girls”). One heroine describes the sucias as her
“anchor in this city for a decade” (Valdes-Rodriguez 2001, 109). Lauren serves
as the primary narrator and draws on the narratives of the “dirty girls” in her
newspaper column, My Life. Lauren fulfills all the criteria of the identifiable
chick lit heroine: she is a neurotic, irreverent journalist who uses her column to
confess her flaws, and she falls in love with the wrong men and eats only when
she is happy.
Through her representation of six women of varied ethnic backgrounds, Valdes-
Rodriguez challenges the homogenization of Latinas in America. In her spirited
commentary, Lauren confronts these issues head-on:

Here’s how my job interview went: You’re a Latina? How . . . neat. You must speak
Spanish, then? . . . With a name like Lauren Fernández, they figured Spanish was part
of the package. But that’s the American disease as I see it: rampant, illogical stereotyp-
ing. We would not be America without it. I admit I did not tell them I was half white
trash, born and raised in New Orleans. (Valdes-Rodriguez 2004, 10)

Valdes-Rodriguez strains the boundaries of chick lit and delivers—through

Lauren—a metacommentary on the limitations of the chick lit heroine. When
Lauren proposes writing about racial tensions, her boss instructs her to tone down
the aggression and aim for “you go, girl, sassy” (2004, 180). He designates her
column as the “‘syncopated counterbalance to all the dreary stuff in the rest of the
paper’” (180).
By the end of the novel, secrets have been shared—stories of domestic abuse and
hidden sexuality are released—and the group affirms its bonds. The Dirty Girls’
Social Club concludes with the wedding of one heroine and looks forward to the
wedding of another. Other sucia have abandoned unhealthy relationships and dis-
covered the values of solitude. Valdes-Rodriguez has since written two more novels
and founded a festival entitled the “Chica Lit Club Fiesta.”
Some of the most popular chick lit novels of the twenty-first century focus on
career paths, treating romance as a subsidiary plot. Young, single heroines striving
for financial independence take assistant positions in the hope of working their way
into publishing or supporting themselves through postgraduate courses. Chauvinistic
co-workers and tyrannical women bosses are a common feature of “work lit,” also
known as “office lit” and “assistant lit.” These novels often blur the line between
fiction and autobiography; two of the most successful incarnations of this subgenre
evolved from the experiences of the authors. Co-written by two former Manhattan
nannies, The Nanny Diaries is a comedy of manners. Nan, a 20-something student
from a liberal, middle-class family, supports herself by looking after the dysfunc-
tional children of Manhattan’s social elite. The prologue of the novel reads like a
nanny’s survival guide; it is peppered with “Nanny Facts” and warnings about
Manhattan’s affluent mommy figures:
 CHICK LIT 147

She is always tiny. Her hair is always straight and thin; she always seems to be inhal-
ing and never exhaling. She is always wearing expensive khaki pants, Chanel ballet
flats, a French striped T-shirt, and a white cardigan. Possibly some discreet pearls. In
seven years and umpteen interviews the I’m-mom-casual-in-my-khakis-but-intimidating-
in-my-$400-shoes outfits never changes. (Krause and McLaughlin 2002, 2)

When Nan meets Mrs. X, an apparently typical Park Avenue mommy, she
becomes nanny to her son, Grayer. How Mrs. X fills her time remains a mystery, yet
she expects Nan to adhere to her tight schedule of pedicures and “charity work”;
she asks her to run personal errands for her without specific instructions and airs
her dissatisfaction with Nan through condescending, “exquisitely passive aggressive”
notes (Mendelsohn 2002): “It has come to our attention that after you left in such
a hurry last night there was a puddle of urine found beneath the small garbage can
in Grayer’s bathroom . . . Such a glaring oversight gives me pause as to the consis-
tency of your performance” (Krause and McLaughlin 2002, 221).
The novel satirizes the twenty-first century cult of childhood and unveils the
child’s function as status symbol: Mr. and Mrs. X approach child rearing as a kind
of competitive sport. Nan is quizzed by a development consultant on Grayer’s
progress and upbraided for neglecting to read him the Wall Street Journal and serve
“‘bilingual meals’” (Krause and McLaughlin 2002, 178). Mrs. X abdicates respon-
sibility for her son by adopting the latest jargon of parenthood: when Grayer is
rejected by a prospective school, she wonders if Nan has “‘set him up for a poten-
tially deleterious self-esteem adjustment’” (176). The novel also makes a serious
political point. One of the “Nanny Facts” registers the race and class prejudice of
Manhattan’s parents: “in every one of my interviews, references are never checked.
I am white. I speak French. My parents are college educated. I have no visible piercings
and have been to Lincoln Center in the last two months. I’m hired” (4).
In The Nanny Diaries, Krause and McLaughlin venture into new territory, but the
staples of chick lit are present: Nan intimates her frustration to the reader through
capitalized inner monologue, a technique also deployed by Bushnell. When her
roommate’s boyfriend moves in, Nan begins the familiar, fruitless quest for an
affordable studio apartment; then a romance develops with a man who lives in the
same building as the X family. Krause and McLaughlin observe the stylistic con-
ventions of chick lit. Chapter titles resemble column headings: “Holiday Cheer at
$10 an Hour” and “Night of the Banking Dead.” The Nanny Diaries reached
number one in the New York Times best-seller list and was declared a “national
phenomenon” by Newsweek.
The success of Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada verifies the appeal of
voyeuristic “revenge” narratives. Reviewers of the novel immediately commented
on affinities with The Nanny Diaries. The Devil Wears Prada dramatizes a year in
the life of Andrea Sachs, a college graduate who moves to New York, having spent
23 years “embodying small-town America” (Weisberger 2003, 10). She lands a job
as junior assistant to Miranda Priestly, the “Devil in Prada,” and the most power-
ful woman in the fashion world. Assured that she will be able to fast-track her way
into journalism if she survives the year, Andrea endures months of humiliation
before finally standing up to Miranda. In the process, she loses her “supportive and
adorable” boyfriend, Alex (127, Weisberger’s italics). Like The Best of Everything,
The Devil Wears Prada deals with the difficult transition from college to the work-
place. At the beginning of the novel, Andrea reflects that all of her friends are in
148 CHICK LIT

entry-level jobs that provide no outlet for creativity or self-expression: “Each swore
she’d actually gotten dumber in the short amount of time since graduation, and
there was no escape in sight” (18). In work lit novels, the workplace demands the
same compromises as romantic relationships. Women can lose their identities to
jobs just as easily as they can to men.
Readers have expressed frustration that heroines such as Nan and Andrea fail to
challenge the older, wealthier woman; Weisberger and Krause and McLaughlin save
self-assertion for the final pages. Having been dismissed unceremoniously by
Mr. and Mrs. X, Nan records her excoriating verdict of their parenting on the
Nanny-cam. Weisberger bucks one chick lit trend by leaving the romantic destiny of
her heroine open. Andrea’s knight in shining armor arrives in the form of a female
mentor; an editor serves as deus ex machina. Andrea acknowledges the triteness of
her ending: “It was storybook-like, nauseating, really, how well we’d instantly hit it
off” (Weisberger 2003, 388). In the final pages, Andrea claims the voice of the chick
lit writer who capitalizes on her experience to expose the realities of the entertain-
ment and fashion industries. She writes “tongue-in-cheek pieces on fashion shows”
and “snarky stuff on being a celebrity assistant” (388).
Context and Issues. Chick lit’s status as literature remains the subject of much
debate. Many women writers object to the term and draw a firm line between chick
lit and more literary incarnations of women’s fiction. The most savage indictments
come from acclaimed women writers such as Doris Lessing and Beryl Bainbridge. In
an interview for the Guardian, Bainbridge describes chick lit as “a froth sort of
thing” and adds: “As people spend so little time reading, it’s a pity they perhaps
can’t read something a bit deeper, a bit more profound, something with a bit of bite
to it” (Bainbridge 2001). Some commentators voice reservations about the conno-
tations of the term “chick lit.” Curtis Sittenfield of The New York Times writes: “To
suggest that another woman’s ostensibly literary novel is chick lit feels catty . . .
doesn’t the term basically bring down all of us?” (“Sophie’s,” 2005). Other com-
mentators express concern that chick lit has closed down other narratives for
women. Stacey D’Erasmo laments the paucity of plots reflected in contemporary
popular women’s fiction: “the marital quest of the fashionable, sexually well-
traveled, 30-something woman has become so popular as to seem like the dominant
narrative of life on earth right now” (Howard 1999). In an article for Book
Magazine, Anna Weinberg parodied the genre by compiling a “Make Your Own
Chick Lit” recipe, listing the formulae of the successful chick lit novel (Harzewski
2005, 34). Some writers welcome associations with chick lit. Valdes-Rodriguez
views the genre as a vehicle for delivering her “message”: “I like being called a beach
read. I don’t want to preach to the choir. I can sit here and say Latinos come in all
shades for the rest of my life and no one would care. I’m trying to create a human
being in a fun, fashion-y way and get the message across” (Acosta 2006).
In 2005, Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young edited a lively collection of essays
entitled Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, outlining the themes and preoccu-
pations of the genre as well as its limitations. The essays focus specifically on chick
lit’s cultural significance. Imelda Whelehan examines chick lit’s embattled relation-
ship with feminism in detail in The Feminist Bestseller. She observes that “feminism
lurks in the background” of much chick lit “like a guilty conscience” (Whelehan
2005, 176). Whelehan acknowledges that the genre engages women readers for
whom feminism has lost its currency: “Chick lit is built on a tacit acknowledge-
ment that feminism has failed to speak to ‘ordinary’ women” (214). As Whelehan
 CHICK LIT 149

notes, overt feminists feature primarily as objects of parody in chick lit. Feminism
is misunderstood by some of Bushnell’s heroines. Trading Up openly asks whether
the tenets of feminism have a place in twenty-first century New York. Dodo
Blanchette, a dowdy lifestyle reporter, exemplifies the contradictions of contempo-
rary feminism: “[she] called herself a neofeminist; she believed in women helping
other women . . . She had tons of girlfriends, and her favorite expression was
‘Women rule!’ . . . Like many young women of her generation, she had no qualms
about using sex to get ahead’” (Bushnell 2004, 187).
From its inception, chick lit has provided rich source material for film and tele-
vision adaptations: Sex and the Single Girl, The Group, Valley of the Dolls, The
Best of Everything, and Heartburn have all been made into films. Contemporary
filmmakers continue to capitalize on the genre’s identifiable narratives. Fielding’s
Bridget Jones novels, McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale, Weiner’s In Her Shoes, and
Wells’s Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood have been made into highly success-
ful romantic comedies. Weiner’s Little Earthquakes (2004) has been optioned by
Universal Pictures, and HBO has bought the rights to the Weiner novel Good in
Bed (2002). Francis Ford Coppola purchased the rights to Melissa Bank’s best
seller, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing (1999) shortly after its publication.
The Devil Wears Prada was released as a film starring Meryl Streep in 2006; the
film bowed to convention more than the novel by granting its heroine both a
fulfilling new job and reconciliation with her boyfriend.
The most influential adaptation of contemporary chick lit is HBO’s television
series Sex and the City. The critical volume of essays, Reading Sex and the City
(2004), attends primarily to the television series. Bushnell’s text features the domi-
nant motifs of chick lit, such as the cocktail, the handbag, and the shoe, but it was
the television series that planted these images firmly in the public’s consciousness. In
many ways, HBO’s adaptation approximates chick lit more than its source material.
In the frenetic world of Bushnell’s novel, relationships are fleeting, and plot lines are
fragmented. The television series centers consistently on a surrogate family of four
single New York women. Although some viewers praised the series for its candid
depiction of female sexuality, others saw only pathos in the lives of the characters.
In “Sex, Sadness, and the City,” Wendy Shalit writes: “Despite the hype, Sex and the
City is not about girls who just want to have fun . . . in fact it is a lament for all the
things of inestimable value that the sexual revolution has wrecked.” She criticized
the series for its skewed message about female liberation, claiming that it “con-
fus[ed] sexual sameness with equality and imagin[ed] that competing with men in
debauchery was part of [the heroines’] social emancipation” (Shalit 1999). Reviewers
repeatedly observed that the heroines deride wives but bemoan the dearth of avail-
able men in the city: “The new single-girl pathos seems more like a plea to be unlib-
erated, and fast. These characters really do just want to get married; they just don’t
want to look quite so naïve about it” (D’Erasmo 1999). Occasionally, the charac-
ters themselves comment on these contradictions. Miranda Hobbes, played by
Cynthia Nixon, often articulates the feminist viewpoint. In “Take Me Out to the
Ball Game,” she complains that the friends’ dialogue centers persistently on men:
“How does it happen that four smart women have nothing to talk about, other than
boyfriends?”
By the end of the series, the women are pursuing the familiar narratives of chick
lit. In “Sex and the City: A Farewell,” executive producer Michael Patrick King
claims that the series is “about defining different ways to be.” However, the series
150 CHICK LIT

ends by securing each woman in a long-term relationship. Fairy-tale plotlines that

the women dismissed as “urban relationship myth[s]” in previous episodes come to
fruition. The commitment-phobic male, Mr. Big, tracks Carrie down and tells her
that she is “the one” (“The Man” and “An American Girl”). In the end, the hero-
ine is not only reunited with Mr. Big but with New York, which, in an earlier
episode, she speculates “may be her one great love” (“Anchors Away”). Miranda
morphs into a different archetype. She marries the father of her baby and is removed
from Manhattan, no longer a suitable setting for her life. Living in Brooklyn and
caring for her mother-in-law as well as working as a lawyer, she resembles the hero-
ines of “mommy lit,” struggling to juggle multiple roles. The final line of the televi-
sion series shifts the emphasis firmly back to self-fulfillment: Carrie’s voice-over
assures the viewer that “the most exciting, challenging and significant relationship of
all is the one you have with yourself” (“An American Girl”). However, like the con-
temporary chick lit novel, the series refuses to contemplate the narrative of the mature
singleton; rather it acknowledges the paucity of plots for women who will remain
alone. In one of the final episodes, Carrie tells her friends: “Ladies, if you are single in
New York, after a certain point there is nowhere to go but down” (“Splat!”).

Selected Authors
Candace Bushnell (1959–). With the publication of her first work of fiction, Sex and
the City, Bushnell established herself as a spokesperson for “a particular type of sin-
gle woman—smart, attractive, successful, and . . . never married” (Bushnell 2004,
25). All four of Bushnell’s texts navigate New York’s social scene and comment
explicitly on sexual politics and urban subjectivity. Read together, they form a kind
of linked sequence, as characters and plotlines cross textual boundaries.
Although classified and marketed as a novel, Bushnell’s Sex in the City is, like Sex
and the Single Girl, a generic hybrid. It is composed of columns written by Bushnell
in the 1990s for the New York Observer. The text reads more like a collection of
essays than a novel. Bushnell initially envisaged Sex and the City as fiction, but her
publisher “wanted it to be journalism.” They eventually reached a “quiet, happy
understanding” that her first text would be “fiction written as journalism” (Bushnell
2003). The columns are narrated by two 30-something women: an anonymous first-
person commentator, whom Bushnell later acknowledged as herself, and her alter
ego, Carrie, who writes a column.
Bushnell’s fiction regularly appears in chick lit bibliographies, but this categoriza-
tion is in some ways misleading. The aggressive pace and fractured structure of
Bushnell’s fiction distinguishes it from much chick lit. Most significantly, Bushnell
feels no obligation to make her characters sympathetic. Simon Hattenstone of the
Guardian refers to the cast of characters in Four Blondes as “a gallery of vile crea-
tures” (Hattenstone 2001). In Bushnell’s fictional world, characters and narratives
are dispensed with once they have served their purpose; genuine enduring relation-
ships are elusive. The on/off relationship between Carrie and Mr. Big constitutes one
of the few sustained narrative lines in Sex and the City. Also missing in Bushnell’s
fictional world is the optimistic tenor of much chick lit. The tone of Sex and the City
is often mordant, and the mood is resolutely unromantic. Moreover, Bushnell’s first
novel focuses on men as much as women. As Mandy Merck notes in “Sexuality and
the City,” the novel’s first chapter features four straight men, a gay male couple and
eventually “my friend Carrie” (Merck 48; Bushnell Sex 7).
 CHICK LIT 151

In Sex and the City, Bushnell casts an unflinching eye over the mating rituals of
New York. She immediately broadcasts the redundancy of the romantic narratives
associated with the city’s past:

Welcome to the Age of Un-Innocence. The glittering lights of Manhattan that served as
backdrops for Edith Wharton’s bodice-heaving trysts are still glowing—but the stage is
empty. No one has breakfast at Tiffany’s, and no one has affairs to remember—instead,
we have breakfast at seven A.M. and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible.
(Bushnell 2004, 2)

Some of the city’s women capitalize on this shift by adopting male habits; they
congratulate each other on their one-night stands, their ability to control their
emotions, and their objectification of men. Very few of the men in the novel are
named; the narrators categorize them into subspecies: “Toxic Bachelor,”
“Modelizer,” “Mr. Big,” “Mr. Groovy,” “Mr. Marvelous.”
Despite their protests to the contrary, the single women in the novel are pursuing
the destiny of New York’s iconic romantic heroines. As well as boasting about their
sexual enterprises, they share strategies for snaring a man: “The thing you have to
realize is that, in terms of socialization for men, getting them ready for marriage,
New York is a terrible place . . . Single men don’t tend to hang around with couples.
They’re not used to that idea of coziness and family. So you have to get them there
mentally” (Bushnell 2004, 154).
Bushnell revised the ending of her first novel to champion the single woman. In
its original incarnation, Sex and the City closed with the reassurance that “Carrie
and Mr. Big are still together” (Bushnell 1996, 228). When the novel was reissued
in 2004, Bushnell changed the ending. The final line of the latest version violates the
conventions of chick lit by inverting gender roles and affirming the possibility of
happiness for the woman without a mate: “Mr. Big is happily married. Carrie is
happily single” (Bushnell 2004, 245).
Described by Bushnell as “four novellas,” Four Blondes was also marketed as a
novel. The four heroines do not cross over into each other’s narratives, but some
characters do recur. Significantly, it is the male power players who move between
stories: Tanner Hart, the movie star, and Comstock Dibble, the movie producer, fea-
ture in two of the stories. Bushnell distinguishes between the heroines of this text
and the women in Sex and the City: the blondes “are not looking for men, they’re
looking for some kind of meaning, and their place in the world” (Hattenstone
2001). For Bushnell’s blondes, the quest for meaning gathers pace when they reach
30. The narrator of the first story, “Nice ’N Easy,” is Janey Wilcox, “a sort of luke-
warm celebrity” who trawls the upper echelons of New York, seeking men to spend
the summer with (Bushnell 2001, 3). Now in her thirties, she struggles to maintain
the persona of the “It girl”: “Something happens when you get into your thirties.
People catch on to your shit. Especially men. It’s important to look like you’re doing
something, even if you’re not” (35). Janey objects to the assumptions that frame
beautiful women, yet her beauty ultimately redeems her. She lands a lucrative
modeling contract and finds a way of telling her story. In a commercial she tells the
camera: “‘I don’t know where I’m going . . . But I know I’m going somewhere’”
(94), a line that resonates with female viewers.
In the second story Bushnell lifts the veil from the world of the “Smug Marrieds”
who torment singletons such as Fielding’s Bridget Jones. Having “hit all her landmarks
152 CHICK LIT

in style” by the age of 34, Winnie wakes up every morning feeling depressed (109). She
berates herself for investing in the myth that propels women towards marriage: “What
was all that crap about men that she grew up with? That one day, one of these (pitiful)
specimens was going to fall in love with her . . . and make her whole” (Bushnell 2001,
155). However, men provide short-term answers for Bushnell’s blondes. An affair with
a movie star revitalizes Winnie.
The longest and darkest story in Four Blondes concerns Cecelia Luxenstein, a
society princess suffocating under the pressure of living the dream. Like Winnie and
Janey, she is trying to calculate her next move but, having achieved the life that
women are supposed to covet, she is obliged to disguise her misery: “I’m the one
who’s miserable, but you can’t tell people that, can you? Especially if you’re a
woman. Because marriage is supposed to make you happy, not make you feel like a
rat trapped in a very glamorous cage with twenty-thousand-dollar silk draperies”
(Bushnell 2001, 191). For Cecelia, as for Janey and Winnie, the thirties usher in
uncertainty and dread. She mourns the loss of the vitality that characterized her
twenties: “I was all instinct then. Raw, aggressive instinct, and I lived my life like an
alien thing was driving me. But now that thing is gone” (208).
Four Blondes concludes with “Single Process,” a story that revisits the premise
of Sex and the City. The journalist narrator travels to London to discover what
men and women really want. When she encounters what appears to be the perfect
family, the wife shatters her illusions, revealing her “black fantasy” in which her
husband dies and she is “still young” and “free” (Bushnell 2001, 305). Reflecting
on the wife’s confession, the narrator acknowledges her investment in the Cinderella
story: “I wanted the big, great, inspiring story about an unmarried career woman
who goes to London . . . and meets the man of her dreams and marries him. She
gets the big ring and the big house and the adorable children, and she lives happily
ever after” (306). The journalist’s wish becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In true
chick lit style, Bushnell’s heroine meets a promising man on the way back to New
York.
Bushnell refers to Trading Up as “technically my first novel” (“Writer’s Craft,”
2003). In this more unified narrative, Janey Wilcox takes center stage as a MAW, a
twenty-first–century acronym that stands for “Model/Actress/Whatever.” She hovers
precariously on the fringes of the entertainment industry, “convinced that she has
great reserves of untapped talents” (Bushnell 2004, 7). Trading Up delivers Bushnell’s
most ruthless dissection of New York society. The narrator constantly reminds us of
the city’s hidden agenda: “The surface of New York’s social interactions was as
smooth and shiny as a sheet of ice, but underneath were water moccasins and snap-
ping turtles” (Bushnell 2004, 37). The hypocrisy of urban discourses is epitomized
by the city’s most powerful media conglomerate Splatch Verner: “On the surface,
‘the company’ appeared to take care of its employers . . . it was politically correct,
spouting its commitment to multiculturalism . . . but below the surface it was busi-
ness as usual, run by men who tacitly agreed that their work was the closest thing
to going to war without going to war” (74). Gender boundaries remain fixed in
Bushnell’s twenty-first–century New York. An old lover’s insinuations serve as a
“niggling reminder” to Janey of “everything that was wrong with New York: A man
could sleep with as many women as he liked, but when it came to sex, there were
still quite a few people in society who clung to the old-fashioned notion that a
woman shouldn’t have too many partners” (Bushnell 2004, 14). Janey spends much
of the novel trying to mask her sexual history. When Bushnell takes a lengthy detour
 CHICK LIT 153

into her heroine’s past, we learn why: Janey once worked as a sex slave on a rich
man’s yacht.
In Trading Up, sex is treated repeatedly as a form of currency or consumption.
Comstock Dibble expresses sexual aggression by demanding payment for a screen-
play that Janey never completed for him. Janey’s sister Patty views the “‘traditional
marriage’” as “a woman’s obviously cynical exchange of sex, housework and child-
raising for a roof over her head” (Bushnell 2004, 135); a man at a party identifies the
fantasy of “the girl in the ad” as “the driving force behind the consumer-oriented
male” (256).
Bushnell engages explicitly with Wharton’s narratives in this novel. Janey pro-
poses a cinematic adaptation of Custom of the Country, clearly perceiving affinities
between Undine Spragg’s strategies and her own. She meets Selden Rose, a success-
ful movie producer, who pursues her as a candidate for his second wife. As Knights
observes, Rose casts himself as the heroine’s rescuer, thereby emulating his name-
sake, Lawrence Selden in Wharton’s The House of Mirth: “He had fervently
believed that if he could get her away from this world, the real Janey Wilcox would
blossom” (Bushnell, 91). Bushnell’s narrative commentary exposes his romantic spin
as the replication of a hackneyed narrative: “Many of his counterparts . . . had
recently taken second wives, trading in their first wives . . . for more exciting women
who were ten or fifteen years younger” (Bushnell 2004, 74–75). Marriage to Selden
does little to quell Janey’s ambition. By the end of the novel, details of her transac-
tion with Dibble emerge and the media brand her a “Model?/Actress?/Whore?”
When Selden is issued an ultimatum by his boss—his job or his wife—he fulfills his
role as rescuer and chooses Janey. The city is less forgiving. Janey receives an invi-
tation to the post-Oscar party and leaves Selden. She is unaware that by accepting
the invitation she is participating in one of the “in-jokes” of show business;
every year the hosts invite the “Bimbo of the Year.” Again Bushnell pondered sev-
eral destinies for her heroine. The first draft of the novel left Janey “crazy on the
plane” to Los Angeles (“Writer’s Craft,” 2003). Bushnell’s publisher suggested that
she reward Janey for her trials, and Bushnell agreed to give her the last laugh in true
chick lit style; Janey meets Dibble on the plane and hands him her screenplay. As the
novel ends, she is on the brink of Hollywood fame. By turning her story into gold,
she forges her own revenge narrative, managing to “beat everyone and all these men
at their own game” (“Writer’s Craft,” 2003).
Bushnell has referred to her next novel, Lipstick Jungle, as “my Valley of the
Dolls” (“Lipstick Jungle”). The narrative observes a familiar structure, following
the lives of three highly successful New York women: Wendy Healy, a movie pro-
ducer, who is married to a metrosexual househusband; Victory Ford, a fashion
designer, who has yet to find a relationship that can equal her career; and Nico
O’Neilly, a married magazine editor who has an affair with an underwear model to
escape feelings of “desperate emptiness” (Bushnell 1996, 28). Lipstick Jungle regis-
ters how female narratives have expanded since the era of Susann’s dolls. All three
heroines are financially independent; Nico is the main breadwinner, and Wendy sup-
ports her husband. Like Susann, Bushnell deals with taboos affecting contemporary
women. Wendy, who at times yearns to be “a single, self-actualized person on her
own,” suffers physical abuse at the hands of her six-year-old son (Bushnell 1996,
107). Victory reflects on the lies that society feeds women: “Still being single and in
your forties was a state of being the world couldn’t really comprehend . . . But if
you were wildly successful, you could make your own rules for how you wanted to
154 CHICK LIT

live your life . . . Why did the world never tell women about this kind of happiness?”
(367–368).
Lipstick Jungle delivers Bushnell’s most positive outlook on women’s urban nar-
ratives so far. The novel presents New York as an empowering site for the single
woman. Bushnell populates the urban landscape with feminine tropes that align the
power of female sexuality with the glamour of the city: “As the helicopter swooped
low, past the tall buildings that resembled a forest of lipsticks, Nico felt a frisson of
something close to sexual excitement . . . New York City was . . . certainly one of
the few places in the world where women like her could not only survive but rule”
(Bushnell 1996, 34). Like Susann, Brown, and Jaffe, Bushnell dramatizes both sides
of urban life, illuminating its hazards well as its possibilities. Her heroines marvel at
the roles that the city offers them but raise objections about the stereotypes and
prejudices that threaten to contain them. The greatest fear of the women is that they
will be consumed by the city’s demands. With imagery redolent of Susann’s novel,
they remind themselves of the cautionary tale of Sarah-Catherine, “the quintessen-
tial example of a particular kind of girl who came to New York, thrived for a while,
and then was eaten alive” (Bushnell 1996, 112). In Valley of the Dolls, Susann
represents the city as “an angry concrete animal” (1996, 1).
In Lipstick Jungle, Bushnell ties up some of the narrative threads from Trading
Up. Readers have surmised that she left Janey on the brink of stardom to set up a
sequel. The next installment of Janey’s life has yet to materialize, but in Lipstick
Jungle Bushnell pursues Selden Rose’s story. Shortly after divorcing Shane, Wendy
marries Selden; he finally provides a happy ending for a woman who can match his
talent but does not need to be rescued from herself. By leaving Shane and marrying
Selden, Wendy subverts gender stereotypes: “Wendy was like one of those success-
ful men who gets divorced and finds new happiness right away, while the woman is
left steaming at home” (Bushnell 1996, 418). Victory finds a man who comes to
terms with her success, and Nico recovers her enthusiasm for life and ends the affair.
The novel ends with the women marveling at all they have achieved.
Melissa Bank (1960–). Commentators on American chick lit often trace the genre
back to Bank’s best-selling debut novel, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing.
However, critics continue to debate Bank’s status as the godmother of American
chick lit, some arguing that the label does not reflect the subtlety of her writing. The
2005 publication of her second novel, The Wonder Spot, did little to settle the
debate. The conventions of chick lit characterize both novels. Jane Rosenal and
Sophie Applebaum are single, slightly neurotic, and witty; they move from the sub-
urbs of Philadelphia to the city where they take jobs in publishing and advertising.
When Sophie arrives in New York, she is buoyed by the sense of possibility. As she
walks through the city she “feel[s] like there were a thousand ways my life could
go” (Bank 1999, 85). The reality is less exhilarating. Urban life for Bank’s heroines
is fragmented and restless. Dingy apartments and unsuitable boyfriends come and
go, and expectation gives way to estrangement. At one point, Sophie seems to artic-
ulate questions about the limitations of the generic chick lit heroine and her place
in the world: “I realize that I don’t know anything about the history of New York
or the history of the United States or the history of anywhere, modern or ancient; I
have no grasp of geography; I don’t even really know what physics is. All this
contributes to my overall lack of substance” (Bank 2005, 199).
Marketed as a novel, The Girls’ Guide is a collection of linked stories covering
20 years of the heroine’s life. This more open, pliable form enables Bank to explore
 CHICK LIT 155

key moments that shape Jane’s identity rather than limiting herself to the single, end-
determined trajectory of much chick lit. In one story, “You Could Be Anyone,” Bank
shifts tense and narrative perspective. The narrator shares Jane’s tone but does not
identify herself explicitly. The shift to the present tense and detached second-person
narration enables Jane to distance herself from her most harrowing narrative: breast
cancer and the breakdown of her relationship. The self in this story remains strictly
provisional. Through her form, Bank addresses but contains some of the more seri-
ous issues that chick lit shuns. The Wonder Spot is more unified in its consistent use
of Sophie’s perspective, but each “chapter” could stand alone as a short story. The
title story appeared in Speaking with the Angel, an anthology edited by Nick Hornby.
In The Girls’ Guide, Bank also uses her flexible form to explore tangential narra-
tives. The narrator of one story, “The Best Possible Light,” is Nina, Jane’s neighbor
and a mother of three adults. Jane is referred to only once in the story, and Nina
herself does not feature in Jane’s stories. Affinities between these two heroines are
immediately apparent. Like Jane, Nina is painfully aware of who she is supposed to
be. Through Nina, Bank enters the territory of “hen lit,” exploring identities that
are projected upon mature women. On hearing that her son is to father his fiancée’s
baby as well as his ex-wife’s, Nina narrates: “Then, everyone turns to me, as though
I’m going to deliver some kind of pronouncement. I get these voices in my head of
what The Mother is supposed to say—maybe something about how it will all work
out” (Bank 1999, 121).
The presence and influence of parents also distinguishes Bank’s fiction from much
chick lit, in which surrogate families dominate. The most defining event in Jane’s
young adulthood is the death of her father. Through this loss, Bank reveals how the
patriarchal gaze shaped her heroine’s narrative: “Something changed then. I saw my
life in scale: it was just my life. It was not momentous, and only now did I recog-
nize that it had once seemed so to me; that was while my father was watching”
(Bank 1999, 189). This epiphany opens up Jane’s destiny; her father’s mantra,
“Don’t take the easy way out, Janie,” gradually loses currency in her narrative
(192). Bank returns to this theme in The Wonder Spot. When Sophie loses her
father, she takes her first risk, leaving her job to travel to Los Angeles with her
boyfriend. Like Jane, she struggles to tune out the patriarchal voice: “It was the idea
of my father that I couldn’t shake. I knew what he would have thought of Demetri—
not that he would’ve said so. He would’ve said, What are you going to do in Los
Angeles?” (Bank 2005, 166).
Jane’s commentary provides much of the humor in The Girls’ Guide. Throughout
the novel, Bank engages with and subverts the jargon of popular psychology, which
is both a shaping discourse and object of parody in much chick lit. Bank prefaces
each of her stories with sound-bites from self-help books, often overturning them in
the stories themselves. Jane expresses suspicion toward these discourses: “I think,
‘Self-help? If I could help myself, I wouldn’t be here’” (Bank 1999, 240). Ellen Fein
and Sherrie Schneider’s best-selling guide to snaring a husband, The Rules (1995)
not only prefaces the title story but infiltrates the narrative itself; the authors
become speaking subjects in Jane’s imagination, goading her on as she embarks on
a new relationship. To her horror, Jane finds that the advice initially works, but she
is so exhausted by adhering to the rules that she eventually gives up. Jane is irked
by one rule in particular, “Don’t be funny,” and protests: “Funny is the best thing I
am” (Banks 1999, 214; Bank’s emphasis, 255). Her objection to this rule is a rallying-
cry for the witty heroines of chick lit.
156 CHICK LIT

Both Sophie and Jane eventually find love in relationships that promise to be
empowering. Despite Bank’s allegiance to the conventions of chick lit, critics dis-
agree about her place on the continuum of popular women’s fiction. Some identify
her as one of the innovators of the genre. Booklist’s Kristine Huntley describes The
Girls’ Guide as a “standout in a genre that was finding its footing at the time.”
Elisabeth Egan protests at the way that Bank is “unceremoniously lumped together
with fellow literary It girl Helen Fielding” and notes that Jane Rosenal, the heroine
of The Girls’ Guide, “share[s] none of the flibbertigibbet qualities so celebrated in
her British counterpart.” Egan praises Bank for moving beyond the unitary plotline
of the quest for Mr. Right: “It’s as though she suspects her audience is tired of all
the Bridget Jones clones trooping through the best-seller list.”
Reviews of The Wonder Spot were more restrained. Sittenfield reluctantly classi-
fies the novel as standard chick lit, arguing that Bank’s subject matter is by no means
“lightweight” but that she writes about it in a “lightweight way.” Catherine Shoard
writes: “There really is no plot here other than the no-show of Mr. Right, and, for
all its literary noodlings, The Wonder Spot is chick lit.” Joanne Briscoe of the
Guardian states that “There is not much further [Bank] can go in this particular
direction” but adds that “within the limits she sets herself, she achieves something
close to perfection.”
Jennifer Weiner (1970–). Jennifer Weiner began her writing career as a journalist
commenting on, among other matters, Generation X culture. Her first novel, Good
in Bed, became an international best seller. Weiner associates herself with chick lit
and identifies tone as the genre’s essential characteristic: “I think the only must-have
is the book’s voice—funny, woeful, smart, sarcastic, wounded but still strong.” She
defines the chick lit heroine thusly: “A smart-yet-wounded female heroine, who’s
young(ish), accomplished but insecure, dealing with (pick one) body image woes,
misery, a dysfunctional family, or a tyrannical boss, trying to find her way in life”
(“Roundtable,” 2004). Weiner’s fiction abides by these rules. Cannie Shapiro, the
heroine of Good in Bed, fits this model and, like most chick lit heroines, dwells on
her shortcomings. Like Ephron’s Rachel Samstat, she recognizes herself as an incar-
nation of a fictional stereotype: “So here I am. Twenty-eight years old, with 30
looming on the horizon. Drunk. Fat. Alone. Unloved. And, worst of all, a cliché,
Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones put together” (Weiner 2002, 19). Like Weiner,
Cannie is a journalist whose job is to be “the eyes and ears on 20-something
Philadelphia” (Weiner 2002, 60). Her ex-boyfriend also writes a column, “Good in
Bed,” in which he shares the trials of “Loving a Larger Woman” (Weiner 2002, 14).
Wish fulfillment drives Weiner’s narratives. In particular, she has been praised by
reviewers and readers for rewarding plus-size heroines with happy endings. In the
course of Good in Bed, Cannie tries to lose weight, win her boyfriend back, and sell
her screenplay: her own fairy tale about a film star who falls in love with a journal-
ist. She achieves the one goal that is not informed by social pressures. She ends the
novel happily married to a new man and financially independent after selling her
screenplay.
In Her Shoes (2004) explores women’s identities and choices by following the
divergent narratives of two sisters, Maggie and Rose. Rose, Weiner’s signature
heroine, is overweight—frumpy but smart. Maggie is beautiful but unable to hold
down a job or establish any roots. After their mother’s death, their father marries a
woman who is obsessed with controlling Rose’s weight. Weiner interweaves the sis-
ters’ narratives with the story of an elderly woman, Ella, who has become estranged
 CHICK LIT 157

from her granddaughters, who turn out to be Rose and Maggie. The friction
between the sisters reaches its height when Maggie sleeps with Rose’s boyfriend. The
separation of the sisters prompts a re-examination of their lives. For Rose, this
involves giving up her job as an attorney and becoming a dog-sitter. Maggie finds a
letter from Ella and tracks down her grandmother. By the end of the novel, the
sisters are reunited, and Rose marries the man whom readers have recognized as
Mr. Right from the start.
In her next two novels, Weiner ventures into the territory of chick lit subgenres.
Little Earthquakes is “mommy lit”: it presents three female friends who support
each other through the challenges of new motherhood. Becky, instantly recogniza-
ble as the sympathetic, overweight nurturer of the group, has an interfering mother-
in-law; the beautiful Ayinde discovers that her husband has been unfaithful; Lia is
recovering from a miscarriage; Ephron’s influence on Weiner emerges in Little
Earthquakes; Becky, a chef, shares her menu ideas with the reader, just as Rachel
Samstat shares her recipes.
Goodnight Nobody (2005) is mystery lit. When an apparently perfect wife and
mother is found dead, neighbor Kate Klein turns detective. Kate has substituted the
signature narrative of chick lit for the domestic narrative of hen lit. A former New
York gossip columnist, she is now a Connecticut wife and mother. As the mystery
unravels, Kate begins to seek satisfaction beyond these roles. When her ex-lover
becomes her accomplice, her marriage begins to fall apart and Kate must re-evaluate
her life.
Although Weiner identifies herself as a writer of chick lit, she is eager to test the
limits of the genre. On her blog, she expresses light-hearted relief that the cover of
her collection of short stories, The Guy Not Taken (2006), bears “the minimum
daily allowance of pink.”
Rebecca Wells (1952–). Rebecca Wells’s Ya-Ya novels achieved best-seller status by
word of mouth; sales of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood soared after a rec-
ommendation from Oprah’s Book Club. Although they are a staple of chick lit glos-
saries, the Ya-Ya novels straddle the boundary between the literary and the popular.
Dan Webster describes Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood as “a literary icon of
pop culture” and places Wells in the esteemed company of Anne Tyler and Fannie
Flagg. Spanning 60 years in their entirety, the Ya-Ya novels appeal to a broad age
range. So far, the series consists of three novels: Little Altars Everywhere (1992),
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and Ya-Yas in Bloom (2005). The Ya-Yas are
four lifelong friends who grew up together in the South in the 1930s and 1940s. The
novels trace the development of their friendship alongside the present-day relation-
ship between Ya-Ya Vivi Walker and her daughter Sidda. As the series progresses,
the Ya-Yas take up a more central position: Little Altars Everywhere is composed of
the first-person narratives of the Walkers and their servants; Divine Secrets juxta-
poses Sidda’s present with the Ya-Yas’ past; and Ya-Yas in Bloom transports us back
to the genesis of the Ya-Ya sisterhood.
Set primarily in Louisiana, Wells’s novels depart from some of the norms of chick
lit. Moving through the stories of the past and present, Wells explores the political
and religious ideologies that inform the heroines’ lives. Elizabeth Boyd identifies the
southern belle narrative as a burgeoning “subgenre” of contemporary popular
women’s fiction and attributes this resurgence to Wells’s Ya-Ya novels. Where some
texts satirize southern manners, others endorse “the old feminine ways” as a means
of regaining power (Boyd 2005, 160). Wells’s novels both celebrate and lightly
158 CHICK LIT

satirize the figure of the southern belle while illuminating the conventions that con-
tain her. Underpinning the Ya-Ya sisterhood is a strong oral tradition. The friends
delight in recounting their pasts and retelling their stories. Fragments of narratives
are released across the three novels, and stories overlap and expand as new details
are revealed.
Wells’s primary themes will be familiar to chick lit aficionados: female community,
gender politics, and postmodern alienation. Like Valdes-Rodriguez, Wells champions
female friendship as the only outlet for self-definition and expression:

Four children—a husband—a house, dripping goddamn boiling water over the chicory
coffee every morning of the world. Everything gets sucked out of me, every ounce of
my high school goldenness, every single iota of my college education—gone. The only
thing left is the Ya-Yas. (2000, 84)

Like most chick lit heroines, the Ya-Yas rely on humor as their most effective sur-
vival strategy: “Of all the secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood the most divine was
humor” (Wells 2000, 422). The Sisterhood becomes a means of debunking gender
roles and contesting romantic paradigms. Sidda recalls vividly how the husbands of
the Ya-Yas registered the primacy of the Sisterhood: “Every year the Ya-Yas threw
themselves a party to celebrate another anniversary of their friendship. And the hus-
bands actually brought gifts! Sidda remembered more about Ya-Ya anniversaries
than she did about Vivi and Shep’s” (Wells 1996, 90).
Vivi Walker’s narrative addresses the preoccupations of hen lit and dramatizes the
dilemma of the older woman: what does the heroine do when her children have left
home? The present-day Vivi struggles to make sense of her children’s departure: “It
was all so fast and furious—having them, raising them, watching them go. I thought
when Baylor left: Alright now, this is when my life can begin! But it never did begin
and I can’t tell you why” (Wells 2000, 289, Wells’s italics). In Little Altars Every-
where, Vivi’s narrative opens with a lament for her girl self. She hankers after the
choices that are available to women in the 1990s: “Maybe if I’d been born later, I
wouldn’t have gotten married. I’d have enjoyed what I wanted, then moved on . . .
But I was born before you could do what you wanted” (Wells 2000, 280).
Wells tempers cries for sexual liberation and independence with nostalgia for the
communal sensibility of the rural South. Through Sidda’s narrative, she questions the
value of urban narratives and queries the authenticity of the celebrated support net-
works that feature so heavily in chick lit. She asks whether communities such as the
Ya-Ya sisterhood are sustainable in postmodern urban America. Divine Secrets opens
with the voice of a 40-year-old Sidda who seems to have it all. She lives in Manhattan
and has a highly successful career and a loving fiancé. Nevertheless, she wrestles with
the malaise common to Bushnell’s heroine: “Sidda had the life she’d always dreamed
of; she was a hot director, engaged to marry a man she adored. But all she wanted to
do was lie in bed, eat Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, and hide from the alligators”
(Wells 1996, 7). As a young girl, Sidda resists becoming a “full-fledged Junior Ya-Ya”
(Wells 1996, 297); as an adult she yearns for the intimacy of the Sisterhood: “The
four of their scents were in key. Their very bodies harmonized together. Surely this
made it easier for them to forget things and forgive each other, not to have to
constantly ‘work’ on this, the way we do now. This has never happened to me
with a group of women” (Wells 1996, 62, Wells’s italics). Whelehan notes how
Fielding engaged women readers who, like Bridget Jones, were “lamenting an
 CHICK LIT 159

excess of freedom and stumbling under the burden of choice and autonomy”
(Whelehan 2005, 5). Sidda’s narrative reads like such a lament. She longs for the
“improvisational laziness” of the Ya-Yas and seeks release from urban introspection:
“She felt ashamed of her insularity. She longed for rambunctiousness, for the
communal craziness in which she’d been raised. She felt sick at the thought of her
constant questioning, her constant self-examination” (Wells 1996, 207).
All of the Ya-Ya novels end on a note of celebration as connections between
women are reaffirmed. By Ya-Yas in Bloom, Vivi is an active 68-year-old: “My life
is so full. I might be a card-carrying member of AARP, but I am not retired. Or retir-
ing, for that matter! Hah! I am busy, busy, busy. Workout at the club every single
weekday. Bourrée with the Ya Yas. Cruises with Shep. And spending time in that
garden of his” (Wells 2005, 2, Wells’s italics); Vivi asserts her identity in the con-
versational tone of chick lit: triumphant exclamations, italics, and repetition exem-
plify the discourse of the chick lit heroine. Through her voice, Wells opens up the
chick lit narrative of reinvention and self-acceptance to women of all ages. Wells is
currently working on a novel entitled Splitting Hairs about a new heroine, a
Louisiana beautician. She plans to return to the Ya-Yas in her next novel.

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“Jaffe’s ‘Best of Everything’ Stands the Test of Time.” Interview by Renée Montagne.
Morning Edition 27 July 2005.
Kakutani, Michiko. “Mary McCarthy, 77, Is Dead; Novelist, Memoirist and Critic.” Oct. 26
1989. <http://nytimes.com/books/00/03/26/specials>.
Knights, Pamela. “‘Hypertexts’ and the City: The House of Mirth at the Millennium.” In
Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Janet Beer, Pamela Knights, and Elizabeth
Nolan, eds. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2007, 127–142.
Krause, Nicola, and Emma McLaughlin. The Nanny Diaries. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2002.
Mabry, A. Rochelle. “About a Girl: Female Subjectivity and Sexuality in Contemporary
‘Chick’ Culture.” In Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction by Suzanne Ferriss and
Mallory Young. New York: Routledge, 191–206.
Mazza, Cris. “Who’s Laughing Now? A Short History of Chick Lit and the Perversion of a
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———. Review of The Group by McCarthy. <http:www.nytimes.com>.
Mazza, Cris, and Jeffrey DeShell, eds. Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction. New York: Fiction
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McCarthy, Mary. The Group. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.
McMillan, Terry. Waiting to Exhale. New York: Pocket Books, 1993.
Mendelsohn, Daniel. “Nanny Cam.” March 4 2002. <http://newyorkmetro.com>.
Memmott, Carol. “Chick Lit, for Better or Worse, is Here to Stay.” June 20 2006.
<http://www.usatoday.com>.
Merck, Mandy. “Sexuality in the City.” In Reading Sex and the City. Kim Akass and Janet
McCabe, eds. New York: Macmillan, 2004, 48–64.
 CHICK LIT 161

Schappell, Elissa. Use Me. New York: Perennial-Collins, 2000.

“Sex and the City: A Farewell.” Directed by Rachel McDonald Salazar. HBO: 2004.
Shalit, Wendy. “Sex, Sadness and the City.” Autumn 1999. <http://www.city-journal.org>.
Shoard, Catherine. “Still Mad About the Boys.” Review of The Wonder Spot by Bank. Oct. 7
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Skurnik, Lizzie. ‘“Good Girl Chick Lit.”’ July 7 2006. <http://washparkprophet.blogspot.com.>
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“Splat!” Sex and the City. DVD. Directed by Julian Farino. HBO: 2004.
Susann, Jacqueline. Valley of the Dolls. London: Virago, 1966, 2003.
Sykes, Plum. Bergdorf Blondes. London: Penguin, 2005.
“Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Sex and the City. VHS. Directed by Allen Coulter: HBO:
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“Teenage Picks.” The Guardian 3 Oct. 2006. http://books.guardian.co.uk/childrenslibrary.
“The Baby Shower.” Sex and the City. VHS. Directed by Susan Seidelman. HBO: 1998.
“The Chicken Dance.” Sex and the City. VHS. Directed by Victoria Hochberg. HBO,
1998.
“The Man, the Myth, the Viagra.” Sex and the City. VHS. Directed by Victoria Hochberg.
HBO, 1998.
Valdes-Rodriguez, Alisa. The Dirty Girls’ Social Club. Arrow: London, 2004.
Webster, Dan. “Rebecca Wells.” March 3 2003. <http://www.spokesmanreview.com>.
Weinberg, Anna. “She’s Come Undone.” Book Magazine July-Aug. 2003: 47–49.
Weiner, Jennifer. Good in Bed. London: Simon and Schuster, 2002.
———. Goodnight Nobody. London: Simon and Schuster, 2005.
———. In her Shoes. London: Simon and Schuster, 2004.
———. Little Earthquakes. London: Simon and Schuster, 2004.
Weiner, Jennifer. “Snarkspot.” 18 and 23 July 2006. <http://www.pkblogs.com/jenniferweiner.>
———. The Guy Not Taken. London: Simon and Schuster, 2006.
Weisberger, Lauren. The Devil Wears Prada. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003.
———. Everyone Worth Knowing. New York: Downtown Press, 2006.
Wells, Juliette. “Mothers of Chick Lit? Women Writers, Readers, and Literary History.” In
Chick Lit: The New Women’s Fiction by Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young. New
York: Routledge, 47–70.
Wells, Rebecca. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. London: Pan-Macmillan, 1996.
———. Little Altars Everywhere. London: Macmillan, 2000.
———. Ya-Yas in Bloom. London: HarperCollins, 2005.
Whelehan, Imelda. The Feminist Bestseller: From Sex and the Single Girl to Sex and the City.
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005.
“Where There’s Smoke.” Sex and the City. VHS. Directed by Michael Patrick King. HBO:
1998.

Further Reading
Akass, Kim, and Janet McCabe, eds. Reading Sex and the City. New York: Macmillan, 2004;
Benson, Heidi. “10 Years After ‘Bridget Jones,’ Chick Lit Grows Up, Gets Serious and Stops
Wearing Pink.” http://www.sfgate.com; Dellecese, Cheryl. “Love, Life, and Literature.”
Smith Alumnae Quarterly 2005 http://saqonline.smith.edu; Boyd, Elizabeth B. “Ya Yas,
Grits, and Sweet Potato Queens: Contemporary Southern Belles and the Prescriptions That
Guide Them.” In Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction by Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory
Young. New York: Routledge; Whelehan, Imelda. The Feminist Bestseller: From Sex and the
Single Girl to Sex and the City. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005.
RACHEL LISTER
162 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
Definition. In “Publishers and Publishing,” an essay in The Oxford Encyclopedia
of Children’s Literature, university professor Daniel Hade asserts that “the produc-
tion of children’s books is an enterprise conducted by adults for children in order to
make a profit” (Zipes 2006, 3, 298). Although the circulation of children’s books in
the twenty-first century involves countless nonprofit entities such as schools,
libraries, and literacy organizations, Hade’s cynicism-tinged statement does highlight
the modern reality of children’s book publishing as a multi-billion-dollar business.
Sales of hardcover and softcover books for children totaled over $4.7 billion in 2005,
accounting for nearly 20 percent of total industry sales (and nearly 45 percent if one
factors in textbooks) (AAP 2006, viii). The 2007 Children’s Writer’s and Illustrator’s
Market, a 440-page directory, details the submission requirements of “more than 800
places to get published.”
It has become customary for bookstores and libraries to have separate, sizable
children’s departments, featuring junior-scale furnishings, playful decorations, a
story-time series, and even child-configured computer terminals, all designed to
attract children, their parents, and their teachers. Periodicals such as Publisher’s
Weekly and The New York Times Book Review often produce several special issues
per year to highlight new and forthcoming books for children. There are graduate-
level programs specializing in the study of children’s literature at The Ohio State
University, Illinois State University, the University of Georgia, and other accredited
institutions; and formal academic journals such as The Lion and the Unicorn circu-
late studies on themes such as “The First World War and Popular Culture” (2007)
and “Asian American Children’s Literature” (2006).
However, despite all this activity, defining what constitutes “children’s literature”
is a problematic exercise, and one inevitably resistant to consensus—so much so that
the very difficulty of defining the genre inhabits a recurring lament among critics and
theorists specializing in the field (see, for instance, Sutton and Paravanno 2004 and
Jones 2006). One factor is the considerable overlap between mature and juvenile
audiences, particularly in the realms of science fiction, fantasies, and mysteries. For
instance, the works of J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973) and J.K. Rowling (b. 1965), ini-
tially marketed to children, command such devotion among their adult fans that
there are entire societies and conferences devoted to analyses of their novels. Mark
Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) and Philip
Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass (2001), categorized as children’s books, each were
named Whitbread Book of the Year—an award that encompasses the entirety of
British publishing for all ages. Similarly, the tales of authors such as Arthur Conan
Doyle (1859–1930), Agatha Christie (1890–1976), Bram Stoker (1847–1912), and
Orson Scott Card (b. 1951) have demonstrated sustained cross-generational appeal
even though they were originally written for adults. The bibliographies of authors
such as Gregory Maguire (b. 1954), Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929), Sharyn McCrumb
(b. 1948), and Madeleine L’Engle (b. 1918) testify to their successes in creating works
for audiences spanning a variety of ages, and the more enduring efforts of classic
raconteurs such as Mark Twain (1835–1910) and Charles Dickens (1812–1870) are
frequently cross-shelved in both the children’s and general inventories of libraries and
bookshops.
History. Individuals interested in learning about the history and scope of chil-
dren’s literature in depth have an abundance of resources at their disposal. When it
first appeared in 1953, A Critical History of Children’s Literature (Meigs et al.
 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 163

1969) was a landmark publication in the field, but it has since been superseded by
more up-to-date surveys such as The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature:
The Traditions in English (Zipes et al. 2005). The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s
Literature (Zipes 2006) devotes four volumes to significant authors, illustrators,
characters, themes, and genres. The Children’s Literature Review: Excerpts from
Reviews, Criticism, & Commentary on Books for Children and Young People
(1976–present) is a hardcover reference journal, featuring an average of 20 selections
per year. Something about the Author: Facts and Pictures About Authors and
Illustrators of Books for Young People is another series published by the same com-
pany (Thomson Gale) that compiles biographical sketches of individuals who have
written or illustrated at least one book-length work for children.
Major periodicals specializing in reviews of children’s books include The Horn
Book Magazine (founded 1924), Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books
(founded 1947), and School Library Journal (founded 1954). All three publications
supplement their printed issues with well-developed, frequently updated Web sites
that offer archives, news, and other resources. All three magazines also sponsor
annual prizes, of which the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award is the most prominent.
The Horn Book also issues a comprehensive semi-annual guide that strives to assess
almost all the hardcover children’s books newly published during the prior season
(totaling over 2,000 titles per Guide).
A number of reference works are marketed not only to institutions but to the gen-
eral public as well, and have proven popular enough to merit revised and updated
editions. These include The Essential Guide to Children’s Books and Their Creators
(Silvey 2002, 2nd ed.,), The New York Times Parent’s Guide to the Best Books for
Children (Lipson 2000, 3rd ed.), Valerie and Walter’s Best Books for Children
(Lewis and Mayes 2004, 2nd ed.), Children Tell Stories (Hamilton and Weiss 2005,
2nd ed.), and The Read-Aloud Handbook (Trelease 2006, 6th ed.). Such books fre-
quently contain themed chapters, indices, and hundreds of annotated recommenda-
tions, enabling individuals interested in a specific topic or genre to pursue it in depth
and more efficiently than a keyword or subject header search (via print or online)
might otherwise allow. The first edition of Kathleen Odean’s Great Books for Girls
(1997) received exceptional reviews, leading to a revised edition in 2002 and three
additional works in the series: Great Books for Boys (1998), Great Books about
Things Kids Love (2002), and Great Books for Babies and Toddlers (2003). Other
reference guides bear the names of retail organizations with a following among
consumers keen on supporting independent booksellers. These include Book Sense
Best Children’s Books (2005) and Under the Chinaberry Tree (Ruethling and
Pitcher 2003).
The use of the term booktalk, now commonplace among reading professionals and
enthusiasts, gained significant traction after the publication of Aidan Chambers’s
Booktalk (1985). Defined by education consultant Ellen A. Thompson as “an ener-
getic discussion about a book or books, done with a whole class, small groups, or
an individual child,” booktalks are short “pitches” designed to hook prospective
readers into reading the books themselves (Thompson n.d.). Booktalks differ from
traditional reports and reviews in their scope and intent because they are geared to
be teasers rather than summaries or assessments of the books in question; library
media specialist Nancy Keane likens the aim of a booktalk to that of a trailer for a
movie (Keane n.d.). A leading proponent of this approach, Keane maintains an
online database of over 5,000 “ready to use” booktalks and has published print
164 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

compilations of them as well, including Booktalking across the Curriculum (2002).

(Her “ready-to-use” thematic bibliographies, such as The Big Book of Children’s
Reading Lists [2006], are also well regarded.) Other influential advocates of book-
talking include Lucy Schall (Booktalks and More, 2003), Rosanne J. Blass (Book-
talks, Bookwalks, and Read-Alouds, 2002), Ruth Cox Clark (Tantalizing Tidbits
for Middle Schoolers, 2005), and Kathleen A. Baxter (co-writer of a series called
Gotcha! with Marcia Agnes Kochel and Michael Dahl).
Although some booktalks are generated merely as assigned projects—one online
tip sheet styled itself as a guide to “Book Talks: You Can’t Live With Them and You
Can’t Pass Without Them”—their ability to foster interest in deserving books has
proved effective, such that many authors, institutions, and publishers now incorpo-
rate them into publicity campaigns as a matter of course (Coiro 2000; Young 2003).
In addition to in-person presentations, enterprising educators have also utilized
digital technology, including podcasts and Web videos to engage students in the
production and dissemination of booktalks.

Trends and Themes

Categorizing Children’s Books. Subcategories commonly employed to describe chil-
dren’s books defy easy standardization. For instance, a library or retailer may elect
to organize the books in its collection based on age-related reading levels, labeling
each item as “preschool” (approximately ages 0–4), “beginner” or “easy” (approx-
imately ages 4–8), “intermediate” or “middle” (approximately ages 8–12), and
young adult (approximately ages 12–18). To optimize the use of limited space, books
sorted into the first two categories may be combined into a larger section or redivided
based on the books’ physical formats (for instance, creating one section for picture
books and a separate one for the slender paperbacks known as “chapter books”).
Another age-based scheme is the one used by the Borders bookstore chain, which
defines the stages as “read to me” (all ages), “baby” (0–4 years), “read together”
(3–6 years), “learn to read” (3–7 years), “read to myself” (7–9 years), “independent
reader” (8–12 years), and “young adult” (13 years and older).
Grade-based rubrics for catalogs, reviews, and reading lists are also popular.
Bookmuse.com divides its recommendations into “grades K–2,” “grades 3–5,”
“grades 6–8,” and “young adult” (and its themed categories include a section for
“reluctant readers”). The children’s literature journal The Horn Book uses the terms
“preschool,” “primary,” “intermediate,” and “high school,” coding some books to
more than one level.
The Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of the American
Library Association (ALA), compiles annual “Children’s Notable Lists” in which the
categories “loosely” correspond to the following groups:

Younger readers—preschool–grade 2 (age 7), including easy-to-read books

Middle readers—Grades 3–5, ages 8–10
Older readers—Grades 6–8, ages 11–14
All ages—Has appeal and interest for children in all of the above age ranges (ALSC 2007)

The Children’s Book Council guidelines for “Choosing a Children’s Book” are
organized in the following sequence: “Babies and Toddlers,” “Nursery School and
Kindergarten,” “Early School Years (Ages 5–8),” and “Older Children (Ages 9–12
and older)” (CBC 2006).
 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 165

The placement of a book into a specific category may be dictated not only by the
reading ability of its intended readers, but also by its subject matter, particularly in
relation to the perceived maturity (or lack thereof) of the age group in question. This
sometimes becomes a matter of debate, formal complaints, and even lawsuits when
adults seek to protect children from topics or narratives they consider too difficult
or out-of-bounds. In recent years, books frequently condemned for “being unsuited
to age group” have included It’s Perfectly Normal (Harris and Emberley 1994); And
Tango Makes Three (Richardson and Parnell 2005); What My Mother Doesn’t
Know (Sones 2001); and Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants series (1997–present).
The ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom tallied over 1,750 formal complaints in
this category between 1990 and 2005, and estimates that the actual number of inci-
dents probably totaled four or five times that figure (ALA 2006). Similarly, book
retailers reportedly field comments such as “I have a fifth grader who reads at an
eighth-grade level, but I don’t want him/her to be exposed to ‘young adult content’”
on a regular basis (Powells 2007), and some stores display “mature content” cautions
on the shelves intended for older children. In short, some adults view the age or
grade classification of a book as much a warning as a recommendation. Although
they may not necessarily object to the book’s availability to the general public, they
may protest its inclusion in a school’s library or on a classroom syllabus, particularly
if they consider the topic sensitive enough to require direct parental supervision (such
as a child’s introduction to sexual education).
That said, children’s books are often targeted by individuals who feel certain
topics, styles, or attitudes are wholly inappropriate for the genre, or indeed for any
book in current circulation. Would-be censors may be politically, culturally, and reli-
giously conservative or liberal: some books have drawn fire for “offensive language”
and “anti-family content” and others for “racism,” “sexism,” “insensitivity,” and
“anti-ethnic” content (ALA 2006). At this writing, the most frequently challenged
books during the first decade of the twenty-first century include Rowling’s Harry
Potter series (1997–2007), Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
(1969), Judy Blume’s Forever (1975), Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War (1974),
Chris Crutcher’s Whale Talk (2001), Jane Leslie Conly’s Crazy Lady (1993), Phyllis
Reynolds Naylor’s Alice series (1985–present), John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men
(1937), Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories series (1981–1991), and Mark Twain’s The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) (ALA 2006). In addition to the reasons
cited above, children’s books have also been deemed objectionable due to their per-
ceived mishandling of sexuality, violence, or religion. (Attempts to ban the Harry
Potter novels have often focused on the books’ setting at a boarding school for
wizards; some adults consider Rowling’s world a glorification of witchcraft to an
unacceptable degree.) Many of the above-mentioned books are over a quarter-
century old, and some of them were best sellers and award nominees as well (for
example, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban captured Stoker and Whitbread
awards, and Crazy Lady was a Newbery Honor Book) . In spite of repeated efforts
to remove them, many of these books have attained the status of literary classics,
well regarded not only among professional educators but by the public at large.
Since 1981, a coalition of prominent book-related associations (including the ALA,
the American Booksellers Association, the American Society of Journalists and
Authors, and the Association of American Publishers) have co-sponsored an annual
“Banned Books Week” in hopes of increasing general awareness of (and, by extension,
resistance to) campaigns to restrict access to books tagged as controversial.
166 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

A positive aspect of age- and grade-based recommendations is their function as

benchmarks for individuals working with children, provided they are regarded as
prescriptive rather than restrictive. Given the diversity of children’s interests and
abilities within any specific age- or grade-based range, there are invariably both
“reluctant readers” and “gifted” students for whom the average will respectively
prove to be either overly ambitious or insufficiently engaging. However, given the
staggering number of children’s books in print (as well as many out-of-catalog titles
still in active circulation via libraries and secondhand vendors), the task of match-
ing a child to the books most appropriate to his or her abilities, interests, and needs
has perhaps never been so daunting or overwhelming, and the recommendations in
guidebooks such as E.D. Hirsch Jr.’s Core Knowledge series (What Your First
Grader Needs to Know; What Your Second Grader Needs to Know, etc. [revised
editions 1998]) at least provide a starting point for parents and tutors seeking a
frame of reference.
This chapter is intended to serve as an introduction to children’s literature popu-
lar in recent years and will focus primarily on works created for readers under 13,
as well as the plethora of resources available to individuals interested in the genre.
There is a separate entry in this encyclopedia delineating current trends in Young
Adult Literature, as well as surveys of contemporary Fantasy Literature, Graphic
Novels, Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, and other genres with strong followings
among both juvenile and adult readers. This chapter will profile mainly authors and
illustrators from the United States, but it should be remembered and recognized that
there are many creators of children’s books from other countries—such as Britain’s
Pauline Baynes (b. 1922), Eva Ibbotson (b. 1925), Michael Morpurgo (b. 1943),
Jacqueline Wilson (b. 1945), David Almond (b. 1951), Debi Gliori (b. 1959), and
Christian Birmingham (b. 1970), to name but a few—who have enjoyed critical and
commercial success in North America as well as on their native continents. Another
caveat is that this entry can introduce only a few of the individuals and works cur-
rently prominent in children’s literature, no matter what criteria one ultimately uses
to define it; because the boundaries of the genre are themselves blurry and subject
to constant reassessment, virtually any survey of its leading practitioners is likely to
encounter dissenting opinions about which authors and illustrators merit such
attention.
Contexts and Issues. Although reading stories aloud to children has existed as an
informal parenting strategy for generations, it was not widely endorsed as a teach-
ing method until the final decades of the twentieth century, and at times it has even
been disparaged as a poor use of classroom time. The shift toward viewing regular
reading aloud as an essential component of raising and educating children began to
gather momentum in the early 1980s, with journalist Jim Trelease at the vanguard.
As an elementary school volunteer, Trelease had noticed a correlation between chil-
dren whose teachers read aloud to them and children who enjoyed reading on their
own, as well as the enthusiastic response of students to his booktalks. After con-
sulting academic publications on the subject, Trelease concluded that there was both
a need to publicize this correlation to the general public and, at the time, a need to
remedy the dearth of guides to suitable books (Trelease 2006, xxi).
First published in 1979, and updated approximately every five years since then,
Trelease’s The Read-Aloud Handbook has sold over two million copies and is now
considered a classic reference for parents and educators. Since its initial publication,
a number of read-aloud programs have been established, many of them devoted to
 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 167

recruiting community volunteers to read to schoolchildren and supplying free

books. One such program, BookPALS (Performing Artists for Literacy in Schools),
also sponsors “Storyline Online” and “Storyline Phone Lines,” through which it
offers video and audio recordings of professional actors reading picture books
(www.bookpals.net). Another initiative, Reach Out and Read, was founded in
1989 and encourages pediatricians to act as read-aloud advocates. It distributes
over 4.6 million books a year through its 3,200-plus programs (www.reachoutan-
dread.com). Corporations, such as Motheread, address “child development and
family empowerment issues” by offering classes on both storytelling and self-
esteem, not only among traditional families but among those with special challenges
such as that of a parent in prison (www.motheread.org).
Another prominent read-aloud advocate is Esmé Raji Codell, a “readiologist”
also known as “Madame Esmé.” In addition to writing How to Get Your Child to
Love Reading: For Ravenous and Reluctant Readers Alike (2003), Codell estab-
lished a private children’s library in Chicago and maintains an influential Web site
(www.planetesme.com). Former school librarian Judy Freeman now performs as a
“children’s literature troubadour” and has published a series on Books Kids Will Sit
Still For (1990–2006), as well as compiling detailed annual guides to the 100 chil-
dren’s books she rates as the best of the previous year’s publications. Australian
author Mem Fox, popular in the United States for picture books such as Where Is
the Green Sheep? (2004), A Particular Cow (2006), and The Magic Hat (2002), is
also well known for her passionate advocacy of reading aloud, both via her lectures
and her book Reading Magic (2001).
The increase of interest in read-aloud curricula in recent years has spawned addi-
tional resources for teachers (and, by extension, librarians and parents) in the form
of curriculum guides such as Judy Bradbury’s Children’s Book Corner series. The
Association of Booksellers for Children established the E.B. White Read Aloud
Award in 2004. Its winners have included Deborah Wiles’s Each Little Bird that
Sings (2005); Chris Van Dusen’s If I Built a Car (2005); Judy Sierra and Marc
Brown’s Wild About Books (2004); Judy Schachner’s Skippyjon Jones (2003), which
has since become a series; James Howe’s Houndsley and Catina (2006), also now a
series; and Watty Key’s Alabama Moon (2006).
Multimedia Promotions and Spin-Offs. The public television shows Reading Rainbow
(premiered 1983) and Between the Lions (premiered 2000) have done much to
enhance the visibility of good picture books both on the air and online, as have the
Web sites of major literacy organizations such as Reading is Fundamental
(www.rif.org). Some children’s publishers make a point of featuring interactive
games, quizzes, contests, polls, forums, and other bonuses on their Web pages to
attract repeat visits from grade-school readers, a tactic also employed by creators
such as Beverly Cleary (b. 1916), Eric Carle (b. 1929), R.L. Stine (b. 1943), Jan Brett
(b. 1949), and Kevin Henkes (b. 1960) on their official sites. Characters with such
sites include Holly Hobbie’s eponymous heroine; Marc Brown’s Arthur; Stan, Jan,
and Mike Berenstain’s Berenstain Bears; Eric Hill’s Spot; and Beatrix Potter’s Peter
Rabbit (ALA 2006a).
The use of celebrity power to promote reading is evident in the poster campaigns
of both the American Library Association and the Association of American
Publishers. The ALA’s “READ” series has included images of heartthrobs Orlando
Bloom (with Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings) and Ewan McGregor (with Beatrix
Potter: The Complete Tales), as well as stars of children’s films such as Alan Rickman
168 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

(with J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye) and Dakota Fanning (with E.B. White’s
Charlotte’s Web). The AAP’s “Get Caught Reading” campaign has included popu-
lar characters from Star Wars, Avenue Q, Batman, and Naruto, as well as singer-
actress Queen Latifah, baseball player Johnny Damon, and various members of the
U.S. Congress.
The premiere of a film adaptation also characteristically increases sales of a book.
The release of a movie from a major studio may be coordinated with a reprinting of
the book with a “tie-in” cover; if the subject matter or characters are sufficiently
franchisable, there may also be action figures, calendars, production diaries, and
other collectibles that help heighten the book’s profile. For instance, the tie-ins to the
2007 movie version of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix included a flip
book, a deluxe coloring book, two poster books, a sticker book, and a set of slot-
together “building cards” with which one could create a model of Hogwarts
(Childrens Bookshelf 2007). The 2005 adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the
Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950) triggered 25 tie-in books and put a boxed edition
of The Chronicles of Narnia onto the New York Times best-sellers list; a similar
surge was seen in sales of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work from 2001 to 2003 when the Lord
of the Rings films premiered (La Monica 2005; Mehegan 2005).
Other successful film adaptations during the first decade of the twenty-first
century include Shrek (2001; based on the 1990 picture book by William Steig);
Bridge to Terabithia (2007; based on the 1997 novel by Katherine Paterson); The
Night at the Museum (2006; based on the 1993 picture book by Milan Trenc); The
Polar Express (2005; based on the 1985 picture book by Chris Van Allsburg);
Nanny McPhee (2006; based on Christianna Brand’s Nurse Matilda novels from the
1960s); Holes (2003; based on the 1998 novel by Louis Sachar); Meet the Robinsons
(2007; based on William Joyce’s A Day with Wilbur Robinson, 1990) and Lemony
Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004; based on the first three books in
that series). With advances in computer-generated imagery (CGI) technology mak-
ing special visual effects more feasible, live-action remakes of book-based animation
classics were also a noticeable trend. These included Charlotte’s Web (2006; based
on the 1953 novel by E.B. White); How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000; based
on the 1957 picture book by Dr. Seuss); and The Cat in the Hat (2003; based on
another 1957 picture book by Dr. Seuss) (Box Office Mojo 2007). Some classics are
repeat favorites for radio, television, film, and theatrical adaptations; these include
Mary O’Hara’s My Friend Flicka (1941), Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the
Prairie series (1932–1943), Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (1952), Roald
Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland (1865), Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew series (1930–present), and
Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess (1905). “Junior novelizations” of
blockbuster movies such as Pirates of the Caribbean are common, as are simplified
versions of books for older children. For example, the “movie storybook” version
of Charlotte’s Web (for ages five to seven) reached the New York Times best-seller
list for picture books during the winter of 2007.
Toys and clothing inspired by popular children’s books have become a staple both
of upscale retail bookshops and mail-order catalogs. For instance, How Do
Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? (Yolen 2000) (and its more than half-dozen sequels)
have been the inspiration for a pajama set and a plush toy as well as a rag book (one
printed on fabric instead of paper, for children too young to handle standard pic-
ture books with care); the Ella the Elegant Elephant (D’Amico and D’Amico 2004)
 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 169

series has received similar treatment. Other picture books deemed both appealing
and enduring enough to be marketed with toys based on their characters include
Michael Bond’s Paddington Bear (1958); Don Freeman’s Corduroy, another bear
(1968); Holly Hobbie’s Opal the pig (1997–present); David Shannon’s No, David!,
a troublemaking toddler (1998); Dan Vaccarino’s Good Night, Mr. Night (1997);
and Simms Taback’s There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly (1998).
Bestsellers and classics are also frequently candidates for multiple formats, in
which the book may be produced not only as a hardcover and a softcover, but
abridged, re-illustrated, and sold in a format more accessible to younger readers.
Laura Joffe Numeroff’s If You Give a Mouse a Cookie (1985) and its sequels have
been packaged in many combinations, including book-and-doll, mini-book-and-
cassette-tape, and printed as a 17 ⫻ 15-inch “big book” (a format in which enlarged
illustrations help the reader-performer overcome the visibility issues otherwise
inherent in group story times). The Best Mouse Cookie (1999) is a board-book vari-
ation of the story (in which the “pages” are sturdy slabs of cardboard, the better to
withstand the direct attention of infants and toddlers), and Mouse Cookies and
More: A Treasury (2006) offers recipes, songs, and other activities to supplement the
series. Other spin-offs from established classics include Mary Poppins in the Kitchen
(Travers 1975 [2006]) and Green Eggs and Ham Cookbook (Brennan 2006).
Another category of spin-off is the expansion, reformulation, and repackaging of
a familiar series into multiple versions or threads. One type of expansion can be seen
in the dozens of products related to A.A. Milne’s “Winnie the Pooh,” some bearing
images drawn by the original illustrator, Ernest Shepard (1879–1976), whereas
others are licensed derivations of the many Disney animated movies. Another type
consists of series that are updated and reformulated to reflect changing cultural
norms or to revive their appeal to contemporary audiences. The “Nancy Drew” and
“Hardy Boys” mystery brands now consist of more than 100 volumes, some belong-
ing to the original series established by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, and others to
later generation “Files,” “Notebooks,” “Clue Crew” stories, graphic novels, and
other permutations (Fisher 2007).
The publishing history of Wilder’s Little House series offers examples of all the
spin-off types mentioned above. The first eight books of the series (from Little
House in the Big Woods to These Happy Golden Years) were published between
1932 and 1943 and were originally illustrated by Helen Sewell and Mildred Boyle.
(A ninth manuscript, The First Four Years, was posthumously published in 1971.)
In 1953, the series was reissued as a uniform set with illustrations by Garth
Williams. This edition became established as the “classic” version of the series to the
majority of its readers, many of whom were unreservedly vocal in expressing their
dismay when the publisher revealed plans to increase interest in the series among
contemporary children by replacing the Williams drawings with staged photographs
(Marell-Mitchell 2006).
Prior to the 1990s, individuals interested in reading beyond the original series
were generally limited to a selection of Wilder’s travel writings, several biographies,
and Barbara M. Walker’s The Little House Cookbook (1979), the last also illus-
trated by Williams. During the 1990s, with the blessing and cooperation of the
Wilder literary estate, the expansion of the Little House franchise kicked into full
gear. Four spin-off series were created, each centered on the childhood of a female
relative of Laura Ingalls: the books on Wilder’s great-grandmother and grandmother
began to appear in 1999 and were initially written by Melissa Wiley; the series on
170 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

Rose Wilder Lane (Wilder’s daughter) was published between 1993 and 1999 with
the byline of Roger Lea Macbride, Lane’s heir; and the series on Caroline Quiner
Ingalls (Wilder’s mother) featured seven books (1996–2005), four by Maria D. Wilkes
and three by Celia Wilkins. Additional volumes in the Martha and Charlotte series are
anticipated, but the publisher’s decision to replace the existing books with significantly
shorter versions prompted Wiley to resign from the project (Wiley 2007).
During the height of the franchise’s popularity (from approximately 1997 to
2000), dozens of excerpts from the core novels were formatted anew as picture
books and chapter books, rendering them accessible to children younger than
Wilder’s original audience. Additional selections were combined to produce gift
anthologies such as Little House Sisters (1997). During this period, activity books
such as My Little House Sewing Book (1997) also proliferated. Although the pace
of spin-off publications has slowed down, interest in the Little House series remains
intense enough to inspire countless events, tours, clubs, and other educational
efforts in Wilder’s honor, and the museums associated with sites she immortalized in
her novels average over 20,000 visitors each year (Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial
Society 2007). William Anderson and Leslie A. Kelly’s The Little House Guidebook
(rev. ed. 2002) has provided both historical background and extensive sightseeing
tips for would-be tourists.
L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series (1908–1939) commands a
large-scale following comparable to that of the Little House sequence, bringing over
130,000 pilgrims each year to the Green Gables homestead on Prince Edward
Island, Canada. Venerated as a Canadian icon, the character of Anne is wildly pop-
ular in Japan as well as in the United States, where numerous film, television, and
stage adaptations have met with commercial success, and the Anne of Green Gables
Licensing Authority had granted almost a hundred licenses as of spring 2007;
detailed plans to commemorate the 2008 centenary of the first book were already in
full development by mid-2006, including the commissioning of an estate-authorized
“prequel” and a gift book based on Montgomery’s scrapbooks (Gordon 2006;
Hunter 2006).
As a career writer, Montgomery was far more prolific than Wilder, and the Anne
series continues the heroine’s story into middle age, with Anne’s role becoming
increasingly peripheral as the narrative focus shifts to her children and their friends.
Given these factors, and the entry of the earlier books into the public domain, the
publication history of Anne of Green Gables (outside of the 100th-anniversary pub-
lications) more closely resembles that of another classic, Louisa May Alcott’s Little
Women (1868): rather than generating spin-offs and sequels, publishers have gener-
ally elected either to reissue the writers’ lesser-known works or to produce new
editions of the opening book in each series, competing with existing editions on the
basis of price, illustrations, or supplemental material. For instance, the 2001
Aladdin edition of Anne of Green Gables includes a foreword by highly regarded
novelist Katherine Paterson (b. 1932).
Little Women remains another perennial favorite for dramatizations. Recent ver-
sions include a 2005 Broadway musical, which toured nationally for a year, and a
critically acclaimed opera by Mark Adamo (b. 1962) that was broadcast on “Great
Performances” in 2001 and has since been added to the repertory of over 20 com-
panies (Schirmer 2007). The book’s continuing influence on American literature was
also evident when the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction was awarded to Geraldine
Brooks’s March, a novel featuring the father of Alcott’s “little women” as its central
 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 171

character. As with other writers of her stature, there is a society dedicated to pre-
serving her Massachusetts home as a museum, and running educational program-
ming based on events and activities depicted in Little Women, such as “Plumfield
Fun Week” and “Meg’s Wedding” (Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association 2007).
Literary Tourism. The popularity of a children’s character, book, or franchise can
both inspire and perpetuate interest in locales associated with either the story or its
production. During the first decade of the twentieth century, a number of new books
offered assistance to travelers interested in planning their vacations with childhood
favorites in mind. These included Storied City: A Children’s Book Walking-Tour
Guide to New York City (Marcus 2003), Storybook Travels: From Eloise’s New
York to Harry Potter’s London (Bates and La Tempa 2002), and Once Upon a Time
in Great Britain (Wentz 2002). The interest in this subgenre was perhaps heralded
by the 1999 republication of How the Heather Looks: A Joyous Journey to the
British Sources of Children’s Books by legendary editor and reviewer Joan Bodger
(1921–2002). Previously out of print for over 30 years, Bodger’s travelogue had
attained the status of “an underground classic” among aficionados of children’s lit-
erature (Donnelly 2000) and reportedly enjoyed the status of “the book most often
stolen by retiring children’s librarians” (Bodger 1999, 299). The reception of its
return to print was mixed, however; although Bodger’s sunny narration was cele-
brated by some critics with encomiums such as “timeless” (Thomas 2000) and
“smart” (Donnelly 2000) by some contemporary reviewers, others felt that the book
exhibited an “absent-minded elitism” (Cohoon 2001) that modern readers might
find “an exclusionary drag” (Wilson 2000).
Travel accounts of a more recent vintage can be found on LiteraryTraveler.com, a
well regarded Web site featuring professional essays on literature-inspired travel.
The site regularly posts articles on pilgrimages inspired by popular children’s books
(including Faith Ringgold’s Tar Beach and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye) and
the reports in the March 2007 children’s literature issue explored locations associ-
ated with iconic characters and authors such as William Blake (1757–1827), Ludwig
Bemelmans (1898–1962), Roald Dahl (1916–1990), Astrid Lindgren (1907–2002),
Robert McCloskey (1914–2003), and P(amela) L(yndon) Travers (1899–1996).
Detailed online travelogues have become a common practice on personal Web
sites as well; the affordability of digital photography and the flexibility of online
storage permit online authors to illustrate their chronicles more lavishly than would
generally be feasible in a printed equivalent, as well as to share their experiences
with like-minded enthusiasts. For instance, Susan Cooper’s “The Dark Is Rising”
sequence (1965–1977) has inspired a number of its devotees to seek out Wales for
themselves (see Given 2002 and Green 2007 for examples). Mark Scott’s account of
his visit, featuring photographs taken by another fan of the series, cites Jean
Valencia’s description of her trip as the nudge he needed to finish assembling his
own recollections (Scott n.d.; Valencia 1997).
The American Girl collection of books, dolls, and accessories has become one
of the most recognizable franchises in upscale children’s “edutainment,” so much
so that a New York Times review recently began with the observation, “Anne of
Green Gables [an off-Broadway musical adaptation] appears to be going for the
American Girl demographic” (Midgette 2007). The demographic in question has
made the “American Girl Place” entertainment complexes in New York, Chicago,
and Los Angeles popular destinations for mother-daughter vacations. Billed as
“More than just a store—it’s an experience!,” each Place consists of multiple
172 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

shops (including a girl-centric bookstore), a theatre, and a cafe. Originally cen-

tered on heroines representing historical periods in America’s past, the brand has
evolved to include contemporary characters (such as their “2007 Girl of the Year,”
a 10-year-old service-dog trainer named Nicki. In tandem with Nicki’s story (Creel
2007), the company released a nonfiction treasury called Girls and Their Dogs
(American Girl 2006). It has also attracted praise for its “Smart Girl’s Guides”
(such as The Smart Girl’s Guide to Friendship Troubles (Criswell 2003), written
by a certified social worker) and other advice tomes such as The Big Book of Help
(Holyoke 2004).
Reception. In their introduction to a Horn Book issue on “the line between books
for children and books for adults,” the magazine’s editors quoted John Rowe
Townsend’s 1971 declaration that “the only practical definition of a children’s book
today—absurd as it sounds—is ‘a book which appears on the children’s list of a
publisher’” (Sutton and Paravanno 2004). Although this is indeed an absurd line to
draw, it underscores the inherent inconclusiveness of attempts to confine the genre
to any one set of age- or topic-delimited boundaries. In discussing the books that
children fix upon as their favorites, critic Selma G. Lanes observed that “the meet-
ing of a book and a child’s individual need is a fragile and fortuitous happening”
that may seem random or peculiar, although adults can foster suitable connections
by ensuring the child’s access to a wide variety of books (1972, 201–202). Because
adults handle the bulk of children’s literature purchases—be it for their dependents
or for themselves—the popularity and shelf-life of such books is ultimately deter-
mined as much by their ability to capture and retain the attention of mature as well
as juvenile readers. When asked about controversy and contentiousness in children’s
literature, historian Leonard S. Marcus mused about how the events of Harry Potter
and the Goblet of Fire “seemed to comment on some of the things that were hap-
pening in the world” during the period he was reading it aloud to his son, which
coincided with the horrors of September 11, 2001. Marcus concluded that, although
such connections are seldom specifically anticipated or intended, “children’s books
have a way of resonating with real experience in unexpected ways. And the
children’s books we remember make sense in precisely that way” (Serlin and
Selznick 2002).

Selected Authors
The Harry Potter Phenomenon. When the seventh and final book of J.K. Rowling’s
Harry Potter series became available for pre-order, it captured the top spot on
several online retailers’ best-seller lists within hours and remained there for weeks.
The last four books in the series each broke records for first printings, with a run of
12 million copies set for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007). The opening
volume, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997; U.S. title Harry Potter
and the Sorcerer’s Stone), appears to be established as a classic, with approximately
0.5 million copies in annual sales a decade after its initial publication (Rich and
Bosman 2007), as well as over 60 authorized editions in translation. The movie
versions of the books were produced and marketed with the author’s active cooper-
ation and have been box-office blockbusters as well (Pandya 2007).
The popularity of Rowling’s storytelling has been attributed to a number of ele-
ments, including her inventive sense of humor, her playful allusions to classical
myths and fairy tales, her realistic portrayal of human relationships, and her ability
 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 173

to sustain a suspenseful, mystery-laden plot across the seven years depicted in the
seven-book saga. Her cast of characters includes unreliable or unhelpful adults,
devious and daring children, and a host of unpredictable magical creatures (some
amusing, others malevolent). As reviewers such as Alison Lurie and Stephen King
have observed, some readers are drawn to the series because they can readily
identify with its orphan hero and his Cinderella-style emergence into the wizarding
world:

From the point of view of an imaginative child, the world is full of Muggles [the series’
term for non-wizards]: people who don’t understand you, make stupid rules, and want
nothing to do with the unexpected or the unseen. Harry’s story also embodies the com-
mon childhood fantasy that the dreary adults and siblings you live with are not your
real family; that you have more exciting parents, and are somehow special and gifted.
(Lurie 2003, 117)

Other readers are enthralled by the books’ richly detailed settings, which range
from the medieval castle housing Harry’s boarding school to the contemporary
sports stadium conjured for the Quidditch World Cup. Others find themselves
entranced by the complexity of the series’ heroes and villains: Rowling is unafraid
to invest her protagonists and their allies with significant flaws and blind spots,
which contribute to numerous misperceptions, misunderstandings, and miscalcula-
tions. These, in turn, help fuel the narrative drive of the series: as university profes-
sor Barbara Carman Garner stated, “The most pressing question in the Potter books
is, ‘Who can be trusted?’” (Zipes 2006, 3: 369). With each volume in the series, the
question becomes increasingly urgent—and its possible answers correspondingly
difficult to discern, with the true loyalties of certain key characters the subject of
passionate debate among their fans.
The Harry Potter series is not without its faults or its detractors. For some read-
ers, the laws governing the Harry Potter universe are inconsistent and poorly con-
structed. Some critics find Rowling’s “good” characters unlikable, arguing that
they are no better than bullies and elitists, and others feel that the books endorse
lying and other undesirable behaviors. Some readers relish the ethnic diversity of
Rowling’s cast and the strong personalities of her female characters, but others
regard her handling of these elements as superficial. And, as with any other popu-
lar author, some readers consider Rowling to be overrated or discover that her
prose is simply not to their taste (in a poll of “books Brits are most likely to own
but are unable to finish,” Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was the fiction
runner-up [Jury 2007]).
On the other hand, the books also have been praised by children’s literature
specialists not only for their literary merit, but for their ability to engage “reluctant
readers.” Jim Trelease calls Harry Potter “the best thing to happen to children’s
books since the invention of the paperback” (250); in a chapter titled “Lessons from
Oprah, Harry, and the Internet,” Trelease analyzes Rowling’s popularity both in
comparison to other children’s best-sellers and in the context of other claims on chil-
dren’s leisure time. He cites the length of books as a positive factor, asserting that
“consuming that many words, students are getting prodigiously better at reading—
many for the first time—and enjoying it. . . . Harry Potter has children willing to
read books that are eight times longer than Goosebumps and twice as long as
Heidi” (Trelease 2006, 142–143).
174 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

Unfortunate Events and Fractured Fairy Tales. By the time the last book in A Series of
Unfortunate Events appeared on October 13, 2006, Lemony Snicket’s saga of the
much persecuted Baudelaire children had appeared on the weekly New York
Times “Children’s Best-Sellers” list over a hundred times. In addition to the 13
novels that form the core of the series, there have also been authorized side enter-
tainments such as a CD of songs (originally composed for the audiobook editions
of the novels), several blank books, an Unauthorized Autobiography (2002), and
The Beatrice Letters, a collection of simulated correspondence in the style of Nick
Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine (1991). Snicket is the pseudonym of Daniel Handler
(b. 1970), who poses as the author’s representative during promotional events and
interviews.
Laden with literary allusions and melodramatic disclaimers, the series was
acclaimed for its combination of shameless erudition, twisted humor, and outra-
geous plots. One reference guide describes the first book as “an Edward Gorey
drawing come to life, or a parody of every dreadful Victorian orphan novel you’ve
never read . . . one of the funniest books for children ever written” (Lewis and
Mayes 2003, 336). As with many traditional fairy tales, the stories offer their read-
ers the vicarious pleasure of identifying with the brave, talented, and wildly unlucky
Baudelaire orphans as they contend with villainous adults and other menaces. At the
same time, the arch narration and baroque plot contrivances help sustain an atmos-
phere of unreality that serves as a cushion, distancing readers from the protagonists’
travails.
In his assessment of the full series, reviewer Henry Alford (b. 1962) admired
Handler’s “interesting and offbeat” efforts to educate his readers:

In between all the exotic ethnic food references and the gallows humor and the teach-
ing of words like “denouement” and “vaporetto,” the books seem at times like a covert
mission to turn their readers into slightly dark-hued sophisticates. To be sure, there’ll
be a payoff for those gothically inclined young readers who, as adults, see the sick joke
at the heart of characters named Klaus and Sunny. Or consider the series’ early lessons
in postmodernism—the author loves to tell us to put the book we’re reading down, and
in The Carnivorous Carnival, he repeatedly gives us the definition of déjà vu; in The
Penultimate Peril, he tells us we don’t need to read the next three chapters in any
particular order. The reader who receives such training is amply prepared for the rocky
narrative landscapes of Borges and Eco. (2006)

In a sense, Handler’s droll manipulations can be considered heirs of the narrative

strategies deployed in The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales (1992),
a picture book that cemented the reputations of writer Jon Scieszka (b. 1954) and
illustrator Lane Smith (b. 1959) as masters of satirical, multilayered storytelling.
The team had already caused a sensation with their first collaboration, The True
Story of the Three Little Pigs (1989), which presented its version of events from the
perspective of an “Alexander T. Wolf” protesting his innocence. For The Stinky
Cheese Man, Scieszka, Smith, and designer Molly Leach combined their talents to
produce a bold, attitude-packed book in which their text, art, and layout choices all
amplify the stories’ seemingly freewheeling plots and characterizations. In an essay
examining the power of good design, Scieszka observed that “some people have
described our books as ‘wacky’ and ‘zany’ and ‘anything goes.’ . . . In order to create
the humor and illusion of wacky/zany/anything goes, there has to be a reason for
everything that goes” (Scieszka 1998).
 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 175

Thirteen years after the book’s publication, The Norton Anthology of Children’s
Literature asserted, “As an ‘advanced’ multireferential text, The Stinky Cheese Man
has not (yet) been bettered. It assumes intertextual skills, its collage medium is delib-
erately ironic, and its characters try to break the bounds of the book” (Zipes et al.
2005, C32). Stinky Cheese Man’s runaway success (so to speak) has been credited
with paving the way for other creators to pursue unconventional and experimental
approaches to storytelling (Britton 2002), having proved that “dark,” “weird,” and
“sophisticated” work for children can be commercially viable; Scieszka himself
notes that The Three Pigs was “rejected everywhere” until an editor at Viking
elected to gamble on it (Scieszka 2006).
In addition to promoting a climate in which personas such as Lemony Snicket
could flourish, Scieszka and Smith’s collaborations also raised the profile of the
“fractured fairy-tale” genre. Lewis and Mayes observe that “now, a season doesn’t
go by without an abundance of fairy-tale retellings that are fractured, skewed, or
otherwise toyed with” and make a point of highlighting several dozen of their own
favorites (225–226). David Wiesner’s version of The Three Pigs (2001) earned the
Caldecott Medal for its virtuosic depictions of the pigs’ escape from the traditional
storyline into several others (collecting a fiddling cat and a besieged dragon along
the way), with the visual action merrily sliding from one style of picture-book illus-
tration into the next. At one point, the pigs fold a “page” of the original story into
a paper airplane, and they are later shown tilting and arranging the remaining pages
to re-enter and conclude the story.
A subcategory of the “fractured fairy-tale” genre consists of myths reinterpreted
through a feminism-informed lens. For readers troubled by the passivity of traditional
damsels in distress (or repelled outright by celebrations of womanly victimhood)—
and also for readers who simply enjoy sassy parodies—these often-humorous varia-
tions offer alternate scenarios where princesses aren’t always yearning for rescue,
much less automatically grateful to their would-be rescuers. Such re-imaginings
include Falling for Rapunzel (Wilcox 2003), in which the heroine cheerfully misinter-
prets the prince’s increasingly frustrated commands for access to her tower; The
Princess and the Pizza (Auch and Auch 2002), in which the impoverished heroine
enters a cooking contest in order to win the hand of “Prince Drupert”; and Gerald
Morris’s The Squire’s Tale series (1998–present), in which an assortment of young
protagonists struggle to make sense of the disconnect they witness between the ideal-
ism of Arthurian chivalry and the less admirable behaviors of the knights and
courtiers they encounter during their adventures.
Although Morris’s straightforward prose is stylistically worlds removed from
Lemony Snicket’s eccentric excesses, it could be argued that the two authors share an
irony-tinged awareness of the distance and self-delusion that so often exists between
cherished principles and actual practice—an awareness lurking beneath both Morris’s
sly glimmers of humor and Snicket’s outlandish posturings, as well as Scieszka’s skew-
erings of “happy ever after” transformations. Morris’s compassionate but realistic
acknowledgment of his heroes’ flaws echoes Snicket’s refusal to spare the Baudelaire
children from uncomfortable and regrettable decisions. After one such error results in
tragedy, Snicket sadly reflects, “It is very difficult to make one’s way in this world
without being wicked at one point or another, when the world’s way is so wicked to
begin with” (Handler 2005, 316). The moral ambiguity inherent in such a declaration
is not far removed from the ancient, maddening complexities and unresolved conun-
drums that have driven other twenty-first-century authors to construct radically
176 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

altered versions of familiar stories, to craft new narratives that liberate stock charac-
ters from unsatisfactory fates, or to challenge a story’s postulates by presenting its
events from the perspective of an antagonist or a secondary character.
Other Trends among Recent Best Sellers. The success of “Harry Potter” has been both
blamed and credited for the plethora of new books in the 2000s featuring magic,
dragons, and other fantastical elements, but humorous escapism has also long acted
as a key ingredient in explicitly educational series such as Joanna Cole’s The Magic
School Bus (1986–present) and Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House
(1992–present). Both retailers and educators unabashedly use “If you like Harry
Potter, you’ll like . . .” stratagems to interest children toward other fantasy
sequences such as tales of “Septimus Heap” (2005–present, by Angie Sage) and
“The Spiderwick Chronicles” (2003–present, by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black).
The latter has also elicited comparisons to Lemony Snicket’s series in both design
and tone, prompted by such devices as leaves artistically obscuring back-cover
blurbs and pseudo-cautionary mottoes such as “Go away/close the book/put it
down/do not look.”
Another recurring element among top-selling titles is the perennial irresistibility
of bunnies. They may appear as sentient toys, such as in The Remarkable Journey
of Edward Tulane (DiCamillo 2006), or as anthropomorphic representations of
children, such as in Not a Box (Portis 2007) and in dozens of titles by Rosemary
Wells (b. 1943). Their popularity echoes that of enduring classics such as Margery
Williams’s The Velveteen Rabbit (1922) and Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight
Moon (1947).
A notable trend in intermediate-level literary fiction has been the popularity of
books featuring a type of self-reliant, unconventional pre-teen girl—enough to
attract a measure of backlash against the frequency of such characters (cf. Sutton
2007a). One reviewer admitted groaning upon realizing she had received “another
book with a plucky, young, motherless heroine—if she gets a dog and names it after
a supermarket, I’m out of here [an allusion to Kate DiCamillo’s Because of Winn-
Dixie]” (Smith 2007). The current parade of feisty female orphans, however, includ-
ing Maud Flynn in A Drowned Maiden’s Hair (Schlitz 2006) and Karen Cushman’s
Rodzina (2003), appeal to readers eager for antidotes against portrayals of passive,
prettiness-defined heroines—a contingent substantial enough to merit compilations
such as The Anti Princess Reading List (Mommy Track’d 2007). In the beginning
reader realm, series featuring imperfect yet likable leads such as Junie B. Jones
(1992–present, by Barbara Park) and Judy Moody (2000–present, by Megan
McDonald) have proved popular. Picture-book characters in the 2000s praised for
their confidence and style include Olivia the pig (in the Ian Falconer series,
2000–present) and Fancy Nancy (2005–present, by Jane O’Connor and Robin
Preiss Glasser), both of whom have been compared to Kay Thompson’s classic
Eloise (1955).
Another intriguing trend has been the attention given to novels in which the
illustrations are integral to the narrative rather than merely decorative. These
include Lynne Rae Perkins’s Criss Cross (2005), Brian Selznick’s The Invention of
Hugo Cabret: A Novel in Words and Pictures (2007), and Gene Luen Yang’s
American Born Chinese (2006), the last a graphic novel shortlisted for several
prizes traditionally granted to conventional chapter books. The success of these
titles may well inspire more writer-artists to investigate this variation of story-
telling.
 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 177

Awards. The Newbery and Caldecott Medals, administered by the American

Library Association, are regarded as two of the top prizes in the field of children’s
literature. The Newbery Medal program was initiated in 1921 by Frederic G.
Melcher, a prominent bookseller and Publisher’s Weekly editor. During the years
that followed, it became apparent that a second, separate award for picture books
would be welcome; as a result, the Caldecott Medal was established in 1937. For
each award, a winner and several runners-up are named; the runners-up are known
as “honor” books, a designation used by several other children’s award programs
as well.
A title that wins the Newbery or Caldecott Medal is ensured a permanent listing
in many reference books and library brochures. The prizes are well publicized and
customarily increase both the immediate and long-term sales of the award winners.
A number of schools, libraries, and retailers have adopted the practice of holding
“Mock Newbery” and “Mock Caldecott” elections each winter, in which the par-
ticipants read and vote upon books perceived as contenders for each award. Such
exercises help stimulate discussion and sales of new titles since books are generally
eligible only within their first year of publication.
The official criteria of the awards mandate that they are to be granted only on the
basis of excellence, rather than “for didactic intent or for popularity” (ALSC 2007).
Although many authors on the winners and honors lists become established class-
room and household favorites, others never catch hold among the general public,
and still others fall out of favor (and subsequently lapse out of print) as fashions in
storytelling and scholarship change.
As with any major prize, the decisions of the Newbery and Caldecott award com-
mittees have not lacked critics. In 2007, the selection of Susan Patron’s The Higher
Power of Lucky became front-page news on The New York Times (as well as the
subject of an editorial in support of the book) after Publisher’s Weekly reported sig-
nificant debate about the winner among children’s literature professionals (Bosman
2007; Maughan 2007a and 2007b). The controversy centered on the author’s use of
the word “scrotum” and whether it rendered the book age-inappropriate for its
intended audience. In the judgment of some librarians, the book was too problem-
atic to add to their collections, whereas other participants in the debates criticized
decisions against purchasing the title as tantamount to censorship.
In discussing the contretemps, some longtime observers of the field noted that
vocal dissent was to be expected with any awards process. Horn Book editor Roger
Sutton commented, “In my going-on-30 years in this field I can’t think of a Newbery
choice that wasn’t reviled and/or ridiculed by a significant number of librarians”
(Sutton 2007b). Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, which received the
1964 Caldecott Medal, was pronounced to be too frightening for its intended audi-
ence in such venues as Ladies Home Journal by experts such as child psychologist
Bruno Bettelheim (1903–1990) (March 1969; excerpted in CLR 1976). The strong
reaction both for and against Sendak’s story has become legendary in the lore of
children’s literature, and its status as a landmark picture book has been the subject
of extended analyses (CLR 2002). Smoky Night, a story set during the 1992 Los
Angeles race riots, won the 1995 Caldecott Medal; its author, Eve Bunting, recalled
“a lot of disgruntled talk after the Caldecott. One of the judges said she got so much
flack she had to take to her bed” (Bunting 2006).
On the other side of the coin, questions regarding whether the award shortlists
lack diversity are also raised on a regular basis (cf. Parravano and Adams 1996;
178 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

Sutton 2007a). That said, the authors of Newbery winners since 2000 include an
African American (Christopher Paul Curtis (1954–) and two Asian Americans
(Linda Sue Park (1960–) and Cynthia Kadohata (1956–)), and recent Caldecott
honors titles have included books about Harriet Tubman (Weatherford 2006), Rosa
Parks (Giovanni 2005), and Martin Luther King Jr. (Rappaport 2002). Jacqueline
Woodson was a Caldecott finalist for Coming On Home Soon (2004) and a
Newbery finalist for Show Way (2005), both works inspired by African American
history, as were Marilyn Nelson’s Carver (2001) and Russell Freedman’s The Voice
that Challenged A Nation (2004).
The ALA sponsors a number of other prizes, including the Belpré Medal (for
Latino authors and illustrators) and the Coretta Scott King Award (for African
American authors and illustrators). The Boston Globe-Horn Book (BG-HG)
Awards, established in 1967, are also influential among children’s literature profes-
sionals. There is often overlap among the BG-HB finalists and those of the Newbery
and Caldecott committees: The Hello, Goodbye Window (Juster 2005) was the
2006 Caldecott medalist and a BG-HB honors book; The Man Who Walked
Between the Towers (Gerstein 2003) won both the Caldecott medal and the BG-HB
picture-book prize; An American Plague (Murphy 2003) was a BG-HB winner in
nonfiction and Newbery honors book. Illustrators appearing multiple times on
major awards lists include David Wiesner (b. 1956), Chris Raschka (b. 1959), and
Mo Willems (b. 1968); favorite authors among the committees include Susan
Cooper (b. 1935), Sharon Creech (b. 1945), Marilyn Nelson (b. 1946), Cynthia
Rylant (b. 1954), Lynne Rae Perkins (b. 1956), Kate DiCamillo (b. 1964), and
M(atthew) T(obin) Anderson (b. 1968).
Nonfiction. Although the awards programs generally highlight outstanding stand-
alone volumes, nonfiction children’s books are often generated in series that are
specifically “reinforced” or “library bound”—a colorful, durable, jacketless hard-
cover format that holds up well to repeat shelvings. There are series devoted to vir-
tually every area of interest, including crafts, holidays, science, social studies, arts,
animals, and sports. Enslow Publishers’ Fun Holiday Crafts Kids Can Do! series
includes games and activities in honor of Earth Day and Kwanzaa as well as Christmas
and Halloween. Scholastic’s second Cornerstones of Freedom series includes a pro-
file of Air Force One, the U.S. commander-in-chief’s airplane, that offers anecdotes
about individual presidents’ styles (such as the meals they enjoyed eating) as well as
a historical and logistical overview of “the Flying White House” and photographs
conveying how its occupants conduct business en route (January 2004). In history
series such as Heinemann’s Picture the Past, there is a marked effort to convey
details that will help the student visualize the reality of distant cultures; for instance,
in Life in a Roman Fort (Shuster 2005) informs its readers that “sponges and sticks
were used as toilet paper, and then washed and reused” (19) and features a recipe
for “army porridge” (29). Series for older children such as Lerner’s Military Hard-
ware in Action feature more advanced vocabulary and data, such as the beam,
propulsion, and displacement details for assorted U.S. vessels in Mark Dartford’s
Warships (2003). Collections developed in reaction to recent events include Scholastic’s
Natural Disasters set, which covers emergency responses to hurricanes, tsunamis,
and other calamities.
Many of these nonfiction series are deliberately formulaic in tone and design,
relying on well-chosen stock photographs, simple line illustrations, colored back-
grounds, and frequent use of sidebars to maintain the reader’s interest. Such books
 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 179

often incorporate the use of boldface type to emphasize key terms to the student;
there is also customarily a glossary in the back, as well as several books or Web sites
listed for those interested in further reading, and sometimes additional appendices
such as timelines or places to visit. Four notably well-designed series that stand out
from the crowd are the Eyewitness guides produced by Dorling Kindersley, the
biographies produced by National Geographic, and the Encyclopedia Prehistorica
volumes produced by Candlewick.
One of the more engaging series to appear in recent years has been Franklin
Watts’s You Wouldn’t Want to Be . . . narratives, which have included You Wouldn’t
Want to be a Pirate’s Prisoner! Horrible Things You’d Rather Not Know (2002),
You Wouldn’t Want to Be a Civil War Soldier! A War You’d Rather Not Fight
(2004), You Wouldn’t Want to Be at the Boston Tea Party! Wharf Water Tea You’d
Rather Not Drink (2006), and the like. As their titles indicate, these books feature
second-person storytelling in which the student is treated to playful but deromanti-
cized perspectives of life in the specified role, with cartoon-style yet historically
grounded depictions of the scenarios such individuals would have encountered. The
You Wouldn’t Want to Be . . . volumes include the anecdotal sidebars and elemen-
tary glossaries of more traditional series, but in attitude, they reflect the trend in
larger society of viewing history through a more realistic lens, even at the popular
culture level (as witnessed in PBS-based reality television shows such as “Frontier
House” and “Texas Ranch House”). Efforts to distinguish myth from actual prac-
tice can also be seen in books such as Piratepedia, where the writers note that there
has only been one verifiable case of “walking the plank” (Niehaus and Hecker
2006, 122).
Poetry. The design of poetry books for children has evolved into a lively and
sophisticated art, one in which the use of multiple fonts and colors help accent the
texts and concepts presented. The strategy of getting children interested in poetry by
encouraging them to write their own is on display in engaging picture guidebooks
such as A Kick in the Head (Janescko 2005) and Jennifer Fandel’s Understanding
Poetry series, which examine a broad range of forms and techniques in tandem with
hip, humorous illustrations. A Kick in the Head delineates the format of more eso-
teric forms (such as blues poems and pantoums) as well as those of more familiar
poetic structures (such as haiku and sonnets), and represents a second collaboration
by veteran anthologist Paul Janescko and popular illustrator Chris Raschka (the first
being A Poke in the I, a collection of concrete poems). In Puns, Allusions, and Other
Word Secrets, intermediate-level readers are asked to consider concepts such as
“wrenched rhyme” and “dramatic monologues” in poems by John Ciardi, Audre
Lorde, and others, as well as to participate in activities such as writing a poem about
a single day from three different points of view (Fandel 2006, 44). Robin Hirsch’s
FEG: Stupid (Ridiculous) Poems for Intelligent Children (2002) also revels in word-
play, comedy, and loopy footnotes; for the poem “But Not Now a Wonton Tub,”
Hirsch comments, “This . . . may well be the lamest, most pathetic palindrome ever
composed. Actually, the poem was written (or rather made up spontaneously) in the
car to try and justify the pitiful palindrome that comes at the end. Surely, you can
do better” (23).
Among living practitioners, the most prominent representative of children’s
poetry is currently Jack Prelutsky (b. 1960), who was designated Children’s Poet
Laureate in September 2006 by the Poetry Foundation (itself founded in 2003 as a
result of a $100 million donation to Poetry magazine). Other major poets and
180 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

poetry editors for children active in the 2000s include Lee Bennett Hopkins, with
anthologies such as Got Geography! (2006) and Oh, No! Where Are My Pants? and
Other Disasters (2003); Douglas Florian, author of Handsprings (2006) and A Pig
is Big (2000); Susan Katz, whose books include Looking for Jaguar (2005), A
Revolutionary Field Trip (2004), and Mrs. Brown on Exhibit (2002); J. Patrick
Lewis, with Please Bury Me in the Library (2005) and Once Upon a Tomb (2006),
as well as Wing Nuts: Screwy Haiku, a collection co-written with Janeczko (2006);
Georgia Heard, who selected the poems for This Place I Know (2002), an anthology
created in response to September 11, 2001; and Janet S. Wong, whose collections
include Twist (2007) and Knock on Wood (2003), as well as a creative writing book
(You Have To Write, 2002) and assorted picture books.
Among deceased poets, individuals whose works continue to captivate new gen-
erations of readers include Shel Silverstein (the 20th anniversary edition of A
Light in the Attic appeared in 2001, and the 30th anniversary edition of Where
the Sidewalk Ends in 2004), Dr. Seuss (Oh the Places You’ll Go! routinely returns
to the New York Times best-seller list during graduation season), and Robert
Louis Stevenson, whose Child’s Garden of Verses has been reprinted since 1885 in
dozens of editions, of which the most popular include versions illustrated by
Tasha Tudor (1981/1999) and Thomas Kinkade (1999). The Poetry for Young
People picture-book series, initiated in the mid-1990s, continues to grow, adding
annotated volumes on topics such as “Animal Poems” (Hollander 2004) and “The
Seasons” (Serio 2005), as well as ones on individual poets such as Langston
Hughes (2006) and William Blake (2007).

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second volume, Dervish, who is a deadly jester able to hide in the pixels of the dig-
ital universe and able to materialize anywhere he likes, breaks all the rules of the
cyberworld: he destroys virtual property, illegally trades weapons, steals online
time, and stalks his ex-wife. The challenge for detective Konstantin is to find out
where Dervish’s body is located in the outside world before she can have him
arrested for his crimes.

Bibliography
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———. Crystal express. New York: Ace, 1989.
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———. The Hacker Crackdown. New York: Bantam, 1993.
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Further Reading
Butler, Andrew M. Cyberpunk. Harpenden, England: Pocket Essentials, 2000; Cavallaro,
Dani. Cyberpunk and Cyberculture. London: Athlone Press, 2000; Gillis, Stacy. The Matrix
Trilogy: Cyberpunk Reloaded. London: Wallflower, 2005; Heuser, Sabine. Virtual Geogra-
phies: Cyberpunk at the Intersection of the Postmodern and Science Fiction. Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2003; McCaffery, Larry, ed. Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk
and Postmodernism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991; Tatsumi, Takayuki. Full
Metal Apache: Transactions between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
SABINE HEUSER
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D

DRAMATIC THEATRE
Definition. Dramatic writing differs from other narrative forms, such as fiction, in
ways that will be outlined below. We will make a distinction in this chapter between
dramatic, meaning serious, and comedic writing. This will focus on serious dramatic
literature.
Gary Vena and Andrea Nouryeh in the preface to their book Drama and
Performance: An Anthology (1996, vii) suggest the dramatic script is a “work of
literary art whose structure differs considerably from other genres and must be
evaluated accordingly.” When we think of dramatic writing, we understand it is
different from other literary genres in that the action is done by each of the char-
acters themselves, without a narrative or omniscient voice telling the readers about
what these characters are doing. The characters, literally, speak for themselves.
Jeffrey H. Huberman, James Ludwig and Brant L. Pope, in their The Theatrical
Imagination (1997, 46), call this “The Action Factor,” meaning: “Drama is the imi-
tation of human actions.” What is vital to action is conflict. Robert Cohen in his
Theatre: Brief Version (2003, 6) writes this about action: “Action is not merely
movement, of course: it is argument, struggle, persuasion, threats, seduction,
sound, music, dance, speech, and passion. It comprises all forms of human energy,
including language, spatial dynamics, light, color . . . It is live action, ordinarily
unmediated by videotape or cinematic celluloid.” The story, if there is one, is
unfolded by each character as it is done.
For a work to be considered dramatic literature it must have characters who act.
The dramatist creates a world through the characters’ language and other devices of
the genre that will be discussed below.
Context and Issues. From the beginning of Western theatre in ancient Greece, suc-
cessful playwrights knew what they wrote needed to be acted out in order for the
work to fully come to life. Vena and Nouryeh (1996, viii) continue: “So while other
literary works reach their potential as words of art in the act of reading, either
silently or aloud, dramas seem incomplete without the spectacle of production.”
290 DRAMATIC THEATRE

DRAMATIC LITERATURE OF THE TWENTIETH AND

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES
Some dramatic literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is not interested in nar-
rative. Many contemporary plays even toy with narrative and time structures. A dramatic
work, therefore, may or may not be interested in story, but it must have characters whose
actions are vital and necessary to enhance the meaning of the work.

Robert Edmund Jones, the twentieth-century director/set designer, in his The

Dramatic Imagination (1990, 36), wrote: “The loveliest and most poignant of all
stage pictures are those that are seen in the mind’s eye.” Dramatists must write for
readers to be able to see and create in their mind’s eye. Vena and Nouryeh (1996,
viii–ix) suggest that dramatic literature demands more from the reader’s imagina-
tions than most other forms of literature. They say:

We must see and understand what is explicitly said and done, as well as be alterted [sic]
to what is implied and left unspoken. We need to be able to determine where the action
is taking place, which characters are present even if they are not speaking, and what is
happening from moment to moment . . . In essence, our role as readers is two-sided:
that of spectator and director, capable of visualizing the play as if we were witnessing
it or creating it on stage.

We get clues from the playwrights. The first clue is the dramatist personae, or cast
list. The second is the stage directions that tell us time and place, perhaps some
details about the characters, and perhaps what they are doing. Playwrights are able
to tell us a lot about the characters through the language they use to write their stage
directions. Take this example from master playwright Tennessee Williams
(1911–1983), who in an early scene in his A Streetcar Named Desire (1951, 14–15)
goes far in creating stage directions that allow the reader to experience Blanche’s
emotional life:

She continues to laugh. Blanche comes around the corner, carrying a valise. She looks at
a slip of paper, then at the building, then again at the slip and again at the building. Her
expression is one of shocked disbelief. Her appearance is incongruous to this setting. She
is daintily dressed in a white suit with a fluffy bodice, necklace and earrings of pearl,
white gloves and hat, looking as if she were arriving to a summer tea or cocktail party
in the garden district. She is about five years older than Stella. Her delicate beauty must

THE WORLD OF THE DRAMATIST

Vena and Nouryeh (1996, viii) state:

Although plays tell stories like novels and other works of fiction, an altogether differ-
ent process takes place using stage directions and dialogue to describe the environ-
ment or the characters that inhabit it. Even when theatrical conventions have called
for an empty stage, as was the case in the Elizabethan drama, the words of the
characters painted pictures for the audience.
 DRAMATIC THEATRE 291

avoid a strong light. There is something about her uncertain manner, as well as her
white clothes, that suggests a moth.

Also through Williams’s stage directions, his readers can get a feel for the mood
of the play, as shown in this excerpt, also from Streetcar:

Lurid reflections appear on the wall around Blanche. The shadows are of a grotesque
and menacing form. She catches her breath, crosses to the phone and jiggles the hook.
Stanley goes into the bathroom and closes the door. (128)

Other playwrights utilize a more straight-forward approach to writing stage direc-

tions. For example, in Claire Boothe Luce’s (1903–1987) 1936 play, The Women, we
can see the use of stage directions to paint a simple picture of each character:

As curtain rises, JANE, a pretty and quite correct little Irish-American maid, is arrang-
ing the tea-table. Four women are playing bridge in a smoking-car cloud of smoke.
They are: NANCY, who is sharp, but not acid, sleek but not smart, a worldly and yet
virginal 35 . . . (5)

For post-modernism there hardly needs to be an interest in narrative, and so this

style of writing allows for a lot of freedom in form. Even stage directions may be
different, as we can see from this example of the structuralist play Double Gothic
(1978) by Michael Kirby (1931–1997):

Seconds of
Scene Character Line darkness
A–1 HEROINE A “My suitcase!” 11
B–1 HEROINE B “There’s a star.” 12
(Now the people are handing something to someone else).

A-5 ANTAGONIST A/HELPER A “Put them on.” 13

Drama and Performance: An Anthology, p. 1067.

One of the main qualifying characteristics of dramatic literature is that the story
is revealed within an element of time. Playwrights may employ real time, when the
time elapses as it would in a segment of real life. Fifteen minutes is fifteen minutes,
for example. But more usual is what Vena and Nouryeh (1996, ix) call “psycholog-
ical time,” which “depict[s] the crucial or pivotal moments from the characters’ lives
to represent their journeys toward selfhood.” There are a variety of ways that play-
wrights structure their works. There are linear forms that move from beginning,
middle and end, to plays that jump around in time. For example, Diana Son’s (born
1965) 1998 Stop/Kiss jumps backward and then forward in order to tell a story that
is poignant, joyous and quite disturbingly sad.
Exposition is used in dramatic literature. Exposition, according to Vena and
Nouryeh (1996, x): “Establishes the background or circumstances in which we
encounter our characters.” A prologue may be utilized in a form of a monologue,
or long speech. Also, a prologue can be a short, separate scene outside the body
of the play, which may be utilized to tell expository information like who the
characters are and other details of the world of the play. During the English
292 DRAMATIC THEATRE

Renaissance, playwrights such as William Shakespeare (1564–1616) utilized the

prologue quite often. In contemporary American dramatic literature it is rarely
used. Exposition may be told in the beginning scenes of the play by characters in
natural conversation.
The denouement is the resolution where a restoration of order may occur, but it
does not always have to. Very often in dramas the work may just end. Order is not
restored, nothing is resolved, and the play simply ends. In contemporary drama
there is no necessity for the work to finish with a clear resolution for it to be con-
sidered a play of quality. Distinctions of greatness can disregard this convention of
tying up the loose ends. The last character’s speech can end and so with it, the work.
Greatness is defined by other conventions such as: language, structure, depth of
character, and timelessness of the themes.
The dramatic playwright utilizes monologues (longer portions of speech that
one character says to another character) and dialogue (speech spoken by people
in conversation either in pairs or small or large groups). Soliloquies were often
used in the Renaissance by playwrights such as William Shakespeare; however,
they are more infrequent in modern and contemporary drama. A soliloquy differs
from a monologue in that the speaker is alone on stage. In contemporary times,
a speech is considered a “speech” or “monologue” and we no longer call a lone
bit of text a soliloquy. Nouryeh and Vena (1996, xi) say this about text in dramatic
literature:

Language in the form of dialogue nourishes the playwright’s craft. The spoken lines
illuminate the characters’ motives and behaviors. Vocabulary, dialectical patterns, and
colloquialisms easily establish social status. Rhythms of speech determined by the inter-
play of articulation and pause reveal personality and convey the rational thoughts and
irrational emotions of the speakers . . . Whether verse or prose, words control charac-
ter development and themes.

The story, characterization, plot and conflict are all revealed by how the charac-
ter speaks, just as much as what they actually say. Different playwrights may be
known for how they handle speech, for instance: Tennessee Williams for his poetic
realism and David Mamet (born 1947) for his terse gritty realism (not to mention
numerous uses of foul language).
The overwhelming difference for readers of dramatic literature is that they are
being asked to imagine a world that exists in a specific time and place on the stage.
The greatest of playwrights are aware that their words are only as powerful as what
they spark to the reader’s imagination and collect in their mind’s eye. Therefore, it
is very important that the voice of the character be specific to each character and
that the playwright truthfully depicts the range of human experience.
What makes a work dramatic versus comedic is that the play is a more serious
work, in tone, than a comedic work. Comedies, simply put, are funny. Within the
realm of the dramatic are plays that are darkly humorous or absurd, where readers
may laugh out loud or chuckle silently to themselves. However, for our purposes,
even if the reader chuckles during a reading, in order for it to be a drama (versus
comedy): it must be sad, disturbing or tragic, with an overall sense of seriousness.
According to Vena and Nouryeh (1999, 1199) a comedy is: “In the classical drama,
a literary format that pays homage to the hero’s triumph over calamity; rooted in
ritual much like tragedy, except that renewal and rebirth are celebrated.” So, though
 DRAMATIC THEATRE 293

the two genres of drama and comedy both stem from ancient Greek tragedy, they
are, since modern times, different in tone, situation, and outcome.

Trends and Themes

Early Roots/Classical Dramatic Literature. Dramatic literature certainly has its roots in
ancient ritual and storytelling, but the beginnings of Western dramatic literature are
firmly rooted in the plays of the ancient Greeks who wrote as early as 5th century
B.C. Thirty-three plays from the dramatic writers Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.),
Sophocles (496–406 B.C.) and Euripides (480–406 B.C.) are still in existence. Nearly
a century after these great dramatic writers, Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), the ancient
philosopher, wrote his Poetics (350 B.C.), which analyzed and defined the notions of
literature, especially drama, and more specifically tragedy. The Poetics established
criteria for critics, actors, writers, and historians throughout the ages to be able
to uniformly judge dramatic literature. Playwrights do not have to adhere to
Aristotelian demands, but most playwrights, throughout the ages, were and are,
aware of Aristotelian criteria.
This chapter focuses specifically on American dramatic literature written
between 2000–2005; therefore it is important to concentrate on the history of
American dramatic literature. Though there is an established connection between
the ancient tradition that has a profound effect on European theatre history, we
will start our discussion of American dramatic literary history in 19th century
America. To fully understand American drama one would need to fully study clas-
sical, Western, and Eastern forms of theatre throughout a wide variety of periods
and styles since they have all had a unique impact on the total variety of American
dramatic literature.
Dramatic Literature in Early North America. The earliest theatre in America was melo-
drama. Melodrama is best explained as plays with heightened emotion and com-
plete polar opposite notions of good and evil. The hero always wins. The American
melodrama is highlighted by two types: the frontier melodrama and the temperance
melodrama and within this form, there are comedies and dramas. We will focus on
the dramas.
Early examples of the frontier type are: David Belasco’s (1853–1931) The Girl I
Left Behind Me in 1893 and Frank Murdoch’s (1843–1872) more famous Davy
Crockett (1872), which made villains of Native Americans and glorified frontier
life. W.H. Smith (dates unknown) wrote the temperance melodrama: The Drunkard;
or, the Fallen Saved (1844), which depicted overly tragic visions of the effects of
alcohol on otherwise noble persons. Playwrights like Augustin Daly (1838–1899)
who wrote the melodrama Under the Gaslight (c. 1869), which is still widely per-
formed today, were interested in the Little Theatre Movement, bringing their plays
to frontier and expanding cities, instead of waiting for audiences to come to them.
This affected the plays being written during this time period. Plays of social and lit-
erary merit that allowed for a greater integrity in acting than the plays that had
gone before them were of interest to these diverse and wider audiences. It was a
precursor to the more sophisticated and complex realistic plays to occur in the later
nineteenth century and into the twentieth and twenty-first. Another important
early melodrama was written by the African American abolitionist writer William
Wells Brown (1814–1884), whose The Escape; or, A Leap For Freedom (1858) was
left unproduced until 1971 at Emerson College in Boston. The play shows the
294 DRAMATIC THEATRE

horrors of American slavery and has an unlikely hero who escapes enslavement.
The Melodrama, like many of the American dramatic forms, came out of Europe,
from France.
Twentieth Century. We see that American dramatic literature is born from European
artistic movements. American writers adopted these and other styles including:
Melodrama from France and Germany; Realism and Naturalism from Russia,
Norway and Sweden; anti-Realism from Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia and
other European countries; Expressionism from Germany; and Absurdist forms from
Ireland, France, Romania, and other European countries. It could be argued that
there is not a wholly American dramatic style until we come to the 1960s with the
Black Arts Movement, which will be discussed at greater length below.
Reception. In the early twentieth century, prior to the birth of Realism in America,
plays were much like the previous century’s melodramas, but with more and more sen-
sational topics explored. It wasn’t until Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953) that America got
its earliest playwright of international repute. In 1915 the Provincetown Players was
founded in Massachusetts by O’Neill. Inspired by the European realistic playwrights:
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904, Russian), Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906, Norwegian) and
August Strindberg (1849–1912, Swedish), O’Neill went on to receive a 1936 Nobel
Prize. He won Pulitzer Prizes for four of his plays: Beyond the Horizon (1920); Anna
Christie (1922); Strange Interlude (1928); and Long Day’s Journey Into Night
(1957). A list of O’Neill’s other plays include: the Expressionistic The Hairy Ape, the
classical tragedy-inspired Mourning Becomes Electra, A Moon For the Misbegotten,
Long Day’s Journey Into Night, The Iceman Cometh, All God’s Chillun Got Wings,
and Desire Under the Elms. Because of O’Neill’s influence other playwrights began
experiments with writing styles inspired by Europeans. A few of these early American
playwrights include: Maxwell Anderson, (1888–1959) poet-dramatist who with his
What Price Glory? (1926) was sharply critical of the First World War and also exper-
imented with plays in verse, inspired by earlier Western periods and playwrights;
Susan Glaspell (1876–1948) whose feminist Trifles (1916) is still important today;
and, Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine (1923), which experimented with early silent
film conventions making its way into dramatic literature and focused on the central
character’s inner psychology.
In the 1930s playwrights wrote about the working classes following the Depres-
sion. These plays were very much interested in social issues and in making change
through the power of dramatic writing and their subsequent performances. These
playwrights include Clifford Odets (1906–1963), who largely wrote for The Group
Theatre (1931–1940) and was interested in Naturalistic and Realistic acting styles
and was influenced by the Russian Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863–1938) and his
Moscow Art Theatre (founded in 1897). Cheryl Crawford (1902–1986), one of the
Group’s founders and producers, said during a videotaped interview that the Group
was made up of New York actors wanting to do plays in their own unique voice.
Odets provided them their dramatic voice with his plays: Awake and Sing!, Waiting
for Lefty and Golden Boy. In Waiting for Lefty the audience raised their arms and
shouted, along with the characters on stage, “Strike! Strike!” The play took New
York by storm, showing the importance of having a theatre interested in the plights
of the masses. Other writers of this period were: Lillian Hellman (1905–1984) who
wrote the highly acclaimed: The Children’s Hour, Toys in the Attic and The Little
Foxes, and Langston Hughes (1902–1967) whose play Don’t You Want to Be Free?
was an Expressionistic voice of African Americans post-Depression who wanted to
 DRAMATIC THEATRE 295

be able to bond with other workers and experience true societal freedoms. Hughes
was an important Harlem Renaissance artist who wrote in a variety of literary gen-
res. Of note: all these playwrights and others in the 1930s were examined under the
House Un-American Activities Committee, challenged as Communists. For some,
this was the end of their career.
In the following period, 1945–1960, we see American Realism become most
important as the dramatists look at life in American cities and in American homes.
Arthur Miller (1915–2005) Pulitzer Prize winner for Death of a Salesman (1949)
and author of many more plays through the subsequent decades, including: All My
Sons, The Crucible, A View From the Bridge; Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) who
wrote: Summer in Smoke, A Streetcar Named Desire (Pulitzer Prize in 1948), Night
of the Iguana, and numerous other dramatic works that were also made into films
that dealt largely with gritty stories of men stuck in hiding and abandoned desper-
ate women who loved them. He wrote of the Old South from its gentility into its
more modern grit as well as poetically looked at people suffering for their desires
disallowed by American society, such as homosexuality and women’s longing for
love and sensual pleasure. He wrote for Lee Strasberg (1901–1982), the artistic
director of The Actors Studio (founded in 1947), which grew out of the collapse of
The Group Theatre. The Studio was made up of a courageous and plucky group of
actors, playwrights and directors (such as Elia Kazan, 1909–2003) who wanted an
American theatre that showed all of the American torment of human experience, as
Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre with writers such as Anton Chekhov, did for
Russian life. Other writers of this juicy period include: William Inge (1913–1973),
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Picnic and Bus Stop, and Lorraine Hansberry
(1894–1965) for her groundbreaking A Raisin in the Sun, which allowed readers
and audiences a glimpse into the personal and home life of an African American
chauffeur. Glynne Wickham in his A History of the Theatre (1985, 236) suggests
that this period is when the United States had become the “undisputed pace-setter
of change and innovation in all areas of dramatic art.”
The 1960s brought a theatre of dissent; a theatre that experimented with notions
of what constituted drama, and largely, what is a play. Notable at this time for dra-
matic literary contributions, were the playwrights involved in the Black Arts Move-
ment. Amiri Baraka (born 1934), formerly LeRoi Jones, was a recent Poet Laureate
of New Jersey, and wrote important American plays such as: Dutchman, The Toilet,
and The Slave. Sonia Sanchez (born 1934) wrote the lyrical and poignant Sister
Son/ji. Adrienne Kennedy (born 1931) became known for her Funnyhouse of a
Negro. Ed Bullins (born 1935) wrote In the Wine Time, The Corner and Clara’s Ole
Man, to name just a few titles from his extensive list of plays.
In the 1970s and 1980s the Off-Broadway theatre emerged, which allowed for
more intimate and less commercial plays. Issues that weren’t fully explored on
Broadway and larger commercial venues were able to be explored, such as: complex
and sometimes taboo relationships in the plays of Sam Shepard (born 1943) who
wrote True West and Lie of the Mind; and Mamet who wrote the testosterone-
fueled Glengarry Glenn Ross and Speed-the-Plow; feminist Wendy Wasserstein
(1950–2006) winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play The Heidi Chron-
icles; AIDS and gay themes by writer Larry Kramer (born 1935) who wrote The
Normal Heart, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and African American
playwright August Wilson (1945–2005) whose strong influence on the American
drama will be discussed further below.
296 DRAMATIC THEATRE

The 1990s was a time to explore the richness of what the preceding generations
of American dramatists had uncovered in themes as well as in the styles of writing.
In the twenty-first century we can look forward to new and young writers experi-
menting still further with structure and themes. Since 9/11, themes of violence and
war and hate, have been explored by these playwrights in ways earlier generations
did not dare try. Below we will examine some of these fresh writers, as well as the
previous generations’ writers who are still forging ahead.

Selected Authors
Edward Albee (1928–). Albee won three Pulitzer Prizes for: A Delicate Balance
(1967), Seascape (1975) and Three Tall Women (1994). He also authored the highly
acclaimed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which starred Elizabeth Taylor and
Richard Burton in the film version of 1966. Though he is arguably one of America’s
best writers, his work has received favorable and not so favorable critiques over the
years. In an interview with David Richards (1994) for The New York Times follow-
ing Albee’s third Pulitzer Prize, the playwright said:

But there is not always a great relationship between popularity and excellence. If you
know that, you can never be owned by public opinion or critical response. You just have
to make the assumption you’re doing good work and go on doing it. Of course, there
are the little dolls you stick pins in privately. (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.
html?res=9C01E0DD173DF930A25757C0A962958260)

In 2004 and 2005 Overlook Press published The Collected Plays of Edward
Albee, Volume 1 (1958-65) and Volume 2 (1966-77). According to the author’s note
in the preface (6), “The plays contained within these anthologies include some
changes the author has made over the years. Although he may revisit these texts
again one day, he considers them to be, at this point, the definitive versions for both
reading and performance.”
David Auburn (1969–). Auburn is the author of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize winning
Proof, which is also the recipient of the Joseph Kesselring Prize, the Drama Desk
Award, and the 2001 Tony Award for Best Play. It was made into a film in 2005 and
starred Anthony Hopkins and Gwyneth Paltrow. The play is a sort of ghost play
about whether or not a twenty-something daughter has inherited her mathematician
father’s genius or insanity. Structurally the play should be noted for its non-linear
use of time. It is not told in real time, though it has a realistic, slice of life feel to it,
as though readers experience something that could happen in real life. Because of
this experiment with time structure Cohen (2003) calls the play post-modern.
Nilo Cruz (1960–). Cruz is the Cuban American dramatist of Anna in the Tropics,
which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It is a poetic play about a cigar man-
ufacturing family in 1929 Tampa. At that time the owners would hire a lector to
read to the cigar rollers. When the machines came in, that was the end of that tra-
dition. Ben Brantley (2003) writes in a New York Times review:

Anna in the Tropics reaches for the artistic heavens—specifically, that corner of eternity
occupied by the plays of Anton Chekhov, where yearning is an existential condition . . .
Although Mr. Cruz’s tone is definitely Chekhovian in its sense of a gentle, pre-modern
world on the brink of extinction, the Anna of the play’s title refers to a creation by
another Russian writer: Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina . . . The resulting confrontations
and collisions are rendered in some of the most densely lyrical language from an
 DRAMATIC THEATRE 297

American playwright since Maxwell Anderson. (http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/

theater/treview.html?html_title=&tols_title=ANNA%20IN%20THE%20
TROPICS%20(PLAY)&pdate=20031117&byline=By%20BEN%20BRANTLEY&id=
1077011429146)

Anna in the Tropics also won the notable American Theater Critics/Steinberg New
Play Award at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Kentucky.
Other plays by Cruz include: Betty and Gauguin, Dancing on Her Knees, A Park
in Our House, Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams, A Bicycle Country, Night
Train to Bolina, Two Sisters and a Piano, Beauty of the Father, and Lorca in a
Green Dress. He has translated two plays by Federico García Lorca (1898–1936,
Spanish): Doña Rosita and The House of Bernarda Alba.
Tom Donaghy (1964–). In his plays people talk, but they do not listen. Perhaps the most
successful of these plays is Northeast Local. All his plays have some sort of disengage-
ment with characters not communicating—especially when dealing with their homo-
sexuality. The theme of parents not wanting to acknowledge a gay son is something
that floats throughout his plays. Brantley (2000) in a New York Times review says:

Looking for sourness and disenchantment within the cute and eccentric is a specialty
of Mr. Donaghy . . . Like many playwrights of his generation, including Nicky Silver
[date of birth unknown] and David Greenspan [born 1956], he portrays fractured fam-
ilies that are not so much dysfunctional as beyond functioning at all. You can’t go home
again in these fretful comedies because home, in its mythic sense, has ceased to exist.
(http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?html_title=&tols_title=
BEGINNING%20OF%20AUGUST,%20THE%20(BOOK)&pdate=20001012&
byline=By%20BEN%20BRANTLEY&id=1077011429268)

Though Brantley calls them comedies, they are more absurd dramas, so that is
why we place them in dramatic literature.
Donaghy’s plays include: the one-act The Dadshuttle, which was made into a
short film that the playwright directed; Northeast Local with compelling characters
and a more accessible story; and Minutes From the Blue Route. The Beginning of
August and Other Plays was published in 2000 by Grove Press.
Eve Ensler (1953–). Ensler wrote The Vagina Monologues in 1996, which has
impacted dramatic literature as well as women’s history. Ensler interviewed hun-
dreds of women and talked with them about how they felt about their bodies,
specifically their vaginas. This resulted in a dramatic work that is as fearless and
daring as it is joyous, celebrating, entertaining, comedic and dramatic, and it has
opened the possibility for people of all ages and genders to dialogue about this once-
previous taboo subject. In her 2004 The Good Body, published by Villard, a divi-
sion of Random House, the writing was created in the same way but this time the
focus is on the writer’s and other women’s thoughts and obsessions about their
bellies.
San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre (founded in 1965) Web site states
that the playwright:

Through her honest, insightful, and sometimes naughty portrayal of genuine experiences
and real-life obsessions . . . strips the complicated issue of body politics down to its inti-
mate essence, once again destroying pre-conceived notions about what women really
think. This is new theater at its finest: The Good Body will move, inspire, entertain—and
just might make you blush a bit in the process.
298 DRAMATIC THEATRE

Horton Foote (1916–). Horton Foote has received two Academy Awards and one
Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Young Man From Atlanta. As Williams wrote solely
about the South, Foote has focused on life in a fictional Texas town. His plays have
been produced on Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, and at many
regional theatres. His titles include: The Carpetbagger’s Children, Last of the
Thortons, The Chase, The Trip to Bountiful, Lily Dale, The Widow Claire, The
Death of Papa, Dividing the Estate, Talking Pictures, The Roads to Home, and
many one-act plays.
Brantley (2000), in his New York Times review of Last of the Thorntons, writes:

In the plays of Horton Foote, the road to home is ultimately a road to nowhere. His
chronicles of lives in the fictional hamlet of Harrison, Tex., [sic] are pervaded with a
sense of rootlessness that hardly accords with the American ideal of small-town solid-
ity. (http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?html_title=&tols_title=
LAST%20OF%20THE%20THORNTONS,%20THE%20(PLAY)&pdate=20001204&
byline=By%20BEN%20BRANTLEY&id=1077011432574)

He continues: “The Last of the Thorntons . . . is, in its way, as unrelenting an

assessment of the human condition as Waiting for Godot [Samuel Beckett, Irish,
1948–1949].” And Michael Feingold (2001) writing for The Village Voice says:

In his plays, the flat landscape seems to breed flat recitals of data that pass for dialogue,
flat assertions that pass for conflict, flat terminations that pass for dramatic resolution.
Yet in this stagy aridity, Foote can grow a wavery ambiguity resembling the empty husk
of drama, like the silage fed to cattle in the arid air outside his Texas interiors. The
nutritive grain the husk might have contained has inexplicably vanished; to ask where
and how only deepens the mystery. Like objects viewed from a great distance on an
open plain, Foote’s plays are never what they appear to be, but impossible to define as
anything else. (http://www.villagevoice.com/theater/0051,sightlines,20993,11.html)

Brantley (2002) in a New York Times review says about The Carpetbagger’s Chil-
dren: “Few dramatists today can replicate this kind of storytelling with the gentle mas-
tery that Mr. Foote provides” (http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?
html_title=&tols_title=CARPETBAGGER’S%20CHILDREN,%20THE%20(PLAY)&
pdate=20020326&byline=By%20BEN%20BRANTLEY&id=1077011432326).
Charles Watson (2003, 1) writes in his biography about Foote:

He is not a social protester like Arthur Miller, a constant experimenter with dramatic
techniques like Eugene O’Neill, nor a psychological investigator like Tennessee Williams.
Rather it is his sensitivity to the troubled men and women who live in Southeast Texas
that gives his work unity.

His work is regarded as in the same vein as Anton Chekhov’s.

Pamela Gien (c. 1957–). Gien’s play The Syringa Tree received an Obie for Best Play
in 2001. It adds to the rich literary tradition of one-person shows. This play was
adapted into a film directed by Larry Moss (dates unknown), the Los Angeles and
New York City acting coach and teacher who authored the acting book The Intent
to Live (2004). Ms. Gien grew up in a suburb of Johannesburg. From her seemingly
personal piece, largely concerned with apartheid’s racism and violence, she creates
a dozen or more roles spanning 20 years’ time. The main character is the little girl,
 DRAMATIC THEATRE 299

ostensibly, herself. Bruce Weber (2000) in a New York Times review called Gien a
“gifted writer [who] has an unyielding spine as a storyteller” (http://query.nytimes.
com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E01E2DE133BF932A1575AC0A9669C8B63).
Richard Greenberg (1958–). Greenberg is the 2003 Tony Award winner for Best Play
for Take Me Out. His other twenty-four plays include: The Author’s Voice, The
American Plan, Eastern Standard, Three Days of Rain, The Dazzle, and The Violet
Hour. He, like Tony Kushner (born 1956) and the creator of the musical Rent,
Jonathan Larson (1960–1996), is among the early group of dramatists writing about
people living with HIV. Greenberg talks about being a gay playwright and suggests
that he does not want to only write in any one theme or genre so that he is only
known as a “gay playwright.” He states in an interview with Jim Provenzano (date
of interview unknown): “All you ever do is write about what you don’t know, or who
you aren’t. That’s the whole point, to go outside the lines of yourself.” Brantley
(2006) in The New York Times, says of Greenberg’s work that: “existential enigmas
and conundrums of faith . . . always pepper this playwright’s work” (http://theater2.
nytimes.com/2006/04/20/theater/reviews/20rain.html?pagewanted=print).
In addition to gay themes the playwright also deals with the question of time, how
memories of the past influence the present and vice versa.
Three Days of Rain depicts life for three riddled New Yorkers who struggle to
find their identity. It explores how adult children wrestle with confusions with their
parent’s struggles. Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre (founded in 1974) describes this
play as one that:

Evaluates the emotional desolation, the lack of answers and the negativity of the 1990s,
and then spins backward to reveal the premises of a happier decade that progressively
broke down into the defeated present.

On a different theme is The Violet Hour, a wonderfully biting play about literary
figures, the future, and how to be on the artistic and commercial cutting edge. Faber
and Faber, Inc. published the work in 2004. Charles Isherwood (2003, 3) of Variety
puns that it is: “A chamber piece that muses on the elusive intersections between the
past, the present and the future . . . Greenberg has concocted an ingenious time-
travel story with a novel twist.”
John Guare (1938–). Guare’s first major success was in 1968 with the one-act
Muzeeka, which won an Obie Award. In 1971, he met great acclaim with House of
Blue Leaves, a semi-autobiographical play that won him an Obie and the New York
Drama Critics Circle Award for the Best American Play of 1970–71. He also
received four Tony Awards during its 1986 revival. Guare also authored Six Degrees
of Separation (1990), which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the
Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Award and an Olivier Best Play Award. The
playscript was made into a movie in 1993 starring Will Smith and Stockard
Channing. In 2002 Guare wrote a play about Ulysses S. Grant called A Few Stout
Individuals. Also in 2002, he wrote the book to the successful Broadway musical,
Sweet Smell of Success, based on the 1957 film of the same name. In 2003 Guare
won The PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Awards for Drama. Brantley (2002)
comments about A Few Stout Individuals in a New York Times review:

The evening’s dominant subject is the nature and purpose of memory. This in turn is
weighed from the points of view of both Western and Eastern civilizations, of history and
300 DRAMATIC THEATRE

art, of mortality and immortality. The scope of reference matches the play’s ambitions,
with allusions to everything from Pompeii to Edmund Wilson, all tossed into one crazy
salad. Mr. Guare also returns happily to two of his favorite subjects: the circus of
celebrity and the circus known as New York City. (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.
html?res=9D0CE2DB1739F930A25756C0A9649C8B63&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss)

Cohen (2003, 104) claims that Guare is “an eternal experimenter . . . always
provocative, always challenging norms.”
Stephen Adly Guirgis (c. 1972–). Guirgis’s plays are heavily character-driven and usu-
ally deal with religion, death and/or persecution. They include: The Last Days Of
Judas Iscariot, set in a modern-day courtroom, which sets forth the question as to
whether or not Judas could find redemption; Our Lady of 121st Street, which
explores what happens when a dead alcoholic nun’s body turns up missing at her
own funeral and probes the flaws of each of the complex and struggling characters;
Jesus Hopped The A Train, about two prisoners in Riker’s Island; and In Arabia
We’d All Be Kings. All four plays are published in an anthology by Faber and Faber
in 2003. Guirgis is a member of New Dramatists, MCC Theater Playwrights’ Coali-
tion, New River Dramatists, The Actors Studio Playwright/Directors Unit, as well
as LABrynth Theatre, for which Philip Seymour Hoffman is a member; he has
directed several of Guirgis’ plays. Brantley (2005) in a New York Times review says
that Guirgis writes with: “a fierce and questing mind that refuses to settle for glib
answers, a gift for identifying with life’s losers and an unforced eloquence that finds
the poetry in lowdown street talk” (http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/
treview.html?res=9B06E0DB133DF930A35750C0A9639C8B63).
A.R. Gurney (1930–). Gurney writes comedies and dramas that deal with academic
life and critiques White Anglo-Protestant viewpoints. He also retells Biblical stories
and ancient Greek dramas. His plays: The Dining Room, The Golden Age, What I
Did Last Summer, The Cocktail Hour, Love Letters, and Another Antigone make
Gurney one of America’s most successful playwrights. In 2001 and 2003, respec-
tively, he wrote two new plays: Buffalo Gal and O Jerusalem. His awards include:
the Drama Desk, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Lucille Lortel Foundation, and the
American Academy of Arts and Letters. His collected play volumes are published
with Smith and Kraus, Inc.
Tony Kushner (1956–). Kushner, a gay Jewish socialist, perhaps best known for
Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1991) for which he won
the Pulitzer Prize, had two important publications in 2000 by TCG, Inc. The first
was Homebody/Kabul and the second was Death & Taxes: Hydriotaphia & Other
Plays. Angels was made into both a television miniseries in 2003 starring Al Pacino
(born 1940) and Meryl Streep (born 1949) and other celebrated actors, as well as
an opera by Peter Eötvös (born 1944, Hungarian), which debuted in 2006. Andrea
Bernstein (1995) in a Mother Jones article, says Kushner is most concerned with
“the moral responsibilities of people in politically repressive times” (http://www.
motherjones.com/arts/qa/1995/07/bernstein.html).
In that same article Kushner himself says:

You have to have hope. It’s irresponsible to give false hope, which I think a lot of play-
wrights are guilty of. But I also think it’s irresponsible to simply be a nihilist, which
quite a lot of playwrights, especially playwrights younger than me, have become guilty
of. I don’t believe you would bother to write a play if you really had no hope.
 DRAMATIC THEATRE 301

Neil LaBute (1963–). When people read a LaBute play, they may be surprised to learn
that he attended Brigham Young University and was a member of The Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, since the themes of his plays address human dark-
ness without preaching this as evil. Brantley (2001), in a New York Times review,
said: “This is a writer, after all, who has built his reputation on presuming to know,
like the Shadow, exactly what evil lurks in the hearts of men” (http://query.nytimes.
com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9806E3DD163FF932A25753C1A9679C8B63).
LaBute has achieved acclaim from critics for these dark portraits. In 2000 he
wrote Bash: Latter-Day Plays, a trio of short plays that expose good Latter-day
Saints doing bad things. This play resulted in his disfellowship (which is not as harsh
as excommunication) from the LDS Church. He has since formally left the church.
LaBute’s 2002 response to 9/11, The Mercy Seat, focuses on the main character,
an employee of the World Trade Center, who was away when the planes hit because
he was with his mistress. This character then considers using the tragedy as a way
to leave his family. The Shape of Things (2001) was made into a film in 2003 and
deals with such timeless questions as what art is, and brings with it a hip and con-
temporary psychopathic twist. It also deals with emotional intimacy and what peo-
ple are willing to do for love. He is a vibrant playwright who offers shocking and
surprising scripts that reach out to a contemporary audience. His other plays
include: Fat Pig, Autobahn: A Short Play Cycle, and This is How it Goes: A Play.
He is the author of several screenplays including: Nurse Betty, In the Company of
Men and Your Friends and Neighbors.
Warren Leight (c. 1957–). Warren Leight is a serio-comic writer whose autobio-
graphical Side Man won the 1999 Tony Award for Best Play and his 2001 Glimmer,
Glimmer and Shine, which is not a sequel to the Tony winner, also dealt with the
world of jazz musicians and the difficulties presented for families involved with that
life. Evan Yionoulis, the director of the two above-mentioned productions, wrote
the Foreword in the Grove Press (2001, vii) publication of the latter-mentioned play,
in which he said:

I was attracted to the play’s exploration of how the choices of one generation impact
the next and how the avoidance of excess doesn’t always lead to balance. It’s a piece
about a broken family whose members are forced to confront one another again and
for the first time. There is wonderful comic energy but also a great deal of heart.

Leight also authored musicals and is the Vice-President of the Writers Guild of
America, East Council; and a member of the Dramatists Guild Council. Critics have
likened Leight to O’Neill and the comic playwright Neil Simon (born 1927).
Tracey Letts (1965–). Actor as well as playwright, Letts is a member of the esteemed
Steppenwolf Theatre Company and is the author of Bug, which is set in a run-down
Okie motel where Agnes, a divorced waitress with a penchant for cocaine, befriends
Peter, a soft-spoken Gulf War veteran. They shack up while she hides from her vio-
lent ex-husband who is recently released from prison. They soon realize that the
motel has a bug infestation problem, which they come to believe is part of a con-
spiracy against Peter and part of the side-effects of experiments conducted while he
was at a veteran’s hospital. The play is funny, but also shocking, violent, and even
repulsive. Brantley (2004) writes in The New York Times that the play is:
“obscenely exciting.” Bug enjoyed critical acclaim during its Off-Broadway run.
Man From Nebraska was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2004 and Letts’s early work
302 DRAMATIC THEATRE

Killer Joe is about homicidal trailer trash. Letts’s most recent play, August: Osage
County has been called by many critics one of the best American plays in recent
memory, is a black comedy about a highly disturbing family. It opened on Broad-
way in late 2007.
Romulus Linney (1930–). Linney is a highly regarded dramatist who has created
many adaptations for the stage. In addition to writing novels and short stories,
Linney has won two Obie awards, (one for sustained excellence in playwriting), two
National Critics Awards, three DramaLogue Awards, and numerous fellowships,
including grants from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations. He has writ-
ten: Lark, Klonksy and Schwartz, The Sorrows of Frederick, Holy Ghosts, Childe
Byron, Heathen Valley, and most recently, an adaptation of Ernest L. Gaines’s novel
A Lesson Before Dying, for which Linney said to interviewer Mary Flinn (2002)
that he was a “very faithful adaptor.” Lesson was published in 2001 by Dramatists
Play Service, Inc. In 2000, Smith and Krauss published Nine Adaptations for the
American Stage, which include: Gint, Lesson and Lark.
Linney is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science, the American
Academy of Arts and Letters and many other institutions for dramatists. He is the
father of the popular actress Laura Linney.
Kenneth Lonergan (1962–). Lonergan, author of 2002’s Lobby Hero, is probably bet-
ter known to commercial audiences for his 2000 screenplay You Can Count On Me.
Contemporary legend has it that Lonergan began writing the script for the film dur-
ing a writer’s circle at New York’s Ensemble Studio Theatre (founded in 1969). This
fact encourages young writers to also write in a workshop environment. Lobby
Hero can be considered a comedy; however, the genre it sits in is more comfortably
seriocomic, since Lonergan explores more serious themes of loneliness and missed
connections with a clear dramatic weight. Other plays include: Waverly Gallery
(nominated for a Pulitzer), a touching serio-comedy that seems quite personal,
about a 50-year old adult child dealing with her ailing mother and her son whose
relationship with his grandmother is very dear to him. Brantley (2001) in a New
York Times review says this about Lonergan:

Mr. Lonergan knows that the road to ruin is paved with intentions that are neither
good nor bad but overwhelmingly mixed. His characters—whether addled by drugs (as
in Youth), Alzheimer’s (Waverly) or everyday indecision—are a combustible brew of
impulses that they can’t begin to sort out. (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?
res=9F04EFD8113AF937A25750C0A9679C8B63&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss)

David Mamet (1947–). Mamet was an actor and director before he reached success
in 1976 with three Off-Off Broadway plays: The Duck Variations, Sexual Perver-
sity in Chicago, and American Buffalo, which was made into a film in 1996. His
works are known for their clever, clipped, and sometimes vulgar speech and for his
interest in high-octane masculinity. The way he writes has become signature and
many playwrights try to copy his terse style. Other plays include: Glengarry Glen
Ross (1984 Pulitzer Prize winner), about the underbelly of corporate greed, which
was made into a film in 1992 starring Alec Baldwin, Al Pacino, and an all-star cast;
Speed-the-Plow, about the ugliness of the entertainment business; and Oleana (film
version in 1994) about what constitutes sexual harassment between a college pro-
fessor soon to be tenured and a young female student. Comedic writer David Ives
(born 1950) both spoofs and honors Mamet with his work Speed-the-Play. More
 DRAMATIC THEATRE 303

recent plays include: Faustus, his adaptation of the Jacobean play, which appeared
at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre (founded in 1967) and was published by Vintage
Books, and Boston Marriage in 2002, which was also made into a film. Mamet has
taught at the Yale Drama School and New York University. His awards are numer-
ous and they include: Obie Awards in 1976 and1983; New York Drama Critics
Circle Awards in 1977 and 1984; and the Tony Award in 1987. Mamet, with actor
William H. Macy (born 1950), created the Atlantic Theater Company (founded in
1983) and the Atlantic Theatre’s actor training program where they believe that the
story of the play and the intent of its playwright are essential to the creative process.
He has also written books on acting, directing, writing, as well as the film and the-
atre businesses, which include: True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the
Actor (1999), Writing in Restaurants (1987) and Three Uses of the Knife (2002).
Donald Margulies (1954–). Margulies is a writer who is interested in Jewish themes.
In 1992, Margulies achieved notoriety with Sight Unseen, about a painter who
leaves a London exhibition of his artwork to visit his former lover. He explores
themes of: Anti-Semitism, art, and lost love. Sight Unseen won an Obie for Best
New American Play. Some of his other plays include: Found a Peanut, The Loman
Family Picnic, Pitching to the Star, Luna Park, What’s Wrong With This Picture?,
The Model Apartment, and The God of Vengeance (Theatre Communications
Group, Inc., 2004), an adaptation of the 1906 Yiddish melodrama written by
Shalom Asch about a father who, though renting to a brothel on the first floor of
his tenement building, desires that his daughter lives the American Jewish dream,
marrying well to a rabbi. His daughter, however, is more preoccupied with her
relationship with one of the prostitutes. The 2000 Pulitzer Prize winner Dinner
With Friends exposes the vulnerability of contemporary middle-class marriages. It
was made into a film in 2001, directed by Norman Jewison. Margulies was nom-
inated for a Pulitzer for Collected Stories (1996), which played on Broadway with
the legendary Uta Hagen as the Jewish writer toward the end of her career
betrayed by her young disciple, and was made into a PBS Teleplay. He was elected
to the Dramatists Guild Council in 1993 and received grants from: the New York
Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John
Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
Terrence McNally (1939–). Early in his career, McNally was a protégé of the noted
playwright Edward Albee. Later in his career, McNally became successful with
Frankie and Johnny at the Claire de Lune (1987), starring Kathy Bates (born 1948)
Off-Broadway and later starred Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer in the 1991 film ver-
sion. The Broadway revival starred Edie Falco (born 1963) of the famed TV show
The Sopranos and Stanley Tucci (born 1960). McNally is a groundbreaking writer in
his fierce works that speak against homophobia. Plays of this category include: Lips
Together, Teeth Apart; the collaboration with Kander and Ebb on the musical Kiss
of the Spider Woman, for which he wrote the book; Love! Valour! Compassion!; and
The Lisbon Traviata and Master Class, both about diva opera soprano Maria
Callas. Master Class won the 1996 Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize.
In 1997, McNally’s Corpus Christi was the focus of many church and religious right
uprisings that tried to ban the play and several of its productions. The play reclaims
the story of Jesus, creating a world where his disciples are homosexuals. The pre-
miere performance at the Manhattan Theatre Club was cancelled due to death
threats against board members, but Tony Kushner and other playwrights threatened
to remove their plays if Corpus Christi was not produced. The board allowed the
304 DRAMATIC THEATRE

production to proceed. About 2,000 protesters picketed the opening, but the play
continued and still continues to be produced.
In addition to four Tony Awards, McNally also received two Guggenheim Fel-
lowships, a Rockefeller Grant, the Lucille Lortel Award, the Hull-Warriner Award,
and a citation from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been a mem-
ber of the Dramatists Guild Council since 1970 and has served as vice-president
since 1981. Recent plays include: The Stendhal Syndrome: Full Frontal Nudity and
Prelude & Liebestod (2004) where McNally explores art, lust and longing and
Dedication or the Stuff of Dreams (2005), which suffered from terrible critical
reviews in its New York production.
Arthur Miller (1915–2005). Perhaps he could be considered the quintessential
American playwright. His long body of work and recent death mark an era in dra-
matic literature made rich because of his contribution. Many of his plays are now
considered American classics and they include: The Crucible, A View from the
Bridge, After the Fall, All My Sons, and Death of a Salesman (1949 Pulitzer Prize in
Drama winner). Resurrection Blues and Finishing the Picture are his last works,
written in 2002 and 2004, respectively. Robert Cohen (2003, 99–100) says about
Miller: “No other playwright in the current theatre has so aggressively called soci-
ety to task for its failures nor so passionately told the audience to pay attention to
the world around them.”
Milly S. Barranger in Theatre: A Way of Seeing (2002, 90) calls Miller a “moralist
and social dramatist.” Barranger continues: “His plays deal with the individual’s
responsibility in the face of society’s emphasis on such false values as material suc-
cess and personal happiness at any price.”
Anne Nelson (dates unknown). Nelson, who never wrote a play before The Guys, was
a former war correspondent who covered El Salvador in the early 1980s and
currently is Adjunct Associate Professor of International and Public Affairs at
Columbia University. The Guys is autobiographical, and it is about her dealings
with a downtown New York fire chief following 9/11, who, following the disaster,
she assisted in writing the all too numerous eulogies. The play enjoyed a successful
run at the Flea Theatre, an Off-Off Broadway theatre in downtown New York City,
where Sigourney Weaver and Bill Murray created the roles, and performed to local
audiences, including groups of firefighters. It was published in 2002 by Random
House. The result is a moving dramatic work that articulates the emotions and
longings many people have faced since September 11.
Lynn Nottage (1964–). Nottage has enjoyed recognition as an up and coming
African American female playwright. Nottage’s collection of plays: Crumbs From
The Table of Joy: And Other Plays was published by TCG, Inc. in 2004, and
includes Crumbs from the Table of Joy, POOF!, Por’knockers; Mud, River, Stone;
and Las Meninas. Jason Zinoman in a New York Times article (2004) calls Nottage:
“An equal-opportunity satirist, Ms. Nottage sends up characters of several races”
(http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C01E2DC1630F930A25755C0A
9629C8B63).
In 1999/2000 Nottage received a NEA/TCG grant for a residency at Philadel-
phia’s Freedom Theatre (founded in 1966) it is the oldest African American theatre.
She was awarded: Playwriting Fellowships from Manhattan Theatre Club, New
Dramatists and the New York Foundation for the Arts, where she is a member of
their Artists Advisory Board. In addition, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in
2005. In 2003 Intimate Apparel, inspired by Nottage’s own grandmother, tells the
 DRAMATIC THEATRE 305

story of an African American seamstress’s romantic troubles and entanglements and

the world of the women around her who use her undergarments. The play was a
contender for the Pulitzer Prize.
Dael Orlandersmith (1959–). Orlandersmith is an actress, poet and playwright who
is best known for her Obie Award winning Beauty’s Daughter (1995) and the 2002
Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Drama, Yellowman, which, according to Annie Nakao in
The San Francisco Chronicle (2004) is: “a lyrical and brutal examination of the
complexities of internalized prejudice and its centuries-old roots in slavery.” In a
September 1996 taping of the radio show “This American Life,” Orlandersmith per-
forms When You Talk About Music in which she portrays a thirty-one-year-old male
who meets a black woman at a mutual friend’s wedding and finds how much he
misses musical expression. Other plays include: The Gimmick, which deals with art
and race; Monster, about a violent family history that passes from one generation to
another, with the narrator, a young women, using stories, poetry and a variety of
characters to introduce and juxtapose situations. Her collection, Beauty’s Daughter,
Monster, The Gimmick: Three Plays is published by Vintage Books (2000).
Suzan-Lori Parks (1964–). Parks has enjoyed great critical acclaim as a young African
American female. While attending Mount Holyoke College, Parks was a student of
James Baldwin (1924–1987). He suggested she write plays; thankfully, she listened.
Parks credits Mount Holyoke later in life for her success. She said in a newspaper
interview that she was inspired by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy
Wasserstein. In 2001, The Red Letter Plays were published by TCG books with: In
the Blood and Fucking A. Topdog/Underdog was the winner of the 2002 Pulitzer
Prize for Drama. Since 2000, she authored: 365 Plays/365 Days, for which she
wrote a play a day for an entire year. Robert Cohen (2003, 114) writes:

Writing about the black experience in America—slavery, lynchings, poverty, discrimi-

nation, minstrelsy, and racism are common themes—she rejects both realism and easy
polemics, preferring a savagely comic irony and freshly minted language to diatribes or
bald recountings.

Adam Rapp (1968–). Rapp was the recipient of the Herbert & Patricia Brodkin
Scholarship, two Lincoln Center le Compte du Nouy Awards, a fellowship to the
Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, the 1999 Princess Grace Award for Play-
wrighting, a 2000 Suite Residency with Mabou Mines, a 2000 Roger L. Stevens
Award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, and the 2001 Helen
Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights. Rapp’s prolific list of plays include these
titles written between 2000–2005: Animals and Plants, Bingo with the Indians,
Blackbird, Dreams of the Salthorse, Faster, Finer Noble Gases, Gompers, Mistral,
Nocturne and Stone Cold Dead Serious.
Bruce Weber in a New York Times review (2003) says of Rapp:

He writes with an urgent, galloping imagination, as if his fingers on the keyboard can’t
keep up with his racing brain. An eager experimenter, he needs a governor, or the self-
editing impulse that generally comes with age—or at least a strict dramaturge . . . His
overall subject is coming of age in the contemporary American heartland, an enter-
prise he views as fearful and portrays with pained sympathy. Generally set in Illinois
(Mr. Rapp grew up in Joliet), but with a clear sense that the American landscape is full
of places that are hopelessly distant from opportunity, his plays are full of horribly lost
teenagers who are entirely unequipped for the assumption of citizenship. Casually
306 DRAMATIC THEATRE

vulgar, poorly educated, television-savvy, arrogant and grabby, they seem to know
nothing of substance that any current adult might recognize as useful, aside from
bits of technological expertise. (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=
9C0DE5DF173AF93BA25757C0A9659C8B63)

John Patrick Shanley (1950–). Shanley grew up in the Bronx. In his personal biography
that appears in the Playbill for his 2005 Pulitzer Prize winning Doubt, a parable, he
writes:

John Patrick Shanley is from the Bronx. He was thrown out of St. Helena’s kinder-
garten. He was banned from St. Anthony’s hot lunch program for life. He was expelled
from Cardinal Spellman High School. He was placed on academic probation by New
York University and instructed to appear before a tribunal if he wished to return. When
asked why he had been treated in this way by all these institutions, he burst into tears
and said he had no idea. Then he went in the United States Marine Corps. He did fine.
He’s still doing okay.

Shanley’s list of plays include: (plays from the 1980s) Welcome to the Moon,
Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Savage In Limbo, The Dreamer Examines His Pillow,
Italian American Reconciliation, Women of Manhattan, All For Charity; (plays from
the 1990s) The Big Funk, Beggars in the House of Plenty, What Is This Everything?,
Kissing Christine, Missing Marisa, Four Dogs and a Bone, The Wild Goose, Psy-
chopathia Sexualis; and (plays from 2000) Where’s My Money?, Cellini, Dirty
Story, Doubt, a parable, Sailor’s Song, and Defiance.
Brantley writes in a New York Times review (2005):

Doubt is an unusually quiet work for Mr. Shanley, a writer who made his name with
rowdy portraits of bruising love affairs. But gentleness becomes this dramatist. Even as
Doubt holds your conscious attention as an intelligently measured debate play, it sends
off stealth charges that go deeper emotionally. (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/
fullpage.html?res=9801E4D8123CF932A35757C0A9639C8B63&sec=&spon=&
pagewanted=all)

Sam Shepard (1943–). Shepard has made a great impact on New York’s off-off-
Broadway theatre scene and he has a long list of plays written in the 1970s and
1980s. He is also a film actor and director, and has appeared on the cover of
Newsweek after marrying actress Jessica Lange, when they met on the set of their
film Frances. In 1976 Shepard moved to San Francisco where he was the playwright
in residence at the Magic Theatre, where much of his work received world pre-
mieres. The most notable of these works include: Buried Child (1979 Pulitzer Prize
winner), Curse of the Starving Class, True West and A Lie of the Mind in 1985. In
1986 Fool for Love was made into a film by Robert Altman. Also, he went from
Off-Off Broadway, to the larger spotlight of Broadway with his play A Lie of the
Mind. Robert Cohen (2003, 105) says of Shepard’s plays, that they are:

basically prose poems; the language is musical, and the subject matter, which is gener-
ally contemporary and American, suggests modern myth more than everyday reality.
His plays, which invariably involve sex and violence, create arresting . . . images and
tantalize the audience with moments of extreme surface realism that ultimately open
into something more abstract.
 DRAMATIC THEATRE 307

In 2002 Vintage Books published: The Late Henry Moss, Eyes for Consuela,
When the World Was Green: Three Plays, and When the World Was Green with
Joseph Chaiken (his profound mentor and collaborator). The God of Hell was pub-
lished in 2005 by Vintage Books.
Anna Deavere Smith (1950–). Smith does not shy away from controversy. She is cel-
ebrated for her one-woman dramatic works inspired by American current events.
She writes these works from interviews with people directly or indirectly involved.
As she performs them she takes on the gestures, voice, and emotional and psycho-
logical characteristics of as many as 40 men and women who make up her plays.
She was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship (known as the “genius
grant”) in 1996. Her non-fiction dramas include: the 1991 Fires in the Mirror, about
the Crown Heights Riots, which followed a young African American child’s acci-
dental death at the hands of a rabbi; the 1992 Twilight: Los Angeles, which dealt
with the Los Angeles riots following the Rodney King verdict. In 2003 Anchor
Books published her new works: House Arrest and Piano: Two Plays. Barranger
(2002, 328) claims that Smith: “As a creator and performer . . . sets out to use the
words of the voiceless and the powerful in society, creating a sophisticated and
poetic dialogue about race relations in contemporary America.”
Paula Vogel (1951–). Paula Vogel is a feminist author who won the 1998 Pulitzer
Prize in Drama as well as the Obie, the Lortel Best Play Award, the Best Off-Broadway
Play from the Outer Critics Circle, the Best Play from the Drama Desk, and the Best
Play from the New York Drama Critics Circle. The awards are for How I Learned
to Drive, which is about a pedophile and the complex relationship he has with his
teenage and then college-age relative by marriage. Uncle Peck, the pedophile, is not
a wholly unlikable character, and that allows for a highly nuanced work. Barranger
(2002, 81) says of Vogel: “Unlike most writers on political issues, she is not inter-
ested in persuading audiences to adopt political or moral positions but rather to
understand that there are no easy answers.”
Other plays are: Hot ‘N’ Throbbing, with a new publication dated 2000, pub-
lished by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.; Swan Song of Sir Henry, Meg, Apple-Brown
Betty, Desdemona, A Play about a Handkerchief, Bertha in Blue, The Oldest Pro-
fession, And Baby Makes Seven, The Mineola Twins, and The Long Christmas Ride
Home. Baltimore Waltz is another of her well-known plays, which is an autobio-
graphical account of her brother who died of AIDS. Alvin Klein in his New York
Times review (1993) says of the play: “it is a piece of original design, fresh imagi-
nation and extraordinary empathy that touches the heart” (http://query.nytimes.
com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CEED71239F935A25756C0A965958260).
August Wilson (1945–2005). In his life he wrote a decalogy of ten full-length plays.
The plays are rich with deeply felt monologues that capture a variety of African
American voices throughout a century. Each play represents a decade in twentieth
century African American history. This cycle of plays include: Gem of the Ocean
(2003) about the 1900s; Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1984) about the 1910s; Ma
Rainey’s Black Bottom (1982) about the 1920s; The Piano Lesson (1986, Pulitzer
Prize winner) about the 1930s, which was made into a movie in 1995; Seven Guitars
(1995) about the 1940s; Fences (1985, Pulitzer Prize winner) about the 1950s; Two
Trains Running (1990) about the 1950s; Jitney (1982) about the 1970s, first pub-
lished in the United States by The Overlook Press in 2003; King Hedley II (2001)
about the 1980s; and Radio Golf (2005) about the 1990s. His list of awards is long,
they include: seven New York Drama Critics Circle Awards for Best Play, six Tony
308 DRAMATIC THEATRE

Award nominations for Best Play, two Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding New
Play, the Tony Award for Best Play (Fences), the Literary Lion Award from the New
York Public Library, the American Theatre Critics’ Association Award (Two Trains
Running), the National Humanities Medal (1999), and The Freedom of Speech
Award at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival (2004). Cohen (2003, 106) says of Wilson:
“He glories, though not always uncritically, in black life, and is not at all interested in
synthesizing races or glossing over cultural differences. A poet still, Wilson blends
drama with profound observation and glorious, though disturbing, humanity.”
Oscar Hijuelos, author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love and the forth-
coming Twain and Stanley Enter Paradise was a friend of Wilson. He retells this
story in a 2005 New York Times article about a time they spent together:

He loved discussing literature: Ralph Ellison, Gabriel García Márquez, James M. Cain,
Jorge Luis Borges and Tennessee Williams were but a few of the writers we talked about
over the years. We tried to maintain a scholarly tone about such things, especially when
our wives were around, but when it was just the two of us, our upbringings kicked in
and our language was riddled with scatological turns of phrase. August’s sentences
blossomed with such language, especially when we came to the history of slavery
and the black man in this country. (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/09/opinion/
09hijuelos.html)

Lanford Wilson (1937–). Wilson is a prolific writer whose plays include: (from the
1960s) Balm in Gilead, The Rimers of Eldrich, and The Gingham Dog; (from the
1970s) Lemon Sky, Serenading Louie, Hot L Baltimore, The Mound Builders, Fifth
of July; (the 1980s) Talley’s Folly (Pulitzer Prize winner of 1980), A Tale Told, later
revised and renamed Talley & Son, Angels Fall, Burn This; (the 1990s) Redwood
Curtain, Sympathetic Magic; and the 2000 Book of Days, published by Grove Press.
Cohen (2003, 103) calls Wilson’s work: “gentle, poetic, natural, and wise; increas-
ingly his works focus on the larger social and philosophical contexts of contempo-
rary life.” He was a founding member with notable director Marshall W. Mason
(born 1940) of the famed Circle Repertory Company (1969–1996) in New York
City, where many of his plays had their debut.
Doug Wright (dates unknown). Wright is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize and Tony
Award for Best Play for I am My Own Wife in 2004. The play was created through
exercises, research and interviews about the German transvestite Charlotte von
Mahlsdorf, a survivor of both Nazism and Communism in East Germany. In a New
York Times (2003) review Bruce Weber writes: “it is terrific enough to raise the
highest expectations” (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE6D
71031F93BA15756C0A9659C8B63).
In 2005 Faber and Faber, Inc. publish Quills and Other Plays: Interrogating the
Nude about Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray and a very interesting exploration
about art, novelty, and government; Watbanaland, which has political overtones of
hunger, poverty, and American marriage; Quills about the Marquis de Sade, which
is humorous but also darkly grotesque and poignant. The publication offers a col-
orful introduction entitled Willful Misbehavior, which provides an anecdote about
a time in the writer’s young life where he decided he like the “forbidden” in art. His
plays certainly explore the forbidden. Wright has said about his own work:

No human appetite is too base, no idea so holy, no institution so revered that it should
be spared art’s scrutiny. At its best, art can function in a society as its collective
 DRAMATIC THEATRE 309

conscience. And such a conscience is useless unless it can operate unchecked. Propa-
ganda provides answers; art should stimulate questions. Dali, Duchamp and de Sade
did more than churn out pages of prose or canvas after canvas. They each took center
stage in their own time as agitators, while—at the same time—revolutionizing their
respective crafts. I hope to follow their example. (http://www.mindspring.com/
~horizonco/plays/quills/author.htm)

Mary Zimmerman (dates unknown). Zimmerman is a stage director and playwright

most celebrated for her contemporary myths. She is a member of Chicago’s Look-
ingglass Theatre Company (founded in 1989) and an artistic associate of The Good-
man Theatre (founded in 1925). Much of her work is created while she works with
her company of actors and designers; the company members will read source mate-
rial together, while Zimmerman is responsible for weaving the dramatic text from
their findings and collaborative engagement. Her play Metamorphoses, based on
David R. Slavit’s translation of The Metamorphoses of Ovid, was published in 2002
by Northwestern University Press. Deborah Garwood (2003, 71) in “Myth as Public
Dream: The Metamorphosis of Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses” in PAJ: Per-
forming Art Journal, states:

At the most accessible level, [Metamorphoses] provides abundant opportunities for the
playwright to theatricalize myth as a hybrid of antiquity and twentieth-century culture.
King Midas resembles a 1920s American industrialist millionaire. Erysichthon, though
dressed in a toga, comes across as a greedy mogul unconcerned about the environment
who pays dearly for incurring Ceres’ wrath. The tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, as told
by Ovid and by Rilke’s poem, creates a poetic bridge between myth and modernism,
artistic process and its inviolate root in the unconscious.

RECENT PULITZER PRIZES IN DRAMA

1990 The Piano Lesson by August Wilson
1991 Lost in Yonkers by Neil Simon
1992 The Kentucky Cycle by Robert Schenkkan
1993 Angels in America: Millennium Approaches by Tony Kushner
1994 Three Tall Women by Edward Albee
1995 The Young Man From Atlanta by Horton Foote
1996 Rent by the late Jonathan Larson
1997 (No Award)
1998 How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel
1999 Wit by Margaret Edson
2000 Dinner With Friends by Donald Margulies
2001 Proof by David Auburn
2002 Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks
2003 Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz
2004 I Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright
2005 Doubt, a parable by John Patrick Shanley
2006 (No Award)
2007 Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire
Source: Pulitzer Prize Web site. http://www.pulitzer.org/
310 DRAMATIC THEATRE

Zimmerman received numerous awards, including the prestigious MacArthur

Fellowship in 1998. Other works include: Journey to the West, The Secret In The
Wings, The Odyssey, The Arabian Nights, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
and Eleven Rooms of Proust. She is the director and co-librettist of the 2002 opera
Galileo Galilei with music by Philip Glass (born 1937) commissioned by the
Goodman Theatre.

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Texas history, life, and culture, no. 9. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
Wickham, Glynne. A History of the Theatre. 2nd ed. Oxford: Phaidon, 1992.
Wilson, August. Century Cycle. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2007.
Wilson, Lanford. Collected Plays: 1965–1970. Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus, 1996.
Wright, Doug. I Am My Own Wife. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2005.
———. Quills and Other Plays. New York: Faber & Faber, 2005.
Zimmerman, Mary. Metamorphosis: A Play. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
2002.

Further Reading
American Conservatory Theatre’s website: http://act-sf.org/goodbody/; Bernstein, Andrea.
“Tony Kushner: ARTS:The award-winning author of Angels in America advises you to trust
neither art nor artists.” Mother Jones: July/August 1995; Brantley, Ben. “A Fractious Family’s
Decline, With Vintage Mustiness.” The New York Times: March 26, 2002; Brantley, Ben. “As
a Nun Stands Firm, The Ground Shifts Below.” The New York Times: April 1, 2005; Brant-
ley, Ben. “Bewildered Ringmaster In a Celebrity Circus.” The New York Times: May 13, 2002;
Brantley, Ben. “Enough Said About Three Days of Rain. Let’s Talk Julia Roberts!” The New
York Times: April 20, 2006; Brantley, Ben. “Judas Gets His Day in Court, but Satan Is on the
Witness List.” The New York Times: March 3, 2005; Brantley, Ben. “Lonely People Aren’t
Nice; Just Ask One.” The New York Times: October 12, 2000; Brantley, Ben. “Motel Tale:
Down and Out (and Itchy and Scratchy) in Oklahoma.” The New York Times: March 1,
2004; Brantley, Ben. “The Poetry of Yearning, The Artistry of Seduction.” The New York
Times: November 17, 2003; Brantley, Ben. “The Road to Ruin? Through the Lobby, Sir.” The
New York Times: March 14, 2001; Brantley, Ben. “They Meet in a Gallery, God Looking
On.” The New York Times: October 11, 2001; Brantley, Ben. “Wry Smiles Temper the
Anguish of Old Age.” The New York Times: December 4, 2000; Garwood, Deborah. “Myth
as Public Dream: The Metamorphosis of Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses.” PAJ: A Jour-
nal of Performance and Art, 25.1 (2003) 69–78; Feingold, Michael. “Sightlines: Francine
Russo on Circus Oz; Michael Feingold on The Last of the Thorntons.” The Village Voice:
December 27–January 2, 2001; Flinn, Mary. “Interview with Mary Flinn and Romulus Lin-
ney” [Online, Spring 2002, vol. 1, no. 1]. Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the
arts. http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v1n1/features/linney_r_81502/linney_r_text.htm; From the
Playwright http://www.mindspring.com/~horizonco/plays/quills/author.htm; Hijuelos, Oscar.
“A Last Round With August Wilson.” The New York Times: October 9, 2005; Isherwood,
Charles. “Future tense in delicate Violet.” Variety: November, 2003; Klein, Alvin. “At Yale
Rep, The Baltimore Waltz.” The New York Times: May 16, 1993; Nakao, Annie. “Play
explores corrosive prejudice within black community.” The San Francisco Chronicle: January
28, 2004; “OUTfield: An Interview with Playwright Richard Greenberg,” Jim Provenzano
on-line at Temenos: http://www.temenos.net/articles/04-09-04.shtml; Ozols, Jennifer Barrett.
“Eve Ensler Redefines the Meaning of Good Body.” Newsweek: November 12, 2004;
Richards, David. “Critical Winds Shift for Albee, A Master of the Steady Course.” The New
312 DYSTOPIAN FICTION

York Times: April 13, 1994; Steppenwolf Theatre website: http://www.steppenwolf.org/

backstage/article.aspx?id=118; Weber, Bruce. “Charming, Lying and Even Killing to Survive.”
The New York Times: May 28, 2003; Weber, Bruce. “Cruelties of Apartheid, Chronicled by a
Child.” The New York Times: September 21, 2000; Weber, Bruce. “Young in the Heartland,
Seeking Video Salvation.” The New York Times: April 18, 2003; Zinoman, Jason. “Lynn
Nottage Enters Her Flippant Period.” The New York Times: June 13, 2004.
ROBIN REESE
DYSTOPIAN FICTION
Definition. Dystopian literature describes an ideal society that has gone terribly
wrong. Because dystopian literature was developed after the industrial revolution,
advanced technology often plays an important role in the societies authors create.
Typically, the imagined society was intended to feature a generally fair political sys-
tem, but that system has instead created near-universal slavery. Conformity to this
social system is enforced by a vigilant and brutal police force and a government-
controlled media that bombards citizens with propaganda. Sometimes the dystopian
societies authors create are plagued by shortages of food, fuel, and other essentials,
while other dystopias are marked by a material abundance that serves to give the
government ever-greater control over the dependant populace. Because dystopian
literature developed in response to utopian literature, fictional dystopias often
resemble fictional utopias. The inhabitants of both types of imagined societies are
required to follow schedules, share meals, live in communal housing, or otherwise
limit their personal choices.
Dystopian literature typically features a main character who is at first a satisfied—
and sometimes prominent—citizen. Discomfort with the stifling regimentation of
the totalitarian regime she or he lives under leads the protagonist to question the
wisdom of the government. This questioning leads to violations of some of the many
rules that govern daily life. Often, the protagonist will subsequently become
involved with a resistance movement. The police typically then step in and force the
protagonist to reform and commit to serving the interests of the state. Dystopian lit-
erature can also feature protagonists who are never aware that they live in a deeply
flawed society. Authors create dystopian literature in order to make a comment
about the society in which they themselves live. Sometimes authors create a dystopia
as a warning about what their society may become. Under different circumstances,
an author might create a dystopia to directly criticize the failings of the society in
which he or she lives. Dystopian can also be used as an adjective to describe elements
of otherwise non-dystopian texts that deal with an oppressive society or to describe
political conditions that exist in the real world. This entry focuses on works of
fiction that were deliberately created to depict a totalitarian society that governs
through outright intimidation or the creation of false needs.
History. Although John Stuart Mill is reported to have used the term dystopia in
a speech to Britain’s parliament in 1868, the word was not directly associated with
literary studies until Glenn Negley and Max J. Patrick made extensive use of the term
in their 1952 book Quest for Utopia. Many scholars believe Jules Verne’s The
Begum’s Fortune, published in 1879 as Les Cinq cents millions de la Begum, is the
first novel to portray elements of a dystopian society, though it does not display all
of the characteristics just discussed. Verne’s book tells the story of two men who
inherit a fortune from a distant relative who had married into Indian royalty. The
Frenchman Dr. Sarrasin uses his share of the money to create a vaguely Fourierist
utopian colony in Oregon. The German Professor Schultze uses his share of the
 DYSTOPIAN FICTION 313

money to create a totalitarian city-state dedicated to arms production just a few

kilometers away from Sarrasin’s colony. Schultze’s high-tech Steel City is a heavily
fortified police state, and its workers’ lives are heavily regulated. But Verne’s tale
does not focus on the political awakening of an inhabitant of Schultze’s city-state.
Instead, Steel City eventually collapses because of Schultze’s own carelessness with
one of the superweapons he develops.
The first clearly articulated portrait of a dystopian society comes in Yevgeny
Zamyatin’s 1920 novel We. Zamyatin experienced the Russian revolution and the
birth of the Soviet Union, and this could very well explain his invention of the dis-
affected citizen of the seemingly omnipotent totality that became so common in later
dystopian fiction. Zamyatin created The One State, an outwardly benevolent soci-
ety governed by The Benefactor that gives its citizens numbers instead of names and
regulates every moment of their lives by means of the Book of Hours. Taking both
Plato’s description of the ideal society and Communist propaganda to their logical
conclusion, Zamyatin creates a state that is ruled by reason and not passion. Even
sexual intercourse is regulated by means of pink coupons.
Of course, the state does not trust that its citizens will always be rational, so the
Secret Police keeps them under surveillance. This is easy to do because everyone lit-
erally lives in glass houses. The novel is presented as the diary of D-503, a promi-
nent mathematician and designer of the rocket ship Integral. Though he begins the
diary as a means to praise The One State, when D-503 begins an affair with I-330,
a member of the resistance movement who is interested in stealing the Integral,
D-503 realizes that he has been afflicted with an imagination. At novel’s end, with
the resistance fighting against the One State’s security forces, D-503 submits to an
operation designed to remove his imagination and help him accept the happiness
that The One State offers.
Themes first developed in We were then taken up in two better known dystopias.
In George Orwell’s 1984, published in 1948, readers meet Winston Smith, an
insignificant bureaucrat in Oceania’s Ministry of Truth. Winston also keeps a diary
and begins to question his society after he begins an affair with a woman named
Julia. Eventually, Winston is tricked into believing that he has joined the resistance
by party member O’Brien. Captured, tortured, and forced to renounce his love for
Julia, at the end of the novel, Winston has learned to love Big Brother in the same
way that the semi-lobotomized D-503 learned to love The Benefactor. Orwell’s
unique contribution to the dystopian genre is his evocation of a totalitarian regime
that has difficulty providing material comfort to its citizens and actively attempts to
suppress its citizens’ sexual experiences. This is very different from the comfortable
world of The One State, where every citizen has plenty to eat, new clothes regularly
delivered, and the right to request sexual favors from every other citizen.
Another descendant of We is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which was first
published in 1932. Like Zamyatin’s One State, Huxley’s World State tries to give its
citizens a happy existence through rationally planning their lives. The World State
attempts to replace passion with reason by means of the Bokanovsky and Podsnap
processes, scientific techniques that produce clones. Using state-produced clones to
replace family-produced biological children helps do away with notions of private
property and the sexual jealousy inherent in monogamy and creates a society where
everyone is cared for by the state and where sexual play is encouraged. There is a
rigid social structure, however, because the clones come in different grades. Alphas,
the highest grade of clone, are destined to rule society, while Epsilons, the lowest of
314 DYSTOPIAN FICTION

the grades, are fated to do society’s dirty work. Huxley’s innovation within the
dystopian genre includes depicting the widespread use of a drug, Soma, to control
emotional response and having the critique of the totalitarian society come from an
outsider.
Bernard Marx, a low-level bureaucrat in the Central London Hatchery, returns
from the savage reservation in New Mexico with John, the biological son of the
hatchery’s director. While this discovery forces the director to resign in disgrace, John
quickly becomes a celebrity because of his parentage and because he has been raised
in a traditional culture. This noble savage cannot tolerate the amoral World State,
however, and eventually hangs himself. While Zamyatin’s and Orwell’s dystopias
were primarily designed to critique political totalitarianism, Huxley’s was intended
to critique the loss of traditional values that occurs in a technological society.
American dystopian literature almost always strongly reflects the political and
social questions facing the nation when the individual dystopian tales are written,
though later works were also strongly influenced by themes developed by Zamyatin,
Orwell, and Huxley. Initial dystopias were concerned with class struggles and the
domination of government by corporate interests. Later dystopian fiction, while
never abandoning these issues, modified the genre to address pressing concerns. In
the 1930s, American dystopian fiction took on the rise of fascism, while in the
1950s it addressed the dangers that material abundance posed to democracy, and in
the 1980s it speculatively depicted the consequences of the backlash against femi-
nism by the religious right. The genre began in the United States with Populist polit-
ical agitator and onetime Minnesota lieutenant governor Ignatius Donnelly’s 1890
novel Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century. Written in response to
Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian novel, titled Looking Backwards, Caesar’s Column
describes a working-class revolt that occurs in New York in 1988. Bellamy’s book
predicted that technological advancement would lead to a worker’s paradise, but in
1890 many feared that class warfare would tear the country apart. In Donnelly’s
tale, working-class radical Caesar Lomellini leads a rebellion against the oppressive
elite of a technologically sophisticated New York City. The uprising is very violent—
the column referred to in the novel’s title is a concrete monument filled with the bod-
ies of those killed in the fighting. The wholesale destruction of the magnificent city
fills Gabriel Weltstein, Donnelly’s main character, with such despair that he is forced
to flee to a Christian socialist utopian community in Africa.
The next significant fictional dystopia was Jack London’s 1908 novel The Iron
Heel. Written during a time of increasing concern about the power of corporate
monopolies, London’s novel is structured as the autobiography of socialist revolu-
tionary Avis Everhard, who describes her battles with the Oligarchy, a combination
of business interests that has run the Unites States for hundreds of years. London
also includes commentary and footnotes written long after Avis’s death by a scholar
named Anthony Meredith. Meredith lived after the Oligarchy had been defeated by
a popular uprising. While Meredith is ultimately a hopeful character, his commen-
tary demonstrates how futile Avis’s hopes were for a revolution that would free
America from the power of the Oligarchy.
Political unrest caused by the Great Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe
led Sinclair Lewis to portray the demise of democracy in America in his 1935 novel
It Can’t Happen Here. Lewis’s tale focuses on Doremus Jessup, a moderate Repub-
lican and the editor of a small newspaper in Vermont. The editor grows more and
more concerned as Buzz Windrip, who makes vague promises about ending the
 DYSTOPIAN FICTION 315

Depression and returning America to its fundamental values, is elected president and
gradually becomes a dictator. Windrip was modeled on the corrupt but popular
Louisiana governor Huey Long, who attempted to arouse populist sentiment by
means of a campaign he called Share Our Wealth. Windrip’s campaign is assisted by
Bishop Peter Paul Prang, who is modeled on the anti-Semitic and pro-fascist Father
Charles Coughlin, who used his radio program to attack the policies of the Roosevelt
administration. Over the course of the novel, Doremus is eventually imprisoned in a
concentration camp and becomes a member of the resistance after fleeing to Canada.
During the postwar abundance of the 1950s, dystopian fiction expressed the fear
that technology would lull America into dystopia through addiction to unnecessary
conveniences. In Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 novel Player Piano, American society has
become an enormous automated factory surrounded by legions of underemployed
consumers. Only a few people have meaningful jobs, and a graduate degree is
required for any paying employment—all real estate agents, for example, have
PhDs. Everyone else lives in public housing and performs menial tasks such as street
sweeping. Even though the standard of living is high, most people are dissatisfied
because they do not have a meaningful role to play in society. Vonnegut’s story
focuses on Paul Proteus, head of industry in Illium, New York. Even though Paul is
one of the very few people with an important job, and even though he is in line for
a significant promotion, he becomes involved with the Ghost Shirt society, a resist-
ance organization that takes its name from nineteenth-century Native American
radicals who believed that if they wore “ghost shirts” they would be invulnerable to
army bullets. The Ghost Shirt society channels very different class resentments than
those found in Caesar’s Column and The Iron Heel. In those stories, the working
class was starved and beaten, exhausted and angry. In Player Piano, they miss hav-
ing something important to do. Although the Ghost Shirt rebellion fails, Vonnegut
presents the uprising as a gesture of resistance that allows the working class to main-
tain its dignity.
A darker variation on the theme of technological abundance leading to dystopian
decadence and democratic decay is found in Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit
451. In the near-future society Bradbury envisions, firemen burn books to prevent
people from reading and developing the intellectual capacity to question the system—
they never put out fires because houses are fireproof. This is soft dystopia at its best:
people have plenty of consumer goods and television to keep them docile and enter-
tained. There is a strong police force that uses a mechanical hound to track and kill
deviants, but most people are quite content. Guy Montag, a fireman, is initially
happy with his life and with his job. After having a few conversations with the
nonconformist Clarisse McClellan, after an old woman who had been hiding books
in her house is killed by firemen, and after his wife Mildred tries to kill herself by
overdosing on tranquilizers, Montag begins to question his society. He starts read-
ing books surreptitiously and eventually hatches a plot with a former English
professor named Faber to plant books in firemen’s homes. When Mildred turns him
in, Beatty, the fire chief, forces Montag to burn down his own house. Montag then
kills Beatty and is chased into the countryside by the mechanical hound. This is a
fortunate move for Montag, however, because nuclear war destroys his city soon
after he flees. The novel ends with Montag joining a group of people who live in the
wilderness and attempt to keep the great books alive by memorizing them. Like
Huxley, Bradbury uses his novel to question the impact that a consumerist, pleasure-
seeking society has on more traditional vales such as literacy.
316 DYSTOPIAN FICTION

While fears of the downside of suburban affluence never entirely left American
psyche, the 1960s and 1970s brought with them new concerns. For example, the
emergence of feminism brought gender issues to the forefront of the cultural battle
between conservatives and liberals. The environmental movement highlighted new
concerns about the hazards of an affluent society. The latter movement began in
earnest in 1962 with the publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring. Because
Carson’s book employed dystopian imagery to depict the damage man-made chem-
icals could do to the environment, it encouraged other writers to imagine dystopia
as polluted. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale combines both
issues, exploring both fears of genetic damage caused by pollution and the backlash
against feminism generated by the religious right.
Atwood imagines the United States turning into the Republic of Gilead when fun-
damentalists foment a military coup against the federal government. Women are
stripped of the right to vote and own property. Because pollution has greatly
decreased fertility, members of the ruling elite often conceive children using fertile
women known as handmaids. Because this is patterned after the relationship that
Abraham had with his servant Hagar in the Old Testament, the handmaids live with
the elite families in a form of polygamy. Atwood’s novel is presented as the diary of
Offred, a woman who had been married to a divorced man. This made her a second-
class citizen in Gilead, but because she was fertile, she was given to a member of the
ruling elite called the Commander. The Commander is not portrayed as a particu-
larly evil person—he plays Scrabble with Offred and is reasonably kind to her—but
her life in such an oppressive patriarchy is very difficult. Naturally, Gilead is a total-
itarian nightmare even for its male inhabitants. Secret police known as the Eyes
monitor citizens’ every move, and public executions are common.
After the Commander fails to impregnate her, Offred begins an affair with Nick,
the Commander’s chauffer. This affair is condoned by the Commander’s wife,
Serena Joy, because children are very valuable in a society that is largely infertile.
Eventually, at Nick’s urging, Offred leaves with a group of men who could be mem-
bers of either the Eyes or the Mayday underground. Readers do not know if Offred
is being taken away to be shot or to be placed in the underground femaleroad and
taken to Canada. Atwood concludes The Handmaid’s Tale much like London con-
cluded The Iron Heel: by having academics from a brighter future give commentary
on the diary. Atwood uses a presentation given by a Professor Piexoto at an aca-
demic conference, held long after the Republic of Gilead fell, to explain some of the
sociology of Gileadan society. Piexoto, however, has not been able to determine
what happened to Offred.
Trends and Themes. Many of the themes found in earlier dystopian writing are
present in contemporary texts. The gender dystopia found in Atwood’s The Hand-
maid’s Tale is revisited in Cheryl Bernard’s Turning on the Girls, which satirically
portrays a society where women are in charge, and in Patrick Califia’s short story
“Dolly,” which introduces vigilante justice into a society similar to Gilead. The cri-
tique of affluent society first seen in Vonnegut and Bradbury has migrated away
from the suburbs and toward various manifestations of an overstimulating enter-
tainment industry. Corey Doctorow looks at a future world that has become a vir-
tual Disneyland in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and Robert Coover’s The
Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Director’s Cut creates a dystopic America that is
obsessed with pornographic movies. The United States is once again under the con-
trol of a falsely populist totalitarian government in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against
 DYSTOPIAN FICTION 317

America. And the corporate dystopia imagined by Donnelley and London finds
updates in T.C. Boyle’s “Jubilation,” Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Lisa
Lerner’s Just Like Beauty, and David Allen Cates’s X Out of Wonderland.
Context and Issues. Three major trends in American society have made the
themes found in contemporary dystopian novels similar to themes found in the ear-
lier novels discussed. The first trend is the disagreement over moral and political val-
ues between conservatives and liberals that has come to be know as the “culture
wars.” Often, the conservative position in the culture war is perceived as a backlash
against progress by authors who respond by creating dystopian fiction that portrays
the United States becoming a fascist Christian republic. The second trend has been
the rapid advancement of entertainment technology. While the technological cocoon
that the Internet, cell phones, and iPods have created makes authors like Vonnegut
and Bradbury appear prophetic, our wired society has also encouraged contempo-
rary writers to imagine technologies that create an even more disconnected and pas-
sive populace. Finally, Americans have long harbored a broad distrust of big
government and big business. Contemporary authors have updated the fears that
were first expressed in Caesar’s Column and The Iron Heel with discussions of what
new technologies can do to enhance government and corporate power.
Reception. It is difficult to accurately gauge the cultural impact of a work of fic-
tion, especially one that has been in circulation for only a few years. Four criteria
can be used to gain a broad idea of how a book has been received: (1) reviews give
a good indication of the story’s perceived literary value, (2) film adaptations and (3)
sales figures demonstrate the popularity of a novel or story, and (4) the genre is his-
torically popular. For example, a poorly selling self-help book is even more insignif-
icant because that genre tends to regularly produce best sellers. All of the novels and
stories discussed in this chapter continues to receive favorable reviews in main-
stream media outlets such as The New York Times. No plans by major studios to
turn any of these works into films have been announced. There are many sources
for sales data, but the rankings provided by Amazon.com are useful because they
give a reasonable idea of how many people are currently purchasing a given novel.
It is important to remember, however, that Amazon.com lists millions of books,
and therefore sales figures must be seen in relative terms. By this measure, both
Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, with an Amazon.com sales ranking dur-
ing January 2007 in the 4,800s, and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, with a
ranking in the 6,600s, promise to have cultural impact. Corey Doctorow’s Down
and Out in the Magic Kingdom ranked in the 34,000s, and T.C. Boyle’s Tooth and
Claw, the collection of short stories in which “Jubilation” appears, ranked in the
35,000s, and they both also show some promise. The rest of the novels discussed
have rankings above 100,000 but still make important contributions to the devel-
opment of the genre.
The relative popularity of some of the new dystopian literature can be explained
in part by the popularity of the genre. While not at the forefront of American cul-
ture, dystopian literature does have a solid appeal. Several of the major dystopian
novels discussed previously have impressive sales rankings. Atwood’s The Hand-
maid’s Tale is in the top 600, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is in the top 500, Huxley’s
Brave New World is in the top 400, and Orwell’s 1984 is in the top 300. Furthermore,
many major dystopian novels have been made into films or television programs. Brave
New World was on television in 1980 and 1998. Fahrenheit 451 was put on the sil-
ver screen in 1966, 1984 appeared in theatres in 1984, and The Handmaid’s Tale was
318 DYSTOPIAN FICTION

made into a film in 1990. Soviet filmmakers even filmed an adaptation of The Iron
Heel in 1919.
Selected Authors. Dystopian fiction is not like romance or mystery, with typical
authors writing many short stories and novels in the genre they have chosen as their
specialty. Instead, most dystopias are unique creations, exploring themes that
authors have addressed in other kinds of fiction. Margaret Atwood and other
authors do return to the genre, but dystopian fiction is usually a small part of their
body of work. Dystopian authors come from many different places in the literary
profession. Some are established, mainstream authors, and others are newcomers
working in less visible genres such as children’s literature.
Cheryl Bernard has an interesting professional background that makes her
uniquely qualified to create a dystopia. Although she has also published Moghul
Buffet, a murder mystery, Barnard’s primary career is as a specialist in Middle
Eastern political issues. She has a PhD in International Relations from the
University of Vienna and is affiliated with the Rand Corporation, a think tank
that has advised the U.S. government. Bernard brings this experience in compara-
tive political analysis to her inverted dystopia Turning on the Girls. The novel
turns The Handmaid’s Tale on its head and presents a society that implicitly asks
if one woman’s paradise would be another man’s prison. Bernard’s near-future
society depicts women in charge “of a fine, upstanding, democratic, justice-and-
equality-oriented, security-minded, peace-seeking social order” (6). Yet while women
may think that a world with a restaurant chain called Balls that focuses its double
entendres on the male anatomy is a far better place than this one, men may not like
having to wear wristbands that could stun or kill them at the whim of a female-
dominated security apparatus. Bernard’s novel tracks the adventures of Lisa, an
employee of the 1984-like Ministry of Thought who has been assigned to create
politically correct sexual fantasies for women, and Justin, a man detailed to work
as her assistant in order to complete his reeducation process. As is typical of
dystopian narrative, Lisa and Justin become involved with the resistance and a plot
to overthrow the government—though they remain loyal and work as spies. The
plot is discovered, the government increases its security forces and places new
restrictions on men, and, as Winston Smith does in 1984, most of the male char-
acters learn to love Big Sister. But Bernard’s extensive use of irony makes the novel
a genuine satire on political correctness and its opponents. Bernard is writing for
readers who would find her playful questioning of gender-based social engineering
and its discontents a refreshing change from the earnest political paranoia of The
Handmaid’s Tale.
Gender dystopias that portray a world very similar to that of Atwood’s novel are
still being written, however. Patrick Califia writes erotic fiction and criticism for the
popular and scholarly gay press. In the short story “Dolly,” Califia begins by intro-
ducing readers to Ro, a butch lesbian who works for a company that programs life-
sized robotic sex slaves. America is under a fundamentalist military dictatorship
reminiscent of the Republic of Gilead, and naturally the sex dolls are supposed to
provide submissive female partners for heterosexual men. In an act of private rebel-
lion, Ro programs the dolls to switch their loyalty to any woman they interact with
sexually. One of the dolls is sold to Jason, a soldier who has recently returned from
a war. He is married to Charlene, who has been laid off from her job because the
government mandates that returned soldier’s wives do not work. Charlene, who had
an affair with a woman while Jason was away, quickly grows to hate her now very
 DYSTOPIAN FICTION 319

abusive husband. Because women cannot legally divorce their husbands, Charlene
is stuck. Eventually, she finds Dolly, and the programming that Ro hid in the
android’s hard drive kicks in. When Jason attempts to beat Charlene after discover-
ing their affair, Dolly ties him to a bed, and Charlene and Dolly leave together. In
many ways, “Dolly” is an edgy reframing of the issues raised in The Handmaid’s
Tale for a gay, lesbian, and transgendered audience.
Cory Doctorow is very active in promoting Internet technology and has written
for technology magazines such as Wired and Popular Science as well as The New
York Times. As part of his exploration of the impact of technology on society,
Doctorow wrote the cautionary dystopia Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
Some commentators have suggested that Disney World has become the ideal to
which American society is tending. Doctorow tries to imagine a future that best
exemplifies the world that Imagineers would create. Unsurprisingly, the novel pres-
ents a net-enabled update of Vonnegut’s Player Piano.
Doctorow’s novel tells the story of Julius, a crowd-control specialist at Disney
World, his girlfriend Lil, who maintains the robots in the Hall of Presidents, and
their friend Dan. They live in a world without scarcity, where even the outcasts of
society have access to all consumer goods. Largely speaking, it is a post-work soci-
ety. People have heads-up displays implanted in their corneas, communication
devices implanted in their cochleas, and continuous access to the Internet and
telecommunications. When people die, a clone is prepared, and their existing mem-
ory is implanted into the clone’s memory. Consequently, people do not have to
worry about death, and age has become meaningless. Most choose to have an
apparent age in the twenties or thirties. Government is based on the will of the pop-
ular, and the world has adapted a reputation economy, with the most popular peo-
ple getting the best goods and services. This new social order is known as the
Bitchun Society.
While this may sound good, Dan has become bored and longs for death. After
serving as a missionary to the areas of the world that are not part of the Bitchun
society and converting everyone he meets, he feels a lack of purpose and decides to
commit suicide. He realizes that he is so unpopular, however, that no one would care
if he died, so he goes to work at Disney World with Julius and Lil. Because of Disney
World’s popularity, people who work there command a great deal of attention, and
in a reputation economy, this is a very good thing. Dan teams up with Julius’s rival,
Debra, and then has his friend assassinated—somewhat meaningless in a post-death
environment but still not very nice. Debra wants to make the Disney experience
completely virtual—dumping data directly into people’s minds while they sit in the
Hall of Presidents or the Haunted Mansion. Julius, on the other hand, wants to keep
the analog elements of the experience intact. Although Dan eventually confesses his
self-destructive, nihilistic plot and drives Debra away from Disney World in dis-
grace, it is clear that Debra’s path is the way that the Bitchun society is headed. Dan
decides to have himself cryogenically frozen and then unthawed when the universe
implodes, while Julius leaves Disney World to live on a space station. This almost
Jamesian renunciation suggests a critique of the lack of challenge that a Bitchun
society would provide.
Fahrenheit 451 depicts television turning people into amoral zombies, and Robert
Coover’s The Adventures of Lucky Pierre updates this theme by injecting America’s
contemporary fascination with pornography. Coover is a novelist and playwright
whose experimental use of language has garnered him widespread recognition since
320 DYSTOPIAN FICTION

the 1960s. His writing has taken up themes such as American political history in
Public Burning and sports in Universal Baseball Association. To understand his
dystopian novel, it is helpful to know that Coover is also the author of the screen-
play for The Babysitter, an erotic film based on one of Coover’s short stories. The
film was released directly to video even though it starred Alicia Silverstone, who was
at that time at the height of her popularity. In Lucky Pierre, Coover creates Cinecity,
a town where pornographic movies are the primary industry and where the mayor’s
office is involved in making sure the industry stays viable. There are pornographic
theatres on every corner, and people copulate in public. Lucky Pierre, the porn star
at the center of Coover’s tale, regularly walks city streets with his erect penis on dis-
play. Cinecity is not a love-in, however, but is instead a place where perpetual sex-
ual gratification masks despair, where “suicides rain into the snow . . . as though the
heavens were taking a dump” (118) and where pedestrians are often run over and
killed as they attempt to cross the streets. There are energy shortages and hackers
who shut down major systems. Making underground movies is a crime, and the
police frequently beat protesters who demonstrate for better access to screen time.
Pornography is no longer erotica, but merely one more way for a dystopian society
to control its population.
Philip Roth is one of America’s most prominent contemporary writers. During his
almost 50-year career, he has dealt with issues including Jewish identity in works
such as Goodbye Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint and American politics in nov-
els such as Our Gang. Believing, like Sinclair Lewis did, that America has always
been in peril of becoming a totalitarian state, Roth creates a dystopian tragicomedy
that focuses on issues of Jewish identity in the 1940s. In The Plot Against America,
unlike Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, America stops short of becoming a
fascist state. The totalitarian regime that almost takes control of the country is ter-
rifying enough, however.
In his novel, Roth traces the impact on Newark’s Jewish community of the hypo-
thetical election of Charles Lindbergh as President of the United States in 1940.
Lindbergh, a dupe of the Nazis since they kidnapped his child years earlier—in
Roth’s version of history, the Lindbergh baby was a Nazi hostage, and the killing
was staged—implements a plan to resettle urban Jews in rural America, isolating
them in small towns and destroying Jewish neighborhoods. He also creates an
Office of American Absorption that is designed to remove Jewish ethnic identity
from Jewish children. Typically, Lindbergh also suppresses all dissenting voices and
arranges to have Walter Winchell, a prominent critic, fired from his radio show.
World War II starts with America having signed a peace treaty with Nazi Germany,
and it appears that the Allies will be defeated. But then, Lindbergh disappears, and
his vice president, Burton K. Wheeler, arrests Franklin D. Roosevelt and attempts to
become a dictator. Anne Lindbergh saves the day, however, when she escapes from
the mental hospital she has been imprisoned in and has Wheeler removed from
office. FDR wins a special election in 1942, and America enters war on the correct
side after the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor in 1942.
Most of the political commentary in contemporary dystopia focuses on fears of cor-
porate domination. Sometimes, as in T.C. Boyle’s satirical short story “Jubilation,”
the domination is soft, and the dystopia created requires consumers to purchase
shares in it. Boyle, who has written 19 books and numerous short stories, tells of the
ultimate planned community, created by the Contash Corporation as an adjunct to
their theme park. Boyle focuses on Jackson, a newly divorced man who has sold a
 DYSTOPIAN FICTION 321

medium-sized company to a larger one and is preparing for early retirement. He

bribes his way into Jubilation, starts dating Vicki, an attractive single mother with
attractive children, and seems to be well on the way to a pleasant if ready-made life.
Unfortunately, Jubilation is not all it is supposed to be. The mosquitoes carry
malaria, a redneck neighbor begins to rebuild a race car on his lawn, and there is a
hurricane. The Contash Corporation has also forgotten to remove the alligators
from the lake around which the town is built, and one of the alligators eventually
eats Vicki’s son Ethan while Jackson is squiring her family around the lake in a row-
boat. Jackson, ever an optimist, stays on after the hurricane and after Vicki’s depar-
ture. He begins dating a woman whose husband was killed in the hurricane and
serving on Jubilation committees. Boyle’s satire strongly argues that dystopia can be
desirable if it is a commodity provided by corporate America.
Although she has written many novels, poems, and television scripts, Margaret
Atwood’s intellectual reputation rests largely on her dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale.
This stature has allowed her to write for The New York Times, The Washington
Post, and the liberal newsmagazine The Nation. In Oryx and Crake, her return to
the dystopian genre, Atwood envisions a near-future dystopia that is a logical exten-
sion of trends in today’s society. Corporations house not only their offices, research
facilities, and plants inside compounds protected by armed security guards, but also
their employees. Everyone else lives in the pleeblands, vast urban wastelands. Global
warming has begun to drown coastal cities and create food shortages. Atwood
begins the story shortly after society has been almost entirely wiped out by a plague
and tells the story of the catastrophe in a series of flashbacks that initially appear to
be the personal reminiscences of Jimmy, a plague survivor.
Jimmy has grown up in a compound run by a bioengineering firm that creates
hybrid animals. While attending the compound’s school, he meets Glenn, a new kid,
and begins an unlikely friendship. Jimmy is a “word person,” while Glenn is a sci-
entific genius. As they go through high school together, Glenn develops an unusual
interest in extinct animals and renames himself Crake. The two friends are parted
by their careers, Jimmy going to an obscure college that specializes in the liberal arts
and Crake attending the prestigious Watson-Crick institute. Jimmy takes a job writ-
ing advertising copy for a futuristic patent-medicine firm, while Crake takes a high-
paying job with a biotech firm. Eventually, Crake recruits Jimmy to run the
advertising campaign for BlyssPluss, a combination birth control/sexual enhance-
ment product that Crake has designed. While working for Crake, Jimmy learns that
his old friend has created a new race of humans via genetic engineering. They are
docile, largely because the females go into estrus, and competition over lovers is
therefore limited. They live for 30 years, and then their bodies shut down. Crake
tells Jimmy that these new humanoids are for research purposes, but eventually
Jimmy learns the truth. Crake has embedded a plague within BlyssPluss, and it soon
spreads throughout the world. Crake has actually created replacements for human-
ity, reasoning that it is more moral to start over. Upon his friend’s request, Jimmy
kills Crake, ensuring that the government will not be able to force Crake to reveal
the antidote for the plague. The novel ends with Jimmy, who has become a minor
deity to Jimmy’s new humans, debating whether to kill other plague survivors and
keep Crake’s Garden of Eden going. Unlike the hopeful ending of The Handmaid’s
Tale, Oryx and Crake provides no future voice telling readers of an eventual reso-
lution. If Atwood is somewhat optimistic about gender relations, she is in a much
darker mood about corporate interference with nature.
322 DYSTOPIAN FICTION

Not all environmental and anti-corporate dystopias present their arguments so

grimly, however. Lisa Lerner’s eccentrically upbeat first novel Just Like Beauty uses
a beauty pageant, a perennial target of satire, to provide a mirror of a monstrously
dystopian society. Set in a generally recognizable near-future—people drive mini-
wagons, live in the suburbs, and shop in identity malls—and focusing on the com-
ing of age of 14-year-old Edie and her relationship with her dysfunctional family,
the novel in many ways is a typical young adult tale. Indeed, a major subplot
involves Edie getting her first period. Yet Edie is maturing in a society that has
become the nightmare that both feminists and anti-corporate activists have been
warning against. The economy is controlled by the Just Like corporation, a manu-
facturer of synthetic alternatives to everything from pharmaceuticals to clothing to
food. Consequently, the rivers and rain smell foul, California has auctioned its red-
wood forests to a partner of the Just Like conglomerate, and housecat-sized
grasshoppers are multiplying and mutating as they drink Just Like insecticide.
Teachers torture students for being late to class, gangs of boys armed with oxy-
acetylene torches terrorize attractive girls, and Edie and her peers are training to
compete in the Feminine Woman of Conscience pageant, a droll satire of contem-
porary pageants that adds rabbit skinning, identifying chemical compounds, and
sexually stimulating the Electric Polyrubber Man to evening gown and swimsuit
competition. Consumerism keeps most of the citizens of Learner’s dystopia
appeased, but there are two countercultural movements. The first is Happy Endings,
a group that promotes suicide as a means to heal the earth’s problems. The second
is the terrorist Lily Gates, who occupies herself with theatrical gestures such as
blowing up Just Like Meat Planet fast food restaurants.
As difficult as adolescence is, Edie must grow into adulthood under these trying
circumstances. Further angst is added to her life by the crush she has on her neigh-
bor and classmate Lana. Even though Edie is one of the favorites to win the Femi-
nine Woman of Conscience, she has trouble seeing how she can fit in to her society.
Having cleverly set up the social and interpersonal conflicts in Edie’s life, Lerner cre-
ates a problematic ending for her novel. At the pageant, Edie, who is poised to win,
decides to pour insecticide around the stage and loose a plague of grasshoppers who
are eagerly drawn to their favorite food. At that moment, a bomb-toting Lana
reveals herself as Lily Gates, and the two girls ride off into the sunset in Lana’s
father’s Triumph TR-3. Almost immediately, however, Edie decides to return home
and patch things up with her family. This abrupt ending makes it seem like Edie has
stopped worrying and learned to love Big Brother.
Many proponents of the free market speak of it in utopian terms. In David Allen
Cates’s X Out of Wonderland, however, contemporary American faith in deregu-
lation is portrayed as creating a dystopia that thinks it is a utopia. Cates, the
Director of Missoula Medical Aid, is also a travel writer whose work has appeared
in magazines such as Outside, and he has written extensively on poverty in
America. Cates combines his journalistic experience and his political advocacy to
create a cautionary tale about free-market fundamentalism modeled on Voltaire’s
Candide. Wonderland is a free-market paradise, at least according to the media
and popular culture, which seem to be relying on the theories of the noted econ-
omist Dr. Fingerdoo for this information. The inhabitants of Wonderland, however,
may see things differently.
Cates explores the distance between free-market utopianism and the lived expe-
riences of the contemporary middle class by telling the story of X, who hosts a
 DYSTOPIAN FICTION 323

call-in radio show for home handymen and women on NPR. Although the
Wonderlandian economy seems to be providing X with the goods and services he
needs and desires, this is not to last. He is let go from his job when his show is
privatized and the hardware store chain that purchases it decides to bring in its own
host. Shortly thereafter, X’s house is destroyed by a tornado, and his bankrupt insur-
ance company is unable to make good on his claim. X’s sudden poverty is much
worse than it otherwise might have been because right before the tornado destroyed
his house, X met C, the love of his life.
This begins X’s lifelong quest to reestablish himself financially and make a life
with C. While the various episodes are by turn funny and gut-wrenching, Cates’s
underlying theme is that the inherent instability of the free market makes it unable
to create lasting human happiness. During the course of the novel, X peddles goods
in an unregulated market with an unnamed woman in a pink lame dress until organ-
ized crime drives them out of business. He then works in a sweatshop making
shoelaces, eventually rising to run the shoelace company with C, though a misun-
derstanding with the woman in pink lame drives X away from C. The star-crossed
lovers eventually reunite, however, when C is dying of AIDS. X is also drafted into
the Wonderlandian army to fight in a war designed to “keep the market free, a war
against mean people who just plain ‘didn’t get it,’ economically or culture-wise, and
weren’t good at making weapons, either” (137). He runs afoul of the Wonderlandian
government and is accused of terrorism and imprisoned by Homeland Security.
Through it all, however, he never loses faith in Dr. Fingerdoo and never bothers to
question his assertions about the utopian nature of an unregulated market economy.

Bibliography
Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. New York: Doubleday, 2003.
———. The Handmaid’s Tale: A Novel. New York: Anchor, 1998.
Bernard, Cheryl. Turning on the Girls. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001.
Boyle, T.C. “Jubilation.” In Tooth and Claw. New York: Viking, 2005.
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Del Ray, 1987.
Califia, Patrick. “Dolly.” In No Mercy. San Francisco: Alyson, 2000.
Cates, David Allen. X Out of Wonderland: A Saga. New York: Random House, 2005.
Coover, Robert. The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Director’s Cut. New York: Grove, 2002.
Doctorow, Cory. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. New York: TOR, 2003.
Donnelly, Ignatius. Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century. Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 2003.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998.
Learner, Lisa. Just Like Beauty. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002.
Lewis, Sinclair. It Can’t Happen Here. New York: Signet, 2005.
London, Jack. The Iron Heel. New York: Penguin, 2006.
Orwell, George. 1984. New York: Signet, 1950.
Roth, Philip. The Plot Against America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.
Verne, Jules. The Begum’s Fortune. Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2003.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Player Piano. New York: Dial Press, 1999.
Zamyatin, Yevgeney. We. New York: Eos, 1999.

Further Reading
Barash, Nanelle. “Biology, Culture, and Persistent Literary Dystopias.” Chronicle of Higher
Education 3 Dec. 2004: B10–B11; Beauchamp, Gorman. “Technology in the Dystopian
Novel.” Modern Fiction Studies 32.1 (1986): 53–63; Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. New
324 DYSTOPIAN FICTION

York: Mariner, 2002; Culver, Stuart K. “Waiting for the End of the World: Catastrophe and
the Populist Myth of History.” Configurations 3.3 (1995): 391–413; Gottlieb, Erika.
Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Terror and Trial. Montreal: McGill-Queens
University Press, 2001; Hintz, Carrie, and Elaine Ostrey. Utopian and Dystopian Writing for
Children and Young Adults. New York: Routledge, 2003; Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the
Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder, CO: Westview-Perseus, 2000.
MARK T. DECKER
Books and Beyond
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Books and Beyond
The Greenwood Encyclopedia
of New American Reading

VOLUME 2: E–M

Edited by
KENNETH WOMACK

GREENWOOD PRESS
Westport, Connecticut • London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Books and beyond : the Greenwood encyclopedia of new American reading / edited by Kenneth Womack.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-0-313-33738-3 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0-313-33737-6 (v. 1 : alk. paper) — ISBN:
978-0-313-33740-6 (v. 2 : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0-313-33741-3 (v. 3 : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0-
313-33742-0 (v. 4 : alk. paper)
1. Books and reading—United States—Encyclopedias. 2. Reading interests—United States—Encyclo-
pedias. 3. Popular literature—United States—Encyclopedias. 4. Fiction genres—Encyclopedias. 5.
American literature—History and criticism. 6. English literature—History and criticism. I. Womack,
Kenneth.
Z1003.2B64 2008
028’.9097303—dc22 2008018703

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.

Copyright © 2008 by Kenneth Womack

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be

reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008018703

ISBN: 978–0–313–33738–3 (set)
978–0–313–33737–6 (vol. 1)
978–0–313–33740–6 (vol. 2)
978–0–313–33741–3 (vol. 3)
978–0–313–33742–0 (vol. 4)

First published in 2008

Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881

An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www.greenwood.com

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the

Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents

Preface ix

Introduction: Reading in America Today xi

Entries
Academic Fiction 1
Adventure Fiction 13
African American Literature 26
Arab American Literature 40
Arthurian Literature 53
Asian American Literature 66
Autobiography and Memoir 87
Beat Poetry 97
Biography 112
Chick Lit 137
Children’s Literature 162
Christian Fiction 185
Comedic Theatre 195
Comic Books 209
Coming of Age Fiction (Bildungsroman) 222
Contemporary Mainstream American Fiction 249
Cyberpunk 274
Dramatic Theatre 289
Dystopian Fiction 312
Ecopoetry 325
Erotic Literature 338
vi CONTENTS

Fantasy Literature 351

Film Adaptations of Books 366
Flash Fiction 385
GLBTQ Literature 401
Graphic Novels 416
Historical Fantasy 427
Historical Fiction 440
Historical Mysteries 455
Historical Writing (Nonfiction) 468
Holocaust Literature 483
Humor 498
Inspirational Literature (Nonfiction) 511
Jewish American Literature 521
Language Poetry 537
Latino American Literature 552
Legal Thrillers 561
Literary Journalism 571
Magical Realism 587
Manga and Anime 600
Military Literature 612
Musical Theatre 625
Mystery Fiction 638
Native American Literature 663
New Age Literature 682
Occult/Supernatural Literature 699
Parapsychology 717
Philological Thrillers 732
Poetry 740
Regional Fiction 767
Road Fiction 782
Romance Novels 796
Science Fiction 805
Science Writing (Nonfiction) 833
Sea Literature 848
Self-Help Literature 862
Series Fiction 880
Space Opera 894
Speculative Fiction 917
Sports Literature 930
Spy Fiction 954
Suspense Fiction 962
Sword and Sorcery Fiction 971
 CONTENTS vii

Terrorism Fiction 995

Time Travel Fiction 1012
Transrealist Fiction 1025
Travel Writing 1034
True Crime Literature 1047
Urban Fiction 1065
Utopian Literature 1078
Vampire Fiction 1091
Verse Novels 1119
Western Literature 1131
Young Adult Literature 1147
Zines 1163

Contemporary Authors by Genre 1177

Suggestions for Further Reading 1191

About the Editor and Contributors 1195

Index 1205
This page intentionally left blank
E

ECOPOETRY
Definition. Readers use the term ecopoetry to describe the most recent develop-
ment in a longstanding tradition of nature-oriented poetry. Ecopoetry uses language
to deepen a sense of nature’s presence in our lives, and these invocations of nature’s
presence—celebratory of the biological fact that we are nature—suggest an ecolog-
ical understanding of nature and its processes. As John Elder explains in the first
book-length treatment of the intersections between poetry and ecology, Imagining
the Earth (1985), the principles of ecology change one’s vision of nature as well as
the form in which that vision is expressed.
History. As early as 1980, Robert Bly suggested that poets have long imagined
something like an ecological worldview. This poetic, cultural, and spiritual orienta-
tion to the world is organized around a sense of interrelatedness between the human
and the more-than-human world. The erosion of this more holistic worldview
appears in the more self-conscious nature writing of late eighteenth-century
Romantic poets in Europe as well as the early nineteenth-century writers in
America. The work of these writers expresses a troubled separation from nature, as
well as a concern with the irreversible industrial, technological, and political events
that were shaping new conditions for human life.
“A poem concerned with a larger economy than the human one”—this is Jonathan
Bate’s summary assessment of John Keats’s “To Autumn,” an ode that expresses a
network of relations between inner and outer ecologies of mind. Bate’s Song of the
Earth (2000) discusses the contexts and legacies of the Romantic tradition through
the affinities between the imagination and the biosphere. Wordsworth is the source
for the tradition of poems that no longer arise from an occasion but rather respond
to a place. This response to place is most vividly expressed in the poems of two
nineteenth-century American writers, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Their
work undermines the religious discourses that determine the place of nature and its
value in our lives. In his Walt Whitman and the Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics (2004),
M. Jimmie Killingsworth turns to Whitman for “a more radical investigation into the
326 ECOPOETRY

possibilities and limits of human creativity” in order to better understand “how we

use language to figure out our relationship to the earth” (4). His study of the
intersections between environmental rhetoric and ecopoetics demonstrates how
“Whitman’s poetry embodies the kinds of conflicted experience and language that
continually crop up in the discourse of political ecology” (9–10).
This “conflicted experience and language” recurs in nature poetry throughout the
twentieth century. Reading William Wordsworth as an ecologically minded natural-
ist, John Elder traces changing attentiveness to nature and increasingly conflicted
attitudes toward tradition from T.S. Eliot and Robinson Jeffers through the intrica-
cies of nature’s processes in the poems of Gary Snyder, A.R. Ammons, Robert Pack,
and Wendell Berry. The intellectual context for Guy Rotella’s 1991 Reading and
Writing Nature is American nature poetry, from the Puritan poets Anne Bradstreet
and Edward Taylor to Emerson and Dickinson. His study traces the broad episte-
mological and aesthetic implications of this early work in the poetry of Robert
Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop. These four poets
turn to nature to explore the possibilities and limits of language and meaning and
to envision poetic forms that are, in Rotella’s reading, “at best conditional or
‘fictive’ consolations, not redemptive truths” (xi). Bernard W. Quetchenbach’s Back
from the Far Field: American Nature Poetry in the Late Twentieth Century (2000)
then extends Rotella’s study of American nature poetry into the postwar poetry of
Robert Bly, Gary Snyder, and Wendell Berry that incorporates the public rhetoric of
environmentalism.
Other literary critics who reread modern poetry using the insights and general
principles of ecology include Gyorgyi Voros, whose Notations of the Wild: The
Poetry of Wallace Stevens (1997) describes six familiar aspects of Steven’s work that
“readily lend themselves to an ecological reading” (83–86). Jane Frazier, in From
Origin to Ecology: Nature and the Poetry of W.S. Merwin (1999), follows the devel-
opment of Merwin’s ecological worldview. Frost, Stevens, and Moore are read
together in Bonnie Costello’s Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern
American Poetry (2003) to demonstrate how landscape serves as both structure and
meaning in the later generation of poets. Costello’s book, although not explicitly a
study of ecopoetics, explores poetic responses to the modern world in Charles
Wright, Amy Clampitt, A.R. Ammons, and John Ashbery as they create new repre-
sentations of the landscape. “In Stevens’ work, as in Frost’s,” Costello explains, “the
desire for the real, and for nature, must reckon always with the frame, with
landscape” (15). Scott Bryson’s The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and
Ecopoetry (2005) also turns to poems that “become models for how to approach
the landscape surrounding us so that we view it as a meaningful place rather than
abstract place” (12), with a focus on the poems of Wendell Berry, Joy Harjo, Mary
Oliver, and W.S. Merwin.
Trends and Themes. These critical discussions of the relationship between the
human and the nonhuman world—between the language of poetry and the world
that surrounds a poem—are a part of the historical development of an ecological
perspective. Ernst Haeckel’s term oecologie suggested to his nineteenth-century
contemporaries the potential to reimagine human affairs as a part of the larger
economy of nature. As late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century ecolo-
gists studied biological entities as a part of an ecosystem, the discipline of ecology
sought standing in the scientific community as a quantitative science. The science of
ecology then diverged from the descriptive explanations of nature and the role of
 ECOPOETRY 327

humans in the natural world and the spatial metaphors that defined the field. The
science of ecology also moved from more general conceptions of ecological
processes to more complex, unpredictable, and open natural systems, random
events, disequilibrium, and flux.
The concept of the ecosystem, however, offered an abstract but at the same time
tangible way to conceive of (and study) the relationship between natural and human
environments. Ecosystem ecology, more simply put, offered a new vision that would
help people reidentify with the processes of the natural world. In his 1989 book The
End of Nature, Bill McKibben reviews the underlying habits of mind that need to
be rethought: “we tell time badly . . . our sense of scale is awry . . . [and] our more-
is-better obsession with ‘positive’ numbers prevents us from seeing that we have
ruptured our link with Nature” (13–14). This critique begins with the ecological
imperatives of the environmental crisis. It envisions the necessity of developing
ecological values within the political, social, and technological realms—encompass-
ing scientific awareness, a reverence for the living world, and the responsibility of
the continuing work of seeking to align social and community systems with the
grander systems of life. These ecological precepts are at the center of Robert Dish’s
The Ecological Conscience: Values for Survival (1970)—a collection of essays that
includes Aldo Leopold, Barry Commoner, Paul Shepard, Lewis Mumford, Paul
Goodman, and R. Buckminster Fuller, as well as an essay by “eco-poet” Gary
Snyder, “Poetry and the Primitive: Notes on Poetry as an Ecological Survival
Technique.” More recently, enthnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan has reiterated these
ecological values in his Cross-Pollinations: The Marriage of Science and Poetry
(2004). Nabhan provides a case study in mixing the practices of field science with
indigenous poetic knowledge (of desert plants, in this case). He moves freely within
and across scientific and poetic discourses to discover the possibilities for a more
integrated (and more humane) understanding of the natural world.
The development of an ecological perspective in the twentieth century is part of a
national and international strain in literary modernism that changed the direction
of poetry and art “as a necessary condition for changing the ways in which we think
and act as human beings” (Joris and Rothenberg 1995, 2). These poets and artists
work from the conviction “that poetry is a part of a struggle to save the wild
places—in the world and in the mind.” They view “the poem as a wild thing and of
poetry and the poet as endangered species” (12).
Literary applications of the term ecology have, as these examples suggest,
extended the scientific study of interrelationships to the process of the mind,
giving rise to the now familiar phrases “ecology of mind” and “environmental
imagination.”

Ecopoetry uses comparable metaphors for describing the relationship between poetic
making and ecology. Snyder writes that the ecologist looks at “population dynamics, plant and
animal succession, predator-prey relationships, competition and cooperation, feeding levels,
food chains, whole ecosystems, and the flow of energy through ecosystems” (1968, 31).The
kind of poem that might draw on these energies in an ecosystem, he goes on to suggest,
would be much like developments in fiction that have moved beyond “stock figures and
charming plots” to “the inner lives and psyches of our characters, all their obsessions,
kinkiness, and secrets” (32).
328 ECOPOETRY

Context and Issues. Contemporary readers have defined the ecopoet’s inclination
toward primary, lived experience and the world of the senses through phenomenol-
ogy. J. Hillis Miller’s Six Poets of Reality (1965) first suggested to readers of
American poetry the theoretical resources of phenomenology—specifically through
the writings of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and the French phenom-
enologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. But it was not until Charles Altieri’s study of
American poetry in the 1960s that readers would begin to explore the relationship
between poetry and ecology. Enlarging the Temple (1979) explores what Altieri calls
radical presence, “the insistence that the moment immediately and intensively
experienced can restore one to harmony with the world and provide ethical and
psychological renewal” (78). Altieri offered a sophisticated reading of Snyder that
appreciated the ecological system as central metaphor in his poetry. “Ecology deals
not with ideas,” Altieri argues in his chapter on Snyder and Robert Duncan, “but
with modes of action and with the unity of interrelationships in nature, and its
verification is the fullness of the environment it creates” (135). Using this definition,
he reads Snyder’s incorporation of the mind’s process into the natural pattern of
relationships in the poems “A Walk” and “Six-Month Song in the Foothills” from
the 1968 volume The Backcountry. “Six-Month Song in the Foothills,” for example,
works from a deep sense of connection and responsibility to the earth that, in turn,
“prepares a possible meditative mode where one can construct an imaginary space
in which particular balances reveal a deeper unity” (137). “Grinding the falling
axe/sharp for the summer/a swallow shooting out over/over the river, snow on the
low hills/sharpening wedges for splitting” (Snyder 1968, 17). These lines suggest a
complex spatial experience by balancing elements in the natural world as well as
revealing a mind alive with the exchange of inner and outer life.
Altieri raises significant questions regarding the philosophical adequacy of any
poetics of presence in his subsequent discussion of W.S. Merwin’s struggles with
presence and absence in The Lice (1968) and Denise Levertov’s attempts to use the
aesthetics of presence in her poems in the late 1960s. “Considered as metaphysi-
cal or religious meditation,” Altieri says, “the poetry of the sixties seems to me
highly sophisticated; it takes into account all the obvious secular objections to tra-
ditional religious thought and actually continues and extends the inquiries of
philosophers as diverse as Heidegger, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein” (1979, 226).
Frank O’Hara, Snyder, Robert Creeley, and Merwin all “give resonance and imag-
inative life to Heideggerean claims that poetry is the taking up of sites in which
being, or the numinous familiar, discloses itself and testifies to the powers of the
attentive mind” (225). However, this very success, Altieri insists, “makes it disap-
pointing that the poetry fails so miserably in handling social and ethical issues.”
What is missing is an acknowledgement of the gap between values found in
meditating on nature and those values developed through reflection on public
themes and problems (236).
Leonard Scigaj argues that this gap is not tenable given the environmental crisis
and the need to use language to understand nature’s process. “With its emphasis on
referential context,” he insists, “environmental poetry must contain an activist
dimension to foreground particular acts of environmental degradation and
degraded planetary ecosystems” (1999, 21). Scigaj’s Sustainable Poetry (1999) seeks
to reorient readers to the referential function of literature and the standpoint of
environmentalism. His project, as he succinctly puts it, seeks to “critique post-
structuralist language theory and provide an alternative” (xiii). He turns to the
 ECOPOETRY 329

phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to elucidate the cultural value of writ-

ers such as A.R. Ammons, Wendell Berry, Denise Levertov, W.S. Merwin, Gary
Snyder, and Adrienne Rich. These poets approach language as “a positive instru-
ment that can promote authentic social and environmental relations between
humans and their environment—relations that can lead to emancipatory change”
(33). As Scigaj admonishes, “We need a sustainable poetry, a poetry that does not
allow the degradation of ecosystems through inattention to the referential base of
all language. We need a poetry that treats nature as a separate and equal other and
includes respect for nature conceived as a series of ecosystems—dynamic and poten-
tially self-regulating cyclic feedback systems” (5). Scigaj concludes that in the face
of environmental crisis, we are no longer able to naturalize these ecosystems “into
benign backdrops for human preoccupations” or to “reduce them to nonexistence
by an obsessive focus on language” in our literary work.
Jonathan Bate argues, to the contrary, that ecopoetics properly begins “not as a
set of assumptions or proposals about particular environmental issues, but as a way
of reflecting upon what it might mean to dwell upon the earth” (2000, 266).
Killingsworth makes a similar distinction. “I use the term ecopoetics when my read-
ings aim for a primarily phenomenological significance and ecocriticism when they
take a sharply political turn, invoking issues on the current environmentalist
agenda” (2004, 6). As the literary critic Jed Rasula points out, after all, the poet
seeks not to “‘change the world’—a futile repetition of the Prometheus complex—
but [to] change the mind that conceives, and accedes to, that composition of the real
we acknowledge as the world” (2002, 62). Rasula’s This Compost: Ecological
Imperatives in American Poetry (2002) elaborates the ecological dynamics at play
in the modern poetics of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan.
Rasula has no interest in defining and arguing for the distinctiveness of a select
group of poets with common ecological concerns. Rather his subject is poets who
call on the imagination “as a resource of ecological understanding” and poetry “in
a truly re-creational capacity, one that redefines ‘recreation’ as original participa-
tion” (3). For Rasula, ecopoetry begins with the inadequacy of the self and its
anthropocentric preoccupations, and it goes on to envision language and poetry, in
the words of Snyder, “as an ecological survival technique” (1969, 117).
Reception. Any poet who writes with an environmental or ecological perspective
is implicated in what Bate calls the “ontologically double” nature of the poetic. As
Bate describes it, “The poetic is either (both?) a language (logos) that restores us to
our home (oikos) or (and?) a melancholy recognizing that our only home (oikos) is
language (logos)” (2000, 281). Angus Fletcher’s A New Theory for American
Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination (2004) affirms
this “ontological doubleness” as the condition of any poetic use of language. John
Clare, Walt Whitman, and John Ashberry elaborate “both the powers and the con-
straints operating upon poetry when it seeks to represent the world around us” (3).
Fletcher’s argument addresses the question of what happens when the poet’s way of
being in the world “is defined as an ecological surrounding” (5). To what degree is
the environment poem, Fletcher asks, “designed to increase our knowledge, as dis-
tinct from our experience, and if the latter, must our increased knowledge be of a
factual nature?” (135); is it possible, in the environment poem, to distinguish the
widest possible definition of nature “from any locally confined notion of any singu-
lar environment, any singular ecosystem?” (136–137). And as ecological discourse
continues to permeate human thinking about the natural world, how might poetry
330 ECOPOETRY

contribute not to representing the environment or “saving the earth,” but rather to
seeing the future world as an ecosystem?
As Fletcher explains, “Unlike most prose discourse, poetry expresses close
personal involvements, and hence pertains to the way we humans respond, on our
own, to environmental matters.” Fletcher elaborates the development of a more
democratic and descriptive mode of poetry, the environment poem, that “introduces
the experience of an outside that is developed for the reader inside the experience of
the work . . . a surrounding that actually has more presence than any state of mind”
(2004, 227). Rather than focus on the end of the poem as representing a place (the
topographic), Fletcher privileges space (the chorographic). He recognizes the limits
of defining space in terms of place or limiting the experience of an environment to
a fixed and static state. The chorographic poetry of Clare, Whitman, and Ashberry
“names the turbulent surface of the living ground on which or in which every thing
is placed, even imprinted, while this sitting or placement remains always shaken and
oscillating in the changes of the becoming” (269). The ecopoet, in this definition,
uses description to undermine the more accessible comforts of place, “the nostalgia
for home that place humanly implies.” As Fletcher concludes, the chorographic
“questions topos or place, by showing turbulent movements within space.”
Scott Bryson reads the ecopoet’s exploration of place and space as working
toward “an increased awareness of the ecological interconnection between all the
inhabitors of a particular place” and a “healthy space-consciousness . . . inherently
humble” and grounded in “the inadequacies in human attempts to control, master,
or even fully understand the world around them” (2005, 22). Bryson argues that the
ecopoet offers a vision of the world with two interdependent if not paradoxical
desires: “to create place, making a conscious and concerted effort to know the
more-than-human world around us . . . and to value space, recognizing the extent
to which that very world is unknowable” (8).
While Fletcher’s work does not explicitly draw on the critical discourse of
ecopoetics, his argument extends Bryson’s discussion of poets who seek to both cre-
ate place and value space—“to know the world and to recognize its ultimate
unknowability” (Bryson 2005, 8). In organizing his study around the idea that
“environmental sensitivity demands its own new genre of poetry” (Fletcher 2004, 9),
however, Fletcher argues that environment poems “are not about the environment,
whether natural or social, they are environments” (103). The question of how a
reader enters and becomes subject to the environment poem then becomes a matter
of entertaining the possible powers of environmental and ecological identification
with a symbolic or semiotic space.
Selected Authors. The primary ecological imperative of poetry, in the words of
Gary Snyder, “must be that we try to see whatever current crisis we are in as part
of an older larger pattern” (2004, 10). The assimilated “compost of feeling and
thinking” that gives rise to a poem is a source, for Snyder, deeper than the individ-
ual and more connected. Buddhist philosophy and Native American cultural per-
spectives and life ways provide additional sources for his distinctive bioregional
poetics. Snyder conceives of poetry and scholarship as treating language and
memory as part of the natural systems of exchange that inspire human song. He
seeks to accomplish this through abandoning the fiction of the self to access a more
primary source for understanding, through archaic practices and human values
more closely associated with nature. From this point of view, poets have more to do
than write poems “about” the environment or “speak for” nature, for their creative
 ECOPOETRY 331

work arises out of and informs the complex exchanges between nature and human
cultures.
Ecology and biology have informed Snyder’s poetics since the 1960s. “As the
evolutionary model dominated nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinking, hence-
forth the ecological model will dominate our model of how the world is—reciprocal
and interactive rather than competitive” (130), Snyder proposes in his 1969 collec-
tion of journals and essays, Earth House Hold. In Snyder’s early poetry, reciprocity
and interactivity play out in forms of consciousness and metaphor modeled on the
continual exchanges of natural energy and form. His poetics incorporate the
impulse to think about nature in language as he articulates a way of being within
nature. At the same time that he has elegantly and successfully developed a distinc-
tive poetry, Snyder has established himself as a preeminent spokesperson for living
more responsibly on the earth. The poems in Turtle Island (1974) celebrate and
affirm life at the same time they suggest a broader vision of living.
Ecological succession is a central metaphor in the bioregional focus of the collec-
tion of poems Axe Handles (1983). As his work develops, moreover, Snyder
continues to affirm the deep and intricate relationship between the ancient cultural
traditions of art in China and Japan and the ecological worldview of the twentieth
century. Snyder sees the world through the prism of language as well as through the
impulse of most Chinese and Japanese poetry, of “seeing the world without any
prism of language, and to bring that seeing into language” (1968, 143).
Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996) is a book-length poem that Anthony
Hunt calls “a fundamental wisdom text for the modern ecological movement”
(272). The sequence of poems explores the present moment (for Snyder the
10,000 years or so of human experience in the Holocene) by moving across
cultures and time. The poem explores the history of the North American landscape
and its geological and geomorphic processes, while drawing on a long tradition of
Chinese art that takes mountains and rivers as the central metaphors for organiz-
ing space. Mountains and Rivers Without End affirms Bate’s conclusion that
Snyder is “the most ecologically self-conscious of twentieth century poets” (2000,
246). The ecological corollary to Snyder’s observation that nature will always
exceed our attempts to define it is precisely the refusal to accept the idea that we
are separate from nature. This reminder expresses a complex and highly developed
program Snyder has called re-inhabitation, a part of what Snyder has called the
practice of the wild. Snyder’s ecopoetry in this way suggests a broader role for
itself, as a guide to the creation of an ecology of readers and writers. For “what we
ultimately need most,” writes Snyder, “are human beings who love the world”
(1968, 70).
Wendell Berry’s agrarian aesthetic parallels Snyder’s bioregional poetics. Elder
observes that “Berry identifies his life as a farmer and a poet with the cycle of decay
and renewal in the soil. This is an analogy for the process of health in art and human
life to which Gary Snyder returns” (1996, 52). Both are persuasive writers of non-
fiction who are fiercely eloquent on the importance of place, the cultivation of
regional economies, and the renewal of place-based, community values. Yet Berry’s
Christian vision provides a distinctive path for developing a poetry that seeks to
redress a radically diminished state of human affairs. His ecological vision casts man
in the role of responsible and responsive steward of the land—in his case, the land
of his farm in Port Royal, Kentucky. Such stewardship requires a rejection of a
modern urban-industrial society organized around “a series of radical disconnections
332 ECOPOETRY

between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community
and the earth” (1991, 64).
Berry explores the possibilities of restoring these broken connections in his first
books of poetry. These poems speak directly to the contemporary origins of an
increasingly indifferent and destructive attitude toward the natural world. The acute
sense of loss and destruction of the human community and its relationship to the
land in the twentieth century is as troubling a problem for Berry as the history of
indifference to the land and the human community that have been a part of this
irresponsible behavior. Much like William Carlos Williams in the 1920s, Berry sees
the relationship to the land as inseparable from a more complex ecology that
includes human history. “I am forever being crept up on and newly startled by the
realization that my people established themselves here by killing or driving out the
original possessors, by the awareness that people were once bought and sold here
by my people, by the sense of the violence they have done to their own kind and to
each other and to the earth, by the persistent failure to serve either the place or their
community in it” (1969, 104). The problem lies in the failure to see the affinities
between the wild and what he calls the domestic. “The wild and the domestic now
often seem isolated values, estranged from one another. And yet these are not exclu-
sive polarities like good and evil. There can be continuity between them, and there
must be,” Berry insists in Long-Legged House (1964, 18).
For Berry, the continuity between the wild and the domestic is sustained through
daily labor. Such service, moreover, involves healing. From his first collection
Broken Ground (1968) Berry seeks to reground his life in the soil of his native
Kentucky. Too, he eschews the too-common sense that an understanding of place
might be won at little cost. Rather, Berry’s poems urge the contemporary reader to
see beyond the narrow vision of one individual’s relationship to the land and to
accept the inherited fate of environmental restoration. As his speaker Nathan
Coulter puts it in the poem “Where” from Farming: A Handbook, “the idea of
making/my lifetime one of the several/it will take to bring back/the possibilities of
this place/that used to be here” (93). In his fifth collection of essays, A Continuous
Harmony (1972), he aligns farming with ecology rather than economy, an argument
much like Snyder’s in the 1960s that economics, properly understood, would be a
sub-branch of ecology. Berry goes on to say that ecology “may well find its proper
disciplines in the arts, whose function is to refine and enliven perception, for eco-
logical principles, however publicly approved, can be enacted only upon the basis of
each man’s perception of his relation to the world” (100). In this, Berry calls atten-
tion to the necessity of discovering things as they are—rather than the impulse to
create and impose human forms on the natural world.
This vision of immersion in the more-than-human world has been difficult for
poets to sustain given the heightened environmental and ecological concerns of the
late twentieth century. Although Snyder and Berry’s work is deeply informed by
science, A.R. Ammons has fulfilled Walt Whitman’s prophecy in Democratic Vistas
of a future that would produce a poet “consistent with science.” Ammons begins
with the scientific view that the planet is ancient and has preceded humans by
billions of years. And he rejects the idea of permanence and embraces nature as an
intricate, evolving, and adaptive system. The critic Helen Vendler celebrates
Ammons’s use of scientific language as a distinctive contribution to modern poetry.
Ammons is the first American poet, Vendler writes, “to use scientific language with
manifest ease and accuracy, as a part of his natural vocabulary” (2005, 215).
 ECOPOETRY 333

Ammons’s first book-length poem, Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965), is most
explicit about his ecological interests: “ecology is my word: tag/me with that,”
writes Ammons, “come in there: you will find yourself/in a firmless country:/centers
& peripheries/in motion,/organic, interrelations!” (112). He puts this perspective
more directly in his poem “Exotic”: “Science outstrips/other modes & reveals more
of/the crux of the matter/than we can calmly/handle” (69). Ideas and terminology
from science pervade The Collected Poems 1951–1971, especially the quatrains
of “Extremes and Moderations” and the tercets of “Essay on Poetics” and
“Hibernaculum.” The poem “Extremes and Moderations” explores the self-regulating
laws of nature in what has been called Ammons’s most significant ecological testi-
mony. Its primary interest is the precarious relationship between the natural and the
artificial. On one level the poem is a romantic paean to those caught in the fixed and
constricted environment of the city. However, the poem is more centrally concerned
with the question of human purpose in the age of science and technology. The poem
cautiously accepts human activity at the same time that it rejects outright the idea
that human ingenuity and innovation can control nature. It registers a self-conscious
environmental concern with the effects of human activity. Echoing Rachel Carson’s
response to the excesses of human ambition and arrogance in Silent Spring (1962),
Ammons takes umbrage at “the rampaging industrialists, the chemical devisors and
manipulators,” intoxicated with “dollar lust”—the cause, he writes, of the loss of
“common air” and “common rain’s/losing its heavenly clarity.” Ammons’s position
is a natural consequence of his interest in physics, biology, physical chemistry, and
meteorology, his love for the inexhaustible mysteries of the natural world, and his
meditations on the philosophical and ethical implications of science.
Ammons revives the romantic correspondence between nature and human
perception through a lifelong study of the intricacies of observable phenomena and
the networks of energy and material that make up the natural world. His praise for
the quotidian, the overlooked and the useless, is therefore compensatory in the face
of the dazzling ephemerality of human activity. His love of the particular thing,
moreover, is enriched by his relentless exploration of transient forms. His broad and
eclectic knowledge of science moves from the intercellular depths of biology to the
interstellar heights of astronomy. And his meditative mind is drawn to the abstract
philosophical implications of physical things and processes—infused with the
multiple actions and energies of the natural world that exist beyond the narrow
boundaries of the self.
In his early essay “Literature and Ecology,” the critic William Rueckert writes
that he knows of no other book of poems “so aware of the biosphere and what
human beings have done to destroy it” as W.S. Merwin’s book The Lice (1967).
“Reading this book of poems,” Rueckert writes, “requires one to unmake and
remake one’s mind” (qtd. in Glotfelty and Fromm 1978, 117–118). The poems in
The Lice hold human culture accountable to the delicate and sustaining web of life,
as in the speaker’s haunting address to a gray whale in the poem “For a Coming
Extinction.” Nevertheless, Merwin’s devotion to nature is shaped by a profound
engagement with the contradictions of human culture—a concern with the contours
of human desire and its at times unacceptable costs.
In his more than 15 books of poetry and 4 books of prose, Merwin’s theme, espe-
cially as it is developed in the later phase of his work, is the postmodern problem of
finding language that can offer an adequate and just account of the world. Merwin’s
poems urge the reader to affirm a more capacious sympathy with the nonhuman
334 ECOPOETRY

world of nature. In The River Sound (1999), nature’s persistence appears as an anti-
dote to human and ecological loss. “The Gardens of Versailles,” for example,
addresses the human impulse to shape nature; the poem identifies the diminishment
of the natural world as the result, moreover, of “form’s vast claim/to have been true
forever as the law/of a universe in which nothing appears/to change” (8).
However, the final lines of the poem intimate that despite this rage for order, the
river goes on, as “the sound of water falling echoes in the dream/the dream of water
in which the avenues/all of them are the river on its way.” Merwin accepts the
difficult and conflicting struggles with language as he seeks to invent distinctive
imaginative structures for understanding nature as well as the human place in a
more-than-human world. The origin of a poem, Merwin writes in the “Preface” to
The Second Four Books of Poems (1993), is “a passion for the momentary counte-
nance of the unrepeatable world.” The destiny of a poem, it might follow, is to
awaken in a reader a fuller recognition of the self within the all-too-fragile and
quickly passing frame of our lives.
For Merwin, as well as for Mary Oliver, the ecological poem might be said to arise
out of what the biologist E.O. Wilson calls the innate “urge to affiliate with other
forms of life” (1984, 1). As Vicki Graham elaborates, Oliver’s poems register a
persistent belief “in the possibility of intimate contact with the non-linguistic world
of nature and the confidence in the potential of language to represent that experi-
ence” (1994, 1). Despite the fact that language mediates our relationship to nature,
Laird Christensen adds in a more recent overview of her ecopoetry, “Oliver clearly
believes that poetry can call attention to the fact that we dwell in a world of
presences” (2002, 140). However, in a 1995 review essay, the poet and critic Gyorgi
Voros disparages Oliver’s work for its “peculiar lack of genuine engagement with
the natural world,” a failure, Voros concludes, that makes Oliver’s poetry “ecolog-
ically unsound” (231, 238). Voros points to the passion for transcendence in Oliver
that “impairs the poet’s powers of observation” (235). For Voros, the problem is
that despite appearances, Oliver is not “content to perceive and honor this world in
all its ordinariness”; rather, her adoration of the natural world betrays a “passion
for transcendence” that “impairs the poet’s powers of observation” (235).
In addition to the two-volume New and Selected Poems (1992), Oliver’s most
recent collections of poetry include What Do We Know (2002), Owls and Other
Fantasies (2003), Why I Wake Early (2004), Blue Iris (2004), and Thirst (2006). In
these poems Oliver rejects the limits of the confessional strain in contemporary
poetry (and the tendency to reproduce merely individually significant moments in a
life). What Voros overlooks is that Oliver’s descriptions of individual experiences in
nature are working toward an ecological understanding of the self and human
agency. Oliver’s focus on dramatizing human experiences in nature works to
reinforce or alter the way in which we experience the natural world. Her work does
not dramatize the commonplace statements that nature is a previously harmonious
realm undisturbed by human activity; that nature is a restorative space for human
use to recuperate from the excesses of human culture; or that nature would simply
reawaken us to a more harmonious or ecological way of being in the world.
Oliver’s book-length poem The Leaf and the Cloud (2000) may best foreground
the limits of what Voros calls “ecologically sound” poetry. One of commonplaces of
normative ecology is that we are connected to everything else—a truism, but only in
the most trivial sense, for bodily identification with the nonhuman world is, of
course, what we already have. One contribution of The Leaf and the Cloud, as a
 ECOPOETRY 335

book-length poem, is its generic departure from the aesthetics of presence that deter-
mine how poems think about the natural world. The Leaf and the Cloud is devoted
to exploring what Charles Olson once called a poet’s “stance toward reality.” It is a
poem preoccupied with the relationship between the work of the poet and the work
of the world. And it is devoted to bringing the reader into its investigation. For
instance, in the first of its seven sections, “Flare,” Oliver welcomes the reader “to the
silly, comforting poem” (1). The immediate concern of the speaker is with what
the poem is not. It is not “the sunrise,/which is a red rinse,/which is flaring all over
the eastern sky”; nor is it the “trees, or the burrow burrowing into the earth.” The
12 numbered parts of section 1 move from Whitman-like questions of a reader
(“Therefore, tell me:/what will engage you?”) to declarative instructions to the reader
(“The poem is not the world./It isn’t even the first page of the world,” 5).
Calling attention to the poem as a poem is of course nothing new. But the
extended and discursive space of the long poem creates a place to record the daily
work of the writer who takes as her subject the states of mind that arise in observ-
ing the daily unfolding of natural phenomena. In part 2 of the poem, “Work,” the
poet’s work is set alongside what Oliver calls the “work of the world,” the “delib-
erate music” of the ears of corn swelling under their green leaves, the dark stone,
the grouse’s fan-tail. The refrain throughout the sections of part 2—“this is the
world”—calls attention to the plenitude of the surroundings and the poet’s surprise
and amazement at finding out—most often what one does not know. Oliver then
poses the inevitable questions that arise in any sustained inquiry into the music of
what is happening. “Would it better to sit in silence?/to think everything, to feel
everything, to say nothing?” (12), Oliver asks. After all, she responds, such is the
impulse of the river and the stone. Her answer is instructive. She is not willing (or
able) to accept the odd human preoccupation with the promise that to abandon
cultural and anthropocentric frameworks—of language and symbolic representa-
tion, of ideas such as beauty, devotion, and respect—would somehow place one
“closer” to the natural world. As she puts it, “the nature of man is not the nature
of silence.” The nature of man, that is, is wild and civilized—utterly alive in the flesh
and fiercely obliged to the anthropocentric devotions to beauty, curiosity, and
respect.
The Leaf and the Cloud enacts the process of building a response to nature
through deliberate self-consciousness. The meaning that Oliver attaches to events or
phenomena—whether more descriptive and empirical or more abstract and
emblematic—comes from an ability to cultivate one’s self, to remain distinct and to
live more fully in our language and its capacities to mediate between our conscious
bodies and the environment that surrounds us and of which we are always already
a part. The Leaf and the Cloud is in this way a summation, a generative moment in
an evolving ecopoetics.
Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, W.S. Merwin, A.R. Ammons, and Mary Oliver are
representative of a more diverse group of twentieth-century poets whose work has
been explicitly shaped by an ecological perspective. In Green Voices: Understanding
Contemporary Nature Poetry (1995), for instance, Terry Gifford highlights the
ecological nature poetry of the British poets Patrick Kavanagh, Sorley MacLean,
Seamus Heaney, and Ted Hughes. Environmental and ecological themes also shape
the work of a number of other poets, including Adrienne Rich, Robert Pack, Louise
Glück, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Charles Wright, Ernesto Cardenal, Jimmy Santiago
Baca, Simon J. Ortiz, Arthur Sze, Daphne Marlatt, Derek Walcott, and Margaret
336 ECOPOETRY

Atwood. This array of voices suggests the expanding focus of ecopoetics as well as
its reach beyond the Anglo-American tradition. The tendency to canonize particular
authors, and forms of writing about the natural world, according to Jamie M.
Killingsworth, is in part a product of the desire to better understand our relation-
ship to the more-than-human world. But, as he explains, “as we come to see ‘saving
the earth’ as one metaphor among many—a metaphor conditioned perhaps by the
historical experience of the cold war—our focus can broaden to include a greater
diversity of writers” (2004, 11). The study of writers with a wider range of imagi-
native responses might thereby offer readers new ways of exploring the interdepen-
dencies of language, human experience, and the more-than-human world.
If one accepts the idea that poetry is “the place where we save the earth,” in the
words that bring Bate’s Song of the Earth to a close, then the term ecopoetry signals
a preoccupation with the fate of the planet. While the narrow framework of human
lives and the perspective gained through generations of human life register radical
geomorphic changes (volcano eruptions, earthquakes, tidal waves, melting icecaps),
the earth’s processes unfold across a timeline not apparent to the perceptions and
actions of human beings. Ecopoetry recognizes these limitations at the same time
that it models forms of attention and linguistic acts that might make a difference in
human lives and the forms of responsibility that arise in the peculiar human capacity
for ethical reflection about forms of life beyond our own.

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———. Tape for the Turn of the Year. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965.
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———. A Continuous Harmony. New York: Harcourt, 1972.
———. Farming: A Handbook. Sand Diego: Harvest, 1970.
———. The Long-Legged House. New York: Harcourt, 1964.
———. Recollected Essays, 1965–1978. San Francisco: North Point, 1981.
———. Standing on Earth: Selected Essays. Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1991.
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton, 1962.
Christensen, Laird. “The Pragmatic Mysticism of Mary Oliver.” In Ecopoetry: A Critical
Introduction. J. Scott Bryson, ed. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002.
135–152.
Frazier, Jane. From Origin to Ecology: Nature and the Poetry of W.S. Merwin. Madison, NJ:
Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999.
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Walt Whitman and the Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics. Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 2004.
Merwin, W.S. The First Four Books of Poems: A Mask for Janus, The Dancing Bears, Green
with Beasts and the Drunk in the Furnace. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press,
2000.
———. The Lice. New York: Atheneum, 1967.
———. The River Sound. New York: Knopf, 1999.
———. The Second Four Books of Poems: The Moving Target, the Lice, the Carrier of
Ladders, Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment. Port Townsend, WA: Copper
Canyon, 1993.
———. Travels. New York: Knopf, 1993.
Miller, J. Hillis. Six Poets of Reality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965.
Oliver, Mary. The Leaf and the Cloud. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2000.
———. New and Selected Poems: Volume One. Boston: Beacon, 1992.
 ECOPOETRY 337

———. New and Selected Poems: Volume Two. Boston: Beacon, 2005.
Scigaj, Leonard. Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets. Lexington: University of
Kentucky Press, 1999.
Snyder, Gary. Axe Handles. San Francisco: North Point, 1983.
———. The Back Country. New York: New Directions, 1968.
———. Back on the Fire: Essays. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hold, 2007.
———. “Ecology, Literature, and the New World Disorder.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies
in Literature and the Environment 11.1 (2004): 1–13.
———. Earth House Hold: Technical Notes and Queries to Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries.
New York: New Directions, 1969.
———. Mountains and Rivers Without End. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1996.
———. No Nature: New and Selected Poems. New York: Pantheon, 1992.
———. Turtle Island. New York: New Directions, 1974.
Wilson, E. O. Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species. Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1984.

Further Reading
Altieri, Charles. Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry during the
1960s. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1979; Bryson, J. Scott, ed. Ecopoetry: A
Critical Introduction. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002; Bryson, J. Scott, ed.
The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 2005; Costello, Bonnie. Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern Ameri-
can Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003; Disch, Robert, ed. The Ecological
Conscience: Values for Survival. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970; Elder, John.
Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature. 2nd ed. Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1996; Fletcher, Angus. A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Envi-
ronment, and the Future of Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004; Gif-
ford, Terry. Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1995; Gilcrest, David W. Greening the Lyre: Environmental Poetics and
Ethics. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002; Graham, Vickie. “‘Into the Body of
Another’: Mary Oliver and the Poetics of Becoming Other.” Papers on Language and Liter-
ature 30.4 (1994): 352–372; Joris, Pierre, and Jerome Rothenberg, eds. Poems for the Mil-
lennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, Volume
One: From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995; Joris,
Pierre, and Jerome Rothenberg, eds. Poems for the Millennium: The University of Califor-
nia Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, Volume Two: From Postwar to Millennium.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998; Nabhan, Gary Paul. Cross-Pollinations: The
Marriage of Science and Poetry. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2004; Quetchenbach,
Bernard W. Back from the Far Field: American Nature Poetry in the Late Twentieth Cen-
tury. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000; Rasula, Jed. This Compost: Eco-
logical Imperatives in American Poetry. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002;
Rueckert, William. “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” The Ecocriti-
cism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. 105–123; Vendler, Helen. “A.R. Ammons:
Dwelling in the Flow of Shapes.” In The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988, 310–342; Vendler, Helen. “The Snow Poems
and Garbage: Episodes in an Evolving Poetics.” In Complexities of Motion: New Essays on
A.R. Ammons’s Long Poems. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999,
23–50; Voros, Gyorgyi. “Exquisite Environments.” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 21.1–2
(Winter 1995): 231–250; Voros, Gyorgyi. Notations of the Wild: Ecology in the Poetry of
Wallace Stevens. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997.
MARK C. LONG
338 EROTIC LITERATURE

EROTIC LITERATURE
Definition. Erotic literature is composed of works in which sex, sexuality, and/or
sexual desire has a dominant presence. Literature from almost every genre can be
considered erotic literature, including drama, poetry, fiction, and memoirs. Scholars
and governments have even classified erotic treatises and sex manuals as erotic
literature. However, the inclusion of a sex scene is not the only criteria for erotic
literature; instead erotic literature—through the exploration of desire and sexuality—
interrogates or calls attention to important cultural, sociological, and philosophical
concepts. Often these texts point to a perceived or real disconnect between the body
and society, between the sexes, and even between children and adults.
Erotic literature differs from pornography in that society views the former as
socially acceptable. Both can also arouse the reader, but erotic literature seeks to
engage the reader’s mind in an exploration of sexuality, while pornography seeks
only to elicit a physical response. Erotic literature, especially erotica, can be porno-
graphic, but pornography rarely (if ever) raises philosophical, cultural, or sociolog-
ical questions for the reader. At times, the line between erotica and pornography
blurs. The ostensible impetus behind their creation, that is, to arouse and titillate a
reader, is similar, but erotica, as in erotic literature as a whole, usually manages to
transcend the purely sexual.
Erotica also moves across genre lines, intersecting with detective fiction, histori-
cal narratives, science fiction and—within the last 10 years—supernatural erotica.
Thus, erotica functions like most literary modes in that it is not tied to any specific
form or genre.
History. Erotic literature has a rich and varied history that dates back to the
ancient Greeks and the ancient civilizations of the Middle East and Asia. This
history includes the many attempts of governments to censor many works now
considered to be classics.
Erotic prose written by the ancient Greeks dates back to the third century B.C.E.,
but it peaked during the second and third century CE during the Second Sophistic.
According to Dominic Montserrat, the works emphasize “romance, seduction,
sexuality, and the erotic development of individuals,” and the writers were the first to
“make the sexual self a field of enquiry” (2006, 584). Moreover, the government did
not consider some of this erotic prose, which included treatises, romantic narratives,
and drama, as immoral. In fact, Montserrat notes that some of these works were
“praised for their medical benefits, because they could stimulate impotent men” (584).
Censure of works with erotic content stemmed from representations of excess and
unbalanced behavior, and the Greek government did not target erotic texts.
Trends and Themes. Ancient Greek verse, like prose, explores the erotic but
incorporates two basic themes, requited and unrequited love. The Greek poets

In erotica, the narrative focuses on a concrete, explicit sexual act to interrogate notions of
taboo in broader cultural context instead of the more abstract notions of sexuality and
desire. As Patrick Califia-Rice notes, erotica is “one way to write sexual history—the slang,
fashion, community institutions, music, controversies, mores, the signifiers and significance of
sexual expression at various points in time and in several different sexual minority commu-
nities” (2001, 150). The preferred form is prose, primarily in the shape of short fiction or
novels, and occasionally poetry.
 EROTIC LITERATURE 339

wrote on the latter with considerable frequency. Monica Cyrino explains that this
unrequited desire is characterized by an “unfulfilled and perhaps even unfulfillable
feeling of erotic desire, and is denoted by the absence of the beloved, the lack of sat-
isfaction, and the impossibility of erotic realization;” in this type of verse, “the
lover’s desire is difficult, painful, and ultimately devastating” (2006, 588). Poets did
not hesitate to explore both heterosexual and homosexual love, as well as the effects
of erotic desire on the mind and body. Aeschylus, in addition to his tragedies, wrote
of the relationship between King Laius of Thebes and his love of the Chrysippus, a
young boy, and Anacreon of Teos was so influential that the cult of Anacreonitic
verse formed, which covered all poetry in praise of wine and women. Sappho also
focused on both the deleterious and beneficial effects of eros on the mind and body.
After the ancient Greeks, writers from Britain and France provide texts that have
been perhaps most influential on both American erotic literature and erotica. The
traditions and conventions established by the English and the French are apparent
in the works of contemporary American authors.
In the seventeenth century, England enjoyed an increase in literacy for both men
and women. Paired with this rise in literacy was the increased availability in the
number of poems, plays, and books designed to arouse sexual desire. The erotic
literature of this time period is marked by a distinct escapist quality, and much was
written to shock as well as to arouse. Literature relating to sexual freedom and
divorce was quite popular. Other prevalent themes were women’s sexual voracity
and prostitution. Although many of the writers during this time intended to titillate,
their pieces often commented on the political, the religious, and the social.
Although popular tastes dictated the types of erotica that writers were producing,
the printing industry itself suffered under tight constraints beyond the control of the
reading public. Due to the monopoly on printing rights instigated by James I in
1603, Stationers’ Company had a tight hold on the printing industry (Curth 2006,
413). According to Louise Hill Curth, Charles I aided in maintaining this monopoly
by “establishing the most repressive system of press censorship since the reign of
Elizabeth I” (412). The monopoly eventually collapsed in 1640, and independent
printers flourished in London.
The eighteenth century saw the rise of the erotic novel, as well as the emergence
of pornography in England. A popular theme in the narratives of this time features
the male examination of the female prostitutes’ life. Bradford K. Mudge explains
that these “[w]hore dialogues,” such as John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, “combined
lascivious passages with sex education, anti-ecclesiastical diatribes, and radical
philosophy,” thus meeting the definition of erotic literature (2006, 416). With the
movement of erotic poetry into periodicals, prose became the genre of choice for
erotic literature, and Mudge contends that by 1789, “sexual obscenity and the novel
were joined at the hip” (418).
Just as erotic literature appeared in England, France saw a surge in the produc-
tion of erotic texts. In 1635, literary production in France came under the auspices
of the French government, which through the Académie Française made it clear
that it expected French literature to conform to governmental sanctions. In this
repressive atmosphere, erotic literature fell into the hands of a group of writers
known as the libertines. These writers produced work that challenged the censors,
sometimes by openly bypassing official publishing channels, and at other times
through more oblique means. French erotic literature became a battleground where
writers fought a sexually repressive regime by showing the hypocrisy government
340 EROTIC LITERATURE

officials practiced, and officials destroyed works that illustrated the link between the
political and the religious. Yet the execution of Claude Le Petit in 1662 also made
it clear that blasphemous and obscene writing could have deadly consequences.
As in eighteenth century England, the novel became a popular vehicle for erotic
literature in France. The novel, as an experimental and radical form, allowed writ-
ers to challenge their readers in their exploration of the nuance of the erotic. Fairy
tales are an unexpected hotbed of erotic literature, where allegorical elements allow
writers to obliquely critique French society. Charles Perrault’s “Le Petit chaperone
rouge” (“Little Red Riding Hood”) is a tale fraught with eroticism, and it serves as
a warning to aristocratic young ladies to avoid the “wolves,” or rakes, of Louis
XIV’s court. According to Paul Scott, however, the conventional representation of
romantic love in fairy tales “accepts the dominant discourse of sexuality, with its
implicit exaltation of patriarchy,” reinforcing rather than challenging the mores of
the time (2006, 479).
After 1740, French erotic literature flourished, thanks in part to the publication
of the best-selling novel Histoire de D[om Bougre] and to the flowering of French
Enlightenment philosophy. In fact, Natania Meeker notes the important role the
“erotic and obscene” played within the “culture of the French Enlightenment, both
as a form of literate entertainment and as a vehicle for the development and diffu-
sion of new modes of thought” (2006, 481). She also argues that several of the most
prominent philosophers, such as Julien Offray de La Mettrie and Charles-Louis de
Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, delved into the erotic as well.
In the eighteenth century two general categories of the novel—the libertine novel
of seduction and the pornographic novel—proved the novel to be one of the most
exciting genres of the period. Meeker explains that “[c]ritics have historically been
reluctant to associate the frank obscenity of the latter with the elegant suggestive-
ness of the former, even though the two genres share an Epicurean focus on sensual
and sensorial pleasure” (481). Also during this time, the “oriental tale” was highly
successful as part of the general interest in the East. Despite a fair amount of
exoticism, some of the writers took the change in setting as an opportunity to
critique the “morals, fashions and rituals of the court of Louis XV” (Meeker 2006,
481). In its examination and critique of matters of social, political, and moral
importance, French erotic literature became increasingly political in tenor in
the years leading up to the Revolution. In fact, supporters of the revolution used
satirical and scathing erotic literature as a tool against the aristocracy, often depict-
ing them as amoral hedonists. These works were popular in France until long after
the collapse of Louis XV’s regime.
Censorship and American Erotic Literature. While sexual descriptions have
become an integral part of American fiction, our Puritan roots and censorial past
ensured that literary sex scenes—explicit or not—have come under careful scrutiny.
The Americans were initially less puritanical than their English counterparts, enjoy-
ing Latin poetry, Shakespeare, and the more contemporary works of English novelist
Henry Fielding (Tom Jones) and Scottish writer Tobias Smollett (Roderick Random)
for much of the eighteenth century with relative impunity. According to Felice
Lewis, early America had “almost no tradition of indigenous erotic fiction,” in part
because American literature was “born in the early nineteenth century” at a time
when the English writing model was quite sedate (1976, 12). The most popular
pieces of American erotic writing were Benjamin Franklin’s “Advice to a Young
Man on Choosing a Mistress” and “A Letter to the Royal Academy at Brussels,”
 EROTIC LITERATURE 341

but the manuscripts were available only in limited copies. Though neither was
published in the United States by Franklin, the London-based Gentleman’s
Magazine published “Advice to a Young man on Choosing a Mistress” in 1747
(Loth 1961, 115). Another American erotic work that managed to elude the censors
was Mark Twain’s Conversation, as it was by the social fireside in the time of the
Tudors, or 1601, and like Franklin’s letters, Twain’s text was not published in the
United States in his lifetime. Written in 1876 between Tom Sawyer and Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn, 1601 critiques the “elevated reputation of Elizabethan society
and its vulgar behavior” (Lee 2006, 1320). Though markedly scatological in nature,
1601 was available only in manuscript and private editions before 1996.
Context and Issues. By the mid-nineteenth century, American writers were begin-
ning to explore the erotic and its moral implications. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The
Scarlet Letter was an instant success because it handled spiritual and moral issues
from a uniquely American point of view. Lewis notes that the novel was originally
charged with “perpetrating bad morals,” even though Hawthorne “could not have
handled the material more carefully,” reiterating the sentiment that sexual urges
lead to immorality and moral decay (1976, 15). However, because Hawthorne was
well established in the New England literary community, his potentially risqué novel
was not censored and passed into the realm of appropriate texts. In contrast to The
Scarlet Letter, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass bursts with exuberant sensuality,
especially the poems “Song of Myself,” “Children of Adam,” and “Calamus.” The
first edition was maligned by some critics for being “exceedingly obscene,” and in
the third edition, the publishers juxtaposed poems with “homosexual overtones.”
Leaves of Grass was criticized and suppressed, but never censored, in part because
it was “too abstruse to have wide appeal” (Lewis 1976, 15). These two important
early American texts illustrate the already-forming relationship between text, audience
size and type, and censorship. Lewis argues the aristocracy’s view “of the masses as
children who are easily led astray” (16) drove nineteenth century censorship.
In the United States, compulsory education and an increase in literacy created a
new market for less than literary erotic literature. David Loth contends that, in
order to satisfy these demands, American publishers imported erotic literature from
England (1961, 120). John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Lady of Pleasure, also known as
Fanny Hill, was one of the first erotic works to find its way to the United States,
where it was banned in 1821—almost a century after similar censure in England—
when Massachusetts judges convicted Holmes of obscene libel. Commonwealth vs.
Holmes marked the first time a book and its publisher were prosecuted for
lewdness. In 1821, Vermont established the first obscenity statute, followed by
Connecticut in 1834 and Massachusetts in 1836 (Loth, 121).
Even though obscenity laws had been on the books since 1821, they were rarely
enforced on printed material before 1870, though plays were heavily censored
throughout the 1800s. Lewis contends that the “anti-obscenity movement in both
England and America begins with Lord Campbell’s Act” of 1857, which allowed
authorities to seize books and prints that were “in their opinions obscene” (7). The
first case tried under Lord Campbell’s Act proved more influential than the act itself.
In 1868, a magistrate seized copies of Henry Scot’s pamphlet titled The Confessional
Unmasked: Shewing the Depravity of the Roman Priesthood, the Iniquity of the
Confessional and the Questions put to Females in Confession (7). Scot appealed and
Benjamin Hicklin, the Recorder of London, “ruled in his [Scot’s] favor on the basis
that his purpose was good, that he had no intention of corrupting public morals”—a
342 EROTIC LITERATURE

decision that was soon overturned by Chief Justice Alexander Cockburn, who
stated, “The test of obscenity is whether the tendency of the matter charged as
obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral
influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall” (Lewis, 7–8).
Cockburn’s definition of obscenity would continue to be cited by American judges
well into the twentieth century, providing an extremely broad, subjective definition
of obscenity (8).
Anthony Comstock and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice
(NYSSV) were pivotal in the censorship movement. The NYSSV was an outgrowth
of the Young Men’s Christian Association and was supported by wealthy, influen-
tial men (Biesel 1997, 76). Nicola Biesel argues that, while Comstock appealed to
the wealthy by citing concern about “youthful corruption in terms of problems that
could befall wealthy children,” he also appealed to the middle class’s concern for
their children (76). He accomplished this by linking “the corruption of children by
obscene materials to other issues already established as ‘social problems,’ such as
prostitution, abortion, and juvenile delinquency” (76). Comstock and the NYSSV
lobbied for a more restrictive law regarding the mailing of obscene items, and in
March 1873, President Grant signed the Comstock Law. Comstock was reputed to
have banned fictional work, sex manuals, newspaper and magazine articles deemed
obscene, and contraceptive manuals. In general, he tended to attack works with
little literary merit that were regarded as “unquestionably pornographic in his day,”
but he also opposed the sale of classics like The Decameron and others (Lewis, 12).
The increase in legal actions against “literature of repute” coincided with popu-
larity of the European realistic-naturalistic fiction (Lewis, 12). Writers like Stephen
Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Frank Norris fought against American publishers
who were reluctant to publish potentially obscene works. Pulp novels, however,
were thriving and increased in availability in the nineteenth century. According to
Chris Packard, pulp Westerns produced before 1900 feature an often all-male world
where “homoerotic affection holds a favored position,” and “affection for women
destroys cowboy comunitas and produces children, and both are unwanted
hindrances to those who wish to ride the range freely” (2005, 3). The cowboy,
Packard argues, is a queer figure who “eschews lasting ties with women but
embraces rock-solid bonds with same-sex partners; he practices same sex desires”
(3). Westerns written after 1900 do not present male affection as freely because of
the “modern invention of the ‘homosexual’ as a social pariah” (3). The same type
of homoeroticism extends to other texts written before 1900, including Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn and The Leatherstocking Tales, where the male partnerships
are erotic yet unconsummated (4). Even though homoerotic relationships abound in
the pulp Westerns of the 1800s, they were situated in the mythical West, and
publishers and writers managed to avoid censors.
Censorship reared its head in the middle of the twentieth century with the trials
of an unexpurgated edition of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Henry
Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, and William S. Burroughs’s
Naked Lunch. The novels were eventually deemed not obscene because of their
social value and literary merit, and the court rulings were based on precedents set
in cases dealing with James Joyce’s Ulysses and Cleland’s Fanny Hill, which sanc-
tioned writing about sex that did not intentionally appeal to prurient interests.
Reception. There is a surprising paucity of scholarly criticism on erotica specifi-
cally, though there is a fair amount on erotic literature as a whole. Like the pulp
 EROTIC LITERATURE 343

Western, contemporary erotica is rarely censored, and scholars rarely, if ever, write
on the themes and issues prevalent in the subgenre. This dearth can possibly be
attributed to scholars’ dismissal of the genre as smut or to a reluctance to analyze
sexually explicit texts. This reluctance on the part of the academy—though not
unexpected—has not gone unnoticed by writers of erotica. In an America where
“signifiers of sex are everywhere we turn,” Simon Sheppard points out that the
shame is still with us (2001, 208). Califia-Rice writes that a simplistic discussion of
writing erotica as simply smut omits the “lack of serious critical attention (because
everyone ‘knows’ pornography requires no serious literary talent)” (2001, 145).
To this day, contemporary novels containing explicit sexual content or those with
homosexual themes are still seen as threat to children and society. Books written by
Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, J.D. Salinger, and Lesléa Newman have all been
challenged and charged as unacceptable and obscene, but because of their literary
merit, they have not been banned.
Selected Authors. Most contemporary American erotica written today is fiction.
While there are still single-authored short story collections and novels being
published, the vehicle of choice is the anthology. Such collections are popular
because they allow editors to feature a cross section of stories centered on a partic-
ular theme. Anthologies are also one of the few outlets for emerging writers to get
published, a role editors have taken over from print magazines.
Since the mid- to late 1990s, specialized anthologies have exploded onto the
market. These anthologies target specific, marginalized groups including (but not
limited to) heterosexual women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, women, African
Americans, Latinos, and those in the sadomasochistic communities. Many antholo-
gies target a combination of these groups. Such specificity can be credited to an
increased demand from readers to see themselves represented in the fiction, as well
as to publishers targeting specific audiences. General anthologies are popular as
well, and they tend to include a sampling of erotica meant to appeal to a broad
range of tastes. Notably, with the exception of some geographically specific antholo-
gies, like Best American Erotica, many of the anthologies being published tend to
have an international list of authors, and some, like editor Maxim Jakubowski’s
Mammoth Book of Erotica, and Mammoth Book of New Erotica, originate in an
international market. This inclusionary trend is a product of literary globalization.
Another trend includes the overwhelming presence of first person narratives in
erotica, which draw readers directly into the story, immersing them in the narrative.
Coinciding with this international trend of specialization is the abundance of
“best of” anthologies. Some, such as Best American Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica,
and Best Gay Erotica, are annual publications. However, a “best of” anthology
generally allows for at least one sequel anthology if the initial volume is successful.
These anthologies promise to deliver the best erotica taken from short story collec-
tions, novels and novellas, and online and print magazines.
While few print magazines carry erotica exclusively, editors have taken the genre
into cyberspace. Online magazines such as Nerve, Clean Sheets, Libido, and Scarlet
Letters are flourishing. These peer-edited, free, online magazines allow the reader to
peruse erotic fiction and poetry, rendering erotica more readily accessible.
Gender and Sexual Minorities. Much of the erotica written in the last 10 years
explores what mainstream society terms deviant sexuality, including sado-
masochism, homosexuality, transgender sex, and a number of fetishes. According to
Califia-Rice, “most subcultures rely on staying underground to survive. . . . Any
344 EROTIC LITERATURE

work that celebrates a stigmatized way of being in the world cuts two ways. It is
both celebratory and revealing, sometimes dangerously so” (2001, 152). Works
dealing with sadomasochism do not hesitate to depict both the sadist’s and the
masochist’s points of views. Likewise, homosexual erotica both challenges and
upholds stereotypes about the gay and lesbian community, where hetero-normative
sexual constructs still exist. Many authors, however, are writing stories that redefine
sexuality as a place where men and women negotiate, manipulate, or accept tradi-
tional notions of gender and power. Male and female writers are also crossing
gender lines, proving it is possible for a man to successfully write women’s, and even
lesbian, erotica, and vice versa.
Mary Gaitskill’s erotic story “A Romantic Weekend” focuses on the characters’
desires, and the sex act becomes almost inconsequential to their angst and
disappointment with each other. Beth and her unnamed lover falsely present them-
selves as a sadist and a masochist, respectively. Beth desires to be a masochist, but
she misconstrues what masochism requires of her. She tells her partner, “I won’t do
anything I don’t want to do. You have to make me want it” (2000, 192). She wants
to be forced, but she does not understand that the key tenets of sadomasochism are
trust and surrender. Similarly, her lover wants to dominate her but is unable to
overcome her refusal to surrender. The sex scene, although beautifully written, is
terse in its rendering of sex while explicitly exploring the failure of desire. Gaitskill
writes:

She put her glass on the coffee table, crossed the floor and dropped to her knees
between his legs. She threw her arms around his thighs. She nuzzled his groin with her
nose. He tightened. She unzipped his pants. “Stop,” he said. “Wait.” She took his
shoulders—she had a surprisingly strong grip—and pulled him to the carpet. . . . He
felt assaulted and invaded. This was not what he had in mind, but to refuse would
make him seem somehow less virile than she. Queasily, he stripped off her clothes and
put their bodies in a more viable position. He fastened his teeth on her breast and bit
her. She made a surprised noise and her body stiffened. He bit her again, harder. She
screamed. He wanted to draw blood. Her screams were short and stifled. He could tell
that she was trying to like being bitten, but that she did not. He gnawed her breast. She
screamed sharply. They screwed. (189)

Rather than Beth yielding to her partner, she makes him yield to her will, leaving
them both dissatisfied in the process. Her desire to be dominated “had been com-
pletely frustrated” (190). Gaitskill’s purpose here is not to titillate the reader or
allow the reader to linger on the intimacy of the act. It is written to disconcert. This
story does not be qualify as erotica—mainly because the story focuses on unfulfilled
desire and its effect on the characters—but it challenges the easy suppositions about
who should surrender.
Patrick Califia-Rice’s short story “Gender Queer” tackles the complexity of trans-
gender identity, specifically that of female-to-male transgender. Califia-Rice uses sex
to talk about important issues because “people are reluctant to think about many
of the issues surrounding sex and gender. Or there’s a knee-jerk reaction that reflects
what ‘everybody knows’ to be true,” but he is also dedicated to questioning the
“mores or policies they develop to socialize new members, regulate the conduct of
insiders, and handle relationships with outsiders” (2001, 153).
The main character, Carleton, is a female-to-male (FTM) transgender who leads
a FTM support group. There we see oblique and explicit references to problems that
 EROTIC LITERATURE 345

plague the transgender community. The men in the support group grapple with
finding a doctor to perform a mastectomy, as well as with social concerns about
attracting the “perfect straight girl” who is unattainable pre-phalloplasty (2006,
80). In effect, once they have completed their transition, most of the FTM transmen
will become heterosexual males. Carleton is the only bisexual in the group, and he
gets no empathy from his support group concerning his anxiety about going to gay
bars downtown. This lack of empathy points to a limited definition of masculinity
and the expectation that identifying as male means identifying as a heterosexual
male, excluding the full spectrum of masculinity.
The story’s central conflict lies in Carleton’s relationship with “Moss,” a woman
who verbally attacked Carleton at a lecture months before because, at the time, she
was afraid of her own desire to be male. She wants to know what it would be like
to be a man, to:

stand there without these sandbags strapped to my chest, and feel my body straight and
strong and free. I wanted to know how it felt to shave my face and walk out my front
door whistling. To have the guy at the gas station call me sir and not have anybody give
me a second look. (Califia-Rice 2005, 80)

For Moss, these are the characteristics of masculinity, the things that deserve envy,
and she sees Carleton as the embodiment of these traits. It is Carleton who mitigates
her fears and validates her desires, and it is he who names her Moss. At this point
in the story, Moss’s gender pronoun switches from female to male.
Carleton then offers to be her guide, because “[m]aking things easier for new guys
was one of the ways Carleton exorcised the pain of his own coming out process”
(82). He shows Moss how to bind his chest, applies facial hair, and even gives Moss
a haircut. The pre-operation transformation is complete when Carleton gives Moss
a “packer,” or a silicon mold of a flaccid penis.
In the sex scene, Moss and Carleton must negotiate the disconnect between the
male gender they claim and the physical reality of their bodies. Carleton is anxious
about his body, making Moss promise that he’s “not going to think [Carleton is] a
girl” once he is naked (85). Post coitus, Carleton reflects it is “good to be touched
by someone who understood that you could be a guy and still have girl parts, but
this intimate act reminded him again that his body was not perfectly and entirely
male” (88–89).
Califia-Rice’s interest in gender construction is indicative of a growing trend in
erotica today. Marginalized groups are redefining for themselves how they are
represented to and within the dominant culture. Erotica written by and for margin-
alized groups often presents a more nuanced representation, and these works are in
conversation with the stereotype they are consciously working against. This is not
to say that all writers of marginalized erotica scrupulously avoid stereotypes or
attempt to complicate or react against it. Some writers seem content to write prose
that present a marginalized group in a stereotypical fashion without bothering to
delve into the politics of being that might surround that group.
Within lesbian erotica, for example, writers are constantly imagining and re-
imagining the literary representation of lesbian relationships, including the tradi-
tional butch/femme, top/bottom power structures, femme/femme, butch/butch, as
well as the interactions between “bois” and “grrls.” The re-appropriation and revi-
sion of how lesbians are represented is a reaction, in some ways, to the derivative,
346 EROTIC LITERATURE

butch/femme (or femme/femme if the medium is visual), hetero-normative images in

popular media. This type of revisionist play is not exclusive to lesbian erotica, and
it points to a growing trend of writers unpacking the possibilities of representation.
Some black erotica focuses on issues of family and stability. The unfortunately titled
“Homecumming” by Cherysse Welcher-Calhoun presents a long-married African
American couple that is happy to have a weekend alone. The story turns the stereo-
type of the black broken home on its head, describing a close-knit family where the
father is present and both parents work in the corporate world. The female protag-
onist comes home from work and is responsible for cleaning the house and taking
care of the kids. She occupies both spheres, but seems happy to do so. This type of
representation is emblematic of the trend in African American erotica. This story is
not particularly radical, but the normative representation of the black family seems
in direct conversation with images of the black family.
Sex-Positive Erotica. Patrick Califia-Rice, Susie Bright, Cecilia Tan, Bill Brent, and
other erotica writers have written, and continue to write, in the spirit of sex-positive
images that allow for power variations in any healthy sexual encounter. Sex-positive
writer Carol Queen writes that one of the “crucial cultural functions of erotic liter-
ature,” specifically sex-positive work, is that it “always serves as a kind of protest
literature exploring (and exploding) taboos, gender roles, and socially imposed
notions of appropriate sexuality” (2001, 47). Sex-positive feminists and writers are
at direct odds with the feminist anti-porn movement that gained prominence in the
mid- to late 1970s as a result of and in reaction to the sexual revolution that
heralded an increase in number of pornographic magazines and films.
Anti-porn feminists criticize pornography for its representation of women as
hyper-sexualized victims and blame the abundance of pornography for the rise in
rape and domestic violence rates. According to Lori Saint-Martin, they condemn
“both literary erotica and mainstream pornography, which they say deliver the same
sexist message,” and while they call for women to “develop their own erotic
imaginations,” they consider the task virtually impossible, given their “patriarchal
conditioning” (2006, 456). As a result, the anti-porn feminists’ definition of a
healthy relationship does not include any form of consensual sadomasochistic
sexual relationship, or any sexual relationship in which the power dynamics are not
equal.
Members of the sex-positive movement embrace the many manifestations of
human sexuality, including the practices of sexual minorities, and believe in sexual
freedom for all people. They argue that to consider a woman’s engagement in, say,
sadomasochistic activities as deviant, or to say it eroticizes power and violence does
not take into consideration the consensual nature of such play. The sex-positive
movement attracts activists from numerous spheres, including anti-censorship
feminists, activists in the LGBT community, pornographers, writers of erotica, and
sexual radicals.
Anti-porn feminists view prostitution as yet another site of female subjugation,
where women are reduced to objects, victims of male violence. In his introduction
to Macho Sluts, Califia describes the prostitute as someone potentially beyond the
control of men. Unlike housewives who put no price on their time, who have no
“demarcation between business and pleasure”—thus leaving them with no space of
their own—prostitutes get men to “part with some of their property instead of
becoming property themselves. . . . The whore does not sell her body. She sells her
time” (1988, 20). This revision of prostitution foregrounds the prostitute’s agency.
 EROTIC LITERATURE 347

Queen’s story “Best Whore in Hillsboro” takes the reader into the world of high-
class prostitutes. Queen admits to “being a sort of Pollyanna of sex writing . . . so
sex positive that there’s not enough for critics who like that cutting-edge style that
wallows in taboo and shame, nouveau de Sade” (2001, 50). Instead of a sordid tale
of prostitution and redemption, Queen presents a narrative that moves prostitution
out of the margins and presents it as a normal job, a job people can like or hate.
Indeed, the main character, Kitty, likes her job. She and fellow prostitute Corrina do
not suffer poor working conditions, and they do not have a pimp; they prostitute
themselves because they want to. The prostitutes in Queen’s story do not conform
to stereotypical norms for their profession: Corrina attended law school, and Kitty
was in the undergraduate honor society, Phi Beta Kappa. Kitty learned early “that
most whores dress up, no down; signaling that your ass is for sale on the night
streets of the Tenderloin is one thing, but slipping into the Fairmont to service an
out-of-town CEO is quite another, and Kitty’s bought more conservative clothes
since she began working than she’s ever owned in her life” (1999, 235). This is not
the traditional representation of prostitutes, but then, it is Queen’s assertion that
there are women who like sex work.
Corrina is less than happy with her job for several reasons, the first being that she
“got caught by the IRS a few years ago and she’s still paying off the heavy fines.
Pimped by the government, the whores called it” (234). In addition to paying fines,
she is jaded, preferring to dominate clients rather than have sex with them (235).
The clients she and Kitty are servicing together are an affluent couple who have
renewed her enthusiasm for her job.
Instead of condemning prostitution, Queen critiques the institution of marriage.
Kitty’s view of marriage is particularly cynical. She estimates that 98 percent of her
clients are married, and that they do not “tell their wives where they go on those
long lunch hours” (236). She is tired of men who “have” to call her because they
“think their wives are too pure or too ‘frigid’” (236). According to Kitty, her
profession is “weird” in that it helps shore “up the illusion that married life is a
functional state” (236). It seems more “legitimate” to work for a married couple.
Kitty is not oblivious to the class differences, and on meeting Tom and Pam, she
realizes they are “creating the near-seamless illusion for Corrina and Kitty that they
are all affectionate friends, in the same class, and enjoying the same life circum-
stances—that they are equals chatting about Christmas and sipping brandy” (237).
Queen also plays on the reader’s expectation that Kitty and Corrina are paying
Tom and Pam a visit at Tom’s request, but it’s really Pam, a former prostitute her-
self, who desires their company the most because she does not quite fit into the high-
class society she has married into. She cannot be herself, and, if Kitty’s analysis is on
target, being “herself” involves having an active sex life.
This movement promotes sexual responsibility, well, and in “Best Whore in
Hillsboro,” the characters are careful to use plenty of latex. With the AIDS epidemic
and the increased spread of STDs, writers working within the sex positive move-
ment are careful about depictions of unprotected sex. When Simon Sheppard co-edited
the gay male anthology Rough Stuff, he and co-editor M. Christian decided not to
accept works that “explicitly eroticized the unprotected aspect of the barebacking”
(2001, 211)—i.e. the practice of unprotected, gay male sex—and in rejecting stories
that sensationalized the dangerous aspects of this act instead of showing the real life
repercussions, Sheppard and Christian demonstrate the careful considerations
editors must make while still allowing for the creativity of their authors.
348 EROTIC LITERATURE

IMPORTANT EDITORS IN EROTIC PUBLISHING

In some respects, the editors of erotica anthologies are as influential in shaping modern erot-
ica as the authors they include. Editors like Thomas S. Roche and Cecilia Tan both founded a
space for genre erotica, while those like M. Christian and Susie Bright work to expand its the
parameters. As the editor of the Noirotica series, Roche wanted the “chance to merge
cutting-edge writing with crime-noir, and bring the erotic subtext up to the surface of a genre
that was always playing with it” (Wharton 2000). Cecilia Tan’s publishing company, Circlet
Press, routinely publishes sci-fi erotica, and she has edited several sci-fi erotica anthologies.
M. Christian is the author of five books, including the Lambda-nominated Dirty Words,
Speaking Parts, The Bachelor Machine, and The Bloody Marys. His fiction has appeared in more
than 200 anthologies, including Best American Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Best
Transgendered Erotica, and Friction. Christian is the editor of over 20 anthologies, including S/M
Erotica, Love Under Foot (with Greg Wharton), Bad Boys (with Paul Willis), The Burning Pen,
Guilty Pleasures, and many others. Christian’s editorial eye is geared towards stories that are
sexually titillating and mentally stimulating.
Susie Bright is arguably one of the most important editors in erotica today. She has edited
18 anthologies and novels. Since 1993, she has been the editor of Best American Erotica,
published by Simon and Schuster. Bright was also the founding editor of the first women’s
anthology, Herotica, in 1988, and she edited the first three volumes. She co-edited On Our
Backs, an influential magazine geared toward lesbians, from 1984 to 1991. As series editor of
Best New Erotica, Bright has managed to expand the boundaries of erotica, including work
from well-known writers like Mary Gaitskill, John Updike, and David Sedaris, as well as
erotica industry standards like Peggy Munson, Carol Queen, and Skian McGuire. It is clear
that Bright subscribes to the notion that erotica has a more important cultural function than
glandular stimulation.

Bibliography
Biesel, Nicola Kay. Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in
Victorian America. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Bright, Susie, ed. Best American Erotica. New York, New York: Touchstone, 1993–2007.
Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch. New York: Grove Press, 1990.
Califia, Pat. Macho Sluts. Los Angeles, California: Alyson Publications, 1988; 20.
Califia-Rice, Patrick. “Gender Queer.” In Best Gay Erotica 2006. Richard Lambonte, ed. San
Francisco, California: Cleis Press, 2005; 76–90.
———. “An Insistent and Indelicate Muse.” In The Burning Pen. M. Christian, ed. Los Ange-
les, California: Alyson Publications, 2001; 145–154.
Christian, M., series ed. Best S/M Erotica: Extreme Stories of Extreme Sex. Pahoa, Hawaii:
Black Books, 2001–2006.
Cleland, John. Fanny Hill: Or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. New York: Penguin Putnam
Inc., 1986.
Curth, Louise Hill. “English: United Kingdom, Seventeenth Century.” In Encyclopedia of
Erotic Literature. Gaetan Brulotte and John Phillips, eds. New York: Routledge, Tay-
lor and Francis Group, 2006; 411–415.
Cyrino, Monica. “Greek, Ancient: Verse.” In Encyclopedia or Erotic Literature. Gaetan Bru-
lotte and John Phillips, eds. New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2006;
588–596.
Gaitskill, Mary. “A Romantic Weekend.” In The Second Gates of Paradise. Alberto Manguel,
ed. Toronto, Canada: Stoddart Publishing Co., 2000; 175–204.
Jakubowski, Maxim, editor. Mammoth Book of Erotica. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2000.
 EROTIC LITERATURE 349

Lewis, Felice Flanery. Literature, Obscenity, and Law. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1976.
Loth, David. The Erotic in Literature. New York: Julian Messner, Inc., 1961.
Meeker, Natania. “French: Eighteenth Century.” In Encyclopedia or Erotic Literature. Gae-
tan Brulotte and John Phillips, eds. New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group,
2006; 481–488.
Miller, Henry. Tropic of Cancer. New York: Grove Press, 1999.
Montserrat, Dominic. “Greek, Ancient: Prose.” In Encyclopedia or Erotic Literature. Gaetan
Brulotte and John Phillips, eds. New York, New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis
Group, 2006; 584–588.
Mudge, Bradford K. “English: United Kingdom, Eighteenth Century.” In Encyclopedia or
Erotic Literature. Gaetan Brulotte and John Phillips, eds. New York, New York: Rout-
ledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2006; 415–420.
Packard, Chris. Queer Cowboys. New York, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Queen, Carol. “Best Whore in Hillsboro.” In More Totally Herotica. Marcy Sheiner, ed. New
York, New York: QPBC, 1999; 234–243.
———. “What Do Women Want? We Want to Be Big Slutty Fags, Among Other Things.” In
The Burning Pen. M. Christian, ed. Los Angeles, CA: Alyson Publications, 2001;
44–50.
Roche Thomas S., series ed. Noirotica. Pahoa, Haiwaii: Black Books, 1996–2001.
Saint-Martin, Lori. “Feminism: Anti-Porn Movement and Pro-Porn Movement.” In Encyclo-
pedia or Erotic Literature. Gaetan Brulotte and John Phillips, eds. New York: Rout-
ledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2006; 455–460.
Scott, Paul. “French: Seventeenth Century.” In Encyclopedia or Erotic Literature. Gaetan
Brulotte and John Phillips, eds. New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group,
2006; 476–480.
Taormino, Tristan, ed. Best Lesbian Erotica. San Francisco, CA: Cleis Press, 1996–2007.
Welcher-Calhoun, Cherysse. “Homecumming.” In Best Black Women’s Erotica. Blanche
Richardson, ed. San Francisco, CA: Cleis Press, 2001; 28–40.
Wharton, Greg. An Interview with Thomas S. Roche. [Online, 2000] Suspect Thoughts: A
Journal of Subversive Writing <www.suspectthoughts.com/roche.htm>
Whitman, Walt. Whitman: Poetry and Prose. Justin Kaplan, ed. New York: Library of Amer-
ica, 1996.
DONIKA ROSS
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F

FANTASY LITERATURE
Definition. Fantasy literature is a genre of literature that has produced much
discussion in regard to definition. What is and is not considered fantasy is often
reflective of the worldview of the critic, and the definition can habitually be too
narrow or general to be considered agreeable. The word fantasy itself comes from
the Greek phantasia, meaning “to make visible.” In its most agreed-upon definition,
fantasy literature is the genre in which heroic or villainous characters narrate from
a setting wholly imagined (i.e., secondary) or amalgamated with existent creations
(i.e., those from existing mythological texts), geographically influenced by historical
settings and often depicting environments in accordance to their nature (e.g.,
haunted forests are dark and diseased, while sacred groves are beautiful and potent),
and chronologically set during (or having a strong connection with) the past. Stories
often involve a conflict between the forces of good and evil in which a war is fought,
a quest is embarked on, a life is chronicled, or order must be restored by central
characters. Fantasy embodies the development of the past and the evolution of the
future; it is an alternate reality, glimpsing into the impossible. Fantasy literature is
sharply divided by its subgenres, constructing their own doctrine and considering
themselves related only through superficial trappings.
The following subgenres are among the largest in fantasy literature:
High fantasy (also known as epic fantasy) is often written in an ancient or
secondary world setting, richly detailed and exhibiting cultures similar to that of
reality (such as medieval). Such fantasy tends to be written in an epic-like manner
(often narrated over several novels), reminiscent of historical and mythological
texts, so as to project a sense of grandeur and significance, and such works often
reflect a great deal of research (much like historical fantasy). Research can extend
to races, language, social customs, and industry. The goal of high fantasy is that of
realism, so to depict the unnatural as being normal. Well-known works in this field
include David A. Drake’s Lord of the Isles series (1997–), David Eddings’s Belgariad
352 FANTASY LITERATURE

FANTASY COMPARED TO MAINSTREAM FICTION

Famed author of fantasy literature Stephen R. Donaldson (best known for his Chronicles of
Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever, series, 1977–), offers a unique school of thought:

[Compare] fantasy to realistic, mainstream fiction. In realistic fiction, the characters

are expressions of their world, whereas in fantasy the world is an expression of the
characters. Even if you argue that realistic fiction is about the characters, and that the
world they live in is just one tool to express them, it remains true that the details
which make up their world come from a recognized body of reality—tables, chairs,
jobs, stresses which we all acknowledge as being external and real, forceful on their
own terms. In fantasy, however, the ultimate justification for all the external details
arises from the characters themselves. The characters confer reality on their
surroundings. (Donaldson 1986, 7)

series (1982–1984), Robin Hobb’s Farseer trilogy (1995–1997), and Tad Williams’s
Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy (1988–1993).
Low fantasy (also known as urban fantasy) primarily takes place in the real
world, often relocating fantastical creatures and characters into a natural environ-
ment. While such stories can venture into secondary worlds, these are the lesser to
the real world because the emphasis of this subgenre is to merge the elements of
fantasy with the world of readers. Such fantasy is often dependent on existing
mythologies (which it has a tendency to modernize) and visible to characters who
believe or seek out the fantastical, which is mostly hidden from the natural world.
Books by authors who have excelled in this genre include Emma Bull’s War for the
Oaks (1987), Jonathan Carroll’s The Land of Laughs (1980), John Crowley’s Little,
Big (1981), and Charles de Lint’s Moonheart (1984). At times, fairy tales are
included in this subgenre, but they are usually set in the past and are often set in a
secondary world, such as Wilhelm and Jakob Grimm’s three-volume Kinder-und-
Hausmarchen (1812) and modern anthologies such as editor Jack Zipes’s Spells of
Enchantment: The Wondrous Fairy Tales of Western Culture (1991).
Sword and sorcery fiction (also known as heroic fantasy) is a subgenre named by
author Fritz Reuter Leiber Jr. (1910–1992) to identify a type of fantasy he and
fellow authors were writing predominantly in the later twentieth century, but that
had originated in the 1920s with Robert E. Howard’s short story “The Shadow
Kingdom” (1929). Sword and sorcery fiction is written in a secondary world setting,
in which protagonists are often social or cultural outcasts who live outside the law
and possess a love-hate relationship with civilization. Like adventure fiction, the
subgenre is full of emotionally charged action and adventure that involves magic,
monsters, and traditional maidens in distress; however, the latter trend has changed
with the growth in warrior women, thanks in part to Jessica Amanda Salmonson
(e.g., Tomoe Gozen, 1981; rev. The Disfavored Hero, 1999). Works that have
excelled in this subgenre include Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series
(recently collected in The First Book of Lankhmar, 2001, and The Second Book of
Lankhmar, 2001); Charles R. Saunders’s Imaro series (Imaro, 1981, rev. 2006;
Imaro: The Quest for Cush, 1984, rev. 2007; Imaro: The Trail of Bohu, 1985, rev.
2008); Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane series (Darkness Weaves, 1970, restored text
1978; Bloodstone, 1975, Dark Crusade, 1976, and short story collections Death
 FANTASY LITERATURE 353

Angel’s Shadow, 1973, and Night Winds, 1978); Richard L. Tierney’s Simon Magus
series (short story collection Scroll of Thoth: Simon Magus and the Great Old Ones,
1997, and The Gardens of Lucullus, 2001, a collaborative novel with Glenn
Rahman); and Darrell Schweitzer’s short story collection We Are All Legends (1981)
and novels The Shattered Goddess (1982), The White Isle (1990), and The Mask of
the Sorcerer (1995). This subgenre is not to be confused with dark fantasy, which
merges fantastical elements with horror.
Historical fantasy is a subgenre set exclusively in the past, often merging fiction
with fact in a display of exhaustive research. Events in history are often retold in an
alternative or contemporary manner (e.g., the reign of King Arthur in Marion
Zimmer Bradley’s Avalon series starting with Mists of Avalon, 1979, and the Trojan
War in David Gemmell’s trilogy of Troy: Lord of the Silver Bow, 2005; Troy: Shield
of Thunder, 2006; and Troy: Fall of Kings, 2007) in which familiar figures are
changed and their characters are reinterpreted differently (such as the life of Jesus
Christ in Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man, 1966, rev. 1969) and Dan Brown’s
The Da Vinci Code, 2003). Dan Brown’s novels are a prime example of when
fictional stories are appended to well-known historical events or figures so to
explore a “secret history,” which has resulted in readers considering the works as
nonfiction. Primarily, historical fantasy does not include supernatural beings and at
times seeks to logically explain the elements of mythology (e.g., Michael Crichton’s
Eaters of the Dead, 1976). However, some authors of historical fantasy willingly
incorporate the supernatural into their stories but are careful that these elements do
not obscure the rich detail of historical events and characters (e.g., Robert E.
Howard’s historical adventures such as “Marchers of Valhalla,” 1932, and “The
Dark Man,” 1931, among others).
Dark fantasy is a subgenre that can be divided into two types of story. The first is
when elements of fantasy are used as the primary source of horror (as exampled in
the short stories of Ray Bradbury, Christopher Golden, Joe R. Lansdale, Thomas
Ligotti, Michael Mignola, and Clark Ashton Smith), while the second type is when
sword and sorcery fiction is overtly embedded with elements of horror, to allow the
development and exploration of darker themes. Often, in the latter type of dark
fantasy, anti-heroes are the protagonists, and the plot includes more violence,
sexuality, or psychological detail (as exampled in the series of Charles R. Gramlich’s
Kainja, Les Daniels’s Don Sebastian de Villenueva, and Karl Edward Wagner’s
Kane).
It is important to note that public perception as to what constitutes fantasy liter-
ature can vary dramatically. Some critics have commented that the trappings of
fantasy exist in more genres than most would initially suspect, as all fiction itself is
fantasy to begin with, and that even the so-called realistic authors are presenting
readers with their own particular, often odd or unusual, perception of reality.
History. An overview of the development of fantasy literature is the grounds for
much discussion, but it is relatively easy to determine a foundational work. Ancient
mythology, primarily Sumerian epics such as The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 1500 B.C.E.)
and Greco-Roman epics such as The Iliad (c. 750 B.C.E.), The Odyssey (c. 750
B.C.E.), and later The Argonautica (c. 250 B.C.E.), are often considered the first forms
of fantasy literature because they are ripe with heroes, villains, quests, and super-
natural beings (living creatures, deities, and the undead), and the once theological
aspects of the stories are no longer considered relative (hence ruling out Jewish,
Christian, and later Islamic sacred literature from being labeled early fantasy
354 FANTASY LITERATURE

literature). For untold centuries both the oral tradition and the world’s dominant
story modes (myths, epics, folktales, legends, and some pseudo-histories) have been
fantastic. That fantasy literature can be redefined as modern mythology may not be
as difficult to imagine as one may believe, for all literature comes beneath the
banner of a unique mythos.
In the United States, it is harder to determine a seminal work. Some commenta-
tors accredit the sacred texts of Native Americans with being the first forms of
American fantasy literature (written down as early as the nineteenth century by
ethnographers working with select tribes), but this opinion is uncommon because
the theological belief of these deities and entities still exists. More common is the
belief that Washington Irving’s stories of dark fantasy, “The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow” and “Rip van Winkle” (collected in The Sketch Book Of Geoffrey Crayon,
Gent., 1819–1820) are the first true American fantasies, followed by the works
of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and
L. Frank Baum, to name but a few American classics of the genre.
During the early twentieth century, the growth of fantasy literature was tremen-
dous. Pulp magazines such as Weird Tales: The Unique Magazine (1923–1954),
Unknown (1939–1943), Fantastic Adventures (1939–1953), Famous Fantastic
Mysteries (1939–1953), The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1949–), and
Fantastic (1952–1980) supplied everyday Americans with fantasy literature and
published thousands of authors. Several of these magazines have become best
sellers. Even when some of these magazines died off because of either financial or
production difficulties, small presses such as Arkham House republished many of
these pulp magazine authors in handsome hardcover editions, including H.P.
Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, and
August Derleth. Slowly but surely, fantasy literature was recapturing the imagina-
tion of American readers again, and with the publication of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord
of the Rings trilogy and Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian series in the latter
half of the twentieth century, book publishers (such as Sphere, Ace, Bantam, and Del
Rey/Ballantine) matched a demand that went into the millions, also publishing the
countless imitators and anthologies of fantasy that emerged soon after.
Trends and Themes. Fantasy literature in the twenty-first century continues the
same trends and themes that have existed in the genre for millennia, and unlike
many other genres, in particular science fiction and horror, it is debatable as to
whether one can consider national or international events as reflective of successful
trends (or sales). For example, events such as the terrorist attacks of September 11,
2001, on America have resulted in new subgenres, and while critics have accredited
this to changes in genres such as political thrillers, the theme of terrorism is not new

IMPORTANT FANTASY AUTHORS IN THE 2000s

Since 2000, fantasy literature has shown no sign of stopping, with small presses mainly pub-
lishing short story collections and mass market publishers manufacturing countless fantasy
novels.With the release of several cinematic adaptations of fantasy novels, the genre contin-
ues to generate new readers, profitable sales, and the opportunity for new authors such as
Jeff Vandermeer, Elizabeth Hand, Jeffrey Ford, Jeffrey Thomas, Michael Cisco, Shelley Jackson,
and Michael Chabon to emerge in a professional manner.
 FANTASY LITERATURE 355

and can hardly be seen as redefining an entire genre. Publishing phenomena like J.K.
Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997–2007) and Dan Brown’s historical fantasy The
Da Vinci Code (2003) are difficult to attribute to a particular event and could not
fairly be considered a widespread trend. The only identifiable change in the themes
of fantasy literature may be modernization for contemporary audiences (as seen in
the works of Neil Gaiman, such as the Sandman series, 1987–1996, and American
Gods, 2001) so to have the imagined world inherit more of the world’s sociological
norms, a trend already witnessed in dark fantasy. Reaffirmation of the fantastical is
an unusual theme in fantasy literature, particular low fantasy, in which the elements
of fantasy are expressed in a manner that indicates they are a natural part of the real
world and not imaginary; it is the belief and survival of fantasy in the work that
becomes its very theme, such as J.M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan, or, The Boy Who
Would Not Grow Up (1928). It is also possible to identify the growth of more
mature and heavily researched work across all subgenres of fantasy literature, such
as Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (2004) and Elizabeth Kostova’s
historical fantasy The Historian (2005).
The theme of the hero’s journey, which one may label as traditional, is among one
the largest in fantasy literature. Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces
(1949) is divided into three stages: Departure, Initiation, and Return. Departure
begins with “The Call to Adventure” and is then followed by “Refusal to the Call,”
“Supernatural Aid,” “Crossing the First Threshold,” and then “Belly of the Whale.”
Initiation begins with “The Road of Trials” and is then followed by “Meeting the
Goddess,” “Woman as Temptress,” “Atonement with the Father,” “Apotheosis,”
and finally “The Ultimate Boon.” Finally, Return begins with “Refusal of the
Return” and is then followed by “The Magic Flight,” “Rescue from Without,” “The
Crossing of the Return Threshold,” “Master of the Two Worlds,” and finally
“Freedom to Live.” The debate over whether most, if even all, fantasy adheres to
this formula has long been a discussion among authors and critics of the genre.
Campbell’s most successful influence was on George Lucas’s Star Wars saga
(1977–2005), which is a merger of fantasy and science fiction. An alternative is the
ongoing series in which short stories compose the main characters’ biography over
a period of time. Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser sword and sorcery
fiction (1939–1988) works are free of set archetypes such as Campbell’s, as they
choose to explore the identity of their characters and often do not have an ending
in sight (irrespective of what sequence in which they were written).
In fantasy literature, particularly high fantasy, the ongoing battle between the
forces of good and evil is a natural component of the plot. Michael Moorcock has
made explicit use of this in his Multiverse series, in which an “Eternal Champion”
(the best known incarnation being Elric, who first appeared in Elric of Melniboné,
1972) is directly involved in the battle between the forces of good and evil (which
Moorcock retitles Law and Chaos). However this battle is described or presented,
while existing in all subgenres of fantasy, it is most prominent in high fantasy
because of its epic-like presence. An alternative to this is the restoration of order by
a force of good, in a world already ruled by the forces of evil, as in the works of
Roger Zelazny (the Chronicles of Amber series, 1970–1991). From this often
emerges the theme of power and the responsibility that comes with it, also promi-
nent in fantasy literature. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of
the Ring (1954), Hobbit Frodo Baggins learns that he will be the one to possess
Sauron’s One Ring and travel to the volcanoes of Mordor to destroy its evil forever.
356 FANTASY LITERATURE

In Neil Gaiman’s Books of Magic (1991), novice magician Timothy Hunter learns
that he will inherit great power, but it is yet undetermined whether he will use the
power for the force of good or evil. Christian fiction, in which elements of fantasy
are renowned, also details the battle between good and evil in which Satan (and his
demons) battle against God (and his angels) in accordance with their natures as
described in the Old and New Testament canons. Christian fantasists such as Karen
Hancock (the Guardian-King series, 2003–2007) and Brock Thoene and Bodie
Thoene (A.D. Chronicles series, 2003–) are authors who often depict Christian
protagonists surviving in a world where the war between God and Satan is ever-
present, but they depict this world allegorically (best exampled in C.S. Lewis’s
Chronicles of Narnia series, 1950–1956). The first three volumes of Orson Scott
Card’s Alvin Maker series are also worth mentioning (Seventh Son, 1987; Red
Prophet, 1988; Prentice Alvin, 1989), as the author’s devotion to Mormonism
comes through in his writings.
Humorous fantasy is a limited trend in fantasy literature, particularly works
written primarily for a young audience. While mostly present in British fantasy
literature, there are some notable American authors who merge comedy with
fantasy. L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt wrote a series about the time-traveling
Harold Shea, beginning in Incompleat Enchanter (1942); Poul Anderson’s novel
Three Hearts and Three Lions (1961) is often referred to as a work of humor, as is
Piers Anthony’s A Spell for Chameleon (1977). Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray
Mouser sword and sorcery stories (1939–1988) also contained humorous moments,
as did the dark fantasy stories of Robert Bloch.
Fantasy works in which animals are protagonists follow a well-known theme and
have existed as far bask as the fables of Aesop (c. 6 B.C.E.) and have remained a
cornerstone within British fantasy, as seen in the works of Lewis Carroll, Beatrix
Potter, Kenneth Grahame, and Richard Adams. Animals that talk come in two
forms: humanoids who talk, eat, and dress like humans or animals that retain their
nature but are able to speak the human language. Examples of American authors
who have chosen to narrate their stories through animals include Joel Chandler
Harris (Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, 1880), Fritz Leiber (The Green
Millennium, 1953, and the Gummitch short stories in Gummitch & Friends, 1992),
and Art Spiegelman (Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, 1992, a retelling of the Holocaust,
belonging to the subgenre of historical fantasy).
Contexts and Issues. In regard to the discussion of fantasy literature and how it
reflects contemporary issues, in “Why Fantasy and Why Now?” Bakker comments
that fantasy is “the primary literary response to what is often called the ‘contempo-
rary crisis of meaning’ . . . [representing] a privileged locus from which one might
understand what is going in [modern] culture.” Citing the aftermath of the Enlight-
enment as an indication of a return to fantasy (and one could argue religion),
Bakker rightly decrees the following:

Fantasy is the celebration of what we no longer are: individuals certain of our meaning-
fulness in a meaningful world. The wish-fulfillment that distinguishes fantasy from other
genres is not to be the all-conquering hero, but to live in a meaningful world. The fact
that such worlds are enchanted worlds, worlds steeped in magic, simply demonstrates the
severity of our contemporary crisis. “Magic” is a degraded category in our society; if you
believe in magic in this world, you are an irrational flake. And yet magic is all we have
in our attempt to recover some vicarious sense of meaningfulness. If fantasy primarily
 FANTASY LITERATURE 357

looks back, primarily celebrates those values rendered irrelevant by post-industrial

society, it is because our future only holds the promise of a more trenchant nihilism. One
may have faith otherwise, but by definition such faith is not rational. Faith, remember, is
belief without reasons. (Bakker 2002)

Themes are universal, as are the emotions we share. When reading fantasy litera-
ture, this is no different. It is composed of a variety of philosophical elements and
structured in an inimitable manner that upholds a particular ideology, connecting it
closer to the values and beliefs of the real world. For example, the appeal of a
dragon may for one reader simply be the entertainment value derived from a sense
of awe at an otherworldly and wondrous beast while for another it might embody
and symbolize his or her dream to fly (either literally or metaphorically). The term
escapism is often applied to fantasy literature, in that fantasy is seen as a means of
escaping the realities of contemporary life. While the elements of horror or science
fiction might be seen as either too confronting or too complex, the worlds of fantasy
are often depicted as being far more favorable and welcoming because they are
absent of the social and ecological problems of the real world. However, when
establishing the weird tale canon, S.T. Joshi includes fantasy but is quick to discard
“imaginary-world fantasy” and heroic fantasy; rather, he includes only fantastical
elements unnatural to this world in the weird tale canon, for the former types of
fantasy seem “to lack a certain metaphysical ramifications present in nearly all other
types of weird fiction” (Joshi 1990, 9). This point of view is open to debate.
As a genre, fantasy literature has faced being stereotyped by the works of a single
subgenre (for example, all fantasy must include sorcerers, dragons, and knights, as
in high fantasy). Formulaic writing is also inherent in some fantasy literature, again
in high fantasy and also sword and sorcery fiction. Public perception of fantasy lit-
erature has shown people’s inability to differentiate its subgenres, and in some
instances, it is seen as the same as science fiction. Others think of fantasy literature
as being the same as children’s literature, reflective of how fantasy was depicted and
presented in the earlier days of the older generation.
Fantasy literature, particularly high fantasy, has often been charged with over-
writing, whether in relation to exhausting the genre as a whole (as is often said of
the subgenre of vampire fiction in horror), too much detail on inconsequential
matter (sometimes considered as self-absorption of research), or the sheer length of
a series that does not appear to have an ending in sight (such as Robert Jordan’s
Wheel of Time series, 1990–). Additionally, some authors have carelessly paid too
much respect, admiration, and honor to the work of an earlier, often classic, author.
Both J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard have been the cause of countless imita-
tors, most of whom are mediocre in comparison to their source of inspiration.
Tolkien’s imitators include authors such as Terry Brooks, David Eddings, Robert
Jordan, and Dennis McKiernan, to name but a few, while Howard’s imitators,
primarily located in sword and sorcery fiction, include Lin Carter, Gardener Fox,
John Jakes, and Roy Thomas. Howard’s works, like H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories
(resulting in the infamous “Cthulhu Mythos”), have resulted in dozens of pastiches
in which established authors (such as L. Sprauge de Camp, Björn Nyberg, and
Harry Turtledove) have continued the saga of well-known creations, in this case,
Conan of Cimmeria. In stating this issue, paying homage in fantasy literature is not
to be seen as a flaw or deemed unworthy of study. A prime example of successful
homage is Lovecraft’s Dunsanian period of writing between the years 1919 and 1921,
358 FANTASY LITERATURE

when the author’s writing reflected the works of Lord Dunsany (1878–1957).
Dunsany is known for his mythological worlds and characters and has rightly been
considered foundational to fantasy literature. Lovecraft was a great admirer of his
work, writing several stories that were Dunsanian in nature, some of the well-
known works being “The Doom That Came to Sarnath,” “The Cats of Ulthar,” and
“The White Ship.” Lovecraft never truly used a creation by Dunsany, only adopting
the feeling and elements present within them.
Another important issue is the lack of literary criticism devoted to the works of
authors within fantasy literature. While classic authors of fantasy, often British,
have produced volumes of critical studies, studies of the life and works of some
American fantasy authors are not as abundant as they should or need to be. That
several American fantasy authors have produced a large oeuvre of work and have
won countless awards without receiving the serious critical recognition they deserve
is an issue of concern (as witnessed in the next section).
Reception. Fantasy literature has attracted incredible interest at the beginning of
the twenty-first century as a result of cinematic adaptations. Historical fantasy has
been predominant in the last decade, with Gladiator (2000), Troy (2004), Alexander
(2004), Kingdom of Heaven (2005), the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy
(2003–2007), and others proving to be financially successful. Film adaptations of
recent fantasy literature such as Christopher Paolini’s Eragon (2005) and J.K.
Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997–2007) are watched either by young readers
who have read the texts and desire to visually experience the story or by younger
audiences who are compelled to read the texts after having seen the cinematic
adaptation. Film adaptations of classic fantasy literature such J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord
of the Rings trilogy and C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series (1950–1956),
while certainly watched by younger audiences, are predominately watched by an
older generation who have read the texts before seeing the adaptations. It would not
be unfair to comment that had these movies not been released, the output of fantasy
literature in the last decade would have been less productive or, at the very least, less
profitable.
Critical studies are often limited to book-length examinations by actual fantasy
authors such as Lin Carter’s Imaginary Worlds: The Art of Fantasy (1973), Ursula
K. Le Guin’s The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
(1979, rev. 1992), and Michael Moorcock’s Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study
of Epic Fantasy (1987, rev. 2004) or are written by academics, such as Brian
Attebery’s The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature (1980), editor Brian M.
Thomsen’s The American Fantasy Tradition (2002), and David Sandner’s Fantastic
Literature: A Critical Reader (2004). They are published by either academic or
small presses (spotlighting a subgenre or a single author). The number of maga-
zines and journals dedicated to the serious study of fantasy literature has shrunk
over the years, for only a few noteworthy titles exist today (such as Studies in
Fantasy Literature; Wormwood: Writings about Fantasy, Supernatural and Deca-
dent Literature; Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles
Williams, and the Genres of Myth and Fantasy Studies; Extrapolation; The Bulletin
of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association; Journal of the Fantastic in
the Arts; and The New York Review of Science Fiction, to name a few). Essays on
fantasy literature are often found sporadically, either on the Internet (such as
webzines, though few are peer reviewed) or in journals of nation-specific literature
(such as Journal of Popular Culture and American Literature). As stated
 FANTASY LITERATURE 359

previously, despite the output of some fantasy authors, the critical study of their
fiction is despondently dearth.
Selected Authors. The following discussion of four major authors active in fantasy
literature includes an analysis of each author’s works. The following American-born
and raised authors are observed: James Blaylock (1950–), Tim Powers (1952–),
Jessica Amanda Salmonson (1950–), and Darrell Schweitzer (1952–).
Author James Blaylock writes both science fiction and fantasy, but it is the latter
in which he excels and is most successful artistically. The books in Blaylock’s earli-
est trilogy, The Elfin Ship (1982), The Disappearing Dwarf (1983), and The Stone
Giant (1989), are best read as children’s literature, merging with high fantasy but
lacking a literary depth that would rank them alongside most contemporary authors
of the subgenre. Far better is Land of Dreams (1987), a dark fantasy for young
adults in which children uncover the border between reality and fantasy, resulting
in an unsolved murder and the return of a sinister carnival. The Digging Leviathan
(1984) is more humorous science fiction than fantasy, and while Homunculus
(1986) and its sequel Lord Kelvin’s Machine (1992) are somewhat fantastical in
their prose and conception, they are better labeled “steampunk,” a struggling
subgenre within science fiction. It is not until The Last Coin (1988) that Blaylock
successfully masters the use of fantastical elements in an original and rewarding
manner. In a tale set in Southern California, innkeeper Andrew Vanbergen unwill-
ingly becomes the force of good against the traveling Jules Pennyman, who is
attempting to collect Judas Iscariot’s original 30 pieces of silver because by doing so
he will achieve immortality. The Paper Grail (1991) is similar in that the Holy Grail
is revealed to be an origami cup, which when folded in particular ways can achieve
different types of magic. Set in northern California, this book features aging grail
guardian Michael Graham, who leaves the Holy Grail to museum curator Howard
Barton, beginning an adventurous story in which Barton, unaware of forthcoming
dangers and hopelessly in love, must ensure that the holy artifact does not end up
in the wrong hands. In All the Bells on Earth (1995), small-business owner Walt
Stebbins accidentally receives a delivery in the mail, a deceased “Bluebird of
Happiness” that makes all his dreams come true. However, the individual who was
to receive the artifact, former friend and business partner Robert Argyle, is desper-
ate to retrieve the artifact at all costs because it is the key to repossessing his soul
(which he sold to a satanic clergyman decades ago). Blaylock’s next novels, Night
Relics (1994), Winter Tides (1997), and The Rainy Season (1999), are all contem-
porary ghost stories, and although they share elements with stories in dark fantasy,
they are best considered and studied as horror.
To date there has been no critical study of Blaylock’s work, the closest being the
author’s own Web site (http://www.sybertooth.com/blaylock/index.htm).
Tim Powers is an author of fantasy literature, best known for his works of
historical fantasy and occasional dark fantasy (though some of his novels could
easily be classified as adventure fiction with supernatural elements). Powers’s novels
are richly researched and are always multilayered with history, mythology, and the
supernatural, and it is often difficult to summarize a novel because of the countless
plots it contains. Epitaph in Rust (1976) is a science fantasy detailing the life of
Brother Thomas, who flees his monastery and finds himself in a future Los Angeles
where revolution is afire. The Drawing of the Dark (1979) is set in sixteenth-century
Europe in which Irishman Brian Duffy, a mercenary, retires and becomes a bouncer
at a Viennese inn, brewer of the legendary Herzwesten beer. Soon enough, the inn
360 FANTASY LITERATURE

is visited by figures from Celtic and Norse mythology, and Duffy learns that he is a
central figure in protecting western Europe from the encroaching Turkish Ottoman
Empire. The Anubis Gates (1983), while possessing elements of science fiction, is
also a fantasy novel. Scholar Brendan Doyle, who is living in the 1980s, is sent back
to nineteenth-century London with a group of students, to work on a biography of
(fictional) poet William Ashbless as well as to experience a lecture by Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. However, when Doyle is kidnapped by gypsies, who are led by a power-
ful sorcerer who desires to destroy the British Empire’s hold over Egypt, the story
take a fantastical turn. The dark fantasy On Stranger Tides (1987) is a supernatu-
ral pirate story set in the eighteenth century in which Jack Shandy (formerly
accountant John Chandagnac) seeks revenge on a family member who financially
betrayed his father as well as engaging in battle against the legendary Blackbeard,
who is not only a fierce warrior but also a practicing voodoo priest.
The Stress of Her Regard (1989) is a dark fantasy, set in the early nineteenth cen-
tury, and revolves around Doctor Michael Crawford, who, on the eve of his wed-
ding, places his wedding ring on a town statue for safe keeping. The morning after,
the statue has disappeared, and his bride is brutally murdered. Accused by the
townspeople and unsure of his actions, he flees and finds solace in the company of
Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats, where it is revealed that the statue with
his ring is, in fact, a vampire. Last Call (1992) is centered around tarot magic and
card gambling, in which ex-professional card player Scott Crane battles against his
father, the current incarnation of the Fisher King, in a game of life and death. Expi-
ration Date (1995) is a supernatural fantasy in which 11-year-old Koot Hoomie Par-
ganas becomes possessed by the ghost of Thomas Edison and must evade a horde of
“ghost eaters” who wish to devour the power of Edison’s ghost.
Earthquake Weather (1997) is the sequel to both Last Call and Expiration
Date, in which the new Fisher King Scott Crane is killed and presided over by
Koot, who will either resurrect the chaos awoken since the king’s death or will
become the Fisher King himself and restore order. Declare (2000) is a supernatu-
ral spy thriller, with fantastical elements thrown in, surrounding recalled spy
Andrew Hale. Hale must investigate Mount Ararat, where it is said Noah’s Ark
resides, before the Russians, who are supernaturally protected during the Cold
War. Three Days to Never (2006) is a more interesting novel (and like other nov-
els contains elements of science fiction), detailing the life of Albert Einstein’s ille-
gitimate daughter (who has superpowers) and her evasion of the Israeli Mossad
and the mystical group the Vespers. It is soon revealed the Einstein successfully
created and used a time machine, and it is the desire of these groups to possess the
machine for their own diabolical use.
Surprisingly, very little literary criticism has been devoted to the works of Tim Pow-
ers, the most notable being Arinn Dembo’s “Impassion’d Clay: On Tim Powers’ The
Stress of Her Regard” (1991) and Fiona Kelleghan’s “Getting a Life: Haunted Spaces
in Two Novels by Tim Powers” (1998), both in the New York Review of Science Fic-
tion, and the largest unofficial Web site at http://www.theworksoftimpowers.com/.
Jessica Amanda Salmonson is known as an author of both fantasy literature and
horror, her books in the latter genre often including elements of dark fantasy, in addi-
tion to being a prolific editor and poet. Salmonson is of importance to the genre in
that her best-known fantasy works, mostly being sword and sorcery fiction, were
upon their publication both unique and original within a genre that is primarily
patriarchal and at many times mediocre. Salmonson’s edited anthologies Amazons!
 FANTASY LITERATURE 361

(1979), Amazons II (1982), Heroic Visions (1983), and Heroic Visions II (1986)
were groundbreaking in that they reestablished the warrior woman in fantasy
literature in an era when stereotypes were still existent, and this was critically
explored further in her exhaustive The Encyclopedia of Amazons: Women Warriors
from Antiquity to the Present Era (1991) and the forthcoming Amazonia: Antiquity’s
Bold Utopian Experiment. Equally enduring is Salmonson’s Tomoe Gozen trilogy
(Tomoe Gozen, 1981, rev. The Disfavored Hero, 1999; The Golden Naginata, 1982;
Thousand Shrine Warrior, 1984), which refreshingly relocated sword and sorcery fic-
tion from a secondary world setting to a twelfth-century Japan in which the super-
natural exists. Loosely based on the historical figure, Tomoe Gozen is a masterless
female samurai who unwillingly killed her master Shojiro Shigeno as a result of being
resurrected by his enemy, the magician Huan. From that point on, her journey is one
of redemption and continues in the following novels, in which she must learn to live
in a patriarchal world of revenge, betrayal, and obedience.
The Swordswoman (1982) spotlights the life of Erin Wyler, who upon unleashing
the power of a magical sword, begins a life full of trials and tribulation. Set in China,
Ou Lu Khen and the Beautiful Madwoman (1985) is a dark fantasy set exclusively
in the past and details the forbidden love of Ou Lu Khen for a beautiful woman who
is favored by the gods. Faced with stigma, but overcome with love, Ou Lu Khen fol-
lows her, even if it means he too must succumb to madness. Anthony Shriek, His
Doleful Adventures; or, Lovers of Another Realm (1992) introduces the character of
Anthony Shriek, a college student who learns he is a demon from the Nightlands. A
dark fantasy, the story explores Shriek’s psychological acceptance of his nature as
well as his relationship with the enigmatic Emily, who is also a demon. Although
Salmonson is currently writing horror stories, many can easily be classified as dark
fantasy, as evidenced by the stories in her collections Mystic Women: Their Ancient
Tales & Legends Recounted by a Woman Inmate of the Calcutta Insane Asylum
(1991), The Goddess Under Siege (1992), and Wisewomen & Boggy-Boos: A Dic-
tionary Of Lesbian Fairy Lore (1992). Particular stories worth citing are “Angel’s
Exchange,” “Madame Enchantia and the Maze Dream,” “Mamishka and the Sor-
cerer,” “Eagle-Worm,” and “The View from Mount Futuba.”
To date there has been no critical study of Salmonson’s work, the closest being an
analytical interview titled “Jessica Amanda Salmonson: Storyteller” for Jitterbug
Fantasia (2004) and the author’s own Web site at http://www.violetbooks.com/.
Darrell Schweitzer is an author, editor, and critic of fantasy literature, writing in
the subgenres of low fantasy, dark fantasy, and sword and sorcery fiction. Former
editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (1977–1982) and Amazing
Stories (1982–1986) and current coeditor of the modern incarnation of Weird Tales:
The Unique Magazine (1988–) with George Scithers, Schweitzer is among one of the
most important assets to the genre and continues to contribute invaluable works.
While The Shattered Goddess (1982) is a science fantasy set in the future, it does
involve the deception of a witch who replaces her son with the heir to the throne.
The royal-blooded child grows up as a sorcerer, and when he learns of his true
origins, he must make a decision that will affect the entire world. Tom O’Bedlam’s
Night Out, and Other Strange Excursions (1985) is a collection of whimsical short
stories about the legendary figure from English folklore and his amusing exploits.
The White Isle (1988) is a dark fantasy novella focusing on the attempts by Prince
Evnos from the Island of Iankoros to retrieve his beloved bride from the God of
Death and is rich in its poetic language and description of an unscrupulous deity.
362 FANTASY LITERATURE

The Mask of the Sorcerer (1995) is in many ways high fantasy, being an
episodic novel set in an alternative Egypt about the travails of the Sekenre (an
immortal sorcerer trapped in the body of a child) and his desire to again become
a powerful sorcerer, like his father Vashtem, even if it means traveling to the Land
of the Dead. Sekenre: The Book of the Sorcerer (2004), the former’s sequel of
sorts, is a collection of short stories exploring the trails and tribulations of the
emerging sorcerer, written in first person. We Are All Legends (1981) is a collec-
tion of short stories involving a wandering crusader called Sir Julian the Apos-
tate, who, because of bedding a witch, is cursed by God and traveling the lands
of Europe in search of redemption and a means to reverse his unsavory fate.
Schweitzer’s works are an amusing exploration of religion by an increasingly
popular author and are among the better sword and sorcery fiction of the era.
Transients: And Other Disquieting Stories (1993) and Necromancies and Nether-
worlds: Uncanny Stories (1999) with Jason van Hollander are both collections of
dark fantasy stories, some with a humorous edge and others that are clearly hor-
ror. Schweitzer is the editor of important anthologies of literary criticism, such as
Exploring Fantasy Worlds: Essays on Fantastic Literature (1985), Discovering
Classic Fantasy Fiction: Essays on the Antecedents of Fantastic Literature (1996),
and The Neil Gaiman Reader (2006) and is the sole author of the book-length
studies Pathways to Elfland: The Writings of Lord Dunsany (1989) and Windows
of the Imagination (1998).
Schweitzer has received very little critical study, despite his popularity and volume
of work. Steve Behrends’s “Holy Fire: Darrell Schweitzer’s Imaginative Fiction,” in
Studies in Weird Fiction (1989), and the analytical interview “The Sorcery of
Storytelling: The ‘Imaginary Worlds’ of Darrell Schweitzer” for Black Gate Magazine
(Fultz 2006) are all that currently exist.

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 FANTASY LITERATURE 363

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———. The Illearth War. The First Chronicles. Orlando, FL: Holt, 1977.
———. Lord Foul’s Bane. The First Chronicles. Orlando, FL: Holt, 1977.
———. The One Tree. The Second Chronicles. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine, 1982.
———. The Power That Preserves. The First Chronicles. Orlando, FL: Holt, 1977.
———. The Runes of the Earth. The Last Chronicles. New York: Putnam, 2004.
———. White Gold Wielder. The Second Chronicles. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine, 1983.
———. The Wounded Land. The Second Chronicles. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine, 1980.
Drake, David. A. The Fortress of Glass. New York: Tor Books, 2006.
———. Goddess of the Ice Realm. New York: Tor Books, 2003.
———. Lord of the Isles. New York: Tor Books, 1997.
———. Master of the Cauldron. New York: Tor Books, 2004.
———. Mistress of the Catacombs. New York: Tor Books, 2001.
———. Queen of Demons. New York: Tor Books, 1998.
———. Servant of the Dragon. New York: Tor Books, 1999.
Eddings, David. Castle of Wizardry. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine, 1984.
———. Enchanters’ End Game. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine, 1984.
———. Magician’s Gambit. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine, 1983.
———. Pawn of Prophecy. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine, 1982.
———. Queen of Sorcery. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine, 1982.
Fultz, John R. “The Sorcery of Storytelling: The ‘Imaginary Worlds’ of Darrell Schweitzer.”
Interview. Black Gate: Adventures in Fantasy Literature 2006. http://www.black-
gate.com/articles/schweitzer.htm.
Gaiman, Neil. American Gods. London: Headline Book, 2001.
———. Books of Magic. New York: Detective Comics, 1991.
Gemmell, David. Troy: Fall of Kings. New York: Putnam, 2007.
———. Troy: Lord of the Silver Bow. New York: Ballantine, 2005.
———. Troy: Shield of Thunder. London: Transworld, 2006.
Hancock, Karen. The Light of Eidon. Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House, 2003.
———. Return of the Guardian-King. Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House, 2007.
———. Shadow Over Kiriath. Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House, 2005.
———. The Shadow Within. Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House, 2004.
Harris, Joel Chandler. Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings. New York: Penguin, 1982.
Hobb, Robin. Assassin’s Apprentice. New York: Bantam Books, 1995.
———. Assassin’s Quest. New York: Bantam Books, 1997.
———. Royal Assassin. New York: Bantam Books, 1996.
Irving, Washington. The Sketch Book Of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. New York: Modern
Library, 2001.
James P. Blaylock Fantasy and Steampunk Author. http://www.sybertooth.com/
blaylock/index.htm.
364 FANTASY LITERATURE

Joshi, S.T. The Weird Tale. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.
Kelleghan, Fiona. “Getting a Life: Haunted Spaces in Two Novels by Tim Powers.” New
York Review of Science Fiction 115 (1998): 13–17.
Kostova, Elizabeth. The Historian. New York: Little, Brown, 2005.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. New
York: HarperCollins, 1992.
Leiber, Fritz. The First Book of Lankhmar. London: Victor Gollancz, 2001.
———. The Green Millennium. New York: Ace, 1969.
———. Gummitch & Friends. New Hampshire: Donald M. Grant, 1992.
———. The Second Book of Lankhmar. London: Victor Gollancz, 2001.
Lewis, C.S. The Horse and His Boy. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994.
———. The Last Battle. Zondervan, 1994.
———. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994.
———. The Magician’s Nephew. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994.
———. Prince Caspian. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994.
———. The Silver Chair. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994.
———. The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader.” Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994.
Moorcock, Michael. Behold the Man. London: Mayflower Books, 1973.
———. Elric of Melniboné. London: Victor Gollancz, 2001.
———. Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy. Austin, TX: MonkeyBrain
Books, 2004.
Paolini, Christopher. Eragon. New York: Knopf, 2005.
Powers, Tim. The Anubis Gates. London: Victor Gollancz, 2005.
———. Declare. Scranton, PA: William Morrow, 2001.
———. The Drawing of the Dark. London: Victor Gollancz, 2002.
———. Earthquake Weather. New York: Tor, 1997.
———. Expiration Date. New York: Tor, 1996.
———. Last Call. New York: Avon Books, 1993.
———. On Stranger Tides. New York: Putnam Berkley, 1988.
———. The Stress of Her Regard. New York: Ace Books, 1991.
———. Three Days to Never. Scranton, PA: William Morrow, 2006.
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. London: Bloomsbury, 1997.
———. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. London: Bloomsbury, 2000.
———. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. London: Bloomsbury, 2006.
———. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. London: Bloomsbury, 2003.
———. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. London: Bloomsbury, 1997.
———. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. London: Bloomsbury, 1999.
Salmonson, Jessica Amanda, ed. Amazons! New York: DAW, 1979.
———, ed. Amazons II. New York: DAW, 1982.
———. Anthony Shriek, His Doleful Adventures or, Lovers of Another Realm. New York:
Dell, 1992.
———. The Disfavored Hero. Boulder Creek, CA: Pacific Warriors, 1999.
———. The Encyclopedia of Amazons: Women Warriors from Antiquity to the Present Era.
New York: Paragon House, 1991.
———. The Golden Naginata. New York: Ace Books, 1982.
———, ed. Heroic Visions. New York: Ace Books, 1983.
———, ed. Heroic Visions II. New York: Ace Books, 1986.
———. Ou Lu Khen and the Beautiful Madwoman. New York: Ace Books, 1985.
———. The Swordswoman. New York: Tor, 1982.
———. Thousand Shrine Warrior. New York: Ace Books, 1984.
———. Violet Books Antiquarian Supernatural Literature, Fantasy & Mysterious Litera-
tures, Vintage Westerns, Swashbucklers, & Juveniles. http://www.violetbooks.com
Sandner, David. Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004.
 FANTASY LITERATURE 365

Saunders, Charles R. Imaro. Newberg, OR: Night Shade Books, 2006.

———. Imaro: The Quest for Cush. Newberg, OR: Night Shade Books, 2007.
Schweitzer, Darrell. Discovering Classic Fantasy Fiction: Essays on the Antecedents of
Fantastic Literature. Philadelphia, PA: Wildside Press, 1996.
———. Exploring Fantasy Worlds: Essays on Fantastic Literature. San Bernardino, CA:
Borgo Press, 1985.
———. The Mask of the Sorcerer. Doylestown, PA: Wildside Press, 2003.
———. The Neil Gaiman Reader, Doylestown, PA: Wildside Press, 2006.
———. Pathways to Elfland: The Writings of Lord Dunsany. Philadelphia: Owlswick Press,
1989.
———. Sekenre: The Book of the Sorcerer. Doylestown, PA: Wildside Press, 2004.
———. The Shattered Goddess. Philadelphia, PA: Wildside Press, 1982.
———. Tom O’Bedlam’s Night Out, and Other Strange Excursions. Buffalo, NY: W. Paul
Ganley, 1985.
———. We Are All Legends. Philadelphia, PA: Wildside Press, 1981.
———. The White Isle. Philadelphia: Owlswick Press, 1988.
———. Windows of the Imagination. Philadelphia, PA: Wildside Press, 1998.
Spiegelman, Art. Fifth Seal. Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House, 2006.
———. First Light. Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House, 2003.
———. Fourth Dawn. Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House, 2005.
———. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Scholastic, 1992.
———. Second Touch. Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House, 2004.
———. Third Watch. Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House, 2004.
Thomsen, Brian M., ed. The American Fantasy Tradition. New York: Tor Books, 2002.
Tierney, Richard L. Scroll of Thoth: Simon Magus and the Great Old Ones. Canada:
Chaosium, 1997.
Tierney, Richard L., and Glenn Rahman. The Gardens of Lucullus. Minneapolis, MN:
Sidecar Preservation Society, 2001.
Tolkien, J.R.R. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
2001.
———. Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.
———. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.
Wagner, Karl Edward. Bloodstone. New York: Warner Books, 1975.
———. Dark Crusade. New York: Warner Books, 1976.
———. Darkness Weaves. New York: Warner Books, 1978.
———. Death Angel’s Shadow. New York: Warner Books, 1973.
———. Night Winds. New York: Warner Books, 1978.
Williams, Tad. The Dragonbone Chair. New York: DAW, 1988.
———. To Green Angel Tower. New York: DAW, 1993.
———. Stone of Farewell. New York: DAW, 1990.
Zipes, Jack, ed. Spells of Enchantment: The Wondrous Fairy Tales of Western Culture. New
York: Viking Press, 1991.

Further Reading
Anderson, Douglas A. The 100 Best Writers of Fantasy & Horror. New York: Cold Spring
Press, 2006; Austin, Alec. “Quality in Epic Fantasy.” Strange Horizons, June 2002.
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2002/20020624/epic_fantasy.shtml; Langford, Michele
K., ed. Contours of the Fantastic. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990; Morse, Donald
E., ed. The Fantastic in World Literature and the Arts. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1987.
BENJAMIN SZUMSKYJ
366 FILM ADAPTATIONS OF BOOKS

FILM ADAPTATIONS OF BOOKS

Definition. At its most basic, film adaptation is a translation of a literary text into
a cinematic one; though film adaptation can be defined very broadly, as well as more
specifically. In fact, one can generalize that many films, despite their lack of any
conventional literary source, are innately adaptations of some aspect of human
experience. Even horror films can, with their seemingly unrealistic ghouls and mon-
sters, metaphorically depict the fears and anxieties embedded in the human psyche.
However, generalizations aside, most scholars agree that a film is considered an
adaptation when its primary intention is to reinterpret a novel, short story, or other
traditional literary genre. As Dudley Andrew suggests, “the broader notion of the
process of adaptation has much in common with interpretation theory, for in a
strong sense adaptation is the appropriation of a meaning from a prior text,” and
subsequently, an interpretation of that previous text (1980, 29). In most cases, film
adaptation is a transfer of meaning from one system of signs into another that
occurs via a practice of filmic translation. The “distinct feature” of adaptation,
Andrew remarks, is “the matching of a cinematic sign system to a prior achievement
in some other system” (qtd. in McFarlane 1996, 21). Indeed, much of the material
available that takes film adaptation as its primary subject borrows heavily from a
variety of established theorists and critics, including Christian Metz, W.J.T.
Mitchell, and Roland Barthes, whose work on semiotics has had an immense influ-
ence on scholarly discussion of film adaptations as interpretative signs of preceding
texts.
Like the novels and stories that films strive to simulate, adaptations are intricately
constructed narratives that possess plot, setting, characters, and manner of discourse.
The definition of a narrative, as Andrew Horton and Stuart McDougal indicate, is
“a perceptual activity that organizes data into a special pattern which represents and
explains experience” (1998, 2). Film adaptations fit squarely into this definition
because they most certainly involve an extensive degree of “perceptual activity,” and
they also exhibit a wide range of human encounters and emotions. Just as reading
a novel provides the reader with an opportunity for making meaning, viewing a film
adaptation allows a similar experience for the filmgoer. “Like reading,” Peter
Reynolds asserts, “spectating involves a complex interaction between the spectator
and the performance in which what has been encoded by the author(s) is decoded
by the spectator” (1993, 3). Both versions of narrative—the conventional text as
well as its cinematic counterpart—are encoded with meaning that is then decoded
by the reader or viewer. However, this meaning-making process is uniquely amended
during the viewing of a film adaptation, given that many viewers who are already
familiar with the source text are inevitably forced to decode a narrative that they
have already seemingly decoded. Yet the film adaptation is, in itself, a new narrative
that must be re(de)coded by the viewer. This narratological rereading is utterly
exclusive to film adaptations.
Because not all film adaptations are completely loyal to their textual antecedents,
some can be seen as critiques, rewritings, or alternate readings of their source texts.
A film adaptation of a nineteenth-century novel that utilizes contemporary dress,
discourse, and setting is an example of a rewrite or alternate reading of the novel in
question. Though the general plot and characters are the same as the novel, the
updated costumes and so on make the adaptation explicitly different from its
original. Indeed, adaptations can be both very similar to and extensively distinctive
from their predecessors. Kamilla Elliott, in her 2003 publication Rethinking the
 FILM ADAPTATIONS OF BOOKS 367

Novel/Film Debate, devises a number of categories into which many adaptations

can fit, implying that film adaptations, both overtly and covertly, address, interpret,
and imitate their source texts in diverse ways. The psychic film adaptation is essen-
tially a “passing of the spirit of the text” into film (Stam 2005, 49, n. 48). In Elliott’s
words, “the form changes; the spirit remains constant” (138). Of course, the spirit
of any text is generally the spirit of the author, manifested in authorial intent. How
does the author want us to feel about his or her work? What are we supposed to get
out of the text or film? In many cases, an accomplished film director or screenwriter
can alter the content of a text while still remaining true to its supposed essence or
theme. The ventriloquist model, unlike the psychic one, writes Elliott, “pays no lip
service to authorial spirit: rather, it blatantly empties out the novel’s signs and fills
them with filmic spirits” (143). In a ventriloquist adaptation, the intent of the orig-
inal author becomes secondary to that of the text’s appointed cinematic author.
Most notably, ventriloquist renderings often add to the original text in some way,
so that the end result is often heavily altered from its source. The film adaptation,
in essence, takes on its own voice, apart from that of the novel.
The genetic concept of adaptation, Elliott’s third category, refers to the transfer of
“an underlying ‘deep’ narrative structure [between literature and film] akin to
genetic structure” (2003, 150). Elliott insinuates that a film adaptation, as an offspring
of some mother-text, will naturally possess many analogous traits to its textual
“mother,” yet will exist as an innately different entity. The “de(re)composing” concept
of adaptation is arguably Elliott’s most complex and abstract category. In this
model, “the novel and film decompose, merge, and form a new composition at
‘underground’ levels of reading. The adaptation is a composite of textual and filmic
signs merging in audience consciousness together with other cultural narratives and
often leads to confusion as to which is novel and which is film” (157).
Any audience disorientation ultimately arises from the total inclusion of any num-
ber of accepted “texts” into a specific cultural imagination. For instance, a certain
story, so ingrained into popular culture, may be without a designated origin. Thus,
the story or content of the adaptation is confusedly understood as “original” when
it certainly is not.
Elliott’s fourth type of film adaptation, the “incarnational,” literally occurs when
“word becomes flesh.” In many cases, according to Elliott (161), “the word is only
a partial expression of a more total representation that requires incarnation for its
fulfillment,” in which case the production of the film becomes an act of completion.
The adapted film realizes its source text in a visual and audible manner, creating a
genuine sensorium in which the reader, now viewer, can revel. The internal, imagi-
native world of reading a novel simply cannot compare with the definitive phenom-
enological experience of seeing the words incarnated into a pseudo-realistic product.
The sixth and final category is that of the “trumping” model of adaptation in which
“the film shows its superior capacities to tell the story” (Stam 2000, 49, n. 48). The
trumping concept addresses the possibility that the film adaptation can be better
than its forerunner. As Elliott notes, “adaptations frequently condemn novels of
prior centuries as representationally immature, their values antiquated, irrelevant,
and inexplicable to contemporary audiences, and their accounts of history, psychol-
ogy, and politics inaccurate” (174). Contemporary updates of classic novels and
dramas have been very popular in Hollywood for several years, though many of
these modernized versions retain the historically accurate mode of discourse. Tradi-
tionally, critics and viewers have held the view that the source text is almost always
368 FILM ADAPTATIONS OF BOOKS

better than its adaptation. However, as Robert Stam postulates, “The clichéd
response that ‘I thought the book was better’ really means that our experience, our
phantasy of the book was better than the director’s” (15). Elliott believes that
adaptations have the ability to be conceived of as superior texts though they are
conventionally not, in part because the word still triumphs over the image in
contemporary thought, although this sentiment is beginning to change in light of the
publication of landmark works on the word–image wars, such as W.J.T. Mitchell’s
Iconology (1987). It is conclusively difficult to discern which is better, book or film,
primarily because a film adaptation is automatically different from its source text.
Not only does the medium differ, but often the authorial intent and overall content
change as well. In the end, however, most directors and screenwriters strive for what
Stam calls “equivalency,” the ability to find “equivalents in a new medium for the
novelist’s style or techniques” (18). The decision as to whether the film adaptation
is better than its progenitor appears to be mostly subjective given that “everyone
who sees films based on novels feels able to comment, at levels ranging from the
gossipy to the erudite on the nature and success of the adaptation involved”
(McFarlane 1996, 3). Most critics and scholars would agree that every viewer,
despite his or her familiarity with the source text, can make a judgment on the
achievement of any film adaptation, even from a general perspective.
Subfields of Film Adaptation. The term film adaptation can often apply to a variety of
subfields that, in many respects, are adaptations, though perhaps not principally.
Most notably, the remake and the biopic are types of adaptations that may not be
conventionally considered as adaptations, even though at their core they possess
many of the same intentions. Remakes are generally updated versions of previous
films or, as in recent years, filmic interpretations of celebrated television shows such
as Jay Chandrasekhar’s 2005 remake of The Dukes of Hazard and Nora Ephron’s
Bewitched (also 2005). Remakes have, indeed, become such popular fodder for
Hollywood studios in the last few years that many critics have called the craze an
epidemic. Like other kinds of adaptations, remakes strive to transform an existing
text into something new. In fact, “more obviously than other forms of art,” writes
Leo Braudy, “the remake—like its close kin . . . the sequel—is a species of inter-
pretation” (1998, 327). The remake reinterprets a source text just like any other
adaptation and necessarily seeks to add to the spirit of that preceding text.
The biopic is yet another subfield of film adaptation. Simply put, a biopic is a
filmic adaptation of a person’s life. Biopics are often much more conventional than
one may initially think, as many of these adaptations pull material from published
sources such as biographies or memoirs. Both Julie Taymor’s Frida (2002) and Ron
Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (2001) are adaptations of acclaimed biographical
studies on the films’ respective subjects. “The bio-pic,” Neil Sinyard observes, “is an
awkward hybrid that falls somewhere between fiction and documentary” because
one can adapt a biography very rigidly, sticking closely to accepted sources, or he or
she can capture what Sinyard calls the “spirit” of a person’s life, abandoning certain
details about the subject that may not enhance the cinematic portrayal of that
particular “spirit” (1986, 143–4). Biopics have also proliferated over the last few
decades, which calls to attention the voyeuristic nature of contemporary American
society: as viewers of these biopics, we are literally peeking into the subject’s
personal and professional life.
History. Film adaptations have been in consistent production since the birth of
the American film industry. In fact, according to the American Film Institute’s Web
 FILM ADAPTATIONS OF BOOKS 369

site, the oldest surviving reel in American archives is a silent film adaptation of
Shakespeare’s Richard III (1912). However, American production companies
began adapting popular American literature even before 1912. Early American
filmmaker Gene Gauntier adapted Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s famous novel The Scarlet Letter for the screen as early as 1907 and
1908, respectively (Internet Movie Database). “As soon as cinema began to see
itself as a narrative entertainment,” McFarlane notes, “the idea of remaking the
novel—that already established repository of narrative fiction—for source material
got underway, and the process has continued more or less unabated [since]” (1996,
6–7). Many American film adaptations are considered “classic,” exemplary exam-
ples of American filmmaking at its best. At least 17 of the American Film Institute’s
“100 Greatest American Movies of All Time” are film adaptations, including such
genuinely American classics as The Godfather (1972), Gone with the Wind (1939),
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), and The Grapes of Wrath (1940).
Indeed, as Barbara Tepa Lupack asserts, film, “from its very beginnings, has turned
to literature for inspiration and persisted in the practice of translating books into
film” (1994, 1). The bulk of early film adaptations produced in the United States
pulled their content from traditional literary works such as established nineteenth-
century novels, but as the twentieth century wore on, directors and screenwriters
began to turn their attentions toward contemporary popular fiction for ideas as
well. Hence came the explosion of what were initially (and still are) considered
“cult classics” in the 1970s and beyond: Francis Ford Coppola’s version of Mario
Puzo’s The Godfather (1972), Milos Forman’s 1975 adaptation of Ken Kesey’s One
Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Stanley Kubrick’s take on Stephen King’s The
Shining (1980).
Trends and Themes. Around the turn of the millennium, as technological advance-
ments in filmmaking equipment reached a zenith, films began to reflect a major shift
in American culture that had been occurring for several decades: a shift from a very

BOOKS MADE INTO MOVIES WIN AWARDS

Adaptations generally fare well in prestigious award circles. Linda Seger speculates that
“eighty-five percent of all Academy Award-winning Best Pictures are adaptations, forty-five
percent of all television movies-of-the-week are adaptations, yet seventy percent of all Emmy
Award winners come from these films, and eighty-three percent of all miniseries are adap-
tations, out of which ninety-five percent of Emmy award winners are drawn” (1992, xi).
Though Seger’s book, The Art of Adaptation, was published in 1992, the staggering statistics
therein have not changed. In 2003 alone, Academy Award nominees in the top six categories
(Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor/Actress, Best Supporting Actor/Supporting Actress)
came from 13 films, of which 9 were adaptations (6 of those were American).
The trend to award films adapted from literature continues to hold true, as more and
more filmmakers are looking to contemporary novels, plays, and short stories for inspiration.
“Today’s adaptations,” Lupack agrees, “are not restricted to literary classics, and embrace
many genres” (1994, 5). Even graphic novels are fair game for adaptations, as the popularity
of Sam Mendes’s Road to Perdition (2002) and Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World (2001) certainly
indicates. Adaptations have yet to become unpopular or irrelevant in American culture, and
with more film adaptations made each year, this rich cultural tradition continues through its
appreciation by both filmmakers and filmgoers.
370 FILM ADAPTATIONS OF BOOKS

A third filmic trend of recent years involves the securing of production rights for literary
works at very early stages of publication and distribution. Popular novels such as Dan
Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003, 2006) and Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada (2003,
2006) are instantly deemed “filmable,” and studios clamor for the rights to produce adapta-
tions. Film adaptations are no longer simply cinematic versions of classic literary works, and
directors, always after the best story, often seek out very contemporary sources from which
to film adaptations.

linear view of history and human experience to a view of the world as multilayered,
interdisciplinary, and seemingly ambiguous. The ability to reinsert oneself into the
historical record through film was first glimpsed by moviegoers in Forrest Gump
(1994). Director Robert Zemeckis could place a fictional character (originally
created by novelist Winston Groom) in a variety of actual historical milieus to the
surprise of many viewers. Forrest Gump (played by Tom Hanks, who, incidentally,
captured the 1995 Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal) could now shake hands with
Richard Nixon and sit rigidly next to John Lennon during one of his famous interviews
with Dick Cavett because of the technological sophistication of computer-generated
graphics. Film adaptations became more accurate as a result of this astonishing
hi-tech revolution.
Another major trend in film adaptation that has sprung up in the last several years
is the increased production of remakes. As mentioned previously, remakes have
become so rampant that many film critics argue that Hollywood has simply run out
of original material for its films. Of course, whether this is the case or not, remakes
have become very popular over the past decade. In many ways, this turn to “remak-
ing” our culture can be seen in other media arenas as well. Reality television, the
popular genre that exploded with the premieres of Survivor and Big Brother, has
certainly altered the way that we perceive and understand our immediate realities,
a change that has inevitably affected the film industry. We are constantly remaking
the terms of “reality”; the millennial remake culture and, specifically, the propaga-
tion of cinematic updates certainly confirm this.
Context and Issues. One of the most pressing issues for filmmakers is the fidelity
of the adaptation to its source text. “The skeleton of the original can, more or less
thoroughly, become the skeleton of a film. More difficult,” Andrew concurs, “is the
fidelity to the spirit, to the original’s tone, values, imagery, and rhythm, for finding
equivalents in film for these intangible aspects” (1980, 12). If Andrew is correct,
then it would be nearly impossible for any adaptation to be completely accurate
because the change in medium, the passing of information from one semiotic system
into another, would effectively alter the resulting “spirit.” Though the filmic out-
come indubitably depends on the source work for its shell, it transforms the static
text into a lifelike phantasmagoria of the senses. Adaptations borrow from their
predecessors but should be viewed as intersections between word and image rather
than true translations of one into the other. “The differences between the novel and
film extend from formal considerations to their conditions of production—which
themselves have quite distinct meanings attached to them” (Cartmell and Whelehan
1999, 6). Many adaptations, because of issues such as these, are expected to possess
some value as stand-alone filmic productions. A film adaptation can still be consid-
ered “good” even if it is not totally loyal to its source. Critics of adaptation fidelity
 FILM ADAPTATIONS OF BOOKS 371

ultimately depend on “a notion of the text as having and rendering up to the (intel-
ligent) reader a single, correct ‘meaning’ which the filmmaker has either adhered to
or in some sense violated or tampered with” (McFarlane 1996, 8). For any film
adaptation to be absolutely true to its subject, it would have to assume that only a
single universal meaning is applicable to that subject, a presumption that seems
highly implausible. If every adaptable text has only one meaning, then it would be
unreasonable for multiple adaptations to be made. Yet filmmakers consistently
return to certain texts in order to portray the multiplicities of their respective spir-
its. Arguments over film adaptations “arise not only because of disputes concerning
the fidelity of adaptations, but also because there is little or no argument on what
the adapter’s role with respect to the original should be” (Reynolds 1993, 9). How
should a filmmaker approach a source text? Without fixed meanings, these texts can
be handled in a variety of ways, hence the existence of multiple adaptations of the
same text. As McFarlane attests, “discussion of adaptation has been bedeviled by
the fidelity issue, no doubt ascribable in part to the novel’s coming first, in part to
the ingrained sense of literature’s greater respectability in traditional critical circles”
(8); however, there are many other angles from which the topic can be approached.
Reception. Various theories of film adaptation have been posed by numerous
scholars throughout the twentieth century. Many of these theories rely on previous
schools of thought, especially the works of structuralist and poststructuralist theo-
rists and semioticians. For example, one expert on film adaptation, Robert Stam,
borrows both from Roland Barthes and from the narrative theorist Gerard Genette.
In Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation, Stam
describes how Genette’s multifarious theories of textuality are applicable to film
adaptations. He writes,

While all of Genette’s categories [“intertextuality,” “paratextuality,” “metatextuality,”

and “architextuality”] are suggestive, Genette’s fifth type, “hypertextuality,” is perhaps
the type most clearly relevant to adaptation. “Hypertextuality,” [sic] refers to the rela-
tion between one text, which Genette calls “hypertext,” to an anterior text or “hypo-
text,” which the former transforms, modifies, elaborates, or extends. Filmic
adaptations, in this sense, are hypertexts derived from pre-existing hypotexts that have
been transformed by operations of selection, amplification, concretization, and actual-
ization. (2005, 31)

Stam’s use of Genette’s theories is just one of the ways that critics have theorized
film adaptations.
Other critics, apart from philosophizing about the loyalty of any adaptation to its
source, also focus on the ways in which adaptations can be both repressive and lib-
erating (Reynolds 1993, 11). In an adaptation, the new author is free to make some-
thing that has never been seen yet that is bound to original materials from which it
cannot be severed. This situation appears to be the ultimate paradox of film adap-
tation. Though adaptations strive to be unique, the viewer will always be plagued
by his or her ideas about the source text. Another difficulty of transcribing an
already established story into film is the transmutation of novelistic linearity into
filmic spatiality. Though both novels and films are regularly bound by specific
chronologies, film has the ability to transcend time by utilizing space more freely.
Films, in a sense, take up (viewing) space and are less devoted to issues of time than
the traditional novel. They explode on-screen and envelop the audience in a display
372 FILM ADAPTATIONS OF BOOKS

of visual and oral splendor. “The movie theatre,” David Denby (2006) observes, “is
a public space that encourages private pleasures: as we watch, everything we are—
our senses, our past, our unconscious—reaches out to the screen. The experience is
the opposite of escape; it is more like absolute engagement.” Novels, on the other
hand, though they do occupy the recesses of human imagination, hardly engage
space.
As Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (1999) point out, criticism on film
adaptation has, since its inception, taken on one of five major theoretical guises: an
all-around disdain for adaptations as lowly copies of more superior originals; a
narratological approach that examines adaptations, as well as their source texts, as
belonging to a narrative system, be it textual or filmic; a film-adaptation-as-nostalgia
approach that considers adaptations to be nods to a bygone era; a method of view-
ing adaptations as an extension of the human inclination toward voyeurism in the
cinema; and finally, the “textuality” method, preferred by Stam and others, that
contemplates film adaptations in light of recent discussions in critical theory and
textual studies. Each approach to film adaptation, despite the inherent differences
among them, attempts to analyze the relationship between the initial text and its filmic
successor. In nearly every article and book devoted to the subject, attention is
focused solely on adaptations of novels, an exception being Horton and McDougal’s
work on remakes as adaptations, as well as Mireia Aragay’s edited volume Books in
Motion (2006). Nevertheless, very few critics have ventured to investigate the
multiplicity of genres from which film adaptations collect their material. The
remainder of this article takes into account film adaptations that stem from a variety
of genres.

Selected Film Adaptations

Ghost World (2001). Graphic novels are only beginning to be taken seriously by
critics and scholars in the academic sphere, so naturally film adaptations (read:
serious and respected film adaptations) of this innately multimedia genre could not
have been possible at any other historical moment. Though film adaptations of
comic books have been successful in the past (e.g., Superman and the many incar-
nations of Batman), the narratological sophistication of the graphic novel has, up
until recently, placed the genre in limbo: stuck between the popular cultural aspects
of a comic book and the conventional narrative structures and complexities of the
novel form. Zwigoff’s adaptation of Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World effectively
altered the status of graphic novels, allowing them to be deemed adaptable material.
Director Zwigoff is famous for using the comic world as hardware for his films,
having produced Crumb (1994), a keen documentary on the legendary Robert
Crumb, creator of veritably poignant and bawdy comics that became popular
during the late 1960s. In Ghost World, Zwigoff turns to the content of the comics
themselves, adapting Clowes’s cult favorite into a bright, yet existential film that
follows the daily proceedings of a cynical teenager lost amid a sea of superficiality.
As Roger Ebert (2001) notes, Enid, the 18-year old protagonist (played by Thora
Birch), “is so smart, so advanced, and so ironically doubled back upon herself, that
most of the people she meets don’t get the message. She is second-level satire in a
one-level world, and so instead of realizing, for example, that she is mocking the
1970s punk look, stupid video store clerks merely think she’s 25 years out of style.”
The fact that people simply do not “get” Enid’s agenda mirrors the customary
 FILM ADAPTATIONS OF BOOKS 373

reception of comics and graphic novels, narrative types that, for a certain period of
time, academics bluntly disregarded because they missed the alacrity and authentic-
ity of the dual genres’ exposition of real human situations and emotions. In essence,
the realness of the genres was below academic critique because the twentieth century
was so utterly bogged down with theories that embraced unreality and ambiguity.
Ghost World’s appeal has been quickly realized by a number of other directors
since its release. In 2002 Sam Mendes and David Self adapted Road to Perdition to
the screen with the ever-popular Tom Hanks as the film’s redemptive central char-
acter. The story, originated in graphic novel form by Max Allan Collins and Richard
Piers Rayner, follows the seedy employment of family man Michael Sullivan (played
by Hanks), whose son (Tyler Hoechlin), after glimpsing one of his father’s “jobs,”
tags along with him as he seeks revenge for a slew of personal and professional
mishaps. The darkly envisioned cinematography, made possible by the late Conrad
L. Hall, snatched an Academy Award. Indeed, the look of the film captures the
crepuscular mien of the original graphic novel, which was composed in black and
white. Mendes and Hall successfully translated the dinginess of the graphic novel to
a filmic composition that is as inky as its predecessor.
American Splendor (2003) is a double adaptation of sorts that is not only a biopic
but also a more conventional adaptation of Harvey Pekar’s series of similarly named
comics and graphic novels. Shari Springer Berlman and Robert Pulcini direct this
film that highlights the near failure of comic artist Harvey Pekar (played by Paul
Giamatti), who, in conjunction with Crumb and others, launched a noteworthy
chain of comics about an autobiographical everyman. Pekar’s character, also called
Harvey, encounters a number of realistic, yet sardonically humorous people and
situations and struggles to persevere through an increasingly dismal world. Berlman
and Pulcini juxtapose straightforward cinematic fiction with live-action comic
sequences and impromptu interviews with the real Harvey Pekar, his family, and
close friends. The doubleness of this piece can be found in at least two combina-
tions: the film is an adaptation of comics that are adaptations of an actual person’s
life, and also, the film adapts the life along with the material comics. Other
contemporary adaptations will embrace this multilayered approach.
Two other, more recent adaptations of graphic novels, Sin City (2005) and Art
School Confidential (2006), continue the tradition of well-adapted pictorial genres
to the screen. Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez utilize techniques borrowed from
film noir in order to capture the grimy landscape and shady society of Miller’s
classic graphic novel series. Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential (another Clowes
work), like Ghost World, is adapted in a more direct manner, though it satisfacto-
rily portrays the vividness of Clowes’s style. Each adaptation of a graphic novel is
another step toward an acceptance of the genre into mainstream American culture.
Whether this transformation is favorable to loyal fans is of little consequence, as the
graphic novel and its historical bedfellow, the comic, are swept into the folds of
popular literature.
Adaptation (2002). Although Adaptation is an adaptation of Susan Orlean’s The
Orchid Thief, it also stands as a commentary on the nature of film adaptation in an
increasingly commercialized Hollywood. Written by Charlie Kaufman and his
pseudo-brother Donald and directed by Spike Jonze, Adaptation follows the efforts
of “Charlie Kaufman” to adapt Orlean’s Orchid Thief into an acceptable
Hollywood film. However, Charlie must contend with the difficulties of adapting a
seemingly plotless tome about the beauty and wonder of orchids—the enigmatic
374 FILM ADAPTATIONS OF BOOKS

flowers that have, themselves, adapted magnificently into a variety of different

species—into another profitable studio blockbuster. “I don’t want to cram in sex or
guns or car chases [into the adaptation]. You know? Or characters learning
profound life lessons” (Kaufman and Kaufman 2002, 5). Charlie also must, amid
his adaptational woes, learn to adapt to adulthood and to the demands of being a
successful Hollywood screenwriter. In the end, despite Charlie’s hopes of protecting
his screenplay from the claws of contemporary filmic predictability, Adaptation
quickly transmogrifies into a plot-driven narrative brimming with sex, drugs, and
monstrous explosions. Charlie and Donald (both played by Nicolas Cage), in an
attempt to hunt down Susan Orlean (played by Meryl Streep) and to gather the
“true” story behind The Orchid Thief, end up in a mysterious chase in a swamp
where Donald meets his untimely fate. Just like the story of the orchid thief, the final
moments of the film declare its purpose as another “study in shape-shifting,” given
that the process of adaptation is ultimately about the alteration of forms (Orlean
2002, vii). In Orlean’s own words, Adaptation “is about orchids, about how they
adapt to their environment, sometimes resulting in the strangest and most
marvelous forms, proving that the answer to everything might indeed be adapta-
tion” (ix). At its core, Charlie’s adaptation, as a person and screenwriter, is also our
adaptation: the adaptation of The Orchid Thief, given to us by the writers and
directors, as well as our adaptation as viewers who, unfortunately for Charlie, do
indeed learn “a profound life lesson.”
Karen Diehl asserts that Adaptation, along with a group of other films that draw
attention to their authorial intentions, “add[s] narratives to that of [its] source
literary text that relocate film and literature as cultural practices determined and
shaped by a specific context. These added narratives variously include the narra-
tivization of the process of writing, the process of reading, and the process of adapt-
ing to the screen itself” (2005, 103).
Chicago (2002). Unlike many adaptations that stem from grandiloquent novels,
Chicago is a flashy adaptation of the lauded Broadway musical, expertly choreo-
graphed by the legendary Bob Fosse in 1975. The musical version of Chicago is itself
an adaptation of a play from the 1920s by Maurine Dallas Watkins. The famous
Broadway duo John Kander and Fred Ebb added music and lyrics to Watkins’s
drama about a flapper-wannabe named Roxie Hart (played by Renée Zellweger in

ADAPTATION IS AN ADAPTATION
The film Adaptation does not rely wholly on Susan Orlean’s story, but rather makes up certain
storylines, with the help of many foreseeable popular plot twists that are, in turn, added to
the adaptation.This dynamic exposes the meta-commentary about authorship that is instinc-
tive to the film.“Reader and spectator alike,” Diehl writes,“are thus persuaded not to believe
in what they read or see, but to accept it as fictitious,” just as the mechanism of film adap-
tation is, itself, a fictitious enterprise (2005, 102). The culminating events in Adaptation are
certainly not conceivable, and their utter implausibility, in fact, brandishes the sheer impossi-
bility of accurately adapting any piece of literature in an industry that is obsessed with profit
to the exclusion of literary and cinematic nuance. Hence, viewers are left with only the
“illusion of a dialogue with a literary author” (100). Adaptation successfully reveals the flaws
of film adaptation using its own medium.
 FILM ADAPTATIONS OF BOOKS 375

the 2002 update) who dreams of becoming a successful actress and singer like her
idol Velma Kelly (played by Catherine Zeta-Jones). However, things go awry when
Miss Hart lands in prison after killing her lover. There she meets her idol, convicted
of a similar charge, and learns that scandal and celebrity are powerful tools in the
media-laden society of what Roger Ebert (2002) calls a “Front Page era.” Marshall’s
2002 adaptation is a brilliant filmic remake of the original musical that, in some
respects, trumps the original in terms of staging and effects. Film, as opposed to
staged theatre, possesses a much greater level of flexibility; films can be edited, and
special effects can be added after their completion. A live musical, on the other
hand, cannot be halted midway so that a scene can be performed again. Addition-
ally, because the stage is the only real setting for the action, a musical is aesthetically
limited. Films, however, can have multiple sets and numerous filming locations,
lending greater versatility to the story. Chicago is an example of how increased
filmic flaccidity can bring forth subtle aspects of a source text that are often under-
played onstage.
The film’s Jazz Age heroine, Hart, has obviously been affected by the nascent
celebrity system of early twentieth-century America in which—because of the rise of
Vaudeville, radio, and other cultural phenomenon—many citizens, now lost amid
the brightness of the modern era, turned to celebrities of all sorts in order to seek
out their own personal identity. Marshall’s film splendidly portrays this harsh aspect
of past Americana by staging the musical numbers “more or less within Roxie’s
imagination” (Ebert 2002). Thus the director accomplishes two tasks: he brings out
a psychocultural feature of the original that may have been softened because of
difficulties in theatrical staging, and he creates a seamless drama that does not
annoy audiences with constant musical interruptions. In essence, Marshall finds a
perfect cinematic balance between the inceptive musical, with its grand song-and-
dance routines, and the filmic adaptation that strives to remain a unified dramatic
narrative. As Ebert explains, “Chicago is a musical that might have seemed
unfilmable . . . because it was assumed it had to be transformed into more conven-
tional terms” and forced into a Hollywood formula. Like Adaptation, Chicago
overcomes formulaic dispositions about what a film adaptation should be and
masterfully “adapts” the standards of filmmaking as it adapts its source material.
Frida (2002). Director Julie Taymor brings the tumultuous life and art of Mexican
artist Frida Kahlo to the screen in this moving biopic. Taymor captures Kahlo’s life
most acutely by utilizing the source of the artist’s passion: her art. Not only does
Taymor engage the viewer in the sometimes unfortunate details of Kahlo’s marriage
and other painful life experiences, but she also animates a number of Kahlo’s origi-
nal paintings, canvases that sway back and forth between seething criticisms of
bourgeois values and heart-wrenching self-portraits. Kahlo, who became perma-
nently disabled as a result of a bus accident in her youth, channeled her pain and
frustration into her unique paintings. Like the vibrant pictures for which Kahlo is
renowned, Taymor’s film embraces the hues and tones of revolutionary Mexico.
This film ultimately succeeds as a biopic because Taymor mixes biography and
artistry into a delectable fusion of filmic brilliance. “Biopics of artists,” writes Ebert
(2002) in his review of the film, “are always difficult, because the connections
between life and art always seem too easy and facile. The best ones lead us back to
the work itself and inspire us to sympathize with its maker.” Indeed, biopics are
different from other adaptations because they often tackle a subject that involves
living people. In the case of Frida, Taymor referenced an established biography on
376 FILM ADAPTATIONS OF BOOKS

Kahlo’s life by Hayden Herrera in which most of the “characters” are deceased.
However, biopics such as Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind, an adaptation of the life
of John Nash, a Nobel Prize-winning mathematician who struggles with schizo-
phrenia, employ a subject who is still living. Issues such as these can present prob-
lems for the directors, screenwriters, and producers of these projects who are
regularly forced to consult with the subject or with his or her family members. The
approval of these individuals sometimes inhibits the filmmakers from illuminating
the life in full. For instance, when director Christine Jeffs and writer John Browlow
wished to adapt the life of Sylvia Plath, they were obliged to confer with Plath’s
daughter, Frieda Hughes, who bluntly “refused to allow any of her mother’s poems
to be used in the script and . . . vowed never to see the film” (Milmo 2004). Biopics
certainly have their detractors, and in fact, the process of adapting a person’s life
into a filmic narrative is rather arduous.
In many respects, makers of the biopic must struggle to present their subjects as
more than simply images. In a culture that thrives on the continuous elevation of
celebrities to idol-like statuses and the incessant circulation of images in the media
and elsewhere, it is easy for adapters to fall into the trap of turning their subject into
just another metonymy for the actual human life. Rather, the biopic should be an
arena in which the filmmaker may topple cultural assumptions about the person in
question by seeking to tell the “true” story. The biopic grapples with the same sorts
of complexities as does any other adaptation, including matters of fidelity. Does the
biopic faithfully render the person’s life? Or does the biopic act as an extension or
representation of the person’s life, artistically removed from actual events? The
answers to these questions are extremely pertinent to the overall understanding of
biopic production.
Other films in recent years have highlighted the lives and works of famous artists.
Julian Schnabel’s 1996 adaptation of the life of New York graffiti artist Basquiat,
titled Basquiat, depicts the street artist’s discovery by Andy Warhol (played by
David Bowie) and his subsequent popularity. Schnabel, a close friend of the late
Basquiat, poignantly captures the instant celebritization of Warhol’s protégé and
the destructiveness that ensues as a result. As with many misunderstood artists who
are thrust reluctantly into the blaring lights of celebrity, Basquiat is unable to over-
come his difficulties in the face of stardom and dies of a drug overdose at age 28.
Following in the footsteps of Basquiat, Pollock (2000) similarly illustrates the life
and art of a struggling artist who finds himself coping with the ramifications,
personally and professionally, of iconoclasm in twentieth-century American culture.
Jackson Pollock, leader of the artistic movement known as Abstract Expressionism,
is veritably portrayed by director and leading actor Ed Harris as the sensitive artiste
and brash cultural ingénue who exploded onto the New York art scene with his
controversial abstract “string” paintings. The film also shows the artist’s tempestu-
ous marriage to fellow painter Lee Krasner as well as his numerous extramarital
affairs and battles with alcoholism. As with Frida, Pollock gives the art its own
story, though one that acutely parallels the artist’s life.
The Hours (2002). The Hours dwells within a category of multilayered adaptations
that have distinct textual lineages. Similar to Chicago, Stephen Daldry’s and David
Hare’s adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel is not a
singular transformation of novel into film but rather an adaptation of a novel that
is, itself, an adaptation of another novel and a biography (in Chicago, the historical
trajectory extends even further). The celebrated modern British novel from
 FILM ADAPTATIONS OF BOOKS 377

which Cunningham and his adapters draw their inspiration is Virginia Woolf’s
Mrs. Dalloway, a stunning exploration of the relevance of the seemingly mundane,
quotidian exploits of a middle-class, middle-aged woman. The novel also examines
how the veil of memory often impedes our ability to glimpse what closely surrounds
us in the present. Cunningham borrows these thematic elements for his tale about
the interconnected lives of three women: Laura Brown (played by Julianne Moore),
a young wife and mother grappling with domestic dissatisfaction in postwar subur-
ban America; Virginia Woolf (played by Nicole Kidman), the eminent British
novelist who also struggles with an edgy domestic situation, worsened by mental
instability, as she begins a new novel, Mrs. Dalloway; and Clarissa Vaughn
(Cunningham’s contemporary Dalloway, played by Meryl Streep), a well-to-do
twenty-first-century New Yorker who, like the protagonist of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway,
is hosting a party of old friends and colleagues at her apartment for which she is
frantically preparing. Scholar Karen Diehl describes the film, and its source text, as
interconnecting “strands” of narrative in which one story is dependent on another
for its existence (2005, 94–5). Though each of these strands appears to be separate
at first, as the film progresses, the viewer is soon clued in to how the three narra-
tives intertwine. We learn that Clarissa’s party—for which she has to buy the
flowers herself, just like the original Mrs. Dalloway—is, in fact, being thrown for
her longtime friend Richard Brown (played by Ed Harris), who has recently won a
prestigious award for his own novel. We also learn that Laura Brown, from another
strand of the story, is Richard’s mother. And of course, in a gesture of mastery, the
author Virginia Woolf has, from her historical viewpoint, inaugurated all of these
events with the composition and publication of Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf’s own
biography prompts her to write Mrs. Dalloway, the book read by the depressed
Laura Brown and eventually by her son as well, who, for as long as he can remem-
ber, has called Clarissa Vaughn his very own “Mrs. Dalloway.” The stories unite in
both direct and indirect ways.
Daldry manages this adaptation by using basically three different casts to tell
three distinct, yet associated narratives. The characters in this film are generally
molded into two opposing groups—victims and survivors—though each can fit into
either of the categories at assorted moments in the film. All of the characters fall
victim to an author, be it Woolf, Cunningham, or screenwriter Hare, who deter-
mines their fate onscreen. They also fall victim to the respective societies and
cultures in which they live. Woolf’s mental illness and eventual suicide stemmed
from multiple factors, not the least of which was her inability to overcome the
instances of sexual abuse that she experienced as a child. Laura Brown finds it
difficult to withstand the pressures of being a wife and mother in postwar America,
and Clarissa Vaughn attempts to please everyone but herself. Additionally, Woolf
certainly becomes a victim after her suicide, as does Richard Brown when, like the
shell-shocked Septimus Warren-Smith in Mrs. Dalloway, he jumps to his death from
a second-story window. Laura Brown nearly commits suicide but decides to live
instead, thus cementing her status as a survivor. Clarissa Vaughn also survives,
appropriately mirroring the outcome of her predetermined fictional equivalent.
Those who survive, incidentally, also learn to adapt, much like the characters in
Adaptation.
Everything Is Illuminated (2005). Everything Is Illuminated is a fascinating adapta-
tion of a seemingly unadaptable postmodern novel about the lasting effects of the
Holocaust on two distant families—unadaptable because, as Stephanie Zacharek
378 FILM ADAPTATIONS OF BOOKS

(2005) notes, the book is made up of “the sort of prose whose wordy digressions
and repetitiveness are part of its style (and part of its challenge).” Though based
only loosely on its source text, the film manages to convey the same emotional
firmament as its predecessor. The novel, written by Jonathan Safran Foer and
published in 2002, traces the story of a young Jewish American (also named
“Jonathan Safran Foer” and played by Elijah Wood) who travels to Ukraine in order
to find information about his family’s roots, specifically the whereabouts of the
mysterious Augustine, the woman who supposedly saved his grandfather from the
Nazi invasion. As with The Hours (the originally published version), Everything Is
Illuminated is composed of more than one story that is combined into a single
narrative: the recounting of the search by Alexander Perchov (played by Eugene
Hutz), Foer’s guide and translator throughout his journey, and also Foer’s literary
reinterpretation of those events in a more historical context. The stories are
connected by a series of letters between the two men that are also included in the
novel. Schreiber’s adaptation does not attempt to film all of these stories but instead
chooses Alex’s point of view. The film is separated into chapters, conceivably deter-
mined by Alex as he “writes” his account of the journey with Foer.
Jonathan is known as “The Collector” by his family, and by the Perchovs in due
time, because wherever he travels, he carries a stock of Ziploc bags in which he
collects fragments of the people and experiences with which he comes into contact.
In one scene, Jonathan pilfers a container of hand soap from a train’s restroom,
acting as if his slightly kleptomaniacal act is completely normal. It becomes obvious,
however, that his itinerant collecting has a more than superficial purpose. In one of
the film’s final moments, Jonathan swipes a heap of Ukrainian dust that he eventu-
ally takes back to America, after the mystery is solved, and throws onto his grand-
father’s grave. Jonathan’s penchant for collecting can also be understood as a
metaphor for the nature of adaptation. When the viewer first glimpses Jonathan
clandestinely gathering objects, the method seems random or even quirky. As the
film advances, however, we begin to comprehend its true intention. By amassing as
large of a collection as he can, Jonathan somehow, at least tangibly, recreates the
past and thus reconnects with it. In the end, the collection no longer resembles a
piecemeal cluster of various objects but rather a unified material landscape of
memory. Similarly, a film adaptation, especially one such as Everything Is Illumi-
nated, appears to be a loose assemblage of the “best of” moments from a novel,
story, or play. In most cases, because of time and budget constraints, directors,
producers, screenwriters, and other industry personnel are forced to make an
acceptable adaptation out of these presumably random parts. Everything Is Illumi-
nated is a keen example of when a director’s “collection” of narrative pieces
becomes a clearly distinguished whole.
The core of the film can be found in a few of its final lines, that “everything is
illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us, on the inside,
looking out.” Though the search for the past illumines the present, the past
always remains with us. Film adaptations often disappoint audiences for this very
reason; they are beleaguered by the past, that is, by the literary source that stays
with them as they watch the adaptation. In order for adaptations to garner
success, the spectators are obligated to separate the film from its original and to
consider them as two divergent narratives that are to be held at different stan-
dards. “It must be tiresome [for filmgoers],” Slate reviewer David Edelstein
(2005) avers,
 FILM ADAPTATIONS OF BOOKS 379

to read yet another review trumpeting the news that a movie is not as good as the book
on which it’s based, and that the medium rarely does justice to narrative loop-de-loops
or to characters’ labyrinthine inner lives. After all, film and literature are different
media, a movie ought to be judged on its own merits.

The film version of Everything Is Illuminated is a markedly reduced adaptation

of Foer’s novel and must inevitably be judged on its own terms, despite its apparent
disloyalty to its source.
Brokeback Mountain (2005). Perhaps one of the most controversial Hollywood
films since the turn of the millennium, Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain is an adap-
tation by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana of E. Annie Proulx’s short story of
the same name. The story first appeared in The New Yorker on October 13, 1997,
and was subsequently included in Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Proulx’s Pulitzer
Prize–winning collection. Jenny Shank of New West (2005) writes that “when
[Proulx] was first approached about turning ‘Brokeback Mountain’ into a screen-
play, she ‘was terrified because this wasn’t my idea of a story that could be made
into a film. It’s the sort of thing that Hollywood has been avoiding for a hundred
years.’” The tale of two Wyoming ranch hands (played by Heath Ledger and Jake
Gyllenhaal) who fall in love during a summer assignment on Brokeback Mountain
shocked the Hollywood establishment and many filmgoers because of its blatant
inclusion of homosexuality, a topic that the film industry has, indeed, avoided since
its beginnings. The filmic treatment of the story is subtle yet breathtaking, and the
gay element of the story, so hyped by the media, is subtle as well. One walks away
from the film believing that he or she has seen simply a love story, not necessarily
a homosexual love story. This type of spotlighting is hardly relevant, as the film
ultimately transcended any media controversy that may have surrounded its
release.
Proulx has said that she “may be the first writer in America to have a piece of
writing make its way to the screen whole and entire” (2005, www.annieproulx.
com). In fact, in adapting the piece, McMurtry and Ossana began by transcribing
the entire story into a screenplay format. However, “when we first scripted only
what was contained in the short story,” McMurtry remembers, “those pages only
comprised about one-third of the final script for Brokeback—about 35 pages of
script. The shooting script was 110 pages long; the other 75 pages were added by
us” (qtd. in Shank 2005). That the screenplay contains the story in its entirety is a
rare feat for Hollywood film adaptations. Generally, screenwriters are compelled to
cut and paste moments of the novel, story, or other source text into the screenplay
in order to form a unified film that is also marketable to a wide-ranging audience.
To adapt a work completely, covering every event and nuance therein, would result
in an extremely lengthy and costly production. “Generally in adaptation, say it’s a
novel, for example,” Ossana attests,

you really have to cut away and decide what you’re going to keep and what you’re
going to retain. As a general rule, very often you can make a very good movie out
of a not-so-good book because you can cut away and then you add things in. It’s
harder, sometimes, to make a good film out of good prose fiction because the beauty
of it is in the actual prose rather than the action. In this particular story, there would
be a single sentence and we could take that sentence and write an entire scene about
it. It would spark our imaginations and we would just take it and run. (qtd. in
Anderson 2005)
380 FILM ADAPTATIONS OF BOOKS

In this case, it was necessary for the screenwriters to heavily augment and expand
the original story, simply because of its scantiness. Brokeback Mountain is an exam-
ple of a truly incarnational film adaptation, in which the adapters transform the
words into a fleshed-out cinematic body.
War of the Worlds (2005). Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds is the apogean
mise-en-abyme of contemporary film adaptations. Its hypertextual chain extends
backward expansively, connected by a series of historical nodes. This expensive
adaptation, transformed for the screen by Josh Friedman and David Koepp, is a
remake of the 1953 film, directed by Byron Haskin. Haskin’s film was, itself,
an adaptation of Orson Welles’s eerie 1938 radio program, an adaptation of
H.G. Wells’s lauded 1898 novel. The history of this story certainly runs deep.
Wells’s earlier novel, a work of science fiction, describes an invasion of Earth
(nineteenth-century England) by alien creatures from Mars who are equipped
with chemical weapons. In one of its endings, the novel finds its narrator and the
rest of humanity starting anew after the Martians are destroyed by some viral
illness. But Wells apparently provided his readers with an alternate ending in
which the Martians triumph over human civilization. The novel has been viewed
both as an indictment of British colonial rule and as a treatise in favor of various
scientific theories popular during Wells’s lifetime, particularly Darwin’s philoso-
phy on evolution.
In the 1930s, burgeoning film director Orson Welles staged a Halloween radio
performance of Wells’s novel that frightened a number of listeners who believed that
aliens were actually attacking the planet. The radio play, written by Harold Koch,
was a modern retelling of the original, presented as a series of news broadcasts.
Though a disclaimer had been communicated at the beginning of the act, those
tuning in after the opening credits were naturally shocked by what they understood
to be an impending attack. A public outcry arose following the broadcast, partially
because of the heightened anxiety of citizens preparing for another world war. The
1953 film, written for the screen by Barré Lyndon, again updates Wells’s material
for its contemporary film-going audiences and, like Welles’s radio version, trans-
plants the action from England to the United States. Spielberg’s 2005 version takes
its cue from its predecessors, refurbishing the plot and setting for present-day
viewers. The protagonist Ray Ferrier, a working class man from New Jersey, is, at
the start of the film, estranged from his wife and family. By the close of the film, Ray
(played by Tom Cruise) becomes a proverbial working-class hero, saving his daugh-
ter Rachel (played by Dakota Fanning) from the alien invaders and surviving the
worldwide destruction. Different from previous adaptations, Spielberg’s War utilizes
sophisticated special effects, marks of the current trend in twenty-first century
science fiction filmmaking to adopt technologically advanced production tech-
niques, similarly seen in the first three episodes of Star Wars, appearing in 1999,
2002, and 2005, respectively. Though David Edelstein of Slate (2005) argues that
“this War of the Worlds does not bear much resemblance to H.G. Wells’ novel, or
to the Orson Welles ’30s radio play,” other critics see Spielberg’s adaptation as
doing the same things, culturally and politically, as its forbears. Both Wells’s origi-
nal novel and Welles’s radio adaptation reflect a specific national or international
mood. The novel echoed debates over colonial rule as well as scientific evolution,
whereas the radio play emulated a sense of interwar distress that plagued the United
States in the 1930s. “At one point [in Spielberg’s film],” reviewer Stephanie
Zacharek (2005) alleges, “the camera scans a wall covered with fliers of missing
 FILM ADAPTATIONS OF BOOKS 381

loved ones (presumably humans who have been abducted or just plain disintegrated
by the marauding aliens). [This gesture is] as direct a reference to post-9/11 New
York City as you could make.” Spielberg’s overt cinematic allusion indubitably
refers to the current state of affairs in the United States. The very basic themes of
his remake mimic the general feelings of terror that Americans now experience on a
daily basis in a world wrought with terrorism. Are Spielberg’s alien invaders
metaphors for the world terrorists who leave devastation in their wake? Several
critics of this film seem to agree with this proposition.
The Devil Wears Prada (2006). The Devil Wears Prada is director David Frankel’s
and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna’s adaptation of Lauren Weisberger’s
roman à clef about a recent college graduate who travels to New York City to
become a paid intern at an influential fashion magazine. In the film, Andy Sachs
(played by Anne Hathaway) has come to the Big Apple from the Midwest in order
to procure a much-coveted position at Runway, a Vogue-style publication headed
by the notoriously strict Miranda Priestly (played by Meryl Streep). The novel, an
extension of the chick lit phenomenon—a genre of fiction that combines contem-
porary postfeminist musings on love and relationships with the world of high-style
fashion—differs from the film in a number of ways. Adapters chose to give Andy
Midwestern roots, rather than Eastern ones, and many of the characters found in
the original novel are lost in the film version. Brosh McKenna took several liber-
ties with the screenplay in order to maintain the novel’s casual and comical tone,
as well as to create a “happy ending” for Andy and her live-in boyfriend Nate
(played by Adrian Grenier). Additionally, the screenwriter chose to downplay two
major cultural themes of the novel. In the original, both Andy and Miranda are
Jewish Americans, but Miranda changes her name and disguises her heritage more
so than Andy. Critics view Weisberger’s inclusion of these details in the novel as
an important, if brief, examination of Jewish assimilation in the American twenty-
first century. Similarly, filmmakers chose to exclude various details about the
sexuality of Andy’s coworkers, especially that of Nigel, who in the novel is very
openly homosexual. Several conclusions can be drawn as to the director’s and
screenwriter’s reasoning for disallowing these more serious thematic elements
from entering into the final film. As a buoyant comedy-drama, The Devil Wears
Prada would appear inconsistent if, all of a sudden, a more formidable thematic
undercurrent was launched into the previously jocund plot. Adapters are respon-
sible for making choices about the content of adaptations based on several
criteria, and marketability is most certainly at the top of that list. The inclusion of
these issues, though assuredly elevating the film to an exceedingly more critical
cinematic echelon, would have necessarily been a mistake.
Both the film and the novel are strong examples of a trend in popular entertain-
ment in which young working females and their interpersonal relationships are
presented in a humorous or even satiric light. Weisberger’s novel stems from her
experience as an intern at Vogue, a situation that is masked thinly by her fictional
account. Indeed, the film reflects an even more widespread drift in twenty-first-century
cinema toward lighthearted adaptations of very contemporary novels and stories.
The Devil Wears Prada was first published in 2003 and was in the hands of
producers almost immediately. However, the final draft of the screenplay was not
concluded until 2005, when Brosh McKenna signed onto the project. The film’s
success at the box office, making over $100 million domestically, will further the
production of film adaptations within the chick lit genre.
382 FILM ADAPTATIONS OF BOOKS

Fast Food Nation (2006). Eric Schlosser’s 2001 book, Fast Food Nation, is a scathing
account of the not-so-healthy practices of the American fast-food industry. Accord-
ing to Schlosser, the influx of fast food into American society “has helped to
transform not only the American diet, but also our landscape, economy, workforce,
and popular culture” (3). The book also exposes how the fast-mood market, as well
as its sibling the meat-packing industry, exploits its workers and, like other profit-
seeking corporate bodies, rarely considers its ultimately negative effects on global
culture. Schlosser’s treatise, though a work of nonfiction, has often been compared
to the realist novels of the early twentieth century, most specifically to Upton
Sinclair’s The Jungle.
Richard Linklater’s 2006 adaptation of Schlosser’s documentary-style book is a
fictionalized story featuring an ensemble cast in which members of the fast-food
industry relay the consequences of their line of employment on public health, the
environment, and society as a whole. As Stephanie Zacharek recognizes, “it can’t be
easy to wrest a work of investigative journalism into narrative form, to take facts,
figures and arguments and work them into a structure actors can easily inhabit.”
The fictionalization of a nonfiction book certainly risks the possibility of turning
convincing evidence into mindless filmic plotlines; however, Linklater’s movie,
complete with clips of bovine slaughtering, resolves to maintain the disturbing facts
embedded in Schlosser’s premiere volume. In Zacharek’s words, the “slaughterhouse
climax is bluntly effective; I walked out of the movie feeling wobbly and a little
faint.” Todd McCarthy (2006) agrees with Zacharek’s sentiments:

Making a shaped, involving film from Schlosser’s intensively researched, highly popu-
lar exposé of the junk food juggernaut in the United States repped a considerable
challenge, and the author and Linklater have made eminently reasonable decisions
about where to train their focus.

Critics concede that Linklater’s film accomplished its proposed goal: to promote
awareness of the methods and practices of the fast-food agglomerate through the
lens of fiction.
Adapting fact into fabrication has become an increasingly trendy cultural anom-
aly. Bennett Miller’s Capote (2005), starring Academy Award–winner Phillip
Seymour Hoffman as the literary artist Truman Capote, is essentially an adaptation
of a factual search for the material that eventually formed the framework for
Capote’s 1965 “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood. The film relates events not only
from Capote’s life but also from the novel, the plot of which follows the story of
two murderers on death row responsible for killing an innocent Kansas family.
Capote fictionalizes the murderers and their crimes simply by placing them in his
novel. The film picks up where the novel leaves off, continuing to fictionalize those
occurrences and adding to them by narrativizing Capote’s life during that period.
Indeed, the narrative structure of film naturally transforms any work into a kind of
fiction given that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, fiction is authenti-
cally defined as “the act of fashioning or imitating.” Capote effortlessly mimics and
refashions a legitimate literary historical moment. Perhaps in this light, all film
adaptations are, themselves, forms of fiction, each existing as a cinematic imitation
of a source text. Some are very loyal to their origins, choosing to represent aspects
of the novel, story, or biography rather realistically, while others are merely shells of
their predecessors. In either case, the end result is a manufactured cinematic
 FILM ADAPTATIONS OF BOOKS 383

narrative that generates from a desire to represent a specific text in a heterogeneous

medium.

Filmography
Adaptation. Directed by Spike Jonze. Columbia Pictures, 2002.
American Splendor. Directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. FineLine
Features, 2003.
Art School Confidential. Directed by Terry Zwigoff. United Artists, 2006.
Brokeback Mountain. Directed by Ang Lee. Focus Features, 2005.
Capote. Directed by Bennett Miller. United Artists, 2005.
Chicago. Directed by Rob Marshall. Miramax Films, 2002.
Crumb. Directed by Terry Zwigoff. Superior Pictures, 1994.
The Devil Wears Prada. Directed by David Frankel. 20th Century Fox, 2006.
Everything Is Illuminated. Directed by Live Schreiber. Warner Independent Pictures, 2005.
Fast Food Nation. Directed by Richard Linklater. BBC Films, 2006.
Frida. Directed by Julie Taymor. Miramax Films, 2002.
Ghost World. Directed by Terry Zwigoff. United Artists, 2001.
The Hours. Directed by Stephen Daldry. Miramax Films, 2002.
Road to Perdition. Directed by Sam Mendes. 20th Century Fox, 2002.
Sin City. Directed by Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez. Dimension Films, 2005.
War of the Worlds. Directed by Stephen Spielberg. Dreamworks SKG, 2005.

Bibliography
American Film Institute. http://www.afi.com.
Anderson, Matt. “Adapting Brokeback Mountain: From Page to Screen.” Movie Habit.
2005. http://www.moviehabit.com.
Andrew, Dudley. “The Well-Worn Muse: Adaptation in Film History and Theory.” In
Narrative Strategies. Sydney M. Conger and Janice R. Welsh, eds. Macomb: Western
Illinois University, 1980, 9–19.
Braudy, Leo. Afterword. In Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes. Andrew Horton and Stu-
art Y. McDougal, eds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998, 327–335.
Cartmell, Deborah, and Imelda Whelehan, eds. Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to
Text. London: Routledge, 1999.
Clowes, Daniel. Art School Confidential. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2005.
———. Ghost World. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1998.
Collins, Max Allan, and Richard Payner. Road to Perdition. New York: Pocket Books, 2002.
Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998.
Denby, David. “Big Pictures: Hollywood Looks for a Future.” The New Yorker. December
2006. http://www.newyorker.com.
Diehl, Karen. “Once Upon an Adaptation: Traces of the Authorial on Film.” In Books in
Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship. Mireia Aragay, ed. Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2005.
Ebert, Roger. “Chicago.” Chicago Sun-Times. December 2002. http://rogerebert.
suntimes.com.
———. “Frida.” Chicago Sun-Times. November 2002. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com.
———. “Ghost World.” Chicago Sun-Times. August 2001. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com.
Edelstein, David. “Adapt This: Everything Is Illuminated and Thumbsucker Are Lost in
Translation.” Slate. September 2005. http://www.slate.com.
———. “They Came From Below: Stephen Spielberg’s War of the Worlds.” Slate. June 2005.
http://www.slate.com.
Elliott, Kamilla. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003.
384 FILM ADAPTATIONS OF BOOKS

Foer, Jonathan Safran. Everything Is Illuminated. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

Herrera, Hayden. Frida. New York: Harper & Row, 1983.
Horton, Andrew, and Stuart Y. McDougal, eds. Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com.
Kaufman, Charlie, and Donald Kaufman. Adaptation. The Shooting Script. New York:
Newmarket Press, 2002.
Lupack, Barbara Tepa. Take Two: Adapting the Contemporary American Novel to Film.
Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press, 1994.
McCarthy, Todd. “Fast Food Nation.” Variety. May 2006. http://www.variety.com.
McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Film Adaptation. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996.
Milmo, Cahal. “Stop Digging Up Mother’s Troubled Past, Says Plath’s Daughter.” The
Independent. November 2004. http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk.
Nasar, Sylvia. A Beautiful Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998.
Orlean, Susan. Foreword. Adaptation. The Shooting Script. New York: Newmarket Press,
2002.
———. The Orchid Thief. New York: Random House, 1998.
Oxford English Dictionary. http://www.oed.com.
Pekar, Harvey, et al. American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar. New York:
Ballantine Books, 2003.
Proulx, E. Annie. Brokeback Mountain. New York: Scribner, 2005.
———. “Brokeback Mountain FAQ.” Annie Proulx Online. December 2005.
http://www.annieproulx.com.
Reynolds, Peter, ed. Novel Images: Literature in Performance. London: Routledge, 1993.
Seger, Linda. The Art of Adaptation: Turning Fact and Fiction Into Film. New York: Henry
Holt, 1992.
Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005.
Shank, Jenny. “Pulitzer Prize Winner Says the West’s ‘Got Balls’: Proulx, McMurtry, and
Ossana Discuss Adapting ‘Brokeback Mountain.’” New West. November 2005.
http://www.newwest.net.
Sinyard, Neil. Filming Literature: The Art of Screen Adaptation. London: Croom Helm,
1986.
Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” In Film Adaptation. James
Naremore, ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000.
Stam, Robert, and Alessandra Raengo, eds. Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and
Practice of Film Adaptation. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.
Weisberger, Lauren. The Devil Wears Prada. New York: Doubleday, 2003.
Zacharek, Stephanie. “Everything Is Illuminated.” Salon, September 2005. http://dir.salon.com/
story/ent/movies/review/2005/09/16/everything_is_illuminated/index.html.
———. “Fast Food Nation.” Salon, November 2006. http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/
review/2006/11/17/fast_food/index.html.
———. “War of the Worlds.” Salon, June 2005. http://dir.salon.com/story/ent/movies/
review/2005/06/29/war/index.html.

Further Reading
Aragay, Mireia, ed. Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship. Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2006; Cartmell, Deborah, and Imelda Whelehan, eds. Adaptations: From Text to
Screen, Screen to Text. London: Routledge, 1999; Chatman, Seymour. Coming to Terms: The
Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990; Conger,
Sydny M., and Janice R. Welsh. Narrative Strategies. Macomb: Western Illinois University,
1980; Desmond, John, and Peter Hawkes. Adaptation: Studying Film and Literature. Colum-
bus, OH: McGraw-Hill, 2005; Elliott, Kamilla. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cam-
 FLASH FICTION 385

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; Giddings, Robert, Keith Selby, and Chris Wensley.
Screening the Novel. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990; Horton, Andrew, and Stuart Y. McDou-
gal, eds. Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998; Lupack, Barbara Tepa. Take Two: Adapting the Contemporary American Novel to
Film. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press, 1994; McFarlane, Brian. Novel to
Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Film Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996;
Naremore, James. Film Adaptation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000;
Reynolds, Peter, ed. Novel Images: Literature in Performance. London: Routledge, 1993;
Seger, Linda. The Art of Adaptation: Turning Fact and Fiction Into Film. New York: Henry
Holt, 1992; Sinyard, Neil. Filming Literature: The Art of Screen Adaptation. London: Croom
Helm, 1986; Stam, Robert. Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adapta-
tion. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005; Stam, Robert, and Alessandra Raengo, eds. Literature
and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2005; Stam and Raengo. A Companion to Literature and Film. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004;
Zatlin, Phyllis. Theatrical Translation and Film Adaptation: A Practitioner’s View. Clevedon:
Multilingual Matters, 2005.
AMY MALLORY-KANI
FLASH FICTION
Definition. Many editors and writers today define flash fiction as a story ranging
from a few words to not usually over 1,500 to 2,000 words (but more often less
than 1,000 words). A traditional short story ranges from 3,000 to 20,000 words, so
flash fiction is considerably shorter. However, while length can help identify flash
fiction, it is of little use in actually defining it.
The amorphous and protean quality of flash fiction allows for the constant chang-
ing of shapes as these stories draw and invent from various genres and traditions to
create stand-alone stories that often work on their own terms. Countless writers are
involved in writing flash fiction in various ways. Many are involved in following the
form’s long tradition, and many others are reinventing the form as they continue to
experiment with the boundaries and methods of fiction. These shortest of stories are
not always diversions for the moment but are often stories that are profound and
memorable—as good fiction of longer lengths can be.
Charles Baxter notes in the introduction to Sudden Fiction International: 60
Short Short Stories (1989), “this form is not about to be summarized by any one
person’s ideas about it . . . the stories are on so many various thresholds: they are
between poetry and fiction, the story and the sketch, prophecy and reminiscence,
the personal and the crowd . . . as a form, they are open, and exist in a state of
potential” (25).

FLUSH FICTION?
Flash fiction often travels by several interesting names, depending on what publishers, editors,
readers, or writers prefer to call such stories. Some of these names include fictions, short-
shorts, sudden fiction (the preceding three usually representing the upper length limits),
micro, zip, miniaturist, minimalist, minute, postcard, fast, furious, quick, snap, and skinny fiction.
They are also sometimes called palm-of-the hand stories, drabbles, smoke-long stories, and
in some cases, prose poetry and American haibun.These small stories have also been called
“flush fiction” to emphasize the important single-sitting ideal Edgar Allan Poe recommended
for short stories.
386 FLASH FICTION

Some names for flash fiction are chosen to stress brevity, suggesting that such
stories can be read or even written in a flash. Other names are chosen to emphasize
the way in which the stories affect and enlighten readers. And still other names are
chosen for the way in which they cause readers to perform the act of reading, many
times forcing them to slow down and read such pieces as slowly and carefully as
they would read good poetry.
Even though this type of writing travels by several names, flash fiction has become
the most popular label, likely because of its snappy poetic consonance, which makes
it easy to hold in memory, and because of its distance from the older, less descrip-
tive term “short-shorts.” More and more writers, editors, and readers use “flash
fiction” to refer to very short stories.
Some current flash fiction continues to follows the writing strategy of O. Henry
by displaying a trick or twist ending. Other flash fiction borrows strategies from the
longer short story, and such pieces will often have a traditional beginning, middle,
and end. Still other flash fiction pieces tend more toward prose poetry or toward the
experimental, and the results are hybrid pieces that push the boundaries of what
fiction typically does.
While some flash fiction pieces are to be read quickly as simple entertainment,
other types are similar to lyric poetry—condensed, thickly layered, evoking a full
range of emotions, and making demands on reader attention and imagination.
Many poetically compressed pieces depend on implication, suggestion, voice, or
situation for their effects and often devote less attention to traditional fiction con-
cepts such as plot or character development. Characters in some flash fiction pieces
are nameless, and instead of having names, characters display an archetypal
relationship identification (such as “mother” or “father”). Those pieces without
character names often give the impression that the stories are “everyman” or
“everywoman” stories. Gitte Mose points out, “Through their testing and tentative
art of storytelling, these writers of short-shorts are able to show the world as fickle
and immense, a world we cannot fathom but perhaps approach when it is captured
at the ‘roots’ of a kind of fiction that is probing and challenging the capabilities of
language.” Writers of short-shorts assume “that the world is full of possibilities,
that it can be examined and told by imposing their artistic form on some small
corners of chaos” (2004, 93).
Some of the more unusual types of flash fiction include plotless stories; mono-
logues; language, tone, or mood pieces; list stories (such as using biographical mate-
rial or a course syllabus to tell a story); the use of unusual second-person point of
view or address; and the use of one, two, or three long sentences covering two or
three pages. More and more writers use flash fiction to “reveal the hidden, to accen-
tuate the subtle, to highlight the seemingly insignificant, or, as William Blake said in
another context, ‘to see a world in a grain of sand’” (Fuller and Casto 2001, 30).
To do this, protean flash fiction puts many old and new and experimental writing
strategies to work.
History. The idea of flash fiction has been around as long as people have been
telling stories around campfires and as long as writers have been writing. Brief,
potent, and suggestive short-short stories abound in ancient literature and continue
to be a strong presence in today’s stories. These short stand-alone stories were once
generally known as short-shorts, and a history of flash fiction will of necessity par-
allel a history of short-shorts. But when several popular anthologies were published
in the mid-1980s and 1990s, the study of what these brief stories are and what they
 FLASH FICTION 387

can do began in earnest. Along with these studies came the search for and use of
new and interesting names. However, until recently most flash fiction has managed
to slip beneath literary radar.
The name flash fiction likely came into widespread acceptance and use with the
publication of Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories, edited by James Thomas, Denise
Thomas, and Tom Hazuka (1992). As the memorable and snappy title spread,
especially across the Internet, “flash fiction” became for many a generic catchall
name for very short stories (along with “sudden fiction” and other descriptive and
memorable names—see this chapter’s sidebar).
Some of the early writers of short-shorts who are major influences on present-day
flash fiction include O. Henry (1862–1910), master of the surprise ending; Charles
Baudelaire (1821–1867), acclaimed for his prose poems; Guy de Maupassant
(1850–1910), known for stories from everyday life that often reveal hidden aspects
of people; Hector Hugh Munro (Saki) (1870–1916), praised for short-short
sardonic and macabre stories; and Ambrose Bierce (1842–1910), acclaimed for his
brief stories of the supernatural.
In his dedication for his series of prose poems in Paris Spleen (1869) Baudelaire
says, “We can cut wherever we please, I my dreaming, you your manuscript, the
reader his reading; for I do not keep the reader’s restive mind hanging in suspense
on the threads of an interminable and superfluous plot. . . . Chop it into numer-
ous pieces and you will see that each one can get along alone” (ix). Some of
Baudelaire’s pieces are less than a half page long while others run two or three
pages in length. That flash fiction can also “get along alone” is one of its main
characteristics—each small story, like each of Baudelaire’s pieces, is complete in
itself.
According to Mildred I. Reid and Delmar E. Bordeaux, editors of Writers: Try
Short Shorts! (1947), prior to 1926, short-shorts were published daily in McClure’s
Newspaper Syndicate. Then in 1926 Colliers Weekly, who claimed the one-page
stories they published were the “greatest innovation in short story publication since
O. Henry,” ran such stories in 20 issues, and the short-short quickly became a
popular form. Some of the authors for Colliers were Rupert Hughes, Zona Gale,
Sophie Kerr, and Octavus Roy Cohen. Cosmopolitan magazine soon followed
suit and engaged W. Somerset Maugham and A.J. Cronin to write short-shorts for
their pages as well (13). As of 1947, from the “slicks to the pulps,” over two
hundred magazines and newspapers were publishing short-short stories as regular
features. The stories also began appearing on radio where they found other eager
audiences (25).
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), known for his deceptively simple and spare
prose style and for his withholding of information so readers can draw necessary
conclusions, is another major influence on modern flash fiction. Some of his flash-
length stories include “Hills Like White Elephants,” “A Very Short Story,” “Cat in
the Rain,” “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” “Ten Indians,” “A Simple Enquiry,” and
“A Canary For One.”
Other early writers whose work is a strong influence on modern flash fiction
include Fredrick Brown and Richard Brautigan. The horror stories collected in
Fredrick Brown’s popular Nightmares and Geezenstacks (1961) are all flash-fiction
length. Richard Brautigan’s only story collection, Revenge of the Lawn (1971),
influenced interest in stories that blurred genre boundaries. Many of Brautigan’s
stories are less than a half page long.
388 FLASH FICTION

Through the years there have been several other acclaimed authors associated
with flash fiction–length stories—far too many to explore in the confines of this
chapter. Instead this chapter’s focus is on some of the major and influential antholo-
gies that have been published. Not all authors in the anthologies are included here,
but the names mentioned show the diversity of writers engaged in writing extremely
short fiction.
Robert Coover and Kent Dixon edited the Stone Wall Book of Short Fictions
(1973), a work made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the
Arts. The stories range from the straightforward to the highly experimental.
Authors include Joyce Carol Oates, Donald Barthelme, Elie Wiesel, Kent Dixon,
Robert Kelly, Richard Brautigan, Robert Coover, Russell Edson, Jorge Luis Borges,
Rikki, W.S. Merwin, and others.
Coover, serving as guest coeditor along with editor Elliott Anderson, collected
and featured 87 “Minute Stories” in the Winter 1976 issue of TriQuarterly. Some
of the stories are as brief as an average paragraph, while others are a page long, and
others run two or three pages. The authors include W.S. Merwin, Alain Robb-
Grillet, Angela Carter, Russell Edson, Michael Benedikt, Jorge Luis Borges, Andrei
Codrescu, Annie Dillard, Kent Dixon, Robert Kelly, Richard Brautigan, and others.
Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander published Microcos-
mic Tales: 100 Wondrous Science Fiction Short-Short Stories (1980). All the stories
are 2,000 words or fewer with many less than two pages long. Some of the authors
are Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, Harlan Ellison, Mack Reynolds, Alice Laurance,
Robert Silverberg, A.E. van Vogt, Fredric Brown, Harry Harrison, Larry Niven,
Joanna Russ, Lester del Rey, and Fritz Leiber.
Irving Howe and Ilana Wiener Howe edited Short-Shorts: Anthology of the
Shortest Stories (1982), which includes masterpieces from around the world. The
average length for the stories is 1,500 words. Some of the authors are Leo Tolstoy,
Anton Chekhov, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Luigi Pirandello,
Sherwood Anderson, Katherine Anne Porter, Isaac Babel, William Carlos Williams,
Doris Lessing, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Grace Paley, Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, Augusto Monterroso, Heinrich Boll, and Luisa Valenzuela.
100 Great Fantasy Short Short Stories (1984) was edited by Isaac Asimov, Terry
Carr, and Martin H. Greenberg. The stories are 2,000 words or fewer, and many are
as short as a half page. Authors include Roger Zelazny, H.P. Lovecraft, Marion
Zimmer Bradley, Harlan Ellison, Damon Knight, Bruce Boston, Jane Yolen, Steve
Rasnic Tem, Lawrence C. Connolly, Mack Reynolds, Fredric Brown, Barry
Malzberg, Edgar Pangborn, Jack Dann, Gene Wolfe, Andre Maurois, and others.
A serious search for a new name for such short stories came with the publication
of Sudden Fiction: American Short-Shorts (1986), edited by Robert Shapard and
James Thomas. The anthology contains good debate and discussion on this type of
writing, and the stories featured range from one to five pages long. The editors
describe the stories as “highly compressed, highly charged, insidious, protean,
sudden, alarming, tantalizing, these short-shorts confer form on small corners of
chaos” (xvi). The authors include Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, John
Cheever, Roy Blount, Jr., John Updike, Gordon Lish, Mary Robison, Langston
Hughes, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Ray Bradbury, Tennessee Williams,
Pamela Painter, Mark Strand, Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Edson, Stuart Dybek,
James B. Hall, Russell Banks, Ron Carlson, Lydia Davis, Jayne Anne Phillips,
Bernard Malamud, and others.
 FLASH FICTION 389

4 Minute Fictions: 50 Short-Short Stories from the North American Review

(1987) was edited by Robley Wilson Jr. The North American Review is the oldest
magazine in the United States and has been published since 1815. Wilson includes
a brief introduction to the 50 stories that range from 200 to 2,000 words and says,
“What’s important is that these are excellent pieces of fiction wrought within a
limited frame of space and of time. Each works in its own way, on its own terms.”
He says that like the work in the anthology, “fiction covers everything, is eclectic,
clings to no armature of critical fashion” (iii). Among the authors are Barry Lopez,
Raymond Carver, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Stephen Dixon, Stuart Dybek, Thomas
Farber, Edward Hirsch, Thaisa Frank, Edward Hirsch, W.P. Kinsella, Pamela
Painter, and Allen Woodman.
Sudden Fiction International: 60 Short-Short Stories (1989), edited by Robert
Shapard and James Thomas, also includes with the various stories an excellent and
useful afterword section where various writers, editors, and theorists comment on
such things as the popularity of this type of fiction and the characteristics of very
short stories. The anthology features notable writers from around the world such as
Margaret Atwood, Yasunary Kawabata, Jamaica Kincaid, Colette, R.K. Narayan,
Heinrich Boll, Jorge Luis Borges, Slawomir Mrozek, Doris Lessing, Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, Peter Handke, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Brautigan, David Brooks,
Krisnan Varma, Isak Dinesen, Panos Ioannides, Hernan Lara Zavala, Rodrigo Rey
Rosa, Talat Abbasi, Denis Hirson, Jeanette Winterson, Luisa Valenzuela, Italo
Calvino, Ron Carlson, Edla Van Steen, Isaac Babel, Feng Jicai, Nadine Gordimer,
Fernando Sorrentino, Daniel Boulanger, Bessie Head, Donald Barthelme, Clarice
Lispector, Julio Ortega, Bai Xiao-Yi, and Paul Theroux.
Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories (1992), edited by James Thomas, Denise
Thomas, and Tom Hazuka, includes stories 250 to 750 words in length. The editors
set out to answer the question “How short can a story be and still truly be a story?”
They decide such stories are “short stage presentations or musical pieces that play
to the full range of human sensibilities—some evoke mood while other provoke the
intellect, some introduce us to people we’re interested to meet while others tell us of
unusual but understandable phenomena in this world, and some of them do several
or all of these things, the things good fiction of any length does” (12). Stories
included are by Francine Prose, Raymond Carver, Lon Otto, Bret Lott, Russell
Edson, Luisa Valenzuela, Pamela Painter, Don Shea, Carolyn Forche, Richard
Brautigan, Jamaica Kincaid, Bruce Holland Rogers, Heinrich Boll, Julio Cortazar,
John Updike, Tim O’Brien, Mark Strand, Gordon Lish, Joyce Carol Oates,
Margaret Atwood, Ronald Wallace, and others.
Allen Kornblum’s Coffee House Press published a series flash fiction collections
by individual authors in the early 1990s as part of their Coffee To Go: Short-Short
Story series. Author collections include Jessica Treat’s A Robber in the House
(1993), Kenneth Koch’s Hotel Lambosa and Other Stories (1993), and Barry
Silesky’s One Thing That Can Save Us (1994).
Sudden Fiction (Continued) (1996) was edited by Robert Shapard and James
Thomas. The editors point out,

The spirit of experimentation continues to be most alive these days in the shorter
forms. No longer relegated to special sections, they are scattered as regular fare
throughout the pages of an even larger number of magazines, including the larger-
circulation magazines. But one thing remains constant: each story revels in its own
390 FLASH FICTION

elements of surprise; each, whether traditional or experimental, proves that a tale told
quickly offers pleasure long past its telling. (12)

This collection’s authors include Margaret Atwood, Alice Walker, Robin Hemley,
Molly Giles, Don DeLillo, Charles Baxter, Milos Macourek, Ursula Hegi, Ron
Carlson, Bret Lott, Robert Olen Butler, Andrei Codrescu, Allen Woodman, Pagan
Kennedy, Richard Plant, Madison Smartt Bell, and Bruce Holland Rogers.
Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Really Short Stories (1996), edited by Jerome
Judson, features a decade of winners and finalists from the annual World’s Best
Short Short Story Contest, which had been running since 1986. It also includes
other writers who took up the challenge of writing such short stories, and all of the
stories presented are 300 words or fewer. Stern says, “These short short stories
represent work by writers who have found ways to play upon a very small field, and
yet to invent their own imaginative and resonant worlds” (19). Writers include
Molly Giles, Roberta Allen, Pamela Painter, Kim Addonizio, Virgil Suarez, Fred
Chappell, Ron Wallace, Stuart Dybek, Russell Edson, Ron Carlson, Ursula Hegi,
Amy Hempel, Antonya Nelson, and Padgett Powell.
Horrors! 365 Scary Stories (1998), edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert
Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg, presents readers a story a day for one year’s
reading. The anthology won the Horror Writer’s Association Best Anthology Award
and includes over 300 writers whose work on average is less than three pages long.
The stories are by Lawrence C. Connolly, Michael Arnzen, Linda J. Dunn, Paula
Guran, Brian McNaughton, Adam Niswander, Steve Resnic Tem, Tim Waggoner,
William Marden, Brian Hodge, Phyllis Eisenstein, Brian A. Hopkins, Hugh B. Cave,
Lisa Morton, Bruce Boston, and others.
Trends and Themes. Short-short stories have undergone various changes through
the years. Early popular short-short stories often adhered to the strategies begun by
O. Henry and Guy de Maupassant, with use of a surprise or trick ending. Many
writers and editors today still stick with this tried-and-true formula. But flash fiction
also takes on many other methods of telling a story. As boundaries continued to be
pushed and genre lines became blurrier, the results were new and inventive ways of
telling stories—less predictable stories that refuse to remain within any strict
formulations about them. This trend continued as short-short stories evolved into
today’s concept of very short fiction, which includes models and strategies from
older short-shorts and which takes stories into new, interesting, and inventive direc-
tions. Following are some of the directions flash-fiction type stories have taken.
Reid and Bordeaux say that by 1947 short-shorts “began dealing with every
variety of emotion” and became committed to “presenting the beauties, the frailties,
and the striking nuances of complex human nature” (14). They describe this type of
story as “a dramatic narrative whose primary aim is to arouse in its readers a shock
of astonishment or surprise” (19). The commonality shared by stories of the time
was “dramatic form, or plot,” which helps the story “achieve its intended effect.”
They claim that in the short-short story, “it is not the solution, but the astonishing
nature of the solution which is depended upon for the chief effect” (17). In these
stories the author “presents a character, or a group of characters acting in and
through a crisis” (19).
Reid and Bordeaux also say the majority of legitimate short-short stories of the
time consisted of eight types: the complication short-short, the character short-short,
the decision short-short, the alienation or reconciliation short-short, the psychological
 FLASH FICTION 391

short-short, the dilemma short-short, the parallel-action short-short, and the iden-
tity short-short.
Whereas stories up until at least 1947 emphasized plot and crisis as essential to the
short-short story, Irving Howe and Ilana Wiener Howe (1983) give plot a much less
central position of importance and point out that in the stories they collected, char-
acter seems to “lose its significance, seems in fact to drop out of sight.” Instead, such
stories depict “human figures in a momentary flash,” in fleeting profile, in “archetypal
climaxes which define their mode of existence.” In short-shorts, “situation tends to
replace character, representative condition to replace individuality” (x).
The average length for stories in the Howes’ anthology is 1,500 words (with some
stories as long as 2,500 words). The editors say that while a traditional short story
has a simple plot “resembling a chain with two or three links,” in the short-short
“there’s only one link.” In successful short-short stories “everything depends on
intensity, one sweeping blow of perception” (xi). Such stories, like lyric poetry, strive
for “a rapid unity of impression, an experience rendered in its wink of immediacy.”
Writers “stake everything on a stroke of inventiveness” (xii). The four variations in
the short-shorts they feature include one thrust of incident, life rolled up, snap-shot
or single frame, and like a fable (xiii–xiv).
Mark Mills in Crafting the Very Short Story: An Anthology of 100 Masterpieces
(2004) says that the primary stylistic features of the stories in the anthology are
voice, point of view, and setting. “Character,” says Mills, is “only glanced at and
plot is a slim shadow of the larger and more important structure” (xv). Such stories
“illuminate the human condition by dramatizing universal aspects of human
nature,” and the results are stories that are “ostensibly simple in appearance, yet
complex and precise in detail.” The writers, Mills says, “deftly employ the tools of
fiction to maximize each story’s power while minimizing length” (xiv). The pace of
this succinct genre is “swift yet unhurried,” and its “uncommon voice [is] supple-
mented by inventive design” (xv).
In Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories (1986), Stephen Minot says
short-shorts are rooted in at least five different traditions: the true experience story
(“vivid, intense, dramatic” and which seems highly personal), the anecdote (which
includes jokes, parables, and fables), the speculative story (often without plot where
“character and even plot become subservient to theme”), dream stories (where
“mood is stressed more than theme” and “tone is everything”), and poetic stories
(rich in auditory effects and where “imagery is more highly valued than narrative
structure”) (235–237).
As Minot points out, flash pieces often seem highly personal and true. Some flash
fiction pieces are read as true stories, and some true stories are read as fictional
accounts—one will often pass as the other. This blurring of genre boundaries
continues in the publication of three popular anthologies of what can be viewed as
flash memoirs or flash creative nonfiction—all related to flash fiction in technique.
Judith Kitchen and Mary Paumier Jones edited In Short: A Collection of Brief
Creative Nonfiction (1996). The anthology includes work by Stuart Dybek, Maxine
Kumin, Terry Tempest Williams, Tobias Wolff, Tim O’Brien, Michael Ondaatje, Joy
Harjo, Rita Dove, Lee Gutkind, Charles Simic, Denise Levertov, Andrei Codrescu,
Gretel Ehrlich, Donald Hall, Barry Lopez, Diane Ackerman, Albert Goldbarth,
Naomi Shihab Nye, and others. The editors point out that such work is similar to
flash fiction, but in these stories “the people, the places, the events are real.” And
like flash fiction, the pieces are complete in themselves (25).
392 FLASH FICTION

Kitchen and Jones also edited In Brief: Short Takes on the Personal (1999). The
editors note that these short-shorts “employ many techniques of fiction—narrative,
dialogue, descriptive imagery, point of view, interior voice,” but they do so “to make
something of the facts” (19). Included are pieces by Anne Carson, Frank McCourt,
Albert Goldbarth, Pattiann Rogers, Bernard Cooper, Edwidge Danticat, Andre
Dubus, Charles Baxter, Jamaica Kincaid, Mary Oliver, William Heyen, Robert
Shapard, Stuart Dybek, and others.
In 2005 Judith Kitchen edited Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary
Nonfiction, and the anthology includes work by Salman Rushdie, Amy Tan, Stephen
Dunn, Ron Carlson, Hayden Carruth, Stuart Dybek, Dinty W. Moore, Terry
Tempest Williams, Albert Goldbarth, Naomi Shihab Nye, and many others.
Another trend is the creation of author collections of flash fiction. Many
acclaimed authors have created and published short story collections that include
their shortest pieces (either exclusively or along with longer stories). Some of those
writers are Raymond Carver, Barry Yourgrau, Yasunari Kawabata, Amy Hempel,
Jayne Anne Phillips, and Bruce Holland Rogers, to name just a few. But another
developing trend is the creation of the flash-fiction style novel. Among these unusual
novels are Italo Calvino’s literary classic Invisible Cities (1974), Richard Currey’s
Fatal Light (1988), and Peter Marcus’s Good, Brother (2006). Roberta Allen notes
that Allen Lightman’s Einstein’s Dream and her own novella, The Daughter, are
composed of linking short-shorts. She also notes that Sandra Cisneros’s novel, The
House on Mango Street, makes use of the form as well (1997, 5).
All the structures and strategies of past flash fiction are still viable for writers and
publishers today. And today’s writers can continue to push the boundaries of what
fiction can do.
Context and Issues. Charles Baxter calls very short stories “tunes for the end of
time, for those in an information age who are sick of data” (1986, 226). Baxter also
says, “The novel is spatially, like an estate; the very short story is like an efficiency
on the twenty-third floor. As it happens, more people these days live in efficiencies
than on estates. The result may be that we will start to see a shift in the imperial self
of the traditional novel to the we and the they of communal stories. . . it is as if we
ourselves are living in tighter psychic spaces” (1989, 21).
Today’s readers have less time available for serious or even pleasurable reading.
In many homes both partners have full-time jobs, and families often engage in hectic
lifestyles. For convenience people often replace lengthy novels with films and replace
short stories with half-hour television shows.
People are also bombarded with information from every direction: from radio,
24-hour television newscasts, news tracks in newscasts, split-screen television news,
daily newspapers, cell phones, e-mails, fax machines, pagers, beepers, text messages,
billboards, telemarketing, junk mail, and more. As Charles Baxter (2001) points
out, a type of “data nausea” can be the result of such an overwhelming amount of
information coming from every direction.
Dinty W. Moore, who also teaches flash fiction and serves as editor for Brevity
online (for short-short creative nonfiction), is often asked to defend such brief
writing. He says in Sudden Stories: The Mammoth Book of Miniscule Fiction
(2003), “People today consume information at a much-accelerated rate. Some of the
information they consume is shallow and of little value, certainly, but some is
incredibly sophisticated. The best examples of short short fiction fall into the latter
category . . . though brief, they are incredibly sophisticated, stuffed to the gills” (16).
 FLASH FICTION 393

Flash fiction fits well with busy lifestyles because it can be read in the small breaks
that life provides, such as while waiting for a doctor’s appointment, while riding on
a subway or bus or as a passenger in a car, while waiting at the barber shop or at
the hair salon, while relaxing in the bathtub—any time a few minutes of freedom
present themselves. Readers still seek stories that provide a bit of escapism or that
provide insights into modern-day people and what it can mean to be human.
Readers also still require good literature to help them make some sense of their lives.
Flash fiction can satisfy these desires, and these small stories fit well with a rushed
and hectic manner of living where there is little time available for prolonged
reading.
Recent advances in electronic technology have given flash fiction an even greater
boost in readership. Now readers can read flash fiction on the Internet and via e-mail,
cell phones, and mobile devices, as well as hear it over podcasts, depending on what
electronic devices are available to the reader and the publisher. Through flash fiction
and electronic availability, readers can get the benefits of reading good literature
without the time commitment longer works require.
Publishing economics enters into this equation as well. Printing costs are expen-
sive, but publishers can give their readers good flash fiction pieces and can publish
more stories in each print issue. Because of the high cost of printing and the diffi-
culty of finding funding, many publishers are discontinuing their print publications
and are turning instead to Internet publishing.
Reception. After years of mostly escaping literary radar, flash fiction has come
into its own. Today it is regularly featured in newspapers, magazines, literary
journals, anthologies, and collections. It is an especially popular form of fiction for
Internet publications. In addition to being published in these ways, flash fiction has
also been published on coffee cans, coffee mugs, public transportation, t-shirts, and
beer mats and has even been sold in vending machines.
Currently this type of writing is taught and studied in high school and university
courses, taught and studied online, and explored in numberless in-person work-
shops. As of 1989, Shapard and Thomas’s Sudden Fiction International: 60 Short-
Short Stories anthology was used in courses at over 200 colleges and universities
(1989, 15).
A further indication of flash fiction’s popularity and reception is the publication
of general “how to” books on the subject. Roberta Allen published Fast Fiction:
Creating Fiction in Five Minutes (1997), which guides writers in crafting such
stories, in turning five-minute writing sessions into short-short fiction. The book
contains exercises and a good overview of modern-day flash fiction. Allen describes
such stories as “intense fictions that use language with power and precision” and as
a type of story “that gets quickly to the core and reveals the essence of a situation
or moment in a very few words” (40).
Other general how-to books include Harvey Stanbrough’s Writing Realistic
Dialogue & Flash Fiction: A Thorough Primer for Writers of Fiction & Essays
(2004), which focuses mainly on dialogue and flash fiction of 100 words or fewer,
and Michael Wilson’s Flash Writing: How to Write, Revise and Publish Stories Less
Than 1000 Words Long (2004). Popular writing magazines such as Writer’s Digest,
Poets & Writers, and The Writer have also run several feature-length articles on
writing flash fiction.
Flash fiction is now receiving more attention from scholars as well. The Art of
Brevity: Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis (2004), edited by Per
394 FLASH FICTION

Winther, Jakob Lothe, and Hans H. Skei, brings together American and Nordic
scholars for a close critical look at short-short fiction. Some of the contributors of
articles include Charles E. May, Mary Rohrberger, Susan Lohafer, John Gerlach,
Hans H. Skei, Andrew K. Kennedy, Per Winther, Stuart Sillars, Gitte Mose, Jakob
Lothe, W.H. New, Gerd Bjorhovde, Laura Castor, Jan Nordby Gretlund, Sandra Lee
Kleppe, Axel Nissen, and Hans B. Lofgren.
Derek White, editor of Sleepingfish, which is almost exclusively devoted to flash
fiction, and publisher at Calamari Press, says that with the exception of one poetry
collection, all the collections published through Calamari Press have been literary
flash fiction collections (see online catalog at http://calamaripress.com/
Catalog.htm). These collections have also been widely reviewed in American Book
Review, NY Press, Bookslut, and elsewhere (personal e-mail communication,
December 24, 2006).
Other Recent Directions. Oprah Winfrey’s O Magazine published several flash
fictions, 300 words and fewer, in its First Ever Summer Reading Issue (“Flash
Fictions” 2006). The high-circulation magazine brought flash fiction before the eyes
of millions of readers. A description of the stories says, “They’re short (and we
mean short), intense (imagine a novel crossed with a haiku), and mesmerizing
(whether they’re illuminating a single moment or a whole life). The result: eight little
beauties that leave a wake of wonder and wondering” (168). The authors of the
flash fiction stories are A.M. Holmes, Antonya Nelson, Anna Deavere Smith, Dawn
Raffel, Mark Leyner, Stuart Dybek, John Edgar Wideman, and Amy Hempel.
Some of the shortest pieces of all appeared in “Very Short Stories” in the November
2006 issue of Wired magazine, another publication with a large circulation. The
editors invited writers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror to submit stories just
six words in length. The resulting collection includes work by such renowned writ-
ers as Margaret Atwood, Arthur C. Clark, Ursula Le Guin, Ben Bova, and Orson
Scott Card and even a story by actor William Shatner (and several other writers).
Esquire (February 2007) sent out 250 napkins to various well-known writers
across the United States, asking them to write a short-short story on them. Nearly
100 writers responded, and the magazine published some of the resulting stories in
their print magazine. Those not published in the print version were published in
their online version. The writers who created the napkin stories included Madison
Smartt Bell, Aimee Bender, Tony Epril, Sheila Heti, Michael Mejia, Rick Moody,
Ethan Paquin, Jim Ruland, Erika Kraus, Ron Carlson, and many others.
The Internet has given flash fiction an even bigger boost in writer and reader
popularity by bringing it before a larger reading public than ever possible before.
Currently there are countless online publications featuring flash fiction and hun-
dreds that feature flash fiction exclusively. There are also countless online critique
workshops and dozens of online flash fiction courses. The stories published on the
Internet run the gamut from sheer entertainment to literary, thought-provoking
stories. The Internet has also helped spread the various newer names for this type of
writing.
Some Internet editors also make use of advances in technology to turn flash fiction
into multimedia events. Some incorporate music and art into the online presenta-
tions. Such productions range from amateur work to highly professional. With the
arrival of recent technology, flash fiction is often read on Internet radio as well.
In 2003 podcasts began broadcasting on the Internet. Podcasts are media files that
use video images, audio, or both and that make use of syndication feeds for playback
 FLASH FICTION 395

on personal computers and mobile devices. Many podcasters use flash fiction in
their broadcasts.
Short-short pieces have always been popular on the radio and were a regular
staple in the 1930s and 1940s. But now such pieces often travel on the radio under
the many newer names for flash fiction. National Public Radio features flash fiction
as part of its regular offering.
In January 2007, Symphony Space on Broadway in New York City arranged an
evening with the stories in Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories from America and
Beyond (2007). Actors read the stories, and they were taped before an audience.
The stories later aired on National Public Radio’s “Selected Shorts” (Personal e-mail
communication with Robert Shapard, December 28, 2006).
Flash fiction has also made its way into film. Several of Raymond Carver’s
short-short stories were made into a film titled Short Cuts (1993), directed by
Robert Altman. The film depicts the way lives intersect among 22 Los Angeles
characters and features actors Andie MacDowell, Tom Waits, Mathew Modine,
Lily Tomlin, Tim Robbins, Jack Lemmon, Julianne Moore, and Anne Archer. A
film reviewer for Time Out London wrote, “The marvelous performances bear
witness to Altman’s iconoclastic good sense, with Tomlin, Waits, Modine,
Robbins, MacDowell and the rest lending the film’s mostly white, middle-class
milieu an authenticity seldom found in American cinema. But the real star is
Altman, whose fluid, clean camera style, free-and-easy editing, and effortless
organisation of a complex narrative are quite simply the mark of a master.” The
film also won the Golden Globe Award in 1994 and was nominated for a Special
Achievement Award.
Barry Yourgrau’s short-short collection The Sadness of Sex (1995) was turned
into a comedy of modern romance and starred the author himself. The film was
composed of 15 short acts showing the many phases of a love affair. Different types
of camerawork and various types of music were used to distinguish one story from
another (Brennan 2007).
Michael Arnzen’s flash fiction collection 100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories
(2005) was a finalist for the 2005 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in
a Fiction Collection. Some individual stories in the collection also received honor-
able mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Because of 100 Jolts’s popu-
larity, it was reissued in hardcover in 2007. Further, 16 stories from 100 Jolts have
also been released in an audio version titled Audiovile. In 2006 about half of the
stories in 100 Jolts were adapted to film in Jim Minton’s Exquisite Corpse: An Inter-
national Collaboration of Dark Cinema, an experiment in horror cinema that is an
international collaboration of directors, multimedia artists, and animators. The
other half of the stories in the film were adapted from Arnzen’s poems (personal e-mail
communication, January 13, 2007).
Lawrence C. Connolly’s flash fiction, “Echoes,” was published in over a dozen
publications worldwide. It was also twice adapted to film. The first, a film festival
production, was filmed in Hollywood by Steve Muscarella. The second adaptation
was directed by Rodney Altman and won Best Achievement in Cinematography at
the Fusion Film Festival in New York City in March 2004 (personal e-mail
communication, January 15, 2007).
Peter Marcus, author of short-short collections The Singing Fish (2005) and
Good, Brother (2006; a reissue of a book that was published through a different
press in 2001), saw a short film based on the title story of Good, Brother that
396 FLASH FICTION

premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival in 2002 (personal e-mail communication,

January 22, 2007).
Selected Authors. There are countless writers involved in writing flash fiction,
and the number grows every day. The stories take on a myriad of subjects, themes,
strategies, and methods. Following is a brief overview of some of the influential
anthologies published since the year 2000, along with the names of some of the
authors engaged in writing flash fiction. Not all authors for each anthology are
included, but those mentioned give a glimpse of the variety of writers of flash
fiction.
Dinty W. Moore edited Sudden Stories: The Mammoth Book of Miniscule Fiction
(2003). The anthology of stories 350 words or fewer also includes some thoughts
on flash or sudden fiction by the writers themselves. The authors are Molly Giles,
Michael Arnzen, Josip Novakovich, Robin Hemley, Allen Woodman, Aimee Bender,
Denise Duhamel, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Ron Wallace, William Heyen, Virgil Suarez,
Jim Heynen, Gail Galloway Adams, Mark Budman, and several others.
Mark Mills’s textbook Crafting the Very Short Story: An Anthology of 100
Masterpieces (2003) looks at the work of various distinguished authors and includes
essays on the short-short written either by scholars or by the writers themselves. The
textbook also includes brief writing instructions. Some of the acclaimed writers in
this culturally diverse textbook are Sherwood Anderson, Amiri Baraka, Giovanni
Boccaccio, Bertolt Brecht, Charles Bukowski, Italo Calvino, Angela Carter,
Raymond Carter, Colette, Sandra Cisneros, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky,
E.M. Forster, Eduardo Galeno, Graham Greene, James Joyce, Langston Hughes,
Shirley Jackson, Pam Houston, Ursula K. Le Guin, Clarice Lispector, Thomas
Mann, W. Somerset Maugham, Herman Melville, Alice Munro, Vladimir Nobakov,
Anais Nin, Joyce Carol Oates, Frank O’Connor, Dorothy Parker, Petronius, Jayne
Anne Phillips, Marcel Proust, Mary Robison, John Steinbeck, James Thurber, Paul
Theroux, Jean Toomer, John Updike, Luisa Valenzuela, Voltaire, Alice Walker,
Eudora Welty, Dorothy West, Tennessee Williams, Oscar Wilde, Tobias Wolff,
Virginia Woolf, and others.
James Thomas and Robert Shapard coedited Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very
Short Stories (2006). The anthology includes all new stories that, for the editors,
represent the best flash fiction from America in the twenty-first century. Some of the
authors are Don Shea, Paul Theroux, Carolyn Forche, Ron Carlson, Robert Coover,
Utahna Faith, Barbara Jacksha, Lydia Davis, Lon Otto, Dave Eggers, Donald Hall,
Grace Paley, Jim Heynen, John Updike, Mark Budman, Amy Hempel, James Tate,
Bruce Holland Rogers, and Pamela Painter. The editors say that the stories, 750
words or fewer, “depend for their success not on their length but on their depth,
clarity of vision, and human significance.” A good flash fiction “should move the
reader emotionally or intellectually” (2006, 11–13).
Peter Connors edited PP/FF: An Anthology (2006), which bridges flash fiction
and prose poetry. Connors says the anthology “is prose poetry and flash fiction
balanced on a makeshift teeter-totter that never lands. Sometimes it is more prose
poetry, sometimes more flash fiction, but it is always in motion between the two.”
Connors says it is “a symbol of a vital and important literary form that is constantly
in flux, appropriating, moving and growing” (9). Included are stories by Jessica
Treat, Stuart Dybek, Daryl Scroggins, Peter Markus, Mark Tursi, G.C. Waldrep,
Brian Clements, Anthony Tognazzini, Lydia Davis, Harold Jaffe, Derek White,
Ethan Paquin, Kim Addonizio, and others.
 FLASH FICTION 397

Robert Shapard and James Thomas also coedited New Sudden Fiction: Short-
Short Stories from America and Beyond (2007). These stories came from both print
publications and Internet publications, and the editors consider the stories to be
some of the best sudden fiction of the twenty-first century. The editors also point out
that none of these new works end with an ironic twist (in the style of O. Henry) but
instead are “suddenly just there, surprising, unpredictable, hilarious, serious,
moving, in only a few pages” (14). Authors include Tobias Wollf, Robert Olen
Butler, Sam Shepard, Aimee Bender, Nadine Gordimer, Joyce Carol Oates, Robin
Hemley, Ron Carlson, Ursula Hegi, Steve Almond, Elizabeth Berg, Sherrie Flick, Ian
Frazier, Barry Gifford, and others.
An anthology titled You Have Time for This: Contemporary Short-Short Stories
was published by Ooligan Press in 2007. This anthology of flash fiction under 500
words was coedited by Mark Budman, editor of Vestal Review, an online
publication that specializes in flash fiction only, and Tom Hazuka. Among the
authors are Aimee Bender, Bruce Holland Rogers, Steve Almond, Deb Unferth,
Katharine Weber, and Pamela Painter (personal communication with Mark
Budman, May 6, 2007).

Bibliography
Allen, Roberta. Fast Fiction: Creating Fiction in Five Minutes. Cincinnati: Story Press, 1997.
Asimov, Isaac, Terry Carr, and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. 100 Great Fantasy Short Short
Stories. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984.
Asimov, Isaac, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander, eds. Microcosmic Tales: 100
Wondrous Science Fiction Short-Short Stories. New York: Daw Books, 1992.
Baudelaire, Charles. Paris Spleen. Trans. Louise Varese. New York: New Directions Publish-
ing, 1970. Originally published in 1869.
Baxter, Charles. Introduction. Sudden Fiction International: 60 Short Short Stories. Robert
Shapard and James Thomas, eds. New York: Norton, 1989.
———. “Shame and Forgetting in the Information Age.” 2001. http://www.giarts.
org/library_additional/library_additional_show.htm?doc_id=494628.
———. “The Tradition.” Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories. Robert Shapard and
James Thomas, eds. Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 1986. 229.
Brautigan, Richard. Revenge of the Lawn/The Abortion/So the Wind Won’t Blow It All
Away. Omnibus Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995.
Brennan, Sandra. “All Movie Guide.” New York Times, May 12, 2007. http://movies2.
nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=135640.
Brown, Fredric. Nightmares and Geezenstacks. New York: Bantam, 1961.
Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Trans. William Weaver. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1974.
Connors, Peter, ed. PP/FF: An Anthology. Buffalo: Starcherone Books, 2006.
Coover, Robert, and Kent Dixon, eds. The Stone Wall Book of Short Fictions. Iowa City:
Stone Wall Press, 1973.
Currey, Richard. Fatal Light. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.
Dziemianowicz, Stefan, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg. Horrors! 365 Scary
Stories. New York: Metro Books, 1998.
Esquire. “The Napkin Project.” February 2007. http://www.esquire.com/fiction/
napkin-fiction/napkinproject.
“Flash Fictions.” O: The Oprah Magazine. July 2006.
Fuller, Geoff, and Pamelyn Casto. “A Short Course in Short-Short Fiction.” Writer’s Digest,
February 2001.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. The Finca Vigia
Edition. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.
398 FLASH FICTION

Howe, Irving, and Ilana Wiener Howe, eds. Short Shorts: An Anthology of the Shortest
Stories Toronto: Bantam Books, 1983.
Kitchen, Judith. Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction. New York:
Norton, 2005.
Kitchen, Judith, and Mary Paumier Jones, eds. In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative
Nonfiction. New York: Norton, 1996.
———, eds. In Brief: Short Takes on the Personal. New York: Norton, 1999.
Mills, Mark, ed. Crafting the Very Short Story: An Anthology of 100 Masterpieces. Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003.
Minot, Stephen. “The Tradition.” Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories. Robert Sha-
pard and James Thomas, eds. Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 1986. 235–237.
“Minute Stories.” TriQuarterly 35 (Winter 1976). Edited by Elliot Anderson and guest
coedited by Robert Coover.
Moore, Dinty W., ed. Sudden Stories: The Mammoth Book of Miniscule Fiction. Du Bois, PA:
Mammoth Press, 2003.
Mose, Gitte. “Danish Short Shorts in the 1990s and the Jena-Romantic Fragments.” In
The Art of Brevity: Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis. Per Winther,
Jakob Lothe, and Hans H. Skei, eds. Columbia: University of South Carolina,
2004.
Reid, Mildred I., and Delmar E. Bordeaux, eds. Writers Try Short Shorts: All Known Types
with Examples. Rockford, IL: Bellevue Books, 1947.
Shapard, Robert, and James Thomas, eds. New Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories from
America and Beyond. New York: Norton, 2007.
———, eds. Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith
Books, 1986.
———, eds. Sudden Fiction (Continued): 60 New Short-Short Stories. New York: Norton,
1996.
———, eds. Sudden Fiction International: 60 Short Short Stories. New York: Norton, 1989.
Sleepingfish. http://www.sleepingfish.net.
Stern, Jerome, ed. Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Really Short Stories. New York: Norton,
1996.
Thomas, James, and Robert Shapard, eds. Flash Fiction Forward: 70 Very Short Stories. New
York: Norton, 2006.
Thomas, James, Denise Thomas, and Tom Hazuka, eds. Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories.
New York: Norton, 1992.
“Time Out Film Guide 13: Short Cuts.” Time Out London. http://www.timeout.com/
film/74563.html.
“Very Short Stories.” Wired. November 2006.
Wilson, Michael. Flash Writing: How to Write, Revise and Publish Stories Less Than 1000
Words Long. College Station, TX: Virtualbookworm.com, 2004.
Wilson, Robley, Jr., ed. 4 Minute Fictions: 50 Short-Short Stories from The North American
Review. Flagstaff, AZ: Word Beat Press, 1987.
Winther, Per, Jakob Lothe, and Hans H. Skei, eds. The Art of Brevity: Excursions in Short
Fiction Theory and Analysis. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004.

Further Reading
Casto, Pamelyn. “Flashes on the Meridian: Dazzled by Flash Fiction.” Writing World.
http://www.writing-world.com/fiction/casto.shtml; Casto, Pamelyn, and Geoff Fuller. “Give
Your Tales a Twist.” Guide to Writing Fiction Today: Writers Yearbook. A Writer’s Digest
publication, December 2002; Davis, Lydia. Almost No Memory. New York: Picador, 2001;
Davis, Lydia. Samuel Johnson Is Indignant. New York: Picador, 2004; Fuller, Geoff, and
Pamelyn Casto. “Simple Complexity: A Course in Short-Short Fiction.” Start Writing Now:
 FLASH FICTION 399

Your Introduction to the Writing Life: Writer’s Yearbook. A Writer’s Digest publication,
January 2002; Fuller, Geoff, and Pamelyn Casto. “Put the Flash into Fiction.” Guide to
Writing Fiction Today: Writer’s Yearbook. A Writer’s Digest publication, Winter 2002;
Hempel, Amy. Reasons to Live. New York: Harper Perennial, 1985; Kawabata, Yasunari.
Palm-of-the-Hand Stories. Translated from the Japanese by Lane Dunlop and J. Martin
Holman. New York: North Point Press, 1988; Koch, Kenneth. Hotel Lambosa and Other
Stories. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1993; Phillips, Jayne Anne. Black Tickets.
New York: Vintage Contemporary Series, 2001; Rogers, Bruce Holland. The Keyhole Opera.
Wilsonville, OR: Wheatland Press, 2005; Silesky, Barry. One Thing That Can Save Us.
Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1994; Treat, Jessica. A Robber in the House.
Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1993; Yourgrau, Barry. A Man Jumps Out of an
Airplane. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1999.
PAMELYN CASTO
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G

GLBTQ LITERATURE
Definition. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ) literature is a
challenging category to define and then contain. For the purposes of this chapter,
GLBTQ literature encompasses both those works of fiction written by GLBTQ per-
sons as well as those with themes involving GLBTQ persons. However, the term
GLBTQ literature in itself is hard to define. For example, the Lambda Literary Foun-
dation, the “country’s leading organization for LGBT literature” (Lambda Literary
Foundation 2006), offers awards in 24 separate categories, with 19 of them poten-
tially or positively linked to fiction. Therefore, because authoring a chapter on
GLBTQ literature is quite a daunting task, not all GLBTQ authors who should be rep-
resented here can be.
History. Prior to the Victorian era, there was no description for GLBTQ persons,
so all GLBTQ writings prior to this period have been labeled as such after the fact.
During the Victorian era, scientists began using the term homosexual to label those
with same-sex attractions as mentally ill (Forrest, Biddle, and Clift 2006). However,
with the negative implications of mental illness tied to this term, the terms gay and
lesbian soon become more popular for those with same-sex attractions.
Following World War II, the homophile movement lobbied politely for social
acceptability for GLBTQ persons (Matzner 2004). This continued until 1969,
when the Stonewall Riots led to organized activism. The term gay was widely
adopted as an antonym to straight, which then implied respectable sexual behavior.
The term gay was utilized by both men and women with same-sex attractions
throughout this period, but starting with the feminist movement of the 1970s,
lesbian became more popular for women and the term gay became more associ-
ated with men (Rich 1980). The groups splintered until the mid-1980s, when the
AIDS crisis shifted the focus to solidarity, and bisexuals and transgendered indi-
viduals were eventually included. This is how the now-popular acronym of
GLBTQ came to exist.
402 GLBTQ LITERATURE

WHAT IS QUEER THEORY?

The Q became commonly attached to GLBTQ with the advent of the queer identity movement
(Beemyn and Eliason 1996).This movement was formed around two main premises. First, on
the activist front, it was a reclaimed word, one which the GLBTQ community (and its allies)
used to revoke its power (Jagose 1996). Second, it became attached to the academic field of
queer theory, which called for a broader definition of persons with same-sex attractions than
those offered by the rigid GLBTQ categories.The term queer, however, is still one fraught with
controversy, for some find it to be an insult, while others find it empowering.

Trends and Themes. Much of the GLBTQ literature prior to Stonewall accepted the
negative societal attitudes towards GLBTQ persons, or homophobia, as it existed at
the time, and the literature of this period was often limited in printing and difficult
to access for those not in urban areas. The homophile movement encouraged a lack
of publicity of sexuality by GLBTQ persons, instead insisting that GLBTQ persons
conform as much as possible.
The works of E.M. Forster (1879–1970) personify much of this period, for his
early work reflects much of his own sexual frustration, while throughout his life a
shift is seen as his works begin to more openly fight oppression and social injustice.
While many focus on Maurice (1971), often cited as the “first modern homosexual
novel” (Fone 1998, 351), published posthumously and cementing his role as a
GLBTQ author, much of his earlier works still deserve consideration for their
reflection of the restraint required of GLBTQ authors in the early twentieth century.
These earlier works include Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest
Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), and A Passage
to India (1924).
Christopher Isherwood (1904–1986) followed a similar path to Forster, coming
to terms with his homosexuality throughout his life and eventually becoming very
active in the GLBTQ rights movement. Born in England, he spent time in Berlin in
the 1930s, a period of great artistic output, seeking escape from the repression in
England. Prior to this escape, he authored All the Conspirators (1928), featuring
repressed homosexual characters. During his exploratory period in Berlin, he
authored The Memorial (1933), which portrays homosexual life through the impact
of the loss of the protagonist’s best friend during World War II. In 1939, Isherwood
emigrated to America with his partner W.H. Auden (with whom he engaged in a
nonromantic sexual relationship), and there he authored A Single Man (1964), his
masterpiece reflecting Isherwood’s growing concern with gay oppression.
The works of Jean Genet (1910–1986) begin to shift this dialogue from assimi-
lation and portrayals of the “tragic queer” (Woods 1998, 275) to questions of
power and identity. Genet is one of the first authors to positively discuss trans-
gendered persons, hence reflecting the French intellectual tradition of deconstruct-
ing a topic in order to celebrate it (Fone 1998). Genet’s first novel, Our Lady of the
Flowers (1942), a prison novel (which formed the basis for the majority of his
works), was written while he was in prison and graphically and explicitly portrays
male prostitution and masturbation. The Thief’s Journal (1948) portrays the men
Genet loves, and The Miracle of the Rose (1951) shows the development of a gay
man from “feminized” to “masculine.” However, Genet’s obsession with prison
 GLBTQ LITERATURE 403

and the subversive side of gay life has often left his works open to criticism, for the
revolution he felt he was beginning by personifying gay prison life has often been
portrayed as a reinscription of the deviance of homosexuality.
James Baldwin’s (1924–1987) Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a critical piece
in the development of African American literature, also tells of the protagonist’s
sexual evolution. The original manuscript for the book was supposedly much more
homosexually oriented, but this draft was rejected and major revisions ensued,
tamping down GLBTQ themes. Giovanni’s Room (1956) dealt much more explicitly
with homosexuality, particularly notions of internalized homophobia. Both
Another Country (1962) and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968)
offer its protagonists redemptive roles as gay men, once again setting the stage for
the upcoming Stonewall Riots of 1969.
Gore Vidal (b. 1925) unabashedly portrayed GLBTQ persons in his works, and
“asserts that gay men are not women in disguise nor, indeed, even very special, and
sets out to prove that effeminacy and homosexuality do not need to occupy the same
conceptual space in novels” (Fone 998, 690). In The City and the Pillar (1948), the
first coming-out novel emerges. It is in Vidal’s work that GLBTQ issues are brought
into a normalizing discourse, a critical step between previous views of the traumatized
GLBTQ person and the impending Stonewall Riots. However, in the original printing,
the editor changed the ending to include a violent death that was not part of the original
manuscript, therefore perpetuating the myth of the “tragic queer,” which Vidal
recanted when he republished the novel in its original version, entitling it The City and
the Pillar Revised (1968). Pushing the envelope even further (and again setting the
stage for the Stonewall Riots of 1969), Vidal published Myra Breckinridge (1968),
which concerns a transsexual undergoing sexual reassignment surgery.
This very abridged overview of twentieth century pre-Stonewall GLBTQ literature
is by no means exhaustive, and it is used here to portray the shift from an accept-
ance of repression to a need for the normalization of GLBTQ persons. Many other
critical works, themes, and activities can be included here, including Oscar Wilde’s
symbolic status as a pervert, thanks to his sentencing as a sodomite; Herman
Melville’s homosexual texts of the late nineteenth century, including Redburn
(1849), White-Jacket (1850), Moby Dick (1851), and Billy Budd (written 1891,
published posthumously 1924); Henry James’ ambivalent relationship with homo-
sexuality at the turn of the century; Gertrude Stein’s many novels, including Q.E.D.
(1903), Fernhurst (1904), Three Lives (1909), Tender Buttons (1912), The Making
of Americans (1925), and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933); Virginia
Woolf’s portrayals of women’s passionate friendships; Jean Cocteau’s homoerotic
avant-garde texts; Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936), which disturbs the compul-
sory heterosexuality imposed by the field of sexology; Mary Renault’s initial por-
trayals of lesbianism and her switch to gay novels; Carson McCullers, the sexually
ambiguous author of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940); Ann Bannon’s lesbian
pulp fiction novels of the 1950s; Marguerite Yourcenar’s lesbian lifestyle, not
reflected in her writings except through gay men; and Truman Capote’s develop-
ment of a homosexual writing style in the 1950s and 1960s.
With the Stonewall Riots of 1969, the concept of coming out as a gay person
emerged. With this, the development of a political agenda developed in much
GLBTQ literature. In the 1970s, the influence of feminism on lesbian literature can-
not be understated. As feminism grew and changed, in the 1980s, literature reflected
the splintering as distinct categories of people began to emerge, dissatisfied with the
404 GLBTQ LITERATURE

portrayal of GLBTQ persons as solely white and middle class. Fiction by GLBTQ
people of color began to emerge during this period. However, with the AIDS crisis
affecting gay men in the 1980s, this splintering lessened, and the literature began to
reflect the entire GLBTQ spectrum. As GLBTQ becomes more common as a unified
group and term, queer literature challenges the rigidity of this alphabet soup.
Rita Mae Brown (b. 1944) published the critical feminist lesbian novel Rubyfruit
Jungle in 1973. The novel “espouses a doctrine of radical individualism” (Kattelman
2002) that challenges the homophobia of the pre-Stonewall era. Brown continues her
career as a novelist to this day, publishing works such as Sudden Death (1983),
inspired by her real-life lesbian relationship with tennis star Martina Navratilova;
Southern Discomfort (1982); and High Hearts (1986); Bingo (1988); as well as a
series of mystery novels, including Wish You Were Here (1990), Rest in Pieces
(1992), and Venus Envy (1993).
Katherine V. Forrest (b. 1939) struggled with the internalized homophobia she
learned during the pre-Stonewall years, and it was only in her forties that she
began writing. Curious Wine (1983), a lesbian romance, established Forrest’s
place in the lesbian fiction genre. However, it was the publication of Amateur City
(1984) that marked her as a writer of lesbian mysteries, a developing subgenre of
lesbian fiction. She continues to work in this vein today, publishing works such as
The Beverly Malibu (1989), Murder by Tradition (1991), and Liberty Square
(1996). Simultaneously, she contributed to the establishment of another lesbian
subgenre—lesbian science fiction—with the publication of Daughters of a Coral
Dawn (1984) and An Emergence of Green (1986).
Jeannette Winterson (b. 1959) began her career with Oranges Are Not the
Only Fruit (1985), which challenges the homophobia of Christian fundamental-
ism by interweaving Old Testament references into the coming-out narrative so
present in the 1970s. Her work continues with The Passion (1987), which has
characters who are not easily identifiably by sexual orientation, androgyny, and
bisexuality, which can be viewed as a portal to the changes occurring in GLBTQ
literature that was becoming more inclusive of transgendered people, bisexuality,
and queer theory. Sexing the Cherry (1989) further asserts Winterson’s influence
in the world of queerness with its disregard for boundaries such as geography,
gender, and even time. Her most recent work, Written on the Body (1992), also
dealing with a protagonist with gender ambiguity, continues her themes of the
transience of socially constructed norms.
Michael Cunningham (b. 1952) published his pivotal piece At Home at the End
of the World in 1990, when gay authors were often writing about the impact of
AIDS, with Cunningham’s piece being no exception. He weaves a tale laden with
alternative families in numerous configurations, which is indicative of the post-
modern bent of queer theory emerging in the 1990s. Cunningham continues to
write complex novels that challenge societal norms, most recently recognized in
The Hours (1999).
Again, the post-Stonewall authors listed above are by no means an exhaustive
group, but rather a reflection of some of the general themes emerging during this
period. Some additional works critical to this time include Isabel Miller’s historical
lesbian romance Patience and Sarah (1971); Andrew Holleran’s portrayals of gay
life in Dancer from the Dance (1978) and Nights in Aruba (1983); Paula Monette’s
moving novels of AIDS, Afterlife (1990) and Halfway Home (1991); Dorothy Allison’s
Bastard Out of Carolina (1992); David B. Feinberg’s examination of the AIDS
 GLBTQ LITERATURE 405

crisis and gay men, including Eight-sixed (1986) and Spontaneous Combustion
(1991); Randall Kenan’s exploration of Southern Black gay men in A Visitation of
Spirits (1989); and Karin Kallmaker’s lesbian romance and erotica.
Contexts and Issues. In the twenty-first century, GLBTQ issues have become a
matter of civil rights. These include issues surrounding religion, marriage and
adoption, medical and legal rights, transgender rights, and identity politics. This is
direct result of the AIDS activism of the 1980s and 1990s, which required GLBTQ
persons to work together to fight for rights in the public health crisis (rather than
fight separatist battles for lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered persons,
as in the past).
A landmark moment in civil rights occurred in 2003, when the U.S Supreme
Court declared laws against sodomy unconstitutional. In the case of Lawrence v.
Texas, “two gay men say the state of Texas deprived them of privacy rights and
equal protection under law when they were arrested in 1998 for having sex”
(Lawrence and Garner v. State of Texas 2006). This was granted on the grounds of
privacy and equal protection rights, and was pivotal in legitimizing the rights of
GLBTQ persons.
Religion has often made headlines when connected with GLBTQ persons. Until
recently, issues such as civil rights, same-sex marriage, and protections under the
law for GLBTQ persons were often not even discussed in a religious context.
Religious texts, particularly the Bible, are often used as the basis for opposition
to GLBTQ rights. Recently, some religious groups have come forward in support
of GLBTQ rights, often with much controversy. Reform Judaism and the United
Church of Christ are accepting of GLBTQ persons. Certain segments of Christianity,
including Unitarian Universalists, as well as some Presbyterians and Anglicans,
are also supportive. However, the Anglican Church is almost evenly split amongst
traditionalists, who view homosexuality as incompatible with scripture, and others
viewing same-sex relationships as viable.
Along with religion comes the issues of gay marriage and same-sex parenting. Full
marriage rights for same-sex partners would entail equality with heterosexuals in
relation to “finances, health care, children, [and] divorce” (Arthur 2004). However,
just a few states offering these rights would not help the majority of GLBTQ per-
sons, for the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) of 1996 allows states not to recog-
nize same-sex marriages sanctioned as viable in other states; and it also does not
allow the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages at all. As of the 2006
elections, one state allowed same-sex marriage, five recognized same-sex unions,
12 states banned recognition of any same-sex union, 26 states amended their con-
stitution to prohibit same-sex marriage, and 20 states enacted their own DOMAs
(Defense of Marriage Act 2007). The DOMA has done more harm for the civil
rights of GLBTQ persons than almost any other government initiative for, in the
public’s eye, it has combined issues of religious marriage with civil marriage. Some
religions have begun to offer same-sex unions, although it is always the decision of
each religious group whether to grant this privilege.
For GLBTQ persons wishing to adopt, the process varies from state to state.
Florida, Utah, Mississippi, and Arkansas specifically do not allow same-sex adop-
tions. Other states make it challenging for same-sex couples to adopt, particularly
as home visits by social workers (who may or may not be in favor of same-sex adop-
tion) are often a mandatory part of the adoption process. Another challenge is states
not recognizing same-sex couples as legal parents. However, certain states, such as
406 GLBTQ LITERATURE

New Jersey, New York, and Washington, D.C. recognize joint adoptions. The
Lawrence v. Texas ruling mentioned previously gives credence to same-sex relation-
ships, and is helping more GLBTQ persons adopt (Arthur 2006).
Transgender rights came to the forefront of the GLBTQ rights movement in
response to the public health crisis of the AIDS epidemic, when GLBTQ persons
came together and formed an inclusive community united by health care inequali-
ties. A series of influential transgender rights groups developed throughout the
1990s, including Transgender Nation, Transsexual Menace, It’s Time America, and
GenderPAC. The release of the Academy Award winning film Boys Don’t Cry
(2000), showing the violence transgendered persons often face, opened the public’s
eyes to the problem. Although acknowledgment of the transgender community has
been achieved through activism, the road to full equality is still quite long
(Meyerowitz 2002).
Queer has emerged, for some, as a unifying term for LGBT (and all its variations),
whereas others in the LGBT community take offense to the term. With the traditional
definition of queer meaning “different,” those using the term see this as a reclamation
of the power of the word, but those in opposition view it as an inappropriate word
with which to be associated. The term queer, when used by those activists who
embrace it, acknowledges the fluidity of sexual orientation and gender identity and is
therefore the preferred term for the complex issues of these areas. The debate over the
usage of the term queer continues (Queercore 1992).
As these issues continue into the twenty-first century, the civil rights issues of
GLBTQ persons are at the forefront. While GLBTQ persons continue to live
productive lives in society, and in some cases gain acceptance by their family,
friends, and community, there are still great legislative battles to be fought. All
of the issues in some way return to the need for recognition of GLBTQ persons
as people with rights. Many of these issues are overtly or covertly portrayed in
GLBTQ literature.
Reception. Since Stonewall, there has been an increase in the publishing and
distribution of GLBTQ-themed texts. As GLBTQ issues are discussed more
openly, younger generations are coming out sooner, and new youth markets for
GLBTQ materials are emerging. As online booksellers such as Amazon and
Barnes and Noble overtake the marketplace, however, the gay bookstore, a
source of pride during so much of the immediate post-Stonewall era, is becoming
a thing of the past, and the Internet is taking its place. Internet book clubs with
GLBTQ themes, such as InsightOut, are developing to keep pace with the tech-
nological demands of GLBTQ persons. Technology is allowing GLBTQ persons
from around the world, regardless of proximity to a GLBTQ cultural center, to
access resources and materials, while it also separates these communities by
changing the need for cultural centers (like gay bookstores).
With the battle for a cure for AIDS raging for over 25 years, activism has
decreased in this arena in the GLBTQ community, as new generations of young
GLBTQ persons did not witness the horrendous personal impact AIDS had on the
GLBTQ community in the 1980s. As a reflection of this, “the number of books deal-
ing primarily with AIDS is down compared to 2,000, which had fewer AIDS titles
than the year before. AIDS is more likely to be treated as an incidental fact, not a
focus” (Hix 2001) in GLBTQ literature. In contrast, publications regarding trans-
gendered persons and those identifying as queer are becoming more easily available
to a mainstream audience.
 GLBTQ LITERATURE 407

GLBTQ literary criticism has not always been openly embraced by the larger lit-
erary criticism community. It is a newer strand of English that evolved from its rela-
tionship to other fields, such as Women’s Studies, History, and Philosophy. Indeed,

queer criticism is connected, historically and methodologically, to feminism, cultural

materialism, psychoanalytical criticism, and post-colonial studies. Although such
approaches are not interchangeable, they share a common scepticism about literary
tradition, and they continue to evolve through a process of collective influence. Indeed,
it is largely because of their rise that the very notion of unitary disciplines . . . has come
into question. (Quinn, 1997)

Literary criticism is not always a field open to non-traditional forms and readings,
and the interdisciplinarity of the development of GLBTQ literature, plus its inbred
questioning of literary “traditions,” has led some to view GLBTQ literary criticism
as unimportant. However, the field continues forward, often portrayed as a disrup-
tive form of reading.
Much of the criticism of GLBTQ literature comes from questions of identity and
community. In stressing the commonalities of this community, there is a denial of per-
sonal identities. Although the term queer has attempted to fill this void, by being
placed on the end of the GLBTQ alphabet chain, it is simply reinscribing the com-
munal identity it tries to deny. In addition, it is becoming more challenging to label
a person as GLBTQ as it becomes more common to label an act as GLBTQ. The
recent phenomena of men on the DL, or down low, which signifies men who identify
as heterosexual but engage in homosexual sexual acts; the lesbian-identified woman
who wishes to engage in sexual acts with men; a man who engages in exclusively
homosexual acts but does not define himself as gay; a former lesbian-identified
woman who is now in an exclusively heterosexual relationship and identifies as
straight; a male-to-female (MtF) transgendered person who is involved with a male
partner and identifies as gay; and any queer person, all push the boundaries of
GLBTQ. By determining a single category to identify lesbians, gay men, bisexuals,
transgendered persons, and queers, the literature of this grouping reflects some
serious disparities in what GLBTQ “means” (Summers 1993).
In addition, another criticism of GLBTQ literature centers around identifying
works that belong in the canon. Should a work written by a non-GLBTQ person,
but which has GLBTQ themes and characters, be incorporated? How about when
a GLBTQ-identified author writes a book with no inherent GLBTQ content? It is
uncertain how to acknowledge this potential disparity. However, it is the gradual
recognition of GLBTQ literature as an emerging field that allows us to ask these
types of questions.
The emergence of the growing body of GLBTQ literature, and its wider accept-
ance, is visible in mainstream works that have been adapted for film. There has
always been an independent film market featuring GLBTQ themes adapted from
literature, with a blossoming in film production occurring post-Stonewall. Some
early adaptations of GLBTQ novels include A Florida Enchantment (1914), based
on the 1891 novel of Fergus Redmond and Archibald Gunter; Reflections in a
Golden Eye (1967), based on a 1941 novel by Carson McCullers; Cruising (1980),
novel by Gerald Walker; The Hotel New Hampshire (1984), based on John Irving’s
1981 novel; Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989), adapted from Hubert Selby, Jr.’s novel
(1964); Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), from Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes
408 GLBTQ LITERATURE

at the Whistle Stop Café (1987); Love and Death on Long Island (1997), based
on Gilbert Adair’s 1990 novel; and The Object of My Affection (1998), based on
Stephen McCauley’s 1987 novel.
Since 2000, there have been some critical film adaptations of LGBT-themed works,
many of which garnered international attention and awards. Michael Cunningham’s
The Hours (2002), based on his 1998 novel, earned a Best Actress award for Nicole
Kidman, as well as nominations for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor, Best Sup-
porting Actress, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and others. The piece features
Meryl Streep as a lesbian book editor caring for her friend who is dying from AIDS.
However, the entire piece focuses on three generations of women who may be lesbian
or bisexual. Cunningham himself states, “were such characters born at later times in
different circumstances they would come out as lesbians” (2007).
The Wonder Boys (2000), based on Michael Chabon’s 1995 novel of the same
name, was a critically acclaimed film success. James Kirkwood Jr.’s 1970 cult classic
P.S. Your Cat is Dead, a farce involving homosexuality, bisexuality, and bondage,
was made into an independent film in 2002. Under the Tuscan Sun (2003) chronicles
the adventures of two women—one lesbian, one heterosexual—on a gay tour of Italy
after both have suffered heartbreak. It is based on Frances Mayes’s 1996 novel.
Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World (1998), a celebration of love
in all its forms, was adapted to the screen in 2004.
2005’s Brokeback Mountain, based on Annie Proulx’s short story, opened the
general public’s eyes to the fluidity of sexuality and the challenges of labels. It won
71 awards and had 52 nominations (Awards for Brokeback Mountain 2007). Much
debate ensued over the sexual orientation of the main characters, as to whether they
were gay, bisexual, or heterosexual. Some claimed the main characters to be het-
erosexual men with a deep friendship, which included a sexual component, whereas
others embraced the epitome of queerness and sexual ambiguity. A criticism from
the GLBTQ community about the film is that neither of the lead actors is GLBTQ
identified, although others claims this to be irrelevant, as GLBTQ actors play het-
erosexuals in film frequently. The Catholic Church praised the film’s acting but not
its content (White 2005). A limited number of movie theatres refused to show the
film. When Brokeback Mountain lost its bid for Best Picture, some complained that
this was due to homophobic judges. By far, this film brought the most discussion
around the definitions of sexual orientation than any other.
Authors and Their Works. We now turn to contemporary American texts (all of
which have published since 2000, with the majority of writers publishing quite
extensively pre-2000 as well) to exemplify the questions of identity and civil rights
for GLBTQ persons in the twenty-first century.
“One of the most prominent and highly acclaimed figures of contemporary gay
literature, Edmund White works in many distinct categories of fiction and nonfic-
tion” (Woodland 2004). His career reads like a map of post-Stonewall literature.
His first novel, Forgetting Elena (1973), was published when he was quite young,
and features no GLBTQ content. His second novel, Nocturnes for the King of
Naples (1978), “the mysterious and lush lament of a young man for his older love”
(Zebrun 2004, 28), explores gay themes openly.
In 1982, White authored A Boy’s Own Story, “widely recognized as a coming-of-age
classic, with a hero who holds his own alongside Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield”
(Ehrhardt 2006). “The honesty White brought to the narration of gay life made him
part of a new wave of gay writers who no longer used euphemisms or tragic language
 GLBTQ LITERATURE 409

to describe their same-sex desires and experiences” (Lee 2006). In this piece, White
traces “the quest for self-identity against the expectations of family and friends”
(Ehrhardt 2006). This semiautobiographical novel also led to another, The Beautiful
Room Is Empty (1988).
The Beautiful Room Is Empty traces the narrator’s experiments with desire and
romance as he moves through an exclusive prep school, sessions with a psychother-
apist, and witnesses the Stonewall riots. The narrator’s swings between joyful
acceptance and critical self-loathing reflect the emerging national gay consciousness.
The events of these novels mirror the shape of White’s own early life: growing up in
Cincinnati, dealing with a demanding father, and attending the exclusive Cranbrook
Academy (Ehrhardt 2006). This led to the final work in his semiautobiographical
trilogy, The Farewell Symphony (1998).
White also authored Caracole (1985), set in the nineteenth century and exploring
the sexuality of two lovers, male and female. In 1988, White published, with Adam
Mars-Jones, an anthology of stories dealing with the impact of AIDS, The Darker
Proof: Stories from a Crisis. “As White and Mars-Jones shape it, the greatest chal-
lenge posed by the AIDS crisis is the spiritual one: What sustains the soul that is
bereft of family, enduring slow death” (Arena 1988)?
White’s next highly acclaimed work The Married Man (2000), in the words of
White, is

about two people who are really very marginal to gay life—one because he’s bisexual
and the other because he’s too old—and who are very involved in a relationship with
each other that isn’t primarily sexual but is very much a love story, I didn’t need to
worry about “doing justice” to gay life. I’m only doing justice to a love story. (White
2000, 26)

In The Married Man, White incorporates bisexuality into his work. This piece is
an homage to White’s lover Hubert, who passed away from AIDS, similar to the
character of Julien, who also has AIDS. The story of the couple’s last trip together
had been told previously in White’s 1994 memoir as well as in The Farewell Sym-
phony. This beautiful yet unsettling novel recalls “loving a self-absorbed, childlike
and ultimately enigmatic bisexual man” (Bahr 2000).
White continues to be a prolific writer. Throughout his career, he has also written
highly influential non-fiction (including 1977’s The Joy of Gay Sex), biography,
memoir, and anthologies (including the highly acclaimed Fresh Men (2004)). Since
the publication of The Married Man in 2000, he has also published A Fine Excess
(2000), a contemporary literature anthology; Fanny (2003), a fictional work; Arts
and Letters (2004), a work of nonfiction; My Lives (2006), a memoir; Terre Haute
(2006), a play based on Timothy McVeigh; and Hotel de Dream, his latest fictional
work, due in fall 2007.
Allan Gurganus’s four novels range in publication dates from 1989 to 2001. His
two most influential pieces are The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
(1989), “a comic epic about the history of the South, and Plays Well With Others
(1997), about the New York Art scene in the 1980s, just as AIDS was emerging”
(Kaczorowski 2005). Gurganus’s first break as an author came in 1974 when The
New Yorker accepted his short story “Minor Heroism” (which was submitted by his
mentor without Gurganus’s knowledge), the first “story the magazine had ever pub-
lished that featured a gay character” (Kaczorowski 2005).
410 GLBTQ LITERATURE

The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is the story of the South as told
by Lucy, a 99-year-old woman in a nursing home. Gay themes emerge throughout
the over 700-page piece, particularly in reference to Lucy’s husband, Will, and his
relationship to a boyhood friend killed in war, Ned. The piece had appeal to a wide
audience, particularly when adapted to television and, less successfully, to stage.
White People (1991) is a wide-ranging collection of short stories told in first-person
voices. Several stories deal with same-sex desire, both openly and covertly.
Plays Well With Others was Gurganus’s first novel with openly gay characters,
in which the young gay protagonist moves to New York from the rural South to
pursue a writing career and finds himself swept up in the burgeoning AIDS epi-
demic of the 1980s and 1990s. “Gurganus has explained in interviews that the
impetus for writing the novel was to celebrate, and commemorate, the ‘compli-
cated love we have for friends when we’re in our twenties . . . when everybody is
a sexual object in one form or another’” (Kaczorowki 2005). As Hartley, the pro-
tagonist, notes after a particularly joyous sexual romp in the bathhouses, “The
prigs won’t tell you how sweet and rollicking the peasant dance was. Before such
accurate lightning struck us” (as quoted in Freeman 1998, 48), portraying both
the joy of the sexual freedom gay men felt in the early 1980s and the impending
doom of the AIDS crisis beginning to emerge in the community. The piece accu-
rately reflects the insights of Charles Krause (1998) about his own move to New
York City as a young writer in 1980:

“And the best part was, there was nothing to be afraid of. In 1980, the clap and crabs
were the worst things you could get, and a trip to the clinic or a dousing with Rid could
fix you up in no time. No one had yet heard of AIDS. (48)

Plays Well With Others has been critically acclaimed as one of the most important
works of AIDS-related fiction. It reflects the innocence of a pre-Stonewall era, and
the immigration many young GLBTQ persons were making to urban centers, only to
find themselves embroiled in a battle over public health, and dying as a result.
Gurganus has often been praised for his simple and Mark Twain-esque writing
style, which, it is often speculated, is why his first novel had such mass market
appeal. Gurganus recognized this appeal and felt, since Plays Well With Others was
published after Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, he had the ability to
bring mass market interest to gay-themed work (Gurganus 1998). This heralded a
change in tone in Gurganus’s work:

Minority fiction usually begins as coded lingo known only to the initiated. To commu-
nicate with those beyond the ghetto is seen as mutinous. But after years of in-jokes, of
bashing most straight people, we’ve sobered, noticing a bigger world parenthesizing the
Castro and the West Village. (Gurganus 1998)

Gurganus questioned why it was acceptable for GLBTQ persons to come hear his
readings in “straight” bookstores, but heterosexuals would not venture into gay
bookstores. He chastised his GLBTQ readers that “we do need tellers and askers in
this land named ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’” (Gurganus 1998).
In 2001, Gurganus published The Practical Heart, a series of four novellas. He
feels the novella is “the perfect genre of our time: a novel with attention deficit dis-
order” (Jeffreys 2001, 43). The novellas include the title story about a woman who
 GLBTQ LITERATURE 411

may have sat for a painting by John Singer Sargent; “Preservation News,” a newslet-
ter formatted story about a conservationist dying of AIDS; “Saint Monster,” in
which a boy places Bibles in motel rooms while his mother carries on a torrid affair
at home; and “He’s One, Too,” the story of a man arrested for making sexual
advances to a young boy in a bathroom, as told through the point of view of his
neighbor who idolized the man as a young boy himself (Jeffreys 2001). More so
than any of his earlier works, The Practical Heart reaches “across risky barriers of
race, sexuality, and class” (Miller 2001).
As can be seen through Gurganus’s work, he has moved from covert to overt
expression of GLBTQ content in his works, reflecting the societal changes occurring
(and demanded) through the AIDS crisis. Gurganus’s personal role as a caregiver for
many friends dying of AIDS becomes more apparent in each of his works. In his
own words,

In the long run I think my value as a writer and my career will be immeasurably
enhanced because I think I can treat gay and straight people fairly. I’m not a gay writer
in the sense that I’ve never written about straight people. I find pathos in both camps
(as quoted in Jeffreys 2001, 43–44).

Gurganus is currently at work on a sequel to his first novel.

David Ebershoff published his first novel, The Danish Girl, in 2000. This piece
of historical fiction, which occurs in early twentieth century Denmark, Paris, and
Dresden, is loosely based on the story of the first known transsexual operation.
Throughout the piece, we meet Einar and his wife, Greta. As Einar struggles with
his own need to cross-dress and, eventually, live his life as Lili, we also witness
Greta’s transformation as she, too, struggles to fulfill Einar’s needs.

The novel is as much Greta’s history as it is Einar’s: a record of her rebellion from the
confines of her wealthy class and family, of her previous marriage to a young man who
died of tuberculosis, and of her need to become as singular and unique as possible. Not
that Einar’s own curious life isn’t brilliantly laid out. . . . Einar emerges inventively, ele-
gantly: The author is uncommonly seductive in presenting the Danish man’s passage
from an ordinary life into his new life as the extremely pretty—and sexually stimulat-
ing—Lili. We are allowed to enter the thoughts and feelings of a man living in a far less
information-drenched time than our own, as he begins and then follows through his
exploration of what is, after all, a truly deviant psycho-sexuality. (Picano 2000, 60)

Indeed, although The Danish Girl handles gender identity issues head on, it also
probes into what forms a marriage and a relationship. Greta’s “wonder, sorrow, and
acceptance lift what could have been a melodrama into a poignant meditation on
change and the meaning of loyalty” (Blue 2000, 15). The Danish Girl reflects the
modern GLBTQ theme of flexibility and changeability, and it analyzes what
becomes of such dynamics when others are involved. It is being adapted for film as
of this writing.
Ebershoff’s first collection of short stories, The Rose City, consists of seven short
stories that offer “fascinating glimpses into the hearts and minds of extraordinarily
ordinary men” (Woelz 2002, 40). “Trespass,” one of the stories, revisits the coming-
out story, often abandoned after the 1990s, through the eyes of an adolescent boy
watching a neighbor’s house when he learns his neighbor is gay; and “Regime”
“takes us into the mind of an adolescent anorexic who wants desperately to remain
412 GLBTQ LITERATURE

pure, a ‘special boy’ unsullied by hunger” (Wolez 2002, 40). In both stories,
Ebershoff looks unflinchingly at the psychological and sexual impacts of coming out
on adolescents, sometimes in a manner which is quite disturbing.
Sarah Waters’s first novel, Tipping the Velvet (1998), is historical fiction set in
Victorian England, where Nan, a female, explores her life as a gender-bending male
prostitute, eventually to be taken in by a wealthy patron and later discarded.

Tipping the Velvet proves a rollicking reading adventure, not simply because of its
Victorian (though not vanilla) flavoring, but also because it offers a fictional rendering of
such late twentieth-century lesbian issues as the sex wars, outing, gender performance,
and grassroots coalition organizing. (Breen 2002)

The lesbian aspect of the novel is not by any means covert but openly embraced,
as is the gender-violating performance of Nan.

So Tipping the Velvet is a special kind of fiction—one that tries to imagine what the
largely undocumented lives of lesbians of that era might have been like. Waters not only
imagines what the underground lesbian scene might have been like, she even imagines
the slang that might have been part of this scene. (Poubelle 2006, 8)

Tipping the Velvet’s 2002 BBC adaptation for television also helped bring Waters
serious public attention.
After Tipping the Velvet, Waters next pens Affinity (1999), also set in Victorian
England. This novel has been compared to “not only Charlotte Bronte’s Villette,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, and even Wilkie Collins’s sensationalist
novel The Woman in White, but also Terry Castle’s 1993 study of lesbian represen-
tation, The Apparitional Lesbian” (Breen 2002). The heroine, Margaret, attempts
to make sense of her own desires for women as she does charitable work in women’s
prisons. Similar to Cunningham’s portrayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours,
Margaret has attempted suicide due to her desire for a different kind of life, one in
which she is not proprietary to men.

Nineteenth-century-style novels have been under a cloud since the invention of the
remote control, but stepping into Tipping the Velvet and Affinity is like entering the Best
of the BBC. In both novels, Waters guides the reader through the late 1800s London
milieu like she grew up there. Better even than Charles Dickens, she summons the era’s
attitudes and ambiance, projecting them onto the screen of the reader’s mind with Dolby
wrap-around sound such that you feel you’re vacationing on all points between Chelsea
and the East End. Not many contemporary writers make novels as sumptuous as a sym-
phony. And what an era Sarah Waters renders! The fact that both novels are richly
embroidered period pieces doesn’t limit their audience appeal. Waters spellbinds readers
with insights into 1870s dance halls and 1880s women’s prisons that the History Chan-
nel would never provide—notably lesbians set in a historical point of view we’re not
likely to find on the telly. And how Sarah Waters writes of lesbians! Not simply as char-
acters, but highlighting the context of an overbearing heterosexual environment that
necessitates closets; boldfacing the sexism that puts such a stranglehold on all women.
(Allegra 2001)

Fingersmith (2002), Waters’s third novel, is yet another tale of Victorian entrap-
ment. In this novel, a pickpocket works with a criminal to defraud a lonely heiress
 GLBTQ LITERATURE 413

of her fortune. An interesting twist is used in Fingersmith in that the narrator is

changed partway through, and different levels of deceit are revealed. Fingersmith
was made into a serial for BBC in 2005.
In her latest novel, The Night Watch (2006), Waters moves from Victorian
England to GLBTQ themes in World War II–era London. She weaves a tale full of
sexual “deviance”—from GLBTQ-themed sexual encounters to heterosexual adul-
tery. Waters’ latest book reads in reverse chronological order, sometimes causing
intentional confusion about relationships or situations, but always in a manner that
builds suspense. Although very different from her previous pieces, The Night Watch
has been called “a splendidly written, engaging novel, by a writer who gets better
with every effort” (DeCresenczo 2006).
Although the focus of this chapter has been general GLBTQ literature, it is
important to recognize the works of some influential authors in specific categories
of literature. In the GLBTQ science fiction arena, Jim Grimsley is winning notice
for his works, particularly 2000’s Kirith Kirin and 2004’s The Ordinary. John
Morgan Wilson contributes to gay men’s mysteries with his Benjamin Justice series
(Simple Justice (1996), Revision of Justice (1997), Justice at Risk (1999), The
Limits of Justice (2000), Blind Eye (2003), Moth and Flame (2004), and Rhapsody
in Blood (2006)). Steve Kluger is making waves with his gay romance novels,
including Almost Like Being in Love (2004), Last Days of Summer (1999),
Changing Pitches (1998), Yank (1992), and the upcoming The Year We Grew Up
(2007). Finally, Tristan Taormino’s enormous contributions as an author and
editor in erotica cannot be underplayed, including Hot Lesbian Erotica (2005),
True Lust (2002), the Best Lesbian Erotica series (annually since 1996), and Rit-
ual Sex (1996), which have won her many awards.

Bibliography
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Arena, Joe. “The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis.” Washington Monthly (1988).
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pedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture website
<www.GLBTQ.com/social-sciences/adoption.html>.
———. Domestic Partnerships. [Online, May 2005]. GLBTQ: An Encyclopedia of Gay,
Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture website <www.GLBTQ.com/
social-sciences/domestic_partnerships.html>.
“Awards for Brokeback Mountain.” [Online, 2007]. Internet Movie Database website
<www.imdb.org>.
Bahr, David. “French Lessons.” Advocate 814 (2000): 137.
Beemyn, Brett and Mickey Eliason, eds. Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trans-
gender Anthology. New York: New York University Press, 1996.
Bergman, David. Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.
Blue, Daniel. “Changing Places.” Lambda Book Report 8 (2000): 15–16.
Bredbeck, Gregory W. “Literary Theory: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer.” GLBTQ.
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Breen, Margaret Soenser. Sarah Waters. [Online, December 2002]. GLBTQ: An Encyclopedia
of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture website
<www.GLBTQ.com/social-sciences/waters_s.html>.
Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
414 GLBTQ LITERATURE

Creech, James. Closet Writing, Gay Reading. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998.
Decarnin, Camilla, Eric Garber, and Lyn Paleo, eds. Worlds Apart: An Anthology of Lesbian
and Gay Science Fiction and Fantasy. Boston: Alyson, 1986.
DeCrecenszo, Teresa. “The Night Watch.” Lesbian News 31 (2006): 33.
Defense of Marriage Act. [Online, January 2007]. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia website
<en.wikipedia.org>.
Doty, Alexander. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1992.
Ebershoff, David. The Danish Girl. New York: Viking, 2000.
———. The Rose City. New York: Viking, 2000.
Ehrhardt, Michael. “A Man’s Own Story.” The Gay and Lesbian Review 13 (2006): 27–29.
Fone, Byrne R.S., ed. The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature: Readings from Western
Antiquity to the Present Day. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
Forrest, Simon, Grant Biddle, and Stephen Clift. Talking about Homosexuality in Secondary
School. 3rd ed. West Sussex, England: AVERT, 2006.
Freeman, Chris. “Bla, bla, blah. But heartfelt.” The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review 5
(1998): 48–49.
Garber, Eric, and Lyn Paleo, eds. Uranian Worlds: A Guide to Alternative Sexuality in
Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. 2nd ed. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990.
Gurganus, Allan. “Dispatch from the Front.” Advocate 750/751 (1998).
———. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. New York: Knopf, 1989.
———. Plays Well With Others. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
———. The Practical Heart. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.
Hinds, Hilary. “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: Reaching Audiences Other Lesbian Texts
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Hix, Charles. “A New Generation Has Arrived.” Publishers Weekly 248 (2001): 19.
Jagose, Annemarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York University Press,
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Jay, Karla, and Joanne Glasgow, eds. Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions. New
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Jeffreys, Joe E. “What a Novelist Believes.” The Gay and Lesbian Review 8 (2001): 43–44.
Kaczorowki, Craig. “Allan Gurganus.” [Online, June 2005]. GLBTQ: An Encyclopedia of
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Macedo, Stephan, and Iris Marion Young, eds. Child, Family, State. New York: New York
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Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Miller, Tim. “Heart Specialist.” Advocate 847 (2001).
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“Queercore.” i-D magazine 110 (1992).

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Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience.” Signs 5 (1980):
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Stone, Martha E. “Sketches from Memory.” Gay and Lesbian Worldwide Review I7 (2000): 53.
Summers, Claude J. “Gay Voices, Gay Genealogies.” American Literary History 5 (1993):
147–158.
———. Gay Fictions: Wilde to Stonewall. New York: Continuum, 1990.
The Hours. [Online, January 2007]. Wikipedia website <en.wikipedia.org>.
Waters, Sarah. Affinity. London: Penguin, 2002.
———. Fingersmith. London: Riverhead, 2002.
———. The Night Watch. London: Riverhead, 2006.
———. Tipping the Velvet. London: Riverhead, 1999.
White, Hilary. “US Bishops’ Organization Gives Glowing Review of Homosexual-Sex
Propoganda Film.” [Online, December 2005]. LifeSite website <www.lifesite.net>.
White, Edmund. “‘I See My Life as a Novel as I’m Leading It.’” Gay and Lesbian Review
Worldwide 7 (2000): 26–31.
———. The Beautiful Room is Empty. New York: Knopf, 1998.
———. The Married Man. New York: Knopf, 2000.
Woelz, Karl. “Tales of the Unnoticed.” The Gay and Lesbian Review 8 (2002): 40.
Woodland, Randall. “Edmund White.” [Online, December 2004]. GLBTQ: An Encyclopedia
of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture website <www.GLBTQ.
com/literature/white_e.html>.
Woods, Gregory. A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1998.
Zebrun, Gary. “Edmund White, Outcast Survivor.” The Gay and Lesbian Review 11 (2004):
28–30.
Zimmerman, Bonnie. The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction 1969–1989. Boston: Beacon,
1990.

Further Reading
Beemyn, Brett, and Eliason, Mickey, eds. Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trans-
gender Anthology. New York: New York University Press, 1996; Bergman, David. Gaiety Trans-
figured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1991; Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Cul-
ture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993; Creech, James. Closet Writing, Gay Reading.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993; Decarnin, Camilla, Eric Garber, and Lyn Paleo, eds.
Worlds Apart: An Anthology of Lesbian and Gay Science Fiction and Fantasy. Boston: Alyson,
1986; Doty, Alexander. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1992; Garber, Eric, and Lyn Paleo, eds. Uranian Worlds: A Guide
to Alternative Sexuality in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. 2nd ed. Boston: G.K. Hall,
1990; Hinds, Hilary. “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: Reaching Audiences Other Lesbian Texts
Cannot Reach.” New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings. Sally Munt, ed. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1992. 153–172; Jay, Karla and Joanne Glasgow, eds. Lesbian
Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions. New York: New York University Press, 1990;
Meyerowitz, Joanne. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002; Quinn, Vincent. “Literary Criticism.” Lesbian and
Gay Studies (1997): 39–52; Summers, Claude J. Gay Fictions: Wilde to Stonewall. New York:
Continuum, 1990; Woods, Gregory. A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1998; Zimmerman, Bonnie. The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian
Fiction 1969–1989. Boston: Beacon, 1990.
JENNIFER M. DE COSTE
416 GRAPHIC NOVELS

GRAPHIC NOVELS
Definition. Graphic novels are often considered a subgenre of comic books. The
definition of the term graphic novel is determined by the way the piece of work
under consideration was originally produced. A graphic novel may consist of a col-
lection of comic strips that has been published as a volume of work. A graphic novel
might also be a collection of short stories that deal with the same subject matter or
that are created by the same author. One overriding factor in defining a graphic
novel is its length. Graphic novels are longer, more complex, and ambitious stories,
which are shown through the graphic visual elements as well as told by text that
supports the visual. A graphic novel is a “novel in comic form” (Kaplan 2006, 14).
A present trend in the industry involves previously published works, such as publi-
cation of Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl in graphic novel form as Artemis Fowl: The
Graphic Novel. Such adaptations further complicate any attempt at stabilizing a set
definition for graphic novels. The graphic novel must also be considered a format,
rather than a genre. To define a format, we must first consider its development.
It is commonly but wrongly believed that the term graphic novel was invented by
Will Eisner in 1978 when Eisner’s A Contract with God was first published. The
term actually had been coined in a Comic Amateur Press Alliance’s Newsletter,
Capa-Alpha #2, in 1964 by Richard Kyle. The term first appeared on the title page
of George Metzger’s Beyond Time and Again in 1976, which was published by none
other than Richard Kyle.
Eisner’s usage of the term in connection with the recognition A Contract with
God received from critics and fans alike popularized the term. “Graphic novel”
appeared on the front cover, and because of the seriousness of the content, this sig-
naled a new direction for future authors. Will Eisner (2008) has been quoted as say-
ing, “It was intended as a departure from the standard, what we call ‘comic book
format.’ I sat down and tried to do a book that would physically look like a ‘legit-
imate’ book and at the same time write about a subject matter that would never
have been addressed in comic form, which is man’s relationship with God.”
History. The history of the graphic novel begins with the history of the comic
book. There is no separation from comic book history because the graphic novel is
an offshoot of comics in general.
With the popularized usage of the term in 1978 with Eisner’s A Contract with
God, the graphic novel began to develop and expand uses of various genres within
comic formats. The time and space of a graphic novel allowed for the deeper devel-
opment of plotlines and social commentary. Early on, authors of comic books were

TRENDS AND THEMES

Origin of Graphic Novel
Will Eisner maintained that his use of the term graphic novel was independent of other
influences. He used the term in order to ensure publication of the book. Eisner said,“[The
phrase] ‘graphic novel’ was kind of accidental . . . a little voice inside me said, ‘Hey stupid,
don’t tell him it’s a comic or he’ll hang up on you.’ So I said, ‘It’s a graphic novel’” (Olson
2005, 7). The term was “permanently cemented into the lexicon” when the book was
eventually published by Baronet Books, who was responsible for the inclusion of the
phrase “A Graphic Novel” on the cover of A Contract with God.
 GRAPHIC NOVELS 417

not allowed to explore deep psychological issues. Art Spiegelman notes, “Cartoon-
ists were actually expected to keep a lid on their psyches and personal histories, or
at least disguise and sublimate them into diverting entertainments” (1995, 4).
The freedom from social barriers in the late 1960s and early 1970s also marked
a freedom of exploration for cartoonists. The underground comics movement estab-
lished a genre in which taboos could be broken and psychological breaks could be
explored. Because these comics were intended for adult audiences, with low print
runs and high cover prices, the publishers were able to sidestep the Comic Code
Authority, which was established in 1955 to censor anything that might possibly
corrupt younger readers.

Context and Issues

Confessional Autobiography. Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets The Holy Virgin Mary
was the first comic to explore the darker recesses of memory and autobiography.
Spiegelman praises Green’s work, noting, “What the Bronte sisters did for Gothic
romance, what Tolkien did for sword-and-sorcery, Justin Green did for confessional
autobiographical comix” (1995, 4).
“Confessional autobiographical” graphic novels were not always factual graphic
novels. Neil Gaiman’s Violent Cases is clearly designed to give the reader ambiguity
regarding the elements of truth in memory and recall. Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan
is a mix of both autobiographical aspects and purely fictional elements; in Ware’s
dedication to his mother, he clarifies that the mother in his book bears no resem-
blance to his real mother. This fusion of fact and fiction is called “autobifiction-
alography” by cartoonist Lynda Barry. Whether these stories are true or fabricated
is unimportant; these stories ring emotionally true to both the creator and the con-
sumer. Craig Thompson’s Blankets recalls his repressive upbringing and his sexual
revolution to that upbringing.
Representing the Historical. Art Spiegelman’s Maus consists of a mix of the autobio-
graphical and the historical. Maus tells the story of Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, and
his mother, Anja. Maus was originally written as a three-page strip for a 1972
comics anthology called Funny Aminals [sic]. Spiegelman’s first idea was to write
about race relations, with mice being African Americans and cats representing white
supremacists. He abandoned this idea because he felt the story would be lacking in
authenticity. Instead he chose to display the bedtime stories his father told his as a
child—the story of his parents’ life in Poland as the Nazis took over and of his par-
ents’ life in Auschwitz.
There are two tales told in Maus. Both tales are equally important but for very
different reasons. There is the story of Vladek Spiegelman, Art’s father, who is
successful both in business and in love. In this past story, it is clear that Vladek
marries Art’s mother Anja for her money; he comments that they learned to love
each other. The Nazis invade, and Vladek’s world comes to an end. It is replaced
with fear and hiding, the death of their young son Richu, and finally, Auschwitz.
Through Vladek’s story, the reader is provided with an excuse to pardon the
twisted, bitter man who appears in the second story, told simultaneously with the
first story.
The second story is also the story of Vladek, but it is the story of Art as well.
This tale details the relationship of the Auschwitz survivor and widower Vladek
with his adult son Art. The relationship is fraught with misunderstandings and
418 GRAPHIC NOVELS

Art’s depression and angst as he comes to terms with the history of his father (and
his mother, who committed suicide) as his father “bleeds history,” the subtitle of
the second book.
The biographic and autobiographic aspects of this graphic novel are clearly seen
in both visual and textual ways. Art remains in mouse character through the entire
piece, even when referring to himself and the difficulties he is experiencing in deal-
ing with his father. When Art experiences writer’s block early in the second book,
he depicts himself as a mouse in present-day clothing surrounded by the corpses of
Jews/mice from concentration camps. This visual experience combines the past and
the present as well as juxtaposes the shared Holocaust history with the personal
history of Art and his father.
The attacks on September 11, 2001, caused Spiegelman to return to the graphic
novel, and in 2004 Pantheon published Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers.
Spiegelman had spent the previous 10 years away from graphic novels and comics,
choosing instead to work for The New Yorker. During this 10-year period
(1992–2002), Spiegelman wrote a number of essays and produced 21 covers,
including on September 24, 2001, the first cover after the attacks. Both personal and
political, Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers focuses on generational rela-
tionships, echoing previous themes seen in his earlier work; this time it is Spiegelman
the father who needs to rescue his daughter from her school at the foot of the Twin
Towers after the attacks. The cover of In the Shadow of No Towers reiterates the
cover Spiegelman produced for The New Yorker. The covers are black, as are the
towers illustrated on the page.
The book itself consists of a personal catharsis for Spiegelman. In the 10 pages
displayed as broad sheets of newspaper, Spiegelman expresses his fears and anger
about how September 11 was handled and about the political situation in which
Americans now find themselves. Spiegelman wrote in his introduction to In the
Shadow of No Towers,

I hadn’t anticipated that the hijackings of September 11 would themselves be hijacked

by the Bush cabal that reduced it all to a war recruitment poster . . . . When the gov-
ernment began to move into full dystopian Big Brother mode and hurtle America into
a colonialist adventure in Iraq—while doing very little to make America genuinely safer
beyond confiscating nail clippers at airports—all the rage I’d suppressed after the 2000
election, all the paranoia I’d barely managed to squelch immediately after 9/11,
returned with a vengeance.

The anger and outrage provide a springboard for Spiegelman’s political attacks
while including homage to famous comics Spiegelman grew up with, such as Yellow
Kid, Katzenjammer Kids, and Krazy Kat. Spiegelman refers to his own book Maus,
and in one example, Art says that the smoke in Manhattan smelled just like Vladek
said the smoke in the concentration camps smelled. He even draws himself as he did
in Maus. Not near the critical success of Maus, In The Shower of No Towers rep-
resents an interesting bookend in Spiegelman’s work.
Selected Authors. The American comic book industry today includes many suc-
cessful writers and artists such as Geoff Johns, Jim Lee, Alex Ross, Jessica Abel,
Devin Grayson, Gail Simone (the previous three being among a growing number of
women creators), and particularly Brian Michael Bendis. Yet some of today’s most
influential writers are native to England and Scotland, such as Warren Ellis and
 GRAPHIC NOVELS 419

Mark Millar. Bendis, Ellis, and Millar are known particularly for their carefully
developed characters and storylines, dynamic dialogue, and attention to and com-
mentary on political and global issues and for vastly redefining and reenvisioning
American superheroes.
Brian Michael Bendis (b. 1967). Following art school, well-known comic book writer
and occasional artist Brian Michael Bendis emerged in the comic book world in the
1990s with independent, creator-owned series and later began working with Image
Comics, where he developed Torso, about the hunt for the Cleveland Torso Mur-
derer. Well known for his dialogue style and story arc pace, Bendis’s transition from
crime and noir stories to superhero noir stories began in 2000 when Marvel asked him
to revitalize Spider-Man for their Ultimate line.
Bendis embraced the opportunity and was largely successful in revamping the
popular superhero and appeased even hard-core fans. In Ultimate Spider-Man
Bendis brought Peter Parker into the new century and created a story about a kid
who gets powers during modern times as opposed to the Peter Parker of 1962.
Instead of getting bitten by a radioactive spider as in the original, Bendis’s Parker
gets bitten by Osborn Industries’ genetically engineered spider that has been subject
to drug tests. Rather than working at the Daily Bugle print newspaper office, the
new Parker is employed at the eBugle, an online newspaper. Parker’s Aunt May and
Uncle Ben are younger than in previous iterations, and his love interest, Mary Jane,
has more intellectual interests than her 1960s predecessor.
Bendis’s Spider-Man remains a human being underneath the costume and has
more problems than powers. Spider-Man is strong, but he can also be hurt phys-
ically and emotionally, just like anyone else, and Parker has everyday tasks and
problems like the rest of us: laundry, money worries, and deadlines at work.
Bendis’s leisurely pace allows readers to better know Spider-Man and his sup-
porting cast, rendering more depth of character, a major point of praise for
Bendis’s reworking of this title. Ultimate Spider-Man was generally well received
by old and new fans alike. A best seller its first month in publication and later
a successful feature film, it still faced criticism from some fans, but most fans
were pleased Bendis did not mess with the essentials of Stan Lee and Steve
Ditko’s original character. In fact, many argue Bendis improved on the original
by creating a more enriched Spider-Man mythos through his fleshed-out charac-
ters and dialogue.
Bendis contributed another groundbreaking title to the American comic book
scene with Alias. In 2001 Alias was the debut title in Marvel’s new “MAX Comics,”
a mature-themed line aimed at adult readers, often depicting scenes of sex and vio-
lence. Bendis was prepared to tone down the sex and violence when he pitched Alias
to Marvel, but instead they decided to bypass the irrelevant Comics Code Author-
ity and released their own rating system, one demonstration of Bendis’s influence on
today’s comic book industry.
Blending crime and superhero genres, Alias focuses on Jessica Jones, a former
superheroine turned private investigator. Through Jessica Jones and the MAX
Comics line, Bendis was able to explore typically taboo aspects of superheroes’
lives, such as their moral principles, decisions, and humanity. Jones, a self-
declared failed superheroine, is self-destructive and has quite an inferiority
complex because of her lack of acceptance within the superhero loop. When a routine
missing persons case not only reveals but even video records the secret identity of
Captain Marvel, Jones finds herself in a dilemma, calling into question Jones’s
420 GRAPHIC NOVELS

principles and the power dynamics of her former and current relationship to the
superhero world. She is faced not only with outing one of the most well-known
heroes, but also with the decision to render him powerless by exposing his true
identity. In essence, Jessica realizes absolute power can inflict powerlessness and
loss of will on others, and she wrestles over which side of this power dynamic she
belongs on. Readers experience her struggle through her self-destructive behavior,
including excessive drinking, foul-mouthed blowups, and promiscuity. Moral and
ethical decisions are not typically fleshed out for comic book characters, especially
superheroes, but Bendis shows readers explicitly how Jessica battles her dilemma
and her self-worth through her reckless actions, ultimately rendering her more
human and relatable.
Alias illustrates Bendis’s knack for creating natural, engaging dialogue and for
altering the Marvel universe to influence the comic book industry one character at
a time. Within the first two months on the stands, Alias sold out despite its graphic
scenes of violent or sexual nature inappropriate for younger audiences.
Warren Ellis (b. 1968). British writer Warren Ellis has played a prominent role in
today’s American comic books as a prolific creator displaying breadth and diversity
of subjects, genres, and forms. He is known for his approachable and consistent
Internet presence through various comics and culture message boards, forums, and
blogs he hosts online, creating a strong connection with his fans. A writer of comic
books since 1994, when he began working for Marvel, Ellis has been key in redefin-
ing and ushering the superhero into the twenty-first century. Ellis’s work often dis-
plays grim worldviews and frequently explores various futures rather than pasts
while also addressing current issues around popular culture, technology, gender
roles, global politics, and human rights. In 1999 Ellis and artist Bryan Hitch col-
laborated on one of his most highlighted titles, The Authority, featuring a team of
superheroes striving to change the world for the better rather than merely maintain
the status quo. Critics and readers alike responded positively to Ellis’s treatment of
the superhero in The Authority. Ellis avoided stereotypical superpowers and per-
sonalities by developing human characters who happen to have superpowers and
who display a sense of humor regarding their overblown celebrity status, demon-
strating their ability to deconstruct their roles within society and explicitly recognize
and comment on the importance of world peace and human rights over their own
notoriety.
Rather than traditional powers such as flying or superhuman strength, Ellis’s
Authority heroes display more advanced and unique powers. Jack Hawskmoor,
“King of the Cities,” demonstrates superhuman agility and strength and has the
capability to “read” and control urban environments through telepathy, allowing
him to link into and control any city through such means as the animation and pos-
session of architecture and infrastructure. Meanwhile, Angie Spica distilled numer-
ous intelligent technological devices into nine pints of liquid machinery to replace
her blood and became “The Engineer,” with nanotechnology flowing through her
body and offering infinite mechanical abilities, such as tapping into technological
infrastructures or creating weapons.
The Authority was also groundbreaking in its positive portrayal of a homosexual
couple on the team. Apollo and Midnighter at first glance seem to be stereotypical
muscle-ridden, masculine heroes yet are romantic partners in a caring, monogamous
relationship. While homosexual characters are not new to comic books, positive and
 GRAPHIC NOVELS 421

prominent portrayals of homosexual characters are. Ellis’s readers see the tender,
intimate side of their relationship several times without being distracted from the
main plot. Ellis illustrates a healthy rather than dysfunctional homosexual relation-
ship between essential characters when typically homosexual comic book characters
are portrayed in poor light or end up being killed off.
Apollo and Midnighter’s groundbreaking relationship in The Authority generally
garnered positive responses from readers. There was some controversy regarding a
panel illustrating a kiss between the two men, and Ellis was asked to alter it to show
Apollo kissing Midnighter on the cheek instead. Readers responded indignantly to
DC Comics editors, questioning why a series regularly depicting murder, genocide,
and events of mass destruction should warrant censoring an innocuous kiss between
a homosexual couple.
Aside from pushing the boundaries of the superhero and gender roles, The
Authority also speaks volumes to current world issues such as global politics and
human rights. At the turn of the millennium, the team encounters global political
and economic superpowers such as Europe and Japan, as well as terrorist-prone and
vulnerable cities such as London, Los Angeles, and New York. Fighting to protect
inhabitants of planet Earth, the team fights colonization by other planets and pro-
tects human rights by punishing those committing genocide and political corruption
in their nations.
Ellis’s more recent collaboration with artist Ben Templesmith on Fell is another
series widely recognized for its dense storytelling and experimentation with comic
book forms and models of production. In Fell, Detective Richard Fell has been
transferred “from over the bridge” to Snowtown, a resident-described “feral city”
that is run-down, decayed, and plagued with poverty and crime. An illustration of
Ellis’s grim worldview, Snowtown offers an anonymous depiction of a mixture of
many existing urban contexts and problems, and Templesmith’s gloomy colors and
gritty illustrations enhance that feeling.
Detective Fell goes about his work trying to make sense of this city whose des-
perate citizens have given up on it yet spray paint the city’s tag everywhere as a form
of protective magic, in hopes the city will not destroy what has already been labeled
its own. Fell goes about solving unique and bizarre crimes in each issue, but citizens
question his practices. Because crime is such a prevalent part of daily life in Snow-
town, they do not understand Fell’s motivations for solving crimes that will just
occur again the very next day—or hour, for that matter. It seems as if Fell wants to
change Snowtown for the better rather than maintain the status quo, sentiments
Ellis’s characters in The Authority also exhibit.
Aside from the dense and meaningful stories, Ellis’s experimentation with the
form of Fell is perhaps the comic’s greatest contribution to modern American comic
books. Creator-owned, Fell was conceived by Ellis and designed to be accessible to
readers financially and contextually. With the comic priced at $1.99 per issue (well
under the usual price of today’s comics, between $2.50 and $3.99), readers could
enter a comic shop with pocket change and leave with a self-contained story in one
issue rather than longer story arcs requiring the purchase of multiple issues. Under-
taking a comic sticking to this price point meant both Ellis and artist Templesmith
remained uncompensated until issues were printed and actually sold.
Ellis’s low-cost model required compressed stories with shorter page counts but
was supplemented with “back material,” including unfinished artwork, author
422 GRAPHIC NOVELS

notes expanding on the story, and reader responses. Still in production, Fell has been
positively received by readers and critics alike for both its form and its content and
has garnered several comic book award nominations. Readers have shown gratitude
to Ellis and Image Comics for developing a low-cost pricing model and appreciate
Ellis’s full use of the shorter page count through carefully developed, dense, and full
storylines in each issue.
Mark Millar (b. 1969). Scottish comic book writer Mark Millar began writing comics
as a college student. Initially his work was submitted to and published by British
comic book presses, like the popular Saviour, which Trident Comics published in the
early 1990s. DC Comics brought Millar into the mainstream American comics
scene, where he immediately established a high profile by taking over Warren Ellis’s
The Authority in 2000. However, scheduling, artist, and censorship problems with
editors and competing lucrative offers from publishers caused Millar to move to
Marvel in 2001, where he began working on their Ultimate line of comics.
Marvel’s Ultimate line aimed to increase readership by revamping popular Marvel
Universe characters to make them accessible and attractive to new readers. Millar
played a seminal role in rewriting the Marvel character histories through his work
on Ultimate X-Men, Ultimate Fantastic Four, and most notably The Ultimates. In
the Ultimate Marvel Universe, the Ultimates (known as the Avengers in previous
Marvel Universes) are a team of superheroes banded together to fend off supervil-
lains and other superhuman threats. Millar’s task was not to merely provide a
face-lift to these Marvel Universe characters, but to start from scratch and rebuild
them anew.
The Ultimates included core members from the Avengers, including Captain
America, Iron Man, Thor, Wasp, Giant Man, and The Hulk, with a handful of oth-
ers. The Ultimates team is funded by the U.S. military through S.H.I.E.L.D. (Strate-
gic Hazard Intervention, Espionage and Logistics Directorate), a counterterrorism
intelligence unit directed by Nick Fury, former U.S. Army hero and spy. Fury, with
the backing of the U.S. government, hopes to reinvigorate the super-soldier program
that originally spawned Captain America and also recruits the Ultimates to fight
against increasingly threatening global meta-human and mutant activity.
Emergent themes in Millar’s The Ultimates series reflect current global and
domestic issues such as homeland security, colonization and genocide, and the
United States’ motives and involvement with the Middle East. Early on, the Ulti-
mates face protecting homeland security and the challenge of controlling their own
member, the Hulk, as he rampages New York City while going after his ex-girl-
friend’s date in a jealous rage, killing over 800 civilians. Millar carefully develops
his characters before moving on to his next story arc where the Ultimates protect
the Earth from colonization and possible extinction, reflecting current genocide
crimes and the imperialistic global climate. Millar wanted his superheroes to be
working and fighting relevant and meaningful battles rather than chasing down
supervillains, and this is apparent in the sequel, The Ultimates 2, where the team
begins to face potential involvement in U.S. foreign relations in the Middle East.
Pressured by the White House to work with European Union super-soldiers, mem-
bers of the Ultimates begin to question their role in helping the United States push
for increasing global power and control of oil resources. Climatically, the group
faces off against the Liberators, a superhero force made up of recruits from enemy
nations in the series, including Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, and Syria, reflect-
ing the recent threat of attacks on American land. Battling the Liberator’s invasion
 GRAPHIC NOVELS 423

on U.S. soil, the Ultimates organize a counteroffensive and successfully defeat the
invaders one-by-one.
Throughout the larger obstacles facing the Ultimates, Millar weaves subplots and
themes allowing for character development, such as Janet (the Wasp) and Hank
Pym’s (Giant Man) marital issues, Bruce Banner’s (the Hulk) internal struggles over
his abilities as a research scientist trying to reformulate the super-soldier serum, and
Steve Rogers’s (Captain America) adjustments to living in the modern world after
being resurrected from a World War II incident in 1945. The rich subplots also
reveal tensions within the group. Some members distrust Bruce Banner because of
his volatility and perceived lack of mental stability, while Hank Pym is jealous of the
attention Steve Rogers has been paying his wife, Janet. Other tensions relate to the
goals and mission of their team. Thor, in particular, feels they should not be used as
a tool for the United States to establish its power with preemptive strikes, and he is
quite vocal about his opinions, causing some to question his loyalty to the group.
Meanwhile, their celebrity status causes other tensions. Some team members share
snide remarks regarding Tony Stark’s (Iron Man) numerous television news talk-
show appearances and romantic trysts with leading ladies of Hollywood or demon-
strate jealousy about Captain America’s potential movie deal.
Readers familiar with the Marvel Universe were likely skeptical about Millar’s
ability to successfully rewrite decades-old mythology without alienating fans and
characters or destroying the continuity of the existing Marvel Universe, but
responses to The Ultimates were mostly favorable, especially among reviewers and
critics. Some hard-core fans blasted Millar and his work on various comic book
message boards and blogs, but the soaring sales figures spoke to the success of
Millar’s undertaking.
Millar’s exploration of American domestic issues continued in his much antici-
pated seven-part Civil War series published by Marvel Comics in 2006 and 2007.
Considered a “Marvel Comics Event,” the storyline included superheroes fighting
against one another in an ideological battle that could forever change the Marvel
Universe. The basis of the conflict regarded the Superhuman Registration Act, a law
passed by the U.S. government requiring all superhumans to register their powers and
identities with the government or be persecuted by S.H.I.E.L.D. (the government-
funded superhuman counterterrorism and intelligence unit), registered superhu-
mans, and nongovernment enforcers such as civilian supporters. Reaction to the
policy among superheroes was mixed, creating a divide between former allies, with
the pro-registration camp led by Iron Man and the anti-registration camp led by
Captain America.
Millar uses this conflict as a basis to explore many current domestic issues facing
the United States, such as the immigration reform debate, the politically and ideo-
logically divided climate of the nation, and the erosion of civil liberties. The Super-
human Registration Act and the superhumans’ reactions to it reflect some of the
debates surrounding the United States’ immigration reform issue. Some heroes feel
they should not have to register with the government because they already positively
contribute to society by capturing supervillains or protecting the public. On the
other hand, the pro-registration camp recognizes the value of standardized training
for superhumans and feels the registration process would allow for more legitimacy
and respect from the American public.
Millar’s political allegory continues with the divided superhero community repli-
cating the currently divided political ideologies of the American public under the
424 GRAPHIC NOVELS

current administration. The philosophical war the superheroes are experiencing

brings up issues of government oversight and involvement in the private lives of its
citizens, including the erosion of civil liberties. The anti-registration camp feels
being forced to work for the government renders them lackeys of the government
and takes their freedom to perform their work as they choose. They also feel their
civil liberties are threatened because if they register and reveal their true identities,
their privacy and safety are at risk, and they will be subject to heavy surveillance by
registration enforcers or S.H.I.E.L.D. whether they register or not.
Millar’s Civil War was highly anticipated, and sales soared, though reader
response remained mixed, as is normal with a major comic book event such as
this. Millar’s undertaking changed the Marvel Universe in a big way, and readers
will continue to learn to what extent the future Marvel storylines involving Civil
War characters will develop from the outcome of the war. Even Civil War’s
numerous “crossovers” or “tie-ins” (stories that combine two or more otherwise
separated characters, stories, settings, or universes that meet and interact with
each other) demonstrated the degree to which this conflict altered and influenced
the mythology of the Marvel Universe. While crossovers and tie-ins are normal
in the comic book industry, Millar’s Civil War spawned over 100 comic book
issues under 20-plus titles, demonstrating the impact of Civil War on the Marvel
Universe and the comic book industry. Numerous new titles were also developed
from the plotlines in Civil War that illustrate and unfold the results of the war in
the entire Marvel Universe.
Women in Today’s Comic Book Industry. Because of the prominent number of males
in the field, some criticize the comic book industry for remaining a “boys club,”
yet female editors, writers, and artists are becoming more common and gaining
more recognition for their work in the medium. American writer Devin Grayson’s
(b. 1971) Batman: Gothic Knights emerged in 2000, making her the first woman
to have a regular ongoing writing assignment on the Batman title, and she has gar-
nered distinction and recognition among the industry and from fans. Grayson’s
Batman marked a new direction in that she brought a concern for relationships to
the character, something her male contemporaries did not display as well in their
stories. Nominated in 1999 and 2000 for the Comics Buyer’s Guide Award for
Favorite Writer, Grayson is still an active comic book writer today. In 2005 she
wrapped up a five-year run on Nightwing and wrote the creator-owned Matador
for DC Comics’ Wildstorm imprint, and in 2006 published DC Universe: Inheri-
tance, a novel about fathers and sons starring Batman, Nightwing, Green Arrow,
Arsenal, Aquaman, and Tempest.
Jessica Abel (b. 1969) is another American comic book writer and artist gaining
recognition; her work leans more toward the independent or alternative genre of
comic books. In the early 1990s, Abel self-published her embellished hand-bound
comic book Artbabe, which was eventually picked up by Fantagraphics for publi-
cation. Abel delved into longer comic books in 2000 when she started La Perdida,
originally a five-part series and later reissued as a single volume in 2005. Receiving
positive critical response, La Perdida featured a Mexican American woman, Carla,
venturing into Mexico City in search of her identity after being raised by only her
white American mother. Abel’s work often includes the experiences of Generation X
characters and demonstrates careful attention to communicating her characters’ ges-
tures and facial expressions. Recently Abel has worked on Carmina, a prose novel
for teens; Life Sucks, a new graphic novel; and a textbook about making comics.
 GRAPHIC NOVELS 425

Gail Simone is yet another prominent woman writer in today’s comic book indus-
try. Simone first entered mainstream comics with her work on Deadpool (later
relaunched as Agent X) in 2002 but had previously been noticed by comic book fans
through her Women in Refrigerators Web site cataloging the many instances in
which female comic book characters were victimized in plot devices for male pro-
tagonists. Simone took over DC Comics’ Birds of Prey, featuring an all-female cast
of characters. Her work on this title has garnered credit for her balance of sus-
penseful action, thoughtful character development, and humor. Simone also con-
tributed to DC Comics’ 2006 “Infinite Crisis” event through the Villains United
series, in which she revitalized the Catwoman character. She has remained active in
the online comic book community through her “You’ll All Be Sorry” weekly column
on the Comic Book Resources Web site and through Bloodstains on the Looking
Glass, her blog. She continues to write and recently has worked on a series for Gen
13 as well as Welcome to Tranquility, a creator-owned project for Wildstorm.

Bibliography
Abel, Jessica. Artbabe [Issues 1–5]. Self-published, 1992–1996.
———. Artbabe [Vol. 2, Issues 1–4]. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, 1997–1999.
———. Carmina. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.
———. Life Sucks. New York: First Second, 2007.
———. La Perdida. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006.
Batman. Directed by Tim Burton. Warner Home Video, 1989.
Batman and Robin. Directed by Joel Schumacher. Warner Home Video, 1997.
Alien. Directed by Ridley Scott. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 1984.
Bendis, Brian Michael. Alias. New York: Marvel Comics, 2002.
———. Torso. Orange, CA: Image Comics, 2001.
———. Ultimate Spider-Man: Power and Responsibility [Vol. 1]. New York: Marvel Comics,
2001.
———. Ultimate Spider-Man: Learning Curve [Vol. 2]. New York: Marvel Comics, 2001.
Benton, Mike. The Comic Book in America: An Illustrated History. Dallas, TX: Taylor
Publications, 1989.
Eisner, Will. 2008. http://www.time.com/time/columnist/arnold/article/0,9565,542579,00.html.
Ellis, Warren. The Authority: Relentless [Vol. 1]. LaJolla, CA: Wildstorm/DC Comics, 2000.
———. The Authority: Under New Management [Vol. 2]. LaJolla, CA: Wildstorm/DC
Comics, 2000.
———. Fell [Issues 1, 2, 4, 5]. Orange, CA: Image Comics, 2006.
Gaiman, Neil. The Sandman [Issues 1–75]. New York: Vertigo, 1989–1996.
Grayson, Devin. Batman: Gothic Knights [Issues 1–32]. New York: DC Comics, 2000–2002.
———. DC Universe: Inheritance. New York: Warner Books, 2006.
———. Matador [Issues 1–6]. LaJolla, CA: Wildstorm/DC Comics, 2005.
———. Nightwing [Issues 53, 71–100, 108–117]. New York: DC Comics, 2000–2005.
Jones, Gerard. Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book. New
York: Basic Books, 2004.
Justice League Unlimited. 2001–2007. Created by Gardner Fox. Warner Brothers Entertainment.
Kaplan, Arie. Masters of the Comic Book Universe Revealed!: Will Eisner, Stan Lee, Neil
Gaiman, and More. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2006.
McFarlane, Todd. Spawn [Issues 1–73]. Orange, CA: Image Comics, 1992–1998.
Millar, Mark. Civil War [Issues 1–3, 5, 6]. New York: Marvel Comics, 2006–2007.
———. Saviour [Issues 1–5]. Leicester, UK: Trident Comics, 1990.
———. Ultimate Fantastic Four [Issues 1–6]. New York: Marvel Comics, 2003–2004.
———. Ultimate X-Men [Issues 1–12, 15–33]. New York: Marvel Comics, 2000–2003.
426 GRAPHIC NOVELS

———. The Ultimates, Vol. 1: Superhuman. New York: Marvel Comics, 2002.
———. The Ultimates, Vol. 2: Homeland Security. New York: Marvel Comics, 2004.
———. The Ultimates 2: Gods and Monsters [Vol. 1]. New York: Marvel Comics, 2005.
Miller, Frank. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns [Issues 1–4]. New York: DC Comics, 1986.
———. Daredevil [Issues 168–191]. New York: Marvel Comics, 1981–1983.
———. Sin City [Issues 1–13]. Dark Horse Comics, 1991–1992.
Olson, Stephen P. Neil Gaiman. New York: Rosen, 2005.
Raiders of the Lost Ark. Directed by Steven Spielberg, produced by George Lucas. Paramount
Home Video, 1981.
Simone, Gail. Agent X [Issues 1–15]. New York: Marvel Comics, 2002–2003.
———. Birds of Prey [Issues 56–102]. New York: DC Comics, 2003–2007.
———. Bloodstains on the Looking Glass [Online January 2007]. http://happystains.
blogspot.com
———. Deadpool [Issues 65–69]. New York: Marvel Comics, 2002.
———. Gen 13 [Vol. 4] [Issues 1–4]. LaJolla, CA: Wildstorm/DC Comics, 2006–2007.
———. Villains United [Issues 1–6]. New York: DC Comics, 2005.
———. Welcome to Tranquility [Issues 1–6]. LaJolla, CA: Wildstorm/DC Comics, 2006–2007.
———. Women in Refrigerators. Accessed January 2007 at http://www.unheardtaunts.com/wir.
———. “You’ll All Be Sorry” [Weekly column]. http://www.comicbookresources.com/columns
Smallville. Created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar. Warner Brothers Entertainment,
2001–2007.
Spiegelman, Art. “Foreword: Symptoms of Disorder, Signs of Genius.” In Justin Green’s
Binky Brown Sampler, by Justin Green. San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1995. 4–7.
———. In the Shadow of No Towers. Self-published, 2004.
———. Maus. New York: Pantheon, 1991.
Star Trek. Directed by Robert Wise. Paramount Home Video, 1980.
Superman. Directed by Richard Donner. Warner Home Video, 1978.
Ware, Chris. Acme Novelty Library. New York: Pantheon, 2005.
Wertham, Fredric. Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Rinehart, 1954.

Further Reading
Benton, Mike. The Comic Book in America: An Illustrated History. Dallas, TX: Taylor
Publications, 1989; Klock, Geoff. How to Read Superhero Comics and Why. New York:
Continuum, 2002; McCloud, Scott. Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology
Are Revolutionizing an Art Form. New York: Perennial, 2000; McCloud, Scott. Understand-
ing Comics. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994; Wright, Bradford. Comic Book Nation: The
Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2001.
TAMMY MIELKE
H

HISTORICAL FANTASY
Definition. To the extent that inner and outer are separable, history forms the surface
of the past: chronology, geography, economics, sociology, technology, and politics. In
contrast, fantasy conveys the internal past—the emotions and the dreams hidden
beneath them. Whereas historical fiction stays closer to the surface (by avoiding the
supernatural) and high fantasy has a generic, medieval setting in some invented coun-
try, historical fantasy depicts reality comprehensively, combining actual history with
dreamlike depths. As such, it makes unusually great demands both on the research time
and creativity of its authors and on the erudition and imagination of its readers.
It uses a factual and fantastic past to address the authors’ present (the time of com-
position) in preparation for their future. Consider, for instance, Neil Gaiman’s histori-
cal fantasy series for Vertigo comic books, ending with a conversation between William
Shakespeare and the Sandman (1996). Not only was Gaiman’s career changing from
comic books to other projects, but his close connection to America was also drawing
him there; Gaiman therefore named that episode after Shakespeare’s comedy The Tem-
pest, a drama often deemed to be that playwright’s farewell to his art and also Shake-
speare’s response to the New World. In the Sandman series, this episode culminates
parallels between the two authors, such as Gaiman’s attributing the same complaint to
both his daughter Holly and Shakespeare’s daughter Judith: each writer’s existence con-
sists of either composing lies or stealing them from previous books (Kwitney 2003, 61).
At the end of the series, Gaiman has Shakespeare himself express this as a regret,
adding that it has kept him from ever truly living. Given Gaiman’s situation (ending his
most famous series), this problem might sound autobiographical entirely, except that it
comes through the mouth of Shakespeare and is itself indebted to Jorge Luis Borges’s
parable Everything and Nothing, where Shakespeare says it to God (Borges 1962,
248–249). Through this intertwining of personal and literary allusions with the
exploits of the supernatural Sandman, Gaiman suggests that his portrait of personal
remorse on concluding the series belongs to some larger pattern—the nature of writ-
ing historical fantasy. This genre inevitably borrows from the past, sometimes staying
428 HISTORICAL FANTASY

close to sources but otherwise sidestepping the ordinary version of reality in order to
reassess its norms, often controversially. The context of this episode was Gaiman’s
struggle for comic books’ First Amendment rights, which brought him America’s
Comic Book Legal Defense Fund’s Defender of Liberty Award the next year (1997).
History. Because the very nature of historical fantasy concerns the past, it often
involves rewriting ancient epics and legends—for example, Stephan Grundy’s
Gilgamesh (2000), which re-imagines the heterosexual descriptions of the ancient
epic with bisexual ones. Why do old sources seem so outmoded as to require rewrit-
ing? Predating science, ancient epics presented myths as fact rather than fiction and
thus were not designed to be historical fantasy per se. For instance, when around
1300 B.C.E. the exorcist priest Sin-Leqi-Unninni produced the best-preserved version
of the Gilgamesh legend, he added an appendix in which a dead character appears
as a ghost, appropriate to the editor’s professional concern with such beings. In
doing this, he violated the sequence of the narrative, which itself is patched together
from previous accounts with so little care for consistency that he could not decide
whether the central character should be spelled “Gilgamesh” or “Bilgamesh”
(Maier 1984, 1–50). In other words, like Grundy’s, his Gilgamesh is a magical ver-
sion of the past reshaped for his own needs, but unlike current historical fantasists,
he did not live in an age that distinguished skillfully between history and fantasy.
That distinction became a shade clearer during the Protestant Reformation in
Europe and America (sixteenth to seventeenth centuries C.E.), with its contrasting
what it called “scripture” (the Protestant section of the Bible) to “apocrypha” (the
rest of the Catholic Bible, deemed historically inaccurate by Protestants). The
emphasis of the time, however, was in purifying faith rather than in writing histor-
ical scholarship per se. From that period, Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene
(1590–1596) recognizes that it is not literally true, but an allegory of Spenser’s own
Elizabethan Britain, set in the legendary Arthurian period. His concern, though, is
denouncing vice rather than portraying historical detail. Shying from such preach-
ing, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt parodied it in their The Incomplete
Enchanter (1940)—a humor already nascent in the Faerie Queene becomes more
playful and detailed after book one, as if evolving toward modern historical fantasy.
Perhaps coincidentally, at approximately the same time as Spenser but in China,
the Journey to the West (Hsi Yu Chi, attributed to Wu Ch’eng-en) turns a historical
event (Hsuan Tsang’s bringing Buddhist scriptures from India) into an enormous
amalgam of legends, humor, and allegory, comparable to Spenser’s. Admittedly, the
Hsi Yu Chi has inspired some American historical fantasy (e.g., Mark Salzman’s The
Laughing Sutra, 1991, and Gerald Vizenor’s Griever: An American Monkey King in
China, 1987), but the primary influence on American historical fantasy has not been
from the East or even from the West in general but has been specifically British. This
dependence has been both a way for America to reimagine its roots and a way for
American writers to learn a genre pioneered by English fascination with the past.
From such British Gothic historical fantasies as William Beckford’s Vathek (French
1782; English 1786) or Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) later comes American
Gothicism, for example, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” (1842). All of
these use history as an excuse for eroticism (to the extent that Beckford first had to
publish in France), yet ultimately they denounce the old, adopting and adapting the
model of confessional literature. This dissatisfaction with the past was not confined to
the Gothic. Despite substituting humor for the frissons of Beckford, Lewis, and Poe,
Mark Twain’s (Samuel Langhorne Clemens’s) historical fantasy A Connecticut Yankee
 HISTORICAL FANTASY 429

in King Arthur’s Court (1889), for instance, makes even more explicit the superiority
of the present over the past, while implicitly criticizing even his age as not sufficiently
modernized.
Enough appreciation of the past for a richer historical fantasy again comes from
England: Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), composed after globe-
trotting, including years in the United States, evidences a new perspective on his
British heritage. Kipling’s own childhood was divided between an idyllic, multicultural
Indian period with his art-historian father and a hellish British period with an
anti-artistic evangelical. Puck of Pook’s Hill exorcizes that trauma by imagining an
alternative: the multiculturalism and tolerance of his India brought home to England
in a way that would make it more like the United States. By way of artifacts, compa-
rable to those in the museum in which Kipling’s father was curator, a fairy introduces
children to previous local cultures, pagan included. As Donald Mackenzie remarks in
a preface to Puck of Pook’s Hill, the artifacts embody Victorian fact-based history,
what he calls the “archaeological imagination” (Mackenzie 1993, xiv)—a past that
remains visible, unlike the invisible realm of merely oral legends.
Puck of Pook’s Hill inspired many children’s books designed to teach history
through fantasy. Because of a need to redefine national identity during and directly
after the chaos wrought by World War II, that period was particularly open to these.
For instance, Alison Uttley’s A Traveler in Time (1939) and Phillippa Pearce’s Tom’s
Midnight Garden (1958) tour history via a temporal slip. One notable series from the
period was Mary Norton’s The Magic Bed-Knob (1943) and Bonfires and Broomsticks
(1947), later collected together as Bedknob and Broomstick (1957) and made eventu-
ally into a Disney movie (1971). The books (with far more historical connection than
the film) reflect the war period’s mood of precarious hope via an incompetent witch
who just barely manages to take a family of children to more promising times (e.g., the
seventeenth century). Equally notable, beginning in 1954 with Half Magic, Edward
Eager’s tales of magic series (Knight’s Castle, 1956; Magic by the Lake, 1957; and The
Time Garden, 1958) fit Britain’s slow recovery from the wartime economy by giving
children only “half magic”; nonetheless, it reaffirms British tradition. By the early
1960s, a Cold War paranoia underlay the “wolves series” by Conrad Aiken’s daugh-
ter Joan Aiken. Beginning with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962), the series tells
of continental werewolves invading eighteenth-century England.
This was a period when America was following the patriotic British trend, though
in a less distinguished way—for example, Carley Dawson’s now-out-of-print colo-
nial magic series (Mr. Wicker’s Window, 1952; The Sign of the Seven Seas, 1954;
and Dragon Run, 1955). With a depiction of racial relations that today seems
embarrassingly conservative, these show a twentieth-century magician’s apprentice
time-traveling to help save eighteenth-century America from foreign influences.
These series are relatively conventional compared to a trend in historical fantasy that
came to the United States first via the works of Jorge Luis Borges. A translator of
Kipling into Spanish, Borges began his highly metaphysical version of the genre in 1935
with his Universal History of Infamy (Historia universal de la infamia). Particularly in
the 1940s, his short stories often juxtaposed historical settings with some temporal par-
adox, for example, a subjective year sandwiched within an objective instant, or a
labyrinth of time, or the same work changing its meaning over the centuries, or immor-
tals devolving into troglodytes. His essay “A New Refutation of Time” (“Nueva
refutación del tiempo,” 1952) explains this fascination with temporal paradox as a
futile desire to nullify time and thus deny death, despite his recognizing himself as being
430 HISTORICAL FANTASY

composed of time (Borges 1962, 234). Learning from Borges the complex interweav-
ing of fantasy and history but remaining political, a magical realism movement devel-
oped in Latin American from the 1960s onward. Among its first masterpieces was
Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad,
1967), which interconnects the story of a village with the history of the world and
mixes verisimilitude with fantasies, freeing the unconscious as part of an agenda of lib-
erating the repressed and oppressed.
As an influence on historical fantasy in the United States, this engagé yet speculative
metaphysical current blended eventually with the more staid British one—the latter
represented particularly by the American fad for J.R.R. Tolkien’s high fantasy Lord of
the Rings, written 1937–1949, published 1953–1954. The American blending started
in the late 1960s, when Tolkien’s combat between clearly defined good and evil no
longer matched the more complex moral questions raised by the Vietnam War and the
youth revolution, which had affinities with the liberalism of magic realism. Typical of
the period in America were Roger Zelazny’s Amber books, commencing with Nine
Princes in Amber (1970), and Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, starting with Interview
with the Vampire (1976). Both form larger-than-life anatomies of dysfunctional soci-
eties and their histories, with the protagonist poised between traditional action and
metaphysical rumination. Anne Rice recovered from the alcoholic despair flowing from
her daughter’s demise by writing Interview with the Vampire (1976), in which a girl
survives death as a monster among the undead—Rice’s imagining something worse
than the loss of her daughter and thus reconciling herself to it. Whereas Rice had
become morbid and nocturnal in her alcoholic phase, the vampire society offered an
exaggerated version of that condition that helped her recognize and move beyond her
addiction. The scenes with that society, however, exist in their own lyrical sense of time,
like Borges’s “A Secret Miracle” (“El Milagro secreto,” 1945).
During the 1970s, American blending of the British conservative and the Hispanic
liberal currents remained tentative; in contrast, during the 1980s, America domi-
nated the genre. After almost a decade of silence, in 1985 Anne Rice produced a
radically new, second Vampire volume, The Vampire L’Estat. Pervaded by the
whining of its protagonist, Louis (i.e., by remnants of Rice’s own depression),
Interview had peered at the dark places of the psyche myopically. The more mature
second volume retold and expanded the previous adventure from the perspective of
L’Estat, wolf-killer, actor, and existentialist. Viewed through Louis’s eyes, the first
volume’s character L’Estat was a pathetic parasite. The retelling and its sequels
made him a multimillionaire playboy, whose exuberance testified that an extended
lifetime need not decrease humanity’s energy, even in an absurd universe.
Like The Vampire L’Estat, many other historical fantasies of the 1980s in America
culminated themes developed in the 1970s. Although feminist Arthurian literature
had been published throughout that decade (e.g., in Britain, Vera Chapman’s The
Green Knight, 1975; The King’s Damosel, 1976; King Arthur’s Daughter, 1976),
the year 1982 brought Marion Zimmer Bradley’s enormously popular American
tome The Mists of Avalon, about the women of Camelot. Its very length and amount
of historical detail granted it opulence and verisimilitude.
Within her own science fiction Darkover series, Bradley had pioneered the use of
bisexual personae in formulaic adventure plots. Set, however, on another planet in
a distant future with the characters part-alien, Darkover was a heavily disguised
comment on human nature. Slightly bolder, The Mists of Avalon posits that here on
earth, in one of the founding Anglo myths, Camelot did not fall because of
 HISTORICAL FANTASY 431

Lancelot’s adultery with Guinevere. Instead, Bradley’s King Arthur forms a three-
some with them, in which the only sexual tension comes from the two men’s being
more interested in one another than in the woman. For Bradley, the major cause of
Camelot’s decline is Christian intolerance. Such a liberal rewriting of legends had
been extremely rare in historical fiction, but the fantasy elements in The Mists of
Avalon gave just enough distancing so that readers of the 1980s found it tolerable.
By the 1980s the British begin to follow the American lead, an example being the
bisexuality of Peter Vansittart’s Parsifal, where the Arthurian grail knight falls in
love with both the goddess-like Kundry and Sir Gawain.
Historical romance, previously one of the most traditional genres, thus found
fantasy as a means of expanding its scope. The Vampire Chronicles eroticized
blood-sucking between bisexuals whose very mode of being Rice described as a
magical sensuous and sensual ecstasy. Comparably provocative, Judith Tarr’s
Hound and Falcon trilogy (The Isle of Glass, 1985; The Golden Horn, 1985; and
The Hounds of God, 1987) reflects 1980s sexual liberalism with a relatively sym-
pathetic homosexual character (King Richard the Lionhearted) and a denuncia-
tion of Roman Catholic celibacy. Despite being a monk, the protagonist is also an
elf who resembles a pretty, lusty boy and who nonetheless keeps his monastic
vows for longer than a human being could live. Eventually, he falls in love with a
shape-shifting elf, who spends long periods as a dog at his feet, from where she
sends him tempting thoughts telepathically. R.A. Macavoy’s Damiano series
(Damiano, 1983; Damiano’s Flute, 1984; and Raphael, 1984) also contains a
human/canine, the protagonist’s talking dog. The two end up playing naked
together in heaven where the dog has acquired a human soul and form.
Another of the themes in the Damiano series as well as in many other historical
fantasies of the period is conflict between Christianity and wizardry. Katherine
Kurz’s Deryny series (1970–2002), despite her MA in Medieval English history, cast
that enmity in another world, where the religion was just different enough from
Christianity so that Christian readers might not be offended. By bringing it into our
world, Tarr, Bradley, and Macavoy removed the disguise, using Christian history to
indict that faith. Tarr’s Hound and Falcon trilogy delivered a passionate denuncia-
tion of the Fourth Crusade, much of which was spent with Christians killing one
another, when Europeans attacked Constantinople, capital of Eastern Christendom.
Although Tarr’s and Macavoy’s satires of Christianity seem to come from outside
that faith, Rice’s years of researching Church history for her books has been radi-
cally ambivalent, compounding Roman Catholic devotion and existential atheism in
shifting combinations ranging from blasphemy to piety.
In the 1980s, Orson Scott Card’s first three volumes of his Alvin Maker series
(Seventh Son, 1987; Red Prophet, 1988; and Prentice Alvin, 1989,) ridiculed
various Christian denominations, but did so from his perspective as a dedicated
member of the Church of Latter Days Saints. The primary model for Alvin’s life was
Joseph Smith, though in miracle-working powers, Alvin resembles Jesus. Despite
satirizing some organized religions and excusing the practice of magic, the series is
very Christian in its presentation of each person’s spiritual gift (or, in frontier parl-
ance, “knack”). What was new for historical fantasy in the Alvin Maker series was
Card’s large-scale interweaving of American frontier superstitions of the uneducated
with actual history. This makes it (among other things) magical realism, even to its
sympathy for the oppressed. The series is a monumental redoing of American his-
tory, so that the Native Americans retain a large territory, slavery is combated by
432 HISTORICAL FANTASY

magic, and the early American dream of founding a New Jerusalem is almost
achieved. Although some other books during the 1980s, such as Mark Helprin’s
Winter’s Tale (1982), a magical history of New York, or S.P. Somtow’s Moon Dance
(1989), a history of werewolves on a Native American reservation, play with por-
tions of American history, the Alvin Maker series constitutes one of the grandest
revisions.
The 1980s achieved so much in historical fantasy that its authors tended to
extend their series thereafter, not always with much new. In fantasy literature, the
great development of the 1990s and early twenty-first century was again British: the
worldwide fad of Harry Potter, beginning with Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s
[or, in American editions, Sorcerer’s] Stone (1997). That series, however, ridicules his-
tory (the class so dull that only hyper-intellectual Hermione Granger stays awake in
it). One source of most characters’ antipathy to the past may be its having been trau-
matic for them, as in Harry’s literal scar, Ron’s spider phobia, the effects of Lucius’s
bullying on his son Draco, Sirius’s dreadful childhood memories, young Lupin’s
being bitten by a werewolf, the abandonment of Tom Riddle, and the commission
of Neville’s parents to an asylum. In book three (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of
Azkaban, 1999), Lupin gives the children a charm to combat their phobias, by
reimagining and deriding the feared person or animal. One exception to the unpop-
ularity of history at Hogwarts is Kennilworthy Whisp’s Quidditch through the Ages
(published by Rowling in 2001 as part of Comic Relief) because it substitutes sports
for the agonizing struggles of real history. In it, Rowling demonstrates through her
parodies that she is a real student of history, but that is not quite the same as infus-
ing her series with actual events and dates. Spurred by the popularity of Harry Pot-
ter, publishers promoted what seemed to them like it; thus, the resulting boom in
fantasy literature did little to nurture the historical variety.
Trends and Themes. The chief legacy of Harry Potter has been an emphasis on
children’s literature, often in very extended series. Before Rowling, the only well-
known heptalogy (seven-volume work) was C.S. Lewis’s Narnia; today, more and
more fantasies stretch themselves into vast sagas. Whereas the 1980s somewhat
matured fantasy, the 1990s and early twenty-first century inspired more young peo-
ple and adults to read children’s books, which were admittedly becoming quite long,
challenging, and complex but which were exempted by their primary audience from
such subjects as explicit sexuality. Rather, the principal Harry Potter–like theme has
been magical education, as in Patricia Wrede’s Mairelon series (Mairelon the
Magician, 1991; and Magician’s Ward, 1997), where a nineteenth-century street
waif rises to a position in the magical community. Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible
Beauty (2005) and Rebel Angels (2005) have a 16-year-old psychic from India
secretly learning to master her powers in a Victorian girl’s school designed to teach
propriety.
Advertised as “Harry Potter for adults,” Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange &
Mr. Norrell (2004) has also become a best seller in the United States. It presents
magical education with enough real history to have taken her 10 years of research
and enough invented history to fill notes that often occupy as much space as the
main text. The book’s central theme is a history simultaneously copious and par-
simonious, analogous to modern Britain, preserving a rich past without quite
managing prosperity. For Jonathan Strange, that situation occurs both with his
miser father and with his mentor, Mr. Norrell, owner of most books on magic ever
written yet reluctant to loan Strange any of them.
 HISTORICAL FANTASY 433

Whereas magical education and hyperrealism are trends particularly associated with the
early twenty-first century, the themes of historical fantasy continue to be very traditional
(usually more than one per volume): (1) the preternaturally old, (2) time slips (i.e., time travel
by magic), (3) reincarnation, (4) old magical objects, and (5) secret histories. If there is any
change in these themes, the difference is in an ever-increasing simplification of them to
resemble popular formulae.

Even further in magical education from Harry Potter is Philip Pullman’s His
Dark Material series (Northern Lights [British edition] or The Golden Compass
[American edition], 1995; The Subtle Knife, 1997; The Amber Spyglass, 2000). In
this nineteenth-century-like England, each person’s unconscious is imaged as an
accompanying animal, which, according to Pullman’s Web site, “is that part of you
that helps you grow towards wisdom.” In other words, the means of education is
fantastic (a metaphor depicted as literal), but the result is ordinary. Not recogniz-
ing that such depiction is the norm in fantasy—historical or otherwise—Pullman
has tended to deny that the series is “fantasy.” Comparably, J.R.R. Tolkien and
C.S. Lewis tended to deny that their Christian allegories were “allegories.” Such a
denial simply meant that, for their period, they were infusing the fantasy with more
verisimilitude, as, with even higher standards, Pullman is doing now. Such an
increasing emphasis on real details is a trend in every kind of fantasy and leads to
expanding research in the historical variety.
For centuries, miraculously long-lived beings entered historical fantasy so that the
author could philosophize on the human condition and give congruity to a vast
stretch of time, as in George Sylvester Viereck’s and Paul Eldridge’s My First Two
Thousand Years: The Autobiography of the Wandering Jew (1928). Now, more com-
mon is Karen Marie Moning’s historical fantasy/romance Kiss of the Highlander
(2001), where an American tourist awakens a handsome Scottish laird after his 500-
year slumber and then takes him back to his century via a time slip (and not for phi-
losophizing). Today, immortals commonly come in teams competing with one
another to fit the adventure formula, as in Mercedes Lackey and Roberta Gellis’s
This Scepter’d Isle (2004), where elves fight over who will be the heir to Henry VIII.
Last century, reincarnation was an uncommon idea in the West, requiring slow expla-
nation, as in Rider Haggard’s She (1887), but lately it not only is common in Western
popular culture but also is reintroduced by Asian historical fantasy, such as Rumiko
Takahashi’s typical manga Inu-Yasha (2003–), where a teenage reincarnation of an
ancient priestess takes a time slip to antiquity to team with an immortal demon in
battles with other immortals. An archaeology of magical objects goes back at least to
Puck of Pook’s Hill but now is likely to come redolent of Indiana Jones, as with Alex
Archer’s Rogue Angel series (Destiny, 2006; Solomon’s, 2006) and Kate Mosse’s
Labyrinth (2006). Alternatively, a magical object can link romances spread through
centuries, as in Shana Abe’s The Last Mermaid (2004). Traditionally, an author of a
secret history had to remain mysterious about whether presumably skeptical readers
should take supernatural events seriously, for example, Paul Féval’s The Vampire
Countess (1856). Today, conspiracy theories belong to genres of both factual and fic-
tional literature; thus, in Archer’s Destiny (2006) a field reporter for the cable series
Chasing History’s Monsters encounters the kind of religious conspiracy that has
434 HISTORICAL FANTASY

become a cliché, particularly since Dan Brown’s extraordinarily popular historical

fiction, The Da Vinci Code (2004).
Context and Issues. Particularly in the United States and Britain, the legacy of
twenty-first-century terrorist attacks and wars in the Middle East has been a trau-
matized public, like Rowling’s wizards under attack by Voldemort’s death-eater ter-
rorists. In direct response to the falling World Trade Towers, the historian Don
LoCicero wrote If Animals Could Speak: A 21st Century Fable Inspired by
9/11/2001 (2004). With the help of an actor pursued as a terrorist by the misguided
American government, talking farm animals defend their home against developers.
Comparably, though for older readers, Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon’s
comic book Pride of Baghdad (2006) transforms the real escape of four zoo lions
during the 2003 American-Iraqi war into a vehicle for discussing whether liberation
can be forced on people or whether they must cooperate. The male lion’s having two
wives mirrors one Near Eastern tradition, while the lions’ conversations with a tor-
toise occasion a long perspective on war in the region.
More commonly, however, authors have simply skewed their material slightly to
reflect recent East–West relations, as with Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Arthur trilogy
(The Seeing Stone, 2001; At the Crossing Places, 2004; and King of the Middle
March, 2006). Advertised for the Harry Potter market, the books likewise form a
coming-of-age series—the first volume written before September 11, 2001. In it, the
twelfth-century, teenage protagonist receives from Merlin a magic stone, which per-
mits the boy to watch the adventures of his namesake King Arthur as a model while
the lad traverses the “crossing place” of adolescence. In subsequent volumes, how-
ever, the disastrous Fourth Crusade looms more prominently, so that the protago-
nist must consider a question very prominent after 9/11: why Muslims and
Christians fight one another.
Similarly, Elizabeth Kostova spent 10 years researching her best seller The Historian
(2005), linked to even earlier memories of European jaunting with her raconteur father.
Nonetheless, the finished version begins with a note remarking, “The glimpses of reli-
gious and territorial conflict between an Islamic East and a Judeo-Christian West will
be painfully familiar to a modern reader” (xvi). Whereas this theme was common in
the 1980s, it then usually occasioned a neo-pagan attack on Christianity. Probably
because of 9/11, Crossley-Holland and Kostova handle the topic more evenly and gin-
gerly, neither East nor West wholly to blame. With rich historical detail, Kostova por-
trays present (associated with the West) and past (associated with the East) as symbols
for conscious and unconscious states of mind. Their relationship is either loving or
sadomasochistic (i.e., based on either equality or dominance). Dracula, who learned
evil from both East and West, personifies such sadomasochistic dominance, particu-
larly in his lust for impaling and vampirism. This is to say he personifies a Western
(conscious) mind fighting against the Eastern (unconscious), which seduces him into
imitating it; he thus exemplifies self-division. All of the major characters are historians,
whose potentially pure love for the past risks deterioration into a perversion. The way
to escape this fall is a willingness to change and mature (contrasted with the seemingly
immutable Dracula, given that his warping occurred before the narrative began). As
Kostova reveals in an interview appended to the novel, she deliberately begins the book
in the voice of a sheltered 16-year-old, so that her maturing (and that of the older but
reclusive other voices) comes “through exposure to evil” (3). As a repository of foul
memories, history therefore holds the place it has since 9/11: a guide away from child-
ish naivety and thus, potentially, a teacher of mature love.
 HISTORICAL FANTASY 435

The Australian author of children’s books Gillian Rubinstein (writing as Lian

Hearn) addresses an equally disturbing 9/11 question: what if one is raised by
terrorists? In her Otori series (Across the Nightingale Floor, 2002; Grass for his
Pillow, 2003; Brilliance of the Moon, 2004; Cry of the Heron, 2006), young
Takeo, despite his moral qualms, is expected to use such magical powers as invis-
ibility for the profession of the “Tribe,” a ninja-like group of spies and assassins.
Rubinstein’s pseudonym, Hearn, recalls the late-nineteenth-century essayist
Lafcadio Hearn, whose works did much to introduce Japanese culture to America,
but in a mannered, not entirely authentic manner. Consequently, her choice of the
name is inherently apologetic, a recognition that Western appropriation of the
East is controversial. Indeed, Near Eastern terrorists have presented themselves as
defenders of Asia against various forms of appropriation.
Reception. Although “historical fantasy” is a marketing category briefly glossed
in such works as Brian Stableford’s Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature
(2005), it is not a genre that has received much scholarly attention as such. Perhaps
because major authors tend to wander in and out of its boundaries, it tends to be
clumped with genres tangential to it: historical fiction, high fantasy, horror, or
romance novels. This, however, does not mean that it is either rare or unrewarded.
Like those genres that border it, historical fantasy books often have screen ver-
sions, such as Interview with the Vampire (1994), a large-budget production that
offers a somewhat moralistic simplification of the far-more amoral book. Rubinstein
has received millions from Universal for the film rights to her Otori series. Accord-
ing to Borys Kit (The Reporter, September 12, 2006), Peter Jackson has optioned
Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, which begins with His Majesty’s Dragon (2006),
about a corps of talking dragons during the Napoleonic wars. Naturally, many of
the cinematic adaptations of historical fantasy are made for television, such as the
2001 miniseries of The Mists of Avalon on TNT.
Typical of historical fantasies adapted into films, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s
comic book series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2000) was simplified
significantly to become the 2003 movie of the same name. The original abounds in
jokes about the lives of Moore and O’Neill, both shown in nineteenth-century garb
on the back cover, the latter as an unconscious drunk. Stereotypically, the movie
begins with the League run by a gallant Alan Quartermain. In humorous contrast
to its title, the original series begins with the League run by its one woman member,
whereas its Quartermain is almost completely incapacitated by opium addiction. In
other words, the balance between conservative and liberal, though common in writ-
ten historical fantasy, tends to tip toward the conservative in cinematic adaptations.
Selected Authors. Aside from those formulaic writers not worth treating any-
where, the authors of historical fantasy tend to be as original as erudite and move
from genre to genre, and thus many are found in other sections of this encyclopedia
as well. Although obviously there is not room to treat all historical fantasists here,
six may stand as representatives of the various types: Orson Scott Card, Stephen
King, Neil Gaiman, Anne Rice, Diana Paxson, and Judith Tarr.
A major figure with a largely American focus, Orson Scott Card has through his
Alvin Maker series provided a major rethinking of Joseph Smith’s nineteenth cen-
tury, a world of angels and other supernatural forces, where Card can play out the
tensions between his conservative politics and his imaginative empathy with people
of all sorts. One of the primary voices in the series is the real British poet William
Blake, an extreme liberal (if not radical) and thus a challenge for Card to integrate
436 HISTORICAL FANTASY

into his conservative worldview, which he does with his own version of Blake as an
American. In addition to the Alvin Maker series, Card has also contributed to his-
torical fantasy through his Enchantment (1999), a retelling of Sleeping Beauty in a
relatively realistic, tenth-century Russian setting. A modern, American Jewish grad-
uate student finds himself in the middle ages, when Christianity and paganism
warred. Naturally, Card is more sympathetic to the Christian side than are neo-
pagan authors, but he also includes virtuous Jewish characters, just as his Alvin
Maker series evidences religious sympathy for Native Americans (perhaps because
the Book of Mormon alleges their descent from various peoples mentioned in the
Bible). Critical studies of Card include Michael Collings’s In the Image of God:
Theme, Characterization, and Landscape in the Fiction of Orson Scott Card (1990),
Collings’s Storyteller: The Official Orson Scott Card Bibliography and Guide (2001),
and Edith Tyson’s Orson Scott Card: Writer of the Terrible Choice (2003). Often
compared to C.S. Lewis as a Christian apologist and to Stephen King as a depicter of
gritty reality, Card has been a teacher of creative writing whose own How to Write
Science Fiction and Fantasy (1990) is also useful as a guide to his work.
Although Stephen King writes primarily within the horror genre, his most impor-
tant work to date, the seven-volume Dark Tower series, takes places in multiple uni-
verses, including ours. The real-world setting includes so many historical allusions
that Robin Furth’s concordance to the series devotes four pages of continuous type
just to listing those allusions in volumes 5 through 7 (Furth 2005, vol. 2, 433–436).
This large real history interweaves with the vast history of other worlds and charac-
ters from several of King’s best-known novels. In its final form, the series is King’s
attempt to pull his life together after a hit-and-run accident almost destroyed it. Based
on a long interview with King when he was just beginning his Dark Tower series,
Douglas Winter’s Stephen King: The Art of Darkness (1986) offers a meticulous,
uncontroversial presentation of facts up to that time. For discussion of the later part
of King’s career, see Furth’s Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: A Concordance
(2003–2005) and Michael Collings’s Stephen King Is Richard Bachman (2007).
Although Card, King, and Gaiman all depict the graphically repugnant and teach
comparable morals, Gaiman—a secularized Jewish, British American—is even more
of an outsider than the others and perhaps thus less prone to stereotypes. For King,
the unconscious, imaged usually as some horror working its way throughout history,
tends to be a place of barely repressed violence and guilt. For Card, the unconscious
can connect one to either the diabolical or the divine. For Gaiman, conscious and
unconscious form a continuum, shading one into another, frightening and beautiful
at once. His Sandman series was his training in historical fantasy, which has since
assumed various forms, notably the subterranean London detritus of Neverwhere
(1998), the melting pot of mythologies in American Gods (2002) and Anansi Boys
(2006), and the fairy-tale, nineteenth-century ambience of Stardust (2001). Studies of
his work include Stephen Rauch’s Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman” and Joseph
Campbell: In Search of the Modern Myth (2003) and Joe Sanders’s The Sandman
Papers: An Exploration of the Sandman Mythology (2006).
Even further from traditional morality than Gaiman (despite her loudly
announced return to Christianity), Anne Rice’s books are the antithesis of King’s
tendency to frighten people into principles. For her supernaturals, evil is an
unavoidable and therefore forgivable sadomasochism, often with blasphemous asso-
ciations, as when the pharaoh usually considered the villain of Exodus is treated as
a hero (in The Mummy or Ramses the Damned, 1991), when Lestat drinks blood
 HISTORICAL FANTASY 437

flowing from the crucified Christ (in Memnoch the Devil, 1997), or when the young
Jesus finds himself miraculously murdering his playmates at the opening of Christ
the Lord: Out of Egypt (2005). Lushly described and often well researched, exotic
historical settings are her ways of evoking erotic aspects of the unconscious. Written
in close cooperation with Rice, three particularly useful books on her are Katherine
Ramsland’s Prism of the Night: A Biography of Anne Rice (1994), The Vampire
Companion (1995), and The Witches’ Companion (1996), treating the Mayfair
witches, whose saga interweaves with the Vampire Chronicles.
Diana Paxson deserves mention as one of the most prominent voices of neo-
paganism in historical fantasy. Whereas Paxson’s friend Marion Zimmer Bradley
was a priest of a Pre-Nicene Catholic Church (which presented a common ground
between Christianity and paganism), Paxson has been more closely connected to
Norse pagan traditions, as with her how-to book Taking Up the Runes: A
Complete Guide to Using Runes in Spells, Rituals, Divination, and Magic (2005).
Perhaps best known for her postapocalyptic Westria series of high fantasy, she is
also prolific in historical fantasy, with series on the Nibelungen and Arthurian leg-
ends, the latter close enough to Mists of Avalon so that she collaborated with
Bradley in writing the prequel to it, Priestess of Avalon (2001), which Paxson fin-
ished after Bradley’s death in 1999. Since then, Paxson has continued the series.
According to a 1989 interview with Raymond H. Thompson, Paxson saw her
Arthuriana as more historically accurate than Bradley’s, in that Paxson has been
researching tirelessly since her graduate-school days in order to combine high
verisimilitude with occult theories. For further information on her life and writings,
see the Gale Reference Team’s online biography of her, and for Paxson’s cultural
context, see Eric Davis’s and Michael Rauner’s The Visionary State: A Journey
Through California’s Spiritual Landscape (2006).
To date, Judith Tarr has found time amid her output in other genres (some under
such pseudonyms as Caitlin Brennan) for 13 historical fantasies. The quality of her
writing ranges from excellent to formulaic, and she is better at characterization than
plotting. At her best, however, she has helped to shape the genre, by finding new
ways to reconcile fantasy with history. Her Hound and Falcon series demonstrated
how invented, magical characters could be interpolated into famous events as
alleged advisors to the great. Her Norman series (beginning with Rite of Conquest,
2004) showed how to make the famous themselves wizards—what she does to
William the Conqueror and his wife Matilda. According to Tarr’s Web site, her pri-
mary interest seems to be raising Lipizzans, with prolific authorship paying the bills.
In a posting on Amazon.com, she has explained that she writes under various names
because bookstores stock fewer and fewer of her works, given that their sales are
average rather than outstanding. Thomson Gale has a biography of her, and she is
mentioned from time to time in such journals as Mythlore (e.g., Kondratiev 1989,
53, 57). At her less spectacular, however, her situation resembles that of those count-
less historical fantasists who rewrite the past prolifically without astronomical
remuneration.

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JAMES WHITLARK

HISTORICAL FICTION
Definition. Historical fiction is fiction that is set, completely or in large part, in the
past. The past in question must be historical from the author’s point of view—that
is, a novel written during the 1930s about the Great Depression is not historical; one
written in the twenty-first century is. There is no universal agreement on how far in
the past a novel’s setting must be to be considered historical, but common usage of
the term suggests a gap of several decades. The Historical Novel Society, for
instance, defines historical fiction as being at least 50 years in the past and specifies
that the work be done from research, not from the memory of the author.
The term historical fiction is most often used for works where the historical
setting is crucial to the action, not simply incidental. Some historical fiction is con-
cerned with famous people and events, and many works incorporate real historical
figures as characters. Other works focus on more ordinary people and purely fic-
tional characters. Most writers of historical fiction try to portray history accurately,
 HISTORICAL FICTION 441

As fiction closely related to reality, historical fiction is sometimes associated with

documentary fiction and the nonfiction novel. As narrative about the past, historical fiction
shares characteristics with historical nonfiction, biography, and autobiography and
memoir. And because almost any genre can be set in the past, historical fiction overlaps
with many other kinds of fiction: romance novels, science fiction, time travel fiction,
mystery fiction, thrillers, western literature, adventure fiction, Christian fiction, and
fantasy literature. Historical fiction is a thriving area in children’s and young adult lit-
erature and a small but growing subset of graphic novels.

incorporating factual information about known people and events and creating fic-
tional characters who live plausibly in the era they inhabit. Still, historical fiction,
like all fiction, requires invention. Writers of historical fiction frequently extrapolate
from what is known, invent inner lives and daily details for historical figures, imag-
inatively fill in gaps in the historical record, and illuminate what might have been.
Some historical fiction intentionally alters or plays with history. Postmodern his-
torical fiction questions the notions of historical truth and linear narrative. Alternate
histories present a counterfactual world: what might have happened if some event
in history had been different. Another form of historical fiction closely related to sci-
ence fiction is the time-slip or time travel fiction, in which characters—by accident
or design—find themselves transported to another historical time. Other historical
novels revise or reimagine previous literary works—altering endings, creating
sequels, or inventing lives for previously minor characters.
Historical fiction often connects the present and past or links historical periods,
sometimes by including multiple times in different threads of the narrative. Historical
novels frequently suggest ideas about the importance of the past, the effect of the past
on the present, and the nature of history itself.
History. The first wildly successful and popular historical novels read by Americans
were written by the British writer Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), whose 1814 novel
Waverly inspired generations of readers and historical novelists. Year after year, Scott’s
historical romances were among the best-selling books in the United States. By the
1820s and 1830s, with Scott’s great popularity, a proliferation of American historical
societies, and talk swirling of American literary independence, it is not surprising that
there was demand to “let us have our own Waverly” (Hart 1950, 79). One of the first
novelists to apply was James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), whose book The Spy
(1821) was set during the American Revolution. Cooper followed with a series of five
historical frontier novels, entitled The Leatherstocking Tales featuring Natty
Bumppo—The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827),
The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841)—and did indeed join Scott on the
best-seller lists.
Cooper’s historical themes—the American fight for independence, the rugged out-
doorsman in the wilderness, and the encounter of settlers with Native Americans—
also preoccupied other historical novelists of the early nineteenth century. According
to James Hart, in the 1820s “almost a third of the novels written by Americans dealt
with the colonial period or the Revolution” (1950, 80). Among the novels explor-
ing contact between colonists and Native Americans were Hope Leslie (1827) by
Catherine Maria Sedgwick (1789–1867) and Hobomok (1824) by Lydia Maria
Child (1802–1880). Some of the most popular historical novels of the 1830s were
442 HISTORICAL FICTION

the American Revolution novel Horse-Shoe Robinson (1835) by John Pendleton

Kennedy (1795–1870); The Yemassee (1835) by William Gilmore Simms
(1806–1870), an account of Native American wars in colonial South Carolina; The
Green Mountain Boys (1839) by Daniel Pierce Thompson (1795–1868), a novel of
colonial Vermont and the American Revolution; and the wilderness romance Nick
of the Woods (1837) by Robert Montgomery Bird (1806–1854).
Some of the most respected authors of the middle and late nineteenth century
wrote historical novels. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s (1804–1864) The Scarlet Letter
(1850) is set two centuries in the past, examining Puritan society and the relation-
ship of the past to the present. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), while most
famous for her contemporary work Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), also wrote an his-
torical novel set in the eighteenth century, The Minister’s Wooing (1859). Herman
Melville (1819–1891), author of Moby-Dick (1851), wrote an historical novel
about an American Revolution hero, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855).
Mark Twain’s (1835–1910) best-known book, Huckleberry Finn (1884), is a
prime example of a work that challenges the definition of historical fiction. While
the setting is within Twain’s lifetime, the novel is set several decades in the past dur-
ing a very different historical time, and the historical setting is integral to the plot
and meaning of the novel. Twain’s novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s
Court (1889), is an early example of both time slip and alternate history fiction, as
the protagonist, a contemporary man, mysteriously finds himself in sixth-century
England and immediately begins changing history. And a lesser-known work by
Twain, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), is a forerunner of a popular
contemporary trend: a novel presented as memoir or biography—in this case a fic-
tional “translation” of a nonexistent account by Joan of Arc’s secretary.
The most popular historical novel of the late nineteenth century was Ben-Hur
(1880), written by Lew Wallace (1807–1905), a politician and former Union Army
general. Set in Palestine and Rome during the time of Christ, the book became one
of the great best sellers in American history and a cultural phenomenon: “an edition
was issued under the sponsorship of the Holy See and another was put out in a
printing of a million copies by Sears, Roebuck. Probably no other American novel
has had either of these distinctions; certainly none has had both” (Hart 1950, 164).
The Civil War inspired a new generation of historical fiction in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, and Civil War fiction has been one of the predomi-
nant forms of American historical fiction ever since. The Red Badge of Courage
(1895) by Stephen Crane (1871–1900) presents the war from the point of view of
a new recruit seeing battles and death for the first time. The early twentieth century
saw Civil War and Reconstruction novels by a wide range of writers, including
Thomas Dixon (1864–1946), Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945), and William Faulkner
(1897–1962). Regional historical fiction was also popular around the turn of the
century, especially novels of the Old South and of the West. Owen Wister’s
(1860–1938) The Virginian (1901) became a best seller and set the model for many
western historical novels to come, and throughout the first third of the century,
Zane Grey (1872–1939) published one western after another, remaining almost
continuously on the best-seller lists.
In the first half of the twentieth century, historical fiction was both popular and
critically acclaimed. Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) published The Bridge of San
Luis Rey (1927), the story of the community affected by a bridge disaster in
eighteenth-century Peru. The most popular book of 1928, The Bridge of San Luis
 HISTORICAL FICTION 443

Rey won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Anthony Adverse, the sprawling pica-
resque tale of a hero wandering through Europe, was published by Hervey Allen
(1889–1949) in 1933. Margaret Mitchell (1900–1949) created even more of a cul-
tural phenomenon with her Civil War saga Gone with the Wind (1936), which
became one of the all-time best sellers and won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Kathleen Winsor (1919–2003) also created a sensation with her 1944 historical
romance of Restoration England, Forever Amber, which was widely popular in spite
of, or perhaps because of, its racy reputation.
In the second half of the twentieth century, several novelists achieved popular suc-
cess with wide-ranging historical epics or family sagas. James Michener (1907–1997)
published many best-selling historical novels, often covering hundreds or even thou-
sands of years and usually focused on a particular place. Hawaii (1958); The Source
(1965), spanning 12,000 years of Middle East history; Centennial (1974), on the his-
tory of Colorado; Chesapeake (1978); The Covenant (1980), covering 15 centuries in
South Africa; Poland (1983); Texas (1985); Alaska (1988); Caribbean (1989); and
Mexico (1992) all follow this approach. Howard Fast (1914–2003) wrote several
novels about the American Revolution, including Citizen Tom Paine (1943), and was
the author of Spartacus (1950), the novel about a Roman slave rebellion that became
the basis of the acclaimed 1960 film. Fast also completed a six-volume saga titled The
Immigrants, which follows one family through most of the twentieth century. John
Jakes (1932–) has published several series of historical novels, frequently centered on
a particular family. The Kent Family Chronicles, eight novels published from 1974 to
1980, trace one family’s adventures from the American Revolution through the
nineteenth century. The North and South trilogy—North and South (1982), Love and
War (1984), and Heaven and Hell (1987)—follows two families through several gen-
erations, culminating with the Civil War and Reconstruction. Among his many other
books, Jakes has also published a two-volume saga of an immigrant family, Homeland
(1993) and American Dreams (1998); California Gold (1989), set in the late nineteenth
century; and Charleston (2002), a work spanning several generations in South
Carolina.
Gore Vidal (1925–), a significant late twentieth-century writer, is best known as an
historical novelist for his seven-volume American Chronicles series, beginning with
Washington D.C. (1967), which covers 1937 to 1952. Vidal followed with Burr
(1973), presenting an alternate view of the founding fathers; 1876 (1976); Lincoln
(1984); Empire (1987) and Hollywood (1990), both set in the early twentieth century;
and The Golden Age (2000), completing the narrative from 1939 to the present.
Among his many other novels, Vidal has written two historical novels set in the
ancient world, Julian (1964) and Creation (1981), and a time-travel historical novel,
The Smithsonian Institution (1998), based in 1939.
The authors of African American literature figures prominently in late twentieth-cen-
tury historical fiction. As Keith Byerman notes, “while there has been an interest in his-
torical narrative as long as blacks have been writing fiction, this is the first generation
to make it the dominant mode” (2005, 1). Jubilee (1966) by Margaret Walker
(1915–1998) was one of the first and best novels to tell the story of slavery and eman-
cipation from a female point of view. Alice Walker (1944–) focused on the lives and
voices of black women in the early twentieth century in her Pulitzer Prize–winning The
Color Purple (1982). Portraying two historical women, one black and one white,
Dessa Rose (1986), by Sherley Anne Williams (1944–1999), is frequently seen as a
response to The Confessions of Nat Turner (1968) by William Styron (1925–2006).
444 HISTORICAL FICTION

David Bradley (1950–) based The Chaneysville Incident (1981), winner of the
PEN/Faulkner Award, on a historian’s quest to document a tragedy. In his 1982 novel,
Oxherding Tale, Charles Johnson (1948–) combines new versions of slave narrative
and picaresque adventure; in his 1990 novel Middle Passage, he uses a similar melding
of genres to tell the story of a stowaway on an 1830 slave ship; in Dreamer (1998),
Johnson imagines a double for Martin Luther King Jr. All three novels mix fact and fic-
tion, storytelling and philosophy. Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison (1931–) has writ-
ten several historical novels, including Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise
(1998). Beloved, set after the Civil War but entwined with prewar memories and the
nature of memory itself, won the Pulitzer Prize; in 2006 the New York Times named it
the best novel of the last 25 years.
Several novelists associated with the late twentieth century’s postmodern move-
ment have written historical novels that challenge the notion of a firm boundary—
or perhaps any boundary at all—between fact and fiction. Postmodern writers
express skepticism about the possibility of stable knowledge or representation, fre-
quently using techniques such as self-referentiality, unconventional narrative struc-
ture, and mixtures of genres, pastiche, and parody. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) by
John Barth (1930–) is a metafictional mock epic of the founding of Maryland, a
work purportedly written by Ebenezer Cook—the name of a real poet who did
write a poem called “The Sot-Weed Factor.” In Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Thomas
Pynchon (1937–) uses the historical moment of World War II to build a complex
allusive narrative that has challenged a generation of readers. His 1997 novel Mason
& Dixon is a saga dense with allusions, anachronism, and complexity, as the two
surveyors journey through eighteenth-century America. In Against the Day (2006),
Pynchon turns to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, again mar-
shalling a wide array of characters, ideas, and moments. Among Don DeLillo’s
(1936–) many novels, two stand out for their use of history and interweaving of fact
and fiction: Libra (1988), an alternate version of President Kennedy’s assassination,
centered on Lee Harvey Oswald, and Underworld (1997), a novel of the Cold War,
baseball, and the threat of nuclear war.
In his essay “False Documents,” E.L. Doctorow (1931–) contends that “there is
no fiction or non-fiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only
narrative” (1983, 26). Whether considered postmodern or not, much historical
fiction of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries blends fact and fiction,
interweaves multiple narratives, and challenges conventional notions of time, mem-
ory, and truth.
Trends and Themes (Since 2000). In the twenty-first century, while historical
fiction has covered a wide range of focuses and approaches, certain trends are
notable.
Historical fiction is frequently set in periods of tumult, such as wars and disasters,
or in a time period one or two generations before the author’s life. Many recent his-
torical novels are set during the Civil War or World War II, with a smaller number
set in the American Revolution and World War I.
Jeff Shaara (1952–) covers the span of the American Revolutionary period from
1770 to its conclusion in two best-selling novels, Rise to Rebellion (2001) and The
Glorious Cause (2002). Former President Jimmy Carter (1924–) published an his-
torical novel, The Hornet’s Nest (2003), focusing on the American Revolution in
1770s Georgia, and Robert Morgan (1944–) sets Brave Enemies (2003), with its
runaway cross-dressing heroine, in North Carolina in the same era.
 HISTORICAL FICTION 445

In three Civil War novels—The Black Flower (1997), The Year of Jubilo (2000),
and The Judas Field (2006)—Howard Bahr (1946–) describes the experience of
ordinary soldiers in Mississippi and Tennessee. Also focusing on the South is James
Lee Burke (1936–) in his Louisiana novel White Doves at Morning (2002). Charles
Frazier uses the Odyssey as his model for portraying a soldier’s journey home in
Cold Mountain (1997), a phenomenal best seller and winner of the National Book
Award. In the Fall (2000) by Jeffrey Lent, The Night Inspector (1999) by Frederick
Busch (1941–2006), and Paradise Alley (2002) by Kevin Baker (1958–) all focus on
the war’s effect on ordinary people. The Pulitzer Prize winner March (2005) by
Geraldine Brooks (1955–) and the PEN/Faulkner winner The March (2005) by E.L.
Doctorow each follow one famous person, the fictional Mr. March of Little Women
and the historical General Sherman, respectively. Jeff Shaara’s Gods and Generals
(1996) and The Last Full Measure (1998) paint a broad, action-filled picture of the
war before and after Gettysburg—together with The Killer Angels (1974) by
Shaara’s father Michael Shaara (1928–88), these novels form a Civil War trilogy.
Two notable World War I novels are Jeff Shaara’s To the Last Man: A Novel of the
First World War (2004) and John Rolfe Gardiner’s epistolary tale of an American doc-
tor, Somewhere in France (1999). Many more recent historical novels have focused on
World War II, either the war itself or its effects on the home front. A World Away
(1998) by Stewart O’Nan (1961–), the alternate history The Plot Against America
(2004) by Philip Roth (1933–), and Gore Vidal’s The Golden Age are all set in the
United States, depicting the war’s effects on families as well as its effects on national
politics. When the Emperor Was Divine (2002) by Julie Otsuka (1962–) follows the
lives of a family in a Japanese American internment camp. Novels by Leslie Epstein
(1938–), including Pandaemonium (1997) and The Eighth Wonder of the World
(2006), mix fictional and real characters, Hollywood and the Holocaust, architecture
and Mussolini. Centered on the fighting of the war itself are Europe Central (2005)
by William T. Vollmann, winner of the National Book Award; Cryptonomicon (1999)
by Neal Stephenson (1959–); and the more conventional narrative The Rising Tide:
A Novel of World War II (2006) by Jeff Shaara.
These works illuminate the idea that “by choosing a setting half a century or so
before the present, the creative writer can capture the elusive relationship between
the individual and society at a moment when a particular fragment of the past is
slipping over the horizon from memory into history” (Morris-Suzuki 2005, 44–45).
In addition to World War II, this time frame now includes the civil rights movement.
Two notable recent novels are the aforementioned Dreamer by Johnson and Four
Spirits (2003) by Sena Jeter Naslund (1942–), a novel of the Birmingham church
bombing in 1963.
In addition to common time periods, contemporary historical novels share several
common approaches to storytelling. These approaches include the following:
centering the narrative on one historical person, sometimes in the form of a journal,
letters, or pseudo-memoir; creating a mix of real and fictional characters; using mul-
tiple threads, storylines, or time periods; mixing or crossing boundaries between dif-
ferent genres; and creating alternate history or literature.
A large number of twenty-first century historical novels center on one historical
figure and sometimes take the form of a purported memoir, biography, or autobiog-
raphy. The range of figures is a microcosm of the topics and themes of recent histor-
ical fiction. Some are American presidents or national figures, as in Abe (2000) by
Richard Slotkin (1942–); Scandalmonger (2000), about Alexander Hamilton and
446 HISTORICAL FICTION

Thomas Jefferson, by William Safire (1929–); and Lucy (2003) by Ellen Feldman, a
novel about Lucy Mercer’s affair with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Novels about
American civil rights leaders include Cloudsplitter (1998) by Russell Banks (1940–),
about John Brown; Johnson’s Dreamer (1998), about Martin Luther King; and
Strivers Row (2006) by Kevin Baker about Malcolm Little, later Malcolm X. Several
novels involve other world leaders, including two first-person novels about Marie
Antoinette, Sena Jeter Naslund’s Abundance (2006) and Kathryn Davis’s (1946–)
Versailles (2002); Karen Essex’s Kleopatra (2001); Brooks Hansen’s (1965–) The
Monsters of St. Helena (2003) about Napoleon writing his memoirs; and Lily Tuck’s
The News from Paraguay (2004), on the dictator Francisco Lopez. Norman Mailer’s
(1923–) novel The Castle in the Forest (2007) follows this pattern with a twist,
telling Adolf Hitler’s story from the point of view of the devil.
Novels centered on a scholar, scientist, or doctor include two by T. Coraghessan
Boyle (1948–)—The Road to Wellville (1993) about Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, inven-
tor of corn flakes, and The Inner Circle (2004) about sex researcher Alfred Kinsey—
as well as Freud’s “Megalomania” (2000) by Israel Rosenfield (1939–). Writers,
musicians, and artists featured in historical fiction include Virginia Woolf in The
Hours (1998) by Michael Cunningham (1952–); Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas
in The Book of Salt (2003) by Monique Truong (1968–); composer Gustav Mahler in
The Artist’s Wife (2001) by Max Phillips, narrated by Alma Mahler; composer Robert
Schumann in Longing (2000), a fictional biography, by J.D. Landis; and the architect
of Paris in Hausmann, or The Distinction (2001) by Paul LaFarge (1970–).
Whether featuring actual historical figures or purely fictional characters, many
recent novels are told in the form of letters, journals, or memoir, including, for exam-
ple, the Pulitzer Prize winner Gilead (2004) by Marilynne Robinson (1943–) and
One Last Look (2003) by Susanna Moore (1947–). Many novels, such as Charles
Frazier’s Thirteen Moons (2006), combine fictional characters with historical figures.
Other important trends include using multiple points of view, as in Master of the
Crossroads (2000) by Madison Smartt Bell (1957–); multiple narratives, generations,
and locations as in The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001) by Amy Tan (1952–); and
multiple genres, such as the mix of historical fiction and science fiction in Specimen
Days (2005) by Michael Cunningham. Ivan Doig’s (1939–) works, such as Prairie
Nocturne (2003) and The Whistling Season (2006), belong to both western literature
and historical fiction. Diana Gabaldon’s (1952–) Outlander series mixes historical
fiction, romance novel, and science fiction, defying genre classification.
One intriguing and genre-mixing branch of historical fiction is alternate (or alterna-
tive) history, “the branch of literature that concerns itself with history’s turning out
differently than what we know to be true” (Hellekson 2001, 1). One of the earliest
American novels that can be considered alternate history is Mark Twain’s A Connecti-
cut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Alternate history is related to science fiction in its
consideration of other worlds that in some sense reflect our own; some critics, in fact,
consider it a branch of science fiction, and some of its well-known practitioners are
classified as science fiction authors, including Philip Dick (1928–82), Harry Turtledove
(1949–), Orson Scott Card (1951–), and Connie Willis (1945–). A prominent recent
example of alternate history is Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, in which
Charles Lindbergh is elected president in 1940. Other recent novels that change or
invent history are Don DeLillo’s Libra, Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, Charles
Johnson’s Dreamer, William Safire’s Scandalmonger, and Michael Chabon’s (1963–)
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (2007).
 HISTORICAL FICTION 447

Even more than other forms of historical fiction, alternate history examines not
just historical events but the significance of history itself. According to Karen
Hellekson, “alternate history as a genre speculates about such topics as the nature
of time and linearity, the past’s link to the present, the present’s link to the future,
and the role of individuals in the history-making process” (2001, 4). Still there is
debate over whether alternate histories are really historical fiction because they
assume facts contrary to historical knowledge, and they are sometimes set in the
present or in an altered future. Another form of historical fiction often categorized
as science fiction is the time-slip or time travel fiction, in which characters find them-
selves transported to another historical time. Examples of time-slip historical fiction
include Kindred (1979) by Octavia Butler (1947–2006), Timeline (1999) by
Michael Crichton (1942–), and The Doomsday Book (1992), To Say Nothing of the
Dog (1997), and Lincoln’s Dreams (1988) by Connie Willis (1945–).
Other historical novels reinvent, revise, borrow characters from, or pay homage
to a previous literary work. Recent examples include The Hours by Michael
Cunningham, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway; Ahab’s Wife (1999) by
Sena Jeter Naslund, an exploration of the world left behind in Moby-Dick; and
March by Geraldine Brooks, a Civil War novel that focused on the father from
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.
Context and Issues. Contemporary historical fiction, not surprisingly, reflects
many problems and concerns of the twenty-first century, including war, disaster,
disease, discrimination, and scandals in politics and business. Many historical nov-
els involve the popular contemporary topics of science, technology, and invention.
Others center on the world of entertainment and sports. Historical fiction also
reflects growing cultural diversity in authors and subjects as well as concern with
issues of gender and sexuality.
Twenty-first century America is living in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, in
the midst of the Iraq war, and in the third decade of the AIDS struggle. One of the
first historical novels to include September 11 is Forever (2003) by Pete Hamill
(1935–), a New York City epic that begins in 1740. Other novels that confront dis-
aster and disease are In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden (2001) by Kathleen Cambor
(1948–) on the Johnstown flood of 1889; The Gates of the Alamo (2000) by
Stephen Harrigan (1948–); The Great Fire (2003) by the Australian American
writer Shirley Hazzard (1931–); Year of Wonders (2001), a novel of the bubonic
plague by another Australian American, Geraldine Brooks; A Prayer for the Dying
(1999) by O’Nan; and Sheri Holman’s The Dress Lodger (2000), set in London dur-
ing a cholera epidemic.
As Americans continue to wrestle with discrimination and debate topics such as
affirmative action, slavery has continued to be a compelling theme in historical nov-
els, including Banks’s Cloudsplitter; Bell’s Haitian trilogy; the Pulitzer Prize winner
The Known World (2003) by Edward P. Jones (1951–); Property (2003) by Valerie
Martin; and Walk through Darkness (2002) by David Anthony Durham (1969–).
Durham is also the author of Gabriel’s Story (2001), set in the aftermath of slavery
as settlers move west.
Political sexual scandals—a topic that led to the impeachment trial of President
Clinton in 1999—are featured in Feldman’s Lucy and Safire’s Scandalmonger. Busi-
ness scandals and mysteries—also much in the news—are at the center of David
Liss’s (1966–) novels set in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: A Conspiracy
of Paper (2000), The Coffee Trader (2003), and A Spectacle of Corruption (2004).
448 HISTORICAL FICTION

As the pace of scientific and technological innovation accelerates, writers of his-

torical fiction focus on the discoveries and inventions of the past. Andrea Barrett
(1954–) examines scientific exploration and conflicts in the National Book Award
winner Ship Fever and Other Stories (1996), The Voyage of the Narwhal (1998),
and Servants of the Map (2002). Scientific and mathematical conflicts and rivalries
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are crucial to the novels of Stephenson’s
Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver (2003), The Confusion (2004), and The System of the
World (2004), and code-making and breaking is at the heart of Cryptonomicon
(1999). Emily Barton (1969–) and Thomas Kelly (1961–) have each created novels
that look back on invention and building: a harness inventor in Barton’s The
Testament of Yves Gundron (2000), the dream of building a bridge to Manhattan
in Barton’s Brookland (2006), and the construction of the Empire State Building in
Kelly’s Empire Rising (2005).
Many recent historical novels have focused on the entertainment world, often mix-
ing entertainment with politics, war, or scandals—perhaps not surprising in an era
when baseball players testify before Congress and political leaders make documen-
tary films. DeLillo’s Underworld uses the story of a renowned baseball to frame a
postmodern narrative about the Cold War; Chabon creates comic book artists who
battle Nazism in the Pulitzer Prize winner The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &
Clay (2000); Glen David Gold (1964–) follows the aftermath of President Harding’s
participation in a magic show in Carter Beats the Devil (2001); Susan Sontag
(1933–2004) depicts a Polish actress who forms a utopian community in California
in In America (2000), winner of the National Book Award. Charley Rosen tackles
basketball and discrimination in The House of Moses All-Stars (1997) and basket-
ball and scandal in Barney Polan’s Game (1998), while Darin Strauss (1970–) inter-
weaves boxing, entertainment, and impersonation in The Real McCoy (2002).
As the United States has become more diverse, so have the authors of historical
fiction. Over the last several decades, African American authors, including the
Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, have been prominent in historical fiction.
Edward P. Jones, Jewell Parker Rhodes (1954–), and David Anthony Durham are
just a few of the African American authors who have published historical novels in
the twenty-first century. Asian American writers of historical fiction include Ha Jin
(1956–), Otsuka, Tan, and Truong. Hispanic American writers include Julia Alvarez
(1950–), author of In the Name of Salome (2000), and Sandra Cisneros (1954–),
author of Caramelo (2002).
Contemporary issues of gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, and family are
reflected in several recent historical works. Interest runs high in the life and work of
sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, as evidenced by the 2004 film and by Boyle’s historical
novel titled The Inner Circle. Transgender issues are reflected in David Ebershoff’s
(1969–) The Danish Girl (2000), an account of the transgendered artist who under-
went the first sex change operation in 1931, and in Jeffrey Eugenides’s (1960–)
Middlesex (2002), the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel depicting the history and life of
an intersexed protagonist.
Reception (and Adaptation). Historical fiction has been a popular American lit-
erary genre since the early nineteenth century. While every generation witnesses
declarations that the historical novel is pedestrian, obsolete, or even dead, histori-
cal novels have continued to thrive, among both literary authors and mass-market
publishers. Some writers, readers, and critics avoid the term “historical fiction,”
claiming, in effect, that a work is not an historical novel, but rather a novel about
 HISTORICAL FICTION 449

history. As Sarah Johnson has noted of late twentieth-century historical fiction,

“Historical fiction was everywhere, but nowhere. It had become the genre that
dared not speak its name” (2005, 3). Many reviews of historical novels omit the
term entirely, characterizing the work as a novel about memory, about the mean-
ing of the past, about time, but not as historical. Nevertheless, authors continue to
write historical novels, many are very popular, and a significant number receive
critical acclaim.
One measure of the acclaim received by writers of historical fiction is the number
of major prizes won by their books, and there is good evidence that we are in the
midst of an historical fiction renaissance. In the 10 years from 1997 to 2006, his-
torical novels (or novels about history) won 6 of the 10 Pulitzer Prizes for fiction;
indeed, two of the three 2006 finalists, the coincidentally named The March by E.L.
Doctorow and March by Geraldine Brooks, were historical. (Even the third finalist
was set a few decades in the past.) Over the same period, both the National Book
Award for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction were
awarded to historical novels at least half of the time.
In the twenty-first century, historical fiction is intertwined with a range of print,
film, broadcast, and electronic media. As Tessa Morris-Suzuki notes, “As the media
of historical expression multiply, so they increasingly interact with one another. His-
torical novels are made into films and TV mini-series; historical dramas on televi-
sion generate accompanying museum displays; Internet web sites are developed to
accompany historical documentaries” (2005, 16). Historical novels are frequently
adapted into other media, particularly film and television. At the same time, histor-
ical novels compete with original films, documentaries, graphic novels, Web sites,
and even games.
Film is especially well suited for historical narrative, sharing with the novel “the
ability to reconstruct the past in ways that engage the empathy of the audience”
(Morris-Suzuki 2005, 127). Historical novels have been popular material for film
adaptations of books from the early days of Hollywood. Ben-Hur, which inspired a
Broadway stage version in 1899, has been adapted on film four times (so far), begin-
ning with an unauthorized silent version in 1907 and including the Academy
Award-winning 1959 version. The D.W. Griffith silent classic Birth of a Nation
(1915), “a film whose brilliance of cinematic technique is exceeded only by the
grotesqueness of its racist message” (Morris-Suzuki, 127) was based on Thomas
Dixon’s The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905). Owen
Wister’s The Virginian was first adapted as a silent film in 1914 by Cecil B. DeMille;
it has since been readapted as a film in 1923, 1929 (with Gary Cooper), and 1946
and in 2000 as a television movie.
Most of the blockbuster historical novels of the early twentieth century have been
adapted at least once into equally successful films. Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis
Rey has been made into films in 1929, 1944, and 2004. The 1936 film version of
Anthony Adverse won four Academy Awards and was nominated for Best Picture.
The film version of Gone with the Wind, based on Mitchell’s novel, won 10 Academy
Awards, including Best Picture. Forever Amber, the literary sensation of the 1940s,
also became a popular 1947 film.
The multigenerational sagas published during the late twentieth century were espe-
cially well suited to the development of a new form of television programming: the
miniseries. Alex Haley’s (1921–92) historical novel Roots: The Saga of an American
Family (1976) was transformed into a 1977 miniseries—critically acclaimed and one
450 HISTORICAL FICTION

of the highest-rated programs ever. Byerman notes that by “creating a saga of a black
family with a heroic ancestor, Alex Haley brought African American experience
within the framework of mass culture” (2005, 16). Michener’s Centennial was pro-
duced as a popular television miniseries that aired in 1978 and 1979. The television
miniseries The Bastard (1978) was based on the first volume in Jakes’s Kent Family
Chronicles, and each book in Jakes’s North and South trilogy became a television
miniseries, in 1985, 1986, and 1994, respectively. The later twentieth century also
saw a resurgence of successful films based on American historical novels, including
Ragtime in 1981, The Color Purple in 1982, Gettysburg in 1993 (based on Michael
Shaara’s The Killer Angels), The Road to Wellville in 1994, and Beloved in 1998.
In the twenty-first century, interest in historical feature films—adaptations of his-
torical novels, original features, and documentaries—continues. Recent adaptations
of historical novels include The Hours (2002), nominated for an Academy Award
for best picture; Cold Mountain (2003), based on the Frazier novel; and Memoirs
of a Geisha (2005), based on the 1997 Arthur Golden (1956–) novel. These adap-
tations fit into a larger trend of historically based films ranging from the Academy
Award–winning Titanic (1997) to the documentary miniseries Band of Brothers
(2001), based on Stephen Ambrose’s nonfiction book.
Selected Authors. Among the many fine writers of historical fiction in the
twenty-first century, several merit particular attention for their accomplishments
in the field and their ongoing work.
Kevin Baker (1958–) is the author of four well-received historical novels, two
since the turn of the century. His first, Sometimes You See It Coming (1993), is

THE GRAPHIC HISTORICAL NOVEL AND MEMOIR

The graphic novel is a vibrant and growing form of popular literature, blending text and art.
While most people are familiar with superhero comics, historical topics have been treated
since at least the mid-twentieth century, beginning with short vignettes of heroes in history
and developing, by the late twentieth century, into full-fledged graphic novels, documentaries,
and memoirs. “Comic books are a very important medium of historical communication in
many parts of the world, and, despite growing competition from electronic media, continue
to play a vital role in shaping popular images of the past. The comic also reaches audiences
who may seldom read academic history texts or historical novels” (Morris-Suzuki 2005, 204).
In the late twentieth century, some of the most acclaimed historical graphic novels were
Maus (1986) by Art Spiegelman (1948–), the Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust narrative; Kings
in Disguise by James Vance (1953–) and Dan Burr (1951–), set amid riots in 1932 Detroit;
Stuck Rubber Baby (1995) by Howard Cruse (1944–), exploring the 1960s civil rights move-
ments for African Americans and gay people; The Jew of New York (1999) by Ben Katchor
(1951–), set in 1830; and 300 (1999) by Frank Miller (1957–), an account of the Battle of
Thermopylae in ancient Greece. Noteworthy twenty-first century historical graphic novels
include both fiction and memoir: Berlin: City of Stones (2000) by Jason Lutes (1967–), set in
Weimar Berlin; The Golem’s Mighty Swing (2002) by James Sturm (1965–), about a Jewish barn-
storming baseball team in the 1920s; The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (2002) by Kim Deitch
(1944–), about an animator in the 1930s; Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories (2003) by
Gilbert Hernandez (1957–), a multigenerational saga set in Latin America; Fun Home: A Family
Tragicomic (2006) by Alison Bechdel (1960–), on growing up gay in the 1960s and 1970s; and
We Are on Our Own (2006) by Miriam Katin (1942–), an autobiographically based account of
a woman hiding with her daughter in Nazi-occupied Hungary.
 HISTORICAL FICTION 451

steeped in baseball history, with many of the characters based on real players. In
Dreamland (1999), Baker combines fictional characters and historical figures in a
panorama of life and corruption in early twentieth-century New York City. Delving
further into the city’s past, Baker sets Paradise Alley during New York City’s 1863
draft riots, as Irish residents violently protested a war they feared would lead to the
loss of their jobs to freed slaves. Further exploring the themes of race and violence,
Strivers Row (2006) is set in 1943 Harlem and features as a character the young
Malcolm Little who would become Malcolm X. Baker creates vivid characters, enter-
taining stories, and themes—race, immigration, violence, corruption—that resonate
in the twenty-first century. Critics—sometimes comparing his work to Doctorow’s—
praise his novels for their intelligence, imagination, and historical detail.
Andrea Barrett (1954–) has combined her expertise in biology and history to
create several works of historical fiction related to science and exploration. After
writing several novels centered on contemporary families, Barrett’s first historical
work was Ship Fever and Other Stories (1996), a collection of short fiction revolv-
ing around nineteenth-century science and medicine. Continuing that focus, The
Voyage of the Narwhal (1998), narrated by a cousin of Charles Darwin, tells the
story of a fictional expedition to the Arctic from 1845 to 1847. Another collection
of short fiction, Servants of the Map (2002), ranges widely through history and
geography and features the reappearance of several characters, and relatives of
characters, from the previous works. Barrett’s scientific historical fiction has been
widely acclaimed, including a National Book Award for Ship Fever. According to
Michiko Kakutani (2002), she writes “as persuasively about the mysteries of sci-
ence as she does about the mysteries of the human heart.”
Barrett has spoken about the need for thorough research, noting that the writer,
like the explorer, does not know at the outset what the final route will be: “I could
never know beforehand what might be useful, or where the things I found might
lead me” (Barrett 2001, 508).
Madison Smartt Bell (1957–), before turning to historical fiction, had established
a reputation as a talented novelist portraying complex relationships and characters
in contemporary, often urban, settings. His breakthrough as a novelist, and as a
writer of historical fiction, came with All Souls’ Rising (1995), a rich, complex, vio-
lent work about the slave rebellion in Haiti that began in 1791. One historical fig-
ure in that novel, the leader Touissaint L’Ouverture, becomes the central character
in the book that continues the story, Master of the Crossroads (2000). Bell com-
pletes the trilogy with The Stone That the Builder Refused (2004), following the rev-
olution to its inevitable conclusion. Bell’s work has been praised for thorough
research, rich detail, and his use of multiple voices and perspectives; included in the
rich detail is horrifying violence, too much for some readers. Bell has criticized min-
imalist fiction and has been praised by John Vernon (1995) for being “refreshingly
ambitious and maximalist,” meaning not just that his work is big, but that it is
detailed, vivid, and complex.
T. Coraghessan Boyle (1948–) is the author of a wide range of novels and short
fiction, including five historical novels; he has said, “Moving back and forth keeps
me alive” (Ermelino 2006, 25). Boyle’s first novel, Water Music (1981), involves two
explorers, one historical and one fictional, at the turn of the nineteenth century.
World’s End (1988), winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, follows three families
through multiple time frames from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries.
His next three historical novels all feature a mixture of historical figures and
452 HISTORICAL FICTION

invented characters. The Road to Wellville (1993) satirizes contemporary health and
self-improvement crazes with a fictionalized version of the early twentieth-century
sanitarium run by Dr. John Kellogg, inventor of Corn Flakes. Another novel set in
the early twentieth century, Riven Rock (1998), is based on a real married couple,
Stanley McCormick, son of the inventor, and Katherine Dexter, a women’s rights
activist. The Inner Circle (2004) tells the story of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey’s
research and relationships from the perspective of one of his assistants. While crit-
ics differ on whether his characters are fully realized, Boyle is universally praised for
his invention, humor, and deft use of language. He has been one of the most signif-
icant writers of twenty-first century historical fiction.
E.L. Doctorow (1931–) has been one of the most prolific, influential, and con-
troversial historical novelists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Doctorow first showed his affinity for history in the western Welcome to Hard
Times (1960) and his variation on the Rosenberg executions, The Book of Daniel
(1971). But it was Ragtime, the best-selling novel of 1975, that solidified both his
popular reputation and his influence. Ragtime broke new ground in the postmod-
ern historical novel by interweaving multiple plots and featuring a mix of fictional
and historical characters—including Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini, Sigmund
Freud, Carl Jung, and Henry Ford. Doctorow, always concerned with economic and
political issues, followed Ragtime with three novels set during the Great Depression:
Loon Lake (1980); World’s Fair (1985), winner of the National Book Award; and
Billy Bathgate (1989), winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book
Critics Circle Award. Several of Doctorow’s works are set in and around New York
City, including Billy Bathgate and The Waterworks (1994), a sort of gothic nine-
teenth-century mystery. In his widely acclaimed The March (2005), winner of the
PEN/Faulkner Award, Doctorow applies his creative imagination and interweaving
of narratives to an iconic American episode, General Sherman’s march through
Georgia during the Civil War.
Doctorow has been both praised and criticized for his postmodern approach to
historical fiction, an approach that blurs the distinction between fact and fiction.
According to Doctorow, “History is a kind of fiction in which we live and hope to
survive, and fiction is a kind of speculative history, perhaps a superhistory, by which
the available data for the composition is seen to be greater and more various in its
sources than the historian supposes” (1983, 25). Where the historical record is
incomplete, Doctorow imaginatively fills in the gaps in ways that challenge the
reader’s assumptions.
David Anthony Durham (1969–) is an African American writer whose three his-
torical novels have won him wide acclaim. His first published novel, Gabriel’s Story
(2001), is set in the period after the Civil War as his teenage protagonist makes his
way west, eventually joining a group of cowboys. Set before the Civil War, Walk
through Darkness (2002) also traces a journey, this time of a fugitive slave and the
man hired to pursue him. Durham’s third novel, Pride of Carthage (2005), tells the
story of Hannibal’s march on Rome in the Second Punic War. Durham’s novels have
all been well received, with critics praising his perceptiveness and imagination and
noting his ability to range from quiet reflection to dramatic storytelling. Janet
Maslin (2002) writes, “Durham ultimately combines history and morality with a
dynamic intelligence.” Durham’s works raise complex issues. As he stated in an
interview with the Historical Novels Review, “the best works of historical fiction—
 HISTORICAL FICTION 453

Toni Morrison’s Beloved, for example—are not so much about providing answers
as they are about asking questions.”
Thomas Mallon (1951–) is the author of five historical novels and a critic and the-
orist of historical fiction. Mallon is known for the depth of his research and the breadth
of his subjects, which have taken him across centuries and from earth to space. His first
historical novel, Aurora 7 (1991), is an account of Scott Carpenter’s space mission
interwoven with the tale of a missing boy. The next two novels, Henry and Clara
(1994), a narrative of the couple who witnessed Lincoln’s assassination, and Dewey
Defeats Truman (1997), both connect political and personal worlds. Two Moons
(2000) is a nineteenth-century romance set at the United States Naval Observatory,
while Bandbox (2004) turns to a magazine rivalry in 1920s New York City.
Mallon is widely praised for his storytelling ability and historical accuracy; as Jay
Parini notes about Dewey Defeats Truman, he “always uses his research cleverly,
and the novel effortlessly summons the feel of a bygone era” (1997, 13). In “Writing
Historical Fiction,” Mallon stresses, “Getting things to look right is the historical
novelist’s paramount task” (2001, 288). Mallon sees the twenty-first century as the
age of historical fiction; as technology brings us closer together, perhaps uncom-
fortably so, Mallon writes in “The Historical Novelist’s Burden of Truth,” the “past
is the only place to which we can get away, and if I had one prediction for the mil-
lennium it would be that all of us, including novelists, shall be spending a lot of
time—more than ever before—looking backward” (2001, 295).
Robert Morgan (1944–) has published five historical novels, all set in his native
state of North Carolina. Known primarily as a poet for the first two decades of his
career, Morgan began writing historical fiction with The Hinterlands: A Mountain
Tale in Three Parts (1994), a story of pioneer life over three generations in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He followed with The Truest Pleasure
(1998), the story of a nineteenth-century marriage, and Gap Creek (1999), the novel
about turn-of-the-century farming life that greatly expanded Morgan’s popularity
when it was selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club. This Rock (2001), set in
the 1920s, is a sequel to The Truest Pleasure, focusing on the next generation of the
Powell family. With Brave Enemies (2003), Morgan returns to the eighteenth cen-
tury with a creative narrative about a husband and wife who find themselves on
opposite sides of the American Revolution. Morgan has been praised for his story-
telling ability, his attention to detail, and his particular skill in creating the voices of
strong women. While ranging widely in time, he has concentrated on evoking a
sense of place and a respect for rural life. In his essay “Writing the Mountains,”
Morgan notes that the focus of his writing “has been on one particular place, not
even a county, just a community, part of the Green River valley in Western North
Carolina. And really not even the whole community, but about a square mile of land
on the banks of Green River bought by my great-great-grandfather Daniel Pace in
1840.” In the same essay, he notes that “the more we study a place, the longer we
know a place, the more mysterious it becomes.” Morgan’s historical fiction is based
on that sense of mystery connecting place, family, and the past.

Bibliography
Barrett, Andrea. “Four Voyages.” Michigan Quarterly Review 40.3 (2001): 507–517.
Boyle, T.C. The Inner Circle. New York: Viking, 2004.
Brooks, Geraldine. March. New York: Viking, 2005.
454 HISTORICAL FICTION

Byerman, Keith. Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998.
Doctorow, E.L. Billy Bathgate. New York: Random House, 1998.
———. “False Documents.” In E.L. Doctorow, Essays and Conversations. Richard Trenner,
ed. Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1983.
———. Ragtime. New York: Random House, 1975.
Durham, David Anthony. Gabriel’s Story. New York: Doubleday, 2001.
Ermelino, Louisa. “According to Boyle.” Publishers Weekly 253.25 (2006): 24–25.
Frazier, Charles. Cold Mountain. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1997.
Hart, James D. The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste. Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1950.
Hellekson, Karen. The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time. Kent, OH: Kent State
University Press, 2001.
Historical Novels Review. Interview with David Durham. Retrieved January 2007 from the
David Durham Web site, http://www.fantasybookspot.com/node/1763.
Historical Novel Society Web site. Accessed January 2007 at http://www.historicalnovel
society.org.
DeLillo, Don. Libra. New York: Viking, 1988.
Johnson, Charles. Dreamer. New York: Scribner, 1998.
Johnson, Sarah L. Historical Fiction: A Guide to the Genre. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlim-
ited, 2005.
Kakutani, Michiko. “Scientists Plumb Life’s Mysteries with Minds and Hearts.”
New York Times 11 January 2002. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=
9B0CEFDE1139F932A25752C0A9649C8B63&fta=y.
Mallon, Thomas. Dewey Defeats Truman. New York: Pantheon, 1997.
———. “The Historical Novelist’s Burden of Truth.” In Fact 291–295.
———. In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writing. New York: Pantheon, 2001.
———. “Writing Historical Fiction.” In Fact 279–290.
Maslin, Janet. “A Fugitive Slave’s Quest for Freedom and Family.” New York Times 16 May 2002.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F03E4DC1039F935A25756C0A9649
C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all.
Morgan, Robert. “Writing the Mountains.” Retrieved March 2008 from Robert Morgan
Web site, http://www.robert-morgan.com/default.aspx?c=10.
Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. The Past within Us: Media, Memory, History. New York: Verso, 2005.
Parini, Jay. “Everything Up to Date in 1948.” New York Times Book Review 2 February
1997: 13.
Pynchon, Thomas. Mason & Dixon. New York: Henry Holt, 1997.
Roth, Phillip. The Plot Against America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.
Safire, William. Scandalmonger. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
Vernon, John. “The Black Face of Freedom.” New York Times 29 October 1995.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE3DB1F3FF93AA15753C1A96
3958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1.

Further Reading
Carnes, Mark C., ed. Novel History. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001; Hellekson, Karen. The
Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001;
HistFiction.net, accessed January 2007 at http://www.histfiction.net; Historical Novel Society
Web site, accessed January 2007 at http://www.historicalnovelsociety.org; Johnson, Sarah L. His-
torical Fiction: A Guide to the Genre. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2005; Lukács, George.
The Historical Novel. Trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1983. Originally published 1937; Madden, David, and Peggy Bach, eds. Classics of Civil
 HISTORICAL MYSTERIES 455

War Fiction. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991; Mallon, Thomas. In Fact: Essays on
Writers and Writing. New York: Pantheon, 2001; Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. The Past within Us:
Media, Memory, History. New York: Verso, 2005; Simmons, Philip E. Deep Surfaces: Mass Cul-
ture & History in Postmodern American Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997.
CAROLYN KYLER

HISTORICAL MYSTERIES
Definition. Historical Mysteries are stories featuring a crime that occurred and
was investigated in the past. The point at which the “past” begins, to distinguish it
from “contemporary,” is rather fluid. When the Crime Writers Association estab-
lished the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger award in 1999 for the year’s best historical
mystery, it defined the category as “any period up to the 1960s.” Mike Ashley in his
volume The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits (1993) defined it as a time
before the author’s birth, whereas Michael Burgess and Jill H. Vassilakos in Murder
in Retrospect (2005) defined it as taking place at least fifty years before the story’s
composition. If there is any common ground between these definitions, it would
seem to be not later than the early 1950s.
Hovering on the border of the historical mystery are those stories set in the pres-
ent day that seek to solve an historical crime, the best known being The Daughter
of Time (1952) by Josephine Tey, and, more recently, The Wench is Dead (1989) an
Inspector Morse novel by Colin Dexter. Though they appeal to the same readership,
strictly speaking they are not historical mysteries because of the contemporary ele-
ment and are not covered in this chapter. There are also those that start in the pres-
ent day but through some device, such as a time-slip, the protagonist ends up in the
past. John Dickson Carr used this approach in several novels, including The Devil
in Velvet (1951) and Fire, Burn (1957), where present-day characters move back in
time and become involved in solving a mystery. The crime and investigation are both
set in the past, therefore these technically qualify.
History. The historical mystery as a distinct publishing niche emerged following
the popularity of the Brother Cadfael books by Edith Pargeter (1913–1995) writing
as Ellis Peters. These books are set in England and Wales in the twelfth century dur-
ing the civil war between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda and take place pri-
marily at the Abbey in Shrewsbury. Pargeter had already earned a reputation as an
author of both detective novels and historical novels. In 1976, she was musing over
an actual historical event in which the Brothers at Shrewsbury ventured into North
Wales in 1137 to collect the relics of Saint Winifred and bring them to the Abbey.
Pargeter realized this would provide an excellent way to conceal a body and so
wrote A Morbid Taste for Bones (1977). This introduced Brother Cadfael as the
world-wise monk who had previously served as a soldier in the Crusades but had
now settled at the Abbey as its herbalist. Pargeter had not intended to start a series
but a couple of years later another idea occurred to her relating to the Battle of
Shrewsbury in 1138 and One Corpse Too Many (1979) became the second Cadfael
book. Their popularity led Pargeter to produce one or two books a year for the rest
of her life, resulting in twenty novels and three short stories. With their appearance
in paperback in 1984, a new commercial genre was created.
There had been historical mysteries before Cadfael but they were neither
enough nor of sufficient prominence to create a distinct category. There had, for
example, been many Sherlock Holmes pastiches written after Conan Doyle’s
death in 1930, and most of these stories were set in the period 1890–1920 and
456 HISTORICAL MYSTERIES

qualify as historical mysteries, but they are usually regarded as a category in their
own right.
The existing genres of historical and crime fiction, although both popular in the
late Victorian and Edwardian periods, remained separate. There were occasional
items involving crimes set in periods earlier than the story’s composition, such as
Barnaby Rudge (1841) by Charles Dickens (1812–1870) or The Other Side of the
Door (1909) by Lucia Chamberlain (1882–1978), but there is minimal detection in
either book.
The usual starting place for the historical mystery is the Uncle Abner stories by
Melville Davisson Post (1871–1930), which began with “The Broken Stirrup
Leather” (1911). These are set in the hills of Virginia at the start of the nineteenth
century and feature Uncle Abner, a god-fearing elder of the community who roots
out wrong-doers by a combination of psychological awareness and skilful deduc-
tion. Early stories were collected as Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries (1918) with
later stories uncollected until The Methods of Uncle Abner (1974).
At the same time British writer Jeffery Farnol (1878–1952), who had established
a reputation for his Regency adventures, introduced the character of Bow Street
detective Jasper Shrig in An Amateur Gentleman (1913). Low key at first, Shrig
moved center stage with The Loring Mystery (1925). Of special interest is Murder
by Nail (1942), in which Shrig becomes obsessed by a case that happened sev-
enty years earlier, making it a historical within a historical.
One writer who was fascinated with real-life historical mysteries was American
lecturer Lillian de la Torre (1902–1993). She used several as the basis for stories
featuring Dr Samuel Johnson, with Boswell serving as his Dr. Watson. The series
started in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in November 1943, and the first
collection appeared as Dr. Sam: Johnson, Detector (1946). Four more volumes fol-
lowed up to The Exploits of Dr. Sam: Johnson (1987). De la Torre is the real grand
dame of the historical detective story and yet is woefully neglected.
Another Grand-Dame, Agatha Christie (1890–1976), turned her hand only once
to the historical mystery—surprising for someone who, through her husband,
became so involved in archaeology. Death Comes at the End (1945) is set in ancient
Egypt, though it is perhaps otherwise a little too like St. Mary Mead.
Rather more unusual are the Judge Dee stories by Robert Van Gulik
(1910–1967). He was the Dutch ambassador to Japan and became fascinated with
the real-life stories about Dee, a seventh-century Chinese magistrate. He translated
an ancient collection as Dee Goong An, which he had privately printed in 1949, and
then created new stories about Dee, some based on real events, starting with The
Chinese Bell Murders (1956). Sixteen more books followed.
The floodgates really opened with the success of the Brother Cadfael novels, but
Pargeter was not alone in producing such works at that time. Peter Lovesey (1936–)
established his reputation with a series featuring Victorian detective Sergeant Cribb,
starting with Wobble to Death (1970). Lovesey also developed a series based around
the life of the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) starting with Bertie and the
Tinman (1987).
Barbara Mertz (1927–), writing as Elizabeth Peters, launched her first Amelia
Peabody archaeological detective novel set in the late Victorian period with Crocodile
on the Sandbank (1975). Jeremy Potter (1922–1997) wrote several novels re-evaluating
noted historical mysteries, including A Trail of Blood (1970) about the Princes in the
Tower, and Death in the Forest (1977) about the death of William II. But if there was
 HISTORICAL MYSTERIES 457

one single work that established the historical mystery beyond doubt, it was The
Name of the Rose (1980) by Umberto Eco (1932–). This atmospheric novel, set in a
monastery in Italy and involving bizarre deaths, ciphers, and ancient manuscripts,
became an international bestseller, and with it the new genre was confirmed.
Trends and Themes. Because the Brother Cadfael books and The Name of the
Rose were set in the Middle Ages, the first flurry of interest from publishers was for
more medieval mysteries. It was not long before most periods were being covered,
but three stood out as the most popular, the Victorian and Elizabethan periods and
ancient Rome; more recently, ancient Egypt and the early twentieth century have
also emerged. The oldest setting used is almost certainly Pleistocene France some
37,000 years ago, in Hyenas (1998) by Sandy Dengler (1939–).
It has also become common to use real historical characters, often as the investi-
gator. Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins appear in a series of books by William J.
Palmer (1943–); Benjamin Franklin is in a series by Robert Lee Hall (1941–); Jane
Austen in a series by Stephanie Barron (1963–); and Dashiell Hammett is not only
in Hammett (1975) by Joe Gores (1931–) but also in a series along with Raymond
Chandler and Erle Stanley Gardner by William F. Nolan (1928–).
Selected Authors. With over five hundred authors active in this area in recent
years, coverage here can only be selective. The authors discussed here are those who
have produced significant work over the last decade and whose work is of both lit-
erary merit and historical interest. They are discussed in order of the time periods
covered by their work.
Ancient Egypt. Two authors have established themselves as the primary writers of
mysteries set in ancient Egypt: Lauren Haney (Betty Winkelman, 1936–) and Lynda
S. Robinson (1951–). Robinson’s series is set in the fourteenth century B.C.E., at the
time of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun. It features Lord Meren, the Pharaoh’s Chief
Investigator, and concentrates on court life and intrigue. Robinson’s research is
impeccable and she has the advantage of depicting one of the best known of Egypt’s
pharaohs at a time when the ruling house was in turmoil following the heretical
reign of Akhenaten. The series is so far six books from Murder in the Place of
Anubis (1994) to Slayer of Gods (2001). Haney’s series is set a century earlier, at the
time of the 18th Dynasty Pharaoh, Queen Hatshepsut. It features Lieutenant Bak,
Head of the Medjay Police who administers a chain of forts along the Nile, many
miles south of Egypt’s capital. The series began with The Right Hand of Amon
(1997) and has continued through eight books so far to A Path of Shadows (2003).
Bak invariably is given charge of a project that leads to the discovery not only of a
murder but also potentially empire-threatening plots. Paul Doherty (1946–) has also
written a series set at the time of Hatshepsut, whom he calls Hatusu. These series
feature Lord Amerotke, the Chief Judge in Thebes, who works alongside the Queen
to strengthen the kingdom. This series has reached seven volumes from The Mask
of Ra (1998) to The Poisoner of Ptah (2007) and is notable for its attention to
detail. Both Doherty and Haney delight in the minutiae of everyday life, making
ancient Egypt more accessible, but whereas Doherty and Robinson explore the lives
of royalty and court officials, Haney follows the lives of the common people.
Ancient Greece. Despite the popularity of ancient Greek history and mythology, it
has not featured prominently in historical mysteries, though as far back as 1978
Canadian writer Margaret Doody (1939–) produced a one-off novel Aristotle
Detective. The great philosopher plays the role of an “armchair” detective helping
another save his cousin who has been accused of murder. The book was critically
458 HISTORICAL MYSTERIES

well received at the time but then vanished almost without trace until an Italian
translation in 1999 revived interest. Since then Doody has completed further nov-
els, Aristotle and Poetic Justice (2002), Aristotle and the Secrets of Life (2003), Poi-
son in Athens (2004) and Mysteries of Eleusis (2005). Aristotle’s friend, Stephanos,
does most of the legwork with Aristotle serving as the focal point to explore Greek
beliefs and customs. Although Doody brings considerable academic knowledge to
the series, using it, for example, to explore her theories about the origin of the novel,
it is also relatively light-hearted.
Paul Doherty has also set two series in ancient Greece, or more accurately
Macedonia, at the time of Alexander the Great. The first two books appeared under
the alias Anna Apostolou, A Murder in Macedon (1997) and A Murder in Thebes
(1998), and featured twin detectives, Jewish by birth. Raised at the court of
Alexander and serving as clerks they are taken into Alexander’s confidence after the
death of his father, whose murder they must solve. The idea of the twin detectives
was clever but Doherty dropped that series for another featuring a physician,
Telamon, also at the court of Alexander, who accompanies him on his conquests.
The series began with The House of Death (2001) and continued through The
Godless Man (2002) and The Gates of Hell (2003). Although as colourful as the
original two books, the new series lacks that spark of ingenuity.
Ancient Rome. Rome has been a setting for a number of series, including those by
Rosemary Rowe, David Wishart, John Maddox Roberts, and Marilyn Todd, but two
authors dominate the market, Lindsey Davis (1949–) and Steven Saylor (1956–).
Davis rapidly earned an enviable but justified reputation with her novels featur-
ing the “informer” Marcus Didius Falco. The first, The Silver Pigs (1989) starts in
70 C.E. during the reign of the Emperor Vespasian and takes place, for the most
part, in Britain, but thereafter the novels take Falco to many parts of the Empire.
The Times called her books “models of the genre.” The series appeals on several lev-
els. Davis succeeds in recreating Rome in a seemingly effortless way, the places, par-
ticularly the seedier sides of Rome, coming alive through comments by the
characters rather than by detailed description. All the characters are well drawn,
especially Falco and his wife Helena, the real power behind the man. Most notice-
able, though, is the humor. Falco is a typical lovable rogue, with all the panache of
a Chandleresque private eye transplanted to the ancient world. He is streetwise,
quick witted, and able to fend for himself. He is also fallible, and in her portrayal
of cases Davis is realistic and not averse to leaving some crimes unsolved. Falco,
though, makes steady progress, even rising to the rank of Procurator in One Virgin
Too Many (2000). Her books won Davis the CWA’s Dagger in the Library award in
1995 as the author who has given most pleasure to readers, and Two for the Lions
(1999) won the inaugural Ellis Peters Historical Dagger. Recent novels include Ode
to a Banker (2000), A Body in the Bathhouse (2001), The Jupiter Myth (2002), The
Accusers (2003), Scandal Takes a Holiday (2004), See Delphi and Die (2005), and
Saturnalia (2007).
Saylor’s novels are set over a century earlier during the days of Cicero and Julius
Caesar. They feature Gordianus the Finder, who is from a more privileged family
than Falco, though like Falco he is married with children. In the first book, Roman
Blood (1991), Gordianus helps Cicero solve a case the orator is defending, and
thereafter Gordianus has Cicero’s patronage, at least for as long as Cicero remained
in favor with the Republic. Most of the novels are set against major historical
events, such as the slave rebellion of Spartacus (Arms of Nemesis, 1992) or
 HISTORICAL MYSTERIES 459

Catilina’s revolt (Catilina’s Riddle, 1993). The novels from A Murder on the Appian
Way (1996) take place against the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, and there-
after the paths of Gordianus and Caesar cross several times. The most recent nov-
els have been A Mist of Prophecies (2002) and The Judgment of Caesar (2004) plus
two collections of short stories set in Gordianus’s early days.
Both Davis and Saylor are thorough in their depiction of Roman life, and whereas
Davis’s work has the advantage in humor and character, Saylor’s series is more real-
istic in its action and atmosphere.
Medieval Period. The medieval period, especially the years from the Norman Conquest
to the death of Richard III (1066–1483) has been the one most plundered by writers,
in the wake of the popularity of the Brother Cadfael books.
One of the earliest, and still the most prolific, authors was Paul Doherty, who
originally produced a one-off novel, Death of a King (1985), about an investigation
into the death of Edward II and then launched into what would be the first of his
many series with Satan in St. Mary’s (1986) featuring Sir Hugh Corbett, who con-
ducts investigations on behalf of King Edward I. This remains Doherty’s longest
running series, with the fifteenth title, The Waxman Murders, published in 2006,
and one of his best realized, chiefly because the period is the one in which Doherty
is most expert—his doctorate was on the reign of Edward II.
Other authors whose series cover this period include Edward Marston, Sharan
Newman, Sharon Penman, Bernard Knight, Ian Morson, Candace Robb, Susanna
Gregory (Liz Cruwys, 1958–), Michael Jecks (1960–), and Margaret Frazer. The works
of these authors, although showing individualistic traits, are broadly in a similar mood
to the Cadfael books. Their market overlaps, so much so that Jecks, Knight, Morson,
and Gregory have teamed up with Philip Gooden as “The Medieval Murderers” and
have produced a couple of books where the storyline is connected by a common theme.
Each author contributes a self-contained chapter set in a specific time period.
Susanna Gregory’s primary historical series features Matthew Bartholomew, a
teacher of medicine at Michaelhouse, part of the fledgling University of Cambridge
in the mid-fourteenth century. The first book, A Plague on Both Your Houses
(1996), is set at the time when the Black Death is ravaging Europe and threatening
Cambridge, though Bartholomew has other deaths on his mind. The series has
reached twelve books with The Tarnished Chalice (2006), though in time-span they
have covered only eight years.
Gregory has written two other series. Under the alias Simon Beaufort, she created
the Crusader Knight Sir Geoffrey Mappestone. In Murder in the Holy City (1998)
he has to solve a series of murders in Jerusalem in the year 1100. The second book,
A Head for Poisoning (1999), brought Mappestone back to England, and thereafter
he finds himself serving as an agent for King Henry II in various trouble spots
around Henry’s empire.
Gregory’s books are known for her meticulous attention to historical detail and
frequently contain notes on historical sources relative to the plot. All of Gregory’s
series have in common a turbulent society coming to terms with significant changes
that have disrupted the social order, be it the Black Death, the aftermath of the
Norman Conquest, or, in her latest series featuring Sir Thomas Chaloner, the years
after the execution of Charles I and the Restoration of Charles II. Gregory explores
how the truth is often the first victim in such difficult times.
Michael Jecks has concentrated on only one series, known generally as the West
Country mysteries, starting with The Last Templar in 1995. The twenty-second
460 HISTORICAL MYSTERIES

volume, The Malice of Unnatural Death, appeared in 2006. The books are set
chiefly in Devon and Cornwall, and primarily around Dartmoor. They feature
Simon Puttock, the bailiff of Lydford Castle—Lydford was then the main adminis-
trative center for Devon and Dartmoor—and Sir Baldwin Furnshill, a former
Templar knight now dispossessed of his lands, who has become the Keeper of the
King’s Peace in Crediton. The stories are sequential, starting in 1316. Jecks has
firmly embedded the series in the historical climate, with the background of the
weak reign of Edward II and the consequent civil unrest, but what makes the series
of special interest is Jecks’s use of the local laws and rights relating to Dartmoor
and the stannaries. Jecks’s detailed research allows one to step straight into the
past, and Jecks writes with a pace and enthusiasm that injects life and action into
the characters.
Tudor and Elizabethan. As with other periods, two authors dominate the Elizabethan
scene. Valerie Anand (1937–) is a British author of historical fiction who uses the
alias Fiona Buckley for a series set in Elizabethan England. Her lead character is
Ursula Blanchard, widowed with a young child and shunned by the court. She is an
illegitimate child of Henry VIII and thus Queen Elizabeth’s half-sister. In the first
novel, The Robsart Mystery (1997; U.S. as To Shield the Queen) Blanchard becomes
involved in the historical scandal of the death of Amy Robsart. As a consequence of
her actions the Queen believes she can trust Ursula, who becomes one of the
Queen’s spies. The novels are set in the 1560s against the background of Elizabeth’s
tenuous hold on the throne and the threat from Mary, Queen of Scots. All of the
books tie in to real historical events. Other recent titles include Queen’s Ransom
(2000), To Ruin a Queen (2000), Queen of Ambition (2002), A Pawn for a Queen
(2002), The Fugitive Queen (2003), and The Siren Queen (2004).
Under her own name, Patricia Finney (1958–) has written both a series of histor-
ical mystery stories for younger readers and a trilogy that might be defined as
Elizabethan thrillers and that caused Ruth Rendell to dub her “The Le Carré of the
16th Century.” The trilogy is Firedrake’s Eye (1992), Unicorn’s Blood (1998), and
Gloriana’s Torch (2003), featuring the escapades of Elizabeth I’s loyal courtier
Simon Ames and his dubious friend, the soldier David Becket. In the first volume
they thwart a plot to assassinate Elizabeth, whereas the second book sees them try-
ing to thwart another plot, this time to murder Mary, Queen of Scots. By the third
book Ames has been captured while spying for the Queen in Spain, and Becket, who
is head of the Queen’s Ordnance, has to rescue him while also infiltrating the
Spanish fleet. The books are a mixture of historical drama and spy thriller and
Finney succeeds admirably in capturing the spirit of the age and distilling that
essence that distinguished the Elizabethan age. This mood carries across into her his-
torical mystery series written under the alias P.F. Chisholm, which began with A
Famine of Horses (1994). It features the historical character of Sir Robert Carey, who
was a cousin of Elizabeth I. He was a loyal servant to the Queen, renowned not only
for his enforcement of the law but also for his understanding and interpretation of legal
matters. He served both as a soldier and in various roles in governing the Scottish bor-
ders before becoming Lord Warden of the Marches in 1596. Drawing upon Carey’s
own memoirs, Finney has produced a series that works both as historical mysteries
and as authentic recreations of life around Elizabeth’s domain. The series has con-
tinued with A Season of Knives (1995), A Surfeit of Guns (1996), and A Plague of
Angels (1998), with more planned. Finney has also contributed to a series for young
readers (aged 9 to 12) that purports to be the accounts related by 13-year-old Lady
 HISTORICAL MYSTERIES 461

Grace Cavendish, Elizabeth’s favorite Maid of Honor, who becomes involved in var-
ious court intrigues and mysteries. The series began with Assassin (2004), in which
she investigates the murder of one of her own suitors, and continued with Betrayal
(2004) and Conspiracy (2005). Jan Burchett and Sara Vogler continued the series
with Deception (2005), Exile (2005), and Gold (2006), with Finney contributing
the sixth book, Feud (2005). The series introduces younger readers to the historical
mystery and helps them appreciate the political intrigue of the Elizabethan age.
Victorian/Edwardian Age. The Victorian period, especially the gaslight era, is synony-
mous with Sherlock Holmes, and so many Holmesian pastiches have been produced
that they restricted the market for anything else. That dam was eventually breached
by Anne Perry (1938–), who over the last twenty years has become the undisputed
master of the Victorian detective story. In recent years she has become remarkably
prolific, developing several series, but her major Victorian work falls into two series
of equal merit. The first features Thomas Pitt, an Inspector (later Superintendent)
with the Bow Street Police, and has currently reached 24 volumes. At the start in
The Cater Street Hangman (1979), set in 1881, he is investigating a series of mur-
ders that brings him into contact with the upper-class Ellison family. Pitt himself is
middle class, his family having suffered from strife, and Perry uses the class system
with its blinkered attitudes toward the murders, to highlight Victorian prejudices
and social divides. To the Ellison household, crime emanates from the lower classes,
and it is only when the truth comes closer to home that they are forced to recognize
the undercurrents of Victorian society. At the end of the first book Pitt proposes to
Charlotte Ellison, whose role was key to Pitt solving the case, and he is reluctantly
admitted into the Ellison family. Charlotte Pitt plays an important part in all of the
novels, her understanding of Victorian society helping open doors for an otherwise
often restricted and bewildered Pitt. The books have explored many of the problems
that Victorian society tried to ignore, including illegitimacy (Callander Square,
1980), male prostitution (Bluegate Fields, 1984), homosexuality (Belgrave Square,
1992), and pornography (Half Moon Street, 2000). In The Whitechapel Conspiracy
(2001), which draws upon the Jack the Ripper murders, Pitt falls foul of a clique of
influential men known as the Inner Circle and as a consequence is fired as Superin-
tendent at Bow Street and is forced to work in the newly created Special Branch,
pursuing anarchists. This allowed Perry to expand Pitt’s world into one of espionage
and political intrigue, with the Inner Circle forever thwarting his plans. Recent titles
are Southampton Row (2002), Seven Dials (2003), and Long Spoon Lane (2005).
Perry’s other main series is set in the 1850s and 1860s and features William Monk
and Hester Latterly. Monk is a police inspector who has an accident in the first
novel, The Face of a Stranger (1990), and loses his memory. It is only gradually that
he recalls flashes of his past, but with Hester’s help he starts to rebuild his life. Monk
finds it difficult to continue in his role as a policeman, and in Dangerous Mourning
(1991) he is dismissed and becomes a private investigator. The Monk series is
bleaker than the Pitt books, as Monk struggles to recover his identity while investi-
gating crimes that frequently place him in situations reminiscent of his former life.
This works especially well in Death of a Stranger (2002) where Monk’s investiga-
tions into possible corruption in a railway company bring him head on with his
past. His investigations occasionally take him outside England, including America
at the start of the Civil War in Slaves of Obsession (2000). Monk and Latterly are
married in The Twisted Root (1999), and Hester subsequently opens a clinic cater-
ing to the health of London’s prostitutes. In The Shifting Tide (2004) Monk
462 HISTORICAL MYSTERIES

becomes involved with London’s River Police and enters their employ in Dark
Assassin (2006), providing further potential for the series. Whereas the Pitt series
explores the relationship between crime and the upper crust of society, the Monk
books look into the darker corners of all strands of society.
In recent years the Victorian setting, not solely in Britain, has provided an oppor-
tunity to explore factors that contributed to the modern world. Caleb Carr (1955–)
is both a novelist and a military historian, and the majority of his books have been
nonfiction, unrelated to his few fictional outings. The Alienist (1994), which was on
the New York Times bestseller list for many months, is set in New York in 1896
where there has been a series of violent murders of young boy prostitutes. Theodore
Roosevelt, then the Police Commissioner, gathers together a team of experts to help
solve the crime. The team is headed by Dr. Laszlo Kreisler, a criminal psychologist,
here called an “alienist.” The story is narrated by another of the team, reporter John
Moore, who recalls the events years later. By introducing criminal profiling at such
a period, Carr is able to analyze not just the psychology of the criminal but the psy-
chology of a city that could produce such a killer. Carr had planned a series of books
each narrated by a different member of the team but so far only one has appeared,
The Angel of Darkness (1997), which looks again at child abuse and killings. The
first novel stands out as one of the most profound of recent historical crime novels,
almost on a par with The Name of the Rose.
The work of Matthew Pearl (1976–) has been likened to that of Carr’s. He has
written two literary mysteries, which he regards as “intellectual thrillers,” drawing
upon his profound knowledge of both Dante and American nineteenth-century lit-
erature. The Dante Club (2003) depicts a serial killer on the loose in Boston in
1865. His methods of murder resemble those inflicted upon sinners as described in
Dante’s Inferno. This comes to the attention of the Dante Club, a group of literati
that includes Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell
Lowell, and James Thomas Fields, who formed the Club out of their interest in
Dante and their desire to protect his work. Their deep understanding of Dante helps
them gain an insight into the criminal’s mind. The Dante Club, which went on to
become a major bestseller, has been compared to Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, though
the similarities are chiefly in the descriptions of nineteenth-century American city
life and the exploration of a criminal’s motivation. Pearl draws his inspiration from
the aftermath of the American Civil War and its impact upon a generation. Pearl’s
second novel, The Poe Shadow (2006), is another atmospheric study, this time into
the facts behind the death of Edgar Allan Poe. In both volumes Pearl brings consid-
erable literary knowledge and analysis to the detective genre.
Boris Akunun (Grigory Chkhartishvili, 1956–) is a Russian author and translator
whose novels about the detective Erast Fandorin, set at the end of the nineteenth
century in Imperial Russia, have become international bestsellers. Fandorin is at the
outset a young police detective but in later novels becomes a private investigator. He
is intelligent but vain and his rakish style of dress more than once saves his life. The
novels are a mixture of styles assembled in a rather cavalier fashion intended as
much to amuse as entertain and aimed at a broad readership who want both popu-
lar and literary escapism. Each book has followed a different crime sub-genre. The
first volume, Azazel (1998; translated as The Winter Queen, 2003), set in 1876, in
which a young Fandorin, only recently recruited to the police force, finds himself
involved with a group of anarchists, is written like a Ruritanian adventure with
Fandorin described as “our hero.” The Turkish Gambit (1998; translated 2005) is
 HISTORICAL MYSTERIES 463

a spy thriller, whereas Leviathan (1998; translated as Murder on the Leviathan,

2004), set on a cruise ship, is imitation Agatha Christie. The books abound with lit-
erary references and Akunin clearly enjoys creating each new style. He has identi-
fied sixteen different sub-genres and plans sixteen books in the Fandorin cycle,
eleven of which have so far appeared in Russia with five translated into English.
When The Winter Queen was translated, the New York Times (13 July 2003)
likened Akunin to Alexander Pushkin. He has a broad cosmopolitan style that suc-
ceeds in depicting Tsarist Russia’s place in the world in such a way as to highlight
parallels with present-day Russia.
Akunin, who has also written a trilogy set in Russia in the 1890s about a nun,
Pelagiya, who, like Cadfael, has a talent for solving mysteries, has demonstrated
that having fun with old stereotypes recast in new packages can prove successful.
The dawn of the twentieth century was a time of change but one that still clung
to the past. These conflicts are evident in several series taking place between 1900
and 1914.
Gillian Linscott (1944–) has written several historical mysteries, but she is best
known for her series about British suffragette Nell Bray in the years before the First
World War. When the series starts, in Sister Beneath the Sheet (1991), Bray has just
been released from prison after throwing a brick through a window at 10 Downing
Street, and she soon finds herself embroiled in a possible murder investigation. The
series follows the suffragette movement over the next decade. Absent Friends (1999),
which takes place after women have received the vote, has Bray standing as a parlia-
mentary candidate. The volume won Linscott both the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger
and the Herodotus Award as that year’s best historical mystery. Recent books in the
series, set in earlier years, include The Perfect Daughter (2000), Dead Man Riding
(2002), and Blood on the Wood (2004). Linscott’s creation of the period is both intel-
ligent and forceful but is written with a wry sense of humor sufficient to deflate
Edwardian pomposity and provide the reader with an understanding of the prejudices
of the age.
The United States was also witnessing changes at this time. David Fulmer
(1950–), already known as a jazz critic and journalist, caused a stir with his first
novel, Chasing the Devil’s Tail (2001). Set in New Orleans in 1907 it features
Valentine St. Cyr, a Creole former police detective who is employed by Tom Anderson,
the unofficial mayor of the Storyville district, to investigate the murder of prosti-
tutes. The book is far more than a detective story because Fulmer recreates the
atmosphere of Storyville with the emergence of “jass” and the early days of forma-
tive musicians Jelly Roll Morton and “King” Buddy Bolden. The book won Fulmer
the Shamus Award as that year’s Best First Private Eye Novel and was nominated
for the Los Angeles Times book award and the Barry Award. The next two books
in the series are Jass (2005), which won the Georgia Author of the Year award, and
Rampart Street (2006), both of which add depth to the setting—the “palpable
ambience” as Booklist described it. Fulmer also wrote The Dying Crapshooter’s
Blues (2007) set in his native Atlanta in the 1920s amidst racial and social division
when a mixed-race thief determines to get to the bottom of a racial shooting. In all
of his books Fulmer treats the past with respect and allows us to pass cautiously
through the portals.
Michael Pearce (1933–) was raised in what was then the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan,
which has given him an understanding of the culture, mores, and attitudes of the
various nationalities embroiled in the region. He has used this to considerable effect
464 HISTORICAL MYSTERIES

in his series of books featuring Gareth Owen, the Mamur Zapt, or Head of the
Secret Police in Egypt in the years before and during the First World War. The series
began with The Mamur Zapt and the Return of the Carpet (1988) and has currently
reached fifteen volumes with The Mamur Zapt and the Point in the Market (2005).
Throughout each book the Mamur Zapt often serves as an observer, only becoming
involved when he has to, though also manipulating events behind the scenes when
he can. As a consequence the reader feels they are being taken into his confidence,
seeing events as a secret witness, a mood strengthened by Pearce’s lean style, which
speaks directly to the reader. He is also frequently very humorous, with a wry obser-
vation on attempts by various factions to gain the upper hand. Pearce’s books have
become timely in the light of the current relationship between the West and the Arab
world, and his commentary provides a shrewd insight into diplomacy.
Pearce has written two other historical series in similar style. There were only two
volumes about Dmitri Kameron, a Russo-Scottish lawyer living in Tsarist Russia in
the 1890s (Dmitri and the Milk-Drinkers, 1997, and Dmitri and the One-Legged
Lady, 1999). With A Dead Man in Trieste (2004), set in 1910, Pearce began a new
series featuring the exploits of Sandor Seymour, a British Special Branch officer
whose expertise takes him to various European embassies and consulates, describ-
ing a world inexorably spiralling toward war. The series allows Pearce a broader
canvas than the Mamur Zapt books, though he brings to it the same humor and per-
ception. Read from the advantage of a further century of conflict it is easy to see
how the same mistakes continue to be made and lessons remain unlearned.
Twentieth Century. The First World War destroyed the old order and brought the
twentieth century of age. There are several profound series that use the experiences
and aftermath of the Great War to good effect.
Rennie Airth (1935–) scored a critical success with River of Darkness (1999),
which was short-listed for several major awards. It was a dark, brooding novel set
in the aftermath of World War I. Inspector Madden, already psychologically scarred
by the harrowing experiences in the War has also lost his wife and daughter in the
flu epidemic. He investigates the slaughter of a family in a quiet Surrey village. Airth
succeeds in blending the traditional country-house mystery with the concept of psy-
chological profiling, producing a powerful but rather solemn evocation of post-war
Britain blighted by tragedy. It was five years before Airth completed the second
book, The Blood-Dimmed Tide, set a decade later in 1932. Madden is retired, liv-
ing on a farm in Surrey, but gets drawn into the murder of a young, local girl.
Madden’s insight links this crime to others and a picture emerges of dark deeds in a
Britain gripped by the Depression and coping with the rise of Nazism. A third and
final volume is planned.
Ploughing similar territory was Charles Todd, the pen name for American mother-
and-son writing team, Carolyn and David Watjen. Their series features Inspector
Rutledge, a detective who is nearly killed during the War and suffers from shell
shock, haunted by the voice of a companion who was killed alongside him. Origi-
nally a highly intuitive detective, he now fears his inner voice, uncertain how to
react. The crimes that Rutledge investigates, starting with A Test of Wills (1996),
bring him into contact with others scarred by the War, both physically and spiritu-
ally. The books atmospherically depict a shell-shocked post-War Britain, and
Rutledge’s determination to seek justice for the murder victims is seen as part of a
wider justice for all the dead, a mood especially poignant in A Long Shadow (2006).
The series reached nine volumes with A False Mirror (2007).
 HISTORICAL MYSTERIES 465

The immediate post-War period soon gave way to the Roaring Twenties. British
writer and former teacher Barbara Cleverly has rapidly risen to the front rank of his-
torical mystery writers with her series set in colonial India in the early 1920s. It fea-
tures Scotland Yard detective Joe Sandilands who has been seconded to the Bengal
Police and becomes involved in a connected series of murders at a local army regi-
ment. Cleverly brings India alive not only with considerable local color and an
atmosphere of a lost world but also with believable characters and an intriguing
plot. The book won the author the Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger and
was listed by the New York Times as one of the year’s best books. Cleverly contin-
ued to develop both the characters and the local atmosphere in Ragtime in Simla
(2003); The Damascened Blade (2004), which won the CWA’s Ellis Peters Histori-
cal Dagger Award; and The Palace Tiger (2004). With the fifth book, The Bee’s Kiss
(2005), she brought Sandilands back to England at the time of social unrest and the
General Strike, whereas in Tug of War (2006) he is in France in an unusual case of
trying to identify a shell-shocked soldier. Cleverly’s books are all ingeniously plot-
ted and move at a relentless pace.
Max Allan Collins (1948–) is a prolific writer of hardboiled crime fiction who
has turned his talents to writing a number of novels set in the first half of the twen-
tieth century. He is perhaps best known for his graphic novel Road to Perdition
(1998), set in the heart of organized crime in America in 1930 and made into the
critically acclaimed film in 2002. Collins is noted for his historical gangster series
featuring Nate Heller, a Chicago ex-cop turned private detective and a friend of
Eliot Ness. In the early novels, Collins recreated the real-life gangsters of the
period, including Al Capone in True Detective (1983) and John Dillinger in True
Crime (1984). Later novels explored the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby
in Stolen Away (1991), the murder of Sir Harry Oakes in 1943 in Carnal Hours
(1994), and, in Angel in Black (2001), the still unsolved murder of Hollywood
starlet Elizabeth Short in 1947 (also the subject of James Ellroy’s first best-seller,
The Black Dahlia, 1987). Chicago Confidential (2002), set at the dawn of the
McCarthy era, has Heller trying to protect himself from both the FBI and organ-
ized crime, because of his knowledge of “where the bodies are buried.” Most of
the novels in this series have been nominated for the Shamus Award presented by
the Private Eye Writers of America with True Detective and Stolen Away winning.
Collins is known for his gritty realism, presenting the past as it was, violent, cor-
rupt, and dangerous. Neither is Heller any shining knight, frequently protecting
his own interests.
Collins is immensely prolific, despite the detailed research he undertakes. His
other major historical mystery work is the Disaster series. In each novel a well
known author becomes involved in solving a crime that happened during a major
disaster. For The Titanic Murders (1999) Collins uses the fact that Jacques
Futrelle, the author of the “Thinking Machine” stories, was on the Titanic and
has him investigate two murders before he goes down with the ship. In The
Hindenberg Murders (2000), Leslie Charteris, creator of The Saint, is directly
involved in the fate of the eponymous airship. Edgar Rice Burroughs turns detec-
tive in The Pearl Harbor Murders (2001), S.S. Van Dine in The Lusitania
Murders (2002), Agatha Christie in The London Blitz Murder (2004), and Orson
Welles in The War of the Worlds Murder (2005). Although these are obvious gim-
mick novels and lack the violent realism of the Heller series, they are still as faith-
ful to the facts as a work of fiction can be and are highly entertaining. J. Kingston
466 HISTORICAL MYSTERIES

Pierce, writing in January Magazine, said of Collins that he is “certainly today’s

foremost expert at concocting credible criminal scenarios within the turbulent
timeline of history” (April 1999).
The shift in mood from the 1920s to the 1930s and that uneasy transition
between the wars is captured in David Roberts’s series featuring Lord Corinth
and Verity Browne. Corinth and his brother, the Duke of Mersham, are in posi-
tions of influence, working behind the scenes to stave off a second world war. The
series, which began with Sweet Poison (2001), explores the rise of fascism and
Communism throughout Europe, including Britain, and explores events related
to the Spanish Civil War. In The Hollow Crown (2002), Roberts covers the abdi-
cation crisis of Edward VIII in 1936. The seventh book, The Quality of Mercy
(2006), takes place against the backdrop of Hitler’s invasion of Austria. The
books not only present intriguing murder mysteries but also set them within the
ever increasing atmosphere of dread that presaged the Second World War, an
intriguing contrast with the attitude prior to the First World War depicted in
Michael Pearce’s books.
The 1940s and 1950s may seem recent, but even these periods can be seen in a
new perspective. The modern master of the near contemporary historical who-
dunit is Andrew Taylor (1951–), whose books, especially the Roth trilogy, bridge
the gap between the historical and the present. The Roth trilogy works in reverse,
each book taking us further back in time to understand the source of later crimi-
nal action. The third book, The Office of the Dead (2000), which won the Ellis
Peters Historical Dagger and which is set in the 1950s, reveals the key events that
became the root of subsequent evil. Taylor’s primary series is set in the decade
after the Second World War in the fictional town of Lydmouth on the Anglo-Welsh
border, near the Forest of Dean. It began with An Air That Kills (1994) with the
eighth volume, Naked to the Hangman, appearing in 2006. Although the books
are told through various viewpoints, the chief protagonists are both strangers to
the area, Detective Inspector Thornhill, who had served in the War, and journal-
ist Jill Francis. Their growing relationship forms the backbone to the series in

WHY ARE HISTORICAL MYSTERIES SO POPULAR?

The reasons for the popularity of historical mysteries have yet to be fully assessed. Although
they bring together two existing popular genres, the books remain primarily crime novels.
They may alienate devotees of both genres because they are genuine hybrids, but there is no
denying their popularity. Nickianne Moody in her paper “Everyday Life in the Medieval
Whodunnit” saw part of the appeal as relating to the cyclical nature of British experience, in
effect “what goes around come around,” revealing that the problems we experience today
have much in common with those of past generations, though they may have been dealt with
entirely differently. Moody also believed, at least in regard to Ellis Peters’s books, that there
was an appeal to a romanticized past, and this is true of many historical mysteries. It is not so
much that the murders are glamorized but that there is huge potential for selecting favorite
periods of history and populating them with popular characters.The more successful of the
novels are those that can capture the mood of the past but relate it to the present.
Jean Mason writing in The Mystery Reader (25 March 2001) believed that the appeal of his-
torical mysteries resided in the ability of the author to recreate the past and to create a
“police procedural” that fit the time.
 HISTORICAL MYSTERIES 467

which the crimes are implanted in the social fabric. Taylor’s intent was to explore
a social and moral climate near to us in time and yet strangely different, a world
in the process of reluctant change. The books are steeped in the atmosphere of the
age from which the characters and stories condense and there is a strong impres-
sion that what ought to be the present is becoming the past before our eyes.
Taylor’s work thus stands at the portals of the historical mystery, like sands in an
hourglass, ushering the reader into the past.
There is thus a challenge to authors to create a believable scenario where some-
one may investigate a crime in the past in accordance with the laws, procedures,
and social climate of the day, and the degree to which they succeed adds to the
pleasure of the story beyond a basic historical premise. The end result tells us
much about how crime was viewed and dealt with at different times, and it may
be reassuring to learn just how civilized, or otherwise, different cultures and ages
have been.

Bibliography
Airth, Rennie. River of Darkness. New York: Viking, 1999.
Akunin, Boris. The Winter Queen. Trans. Andrew Bromfield. New York: Random House,
2003.
Anand, Valerie. The Robsart Mystery. New York: Orion, 1997.
Ashley, Mike. The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits. London: Constable and New
York: Carroll & Graf, 1993.
Burgess, Michael, and Jill H. Vassilakos. Murder in Retrospect. Westport, CT: Libraries
Unlimited, 2005.
Carr, Caleb. The Alienist. New York: Random House, 1994.
Chisholm, P.F. A Famine of Horses. New York: Walker and Co., 1995.
Collins, Max Allan, and Richard Payner. Road to Perdition. New York: Pocket Books, 2002.
Davis, Lindsey. The Silver Pigs. New York: Crown, 1989.
de la Torre, Lillian. The Exploits of Dr. Sam Johnson. New York: International Polygonics,
1987.
Dexter, Colin. The Wench is Dead. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990.
Doherty, Paul. Death of a King. New York: St. Martin’s, 1985.
———. The Mask of Ra. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998.
———. The Poisoner of Ptah. London: Headline, 2007.
Doody, Margaret. Aristotle Detective. New York: Harper and Row, 1978.
Finney, Patricia. Firedrake’s Eye. New York: Picador, 1992.
———. Gloriana’s Torch. New York: St. Martin’s, 2003.
———. Unicorn’s Blood. New York: Picador, 1998.
Fulmer, David. Chasing the Devil’s Tail. Scottsdale, AZ: Poisoned Pen Press, 2001.
Gregory, Susanna. A Plague on Both Your Houses. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996.
Haney, Lauren. The Right Hand of Amon. New York: Avon Books, 1997.
Jecks, Michael. The Last Templar. New York: Avon Books, 1995.
Linscott, Gillian. Sister Beneath the Sheet. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991.
Lovesey, Peter. Bertie and the Tinman. New York: Mysterious Press, 1987.
Moody, Nickianne. “Everyday Life in the Medieval Whodunnit: The Popularity of Ellis Peters
in the 1980s.” Paper produced for Media & Cultural Studies, Liverpool University,
1996.
Pearl, Matthew. The Dante Club. New York: Random House, 2003.
Perry, Anne. The Cater Street Hangman. New York: St. Martin’s, 1979.
Pierce, J. Kingston. “A Case to Remember.” January Magazine. 1999. http://januarymagazine.
com/crfiction/titanic.html.
468 HISTORICAL WRITING (NONFICTION)

Robinson, Lynda S. Murder in the Place of Anubis. New York: Walker, 1994.
———. Slayer of Gods. New York: Mysterious Press, 2001.
Saylor, Steven. Roman Blood. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991.
Taylor, Andrew. The Office of the Dead. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000.
Todd, Charles. A Test of Wills. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996.

Further Reading
Browne, Ray Broadus, and Kreiser, Lawrence A., eds. The Detective as Historian: History
and Art in Historical Crime Fiction. Bowling Green University, Popular Press, 2001;
Johnsen, Rosemary Erickson. Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction. London: Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2006; Onotade, Ayo, “Courts, Knights and Treachery,” Crime Spree Mag-
azine #6, 2005, at <http://www.crimespreemag.com/MedievalCrimeFictionPaper.pdf>.
Websites
Bishop, Alan J. “Criminal History,” <http://www.criminal-history.co.uk/>
Crime Thru Time, <http://www.crimethrutime.com/index.htm>
Heli, Richard M. “The Detective and the Toga,” Roman Mysteries, <http://histmyst.org/>
Hurt, N.S. “Historical Mystery Fiction,” <http://members.tripod.com/~BrerFox/
historicalmystery.html>
Swank, Kris. “The Sybil and Sleuth,” Ancient Greek Mysteries, <http://personal.riverusers.com/
~swanky/greece.htm>.
MIKE ASHLEY
HISTORICAL WRITING (NONFICTION)
Definition. From Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) to James Frey’s A
Million Little Pieces (2006), many famous works of fiction have first presented
themselves as fact. Consequently the claim to be nonfiction may be controversial,
particularly in a very skeptical, postmodern age. That claim, nonetheless, is inher-
ent to historical writing, which is real, although not necessarily an entirely objective
account of data. In partial contrast to autobiography and memoir, and biography,
centered on a single life, collective history needs some shaping purpose to focus the
material—a purpose that drives the historian yet can be shared by the reader.
Consider, for instance, the historian Aby Warburg. After admission to an asylum,
he managed to restore his sanity through a “cultural-historical” study of Pueblo
Indian myths and rituals for the way they helped their society to represent and thus
control primal fears; this then taught him to do the same for his own fears (Mali
2003, 134). His case exemplifies one common function of history writing: histori-
ans may begin with a trauma that is both personal and collective—in Warburg’s
case, paranoia occasioned by World War I. The historian then seeks a solution from
the past—sometimes a very different past, as with Warburg’s countering the lack of
collective, therapeutic ritual in modern Europe with its presence in early America.
History. Although oral histories may have existed from the beginning of humanity—
and written ones from the origin of writing—Herodotus (c. 484–c. 424 B.C.E.) was
one of the first to engage in a large-scale form of what he called “demonstration of
research” (apodexis histories) (Hughes-Warrington 157). From this phrase near the
beginning of his Histories, our word “history” may derive. Writing during the
Peloponnesian War, but about the earlier Persian one, his stated purpose was to
show the source of people’s coming into conflict (Herodotus 1). Greek by culture
but Asian by birth, Herodotus was fascinated with the war between Persia and
Greece, which mirrored the tensions within his own origins. Despite admitting that
all of the tales he recounted were not equally credible, he did not rudely label
 HISTORICAL WRITING (NONFICTION) 469

legends as lies but, as if with a reconciling purpose, used them to introduce readers
to diverse cultures. He set a paradigm for this, which continues to be appreciated in
such books as François Hartog’s The Mirror of Herodotus (1988), Aubrey de
Selincourt’s The World of Herodotus (2001), and Carolyn Dewald and John
Marincola’s The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus (2006).
This tolerant laxity contrasts with the next great Greek historian, Thucydides
(460–400 B.C.E.), who was careful to maintain the appearance of credibility. If one
judges by the mines he owned in Thrace and by his father’s Thracian name (Olorus),
his ancestors may have been from that land, but he was for much of his life Athenian,
engaged in its politics and strategies during the Peloponnesian War, which was the
subject of his history (Hughes-Warrington 319). His appearance of objectivity therein
is itself an important technique for arguing the reader into his conclusions, such as his
decision after the Athenians exiled him that their expansionism was largely to blame
for the war. Thucydides provided the pattern for history as a record of conscious poli-
cies, unlike Herodotus’s fascination with legends that function as a people’s collective
dreams, set in some antique, unverifiable time. Although the dominant pattern of his-
toriography in the nineteenth century, Thucydides’s ostensible objectivity now seems
outdated to such revisionists as Marshall Sahlins in his Apologies to Thucydides:
Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa (2004)
Another pioneer, the Roman historian Livy (c. 64 B.C.E.–c. 12 C.E.) was the author
of a 142-book history of Rome; only 35 volumes of it remain along with ancient
summaries of the rest. His original intention was for it to span from the founding
of that city to the murder of Cicero (42 B.C.E.), but according to the elder Pliny, Livy
extended beyond that because “his restless spirit thrived on hard work” (Pliny
1958, 16). Although earlier historians, Herodotus among them, had discussed how
a country’s moral degeneration may lead to its political decline, Livy added to this
the notion that degeneration sprang from foreign ideas (Hughes-Warrington 205).
As T.J. Luce and P.A. Stadter have demonstrated, Livy’s hunger for order caused him
to reorganize his sources with a major event at the beginning, middle, and end of
each book and the treatment of intervening material being extended or compacted
to make the book completely fill a papyrus scroll (Luce 1977, 6; Stadter 2007,
287–307).
Naturally, foreign influences, against which he wrote obsessively, could not be
excluded, and the attempt to do so may even have decreased Rome’s ability to grow
and adapt. During the final wars and the ensuing chaos, European history writing
largely halted. It returned in the hands of such monks as Bede (c. 673–735), who
spent his life in a monastery from the age of seven. Typical of medieval historiogra-
phy, he credits miracles and shapes the material in a religiously edifying manner—
history writing as defense of the pious order as compared to Livy’s of the moral and
political. Outside Europe, of course, events continued to be recorded, particularly in
China, which had a long tradition of annals, some of which turned into subjects for
state examinations. Like the Western tradition from Herodotus to Bede, Chinese
history was a way to exemplify moral norms. For the West, the historical classic was
the Bible, which became a model; for instance, Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte
D’Arthur (1485) likens the immoral anarchy before Arthur’s coming to that
throughout the Book of Judges and patterns Merlin’s vision of dragons on that in
the Vulgate’s Book of Esther. This is to say that during and before) the Middle Ages,
history was largely normative, affirming traditional patterns and showing the disas-
ters that resulted from the breach of them.
470 HISTORICAL WRITING (NONFICTION)

However, as early as the fourteenth century Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) was using
history to question traditional norms in much the manner of Niccolo Machiavelli
(1469–1527), both of them to further their political agendas. Thereafter, conserva-
tive and revisionist versions of the past warred against one another, at first to estab-
lish one norm or another. With the nineteenth century came an amplified
professionalism through the example of Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), who, in
History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations (1824), used it to make his argument for
the unity of Europe seem an objective reflection of the people’s origins.
Such professionalism, with its careful assessment of sources, limning of causation,
and focus on political and military leadership, constituted a conscious history: the
deliberate choices made by officials and the lives of everyone else repressed from
public awareness. It presents the slow, linear skeleton of verifiable events while
refraining from fleshing them with speculative details. In the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries, however, a growing number of historians have emphasized instead
the sensuous and sensual texture of common lives and emotions as well as the popu-
larly held myths and metaphors that gave them meaning. The change has occurred
gradually. A founder of the famous journal Annales d’Histoire Economique et Sociale
(1929), Marc Bloch (1886–1944), for example, began his career in reaction against
the Dreyfus Affair (the French government’s complicity with anti-Semitism).To under-
mine the prestige and power of rulers, he showed medieval governments advancing
human freedom through confusion and weakness rather than intent. Today, though,
Bloc’s version of the Middle Ages sounds very old-fashioned in its assumption of
politics as the shaper of life (albeit sometimes accidentally). Since then history has
uncovered a far more diverse, self-contradictory, visionary Middle Ages, such as in
Carolly Erickson’s The Medieval Vision: Essays in History and Perception (1976),
where she demonstrates that those desiring a return to medieval simplicity, unifor-
mity, and order have missed that period’s true interest, its expression of the uncon-
scious—although staying within the facts, she, nonetheless, evokes a world almost
as strange as historical fantasy.
Trends and Themes. The increased desire to make history psychologically appeal-
ing often brings at least some deviation from dull linearity, as with Michael Brown’s
The Wars of Scotland, 1214–1371, which interrupts the flow of text with maga-
zinelike boxes, singling out stimulating remarks. In other books, advances in print-
ing make possible lavish illustrations, such as Douglas Brinkley’s National
Geographic Visual History of the World (2005) with timelines on each page and
color-coded sidebars, so that readers may flip at random. A step beyond this are
such tomes as Felipe Fernandez-Arnesto’s two volume The World: A History with
interactive CD-Roms (2006) or Jane Bingham’s The Usborne Internet-Linked
Encyclopedia of World History (2001).
Availability of illustration not only embellishes traditional historical subjects but
inspires ones built around pictures, for example, Jack Larkin’s Where We Lived
(2006). By combining photographs from the Historic American Buildings Survey
with travelers’ diary entries, he recreates the experience of the past. Project director
for “Back to Our Roots,” Larkin makes material remains fulfill a common function
of myth, a sense of restored origin. Finally, Larry Gonick’s The Cartoon History of
the Modern World (2006) and similar books allow for a commingling of fact and
fantasy, where the two remain sufficiently separable so that a careful reader can
learn history from the former and be amused by the latter without necessarily con-
fusing the two.
 HISTORICAL WRITING (NONFICTION) 471

Some history books share much with cinema (the most popular amalgam of picture and con-
densation).This connection is occasionally literal, such as the flood of film histories, for exam-
ple, Robert A. Rosenstone’s History on Film/Film on History (2006) or Robert Niemi’s History
in the Media: Film and Television (2006). So far, though, the more common tendency is to share
with the popular media sensational topics, especially sex. Such histories focus on erotic sit-
uations (e.g., Antonia Fraser’s Love and Louis XIV:The Women in the Life of the Sun King, 2006)
or embrace a broader scope as with Stephen Chippenham’s Histories of Sexuality (2004), Kim
Phillips’s Sexualities in History (2001), and Elizabeth Reis’s American Sexual Histories (2001).

One of the fascinations of pictures comes from their suggesting understanding at

a glance, an effect also of condensation, a process like dreams, which tell whole
stories in moments of Rapid-Eye-Movement sleep. Working as well (or badly) as
other labor-saving devices, literary condensation (or the promise of it) has become
a publishing staple, such as E.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World (2005),
Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything (2005), and Ken Wilber’s new
age A Brief History of Everything (1996). Gombrich’s title perhaps best exemplifies
this tendency because the book was first published in German in 1936 as World
History from the Beginning to the Present (Weltgeschichte von der Urzeit bis zur
Gegenwart) and then in 1985 as A Short World History for Young Readers (Eine
kurze Weltgeschichte für junge Leser). The earliest title presupposes readers desirous
of much for their money, the second is a concession to the short attention span of
children, and the third suggests that everyone may share this trait. Given the vogue
of promised condensation, when David Harvey decided to employ such a jaw-
breaker as “neoliberalism” in a title, he felt obliged to soften it by calling the book
A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005). After the success of Stephen Hawking’s A
Brief History of Time (1988) came The Illustrated Brief History of Time (1996) and
then A Briefer History of Time (2005).
To the extent that technological developments affect the trend, these are also
chronicled, for example, in Joan Meyerowitz’s How Sex Changed: A History of
Transsexuality in the United States (2002). Ranging from Marilyn Yalom’s History
of the Breast (1998) to David Friedman’s A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of
the Penis (2001), every part of the subject is exposed repeatedly and treated directly,
indirectly, or even by its absence, as with Gary Taylor’s Castration: An Abbreviated
History of Western Manhood (2000) or Piotr O. Scholtz’s and John A. Broadwin’s
Eunuchs and Castrati: A Cultural History (2000)—both probably stemming from a
curiosity whetted by the movie Farinelli (1994).
Freudian analysts began with a historiography that Richard H. Armstrong titled
A Compulsion for Antiquity (2005) and continue to publish that the past is an
expression of subconscious sexual impulses. In such books as Robert B. Clarke’s An
Order Outside Time: A Jungian View of the Higher Self from Egypt to Christ
(2005), Jungian psychologists chronicle spiritual history. Although relatively old-
fashioned ecclesiastical histories (the conscious side of religion) continue to be pub-
lished, newer publications examine trancelike, spiritual experiences that contradict
orthodoxy. For years, there was one voluminous tome on that subject, Evelyn
Underhill’s Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Spiritual
Consciousness (1911), but its examples, largely from the lives of the saints, were
472 HISTORICAL WRITING (NONFICTION)

only a mild challenge to the Christian church because Underhill was a devout
Anglo-Catholic.
However, the poet and former college professor Nicholas Hagger has been pub-
lishing one massive compendium on the history of mysticism after another, among
them The Light of Civilization: How the Vision of God has Inspired All the Great
Civilizations (2006). What is remarkable, however, is their unparalleled mix of real
scholarship and amateurish reliance on very questionable sources. Even the latter
constitute a quarry of information about new-age groups. Admittedly, there has
been a tradition of idiosyncratic religious historiography among some British poets
since Robert Graves’s The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth
(1948). Nicholas Hagger’s accomplishment, however, is to be one of the first to pub-
lish the kind of unselective information accumulation that the Internet has made
available, which is many students’ experience of history—a flood of data that once
(for both good and ill) was prevented by academic prejudices and standards. The
twenty-first century, of course, also issues more restrained and limited treatments of
his subject (e.g., Roy Anker’s Catching Light: Looking for God in the Movies, 2004;
or Eva Parinou’s The Light of the Gods: The Role of Light in Archaic and Classical
Greek Cult, 2000). Hagger, though, is one of the most conspicuous examples of
writers whose very personal spiritual search expresses itself through historical
research; other examples are Layne Redmond’s When the Drummers Were Women:
A Spiritual History of Rhythm (1997) or Nevil Drury’s The History of Magic in the
Modern Age: A Quest for Personal Transformation (2000).
As Amy Hollywood has demonstrated in her Sensible Ecstasy (2002), during the
latter twentieth century, many French intellectuals, even atheists, wrote sympathet-
ically about past mystics, especially if they were women, because the intellectuals
favored the emergence of the repressed and suppressed (including feminism).
Twenty-first-century feminism is not only exhuming women’s history but also giv-
ing voice to the emotions and spiritualities once dismissed by academic historians.
Bonnie Smith’s The Gender of History (1998), for instance, recovers a time when
women historians, condemned as amateurs, were dealing conspicuously with the
emotional and spiritual traumas that underlie history being the realm of the dead.
In addition to pursuing the theoretical issues of a feminist historiography, as in
Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai’s Women’s Words (1991) and Sue Morgan’s
The Feminist History Reader (2006), feminist historians have been rethinking reli-
gious traditions, for example, Luise Schottroff, Barbara Rumscheidt, and Martin
Rumscheidt’s Lydia’s Impatient Sisters: A Feminist Social History of Early Chris-
tianity and Rita Gross’s Buddhism After Patriarchy; A Feminist History, Analysis
and Reconstruction of Buddhism (1995).
Other formerly suppressed voices finding their histories include sexual and racial
minorities. African American history is epic celebrated in such major works as
Taylor Branch’s three-volume chronicle of the King years: Parting the Waters
(1988); Pillar of Fire (1998); and At Canaan’s Edge: American in the King Years,
1965–1968 (2004). Also notable are African American contributions to world cul-
ture, as with Leland’s Hip: The History (2004). Particularly since Martin Bernal’s
Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1988; rev. ed. 2006)
and Chancellor Williams’s Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race
from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D. (1971), black history has challenged traditional ver-
sions of the past and served as a model for recollections of other suppressed minori-
ties, for example, Melissa Wender’s Lamentations as History: Narratives by Koreans
 HISTORICAL WRITING (NONFICTION) 473

in Japan, 1965–2000 (2005). At least since Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979), the
Occident’s projection of its own unconscious on Asia has been a recognized prob-
lem, studied, for instance, in Robert Markley’s The Far East and the English Imag-
ination, 1600–1730 (2006). Ruth MacKay’s “Lazy, Improvident People”: Myth
and Reality in the Writing of Spanish History (2006) exemplifies a related kind of
book, the defense of a slandered nation; the diasporas of so many states’ citizens
almost guarantees that they will form minority groups somewhere with reason to
question the dominant group’s version of history.
Comparably, twenty-first century historians are likely to focus on people outside
the dominant culture, including the feral children of Michael Newton’s Savage Girls
and Wild Boys (2002), the loafers in Tom Lutz’s Doing Nothing (2006), or even the
obnoxious in Mark Caldwell’s A Short History of Rudeness (2000). Of course, this
trend encompasses recollections of the American counterculture in Robert Stone’s
Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, (2007), and Marc Fisher’s Something in the
Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation (2007) as well as
a much longer span of pleasure seeking in Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the
Streets (2007). Given the success of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (2003 and
2006), books on sea rovers proliferated in time for the films and their CD and tele-
vision re-release, for example, Gail Sellinger’s and W. Thomas Smith’s The Complete
Idiot’s Guide to Pirates (2006) and John Matthews’s Pirates (2006). Typical of
much American history writing, Hampton Sides’s Blood and Thunder: An Epic of
the American West (2006) stresses the wilds and their inhabitants in the United
States adventure.
This chronicling of what and whomever lies beyond the pales of propriety, civi-
lization, and conscious control already constitutes a history of the unconscious’s
imagery. Histories of the unconscious itself may include such post-Freudian research
as is summarized in Frank Tallis’s Hidden Minds: A History of the Unconscious
(2002) and Guy Claxton’s Wayward Mind: An Intimate History of the Unconscious
(2006). Given the growing prominence of “dissociation” and the continuing impor-
tance of myth in psychological theory, the subject also includes Robert Rieber’s The
Bifurcation of the Self: The History and Theory of Dissociation and Its Disorders
(2006) and Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth (2002). The idea of the
unconscious explicitly figures in Jenni Hellwarth’s The Reproductive Unconscious
in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (2002), Lesslie Hossfeld’s Narrative,
Political Unconscious and Racial Violence in Wilmington, North Carolina (2004),
and Elizabeth Ezra’s The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar
France (2000).
One of the most prominent ways that authors serve a public desire for represen-
tations of the unconscious, however, is to take a metaphor for it and build a history
around it associatively. Consider, for instance, Victoria Finlay’s Color: A Natural
History of the Palette (2002), which commences with images of her tumbling some-
what like Alice in Wonderland, but through a “paintbox,” into the imagination,
which is inhabited by a “rainbow serpent” (ix). She writes “I dreamed of a moun-
tain with veins of blue, inhabited by men with wild eyes and black turbans, and
when I woke up I knew that one day I would go there” (281). Her journey for pig-
ments brings her to the Afghanistan of her dream and to Australia, where she con-
templates how sacred ochres lead the aborigines into dreamtime: “Dreamtime—a
dream in the sense that it is not set in the past, but in a kind of parallel present
universe, rather like the one we operate in while we are asleep” (35–36). As for
474 HISTORICAL WRITING (NONFICTION)

Hagger, light represents a reality both internal and transpersonal, so for Finlay do
the colors of light. What makes her book much more popular than Hagger’s, how-
ever, is that she manages to integrate her subject as symbol with its very physical
manifestations.
Comparable books treat the histories of specific colors, such as the synthesizing
of royal purple: Simon Garfield’s Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color that
Changed the World (2000). They easily focus on light solidified—some shiny object
as with Eric Wilson’s The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the
Imagination (2003) or Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History (2002), which
begins with a mysterious, luminous, icelike saline mass that the author bought.
Given, for instance, Chinese use of gardens as spiritual microcosms of the world,
Tom Turner’s Garden History: Philosophy and Design 2000 B.C.–2000 AD (2005)
belongs here as well. Related to these single fetish books are ones that bring together
many treasures from the past and the search for them, as in Frank Pope’s Dragon
Sea: A True Tale of Treasure, Archeology, and Greed off the Coast of Vietnam
(2007) and in Josh Bernstein’s Digging for the Truth: One Man’s Epic Adventure
Exploring the World’s Greatest Archaeological Mysteries (2006). They follow the
very gradual shift in history writing from finished record to search in progress—a
search as much internal as external.
Context and Issues. The approach of the year 2000 inspired apocalyptic specula-
tions, which did not entirely disappear when the first few years of the twenty-first
century brought September 11, 2001, a variety of wars, including the American
invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and natural disasters, notably a 2004 tsunami in
the Pacific and a 2005 inundating hurricane in New Orleans. Perhaps coincidentally,
books on past disasters that might have seemed like academic exercises began to
sound like precursors of the present, for example, Willam Wayne Farris’s Japan’s
Medieval Population: Famine, Fertility, and Warfare in a Transformative Age
(2006). Naturally, people wondered what might be done. The biologist Jared
Diamond had written two, very fatalistic, previous books, with humans as chim-
panzees controlled by their environments: the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Guns, Germs,
and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1999) and The Third Chimpanzee: The
Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (1992). His twenty-first-century book
was Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2004)—still portraying his-
tory as a response to weather and geography but with a greater recognition that
people could adapt to adverse conditions.
In order to adapt, however, people had to decide what had happened, beginning
with 9/11, and publishers were very obliging in this regard: Mitchell Fink’s Never
Forget: An Oral History of September 11, 2001 (2002), Damon DiMarco’s Tower
Stories: An Oral History of 9/11 (2007), Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower:
Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006), and so on. The larger questions about the
Middle East reaped a comparable harvest: F.E. Peters’s The Monotheists: Jews,
Christians, and Muslims in Conflict and Competition (2005), Andrew Wheatcroft’s
Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam (2004), Bernard
Lewis’s The Middle East: 2000 years of History from the Rise of Christianity to the
Present Day (1996; rev. ed. 2000), Michael Oren’s Power, Faith, and Fantasy:
America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present (2007), and so on. Such books as
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America (Hedges, 2007)
have argued that government measures to defend America against terrorism have
helped a larger conservative agenda. A few books themselves became foci of
 HISTORICAL WRITING (NONFICTION) 475

“BASED ON A TRUE STORY”

At a time when fictions like to advertise themselves as “based on a true story,” history con-
stitutes a very marketable commodity.A revelation about organized crime, such as Nicholas
Pileggi’s Wiseguy (1985), is very likely to be filmed—in this case, becoming Goodfellas (1990).
Sports are another photogenic activity, as with Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit (2001) adapted
into a major movie (2003). Mark Bowden’s military thriller Blackhawk Down (2000) evoked
the moment by moment panic of combat in Mogadishu so powerfully that it easily flowed
into Ridley Scott’s riveting cinema of it (2001). George Jonas’s Vengeance:The True Story of an
Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team (1984) first inspired the 1986 TV movie Sword of Gideon and then
Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2005).

controversy—somewhat the case with Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not

Apartheid (2006), accused of being pro-Arab, and more obviously with Bob
Woodward’s State of Denial (2006), which played a part in President Bush’s declin-
ing popularity. The title of Woodward’s book well captures the mood of the time
with its suggestion that the real situation was being politically suppressed and/or
psychologically repressed by those in power. In more questionable books, extreme
speculations flourished about the United States causing the attack on the twin tow-
ers. These theories were opposed in Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy The-
ories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts by the Editors of Popular Mechanics with an
“Introduction” by John McCain (2006).
Reception. When one includes the “History Channel” on American cable televi-
sion, historiography seems very much alive. Consequently, Francis Fukuyama
caused a stir in 1992 when he expanded his 1989 article “The End of History? After
the Battle of Jena” into the book The End of History and the Last Man. He was
writing about Immanuel Kant’s notion that, in large terms, historical writing nar-
rates the long development from prehistory to modern liberal democracy, so that
readers can see the goal of history and participate in it (Fukuyama 1992, 57).
George W. Hegel concluded that with Napoleon’s victory over the Prussian monar-
chy in 1806, the idea of liberty had materialized, so that further history writing was
pointless. This, of course, ignores the value of limited historiography, designed to
help a specific society become more democratic, but it raises interesting questions
about “Universal History.” At the end of his book, Fukuyama wonders if we are in
the age of (what the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called) “the Last Man,” who
contents himself with creature comforts because there is no longer any great pur-
pose to be achieved.
The basic problem with Fukuyama’s premises is that they come from Kant and
Hegel, who assumed “history” meant (as it did in their day) a chronological
account of changing political structures. The history writing of the twentieth and
early twenty-first century, however, has not been limited to the external shape of
events but has suggested the internal: how impulses, impressions, and intuitions
contribute. Because of Hegel’s influence on Marx, communism was a fossil pre-
serving the old history to inspire the struggle toward utopia. After the fall of com-
munism, though, the function of history has tended to be an enlargement of
awareness and (whether or not this leads to structured political and economic
changes) its goal is achieved as reading history opens the minds of the readers to
greater complexity. The continuing struggle, of course, is that such complexity is
476 HISTORICAL WRITING (NONFICTION)

initially frightening. Consequently, histories are most widely received if they

include elements of the familiar—the degree of reassurance needed, of course,
being related both to the fearsomeness of each age described and each age in which
the describing occurs.
Selected Authors. During an economic boom, when the government was lavishly
funding social and educational projects, the “New Left” of the 1960s was attracted
to Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955), which viewed the past as a
record of unnecessary repression and championed unconscious impulses. The “New
New Left” of the 1970s and 1980s reveled in such philosophical historiography as
Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (Surveiller et Punir:
Naissance de la Prison, French 1975; English 1977)—a strident condemnation of
enforcing norms. Naturally, even then there was a growing neo-conservative move-
ment in reaction against the proposed anarchy. Near the ominous year 2000, the
most prominent interpreters of history tended to be far from the radicalism of
Marcuse or Foucault. This is not to say that history writing went back entirely to the
old mode, but it often mixed the new impressionistic approach with a relatively con-
servative nostalgia, as with Thomas Cahill, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Eric Larson,
and Thomas Friedman.
Author of Jesus’ Little Instruction Book (1994), Thomas Cahill is publishing a
multi-volume “Hinges of History” series, mostly Christian apologetic. Back in
1936, C.S. Lewis argued in his Allegory of Love that Christianity had raised the sta-
tus of women through courtly love, which he traced to Christian roots (thereby, per-
haps, underplaying the importance of Arab sources). Cahill’s Mysteries of the
Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic
Europe (2006) functions in a similar way, focusing almost exclusively on possible
Christian influences. Even though many patriarchal cultures have had idealized
images of the feminine (e.g., Kuanyin in China or the goddesses of Greece), Cahill
presumes that the Catholic version of these led to feminism. Even though alchemy
flourished in China with no connection to the transubstantiation allegedly occurring
in the Christian mass, Cahill presumes such a connection instrumental in Western
alchemy and that alchemy was the source of science. Another way feminism and
science might be explained is quite the opposite: the breakdown in Christian ortho-
doxy that allowed people to deviate from tradition.
Cahill’s other “Hinges of History” also emphasize the possible contributions of
Christian tradition. Although the copying of manuscripts in Irish monasteries dur-
ing the Dark Ages has been a given in many studies of world history, Cahill titles
the first volume in this series How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of
Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe (1995).
Obviously, the Greco-Roman civilization therein preserved was not the only one in
the world, and the preservation of its books owes at least as much to the Byzantines
and Arabs as to the Irish, but How the Irish Saved Civilization spent over two years
on the New York Times bestseller list. Winner of a Christopher award, Cahill’s next
book The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way
Everyone Thinks and Feels (1998) makes what Christians call the “Old Testament”
the foundation of civilization. The third volume, Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The
World Before and After Jesus (1999) interprets Jesus as the shaper of civilization.
The fourth volume, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)
comes closest to diverging from Christian apologetic, but functions to introduce
Greek culture as a component of early Christianity and thence an influence today.
 HISTORICAL WRITING (NONFICTION) 477

Although lacking that kind of tunnel vision, the erudite, multi-cultural Felipe
Fernandez-Armesto is in his own way even more conservative. He grew up as part
of a Hispanic minority in Britain, and his The Spanish Armada: The Experience
of War in 1588 (1988) mocks the Britains’ notion that their victory over Spain
showed the superiority of liberty over despotism. A Roman Catholic, his Refor-
mations: A Radical Interpretation of Christianity and the World, 1500–2000
(written with Derek Wilson, 1997) argues that the Protestant Reformation was
not a major event but merely one of many reform movements. In this and as a
refrain through many of his works, he argues that, given history as a whole,
change is a relatively rare aberration, likely to go away (see his Internet interview,
“Back to the “Future”). His So You Think You’re Human? (2005) portrays peo-
ple as a species of chimpanzee. With nostalgia for the jungle, his 2001 Civiliza-
tions considers civilization to be a mistake. In an age when postmodernism makes
many historians skeptical about the existence of objective truth, he not only
believes in it but has written Truth (2001) to defend the comforting idea that his-
tory can be objective truth.
The former Wall Street Journal reporter Erik Larson began with standard liberal
notions but has been following an ever darker skepticism about progress, which is
taking him in the direction of Fernandez-Armesto. Larson’s reporting career led
him to write Naked Consumer: How Our Private Lives Become Public Commodi-
ties (1993) in reaction against the rise of invasive technologies. With Lethal
Passage: The Story of a Gun (1994), he was, of course, advocating gun control to
preserve us from a murdering sixteen-year-old with an M–11/9. His swerve from
liberal reportage was Isaac’s Storm: The Drowning of Galveston, 8 September
1900 (2001). The villain is no standard target of liberals, such as prying censors or
gun manufacturers, but nature aided by a meteorologist’s naïve trust in an imper-
fect technology. The swerve from liberalism continues in The Devil in the White
City (2006). Larson contrasts the World’s Fair—embodying the age’s optimism
about technology—with a serial killer, employing his own technology for homi-
cide. In Thunderstruck (2006), Larson again contrasts an image of technological
progress, Guglielmo Marcone, inventor of the wireless, with a murderer, this time
H.H. Crippen. Repeatedly, Larson makes the point that public acceptance of the
new technology was spurred by the hunt for Crippen, so that homicide and prob-
lematic advance become conflated, as with his previous book. Both volumes are
rather like the movie Forbidden Planet, where progress runs up against monsters
from the unconscious.
Although initially a fairly liberal reporter, Thomas Friedman’s long support for
the Iraq war and for capitalist expansion aligned him with President Bush’s neo-
conservative government. Eventually, Friedman condemned the war, but by then so
did a number of conservatives. Winner of three Pulitzer Prizes for reporting, he
brought first-hand experience to his From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989), in some ways
a moderate and conciliatory survey of the Middle East, but sufficiently appreciative
of force so that the book’s prestige may have helped to steer America in that direc-
tion. His angry reaction to 9/11, Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World
After September 11 (2002) was distinctly hawkish. His encomiums to the Internet,
The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999) and The World is Flat: A Brief History of the
Twenty-First Century (2005) recognize some dangers of globalization but focus
more on the boons to the privileged than on the banes to those not in a position
to profit.
478 HISTORICAL WRITING (NONFICTION)

THE PULITZER PRIZES FOR HISTORY

Recent Pulitzer Prizes for history writing have included these:

2007 The Race Beat:The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation by
Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff (Alfred A. Knopf)
2006 Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky (Oxford University Press)
2005 Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer (Oxford University Press)
2004 A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the
Great Migration by Steven Hahn (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)
2003 An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943 by Rick Atkinson (Henry
Holt and Company)
2002 The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand (Farrar, Straus
and Giroux)
2001 Founding Brothers:The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis (Alfred A. Knopf)
2000 Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 by
David M. Kennedy (Oxford University Press)
Source: Pulitzer Prize Web site. http://www.pulitzer.org/

Like other such great popularizers of history, such as Barbara Tuchman with her
A Distant Mirror (1978), Cahill, Fernandez-Armesto, Larson, and Friedman have
helped bridge past and present. In a world of rapid, seemingly chaotic change,
Cahill has given modern Christian readers a sense of some design, working through-
out the centuries to unfold their values, and Fernandez-Armesto has presented such
a great span of time and space that the disturbing changes almost seem to disappear.
Larson has dramatized the current disenchantment with technology, projecting it
backward a hundred years, and Friedman has produced the opposite, but also reas-
suring, A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, where he manages to be nos-
talgic for traditional communities, which he hopes to preserve, yet also optimistic
about a global one to come.

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Further Reading
Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900
(Studies in Environment and History). London: Cambridge University Press, 1986; Gaddis,
Lewis, John. The Cold War: A New History. New York: Penguin, 2006; Harrison, Thomas.
Divinity and History: The Religion of Herodotus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005;
Kelley, Donald R. Frontiers of History: Historical Inquiry in the Twentieth Century. New
Haven: Yale UP, 2006; Lee, Nancy, Lonnie Schlein and Mitchell Levitas, eds. A Nation Chal-
lenged: A Visual History of 9/11 and Its Aftermath. New York: The New York Times, 2002;
Luce, T.J. Livy: the Composition of his History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977;
Rabasa, Angel M., Cheryl Bernard, Peter Chalk, C. Christine Fair, Theodore Karasik, Rollie
Lal, Ian Lesser, and David Thaler. The Muslim World after 9/11. Santa Monica: Rand, 2004;
Ranke, Leopold von. History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations, 1494–1514. Translated by
 HOLOCAUST LITERATURE 483

G.R. Dennis. Houston: Kessinger, 2004; Ricks, Thomas E. Fiasco: The American Military
Adventure in Iraq. New York: Penguin, 2006; Selincourt, Aubrey de. The History. New York:
Longman, 2006.
JAMES WHITLARK
HOLOCAUST LITERATURE
Definition. The Holocaust was a series of events between 1933 and 1945 that
included the attempted genocide of the Jewish people by the Nazi forces of
Germany. More than six million Jews were murdered in this period, a large pro-
portion in specially designed concentration camps (Kremer 2003, xxi).
In his seminal anthology of Holocaust literature, Art from the Ashes (1995),
Lawrence Langer remarks that “we may never know what the Holocaust was for
those who endured it, but we do know what has been said about it and . . . the var-
ied ways writers have chosen to say it” (Langer 1995, 3). Thus, Langer distinguishes
between the Holocaust as an event—which we can never know—and the Holocaust
as a theme for literature, which, as he puts it, changes “the route by which we
approach it” (Langer 1995, 3). Yet what does it mean to transform the deaths of
millions into a literary theme for a work of fiction? If this is a worrying question for
those of us who have no experience of the Holocaust, we can barely imagine how
troubling a question it might be for the survivors of the camps, who display both an
overwhelming necessity to turn their experiences into words and, at the same time,
apprehend that words may be incommensurate with the task.
The Holocaust memoirist Elie Wiesel (1928–) expressed suspicion of the genre
when he remarked that “a novel about Treblinka is either not a novel or not about
Treblinka” (Wiesel 1990, 7). Wiesel is suggesting that works about the Holocaust
can only be factual and, therefore, that fiction cannot be about the Holocaust.
Yet there is such a genre as Holocaust literature. Novels by survivors, their
descendents, and others are read, reviewed, and taught on a regular basis. Further,
one might venture a straightforward definition of Holocaust literature as simply lit-
erature “about the Holocaust” (Eaglestone 2004, 102). This is not quite as clear as
it first appears, however, because much late twentieth-century American fiction has
been concerned with the Holocaust even when the Holocaust has not been its
explicit theme. For example, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
(1968) is thematically “about the Holocaust,” even though not overtly concerned
with Nazis and European Jews (Sammon 1996, 16–17). A similar observation
might be made, for example, of Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer (1966), Thomas
Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1984).
Indeed, “one might even be tempted to ask what it means when a novel or poem

CAN THE HOLOCAUST BE RESPONDED TO CREATIVELY?

The philosopher Theodor Adorno famously proposed that “to write poetry after Auschwitz
is barbaric” (Langer 1975, 1).The same might be said of fiction. How can one derive aesthetic
pleasure from contemporary novels after this supreme manifestation of human wickedness?
Adorno was particularly suspicious of Holocaust literature precisely because it might pro-
vide readers with such aesthetic pleasure. He wrote,“The so-called artistic rendering of the
naked bodily pain of those who were beaten down by rifle butts contains, however distantly,
the possibility that pleasure can be squeezed from it” (Adorno 1993, 88).
484 HOLOCAUST LITERATURE

written after 1945 in Europe or America did not engage with the issue” (Eaglestone
2004, 106).
For the sake of clarity, we will confine ourselves in this essay to a discussion of
canonical Holocaust literature written by survivors to bear witness to the experience
of the events and to recent American novels concerned with the Holocaust and its
aftermath in the United States.

Trends and Themes

Auschwitz defies imagination and perception; it submits only to memory. . . . Between
the dead and the rest of us there exists an abyss that no talent can comprehend.
I write to denounce writing. I tell of the impossibility one stumbles upon in trying to
tell the tale. (Wiesel 1983, 1)

According to Elie Wiesel, if Holocaust literature must be attempted it should be

written solely by witnesses of the events. Only those who submit to “memory” can
be trusted “to tell the tale” of the disaster. Yet even survivor-writers are confronted
with “the impossibility” of conveying their ghastly experiences in the necropolis of
the Nazi death camps. Thus, Wiesel recommends silence: “As the ancients said:
‘Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know’” (Wiesel 1967,
152). Throughout the 1960s, the critic George Steiner was similarly recommending
“only silence or the Kadish for the unnumbered dead” (Steiner 1967, 168).
Despite such objections, Holocaust literature was written. To trace its develop-
ment, one must look first to European novelists, including Wiesel. Other important
authors to consider are Primo Levi (1919–1987) and Charlotte Delbo (1913–1985).
We now turn to the principal texts by these influential writers.
Elie Wiesel’s Night (1958). Elie Wiesel was born in the Transylvanian town of Sighet
in 1928. When he was fifteen years old, he was deported with his family to
Auschwitz. At the end of the war, his parents and younger sister were dead. In 1963
he moved to New York and assumed American citizenship. Since 1976 he has taught
at Boston University, and in 1986 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Night, Wiesel’s account of his time in Auschwitz and deportation to Buchenwald,
was published in French in 1958 and English in 1960. The original version of this
novelistic memoir, written in Yiddish, was titled And the World Remained Silent
(1956). Given the importance of silence in all of Wiesel’s writings, this title is sig-
nificant. Indeed, Night is concerned with at least four types of silence: the mystery
of God’s silence in the face of evil, the muteness of the dead, the inadequacy of lan-
guage in relation to the events of the Holocaust, and the proper awed stance of the
reader in the face of Holocaust testimony.
Firstly, there is the mystery of God’s silence in the face of evil. This question is
theological and concerns theodicy, or whether one can have faith in omnipotent
divine providence that, by definition, oversees suffering in the world. The question of
theodicy, or of God’s silence, is not new. Indeed, it goes back to the biblical Book of
Job and the issue of Job’s suffering. Much of Wiesel’s writing after Night approaches
such theological issues as a way of indirectly asking the question: Where was God
during the Holocaust? Wiesel moves in Night, and subsequent books such as Dawn
(1961) and The Jews of Silence (1966), from the immediate terrors that he experi-
enced to a larger cosmic drama; he moves, in other words, from stunned realism to
theology: in the absence of divine justice or compassion, silence is the only possible
response to this mysterious absence of God. In a key passage from Night (which has
 HOLOCAUST LITERATURE 485

been published elsewhere as a poem (Schiff 1995, 42)), Wiesel moves from the death
of children in the first night of the camp to the death of God inside him:

Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the
desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and soul
and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am
condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never. (Wiesel 1981, 45)

Wiesel’s second kind of silence is the muteness or silence of the dead. In his essay
“A Plea for the Dead” (1967), Wiesel remarks:

I cannot believe that an entire generation of fathers and sons could vanish into the
abyss without creating, by their very disappearance, a mystery which exceeds and over-
whelms us . . . All the words in all the mouths of the philosophers and psychologists
are not worth the silent tears of that child and his mother. (Wiesel 1967, 143)

Thus, he urges readers to respect the silence of the dead and not to try to speak for
them. The essay is an exhortation to “learn to be silent” (Wiesel 1967, 152). In these
terms, no writer can speak for the dead.
The third kind of silence derives from the sense that language and our systems of
representation cannot do justice to the enormity of the Holocaust. Wiesel, in his
essays and criticism, writes of the sheer inadequacy of language to depict the events
of the Holocaust. In other words, Wiesel names the enormity of the Holocaust as
something that is unnameable, and he calls for silence as the only possible response
to these events. He epigrammatically states: “I write to denounce writing.” This goes
some way to explaining why Wiesel’s writing also incorporates the idea of silence.
The final kind of silence is the awed response of the reader in response to these
events. For the reader of Holocaust memoirs, silence is supposed to equal a kind of
muteness in response to the sacredness of the dead. Gillian Rose, in Mourning
Becomes the Law (1996), has controversially characterized such sanctification of the
Holocaust as “Holocaust piety” (Rose 1996, 43). For Primo Levi, too, the Holocaust
takes on something of the sacred in If This Is a Man.
Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man (1958). If This Is a Man was only accepted by a small,
short-lived publishing house, De Silvo, in 1947, after being rejected by several major
publishers, and so it made little impact until it was republished by Einaudi in 1958
(Kremer 2003, 750). It is now universally acknowledged to be one of the essential
Holocaust memoirs.
Following a biblical theme, Levi describes Auschwitz inmates’ stories as “simple
and incomprehensible like the stories in the Bible” and asks, “But are they not them-
selves stories of a new Bible?” (Levi 1987, 72). Yet in almost every other way, Levi’s
novelistic memoir differs from Wiesel’s Night.
The American Holocaust novelist Cynthia Ozick is not alone in admiring Levi for
his “lucid calm,” “magisterial equanimity,” and “unaroused detachment” (Ozick
1989, 46). Certainly Levi attempts to frame the narrative of his 11 months in
Auschwitz-Birkenau within the language of reason. In If This Is a Man he writes as
a “European” and a secular Jew rather than a religious Jew whose faith has been
shaken to its foundations (Levi 1987, 125, 136).
Further, Levi writes as a scientist. He was a twenty-four-year-old chemistry grad-
uate of Turin University, Italy, when he was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. Indeed,
486 HOLOCAUST LITERATURE

he survived mainly due to his chemistry skills being exploited in a rubber factory at
the sub-camp of Monowitz-Buna. Thus, it is unsurprising on one level that Levi
writes the following of the concentration camp: “We would like to consider that the
Lager was pre-eminently a gigantic biological and social experiment” (Levi 1987,
93) [my italics]. However, it is surprising to encounter such apparently dispassion-
ate “equanimity” from a former inmate of the world’s most infamous death camp.
In the Afterword to If This Is a Man, Levi attempts to justify the calm tone of his
narrative:

I have deliberately assumed the calm, sober language of the witness, neither the lament-
ing tones of the victim nor the irate voice of someone who seeks revenge. I thought my
account would be all the more credible . . . the more it appeared objective . . . only in
this way does a witness in matters of justice perform his task, which is preparing the
ground for the judge. The judges are my readers. (Levi 1987: 382)

Here, Levi deploys the rhetoric of law and reason. However, we may ask whether
Levi’s horrendous experiences can be contained and recounted in this objective nar-
rative voice. How far can a survivor write about himself, as it were, from the out-
side? What makes If This Is a Man especially interesting are the points in Levi’s
memoir when the language of law and reason proves no longer adequate to the task
of narrating his experiences.
Levi’s memoir relies heavily on poetry. Indeed, the passionate poem that precedes
the prose of If This Is a Man reveals the author to be far from objective and
detached. The last eight lines of Levi’s poem read:

I commend these words to you. Carve them in your hearts

At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children,
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.

What then of Levi the scientific investigator and the language of law and reason?
What then of Levi’s humane restraint? References to the Italian poet Dante
Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (1307–21) which pepper the text, serve a similar func-
tion in foregrounding poetry, passion, and a sense of rupture in Western culture.
If This Is a Man also features nonscientific anger and frustration. When a reli-
gious Jew, Kuhn, thanks “God because he has not been chosen” for the “gas cham-
ber,” the narrator is outraged:

Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him,
Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day after tomorrow
and knows it . . . Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abom-
ination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which
nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again?
If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer. (Levi 1987, 135–136)

Again, Levi’s frustration is evident when he speaks of the inadequacy of language:

“for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this
 HOLOCAUST LITERATURE 487

offence, this demolition of man” (Levi 1987, 32). Further, an impersonal, scientific
explanation of his experience fails to do justice to the horrendously isolated indi-
viduals whom Levi encounters in the camp:

He told me his story, and today I have forgotten it, but it was certainly a sorrowful,
cruel and moving story; because so are all our stories, hundreds of thousands of sto-
ries, all different and all full of a tragic disturbing necessity. (Levi 1987, 71–72)

One of the key problems confronting Levi is how to square such “tragic” experience
with the collective Western vision of a scientific and rational culture.
Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After (1946–1971). Charlotte Delbo’s trilogy
Auschwitz and After consists of three volumes published between 1946 and
1971: None of Us Will Return (1946), Useless Knowledge (1970), and The
Measure of Our Days (1971). They detail the experiences of Delbo and her
French Resistance comrades both during and after their traumatic incarceration
in Auschwitz. Unlike Wiesel and Levi, Delbo was a non-Jewish political prisoner.
Therefore, her time at Auschwitz was not subject to the same degree of lethal
threat. Indeed, measures of everyday existence continued to exist side-by-side
with the extremities of the concentration camp world for Delbo, as for other
political prisoners. It is this relationship between the everyday—for example,
domesticity, friendship and romance—and the extreme—traumatic, unrepre-
sentable horror—in Delbo’s trilogy that makes it so powerful. Further, such jux-
tapositions anticipate novels by the American children of survivors such as Thane
Rosenbaum (1960–) and Melvin Jules Bukiet (1953–), the so-called “second gen-
eration” of Holocaust survivors. (“The ‘second generation’ is a term used by clin-
ical psychologists and therapists for the children of Holocaust survivors who
have in various ways been affected by the after-effects of their parents’ experi-
ence” (Sicher 2005, 133).) (See later.)
Delbo’s project is not simply to document her time in Auschwitz. Her texts also
bear witness to what Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub have called a “crisis in truth”
(Felman and Laub 1992, 5–6). According to Felman and Laub, testimonial
Holocaust “texts do not simply report facts but . . . encounter—and make us
encounter—strangeness” (Felman and Laub 1992, 7). Delbo leads us into such an
encounter with strangeness, but her texts also present a version of documentary
realism in their reportage of everyday events. Indeed, Delbo’s testimony manages to
perform a double function. It reveals how the radically strange world of Auschwitz
has marked similarities with our everyday world; and, at the same time, it demon-
strates that the familiar categories and frameworks of everyday life need to be
estranged through a text that forces us to recognize that a complete witnessing by
readers of the experiences of the Holocaust is impossible. Both functions correspond
to an attempt to narrate the everyday nature of an event in Auschwitz in its histor-
ical context and in its extremity as traumatic experience. Delbo manages such a
double task precisely by her recourse to literature, a place where historical facts can
interact with intense personal memories.
For example, Delbo disrupts her testimony of everyday reality in Auschwitz by
introducing excessive objects such as teddy bears (Delbo 1995, 162–166) and love
letters (Delbo 1995, 155–161). Her fragmented narratives are haunted by such
unintegrated details. Indeed, details such as the teddy bear transform her personal
testimony into a collective project. Holocaust literature becomes a recording of
488 HOLOCAUST LITERATURE

trauma in which the ruins of civilian life are assembled in order to disrupt any neat
separation between the individual and history; then and now.
“The Teddy Bear” episode begins, innocuously enough, with the description of a
Christmas spent in the laboratory of Raisko, a satellite camp of Auschwitz. Though
melancholy, this episode seems to represent one of those “moments of reprieve”
(Levi 1981) during which privileged prisoners are almost able to obtain an experi-
ence of normality in the camps. The festivities reach their climax with the exchange
of token gifts, one of which is a small teddy bear for a little girl. This most innocent
of presents turns out to have a ghastly origin which, recounted by the narrator, shat-
ters the apparent normality of the scene:

I stared at the teddy bear. It was a terrifying sight.

One morning, as we passed near the railway station on our way to the fields, our col-
umn was stopped by the arrival of a Jewish convoy. People were stepping down from
the cattle cars, lining up on the platform in response to the shouted orders of the SS.
Women and children first. In the front row, a little girl held her mother by the hand.
She had kept her doll tightly squeezed against her body.
This is how a doll, a teddy bear, arrives in Auschwitz. In the arms of a little girl who
will leave her toy with her clothing, carefully folded, at the entrance to “the showers.”
A prisoner from the “heaven commando,” as they called those who worked in the cre-
matoria, had found it among the objects piled up in the showers’ antechamber and
exchanged it for a couple of onions. (Delbo 1995, 166)

This short anecdote establishes a chain of contamination in the camps, connect-

ing the murder of a Jewish girl with the celebration of a Christian holiday, the cre-
matoria and machinery of death to the commerce of the concentration camp. The
same process that facilitates Nazi genocide is shown here to enhance an ordinary
celebration at the privileged end of the camp hierarchy. In its circulation from one
little girl to another, the teddy bear is the bearer of a double heritage. Yet it is by no
means clear that the Christmas party has been spoiled by the teddy’s origins. Only
the narrator knows about the bear’s original owner—a fact that ensures the chain
of evidence leading from murder to celebration will survive. Still, the party goes on
despite the murder of the teddy bear’s previous owner. From the narrator’s chance
witness comes this testimony that in turn contaminates the receiver—ultimately, the
reader—with useless knowledge.
Delbo’s elucidation of the teddy bear’s progress from arrival to circulation in the
camp economy is typical of her use of metonymy. As a poet, she uses the teddy bear
to represent something larger: the toy stands for the child who owned it and was
murdered. Thus, Delbo reveals the relationship between the everyday world of work
and play and the death factory reality of the concentration camp (Rothberg 2000,
152–153).
Contexts and Issues. Since the late 1950s, many American novelists have dealt
thematically with the Holocaust. Survivor experience has been conveyed, for exam-
ple, in Philip Roth’s “Eli the Fanatic” (1959) and The Ghost Writer (1979); Edward
Wallant’s The Pawnbroker (1961); Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies, A Love Story
(1966); Saul Bellow’s Mr Sammler’s Planet (1972); William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice
(1979); Cynthia Ozick’s Cannibal Galaxy (1983), The Messiah of Stockholm
(1985), and The Shawl (1989); Louis Begley’s Wartime Lies (1991); Melvin Jules
Bukiet’s Stories of an Imaginary Childhood (1992) and After (1996); Anne
Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces (1996); Thane Rosenbaum’s Elijah Visible (1996), Second
 HOLOCAUST LITERATURE 489

Hand Smoke (1999), and The Golems of Gotham (2002); Jonathan Safran Foer’s
Everything is Illuminated (2002); and Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures
of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and The Final Solution (2005). Between 1978 and 1991,
Art Spiegelman drew a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust,
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1992).
At least since the 1990s, these literary works have shared the perspective of
“postmemory.” According to the critic Marianne Hirsch, who coined the term,
postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by
narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the
stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither
understood nor recreated. (Hirsch 1997, 22)

We turn now to contemporary American texts that exemplify this phenomenon of

“postmemory” Holocaust literature.

Selected Authors
Art Spiegelman (1948–). Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale shows just how
“postmemory should reflect back on memory, revealing it as equally constructed,
equally mediated by the processes of narration and imagination . . . Post-memory is
anything but absent or evacuated: It is as full and as empty as memory itself”
(Young 2000, 15).
Indeed, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale is not so much about the Holocaust as about the
survivor’s story and the artist-son’s recovery of it. In Spiegelman’s own words:
“Maus is not what happened in the past, but rather what the son understands of the
father’s story . . . It is an autobiographical history of my relationship with my father,
a survivor of the death camps, cast with cartoon animals” (Young 2000, 15).
As the Holocaust survivor Vladek recalls what happened to him at the hands of
the Nazis, so his son Artie recalls what happened to him at the hands of his father
and his father’s Holocaust narratives. Much as his father related his experiences to
Artie in all their painful immediacy, so Artie tells his experiences of interviews with
his father and the painful father-son relationship they reveal. Artie’s relationship with
Vladek is intimately connected to a past that continues to overwhelm both of them.
Thus, Spiegelman’s subtitle—A Survivor’s Tale—may well refer as much to Artie as
to his father. In this, it is typical of second-generation American Holocaust literature.
Maus is analyzed in several academic studies, most notably Michael Rothberg’s
Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000) and James
E. Young’s At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust (2000). Young stresses
the surprising appropriateness of the graphic novel form to this genre, a “comix-
ture” of words and images [which] generates a triangulation of meaning—a kind of
three-dimensional narrative—in the movement among words, images, and the
reader’s eye (Young 2000, 18).
Similarly, Rothberg praises Maus for encouraging “everyone interested in the
Holocaust to reflect on how we approach the events of the genocide and how we
represent them to ourselves and to others” (Rothberg 2000, 2).
Anne Michaels (1958–). Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces (1996) concerns the after-
math of the Holocaust. This Canadian novel explores precisely the ways that one
remembers an event not experienced. The critic Henri Raczymow has characterized
such recall as “memory shot through with holes” or absent memory (Raczymow
1994, 98). Michaels is interested less in the clarity and authenticity of testimony
490 HOLOCAUST LITERATURE

than her protagonists’ complex relationship to the traumatic past, and its fragmen-
tary traces in the lives of those born too late to remember the Shoah (Hebrew for
the Holocaust, literally meaning “catastrophe”).
The novel is divided into two parts, the first of which concerns a Polish Jewish child
(Jakob) who is brought to Greece by an archaeologist (Athos) and so survives the
Holocaust. Jakob is haunted by the deaths he did not witness of his parents and sister
(Bella). He becomes a poet in order to assert love and a faith in language after the Nazi
violence visited upon his family. Part II shifts to Ben, the son of Holocaust survivors,
who displays many of the problems experienced by second-generation children. After
Jakob and his wife (Michaela) die, Ben travels to Greece in search of Jakob’s memoirs.
When he finds a note indicating that Michaela was pregnant at her death, Ben takes on
the mantle of surrogate child. Thus, the theme of reconciliation through language and
love is reasserted. At the same time, the novel resists any comforting resolution of the
past. “No act of violence is ever resolved,” Michaels writes. “When the one who can
forgive can no longer speak, there is only silence” (Michaels 1997, 161).
Fugitive Pieces has provoked much debate about the role of lyricism in portray-
ing the Holocaust. Some reviewers have praised its project of bringing beauty into
the equation of post-Holocaust survival. Robert Eaglestone notes the novel’s
“fugue”-like quality and the exploration of “postmemory through recurring tropes
and themes of . . . love, and music” (Eaglestone 2004, 117). By contrast, critics such
as Adrienne Kertzer question Michaels’s aestheticization of the Shoah in a skeptical
stance reminiscent of Adorno’s warning about squeezing “pleasure” from the “bod-
ily pain of those who were beaten down by rifle butts” (Adorno 1993, 88).
Melvin Jules Bukiet (1953–). Melvin Jules Bukiet draws on Jewish literary
antecedents, including Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991), Bruno Schulz
(1892–1942), and Isaac Babel (1894–1940), to create a phantasmagorical world in
his collection Stories of an Imaginary Childhood (1992). Here, he reinvents a Jewish
childhood between the wars in Proszowice, a Polish shtetl (Yiddish for “village”)
unaware of the forthcoming Churban (another Hebrew term for the Holocaust, lit-
erally meaning “destruction”). Allusively, these stories alert the reader to the fate of
the unnamed narrator. Seemingly innocuous descriptions evoke the Holocaust. For
example the opening story, “The Virtuoso,” introduces an “iron-maiden-shaped
box” that holds a violin but resembles an instrument of torture; melodies which
“flew like a fireplace cinder to the winds;” and a failed musician’s reflection that
“burning was too cruel a fate for the creator of beauty” (Bukiet 1992, 3, 6, 11).
In “The Quilt and the Bicycle,” the 12-year-old narrator’s quilt displays key
metonymical signs of the Shoah: “a yellow star and menorahs and bunnies and trains”
(Bukiet 1992, 45). Thus, readers are reminded of the Jewish children forced to wear
yellow Stars of David before being taken by train to their deaths in concentration
camps. Such children were dehumanized by the Nazis, with anti-Semitism preparing
the ground for such dehumanization. Here the narrator notes, “I was treated as the
creature I had heard called ‘Jew’” (Bukiet 1992, 55). Further, Bukiet’s text yokes
together Christianity and chimneys to subtly suggest that the common denominator
in the Church and Auschwitz was anti-Semitism: “I passed the church spire and the
Proszoworks smokestack; I forgot where I was going” (Bukiet 1992, 90–91).
Following the success of Stories of an Imaginary Childhood, which won the
Edward Lewis Wallant Award and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book
Award, Bukiet went on to write the Holocaust-related While the Messiah Tarries
(1995), After (1996), and Signs and Wonders (1999).
 HOLOCAUST LITERATURE 491

While the Messiah Tarries is mainly relevant for the light it sheds on those who
record and archive Holocaust testimony. In “The Library of Moloch,” for instance,
Bukiet suggests that his American protagonist, Dr. Arthur Ricardo, approaches
Holocaust survivors in order to “preserve their suffering, to remit immortality in
return for the chronicle of their woe” (Bukiet 1995, 185). Although this may be an
ethical ambition, one of Ricardo’s interviewees implies that an unacknowledged
victim-envy taints such American labors.
After is a picaresque comedy that opens with Isaac Kaufman’s liberation from
Aspenfeld, a sub-camp of Buchenwald. In tone, it could not differ more from the
somber melancholia found, for example, in Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl or Saul
Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet. At times the dialogue is zanily reminiscent of a Marx
Brothers sketch: “‘I like a girl with spirit.’ ‘I like a man who likes a girl with spirit.’
‘I like spirits’”(Bukiet 1996, 124); whereas the comedic narrative recalls Mel
Brooks’s satirical movie about Nazism, The Producers (1968):

Then the War travelled east and Spain was forgotten in the twentieth-century totalitarian
extravaganza, a roadshow complete with posters, banners, songs, salutes, and armies.
Madrid was the introductory act; and Berlin was the main event. (Bukiet 1996: 130)

This is clearly the opposite of “Holocaust piety.” Rather than fixing its attention on
the horrific and incomprehensible past, After sets its sights firmly on the future and
the American Dream of creating oneself “anew” through enterprise and hard work
(Bukiet 1996, 83). Only in this case, Isaac and his friends—principally, a forger,
Marcus Morgenstern, and a devout scholar, Fishl—display such American virtues
by making money on the black market.
Still, After raises important issues. Notably, it asks what values can be redeemed
in the aftermath of the Holocaust amidst anarchic free enterprise and amoral com-
mercialism (“Screw the pain. Think of the money” (Bukiet 1996: 102).). In a sense,
it reframes Primo Levi’s question of what constitutes humanity (If This Is a Man) in
a post-Holocaust American context. What is morality and who is a Jew after the
Holocaust? To some extent, a hopeful riposte is offered in Isaac’s mercy toward the
son of a Nazi. Isaac decides not to kill the boy, so that he can leave Aspenfeld with
“a perfect emptiness . . . create himself anew” (Bukiet 1996, 83). By eschewing ruth-
less murder, Isaac suggests a humane alternative to nihilism.
Bukiet presents the Holocaust less directly in Signs and Wonders. This novel con-
cerns a messianic sect that sweeps Germany on the eve of the new millennium. Con-
sidering themselves “New Jews,” the so-called Alefites victimize “old Jews” in an
eerie echo of Kristallnacht (“the night of broken glass” on 9–10 November 1938,
when much Jewish property was destroyed by German Nazis):

The message was redemption. Absolved of all sins, the New Jews no longer had to mor-
tify their own flesh. Instead, they struck outward, and the old Jews, that stubborn, stiff-
necked people who refused to accede to the right world order, were the first to feel the
sting of the lash of salvation. . . . Windows were smashed and fires were lit elsewhere
in the city, wherever a store front had the gall or ill-fate to bear a Jewish surname.
(Bukiet 1999, 263)

This is satire of the type found in After, though it appears to offer a bleaker vision
of violence persisting beyond the Holocaust into the twenty-first century.
492 HOLOCAUST LITERATURE

Critical responses to Bukiet’s work have tended to be favorable. For example, in

“Dares, Double-Dares, and the Jewish-American Writer,” Sanford Pinsker praises
Bukiet’s “tone of deliberately disconcerting humor” (Pinsker 1997, 285). He main-
tains that Bukiet’s outrageous narratives serve to “re-humanize Holocaust survivors
by allowing them to make jokes, make love, and, yes, connive for money just like
other human beings” (Pinsker 1997, 285). However, other critics have found fault
in the humor. Deborah H. Sussman, for instance, remarks of After that Bukiet fails
to achieve “perfect pitch and perfect balance . . . to sustain the tension on the
tightrope between hilarity and utter despair” (Sussman 1996).
Thane Rosenbaum (1960–). Thane Rosenbaum has written a trilogy of critically
acclaimed Holocaust literature: the short story collection Elijah Visible (1996) and the
novels Second Hand Smoke (1999) and The Golems of Gotham (2002). The first of
these won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for the best work of Jewish-American
fiction, whereas Second Hand Smoke was a National Book Award Finalist. Like
Spiegelman and Bukiet, Rosenbaum is a second-generation Holocaust writer: his
mother was imprisoned in Maidanek and his father survived Bergen-Belsen.
The stories in Elijah Visible are linked by their protagonist Adam Posner.
Depicted in Miami, New York, and Atlantic City, Adam comes to represent a com-
posite second-generation survivor in America. The collection opens with “Cattle
Car Complex,” where a New York lawyer gets trapped inside an elevator. Adam’s
psychological kinship with the Holocaust—“the legacy that flowed through his
veins” (Rosenbaum 1996, 5)—leads him to imagine that he is in a cattle car on the
train journey to a concentration camp. However, Adam is not a Holocaust survivor.
Like other second generation writers, he is burdened by imagination of his parents’
horrors rather than memories of them. The fact that Adam cannot know the details
of the Holocaust generally, and his parents’ experiences specifically, leads to a neb-
ulous terror accompanying a failure of inter-generational understanding. Such fail-
ure is depicted, for example, in “The Pants in the Family,” where Adam recalls “an
impenetrable secret—my parents speaking in code, changing the passwords repeat-
edly” (Rosenbaum 1996, 48). Only when his father makes some effort to explain
the “silence” surrounding the Holocaust in their home is Adam able to make a con-
nection with him (Rosenbaum 1996, 51).
Connecting with the generation of Holocaust survivors is also a central theme of
the title story. In “Elijah Visible,” Adam and his cousins receive a letter from Artur,
a survivor cousin in Antwerp. Artur wants to meet his American relatives in order
to recount their family’s history in Europe. Although Elijah does not arrive in this
story—an arrival which in Judaism would presage the coming of the Messiah—by
the conclusion Artur is “on his way” to offer peace and reconciliation to the second
generation (Rosenbaum 1996, 103).
As its title suggests, Second Hand Smoke explores the Holocaust legacy that sur-
vivors pass down to their children. The novel relates the life of Duncan Katz, a Nazi
hunter for the Operation of Special Investigations, and the son of survivors. As a
boy, he is deprived of parental love. Second Hand Smoke opens with the lines: “He
was a child of trauma. Not of love, or happiness, or exceptional wealth. Just
trauma. And nightmare too” (Rosenbaum 1999, 1). Rather than despair or melan-
choly, Duncan feels rage. His mother, Mila, encourages his belligerence. After the
vulnerability she and her husband Yankee (nee Herschel) experienced in Europe,
“what his mother really wanted was not a son, but a comic-book superhero”
(Rosenbaum 1999, 32). (Michael Chabon also addresses the theme of a Jewish
 HOLOCAUST LITERATURE 493

comic-book “Superman” in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Chabon

2000, 585). See later.)
In order to calm his rage and find restored faith in a changed but viable Jewish
continuity, Duncan visits his Zen-master brother Isaac in Warsaw. Isaac offers
Duncan the vision to be “kind” to himself and connect without anger to “the mur-
dered ones” of the Shoah (Rosenbaum 1999, 215).
Surprisingly perhaps, Second Hand Smoke is also a very funny novel. It affirms
post-Holocaust optimism through transgressive comedy. At one stage, Duncan and
Isaac appear to be locked overnight in Birkenau by neo-Nazis, although this episode
may be dreamt by Duncan. Isaac remarks, “I think what you’re talking about is
what they call gallows humor, but gallows and gas chambers don’t make me laugh.
After Auschwitz, nothing is funny” (Rosenbaum 1999, 209). Demonstrating the
contrary, Second Hand Smoke asserts survival in the same breath as comedy. In this,
it resembles Roberto Benigni’s Academy Award-winning concentration camp com-
edy Life is Beautiful (1997).
The Golems of Gotham (2002) concludes Rosenbaum’s Holocaust trilogy by
graphically detailing how the second generation is haunted by the Shoah: “the
Holocaust is . . . not in the past” (Rosenbaum 2002, 42). Decades earlier, Philip
Roth had imagined the survival of Anne Frank in The Ghost Writer (1979) and sug-
gested in Reading Myself and Others (1975) that the Holocaust haunted “most
reflective American Jews” (Roth 1975, 130). Rosenbaum rhetorically wonders
whether “all writers of atrocity are essentially ghostwriters” (Rosenbaum 2002, 61).
In The Golems of Gotham, such metaphorical haunting becomes literal as the
ghosts of six Holocaust literature writers—Primo Levi, Jerzy Kosinski
(1933–1991), Paul Celan (1920–1970), Jean Améry (1912–1978), Tadeusz
Borowski (1922–1951), and Piotr Rawicz (1919–1982)—are summoned as golems
to contemporary New York by Ariel, the granddaughter of survivors. Like her
father’s parents, who also return as golems, all six writers committed suicide after
surviving the Shoah.
Once in New York, the golems attack anything associated with the Holocaust,
including tattoos, trains, and showers. As a result, Gotham becomes “suffused with
warmth and connection” (Rosenbaum 2002, 103). Ironically perhaps, the golems
also express their horror at the humor of Life is Beautiful—“a movie made by an
Italian clown in which Auschwitz was depicted as no more threatening than a cir-
cus”—and the “good-guy-triumphs-over-bad-guy sanctimony” of Steven Spielberg’s
Holocaust movie Schindler’s List (1993) (Rosenbaum 2002, 292–293). Unlike this
funny and frequently sanctimonious novel, such movies apparently trivialize the
Shoah.
Critical reception of Rosenbaum’s novels has been enthusiastic. Reviewing Second
Hand Smoke in the New York Times Book Review, Richard Lourie remarked:

The overheated atmosphere of the novel reminds one of Isaac Babel’s Tales of Odessa
. . . and the film Life is Beautiful. But in a style very much his own Rosenbaum depicts
the painful comedy of being a regular American kid raised to be an angel of retribution
(Lourie 1999, 7).

Sanford Pinsker, the reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, lauded Second Hand
Smoke as “superb, if deeply disturbing, writing” (Pinsker 1999). Academic studies
of American Holocaust writers by Alan Berger (Children of Job: American Second-
494 HOLOCAUST LITERATURE

Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust (1997)) and Andrew Furman (Contempo-

rary Jewish-American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: The Return of the
Exiled (2000)) have also praised Rosenbaum’s contribution to this genre.
Jonathan Safran Foer (1977–). Like The Golems of Gotham, Jonathan Safran Foer’s
Everything is Illuminated (2002) might be described as a postmodern novel insofar
as it foregrounds the process of writing rather than the events of the Holocaust.
Moreover, it concerns the grandchildren of survivors and bystanders, and is thus
also a third-generation Holocaust novel (Eaglestone 2004, 128).
One strand of the narrative features the story of Trachimbrod, a shtetl on the
Ukrainian-Polish border. The author of these sections is introduced as “Jonathan
Safran Foer,” a young American-Jewish writer who is visiting the Ukraine to explore
the history and remnants of the community that his grandfather escaped. The story
begins in 1791 and continues until 1942 when “1204 Trachimbroders [are] killed
at the Hand of German Fascism” (Foer 2002, 189). Foer’s postmodern style focuses
on dreams and quirky, marginal moments, mixing comedy, satire, and tragedy.
The second strand of the novel is narrated by Alexander Perchov, son of the
Ukrainian owner of “Heritage Touring,” which is taking “Foer” in search of
Trachimbrod. Alex speaks a self-conscious English of endearing solecisms that
foregrounds the postmodern constructedness of this text; for example

I undertaked to input the things you counselled me to, and I fatigued the thesaurus you
presented me, as you counselled me to, when my words appeared too petite, or not
befitting. (Foer 2002: 23)

Together “Foer,” Alex, and his grandfather drive to a house that is all that remains
of Trachimbrod. Here the “illumination” occurs, when the grandfather’s involve-
ment in the massacre at Trachimbrod is revealed. Threatened with execution, he
betrayed his Jewish best friend to the Nazis.
Both these strands form part of an epistolary novel, with monthly letters from
Alex to “Jonathan” commenting on the “heritage tour” and the Ukrainian-Jewish
past. Foer appears to offer some form of reconciliation, so far as this is possible,
between the grandchildren of survivors and bystanders. He optimistically suggests
that they share “the same story . . . I am Alex and you are you, and that I am you
and you are me? Do you not comprehend that we can bring each other safety and
peace? (Foer 2002, 214).
Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Francine Prose characterized “this
wonderful first novel” as “endearing, accomplished and (to quote Alex one last
time) definitely premium.” The “assured, hilarious prose,” she continued, manages
to carry “themes so weighty that any one of them would be enough to give consid-
erable heft to an ordinary novel” (Prose 2002, 8). Henry Hitchings, the reviewer for
the Times Literary Supplement, was similarly impressed. He noted

The opening chapters of Jonathan Safran Foer’s fictional debut are so vibrant and play-
ful that they succeed in calling to mind not only Philip Roth and Isaac Bashevis Singer,
but also James Joyce, Laurence Sterne and Milan Kundera (Hitchings 2002, 21).

However, Hitchings also found Foer’s “authorial prestidigitation” occasionally

“irritating” and bearing some marks of “a flashy apprentice piece” (Hitchings
2002, 21).
 HOLOCAUST LITERATURE 495

In 2005, Everything is Illuminated became a film directed by Liev Schreiber, star-

ring Eugene Hutz as Alex and Elijah Wood as “Jonathan Safran Foer.”
Michael Chabon (1963–). Both The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)
and The Final Solution (2005) are Holocaust novels with a difference. The former
relates the lives of two comic-book artists, one of whom, Josef Kavalier, is a refugee
from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. The latter concerns a mute young refugee from
Nazi Germany, his parrot, and a plot in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes detective
stories.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
It begins in 1939 as Josef escapes Prague by hiding in the coffin that holds the
clay of the golem, Rabbi Loew’s seventeenth-century superhero created to protect
the Jewish ghetto of the city. Much as the golem becomes the means for Josef’s
literal escape to America, comic-books subsequently facilitate his imaginary
escape from the European past. Josef and his American cousin Sam are clearly
based on Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, the Jewish creators of Superman. As Sam
remarks

What, they’re all Jewish superheroes. Superman, you don’t think he’s Jewish? Coming
over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would
pick a name like that for himself. (Chabon 2000, 585)

Yet fantasy figures of power cannot save Josef’s family from murder at the hands of
Nazis. Kavalier and Clay’s comic-book hero “The Escapist” frees no European Jews
from Auschwitz.
Near the end of the novel, Josef is working on a comic book that resembles
Spiegelman’s Maus insofar as it offers a narrative response to the Holocaust in a tra-
ditionally unserious medium. Ultimately, his 2,256-page graphic novel The Golem
(like Rosenbaum’s The Golems of Gotham) signifies “a gesture of hope, offered
against hope, in a time of desperation” (Chabon 2000, 582). Perhaps like all art,
Josef’s story is “the voicing of a vain wish, when you got down to it, to escape”
(Chabon 2000, 582).
The title of The Final Solution calls to mind the Nazi decision at the Wannsee
Conference to exterminate all the Jews (Roseman 2003) as well as a Sherlock
Holmes short story called “The Final Problem” (Doyle 1984, 469–480). Startlingly,
Chabon has produced a homage to Sherlock Holmes that alludes to the Holocaust.
The Final Solution is set in 1944, when a mute German-Jewish boy, Linus
Steinman, arrives in Sussex with a talking parrot, Bruno. He is taken into care by
a retired Sherlock Holmes, referred to only as the “old man.” The parrot, mean-
while, repeats a list of numbers. When it is stolen, the “old man” sets off for
London to solve the mystery of the numbers and the theft. However, this partic-
ular mystery has no “final solution.” Though the numbers may “represent num-
bered Swiss bank accounts,” this is by no means certain (Chabon 2005, 125).
Consequently, the “old man” revises his faith in “final” solutions and comes to
“perhaps, conclude”

that meaning dwelled solely in the mind of the analyst. That it was the insoluble prob-
lems—the false leads and the cold cases—that reflected the true nature of things. That
all the significance and pattern had no more intricate sense than the chatter of an
African grey parrot. (Chabon 2005, 125)
496 HOLOCAUST LITERATURE

This is the opposite of Nazi ideology, and rounds off a novella written in the “spirit
of play and of experimentation” that is central to both “storytelling” and freedom
(Chabon 2005, 8).
Critics have generally been impressed by Chabon’s Holocaust novels. Several have
lauded Kavalier & Clay for its “big historical relevance without strain” (Maslin
2000) and even judged it a candidate for the title of “Great American Novel.” On
the other hand, a Commentary review by John Podhoretz criticized Chabon’s use of
the golem as “a symbol of the murdered European diaspora,” and the inappropri-
ate mysticism suggested by such a symbol (Podhoretz 2001).
The Final Solution has also won plaudits. Sam Thompson, writing in The
Guardian, had the following remarks:

The novella gives us the delights of suspense and resolution, puzzle and solution, but
the vast crime that hovers behind the story is a mystery too great for even Holmes to
make sense of. (Thompson 2005)

Andrew Lewis Conn, the reviewer for The Village Voice, was enthusiastic:

At once an ingenious, fully imagined work, an expert piece of literary ventriloquism,

and a mash note to the beloved boys’ tales of Chabon’s youth, The Final Solution is a
major minor work that will come to be seen as a hinge piece in the development of
Chabon’s art. (Conn 2004)

However, Marco Roth in the Times Literary Supplement was uncomfortable with
the “grandiosity and poor taste” of the title and concluded that The Final Solution
was little more than “a lightweight caprice” (Roth 2005, 22).

Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor. Commitment. In Notes to Literature, II. Rolf Tiedemann, ed., translated
by Shierry Weber Nicholson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Berger, Alan. Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust.
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997.
Bukiet, Melvin Jules. Stories of an Imaginary Childhood. Evanston, IL: Northwestern Uni-
versity Press, 1992.
———. While the Messiah Tarries. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995.
———. After. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
———. Signs and Wonders. New York: Picador, 1999.
Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. London: Fourth Estate,
2000.
———. The Final Solution. London: HarperCollins, 2005.
Conn, Andrew Lewis. What Up [sic], Holmes? The Village Voice, 9 November 2004.
Delbo, Charlotte. Auschwitz and After. London: Yale University Press, 1995.
DeLillo, Don. White Noise. London: Picador, 1985.
Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? London: Orion, 1968.
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Penguin Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
Eaglestone, Robert. The Holocaust and the Postmodern. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004.
Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psycho-
analysis, and History. London: Routledge, 1992.
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Everything is Illuminated. London: Penguin, 2003.
 HOLOCAUST LITERATURE 497

Furman, Andrew. Contemporary Jewish-American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma:

The Return of the Exiled. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000.
Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photographs, Narrative and Postmemory. London:
Harvard University Press, 1997.
Hitchings, Henry. Elliptical Ideolects. Times Literary Supplement, 14 June 2002.
Kertzer, Adrienne. Fugitive Pieces: Listening as a Holocaust Survivor’s Child. English Studies
in Canada 26, 22 (22) (2000): 193–217.
Kremer, Lillian, ed. Holocaust Literature. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Langer, Lawrence. The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1975.
———, ed. Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology. New York: Oxford University Press,
1995.
Levi, Primo. Moments of Reprieve. London: Abacus, 1981.
———. If This is a Man/ The Truce. London: Abacus, 1987.
Lourie, Richard. Rev. of Second Hand Smoke, by Thane Rosenbaum. New York Time Book
Review 1999. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/11/reviews/990411.11louriet.
html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Malamud, Bernard. The Fixer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
Maslin, Janet. A Life and Death Story Set in Comic Book Land. New York Times,
21 September 2000.
Michaels, Anne. Fugitive Pieces. London: Bloomsbury, 1997.
Ozick, Cynthia. Primo Levi’s Suicide Note. In Metaphor and Memory. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1989.
Pinsker, Sanford. Dares, Double-Dares, and the Jewish-American Writer. Prairie Schooner 71
(1) (1997): 278–285.
———. Review of Second Hand Smoke. Wall Street Journal: W10, 9 April 1999.
Podhoretz, John. Escapists. Commentary 111 (6) (2001): 68–72.
Prose, Francine. Back in the Totally Awesome U.S.S.R. New York Times Book Review, 14 April
2002.
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. 1973. New York: Penguin, 1987.
Raczymow, Henri. Memory Shot through with Holes. Yale French Studies 85 (1994): 98–105.
Rose, Gillian. Mourning Becomes the Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Rosenbaum, Thane. Elijah Visible. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996.
———. Second Hand Smoke. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999.
———. The Golems of Gotham. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.
Roth, Marco. Pass the Aspergillum. Times Literary Supplement, 28 January 2005: 22.
Roth, Philip. Reading Myself and Others. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1975.
———. The Ghost Writer. London: Jonathan Cape, 1979.
Rothberg, Michael. Traumatic Realism. London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Sammon, Paul M. Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner. London: Orion, 1996.
Schiff, Hilda, ed. Holocaust Poetry. London: HarperCollins, 1995.
Sicher, Efraim. The Holocaust Novel. London: Routledge, 2005.
Steiner, George. Language and Silence: Essays 1958–1966. London: Faber, 1967.
Sussman, Deborah H. From Horror to Humor: Review of After. Washington Post C2, 21 Nov.
1996.
Thompson, Sam. Lost in the Broken World. The Guardian, 26 Feb. 2005.
Wiesel, Elie. A Plea for the Dead. In Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1967.
———. Night. London: Penguin, 1981.
———. Does the Holocaust Lie Beyond the Reach of Art? New York Times, 17 April 1983:
sec 2, p. 1.
———. The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration. In Dimensions of the Holocaust. Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990.
498 HUMOR

Young, James E. At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and
Architecture. London: Yale University Press, 2000.

Further Reading
Berger, Alan. Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust.
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997; Budick, Emily Miller. The Holocaust
in the Jewish American Literary Imagination. In The Cambridge Companion to Jewish
American Literature, edited by Michael P. Kramer and Hana Wirth-Nesher. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003; Eaglestone, Robert. The Holocaust and the Postmodern.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; LaCapra, Dominic. Representing the Holocaust:
History, Theory, Trauma. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994; Langer, Lawrence. The
Holocaust and the Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975;
Langer, Lawrence. Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1995; Langer, Lawrence. Preempting the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1998; Rothberg, Michael. Traumatic Realism. London: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000; Schiff, Hilda, ed. Holocaust Poetry. London: HarperCollins, 1995;
Sicher, Efraim. The Holocaust Novel. London: Routledge, 2005; Vice, Sue. Holocaust Fic-
tion. London: Routledge, 2000; Wollaston, Isabel. A War Against Memory? London: Soci-
ety for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1996; Young, James E. At Memory’s Edge:
After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. London: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2000.
PETER LAWSON
HUMOR
Definition. Defining humor has proven slippery over the centuries, but that
difficulty has not stopped philosophers, scholars, and critics from trying, in a long
line from Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) to Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) to more cur-
rent thinkers. A simple dictionary definition—“the quality of being amusing or
comic”—might suffice as a beginning, but even such a simple definition depends
on two other slippery terms: “amusing” and “comic.” The dictionary further com-
plicates matters by referring not to a quality one can perceive, but to a “state of
mind; mood; disposition” (“Humor” 1982). Add the equally slippery term “liter-
ary” to the mix, and one quickly sees the trouble that lies in definition. A common
sense definition might call literary humor writing intended to amuse or to provoke
laughter, writing focused on the comic as opposed to the serious. Such a loose def-
inition embraces a multitude of forms, from slapstick to light verse to satire. In the
end, “humor” is as variable as each individual because all people do not laugh at
the same things; what Bill finds humorous might mortally offend Mary, and vice
versa.
Three main theories of humor, or more properly, theories of laughter, have
emerged over time: the superiority theory, the relief theory, and the incongruity the-
ory. Each attempts to explain why we laugh and thus explain what we perceive as
humorous and why. The superiority theory, associated most closely with Thomas
Hobbes (1588–1679), who used ideas dating back to Plato (427–347 B.C.E.) and
Aristotle, states that we find humor in the perception that we are superior to others.
As Hobbes writes, “the passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising
from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with
the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly” (qtd. in Morreal 1987, 20). Such
a theory explains why we laugh at a person slipping on a banana peel or why we
 HUMOR 499

laugh at ourselves when we think back to some stupid act we performed in the past.
But as many have shown, such a theory cannot account for all humorous situations,
as Hobbes claimed.
The relief theory takes two general forms, the first from Herbert Spencer
(1820–1903), who saw laughter as a release of nervous energy, release that
occurs after we build up energy because of the tension of a situation or joke and
then release the energy when we recognize that the situation is comic rather
than serious—thus bringing about relief. To return to the slipping on a banana
peel example, we build up nervous tension as we think the person is in dire
trouble, and then we release that energy when we recognize that the person is
not in any real danger. Freud used Spencer’s ideas to postulate a second, more
psychological, form of relief: psychic relief. In Jokes and Their Relation to the
Unconscious (1905), Freud saw laughter arising from a release of repressed
desires, emotions, and thoughts. In this way, Freud saw jokes (and other forms
of humor) as ways to reveal the unconscious, just as he had done earlier for
dreams. Like the superiority theory, the relief theory can explain much humor,
but certainly not all.
The last theory, the incongruity theory, can again be traced back to Aristotle but
is most associated with Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Arthur Schopenhauer
(1788–1860). In its simplest form, we may say that laughter arises from our sud-
den perception of a mismatch between what we expect in our usually ordered
world and the incongruity we perceive when that order is overturned. In Kant’s
terms, “Laughter is an affectation arising from the sudden transformation of a
strained expectation into nothing” (qtd. in Morreal 1987, 47). The incongruity
theory proves more satisfactory than the other theories in explaining most humor:
it explains the banana peel situation, as well as jokes, riddles, and puns. We laugh
at a joke because it sets up an expectation, based on our past experience, and then
suddenly reverses that expectation with an incongruous and well-timed punch line
(hence the importance of “sudden recognition of incongruity” in the definition).
Although the incongruity theory does not explain all laughter, it does explain
much humor and can serve as a good way for us to distinguish and identify liter-
ary humor. Actually, all three theories, taken together, are useful in helping us
define and understand literary humor. These theories from the seventeenth
through twentieth centuries are being supplemented by more recent scientific
research into the brain and cognitive function, and the twenty-first century will
surely bring greater understanding of what causes laughter and thus help explain
what we perceive as humorous.
But to turn to a much older definition, Horace’s ideas about art can be used in
formulating a definition of literary humor. The purpose of art, Horace (65–8 B.C.E.)
wrote in “The Art of Poetry,” is “to delight and instruct” (Richter 2007, 91), and
thinking of literary humor in these terms will be helpful. Surely literary humor
delights, but it can also, to varying extents, instruct. For example, Mark Twain
(1835–1910) claimed in a letter that his humor will last because, as he says, he has
“always preached” (Twain 1906, 202). Actually, much of his humor is intended
merely “to delight,” but his “preaching,” or “instructing,” truly is one of the
reasons he has endured. American literary humor certainly contains much of both,
one of the reasons it has always been so important, and one of the reasons it
remains so.
500 HUMOR

Literary humor can be found in all the major literary genres: fiction, poetry,
drama, and non-fiction. Satire and parody are important characteristics of much lit-
erary humor, with examples in all the previously mentioned genres.
History. American literary humor can be traced back to the beginnings of
European settlement in the New World, and even before that if we look to the oral
tradition of Native American trickster tales, which used humor to delight and
instruct. Among the English settlers, John Smith (1580–1631) used humor, con-
sciously or unconsciously, to recount his adventures and to advertise the New
World; Thomas Morton (c. 1579–1647) used humor as a weapon against his
Puritan tormentors; William Byrd (1674–1744) used humor in both his public and
secret histories of the dividing line between Virginia and North Carolina. But a con-
venient starting point for a history of American humor would be Benjamin Franklin
(1706–1790), most notably Poor Richard’s Almanac, which first appeared in 1773.
Franklin’s creation of comic personas such as Silence Dogood and Poor Richard put
a particularly American stamp on a long line of English humor, and his aphorisms
used humor to define American characteristics, humor whose delight helps deliver
the moral, capitalistic instruction that was to help found the new country. Franklin’s
“Rules by Which a Great Empire May be Reduced to a Small One” (1773) is one
of the first examples of humorous political satire, an important kind of American
literature that continues today.
Humor was an essential ingredient in the work of Washington Irving
(1783–1859), the first American literary artist to be fully recognized by the English
literati. The popularity of his Knickerbocker Tales and The Sketch Book (1819–20)
owed as much to their humor as to their borrowing from a European folktale tra-
dition. We can see the beginnings of the American short story in such comic tales as
“Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” From the start, American
literature was founded on a firm bed of humor.
The canonical writers of the American Renaissance, although more noted for
their serious, philosophical ideas, often employed humor at the heart of their works.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) and Herman Melville (1819–1891) are comic
writers despite their darker themes; Edgar Allan Poe’s (1809–1849) humor shines
through in some of his most macabre tales; and Henry David Thoreau
(1817–1862), with a Yankee persona of dour stoicism, was an inveterate punster
and wit. But much of American humor in the nineteenth century appeared in news-
papers and periodicals, and much of it was regionally localized. In New England,
Down East humor produced such characters as Jack Downing, Sam Slick, Widow
Bedott, and Mrs. Partington in tales and sketches that used dialect and local color
to comment satirically on Jacksonian democracy, the Mexican War, and other polit-
ical matters, but even more importantly they served to cement for the American con-
sciousness a vision of New England.
In what were then the frontier regions of the young country, Southwestern humor
also used dialect and local color, less for overt political commentary and more for
an exploration of the comic possibilities inherent in the clash between the educated
and the untutored. The chief Southwestern humorists were Augustus Baldwin
Longstreet (1790–1870), Georgia Scenes (1835); Joseph G. Baldwin (1815–1863),
The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (1853); Johnson J. Hooper
(1815–1863), Some Adventures of Simon Suggs (1845); Thomas Bangs Thorpe
(1815–1878), “The Big Bear of Arkansas” (1854); and George Washington Harris
(1814–1869), Sut Lovingood (1867). Common in many of these tales and sketches
 HUMOR 501

is the use of a frame narrative, with an educated, genteel narrator introducing an

uneducated narrator who recounts his story in often raw vernacular language. The
stories of the Southwestern humorists capture for us a part of the nation in the midst
of transformation, with rollicking and often violent humor that greatly influenced
Mark Twain later in the century and William Faulkner (1897–1962) in the next.
After the Civil War, the Literary Comedians were the most important American
humorists. Also called the “Phunny Phellows” for their use of comic misspelling,
the Literary Comedians included Petrolem V. Nasby (1833–1888), Orpheus C.
Kerr (1836–1901), Josh Billings (1818–1885), Artemus Ward (1834–1867), and
Mark Twain. Almost always under pseudonyms, they wrote newspaper and mag-
azine sketches, published books, and traveled the country giving lectures. They
were a nineteenth-century version of standup comedians, although their strong tie
to printed humor made them different from what we think of today as standup
comedy.
Another important development in the post-Civil War era was local color, an
attempt in various regions of the country to capture local speech and manners,
almost always through humor. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) and Sarah Orne
Jewett (1849–1909) in New England, Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908) in the
south, and Bret Harte (1836–1902) and Mark Twain in the west are examples of
writers who used humor to capture and preserve for the nation pockets of local
national life that were undergoing rapid change. The local colorists were influential
in the rise of American literary realism, the dominant literary movement of the sec-
ond half of the nineteenth century.
In many ways, Mark Twain was the culmination of the historical trends of
nineteenth-century American humor. An heir of the Southwestern tradition and a
“member” of the Literary Comedians and the local colorists, he burst on the
national scene with “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” in 1865, and then solidi-
fied his fame with a bestseller that lampooned travel books and helped change travel
for Americans, The Innocents Abroad (1869). Twain used humor in nearly every-
thing he wrote, but he also used humor as a device and a weapon to tackle serious
issues such as racism, hypocrisy, and colonialism. Even as he claimed for himself an
iconic position as America’s beloved cracker-barrel philosopher and humorist, he
increasingly turned his sardonic wit to the darker side of human behavior. His
stature grew even more after his death in 1910, with his masterpiece Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn (1885) outgrowing its boy-book status to become recognized as
one of the great works of American (and world) literature. Mark Twain has long
claimed the title of America’s greatest comic writer and indeed used his humor to be
counted among the great writers of any kind.
In the twentieth century, humor became increasingly urban as the population
shifted to cities. Newspaper columns and magazines were the major sites for humor.
Finley Peter Dunne (1867–1936), George Eugene Field (1850–1895), Damon
Runyon (1884–1946), H.L. Mencken (1880–1956), Will Rogers (1879–1935), and
Ring Lardner (1885–1933) were first known to a national reading audience from
their newspaper columns. But perhaps the central event for American humor in the
first half of the century was the founding of The New Yorker in 1925. The writers
associated with the Algonquin Roundtable—Dorothy Parker (1893–1967), George
S. Kaufman (1889–1961), Robert Benchley (1889–1945), and Alexander Woolcott
(1887–1943)—were soon all writing for the new sophisticated humor magazine, as
well as S.J. Perelman (1904–1979) and James Thurber (1894–1961). The fiction,
502 HUMOR

BLACK HUMOR
In the post–World War II era, the most important trend in American humor was what has
been labeled (or mis-labeled) “black humor.” Referring not to race but to a bleak existen-
tialist, post-apocalyptic vision, black humor describes an impulse to laugh at that which
should more properly invoke tears or horror. As Brom Weber notes, “Black humor disturbs
because it is not necessarily nor always light-hearted funny, amusing, laughter-arousing.
Furthermore, black humor seems to have little respect for the values and patterns of
thought, feeling, and behavior that have kept Anglo-American culture stable and effective, have
provided a basis of equilibrium for society and the individual” (Weber 1973, 362).
A list of so-called “black humorists” shows how loose the term is: John Barth (1930–),
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922–2007),Thomas Berger (1924–), Joseph Heller (1923–1999),Thomas
Pynchon (1937–), J.P. Donleavy (1926–), Ken Kesey (1935–2001), William Gaddis
(1922–1998),Terry Southern (1924–1995), and Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977).

short sketches, and above all the cartoons of The New Yorker were a driving force
in American humor until well after World War II.
Humor was also central to the important novelists of the first half of the century.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and John
Steinbeck (1902–1968), although certainly not considered “humorists,” nonetheless
all possessed great comic gifts. William Faulkner is clearly an heir of the Southwestern
humor that pervaded his region in the previous century, with humor an integral part
of his best work, including The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930),
and The Hamlet (1940). Southern writers such as Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
and Eudora Welty (1909-2001) effectively used humor, often combined with a sense
of the grotesque and with what has been called “Southern gothic,” in their short sto-
ries and novels.
Just as black humor was a response to the political realities of the postwar
world, other dominant developments in humorous fiction arose from the new
world order that began in 1945. In response to political movements involving
ethnicity, race, and gender, numerous comic writers explored their group identi-
ties and emerged as major voices. After the war, Jewish writers gained a national
readership far beyond what they had ever achieved before in America, and the
most notable—Saul Bellow (1915–2005), Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Bernard
Malamud (1914–1986), and Philip Roth (1933–)—all used humor as a central
element in their work to explore the Jewish experience in a predominantly
Christian culture. The Civil Rights Movement opened white society to African
Americans, and African American writers Ralph Ellison (1913–1994), James
Baldwin (1924–1987), Ishmael Reed (1938–), Alice Walker (1944–), Toni
Morrison (1931–), Rita Mae Brown (1944–), and Toni Cade Bambara
(1939–1995) used humor as an artistic and political tool, the emergence of what
could properly be called “black humor.” Similarly, from the women’s movement
of the 1960s and 1970s emerged many female comic writers: Judith Viorst
(1931–), Nora Ephron (1941–), Gail Parent (1940–), Erica Jong (1942–), and
Fran Lebowitz (1950–), to name only a few. The rise of various ethnic and sub-
group literatures—Asian American, Latino American, Native American, and
gay—also brought forth writers who used humor to explore the conflicts within
their groups and with the dominant culture. In Cracking Up, Paul Lewis poses
 HUMOR 503

several conflicted comic scenarios that help us understand recent developments in

humor:

The paradox of American humor since 1980 appears in just such moments of conflict
or perplexity: during years in which the country has been drawn together in ever larger
audiences via new technologies of communication, the jokes we’ve told and our
responses to them suggest that we are deeply divided. We think about humor in con-
tradictory ways. Split into subgroups, we are delighted and outraged by the comic
treatment of different ideas. (Lewis 2006, 2)

In the first half of the twentieth century, pioneering humor scholars such as
Constance Rourke and Walter Blair posited unifying concepts like “the American
comic spirit”; as we move into the twenty-first century, we had best make that
“spirit” plural.
The groupings in this survey are somewhat arbitrary, and they omit perhaps the
greatest comic novel of the twentieth century, J.D. Salinger’s (1919–) The Catcher
in the Rye (1951). They also focus almost exclusively on fiction, overlooking the
rich comic history of American poetry, drama, and nonfiction. The sheer breadth of
the field makes cogent and comprehensive summary nearly impossible, but that
breadth is testimony to the enduring richness of the comic imagination in America.
The comic spirit lies deep in the heart of the American experience, a nation that has
always joked about itself, a nation that has produced a long line of artists who use
humor not just to delight, but also to instruct; when the ideals of a nation do not
match up with its practices, as is so often the case, the weapon of choice, more often
than lofty speeches, is the pomposity-deflating joke, the hypocrisy-exposing satire.
In an introduction to a study of American humor, Nancy A. Walker makes this con-
cluding point:

While the concept of a single “national character” has been wisely abandoned, it is
nonetheless true that certain widely shared values, such as the freedoms put forth in the
Bill of Rights, stand in contrast to our many differences, and this leads to a final con-
clusion about American humor: the paradox that while humor declares nothing to be
sacred, Americans have used it to press for those ideals of equality, opportunity, and
freedom that often seem to gleam elusively in the distance. (Walker 1998, 64)

Or as Mark Twain wrote near the end of his career, “Against the assault of laugh-
ter nothing can stand” (Twain 1900, 166).
Context and Issues. The year 2000 (or more properly by the calendar, 2001) ush-
ered in a new millennium, which in itself would be an auspicious marker, a cusp in
time sure to bring recognition and reflection. But the events of September 11, 2001,
overshadow and color contemporary times as markedly as the events of December 7,
1941, marked an earlier era. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon stopped humor for a time, just as the planes all over America were
grounded until the threat was understood. A comic mainstay like The David
Letterman Show became for a time a solemn gathering of stunned witnesses; Saturday
Night Live began its first show after the attacks with a permission-granting request
from then-New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani: “It’s time to be funny again.”
Although respectfully silent for a time, American humor resurged in the troubled after-
math of 9/11, with humor taking a stronger political edge than it had for many years.
The contested Bush presidency, decided not by American voters but by a 5-4 vote of
504 HUMOR

the Supreme Court, presided over a deeply divided nation, and humor has proven
to be both a weapon and comfort in troubled times. As the war in Iraq moved from
an apparently swift victory to a protracted quagmire, world events and America’s
unpopularity in the world have been reflected and sharpened in the nation’s literary
humor of the first decade of a new century.
In the contest for American minds that has followed 9/11, humor has been used
by both sides to make their arguments. Some who support Bush’s version of a war
on terror have often used ridicule to make their points. Those who oppose Bush’s
handling of the war and its aftermath have used polemic, but they have also effec-
tively used humor as a weapon. The rise of sharpened political humor has mirrored
the split in American politics and society.
The other strains that have dominated American humor in the last years of the
twentieth century have also remained: racial, ethnic, and gender humor, as well as
the continuing presence of post-modernism, a humor that calls attention to itself as
humor.
Perhaps above all else, the persistence of humor in a troubled and divided time,
rather than merely reflecting contemporary issues, also shows something about the
human spirit. As humans, we need to laugh, to be amused, even if that laughter is
something bitter and sardonic. In its own way, as it has done in other dark passages
of history, American humor has helped us survive.
Trends and Themes. Literary humor has always been used, as Horace said of art
in general, to delight and instruct; in most eras, humor focuses more on amusement
than teaching. But events since 2000 have caused a shift in American humor:
although the commitment to amusement remains strong, much recent humor has
taken on a more didactic and politically engaged edge. The most important trend in
American literary humor since 2000 has been the resurgence of political humor. In
many ways, humor had become, by the end of the twentieth century, largely disen-
gaged from the events of the world. The black humor of the 1950s and 1960s,
which rebelled against the horrors of the Holocaust and impending nuclear disaster,
had given way to a humor that more often turned on its own existence, a postmod-
ern, cynical, detached humor about humor. The stunning political events of the new
millennium partially recalled humor to its didactic uses, although the comic force
can never be wholly contained within the serious. Although the world situation
caused this general shift in both fictional and non-fictional humor, many of the
trends of the last quarter century continued, including the changes in ethnic, gender,
and sexual orientation issues.
In perhaps a counter-trend, a turning in toward the self and the world, the mem-
oir has become increasingly important in the American literary scene, with humor
playing a central role in some of the most popular recent autobiographical works.
Finally, humor for the sake of amusement (or even escapism) has remained strong,
partly perhaps in reaction to the serious turn of our age but mainly because that has
always been the case with the comic spirit.
Reception. Serious critical study of American humor began in the 1930s, with
pioneering scholars Constance Rourke (1885–1941) and Walter Blair (1900–1992).
Rourke’s American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931) laid the
groundwork analysis of American humor, followed later in the decade by Blair’s
Native American Humor (1937). Both Rourke and Blair argued that America’s
humor tradition was evidence of a “national comic spirit”—although their studies
excluded many Americans, focusing almost exclusively on the work of white males.
 HUMOR 505

As the literary canon was opened to include works by women, African Americans,
and other ethnicities and nationalities, humor studies began to address works that
had been forgotten or ignored. One highly influential study was Nancy Walker, The
Tradition of Women’s Humor in America (1984), which helped reclaim women’s
status in the humor tradition. Pioneering studies of African American humor include
Roger Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle (1964) and William Schecter, The
History of Negro Humor in America (1970). Those interested in keeping up with
developing trends in American humor should consult the annual overview article
“Year’s Work in American Humor Studies” by Judith Yaross Lee in the academic
journal Studies in American Humor.
Selected Authors. A good place to begin a survey of humorous literature since
2000 is Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000). Set in 1998, the novel captures the
moment in America when the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal broke, not by focusing on
the president’s misdeeds but on a classics professor resigning from his job for say-
ing the word “spooks” in class. Ironies abound in this comic tale that ultimately
turns tragic: the professor intends no racism with his use of the term, not even
knowing that the missing students he is referring to are black, and the professor, it
turns out, is himself black, having spent most of his life passing as Jewish. The novel
is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman and is the eighth of Roth’s Zuckerman novels.
The Human Stain shows academe (and America) confronted with issues of multi-
culturalism, sexism, classism, and political correctness, issues that dominated
American culture in the 1990s and continued into the new century. The Human
Stain completes a recent trilogy of Zuckerman novels, the first two works being
American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998). Roth’s burst of cre-
ativity late in a career that has already been monumental cements his position as one
of the great comic writers of the last half century.
Thomas Berger (1924–) is best known for his comic novel Little Big Man (1964),
but like Roth, he continues to publish into the new century. His novel Adventures
of the Artificial Woman (2004), an updating of the Pygmalion myth, contains witty,
dark comedy. Another novelist with a large body of comic work, John Irving
(1942–), published The Fourth Hand in 2001. Like Irving’s best and most-read nov-
els, The World According to Garp (1978) and The Hotel New Hampshire (1981),
The Fourth Hand revolves around macabre, grotesque events: a man’s loss of his left
hand and his subsequent hand transplant. The novel was widely praised for its satire
of TV news.
Jane Smiley’s (1949–) Good Faith (2003), further establishes her status as the
most important and prolific comic woman novelist. Smiley won the Pulitzer Prize
for fiction with A Thousand Acres (1991), and her novel Moo (1995) is a comic par-
ody of academia. In Good Faith, she examines the real estate boom of the 1980s,
with an ethical small-town real estate agent lured into a Faustian bargain of quick
riches and sleazy dealings. In Ten Days in the Hills (2007), she uses Boccaccio’s
Decameron as a literary subtext, with a group of Hollywood actors and executives
telling stories (many of them luridly sexual) in the Hollywood Hills.
The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center are imaginatively pre-
figured by Don DeLillo (1936–) in Cosmopolis (2003). DeLillo has used dark, dis-
turbing humor in important works such as White Noise (1985) and Underworld
(1997); in Cosmopolis, he traces one day in 2000, a limousine ride that moves from
the comic to the apocalyptic. His novel catches the end of one era—the self-indulgent
1990s—from the perspective of post-9/11 America.
506 HUMOR

The most direct literary influence of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush presidency, and the
Iraq war has been an increase in political humor, particularly from those opposed
to Bush and his policies. Al Franken (1951–) had a big bestseller with Rush
Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot (1996), success continued with Lies and the Lying Liars
Who Tell Them (2003), a scathingly humorous attack on George Bush, Dick
Cheney, and conservative media commentators Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter,
among others. His most recent book is The Truth: With Jokes (2005). Franken is
now running for the U.S. Senate in his native Minnesota, a state that could move
from electing a pro wrestler as governor to a Saturday Night Live writer/comedian
as senator. Television has also given a comedy/satiric political pulpit to Bill Maher
(1956–) and Jon Stewart (1956–), both of whom have published books of political
humor and commentary since 2000. Maher, who lost a television job for comments
he made about the 9/11 hijackers in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, a time
when any remarks about the events were closely scrutinized, published When You
Ride Alone, You Ride With Bin Laden (2002), a wry updating of World War II
propaganda posters, and then Keep the Statue of Liberty Closed: The New Rules
(2004) and New Rules: Polite Musings from a Timid Observer (2005). Jon Stewart’s
America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction (2004), a mock high
school history textbook, was a number one bestseller, following on the heels of his
Comedy Central spoof news program, The Daily Show, from which many people,
especially the young, now get their main dose of news. Stephen Colbert, a Daily
Show alumnus, whose own show, The Colbert Report, is also a popular satiric look
at the news, had his own bestseller in 2007 and 2008: I Am America and So Can
You, a compendium of goof-ball tips on how to be more patriotic.
Humor has become one of the main ways many people try to make sense of an
increasingly crazy world. Comedian George Carlin (1937–) also had a big bestseller
with When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? (2004), a collection of his character-
istic observations on religion, politics, and other contemporary topics.
The political right has its own humorists, notably P.J. O’Rourke (1947–), who
made his mark with books in the 1980s and 1990s, such as Republican Party Reptile
(1987), Parliament of Whores (1991), and Give War a Chance (1992). The CEO of
the Sofa (2001) skewers corporate ethics scandals of the late 1990s and the young
new century. He examines America at war with the sardonically titled Peace Kills:
America’s Fun New Imperialism (2004). More recently, he has trained his satiric
skills on capitalism with The Wealth of Nations (2007). Christopher Buckley
(1952–), son of noted conservative spokesman and writer William F. Buckley, has
had great success with several satirical political novels. His Thank You For Smok-
ing (1994) looks satirically at the tobacco lobby and was made into an acclaimed
film in 2006. In No Way to Treat a First Lady (2002), Buckley recounts the murder
trial of a first lady who kills her husband, with blazing satire of the Lewinsky scan-
dal and its treatment in the media. Post-9/11 he turned his attention to the Middle
East with Florence of Arabia (2004), in which a female State Department worker
crusades for women’s rights in a fictional Muslim country. His most recent work is
Boomsday (2007), a comic novel about, of all things, social security reform.
Perhaps the prevailing literary trend of the new century is the memoir, especially
autobiographical accounts of childhood abuse and substance addiction. Despite
such somber themes, the memoir has become an important trend among humorous
writers. Most notable and successful is David Sedaris (1956–), whose autobio-
graphical humorous essays explore his family life, his Greek background, his North
 HUMOR 507

Carolina upbringing, his homosexuality, and his childhood speech impediments,

among many other topics. Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000) and Dress Your Family
in Corduroy and Denim (2004) collect his essays from magazines and public radio.
Bill Bryson (1951–), a travel writer who often employs humor in his work, includ-
ing the science book A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003), nostalgically and
comically remembers his 1950s childhood in The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt
Kid (2006). Completing a trilogy, Frank McCourt’s (1930–) Teacher Man (2005)
employs the same bittersweet Irish humor as in his earlier Angela’s Ashes (1996) and
’Tis (1999). The novelist Pat Conroy (1945–) effectively uses humor to tell the story
of his basketball career at The Citadel in the 1960s, My Losing Season (2002).
Humor remains a mainstay among younger novelists, promising that the new cen-
tury, no matter how bleak its start, will continue the long tradition of American
humor. Some notable recent novels include Indecision (2005) by Benjamin Kunkel
(1972–), in which a 28-year-old man tries to banish his indecision with an experi-
mental pill; All Is Vanity (2002) by Christina Schwarz, a humorous novel about
aspiring novelists; John Henry Days (2001) by Colson Whitehead (1969–), an
African American writer whose novel concerns the unveiling of a postage stamp and
the folk hero of the title; You Suck: A Love Story (2007) by Christopher Moore
(1957–), who uses goth-horror-humor in a postmodern Dracula love story; and The
Locklear Letters (2003) by Michael Kun (1962–), whose epistolary novel about a
software salesman writing letters to Heather Locklear has been called by several
on-line book reviewers for sites such as Amazon.com “the funniest novel ever writ-
ten.” Such praise for a very funny and clever novel is hyperbole, of course, but the
sentiment attests to the vitality and endurance of the comic spirit as we move our
way into a new millennium.

Bibliography
Abrahams, Roger. Deep Down in the Jungle. Hatboro, PA: Folklore Associates, 1964.
Berger, Thomas. Adventures of the Artificial Woman. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004.
Blair, Walter. Native American Humor. New York: American Book Company, 1937.
Bryson, Bill. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. New York: Random House, 2006.
———. A Short History of Nearly Everything. New York: Random House, 2003.
Buckley, Christopher. No Way to Treat a First Lady. New York: Random House, 2002.
———. Florence of Arabia. New York: Random House, 2004.
———. Boomsday. New York: Twelve, 2007.
Carlin, George. When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? New York: Hyperion, 2004.
Colbert, Stephen. I Am America and So Can You. New York: Grand Central Publishing,
2007.
Conroy, Pat. My Losing Season. New York: Doubleday, 2002.
DeLillo, Don. Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner, 2003.
Franken, Al. Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. New York: Dutton Books, 2003.
———. The Truth (With Jokes). New York: Dutton Books, 2005.
Franklin, Benjamin. “Rules by Which a Great Empire May be Reduced to a Small One.”
London, 1773.
Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. 1905. Trans. James Strachey.
New York: Norton, 1960.
Horace. “The Art of Poetry.” David H. Richter, ed. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and
Contemporary Trends. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007.
“Humor.” The American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition. Boston, MA:
Houghton-Mifflin, 1982.
508 HUMOR

Irving, John. The Fourth Hand. New York: Random House, 2001.
Kun, Michael. The Locklear Letters. New York: MacAdam/Cage, 2003.
Kunkel, Benjamin. Indecision. New York: Random House, 2005.
Lewis, Paul. Cracking Up: American Humor in a Time of Conflict. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 2006.
Maher, Bill. When You Ride Alone, You Ride With Bin Laden. New York: Ingram Publish-
ing Services, 2002.
———. Keep the Statue of Liberty Closed: The New Rules. New York: New Millennium,
2004.
———. New Rules: Polite Musings From a Timid Observer. New York: St. Martin’s Press,
2005.
McCourt, Frank. Teacher Man. New York: Scribner, 2005.
Moore, Christopher. You Suck: A Love Story. New York: William Morrow, 2007.
Morreal, John, ed. The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press, 1987.
O’Rourke, P.J. The CEO of the Sofa. New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2001.
———. Peace Kills: America’s Fun New Imperialism. New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2004.
———. The Wealth of Nations. New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2007.
Roth, Philip. The Human Stain. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
Rourke, Constance. American Humor: A Study of the National Character. New York:
Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1931.
Schecter, William. The History of Negro Humor in America. New York: Fleet Press Corpo-
ration, 1970.
Schwarz, Christina. All is Vanity. New York: Doubleday, 2002.
Sedaris, David. Me Talk Pretty One Day. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2000.
Smiley, Jane. Good Faith. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.
———. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Com-
pany, 2004.
———. Ten Days in the Hills. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.
Stewart, Jon. America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction. New York:
Warner Books, 2004.
Twain, Mark. “The Chronicle of Young Satan.” The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts. 1900.
William M. Gibson, ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969; 35–174.
Twain, Mark. Mark Twain in Eruption. 1906. Bernard DeVoto, ed. New York: Grosset and
Dunlap, 1922,
Walker, Nancy A. The Tradition of Women’s Humor in America. Huntington Beach, CA:
American Studies Publishing, 1984.
———, ed. What’s So Funny?: Humor in American Culture. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly
Resources, Inc, 1998.
Weber, Brom. “The Mode of ‘Black Humor.’” The Comic Imagination in American Litera-
ture. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1973.
Whitehead, Colson. John Henry Days. New York: Anchor Books, 2001.

Further Reading
Blair, Walter, and Hamlin Hill. America’s Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1978; Cohen, Sarah Blacher. Comic Relief: Humor in Con-
temporary American Literature. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1978; Michelson,
Bruce. Literary Wit. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000; Mintz,
Lawrence E. Humor in America: A Research Guide to Genres and Topics. Westport, CT:
Greenwood, 1988; Morreal, John. Taking Laughter Seriously. Albany, NY: State University
of New York, 1983; Morris, Linda A., ed. American Women Humorists: Critical Essays. New
 HUMOR 509

York: Garland, 1994; Oring, Elliott. Engaging Humor. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 2003; Sloane, David E.E., ed. New Directions in American Humor. Tuscaloosa, AL:
The University of Alabama Press, 1998; Wallace, Ronald. God Be With the Clown. Colum-
bia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1984.
JOHN BIRD
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I

INSPIRATIONAL LITERATURE (NONFICTION)

Definition. Inspirational literature is a large genre that consists of easily under-
stood rhetoric and personal stories designed to appeal to the emotions and spiritu-
ality of the reader. This type of literature attempts to uplift readers and encourages
them to be hopeful and optimistic about their lives. The inspirational genre does not
use complicated philosophies or in-depth doctrine, relying instead on anecdotal sto-
ries and simple instructions to accomplish its goals.
Because inspirational literature tends to emphasize spiritual topics, the genre is
dominated by evangelical Christian authors and readers. The pastor of the evangel-
ical Saddleback Church, Rick Warren (1954–), is the author of The Purpose Driven
Life (2002), which has recently sold over 25 million copies, making it the biggest
selling hardcover book in American history (Financial Times 2006) and a New York
Times bestseller. Joel Osteen (1963–) and Max Lucado (1955–) join Warren as
evangelical authors whose writings currently dominate the inspirational literature
market. Even the secular inspirational series Chicken Soup for the Soul aims at the
evangelical reading base with entries such as Chicken Soup for the Christian Soul
(1997) and Chicken Soup for the Christian Soul II (2006).
Philip Yancey conveys the spirit and intent of inspirational literature in the intro-
duction to What’s so Amazing about Grace (1997), saying, “I will rely more on sto-
ries than on syllogisms. In sum, I would far rather convey grace than explain it”
(Yancey 1997, 16). Joel Osteen’s introduction to his book Daily Readings from Your
Best Life Now (2005) likewise claims that inspirational passages are “not meant to
be an exhaustive treatment of a particular passage of Scripture; instead, it is
intended to inspire ardent love and worship of God” (Osteen 2005, vi). Therein is
the essence of inspirational literature: convey easy concepts with stories in order to
inspire rather than explain difficult ones with dogma.

History
Types of Inspirational Literature. Both past and current authors have chosen three
main ways of writing within the genre. A staple of inspirational literature is true and
512 INSPIRATIONAL LITERATURE (NONFICTION)

personal stories that are used in an attempt to relate to the audience. These stories
are collected in book form and often appeal to a particular kind of readership.
Entries are short and several can be read in one sitting.
The second type of writing found in the genre is more of an instructional type
of writing that uses short chapters and simple language in order to present guid-
ance to the readership. Instead of organization based on individual stories, these
books often base chapters on specific simple points, with personal stories woven
in at various points.
The third major type of inspirational literature corresponds a particular entry
with a specific date. The goal of these collections is to provide a brief, uplifting
selection to be read in order on a specific set of days. These entries are often a com-
bination of true, personal stories and moralizing prose that attempts to encourage
the reader into a specific action or state of mind. Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life
is meant to be read on forty consecutive days because, according to Warren, “Studies
have shown that something doesn’t become a habit until you have done it . . . every
day for six weeks” (Philippine Daily Inquirer 2006).
True Inspirational Stories. Inspirational collections based on the short true story for-
mat generally have some characteristics in common. Often, the stories are written
recordings of stories people have told orally. These collections tend to organize the
stories topically, and they tend to include many different contributors. Usually, these
books leave the readers to their own thoughts on the story and tend to leave mor-
alizing out of the prose of the story itself.
In the Chicken Soup series, the original book, Chicken Soup for the Soul, is
organized into sections such as “On Love” or “Overcoming Obstacles,” with each
short story in each section designed to encourage the reader about that particular
topic. For instance, the section “On Learning” contains a four-page story told by
Sister Helen P. Mrosla about a student she taught in elementary and high school and
the lesson she learned from her student (Canfield 1993, 125–28). Thus, contribu-
tors are matched with topics in which they have some experience or degree of
authority.
Expanding on this principle of organization, later books in the series focus on a
particular niche and employ contributors specialized in that field. Chicken Soup for
the Pet Lover’s Soul contains entries by veterinarians such as George Baker, D.V.M.;
the president of The Squirrel Lover’s Club, Gregg Bassett; and various other pet
owners and enthusiasts. Even these books are divided into sections, and many of the
books, whether written for general or niche audiences, typically start with “On
Love” as the first section.
Many other books of inspirational literature follow this pattern. Apples and
Chalkdust (1998) is compiled by Vicki Caruana, a professional teacher and curriculum

CHICKEN SOUP FOR EVERYONE

Perhaps the most popular example of book collections of inspirational true life stories is the
Chicken Soup for the Soul series. Originally written and compiled by Jack Canfield and Mark
Victor Hansen, this series boasts over one hundred books.The series attempts to appeal to
audiences of all kinds, from the general Chicken Soup for the Soul (1993) and A 2nd Helping of
Chicken Soup for the Soul (1995) to Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover’s Soul (1998) and Chicken
Soup for the College Soul (1999).
 INSPIRATIONAL LITERATURE (NONFICTION) 513

designer. Each story is introduced by a quotation of a famous person. The stories

are very short and designed to provide encouragement to primary and secondary
educators by sharing true stories from other teachers. God’s Little Devotional Book
for Couples aims at “sharing ‘moments of the soul’ with a spouse” (1995, 9) and
includes stories from the lives of other married couples.
Evangelist Joel Osteen recently published Daily Readings from Your Best Life
Now (2005) using a similar template. Each entry is introduced by a Bible verse that
corresponds to it, and many of the entries contain brief personal references or
stories from Osteen’s life. Osteen, however, goes on to provide the moral or the
point he wants the reader to glean from his experiences. Also, unlike many other
collections of the genre that use this template, Osteen is the exclusive author for this
particular book.
Inspirational Instructionals. Although this second type of inspirational literature may
include true stories to illustrate different points, it relies on a book format with basic
chapters and non-fiction prose that is intended to persuade the reader toward a
certain action or particular way of thinking. The amount of literature that falls into
this category is vast and is dominated to a great degree by authors who are evangelical
pastors.
These books attempt to tackle a specific subject audiences may struggle with. Max
Lucado’s It’s Not about Me begins with the premise that “trying to make life ‘all
about us’ pushes happiness further out of reach” (Lucado 2004, xiii), and he
attempts to inspire the reader to move “from me-focus to God-focus by pondering
him” (9). John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart (2001) attempts to provide a different view
of a man’s soul and challenges the emasculation of males in today’s culture. Philip
Yancey’s What’s so Amazing about Grace (1997) focuses on the Christian concept
of grace. Anne Graham Lotz’s Just Give Me Jesus (2000) focuses on the role of Jesus
in inspiring people. She writes, “[W]e would be desperate for the simplicity and the
purity, the freedom and the fulfillment, of ‘life in his name’” (Lotz 2000, x). Such is
the nature of inspirational books designed to promote feelings of well-being and
encouragement about specific topics and situations.
Calendar Readings. The third major type of inspirational literature resembles the
first in structure, but uses both personal stories and instructional prose to inspire
the reader. The entries are short and meant to be read in one sitting, and like Osteen
the authors have a specific purpose for each entry, which they reveal to the reader.
What makes this third type unique is that the readings are set up to correspond with
particular days, either general numbered days or specific calendar days of the year.
The two seminal publications of inspirational literature represent the two sub-
types of this category of the genre. My Utmost for His Highest (1992) is a compila-
tion of lessons given by Oswald Chambers (1874–1917). Originally published in
1935, the book has enjoyed an amazing run, with several reprints, including an
updated 2006 edition. Each entry is one page long and corresponds with a specific
date on the calendar. The format is very similar to the format of the true inspira-
tional stories. Each entry starts with a Bible verse and includes the date it should be
read (i.e., January 1). However, the entries are instructional in nature rather than
contemporary true personal stories.
The other seminal work is Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life. Warren’s book is
meant to be read one chapter per day on any forty consecutive days. Like Cham-
bers’ book, each entry begins with a Bible verse but also adds a quote from a famous
person that relates to the topic of the chapter. Also like My Utmost for His Highest,
514 INSPIRATIONAL LITERATURE (NONFICTION)

Warren’s book relies mostly on instructional prose, only occasionally inserting true
stories, such as his conversation with Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for
Christ, on the topic of writing out physical contracts to God (Warren 2002, 106).
Many other works of inspirational literature follow the template laid out by
Chambers. Charles Stanley’s On Holy Ground (1999), Norman Vincent Peale’s
Positive Living Day by Day (2003), and Dennis and Barbara Rainey’s Moments
Together for Couples (1995) have page-long readings for a specific calendar day.
Selwyn Hughes and Thomas Kinkade’s Every Day Light (1997), like Warren, have
ordered readings for general, nonspecific days. Besides this unique feature of calendar
readings, these works are not compilations of various authors; rather, the same
author typically writes all of the entries. Also, instructions or advice replaces the
true stories found in other works in the inspirational genre.
Other Forms of Inspirational Literature. Another form in which inspirational literature
frequently comes is periodical publications. These publications have the same traits
as other forms of the genre: personal true stories, instruction or advice on a partic-
ular topic, dates with entries to read. One such magazine is Guideposts, which
includes true stories about a variety of people and issues. Often, celebrities are fea-
tured on the cover and provide stories from their own lives. Other magazines such
as Our Daily Bread, Homelife, Journey, and Stand Firm provide inspiration to dif-
ferent readerships and on different topics.
The utilitarian nature of inspirational literature allows it to show up in many
other forms of literature as well. Inspirational stories are frequently included in lit-
erature falling outside the genre. For example, financial advisor and radio talk-show
host Dave Ramsey (1960–) inserts inspirational literature into his best-selling The
Total Money Makeover (2003). The book contains over thirty true stories strategi-
cally placed to illustrate Ramsey’s financial plans and to encourage the readers to
put them into practice by revealing how other people with similar struggles have
done so successfully. These stories help readers identify with the material. Local
print advertisement papers, such as Harvest Weekly from Sylvester, Georgia, also
often contain columns that are inspirational literature. A particular issue from
December 2006 included a column titled “Switch Seats” that tells a true story about
a company that makes spiritually themed t-shirts. The purpose, in this case, is to
encourage Harvest Weekly readers to follow God, a theme often found in the genre.
Trends and Themes. Although the formats used for inspirational literature have
changed little since Oswald Chambers’s seminal My Utmost for His Highest, con-
tent has clearly shifted. Contemporary inspirational writers tend toward simplistic
writing, refer to looser translations of the Bible, such as The Message, when it is
used, and eliminate exclusive or judgmental doctrine from their work. Current writ-
ers want to make their inspirational message universal.
Besides the major shift in content, other trends have emerged to prominent
places within the genre. Many authors have large followings and thus a built-in
audience for their work. Many recent works of inspirational literature have quickly
risen to best-selling prominence. There is a current movement of sophisticated mar-
keting of the books and the concepts they teach. Technology has also become an
important tool that has impacted the genre by providing an additional outlet by
which authors of inspirational texts can reach massive audiences and achieve noto-
riety quickly.
Contemporary Content. Chambers’s work did not shy away from complex thoughts,
taking on sanctification (Chambers 1992, 15), personal responsibility (Chambers
 INSPIRATIONAL LITERATURE (NONFICTION) 515

1992, 74), and self-denial, with entries that read, “Sorrow removes a great deal of
a person’s shallowness. . . . But if a person has not been through the fires of sorrow,
he is apt to be contemptuous, having no respect or time for you” (Chambers 1992,
177). The current trend in the literature, however, is away from difficult concepts
and toward attempts to eliminate personal challenges. Osteen, who wrote the New
York Times bestselling book Your Best Life Now (2004), provides a stark counter-
point to Chambers. Osteen’s devotional topics include entries such as “Having a
Positive Vision,” which persuades people to visualize success (Osteen 2005, 7–10),
and “God is a Giver” (Osteen 2005: 253–5). Sanctification is not a concept that
shows up.
Rick Warren has been described by The Wall Street Journal in similar fashion:
“His sermons rarely linger on self-denial and fighting sin, instead focusing on heal-
ing modern American angst, such as troubled marriages and stress” (Sataline
2006). Like Chambers, the literature is representative of what the author preaches
from the pulpit. The Purpose Driven Life is made of the same substance as
Warren’s sermons. A section in the book for thinking about life’s purpose reads,
“Life is all about love” for a “point to ponder,” and, “Honestly, are relationships
my first priority?” for a “question to consider” (Warren 2002: 161). Warren attrib-
utes his book’s success to its universal appeal and simplicity. “It deals with a uni-
versal subject. Everybody’s interested in ‘What am I here for?’ . . . I intentionally
made it extremely simple to read” (Philippine Daily Inquirer 2006). He sums up
the biggest trend in content succinctly: “It’s a universal question; it’s not a religious
question” (Philippine Daily Inquirer 2006). Warren has also ventured into politi-
cal and economic territory by teaching others to apply his principles in those areas
as well as the area of spirituality.
Max Lucado is one of the few major inspirational writers who, to some extent,
does not fit completely into this current trend. Like Warren and Osteen, he fre-
quently quotes Bible verses from The Message translation. Also like other writers in
his field, he uses simple language and short, catchy sentences: “Lesser orbs, that’s us.
Appreciated. Valued. Loved dearly. But central? Essential? Pivotal? Nope. Sorry . . .
Our comfort is not God’s priority” (Lucado 2004, 5). However, in this passage, self-
denial and discomfort are prevalent themes. Even the title of this recent book, It’s
not about Me (2004), brings to mind Oswald Chambers and sets Lucado apart from
the current positivism found in so much contemporary inspirational literature.

Context and Issues

Popularity and Influence. Of Americans surveyed in a recent Gallup poll, 91.8 per-
cent said they believed in God or a higher power (Grossman 2006), and over 50 mil-
lion are evangelicals (Sataline 2006). Much of the current inspirational literature
plays on that belief. Current authors also tend to have large built-in audiences for
their work. Many authors are already pastors of churches with thousands of mem-
bers and the ability to network. Warren’s Saddleback Church has 100,000 regis-
trants (Philippine Daily Inquirer 2006). Osteen preaches multiple sermons in a
weekend to crowds as large as 16,000 per service (St. Petersburg Times 2006).
Lucado is also the pastor of a large church. Even authors who are not pastors
already have large followings when their inspirational books are published. Canfield
had a strong reputation as a “success coach” (www.jackcanfield.com) well before
the first Chicken Soup for the Soul book was published. Often, these authors
516 INSPIRATIONAL LITERATURE (NONFICTION)

become celebrities, thus fueling the popularity of their works. Osteen was featured
on “Barbara Walter’s Presents: The 10 Most Fascinating People of 2006,” the first
pastor to be featured on that show (Christian Newswire 2006). Warren has speak-
ing engagements all over the world, including a tour of Asia and even a visit to Syria.
Jack Canfield has appeared on more than 1,000 radio and television shows, includ-
ing Oprah, 20/20, Larry King Live (who has also hosted Warren and Osteen), and
others (www.jackcanfield.com).
The best gauge of the popularity and influence of these writers is the sale of their
works. Currently, sales are record setting. Canfield’s Chicken Soup for the Soul fran-
chise has sold over 100 million books, and he holds the Guinness world record for
having seven books on The New York Times bestseller list simultaneously
(www.jackcanfield.com). Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life, with 25 million copies
sold, is the best selling hardcover book in American history and has been translated
into 56 languages (Philippine Daily Inquirer 2006). Max Lucado has sold over 33
million copies of 20 different inspirational books (www.christnotes.org), and
Osteen’s Your Best Life Now has been a New York Times bestseller. Guideposts, the
popular inspirational magazine, has over 2.3 million paid subscribers and a 71%
renewal rate (www.guidepostsmedia.com).
Marketing and Technology. Perhaps the most interesting trend in contemporary inspi-
rational literature is how well and how hard the literature is marketed and how cut-
ting edge technological trends are incorporated into the marketing. Rick Warren,
whose trendy book currently dominates the genre, has been a lead innovator in this
area. Warren has created a marketing campaign called “Forty Days of Purpose,”
based around The Purpose Driven Life and the forty consecutive days recommend
for the reading of it. Through this campaign, Warren has trained 400,000 pastors
and priests around the world (Sataline 2006). He is attempting to tap into the
Roman Catholic market as well, compiling a Catholic workbook for The Purpose
Driven Life with American priests (Philippine Daily Inquirer 2006).
What Warren has done more effectively than any of his predecessors in the inspi-
rational genre is, through training of pastors, get his book into many churches as
the curriculum from which sermons and Sunday school lessons are drawn. Often,
church leaders adopt “a strategic plan built around Warren’s five fundamental pur-
poses: worship, fellowship, discipleship, ministry, and evangelism” (Sataline 2006).
Warren has also created acronyms to market new programs based on his inspira-
tional text. One such acronym is P.E.A.C.E., which stands for partner with or plant
a congregation, equip servant leaders, assist the poor, care for the sick, and educate
the next generation (Lawton 2006).
While Warren works to bring attention back to The Purpose Driven Life, other
authors capitalize on their publishing success by marketing support material or new
material based on the same formula. Joel Osteen published Daily Readings from
Your Best Life Now as a companion to his bestseller Your Best Life Now. Canfield
and Hanson used the same formula and almost the same title to market 100 new
variations of Chicken Soup for the Soul after the first one’s initial success.
Technology has also become a big part of the marketing scheme. Warren’s church
does pod casting, and a social networking site based on The Purpose Driven Life
has popped up (Christian Newswire 2006). Many inspirational authors, including
most of the major ones, have Web sites, and some e-mail inspirational texts to those
who have signed up. Guideposts has such a site with thoughts and devotionals
updated daily at www.guidepostsmag.com/.
 INSPIRATIONAL LITERATURE (NONFICTION) 517

Reception. Inspirational literature is not prominently studied in an academic

setting, and because of this lack of interest, academic criticism of the field in general
and works in particular is muted. However, contemporary culture does have many
people critical of the content, rather than literary quality, of these works.
Despite the widespread popularity and bestseller status of many inspirational
books, critics of the works in the evangelically dominated genre have been harsh.
The contemporary content, with its simplistic ideas and unwillingness to tackle
divisive topics, has drawn especially heated criticism. Joel Osteen is criticized as a
“cotton-candy preacher who specializes in Christianity lite” (Day 2006). Rick
Warren is accused of encouraging simplistic Bible teaching, and The Purpose
Driven Life is described as “a slogan-filled view of faith” (Lawton 2006). This kind
of criticism of these two leaders of the genre is typical of the reaction many inspira-
tional authors receive.
Ole Anthony, president of Trinity Foundation in Dallas, says Osteen’s popularity
is “a testimony of the spiritual infantilism of American culture. . . . He’s qualified to
be an excellent spiritual kindergarten teacher” (Day 2006). A contributing factor is
Osteen’s lack of an academic background: he never went to seminary. As the most
popular contemporary writer of inspirational literature, Warren receives the harsh-
est criticism, as well as blame, for dividing evangelical churches with The Purpose
Driven Life curriculum. Churches such as Iuka Baptist in Mississippi have split
because of dissent over the curriculum’s management tactics, such as writing mis-
sion statements to increase membership and viewing the church as a market
(Sataline 2006).
Selected Authors. The major contemporary authors and works in the inspira-
tional genre are Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen’s Chicken Soup for the Soul
series, Joel Osteen’s Your Best Life Now, Max Lucado, the Guideposts inspirational
monthly magazine, and Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life.
Jack Canfield’s Web site, www.jackcanfield.com, claims he “fostered the emer-
gence of inspirational anthologies as a genre.” Both Canfield and Hansen have
extensive backgrounds as motivational speakers and make presentations in areas
such as sales strategies and personal success. Certainly, the popularity of the
Chicken Soup for the Soul “anthologies” has made it a major force within the inspi-
rational genre. The first book was published in 1993, and over 100 entries later, the
Chicken Soup books have sold over 100 million copies. Each book contains 101
true stories. Although the first few books were marketed for a general audience
(Chicken Soup for the Soul and A 2nd Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul), the
more recent trend has been to publish books marketed toward a particular sub-
section of inspirational literature readers, as well as spin series off of the main
anthologies. Recent books geared toward specific audiences include Chicken Soup
for the Entrepreneur’s Soul, Breast Cancer Survivor’s Soul, and Dieter’s Soul among
others. Currently, the series also publishes cookbooks and a healthy living series
spin-off. Still, the mainstay of the collection is the general Chicken Soup books, with
its “6th bowl” published in 1999.
Joel Osteen’s Your Best Life Now has been a New York Times number one best-
seller, and as a pastor, Osteen represents part of the large inspirational segment that
is evangelical Christian. Osteen has capitalized off of the success of Your Best Life
Now with a second book, Daily Readings from Your Best Life Now, a calendar,
audio compact discs, and a journal. Osteen is also representative of the genre’s dis-
tance from academia: he has no advanced degrees in higher education or seminary
518 INSPIRATIONAL LITERATURE (NONFICTION)

training. He is currently the pastor at Lakewood Church, which draws 42,000 peo-
ple to weekly services.
Max Lucado, like Osteen, is an evangelical pastor of Oak Hills Church. How-
ever, Lucado is one of the most prolific writers of the contemporary inspirational
genre. According to his Web site, “In 1994, he became the only author to have
eleven of his twelve books in print simultaneously appear on paperback, hardcover,
and children’s CBA (Christian Book Association) bestseller lists.” Also, he “set a
new industry record by concurrently placing nine different world publishing titles
on the CBA hardcover bestseller list in both March and April 1997” (www.maxlu-
cado.com). As of February 2007, Lucado’s Cure for the Common Life was ranked
second on the CBA inspirational bestseller list. He has published 21 inspirational
titles to date.
Guideposts is a magazine of “true stories of hope and inspiration.” Published
monthly, the magazine often features true stories from celebrities, such as model
Niki Taylor (May 2006) and country singer Martina McBride (November 2006).
Guideposts was founded in 1945 by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, who wrote The
Power of Positive Living, a forerunner of much of the contemporary inspirational
literature. The magazine’s mission is to help “people from all walks of life achieve
their maximum personal and spiritual potential” (www.dailyguideposts.com).
Guideposts even featured inspirational literature heavyweight Rick Warren on the
cover of its October 2006 magazine.
Perhaps the most prominent, recognizable, and influential contemporary inspi-
rational writer is Rick Warren. His bestselling The Purpose Driven Life has gar-
nered the most popularity and drawn the most criticism. Like Osteen and Lucado,
Warren is an evangelical pastor. His Saddleback Church is one of the biggest
churches in the United States, and he has trained hundreds of thousands of clergy
around the world with his Purpose Driven curriculum. Also like Osteen, Warren’s
The Purpose Driven Life has become something of a franchise, with journals,
additional readings, and audio compact discs based on the material for sale. In
fact, The Purpose Driven Life is itself a spin-off of Warren’s The Purpose Driven
Church (1995). Originally, this book was written for pastors and contains a five-
part growth strategy.
The Purpose Driven Life illustrates the philosophical simplicity of much of the
inspirational genre in a section titled “The Reason for Everything.” Warren writes,
“Wherever you are reading this, I invite you to bow your head and quietly whisper
the prayer that will change your eternity: ‘Jesus, I believe in you and I receive you.’
Go ahead. If you sincerely meant that prayer, congratulations! Welcome to the fam-
ily of God” (Warren 2002, 74).

Bibliography
Canfield, Jack, and Mark Victor Hansen, eds. Chicken Soup for the Soul. Deerfield Beach,
FL: Health Communications, Inc., 1993.
Caruana, Vicki. Apples and Chalkdust. Tulsa, OK: Honor, 1998.
Chambers, Oswald. My Utmost for His Highest. Grand Rapids, MI: Discovery House, 1992.
Day, Sherri. “God’s Cheerleader.” St. Petersburg Times 26 Nov. 2006.
Eldredge, John. Wild at Heart. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2001.
God’s Little Devotional Book for Couples. Tulsa, OK: Honor, 1995.
Grinnan, Edward, ed. Guideposts. (2006) http://www.guidepostsmag.com/.
Grossman, Cathy Lynn. “View of God Can Predict Values, Politics.” USA Today 12 Sept. 2006.
 INSPIRATIONAL LITERATURE (NONFICTION) 519

Hughes, Selwyn, and Thomas Kinkade. Every Day Light. Nashville, TN: Broadman, 1997.
“Joel Olsteen to be Featured on Barbara Walters’ ‘10 Most Fascinating People.’” Christian
Newswire 4 Dec. 2006.
Lawton, Kim. “Purpose Driven Pastor Rick Warren Goes Global.” Religion News Service 8
Sept. 2006.
Lotz, Annie Graham. Just Give Me Jesus. Nashville, TN: Word Publishing, 2000.
Lucado, Max. Come Thirsty. Nashville, TN: Word Publishing, 2004.
———. It’s not about Me. Nashville, TN: Integrity, 2004.
Osteen, Joel. Daily Readings from Your Best Life Now. New York: Warner Faith, 2005.
———. Your Best Life Now. New York: Faith Words, 2004.
Peale, Norman Vincent. Positive Living Day by Day. Nashville, TN: Ideals, 2003.
Sataline, Suzanne. “Strategy for Church Growth Splits Congregation.” The Wall Street
Journal 5 Sept. 2006.
Stanley, Charles. On Holy Ground. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1999.
“The Purpose Driven Rick Warren.” Philippine Daily Inquirer 30 July 2006.
Warren, Rick. The Purpose Driven Life. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002.
Yancey, Philip. What’s so Amazing about Grace? Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1997.
CHAD R. HOWELL
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J

JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE

Definition. The Jewish American literary genre first developed in the late-nineteenth
and early-twentieth centuries as a literature that was linked inextricably to a
particular place, time, and social state—primarily the impoverished urban immi-
grant communities of Chicago and New York’s Lower East Side. Of course, this is
not at all surprising considering the fact that Jews, since the inception of their his-
tory, have consistently written with a very acute awareness of place, of where they
were physically at a given point in time. This awareness defines both their collective
and individual identities and the place of such identities in a world of non-Jews.
Even in the biblical era, writing by Jews sought to define their existence in very con-
crete terms, and in the context of their surrounding environment, as destabilized as
it might be. Throughout history, Jews have had a way of not only making them-
selves at home wherever they are, but also of redefining themselves according to that
geographical place in a manner that perhaps challenges the traditional belief that
Jews are a diasporic community of people whose roots are in a Jewish homeland. In
an examination of the evolution of literature by Jews and American Jews, it seems
that this tendency has not changed. Place often defines the people, and if it doesn’t,
at the very least it forces them into a constant examination of both collective and
individual identities.
In a landmark book entitled New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora (2005),
David Shneer and Caryn Aviv argue provocatively that the new generation of Jews
has liberated itself from older and more traditional ideologies and is instead com-
mitted to creating homes and communities wherever they live. Jewish unity, they
implicitly argue, is grounded not in the shared (and, in their opinion, all but obso-
lete) longing for a Jewish homeland, but in the common search for new identities.
Shneer and Aviv find, further, that in this contemporary era, the focus shifts from
Jewish unity to Jewish diversity. The point being that Jews and various manifesta-
tions of Jewish life are thriving in all sorts of places—a global community of multiple
networks comprised by a diversity of Jewish languages, cultures, and concerns that
522 JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE

are each distinctively Jewish in their own ways. Contemporary Jews, they argue,
particularly the younger generation, are deeply concerned with Jewish culture and
its various expressions, but they are also less religious than their parents and grand-
parents, and still less interested in Israel and the Holocaust as markers of their
Jewish identity.
History. The notion that Israel and an image of Jewish life that perceives the state
as the primary homeland need not remain a defining facet of Jewish identity for
those Jews who live outside of the state is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the
diversity of Jewish American literary expressions of the past decade. Jewish American
writing began as the first manifestation of immigrant writing in the United States,
and later transitioned into what we might call the literature of assimilated Jews in
the middle and later part of the twentieth century. The writing of the last decade is
unique in that a single unifying characteristic is lacking from the body of work as a
whole. The most recent writing of American Jews depicts a diverse community of
people who are at home in America. These are people whose concerns about
Judaism or Jewishness—although it should be noted that a number of the more
recent American Jewish writers, Paul Auster for instance, seem not to be overly con-
cerned with this at all—have more to do with what it means to be an American who
also happens to be a Jew.
Sometimes—as in the case of writers like Shalom Auslander (Beware of God,
2005), Pearl Abraham (The Romance Reader, 1996), Tova Mirvis (The Ladies
Auxiliary, 2000), and even Allegra Goodman (Kaaterskill Falls, 1998)—this means
responding directly to Jewish rituals and traditions, whether through critiquing,
rejecting, or redefining them. It is interesting to note, however, that the books that
follow in many of these writers’ repertoires often move completely away from such
concerns. Judaism and Jewish community, for example, which dominate the con-
cerns of the religious enclave in Goodman’s Kaaterskill Falls, could not be farther
from the minds of the characters in Goodman’s Intuition (Goodman 2006), who are
comprised primarily of postdoctoral researchers in a scientific laboratory. The char-
acters remain deeply complex and brilliantly developed, but it is as if they inhabit a
world not accustomed to the religious concerns of her previous novel.
In other instances, it manifests itself in a critique of the tendency of an older
generation of Jews to see their identity as connected primarily to the events of the
Holocaust. As in Tova Reich’s provocative My Holocaust, which satirizes the way
in which the Holocaust has become not just a marker of Jewish identity, but a com-
modity or industry to be exploited. Reich’s novel attacks not just the abuse and mis-
use of the Holocaust, but also the tendency of a previous generation of Jews to
define themselves in the shadow of the Holocaust. Indeed, a number of Jewish
American writers—including Jonathan Safran Foer and even Art Spiegelman, the
creator of the infamous graphic narrative Holocaust memoir entitled Maus—have
shifted their focus from the Holocaust as a Jewish tragedy, to the events of 9/11 as
an American tragedy. This, of course, is not to say that the Holocaust is not
addressed in contemporary Jewish American literature—quite the contrary. Michael
Chabon’s The Final Solution (2004), Cynthia Ozick’s Heir to the Glimmering World
(2005), and E.L. Doctorow’s City of God (2000), for example, do not address the
events of the Holocaust directly, but depict a world over which its dark shadow
looms largely, haunting us from the margins and backdrops of the stories.
We have now seen the Jewish American literary tradition progress in three main
waves: immigrant writing (Gold, Henry Roth, Yezierska, Cahan), assimilationist
 JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE 523

literature (Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, E.L. Doctorow, Nathaniel
West, Norman Mailer), and the literature of the past two decades, which often
returns to the cultural and religious themes of the Jewish tradition (Allegra Good-
man, Tova Mirvis, Steve Stern, Nathan Englander, Pearl Abraham), sometimes
dealing simultaneously with complex issues of gender and sexual orientation. The
1980s saw the emergence of many new Jewish American voices, and on the heels
of these new voices followed an increased interest in Orthodox Judaism and
Hasidism, feminism, post-Holocaust issues, and Jewishness as an ethnic manifesta-
tion. The product of these new and revived curiosities is a multiplicity of Jewish
American voices that together represent a complex contemporary Jewish American
literary identity—one that flirts with memory and history while exploring both the
sacred and secular as equally important veins of a new Jewish American literary
canon. At the same time, some of the most significant writers of the Jewish American
literary field (and, arguably, of the American literary canon in general) continue to
forge novelistic expressions of American concerns and multi-cultural identities.
Philip Roth, for example, has published five novels since 2000, including The
Human Stain (2000), which deals with American racism and the feasibility of pass-
ing in American culture; and The Plot Against America, which is set in 1940s
America and creates an alternate American history that includes the election of
Charles Lindbergh to the American presidency—what follows in this chilling his-
torical revision is the rise of anti-Semitism in America.
Over the past decade we have also begun to see the emergence of a fourth wave
of Jewish American writing. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union there has been a
substantial influx of Russian-Jewish immigrants. Many of these immigrants and
their children have begun to write fiction, and they write with new, compelling
voices, sometimes evocative of the prose of famed modern Russian-Jewish writer
Isaac Babel, carefully revealing the interior life of the Jewish underworld. In other
instances, these post-Soviet voices are sharp with the cynical wit and insight pos-
sessed only by those who have experienced both the scarcity of Soviet life and the
excess of American life. Writers in this wave include Gary Shteyngart (The Russian
Debutante’s Handbook [2002] and Absurdistan [2006]), Lara Vapnyar (There Are
Jews in My House, 2003), David Bezmozgis (Natasha, 2004), Anya Ulinich (Petrop-
olis, 2007), Sana Krasikov (One More Year, 2008), and even Jonathan Safran-Foer,
among others.
Trends and Themes. In his now infamous introduction to Jewish American Stories
(1977), Irving Howe insisted upon the imminent demise of the Jewish American
literary canon, a genre that would certainly dissipate with the passing of its major
voices—Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth—and the scattering of
Jewish distinctiveness among the milieu of mainstream American culture. In Howe’s
assessment of the Jewish American literary world, which according to his estimation
had already moved past its high point once it climaxed with Bellow, the key figures
were those writers upon whom the mark of immigrant life and the distinctive expe-
rience of Jewishness was ineradicably placed.
Indeed, what we now know as Jewish American literature began as the efforts of
Jewish (primarily Russian and Polish) immigrants and their children to grapple with
the pervasive feelings of alienation and conflict that characterized their experience
in the new world. Works such as Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky
(1917), Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1925), Michael Gold’s Jews Without
Money (1930), and Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934)—all written by immigrants or
524 JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE

children of immigrants—focused on the trials and tribulations of immigrant life in

New York’s Lower East Side or Chicago. They provided the starting point for a
literary genre that would continue to flourish and evolve over the next century and
beyond. Such writers had barely shaken the shtetl mud from the soles of their feet
when they found themselves plagued not by the pogroms and raging Cossacks from
which they and their traditions had narrowly escaped, but by the insular world of
tenement life that was colored by greed, poverty, and even ethnic persecution.
(Shtetl is Yiddish. A shtetl was typically a small village with a predominately Jewish
population in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe. The notion of shtetl culture is often
used as a metaphor for the traditional way of life of 19th-century Eastern European
Jews. Shtetl communities were characterized by their adherence to Orthodox
Judaism, and members of the community lived under constant threat of pogroms—
large-scale, violent anti-Semitic rioting thought by many historians to be advocated
by Tsarist Russian secret police in many cases. The events of the Holocaust culmi-
nated in the disappearance of most shtetls, through both extermination and mass
exodus to the United States and eventually the State of Israel.)
One need look no farther than little David Schearl of Roth’s Call it Sleep for a vivid
account of the difficulties faced by immigrants and their young children, eager to
escape the tell-tale Yiddishisms of their family lives, but unable to hide them from the
leering (or, so it seemed) faces of other—primarily Irish and Italian—immigrant com-
munities who were faced with some of the same struggles as Jewish immigrants,
namely, how best to assimilate quickly into mainstream American culture. It is as if
Roth means to say that, as immigrant Jews, we are not free from threat and persecu-
tion here in America—it may not be the Cossacks and pogroms, but the threat is just
as real as it was in the Eastern European communities from which we came; we have
not yet escaped such terrors. To be sure, as part of the first wave of Jewish American
writing, the work of such writers is characterized by the influence of the immigrant
world, a world dominated by shtetl sensibilities, Yiddish accents, and a certain
tentativeness when it came to the perception of America as the land of opportunity.
In many respects, however, the immigrant communities of Roth’s, Cahan’s, Gold’s,
and Yezierska’s worlds were much different from the European shtetls from which
they had fled. The new immigrant living conditions forcibly pushed immigrants into
living nearly on top of one another, in such close proximity that it was virtually
impossible to have a life of one’s own—this compared to the Russian and Polish
shtetls, where people lived apart from one another and enjoyed a certain level of pri-
vacy and autonomy. Such, however, was the life of the new American Jew—destined
to live, at least during this period, confined by language, unfamiliar customs, cultural
idiosyncrasies, and the difficulty of finding suitable jobs and a dignified manner of liv-
ing. They were, like many other immigrant communities, set apart from the American
society to which they could only dream of belonging. Clearly, the work of Cahan,
Roth, Gold, and Yezierska depicts a portrait of Jewish life that is quite different from
the earlier depictions of writers such as Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Babel, whose sen-
sibilities were generated through imaginative depictions of European shtetls and the
perpetual threat of pogroms. The modern Jewish immigrant writers relate to us the
stories of a people who have truly immigrated, and who find themselves in the
squalor and impoverishment of the “land of opportunity.”
Life in the “New World,” of course, was clearly not as glorious and rewarding
as the first Jewish American writers had hoped it would be. In fact, the new sur-
roundings delivered many new hardships and a great deal of suffering for hopeful
 JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE 525

European Jewish families who tried to create fresh lives in America, hoping to leave
their suffering in Europe behind them. Perhaps it was this disappointment that
compelled many Jewish American writers to look toward Socialist philosophies
and leftist impulses as a means of escaping from the impoverishment—an impulse
that would characterize the work many Jewish American writers, beginning with
those of the turn-of-the-century period and progressing into the work of more con-
temporary writers like E.L. Doctorow (see, for example, The Book of Daniel).
It is a sense of uneasiness that dominates the Jewish American literature between
1900 and 1945, and much of this can be attributed to language. This era of litera-
ture acts as a bridge between the Yiddish literature of the late-nineteenth century
and the literature of the second wave of Jewish American writing—primarily the
work of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and even Bernard Malamud and Cynthia Ozick,
whose characters personified the new American Jew who was better educated and
had a better grasp of the English language. The literature generated by American
Jews in the first half of the twentieth century is in effect a literature of transforma-
tion, for in it we witness the often difficult transition from Yiddish to English, as
characterized especially by Nobel prize-winning novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer, one
of very few Yiddish writers whose work was translated into English. But, it is a
transformation that will not be fully developed for at least another twenty years or
so. Yiddish is depicted as the language of kings in Call It Sleep, for instance. Set
against the backdrop of the fragmented, halting, and frequently mispronounced
English of the little immigrant street urchins, the Yiddish that is spoken in the homes
of Jewish immigrants takes on a regal, almost Shakespearean quality. For, Yiddish
was life—it was the gateway to knowledge of just about everything.
And for this reason, Abraham Cahan, the founder and editor of the Daily Yiddish
Forward, is a particularly important figure in this era of Jewish American literature.
The Forward was the only means by which the immigrant Jews learned about the
world around them—the crux of knowledge for Jewish immigrants at the turn of
the century. This, of course, is not directly evident in the works of writers like
Yezierska, Gold, and Roth, but the fact that Yiddish figures so largely into the expe-
rience of the immigrant world reinforces its significance. These writers may have
written in English, which sets them apart from an earlier generation of Jewish writ-
ers such as Singer, Aleichem, Chaim Grade, and I.L. Peretz, but Yezierska and Roth
clearly imagined in Yiddish, creating an alliance between parallel communities, sep-
arated by an ocean, but conjoined by similar problems—one foot in Europe, and
one foot in America.
Context and Issues. All in all, Jewish American writers from 1900 to 1945 intro-
duced a literary genre that was entirely their own—infused with new voices,
dialects, and rhythms that allowed it to be viewed as the first form of multi-ethnic
literature in the United States, arriving earlier than most to the identity politics party
that would surface much later in the century within English departments and liter-
ary circles. Moving up in the twentieth century, Chaim Potok introduced a new
form of the Jewish—though not immigrant—community in The Chosen (1967).
This novel begins during World War II and ends with the founding of Israel, and it
is important to note that, at this time, most writers were not focused on religion or
on maintaining the homogeneity of a Jewish community. Instead, the focus of
American Jews seemed fixed on the goal of assimilation. But with Potok, we get an
undiluted look at the Jewish Orthodox community—an unfiltered view of Lee
Avenue of Williamsburg, essentially a shtetl-like community of ultra-Orthodox Jews
526 JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE

and Modern Orthodox Jews (as it still is today), neither of whom aspire to assimi-
late or blend in too closely with mainstream American community.
Nearly thirty-five years after Roth introduced us to the world of the Jewish American
immigrant community, Potok retains the concept of an insular Jewish community,
but doesn’t extract from it the religious impulses. One contrast, however, resides in
the fact that while earlier Jewish writers conveyed a sense of longing to escape from
the immigrant community and move up in American society, Potok depicts a group
of American Jews who actually want to live in a close, tightly knit Jewish commu-
nity, set apart from mainstream American culture and all of its influences—a depic-
tion that would remain remarkably rare in Jewish American literature. Yet, at the
same time, these Jews are beset by the same problems experienced by secular
Americans, Jewish and Gentile: the relationships between fathers and sons and
whether or not to continue to embrace the ways of their fathers. The Chosen’s
Danny, for example, a great Talmudic genius, doesn’t follow his father, but falls in
love with Freud—in Freud’s very early stages of popularity—who is the embodi-
ment of the new secular world, and goes to graduate school to study rather than a
rabbinic school.
What Yezierska, Roth, Potok, and others all have in common is the shtetl-like
community—totally transported and re-positioned in America. Yet, unlike Yezierska
and Roth, who, in their socialist and leftist leanings become nearly anti-religious,
Potok presents us with the image of a group of people who, essentially, say no to
assimilation. They metaphorically proclaim, “We don’t have to give up the Torah,
the Talmud, and Ultra-Orthodoxy in order to be American.” This really is a critical
point because early Jewish American fiction, by definition, was laced with
Yiddishisms and Jewish cultural quirks, but implicit in the literature was a tacit
understanding that they wanted to be as American as possible—and we see this
beginning with the earliest Jewish American writers and culminating in the mid to
late-twentieth century writers like Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth.
But, an aggressive impulse toward assimilation does not seem to be a problem in
Potok’s Williamsburg shtetl; rather, the issue becomes a divisiveness that exists
between religious groups: the Hasidic Jews and the Modern Orthodox Jews. In con-
trast to the early twentieth-century immigrant community, so religiously entrenched
are the Jews of this new community that the issue shifts from being at odds with
American culture, to being at odds with the other religious Jews who live just on the
other side of Lee Avenue. The Hasidic Jews see the Modern Orthodox Jews as
disgraceful, but the genius of this lies in the way in which Potok chooses to open
The Chosen—with a baseball game, one in which all the boys, both Hasidic and
Orthodox, play together a very American game.
The irony, of course, lies in the fact that Potok depicts a religious community,
eager to retain and embrace its religious identity in a way that challenges the
impulse of most Jews and Jewish writers in America during this time to blend in
with mainstream American culture. Even Saul Bellow’s first novel, Dangling Man
(1944), addressed not the issues one imagines would grace the pages of a first novel
from a child of immigrants, but the issues that colored the minds and concerns of
most Americans during this time, regardless of ethnic or religious descent: war and
the draft. Bellow’s work, though it often contained Jewish characters and concerns,
would continue to focus primarily on the shared issues of mid-twentieth-century
mainstream Americans. Bernard Malamud’s The Natural (1952), of course, utilizes
the setting of the baseball field to explore, not the nuances and complexities of religious
 JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE 527

life in America, but the challenges of isolation and dashed dreams for—true to the
American individualist impulse—one man. This very same baseball setting, both the
game and the field, will later be used by Ehud Havazelet (Like Never Before, 1998)
to explore the tension between an older, more religious generation, and a younger,
secular generation. Regardless, work by Jewish American writers including Grace
Paley, Tillie Olsen, Nathanael West, Joseph Heller, and later Norman Mailer would
continue to haunt the mid-twentieth-century era with its striking absence of Jewish
characters or concerns, rituals or traditions.
Reception. Though Howe believed staunchly that the era that hailed Jewish
American literature, a force with which to be reckoned was drawing to a close, evi-
dence of a newly revived Jewish American literary canon suggests that not only is
Jewish American literature alive and well, but also that it is larger than the confines
of Howe’s imagination could bear. It is perhaps even bigger—in terms of sheer
breadth and the variety of its range— than it was during the advent of writers such
as Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud. Although much of this has to do with the
multiplicity of Jewish voices that have burst onto the literary scene in the past
twenty years—from feminist writers, to those writing about neo-orthodoxy and
Hasidic communities, to gay writers, and to post-Holocaust voices—one strong ele-
ment of this literary persistence has to do with the newest generation of Russian
Jews who have immigrated to the United States. Once again, the shtetl-like commu-
nities—though not impoverished and miserable anymore—play a central role in the
fiction of Jewish American literature. The storytelling of this new generation of
Jewish American writers is infused with both the memories of prior immigrant expe-
riences and the experiences of new ones, and yet it is simultaneously innovative in
its tendency to reconcile—or at least draw our attention to—disparate parts of the
Jewish American identity. In an essay called “Against Logic,” that was part of a
1997 issue of Tikkun devoted to the explosion of new Jewish American literary
voices, novelist Rebecca Goldstein (Mazel, 1995; The Mind-Body Problem, 1992)
ponders the persistence of a collective Jewish literary imagination despite genera-
tions of assimilation into mainstream American culture. She writes:

Yet here I am . . . dreaming Jewish dreams. Deep down in the regions of psyche where
fiction is born, regions supremely indifferent to criteria of rationality, being Jewish
seems to matter to me quite a lot; and in this way my own small and personal story
might be offered up as a metaphor for the very re-awakening in Jewish American
letters . . . For here we all of us are, after several generations that have tried their
damnedest to shrug off the accidents of our shared precedents; here we all are, having
sufficiently assimilated the culture at large to be able to inhabit, should we so choose,
the inner worlds of characters to whom Jewishness is nothingness; here we all are,
against logic, dreaming Jewish dreams. (Goldstein 1997, 43)

Yet, perhaps this logic-defying phenomenon has as much to do with a shared history,
as it does with the ability of American Jews to thrive in and adapt to the places in which
they find themselves, rather than lament the loss of a shared Jewish homeland.
The ghettos may be far behind them, but they are not long forgotten—they
continue to appear, albeit in newer and less miserable forms; Brooklyn’s Brighton
Beach is a prime example of this new phenomenon of Jewish Russian immigrant
communities. Moreover, Henry Roth’s attempt to reconcile the vulgarity of the
English spoken by little immigrant street urchins with the Yiddish of an almost
Shakespearean quality spoken in the home is mirrored by new sets of cultural
528 JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE

discrepancies in the newest wave of Jewish immigrant literature. It turns out that,
in terms of part of his prediction, Howe was right; he just didn’t know exactly how
right he was. Much like the Jewish people and the collective history that is so much
a part of the burden that compels them to satisfy, even fulfill, the literary imagina-
tion, their literature tracks the experiences of its people.
Selected Authors. The novelist who, in many ways, both reinforces and tran-
scends many of these boundaries is Philip Roth; an examination of Jewish
American literature would not be complete without an extended discussion of his
work. Philip Roth’s work is particularly interesting and unarguably important to
the Jewish American literary genre as a whole in that it spans two different waves
of Jewish American writing (In an article published in The Nation in 2001, it was
suggested by Morris Dickstein that The Ghost Writer actually launches and pro-
pels us into the next wave of Jewish American writing.) and offers readers a last-
ing glimpse into the making of the so-called American Jew. Through the trajectory
of Roth’s novels, we have the rare opportunity to observe the continually evolv-
ing identity of the American Jewish male. However, because Roth so obviously,
and purposely, plays with both real and fictional depictions of the Jewish American
identity (and perhaps his own evolving identity), frequently melting and molding
them into undistinguishable personae, we are often unable to identify concretely
what is Roth’s own perception of the Jewish American identity that he seems con-
tinually to mock through morphing representations of it. A man whose closest
friends are “sheer playfulness and deadly seriousness,” through his explorations
of Jewish, particularly male identities, Roth both entertains and educates his read-
ers. Nevertheless, the ever-transforming protagonist of Roth’s work is typically
seen in the context of—and habitually in opposition to—the Jewish family and
community.
Two of Roth’s earliest constructions of personae designed to explore the complex-
ities of Jewish and Jewish American identity include Goodbye, Columbus (1959)
and Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). In both of these seminal works, the protagonist is
utterly self-conscious, narcissistic, and consumed by sexual neuroses. Clearly this
description is more characteristic of Alexander Portnoy than it is of Neil Klugman,
who is, after all, supposed to be an Orthodox Jew, but in Neil we see the beginnings
of Alexander Portnoy, even if only tentatively. In the ten-year period between the
constructions of Neil Klugman and Alexander Portnoy, there was ample time for the
faltering Neil to evolve into the notoriously obsessive and sexually perverted
Portnoy. Through both characters, Roth begins to unleash his literary voice—an
ironic one that contains a real sense of the inner city, stickball-playing boy turned
misogynistic assimilated American, consumed by his own narcissism and inferiority
complexes. Albeit at different levels, both Neil and Portnoy emerge as somehow sus-
pended between Jewishness and an assimilated American identity—both seem at
once within reach and just out of grasp. Just as Portnoy seems unable to fit himself
solidly into one identity or another, he is also unable to achieve sexual satisfaction
and fulfillment, and his readers are sure to find him either compulsively masturbat-
ing or simulating sex with a piece of liver. Whereas Neil Klugman is fixated on
Brenda Patimkin, a Jewish girl from a wealthy and assimilated family, Portnoy finds
pleasure in taking out his anger and psychological confusion on unwitting shiksas.
Moreover, Neil’s conflicts, of course, are mostly external—with family and commu-
nity—while Portnoy’s conflicts involve everyone around him, including himself.
Perhaps Portnoy is Portnoy’s own most worthy adversary.
 JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE 529

Although they share some similar characteristics, Portnoy is in many cases the
polar opposite of Neil. While Portnoy is clearly a much more aggressively liber-
ated individual—an intelligent, high powered government official who seems to
be on a mission to copulate with every woman possible—Neil cannot quite get
past the allure of Brenda Patimkin, and all that her wealthy, assimilated family
represents. Roth’s depiction of Neil’s fascination with the wealthy Patimkins, Jews
who could afford to keep a separate refrigerator for only fruit, provides a kind of
anti-thesis to Henry Roth’s immigrant world. We cannot quite tell if Neil admires
or is repelled by the Patimkins’ ability to become successful and to pass. Similarly,
while many of Portnoy’s hang-ups stem from his relationship with his obsessive
mother, Neil’s mother is not present in the story. Though both Neil and Portnoy
are engaged in a battle with their Jewishness and their ambivalent connection to
both their biblical and recent Jewish American past, it manifests itself in much dif-
ferent forms. One cannot help but see in Portnoy the implicit comparison to the
good yeshiva boy—deemed the productive, prize-winning student as depicted by
Isaac Babel in “Story of my Dovecote,” as well as by other Jewish writers,
American and European, in the ultimate trajectory of Jewish literature—who
would probably never lower himself to attempting to copulate with a piece of liver
or even a shiksa for that matter. Portnoy, however, though he is prone to frequent
Yiddishisms, is anything but the stereotypically good Jewish boy. He is the
epitome of someone who knows no boundaries, someone who has spun out of
control, who is eternally engaged in a battle against himself. Tellingly, Portnoy
recalls that in school he

chanted, along with [his] teacher “I am the Captain of my fate, I am the Master of my
soul,” and meanwhile within my own body, an anarchic insurrection had been
launched by one of my privates—which I was helpless to put down! (Roth 1969, 38)

His sexual neuroses, ambiguities, and dissatisfactions become a metaphor for the
ways in which he deals with his Jewish identity. We see, also, his inability to function
sexually even when he is in Israel, at what should be the height of his exploration
of his Jewish identity.
As shocking, even disturbing, as some of his characterizations of Jewish identity
might be, Roth was very much a man of his day—something that is reflected in not
just the early novels, but many of his middle and later works as well. His protago-
nists are typically unusual characters who are living in the sexual politics of the era,
bringing hedonism and bachelorhood to the forefront of Jewish American fiction. In
a sense, Philip Roth did for literature what Woody Allen did for film—neurotic, sex-
ually obsessed, self-referential, and imbued with a ferocious sense of artistic entitle-
ment. In The Breast (1972), The Professor of Desire (1977), and The Dying Animal
(2001), for instance, we are introduced to David Kepesh, a fully assimilated, grad-
uate school educated Jewish man, who is perhaps a milder, more mature version of
Portnoy, living in a state of what he terms “emancipated manhood.” The radical
individualism of America lays claim to each of Roth’s fictional characters, but
despite their predisposition toward success, these self-conscious overachievers rarely
make for a flattering picture of the American Jew. Instead, they become perhaps
pivotal examples of the consequences of too much assimilation, some have argued.
As Jewish American identities, they are both alluring and revolting to American
Jews living in the real world.
530 JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE

It would be an understatement to suggest that Roth’s work abounds in contradic-

tions, and it often seems meant to inspire confusion, especially when it comes to
deciphering which are the fictional impulses and which ideas spring directly from
autobiographical instances. Critics who have attempted to make such distinctions
have often been attacked for taking his work as autobiographical, yet he clearly
insists on drawing repeatedly from the commonly known facts of his life in forming
many of his protagonists. In keeping with this idea, many of Roth’s later works deal
specifically with writers and the act of writing—in some cases becoming quite meta-
fictional, as elements of the writer are infused into the text—and The Ghost Writer
begins this new focus in his work. One of the most interesting aspects of this novel
is that it pays homage to two other writers with whom Roth was consistently iden-
tified: Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow. The character of I.E. Lonoff, who the
Zuckerman character seems to emulate, is a stand in for Malamud, while the
Abravanel character represents Bellow, even down to the multiple marriages. Nathan
Zuckerman, the young character who has just published a very controversial set of
stories, of course, is clearly indicative of Roth himself when he was that age.
While The Ghost Writer seems to be a transitional piece in both Roth’s fiction and
the wave of Jewish American literature in general, as Roth’s work progresses his
protagonists become less self-conscious and less self-referential. The Nathan
Zuckerman of The Ghost Writer is still the same character—still embarrassing to
the Jewish community; he has assimilated a bit too well—but the later depictions of
Zuckerman are less humiliating, though he is still well assimilated into mainstream
American culture. In later works, Roth’s emphases are broader and more diverse,
ranging from friendly, even loving, father-son relationships (Patrimony) to political
issues (The Counterlife). Morris Dickstein suggests that this phase in Roth’s writing
reflects the vengeful return of the Jewishness “that once seemed to be disappearing.”
“In this phase,” he asserts, “the inevitability of assimilation gives way to the work
of memory.” Character construction becomes, it seems, less of a burden—less a
reflection of a disjointed self and fractured identity. Similarly, rather than depicting
Zuckerman as a protagonist, Roth begins to employ Zuckerman as a narrator, the
lens through which other people’s stories are told—as in The Human Stain (2000)
and American Pastoral (1997). Since the 1990s, Roth’s fiction has often fused auto-
biographical components with retrospective dramatizations of postwar American
life. A sense of frustration with social and political developments in the United
States since the 1940s, and with the perpetual collapse of the American dream, is
apparent in the American trilogy and his most recent novel Exit Ghost (2007),
though it was evident in much earlier works that flaunted political and social satire.
But as important as Philip Roth is to the Jewish American literary field and to
American literature as a whole, neither his voice nor his concerns reflect those of the
majority of Jewish American writers. Of course, it is impossible to conceive of mid
to late-twentieth-century Jewish American writing without invoking the name of
Cynthia Ozick, who continues to be a major writer in the field, but whose work,
though generated in the same time period as Philip Roth’s, addresses entirely differ-
ent concerns. She has characterized her work as being focused primarily on issues
that are “centrally Jewish”—that is, Judaism and the history of liturgical issues, in
addition to the notion of idolatry. Individual distinctiveness, it seems, is as much a
hallmark of Jewish American literature as it is of the Jewish religion and ritual that
the literature confronts, embraces, challenges, or repels. And while Roth seems, over
the the duration of the twentieth century, to have dealt with his own issues regarding
 JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE 531

Jewish identity in America, a growing number of Jewish American writers are grap-
pling with these issues in new ways. Margot Singer’s literary debut, The Pale of Set-
tlement (2007), amounts to a sustained negotiation on the role of Israel in Jewish
American identity today. The linked stories follow Susan from her home in New
York across borders into Israel, Germany, and beyond. The transnational focus
decenters Israel as the signifier of her Jewish identity and allows for complex dynam-
ics to take shape. The stories are fragmented both geographically and historically,
jumping between Palestine pre-1948, Israel in both the present and tumultuous past,
and her home in New York where Susan is firmly rooted. The complex influence of
Israel as the Jewish homeland is not lost on Susan, but the idea that it supersedes her
American or global sensibility is lost. The relationship with history remains impor-
tant but in the past as it is realized in the stories Susan’s mother tells her.

The places her mother talked about had vanished into a pink blotch that spread across
the top of the map that pulled down over the blackboard in Susan’s classroom like a
window shade. Vilna, Lwow, Bessarabia, Belarus. The Pale of Settlement. You couldn’t
go to those parts of the world any longer. They were gone. (Singer 2007, 188)

There is a clear sense that return is not possible. The only places in the world
that are closed off to Susan are these locations of historical significance to the way
Jewish identity has been formulated in the past. Now, she feels part of a networked
and interconnected culture that does not rely on a sense of home being the ancient
center. The idea is clearly demarcated in the inaccessibility of historical locales.
Susan “has the feeling that she could live anywhere in the world, even though New
York is the place she’s always been” (Singer 2007, 200). The Diaspora is part of
history, not the present. It plays a role in defining her cosmopolitan nature but does
not pull her toward a homeland or a particular version of what is means to be Jewish
in today’s global culture.
As much as place has played a major role in defining Jewish American identity,
the role of the Holocaust in tying American Jews to Israel throughout the twentieth
century cannot be underestimated. Tova Reich takes issue with that role in My
Holocaust (2007) and confronts the ethics of relying on a historical trauma for
contemporary identity. Her primary concern is the commodification of the event
and the subsequent foreclosure of meaning for those generations to follow. She
clearly delineates how the contemporary generation is supposed to be that of
“continuity,” the “designated Kaddish,” or the “living memorial candle” (Reich
2007, 19). This third generation is intended to carry-on the memory of the Holocaust
in exactly the way previous generations have done, reaping the political and
financial benefits of doing so. Tova Reich resists such a direct connection and prob-
lematizes how prior generations have created a cultural industry that defines the
historical trauma. She takes issue with the idea that previous generations should
define what the Holocaust means to Jews of the future. She satirizes the way
Auschwitz has become a tourist attraction and how the Holocaust Museum on the
Washington Mall amounts to a definitive source of cultural memory. Hers is a more
complexly-formed idea of the Holocaust and what the trauma means to contempo-
rary Jews. Just like the idea of Israel is dissipating as the definitive homeland of
Jewish identity, she discards prescriptive ideas of what the Holocaust represents.
Her emphasis on humor and satire and farcical characters drives the point that to
define the event to the extent that previous generations have attempted to do is not
532 JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE

possible. Contemporary generations need to negotiate with the past on their own
terms in order to reside in the present.
Other more recent Jewish American writers have relinquished the idea of the Holo-
caust as the definitive event and have focused attention on the tragedy of 9/11. The
transition can be seen in the graphic novels of Art Spiegelman. His groundbreaking
work on the Holocaust in Maus I and II has given way to an examination of 9/11.
In In the Shadow of No Towers, he at first portrays himself, in a metafictional
moment, as a personified mouse, the legacy of his original graphic narratives where
the Jews are mice and the Germans cats. In the role of a mouse/Jew, he insists on put-
ting the events of 9/11 in the context of the Holocaust and his father, a survivor of
Auschwitz: “I remember my father trying to describe what the smoke in Auschwitz
smelled like . . . That’s exactly what the air in lower Manhattan smelled like after
Sept. 11!” (Spiegelman 2004, 3). This scene is where the trauma of the Holocaust
and being a second generation survivor gives way to being a New Yorker and the eye-
witness to a personal trauma. The human depictions shift to being human forms in
varied guises to the point where the artist renders himself falling from the tower. He
places himself in the tragedy as the narrative moves to the aftermath of the terrorist
attack and how the event shifted the political landscape of the United States. Spiegel-
man depicts himself in a domestic setting, reading The New York Times in a nostal-
gic American living room scene, to drive home the point that he is at home in New
York and was personally attacked on 9/11. The comic book frames depict him mor-
phing from his own human form back to that of a mouse as if terrorism and trauma
return him to his Jewish identity while at home in New York.
Ken Kalfus picks up Spiegelman’s train of thought in A Disorder Peculiar to the
Country (2006), but with one exception, his Jewish identity is never mentioned. He
has the political climate of the United States squarely in view as he depicts how an
unhappily married couple experiences the terrorist attack and its aftermath. The
focus on the domestic grounds the situation in a decidedly American context, sepa-
rating the global context of the attack from the way it takes place as a personal
event. It forms a dichotomy that poses the broad context of geopolitics against pri-
vate life. Marshall, the husband, envisions the dichotomy as a personal dilemma,

Everyone was dating everything now from September 11, regardless of whether they or
anyone they knew had been at Ground Zero—when was that going to stop? . . . “I was
there. In the World Trade Center. I escaped.” (Kalfus 2006, 58)

The event has, as it did for Spiegelman, added a personal experience that height-
ened the feeling of being a New Yorker. Even in its global implications, the individ-
uals that experienced New York on the day of the trauma take a personal stake in
the event. Kalfus portrays this in the marital dispute of the couple. Each thought the
other was killed in that attack and instead of mourning the loss was overjoyed at
the thought of their spouse’s death. The terrorist attack had personal implications
for them and the effect had nothing to do with the politics that take place around
the world and everything to do with their domestic situation. The divorce turns out
to be even “more painful to speak about than September 11” (Kalfus 2006, 59).
Jonathan Safran Foer brings the domestic context of 9/11 to light through the eyes
of a child. Oskar Schell lost his father in the World Trade Center and embarks on a
journey to find a lock that fits the key he finds in his father’s belongings. Ultimately, it
is a process of making meaning out of the “worst day” (Foer 2005, 11). It is unclear
whether it is the worst day because the towers fell and many lives were lost or simply
 JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE 533

because Oskar lost his father. Either way, the day is a definitive split in which belief,
faith, and all sense of place in the world are questioned. Safran Foer depicts all of the
questions through the eyes of a child to contradict the set meanings of what the events
meant to the world, the United States, and New York. The places are interrelated, con-
tradicting at times, and ultimately more complex and ambiguous than imagined. The
conversation between Oskar and his mother depict this sentiment:

“What do you mean I sound just like Dad?”

“He used to say things like that.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, like nothing is so-and-so. Or everything is so-and-so. Or obviously.” She laughed.
“He was always very definitive.”
“What’s ‘definitive’?”
“It means certain. It comes from ‘definite.’”
“What’s wrong with definitivity?”
“Dad sometimes missed the forest for the trees.”
“What forest?”
“Nothing.” (Foer 2005, 43)

The child begins to learn that what was killed in 9/11 was a sense of center that
provided definitive ideas about who people are or where they are going. The uncer-
tainty and complexity brought to light in 9/11 and highlighted by Safran Foer and
others shows the place of identity in the contemporary world. It is not tied to a sense
of history or a single conception of what it means to be Jewish; identity forms based
on events and interactions that occur in the contingent environment of a place.
Paul Auster’s entire body of work has followed this same theme. A New Yorker
himself, he has avoided direct discussion of 9/11 in his novels since the event. How-
ever, his questioning of freedom, America, and terrorism’s political goal lead into the
same questions other have asked and provide a local, contingently constructed con-
text for identity. Leviathan, although published before 9/11, remains his best medita-
tion on the question. Ben Sachs, a writer and New York Jew, takes it upon himself to
bomb replicas of the Statue of Liberty around the country in order to get his message
about freedom to the public. He decides upon this course of action while writing an
extended novel upon the subject, but he knows his writing will never have the politi-
cal impact of the bombings. It is important to note that Auster depicts the Statue of
Liberty as the target of the bombings, meaning the statue is the ultimate referent of
freedom. It also appears on the cover of Sachs’s book in a blurry photograph, an apt
metaphor for both the meaning of freedom and the blurring of the center of identity.
As the referent gets lost in the shuffle of a global culture that is endlessly intercon-
nected and complex, the center is lost and fixed meanings are thrown into question.
Though Howe believed staunchly that the era that hailed Jewish American litera-
ture a force with which to be reckoned was drawing to a close, evidence of a newly
revived Jewish American literary canon suggests that not only is Jewish American
literature alive and well, but also that it is larger than the confines of Howe’s imag-
ination could bear, perhaps even bigger—in terms of sheer breadth and the variety
of its range—than it was during the advent of writers such as Philip Roth and
Bernard Malamud. Although much of this has to do with the multiplicity of Jewish
voices that have burst onto the literary scene in the past twenty years—from femi-
nist writers, to those writing about neo-orthodoxy and Hasidic communities, to gay
writers, and to post-Holocaust voices—one strong element of this literary persist-
ence has to do with the newest generation of Russian Jews who have immigrated to
534 JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE

the United States. Once again, the shtetl-like communities—though not impover-
ished and miserable anymore—play a central role in the fiction of Jewish American
literature. The storytelling of this new generation of Jewish American writers is
infused with both the memories of prior immigrant experiences and the experiences
of new ones, and yet it is simultaneously innovative in its tendency to reconcile—or
at least draw our attention to—disparate parts of the Jewish American identity. In
an essay called “Against Logic,” which was part of a 1997 issue of Tikkun devoted
to the explosion of new Jewish American literary voices, novelist Rebecca Goldstein
(Mazel, 1995; The Mind-Body Problem, 1992) ponders the persistence of a collec-
tive Jewish literary imagination despite generations of assimilation into mainstream
American culture. She writes:

Yet here I am . . . dreaming Jewish dreams. Deep down in the regions of psyche where
fiction is born, regions supremely indifferent to criteria of rationality, being Jewish
seems to matter to me quite a lot; and in this way my own small and personal story
might be offered up as a metaphor for the very re-awakening in Jewish American let-
ters . . . For here we all of us are, after several generations that have tried their
damnedest to shrug off the accidents of our shared precedents; here we all are, having
sufficiently assimilated the culture at large to be able to inhabit, should we so choose,
the inner worlds of characters to whom Jewishness is nothingness; here we all are,
against logic, dreaming Jewish dreams.

And yet perhaps this logic-defying phenomenon has as much to do with a shared
history, as it does with the ability of American Jews to thrive in and adapt to the
places in which they find themselves, rather than lament the loss of a shared Jewish
homeland.
The ghettos may be far behind them, but they are not long forgotten—they con-
tinue to appear, albeit in newer and less miserable forms; Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach
is a prime example of this new phenomenon of Jewish Russian immigrant commu-
nities. Moreover, Henry Roth’s attempt to reconcile the vulgarity of the English spo-
ken by little immigrant street urchins with the Yiddish of an almost Shakespearean
quality spoken in the home is mirrored by new sets of cultural discrepancies in the
newest wave of Jewish immigrant literature. It turns out that, in terms of part of his
prediction, Howe was right; he just didn’t know exactly how right he was. Much
like the Jewish people and the collective history that is so much a part of the bur-
den that compels them to satisfy, even fulfill, the literary imagination, their litera-
ture tracks the experiences of its people.

Bibliography
Abraham, Pearl. The Romance Reader. New York: Riverhead Books, 1996.
Auslander, Shalom. Beware of God. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005.
Auster, Paul. Leviathan. New York: Penguin, 1992.
Bellow, Saul. Dangling Man. 1944. New York: Penguin, 1996.
Bezmozgis, David. Natasha. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.
Cahan, Abraham. The Rise of David Levinsky. 1917. New York: Modern Library, 2001.
Chabon, Michael. The Final Solution. New York: Harper, 2004.
Doctorow, E. L. The Book of Daniel. New York: Plume, 1971.
———. City of God. New York: Plume, 2001.
Englander, Nathan. For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. New York: Vintage, 1999.
 JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE 535

Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. New York: Mariner Books,
2005.
Gold, Michael. Jews Without Money. 1930. New York: Carroll & Graff, 2004.
Goldstein, Rebecca. “Against Logic.” Tikkun 12.6 (1997): 43.
———. Mazel. New York: Penguin, 1995.
———. The Mind-Body Problem. New York: Penguin, 1983.
Goodman, Allegra. Intuition. New York: Dial Press, 2006.
———. Kaaterskill Falls. New York: Dell, 1998.
Havazelet, Ehud. Like Never Before. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
Howe, Irving. Jewish American Stories. New York: New American Library, 1977.
Kalfus, Ken. A Disorder Peculiar to the Country. New York: Harper Collins, 2006.
Krasikov, Sana. One More Year. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2008.
Malamud, Bernard. The Natural. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1952.
Mirvis, Tova. The Ladies Auxiliary. New York: Ballantine, 2000.
Ozick, Cynthia. Heir to the Glimmering World. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.
Potok, Chaim. The Chosen. New York: Ballantine, 1967.
Reich, Tova. My Holocaust. New York: Harper Collins, 2007.
Roth, Henry. Call it Sleep. 1934. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.
Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. New York: Vintage, 1997.
———. The Breast. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972.
———. The Counterlife. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987.
———. The Dying Animal. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.
———. Exit Ghost. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007.
———. The Ghost Writer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.
———. Goodbye, Columbus. New York: The Modern Library, 1959.
———. The Human Stain. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000
———. Patrimony. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991.
———. The Plot Against America. New York: Vintage, 2004
———. Portnoy’s Complaint. New York: Random House, 1969.
———. The Professor of Desire. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.
Shneer, David and Caryn Aviv. New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora. New York: New
York Univeristy Press, 2005.
Shteyngart, Gary. Absurdistan. New York: Random House, 2006.
———. The Russian Debutante’s Handbook. New York: Riverhead, 2002
Singer, Margot. The Pale of Settlement. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2007.
Spiegelman, Art. In the Shadow of No Towers. New York: Pantheon Books, 2004.
———. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Penguin, 2003.
Ulinich, Anya. Petropolis. New York: Viking, 2007.
Vapnyar, Lara. There are Jews in My House. New York: Pantheon, 2003.
Yezierzka, Anya. Bread Givers. 1925. New York: Persea Books, 2003.

Further Reading
Aleichem, Sholem. Tevye the Dairyman. Trans. Hillel Halkin. New York: Schocken, 1987;
Babel, Isaac. The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel. Nathalie Babel, ed. Translated by Peter
Constantine. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002; Bellow, Saul. Seize the Day. New York:
Viking Press, 1956; Bukiet, Melvin Jules, ed. Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex. New York:
Norton, 1999; Chabon, Michael. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. New York: Harper-
Collins, 1997; Diamant, Anita. The Red Tent. New York: Picador, 1997; Eisner, Will. The
Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. New York: W.W. Norton,
2005; Eve, Nomi. The Family Orchard. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000; Foer, Jonathan
Safran. Everything is Illuminated. New York: HarperCollins, 2002; Goldberg, Myla. Bee
Season. New York: Anchor, 2000; Horn, Dara. In the Image. New York: W.W. Norton,
2002; Kushner, Tony. Angels in America. New York: Theatre Communications Group,
536 JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE

1992; Olsen, Tillie. Yonnondio: From the Thirties. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska
Press, 1974; Ozick, Cynthia. “The Pagan Rabbi.” The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories.
Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995. 1–38; Rosen, Jonathan. The Talmud and
the Internet. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000; Stern, Steve. The Angel of For-
getfulness. New York: Viking, 2005; Stern, Steve. The Wedding Jester. St. Paul, MN: Gray-
wolf Press, 1999; Stollman, Aryeh Lev. The Far Euphrates. New York: Riverhead, 1997;
West, Nathanael. The Day of the Locust. New York: Buccaneer Books, 1981; Wiesel, Elie.
The Time of the Uprooted. Trans. David Hapgood. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
MONICA OSBORNE AND DAVID COCKLEY
L

LANGUAGE POETRY
Definition. Language poetry has its roots in the social upheavals of the 1970s.
American poetry was a prominent voice in the cultural revolution of the 1960s and
1970s that saw protests against the Vietnam War, the beginning of the Free Speech
Movement, and the coming of Second Wave Feminism. With the advent of protest
poetry, some writers viewed with dissatisfaction what they considered the artificial
constructs of ego in the lyrical conventions of American poetry, particularly those
well-grounded in the post-Romantic tradition and Modernism’s predilection for
lyric and narrative verse forms, styles that came to prominence with the acceptance
of “free verse” in the early years of the century.
Language poets reject the Modernist assumption that language is a “transparent”
medium that accurately captures the essence of the things described. Instead, they
challenge what Bernstein calls “official verse culture,” the dominant use of lyric forms
in academic writing programs (Bernstein 1986, 246). In his collected essays, Content’s
Dream: Essays 1975–1984 (1986), Bernstein’s assessment hints at the confrontational
nature of the early exchanges between traditional publications and the magazines sup-
porting Language poetry. The acrimonious debates underlined the radical nature of
Language poets’ challenge to representational structures. In The Marginalization of
Poetry (1996), an essay collection by another leading poet from this period, Bob
Perelman complained that in traditional poetry “sensibility and intuition reigned
supreme,” and even if “craft and literary knowledge” were still evident, contemporary
poetry had become simply “conversational” (Perelman 1996, 12).
The techniques of the Language poets vary as much as the works themselves, but
there are certain salient features. One of the leading critics in support of Language
poets has been Marjorie Perloff. Her estimation of the poetry of Bruce Andrews,
another prominent member of the early group, suggests many of the features found
among its practitioners: “The poetic devices you use tend to be rhetorical figures rather
than tropes—the pun, the neologism, the portmanteau word—and of course a great
deal of sound-play rather than metaphor, simile, symbol” (Andrews 1996, 80). In
538 LANGUAGE POETRY

THE BEGINNINGS OF LANGUAGE POETRY

In the main, Language poets began to explore language as construction, not as a representa-
tional medium used to describe experience but as a set of relationships and signifying
structures relevant to themselves. Charles Bernstein, a leading theorist and practitioner of
the movement, has said, “We were interested in poetry that did not assume a syntax, a
subject matter, a vocabulary, a structure, a form, or a style but where all these were at issue,
all these were explored in the writing of the poem” (Senning 2005).The subject of Language
poetry is often language itself, not its meanings or its message but the particulars of its formal
structure and how it creates, and is created by, social and political ideas.

similar fashion, Perelman has argued that there are really many different “Language
poetries,” and yet certain trends are common among the group: “breaking the automa-
tism of the poetic ‘I’ and its naturalized voice; foregrounding textuality and formal
device; using or alluding to Marxist or poststructuralist theory in order to open the
present to critique and change”; and “the aggressive dismissals of self-expressive
mainstream poetics as politically reactionary” (1996, 13). In her piece, “Experiments,”
for the seminal anthology, The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (1984), Bernadette Mayer
gives a list of exercises for writing poems that reflect the group’s understanding:
“Systematically eliminate the use of certain kinds of words or phrases from a piece of
writing, either your own or someone else’s, for example, eliminate all adjectives from
a poem of your own, or take out all words beginning with ‘s’ in Shakespeare’s son-
nets”; and again: “Get a group of words (make a list or select at random); then form
these words (only) into a piece of writing—whatever the words allow. Let them
demand their own form” (1984, 80). Such arbitrary conditions identify the formal
nature of the works.
The Marxist leanings of many of the Language poets in the 1970s made it clear
that the normative relationships in language were not innocent correspondences but
rather strictures created over time through the process of cultural production.
Language, they realized, carried all the imprints of the society against which they
had been struggling. The writers’ distrust of the poetic tradition was based on its
fundamental correspondence with capitalism. But they were also aware of a parallel
tradition, what they took as a subversive one composed of writers who had not
followed the Modernist dictates of realism, naturalism, and symbolism. Among
these were Gertrude Stein with her verbal repetitions, Louis Zukofsky with his musi-
cal analogies, and Ezra Pound (although associated with the mainstream tradition
as well) with his demands that language must be rewritten to fit the age. Two of
these, Zukofsky and Pound, were associated briefly by sympathies with the
“Objectivist” movement, often cited as a precursor to the Language poets with its
treatment of the poem as object. All Language poets were not, of course, Marxists,
and some even found themselves in opposition to Marxism’s hegemony in academia
in the 1970s (Hartley 1989). Initially, however, the Language writers turned to both
Marxist and poststructural ideologies to inform their poetry (Perelman 1996, 13).
These differences within the Language movement are partly responsible for the
controversy over its definition. Many rejected the label of “Language Poets” on the
grounds that such an attempt to unify the movement undermined the diversity of
their approaches and concerns and was, in effect, a way of annexing their efforts.
The movement wanted to maintain their marginality as a sign of the challenge to the
historicizing process. This ahistorical position was not simply a refusal to accept
 LANGUAGE POETRY 539

recognition, Eleana Kim points out, but an effort to place themselves beyond
socializing forces that had assimilated earlier avant-garde groups:

An equally important consideration in any definition of Language poetry is the degree to

which it was a self-identifying group. The group’s identity is, in many ways, a product of
critics and scholars interested in establishing it as the latest in avant-garde formations, and
the poets themselves demonstrated deep ambivalences as the tendency began to gain
currency under the Language moniker. The poets often resisted a unified identity even as
their public manifestations exhibited a more or less stable core to the movement. (1994)

The problem underlines their eventual acceptance into academic institutions, a

move that both legitimized and historicized the movement in the 1980s. The desire
to retain their individuality was tantamount to a statement rejecting the tradition,
particularly aspects associated with old avant-garde poets represented in Donald
Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry (1960). Allen had broken with New
Critical traditions and gathered together elements of the Black Mountain school, the
Beats, the New York school, and others in a wide-ranging, avant-garde collection.
But the poets in this anthology soon found themselves at the center of a new poetic
mainstream (Holcombe n.d.). The Language poets were intent on distinguishing
themselves through an even newer understanding of “poetic inheritance, tradition,
and the role of literary theory” (Kim 1994). Yet, even among Language poets there
were difficulties on how to define the movement, as is evident in the organizing
principles in two prominent anthologies: Ron Silliman’s In the American Tree
(1986) and Douglas Messerli’s “Language” Poetries (1987). Silliman’s introduction
to his anthology already warns of the “reductive assumptions” of the label
“Language Poets,” and Messerli uses the plural, “poetries,” to show an inclusive
factor in the movement (ibid). The main import of these moves to solidify the group
was to show the ideological associations rather than the differences in poetries.
Silliman suggests that no less was at stake than “The nature of reality. The nature
of the individual. The function of language in the constitution of either realm,” and
“The shape and value of literature itself” (1986, xix).
History. Language poetry begins with a number of small magazines in the early
1970s, corresponding to groups in San Francisco, New York, and the Washington,
D.C., area (Perelman 1996, 11). Some argue that it was really the first issue of This
magazine in 1971 that started the phenomenon (Silliman 1986, xvi). The zenith of the
early period is surely the publication of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine (1978–1982)
in San Francisco. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E created a forum for the discussion of con-
temporary poetics that helped define the group’s distinctions from the lyric tradition
(Perelman 1996, 16). The movement grew in the 1970s with the publication of other
little magazines, including Tottel’s, Hills, Roof, Miam, Qu, The Difficulties, A
Hundred Posters, Sink, Tramen, and Tremblor (Kim 1994; Hartley 1989; Kinsella
2007). Associated primarily with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E after 1978, it was referred to
in various ways as the Language movement, Language poetry, the Language group and
as the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets (Perelman 1996, 18; Izenberg 2003). By the late
1970s, a number of anthologies and journal special editions featured the group, adding
to its critical legitimacy: Lisbon & the Orcas Islands (1973), Alcheringa (1975), Open
Letter (1977), Hills (1980), Ironwood (1982), Paris Review (1982), The
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (1984), Change (1985), Writing/Talks (1985), and
boundary 2 (1986) (Hartley 1989). During this period, a number of poets were identi-
fied specifically with the movement, including Bruce Andrews, Rae Armantrout, Steve
540 LANGUAGE POETRY

Benson, Charles Bernstein, David Bromige, Clark Coolidge, Alan Davies, Ray
DiPalma, Robert Grenier, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Steve
McCaffery, Michael Palmer, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, Peter Seaton, James Sherry,
Ron Silliman, Diane Ward, Barrett Watten, and Hannah Weiner (Hartley 1989).
But these experimental publications were the result of changes that had been
building for some time. By the early 1970s the lyric trend in American poetry,
sustained throughout much of the mid-century under the prominence of the confes-
sional school of poets and their successors were under attack for what a new
generation saw as self-centered emotionalism. The confessional school had refined
the lyric as a mode of self-examination and personal experience, often dealing with
human alienation. Perpetuated during the middle years by powerful influences such
as Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, and Sylvia Plath, it was not until
the protest poetry of the 1960s that political and social problems became a general
focus of the poetry. A new social awareness brought with it a questioning of
language itself as the medium for social and political change, even in the arts.
Although to write the history of Language poetry proves as controversial an act
as trying to define what it is, there are definite antecedents to the kind of experi-
mentation that was attracting young poets in the 1970s. In The Poetics of Indeter-
minacy (1981), Perloff delineates a marginalized tradition within 20th-century
poetry, and draws a line from Arthur Rimbaud and Gertrude Stein to contemporary
postmodernist poets such as John Ashbery. She was one of the first to link the
critical theorists of the French and Geneva schools to an understanding of the poetic
tradition. By citing Gertrude Stein, and seeing in her word experiments an aware-
ness that language is a material medium, like paint is for the painter, and that it can
therefore be manipulated to expose social assumptions, Perloff helped create a
critical space for the later understanding of Language poetry.
Other predecessors can be found in the early-twentieth-century Dadaists, who
reacted against the “idea of art” in much the way Language poetry would criticize
the romanticized tradition. Tristan Tzara’s ideas could easily be read in a contem-
porary context: “It seemed to us that the world was losing itself in idle babbling,
that literature and art had become institutions located on the margin of life, that
instead of serving man they had become the instruments of an outmoded society”
(Kinsella 1996). Perloff makes the connection that Dada was a community effort,
not one focused on the individual, and that political action was a primary compo-
nent of the movement (Perloff 1999). The “anti-art” stance was a political statement
about the social constrictions of “high” art, and one that parallels Language
poetry’s rejection of the Modernist tradition in poetry. Other influences were surely
Concrete poetry, a form that took the material nature of letters and words to an
extreme and constructed non-linear typographical images. Further connections have
been suggested with Charles Olson and the Black Mountain school, William Carlos
Williams, the Russian Formalists, the Surrealists, and the OULIPO group in the
early 1960s (Kinsella 1996; Hartley 1989; Gelpi 1990; Perelman 1996). It may be
indicative of the controversies surrounding its history that its efforts to avoid clas-
sification as yet another avant-garde group somehow ensured its place as an avant-
garde group in literary history. Kim cautions, however, that the act of historicizing
the group carries its own implications: “The connections between the movement
and the European avant-gardes of the 1920s have been examined by academics who
promote its formal innovations and political interventions, as well as frame it within
a narrative of American transavantgardism or postmodernism” (Kim 1994).
 LANGUAGE POETRY 541

Trends and Themes. After a period of wider academic acceptance in the late 1980s
and 1990s, the original Marxist components of the movement and the predomi-
nance of male writers in the original groups faced challenges from poets who
demanded a greater awareness of gender and ethnic concerns. Consequently, many
today have come to refer to the “Language Poets” as an historical movement dating
to the early 1980s. Some of the earliest poets themselves now “refer to language
poetry in the past tense” (Lilley 1997). But it is possible to see a continuance of
concerns in what some today call the “postlanguage” poets (Wallace 1998). It might
even be said that the “post” state of Language poetry is a necessary development in
a poetics that rejected its own historical definition. At the same time, postlanguage
poets are disclaiming aspects of the early coalition, and reformulating new
positions.
The movement existed on the fringe of American poetry until the mid-1980s, but
its early uses of critical theory and poststructural ideas ensured its entrance into
academic literary circles just then exploring these fields. Language poetry “enjoyed
a privileged status among high-brow academics who had found an art form partic-
ularly suited, indeed, symptomatic, of the very forces engendering the rise of
postmodern cultural and post-structuralist theories” (Kim 1994). But this also
created a dichotomy in that it had “secured an institutional foothold which brokers
against our usual notion of the avant-garde” (Reddy n.d.). Presently, theory is one
of the critical points of difference, with some postlanguage poets critical of the dom-
inant theoretical focus of the earlier poets (Wallace 1998). In the 1970s, theory was
not just a concern but a cohesive element in the movement. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
magazine, for instance, was composed almost exclusively of “critical essays” not
“poetry” (Watten 2003, 51). And even “genres” such as these were destabilized
whenever possible. The postlanguage poets, however, have retained the intrinsic
concern with language and its relationship to power (Wallace 1998). The preemi-
nent role of critical theory in early Language poetry was due, in part, to its
marginality within the academic community. Postlanguage poets have rather grown
up in an environment accepting critical theory as part of the necessary dialogue of
the times. But conceptualizing has become less important:

Postlanguage poets often feel that theorizing their practice is a burden. Literary theory
has often seemed to them something that the dominant power structures of the acad-
emy and their elders in avant-garde poetry have demanded that they create in order to
justify their practice as poets. Literary theory does continue to be a central part of the
practice of many postlanguage poets, yet they tend to undertake it with an ambivalent
and often wearied eye. (Wallace 1998)

With greater visibility has come an increased awareness of Language writing in

areas outside the two coasts, with poets now writing from regions as diverse as Okla-
homa and Hawaii, with international groups in Europe and Australia (Wallace 1998).
Whereas the first poets defined their work in an atmosphere of 1970s cultural rev-
olution, newer members have moved beyond this “militant phase” associated with
“manifestos” and turned “toward other, more meditative forms of literary inquiry”
(Reddy n.d.). Some have even returned to specific aspects of poetry that were once
disapproved of, including “narrative, lyric, spirituality, and a poetics of the every
day” (Wallace 1998). Most now see a “growing array of hybridizing writing prac-
tices that make use of visual, sound, performance, and cyber media in order to bring
the materiality of language (and thus the reader) into a more activist position”
542 LANGUAGE POETRY

(Osman 2001). Consequently, today “the detached eye of the ‘language poem’ must
share the textual stage with connective, collective, and absorptive forms” (Osman
2001).
The influence of feminism has had the greatest effect on today’s Language poetry.
Although poets Carla Harryman, Rae Armantrout, Lyn Hejinian, Hannah Weiner,
Susan Howe, and Bernadette Mayer were all early members of the movement, much
of the early critical theory was written by men, Charles Bernstein, Bob Perelman,
and Ron Silliman (Perloff n.d.). The movement, in some ways, reflected the mascu-
line nature of the New Left politics out of which it had grown. It was not until the
mid-1980s, and the realization of Second Wave feminism, that women’s interests
were addressed. Some argue that in the 1980s the movement represented women
better than other disciplines, at least in the area of small magazine publication
(Vickery 2000, 99). Today, the importance of cultural studies in academia has
increased the awareness of gender and ethnic concerns. Postlanguage writers often
“highlight problems of identity politics from specific cultural positions,” and
“critique the limits of identity politics” by crossing “cultural boundaries” (Wallace
1998). Harryette Mullen, Tan Lin, Susan Schultz, Rodrigo Toscano, Myung Mi
Kim, and Bob Harrison are writers who “have explored the complex ways that
problems of cultural identity interact with poetic practice” (Wallace 1998). In the
1990s two anthologies were published that reflected these changes: Out of Every-
where: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North American & the UK
(1996), edited by Maggie O’Sullivan, and Moving Borders: Three Decades of Inno-
vative Writing by Women (1998), edited by Mary Margaret Sloan (Retallack 2003,
251). These were complimented by a number of critical studies, including Translat-
ing the Unspeakable: Poetry and the Innovative Necessity, by Kathleen Fraser
(2000); Lyric Interventions: Feminism, Experimental Poetry, and Contemporary
Discourse, by Linda Kinnahan ( 2004); and Women Poets in the 21st Century,
edited by Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr (2002) (Ashton 2006).
Early Language Poets conflicted with certain groups due to their denial of the
validity of the “subject” in writing. “Since one of its early premises was the critique
of ‘identity,’” Brian Kim Stefans observes, the movement “never had the language
for dealing with minority issues that attempted to legitimize ‘identity’ as a central
subject of discourse” (2001). Similarly, popular women writers of the 1970s, by
choosing “traditional lyric forms” were participating in “an unwitting acquiescence
to centuries of male dominance in the art of poetry” (Ashton 2006). Citing Rachel
DuPlessis’s 1985 essay, “Otherhow,” Jennifer Ashton points out that “it is not
sufficient to write lyric poems in which a woman’s experiences are the main subject
matter of the song, for the very forms of the lyric—including even basic grammati-
cal forms used to represent the presence of a speaker—are themselves indices of a
history of male domination” (Ashton 2006). Finally, “The literary feminism that
emerged in the 1980s thus transformed the attack on women’s underrepresentation
into an attack on representation as such, and it did so by way of the avant-garde
requirement of formal innovation,” insisting as it did “on an even more literal
connection between the text and the body” (Ashton 2006). Others warn that the
return to the “subject” risks an acquiescence to socially restrictive language, and
writers need to keep the “systemic” nature of language in mind (Spahr 2001).
Contexts and Issues. The critique of the “subject” was at the center of the
Language movement’s argument with poetic tradition. According to Language
poets, modern poetry had prioritized the speaker of the poem in such a way as to
 LANGUAGE POETRY 543

perpetuate the “illusion” that the poem simply expressed the truth of psychological
states. As the editors of the journal Rethinking Marxism explain in “On Language
Poetry”: “If language is historically changing and constitutive of subjectivity,
making us as we make and use it, then it neither reveals nor represses some inner
self, some ‘species being,’ that exists before the fact of its use” (1988). Modernism
had lionized the subject and its psychological effects as the domain of the poem. The
society within which the individual lives, however, is hegemonic, that is, it rules
through official concepts and ideas. As Bernstein writes, “a poem exists in a matrix
of social and historical relationships that are more significant to the formulation of
an individual text than any personal qualities of the life or voice of an author”
(Bernstein 1986, 408). Perloff calls this the “cardinal principle” of the Language
group: the “dismissal of ‘voice’ as the foundational principle of lyric poetry” (Perloff
1998). The realities of the postmodern world are not centered on the individual but
on the production of meanings generated by historical, social, and political forces.
Writing therefore becomes a dynamic process of exchange. As Andrews writes in
“Code Words,” “The subject loses authority, disappears, is unmade into a network
of relationships, stretching indefinitely” (Andrews 1996, 190).
In order to escape this constructed subjectivity poets explore nonreferential
language, or words and phrases in other than traditional contexts, such as norma-
tive syntax or spelling. These are the semiotic and structural aspects of the language
that allow for the free play of malapropos, solecisms, parataxis, and other syntacti-
cal experiments. The poetic techniques all attempt to dismantle the poem’s depend-
ence on the individual’s intention or expression. “All writing is a demonstration of
method,” Bernstein says, “it can assume a method or investigate it. In this sense,
style and mode are always at issue, for all styles are socially mediated conventions
open to reconvening at any time” (Bernstein 1986, 226). Henry Sussman argues that
this opens the poem to new meanings: “The concrete handling of words and word
fragments thus resides at the extreme of language’s generative capabilities”
(Sussman 2005, 42). A brief example will help clarify: Andrews’s piece,
“LETTERS” begins “THEIR midst mix power to crystallize with connected the next
room hope openings bent her white fragments effusive neck smoked verge of recog-
nition’s to hold fast as if unwittingly even to the fissures looming sight shadow
surprises stays at home her words for the feeling to arrow soothed” (Silliman 1986,
315). The capitals of the title alert us to the fact that these are both “letters” as
separate signs and “letters” such as one writes in correspondence. On the printed
page the words are justified and also spaced just a little extra between each, so that
each stands out as separate signs. It is possible to sense, rather than strictly “read”
a context here, with words such as “crystallize,” “connected,” “white fragments,”
“fissures,” and “stays at home.” These are all things that both kinds of letters do or
suggest. Andrews is playing on the multiple sense of how signs both identify a social
function, letter writing, and yet can be broken down to signify writing as a momen-
tary act. The idea of nonreferentiality means that words relate to each other in more
ways than through normative syntax, such as we are taught in school, or, the poets
might say, as we are socialized to believe. The poem is not nonsense, but a
disruption of normal reading processes to produce new effects. As Bernstein admits:

Words are almost always referential, but what many of us were interested in exploring
were nonconventional forms, allowing the expressive (and nonexpressive) features of
language to roam in different territory than possible with tamer verse forms. So what
544 LANGUAGE POETRY

you get might better be called polyreferential in that the poems do not necessarily mean
one fixed, definable, paraphrasable thing. (Senning 1999)

A key work for the early Language poets was Roland Barthes’s essays, “The
Death of the Author” (1968). Steven McCaffery, a Canadian member of the
Language group, made the connection clear by titling his own essay, “The Death of
the Subject” (1976). Andrews also wrote of the essay in his note “Code Words” for
the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Barthes argues that “Writing is that neutral,
composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all
identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing” (Perloff 1998).
His critique of the “subject” was a pivotal moment in the poststructural assessment
of authorship. With Barthes’s lead, then, Language poetry became involved on an
ever-increasing level with critical theory, even as it developed as part of curriculums
across the country.
Much has now been made of the “issue of careerism” among early participants in
the movement (Stefans 1999). Although at the start it could be said that “despite
their general obsession with theory and critical practice, the Language poets tend to
be anti-Academic” (Kinsella n.d.), many have now taken academic positions at
schools, including the University of California Berkeley, SUNY Buffalo, and the
University of Pennsylvania. Kate Lilley points out a crucial aspects of this change:

The point at which the means of production and distribution passed out of the hands
of the original editors and contributors marked an historic juncture in the commodifi-
cation of language writing as a school, with a reasonably secure curriculum and
membership. It also signaled the beginning of the movement’s wider dissemination qua
movement in a variety of prestigious literary and academic venues. (Lilley 1997)

The effect has been to change the nature of the original experiment: “Along with
the assimilation of the group’s basic tenets and political strategies into a welcoming
leftist academic agenda, the group’s deformation has left many of the major partic-
ipants (most of whom are still writing and publishing) refining their initial
positions” (Kim 1994). As Language poetry’s importance has grown in influence to
compete with traditional poetics, it finds itself in a position not far from the estab-
lishment it originally set out to criticize for its dominance of the field: “A few
minutes with the Arts and Humanities Citation Index confirms that, during
1994–1997, the number of academic citations for Bernstein’s work doubled those
for [Anthony] Hecht’s” (Caplan 1997). By the 1990s, Language poetry was often
talked about in the past tense, as if its new academic standing had somehow
compromised its critical position (Kim 1994).
Reception. Although initially accused of “elitism” and “a sense of haughtiness”
in refusing to address ethnic or gender questions, there have been noticeable changes
in the original makeup of the generally “white” male movement (Gelpi 1990;
Stefans 2001). Much of the initial reception was antagonistic: “The negative
polemics raised against the Language school project ranged from invocations of
McCarthyism and corporate juntas . . . to dismissals of their so-called avant-gardism
at a time in which the term itself had been evacuated of its historical or political
effect” (Kim 1994). The sense that the new poetics might allow for a “co-opting”
by reactionary political forces was extreme (Kovacik 2001). For although Language
theorists would continually speak of social advocacy, there was an inherent conflict
 LANGUAGE POETRY 545

between hermetic experimentation and social relevance. The fact that all philosophy
was now presented as a set of linguistic constructs “is not that the world is just
codes and as a result presence is to be ruled out as anything more than nostalgia,
but that we can have presence, insofar as we are able, only through a shared
grammar” (Andrews and Bernstein 1984, 61). But in contrast, postlanguage poets
were looking to reassert the importance of disenfranchised groups, whose identities
might continue to be displaced by the theoretical focus on “authorless texts.” The
practical reality was that authors still created texts: “[I]n practice, we do take
signatures seriously as markers of a particular individual, a cultural practice, an
historical period, a national formation, a convention, and so on” (Perloff 1998).
Its reception today reflects specific changes that have allowed Language poets a
more prominent place in contemporary poetry. Perloff argues for changes in three
areas in particular: the early concern with demonstrating “referentiality” has
become a more “nuanced emphasis on the how of poetic language rather than the
what”; the condemnation of tradition poetic language as a “commodity fetish” has
been criticized when poets realized that any language, even Language poetry, can
become “fetischized”; and the efforts to give readers a role in the sense-making
process of the poem has been seen as merely a shifting of authority from the author
to the reader (n.d.). These factors have given today’s poets an historical vantage
point. Postlanguage poets now incorporate what early groups omitted: “sound
poetry, visual and concrete poetry, fluxus, conceptual art, appropriative strategies,
oulipian process-oriented writing, a focus on the more performative aspects of
poetry, not to mention technological innovations which weren’t available then”
(Goldsmith 2001).
Some of the strongest early criticism was from Marxist theorists such as Fredric
Jameson. Jameson’s famous reading of Perelman’s poem, “China,” in Postmod-
ernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), saw the poem as an exam-
ple of “schizophrenic language” (Hartley 1989, 42). Jameson’s position suggests a
general attack on the idea of nonreferential language: “these sentences are free
floating material signifiers whose signifieds have evaporated” (Jameson n.d.). For
the Marxists, reference was grounded in a historical moment that cannot be escaped
by poetic innovation. The real complaint, however, was aimed at the more extreme
forms of theory: “Theory swallowed all: poetry submerged into criticism and
linguistics, words about words; even Marxism exercised itself not in political action
but academic analysis” (Gelpi 1990). The fact that postmodern poetry would deny
its efficacy as political action was the key, and this difference has remained at the
center of the ongoing argument. Kristin Prevallet summarizes an exemplary debate
between poets Barrett Watten and Amiri Baraka:

Watten embraced a poetics of alienation that matched the rupture between speech and
society that he had witnessed during the Free Speech Movement and the Vietnam War.
In his writing he seeks to reveal the material power of language in order to expose very
real divisions between oppressive structures and the language used to maintain them.
Baraka also writes to expose power structures, but uses poetry as a lived embodiment
of intricately experienced intellectual, emotional, and musical realities. (Prevallet 2000)

The problem also goes to the heart of the question about poetry as an elitist
endeavor. Language poetry has adjusted to the new social consciousness, but its ini-
tial position remains problematic for many: “Language poetry was a self-conscious
546 LANGUAGE POETRY

avant-garde group,” Kim points out, “whose poetic and historical distinctions were
articulated across of broad set of concerns. . . . It is a writing practice that started
as a collective belief of a new generation of poets which became an actual shift in
the consideration of poetry” (Kim 1994). More recently, Bernstein admits: “Poetry
may not be able to redistribute the wealth, but it can open up a way of—again to
say—representing the issues that can change how we respond, indeed keep us
responding. For the political question is never just what is to be done but also the
formulating and reformulating of the issues” (Senning 1999).
Today, Language poets are a general influence in American poetry, not only felt
among traditional poets who have adopted certain Language techniques but also by
way of early Language poets who have begun to return to traditional forms and
even the authorial voice. In addition, a number of early members of the movement:

have been incorporating elements that might be thought of as postlanguage, including

European forms and rhyme schemes, representation and narrative, and social con-
structions of cultural identity and subjectivity, although they use such elements in ways
that expand possibilities for innovation, and critique and expose received notions of
tradition and form. (Wallace 1998)

Poets have also revised early theoretical positions in order to accommodate a

growing range of contemporary issues, including the realization that all art is not of
the same value, whatever the “value” is determined to be (Perloff 1998).
Selected Authors. Harryette Mullen (1953–) has come to the attention of critics
particularly because she attempts to bridge certain contemporary concerns of the
Language poets with an ethnic and gender focus. One of her most recent collections,
Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), although not as sustained in its effort as her
earlier, Muse & Drudge (1995), which Perloff has called a “pseudo-ballad . . . written,
seemingly against the ‘Language’ grain” (Perloff n.d.), nonetheless questions ethnic
roles in postlanguage terms. Many of the poems are “prose” poems, or sections of
writing that follow declarative statement form. In “Once Ever After,” the mythic
echoes are restructured under a feminist sensibility. The “princess” who “wet the
bed through many mattresses” is yet “attuned,” although she “was born on a chess-
board” and seems destined in some ways to struggle against an identity imposed
upon her classic role (Mullen 2002, 53). The postlanguage elements include the
suspended sentence fragments, “Her lips were. Her hair was. Her complexion was,”
which go to anticipate the stereotypical phrases as descriptive limits to her identity,
and yet by not completing such fragments, Mullen exposes the presuppositions in
the mythic construction (Mullen 2002, 53). She does not limit herself to ethnic
concerns, however, and can be read in a Language context in her efforts to “disable
corporate jargon and political doublespeak” (Thomas 2002). Again, in “All She
Wrote,” Mullen presents ironic contrasts that mean and do not mean what they say:
“Forgive me, I’m no good at this. I can’t write back” (Mullen 2002, 3). And yet the
collection is itself a “writing back” both against racial and gender stereotypes and
against the idea of language as a simple, intentional act. Going beyond the decon-
structive assumption that all oppositional terms are prejudiced in favor of one side
or the other, a notion critiqued by both Language poets and poststructural theorists,
Mullen re-imagines new configurations, including “a resistance to traditional dialec-
tics,” by which she “disorganizes this pattern by imagining other ways of being
opposite” (Hume 2003). Ultimately, the poetry addresses oppositions that “cannot
 LANGUAGE POETRY 547

be read in terms of dualities, the world according to binary oppositions which

privilege one side of the equation (rational or emotional, public or private, white or
black, male or female) over the other” (Hume 2003).
Rae Armantrout’s (1947–) first collections, Extremities (1978) and The Invention
of Hunger (1979), helped define what Silliman calls the “anti-lyric” challenge of the
original movement (2004). In Up to Speed (2004), the poet moves into more subtle
areas of experimentation, arranging her line fragments in three and four stanza
groups so that they lend a secondary structure to the book. Armantrout addresses
the once taboo subject of domestic angst, a familiar topic for lyric poets. But she
does so in a fashion that challenges the reader’s notion of the domestic. She builds
her poems on absences, but rather than avoiding the moment, each fulfills the
collection’s sense of a deeper betrayal: “she calls to our attention the overlooked
chinks and fissures in the linguistic exoskeleton that stands between us and the expe-
riences it envelops” (Muratori 2002). There are the normal poststructural references
in Up to Speed, but what has changed for Armantrout of late is that these seems less
urgent: “I could handle symbols,” she writes, “without being manipulated by them”
(Armantrout 2004, 3). Like others, she has moved away from the constant
pronouncements of Language poetics, and focused more on human exchanges. At
its best, the new work reflects a consciousness where both non-referentiality and
humanity coexist. “One’s a connoisseur of vacancies,” she writes, “loud
silences/surrounding human artifacts” (Armantrout 2004, 26). The humanistic
concerns of Modernist poetry, which were first rejected wholesale by the Language
poets in their efforts to destabilize the traditional emotionalism of the poem, return
now with a certain casualness in moments of individualistic clarity: “She’s
concerned with the rhythm/of her own sequence of events” (Armantrout 2004, 26).
There is a sense in Armantrout’s recent work that the fragmentary impulses that
sustain her early experiments are now coalescing more into questions of recurrent
human values.
Myung Mi Kim (1957–) was born in Seoul, Korea, and moved as a child to the
United States, a fact that informs her use of poetic structures. For Kim, the experi-
ence of the immigrant is one where language always represents multiple voices. Kim
seems to be more aware than most that poststructuralism is not simply an aesthetic
preference but a natural attribute of growing up divided between cultural identities.
Her first work, Under Flag (1991) was an important effort to bridge Language
experiments with new ethnic concerns. Her most recent work, Commons (2002),
moves into the area of transliteration, where Kim explores the difficulties of adapt-
ing one language to another, in this case her native Hangul alphabet to English. She
asks: “Whose ears are at work? Where does the authority of romanizing reside?”
(Kim 2002, 110). The questions are not just about the dissemination of meaning
through the transliterative act but also about who has the authority to Romanize a
language. The nuances of the Hangul are not lost so much as reinterpreted into
something else in the standardization of English. Kim’s poetry breaks up the stan-
dards by fragmenting the impressions and scrambling the process of logical
sequence in order to make plain the process hidden in cultural acquisition. Here the
Language movement’s concern with process seems most clear but has been taken
further toward an awareness of how acculturation itself works. About the poem,
“Siege Document,” Jeon Joseph Jonghyun points out: “the primary audience for this
poem is the reader who does not speak or read the Korean language and that knowl-
edge of Hangul does not dramatically change one’s reading experience because the
548 LANGUAGE POETRY

author’s central preoccupation is with sound; transliteration takes precedence over

translation” (Jonghyun 2004). In the end, this is not a process of supplanting one
language with another, but an interaction of two in the possibilities of an exchange
(Jonghyun 2004).
Lyn Hejinian (1941–) is one of the original west coast members of the Language
movement. Her seminal work, My Life (1980), remains a major influence on
writers. Instrumental in the ongoing critique of “autobiography,” it continues the
questioning of subjectivity. Hejinian’s collected essays, The Language of Inquiry
(2000), which includes the much cited “Two Stein Talks” on Gertrude Stein, makes
clear her prominence among theorists. There is often a direct correspondence
between Hejinian’s Russian ancestry and her formal tendencies, apparent in her
writings on the Russian Formalists, particularly Viktor Schlovsky. Most important
among her recent works is the long poem of narrative fragments, Happily (2000),
which Perloff calls “a Steinian work” for its use of juxtaposed sentence fragments
and stanzas. Although Stein’s own repetitions are a continual “insistence” of salient
features rising to the surface of her prose, Hejinian’s fragments work more toward
their own autonomous display, weaving a logic of prosaic inclusion rather than
repetition. Hejinian has often worked with longer, open lines, with a tendency
toward ideation that underlines her exploration into feminist differences. She
creates a logic and sequence: “Now is a noted conjunction” she writes, moving to
emphasize the immediate “place in place” (Hejinian 2000, 27, 3) that is yet a sepa-
ration of the act and the moment that inspires it: “States of intuition may be only
sudden / Now is a blinding instant . . .” (Hejinian 2000, 27). This fluid exchange
within “a carefully plotted set of synonyms” plays on the contrasts in words like
“happily” and “happen” (Perloff 2000). Hejinian’s use of “happily” as opposed to
“happiness” is a way of denying the reduction of being to language or language to
being: “the adverbial form [happily] is preferable to the noun happiness, since
modification is much more likely to produce contingency than is nominalization,
which suggests a state of being” (Perloff 2000). Hejinian’s sense of continuance, a
Steinian feature in her works, adds to both the book’s coherence and its subtle
rhythms, reinforcing the poet’s primary concern: “Perhaps it is the role of art to put
us in complicity with things as they happen” (Hejinian 2000, 13).
Others have moved into different areas of the Internet and electronic media.
Silliman has his own blog, where he continues to engage poetic and political
matters, and he has published recent reprints and compilations of works, including
Under Albany (2004), an autobiographical “back story” that informs his earlier
poem, “Albany” (ABC 1983). This autobiographical work contextualizes the orig-
inal poem, at the same time that it explores Silliman’s own relationship to the
“author” as historical sign. Another poet, Bernstein, recently published Girly Man
(2006). Here he moves further into his familiar sense of parody and self-parody.
“This is a totally / accessible poem,” he writes. If the work retains a political edge,
it is through a renewed attack on governing authority. The poems continue a
tradition of the “exploded cliché or the dislocated fragment of conventional unwis-
dom” (Kaufmann 2007). Bernstein has also written a libretto for an opera, Shad-
owtime (2005), with music by Brian Ferneyhough. Other divergent forms include
Andrews’s interactive collage with Dirk Rowntree titled Prehab (2005) on
UbuWeb.com., a leading avant-garde poetry Web site, and various examples of
internet cyberspace experiments using flash technology. More centrally, there are
increasing numbers of writers who incorporate Language concepts with traditional
 LANGUAGE POETRY 549

first-person and third-person voices. The most prominent among these are Juliana
Spahr’s Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You (2001), Fanny Howe’s Gone (2003), Mei-Mei
Berssenbrugge’s Nest (2003), Lucie Brock-Broido’s, Trouble in Mind (2004), and
Michael Palmer’s A Company of Moths (2005).

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———. Prehab (with Dirk Rowntree), 2005. UbuWeb.com. Web Site http://www.ubu.com/
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IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.
Armantrout, Rae. Why Don’t Women Do Language-Oriented Writing? In In the American
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———. Up to Speed. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004.
———. Veil: New and Selected Poems. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.
———. Extremities. Berkeley, CA: The Figures, 1978.
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———. Shadowtime. Libretto for an opera with music by Brian Ferneyhough. Los Angeles,
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———. Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984. Los Angeles, CA: Sun & Moon Press, 1986.
Berssenbrugge, Mei-Mei. Nest. Berkeley, CA: Kelsey Street, 2003.
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Hartley, George. Textual Politics and the Language Poets. Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univer-
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Hejinian, Lyn. Happily. Sausalito: Post-Apollo Press, 2000.
———, My Life. Providence, RI: Burning Deck, 1980.
Howe, Fanny. Gone. New California Poetry, 7. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
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Hume, Christine. Review of Sleeping with the Dictionary by Harryette Mullen. The Constant
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Jonghyun, Jeon Joseph. Speaking In Tongues: Myung Mi Kim’s Stylized Mouths. Studies in
the Literary Imagination, Spring (2004). [Online December 2006]. Web Site
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Kaufmann, David. Rattling The Chains Of American Poetry: Charles Bernstein’s Unique
Blend of Polemic, Parody and Just Plain Invention. The Jewish Daily Forward, Jan 12
550 LANGUAGE POETRY

(2007). [Online January 2007]. Web Site http://www.forward.com/articles/rattling-

the-chains-of-american-poetry.
Kim, Eleana. Language Poetry: Dissident Practices and the Makings of a Movement (1994).
ReadMe, Issue #4, Spring/Summer (2001). [Online October 2006]. Web Site
http://home.jps.net/~nada/language1.htm.
Kim, Myung Mi. Commons. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
———. Under Flag. Berkeley, CA: Kelsey St. Press, 1991.
Kinsella, John. C-O-M-M-U-N-I-C-A-T-I-N-G An Ad-Hoc Introduction To American
Language Poetry (1996). Fremantle Arts Review. Jane Cousins, ed. JohnKinsella.org.
[Online October 2006]. Web Site http://www.johnkinsella.org/essays/communicat-
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———. Muse & Drudge. Philadelphia, PA: Singing Horse Press, 1995.
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———. Dada Without Duchamp/Duchamp Without Dada: Avant-Garde Tradition and the
Individual Talent. Stanford Humanities Review Volume 7.1 (1999). [Online December
2006]. http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/7-1/html/perloff.html.
———. Happy World: What Lyn Hejinian’s Poetry Tells Us About Chance, Fortune and Plea-
sure. The Boston Review, February/March (2000). [Online December 2006]. Web Site
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/perloff/articles/hejinian.html.
———. The Poetics of Indeterminacy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999.
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#12, July (2000). [Online October 2006]. Web Site http://jacketmagazine.
com/12/prevallet-orono.html.
Reddy, Srikanth. Beyond the Manifesto: Language Poetry and Lyn Hejinian’s The Language
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viewmedia.php/prmMID/5895.
 LANGUAGE POETRY 551

Senning, Bradford. Charles Bernstein Interview. ReadMe, Issue #1, Fall (1999). [Online
November 2006]. Web Site http://home.jps.net/~nada/bernstein.htm.
Silliman, Ron. Forward to Veil: New and Selected Poems by Rae Armantrout. Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.
———. The New Sentence. New York: Roof Books, 1995.
———, ed. In the American Tree. Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1986.
———. ABC. Berkeley, CA: Tuumba Press, 1983.
Sloan, Mary Margaret. Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women.
Jersey City, NJ: Talisman House, 1998.
Spahr, Juliana. After Language Poetry. Reprint of OEI 7-8 2001 (Sweden). Anders Lundgerg,
Jonas (J) Magnusson, and Jesper Olsson, eds. UbuWeb.com. [Online October 2006].
Web Site http://www.ubu.com/papers/oei/index.html.
———. Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You. Wesleyan Poetry Series. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 2001.
Stefans, Brian Kim. After Language Poetry. Reprint of OEI 7-8 2001 (Sweden). Anders
Lundgerg, Jonas (J) Magnusson, and Jesper Olsson, eds. UbuWeb.com. [Online
October 2006]. Web Site http://www.ubu.com/papers/oei/index.html.
———. Subject: BK Stefans on Standard Schaefer Date: Wed, 19 May 1999 08:13:45 -0400
(EDT). [Online December 2006]. Web Site http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/
88/stefans-institutionalization.html.
Sussman, Henry. The Task of the Critic: Poetics, Philosophy, and Religion. New York: Ford-
ham University Press, 2005.
Thomas, Lorenzo. Review of Sleeping with the Dictionary by Harryette Mullen. African Amer-
ican Review, Winter (2002). [Online December 2006]. Web Site http://findarticles.com/
p/articles/mi_m2838/is_4_36/ai_97515904.
Vickery, Ann. Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing.
Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 2000.
Wallace, Mark. Definitions In Process, Definitions As Process/Uneasy Collaborations:
Language And Postlanguage Poetries. Flashpoint Spring 1998, Web Issue 2. v [Online
December 2006]. Web Site http://www.flashpointmag.com/postlang.htm.
Watten, Barrett. The Secret History of the Equal Sign: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E between
Discourse and Text. Poetics Today 20.4 (1999) 581–627. Reprint Porter Institute for
Poetics and Semiotics (2000). [Online December 2006]. Web Site http://muse.jhu.
edu/journals/poetics_today/v020/20.4watten.html.

Further Reading
Bartlett, Lee. “What Is ‘Language Poetry.’” Critical Inquiry 12 (1986); Bernstein, Charles, ed.
The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy. New York: Roof, 1990; Hejinian, Lyn.
The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000; Howe, Susan.
My Emily Dickinson. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1988; Huk, Romana, ed. Assem-
bling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 2003; McCaffery, Steve. Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001; Jerome McGann. “Contemporary Poetry,
Alternate Routes.” Critical Inquiry 13 (Spring 1987): 624–47; Perelman, Bob. Virtual
Reality. New York: Roof, 1993; Rasula, Jed. Syncopations: The Stress of Innovation in
Contemporary American Poetry. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2004; Watten,
Barrett. The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics. Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.
GEORGE B. MOORE
552 LATINO AMERICAN LITERATURE

LATINO AMERICAN LITERATURE

Definition. Terms of identity are particularly important in a review of Latino
American literature, since there has been a tendency to lump all Latinos into one
homogeneous group. The result of this has been an undifferentiated mixture of
Latinos from Latin America and Latinos who are of the United States (citizens) all
classified as one group. This has led to including Latinos from Latin America in
anthologies of American (U.S.) literature as if they were Latino writers from the
United States. For example, Isabel Allende is a Latina writer from Chile. Including
her in The American Tradition in Literature (Norton 2002) as a representative of
U.S. Latino writers is like including Chinua Achebe, an African writer, as a repre-
sentative of African American writers. But the fact that she now lives and works in
the United States makes her part of that diasporic group of Latino writers
contributing to Latino American literature.
Latinos in the United States fall into four broad categories:
• Mexican Americans (many of whom identify themselves with the self-affirming term
of “Chicanos”) constituting about two-thirds (30 million) of the 45 million Latinos
counted in the U.S. Census and concentrated mainly in the American southwest
states of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and California
• Puerto Ricans (many of whom identify themselves with the self-affirming term of
“Boricuas”—from Borinquen, the original name of the island by the Taino Indians—
to distinguish themselves from the four million Puerto Ricans from the island and not
counted in the U.S. Census) numbering about four million in the Continental United
States and concentrated in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Illinois
• Cuban Americans numbering about two million, concentrated principally in Florida and
• about nine million “other” Latinos from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa
Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua,
Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

Spaniards are not considered in the Latino mix. For example, during the Spanish
Civil War (and the period following during which Franco was consolidating the
gains of his “revolution”), Federico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish playwright and poet,
spent some time living and writing in New York. Some of his major works were
written during this time. However, he is not considered a Latino.
It is important to point out, however, that demographically Latinos in the United
States are growing exponentially; they are everywhere in the United States. There
are large enclaves of Dominicans in New York City and the District of Columbia.
More than four million Mexican Americans are spread across the Ohio Valley
Crescent from Northfield, Minnesota, to Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The distribution
of Latinos in the United States is phenomenal.
History. Many Latinos in the United States have their origins in Spanish settle-
ments dating back to the Sephardic (Spanish) Jews of New Amsterdam, the Spanish
communities that were part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 especially in New
Orleans, and the Spanish communities like St Augustine that were part of the
Florida acquisition by the United States in 1819. Countless Latinos immigrated to
the United States from the founding of the nation to the present. The Cuban
American community of Yuba City, Florida, dates from the early twentieth century,
long before the mass exodus of Cubans to the United States after 1959.
In the United States today there are two categories of Latino writers each with a
considerably wide latitude in definition. The first group includes Latino writers from
 LATINO AMERICAN LITERATURE 553

the Latin American countries previously mentioned with the exception of Puerto
Rico (since all Puerto Ricans are considered U.S. citizens). For the most part, these
Latino writers are still citizens of their countries, and their literary and social orien-
tation are generally congruent with the literary and social orientations of their
homelands. Many are in the United States as political refugees or exiles, although
many more are in the United States because they are simply at odds with the
ideological trends in their countries. The Cuban poet Valladares is a good case in
point of a Latino writer living and writing in the United States because of political
differences with the ruling group of his country. For the most part, this group of
Latino writers deals with themes and conventions traditionally part of the literary
orientation of their homelands, not with themes pertinent to Latino struggles in the
United States. Their works are therefore not classified as Latino literature. In this
regard, the works of the Russian writer Solzenitzen’s written while he lived (in exile)
in the United States are not considered American literature.
The second group of Latino writers is essentially indigenous to the United States,
that is, Latinos who are citizens of the United States and identified as members of a
Latino group like Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, etc.
Like the British roots in the new American soil, U.S. Latino literary roots have
yielded a vigorous and dynamic body of literature, which, unfortunately, has been
studied historically as part of a foreign enterprise rather then as part and parcel of
our American literary heritage. If one were looking for U.S. Latino writers in the
libraries of the 1960s, one would not have found them since the Library of Congress
and the Dewey System did not have that classification. For example, if one were
looking for Mexican American writers, then one would have found them under the
classification of “Mexicans in the United States.” Asking a librarian for the location
of Latino writers would have yielded the names of Octavio Paz, Julio Cortazar,
Gabriel García Márquez, Gabriela Mistral, and Miguel Angel Asturias, all in the
card catalogs. These are Latino writers, but not Latino American writers.
The point is that the term “Latino Writers” most often directs inquiries to Latin
American writers. The unfortunate truth of the matter is that few Americans outside
of literary specialists know very much about U.S. Latino Literature today. To be
sure, there are successful U.S. Latino writers like Sandra Cisneros (Mexican
American), Rudolfo Anaya (Mexican American), Denise Chavez (Mexican
American), Piri Thomas (Puerto Rican), Miguel Algarin (Puerto Rican), Nicolasa
Mohr (Puerto Rican), Achy Abejas (Cuban American), and Angel Castro (Cuban
American). In the main, however, when pressed, uninitiated Americans will ask
quizzically: Are there U.S. Latino writers? (Ortego 1983). Who are they? What this
points to is the woeful ignorance of most Americans about U.S. Latino writers.
Spaniards are not Latinos; and Latinos are not Spaniards. Though by and large,
with the exception of the indigenous peoples of Latin America still there today,
Latinos are a product of the historical “blending” (a euphemism for cohabitation)
between Spanish males and indigenous women—a process commonly labeled as
mestizaje, a term from which the word mestizo/a (the noun identifying the product
of that process) derives.
While the current perspective about U.S. Latinos is that they are recently arrived,
Latinos have been markedly part of the American demographic landscape since
1848 when the United States annexed more than half of Mexico’s territory as a
prize of war with Mexico (1846–1848). No one is sure just how many Mexicans
came with the dismembered territory. Puerto Ricans became Americans with the
554 LATINO AMERICAN LITERATURE

U.S.-Spanish War of 1898. Cuban Americans began their Americanization process

with Fidel Castro’s “liberation” of Cuba in 1959. The historical ingress of other
Latino groups into the United States is hard to determine.
Mexican American writers have been part of the United States since 1848, some
50 years before the acquisition of Puerto Rico and over a century before the arrival
of Cubans in the United States. For more than a century, Mexican American writers
produced their works mostly outside the U.S. literary mainstream. There were
occasional Mexican American writers whose works were published by major U.S.
publishers, but by and large Mexican American writers were known chiefly by
Mexican American readers, their works circulating in books with modest runs or in
manuscript form like the works of many Cuban American writers today. By the first
half of the twentieth century notable Mexican American writers like Aurelio
Espinoza, Nina Otero, Aurora Lucero, Arturo Campa, and Fray Angelico Chavez
were being published by English-language periodicals, and their works were
seriously acclaimed by non-Hispanic readers.
While the boom (the Chicano Renaissance) in Mexican American Literature in
1966 established the primacy of English as the literary language for Chicanos
(Ortego 1971) a number of Chicano writers like Alejandro Morales continue to
produce works in Spanish.
By and large, Boricua and Nuyorican writers, like most Chicano writers, direct their
works toward English language audiences. Some Boricua and Nuyorican writers like
Piri Thomas (Down These Mean Streets) and Nicholasa Mohr (El Bronx Remem-
bered) are published by mainstream U.S. presses. However, most Boricua writers are
published by “small” U.S. Hispanic presses like Arte Publico Press in Houston.
Yet, there is really no significant number of American-born Cuban American writ-
ers, owing mostly to the recency of the Cuban influx into the United States. This is
not to say there is not a large group of Cuban (now American) writers. On the
contrary, large numbers of Cuban writers have fled to the United States since 1960.
The literary production of Cuban writers in the United States (many, if not most, of
them now citizens) may be described as “exilic.” Much of their writing is in Spanish
and their aims by and large, have been to keep the Cuban American community
aware of the state of affairs in Cuba while at the same time creating a positive image
of the Cuban diaspora in the United States.
As a group, Latino Americans who are not Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans,
or Cuban Americans is considerably small, although as a group it is the third largest
group of U.S. Latinos, numbering some eight million. However, this group is not a
coherent group, although there are large pockets of Dominicans, Salvadoreños,
Guatemalans, and Peruvians throughout the United States. Until recently this group
was identified as “Latinos,” rounding out the lexicon of labels that identified U.S.
Hispanics: Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Latinos.
Trends and Themes. The early works in English by Mexican Americans focused
mostly on the folkloric traditions of Mexico as they existed in the Hispanic
Southwest or as they were brought north from Mexico in the peregrinations of
Mexicans and Mexican Americans crossing back and forth across the ephemeral
U.S.-Mexico border. Until about the First World War, Mexican American literature
was written primarily in Spanish and mirrored the themes and conventions of the
Hispanic literary tradition as practiced in Mexico.
For the period representing the start of the Chicano movement, 1848 to 1960, less
than a dozen novels have been attributed so far to Mexican Americans. However,
 LATINO AMERICAN LITERATURE 555

the project at the University of Houston on Recovering the Hispanic Literature of

the United States is hopeful of finding more. The contemporary Chicano novel has
its beginnings with publication of Pocho in 1959 by Jose Antonio Villarreal,
followed in the 1960s with a pittance of novels by a handful of Chicano writers,
among them John Rechy (City of Night, 1963) and Floyd Salas (Tattoo the Wicked
Cross, 1967).
There were a number of Chicano practitioners of the short story between 1848
and 1960, the most prominent of whom were Arturo Campa (1934) and Mario
Suárez (1947), identified as “the most important short story writer of Mexican
descent from the mid-twentieth century” (Suárez 2004, 1).
From 1898 to 1960, there was scant production of fiction by Puerto Ricans in the
continental United States. On the island, however, Puerto Rican writers produced a
prodigious amount of fiction in novels and short stories (cuentos) in the continuing
Spanish literary tradition as it had evolved there. What most characterizes Boricua
and Nuyorican literature is its discontinuity from the literature of Puerto Rico (the
island). The communicative context of each literature is different. Although some
roots of Boricua and Nuyorican literature spring from the Puerto Rican literary
tradition, Boricua and Nuyorican literature have sprouted other roots intertwined
with the roots of mainstream American literature.
Contexts and Issues. The most important issue to consider in surveying the
conspectus of Latino American Literature today is that not all Latinos are immi-
grants in the United States. For example, Puerto Ricans are not immigrants: they are
American citizens per their commonwealth status in the American hegemony. As
Latinos, Mexican Americans pose a particular consideration. When the United
States annexed more than half of Mexico’s territory per the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo (February 2, 1848), the Mexicans who came with the land (a territory
larger than Spain, France, and Italy combined) became Americans by fiat. There is
no accurate number of how many Mexicans came with the dismembered territory.
Estimates range variously from a low of 75,000 to a high of 300,000. The land of
the Mexican Cession was not an empty wasteland. It included established cities like
San Antonio, El Paso, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Tucson, San Diego, Los Angeles,
Santa Barbara, Monterrey, and San Francisco as well as hundreds of smaller
communities across the Hispanic landscape from south Texas to northern
California. The San Luis Valley of southern Colorado was teeming with Hispanic
villages and towns. In Mexican American history, this group of Mexican Americans
is referred to as the “conquest generation.” Though their numbers were augmented
by the ingress of subsequent immigrants from Mexico, this group of Latinos—most
of whom eschew the term “Latino,” preferring instead to be identified as mejicanos
(lower case m) or Mexican Americans or Chicanos (an ideological term)—remains
steadfast in its avowal that the United States came to them and not the other way
around.
Unfortunately, one of the most difficult barriers for Latino American Literature
has been the Spanish language. For the most part, Latino Americans wrote in
Spanish, continuing in the literary tradition of the countries they came from. In
other words, Cuban American literature reflects the themes and traditions of Cuba.
So too, Puerto Rican writers on the mainland (Continental Puerto Ricans: those
who were born or were raised in the continental United States) wrote employing the
literary strictures of the island of Puerto Rico. The same is true for Mexican
American writers who in the period of transition (1848–1912) maintained a literary
556 LATINO AMERICAN LITERATURE

tradition consonant with the literary traditions of Mexico. However, these exten-
sions were short-lived. Within a generation Latino American writers with origins in
Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico (as well as the other Latin American countries) were
writing in English, probing into their experiences in the United States, and emulat-
ing distinctively American themes as they evolved into Americans. This is not to say
they were assimilated in the metonymical “melting pot.” On the contrary, in the
contact zones of culture and language they were “sprouting up” as a bilingual and
bicultural people, pushing the envelope of literary creativity to include both Spanish
and English in unique binary productions, sometimes disparagingly called
“Spanglish” or Tex-Mex in the Mexican American Southwest. This is the phenom-
enon of languages and cultures in contact: like consenting adults, their issue was
innovative and startling. An aspect of this phenomenon blends English and Spanish
in the same sentences (intrasententially).
Other Latino American poets like the Chicano Tino Villanueva created poems
with more emphatic code switching (alternating Spanish and English words more
repeatedly in a sentence):

always had a movida chueca somewhere up town.

Of course, not all Latino American writers code switch. In the main, though,
Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans code switch the most.
Poetry is the genre in which code switching occurs most often among Latino writers.
It occurs far less in fiction, and when it does, the Latino writers provide some help
in deciphering the Spanish words or expressions by follow-up translations in English
that are not intrusive. For example, in Philip D. Ortego’s story “The Coming of
Zamora,” Alarcón is shooing away a stray dog, saying “Vete” followed immediately
with “Go,” translation of the Spanish word “Vete” (Simmen 1971, 297).
Like the Mexican Americans, Puerto Rican writers reflect the dual circumstances
of their presence in the United States. On the one hand, Puerto Rico is still essen-
tially a Hispanic “country” despite its commonwealth status with the United States.
Perhaps better said, it is a “Hispanic state.” Unlike the Hispanic states of California,
Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado, whose Hispanicity has diminished
over time, the Hispanicity of Puerto Rico is still as strong as ever. The relevance of
this fact is manifest in Puerto Rican literature, which is still essentially a Spanish-
language literature.
However, there is another Puerto Rican literature that is more akin to the litera-
ture of Chicanos. This is the literature of Puerto Ricans in the United States proper,
sometimes called “Nuyorican” literature. The tag would be appropriate except for
the fact that Puerto Ricans in the United States are found everywhere, not just in
New York. To distinguish themselves from Puerto Ricans from the island, many
continental Puerto Ricans use the label “Boricuas” to identify themselves, just as
some Mexican Americans choose to distinguish themselves from Mexicans by
calling themselves “Chicanos.” No such term has surfaced for Cuban Americans,
although the term “Cubano” is popular among them and issued much the way
Mexican Americans use the term “mejicano” [lower case “m”] to identify
themselves.
Selected Authors. The most important Nuyorican writer of this period writing in
Spanish and English was Jesús Colón, labor activist and polemicist, who paved the
way for further Nuyorican literary production (Herencia: The Anthology of
 LATINO AMERICAN LITERATURE 557

Hispanic Literature of the United States, edited by Nicolás Kanellos, Oxford, 2002,
12). Fiction was slow in gaining ascendancy among Puerto Rico writers who until
mid-twentieth century were concerned with existential problems of freedom from
Spain, then nationhood as a territory of the United States after the U.S. war with
Spain in 1898. The most widely recognized Puerto Rican writer in the period
extending to the post–World War II era was Enrique Laguerre, a Nobel Prize
nominee. A remarkable Puerto Rican female storyteller publishing Puerto Rican
folktales in the 1930s and 1940s was Pura Belpré, a librarian with the New York
Public Library. Today, REFORMA (the National Association for Library Services to
Hispanics, an ALA affiliate), honors her annually with its Pura Belpré prize for
Children’s Literature.
Of the Continental Puerto Rican writers (Boricuas), Piri Thomas’s autobiograph-
ical novel Down These Mean Streets published in 1967 heralded a wave of Boricua
fiction that has not realized its premises nor its promises. Published in 1973,
Nicholasa Mohr’s novel Nilda became a “touchstone” work in Puerto Rican fiction.
Nilda is “a classic novel of a Puerto Rican girl coming of age in New York City
during World War II” (Extracted from http://biography.jrank.org/pages/3407/Mohr-
Nicholasa-1938-Writer.html). Though principally a poet, Judith Ortiz Cofer
published the novel Line of Sight in 1989 (University of Georgia Press). In the vein
of Piri Thomas’s street esthetic, Abraham Rodriguez’s Spidertown (1994) lays out
the gritty life of dope and hope in the South Bronx. Focusing on the seamy side of
drugs in Spanish Harlem, Ernesto Quiñones’s Bodega Dreams (2000) serves up a
story of hope gone awry by ignorance and romanticism. Since the year 2000, López
Nieves has scored with a run of books including El Corazon de Voltaire (Voltaire’s
Heart), winner of the 2000 Premio Nacional de Literatura (National Literary Prize)
and again in 2006 with La verdadera muerte de Juan Ponce de León (The True
Death of Juan Ponce de León). In 2003 he authored the historical novel Seva (Edi-
torial Cordillera).
Like the themes of Mexican American/Chicano writers of fiction, Puerto Rican
novelists focus on self-identity, their cultural and racial identities, and the diasporic
problems of life in the United States viewed as neocolonialism. By and large Boricua
and Nuyorican writers, like most Mexican American/Chicano writers, direct their
works toward English language audiences. Magazines like The Rican in Chicago
sought to publish the splay of creative efforts by continental Puerto Ricans across
the country. Puerto Ricans are well aware that the continental Puerto Rican experi-
ence is different from the island Puerto Rican experience. In Puerto Rico, there are
still thoughts of independence. In the continental United States, Puerto Ricans are
reaching for the “independence” of the mainstream. Their literary works reflect that
outreach. Much Boricua literature may reflect anger, just as some black literature of
the 1960s and 1970s reflected anger. But most of that anger deals with coming to
terms with the facts of American life, not life in Puerto Rico, coming to terms with
where “home” is and “what” home is. Piri Thomas’ protagonist in Down These
Mean Streets is trying to carve out the sense of home in East Harlem just as Antonio
Mares, Rudy Anaya’s protagonist in Bless Me, Ultima is trying to carve out the
sense of “home” in northern New Mexico.
The English language literary boom of the Chicano Movement does not appear
until after World War II. “The Chicano Renaissance” is a product of that move-
ment. Realizing they could expect little recognition by U.S. mainstream publishers,
a group of Mexican American writers, led by Octavio Romano, launched a small
558 LATINO AMERICAN LITERATURE

journal of Mexican American thought appropriately called El Grito (The Cry). The
first issue appeared in the Spring of 1967, and with its publication the “Quinto Sol”
(Fifth Sun) writers (identified with the name of the press) announced their literary
independence. Their goals were to praise the people, identify the enemy, and
promote the revolution, the Chicano Movement being the revolution. Brown
became beautiful and Mexican American writers (now Chicanos) set out like embat-
tled visionaries to make a place for themselves in the American literary sun.
The list of Chicano writers grew rapidly in all genres. Chicano writers won
national and international literary prizes. Tomás Rivera won the coveted Quinto Sol
Prize for literature for his episodic novel Y no se lo trago la tierra (And the Earth
did not Part), 1971; and Rolando Hinojosa won the Cuban Premio Casa las
Americas for his work Klail City y sus alrededores, 1976. Alejandro Morales had
his works published in Mexico (Caras Viejas, Vino Nuevo, Old Faces, New Wine),
Moritz 1975; and Jose Antonio Villarreal (Pocho, 1959), Richard Vasquez
(Chicano, 1970), and Raymond Barrio (The Plum Plum Pickers, 1969) had their
works published by mainstream presses.
As a part of Latino American literature, modern Chicano literature exhibits
unique characteristics in responses to the particular conditions of contemporary life.
Tomás Rivera once called Chicano literature “life in search of form.” Indeed, much
of contemporary Chicano literature addresses itself to the search for form, a lin-
guistic fit to accommodate the lexical and cultural realities of Chicano life.
Like Puerto Rican and Boricua writers, Cuban American writers have focused on
the diasporic condition of Cubans in the United States, many of them now
Americans as second generation Cubans in the United States. Their literary produc-
tion as Latinos in the United States, while still scant, is experiencing a “boom” much
like the Chicano Renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s, in English rather than
Spanish. The most renowned Cuban American writers is Jose Yglesias, (seven nov-
els) often referred to as the father of Cuban American fiction in English. In 1963,
Holt Rinehart published Yglesias’s A Wake in Ybor City about Cuban immigration
to Florida and their experiences as a cultural minority in the United States.
For the most part, Cuban American writers in general, and writers of fiction
specifically, have dedicated themselves to the preservation of cultural memory, the
loss of patria (homeland) caused by the mass exodus of Cubans after 1960 bringing
more than 700,000 of them to the United States. Like Chicano writers, Cuban
American writers are vates (selected ones) in reinventing Cuban Americans in their
search for fixity following political turmoil, a place from which to glance back at
the “golden age” of their existence and also a place from which to determine their
future. Relatively recent Cuban American writers like Oscar Hijuelos (The Mambo
Kings Play Songs of Love, 1989, Pulitzer Prize) and Cristina Garcia (Dreaming in
Cuban, 1992, and A Handbook to Luck, 2007) have spotlighted the fertility of the
Cuban American literary imagination. In 1999, Hijuelos published Empress of the
Splendid Season (Harper Perennial) the story of a search for roots. While not exten-
sive, the list of Cuban American writers is growing substantially with voices like
Elías Miguel Muñoz (Viajes Fantasticos, 1999), Gustavo Perez Firmat (Anything but
Love, 2000), the satirist Roberto G. Fernández (En la ocho y la doce, 2001), Achy
Obejas (Days of Awe, 2001), and Pablo Medina (The Cigar Roller, 2005).
Latino American literature is rich in literary diversity with voices from many of
the Latin American countries. This includes Dominican American writers like Julia
Alvarez with How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), In the Time of the
 LATINO AMERICAN LITERATURE 559

Butterflies (1994), and In the Name of Salomé, (2000); Junot Diaz Drown (1996)
with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), which won the Pulitzer Prize
for fiction in 2008; the Colombian American Jaime Manriquez with Twilight at the
Equator (2003); the Guatemalan American writer Francisco Goldman with The
Long Night of the White Chickens (1992) and his most recent work, which is non-
fiction, The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop (2008); and the Chilean
(now American writer) Isabel Allende with House of the Spirits (1985). Chicanas
have outdistanced their Chicano counterparts in the Chicano literary arena since the
1990s, creating a second-wave of the Chicano renaissance. This second wave actu-
ally started with Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua’s This Bridge Called my
Back (1981). It was followed up by Intaglio (1990) by Roberta Fernandez; Eulogy
for a Brown Angel (2002) by Lucha Corpi; So Far from God (1992) by Ana
Castillo; The Candy Vendor’s Boy (1993) by Beatriz de la Garza; The Memories of
Ana Calderón (1994) by Graciela Limón; Mother Tongue (1994) by Demetria
Martinez; Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) by Helena Maria Viramontes; Loving
Pedro Infante (2001) by Denise Chavez; Let Their Spirits Dance (2002) by Stella
Pope Duarte; and Playing With Boys (2004) by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez.
The canon of Latino American literature is beset by a division of nomenclature
between Latinos who are residents of the United States (that is, born here), and
Latinos who are immigrants. The outcome will depend on “mainstream” publishers—
who they favor to publish, how they read the runes of canon formation in the Latino
literary galaxy of the United States. Because of their numbers and historical prior-
ity, Chicano literary production has defined the parameters of the Latino literary
canon, but their presence in that canon has diminished in the lexicon of Latinismo.

Bibliography
Allende, Isabel. House of the Spirits. New York: Knopf, 1985.
Alvarez, Julia. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. New York: Penguin Group, 1992.
———. In the Time of the Butterflies. New York: Penguin, 1994.
———. In the Name of Salomé. New York: Algonquin Books, 2000.
Anaya, Rudolfo. Bless Me, Ultima. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1994.
Barrio, Raymond. The Plum Plum Pickers. San Francisco, CA: Canfield Colophon, 1971.
Campa, Arturo. “The Cell of Heavenly Justice,” New Mexico Quarterly (August 1934):
219–230.
Castillo, Ana. So Far From God. New York: Plume Penguin, 1992.
Chavez, Denise. Loving Pedro Infante. New York: Washington Square Press, 2002.
Cofer, Judith Ortiz. Line of Sight. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989.
Corpi, Lucha. Eulogy for a Brown Angel. Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, 2002.
Diaz, Junot. Drown. New York: Riverhead Books, 1996.
———. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Putnam, 2008.
Duarte, Stella Pope. Let Their Spirits Soar. New York: Harper Collins, 2003.
Fernandez, Roberta. Intaglio. Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, 1990.
Fernandez, Roberto G. En la ocho y la doce (At 8th and 12th). Boston, MA: Houghton
Mifflin, 2001.
Firmat, Gustavo Perez. Anything but Love. Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, 2000.
Garcia, Cristina. Dreaming in Cuban. New York: Ballantine, 1993.
———. A Handbook to Luck. New York: Knopf, 2007.
Goldman, Francisco. The Long Night of White Chickens. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press,
1992.
———. The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop. New York: Grove Press, 2008.
560 LATINO AMERICAN LITERATURE

Hijuelos, Oscar. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. New York: Harper Collins, 1989.
———. Empress of the Splendid Season. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999.
Hinojosa, Rolando. Klail City y sus alrededores (Klail City and its Environs). Havana: Casa
de las Americas, 1976.
Limón, Graciela. The Memories of Ana Calderón. Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, 2001.
Manriquez, Jaime. Twilight at the Equator. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press,
2003.
Martinez, Demetria. Mother Tongue. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press, 1994.
Medina, Pablo. The Cigar Roller. New York: Grove Atlantic, 2005.
Mohr, Nocholasa. El Bronx Remembered. New York: Harper Collins, 1993.
———. Nilda. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.
Moraga, Cherrie, and Gloria Anzaldua. This Bridge Called my Back. New York: Kitchen
Table/Women of Color Press, 1981.
Morales, Alejandro. Caras Viejas y Vino Nuevo (Old Faces and New Wine). DF, Mexico:
Moritz, 1975. Published as Barrio on the Edge/Caras Viejas y Vino Nuevo. Translated
by Francisco Lomelí, Phoenix, AZ: Bilingual Review Press, 1997.
Muñoz, Elías Miguel. Viajes Fantasticos. New York: McGraw Hill, 2000.
Nieves, Lopez. El Corazon de Voltaire (Voltaire’s Heart). San Juan, Puerto Rico: Editorial
Norma, 2006.
———. La Verdadera Muerte de Juan Ponce (The True Death of Juan Ponce). Hato Rey,
Puerto Rico: Editorial Cordillera, 2000.
———. Seva. Hato Rey, Puerto Rico: Editorial Cordillera, 2003.
Obejas, Achy. Days of Awe. New York: Ballantine/Random House, 2001.
Ortego, Philip D. “The Coming of Zamora.” In The Chicano: From Caricature to Self
Portrait. Edward Simmen, ed. New York: New American Library, 1971.
Ortego y Gasca, Felipe de. “Mexican American Literature: Reflections and a Critical Guide.”
In Chicana/o Studies: Survey and Analysis. Dennis Bixler-Marquez, et al., eds.
Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 2007.
———. “Chicano Poetry.” In The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006.
———. “Mexicans and Mexican Americans: Prolegomenon to a Literary Perspective.” Journal
of South Texas 18.1 (2005): 71–90.
———. “The Minotaur and the Labyrinth: Chicano Literature and Critical Theory.” In
Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies (Spring 2001). http://www.hispanicvista.com/
HVC/Opinion/Guest_Columns/032805ortego.htm.
———. “Twentieth Century Hispanics in Texas Letters.” In Journal of South Texas 14.1
(2001): 5–21.
———. “Towards a Cultural Interpretation of Literature.” In ViAztlan: International Journal
of Chicano Arts and Letters April–May 4.4 (1986): 10–13.
———. “Chicano Literature: From 1942 to the Present.” In Chicano Literature: A Reference
Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985.
———. “American Hispanic Literature: A Brief Commentary.” ViAztlan: International
Journal of Chicano Arts and Letters Part I, January–February 1985: 11–13; Part II,
March 1985: 8-11; Part III, May 1985: 4–7.
———. The Cross and the Pen: Spanish Colonial and Mexican Periods of Texas Letters
(Monograph). Washington, DC: The Hispanic Foundation, 1985.
———. “Are There U.S. Hispanic Writers?” Nosotros Magazine April (1983): 20–21, 60.
———. “An Introduction to Chicano Poetry.” In Modern Chicano Writers: Twentieth
Century Views. New York: Prentice Hall, 1979.
———, with Jose Carrasco. “Chicanos and American Literature.” In The Wiley Reader:
Designs for Writing. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1976.
———, ed. We Are Chicanos: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature. New York:
Washington Square Press, 1973.
 LEGAL THRILLERS 561

———. “Chicano Poetry: Roots and Writers.” In Southwestern American Literature. 2.1
(1972): 8–24.
———. Backgrounds of Mexican American Literature. Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1971.
———. “The Chicano Renaissance,” Journal of Social Casework 52.5 (1971): 294–307.
———. “Which Southwestern Literature and Culture in the English Classroom?” Arizona
English Bulletin 13.3 (1971): 15–17.
———. “Mexican American Literature,” The Nation 15 Sept. 1969: 258–259.
Quiñones, Ernesto. Bodega Dreams. New York: Vintage, 2000.
Rechy, John. City of Night. New York: Grove Press, 1963.
Rivera, Tomás. Y no se lo trago la tierra (And the Earth did not Part). Berkeley: Quinto Sol
Publications, 1971.
Rodriguez, Abraham. Spidertown. New York: Viking Penguin, 1994.
Salas, Floyd. Tattoo the Wicked Cross. New York: Grove Press, 1967.
Suarez, Mario. “Señor Garza.” Arizona Quarterly 3 (1947): 112–115.
Suarez, Mario. Chicano Sketches: Short Stories by Mario Suarez. Francisco A. Lomeli, Cecilia
Cota-Robles Suárez, and Juan José Casillas-Nuñez, eds. Tucson, AZ: University of
Arizona Press, 2004.
Thomas, Piri. Down These Mean Streets. New York: Knopf, 1997.
Urista, Alberto, in El Espejo—The Mirror. Berkeley: Quinto Sol Publications, 1967.
Valdes-Rodriguez, Alisa. Playing With Boys. New York: Macmillan, 2004.
Vasquez, Richard. Chicano. New York: Harper Perennial, 1970.
Villanueva, Tino. Hay Otra Voz Poems. Staten Island, NY: Editorial Mansaje, 1972.
Villarreal, Jose Antonio. Pocho. New York: Random House, 1970.
Viramontes, Helena Maria. Under the Feet of Jesus. New York: Penguin, 1995.
Yglesias, Jose. A Wake in Ybor City. New York: Holt Rinehart, 1963.

Further Reading
Kanellos, Nicolás. Herencia. The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; Ortego, Philip D. Backgrounds of Mexican American
Literature. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971.
FELIPE DE ORTEGO Y GASCA
LEGAL THRILLERS
Definition. Legal thrillers constitute a crime fiction subspecies focusing on the
legal procedures in connection with crime. American writers John Grisham and
Scott Turow are contemporary writers central to both form and concerns of the
legal thriller. In countries adhering to the tradition of Roman law, the bench has a
role during investigations prior to trial and the passing of sentence, for example,
Georges Simenon’s Paris-based police investigator Maigret, whose life with “juges
d’instruction” is seldom easy. In countries building on the Anglo-Saxon tradition of
jurisprudence and law enforcement, the court machinery is usually involved only
after the police have handed over a case for trial (except for judges’ authorizations
of search warrants, etc.). Nonetheless, in legal thrillers, the questioning of police
procedures and the call for additional or revised investigative procedures take the
drama of full-scale crime detection into the courtroom. In the United States
especially the genre has found fertile soil, an effect no doubt of the conspicuous role
played by law at every level in society.
History. Ancient sources are often, and then mostly facetiously, referred to as the
forerunners of present-day popular literature. But it is hardly helpful to look back
too far for generic models because the form obviously is dependent on modern print
562 LEGAL THRILLERS

and distribution technology and cultural institutions and lifestyles of comparatively

recent standing for its mode of being. It is true that Old Testament King Solomon
did act in the capacity of investigative judge, and it is true that the old Chinese tales
about investigative judges Dee Jendijeh and Pao Cheng show proto elements of the
later full-grown genres. It is also true that lawyers have appeared regularly in liter-
ature in English since Chaucer. But to talk generally of generic fiction as such, or
specifically of the legal thriller in the contemporary sense of the genre designation,
as much older than the twentieth century would be misleading.
The genre of the legal thriller grew out of the crime story adapting itself to the
demands of a mass market audience fully ripe only in the second and third decades
of the twentieth century. Throughout the nineteenth century court reports had been
popular reading, as exemplified by the early career of British novelist Charles
Dickens, who as a young man reported cases from the London courts. Dickens
showed an interest in courts and lawyers in his later novelistic work but as part of
a broader social critique not hinged particularly on this aspect of society adminis-
tration. In terms of literary history, the investigator in public employ, as in the case
of E.A. Poe’s Inspector Dupin, or in self-employ, as in the case of Arthur Conan
Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, is more of a generalist than a legalist. Although Holmes
had a more than working knowledge of jurisprudence, as he had of an astounding
number of other things, fictional investigators of fictional crime typically celebrate
their triumphs before the court machinery takes over, only to affirm by sentencing
that which detectives have already brought out in the open. The courtroom, how-
ever, is where legal thrillers make their distinctive generic mark. It is within the fixed
framework of court proceedings that criminal cases are not only wrapped up but
also, and more importantly, looked into, frequently to the effect of completely
upsetting expectations of routine business.
In British crime fiction the bench was introduced by Gerald Bullett (1893–1958)
and Cyril Hare, pseudonym of Arthur Alexander Gordon Clark (1900–1958).
Bullett was a very versatile writer practicing a great variety of literary genres.
Working for the BBC during and continuing work in broadcasting after World War II,
Bullett wrote regular fiction, crime fiction, children’s fiction, and supernatural
fiction and did translations. His poems were collected and published by the distin-
guished English philologist E.M.W. Tillyard in 1959. Bullett’s venture into legal
fiction was with the aptly entitled The Jury in 1935. Belonging to the literary end of
crime fiction with in-depth and sophisticatedly interlocking study of characters and
their backgrounds, both of those centrally involved in the murder trial and of those
on the jury, Bullett’s description of the court procedure reads deliberately like an
unedited transcription.
Hare drew on his background as a barrister for many of his nine novels and
thirty-eight stories, which he started writing in the thirties. In 1950, he was
appointed county court judge in Surrey after having done war-time service in vari-
ous legal capacities. One of his most admired novels is Tragedy at Law from 1942,
introducing barrister Francis Pettigrew, and, arguably, consolidating the legal
thriller as a viable genre in England.
Perhaps the all-time best-known fictional English lawyer is Horace Rumpole,
who, despite his getting on in years and his gaining of experience by force of his con-
troversial views, his preference for seedy clients, and his lack of ambition, remains
a junior counsel in his London firm of barristers. The creator of hen-pecked, plonk-
swilling, literature-loving Rumpole, who applies his legal competence entirely
 LEGAL THRILLERS 563

within the short-story format, and who was so brilliantly TV-cast by Australian
actor Leo McKern, was John Mortimer, himself a barrister noted for his freedom of
speech cases and as a highly successful writer of novels and stage and TV drama.
Among recent additions to the English variety of the legal thriller are the novels
of Frances Fyfield. She worked for the London Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard)
and as a public prosecutor in the employ of the British Crime Prosecution Service.
Her work and private-life experiences found their way into her first crime novel, A
Question of Guilt (1988), featuring Crown Prosecutor Helen West in problematic
professional and amorous intercourse with Detective Superintendent Geoffrey
Bailey. Fyfield has introduced the feminist agenda, already a stock element in the
contemporary private-investigator and police-procedural whodunit, to the English
legal profession in its parallel fictional world.
Fictional lawyers, seedy representatives of the profession more often than not,
made their appearance in American pulp-fiction crime stories as part of the
crime/law set-up but then most frequently as part of the backdrop, not upstage with
the main action.
Erle Stanley Gardner, himself a member of the Californian legal profession,
supplemented his meager income by writing for the pulp magazines and struck a
rich vein when in 1933 he introduced Perry Mason as a very outgoing lawyer. He
succeeded in alerting the reading public interested in crime stories to the drama of
lawyers’ offices and court rooms as being an eventful universe just as exciting as the
mean streets stalked by private investigators.
Complementing the new development in the east, Eleazar Lipsky (1911–1993)
focused on small-time criminals and their legal handlers in stories from the New
York criminal underworld (Kiss of Death, 1948), based on his own experience as a
Manhattan public prosecutor, whereas in Kentucky the father of pioneer feminist-
whodunit writer Sue Grafton, Cornelius Grafton (1909–1982), undertook fictional
forays into the legal side of criminal events in the South just before the war (The Rat
Began to Gnaw the Rope, 1944).
Apart from Erle Stanley Gardner’s courtroom dramas sprouting film and TV
versions in the post-war period, and apart from the isolated appearances of court-
room activities in Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny (1951), Ben Traver’s Anatomy
of a Murder (1958), and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), the legal
thriller had to wait until the 1980s for its massive break-through.
No doubt the flooding of the literary market with legal thrillers in the 1980s was
due to a close watch of the legal profession from outside as well as inside. With the
economic boom the spotlight was on the legal profession as the brokers of the
golden times. Coinciding with offering assistance to the fast-track economy, lawyers
were also busy in the fields of civil and human rights, areas by then recognized as
part of the legal business, although usually not very remunerative but good for
publicity. Also, the current and highly profiled discussion of the death penalty
involved attention on the American way of handling justice. All in all these factors
put the legal profession right in the middle of the public gaze.
The practicing of law, being such a diverse field, attracted varied talents, among
them lawyers also able to make up exciting stories from the corridors of the law
firms and to put them over in compelling prose. It is a quite unique characteristic of
the legal thriller, and not only in the United States, that its practitioners more often
than not have a solid professional background in their chosen fictional field.
Generally, writers of whodunits are professional writers, such as journalists,
564 LEGAL THRILLERS

professional writers of fiction with a creative-writing or self-taught background, or

academics in diverse fields, whereas very few writers of private-eye stories are
private investigators or policemen who write police procedurals.
Among the most commercially successful types of genre fiction, the legal thriller
has been constantly on the bestseller lists since the mid-1980s. Outstanding authors
such as John Grisham, Scott Turow, and Brad Meltzer are certain to attract huge
interest when they use the court room or the lawyers’ offices not only as exciting
settings for events where life and property are at stake but also, and certainly not to
be ignored, as catalysts for casting critical glances at society at large. The breadth of
the genre of the legal thriller in a perspective of issues adopted and positions taken
is demonstrated by the gendered approach of such writers as Lia Matera, who
presented her heroine Willa Jansson first in Where Lawyers fear to Tread in 1987.
African American perspectives are provided by writers such as Jay Brandon,
Christopher Darden, and Lee Gruenfeld. Issues of American multiculturalism,
minority, and gender are not in themselves particularly suited for legal action but
often appear as strong determinants when cases are taken to court. The legal thriller,
like other varieties of the whodunit, has the capacity for reflecting and modeling the
structure and substance of clashes and crises that the particular nature of American
society presents.
Trends and Themes. The extent of the scope for investigative action on the part of
legal personnel—lawyers in most cases, seldom judges and jurors—depends entirely
on national characteristics of the court system. In European countries bordering on
the Mediterranean and in Latin America, all relying on the tradition of Roman Law,
the use of investigative judges gives such functionaries a chance to complement—or
compete with—the police from a point early on in an investigative procedure. In
Great Britain, and with it in many countries formerly part of her empire, the
traditional system with brief-commissioned barristers acting on behalf of defen-
dants/accused directly represented by solicitors and with barristers commissioned by
the state on behalf of the Crown as prosecutors is being increasingly supplemented
with a system of state-employed public prosecutors under the judiciary, such as is
the case in Germany and Scandinavia. The legal system of the United States is
characterized by an extended democratic or popular element reflected in the
foregrounding of trials by jury, also in cases of civil litigation, and in both bench and
prosecution at the local level being elective offices.
In a legal thriller, when the authorial sympathy is with the district attorney’s (DA)
office, the antagonist is often organized crime or points of weakness on the public

COURTROOM THRILLERS COME FROM THE UNITES STATES

The majority by far of contemporary legal thrillers, printed or screened, originate in the
United States. Due no doubt to a mixture of a much more ingrained sense of law as society
dynamic and the histrionic opportunities offered by jury trial, the drama of crime and its
investigation has in large measure been taken into the courtroom. There can hardly be any
doubt that the law—state and federal—is the glue that binds together the otherwise
extremely heterogeneous nation. From the constitution and its interpretation by law panels
over business law putting a brake on the potential running amok of private enterprise to the
safeguarding of individuals, the law looms large in the American awareness, both public and
private.
 LEGAL THRILLERS 565

side. Here the law and the courtroom guarantee society’s order against lawlessness.
When the sympathy is with the defense, focus is often on the carelessness or the
cynicism of the publicly employed officers of justice or on the willingness to sacri-
fice the individual accused of a crime for better statistics or re-election. But the genre
is used as the platform for a great many different issues, all with a bearing on the
law. Grisham, for instance, generally has a sharp eye for the greediness of the legal
profession. Michael Crichton, in Disclosure (1994), deals with the issue of political
correctness in terms of a case of sexual harassment. He demonstrates the potential
damage of legislation well intentioned in its outset, but perhaps having uncalculated
effects, as also showcased in the mainstream, but nonetheless legally concerned and
focused, novels Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) by Tom Wolfe or A Human Stain
(2000) by Philip Roth.
Contexts and Issues. Marlyn Robinson’s opening of her short account of the
history of legal thrillers points to the proceedings of the court room and the nature
of narrative:

“Whoever tells the best story, wins the case.” To many Americans, this modern maxim
embodies the pivotal role of the lawyer: control of the narrative. Whether drafting a
contract or laying out evidence in a courtroom, the lawyer’s ability to manipulate
language determines the outcome of the client’s case. Many would argue that the law’s
language, arcane procedures, rules and conventions are purposely made mysterious by
its practitioners. What could be more natural than for lawyers and legal stories to have
been instrumental in the creation of the mystery novel, and particularly, the subgenre
legal thriller? (Robinson 1998)

By centering on courtroom procedures the legal thriller puts the emphasis of crime
and its processing from the events of detection, which constitute whodunits relying
on investigators, private or public, to the circumstances under which justice is meted
out. It also shifts the perspective from the nonprofessional environment of investi-
gators to the legal profession with its specialized personnel of judges and lawyers.
Not of the least importance from a literary perspective, it replaces the action of pre-
court investigation with rhetoric. But, in most cases, the plot of a legal thriller is
pivoted on the sudden and surprising turn that parallels the investigator’s break-
through in the field.
Since the legal thriller relies on the dialectics of court procedure for its narrative
progression, focus is naturally on the verbal presentation of cases, involving
witnesses, evidence rendered verbally, and argumentation. The detection of crime is
either finalized and has been put into reports, or, insofar as it is still going on, it has
to pass into the court room via the counsel for the prosecution or defense. The
courtroom and its conventions constitute the narrative bottleneck through which
everything must pass.
Related structurally to the legal thriller is the police procedural. This subspecies
of crime fiction is concerned only eventually with putting a case into the words of
the report. The business is with the crime and all sorts of material evidence. But it
shares with the legal thriller the dealing with crime in a publicly sanctioned institu-
tionalized context and also the reliance on a collective effort within a pre-established
paradigm of detection, which parallels the gradual unveiling and documentation of
crime in the court room. The progression of detection in the police procedural, like
the proceedings in court, lends patterns easily transformed into narrative structures
566 LEGAL THRILLERS

with, admittedly, much more room for discourse maneuver in the police procedural,
which, in turn, is less free than the private-eye subspecies, where the protagonist
often makes a point of his acting with no strings attached whatsoever.
Another sibling of the legal thriller is the political thriller, in its manifestation of
“muckraking” domestic politics critique rather than dealing with international
political relations. This is a thematic, not a structural sharing, as the critique may
be contained within the structural conventions of the legal thriller. Since the law is
the common ground of American civic life, it is the natural field for presenting social
problems made visible by the crises implied by lawsuits and criminal cases.
The narrative format and conventions of the legal thriller lend themselves readily
to film and TV. Here known as courtroom drama, the intermedial dynamics of
book-screen tie-in has been cultivated extensively, but many films and TV shows
have also been based on scripts originally for the screen. Among extremely popular
TV shows based on legal thrillers in book format the Perry Mason series stands out,
whereas the intricate problems of a diversity of legal branches and specializations
are presented in L.A. Law and Law and Order. The potential for integrating with
the staple diets of soap opera and situation comedy are exploited in series such as
Ally McBeal and Judging Amy. A counter-crossing infotainment phenomenon symp-
tomatic of both the pervasiveness of the sense of the law and its reflection in the
more or less fictionalizing formats of the media was The People’s Court running
from 1981 to 1993, featuring the retired judge Joseph A. Wapner. Dealing with real
cases presented voluntarily by litigants before his fictional but nonetheless effica-
cious court, the syndicated TV series reveals, as Helle Porsdam observes, that the
“subtext of The People’s Court was a highly interesting discussion about the role of
the legal system, moral values, and preferred behaviour in modern, pluralistic, and
law-permeated America” (Porsdam 1999, 91).
Reception. The huge sales figures of legal thrillers tell their own story about the
popularity among readers of the genre. The community standing of a writer such as
John Grisham, with his committee work for Washington, also tells us a good deal
about the public esteem enjoyed by an outstanding practitioner of the genre.
Verisimilitude and authenticity are mandatory in crime fiction, to a far greater
extent than in the average realist piece of prose fiction. Even though elements may be
spurious, great pains are taken by the author to persuade the reader of the real-world
validity of such elements. Courtroom proceedings in themselves constitute drama
and suspense, so there is no need to interfere with the plot progression. Staple devices
for the creator of legal thrillers, when the action is taken inside the court, are the
breaking down of the evidence presented by the opposition and the introduction of
startling new evidence. Against that background it cannot surprise that critical inter-
est has primarily been on the extent to which the genre can be said to simulate real
court proceedings: in how far does this or that story reflect this or that real trial.
Similarly, from the angle of the fiction, the closeness of the made-up train of events
is often used to criticize current court principles and practices. In particular, writers
of legal thrillers have been interested in the differences between the technicalities of
the practice of law and its effects on the individual, whether guilty or not guilty.
When capital punishment is involved, with the irreversibility of the sentence after
having been carried out, the court with its many fine points of law and the reliance
on the varied talents of its officers may sometimes find itself in the dock.
That there is an energetic and very varied interest in not only the legal thriller but
also all possible combinations of law and literature in the media and culture generally
 LEGAL THRILLERS 567

THE LAWYER IN POP CULTURE

The University of Texas’s Tarlton Law Library in Austin, Texas, has an excellent popular
collection and Web site, “The Law in Popular Culture Collection.” http://tarlton.law.
utexas.edu/lpop/index.html. It features lists of legal thrillers, links to old novels that are avail-
able online, access to the list of materials included in its library collection, lists of films and
posters, quotations about lawyers, and links to other related legal topics.

is in ample evidence from the very comprehensive bibliography, including legal

poetry, at http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/. A comprehensive list of publica-
tions on law and the legal thriller, compiled by Marlyn Robinson, may be found at
http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/lpopbib2.html.
Selected Authors. The following list, ordered chronologically by date of birth of
authors, aims at pointing to some important pioneers of the legal thrillers and at
demonstrating the scope of the genre. It is by no means meant as exhaustive but is
suggestive. It can be supplemented by consulting the bibliographical material in the
reference section. Erle Stanley Gardner (1889–1970) must be thought of as the
writer who pioneered the American legal thriller and probably set the pattern for
the genre worldwide. Self-educated in jurisprudence he passed the Californian Bar
Exam in 1911 and started to practice law. To compensate for lack of work and the
trivia of the legal business he began to contribute whodunits to pulp magazines.
Under various pen names—A.A. Fair, Kyle Corning, Charles M. Green, Carleton
Kendrake, Charles J. Kenny, Les Tillray, and Robert Parr—his output of stories was
prodigious from the start. What put Gardner on the map was the series of more than
eighty titles with the defense lawyer Perry Mason in the lead, which started in 1933
with The Case of the Velvet Claws and The Case of the Sulky Girl. The Perry Mason
stories, resulting in hugely successful cinema films and a TV series, are based on
legal action in and out of the courtroom, centering on murder and reported in
dialogue with only spare, and then uninventive, description. Mason is regularly
helped by his faithful secretary Della Street and cunning private investigator Paul
Drake and is always hard up against various representatives from the DA’s office.
Retiring from law practice in 1933, Gardner retained a link with actual cases by his
charitable initiative, “The Court of Last Resort,” which looked into alleged miscar-
riages of justice.
Robert Traver is the pseudonym of John D. Voelker (1903–1991), a former
judge of the Michigan Supreme Court. His Anatomy of a Murder, published in
1958, is a court room drama classic. Released in 1959 as a film by Otto
Preminger with James Stewart in the lead, the novel is based on an actual crime
in upper Michigan. The case seems straightforward, as Lieutenant Frederick
Manion confesses to the deliberate killing of the man who raped his wife. Defense
attorney Paul Biegler seems landed with the comparatively simple job of finding
mitigating circumstances to partly exonerate the killer, whose crime was wit-
nessed by several people. But as the case proceeds, there turns out to be more to
it than meets the eye.
Robert Traver’s legal thriller adheres to the pattern of balancing courtroom
procedures with life outside the austere premises, but its high points occur
before the jury. With the court technicalities in perfect order and the legal rhet-
oric in full flourish, the story unfolds against a background of harmonious,
568 LEGAL THRILLERS

provincial America, as the opening paragraph testifies. Against this pastoral

background the crime is a most unwelcome disturbance, but the judicial system
is up to handling it.
Herman Wouk (1915–) in 1951 published a novel first and foremost address-
ing the trauma of the Second World War in terms of a moral dilemma: whether
to follow the leader under all circumstances. The Caine Mutiny was not written
as a legal thriller, but to all practical purposes Caine avails himself of the genre
format. The first part dramatizes mutiny on board a naval ship in the thick of
war. To the fellow officers the behavior of the captain during a crisis seems
irresponsible and possibly explainable as determined by incapacitating stress,
which to them justifies their relieving him of his duties by force. When the case
subsequently is given over to the court martial, what seemed a natural decision
under pressure gets enmeshed in considerations that involve legal niceties and
court room histrionics.
The Caine Mutiny demonstrates with almost pedagogical clarity how what starts
out as the processing (in the context of a court martial) of an allegedly criminal act
soon entails deliberations to do with the rights and obligations of the individual. In
this way Wouk’s novel puts focus on core values in American society.
Nelle Harper Lee (1926–) made one of the most important literary contributions
to the civil rights movement in her To Kill a Mockingbird (1960; filmed 1962). The
novel deals with racial relations in the South during the Depression. The function of
the court proceedings is to highlight the discrepancy between the ideals of American
law and the realities of a society weighed down by history and prejudice. The court,
though, is where all the unspoken is made to come out. Tragically, the ideal notion
of equal justice for all is not allowed to triumph, but attention is called to the
American legal machinery as a construction never any stronger than the people
elected or appointed to serve it.
William J. Coughlin (1929–1992) applied his experience as a defense counsel and
judge in Detroit to the writing of fiction, starting with The Widow Wondered Why
in 1966. Coughlin is especially known for his series hero Charley Sloan in Shadow
of a Doubt in 1991. Sloan is on the verge of total disintegration from alcohol when
an apparently impossible case requires his dormant talents.
George Vincent Higgins (1939–1999) combined careers as journalist, writer,
lawyer, and college academic at Boston College and Boston University. Having
received his law degree from Boston College in 1967, he worked for the prosecution
in Massachusetts, and later, in 1973, he went into private practice. He was counsel
for Eldrige Cleaver. In his deliberately rough-hewn-style fiction, Higgins liked to see
a case from the perspective of the accused, such as in The Friends of Eddie Coyle
(1972), The Digger’s Game (1973), and Cogan’s Trade (1974). In his stories about
the Boston criminal lawyer, Jerry Kennedy, he adopted the more conventional legal-
thriller format: Kennedy for the Defense (1980), Penance for Jerry Kennedy (1985),
and Defending Billy Ryan (1992).
Dudley W. Buffa’s (1940–) working experience came from his teaching of sociol-
ogy (Union Power and American Democracy: The UAW and the Democratic Party,
1935–72, University of Michigan Press, 1984) and practice of law in Oregon. His
legal crusader is Portland-based defense attorney Joseph Antonelli, who first
appeared in The Defense (1998). Further legal thrillers, all with series hero Joe
Antonelli, are The Prosecution (1999), The Legacy (2003), The Judgment (2002),
Star Witness (2004), Breach of Trust (2004), and Trial by Fire (2005).
 LEGAL THRILLERS 569

Phillip Margolin (1944–) practiced criminal law in Portland, Oregon, and was
defense counsel in a number of high-profiled murder cases, from 1972 to 1996,
when he retired from the bar to become a full-time writer of legal thrillers. Having
grown up in New York and been a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia in West Africa,
he received his degree from New York University School of Law. Margolin’s Proof
Positive (2006) is the fourth novel about defense lawyer Amanda Jaffe, who
appeared earlier in Wild Justice (2000), The Associate (2002), and Ties That Bind
(2003). Margolin’s thrillers are not strictly court-room affairs, but tend to entangle
those from the legal profession in often gorily dramatic off-bench goings on.
Steve (Steven Paul) Martini (1946–) introduced his series hero Paul Madriani in
Compelling Evidence in 1992. At that time he had already tried his hand at fiction
with Simeon’s Chamber in 1987. Martini has a background as both a journalist
specializing in legal affairs and, after having completed his law degree, an attorney
in private law practice and in various legal capacities in the Californian judiciary.
Martini is one of those writers of legal thrillers who make the most of the techni-
calities and fine points of law, something obviously appealing to the audience as his
string of bestselling novel demonstrates.
Scott Turow (1949–) sets an ideal pattern for a writer of legal thrillers, combining
an active career in law practice and legal-committee work with his writing, which is
always quite close to the legal problems of the contemporary United States. A gradu-
ate from Amherst College and having been a lecturer at Stanford in creative writing, he
entered Harvard Law School, from which he received his Juris Doctor degree in 1978.
At that time he had written and published his first book, about first-year law students,
one L (1977), and had gained employment with the U.S. Attorney’s office in Chicago.
With Presumed Innocent in 1987, Turow placed the legal thriller firmly on the literary
map, following up with The Burden of Proof (1990), Pleading Guilty (1993), The
Laws of Our Fathers (1996), Personal Injuries (1999), Reversible Errors (2002), and
Limitations (2006). Ordinary Heroes (2005) takes us back to a mysterious World War
II court martial case. Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer’s Reflections on Dealing with the
Death Penalty (2003) has a bearing on Turow’s committee work for the Governor of
Illinois. As an active lawyer in a Chicago law firm, Turow conducts pro-bono cases at
the same time as he is committed on behalf of the writing profession.
Michael A. Kahn (1952–) is a busy St. Louis-based practicing lawyer who also has
found time to transfer his legal competence into a series of legal thrillers featuring
attorney Rachel Gold. Introduced in Grave Designs in 1988, she quickly tired of the
large law firm and set up her own office, the base of law practice that frequently
takes her right into the centers of dramatic action.
Michael Nava (1954–) is a Californian lawyer with roots in the gay community,
a circumstance he has turned into his legal-thriller series of seven novels centered on
gay lawyer Henry Rios, who made his appearance in The Little Death in 1986 and
bowed out in Rag and Bone in 2001. Sharing atmosphere with the hardboiled
whodunit, Nava’s Henry Rios stories constitute an increasingly complex character
exploration of the protagonist set on taking upon himself the defense of underpriv-
ileged people from the edges of society.
Since his breakthrough with The Firm in 1991, John Grisham (1955–) has delivered
a book with clockwork regularity once a year, most of them legal thrillers. The Firm
was his second novel. The first one, A Time to Kill, was published in 1988. The story
about an outraged father’s retaliation against his daughter’s rapists was written when
Grisham, after graduating from University of Mississippi School of Law in 1981, was
570 LEGAL THRILLERS

working in a general law practice, as well as between 1983 and 1990 also being a rep-
resentative in the state legislature. John Grisham’s legal thrillers have enjoyed massive
popularity, in both book and movie formats. His distinction as a writer rests on a firm
sense of community, which comes out in his thrillers in the form of lawyers caught
between conscience and the more or less cynical demands of the law/politics complex
combined with personal greed and other human vices. Memorable titles in his literary
output, which also includes non-generic fiction (A Painted House, 2001) and non-
fiction (The Innocent Man, 2006) about the South, where Grisham has homes in both
Oxford, Mississippi, and Charlottesville, are The Pelican Brief (1992), The Client
(1993), The Street Lawyer (1998), and The Last Juror (2004).
Christopher Darden (1956–) was with the DA’s office during the trial of O.J.
Simpson. He left in 1995 to teach law at various Californian universities until in
1999 he established his own firm of attorneys. With his In Contempt (co-written by
Jess Walter) he in 1996 offered his version of the (in)famous trial of the football
player. From 1999 he has collaborated with mystery writer and critic Dick Lochte in
authentic fictional legal thrillers beginning with The Trials of Nikki Hill in 1999, and
continuing with L.A. Justice (2001), The Last Defense (2002), and Lawless (2004).
Brad Meltzer (1970–) is a versatile writer with both TV and graphic-book
experience. He graduated from Columbia Law School and his jurisprudence shows
clearly in his first legal thrillers, The Tenth Justice (1998) and Dead Even (1999).
From The First Counsel (2001) Meltzer has veered away from the beaten path of
the legal thriller and moved into the field of the political thriller, a genre he is
familiar with from his work for TV.
Alphabetical list of other American legal-thriller writers: David Baldacci,
William Bernardt, Michael Bihl, Sallie Bissell, Bill Blum, Jay Brandon, Alafair
Burke, David Compton, Rose Connors, Ellis Cose, Rankin Davis, Terry Devane,
Dexter Dias, William Diehl, Richard Doolig, Linda A. Fairstein, Joseph Finder, J.F.
Freedman, Pat Frieda, Philip Friedman, Lee Gruenfeld, Jeremiah Healy, Tami
Hoag, Stephen Horn, Clifford Irving, Jonnie Jacobs, Michael Kahn, Lisa Kelly,
John Hanff Korelitz, Carroll Lachnit, William Lashner, Stan Latreille, Mimi Latt,
John T. Lescroant, Paul Levine, Harry Levy, Bonnie MacDougal, Christine
McGuire, Malcolm MacPherson, John Martel, Penny Mickelburg, Peiri O’Shaugh-
nessy, Barbara Parker, Richard Parris, Richard North Patterson, John A. Peak,
Barry Reed, Nancy Taylor Rosenberg, Lisa Scottoline, Barry Siegel, Sheldon Siegel,
Grif Stockley, Silliam G. Tapply, Robert K. Tannenbaum, Edwin Torres, Laura Var
Wormer, Gallatin Warfield, Marianne Wesson, Carolyn Wheat, Kate Wilhelm,
Sabin Willett.

Bibliography
Buffa, Dudley W. The Defense. New York: Henry Holt, 1997.
Crichton, Michael. Disclosure. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1994.
Coughlin, William J. Shadow of a Doubt. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991.
Darden, Christopher, and Jess Walter. In Contempt. New York: ReganBooks, 1996.
Grisham, John. A Time to Kill. New York: Wynwood Press, 1989.
———. The Firm. New York: Doubleday, 1991.
The Lawyer’s Story: Legal Narrative e-Texts. 2008. http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/.
Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1960.
Margolin, Phillip. Proof Positive. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.
Martini, Steve. Compelling Evidence. New York: Putnam’s, 1992.
 LITERARY JOURNALISM 571

Meltzer, Brad. The Tenth Justice. New York: Rob Weisbach Books, 1997.
Nava, Michael. The Little Death. Boston, MA: Alyson, 1986.
Porsdam, Helle. Legally Speaking: Contemporary American Culture and the Law. Amherst,
MA: Massachusetts University Press, 1999.
Robinson, Marlyn. “Collins to Grisham: A Brief History of the Legal Thriller.” Legal Studies
Forum, 21, 1998, accessible at http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/legstud.html.
Robinson, Marlyn. http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/lpopbib2.html.
Traver, Robert. Anatomy of a Murder. New York: St. Martin’s, 1958.
Turow, Scott. Presumed Innocent. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1987.

Further Reading
Ashley, Mike. The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction. New York: Carroll
and Graf, 2002; Bergman, Paul, and Michael Asimow. Reel Justice: The Courtroom Goes
to the Movies. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2006; Bounds, J. Dennis. Perry
Mason: The Authorship and Reproduction of a Popular Hero. Westport, CT: Greenwood,
1996; DeAndrea, William L. Encyclopedia Mysteriosa: A Comprehensive Guide to the Art
of Detection in Print, Film, Radio, and Television. New York: Prentice Hall, 1994; Herbert,
Rosemary. Whodunit? A Who’s Who in Crime and Mystery Writing. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003; Herbert, Rosemary, Catherine Aird, John M. Reilly, Susan Oleksiw
(eds.), The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing. Oxford and New York,
1999; Kahn, Michael A. Grave Designs. New York: Signet, 1992; Keating, H.R.F. ed.
Whodunit? A Guide to Crime, Suspense & Spy Fiction. London: Windward, 1982; Lord,
Graham. John Mortimer: The Devil’s Advocate. London: Orion Books, 2005; Murphy,
Bruce F. The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery. New York: Palgrave, 1999; Porsdam,
Helle. Legally Speaking: Contemporary American Culture and the Law. Amherst, MA:
Massachusetts University Press, 1999; Van Dover, J. Kenneth. Murder in the Millions. New
York: Ungar, 1984.
LARS OLE SAUERBERG
LITERARY JOURNALISM
Definition. Literary journalism has been defined as journalism that reads like a
novel or short story. In other words, it tells a story in the conventional sense—starting
with a complication that intrigues the reader, proceeding through a series of devel-
opmental actions, and concluding with a resolution to the complication. Unlike
autobiography and memoir, which emphasizes personal revelation, literary journal-
ism emphasizes cultural revelation. The experiences and individuals described in lit-
erary journalism are or were real. Literary journalism is not fiction in the sense of
the conventional fictional novel or short story. It is not “made up.” Ultimately, lit-
erary journalism is part of a larger very fluid category of documentary prose, prose
that claims to reflect or “document” our world of phenomenon.
The name for the genre begs whether the conventional journalistic essay, such as
a newspaper editorial or a think-piece in, say, The Atlantic Monthly, could be con-
sidered a kind of “literary” journalism, given that in the history of nonfiction forms
the essay has been considered to have literary merit. In principle, yes—curiously,
however, “literary journalism,” during the century in which the term has been used,
has usually been applied to those true-life texts of journalism that read like a novel
or short story. That may now be changing.
Contexts and Issues. Historically, the term “literary” has been applied to
“journalism” either because such work was perceived as reflecting the kind of
universal values associated with belles-lettres or because the techniques used,
those of artful description, were perceived as “literary.”
572 LITERARY JOURNALISM

THE MANY NAMES FOR LITERARY JOURNALISM

The genre has had many names. In the 1960s it was called new journalism, and in the case of
Hunter S. Thompson’s work, the subset was gonzo journalism. It is classified as reportage
literature by the Library of Congress, although the latter is rarely used in the United States
beyond the Library. It has also been characterized as the nonfiction novel and literary nonfiction,
and more recently as nonfiction narrative, narrative journalism, and narrative serial in newspapers.
Sometimes it has been called creative nonfiction, although this last tends to take in a broader
range of belletristic nonfiction prose such as memoir and the personal essay. In Europe literary
journalism is often called literary reportage and has a long tradition there.Today it continues to
be known in the United States most commonly as literary journalism.

An alternative that has arisen in recent years is “narrative journalism.” Some

authors prefer that term because they are uncomfortable and consider it presump-
tuous to characterize their work as “literary.” But “narrative journalism” poses
problems of its own because it remains unclear if it is the same as literary journal-
ism or whether it is a broader category of journalism (similarly with the aim of
cultural revelation written fundamentally in a narrative mode) of which literary
journalism is part. If it is a broader category, it can include more extended exposi-
tory or argumentative discussion of the kind found in sophisticated feature writing
(such as in The Atlantic Monthly), or it can include more narrative summary
combined with analysis of the kind found in history writing. Although literary
journalism is also “narrative” in the conventional sense of being a representation of
an event or sequence of events, what has distinguished it in the past from such
related forms is that it is also fundamentally and broadly descriptive in the attempt to
portray people’s lives, the descriptive details framed by what Tom Wolfe, one of the
eminent literary journalists of the 1960s, described as “scene-by-scene construc-
tion” (Wolfe 1973, 31–32). Thus, it is defined primarily by means of two modali-
ties, narrative and descriptive, and for that reason has been characterized in the
more rarefied air of academic research as a narra-descriptive journalism in order to
differentiate it from a broader category of narrative journalism.
Given that literary journalism is composed primarily of narrative and descriptive
modes, this does not mean that the exposition or narrative summary are excluded.
Rather, the emphasis in literary journalism is on narrative and descriptive modes
synthesized “scene by scene,” with the expository and persuasive modes, along with
narrative summary, playing tangential and supporting roles, if any.
Contemporary writers of narrative journalism may indulge solely in literary
journalism or move among the different modalities according to what they perceive
as appropriate to their needs.
Another issue that arises in distinguishing the boundaries of literary journalism,
boundaries that are, to be sure, not hard and fast, is how literary journalism differs
from and is similar to such forms as travel writing, true crime literature, and sports
journalism that read like a novel or short story, among some of the more promi-
nently delineated forms defined by their subject matter. What separates literary jour-
nalism from, say, travel writing is not that each is a discrete category of journalism,
but rather that each is a different genre determined by the critical perspective
brought to bear on them. Travel writing is a topical genre. Literary journalism is a
modal genre, as determined by its dominant narrative and descriptive modalities.
 LITERARY JOURNALISM 573

There is no reason why travel writing, for example, cannot be viewed as both a
modal genre and as a topical genre. Thus they are not mutually exclusive. At the
same time, not all travel writing need be literary journalism—or a journalism that
emphasizes narra-descriptive modalities. That said there may be good reason for set-
ting travel writing aside as a separate grouping if only because in literary history the
sheer volume of travel writing could overwhelm considerations of literary journal-
ism. That is the approach taken here.

History
Emergence of modern literary journalism. Literary journalism has a much longer history
than generally acknowledged. The emergence of literary journalism in the United
States as a modern genre can be traced to after the American Civil War. Three major
periods have been identified for when it thrived—the 1890s, the 1930s, and the
1960s and early 1970s. However, it never really disappeared after each of the
periods, and after the 1970s it has evolved increasingly into a mainstream literary
and journalistic genre. It very much has an ongoing presence today and continues
to be practiced for much the same reasons as it was after the Civil War.
There are at least two related reasons for why a modern literary journalism
emerged when it did. First, the post–Civil War period was a time of tremendous
social and economic change and turmoil in the United States, when different sectors
of society found themselves at odds with each other, laborers and capitalists serving
as one example, native born and newly arrived immigrants serving as another.
Second, this was the period when the concept of “objective” journalism began to
emerge (or what at the time was called “factual” journalism). In what has proved a
cultural irony, the highly distilled, abstract style of such journalism tended to alien-
ate readers from what they most wanted to comprehend: the economic and social
turmoil around them, or, in sum, the distress of society.
In objective journalism, the personal voice of the reporter is viewed as a liability,
one that interferes with presenting the news as “factually” or as “objectively” as
possible. What practitioners of literary journalism understood then is that the
personal voice is more honest in its relationship to the reader, based on the premise
that there can be no absolute “objectivity.” As we well understand today, all
discourse reflects to some degree the inherent personal taste, views, values, mores,
and biases of a reporter—in short, what we often call “subjectivity” as opposed to
objectivity. For example, the selection of the concrete descriptive details in the scene-
by-scene construction by what has been characterized as the literary journalist’s
“shaping consciousness” (Weber 1974, 20) appeals to what all of us at some level
can concretely comprehend with our different senses of sight, touch, hearing, smell,
and taste. To read and perceive with one’s senses a scene described in a piece of
literary journalism is to vicariously “feel” it. Herein lies an important virtue of the
form—one lacking in the abstraction of “objective” journalism—a virtue realized by
means of a reporter’s individual (and subjective) choices in the creation of the text.
The conditions that gave rise to literary journalism’s modern manifestation during
the post–Civil War period are still very much with us today: As long as there is
cultural distress and alienation such journalism remains a viable discourse for trying
to understand those who are different from us. As Lincoln Steffens, an editor and
advocate of the genre during the 1890s, noted, the purpose of literary journalism is
“to get the news so completely and to report it so humanly that the reader will see
574 LITERARY JOURNALISM

himself in the other fellow’s place”—even if that place is occupied by a murderer

awaiting execution (Steffens 1931, 317). Literary journalism, then, requires the sub-
jectivity of a reporter to try to empathically understand the subjectivities of others,
or what is frequently called the cultural “Other.”
To be sure, practitioners of the form have been very much a minority in the
journalism establishment, especially in the early years. Among some of those early
literary journalists, Lafcadio Hearn stands out as an exemplar who foresaw the
promise of the form in the 1870s. Shortly after he arrived in the United States from
Ireland, he embarked on a remarkable career as a newspaper reporter. He brought
to his work a Chekhovian realism and poignancy as reflected in such stories as
“Dolly” and “A Child of the Levee.” In Cincinnati, one city where he worked as a
reporter, his most common subject was the African American community, a
marginalized group largely ignored by polite, genteel white Cincinnatians and, by
extension, white Americans in general. Hearn’s focus, then, was on the cultural
“Other,” and the attempt to understand the cultural Other remains a hallmark of
literary journalism to this day.
The 1890s remain the first significant period when narrative literary journalism
thrived in the United States, and among some of its more noteworthy practitioners
we find Hutchins Hapgood, Richard Harding Davis, Ambrose Bierce, George Ade,
Nelly Bly, Abraham Cahan, Theodore Dreiser, and Stephen Crane. Bierce, Dreiser,
Twain, Cahan, and Crane remain better known as literary fictionists. Others, such
as Davis and Bly, remained active as literary journalists well into the twentieth
century.
Shortly after the turn of the century, in 1907, we see the as yet earliest instance of
the term “literary journalist” applied as a name for writers of this kind of work.
This came after a considerable debate in journals of literature and ideas on whether
journalism could be literature.
A lull in the practice of narrative literary journalism had set in by the First World
War and lasted through the 1920s. One reason is that this was a period when the
concept of “objective” journalism was theorized and ascendant. Nonetheless, the
form never entirely disappeared, and Ernest Hemingway was one of its practition-
ers during this period.
By the 1930s literary journalism thrived again for similar reasons as it had in the
1890s. This was the period of the Great Depression and once again Americans were
trying to understand the social and economic dislocation around them. Not only
was objective journalism not suited for understanding the subjectivities of
Americans caught up in the adversity of the times, but the newspaper, the foremost
venue for objective journalism, largely ignored the human or empathic element
except in the highly personal writing of newspaper columnists. Instead, it fell mostly
to magazines, especially Progressive magazines such as The New Republic and New
Masses, to try to examine the cultural upheaval through literary journalism. Often
such writing, because it strongly invoked the voice of the writer and thus the feelings
of the writer, reflected leftist political sympathies. Two writers who fall into this
group are Edmund Wilson and Erskine Caldwell. Yet there were still others who
tried to avoid outright political posturing in their writing even as they maintained
their personal voice as a means for engaging readers’ empathy. These include
Sherwood Anderson (better known as a short story writer), Joseph Mitchell at the
New Yorker, Martha Gellhorn, and, again, Ernest Hemingway (by this point also an
established novelist and short story writer).
 LITERARY JOURNALISM 575

Mitchell’s New Yorker, where he worked for more than 30 years, has been a
mainstay of the genre since shortly after the publication’s founding by Harold Ross
in 1925. Moreover, the magazine eschewed the Progressive and leftist sympathies of
the other publications noted previously.
Although the end of the Great Depression would result in less literary journalism,
the 1940s are important because of what are considered two seminal works of
modern American literary journalism, James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men, published in 1941, and John Hersey’s Hiroshima, published in 1946. What
separates them, of course, is a World War. But what they have in common is that
they were both major influences on the third period of literary journalism during the
1960s and early 1970s, or what was called the “new” journalism. One measure of
how compelling Hiroshima has proved in the American cultural experience is that
in 1999 a distinguished panel of 36 journalists and academics at New York University
ranked it as the most important work of American journalism in the twentieth
century.
The 1950s mark another lull in the fortunes of narrative literary journalism,
although, as in the 1920s, it never entirely disappeared and The New Yorker and
Esquire magazines were two of its most important venues at this time. Among the
form’s practitioners during this period were Lillian Ross, A.J. Liebling, Mary
McCarthy, Meyer Berger, and, again, Joseph Mitchell.
The “New” Journalism. The 1960s usher in the third most important period of the
form since it emerged after the Civil War, the century in between serving then as a
kind of incubation period for the genre’s maturation. As perhaps the most memo-
rable period, it continues to cast a long shadow over contemporary practice, which
to some extent is still judged according to the “new” journalism.
The genre would be called the “new” journalism because its earlier history was
largely forgotten, and to many it did indeed seem new. The origin of the expression
“new” journalist as applied to this period is not entirely clear. It has been attributed
to Pete Hamill, a sometime “new” journalist and part of the movement, who
attempted in the mid-1960s to characterize the journalistic trend. Once again, it
appeared at a time of considerable social turmoil in the United States, although not
necessarily economic as was true of the earlier periods. This was the time of the
Cold War, fear of nuclear annihilation, political assassinations, racial strife,
increased illicit drug use, changing sexual mores, and the Vietnam War and the mass
protests it prompted. Once again “objective” journalism proved inadequate for
trying to fathom the complexity of—and the humanity caught up in—those events.
Gay Talese, one of the first of the “new” journalists and sometimes considered its
godfather, detected this when he observed, “The New Journalism, though often
reading like fiction, is not fiction. It is, or should be, as reliable as the most reliable
reportage although it seeks a larger truth than is possible through the mere compi-
lation of verifiable facts” (Talese [1970] 1993, xii). Thus he took aim at the inade-
quacies of a strictly “factual” journalism. So did Michael Herr, whose Dispatches is
a collection of articles he wrote on the Vietnam War. He observed of that war, “The
press got all the facts (more or less): it got too many of them. But it never found a
way to report meaningfully about death, which of course was really what it was all
about” (Herr 1991, 214–15).
Besides Talese and Herr, some of the major writers of literary journalism during
this period were Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion,
Norman Mailer, John McPhee, Richard Rhodes, Joe Eszterhas, and Sara Davidson.
576 LITERARY JOURNALISM

Unlike the 1930s, however, much of their work appeared in mainstream magazines
and increasingly in book form, reflecting the genre’s greater cultural acceptance.
Magazines included, among others, the New Yorker and Esquire again, the Village
Voice, Rolling Stone, New York, Playboy, and the Saturday Evening Post.
Among watershed book-length efforts are Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966)
and Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test (1968). What we detect in them
are challenges to societal assumptions in order to understand the cultural “other.”
Capote engaged in an assault on the American Dream by attempting to empatheti-
cally understand the psychologies of two killers who murdered the archetypal white
American family. The book appeared to considerable critical acclaim, in part
because Capote claimed he had invented a new genre, the “nonfiction novel.” As we
understand now, he did not, but at the time it did seem new because of the lack of
recognition of the genre earlier in the century. Although In Cold Blood is still
considered a classic, it is a flawed one because evidence has emerged that some
scenes in the book were invented. In other words, they are fiction. Still, the volume
is considered fundamentally true and factual in the sense that the characters and
experiences portrayed once existed.
Wolfe’s Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test takes as its theme the counterculture of the
1960s. He accompanies the novelist Ken Kesey and a group of friends called the Merry
Pranksters on a journey across the country in an old school bus painted colorfully in
psychedelic designs. Often, they are smoking marijuana and tripping on LSD and other
hallucinogenic drugs on their journey. To staid, white middle-class Americans, the
book served as a similar challenge to the shibboleth of the American Dream.
Wolfe has been characterized as the journalist most completely identified with the
“new” journalism. In part this is because he created a critical furor with his
linguistic pyrotechnics that seemed to pose a taunt to advocates of standard English
usage, over-using, for example, expressive punctuation and onomatopoeia, such as the
vocal imitation of a speeding car: “Ggghhzzzzzzzhhhhhhggggggzzzzzzzeeeeeong!”
(Wolfe 1965, 129) The result is baroque in its exaggeration. What also attracted
attention to Wolfe was his eye for phenomena that reflected and marked the ten-
sions, ironies, and existence of subcultures, characteristics described as “status
details” or “symbolic details.” These could include an individual’s gestures, as well
as styles of furniture and clothing, and were often used for satiric effect. In 1973
Wolfe also published The New Journalism, an anthology of examples from the
period. Aside from the examples, the work is perhaps more important because it
included an essay of the same name, “The New Journalism,” by Wolfe that became
a kind of coda for the genre for many of the aspiring literary journalists of the
period.
Thompson deserves to be singled out because he was a practitioner of what came
to be called “gonzo” journalism, or a journalism that consistently challenged taken-
for-granted assumptions about what constitutes “reality” by engaging in outrage.
He did Wolfe one better because his journalism often was drug induced and he
irreverently challenged many sacred American cultural themes, thus infuriating the
cultural status quo. One example is Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,
which appeared in 1971. The term “gonzo” was coined by journalist Bill Cardoso
in 1970, who characterized Thompson’s notorious and over-the-top journalism as
“pure gonzo” (Weingarten 2006, 235).
After the “New” Journalism. By the mid-1970s the “new” journalism no longer seemed
so new and was entering a more stable middle age. It was also less noticed, perhaps,
 LITERARY JOURNALISM 577

and as a result it would be easy to conclude that it had waned as it had in the 1920s
and 1950s. This would be a mistake, however, and an understandable one because
what had changed was that much of the social turmoil subsided after the end of the
Vietnam War. What was gone by the late 1970s was the edge that whetted the social
appetite for trying to better understand cultural “others” in a turbulent world.
Another reason why it appeared to wane is that until very recently literary
journalism remained largely unstudied by the academy: It was not considered polit-
ically correct either as journalism or literature. Except for a small group of
pioneering scholars of the genre located in the journalism, literature, and American
studies disciplines, it was largely ignored because of the difficulty of negotiating the
divides between those disciplines, particularly between journalism and English.
Nonetheless, literary journalism continued to be practiced and the “new”
journalism served as an important inspiration for younger generations of writers.
Among them was Jon Franklin. Franklin is notable because he was one of the few
newspaper journalists to see the potential of publishing the form in the daily report.
In 1979, writing for the Baltimore Evening Sun, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his series
“Frightening Journey Through the Tunnels of the Brain,” an account of a risky
brain operation in which Franklin witnesses the patient dying on the operating
table. Eventually, and prompted in part by his public advocacy, daily newspapers
would, by the 1990s, take an increasing interest in publishing a narra-descriptive
journalism, a subject to be explored later.
Another who saw the potential of literary journalism in newspapers is Barry
Newman, who joined The Wall Street Journal in the 1970s and carved out a niche
for himself as a narrativist who had to limit his stories to no more than 2,000 words.
As a roving foreign correspondent for the Journal, he wrote on subjects as varied as
maggot farmers and bullfighters.
Although the seeds had been planted, then, for newspapers to publish more such
work, literary journalists continued to publish books as well as articles in maga-
zines. Tracy Kidder, who is still publishing today, first achieved considerable
national recognition when he won the Pulitzer Prize for his book, The Soul of a New
Machine. Published in 1981, his is an account of engineers engaged in inventing a
new computer. Since then Kidder has published a number of critically acclaimed
books of literary journalism, including House (1985), Among Schoolchildren
(1989), Old Friends (1993), and Home Town (1999). To demonstrate the eclectic
nature of his work, they are, briefly, and in the same order, accounts of building a
house, the daily lives of elementary school children in the classroom, life in a nursing
home, and life in a small town. As much of Kidder’s work demonstrates, the
ordinary and prosaic can be just as promising as topics for literary journalism as the
extraordinary and unusual.
Other notable literary journalists during this period are Mark Kramer, Mark
Singer, Jane Kramer, Richard West, Ron Rosenbaum, Ted Conover, and Bill Barich.
Trends and Themes. The work of the current generation has been characterized
as “the new new journalism” from a book of the same name by Robert Boynton
who suggests that such writing differs today from the earlier “new” journalism
because the contemporary “movement’s achievements are more reportorial than
literary. . . . The days in which nonfiction writers test the limits of language and
form have largely passed” (Boynton 2005, vii). The emphasis, then, is more on
“how” such practitioners get the story, not on linguistic style as exemplified by
such “new” journalists as Wolfe, Didion, and Thompson.
578 LITERARY JOURNALISM

But if the current generation is less inclined to literary flourish, one issue that has
emerged is how “literary” such works are and the corollary of how memorable they
will prove to be. A criticism that has been raised about such work is that it tends to
be more ethnographic, sociological, or anthropological than such work in the past,
which is not entirely surprising given literary journalism’s intent is to examine the
cultural “other,” no matter how problematic that may prove as an act of linguistic
representation. That social scientific ambition is, moreover, not surprising when one
considers that in the formative years of a “factual” journalism (the 1890s), and in
the formative years of “objective” journalism (the 1920s), the journalism commu-
nity viewed itself as engaged in a scientific profession. That legacy still influences
journalism today, including literary journalism.
One example of a work perceived as having social scientific attributes is Conover’s
Newjack. Conover is described as possessing “a sociologist’s eye for detail” by the
publisher on the back of the book’s dust jacket. Similarly, a Newsweek reviewer
characterized LeBlanc’s 2003 Random Family as “literary anthropology” (Agovino
2003, 68). Elsewhere the book has been characterized as “ethnographic” (Hartsock
2004, 193–194). By comparing their works to the social sciences, in other words
investing them with the scientific ambition to eliminate ambiguity in meaning, the
issue remains as to what may be lost in terms of literary qualities, given that litera-
ture is about the possibilities of meaning and not just about locking up meaning with
the kind of unambiguous scientific precision associated with, say, a sociological text.
To utilize one common definition of the literary, what about such work will “tease
us out of thought”—this because of a deliberate linguistic ambiguity or resonance to
suggest possibilities of meaning, much as one would find, say, in Shakespeare. Only
time will tell if such recent works are as memorable as those of the period of the
“new”journalism, when there was considerably more experimentation with
language.
Another consequence has been to further blur the already blurred boundaries
between literary journalism in which the narrative and descriptive modalities
predominate, on the one hand, and, on the other, the broader “narrative
journalism” discussed earlier. That’s because many of the authors characterized as
“new new” journalists, even as the moniker betrays they are part of the “new”
journalism legacy, also engage in writing that is more expository at the expense of
dominating “narra-descriptive” modalities. In other words, the writing tends to
engage more in narrative summary and explication to make for a kind of
“journalism-history,” or it simply tends to be more expository in the tradition of
conventional feature writing.
An example is Lawrence Wright’s 2006 The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the
Road to 9/11. It is largely a summary narrative on the rise of Islamic terrorism and
is integrated with essaylike analysis, much like a conventional history. Except for the
chapter on the Boeing 747s crashing into the World Trade Center, the book for the
most part lacks the sustained scene-by-scene descriptive construction to which
Wolfe alluded. Such a “journalism-history” does not attempt to demarcate where
journalism leaves off and history begins given the inherently problematic and
ambiguous nature of such boundaries as reflected in the old adage that “journalism
is the first draft of history.”
The other variation can be found in the sophisticated and complex feature
writing often found in The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly that may make
 LITERARY JOURNALISM 579

a more limited use of the descriptive techniques associated with literary journal-
ism. An example is Ron Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler: The Search for the
Origins of His Evil (1998). Occasionally, the book engages in the kind of scenic
description associated with literary journalism, but it is not sustained, which is the
hallmark of literary journalism at least as the term has been applied in the past.
Instead, the expository mode predominates. Similarly, conventional feature writ-
ing is written largely in an expository mode framed by narrative elements. Often, it
drafts brief descriptive sketches (presented sequentially in narrative form) to
illustrate the expository point. Description then becomes only a handmaiden in
support of exposition, the latter of which remains the dominant mode for such a
discourse.
But this is why the boundaries of literary journalism are not fixed and may indeed
be shifting. Either they are enlarging to include such variations, or the narrative
“journalism-histories” and the narrative-expository emphasis in complex and sophis-
ticated feature writing are close siblings to a narra-descriptive literary journalism
within a larger “narrative journalism.” Only time and cultural usage will tell.
But even if it continues to be viewed as a form of journalism that reads like a
novel or short story, literary journalism is a practice that is likely to endure for the
foreseeable future. This is because the genre tells a story in the conventional sense—
starting with a complication that intrigues the reader, proceeding through a series of
developmental actions, and concluding with a resolution to the complication
(although not necessarily a happy ending). Thus literary journalism helps us to
understand, if only vicariously, how others live, think, and die in the real world of
phenomenon, this in a way that “objective” journalism cannot. Whether it is in
times of cultural turmoil or cultural peace, there will always be a need to better
understand the nature of those who are different from us.

Selected Authors
Magazines and Books. The contemporary period of literary journalism finds practi-
tioners continuing to ply their art in books and magazines. One signal event in the
improving fortunes of literary journalism is that the venerable Atlantic Monthly
magazine announced in 2005 that it would cease to publish fiction (an area in which
it had excelled for more than 150 years) on a regular basis. In its place, it promised
to publish more “long-form narrative reporting,” its term for a broad narrative
journalism that includes literary journalism (Wyatt 2005). Today The Atlantic
Monthly is one of the standard bearers among magazines to publish literary
journalism,
In addition to The Atlantic Monthly, other magazines that publish such writing
include the perennial New Yorker, Outside, and GQ. Writers for magazines often
expand their short-form literary journalism into books. For example, Susan
Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (1998), an account of an obsessed lover (and thief) of
rare orchids in Florida, first appeared as an article in the New Yorker. Similarly, Jon
Krakauer’s Into the Wild (1996) and Into Thin Air (1997) initially appeared as arti-
cles in the magazine Outside. The first is about a young man who starves to death
when his efforts to live in the wilderness of Alaska go awry. The second is about an
expedition to climb Mt. Everest that results in death during a horrific snow storm
on the slopes.
580 LITERARY JOURNALISM

But another development has also emerged. As often as not, authors now write
books from the outset and not initially magazine pieces. As the books near comple-
tion they may then be excerpted in magazines. For example, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
is the author of Random Family (2003), which is an account of uneducated and
unemployed Latinas and Latinos attempting to survive in New York City’s barrios.
The book was excerpted in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine.
Still another work conceived first as a book and not as a magazine article is
Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action (1995), an account of a lawsuit against chemical
companies who were sued on civil charges that their toxic wastes poisoned children
in the community of Woburn, Massachusetts.
Among other contemporary exemplars of the form is Alex Kotlowitz, the
author of There Are No Children Here (1991), which is an account of two African
American brothers growing up—and surviving—in the housing projects of
Chicago. He followed this in 1998 with The Other Side of the River, an account
of two neighboring Michigan towns divided by a river, the death of a black
teenager, and how long-held misperceptions and attitudes undermine race rela-
tions. Another author is Lawrence Weschler, who has published several collections
of magazine pieces, as well as Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (1995), which is
an account of scientific oddities at the storefront “Museum of Jurassic Oddities”
in Los Angeles.
Since the advent of 2000 notable examples of literary journalism—or a “narra-
descriptive” journalism—include the following publications.
Ted Conover published Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing in 2000. Conover, who had
already established his credentials as a literary journalist with Rolling Nowhere: a
Young Man’s Adventures Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes (1984) and
Coyotes: A Journey Through the World of America’s Illegal Aliens (1989), demon-
strates the extent to which literary journalists will immerse themselves in their
material in order to write authoritatively about it. In Newjack he takes a job as a
prison guard at the infamous maximum-security Sing Sing prison on the banks of
the Hudson River above New York City in order to provide a cultural portrait about
life on the inside, both for prisoners and their guards.
In 2001 Michael Lewis published Next: The Future Just Happened, which is an
account of how the Internet has challenged the hierarchical world of top-down
knowledge. He tells his narrative with extensively developed sketches of individuals,
such as 15-year-old Jonathan Lebed, who figured out how to hack into the stock
markets online to engage in stock fraud. Although the volume is largely composed
of such descriptive sketches, it also engages in some extended expository examina-
tions of the issue, illustrating just how fragile the boundaries are between literary
journalism and related narrative journalistic forms. Since Next, Lewis, who usually
writes about the financial world and sports, published Moneyball: The Art of
Winnng an Unfair Game (2003), which recounts how the Oakland Athletics defy
the conventional business wisdom by winning games without paying astronomical
star-athlete salaries.
Richard Preston first gained national fame with The Hot Zone, published in
1994. The book, developed from one of his New Yorker articles, recounts an
outbreak of the Ebola virus among monkeys in a laboratory in Reston, Virginia, and
how it was contained from becoming an infectious disease crisis. He has continued
to write about scientific topics, and in 2002 published The Demon in the Freezer, an
account focusing on smallpox. Despite official pronouncements that smallpox had
 LITERARY JOURNALISM 581

been eradicated in 1979, Preston relates how frozen specimens in a laboratory in

Siberia remain unaccounted for and could be used as a weapon against humans who
no longer receive smallpox vaccinations.
Jane Kramer’s Lone Patriot: The Short Career of an American Militiaman
(2002) recounts the life of a white supremacist who lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Kramer is remarkable because her publication credits go back to the “new”
journalism of the 1960s. In 1963 she published her first book, a collection of her
stories from the Village Voice called Off Washington Square: A Reporter Looks
at Greenwich Village. Thus she has been contributing to the genre for half a
century.
Still other examples include works by Richard Ben Cramer, William Langewiesche,
Daniel Bergner, and, once again, Kidder and Kotlowitz. Cramer published Joe
Dimaggio: The Hero’s Life in 2000. Aside from being an account of the baseball star
written largely in the form of narra-descriptive journalism, it also illustrates once
again how documentary genres can overlap. In this case the account is also an exam-
ple of two topical genres, sports journalism and biography, thus serving as a
cautionary lesson about trying to insist too strongly that documentary genres can be
clearly delineated.
Langewiesche is the author of, among other books, American Ground: Unbuild-
ing the World Trade Center (2002), an account, as the title suggests, of those who
responded to the attack on and collapse of the World Trade Center in New York on
September 11, 2001, and then had the grisly task of removing the remains. In 2003,
Bergner published In the Land of Magic Soldiers, which recounts the savagery of
civil war in the West African country of Sierra Leone. Also in 2003, Kidder
published Mountains Beyond Mountains, an account of an American doctor’s
efforts to provide medical care for AIDS patients in Haiti. Meanwhile, Kotlowitz
published Never a City So Real (2004), a personal account, or series of accounts, of
everyday ordinary people who are representative of the Chicago not normally seen
by outsiders.
As these examples illustrate, the subject matter is eclectic, and indeed covers the
range of human experience.
Newspapers. Perhaps the most remarkable contemporary development in the area
of literary journalism has been that since the 1990s daily newspapers have become
more receptive to publication of the form. Except in individual newspaper columns,
narrative literary journalism appears to have been largely (although not entirely)
absent from newspapers through the course of much of the twentieth century. One
notable exception was the old New York Herald-Tribune, which had encouraged
the form in the 1920s and 1930s, and again in the 1960s. Also, its Sunday maga-
zine, New York (not to be confused with the New Yorker) survived the newspaper’s
bankruptcy and demise in 1967 to become a showplace in its own right for the
form. But as noted, it was in the 1970s that Barry Newman and Jon Franklin began
publishing literary journalism in their respective newspapers. Thus, in the aftermath
of the “new” journalism, some editors and reporters at newspapers sensed the
possibilities of the form for the daily report.
This has important consequences for where we are today because the most
dramatic growth for this kind of “story” journalism appears to be in newspapers.
Just how much will stand the test of time as “literary” remains to be seen. But
certainly what we can detect are ambitious efforts to write journalism that are
narrative and descriptive in their modalities.
582 LITERARY JOURNALISM

The reasons for why newspapers are turning to this form are not difficult to
understand. Increasingly since the 1920s, newspapers have had to share the media
market with newer forms of media, starting with cinema, radio, and recorded music
and then broadcast television, cable TV, and most recently the Worldwide Web. This
has meant a decreasing portion of media market for newspapers. When one consid-
ers the inherently alienating nature of “objective” news reporting, one can see the
attraction of a more “reader-friendly” literary journalism that elicits empathy from
the reader and thus engages the reader on a more personal level.
Moreover, a small group of practicing journalists has taken the lead in promoting
publication of narrative literary journalism in newspapers. Perhaps most notable are
Franklin; Managing Editor Jack Hart of the Portland Oregonian; Roy Peter Clark
of the Poynter Institute; The Associated Press’s features editor, Bruce DeSilva; and
Mark Kramer of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University.
Aside from winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for his literary journalism, Franklin
founded Writer-L in the 1990s, which is an online paid chat group that discusses
literary journalism and has included Pulitzer Prize winners among its participants.
Moreover, he is the author of Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfic-
tion by a Two-Time Pulitzer Prize Winner, which has been characterized as “iconic”
and a “bible” for aspiring narrative literary journalists (Hartsock 2007).
Hart of the Oregonian has nurtured his reporters to win Pulitzer Prizes for their
narratives and since the 1990s has been one of the most vocal advocates of such
work, writing frequently in trade journals about how newspapers could benefit from
the genre, which he prefers to call simply “narrative journalism.” Clark, vice presi-
dent of the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, which is dedicated to
providing ongoing professional education to journalists, published a manifesto in
The Quill, the journal of the Society of Professional Journalists, in the mid-1990s
calling for more such writing in newspapers, and he continues to actively promote
the genre to this day. DeSilva was hired by The Associated Press for the express
purpose of encouraging this kind of writing at the wire service. Finally, Mark
Kramer, whose publication history is in magazines and books, established the
annual Narrative Conference at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.
The conference has provided an important venue attended largely by newspaper
reporters and editors to learn how to write narrative journalism, again, his preferred
usage for the form.
The results are that since the millennium newspapers around the country have
been publishing more “story” journalism on a scale not seen since the beginning of
the twentieth century. This is not to suggest that all newspapers are doing so. But
that some are is still remarkable considering how absent traditional narrative story-
telling had been from newspapers. A sampling of papers includes the St. Petersburg
(Florida) Times, the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The
Boston Globe, the Asheville Times-Citizen, the Raleigh News and Observer, the Des
Moines Register, the Baltimore Sun, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and the
Seattle Times.
To be sure, newspapers with national reputations also publish examples of
narrative literary journalism, namely, The New York Times, the Washington Post,
and the Los Angeles Times. With their extensive resources, this is perhaps to be
expected. But that newspapers without national readerships give reporters the time
and other resources to write narratives reflects the value increasingly placed on
publication of the form.
 LITERARY JOURNALISM 583

One of the most notable examples was Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down.
Bowden initially wrote it as a series that was published in 1997 in the Philadelphia
Inquirer, where he was a reporter. Eventually it was expanded into a book as well
as made into a feature-length movie.
Among other exemplars in newspapers can be included Tom Hallman Jr., of the
Portland Oregonian. His series, “The Boy Behind the Mask,” published in 2000,
won the Pulitzer Prize. The series is about a boy who suffers from a disfiguring facial
abnormality and requires a risky operation. Hallman’s relationship with Jack Hart,
who was his coach on the story at the Oregonian, has been characterized “as the
most innovative editor/writer team in America, which is why journalists everywhere
should pay close attention to their work” (Clark 2003).
Another exemplar of the form in the newspaper field is Thomas French of the
St. Petersburg Times in Florida, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for his “Angels &
Demons” series about how authorities tracked down the murderer of an Ohio mother
and her two teenaged daughters in the Tampa Bay area.
Still another is Sonia Nazario of the Los Angeles Times. Her Enrique’s Journey
series reveals the lengths, once again, to which literary journalists will go to
attempt to reconstruct a story. The Pulitzer Prize-winning series, published in the
Times in 2002 and later published as a book, recounts the eight attempts by
“Enrique,” a 17-year-old Honduran, to travel illegally to the United States to be
reunited with his mother, a passage that an unusually high number of Central
American children and teenagers make to be reunited with parents who immigrate
illegally to the United States. She left him when he was 5 to find work in the United
States so that she could send back money to support him and his sister. Enrique
rides freight trains through Mexico to get to the American border. Seven times he
was caught, arrested, and returned to Honduras by Mexican police. At one point
he was nearly beaten to death by gang members who prey on illegal migrants
traveling through Mexico. Finally, on his eighth attempt, he succeeds in crossing
the Rio Gande illegally and eventually reunites with his mother. In reconstructing
the story, Nazario took the same route as Enrique and rode atop freight trains
herself along with a photographer from the Los Angeles Times, doing so at no
small personal risk.
Even The Associated Press has been encouraging reporters to engage in
journalistic “storytelling,” their preferred term for literary journalism. Among
them, Helen O’Neill has carved out a niche as a narrativist and in 2005 won an
American Society of Newspaper Editors award for excellence in journalism with her
2004 series “The Kidnapping of Grandma Braun.” The story recounts the kidnap-
ping and rescue of an elderly grandmother in Wisconsin. What makes The
Associated Press’s encouragement of narrative literary journalism so remarkable is
that the world’s largest wire service and news gathering organization has long been
viewed as “the bastion of hard news leads and for-the-record coverage” (Grimes
1997, 28). Clearly that bastion has been breached.
Some of the other accomplished newspaper reporters who write in the form are
Bob Batz, Paula Bock, Anne Hull, Lisa Pollack, and Mary Miller. Medical topics—
a patient, for example, who needs a rare surgical operation—seem to be one
common theme, thus following in a tradition established by Jon Franklin. Other
topics include murder (again), as well as homelessness, high school marching bands,
adolescence, and mine disasters—in effect the vast experience of life in its many
different shades and colors.
584 LITERARY JOURNALISM

Bibliography
Agovino, Michael J. “I Wanted to be Here All of the Time.” Newsweek (10 February
2003): 68.
Bergner, Daniel. In the Land of Magic Soldiers. New York: Picador, 2003.
Boynton, Robert S. The New New Journalism. New York: Vintage, 2005.
Clark, Roy Peter. “Tell Me a Story.” Poynter Online (12 December 2003). Available from:
http://www.poynter org/content/content_view.asp?id=51437.
Cramer, Richard Ben. Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life. New York: Simon and Schuster,
2000.
Grimes, Charlotte. “Rewired.” American Journalism Review (October 1997): 28.
Harr, John. A Civil Action. New York: Random House, 1995.
Hartsock, John C. “Caught Between the Rhetoric of the Scene and the Rhetoric of the
Polemic: A Review of Random Family.” Points of Entry 2.1 (2004): 192–195.
———. “It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: Newspaper Reporters Rediscover the Art of Nar-
rative Literary Journalism and Their Own Epistemological Heritage.” Prose Studies
(2007).
Herr, Michael. Dispatches. New York: Vintage, 1991.
Kidder, Tracy. Among Schoolchildren. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990.
———. Home Town. New York: Pocket, 1999.
———. House. New York: Mariner, 1999.
———. Mountains Beyond Mountains. New York: Random House, 2003.
———. Old Friends. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.
Kotlowitz, Alex. Never a City So Real. New York: Crown, 2004.
———. The Other Side of the River. New York: Nan A. Talese, 1998.
Krakauer, John. Into the Wild. New York: Villard, 1996.
———. Into Thin Air. New York: Villard, 1997.
Kramer, Jane. Lone Patriot: The Short Career of an American Militiaman. New York:
Pantheon, 2002.
Langewiesche, William. American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center. New York:
North Point Press, 2002.
LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole. Random Family. New York: Scribner, 2003.
Lewis, Michael. Next: The Future Just Happened. New York: Norton, 2001.
Nazario, Sonia. Enrique’s Journey. New York: Random House, 2006.
Orlean, Susan. The Orchid Thief. New York: Random House, 1998.
Preston, Richard. The Hot Zone. New York: Random House, 1994.
Rosenbaum, Ron. Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil. New York:
Random House, 1998.
Steffens, Lincoln. The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens. New York: Harcourt, 1931.
Talese, Gay. [1970] Fame and Obscurity. New York: Ivy Books, 1993.
Weber, Ronald. Some Sort of Artistic Excitement. In The Reporter as Artist: A Look at
the New Journalism Controversy. Ronald Weber, ed. New York: Hastings House,
1974.
Weingarten, Marc. The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight. New York: Crown, 2006.
Weschler, Lawrence. Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder. New York: Pantheon, 1995.
Wolfe, Tom. Last American Hero. In The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.
New York: Farrar, 1965.
———. The New Journalism. In The New Journalism: With an Anthology. Tom Wolfe and
E.W. Johnson, eds. New York: Harper, 1973.
Wright, Lawrence. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. New York: Knopf,
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 LITERARY JOURNALISM 585

Further Reading
Barringer, Felicity. “Journalism’s Greatest Hits.” New York Times (1 March 1999): C1;
Connery, Thomas B., ed. A Sourcebook of American Literary Journalism: Representative
Writers in an Emerging Genre. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992; Hartsock, John C. A His-
tory of American Literary Journalism: The Emergence of a Modern Narrative Form.
Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000; Sims, Norman, ed. Literary Journal-
ism in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
JOHN C. HARTSOCK
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M

MAGICAL REALISM
The contemporary reader of magical realism by American authors—here meaning
authors writing and/or originating from the United States—may not anticipate such
an encounter or, indeed, recognize the experience for what it is. Although the United
States shares in common with Latin America many of the seeds from which the
literary mode sprang, critics and readers alike still ascribe to magical realism a
decidedly Latin American sensibility. Yet contemporary American authors use the
mode as a means of addressing such issues as consumerism and popular culture, as
well as for challenging the veracity of history and revising notions of truth.
Definition. Most readers approaching a novel or short fiction described as “magic
realism” anticipate the presence of something “unnatural” or magical, but evidence
of the supernatural in and of itself does not constitute magical realism. In magical
realism, neither the natural nor the supernatural is compromised. The author cre-
ates a supernatural as ordinary or normal as the everyday, a supernatural that ulti-
mately does not stand out for the reader. Critic Amaryll Chanady works toward a
concrete and applicable rubric against which texts can be evaluated as magical real-
ism. Chanady offers the following criteria for magical realism. First, it is character-
ized by two perspectives, one based on a “rational view of reality and the other on
the acceptance of the supernatural as part of everyday life” (Chanady 1985, 21).
Next is the fact that “the supernatural is not presented as problematic”; characters
and narration alike perceive it as normal (Chanady 1985, 23). Finally, Chanady
argues, magical realism lacks “judgments about the veracity of the events and the
authenticity of the world view expressed in the text,” so that the supernatural world as
the author presents it is not subordinate or the “real” world privileged (Chanady
1985, 29–30). The magical realist text makes no attempt to invoke the uncertainty
that would challenge a reader’s decision to believe or not believe in the world
described as it is in the text. Thus, the supernatural cannot be explained away—as
a miracle, for example, or a possible illusion—or the equality between the natural
and unnatural would be imbalanced. A final required aspect is that in order for the
588 MAGICAL REALISM

supernatural and the real to coexist without hierarchy or questions, they must be in
balance. A magical moment in a text—even one that conforms to Chanady’s
criteria—cannot be enough to warrant the text’s classification as magical realism.
Franz Roh first coined “magic realism” in 1925 for post-expressionist art, but by
the late 1920s the term had already crossed over into literature. Authors Alejo
Carpentier, Arturo Uslar Pietri, and Miguel Angel Asturias and critics Angel Flores
and Luis Leal were among those responsible for labeling magical realism as a dis-
tinctly Latin American phenomenon. Carpentier coined the phrase lo real maravil-
loso in the preface to The Kingdom of This World (1949), privileging a Latin
American (or Caribbean or even Cuban) sensibility he believed unduplicated else-
where in the world. Yet only after the 1960s literary event known as the “Boom,”
when Latin American literature exploded onto the world scene, would magical real-
ism become a marketable literary commodity—a simultaneous Latin American and
literary happening. The text most influential both in the Boom and in Latin Ameri-
can magical realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude, brought Gabriel García
Márquez international fame. At the same time, the literary mode’s sudden popular-
ity and Latin America’s seemingly exclusive claims gave rise to broad generalizations
that still threaten the term’s denotation and application.
Perhaps the greatest threat to magical realist criticism in the years since critics
such as Leal and Flores first borrowed it for literary applications—even greater a
risk than the threat of reductive geographic constraints—is this tendency to misap-
propriate the term for contemporary literature without first establishing a decisive
and applicable denotation. One failing of critics and publishers alike has been to use
the term loosely—begging the question as they market texts or even label entire col-
lections “magical realism”—and so inaccurately that other modes, genres, and even
religious beliefs are subsumed under the heading. To this day, “magical realism”
appears on book jackets to connote Latin American origins or to “explain” the
inclusion of the supernatural or miraculous rather than to categorize a text that cre-
ates what critic Joe Benevento describes as a “hybrid” of the everyday with the
supernatural. The end result has been that many scholars and readers fail to recog-
nize the mode or, worse, begin assigning it with impunity to fantasy and folklore,
myth and science fiction, and blurring the lines in between.
Although the supernatural in literature rarely defies description, both magical
realism and any number of other modes or sub-genres suffer when this literary mode
is misidentified. Inevitably, other supernatural texts privilege either the real or mag-
ical worlds they create. Fairy tale, science fiction, horror, and fantasy, for example,
create imaginary places—physical spaces defined not by the rules of the natural
world as we know it—and conform to often rigid conventions or to explanations
that explain away the supernatural altogether. Fairy tales, for example, often begin
with the formulaic “Once upon a time,” letting readers know that the rules of real-
ity no longer apply to the actions of the text. Legends and lore function as sites of
communal knowledge or superstition and operate under similar systems of order.
For instance, stories of vampires or of other supernatural creatures generally abide
by a set of rules for the supernatural: we know that a silver bullet kills a werewolf
and thus we can often explain away or mediate for the supernatural events in works
with werewolves.
In literary terms, magical realism’s closest European relatives are perhaps surreal-
ism and the fantastic. Surrealism has no interest in portraying a realistic world; that
divorce from reality is made manifest in an exploration of the workings of the mind
 MAGICAL REALISM 589

and, in particular, the subconscious. Like surrealism, the fantastic avoids or dis-
tances reality altogether, though Roger Caillois claims that the fantastic “presup-
poses the solidity of the world but only to ruin it more radically” (qtd. in Durix
1998, 82). The fantastic requires what Tzvetan Todorov describes as “hesitation”
on the part of the reader or characters. Unlike magical realism, the fantastic,
because it does not establish that the supernatural events have or have not taken
place, calls into question whether or not the reader should believe in them.
History. As if magical realism’s bonds with postmodernism and American
Romanticism were not enough to ensure that magical realism could hold its own in
North America, our shared history and postcolonial status with Latin America and
the changing face of the American reading public has augmented its appeal. Magical
realism is a catalyst “for the development of new national and regional literatures”
(Zamora and Faris 1995, 2), a development perhaps best understood by nations
with relatively young literary traditions. The Americas, in sharing a certain cultural
indebtedness to the historical and literary traditions of Europe, also have in com-
mon the goal of independence and distinction from those traditions. Arriving white
Europeans brought much of that unrest upon our “historical selves” by attempting
to superimpose European culture onto the indigenous races they found in or
brought to the Americas. To some extent, though, the U.S. subjugation of the
natives was unusual in that it largely displaced and marginalized indigenous peo-
ples, pushing them ever westward and away from the center, or, in an even more
radical displacement, introduced marginalized groups, such as during slavery. The
Spanish, unlike the Protestants settling on the Eastern shores of the United States,
were more concerned with the inclusive civilizing and conversion of native peoples.
The make-up of the New World, largely through the colonizers’ own doing, is het-
erogeneous rather than homogenous. Of course, not all marginalized groups are
brought to or made out of nations against their wills, as illustrated by the tremen-
dous influx of Latino/a people into the United States. These new arrivals carry with
them their traditions, whether historical, religious, or cultural; in addition, they
transport their language and their literary legacies. As marginalized groups, natives
and immigrants create only slight tremors in the structure of the nations they call
home. Still, together they challenge ideas of national language and culture; out of
their oppression and misfortune spring the tools of change—such as multicultural
and bilingual education, affirmative action, and political correctness. And the fea-
tures of their literary consciousness are slowly being woven together with the tradi-
tional strands of the majority.
Just as the Americas are refining questions of “nation,” they are also either form-
ing or redefining questions of national identity. Literary modes such as magical real-
ism play an important role in the reviewing and revision of self; literature is the
means by which assimilation of different influences is reflected. Because assimilation
can sometimes mean the loss of culture, narrative modes such as magical realism
also constitute a reaction to such potential loss. And because magical realism juxta-
poses the reality of America with other options, it provides an excellent forum for
the marginalized voices in the Americas.
Latin American magical realism began as an outgrowth of and reaction against
Latin American political upheaval and socioeconomic distress. Although the United
States shares at least some of those socioeconomic concerns, the magical realism of
the United States is necessarily something quite different. A relatively stable nation,
with no major overturning of its system of government in the past 230 years, the
590 MAGICAL REALISM

United States reflects a facade of stability, yet magical realism still allows main-
stream and marginalized communities alike to express discontent with oppressive
situations, the political rhetoric of capitalism, and the consumer culture. Such
American magical realist writers as Laurie Foos, Ana Castillo, and Marie Arana
challenge the rhetoric that equates the consumer society with cultural norms by
infusing the consumptions of goods with supernatural qualities. The magical real-
ism of U.S. writers also frequently manifests itself as an extension of the marginal-
ized, the “Other” of Western culture and society, as illustrated by the revision of
accepted religious, historical, and even supernatural beliefs by such marginalized
authors as Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, and Jonathan Safran Foer.
As such, magical realist literature ultimately makes powerful statements about
America as both a consumer culture and the Other in North Atlantic society, but the
foundation of its assertions is primarily social or cultural rather than predominantly
political. If the Boom privileged the white male center of Latin American culture, the
North American counterpart has set out to dethrone the center.
Magical realist authors—and American magical realist authors in particular—are
not writing constantly in the mode. Jeanne Delbaere notes, “Writers do not as a rule
think of themselves as magic realists or write exclusively magic realist works; if the
label fits some of their novels or stories it is usually because what they had to say in
them required that particular form of expression” (Delbaere 1992, 98). Some texts
incorporate particular elements of magical realism but may ultimately fail to sustain
the supernatural in juxtaposition with the real across the whole of the text; other
works provide the acceptable rationale of religious beliefs, counteracting the possi-
bility that the text can be read as magical realism. Yet those who draw upon magi-
cal realism for their short fiction and novels often employ supernatural effects. Thus,
Laurie Foos’s Ex Utero, a feminist take on magical realism, is the only one of her
novels to date that would classify as such. Twinship, her most recent work, is closer
to the surreal, with characters and readers alike questioning the impossible notion
of a woman giving birth to herself, her mother having planted the suggestion in her
desire for a child just like the perfect daughter to whom she gave birth.
Steven Millhauser’s short story “Flying Carpets” (surrounded as it is by a collec-
tion of works closer to the fantastic than to any other mode or genre) seems to call
into question whether or not it could be magical realism. It is, after all, a story about
the sort of “magic” readers expect in fairy tales. Yet Millhauser’s matter-of-fact
description of the narrator’s first maneuvers on the carpet treats the title objects as
little more than glorified go-carts for the boys in his neighborhood. And these details
are balanced against the narration’s skeptical imaginings of anything “out of this
world”: “My father had taught me not to believe stories about Martians and space-
ships, and these tales [about cities in the clouds] were like those stories: even as you
refused to believe them, you saw them, as if the sheer effort of not believing them
made them glow in your mind” (Millhauser 1999, 72). Millhauser lulls his reader
into an easy belief in the most supernatural effect in the story, a “toy” that bores its
young owner when it promises the moon but seems instead to make his world
shrink and that ultimately goes missing, neglected in the attic. The story both calls
into question and romanticizes stories of Martians and floating cities and, in so
doing, leaves us unguarded against flying carpets.
Some North American texts lend themselves easily to a discussion of the magically
real, upholding the precepts for magical realism set forth by Chanady. For example,
such contemporary American texts as Ex Utero, Beloved, Everything Is Illuminated,
 MAGICAL REALISM 591

and Cellophane—despite drastic differences among their authors, tones, settings,

and purposes—provide clearly definable instances of magical realism by writers
practicing in the United States. Other works, perhaps even those frequently
described as magically real, require more extensive justification in order to be
considered as such, particularly texts such as Tropic of Orange and Everything Is
Illuminated, with their very postmodern approaches to storytelling.

Trends and Themes

Consumerism. In a capitalist, consumer culture, the “have-nots” do not live in
remote villages where little interaction between the upper and lower classes takes
place. Instead, daily life continuously emphasizes the differences between the two,
and the popular culture is largely responsible for highlighting for the less-fortunate
the paradox of living in America without living “the American dream.” William
Leach explains that the separation of customer from goods on display behind glass
contributed to the increasingly obscured “difference between the real and the
unreal” in consumerism (Leach 1993, 189). Because even the language Leach uses
to describe the consumer culture is rich with the same rhetoric of magical realism
(where “the difference between the real and the unreal” is blurred), it stands to rea-
son that the narrative mode is appropriated as an effective means for discussing
socioeconomic conditions in the United States. Thus, the American brand of magi-
cal realism dramatizes both the popular culture and the consumer culture in all their
manifestations; in doing so, it challenges the authority of those cultures and their
effects on the American population.
Dreaming in Cuban’s questionable magical realist status results from Garcia’s
almost hesitant use of the supernatural. The fact that, generally, only one or two
characters experience the supernatural at any one time might compromise the
novel’s status as magical realism were it not for Garcia’s intentionally nonlinear
storyline. Certainly, some events also can be accounted for by religion: Felicia’s
dependence on the very traditional, Caribbean spiritual medium of Yoruba offers
several moments that, though supernatural in tone, cannot be considered magical
realism, even when her reliance on the occult fails her. But Garcia also incorporates
other indefinable elements into Dreaming in Cuban, redeeming the magical realism
by interspersing these examples throughout the text: the emotional bond between
Pilar in the United States and her grandmother Celia in Cuba, Jorge’s visits to both
daughter and wife after his death, Celia’s ability to transfer her son’s cancer to her
own breast.
In Cristina Garcia’s novel, even the most culturally marginalized characters rarely
seem at risk of becoming consumed; instead their appetites as U.S. consumers are
perpetually fed, both literally and figuratively. Consider, for example, Lourdes’s
massive consumption of baked goods. Her appetite in the kitchen translates into a
sexual appetite; and the “heavier she got, the more supple she became” (Garcia
1992, 21). Yet because she equates her dieting (during which she eats no solid foods
whatsoever) with transparency, “as if the hard lines of her hulking form were disin-
tegrating,” she loses interest in sex. Only when her “metamorphosis is complete,”
when she can fit into a size-six designer suit, does she begin to eat again. “On Fifth
Avenue, Lourdes stops to buy hot dogs (with mustard, relish, sauerkraut, fried
onions, and ketchup), two chocolate cream sodas, a potato knish, lamb shish kebabs
with more onions, a soft pretzel, and a cup of San Marino cherry ice. Lourdes eats,
592 MAGICAL REALISM

eats, eats, like a Hindu goddess with eight arms, eats, eats, eats, as if famine were
imminent” (Garcia 1992, 174).
As opposed to the literal consumption in Garcia’s text, Ex Utero transforms the
consumer culture into the impetus for (and a menace against) the magical realism of
the text. Foos refigures the shopping mall as the site of loss of womanhood for the
main character. “Somehow, in her quest to achieve a versatile wardrobe, she’d lost
her womb, the way some people misplace car keys or a pair of sunglasses” (Foos
1995, 2). Rita’s pursuit at the mall symbolizes the stereotypical female desire in our
consumer shopper, the desire to “shop ’til you drop”—only in this instance the
“dropping” refers to Rita’s uterus rather than to Rita herself. Shopping, the con-
sumption of goods, and consumers themselves all play important roles in the cre-
ation and perpetuation of the consumer cycle.
Popular Culture. Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban illustrates ways in which the consumer
culture and the popular culture commingle. For Garcia, what Cubans import from
the United States is as important as that they import. Cuban characters eat, drink,
wear, and play the United States, even if they are unable or unwilling to live there.
From Jorge’s and Lourdes’s love of baseball to the Coca-Cola they keep in their
fridge, the del Pinos in Dreaming in Cuban are shaped by the popular culture of the
United States as much as they are by their own. But when Jorge and Lourdes embrace
this foreign element, it inspires them to move away from Cuba. Celia, by choosing
to place her loyalty in El Lider, champions Cuba; her country is her spirituality.
Of the many messages that Foos advances in Ex Utero, the most significant in
terms of popular culture is her indictment of the talk show genre. After she loses her
womb, Rita makes the round of the syndicated talk shows, finally ending up on The
Nodderman Show. Rod Nodderman is the quintessential talk show host, and Rita
finds herself in TV Guide, along with Nodderman, whose Nielson ratings skyrocket
after her appearance. One character and fan of the show, Adele,

likes to make love with her boyfriend Leonard while watching talk shows. There is
something about the distant murmur of voices, she says, that never fails to propel her
to orgasm. Some of the syndicated shows do the trick, but it is The Nodderman Show
that drives her into a frenzy. Certain shows have sent her tearing at Leonard’s hair and
begging for commercials. She has been known to scream with pleasure at the opening
strains of game show theme songs, writhing on the bed from the spinning of the Wheel
of Fortune. (Foos 1995, 33)

But her sympathy for Rita’s plight causes Adele’s vagina literally to seal shut, and
not even Leonard’s hammering, drilling, and chiseling can reopen it. A third central
figure in the text, Lucy, expresses her sympathy for Rita through constant menstru-
ation. When reporters follow her trail of blood to her apartment, they pass unan-
swered notes under the door: “We just want a few shots of you bleeding, the notes
say, or a couple of quotes about menstruation. Why won’t you give us that much?”
(Foos 1995, 101). Women are not the only casualties of the media frenzy. Marty, a
shoe salesman who cannot keep red pumps in stock after Rita’s appearance on the
talk show, thinks “perhaps it is the constant bombardment of wombs by the media
that has driven him to [an] insatiable lust” (Foos 1995, 75). Ex Utero equates pop-
ular culture or “the boob tube” with both the female reproductive system and sex-
ual excitement; the novel’s supernatural elements become a pawn in the production
and reproduction of mass media, daytime television, and femininity.
 MAGICAL REALISM 593

The women in Ex Utero (whose bodies have rebelled against them) and in So Far
From God (who gravitate toward rebellion) become media icons in what has
become an all-too-familiar response to tragedy and personal misfortune. Castillo’s
characters experience a very traditional set of supernatural occurrences in extremely
unconventional ways. Castillo references resurrection, saints, curanderas, and even
La Llorona in such original ways that the supernatural can no longer be explained
away by the religion that supposedly produces it. Foos insists that the reader not
only accept that her main characters’ sexual organs have “closed up shop,” but also
that the corresponding effects on the male characters are immediate and drastic.
Drawing upon the everyday settings of the television studio and the shopping mall,
Foos directly implants the supernatural into the ideological constraints of North
America, restrictions that typically guard against the representation of the super-
natural as anything other than a ghost story.
The temptation for some readers of magical realist fiction is to rely on more tra-
ditional or popular claims to explain away the supernatural elements in the texts.
One popular attempt at contextualizing Morrison’s novel Beloved has been to refig-
ure it as a ghost story; in her own discussions of the work, Morrison herself
describes it as such. Yet Beloved’s continual presence, along with the other super-
natural events in the novel, bumps up against but does not consume the natural
aspects of the story. Her return encompasses many possibilities, and her primary
effect on both the implied reader and the characters in the story is not to elicit hor-
ror or suspense. Beloved functions as the site for many histories, rather than just
one; ultimately, she embodies magical realism.
Truth and History. Returning to the origin of things, finding the “true” history and
making meaning of it, seems a constant task for American magical realism. Because
it delves into the historical, social, mythical, individual, and collective levels of
human reality (Hancock 1986, 47), magical realism offers new ways of exploring
literature, but it also offers a space where truth can be confronted, challenged, or
even changed. Beloved is perhaps the best example of such revisions. Beloved’s rec-
ollections of the “other side” are the supernatural reflection of the South (and of the
Middle Passage spawned by the South’s commodification of black flesh) in the text.
Sethe’s house on Bluestone Road is the middle ground, the only place in the text
where the two realms meet. The specter of Beloved seducing Paul D and torturing
Sethe pale in comparison to Paul D’s earlier subjugation or Sethe’s victimization at
the hands of the young white boys who steal her milk. Because we see slavery in
such a light, because Morrison forces us to deal with hatred and racism and evil,
two things happen for the reader: we can forgive Sethe’s actions, and we can accept
Beloved’s presence as easily as the main characters do. After all, this spirit plaguing
the text, comparatively, is neither fantastic nor terrifying. If history is the privilege
of the oppressor, then revision of history, Morrison suggests, is the purview of the
oppressed.
The plague of truth in Cellophane recalls the insomnia plague in One Hundred
Years of Solitude and demonstrates one of the ways in which Marie Arana manip-
ulates what is “true” through magical realism. Even before the plague, Arana’s char-
acters seek truths about the world—Tía Esther’s stories for Victor, Victor’s
unwillingness to remember his past and his obsession with paper, Belén’s escape
from reality into the library housing her books, and Elsa’s wishful translation of the
note she believes the general has given her all conspire to create individual truths for
characters surrounded by the unsympathetic and oftentimes hostile rainforest. And
594 MAGICAL REALISM

because Victor, an engineer, constantly looks for how reality works, he discovers
that technology is a bigger joke on humanity than on nature. In the window of a
shop in Lima, Victor both finds his calling (in a poster of the Peruvian rainforest)
and learns to regard technology and the supernatural on equal footing. “Perhaps, as
with Señor Urrutia’s perpetual-motion machine, an explanation [for the medicine
man’s abilities in delivering Victor’s children or for other rain forest magic] lurked
in the wings. Events only seemed miraculous—one had to look for the science
behind them. . . . Someday he would trace all these circuits and see the truth of the
world clearly” (Arana 2006, 10). Later, his spiritual guide and friend Yorumba tells
him, “There is a difference between the truth of the world and the world as a per-
son sees it. We cannot know the truth” (Arana 2006, 134). Technology fails to pro-
tect Victor’s fanciful and unnatural desire to produce cellophane out of the
rainforest. Victor loses the war against nature and the people living in (rather than
in conflict with) nature; the natives disassemble the machinery and return Floralinda
to the land.
Context and Issues. Critics such as Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wayne Ude
contend that the United States, by looking “to the south,” is actually rediscover-
ing its own influences on the Latin American magical realist tradition. Both
Zamora and Ude cite the American Romantic tradition as a precursor, arguing
that Latin American authors borrowed heavily from romanticism, which freed
itself from the moral and realistic requirements of traditional forms. Ude suggests
that the frontier myth plays a part in the emergence of the North American strain
of magical realism and extends the mode’s family tree to include the Gothic and
folklore traditions as well.
Magical realism has even closer familial ties with postmodernism, another criti-
cal term with Latin American roots. Indeed, innovative postmodern features—
including awareness of the work as a text, or metafiction; multiplicity;
discontinuity; and the erasure of boundaries—are the frequent tools of magical
realists. And both magical realism and postmodernism blur the lines between pop-
ular or mass culture and “high” or literary arts. Still, Romanticism and postmod-
ernism do share their counter-realism with magical realism. Romanticism created
readers who were ready for something new, for authors and texts that would
counter scientific reason. Postmodernism discarded our conventional definitions of
reality and challenged the literary techniques constrained by that reality. Both
paved the way for magical realism’s journey north and, in doing so, prepared read-
ers for the “new” mode.

IS MAGICAL REALISM FOUND ONLY IN LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE?

Until recently, magical realism has been such a geographically bound commodity that it was
difficult to imagine it in terms of literature outside Latin America, much less to apply the
phrase in scholarly criticism of other literatures or, more specifically, to consider American
texts through a magical realist lens.Yet the very features that distinguish magical realism
as an historically situated mode—its postcolonial nature, its shared history with
postmodernism—also keep it from such proprietary claims. Magical realism, as Argentinean
author Jorge Luis Borges suggests, may have germinated in, rather than been imported into,
the United States.
 MAGICAL REALISM 595

Reception. The many thematic capabilities of magical realism converge for the
marginalized text. Issues of consumerism, popular culture, identity, history, revision,
and truth intersect within the worlds of marginalized authors, where the magical
realist mode allows writers to uncover inconsistencies of an American life. As such
writers challenge the terms “mass” or “popular culture,” “identity,” and “his-
tory”—and because majority rules tend not to apply to predominantly diversified
areas such as the Los Angeles of Tropic of Orange—marginalized authors relocate
the mainstream and the margin to a more unified center.
When critic Debra Spark laments the paucity of magical realist works in the
United States, her own difficulties as a writer attempting the mode on American soil
may ultimately hinge on a personal rather than communal difficulty. The American
magical realist author does not work in the mode exclusively, and yet the breadth
of offerings provide rich and convincing truth that the literary mode deserves careful
and continued critical attention.
Selected Authors. In Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything Is Illuminated, the
magical realism revolves around the act of telling truths—whether those events are
factual or not. Chronologically, the tale begins with the discovery that a wagon has
overturned in the river Brod. The location—Trachimbrod—is named for an event
that may not even have caused the death of Trachim, who is merely the rumored
occupant of the wagon. The current-day setting for the work is no less interested in
truthfulness: in the letters Alexander Perchov writes to the character Jonathan
Safran Foer, Alexi weaves a series of not-truths into language that relies on a the-
saurus to present a more engaging—though less, or at least alternately, meaning-
ful—version of Alexi’s own words. He tells Jonathan, “In Russian my ideas are
asserted abnormally well, but my second tongue is not so premium. . . . I fatigued
the thesaurus you presented me, as you counseled me to, when my words appeared
too petite, or not befitting” (Foer 2002, 23).
As Jonathan and Alexi reconstruct the story of Jonathan’s European roots, craft-
ing the novel together, Alexi’s letters reveal that fiction could tell the better story: “I
could hate you! Why will you not permit your grandfather to be in love with the
Gypsy girl, and show her his love? Who is ordering you to write in such a manner?
We have such chances to do good, and yet again and again you insist on evil” (Foer
2002, 240). Soon after, in the same letter, Alexi contends, “I would never command
you to write a story that is as it occurred in the actual, but I would command you
to make your story faithful” (Foer 2002, 240). Alexi’s complaint comes full circle as
he realizes that Jonathan’s narrative will also incorporate a more “actual” version
of his own grandfather’s tale, the horrific version in which Grandfather is accom-
plice to his Jewish friend Hershel’s death in order to save his own family. Alexi’s
preference for the “good” versions of these stories, where the Gypsy girl finds love
with Safran and where Grandfather risks his family’s wellbeing to keep Hershel’s
secret, might ironically create a world in which neither Alexi nor Jonathan was alive
to tell any tale.
Such attempts at revision comprise an equally important theme in contemporary
magical realism. Morrison re-envisions the legacy of slavery incarnate in Beloved.
Alexi actively participates in the process of revising the family history in the Jewish
novel Jonathan is writing. American-Canadian writer Thomas King revises Native
American creation myths, history, and even a classic John Wayne movie in Green
Grass, Running Water. When the Indian characters (already in the act of revising the
white Western canon by taking on iconographic names) Lone Ranger, Hawkeye,
596 MAGICAL REALISM

Robinson Crusoe, and Ishmael view a store owner’s favorite Western, they find
mistakes in the production.

“The next scene,” said Bursum, “used over six hundred extras, Indians and whites.
And five cameras. The director spent almost a month on this one scene before he felt it
was right.”
“He didn’t get it right the first time,” said the Long Ranger.
“But we fixed it for him,” said Hawkeye. (King 1994, 351–352)

These four new “directors” of the movie colorize their version and remove the
cavalry that charges in to save John Wayne. “There at full charge, hundreds of sol-
diers in bright blue uniforms with gold buttons and sashes and stripes, blue-eyed
and rosy-cheeked, came over the last rise./And disappeared [ . . . ]. ‘What the hell,’
said Bursum” (King 1994, 357). Those in the store watch as John Wayne and
Richard Widmark “[pull] the trigger on empty cartridges” and the tide of the bat-
tle turns to favor the Indians. John Wayne looked down and stared stupidly at the
arrow in his thigh, shaking his head in amazement and disbelief as two bullets
ripped through his chest and out the back of his jacket” (King 1994, 358). Bursum’s
response is to stab at the remote in an attempt to stop the revision, but Charlie—
the son of Portland, an actor not “Indian” enough to portray himself until he dons
a prosthetic nose—hisses “Get ’em, Dad” (King 1994, 358). King, whose text
rewrites multiple histories, reverses the cultural impact intended by the movie. His
Indians refigure the popular genre of the Western into a new space where the
Portlands and not the John Waynes save the day. In doing so, King and his team of
revisionists return to Charlie a father, as well as a culture and a history, of which he
can be proud.
Magical realism allows for supernatural blendings of history and identity, one of
its most important benefits to authors searching for what makes the historic real for
readers and characters. In Cellophane, Victor’s identity is defined by his actions;
locals call him “the shapeshifter” for what he creates (cellophane, paper) out of
nature (hemp, cotton). Jonathan’s grandfather is “Shalom-then-Kolker-now Safran”
and then a statue known as the Dial in Everything Is Illuminated; his journey
through the text is a constant attempt to find an identity that will allow him to fit
into Trachimbrod. And Morrison’s Beloved encompasses any number of possible
existences, including the “crawling-already?” baby, the young escaped woman from
Deer Creek, and the Middle Passage personified. Using magical realism to negotiate
the often merciless histories of contemporary existence, authors such as King, Foer,
Arana, and Morrison rescue identities worth more than those allowed by outsider’s
accounts.
Humor. Magical realist texts make for some of the most haunting and brutal writ-
ing imaginable. Yet several contemporary writers use the mode to great comedic
affect, even as those authors juxtapose playful rhetoric against the horrors of daily
life. In Everything Is Illuminated, Alexi’s malapropisms and jokes are at the expense
of the character and “author,” Jonathan Safran Foer, who is searching for the
woman who saved his family from the Holocaust. Alexi’s first letter to Jonathan
includes a scene where his father describes Jonathan to Alexi and his grandfather:
“‘He desires to write a book about his grandfather’s village.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘so he is
intelligent?’ ‘No,’ Father corrected. ‘He has low-grade brains. The American
office informs me that he telephones them every day and manufactures numerous
 MAGICAL REALISM 597

half-witted queries about finding suitable food.’ . . . Here,” Alexi inserts, well aware
of Jonathan as his audience, “I will repeat that the hero is a very ingenious Jew,”
but he immediate quotes his Grandfather’s lament that he does “not want to drive
ten hours to an ugly city to attend to a very spoiled Jew” (Foer 2002, 6–7).
Joe Hill’s “Pop Art,” with its easy and simple beginning—“My best friend when I
was twelve was inflatable” (Hill 2001, 85)—uses humor as a mediator between
reader and text, allowing the magical realist text to speak to injustice while still tak-
ing delight in the circumstances that would make Art easy prey. Hill’s text could
thwart the reader’s efforts to accept its premise as a reality were it not for the author’s
liberal use of practical concerns for a character weighing only eight ounces. The nar-
rator describes Art early in the story: “Also, I can say truthfully, he was the most
completely harmless person I’ve ever known. Not only would he not hurt a fly, he
couldn’t hurt a fly. If he slapped one and lifted his hand, it would buzz off undis-
turbed” (Hill 2001, 87). Art writes with a crayon to avoid the danger of pencils and
is kicked around, literally, on the playground for being different: “There was some-
thing special about Art, an invisible special something that just made other kids nat-
urally want to kick his ass” (Hill 2001, 87). When another kid “held Art down
during recess and wrote KOLLOSTIMY BAG with indelible ink,” Art writes on his
pad that “[t]he worst thing was my mom saw. Bad enough she has to know I get beat
up on a daily basis. But she was really upset it was spelled wrong” (Hill 2001, 89).
The Native American experience King creates in Green Grass, Running Water
counteracts its own spiritual origins by humorously reframing the traditional myths.
King appropriates and rewrites The Last of the Mohicans, Robinson Crusoe, Moby
Dick, the Bible, and even a radio-originated television series (The Lone Ranger).
The four Native Americans—who are the four originary women of the story (First
Woman, Changing Woman, Thought Woman, and Old Woman) and who first reject
the Christian myths of “Ahdamn” and Eve, Noah and the Flood, Mary’s immacu-
late conception, and Christ (Young Man Walking On Water)—adopt their (male)
names from the white Anglo texts and are responsible for establishing the narrative
frame around the story. In the tale, then, King also irreverently modifies Native
American myths because he uses four cross-dressing, cross-naming women to effect
changes in the “present” of the text and because Coyote, the audience for their tale,
is traditionally the story-teller.
King’s playful irreverence does not stop with Native American mythology or the
Western canon. When A.A. Gabriel (whose business card lists him as a Canadian
Security and Intelligence Service agent and as the Heavenly Host) appears to
Thought Woman, the interviewer attempts to rename her Mary, to require “virgin
verification,” and to take her picture next to a “snake” who is actually Old Coyote.
When she refuses him and floats away again on the ocean, A.A. Gabriel shouts after
her: “There are lots of Marys in the world. . . . We can always find another one, you
know” (King 1994, 301). And one of King’s most elaborate jokes unfolds over the
course of the novel as he toys with the idea of “discovering” a continent filled with
indigenous peoples. Columbus’s three ships’ journey to the New World is recreated
and revised in the destruction of the Parliament Lake Dam by three cars sailing on
the lake—“a Nissan, a Pinto, and a Karmann-Ghia” (King 1994, 448). King’s
magical realism “out-Coyotes” Coyote because it plays tricks on the tricksters.
Coincidence. Because coincidence calls into question the planned nature of human
events and our seeming control of the world around us, many magical realists delight
in confounding plots with nearly miraculous coincidences. Arana’s Cellophane is
598 MAGICAL REALISM

riddled with them. When he mistranslates the Australian’s course note, Luis inadver-
tently sparks love between John Gibbs and Marcela the school teacher, allowing
Gibbs to be in the right place at the right time to save the family; Tía Esther arrives
on the Australian’s boat the very day they will need to escape Floralinda. The tsantsa,
a shrunken puma head Tía wears as a souvenir from a failed love affair from her
youth, warns off the Jivaro; the tribe of Machiguenga inadvertently save Victor from
the Jivaro. Most important to Victor’s family’s fate and yet a matter of coincidence
itself, the monkey La Negrita’s fortune, suitably vague and drawn at random out of
the mini shrine, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of the ending of the story. Coinci-
dences conspire by the end of the novel, tying together the realist threads, becoming
more than mere conveniences or plot contrivances, and these once random events
begin to form a pattern for Victor’s life. Though Victor is a man who finds “truth . . .
in tangible things” (Arana 2006, 49), as with his cellophane, the intangibles—as
both the monkey fortune and Yorumbo warn him—force him to let go.
Abby Frucht’s Polly’s Ghost translates coincidence into an extraordinary
performance of motherly love. Polly, newly learning her abilities and limitations as a
ghost, attempts to bond her youngest son Tip and his new acquaintance Johnny but
instead causes the death of the man who will dissolve that bond. “I never intended for
Tom Bane’s airplane to fall out of the sky,” begins Frucht’s narrative (Fruchy 2000, 11).
Polly spends the novel learning how much she is at the whim of her dance partner, the
night. Polly’s Ghost refuses the confines of a ghost story but also disallows Polly’s own
need to offer Tip her forgiveness (she dies bearing him) and to have a motherly influ-
ence in his life. Instead, she hovers on the fringes, touching Tip’s life indirectly through
the small influences she has with others; and as the novel winds to a close, that dis-
parate group of individuals forms a protective chain around the now-adult Tip. Frucht
literally illustrates how, according to Zamora, “[m]ost contemporary U.S. magical real-
ists find a way to bring their ghosts above ground and integrate them into contempo-
rary U.S. culture in order to enrich or remedy it” (Zamora 1995, 118).
Marginalization. When we categorize a writer’s work as marginal, the issue often
becomes a question of “nature or nurture”—is the author’s natural (biological or
geographical) marginality the deciding factor, or does the theme or subject matter
“nurtured” in the text determine whether the work is a peripheral one? Criticism
that addresses this question generally chooses “natural” marginalization as the
more dominant feature. Marginalized writers tend to produce marginalized works,
whether they intend to or not, because the very conditions at work on the authors
similarly affect judgments of their texts. According to Jean-Pierre Durix, “Through
‘marginal modes’ of expression, writers [search for their own roots and rediscover]
those myths which might help them to transcend this marginal position” (Durix
1998, 148). Magical realism not only challenges the center, it also allows the
margins to rediscover their historical and mythical past.
Writers and critics in the United States are redefining our very “Americanness,”
how we perceive ourselves as parts of a larger whole in the New World—a fluid
perception that, for marginalized authors, is predetermined by their peripheral sta-
tus. Magical realism provides a tool for revision of marginality, perhaps especially
for those authors who are themselves bound by geography, by race, by gender, or
by other collective categorizations of identity. Magical realism permits the margins
more than an entry into the main discourse, it offers the opportunity to reevaluate
that central ideological constraint and to challenge the very features of the mainstream
that allow for a margin in the first place. And, as the marginalized female magical
 MAGICAL REALISM 599

realists perhaps best illustrate, the revision of the center inevitably requires con-
fronting the margins themselves.
For the marginalized female writer, magical realism proves an optimum mode of
choice because if its flexibility and marketability. Magical realism allows women
writers who themselves exist on multiple planes to create worlds that can address
all of those levels within a single work. Counterbalanced with this marginalization
and silencing of the (m)other is the fact that women are cultural impetuses for the
supernatural. Women provide magical realism with several things—children,
homes, and rebellion being only a few of their offerings—as Morrison, Castillo,
Foos, and others detail in their literature.
Frequently, the imposed order of the mainstream needs to be revised in order for
mother and daughter characters to survive the margins. Pilar Puente manages to get
herself kicked out of the Catholic school to which she refers as “Martyrs and
Saints” (Garcia 1992, 58). M.O.M.A.S. (Mothers of Martyrs and Saints) does this
for So Far From God; for a people “so far” from the God of Catholic religion, the
rules of martyrdom are bent in order to honor the children whom the Hispanic
mothers are losing. La Loca’s death experience and visit to Hell reenvision what the
priest understands his religion to be, but her experience grants her mother a privi-
leged position in the community of other marginalized mothers.
Though the Hispanic origins of both the characters and the authors are driving
forces behind the magical realism of Castillo’s and Garcia’s works, these authors, by
reveling in (rather than separating themselves from) an admixture of traditionally
U.S. popular culture with Hispanic overtones, claim simultaneous places in the
Latin American and North American traditions. Several of this chapter’s primary
texts are set partially or entirely outside the United States, suggesting that a partic-
ular categorization such as American literature cannot hope to encapsulate the full
landscapes of the text. In the most extreme cases, such as with Cellophane, Dream-
ing in Cuban, or Everything Is Illuminated, the supernatural occurrences are often
or completely off site. Yet the authors refuse to compartmentalize the magic, to
make it “foreign” or exotic and therefore less real.

Bibliography
Arana, Marie. Cellophane. New York: Dial, 2006.
Castillo, Ana. So Far from God. New York: Plume, 1994.
Chanady, Amaryll. Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved versus Unresolved Antinomies.
New York: Garland, 1985.
Delbaere, Jeanne. “Magic Realism: The Energy of the Margins.” Postmodern Fiction in
Canada. Theo L. D’haen and Hans Bertens, eds. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992.
Durix, Jean-Pierre. Mimesis, Genres and Post-Colonial Discourse: Deconstructing Magic
Realism. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Everything Is Illuminated. New York: Harper Perennial, 2003.
Foos, Laurie. Ex Utero. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1995.
Frucht, Abby. Polly’s Ghost. New York: Scribner, 2000.
Garcia, Cristina. Dreaming in Cuban. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992.
Hancock, Geoff. “Magic or Realism: The Marvellous in Canadian Fiction.” Magic Realism
and Canadian Literature: Essays and Stories. Peter Hinchcliffe and Ed Jweinski, eds.
Ontario, Canada: University of Waterloo Press, 1986.
Hill, Joe. “Pop Art.” With Signs & Wonders: An International Anthology of Jewish Fabulist
Fiction. Daniel M. Jaffe, ed. Montpelier, VT: Invisible Cities Press, 2001, 85–107.
King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. New York: Bantam, 1994.
600 MANGA AND ANIME

Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture.
New York: Pantheon, 1993.
Millhauser, Steven. “Flying Carpets.” The Knife Thrower and Other Stories. London:
Phoenix, 1999, 66–75.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Plume, 1987, 1998.
Yamashita, Karen Tei. Tropic of Orange. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1997.
Zamora, Lois Parkinson. The Usable Past: The Imagination of History in Recent of the
Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Zamora, Lois Parkinson, and Wendy B. Faris, eds. Magical Realism: Theory, History,
Community. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.
SHANNIN SCHROEDER
MANGA AND ANIME
Definition. Manga means, simply, “comic books” made for the Japanese market
and anime is animation made for the Japanese market. In Japan these same terms
are used in a general sense to mean works from anywhere in the world. For this
essay, however, the narrower definition, which is the dominant one in the English
speaking world, shall be used.
Other terms are used to describe types of manga commonly seen. Shônen is used
to refer to manga for boys from grade school to the late teens. Shôjo is manga for
girls of roughly the same age. Seinen is the kind of managa aimed at young men
from late teens through mid twenties, college aged or young working men. Gekiga
can be translated as “dramatic pictures” and is used for grittier manga stories with
a certain hard edge to them. There is no plural ending to Japanese words; thus
manga can refer to one or many. Generally, in this chapter I list the English title after
the Japanese title for the section on Japan and vice versa for the section on the Eng-
lish market; the title used will be for the U.S. commercial release rather than an
accurate translation. In some cases, the title is the same in both languages.
Why include animation in a work devoted to reading? Almost all anime available
in North America is released subtitled; a format that historically the majority of
anime fans have preferred over works being re-dubbed into English. Fans of anime
and manga will notice that the historical section is slanted toward works and
creators that have had an impact on the North American market.

History
Japan. Observing the history of manga and anime gives us a view on the develop-
ment of these two forms of entertainment. This essay is far too short to go into
much detail; however, this history can be seen as one of increasing sophistication
and improvement of craft.
Manga Predecessors. There are many types of works that are considered prede-
cessors of modern manga. These range from graffiti left on ancient temples to the
humorous “Animal Scrolls” of Bishop Toba from the twelfth century (Schodt 1986,
28). Later there were the various illustrated books of the Edo Period (1603–1867),
some of which, such as the Kibiyôshi, had images taking up much of the page with
text for dialog and narration.
Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989) revolutionized the manga and anime industries with
his willingness to experiment and innovate. One of his early innovations was to
move away from conventional layouts in his manga and to draw his work as if he
was using still images from the storyboards of a live action movie. Manga was then,
and is still today, almost always black and white.
 MANGA AND ANIME 601

THE BEGINNINGS OF MANGA

During the Meiji Period (1868–1912) there was a rejection of older illustrated genres that
led to the end of publication of these types of works for adults. At the same time the use
of illustration in children’s magazines became common. After World War II there was a
shortage of affordable entertainment so manga rental shops, kashibonya, became common.
Several noted manga artists of the late 1940s and the 1950s wrote works intended for sale
to these shops. Among these was Osamu Tezuka, a young medical school graduate who
found he could make a living as a manga artist rather than as a doctor.

Although manga stories can be short, comparable in length to an American comic

book, they commonly are long works with a single story spanning multiple volumes,
such as Rumiko Takahashi’s Maison Ikkoku, which has 15 volumes in the English
edition. The same is true of anime television series, which are often adapted from
manga; usually television anime series are either 26 episodes or 13 episodes long. In
these programs each episode is a chapter in a longer story; when the story is over,
the series ends to be replaced by an entire new show. This structure for both anime
and manga helps create a great deal of diversity because creators are able to try new
ideas, and television time slots are not taken up by shows that last years.
Another type of manga that bears mentioning is dôjinshi. These are self-published
works and not always manga because they sometimes are text publications, much
like zines in America. The dôjinshi scene in Japan is very different than the scene for
fan-produced works in the United States. Dôjinshi often use actual characters from
manga, anime, video games, movies, or television shows and sometimes even actual
people. Who makes and consumes dôjinshi? Fans, often of high school or college
age, are often girls. Many professionals in Japan started out publishing dôjinshi and
later graduated to professional work. Some professionals still produce dôjinshi as a
hobby, occasionally spoofing their own characters. There are even several conven-
tions entirely devoted to creators selling their own dôjinshi; the largest is Tokyo’s
famous Comic Market, commonly referred to as Comiket or Komiket, which takes
place twice a year for three days in August and December drawing about 500,000
attendees. What do the Japanese companies think of this fan activity? They usually
look the other way. Japanese trademark law is such that unauthorized use of their
characters will not harm a company’s rights and the popularity of a series can be
measured in a sense by how many dôjinshi there are based on it.
Anime. The oldest commercial anime dates from 1917 when Oten Shimokawa
made Imokawa Mukuzo genkanban no maki (Mukuzo Imokawa, the Doorman),
the first of a series of shorts to be shown in movie houses before regular features.
Such short works remained the norm until 1945 when the first anime feature length
black and white film, Momotaro Umi no Shinpei (Momotaro’s Divine Sea War-
riors), was released. This was the longest of a series of anime made for internal
propaganda, and it was paid for by the Japanese Imperial Navy. It would not be
until 1958 that the next feature, Hakujaden (Panda and the Magic Serpent), would
be released, this time in color.
The 1960s brought a new element to anime in Japan, works made for television.
Otogi Manga Karendâ (Otogi Manga Calendar), made in 1962, was the first made-
for-television series. Otogi Manga Karendâ consisted of three-minute educational
602 MANGA AND ANIME

clips discussing history; eventually 312 of these short works were made. The first
half-hour children’s series firmly establishing anime format in the medium for television
in Japan was Tetsuwan Atom (Astro Boy) in 1963 to be soon followed by Tetsujin
28-go (Gigantor) and 8 Man (8th Man).
The 1970s saw the number of anime titles for middle school students increase as
well as the further development of the “giant robot” genre that started with Tetsu-
jin 28-go. The end of the decade saw pivotal titles establish that older viewers could
be an audience for anime. Kido Senshi Gundam (Mobile Suit Gundam) was a giant
robot science fiction show about future war. Unlike other giant robot shows, the
enemies were not invaders from space or another dimension; they were other
humans, rebelling space colonists. The show had a serious element also, including
the impact of war on civilians as well as the emotional impact of combat on soldiers.
The television series was cut short after the sponsor realized that the toys were not
selling well. However, reruns of the show had a high viewership that was proven to
be older than the usual giant robot show audience. When Gundam model kits were
released, they sold very well. This resulted in other Gundam anime being made,
some that were not set in the same “universe” as the original series. In fact, to dif-
ferentiate between these “universes,” the original series and related works are
referred to as belonging to the “Universal Century” Gundam shows.
The 1980s brought anime creators a new method of distribution made possible
by the VCR. Original Video Animation, usually referred to as OVA by the Japanese
and sometimes as OAV by others, were works made for sale directly as videos rather
than first shown in theatres or on television. This format allowed creators to exper-
iment and produce works that did not have a clearly defined market or had one that
was too small to be profitable with the previous methods of distribution. The first
commercial OVA was Dallos, directed by Mamoru Oshii and released in 1983. The
experimental nature of many of the early OVA is apparent in the variety of works
released in this format in the 1980s. Some OVA titles, such as the successful
Patlabor and Aa! Megamisama! (Oh! My Goddess), would later be adapted into tel-
evision series. Creators of OVA also had an advantage over television series in that
OVA did not have the strict deadlines that broadcasting requires. This meant a series
episode could be delayed if needed to ensure quality work. The OVA formant also
increased the number of erotic works. There had been some relatively tame erotic
anime released in theatres in the late 1960s and early 1970s with little financial suc-
cess. However, erotic anime is still a very small percentage of the market; only a few
titles are released each year, compared to the much larger television, movie, and
non-erotic OVA markets.
In 1984 Hayao Miyazaki released his first independent animated feature, Kaze no
Tani no Nausicaä (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind). A few years later Miyazaki
was one of the most noted and internationally famous directors from Japan. In 1985
Miyazaki and fellow director Isao Takahata founded their own studio, Studio Ghibli,
to make and release the kinds of anime they wanted to make. Also in 1984 a new
company, GAINAX, was founded by a group of science fiction fans in their twenties,
some of whom worked professionally in the anime industry. In 1987 GAINAX
released Oritsu Uchuugun—Honneamise no Tsubasa (Royal Space Force: The Wings
of Honneamise), one of several anime that raised the standards of quality and sophis-
tication at the end of the 1980s. Other transformative titles of the period were Akira,
released in 1988 and directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, and Kidou Keisatsu Patlabor
Gekijouban (Patlabor: The Movie) in 1989, directed by Mamoru Oshii.
 MANGA AND ANIME 603

In the 1990s the anime industry experienced growth with an increasing number
of programs on television, both conventional broadcast and cable or satellite. The
general quality of the craft of animation increased with many works made for tele-
vision rivaling feature films and OVA for the quality of their imagery. GAINAX con-
tinued to produce critically acclaimed works, and in 1995 it produced a 26-week
episode television series that was to become one of the most watched anime series
of the period. Shin Seiki Evangelion (Neon Genesis Evangelion), directed by
Hideaki Anno, proved highly successful and resulted in two movies, as well as a
continuing line of toys and related merchandise. There are still other Neon Genesis
Evangelion works in production over a decade later.
Miyazaki, Takahata, and Anno were only a few of the directors who attained
auteur status in this period. Others include Oshii and Satoshi Kon. Kon, a manga
artist, went from relative obscurity to international fame when the first anime he
directed, the 1997 feature Perfect Blue, premiered at the Berlin International Film
Festival. Anno and Oshii have also made award-winning live action films, whereas
Kon has steadfastly stuck to doing just animation.

The United States and Canada

1960s. In the United States the history of translated anime began in the 1960s and
manga in the 1970s. The earliest anime releases in the United States were three the-
atrical features, all re-dubbed into English in 1961: Magic Boy (Shônen Sarutobi
Sasuke), Panda and the Magic Serpent (Hakujaden), and Alakazam the Great
(Saiyuki). Televised anime series were broadcast in the United States beginning in
1963 with Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atom) by Osamu Tezuka. In 1965 the first color
anime television series, also based on a Tezuka story, was shown on U.S. television.
Kimba The White Lion (Jungle Taitei) was a series about an orphaned lion cub who
was the ruler of his part of Africa. In fact, it was due to NBC licensing the show
ahead of its production that allowed the use of color, which was much more expen-
sive to produce than the various grays of earlier shows. Soon other Japanese shows,
such as Gigantor (Tetsujin 28-go) and 8th Man (8 Man), were broadcast in the
United States in edited and redubbed versions. The late 1960s saw another series
that attained icon status for American television viewers, Speed Racer (Mach, Go,
Go, Go), edited in the U.S. version so no one died.
1970s. The 1970s was an era in which animated shows with even a mild level of vio-
lence were removed from network television and relegated to independent stations
showing reruns of older programs. Anime, which often was far more serious than Amer-
ican cartoons, was largely not available for television viewers during this time. However,
in 1978 the first new anime series to be shown on U.S. television hit the airwaves. Bat-
tle of the Planets was a heavily rewritten version of Kagaku Ninjatai Gatchaman. The
story was drastically altered with the intent to capture some of the popularity of the first
Star Wars movie of the previous year. The original tale was set in Japan with a special
force defending the earth; the U.S. script set the tale far away in another part of the
galaxy and greatly toned down the seriousness of the original story.
In 1977 there was another development that changed the market for anime and
manga in the United States. The first anime and manga fan club, the Cartoon/Fantasy
Organization, C/FO for short, held its first meeting in May 1977. Drawing its mem-
bers heavily from existing science fiction fans, the founding of the C/FO was a sig-
nificant event that resulted in similar clubs being established across the United
604 MANGA AND ANIME

States. These early clubs helped solidify and expand early English-speaking anime
and manga fandom by holding regular meetings, screenings of shows in raw Japan-
ese, publishing newsletters, sharing information, and recruiting new fans. These fans
provided the foundation for the establishment of a market in North America for
anime and manga. In 1978 the first English translated manga was published, the
first volume of Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen)—the autobiographical manga of a
Hiroshima survivor.
1980s. In 1983 the Japanese based publisher Kodansha International released the
first book on manga in English, Manga! Manga!, by Frederik L. Schodt. Manga!
Manga! quickly became, and remained, an essential reference for anyone interested
in the subject.
It was nearly a decade after Barefoot Gen was first published in English that new
translated manga titles were released. In May 1987 First Comics published its first
issue of excerpts from the Lone Wolf and Cub (Kozure Okami) manga series. In the
same month a partnership between Eclipse International and the new, Japanese
owned, company Viz Communications released its first joint publications: Area 88,
Legend of Kamui (Kamui Gaiden), and Mai the Psychic Girl (Mai). These works
were not published in book form; rather they were in the usual American pamphlet
format of comic books. Manga finally became a regular feature of comic book shops.
The following year was the beginning, by the Epic Comics branch of Marvel
Comics, of publication for Katsuhiro Otomo’s famous manga Akira. This was a
project that also involved adding color to the original black and white work and
took until 1995 to complete. Also in 1988 was the Eclipse International publication
of Appleseed by the soon to be famous Masamune Shirow and translated by Studio
Proteus, a company founded by Toren Smith in 1986 and dedicated to high quality
work in their releases. Many of these early manga were seinen manga aimed at a
late teen and early twenties male audience.
In 1989 the feature length version of the Akira anime was released redubbed into
English to the American art house theatre circuit. It became a landmark film—for
many years afterward if anyone had seen only one anime feature, the odds were that
it was Otomo’s groundbreaking work. Several companies were established in 1987
and 1988 to release anime, such as The Right Stuf, U.S. Renditions, Streamline
Pictures, and AnimEigo. All four companies began releasing anime on VHS in 1989
and 1990, including the first subtitled anime releases, which started with AnimEigo’s
release of Metal Skin Panic Madox 01.
North American fans were ready to go beyond club publications and began
launching commercial anime magazines, beginning with Anime-Zine in April 1986,
Animage in 1987, and Protoculture Addicts in 1988. Protoculture Addicts, pub-
lished in Montreal, was devoted to one show, Robotech, until 1990, when it became
a general anime, manga, and Japanese culture magazine; it still exists today, making
it the longest running anime magazine in North America.
In November 1987 Ann Schubert launched the first Usenet newsgroup devoted to
anime, rec.arts.anime, and soon it was not only available through computer BBS
networks but also via the Internet. Today it still exists divided into several special-
ized newsgroups all beginning with rec.arts.anime. In 1988 the Valley of the Wind
BBS, the official BBS for Animag magazine, started in San Mateo, California. This
was perhaps the first anime BBS established in North America.
Another significant development in the late 1980s was the creation, with the use
of computers and video editing hardware, of fan subs, that is, noncommercial, and
 MANGA AND ANIME 605

illegal, video releases of anime with subtitles created by fans and distributed for free,
mainly to clubs for showings, by networks of volunteers. This was to provide clubs
with a greater number of titles to show and help spread anime to more viewers.
College and University based anime clubs also came into existence at this time.
Earlier some C/FO chapters used facilities at schools without actually being student
organizations, for example the Cartoon/Fantasy Organization of Denver, founded in
1982, met in an available room at the Iliff School of Theology until the club presi-
dent, Michael Burgess, who was an Iliff student, graduated. In time actual student-
run groups began organizing, such as Cal-Animage Alpha, the anime club at the
University of California Berkeley, which was founded in January 1989, and MIT
Anime, which was founded the following year.
1990s. Dallas, Texas, holds the distinction of being the location of the first U.S.
anime convention with three locally advertised conventions, Yamatocon in August
1983 and March 1986 and Animagic in September 1986, and the first nationally
advertised general anime convention, Project A-Kon, in July 1990. In 1991 Anime-
Con ’91 took place in San Jose, California. Organized in part by Toren Smith of Stu-
dio Proteus and Toshio Okada of GAINAX, AnimeCon ’91 had a large number of
Japanese guests and an original opening animation done by U.S. fans. In October
U.S. Manga Corps, a division of Central Park Media, released the first tape of their
first anime title Dominion. After this new anime and manga companies were estab-
lished every few years.
Viz entered the anime magazine scene with the release of Animerica issue 0 in
November 1992. The magazine was to run until June 2005 as a newsstand publi-
cation and then be transformed into a free quarterly issued largely to publicize Viz
products. In the early 1990s Studio Proteus changed publishers and had their seinen
manga works handled by Dark Horse.
With organized anime and manga fandom firmly established, AnimEigo released
a title in 1993 that shaped fan activities for some time: they did not even bother to
translate the title. Otaku no Video was another product from GAINAX, which was
an OVA playfully mocking both Japanese fandom and their own science fiction fan
origins. American fans looked at this work, which is extremely dense with examples
of Japanese fan activities, and gleefully took part in many similar activities, even
proudly calling themselves otaku. Otaku is a term with mixed origins: originally a
word that can be used to address someone in a very polite manner, it became heav-
ily used by polite and shy Japanese fans when speaking to each other. In time it came
to be used to refer to obsessed fans and often not in a complimentary manner, much
like nerd or geek in English. However, there are Japanese fans who without hesita-
tion use the term to describe themselves. In recent years the term has lost some of
its edge in Japan as otaku have come to be seen as important in both the produc-
tion and consumption of entertainment, not only anime and manga but also live
action movies and video games.
The mid-1990s saw the earliest U.S. anime releases of works that were intended
for a female audience. Starting in September 1995 Sailor Moon hit the television air-
waves in a highly edited and redubbed version that quickly drew teenaged and
younger girls to anime. This permanently transformed anime fandom; before Sailor
Moon, fans were mainly male, college age and older. Girls and women now became
major players in the fan scene. Partly due to the popularity of Sailor Moon bringing
in younger fans, High School anime clubs began to spread at this time. The first sub-
titled video release of a title aimed at a female audience, Here is Greenwood, set in
606 MANGA AND ANIME

a boy’s high school dorm, was released in 1996. The following year, 1997, saw the
first anime DVD released in the United States, Battle Arena Toshinden from Central
Park Media.
Given the growth of female fandom, a new company, Mixx Entertainment, began
releasing the Sailor Moon manga in 1998, with the original characters renamed to
match the anglicized names in the U.S. version of the television series. They also
published a manga anthology magazine called MixxZine, later renamed TOKY-
OPOP, that ran until 2000. Other anthology magazines started at this time, such as
the Eisner Award-nominated Pulp, aimed at releasing “manga for grownups,”
Animerica Extra for boys and girls, and Smile, a girl’s magazine that also included
manga. Most of these magazines only lasted a few years. However, at the same time,
more of the manga publishers were abandoning the releasing of manga in American
comic book format and switching to anthologies or directly to the paperback book
format, which quickly became the standard way to package most manga.
In July 1998 Viz did something very different—released the first volume of the
Neon Genesis Evangelion manga in a special collector’s edition unflipped. Until this
time all manga had been flipped from its original Japanese right-to-left orientation
to the Western left-to-right orientation. This involved extra work on the part of the
companies to touch up the art that not only increased the cost of production but
also took time. Japanese artists also often requested that their design work not be
reversed, and some were rumored to refuse to license their works unless they would
not be flipped. Readers easily adjusted to the change, and it would not be long
before leaving the art unflipped became the norm, even to the point of re-releasing
previously flipped volumes in second unflipped editions. A few years later, in
January 2002, TOKYOPOP not only announced that all of their manga were going
to an unflipped format but they also made this decision a major part of their pub-
licity for that year with their “100% Authentic Manga” advertising campaign.
In the late 1990s there was another significant development—major chain book-
stores began selling manga. This opened up the market to a significant segment of
the population that would rarely enter comic book shops—girls. For the next sev-
eral years, manga sales grew at a rate of over 100% per year mainly due to teen-age
girls becoming a large segment of the customer base. This also resulted in compa-
nies placing more of their resources to serve the needs of this segment of the market
The Internet also played a larger role in communication between fans. In 1995
the Anime Web Turnpike, a large directory of anime and manga related Web sites,
was started to help fans locate useful resources online. In 1998 two new anime serv-
ices were established on the Web, The Anime News Network and Anime on DVD.
Both contain archives of press releases from companies, reviews, articles, online
forums, reference tools, and the latest news.
2000–. In the early twenty-first century, magazine anthologies are still being
released and experimented with in the United States, such as the successful monthly
Shônen Jump boy’s manga anthology from Viz, which began publishing in 2002,
and its sister publication, Shojo Beat, which began in 2005, serializing manga for
girls. Other manga anthologies, such as the seinen and Raijin Comics (2003–2004)
and the general Super Manga Blast (2000–2006), did not do as well.
Trends and Themes. Anime and manga have had an impressive growth in North
America over the past few decades; however, they still remain a niche market and
have not become part of the mainstream entertainment industry. After all, enter-
tainment news programs on television and columns in the press rarely cover anime
 MANGA AND ANIME 607

or manga. Because of the niche market for these products, fans are a significant per-
centage of the consumers. Perhaps this will change in the near future—perhaps even
by the time these words reach print. However, even now manga and anime are so
firmly established that almost all manga is no longer flipped, and it is almost
unheard of to release anime unless it is unedited and subtitled. The twenty-first
century has also seen the practice of localization, the removal of Japanese elements
in anime, and manga translations have almost vanished. Whereas in the past names
were changed to American sounding ones, foods were given “familiar” names
like pizza or pancakes instead of okonomiyaki, and in extreme cases scenes where
people were eating with chopsticks were edited out, today many see the Japanese
elements as part of why anime and manga sell. This has reached the point that
some works are released under their original Japanese titles, such as Hikaru no Go,
Rurouni Kenshin, Kaze Hikaru, Genshiken, Gokusen, Kaze no Yojimbo, and
Haibane Renmei.
Female fandom had changed since 1995 when Sailor Moon hit the American air-
waves. Many of the earlier fans have grown up, but the girls did not leave their
anime and manga interests behind when they became women. Instead they often
delved deeper into anime, manga, and fan activities. This was evident in a conven-
tion that even five years earlier, before Sailor Moon, would not have seemed possi-
ble, an entire convention devoted to what is variously called shônen-ai, Boys Love,
or BL by the Japanese. YAOI-con 2001 was an entire convention devoted to manga
and anime that focus on male-male romance, often with a sexual element to it.
Needless to say the convention had, and continues to have, an age requirement of
18 and over for admission. In Japan such male-male love stores have existed in
women’s manga since the 1970s, the stories and images ranging from Platonic to
torrid. The term yaoi is a Japanese abbreviation for the phrase yâma-nashi, ochi-
nashi, imi-nashi (no climax, no punch line, no meaning). In Japan yaoi is a genre of
fan-published manga, often male-male pairing parodies of commercial works, much
like Slash fiction in Star Trek and other English language fandoms. English-speaking
fans have come to apply the term yaoi to all stories involving male-male parings, not
just fan produced works. In recent years the number of translated anime and manga
that are in this genre have increased to the point that some stores have subsections
devoted to these volumes.
The growth of yaoi as a genre shows that adult women are not only consuming
manga and anime but also actually becoming active in the translation and release
of products, not only product lines of established companies, such as Digital
Manga, but also independent companies, such as Blu and DramaQueen. Major
players such as Viz and TOKYOPOP have for some time released non-yaoi manga
for women.
Adult male, seinen, fans have always had some anime and manga aimed at their
interests, especially titles from Studio Proteus and Viz. In 2002 TOKYOPOP pub-
lished their first manga title aimed at a seinen audience. For a publisher with a rep-
utation for publishing works aimed at teen and pre-teen girls this was quite a step.
This title was GTO: Great Teacher Onizuka by Tohru Fujisawa, the tale of a
former biker turned private schoolteacher. GTO was to become very popular with
adult fans of both genders as well as older teens; TOKYOPOP later released the
GTO anime television series on DVD. TOKYOPOP has continued to publish some
seinen with works such as GTO The Early Years and Rose Hip Zero, both also by
Fujisawa.
608 MANGA AND ANIME

Another trend, reflected in the growing market for yaoi and seinen manga titles is
the growing number of adults enjoying these stories—many of whom started out as
fans at a younger age. Fans are also becoming much younger with grade school aged
kids now wanting to read more manga and watch more anime. Companies now
have to take both age ranges into consideration when they shop for new titles to
bring out, not just readers in their teens.
Since the turn of the century, a few manga companies began publishing works by
North American creators with Asian elements and calling them manga. TOKY-
OPOP even began an annual contest called the Rising Starts of Manga; the winners
have their works published. These have been variously called American-manga,
Ameri-manga, Original English Manga, and other names. Some see this as a cynical
ploy to simply make more money off the popularity of manga. After all, why refer
to a work done by American creators with a Japanese term like manga when per-
fectly good English terms like comic book and graphic novel already exist?
On the other hand, many American fans of anime, manga, and Japanese video
games have begun to create their own comics with Japanese influences, some on the
Internet in the form of Web Comics. Publishers in the United States have even com-
mercially released a few of these Web Comics in printed form; popular examples
include Megatokyo by Fred Gallagher or Peach Fuzz by Lindsay Cibos.
The year 2003 brought several interesting developments. Hayao Miyazaki’s Spir-
ited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi) won the Oscar for best-animated fea-
ture. Vertical Inc., a respected New York-based publisher of Japanese popular
literature, published the first hardcover volume in Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha eight-
volume manga series. Buddha received excellent reviews in the regular press and
sold well enough that the company started publishing older classic works that were
unlikely to come out from other manga publishers. Also in 2003, the Fremont,
California,-based manga publisher Comics One, later renamed DR Master, brought
out a translation of the Onegai Teacher novel, a work related to previously released
anime and manga series. Later, other manga publishers began releasing prose works
related to manga and anime, such as Dark Horse’s release of the Ghost in the Shell
Stand Alone Complex novels, The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair by noted sci-
ence fiction writer Haruka Takachiho, as well as ADV Manga’s release of GAINAX
executive Yasuhiro Takeda’s autobiographical work The Notenki Memoirs.
We are now also seeing licenses to anime and manga titles lapse, and they may
either become available in English or be re-released by other companies. Sometimes
after a title has been out of print for some time, another company steps in and picks
up the license with the view that the market has changed and the particular work
will do better now than in the past. An example of such a title is the manga Crying
Freeman by Kazuo Koike that was originally licensed by Viz and years later reissued
by Dark Horse.
Televised anime have also changed, especially on cable and satellite systems.
Whereas the Cartoon Network began regularly broadcasting anime in the late
1990s, other companies have also begun dedicated cable channels for anime. A.D.
Vision established the Anime Network in late 2002, and in 2006 the FUNimation
Channel was created. Because of its wide distribution throughout the country, The
Cartoon Network’s two weekly slots, Toonami and Adult Swim, showing anime on
a regular basis has had the greatest success in introducing many more viewers to
anime and manga. As the other networks expand their market penetration, this
could shift.
 MANGA AND ANIME 609

To some, it appeared that the industry was becoming saturated with large num-
bers of titles being released, for example 810 different anime DVD releases for 2005
declining to 765 for 2006. For manga, 1,014 volumes were released in 2005 and
1,096 in 2006. In late 2005 the anime and manga industry was hit with a financial
blow when Musicland shut down all 61 of the Media Play stores it owned, filed for
protection from creditors, and closed many Sam Goody and Suncoast stores. Sev-
eral anime companies had been selling directly to the Musicland-owned chains and
found themselves lacking needed cash. In early 2006, Central Park Media
announced that it was in the uncomfortable position of laying off most of its staff
as a result of the Musicland bankruptcy. Central Park Media even issued a press
release with an email address for prospective employers if they had positions open
that former staff could apply for.
In 2004 Toren Smith, citing a saturated manga market, sold Studio Proteus to his
publisher Dark Horse Comics after nearly 20 years of producing some of the best
manga translation in the industry. Smith continues to do translation work without
the grueling schedule he had set for himself while running the company. Dark
Horse, on the other hand, has continued to provide manga for the seinen audience,
such as many works written by the prolific and popular Kazuo Koike, including a
complete edition of the Lone Wolf and Cub manga series.

Context and Issues

Different Cultural Perspectives. Anime and manga give those who enjoy such products
exposure to several perspectives that are very different from the U.S. and Canadian
entertainment industries. On one hand, there is the exposure to Japanese culture and
history, such as Rurouni Kenshin set in the late nineteenth century, Maison Ikkoku
set in modern Tokyo, and Genshiken with its cast of college student otaku.
On the other hand, there are also stories with different views than those reflected
in American works. Relating to the concerns of adolescents, this is especially true
for girls, a market largely ignored by American comic book and graphic novel pub-
lishers. However, this is also true for boys—for example, the male oriented
romance manga, and the anime adapted from them, of Masakazu Katsura and
Izumi Matsumoto. Issues of gender identity are also topical in some recent works,
aimed at teens but popular with adults, such as Revolutionary Girl Utena (Shoujo
Kakumei Utena), Day of Revolution (Kakumei no Hi), and Kashimashi—Girl
Meets Girl.
Geopolitics. Internal and international politics do not escape scrutiny. A recent two-
season series Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex (Kokaku Kidotai Stand Alone
Complex) dealt extensively with a near-future Japan that, although neutral, did not
escape damage and repercussions of World War III, such as large numbers of
refugees afterward. The series also deals with Japan’s often-uncomfortable military
relationship with the United States and the treaties between the two nations. In fact,
one key thread that runs through many anime and manga that deal with war and
the aftermath is the impact on the civilian populations. Japan’s experience of losing
a significant percentage of its young male population and the destruction of its
major cities in World War II is only part of what shapes such a view. There is also
a considerable body of literature, memoirs, as well as manga and anime based on
the experiences of children during war time, the most famous of these are Barefoot
Gen and Studio Ghibli’s anime feature Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru No Haka).
610 MANGA AND ANIME

Libraries. Libraries have increasingly made manga and anime part of their collec-
tions. Workshops on graphic novels, manga, and anime are common at librarian
conventions. Articles appear in the professional press and increasingly titles are
reviewed to assist in the selection of material for library collections. This is not as
easy as selecting books where there have been long established resources for evalu-
ating items to add to collections. Anime and manga have only recently been suffi-
ciently reviewed to enable libraries to make decisions about adding them to library
collections. This is especially important with mediums that are visual; local com-
munity standards concerning violence, nudity, and sexuality have to be considered
in ways that are not a problem with written text. Librarians have a long history of
standing up for freedom of access to materials. However, they also do not particu-
larly care for conflict and will pay attention to the community they serve. Sometimes
elements in a community will not respect this viewpoint and will seek to impose
their will on the local library with the assistance of outside forces such as local
politicians. For example, in April 2006 Paul Gravett’s book Manga: Sixty Years of
Japanese Comics was pulled from the libraries of suburban San Bernadino County,
California, on orders from Bill Postmus, Chairman of the Board of Supervisors.
Why would a scholarly book on manga get pulled? Two pages, 144 and 145, had
six small images—pages from adult manga with sexual content. The book was
shelved in the adult section of the library, where a teen-age boy found it, checked it
out, and showed the two pages to his mother.
Conventions. Conventions continue to play a significant role in fan activities. The
number of conventions in the United States and Canada has grown since the first
small ones of the early 1990s to well over 100 each year. Many are small local events;
some are much larger. The largest are Anime Expo, which in 2006 released atten-
dance figures of over 40,000, and Otakon, which has had to cap attendance at
25,000, as that is what they feel the Baltimore Convention Center can safely handle.

Reception
Exhibits. Two art exhibits focusing on anime and manga were held in 2005.
Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture, curated by Takashi
Murakami, ran from April 8–July 24 at the Japan Society in New York City.
Another ran from October 26–December 8 at California State University Chico
and was titled Shojo Manga: Girl Power! and curated by associate professor of
art education Masami Toku. The Shojo Manga exhibit also toured North Amer-
ica. Both exhibits sought to expose Americans to aspects of Japanese post-World
War II entertainment, and both were curated by artists. In 2007 the Asian Art
Museum in San Francisco held the first manga and anime exhibit at a major U.S.
museum from June 2–September 9. The exhibit, Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga,
was devoted entirely to one creator, Osamu Tezuka, whose influence and signifi-
cance is widely acknowledged in Japan.
Awards. In the U.S. comic book industry, the most prestigious award is the Eisner.
Between 1998 and 2006 manga won Eisner awards 7 out of 9 times for the Best U.S.
Edition of Foreign Material. Given the high quality of much of the European work
released in the United States, these figures are significant.
As was already mentioned, in 2003 Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away won the
Oscar for best animated feature. However, other anime features not made for a child
audience that have been submitted for consideration have not been able to reach the
 MANGA AND ANIME 611

ballot. Many of these films have also received notable awards elsewhere, such as
Millennium Actress, which won both the Best Animation Film and the Fantasia
Ground-Breaker Award at the Fant-Asia Film Festival in 2001.
Adaptations. The American movie and television industries have expressed interest
in releasing remakes of several titles for the U.S. market. Proposed films include
Neon Genesis Evangelion, Battle Angel Alita, Ghost in the Shell, Speed Racer,
Witch Hunter Robin, and others. However, to date (2007) few have reached the
stage of production.
Selected Authors. To North American consumers many works released in Japan
before 2000 have only recently become available in English. For this reason, any dis-
cussion of contemporary creators has to include some works done before 2000.
Also, given the large number of persons and companies whose works are available,
the following choices are limited to a few of the better known.
Hayao Miyazaki is perhaps the best-known creator of anime. His Nausicaa
manga, his only manga series to be translated, is available in a large format dupli-
cating the tones and colors of the original Japanese release. One cannot mention
Miyazaki without pointing out the work of his fellow Studio Ghibli cofounder Isao
Takahata. Works recently released in North America directed by Takahata include
Pom Poko and My Neighbors the Yamadas.
Another name with both an anime and manga connection is Mamoru Oshii. Oshii
has written both novels and manga, some of which have been adapted into anime.
One of his most recent anime works, Ghost in the Shell Innocence, was funded in
part by Studio Ghibli and animated by Production I.G, a well-known company
heavily associated with Oshii’s projects. Production I.G also released the Ghost in
the Shell Stand Alone Complex television series, inspired by a manga series by
Masamune Shirow. Shirow continues to release manga at a slow pace, as well as
work on various video game and animation projects, such as the Appleseed movie
series. Satoshi Kon continues to be productive with such recent works as Millenium
Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, the Paranoia Agent television series, and his most recent
feature, Paprika.
For manga, Osamu Tezuka, who died in 1989, has become widely known
through recent translations of his works for adult readers, such as the Ode to
Kirihito, Buddha, and Phoenix series. A major factor in the growing awareness of
his work is the fact that magazines and newspapers that rarely cover manga have
reviewed many of his titles. Writers popular with a younger audience include one of
the best known, Rumiko Takahashi, author of large multivolume series such as Urusei
Yatsura, Maison Ikkoku, Ranma 1⁄2, and Inuyasha. All of these works and several
shorter ones have been adapted to anime and released in the United States. A con-
trast to Takahashi is a man whose works are very different than her teen and young
adult style, a man who was her teacher when she was beginning her career. Kazuo
Koike is best known in the United States for his lengthy Lone Wolf and Cub manga
series. However, several other series of his have been coming out in English in rapid
succession—Lady Snow Blood, Samurai Executioner, Path of the Assassin, and a
new release of his Crying Freeman manga. Koike does not do the art; he is a writer
and has worked with a variety of artists over the years. His manga have not only
been adapted into anime but also into live action movies and television shows. An
artist who works with several writers is Takeshi Obata, who illustrated Hikaru no
Go, the tale of a high school student who discovered the ancient game of Go and
struggles to become a professional player. Another work Obata illustrated is Death
612 MILITARY LITERATURE

Note, a suspenseful tale of murder and the supernatural. Both titles are also available
as anime in the United States. Reviews are difficult to track down, outside of anime
and manga specialty magazines aimed at fans, only professional journals for librar-
ians review such works with any regularity.
One interesting development since 2000 is the increasing number of academics
writing about anime and manga. For manga there are such books as Permitted and
Prohibited Desires by Anne Allison and Adult Manga by Sharon Kinsella. Anime
books include Anime From Akira to Princess Mononoke by Susan Napier released
in 2000 and in a later edition titled Anime From Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle,
Brian Ruh’s Stray Dog of Anime: The films of Mamoru Oshii, and Cinema Anime,
an anthology of essays edited by Steven T. Brown. There is even an annual scholarly
anthology of essays titled Mechademia published by the University of Minnesota
Press.

Bibliography
Allison, Anne. Permitted and Prohibited Desires. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996.
Kinsella, Sharon. Adult Manga. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2000.
Koike, Kazuo. Path of the Assassin. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Manga, 2006.
———. Lady Snow Blood. Australia: Madmen Entertainment, 2005.
———. Lone Wolf and Cub. Tokyo: Futabasha, 1970–1976.
———. Samurai Executioner. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Manga, 2004.
Miyazaki, Hayao. Spirited Away. San Francisco, CA: Viz Communications, 2002.
Napier, Susan. Anime From Akira to Princess Mononoke. New York: Palgrave, 2000.
Obata, Takeshi. Hikaru No Go. San Francisco, CA: Viz Communications, 2004.
Ruh, Brian. Stray Dog of Anime. New York: Palgrave, 2004.

Further Reading
Anime News Network: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/; Anime on DVD: http://www.
animeondvd.com/; Clements, Jonathan, and Helen McCarthy. The Anime Encyclopedia:
Revised and Expanded Edition. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2006; Patten, Fred. Watching
Anime Reading Manga. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2004; Schodt, Frederik. Manga!
Manga! Tôkyô: Kodansha International, 1986; Schodt, Frederik. Dreamland Japan. Berke-
ley: Stone Bridge Press, 1996; Yasuhiro, Takeda. The Notenki Memoirs. Houston, TX: ADV
Manga, 2005.
GILLES POITRAS
MILITARY LITERATURE
Definition. Stories about soldiers and war have been a staple in American litera-
ture. As such, military literature is an extremely expansive, influential genre. Military
literature can be broadly defined as any literature that represents one of the many
facets of the military. While much military literature is focused on what may be
termed combat literature—fiction and nonfiction narratives that describe combat—
military literature is much more than only stories about combat. As Philip K. Jason
and Mark A. Graves write, “The literature of war has a wider arc that takes in pre-
sentations of causes and consequences of the battlefield action. It has political, cul-
tural, and psychological dimensions” (Jason and Graves 2001, ix). In this broad
scope, military literature portrays life in the military—both during war and times of
peace—as well as explores how civilians interact with the military, either completely
outside the military looking in or as family and friends of soldiers attempting to deal
 MILITARY LITERATURE 613

ACCLAIMED MILITARY LITERATURE WRITERS WHO NEVER SERVED

Authors of military literature have often had close contact with the military, but service in
the armed forces is not a prerequisite for writing military literature. For example, Sabina
Murray’s The Caprices (2002) is written about two soldiers in the Pacific Campaign of World
War II and has won many comparisons to military literature icon Stephen Crane’s Red Badge
of Courage for its imaginative power, especially because, like Crane, Murray never actually
experienced the battlefield firsthand before writing about war. Likewise,Tom Clancy, usually
classified as a techno-thriller writer, deals extensively in military representations and themes
but was rejected from military service because of his nearsightedness (Garson 1996, 4). Even
though these writers haven’t served in the military, their works are still considered military
literature because some aspect of the military is focused on in their writing.

with how the military shapes their lives. Military literature is often, but not always,
focused on soldiers (traditionally men, but this stereotype is slowly equalizing) who
experience combat on the battlefront. Most military literature fiction, poetry, and
memoirs tend to describe this aspect of the military and could be aptly called
“war stories” for their focus on combat details But there are pieces of military lit-
erature that portray other aspects of the military, such as Dale Brown’s short
story “Leadership Material” (Brown 2001), which describes the process of rank
advancement while exploring the strained relationships of those who fight on the
frontlines and those who provide the infrastructure necessary for the armed serv-
ices to function.
One of the most popular military literature genres is the memoir or personal nar-
rative. Since 2000, memoirs on Vietnam and the first Gulf War have been widely
published. Works such as Joel Turnipseed’s Baghdad Express (2003) or Anthony
Swofford’s Jarhead (2003), which became a better-known movie two years after its
publication, have held popular attention, especially with their publications coincid-
ing with the beginning of the current war in Iraq. Fictional stories about the mili-
tary are also extremely popular (just look through any bookstore and see how many
tanks, planes, subs, or soldiers are on the covers) and traditionally tend to glorify
the armed forces, combat, and undying patriotism toward the United States. Con-
versely, poetry about the military since Vietnam has been largely protestant. Fluctu-
ating between these apparent polar opposites, memoirs are often a conflation of the
two extremes, generally attempting to portray both the dehumanization of military
experience while simultaneously describing the camaraderie and personal growth
one finds in a military life.
Historical works on past wars have also been extremely prolific, the Gulf War in
particular during the buildup to and invasion of Iraq in 2004. Other forms of writ-
ing that could possibly be defined as military literature are blogs and letters of sol-
diers serving in the armed forces, as well as journalistic writing from reporters
embedded with active troops. Overall, the defining element of military literature is
that the piece of writing is about the military in some way.
Because military literature is any writing that deals with military issues, there are
obviously ample opportunities for blurring genre lines. For instance, Tom Clancy
and Stephen Coonts, two authors whose works are traditionally labeled as techno-
thrillers, could also easily be classified as military literature writers because many of
614 MILITARY LITERATURE

their works focus on the armed forces. Likewise, contemporary military literature is
not constricted to contemporary militaries or current conflicts, so one will quickly
find multiple science fiction military literatures, such as David Drake’s collection
Foreign Legions (2001) or Dave Grossman and Leo Frankowski’s The Two Space
War (2005). Authors also often reach back in time to portray earlier wars. Jeff
Shaara, for instance, wrote his highly acclaimed Gods and Generals (1998) about
the Civil War, and has since written recently written To the Last Man (2004), which
takes place during World War I, and The Rising Tide: A Novel of World War II
(2006), among his many other works. Shaara’s and others’ works that deal with past
events are traditionally labeled historical fiction, but their focus on war or the mili-
tary of days gone by make these works military literature. While authors such as
Shaara create historical fiction, the creation of alternate histories has also been a
fruitful bed for authors, such as Harry Turtledove in his American Empire series, to
explore military literature in a world of what might have been if, for instance, the
Allies didn’t win World War II or if the North didn’t force the confederacy back into
the Union. Vastly different from the other types of military literature, Married to the
Military: A Survival Guide for Military Wives, Girlfriends, and Women in Uniform
(Leyva 2003) or Shellie Vandevoorde’s Separated By Duty, United In Love (2006)
appeal to an audience with a very different interest in and viewpoint of the military,
that of the military wife. These books tend to focus on offering advice over telling
a story. James Thomas’s My Dad Is Going Away, but He Will be Back One Day: A
Deployment Story (2004) pushes genre limits even further by creating military lit-
erature in children’s book form.
Military literature can be anything from techno-thrillers to self-help and rela-
tionship books to children stories. From this we see that military literature is a
broad, inclusive term applicable to many genres of writing. In this chapter we will
examine the most popular forms of military literature—novels and memoirs. This
is not to slight other forms of writing dealing with any of the many aspects of the
military but to instead focus on the most popular forms of military literature. See
FURTHER READINGS at the end of the chapter for information on military
poetry.
History. This broad spectrum of possible military literature genres is to be
expected. Stephen Coonts, author of countless fictional works, argues in his intro-
duction to Combat, a collection of what he calls “techno-thriller novellas,” (Coonts
2001, 12) that “armed conflict has been a fertile setting for storytellers since the
dawn of the written word, and probably before” (Coonts 2001, 9). Others agree.
As John W.I. Lee informs us, the aristocratic Greek soldier, Xenophon, wrote the
first soldier’s memoir in the fourth century B.C.E. (Lee 2005, 41). The Iliad, possibly
the best-known example of military literature, is estimated to have been written
about four centuries earlier. Every nation since (and most likely before) has had its
various military literatures, and while American literature has been no different in
writing about war, American literature is unusual because it is relatively modern,
without ancient national literatures of its own. The modern war story, then, has
undergone vast changes while keeping in touch with traditional military story
themes. As we trace the development of military literature in America, it will be
helpful to examine a few particular works to illustrate the depth of the genre. The
pieces focused on in this chapter are often considered some of the most influential
pieces of military literature, and themes we see in them are often returned to in mil-
itary literature written today. Again, for space constraints we are forced to limit the
 MILITARY LITERATURE 615

number of “key” pieces of American military literature over the centuries, but the
selected bibliography will offer those interested further readings connected to this
issue.
Before beginning this short summary, it is interesting to note that some scholars
believe military literature perhaps consciously attempts to erase its literary legacy.
According to Samuel Hynes, well known war narrative scholar,

The stories that men tell of war belong to a curious class of writing. In most war
narratives there is nothing to suggest that the author is aware of any previous exam-
ple: no quotations or allusions or imitations of earlier models, and no evident
knowledge of previous wars, or even of other theatres in the war that he is recall-
ing. War writing, it seems, is a genre without a tradition to the men who write it.
(Hynes 1997, 4)

This noted, it is interesting that there are still trends and threads of commonality
among many military literatures. But Hynes’s commentary hinges on the word
“seems” in the final sentence. In fact, military literature, as with most literature, in
some way responds to the writing of earlier generations. As we will see, there are
themes and trends in contemporary military literature that can be traced to literary
ancestors since the Civil War.
In this light, many view Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895) as the
genesis of the modern American war story. Written by a young author who never
experienced war before producing the novel, The Red Badge of Courage tells the
story of a young soldier, Henry Flemming, usually identified as “the youth,” who
enlists with the Union army; his subsequent fleeing from the battlefield; his attempt
at self-justification for his supposed cowardice; and finally his triumphant return to
the battle and earned self-respect. While Crane hadn’t experienced war personally
before writing Red Badge, it was immediately hailed as a realistic depiction of the
Civil War by veterans who experienced what the story depicts. Red Badge deals
with, among other things, issues of courage, honor, duty, and the craziness and
atrocities of war—themes that many pieces of military literature since have
repeated.
For example, note how the following passage describes a charge the main char-
acter, Fleming, makes with his company on the opposing army’s lines:

But there was a frenzy made from this furious rush. The men, pitching forward
insanely, had burst into cheerings, moblike and barbaric, but tuned in strange keys
that can arouse the dullard and the stoic. It made a mad enthusiasm that, it seemed,
would be incapable of checking itself before granite and brass. There was the delir-
ium that encounters despair and death, and is heedless and blind to the odds. (Crane
2001, 102).

Crane uses particular words such as “frenzy,” “furious,” moblike,” and “delirium”
to give a feeling of insanity and confusion in the charge, describing what many have
called the “fog of war.” This craziness of war has been both repeated by many
authors and transformed into a humorous theme by displaying just how absurd war
is. Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller, unlike the seriousness of Red Badge, turns to
humor and absurdity instead of poignancy and realism. In one instance the charac-
ter Yossarian, a bomber pilot who has decided he doesn’t want to fly any more
616 MILITARY LITERATURE

missions, tries to convince a doctor he is crazy, thus forcing the doctor to ground
him and not allow Yossarian to fly any more missions. But as Doc Daneeka explains
to Yossarian, the only pilots who are truly sane are those who don’t want to fly the
missions. As Yossarian and Doc Daneeka discuss another “crazy” pilot, the narrator
informs us

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for
one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process
of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask;
and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more
missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was
sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he
didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the
absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. (Heller
1961, 46)

This passage is not only entertaining through its dizzying ridiculousness but also
highlights another aspect of the craziness of war—that to desire to go to war is in
itself an act of lunacy because it places one’s body in harm’s way. Both the serious
and comic representations of the craziness of war have been underlying themes in
many military literatures in American history.
Catch-22 has been praised by many as one of the most influential novels of the
twentieth century, and has influenced much subsequent military literature. For
example, Turnipseed’s Baghdad Express also deals with issues of absurdity, in
somewhat different fashions. While Turnipseed isn’t as out and out funny as
Heller, he does use absurdity to add a humorous element to his memoir. For exam-
ple, his memoir is dotted with homemade comics that break up the narrative ten-
sion his story creates. In one instance, a comic portrays soldier responses to an air
raid call. Among the jokes in this comic is that the air raid informs soldiers that
three enemy planes are en route to attack and that two are intercepted and
destroyed, but it forgets to mention the state of the third enemy plane. Instead of
mentioning the plane, the voice over the intercom states “the skies are now clear
and should continue to clear up” (Turnipseed 2003, 49). The statement is even
more absurd because the picture before it indicates the weather is rainy, driving all
soldiers inside. Thus the clear skies are false on two levels. While the joke isn’t
particularly funny, it’s medium—a comic in the middle of a memoir—helps to
illustrate the absurdity of both the information given to troops as well as the illog-
ical elements of the military itself. From this we see a gradual progression from
one century to another where issues of the craziness of war are played out in dif-
ferent ways, and we can expect further representations of the craziness of war in
military literature to come.
Tim O’Brien has also held major influence over the military literature genre. His
works Going After Cacciato (1978) and The Things They Carried (1990) have set
standards of form and style that many military writers have felt compelled to fol-
low. One of his most popular works, The Things They Carried is a series of loosely
related stories dealing with issues such as one soldier’s contemplated draft-dodging
or how soldiers cope with losing friends and fellow soldiers in battle. Like Catch-22,
O’Brien’s narratives question the value of war by portraying the drastic psycholog-
ical changes and moral dilemmas forced on individuals in wartime, as well as
explore the sheer violence and madness of wartime situations. For example, O’Brien
 MILITARY LITERATURE 617

tells a story of one soldier, Curt Lemon, who steps on a mine. To drive the point
home to an audience that may not be familiar with the effects of a landmine on a
soldier, O’Brien writes the following:

Then he took a particular half step, moving from shade into bright sunlight, and the
booby-trapped 105 round blew him into a tree. The parts were just hanging there, so
Dave Jensen and I were ordered to shinny up and peel him off. I remember the white
bone of an arm. I remember pieces of skin and something wet and yellow that must’ve
been the intestines. The gore was horrible, and stays with me. But what wakes me up
twenty years later is Dave Jensen singing “Lemon Tree” as we threw down the parts.
(O’Brien 1998, 83)

This passage illustrates aptly the aforementioned absurdity of war and the descrip-
tive power of O’Brien’s writing, but it also signifies what other writers have tried to
produce. Compare, for instance, Buzz Williams’s Spare Parts: A Marine Reservist’s
Journey from Campus to Combat in 38 Days (2004) depiction of a look into the
remains of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait he discovered during his tour during Desert
Storm:

It didn’t sink in right away . . . a mattress on the floor . . . bloody undergarments strewn
about . . . lengths of rope for binding hands and feet . . . kerchief gags for muffling
screams. [ . . . ] As I walked back to the living room, a toilet caught my attention. What
I wanted was to take a leak, but even the bathroom wasn’t what it seemed. Electrical
wires from a chandelier ran along the ceiling, with bare ends dangling into the bath-
tub. Next to the tub was a homemade device fashioned with batteries and wires. And
more rope [ . . . ] The washer and dryer showed it had once been a laundry room. The
blood splash on the wall, though, showed it had been used for executions. The walls
and floor were sticky with innards—blood and guts and brains. The grisly scene drove
me out into the alley gagging on the stench of death, spitting to rid my mouth of the
taste, and blowing to lose the smell. (Williams 2004, 245)

Graphic violence such as this is intended to shock the reader into a sense of disgust-
inspired awe, a feeling to drive home the brutality and depravation of the situation,
and is a common trope of much military literature.
O’Brien’s work is also interesting due to his narrative structure. Instead of telling
a consecutive story, each chapter building from the previous one and into the fol-
lowing one, O’Brien’s The Things They Carried makes jumps in time and space,
going from various locations in the jungles of Vietnam to hometown America before
the soldiers left for the war. In addition, instead of following the story of one or two
characters, as most novels do, The Things They Carried follows the lives of the men
in one company, telling incomplete stories for each of them. The final effect of this
is to force the reader to be in a constant state of uneasiness, always attempting to
understand how one story is placed in connection with another. This uneasiness,
though difficult for the reader, is obviously what O’Brien wants his readers to expe-
rience. Instead of reading a tidy war story, O’Brien’s audience is forced into a new
situation, as are the characters in the novel. This adds a greater sense of what a sol-
dier in Vietnam would have faced, giving the reader a closer (though not perfect)
connection to the reality of war experience.
In addition to these highly acclaimed war novels, military literature on the popu-
lar front has been extremely prolific. One of the best known writers whose works
618 MILITARY LITERATURE

deal with military issues is Tom Clancy. While usually classified as a techno-thriller
writer, Clancy’s work often involves Special Forces, military weaponry, and even the
military’s relationship with other branches of the government, therefore qualifying
some of his novels as military literature. If we were to consider only the 1.6 million
copies of Clancy’s Clear and Present Danger that sold in 1989 alone and exclude all
the novels by other writers such as Stephen Coonts, Dale Turner, and Jeff Shaara,
we can still see that military literature is extremely well received, at least in terms of
book sales.
Trends and Themes. From this short survey of twentieth century military litera-
ture and some of the descendants of these works, we can calculate where military
literature in the twenty-first century is going. As we have seen, some but not all mil-
itary literature is centered on blood, guts, weaponry, and Rambo-esque super sol-
diers single-handedly eradicating the enemy. While there is this tendency in much of
what could be called military thrillers, and even some memoirs, to focus on the
Rambo-style characters or small, elite groups of soldiers on secret missions, other
genres of military writing offer other focuses. Military thrillers that focus on the
technological aspect of the military or their need for the commandos to save the day
and become national heroes in the end of the novel tend to be weak in strong char-
acter development and complexity, thus weakening the stories’ believability and
influence over a reader’s response. But saying this doesn’t mean there aren’t many
redeeming qualities in the military thriller. Instead of just being tales of suspense and
action that are quickly forgotten, military thrillers, like other types of military liter-
ature, often deal with contemporary issues in the military and society.
Like in The Red Badge of Courage, Catch-22, and The Things They Carried, the
craziness of war is often portrayed in contemporary military fiction. But, interest-
ingly, this theme has emerged more in the past decade in memoirs and personal nar-
ratives than in contemporary fiction. As we have seen, Turnipseed responded to the
craziness of war in a quirky way and Pantano reacted to the craziness of war by try-
ing to portray the graphic details of his encounter with the “rape room.” But most
military fiction, especially the military thrillers, tends to overlook this detail to por-
tray soldiers performing their duties with precision and even flair. The stereotypical
military thriller hero is calm, composed, and deadly.
Although different genres in military literature may employ different themes, just
as often they share other themes across genre borders. One such shared theme is
camaraderie among soldiers. Much military literature draws on the natural bond
that is created through training and serving with a group of soldiers. This cama-
raderie separates soldiers from the rest of society. As Jason and Graves suggest, this
theme, once used to exemplify the “melting pot” theory of America—that the
United States is a blend of multiple nationalities and ethnicities—and create a
greater sense of American nationalism, has been drastically changed to create
instead a loyalty among soldiers, separate from the nation. In many ways, the sol-
diers become outcasts of society, freaks that can only relate to one another after
their war experiences (Jason and Graves 2001, xi).
For example, in Jarhead a scene takes place in Michigan, where Swofford and five
other marines travel to a former comrade’s funeral six years after serving in the Gulf
War. In describing the experience of mourning the death of his friend from the
Marines, Swofford writes, “We were all hurt badly, and ready to die, to join our
friend” (Swofford 2003, 76). After the funeral services, Swofford and his friends go
to a bar where one of them drinks until he passes out. A local mocks the marine,
 MILITARY LITERATURE 619

hits his head against the bar, and a fight between the marines and apparently every-
one else in the bar ensues. While Swofford feels he and the marines did their com-
rade an honor in fighting (“he’d have wanted us spending the evening of his funeral
drunk and at combat” (Swofford 2003, 81), the dead marine’s mother is upset
because she sees the marines’ actions as tarnishing her son’s memory. Swofford’s
story illustrates that civilians can’t quite understand soldiers, and so soldiers must
turn to their own kind for support.
Another theme that is extremely prevalent in contemporary military literature is
the individual’s growth. This theme is often seen in two forms—either in a charac-
ter’s coming of age or in rehabilitation/healing of former problems. Jason and
Graves claim that “the great bulk of war narratives that focus on young men [ . . .]
are essentially initiation or coming of age stories” (Jason and Graves 2001, xi).
While we don’t see this as much in military thrillers as we do in memoirs, it is still
a common theme. Stephen Coonts’s novella, “Al Jihad,” likewise implies this same
message; the military’s tough love, discipline, and second chance on life is symboli-
cally offered through Charlie Dean (retired marine sniper turned gas station owner)
giving Candy (a stereotypical multiple-facial pierced, thieving, cowardly punk) a
beating for stealing from the station. This, along with Dean’s mercy as Candy’s plot
to rob Dean’s filling station fails and Dean keeps Candy from being arrested, helps
straighten out the troubled youth and turns him into a hardworking, respectable cit-
izen. If the marine’s tough love can do this for Candy, then it can do it for anyone.
Similar to Candy’s treatment, another trend in military memoirs is the rehabili-
tory effects of military service. Many characters are presented as troubled youth
who the military straightens out. For example, Joel Turnipseed, in his Baghdad
Express, describes his less than ideal youth with a father who beat his mother and
horrific nightmares that turn out to be memories of a car fire that he barely escaped
from as a child (Turnipseed 2003, 26). As Turnipseed states, “This awkwardness,
this abruptness, was not new to me: I was born into it [ . . . ] In all, I went to a dif-
ferent school in a different city every year from kindergarten to tenth grade. It made
me a connoisseur of loneliness” (Turnipseed 2003, 25). For Turnipseed and others,
life in the military is seen as a step toward stability away from a chaotic family.
Like the broad range of themes, there has also been a trend emerging in military
literature to portray previously unheard elements of the military. Two that have
been particularly interesting are the infrastructure and politics of the military and
the roles of women in war. Neither necessarily focuses on combat, and so were not
written about to a great extent in the past. But recently these subjects have seen
more publishing. The tendency of the literature to focus on the soldier who has seen
fighting creates a largely skewed vision of the military because most individuals who
serve in the military do not experience firsthand firefights or modern warfare. From
the majority of military literature, then, one forgets the huge infrastructure used to
support a nation’s war efforts. Resource transportation, training, and paperwork
happen away from the battlefront but require as much if not more manpower than
troops on the ground. While most military literature is still focused on the men on
the frontlines, there is an increasing trend to represent the military superstructure
and women’s roles in the military in literature. One such example is Dale Brown’s
“Leadership Material.” In this short story, we see the process of rank advancement
through committee. In Orson Scott Card’s short story “50 WPM” (2002) we see
another example of the bureaucratic element of the military. In this story, a young
man is trained by his father to be exceptional at typing. The youth’s war veteran
620 MILITARY LITERATURE

father chooses to train his son in typing in order to save him from battle in case he
is ever drafted into the army, since this skill is a rare commodity and more useful in
the general’s offices where there is less chance for fighting.
Another realm where we see an expanded interest in non-fighting military stories
is in the abundant memoirs about the Gulf War. Turnipseed’s Baghdad Express is
his story of being a convoy driver, a dangerous job but not one that necessarily
required him to constantly be on the front lines. From the popularity of these exam-
ples, we see a growing interest in not only what a military does on the battlefield but
also rather a general interest in the mystery of how the military functions.
Context and Issues. While many critics of military literature claim it is mostly a
lot of pulp fiction that offers readers little valuable intellectual work, military liter-
ature in general since 2000 has done well responding to current events and debates.
The two most obvious contextual issues are the post September 11, 2001, American
“War on Terrorism” and its subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Each age of
military literature has its stereotypical bad guys. In the 1980s and early 1990s it was
the Soviet Union and communist countries in general. Today it is the terrorist, and
stereotypically the Islamic, usually Middle Eastern or American convert, extremist
bent on destroying good Americans wherever they exist, as in Oliver North and Joe
Musser’s Mission Compromised (2003). As one would expect, direct and indirect
responses to the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
and the failed attack on the White House pepper military literature. This trend is
especially strong in military thriller novels, possibly because they are attempting to
tap into readers’ fear in an attempt to entertain.
The current war in Iraq stoked an already heated debate in the American culture
as to what roles the different genders should play in war, especially in battle. Tradi-
tionally, women have been able to serve in various positions in the military, from
nurses to supply troops, but never in active combat forces. While here is not the
place to discuss the many sides of this debate, there are inexhaustible resources for
those interested. For example, at http://www.militarywoman.org/reading.htm, one
can trace one of these debates as it has evolved over more than ten years. And even
the U.S. Army has made it a point to discuss women’s roles in fighting units as it has
allowed some women to serve as HUMVEE turret gunners in patrol units (“Books
about Women in the Military”). This debate was again revived as America invaded
Iraq in 2003. Radio talk shows, TV news programs, newspapers, and even online
forums discussed the national policy that barred women from combat duty. This
debate was in part further ignited by the capture of U.S. convoy soldiers on March 23,
2003, and their subsequent rescue on April 1, 2003, including two female soldiers,
Shoshona Johnson and Jessica Lynch. Initial reports (that are still unsubstantiated)
that Lynch was repeatedly raped by her captors fueled those who feared this very
possibility for servicewomen. Both women were rescued, along with members of
their convoy, but media responses to their individual stories appeared biased toward
Lynch—a blonde Caucasian—and away from Johnson—an African American, spark-
ing another deeply seeded debate of racism in the military and media. Jessica Lynch’s
story has continued to make headlines, with occasional updates on her college edu-
cation and the birth of her daughter, Dakota. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Rick
Bragg even wrote a book on Lynch entitled I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch
Story (2003).
While the country has argued about women’s roles in the military and infantry
divisions, military literature writers have taken the opportunity to weigh in on the
 MILITARY LITERATURE 621

subject through their writing. For example, Charles W. Sasser’s Detachment Delta:
Punitive Strike (2002) follows in part the story of two fictional soldiers—one a man
and the other a woman—who are captured by Islamic terrorists. In Sasser’s novel,
both the male and female prisoners are beaten, but only the female is assaulted
sexually. From this we see military writers responding to current debates and events,
possibly to garner an interested readership, but also to make statements on military
policy.
Just as headline savvy as those writers who discuss women in the military are the
writers who take on issues of interrogation and torture. In Spring 2004 stories broke
through The New Yorker and 60 Minutes II on torture and prisoner abuse at the
U.S. controlled Iraqi prison, Abu Ghraib. This event called into question the actions
of U.S. service men and women while offering fodder for those who criticized U.S.
occupation of Iraq. Likewise, reports of U.S. interrogation methods came under fire
as reports from Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay trickled out.
David Alexander, like many other military literature writers, deals with this issue
and other contemporary issues and debates directly in his novel Marine Force One
(2003). As he describes early in his novel, Alexander portrays illegal interrogation
by the U.S. government. He writes, “Saxon did not approve of the methodology of
interrogation, but it was out of his hands now and in the hands of the spooks. The
Geneva Convention (banning torture in interrogation) didn’t apply here. Neither did
the Constitution or Bill of Rights. The spooks called the shots and they had opted
for chemicals” (Alexander 2003, 41). This passage is especially illustrative in that it
is shortly followed by the mentioning that the observers of the interrogation include
“representatives from the president’s small group of advisors and the DOD and
NSC deputies groups, as well as lawyers from the JAG and Marine Corps Office of
Special Operations” (Alexander 2003, 41). That the narrator informs the audience
that the main character openly disapproves of illegal interrogations serves to sway the
reader’s opinion of events transpiring in the novel, even though we clearly see that
the illegal interrogation is sanctioned by both the military and the president.
Passages such as this draw the readers with news stories, such as one reported
through Newsweek that “The Bush administration’s emerging approach [ . . . ] that
America’s enemies in this war were “unlawful” combatants without rights” (Barry,
Hirsh, and Isikoff 1996), thus linking Alexander’s novel to current hot debates.
Alexander’s decision to present prisoner abuse as a negative thing offers his audi-
ence an extension of the debate. So from military literature’s dealing with women’s
roles in the military and prisoner abuse and interrogation we see that military liter-
ature writers often offer their audiences both fiction dealing with current events and
commentary on these debates and current events.
Reception. While military literature has been a staple in the reading public, cer-
tain genres garner much more commentary, applause, and criticism than others. In
particular, military memoirs are often seen as much more “valuable” literature than
military thrillers and have therefore earned more attention. In the ever-expanding
field of military literature, there has been a surge of military memoirs since 2000.
This has happened in part because of the current war in Iraq, creating a reading
audience wanting to experience the previous Gulf War as a means of understanding
the current conflict. As a result, memoirs such as Jarhead and Baghdad Express have
seen increased sales. Indeed, the exigency of the issue has spurred the public recep-
tion of the works. But even though these works have received a lot of public atten-
tion in the form of book reviews, they have not received much critical attention.
622 MILITARY LITERATURE

Baghdad Express and Jarhead have garnered most of the critical attention, but even
these two works have been slow to gain academic, or “literary,” acceptance. We will
focus on the reviews of Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead because, as the most well-
known piece of military literature to be written within the decade, Jarhead offers
both a continuation of a discussion of the themes and contextual issues in military
literature as well as an opportunity to discuss how military literature is translated
into major motion pictures.
Jarhead is a contemporary war narrative that has, in good military fashion,
stormed the United States, captured popular approval, and earned for its author,
Anthony Swofford, all the essential popular literature medals of honor—numberless
book reviewer’s hearts and praise, television interviews, including Good Morning
America and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and the ever-coveted Hollywood
blockbuster.
There are generally three focuses reviewers have taken when dealing with
Jarhead. First, reviewers have read Jarhead as a form of protest or antiwar narrative.
This form of review is nearly always accompanied by accolades about how well
written or how accurately Jarhead portrays reality. For example, a 2002 Publisher’s
Weekly anonymous review of Jarhead says it “offers . . . an unflinching portrayal of
the loneliness and brutality of modern warfare and sophisticated analyses of—and
visceral reactions to—its politics” (241). Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk
Down (1999), follows form, stating the following:

Jarhead is some kind of classic, a bracing memoir of the 1991 Persian Gulf War that will
go down with the best books ever written about military life. It is certainly the most
honest memoir I have read from a participant in any war. Swofford writes with humor,
anger and great skill. His prose is alive with ideas and feeling, and at times soars like
poetry. He captures the hilarity, tedium, horniness and loneliness of the long prewar
desert deployment, and then powerfully records the experience of his war. (2003, 8)

With phrases such as “some kind of classic” or “best books ever written about
military life,” we quickly see Bowden approves of Swofford’s work.
Marc Herman agrees with Bowden but expands this praise by lauding the accu-
sational tone of the memoir, stating “Jarhead emerges as a scary, detailed, well-written
indictment of life in the military” (2003, 76). Like Bowden, Herman uses imagery
loaded phrases, “scary” and “well-written indictment,” to illicit a particular
response from his audience. That this indictment of the military is “detailed” and
“well-written” is Herman’s rhetorical evidence that not only is Swofford correct
because he has offered enough proof through his details but also he has proven he
is a trustworthy spokesman because what he has written is executed with skill.
Herman also claims the memoir “could hardly be more timely” (2003, 76) by hit-
ting the bookshelves at the start of the current war in Iraq (in fact, it was pushed a
couple months ahead of schedule by publishers eyeing a valuable opportunity). The
exigency of the issue, along with the message Jarhead appears to purport, leads
Herman to believe Jarhead works as a protest against the current war and U.S.
foreign policy.
The second bend reviewers have taken toward Jarhead is to examine the work
from a cultural perspective. Edward Nowatka believes Jarhead catches the incon-
gruence of American feelings about war. In his 2003 article in Publisher’s Weekly
entitled “On the Heals of Jarhead,” Nowatka, like Bowden and Herman, suggests
 MILITARY LITERATURE 623

Jarhead’s popularity comes from its ability to “[capture] the contradictions of mod-
ern warfare for the average soldier—the tedious days of waiting punctuated by
moments of jolting terror, friendly fire, and surreal encounters with the dead”
(2003, 20). This is what makes Jarhead so successful as compared to its Gulf War
narrative counterparts—it shows not only the fear and surrealism of war, but bal-
ances these images with feelings of boredom and monotony, creating a more realis-
tic and trustworthy work instead of works that focus “on the lives of elite warriors
and read like thrillers” (2003, 20). Like Nowatka, Justin Ewers finds a rough cul-
tural ambiguity in Jarhead, but for Ewers this ambiguity represents something more
than accusations against the military. He writes in U.S. News and World Report that
“In Swofford’s conflicted psyche and lucid prose can be seen the evolution not only
of the war memoir but of American attitudes toward war—and war’s current place
in the American consciousness” (Ewers 2003, 52). Claiming the American war
memoir finds its roots in World War II, when more educated servicemen were
returning from a grisly war and finding a need to write about their experiences,
Ewers places Jarhead in a historical context of previous war memoirs. Common
themes in these memoirs were often the brutality of war and distrust of officers and
authority, while many “still overflowed with pride in the cause and the flag and the
uniform” (Ewers 2003, 52). This changed in Vietnam, when, according to Ewers,
“memoirs became overtly antiwar” (52). He claims Jarhead “combines the anti-
authoritarian tone of World War II with the lingering cynicism of Vietnam” (52).
Jarhead, then, is in many ways a culmination of the twentieth century war narra-
tive, with Swofford’s anti-authoritarianism and cynicism oddly mixed with pride to
be a marine, making the book reveal Swofford’s dysfunctional relationship with the
marines.
Margo Jefferson offers another cultural approach by referring to Walter Benjamin,
who claims the two oldest forms of storytelling are the historical chronicle and the
fairy tale. From this Jefferson decides “when we read a good memoir we know we
are reading both history and legend,” in this case history and legend about “all male
worlds of secrecy and ritual” where “strangers are seen as aliens, inferiors, or
enemies” (2004, 27). For Jefferson, Jarhead is a peek into a world from which she
and women have generally been excluded. Implied in her analysis of Jarhead is the
suggestion that Swofford claims women are “aliens, inferiors, or enemies,” and she
is right. There is plenty of male chauvinism in Jarhead, with women portrayed as
comforting mothers, wives, or girlfriends while simultaneously being unfaithful to
their soldier husbands. Few women are portrayed without sexual connotations
attached to them, a fact that has garnered little attention from critics.
The third approach reviews have taken to Jarhead is to read the personal over the
narrative, or to examine the work as more indicative of Swofford’s psyche than the
actual Gulf War. Edwin B. Burgess’s review typifies this approach by stating Jarhead
“is in no sense a chronicle of the Gulf War but instead an interior monolog reflect-
ing Swofford’s inner journey from despised childhood to coming of age as an
enlisted marine and finally coming somewhat to terms with the man he has become.
For Swafford, warfare was the culmination of everything he had experienced, so
that his existential narrative hangs on his pivotal nine-month tour of duty” (Burgess
2003, 126). To Burgess, Swofford’s time in Iraq is the turning point in his life, where
Swofford finds a greater sense of self through his training and experience than a bad
childhood and chemical dependency offered, but at the same time is able to “back
away from the total absorption of combat to live in the real world” (126). In this
624 MILITARY LITERATURE

way Jarhead isn’t so much about the Gulf War as it is about Swofford’s personal
development. In fact, Swofford, tells us on the second page of his memoir that “my
vision was blurred—by wind and sand and distance, by false signals, poor commu-
nication, and bad coordinates, by stupidity and fear and ignorance, by valor and
false pride. By the mirage. Thus what follows is neither true nor false, but what I
know” (Swofford 2003, 2). From this early introduction of Swofford’s own
acknowledgement of his shortcomings in describing his Gulf War experience,
Swofford intends for his reader to understand that he is writing about himself.
As we have seen, book reviewers have approached Jarhead in various ways, but
what have scholars said about the memoir turned movie? Surprising or not, they
have said very little. Except for the positive reviews the book has received, few
scholars have paid much attention to Swofford’s memoir. This seemingly minor
interest in Jarhead is surprising not only considering the vast amount of commen-
tary it has produced in the public sphere but also that it falls into a natural position
in the discussion of war narratives and provides much unbroken ground in war nar-
rative studies. Even with the 2004 film based on the book, there has been relatively
little scholarly work published on Swofford’s memoir. The fact that Jarhead is per-
haps the best known, critically acclaimed piece of contemporary military literature
that hasn’t been taken seriously in the academic world perhaps tells us a little about
how military literature is being received generally.

Bibliography
Alexander, David. Marine Force One: Recon by Fire. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2003.
Barry, John, Michael Hirsh, and Michael Isikoff. “The Roots of Torture.” Newsweek 1996.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4989436/site/newsweek/. (accessed Feb 28, 2007).
Bowden, Mark. “The Things They Carried: One Man’s Memoir of the 1991 Gulf War and
Other Battles.” New York Times Book Review 2 Mar 2003:8.
———. Black Hawk Down. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999.
Bragg, Rick. I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story. New York: Knopf, 2000.
Brown, Dale. “Leadership Material.” In Combat. Stephen Coonts, ed. New York: Tom
Doherty, 2001; 73–147.
Burgess, Edwin B. “Rev. of Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other
Battles.” Library Journal Jan. 2003: 126.
Card, Orson Scott. “50 WPM.” In In the Shadow of the Wall: An Anthology of Vietnam
Stories That Might Have Been. Byron R. Tetrick, ed. Nashville: Cumberland House,
2002.
Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. 1895. New York: Tor Classics, 2001.
Drake, David. Foreign Legions. Riverdale: Baen, 2001.
Ewers, Justin. “Soldiers’ Stories: A Marine’s Memoir Reflects the Changing Literature of
War.” U.S. News and World Report 24 Mar. 2003: 52.
Garson, Helen S. Tom Clancy: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996.
Grossman, Dave, and Leo Frankowski. The Two Space War. Riverdale: Baen, 2005.
Herman, Marc. “Jarhead.” Mother Jones 28.1 (2003):76
Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961.
Hynes, Samuel. The Soldier’s Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War. New York: A. Lane, 1997.
Jason, Philip K., and Mark A. Graves. “Introduction.” Encyclopedia of American War
Literature. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001.
Jefferson, Margo. “The Stuff of Legend.” New York Times, 2004.
Lee, John W.I. “Xenophon’s Anabasis and the Origins of Military Autobiography.” In Arms
and the Self: War, Military, and Autobiographical Writing. Alex Vernon, ed. Kent:
Kent State University Press, 41–60.
 MUSICAL THEATRE 625

Leyva, Meredith. Married to the Military: A Survival Guide for Military Wives, Girlfriends,
and Women in Uniform. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003.
Murray, Sabina. The Caprices. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. 1990. New York: Broadway, 1998.
Nowatka, Edward. “On the Heels of Jarhead.” Publisher’s Weekly 31 March 2003: 20.
Pantano, Ilario, with Malcolm McConnell. Warlord: No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy.
New York: Threshold, 2006.
Sasser, Charles W. Detachment Delta: Punitive Strike. New York: Avon, 2002.
Shaara, Jeff. The Rising Tide: A Novel of World War II. New York: Ballantine, 2006.
———. 2004. To the Last Man: A Novel of the First World War. New York: Ballantine, 2004.
———. Gods and Generals. New York: Ballantine, 1996.
Swofford, Anthony. Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles. New
York: Scribner, 2003.
Thomas, James, and Melanie Thomas. My Dad Is Going Away, but He Will Be Back One
Day: A Deployment Story. Victoria: Trafford, 2004.
Turnipseed, Joel. Baghdad Express: A Gulf War Memoir. St. Paul, MN: Borealis, 2003.
Turtledove, Harry. American Empire: Blood and Iron. New York: Del Rey, 2001.
———. American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold. New York: Del Rey, 2002.
Vandevoorde, Shellie. Separated by Duty, United in Love: A Guide to long-Distance
Relationships for Military Couples. New York: Citadel Press, 2006.
Williams, Buzz. Spare Parts: A Marine Reservist’s Journey from Campus to Combat in
38 Days. New York: Gotham Books, 2004.
“Books about Women in the Military.” http://www.militarywoman.org/reading.htm.

Further Reading
Bates, Milton. The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996; Benedetto, Christian M. War Cries: A Collection of
Military Poems. Shelbyville: Wasteland Press, 2005; Carroll, Joseph. “War novel (Represen-
tations of war in the novel).” In Encyclopedia of the Novel. 2 vols. Chicago: Fitzroy
Dearborn, 1998; Gannon, Charles E. Rumors of War and Infernal Machines: Technomilitary
Agenda-Setting in American and British Speculative Fiction. Lanham: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2003; Jason, Philip K. Acts and Shadows: The Vietnam War in American Literary
Culture. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000; Jason, Philip K., and Mark A. Graves.
Encyclopedia of American War Literature. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001; Smith, Myron
J. War Story Guide: An Annotated Bibliography of Military Fiction. Metuchan: Scarecrow
Press, 1980; Stallworthy, Jon. Were You There?: War and Poetry. Cheltenham: Cyder Press,
2005; Tatum, James. The Mourner’s Song: War and Remembrance from The Iliad to
Vietnam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003; Vernon, Alex. Arms and the Self: War,
the Military, and Autobiographical Writing. Kent: Kent State University Press, 2005;
“Women in Combat Forces.” Military Women. www.militarywoman.org/reading.htm—
debate. Acessed Feb 27, 2007; Yuknavitch, Lidia. Allegories of violence: Tracing the writ-
ing of war in Twentieth-Century fiction. New York: Routledge, 2001.
CHAD MCLANE

MUSICAL THEATRE
Definition. “Musical theatre,” like “poetry,” might be a term better said to
describe the presentation and reception of a work rather than its form or structure.
In the last ten years, pieces as diverse as Contact (a set of three dramatic sketches
set to mostly prerecorded music), Fosse (a revue of dances by choreographer-director
Bob Fosse), and Hairspray (a traditional musical comedy in which the dialogue
often gives way to songs sung as an extension of the spoken text) have all been given
the “Best Musical” Tony Award. Scholars who attempt to define the genre usually
626 MUSICAL THEATRE

define their boundaries generously. In the introduction to his book The World of
Musical Comedy, Stanley Green writes that musical theatre “covers operetta, comic
opera, musical play (now frequently merely called ‘musical’), musical comedy itself,
revue, and, in the past, spectacle or extravaganza” (Green 1974, xiii). In his
Encyclopedia of Musical Theater, published two years later, Green extends his defi-
nition to include opera “if offered for a regular commercial run” (Green 1976, v).
In general, then, almost any piece of theatre that uses music in a significant way
could be called a musical. In practice, though, the titles usually marketed and stud-
ied as musicals can be distinguished from other forms of theatre that use music by
three defining characteristics:
1. Words are important. Unlike opera, which, in general, privileges music, and ballet,
which privileges dance, the musical tends to encourage the audience to attend
closely to its text. Sheldon Harnick, lyricist of Fiddler on the Roof, writes that the
“book” (or unsung text of a musical) is “of primary importance” (Guernsey 1974,
38). This sentiment is echoed by lyricist and composer Stephen Sondheim who
claims, “Books are what the musical theater is about” (Guernsey 1974, 91). Operas
can be appreciated and understood purely for their music; they are often performed
in a language unfamiliar to the majority of their audience. Musicals, as a rule,
require the audience to understand what is being said and sung.
2. Songs are sung in a “popular” style. Opera and operetta are typically sung in a clas-
sical style, a performance practice developed to project the sound of the voice across
great distances. In The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical, Mark Grant con-
trasts the classical with the “popular” style, which places “more emphasis on con-
sonants and the clarity of the lyrics than on vowels and tonal beauty” (Grant 2004,
17–18). Musicals today are usually sung in a popular style that, arguably, privileges
the acting (rather than singing) ability of the performer. “Opera is designed to show
off the human voice,” says Sondheim, contrasting the form to his Sweeney Todd,
which he says, “is about telling a story and telling it as swiftly as possible” (Bryer
and Davison 2005, 202).
3. Extra-diegetic songs are used. Although most shows on Broadway use music in
some way, songs in nonmusical plays are typically diegetic, that is, the characters in
the play recognize these songs as songs. Musicals (and for that matter operas), on
other hand, make extensive use of extra-diegetic songs (songs sung by characters
who don’t realize they are singing). Musicals may, of course, contain diegetic
songs—in The Phantom of the Opera, Christine sings “Think of Me” and is lauded
by other characters for her exceptional performance. However, when she sings “All
I Ask of You” to Raoul, there is no indication that the characters realize they are
singing rather than speaking. A play that contains only diegetic songs is usually not
considered a musical.
A musical may be defined, then, as a piece of theatre that uses both spoken text
and extra-diegetic songs sung in the popular style to communicate to its audience.
This definition, though, only circumscribes the form and distinguishes it from other,
similar, kinds of performances. In the next section we will look further at the parts
of the musical, both spoken and sung, to further understand the nature of the form
itself.
Parts of a Musical. The Book: In the study and practice of musical theatre, the term
“book” is used to refer to the part of the musical that is spoken rather than sung.
Stephen Sondheim further defines the book as “the scheme of the show, the way the
songs and the dialogue work together, the style of the show” (Guernsey 1974, 91).
Thus, musicals such as Les Misérables, which contain almost no spoken text, may
 MUSICAL THEATRE 627

still be said to have a book. The book is sometimes known as the libretto (though,
often, this refers to the entire text, both spoken and sung).
The Music: In addition to the songs, which will be discussed shortly, musicals
usually include several pieces of instrumental-only music.
• The Overture: The overture is the music usually played after the lights are lowered
but before the action of the musical begins. It is entirely instrumental (there is no
singing), and usually consists of a medley of songs from the show. The overture
serves to lead the audience into the world of the musical and to establish the mood
of the first scene.
Since the early 1970s, overtures began to be less frequently used in new musicals.
In 1969, the relatively traditional musical 1776 began with a fife and drum medley
that transported the audience to the revolutionary congress in Philadelphia. In 1970,
the musical Company brought the audience into the contemporary world of the
musical, no less effectively, with the sound of a telephone busy signal. Since then,
there has been an increasing tendency on the part of musical theatre composers to
dispense with an overture of any significant length.
• Underscoring: The underscore is the music that plays under spoken dialogue. It is
common in nonmusical films and plays as well as in musicals and serves to enhance
the mood of a scene. In musicals, underscoring often immediately precedes or fol-
lows a song and helps to make the transition between speaking and singing.
• Bows/Exit Music: The bows and exit music are the counterpart to the overture. As
the name suggests, this music plays while the performers bow to the applauding
audience and continues while the audience files out of the theatre. The exit music
usually consists of the most memorable melodies in the show and works to ensure
the audience leaves the theatre with the songs in their head (hopefully predisposed
to tell their friends about the show).
Songs: Theatre writer Aaron Frankel credits choreographer Bob Fosse with clas-
sifying musical theatre songs into three categories: “I am songs,” “I want songs,”
and “new songs” (95).
• In “I am” songs, in Frankel’s words, “the character commits himself in some way”
(Frankel 2000, 95). This may be as simple as a character introducing himself (the
title song in “The Phantom of the Opera”) or as complex as a character realizing
the reality of her situation (“See I’m Smiling” from The Last Five Years).
• “I want” songs, on the other hand, express the “need” of a character “to reach”
(Frankel 2000, 95). The character may directly express her desires (“The Wizard
and I” in Wicked) to the audience or may imply them by what he sings to another
character (for instance, in a love song like Rent’s “I’ll Cover You”).
• “New” songs are Fosse’s catch-all category for songs that don’t exactly fit into either
of the other ones. “Masquerade” in Phantom of the Opera, for example, serves as
a spectacular and colorful opening to Act II and underscores the musical’s theme of
the masks but does not directly express the needs or nature of any of the characters.
Fosse, as a director, centered his categories on the motivations of characters. A
more structural taxonomy is described by musical theatre teacher and writer
Lehman Engel in his book, The American Musical Theatre. Engel describes the
following six types of songs:
• Opening number: As the name suggests, this is the song that begins the musical and
establishes the world of the piece. The importance of the opening number is illus-
trated by the familiar story of the development of A Funny Thing Happened on the
Way to the Forum, which according to those involved, failed to entertain audiences
628 MUSICAL THEATRE

until Sondheim wrote the opening number, “Comedy Tonight,” which tells the audi-
ence how to respond to the show (Guernsey 1974, 67).
• Soliloquy: A soliloquy is a moment in which a single actor expresses his inner
thoughts as they move from one state to another. In Les Misérables, Jean Valjean
sings “Who Am I” to the audience as he thinks through an ethical dilemma. By the
end of the song he has made his decision, and he directs his song once more to other
characters in the piece.
• Charm Song: A charm song, in the words of Engel, “embodies generally delicate,
optimistic, and rhythmic music, and lyrics of light though not necessarily comedic
subject matter” (Engel 1975, 87). Rent’s “Santa Fe,” in which the action stops as
two characters dream of opening a restaurant in New Mexico, is a recent example.
• Musical scene: At the end of Act I of the musical Wicked, the two witches from The
Wizard of Oz are trapped in a broom closet in the Emerald City. A moment of cri-
sis has come, and they must each decide whether to defy the corrupted establish-
ment or serve their own interests by joining it. Throughout the scene, the dialogue
moves back and forth between spoken and sung text. This is an example of what
Engel calls a musical scene. Other examples include “Light My Candle” in Rent and
“Chip on My Shoulder” from Legally Blonde.
• Comic song: Engel observes that the most successful comic song is usually charac-
ter-driven and “evokes in people the amusement of seeing themselves (or others
whom they recognize instantly) and being entertained by the spectacle of their own
foibles” (Engel 1975, 104). “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist” and “The Internet is for
Porn” from Avenue Q both fit into this category.
• 11 o’clock number: Named for the actual time at which a song of this sort would
be sung in an evening, 11 o’clock numbers are usually up-tempo songs close to the
end of the final act, which serve to energize the audience for the final few scenes.
The song “The American Dream,” in Miss Saigon, in which the character known as
the “Engineer” fantasizes about American life in a spectacular, brassy number just
before the action begins its final descent toward the musical’s inevitably tragic con-
clusion, is an example. Others include “What You Own” in Rent and “No Good
Deed” in Wicked.

To Engel’s categories, I would add three others (though these are hardly original):
• Recitative: Recitative (an Italian term that rhymes with “cassette at Eve”), describes
words sung using the normal patterns of speech (usually without rhyme). The answer-
ing machine messages in Rent (e.g., “That was a very loud beep”) are an example.
• Act I Finale: The finale of the first act of a musical usually establishes what remains
to be accomplished in the next act. “Defying Gravity” in Wicked establishes the
main character’s choice to be “wicked” (that is, opposed to establishment) and ends
with her battle cry against anyone who would try to “bring her down.” Usually
this song is upbeat and memorable so the audience will be likely to have it in their
heads during intermission and return to their seats with the action of the first act
fresh in their minds.
• Finale: The final song of a musical is often a reprise of music that originated earlier
in the show, but which is so connected with a major theme of the musical that it
deserves repetition at the privileged final position. Rent’s finale begins with a reprise
of “Without You” and concludes with a reprise of “Seasons of Love,” solidly estab-
lishing the musicals message about the importance of finding and maintaining lov-
ing relationships. Avenue Q, on the other hand, introduces a new song “Only for
Now,” that explicitly expresses a response to the questions about “purpose” that
are asked throughout the show.
 MUSICAL THEATRE 629

History. Recent studies of musical theatre have looked into the far past to find the
beginning of musical theatre. In Musical! A Grand Tour, Denny Martin Flinn traces
the beginnings of the musical from Greek theatre through Italian Commedia
Dell’Arte to operetta. This path reveals a good deal about the sources of musical
theatre, and, indeed, along this path one finds shows that meet the definition of a
musical as given previously. However, the concept of musical theatre as an art form
distinct from other forms of drama and with a corpus of its own only clearly
emerged in the late nineteenth century.
Many accounts of the history of musical theatre begin in September of 1866 at
the opening of The Black Crook. The play, by a virtually unknown writer named
Charles M. Barras, tells the story of the titular magician who has promised the
demons that he will lead one soul a year to damnation in exchange for infernal pow-
ers and his own immortality. It was probably not originally intended to include a
great deal of music, but, so legend has it, a fire at the Academy of Music stranded a
troupe of French ballet dancers in New York and the producer of both the ballet
and The Black Crook was inspired to combine them into the extravaganza that
would, for many, define the beginning of musical theatre.
The Black Crook has been designated as a milestone in musical theatre history
since the form first became a legitimate object of study. Cecil Smith’s 1950 work,
Musical Comedy in America, begins with the claim that the musical stage “reached
major dimensions for the first time” when The Black Crook opened (Smith 1950, 3),
and Lehman Engel dedicates a large portion of the first chapter of his 1967 book,
The American Musical Theater, to a discussion of the show. Denny Martin Flinn
makes a long stop in the sixth chapter of his tour to discuss The Black Crook and
calls the show “the beginning of a new era in theatre” (Flinn 1997, 87). On the
other hand, early musical theatre historian Julian Mates argues “nothing about The
Black Crook justifies its position as the precursor of our modern lyric stage; all its
forms and conventions derive from a long tradition established well before 1866”
(Mates 1996, 31–32). Whatever the case, The Black Crook was, in many ways, a
microcosm of the musical theatre of the next sixty years. It contained a more or less
coherent plot told through both words and music, but it was also something of a
variety show (later productions employed trapeze artists as well as dancers). This
marriage of high art and low, of operetta and variety, represents for many the begin-
ning of musical theatre. The Black Crook was followed by many similarly inten-
tioned extravaganzas including The White Fawn (1868) and Evangeline (1874)
(Smith 1950, 22).
By the mid-1870s, the tastes of audience began to shift from spectacle to satire
and from melodrama to comedy (a progression that occurred again, as we will see,
at the beginning of the twentieth century). From 1871 to 1896, the Englishmen
William S. Gilbert (lyricist) and Arthur Sullivan (composer) wrote a series of shows
that redefined musical theatre for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Although
sometimes called “comic operas,” these shows, when sung in the popular style, are
barely distinguishable from musical theatre as it is understood today. Gilbert and
Sullivan’s work, unlike most operas, privilege the libretto to a greater degree even
than many of those shows undisputedly classified as musicals today. A better
designation for Gilbert and Sullivan’s musicals is “operetta.” Operetta is not distinct
from musical theatre but may be considered a subset of the larger genre. Operettas tend
to be light, though not necessarily comic. Although Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta’s
were primarily satirical, others of the time, such as Sigmond Romberg’s Desert
630 MUSICAL THEATRE

Song, were melodramatic with valiant and aristocratic (if one dimensional) heroes
and evil villains.
At the same time that Gilbert and Sullivan operettas were entertaining middle and
upper class audiences, variety shows continued to combine music, drama, and dance
in a form that appealed, in general, to working class audiences (Hamm 1997, 175).
Vaudeville shows (“family friendly” versions of the more risqué variety shows of
earlier decades) often contained songs sung in character by actors in a short skit. At
the turn of the century, vaudeville performers such as George M. Cohan extended
Vaudeville-like sketches and songs to create full-length musicals (usually celebrating
American patriotism during World War I). The plots of these musicals were, in many
ways, just as melodramatic and their characters just as one dimensional as those in
operettas, but they tended to tell the stories of “average” people in a musical idiom
more like the popular “folk” music of the time than that of European concert hall.
Also during this time Florenz Ziegfeld staged spectacular variety shows, known
as the Follies, in which songs, dances, and dramatic sketches were stitched together
against a backdrop of spectacular scenery and special effects. In the late 1920s
Ziegfeld’s work took a more serious turn when he joined with writer P.G. Wood-
house, Lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, and Jerome Kern to produce Show Boat, a
serious “musical play” that explored thematic elements unknown to either operetta
or the Cohan musicals. The musical is now viewed as a milestone in the genre, and
Geoffrey Block observed the following: “Beginning in the late 1960s historians
would almost invariably emphasize Show Boat’s unprecedented integration of music
and drama, its three-dimensional characters, and its bold and serious subject mat-
ter, including miscegenation [interracial marriage] and unhappy marriages” (Block
2003, 20–21).
Throughout the 1930s, as the country entered the Great Depression, another sub-
genre, the political musical, emerged. Based in large part on the German works of
Kurt Weill (e.g., Threepenny Opera), musicals such as Marc Blitzstein’s Cradle Will
Rock and the Gershwins’ Of Thee I Sing satirized and critiqued the political and
economic systems they saw as corrupt. Although Gilbert and Sullivan and other cre-
ators of operetta had addressed similar themes with their work, they were usually
set in far off times and places. The political musicals of the 1930s were set in con-
temporary America (or at least an obvious allegorical representation thereof).
Political musicals continued into the 1940s, though a rush of patriotism follow-
ing the beginning of World War II swept away most of their earlier popularity. The
public had also lost patience, however, with the one-dimensional patriotic pageants
that had entertained the home front during the First World War. In response, the
lyricist of Show Boat, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Richard Rodgers, composer of
many of the operettas of the previous decades, developed a new form of patriotic
musical for the new war. The musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein, beginning with
Oklahoma in 1943, told stories that celebrated American ideology with fully devel-
oped characters who spoke and sang in the popular language of the time. These
musicals distributed the storytelling over dialogue, song, and dance and integrated
each into the narrative more fully than most of the work of earlier decades. The
Rodgers and Hammerstein model more or less defined musical theatre until the mid-
1960s and for many, even today, is what the word “musical” evokes.
The sixties were a time of many changes, however, and musical theatre was not
unaffected by them. Patriotism, along with most sorts of institutional fealty, was out
of fashion and had been replaced by a new ethos of individualism and institutional
 MUSICAL THEATRE 631

defiance. The 1969 musical, Hair, with no plot to speak of and songs with titles like
“Hashish” and “Sodomy,” epitomized these values, but they found quieter expres-
sion in more traditionally structured musicals such as Fiddler on the Roof, which
challenged the supremacy of tradition while at the same time celebrating it.
In the following decade the transformation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein
model was effectively completed by composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim. Sondheim
had earned respect as a lyricist in the late 1950s and early 1960s for his work on
West Side Story and Gypsy, but his music and lyrics for Company and Follies in the
early 1970s made him, in the eyes of many, the master of late twentieth century
musical theatre. Sondheim broke with the Rodgers and Hammerstein model in both
form and content. Company and Follies, termed “concept musicals” because they
were structured, not around a narrative, but by a theme or “concept,” explored the
often unpleasant realities of marriage and growing old—concepts foreign to the ide-
alistic celebration of love and marriage in The Sound of Music or Oklahoma. Like
many of the artistic revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, however, what once defied
convention was quickly absorbed into the mainstream. By 1982, the two most com-
mercially successful musicals on Broadway, A Chorus Line and Cats, were concept
musicals.
The latter launched a new trend of spectacle-driven, sung-through, mostly British
musicals popularly designated “megamusicals” for their scale. These musicals, espe-
cially Phantom of the Opera, Les Misérables, and Miss Saigon, were hugely popu-
lar with audiences, yet were largely reviled by critics and many in the theatre
community who felt the shows promoted an aesthetic of spectacle that worked
against the more serious direction the art form had taken in the 1970s. These crit-
ics were, to some degree, vindicated in the mid-1990s as the demand for bigger and
better spectacles became unsustainable. Sunset Boulevard, one of the last of the
megamusicals, closed quickly on Broadway and cut short its tour, in large part
because the musical required unrealistically high ticket sales to recover its astro-
nomical expenses. The season after Sunset Boulevard opened on Broadway,
Jonathan Larson’s Rent announced the death of the megamusical and the beginning
of a new era.
Rent, performed on a nearly bare stage by a small cast, was, in its simplicity, a
sort of implicit reaction to the excess of the megamusical. In contrast to the soaring
ticket prices necessitated by the expense of the megamusicals, top tickets to Rent
were available for $20 to fans who arrived on the day of the show. Rent, which dealt
directly with contemporary problems including AIDS and drug addiction, was also
as thematically far removed from the megamusical as the political musicals of 1930s
were from the operettas that preceded them. Many who watched Rent’s rise to fame
predicted Jonathan Larson would redefine musical theatre for the twenty-first cen-
tury. Alas, the day before the first preview, Larson died of an aortic aneurysm.
At the same time that Rent was working its way from workshop to Off Broad-
way to Broadway, a titanic machine was gearing up production for a new set of
megamusical-like spectacles that would transform not just musical theatre, but the
entire New York City Theatre District. Before the 1990s, the Disney Company,
although responsible for some of the most successful film musicals of all time, had
been content to produce live theatre only within the boundaries of its theme parks.
Throughout the 1990s, however, New York City, and the Theatre District in par-
ticular, underwent a major urban revitalization project that made Broadway more
attractive to tourists (and more acceptable to the clean and safe Disney ethos).
632 MUSICAL THEATRE

Disney contributed to this revitalization through the purchase and reopening of

several defunct theatres. In 1998 Disney reopened the New Amsterdam, the the-
atre in which Ziegfeld’s Follies had originally played but which had fallen into dis-
repair in the following decades, and soon after mounted within it an adaptation
of its 1994 animated movie, The Lion King.
The last chapter of the history of musical theatre in the twentieth century might
end, then, with a newly redecorated Broadway under the new management of multi-
national corporations. The era of the megamusical had passed and had been
replaced, not, as the success of Rent might have suggested, by small musicals pro-
duced by new, young artists, but by movie adaptations produced by committees
rather than by artists. Such a narrative, while true to an extent, would, however,
unfairly neglect the important voices that began to be heard from Off Broadway
during this period and that, in important ways, laid the foundation for the musical
in the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Theatre in New York City is separated into three divisions: Broadway, Off Broad-
way, and Off Off Broadway. These distinctions are, among other things, used for
determining the jurisdiction of the various theatre unions. There are 39 theatres des-
ignated by theatre producers and unions as “Broadway” theatres. Off Broadway is
limited by the Actor’s Equity Association’s “Off Broadway Rulebook” to produc-
tions “presented in the borough of Manhattan” but not performed in “any theatre
located in an area bounded by Fifth and Ninth Avenues from 34th Street to 56th
Street and by Fifth Avenue and the Hudson River from 56th Street to 72nd Street”
(in general, the area immediately around Broadway, the street) and in “any theatre
having a capacity of more than 499” (Actors’ Equity Association 2005, 1). The 39
Broadway theatres are, in general, within these geographical boundaries and tend to
have more than 500 seats. In their Seasonal Showcase Code, Actors’ Equity implic-
itly defines Off Off Broadway by limiting the union’s agreements for that “arena”
to theatres in New York City with less than 100 seats (Actors’ Equity Association
2006, 1).
During the 1990s the Off Broadway work of composers Jason Robert Brown,
Michael John LaChiusa, and Adam Guettel provided a thoughtful alternative to the
spectacle driven shows that were playing in Broadway theatres. Much like Rent, the
work of these composers tended to explore nontraditional themes in experimental
forms (Guettel’s Floyd Collins, for instance, uses bluegrass and country music
to narrate the last days of a man who slowly dies after an accident traps him in a
cave in Kentucky). Few of these artists had produced a commercial hit by the end
of the century, but through cast recordings and regional productions, the influence
of these composers’ shows extended beyond their limited original Off Broadway
runs. Their work established a second, parallel stream of musical theatre work that,
in the middle of the next decade, would arrive on Broadway.
Trends and Themes. The twenty-first century began with the September 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. Escapist comedies based
on popular movies set in what were perceived to be simpler times sprouted up in
their wake. The Producers (set in the 1950s), Thoroughly Modern Millie (set in the
1920s), and Hairspray (set in 1962) all allowed audiences to momentarily forget
the anxiety they might have felt from being in an area so near the location of the
attacks. However, even as big budget musicals produced by big corporations con-
tinued to draw big audiences, small, low-budget musicals that, in earlier days, might
have had limited runs in not-for-profit theatres also began to make their way to
 MUSICAL THEATRE 633

Broadway where they often were tremendously successful. Just days after Septem-
ber 11, Urinetown, a Blitzstein-esque satire of American capitalism opened on
Broadway where it ran for three years. In the 2002–2003 season Universal Studios,
a company best known for its films, produced the hugely successful, hugely expen-
sive musical Wicked (based on Gregory MacGuire’s retelling of The Wizard of Oz).
At the same time, however, the previously mentioned Avenue Q, a puppet show
with very adult themes, rose quickly from a class project to an Off Broadway show
to a Broadway hit that beat Wicked in almost every category at the 2003 Tony
Awards. The 2002–2003 season demonstrated that there is an audience for both
kinds of musical, and both Wicked and Avenue Q continue to play to packed houses
at the time of this writing in December 2007. The success of Urinetown and Avenue
Q paved the way for other, slightly quirky, relatively low budget musicals to come
to Broadway. In the following seasons, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling
Bee, The Drowsy Chaperone, Grey Gardens, and Spring Awakening all successfully
transferred from Off Broadway to Broadway, where they found welcoming audi-
ences and, often, critical acclaim.
Many of these Off Broadway hits originated in the various musical theatre festi-
vals and workshops that were founded in the previous century to promote the devel-
opment of new musicals. The oldest and most successful of these, the BMI
(Broadcast Music, Inc.) Workshop, was founded in 1961 and originally directed by
musical conductor Lehman Engel. It was intended to be, in the words of the official
Web site, “a setting where new writers for the musical theatre could learn their
craft,” and, given the names of its alumni, it has succeeded in being exactly that.
Bobby Lopez and Jeff Mark, for instance, met and conceived the idea for Avenue Q
at BMI and speak well of their experience in interviews. More recently, the New
York Musical Theater Festival (NYMF), founded in 2005, has provided a venue for
new artists to stage their work relatively inexpensively in New York. Over the
few years of its existence, the Festival has produced the premieres of many Off
Broadway hits, including the acclaimed Altar Boyz.
Also during this period the non-animated movie musical became popular once
again. The spectacular commercial failures of the 1985 movie version of A Chorus
Line and the 1992 Disney movie Newsies led many in the 1980s and 1990s to
believe the movie musical was a defunct form. However, in 2001, director Baz
Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge—an original musical with a score composed mostly of
pop songs from the 1980s—earned critical acclaim and surprising commercial prof-
its. Over the next six years the success of the movie adaptations of Chicago, Dream-
girls, and Hairspray and the phenomenal popularity of the 2006 Disney Channel
television movie, High School Musical, confirmed that the film musical was, once
again, a commercially viable form.
Selected Authors. Musical theatre is clearly alive and well in the twenty-first
century. Despite the perennial complaints of cynics who complain musical theatre is
a dying art, exciting new works are regularly produced on Broadway, Off Broad-
way, in workshops and festivals, and on film. The remaining pages of this chapter
outline some of the most influential musical theatre authors producing these works
in the twenty-first century. Of course, musical theatre is a highly collaborative art
and it is not always easy to determine who should be considered the author of a par-
ticular show. At times, directors, producers, and even key performers exercise as
much authorial power as do those who write the words and music. Still, because of
space constraints I will limit this list only to librettists, composers, and lyricists.
634 MUSICAL THEATRE

Even within these limits, it is impossible to be comprehensive, but I hope this list
will give interested readers a sense of the genre in the first decade of the twenty-first
century.
Lynn Ahrens (1948–)—Lyricist & Stephen Flaherty (1960–)—Composers. Ahrens
and Flaherty are among the few contemporary musical theatre writing teams that
work almost exclusively together. They met at the BMI workshop in the 1980s and,
soon after, had their New York premiere Off Broadway with Lucky Stiff (1988)—a
musical about a man who, in order to inherit 6 million dollars, must take his dead
uncle’s corpse on a gambling vacation. Their next collaboration, Once on This
Island (1990), a retelling of The Little Mermaid set in the Caribbean, transferred
from Off Broadway to Broadway and established the team as a thoughtful alterna-
tive to the megamusicals that then ruled Broadway. Their epic adaptation of the E.L.
Doctorow novel, Ragtime (1998), about the maturation of America in the early
twentieth century, is considered by many to be their masterpiece and one of the best
musicals of the 1990s. Since 2000 the pair have collaborated on the critically and
commercially disappointing Seussical (based on the children’s books of Dr. Seuss); a
charming Off Broadway adaptation of the 1994 film A Man of No Importance
(2002) about a gay bus conductor who longs to stage Oscar Wilde’s Salome in his
conservative Irish community; Dessa Rose (2005), from a 1986 Sherley Anne
Williams novel about the friendship of a runaway slave and the daughter of her old
master; and The Glorious Ones (2007) about a troupe of commedia dell’arte play-
ers struggling to adapt to changes in dramatic taste in the sixteenth century.
Jason Robert Brown (1970–)—Composer / lyricist. Jason Robert Brown is per-
haps the most popular of the young musical theatre composers who rose to promi-
nence in the 1990s. His first piece, Songs for a New World (1995), a song cycle of
the his own work (mostly written for other projects), was directed by Daisy Prince
and opened Off Broadway at the WPA Theater to critical praise. During rehearsals
for the show, Brown was hired by the director’s father, Hal Prince, to collaborate on
a musical based on the true story of Leo Frank, a Jewish man falsely accused of the
murder of a young girl in Atlanta at the turn of the century. The musical, which was
eventually titled Parade, opened on Broadway at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont
Theatre in 1998 and, despite an early closing, earned Brown critical acclaim and a
Tony Award. Brown’s next piece, The Last Five Years, a two-person song cycle
about a short-lived marriage between a singer and a writer, opened at the Minetta
Lane Theatre in 2002 to mixed reviews but went on to become a staple of regional
and amateur theatre seasons. In 2003 Brown was nominated for his second Tony
Award for his work as a composer, lyricist, and music director for the short lived
and critically despised, Urban Cowboy. As of this writing, he is working on two new
musicals: 13, about the quest of a Jewish boy in Indiana to find 13 friends to invite
to his Bar Mitzvah, and Honeymoon in Vegas, a stage adaptation of the 1992 film
of the same name.
Brown’s music is a difficult to classify mixture of jazz, rock, and musical theatre
ballad. He often cites Billy Joel and Joni Mitchell as major influences on his work,
but he is also clearly aware of the traditions of classical music and musical theatre
and has consciously and successfully adopted the styles of composers such as
Charles Ives and Kurt Weill when a dramatic situation demanded it. The accessibil-
ity of his lyrics and music has earned him a large following of fans who celebrate
his work on internet discussion forums and on the composer’s own blog
(http://www.jasonrobertbrown.com).
 MUSICAL THEATRE 635

William Finn (1952–)—Composer / lyricist. William Finn has been working in

New York theatre since the 1970s, but his contemporary style and subject matter
often earn him a place in lists of the “new” musical theatre artists. Best known for
his Off Broadway Falsettos trilogy about the life of a gay Jewish man named
Marvin, Finn’s musicals are distinctive for their transparently autobiographical plots
and characters. When Finn suffered a brain disease, originally diagnosed as an inop-
erable brain tumor, he wrote A New Brain about a musical theatre composer who
survives a near-fatal brain operation. Most recently, though, Finn has branched out
from purely autobiographical work and contributed music and lyrics for the 2005
Broadway hit 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, for which he earned a
Tony nomination for Best Score.
Ricky Ian Gordon (1956–)—Composer / lyricist / book writer. Ricky Ian Gordon,
now in his forties, is one of the oldest of the “young” new musical theatre artists
working in New York. His work, which in musical style tends to resemble opera
more than musical theatre, has not yet been on presented Broadway, though his
Only Heaven (a 1995 song cycle of Langston Hughes poetry), My Life With Alber-
tine (2003, based on a novel by Proust), and his 2005 reimagining of the Orpheus
myth all received critical praise for their Off Broadway productions and associated
cast recordings. His most recent project, an opera adaptation of The Grapes of
Wrath, opened in Minnesota in February 2007.
Adam Guettel (1965–)—Composer / lyricist / book writer. Adam Guettel is the
grandson of composer Richard Rodgers and son of composer Mary Rodgers, but
Guettel’s voice is unquestionably his own. Guettel’s Off Broadway musicals Floyd
Collins (1996), about a man trapped in a Kentucky cave, and Saturn Returns
(1998), a song cycle of Greek and Christian mythology demonstrated a style far
removed from those of his grandfather and mother and established Guettel as an
important new voice in musical theatre. Guettel’s first commercial success, the 2005
hit Light in the Piazza about an American mother and her mentally handicapped
daughter’s romantic journey to Italy, ran for over a year at the Vivian Beaumont
Theatre in Lincoln Center and earned Guettel Tony Awards for best score and best
orchestrations. Stephen Sondheim appears to have great respect for Guettel and
named “The Riddle Song” from Floyd Collins as a “song I wish I’d written” in a
list compiled for a concert at the Library of Congress (Horowitz 2003, 171).
Michael John LaChiusa (1962–)—Composer / lyricist / book writer. Michael John
LaChiusa is perhaps the most prolific musical theatre composer in recent history. A
musical featuring the work of LaChiusa has opened each year since 1999, usually
to some critical praise but limited commercial success. Like many of the young, crit-
ically praised musical theatre composers listed here, LaChiusa’s subject matter tends
to be unconventional. He has written song cycles about prominent first ladies (First
Lady Suite, 1993) and sexual intercourse (Hello Again, 1993). His Broadway musi-
cals, an updating of the Greek tragedy Medea (Marine Christine, 1999) set in
Louisiana and an adaptation of the 1928 poem The Wild Party (unrelated to the Off
Broadway adaptation by Andrew Lippa that also opened in 2000), were praised by
some music critics but mostly confused audiences and closed quickly. LaChiusa
remains an influential voice in the art form and is, in the eyes of many critics, an
under-appreciated genius. Musical theatre historian Ethan Mordden expresses a
common prediction for the composer in his book, The Happiest Corpse I’ve Ever
Seen: “LaChiusa is now where Sondheim was in the early 1970s. But Marie Christine
was recorded, and discerning ears will hear it. By the next generation or so, it will
636 MUSICAL THEATRE

be in the repertory of every major opera company in the Western world.” (Mordden
2004, 153).
Andrew Lippa (1964–)—Composer / lyricist / book writer. Andrew Lippa is prob-
ably best known for the additional songs he wrote for the 1999 revival of You’re A
Good Man, Charlie Brown, especially “My New Philosophy,” which helped launch
the career of Broadway and film star Kristin Chenoweth. However, Lippa’s other
work, including the book, music, and lyrics for the 2000 Off Broadway version of
Wild Party (unconnected to the Broadway adaptation of the same title by Michael
John LaChiusa) and john & jen (1995), earned him the respect of critics and fans
as one of the important composer-lyricists-book writers of the post-Sondheim
generation. Lippa’s music tends to be relatively accessible, though he has not yet
written a complete score for a commercial Broadway hit. As of this writing, he is
working on a musical adaptation of the Addams Family television series (Jones
2007).
Stephen Schwartz (1948–)—Composer / lyricist. In the early 1970s Stephen
Schwartz had three hit shows running simultaneously on Broadway: Godspell,
Pippin, and The Magic Show. In the next three decades, though, Schwartz struggled
to write a musical that would last even a few months on Broadway until his music
and lyrics for the 2003 hit, Wicked, brought his work to the attention of a new
generation of fans.
Schwartz’s music is a blend of both rock and traditional Broadway sounds. In an
interview for Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn’s 1985 book, Notes on Broadway,
Schwartz cites “Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Lowe, Bock and Harnick,
and Stephen Sondheim” as well as “The Mamas and the Papas” and “Jefferson
Airplane” as influences on his work (Kasha and Hirschhorn 1987, 267). Themati-
cally, his work is often centered on moral, even religious, questions. Three of his
musicals—Godspell, Children of Eden, and the animated film Prince of Egypt—are
adaptations of Biblical stories, and Mass, as the title suggests, is an adaptation of a
Christian church service. Wicked is less obviously religious, though it does explore
the nature of good and evil and begins with a main character asking, in a parody of
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, whether people are “born wicked” or “have wicked-
ness thrust upon them.” As of this writing, Schwartz is working on an opera version
of the 1964 film Séance on a Wet Afternoon, commissioned by the Opera Santa
Barbara, which will premiere in a staged reading at Lincoln Center in January of 2008.
Jeanine Tesori (1961–)—Composer. Jeanine Tesori debuted as a New York com-
poser with her 1998 Off Broadway musical Violet about a young girl whose face
was disfigured by an accident at age 13 and who travels across the country on a bus
to be touched by a faith healer. The musical was recorded on CD and was staged in
several regional productions, but Tesori’s real rise to prominence came in 2002 with
her Tony Award nominated score for the stage adaptation of Thoroughly Modern
Millie. She was further lauded for her work with Tony Kushner on his semi-autobi-
ographical Caroline, or Change—about a black washer-woman and the Jewish family
who employs her in 1960s Louisiana. She is currently working on a musical adap-
tation of the Dreamworks animated film, Shrek (Gans 2007).
David Yazbek (1960–)—Composer / Lyricist. Originally a rock musician whose
best known work was, perhaps, the theme song to the 1990s PBS game show
“Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego,” Yazbek reports having no real interest
in theatre music until composer Adam Guettel suggested to producers that Yazbek
might be the appropriate composer-lyricist for a stage adaptation of the 1997 movie
 MUSICAL THEATRE 637

The Full Monty (Finn 2001). He was hired and was nominated for a Tony Award
for his efforts. Yazbek went on to contribute lyrics to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s pro-
duction of the Bollywood musical Bombay Dreams and music and lyrics to the 2005
adaptation of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Critics praise Yazbek’s work as a much
needed updating of the somewhat anachronistic Broadway musical style that, at the
beginning of the decade, lagged significantly behind the rest of the music culture
(Singer 2001).

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Kasha, Al, and Joel Hirschhorn. Notes on Broadway: Intimate Conversations with Broadway’s
Greatest Songwriters. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.
Jones, Kenneth. “Go, Go, Go Gomez! Addams Family Musical, by Lippa, Brickman and Elice
in Development.” Playbill Online. 21 May 2007. <http://www.playbill.com/news/article/
108236.html>. [Accessed December 16, 2007.]
Larson, Jonathan, et al. Rent. New York: Rob Weisbach, 1997.
Mates, Julian. “The Black Crook Myth.” Theatre Survey. 7 (1996): 31–43.
Mordden, Ethan. The Happiest Corpse I’ve Ever Seen: The Last 25 Years of the Broadway
Musical. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Schwartz, Stephen. Wicked. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2003.
Singer, Barry. “Pop Self-Consciousness Finally Infiltrates Broadway.” New York Times 26
Aug 2001: 2.3.
Smith, Cecil. Musical Comedy in America. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1950.
Tesori, Jeanine. Thoroughly Modern Millie. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2003.
Yazbek, David. The Full Monty. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2000.

Further Reading
Block, Geoffrey. Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003; Bryer, Jackson R., and Richard Allan Davison. The
Art of the American Musical: Conversations with the Creators. New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni-
versity Press, 2005; Chesterton, G.K. “Introduction.” In Gilbert and Sullivan: A Critical
Appreciation of the Savoy Operas, A.H. Godwin. Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1926;
Ganzl, Kurt. The Musical: A Concise History. Boston: University Press of New England,
1997; Hernandez, Ernio. “Wicked Creator Schwartz’s First Opera, Séance on a Wet After-
noon, to Be Presented in January.” Playbill Online. 14 December 2007; Hibbert, Christopher.
Gilbert and Sullivan and Their Victorian World. New York: American Heritage Publishing
Co., 1976. <http://www.playbill.com/news/article/113565.html>. [Accessed December 16,
2007.]; Perry, George C., et al. The Complete Phantom of the Opera. New York: Henry Holt,
1988.
DOUG RESIDE

MYSTERY FICTION
Definition. At its broadest, the definition of mystery fiction is that of a story in
which a crime is solved. The popularity of crime fiction in the United States is sig-
nificant. Over 28,000 fiction titles were released in the United States in 2004 (“U.S.
Book Production”). Although it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what percentage of
this production is mystery/detective/crime fiction, a recent estimate is that crime fic-
tion grabs approximately 25 percent of the fiction market (“U.S. Book Production”).
The subgenres and categories of mystery fiction are seemingly endless. The most
influential subgenres, however, have been the cozy, the hard-boiled detective, the
police procedural, and most recently the forensic detective.
History. There is scholarly disagreement about which novel is the first true
mystery novel, as many early novels contained elements of the mystery genre. Wilkie
Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories about C. August
Dupin, Anna Katharine Green’s The Leavenworth Affair (1878), and William
Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) have all been put forth as firsts on both sides of
the Atlantic. In general, however, the origin of the detective story is usually traced
to mysteries solved by Poe’s Dupin: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841),
“The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1842), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844). In these
stories, Poe established some of the conventions of detective fiction, including an
eccentric detective, an impossible crime, and the creation of a series character.
 MYSTERY FICTION 639

In the nineteenth century, dime novels with their sensational and lurid stories pro-
liferated and the detective novel was born. Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton,
R. Austin Freeman, Jacques Futrelle, and Anna Katharine Green were major con-
tributors to the field until the 1920s. In 1920, Agatha Christie made her debut with
The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which was followed soon after by Dorothy Sayers’s
Whose Body in 1923. Together they ushered in what is known as the Golden Age
with novels often referred to as cozies. Cozies have low levels of overt violence (the
murder takes place off-stage), are solved by an amateur, and are usually set in a nar-
row environment (a small village, an estate, a train, etc.), which allows the detective
to find a motive among a few limited suspects and to concentrate on the victim’s
relationship to the killer.
The Golden Age belonged to the British. In the United States, the 1920s produced
Earl Derr Bigger’s Charlie Chan novels and S.S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance. The estab-
lishment of the magazine The Black Mask, co-founded by H.L. Mencken, offered
writers like Raymond Chandler, Rex Stout, and Erle Stanley Gardner a place for
their more robust stories. The launching of the hard-boiled detective is credited to
the writers published in The Black Mask between 1926 and 1936. The hard-boiled
detective is described as being a loner, a man with values that are laced with moral
ambiguity: a man who doesn’t shun violence. James M. Cain’s The Postman Always
Rings Twice (1934), Cornell Woolrich’s I Married a Dead Man (1948), and Jim
Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (1952) were so dark that their style of writing was
dubbed noir, a genre upon which Hollywood capitalized.
By the 1960s, Cold War espionage or spy fiction had all but ousted the tradi-
tional detective and the cozy. Writers like Ian Fleming, John le Carré, and Len
Deighton wrote novels set in post World War II Berlin or Moscow. Romantic sus-
pense authors, influenced by the gothic novels of eighteenth-century Horace Wal-
pole and Ann Radcliffe and of the nineteenth-century Charlotte Brontë
(particularly Jane Eyre, 1847), were immensely popular as well. Victoria Holt,
Mary Stewart, and Phyllis A. Whitney penned dozens of romantic suspense novels.
(See Romance Novels.)
The subgenre of historical mysteries, those set in an historical era, such as the
Middle Ages, or the age of Victoria, exploded in the 1970s. Elizabeth Peters’s
nineteenth-century sleuth Amelia Peabody and Ellis Peters’s medieval monk Brother
Cadfael were among the popular offerings. Women have always populated the
mystery field as heavily as men; however, it wasn’t until the 1980s that their work
began to receive much critical acclaim. Female sleuths occupied the police force and
private eye offices in record numbers. Women’s novels frequently commented on
social issues. Since then, the mystery genre has seen contributions from increasing
numbers of writers from multicultural backgrounds, and the field is dominated by
diversity. It is also apparent that while there are still many mysteries that are clearly
genre-driven, just as many are blurring the line between mystery and mainstream
fiction.
Trends and Themes. There are numerous subgenres within the genre of mystery
fiction. Some of the most notable and popular are described below.
The Cozy. A lack of graphic crime scene description is the first indicator that one
is reading a cozy. Another is the fact that the mystery takes place in a seemingly
ordinary environment where violence is not a common occurrence. The cozy sleuth
is an amateur, helped by or a helper of the official investigative force. Cozies, estab-
lished in the 1920s, dominated the world of fiction for many decades, waning and
640 MYSTERY FICTION

waxing in popularity. In recent decades, cozies have splintered into dozens of cate-
gories. Many readers of this genre are interested in books with a certain type of
sleuth: bibliophiles, cooks or gardeners, dog or cat lovers, or practitioners of innu-
merable hobbies (quilting, for example). Academic and religious mysteries also fall
into this category. Teachers, professors, and anthropologists are some of the char-
acters found in academic mysteries; priests, pastors, and other lay people are central
to religious mysteries.
Mary Higgins Clark appeared on the mystery scene in 1975 with the publication
of her first suspense novel, Where Are the Children. Because of the lack of on-stage
violence, Clark’s books are often categorized as cozies. She has written more suspense
novels than true mysteries, basing her plots on current events and newspaper head-
lines and providing social commentary with her clearly defined good/evil characters.
Clark’s books have been praised for their fast pace, detailed locations, and breathless
action. At the same time her characters and plots have been criticized for being for-
mulaic. However, Clark’s formula of rollercoaster storylines and strong heroines
have led to the publication of over 20 suspense novels selling 80 million copies
worldwide. Her latest, a novel based on telepathy, is Two Little Girls in Blue (2006).
Since 2000, she has co-authored three Christmas suspense titles with her daugh-
ter Carol Higgins Clark. The younger Clark is best known for her Regan Reilly mys-
teries, of which Decked (1991) was nominated for both the Agatha and Anthony
Awards.
Academic Mysteries. Scholarship is the basis of many mystery subgenres. Religious
sleuths such as Rabbi Small and Father Koesler delve into Scripture and the Torah to
solve crimes. Historians of every ilk, manuscripts in ancient abbeys, archaeological
digs, Native American pottery, herbology—any and all subjects lend themselves to
scholarship. Mysteries set in academic settings are popular mostly with academics
themselves; universities and boarding schools serve as the most popular locations.
The popularity of academic crossover novels is seen by writers such as A. S. Byatt
and her novel Possession (1990), about the mystery surrounding the letters of a
Victorian poet. Dan Brown’s successful Da Vinci Code (2003), although definitely
not a cozy, follows Harvard professor Robert Langdon’s scholarly romp through the
mysteries of the Holy Grail, indicating that the study of esoteric subjects can have
wide appeal.
Carolyn G. Heilbrun, one of the first female professors of literature at Columbia
University, created the pseudonym Amanda Cross in the 1960s. Her character pro-
fessor Kate Fansler served as Cross’s alter ego, combating chauvinism in the aca-
demic world and overcoming obstacles as Heilbrun herself did. Fansler first
appeared in the 1964 In the Last Analysis, which received an Edgar nomination,
and became an immediate favorite. Cross’s academic mysteries are considered the
finest of the genre, mixing solid plots with witty satire directed against the univer-
sity. Often compared to Dorothy Sayers, who Cross admired, her Fansler mysteries
are set in a university locale and examine both feminist and academic issues. The
Edge of Doom (2002) was the last Cross novel before Heilbrun committed suicide
in 2003.
Gillian Roberts’s character Amanda Pepper is an English teacher in a Philadelphia
prep school. Pepper made her debut in the 1988 Anthony-winning Caught Dead in
Philadelphia. A Hole in Juan (2006) and All’s Well That Ends (2007) are Roberts’s
most recent installments in the Pepper series. Charlotte Macleod’s charming Profes-
sor Peter Shandy is introduced in the 1978 Rest You Merry. Her series of 10 novels
 MYSTERY FICTION 641

is set at Balaclava Agricultural College headed by college president Thorkjeld

Svenson. Macleod’s humorous narratives about academic life culminated in her
1996 Exit the Milkman, her final Shandy novel. Pamela Thomas-Graham presents
a darker look at academia. Harvard University is the location of amateur sleuth
Nikki Chase as she struggles to become the first tenured African American woman
at the university.
Culinary Mysteries. Nan and Ivan Lyons introduced the combination of food and
mysteries with the 1978 Someone Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe. It was food
editor Virginia Rich’s creation of chef Eugenia Potter in the 1982 Cooking School
Murders, though, that set the stage for the dozens of culinary mysteries that crowd
the mystery shelves in bookstores. Eugenia appeared in three Rich novels until her
death in 1985. Nancy Pickard completed Rich’s The 27 Ingredient Chili Con Carne
Murders (1993) and went on to produce several Potter mysteries on her own. In a
culinary mystery, the sleuth is usually a food professional of some sort (chef, restau-
rant or inn owner, caterer, even a restaurant critic), but not a professional detective.
The murder is often committed through the food itself, with a kitchen utensil, or in
a culinary environment, such as a party, a convention, a kitchen, or even in a cook-
ing school.
Some famous mystery characters have an interest in food, even though they are
not professionals. For example, Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe and Patricia Cornwell’s Kay
Scarpetta are food lovers and have had their recipes collected in cookbooks. A true
culinary mystery, however, is one that focuses on the food and its relationship to the
murder victim. Culinary mysteries often feature recipes from the characters as well.
Mystery Readers International devoted two issues to “Culinary Crime” in 2002 by
contributors who are mostly gastronomic mystery writers.
Catering seems to be a risky business; several authors have created characters who
become involved in murder while catering events. Diane Mott Davidson is one of
the foremost names in cooking crimes. Her novels feature Goldy Bear, Colorado
owner of Goldilocks Catering, her son Archie, and husband investigator Tom
Schulz. The series opener is titled Catering to Nobody (1990) and is followed by 12
more Goldy Bear installments, the most recent Dark Tort (2006). Katherine Hall
Page’s character Faith Fairchild, a minister’s wife, owns a catering business in
Aleford, Massachusetts. Fairchild has starred in 16 mysteries, the most recent The
Body in the Ivy (2006). Lesbian restaurant owner Jane Lawless stars in over a dozen
Ellen Hart mysteries (Night Vision, 2006).
Bed and breakfasts, or inns, are often locations of culinary mysteries. Claudia
Bishop’s Hemlock Falls series features Sarah Quilliam and her sister Meg as owners
of the Hemlock Falls Inn in upstate New York. The fourteenth book in the series is
Ground to a Halt (2007). Like many other culinary mysteries, Bishop’s include
recipes from the books’ storylines. Tamar Myers began her Pennsylvania Dutch
Mysteries with Recipes series in 1994 with Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth fea-
turing PennDutch Inn owner Magdalena Yoder. The series has been very popular
and Hernia, Pennsylvania has been the setting for 16 Yoder mysteries. Food writers
and restaurant critics often appear as main characters. Another Ellen Hart charac-
ter, Sophie Greenway, is a Minneapolis Times Register restaurant reviewer/sleuth
(No Reservations Required, 2005).
Scores of mystery titles have humorous titles that rely on puns or other wordplay,
but culinary mysteries seem to take the art of punning to a higher level. Plays on
cooking terms and techniques are seen in such examples as Nancy Fairbanks’s
642 MYSTERY FICTION

Crime Brulee (2001), Farmer’s Dim Sum Dead (2001), and Lou Jane Temple’s Red
Beans and Vice (2001). Along with their humorous titles are often hilarious romps
featuring irate customers, cooking mishaps, and other kitchen slapstick. Though
some culinary mysteries do have serious crimes and themes at the heart of them,
most are light cozies penned for sheer enjoyment rather than edification (unless one
counts the inclusion of recipes).
Gardening Mysteries. In 1868, Wilkie Collins published The Moonstone, one of the
all-time great mystery novels. The detective in the novel, Sergeant Cuff, has a pas-
sion for rose gardening, and the first connection between gardening and mysteries
was established. The most famous detective/plant lover was Nero Wolfe whose love
for food was matched only by his passion for orchids. Barbara Michaels, fond of
gardening, penned The Dancing Floor (1999) in which mazes and country gardens
figured.
Gardening mysteries include gardeners, herbalists, and florists. Kate Collins intro-
duced Abby Knight, flower shop owner in Mum’s the Word (2004). Nursery owner
Janis Harrison has created the Gardening Mystery series featuring florist Bretta
Solomon. The most popular gardening author is Susan Wittig Albert. Her China
Bayles series is set in Pecan Springs, Texas, where Bayles moves to open an herb
shop after quitting her law practice. Spanish Dagger (2007) is the fifteenth entry in
the series. Although not based on a book, a British TV series produced from
2003–2006 called Rosemary & Thyme was a popular program, featuring two
female landscape design and gardening sleuths.
Religious Mysteries. G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown appeared in 1911 in The Inno-
cence of Father Brown. Other notable British authors of religious mysteries are
Ellis Peters (Brother Cadfael), Veronica Black (Sister Joan), Margaret Frazer (Dame
Frevisse), and Peter Tremayne (Sister Fidelma). There are quite a few sleuths in reli-
gious orders on the American side of the Atlantic as well. Religious sleuths are
often underestimated by the other characters around them. Chesterton’s Father
Brown is a stumpy sort of individual, very plain looking and mild seeming, yet he
is well versed in the complexities and depravities of the human mind. Religious fig-
ures are often privy to times of grief and horror and the events that precipitate
them. Their understanding of people and their knowledge of their particular reli-
gious order make them useful in solving crimes, often surprising the police with
their accurate solutions.
An ordained priest, Andrew Greeley is a prolific author of books on religious and
sociological topics. It is for his Father “Blackie” Ryan series, however, that he is best
known. Greeley’s The Bishop in the Old Neighborhood (2005) marks the fifteenth
installment in the Father Ryan, or rather the Bishop Ryan series, as he achieves this
status midway through the series. Greeley uses his fiction not only to criticize vari-
ous aspects of the Catholic Church, but to explore matters of Christian living that
he feels do not receive enough attention by parish priests.
After leaving the priesthood in 1974, William X. Kienzle combined his jour-
nalistic skills with his knowledge of the Church and experience as a Roman
Catholic priest to create the popular Father Koesler who debuted in the 1979 The
Rosary Murders. Detroit and its environs operate as the backdrop for the Koesler
mysteries, and Kienzle’s familiarity with the city comes through in his detailed
descriptions of Detroit’s locales and people. Compared to Greeley in his use of
the mystery novel to highlight problems in the Church, Kienzle’s Koesler series
has, however, received the praise for his plots and characters that Greeley’s often
 MYSTERY FICTION 643

failed to. Kienzle’s final installment in the series, The Gathering (2002), was pub-
lished posthumously.
Harry Kemelman began his writing career contributing stories to Ellery Queen’s
Mystery Magazine. These stories, about a New England English professor were col-
lected in The Nine Mile Walk (1967). With a desire to chronicle the lives of subur-
ban Jews, he eventually used his mystery writing talents to create Rabbi Small, an
armchair detective who solves crimes in his community using Talmudic logic. The
Rabbi Small novels depict a community and its people, not just the character of
Small and his family. Friday the Rabbi Slept Late (1964) won the Edgar award and
Rabbi Small went on to become one of the most famous and loved fictitious rabbis.
In the final Rabbi Small mystery, The Day the Rabbi Left Town (1996), a retired
Small begins teaching at a local college. Kemelman’s books have been praised for
their intellectualism and depiction of the often-uneasy existence of Jewish commu-
nities in a predominantly Gentile culture.
Notre Dame professor Ralph McInerny began his Father Dowling series in 1976
at an agent’s suggestion. Her Death of Cold (1977) has been followed by 25 more
Dowling novels. A teacher of philosophy, McInerny invests his novels with serious
considerations of moral issues. Under the pseudonym Monica Quill, McInerny
wrote a series of mysteries about Sister Mary Magdalene, a Carmelite nun, which
culminated in a collection of stories and novellas in the 2001 Death Takes the Veil.
Ministers are not the only religious sleuths popular with mystery writers; nuns
have also been successful as amateur detectives. Aimée and David Thurlo are better
known for their Ellah Clah series (see Native American Mysteries), but Sister
Agatha who is an extern nun for a cloister in New Mexico, has proven popular as
well. The eighth Sister Agatha mystery is Prey for a Miracle (2006). Sister Carol
Anne O’Marie introduced Sister Mary Helen in Novena for Murder (1984), which
she has followed up with 10 more Sister Mary Helen titles. Neither a minister nor
a nun, Faith Fairchild is the wife of a minister in Aleford, Massachusetts. Katherine
Hall Page’s Body series has 16 titles, the latest The Body in the Ivy (2006).
Crimes Feline, Canine, and Equine. Beginning with the Depression-era publication
of D.B. Olsen’s The Cat Saw Murder (1939), cats have been featured as detectives
in a niche that has turned into a subgenre all its own—that of cat mysteries. Cat
mysteries can be defined as mysteries in which a cat either solves a crime or assists
its human in doing so. Lilian Jackson Braun is the undisputed queen of cat mys-
teries: her “Cat Who” series numbers over two dozen titles. Jim Qwilleran, a
retired journalist, moves to a small town up North to escape the hectic rush of
big city life. He partners with KoKo, a Siamese cat, in his first mystery, The Cat
Who Could Read Backwards (1966). Along with Yum Yum, another rescued
Siamese, Qwill and KoKo have starred in 29 Cat Who mysteries, the most recent,
The Cat Who Had Sixty Whiskers (2007). The series, although always featuring
a murder, is loved for Braun’s humorous depiction of small town life and lack of
overt violence.
Close behind Braun in production is Lydia Adamson, who has published 21
feline mysteries since 1990. Alice Nestleton is an actress/cat sitter who stumbles
across crimes while taking care of her feline charges. Lydia Adamson is the nom de
plume for Frank King who has written both a dog series and a cat series under the
Adamson name. Carole Nelson Douglas’s feline mysteries revolve around Midnight
Louie, who solves crimes in Las Vegas. Unlike the lighthearted Cat Who books,
Douglas’s series has won much praise and a number of awards for its exploration
644 MYSTERY FICTION

of such serious issues as sexual addiction. To mystery readers, Rita Mae Brown,
who achieved critical acclaim with Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), is better known for her
Mrs. Murphy and Sneaky Pie Brown mysteries. Set in Crozet, Virginia, the animals
help their owner, postmaster Harry, solve crimes.
Elizabeth Peters/Barbara Michaels has not written about a feline sleuth, but many
of her novels include cats, the most famous being Bastet who appears in the Amelia
Peabody books. Other detectives own cats, even though they don’t participate in
their owners’ sleuthing: Sharon McCone, Peter Shandy, Amanda Pepper, and Annie
Laurence Darling are all fictional sleuths who own cats.
Although cats are popular as companions to sleuths, dogs are close behind in rep-
resentation. Susan Conant has won the Maxwell Award for Fiction Writing given
by the Dog Writers’ Association of America for three of her Dog Lovers Mysteries
titles. Her detective is Holly Winter, a dog trainer and columnist who owns two
Alaskan Malamutes. The novels are humorous and replete with dog information
along with the requisite crime solving. Gaits of Heaven (2006) is the most recent
Malamute and Winter novel. Another author who sets her mysteries in the far
North, Sue Henry lives in Alaska, where she teaches writing at The University of
Alaska. Her Alaska mystery series featuring musher Jessie Arnold debuted with
Murder on the Iditarod Trail (1991), which won both the Anthony and the
Macavity awards.
Dick Francis is unquestionably the ruler of equine mysteries. A former jockey,
Francis used his knowledge of horseracing to write over 40 equine mysteries. Fol-
lowing in his footsteps is Kit Ehrman, whose Steve Kline mysteries are set in the
horseracing circuit. Another veterinarian, Gail McCarthy, solves crimes in mysteries
related to horses in Laura Crum’s series. Quarter horse trainer Michaela Bancroft is
the creation of Michele Scott, author of the Horse Lover’s Mystery series.
Hard-Boiled. It is argued that the hard-boiled detective is a truly American phe-
nomenon that grew out of the disillusionment of the post World War I period.
Carroll John Daley’s Race Williams is one of the first tough guys of detective fiction.
Dashiell Hammet’s Continental Op and Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Philip
Marlowe made the genre memorable, particularly with the help of Humphrey
Bogart playing the part of Spade and Marlowe in several Hollywood blockbusters.
A loner, the hard-boiled private eye works on the margins of society, offering a
window into both the underworld of criminals and the mainstream world as it
appears to the outsider. Often cynical and seemingly callous, the typical hard-boiled
detective is no stranger to the meanness in his fellow man, and woman. Women are
often portrayed as deceitful and insincere, luring the detective into danger for pur-
poses often nefarious. The detective is tough and inured to violence, but often pres-
ents dark gallows humor and a fondness for metaphorical descriptions. Almost
disappearing under the onslaught of espionage novels in the 1960s, the hard-boiled
detective was revived by Robert B. Parker’s Spenser and Bill Pronzini’s Nameless
Detective. Andrew Vachss’s Burke, Loren D. Estleman’s Amos Walker, Lawrence
Block’s Matthew Scudder, and Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins (see African American
Literature) are descendants of the hard-boiled tradition.
Set in Northern California, Bill Pronzini’s prolific series about the Nameless
Detective follows the detective’s career through 32 installments in as many years
(The Snatch was published in 1971 and Savages in 2007). Nameless is a detective in
the pulp tradition. Overweight, a smoker, he resembles Raymond Chandler’s Con-
tinental Op. Like the Op, Nameless views the world of San Francisco through the
 MYSTERY FICTION 645

eyes of a working-class stiff who sees the seamier side of both the underbelly of the
criminal world and the glitzy neighborhoods of the wealthy.
Unlike Chandler’s detective, Pronzini’s investigator solves “impossible” or
“locked room” crimes. These types of crimes, difficult to solve as it appears impos-
sible for the criminal to have been able to enter or leave the room without being
detected, usually belong to the school of ratiocination, where crimes are solved by
sheer intellectual genius. Pronzini has created a hard-boiled detective with a brain.
Hoodwink (1981) features Pronzini’s astonishing grasp of the history of mystery
fiction. Nameless, a collector of pulp fiction, attends a pulp convention, where he
investigates two murders. The novel combines Pronzini’s passion for pulp with
Nameless’s strong detection skills, earning the novel a Private Eye Writers of America
Shamus Award for best novel.
Andrew Vachss began his career as a children’s rights lawyer among other legal
system jobs. He uses his background in many of his novels. Since the publication of
his first novel Flood (1983), featuring ex-con and private investigator Burke, Vachss
has been labeled a writer of “hard-boiled” or “neo-noir” detective stories. His char-
acters, particularly Burke, cross the line of right and wrong easily, resorting to vig-
ilante violence when justice does not seem to be forthcoming through legal channels.
In Vachss’s 16 Burke novels, the tough investigator is often called upon to find child
abusers and killers. Vachss’s novels are often brutal, but they are praised for their
high quality writing.
Lawrence Block is one of the most respected mystery writers today. The creator
of three popular series and dozens of stand-alone titles, Block has become synony-
mous with successful mystery fiction. His Bernie Rhodenbarr series is written in the
tradition of the humorous caper. Novels about Evan Tanner are set squarely in the
Cold War years of spy novels. Tanner is a Korean War veteran who becomes
involved in international intrigues.
Block’s most successful series, however, is the dozen or so novels about former
cop and alcoholic Matthew Scudder. After a gunshot goes awry, killing a small girl,
Scudder resigns from the police force, drowning his guilt in alcohol and fighting bad
guys with the help of his less-than-upright friends. The first novel in the series, The
Sins of the Fathers (1976), introduces Scudder and reveals his drunken life working
out of the hotel room in which he lives for the better part of the series. As morally
ambiguous as any hard-boiled detective ever created, Scudder is not above using
criminal behavior or relying on the “favors” of criminals to obtain justice for his
clients.
A bottle in the desk drawer has been a hard-boiled detective tradition, equating
to strength and masculinity. As the series progresses, though, Scudder dries out, but
maintains his bachelor lifestyle combing the streets of New York and visiting with
his old bar buddies, all of whom live on the seamy side. His sometime girlfriend, the
high-priced prostitute Elaine, marries Scudder in a recent installment, and they
begin making a life together. Nothing is as it appears in Scudder’s world: The good
are often evil and the bad guys, although not saints, are often the ones who reclaim
a justice that the universe has denied the victims. As Block’s characters age, the
darker tone of Scudder’s nihilistic early appearances recedes; yet the world he and
Elaine inhabit is still a rough one.
Michael Connelly’s novels are located in the noir world of Raymond Chandler’s
Los Angeles. He exploded onto the mystery landscape with the publication of his
first novel, The Black Echo, featuring detective Harry Bosch, in 1992. The novel
646 MYSTERY FICTION

was well received by critics and readers, winning the Edgar Award for Best First
Novel by the Mystery Writers of America. Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch is named for
the fifteenth-century Dutch painter whose nightmarish canvases were peopled with
grotesque figures against the backdrop of violent landscapes. Bosch is a fictional
composite of bits from both real detectives and fictional ones: Raymond Chandler’s
Philip Marlowe and Ross McDonald’s Lew Archer, along with film icons Dirty
Harry and Frank Bullit are some of the characters who shape Bosch.
In Echo Park (2006), Bosch is out of retirement and working cold cases for the
Open Unsolved Unit. He is obsessed by a 13-year-old case that he was unable to
solve. Bosch’s whole career as a cop is thrown into question when a jailed serial
killer confesses to the death of the woman whose killer eluded him. In all of
Connelly’s Bosch novels, he creates a real man performing a real job. The man is
flawed and his flaws contribute to his own torturous path through his career and
into his own psyche. Bosch must confront his own demons and find a way to make
peace with his path to salvage his future.
Robert B. Parker is best known for his Spenser novels, a series that prompted the
creation of the television series Spenser for Hire (1985–1988), in which Robert
Urich played the part of the Boston detective. A prolific author, Parker has written
over 30 Spenser novels beginning with The Godwulf Manuscript in 1974. Unlike
the archetypal private investigator, Spenser does not hold himself apart from the
community in which he works. In Spenser, Parker has created a detective whose con-
nection to Boston and its people is strong, and a sense of place is important in the
novels. Like his predecessors, Spenser does have an idealistic code that he is unable
to carry out in the traditional venue of police work; thus he strikes out on his own.
Along with his partner, Hawk, and his lover, Susan Silverman, this college-educated
private eye battles stereotypes, all the while upholding his traditional hard-boiled
image. In the late 1990s, Parker created two more series characters, former LAPD
detective Jesse Stone and another former police officer (a female this time), Sunny
Randall.
Another Boston writer is Dennis Lehane, whose series is set in working-class
immigrant neighborhoods. The gritty Mystic River (2001), bringing together three
childhood friends in an investigation of one of the group’s murdered daughters, was
made into a successful film. Lehane’s writing career began with a mystery series fea-
turing Boston detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. The novels, particu-
larly Darkness, Take My Hand (1996), generated praise for their brutally realistic
portrayals of Boston and its environs. Both Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone,
Lehane’s 1998 title featuring Kenzie and Gennaro, have been made into successful
and critically acclaimed films.
Hard-boiled detective fiction was long the jurisdiction of male writers. The genre
appeared particularly ill suited to women characters. Although historically there
have been many female private eyes in mystery fiction (one of the first was Seeley
Regester’s Dead Letter: An American Romance, which appeared in 1864), it wasn’t
until the 1980s that the female sleuth broke the barrier of the male-dominated pri-
vate detective and garnered praise for doing so. Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, and
Marcia Muller are the foremost authors with female private eye protagonists.
Marcia Muller introduced the popular Sharon McCone in the 1977 Edwin of the
Iron Shoes. Influenced by her husband Bill Pronzini (see Hard-Boiled Detective),
Muller created the first female detective to compete in the hard-boiled tradition.
McCone begins her career working as a detective for the All-Souls Legal Cooperative.
 MYSTERY FICTION 647

Unlike most hard-boiled PI’s, though, McCone has a circle of friends and family to
whom she is close and who she often helps. Female sleuths are rarely portrayed as lon-
ers. Muller’s earlier titles show McCone as becoming personally invested in her client’s
problems; in later works, the issues are more social and political in nature. McCone
also becomes hardened, particularly after she kills a man in self-defense. Muller’s plots
involve shady ethics in many industries (dot coms, country music, politics), and she
finds in typical hard-boiled fashion, that her own ethics in pursuing justice for her
clients become slippery as well.
Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton both began their publishing careers in 1982 with
series characters that became much more commercially successful for them than
Sharon McCone did for Marcia Muller. Paretsky and Grafton are consistently on
the bestseller lists.
Sara Paretsky founded Sisters in Crime in 1986. The worldwide organization
states that its mission is “To combat discrimination against women in the mystery
field, educate publishers and the general public as to inequities in the treatment of
female authors, raise the level of awareness of their contributions to the field, and
promote the professional advancement of women who write mysteries.” Paretsky’s
protagonist, V.I. Warshawski introduced readers to strong, capable female charac-
ters who are not victims, but rather the protectors of victims. Playing with the con-
ventions of the hard-boiled genre, Paretsky carves a niche for Warshawski and for
other female authors in the male world of hard-boiled private eyes. Warshawski is
a fighter for justice, taking on cases where the downtrodden have no other hope.
Her cases are often more socially oriented than Chandler’s or Hammett’s would be.
In Indemnity Only (1982), Paretsky provides a background for her character that is
strengthened as the series continues. Warshawski left the public defender’s office
jaded with the corrupt nature of the job. Thirteen novels later Paretsky has legions
of fans of the feminist ideas imbued in her mystery fiction. Warshawksi is involved
with feminist issues, but also with issues of community and social responsibility. Her
cases often center on white-collar crime, which defrauds the poor and defenseless.
She comes up against, and overcomes, traditional patriarchal objections to her deci-
sion to ply a man’s trade. Like McCone, Warshawski differs from male hard-boiled
detectives in her deep social relationships with families and friends.
Kinsey Millhone is one of the best-recognized female sleuths being published
today. She was introduced by Sue Grafton in the 1982 A is for Alibi. T for Trespass
(2007) is her twentieth Millhone installment. Grafton has created in Millhone a tra-
ditional loner of a private eye, one with demons in her past, including a stint as a
police officer and two failed marriages. What sets the novels apart from those of her
male predecessors is the consistently strong background and personality develop-
ment of Millhone. Grafton’s novels tackle social themes in an effort to understand
the “whys” behind the murders investigated.
Police Procedurals. Helen Reilly was a prolific author of mystery novels, whose
career stretched from 1930 to 1962. Her books feature New York City Police
Inspector Christopher McKee. They were among the first American novels to stress
police procedure. Authors of police procedurals strive to create an accurate envi-
ronment in which their characters respond to crime scenes, perform investigative
work, and apprehend criminals. They focus in on the various officers in a force,
their relationships with each other, and the development of their characters.
Lawrence Treat’s V as in Victim (1945) is usually acknowledged as the first novel in
this genre; however, the television show Dragnet (1951–1959) is often credited with
648 MYSTERY FICTION

jumpstarting the popularity of police procedurals. Unlike the classic hard-boiled pri-
vate eye or cozy, with its amateur sleuth, the hero of a police procedural is acting as
part of a team. The reader of this genre is thrust into a setting where rules (proce-
dures) are followed and the operation of a police force is described in great detail.
Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels are a superb example of this genre.
Ed McBain, pseudonym of Salvatore Albert Lombino (AKA Evan Hunter), was a
prolific writer, with over 125 novels published under various names. More than 50
of these titles have been part of the influential and highly regarded 87th Precinct
series, which provided the impetus for many police force television series, such as
Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue. The 1956 Cop Hater was the first novel in the
87th Precinct series. McBain’s novels stood out from the heroic detective story in that
the hero was a collection of police officers, each with his own eccentricities and tal-
ents, working together as a team to apprehend criminals. The novels are set in New
York and the setting is an important part of the series’ success. New York is por-
trayed through the eyes of those on the streets, walking the beat, knocking on door
after door to find witnesses, questioning suspects, gathering evidence bit by bit. The
settings are realistic as are the characters, the dialogue, and the crimes. In over
40 years of creating novels for the series, McBain has continued to move forward in
time, keeping his characters updated in the latest crime-solving techniques and inno-
vations. His novels have been consistently praised for their strong characters and
gritty outlook. The final 87th Precinct novel, Fiddlers, was published in 2005,
the year McBain died.
Stuart M. Kaminsky, well known for several series characters (see Historical
Mysteries), is most celebrated for his series about Russian inspector Porfiry
Rostnikov. Death of a Dissident (also published as Rostnikov’s Corpse) was pub-
lished in 1981 and was praised for both its depiction of police work in a constantly
changing Russia and the characterization of Rostnikov himself, a dedicated cop in
a corrupt world. Kaminsky’s 1989 Cold Red Sunrise won an Edgar for best novel.
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist John Camp is better known as John Sandford.
Sandford has published 17 novels in his Prey series, beginning with Rules of Prey in
1989, setting his Police Lieutenant Lucas Davenport mysteries in Minneapolis.
Capers. A caper is a humorous mystery novel, one in which both felons and law
enforcement are equally incompetent. Capers often involve criminals attempting to
pull off major heists and usually doing so badly. Donald Westlake’s Dortmunder
series and the Parker series written under a pseudonym, Richard Stark, are two of
the best caper characters. Stark’s first Parker installment, Point Blank (1962) was
made into a film starring Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson. Parker was such a suc-
cessful character that Westlake created Dortmunder, a bungling jewel thief, who
debuted in the 1970 The Hot Rock. There have been over a dozen Dortmunder titles
and over 20 Parker titles, all absurdly fast-paced and comic. Bernie Rhodenbarr, cre-
ated by Lawrence Block, is the proprietor of a used bookstore by day and a thief at
night. As humorous as Westlake’s Dortmunder series, Rhodenbarr is a far cry from
Block’s retired cop and reformed alcoholic Matthew Scudder. Block introduced the
thief in Burglars Can’t Be Choosers (1977) and has written almost a dozen more
installments in the series.
Forensic Science. The current public fascination with forensic science reaches back
to the television series Quincy, M.E. (1976–1983), starring Jack Klugman, and is
now reflected in dozens of shows, specifically the CSI franchise currently on the air.
Forensic novels are those that use science to solve crimes: pathology, anthropology,
 MYSTERY FICTION 649

toxicology, and behavioral profiling among many other fields. High-tech investiga-
tive techniques are often employed to solve otherwise impossible crimes. The novels
are also often gory with descriptions of autopsies and close-up details of the victims’
causes of death making for unsettling reading. Kathy Reichs, Patricia Cornwell, and
Jeffrey Deaver lead the pack with detectives who use science to solve crimes.
Although preceded by P.D. James’s Death of a Expert Witness (1977) and Susan
Dunlap’s Pious Deception (1989), both medical detective mysteries, Patricia
Cornwell’s 1990 Postmortem introduced mysteries readers to the world of Kay
Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner for the State of Virginia, and opened the flood-
gates to a slew of forensic mysteries. Cornwell’s novels employ all of the features of
forensic science in her Scarpetta mysteries. Critics praise Cornwell’s use of highly
detailed forensic techniques, but often criticize the character of Scarpetta as being
too introspective, and at times, downright unpleasant. Postmortem was followed by
over a dozen more Scarpetta novels, following the medical examiner as she moves
to several states, working in various capacities to solve crimes.
Kathy Reichs is a forensic anthropologist for Quebec, medical examiner for North
Carolina, and anthropology professor at the University of North Carolina,
Charlotte. Her experience in the field has helped her books about Temperance
“Tempe” Brennan rival those of Cornwell. Brennan debuted in Deja Dead (1997)
where readers are also introduced to Brennan’s archenemy, Montreal Police Inspec-
tor Luc Claudel. Grisly forensic details are based on Reich’s own examination of
bodies too far decomposed to be identified by pathologists. It is Reichs’s ability to
combine explanations of forensic procedures with strong storylines that have cap-
tured an ever-increasing fan base for her novels. The television series, Bones, is based
on Reichs and her character. The tenth Brennan installment is Bones to Ashes (2007).
Jeffery Deaver has introduced a new type of forensic scientist. Injured while work-
ing a case, Lincoln Rhyme is now a quadriplegic, able to move only a finger.
Equipped with every high-tech gadget known to the world of forensic science,
Rhyme works out of his home/lab in New York. A complex man, Rhyme does not
endear himself to many, but his intellect is highly sought after. In The Bone Collector
(1997), made into a 1999 movie starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie,
Rhyme begins working with Amelia Sachs. Sachs goes where Rhyme sends her and
acts as his eyes and ears as she investigates crime scenes and tracks criminals.
Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme series is praised for the books’ dizzyingly fast-paced and
twisted plot lines.
Nursery rhyme titles catapulted James Patterson into the spotlight. Along Came
a Spider appeared in 1993, and much to his readers’ delight, has been followed by
10 more Alex Cross novels. Cross is a psychologist who works with the police
department to track killers. His ability to get inside the mind and psyche of crimi-
nals often clashes with his desire to live quietly with his family. Patterson’s books
are filled with action, and despite his doctoral studies in literature at Vanderbilt,
simple in style and language. Kiss the Girls starring Morgan Freeman and Ashley
Judd was released in 1997, followed by Along Came a Spider (2001); Roses Are Red
is scheduled for release in 2007.
Thomas Harris’s novels about FBI agent Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter are
often categorized as forensic mysteries, and forensic mysteries are often grouped
along with those about serial killers. Forensic techniques, particularly psychological
profiling of killers, are often employed to track down the criminals. In Silence of the
Lambs (1988), the second Harris book to include Lecter, Agent Starling must use
650 MYSTERY FICTION

Lecter’s own psychological insights along with her intuition to track down a serial
killer. The book was made into an extremely successful movie (1991) starring
Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster and has become the definitive serial killer movie,
against which all others are evaluated. Silence was followed by Hannibal (1999, a
prequel to Silence), and Hannibal Rising (2006, a sequel to Silence). Both have been
made into films along with Red Dragon (1981), which was made into the movie
Manhunter (1986).
Ridley Pearson’s police procedurals about serial killers featuring detective Lou
Boldt and police psychologist Daphne Matthews are set in Seattle, Washington. Like
Reichs and Cornwell, Pearson employs up-to-the-minute forensic techniques in his
mysteries. Caleb Carr offers readers a look at forensic science as it “might have
been.” In The Alienist (1994) Laszlo Kreizler, a psychologist (alienist) tracks down
a killer in 1896 New York. The characters from The Alienist reunite in the 1997
Angel of Darkness. Set in future world of 2023, Gideon Wolfe is an expert criminal
profiler criminologist living in an apocalyptic New York in Killing Time (2000).
Edgar winner Aaron Elkins introduced anthropologist and forensics professor
Gideon Oliver, better known as the “Skeleton Doctor” in Fellowship of Fear (1982).
Oliver travels to various locales worldwide to read the crimes written in the victims’
bones in this often-humorous series. Elkins’s latest novel is Unnatural Selection
(2006), which follows Oliver to the Isles of Scilly.
Other sciences prove useful in finding killers as well. Forensic geologist Em
Hansen (Sarah Andrews) uses her background to help her dig up criminals in Utah
and Montana. In Cold Pursuit (2007) is the eleventh Hansen novel. Sarah R.
Shaber’s Professor Simon Shaw is a forensic historian in North Carolina, solving
crimes with southern connections.
Archaeology is a subgenre of forensic mysteries. Sharyn McCrumb has received
awards for her contributions to Appalachian literature with such titles as If I’d
Killed Him When I Met Him . . . (1995). Elizabeth McPherson appears in nine
mysteries set in Appalachia. As a forensic anthropologist, McPherson uses her
knowledge to solve old crimes that have modern repercussions. (See also Regional
Mysteries.) Beverly Connor has created two more bone experts: Lindsay
Chamberlain, who divides her time between excavating archaeological sites and
solving crimes, and Diane Fallon, who is the director of the RiverTrail Museum of
Natural History in Georgia.

Context and Issues

Cultural Diversity in Mysteries. Since the 1980s, the mystery genre has seen an explo-
sion of authors from different cultural backgrounds. Novelists who had been on the
publishing fringes were beginning to enter the mainstream mystery market. Multi-
cultural characters as well as those of alternate sexual orientations appeared on the
shelves with more regularity.
Gay and Lesbian. Two excellent sources cover the history of gay detective fiction:
Drewey Wayne Gunn’s The Gay Male Sleuth in Print and Film (2005) and Judith
Markowitz’s The Gay Detective Novel (2005). Both investigate the history of this
subgenre from the first openly homosexual character, the British psychiatrist Tony
Page (The Heart in Exile by Rodney Garland, 1953) to Ellen Hart’s lesbian restau-
rant owner, Jane Lawless. They trace the development of gay mystery fiction, at its
height until 2000, with several authors contributing to the genre with their series:
 MYSTERY FICTION 651

Mark Richard Zubro (Paul Turner, a gay Chicago police detective), John Morgan
Wilson (journalist Benjamin Justice), Lev Raphael (English professor Nick Hoffman),
Dorien Grey (detective Dick Hardesty), and Richard Stevenson (private investigator
Donald Strachey).
One of the better-known sleuths is George Baxt’s creation, Pharoah Love (delib-
erately misspelled), a homosexual African American New York detective who makes
his first appearance in A Queer Kind of Death (1966). The novels have not aged
well, and although there is much humor in the adventures and characters sur-
rounding Love, the characters are more stereotypical and campy than modern gay
detectives.
Joseph Hansen’s Dave Brandstetter novels were a groundbreaking phenomenon
in the world of mystery fiction. As tough as traditional mystery protagonists of the
late 1960s, Brandstetter was also openly homosexual. Hansen introduced
Brandstetter in the 1970 Fadeout, a mystery in which the upstanding gay characters
are positioned as being extreme opposites of the sleazy heterosexual ones. Hansen’s
first mystery, Known Homosexual (also published as Stranger to Himself, 1978, and
Pretty Boy Dead, 1984) involved a love affair between an African American and his
white lover. In a 1991 interview with Peter Burton (collected in Talking To . . . ,
1991), Hansen said he wanted to overturn gay stereotypes with his characters. He
had not planned on writing so many books about Brandstetter, but mainstream
acceptance of the character led him to write 12 mysteries featuring the insurance
investigator.
M.F. Beal’s Angel Dance (1977) broke ground with Latina private eye, Kat Guerrera.
From the beginning, lesbian mystery writers have foregrounded serious subjects in
their novels, tackling issues of racism, sexism, violence against women, and homo-
phobia. Lesbian mysteries often also have a romantic subplot that is often missing
from gay mysteries. The now defunct Naiad Press (it has been incorporated into
Bella Books) began publishing lesbian mysteries in the 1980s, featuring the works
of Katherine V. Forrest who created the first lesbian police detective. Kate Delafield
is a former Marine and first appears in Amateur City (1984). Forrest has twice won
the Lambda Literary Award for best mystery. The latest Delafield novel Hancock
Park was published in 2004. Another feminist publisher, Seal Press, brought forth
the Pam Nilsen series by Barbara Wilson.
Sandra Scoppettone’s lesbian character Lauren Laurano is a private investigator
living in Greenwich Village. Very successful, Scoppettone is the first author of a les-
bian mystery to be published by a mainstream press. Laurano was a very popular
character and when Scoppetone ended the series at number six, Gonna Take a
Homicidal Journey (1998), her fans begged for her return.
Laurie R. King is best known for her Mary Russell series set in England during
World War I. Russell solves mysteries with the retired Sherlock Holmes, whom she
marries. Although heterosexual herself, King has also created San Francisco-based
Kate Martinelli, a lesbian homicide detective. King’s first Martinelli novel, A Grave
Talent (1993) won the Edgar Award for the best first crime novel of the year.
Jane Lawless is a restaurant owner in Minneapolis. Ellen Hart, Lawless’s creator,
has been compared to Agatha Christie and Barbara Vine. Extremely popular, the
latest Lawless installment, Night Vision (2006), numbers the fourteenth in the
series.
African American. Before the Continental Op, Philip Marlowe, Lew Archer, and Sam
Spade, there was John Edward Bruce’s The Black Sleuth appearing in McGirt’s
652 MYSTERY FICTION

Magazine in 1907. Bruce’s West African protagonist Sadipe Okukenu is one of the
earliest known black mystery writers ever published. And then there was Florian
Slappey, a black private detective created by Octavus Roy Cohen. Regrettably
stereotypical and conceived out of the minstrel show tradition, the Slappey stories
achieved great popularity and were published in the “Darktown Birmingham”
column in The Saturday Evening Post. Rudolph Fisher’s 1932 The Conjure-Man
Dies was a product of the Harlem Renaissance.
Chester Himes was one of the most important African American mystery novel-
ists. His novels introduced Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones in A Rage in
Harlem (1957) after the publication of several other novels. Himes’s mysteries
showed the violence of African American lives in Harlem and the racism that kept
whites and blacks divided. Highly regarded in France where he moved in the 1950s,
Himes won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policiére in 1957.
After Himes there were no African American detective series with much staying
power until the Shaft novels appeared in 1970. John Tidyman, the white author of
the Shaft novels, was awarded the NAACP Image Award. The Shaft movies were
immensely popular, and Shaft was remade in 2000 starring Samuel L. Jackson. John
Shaft was ranked as one of the toughest hard-boiled detectives of the 1970s. Other
African American detectives created between the 1950s and 2000 are Ezell “Easy”
Barnes, created by Richard Hilary; and Carver Bascombe, originally created by
Kenn Davis and John Stanley.
In 1990 Walter Mosley achieved critical acclaim with his first Easy Rawlins book,
Devil in a Blue Dress. Rawlins, a war veteran, walks the streets of post World War II
Los Angeles. Mosley’s novels follow Rawlins through time as he marries and starts
a family; the first novel is set in 1948, the most recent, Cinnamon Kiss (2005) takes
place in 1969. A series featuring Fearless Jones and his sidekick Paris Minton is also
set in the Los Angeles of the 1950s. A third series character is Socrates Fortlow
(Walkin’ the Dog, 1999). Through Socrates and Rawlins, Mosley poses hard ques-
tions about the nature of race relations and the future of the black man in America
of the fifties and sixties and in the Los Angeles of the 1990s. His novels are seen as
providing strong social commentary on the life of African Americans in a volatile
period that still has repercussions today.
Racial tension and violence are the backdrop for Gary Phillips’s Ivan Monk series
set in Los Angeles. C.J. Floyd is Robert Greer’s Denver-based bail bondsman and
private eye. Greer is a professor of Pathology and Medicine at the University of
Colorado, and he brings his erudition to the Floyd novels (The Fourth Perspective,
2006). Police Commander Larry Cole of the Chicago Police Department is the cre-
ation of Hugh Holton. Holton himself was a police detective until his death in 2001.
A scene formerly dominated by male writers has experienced an explosion of
female authors. Along with focusing on social issues as their male counterparts do,
African American authors often infuse their mysteries with family dynamics as well.
Former Essence magazine editor Valerie Wilson Wesley’s Tamara Hayle is a
Newark, New Jersey ex-cop turned private eye. Wesley’s novels follow Hayle as she
struggles to raise her son. Barbara Neely created Blanche White, a nosy 40-year-old
domestic who frequently finds trouble. Blanche on the Lam (1992) was her first
appearance and won the Agatha, the Macavity, and the Anthony awards. Nikki
Chase solves crimes while teaching economics at Harvard (Orange Crushed, 2004).
Eleanor Taylor Bland’s popular series stars Marti McAlister. McAlister is a Chicago
cop transplanted to a small town, Lincoln Prairie, Illinois, where fighting crime goes
 MYSTERY FICTION 653

hand in hand with fighting small town attitudes. Suddenly a Stranger (2007) is the
fourteenth in the series.
Native American. Although not a Native American himself, Tony Hillerman is
unquestionably the most popular author to feature Indian characters. Influenced by
Arthur W. Upfield’s Australian police officer who is part Aborigine, Tony Hillerman
created Joe Leaphorn, a member of the Navajo Tribal Police in New Mexico.
Leaphorn grew out of an encounter Hillerman had with a Texas sheriff he met while
a young reporter. His Leaphorn novels, beginning with The Blessing Way (1970),
became very popular for their authentic depictions of Navajo life and the Southwest.
Leaphorn’s partner Jim Chee was introduced with People of Darkness (1980),
adding a deeper look into the religious beliefs of the Navajo as Chee balances his
desire to be both a law officer and a shaman. Based on the students Hillerman
taught at the University of New Mexico, Chee is young and idealistic. Although he
has written other mysteries and nonfiction titles, the Leaphorn/Chee novels are the
most popular; almost 20 have appeared since his 1970 publication of The Blessing
Way. The most recent title is the 2003 Sinister Pig.
The husband and wife team of Aimée and David Thurlo has written two series of
books based on Navajo characters. Lee Nez is a nightwalker, the Navajo equivalent
of a vampire in the Lee Nez series (Second Sunrise, 2002). Nez teams up with an
FBI agent to solve crimes both human and supernatural. Blackening Song (1995) is
the first in the acclaimed Ella Clah series about Clah, a former FBI agent, now a
Navajo Police Special Investigator, who combines modern investigative techniques
with ancient Navajo tradition as she solves crimes on the reservation. Turquoise
Girl (2007) is the latest in the series.
Peter Bowen’s Gabriel Du Pre, cattle-brand inspector and Toussaint, Montana
deputy, makes his first appearance in the 1994 Cattle Wind. Bowen’s 13 Du Pre mys-
teries revolve around current events as well as Native American issues. Margaret
Coel is an expert on the Arapaho Indians. Her series featuring Father John and
Arapaho lawyer Vicky Holden are set on the Wind River Reservation. In the eleventh
book of the series, Eye of the Wolf (2005), the inhabitants of the Wind River Reser-
vation are on the brink of civil war with the neighboring Shoshone. Award-winning
Jean Hager is the author of two series characters: Mitch Bushyhead is a half-Chero-
kee police chief, and Molly Bearclaw is an investigator for the Cherokee Nation.
Inupiat Police Detective Ray Attla investigates mysteries in Christopher Lane’s
Inupiat Eskimo series. Like many mysteries featuring Native Americans, Lane’s
series features the tension of Attla trying to straddle two different cultures. Another
Alaskan native, Dana Stabenow, is the author of the Kate Shugak mysteries. A Cold
Day for Murder (1992), winner of the Edgar Award, introduces Shugak, an Aleut
who has left her job with the Anchorage district attorney to live in the Alaskan
wilderness. Stabenow’s books have been praised for their accurate depictions of
Native Alaskan societies, particularly fishing communities.
James D. Doss adds an element of humor to his Southern Ute tribal policeman
Charlie Moon series. Stone Butterfly (2006) is the eleventh novel to feature Moon
and his aunt Daisy Perika, an Ute shaman. FBI special agent Anna Turnipseed, a
Modoc Indian, and Bureau of Indian Affairs Investigator Emmett Parker, a
Comanche, star in Kirk Mitchell’s mysteries. In the 2003 Sky Woman Falling, an
Oneida creation myth stirs up modern day trouble.
Asian American and Hispanic American. Japanese American gardener Mas Arai
becomes involved in unraveling a decades-old mystery in Naomi Hirahara’s Summer
654 MYSTERY FICTION

of the Big Bachi (2004). Bachi is the Japanese spirit of retribution; Mas’s less than
pure life after Hiroshima is catching up with him. Sujata Massey has created
Japanese American sleuth Rei Shimura, a Japanese American antiques dealer work-
ing in Tokyo. The seventh installment, Agatha Award nominee The Pearl Diver
(2004), finds Shimura making a fresh start in Washington, D.C. New York City
detective lieutenant Jimmy Sakura solves crimes in Harker Moore’s Cruel Season for
Dying (2003) and A Mourning in Autumn (2004). S.J. Rozan’s mystery series fea-
turing Chinese American private investigator Lydia Chin, have garnered many nom-
inations and awards (Winter and Night, 2003, won the Edgar and Macavity awards
and was nominated for the Shamus and the Anthony).
Sonny Baca appears in Rudolpho Anaya’s Albuquerque Quartet. Baca is a minor
character in Albuquerque (1992), but in the next three installments he takes the lead
role. Each installment of the quartet is concerned with the Mexican American tra-
ditions associated with the seasons. Anaya combines Mexican mythology, history,
and legend with current issues, such as drugs and corporate greed. In Shaman
Winter (1999), Baca fights his nemesis Raven as he travels back in time to 1598
New Mexico. The series has been continued beyond the quartet with Jemez Spring
(2005).
Critically acclaimed Michael Nava writes mysteries about a gay Chicano charac-
ter, Henry Rios. Inspired by Joseph Hansen, Nava has created a character who rep-
resents a marginalized group within the marginalized Chicano society. Rios is
introduced in the 1986 The Little Death, in which he resigns from his position in a
law firm to start his own business defending society’s outcasts. Rag and Bone (2007)
is the seventh Rios mystery. Like Rios, Luis Montez is a Chicano legal aid attorney
helping the down and out. Burned out by his job, Ruiz longs for his activist youth
in the series debut, The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz (1993).
Rex Burns has written several mysteries featuring introspective Hispanic
American Gabe Wager, a homicide detective for the Denver Police Department.
Cuban American Lupe Solano is the creation of Carolina Garcia-Aguilera. The
Miami private investigator has been featured in six installments (Bitter Sugar,
2001). K.J.A. Wishnia’s New Yorker Filomena Buscarsela returns to her native
Ecuador in Blood Lake (2002).
Regional Mysteries. Although many mysteries have strong locales as part of their
plots, some mystery writers are inextricably linked to a particular region: the South,
the West, and even specific states or cities: New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles.
More so than most general fiction, the often-regional nature of many mysteries,
especially those written with series characters, appeal to readers in various geo-
graphic regions.
New England. Boston figures prominently as a locale for a number of mystery writ-
ers. Jane Langton’s series about Homer Kelly includes Cape Cod and other
Massachusetts environs, while Linda Barnes’s Carlotta Carlyle investigates crimes in
Boston. Other popular Bostonians are Robert B. Parker and Jeremiah Healey.
Dennis Lehane’s series featuring private investigators Kenzie and Gennaro is set in
his hometown of Dorchester, Massachusetts.
Mid Atlantic. New York City has been cited as the U.S. city most frequently serving
as the setting for mystery novels. Ed McBain, Rex Stout, and Donald Westlake have
all set mysteries in New York. Lawrence Block lends a strong air of realism to his
several series of mysteries, including the popular Matthew Scudder, by evoking New
York both pre- and post-9/11. Janet Evanovich sets her wildly popular novels about
 MYSTERY FICTION 655

bond agent Stephanie Plum in New Jersey. Gillian Roberts’s Amanda Pepper series
is set against the backdrop of Philadelphia as are those of Lisa Scottoline and Jane
Haddam. K.C. Constantine created the mythical Rocksburg, Pennsylvania, and
Tamara Myer depicts the Pennsylvania Dutch country. Margaret Truman’s Capital
Crimes series in set in Washington, D.C., as are George P. Pelecanos’s Derek Strange
novels.
The South. The South is home to many mystery writers. Patricia Houck Sprinkle
and Kathy Hogan Trochek both use Atlanta and its environs as settings. Charlotte,
North Carolina is the setting for both Kathy Reichs’s Temperance Brennan series
and for Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta titles. (See Forensic Mysteries.) Julie
Smith sets her novels in New Orleans and Edgar Award-winning James Lee Burke’s
hard-boiled mysteries about Dave Robicheaux span the area from the Big Easy to
the bayous.
There are currently sixteen titles featuring Burke’s character Dave Robicheaux, a
retired New Orleans police officer who has moved to the small town in New Iberia
parish. The setting is intrinsic to a Burke novel. The bayous and their landscapes
and wildlife are not just backdrops, they act as characters, often fighting against the
same ills faced by many southern locales: increasing development and crime, which
decimates the wildlife and the economy of rural areas. Into the mix are thrown
felons hiding in the swampy backwoods and the often crime-laced nightlife of the
French Quarter.
Florida is the location of Carl Hiaasen’s novels, which tackle the multiple issues
of theme parks, endangered species, and overdevelopment. Strip Tease (1993) was
the first of Hiaasen’s novels to make the best-seller list. The novel was later adapted
for the screen in 1996 with Demi Moore and Burt Reynolds. Readers are introduced
to a recurring character in Hiaasen’s work: Clinton “Skink” Tyree, a Florida gover-
nor who suddenly vacates the office after the corruption around him becomes too
much to bear. Tyree ultimately flees into the swamps and becomes something of an
ecoterrorist or prankster, a role often taken up by characters in later works, some-
times after direct contact with Skink, who appears to mature into a teacher figure.
Joan Hess’s characters live in Farberville, Arkansas and feature bookstore opera-
tor Clair Malloy. Hess’s 16 novels featuring Malloy present all aspects of southern
culture, including family relationships and racism. Hess’s other character is Arly
Hanks, chief of police in Maggody, Arkansas. Ruby Bee’s Bar & Grill and Estelle’s
Hair Fantasies are the locations Hanks goes to relax, and that provide moments of
humor in the midst of sometimes biting social commentary.
The Appalachian Mountains of Eastern Tennessee are the setting of Sharyn
McCrumb’s extremely popular best sellers. Her Ellen McPherson mysteries are read
as social satires of southern life as she works as a forensic anthropologist.
McCrumb’s novels on the McPherson series provide voluminous information about
the history of the South, both its Confederate ancestors and its Native American
ones. Her ballad series, beginning with If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O (1990) are
set in a fictional Tennessee town, and the mysteries are structured like ballads with
their stories of passion that have their roots in the past and their violent conse-
quences in the present.
Margaret Maron sets her dozen judge Deborah Knott titles in the South as well.
Her characters are representative without being stereotypical, with sharply rendered
dialogue and plots played out against the backdrop of a fictionalized North
Carolina comparable to William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi.
656 MYSTERY FICTION

One of the most popular mysteries series set in the South has been Carolyn Hart’s
“Death on Demand” and “Henrie O” novels. Set on a fictional South Carolina
resort island, the “Death on Demand” series features an attractive, wealthy couple,
Annie and Max Darling. They own a mystery bookshop, and also work together to
solve the many real mysteries that come their way. Hart hit on a winning formula
with her “Death on Demand” series. The stories combine elements of romance,
mystery fiction, and bibliophilia, and have proven tremendously popular with read-
ers. Part of the fun of the series comes from Annie Laurance Darling’s devoted cus-
tomers, all of whom are fanatical mystery readers. The author reveals in the books
a familiarity with esoteric mystery fiction that appeals to devotees of the genre.
The Midwest. William Kienzle’s Father Koesler mysteries and Loren D. Estleman’s
Amos Walker novels are both set in Detroit; and Ellen Hart’s Jane Lawless and John
Sandford’s Lucas Davenport both operate in Minnesota as well. Estleman is equally
well known and well respected for his westerns as for his mysteries. Amos Walker
was created in the tradition of Hammett and Chandler, but the streets he walks are
those of Detroit instead of Los Angeles. Motor City Blue (1980) is the first Walker
novel and shows Estleman’s deep research and sharp eye as the characters ply their
trades on the often seedy and dangerous streets of the city. A detective with a blue-
collar background, Walker takes the reader on location from Detroit’s poverty-
stricken inner city to the prestigious Grosse Point.
The West and Southwest. Rudolfo Anaya, best known for his coming of age novel
Bless Me, Ultima, joins the ranks of mystery writers with his series featuring Sonny
Baca set in New Mexico. The novels of Susan Wittig Albert are set in Pecan Springs,
Texas. Nevada Barr sets her environmental mysteries in various national parks,
including those in New Mexico and Texas, among other southwestern locales.
Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins prowls the streets of Los Angeles along with Michael
Connolly’s Harry Bosch. T. Jefferson Parker has published well-received novels set
in 1950s Orange County, California.

Selected Authors
Historical Mysteries. There are dozens of mysteries that feature historical characters,
real or imagined, solving crimes in every time period imaginable—from the
Paleolithic to World War II. The following discussion focuses on characters created
by Americans and writers still producing works in the 2000s.
Robin Paige, the pseudonym of husband-wife team Susan Wittig Albert and Bill
Albert, has created a series set in Victorian England and featuring Kate Ardleigh
and Sir Charles Sheridan. Susan Wittig Albert, better known for her China Bayles
series, has developed a series of mysteries around the children’s author, Beatrix
Potter. Emily Brightwell introduced Mrs. Jeffries in the 1993 The Inspector and
Mrs. Jeffries. Mrs. Jeffries keeps house for Scotland Yard Inspector Witherspoon
and helps him solve crimes. These historical mysteries are light enough to be con-
sidered cozies.
Far from the world of cozies, Caleb Carr is a military historian and novelist who
has written thrillers set in the past and future. Reviewers praised The Alienist as an
engrossing book infused with the authentic atmosphere of turn-of-the-century New
York. Some critics, however, found that the story was sometimes overwhelmed by
historical detail. A sequel to The Alienist is The Angel of Darkness. In 2005, Carr
published The Italian Secretary: A Further Adventure of Sherlock Holmes. There
 MYSTERY FICTION 657

has long been a mania for creating Sherlock Holmes stories to satisfy the detective’s
legions of fans. In The Italian Secretary, Watson and Holmes are joined by Holmes’s
brother, Mycroft, and the three are drawn into an investigation of the mysterious death
of two workers at Queen Victoria’s castle in Scotland. Conspiracy theories abound,
along with the possibility of supernatural predators hovering in the gloom, but the
clues that Holmes discovers lead him in quite a different direction.
Laurie R. King is another author who has created a series based on the further
adventures of Sherlock Holmes. King’s Mary Russell first appeared in 1994 with
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. The novel is set in 1914 and Homes takes the 15-year-old
Mary under his wing and the two solve crimes; she eventually becomes his wife.
Sherlock Holmes purists rejected King’s novels, but their inclusion of a female
character at the heart of the mysteries have won over many female readers. In the
eighth series installment, Locked Room (2005), though, Holmes emerges as the
lead character.
Barbara Mertz writes under two extraordinarily popular pseudonyms: Elizabeth
Peters and Barbara Michaels. Peters has set dozens of books in nineteenth-century
Egypt with its many tombs and historical locations described in great detail. Family
life may have curbed her archaeological activities, but her vast knowledge of the
field lends much background interest and credibility to her Amelia Peabody novels
(begun in 1975), which are set against the backdrop of the excavations of Egypt’s
Valley of Kings. Mertz has continued to publish yearly installments in the Amelia
Peabody series. Tomb of the Golden Bird (2006) is the eighteenth Peabody novel.
Bruce Alexander’s final two installments in the Sir John Fielding series about an
eighteenth-century blind London judge are The Price of Murder (2003) and Rules
of Engagement (2005).
Stuart M. Kaminsky is a prolific author of mysteries and creator of several
sleuths, one of them the World War II-era Toby Peters. The Peters mysteries feature
historical figures, such as Errol Flynn and Emmett Kelly, involved in fictional
actions.
Legal Mysteries and Thrillers. Technically speaking, a thriller is a genre that has a
plot devoted to the chase or hunt. Thriller subgenres are endless: medical thrillers,
techno thrillers, spy novels, and so on. However, legal thrillers are popular with
mystery readers because the pursuit of justice is usually local and based on a par-
ticular crime as is a traditional mystery. John Grisham, a former Mississippi attor-
ney and author of almost 20 best-selling novels, most of which are legal thrillers,
has said, “Though Americans distrust the profession as a whole, we have an insa-
tiable appetite for stories about crimes, criminals, trials and all sorts of juicy lawyer
stuff” (Grisham).
As early as Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, the legal thriller was appearing
in the marketplace to great popular success. For example, Collins’s The Moonstone
(1868) and The Woman in White (1859) contain elements of a legal thriller: an
innocent person, the criminal justice system (legal proceedings and courtroom
drama) playing an intrinsic part of the storyline (e.g., Dickens’s Bleak House
[1853]), witness testimony, legal documents (wills, etc.), and lawyers assisting in
solving the crime. In the 1930s Erle Stanley Gardner, a practicing attorney, became
one of the most prolific and popular authors of courtroom dramas with his creation
of Perry Mason.
Many authors of legal thrillers are former attorneys themselves. Grisham, Scott
Turow, Richard North Patterson, and Steve Martini are four of the most recognized
658 MYSTERY FICTION

attorney/authors in the genre. It was Turow’s 1987 Presumed Innocent that opened
the floodgates to modern courtroom dramas.
Turow’s first novel, One-L (1977), written while Turow was a law student at
Harvard, documented the difficulties of law school. Presumed Innocent was pub-
lished while Turow was working as an assistant U.S. district attorney in Chicago.
The novel was well received and its publisher, Farrar, Strauss, paid more money for
the title than they ever had for a book by a first-time author. Their chance paid off
as Presumed Innocent hit the best-seller lists. The novel was praised for its insight
into the legal system and its refusal to divide the world into simplistic fields of black
and white, good and evil. The film, starring Harrison Ford, was released in 1990.
Turow’s most recent title is Limitations (2006), originally published as a weekly
serial in the New York Times Magazine.
John Grisham’s first novel, A Time to Kill (1989), was slow to take off in the mar-
ket, but when it was republished by a major publishing house, he became a house-
hold name very quickly. A Time to Kill was inspired by a courtroom case, but
several of his subsequent novels were criticized as being too formulaic. His 1994
The Chamber was written at a much slower pace and garnered more critical acclaim
than some of the earlier titles. Grisham’s novels, although sometimes criticized for
their unrealistic plots, are almost always praised for their characterization and their
intense pace. These two elements have led to several of Grisham’s titles, among them
A Time to Kill, The Firm (1991), and The Pelican Brief (1992), being made into
blockbuster films.
Before turning to fiction writing, Richard North Patterson was a successful lawyer
who worked for the prosecution on the Watergate case of the 1970s. His literary
career took off after the publication of his second novel, Degree of Guilt (1992)
published after an eight-year hiatus from writing. Unlike many other mystery writ-
ers, Patterson does not have a series character; each novel is written about a differ-
ent protagonist, in a different place, with different kinds of crimes. The common
thread in Patterson’s mysteries is the attention paid to the legal system. In the 2005
Conviction, an eleven-year-old conviction is re-investigated; Balance of Power
(2003) combines politics and law in issues about gun control; and in Exile (2007)
the Middle East of today’s headlines is at the center of attorney David Wolfe’s most
difficult case.
Steve Martini is a former journalist and attorney. His skills combine to make him
one of the foremost authors of courtroom drama. Most of Martini’s titles feature
attorney Paul Madriani, whose cases are always part of a larger, more corrupt, polit-
ical scene. He has been praised for his torn-from-the-headlines plots and exception-
ally well-drawn and exciting courtroom pyrotechnics. Double Tap (2005) is the
eighth Madriani installment.
Many people are curious about how the law works and doesn’t work, and
authors spend a good amount of ink on explaining points of law that make the nov-
els not only entertaining but educational. As in forensic mysteries, the author of
legal thrillers must clearly explain the points, in this case legal, upon which a case
rests. Legal mysteries often focus on glitches in the justice system or the manipula-
tion of the law by shady attorneys. The protagonists themselves are usually of two
types, the idealistic young attorney who is up against a corrupt system, or a jaded
lawyer who is closer to the wrong side of the law than to the right. Michael
Connelly has created Michael Haller, who is an example of the latter type in The
Lincoln Lawyer (2005).
 MYSTERY FICTION 659

THE EDGAR AWARD FOR BEST MYSTERIES

Since 1946, the Mystery Writers of America has annually presented the Edgar awards, named
in honor of Edgar Allan Poe, for the best mysteries of the year, although there was no “Best
Novel” category until 1954, for fear of alienating key members. (Instead, there was a “Best
First Novel,” which is still given.) The recent “Best” mystery novel winners have included

2007 The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin (2007)

2006 Citizen Vince by Jess Walter. Regan Books.
2005 California Girl by T. Jefferson Parker.William Morrow.
2004 Resurrection Men by Ian Rankin. Little, Brown.
2003 Winter and Night by S.J. Rozan. St. Martin’s Minotaur.
2002 Silent Joe by T. Jefferson Parker. Hyperion.
2001 The Bottoms by Joe R. Lansdale. Mysterious Press.
2000 Bones by Jan Burke. Simon & Schuster.
Source: Mystery Writers of America Web site. http://mysterywriters.org/

Female authors have cornered a large sector of the legal thriller market as well.
Lia Matera began publishing fiction after law school, creating the characters
Willa Jansson and Laura Di Palma, who have starred in over a dozen titles. Lisa
Scottoline is another former lawyer who sets her novels in Philadelphia. Her
novels about the all female law firm Rosato and Associates have won her many
awards.

Reception
Awards. There are several awards for mystery fiction. The Edgar Allan Poe
Awards (The Edgars) were established by the Mystery Writers of America for var-
ious categories (best novel, best first novel, etc.). The first award was given in
1953 to Jay Charlotte’s Beat Not the Bones. The winner of the 2007 award for
best novel is The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin. The Grand Master Award,
also presented by the Mystery Writers of America association, recognizes lifetime
achievements of nominees. Recent winners have been Stephen King (2007), Stuart
Kaminsky (2006), and Marcia Muller (2005). Other awards include the Agatha,
which honors the traditional mystery and is awarded by Malice Domestic. The
Anthony Awards are named for Anthony Boucher, one of the founders of Mystery
Writers of America. And finally, there is the Macavity Award, presented by Mys-
tery Readers International.

Bibliography
Anaya, Rudolpho. Albuquerque. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992.
Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured
Popular Fiction. New York: Random House, 2007.
Bailey, Frankie Y. Out of the Woodpile: Black Characters in Crime and Detective Fiction.
New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.
Beal, M.F. Angel Dance. New York: Daughters, 1977.
Bishop, Claudia. Ground to a Halt. Waterville, ME: Wheeler, 2007.
Block, Lawrence. The Sins of the Fathers. Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1976.
Brown, Dan. The Da Vinci Code. New York: Doubleday, 2003.
660 MYSTERY FICTION

Browne, Ray B. Murder on the Reservation: American Indian Crime Fiction, Aims and
Achievements. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.
Burke, Jan. Bones. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.
Burton, Peter. Talking To . . . Peter Burton in Conversation with Writers Writing on Gay
Themes. Exeter, England: Third House, 1991.
Carr, Caleb. The Alienist. New York: Random House, 1994.
Clark, Mary Higgins. Two Little Girls in Blue. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.
Collins, Max Allan. The History of Mystery. Portland, OR: Collectors Press, 2001.
Conant, Susan. Gaits of Heaven. New York: Berkeley Prime Crime, 2006.
Connelly, Michael. Echo Park. New York: Little, Brown, 2006.
Cross, Amanda. The Edge of Doom. New York: Ballantine, 2003.
“Culinary Crime: First Course.” Mystery Readers International 18.2 (Summer 2002).
“Culinary Crime: Second Seating.” Mystery Readers International 18.3 (Fall 2002).
Deaver, Jeffrey. The Bone Collector. New York: Viking, 1997.
Demko, George J. Crime in Cold Places: A Geographic Review of George J. Demko’s Land-
scapes of Crime. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~gjdemko/toc.htm.
Fischer-Hornung, Dorothea, and Monika Mueller. Sleuthing Ethnicity: The Detective in
Multiethnic Crime Fiction. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London:
Associated University Presses, 2003.
Goodwin, Jason. The Janissary Tree. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
Gorman, Ed, et al., eds. The Fine Art of Murder. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc.,
1993.
Greeley, Andrew. The Bishop in the Old Neighborhood. New York: Forge, 2005.
Grisham, John. “The Rise of the Legal Thriller: Why Lawyers are Throwing the Books at
Us.” New York Times, Book Review Section. 18 October 1992: 33.
Gunn, Drewey. The Gay Male Sleuth in Print and Film. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press,
2005.
Harris, Thomas. The Silence of the Lambs. New York: St. Martin’s, 1988.
Helen Windrath, ed. They Wrote the Book: Thirteen Women Mystery Writers Tell All.
Duluth, MN: Spinsters Ink, 2000.
Hiaasen, Carl. Strip Tease. New York: Knopf, 1993.
Johnson, Adrienne Gosselin, ed. Multicultural Detective Fiction: Murder from the “Other”
Side. New York: Garland Press, 1999.
Kemelman, Harry. The Day the Rabbi Left Town. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1996.
Kienzle, William. Motor City Blue. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980.
King, Laurie R. The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. New York: St. Martin’s, 1994.
Klein, Kathleen Gregory, ed. Diversity and Detective Fiction. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling
Green State University Popular Press, 1999.
Klein, Kathleen Gregory, ed. Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary. Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.
Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction, 1800–2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Lansdale, Joe R. The Bottoms. New York: Warner Books, 2000.
Malmgren, Carl Darryl. Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction. Bowling
Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2001.
Markowitz, Judith. The Gay Detective Novel: Gay and Lesbian Characters and Themes in
Mystery Fiction. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2004.
McDermid, Val, and Nevada Barr. A Suitable Job for a Woman: Inside the World of Women
Private Eyes. Scottsdale, AR: Poisoned Pen Press, 1999.
Mizejewski, Linda. Hardboiled and High Heeled: The Woman Detective in Popular Culture.
New York: Routledge, 2004.
Mosley, Walter. Devil in a Blue Dress. New York: Norton, 1990.
 MYSTERY FICTION 661

Murphy, Bruce F. The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery. New York: St. Martin’s
Minotaur Books, 1999.
Panek, Leroy Lad. New Hard-Boiled Writers, 1970s–1990s. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling
Green State University Popular Press, 2000.
Parker, T. Jefferson. California Girl. New York: William Morrow, 2004.
———. Silent Joe. New York: Harper Collins, 2003.
Pronzini, Bill. Savages. New York: Forge, 2007.
“New York and London Are Most Popular Settings for Novels, According to Newly Released
Fiction Statistics Analysis from Bowker.” Bowker. http://www.bowker.com/press/
bowker/2006_0121_bowker.htm.
Quill, Monica. Death Takes the Veil. Waterville, ME: Fiver Star, 2001.
Rankin, Ian. Resurrection Men. Boston: Little, Brown, 2003.
Reddy, Maureen. Traces, Codes, and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction. New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003.
Reynolds, Moira Davison. Women Authors of Detective Series: Twenty-One American and
British Writers, 1900–2000. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2001.
Rich, Virginia. Cooking School Murders. New York: Dutton, 1982.
Rippetoe, Rita Elizabeth. Booze and the Private Eye: Alcohol in the Hard-Boiled Novel.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2004.
Rodriguez, Ralph E. Brown Gumshoes: Detective Fiction and the Search for Chicana/o Iden-
tity. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005.
Roth, Laurence. Inspecting Jews: American Jewish Detective Stories. Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2004.
Rozan, S.J. Winter and Night. New York: St. Martins, 2002.
Schwartz, Richard B. Nice and Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction. Missouri:
University of Missouri Press, 2002.
“U.S. Book Production, 1993–2004.” Book Wire. http://www.bookwire.com/bookwire/
decadebookproduction.html.
Walter, Jess. Citizen Vince. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.
Watson, Priscilla L. Walton, and Manina Jones. Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the
Hard-Boiled Tradition. California: University California Press, 1999.
Williams, John. Back to the Badlands: Crime Writing in the USA. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2007.
Woods, Paula. Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes: Black Mystery, Crime and Suspense Fiction.
New York: Doubleday, 1995.

Web Sites
African American Mysteries. http://mystnoir0.tripod.com/MystNoirDir/.
Classic Crime Fiction: The History of and Articles about Detective, Crime, and Mystery Fic-
tion. http://www.classiccrimefiction.com/history-articles.htm.
Crime thru Time: Historical Mysteries. 1999. http://crimethrutime.com/.
“Detective, Mystery, and Suspense Fiction.” New York Public Library. 2007. http://
www.nypl.org/research/chss/grd/resguides/detective/print.html.
Grost, Michael E. A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection. 2007. http://members.aol.com/
MG4273/classics.htm.
“History, Literary Criticism & Theory and Other Agendas.” The Thrilling Detective Web
site. 2007. http://www.thrillingdetective.com/trivia/triv257.html.
Malice Domestic. http://www.malicedomestic.org/.
The Mysterious Home Page. 2005. http://www.cluelass.com/MystHome/index. html.
Mystery Writers of America. http://www.mysterywriters.org/.
Sisters in Crime. http://www.sistersincrime.org/.
Ultimate Mystery/Detective Web Guide. 2003. http://www.magicdragon.com/UltimateMystery/.
662 MYSTERY FICTION

Further Reading
Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured
Popular Fiction. New York: Random House, 2007; Collins, Max Allan. The History of
Mystery. Portland, OR: Collectors Press, 2001; Johnson, Adrienne Gosselin, ed. Multicultural
Detective Fiction: Murder from the “Other” Side. New York: Garland Pr., 1999; Murphy,
Bruce F. The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur Books,
1999; Schwartz, Richard B. Nice and Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction. Missouri:
University of Missouri Press, 2002.
PATRICIA BOSTIAN
Books and Beyond
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Books and Beyond
The Greenwood Encyclopedia
of New American Reading

VOLUME 3: N–S

Edited by
KENNETH WOMACK

GREENWOOD PRESS
Westport, Connecticut • London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Books and beyond : the Greenwood encyclopedia of new American reading / edited by Kenneth Womack.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-0-313-33738-3 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0-313-33737-6 (v. 1 : alk. paper) — ISBN:
978-0-313-33740-6 (v. 2 : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0-313-33741-3 (v. 3 : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0-
313-33742-0 (v. 4 : alk. paper)
1. Books and reading—United States—Encyclopedias. 2. Reading interests—United States—Encyclo-
pedias. 3. Popular literature—United States—Encyclopedias. 4. Fiction genres—Encyclopedias. 5.
American literature—History and criticism. 6. English literature—History and criticism. I. Womack,
Kenneth.
Z1003.2B64 2008
028’.9097303—dc22 2008018703

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.

Copyright © 2008 by Kenneth Womack

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be

reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008018703

ISBN: 978–0–313–33738–3 (set)
978–0–313–33737–6 (vol. 1)
978–0–313–33740–6 (vol. 2)
978–0–313–33741–3 (vol. 3)
978–0–313–33742–0 (vol. 4)

First published in 2008

Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881

An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www.greenwood.com

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the

Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents

Preface ix

Introduction: Reading in America Today xi

Entries
Academic Fiction 1
Adventure Fiction 13
African American Literature 26
Arab American Literature 40
Arthurian Literature 53
Asian American Literature 66
Autobiography and Memoir 87
Beat Poetry 97
Biography 112
Chick Lit 137
Children’s Literature 162
Christian Fiction 185
Comedic Theatre 195
Comic Books 209
Coming of Age Fiction (Bildungsroman) 222
Contemporary Mainstream American Fiction 249
Cyberpunk 274
Dramatic Theatre 289
Dystopian Fiction 312
Ecopoetry 325
Erotic Literature 338
vi CONTENTS

Fantasy Literature 351

Film Adaptations of Books 366
Flash Fiction 385
GLBTQ Literature 401
Graphic Novels 416
Historical Fantasy 427
Historical Fiction 440
Historical Mysteries 455
Historical Writing (Nonfiction) 468
Holocaust Literature 483
Humor 498
Inspirational Literature (Nonfiction) 511
Jewish American Literature 521
Language Poetry 537
Latino American Literature 552
Legal Thrillers 561
Literary Journalism 571
Magical Realism 587
Manga and Anime 600
Military Literature 612
Musical Theatre 625
Mystery Fiction 638
Native American Literature 663
New Age Literature 682
Occult/Supernatural Literature 699
Parapsychology 717
Philological Thrillers 732
Poetry 740
Regional Fiction 767
Road Fiction 782
Romance Novels 796
Science Fiction 805
Science Writing (Nonfiction) 833
Sea Literature 848
Self-Help Literature 862
Series Fiction 880
Space Opera 894
Speculative Fiction 917
Sports Literature 930
Spy Fiction 954
Suspense Fiction 962
Sword and Sorcery Fiction 971
 CONTENTS vii

Terrorism Fiction 995

Time Travel Fiction 1012
Transrealist Fiction 1025
Travel Writing 1034
True Crime Literature 1047
Urban Fiction 1065
Utopian Literature 1078
Vampire Fiction 1091
Verse Novels 1119
Western Literature 1131
Young Adult Literature 1147
Zines 1163

Contemporary Authors by Genre 1177

Suggestions for Further Reading 1191

About the Editor and Contributors 1195

Index 1205
This page intentionally left blank
N

NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE

Prior to 1968—the dawn of an era known as the “renaissance” of American Indian
literature—most literary scholars would have struggled to name a single Native
American literary work. However, with the 1960s came profound social transfor-
mation; Civil Rights activism, including a new phase of feminism, prevailed
throughout the rest of the century. Both movements galvanized advancements on
multiple fronts by Native Americans and other disfranchised groups. Nowadays, by
contrast, nearly all Americanists, and even some undergraduate literature majors,
can name at least a few Native writers.
Definition. Still, no concise definition of “Native American literature” exists.
Debates revolve around definitions of “literature,” as well as conceptions of
“Native” identity. Such debates do not resolve with the passage of time; on the con-
trary, they continue to broaden and deepen.
Significant philosophical and literary critical developments, along with the
steadily increasing body of works written by American Indians, have facilitated our
understanding of Native American literary art in recent years. Ironically, these same
developments make defining the field more difficult. In general, a crisis in terminol-
ogy has transformed intellectual (and to an extent, popular) discourse throughout
the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. During the twentieth century,
political, social, and intellectual revolutions continually focused on the powers of
language, which in the aftermath of structuralism and deconstruction, are no longer
presumed to access “truth” about objective “reality.” Intellectual inquiry proceeds
in a state of heightened awareness of how language shapes experience and ideas
according to perceptual and conceptual screens, which are themselves sustained by
discourse. Scholars across diverse disciplines, including even the physical sciences,
ponder the verbally constructed frames of reference that define their fields of study.
The West has witnessed a widespread shift of intellectual attention onto the nature
of representation.
664 NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE

Questions about the meaning of the terms “American” and “literature” arise
from this intensely self-conscious frame of mind. After the 1960s, critics concerned
with ethnic and gender politics began, for instance, to ask why the word “America”
has implicitly meant “United States,” and to object to the definition of “American”
literature primarily as an Anglocentric, masculine enterprise. Beginning in the
1980s, New Historical critics, confronting traditional disciplinary boundaries,
asked whose writings, and what kinds of writing qualify as “literature,” as opposed
to “popular,” historical, or anthropological material. Indeed, the last half of the
twentieth century saw a substantial erosion of conventional, Eurocentric concep-
tions of who, and what, counts as “American” and “literary.” Therefore, defining
“Native American literature”—with its many nonwestern features eluding Eurocen-
tric generic classification—presents a noteworthy challenge.
Since 1968, and N. Scott Momaday’s publication of House Made of Dawn, which
expressed multicultural themes from Navajo, Pueblo, Kiowa, and Eurocentric
cultures, an expanded critical vocabulary and more suitable frames of reference
have become available for scholarly discussion of Native literature. The pre-1968
material—a variety of traditional stories, songs, chants, oratory, ceremonial works,
nonfiction and autobiographical works—is no longer exclusively the province of
historians, folklorists and anthropologists with non-literary and non-tribal
(Eurocentric) perspectives; it has become newly “visible” for critical reassessment by
both Native and non-Native literary scholars. Such a reclamation project is
daunting, for inclusion of these early works leads to more, rather than fewer ques-
tions about the intellectually constructed boundaries defining fields of academic
inquiry.
Before the European colonization of North America, over 300 indigenous tribes
existed; they spoke more than 200 different languages. Though none of these
languages were orthographic, petroglyphs and pictographic varieties of expression
nevertheless amounted to a kind of “writing” that belies descriptions of tribal
cultures as purely “oral.” Tribal “literature” thus includes these iconographic forms
of representation among a variety of other modes that, until recently, fell outside
the print-oriented, Eurocentric vision of the “literary.” Today, we understand
Native American literature to include such material as both content and contextual
background.
Pre-twentieth century written texts frequently reveal the heavy-handed editorial
interference of non-Indians. Before 1968, there were few unmediated Native literary
voices, and even today, finding “pure” cultural and literary artifacts is impossible.

ESTABLISHING DATES FOR CONTEMPORARY

AMERICAN INDIAN LITERATURE
Using the year 1968, and the publication by N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa/Cherokee, 1934–) of
his Pulitzer Prize-winning House Made of Dawn, to mark the beginning of an Indian literary
“renaissance” compares to using the year 1798, and the publication of The Lyrical Ballads by
Wordsworth and Coleridge, to mark the beginning of the British Romantic Period.To do so
is clarifying, but also somewhat arbitrary and misleading. Native American literary forms
existed long before 1968, just as romanticism existed long before 1798. However, the
pinpointed year is heuristically useful; it focuses our thoughts around key questions.
 NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE 665

Contemporary written works are cross-cultural forms, and even some of the oldest
tribal stories sometimes hint of cross-cultural connections with ancient European
lore. “Deer Woman” (1991), by Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna/Metîs, 1939–), and the
old Dakota tale that inspired it, suggest this kind of connection. A story from
Dakota Texts (1932), collected by Ella Deloria (Yankton-Dakota, 1889–1971), and
Allen’s narrative both feature magical beings who lure ignorant, innocent characters
and hold them captive; both stories are vaguely allusive of Washington Irving’s
“Rip Van Winkle.” Irving’s romance, in turn, is informed by German folklore.
Along with Jungian archetypal critics and New Historicists, one may speculate from
sophisticated perspectives about the circulation of such apparently transcultural ele-
ments; however, neither traditional nor contemporary Native American literature is
comprehensible from within exclusively Eurocentric critical frames of reference.
Today’s Native writers emphasize this fact in works requiring the reader’s knowledge
of indigenous cultural contexts and interpretive practices.
Twentieth-century efforts to preserve indigenous cultural material have included
recordings and films; moreover, Native people now write, record, film, and publish
their own works. Still, even in the hands of Native artists, both writing and audio-
visual technology are western modalities. Electronic media freeze narration and
performance in time, thus failing to render important experiential dimensions of
tribal dramatic arts that are usually based on different spatial, temporal, and other
cosmological paradigms. Translation of older works into English, as well as the
creation of newer works in English rather than tribal languages, present additional,
formidable barriers to unmediated preservation. In fact, many contemporary Native
writers deal overtly in their art with questions about how to render tribal worlds
and ways in the English language, and in Eurocentric genres.
Finally, definitions of “Native American literature” sometimes turn on identity
politics, on questions contesting not only which modes of expression, but also
which writers may be counted as Native American. Some insist that DNA alone
determines “Indian” identity, but arguments develop over “blood quantum”—
whether one is full-blood, half-blood, mixed-blood, or partly white, black,
Mexican, and so on. Others contend that being “Indian” is a result of cultural
experience, such as growing up “on the rez.” N. Scott Momaday and Gerald
Vizenor (White Earth Anishinaabeg, 1934–) probably represent the polar extremes
in this controversy. On the one hand, Momaday claims that being an Indian is
mostly a matter of having a certain self-conception, a way of knowing oneself and
the world that stems from super-consciousness or collective memory. On the other
hand, Vizenor declares that there is no such thing as an “Indian”; an “Indian” is a
verbal, historical, cultural construction. He believes that the term misleadingly
defines individuals and homogenizes hundreds of North and South American indige-
nous groups. Like Vizenor, Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene, 1966–)
argues, controversially, that Native identity today is less a matter of bloodline or
culture than of politics. Thus, attempting to define Native American literature
and identity, we may concur with David Murray—nowadays, “every term seems
contested” (2005, 81).
History. In an arena of legitimately contested terms, the best strategy for discussing
Native American literature may be to invoke as few such terms as possible. Useful in
an historical overview of Native American literature, however, are the conventional
distinctions between pre- and post-1968 works, and between works (usually pre-1968)
originally composed in tribal languages and those originally composed in English.
666 NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE

Native American Literature Before 1968. Consisting of oral and, to a lesser extent,
iconographic forms of expression (rock art, sandpainting, pictographic narrative,
and performative gesture, for instance), the pre-colonial, indigenous repertoire
included foundational stories, ceremonial and ritual performances, songs, chants,
prayers, and merely entertaining or instructive tales. With the eradication of
hundreds of tribes following colonization, much of this traditional material was
lost. Nevertheless, much has survived through successive generations in tribal mem-
ory; it informs the contextual background of contemporary Native literature that
must be engaged if a reader hopes to comprehend these works.
Indigenous cosmologies, a key part of this context, are communicated through
foundational stories, which range from the tribally specific, such as the Diné
bahane’ (Navajo), Hactin and Black Hactin stories (Apache), and the Basket Dice
Game (Pawnee), to the relatively pan-tribal, such as the Earth Diver narratives
common among North American groups. Foundational works address questions
about the origins of life, both material and spiritual, and the interconnections
among beings and places on the earth. These works often center around the deeds of
culture heroes and trickster characters, usually the world’s first inhabitants
following its creation by spiritual entities—not entirely separate “gods,” but
individual manifestations of the all-pervasive Creator. Heroes and tricksters are
responsible for the preservation or destruction of the worlds the creators have made.
Culture heroes include, for instance, Monster Slayer and Child of Water (twin
figures known by various names among southwestern tribes and clans), Pine Root
and Beaded Head (Cree), Hisagita misa (Seminole), I’itoi (Pima), and Beaver Man
(Yukon), among many others. Some best known pan-tribal tricksters are Coyote,
Raven, Glooscap, and Winabojo, who sometimes resemble or even double as culture
heroes. Tricksters and heroes might be shape-shifters, have animal relatives or
helpers, and move between dimensions of reality in ways that ordinary beings
cannot.
Indigenous ceremonial and ritual works are integrally connected to foundational
narratives. The Hero Twins play important roles, for example, in Navajo healing
ceremonies such as Blessingway, Nightway, and others. Though ceremonies are
frequently kept secret by tribes and groups within tribes, parts of some are preserved
in writing. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance,
Washington Matthews, Elsie Clews Parsons, Ruth Benedict, Franz Boas and others
undertook such projects, usually with the assistance of tribal people. Recording
ceremonials is often controversial because of their sacred status and power, and
because Native Americans justifiably resent Eurocentric appropriation of their
spirituality, whether intellectually or commercially motivated. After all, not until
1978, with U.S. congressional passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom
Act, were Native people allowed the free and legal practice of their religions. Today,
cultural preservation continues, but with tribal members taking the lead and some-
times engaging in cooperative efforts with such organizations as the Smithsonian
Institution (the National Museum of the American Indian) in Washington, D.C.,
and the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona. Some museums, such as the Hatathli
Museum at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona, are located on tribal college campuses
and thus entirely under tribal management.
Ceremony and ritual are also conducted through the songs, chants, and prayers
that make up another category of traditional Native literature. According to the
Navajo Blessingway, the world was created through song. Songs heal, tell stories,
 NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE 667

give power to individuals undergoing initiations into clans and societies, open psy-
chic channels to higher knowledge, and preserve memories and information. Songs
are sometimes gifts to humans from plants or animals. Songs may be dreamed or
inherited. Some songs are also prayers.
Finally, traditional literature also includes a vast array of entertaining and instruc-
tive works. Coyote’s foolishness, Crow’s tendency to gossip, and other characters’
general misbehavior in humorous tales make people reflect on the worst of human
traits. Making us laugh at the human predicament, they remind us of our imperfec-
tions and responsibilities to ourselves, to others, to all creation. Instructive stories
also include historical accounts of heroic deeds and significant events; parables that
teach morality, ethics, and values; and tales that provide models for behavior, or
explain natural phenomena.
During the late eighteenth century and, increasingly, during the nineteenth, a
variety of written autobiographies and other accounts of Native life began to appear
as more and more Indians “learned paper.” Many of these, such as Black Hawk, An
Autobiography (1833), fall into the “as-told-to” category—works dictated by
Indian authors to non-Indian editors who, intentionally and unintentionally, shaped
the stories they were told. Examples include Frank Linderman’s collaborations
with Plenty-Coups (Crow) in 1928 and Pretty-Shield (Crow) in 1930, and Ruth
Underhill’s partnership with Maria Chona (Tohono O’odham) in 1936.
Culturally assimilated Indians writing in English also produced their own texts.
One well-known and frequently anthologized work by Samson Occum (Mohegan,
1723–92), A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian (1772),
warns a mixed audience of Indians and whites concerning alcohol. Occum’s sermon
and A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1774) are the first works
published in English by an Indian writer.
The first autobiography written in English by a Native American is Son of the
Forest (1829), by William Apess (Pequot, 1798–1839). Apess’s well-developed
political awareness shows in this text, and in An Indian’s Looking Glass for the
White Man (1833), where he chastises whites for their widescale destruction of
Native communities. Nevertheless, like Occum, Apess was Christianized and deeply
assimilated into Eurocentric culture. Such early Native American autobiographers
worked within the strictures of Eurocentric generic forms (Christian redemption
narrative, for example) that shape the narrator’s self-representation. Thus, as
scholar H. David Brumble III contends, Native “lifewriting” must be distinguished
from Eurocentric “autobiography” owing to different underlying conceptions of
“self.” Brumble identifies six types of “life-story” antecedent to European contact:
coup tales (tales of daring encounters with enemies), informal accounts of experi-
ences or achievements, self-examinations, self-vindications, educational narratives,
and stories of vision and power quests.
Well-known pre-1968 written autobiographies include Life, History, and Travels
of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (1847), by George Copway (Ojibwe, 1818–1869); the
autobiographical Life Among the Piutes (1883) by Sarah Winnemucca (Paiute,
1844–1891); Indian Boyhood (1902), and From the Deep Woods to Civilization
(1916), by Charles A. Eastman (Santee Sioux, 1858–1939), who also wrote The
Soul of the Indian (1911), a work addressing indigenous spirituality and the Ghost
Dance phenomenon of the 1890s; and Talking to the Moon (1945), by John Joseph
Mathews (Osage, 1894–1979). Reprinted in 1972 and after, Black Elk Speaks,
Nicholas Black Elk’s spiritual autobiography as told to John Niehardt, has been
668 NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE

admired since its first appearance in 1932. As-told-to autobiographies continue to

appear well into the late twentieth century: John (Fire) Lame Deer (Lakota), in
Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions (1972), and Mary Brave Bird in Lakota Woman
(1990), both collaborated with Richard Erdoes to produce popular texts of this
type.
Native nonfiction and lifewriting have a longer continuous history than written
fiction. In fact, Native Americans published no written works of fiction before the
1820s, when Jane Johnson Schoolcraft (Ojibwe, 1800–1841) wrote poems and
stories for her own magazine, The Literary Voyager, or Muzzeniegun (1826–27). In
1833, Elias Boudinot (Cherokee, 1804–1839), published the first novel by a Native
American, Poor Sarah; or The Indian Woman (1833); Boudinot was also the editor
of the first tribal newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, printed in both Cherokee and
English. However, better known is The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the
Celebrated California Bandit, by John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee, 1827–1867), which
appeared in 1854. Some years later, S. Alice Calahan (Muscogee-Creek,
1868–1894) published Wynema (1891).
Other notable early Native American authors include poet and short story writer
Emily Pauline Johnson (Canadian Mohawk, 1861–1913); poet and journalist
Alexander Posey (Muscogee, 1873–1908); Mourning Dove (Okanogan/Colville
1882–88?–1936), whose autobiographical novel, Cogewea, the Half-Blood (1927),
highlights Indian women’s issues; John Joseph Mathews, whose works include a
history, Wah’Kon-Tah (1932), and a novel, Sundown (1934), as well as the previ-
ously cited autobiography; John Milton Oskison (Cherokee, 1874–1947), who
wrote both nonfiction and fiction, including Wild Harvest (1925) and Black Jack
Davey (1926); Zitkala-Så (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, Yankton Dakota,
1876–1938), who recorded traditional stories in Old Indian Legends (1901), and
American Indian Stories (1921); [George] Todd Downing (Choctaw, 1902–1974) a
writer of mystery and detective fiction; and D’Arcy McNickle (Metîs Cree/Salish,
1904–1977), best known for three novels, The Surrounded (1936), Runner in the
Sun (1954), and Wind from an Enemy Sky (1978). McNickle’s The Surrounded was
admired as the most complex work of fiction by a Native writer before N. Scott
Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, with which it shares thematic concerns.
Also enjoying a measure of fame in the early twentieth century were Lynn Riggs
(Cherokee, 1899–1954), whose play, Green Grow the Lilacs (1931) was staged as
Oklahoma, and William Penn Adair “Will” Rogers (Cherokee, 1879–1935), who
during the 1920s wrote columns for the New York Times and the Saturday Evening
Post that occasionally addressed Indian concerns. Since 2000, several American
literary scholars have begun to note the influence of such pre-1968 non-narrative
material—journalism, speeches, treaties, and popular nonfiction genres—on
contemporary Native American writing, most obviously, perhaps, in the speeches
and writings of Sherman Alexie.
Native American Literature Since 1968. American Indian writers emerging since 1968
include novelists, short story writers, poets, nonfiction writers, and dramatists,
most of whom publish in more than one genre. They are included in anthologies of
American literature as well as in a proliferating number of anthologies of Native
American literature. Among the best known are Kenneth Rosen’s The Man to Send
Rain Clouds: Contemporary Stories by American Indians (1974); Duane Niatum,
Carriers of the Dream Wheel (1977) and Harper’s Anthology of Twentieth-Century
Native American Poetry (1988); Simon Ortiz’s Earth Power Coming: Short Fiction
 NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE 669

in Native American Literature (1983); Clifford E. Trafzer’s Blue Dawn, Red Earth:
New Native American Storytellers (1996); Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird’s Reinvent-
ing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writings of North
America (1997); Mimi D’Aponte’s Seventh Generation: An Anthology of Native
American Plays (1999); Jaye T. Darby and Hanay Geiogamah’s Stories of Our
Way: An Anthology of American Indian Plays (1999); and John L. Purdy and
James Ruppert’s Nothing But the Truth: An Anthology of Native American
Literature (2001).
Browsing through these anthologies affords insight into both stable and evolving
patterns in post-1968 Indian writing. We may observe, for instance, the integral
relationship between contemporary works and their tribal, traditional predecessors.
Momaday’s House Made of Dawn and The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969),
together with Ceremony (1977) and Storyteller (1981) by Leslie Marmon Silko
(Laguna, 1948–), clearly articulate important topical and structural paradigms
informing indigenous oral and written storytelling; these texts present fictive worlds
complexly interlaced with foundational stories and tribal cosmologies. In
Momaday’s House, the protagonist, Abel, is physically, emotionally, and spiritually
ill, partly because of his experiences as a soldier in World War II, and partly because
he is ignorant of his Puebloan identity. Returning home to Walatoa (Jemez Pueblo)
and recognizing his identity as a Dawn Runner lead to his gradual healing.
Momaday’s narrative unfolds as Abel recovers, and the reader discovers, an Indian
“reality” alternative to that of mainstream U.S. society. The author spins an
intricate web of Navajo, Pueblo, Kiowa, and Eurocentric tropes and allusions that
readers must negotiate accurately if they wish to assume the participatory reader’s
role in this demanding text.
Like House, Momaday’s autobiographical The Way to Rainy Mountain under-
takes a cross-culturally informative task. Three kinds of prose—United States
history, tribal stories, and the author’s personal experiences—choreograph the
reader’s role. In the top halves of recto pages, the reader finds the “official” view of
the dominant society, while the bottom halves contain italicized, autobiographical
matter. Verso pages bear Kiowa stories and tales that pertain to U.S. history, as well
as to Momaday’s own self-definition. The three bodies of information, and their
respective discursive modes, cast significant light upon one another, inviting readers
to reassess dominant society perspectives.
In Ceremony, Silko develops a plot similar to Momaday’s in House. Like
Momaday’s Abel, Silko’s protagonist, Tayo, is a spiritually ailing, World War II
veteran on a healing vision quest. With the help of a powerful mixed-blood Navajo
healer, he finds his way back home to Laguna Pueblo to become a storyteller with
world-sustaining responsibilities. As Tayo’s story unfolds, it incorporates into itself
Navajo and Pueblo foundational stories that are at first presented separately, as
lyrical, italicized passages within the text. This textual orchestration implies that for
Tayo, to heal is to meld with Native culture, to comprehend and wield the creative-
destructive potentiality of words.
Like Momaday and Silko’s works, most writing by Native Americans emphasizes
this power of language. Moreover, these works collectively articulate a fundamental
structural pattern of American Indian written narrative. Indeed, William Bevis has
argued that a separation-illness-return-recovery pattern informs Native American
narrative, comparable to the way the bildüngsroman pattern informs the western
novel. Well-known Indian writers whose novels, poetry, short stories, plays, and
670 NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE

other works variously reiterate these topical and structural features include James
Welch (Blackfeet/Gros Ventre, 1940–2003), Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain
Ojibwe, 1954–), Anna Lee Walters (Pawnee-Otoe-Missouria, 1946–), Robert
Conley (Cherokee, 1940–), Linda Hogan (Chickasaw, 1947–), and others.
For Native writers, the use of western literary forms to convey tribal worldviews
poses monumental challenges. Post-1968 writers develop strategies for transforming
these genres to their own purposes. Momaday and Silko’s technique of interweav-
ing foundational material into their works is an intertextual strategy that also
negotiates basic differences between western and indigenous conceptions of time.
Western forms are constructed around Eurocentric notions about space and time;
representation of nonwestern realities within such western forms thus requires much
ingenuity. To dramatize the role that traditional and foundational stories play in the
lives of characters is to dramatize for the audience the indigenous experience of the
presence of the past. Unlike the western temporal paradigm of “clock” time (linear
time, the measured, industrial time of “progress”), the indigenous temporal
paradigm is cyclic (natural, seasonal), emphasizing an eternal present that enfolds
not only past and future, but also other dimensional worlds (such as the world of
spirits). American Indian writing depicts worlds based on such alternative spatio-
temporal models, despite significant formal resistance presented by western, written
genres. Momaday and Silko’s works, again, provide definitive examples. Both Abel
in House and Tayo in Ceremony must align their present-time lives with the lives of
other-dimensional characters in foundational stories; their lives are, in essence,
coterminous with the lives of foundational characters in the “one story,” the never-
ending story of Creation. To be out of sync with the “story” is to lose one’s identity,
one’s connections to family, society, humanity, and the earth.
To meet such aesthetic challenges, post-1968 Native writers exploit a variety of
postmodern textual strategies. Much literary critical discussion explains how post-
modern developments have facilitated communication of indigenous messages.
Using multiple narrators, engaging readers in self-reflexive reader roles, developing
nonlinear organizational tactics, and focusing attention on the nature of language,
discursive forms, and representation are only a few of the postmodern techniques
that Native artists have adapted to serve their purposes. Like Momaday in The Way
to Rainy Mountain, Silko in Storyteller, and Anita Endrezze (Yaqui/mixed European,
1952–) in Throwing Fire at the Sun, Water at the Moon (2000), they have also intro-
duced fascinating multi-generic forms. Native American writing is frequently also
metatextual, instructing the audience about the interpretive practices necessary for
reading the text even as they are reading it. Silko’s Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead
(1991) are replete with metatextual cues, as are Ghost Singer (1988), by Anna Lee
Walters, and Eye Killers (1995) by A.A. Carr (Navajo/Laguna, 1960–).
In American Indian literary works since 1968, we may also observe that content
and themes have shifted gradually away from preoccupation with the past and the
near impossibility of living in the dominant society, to a revisionary emphasis on the
future—to the subversive transformation of the dominant society. Gerald Vizenor’s
works, in particular, exemplify this trend. Insisting on the powers of language to
construct reality, he also deploys the destructive and deconstructive powers of
language to undermine cultural stereotypes. In his fiction and nonfiction, we observe
these dynamic, transformative forces in the hands of Native narrators and charac-
ters who are determined, according to Vizenor as literary critic in Earthdivers: Tribal
Narratives on Mixed Descent (1981), to create a “new urban turtle island” (xi). One
 NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE 671

such creator himself, Vizenor employs an array of transformative tactics, ranging

from revisions of tribal lore, to the invention of new terms such as “imagic,”
“survivance,” and “postindian,” to the use of “fictional characters with real names”
(Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart, 1978, xxi). Novels and short stories by
Canadian Native Thomas King (Cherokee/European, 1943–) also fit into this post-
modern revisionary category. Green Grass, Running Water (1993), Truth and
Bright Water (1999), and many of King’s short stories disrupt both Eurocentric and
Native stereotypes. In Green Grass, Native Americans rent John Wayne movies,
“edit” them to include significant changes, and then return them to video stores
where they become transformational instruments within popular culture.
Equally revisionary agendas but less overtly postmodern tactics characterize the
works of other contemporary Native authors. Linda Hogan’s novels, stories, poems,
and essays outline a future inhabited by powerful, rather than victimized indigenous
people. In Solar Storms (1995) and Power (1998), young female protagonists resist
pressure from both tribal and U.S. society to control their destinies. Such characters
embody hope for a new generation of Native people to heal the past through
efficacious participation in the present. Though Hogan’s and other future-oriented
works such as Almanac of the Dead by Silko, Eye Killers by Carr, and Indian Killer
(1996), by Sherman Alexie, honestly confront serious problems without easy
resolutions, their emphasis on the renewed presence of empowered Native
Americans reminds readers of ancient Native prophecies foretelling the end of
colonial domination.
Trends and Themes. These observable trends in post-1968 Native writing corrob-
orate Paula Gunn Allen’s claim in her critical study, Song of the Turtle: American
Indian Literature, 1974–1994 (1996). She identifies two phases in the development
of Native American literature since the 1970s. In works from the early 1970s
through the early 1990s, she sees a healthy expression of anger about history, com-
bined with a pronounced sense of “renewal and hope,” particularly in the tendency
of these works to convey information about Native identity and cosmology to a
diverse, receptive audience. Beginning in the early 1990s, Allen observes a shift
toward concern with contemporary Native life, with urban Indian experience, and
with designs for the future.
Post-1968 writers best known as novelists are Momaday, Vizenor, Silko, Welch,
Hogan, Erdrich, Walters, Alexie, Conley, King, Louis Owens (Cherokee/Choctaw,
1948–2003), Michael Dorris (Modoc, 1945–1997), and Greg Sarris (Miwok/Pomo,
1952–). Also notable are Carr, Susan Power (Standing Rock Sioux, 1961–), Gordon
Henry (White Earth Chippewa, 1955–), LeAnne Howe (Choctaw, 1951–), and
Debra Magpie Earling (Bitterroot Salish, 1957–). Short story writers include most
of these novelists, along with Allen, Endrezze, Ralph Salisbury (Cherokee, 1924–),
Beth Brant (Mohawk, 1941–), Carter Revard (Osage, 1931–), Peter Blue Cloud
(Mohawk, 1933–), and Duane Niatum (S’Klallam, 1938–), among many others.
Though novels and short stories (during and after the twentieth century) feature
more prominently in popular culture than other genres, a discussion of Native
American literature must include a few words about poetry and drama. Momaday’s
“Earth and I Give You Turquoise” (1958), patterned on oral chant and articulating
the foundational theme of indigenous connection with the land, inspired his gener-
ation of Native poets including Simon Ortiz (Acoma, 1941–), Silko, Hogan, Welch,
Joy Harjo (Muscogee Creek, 1951–), Vizenor, Lance Henson (Cheyenne/Oglala,
1944–), Revard, and others. Native American poets address many of the same issues
672 NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE

as novelists, and often even more directly borrow from traditional oral genres such
as song, prayer, and chant. A major contemporary writer, Joy Harjo transforms
many of her poems into lyrics, which she and her bands, Poetic Justice, and later,
Arrow Dynamics, in turn have set to a multicultural pastiche of musical styles. Her
most recent works include A Map to the Next World (2000), and How We Became
Human: New and Selected Poems (2002). Louise Erdrich is also well known for her
poetry. Like her novels, many of her poems deal with cultural and spiritual experi-
ences of people attempting to preserve indigenous lifeways and values within an
unreceptive, sometimes hostile, dominant society. One of her most frequently
anthologized poems, “Jacklight” (1984) and several of her recent ones in Original
Fire: Selected and New Poems (2003), deal directly with bicultural individuals and
situations in the lyrical style typical of her narrative works. “Captivity” (1984) is a
fascinating poem in which the speaker assumes the voice of Mary Rowlandson,
author of the famous colonial narrative of Indian captivity, but tells a somewhat
different story.
Other widely published, post-1968 poets (many of whom also write novels, short
stories, and nonfiction) are Hogan, Ortîz, Blue Cloud, Mary Tall Mountain
(Athabascan, 1918–1994), Jim Barnes (Choctaw, 1933–), Lance Henson
(Cheyenne, 1944–), Geary Hobson (Cherokee-Quapaw-Chickasaw, 1941–),
Maurice Kenny (Mohawk, 1929–), Roberta Hill Whiteman (Oneida, 1947–),
Allison Hedge Coke (Cherokee, 1958–), Wendy Rose (Hopi/ Miwok, 1948–), Diane
Glancy (Cherokee, 1941–), Ray Young Bear (Mesquakie, 1950–), Luci Tapahonso
(Navajo, 1953–), Armand Garnet Ruffo (Ojibway, 1955–), and Gloria Bird
(Spokane, 1951–).
Like poetry, Native American theatre does not enjoy as high a profile as fiction.
Nevertheless, it has developed steadily alongside other genres since the 1970s.
Hanay Geiogamah (Kiowa/Delaware, 1945–) is well known for Body Indian
(1972) and two other plays published together in New Native American
Drama: Three Plays (1980). Diane Glancy is the most prolific of today’s Native
playwrights, and her works include War Cries (1997) and American Gypsy: Six
Native American Plays (2002). Tomson Highway (Cree, 1951–) is a recognized
Canadian Native playwright best known for his comedy, The Rez Sisters (1988).
Many of these playwrights earned reputations in theatre companies such as the
Native American Theater Ensemble (NATE), Spiderwoman Theater, Red Earth Per-
forming Arts Company, and Echo Hawk, all founded in the 1970s. Throughout the
1980s, other companies appeared, including Indian Time Theater and Washington’s
First American Theater/Free Spirit Players. Unfortunately, American Indian theatre
productions in the United States are still rare; the situation is somewhat better in
Canada, but even there, the relatively small number of venues, in general, inhibits
the development of indigenous theatre.
Literary nonfiction, including autobiographical and “life” writing, is an increas-
ingly visible genre in both American and Native American letters. Most of the
writers previously mentioned, including Momaday, Silko, Vizenor, Hogan, Allen,
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Dakota, 1930–), and many others have written nonfiction
and autobiographical essays concerned with indigenous experience. Particularly
popular when it appeared was Michael Dorris’s The Broken Cord (1989), which
recounts the short, tragic life of his (and Louise Erdrich’s) adopted son who suffered
from fetal alcohol syndrome. Other significant contributions to nonfiction are
Silko’s Sacred Water (1993), and Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays
 NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE 673

on Native American Life Today (1996), Louise Erdrich’s The Bluejay’s Dance:
A Birthyear (1995), and Hogan’s The Woman Who Watches Over the World:
A Native Memoir (2001). Collective “life writing” includes Life Lived Like a Story:
Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders (1990) by Julie Cruikshank with Angela
Sidney (Tagish/Tlingit, 1902–), Kitty Smith (S. Tuchone/Tlingit, c. 1890–), and
Annie Ned (S. Tuchone/Tlingit, c. 1890s–), a clan history melded with commentary
on the land; the three female elders offer the book as a message to the younger
generation.
Selected Authors. Novelists, poets, playwrights, short story and nonfiction writers
from the post-1968 “renaissance” have established enduring trends and themes in
American Indian literature. Grounded in Native cosmologies and shaped by unique
historical forces, the following basic thematic emphases will undoubtedly prevail
throughout the foreseeable future: concern with collective and individual identity,
including matters of gender; focus on preservation of ancient knowledge, traditions,
and practices; attention to marginalization of Native people within the dominant
society; concern with the natural environment; attention to the continuing effects of
history on the present time and thus, insistence on repatriation of tribal artifacts;
preoccupation with the power of language and human responsibility for its use; and
interest in cross-cultural educational initiatives.
In the twenty-first century, a list of major Native American authors still includes
most members of the “renaissance” generation such as Momaday, Silko, Welch,
Erdrich, and others we have noted, plus a number of younger writers such as
Sherman Alexie, whose works have received a disproportionate amount of
attention, doubtless owing to his high public profile as a speaker and filmmaker.
To some extent, all contemporary Native writers concerned with identity must
engage with patterns set by Momaday, Silko, and Welch. Momaday’s Abel in House
Made of Dawn, Silko’s Tayo in Ceremony, Welch’s Jim in The Death of Jim Loney
(1979), and his nameless narrator in Winter in the Blood (1974) make very clear the
equation of a Native individual’s tribal connections with his or her physical,
spiritual, emotional, and psychological well-being. Abel, Tayo, and Jim must not
only learn their tribal heritage and reestablish contact with their relatives, living and
dead, but also literally return home to the geographical spaces inhabited by their
tribes. The scholar William Bevis thoroughly addresses this Native foundational
theme of returning home in the works of these writers, and Ron McFarland and
others have argued that Welch’s Jim dies primarily because he is unable to reconnect
in these ways; thus, he joins his people in spirit by deliberately arranging his own
warrior’s death.
Welch’s later works, however, particularly The Indian Lawyer (1990) and The
Heartsong of Charging Elk (2000), branch out into a new direction regarding
such matters of identity. They entertain controversial questions about assimilation
into the dominant society; in so doing, they underscore the message inherent
within all of his works—the fact that Native individuals are entitled to freedom
from pressure to live up to the ideas of other people (including Native Americans)
about Native Americans. Sylvester Yellow Calf, in The Indian Lawyer, stops short
of complete identification with Native people; though he works on their behalf, he
refuses to define himself exclusively in terms of a single cultural frame of refer-
ence. In Heartsong, Welch’s protagonist, Charging Elk, is a nineteenth-century
Lakota who joins Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and goes to France, where he
remains by choice even when given a chance to return home. Critics of Welch’s
674 NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE

later works focus on the author’s implied departure from the Native-identity mod-
els that he himself helped establish.
Related to the subject of identity, Welch sets precedent questions about gender
roles, as well, a subject often explored in Native American literature. Jim Loney’s
masculine identity is compromised because no place for a traditional Indian warrior
or hunter exists in the modern world. Welch suggests that without constructive
outlets for their energy, and without desirable roles in either tribal or mainstream
society, men like Jim, and like Silko’s destructive male characters in Ceremony and
Almanac of the Dead, become prone to alcohol abuse and violence. Welch and his
contemporaries explore the consequences of this dilemma for women as well as for
men; the female characters in Jim Loney’s life, his sister and girlfriend, are forced
into compensatory, caretaking roles that distort their own identities. Likewise,
though Silko’s Ceremony features a male protagonist, the novel addresses the key
issue of social and cosmological disorder resulting from men’s loss of respect for
themselves and for women. When Silko’s Tayo insults female deities and curses the
rain, he intensifies his own plight as well as the suffering of his own people.
Similarly, Louise Erdrich’s novels variously address the subject of masculine and
feminine roles and power; the interconnected worlds of her novels that are first
introduced in Love Medicine (1989) feature multi-generational families who must
continually renegotiate self-definitions arising from conflicts between tribal and
Eurocentric traditions. The conflicts destroy potentially powerful women and men,
such as Lulu Lamartine and Gerry Nanapush, and profoundly confuse others, such
as Lipsha Morrissey. Even more directly focused on the lives of women, Linda
Hogan’s Solar Storms and Power examine the experiences of multiple generations
of women as they attempt to survive in the dominant society without sacrificing
their Native identities. Hogan portrays the god-like, collective female power of
mothers and caretakers in many poems included in Book of Medicines (1993), and
develops variants of this message in all of her novels.
Not only in fiction but in nonfiction works, Erdrich, Hogan, and Allen also deal
with matters of gender. Picking up the thread established in the nineteenth century,
when Jane Johnson Schoolcraft, Sarah Winnemucca, Mourning Dove, and others
first attempted to correct Eurocentric notions about Indian women and their roles
within tribal societies, Allen since the early 1980s has educated her readers through
nonfiction works emphasizing past and present roles of Native women, particularly
within Puebloan, matrilineal societies. Probably Allen’s most famous, groundbreak-
ing work is The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian
Traditions (1986), a nonfiction discussion of Native literature delineating features
that distinguish it from Eurocentric genres. Embodying these features, her novel,
The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983), develops a female protagonist who
must recover, and to an extent, reinvent a woman’s spiritual tradition lost owing to
the European destruction of tribal worlds.
Also speaking on behalf of Native women is the poet, musician, and screenwriter,
Joy Harjo, whose art celebrates female strength and endurance in ways that shatter
stereotypes not only of Native women, but women in general. Her poetry,
frequently recorded as lyrics by her and her bands, reflects her powerfully visual
imagination. With co-editor Gloria Bird, in Reinventing the Enemy’s Language:
Contemporary Native Women’s Writing of North America, Harjo offers a collec-
tion of writings by Native authors exploring the “beautiful survival” of Indian
women.
 NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE 675

Interwoven with the theme of individual and collective identity is concern with
the preservation of ancestral knowledge and lifeways. Momaday, Welch, Silko,
Erdrich, Hogan, Walters, and Harjo, among numerous others, connect such preser-
vation with survival itself. Hogan’s Power equates the near-extinction of the Florida
panther with the demise of the Taiga tribe, whose cosmology is founded upon their
relationship with this animal. The young girl protagonist, Omishto, bears profound
responsibility as the youngest member of the Taiga to figure out how to adapt to
twenty-first century life without breaking the hearts of the elders, who adhere to the
old ways. However, Hogan’s novel—like Silko’s Ceremony, Walters’ Ghost Singer,
Erdrich’s Tracks, and A.A. Carr’s Eye Killers—suggests that even the most power-
ful traditional knowledge, ceremonies, and rituals are sometimes inadequate to the
crises of the present day. Key characters in these books—Betonie in Ceremony and
Michael Horse in Mean Spirit (1990), for instance—frequently display visionary
capacities for imagining a future in which tribal lifeways survive in rejuvenated
forms. Native humorists Vizenor, King, and Alexie also contribute to this conversa-
tion through the development of characters good at disruption and disorganization
of the dominant society in ways that open spaces for Native inhabitation on their
own terms.
Appearing in several of his works, Vizenor’s Almost Brown is an adept trans-
former of Eurocentric language and technology to Native purposes. In the comical
short story, “Feral Lasers” (1991), for example, Almost creates enormous
holograms of animals, Native Americans, and American folk and historical figures,
then sends them out to wreak havoc among drivers on crowded urban highways.
These figures symbolically suggest the ways in which technologically knowledgeable
Native people may begin to manage representation and thus attain a larger share of
the social and political power that such control entails. In a similar comic vein,
Thomas King confronts Eurocentric society with the absurdity of their own
thoughts about Indians in his story, “A Seat in the Garden” (1990, 1993), where
two white characters are unable to recognize actual Indians, but quite good at con-
juring up illusory ones from their own imaginations. Like Vizenor, King implies that
Eurocentric ways of seeing and controlling reality can be used by disfranchised out-
siders who learn to wield representational power in creatively disruptive ways.
Sherman Alexie joins comic writers Vizenor and King in his own denouncement
of Indian stereotypes. Alexie is in some ways like a real-life embodiment of Vizenor’s
character, Almost. Indeed, in the dialogue among Native writers about who may call
him- or herself a “real” Indian, Alexie shares Vizenor’s notion that Native identity
is more clearly defined by self-creative, individual expression and personal politics
than it is by cultural heritage. Well known for his novels Reservation Blues (1995)
and Indian Killer, and for collections of short stories including The Lone Ranger
and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), Alexie’s ideas are developed in five different
genres, including two films, Smoke Signals (1998) and The Business of Fancydanc-
ing (2001). Critic David L. Moore aptly describes Alexie’s iconoclastic, comic irony
as a style conjoining aesthetics and ethics in a revisionary project for retelling his-
tory. Stories in The Toughest Indian in the World (2001) suggest that the best way
for Native people to break free of stereotypical representation—including their own
ideas about themselves—is by adopting a kind of postmodern self-consciousness
content with uncertainty and marked by perpetual self-reinvention.
Common to contemporary Native literature is also a concern with alienation, mar-
ginalization, and geographical displacement of Native people within the dominant
676 NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE

society. Concerned with both past and present—indeed, the present effects of the
past—Walters’s Ghost Singer treats the ongoing consequences of the Long Walk for
the Navajo; she instructs the audience not only about the forced removal of the
Navajo from Dinétah to Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico from 1864 to
1868, but also the ways in which the Long Walk continues to this day to affect the
Navajo and many other people. Robert Conley’s Mountain Windsong: A Novel of
the Trail of Tears (1992) asks the reader to ponder the consequences of the forced
removal of the Cherokee from their southeastern homeland to Oklahoma Indian
Territory during the 1830s.
Forced removal of Native people did not end with the nineteenth century, but
continued in various ways well into the twentieth century with consequences
extending into the present. Hanay Geiogamah’s Body Indian and Bruce King’s
Evening at the Warbonnet (1990) are plays that expose the suffering of spiritually
and physically damaged Indians living in cities. Subjects of various twentieth-
century “relocation” policies of the U.S. government, displaced urban Indians also
appear in Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, Vizenor’s Darkness in Saint Louis
Bearheart, and Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, Alexie’s works, including Indian Killer,
and in the poems of Hogan, Harjo, Henson, Welch, and Ortîz. Political concerns are
reflected in James Welch’s poems in Riding the Earthboy 40 (1971) and in Simon
Ortîz’s poetry in Going for the Rain (1976). Both collections offer Native perspec-
tives on America around the time of the nation’s bicentennial year. Combining prose
and poetry, Ortiz’s Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land
(1980) and Sand Creek (1990) deal with the ongoing historical effects of the 1680s
Pueblo Revolt upon contemporary life, and with the implications for American
politics of the Sand Creek massacre of 1864.
A third thematic thread connecting major works and authors addresses the
western appropriation and industrial destruction of the earth. Environmental
damage is not only a material but a spiritual problem from tribal perspectives, for
most Native people conceive of the earth not as an inert, commodifiable
“resource,” but as a living being. Traditional American Indian literature reveals a
spiritual relationship among humans, animals, spirit entities, and the North
American land, a relationship that continues to inform literary works of the pres-
ent day. The geographical space one inhabits is not just a physical location but a
spiritual home as well. Thus the Long Walk and the Trail of Tears are more tragic
for Native people than might be obvious to non-Natives. For the Navajo, to leave
or destroy the place inhabited by the Holy People, who shape and sustain the
tribe, who include Nilchi, the Holy Wind that is the breath of life, is to wither and
die. Diné bahane’, for instance, teaches that the life patterns of the Holy People
and other spirit entities are replicated in the lives of human beings within a cos-
mos where spiritual and material dimensions are inseparable. Thus, for a person
to lose the land where he or she draws breath is to become profoundly displaced,
to risk illness, death, and nonbeing. Likewise, for the Cherokee, removal meant
leaving behind the place chosen for them by Great Buzzard—the Tsalagi country
full of mountains (North Carolina)—for a land they did not know and that did
not know them. A fundamental claim of Native literature is that specific places
were made for specific people, animals, and spirits, and that centuries of exile can-
not alter this fact of creation. In the early years of the twenty-first century, the
White River Band of Utes have been returning to Meeker, in Colorado’s White
River Valley, from a reservation in Utah where they were banished over 100 years
 NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE 677

ago; this is one of many real-life events underscoring the authenticity of views
expressed in literary works.
Even more devastating than appropriation of tribal homelands is the utter
destruction of such places by logging, mining, oil-drilling, urban development, and
other western forms of encroachment. Mary Tall Mountain’s poem, “The Last
Wolf” (1981, 1995), is a melancholy testimony to such loss. The speaker addresses
the wolf, who seems to search for her throughout the “ruined city” to seek her help.
Similar lamentations occur in Silko’s Ceremony, in its concern with atomic warfare,
and Almanac of the Dead, which addresses global environmental issues, and Carr’s
Eye Killers, in its focus on the widespread pollution of the Southwest by nuclear
testing and uranium strip-mining. Hogan’s Mean Spirit deals with the U.S. govern-
ment’s repeated exploitation of inhabitants of Indian Territory, particularly the
Osage, owing to the discovery of oil on tribal lands. Her more recent novel, Power,
deals with the destruction of Florida’s natural environment, home to the nearly
extinct Florida panther. Louise Erdrich’s Tracks (1998) and Four Souls (2004)
address logging practices that have laid waste to tribal lands and to the hearts of
tribal people in the region of the Dakotas and Wisconsin.
Yet another thematic strand of Native literature concerns tribal demands for
the repatriation of property, particularly ceremonial items and human remains.
Like Native people who belong in the places the Creator designed for them, tribal
artifacts must return to their home lest the world continue to be disrupted by
their restless spiritual energy. “Old Students of the New Physics” (1993), a poem
by Marilou Awiatka (Cherokee, 1936–), develops this theme. She asks us to pon-
der the Butterfly Effect, a metaphor used by physicists to illustrate small-scale
physical events that can have very large-scale effects: figuratively, a butterfly
flapping its wings in one place on the earth may cause a hurricane in another. In
Awiatka’s poem, when earthmoving equipment in an urban development project
scatters bones from an Indian gravesite, the speaker predicts consequences felt far
and near. Other literary works dealing with stolen, abused, or misplaced Native
artifacts include, as previously mentioned, Carr’s Eye Killers and Walters’s Ghost
Singer. In Eye Killers, prayer sticks brought home by Navajos to Dinétah from
Bosque Redondo, and kept safe by Puebloan families, are powerful enough to
vanquish modern-day monsters—vampiric creatures representing the European
presence in North America. In Ghost Singer, part of the plot revolves around
stolen objects and human remains wreaking havoc among employees of the
Smithsonian Museum of Natural History who come in contact with them.
Indeed, Walters’s novel, a profound explanation of tribal views on the subject,
may have played a significant role in the passing of the Native American Graves
Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. Hogan’s Mean Spirit (1990) likewise
addresses the fate of Indian bones scattered about the land with the arrival of
more and more white settlers. Two novels by Louis Owens, The Sharpest Sight
(1992) and Bone Game (1994), deal with a man’s repatriation of his veteran
brother’s bones, and with the threat of their ending up in a museum, the ultimate
desecration for Native people. In Erdrich’s The Painted Drum (1995), a real
estate agent sells to a museum some Indian bones that she finds on property she
has purchased, but she steals a ceremonial painted drum that should have been,
along with the bones, returned to the Ojibwe. Like poet Joy Harjo, who stresses
the ways in which social and political problems of the present day are related to
imperialist atrocities of the past, Erdrich and others insist that the past cannot be
678 NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE

simply forgotten, stored away in archives, or appropriated for present-day use in

a Eurocentric agenda.
Still another theme that distinguishes most contemporary American Indian litera-
ture concerns the creative and destructive powers of language. Louise Erdrich’s
Nanapush, an important character in several novels and a narrator in Tracks,
remarks on the power of language to “cure or kill,” a power that Silko’s Ceremony
similarly highlights in a plot driven by the destructive magic of beings showing off
their storytelling abilities in a contest of “dark things”; the story of atomic energy
escapes its author’s control and cannot be called back. The bombings of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki and the Cold War nuclear arms race are the result. Such narratives
emphasize how potential realities originate in thought, find expression in words,
and then take actual shape in material forms and practices. Because of this monu-
mental power of words to create, sustain, and destroy worlds and their inhabitants,
Native storytellers believe profound responsibility accompanies language use, and
storytelling in particular.
In Hogan’s Power, Omishto and Ama are caught up in real events that unfold
according to an ancient tribal story. The humorous works of writers such as Vizenor
and King are rife with tricksters, including Coyote, who manipulate stories and other
modes of representation for revolutionary, revisionary purposes. Though King’s
Coyote in Green Grass, Running Water usually claims to have been out of town
when bad things happen, the reader entertains no doubts about the material conse-
quences of trickster discourse. A comic element in Momaday’s House Made of Dawn
involves a member of the Native American Church, a “priest of the sun,” who
observes that part of what is wrong with creation is that after St. John the Divine said
in the Bible that, “in the beginning was the Word,” he should have been quiet; he
should have trimmed the “fat.” Instead, he talked too much. Too much talk wreaks
havoc. Indeed, a common complaint of Native people about whites is that they talk
too much. In Walters’s Ghost Singer, Indian characters advise whites to “be quiet”
so that they might “learn something” about indigenous views of the world.
Finally, we may observe among major American Indian authors an educational
initiative comprising another thematic pattern uniting their work. An enduring
educational trend in nonfiction writing began, perhaps, with Eastman’s The Soul of
the Indian and continues today in works by Hogan, Silko, Allen, Momaday, and
many other major Native writers who have written not only poems, novels, and
short stories, but also nonfiction essays and autobiographical pieces serving educa-
tional purposes. Ongoing efforts have ranged from Luther Standing Bear’s Land of
the Spotted Eagle (1933), to many works by Vine Deloria, Jr. (Yankton/Standing
Rock Sioux, 1933–2005), most recently The World We Used to Live In: Remem-
bering the Powers of the Medicine Men (2006). Current works focusing on the
distinctiveness of Native worldviews, and suggesting that Native values and
practices are needed for the preservation of the world, include Defending Mother
Earth (1996), by Jace Weaver (Cherokee); The Tewa World (1967), by Alfonso
Ortîz (San Juan Pueblo, 1939–1997); Talking Indian (1992), by Walters; and Tribal
Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (1995), by Robert
Warrior (Osage). Not to be overlooked is the powerful instructive message regard-
ing education itself that emerges from Alexie’s novel, Indian Killer. Insisting that any
kind of non-Native intervention in Native cultures, sometimes especially well-
intended intervention, is a violation, Alexie attacks cross-cultural adoption, anthro-
pological preservation efforts, and non-Native teachers of Native material.
 NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE 679

Contrary to Alexie’s radical rejection of non-Indian enthusiasts, many Native

authors offer metatextual instruction to their projected readers, who are given
important information about history, cultural context, and Native interpretive
practices that significantly enhance their understanding of the texts in the process of
reading them. Ghost Singer offers the reader historical information, as well as infor-
mation about Navajo and Puebloan cosmology, through characters’ dialogue.
Silko’s Ceremony, Conley’s Mountain Windsong, and Hogan’s Mean Spirit, among
others, do the same. These authors are variously skillful at integrating the necessary
“educational” content into plot and character development without artificial
digressions.
Critical Views of Native American Literature. Native American literature has enjoyed
voluminous critical attention since the 1980s by both Native and non-Native
scholars, and the pace of scholarly activity shows no signs of slowing. Moreover,
literary critical response to Native literature of all genres has become increasingly
sophisticated with each passing decade.
Studies of particular interest, and related to broader social and cultural concerns
of the twenty-first century, include Joni Adamson’s American Indian Literature,
Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism (2001), and Eric Gary Anderson’s
American Indian Literature and the Southwest (1999). Adamson highlights Native
American literary and philosophical contributions to global discussions of environ-
mental crisis. Anderson’s book is a thought-provoking study of the complex,
cultural composition of the American Southwest, and the interconnections between
Native and non-Native American literature that this land has inspired.
Also concerned with cultural negotiations between Native and non-Native groups
are Gretchen M. Bataille, editor of Native American Representations: First Encoun-
ters, Distorted Images and Literary Appropriations (2001), and Devon Abbott
Mehesuah, Indigenous American Women: Decolonization, Empowerment,
Activism (2003). These critical studies deal with questions of Native identity, both
individual and collective, and its preservation despite adversities of dominant
cultural pressure, past and present.
Significant introductory studies of Native literature published within the current
decade are Eric Cheyfitz’s The Columbia History of Native American Literature
Since 1945 (2005), Joy Porter and Kenneth M. Roemer’s The Cambridge Compan-
ion to Native American Literature (2005), Suzanne Eversten Lundquist’s Native
American Literatures: An Introduction (2004), and Roemer’s Native American
Writers of the United States, Dictionary of Literary Biography (1997).
More specialized studies treating particular literary critical issues include
Arnold Krupat’s Red Matters: Native American Studies (2002), Robert Dale
Parker’s The Invention of Native American Literature (2003), Elvira Pulitano’s
Toward a Native American Critical Theory (2003), Theodore Rios and Kathleen
Mullen Sands’s Telling a Good One: The Process of a Native American Collabo-
rative Biography (2000), Catherine Rainwater’s Dreams of Fiery Stars: The Trans-
formations of Native American Fiction (1999), and Craig S. Womack’s Red on
Red (1999).
Dealing with Native American poetry are Norma C. Wilson’s The Nature of
Native American Poetry (2001), Kenneth Lincoln’s Sing with the Heart of a Bear:
Fusions of Native and American Poetry, 1890–1999 (2000), and Robin Riley Fast’s
The Heart as a Drum: Continuance and Resistance in American Indian Poetry
(1999). Fast focuses on the concern with negotiation of physical space in Native
680 NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE

poetry, while Lincoln traces intercultural developments, and Wilson develops read-
ings of specific poets’ works.
Critical views of Native American theatre are found mostly in reviews and
newsletters; a few book-length critical studies have appeared since Per Brask and
William Morgan’s collaborative study of Native Canadian theatre, Aboriginal
Voices: Amerindian, Inuit, and Sami Theater (1992), a work pertinent to the study
of Native theatre in the United States. Also useful is Hanay Geiogamah and Jaye T.
Darby’s American Indian Theater in Performance: A Reader (2000).
On nonfiction and “life writing,” David H. Brumble III remains an authoritative
voice. His American Indian Autobiography (1988) is an indispensable work, as are
Arnold Krupat’s Who Came After: A Study of Native American Autobiography
(1985), and The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon
(1989), and Gerald Vizenor and A. Robert Lee’s Postindian Conversations (1999),
among others.

Reception
The Many Audiences for Native American Literature. Though Momaday’s House Made
of Dawn received critical attention when it appeared, this novel and most other
writing by Native Americans presents difficulties for the average reader, and even
for literary scholars who are unversed in Native cultural contexts. Work by Native
writers that appeared throughout the 1970s drew a mostly literary and academic
audience. Novels by Louise Erdrich that began to appear in the late 1980s probably
helped create whatever popular audience exists today for Native writing, for even
though her works are steeped in Native culture, their plots and characters are
relatively more accessible to the general reader than are most of the writings of her
predecessors. By the turn of the twentieth century, the readership for Native works
was further expanded owing to multicultural educational agendas in schools and
universities where students are introduced to works by minority writers. The grow-
ing number of literary critical books and articles on Native works is helpful to those
who wish to teach them. Consequently, whereas in 1970, a bookstore patron look-
ing for Native American writing would have come out empty-handed, the same vis-
itor in the 1990s and after could easily fill a cart to include a broad selection of
literary critical studies to enhance his or her understanding of the material.
Moreover, most current anthologies of American literature contain both traditional
and contemporary Native works.
Today’s Native American writers share a keen sense of the diversity of their poten-
tial audience, which may include other members of their tribe, members of other
tribes, Eurocentric people of many ethnicities, and non-Eurocentric, non-tribal
people; in other words, there is a global audience for their work, often translated
into a variety of languages. With this fact in mind, many Native writers have
become impressively inventive of ways to reach their audience. Some of these
techniques are developed based on oral storytelling practices, for oral storytellers
are traditionally adept at audience accommodation—altering the way a story is told
depending on who is listening.
The popular audience for Native American writing, however, as opposed to the
scholarly one, remains relatively small, to an extent owing to difficulties the mate-
rial presents. Though Hollywood films such as Dances with Wolves (1990), and film
adaptations of popular novels set in Navajo country by Tony Hillerman (not Native
 NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE 681

American) are box-office hits, most Native people and scholars of Native literature
entertain, at the very least, mixed feelings about this phenomenon. Despite the fact
that such works by non-Native people are often composed in good faith and contain
accurate information, they nevertheless amount in various degrees to appropriation
of Native cultures. Unfortunately, many more people have seen Dances with Wolves
and the Disney cartoon Pocahontas (1995) than are familiar with Sherman Alexie’s
Smoke Signals (1998), or Valerie Red Horse’s Naturally Native (1999); few have
heard of films such as Spitz and Klain’s The Return of Navajo Boy (2000). Native
filmmakers and screenwriters legitimately fear the inevitable co-optation and
trivialization that accompany mainstream productions. For instance, when A.A.
Carr negotiated with film companies for rights to Eye Killers, he withdrew from
projects when he was told that the Navajo material would have to be cut. Had he
agreed, a film version of his novel would have been little more than another vampire
tale set among stereotypical Indians in the Southwest. N. Scott Momaday did
collaborate with Richardson Morse and an independent film company to produce a
video of House Made of Dawn in 1972; starring the Laguna/Santo Domingo actor
and poet Larry Littlebird, the film was re-released in 1996, but never drew popular
or critical attention.
Like Carr and Momaday, most Native artists prefer not to lose control of their
materials to the dominant culture; consequently, movie adaptations of their works
are rare to nonexistent. This challenge seems, so far, difficult to overcome.

Bibliography
Alexie, Sherman. Smoke Signals. New York: Hyperion, 1998.
Allen, Paula Gunn. Song of the Turtle: American Indian Literature, 1974–1994. New York:
Ballantine, 1996.
Awiatka, Marilou. Selu: Seeking the Corn-Mother’s Wisdom. Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1993.
Bevis, William. Native American Novels: Homing In. In Recovering the Word: Essays on
Native American Literature. Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat, eds. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1987; 580–620.
Brumble, H. David, III. American Indian Autobiography. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988.
Carr, A.A. Eye Killers. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995.
Erdrich, Louise. “Jacklight.” In Jacklight. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984.
———. “Captivity,” In Jacklight. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984.
———. Love Medicine. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984.
———. The Painted Drum. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.
Geiogamah, Hanay. New Native American Drama: Three Plays. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1980.
Hogan, Linda. Power. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998.
———. Mean Spirit. New York: Atheneum, 1990.
———. Solar Storms. New York: Scribner, 1995.
King, Thomas. “A Seat in the Garden.” In One Good Story, That One. New York: Harper-
Collins, 1993.
———. Green Grass, Running Water. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.
McFarland, Ron, ed. James Welch. Lewiston, NY: Confluence, 1986.
Momaday, N. Scott. House Made of Dawn. New York: Harper and Row, 1968.
———. The Way to Rainy Mountain. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969.
Moore, David L. “Sherman Alexie.” In The Cambridge Companion to Native American
Literature. Joy Porter and Kenneth M. Roemer, eds. New York: Cambridge, 2005;
397–410.
682 NEW AGE LITERATURE

Murray, David. “Translation and Mediation.” In The Cambridge Companion to Native

American Literature. Joy Porter and Kenneth M. Roemer, eds. New York: Cambridge,
2005; 69–83.
Porter, Joy, and Kenneth M. Roemer. The Cambridge Companion to Native American
Literature. New York: Cambridge, 2005.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 1977.
———. Storyteller. Boston: Little, Brown, 1981.
Tall Mountain, Mary. “The Last Wolf.” In Listen to the Night: Poems to the Animal Spirits
of Mother Earth. Ben Clarke, ed. San Francisco: Freedom Voices, 1995.
Vizenor, Gerald. Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart. Saint Paul, MN: Truck Press, 1978.
———. Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1981.
———. “Feral Lasers.” Landfill Meditation: Crossblood Stories. Hanover: University Press
of New England, 1991.
Walters, Anna Lee. Ghost Singer. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988.
Welch, James. Heartsong. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2001.

Further Reading
Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Tradi-
tions. Boston: Beacon, 1986; Lundquest, Suzanne Eversten. Native American Literatures: An
Introduction. New York: Continuum, 2004; Native American Authors Project (Internet
Public Library), www.ipl.org/div/natam/; Owens, Louis. Other Destinies: Understanding the
Native American Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992; Rainwater, Catherine.
Dreams of Fiery Stars: The Transformations of Native American Fiction. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999; Storytellers: Native American Authors Online,
www.hanksville.org/storytellers/index.html; Vizenor, Gerald, ed. Narrative Chance:
Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 1989; Wong, Hertha D. Sweet. Sending My Heart Back Across the Years:
Tradition and Innovation in Native American Autobiography. New York: Oxford, 1992.
CATHERINE RAINWATER
NEW AGE LITERATURE
Definition. “Faith is universal. Our specific methods for understanding it are
arbitrary. Some of us pray to Jesus, some of us go to Mecca, some of us study sub-
atomic particles. In the end, we are all just searching for truth, that which is greater
than ourselves,” says Vittoria Vetra in Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons (Brown,
2000, 110). In this quote, Brown encapsulates New Age ideology.
In order to discuss New Age literature, it is first necessary to understand key
concepts of the movement that sparked the literature. The predominating concern
is the healing of the self, others, and the planet through the raising or expanding of
spiritual consciousness. The holistic healing and personal transformation move-
ments were some of the very earliest manifestations of the present-day New Age.
Late in the twentieth century, alternative healers began incorporating Eastern heal-
ing traditions. Along with Eastern healing traditions come Eastern spiritual beliefs,
including chakras (the seven key energy centers in the body), karma, reincarnation,
meditation, and yoga. In addition to incorporating Eastern spirituality, the New Age
draws upon and often blends ancient forms of knowledge from many paths. It’s not
at all unusual to find an author illustrating a principle by blending Christian,
shamanic, and other metaphysical traditions.
Creating your own reality is another major component: the theory that human
beings are co-creators with a Higher Power or the Universe, and, therefore divine,
 NEW AGE LITERATURE 683

that what we focus on, we bring into being. Certain interpretations of quantum
physics seem to support this idea of mind manipulating matter.
Another path to spiritual consciousness is in the channeling of either deceased
loved ones or evolved entities who wish to bring knowledge of spiritual truth to
the human race. This technique has been utilized from Edgar Cayce to Sylvia
Browne.
Two main complications arise when trying to define New Age literature. The
first is that two epochs have been assigned the term “New Age.” The term was
originally coined by Alice Bailey, a channeler, in the 1920s. A later incarnation
grew in strength in the 1980s but had its roots in the revolutionary atmosphere
of the late 1960s. In Not Necessarily the New Age, J. Gordon Melton, author
of several authoritative works on the New Age, and on religion, writes a fasci-
nating essay linking the modern-day New Age Movement back to Frank Anton
Mesmer’s principles, Transcendentalism, Spiritualism, The New Thought
Movement, the Theosophical Society, and more (Basil, 1998, 35). For the pur-
poses of this entry, we will concentrate on the latter period, mentioning the
older wave inasmuch as it pertains to its influence on the present-day New Age
literature.
History. Though the genre is purported to have sprung up in the 1980s with the
cultural upheaval of the 1960s having played a significant role, most of the basics
were established in the eighteenth-century religious/spiritual search. In fact, in a
recent article, Doreen Virtue, author of several books about angels, and a holder of
a PhD in Counseling Psychology, attributes many of the ideas in her new book,
DIVINE MAGIC: Seven Sacred Secrets of Manifestation (2006) to a 1908 book,
Kybalion (Evolve, 6.1, 4). However, to reach that far back into history is beyond the
scope of this entry.
We’ll begin in the 1960s, when much of the population was ripe for exploration
into a redefinition of values in the wake of the Vietnam War, the draft, and mistrust
of the government, and was questioning the validity of the then-current social norms
in the midst of civil rights, women’s, and other movements. Society was ready for a
broader definition of truth. Almost synchronistically,

[Asian immigration] barriers were lowered in 1965. In the late sixties and early seventies,
a new wave of Indian gurus found a receptive audience among young Americans seeking
religious inspiration from nontraditional sources . . . This spiritual subculture, which was
in many ways the successor movement to the counterculture of the sixties, led directly to
the New Age Movement of the eighties. (Diem, 1992, 48)

In addition, information was easily disseminated. Susan Love Brown reminds us

that the Baby Boomers were the “first generation to be affected by television” and
were “also a highly educated generation—nine out of every ten graduated from high
school and half have attended college . . . more than twice as educated as their par-
ents” (Brown, 1992, 91).
Some credit the countercultures’ experimentation with drugs as one avenue to
expand consciousness. While that was certainly true in the 1960s, Basil, in his
introduction to Not Necessarily the New Age, detects a shift. “Today, however,
the key to enlightenment isn’t dope—according to many New Age magazines,
such a key is more likely to be raw vegetables.” About attending the 1987 Har-
monic Convergence celebration at Niagara Falls, he states, “Although there were
684 NEW AGE LITERATURE

more than a thousand people [there] for instance, I smelled no pot, only incense”
(Basil, 1998, 27).
Three of the most visible authors from the 1970s to 1980s era are Richard Bach,
Jane Roberts, and Shirley MacLaine, and Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull is one
of the most well-known stories. The classic 1970 allegory is told much like a para-
ble. Instead of being interested in flying only as it facilitates the getting of food (read:
the pursuit of material success), our seagull is determined to reach beyond the ordi-
nary, to fly for the joy of flying and for the joy of perfecting his flight. He yearns to
show all gulls that “Instead of slogging forth and back to the fishing boats, there is
a reason to live! We can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and
skill. We can be free! We can learn to fly!” (Bach, 1970, 27).
Because of his disregard for tradition, the Elders banish him. Alone, he increases
his flying skills until he encounters two shining seagulls who take him to a new land
that he thinks is heaven, but soon he finds out is another level of existence on his
climb to perfection. Here, the idea of reincarnation enters. He finds very few other
gulls there because, he is told, most gulls have to live “thousands or even tens of
thousands of ordinary lives” before they achieve the level he has (Bach, 1970, 55).
He essentially becomes an ascended master and returns to earth to teach others
that “We are free. When we are our true selves, there are no limitations” (Bach,
1970, 82). This is the message of so much of New Age literature, that there are no
limitations.
When Jonathan Seagull ascends to the next level, he leaves Fletcher, his apprentice,
to teach the students. Near the end of the tale, Fletcher tells them, “To begin, . . .
you’ve got to understand that a seagull is an unlimited idea, an image of the Great
Gull, and your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip, is nothing more than a thought
itself.”
From here we launch into another major phenomenon of New Age literature—
the series of Seth books. Seth, an entity channeled by Jane Roberts, teaches much of
what will later abound in New Age literature. Creating one’s own reality by manip-
ulating matter through thought is his most prominent theme in both The Seth Mate-
rial (1970) and Seth Speaks (1972). Seth says, “We form the physical world as
unselfconsciously as we breathe. . . . Our bodies are the materialization of what we
think we are. We are all creators, then, and this world is our joint creation”
(Roberts, 1970, 112).
Also, he talks about reincarnation:

I write this book though the auspices of a women of whom I have become quite fond.
To others it seems strange that I address her as “Ruburt,” and “him,” but the fact is I
have known her in other times and places, by other names. She has been both man and
woman, and the entire identity who has lived these separate lives can be designated by
the name of Ruburt. (Roberts, 1972, 3)

These three things, then—being creators of reality, reincarnation, and having a

Being larger than the one manifested in the current incarnation—along with chan-
neling, form the core of New Age ideology.
Someone who brought these ideas to the public in a highly visible way was the
already-famous actress and dancer, Shirley MacLaine, when the mini-series based on
her book Out on a Limb was televised. In her series of autobiographical books in
the 1980s, including Out on a Limb (1983) and Dancing in the Light (1986),
 NEW AGE LITERATURE 685

TRENDS AND THEMES

As James R. Lewis states, “When studying an amorphous movement like the new age, one
almost always has difficulties deciding where the phenomenon begins and ends . . .” (Lewis
and Melton, 1992, 1). The same problem applies to the literature of the movement, since
many of the works that can be categorized as New Age fit equally well under other head-
ings. Do self-help manuals that tell us that in order to change our luck we will have to change
our way of thinking belong to the realm of the New Age or to the field of psychology? If they
say instead we have to change our way of believing, do they then fall under metaphysics?

MacLaine recounts her own spiritual search, including her friend Kevin Ryerson the
channeler, out-of-body experiences, past lives, even traveling to a South American
city to spot UFOs. Her new work, The Camino: A Journey of Spirit, is described as
her pilgrimage “called the Santiago de Compostela Camino across northern Spain.”
It is “a nearly 500 mile-trek across highways, mountains, cities and fields.”
“Through a range of astonishing and liberating visions and revelations, Shirley saw
into the meaning of the cosmos, including the secrets of the ancient civilizations of
Atlantis and Lemuria, insights into human genesis, the essence of gender as sexuality,
and the true path to higher love” (shirleymaclaine.com).
Whenever we read that a person can change his/her health or quality of life by
changing the focus of his/her thoughts—that thoughts are simply a form of energy
from which matter (or reality) is formed—we can be confident that, at least loosely,
what we are reading will qualify as New Age.
Often instructional manuals for anything from increasing creativity to developing
psychic powers, the genre covers anything from variations on traditional
Christianity to Buddhist and Hindu beliefs. Native American spirituality and
healing methods are often linked to New Age, as are elements of Wicca. Jungian
psychology is drawn from in books on synchronicity, and the literature also takes
the form of autobiographies of psychics. Therefore the majority of New Age litera-
ture falls under the non-fiction category. However, novelists like Dan Brown, James
Redfield, and Richard Bach take these non-fiction concepts and transform them into
some engrossing fiction.
Some would even include twelve-step literature. The New Age Encyclopedia
points out that its religious affirmations are the type that tends to appeal to New
Agers. For example, there is an AA custom of referring to one’s “Higher Power”
rather than to “God” and of insisting that members are free to define their “Higher
Power” in any way that they choose (Melton, 1990, 469).
A common thread that flows through the literature can be found as early as the
1970 book The Seth Material. Seth, a disembodied entity channeled by Jane
Roberts, states, “In reality you project your own energy out to form the physical
world” (Roberts, 1970, 3). This concept is reiterated in the most recent popular
books and movies What the Bleep Do We Know and The Secret. These ideas have
become so mainstream that the movies can be found on the shelves of rural video
stores and on Internet movie clubs such as Netflix. A host of messages from chan-
neled entities can now be accessed as easily as doing a simple Google search. Major
networks carry shows featuring psychics, such as Montel Williams with Sylvia
Browne. Other psychics, including James Van Praagh, appear regularly on major tel-
evision shows, and Echo Bodine has her own radio show.
686 NEW AGE LITERATURE

Context and Issues. The need for spirituality has always existed. Many people
find this new form more inclusive and less discriminatory. Like Wicca, New Age
addresses, includes, and empowers women, where the church and other male-
dominated traditions often had not. Ehud Sperling, president of Inner
Traditions/Bear and Company publishing, says:

What makes the Da Vinci Code exciting . . . isn’t the character development or even
the setting, it’s the whole mystery and magic around a reinterpretation of the Christian
mythos. There’s a real thirst and a hunger in our society today for a different story
around Christianity. (Kalye, 2004, 36)

Judith Rosen’s Publishers Weekly article, “Casting a Wider Spell,” quotes Katie
McMillan, publicity manager for Inner Ocean Publishing: “Let’s face it, between the
war, terrorism, and the economy, people are dealing with issues they may not have
ever had to deal with before, and they are looking for the tools that will help them”
(Rosen, 2003).
The upside of all of this is that New Age spirituality and the literature that accom-
panies it do fill a need for spirituality for some who can not find it in traditional
establishments, and can enhance the spirituality of others who do fit within main-
stream religion. The downside is that, like anything, there are charlatans. Frauds
existed in the Spiritualism era and still do. This is not to debunk all New Age prac-
titioners. People willing to take advantage of the gullible abound in all walks of life,
from used car sales to politics. “There’s no arguing the fact that for every legitimate,
gifted, honest psychic who’s ever existed, there have been thousands and thousands
of frauds,” says Sylvia Browne (Browne, 2006, 11).
Reception. How is all this received by the “mainstream” public? Many people are
comforted by this more inclusive spirituality. That fact is proven by the mere sales
numbers of such books and movies. On the other hand, though, there’s sentiment
by some on the Native American side that whites are ripping off their spiritual prac-
tices just like they did their land. Their ways are sacred and not to be “sold.” Many
Wiccans and Neo-Pagans look down on some of the New Age gurus, viewing them
as more concerned with money-making than spirituality. Also, there of course will
always be those who insist that others not following the tenets of the religion they
themselves follow are worshipping Satan.
As far as the desire for this knowledge by the general public, sales speak for them-
selves. Judith Rosen again quotes Katie McMillan: “New Age is no longer becom-
ing mainstream; it is mainstream . . .” (Rosen, 2003).
“‘New Age titles are still the cash cow,’ says Hay House publicity director Jacqui
Clark. ‘The main difference these days is that New Age has moved into the mainstream
market with sales to Target, Walmart and Costco as the norm . . .’” (Rosen, 2003).
Others have found it less popular. The New Age Encyclopedia has found that
“Neo-Pagan Witches [ . . . ] operate with an ethic that forbids them to accept money
for initiating or training anyone in the essential practices of the Craft as a religion.
[ . . . ] As a result of this ethic, Neo-Pagans look upon the psychic fairs and New
Age expos with open contempt, and consider most New Age gurus to be money-
hungry frauds who are exploiting the public by charging exorbitant fees for spiri-
tual practices that can be learned for free within a Neo-Pagan coven.” (There are,
nevertheless, a few Neo-Pagan Witches who consider themselves to be part of the
New Age Movement as well.) (Melton, 314)
 NEW AGE LITERATURE 687

Lisa Aldred explains the stance taken by many Native Americans: “By far, the
biggest business in New Age appropriation of indigenous spirituality transpires in
the publishing industry where plastic medicine men authors are big sellers.” About
titles by Mary Summer Rain and Lynn V. Andrews, she says, “Native American
activists have greatly castigated these works for their trivialization of Native
American spirituality” (American Indian Quarterly 24.3, 2000).
Within the Catholic community, articles can be found either denouncing the
movement as a whole, or somewhat accepting it, and making an effort to
understand. “The Devil has much to gain from a witch hunt,” says Stratford
Caldecott in Catholic Culture (June 26, 2002). In this article, the author takes a
somewhat amiable stance in attempting to quell the fears Catholics and others may
have about New Age beliefs. Instead of demonizing these New Age beliefs, the
writer urges the reader to look upon them as an honest quest to connect to the
divine. Caldecott calls upon Catholics and the church to rather examine the church
from within to discover what it is that needs to be addressed as far as why so many
people are looking for something more or different.
The April 2007 issue of The Sun features an interview by Diane Covington with
John O’Donohue, a poet, philosopher, and former priest. In answer to Covington’s
questions, he states:

There is a fierce hunger for spirit at the heart of an American culture that has lost all
belief in the old language about God.
New Age spirituality is rising up to try to fill the gap. I do not wish to criticize any
system which can nourish people’s spirits, but I find that a lot of New Age writing
cherry picks the attractive bits from the ancient traditions and makes collages of them;
it usually excises the ascetic dimension. In general it is not rigorously thought out, but
is what I would call ‘soft’ thinking. (Covington, 2007, 5–6)

Others denounce New Age thought as a trick of Satan. On the Web site
BibleProbe, Steve Keohane reviews Texe Marrs’s Ravaged by the New Age, calling
it “a shocking expose of the New Age occultism . . . snatching up our innocent
children in its rotten net. It also reveals the hidden plan of New Age leaders to bring
our teenagers into hideous bondage through Satan worship and witchcraft”
(Keohane).
All in all, this surging interest in redefining spirituality might be best summed up
in the words of a The Da Vinci Code character:

It is the beauty and wonderment that serve our souls, not the Grail itself. The beauty
of the grail lies in her ethereal nature . . . For some, the Grail is a chalice that will
bring them everlasting life. For others, it is the quest for lost documents and secret
history. And for most, I suspect, the Holy Grail is simply a grand idea . . . A glori-
ous unattainable treasure that somehow, even in today’s chaos, inspires us. (Brown,
2003, 444)

Selected Authors
Mind/Body/Spirit Connection. The mind/body/spirit connection is based on the idea
that physical illness is only a symptom of some underlying emotional or spiritual
“dis-ease.” Practitioners work on the entire being to heal, hence the term “holistic.”
Furthermore, curing and healing are not the same thing. Curing only eliminates
688 NEW AGE LITERATURE

symptoms, and not permanently, since the underlying spiritual cause has not been
addressed. Deepak Chopra is one of the leading proponents of this idea.
Chopra, winner of the Einstein award through Albert Einstein college of
Medicine, “is one of the best known and widely respected leaders in the field of
mind/body medicine in the world today,” hailed by Time Magazine as “one of the
top one hundred heroes and icons of the twentieth century” (enlightenment).
Chopra, author of approximately 40 books, most having to do with the connec-
tion between healing and spirituality, explains much of his thinking from a Hindu
or Buddhist perception, though other spiritual traditions are also employed to
make his points. Being a medical doctor, he approaches his information from a
scientific standpoint. Early in The Book of Secrets (2004), he introduces us to a
concept called “cell wisdom.” He declares that cells of the body possess a form
of intelligence:

Ten years ago it would have been absurd to speak of intestines being intelligent . . .
Now it turns out that the intestines are not so lowly after all. The scattered nerve cells
form a finely tuned system for reacting to outside events—an upsetting remark at work,
the threat of danger, a death in the family. The stomach’s reactions are just as reliable
as the brain’s thoughts, and just as intricate. Your colon, your liver and your stomach
cells also think, only not in the brain’s verbal language. What people had been calling
a “gut reaction” turned out to be a mere hint of the complex intelligence at work in a
hundred thousand billion cells. (Chopra, 2004, 7)

In a nutshell, thoughts affect the physical body, causing illness or health.

Sylvia Browne, world-renown psychic and author of 115 volumes on psychic phe-
nomenon, explains in The Other Side and Back (2000), the power of the mind to
manifest things in the physical body:

Under hypnosis—when the subconscious mind is in charge—if you’re told that the
hypnotist’s finger is a white-hot poker, and the hypnotist touches you with that finger,
a blister will form where you were touched. The body doesn’t intervene and say, ‘Hold
it, you can’t fool me, I can’t be burned with a finger.’ It hears ‘white-hot poker’ and
responds appropriately. (Browne, 2000, 94)

Create Your Own Reality. In an essay titled “The Magical Staff: Quantum Healing in
the New Age,” Catherine L. Albanese explains the principles of quantum physics as
they relate to healing and the formation of reality, referring to Einstein’s discoveries:

At the subatomic level, matter—as it turned out—was not nearly so solid as it first
appeared. If light could act like waves in some ways and like particles in others, elec-
trons had become microchameleons. Matter dissolved into energy and then reconfig-
ured itself as matter. (Albanese, 1992, 72)

The curiosity about quantum physics has become so widespread that a film enti-
tled What the Bleep do We Know? (2005) is popular enough to be an item on video
store shelves. The visually stunning film has Marlee Matlin as Amanda, a recently
divorced woman betrayed by her husband, walk through ideas of quantum physics.
Interspersed with the action are interview-type sequences with prominent scientists,
theologians, psychologist, and the entity Ramtha channeled through J.Z. Knight. In
addition, animation aids in illustrating concepts. Some interesting things about cell
 NEW AGE LITERATURE 689

wisdom and thoughts affecting health are demonstrated in a scene where the main
character, a photographer, is assigned to photograph a wedding, a distasteful job to
her because of her previous experience with marriage. Animated cell-creatures
appear on the screen to demonstrate what happens inside the body when various
person’s addictions to feeling are aroused: sex, anger, and overeating. Dr. Joe
Dispenza, who holds post-graduate degrees in physiology, neurochemistry, and
neuro-physiology, states:

Nerve cells that fire together wire together. If you practice something over and over, those
nerve cells have a long-term relationship. If you get angry on a daily basis, if you get frus-
trated on a daily basis, if you suffer on a daily basis, if you give reasons for victimization
in your life, you’re rewiring and integrating that neuro-net on a daily basis and that
neuro-net has a long-term relationship with all those other nerve cells called an identity.

Hope is offered, though. Dispenza goes on to say, “ . . . nerve cells that don’t fire
together no longer wire together.” Therefore, it again comes down to the power of
thought and what the individual focuses on—or in this case, refuses to focus on.
In a subway scene, Amanda comes upon a demonstration complete with tour
guide on Emoto Masaru’s photographs of water molecules. The first molecule is
untouched and quite shapeless. The second has been blessed by a Zen Buddhist
Monk, and the third was kept in a bottle onto which Masaru had simply taped a
label saying “Thank you.” These display a strikingly lovely, symmetrical quality.
However, the last water molecule, labeled “You make me sick. I want to kill you”,
is hideous. The point of this sequence arrives when a stranger turns to her and says,
“It makes you think, doesn’t it? If our thoughts can do that to water, what do you
think our thoughts can do to us?” This is the lesson Amanda learns by the end of
the movie. Drips of water from the bathroom faucet cause her to remember his
words at a time when she is looking in a mirror and saying “I hate you,” to herself.
Realizing what her thoughts have done to her, she consciously changes her focus and
is happy and self-accepting as the film closes.
One reviewer commented that the movie “has the corny, ham-handed feel of an old
16 mm educational film” (Monaghan). Jean Lowerison, however, in her review for
San Diego Metropolitan Magazine praises it as “a great discussion starter, and it’s a
pleasure to find a film that actually requires gray matter participation” (Lowerison).
Australian filmmaker Rhonda Byrne talked to Evolve! magazine about the
process of creating the film and book The Secret. She “stumbled upon The Secret in
a hundred year old book her daughter gave her” and in an excerpt from chapter
four, Byrne cites gratitude as the single most powerful tool to bring about abun-
dance. She quotes Dr. Joe Vitale, a metaphysician:

It is impossible to bring more into your life if you are feeling ungrateful about what
you have. Why? Because these thoughts and feelings you emit as you feel ungrateful are
all negative emotions. . . . Those feelings cannot bring you what you want. They can
only return what you do not want. Those negative emotions are blocking your own
good coming to you. (Evolve!, 6.1, 10)

Vitale states this in the film, as well. This work is an unusual case in which the movie
came out before the book. At first the DVD was available only through the Inter-
net, then it became possible to purchase it through book clubs. In 2006, The Secret
was released in CD and book form (Evolve, 6.1, 10).
690 NEW AGE LITERATURE

The Secret (2006), we find out, is the Law of Attraction. The film puts forth the
idea that the Universe is like a giant genie, saying “Your wish is my command.”
That genie doesn’t make any distinction between negative or positive, it just grants
whatever a person is focusing on, whether it’s poverty or wealth. This film also
states that what we focus our thoughts on we bring into being. However, The Secret
takes it a step farther and says it’s what we focus our feelings on as well. While we
might think positive thoughts on the surface, if feelings of fear or negativity are
stronger underneath the surface, thoughts will not be enough.
This film depends on such notables as Dr. John Hagelin and Fred Alan Wolf, the
Reverend Michael Beckwith, Esther Hicks (Ask and It is Given), John Proctor,
philosopher, Dr. Denis Waitley, psychologist, and others (most played by actors) to
illustrate how the Law of Attraction works. Like What the Bleep Do We Know?,
dramatizations are used. However, unlike the former film, this film does not depend
on animation. The book and film received another boost when The Secret and Byrne
were featured on Oprah Winfrey’s television program in 2007.
The movie answers the question about why people who think they are focusing
on positive thoughts sometimes get no results. Affirmations have to be done cor-
rectly. If you say “I will get out of debt,” the word and idea of “debt” exist in the
sentence thereby causing you to focus on debt. Instead, the film tells you, you must
visualize yourself having things you want. There is a sequence in which a man in
pajamas and robe is sitting in his easy chair pretending to drive the new sports car
he is wishing for, making corresponding motions of shifting gears and producing
sounds of the car revving up. He is so thorough in his visualization that he even
remembers to turn around and lock the car with his imaginary remote locking
device when he leaves his chair. This is because passion is a force that brings things
into existence even faster.
Criticisms of this film rise both from other New Age practitioners and from the
medical community. Health care providers are concerned that seriously ill persons
may try to use positive thinking instead of seeking medical treatment.
The overall reception of the book, however, tends to be on the positive side.
Rachel Deahl notes in her March 1, 2007 Publishers Weekly article that “Simon and
Schuster has placed the biggest reorder in its history . . . Going back to press for two
million more copies.”
In another Publishers Weekly article, “The Secret Bashing Begins,” Lynn Garrett
quips, “you’re nobody in spiritual publishing until other authors start lining up to
debunk you,” and lists There is More to “The Secret” by Ed Gungor, The Secret
Revealed: Exposing the Truth About the Law of Attraction by Jim Garlow and Rick
Marschall, and The Secret of the Secret by Karen Kelly as publications in the works
in opposition to The Secret (Garrett, 2007).
Variations on Traditional Christianity. Dorren Virtue holds advanced degrees in counsel-
ing therapy. Having authored some 22 books on mind, body, and spirit issues, she
serves as founding director of Nashville’s WomanKind Psychiatric Hospital. During
her career, Virtue has also directed three outpatient psychiatric centers, including,
most notably, a center devoted to treating drug and alcohol abuse.
Virtue’s Angels 101 offers a comforting message to those who have grown up
with what they consider a punishing God. She says that angels, even Archangels, are
available to us always and that they love us unconditionally. “The angels will help
you with anything and everything . . . there’s nothing too big or too small for them
to handle. You needn’t worry about bothering the angels, as they’re unlimited beings
 NEW AGE LITERATURE 691

who can help everyone simultaneously . . . Angels have unlimited time, energy and
resources” (Virtue, 2006, x).
She goes on to assure readers they don’t have to follow any certain religious path
to have access to angels (Virtue, 2006, x–xi). She responds to such inquiries as
“Why can’t I hear my angels?” “I’ve asked my angels for help, but nothing seems to
happen,” and “Why don’t the angels save everyone, especially innocent children?”
Angels and God can’t or won’t violate free will, she explains. This is an important
explanation not only in New Age thinking, but in a lot of traditional religious belief
as well: If we refuse to follow our guidance, or if we are stuck in having our prayers
answered in a certain way, we won’t recognize blessings if they arrive in another
form. Also, it seems that we all have a “time” to return home to Heaven, which our
souls determine prior to our incarnation (Virtue, 2006, 114–117). This theme, that
we create a “blueprint” for our lives before we incarnate on earth, runs through
most of the New Age thought, from Seth to Sylvia Browne.
Another uplifting thing Virtue asserts is that God and angels know “ . . . while
we can grow through suffering, we can grow even faster through peace. And our
peacefulness inspires others in a way that suffering cannot” (Virtue, 2006, 121).
The Sacred Feminine. The sacred feminine is not a new concept; it is probably one
of the oldest concepts existing. The female life-giving force has been honored
since the earliest civilizations. It enjoyed a resurgence in the early women’s move-
ment when many women were searching for a spirituality that was personal to
them.
This quest for the lost feminine is sometimes called the quest for the Holy Grail
and is at the center of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code. Like any good mys-
tery, it starts with a murder. Also, like any good mystery, it is jammed with plot
twists, danger, and chases. The central mystery, however, is a metaphysical one: It
invites the reader to ponder on the idea of the sacred feminine being lost or sup-
pressed by mainstream Christianity. It goes so far as to conjecture that Mary
Magdalene was more than a follower of Jesus—she was his wife. The Grail in this
case becomes not a vessel from which to drink, but the vessel of Mary’s womb that
was carrying the bloodline of Jesus at his crucifixion.
The plot: Robert Langdon, a symbologist and art historian, is called in to inter-
pret symbols on the body of murdered Louvre curator Jacques Sauniere and soon
finds himself the prime suspect. He connects the symbols to early Goddess-
worshiping imagery, which would be in keeping with the curator’s research and
publications. He is aided in escaping the French police by Sophie Neveu, a cryptol-
ogist on the French force, and, it will later be discovered, the estranged grand-
daughter of Sauniere.
The two embark on a quest to find the Holy Grail—the one way to prove
Langdon’s innocence—aided by symbols Leonardo da Vinci encoded within his
paintings, particularly of The Last Supper. Circumstances cause them to hide in the
home of Langdon’s friend, Leigh Teabing, where the idea of the Grail being not a
cup but a womb is revealed to Sophie, Teabing claiming the figure seated next to
Jesus in The Last Supper was not John, but Mary Magdalene.
Langdon and Neveu follow the clues in these paintings in search of documents
tracing the genealogy of this bloodline, allegedly protected and kept hidden by the
Priory of Sion and the Knights Templar.
Meanwhile, another group is just as desperate to find this evidence. In a
complicated relationship, a bishop who is the head of Opus Dei, a man he’d
692 NEW AGE LITERATURE

saved, and an anonymous mastermind called “The Teacher” are in deadly pursuit
of our heroes.
In the end, the pair find information that confirms the Grail, but not the Grail
itself. Though the novel does question the church and religion, and the suppression
of female divinity within the church, like every well-structured argument, Brown’s
characters concede in many places within the text that religion has done much good
in the world. In fact, a main dilemma in the novel is the fear that exposing the doc-
ument will go farther toward destroying that good than it will in setting other things
right. That conflict is not resolved by the end of the novel.
Controversy over The Da Vinci Code has spawned at least a dozen books and a few
movies. The first film, of course, is the one based on the novel. While filmmakers must
necessarily condense a 454-page novel in order to fit it into a one-and-one-half to two-
hour viewing time, some of the shortcomings are glaring. For instance, the red-eyed
albino has the most beautiful bright blue eyes. Opus Dei and the Vatican are grossly
misrepresented in the film. In the book, Bishop Aringarosa, head of Opus Dei, is a
man with something to lose acting on his own for personal gain—the Vatican has
threatened to remove its support from Opus Dei, and he’s going to blackmail the Vat-
ican with the information he hopes to find. The movie makes it appear that the whole
of Opus Dei and the whole of the Vatican are behind the four plus murders and a con-
spiracy. Brown is much kinder to these two entities, making it clear that the villains
are acting separately from these two bodies.
Of documentaries exploring the ideas in this novel, we’ll confine ourselves to two:
Breaking the Da Vinci Code (Grizzly Adams Productions, 2005) and Beyond the Da
Vinci Code (History Channel, 2005).
The History Channel’s production comes off as the more believable of the two,
delving into both sides of the issue and featuring experts that propound various
views. Breaking the Da Vinci Code attempts to debunk all of the ideas of Mary
Magdalene and the sacred feminine by—basically—nitpicking. This side of the
story claims there was no Priory of Sion in 1099; that it wasn’t formed until 1956.
However, the History Channel does find evidence for this organization as early as
1099. About Gnosticism, Breaking claims that the Gnostic texts that include Mary
Magdalene as an equal to Jesus weren’t written until approximately 300 years
after the rest of the Gospels, therefore weren’t important. Beyond the Da Vinci
Code disagrees, saying the Gnostic Gospels were contemporary with the Gospels
found in the modern-day Bible—they just weren’t found until years later. The
reason for this is that Gnosticism was proclaimed a heresy and followers felt com-
pelled to hide any evidence of their beliefs. Also, Breaking tries to defend its side
of the controversy by saying that books weren’t eliminated from the New Testa-
ment at the Council of Nicea. A moot point—Brown got his dates wrong, but that
does not disprove the sacred feminine a part of early Christianity. The fact remains
that gospels were eliminated from the New Testament about half a century later
and the Gnostic texts were indeed among those. Art historians, though, back up
one aspect of debunking the da Vinci conspiracy of couching pagan symbolism in
his art, as well as painting Mary instead of John at the right hand of Jesus. In
journals of Leonardo da Vinci, they say, can be found notes on his strict adher-
ence to compositional techniques. Also, that he painted many of his younger male
subjects looking feminine to emphasize their extreme youth. For instance, the fact
that some of these figures do not have beards is because they are as yet too young
to grow them. A point well taken. The paintings of The Last Supper shown in any
 NEW AGE LITERATURE 693

of these three movies show Jesus himself with a face as feminine-looking as John’s
(or Mary’s).
A major theme in the New Age thriller, Angels and Demons (2000), Dan Brown’s
“prequel” to his Da Vinci Code, is science versus religion. Father Vetra, a Catholic
priest and quantum physicist, attempts to reconcile God (religion) and science. He’s
used a particle accelerator in order to isolate the smallest particle into light/photons,
recreates the Big Bang and creates matter (actually, antimatter) with this energy. He
believes that he’s proved the existence of God with his experiments—connecting to
two New Age themes: that we are co-creators with God, and the theory that matter
is energy.
Unfortunately, he’s found dead at the opening of the novel. Branded into his chest
is the word Illuminati, the name of a secret society of scientists formed around the
time of Galileo to safely discuss scientific matters labeled as heresy by the church.
An assassin, who believes he’s a descendant of one of the Illuminati’s number, steals
this canister of antimatter for purposes of destroying the Catholic Church. (If the
antimatter comes into contact with matter, there will be an explosion that will
destroy nine city blocks.) This time the artist whose clues Langdon follows is
Bernini, the sculptor’s statues pointing the way across Rome to the ancient Illumi-
nati lair that Langdon and his lovely young acquaintance—again the daughter of
the murder victim—must find to capture the mastermind of the plot and retrieve the
antimatter before a timer goes off. Ancient arcane symbols of the Illuminati and its
offspring—the Masons—are what Langdon and Vittoria Vetra must decode before
they even discover that they need to follow the statues.
Channeling. Echo Bodine and Sylvia Browne are psychics who extend very similar
messages. Both write books not only to explain psychic phenomena, but also to
teach readers how to develop their own psychic talents, often called channeling.
They have so much in common, in fact, that Browne is one of the persons Bodine
lists in her dedication in The Gift.
At the age of 17, Echo Bodine learned that she had psychic powers, as well as
innate gift for healing. “Echo Bodine discovered at age 17 that she has psychic pow-
ers and the gift of healing” (New World Library). She’s appeared on Sally Jesse
Raphael, Sightings, Encounters, and other national TV shows and even as the cover
story for an April 1992 issue of Corporate Report (New World Library). Bodine,
author of eight books on psychic phenomenon, was recently featured along with
other psychics in Minneapolis’ New Age newspaper Edge Life, giving predictions
for 2007. Here is part of what she had to say:

It seems to be a year of resolution in many areas, and it has to do with finding a whole
new way of approaching things. We’ve heard a lot about the feminine energy these last
few years and I see it being more noticeable than ever before in the new year. Women
and men both will be using their intuition. We’ve come to see that our intellect alone
can’t bring about the changes we need.
I’ve seen an obvious movement in the last five years to get people to pay more atten-
tion to the still small voice within and we’re going to be reaping rewards from that in
this new year. It’s the new order of things. (Edge Life, Jan. 2007, 14)

Bodine tells us in The Key (2002) that there are four types of psychic awareness:
clairvoyance, the ability to see the future or spirits; clairaudience, the ability to hear
the unseen; clairsentience, being able to feel presences or people’s auras; and clair-
gustance, the ability to smell such things (10). Bodine makes a distinction between
694 NEW AGE LITERATURE

ghosts and spirits, claiming that ghosts prefer to hold on to their former lives and
identity. Many are filled with self-pity, anger, resentments, fear, or self-loathing.
Often they are afraid to go into the light after death for fear of punishment for what
they’ve done in this life, or because they are attached to certain people or locations
they don’t wish to leave. Also she states possession is possible, especially by ghosts
of people that were alcohol or drug addicted in life. They like to take over the bod-
ies of living alcoholics or addicts to feel the high. Spirits, however, are evolved
beings that come to earth to guide us. They may be departed family members, or
they may be other entities whose work on the other side is to help those on the
earth-plane (Bodine, 2002). Sylvia Browne agrees with the spirit guide concept, and
she has much the same to say about ghosts. Possession, however, she denies vehe-
mently as “a physical and spiritual impossibility” (Browne, 2006, 92).
Like most New Age adherents, both Bodine and Browne believe that we’ve all
lived before and that those past lives can affect us in this life. As in many traditional
religions, the belief is that the individual returns to earth again and again to learn,
and to perfect spiritually. Browne, however, discusses reincarnation in every one of
her books. She asserts that we incarnate on earth in order to experience and over-
come negativity. The subject is treated in depth in the 2001 title Past Lives, Future
Healing. She recounts case histories in which events in past lives have affected per-
sons in the present incarnation. For instance, in one such chapter, she tells the story
of Camille, who came to Browne for help with chronic lower back and hip pain.
Sylvia regressed Camille to a past life in 1851 in which she was traveling by covered
wagon and the train was attacked by a hostile tribe. “Arrows pierced Camille’s
lower back and ‘left hip.’” In another life, the same woman was thrown from a
horse and “her hip and lower spine were shattered . . .” (Browne, 2001, 160).
Her 2006 book Insight: Case Files from the Psychic World is a summation of her
50 years working as a psychic. Born on October 19, 1936, in Kansas City, Missouri,
she had her first psychic vision when she was three, and met her spirit guide,
Francine, when she was eight. This was terrifying to Browne, but her grandmother,
Ada Coil, was also psychic and guided Sylvia to make use of her gift. During her
college years she feared that these voices she heard from Francine and other spirits
proved she was schizophrenic. She says that a psychiatrist diagnosed her as not
schizophrenic but psychic. She started a teaching career at the age of 19, but later
became a full-time psychic reader (Browne, 2006, 17–24).
Browne describes heaven in The Other Side and Back (2000) as “A breathtaking
infinity of mountains, and oceans, and vast gardens and forests . . . The landscape
with brilliant design and variety . . . temples, concert halls, courtyards, sports are-
nas . . . and homes to meet every presence’s personal preference” (Browne, 2000, 5).
Criticisms arise from many quarters, especially from James Randi, a stage magi-
cian, and Robert Lancaster, whose Web sites James Randi Educational Foundation
www.randi.org/ and StopSylviaBrowne.com (respectively) are devoted to disproving
Sylvia Browne’s psychic claims.
Browne has 115 titles to her credit, including audio books and translations of her
works. She also advances the cause of the female principle, devoting a book apiece
to Mother God and Father God.
Expanding Consciousness—Maximizing Human Potential. Another author who success-
fully employed fiction to convey spiritual messages is James Redfield, whose
contributions to environmental and humanitarian causes is extensive, and has
resulted in Humanitarian of the Year awards from Habitat for Humanity and the
 NEW AGE LITERATURE 695

International New Thought Alliance, and in Wisdom Media Group’s Worldview

Award (enlightenment).
His Celestine Prophecy (1993) is a fictional search in South America for some scrolls
that are legended to hold nine important spiritual insights. Similar to the later Da Vinci
Code, these insights are so valued that many will kill for them. The lead character hears
about these manuscripts and travels to Peru to search for them in a story in which spir-
itual insights are constantly revealed. Synchronicity continually pops up—beginning
with affordable airline tickets. Throughout his journey, revelations abound and he
begins to see through the fabric of existence. Redfield’s gone on to write other such
tales, including The Tenth Insight (1996) and The Secret of Shambala (1999).
Then, in 2002 he teamed up with Michael Murphy, a founder of the Esalen New
Age community in California and author of Golf in the Kingdom, and documentary
filmmaker Sylvia Timbers to pen God and the Evolving Universe. Their purpose can
be best summed up thus:

For millennia, poets have envisioned times and places in which people lived with joy-
ous accord. Philosophers have long dreamt of good societies. And activists in many
fields have embodied such dreams in programs for creative cultural change. We believe
that the aspiration for social transformation implicit in such visions and activities is
essential to the greater life pressing to be born in us. Our ego-transcendent nature, our
larger self, has a fundamental urge to help further the world’s advance. This drive, this
call, has long been expressed in the dreams of humankind. (Redfield, Murphy, and
Timbers, 2002, 157)

One message of this book, along with Deepak Chopra’s The Book of Secrets and
Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth, is that in order to experience creation to the fullest,
and to actualize a heaven on earth, we must transcend the ego and operate from the
pure Being that is behind the ego. Here, ego is not equal to conceit. Ego is a false
but very necessary self the soul must don in order to maneuver on the physical
plane. However, separation generates the feelings of envy, anger, and fear that lead
to war and atrocities when individuals conceive of the ego as being the true and only
self. In fact, they all warn us that the planet is in such dire straits that humankind
must evolve or die.
Evolution is recounted in God and the Evolving Universe from the Big Bang,
through animal and human evolution, to the evolutions of art, philosophy, religions,
and societies, and the authors say it all culminates in evolution of spirit. Similar
concerns are voiced in Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth (2005). Tolle espouses being
present in the moment.
Tolle, in A New Earth, explains how the ego comes into being. The ego attaches
itself to and therefore identifies with “things.”

When a young child learns that a sequence of sounds produced by the parents’ vocal
cords is his or her name, the child begins to equate a word, which in the mind
becomes a thought, with who he or she is. At that stage, some children refer to them-
selves in the third person. ‘Johnny is hungry.’ Soon after, they learn the magic word
‘I’ and equate it with their name, which they have already equated with who they are.
Then other thoughts come and merge with the original I-thought. The next step are
thoughts of me and mine to designate things that are somehow a part of ‘I.’ This
identification with objects, which means investing things, but ultimately thoughts
that represent things, with a sense of self, thereby deriving an identity from them.
696 NEW AGE LITERATURE

When ‘my’ toy breaks or is taken away, intense suffering arises. Not because of any
intrinsic value the toy has . . . but because of the thought of ‘mine.’ The toy becomes
part of the child’s developing sense of self of ‘I.’
. . . My toy later becomes my car, my house, my clothes and so on. I try to find
myself in things but never quite make it and end up losing myself in them. This is the
fate of ego. (Tolle, 2005, 35)

He explains the pain-body, the painful emotions carried since childhood, and
demonstrates that it is not the emotions alone that are carried and block pure
Presence in each moment, but the thoughts that accompany and shape the emotion.
The pain-body, he says, becomes addicted to the chemicals that emotion and
thought produce, and, usually totally unaware, persons draw negative situations to
themselves to feed the pain-body’s addiction. He blames identification with “things”
(which include thought patterns) for all the wars, atrocities, and damage to the envi-
ronment that has been perpetrated. Not only do we identify with objects, but we
can also identify with a group, religion, nation, or cause. That in itself is not a bad
thing, but the idea of making “me” right and “you” wrong is an identity the ego
can attach to and feel the need to strengthen.
His ideas about ego have much in common with Chopra’s; it is a false self, one
necessary for survival in a physical existence. Chopra tells us:

The ego, we are told, blinds us with its constant demands, its greed, selfishness and
insecurity. That is a common theme but a mistaken one, because throwing the ego into
the dark, making it an enemy, only creates more division and fragmentation. If there is
one reality, it must be all-inclusive. The ego can’t be thrown out any more than desire
can be thrown out. (Chopra, 2004, 25)

Bibliography
Albanese, Catherine L. The Magical Staff: Quantum Healing in the New Age. In Perspectives
on the New Age. James A. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton, eds. Albany, NY: State Uni-
versity of New York Press, 1992.
Aldred, Lisa. “Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun Dances: New Age Commercialization of
Native American Spirituality.” American Indian Quarterly 24.3 http://www.demo/
american_indian_quarterly (2000).
Bach, Richard. Jonathan Livingston Seagull. New York: Macmillan, 1970.
Basil, Robert. Introduction. In Not Necessarily the New Age. Robert Basil, ed. New York:
Prometheus, 1988.
Beyond the Da Vinci Code, DVD. History Channel. A&E Entertainment. 2005.
Breaking the Da Vinci Code, DVD, directed by David Priest. Grizzly Adams Productions.
2005.
Brown, Dan. Angels and Demons. New York: Pocket Books, 2000.
________. The Da Vinci Code. New York: Doubleday, 2003.
Brown, Susan Love. Baby Boomers, American Character and the New Age: A Synthesis. In
Perspectives on the New Age. James A. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton, eds. Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press, 1992.
Browne, Sylvia, and Lindsay Harrison. Insight: Case Files From the Psychic World. New
York: Dutton, 2006.
———. The Other Side and Back. New York: Signet, 2000.
———. Past Lives, Future Healing. New York: New American Library, 2001.
Browne, Sylvia, and Antoinette May. Adventures of a Psychic. Carlsbad: Hay House, 1990.
Byrne, Rhonda. The Secret. New York: Atria Books, 2006.
 NEW AGE LITERATURE 697

Caldecott, Stratford. “An Approach to the New Age.” Catholic Culture. Crux Publications
Ltd. 26 June 2002. Ebscohost http://www.search.ebscohost.com.
Chopra, Deepak. The Book of Secrets. New York: Harmony Books, 2004.
Clark, Jerome, and Aidan Kelly. New Age Encyclopedia. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, Inc.,
1990.
________. “New Thought and the New Age.” In Perspectives on the New Age. James A. Lewis
and J. Gordon Melton, eds. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992.
Covington, Diane. “The Unseen Life That Dreams Us.” The Sun. Chapel Hill, NC: The Sun
Publishing Company, 2007.
Da Vinci Code, The. DVD, directed by Ron Howard. Columbia Pictures and Image
Entertainment, 2006.
Diem, Andrea Grace. “Imagining India: the Influence of Hinduism on the New Age
Movement.” In Perspectives on the New Age. James A. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton,
eds. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992.
Echo Bodine’s Bio Page. New World Library. www.newworldlibrary.com/client/client_pages/
authorbios/bios/bodine.cfm.
Enlightenment. “James Redfield Biography and Resources.” http://www.wie.org.bios.
________. “Deepak Chopra Biography and Resources.” http://www.wie.org.bios.
Evolve! “Divine Magic.” Minneapolis, MN: Magus Books, 2007.
________. “The Powerful Process of Gratitude.” Minneapolis, MN: Magus Books, 2007.
Freke, Timothy, and Gandy, Peter. Jesus and the Lost Goddess. New York: Three Rivers
Press, 2001.
Garrett, Lynn. “The Secret Bashing Begins.” Publishers Weekly 28 March 2007.
http://www.publishersweekly.com.
Kayle, Hillary S. “Inner Traditions/Bear and Company Da Vinci Code Redux.” Publishers
Weekly 6 September 2004. Ebscohost http://www.search.ebscohost.com.
Keohane, Steve. “The Age-Old New Age Movement.” BibleProbe. http://bibleprobe.com/
new_age.htm.
Lowerison, Jean. “The Reel Story.” San Diego Metropolitan Magazine April 2007.
http://www.sandiegometro.com.
Melton, J. Gordon. “A History of the New Age Movement.” In Not Necessarily the New
Age. Robert Basil, ed. New York: Prometheus, 1988.
Miejan, Tim, ed. Edge Life. Minneapolis, MN: Leap Publications, January 2007.
Monaghan, John. Detroit Free Press, in Rotten Tomatoes, 04/10/07.
Redfield, James, Michael Murphy, and Silvia Timbers. God and the Evolving Universe. New
York: Tarcher/Putnam, 2001.
Redfield, James. The Celestine Prophecy. New York: Warner Books, 1993.
Roberts, Jane. The Seth Material. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1970.
Roberts, Jane. Seth Speaks. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1972.
Rosen, Judith. “Casting a Wider Spell.” Publishers Weekly 1 September 2003.
http://www.publishersweekly.com
The Secret. DVD. Directed by Drew Heriot. Prime Time Productions, 2006.
Shirley MacLaine’s official Web site, “The Book the Camino by Shirley,” http://www.shirley
maclaine.com
Tolle, Eckhart. The Power of Now. Novato: New World Library, 1999.
________. A New Earth. New York: Dutton, 2005.
What the Bleep do We Know? DVD, directed by William Arntz, Betsy Chasse, and Mark
Vincente. Captured Light Industries and Lord of the Wind Films LLC, 2005.

Further Reading
Barrett, Jayme. Feng Shui Your Life. New York: Sterling, 2003; Braden, Gregg. The Isaiah
Effect. New York: Harmony Books, 2000; Bradley, Marion Zimmer. The Mists of Avalon.
New York: Ballantine, 1984; Browne, Sylvia. Mother God. Carlsbad: Hay House, 2004;
698 NEW AGE LITERATURE

Chopra, Deepak. Creating Affluence: Wealth Consciousness in the Field of Possibilities. San
Rafael: New World Library, 1993; Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade. New York:
HarperCollins, 1987; Freke, Timothy, and Gandy, Peter. The Jesus Mysteries. New York:
Three Rivers Press, 2000; Gawain, Shakti. Living in the Light. Novato: New World Library,
1998; Myss, Caroline. Anatomy of the Spirit. New York: Harmony Books, 1996; Starhawk
and Hillary Valentine. The Twelve Wild Swans. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001;
Walsch, Neale Donald. Communion with God. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2000; West,
Kate. The Real Witches Craft. London: HarperElement, 2005; Wilson, Colin. From Atlantis
to the Sphinx. New York: Fromm International, 1997.
DEBBIE K. TRANTOW
O

OCCULT/SUPERNATURAL LITERATURE
Definition. Supernatural fiction is a generic term that encompasses a wide range
of fields, almost all of which deal with matters that defy science and can be classi-
fied as “the unknown.” The phrase “supernatural fiction” has fallen out of common
usage in recent years, subsumed within the marketing categories of horror or
fantasy, but the categories that make up the field remain popular and easily defin-
able. These include such basic icons as ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and zombies
plus those that fall under the more specific term of occult fiction.
Since some occult knowledge may have a scientific rationale, the occult may be
seen as covering a borderland between the natural and supernatural. It can include
those subjects that to the majority of us seem strange, such as fortune-telling or
divination, but which to practitioners are completely natural. What distinguishes
the natural from the supernatural is often a matter of faith and perception and
consequently the borders of the supernatural realm are vague and, to the influen-
tial mind, believable. It highlights the facts that those things that may be perceived
as supernatural—such as hauntings, visions, curses, or dreams-come-true—may
be psychological manifestations and reflections of a tortured, drugged, or
demented imagination. All too often in fiction the supernatural and madness form
an unholy bond.
While supernatural fiction is broad enough to encompass fantasy fiction, by con-
vention the two tend to be kept apart. Supernatural fiction is set in the world we
know upon which occult or strange events intrude. Fantasy allows for another
world in which stories may be set entirely or in part and which may be governed by
rules totally alien to our world.
History. The supernatural features in all of the world’s ancient legends, but as the
world of ghosts, gods, and demons was a central part of cultural beliefs these tales
were simply reflecting an interpretation of the world and were not intended as fic-
tion. These ancient fears of the unknown are deeply inbred and are the basis for the
popularity of supernatural fiction. Supernatural manifestations appear in many
700 OCCULT/SUPERNATURAL LITERATURE

WHAT DOES OCCULT MEAN?

The world “occult” comes from the Latin occultus, meaning hidden or concealed, a secret not
to be divulged. So while matters occult may still be unknown to many, they are known to a
select few. Central to the occult, therefore, is secret knowledge, which may take the form of
magic or demonology or witchcraft or other religious beliefs, such as theosophy or obeah.

early works of fiction, such as “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” (c1392) by Geoffrey
Chaucer (c1343–1400) or Caesar’s Ghost in Julius Caesar (c1599) by William
Shakespeare (c1564–1616), but these were plot devices used as portents and were
not central to the plot. We have to wait for the Age of Enlightenment to allow minds
to view the supernatural logically and objectively before it can be reintegrated into
fiction. During this transition the progenitor of the true ghost story appeared, “A
True Relation of the Apparition of Mrs. Veal” (1706) by Daniel Defoe
(c1660–1731), an account of an apparent haunting in Canterbury, Kent, in 1705.
Defoe’s approach was to render the event in story form and in so doing he set the
prototype for many basic ghost stories. Defoe had a fascination for the supernatu-
ral and his open-mindedness allowed for a more healthy skepticism of the super-
natural, distancing the imagination from belief and allowing more objective
research. Investigations of apparent hauntings have remained fundamental to super-
natural fiction, most notably in one of the most influential of all Victorian ghost sto-
ries, “The Haunted and the Haunters” (1859) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
(1803–1873), which brought together the threads of ghost and occult fiction in a
detailed exploration of a haunting in both rational and imaginative terms.
Gothic Fiction. That ambivalence between logical skepticism and emotional doubt is
what fuels the supernatural tale and led to the eruption of gothic fiction in the late
eighteenth century, starting with the success of The Castle of Otranto (1765) by
Horace Walpole (1717–1797). His attempt at mock medievalism brought with it all
the supernatural trappings of rattling chains, ghostly groans, and spiritual manifes-
tations that remain symbolic of the genre, along with the ghosts being both portents
of doom and a substitute for guilt. The gothic mood prevailed for over 40 years and
its shadow continued to be cast over the Victorian period, influencing the so-called
“penny dreadful” cheap fiction of which Varney the Vampire (1847), attributed to
James Malcolm Rymer (1814–1881), is perhaps the most extreme.
The gothic atmosphere was ideal for the rise in novels of the occult, where those
who dabble in demonology or necromancy suffer the inevitable fate. There was a
rash of deal-with-the-devil stories including Vathek, originally An Arabian Tale
(1786), by William Beckford (1760–1844) and The Monk (1796) by Matthew
Gregory Lewis (1775–1818). While Faust (Part 1, 1808; Part 2, 1832) by Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) may be the best known deal-with-the-devil
story, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Robert Maturin (1780–1824), is
the epitome, regarded by Everett Bleiler as “one of the most remarkable novels in
English and certainly one of the great classics of supernatural fiction” (Bleiler, 1983,
351). It symbolized the figure of the accursed wanderer, which became adopted into
vampire fiction, starting with “The Vampyre” (1819) by John Polidori
(1795–1821). This drew upon Polidori’s mentor, Lord Byron, who became the liv-
ing embodiment of the accursed wanderer, infusing the vampire with the romantic
and tragic image that has remained ever since.
 OCCULT/SUPERNATURAL LITERATURE 701

Bulwer Lytton figured strongly in the development of the occult novel, most
notably with Zanoni (1842) and A Strange Story (1861). Their significance lies in
the degree of detail that Lytton provides, drawn from his own researches into kabal-
listic and eastern religions. Although both suffer from Lytton’s notoriously excessive
prose, they are the prototype of the romantic occult novel which uses genuine
knowledge, rather than speculative, as a source for realistic fantasy.
Psychological Explorations of the Supernatural. The desire for more realism saw a sig-
nificant shift in the supernatural tale during the Victorian period from the gothic
extravaganza towards subtler psychological explorations. Key to this was the Irish
writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873). His early works, such as “The For-
tunes of Sir Robert Ardagh” (1838) and “Schalken the Painter” (1839), followed
the gothic tradition, but with “The Watcher” in Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery
(1851) and especially “Green Tea” (1869), Le Fanu raised the question of whether
the ghosts, visible only to the victim, are real or imagined and, if the latter, whether
they are drug-induced or a prelude to insanity. Le Fanu rightly does not answer these
questions, leaving the reader to decide, and as a consequence he created a whole
new school of ghost story. Sullivan has called it “a thoroughly modern tale” and in
its modernity “unexpectedly daring” (Sullivan, 1978, 12). Charles Dickens
(1812–1870) had recognized that ghosts may as likely be a product of the brain
than of the spirit world; Scrooge remarks that there is “more of gravy than of grave”
about Marley’s ghost in A Christmas Carol (1843), but it was Le Fanu who gave
voice to the dilemma. The concept was developed by others, none better than Henry
James (1843–1916) in “The Turn of the Screw” (1898).
The Golden Age of the Ghost Story. The Victorian age is generally regarded as the
Golden Age of the ghost story, encouraged by the growing interest in spiritualism,
and though it advanced in the capable hands of Le Fanu and others, the basic story
became formulaic. Although there were many talented writers whose stories, indi-
vidually, are of merit, the overall effect began to pall. Nevertheless the field was
notable for the number of women writers who brought characterization and motive
to the stories. In Britain these included Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897), Mary
Molesworth (1839–1921), Charlotte [Mrs J.H.] Riddell (1832–1906) and, arguably
the best of them, Vernon Lee (real name Violet Paget, 1856–1935); plus in America,
where the New England ghost story flourished, Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909),
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911), Mary Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930) and, the
mistress of the ghostly tale, Edith Wharton (1862–1937). In their hands the ghost
story moved away, generally, from a tale of warning to tales of helplessness where
people are trapped by the past. Memories can evoke a potent haunting, especially of
a lost loved one, making the story both poignant and effective.
By the end of the Victorian age the old-style ghost story had fallen out of fashion,
replaced by a demand for more complex stories displaying a deeper understanding
of arcane matters. This took several related forms. The most popular in their day
were the spiritualist fantasies of Marie Corelli (1855–1923), starting with A
Romance of Two Worlds (1886), which propounded a confusing concept of psychic
vision and religious theory but which at the heart dealt with past lives and reincar-
nation. Along similar lines were the theosophical works of Helena Blavatsky
(1831–1891), including her stories in Nightmare Tales (1892), which point to hid-
den masters and secret doctrines.
Linked to this pursuit of arcane knowledge is the antiquarian ghost story. Montague
Rhodes James (1862–1936), Dean of King’s College, Cambridge (and later Provost of
702 OCCULT/SUPERNATURAL LITERATURE

Eton), is generally regarded as the dean of the ghost story, many of which he first
recounted to his students and only later collected in Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary
(1904) and subsequent volumes. James takes the adage that “a little knowledge is a
dangerous thing” to frightening extremes in tales that are seldom traditional ghost sto-
ries but more often related to ancient evils, once trapped but now released by unwary
meddlers. James’s horrors are usually very physical, with plenty of teeth and hair. His
approach of a learned or amateur investigator delving into matters best left alone and
suffering the consequences proved irresistible to others. Not only was he imitated by
fellow antiquarians such as Edmund Gill Swain (1861–1938) and R.H. Malden
(1879–1951) but also by his contemporaries, such as the brothers A.C. Benson
(1862–1925) and E.F. Benson (1867–1940), and his influence continues today.
The Occult Detective. The antiquarian interest also ushered in the dawn of the occult
detective, including Van Helsing in Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker (1847–1912), and
others in the works of Arthur Machen (1863–1947), Algernon Blackwood
(1869–1951), and William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918) with Carnacki the Ghost
Finder (1913). Both Machen and Blackwood were students of the occult, and members
of the kaballistic Order of the Golden Dawn, along with W.B. Yeats and Aleister
Crowley, and they used their knowledge in a remarkable range of fiction. Blackwood,
who was a nature mystic, took this further. Stories such as “The Willows” (in The
Listener, 1907) and those collected in Pan’s Garden (1912) explore man’s place in the
cosmos and his general insignificance against the vast powers of Nature and beyond.
Both Blackwood and Machen influenced the American writer Howard Phillips
Lovecraft (1890–1937). Over time, Lovecraft developed what has since been called
the Cthulhu Mythos, built around the idea that alien god-like entities had once been
either banished from Earth or imprisoned here, from where meddling humans or
some catastrophe may release them. Lovecraft’s vision is a blending of science fic-
tion concepts with supernaturalism; the latter meaning, as Blackwood also per-
ceived it, that everything is natural, but that humans are limited in their
comprehension so that inexplicable events appear to be supernatural. Like M.R.
James, Lovecraft’s work was immensely influential. He encouraged fellow writers to
contribute to his concept of the Elder Gods, among them Frank Belknap Long
(1901–1994), August Derleth (1909–1971), and a young Robert Bloch
(1917–1994). It has continued to remain popular throughout the last five decades
and even attracted contributions by such literary figures as Colin Wilson (1931–)
with The Mind Parasites (1967) as well as influencing such writers as Ramsey
Campbell (1946–) and Brian Lumley (1937–).
The supernatural story remained popular until the 1930s, especially following the
rise of interest in spiritualism after the First World War, with stories by Herbert
Russell Wakefield (1888–1964), Leslie Poles Hartley (1895–1972), Walter de la
Mare (1873–1956), and Oliver Onions (1873–1961). In “The Beckoning Fair One”
(in Widdershins, 1911), Onions created what some regard as “the best classical
ghost story” (Bleiler, 1983, 391). Although on the surface a haunted-house story, it
deftly portrays how the residuum of an evil personality gradually drains that of the
new resident and a new personality emerges. The only spectral manifestations are
sounds, so slight as to be imagined, and with commendable restraint Onions creates
an atmosphere charged with the supernatural.
Supernatural Literature after World War II. The horrors of the Second World War and
the rise of commercialism in the 1940s and 1950s led to a waning of interest in the
supernatural. Only a few writers persevered in Britain, primarily Dennis Wheatley
 OCCULT/SUPERNATURAL LITERATURE 703

MOVIES AND SUPERNATURAL HORROR FICTION

The boom in supernatural horror fiction in the 1970s was encouraged by the cinema, mostly
because of the success of Rosemary’s Baby (1967) by Ira Levin (1929–2007), filmed in 1968,
and The Exorcist (1971) by William Peter Blatty (1928–), filmed in 1973. These introduced a
more violent, physical horror, which made the supernatural more convincing and frightening.
It tapped into a mood that had also regenerated interest in fantasy fiction in the late sixties,
partly because of the hippie fascination with drugs and alternate religions, but also because
of the question of faith at a time when the “God is Dead” movement had taken hold.

(1897–1977) and Robert Aickman (1914–1981). Wheatley’s occult thrillers had

started before the war with The Devil Rides Out (1935) and continued through to
The Irish Witch (1973). In America authors like H.P. Lovecraft, Frank Belknap
Long, Manly Wade Wellman (1903–1986), Robert Bloch, and Ray Bradbury
(1920–) had been published in the pulp magazines, notably Weird Tales, but this
also ceased in the fifties. Although Wellman continued to write weird fiction during
the fifties, along with Joseph Payne Brennan (1918–1990), Charles Beaumont
(1929–1967), and Ray Russell (1924–1999), many writers, including Bloch and
Bradbury, shifted from supernatural fiction to crime and mystery. The spirit of the
supernatural was kept alive chiefly by August Derleth. In partnership with Donald
Wandrei (1908–1997), he established a specialty publishing business, Arkham
House, which reprinted the best of the classic material and encouraged new work.
Stephen King called Derleth “an editor of pure genius” (King, 1981, 284) and the
books he produced during the horror drought of the mid-twentieth century were a
major source of inspiration for the new generation of writers who emerged in the
sixties and seventies.
You could not believe solely in evil without also looking for its counterpart, and
when, in the 1960s and 1970s, the horrors of the Vietnam War were a daily
reminder of the evil that men do, there was some consolation in reading novels of
supernatural horror where the evil might be vanquished. There was not only a rash
of horror films in the seventies, most notably the sequence starting with The Omen
(1976), but there was also a resurgence in supernatural fiction. Blatty believed that
“The Exorcist brought a new legitimacy to the field of horror; in publishing and
film-making parlance, horror was now profitable” (Winter, 1990, 62). Several
authors emerging at that time were ideally placed and equipped to take advantage
of this revival, among them Stephen King (1947–), Peter Straub (1943–), Dean
Koontz (1945–), and Anne Rice (1941–) and their work, and those of their imita-
tors and colleagues, not only dominated the horror boom of the next 20 years, but
remains preeminent among works since 2000.
Trends and Themes. During the seventies the category “horror” emerged as a pub-
lishing niche, subsuming supernatural fiction. The film versions of The Exorcist and
Stephen King’s first novel Carrie (1974; film 1976) had emphasized the graphic
nature of horror over the supernatural, while non-supernatural films like The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre (1974) went for all-out gross and became idiomatic of horror,
which took on terms like splatterpunk or slash-horror.
One of the trends during the seventies and eighties was to blur the boundaries
between themes, creating more doubt and uncertainty about the nature of the inex-
plicable. There is a case to make, for instance, that Carrie is science fiction rather
704 OCCULT/SUPERNATURAL LITERATURE

than supernatural, if one interprets the girl’s psychic power as emanating from
within rather than as the result of a poltergeist.
Three major themes emerged, all with considerable overlap.
1. Magic or strange religion in all its forms, either ancient or black magic, involving
demonic (or angelic) entities and ancient gods. This includes secret cults or hidden
worlds.
2. Apocalyptic fiction. This is closely related to (1) as it usually involves secret
knowledge or the discovery of a lost secret that might give clues to a forthcoming
apocalypse.
3. The undead, principally vampires, but including ghosts, possession by spirits, and
reincarnation.

It is worth looking at these themes in some detail as it highlights the key writers
and trends that developed during the seventies.

Contexts and Issues

(1) Black Magic and the Occult. The rise in interest in satanic and witchcraft fiction
was primarily due to the popularity of the book and film versions of Rosemary’s
Baby and The Exorcist, though it had been gathering pace during the late sixties
with the emergence of the drug culture and the exploration of pagan and other
“New Age” religions. Newfound sexual, moral, and social freedoms in the western
world had caused many to abandon old values, and to those who remained faith-
ful the social order in the late sixties and early seventies must have seemed like the
devil had taken over. The most notorious example was the murders committed by
Charles Manson’s “Family” in August 1969, which were linked to satanic and
apocalyptic beliefs, with Manson being referred to variously as “God” or “Satan”
by his followers. The films in turn had their influence. A 17-year-old youth found
guilty of murdering a 9-year-old girl in October 1975, in York, England, claimed
he was “possessed” after seeing The Exorcist. A survey conducted by Birmingham
University, England, in 1971 concluded:

The decline of institutional religion seems to have been offset by the growth of ‘super-
stitions’ or non-Christian beliefs about the supernatural or the meaning of life, and by
the rise of a large number of cults such as spiritualism, theosophy, scientology and the
flying saucer movement. (The Times, 10 April 1971, 2)

The fascination for works of the occult increased. Some were relatively mild, usu-
ally set in a remote town where innocents unwittingly stumble upon devil worship-
pers or other religious cults. New England proved a popular locale for such stories.
Harvest Home (1973) by Thomas Tryon (1926–1991), became the prototype novel
of this approach in the seventies. It was a form parodied, to some degree, by John
Updike (1932–) in The Witches of Eastwick (1984). Charles L. Grant (1942–2006)
developed a series of novels set in the fictional New England town of Oxrun Station
(connected series also became a trend during the seventies), starting with The Hour
of the Oxrun Dead (1977), which involved a covert group of Satanists. John Saul
(1942–) worked a variant on the theme in Cry for the Strangers (1979) in which a
jealously guarded town proves a haven to an emotionally disturbed boy, though all
other “strangers” start to disappear. Places of learning also seem ripe for satanic
activities, and this dates back long before the popularity of J.K. Rowling’s Harry
 OCCULT/SUPERNATURAL LITERATURE 705

Potter books. In Conjure Wife (1943; expanded, 1952), Fritz Leiber has a college
professor discover that his wife is a witch who has been protecting him with her
magic. More recently Edward Lee (1957–), one of the writers of more extreme hor-
ror, has a college as the focus for a supernatural force in Coven (1991), while in Uni-
versity (1994; aka Night School) Bentley Little (1960–) has an entire college campus
gradually meld into a tangible supernatural evil.
Cults, usually satanic, became a stock item, especially after the success of the
British cult film, The Wicker Man (1973) from the script by Anthony Shaffer
(1926–2001). That film involved no supernatural events, but followed the investi-
gations of a policeman into the disappearance of a girl on a remote island, where he
falls foul of a pagan group. In The Night Church (1982), Whitley Strieber (1945–)
depicted a cult that used selective breeding to produce Satanists. In Servants of the
Twilight (1984), Dean Koontz depicts a cult that has helped deliver a son of Satan,
while in Hell’s Creation (1995) by John Russo (1939–), a mother is so convinced
her newborn child is the son of Satan that she gives him to Satanists. Another
Satanist cult appears in Once Upon a Halloween (2000) by Richard Laymon
(1947–2001). In both Ceremonies (1984) by T.E.D. Klein (1947–) and The Song of
Kali (1985) by Dan Simmons (1948–) people stumble across plans by cults to res-
urrect ancient gods. Ray Garton (1962–), renowned for the extreme physical and
sexual imagery in his books, depicts a violently evil Manson-like cult leader called
Mace in Crucifax (1988), a novel that proved so explicit that it was heavily edited
with the uncut version appearing from a small press as Crucifax Autumn (1988).
Mace is not entirely human, but Garton created him as the embodiment of all the
misery and disaffection experienced by youngsters when they are abused or aban-
doned by their parents. Mace becomes a revenge figure against inhumanity.
Running alongside works of satanic interest have been those exploring both old
and new gods. Some of this has arisen because of the New Age movement and an
interest in Celtic and other religions. Witchcraft is central to Dark Sister (1992) by
Graham Joyce (1954–). John Farris (1936–) produced what many regard as one of
the best novels to explore voodoo, its African origins, and its impact in the United
States, in the southern gothic novel All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By (1977;
aka Bad Blood). In Darkness Comes (1984; aka Darkfall), Dean R. Koontz has the
police confront a Haitian priest who uses voodoo to summon creatures to do his
killings. The venerable pulp writer Hugh B. Cave (1910–2004), who lived in the
West Indies and had direct experience of voodoo ceremonies, incorporated much
authentic detail in several of his novels including Legion of the Dead (1979), The
Evil (1981), and Disciples of Dread (1989). Inevitably these novels also feature
zombies, favorites of the cinema ever since the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead,
from a script by John Russo and George Romero. Russo returned to the zombie
theme on several occasions, including Inhuman (1986) and Living Things (1988). A
more thought-provoking use of voodoo occurs in Darker Angels (1997) by Somtow
Sucharitkul (1952–) under his alias S.P. Somtow. Set during the American Civil War
it develops a deep understanding of the voodoo religion and the role it might play
in resurrecting the dead.
Other ancient gods feature increasingly in new fiction. The spirits of the sea are
worshipped in The Devil’s Churn (1996) by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (1960–) while
in Forests of the Heart (2000) Charles de Lint (1951–) explores the conflict between
Celtic spirits that have migrated to America and come into conflict with ancient
American powers. A similar idea was explored in American Gods (2001) by Neil
706 OCCULT/SUPERNATURAL LITERATURE

Gaiman (1960–) in which various ethnic deities have accompanied their emigrants
to America. Other forms of mythical spirits, alien though not necessarily harmful
and usually in forests, are revealed in Wildwood (1986) by John Farris, Campbell
Wood (1986) by Al Sarrantonio (1952–), and The Midnight Sun (1990) by Ramsey
Campbell.
All of these works explore our primitive desire for gods or spirits to help us cope
with life. Michael Jordan observed that the world is a frightening place and that if
we create gods, the “responsibility for our actions is taken from us and given into
the hands of an all-powerful if unseen being” (Jordan, 1992, viii). In a series of sto-
ries collected in Deathbird Stories (1975), Harlan Ellison (1934–) considered how
we have abandoned the old gods and created new ones, spirits borne of greed and
violence. In “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” a woman about to be murdered calls
upon the spirit of violence to save her. In “Basilisk” the gods of war manipulate
humans for their own ends, while in “The Deathbird” we discover that God has
been lying all along and it is time to atone. These stories explore humanity’s spiri-
tual reconciliation with the world.
Among conspiracy theorists there has long been a belief that it is not gods but
Secret Orders that control history. These date back at least as far as the Rosicrucians
and also occur as the Secret Masters in Theosophy. Such secret organizations need
not be supernatural. Notable recent examples may be found in The Illuminatus
Trilogy (1975) by Robert Shea (1933–1994) and Robert Anton Wilson (1932–) and
The Da Vinci Code (2003) by Dan Brown (1964–). Mark Frost (1953–) combined
the conspiracy theories with the supernatural in The List of 7 (1993) where Arthur
Conan Doyle becomes involved in a quest to unearth a secret society that is using
supernatural means to take over the world. John Crowley (1942–) questioned the
very nature of history in Aegypt (1987) and, in its sequels Love and Sleep (1994)
and Daemonomania (2000), charted the rise of cults and the possible end of the
world. The sequence may be described as fantasy, but its use of alchemical imagery
and metaphysical rationalization places the books firmly in the world of the occult.
The supernatural versions of these works posit some form of secret race or elder
gods within our world, the idea most notably explored by H.P. Lovecraft and per-
petuated by many of his disciples, including Robert Bloch, whose Strange Eons
(1979) charts a coming apocalypse as the Elder Gods prepare to return. Lovecraft’s
fiction aside, there are other forms of hidden worlds. T.M. Wright developed a
sequence of books exploring the lost Earth Children, an ancient race surviving hid-
den in America, which form the basis of mysterious events in Strange Seed (1978;
revised, 2006), Nursery Tale (1982), The Children of the Island (1983), The People
of the Dark (1985), and most recently Laughing Man (2003). Vampires may also
exist as secret societies as explored further below.
Dean Koontz introduced his own ancient race in Twilight Eyes (1987) in which
the protagonist has the ability to see “goblins,” evil creatures who masquerade as
humans. Goblins were created, genetically, by a very ancient advanced civilization,
but while that race was wiped out in a nuclear war, the goblins have survived and
cause most of the woes on Earth.
Koontz sets this story for the most part in a travelling carnival, which is another
form of secret world much beloved by writers. It was perhaps most wonderfully
evoked in Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) though its
prototype was The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935) by Charles G. Finney (1905–1985).
The carnival is the lure for the unwary who, once they have arrived, are trapped by
 OCCULT/SUPERNATURAL LITERATURE 707

their desires or failings. Others who have found evil lurking in the sideshow include
Al Sarrantonio in Totentanz (1985) and Thomas Monteleone (1946–) in The Mag-
nificent Gallery (1987). All of these tap into our dreams for wish-fulfillment. Indeed,
all occult novels, especially those involving black magic, explore the mortal desire
to reach out for forbidden fruit. If occult fiction teaches us anything, it is to know
our place in the world.
(2) Apocalyptic Fiction. The coming end of the millennium brought forth considerably
more apocalyptic fiction than usual, and this time a high proportion looked to
Armageddon and a religious apocalypse. Most significant in this respect was The
Omen (1976) by David Seltzer (1940–), the book based on his own film script, and
the seminal work on the Antichrist.
The interest in apocalyptic fiction had been rekindled a few years earlier by James
Blish (1921–1975) in Black Easter (1967) and its sequel The Day After Judgement
(1971). This developed from the “God-is-dead” belief prevalent in the sixties. In this
novel a black magician is commissioned to let demons loose on the world for one
night to cause as much chaos as possible. The demons refuse to return to Hell and
a satanic city is created on Earth. With God dead, Satan finds he has to fill that role.
Stephen King brought a modern idiom to the idea in The Stand (1978), where a
plague wipes out much of humankind and Satan, manifested as the Walking Dude,
recruits an army for the last battle. George R.R. Martin (1948–) took the idea fur-
ther by linking Satanism and rock music in Armageddon Rag (1983), while in Swan
Song (1987) by Robert McCammon (1952–) a nuclear war not only virtually wipes
out humankind but unleashes an ancient demon determined to take control. Charles
L. Grant used the approaching Millennium as the basis for a sequence of four
books—Symphony (1997), In the Mood (1998), Chariot (1998), and Riders in the
Sky (1999)—each volume following the impact of one of the Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse. In quieter mode in The Last Coin (1988), James Blaylock (1950—)
looks to the coming Armageddon triggered once an obsessive collector has amassed
all the silver coins Judas received in payment for betraying Jesus.
The Millennium was also the catalyst for two books by Thomas Monteleone,
which blend science and the supernatural. In Blood of the Lamb (1993) those seek-
ing to engineer the Second Coming clone a human from the blood on the Turin
Shroud. He becomes a Roman Catholic priest with the power of healing and the
ability to raise the dead. In the sequel, The Reckoning (1999), the priest has been
elected Pope and subverts Catholicism to his own ends.
John Shirley (1953–) has always been an author to push the limits. In Demons
(2000; expanded, 2002), he lets an army of demons loose on the world in the near
future. This is no ordinary apocalyptic novel. Shirley looks deep into our souls and
at the consequences of our actions or inactions in bringing the Earth to its current
state. It is as much a mystical novel as supernatural, exploring consciences and moti-
vations in a world of destruction.
British writer Garry Kilworth (1941–) saw the approaching Millennium as a
moment when the war between Heaven and Hell broke loose on Earth. In Angel
(1993), angels have been sent to Earth to destroy escaped demons, though they do
not discriminate between demons and humans. In its sequel, Archangel (1994), a
Heavenly force tries to protect a convocation of religious leaders seeking to obtain
world peace, while Hell does its best to destroy it.
Perhaps the ultimate apocalypse is when Hell breaks loose. The idea of Hell as a
real place to visit dates back at least as far as the Greek legend of Orpheus in the
708 OCCULT/SUPERNATURAL LITERATURE

Underworld and Dante’s Inferno (written c1307). In The Sentinel (1974) by Jeffrey
Konvitz (1944—), a Roman Catholic priest is the guardian of the doorway to Hell
and the time has come for the Church to seek a replacement. Dante’s version of Hell
was revisited in Inferno (1976) by Larry Niven (1938— ) and Jerry Pournelle
(1933—), but an even more disturbing Hell was created by Edward Lee in City
Infernal (2001) and Infernal Angel (2003). Here a young girl discovers she has the
power to enter Hell where she goes in search of her dead sister. Lee creates a gothic,
Bosch-like Hellscape, but also infuses the book with sharp satire and humor,
unusual among his works.
The increase in apocalyptic fiction has been responding partly to a market need
encouraged by the Millennium, but the number and content of the novels suggest a
deeper need, one related to the growing interest in occult novels, namely that the
world has become a more violent and dangerous place and that retribution is nigh.
(3) Vampires and the Undead. The fascination with the undead, especially vampires,
has grown significantly since the seventies to the extent that it might be considered
a genre in its own right. Vampire fiction has always been popular but it received a
double boost with the success of both Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot in 1975 and Anne
Rice’s Interview With the Vampire in 1976. Salem’s Lot successfully transferred the
horrors of Dracula’s Transylvania to small-town Maine, but it is Rice’s novel, the
first in her Lestat series, that has had the most impact. In this and the many sequels,
especially The Vampire Lestat (1984) and Queen of the Damned (1988), Rice cre-
ated an entire culture of vampires living, like a secret society, hidden within our
own. The use of New Orleans as a decadent setting is also evocative of an ancient
world. Rice portrays the vampires as a race with their own form of honor, building
upon the accursed wanderer of Polidori’s original image, but now far more multi-
layered, and with overt eroticism.
While Rice portrayed vampires sympathetically, they remained otherworldly. In
The Dracula Tape (1975), Fred Saberhagen (1930–) sought to humanize them. He
revealed the true story of Dracula as recounted by the Count himself. Saberhagen
showed that Stoker’s account of him, via Jonathan Harker, was misrepresentative
and that vampires are misunderstood, being as equally forces for good as for evil.
On its own, Saberhagen’s novel is an ingenious and, at times, credible account.
However, Saberhagen continued the series, starting with The Holmes Dracula File
(1976), with Dracula an adventurer combating various villains, which demoted the
Count to a pulp hero.
The idea of seeing humanity through a vampire’s perception, however, caught on.
Two further series appeared, simultaneously, which traced a romanticized image of
the vampire through history. In The Black Castle (1978), Les Daniels (1943–) intro-
duced Don Sebastian de Dellanueva, a vampire living in Spain in 1496, at the time
of the Inquisition. Sebastian is appalled at the horrors committed by mortals against
their own kind. This becomes the central theme to the series with Sebastian wit-
nessing various atrocities committed by humankind over the centuries. In The Silver
Skull (1979) it’s the conquistadores decimating the natives in the New World; in
Citizen Vampire (1981) it’s the horrors of the French Revolution, while in No Blood
Spilled (1991) it’s the violence of British colonial India. In all of these books, Don
Sebastian is in search of arcane knowledge and a quest for Truth and discovers that
humanity has its own thirst for blood.
The Saint-Germain Chronicles by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (1942–) follows a simi-
lar outline. Yarbro has adapted an historical character, Le Comte de Saint-Germain,
 OCCULT/SUPERNATURAL LITERATURE 709

who lived in the eighteenth century and who claimed to have discovered the elixir
of life and to have lived for centuries. Yarbro treated the Count’s elixir of life as
blood itself. He was an ideal choice for an honorable vampire, not least because one
claim concerning his origin was that he was a Prince of Transylvania. She intro-
duced the Count in Hotel Transylvania (1978), which developed as much historical
information as we have about him with a storyline featuring Satanists at the court
of King Louis XV. Thereafter the 20 books at present in the series range from
ancient Rome (Blood Games, 1979) to the First World War (Tempting Fate, 1982)
and many points in between.
The novels by Rice, Daniels, and Yarbro cover a vast timescale. By contrast,
despite the title, The Vampire Tapestry (1980) by Suzy McKee Charnas (1939–) is
a series of snapshots in the life of a vampire, currently masquerading as a professor
of anthropology, Dr. Weyland, who has no memory of his previous existences prior
to various hibernations. Weyland knows of no others of his kind and tries to keep
his true nature a secret, but when it is discovered he has to go on the run.
In They Thirst (1981) by Robert McCammon a vampire lord, Count Vulkan,
descends on Los Angeles with his evil cohorts, intent on attacking and converting
all of the city’s inhabitants to vampires, passing the vampire virus on like a plague.
In The Hunger (1981), Whitley Strieber reverses the situation. His solitary, preda-
tory female must hunt for her mate for it is only the female vampire that is ageless.
Although the males do not die they wither, surviving as mere shadows. This novel
was a one-off until Streiber returned to his female vampire in The Last Vampire
(2001), while in Lilith’s Dream (2002), he developed the series by resurrecting the
world’s oldest vampire, Lilith. Throughout these books the vampire is shown as
superior but persecuted. Indeed, the vampire has become a symbol for many perse-
cuted minorities and Streiber’s books struck a chord with the feminist movement.
J. Gordon Melton noted: “In contrast with the powerful male vampire, the female
vampire of the 1980s emerged with the many new roles assumed by women in the
larger culture and as important models (however fanciful) of female power”
(Melton, 1994, 698).
In Fevre Dream (1982), George R.R. Martin (1948–) produced an overlooked
classic of vampire fiction. It is set in 1857 on a Mississippi steamboat that has been
chartered by a vampire who has created a potion that inhibits the vampire’s lust for
human blood. He is in conflict with a leader of other vampires who still yearn for
the old days. The conflict portrayed is thus between vampire factions striving for a
new world or trying to safeguard the old. Set at the time of increasing unrest about
slavery and advancing technology the novel parallels American life.
Many of the vampire novels and series that appeared in the eighties and nineties
were by women and their work is often categorized as “dark fantasy” rather than
occult. In addition to those by Anne Rice and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro are works by
Elaine Bergstrom (1946–), Nancy Collins (1959–), Patricia [“P.N.”] Elrod (1951–),
Poppy Z. Brite (1967–), Storm Constantine (1956–), Laurell Hamilton (1963–),
and Karen Koehler (1973–). Their work has emphasized the erotic and generally
portrays vampires as benevolent and misunderstood. Most recently the vampire has
become a subject for “paranormal romances.” Premier among these is the Dark
series by Christine Feehan, which began with Dark Prince (1999) and has currently
reached 14 volumes. Feehan has created the dying race of the Carpathians, super-
natural creatures who can shapeshift but who, if they do not find their soul mate,
will eventually devolve into soulless vampires.
710 OCCULT/SUPERNATURAL LITERATURE

Vampires created by male writers tend to be more violent and the stories feature
more original twists. Perhaps the most extreme work is Ray Garton’s Live Girls
(1987) where a nightclub allows female vampires to prey upon their male victims. In
the series that began with Necroscope (1986), Brian Lumley’s powerful vamphyri
invade Earth from an alternate reality. John Farris relates vampires to the fallen angels
in Fiends (1990). Bentley Little’s vampire in The Summoning (1993) is Chinese rather
than Transylvanian, with a fear of jade and willow. Lucius Shepard (1947–) depicts a
rich and fascinating vampire culture in The Golden (1993), which he also turns into
an unusual detective story when the vampires have to solve a murder in their midst.
Dan Simmons looked for a scientific rationale for vampires in Carrion Comfort
(1989), seeing them as a genetic mutation, though in Children of the Night (1992) he
resorted to a more traditional view when a child with a unique immune system turns
out to be a son of Dracula. Brian Stableford (1948–) also explored a scientific ration-
ale in Young Blood (1992), where vampirism is a viral infection. He had used the vam-
pire theme earlier in The Empire of Fear (1988), set in an alternate history where the
ruling aristocracy in Europe, including Charlemagne and Richard the Lionheart, are
all vampires. An adventurer goes into darkest Africa to find the source of the vampire
bloodstock and the secret of immortality. Both Brian Stableford and Kim Newman
(1959–) have a fascination with the late Victorian period and have used it as a setting
to rework the vampire theme against other fictional and historical settings, Stableford
in The Hunger and Ecstacy of Vampires (1996) and Newman in a sequence starting
with Anno Dracula (1992), which incorporates Jack the Ripper.
The vampire theme continues to fascinate writers, though in the last decade it has
been somewhat diverted by the paranormal romance movement and the popularity
of the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), which has led to many spin-
off and imitative novels. Romance and young adult markets come together in the
series by Stephanie Meyer that began with the best-selling Twilight (2005), which
follows the love between a young girl and a vampire.
The theme has remained more enduring than that of werewolves, which lacked a
basic template like Dracula, and does not have the romantic or erotic connotations.
Such early novels as did explore the theme, such as The Werewolf of Paris (1933) by
Guy Endore (1900–1970), which equates lycanthropy to cannibalism, never attained
cult status, and it has always remained of secondary interest. The most successful of
recent books was The Howling (1977) by Gary Brandner, made into an influential
movie in 1980. Brandner treated werewolves rather like vampires, as creatures who
looked for safety among their own kind and existed as a secret community until
unearthed and destroyed. Whitley Strieber likewise depicted werewolves, or as he
perceived them wolves of superior intelligence, as an ancient race who try to remain
secretive. In Wolfen (1978) he shows how they choose their prey among the outcasts
of society who would not normally be missed. Perhaps the most ambitious werewolf
work of recent years is the trilogy by Brian Stableford, The Werewolves of London
(1990), The Angel of Pain (1991), and The Carnival of Destruction (1994), which
combined various occult and apocalyptic imagery in a late Victorian setting to por-
tray a secret war being conducted throughout London by werewolves combating a
reawakening of fallen angels, bent on regaining the Earth.
In Wolf Moon (1988), Charles de Lint portrays a werewolf who is a victim and
searches for a means to stop his affliction, which is eventually cured by love. It is a
story reminiscent of the fairy-tale motif of the beauty and the beast. Although the
werewolf theme has less appeal for the paranormal romantics, it does appeal to the
 OCCULT/SUPERNATURAL LITERATURE 711

feminist movement as it can depict powerful individuals seeking to assert themselves

in the world. Of recent works in this vein the most striking is the Women of the
Otherworld series by Kelley Armstrong (1968–) that began with Bitten (2001).
Once again there are werewolves existing as a secretive pack society. A unique
female werewolf tries to survive in the human world but finds the call of the wild
drawing her back. As the series developed Armstrong incorporated witches and
other creatures within her supernatural menagerie.
Unlike vampires and werewolves, which have a powerful physical presence,
ghosts are usually intangible. The interest in traditional ghosts faded in the fifties
and sixties and took a while to recover in the seventies, although The Haunting of
Hill House (1959) by Shirley Jackson (1919–1965) and the similar Hell House
(1971) by Richard Matheson (1926–), both about investigations into haunted
houses and both effectively filmed, helped keep the theme alive. From the late sev-
enties onwards there was a shift to making ghosts more violent. It was the double
whammy in 1979 of Ghost Story by Peter Straub and the film The Amityville
Horror (1979) based on the 1977 book by Jay Anson (1921–1980) that galvanized
this change. Straub had already written two novels featuring malevolent ghosts,
Julia (1975) and If You Could See Me Now (1977), both of which sold well, but it
was Ghost Story, filmed in 1981, that caught the imagination and became a best
seller. Here the ghost of a woman accidentally killed and concealed by a group of
men many years before returns in a violent way, able to interact with the world and
take her revenge. The events described in The Amityville Horror were purportedly
true though subsequent challenges have suggested that much of it may have been
fabricated. Nevertheless the book, which recounted a violent haunting and psychic
infestation of a house where a family had been murdered two years before, became
a best seller and catapulted interest in hauntings and possession back into the pub-
lic conscience. At the same time Stephen King had published his novel of possession
in a haunted hotel, The Shining (1977), while the first of Clare McNally’s popular
books, Ghost House (1979) appeared, itself very reminiscent of the Amityville story.
A new generation of ghost stories soon established itself, dealing with houses
haunted by an evil presence that frequently tried to take possession of or in some way
harm the occupant. The film Poltergeist (1982) successfully whetted the public
appetite further. Such stories include Cold Moon Over Babylon (1980) by Michael
McDowell, The Brownstone (1980) by Ken Eulo (1939–), A Cold Blue Light (1983)
by Marvin Kaye (1938–) and Parke Godwin (1929–), A Manhattan Ghost Story
(1984) and The Waiting Room (1986) by T.M. Wright, Familiar Spirit (1983) by Lisa
Tuttle (1952–), The Night Stone (1986), Winter Wake (1989), and Dark Silence
(1992) all by Rick Hautala, Soulstorm (1986) by Chet Williamson, and Night Relics
(1994) by James Blaylock. John Saul delighted in stories of ghostly children, which
featured in several of his early novels: Suffer the Children (1978), Comes the Blind
Fury (1980), and When the Wind Blows (1981). T.M. Wright explored a haunted
school in The School (1990) while Douglas Clegg (1958–), one of the best of the new
generation of writers, developed a sequence of novels about a haunted house that had
become a school starting with Mischief (2000) and continuing through Infinite
(2001), Nightmare House (2002), and The Abandoned (2005).
Reception. Although critics will argue that the bottom fell out of the slash-horror
market in the 1990s, since 2000 ghost stories have continued to thrive. Most follow
fairly traditional lines, though good writers continue to apply that novel twist.
Richard Laymon (1947–2001) brought together vampires and a carnival in The
712 OCCULT/SUPERNATURAL LITERATURE

Traveling Vampire Show (2000) in what proved to be one of his last books and
which won the Stoker Award as that year’s best novel. Diana Barron blended the cir-
cus with a far from traditional ghost story in her first novel, Phantom Feast (2001).
There are plenty of ghostly evils in The Deceased (2000) by Tom Piccirilli, The
Darkest Part of the Woods (2002) by Ramsey Campbell, The Lovely Bones (2002)
by Alice Sebold, The Hour Before Dark (2003) by Douglas Clegg, Perfect Circle
(2004) by Sean Stewart, and The Night Country (2004) by Stewart O’Nan (1961–),
plus some rather bizarre haunted (or evil) houses in House of Leaves (2000) by
Mark Z. Danielewski (1966–), A Winter Haunting (2002) by Dan Simmons, House
of Bones (2003) by Dale Bailey, and Riverwatch (2003) by Joseph Nassise. In all of
these books, whether by new or accomplished writers, old themes have been given
original twists. Although much emphasis remains on gross horror and the macabre,
the supernatural is center stage, and not just in the wings. The continued appear-
ance of these books and the popularity of the film The Sixth Sense (1999) shows that
there is still considerable life in the ghost story.
Selected Authors. Devotees of supernatural fiction tend to remain loyal to their
favorite writers so that such longtime authors as Ramsey Campbell, Stephen King,
Richard Matheson, and Ray Bradbury, who have been producing material for 40,
50, even 60 years, find much of their work still in print. Readers are as likely to pur-
sue an old book by H.P. Lovecraft or Arthur Machen as they are a new one by
Douglas Clegg or Tom Piccirilli. Moreover the popularity of sequels and series
means that authors like Anne Rice and Laurell K. Hamilton have a ready-made
readership for their next volume.
Currently most popular writers of supernatural fiction tend to be classified
either under horror fiction (Tom Piccirilli, Douglas Clegg, Rick Hautala) or fan-
tasy (Charles de Lint, Jonathan Carroll, John Crowley). Occasionally an author
will throw everything into the pot, challenging genre definitions. Serenity Falls
(2003; reprinted in three volumes as Writ in Blood, The Pack, and Dark Carni-
val) by James A. Moore is a panjandrum of a book that combines just about every
archetypal image in supernatural fiction. It starts out as the story of a town cursed
by a dying witch 300 years before, but her curse takes many forms, which inflict
the town until the apocalyptic final battle. Moore’s novel is a kaleidoscope of hor-
rors but within a modern context showing how even tired old images can be
sharpened and refocused.
This is evident in the work of Tananarive Due (1966–), one of the strongest new
talents of the last decade, who has created several variations on old themes. My Soul
to Keep (1997) and its sequel Living Blood (2001) revisit the deal-with-the-devil
theme with a dash of vampirism as a woman discovers that her Ethiopian husband
is a 400-year-old immortal. In the sequel she too becomes possessed of the living
blood and discovers the powers it grants her. In The Good House (2003) Due
breathed life into the voodoo novel while in Joplin’s Ghost (2005) she provides a
novel twist on the traditional ghost story. The Afro American culture is potently
recreated in all of these books, which are as firmly rooted in the past as in the future.
Cross-genre fertilization has continued to develop, particularly since the early
days of Dean Koontz, Stephen King, and Peter Straub, some of whose works were
thrillers and mysteries first—and certainly marketed that way for maximum sales—
but with the supernatural as seasoning. In recent years, however, these authors,
notably Koontz, King, and Straub, have returned to the roots of supernatural fiction
to explore new directions.
 OCCULT/SUPERNATURAL LITERATURE 713

Dean Koontz, whose books continue to hit the best-seller lists, has also returned
more deeply to the supernatural. With Odd Thomas (2003), Forever Odd (2005),
and Brother Odd (2006), Koontz has completed a trilogy about Odd Thomas, who
can see spirits of the recent dead who remain in limbo. Sometimes Thomas can help
them move on and sometimes the spirits, such as that of Elvis Presley, hang about
him for reasons he does not know. Thomas can also see bodachs, strange wolflike
shadows which, like vultures, seem to know of impending, violent deaths. Thomas
sometimes tries to stop these deaths before they happen. Other times he helps the
police solve murders. Thomas cannot avoid being drawn into these events any more
than he can avoid his special talent and, as a result, he can be manipulated as hap-
pens in the second book where an evil woman lays a trap for him. As a consequence
by the third book Thomas has sought refuge in a monastery hoping to escape his
ghosts, but death follows him. These books mark a change for Koontz, not only
because for once he has developed a sequence featuring the same character, but also
because the book focuses on the supernatural as a form of salvation rather than hor-
ror. It is an indication of one growing trend in recent years where the supernatural
is not necessarily the focus of the horror, but a means to fight it. This is most evi-
dent in the recent work of the two major writers of the last 30 years, Stephen King
and Peter Straub.
King’s ability to sustain a varied and popular output of considerable proportion
is remarkable, though in recent years the significance of his work has been chal-
lenged. While there are those who believe that Stephen King is American horror fic-
tion, he has plenty of critics. When King received the National Book Foundation
Medal in 2003 for services to literature, Harold Bloom remarked that he only wrote
what used to be called “penny dreadfuls” (New York Times, 15 September 2003).
King’s most vociferous critic is probably S.T. Joshi who commented:

King’s domination of the bestseller lists over the last two decades has been an unmiti-
gated disaster for the weird tale. By being the chief exemplar of the ‘banalization’ of
horror, he has caused an inferior strain of weird fiction (commonplace, flabby, senti-
mental work full of ‘human interest’ but entirely lacking in originality of conception)
to gain popular esteem. (Joshi, 2001, 95)

Yet it is almost certain that had it not been for King causing horror fiction (at least,
as per the marketing label) to be among the best sellers, publishers would not have
been so open to other writers during the seventies and eighties, and the next genera-
tion of writers would not have found it so easy to enter the market. King hoped that
his success did encourage others. When interviewed in 1990 he commented:

I’m not sure how much we raised the awareness of horror or gave it any kind of cul-
tural cachet. I’m sure that we allowed a lot of contracts to be signed by a lot of writ-
ers, put a lot of money in a lot of pockets that otherwise wouldn’t have gone there. And
I think that’s a wonderful thing . . . because most of the people who are doing it aren’t
in it for a free ride. They’re serious about it. I think now—and I didn’t use to think this
way—but I think now that we might actually have a serious place in American litera-
ture in a hundred years or so. (Wiater, 1990, 100)

The main impact King has had on the content of supernatural fiction is to empha-
size the horrific so that the supernatural, if present, has become a means to an end
rather than the main feature of the book. Although King has continued to place an
714 OCCULT/SUPERNATURAL LITERATURE

emphasis on horror in his non-supernatural books, like Cell (2006), several of his
more recent books have explored a quieter, more reflective form of the macabre with
a stronger emphasis on the therapeutic significance of the supernatural. Bag of
Bones (1998) is, unusually for King, written in the first person by a best-selling nov-
elist, giving the book a stronger personal feel. The novelist, Mike Noonan, is
recently widowed and is suffering writer’s block. He is haunted by dreams of his
dead wife who seems to be luring him to their lakeside summer home but once there
he finds the dreams stronger and the supernatural becomes a driving force to dis-
covering past sins. Here the supernatural makes memories tangible, and King is able
to show how the past lives on around us and within us.
King has provided a counterpoint to Bag of Bones in Lisey’s Story (2006), this
time the story of a widow coming to terms with the death of her husband, Scott,
who had been a writer, after 25 years of marriage. Scott comes alive in the story
within her memories as she sorts out his papers, and their close relationship takes
her into a private world that Scott had escaped to in his childhood when abused by
his father. This world is both a source of imagination and inspiration. King shows
how you can draw strength from the past and how hauntings can be as positive as
they can be frightening. In these novels King uses the supernatural to stir the emo-
tions through the heart rather than the gut.
Recently King has collaborated again with his friend Peter Straub on Black House
(2001) a sequel to their 1984 dark fantasy novel, The Talisman. Straub has himself
been very active in recent years producing a number of novels, three of which won
the Bram Stoker Award for the Best Horror novel in their respective years. Mr. X
(1999) is an extremely complex novel of a man, Ned Dunstan, coming to terms with
his bizarre family from which he had been cut off for his own safety when his
mother fostered him out as a baby. In particular Dunstan has to confront his real
father, the eponymous Mr. X., whom Dunstan had never known, and through
whose evil mind part of the story is revealed. There is also the mystery of Dunstan’s
possible twin brother, a doppelganger presence that seems to follow Dunstan like a
shadow. Straub draws upon much Lovecraftian lore in depicting the bizarre ances-
try of this family, which provides most of the occult element, and though the super-
natural is intrinsic to the plot, the novel also works as a mystery, driven by its strong
but enigmatic characters.
Straub’s other recent award-winning books Lost Boy Lost Girl (2003) and In the
Night Room (2004) also explore family relationships but in a more multi-layered
and multi-perspective way. They are complex metafictions which question the basis
of reality and perception and in so doing blur the boundaries between the natural
and the supernatural and between the real and the fictional. The central character
of both novels is the author Tim Underhill who had previously appeared in Straub’s
dark mystery novels, Koko (1988) and The Throat (1993). In Lost Boy Lost Girl
Underhill returns to his hometown of Millhaven where his brother’s wife has killed
herself. Their son, Mark, is missing, perhaps the victim of a serial killer who seems
to be copying a killer from 20 years before. Underhill’s quest to find his nephew
centers on the house once occupied by this former killer which may or may not be
haunted by a young girl, perhaps the killer’s daughter. However, in In the Night
Room we discover that Lost Boy Lost Girl is only Underhill’s version of events,
written to assuage the fate of his nephew, which had remained unsolved. In the
Night Room seeks to step back and re-explore the real events. Straub is entering
the territory of the mystics, discovering that beyond our own belief in events is a
 OCCULT/SUPERNATURAL LITERATURE 715

further understanding, a truer interpretation, uncorrupted by memory or guilt or

pain. But how much can we face that reality?
As with King’s recent books, Straub is exploring how memory and reality haunt
us and how ghosts may be psychological manifestations of alternate existences. It is
this lack of a firm connection to reality that evokes horror and uncertainty, and yet
our natural reaction is to retreat into ourselves to escape the horror. Straub has con-
stantly challenged the boundaries between genres recognizing that “it’s all about a
point of view” (Locus #507, April 2003, 66). His novels may thus be seen as fan-
tasies of perception in which the supernatural is but one method of understanding.
Straub’s recent work marks one of the high points of supernatural fiction, utiliz-
ing basic, age-old themes such as a haunted house, but refashioning it with images
not solely from fantasy and horror but from within our own psyche to produce a
book that deliberately defies categorization. It is perhaps one of the best examples
of a key direction that supernatural fiction may take in the new century, to make us
aware that it is us who fashion the world about us, including all things of Heaven,
Earth, and Hell.

Bibliography
Bleiler, Everett F. The Guide to Supernatural Fiction. Kent, OH: Kent State University
Press, 1983.
Jordan, Michael. The Encyclopedia of Gods. London: Kyle Cathie, 1992.
Joshi, S.T. The Modern Weird Tale. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001.
King, Stephen. Bag of Bones. New York: Scribner, 1998.
________. Danse Macabre. London: Macdonald, 1981.
________. Lisey’s Story. New York: Scribner, 2006.
Koontz, Dean. Odd Thomas. New York: Bantam, 2003.
Melton, J. Gordon. The Vampire Book. Detroit, MI: Visible Ink Press, 1994.
Straub, Peter. “Horror’s House,” Locus #507, April 2003.
________. In the Night Room. New York: Random House, 2004.
________. Lost Boy Lost Girl. New York: Random House, 2003.
________. Mr. X. New York: Random House, 1999.
Sullivan, Jack. Elegant Nightmares. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1978.
Wiater, Stanley. Dark Dreamers. New York: Avon Books, 1990.
Winter, Douglas E. Faces of Fear. London: Pan Books, 1990.

Further Reading
Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997;
Bleiler, Richard. Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror. 2nd ed.
New York: Scribner’s, 2002; Briggs, Julia. Night Visitors. London: Faber, 1977; Campbell,
Ramsey. “A Life in Horror,” Locus #507, April 2003; Cavaliero, Glen. The Supernatural &
English Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995; D’Ammassa, Don. Encyclopedia of
Fantasy and Horror Fiction. New York: Checkmark Books, 2006; Datlow, Ellen, and
Windling, Terri (& others), eds. The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series. New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1988–present; Fonseca, Anthony J. and Pulliam, June Michelle. Hooked
on Horror: A Guide to Reading Interests in Horror Fiction, New Edition. Westport, CT:
Libraries Unlimited, 2003; Frost, Brian J. The Monster With a Thousand Faces. Bowling
Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989; Frost, Brian J. The Essential
Guide to Werewolf Literature. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003; Gelder,
Ken, ed. The Horror Reader. London: Routledge, 2000; Gordon, Joan, and Hollinger,
Veronica. Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture. Philadelphia,
716 OCCULT/SUPERNATURAL LITERATURE

PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997; Heldreth, Leonard G., and Pharr, Mary. The
Blood is the Life: Vampires in Literature. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State
University Popular Press, 1997; Joshi, S.T. The Weird Tale. Austin, TX: University of Texas
Press, 1990; Joshi, S.T. The Evolution of the Weird Tale. New York: Hippocampus Press,
2004; Joshi, S.T., and Dziemianowicz, Stefan. Supernatural Literature of the World.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005; Magistrale, Tone, and Morrison, Michael A. eds.
A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction. Columbia, SC:
University of South Carolina Press, 1996; Ramsland, Katherine. Dean Koontz, A Writer’s
Biography. New York: HarperPrism, 1997; Schweitzer, Darrell. Discovering Modern Horror
Fiction – I. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1985; Schweitzer, Darrell. Discovering
Modern Horror Fiction – II. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1988; Sheehan, Bill. At the
Foot of the Story Tree. Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2000.
MIKE ASHLEY
P

PARAPSYCHOLOGY
Definition. Parapsychology is the term introduced in the 1930s by J.B. Rhine, one
of the field’s pioneers, for the scientific study of scientifically paranormal claims, but
belief in the phenomena that parapsychologists attempt to study appears to be as
old as humanity itself. The set of phenomena of interest to the parapsychologists is
referred to by many names, including psi powers, psychic phenomena, paranormal
abilities, and the most popular of all, extrasensory perception (ESP). This last name
is of special interest to psychologists, as perception is typically defined as the brain’s
cognitive processing of information received from the senses. Perception is therefore
sensory by definition—ordinarily the only circumstances under which it occurs in
the absence of sensory input would involve either hallucination or direct stimulation
of the brain. This is one of the things that makes psychic research both fascinating
and frustrating: If parapsychologists are able to establish convincingly that these
phenomena occur, then much of what we know about how the human brain
functions (to say nothing of the rest of the physical world, including the basic laws
of physics) must be, at best, incomplete and obsolete, and at worst, just plain wrong.
Trends and Themes. The alleged phenomena include the following:
• Telepathy—The ability to send or receive information without using the usual
sensory apparatus (speaking, hearing, seeing, etc.). Also colloquially referred to as
mind reading. Anecdotal evidence abounds for telepathy, as when one “knows”
who is calling when the telephone rings, or two close friends or relatives say the
same thing at the exact same time (there are of course more parsimonious, but far
less exciting, explanations for these situations). A demonstration used by self-
proclaimed psychics (and which has been repeatedly tested by parapsychologists)
involves remote viewing, in which the “sender” travels to a remote (and unknown
to the receiver) location and proceeds to concentrate on a landmark, picture, or
other stimulus. The “receiver” attempts to form a mental impression of what the
sender is seeing, and then draws or describes it. Under very loose testing conditions,
remote viewing demonstrations are often successful; under conditions that have
718 PARAPSYCHOLOGY

been set up to exclude various other ways of accomplishing the feat (several are well
known among stage magicians), successes are quite rare.
• Clairvoyance—Knowing information without resort to ordinary perception, mem-
ory, or inference. Again, anecdotes abound about this sort of thing, and it is what
dowsers claim to be able to do—they can allegedly detect water or minerals under-
ground (often guided by a gently-held stick or other device). Many laboratory
experiments have attempted to demonstrate clairvoyance, usually requiring the sub-
jects to detect the identity of a hidden target object (frequently a card).
• Psychokinesis (previously known as telekinesis)—Sometimes referred to as “mind
over matter,” this is the ability to use the mind to cause physical movement or
changes in other objects without resort to normal means of doing so. The term
telekinesis fell into such disrepute in the early days of psychic research, thanks to the
many fraudulent manifestations produced by spirit mediums, that psychokinesis is
now the preferred term.
• Precognition—Knowing of events in advance of their occurrence, again without
resort to the usual means of acquiring knowledge. Stories of prophecy abound in
religion, mythology, and folklore, and so many people are certainly prepared to
believe that such a phenomenon exists. As with other psychic gifts, this one has not
been reliably manifested by anyone under controlled conditions.
• Spirit mediumship—Some practitioners, known as mediums, claim to obtain their
extrasensory knowledge from the spirits of the deceased. In the early days of the
practice (late-nineteenth century), this information (often spoken by the medium in
an eerie voice) was often accompanied by physical manifestations (odd sounds, mys-
teriously floating objects, ectoplasm, etc.—more information about this follows
below), but most current mediums have completely abandoned this approach in
favor of a fully vocal approach.

History. The initial burst of interest in scientific study of the paranormal was a
direct result of the explosion in popularity of spiritualism (also called spiritism) in
mid-nineteenth century America and Europe. In spiritualism, which eventually
became an organized church based in New England, people interested in communi-
cating with the spirits of the dead would hold séances, in which they would gather
about a table in a darkened room, holding hands, and ask the spirits to communi-
cate with them. The response would usually come in the form of mysterious rapping
noises. Over time, the phenomena involved in séances grew to include such things
as trumpets floating in the air and being mysteriously blown, the table rising briefly
into the air, and the production of ectoplasm, or ghost substance, a mysterious shim-
mering product that the medium would pull from thin air, or sometimes from vari-
ous body parts, and wave about.
The birth of the Spiritualist movement can be dated quite precisely: The first
séances were held in 1848, in the Hydesville, New York, home of the teenage Fox
sisters (Margaret and Kate), who decided to have a bit of fun at their parents’
expense. Margaret had developed the ability to produce loud rapping sounds with
her toes, which seemed to be mysterious communications from beyond when
performed in a dark room with everyone holding hands on the tabletop. Very soon
the Fox sisters were performing séances with a wide range of people, and others fol-
lowed their lead until people all over Europe and America were communicating with
the dead, and performing ever more elaborate variations on their initial deception.
Within a few years, some eminent men of science, believing the phenomena to be
real, began to investigate the conditions under which they occurred. The first
 PARAPSYCHOLOGY 719

attempt to describe a method of investigating these phenomena (and to provide

a theory of sorts to explain them) was produced by the French author Léon-
Dénizarth-Hippolyte Rivail, writing under the pseudonym Allan Kardec, primarily
in two books: Le Livre des Esprits (1856) and Le Livre des Mediums (1861).
Kardec’s interest in the subject seems to have begun when he met two young
mediums, whose father was known to him, and they told him (or rather, the spir-
its whose words were coming through them told him) that he had an important
spiritual mission to carry out. The resulting “spiritist theory” which he detailed in
his books was the result of responses produced by these mediums via rapping and
planchette movement (the trick best known today as the OuijaTM board). Indeed,
the pseudonym was provided by the spirits as well: both Allan and Kardec were
alleged to have been his names in prior lives. The spirits even told him what to call
the book.
Le Livre des Esprits become an instant sensation, making converts to his brand
of spiritualism all over Europe. Kardec founded the Parisian Society of Psychologic
Studies, which met in his home on Fridays in order to receive, via automatic writ-
ing (another standard medium technique), further instructions from the spirits. One
outgrowth of this organization was his editorship of La Revue Spirite, which he
continued to produce until his death (though not thereafter; it is still published
today by the World Spiritist Congress).
Kardec’s impact on his world was remarkably far-reaching: Napoleon III even
sent for him several times to discuss the teachings in Le Livre des Esprits. In the
wake of the founding of Kardec’s organization, other such groups were rapidly
formed throughout Europe and America. As with most spiritual movements,
schisms were evident early on, however, as the French version of Spiritualism
differed markedly from the American in Kardec’s endorsement of the idea of
compulsory reincarnation—in Kardec’s books, it is made clear that all are
required to live multiple lifetimes. This is an odd feature of Kardec’s teachings,
given that he followed up his early successes with books such as The Gospel as
Explained by Spirits (1864), Heaven and Hell (1865), and Genesis (1867), whose
target audience couldn’t be expected to be particularly receptive to the doctrine
of reincarnation.

Context and Issues

“Psychical Research”Takes Hold. As the phenomena produced by mediums began to
attract the attention of more scientifically minded observers as well, these men
also became interested in investigating the claims of mind readers, hypnotists,
and fortune-tellers. Soon they had formed formal organizations, and their “psy-
chical research” was a respectable and rapidly growing enterprise. The Society
for Psychical Research formed in London in 1882; the American Society for Psy-
chical Research, today the Parapsychological Association, followed in 1885.
Early in their investigations, they began to document a few things about the con-
ditions under which such phenomena seemed more likely to occur. A successful
séance, for example, required darkness—the materializations would not occur in
a well-lit room, and the spirits would often not communicate at all. The presence
of very skeptical people, who might watch very closely, also seemed to make the
spirits less likely to turn up. Despite these inconvenient facts, several skillful
“superstar” mediums emerged (D.D. Home and Eusapia Palladino are probably
720 PARAPSYCHOLOGY

the best known) over several decades following the Fox sisters’ initial break-
through, and they were instrumental in attracting the interest of serious scien-
tists. Sir William Crookes, the great chemist (known for, among other
accomplishments, the discovery of thallium, as well as early developments in the
field of chemical fertilizer), for example, became interested in spiritist phenom-
ena following the death of his brother. After attending a séance with the Fox sis-
ters, Crookes was instrumental in getting other scientists to take more seriously
the phenomena they produced, along with validating the levitation and table-
tilting of D.D. Home. Following his example, the Society for Psychical Research
counted several members of the British Royal Society among its early con-
stituency. Alfred Russel Wallace, best known as Charles Darwin’s chief competi-
tor for the discoverer’s role in the saga of evolutionary theory, also dabbled in
psychical research, attending séances and speculating on the sources of the
phenomena witnessed therein.
Despite the legitimizing influence of Crookes, Wallace, and other prominent
scientists (in America, William James was also an early enthusiast), Home and
Palladino were also frequently caught cheating. This was readily overlooked by
clients as well as by some of the prominent scientists, who were quick to accept the
idea that too-close scrutiny prevented the rather shy spirits from showing up. People
who openly deceived others for a living (especially such magicians as Houdini),
however, began to take notice of these competitors who claimed their miracles were
real. Houdini, still the best known of all conjurers, made a second career of attend-
ing séances and exposing fraud therein.
Harry Houdini’s (born Erich Weiss; 1874–1926) A Magician among the Spirits. Unlike most
who arrived in a medium’s parlor, Houdini was uniquely qualified to detect the
trickery involved in spirit manifestations. Early in his career, he and his wife hosted
regular séances for a Midwestern medicine show, during which he would cause
tables to tip and float, while he also played musical instruments, all while tied to his
chair! After his career as an escape artist took off circa 1899, Houdini left the stage
medium business behind and largely forgot about it.
His interest was revived in the early 1920s when he befriended Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Theirs was an odd friendship, bal-
ancing Houdini’s professional skepticism with Doyle’s extreme credulousness
(among other things, he wrote a book endorsing the clearly faked photos three
young girls took of fairies at Cottingley). Having become a Spiritualist leader, Doyle
introduced Houdini to several prominent mediums in hopes of convincing him of
the reality of the manifestations they produced. Far from being converted to
Spiritualism, Houdini immediately recognized the fairly obvious tricks he had given
up earlier in his career, and was offended at their deception of grieving people hop-
ing only to reunite with their loved ones. He was especially sympathetic toward the
victims, as he was still tormented by the unexpected death of his own mother a
decade earlier.
He set out to show that the business of psychic readings, far from being helpful
to those left behind, was in fact built on their exploitation. An early book on the
subject, Miracle Mongers and their Methods (1920), set the template for the far
more influential A Magician among the Spirits (1924). Houdini made big changes
in his stage act, in order to demonstrate far and wide that as a mere magician, he
could not only reproduce all the effects associated with the mediums, but could
actually perform them more convincingly. He went beyond reproducing their
 PARAPSYCHOLOGY 721

effects, however, going so far as to attend séances and expose the trickery while it
was occurring. This had the added benefit, of course, of keeping his name before the
public at a time when he was becoming too old to continue performing the very
physically demanding stunts on which he built his career.
According to his book, Houdini frequently attended séances in disguise, with both
a reporter and police officer in tow, so that he could simultaneously have the
medium arrested for fraud and have a story about the incident (prominently featur-
ing Houdini’s own role, naturally) published in the local newspaper. He would also
sometimes forego the disguise, instead challenging local mediums in the cities where
he performed to demonstrate their powers on stage. The most noteworthy of these
challenges involved a medium who went by the name of Margery (real name: Mina
Crandon), billed as “The Boston Medium.” Margery had already convinced some
prominent scientific investigators, a committee put together by Scientific American,
that she was the real deal. When the committee sent Houdini to investigate, how-
ever, he found that she was just like all the other mediums he had seen, using the
same fraudulent techniques (he published a separate pamphlet concerning this case,
entitled “Margery” The Medium Exposed, expanded to book length as Houdini
Exposes the Tricks Used by Boston Medium “Margery”). Among other things, he
reported catching her ringing an electric bell with her foot and levitating a table by
leaning over and lifting its edge with her head. So confident was he of her methods
that he offered her $10,000 to demonstrate her abilities on stage at Boston’s
Symphony Hall. The only condition attached to the prize was that she produce a
manifestation he could not duplicate. When she refused, Houdini recreated her
entire act for the audience, and subsequently went on to do so as a permanent part
of his stage act.
Following his success with Margery, he went on to expose the methods used by
many other famous mediums, including the Fox sisters, as well as the single most
famous medium of the time, Eusapia Palladino. These exposés, and the stories
behind them, make up the bulk of A Magician among the Spirits.
The impact of earlier exposures of fraud on the popularity of the mediums had
been quite minimal (a common reaction: The spirits don’t always respond, so of
course they have to cheat sometimes—that doesn’t mean it isn’t real on the other
occasions! This justification continues as a major part of the arsenal of certain psy-
chic performers today), even when the originator of the movement admitted her
fraud: In 1888 (40 years after getting it all started, but 36 years before Houdini’s
book), Margaret Fox, by this time a widow, told her story and gave public demon-
strations of how the effects were achieved.
Because of his high media profile and name recognition, Houdini was far more
effective. The book was quite influential in starting the decline of the large-scale
popularity of spirit mediums, as it became much harder for them to justify the need
for darkness in order for their effects to occur (ectoplasm, for example, was far less
convincing to readers who knew it was usually cheesecloth coated with luminous
paint). They have never completely gone away, however—the National Spiritualist
Association of Churches still boasts 3000 members, and they still hold séances.
Furthermore, spiritualist resorts are still in business: Just as children go to summer
camps to learn outdoor skills or improve their athletic abilities, thousands of
(mostly elderly) spiritualists attend such places as Camp Chesterfield in Indiana to
communicate with the departed. Camp Chesterfield (still in operation) became well
known outside spiritualist church circles in 1976, with the publication of M. Lamar
722 PARAPSYCHOLOGY

Keene’s The Psychic Mafia. Keene spent years as one of the camp’s top mediums,
and his book lays out in great detail the extent to which not much had changed from
the previous century. It was ultimately conscience that led Keene to abandon the
camp and publish its secrets: Among other things, he expresses some regret over the
large amounts of money his congregations would donate to the church “building
fund,” all of which was destined not for construction but rather for Keene’s own
wallet. The book reveals numerous tricks of the trade that had not previously been
exposed, such as the technique used to “apparate” items that the attendees had lost.
Often, the items had in fact been surreptitiously stolen from their homes by church
accomplices. The book also goes into great detail regarding the use of common, sim-
ple magician’s tricks to convince the audience that the medium is actually in touch
with the spirits.
Keene’s book had the usual impact of such exposés on the fraud being exposed:
Almost none. Not only are spiritualist churches still in business, the last quarter of
the twentieth century and the turn of the millennium saw several waves of new spir-
itualist practitioners boasting new approaches to the same old thing.
In the mid-1980s, a new wave of mediums emerged, with a new name: channel-
ers. Gone were the physical manifestations, and thus gone also was the need for the
cover of darkness. Furthermore, to make their statements even harder to pin down,
the new mediums did not claim to be in touch with spirits of dead friends or rela-
tives of their audience, but rather with ancient wise beings removed from the pres-
ent (and thus from specific details known to the audience) by thousands of years.
Rather than answering questions, these mediums would enter a trance, after
which their body language and voice would change, indicating that their bodies had
been taken over by entities who wished to speak to the modern world. The most
successful of these was certainly JZ (the initials stand for Judy Zebra) Knight. A
pretty, small blonde woman, she believes she has been taken over by a 35,000-year
old, 8-foot-tall male warrior named Ramtha, from the lost continent of Atlantis. In
addition to performing for years to capacity crowds, she published several best-
selling books about her experiences, the best known of which is A State of Mind:
My Story. From the back cover of the 1988 paperback edition:

. . . he spoke to her with vital spiritual messages for our time. This visionary event
changed her life and was to change the lives of countless others all over the world as
they flocked to see and hear JZ Knight “channel” the teachings of Ramtha on the eter-
nal paths of unconditional love. . . .the thrilling quest of the spirit that has led to a UFO
encounter, miraculous healing, visits from the ever-watchful dead, and—most of all—
an eternal wisdom that points to a future of radiant, limitless hope for us all.

The vague positivity of this description is typical of the content of her channelled
communications as well, although Knight also frequently appears to espouse a sort
of feminist-apocalyptic vision, in which men are brutal creatures who eroticize vio-
lence and who must be removed from power and replaced by women—an odd phi-
losophy for a great male warrior from the past. Knight was part of a wave of
channelers that crested and broke in the late 1980s, and most have faded back into
obscurity. Knight is still making an impact on the entertainment world, however.
Some of her followers, members of the Ramtha Foundation, were behind two pop-
culture phenomena in the new millennium. The first, the 2005 semi-documentary
film What the Bleep Do We Know?, explores a variety of esoteric subjects with the
 PARAPSYCHOLOGY 723

help of various on-screen experts (physicists, neuroscientists, etc.), among which

Knight appears (with the on-screen credit Ramtha). The movie caused a bit of a sen-
sation at film festivals and had a popular run at the box office.
Some of the same production team was behind a 2006 publishing success, the
book and accompanying movie entitled The Secret. The book is credited to Rhonda
Byrne, and the film incorporates the same blend of slick production values and alter-
native interpretation of science (some would say misrepresentation) that made What
the Bleep . . . such a success. The producers have taken full advantage of modern
technology, spreading the book and movie through a Web site that describes the
book/film as follows:

The Secret reveals the most powerful law in the universe. The knowledge of this law
has run like a golden thread through the lives and the teachings of all the prophets,
seers, sages and saviors in the world’s history, and through the lives of all truly great
men and women. All that they have ever accomplished or attained has been done in full
accordance with this most powerful law. . . .The Secret explains with simplicity the law
that is governing all lives, and offers the knowledge of how to create—intentionally
and effortlessly—a joyful life. This is the secret to everything—the secret to unlimited
happiness, love, health and prosperity. This is the secret to life. (www.thesecret.tv)

As it turns out, the secret is fairly straightforward: Byrne proposes that in order
to attain whatever we wish, we simply have to believe fervently that we shall attain
it, and it will come to pass. The universe wants us to be happy, and we just need to
make clear what we desire.
The channelers were not the only ones to begin a new mediumistic ascendancy in
the last several decades—there are currently several popular entertainers (such as
Sylvia Browne, John Edward, and James Van Praagh) who have become successful
by claiming to communicate with the dead in yet another, somewhat old-fashioned,
manner. Like the channelers, they’ve eliminated the need for darkness, but are still
using a very old technique known among magicians as cold reading. In cold read-
ing, the medium asks many questions and zeros in on specific information based on
the answers that are given. The person receiving the reading will often only remem-
ber the questions to which the answer was “yes” (hits), while forgetting about the
much larger number of misses.
These mediums have mostly had little impact in publishing, with the exception of
Sylvia Browne, who has many books to her credit. Some concern the expected
messages of comfort from the “other side”—both in the books and in her public
readings with the bereaved, she claims that her information is provided by a “spirit
guide” named Francine. These works include, among others, Temples on the Other
Side: How Wisdom from “Beyond the Veil” Can Help You Right Now (2008),
Sylvia Browne’s Lessons for Life (2004), Sylvia Browne’s Book of Angels (2004),
Conversations from the Other Side (2002), and the forthcoming End of Days: What
You Need to Know Now about the End of the World (2008). Uniquely among
current mediums, however, Browne has also positioned herself as a spiritual leader,
founding a church called the Society of Novus Spiritus, which she presents as a
Gnostic form of Christianity. Her books therefore also include such explicitly
religious titles as The Two Marys: The Hidden History of the Mother and Wife of
Jesus (2007), Sylvia Browne’s Book of Angels (2004), and If You Could See What I
See: The Tenets of Novus Spiritus (2006).
724 PARAPSYCHOLOGY

The Emergence of Scientific Parapsychology. Given the continuing current popularity

of mediums who claim to communicate with the dead, it is important to note that
the scientific study of psychic phenomena abandoned the notion that psychics
were actually communicating with the dead over a century ago. In the late nine-
teenth century, the Society for Psychical Research had already begun to turn its
attention toward paranormal phenomena beyond those manifested by the spirit
mediums. In an 1886 two-volume collection of reports of ghosts and contact with
the dead, entitled Phantasms of the Living, Society members Edmund Gurney and
Frederic W.H. Myers speculated that some of the apparitions they studied were
actually due to thought-transference (a theory, incidentally, about which Alfred
Russel Wallace then wrote a highly critical paper), for which they coined a new
word: Telepathy.
By the early twentieth century, psychical researchers had become less interested in
the spirit mediums, and were concentrating their attention more fully on telepaths
and clairvoyants. As their methods became more rigorous and quantitative, and psy-
chologists began to take over a field previously dominated by physical scientists, the
new science began to find a home at major universities. Pride of place for publish-
ing the first report of an experiment on clairvoyance (card guessing, in this case)
goes to John Coover, the first holder of a Fellowship in Psychical Research at
Stanford University. In the monograph Experiments in Psychical Research, he
published the results of four large studies, involving 100 research participants.
Somewhat prophetically for the field of study as a whole, he concluded that he had
found nothing supportive of belief in ESP. Perhaps in part because of his willingness
to publicize his negative results, Coover is largely forgotten even among those who
know the parapsychological literature well.
Selected Authors. James Banks Rhine (1895–1980) is known to nearly everyone
with even a passing interest in parapsychology. In 1934, he cofounded and became
director of the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University, located in North
Carolina. Rhine and his wife, Louisa, first went to Duke to join the psychology
department and work with William McDougall, who shared their interest in para-
normal phenomena, and soon this shared interest took psychical research in a new
and altogether more scientific direction.
Although he agreed with Houdini after a session with Margery, the Boston
medium, that she was guilty of fraud and trickery, Rhine was nonetheless fascinated
by telepathy and similar phenomena, and he wanted to establish the study of this
more scientifically observable subject matter as a subject distinct from the study of
those who claimed communion with the dead. It was Rhine who shook off the
phrase “psychical research” with its attendant baggage and popularized the more
scientific-sounding parapsychology (a term used as far back as 1889 by the psy-
chologist Max Dessoir) to replace it. He also introduced the terms extrasensory per-
ception and psychokinesis, and was easily the most influential of all
parapsychologists, both in his methods and in his ability to popularize the field in
his books, articles, and lectures.
More than through books, Rhine’s influence came via the publication of a
research journal. He founded the Journal of Parapsychology in 1937, thus provid-
ing American parapsychologists with a respectable peer-reviewed journal in which
to publish their findings. The Journal is still published today, appearing semi-
annually. Twenty years after founding the journal, Rhine was also instrumental in
founding the Parapsychological Association. In the lab at Duke he developed, with
 PARAPSYCHOLOGY 725

his colleague Karl Zener, the most popular piece of equipment in parapsychology,
the Zener cards. The Zener cards are a deck made up of five simple symbols, one
on each card: star, circle, square, cross, and wavy lines. The Zener cards were
widely used in ESP experiments, in which the participant was required to identify
a hidden target card from a set of five known possible targets. In a telepathy exper-
iment, the cards were viewed by a remote person (the sender) who attempted to
“transmit” the information to the participant. In a clairvoyance experiment, the
participant would simply attempt to identify the order of the cards, without any-
one looking at them first.
Rhine’s first book, Extra-Sensory Perception (1934), may well be the most impor-
tant book in the history of parapsychology, if only because it gave the world (via its
title) a new term for the phenomena of telepathy and clairvoyance. The book’s pub-
lication was also a watershed event in that it started a new era of publishing on
parapsychology and on paranormal phenomena in general. Extra-Sensory Percep-
tion established the pattern that would be followed thereafter, in which experimen-
tal work is largely ignored (and when not ignored, largely ridiculed) by the scientific
community but becomes massively popular when sold directly to the public in book
form. In this book, Rhine reached exactly the opposite conclusion from that reached
by Coover: That “it is independently established on the basis of this work alone that
Extra-Sensory Perception is an actual and demonstrable occurrence” (162).
This seminal work was followed in rapid succession by a popular treatment of the
research, New Frontiers of the Mind: The Story of the Duke Experiments (1937),
which sold quite well and was rapturously received by reviewers outside the scien-
tific community, who compared Rhine to Copernicus and to Darwin, among others.
Extra-sensory perception had entered the popular lexicon, as had the idea that it
was scientifically testable using the Zener cards, and both have endured in the pop-
ular imagination ever since. New Frontiers was followed over the next several
decades by many more books, some co-authored by his wife, Louisa Rhine, a pro-
lific psychic researcher in her own right. The Rhines’ entire body of work continued
to champion the view that Rhine’s lab results consistently demonstrate the reality of
extra-sensory perception, in the face of the equally consistent failure of other labo-
ratories to replicate his results when adequate precautions against cheating were
taken. Significant titles include the following: The Reach of the Mind (1947), New
World of the Mind (1953), Parapsychology, Frontier Science of the Mind: A Survey
of the Field, the Methods, and the Facts of ESP and PK Research (1957), Extra-Sen-
sory Perception after Sixty Years: A Critical Appraisal of the Research on Extra-Sen-
sory Perception (1967—co-authored with J.G. Pratt).
It should be noted that two years after Rhine began his studies of ESP at Duke (in
1927, working with William McDougall), Pulitzer Prize-winner Upton Sinclair pub-
lished Mental Radio (1929) detailing a series of clairvoyance experiments he con-
ducted with his wife. The book was a popular seller, and the extent to which the
idea of clairvoyance was seen as a legitimate topic for study at the time is perhaps
best illustrated by the fact that Albert Einstein wrote a preface to the book. In the
preface, Einstein stresses Sinclair’s honesty and integrity, as well as the dubious
nature of the phenomenon itself:

. . . it is out of the question in the case of so conscientious an observer and writer as

Upton Sinclair that he is carrying on a conscious deception of the reading world; his
good faith and dependability are not to be doubted. So if somehow the facts here set
726 PARAPSYCHOLOGY

forth rest not upon telepathy, but upon some unconscious hypnotic influence from per-
son to person, this also would be of high psychological interest. (in Sinclair 1929)

This passage is sometimes presented as indicating an endorsement of paranormal

abilities on Einstein’s part. It does not indicate any such thing, but he was clearly
open to further study of the phenomena, especially the idea that something psycho-
logical rather than paranormal is at work. The additional introduction by Rhine’s
collaborator, William McDougall, is less guarded:

The experiments in telepathy, as reported in the pages of this book, were so remark-
ably successful as to rank among the very best hitherto reported. The degree of success
and the conditions of experiment were such that we can reject them as conclusive evi-
dence . . . only by assuming that Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair either are grossly stupid, incom-
petent and careless persons or have deliberately entered upon a conspiracy to deceive
the public in a most heartless and reprehensible fashion. (from Sinclair 1929)

Then came the (temporary) decline of academic parapsychology. Despite Rhine’s

continuing conviction that the body of research supported the reality of ESP, however,
the ongoing lack of replicable evidence had lost his quest most of the little remaining
support it enjoyed in the academic scientific community by the end of the 1950s. In
1962, with several decades of research having failed to conclusively demonstrate the
existence of any paranormal phenomena, Duke University followed the lead of most
other major institutions and quietly distanced itself from parapsychological research.
Without the university’s continuing support, Rhine moved off campus and founded
the Parapsychological Laboratory’s successor, the Foundation for Research on the
Nature of Man (now the Rhine Research Center), up the street from Duke.
As the 1970s dawned, and brought with them a new wave of “occult” fads
(including such things as astrology, Kirlian photography, UFOlogy, pyramid power,
the Bermuda Triangle, transcendental meditation practitioners claiming to be able
to levitate, etc.), Rhine became quite concerned for the future of parapsychology, as
well as its popular image as an experimental science. Many parapsychologists took
a positive and uncritical approach to such ideas as the ability of pyramids to focus
undefined “energies” to keep blades sharp and prevent food from spoiling when
kept under them. Rhine recognized, correctly, that this was eroding the credibility
of their continuing research on ESP.
Despite Rhine’s concerns, parapsychological research has continued unabated,
though it has remained marginalized, with very few degree programs in parapsy-
chology still in existence. Despite the large number of universities in the United
States, for example, only two still maintain active parapsychology programs.
This has not halted innovation, however—parapsychology has come a long way
from card-guessing experiments. In the early 1970s, even as the number of para-
psychology labs dropped dramatically, the productivity of those remaining
researchers remained high, and a number of new, more sophisticated paradigms
arose to replace the old Zener cards with high technology.
Work in scientific parapsychology continued in the 1970s. Helmut Schmidt, a Ger-
man-born parapsychologist who worked at the Rhine Research Center, began in the
late 1960s to conduct experiments on micro-psychokinesis, or micro-PK, in which
subjects attempt to influence the generation of random numbers by computers. He
continued this research in the 1970s, and has written many scholarly articles in
which he claims to have demonstrated a slight human mental influence on the oper-
 PARAPSYCHOLOGY 727

ation of machines, an influence he explained in terms of quantum mechanics. This

has become a common explanatory mechanism for parapsychologists in the ensuing
years, although few people outside of physics actually understand quantum mechan-
ics. Other researchers have conducted hundreds of experiments attempting to repli-
cate his findings, frequently claiming to have found further support for micro-PK.
Meanwhile, Stanley Krippner, Montague Ullman, and Charles Honorton were
using the sleep lab at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn to conduct experi-
ments in dream telepathy, collected in the volume Dream Telepathy (1973), edited
by Ullman and Krippner. In these experiments, which involved over 100 partici-
pants, one person would attempt to “send” thoughts to a second person, while the
second person was sleeping. The second person was then awakened and asked to
describe his/her dreams, and the dreams were examined for evidence of the sent con-
tent. The authors claim to have found, in many instances, a significant relationship
between what was sent and what was dreamt. The volume also contains two papers
by Honorton that purport to present strong scientific evidence for precognitive
dreams. Throughout recorded history, people have of course believed to varying
degrees in the ability of dreams to sometimes predict the future—Honorton was the
first to claim scientific proof of the phenomenon.
Honorton’s dream research is noteworthy mostly for inspiring the next stage of
his research, which introduced a highly touted recent parapsychological paradigm:
The ganzfeld experiment, widely regarded by parapsychologists as the best
evidence for paranormal ability so far. The word ganzfeld means “total field” in
German and is used to refer to a technique of sensory deprivation that creates an
absolutely uniform visual field. The usual procedure involves taping halves of ping-
pong balls over the experimental subject’s eyes. A bright light is then pointed at the
eyes, creating a visual field without discontinuities. In addition to the bright light,
the subject usually wears headphones playing pleasant noise, such as the sound of
surf. Parapsychologists believe the pleasant, relaxed state thus produced is highly
conducive to the reception of psychic signals. After the subject (receiver) has spent
about 15 minutes in this state, a sender is given a target image, randomly selected
from four possible pictures, which were in turn randomly selected from a larger
pool of possibilities.
The sender concentrates on the picture for a prearranged interval, while the
receiver, in a soundproof room, freely describes all mental impressions that occur
during this period. At the end of the session the receiver selects from the four the
picture that best matches his impressions. Over a large number of trials, the receiver
could expect to get 25 percent correct by chance. An actual rate of correct responses
significantly above this level is assumed to be evidence of ESP. Honorton and others
have claimed success rates in some experiments as high as 55 percent, but various
psychologists (most notably Ray Hyman) have written extensive critiques faulting
both the methodology and the statistical techniques involved.
Both the random-number and ganzfeld techniques found new life in the hands of
Robert Jahn, a Princeton University physics professor and dean who established the
Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory to conduct parapsy-
chological research in 1979. Though his background is in physics and engineering,
he became convinced that the human mind directly influences the world around it,
an idea described fully in Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the
Physical World (1987, co-authored by Brenda J. Dunne). In the book, they claim to
have replicated Schmidt’s random number generator findings, and thus to have
728 PARAPSYCHOLOGY

demonstrated the reality of micro-PK. In 2007, the PEAR lab at Princeton Univer-
sity shut down, but its work continues at a new nonprofit organization, Interna-
tional Consciousness Research Laboratories.
Carrying on Jahn’s ideas, however, is fellow physicist Dean Radin, author of the
popular (in its fifteenth printing as of late 2006) The Conscious Universe: The Sci-
entific Truth of Psychic Phenomena (1997).In the book, Radin introduces a now
fairly popular interpretation of psychic phenomena in terms of quantum mechanics
(which often makes little sense to most of the physics community Recognizing the
extent to which other scientists reject his ideas, he treats this rejection as temporary
setback on the road to a forthcoming validation. From the introduction:

In science, the acceptance of new ideas follows a predictable, four-stage sequence. In

Stage 1, skeptics confidently proclaim that the idea is impossible because it violates the
Laws of Science. This stage can last from years to centuries, depending on how much
the idea challenges conventional wisdom. In Stage 2, skeptics reluctantly concede that
the idea is possible, but it is not very interesting and the claimed effects are extremely
weak. Stage 3 begins when the mainstream realizes that the idea is not only important,
but its effects are much stronger and more pervasive than previously imagined. Stage 4
is achieved when the same critics who used to disavow any interest in the idea begin to
proclaim that they thought of it first. Eventually, no one remembers that the idea was
once considered a dangerous heresy. . . .
The idea discussed in this book is in the midst of the most important and the most
difficult of the four transitions—from Stage 1 into Stage 2. While the idea itself is
ancient, it has taken more than a century to conclusively demonstrate it in accordance
with rigorous, scientific standards.

After the long dry spell in the world of celebrity (non-medium) psychics prompted
by the decline of the spiritualists, popular parapsychology came back in a big way in
the 1970s, and at the center of this revival was a tall, handsome, Israeli-born psychic
named Uri Geller (1946–). Geller burst onto the international stage with an original, if
underwhelming, claim to psychokinetic ability: He appeared to bend silverware, keys,
and other small metal objects with his mind. In addition, he claimed to be able to
reproduce drawings made by people at some distance from him—sometimes in the
next room, sometimes in another part of the world. Uri Geller’s genius was in con-
vincing apparently reputable scientists (with no experience of magicians’ methods) of
his skills, and then parlaying the publicity attendant on their published articles and
books into further television appearances and books of his own.
In 1972, for example, Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff conducted a series of
tests of Geller and another young psychic, Ingo Swann, focusing on the drawing-
reproduction trick described above, to which Targ and Puthoff gave a new name:
remote viewing (Honorton’s ganzfeld experiments simply represent a refinement of
this technique, which attempts to more thoroughly control for the possibility of
cheating). After numerous revisions to remove some of the odder material, the
highly respected British science journal Nature published Targ and Puthoff’s “Infor-
mation Transmission under Conditions of Sensory Shielding” in October 1974. This
publication led to a substantial amount of respectful, positive publicity both for the
psychics and the authors, with even the New York Times treating it as a serious
scientific paper. What none of the publicity mentioned was that Nature had decided
to publish the article to let the rest of the scientific community evaluate the quality
of current paranormal research. The article was accompanied by an editorial that
 PARAPSYCHOLOGY 729

explained this, and which used such words as “weak,” “naïve,” and “flawed” to
describe the research.
Despite the collective yawn of the scientific community, Targ and Puthoff went
straight to the public with a summary of their experiments, entitled Mind Reach:
Scientists Look at Psychic Ability. The book featured a foreword by Jonathan
Livingston Seagull author Richard Bach, and an introductory essay by respected
anthropologist Margaret Mead, in which she indicates that the research described
in the book uses solid laboratory science to confirm the existence of remote view-
ing. Elsewhere in the book, Targ and Puthoff create a new term to refer to Geller’s
apparent ability to weaken metal with his mind: The Geller Effect, which also
became the title of Geller’s successful autobiography. The book was co-authored by
Guy Lyon Playfair, who has written many other books on paranormal topics, with
a special focus on hauntings and reincarnation.
Geller has ridden the wave of publicity ever since, with frequent television appear-
ances and a continuing stream of books and products, most now available via his
Web site. His repertoire has varied little since the early 1970s: A typical TV appear-
ance includes the bending of silverware and the guessing of drawings made by other
guests. One venture presented him as a health practitioner of sorts; the book Mind
Medicine, a 1999 publication, barely mentions his putative powers and instead
offers a wide range of fairly ordinary health-related advice on the power of such
things as relaxation and meditation.
James Randi (1928–), Canadian-born magician and escape artist, had a highly
successful career as a stage performer from the 1950s into the 1970s, but since the
early 1960s he has been primarily known for picking up where Houdini left off, as
the world’s leading skeptical investigator of paranormal, occult, and supernatural
claims. In the beginning of this phase of his career, he carried around a blank check
for $10,000, which he promised to anyone who could show, under proper observ-
ing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event.
With inflation and the participation of some generous donors, the prize is up to over
$1 million today, and has never been given away.

THE AMAZING RANDI VERSUS THE AMAZING GELLER

James Randi achieved his greatest fame with his ongoing battle with Uri Geller, whose fre-
quent television appearances (and his insistence that his powers were real and that he never
used tricks) offended Randi, who saw not a psychic but a magician, with a very limited reper-
toire, when he looked at Geller. They also bothered The Tonight Show’s then-host, Johnny
Carson (a skeptical ex-magician himself), who called Randi in as a consultant on ways to
prevent Geller from cheating.The result was an embarrassing 22-minute appearance in 1973
during which he was unable to perform any of his usual feats. (Videos of the Geller Tonight
Show appearance are available on You Tube, www.youtube.com.) Following this experience,
Randi went on to write an entire book detailing ways to duplicate many of Geller’s psychic
feats without resort to any paranormal gifts. The Magic of Uri Geller was first published in
1975, and was retitled, more directly, The Truth about Uri Geller in 1982. It remains in print
under that title, despite numerous lawsuits Geller has directed Randi’s way. Contrary to the
content of Geller’s legal complaints, Randi does not state that Geller is definitely a fraud—
he simply points out that Geller does nothing that cannot be done better using simple magi-
cian’s tricks. Despite Randi’s investigations, Uri Geller continues to perform around the world
and has an extensive Web site.
730 PARAPSYCHOLOGY

James Randi has investigated psychic Uri Geller a number of times, and in addi-
tion to publishing The Magic of Uri Geller in 1975 (retitled The Truth about Uri
Geller in 1982) he provided further information on Geller’s history, including an
entire chapter devoted to what he considers the poor methodology of Targ and
Puthoff (Randi titles the chapter “The Laurel and Hardy of Psi”), in Flim-Flam
(1980). Among many other problems, Randi believes that in one of the more
famous tests of Geller (the one that was written up in Nature), the room in which
Geller was placed to isolate him from the “senders” actually had a hole in the wall
through which Geller could hear the experimenters discussing the stimulus item.
The book also includes chapters on many other odd beliefs of the 1970s, including
the presence of space aliens in ancient Egypt (and the resulting pyramid power), the
Bermuda Triangle, and the Houdini-Doyle conflict over the Cottingley fairies, as
well as an excellent history of the Fox sisters and the early days of psychical
research.
Randi’s mantra is a simple one: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evi-
dence. If a person is claiming something that is not possible given our current
understanding of the world, then it is unlikely to be true, and substantial scientific
evidence should be required of that person before his claim is believed. His devo-
tion to the pursuit of truth against a rising tide of nonsense and pseudoscience
earned him a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant (a prize usually given to peo-
ple pursuing groundbreaking academic research) in the 1980s, which he put
toward his efforts to expose the tricks of phony faith-healers. In 1976 he was a
founding fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the
Paranormal (CSICOP, made up of leading scientists and thinkers in a variety of dis-
ciplines), and he has more recently left CSICOP behind (in part as a result of their
being named as co-defendants in lawsuits filed against Randi by Geller and others)
to form his own organization, the James Randi Educational Foundation. The JREF
serves as a clearinghouse of information on pseudoscience, skepticism, and the
paranormal, and also hosts an annual conference (“The Amazing Meeting”)
devoted to those topics.
Given parapsychology’s ongoing failure to produce replicable psychic events
involving humans, it is somewhat unsurprising that some authors have turned to the
animal world instead. Most prominent in this field is Rupert Sheldrake. He has a
PhD in biochemistry, but has chosen to focus his attention on a wide range of para-
normal topics, frequently jumping on current paranormal bandwagons. He has
joined the ranks of Jahn and Radin, for example, with The Presence of the Past:
Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1995), and Chaos, Creativity, and
Cosmic Consciousness (co-authored by Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and
Jean Houston, 2001), in which he and his colleagues attempt to use complex sys-
tems theory to explain how psychic powers work. In books such as these, he has
added an explanatory piece of jargon to the parapsychological lexicon: morphic res-
onance, a term for the process he believes underlies telepathy. The basic idea is that
all living things generate a morphic field (which cannot be measured), and that these
fields interact in ways that we cannot currently detect.
Sheldrake has in the last decade or so moved toward a rather unusual career path
focused on studies of two phenomena: The sense of being stared at and psychic pets.
He has attempted to give a scientific foundation to the fairly ancient folk belief that
people can sense when they are the object of staring, claiming to have experimen-
tally demonstrated that people really can tell when somebody out of their line of
 PARAPSYCHOLOGY 731

sight is staring. His primary work on this is the book The Sense of Being Stared At:
And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind (2003), in which he argues that, thanks
to morphic resonance, the mind is able to sense this phenomenon without resort to
the usual senses. Other scientists and reviewers have been fairly merciless in their
criticism of his methods, but Sheldrake has accepted this criticism with a wry sense
of humor, collecting and responding to his critics’ objections in an issue of the Jour-
nal of Consciousness Studies, with a piece called “Sheldrake and his Critics: The
Sense of Being Glared At” (2005).
Sheldrake has also become convinced that our pets, especially dogs, have far more
sensitive psychic gifts than their owners, an idea he explored thoroughly in Dogs
that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home: And Other Unexplained Pow-
ers of Animals (2000). In the book he claims that experiments show that even when
owners come home at unusual times, and dogs are prevented from in any way see-
ing or hearing any signs that they are coming, the dogs nonetheless begin to become
restless or excited shortly before the owner’s arrival. Like the staring research, this
has been largely ignored or dismissed by the scientific community, including other
parapsychologists, but the book has been quite successful.
Reception. Despite over a century of research into psychic phenomena, the field
of parapsychology remains a publishing success but a scientific failure. The essential
problem is that a large portion of the scientific community, including most research
psychologists, regards parapsychology as a pseudoscience, due largely to its failure
to move on beyond null results in the way science usually does. Ordinarily, when
experimental evidence fails repeatedly to support a hypothesis, that hypothesis is
abandoned. Within parapsychology, however, more than a century of experimenta-
tion has failed even to conclusively demonstrate the mere existence of paranormal
phenomena, yet parapsychologists continue to pursue that elusive goal, and readers
continue to accompany them.

Bibliography
Browne, Sylvia. Sylvia Browne’s Book of Angels. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 1993.
———. Sylvia Browne’s Lessons for Life. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2004.
———. If You Could See What I See: The Tenets of Novus Spiritus. Carlsbad, CA: Hay
House, 2006.
———. The Two Marys: The Hidden History of the Mother and Wife of Jesus. New York:
Dutton, 2007.
Byrne, Rhonda. The Secret. New York: Atria Books, 2006.
Geller, Uri. Mind Medicine. Boston: Element Books, 1999.
———. Uri Geller’s Mindpower Kit. New York: Penguin Studio, 1996.
Geller, Uri, and G.L. Playfair. The Geller Effect. New York: H. Holt, 1987.
Gurney, Edmund, F.W. Myers, and F. Podmore. Phantasms of the Living. London: Trubner
and Co., 1886.
Houdini, Harry. A Magician among the Spirits. New York: Arno Press, 1972 (1924).
———. Houdini exposes the tricks used by the Boston medium “Margery” to win the $2500
prize offered by the Scientific American. Also a complete exposure of Argamasilla, the
famous Spaniard who baffled noted scientists of Europe and America, with his claim
to X-ray vision . . . New York: Adams Press, 1924.
———. Miracle Mongers and their Methods: A Complete Exposé. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus,
1981 (1920).
Hyman, Ray. The Elusive Quarry: A Scientific Appraisal of Psychical Research. Buffalo, NY:
Prometheus, 1989.
732 PHILOLOGICAL THRILLERS

Jahn, Robert, and Brenda Dunne. Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Phys-
ical World. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987.
Kardec, Allan. The Spirits’ Book (Le Livre des Esprits). Albuquerque, NM: Brotherhood of
Life, 1993.
———. Book on Mediums (Le Livre des Mediums). Boston: Colby and Rich, 1874.
Keene, M. Lamar, and Allan Spraggett. The Psychic Mafia. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1997,
1976.
Knight, J.Z. A State of Mind: My Story. New York: Warner, 1987.
McMoneagle, J. The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy. Charlottesville, VA:
Hampton Roads, 2002.
Morehouse, D. Psychic Warrior: Inside the CIA’s Stargate Program: The True Story of a Sol-
dier’s Espionage and Awakening. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996.
Radin, D. The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Reality of Psychic Phenomena. New York:
HarpersEdge, 1997.
Randi, James. Flim-Flam! Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1982.
———. The Truth about Uri Geller. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1982.
Rhine, J.B. ExtraSensory Perception. Boston: B. Humphries, 1964.
———. New Frontiers of the Mind: The Story of the Duke Experiments. New York: Farrar
& Rinehart, 1937.
Sheldrake, Rupert. Dogs that Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. New York:
Crown, 1999.
———. “Sheldrake and his Critics: The Sense of Being Glared At.” Journal of Consciousness
Studies 12.6 (2005).
———. The Sense of Being Stared At. New York: Crown, 2003.
———. The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature. New York:
Times Books, 1995 (1988).
Sheldrake, Rupert, T. McKenna, and R. Abraham. Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Con-
sciousness. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2001.
Sinclair, Upton. Mental Radio. Springfield, IL: C.C. Thomas, 1962 (1929).
Targ, R., and H. Puthoff. Mind Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Ability. New York:
Delacorte, 1977.
Ullman, M., S. Krippner, and A. Vaughan. Dream Telepathy. New York: Macmillan, 1973.
What the Bleep Do We Know? Dir. by Mark Vicente, Betsy Chasse, and William Arntz.
Twentieth Century Fox. 2005. 108 mins.
Wolman, B.B., ed. Handbook of Parapsychology. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1977.

Further Reading
James Randi Educational Foundation. www.randi.org; Rupert Sheldrake, Biologist and
Author. www.sheldrake.org; Uri Geller’s Web site. www.urigeller.com.
LUIS A. CORDÓN
PHILOLOGICAL THRILLERS
Definition. Philological thrillers base their suspense effect on mysteries soluble
by scholarship or learning. Plots are pivoted on matters requiring the attention
and skill of a protagonist well versed in history and literature, often requiring in-
depth linguistic command of classical Greek and Latin, and with broad cultural
knowledge. Specialization on the part of the investigator in some arcane subject
or sign system/language is mandatory. Usually following the structure of the
action thriller with its leading up to a final showdown the learned hero must also
possess a modicum of physical prowess, and all in all turn out to command mental
and physical resources more than matching those of his vile opponent. In a
 PHILOLOGICAL THRILLERS 733

TYPES OF PHILOLOGICAL THRILLERS

Like all generic fiction somewhat blurred at the genre edges, the philological thriller seems
to subdivide into mysteries to do with antiquity, notably ancient Egypt, mysteries to do with
the origins and circumstances of the Christian faith, mysteries about the Knights Templar (the
latter two categories often, by force of their shared concerns, fused into one), and a group
with no distinct shared thematic emphasis but sharing the central issue of a mystery, the solu-
tion of which depends on successful philological enquiry, exhibiting the element of ancient
and/or coded texts in need of interpretation.

perspective of time setting the philological thriller typically usually works in terms
of a tension between a past containing mysteries in need of interpretation and a
present inviting or necessitating such interpretation and, which is essential,
making such interpretation possible (e.g., Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code). In
cases where such tension is not activated because of events taking place completely
in the past, the approach of the investigator is markedly modern (e.g., Umberto
Eco, The Name of the Rose). As the mystery of the philological thriller involves
specialist knowledge for its unravelling, an important characteristic of this kind of
thriller is its strong efforts to ensure the reader’s appreciation of what is at stake,
hence its prominent didactic elements, which may often amount to what is known
from popular-science writing.
History. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003) was, in market figures, the cul-
mination of a literary trend with increasing mass appeal since Umberto Eco’s very
learned but nonetheless best-selling The Name of the Rose (1980). There is a his-
tory of philological-thriller elements before Eco, but to talk of a (sub-) genre as such
would hardly make any sense. Indeed, it is even only to a superficial reading that
Eco’s novel may be said to be the first instance of the modern bona fide philological
thriller. The Name of the Rose, as it appears with all desirable clarity from Eco’s sep-
arately published Postscript to The Name of the Rose (1983), the novel was meant
to argue against the Newtonian rationalism that pervades most thrillers. Based on
semiotics, Eco’s specialty as a scholar, the novel is a practical but always subtle
demonstration of how meaning is constructed and works by systems of signs.
Nonetheless, it makes sense, despite authorial intention, to read the work as a rather
straight story of uncovering a secret of immense importance to certain clerics of the
medieval church, a secret of a nature only immediately appreciable by philologists
and literary historians familiar with Antiquity.
No doubt the good quest-cum-mystery yarn of Eco’s novel secured an audience
beyond the literary and semiotic connoisseurs, who recognize it, in accordance with
Eco’s intention, as a work in an anti-rationalist tradition embracing writers before
him, like Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov, and after, like Thomas Pynchon
and Paul Auster. We may take it that it is exactly this quest-cum-mystery quality that
two decades later appealed to the perhaps even larger audience of Dan Brown’s The
Da Vinci Code. Dan Brown’s best seller from 2003 is the work that gathered up nar-
rative and thematic elements in a particularly successful combination in terms of
reader appeal. It may consequently be considered the common reference work in the
genre, a status given irrespective of criteria to do with evaluative criticism.
734 PHILOLOGICAL THRILLERS

Central to the philological thriller is a quest for some knowledge deemed of cru-
cial importance, of such an importance indeed that the generally accepted historically
based self-understanding of modern (Western) society is in for radical adjustment. In
the case of Eco it was the lost—and eventually lost again!—manuscript of Aristotle’s
treatise on comedy, considered unsound for proper religious observance. In the case
of Brown it was the dogma-thwarting notion of a feminine lineage from Christ. Such
involvement of searching for tradition-disturbing basics resembles the famous quests
for the Holy Grail catalogued by European mythology and literature. We find the
myth material to do with the Holy Grail in medieval romance cycles in the Romance
languages as well as in English. It found expression in the operas of Richard Wagner,
here merging with elements from Nordic mythology, and later also in, for instance,
the fiction of such different writers as Lawrence Durrell (The Avignon Quincunx),
J.R.R. Tolkien (Lord of the Rings), and J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter). Victorian
adventure fiction (e.g., H. Rider Haggard) often involves the solution of riddles need-
ing a scholarly approach combined with muscular activities.
Trends and Themes. Philology, from classical Greek meaning the love of words,
and a concept and term introduced as late as the early nineteenth century in the con-
text of modern university enquiry, presupposes a common culture constituted by
written language—texts—accessible by methods relying on the philologist’s textual
instruments such as what we today would call linguistics, historiography, and liter-
ary study, often extending its practices to draw on related domains within anthro-
pology, psychology, and so on.
Central to the philological thriller is the common attribution of extraordinary
power to language and other cultural constructs. The phenomenon is well known in
the observing of religious and quasi-religious practices. For the transformation—
transubstantiation—of the bread and wine of the Eucharist into the body of Christ
the Roman Catholic liturgy requires a verbal formula including the Latin words Hoc
est corpus meum. Although inherently nothing mysterious in the Latin words they
have come to be associated with the metaphysical transubstantiation depending on
faith, an association all the more apparent in the layman’s lack of understanding of
the Latin that has resulted in the expression hocus pocus, designating that which
cannot be immediately understood. To Plato the poets posed a danger to the polity,
since their words were capable of arousing feelings contrary to the common sense
needed for everyday transactions. To the Nordic Vikings the runes had power of
fate. And in most civilizations the written word has carried more importance, in,
say, business matters, than oral understandings, although oaths, affidavits, and so
on, by having been uttered, do carry legal consequences. In other words, language
has traditionally served a double purpose as both means of communication and—
more or less powerful—object of communication. Arguably, also the pervasive post-
modernist climate of recent decades with its predilection for a “textual” or “verbal”
approach to existence has made philological enquiry of topical interest.
Eco radicalized philological enquiry by way of semiotics, a theory of signs devel-
oped from the Swiss philologist Ferdinand de Saussure’s posthumous publication
Cours de linguistique generale (1916) consisting of students’ lecture notes taken
1906–11, with notable contributions from linguistic scholars such as the Dane
Louis Hjelmslev and the American Charles Peirce. In his notes for his novel, Post-
script to The Name of the Rose (1983), Eco himself draws attention to the way he
treats language and text conventions to challenge and redirect interest in cultural-,
text-, and language-dependent constructs. The philological enquiry at the heart of
 PHILOLOGICAL THRILLERS 735

the story, the discovery of the lost treatise by Aristotle on comedy, a companion
piece to the Greek philosopher’s famous and philologically fully processed treatise
on tragedy, is the kind of work requiring the philological expertise represented by
the “investigating officer,” the English monk William of Baskerville, whose proce-
dures parallel and complement the present-day philological work of the author of
the novel.
Whereas Eco undertakes to question and put at risk cultural conventions taken
for granted in Western culture and thereby joins forces with contemporary philo-
sophical work deconstructing seemingly cultural givens pioneered by the French
philosopher Jacques Derrida, Dan Brown’s center of interest in his best seller is in
the ancient “conspiracy theory” regarding the possible issue of Christ and the exis-
tence of a female Christian tradition. The way to the (re-)discovery of this alterna-
tive to established Christian dogma is a chain of riddles left by the guardians of the
heresy. Unlike Eco’s mystery that leaves the investigator and the reader enmeshed in
the net of language, Brown’s protagonist, the symbologist professor Robert
Langdon, and the reader with him, is able to break the code insofar as it is consti-
tuted by a series of enigmatic ciphers, but will have to negotiate himself the
theological implications of Langdon’s quest into apocryphal Christianity.
Contexts and Issues. Structurally, philological thrillers generally follow the broad
outlines of the action thriller, the learned labor in the study accompanied by the
physical exertions that the pursuit of the implications of the paperwork entail, with
or without the heightened danger presented by rivals invariably less given to intel-
lectual sorting out than the protagonist and his/her entourage. A shared trait of
most philological thrillers is their two-epoch setting. The mystery or riddle belongs
to the past, whereas its solution is a matter of present-day effort calling for all the
state-of-the-art tools of the modern scholar.
As the modern philologist—historian, linguist, Egyptologist, and so on—relies
very much on technological resources, and as the mystery handled by the philo-
logical scholar may very well be in the area of text-dependent science, the philo-
logical thriller shares some ground with its cousin the scientific thriller. Also the
historical novel, to the extent it is characterized by preoccupation with some prob-
lem requiring the scrutiny of texts, and the historical whodunit, may be said to be
cousins. The parallel-world explorations of regular science fiction may share ele-
ments with the reconstructions of the past in terms of either counter-factual or
complementary-factual events.
The philological thriller is characterized by the quest for origins, factual or fic-
tional. As such the application of philological instruments and procedures are made
to work in relation to a set of elements existing prior to or outside of the fiction, so
to speak. A variety of the philological thriller could be said to exist in the strong tra-
dition in the English academic whodunit (e.g., Michael Innes, pseudonym of the lit-
erary historian J.I.M. Stewart), for letting the plot revolve around matters to do
with literature, to the point of hinging the plot on some literary element, a tradition
playfully honored in the more recent crime novels of Colin Dexter (featuring Inspec-
tor Morse) and Reginald Hill (featuring the investigating duo of Dalziel and Pascoe).
In generic perspective the philological thriller is a hybrid. It combines features
from the straight mystery whodunit with its sleuth combining hard evidence and
intuition for the investigation of crime, the action thriller with its dependence on
crude suspense construction, the political thriller with its potential for consideration
of matters of (geo)political importance, the regular realist novel with its invitation
736 PHILOLOGICAL THRILLERS

to empathy, and the historical novel with its reconstructions of plausible pasts. Sam
Bourne’s The Last Testament from 2007, to choose a novel in the wake of The Da
Vinci Code, is a good illustration of the way that these elements are joined to cre-
ate a successful philological thriller.
The central event in Bourne’s novel is the appearance of old Babylonian clay
tablets after the pillage of the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad in April 2003.
Among the clay tablets is one that turns out to be the will of Old Testament
Abraham, assigning ownership of Mount Moria, the present-day sacred site in
central Jerusalem, facing claims from his two sons Isaac and Ishmael, celebrated by
Jews and Muslims respectively. If it can be proved that either one received the land
from Abraham, it would give the successful side a legitimate claim rooted in history.
The political thriller is in evidence in the importance of the old tablet for current
political and military efforts. The mystery element is in the efforts on the part of the
two protagonists to get to the root of the matter. The action is in the chases follow-
ing upon the competition for control of the tablet, with Israeli, Palestinian, and
American agents chasing one another. The historical aspect is in the building up of
the whole background of Old Testament historiography and archaeology. The
empathy is secured by a realist portrayal of Maggie Costello, professional negotia-
tor suffering from past trauma and being first presented as Washington housewife
and very much living in a recognizable everyday world. The philological element is
a code-breaking involving first the specialist appraisal of the tablet’s cuneiform lan-
guage. In this case it is not the domain of the protagonist(s), but of the character
that furnishes the inciting event of the plot, and who is immediately killed. But by
the flashback narrative technique the reader is allowed to follow his investigation
and interpretation of the tablet, except for the circumstance that information as to
the exact nature of Abraham’s decision is protracted for structural suspense reasons
until the very end. The philological aspect here also applies to the mastery of the
Internet resource of Second Life, without which the endeavors of the protagonists
would have come to nothing.
Reception. Usually relegated to the popular-fiction dump of the adventure novel
or mystery story by its very topic, setting, and thematic issue—murder in the
medieval monastery—Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose created quite a critical
stir at the same time as the general reading public took warmly to it. It was pub-
lished at a time when deconstruction, metafictional concerns, and attention to inter-
textuality were sweeping the literary-critical landscape worldwide. It could be read
as an ingenious murder mystery, modelling itself deliberately on the Sherlock
Holmes stories, or as a slyly devised practicing of linguistic and literary-critical the-
ories centring on the epistemological implications of language and culturally condi-
tioned verbal constructions such as (non)fictional texts, or it could be read as a
warning against the tendency by the powers that be to exercise censorship, or, and
surely by most readers, as just a gripping yarn. Eco in one fell swoop set a new and
critically acclaimed standard for the historical suspense story turning it into a trend-
setting philological thriller.
Eco’s novel rekindled interest in the Middle Ages generally, reflected in both aca-
deme and entertainment. No doubt his approach to language and other cultural
constructs as systems of signs propelled interest in language and language-derived
issues. Since language is a kind of cipher agreed upon for its meaning in a given cul-
ture, the urge to look into cipher proper is a natural consequence. Literary criticism
contemporary with Eco’s novel welcomed instances of language games, such as we
 PHILOLOGICAL THRILLERS 737

find in the fiction of British Julian Barnes (Flaubert’s Parrot (1984)), Lawrence
Norfolk (Lemprière’s Dictionary (1991)), and Iain Pears (An Instance of the
Fingerpost (1997)) or by American Allan Kurzweil (A Case of Curiosities (1992)),
or Susan Sontag (The Volcano Lover (1992)). Whereas the success of Eco’s book
resulted first and foremost indirectly as an encouragement in this upsurge of narra-
tive integrating themes of self-reflection in the text, the success of Dan Brown’s The
Da Vinci Code lacked the academic acclaim bestowed on Eco’s book with its invi-
tation to sheer enjoyment at the same time as critical scrutiny according to taste and
training. The reason is not far to seek. The mystery in Brown’s novel may be hard
for the fictional characters involved to solve and it may, as it has certainly done, give
rise to lively theological debate, but only to the extent that its solution is a matter of
reading on and thus dealing in a very basic way with the sign nature of language—
understanding the words on the page—does it offer a challenge. Arguably, the work
of Eco and Brown between them, however different their intentions and literary exe-
cutions, opened the field for seeking out the lacunae or mysteries of the past—a lost
Aristotelian manuscript in the case of Eco, generation in Christ’s family in the case of
Brown—and offering a bid for fictional redress. Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece and
Rome, the Crusades and the Knights Templar, and a host of other historical figures,
events, or complexes ripe for conjecture opened themselves up to writers’ and read-
ers’ interest alike. Since Eco’s The Name of the Rose there has been an increasing pro-
duction of philological thrillers. Accelerating conspicuously since Dan Brown’s best
seller, most of them go unheeded by academic literary criticism, but they obviously
satisfy a hungry craving on the part of the reading public.

Selected Authors
Mysteries Related to Antiquity, Notably Ancient Egypt. The ancient Egypt of the pharaohs
constitutes a particularly inviting site for the genre of the philological thriller.
Although many of the riddles to do with social, religious, and political life were
more or less solved after the interpretation of the Rosetta stone made hieroglyphs
readily accessible as a language, there still remains considerable material for thrilling
stories, both in the old civilization itself and in the history of its discovery. Preemi-
nent among those who have written suspenseful tales about ancient Egypt, based on
his own expertise as a world-renowned Egyptologist, is Christian Jacq. His novels,
most of them gathered together in series (Ramses, Stone of Light, Queen of
Freedom, Judge of Egypt, Mysteries of Osiris, and Vengeance of the Gods) lean
toward the historical novel, but have distinct traits of the philological thriller.
Among those who have tried their hands on the Kingdom of the Nile are Tom
Holland with The Sleeper in the Sands (1998), Arthur Phillips with The Egyptologist
(2004), Matthew Reilly with Seven Ancient Wonders (2005), Paul Sussman with
The Last Secret of the Temple (2005), and Nick Drake with Nefertiti—the Book of
the Dead (2006), all of them relying on philological means to explain and explore
phenomena sparking off danger and drama.
Regarding ancient Greece and Rome philological work has been carried out in
bulk since the Renaissance; indeed, it was the rediscovery of Greece through
Rome—and through the medieval heritage of Rome—that triggered philology as a
line of academic enquiry.
Homeric echoes and Greek mythology are the subject of modern-Greek-and-
Byzantine-history specialist Roderick Beaton’s Ariadne’s Children (1995), making
738 PHILOLOGICAL THRILLERS

the archaeological work on the Minoan civilization in Crete the basis of an exciting
plot, and A.J. Hartley making Mycaenean Greece the background of American
Museum drama in The Mask of Atreus (2006). Novels about ancient Rome have
been staple fare in the genre of the historical novel, with Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s
The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) as the perhaps best known, and best loved, of its
kind. The British writer Robert Harris offers his angle on the volcanic eruption of
the Vesuvius in 79 AD in Pompeii (2003) with the variation of having a state-
employed water engineer “read” the signs of the imminent catastrophe. The philo-
logical interest habitually associated with generations of Latin-school pupils reading
the speeches and letters of Cicero is the background of the same writer’s portrayal,
through sources accessible by philological effort, in his novel Imperium from 2006.
Disputed Origins of the Christian Faith. In this category Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci
Code (2003) has pride of place. The murderous lengths to which orthodox Chris-
tianity, here in the shape of the Opus Dei organization within the Roman Catholic
Church, will go in order to protect dogmatic vested interests found a ready public,
ever craving and welcoming conspiracy theories. The popular response to the novel
showed that fiction’s claims on reality were readily accepted for reality itself. No
doubt the offering of a female link to Christ chimed in with a readership since the
1970s raised on gender consciousness. With a bearing on Dan Brown we find also
Kathleen McGowan’s The Expected One—Book One of the Magdalene Line
(2006). The author depicts her heroine Maureen Paschal pursuing signs of Mary
Magdalene having been seen by people from various cultures throughout the cen-
turies. It goes without saying that this is a venture that, as soon as dogmatic apolo-
gists become aware of her, promises serious threats to Maureen. Michael Cordy
offers his approach to the question of numinous genealogy in The Miracle Strain
(1997), a story bridging across to the science thriller in that it has its protagonist, a
gene scientist, start work on divine genes.
Knights Templar and the Crusades. The Knights Templar and the Crusades of the Middle
Ages saw their justification as the protectors of the Christian faith against Islam, the
great imperialist of the time in the lands of the Bible. In concrete terms the Knights
Templar were a partly religious, partly mundane order of knights supervising the con-
trol with the holy places in the present-day Middle East. As soldiers and warriors they,
so to speak, kept open access from the European West to the various holy places and
shrines. Associated with the knights was a rich mythology about their passing on from
generation to generation the guarding of relics and powerful documents, the most
important of them all being the Holy Grail, Christ’s drinking cup from the Last Sup-
per. Also in this area the historical novel has long held its own, with Sir Walter Scott’s
Ivanhoe (1820) and various nineteenth-century workings of the Robin Hood stories
referring to the crusading Richard Lionheart, as central in this tradition. In Raymond
Khoury’s The Last Templar (2005) we are offered a story that moves between 1291
and present-day New York. The decrypting of an old document plays the central role
and justifies the designation of philological thriller. The identical structure of narration,
switching between the Middle Ages and the now we have in Kate Mosse’s Labyrinth
(2005). The whereabouts of the Holy Grail will only be revealed to the person in pos-
session of the Trilogy of the Labyrinth, a book preserving in its entirety the truth about
the grail. The Knights Templar having something of considerable importance is like-
wise the subject of Steve Berry’s The Templar Legacy (2006), a story that throws long
glances back into the Middle Ages at the same time as it unfolds its plot by counter-
pointing events in contemporary Copenhagen and the south of France.
 PHILOLOGICAL THRILLERS 739

Whatever the nature of any secret held by the medieval order of knights and its
relation to Christian dogma, there seems to be boundless opportunities in this line
of fiction.
Assorted Philological Thrillers. Ancient civilizations and Christianity are favorite
haunts of the philological thriller, but a good many works of exciting fiction have
made use of a need for, or at any rate a sympathizing with, philological competence
as the motor of a story, and with an everything but conventionally heroic philolo-
gist in a central role. Mention has been made of Umberto Eco and his The Name of
the Rose, followed by other Eco works deserving the designation of philological
thriller, such as Foucault’s Pendulum (1988; with a bearing on the Knights Templar)
and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004).
In Eco’s genuinely learned tradition we find Dame Antonia Byatt’s Possession: A
Romance (1990), about two literary researchers gradually uncovering great secrets
in their efforts, which to begin with seem like so much lit crit-career-sustaining
drudgery. Also in the kind of literature distinctly not designed for the best-seller lists
we have Lawrence Norfolk’s Lemprière’s Dictionary (1991), a story of a young
English scholar setting out to write a mythological dictionary. In his research and as
a result of his dictionary work he discovers startling things about his father, things
that seem to have a very dramatic and deadly bearing on his surroundings while at
the same time reflecting his literary endeavors. In this book Eco’s and other semiol-
ogists’ notion of the world in terms of sign systems is made of central importance.
In Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club (2003) the authentic work by New England
philologists and literary critics on a new American translation of Dante form both
the background, and, as it turns out, the foreground of deadly events in picturesque
campus surroundings. There is no need to be able to read The Divine Comedy in
the original medieval Italian, but a certain familiarity with the work makes for a
more satisfactory response. Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason soon after pub-
lished The Rule of Four (2004). Here we have to do with a story in which the pro-
gression of the plot keeps pace with the gradual translation of a medieval document
in Latin and six other languages, The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. It turns out that
working on the old texts previously cost the on-the-point-of-graduating Tom
Sullivan’s philologist father his life. And more violence is in store, as Tom and his
Princeton roommates concentrate beyond the call of curriculum duty on the secrets
of the document. In The Romanov Prophecy (2004), Steve Berry anticipated his
Crusades story by a story set in present-day Russia. When the American lawyer
Miles Lord is sent to the Russian archives in Moscow to find documents justifying
the claim of the Romanovs on the Russian throne, the dreary work in the vaults has
dramatic repercussions. Leaning to the side of conspiracy theory—what actually
happened when the Bolsheviks executed the Czar family and did they all die?—
Berry makes archive enquiry into a very dangerous discipline. Also to do with recent
history, but necessitating the mind of the trained philologist we have Elizabeth
Kostova’s The Historian (2005). This is a Dracula story that closes in on that monster
by a combination of careful work on old texts and muscular action in brisk interac-
tion. Old texts and strange artifacts form the key to an old secret in John Fasman’s
The Geographer’s Library (2005), a story that centers on medieval alchemy. Switch-
ing between 1145 and present-day provincial New England a journalist is asked to
write the obituary of an Estonian professor of history, who has died while in the
United States. The story proceeds along with the collection and interpretation of 15
artifacts. But the interests of others are ignited as the journalist makes his enquiries.
740 POETRY

It seems as if philology is a rich vein for fiction with a wide audience appeal. Cer-
tainly since the end of the twentieth century it has been mined with increasing inter-
est and imagination by contemporary writers. Unfortunately there is no critical
literature to cover the whole field as presented above. This is partly due to the fact
that “philological thriller” has yet to be recognized as a useful designation for a kind
of literature enjoying popular appeal but to a superficial glance of immense variety.
Partly it is due to the fact that this kind of fiction has suddenly, almost tsunami-like,
flooded the book market, with the consequence of virtually stunning those attempt-
ing to compare and categorize. As for critical curiosity it is recommended to search
for sources under specific author names or in treatises on suspense fiction generally.

Bibliography
Barnes, Julian. Flaubert’s Parrot. New York: Knopf, 1985.
Beaton, Roderick. Ariadne’s Children. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996.
Berry, Steve. The Romanov Prophecy. New York: Ballantine, 2004.
———. The Templar Legacy. New York: Ballantine, 2006.
Brown, Dan. The Da Vinci Code. New York: Doubleday, 2003.
Bourne, Sam. The Last Testament. London: Harper, 2007.
Caldwell, Ian, and Dustin Thompson. The Rule of Four. New York: Dial, 2004.
Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.
Fasman, John. The Geographer’s Library. New York: Penguin, 2005.
Harris, Robert. Pompeii. New York: Random House, 2003.
Holland, Tom. The Sleeper in the Sands. Boston: Little, Brown, 1998.
Khoury, Raymond. The Last Templar. New York: Dutton, 2005.
Kostova, Elizabeth. The Historian. Boston: Little, Brown, 2005.
Kurzweil, Alan. A Case of Curiosities. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.
McGowan, Kathleen. The Expected One. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.
Mosse, Kate. The Labyrinth. New York: G.P. Putnam, 2005.
Norfolk, Lawrence. Lemprière’s Dictionary. New York: Harmony, 1991.
Pearl, Matthew. The Dante Club. New York: Random House, 2003.
Pears, Iain. An Instance of the Fingerpost. New York: Riverhead, 1998.
Phillips, Arthur. The Egyptologist. New York: Random House, 2004.
Sontag, Susan. The Volcano Lover. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1992.

Further Reading
de Saussure, Ferdinand. Cours de linguistique generale. Paris: Payot, 1972; Eco, Umberto.
Postscript to The Name of the Rose. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.
LARS OLE SAUERBERG

POETRY
Definition. “Poetry, the art of articulation, renders us inarticulate when it comes
to defining it.” So proclaims David Lehman, series editor of the wildly successful
Best American Poetry, in his forward to the 2002 edition. One of the most popular
texts used in college poetry classrooms, Sound and Sense, acknowledges that “people
have always been more successful at appreciating poetry than defining it” (2002, 3).
If people whose livelihoods depend upon their cogent definitions of poetry fumble
and hesitate, the average reader can be forgiven her or his tentative stabs at a defi-
nition. Most of us know a poem when we see one but when pressed to define one,
retract almost every definition or characteristic as we articulate it. Young children
associate poetry with its rhyme, and while it is true that poetry often contains
 POETRY 741

WHAT IS POETRY?
In his famous explorations of the differences between poetry and prose, William Carlos
Williams (1883–1963) elliptically announced that “prose has to do with the fact of an
emotion; poetry has to do with the dynamization of emotion into a separate form. . . . poetry:
new form dealt with as a reality in itself. . . . [T]he form of poetry is related to the move-
ments of the imagination revealed in words—or whatever it may be” (1970, 133). And
Wallace Stevens’s definition announces that a poem is “the cry of its occasion.” “A poem
should not mean / But be,” says Archibald MacLeish.

rhyme, we cannot define poetry by its presence. Much poetry does not rhyme. We
may point out that poetry is created from the basic unit of a line, so we may iden-
tify poetry as writing that is preoccupied with that unit; however, the line, too,
becomes a blurry characteristic, particularly when one examines the genre of prose
poems or Language poetry, both of which confound our understanding of what con-
stitutes a line. Rhythm or regular meter frequently marks poetry, but even that char-
acteristic cannot be offered as part of an unwavering definition.
Poets themselves often present ambiguous definitions of poetry, couched around
what it contains and what it does rather than what it is, definitions that suggest that
each poem creates its own parameters.
In her introduction to the Best American Poetry 2004, poet Lyn Hejinian writes
“What is, or isn’t, a poem? What makes something poetic? These questions remain
open. And the fact that there are no formal answers is one source of the vitality of
the art form” (2004, 9). Influential poetry critic Helen Vendler remarks that “[w]e
have been conscious, too, that a poem can be any one of a number of things, from
a whimsical couplet to a sublime sequence” (1987, x). The definition of poetry, like
some of its most intriguing examples, resists closure.
When Vendler does define poetry, she offers a list of features: intensity, a point,
concentration of the form, and melody (1987, xxx), and this listing technique for
defining poetry is common. Most handbooks of literary terms and poetry textbooks
will define poetry according to its content and purpose along with one or two of its
most salient features. Some will call poetry a rhythmic, imaginative expression
intended to supply pleasure, offer an idea of significance, or engage in some manner
with meaning, frequently marked by its concentrated and organized use of language.
And that’s where the definition will begin: a poem is an attempt to communicate
some idea of importance through language that is frequently concerned with itself
as an artistic medium. For in treating language as art, the definition allows but does
not require attention to sound and rhyme, rhythm, image and metaphor, compres-
sion and intensity in the definition of the genre.
Identifying poetry’s basic material as language rather (as is often the case) than
the line allows poetry to exist on the page or on the stage, to offer complete sen-
tences or merely sounds, even symbols. In the broad swath of printed, recorded, and
audio-visually taped materials that constitutes current American poetry, more
appears to fall under the rubric of poetry than ever before. In James Longenbach’s
discussion of this expansion of the genre in 2004, he intones that “[i]t’s difficult to
complain about poetry’s expanding audience, but it’s more difficult to ask what a
culture that wants poetry to be popular wants poetry to be” (2004, 6). Poetry is still
742 POETRY

the “emotion recollected in tranquility” that it was when Wordsworth said so. And
it is still marked by attention to image and metaphor, line breaks and rhythm,
sound, compression. But it is also now gesture and voice inflection, meaning
divorced from words, ideas divorced from sentimentality. The profusion of genres,
schools, and even events that identify themselves as poetry or poetic have pushed
the already broadly outlined definitions of poetry even further. Poet Marvin Bell
announced in 2003 that “Poetry is a great big Yes: Yes to formalists, yes to free verse
writers, yes to surrealists, yes to political poets, yes to the poets of wordplay and
slippery self-consciousness” (131). His description responds to the expansion of
poetry’s definition, which has always been the most slippery of definitions.
The Tendency toward Dichotomies. As welcoming and all-inclusive as contemporary
poetry seems to be, any discussion of poetry must navigate the bifurcation that
constantly dominates the world of poetry and the interpretations and assessments
of it. Longtime editor of the Cambridge History of American Literature Sacvan
Bercovitch acknowledged that poetry was one of the two most problematic areas
covered under the rubric of “American Literature” during the past 20 years, in
part because of the multiple simultaneous concepts that render the split. Critics
disagree not only on what schools or movements may be included under the
rubric of poetry, but also on what specific parameters should be used to differ-
entiate between those schools. Most critics prefer to speak in terms of
dichotomies, for example, yet Robert Hass’s review of American poetry pub-
lished in 2001 convinced him of three traditions, and the triad of traditions he
notes does not contain mention of any oral traditions. Granted, he speaks in an
introduction to the best poetry published and therefore restricted to the printed
medium, but he offers no qualifiers to his list of poetic traditions.
As is the case in almost all histories of various art forms, each burgeoning new
trend or radical challenge to the prevailing artistic practices rejects the philosophies
and the features that hold sway. As the new trend accumulates adherents and those
adherents gain popular acceptance, important awards, or critical acclaim, its exper-
imental, radical slant against or relationship to the mainstream eventually shifts
from the position of radical outsider to prevailing insider.
We could identify the acceptable, mainstream poetry as traditional, if we keep
in mind that what falls into this category is ever-shifting. Traditional does not
mean for all time, but rather, for some recent period of time. And we also must
remember that what is traditional at any given moment very likely occupied the
position of challenger or avant-garde prior to its ascent (some would call it
descent) to the category of traditional.

DO YOU PREFER YOUR POETRY RAW OR COOKED?

One of the rather static rifts has divided the poetic world between the realm of acceptable
or mainstream, and that which challenges the status quo, or the avant-garde. Robert Lowell
(1917–77) rather famously divided the two into the “raw” and the “cooked” in his accept-
ance speech for the National Book Award for poetry in 1960, with cooked referring to that
“marvelously expert and remote” poetry of the accepted mainstream academic poetry and
raw, to that which challenged it.
 POETRY 743

Despite the near-constant stream of poetic schools and movements from avant-
garde to status quo, then back out again, one line over which the two realms divide
has remained rather consistent for approximately the past half-century. Most
twentieth-century schools of poetry have organized themselves in relationship to the
position of the self in the poem and the poem’s fashioning—or not—of its speaker.
Alternately described by critics as the absence or presence of the speakerly self in the
poetry, as impersonal versus personal or objective or subjective content, as cooked
compared to raw, as poetry keening toward the universal arrayed against that of the
local, this essential line over which the poets and critics split the discussion has
remained fixed pretty much since the midpoint of the twentieth century.
Another way the world of American poetry is presented as bifurcated focuses on
the division between academic and popular judgment, between the worlds of high
and low culture, of elitists and commoners. Poetry and criticism emanating from the
academy—what university writers’ workshop faculty members and students study
and write, what journals housed in those universities publish, what published crit-
ics deem worthy of their attention, what movements in and schools of poetry con-
stitute the syllabi in college poetry classes—often deviates severely from the poetry
that popular audiences demand and applaud, that which average Americans will
purchase or that which members of the public will attend. However, in the same
way that experimental challenges to the status quo eventually become part of the
world of mainstream poetry, so is there constant traffic between the poetic worlds
of low and high culture. What is at one point eschewed by the realm of academic
presses and classrooms because of its origins among the masses or from the streets
rather than from within the walls of institutions of higher education eventually
enters academia. Today’s academic poets were often yesterday’s popular, radical,
marginal, even street poets and enjoy a symbiotic or at least connected relationship.
The two categories feed each other.
The connectedness of these two worlds must remain in view whenever one
assesses the current state of poetry. While at the same time that many have lamented
the deplorable decline of national reading practices, and anyone particularly inter-
ested in poetry could specifically lament the infrequency with which poets’ books
are read (let alone purchased), the numbers of Americans—particularly young
Americans—who consider themselves poets, participate in local poetry events,
apply to Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs in poetry, and submit poetry to jour-
nals and presses that publish it have surged. Public interest in and community
activism to promote poetry are also very high. A recent summation of the state of
American poetry noted that reading “is in chronic decline” particularly among the
18–24-year-olds at the same time that the President of the Poetry Foundation, John
Barr, predicts of “a new Golden Age for poetry” (Walker, 2004, 93–94). A best-
selling book of poetry is purchased by only 500 Americans, but the National Poetry
Slam competition can fill a major stadium in a large city, with the price of admis-
sion roughly equivalent to the cost of that best-selling book of poetry.

History
The American Tradition of Poetry. A complete understanding of the current state of
American poetry requires familiarity with the development of the American tradi-
tion in poetry, a tradition of mavericks inaugurated in Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
and Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) in the nineteenth century, whereby “American”
744 POETRY

poetry became associated with or defined by the challenge it proffered to whatever

tradition was currently in vogue. Within the context of this association of
“American” with challenge of the status quo, we can look at the specific movements
of the previous century whose reactions to the status quo continue to exert defining
forces on the current trends in the genre.
Most surveys of American poetry root the national tradition in Whitman, who
offers the first successful American challenge to the status quo. Dickinson also
figures predominantly in the establishment of a distinctly American tradition;
however, only a few of her poems were published in her lifetime, and some addi-
tional publications followed shortly after her death, but a scholarly collection of her
work did not appear until midway through the twentieth century. Her challenge to
the status quo entered critical consciousness a full century after Whitman’s.
Stemming from European epic traditions, particularly British poetry, American
poetry of the mid-nineteenth century centered itself on the impersonal, universal,
objective, cooked side of the poetic divide. The dominance of the epic, particularly
Virgil’s Latin epic The Aeneid, in scholarly traditions handed to the United States
from England, allowed little room for poetic exploration of either the local or of the
autobiographical. There was no room for the poet to craft a speakerly “I” within
his work. Rigid structures with regular, prescribed meter and rhyme also dominated
the world of published poetry.
Into this poetic world Whitman avowed something “transcendent and new” in his
poetry, challenging the deeply entrenched epic tradition that dominated intellectual
strains of poetry, while at the same time he avoided the unfaltering metrics and
rhyme scheme of the poetry so widely read during the American nineteenth century.
His “Song of Myself,” always central to the various iterations of Leaves of Grass,
brashly revises Virgil’s epic promise to sing of arms and of a man whose fate had
made him fugitive; Whitman boldly sings, “I celebrate myself, / And what I assume
you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” His
democratizing assertion of equal possession (“every atom belonging to me as good
belongs to you”) was a direct challenge to the poetic traditions that celebrated
mythic, long-dead but singular national heroes such as Aeneas and Odysseus. In her
summary of Whitman’s project, Helen Vendler points out that America itself “was
to be democratic, not monarchic; free, not feudal; revolutionary, not traditional;
America, new in spirit, was to be new in art” (1987, xiv–xv). If the European epic
traditions celebrated the epic journey of their nations’ founding fathers, often part-
divine offspring of the gods, Whitman’s celebrates the meandering of his own poetic
self, which he also identifies as “Divine . . . inside and out.”
Compared to the carefully planned and rigidly executed epic structure, which
demands divisions into books or cantos, Whitman’s epic (a term his preface dis-
avows) presents 52 sections of such variant length and focus that critics continue to
wrangle over the exact dividing lines of those sections, to say nothing of the debate
over the topic and meaning of the sections. His individual lines defy all attempts at
scansion in hopes of discovering a regular meter, an attempt obliterated already in
the first section, where the short line “I celebrate myself” coexists with the run-on
lines that catalog what about himself he celebrates: “My respiration and inspira-
tion. . . . the beating of my heart. . . . the passing of blood and air through my lungs, /
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and darkcolored sea-rocks,
and of hay in the barn[. . . . ]” More than comfortable with ambiguity of meaning,
Whitman’s poem revels in its contrary nature, famously catechizing, “Do I contradict
 POETRY 745

myself? / Very well then . . . I contradict myself[.]” Rather than impose an external
structure that dictates meter, line length, rhyme scheme, and division of content,
Whitman’s poetry employs organic form, the notion that the idea or concept of the
literary work dictates its structure or allows the work to grow into its form.
Initially derided and dismissed by many influential critics, Whitman has since
come to occupy the seminal place in American poetry. In Whitman, American
poetry also obtains its first, tradition-forming icon of resistance: in the tradition of
Whitman, the poets deemed most central to the American tradition of poetry con-
tinue to be those whose work resists classification. Numerous conflicting current
schools of poetry claim Whitman as an antecedent. A perfect illustration of his con-
founding of categorization is that despite his claim that his poem is not epic, most
studies of the modernist epics begin with Whitman. At the same time, beat and con-
fessional poets also cite him and Leaves of Grass as precursor and influence. In his
poetic challenge to the mid-nineteenth-century American status quo, Whitman
crafted poetry that embraced both sides of the apparent dichotomies that have come
to describe poetry, most notably the partition set between the roles of the self in the
poetry. This dual embrace also marks some of the most exciting poets publishing
today and those poets most definitively linked to an American tradition.
Twentieth-Century Poetic History
High Moderns and New Critics. Whitman serves as an iconic example of the
quintessential American poet’s trajectory from upstart to paradigm, a trajectory that
specific movements have followed as well as individual poets. Of particular concern
to anyone who wishes to study contemporary poetry are the upstart movements that
reacted to what was, at the midpoint of the twentieth century, the overwhelming
mainstream and academic acceptance of the high modern poets and power of the
new critics to interpret that poetry. For those movements—the confessional school,
the Black Arts movement, and Language poetry—both hearkened back to strong
elements of previous poetic traditions and advanced or broadened the definition of
what was acceptable within poetry. Each of these three movements became a pow-
erful force in and of itself, asserting in time its own indelible mark on the shape of
American poetry and becoming that against which future movements reacted.
The early poetry of Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) and Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
and the many historically based, culturally allusive, intellectually driven poems of
Ezra Pound (1885–1972), T.S. Eliot (1888–1965), Wallace Stevens (1879–1955),
HD (Hilda Doolittle, 1886–1961), and William Carlos Williams, including the devo-
tion of many of them to the epic form, suggested that the high modern poet’s role
was to serve as a voice for his or her time without necessarily crafting a speakerly self
in the poem that narrates that voice. In the dichotomy noted above, much of the high
moderns’ poetry would fall on the absent, impersonal, objective, universal side of the
line. Following an earlier, self-described imagist devotion to no idea but in things,
these poets focused on epic poems like Pound’s Cantos, H.D.’s Helen in Egypt and
Trilogy, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, and Hart
Crane’s (1899–1933) The Bridge. An indication of the importance that these poets
presumed accompanied them and their work is evidenced in the rather humorous fact
that Pound gave a copy of his Cantos to Mussolini (who misunderstood them if he
read them at all) and defined his project, an epic poem, as a poem “that contains his-
tory.” In a focus from things to history, the speakerly self was easily obscured.
Of course, reducing all these poets to simplified summaries that outline the simi-
larities among them fails to value the complexity or subtlety of the individual poets
746 POETRY

and some of their most enduring poems. Even the quintessentially impersonal poem
The Wasteland, written by the poet who coined the term objective correlative, can
be persuasively argued as a personal grouse, as the poet’s facsimile edition asserts.
And William Carlos Williams supplies an equally confounding body of work that
much more closely mirrors Whitman’s embrasure of competing traditions.
Interpretations of high modern poetry were dominated by a group of critics and
then an intellectual movement known as New Criticism, which firmly established
itself in the academies of the United States. These critics evaluated poetry according
to its ability to craft complex yet unified explorations centered on some theme of
universal significance, furthering the presumption that good poetry was objective
poetry. The best poems were those that employed the most formal poetic elements
in this unified statement, crafting “well-wrought urns” whose aesthetically pleasing
surface rested upon a structurally complex yet perfect interior. The best readings
were those that accounted for as many of these elemental features as possible. The
text itself supplied all the reader needed in order to ascertain this statement. In fact,
autobiographical details and authorial intention were not to enter into the discus-
sion of the work unless the work itself invited the reader to do so. The poem’s effect
on the reader also could not be included in the evaluation of the piece. At its most
basic, New Criticism focused on text over act: how a poem conveyed its meaning
was far more central to its value than why the poet said it, what occasioned the writ-
ing of the poem in the first place, or how readers responded to it.
Mid-century Challenges to the New Critics
Confessional Poetry. Confessional poetry presented the first significant challenge
to the readings of the new critics and the writings of the high moderns. Confessional
poetry brings private, personal details and issues into the public arena of poetry,
often through direct addresses of the audience and the use of the first-person pro-
noun. As Whitman proffered his radical departure from the rhyme and rhythmically
rigid poetic forms of his era, the confessional poets of the late 1950s and 1960s
reacted against rigidly confined content matter established in the mainstream, aca-
demic poetry of their day. In direct violation of poetic trends and principles, con-
fessional poets crafted poetry in which the speakerly self was very much present,
very much personal and often autobiographical, focusing not on universal but
extremely personal issues.
The confessional poets—often most deeply associated with Sylvia Plath
(1932–1963), Anne Sexton (1928–1974), Robert Lowell, W.D. Snodgrass (1926–),
Theodore Roethke, and Diane Wakoski (1937–)—popularized the practice of
writing from the first person in poetry that was distinctly autobiographical, without
the intervention of a poetic persona. It was not narrated upon a world stage, as
many of the High Modernist epics were, but rather, it tended to focus on the poet’s
own life, particularly among those moments limited to the poet’s immediate family
or times of crisis. If under the scrutiny of the new Critics elements of “good” poems
revealed issues of universal significance (itself a much contested entity), in the hands
of confessional poets, national or mythic materials often revealed the poet’s own
emotional or mental breakdown.
This is not to say that the sole subject of confessional poetry is the self. On the
contrary, poets in this movement presented poems that revealed how the personal is
political. Many participants in this movement used their poetry to issue scathing cri-
tiques of American culture at the mid-century, especially those portions of culture
deemed inappropriate for polite conversation or public discussion. Many critics
 POETRY 747

suggest that Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) wrote what could be identified as one of
the earliest confessional poems in 1956, with “Howl,” a poem that hearkens back
to the rhythms of Whitman’s self-described barbaric yawp and reclaims the poet’s
right to employ the first-person pronoun and write about personal experience, but
this first-person poem reveals personal disillusionment and disaffection with empty
American consumerism in the postwar era. Anne Sexton’s bitter fairy-tale revisions
in Transformations (1971) exposes the false promise of happiness in marriage,
where parents are “never bothered by diapers or dust, / never getting a middle-aged
spread.” As described by Diane Wood Middlebrook, the work of confessional poets
“investigates the pressure on the family as an institution regulating middle-class pri-
vate life” (1993, 636) at a time when the nuclear family was depicted in all forms
of popular culture as a source of sustenance and support.
In the poetry of the women in particular, the picture of middle-class family life
contradicted the images television sitcoms and mass advertisement campaigns pro-
moted, of the happy homemaker bedecked in a cashmere twin set and pearls and a
scrubbed, cheerful family whose biggest concern was Junior’s B on Friday’s spelling
test. The family life revealed in confessional poetry included domestic and substance
abuse, mental instability, sexual promiscuity, and rage at many forms of victimiza-
tion, among other topics considered taboo in polite and popular society. In fact,
many young readers of confessional poetry still gravitate toward the depiction of a
young woman’s rage simply because it is so rare to see women’s rage acknowledged
at all, in Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy.”
The legacy of the confessional poets is enormous. Initially lambasted by the crit-
ical establishment, confessional poets soon earned the nation’s most prestigious
awards (W.D. Snodgrass won the Pulitzer Prize and Lowell won the National Book
Award in 1960), entered the most austere anthologies, and secured a place in the
canon of American poetry. Their success gave permission to all future poets to
plumb their own experiences for poetic inspiration, and to complain, if need be,
about those experiences. And to a large extent, much of the poetry popular with
Americans since 2000 is just that: one person offering public confession of certain
experiences and thoughts, sometimes without much attention to the artistry of the
language. At least one critic has complained that “[t]o a large swath of the general
public now, that’s what poetry is” (Walker 2004, 97): confessional prose without
metaphor, compression, rhythm, use of sound, or attention to language. The “auto-
biographical encounter,” to use poet Gregory Orr’s term, has become not just
acceptable, but mainstream in contemporary American literature, so much so that
critics still identify the demarcations in American poetry as those between confes-
sional and avant-garde.
The other deep legacy of the confessional poets is the emphasis on voice that still
predominates most discussions of poetry, both written and performed. Most poetry
workshops are designed to help emergent poets discover their own voice, poets of
renown are discussed according to the uniqueness of their voice, and some of the
most well-respected treatises on poetry start with or emphasize the role of voice in
poetry. Among the most influential of poetry critics, Helen Vendler introduced Part
of Nature, Part of Us, her collection of essays published in 1980, with the admis-
sion that her “own preference is to focus on poets one by one, to find in each the
idiosyncratic voice wonderfully different from any other,” noting that what lingers
in her memory of the poets are “the voices of genius” (1980, x). A later Vendler
publication was titled, tellingly, Voices & Visions. And a 2004 review of three
748 POETRY

contemporary poets opened with “We think of ourselves as having voices, but these
days our poets are voices. That is to say, the word ‘voice’ has come to be synony-
mous with the word ‘poet’ in all of those venues in which we discuss poetry”
(Martin 2004, 34). The confessional poets ensured this continued focus on voice as
something the poet develops rather than just imparts onto the poem, and its impli-
cation, then, that the voice in poetry is always also the poet’s own.
Black Arts. Another important challenge both to high modernism and to the affilia-
tion of “good” poetry with that coming from American universities surfaces in the
Black Arts or Black Aesthetic movement of the 1960s. Inspired by both the successes
of the civil rights movement and the radical militant stance of Black Nationalism,
Black Arts emerged as a way for African American artists to pursue distinctly African
American art forms. Chief among its tenets were the beliefs that one couldn’t sepa-
rate the artist from his or her community and that in order for African American art
to flourish, it needed to develop its own aesthetic values separate and distinct from
those that descended from or were rooted in European or white American art forms.
It sought to provide support and space for African American artists to develop and
present their art to an audience comprised of African Americans.
Poetry written by those of African descent in America, when it was discussed or
published at all in mainstream presses and journals, was always presented as periph-
eral to the primary activities of poetic development. The chronicles of American
poetic history have always ghettoized or separated out poetic schools or movements
populated by significant numbers of non-white poets, and many continue to do so
today. Granted, many such movements deserved discussion in their own right; how-
ever, consistently addressing African American poets under the rubric of the Harlem
Renaissance, the Black Arts movement, or even under a currently popular category
of black poets, serves to foster a misunderstanding about the centrality of non-
white, particularly black, poets to the development and significance of the genre as
a whole.
Many reference sources will devote a chapter or section to one of the two move-
ments mentioned above but not address a single non-white poet in its pantheon of
poets of import and significance. The effect of such treatment may be a false popu-
lar consensus that the poets who participated in those movements—or the black
poets not specifically part of those movements—are insignificant. This exclusion of
black voices and black experiences was even more pronounced in the 1960s than it
is today.
An instrumental participant in and shaper of this movement, Amiri Baraka
(1934–) describes in his autobiography about the moment he realized that he could
never write poetry like that which the New Yorker published unless he were to
become someone alien to himself. The language he uses focuses on how “out” he
feels from this world—from the poetic world that in this country, at that time, pub-
lished almost exclusively white writers. The black writers who did publish, most
famously Gwendolyn Brooks, who had by that time already won a Pulitzer Prize for
her poetry in 1950, were not calling attention to their art as distinctly African
American art. Not yet.
Born LeRoi Jones, Baraka attended Rutgers and Howard, following which he joined
the United States Air Force. He moved to Harlem shortly after the assassination of
Malcolm X, where he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School and was a
major force in the Black Arts’ search for a distinctly Black Aesthetic. Remaining true
to the notion that an artist must remain rooted in his community and create art for his
 POETRY 749

people’s sake, Baraka lived, worked, and performed in Harlem. The dedication to and
awareness of the audience’s role crucial to the development of one’s art prefigures the
current spoken word movement’s attention to its audience. Furthermore, the Black Arts
movement in general and Baraka’s commitment to Harlem in particular reinforced the
vibrant primary role of the urban setting in poetry. Eastern coastal cities had long been
identified as meccas for poets, as centers of poetic life, but more so for the publishing
houses and major universities located within than because of the distinctly urban
lifestyle that fostered poetic communities, communities nourished in coffee houses and
apartment meetings, in street life and in neighborhoods.
Concomitant with forging a new system of aesthetic valuations, the Black Arts
movement also charted the history of art created by artists of African descent and,
in so doing, established historical artistic timelines and traditions that hearkened
back to African sources. Paradoxically, in examining African and African American
art in isolation from other traditions, namely other American ones, Baraka and oth-
ers reminded critics and historians of elements from Africa and African American
art that are central to our understanding and development of American art. The
spoken word has been identified (and is so here) as a revolution, yet the Black Arts
movement reminds us that orality remains a cultural fixture both in the various griot
traditions of oral African communities and throughout the history of African
American literature.
The African griot traditions and specifically the Gicaandi competitions, as well as
the tradition of the dozens among some African Americans, should be acknowl-
edged as some of the foreparents of current slam poetry and poetry bouts. In the
Gicaandi competitions, a seed-filled gourd rattled an accompaniment for the con-
testants, who competed against each other with songs, riddles and conundrums,
wise sayings and wisecrackings, often performed by moonlight in the town square.
So the audience was asked to participate in this ritual competition of verbal spar-
ring performed rhythmically. The gicaandi, or gourd, rooted the performer to his
community, as it was grown locally in special plantings. Its traditions were inher-
ited, with a griot father teaching his son the history lessons and details of cultural
importance along with all of the improvisional, performative techniques with which
to craft his poetry. The griot subtly crafted each performance to match the particu-
lars of his audience. Similarly, in the ritualized insults of the dozens, the audience is
crucial as the insults are intended more for their entertainment than for the oppo-
nent’s shame.
Even our current avant-garde movement, with explicit origins in the Language
poetry movement (see below) must acknowledge the conceptual contribution of
African American poetry, especially that which was fostered by the Black Arts
movement. In its frequent employment of blues- and jazz-inspired elements in
poetry, the Black Arts movement occasionally celebrated artistic elements merely for
their own sake. Within jazz the celebration of sound for its own sake, in the use of
scat, predates the Language poetry movement that calls heightened attention to the
material of poetry—the words and even letters themselves. So the new Black Arts
poets’ use of and references to jazz already celebrated the material apart from its ref-
erent or its references to anything other than itself. Scat is celebration of sound as
sound, not of sound as representative of something else.
Furthermore, in directing our critical gaze at the history of African American
poetry, where orality reigns as a if not the dominant feature, the Black Arts artists
reminded the United States of a long-established tradition of orally performed
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poetry that predates the current performance poetry craze. Numerous African
American poets crafted poems—many of them sermons—with the intended
medium of oral performance, not the silent page. James Weldon Johnson’s “Cre-
ation” from God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927) is one such
poem that begs, even demands, to be performed. Gwendolyn Brooks coined a term,
preachment, with which to address and discuss it; so prevalent is the sermonic mode
in African American poetry. One could argue, in fact, that African American preach-
ers are the new world equivalents of the African griots, as their community-saving
roles and public language performance methods are nearly identical.
Language Poetry. Though many Americans are likely less aware of the Language
poetry movement than they are of the confessional poets or Black Arts, this move-
ment, too, has profound influence on the current trends in both academic and
popular poetry, particularly in the way its approach to language in poetry has
remained synonymous with the definition of avant-garde or experimental poetry.
Often written out as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, in homage to one of the two prominent
early Language poetry journals, the movement, which began in the 1970s, was
enabled in part by structural theorists and linguists, who insist that and reveal how
language shapes and dictates humans’ perceptions of their own experiences. Like
virtually all significant movements in the genre, this one challenged mainstream
poetry and organized itself around a radical political stance, as its practitioners
believed that traditional verse form, conventional syntax, and linear narrative—
those aspects of mainstream poetry and other writing they disavowed—
“transmit[ted] conservative ideologies” (Gilbert 2001, 567).
The work of such linguists as Ferdinand de Saussure, who explored the arbitrary
connection between the signifier and the signified, the utterance and the referent, laid
the groundwork for the philosophical underpinnings of this movement. Translated
into English and made widely available in the United States in the 1950s, Saussure’s
work called attention to the deep structure of language (or langue)—the relationships
and differences that govern our language rules—rather than the surface phenomena
of the individual utterances (or parole). Since utterances (or words, signifiers) refer to
the concepts they represent only by dint of social convention (“tree” represents a
large organic growth composed of trunk, limbs, and foliage only because all speak-
ers of English have agreed to relating the word “tree” to our concept of tree, not
because of any inherent features of a tree in the utterance itself), we must acknowl-
edge the arbitrary nature of the words we use to represent concepts.
From these ideas arose the theory of structuralism, a mode of interpreting mean-
ing that searches for the underlying patterns that structure our language (and, by
extension, our literature). Given the arbitrary relationship between words and con-
cepts, structuralists posit that all patterns are those perceived by the human mind
and imposed onto our language. As we learn language, we learn to privilege or rec-
ognize some differences but not others. So, a young child in early stages of vocabu-
lary development learns to recognize the difference between dogs and cats as
significant because those are the early words he learns, but those differences between
a poodle and a German shepherd are coded in the language and offered to him as
insignificant differences, ones not worthy of note just yet. The language, therefore,
doesn’t reveal the world to him but it shapes the way he perceives the world. In gov-
erning our perceptions of the world, language controls our experiences of the world.
This assertion that language structures meaning and not the other way around was
crucial to the Language poets’ project. The movement placed complete emphasis on
 POETRY 751

the language of the poem, calling self-conscious attention to the words and letters
themselves, often breaking up words to reveal smaller words subsumed within the
larger ones, creating non-words, or grouping letters or symbols according to their
size or shape. For example, skinny letters might form a line of poetry, like ilklih, or
a poem or a line may be composed entirely of symbols, as in Armand Schwerner’s
(1927–99) “Tablet III,” which includes the lines “+ + + + + + + + + / + + + + + + + +
+ + + / + + + +. . . . .. . . . .. . . . . tremble” (1983, 66). The poetry rarely offered what
in prose would be considered complete sentences (in fact, Ron Silliman 1946–, one
of Language’s practitioners claimed to be part of the creation of the “new sentence”)
in part to remind us that poetry offers readers not someone’s “voice,” but someone’s
voice as mediated and conveyed by language. Therefore language itself is always the
subject of poetry, and the word or letter alone serves as the material. Language poets
could have used as their motto one of William Carlos Williams’s assertions, made
much earlier in Spring and All: “[T]he word must be put down for itself” (1923,
102). To Language poets, their strategy was simply more honest than others. They
didn’t pretend that there was some external idea the language was trying to convey:
the language dictated the idea; the language IS the idea.
Central to the Language poetry movement was the notion of an active reader,
whose action was inspired rather than hampered by what may appear as obscure
poetic text. The initial barriers to understanding arising from the text’s difficulty, so
the practitioners argued, invited repeated returns to the text. Furthermore, in call-
ing attention to the role of language itself in controlling and shaping meaning, poets
of this movement hoped to train readers to question the agenda of their other
encounters with language. Aware that language usage in popular culture directs con-
sumer attention to just that—consumption—and away from issues that might
inspire radical political action (or any political action), Language poets posited that
language as used in popular culture served as a means of social control.
As scat within jazz reminded listeners that the basic material, the stuff of jazz, is
sound—not music—Language poets reminded readers of poetry that the stuff of
poetry is language, not meaning.
Many Language poets emphasized the human role within language development
(the human process of perceiving and imposing patterns) by devising and imposing
outrageous structural requirements onto their poetry. A particular success example
of this is Lyn Hejinian’s (1942–) My Life, written when she was 37 years old and
comprised of 37 sections of 37 sentences each. When she revised it eight years later,
she added eight sentences to each pre-existing section and an additional eight sec-
tions to represent the additional years of her life since the original publication date.
In the same way that the autobiographical, speakerly self of the confessional poet,
who reports internal observations in a consistent voice, continues to be affiliated with
acceptable mainstream poetry, the experimental approach espoused by Language
poets that privileges attention to the medium of language itself over the relationships
between language and its referents remains identified as the avant-garde. Yusef
Komunyakaa (1947–) even calls such poets the “new avant garde, those exploratory
poets . . . [who] introduce tonal and linguistic flux as the center of the poem” (1993,
15, italics mine). Komunyakaa criticizes them for what “seems” like their “attempt to
undermine the importance of recent history . . . anything goes because the poet or the
poem’s speaker doesn’t exist. It’s death in language” (1993, 15).
Komunyakaa’s comment embodies the dichotomy that still dominates poetic dis-
cussions. He eschews the avant-garde in favor of poetry “that embodies content”
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(1993, 17). Self-referential poetry—that which uses language to call attention to its
linguistic creation without offering someone’s (presumably the poet’s) thoughts
about an event that exists beyond the poem’s parameters—was not worthy of the
designation best, in his opinion. His comment testifies to the power the mid-century
poetic movements still wield over contemporary poetry.
Trends and Themes. As alluded to in Marvin Bell’s “Yes!” above, poetry in the
United States currently is enjoying a wave of popularity, as the spoken word revolu-
tion and technically savvy poets and community-builders create spaces for virtually
any voice to be heard. The widespread availability of Internet access has democra-
tized poetry as well, with ordinary Americans (some without any or much formal
training in reading poetry) making public comments about some of the nation’s most
well-educated and well-paid critics. James Longenbach’s recent book The Resistance
to Poetry points out that there are over 300,000 Web sites devoted to poetry, and
that in rankings of terms most frequently inserted into Internet search engines, the
term poetry ranks eighth, above both football and the Bible (2004, 6). Americans can
buy books of poetry online, read the collection, then return to the online bookseller
to write a review of that book; and many do just that, so University of Chicago critic
Harold Bloom can be identified as “grumpy” by an anonymous Amazon.com reader
because of his emotionally expressive introduction to The Best of the Best American
Poetry 1988–1997. In the same way that any consumer can describe how a certain
shoe runs narrow in an online description at Zappos.com or assess a professor’s
grading difficulty on ratemyprofessor.com, so can ordinary readers of poetry
“publish” their review of poetry and evaluate other published reviews.
Occasional Poetry and the Post-9/11 Response. The many hands that craft poetry also
reinforce the many purposes of poetry, and the trend of poetry as more than aes-
thetic object has also marked American poetic activity since 2000. Among its supra-
aesthetic roles include “its function in times of war and peace, its role in subverting
dominant ideologies, its purpose in communicating the concept of American iden-
tity” (Gwiazda, 2004, 462). Perhaps no war has dominated the American imagina-
tion (not to mention electoral politics, national budget decisions, even changes to
our concepts of personal liberties and acceptable intrusions in or erosions of them)
as the War on Terror that emerged in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001,
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Virginia Woolf noted during
World War I that war always moves people to poetry, and the twenty-first century
so-called War on Terrorism is no exception. Immediately after 9/11 our nation wit-
nessed a renewed outpouring of poetry and a renewed faith in poetry to express our
collective emotions and make the first move toward healing our sense of national or
collective grief. Internet-enabled forwarding of poetry that seemed to speak to the
shock of 9/11 made instant household names of poets such as W.H. Auden, whose
“September 1939” shot over countless wireless connections. Numerous newspapers
printed poems to the editor rather than or in addition to letters to the editor, poems
which were written not for their aesthetic value but simply to convey the writer’s
strong emotion. So numerous are such letters that Internet Web sites devoted to bad
9/11 poems published in local newspapers emerged. Trained poets responded to
9/11 as well, with poems contributed to anthologies devoted expressly to the sub-
ject of 9/11 and with shifting poetic techniques that the poets attribute in interviews
explicitly to either 9/11 or a post-9/11 world, attitude, or mentality.
Most notorious of the 9/11 poems was Amiri Baraka’s. Baraka was heretofore
best known for his seminal work with the Black Arts movement of the 1960s. His
 POETRY 753

poem in response to the attacks, “Somebody Blew Up America,” caused an uproar

after he read it at the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival in September 2002. Several
lines from this 200+-line poem were extracted as examples of Baraka’s allegedly
anti-Semitic stance. When the Anti-Defamation League charged Baraka with hate
speech, New Jersey Governor McGreevey asked Baraka to resign his post as the
state poet laureate, but Baraka refused on the grounds that his accusers were mis-
reading his poem.
The lines purported to be anti-Semitic—“Who knew the World Trade Center was
gonna get bombed/Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers/To stay home
that day/Why did Sharon stay away?”—Baraka claims are actually an “attack” on
anti-Semitism (see amiribaraka.com). His questions are rhetorical, designed to
encourage the reader to question who truly knew and why those who knew did
nothing.
The answer to that question, who knew?, as all of Baraka’s answers, is compli-
cated. The totality of the poem is an invective against imperialism, a litany of abuses
against minorities Baraka sees as systemic in the United States, an encouragement
to question how the current presidential administration has used the 9/11 attacks to
pursue an agenda and pass acts such as the Patriot Act otherwise unacceptable to
the American people and identified by Lyn Hejinian as “nefarious policies”; and as
such, this poem is no different from the kinds of poems Baraka has written through-
out his career, particularly since 1974 when he renounced his former black nation-
alist stance and embraced world socialism/Leninism-Marxism.
The unprecedented reliance on poetry and poets to speak for a national moment
reinforces an affirmative answer to the question posed by Dana Gioia: Can Poetry
Matter? American popular use of the Internet, willing attendance at spontaneous
readings, the profusion of sincere if untrained poetic responses sent out for local but
public view seems to repeat Marvin Bell’s emphatic “Yes!”
If we are in a new Golden Age for poetry as the president of the Poetry Founda-
tion claims, some of the supporting evidence would include the selection of various
levels of poets laureate. Our nation names a national poet laureate, and 37 states
name one as well. In recent years, many cities, including some mid-sized ones, have
begun to name their own poet laureates. One might expect San Francisco and New
York City to boast its own laureate, so married are the cities of the nation’s coastal
poles to our poetic traditions, but some might be surprised to learn that midwestern
cities such as Kansas City, the Quad Cities, and even Grand Rapids, Michigan, have
named their own poet laureate.
During their tenure as poet laureate, titleholders are charged with promoting the
reading, writing, and appreciation of poetry among the public. How they do so
remains up to the individual laureates. Our national poets laureate since 2000 include
Stanley Kunitz (2000), Billy Collins (2001–2003), Louise Glück (2003–2004), Ted
Kooser (2004–06), Donald Hall (2006–2007), and Charles Simic (2007–present).
Certainly the broadening of poetry’s outreach net nourished by the various laure-
ates is partially responsible for sustaining the country’s 250 MFA (Master of Fine
Arts) programs, its 500 presses and its 2000 journals that publish poetry, 1100 of
them nationally circulated. Poetry has truly been wrested from the exclusive hands
of the universities with successful programs like Billy Collins’s (1941–) program
Poetry 180. This program supplies a poem a day for high schools to share with their
students on each of the 180 days of the school year. Another program designed to
bring poetry to the masses is the People’s Poetry Project, which brings together folk,
754 POETRY

ethnic, inner city, and literary poets as it turns Lower Manhattan into a poetry vil-
lage for three days. Such programs guarantee that the future of America’s poetry lies
in many people’s hands, if not in many elite hands.
Spoken Word Revolution. What in the late 1980s may have been identified as a trend
in American poetry must by now, in 2007, be acknowledged as at least one of, if not
the most reinvigorating forces in the genre: spoken word poetry. Spoken word is an
umbrella term for poetry performed. It reaches its audience via oral (often also the-
atrical) transmission, thereby diminishing the centrality or importance of the printed
word. As a performance, the poetry frequently attempts to engage its audience in
ways not available through the printed medium. For example, in many poetry slams,
judges of the poetry are randomly selected from the audience, or the audience’s
applause becomes the scoring system, with the loudest and most enthusiastic audi-
ence responses marking the winning poems. So central is the spoken word revolu-
tion to current American poetry that Roger Gilbert deemed the performance culture
“the most significant development in American culture” (2001, 568) of the final two
decades of the twentieth century.
Slam Poetry. The birth and growth of poetry slams, coupled with their cousins,
poetry bouts, and the numerous urban venues that sprung up in support of both
have welcomed those for whom academic poetry was either stale or inaccessible.
Winners of and participants in the National Poetry Slam and of the now-defunct
World Heavyweight Poetry Bout were and continue to be predominantly young and
urban, often with working-class roots and frequently people of color. Their energy,
passion, and humor make the spoken word revolution attractive to producers of
visual media, and part of its swift rise to prominence must be attributed to its media
coverage and savvy incorporation of and connections to other forms of media.
MTV, for instance, played and plays a large role in promoting the works of partic-
ular poets, most notably perhaps of Maggie Estep (1962–), so-called poet laureate
of MTV. With this coverage, winning one of these competitions could launch a
poet’s career, and so frequently have careers been thereby launched that now, after
more than 20 years, slam poets and academic poets are, in some cases, synonymous,
as the winners accept positions at prestigious universities, earn book contracts with
mainstream or academic presses, and continue to win some of poetry’s most coveted
national (often academic) awards. Slam poets have been known to win the Yale
Younger Poets Award, for instance, and Pulitzer Prize winning poets have been
known to compete in slam contests.
In a local slam the rules may be determined by the organizers of the event, but in
a National Slam pre-set rules govern the competition in the organizers’ attempt to
be fair to all contestants. All poems must be work written by the poets themselves
and be read aloud in three minutes or less, with point deductions incurring incre-
mentally for every 10 seconds the poet exceeds this time limit. No props or costumes
are allowed, though some interesting debates about what constitutes either have
ensued. (Apparently if a poet’s bare chest can be considered a prop has yet to be
definitively determined.) The five judges score each poem on a point system to reflect
both the writing of the poem and its performance, with zero representing the low-
est possible score and 10, the highest. The high and low scores for each poem are
discarded and the rest, added together, resulting in 30 points as the highest possible
score for any single poem. Judges hold their scores up on large cards, Olympic style.
All of the rules and protocols are designed to enliven the event and draw the audi-
ence into an active relationship with the poet. It is precisely this keen audience
 POETRY 755

awareness that both rejuvenates the current popular perception of poetry and recalls
some of the oldest forms of poetry.
Poetry slams, which celebrate spoken word poetry, descend from numerous pred-
ecessors, some of which are as old as the genre of poetry itself. The primary epics of
the world (primary epic refers to an epic which exists first in oral form, as opposed
to secondary epics, which exist first in written form) were originally delivered to
their audiences via public, spoken performances, and these poems form the bedrock
of many an academic department, course, or lecture. Within the epic tradition,
bards or griots would perform the epic over numerous nights, often to his audience’s
participatory beat. The best bards always paid careful attention to audience, shap-
ing the story to praise, ridicule, or otherwise add material unique to each particular
performance’s audience members. The rhythmic participation of the audience facil-
itated the community learning that was to occur during these performances, as pri-
mary epics often were used to teach the audience members their national history,
instill a sense of national pride, teach them about proper modes of citizenship, and
celebrate the achievements of their culture. So integral to the genre of epic poetry is
its oral history that many theorists proclaimed the genre dead once it transitioned
to a primarily print or literary one.
In delineating slam’s predecessors, one could and ought to look to numerous
sources both within and without the United States. The bardic traditions of oral
societies, including Greek and African, should be noted, with both epic and lyric his-
tories taken into account. Specific moments in American poetic history, such as
Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Amiri Baraka’s “Nation Time” come to mind, with
Ginsberg’s subsequent trial for obscenity foreshadowing Sarah Jones’s recent run-in
with the FCC over the alleged indecency of one of her performance poems/songs.
The poetry happenings and open mike nights that flourished in the late 1950s and
through the 1960s certainly contributed to the current atmosphere, offering the
notion of spontaneous readings perhaps moderated by a skilled or entertaining
emcee, welcoming anyone with courage to proclaim themselves poets and perform
on-the-spot for an audience. Numerous West Indian dub poets such as Linton Kwesi
Johnson (1952–) and Jean “Binta” Breeze (1956–) have been performing sponta-
neous, improvised, musically centered poetry that would be difficult to distinguish
in some cases from performance poetry; and the Four Horsemen, a Canadian group
of poets, added to an American appetite for vigorously read poetry.
What is of special interest regarding these non-Western, non-European origins of
spoken word performances is that it reflects the relatively contemporary emphasis
on globalization and democratization in both poetry and the world at large. As
modern technologies make instant communication with virtually any part of the
world a possibility for the average American, the parameters of what subject mat-
ter can enter American poetry, what constitutes a predecessor to an American poetic
trend, and, indeed, who is considered an American poet constantly expand.
Despite the numerous claims of ancestry, slam poetry as its own event holds a
rather specific history. Poetry slams began in 1984 with public poetry readings at the
Get Me High lounge, then the Déjà vu Bar in Chicago, organized by Marc Smith.
The year 1985 marked the first Uptown Poetry Slam as well as coverage by the
Chicago Tribune, and the formation of the Chicago Poetry Ensemble, which began
holding its slams in 1986 at the Green Mill, a Chicago jazz landmark. These early
readings coincided with increasing national—if controversial—attention on per-
formance art, perhaps most notable for Marc Smith when Chicago performance
756 POETRY

artist Karen Finlay lost an NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) grant for a piece
in which she smeared chocolate pudding over and into her body. By 1987, Ann
Arbor, Michigan, began holding its own slams, quickly followed by slams in New
York City, San Francisco, and Fairbanks, Alaska. The urban movement embracing
young poets was born.
Cities began sending teams to compete at what by 1991 was dubbed the National
Poetry Slam. In 1992, 17 cities sent teams to the competition, including the first
Native American team. Another first followed in 1993 with the first Canadian team,
paving the way for additional international teams in future years. Much as winning
the competition is connected to a potential future as a professional poet, the real
purpose of the slams is to promote the writing, enjoyment of, and learning from
poetry. The rallying cry of the competitions since 1994 has been “the points are not
the point; the point is the poetry,” a dictum found on the Web site and often
repeated.
The energetic performances of the poets combined with the competitive atmos-
phere translated well into visual mediums, evidenced in 1996, when the documentary
Slam Nation was filmed and released at the Sundance Film Festival two years later,
featuring a stand-out performer from Team Nuyorican, Saul Williams (1972–). The
documentary series The United States of Poetry and Have You Heard the Word aired
on PBS featured slam and other competitions and helped to spread the popularity of
slams even more quickly.
Nuyorican Poets Café. Founded by poet and professor Miguel Algarin in 1973, the
Nuyorican Poets Café established as its mission to create a multicultural venue that
both nurtures artists and exhibits a variety of artistic works. Founded close on the
heels of the Black Arts movement, the Café reacted to some of the same feelings of
alienation and disconnection Baraka and other black poets experienced when they
assessed the contemporary American poetry scene. With prizes awarded and publi-
cations selected primarily by white men, poets whose experiences and sensibilities—
as well as whose voices—were forged in multicultural settings did not view the
traditional path to poetic fame as a conduit to an audience that would value their
work: enter an MFA program, learn under a famous white poet, submit poetry to a
contest judged by white poets, and publish your prize-winning poetry in a journal
edited by a white poet and read by hundreds more of the nation’s white poets.
Even more than 20 years after the Café’s founding, the guest editor of one of the
most successful annual poetry publications announced her strategy to correct for
this “literary apartheid” (Rich, 1996, 19), and Web sites devoted to exposing the
nepotism of major poetry prizes—contests which award the prize money or publi-
cation contract to the judges’ students, friends, or lovers even before all the entries
are read—continue to suggest an inbreeding or good old boys’ (or woman’s) club
cultivated among the nation’s elite and predominantly white MFA instructors and
press editors (see Foetry.com).
The quick success of the Café is testament to the validity of its poets’ perceptions.
There was an audience hungry for their work, but that audience wasn’t necessarily
in the universities. Its constant attempt to “put the poem into action,” as Algarin
promised, enlivened the world of American poetry with its reminder of poetry’s long
relationship with the world of theatre.
This venue has become of the most recognized poetry venues of the nation, and
its high profile alumni have demonstrated significant success crossing over into other
artistically defined cultural arenas. Its team won the National Poetry Slam in 1996,
 POETRY 757

the year Slam Nation was filmed. Although he was not the individual winner of that
year, Saul Williams of Team Nuyorican, who is featured in the film, saw his poetic
career launched. He later performed the role of an ex-con poet in the film Slam and
has seen four of his books to print, two of them with MTV Books. The PBS series
on African American art in the twentieth century, I’ll Make Me A World, closed its
six-part series with Williams reciting one of his poems, and his musical album,
Amethyst Rock Star, has met with critical praise.
Concurrent with Marc Smith’s attention to poetry slams, Terry Jacobus, a student of
poets Ed Dorn (1929–1999), Robert Creeley (1926–), and Anne Waldman (1945–),
began Poetry Bouts, slightly different in nature from slams. In a poetry bout, two poets
clash one-on-one with each other, with one round of spontaneous composition on a
topic selected at that moment. As such, the poetry bouts claim to be the origin of com-
petitive poetics. The first bout, with Terry Jacobus pitted against Gregory Corso
(1930–2001), occurred in 1981. This event, like the slam, saw phenomenally swift
growth, particularly in the reputation of the poets it attracted. Made part of the Taos
Poetry Circus in 1982 and continued until its demise in 2003, the World Heavyweight
Poetry Bout winners have included Jimmy Santiago Baca (1952–), Saul Williams,
Wanda Coleman (1946–), Simon Ortiz (1941–), Gregory Corso, Ed Dorn, Sekou
Sundiata, Quincy Troupe, Jr. (1939–), Patricia Smith, Anne Waldman, and four-time
winner Sherman Alexie (1966–). Many of these poets have earned crossover success in
other genres, with CDs, film credits, and radio commentaries on their resumes.

Contexts and Issues

Use of Multi-Media. Sherman Alexie, Saul Williams, and Sarah Jones (1973–) are
accurate representatives of the new directions poetry has taken into the worlds of per-
formance and media other than print, as all three are successful in multiple artistic
genres. Alexie continues the tradition of poetry and poets in performance, as his own
tours seem more akin to stand-up comedy than they do to traditional poetry. His suc-
cessful film Smoke Signals, a collaboration between Alexie and Cheyenne/Arapaho
Indian Chris Eyre based on one of the short stories from Alexie’s collection The Lone
Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, probably did more to bring him to the aware-
ness of a poetry-reading public than his first two books of poetry, The Business of Fan-
cydancing and I Would Steal Horses. Alexie also demonstrates the ability of the
radical avant-garde challenger to move into positions of power and influence, with his
numerous prestigious awards and academic posts. His short stories have earned selec-
tion in The Best American Short Stories of 2004, Pushcart Prize XXIX of the Small
Presses, The O’Henry Prize Stories 2005, and he was named Artist in Residence to
the University of Washington for both 2004 and 2006.
Poetry’s successful marriage with the world of musical production also marks
the years since 2000. Nuyorican Poetry slam winner Reg E Gaines wrote the libretto
for the Broadway musical Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk. When Def Poetry
Jam appeared on Broadway in the fall of 2002, it did so under the production of
Russell Simmons, Def Jam recording label founder. In fact, much has been written
about the black poetry to be found in rap and hip-hop, and some may suggest that
to simply remove the instrumental backdrop from rap or hip-hop would result in
spoken word. Despite that oversimplification, the poetic movement did and does
benefit from the money and fame of the musical world. A Broadway stage alive with
dancers can, indeed, put a poem into action.
758 POETRY

Like fellow Nuyorican Poets Café poet Saul Williams, Sarah Jones enjoys success in
the world of performance, even garnering a 2006 Tony Award for her one-woman
show Bridge & Tunnel. Jones represents as well some of the connections between
poetry and music. She also achieved notoriety when she successfully sued the FCC for
its censorship of her song “Your Revolution,” for indecency, itself a playful response
to Gil Scot Herron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (Jones’s chorus repeats
“your revolution will not be between these thighs”). Like many of the slam poets,
Jones involves herself in political and civic activism, taking up such projects as protest-
ing discriminatory laws against women and disparities in health care practices that
follow racial and ethnic lines. Her 2003 tour of Surface Transit, another one-woman
show, frequently scheduled talkbacks and Question & Answer sessions after the per-
formance, allowing Jones further arenas to advance her activist projects.
Protest Poetry. Sarah Jones’s use of her poetic stage for a soapbox is part of a larger
awareness that poetry can be and currently is an appropriate vehicle for protest. Just
as each war produces its flurry of poetry that in its graphic or realistic content serves
to denounce the war that produced it (one thinks of Wilfrid Owen, Siegfried Sasson,
even Homer’s The Iliad, as icons of detailed violence that laments the situations that
produced them), so does war inspire protest at home.
The nations turning to poetry in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 emboldened
poets to use this bright spotlight to their advantage. As the U.S. administration
pushed for war, poets pushed for peace. On the eve of war in Iraq, on February 17,
2003, the Lincoln Center presented Poems Not Fit for the White House, a poetic
response to the possibility of war: a resounding no.
Another vibrant protest movement is spearheaded by the People’s Poetry Project,
this one protesting the disappearance of the world’s languages—and with it, the
poetry composed in those languages—as the very technologies that increase the
speed of worldwide communication also reduce the number of languages in which
that communication occurs. Its Declaration of Poetic Rights and Values clearly
establishes its reasons for preserving the world’s oral, written, and ceremonial
poetry in the language in which it was composed as part of its efforts to retain
humanity’s creative genius, invested in its poetry.
Culture Wars. This constellation of activities associated with the spoken word has
not been without its well-heeled critics. Most famous, perhaps, is critic Harold
Bloom’s pronouncement that the spoken word marks the “death of art” in the Paris
Review. However, Bloom’s summation may be better understood in the context of
American poetry and the culture wars.
Bloom operates from a critical position that was schooled during the New Critics’
heyday, and he places a rather narrow definition onto what he would deem “good”
poetry. To him, aesthetics is all, and in his determination of aesthetics, a poet’s or a
poem’s purpose—if it is anything other than to impress the well-educated reader
with its tightly controlled use of meter, rhyme, ambiguity—cannot be considered in
that aesthetic evaluation. His infamous introduction to the The Best of the Best
American Poetry reveals his belief that the United States is overrun with a culture of
resentment, with angry professors leading the charge against those who would value
craft. In that introduction, he hurls an angry invective against his editorial prede-
cessor, Adrienne Rich (1929–), who, in his words, created in her edition of the series
“a monumental representation of the enemies of the aesthetic who are in the act of
overwhelming us. It is of a badness not to be believed, because it follows the criteria
now operative: what matters most are the race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic
 POETRY 759

origin, and political purpose of the would-be poet” (1998, 16). He remarks that he
could not find a single poem included in Rich’s edition that was worthy of inclusion
in the Best of the Best.
By her own admission, Rich was not seeking primarily the most aesthetically
complex or pleasing poems. Her project was to include those poems that are
“especially urgent, lively, haunting, resonant, demanding to be reread” (1996, 15).
As Rich points out in her introduction to the Best American Poetry of 1996, most
literary magazines in this country are edited by white men. And the list she supplies
of major U.S. poetry prizes “administered largely by white judges and bestowed
largely on white men” includes the Ruth Lilly Prize, Kingsley Tufts Prize, Academy
of American Poets fellowship, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Critics Circle
Award (1996, 18). It is this “literary apartheid” (Rich 1996, 19) that the commit-
ment to a multicultural venue fights.
The antagonism between Bloom and Rich should be understood in the larger con-
text of the culture wars marking American society. The 2004 elections and the
media focus on blue vs. red states reminded us that the brief moments of national
unity heralded in our collective response to 9/11 were over. The culture wars sug-
gest that what polarizes Americans are hot-button issues, with ideology rather than
any factor such as religion, race, or social class acting as the divisive factor. Those
who are pro-Affirmative Action are likely also pro-choice, anti-gun, environmental-
ists who believe global warming is a real threat and that Americans have the right
to die with dignity and with medical intervention if need be. They tend to reject
Intelligent Design, favor the separation of church and state, and support same-sex
marriage.
Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly calls such people Secular-Progressives and
those on the other side of the ideological divide, Traditionalists. The Traditionalists
are the ones engineering the backlash against such race-, gender-, class- , and sexual
orientation-sensitive social movements that demanded civil rights and affirmative
action. California, Washington, and, as of 2006, Michigan’s so-called “Civil Rights
Initiatives” ban affirmative action that given preferential treatment to groups based
on race, gender, color, ethnicity, or national origin for public employment, educa-
tion, or contracting purposes. Each state or city court that recognizes same-sex
unions galvanizes the Traditionalists to mount a campaign for a Defense of
Marriage Acts, with 40 states as of January 2007 with a DOMA on the books and
resulting Web sites to keep lawyers updated on the interpretation of those acts.
Identity Politics. Bloom, Rich, and spoken word poetry fit into the culture wars with
Bloom representing the Traditionalists; Rich, the Secular-Progressives; and spoken
word, the ground in which the Secular-Progressives work out their identity politics.
Identity politics is the practice whereby members of minority groups identify them-
selves according to shared discrimination they have endured as members of that
group and agitate for social change based on what that discrimination has denied
them. Ironically, to determine both whether or not some benefit has been systemat-
ically denied to members of that particular group and to chart progress in re- or
instating those benefits requires that all members identify themselves as such. If the
goal of identity politics is to level some heretofore uneven playing field (as is often
the case) and erase the results of the difference that caused the unevenness in the first
place, that very difference must first be marked and thereby made visible again. For
example, were a university to redress the claims of lesbian faculty members that they
were unfairly passed over for promotion and pay increases, that university would
760 POETRY

first need to ask all members to identify themselves according to their gender and
sexual orientation, specifically marking lesbians as such. If their complaint was that
their gender compounded by their sexual orientation was the difference that
accounts for the pay discrepancy, that very difference would first have to be invoked
in order for the effects of the institutional discrimination because of that difference
to be reduced or erased.
As various groups organized around identity politics and agitated for inclusion in
university curriculum as well as national publications, American poetry publica-
tions—both primary and secondary sources—enjoyed surges in anthologies and
critical collections devoted to each minority group. This trend began with the Black
Arts movement of the 1960s and the feminist movement of the 1970s, both of which
sought to recover past writers either forgotten or ignored, thereby revealing or
establishing a tradition of black or woman’s art. Both movements also supported
emergent writers, support that continues today. Each movement that organized
around an aspect of identity—the American Indian Movement, the post-Stonewall
gay rights groups like Act Up, for example—worked to recover and promote writ-
ers and poets who represented them and contributed to an artistic tradition that
foregrounds issues of particular concern to members of that group. Their success
can be measured in both the changing parameters of the national debates and, often
more hopefully, in the burgeoning publications that include or focus on those issues
of concern. Though civil rights and specific, legal protection for gay and lesbian
Americans have been slow in coming, the ever-increasing critical attention given to
poets who identify themselves (or who have been identified) as gay or lesbian testi-
fies to the success of identity politics to bring gay and lesbian issues to the attention
of our nation’s scholars and students.
The annual American Literary Scholarship section devoted to poetry from the
1940s to the present, for example, notes that from 2001–2003, scholarship on
closet lesbian Elizabeth Bishop “far exceeds that on any other poet of the period”
(2003, 425). A first-rate poet of major import, Bishop’s command of critical atten-
tion nonetheless is boosted by college courses devoted specifically to lesbian issues.
Ask Google to find poetry anthologies with lesbians as a keyword and 768 hits
appear. Harold Bloom and new critics would cringe at the thought of a poet’s sex-
ual orientation or a poem’s subject matter serving as selection criteria for inclusion
in an anthology, but they work with a limited view of poetry’s purpose, particularly
in the context of current American culture. Traditional views of poetry hold that its
purpose, to borrow Piotr Gwiazda’s descriptions, is to serve “as an object of aes-
thetic contemplation,” whereas the secular-progressive view is that poetry may also
serve as “a vehicle for social change” (2004, 462). In the years since 2000, poetry
publications suggest that poetry is being used—frequently—by those who hope to
effect change.
Reception. The questions that a student of poetry would ask now are the same
questions they would ask since poetry was first spoken, or written. Is poetry prima-
rily an oral or a written art? What is its primary purpose? Does it serve to entertain,
or is its purpose to inform, educate, enrage? Should its subject remain rooted in the
personal, the local, or must it move toward the oft-ridiculed “universal,” or
national? Is poetry now wildly popular or caught in a dismal state of affairs?
These questions are not rhetorical, nor are they simple to answer. To examine
popular American poetry since 2000 is to track developments in several media that
embrace and excite the young of our country and to bemoan; to roam the latest
 POETRY 761

applications of the most recent technologies and to be thrown into a study of clas-
sical and pre-literate histories. The most exciting and important trends in American
popular poetry continue to be the multiple manifestations of the same movement:
to get poetry out of the exclusive hands of the elite and the academic and into the
hands of the masses, particularly the young. The spoken word revolution dominates
this trend and illustrates how poetry has reinvigorated itself by simultaneously
returning to some of poetry’s origins, reminding its contemporary audience that the
written form is a late-comer to poetry, and capitalizing on new technologies and
other forms of popular cultural media. Performance, specifically dramatic perform-
ance, as well as the celebration of sound and music that marks the world’s earliest
poetic forms, have been the vehicles through which countless new, young Americans
have been introduced to poetry, often in flashy, slickly produced events.
Selected Authors. Any discussion of poets in a venue such as this would be ridicu-
lously limited and revelatory of the author’s own biases. This discussion will not prove
an exception to that rule. However, three will be presented for their command of the
critical attention and their relationship to the largest prize the world offers poets,
the Nobel Prize for Literature. One, Derek Walcott, has already earned that prize; yet
he remains an active poet and, according to some criteria, remains an “American”
poet. The other two poets are perhaps most likely of all the American poets writing
today to win the prize in the future, if critical attention is any indication.
A discussion of popular American poetry would not be complete without address-
ing one of the most astounding best-selling books of poetry, Derek Walcott’s Omeros.
Though one can question including Walcott in a list of “American” poets because of
his birthplace, the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, by virtue of his long tenure at uni-
versities in the United States and with a broad definition of America that includes the
various Americas, compounded with the amazing sales of his poetry within our coun-
try, he is an American poet to be reckoned with, publishing two books of poetry since
2000: Tiepolo’s Hound in 2000 and The Prodigal in 2004.
Winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature, Walcott was born in 1930 in
Castries, St. Lucia, to a schoolteacher mother and civil servant father (who died
before Derek and his twin brother, Roderick, reached their second birthday). His
325-page poem, Omeros, published by Farrar Straus Giroux in 1990, cemented his
reputation not only as the premier Caribbean poet, but also as the “very man by
whom the English language lives,” according to his friend and fellow Nobel-prize
winning poet Joseph Brodsky. Its publication and subsequent widespread appeal are
widely accepted as the catalyst for Walcott’s Nobel Prize.
What astounds about Walcott’s success with Omeros is that the brisk sales of his
long and culturally dense but masterful poem testified as early as 1990 that a poetry
resurgence was on its way to the United States. Perhaps only one other recent
American book, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, has so quickly entrenched itself in the
canon of U.S. literature classrooms. That Walcott did so with poetry, and an epic
poem no less, almost baffles the mind.
Perhaps, we can read in Walcott several trends converging to contribute to that
success. Just as identity politics seems to offer a boost to some poets whose member
group is currently active in the academy, demanding courses and attendant antholo-
gies and critical scholarship to support those courses, Walcott’s poem appeared
two years shy of the five-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s so-called
discovery of the New World. Many thinkers and cultural critics were interested in
assessing the legacy of Columbus, and in the pantheon of New World voices whose
762 POETRY

very existence was forged in the often violent histories that converged on the New
World between 1492 and 1992, Walcott presented an example of artistic near-
perfection that even the New Critics would agree was worthy of the designation
“best” poetry.
Titled with the Greek word for Homer and divided into seven books of multiple
chapters each, with the first and final two books set in St. Lucia and the middle three
in Africa, the United States, and Europe, the poem, like Walcott himself, contributes
to a new American definition that is globally inclusive. Walcott has made much of
the fact that his last name along with his brown skin and green eyes testify to his
varied ancestry—Dutch, African, and British. Rather famously, one of his poems
declares “either I’m nobody or I’m a nation.” As his very body carries the strains of
several world cultures converging upon him, so, too, does his poetry retain the sev-
eral literary heritages he claims. The characters with whom Walcott populates this
narrative poem further suggest the deliberate relationship between this poem and
The Iliad and The Odyssey alluded to in the poem’s title.
Walcott also embraced several genres, notably poetry and drama, at a time when
poetry reinvigorated itself by reminding its audience of its dramatic roots. Walcott
began his career as a playwright, with his earliest writing successes in drama. He
spent many years nourishing the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, which he founded
and for which he wrote his early plays; and his first post-Nobel publication was a
stage version of The Odyssey, his Caribbean-infused reworking of Homer’s text,
composed primarily in verse. The Stratford Festival of Ontario, Canada, is staged
this play for its 2007 season. And like some of his younger poetic contemporaries,
he has also made forays into musical theatre, though with rather disastrous results:
his longtime collaboration with Paul Simon on Capeman resulted in a financial flop.
He has even included his own watercolor paintings as cover art and within his
books of poetry.
The contemporary avant-garde, the exploratory poets for whom language itself is
both barrier to understanding and stuff of meaning, can find much in Walcott’s
poetry to admire. For Walcott the poet, among the maladies cured by the conver-
gence of cultures in the Caribbean is no less than the problem of language. Often
questioned for his apparent bifurcated devotion to the Caribbean as a place on the
one hand and the language and literary traditions of Western Europe on the other,
Walcott asserts in Omeros his right to all of the beauties of the English language,
described in his earlier poem “A Far Cry from Africa” as “the English tongue I
love.” In Omeros Walcott writes that “this language carries its cure” (1990, 323).
Most notable may be that near the millennium’s end, with one decade remaining,
Walcott offered up what he has described as a love poem to St. Lucia, his home
island, that simultaneously serves as an epic reassessment of Caribbean culture. The
astoundingly beautiful and technically perfect poetry contained in this assessment
celebrates the achievements of those in the Caribbean who, in the words of the
poem, “walked. / They survived. There is the epical splendour.” When Walcott uses
his poetry to “give those feet a voice,” his vision transforms a history built on pain
and forced migration, marked by poverty, into a testament of beauty.
The poets since 2000 who continue to garner the most critical attention and
praise—those most likely identified as The Major Poets compared to the merely
influential poets or A Major Poet—remain those in the inclusive, paratactic tradi-
tion of Whitman and Williams. Our current poets who practice a both/and form of
poetics, who, in Vernon Shetley’s words, “find some kind of middle way between
 POETRY 763

the alternatives of a poetry descended from Eliot . . . [and] oppositional politics of

a figure like Ginsberg” (1993, 16–17) are those who remain our most interesting,
our most significant.
Jorie Graham. One of the most exciting and prolific of those poets is Jorie Graham
(1951–), longtime faculty member of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop now at Harvard.
Like the most profound American poets, Graham deftly and masterfully dances the
line that so often has divided poetry, redefining the dichotomy often aligned over
the absence or presence of the poem’s speakerly self, the impersonal poem against
the personal, the confessional mode in which the poet-as-I reveals the self arrayed
against the avant-garde mode in which issues of the poet’s voice become obsolete as
language itself is presented as the only material of poetry. Kirstin Hotelling Zona
describes this as Graham’s “dance between autonomy and contingency” (2005,
669)—the poetic self that shapes its destiny only as it realizes its dependence upon
and existence only within the contexts of relationships. Graham crafts a poetic
persona hungry for meaning, and presents that persona in the act of creating that
meaning, simultaneously embracing and abjuring the power and responsibility
involved in the act of making that meaning. Like Whitman, she fuses features from
both sides of the poetic divide, “locat[ing] writerly authority not in the ruptured
referent, nor in the lyric ‘I’ who appears to choose one action over another, but
in the play between these positions—between presence and absence, desire and
dislocation—from which the ‘I’ emerges” (Zona 2005, 670).
Graham’s nine books of poetry, three since 2000, and her resume of achievements
have secured her position as Major Poet. Following a trilingual childhood abroad,
Graham earned a BA from New York University (1973) and an MFA from Iowa
(1978). She has earned an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Whiting Award, and
a Pulitzer (for Dream of a Unified Field), and been awarded both a Guggenheim fel-
lowship and an NEA grant. Even when critics pen mixed reviews of her books, they
are forced to admit the intellectual rigor and the beautiful poetics that mark her
writing, as well as the uncanny way she locates her work at the nexus of the debate
about poetry, embodying the oppositions and making out of them poetry that unites
previously separated worlds. James Longenbach identifies her “acts of inclusion” as
the defining feature of her distinct voice and formidable achievements, referring to
various, often opposing, poetic traditions infused into her poetry.
From Graham’s debut book of poetry, Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts (1980) to
Never (2002), what many critics have noted is the range of Graham’s poetry. Each
book takes a new direction, sometimes to the bafflement or consternation of critics
who enjoyed the poetics of the previous one. Especially laudatory readings have
been published in two of the most prestigious literary journals since 2000, one in
PMLA and another in Contemporary Literature, and one of the nations most for-
midable poetry critics, Helen Vendler, makes Graham one of three poets who are the
subject of a recent book.
Graham has said that she writes for the “harried” reader and much has been said
about her “breathless” lines, both of which might yield an impression of a poetic
world crowded with images or hurried in its presentation. But Graham is also an
unceasing advocate for poetry—revealed both by the unflagging interest in and
encouragement to the younger poets she teaches, and in her undogged defense of the
art. She appears to bristle in interviews only when poetry is identified as marginal
and when questions about the proliferation of bad poetry are posed. Her emphasis
on the ways poetry can put us in contact with sets of values not affiliated with other
764 POETRY

forms of learning—how it can inspire curiosity, teach ambiguity—makes her a

champion of all forms of poetry. Only in the economic sense, she insists, is poetry
marginal, and she suggests that economic value holds little real value to that asso-
ciated with the heart’s knowledge.
Another prolific poet whose command of critical attention derives from her mas-
tery of both sides of a poetic divide is Louise Glück (1943–). Former poet laureate
and winner of most prizes awarded to poets, including a Pulitzer in 1993, the Acad-
emy of American Poets Prize, the Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize, Glück’s poetic
hallmarks include archetypal symbolism, mythic subject matter, formal experimen-
tation, and the use of epic material in poetry that foregrounds “the personal, the
occasional, the interior” (Murnaghan and Roberts, 1992 4). As is the case with
Jorie Graham, however, Glück’s poetry evades all categories set to it. Her “need to
resist [the closed self’s] seduction is her great theme,” writes James Longenbach in
2004. Like Plath, who employs myth to embody a personal or speakerly self in the
poetry, Glück eschews both confessional and intellectual traditions at the same
time that her poetry toys with them. Her poetry is simultaneously personal and
distant from the persona, with classical figures such as Penelope and Odysseus
representing a contemporary couple caught in the process of a dissolving marriage,
as is the case in her 1996 collection Meadowlands.
Her most recent poetry collection, Averno (2006) may indeed be her “master-
piece,” as the New York Times Book Review announces, a collection that announces
Glück’s self-positioning with the world’s most notable poets (the title refers to the
Italian lake that ancient Romans believed ran to the underworld, immortalized in
Virgil’s Aeneid). The poems in this collection promise to reveal “a theory that
explains everything,” yet that theory comes from the persona of the poet who takes
“it upon myself / to become an artist, / to give voice to these impressions.”
The frequency with which these three poets publish and, even more so, command
critical attention suggest that they are the future of American academic poetry. The
future of American popular poetry lies with us all.

Bibliography
Algarin, Miguel, and Bob Holman, eds. Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café. New
York: Henry Holt, 1994.
Baraka, Amiri. “Somebody Blew Up America.” http://www.counterpunch.org/poem1003.html.
Bell, Marvin. “The Poetry Scene: No One Way.” In The Spoken Word Revolution: Slam,
Hip-hop, & the Poetry of a New Generation. Mark Eleveld, ed. Naperville, IL:
Sourcebooks, 2003.
Bloom, Harold. “Introduction.” The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988–1997. New
York: Scribners, 1998.
Gilbert, Roger. “Contemporary American Poetry.” In A Companion to 20th Century Poetry.
Neil Roberts, ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
Gioia, Dana. Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture. St Paul, MN:
Graywolf, 2002.
Glück, Louise. Averno. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2006.
Graham, Jorie. “The Glorious Thing: Jorie Graham and Mark Wunderlich in Conversation.”
Interview with Mark Wunderlich. American Poet. (Fall 1996): 20–23.
———. Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.
———. Never. New York: Ecco, 2002.
Gwiazda, Piotr. “The Aesthetics of Politics/The Politics of Aesthetics: Amiri Baraka’s ‘Some-
body Blew Up America.’” Contemporary Literature 45.3 (2004): 460–485.
 POETRY 765

Hass, Robert. “Introduction.” Best American Poetry 2001. New York: Scribners, 2001.
Have You Heard the Word? TV Ontario, 1994.
Hejinian, Lyn. “Introduction.” Best American Poetry 2004. New York: Scribners, 2004.
Kearful, Frank. “Poetry: The 1940s to the Present.” American Literary Scholarship. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003, 425–474.
Komunyakaa, Yusef. “Introduction.” Best American Poetry 2003. New York: Scribners,
2003.
Lehman, David. “Forward.” Best American Poetry 2002. New York: Scribners, 2002.
Longenbach, James. Modern Poetry After Modernism. New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997.
———. The Resistance to Poetry. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Martin, Charles. “The Three Voices of Contemporary Poetry.” The New Criterion 22.8
(April 2004): 34–37.
Middlebrook, Diane Wood. “What Was Confessional Poetry?” In The Columbia History of
American Poetry. Jay Parini, ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
Murnaghan, Sheila and Deborah H. Roberts. “Penelope’s Song: The Lyric Odysseys of Linda
Pastan and Louise Glück.” Classical and Modern Literature 22.1 (1992): 1–33.
“The People’s Poetry Language Initiative: A Declaration of Poetic Rights and Values.”
People’s Poetry Project. http://peoplespoetry.org.
Rich, Adrienne. “Introduction.” Best American Poetry 1996. New York: Scribners, 1996.
Schwerner, Armand. Sounds of the River Naranjana & THE TABLETS I–XXIV. Barrytown,
NY: Station Hill, 1983.
Shetley, Vernon. After the Death of Poetry: Poet and Audience in Contemporary America.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.
The United States of Poetry. Washington Square Films, 1996.
Vendler, Helen. The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1995.
———. Part of Nature, Part of Us. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.
———. Voices & Visions. New York: Random House, 1987.
Walcott, Derek. Omeros. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1990.
———. The Prodigal. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2004.
———. Tiepolo’s Hound. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000.
Walker, Jeanne Murray. “A Comment on the State of the Art: Poetry in 2004.” Christianity
and Literature 54.1 (Autumn 2004): 93–110.
Williams, William Carlos. Spring and All. 1923. Imaginations. New York: New Directions,
1970.
Zona, Kirstin Hotelling. “Jorie Graham and American Poetry.” Contemporary Literature
46.4 (Winter 2005): 667–687.

Further Reading
African-American Review 37.2–3 (Special Issue on Amiri Baraka); Arp, Thomas, and Greg
Johnson, eds. Perrine’s Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry. Tenth edition. Boston,
MA: Heinle & Heinle, 2002; Brown, Fahamisha Patricia. Performing the Word: African
American Poetry as Vernacular Culture. New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers
University Press, 1999; Glazner, Gary Mex, editor. Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of
Performance Poetry. San Francisco: Manic D P, 2000; Otten, Thomas. “Jorie Graham’s ___s.”
PMLA 118 (2003): 239–253; Perloff, Marjorie. “William Carlos Williams.” Voices and
Visions. 157–203; poets.org.
MICHELLE DEROSE
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R

REGIONAL FICTION
Definition. In his essay, “The Regional Motive,” novelist, essayist, poet, and envi-
ronmentalist Wendell Berry confesses that he knows “no word that is more sloppily
defined . . . or more casually understood” than “regionalist” (Berry 1972, 63).
Because it lacks intellectual dimensions, the “regional” label leaves a writer feeling
branded and embarrassed. The label is more embarrassing than other modifiers of
contemporary American fiction writers because it implies that the writer is either a
mouthpiece for over-storied regions (such as New England, the South, Appalachia,
or the Midwest) or a fetishizer of the remains of rurality in America. Forced to
negotiate received notions of places and vernacular expression, regionalists confront
a dialectic clash between preservation and renewal. The most innovative regional
fiction defies the traditional iconography of standard regions, disturbs reader
expectations about vernacular expression, and dismantles encyclopedic ownership
of place.
With this progressive agenda, it would seem that regional fiction is beginning to
merge with “literary fiction,” with its focus on the larger cultural and human prob-
lems often eclipsed by excessive interest in local detail. However, the entire genre of
regional fiction, from the most traditional to the most innovative texts, retains an
adverse relationship to official literary culture for a couple of reasons. First, as
Marilynne Robinson indicates, the very existence of a “regional” category reveals
“a cultural bias that supposes books won’t be written in towns you haven’t heard
of before” (qtd. in Kowalewski 2003, 7). Secondly, regional fiction has internalized
the distinction between regional and non-regional writing insofar as it elevates the
importance of place over its mere necessity as a background upon which to stage a
character’s psychological development or “soul search.” In this sense, regional
fiction has the potential to destabilize the distinction between setting and narrative
voice. On the other hand, there remains a nostalgic model of regional fiction, which
preserves vernacular relics for no other reason than that they are scarce. In this
sense, regional fiction is either dismissed or revered as a genre purporting to contain
768 REGIONAL FICTION

“authentic” representations of rural places and folk wisdom. To a large degree,

regional fiction is persistently popular because, in America, the question of authen-
ticity is asked on so many fronts.
For instance, in November 1998, the State Department issued a publication
entitled Outline of American Literature, the final section of which was entitled “The
New Regionalism.” This section of the publication claims that regionalism is
making “a triumphant return in American literature, enabling readers to get a sense
of place as well as a sense of time and humanity” (Outline, 1998). Similarly, but on
a more literary front, Joyce Carol Oates has recently called the regional voice the
universal voice. Her prose poem “My Faith as a Writer,” printed in the front matter
of her collection of craft essays, The Faith of a Writer (2003) and reprinted on her
lecture tour pamphlets, reads as follows:

Through the local or regional, through our individual voices, we work to create art that
will speak to others who know nothing of us. In our very obliqueness to one another,
an unexpected intimacy is born.
The individual voice is the communal voice.
The regional voice is the universal voice. (Oates 2003, 2)

Even in her introduction to the Oxford Book of American Short Stories, Oates
answers the question “Is American literature at its core a literature of regions?” in
the affirmative, asserting that contemporary writers resemble one another “along
lines that have less to do with traditional American themes than with . . . highly
specific, brilliantly realized American places” (Oates 1992, 15).
This curious endorsement from both the federal government and the literati indi-
cates that the question of region is important to both the political and cultural
engines of American public opinion. As the State Department publication indicates,
regional fiction is popular because it “enables” curious readers to assume a “sense
of place.” It thus facilitates a manner of thinking territorially, which helps explain
why the State Department has a stake in its comeback. Regional fiction is also, as
Oates indicates, a fiction that builds cosmopolitan and humanist connections from
the raw materials of the unique timbres of our own voices. It is uniquely
“American,” these claims suggest, to think territorially and to think that specificity
is a pathway to universal, trans-territorial, humanity. Like Whitman, whose careful
inventory of body parts “sings the body electric,” the regional fiction writer uses the
specificity of place to generate tangible patterns of commonality.
Regional fiction became popular in American literature in the late nineteenth cen-
tury, primarily as a category of realism devoted to representing local specificity. The
genre, usually understood as “quaint” representations of places outside the beltway
of industrial progress, satisfies reader fantasies about a preindustrial past. Originally
solicited elite periodicals, such as The Atlantic Monthly, regionalism entered literary
history as a genre whose subject (people and places untouched by national
standardization) serves a social need (to pacify anxiety about rapid standardiza-
tion). As Stephanie Foote argues, this category of realism gained popularity because
it “represented various sections of the consolidating nation to an audience that was
conscious of itself as a national elite” (Foote 2001, 4). In other words, regional
fiction allowed middle-class urban readers to think that the disappearance of locally
diverse rural communities was part of a natural progression, not a revisable byprod-
uct of industrial progress. Late-nineteenth century regional fiction was remarkably
 REGIONAL FICTION 769

anti-modern. Its stories were set outside the patterns of industrial progress, in what
Brodhead calls “zone[s] of backwardness where locally variant folkways prevail”
(Brodhead 1994, 150). In this sense, regionalism can be defined as a form of cultural
incubation, wherein literary representation preserves the cultures and landscapes
threatened by the ongoing procession of modern progress. In the late twentieth
century, regional fiction has achieved a renaissance of popularity. The reason is
similar; contemporary globalization has introduced another concentric circle by
comparison to which the value of the smaller, tangible spheres to which people
actually feel the bond of affiliation appear to be in jeopardy.
A definitional obligation to address early in explaining regional fiction is the
distinction between “regionalism” and “local color.” Where literary regionalism
refers to literature that is specific to a particular set of geographical coordinates, local
color is a feature of realism that facilitates the production of regional fidelity. Local
color differs from realist representation in that it “subordinated plot to the revelation
of personality . . . capture[d] the speech patterns of unlettered Americans . . . [and]
distinctly rejected any sense of capturing Truth” (Nagel 1997, xxii). Local color,
then, is a representational tool that facilitates regional fiction. Though it is possible
to do local color without writing a regional text, it is impossible to read a regional
text that is devoid of local color. Local color is basically a mode of realism that
captures the peculiarities local to places outside the literary mainstream, a mode of
representation that highlights the specificity of places not yet on literary maps. As
Hamlin Garland explains, “Local color in a novel means that it has such quality of
texture and back-ground that it could not have been written in any other place or by
any one else than a native” (Garland 1894, 53–54).
The formal properties of regional fiction are (1) a setting that is outside the world
of modern development but whose existence is in some discernible way being threat-
ened by modern development, (2) the inclusion of characters and cultural features
that personify some form of humanity that has been sacrificed in the name of
progress, and (3) a concerted effort to employ local knowledge and to textualize the
peculiarities local to the region in which the piece is set. For instance, vernacular
dialect and “foreign” cultural traditions are often a focus of regional fiction.
Considering these defining properties, many see regional fiction as engaging in
conservative cultural work. Looking at the same characteristics, others argue that
regional fiction resists unchecked modernization. Recently scholars have argued
that what looks like nostalgia is in fact the type of anti-modern ambivalence that
drives literary modernism. The difference between modernism and regionalism,
though one sees few differences after reading Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg,
Ohio (1919), is the obvious preference in the latter for realist representation. In
addition, regional fiction differs from modernist anti-modernism in that its moral
urge is similar to that of nature writing. Regional fiction is now studied as a genre
that synthesizes the clashes of opposing concepts such as “city” and “country,”
“center” and “margin,” “tradition” and “modernity,” even “masculinity” and
“femininity.” Instead of favoring one or another side (i.e., leaning too conspicu-
ously in the direction of conserving rural values), regional fiction oscillates between
sides, producing a symphony of voices and positions whose source of resolution is
the reader-writer agreement to survey the whole scene. Regionalism thus treats the
delicate textures of its subject gently, sharpening them by emphasizing the
contrasting hues needed to represent “the local.” This means that the narrator’s
process of encountering a specific region becomes a process of balancing different
770 REGIONAL FICTION

perspectives on culture, of accommodating the concentric circles of human

affiliation.
Finally, then, regional fiction, regardless of the historical period it is produced in,
is an arm of realism that captures the spirit of place. Its practitioners assume that
there is enough aesthetic value in specific soil to sustain the art of fiction. Sometimes
excessively limited in focus, regional fiction seems conspicuously interested in
reinforcing the special existence or value of what is off the beaten path. More specif-
ically, literary works that stay within the lines of region seem to neglect or eclipse
the greater social and human issues to which literature is supposed to respond.
However, the proponents of regional fiction argue that it represents the confluence
between who and where human beings are in the world. Its limited focus, like that
of pastoral poetry, induces “universal” themes and resemblance from the grainy
details of the local.
History. There is some debate regarding which is the earliest work of regional
fiction; the regional coordinates and literary form of each disputed work indicate
much about the bifurcated history and development of the genre. Some critics cite
the first Southwest humorist work, Augustus Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes (1835), as
the first book-length regional work. Other critics agree that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
first novel, set in Maine, Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862), was the first regional offering.
It is generally agreed, however, that the publication of Mark Twain’s humorous
sketch, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865) in New York’s
Saturday Press, and Brett Harte’s frontier sketches published in the Overland
Monthly (1868–1870) inaugurate the “heyday” of regional fiction in America.
It would appear, then, that the masculine-inflected, frontier humor sketches were the
agenda-setting texts of regional form, and that the serene sketches of the New
England countryside represent a second tier of regional form.
However, this master narrative has been revised in recent years, as the early works
of Twain and Harte have become attached to the histories of adventure fiction and
Western literature more so than to regional fiction. This is true especially in the
wake of feminist revision of regional history. In the 1970s and 1980s, feminist
literary critics claimed regional fiction as a “woman’s genre,” beginning the history
of the genre in New England, concentrating mostly on the work of Sarah Orne
Jewett. In fact, the first publications of prominent feminist literary critics such as
Elizabeth Ammons, Josephine Donovan, Ann Douglas, Judith Fetterley, Marjorie
Pryse, and Alice Hall Petry were on the subject of Jewett’s New England fiction. This
feminist reclamation seems counterintuitive, since the genre’s “miniaturism, descrip-
tiveness, and domesticity bears the hallmarks of the dominant nineteenth-century
gender ideology, specifically the notion of separate spheres and the dismissal of most
women’s writing as merely ornamental” (Ammons and Rohy, 1998, xviii). Even
after considering the impact of feminist criticism on the history of the genre, any
history of regional fiction must begin not by choosing to link the genre to either
New England domestic realism or Southwest humorism, but by acknowledging the
institutional origins of this bifurcation and gauging the development of regional
fiction from within these competing historical narratives.
In Reading for Realism, Nancy Glazener argues that regional fiction gained pop-
ularity through the efforts of a conglomeration of literary institutions. The “Atlantic
group,” as Glazener calls it, “shared contributors . . . endorsed each other’s author-
ity, and based that authority in similar understandings of class-inflected cultural
trusteeship” (Glazener 1997, 257). Glazener reveals the meta-editorial chatter
 REGIONAL FICTION 771

among these periodicals, which sought to define fiction written in America as

uniquely “American.” Atlantic-group editors (not the least of which is William
Dean Howells) have faith in the ability of regional fiction to, as Foote characterizes
it, “construct versions of local culture that can coexist peacefully in a single political
entity” (Foote 2001, 9). Yet, as Foote further argues, this faith “conceals, as region-
alism itself will, the absence of certain kinds of local cultures, identities, and
accents” (9). The primary cultures, identities, and accents that these editors
concealed are obviously those which cannot “coexist peacefully,” those that do not
ultimately bend regional fiction around a nationalist project.
A byproduct of this exclusionary literary nationalism, argues Donna Campbell, is
what an 1897 Atlantic Monthly editorial terms the “Feminine Principle” and
“Masculine Principle” of American fiction. This division is similar to the traditional
understanding of the split between domestic local color and untamed naturalist
fiction. As Campbell explains, a gendered logic is built into regional fiction. The
Atlantic editorial, written by novelist James Lane Allen, explains that naturalist
writers rebel against the popularity of preservation-centered realism. They dislike,
among other things, the assumption that preserving local variance is inherently a
good idea. Campbell provides an insightful reading of Stephen Crane’s story, “The
Monster,” as naturalist fiction that deliberately subverts regional conventions in
order to expose the conservative logic of regionalism’s popularity. Crane’s setting, a
small town that has lost its economic reason for being, features a self-destructive
man on the verge of disaster, for whom small-town rituals are a source of anger and
oppression. Presenting local color this way, Crane dramatizes the impulse toward
violent self-destruction that has long loomed under the surface of even the most
innocuous regional fiction.
New England Regionalism. More important than Crane’s critique of regional fiction
is Edith Wharton’s more popular and fully realized critique in Ethan Frome (1911),
in which Wharton portrays local knowledge as the raw material of self-destruction.
In the famous penultimate scene, Ethan and his star-crossed lover steer their sleigh
down a hillside in bucolic Starkfield, Massachusetts, straight into an elm tree. This
suicide collision marks the beginning of an ongoing critique of nostalgic represen-
tation of rural America. It is Wharton’s effort, in her words, to “contradict the
‘rose and lavender’ pages of native writers . . . Mary Wilkins [Freeman] and Sarah
Orne Jewett” (qtd. in Hamblen 1965, 239). Ethan Frome is thus a “blackly comic
joke, a vision of the genre so extreme as to border on private parody” (Campbell
1997, 172). By using the standard trappings of New England local color (the sleigh,
the snowy hill, the innocent lovers) as the instruments of violence, Wharton
“confronts local color fiction on its own terms . . . disrupt[ing] and transform[ing]
its narrative conventions,” ultimately revealing that regions can be crippled by
their own quaintness (162). Wharton hopes her anti-local color will catch on as the
New England fiction writer’s “siren-subject”; she hopes regional writers will
answer her prefatory call to crash their “cockle-shell to the rocks,” meaning to
abandon the “woman’s work” of representing the delicate, irrelevant hues of New
England (Ethan Frome, vii). Wharton’s Fromes are deliberately colorless, charac-
ters she describes as “scarcely more articulate” than “granite outcroppings” (Whar-
ton 1911, vii). They are recounted through the detached sobriety of an outsider
narrator, or “looker-on with scope enough to see it all, to resolve it back into sim-
plicity” (viii–ix). Wharton thus replaces interest in the delicate, exotic, and endangered
details of regional difference with a crude formal essentialism wherein difference is
772 REGIONAL FICTION

reduced to proto-elemental categories like soil and rock. Fetterley and Pryse criti-
cize Wharton for having “treat[ed] regionalism with extreme hostility” (Fetterley
and Pryse 2003, 58). But Wharton was hostile not toward regional fiction in gen-
eral, only toward the fact that popular regional fiction was “[s]uffocatingly claustro-
phobic; utterly regressive; filled with meaningless whining drone voices of women
incapable of development” (58).
In short, Wharton was no fan of the “Feminine Principle.” This isn’t a surprise,
especially considering that her strong suit is the urban social fiction. As Fetterley and
Pryse imply, Wharton’s New England novellas (which include Frome and Summer
[1917]) read as cautionary tales that warn women writers against market expecta-
tions that require them to write nostalgic portrayals of rural America. But they are
produced with a fairly standard representational objective. In Wharton’s words, her
novellas “draw life as it really was in the derelict mountain regions of New
England,” a life “utterly unlike that seen through the rose-coloured spectacles of my
predecessors” (qtd in Fetterley and Pryse 2003, 58). Wharton’s critique of rose-
colored regionalism is a critique of the kind of reader interest in representations of
New England that find roses and lavender where there is only stark granite. The
effect of contradicting the “‘rose and lavender’ pages” of Jewett and Freeman
reveals a key moral tension of regional fiction.
Wharton’s heartbreaking hues have inadvertently inspired writers to turn to New
England for tragic plotlines and even horror. Even the recent State Department pub-
lication has taken note of this phenomenon in new regionalism, citing Joyce Carol
Oates’s “haunting works” of the northeast United States whose “obsessed charac-
ters’ attempts to achieve fulfillment within their grotesque environments lead them
into destruction” (Outline, 1998). The publication also notes the fact that Stephen
King “generally sets his suspenseful page-turners in Maine—within the same
region.” Also in Maine, recent novelist G.K. Wuori has started to receive recogni-
tion for his short story collection, Nude in the Tub (1999), and novel, An American
Outrage (2000), about the north woods of Quillifarkeag, Maine. According to Kent
Ryden, the New England of recent regional fiction is a place “where moral corrup-
tion and violence hide behind a static surface” (Ryden 2003, 206). Wharton likely
did not intend to replace nostalgic representations with horrifying representations
of the New England region. Instead, she seems to have wanted to point out that the
basic presuppositions of regional fiction are problematic. The fact that an entire
(mostly female) faction of writers somehow depend upon the survival of backwards
folkways is troubling to Wharton for obvious reasons. A less obvious problem that
writers like Wharton have with the nostalgia tradition is that it makes inventories
of provinciality mean as much as, if not more than, the larger cultural or human
problems that take root in rural regions.
Since Wharton, much has happened to literary New England. It has become,
through Robert Frost’s poetry, the site of “the social and emotional costs of living
in a poor and declining part of the country”; it has been allegorized by Thornton
Wilder’s Our Town (1938) as “the imaginative property of the entire nation”
(Ryden 2003, 206–208). But anyone who has read Stephen King’s Castle Rock
novels knows that the unseemly side of rural New England is the most enduring in
popular fiction. King’s horror parallels that of H.P. Lovecraft, as both draw their
horror from their native knowledge of place. Both fuse and reuse real historical
locations and fictional New England locations. Lovecraft explains his interest in
New England by claiming the “night-black Massachusetts . . . is material for a really
 REGIONAL FICTION 773

profound study in group neuroticism; for certainly, none can deny the existence of
a profoundly morbid streak in the Puritan imagination” (qtd. in Joshi and Cannon
1999, 2). King, along with Russell Banks, Richard Russo, and lesser-known
contemporaries like Ernest Hebert and Wuori, flock to New England settings for
similar reasons. This “group neuroticism” has become absorbed into a fiction of
isolated, self-destructive blue-collar males. Whether probing the psychic contours of
such men or writing plainly of the topology of the region, contemporary New
England writers always demonstrate a self-evident correspondence between the
region and its wrecked lives. Tragic antiheros are matters of fact, lives that, like the
Puritan culture that once ruled the region, have already ended and are told just to
get the record straight, to continue Wharton’s revision of regional fiction to include
the violent impulses indigenous to the American landscape.
Trends and Themes. Though the legacy of New England regionalism is evident in
many recent works of fiction, most contemporary regional fiction has more in
common with the other side of the original bifurcation in regional fiction, that of
the Southwest humorist tradition. New England fiction, and perhaps more impor-
tantly scholarship about New England regionalists, has helped the genre mature and
develop beyond the nostalgia model. However, New England regionalism tends to
focus too heavily on the life and death of a single endangered culture. This mono-
cultural thematic center has lost resonance in a literary marketplace eager to absorb
the multicultural complexities dramatized in the fiction of Julia Alvarez, Sandra
Cisneros, Oscar Hijuelos, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-Rae Lee, Leslie Marmon
Silko, and Amy Tan. As Dwight MacDonald forecasts in his polemic “Masscult and
Midcult” (1961), New England has been “pushed aside by history” and has since
the mid-twentieth century been slowly “dwindling to provincial gentility”
(MacDonald, 1961, 34–35). In the wake of losing New England as a cultural center
of American thought and letters, America’s “pluralistic culture” finally becomes
realized in the 1960s (35). This pluralism makes the organizing tension of New
England fiction, namely that between rurality and urbanity, seem outmoded and of
no concern to the larger polity. The obsolescence of New England is contested in the
fiction of Anne Tyler, Russell Banks, Richard Russo, and others, but only to the
extent that the economic problems facing New England are the problems of
America at large. As opposed to the New England strand of regional history, the
Southern and Western strand produced some of the earliest examples of cross-
cultural contact in regional fiction. From Joel Chandler Harris’s racially problematic
“Uncle Remus” sketches to George Washington Cable’s epic portrait of Creole
culture, The Grandissimes (1880), fiction of the American South has simultaneously
highlighted regional fidelity and dramatized cross-cultural tensions. This fiction is
thus thematically more in touch with multicultural America and therefore is a more
viable progenitor of fiction in today’s era of globalization.
Southern Regionalism. The fiction of the American South is the ideal case study of
parallel development of regional fiction and multiculturalism. Indeed, as Andrew
Hoberek indicates, literary critics are starting to ask whether “southern literature
might be understood as the origin of American multiculturalism and identity
politics” (Hoberek, 2000). However, in his survey of contemporary Southern and
Western fiction, Robert Brinkmeyer asks the crucial question: “Should we, in these
days of the global village of cyberspace, do away with the designation ‘Southern’
and stop worrying about literary classifications grounded in place and region?”
(Brinkmeyer 2000, 3). Though the reasonable answer seems to be yes, scholars of
774 REGIONAL FICTION

Southern fiction still focus their inquiries on motifs of place. Such scholarship is
problematic when it refuses to acknowledge modern realities, such as the fact that
agricultural references to the South as the “Cotton Belt” are less accurate than the
corporate reference “Sun Belt.” Motivated by nostalgia for a monocultural
Southern community, some Southern literary scholarship often clings to the idea
that the South is immune to the standardizing effects of corporate capital. On the
other hand, some contemporary Southern writers rely too heavily on historical
designations such as “Old South” and “New South” to exorcise the troubling ances-
tors from their regional lineage.
Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Wendell Berry have
contributed the most substantial battery of essays on the trend of viewing regional
fiction, multiculturalism, and identity politics as parallel phenomena. Welty and
Percy represent opposite extremes of the argument, expressing conflicting ideas
about the virtues of place-based multiculturalism. Welty sees the regionalist frame-
work of her fiction as an intuitive site for interracial encounter. Her late fiction, most
notably The Optimist’s Daughter (1972), uses this specificity of place not to defend
against postmodern spatial amnesia, but to put local-level knowledge and power in
the service of larger-scale forms of intimacy. Percy, on the other hand, is reluctant to
embrace place and local-level racial tensions. Being more interested in existential
and psychological themes, Percy sees place as an accident of birth. His essay “Why
I Live Where I Live” explains that the importance of geographical location will
diminish as the age of postmodern consumerism takes root, especially considering
that most Americans find themselves living in the “nonplaces” of American suburbs.
Indeed, Percy’s confession that Dixie beer is the only outlet for “authentic” local
knowledge of New Orleans for those who live in the satellite suburb of Covington,
LA, indicates that, if uninterested in wrestling with enduring historical and racial
tensions, there’s little reason to write about the South anymore.
Obviously, not all contemporary Southern writers share Percy’s pessimism about
the bankruptcy of Southern soil. Many think that the Southern writer has an obli-
gation to the legacy of Southern history. Berry, for instance, sees the debate over
Southern regionalism as having both political and aesthetic repercussions, as
regional protocols have typically been used in Southern literature to monumentalize
a particular version of the place and its history. Berry notices that regional thinking
promotes “exploitive” marketing strategies that put the “picturesque” and “old
charm” qualities of the region in the service of producing a collectible version of the
South (qtd. in Wilson 1997, 145). Whether writers use parody, the grotesque, or less
refurbished literary conventions to counter this type of appropriation, the important
writers of the contemporary South contribute at some level to the type of place-
based thinking that overlooks the contemporary similarities among American
places.
One needs only to realize how near in chronological time Southern writers are to
the “Southern Renaissance” of the 1920s and 1930s, to see why writers from the
South want to be perceived as also being of the South. Unlike New England, whose
“Brahmins” of the “American Renaissance” lost currency after the Civil War, the
South is still enjoying literary dominance. Proud Southerners today assert that their
ground is still rich in divisive, almost prurient, distinction. The history of the South
has thus afforded the rest of the United States some measure of awareness of the
virtues and limitations of multiculturalism. In fact, as Brinkmeyer notes, the
 REGIONAL FICTION 775

SOUTHERN FELLOWSHIP
The truth is that local affiliation is still very important to Southern writers. In fact, a
“Fellowship of Southern Writers” was founded in 1987. The “fellowship” counts nearly
every noteworthy contemporary writer of Southern persuasion as a member. With the
anachronistic-sounding name “fellowship,” the FSW appears to be as conspicuously inter-
ested in imposing its trusteeship on Southern literature as was the Atlantic group. The
fellowship meets biennially to award numerous prizes to fiction writers who continue to
contribute works to the canon of Southern fiction. The fellowship’s charter members
include such pivotal arbiters of Southern literature as A.R.Ammons, Cleanth Brooks, James
Dickey, Ralph Ellison, Shelby Foote, John Hope Franklin, Ernest Gaines, Walker Percy,
Reynolds Price, Mary Lee Settle, Elizabeth Spencer, William Styron, Peter Taylor, Robert
Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and C.Vann Woodward. Elected members include contempo-
rary dynamos such as Wendell Berry, Lee Smith, Richard Bausch, William Hoffman, Allan
Gurganus, Josephine Humphreys, Bobbie Ann Mason, Kaye Gibbons, Barry Hannah, and
Larry Brown. Through their allegiances, these writers advance the argument that where
one hails from is an indispensable consideration when evaluating the production of fiction.

culturally conservative Agrarians are important forerunners of recent literary con-

cerns. In addition to being the first to articulate the New Criticism (with John
Crowe Ransom’s 1938 The World’s Body), the Agrarians enumerated the virtues of
non-acquisitive cultures in ways that anticipate contemporary non-Southern envi-
ronmentalist writers, such as Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, John McPhee, and
Terry Tempest Williams. Despite their goal of producing a Southern monocultural
South, Agrarian documents like Ransom’s “Aesthetics of Regionalism” (1934) were
the first to interrogate the ideological and literary implications of regional form,
exemplifying the warrant that region is socially, rather than geographically,
constructed.
This Agrarian sociology still influences alternative taxonomies of recent Southern
literature. For instance, Matthew Guinn groups contemporary Southern writers
such as Dorothy Allison, Larry Brown, and Harry Crews together as “mythoclasts,”
or blue-collar writers who reject the dominant cultural legacies of Agrarianism,
namely nostalgia for capital “S” Southern aristocracy. These writers delineate the
virtues of “poor white trash,” an endeavor that has arguably been on the Southern
intellectual agenda since W.J. Cash’s popular and controversial history of the South,
The Mind of the South (1941). Contemporary Southern women writers, specifically
Bobbie Ann Mason, articulate what Patricia Yeager calls the “crises of whiteness”
that have resulted from the success of multicultural models of contemporary fiction
(Yeager 2000, 11).
Contexts and Issues. Literary critic Mark McGurl claims that these supposed
crises of whiteness are not limited to Southern women writers, but are a concern
also of male writers. McGurl lists a slate of successful contemporary male writers—
including Wallace Stegner, William Kennedy, and Cormac McCarthy—who “have
staged their careers . . . in the continuing tradition of literary regionalism” (McGurl
2005, 119). Using regional writing as a way of breaking into the literary market is
not a new tactic. As Brodhead reminds us, all major late-nineteenth century
American writers, with the exception of Henry James and Howells, succeeded
776 REGIONAL FICTION

through regional form (viz., Cable, Jewett, Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Mary Wilkins
Freeman, and Abraham Cahan). According to Brodhead, “authors in this [regional]
mode typically had their first efforts published” (Brodhead 1994, 165). Wallace
Stegner has not only sustained a long career via regional protocols, he has also
produced a generation of American writers who capitalize on their regional inflec-
tions. Having founded and run the Stanford University writing workshop, Stegner
shaped the careers of many influential writers, the list of which includes Edward
Abbey, Wendell Berry, Ken Kesey, and Larry McMurtry. Teaching a genre that,
according to McGurl, “has always been cultural pluralist . . . a form of appreciation
of diversity,” Stegner helped young white, male writers attain an “alignment by
analogy” to the market requisite of diversity (McGurl 2005, 119).
Unlike McGurl, who encourages readers to view regional fiction as a cheap trick
used to break into the literary market, Sally Robinson categorizes such writerly
positions as gestures toward “marked” embodiment. This is the writer’s earnest
impulse to register his distinct presence in an era of “identity politics,” which
Robinson and colleague Peggy Phelan call “visibility politics” (Robinson 2000, 2).
No longer the “historical malady of underrepresented populations” alone, invisibil-
ity has become a legitimate problem for white men at the end of the twentieth
century (2). As Susan Faludi explains, the 1990s male resembles the 1950s house-
wife archetype in that “the empty compensations of the ‘feminine mystique’ are
transforming into the empty compensations of the masculine mystique” (Faludi
2000, 40). Faludi’s historical explanation for this phenomenon is basically that in
the late 1960s, in the wake of the civil rights movement and with the rise of women’s
and homosexual liberation, white men began to take the role of victim of historical
processes. Robinson agrees with Faludi, adding that

from the late sixties to the present, dominant masculinity appears to have suffered one
crisis after another, from the urgent complaints of the “silent majority” following the
1968 presidential election, to the men’s liberationists call for rethinking masculinity in
the wake of the women’s movement in the 1970s, to the battles over the cultural
authority of “dead white males” in academia, to the rise of a new men’s movement in
the late 1980s. (Robinson 2000, 5)

McGurl wants to categorize male-authored regional fiction as the most recent

“men’s movement.” Indeed, even Robinson explains each men’s movement in liter-
ary terms, noticing how all assertions of white masculinity employ a “language of
crisis, . . . vocabulary of pain and urgency to dwell on, manage or heal the threats
to a normativity continuously under siege” (5). Through this process of reacting to
the changing tide, white men have become “marked men.” In fact, white men are
becoming so specialized a group, Robinson claims, that the “enduring image of the
disenfranchised white man has become a symbol for the decline of the American
way of life” (2). By acquiring “markings,” in this case place-based determinants, the
masculine reclamation of regionalism, as both McGurl and Robinson conceive of it,
perpetuates the prominence of identity politics by making the survival of difference
a key objective of literary production. Branding the otherwise bland experience of
white men with a retroactive ethnic mark is supposed to equalize the playing field
among diverse authors, as it makes white masculinity into another kind of diversity.
In this sense, male writers have appropriated what Mary Louise Pratt calls the
“rhetorics of diversity and multiculturalism” that have emerged in contemporary
 REGIONAL FICTION 777

America. The “import” of these rhetorics, Pratt warns, is “up for grabs across the
ideological spectrum” (Pratt 1999, 617). Jonathan Franzen, a leading contemporary
fiction writer and occasional arbiter of literary culture, has recently (begrudgingly)
acknowledged this misuse of diversity. Regionalism, Franzen claims, “is still thriving”
in both American literature and on American campuses (Franzen, 2003, 68). Indeed,
some forms of academic fiction seem also to be forms of regional fiction, namely
Jane Smiley’s novel about a fictional midwestern state university Moo (1995).
Naysayers such as Franzen see regional fiction as a genre hungrily “feed[ing] on
specificity” and finding “the manners of a particular region . . . fertile ground” for
exploitive literary enterprises (68). Franzen complains that “it’s fashionable on
college campuses nowadays to say that there is no America anymore, there are only
Americas; that the only things a black lesbian New Yorker and a Southern Baptist
Georgian have in common are the English language and the federal income tax”
(68–69). In short, regionalism has facilitated an almost curricular pathway toward
the emergence of a post-national imagination; or, to employ Franzen’s pessimism,
regional fiction writers and identity politicians alike have become so skilled at
delineating the differences among Americans that the United States is beginning to
look like a small-scale version of an inassimilable world rather than like a unified
national body. The question is whether or not these skills should be used to
dismantle commonality, whether or not America’s national identity should be
debated to the point of being irrevocably splintered. The regional writer ostensibly
has no preference, save to represent the living ground local to her experience.
Reception. The most telling barometer of both the reception and gender inflection
of regional fiction at large is Oprah Winfrey’s agenda-setting book club. Since its
inception in the fall of 1996, Oprah’s Book Club has frequently selected regional
fiction by contemporary women authors. In a sense, the book club is the popular
manifestation of the female-centered regional fiction championed in the scholarship
of Judith Fetterley, Marjorie Pryse, and others. Oprah’s Book Club does some of the
same cultural work as this scholarly endeavor. As Foote argues, the “feminist
retrievals” of the 1970s and 1980s construct an “alternative literary tradition” that
values community over alienation, nature over urban zones, and the values of
“cooperation, communication, and a tradition of feminine knowing” (Foote 2001,
33). Oprah’s Book Club is a similar and more popularly effective engine of public
opinion that values feminine community over masculine alienation. By elevating
regional settings and identities as discrete from society at large, however, Oprah’s
Book Club also threatens to re-inscribe counterproductive cultural divisions.
From its first selection, Jacquelyn Mitchard’s The Deep End of the Ocean (1996),
Oprah’s Book Club has favored regional inflections in its women authors. In The
Deep End of the Ocean, a Wisconsin photographer and housewife loses her son in
a Chicago hotel lobby and is reunited with him nine years later. The novel highlights
a core binary of regional fiction, the tension between dangerous urban centers and
the more innocuous “homeland” of middle-class suburbia. Through the selection of
Jane Hamilton’s Book of Ruth (1989), also in the charter season, Oprah’s Book
Club recovers and republishes the first novel of a writer whose biographical note
highlights the author’s quaint regional credentials by stating that she “lives, works,
and writes in an orchard farmhouse in Wisconsin.” Since then, the book club has
popularized subsequent novels by Hamilton. Other female regional novels selected
for the book club include: Kaye Gibbons’s A Virtuous Woman (1989), Marry
McGarry Morris’s Songs in Ordinary Time (1995), Edwidge Danticat’s Breath,
778 REGIONAL FICTION

Eyes, Memory (1995), Billie Letts’s Where the Heart Is (1995), Joyce Carol Oates’s
We Were the Mulvaneys (1996), Gwyn Hyman Rubio’s Icy Sparks (1998), Melinda
Haynes’s Mother of Pearl (1999), Tawni O’Dell’s Back Roads (2000), Christina
Schwarz’s Drowning Ruth (2000), and Lalita Tademy’s Cane River (2002). In recent
years, book-club selections have shifted away from feminine regionalism, favoring
instead novels by traditionally canonical “literary” figures (such as Tolstoy,
Faulkner, Steinbeck) and contemporary memoirs. This shift appears to be the result
of criticism that Oprah might be devoting disproportionate attention to themes of
feminine travails. Most apparent, however, is the fact that the shift followed a
scandal involving Franzen’s being invited, then disinvited, to the list.
Franzen’s discomfort, more specifically his claim that the book club includes
“enough schmaltzy, one dimensional” novels to give any serious fiction writer
pause, sparked a public debate about the virtues and limitations of popularizing
“literary fiction.” It should have investigated the question of why Oprah found
Franzen’s The Corrections (2001) a novel to shelve alongside feminine regionalism.
Stylistically, Franzen differs much from the novelists named above; he is much less
invested in realist narration or sentimental tones. On a thematic level, however, The
Corrections resembles the very novels Franzen considers “schmaltzy.” Like the work
of Mitchard, Hamilton, Letts, and others on Oprah’s list, Franzen’s novels ques-
tion the heartland values and bourgeois complacencies of red-state America. His
first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), dramatizes municipal corruption in
St. Louis, representing a heartland whose households act as incubators against the
multicultural revolution. Continuing this theme in The Corrections, Franzen delin-
eates the political, cultural, and psychological decline of the Midwest. The differ-
ence between The Corrections and the regionally inflected late-twentieth century
novels that precede him on Oprah’s list is that it does not approach the representa-
tion of place as what W.J. Keith calls “a welcome limitation of possibility” (Keith
1988, 10). Rather than uncover the “numinous landscape beneath a desacralized,
irradiated, and overdeveloped one,” which Michael Kowalewski takes to be the goal
of contemporary regional writers, Franzen acknowledges the transformations that
globalized capital brings to the Midwest (Kowalewski 2003, 18).
This acknowledgment of the effects of progress on regional landscapes might be
the cultural work of twenty-first-century regional fiction. For more than a century,
the genre has exploited its difference from the mainstream, entertaining audiences
whom Foote describes as “preoccupied with national problems regarding the proper
constitution of the citizen” (Foote 2001, 36). Regionalism, according to Foote, has
helped those audiences “negotiate their fear of foreigners alongside a romantic long-
ing for rural countrymen” (36). The recent re-appropriation of local knowledge by
male writers, though it might be reducible to a marketing ploy, indicates that the
regional fiction of tomorrow will be inclusive, not separated into gendered camps,
with women regionalists protecting the quaintness and sanctity of place and men
regionalists exploring the “territories.”
Selected Authors. In fact, gender roles in regional fiction seem to have reversed.
For instance, Bobbie Ann Mason exemplifies the exploitive tendencies of the
Southwest humorist tradition. Her fiction, according to Fred Pfeil, “allows upscale
readers to savor the narrative as a virtual transcription of likeable, down-home
stupidity” (Pfeil 1990, 76). Mason’s very career mimics the economy of late-
nineteenth century regional writers. After leaving the academy in 1979 to become
a full-time writer, Mason has published short stories about the “New South” in
 REGIONAL FICTION 779

The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. These stories, later collected in Shiloh
and Other Stories (1982), feature a “white trash” culture (with strip malls, fast-
food, and bad TV) that the reader is positioned to encounter with condescending
amusement.
Similarly reminiscent of traditionally masculine modes of regional fiction, is the
work of Annie Proulx. In fact, Proulx’s career trajectory moves geographically in the
direction of male-centered regionalism. Her early novels, Postcards (1992) and The
Shipping News (1993), are set in the typically feminine rural New England. Next,
her innovatively structured novel, Accordion Crimes (1996), defies locational
fidelity by following a Sicilian accordion from the “Old World” to a diverse set of
American regions, such as New Orleans, rural Iowa, Maine, and the Mexican
border. Finally, Proulx’s most recent work has been two short story collections set
in rural Wyoming—Close Range (1999) and Bad Dirt (2004). These collections
evoke the spirit of Bret Harte to the extent that they feature “ne’er-do-well
antiheroes unlikely to appear” in the promotional literature for the Wyoming region
she documents (Kowalewski 2003, 11). Furthermore, these collections ignore the
over-storied zones of Wyoming, such as Jackson Hole and Yellowstone, echoing
Harte’s “pioneering” accounts of the seedy side of the frontier landscape while also
highlighting the homoeroticism of the all-male frontier (Close Range includes
“Brokeback Mountain,” the story that Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana adapted
into an Academy Award winning screenplay).
On the other side of both the country and the gender line, New England has
recently become the favorite setting for small-town realists such as Ernest Hebert,
Russell Banks, and Richard Russo. In Dogs of March (1979), Hebert produces the
prototypical self-destructive New England everyman in the character of Howard
Elman, after whom Banks models Wade Whitehouse, antihero of his novel
Affliction (1989). Elman is a former foreman of a textile mill who loses his job when
the mill is sold to a company from the New South. According to Kent Ryden, Elman
is the realistic counterpart to the romanticized “Yankee”; he is “profane and given
to drinking, a factory worker who deliberately refuses to farm the fields that he
owns, an imperfect father and husband” (Ryden 2003, 209). He has no interest in
the physical beauty championed by a previous generation of New England region-
alists. Hebert implies that this lack of appreciation is an essential feature of postin-
dustrial New England. This argument is evident in the novel’s culminating scene,
wherein Elman’s ugly trailer home (a symbol of economic decline) obscures the view
of the idyllic countryside for which the novel’s other main character, an idealistic
midwesterner, had left his life in the Midwest.
Similarly, Banks’s early works confront the allegorical resonance of blue-collar
New England. His story collection, Trailerpark (1981) is a storehouse of America’s
fears about its orphans. In the tradition of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio,
each story couples a culture in decline with the fears that such decline inspires in
the general reader. For instance, the lead story introduces the park through the eyes
of its lenient resident manager. Her passive acceptance of her tenants’ infractions is
challenged when she learns that a tenant is breeding rodents. The guinea pig trailer
becomes a metaphor for overpopulation, an image that corresponds with the fear
of being outnumbered by undesirable others. As the early 1980s popular imagina-
tion is subdued by pathos-driven images of the large-scale poverty and overpopu-
lation on remote continents, Banks’s small-scale parable reminds the reader of
homegrown orphans. The eccentric guinea pig lady, her illogical allegiance to her
780 REGIONAL FICTION

rodents’ natural impulse to reproduce, brings global “epidemics” uncannily close

to the reader.
Banks extends this relationship between the shrinking world and the small town
in his most recent novel, The Darling (2004). The narrator, a middle-aged former
1960s political radical who has made a life out of abandoning anything that takes
on even the slightest resemblance of home, moves from rural New England to war-
torn Monrovia to reunite with a chimpanzee sanctuary she had abandoned during
the Liberian civil war. Banks’s international turn is not anti-regional, but a reinven-
tion of regional storytelling that elevates the resemblance of socially disparaged
regions throughout the world. The resemblance between old New England and the
Third World allows readers to assess the enduring value of local color. Ultimately,
Banks, like his predecessor Wharton, champions the destruction of sentimental
attachment to local color, but not without dramatizing the complexities of mobiliz-
ing the local knowledge of unfamiliar places, such as Monrovia, into fictional
narratives that build a version of world citizenship from the common ground of
local affiliation with postindustrial economic and cultural realities.
Recent popular novels set in the Midwest also evoke postindustrial moods and
landscapes. For example, Whitney Terrell’s The Huntsman (2001) and Michael
Collins’s The Keepers of Truth (2001) cast a kind of third-world shade on the
Midwest. In Terrell’s novel, a Kansas City judge claims that there is “no differ-
ence between [Kansas City] and the most obscure village on the Congo River that
Conrad once went past. . . . And that, then, is the dream, isn’t it? . . . that we are
not, in fact, so obscure as savages, eh? That we have some reason not to kill and
rape?” (Terrell 2001, 341). In short, Terrell represents the “heartland” as a place
to “go native,” a place so inconsequential as to be a no man’s land, or what Tom
Lutz calls the “bloody crossroads” between cultures (Lutz 2004, 12). Collins is
an Irish citizen who has himself recently gone native in the Midwest, writing a
series of murder-plot novels set in the rustbelt detritus of Illinois. Collins strikes
a similar logic of resemblance between the Midwest and the Third World. His
narrator names the obvious opponent to Midwest economic stability—outsourcing—
but for unobvious reasons. His midwestern men have the typical paradox of guilt
and contempt regarding sweatshop labor, which simultaneously shuts down fac-
tories in the Midwest and makes consumer habits less prohibitive. But more
importantly, Collins’s male characters “long for . . . immigrant exhaustion”
(Collins 2001, 173). Therefore, where Terrell exploits the lawless remoteness of
the Midwest, Collins romanticizes the botched camaraderie between its unem-
ployed men and the “women and children . . . of places without names” (173).
These narratives of postindustrial resemblance respond to Amitava Kumar’s call
for fiction that does not simply showcase the diverse cultures that are now avail-
able as a result of economic globalization, but that “forge[s] new connections and
elaborate[s] on . . . new coalitions and emergent subjectivities” (Kumar 2003,
xxiii). Such narratives are setting the agenda for future generations of writers
who think territorially.
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 REGIONAL FICTION 781

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JASON ARTHUR
ROAD FICTION
Definition. The literal road is a structured path that enables someone to transport
or relocate people, vehicles, animals, and other objects to another area. The
metaphorical road enables someone to travel down a structured way in order to find
a personal path, for example, a place in society. The road is also a learning device,
incorporating life experience as education, involving learning about different cul-
tures and traditions of dissimilar people in other places. “Simply put, a road story
shows that experiences away from home—perspectives gained on the road—reveal
and even transform identity. The road dares us to dream of a better life” (Mills
2006, 22).
History. Road fiction began as a genre in the late 1950s and through the 1960s,
starting with the emergence of Jack Kerouac and his highly praised novel On the
Road (1957). Upon publication, On the Road was heralded as an inspirational
work and its creator as the voice of a new generation: the Beat generation. Taking
their name from the pulsating style of jazz and scat, the Beat generation authors
composed prose and poetry that had a distinctive rhythmic pattern. Beat also
reflected the feelings of many people in postwar America: tired, poor, and
abused.
After World War II, travel became more accessible because of automobiles and
newly constructed highways. Most automobile production had been suspended for
the duration of the war, which had left many people without an affordable means of
transportation. With a new sense of mobility, the Beats were able to use this auto-
motive freedom as a source of rebellion—a way to reject the traditional life of a
house, steady job, and family that was labeled the American Dream in 1930s and
1940s. “Through their pursuit of mysteries, Kerouac and Ginsberg supplanted the
road stories they knew from childhood—the tragedies and screwball comedies of the
Depression in which the road story signified hard times and chastity” (Mills 2006,
39). Starving for adventure and excitement, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs,
Allen Ginsberg, and friends Lucien Carr and Neal Cassady set out on the road to put
the university life behind them and to learn what real life could teach them.
Literature of rebellion often includes thoughts on how to represent new ideas—
the presentation of conscious changes in literary style, word use, sentence structure,
 ROAD FICTION 783

and even point of view and narration. Jack Kerouac purposefully wrote to change
the conservative way of thinking in postwar America. Kerouac was not alone in his
new vision. His friend, and sometimes coauthor, Allen Ginsberg wrote poetry in
accordance with the spontaneous beat developed by Kerouac. Criticized for being
indecent and, more often, vulgar, the Beats wrote about America as they saw it in
their travels and from the stories they would share with one another. “Beginning
with Kerouac’s On the Road, however, the Beats initiated an ambitious remapping
that went far beyond the theme of the road, becoming a radical experiment in the
style and syntax of literary expression” (Mills 2006, 40). The Beats loved the
vernacular of other cultures and their changing signifiers, meaning that their slang
terms were constantly being reformatted over the years. They drew from the
subculture in America; they loved the raw sound of jazz and admired the constant
changing of slang words, which fueled their desire to have language become more
feeling than meaning. “The writers’ experiments with language and with the mobil-
ity of meaning have distilled over time into set themes—bebop jazz, sexual freedom,
male bonding and rivalry—or have been reduced to their bare predictable narrative
patterns—escape, rebellion, renewal” (Mills 2006, 36). The Beat authors craved the
slang language being spoken by minorities and the American youth. This new
language was being used in music, in new literature and poems, and most
importantly, on the street. Kerouac utilized the new “talk” in his first versions of On
the Road and Visions of Cody. Kerouac wrote in On the Road, “What’s your road,
man?—holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an
anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?” (1976, 251). Like the
nonsensical lyrics of scat, Kerouac developed the new language of the Beatniks. The
new generation now had a new language with which to rebel against conventional
American society.
Minority authors had a natural, yet not always appreciated, place in literature.
LeRoi Jones found inspiration in Kerouac’s On the Road and decided to write his
own version from a black man’s point of view. Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man
was published in 1952, just five years before Kerouac’s On the Road. Both Ellison
and Jones’s novels represent the African American man in postwar America. Woman
writers, such as Joyce Glassman and Hettie Jones, also took it upon themselves to
write from the female point of view, trying to break the stereotypical mold of
women on the road and at home.
The Beat generation also sought to expose the subculture or counterculture of
American society by openly discussing the growing popularity of drug use. Jack
Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Ken Kesey, and Allen Ginsberg often cited drug use
in their works, intending for their readers to help break the taboo of such contro-
versial subjects. They also wanted to break the taboo concerning minorities, not just
for women and African Americans, but also for Mexicans and Native Americans,
for gays, lesbians, and transgenders, and for the working lower class of Middle
America. “The Beats’ emulation of minority subcultures also helped to reassert
some of the social changes begun by the war, including the demand by minority
cultures for representation and the refusal of non-conformists to be labeled
‘deviant’” (Mills 2006, 38). These Caucasian men of middle-class families discov-
ered a world that was secret and taboo; they encountered racial and sexual diversity,
made friends with drug addicts and the homeless, immersed themselves in the work-
ing class, and deliberately learned what poverty was like. Irony, however, can be
found in Kerouac’s narrative in On the Road, when his main character Sal Paradise,
784 ROAD FICTION

a representation of himself, becomes excited to leave his familiar and safe world
behind for the excitement of the open road but at several times during his trip
becomes frightened of his surroundings and retreats back to familiar ground.
African American writer LeRoi Jones, on the other hand, “finds racial salvation on
Louisiana’s segregated roads” (Mills 53). Kerouac tried to capture life from all
angles but could not truthfully report on all of the aspects of a culture that society
refused to let him experience; in other words, only a black man can tell you what it
is like being a black man.
Landmarks of Road Fiction. One of the aspects of the road, or Beat, authors is
their interconnection with each other. They often gave credit to their friends for the
style, content, and even titles of their own novels and poems. Without this con-
nection, the Beat counterculture would not have held together for almost two
decades, until Kerouac’s death in 1969, and continued through the Beats as indi-
vidual artists into the 1970s through the 1990s. The connection between Jack Ker-
ouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe,
Ken Kesey, LeRoi Jones, Hettie Jones, and Joyce Johnson can be seen through each
other’s stories and novels. All of these writers were somehow connected in life,
inspiring one another and helping each other transform new literary ideas into a
new literary genre.
Jack Kerouac, On The Road (1957) and “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” (1958). Kerouac
is regarded as the forefront master of road fiction, a movement he set out to create,
though he felt uncomfortable with the title of creator.
Like a traditional quest story, On the Road concludes in the same place it
started, in New York City. Alter Ego to Kerouac is Salvatore (Sal) Paradise.
Ironically, his last name is a paradox to what Sal actually finds on the road. He
is interested in humanity and everything that has to do with humanity, including
jazz, women, and his friends and other people who are connected to him. He has
a fascination with his friends Dean Moriarty and Carlo Marx, the landscape,
traveling, and writing about the landscape. Sal, like Kerouac, believes that the
narrator is the writer as the creator; he is the man experiencing the experience.
He tries his best to write everything that happens down in his notebooks, just as
Kerouac himself had done during his own travels that inspired the writing of the
novel. He tries to be a truthful witness, finding words for every sight he sees,
including those around him, who are just as important to the story as the road
itself.
The character Dean Moriarty, inspired by good friend Neal Cassady, is the perfect
travel companion: “With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life
you could call my life on the road . . . Dean is the perfect guy for the road because
he actually was born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake
City in 1926, in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles” (Kerouac 1976, 1). Dean, a
free spirit, is imprisoned; “only a guy who’s spent five years in jail can go to such
maniacal helpless extremes . . . Prison is where you promise yourself the right to
live” (236). In marriage, too, Dean finds himself trapped. He is three times married,
twice divorced. Prison is representative of any situation in which one feels trapped,
whether school, family, or marriage. The restrictions of the war left many
Americans needing freedom—personal freedom, educational freedom, freedom of
movement, and the right to be themselves in an unconfined society. Kerouac
believed that one of the ways to learn about the world, which affected his writing
and his life in general, was to travel the roads of the American countryside, learning
 ROAD FICTION 785

as he went, exploring the landscapes, and experiencing a life different from that to
which he had been accustomed.
Sal finds the difference between the education one can receive at school and the
education that one can receive on the road, living the experience of what life has to
offer him. He also finds disappointment on the road, not the glamour or glory of
traveling. He befriends people of the lower classes and the subcultures, and he is
intrigued by them and fears them and their society. Coming from a middle-class
family, Sal feels uncomfortable being poor and often retreats back into the world to
which he is accustomed, a place that is familiar and safe. Kerouac knew that the
road did not have all of the answers. He discovered on his own travels that not every
trip was going to be magical or perfect; “the road is life” (Mills 2006, 22). Kerouac
experienced, firsthand, the “starving Sidewalks and sickbeds” (1976, 8).
Kerouac set out to change the style of writing and to create a movement in terms
of identity. He believed that writing should not be altered or edited once initially
written. He thought writing was visceral and natural, which was similar to the
position of the surrealist poets of France in the 1940s. They too believed in a
constant, undisturbed line of thought called the stream of Consciousness. This con-
cept entitled the writer to continuously write without stopping, creating a unified
and blended narrative. Kerouac writes in his essay “Essentials of Spontaneous
Prose” (1958), “Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching
language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea words, blowing
on subject of image” (72). This type of writing is considered a kind of literary
liberation and challenges the writer to keep focused on the one thought instead of
changing from one idea to another.
Kerouac’s first draft of On the Road was written in three weeks in 1951 on a con-
tinuous scroll of Teletype paper. Publishers, however, would not publish his novel
because of the controversial content and the unusual experimental writing style.
Kerouac edited his manuscript several times before it was finally published six years
later in 1957. An unedited version of On the Road was published as Visions of
Cody which was part of one pre-publication version of On the Road, in 1972.
Kerouac’s infatuation with jazz can be seen in the narrative of Visions of Cody more
than in On the Road.

The Mad Road, lonely, leading around the bend into the openings of space towards
the horizon Wasatch snows promised is in the vision of the west, spine heights at the
world’s end, coast of blue Pacific starry night—nobone half-banana moons sloping
in the tangled night sky, the torments of great formations in the mist, the huddled
invisible insect in the car racing onward, illuminate.—The raw cut, the drag,
the butte, the star, the draw, the sunflower in the grass—orangeubuttered west lands
of Arcadia, forlorn sands of the isolate earth, dewy exposures to infinity in black
space, home of the rattlesnake and the gopher—the level of the world, low and flat.
(1972, 391)

Kerouac used his spontaneous prose to try to capture the landscape in words,
rather than focusing on story plot and character traits. He wanted to paint a picture
of the landscape by using words. After publication of On the Road, Kerouac had
the credibility of a successful writer and had the freedom to return to his sponta-
neous prose style and nonconformist attitude, as can be seen in moderation in The
Dharma Bums (1958) and The Subterraneans (1958).
786 ROAD FICTION

Allen Ginsberg, “Howl” (1954) and Selected Poems: 1947–1995 (1996). Ginsberg met
Jack Kerouac during his first year at Columbia University, along with other writers
such as William S. Burroughs and John Clellon Holmes. Ginsberg and Kerouac
became good friends, and Ginsberg even makes an appearance in Kerouac’s novel
On the Road, as the character Carlo Marx. Being a poet, Ginsberg did not write
about his road experiences in the same way as Kerouac, though he admired his
spontaneous prose style and spent years applying it to his composition of poetry.
He also drew inspiration from French surrealist poet André Breton. Ginsberg was
also a part of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and often would perform his poetry
on the road with them, “keeping apace with their psychedelic experiments” (Mills
2006, 92).
Ginsberg became good friends with William S. Burroughs after their introduction
by mutual friends Lucien Carr and David Kammerer. After Burroughs was arrested
for conspiracy to deliver marijuana on the basis of letters found by police that he
had written to Ginsberg, he moved his family to Mexico. Ginsberg still kept in touch
with Burroughs and encouraged him to continue his writing even after the death of
his common-law wife, Joan. Ginsberg traveled with Jack Kerouac to Tangiers,
where Burroughs had gone in order to write. Burroughs compiled several manu-
scripts and sought his friends’ advice on how to edit them. Their trip resulted in
Burroughs’s masterpiece Naked Lunch.
Kerouac collaborated with Ginsberg on a film version of the poem “Pull My
Daisy,” written by Ginsberg, Kerouac, and friend Neal Cassady. The poem had been
written in the Beat style scat that Kerouac had employed in his earlier versions of
On the Road. The film was also titled Pull My Daisy and was to be made into an
art film version of On the Road. Photographer Robert Frank was chosen to direct
the movie. “Frank’s cinematography in this film—grainy black and white imaged,
titled horizons, atmospheric and spontaneous shots—helped lay the aesthetic
groundwork for the New American film” (Mills 2006, 61).
Ginsberg became famous for his insight into the American culture and his
desire not only to change it but to make it more aware of its subcultures and
emerging counterculture. He also attacks the mass-media images such as movies,
radio, and television in his poem “I Am a Victim of Telephone” (Selected Poems
1996, 141). His dream about changing American society with the innocence of
youth as a vehicle became his life passion, and most critics would say that he
achieved it.
One of his best-known poems is “Howl,” a biographical look at the Beat poets’
destructive lifestyle. The Beats’ fascination with the subculture of America brought
them to less-than-desirable sections of strange cities where they learned the lives of
drug addicts and prostitutes. Accused of being immoral and obscene, Ginsberg’s
poem came under attack from the public, and it was therefore banned in many
bookstores across the country. An obscenity trial boosted its popularity, and the
Beat generation became famous as champions against censorship, fighting for First
Amendment rights. Ginsberg also claimed he wanted to talk about taboo subjects in
order to start a conversation, bringing the taboo to light in the public eye and there-
fore helping to bring about change.
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959). Burroughs started writing in 1945, result-
ing in a collaboration with Jack Kerouac about the murder of David Kammerer by
a mutual friend, Lucien Carr, called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks.
Allen Ginsberg encouraged Burroughs to continue writing, but it was not until the
 ROAD FICTION 787

shooting death of his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer Adams, in Mexico in 1951—
for which Burroughs was arrested and convicted absentia of homicide—that he
claims he began to really write. In the introduction to Queer (1985), he wrote, “The
death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneu-
vered me in to a life long struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my
way out” (xxiii). Before Joan died, while in Mexico with Joan and their three
children, he had written two novels: Queer and Junkie. (Queer would not published
until 1985, and Junkie would be published in 1953.) Burroughs and Ginsberg’s
collection The Yage Letters, which was published in 1963, includes correspondence
letters between Burroughs and Ginsberg from when Burroughs was in South
America. In 1953, because there was no restriction on the use or sale of drugs,
Burroughs traveled to Morocco and stayed in a small apartment in Tangiers. Over
the next four years, with the help of readily available drugs, he composed a first
draft of what would become his most influential novel, Naked Lunch. In 1957
Ginsberg and Kerouac traveled to Tangiers to help Burroughs edit his manuscript
and shape it into the version that was finally published in 1959. Parts of the Naked
Lunch manuscript also resulted in three other novels: The Soft Machine (1961), The
Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964). All have the same style of
writing as Naked Lunch, meaning that while composing the manuscripts,
Burroughs used creative techniques such as a nonlinear style, cutting sentences apart
and splicing them with other phrases to create an altered sense of reality like the real
reality he experienced during his drug-induced writing sessions: “fumbling through
faded tape at the pick up frontier, a languid grey area of hiatus miasmic yawns and
gaping goof holes” (1959, 63). Burroughs would confuse readers further by editing
the pre-published proofs and sending them to the publisher, ironically, in no partic-
ular order, resulting in the final unintentional chapter splicing that can be found in
the final publication of the novel.
Like Kerouac, Ginsberg, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson, Burroughs
enjoyed the ambiguity of his writings, most often created by accident, but his work
is still considered as natural writing. The creativity of the nonlinear form was a
direct representation of Burroughs and how he lived his life. “The Beats flocked to
subcultures that manipulated the precarious nature of language to create new and
unexpected meanings” (Mills 2006, 37). Also like Ginsberg, Burroughs’s master-
piece went on trial for obscenity soon after its publication. California was the first
state to accuse the novel of being obscene, but in 1965 all charges were dropped. In
1966, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts declared that it was not obscene and
considered the novel an important contribution to American literature. Several
excerpts from the Boston trial are included in the 1991 edition of Naked Lunch,
published by Grove Press.

The freeing of the artist in literary presentation is as much a precondition of the desirable
creating of adequate opinion on public matters as is the freeing of social inquiry. Artists
have always been the real purveyors of news, for it is not the outward happening in itself
is news, but the kindling by it of emotion, perception, and appreciation. (xxxiv)

Allen Ginsberg was one of many people to testify for the novel, having experienced
the same accusation in 1956 for his poem “Howl.”
Burroughs remained friends with Ginsberg throughout his life, supporting him
especially during the late 1970s when Burroughs’s son William S. Burroughs Jr.
788 ROAD FICTION

(Billy) became ill from liver cirrhosis. In 1974 Ginsberg found Burroughs a job
teaching creative writing at the City College of New York. Burroughs lasted a
semester, claiming that he was uninspired by his students “The teaching gig was a
lesson in never again. You were giving out all this energy and nothing was coming
back” (Morgan 1988, 477).
Burroughs became a cult figure in American popular culture in the 1980s and
1990s. He had cameos in many films, notably a small role as a junkie priest in Gus
Van Sant’s film Drugstore Cowboy (1989). In 1997 he made appearances in the
video for U2’s song “Last Night on Earth.” He also contributed a spoken word
performance on a track by Nirvana called “The Priest They Called Him.”
Burroughs recorded the song “Just One Fix” with the 1990s alternative band
Ministry and made an appearance in the video version of the song. He also made an
appearance on the television show Saturday Night Live in 1981 (Internet Movie
Database).
Context and Issues. Since the 1960s, other authors have written about the road
and thematically the experiences of the traveler, the adventure and the culture that
they encounter, and the culture that they create. Following are some of those
books: Erika Lopez’s Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Thing
(1997), Joyce Johnson’s Come and Join the Dance (1961), LeRoi Jones’s The
System of Dante’s Hell (1965), Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), Vladimir
Nabokov’s The Annotated Lolita (1970), Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (1974), Thomas Pynchon’s The
Crying of Lot 49 (1965), Tom Robbins’s Another Roadside Attraction (1971) and
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976), Mona Simpson’s Anywhere But Here (1986),
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Don DeLillo’s America (1971), Barbara
Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees (1988) and Pigs in Heaven (1993), Bobbie Ann
Mason’s In Country (1985), Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto
Fistfight in Heaven (1993), and Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel Lost at Sea
(2005). Music and film have also drawn upon the road experience. Bands of the
1960s included the Grateful Dead and Jim Morrison and The Doors, and musicians
of the 1970s included Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seager. Road movies have
included Easy Rider (1969), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Alice Doesn’t Live Here
Anymore (1974), Mad Max (1979), Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1982),
Thelma and Louise (1991), My Own Private Idaho (1991), Dumb and Dumber
(1994), Road Trip (2000), and Sideways (2004), and there have been television
shows such as Route 66 in the 1960s and the commodification of the road in the
reality show Road Rules in the 1990s.
Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005). Thompson is best known for his gonzo style of
journalism. Gonzo is a term he invented to describe this free-flowing, naturalistic
writing style, similar to that of Kerouac’s spontaneous prose: “one of the basic tenets
of gonzo: no revision. Gonzo was to be first-draft, written-at-the-moment . . . a
genuinely spontaneous feel” (McKeen 1991, 49). Thompson started his style when
deadlines began to expire; instead of sending his editors polished and reworked
articles, he would send them his notes, often written by hand from his point of
view as representative of the finished article. The style became widely popular.
Thompson had always believed that writing should be natural and spontaneous,
putting the author himself into the middle of the action. He wrote many of his
articles and novels in first person, using his own experiences and encounters as his
storylines.
 ROAD FICTION 789

His first full-length published book, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga
(1967), introduced Thompson as a risk-taker. Like many of the road authors,
Thompson became immersed with the subculture of America. The one thing that
made his writing different, however, was that Thompson felt that the deeper one
submerges oneself into the culture, the better one can write about it, as he demon-
strates with his nonfiction piece Hell’s Angels, based on his travels with the infa-
mous biker gang in late 1965. Because the group was known to dislike outsiders,
Thompson presented his assignment for The Nation, open and honestly, to the then-
leader of the gang, Ralph “Sonny” Barger, with the help of Birney Jarvis, a former
Hell’s Angels member and police-beat reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Thompson built a reputation with the gang, ultimately earning their trust.
Thompson shared the life of a Hell’s Angel for over a year, but then several of the
members with whom Thompson was not familiar, who suspected him of profiting
from his writings about the gang, demanded a part of Thompson’s compensation.
Thompson tried to explain to them that although he would be paid for the articles,
it was not more than his regular pay. Unconvinced, they gave Thompson a “stomp-
ing,” as they termed it, meaning that the bikers gave Thompson a severe and brutal
beating. His involvement with the gang dwindled, but in letters to friends later in
his life, Thompson always held Ralph “Sonny” Barger in high regard and felt no ill
will toward him, despite the incident involving his gang members.
Much of American society feared the Hell’s Angels because of their disregard for
others. Their attitude toward outsiders, the law, and society in general earned them
the reputation of being a part of a degenerate society. The outlaw gang gained a
quick reputation when they were hired to act as security for a concert for the Rolling
Stones in California, which ended in the beating death of one of the spectators by
several of the bikers-turned-guards. The opening page of Hell’s Angels presents the
reader with Thompson’s witnessed description of the elusive gang:

The Menace is loose again, the Hell’s Angels, the hundred-carat headline, running fast
and loud on the early morning freeway, low in the saddle, nobody smiles, jamming
crazy through traffic and ninety miles an hour down the center stripe, missing by
inches . . . tense for the action, long hair in the wind, beards and bandanas flapping,
earrings, armpits, chain whips, swastikas and stripped-down Harleys flashing chrome
as traffic on 101 moves over, nervous, to let the formation pass like a burst of dirty
thunder. (1996, 3).

Eliot Fremont-Smith (1967), a book reviewer for the New York Times, called
Hell’s Angels an “angry, knowledgeable, fascinating and excitedly written book”
that details the gang “not so much as dropouts from society but as total misfits, or
unfits—emotionally, intellectually and educationally unfit to achieve the rewards,
such as they are, that the contemporary social order offers.” These “misfits,” such
as they were regarded by American culture as a whole, were a part of the subculture
that only being on the road could uncover. They existed because of the road, the
inspiration of mobility on the road, rebelling against the social norm and doing so
in an extreme, but effective manner.
Thompson’s best-known novel, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971),
originated from a road trip he took with Oscar Zeta Acosta, a popular Mexican
American attorney and activist for human rights in Los Angeles. Thompson and
Acosta traveled to Las Vegas using Thompson’s assignment for Sports Illustrated as
790 ROAD FICTION

a reason. Throughout the novel, Acosta is referred to as “my attorney,” whereas

Thompson appears as his alter ego, Raoul Duke. “‘I want you to know that we’re
on our way to Las Vegas to find the American Dream.’ I smiled. ‘That’s why we
rented this car. It was the only way to do it. Can you grasp that?’” (Thompson
1996, 6). Their search for “the American Dream” becomes futile as their penchant
for drugs deters them from their path. “The trunk of the car looked like a mobile
police narcotics lab” (4). The book, considered a cult classic, became even more
popular after the release of the film version in 1998, starring Johnny Depp and
Benicio del Toro.
Thompson was always looking for the American dream in his writings, but some-
how it always eluded him in his writings and his personal life. The American dream
that Thompson was looking for did not exist. Thompson died in 2005 from a self-
inflicted gunshot wound to the head in his home in Colorado.
Tom Wolfe (1931–). His journalistic-style novel The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
detailed the adventures of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters in the late 1960s. Wolfe’s
novel became an anthem for the emerging hippie culture of Southern California,
with its promotion of drug use, music, and rebellion against conventional American
society and the ensuing Vietnam War.
Wolfe, like Kerouac, experimented with new literary techniques such as free asso-
ciation (spontaneous prose), repetition, and overuse of punctuation in order to
express the drug-induced hysteria of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters,
accounted in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. This style of writing, Wolfe called
“New Journalism.” “[New Journalism] has revolutionized several genres of writing.
Thanks to Wolfe, not Kesey, strangers understand that to be ‘on the bus’ means to
have awareness” (Mills 2006, 88–89). Along with E.W. Johnson, Wolfe edited an
anthology of journalism titled The New Journalism. Unlike Hunter S. Thompson’s
gonzo journalism, The New Journalism claims that the reader will get a better
understanding of the narrative if the text is written in third person but recounted
from firsthand author experience.

What really characterizes the New Journalism, at least as it is represented in this book,
is first, a certain elusiveness on the part of the writer. The more he puts himself for-
ward, hopping about inside his own story, nattily dressed, bearded, drunk, eccentric,
acting up, the less we seem to know about where he stands, because he has made it his
job to hide his opinions, or to hint at them only indirectly, or perhaps even to have
none. (Wood 1973)

Wolfe itemized the happenings aboard Kesey’s “Furthur” bus, keeping detailed
accounts of the stories developed by the larger-than-life characters.
Ken Kesey (1935–2001). Kesey is best known for his novel One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest (1962). The novel was an instant success. The film version was
released in 1975 and won five Academy Awards. To coincide with the countercul-
ture of the late 1960s, Kesey hosted a series of parties called “Acid Tests” that
included psychedelic themes such as the music of the Grateful Dead, visits from
members of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, black lights and florescent paint, and
hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD. The 1960s icon Timothy Leary, who popularized
the term psychedelic, was among the guests at Kesey’s parties. Out of these parties
came the group Kesey put together known as the Merry Pranksters, who traveled
across the county in a repainted school bus named Furthur. These journeys are
 ROAD FICTION 791

described in detail in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968),
utilizing Kerouac’s spontaneous prose method. Other members of the Merry
Pranksters included Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and Timothy Leary. The Merry
Pranksters are also mentioned briefly in Hunter S. Thompson’s book Hell’s Angels:
A Strange and Terrible Saga (1967).
Kesey replaced Kerouac as the voice of the new generation.

On the Road was . . . stance-changing. We all tried to imitate it. Yet, even then, no
one considered it the work of a Truly Great Writer. I recall my initial interpretation of
the phenomenon, that, yeah, it was a pretty groovy book, but not because this guy
Ker-oh-wak was such hot potatoes; that what it was actually was one of those little
serendipitous accidents of fate, that’s all. (Kesey 1983, 60)

After the release of his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, in 1964, Kesey
decided to stop writing and focus on the film that he was making about his
friends: The Merry Pranksters Search for the Kool Place. “For Kesey and his
collaborators, the road story needed retelling, not because the road had lost its
meaning but because the road novel had. The Pranksters wanted to enlighten
others, not only through LSD and their ‘acid tests’ but also through America’s
primary mechanism of altered consciousness—the movies” (Mills 2006, 93).
Kesey believed that his movie would be the ultimate road trip, looking for
“something wilder and weirder out on the road” (Wolfe 1981, 90), but Kesey
failed to finish it. The unfinished acid road trip movie, however, was upstaged by
the failure of another acid road trip movie that was released: Magical Mystery
Tour, produced by the Beatles in 1967.
Kesey continued to write essays, short stories, and plays throughout his life. He
and the Merry Pranksters also made appearances well into the 1990s, especially at
Phish concerts, a band that is said to resemble the Grateful Dead. Kesey died on
November 10, 2001, at his home in Pleasant Hill, Oregon.
LeRoi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka) (1934–). The Beat icons Jack Kerouac and Allen
Ginsberg were Jones’s early influences, especially with their love for jazz in common.
Jones’s wife, Hettie Cohen, became a successful Beat author with her memoir about
her life with Jones titled How I Became Hettie Jones (1996). His decision to marry
a white woman shocked some of the literary community, but it was the first step in
Jones’s rebellion against the racism raging in the country at the time. The publica-
tion of his novel The System of Dante’s Hell, in 1965, propelled him to Beat fame.
Mostly inspired by Kerouac’s novel On the Road, Jones decided to write his own
road novel from an African American point of view. Jones was raised in a middle-
class family; however, he was also raised in the middle of America’s turmoil with
racism.

Selby’s hoodlums, Rechy’s homosexuals, Burroughs’ addicts, Kerouac’s mobile young

voyeurs, my own Negroes, are literally not included in the mainstream of American
life . . . They are Americans no character in a John Updike novel would be happy to
meet, but they nonetheless Americans, formed out of the conspicuously tragic evolu-
tion of modern American life. (Jones 1963, xiv)

Jones dedicated much of his writing to trying to break the stereotype of black
writing; he wrote from his perspective but kept it culturally neutral, not to hide the
792 ROAD FICTION

fact that he was African American, but to blend into literature the black writer’s
point of view, without making it racially biased. “His belief at the time [was] that a
writer’s creative individuality—the writer’s ‘voice’—becomes his only voice” (Mills
2006, 52). Jones admired Kerouac’s use of style and language. He felt that Kerouac
was able to capture creativity in his writing voice with the use of his spontaneous
prose. Similar to Kerouac’s character Sal in On the Road, Jones’s character Roi, in
The System of Dante’s Hell, sets off on the road to discover the real America and to
shun the society in which he was raised. Unlike Sal, Roi does not feel displaced in
the African American communities. Whereas Sal feels “scared” (Kerouac 1976,
157), Roi rediscovers his lost past and comes to terms with his ethnicity. “If we can
bring back on ourselves, the absolute pain our people must have felt when they
came onto this shore, we are more ourselves again, and can begin to put history
back on our menu” (Jones 1965, 153). Like his character and alter ego Roi, Jones
left his wife Hettie to return to the black community. “Hettie, ‘the white wife,’ was
a liability for a young Afro-American male who felt ethnically illegitimate and who
wanted now to be black, which tragically for Jones meant being seen as black by
both blacks and whites . . . [He became] distanced from his bohemian life and closer
to a ‘deeper black’ identity” (Watts 2001, 141). Later in his life, Jones wrote many
critical essays about jazz, blues, and other black-influenced music. He became a
professor of African American studies in 1984. In 1989 he won an American Book
Award and a Langston Hughes Award for his collection of works. He was named
poet laureate of New Jersey in 2002 but was forced to relinquish the title because
of the controversy surrounding his poem about 9/11, “Somebody Blew Up
America,” in 2003.
Women in Writing Road Fiction. Unlike many African American male writers,
women authors were often overlooked in the 1950s and 1960s, overshadowed by
their male counterparts and dismissed as not having original thoughts among the
Beat generation authors. The male authors, such as Jack Kerouac, tried to give
women a voice of their own in their works but failed to do so; instead they stereo-
typed women into roles of caretakers, prostitutes, and wives who were partly
responsible for their husbands’ misery in marriage. Hélène Cixous states in her 1975
essay “Sorties” that women authors need to develop a separation from male writ-
ers, opposing themselves from their points of view. Janet Wolff wrote in her 1993
essay “On the Road Again: Metaphors of Travel in Cultural Criticism” that she
believes women are following in the footsteps of their male counterparts, utilizing
the same language in their own writings, causing the female authors to become mar-
ginalized. “Just as women accede to theory, [male] theorists take to the road . . .
[and] the already-gendered language of mobility marginalizes women who want to
participate in cultural criticism” (234). She feels that it is necessary for women to
develop their own metaphors so that they can be recognized as women writers,
instead of following in the same linguistic footsteps of male authors, such as
Kerouac, who had popularized the “road” as a male-dominated domain in literature.
Joyce Johnson wrote her own version of On the Road, titled Come and Join the
Dance, in 1961. It was not until the end of the 1990s that she gained fame with the
play version of her memoir Minor Characters, detailing her life as a woman writer
in the 1960s and as Jack Kerouac’s girlfriend and representing every other female
character that had become a supporting role in the novels written by the popular
male authors of that time. As noted previously, Hettie Jones, wife of LeRoi Jones,
also made a name for herself later in life with her memoir about her life with Jones
 ROAD FICTION 793

and the racism they experienced being a mixed-race couple in the 1960s. Other
female writers include Diana di Prima and Carolyn Cassady.
Hélène Cixous expressed belief that “another thinking as yet not thinkable will
transform the functioning of all society” (1988, 289). Erika Lopez explores new
ways of thinking, living, and traveling, finding her own freedom and adventure in
her novel Flaming Iguanas: An All Girl Road Novel Thing (1997), in which she not
only explores the life of the woman on the road but also explores the lesbian
perspective of life on the road. “When you’re on the road, you just let your head go.
You start thinking about your life, and it’s just kind of inevitable. You also lighten
up on yourself, because you’re not next to other people, so you don’t really have
anyone to gauge yourself by. You feel quite normal and very much OK about your
thinking and who you are . . . You’re just there, thinking” (qtd. in May 1997).
Erika Lopez grew up on the road, on welfare and in the middle of the impover-
ished society Kerouac set out to find. Lopez was raised to speak her mind, and
because her mother practiced Quakerism, Lopez was also raised to not be sub-
servient to anyone, a lesson the women of the 1950s and 1960s did not have the
luxury to practice.
Joyce Johnson (nee Glassman) (1935–). Joyce Johnson claims that she was “deter-
mined . . . to write about sex frankly, unusual for a young women at the time” (qtd.
in Tallmer 2003). Sexual freedom—women’s freedom—was another theme of road
fiction. Johnson’s memoir Minor Characters won her a National Book Critics Circle
Award. The memoir was also turned into a play, titled Door Wide Open, in 2003.
Based on her life with Jack Kerouac and the rest of the Beat authors and poets,

Minor Characters is first and foremost Joyce’s own story, showing us what it was like
to be a young woman coming of age in the tumultuous and transitional fifties, as the
youth of postwar America chafed against the constraints of a buttoned-up conservative
society. (Knight 1998, 167)

Her novel Come and Join the Dance (1961) tells the story of a young woman,
Susan, who yearns to be free of the confines of university life. She wants to become
a rebel. Susan daydreams during her exams and excitedly waits for her time to leave
her life of comfort and constraint and travel to Paris. She feels that once she is on
her own, things will happen for her. Similar to other Beat authors and poets,
Glassman believed that a university education is good, but life experience is better.
Susan is given the voice of a strong woman, ready for the road and the experiences
that come with it, but she stays true to herself, realizing that no man is able to give
her what she cannot give to herself. “She remembered she had a train to catch,
suitcases to pick up four blocks away, and a door to close for the last time. She was
slipping away from Peter, just as he was slipping away from her. This was the end
of something that had been completed” (171). She had no regrets about leaving him
to pursue her travels in Paris. Female characters are often given a minor role in
novels authored by men, with stereotypical personalities, but written from a
woman’s perspective, Susan is given an independent personality, a radical change for
female characters in the 1950s and 1960s.
As Kerouac’s lover from 1957 to 1958, Glassman witnessed his shot to stardom
after the publication of On the Road. The Beats became famous in American
literature, but Glassman still struggled to have her voice heard over the many
talented men who were finally getting recognized for their visions. Like Hettie Jones,
794 ROAD FICTION

Glassman found it difficult to conform to society’s preconceived notions of the role

of the woman in 1950s and 1960s America. Some of Glassman’s fame came from
her connections, rather than her talent as a writer. This made Glassman even more
determined to make a name for herself based on her own merit.
Hettie Jones (nee Cohen) (1934–). Hettie Jones had to overcome not only the fact that
she was a white Jewish woman but also that she was married to a black man and
was raising two daughters of mixed race during the 1960s. Being the wife of author
and poet LeRoi Jones, Hettie had to fight to make a name for herself in a predom-
inantly male-oriented literary world. “She discusses the manner in which her life as
a woman and particularly as a bohemian wife and mother restricted her opportuni-
ties to edit, write, and otherwise engage her mind in ways available to her husband,
LeRoi” (Watts 2001, 44). Brenda Knight wrote about Hettie in her collection
Women of the Beat Generation (1998) as being a woman who, from childhood,
knew she did not belong in conventional society, in the traditional role of a Jewish
woman on Long Island during the 1950s. “Hettie Cohen made a choice to leave
behind comfortable Long Island and the fifties’ ideal of a cookie-cutter marriage
when she went to a women’s college in Virginia to study dramas. There she explored
the creative arts, discovered jazz, and realized there was no turning back” (360).
Thus, Hettie Jones entered into the nonconformist lifestyle of the Beat generation.
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ANNE BAHRINGER
ROMANCE NOVELS
Definition. The term romance novel is used to categorize a type of fiction focused
on stories of successful love. In academic discussions, the word romance may be
used to characterize a story of a triumphant or tragic relationship, but in the retail
book industry, it is specifically understood that a book marketed as a romance novel
will conclude on a happy or hopeful note. Naturally, there are numerous novels
classified in other genres (including erotic literature, historical fiction, and chick lit)
in which romantic relationships play a prominent role in the plot. Whether a book
is regarded specifically as a romance novel or as mainstream fiction depends in part
on authorial intent and publisher specialty: the genre attracts legions of devoted
readers because it promises reliable entertainment in the form of likable protago-
nists and accessible plots. Many readers become attached to specific authors, series,
or imprints, while others become connoisseurs of a particular subgenre. In recent
years, there has been an upswing in the promotion titles across multiple genres, such
that publications such as Romantic Times regularly feature reviews of writers whose
books are primarily marketed, shelved, and nominated for awards in other genres
such as mystery novels, science fiction, and fantasy literature. These writers
include Janet Evanovich (b. 1943), Lois McMaster Bujold (b. 1949), Elizabeth Bear
(b. 1971), and Naomi Novik (b. 1973).
Be they manuals for writers, promotional brochures aimed at library and book-
store patrons, or Web sites and blogs with reviews and forums for multiple types
of participants, many guides to romantic fiction emphasize the diversity of the field
by outlining its major subgenres. One primary form of distinction is temporal—
that is, the grouping of novels into “historical,” “contemporary,” and “futuristic.”
The Romance Writers of America (RWA), a professional network for both
published and aspiring authors, currently lists the end of World War II (1945) as
the dividing point between “historical” and “contemporary,” but Estrada and
Gallagher (1999) set the cutoff year as 1899, “a time distant enough to be consid-
ered ‘historical’ by the masses” (16), whereas the “Browse by Time Period” feature
on the Historical Romance Writers Web site includes listings for the Korean War
(1950–1953) and the Vietnam War (1954–1975). There is general agreement,
 ROMANCE NOVELS 797

however, that the most popular setting for historicals is Regency-era Great Britain.
While the future George IV’s reign as Prince Regent ran specifically from 1811 to
1820, narratives set in the decades immediately preceding or following that span of
time may also be perceived as Regency style if their characterizations or plots
originate from events such as the Napoleonic Wars (for instance, veterans of
Waterloo reentering society, contending with profiteers, or awakening the interest of
bereaved, would-be spinsters). A further distinction is often drawn between
traditional Regency romances, which are often characterized as light comedies, and
Regency-era historicals, which are generally viewed as longer and more sexualized
in content (Beau Monde 2005).
Another primary form of classification within the genre is that of format. There
are two major formats: category romances, relatively short novels (approximately
50,000–70,000 words) that are packaged as part of a routinely issued series by their
publishers (often 2–6 volumes per month), and single-issue or stand-alone titles
(generally between 70,000 and 120,000 words), which are promoted similarly to
general fiction titles (and indeed sometimes referred to as mainstream books by
some romance industry professionals).
It is important to note that “series” has two separate definitions in this context.
In relation to category romances, the term refers to a group of books published
under a specific publisher’s imprint. The books are written by different authors and
are not directly related to each other except in overall theme and tone (for instance,
books in Harlequin’s American Romance line are promoted as “fast-paced, heart-
warming stories about the pursuit of love, marriage and family in America today,”
while those in the Steeple Hill Love Inspired line depict “Christian characters facing
the many challenges of life and love in today’s world,” and those for Kimanu TRU
offer younger African American readers stories about “real-life situations they
encounter without being preachy or naive” (eHarlequin.com). In relation to single-
issue romances, the term “series” refers to a group of books created by a single
author with shared characters (such as protagonists who belong to the same family)
and a storyline that is extended from one book to the next. The stories of a partic-
ularly engaging clan (such as Nora Roberts’s MacGregors) may build into a saga
that spans multiple volumes and generations.
A common career trajectory among romance writers is to debut as a category
writer and then progress to single-issue work as one gains experience and
confidence. In both formats, the majority of authors see their work printed as mass-
market paperbacks; hardcover publication is generally reserved for new volumes of
especially popular storylines (as well as reissues or omnibus editions of those series’
older volumes). For example, Stephanie Laurens’s Bar Cynster series commenced
with six stand-alone novels about a group of brothers and cousins; these were issued
between 1998 and 2001, all as mass-market titles. As the series’ fan base solidified,
the series expanded into additional stories about characters who had appeared in
secondary roles in the earlier novels; three of these were also issued only in mass-
market format (2001–2002), but all the others (more than a half dozen to date)
have first appeared as hardcover volumes, the series’ devotees having proved them-
selves eager enough for each new installment to pay the additional expense (often
listed at three times the mass-market price) rather than wait for the mass-market
edition (in Laurens’s case, customarily issued 10 months after the hardcover). At the
same time, Laurens’s Bastion Club storyline formally debuted in 2003 as a mass-
market series and has remained in that format.
798 ROMANCE NOVELS

The Bastion Club series by Laurens demonstrates another narrative strategy that
established authors sometimes employ—that of “borrowing” characters or events
from their other titles or series for cameos in their newer novels. Laurens’s Captain
Jack’s Woman (1997), originally published as a true stand-alone story, is now listed
on her Web site (stephanielaurens.com) as a prequel to the Bastion Club series, and
characters from the Cynster clan sometimes show up in the ballrooms of Bastion
Club narratives. When crafted properly, such scenes reward an author’s longtime
fans with the pleasure of an in-joke without requiring newer readers to be familiar
with books outside of the series.
A third type of subgenre label signals the story’s style to would-be readers. Exam-
ples of such labels include classic, ethnic, inspirational, paranormal, romantic
comedy, sensual, suspense, and time travel. Both the specific labels and their scope
vary among publishers, reviewers, and writing instructors, but it is common practice
to adopt or develop a system of such labels when discussing the genre as a whole.
Coding books by subgenre enables prospective consumers to sift efficiently through
the dozens (and sometimes hundreds) of blurbs in a typical review publication or
marketing campaign, allowing them to ascertain and assess the titles most likely to
match their tastes more quickly.
Authors who specialize in one subgenre and then choose to write in a radically
different style sometimes adopt separate names for each type of story in order to
manage reader expectations. As Jayne Ann Krentz puts it, “This way readers always
know which of my three worlds they will be entering when they pick up one of my
books”; as a specialist in suspense novels, Krentz uses her married name for
contemporary stories, the name Amanda Quick for historicals, and Jayne Castle for
futuristic and paranormal tales (Krentz “Biography”). On the “Frequently Asked
Questions” page of her Web site, Sabrina Jeffries cites similar reasons for writing as
Deborah Martin and Deborah Nicholas. Authors also may elect to publish their
novels under pseudonyms because of other marketing considerations (such as the
fear of prolific output being equated with poor quality), contractual obligations
(some names are restricted to specific publishers), or personal concerns (Gorlinsky);
if an author’s name becomes a powerhouse brand, where readers habitually seek out
that author’s work regardless of subgenre, multiple pseudonyms may become an
open secret among booksellers and fans (Little and Hayden 2003, 376) and later
formally publicized (292–93).
Selected Authors. The most influential classic in the history of romance novels is
Pride and Prejudice (1813) by Jane Austen (1775–1817). In addition to remaining
popular in its own right (placing third in All About Romance’s “Top 100
Romances” poll in 2007 and consistently ranked among the top 25 titles in earlier
incarnations of the list), it has inspired more than 60 sequels and adaptations in
various media (www.pemberley.com). Austen is credited as the main literary model
for Georgette Heyer (1902–1974), who in turn is considered the pioneer of Regency
stories as a subgenre of historical romance (Regis 2003, 125–126). Allusions to
Pride and Prejudice also permeate chick-lit bestseller Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996)
by Helen Fielding (b. 1958), and it has been dubbed “the original chick-lit master-
piece” (Swendson 2005). (Some writers view chick lit as a subgenre of romance,
while others treat it as a distinctly separate niche.)
Among nineteenth-century novels, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) also has
demonstrated enduring appeal and influence (All About Romance 2007; Falk 1999,
217), as has her sister Emily Bronte’s classic Wuthering Heights (1847), with its
 ROMANCE NOVELS 799

iconic brooding hero, Heathcliff. Among twentieth-century authors, Barbara

Cartland (1901–2000) and Kathleen E. Woodiwiss (1939–2007) were two of the
romance genre’s giants. Cartland composed over 700 novels between the 1920s and
her death; habitually dressed in pink and prone to voicing conservative opinions,
she catered to the traditional perception of romance novels as chaste, ultra-feminine
fare. Woodiwiss was far less prolific, producing just 15 novels across 35 years, but
she is revered by many modern writers for revolutionizing the genre; when it first
appeared in 1972, The Flame and the Flower electrified readers with the scope of its
plot (significantly broader than category romances, which had dominated romance
publishing up to that point), the feistiness of its heroine, and the explicit details
incorporated into its love scenes. The success of Woodiwiss’s novels and other
stand-alone titles such as Rosemary Rogers’s Sweet Savage Love (1974) and Bertrice
Small’s The Kadin (1978) encouraged publishers to view long historical romances as
commercially viable (Radway 1991, 33–34).
By the advent of the twenty-first century, steamy novels had become very much
the norm—enough to invite considerable criticism from both within and outside the
field. For example, in one discussion of trends, author Dorothy Garlock (b. 1942)
complained that classic storytelling was “being replaced by raunchy erotica
published as romance,” a lament actively echoed and debated in All About
Romance (AAR) forums between 1997 and 2000 (AAR; Authors on the Web 2003;
Gracen 1999). When asked about changes in the genre since The Flame and the
Flower, Woodiwiss suggested that explicit sex had become “overdone” (Wehr and
Weiss 2000).
At the same time, interest never wholly waned in milder novels. The Christian
romances of Grace Livingston Hill (1865–1947), popular during her lifetime,
were regularly reissued during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Janette Oke
(b. 1935) has been lauded as the author whose Love Comes Softly series
(1979–1989) proved the viability of Christian fiction to modern publishers. In 1999
AAR began “One Foot on the Floor,” a periodically updated recommendations list
of romances featuring “kisses only” or “subtle sensuality” (www.likesbooks.
com/onefoot.html). In 2007 the president of the RWA, Sherry Lewis, observed that
both inspirational romance and erotic romance were “two of the hottest subgenres”
in the field (Robbins 2007).
Trends and Themes. Writing mavens frequently advise would-be novelists to
eschew chasing trends, in part because regular romance readers tend to be very well-
versed in their subgenres (and thus quick to detect and dismiss phonies) and in part
because books created merely to capitalize on fads may fail to reach retail buyers
before the market becomes saturated and interest fades. Moreover, because the
perception of trends is often based on local, anecdotal observation rather than
global statistical analysis, experts may disagree on whether a pattern is truly in
effect: for example, interest in historical romances is commonly thought to have
peaked during the 1990s, but some industry professionals contend that the audience
for that subgenre never materially decreased. Rather, it may have become less
prominent as the markets for other subgenres grew. Nonetheless, some analysts
believe historicals fell out of fashion during the early 2000s, returning to favor in
2007 (MacGillivray 2008; Robbins 2007; St. Claire 2007). Other possible trends
that have attracted notice in recent years include significant turnover among
romance editors (resulting in younger staff and shifting perspectives), the popular-
ity of strong, athletic heroines in other media (such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer),
800 ROMANCE NOVELS

and the success of hero archetypes beyond the “alpha male” of stereotypical bodice-
rippers, such as in Vicki Lewis Thompson’s Nerd series (Wheless 2007; Vinyard
2004, 93–98).
Some observers believe that the conventional boundaries between romance and
other genres have become increasingly flexible, allowing for subgenres such as
paranormal romances, romantic mysteries, and time-travel fantasies to flourish.
Publishers have become more aware of the sophisticated and diverse tastes of present-
day romance readers and have refined their submission and purchasing standards
accordingly. For instance, the writing guidelines for the Harlequin Romance imprint
stress that “stories must have a global outlook that is mindful of the different
lifestyle choices of our readers worldwide” (eHarlequin.com). Another editorial
department offers tips on what to avoid among its subgenre specifications—for
example, writers of time-travel romances should “beware of philosophizing about
the meaning of time, and how the past affects the present. No time machines,
please” (Dorchester Publishing 2004).
With Internet access becoming commonplace, both author- and fan-based Web
sites and blogs have proliferated. In addition to serving as marketing tools, many
sites host forums or encourage extended comment threads that permit authors and
readers of romance novels to champion underappreciated texts, commiserate with
each other on misconceptions about romance fans, debate appropriate responses to
plagiarism scandals, kibbitz about experiences such as attending conventions or
chapter meetings, and partake of other interactive opportunities. There is a wide
range of tone among these sites, ranging from the demure Romance Reader
(www.theromancereader.com) to the raucous and blunt Smart Bitches Who Love
Trashy Books (www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com).
In addition to online communities and local book clubs, romance readers also
congregate at regional and national gatherings. These have included the yearly
Booklovers extravaganza organized by Romantic Times since 1982 and Celebrate
Romance! (also known as “CR”), an annual conference founded by romance fans
in 1998. For writers, agents, and publishers, the RWA’s national and chapter-based
conferences provide opportunities to network, attend workshops, and promote their
manuscripts or books.
Throughout the 1990s and most of the 2000s, the viability of electronic books
(frequently referred to as “e-books”) was repeatedly explored by both entrepre-
neurial and established publishers. The format has not displaced print editions of
books to any appreciable degree, but as the devices and interfaces for downloading
and perusing e-texts became more affordable and user-friendly, the distribution of
romance novels through Web-based vendors received more attention from review-
ers and consumers, and the RWA established a special-interest chapter to support
authors of electronic and small press titles. The e-book industry has been praised for
making available romance novels deemed too non-commercial or risky for print
publishers, particularly those by authors who push depictions of erotic adventures,
homosexual or polysexual relationships, or paranormal phenomena beyond the
perceived limits of conventional taste. Some authors have also earned royalties via
the e-publication of older books that had lapsed out of print.
Although romance novels have often been disparaged as “trashy” throwaway
stories with short shelf lives, a number of titles in the genre have demonstrated
substantial staying power, remaining in print and appearing on top 100 lists (AAR
2007) more than a decade after their first appearance in publishers’ catalogs.
 ROMANCE NOVELS 801

Modern classics include Lord of Scoundrels (1995) by Loretta Chase (b. 1949),
Outlander (1991) by Diana Gabaldon (b. 1952), The Bride (1989) by Julie
Garwood (b. 1946), MacKenzie’s Mountain (1989) by Linda Howard (b. 1950),
Dreaming of You (1994) by Lisa Kleypas (b. 1964), and Paradise (1991) by Judith
McNaught (b. 1950).
Context, Issues, and Reception. The lack of respect accorded to romance fiction
by both professional critics and the general public has long been a source of frus-
tration to its fans. Although romance fiction now accounts for over 25 percent of
all books sold each year (RWA 2008), its books are frequently condemned as for-
mulaic, trite, and unrealistic and its authors accused of perpetrating fairy-tale myths
or soft-core pornography. As with works of science fiction, fantasy, and mystery, the
genre classification frequently applied to romance novels is simultaneously an asset
and a liability: while the designation helps publicists, booksellers, and librarians
identify and promote new titles to readers likely to enjoy them, it can also result in
the “ghettoization” of such books, where their separation from mainstream literary
fiction encourages academic and “serious” readers to dismiss them as irrelevant
fluff. Women seen perusing romances in public still run the risk of being automati-
cally judged as intellectually lightweight or unfulfilled in their relationships; in
response to charges that the genre celebrates passive protagonists and patriarchal
values, defenders of romantic fiction have repeatedly pointed out the strength, inde-
pendence, and resourcefulness of its heroines (Allen 2007; Bly 2005; Michaels 2007, 6;
Regis 2003, 9–16). Another criticism leveled at romance authors has been that they
graft overly modern characterizations or concerns onto historical scenarios, render-
ing their stories inherently anachronistic; the degree to which works of fiction
should be expected to conform to real-life history and culture (as well as the exact
nature of said history and culture) is a perennial source of contention among
romance readers. The expectations among readers regarding historical verisimili-
tude vary wildly, and a detail that strikes one reader as an insignificant error may
cause another to abandon the story in disgust (and, in the opposite direction, a
reader who expresses concern about an item she considers inaccurate may be viewed
either as helpfully informative or as unnecessarily nitpicky, depending on the author
in question).
A recurring source of debate and tension within the field has been its treatment of
non-Caucasian characters. As in the wider world, there has been much heat and lit-
tle consensus over questions such as if and how an author’s description of a Native
American or Middle Eastern hero may reflect or perpetuate racist stereotypes, where
best to display African American romance novels (in romance? in African American
literature? in general fiction?), why Asian American protagonists are rare, if political
correctness and historical accuracy are mutually exclusive, if the casts of contem-
porary romance novels need to become more multicultural, and other concerns.
Issues such as the romance industry’s perceived role in propagating ageist and
heterosexist beliefs have also prompted discussion and analysis.
That said, positive attention to romantic fiction also has increased in recent years,
with libraries investing more thought and resources into building collections that
offer their patrons the best of the genre (Bouricius 2000; Wyatt et al. 2008). In 2008
the American Library Association’s Reading List Council initiated its annual list of
the Best Adult Genre Fiction, and it has become common for major public library
systems to include romance recommendations on their Web sites (Atlanta-Fulton,
Nashville, New York, and Seattle among those doing so).
802 ROMANCE NOVELS

ROMANCE AWARDS
The RWA bestows a number of awards each year, including ones that recognize booksellers,
librarians, and other professionals whose support of the genre has been exceptional.The top
awards for novels are the RITAs (named after the association’s first president, Rita Clay
Estrada), which are currently awarded in 12 categories. Authors who win three or more
RITAs in the same category are inducted into RWA’s Hall of Fame.The members of the Hall
of Fame include Jo Beverley (b. 1947), Justine Dare, Jennifer Greene, Kathleen Korbel, Susan
Elizabeth Phillips, Francine Rivers (b. 1947), Nora Roberts, LaVyrle Spencer (b. 1944), Jodi
Thomas, and Cheryl Zach (b. 1947).Winners of the RWA’s Lifetime Achievement Award have
included Estrada, Howard, Krentz, Phillips, Roberts, and Woodiwiss, as well as Heather
Graham, Robin Lee Hatcher, Maggie Osborne, and others. The most recent RITA award
winners for the Best Traditional Romance category have been Claiming His Family by Barbara
Hannay (2007); Princess of Convenience by Marion Lennox (2006); Christmas Eve Marriage by
Jessica Hart (2005); Her Royal Baby by Marion Lennox (2004); The Christmas Basket by Debbie
Macomber (2003); Quinn’s Complete Seduction by Sandra Steffen (2002); The Best Man & The
Bridesmaid by Liz Fielding (2001); and Annie, Get Your Groom by Kristin Gabriel (2000).

Bibliography
All About Romance. All About Romance: The Back Fence for Lovers of Romance Novels.
http://www.likesbooks.com
———. “Top 100 Romances, November 2007.” 2007. http://www.likesbooks.com/top
1002007results.html
Allen, Louise. “My Heroines Are Independent. This Is Not Patriarchal Propaganda.”
Guardian Unlimited December 12, 2007. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentis-
free/2007/dec/12/comment.books
Authors on the Web. “Romance Author Roundtable.” 2003. Retrieved January 2, 2008,
from http://www.authorsontheweb.com/features/0302-romance/romance-q11.asp
Beau Monde. “About Us.” 2005. Retrieved January 21, 2008, from http://thebeaumonde.
com/about
Bly, Mary. “A Fine Romance.” New York Times 12 February 2005.
Bouricius, Ann. The Romance Readers’ Advisory: The Librarian’s Guide to Love in the
Stacks. Chicago: American Library Association, 2000.
Chase, Loretta. Lord of Scoundrels. New York: Avon, 1995.
Dorchester Publishing. 2004. “Submission Guidelines.” Retrieved January 24, 2008, from
http://www.dorchesterpub.com/Dorch/SubmissionGuidlines.cfm
eHARLEQUIN.com. “Writing Guidelines.” Retrieved January 23, 2008.
Estrada, Rita Clay, and Rita Gallagher. You Can Write a Romance. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer’s
Digest, 1999.
Falk, Kathryn. How to Write a Romance for the New Markets and Get It Published!
Columbus, MS: Genesis, 1999.
Gabaldon, Diana. Outlander. New York: Delacorte, 1991.
Garwood, Julie. The Bride. New York: Pocket Books, 1989.
Gorlinsky, Rachel. “Sensual Romance—What’s in a Name?” Retrieved January 23, 2008,
from http://sensualromance.writerspace.com/WIAN_Aliases.html
Gracen, Julia. “Too Darn Hot: Romance Fans Clash Over a New Breed of Explicit, Kinky
Love Story.” Salon.com 5 October 1999.
Historical Romance Writers. http://historicalromancewriters.com. Accessed January 20,
2008.
Howard, Linda. MacKenzie’s Mountain. New York: Mira, 2000.
“Jane Austen Novels and Adaptations.” 2008. http://www.pemberley.com/
 ROMANCE NOVELS 803

Jeffries, Sabrina. “About Sabrina—Frequently Asked Questions.” Retrieved January 24,

2008, from http://www.sabrinajeffries.com/faqs.php
Kleypas, Lisa. Dreaming of You. New York: Avon, 1994.
Krentz, Jayne Ann. Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the
Appeal of the Romance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1992.
———. “Biography.” Retrieved January 23, 2008, from http://jayneannkrentz.com/
biography.html
Little, Denise, and Laura Hayden. The Official Nora Roberts Companion. New York:
Berkley, 2003.
MacGillivray, Deborah. “Historical Romances? The Phoenix of Romance Novels.” Romance
Writers Report, January 2008.
McNaught, Judith. Paradise. New York: Pocket Books, 1991.
Michaels, Leigh. On Writing Romance: How to Craft a Novel That Sells. Cincinnati, Ohio:
Writer’s Digest, 2007.
Nashville Public Library. 2006. “Books, Movies & Music: Romance.” Retrieved January 19,
2008, from http://www.library.nashville.org/bmm/bmm_books_romance.asp
Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, With
a New Introduction by the Author. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1991.
Originally published 1984.
Regis, Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania, 2003.
Robbins, Sarah. “Textually Promiscuous: Romance Readers Definitely Read Around.”
Publishers Weekly 19 November 2007.
Romance Writers of America. http://www.rwanational.org. Accessed January 26, 2008.
Schoenberger, Chana R. “E-Bodice-Ripper.” Forbes 18 July 2007.
St. Claire, Roxane. RWA Conference Blog 12 July 2007. http://www.rwanational.
org/cs/rwa_annual_conference/rwa_conference_blog
Swendson, Shanna. “The Original Chick-Lit Masterpiece.” In Flirting with Pride and
Prejudice: Fresh Perspectives on the Original Chick-Lit Masterpiece. Jennifer Crusie
with Glenn Yeffreth, eds. Dallas: BenBella, 2005, 63–69.
Vinyard, Rebecca. The Romance Writer’s Handbook: How to Write Romantic Fiction & Get
It Published. Waukesha, WI: Writer Books/Kalmbach, 2004.
Wehr, Isolde, and Angela Weiss. “Interview with Kathleen E. Woodiwiss.” 2000. Retrieved
January 23, 2008, from http://kwoodiwiss.forumwise.com/archive/o_t/t_39/
an_interview_with_kathleen.html
Wheless, Karen. “CR2007 Write Up.” Celebrate Romance Conference Blog.
http://www.crspring.com/cr2004-write-up
Woodiwiss, Kathleen. The Flame and the Flower. New York: Avon, 1972.
Wyatt, Neal, Georgine Olson, Kristin Ramsdell, Joyce Saricks, and Lynne Welch. “Core
Collections in Genre Studies: Romance Fiction 101.” RUSQ—Reference & User
Services Quarterly (January 2008). Available at http://www.rusq.org

Further Reading
All About Romance: The Back Fence for Lovers of Romance Novels, http://www.
likesbooks.com; Dear Author: Romance Book Reviews, Author Reviews, and Commentary,
http://dearauthor.com; Regis, Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania, 2003.
PEGGY LIN DUTHIE
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S

SCIENCE FICTION
Definition. Despite science fiction’s familiarity and prominence in contemporary
culture, no definition of it commands universal scholarly assent. Certain formal
elements, however, do feature in most definitions. First, science fiction is marked by
novelty—or what Suvin (1979, ix, 3) calls “the novum”—essentially a violation of,
or break with, some aspect of historical experience. At the same time, it displays
rationality, that is, a degree of deference to the worldview and the established theo-
retical paradigms of modern science. Finally, it contains realism, in the sense of
literalness and verisimilitude: the events depicted are to be understood as actually
happening, even if they have a further, metaphorical level of meaning. Hence,
science fiction’s presentation of novel phenomena such as innovations in technology
is constrained to some extent by its characteristic rationality and realism.
Many works read and discussed as science fiction fit somewhat uncomfortably in
a narrative genre that is characteristically focused on technological innovations or
their social impact. These works include (1) alternate (or more correctly, alternative)
history stories—such as Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), which
describes a world where the Axis powers won World War II; (2) stories that describe
contact with alien civilizations, even if set in the present and not involving any

SCI-FI CHARACTERISTICS
Science fiction is a genre or mode of narrative characterized by novelty, rationality, and realism.
It typically depicts future developments in social organization, science, or technology, and its
main thematic focus is on the effects of technological change, whether on individuals or soci-
eties. However, this is a somewhat idealized description. Science fiction is extremely varied,
and it has been shaped by historical contingencies and commercial realities that have not
favored conformity to any abstract ideal.
806 SCIENCE FICTION

technological innovations by human beings; (3) stories that describe certain kinds of
natural disasters, such as asteroid impacts; (4) postholocaust narratives about the
aftermath of a global war; and (5) prehistoric fiction, which speculates about
humanity’s distant past, as in Jean M. Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980).
Nonetheless, these kinds of narrative do combine novelty, rationality, and realism.
Their composition and intelligibility depend, moreover, on modern scientific knowl-
edge or a general sense of human societies’ historical contingency. For example,
nuclear holocaust stories would be impossible but for the scientific advances that led
to the development of nuclear weapons. Stories about asteroid impacts, alien
contact, or mankind’s distant past were not readily imaginable until science began
to describe the vastness of space and depth of time, and to theorize systematically
about human origins. Such stories are made possible by a modern, scientific image
of the world and of humanity’s limited place within it.
A more troubling set of issues arises when science fiction is compared to the modern
fantasy genre. Fantasy is notable for its depiction of gods, demons, and other super-
natural beings; rationally inexplicable events; or the effective operation of magic in
some form. Its plots and character types tend to draw on those found in myth, legend,
fairy tale, and romance. Yet, though initially seemingly paradoxical, science fiction and
fantasy share an extensively overlapping audience and often exert a similar appeal. To
resolve the paradox, we must acknowledge that the contrast is not absolute, that there
are certain similarities, as well as differences, between these genres.
Importantly, the work of modern fantasy writers, such as J.R.R. Tolkien or David
Eddings, much resembles science fiction in its detailed portrayal of imaginary
societies, and sometimes of entire worlds. Moreover, fantasy narratives can display
a kind of rationality: the operation of magical forces and methods may be internally
consistent within the narrative, not unlike the body of self-consistent natural laws
postulated by science. There is a sense that problems are being solved within a set
of “rules.” Conversely, science fiction’s deference to real science can be quite
arbitrary, and the fictional science it describes can appear magical. As a result, much
of what is marketed as science fiction could be understood as a kind of fantasy with
technological trappings.
Science fiction and modern fantasy are not simply equivalent, and science fiction
is not merely a variety of fantasy. However, where the emphasis is on extraordinary
adventures in exotic societies, magic and superscience are approximately equivalent.
Upon reflection, then, it is understandable that many narratives blend science fiction
and fantasy elements, that adventure-oriented science fiction and fantasy are
particularly likely to blur into each other, and that the two genres have overlapping
audience appeal.
As a further complication, a rich body of literary narrative has responded in one
way or another to social, economic, scientific, and technological change. Much of
this work bears no resemblance to science fiction, but some of it includes obvious
science fiction elements, such as the depiction of future social and technological
developments. However, it may also display features—for example, a concern for
literary style and relatively subtle characterization—that are atypical of what can be
called “genre science fiction,” that is, narratives produced for a specific, identifiable
science fiction market. Historically, most literary science fiction narratives are anti-
utopian (or dystopian) in nature.
Much of Thomas Pynchon’s fiction—such as Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and
Against The Day (2006)—resembles science fiction’s New Wave and cyberpunk
 SCIENCE FICTION 807

styles. Indeed, Gravity’s Rainbow was a major influence on the cyberpunk writers
of the 1980s, such as William Gibson. Another influence was William S. Burroughs’s
bizarre oeuvre—notably The Naked Lunch (1959), The Soft Machine (1961), The
Ticket that Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1966)—which depicts mind con-
trol, dystopian forms of social oppression, alien invasion, and transmutations to and
from human form.
Popular fiction that emphasizes danger and adventure may not be marketed as
science fiction, even when it displays science fiction elements. This is especially true
of techno-thrillers by such authors as Michael Crichton. Crichton’s Jurassic Park
(1990), Prey (2002), and Next (2006), for example, could easily have been badged
as science fiction novels if that had been commercially justified. It is often observed
(e.g., by Clute, 1999) that the authors and publishers of works with broad appeal
may be reluctant to categorize them as science fiction. The practical reality is that
the commercial classification of novels as science fiction or as something else (e.g.,
as “literary” novels or as thrillers) often depends on marketing considerations as
much as formal narrative elements.
History. Human societies have always experienced periods of tumultuous change
from such causes as war, famine, and plague. However, as Robert Scholes has
argued, the idea of future societies with radically different social and economic
organization was probably unthinkable before the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, while the transformation of societies by irreversible technological change
became apparent only in the nineteenth (Scholes, 1975, 14–15). For the first time,
it became possible to think of a future greatly different from the present as a result
of continuing advances in human knowledge and technology.
This breakthrough in conceptualizing the future offered new opportunities for
storytelling. Some works written in the early phases of the Scientific Revolution can
be seen as prototypes for science fiction; examples include Francis Bacon’s The New
Atlantis (1629), a utopian fragment that glorifies science and technology. However,
the modern genre finds more immediate roots in the fiction of Mary Shelley, Edgar
Allan Poe, Jules Verne, Edward Bellamy, H.G. Wells, and other literary giants of the
Romantic and Victorian ages. During the nineteenth century, imaginative writers
increasingly speculated about technological devices not yet invented. They
conceived of diverse possible futures, and used imagined places and times as exotic
locations for tales of adventure and heroism.
Brian Aldiss (1986, 18) identifies Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern
Prometheus (1818) as the first true science fiction novel, and it does indeed have a
respectable claim to the title. It depicts Victor Frankenstein’s use of advanced,
scientifically based technology to create something entirely new in the world: a
repulsive and powerful artificial man. Some of Poe’s stories from the 1830s and
1840s also have science fiction elements. However, a substantial body of work that
resembles modern science fiction first emerged around 1860, particularly with the
stories and novels of Jules Verne.
Verne is best known for novels in which science and technology provide the means
to accomplish fantastic journeys, as in Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), Journey to
the Centre of the Earth (1863), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), and 20,000
Leagues under the Sea (1870). H.G. Wells’s career as a writer of what were then
known as “scientific romances” commenced a few decades later, with a group of
short stories that led up to his hugely influential novella The Time Machine (1895)
and his first full-length “scientific romance,” The Island of Dr Moreau (1896). Wells
808 SCIENCE FICTION

was more didactic and socially concerned, while Verne was more focused on
adventure and had an engineer’s sense of realism—the plausible depiction of techno-
logical novelties.
Though they are the best remembered proto–science fiction authors today, Verne
and Wells were certainly not the only writers of their era producing work with
elements similar to those of modern science fiction. During the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, such elements appeared in many utopias, lost-race novels,
and stories of near-future geopolitical disruption. The latter described wars, inva-
sions, and racial conflict, but not necessarily any new technologies or methods of
warfare.
Nineteenth-century adventure novels, such as H. Rider Haggard’s She: A History
of Adventure (1886), frequently took place in remote, exotic, and often mildly erotic
locations. The use of interplanetary settings merely took this a step further. The first
novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars (1917)—actually first published
in All-Story Magazine in 1912—epitomized this trend. It defined one pole of early
science fiction, emphasizing action and adventure in an alien setting. Burroughs
revitalized the lost-race motif, and he was the major influence in science fiction until
the mid-1930s, with many imitators writing similar stories set in faraway places
(Clareson, 1990, 11–12). Elements of this style can be found up to the present day.
However, genre science fiction is a newer phenomenon, dating from the 1920s
and 1930s, when the genre’s direction was shaped by two great American editors:
Luxembourg-born Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell. Though Gernsback
looked for original stories that emphasized futurism, science, and gadgetry, the
immediate context for his contribution was the popular success of exotic adventure
stories such as those by Burroughs. He first showed this sort of interest with the
magazine Modern Electrics (1908) and the novel Ralph 124C41+ (1911), but he did
not devote an entire magazine to genre science fiction until the launch of Amazing
Stories in April 1926 (Clareson, 1990, 14–15). Amazing Stories is usually consid-
ered the first specialized science fiction magazine, though Gernsback originally
coined the term scientifiction. He adopted the usage science fiction for the first issue
of Science Wonder Stories in 1929, and it became the established term in 1938,
when it was incorporated into the title of Campbell’s Astounding Science-Fiction
(Clareson, 1990, 16).
During the Gernsback era, Verne and Wells came to be thought of as science
fiction writers. Their work was often reprinted in genre magazines, alongside new
stories that tended to applaud the advance of science and technology. Also during
this first era of modern science fiction, the subgenre now known as space opera
became an established form. This type of narrative involves action on a galactic
scale, or beyond, rather than mere adventure on the local planets of our solar
system. Space opera often includes space voyages that are analogous to Earth-bound
naval fleets, and it may involve such elements as contact with alien species, war on
a colossal scale, descriptions of immensely destructive weapons, and other kinds of
superscience. The Skylark of Space (1928), by E.E. “Doc” Smith, was the novel that
really established the form, and it has been argued that Gernsback’s principal con-
tribution to the new genre was the discovery of Smith’s exuberant talent (Clareson,
1990, 17).
Science fiction’s so-called golden age began in the late 1930s and lasted until the
end of the 1940s. In 1937, John W. Campbell began to assume editorial duties at
 SCIENCE FICTION 809

THE FUTURE HISTORY OF HUMANITY

During the golden age of science fiction, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and others developed the
concept of a future history of humanity, first formalized by Heinlein but expanded into a
complex narrative framework by Asimov. By the end of the 1940s, science fiction had created
an intertextual mythos involving the development and fluctuations of future galactic empires
(Clareson, 1990, 31–33). This may be viewed as a generic megatext, providing a network of
familiar, easily evoked icons that are well understood by dedicated readers (compare
Broderick, 1995, 57–63).

the magazine Astounding Stories of Super-Science (to use its complete title), and in
1938, he officially became the magazine’s editor, changing its name to Astounding
Science-Fiction (it is now called Analog Science Fiction and Fact). By 1939, the
magazine and the science fiction genre as a whole were being steered by Campbell’s
strong personality. During this period, he published the first short stories of
celebrated British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke and established a group of
regular contributors who became the major figures in genre science fiction. These
included Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and A.E. Van Vogt.
Isaac Asimov’s original Foundation trilogy became one of the great canonical
texts of twentieth-century science fiction. The three volumes appeared in sequence
during the early 1950s, and they were a repackaging of a series of stories about the
Seldon Plan that had originally been published from 1942 to 1950. Thousands
of years in the future, Hari Seldon, founder of the new science of psychohistory,
establishes two foundations at the opposite ends of the galaxy. Their mission is to
reduce the 30,000-year interregnum of chaos between the predicted fall of the
Galactic Empire and the rise of a new empire. Seldon has predicted that this long
interregnum can be reduced to only a thousand years, saving untold chaos and
suffering.
The stories that comprise the first volume, Foundation (1951), trace the early
history of the First Foundation and establish Asimov’s narrative strategy for the
series. At each crisis point for the Foundation, the key to a successful outcome is an
insight into the situation that is reached by the Foundation’s leaders (and that was
achieved in advance by Seldon). Nevertheless, this insight is withheld from the
reader until the end of each respective story. Asimov adopts a similar approach in
the stories contained in Foundation and Empire (1952) and Second Foundation
(1953), the trilogy’s second and third volumes, respectively. All three volumes
display Asimov’s frequent technique of setting his characters to outguess each
other’s understandings. Those who most fully grasp the underlying situation are
successful.
Three decades later, Asimov returned to this universe with Foundation’s Edge
(1982), which jumps 120 years into the future from the events depicted at the end
of Second Foundation. Unlike its predecessors, but like other works in the Founda-
tion mythos that followed it, Foundation’s Edge was conceived from the beginning
as a full-length novel: it contains far more descriptive detail and appears designed
to exceed the earlier stories/volumes in the complexity of its puzzles.
Asimov’s other great achievement during the golden age was the development of
one of science fiction’s most celebrated and recurrent icons: the mechanical human
810 SCIENCE FICTION

being, or robot. He devised his famous three laws of robotics to govern his robots’
behavior. These laws required them to preserve human life, obey human commands,
and preserve themselves, in that order of priority. The possible loopholes inherent
in the three laws enabled Asimov to write many ingenious puzzle stories, including
two robot detective novels in the mid-1950s, The Caves of Steel (1954) and The
Naked Sun (1957).
In Foundation’s Edge, Asimov began to unite his Foundation mythos with his
robot stories, and he continued this program in further novels published in the
1980s and 1990s: The Robots of Dawn (1983), Robots and Empire (1985), Foun-
dation and Earth (1986), Prelude to Foundation (1988), and Forward the Founda-
tion (1993, after Asimov’s death the previous year). Of all these, Foundation and
Earth takes the story furthest into the future. These novels supplement the original
trilogy with far more background and breadth, and portray the hero, Hari Seldon,
at various stages of his life, whether as a swashbuckling young man or in his later
years. After Asimov’s death, his estate authorized the publication of three more
novels along similar lines—the Second Foundation Trilogy—Foundation’s Fear, by
Gregory Benford (1997), Foundation and Chaos, by Greg Bear (1998), and Foun-
dation’s Triumph, by David Brin (1999).
Robert A. Heinlein turned to writing in his early thirties and soon became one of
the key figures of the golden age of science fiction. His first novel to appear in book
form, Rocket Ship Galileo, was published in 1947. It was followed by a string of
highly successful novels—the Heinlein juveniles—aimed at what would now be
called the young adult market. Like Asimov, he flourished as a leading American
science fiction writer for many years after the golden age.
By the late 1940s, science fiction was changing. The atomic bomb and the abrupt
surrender of Japan turned the public’s attention to science—and hence to science
fiction. And some science fiction narratives began to appear in the slick magazines
and in book form. At about the same time, new specialized magazines challenged
Campbell’s hegemony. In 1949, The Magazine of Fantasy appeared, edited by
Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas, which became The Magazine of Fantasy
and Science Fiction with the publication of its second issue in 1950 (Clareson,
1990, 49). This magazine introduced greater variety, with stories that stepped
outside the technocratic vision favored by Gernsback and Campbell. In 1950, the
first issue of Galaxy Science Fiction appeared. Book publication became increasingly
important, and as described by Clareson (1990, 40–49), 1952 was a pivotal year:
Donald A. Wollheim became science fiction editor at Ace Books; Betty and Ian
Ballantine founded Ballantine Books; and Clifford Simak’s City was published. The
latter was a key work in shifting away from an adulation of technology to critique of
modern urban-industrial society. In the same year, Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, the
dystopian Player Piano, was published.
Such writers as Clifford D. Simak, Kurt Vonnegut, Damon Knight, James Blish,
Alfred Bester, Ray Bradbury (who leaned more to fantasy and horror fiction),
Frederick Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, Theodore Sturgeon, and Walter M. Miller
experimented with form, style, and tone, some of their work presaging the experi-
ments of the 1960s New Wave. The Demolished Man (1953) and The Stars My
Destination (1957), Bester’s most successful works, show “obsessed men driven to,
if not beyond the borders of sanity” (Clareson, 1990, 71). Pohl and Kornbluth were
published in Galaxy Science Fiction during the 1950s. Their satirical Gravy Train
was serialized in 1952, and in the following year it was revised in book form as
 SCIENCE FICTION 811

The Space Merchants. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) is a high point in
science fiction’s treatment of the nuclear holocaust theme. After a nuclear war, the
remnants of human civilization eventually progress to a new Renaissance and
beyond—leading, however, to another nuclear war.
During the 1950s, Vonnegut and Bradbury, in particular, brought science fiction
to a wider audience than it had previously enjoyed (Clareson, 1990, 49–50). Ray
Bradbury is probably best known for The Martian Chronicles (1950) and Fahrenheit
451 (1953). The Martian Chronicles portrays the settlement of Mars by humans,
and as in much science fiction of the time, the threat of nuclear war underlies its
storyline. The first explorers from Earth wipe out the ancient Martian civilization
by accident: humans infect the Martians with chickenpox, which is a deadly disease
to the latter. A frontier culture develops on Mars, until the long feared nuclear war
takes place on Earth in 2005 and Mars is deserted. Fahrenheit 451 is a satirical
depiction of an anti-intellectual future America, where houses are fireproof and
“firemen” burn books.
In many ways, though, as Clareson points out (1990, 115–116), the 1950s
belonged to Heinlein with the publication and success of the Heinlein juveniles and
the reprinting of much of his work from the magazines. The 1960s saw further
experimentation, and Heinlein continued to adapt. In 1961, he published his most
famed novel of all, Stranger in a Strange Land, which celebrates sex and the body
(the characters seem to be nude as often as not), advocates open sexual relation-
ships, and satirizes politics, organized religion, and traditional social mores.
During the 1960s and early 1970s, Heinlein wrote several more books, most
notably The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966), which tells the story of a lunar
colony’s rebellion against Earth analogous to the American Revolution. However,
some of his later work lacks shape and discipline, and there was a seven-year gap
in his output from 1973 to 1980, when he was plagued by health crises. In the
1980s—prior to his death in 1988—he wrote several novels, of which Friday
(1982) and the satirical Job: A Comedy of Justice (1984) shows him still near his
best form.
Other novels to escape the boundaries of the genre and obtain cult status were
Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963) and his ambiguously science fictional
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), which reacts to the political assassinations of the
Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the Vietnam war, and the social conflict that
troubled America throughout the turbulent 1960s. Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965)
also obtained a huge audience. Its plot involves complex political and religious
struggles on a desert world far in the future. Dune was followed by many sequels
by the author, and since his death in 1986, by a continuing series of sequels and
prequels by his son, Brian Herbert, and Kevin J. Anderson.
In the early 1960s, under the editorship of E.J. Carnell and then of the more
aggressive Michael Moorcock, the leading British science fiction magazine New
Worlds began to promote the New Wave style of science fiction. This style largely
rejected the genre’s tradition of narrative realism, purporting instead to explore the
mind’s “inner space,” a concept that was associated with J.G. Ballard in particular.
Strictly speaking, the New Wave comprised a group of writers closely involved with
New Worlds, and British authors Ballard, Brian Aldiss, and John Brunner were its
major exponents. However, the term New Wave is often used somewhat more
loosely to cover broader changes in the style of American, as well as British, science
fiction during the 1960s.
812 SCIENCE FICTION

In the United States, Harlan Ellison published his blockbuster anthologies Dan-
gerous Visions (1967) and Again Dangerous Visions (1972), for which he commis-
sioned stories that might be seen as controversial and subversive. Major American
science fiction writers of the 1960s who participated in the transition to a new style
are Norman Spinrad—notably with Bug Jack Barron (1969)—Thomas M. Disch,
Roger Zelazny, Samuel R. Delany, and James Tiptree Jr. (pen name of Alice
Sheldon). The writers of the sixties dealt with such subjects as environmental disas-
ter, and they often depicted Western civilization as doomed. Philip José Farmer and
Samuel R. Delany explored sexuality with a newfound freedom. The prolific Philip
K. Dick—whose stories and novels have perhaps been the subject of more cinematic
adaptations than any other science fiction writer’s since Verne and Wells—produced
much of his best work during the 1960s, including The Man in the High Castle
(1962) and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968).
After this point, the science fiction genre displayed multiple facets, but only a few
can be mentioned here. During the mid-1960s and early 1970s, Robert Silverberg,
another immensely prolific writer, produced some of his most studied and insightful
works, including the award-winning novella “Nightwings” (1969), as well as the
novels A Time of Changes (1971) and Dying Inside (1972). A Time of Changes
depicts one man’s rebellion against an oppressive culture that rejects individuality as
an obscenity. Dying Inside is a sensitive depiction of the declining powers of a
middle-aged man whose telepathic abilities are failing him. Joe Haldeman appeared
as a powerful new talent with The Forever War (1974), a grim antiwar novel that
draws on Haldeman’s experience as a soldier in Vietnam. The values of the golden
age of science fiction were kept alive in the work of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle,
most notably in Niven’s Ringworld (1970) and in the Niven-Pournelle collaboration
The Mote in God’s Eye (1974).
During the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, there was also a vigorous
interest in feminist and racial themes, sexuality, political theories, and utopian
visions (the latter sometimes of complex, ambiguous kinds). Key works of the
period were Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The
Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974), Joanna Russ’s The Female Man
(1975), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Samuel R. Delany’s
Dhalgren (1975) and Triton (1976), and Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979), which
uses time travel as a narrative device to examine the American experience of slavery.
The Dispossessed, possibly Le Guin’s best known novel, depicts life on Anarres,
a hostile desert world whose society is a resource-poor, would-be utopia run along
anarchist lines. Though Anarresti society is presented sympathetically, we are led to
see its flaws: in particular, it is hostile to individuality and genius. Anarres is
contrasted to another world, Urras, which is home to both a luxurious capitalist
society and a communist dictatorship of the worst kind. Though the development
of an anarchist society on Anarres has fallen short of its founder’s revolutionary
ideals, there are indications—as the narrative draws to a close—that revolution can
be a permanent process and that renewal is beginning.
Russ’s The Female Man and her other work of this period constitute the science
fiction genre’s most forthright attack on sexism and sexual inequality. The novel’s
four main characters—Joanna, Jeannine, Janet, and Jael—live in different realities:
one of them evidently lives in our reality, but the others live in realities that diverge
widely from ours. Russ’s fierce style and hard-edged characterization influenced the
cyberpunk writers of the following decade. In particular, her highly capable female
 SCIENCE FICTION 813

warriors—such as Jael in The Female Man and Alyx in Picnic on Paradise (1968)—
provided models for the no-nonsense razor girls of William Gibson’s early fiction.
Butler’s Kindred has obtained widespread praise for the horrifying realism of its
depiction of slavery, with its popularity and message enabling it to transcend the
science fiction genre. Kindred depicts the dilemma of a modern-day African
American novelist who finds herself leading a dual life as she is transported repeat-
edly to a slave plantation in the nineteenth-century South. Her struggle to survive
takes an additional twist because she is descended from a brutal slave owner, Rufus,
who somehow has the ability to summon his descendants to help him when he is
danger. She must assist him to survive, at least until he has the child whose line will
one day lead to her own existence.
Delany’s huge, enigmatic, sexually explicit Dhalgren (1975) was another book
that burst out of the confines of science-fiction marketing and found a cult audience.
Delany followed up with Triton (later republished under the author’s preferred title,
Trouble on Triton). Like The Dispossessed, to which it seems a response, Triton
depicts a world that is not entirely utopian. Delany’s focus is more on the personal
than the political: the narrative concerns a character who is unable to fit into a
seemingly utopian future society, but purely because of his own shortcomings.
As Harris-Fain points out (2005, 98–100), the science fiction field was fragment-
ing in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was possible for a reader to focus on a
particular type of science fiction, according to taste, but many writers and publish-
ers were looking for something to reunify the field. At this time, Frederick Pohl
published what many consider his best solo novel, Gateway (1977), which is a
prominent example of a veteran writer’s adoption of some of the New Wave
techniques (Harris-Fain, 2005, 69).
In the early 1980s, Gene Wolfe revived far-future science fiction in his novel series
The Book of the New Sun (1980–1987) as well as in subsequent series that contin-
ued into the 1990s and beyond. The five volumes of the first series—including its
coda, The Urth of the New Sun (1987)—four volumes of The Book of the Long Sun
(1993–1996), and three volumes of The Book of the Short Sun (1999–2001) can be
read as one huge narrative. The Book of the New Sun, which commences with The
Shadow of the Torturer (1980), tells the story of Severian, a journeyman torturer
who is ultimately made Autarch, or ruler of the kingdom . He must find a way to
renew the dying Sun—for which he travels to a higher universe, Yesod—and plead
with an entity closer to the Increate or creator.
Far-future science fiction relies on the fact that we find ourselves in a universe
incomprehensibly old and with a similarly incomprehensible number of years still
ahead. This subgenre responds to this fact by telling stories about the Earth in a future
separated from us by a vast temporal gulf. There is no precise starting point for the
far future, but such stories typically involve a planet that is so completely different
from the present day as to be almost unrecognizable. The classic example is Jack
Vance’s The Dying Earth (1950), which had numerous sequels and influenced many
other writers. Wolfe takes a similar approach on a gargantuan scale. As discussed by
Michael Andre-Driussi (2001), far-future science fictional texts such as those by Vance
and Wolfe use linguistic techniques that create a sense of strangeness and ancientness.
They employ many archaic words or archaic-seeming coinages, and their prose is lush
with exotic, often polysyllabic, names for characters and places.
Other writers maintained a hard–science fiction tradition throughout the second
half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Their values reflect those
814 SCIENCE FICTION

shown by Jules Verne and by the writers of the golden age. The precise boundaries
of hard science fiction are disputed. In their introduction to The Hard SF Renaissance,
David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer suggest that the expression “has always
signified SF that has something centrally to do with science” (2002, 13). This
“something” is somewhat vague, but hard science fiction generally emphasizes logic,
problem solving, scientific accuracy, and plausible detail. It often includes realistic
depictions of the lives of working scientists, engineers, astronauts, and similar
professionals. The hard–science fiction subgenre is epitomized by such works as Hal
Clement’s Mission of Gravity (1954) and Gregory Benford’s Timescape (1980), a
widely admired story of communication across time.
The cyberpunk movement of the 1980s synthesizes elements from the New Wave,
hard science fiction, and the politically engaged narratives of Delany and Russ.
Cyberpunk writers—such as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, and
(later) Neal Stephenson—produced, in effect, a new (or at least revised) science
fiction megatext that presents direct interfacing between human minds and
advanced computers, events in computer-constructed virtual realities, and the
activities of powerful artificial intelligences. The punk aspect of their work involves
portrayals of street life, youth rebellion (often against the power of ubiquitous,
transnational corporations), tough-guy attitudes and dress codes, and certain
recurring images (e.g., of rust, chrome, concrete, reflective glass, and architectural
ruins).
William Gibson was born in South Carolina in 1948, but he has lived in Canada
since the late 1960s. His work was a dominant presence within the cyberpunk
movement’s early output, and it has subsequently exerted an enormous influence on
American and international science fiction. The movement was showcased in
Gibson’s early short stories—collected in Burning Chrome (1986)—and in his first
novel, Neuromancer (1984), which was soon expanded into a trilogy whose
volumes are Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). Bruce Sterling’s
anthology Mirrorshades (1986) also helped define the spirit of cyberpunk, as it
collects important stories by Gibson and other key writers of the 1980s.
Neuromancer, in particular, had a stunning impact on the American and interna-
tional science fiction communities. It is a linguistically pyrotechnic and conceptually
dense crime thriller set in the polluted, high-tech urban jungle of a near-future world
in which a vast sprawl of buildings stretches from Boston to Atlanta; nonhuman
nature has receded to make way for patterns of streets, Styrofoam, and neon lights;
and the world of sensorial experience has lost ground to an artificial cyberspace
(Gibson’s celebrated coinage, though the idea had precursors) that is the construct
of electronic neuro-stimulation. The novel’s language is marked by vivid, risky
similes and swift sentences; and images and fragments of dialogue intrude in the
flow of the narrative in a disorienting way. Gibson conveys the rush and confusion
of the hard, amoral—yet sometimes alluring—world in which the novel’s events
take place. Neuromancer synthesizes the influences of noir crime writers such as
Raymond Chandler, the prose experiments of Alfred Bester, the elements of 1960s
New Wave science fiction, and the challenging fictions of William S. Burroughs and
Thomas Pynchon.
Since the 1980s, cyberpunk sensibility has been assimilated into much of the
science fiction field and beyond into the nonnarrative arts. This, however, has
scarcely been the only development. During cyberpunk’s heyday, there was a vig-
orous debate between its advocates and the so-called humanists—notably John
 SCIENCE FICTION 815

Kessell and James Patrick Kelly—who took a more critical and selective attitude to
technology. Standing outside of any subgenre or movement, James Morrow
produced darkly satirical narratives, combining science fiction and fantasy
elements, whereas Connie Willis became widely acclaimed and multiply awarded,
primarily for work that brought new interest and gave vitality to the tradition of
time travel narratives.
During the 1980s and 1990s, space opera’s tradition was also enriched by such
writers as C.J. Cherryh, Orson Scott Card, David Brin, Dan Simmons, Elizabeth
Moon, Lois McMaster Bujold, Catherine Asaro, and Vernor Vinge, who took space
opera in a dazzling variety of directions. Their stories are set against the wide
backdrops of the space opera subgenre but with emphases ranging from intellectual
speculation and play to action-adventure to unashamed romance.
Through the 1990s and beyond, there was also a distinctive international
resurgence of hard science fiction, showcased in Hartwell and Cramer’s The Hard
SF Renaissance (2002). In the United States, this renaissance was strongly associated
with the work of Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, and David Brin as well as with Kim
Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, but numerous other writers also took part, includ-
ing newer talents such as Ted Chiang. This renaissance was also evident in other
English-speaking countries. It can be seen, for example, in the stories and novels of
Australian author Greg Egan and in the work of a prominent group of British
writers that includes Ken MacLeod, Iain M. Banks, and Stephen Baxter.
For twenty-first-century science fiction, all the boundaries are blurred. Space
opera is influenced by hard science fiction and cyberpunk. Prose space opera gener-
ally displays a higher degree of realism—and a greater distance from fantasy—than
its cinematic equivalent. Science fiction as a whole has become, to an extent, post-
cyberpunk: it is permeated by images of alienation, machine intelligence, and
posthuman minds and bodies. The megatext has metamorphosed into something
darker, harder, and weirder.
Trends and Themes. Science fiction is a thematically rich genre. The three-volume
Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy (2005) contains four
hundred entries on specific themes, many of which—such as “Alien Worlds,” “Aliens
in Space,” “Aliens on Earth,” “Generation Starships,” “Mad Scientists,” “Planetary
Colonies,” “ Time travel,” and “Virtual Reality”—are of relevance mainly or entirely
to science fiction rather than fantasy narratives.
As a genre that developed in the wake of the scientific and industrial revolutions
of the past four centuries, science fiction tends to make certain assumptions. These
include the idea that human experience takes place within a small part of an
unimaginably vast space-time continuum, and that it is open to us to imagine the
rest. Thus, the genre’s canvas comprises the past, present, and future, as well as the
depths of interplanetary and interstellar space. It is natural for science fiction
authors to speculate about life on other planets, contact between humans and alien
life forms, and the possibility of human expansion beyond the confines of planet
Earth. It is equally natural for them to imagine travel in time and space—whether
to the historical or prehistoric past or to the near or far future.
Science fiction’s canvas spreads even further to include entirely different realities.
These may be rationalized in various ways—for example, there may be mathemat-
ical spaces beyond our own, as in Rudy Rucker’s novel of supermathematics,
Mathematicians in Love (2006), whose main characters travel through a variety of
alternative realities. In other cases, alternative histories or realities may be presented
816 SCIENCE FICTION

as purely imaginary constructs with no explanation as to how they relate to our own
world in a physical or metaphysical—rather than thematic—sense.
In principle, science fiction assumes the contingency and mutability of current
technologies, economic arrangements, and social forms. The technological and
other novelties that it depicts enable its characters to act within constraints—
physical, biological, technological, or cultural—that differ from those applying to
human beings in historical and contemporary societies. This alteration of expected
constraints can be deployed for a wide range of literary effects. In some cases, it
enables the exploration of specific aspects of human behaviour, life, or the universe.
It also enables authors to speculate about the future or to comment on the customs
and values of existing societies by extrapolating their worst tendencies or by viewing
a real society from the perspective of an imaginary one with different assumptions.
Thus, the genre has lent itself to the purposes of utopian or visionary speculation,
and to various kinds of satire. Of course, the creation of locales separated in space
or time—or otherwise—from the reader’s society can often function for less didac-
tic purposes. In much science fiction, these locales are used primarily for entertain-
ment: distant worlds can provide exotic settings for conflict and adventure, as in the
planetary romances of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the gaudy narratives that typify
space opera.
Science fiction narratives tend to include characters whose abilities differ from
those of historical humans, sometimes because of their greater inherent powers,
sometimes because of their access to innovative and empowering technology. At one
extreme, this encourages the creation of superheroes and supervillains—good and
evil characters with superhuman powers—and of the spectacle that ensues when
they are drawn into violent conflict. Other forms of conflict in science fiction include
wars between rival military forces equipped with superweapons and, often, with
superpowers’ warriors in their ranks. Such forms of superspectacular combat create
an affinity with heroic fantasy, with its magical locales and characters, typically
deployed for similar purposes.
Inevitably, science fiction’s main thematic concern is the consequences of scientific
advance and technological change. The genre has always shown a range of attitudes
to science and technology, reflecting—and sometimes opposing—tendencies in the
Western culture that has nurtured it. In medieval Europe, there was a long tradition
of suspicion toward “impious” inquiries into nature—expressed in hostile
depictions of magic and alchemy—and this can be seen continuing through the
Renaissance and even the age of the Enlightenment. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels (1726), for example, contains merciless satire of Enlightenment-era
scientists.
Hostility to science and technology increased in the Romantic period around the
beginning of the nineteenth century, as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Shelley
warned against scientific hubris, but during the later nineteenth century, techno-
logical progress came to be a popular value in industrialized nations. There was
far more optimism about technological progress in Verne’s tales of imaginary
voyages, which postulates such devices as Nemo’s submarine in Twenty Thousand
Leagues under the Sea (though the submarine is also an engine of destruction that
preys on shipping). The period’s techno-optimism culminated in futuristic
utopias—such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888) and
Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1905)—and in the magazines of the Gernsback era and
the golden age.
 SCIENCE FICTION 817

The science fiction pulp magazines of the Gernsback era valorized science,
scientists, and technology, while golden age science fiction was only slightly more
cautious in its optimism about technology and the future. Hard science fiction and
various forms of space opera continued this golden age optimism in the following
decades. By contrast, more literary forms of twentieth-century science fiction
conveyed greater pessimism. Even H.G. Wells was more than a Wellsian techno-
utopian, but the utopian component of his output produced a backlash—first seen,
perhaps, in E.M. Forster’s cautionary tale of a machine-dependent future, “The
Machine Stops” (1909). Thereafter, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, and George
Orwell described dystopias in which technology is used as an instrument for totali-
tarian enslavement, or as the enforcement of a decadent and repugnant form of
social stability.
Widespread intellectual rejection of technology followed the destruction of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the atrocities of the Nazi death camps. Even within
the professional genre, postwar science fiction gave expression to fears of decay or
destruction, produced by overreliance on technology or the use of immensely
powerful weaponry. The dominant British and American figures of the New Wave
era often expressed the vision of a doomed society. In the late decades of the
twentieth century and at the turn of the twenty-first, the technophobic imagination
focused increasingly on dangers from computers, artificial intelligence, and biotech-
nology. However, 1980s cyberpunk handled all this with a degree of ambivalence.
Cyberpunk writers produced images of a dark future, but they also portrayed
advanced technologies as inevitable, adaptable, and alluring. Though potentially
dangerous, the invasive technologies depicted by the cyberpunks have their attrac-
tions, and the near-future societies portrayed in such novels as Neuromancer are not
totally dystopian.
Chris Moriarty’s Spin State (2003) is an example of how all this plays out when
contemporary space opera combines with cyberpunk. In the relatively near future,
Earth has become uninhabitable. Climate change has led to ecological disaster,
though there are plans to restore the global environment and seed the planet with
stored genetic material. Meanwhile, most human beings have been evacuated to an
artificial construct, the Ring, where various cultures and nationalities remain as
suspicious of each other as ever. Thanks to the invention of faster-than-light travel,
new societies have also been established on the planets of other star systems. Some
of these are under UN control, but others have broken away in defiance—and the
authorities seem to have lost track of still others.
Of course, the ambivalent, complex attitudes to technology found in cyberpunk
and post-cyberpunk writing are not entirely new. Indeed, a powerful characteristic
of science fiction from the beginning was the moral ambivalence of technology. Even
Verne sometimes showed dangers in the powerful new technologies that he
described and glorified. Part of science fiction’s appeal lies in its ability to show
advanced technology as dangerous and potentially destructive, while simultaneously
revealing its allure and giving it some accommodation within the megatextual value
systems that result.
Most imaginable forms of technology receive a mix of positive and negative
portrayals in current science fiction. The predicted technology of molecular engi-
neering (or nanotechnology) is one example: while some works show it as offering
a world of plenty, it can also be portrayed as a threat by a techno-thriller writer such
as Michael Crichton. In Crichton’s Prey (2002), escaped “clouds” of tiny nanotech
818 SCIENCE FICTION

devices commence a bizarre parasitism on human victims. By contrast, a number

of current authors—such as Neal Stephenson, Wil McCarthy, and the British crop
of space opera and hard science fiction writers—attempt to imagine life in a world of
economic plenty.
One example is McCarthy’s The Collapsium (2000) and its sequels in the Queen-
dom of Sol series. Set about five hundred years in the future, this series describes a
society in which people can transport themselves around the Solar System, using
nanotechnological devices to analyze their bodies as data patterns. Aging and
disease have been eliminated by using a “morbidity filter.” Among the other inven-
tions of the future age is “wellstone,” or programmable matter: a substance capable
of mimicking the properties of many naturally occurring materials as well as phys-
ically hypothetical ones. People are coming to terms with what all this plenty means
for their lives, work, and relationships.
With its frequent depiction of exotic or greatly altered societies, science fiction is
also well placed to depict alternative moral outlooks, family arrangements, political
forms, and methods of social organization. This gives the genre its cognitive tools
for examining a wide range of social issues, from forms of government and the rela-
tionship between the state and the individual to sexuality, relations between men
and women, and methods of reproduction. The approaches taken may be utopian,
dystopian, or simply heterotopian, with the presentation of arrangements that are
different from those familiar to the reader, yet not entirely good or bad. Its hetero-
topian impulse gives science fiction some tendency to imply a kind of moral rela-
tivism, because many possible social arrangements and moral attitudes are viewed
rather dispassionately. On the other hand, perhaps surprisingly, the genre sometimes
adopts conservative or even reactionary conventions, as with the widespread depic-
tion of empires in space ruled along the lines of ancient imperial dynasties.
Despite its obvious potential to reimagine love, courtship, sexuality, and marriage,
science fiction is frequently quite conservative also in its implied philosophy of sex
and gender. Many science fiction narratives appear to assume that the dating and
marital customs of their authors’ own times and places will last into the near and
even distant future. Feminist utopias, however, typically reject traditional relation-
ships between the sexes, including marriage. Some feminist novels, such as Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man describe soci-
eties without men. Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time depicts a utopia in
which women have achieved freedom from male domination, and sexuality is free of
guilt (though not of all interpersonal conflict). Ectogenesis is used to separate repro-
duction from “recreational coupling,” and there is no marriage bond.
Because science fiction examines social changes that arise from the advance of
science and technology, it provides an ongoing literary forum for such issues as
preservation of monogamy. It sometimes criticizes monogamy from an alien
viewpoint, as in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, or describes alternatives,
such as the line marriages of the same author’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Some
science fiction narratives describe unusual familial/sexual arrangements for their
alien characters—as in Asimov’s The Gods Themselves (1972)—without consider-
ing anything very radical for future humans. However, Anne McCaffrey, Philip José
Farmer, Samuel R. Delany, and others have imagined more startling sexual
arrangements involving the interactions of humans and nonhumanoid aliens, or
even direct human-alien sex, especially in Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains
of Sand (1984).
 SCIENCE FICTION 819

Context and Issues. During the 1990s, the biological and computational sciences
became particularly prominent within the more general intellectual culture. This
was the result of scientific advances, the explosion in rapid, computerized commu-
nications, and some foreboding about where biotech and computers might be lead-
ing us. Such concerns and emphases are reflected in the science fiction of the 1990s
and the new millennium, sometimes accompanied by the striking idea of a coming
technological singularity: a point in time where the rate of technological change will
approach infinity, perhaps because it falls under the control of minds more power-
ful than ours.
From its beginnings, science fiction has postulated advances in biology, and it has
also depicted the work of biologists, the biology of alien beings, the structure of
alien worlds, and mutational changes on Earth. Its specialized concerns have
included artificial organic life (as in Frankenstein), medical advances, new diseases,
the creation of human clones, life extension and immortality, increased physical and
cognitive abilities, genetic engineering, and the terraforming of other planets.
Despite this variety, however, monstrosity and alien threats to human life have long
been the genre’s staples when it addresses the biological sciences. Physical or moral
monstrosity, it is often suggested, results from human meddling with the stuff of life.
Some authors have resisted the genre’s teratological and cautionary impulses, but
more optimistic works have usually been the exception: James Blish projects a vision
of human adaptation to the environments of other worlds in his short story “Sur-
face Tension” (1952), and something similar is imagined in Joan Slonczewski’s A
Door into Ocean (1986), among others. Some science fiction authors have imagined
entire alien ecologies that often resemble those of fantasy, but others—such as those
in Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Asimov’s The Gods Themselves, and
Slonczewski’s A Door Into Ocean—display more cognitive rigor. Octavia E. Butler’s
radical Xenogenesis novels, beginning with Dawn (1987), depict aliens who change
constantly through their history as they encounter new species and mix with them.
The most noteworthy saga of terraforming is perhaps Kim Stanley Robinson’s
Mars trilogy—Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), and Blue Mars (1996)—
which describes how Mars is made habitable through centuries of effort, resulting
in beneficial but not entirely expected outcomes. Greg Bear’s Blood Music (1985)
provides another exception to science fiction’s distrust of biological experimenta-
tion: in this novel, a renegade researcher’s experiment on his own body eventually
leads to a benign transformation of the Earth and humanity. Bear’s Darwin’s Radio
(1999) and Darwin’s Children (2003) are contemporary versions of the idea that a
sudden evolutionary change may occur in the human species.
One successful approach during the 1990s renaissance of hard science fiction was
that of Nancy Kress, initially in her novella “Beggars in Spain” (1990). This was
subsequently reworked and expanded into a successful series of novels: Beggars in
Spain (1993), Beggars and Choosers (1994), and Beggars’ Ride (1996). Kress’s work
contains intelligent observation of what might happen if human abilities could be
enhanced by genetic engineering. Her main characters are modified human beings
whose superior abilities include the capacity to live without sleep and devote the
extra hours to self-improvement. The narrative asks such questions as how society
would—or should—react to the presence of individuals who might seem to have an
unfair advantage over everyone else, in whatever fields of work they choose.
Conversely, what duties would such individuals owe to those less fortunate, without
losing the integrity of their own extraordinarily impressive lives?
820 SCIENCE FICTION

Observation of the rapid pace of technological change has led to the idea—
popularized by Vernor Vinge in particular—that humanity is headed for a point of
infinite possibility (the aforementioned singularity); it has also led to speculation
about the possibility that human beings may be transformed by technological
processes into something posthuman, that is, into humans possessing unprecedented
physical or cognitive capacities. Vinge’s prolific speculations about such issues—
initially in his novella “True Names” (1981) and his novel Marooned in Realtime
(1987)—have made him something of an icon for pro-technology activists—such as
those in the transhumanist movement, which favors the enhancement of human
capacities.
Post-cyberpunk space opera and related fictional forms typically imagine
scenarios in which technology goes inwards: it alters human capacities rather than
merely altering our environment or providing us with new tools. Robert Reed’s
Marrow (2000), for example, is a disciplined attempt to portray a truly posthuman
civilization whose people have indefinitely long lives and extraordinary personal
abilities. Reed’s characters are technologically enhanced to a degree that makes
them immortal and almost indestructible. Individuals are able to pursue the same
roles for many thousands of years, and they seem to possess infinite patience. Much
of the plot turns on the difficulty of inflicting certain and permanent death, even
with the most extreme methods or with deadly weapons specially designed for the
purpose. Characters who die convincingly are as likely as not to return chapters
later.
In Moriarty’s Spin State, the characters possess advanced artificial intelligences
that have emerged into self-awareness, and that are now struggling for political
emancipation, as well as genetically engineered posthumans, some of them “wired”
with extensive nonbiological hardware. Indeed, the book’s main character, Major
Catherine Li, is a “genetic construct” who has managed to alter the official records
on her biological background in order to escape a requirement for registration. She
works as a UN Peacekeeper, and she is thoroughly wired with “ceramsteel”
augmentations.
But there is a paradox about cyberpunk’s legacy. Much of what it once described
as the future has actually come to pass, while the more extreme ideas, such as
uploading human personalities into a virtual reality, may seem implausible. Partly,
perhaps, for this reason some of the most notable cyberpunk writers have recently
produced narratives that are scarcely identifiable as science fiction at all. Yet, these
writers would have been perceived as painting a radical picture of the near future if
they had been published only twenty years ago, when cyberpunk was young.
William Gibson’s most recent novels—Pattern Recognition (2003) and Spook
Country (2007)—have a cyberpunk feel but no clearly identifiable science fiction
elements. Gibson’s current mission, it seems, is to portray the present as if it were
science fiction. Cayce Pollard, the main character of Pattern Recognition, lives in a
milieu of fashion and design, consulting on corporate design proposals and identi-
fying cool trends a step in advance. She suffers from a hypersensitivity to images and
patterns that sometimes induces panic and nausea, but that enables her to perform
her job with extraordinary success. Gibson depicts Cayce’s comings and goings
across several countries; she encounters numerous cultures, subcultures, and strange
individuals as she attempts to uncover the identity of a mysterious auteur who is
releasing cut-up bits of original movie footage on the Internet in an inexplicable
order. Cayce’s father, we learn, disappeared on September 11, 2001, in New York
 SCIENCE FICTION 821

City, a year before the events of the book. Spook Country is set in the same world—
again, a strange version of our own—with a story of espionage, avant-garde art,
drug use and abuse, and fancy corporate marketing.
Gibson seems to suggest that in the early years of the new millennium, after such
events as the September 11 attacks in 2001, our own world has become alien to us,
and it needs to be looked at with fresh eyes. Perhaps Gibson’s drift into a literary
place that is not quite the house of science fiction also reflects a greater willingness
on the part of some writers from the science fiction tradition to write more directly
about the contemporary context and its concerns: about such familiar anxieties as
the influence of corporations and markets, the allure of fashion and style, the
ubiquity of prohibited drugs, the shadows of racial, cultural, and religious tension,
and the realities of environmental degradation and climate change. Twenty-first-
century science fiction addresses these issues in many different ways—for example,
Spin State makes reference to a ruined environment on Earth; several cyberpunk and
post-cyberpunk works present a future with many racial, linguistic, and cultural
demographics; and Kim Stanley Robinson’s writings have recently emphasized
global warming and its impact (discussed below under “Authors and Their
Works”).
Gibson’s recent novels also reflect a more general convergence of the literary
mainstream and more ambitious forms of prose science fiction. Since the 1960s New
Wave, if not before, science fiction writers have developed an increasing stylistic
sophistication, embracing such values as deep and particularized characterization,
complex narrative design, and less literal kinds of story telling.
Like Gibson, Neal Stephenson comes from the science fiction tradition, and he
made his mark during the 1990s with such late-cyberpunk novels as Snow Crash
(1992) and The Diamond Age (1995). With Cryptonomicon (1999) and his more
recent Baroque Cycle of novels (2003–2004), Stephenson can be seen as another
writer who challenges the distinction between science fiction and the mainstream.
Like Gibson, he shows a strong influence from the writings of Thomas Pynchon—
generally placed on the other side of the science fiction–mainstream literary
divide—and he has achieved success beyond the confines of a dedicated science
fiction readership. Cryptonomicon, mainly set during the Second World War, depicts
efforts to crack the military code used by the Axis powers, whereas the Baroque
Cycle is set in the same reality about 250 years earlier. Though some historical and
geographical details are changed from the world that we know, there is little in these
books that is truly science fictional.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) takes a radically
different approach to contemporary anxieties, making use of the alternate history
form of narrative. It is, perhaps, the most ambitious work of this kind published to
date. The book’s premise is that the Black Death of the fourteenth century destroyed
almost the entire population of Europe, not only one-third or so, creating a politi-
cal vacuum to be filled by Islam and the Chinese. Christianity and white-skinned
humans are essentially wiped out. This novel also uses a fantasy device to reimag-
ine the course of history since the 1300s: its main characters are repeatedly reincar-
nated after their deaths, with no scientific or pseudoscientific explanation.
Robinson’s characters discuss the nature of history among themselves, and the
author appears to suggest that major real events, such as the rise of modern science,
would have had equivalents even in the absence of European civilization. Mark Bold
describes in detail Robinson’s use of a world focused on cultures about which
822 SCIENCE FICTION

Westerners are seldom educated, which is a profoundly political and timely act. Bold
argues that “ignorance of Islamic cultures forms the basis of the stereotyping that is
used to justify slaughter of Afghan civilians, oppression of Palestinians, and geno-
cide sanctions in Iraq” (Bold 2002, 136). However, the relatively sympathetic view
of Islam suggested by Robinson may be contrasted with the suspicion implicit in
some of Dan Simmons’ recent fiction (discussed below under “Authors and Their
Works”).
Reception. As the pace of social and technological change accelerated during the
twentieth century, narratives of technological innovation and futuristic prospects
became more culturally prominent. Science fiction expanded into new media such
as radio, cinema, comics, television, and computer games.
Science fiction concepts first appeared in radio serials starting in the 1930s; Buck
Rogers in the 25th Century (1932–1947), a space opera serial aimed at a young
audience, was probably the first genuine science fiction radio program. Since the
1960s, science fiction radio drama has been rare in the US, but it was relatively
common in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Broadcasts usually took the form of
juvenile serials, including the Superman series (1940–1952), in which the superhero
from Krypton foiled the schemes of various criminals. However, the most famous
radio drama of all is a 1938 broadcast by Orson Welles: an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s
novel War of the Worlds. This broadcast produced widespread panic when many
listeners mistook it for a genuine news report about an invasion of planet Earth by
Martians.
As Peter Nicholls has observed in a detailed encyclopedia entry on science fiction
cinema, science fiction has a natural affinity with the cinema, as the latter’s illusory
qualities “are ideal for presenting fiction about things that are not real” (Clute and
Nicholls 1993, 219) Cinematic science fiction began to develop in the early decades
of the twentieth century, often showing a Frankensteinian or dystopian edge, as in
Metropolis (1926), Fritz Lang’s portrayal of a mechanized and dehumanizing future
city. During the 1930s, there was something of a boom in American science fiction
cinema. This included adaptations of notable early science fiction texts, such as
Shelley’s Frankenstein and works by H.G. Wells, though there were also entirely
new stories, such as King Kong (1933). Again, the predominant emphasis was
Frankensteinian, highlighting the self-destructive schemes of mad scientists.
Some early movies were more optimistic about science and technology, notably
When Worlds Collide (1951) and Things to Come (1936), the latter a British
celebration of technocratic Wellsianism. Nonetheless, science fiction cinema has
often displayed a bias against science and technology—most markedly in the many
American and Japanese portrayals of monsters created by the misuse of science—
such as the giant ants of Them! (1954), and the huge, city-destroying reptile of
Gojira (1954) and its many sequels. Other movies that influenced American popu-
lar culture in the 1950s were Destination Moon (1950), The Thing (1951), The Day
the Earth Stood Still (1951), Forbidden Planet (1956), and The Fly (1958). In
general, monsters, aliens, and space exploration provided the icons of 1950s science
fiction cinema.
Nicholls regards 1968 as the most important single year in science fiction
cinema’s history (Clute and Nicholls 1993, 222). That year’s movie releases
included Planet of the Apes, the likeable spoof Barbarella, and above all Stanley
Kubrick’s visionary, cryptic, numinous 2001: A Space Odyssey (on which the director
collaborated with Arthur C. Clarke). The 1960s and 1970s saw a large number
 SCIENCE FICTION 823

of cautionary antitechnology movies, cinematic dystopias, and post-Holocaust

movies.
In more recent decades, besides drawing heavily on the conventions of heroic
fantasy, adventure movies such as Star Wars (1977) have looked back to older forms
of science fiction, such as superhero stories and Gernsback-era space opera. Star
Wars can also been seen as belonging to the tradition of 1930s cinematic space
opera, which yielded movies such as Flash Gordon (1936). Star Wars and its
sequels, prequels, and imitations gave more impetus to media tie-in writing, which
has sometimes been controversial in the science fiction writing. The frequent resem-
blance to modern fantasy works applies to science fiction in all media, but with
particular force to action-adventure science fiction movies.
During the late 1970s and the 1980s, a new kind of science fiction cinema
emerged, perhaps beginning with Alien (1979), The Terminator (1984), David
Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly (1986), Predator (1987), and the sequels to each of
these. This was a darker, grittier, sometimes ickier approach to science fiction. To
some extent, this type of science fiction was rooted in the Frankensteinian tradition
of technophobic horror, but it also had affinities with contemporaneous develop-
ments in prose science fiction, as well as in comics, where a darker style was show-
cased in the 1980s work of Frank Miller. Blade Runner (1982) depicts a police hunt
for renegade androids in a near-future Los Angeles. Appearing at the same time as
the first clearly cyberpunk short stories by Gibson and others—and anticipating
Neuromancer by two years—Blade Runner is pure cyberpunk, imagined for the big
screen; its importance as a masterpiece of cyberpunk film is rivalled only by The
Matrix (1999), and its more recent sequels (The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix
Revolutions, both released in 2003) and spin-offs.
The history of science fiction comics begins with the space opera comic strips
introduced into newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s, such as the Flash Gordon strip
created in 1934. These led to reprints in comic-book form and then to original
comic-book series, such as Action Comics, which introduced the figure of Superman
in 1938. Superman obtained his own comic book in the following year, and he has
provided the inspiration for a huge number of superheroes ever since. By the early
1950s, science fiction comics were popular, with an emphasis on interplanetary
adventure and space opera, though a broad range of science fiction types and themes
was covered. There were also frequent adaptations of prose science fiction by well-
known authors of the time.
The year that transformed modern comic books was 1961, when Marvel
Comics—which had published work in a variety of genres through the 1950s—
created a new team of superheroes, the Fantastic Four. These characters obtained
their superhuman powers through bodily mutation induced by exposure to cosmic
rays during a mission in space. During the 1960s, Marvel and DC (which published
comics featuring Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, and others) embarked on a
rivalry that led to the creation of countless more superheroes and supervillains. Less
commercially successful than the superhero comics were comic-book adaptations of
movies, television shows, and prose narratives, though there were long-running
adaptations of some major science fiction texts from cinema and television.
Some companies began to experiment with collections of stories—or with long,
stand-alone stories of considerable complexity, published in a larger and more
durable format. The first of these that could plausibly be termed graphic novels
began to appear in the early 1970s, and the expression “graphic novel” was
824 SCIENCE FICTION

popularized towards the end of that decade. This form of publication became estab-
lished during the 1980s, with the publication of the Marvel Graphic Comic line,
including God Loves, Man Kills (1982), by Chris Clairmont, which later influenced
the X-Men movies; Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986) by Art Spiegelman; the four-
volume Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) by Frank Miller; and the twelve-
volume Watchmen (1987) as well as the ten-volume V for Vendetta (1982–88), both
by Alan Moore. This format has now become a staple within the comic-book
industry.
About the same time that the graphic novel reached its initial heights, George
R.R. Martin and a group of collaborators—including Roger Zelazny and leading
comics writer Chris Claremont—commenced a complementary venture: the Wild
Cards series of books (1987–). Some of these volumes contain interrelated stories,
while others are novels in their own right, composed by either a group of authors
or a single author. This ongoing series tells of events in an alternative reality inhab-
ited by superheroes and supervillains, among others, following the accidental release
of an alien virus that transforms human DNA. The Wild Cards series has itself spun
off comic-book adaptations.
While the world of comic books is complex, the general tendency has been for
American comics to be dominated by superhero adventures. These have fed back
into television, cinematic, and prose science fiction, with numerous adaptations of
superhero comic series. Some cinema adaptations—such as those involving Super-
man, Batman, and Marvel’s Spider-Man and X-Men—have achieved high levels of
success, often setting box-office records and establishing places among the top-
grossing movies of all time. The movies X-Men (2000), Spider-Man (2002), and
their sequels have led to a major resurgence of comic-book superheroes in cinema
during the early years of the twenty-first century. These movies have inspired further
novelistic spin-offs, including novelizations in prose form of film scripts and entirely
original superhero adventures.
The first science fiction television series to be broadcast in the United States was
the postwar Captain Video (1949–53, 1955–56), which featured a futuristic hero
who battled various alien threats with the help of his Video Rangers. This started
the practice of aiming science fiction on TV mainly at a young audience. Captain
Video was followed by many space adventure and superhero programs. However, The
Twilight Zone (1959–64) and The Outer Limits (1963–65) were varied anthology-
style programs with more appeal to adults: the former used a mix of science fiction
and fantasy, while the latter was focused on science fiction, often reflecting some-
thing of the New Wave sensibility of the time. Some of its most famous scripts,
including that for the most celebrated episode of all—“Demon with a Glass Hand”
(1964)—were written by Harlan Ellison. The 1960s also saw the production of many
science fiction or fantasy comedy shows, such as My Favorite Martian (1963–66).
Drama series of the 1960s included Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964–68), Lost
in Space (1965–68), and Time Tunnel (1966–67)—all aimed at children and
teenagers—and The Invaders (1967–68), which sought a more mature audience.
However, Star Trek (1966–69) was ultimately the most successful of the American
science fiction shows of the 1960s. It featured the voyages of a giant starship, sent
out to explore for new worlds and civilizations. Once again, the episode widely
regarded as the best in the original series was one scripted by Ellison: “The City on
the Edge of Forever” (1967). Though it did not attract strong ratings, Star Trek not
only gained an enthusiastic fan base and eventually had many successors and
 SCIENCE FICTION 825

imitators but also became the basis for both a long succession of movies—beginning
with Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)—and numerous spin-off novels and
comic books.
Star Trek and the series that followed it maintained a strand of optimism that was
not apparent in the dominant prose science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. Star
Trek itself was set in a somewhat utopian version of the twenty-fourth century,
when humanity has come together in the benign United Federation of Planets. With
this backdrop, the series expressed hopes for mankind’s survival, maturity, and
eventual flourishing in space. However clumsily, it suggested the possibility of a
human society without racism, sexism, poverty, or gross inequality. The show’s cult
following, together with the success of the Star Wars movies, led to the creation of
many science fiction series in the 1970s and beyond, with fluctuations in priorities
and fashions. One notable success was The X-Files (1993–2002)—a TV show that
investigated the paranormal—with its catchy slogan “the truth is out there.”
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, there is an intricate cross-fertilization
of American and foreign cinema, comics, television, media-related prose science
fiction, and computer games—a new medium that has gained enormous participa-
tion, especially among younger people, and that is now a wealthy industry in its
own right. For example, the 1999 movie The Matrix has spawned feature-length
sequels, short animations, comics, games, and other tie-in material. Along with the
related genre of modern fantasy, science fiction has become a dominant presence in
popular cultures worldwide.
But despite the visibility of science fiction in popular culture—or perhaps because
of it—the kinds of science fiction that are best known to the public do not accu-
rately reflect the state of the art in prose science fiction. Cinematic space opera
typically resembles the stories that first appeared in the 1920s as much as it resem-
bles current post-cyberpunk forms of narrative. The relatively peripheral superhero
variety of science fiction has had great prominence in the cinema, whereas more
thoughtful movies with strong science fiction elements—such as The Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)—are frequently not even marketed or discussed
as science fiction.
To an outsider, science fiction may appear to be a form of entertainment—a some-
what lurid one—aimed at the youth market, along with pop music and computer
games. Of course, the production of entertaining works for children and teenagers
is not a contemptible thing, and the most culturally visible works, such as the Star
Wars movies, are technically dazzling products that gain additional strength and
resonance through their respectful treatment of mythic archetypes. The work of
writers and others involved in the multimedia complex of science fiction–based
entertainment requires high levels of skill, knowledge, and professionalism.
Moreover, popular science fiction in all media displays an admirable knowingness,
complexity, and capacity for self-scrutiny that may not be apparent to the uniniti-
ated. All that conceded, the most innovative work in prose science fiction is largely
obscured.
An ever-expanding body of scholarly and critical writing has emerged that exam-
ines, interprets, and evaluates the science fiction genre. This includes encyclopedic
volumes such as The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993); specialist journals such
as Science Fiction Studies, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction
(published by the Science Fiction Foundation) and Extrapolation (published by an
official academic body, the Science Fiction Research Association); news magazines
826 SCIENCE FICTION

such as Locus; and many semiprofessional and amateur publications (the latter
known as “fanzines”) that sometimes achieve high standards of analysis. Nonethe-
less, science fiction is held in relatively low regard by the elite literary culture. Some
novelists (or their publishers) avoid the label, even when incorporating science
fiction elements into their narratives. Karen Joy Fowler’s Sarah Canary (1991), for
example, avoided science fiction marketing and thereby obtained a broader
audience.
In the process of defending science fiction, John Clute (1999) offers additional rea-
sons why it is often dismissed as trash: much science fiction that is prominently mar-
keted as such really is trash, he suggests. American science fiction authors have tended
to dramatize ideas about the world and technology, as a consequence of which their
work can be simplistic both in dealing with complex matters such as human nature
and in depicting American triumphalism. These authors also receive a degree of the
defensive disparagement from technology-wary humanists. At the same time, Clute
argues, science fiction provides a bracing angle for writers to adopt in looking at
the world—and at its potential—in a time of constant innovation and crisis.
In the midst of ongoing controversy about science fiction’s literary and cultural
value, Peter Brigg’s The Span of Mainstream and Science Fiction (2002) offers a
sustained argument that trends in the last few decades have produced a convergence
between science fiction and mainstream forms of fiction—however, exactly, these
are understood. As discussed above, genre science fiction writers have developed an
increasing literary sophistication. Conversely, the major physical, conceptual, and
social transformations wrought by science during the nineteenth century and since
have prompted mainstream writers to investigate themes that fall within science
fiction’s domain.
As Jonathan Lethem (1998) has lamented, there has been no true merger of
science fiction and the literary mainstream, which often forces writers to choose a
career in either one or the other. However, many literary authors have published
stories and novels that are formally science fiction, or close to it. Two recent exam-
ples, out of many, are John Updike’s Toward the End of Time (1997) and Philip
Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004); the former portrays the aftermath of a
nuclear war between China and America, whereas the latter postulates that the great
aviator and notorious anti-Semite Charles Lindbergh stood successfully for the U.S.
presidency in 1940. Like Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt and Jack Dann’s The
Rebel: An Imagined Life of James Dean (2004), Roth’s book demonstrates the
ongoing vitality of the alternate history novel.
Selected Authors. Since the early years of the new millennium, significant work
has been written and published by science fiction authors whose careers commenced
in several different eras of the genre’s development. This underlines the genre’s teem-
ing diversity of movements, styles, and subgenres. Some of the distinguished authors
who remain productive—such as Robert Silverberg, Frederick Pohl, and Ray
Bradbury—have careers stretching back to the 1950s or even earlier. Major
American authors from the New Wave era (such as Ursula Le Guin), from the cyber-
punk era (such as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, and Michael
Swanwick), and from the hard science fiction tradition (such as Gregory Benford,
Greg Bear, and David Brin) continue to produce fine work, as do practitioners of
varied forms of space opera—such as Orson Scott Card, Catherine Asaro, and
Elizabeth Moon. Accordingly, any discussion of major authors who have been
active in recent years must be highly selective.
 SCIENCE FICTION 827

The recent novels of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson are discussed above
under the heading “Contexts and Issues,” where the point is made that their work
is merging with the mainstream. Something similar may be said of Bruce Sterling,
the most aggressive advocate of cyberpunk during the 1980s: Sterling’s Zeitgeist
(2000) and The Zenith Angle (2004) are further examples of novels that have
emerged from the science fiction tradition but crossed over into territories that
resemble the literary mainstream or the techno-thriller genre. Conversely, Richard
Powers is the most prominent contemporary example of an American author whose
interest in the implications of science and technology almost carries him into the
house of science fiction. His career has explored such issues as genetics, artificial
intelligence, and virtual reality—as in The Gold Bug Variations (1991), Galatea 2.2
(1995), and Plowing the Dark (2000).
Powers’s ninth novel, The Echo Maker (2006) won the National Book Award and
was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Its focus is on cognitive neurology and, particu-
larly, on the mysteries that surround a young man, Mark Schluter, who suffers
severe head injuries when he flips his truck at high speed and is subsequently
diagnosed with Capgras syndrome. He is unable to accept that his sister, Karin, is
really his sister and accuses her of being a fake. Indeed, he starts to think that his
dog, his house, and much else in his Nebraska hometown, are cunning facsimiles,
which leads him to concoct bizarre explanations for this. A celebrated neurologist,
Dr. Gerald Weber—a kind of Oliver Sacks figure—is brought in to assist, but he
finds his own personality undermined by his interactions with Mark and others in
the town. Throughout, The Echo Maker contains meditations on the vulnerability
of our selves and our perceptions of the world, a vulnerability that is acted out at
many levels.
By contrast, old-fashioned space opera continues to be strongly represented in
contemporary science fiction. Its most prominent exponents include Lois McMaster
Bujold and Elizabeth Moon. Bujold’s main claim to prominence in the science fiction
field is based on a series of space opera adventures reminiscent of C.S. Forester’s
Horatio Hornblower stories (and their earlier science fiction imitators). She writes
about the life, vicissitudes, and successes of Miles Vorkosigan, a somewhat unusual
hero for such adventures, because he is born with brittle bones and other medical
problems. As a result his growth is stunted, and at one stage he fails the physical
requirements to join the Service Academy. Nonetheless, Miles gradually rises in
rank: in Diplomatic Immunity (2002), he is 32 years old and has attained the high
post of Lord Auditor. In this book, the Barrayarran Emperor delegates him to deal
with a diplomatic problem that involves murder, intrigue, and a colorful cast of
characters.
Elizabeth Moon’s greatest single success has been her Nebula Award–winning novel
The Speed of Dark (2002), which is about a profoundly autistic but highly function-
ing individual, Lou Arrendale, who holds down a difficult job with a large employer.
Lou is confronted by a possible cure for his syndrome. In reviewing this novel,
Gwyneth Jones describes Lou’s choice as a tragic one: “do you want to be normal if
it will cost you everything you know and love?” (Jones, 2003, 20). Apart from The
Speed of Dark, Moon has produced a large body of writing that typically describes
adventures in space, often with an emphasis on military operations and tactics, reflect-
ing her own significant experience in active service with the U.S. Marine Corps.
Joe Haldeman’s continued success since the mid-1970s represents the flowering of
a traditional kind of science fiction. Despite its title, Haldeman’s Forever Peace
828 SCIENCE FICTION

(1997) is not a sequel to his 1970s award-winning novel, The Forever War, but they
both deal realistically with the horrors of war and war’s possible roots in human
nature. Forever Peace is set in the year 2043, during the Ngumi War, in which a
coalition of Western nations led by the United States is attempting to put down the
rebellion of an alliance of poor nations.
The early part of the novel focuses on the methods of mid-twenty-first-century war-
fare, in which Americans use remote-controlled war machines—notably, the robotlike
“soldierboys,” constructed through advanced nanotechnological manufacturing. In
the second half, intrigue and complexity are added when two scientists discover that
the completion and operation of an immense particle collider being built around
Jupiter could create a new Big Bang and destroy the existing universe. The two
scientists, aided by other people, attempt to stop the project and to advance their own
plan to alter human nature—by making us more peaceful and putting an end to the
cycle of wars—but they are opposed by a fanatical religious cult, the Hammer of God.
Forever Free (1999), however, is a true sequel to The Forever War, set after the
interspecies war described in the earlier book has actually ended. Told in the first
person by William Mandella, the main character of The Forever War, Forever Free
involves an attempt to hijack an old space cruiser on the planet Middle Finger,
where Mandella has settled down with his wife Marygay. The idea is for a group of
war veterans and their families to escape the Galaxy and to use relativistic time
dilation to travel forty thousand years into the future, when things might be more
interesting. However, something goes wrong early in this journey, and the disgrun-
tled vets are forced to return to Middle Finger, where everything has changed much
more quickly than expected. This is a surprisingly whimsical book, sometimes a bit
self-indulgent, much in the spirit of Heinlein’s late novels.
Haldeman’s Camouflage (2004) is a classic science fiction narrative that would
have been successful in the golden age, except for its sexual frankness. In the near
future, an alien spaceship is discovered deep beneath the surface of the ocean, and
two dangerous nonhuman beings take an interest in it, though initially being
unaware of each other. Both are millions of years old, superhuman in many of their
abilities, and possessed of similar (though interestingly not identical) capacities to
change shape and appearance. They both live within human societies, camouflaged
as human beings. One of these creatures, the changeling, has gradually become
benevolent towards humans, but the other, the chameleon, is driven by an urge to
kill and destroy. This sets up a confrontation between good (of a kind) and evil,
enlivened by spectacular combat and interspecies sex, all described with vividness
and panache that few of Haldeman’s peers could equal.
American-born Toronto resident Robert Charles Wilson became a Canadian
citizen in 2007, but he has been a significant player in American science fiction since
his first novel, A Hidden Place, was published in 1986. Wilson’s narratives draw on
the full breadth of the genre’s traditions, particularly hard science fiction and the
New Wave. He describes strange transformations of the world, as in Darwinia
(1998), which is premised on the mysterious replacement in 1912 of the flora,
fauna, as well as geographical and geological identity of Europe. In The Chronoliths
(2001), huge monuments, seemingly from the future, appear suddenly in the early
twenty-first-century world. They commemorate victories by somebody named only
as “Kuin” in inscriptions on the monuments. The appearance of each Chronolith
causes immense local destruction, and, as each new one appears, there is worldwide
fear, confusion, and political destabilization. In both of these novels, Wilson
 SCIENCE FICTION 829

concentrates on the reactions of an ordinary American man to the world-changing

events and their social repercussions.
Spin (2005) is in a similar mold. A kind of membrane suddenly appears around
the Earth, with no explanation, and blanks out the stars and the moon, while selec-
tively letting through the light of the sun. The alien membrane comes to be known
as “the Spin,” whereas the beings hypothesized as having created it are called “the
Hypotheticals.” Spin is also a love story, depicting the narrator’s devotion to his
childhood sweetheart over three decades, and the complications and difficulties that
their relationship encounters. His life is confusingly entangled with Diane’s and her
twin brother’s from the night when the stars go out. The first published sequel to
Spin, entitled Axis (2007), describes the human colonization of a new world created
by the mysterious Hypotheticals.
Vernor Vinge has long been a prophet of Singularity and posthuman future,
though this hardly exhausts his immense contribution to science fiction. His most
significant achievement in the new millennium is Rainbows End (2006), a near-
future novel, set in San Diego in 2025. It impressively portrays a world greatly, yet
plausibly, altered from our own, one with ubiquitous cybernetic devices and endless
conspiracies within conspiracies. This world is, it seems, fast approaching the
Singularity or something like it.
At one level, Rainbows End is a redemption narrative: the story of a brilliant—
but unscrupulous and emotionally cruel—poet, Robert Gu. Gu is restored to mental
clarity and youthfulness after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, and he now has to
create a new life for himself. He finds that his poetic genius has gone, though he has
new talents and a softened personality. He struggles to fit into society after losing
two decades as he is gradually transformed into a wiser and kinder person. At
another level, Vinge presents a battle of cyberspace geniuses, one of whom is Alfred
Vaz. Vaz is a high-level intelligence operative who wants to develop a mind-control
technology to enforce world peace—a similar theme to Haldeman’s Forever Peace,
but presented with a quite different authorial attitude. We sympathize with Vaz’s
goal, even while being led to believe that his methods are unacceptable. Much of the
book’s mystery lies in the true identity of Mr. Rabbit, Vaz’s opponent, who tries to
put a stop to the mind-control scheme.
Though Rainbows End has many of the trappings of cyberpunk—and its author
has a strong claim to have inspired the cyberpunk movement with his fiction of the
early 1980s—Graham Sleight shrewdly observes that Vinge’s novel does not have a
cyberpunk ethos. Whereas Gibson, for example, depicts a world that is socially
polarized between the street-smart and the corporate rich, Vinge presents a sunny
and nonthreatening middle-class vision (Sleight 2006, 17). The rush towards a
posthuman techno-rapture seems to take place within a comfortable suburban bub-
ble. This may, in fact, be astute extrapolation on Vinge’s part, but it does raise ques-
tions about what role there will be for the poor people of the world in a massively
information-rich future.
In Ilium (2003) and its sequel Olympos (2005), Dan Simmons takes a radically
different approach to posthuman possibilities: the events are set several thou-
sand years in the future, long after our world has been transformed by extraordi-
nary technologies. This is a “far future of posthumanity where the distinction
between organic and machine blur[s] into insignificance” (Jeffery 2004, 1220).
Simmons gradually reveals a complex backstory that requires considerable effort to
piece together. The background includes global religious conflict on an unprecedented
830 SCIENCE FICTION

scale, with the development of biological weapons for mass extermination by

political Islamists; the rise of reengineered superhuman beings; colossal engineering
projects (such as habitable rings that orbit the Earth); and a space-faring civilization
of surprisingly sympathetic, self-conscious robots called “moravecs” (after Hans
Moravec, a celebrated robotics guru). Much of the action in the narrative present
takes place on the plains of ancient Troy—but it is an alternative version of ancient
Troy created by posthuman beings who emulate the powers and personalities of the
Greek gods. Simmons weaves together multiple strands of story into what is really
a single, immense novel published in two volumes.
Simmons is one of a growing number of science fiction writers who attempt to
imagine a truly posthuman future while still engaging the sympathies of human read-
ers. In part, this is achieved by including more-or-less human characters in all the nar-
rative strands, though, as Jeffery recognizes, (2004, 123) the moravecs have the most
human-seeming sensibilities of the lot. The Ilium-Olympos project represents only one
fraction of Simmons’s ambitious and growing body of literary work, which also
includes important contributions to modern space opera and the horror genre.
As one leading science fiction scholar has remarked (Freedman, 2005,
125–126), Kim Stanley Robinson may be the most accomplished American
science fiction writer to emerge since the 1960s and 1970s. Robinson’s first two
novels, Icehenge and The Wild Shore, were published in 1984, and since then he
has continued to produce complex, humane works of hard science fiction, inter-
spersed occasionally with more whimsical pieces, such as Escape from Kathmandu
(1989). He is best known for his epic Mars trilogy—which covers two centuries
of colonization, terraforming, and revolution on Mars, beginning with the depar-
ture of the First Hundred from Earth in 2027. Since then he has written Antarctica
(1997), a near-future novel of illicit oil drilling and secret feral settlements, and his
huge alternate history novel The Years of Rice and Salt (discussed above under
Context and Issues).
Most recently, Robinson has published a new trilogy focused on the near-future
impact of global warming: Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005),
and Sixty Days and Counting (2007). Robinson’s characters are involved in politics
and high-level science administration in a very-near-future Washington, DC. They
face accelerating climate change that produces floods in Washington, huge storms
along the California coast, the halting of the Gulf Stream, a ferociously bitter winter
in North America, the breaking off of enormous tabular icebergs in Antarctica, and
the necessary evacuation of Tuvalu, as sea levels rise. American political leaders are
slow to accept the new reality, remaining driven by an increasingly irrelevant imper-
ative for economic growth.
The strength of these novels lies in their synthesis of many types of events as the
author conveys the idea of a world undergoing change. There are dramatic depic-
tions of disasters interweaved with political machinations, mysteries, and the char-
acters’ ordinary lives. We are shown day-to-day work activities and the detail of
juggling these with personal demands (looking after children, finding somewhere to
live in a new city, and so on). In his review of Forty Signs of Rain, Freedman (2005,
129) observes that, at points, it is one of the best novelistic depictions of the insti-
tutional practice of science since Gregory Benford’s Timescape in 1980. That obser-
vation could be extended to the other books of the trilogy, and it is even more
impressive that Robinson is able to combine the hard–science fiction elements with
a finely observed picture of his characters’ personal lives.
 SCIENCE FICTION 831

Robinson does have rivals for preeminence, and they surely include Connie Willis,
who has won many major awards in the broader field of science fiction and fantasy.
By any reasonable measure, she is the most professionally honored author ever to
work in genre science fiction. Willis began writing professionally in the late 1970s,
and she emerged as a major talent during the following decade. Her 1982 story
“Fire Watch” won both of the science fiction field’s premier awards—a Hugo Award
and a Nebula Award—and it remains one of the most admired of all time-travel
narratives. She won her most recent of many Hugo Awards for “Inside Job” (2005),
a humorous fantasy novella. Other highlights of her distinguished career include her
Fire Watch collection (1985) as well as the novels Lincoln’s Dreams (1987),
Doomsday Book (1992), and To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998).
Willis displays a fascination with history, and much of her work uses the plot
device of a near future in which historians at Oxford University are trained to use
time travel to observe the past—often encountering awkward problems or personal
dangers, and becoming deeply involved in events. This enables the author to reveal
and interpret past eras. She shows them in vivid detail, whether her focus is on the
Nazi Blitz (Fire Watch), Europe at the time of the Black Death (Doomsday Book),
or Victorian England (To Say Nothing of the Dog). Lincoln’s Dreams employs a
somewhat different device to reveal the past: it is set in the present, but one charac-
ter is seemingly dreaming the dreams of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.
In Passage (2001), Willis presents the highly realistic narrative of a research
psychologist’s investigation of near-death experiences. The science fictional twist in
the tale is that a brilliant neurologist at the same hospital invents a drug that enables
these experiences to be manufactured at will. When she uses the drug, the researcher
has an apparent experience of wandering the Titanic on its ill-fated voyage, allow-
ing Willis to examine another emotionally resonant corner of history’s mansions.
We see, too, a fine example of the thematic and stylistic convergence between
literary mainstream and some ambitious kinds of science fiction. Phenomena
described by the neurological sciences are now proving a common source of fasci-
nation for supposedly genre writers, such as Willis, and supposedly mainstream
writers, such as Richard Powers.
Once again, there is a considerable affinity between thoughtful, technically ambi-
tious science fiction and scientifically literate work from the literary mainstream.
There has, of course, been no true merger; and it should not be forgotten that science
fiction has become an increasingly visible component of a popular culture whose val-
ues are often remote from those of novelists and short story writers from a high lit-
erary tradition. Popular science fiction is of interest and value in its own right,
whether or not it displays a conventional literary sensibility. But scientific under-
standing and technological innovation continue to transform our world and the ways
in which we perceive ourselves. As long as that remains so, the implications of sci-
ence and technology will interest artists and writers from many traditions.
It should not, therefore, be surprising to find resemblances between, say, Delany’s
Dhalgren and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (in the 1970s), or between a recent
novel by a science fiction author, such as Passage, and a novel from across the
literary divide, such as The Echo Maker. Marketing techniques and authorial repu-
tations aside, there is little that distinguishes the most ambitious science fiction writ-
ing and the most scientifically aware narratives currently being produced within the
literary mainstream. It is salutary to note this convergence, or at least intersection,
of traditions: a lively awareness of it may enrich our experience of both.
832 SCIENCE FICTION

SCIENCE FICTION AWARDS

World Science Fiction Society presents the annual Hugo Awards at the annual World Science
Fiction Convention (WorldCon). Awards are currently presented in 15 categories. Recent
award winners in the “Best Novel” category have included Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
(2007); Spin by Robert Charles Wilson (2006); Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna
Clarke (2005); Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold (2004); Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer
(2003); American Gods by Neil Gaiman (2002); Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K.
Rowling (2001); and A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge.
The Nebula Awards are presented by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
Recent winners for “Best Novel” have included Seeker by Jack McDevitt (2006); Camouflage
by Joe Haldeman (2005); Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold (2004); Speed of Dark by
Elizabeth Moon (2003); American Gods by Neil Gaiman (2002); The Quantum Rose by
Catherine Asaro (2001); and Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear.
Sources: World Science Fiction Society-World Science Fiction Convention Web site.
http://www.worldcon.org/index.html, and Science Fiction Writers of America Web site.
http://www.sfwa.org/awards

Bibliography
Aldiss, Brian, and David Wingrove. Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction.
London: Gollancz, 1986.
Andre-Driussi, Michael. “Languages of the Dying Sun.” In Earth Is But a Star: Excursions
Through Science Fiction to the Far Future. Damien Broderick, ed. Perth: University of
Western Australia Press, 2001, 217–236.
Bould, Mark. “Review of The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson.” Founda-
tion 86 (Autumn 2002): 134–136.
Brigg, Peter. The Span of Mainstream and Science Fiction: A Critical Study of a New Literary
Genre. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2002.
Clareson, Thomas D. Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction: The
Formative Period (1926–1970). Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press,
1990.
Clute, John, and Peter Nicholls, eds. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1993.
———. “In Defense of Science Fiction” Salon November 27, 2007. http://www.salon.com/
books/feature/1999/05/25/sfdefense/index.html.
Crichton, Michael. Prey. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.
Freedman, Carl. “Review of Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson.” Foundation 95
(Autumn 2005): 125–130.
Haldeman, Joe. Camouflage. New York: Ace, 2004.
———. Forever Peace. New York: Ace, 1997.
Harris-Fain, Darren. Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction: The Age of
Maturity, 1970–2000. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2005.
Hartwell, David G., and Kathryn Cramer, eds. The Hard SF Renaissance. New York: Tor,
2002.
Jeffery, Steve. “Review of Ilium by Dan Simmons.” Foundation 91 (Summer 2004):
122–124.
Jones, Gwyneth. “Review of The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon.” New York Review of
Science Fiction 177 (May 2003): 20–21.
Moon, Elizabeth. The Speed of Dark. New York: Ballantine, 2003.
Powers, Richard. The Echo Maker. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006.
 SCIENCE WRITING (NONFICTION) 833

Robinson, Kim Stanley. Forty Signs of Rain. New York: Bantam, 2004.
Scholes, Robert. Structural Fabulation: An Essay on Fiction of the Future. Notre Dame, IN:
Notre Dame University Press, 1975.
Simmons, Dan. Ilium. New York: EOS, 2003.
———. Olympos. New York: EOS, 2005.
Sleight, Graham. “Review of Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge.” New York Review of Science
Fiction 215 (July 2006): 17–18.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1979.
Vinge, Vernor. Rainbow’s End. New York: Tor, 2006.
Willis, Connie. Passage. New York: Bantam, 2001.
Wilson, Robert Charles. Spin. New York: Tor, 2005.

Further Reading
Broderick, Damien. Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction. New York: Routledge,
1995; Clute, John, and Peter Nicholls, eds. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1993; Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000; Geraghty, Lincoln. Living with Star Trek: American
Culture and the Star Trek Universe. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007; Locus Online.
http://www.locusmag.com/ (accessed November 27, 2007); James, Edward, and Farah
Mendlesohn, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003; Lethem, Jonathan. “Why Can’t We All Just Live Together? A Vision
of Genre Paradise Lost.” New York Review of Science Fiction 121 (September 1998): 1, 8–9.
(Originally published in shorter form in Village Voice as “Close Encounters: The Squandered
Promise of Science Fiction.”); Science Fiction Foundation Web site. http://www.sf-founda-
tion.org/ (accessed November 27, 2007); Science Fiction Research Association Web site.
http://www.sfra.org/ (accessed November 27, 2007); Science Fiction Studies Web site.
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/ (accessed November 27, 2007); Seed, David, ed. A Companion
to Science Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2005; Westfahl, Gary. The Mechanics of
Wonder. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998; Westfahl, Gary, ed. The Greenwood
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders (three volumes).
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005.
RUSSELL BLACKFORD

SCIENCE WRITING (NONFICTION)

Definition. Science nonfiction—or popular science, for the general audience—is
an omnibus term referring to science-based literature that is not fiction (popular
science and pop science have a slightly derogatory connotation). It includes essen-
tially all literary nonfiction about science, particularly the natural sciences. It is
distinct from the specialized literatures of the arts, sciences, and humanities that
appear primarily in scholarly journals and university press monographs, and from
the technical references and textbooks that are intended for professionals, practi-
tioners, and students in a given field. Popular science literature includes the biogra-
phy and autobiography of individual scientists, accounts of scientific discovery and
technological invention, as well as explanations of scientific ideas and their
implications. It is intimately connected to the professional domain of science
journalism, drawing many of its practitioners from the ranks of science news
reporters and science writers.
Popular science also overlaps with the interdisciplinary scientific monograph, that
is, a book published by a scholarly press that is read by scientists outside the
834 SCIENCE WRITING (NONFICTION)

author’s particular specialty but whose research will nonetheless be influenced by

the author’s ideas. Some such books receive broader attention, especially if they are
in some degree controversial. E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology (1975), for example, is
regarded by some critics as an extremist argument for the genetic determination of
human behavior and thus as a potential rationalization for social injustice (see
Ceccarelli 2001 for a discussion of the reception of Wilson’s work). The present
chapter excludes topics such as astrology, UFOlogy, parapsychology, and New Age
occultism (that is, the hidden powers of things such as pyramids and crystals), which
are more properly regarded as pseudoscience.
Popular science tends to emphasize the intellectual content of science—that is, its
findings and speculations—rather than its sociological character, its historical devel-
opment, or even its policy implications. According to Mellor (2003), when written
by a scientist, it tends to be didactic in purpose and tone, and it is primarily inter-
ested in an expository effect (this does not prevent the occurrence of some lively
prose, however; e.g., Sagan 1973). When written by a science journalist or other
nonscientist, the focus usually shifts toward storytelling, which creates a narrative
effect by highlighting the dramatic elements of discovery within a particular field
(e.g., Gleick 1987); the tone thus often becomes literary or even poetic (e.g., Ferris
1997). Either scientistic or journalistic popular science authors may alternately
focus on argumentation, laying out some kind of science-based critique of society’s
use, misuse, or abuse of science and technology (e.g., Carson 1962; Kolbert 2006;
Rees 2003) or, more rarely, an examination of science itself (Smolin 2006; Horgan
1996) to achieve a critical effect.
In other words, popular science as a type of literature generally consists of works
written by scientists or science journalists who try to explain current ideas and
recent developments in a scientific field, usually either from the perspective of an
expert scientific “insider” who seeks to teach the lay reader about those ideas or
from that of a knowledgeable outside observer who emphasizes the narrative of
discovery and the praiseworthy responsibility of particular individuals for some of
those developments. A critical popular science also exists that warns a lay audience
of problems associated with ignoring social or other ramifications of scientific
findings, or that conversely engages in a critique of the practice of science. The
underlying point of commonality among all three types of popular science litera-
ture is that they are geared toward “popularization,” that is, toward making
science, scientific knowledge, or scientific habits of mind accessible to a broader
audience.
The derogatory connotation of the term popular science stems from its implicit
contrast with real science, that is, the scientific communications produced by
scientists for other scientists, rather than for a more general public. Very few
scientists are charged in their job descriptions with communicating with the public
(Reichhardt 2005); therefore, popular science is taken to be less serious than real
science, a distraction from more worthy efforts—at least in the judgment of the
review, tenure, and hiring committees evaluating the professional accomplishments
of scientists, who tend not to consider themselves responsible for “outreaching” to
the public in any case (Brown, Propst, and Woolley 2004). And despite the existence
of a few high-profile popular science best sellers, publishers are coming to recognize
the category as an increasingly crowded niche with a comparatively limited reader-
ship (Reichhardt 2005).
 SCIENCE WRITING (NONFICTION) 835

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POPULAR SCIENCE AND

SCIENCE FICTION
In general, popular science is treated with greater respect than is science fiction, because
as nonfiction, the former can claim for itself the sober mantle of “real science,” in contrast
to the speculative and ostensibly puerile character of genre fiction. Science fiction writers,
for their part, make extensive use of information from popular science as background and
inspiration (Sheffield 1999), and those with scientific expertise sometimes write popular
science as well as science fiction, as the oeuvre of noted writer Isaac Asimov (1920-1992),
whose PhD was in biochemistry, indicates (e.g., Asimov 1972). Similarly, science luminaries
better known for their popularizing work have also written science fiction novels (e.g., Sagan
1985; Forward 1980).Additionally, an entire subcategory exists of titles purporting to exam-
ine and explain the “science” underlying science-fictional pop culture, of which The Physics of
Star Trek is an early example (Krauss 1995) and The Physics of Superheroes (Kakalios 2005), a
more recent one.

History. The emergence of a robust publishing category called popular science can
be seen as an expression of a basic human desire to make sense of the world,
coupled with the existence of both a diffuse reading public and a class of
knowledgeable expert writers, conditions which existed as early as the Renaissance
in some Italian cities (Eamon 1985). A functional, sociological impetus for science
popularization is linked to the growth of science as a domain with a characteristic
and paradoxical central feature—namely, science produces knowledge that is on the
one hand universal in its scope and applicability, but on the other esoteric in its
origins and provenance. The working out of this tension was part of the early
development of science—for example, in the seventeenth century natural
philosophers wrangled over how much confidence to place in experimental demon-
stration vis-à-vis reason-driven theorizing, and over how much public participation
in the counsels of science was warranted (Eiseley 1973; Lynn 2001; Shapin and
Schaffer 1985).
The sacerdotal character often ascribed to scientists speaking in the public
sphere—speaking, that is, as priestly mediators of the natural world—is a product
of their access to this abstruse but essential knowledge (Lessl 1989). In the 19th
century, popular science essayists and writers emerged in Europe, Australia and the
United States to explicate scientific ideas and make the case, however tendentious,
for their larger social or cultural meaningfulness (Fyfe 2005; Repp 2000; Lightman
2000; Lucas, Maroske, and Brown-May 2006; Menand 2001). Besides increasing
public knowledge of science, the popularization of science garners and shapes public
support for scientific enterprise (Bates 2005; Cassidy 2005, 2006); and some
scientist-popularizers eventually turn from presenting scientific concepts per se to
promoting the principles and practices of scientific inquiry (e.g., Sagan 1973 vs.
Sagan 2006; Gould 1977 vs. Gould 1999; Weinberg 1977 vs. Weinberg 2001) in the
face of exaggerated or dystopian science-fictional and mass-media images of science
(see Nerlich, Clarke, and Dingwall 1999; Petersen, Anderson, and Allan 2005;
Schnabel 2003 for discussions). Popular science also enables disparate scientific
communities to monitor each other for useful ideas and innovations (Paul 2004).
There is, therefore, a recognized social value in the mission of popularizing sci-
ence, despite an unwarranted professional stigmatization of those who engage in it
836 SCIENCE WRITING (NONFICTION)

(Shermer 2002). Opinion surveys show that while support for science and scientific
research is broad and strong, public knowledge of specific scientific concepts is
sparse (Miller 2004; Brown, Propst, and Woolley 2004; Smith 2003; Bainbridge
2002). Given this fact, legislatures, science policy advocates, and science educators
have consistently sought to encourage greater public awareness, knowledge, and
appreciation of science, motivated by the sense that “scientific literacy”—that is,
familiarity with concepts and ideas emerging from the work of science (see DeBoer
2000; Paisley 1998)—is essential for robust economic competitiveness and (more
recently) meaningful democratic decision making (Hodson 2003). For example,
during the 1920s a national debate took place in Britain over the “neglect of
science” in public education, inspiring many scientists to write and publishers to
print books on science for the public (Mayer 1997; Bowler 2006).
However, the incorporation of popular science into formal scientific education
occurs only on an ad hoc basis (Lam 2005; Wally, Levinger, Grainger 2005). In the
1940s, American comic books published biographical accounts of medical
researchers and innovators—such as Louis Pasteur and Walter Reed—as a
commercial effort to capitalize on the general success of comic books by making use
of educational (i.e., “true life”) material (Hansen 2004). Later, during the Cold War,
when the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite created perceptions of a
“science gap,” legislation was enacted to support science education (Clowse 1981),
itself part of a broader political discussion over the character and form of a national
scientific research alliance of private and public research-sponsoring organizations,
institutions, and corporations (Greenhill 2000), most of which are little known to
the public (Brown, Propst, and Woolley 2004). Some critics suggest that the pressure
upon researchers to justify their funding creates an environment in which they are
motivated to seek out media attention, thereby contributing to the “hyping” of
science (Caulfield 2004). Popularizers of science, on the other hand, attribute their
motivation to a desire to share the romance of science, the sense of wonder that it
evokes. “Not explaining science seems to me perverse,” wrote astronomer Carl
Sagan (1996), whose 13-part television documentary Cosmos and its accompanying
book (Sagan 1980) presents a panoramic breadth of scientific ideas and speculation.
“When you’re in love, you want to tell the world.”
Despite the prior existence of some well-known popularizations such as Sagan’s
work and physicist Steven Weinberg’s account of the Big Bang in The First Three
Minutes (1977), the recent history of popular science publishing begins in many
accounts with the publication of physicist Steven Hawking’s A Brief History of Time
(1988), which despite its intellectual density (some reports call it “unreadability”)
initiated a pop science boom in publishing that lasted through the 1990s (Reichhardt
2005; Tallack 2004). At about the same time, the publication of James Gleick’s Chaos
(1987), with its intimations of a revolutionary new mathematics, drew considerable
popular attention to the implications of studying complex dynamic systems. Chaos
theory emerged from such studies, and its popularization took on an enormous weight
as a metaphor for the fragmented and chaotic postmodern world. Mathematical
insights from chaos theory have been used in various scientific disciplines and still
receives some attention from science popularizers (Gribbin 2004). Some suggest that
the popular science boom has tightened up subsequently, though the precise dimen-
sions of the contraction are disputed (Levin 2005a).
The success of Hawking’s book and of science journalist Dava Sobel’s Longitude
(1995)—an account of the solution of a perplexing navigational problem in the 17th
 SCIENCE WRITING (NONFICTION) 837

century—is cited as the proximate cause of a glut of popular science books, in

which “formulaic and regurgitative writing” are the norm—although even the most
critical admit the possibility of gold among the dross (Laszlo 2005). Despite exper-
imentations with novelistic and memoir-form popular science (e.g., Levin 2002), a
consensus seems to have arisen that the paramount requirement for good popular
science is clarity of writing combined with an understanding of the science, rather
than literary flair (Aczel 2004). This may mean only that the content of popular
science has spilled out of its traditional boundaries; for example, certain playwrights
have found great dramatic potential in scientific ideas such as chaos theory
(Stoppard 1993) and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (Frayn 2000). But the over-
all imperative toward clarity may account for the recent critical and popular success
of Bill Bryson’s (2003) A Short History of Nearly Everything, an overview of
scientific ideas. As a travel writer, Bryson is used to clearly explaining unfamiliar
territory to his readers.
Trends and Themes. There are a few topic areas in popular science that consis-
tently receive attention from writers of popular science, their publishers, reviewers,
and the public. These include the related areas of physics, cosmology, and astron-
omy on one hand, and biology, genetics, and evolution (and its discontents) on the
other. The public fascination with these domains of scientific inquiry can be attrib-
uted to their perceived potential for revealing fundamental information about the
nature of the cosmos or the character of humanity. Hawking (1988) after all prom-
ised in A Brief History of Time to show how physics could let us understand the
mind of God; and the emergence of a school of literary criticism that seeks to
analyze the behavior of fictional characters in evolutionary terms speaks to the
power of genetic explanations of human activities (Shea 2005).
Much recent popular science in the domain of physics and cosmology continues
to follow in the tradition of Hawking. The author reviews the development of mod-
ern physics, beginning with Einstein’s insight about the invariance of the speed of
light regardless of the speed of the observer and showing how this led to further
insights about the composition of matter at subatomic scales and the large-scale
history of the universe. After this review, the author turns to a discussion of more
recent, speculative developments that build upon the earlier findings or address their
implications, such as alternate universes (Kaku 2005b), hidden or “rolled up”
dimensions of space-time (Randall 2005), or variations in the speed of light at
different times in the history of the universe (Magueijo 2003). The centennial of the
publication of Albert Einstein’s groundbreaking papers explaining poorly under-
stood experimental findings relating to the nature of light and the behavior of atoms
(one of which earned him a Nobel Prize) in 1905 marked a surge in Einstein-related
books (Levin 2005b), some by physicists (Kaku 2005a; Rigden 2005) and others by
science writers (Fox and Keck 2004)—with the former focusing on the implications
of Einstein’s physics and the latter seeking to provide the scientist’s human context.
Interestingly, a number of books in recent years have been written by physicists
who believe that a mistake is being made by the continued commitment of physi-
cists to string theory, which posits that various subatomic particles can be under-
stood as the three-dimensional “projections” of unobservable string-like objects
vibrating in some kind of higher-dimensional space (Smolin 2006; Woit 2006).
These critiques vary in their vehemence but hinge upon the idea that string theory
is so far from testable that it is not truly scientific. Testability (or falsifiability) means
that an empirical demonstration would produce different results if an idea were true
838 SCIENCE WRITING (NONFICTION)

than if it were false, and so the possibility of experimental refutation is regarded as

the sine qua non of scientific status for a theory. The critics believe that the focus on
string theory is stifling alternatives, and this debate has reached the popular press
(Matthews 2006). For their part, advocates of string theory–based approaches point
to the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland as an
exciting opportunity for garnering further empirical data that may provide support
for string theory models (e.g., Greene 1999; Randall 2005).
With the passing (at least for now) of the heroic age of space exploration—no
giant leaps for humanity seem immediately in the offing—books about astronomy
and space science have grown narrower in scope, even if their scale remains
interplanetary. Science writer Dava Sobel’s The Planets (2005) is a set of essays, one
per planet, that combines scientific information with literary, historical, and even
astrological allusions, in an effort to show how the lore of the planets is very much
embedded in Western thought. The effect is one of a literate and meditative musing
upon the intersection of science and culture. Such efforts are not limited to astro-
nomical science, however: Jennifer Ouellette’s Black Bodies and Quantum Cats
(2005) attempts to illuminate episodes from the history of physics with references
to history and popular culture. Planetologist Steve Squyre’s Roving Mars (2005), on
the other hand, is straight narrative. He tells the story of the design, construction,
launch, and success of Spirit and Opportunity, two robotic Mars rovers that he
helped build. Similarly, astronomer Fred Watson’s Stargazer (2005) is a historical
and technological appreciation of the telescope and its role in astronomy.
Increasingly, however, popular science is drawing upon the cognitive sciences for
its material. This is perhaps to be expected, given the extent to which questions
about the workings of the brain and its relationship to consciousness and mind have
gained prominence in scientific inquiry over the past ten to fifteen years (Horgan
1999). Recent contributions by cognitive scientists to popular science include Daniel
Levitin’s This Is Your Brain On Music (2006), which discusses Levitin’s investiga-
tions into the psychology of music as well as his own metamorphosis from musician
to music-loving scientist. Intellectual territory somewhat more fraught is covered by
Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain (2006). This book provides an account of a
neuropsychiatrist’s conclusions about the differences between male and female
brains, drawing upon her twenty years of research and clinical practice. Brizendine
argues that hormonal and neurological differences between the sexes do in fact
make women more language-, emotion-, and memory-oriented and men more sex-
and aggression-oriented.
Recent popular science drawing on biology and genetics has notably included a
retrospective summary of James Watson’s contribution to molecular biology to med-
icine, law, and technology (Watson and Berry 2003). His codiscovery of DNA’s
double-helical structure (Watson 1968) made possible more recent innovations in
gene therapy, genetic engineering, and genomics. Explanations of evolutionary
theory and the operation of natural and sexual selection continue to occupy the
attention of science popularizers. In The Ancestor’s Tale (Dawkins 2004), Richard
Dawkins retraces the evolutionary branchings that resulted in humanity moving
backwards in time through a series of rendezvous toward the common ancestor of
life on earth. The (specious) currency of intelligent design (ID) has moved some
science popularizers to an ardent defense of evolution, as in skeptic Michael
Shermer’s Why Darwin Matters (2006), which refutes the various argumentative
threads essayed by ID’s proponents, such as the “anthropic principle” (the universe
 SCIENCE WRITING (NONFICTION) 839

seems to have been made especially well suited to us) and “irreducible complexity”
(biological features like eyes and the organelles of cells are just too complicated to
have evolved by chance) by showing that they don’t hold up to scrutiny.
A broader trend to use science to make sense of human action rather than origin
is evident in two quite disparate books: science writer Stephen Hall’s Size Matters
(2006) and geographer Jared Diamond’s Collapse (2005). Hall, himself a short man,
is interested in the effect of height on boys’ happiness and future success. He
outlines the history of research on height and growth and criticizes the medicaliza-
tion of shortness by using human growth hormone on children. Diamond, on the
other hand, is interested in identifying the causal forces at work in broad swaths of
human history. His earlier book Guns, Germs, and Steel (Diamond 1997) argues
that accidents of geography explain how the West came to geopolitical primacy in
modern times. Collapse (subtitled “How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”) is a
set of case studies that again seeks to isolate the causal features of a particular
historical phenomenon: in this case, how societies can emerge, develop, flower, and
then—sometimes even in their moment of flowering—collapse and vanish utterly,
like the Norse in Greenland or the priesthood of the temples of Angkor Wat did. His
answer includes some combination of self-inflicted environmental damage, climate
change, and the presence or absence of hostile or unhelpful neighbors, and it is
derived from comparative quantitative analysis of the factors he finds in the cases
he examines. Similarly, the economist Steven Levitt’s Freakonomics (Levitt and
Dubner 2005) offers counterintuitive, startling conclusions—such as the possibility
that the legalization of abortion may lower the crime rate—drawing upon economic
(rather than moral) reasoning and analysis.
Finally, scientists continue to debate over the relationship between science and
religion, as implicated in the notion of intelligent design discussed above. The
lectures posthumously published as The Varieties of Scientific Experience (Sagan
2006) seek to convey the literal awesomeness of science as a way of understanding
the universe and as a source through which human purpose may be made rather
than received. The God Delusion (Dawkins 2006), a more controversial and polem-
ical book, tries to explain religious sentiment as the product of our inability to
understand the causal features of inanimate objects and the intentionality of
animate beings. Other scientists (Collins 2006; Gingerich 2006) seek to provide rea-
sons for their belief in God. Francis Collins—former director of the National
Human Genome Research Institute and once an atheist—argues that science and
faith are fundamentally compatible, and that the existence of altruism and other
examples of moral law strongly suggests the presence of a God to initiate them.
Owen Gingerich, an astronomer, asserts the anthropic principle that finds the earth
and the universe suspiciously well suited for the emergence of life and intelligence;
from this he infers the hand of a benign creator. Finally, sociobiologist Edward O.
Wilson (2006) retreats from demonstration to embrace persuasion: he addresses his
slim epistle The Creation to a Southern Baptist minister in an effort to enroll people
of faith into the project of protecting and preserving the environment and the earth’s
natural resources, bracketing off disputes about faith and reason in order to save
what is precious to both.
Context and Issues. The popularization of science occurs against a backdrop in
which science stands in tension with other domains of knowledge and belief. In
other words, the writer of popular science is potentially addressing a variety of
audiences, all of which have different stakes in and commitments to the science at
840 SCIENCE WRITING (NONFICTION)

issue. In order to negotiate that variety, the writer of popular science must implic-
itly or explicitly take stances on the boundaries of science (how can science be
distinguished from nonscience?); the relationship between science and society (is
science a separate culture, or an integral part of this one?); and the larger purpose
of science (is science merely a tool for instrumental, empirical knowledge, or does it
fulfill some more transcendental function?).
The ways in which science is bounded off from nonscience is called the “demar-
cation of science.” However, some scholars of science find it difficult to sustain
efforts to mark the science-pseudoscience border, efforts which are based on the
assumption that there exists a unified entity called science that can be defined with
sufficient precision so as to include all desired cases and exclude all undesired ones
(Still and Dryden 2004). Thus, a large subgenre within popular science has grown
up around efforts to allow laypeople to distinguish the hallmarks of true science
from its pseudoscientific imitators. Michael Shermer (2001), for example, attempts
to establish principles for detecting the boundaries of science. Drawing upon science
historian Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) notion of scientific paradigms that shift as new
explanations gain adherents, he posits a scientific borderland in which tentative
theories and approaches exist until moved, via further examination, to the precincts
of either true science or nonscientific pseudoscience. Carl Sagan (1996) proposes
that scientific habits of mind (a concern for evidence, an awareness of fallacious rea-
soning) and a compassionate skepticism are the proper tools for combating
pseudoscience.
The question of the culture of science and its relation to the society that supports
it has prompted a number of critiques. The best known is probably C.P. Snow’s
(1959) discussion of the two cultures of science and the arts, finding the two socially,
politically, and ideologically diametrically opposed to each other. While Snow’s
observations are dated with respect to the particular oppositions he observes, the
overall notion of opposition continues to resonate in some quarters. Joseph
Schwartz (1992), a physicist by training, argues that by conceiving of mathematics
rather than visualization as its heart, science has in fact lost touch with nature and
thereby alienated itself from the rest of society. The problem has real consequences
for the task of science popularization, which therefore must conceive of itself as
translating the arcane into the mundane, and thereby, having to balance fidelity to
the source, and comprehensibility and engagement to the reader (Littmann 2005).
Rhetorical examination of such translations in the popular press by science
reporters have found that science reporters tend to adopt a celebratory rather than
interrogatory tone, and to value decision and action over evaluation and causation
(Fahnestock 1986). Popular science sometimes addresses these issues by considering
the aesthetics of science (Hamann, Morse, and Sefusatti 2005) as well as by directly
confronting the tension between science and the humanities—in some instances
calling for the ultimate reduction of humanistic inquiry to explanations rooted in
natural science (Wilson 1998), and in others arguing for some sort of détente
(Gould 2003).
The tensions between faith and reason, belief and skepticism, the miraculous
sublime and the empirical mundane all contribute to the conflict between religion
and science. Since the emergence of science, religion has been forced to retreat from
many of its claims to causal or empirical knowledge. Thus, many scientists, as well
as others who are dissatisfied with an increasingly unemployed “God of the gaps,”
reconcile science and religion by ascribing to one the domain of facts and the other
 SCIENCE WRITING (NONFICTION) 841

that of values—what evolutionary biologist Steven Jay Gould (1998) called the
“non-overlapping magisteria” of science and faith. Many others also see the conflict
as nugatory (Broad 2006); but this solution is not entirely satisfying, given that it
insulates science from its moral obligations and religion from its duty to see things
as they are as well as how they ought be. Some scientists, motivated by an atheistic
sentiment, attempt to debunk religion as superstition (Dawkins 2006; Dennett
2006). But partisans of religion tend not to make the obvious reverse criticism—that
science may require moral guidance not available to it internally—at least not too
loudly. Instead, some try to reclaim a space for God by suborning the cognitive
authority of science for themselves (Dean 2005; Glanz 2001)—thus, the transfor-
mation of pseudoscientific creation science into intelligent design theory. By all but
the most tendentious of readings, intelligent design counts as pseudoscience, as its
currency is due to ideological rather than scientific reasons. But it merits attention
not for its own intellectual merits, but rather for the extent to which biology
(particularly evolutionary biology, of course) is informed by its self-conscious
contrast with creationist advocacy. This results from the cultural tension between
science and religion, which also manifests itself in the credence given by some
scientists to a strong anthropic principle that wonders why the universe seems to
have been made just right for human beings to exist.
Reception. Popular science is presented in the mass media in a variety of forms.
Science journalism by newspaper reporters on the “science beat” (Nelkin 1995) and
by writers for science-oriented magazines such as Seed, Scientific American, and
Discover provides a training ground for many writers of popular science books.
Another common connection of popular science literature to other media is the
television tie-in—that is, a televised documentary series explicating a popular
science book—or even books and documentaries conceived as synergetic compan-
ions to each other. Examples of televised documentaries of popular science include
Carl Sagan’s 13-episode Cosmos series and its lavishly illustrated accompanying
volume (Sagan 1980). Sagan’s successor is string theorist Brian Greene, whose
description of The Elegant Universe (1999) was turned into a three-hour television
documentary.
The scholarship of popular science occurs in at least two distinct academic com-
munities: (1) studies of public understanding of science (PUS) and the related field
of rhetoric of science (RS) as well as (2) research in science education. PUS is a soci-
ological specialty within the broader domain of science and technology studies
(STS), which is concerned with the social and cultural dimensions of science and
technology (Locke 2001). PUS investigates science in public discourse in all its
forms—including museums, classrooms, newspapers, and community forums—
while rhetoric of science is interested in the persuasive character of scientific texts.
Science educators concern themselves to some degree with the role of popular
science in the classroom (e.g., Parkinson and Adendorff 2005). Additionally, scien-
tific communities pay some attention to popular science as a teaching tool and a
means of judging the reputation of their discipline in the public eye (von Baeyer and
Bowers 2004).
Selected Authors. This section briefly discusses two physical scientists, two
biological scientists, and two science journalists who have popularized and written
about popular science. The physical scientists are Carl Sagan, an astronomer, and
Briane Greene, a physicist known for his work in string theory; the biological
scientists are Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist, and Richard Dawkins, a
842 SCIENCE WRITING (NONFICTION)

zoologist; and the science journalists are Timothy Ferris and Dava Sobel, both of
whom began their careers as reporters.
Carl Sagan (1934–1996). Though Albert Einstein certainly eclipsed Carl Sagan in
terms of sheer fame, Sagan was the first celebrity scientist to be fully integrated into
the popular culture media industry, a fact which had negative consequences for his
academic standing: he was refused tenure at Harvard, and the National Academy of
Science rejected his nomination for membership (Poundstone 1999). Sagan contin-
ued to be a productive scientist even as his popularizing work expanded over the
course of his career (Shermer 2002). Sagan’s oeuvre included speculation about
extraterrestrial intelligence (Sagan 1973), space exploration and colonization (Sagan
1994), the fates of humanity and the earth (Sagan 1997), as well as discussions of
the character and significance of scientific knowledge (Sagan 1996, 2006).
Brian Greene (1963–). Brian Greene is a professor of mathematics and physics at
Columbia University. He received his PhD from Oxford University in 1987, where
he was a Rhodes Scholar upon graduating from Harvard. His research involves
superstring theory, which is an attempt to find an overarching formulation from
which the different kinds of interactions of matter and energy can be derived,
unifying gravity with the other fundamental forces—in brief, a theory of everything
of the sort desired by Einstein, and promised—but ultimately not delivered—by
Hawking. The Elegant Universe (Greene 1999)—winner of the Royal Society’s
Aventis Prize for Science Books in 2000—discusses this search. His more recent
book, The Fabric of the Cosmos (Greene 2004), discusses relativity, cosmology, and
the nature of space and time.
Richard Dawkins (1941–). Richard Dawkins received his PhD from Oxford
University in 1966, and he was for most of his career a professor of zoology at
Oxford (following a brief stint at UC Berkeley). In 1995, he became the Charles
Simonyi Professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. His popular
science explanations of evolutionary theory focus on the notion expounded in The
Selfish Gene (1976) that fitness in terms of natural and sexual selection refers less to
individual organisms than to the genes they comprise, because it is the differential
survival of units of replication that selection pressures act upon. The Blind
Watchmaker (1986), which marshals arguments against the notion of design, was
made into a BBC documentary (Dawkins himself has made numerous appearances
as a scientific presenter and panelist on British television). His increasingly
antagonistic engagement with religious faith, culminating in The God Delusion
(2006), engenders harsh criticism of both his ideas and his methods (Dean 2006;
Holt 2006).
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002). Widely regarded as among the most stylistically
sophisticated and erudite popularizers of science, Stephen Jay Gould at intervals
collected the essays he wrote for Natural History magazine (published by the
American Museum of Natural History) and compiled them in book form. The first
compilation, Ever Since Darwin, appeared in 1977; the last, I Have Landed, was
published in 2002. He was associated with the notion of punctuated equilibrium
(the idea that massive die-offs or extinction events occur in the evolutionary record,
at which point newly emptied ecological niches become available to be filled). His
evolutionary thought has attracted criticism from those who disagree with his
critique of adaptationism (the tendency to regard all features of an organism as
functional products of evolution rather than as possible adaptations needing to be
demonstrated as such), including Richard Dawkins (Shermer 2002). Michael
 SCIENCE WRITING (NONFICTION) 843

Shermer’s even-handed assessment of Gould’s output concludes that the essays by

the latter embody a philosophy of science—and of the history of science—that
holds the value of the past to lie in its service to the present.
Timothy Ferris (1944–). Timothy Ferris is a journalist and professor of journal-
ism who was a reporter in New York City and a writer for Rolling Stone. He then
took a job teaching English at CUNY in Brooklyn and published The Red Limit
(Ferris 1977), an account of the astronomical investigations into the expansion of
the universe. On the strength of his musical, technical, and scientific expertise, he
produced the recording—made of gold and containing sounds of the Earth and its
creatures—that was stowed aboard the Voyager space probe, should any extrater-
restrials ever come upon it. He has written, narrated, produced, and directed in
various combinations audio and video productions for planetariums, news shows,
and television documentaries. He is currently an emeritus professor of journalism at
UC Berkeley, a consultant to NASA on its long-term space exploration policy, and
an amateur astronomer. His books have received critical acclaim from newspapers
as well as awards and recognition from scientific societies and educational institu-
tions. Reviews by scientists find him a clear guide to science for laypeople, albeit one
given perhaps overmuch to poetical extravagances (Gingerich 1997).
Dava Sobel (1947–). Dava Sobel is a professional science writer, with a back-
ground in science reporting and magazine writing. As of 2006–2007, she was the
writer-in-residence at the University of Chicago’s creative writing program. Sobel is
best known for her popular science histories Longitude (1995) and Galileo’s Daugh-
ter (Sobel 1999). Longitude won enormous praise for the lucidity of its prose and
the fascinating story it tells about how the problem of determining longitude at sea
was solved, requiring the construction of a reliable clock as well as accurate celes-
tial observation. Longitude was also produced as a BBC documentary, and then a
dramatized version was aired by the BBC and American cable television. However,
recent scholarship and criticism (Charney 2003; Dizikes 2006) takes issue with
Sobel’s lone genius approach to understanding the history of science, arguing that it
misrepresents the collective and consensual character of science. This approach—
the “standing on the shoulders of giants” school of scientific history—is out of step
with contemporary models of how science works, in which it is viewed as far more
enmeshed in its social context than previously thought.

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848 SEA LITERATURE

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Further Reading
Bryson, Bill. A Short History of Nearly Everything. New York: Basic Books, 2003; Dawkins,
Richard. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976; Diamond, Jared.
Guns, Germs, and Steel. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997; Ferris, Timothy. The Whole
Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997; Gleick,
James. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Viking, 1987; Gould, Stephen Jay. Ever
since Darwin. New York: W.W. Norton, 1977; Greene, Brian R. The Elegant Universe. New
York: W.W. Norton, 1999. Horgan, John. The End of Science. Reading, MA: Addison-
Wesley, 1996. Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World. New York: Random House, 1996;
Smolin, Lee. The Trouble with Physics. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2006; Watson,
James D. The Double Helix. New York: Atheneum, 1968.
WILLIAM J. WHITE

SEA LITERATURE
Definition. To explore the lasting influence of the sea on the American imagina-
tion and thereby explain the popularity of seafaring themes throughout American
literary history is by no means an easy task. The universal human fascination with
uncharted oceans and adventurous voyages notwithstanding, the sea has always
served the dual purpose of arousing desire, to retool Richard Proirier’s famous
phrase, for “a world elsewhere” and simultaneously providing a powerful imagery
that helped to articulate complex human issues of the here and now. Furthermore,
seafaring tales usually comprise different levels of human agency: the natural (i.e.
the sea) and the technological (the ship), individual skills (navigation, the art of
sailing, physical endurance etc.) as much as collective efforts (the ship as a highly
complex, social microcosm or the maritime traditions and achievements of a whole
nation), and the known world (the port of departure, the ship, the crew) and the
unknown, new spaces of the ship’s destination. Taking to the sea also always
involves a certain degree of risk taking, the readiness to take chances and immerse
oneself in a world one can never entirely control. The sea as a literary topic can
thus be understood as epitomizing the greatness and tragedy of human life itself.
And yet, their apparently universal appeal to the contrary, seafaring tales have not
intruded into the collective memory and unconscious of all nations alike. If
regional, cultural, and historical differences are important in shaping a people’s lit-
 SEA LITERATURE 849

erary traditions, they are equally instrumental in instilling a popular taste for the
sea and its mysteries. The lingering appeal of sea fiction in America is a good case
in point.
History. As cultural critic Robert Lawson-Peebles argued “before America existed
on the map, it existed in the imagination” (1988, 7). Given that America was as
much a product of the imagination as the result of geographic discovery, the narra-
tives and stories that Europeans have used to recreate their initial encounter with
the “New World” are heavily indebted to their seagoing experience, an experience
that preceded the actual “landings” or “arrivals” in America. From Christopher
Columbus’s report of his first voyage to the West Indies (1493) to Sir Walter Raleigh’s
The Discovery of Guiana (1595), Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations,
Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1598–1600), and John
Winthrop’s programmatic A Modell of Christian Charity (1630), which was drawn
up in the midst of the hazardous trans-Atlantic passage, the sea and its perils, prom-
ises, and traditional mythical connotations figured prominently in the writings of
early explorers of America.
Though later generations appeared to have been preoccupied with conquering
and settling the “wilderness” that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean,
the imagery of the sea never actually lost its hold on the American mind. The most
important mode of transportation during the early national period—the one that
actually became the symbol of westward migration—was the so-called “prairie
schooner” or Conestoga wagon (a reference to the town in Pennsylvania where they
were originally built). Named because their white-covered tops seemed to float like
graceful sails through the prairie grass, prairie schooners rhetorically invoked the
perilous passage to the New World. In his late, experimental prose poem “John
Marr and Other Sailors” (1888) Herman Melville adopts the image of the prairie
schooner to articulate the (semi-autobiographical) longing for the sea of an old salt
who, putting an end to his rovings, finally married and removed to a log house on
the western frontier:

With some of his former shipmates [ . . . ] he had contrived, prior to this last and more
remote removal, to keep up a little correspondence at odd intervals. But from tidings
of anybody or any sort he [ . . . ] was now cut off; quite cut off, except from such news
as might be conveyed over the grassy billows by the last-arrived prairie-schooners—the
vernacular term, in those parts and times, for the emigrant-wagon arched high over
with sail-cloth, and voyaging across the vast campaign. [ . . . ] To the long-distance
traveler [ . . . ] recent settlements offered some landmarks; but otherwise he steered by
the sun. In early midsummer, even going but from one log-encampment to the next
[ . . . ] travel was much like navigation. (Melville 2000, 265–266)

By rhetorically joining the hazards of westward expansion to the earlier crossing

of the Atlantic, nineteenth-century Americans both reinforced and added to the cul-
tural heritage that ties America to the sea.
More significantly, seascapes also provided a foil for literary discussions of vari-
ous national, political, and philosophical issues in America. Just consider the numer-
ous seafaring stories written during the time of the so-called “American
Renaissance,” when Americans were struggling to define their own idea of a
national literature, thereby slowly weaning themselves from the ongoing cultural
dominance of Europe. “Because the sea was central to their identity,” as critic John
850 SEA LITERATURE

ISHMAEL’S VIEW OF THE COMMON SAILOR

No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the fore-
castle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. [ . . . ] I always go to sea as a sailor because of the
wholesome exercise and pure air of the forecastle deck. For as in this world, head winds are
far more prevalent than winds from astern [ . . . ], so for the most part the Commodore on the
quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks
he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonality lead their leaders in
many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. (Melville 1967, 14–15)

Peck reminds us, “Americans turned to the sea to understand themselves” (2001, 94).
Ishmael, the principle narrator of Melville’s classic sea novel Moby-Dick (or The
Whale (1851)), thus takes to the sea in order to cope with impending “hypochon-
dria,” an ailment particularly reminiscent of the Old World. By the same token, he
does not want “ever to go to sea as a passenger,” nor does he intend to embark on
a career “as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook.” A true American, Ishmael
deliberately abandons the “distinction of such offices” for the community and soli-
darity of the common sailor.
In maritime literature such as Richard Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840),
Melville’s posthumously published novella Billy Budd, Sailor (1891), Jack London’s
The Sea-Wolf (1904), Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (1922), Ernest Hemingway’s
To Have and Have Not (1937), Peter Matthiessen’s Far Tortuga (1975), or Charles
Johnson’s Middle Passage (1990) ships have repeatedly served to articulate concern
about the course of American society. Early on, Melville, the experienced salt-
turned-writer, depicted the world-as-ship or, as in Moby-Dick, the ship-as-world.
The Pequod is a human microcosm of its own, a floating world replete with sailors
from all walks of life. The economic nature and physical hardships of the whaling
business notwithstanding, theirs is a community of equals that cuts across the
boundaries of both class and race. As the doomed journey of the vessel reveals, the
communitarian ideal of the simple sailor is eventually threatened. Yet as a powerful
democratic myth, Melville’s idealized treatment of maritime life nevertheless helped
to establish the sea as a utopian counter-space to the increasing rigidity and social
divisiveness of modern American society.
If we look at the economic conditions from which seafaring parables such as James
Fenimore Cooper’s The Pilot (1824), Melville’s Moby-Dick, or Edgar Allan Poe’s
Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) sprang, we find that nineteenth-century America—its
rapid industrialization notwithstanding—was still a nation that depended heavily on
the sea and its allegedly unlimited resources. This is especially true of those Ameri-
cans who lived near the Eastern shore and participated in one the first truly global
businesses, the bloody harvesting of the sperm whale. In the early nineteenth century,
according to maritime historian Nathaniel Philbrick, “people didn’t invest in bonds
or the stock market, but rather in whale ships” (2000, 20). As we can learn from
Moby-Dick, sperm oil lubricated the machines of the industrial age. If transforming
a gigantic sperm whale into oil entailed a quasi-industrial form of work, the hunting
of the whale—especially, as whalers pushed farther and farther into as yet uncharted
regions of the Pacific—remained a hazardous, myth-laden enterprise. Whalemen,
Philbrick argues, were not merely seagoing hunters and factory workers but also
 SEA LITERATURE 851

explorers whose wondrous maritime adventures continued to haunt the imagination

of Americans well into the twentieth century.
Trends and Themes. Although taking to the sea appeared to be the natural incli-
nation and symbolic focus of New Englanders, the land-bound, aristocratic planter
society of the South was no less predicated on seafaring goods and tropes. As poet
William Carlos Williams remarked, “poised against the Mayflower is the slave ship”
(1925, 208–211). Though the slave trade had been legally banned since 1808, the
entire system of plantation slavery could not have thrived without the triangular
pattern of the transatlantic trafficking in know-how (such as West African rice
planting technology in the Carolinas), human cargo (slaves), and, finally, the prod-
ucts of enforced labor (sugar, molasses, rum, cotton, etc.). As historians of the
colonial period point out, images of the sea had a firm grip on people of color in the
Americas, even if their understanding of the “New World” was never one of myth-
ical homecoming but rather of rejection, disaster, and catastrophe. With an eye on
white America’s maritime roots the militant black leader Malcolm X quips in his
1965 autobiography: “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, my brothers and sisters,
Plymouth Rock landed on us” (201).
Compared to the utopian interpretations of the sea in early white American sea
fiction, the seafaring experience of enslaved Africans differs considerably from that
of their masters. “Whereas Columbus conquered ‘new’ lands for Europeans, thus
increasing their mobility and freedom and providing them with new perspectives,
the African diaspora,” Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich argue in The Black
Columbiad, “stands for the end of freedom, for the loss of perspective; [ . . . ] whites
celebrated the New World as their potential paradise, while the African drifted in a
world of evil spirits which threatened them with social and physical annihilation”
(1994, 5). However, despite the traumatic experience of the so-called “middle
passage” sea images spelled out more than merely disaster for African Americans.
“For the slave community,” as critic Elizabeth Schultz observed, “for whom the sea-
crossing would have been an appalling memory, that some [of their] songs should
identify the sea as an uncontrollable element is probably not surprising. What is
noteworthy, however, is the existence of spirituals and sermons in which an
individual either prevails against the sea or harness it to his use” (1995, 234).
To many slaves on the Atlantic coast, the sea signified a means of escape to free-
dom. Although in some spirituals the implication that the sea may lead to freedom
can hardly be missed (“I set my foot on de Gospel ship / [ . . . ] it landed me over
on Canaan’s shore / An’ I’ll never come back no mo’”), others used sea images in a
more figurative manner. Because much of African American folklore is derived from
the Bible, references to Noah, Jonah, or Moses at the Red Sea are widespread. These
images “have overtones of wish-fulfillment, implying that the sea might lead to
liberation. [ . . . ] spirituals and sermons invoking the sea inspired and encouraged
the slave community, strengthening both their collective hopes for a savior in this
world and individuals’ hopes for saving themselves” (Schultz 1995, 234–235).
If the sea often works as separator, border, or dangerous boundary, it is also, as
Haskell Springer points out, “the joiner of human beings and the center of their com-
munities” (1995, Introduction 1). This is particularly true of African Americans that
had been abducted from their homeland and brought to a strange “new” world where
they found themselves, in Olaudah Equiano’s famous phrasing, “deprived of all
chance of returning to [their] native country” (1995, 56). To the exiled slave
population, Africa was irretrievably lost. The desire to cross the Atlantic again and to
852 SEA LITERATURE

return to the land of “origin” has therefore become a prominent feature of the African
diaspora. Real or imagined, for people of African descent Africa remained the guar-
antor of a common identity, a mythic source of inspiration and community. In African
American writing the sea, therefore, often emerges as a means to bridge the historical
and geographical gap between Africa and the descendants of former slaves. By the
same token, Barbadian poet Edward Kamau Braithwaite claims that only the return
to Africa enabled him to discover his native Caribbean (quoted in Pedersen 1994, 43).
Afrocentrist movements such as “Ethiopianism,” “Pan-Africanism” or the francoph-
one “Negritude” lend ample proof to the pervasive consciousness of common roots
and a shared transatlantic cultural heritage within the African diaspora. In the wake
of these earlier attempts to undo the initial separation and dramatic uprooting asso-
ciated with the middle passage, the sea, and in particular the Atlantic, is now increas-
ingly being reconsidered as a space where routes cross and cultures merge to form an
encompassing network of transatlantic exchange. In his path-breaking study The
Black Atlantic (1993) the British critic Paul Gilroy describes the “ship” as a major
driving force in the cultural system of the African diaspora: “The image of the ship—
a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion—is especially important for
historical and theoretical reasons [ . . . ]. [It] immediately focuses attention on the mid-
dle passage, on the various projects for redemptive return to an African homeland, on
the circulation of ideas and activists as well as the movement of key cultural and
political artifacts: tracts, books, gramophone records, and choirs” (4). Gilroy’s influ-
ential study not only paved the way for a wave of new interrogations into transatlantic
patterns of cultural exchange, but it also reflects the overriding importance of sea
images in American and, especially, African American fiction.
If many African Americans were drawn to maritime occupations for merely
practical reasons, the sea often also figured as a mythical, utopian space that prom-
ised freedom, equality, and adventure. When resting from his job as a ship caulker
in Baltimore, Frederick Douglass mused about the sight of the “beautiful vessels,
robed in white, and so delightful to the eyes of freemen” that he had seen as a boy
on the Chesapeake Bay:

I have often, in the deep stillness of a summer’s Sabbath, stood all alone upon the lofty
banks of that noble bay, and traced, with saddened heart and tearful eye, the countless
number of sails moving off to the mighty ocean. The sight of these always affected me
powerfully. My thoughts would compel utterance; and there, with no audience but the
Almighty, I would pour out my soul’s complaint, in my rude way, with an apostrophe
to the moving multitude of ships. (1993, 74)

Having thus contemplated the multitude of ships on the Chesapeake Bay,

Douglass decided to follow in their wake and attempt the hazardous escape to the
north: “Why am I a slave? I will run away. I will not stand it [ . . . ] I will take to
the water. This very bay shall yet bear me into freedom. The steamboats steered in
a north-east course from North point; and when I get to the head of the bay, I will
turn my canoe adrift and walk straight through Delaware into Pennsylvania” (1993,
74–75). Douglass finally escaped by dressing up as a black sailor and—with the
help of forged “seaman’s protection” papers—embarked on a ferry to cross the
Susquehanna River.
African American writers have repeatedly added to Douglass’s visionary “apos-
trophe to the moving multitude of ships.” In the famous opening chapter of Their
 SEA LITERATURE 853

Eyes Were Watching God (1978), Zora Neale Hurston adopts the same nautical
image, although in this instance it is used to express her dissatisfaction with those
male would-be sailors that never manage to actually go “aboard”:

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide.
For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the
Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. (9)

If for Douglass and Hurston the liberating prospects of a life at sea remained
largely a rhetorical figure, for blues poet Langston Hughes taking to the sea
represented a crucial moment in the search of an identity of his own. In his
autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), Hughes describes how he fled the racist atmos-
phere at Columbia University that at the time was mostly white and how, as an
ordinary sailor, he embarked on a merchant vessel headed for Africa:

Melodramatic maybe, it seems to me now. But then it was like throwing a million
bricks out of my heart when I threw the books into the water. I leaned over the rail of
the S.S. Malone and threw the books as far as I could out into the sea—all the books
I had had at Columbia, and all the books I had lately bought to read. [ . . . ] Then
I straightened up, turned my face to the wind, and took a deep breath. I was a seaman
going to sea for the first time—a seaman on a big merchant ship. And I felt that noth-
ing would ever happen to me again that I didn’t want to happen. I felt grown, a man,
inside and out. [ . . . ] Inside the hot cabin, George lay stark naked in a lower bunk,
talking and laughing and gaily waving his various appendages around. Above him in
the upper bunk, two chocolate-colored Puerto Rican feet stuck out from one end of a
snow-white sheet, and a dark Puerto Rican head from the other. It was clear that
Ramon in the upper bunk didn’t understand more than every tenth word of George’s
Kentucky vernacular. But he kept on laughing every time George laughed—and that
was often. (Hughes 1940, 3–4)

The liberating aspects of seafaring are equally prominent in Hughes’s poetry. In

his poem “The Young Sailor,” he foregrounds the self-esteem and personal inde-
pendence often associated with shipboard life: “This strong young sailor / Of the
wide seas” (Hughes 1994, 62). Not unlike earlier generations of African American
sailors, Hughes ostensibly cherished the relative absence of racial constraint aboard
ship. If this freedom, at times, turned out to be treacherous, it was nevertheless real
insofar as it provided a way out of the racist environment on the continent and
allowed the skilled black mariner a degree of self-assertion and quasi-autonomy
unknown in many other professional areas.
To contemporary African American writers of the sea, the infamous middle pas-
sage now often represents an imaginary journey into a common past. In Paule
Marshall’s 1983 novel Praisesong for the Widow, the black female protagonist con-
sciously links her own history to the collective history of all African peoples. As
Schultz notes, “in the course of Marshall’s novel, Avey Johnson, a black matron
from North White Plains, is nudged back through her own history, back through the
history of her people, with the sea as the setting for each stage of her own psychic
rebirth” (1995, 252–253). In close symbolic parallel to the collective trauma of the
middle passage, Avey is made to undergo a similar catastrophic yet for her also
cleansing seafaring experience. Aboard a battered schooner on her way to the small
Caribbean island of Carriacou, choppy seas cause her to vomit in plain view of a
854 SEA LITERATURE

motley crowd of men, women, and children. Although Avey is reminded of similar
embarrassing moments in her childhood, the ironic, affirmative stance of the people
on board, who recontextualize the event as the disposal of “waste and pretense”
from Avey’s bourgeois black life, enables her to master the imagined humiliation.
Having thus symbolically relived her own history through the history of African
people, Avey eventually leaves the sea and returns to life in the community.
In his novel Middle Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990,
Charles Johnson returns to the 1830s and the world of slavery; the protagonist of
the novel, Rutherford Calhoun who is a newly freed slave, embarks on an
adventurous journey across the Atlantic to Africa and, later, back to the New World.
To his shock and horror Calhoun learns that the vessel, significantly called The
Republic, is a slave ship whose secret mission is to transport the last survivors of a
legendary African tribe, the Allmuseri, from their devastated homeland to America.
His journey turns into a symbolic, perilous voyage into the cruel machinery of the
slave trade and, even more important, the netherlands of his own, divided psyche.
As a freed slave Calhoun is a product of the black and white worlds, a fact that
leads to a form of ontological “inbetweeness” that Johnson, in a mix of historical
detail and satire, explores with the help of phenomenological philosophy and
Zen Buddhism.
From yet a different angle, West Indian writer Caryl Phillips, who teaches at
Amherst College, also revisits the former routes of the slave trade. In what amounts
to a constant shifting between an imaginary and factual journey across continents,
Phillips metaphorically employs the sights and sounds of the (black) Atlantic to
investigate the complex cultural heritage of slavery. In his autobiographical trave-
logue The Atlantic Sound (2000), he encodes the sound of waves that break against
the slave ship with the mythic ramifications of the African Diaspora. Long after the
abominable traffic has ceased, the throbbing, threatening sound of the waves still
holds sway, according to this sensitive traveler into our racial past, over the imagi-
nation of Africans, Americans, and Europeans alike.
Contexts and Issues. American sea fiction reflects the history of the larger society
(including its racial divisiveness), and yet, at the same time, it also transcends the
historical context by continuously bringing into focus a number of universal themes
and topics. Even though in some cases neither the voyage nor the sea itself takes
center stage, authors drawn to the sea usually invest both with a symbolism and
meaning that transform the actual seagoing experience into a kind of spiritual
journey. If this is true, as we have seen, of the bulk of maritime literature of the
nineteenth century—the so-called great age of sail—it is equally true for a large
number of contemporary sea fictions, written against the backdrop of rapid tech-
nological and ecological change. If in some cases the prevalent mood is rather
somber and nostalgic, in others we find an ongoing effort to wrest from the bare,
unchanging facts of maritime life a new meaning, an as yet untold story. Regardless
of the form that story eventually takes—autobiographical, documentary, or
fictional—it often reverberates with references to earlier attempts by other authors
to write about the sea. American sea fiction thus betrays a sense of continuity and
tradition that in other literary genres critics have come to find problematic. Cutting
across a huge variety of narrative techniques and differing authorial agendas,
American writers of the sea appear to be bound together by a shared understanding
of the importance of the sea as a joining rather than a separating force and, perhaps
more important, as a vital ingredient of American identity.
 SEA LITERATURE 855

If for Melville and his generation seascapes were often laden with metaphysical,
dark philosophical meaning, turn-of-the-century writers such as Stephen Crane,
Jack London, Frank Norris, and later dramatist Eugene O’Neill used the sea to
probe contemporary theories of biological evolution (Darwinism) and psychoanalysis
(Freud and Jung). In this realist-naturalist tradition of American sea literature the
captain and his crew act out in representative ways the eternal laws of nature or, as
in Crane’s “The Open Boat” (1897) and London’s “A Thousand Deaths” (1899),
the threat of drowning takes on complicated psychological meaning thereby epito-
mizing the subliminal structure of human consciousness. Other writers of that era
such as William McFee (next to London probably the most famous American
author of maritime fiction during his time), Lincoln Colcord, Richard Hallet, or
Archi Binns, were either trying to wed the increasingly important role of the
engineer to the tradition or register the fact that the kind of life aboard ship eter-
nalized in Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840), as London once noted, “had
passed utterly away” (Bender 1988, 150).
Though often neglected by critics and historians of sea literature, the most popu-
lar book about an epic sea voyage in modern times, the one that became a model for
generations of sailor-writers interested in the physical and psychic challenges of
single-handed circumnavigation, is certainly Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around
the World (1900). An expert sailor and professional captain, Slocum embarked in
1895 on a voyage around the world in a 37-foot sloop of 9 tons that he himself
rebuilt from an abandoned hulk. The fact that he decided to use only the sparsest
means of navigational technology and generally championed simplicity as the most
adequate form of a sailor’s life helped to turn his autobiographical book into a
maritime classic often compared to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854). When he
writes “I sailed with a free wind day after day, marking the position of my ship on
the chart with considerable precision; but this was done by intuition, I think, more
than by slavish calculations” (1996, 145) Slocum’s view of the alleged benefits of
modern science is utterly skeptical. Yet unlike Thoreau’s scathing cultural critique
before him, his is a rather soft-spoken and ironic assessment of the future course of
the world. If Slocum’s life embodies a history of the decline of sailing as a commercial
activity in America, his epic voyage and the book it spawned were meant to celebrate
the tenacity and perseverance of the simple sailor in the face of natural chaos.
To pit man against nature has always been a favorite topic among writers of sea
fiction. In the novels and stories of Ernest Hemingway this classic theme increasingly
comes to reflect the author’s animalistic view of human life. Hemingway, in Joseph
DeFalco’s words “the most distinguished writer of prose fiction in the twentieth
century fully to explore the sea” (1995, 298), showed a life-long interest in the
ocean as a metaphor of human conflict and man’s existential condition. Of his three
major sea novels—To Have and Have Not (1937), The Old Man and the Sea
(1952), and Islands in the Stream (1970, posthumously)—The Old Man and the Sea
is probably the most radical attempt to capture the sea’s symbolic significance. Both
Islands in the Stream and The Old Man and the Sea came out of a project that went
through several mutations and that Hemingway originally envisioned as his “sea
book”: a trilogy entitled The Sea When Young, The Sea When Absent, and The Sea
in Being. Though not all segments of the trilogy were published, these later books
betray a heightening concern about the sea as a metaphor of existence. This
becomes particularly clear in The Old Man and the Sea where the protagonist, a
Cuban fisherman called Santiago, challenges the forces of biology and the marine
856 SEA LITERATURE

environment. Though he is marvelously in tune with the ocean, its creatures and
mysteries, Santiago also represents the dualisms and ambivalence of the human
relationship with nature. If his is a life, as one critic called it, of “biological broth-
erhood” (Bender 1988, 195) Santiago’s readiness to accept the voracious struggle
for survival in nature turns him into a sea hero of tragic dimensions. The story,
which is replete with religious and existentialist meaning, represents Hemingway’s
attempt to write a parable of the sea that is set—contrary to his other seafaring
fictions—in an ahistorical situation. Santiago’s struggle with the gigantic Marlin
becomes a universal story of man’s return to harmony in nature and the treacherous
ambivalence of this return exemplified by the sharp contrast between Santiago’s
timeless world and the tourists who at the end of the novella tactlessly disrupt the
sacred unity of the old man and the sea.
In Peter Matthiessen’s highly acclaimed novel Far Tortuga (1975), the nautical
setting is wedded to particular socio-historical circumstances such as the declining
turtle fishery of the Cayman Islands during the 1960s. However, the tragic death of
Captain Raib Avers, one of the last “turtlers,” also resonates with larger cultural
and moral implications. By some critics judged the best American novelist of the
sea since Herman Melville, Matthiessen exploits a number of classic topics in
maritime fiction—the last voyage, nautical hazards, the ambiguous character of the
captain, mutiny, and the violence and amorality often associated with life aboard
ship. However, the blending of different linguistic registers and the unusual
psychological depth of the novel turns the seemingly simple tale into an increasing
complex story about human fallibility; more generally, its major theme is man’s
age-old attempt to overcome the vagaries of fate and to bring order, at least
temporarily, to a dark and chaotic universe. Matthiessen’s challenging narrative
technique, as critics often claim, amalgamates postmodern style and traditional sea
writing. What is more, Far Tortuga and the later Men’s Lives: The Surfmen and
Baymen of the South Fork (1986), a documentary history of the declining fishing
communities on eastern Long Island, foreground issues that have become an
ongoing concern of writers about the sea in contemporary America: (1) the van-
ishing world of individuals heroes, workers, or navigators; (2) the problem of
increasing mechanization and commercial exploitation in maritime professions;
and (3) the disastrous ecological consequences of modern ways of life that appear
to threaten a staggering number of marine species, eventually creating a dangerous
imbalance between man and nature.
A prominent topic ever since Rachel Carson’s environmentalist classic The Sea
Around Us (1951), ecological concerns loom large in contemporary American litera-
ture of the sea. If Matthiessen stands out because of his interest in and detailed knowl-
edge of marine biology, others treat the sea with a similar kind of reverence born from
a consciousness of man’s dependence on an intact marine habitat. Given the obvious
and often irrevocable destruction of wetlands, rivers, and even oceans many authors
articulate human responsibility and occasionally a nostalgic longing for the sea as a
sustaining, purifying force. One aspect of this new trend in nautical fiction is an empha-
sis on marine life and the tendency to adopt the animal’s point of view. In Hank Searls’s
novels Overboard (1977) and Sounding (1982), for example, much of the action is told
from the imagined perspective of a pregnant female shark and an aging bull sperm
whale. Set against a complementary story line that involves a stranded Soviet nuclear
submarine and sprinkled with allusions to Melville’s Moby-Dick, Sounding attempts to
reintroduce interspecies communication as an important aspect of sea fiction.
 SEA LITERATURE 857

An interesting philosophical twist on this topic is Edward Albee’s play Seascapes

(1975). Albee, the foremost American representative of the theatre of the absurd,
confronts an elderly American couple strolling on a New England beach with two
human-sized lizards that speak and act like real people. The lizards apparently no
longer feel at home in the sea, but the conversation is so hopeless and depressing
that they are nearly driven back to their original environment. Against the symbol-
ically rich backdrop of the seascape, the play, for which Albee won his second
Pulitzer Prize for drama, explores the alienated, distorted relations between man,
animals, and the natural environment. The play also asks fundamental philosophical
questions about whether life is worth living, but it decides, as critics pointed out,
that there is no alternative.
In an equally surrealistic fashion, postmodern author Kurt Vonnegut also investi-
gates the relationship between humans and marine environments. His 1985
postapocalyptic novel Galápagos proffers an alternate version of human history: in
the wake of a sudden war a motley group of survivors manage to escape to the
Galápagos Islands where they evolve over the course of a million years into a kind
of amphibian species. Because their brains have shrunken considerably, they are
now able to live a life more in tune with the sea and their natural surrounds.
Selected Authors. Matthiessen, Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Ken Kesey, or science
fiction author Ursula Le Guin are often grouped as postmodern authors with a keen
interest in both the metaphorical and ecological ramifications of the sea. However,
the one writer best known for repeatedly probing the symbolic interfaces between
seafaring and the act of storytelling is novelist John Barth. In a number of intricately
woven postmodern fables, Barth effectively juxtaposes the at times erratic, mean-
dering activity of sailing or floating on the water and the conventions of prose
fictions. In his first published novel, The Floating Opera (1956), the narrative is
repeatedly compared to a showboat idly drifting in the Virginia and Maryland
tidewater areas. The boat also emerges as a metaphor or mirror of human life in
general. As Todd Andrews, the narrator of the story, explains:

It always seemed a fine idea to me to build a showboat with just one big flat open deck
on it, and to keep a play going continuously. The boat wouldn’t be moored, but would
drift up and down the river on the tide, and the audience would sit along both banks.
They could catch whatever part of the plot happened to unfold as the boated past, and
then they’d have to wait until the tide ran back again to catch another snatch of it, if
they still happened to be sitting there. To fill in the gaps they’d have to use their imag-
inations, or ask more attentive neighbors, or hear the word passed along from upriver
to downriver. Most times they wouldn’t understand what was going on at all, or they’d
think they knew, when actually they didn’t. [ . . . ] I needn’t explain that that’s how
much of life works. (Barth 1956, 7)

Like many of his postmodern fellow writers Barth often foregrounds the impor-
tance of storytelling as the most appropriate analogy to life itself: life holds mean-
ing because it is a story constantly told and re-told, a multifaceted narrative plot
that changes with each introduction of a new character or story line. Yet if the act
of narration serves well to illustrate Barth’s point that life is as quintessentially
fabricated, unpredictable, and shifting as the numerous stories it holds in store, the
ubiquitous sea imagery in his work emphasizes that point even further.
In Barth’s 1982 novel Sabbatical: A Romance, perhaps his most successful medi-
tation on his twin interests—boating and storytelling—the action centers around a
858 SEA LITERATURE

nine-month sabbatical cruise on a sailboat named Pokey, Wye I. The novel is infused
with sailing terminology, and its two principal characters, Fenwick Turner, a former
CIA agent, and his wife, Susan Seckler, a professor of American literature, blend
sophisticated reflections on their past lives and future with nautical metaphors, lit-
erary history, and narratological discourse. With Sabbatical, as Dennis Berthold
observes, Barth “legitimizes sea fiction as a serious academic subgenre and ensures
that the most sophisticated contemporary literary critics will have to know a jib
from a stay” (1995, 319). Among contemporary writers of sea fiction Barth is cer-
tainly among the most formally varied and intellectually challenging. His fascina-
tion with similarities between storytelling and the world of sailors and ships can be
traced throughout his extensive prose fiction and essay writing. In novel after novel
he returned to either ships or the people who navigate them interweaving the tradi-
tion of sea fiction with his special interest in authorial self-reflection and the
mechanics of storytelling. If in his more recent novels—Tidewater Tales: A Novel
(1987), The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991), Once Upon a Time:
A Floating Opera (1994), or Coming Soon (2001)—sea topics figure to varying
degrees, all of these works add, each in its own interesting way, to Barth’s ongoing
obsession with the sailing world and the estuarine tidewater system of his naviga-
tional “home turf,” the Chesapeake Bay.
Having so far reviewed selected contemporary novels that either employ sea
imagery to explore the conflictual relationship between humans and the environ-
ment or share an interest in seafaring as an epitome of man’s voyage of self-
discovery, I want to conclude this essay by mentioning a number of recent popular
sea fictions that do not, or at least not exclusively, fall into one of these categories.
Following in the wake of Peter Benchley’s enormously successful marine thriller
Jaws (1973), there are quite a few texts that seek to exploit the sensationalism of
shipwrecks or natural disasters. Among the more interesting examples are Beryl
Bainbridge’s dark and brittle tale of the Titanic’s fatal voyage, Every Man for
Himself (1996), and the superbly written first novel of Sebastian Junger, The
Perfect Storm (1997). Junger recounts the authentic 1991 October storm off the
coast of Nova Scotia when natural forces combined to create the “perfect storm”
whose conditions could not possibly have been worse. Also based on authentic
events are Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools (1962), which centers on interna-
tional travelers going from Mexico to Germany in 1931 aboard the freighter Vera,
Robert Stone’s fictional account of a failed solo circumnavigation race in 1969,
Outerbridge Reach (1992), and Peter Landesman’s The Raven (1995), which tells
the story of the disappearance of a ship with thirty-six people who had gone out
for a day of deep-sea fishing.
There are also numerous novels that turn on naval history and military events
such as Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October (1984), William Brinkley’s The
Last Ship (1988), and David Poyer’s The Med. (1988), the first book of a series
designed around the protagonist Dan Lenson, a graduate from the Naval Academy.
An outstanding representative of this category is David Guterson’s Snow Falling On
Cedars, which won the Pen/Faulkner Award in 1995. The novel is set on San Piedro
Island, north of Puget Sound; it tells the story of a local fisherman, who in 1954 is
found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese American, named Kabuo Miyamoto,
charged with his murder. The gripping tale evolves around a historical incident
during World War II when San Piedro’s Japanese residents were sent into exile while
their neighbors watched.
 SEA LITERATURE 859

Finally, I want to mention a group of texts that is informed—like much of

American sea literature—by either autobiographical or regional/geographical expe-
riences. A remarkable representative of this tradition is John Casey’s 1989 novel
Spartina. Set on the Southern Rhode Island shore, the story offers a bleak portrait
of a region that is dramatically changing under the impact of increasingly new
resorts for inland tourists. Though conscious of his own anachronistic lifestyle, the
novel’s protagonist, fisherman, and boat-builder Dick Pierce, embarks on a heroic
project: to finish a half-built 50-foot boat in his backyard so he can fish for red crabs
out in deep water and make some real money to support his family. Spartina won
the National Book Award in 1989; its description of Pierce’s complex, grieving
character has been repeatedly compared to the best in sea fiction since Melville and
Hemingway. Other examples of regionally inspired maritime fiction include William
Martin’s Cape Cod (1992), which follows the involvement of the people of Cape
Cod with the sea from the landing of the Mayflower to the present era of whale-
watching; Annie Proulx’s internationally successful novel The Shipping News
(1993); James Michel Pratt’s saga of three generations of lighthouse keepers off the
coast of Massachusetts, The Lighthouse Keeper (2000); Tony Horwitz’s Blue
Latitudes (2002), an autobiographical travelogue by a journalist who embarks on a
cruise to retrace the nautical legacies of the British navigator James Cook; and Lewis
Robinson’s collection of stories set on the Maine coast, Officer Friendly and Other
Stories (2003).
If the present survey of American maritime literature has not nearly covered
the staggering number and huge variety of texts in the field, it should have
become clear that today the tradition of sea fiction, though constantly trans-
forming itself to meet new challenges and concerns, is as vital a part of the
national literary identity as in the days of Cooper, Dana, and Melville. Far from
becoming a fringe activity, sea writing in America continues to investigate the
ocean’s compelling mysteries and to plow its uncharted depth for symbols to
articulate our own modern and postmodern version of man’s universal fascina-
tion with the sea.
Reception. Today, scholars examining the role of the sea in American literary
history are confronted with a wave of critical texts that stand in need to be charted
and explored. Though in the broadest sense the topic may well include Native
American water myths or contemporary seashore environmentalism, in my own
approach here I could only present a small number of American writers and discuss
ways in which they recreate, question, and thereby continuously reinforce connec-
tions (whether imagined or real) between America and the sea. More encompassing,
encyclopedic publications include Haskell Springer’s America and the Sea: A Literary
History (1995), Peter Neill’s compilation of primary American sea literature
American Sea Writing: A Literary Anthology (2000), and Jill B. Gidmark’s
Encyclopedia of American Literature of the Sea and Great Lakes (2001). Equally
comprehensive though by now also somewhat dated is Myron J. Smith’s
and Robert C. Weller’s Sea Fiction Guide, a partially annotated listing of sea writ-
ing and authors up to 1976. Other critics have looked more selectively at the tradi-
tion and produced case studies such as Patricia Ann Carlson’s Literature and Lore
of the Sea (1986), Bert Bender’s Sea-Brothers: The Tradition of American Sea
Fiction From Moby-Dick To the Present (1988), and lately Robert Foulke’s topical
study The Sea Voyage Narrative (2002) and Klaus Benesch’s, Jon-K Adams’s, and
Kerstin Schmidt’s The Sea and the American Imagination (2004).
860 SEA LITERATURE

Bibliography
Albee, Edward. Seascape—A Play. New York: Atheneum, 1975.
Barth, John. Coming Soon. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001.
———. Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1994.
———. The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991.
———. The Tidewater Tales: A Novel. New York: Putnam’s, 1987.
———. Sabbatical: A Romance. New York: Putnam’s, 1982.
———. Lost in the Funhouse. New York: Doubleday, 1968.
———. The Floating Opera. New York: Appleton, 1956.
Bender, Bert. Sea-Brothers: The Tradition of American Sea Fiction from Moby-Dick to the
Present. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1988.
Benesch, Klaus, Jon-K Adams, and Kerstin Schmidt, eds. The Sea and the American
Imagination. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2004.
Berthold, Dennis. “Prose Since 1960.” America and the Sea: A Literary History. Haskell
Springer, ed. Athens/London: The University of Georgia Press, 1995, 307–326.
Carlson, Patricia N., ed. Literature and Lore of the Sea. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1986.
Carson, Rachel. The Sea Around Us. New York: Oxford University Press, 1951.
Crane, Stephen. “The Open Boat.” The Works of Stephen Crane. Vol. 5. Fredson Bowers, ed.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969.
Dana, Richard Henry, Jr. Two Years Before the Mast. New York: Harper, 1840.
DeFalco, Joseph. “Modernist Prose and Its Antecedents.” America and the Sea: A Literary
History. Haskell Springer, ed. Athens/London: The University of Georgia Press, 1995,
289–306.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written
by Himself. David Blight, ed. Boston/New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993.
Gidmark, Jill B., ed. Encyclopedia of American Literature of the Sea and Great Lakes.
Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2001.
Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. Vincent Carretta, ed. New
York: Penguin, 1995.
Fabre, Geneviève, and Klaus Benesch, eds. African Diasporas in the Old and the New World.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003.
Farr, James. Black Odyssey: The Seafaring Tradition of Black Americans. New York: Peter
Lang, 1989.
Foulke, Robert. The Sea Voyage Narrative. (1997) New York/London: Routledge, 2002.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Hemingway, Ernest. Islands in the Stream. New York: Scribner’s, 1970.
———. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner’s, 1952.
———. To Have and Have Not. New York: Scribner’s, 1937.
Horwitz, Tony. Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before. New
York: Picador, 2002.
Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Arnold Rampersad and David
Roessel, eds. New York: Vintage, 1995.
———. The Big Sea. New York: Knopf, 1940.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. Urbana/Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 1978.
Johnson, Charles. Middle Passage. New York: Atheneum, 1990.
London, Jack. Great Short Works of Jack London. Ed. Earle Labor. New York: Harper, 1965.
Lawson-Peebles, Robert. Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America: The
Worlds Turned Upside Down. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Malcolm X. Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove Press, 1965, 201.
Marshall, Paule. Praisesong for the Widow. New York: Dutton, 1983.
Martin, William. Cape Cod. New York: Grand Central, 1992.
 SEA LITERATURE 861

Matthiessen, Peter. Men’s Lives: The Surfmen and Baymen of the South Fork. New York:
Random, 1986.
———. Far Tortuga. New York: Random, 1975.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York/London: Norton, 1967.
———. Billy Budd, Sailor. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., eds. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1962.
Peck, John. Maritime Fiction: Sailors and the Sea in British and American Novels,
1719–1917. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Neill, Peter, ed. American Sea Writing: A Literary Anthology. New York: The Library of
America, 2000.
Pederson, Carl. “Sea Change: The Middle Passage and the Transatlantic Imagination.” The
Black Columbiad. Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich, eds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1994, 42–51.
Philbrick, Nathaniel. In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. New
York: Viking, 2000.
Phillips, Caryl. The Atlantic Sound. London: Faber and Faber, 2000.
Poirier, Richard. A World Elsewhere. The Place of Style in American Fiction. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1966.
Robillard, Douglas, ed. The Poems of Herman Melville. Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University
Press, 2000.
Schultz, Elizabeth. “African-American Literature.” America and the Sea: A Literary History.
Haskell Springer, ed. Athens/London: The University of Georgia Press, 1995,
233–259.
Slocum, Joshua. Sailing Alone Around the World. (1900). London: Adlard Coles Nautical,
1996.
Smith, Myron J., Jr., and Robert C. Weller, eds. Sea Fiction Guide. Metuchen, New Jersey:
The Scarecrow Press, 1976.
Sobel, Dava. Longitude: The Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific
Problem of His Time. London: Fourth Estate Limited, 1996.
Sollors, Werner, and Maria Diedrich, eds. “Introduction.” The Black Columbiad: Defining
Moments in African American Literature and Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1994.
Springer, Haskell. “Introduction: The Sea, the Land, the Literature.” America and the Sea:
A Literary History. Haskell Springer, ed. Athens/London: The University of Georgia
Press, 1995, 1–31.
———. “Call Them All Ishmael?: Fact and Form in Some Nineteenth-Century Sea Narra-
tives.” Literature and Lore of the Sea. Patricia Ann Carlson, ed. Amsterdam: Rodopi,
1986, 14–22.
Stein, Roger B. Seascape and the American Imagination. New York: Clarkson N. Potter,
1975.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Galápagos. New York: Delacorte, 1985.
Williams, Williams Carlos. In the American Grain. (1925) New York: New Directions, 1956.

Further Reading
Bender, Bert. Sea-Brothers: The Tradition of American Sea Fiction from Moby-Dick to the
Present. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1988; Benesch, Klaus, Jon-K Adams,
and Kerstin Schmidt, eds. The Sea and the American Imagination. Tübingen: Stauffenburg,
2004; Berthold, Dennis. “Prose Since 1960.” America and the Sea: A Literary History. Ed.
Haskell Springer. Athens/London: The University of Georgia Press, 1995, 307–326; Foulke,
Robert. The Sea Voyage Narrative. (1997) New York/London: Routledge, 2002; Neill, Peter,
ed. American Sea Writing: A Literary Anthology. New York: The Library of America, 2000;
Carlson, Patricia N., ed. Literature and Lore of the Sea. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1986; Smith,
862 SELF-HELP LITERATURE

Myron J., Jr., and Robert C. Weller, eds. Sea Fiction Guide. Metuchen, New Jersey: The
Scarecrow Press, 1976.
KLAUS BENESCH

SELF-HELP LITERATURE
Definition. The genre of “self-help” literature is known by several other labels,
including “self-improvement,” “self-actualization,” “life skills,” “personal growth,”
and “recovery.” The genre is so popular that it merits its own section on the New
York Times weekly bestseller list, which is titled “Advice, How-To, and Miscella-
neous.” Books in this genre often fit several other categories utilized by retailers,
librarians, and marketers, including art instruction, alternative medicine, business
writing, career coaching, diet, etiquette, health, humor, inspirational literature,
motivational literature, new age literature, personal finances, popular psychology,
reference, and spirituality. Whereas this entry will use the term “self-help” through-
out, many of the guides and manuals regarded as “self-help” books actively urge
their readers to seek assistance rather than relying solely on their own resources.
Such texts can be regarded as “self-help” in terms of the books’ function as starter
kits and handbooks rather than stand-alone, self-contained solutions to the readers’
issues.
History. Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), whose many roles included author and
publisher, remains an iconic figure to many modern advocates of task and time
management. The advice he dispensed through his series of Poor Richard’s
Almanacs (1732–1758) and the manuscript of his autobiography (edited and
published in numerous versions after his death) is still quoted widely and frequently,
including on the front page of “Franklin planners” (“Dost thou love life? Then do
not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of”). The planners, a calendar-
based tool popular among many white-collar employees, are part of a larger,
massively influential system developed and marketed by FranklinCovey, a company
formed from the 1997 merger of Franklin Quest (the original manufacturer of the
planners) and Covey Leadership Center (a training and consulting corporation). The
Covey Leadership Center was founded by Stephen R. Covey (b. 1932), who wrote
The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People (1989). The book sold over 15 million
copies during its first two decades in print, appearing on the New York Times
Business Best Sellers lists well into the first decade of the twenty-first century. Sequels
such as First Things First (Covey, Merrill, and Merrill 1994), The Seven Habits of
Highly Effective Families (Covey 1997), and The Eighth Habit (Covey 2004) were
also bestsellers. Covey’s fame is manifest both in the honors he’s received, such as
being named one of America’s twenty-five most influential people (Time 1996), as
well as the ongoing success of the FranklinCovey company and its stores, workshops,
and conferences. The phrase “seven habits” is so recognizable that it is frequently
borrowed for headlines to books and articles largely unrelated to Covey or time man-
agement; a quick Internet search turns up titles such as the “Seven Habits of Highly
Effective Massgoers” (2004), “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Imperialists” (2004),
“Seven Habits of Highly Effective Foundries,” “Seven Habits of Highly Effective
Physical Educators” (2005), and “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Global Private-
Public Health Partnerships” (2007).
Another iconic figure in the genre is Dale Carnegie (1888–1955). As with
Franklin’s autobiography, Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People
(1936) and How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948) have been reprinted and
 SELF-HELP LITERATURE 863

repackaged in multiple editions since their original press runs; as with the
FranklinCovey corporation, the Dale Carnegie Training company (founded 1912)
conducts numerous courses nationwide that are factored into many business budgets.
A contemporary of Carnegie, Minister Norman Vincent Peale (1898–1993),
wrote The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) and forty-five other books; as with
How to Win Friends and Influence People, The Power of Positive Thinking remains
in print in multiple formats. Peale’s platform was religious rather than corporate;
the continuation of his legacy has resided in Guideposts, an inspirational magazine
Peale co-founded with his wife in 1945.
In the secular realm, one of the most influential figures among self-help enthusi-
asts is talk-show host Oprah Winfrey (b. 1952), whose endorsements have helped
secure the success of other household names such as Deepak Chopra (b. 1946), John
Gray (b. 1951), Suze Orman (b. 1951), “Dr. Phil” McGraw (b. 1950), and
Marianne Williamson (b. 1952). Winfrey, repeatedly named on Time 100 lists
(Mandela 2007), also promotes a number of self-help books via her lifestyle maga-
zine, O, which premiered in May 2000. The inaugural theme, “Live Your Best Life,”
became the title of an anthology (Randol 2005), as well as several tours of motiva-
tional seminars conducted by Winfrey and an online workshop that closed in 2006.
Individuals whose profiles have been boosted by Winfrey’s support have also
included physicians Michael F. Roizen (b. 1946) and Mehmet C. Oz (b. 1960),
known for their “RealAge” and “YOU” programs for diet and personal care; fitness
expert Bob Greene; professional organizer Peter Walsh (b. 1956); and interior
designer Nate Berkus (b. 1971).
Not all of Winfrey’s endorsements are greeted with enthusiasm or approval. In
particular, her support of The Secret (Byrne 2007) was fiercely criticized by com-
mentators who found its “ask, believe, receive” variation of positive thinking to be
simplistic, materialistic, and even offensive, particularly in its implication that
victims of tragedies somehow attract their misfortunes (cf. Birkenhead 2007; Klein
2007; Salkin 2007). However, the book’s promise of life-changing revelations
attracted enough readers for it to dominate bestseller lists during the better part of
2007. Another popular author promoting the notion of a desire-responsive universe
is Michael J. Losier, who teaches workshops on utilizing the Law of Attraction
(2004) and who has received repeat airtime with Winfrey. Esther and Jerry Hicks
are also well-known advocates of “prosperity consciousness”; their most recent
book is also titled Law of Attraction (2006). Their dispute with Rhonda Byrne over
the documentary version of The Secret added to the controversy surrounding
Byrne’s success (Salkin 2007).
Although the popularity of The Secret surged in 2007, the concepts it promoted
are not wholly new. In addition to Peale, another classic author mentioned in dis-
cussions of prosperity consciousness is Napoleon Hill (1883–1970), who penned
Think and Grow Rich (1937). The book has appeared in several different versions
over the years, with several expanded editions produced during the first decade of
the twenty-first century.

Trends and Themes

Topical. A primary concern among contemporary readers is finding, establishing,
and maintaining a proper balance between professional and personal priorities.
Some of the concepts addressing this issue include time management and clutter
864 SELF-HELP LITERATURE

HELP FOR DUMMIES AND IDIOTS

Two of the most recognizable brands in self-help are the black-and-yellow “Dummies” guides
launched in 1991 and the orange-bordered “Complete Idiot’s Guides” launched in 1993. Both
series began as hip, humorous introductions to the basics of various computer programs.The
format proved to be popular enough to expand into nontechnical areas of interest, with both
series going strong into their second decades. Sample titles in recent years have included
Grieving for Dummies (2007), Baby and Toddler Sleep Solutions for Dummies (2007), Frugal Living
for Dummies (2003), The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creative Visualization (2005), The Complete
Idiot’s Guide to Organizing Your Life (4th edition, 2005), and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to
Managing Your Time (3rd edition, 2002).The Dummies brand is so recognizable that the 2007
movie Evan Almighty featured a book called Ark Building for Dummies both in its plot and in its
advertising.

management. In an appendix to First Things First, the authors analyzed the

strengths and weaknesses of eight basic approaches covered in the time management
literature they surveyed:
The “Get Organized” Approach (putting things in order)
The “Warrior” Approach (protecting time to get things done)
The “Goal” Approach (focusing on goals)
The “ABC” Approach (concentrating on top priorities)
The “Magic Tool” Approach (using customized planners and other aids)
The “Time Management 101” Approach (treating time management as a specific,
acquirable skill)
The “Go with the Flow” Approach (redefining one’s frames of reference)
The “Recovery” Approach (examining one’s personal hangups)
(Covey, Merrill, and Merrill 1994, 332–341)
One of the newer systems that caught on in the early 2000s is “Getting Things
Done” (GTD), which was developed by trainer and consultant David Allen (b.1945)
and is promoted through his book of the same name. Allen’s prescription for “stress-
free productivity” includes exhortations such as his “do it,” “delegate it,” and
“defer it” rules for handling the contents of one’s in-box (Allen 2001, 131) and “use
your mind to think about things, rather than think of them” (233).
Another organizational program that acquired numerous adherents during this
period was the humor-laced “Sidetracked Home Executives”™ (SHE) system, estab-
lished by “The Slob Sisters” in 1977 and aimed primarily at homemakers. As with
many self-improvement franchises, the SHE system has been propagated through
workshops, Web pages, newsletters, media appearances, and other offerings, includ-
ing books; a revised and updated version of its basic guide, Sidetracked Home Exec-
utives, was issued in 2001, twenty years after the first edition (Young and Jones
2001). The SHE system has inspired two peppy spinoffs, FlyLady and Company
(founded 1999) and The Brat Factor (founded 2006). The FlyLady program, known
for its cheerleading style and for slogans such as “Shine Your Sink,” has produced
books on routine-building and self-care, including Sink Reflections (Cilley 2002) and
Body Clutter (Cilley and Ely 2006), as well as partnering with the “Dinner Diva”
and her “Saving Dinner” series (Ely 2003, 2005, 2005a, 2006, 2007). The Brat
 SELF-HELP LITERATURE 865

Factor occupies a cartoonesque online Web space called “Bratland,” where it

addresses the issue of self-sabotage, that is, when a person’s “Inner Brat” resists the
efforts being made to control or eradicate bad habits; the motto of the Brat Factor is
“If it isn’t fun, it won’t get done.” The tools sold in the Brat Factor online store
include “Mouth Traps”—decals the user places over her own mouth to create time-
outs and deter “complaining, snacking, smoking, drinking, or whining.”
The theme of self-sabotage is discussed in Judith Wright’s books and workshops
as well. Wright’s specialty is teaching people how to overcome their “soft addic-
tions,” her trademarked term for benign-seeming habits that become liabilities from
overindulgence, such as watching television and spending time on the Internet.
Wright, who runs an institute in her name, is best-known for a 2003 book called
There Must Be More than This, which was revised and expanded several years later
into The Soft Addiction Solution (Wright 2006). Wright has also trademarked the
concept of “The One Decision,” which urges readers to approach and assess their
lives in the context of a single guiding principle. The principle, which is up to each
reader to define for himself or herself, is framed in epic terms: not unlike The Secret
and other prosperity consciousness manuals, The One Decision tells its disciples
that they too will benefit from the laws of attraction:

Magic happens once you definitely make your One Decision. The very act of commit-
ting sends out a message to the universe, and then, and only then, can full resources
come to your aid. When you definitely commit, unforeseen support, inspiration, and
encouragement come your way. You begin to find synergies and synchronicities in
events and things around you. You begin to attract the support of other people who
have made deeper life commitments. It requires a leap of faith to make your One
Decision, but once you have, resources will appear that you never would have
expected. (Wright 2005, 73)

The One Decision program also employs language evocative of epic and spiritual
journeys, using phrases such as “The Way of the Heart,” “The Keys to the Kingdom,”
and “The Good Fight” to describe facets of the user’s progress toward self-improve-
ment and alluding to heroic fantasies such as The Fellowship of the Ring (32–33)
and the quest for the Holy Grail (157). Wright’s work has been endorsed by a num-
ber of eminent authors, including Covey, novelist James Redfield (b. 1950), mystic
Andrew Harvey (b. 1952), and “medical intuitive” Caroline Myss.
The search for meaningful work is a central theme in many advice books pub-
lished since 2001. In The Answer to How Is Yes (Block 2002), readers are urged to
ask “What” questions instead of “How”-based ones in order to frame their priori-
ties in the context of their personal values rather than measurable results. In I Don’t
Know What I Want, But I Know It’s Not This (Jansen 2003), readers are offered
multiple self-assessment exercises to help them ascertain what type of career change
would best suit their skills and personalities. In The Anti 9 to 5 Guide (2007),
Michelle Goodman (b. 1976) details the steps women can take to pursue a variety
of non-office-based careers or to adjust their professional commitments to make
more time for avocations or side gigs. Goodman’s observation that “work in the
twenty-first century is dramatically different from the way it was in the 1960s,
1970s, 1980s, and early to mid-1990s” (Goodman 2007, 9) is echoed in Free to
Succeed (Reinhold 2001), a guide for individuals interested in becoming “free
agents” such as entrepreneurs, “intrapreneurs” (employees with ownership of special
866 SELF-HELP LITERATURE

projects), or seasonal workers. The author, a woman known as “The Career Coach”
on the job-hunting Web site monster.com, offers prospective free agents a seven-step
program for discerning whether they are suited to nontraditional employment and
anecdotal examples to illustrate each step.
The word “authentic” and its variations also appeals to modern workers. Readers
of The Authentic Career (Craddock 2004) are led through stages of “Awareness,”
“Emotional Ownership,” “Interaction,” and “Integration,” with exercises such as
“Weeding the ‘Shoulds’” and “The Mandala of Your Life.” Authenticity (Cappannelli
and Cappannelli 2004) is organized in four stages as well: “Exploring Ten Beliefs
that May Be Limiting Your Life,” “Penetrating Those Thorny Myths that Limit
Authenticity,” “Turning Deliberately Toward Greater Meaning and Purpose,” and
“Practicing A Few Simple Strategies that Can Change Your Life.” British personal
development coach Neil Crofts (b. 1963) runs a large franchise called “Authentic
Transformation”; like many other self-improvement companies, its offerings include
an electronically distributed newsletter, a team of consultants (called “Authentic
Guides”), a schedule of workshops and gatherings (include a retreat-style event
termed an “advance”), and several books, including Authentic (Crofts 2003) and
Authentic Business (Crofts 2005). Other titles geared to address aspects of this
yearning include Authentic Happiness (Seligman 2003), Something More: Excavat-
ing Your Authentic Self (Breathnach 1998), The Authentic Heart (Amodeo 2001),
and Authentic Relationships (Jacobsen and Jacobsen 2003).
Another trend has been to invoke the Renaissance period of history and its major
figures, including artists Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) and Leonardo Da
Vinci (1452–1519). Such books appeal to users who associate the Renaissance with
versatile, multi-talented geniuses. In The Angel Inside, Chris Widener uses the life
and art of Michelangelo to tell a parable about choosing one’s path; the book
includes an eleven-page “Discussion Guide and Workbook” with sections such as
“Embrace the Stages of Chipping, Sculpting, Sanding, and Polishing” and “No One
Starts with the Sistine Chapel” (Widener 2004, 103–105). The authors of The
Michelangelo Method also employ artistic metaphors in their guide to fostering
creativity, with one chapter titled “Plan First, Then Chip Away,” and two others
featuring the word “vision” (Schuman and Paxton 2007). The concept of viewing
oneself as a masterpiece also appears in books such as The Secret, which quotes Joe
Vitale as saying, “You are the Michelangelo of your own life. The David you are
sculpting is you” (Byrne 2006, 23); Sacred Self, Sacred Relationships, in which the
reader is exhorted, “Come to see yourself as the artistic perfection Michelangelo
saw hidden in the block of granite” (Jones and Jones 2002, 59); and The Play of
Your Life, where the user is guided through the search for a new career by thinking
of it in terms of “the script,” “the audition,” and other elements of a dramatic
production (Sabatino 2004). In How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci and its
workbook, “high performance learning” expert Michael J. Gelb names seven prin-
ciples in Italian (curiosita, dimostrazione, sensazione, sfumato, arte/scienza, corpo-
ralita, and connessione) that he presents as reflective of da Vinci’s skills (Gelb 1998).
In Da Vinci Decoded (an allusion to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, a blockbuster
novel in 2003), Gelb encouraged his readers to apply the seven principles featured
in the earlier book to spiritual as well as creative matters (Gelb 2004). In The Da
Vinci Method, Garret LoPorto speaks of a “DaVinci” personality type that he sees
as common to most entrepreneurs, including himself, and one that includes a high
percentage of individuals with Attention Deficit (Hyperactive) Disorder (ADD/ADHD)
 SELF-HELP LITERATURE 867

(LoPorto 2005); one headline for the book on its Web site billed it as “The Most
Advanced Adult ADD/ADHD Therapy on the Planet!” Disciples of the method are
called “DaVincis” and congregate in an online community called “DaVinci
Nation.”
The theme of advising users that their weaknesses are actually hidden strengths
can also be seen in books such as The Renaissance Soul, which addresses individu-
als who can’t seem to focus on just one interest; the author repeatedly cites Franklin
and da Vinci as examples of successful Renaissance Souls (cf. Lobenstine 2006, 33).
Barbara Sher discusses a similar personality type at length in Refuse to Choose!,
having coined the term “Scanners” to describe individuals who “instead of diving
down into the depths of an interest . . . scanned the horizon for many interests.”
Sher, too, mentions Franklin as a role model, as well as the philosopher Aristotle
(384 B.C.E.–322 B.C.E.) and the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832)
(Sher 2006, xiv).
Another type of weakness that has received significant attention within the past
decade is the compulsion of many individuals to repeat behaviors they already know
to be unproductive or even self-destructive. One school of thought posits that indi-
viduals subconsciously adhere to internal narratives that tend to prevent them from
moving forward with their lives; the role these stories play has been examined in
books such as I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was (Sher and Smith
1994), with chapters such as “Fear of Success: Leaving the Ones You Love Behind.”
In its “Going Deeper” section, The Renaissance Soul also devotes space to “Rewrit-
ing Old Messages” and coping with “Creative Fear and Anxiety” (Lobenstine 2006,
267–292). This theme is central to books such as Becoming Real: Defeating the
Stories We Tell Ourselves that Hold Us Back (Saltz 2004) and Bad Childhood,
Good Life (Schlessinger 2006).
Transcending one’s baggage is also emphasized in books on overcoming negativ-
ity, such as The Emotional Toolkit (Mininni 2005). Based on a course called
“LifeSkills” that the author began teaching in 1999, The Emotional Toolkit
employs lists and charts such as “The Emotion Tree” to guide its users toward
analyzing and managing distressing feelings. In Be Nice (Or Else!), the first step
listed under “Take Control of Your Life” is “Eliminate and Cancel Negative
Programming” (Claybaugh 2004, 40–47). In Receiving Love, relationship thera-
pists Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt examine why individuals “have
trouble accepting compliments and positive feedback from their partners and
others” (Hendrix and Hunt 2004, 3), tracing it back to hidden triggers and uncon-
scious defenses developed in childhood. This is an extension of Hendrix’s “Imago”
theory of couples interaction, so called because of his belief that “partners in an
adult intimate relationship are, in important ways, mirrors of their caretakers”
(Hendrix and Hunt 2004, 289). This theory was first presented in Getting the Love
You Want (1988), a bestseller that continued to attract new readers during its
second decade in print and generated spin-off products such as workbooks, “home
video workshops,” and sequels titled Keeping the Love You Find (Hendrix and
Hunt 1992) and Giving the Love That Heals (Hendrix and Hunt 1997). The exer-
cises in Receiving Love include keeping a “Gift Diary” and practicing “Positive
Flooding” (setting aside time to shower one’s partner with compliments).
Although many authors in the genre couch their advice in gentle, sympathetic
language, the blunt approach favored by personalities such as “Dr. Phil” McGraw
and “Dr. Laura” Schlessinger (b. 1947) has also attained a substantial following.
868 SELF-HELP LITERATURE

McGraw developed his fan base as a regular on Oprah Winfrey’s television talk
show in the late 1990s, and he began hosting his own show (produced by Winfrey’s
company) on television in 2002. His publications have covered both relationships
and diet and include Relationship Rescue (2000), Self Matters (2001), The Ultimate
Weight Solution (2003), Family First (2005), Love Smart (2006), as well as work-
books and a cookbook. Schlessinger became a household name with her first book,
Ten Stupid Things Women Do To Mess Up Their Lives (1994); her publications
since have included Ten Stupid Things Couples Do to Mess Up Their Relationships
(2001) and The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands (2004). Conservative writer
Paul Coughlin attracts readers who share his aggravation with the Christian
church’s treatment of men, which he discusses in books such as No More Christian
Nice Guy (2005). Coughlin contends that Christianity has focused too much on
comfort at the expense of personal growth and deplores the under-masculine image
of Christ that he sees churches promoting: “That sweet, Gumby-like Jesus can’t save
you from a dark night of the soul” (Meadows n.d.). Coughlin’s aggressive stance is
also evident in No More Jellyfish, Chickens, or Wimps (2007), a guide to rearing
“assertive” children.
The perception of anxiety, uncertainty, and dissatisfaction with society’s current
roles for men can also be witnessed in other “male liberation” titles intended to
address these symptoms, such as No More Mr. Nice Guy! (Glover 2003), The Way
of the Superior Man (Deida 2004), and Being the Strong Man a Woman Wants
(Katz 2005). There are also unisex guides to self-assertiveness and conflict manage-
ment; these include Anxious to Please (Rapson and English 2006), Too Nice For
Your Own Good (Robinson 1997 [2000]), Don’t Be Nice, Be Real (Bryson 2004),
The Disease to Please (Braiker 2001), The Power of Positive Confrontation (Patcher
and Magee 2000), and The Coward’s Guide to Conflict (Ursiny 2003).
On the distaff side, a prime example of the unsentimental, anti-self-pity approach
is He’s Just Not That into You (Behrendt and Tuccillo 2004), written by two mem-
bers of the creative team for the Sex in the City television show. The book proved
to be so popular that it was later abridged into a version subtitled Your Daily Wake-
Up Call (2005), reformatted into a “pocket guide” (with a pink-ribboned telephone
bookmark, 2005), and expanded into a second edition (2006). Rebuttals include Be
Honest—You’re Not That into Him Either (Kerner 2005). Parodies include He Just
Thinks He’s Not That into You (Whitman 2007). Behrendt, a comedian by profes-
sion, has since parlayed his reputation as a relationships expert into a short-lived
daytime talk show (2006–2007) and additional books co-authored with his wife,
Amiira Ruotola-Behrendt, including It’s Called a Break-Up Because It’s Broken
(2005).
With many humor books adopting a pseudo-handbook format, and many hand-
book writers employing sarcasm and irony to entertain their readers, it can be
difficult to assess to what extent a book genuinely intends to offer help and when
its advice is tongue-in-cheek. This is particularly the case with books with cynical
titles. One reviewer called The Complete A**hole’s Guide to Handling Chicks
“basically a how-to book for the sexually frustrated, offering advice—often in
handy chart form—on how to have as much meaningless sex as possible. I think it’s
supposed to be funny, but I’ve laughed more at books about genocide” (Schaub
2003). Another book in the “telling it as it is” subgenre is Why Men Love Bitches
(2002), written by comedian Sherry Argov, which received sufficient interest for a
follow-up titled Why Men Marry Bitches (2006).
 SELF-HELP LITERATURE 869

The potent combination of satire and how-to can be seen in the enthusiasm
nationwide for Southern-flavored guides to manners. One of the classics of this
category, The Southern Belle Primer, or Why Princess Margaret Will Never Be a
Kappa Kappa Gamma (Schwartz 1991), was reissued in 2006 with a new subtitle,
Why Paris Hilton Will Never Be a Kappa Kappa Gamma. Ronda Rich followed
What Southern Women Know (1999) with What Southern Women Know about
Flirting (2005). Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays provide both irreverence and
recipes in Being Dead Is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to
Hosting the Perfect Funeral (2005) and Somebody is Going to Die if Lilly Beth
Doesn’t Catch That Bouquet, a sequel on organizing weddings (2007). Deborah
Ford’s GRITS (Girls Raised in the South), Inc. franchise has inspired the formation
of the Official Sisterhood of GRITS as well as a series of books, including The
GRITS Guide to Life (2003), Puttin’ On the Grits: A Guide to Southern Enter-
taining (2005), GRITS Friends Are Forevah: A Southern-Style Celebration of
Women (2006), and Bless His Heart: the GRITS Guide to Loving (Or Just Living
With) Southern Men (2006).
Another major Southern sisterhood brand features the Sweet Potato Queens,
who hail from a Jackson, Mississippi, parade tradition that began in 1982 and
now counts more than five thousand regional chapters with names such as
“The Sweet Tea Queens,” “The Kudzu Queens,” and “The Divine Dixie Divas”
(www.sweetpotatoqueens.com). The first book in the series, The Sweet Potato
Queen’s Book of Love (Browne 1999), was followed by God Save the Sweet Potato
Queens (Browne 2001), a combined cookbook and financial planner (Browne 2003),
a “field guide” to men (Browne 2004), and a wedding-and-divorce guide in one vol-
ume (Browne 2005).
The appeal of advice from other geographic and ethnic perspectives has also been
a significant trend during the first decade of the twenty-first century. The elegant,
stylish reputation of French women has helped fuel interest in titles such as French
Women Don’t Get Fat (Guiliano 2005) and its sequel, French Women for All
Seasons (Guiliano 2006); Entre Nous (Ollivier 2003); Joie de Vivre (Arbor and
Whiteside 2003); All You Need to Be Impossibly French (Powell 2006); The French
Diet (Montignac 2005); and The French Don’t Diet Plan (Clower 2006). Books
highlighting the lifestyle approaches of other cultures include Mediterranean
Women Stay Slim, Too (Kelly and Adamson 2006) and Japanese Women Don’t Get
Old or Fat (Moriyama and Doyle 2005).
During the 2000s, books listing “things to do you die” also represented a trend.
Patricia Schultz’s “1,000 Places” travel guides inspired a cable television show as
well as appearing on the New York Times “Advice, How-To and Miscellaneous”
bestseller list multiple years (Schultz 2003 and 2007). Other variations on the theme
include 2Do Before I Die (Ogden and Day 2005), 101 Things to Do Before You Die
(Horne 2004), and 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (Boxall 2006), the
last title part of a series that also features volumes devoted to music albums, movies,
and paintings.
Design. What Would You Do If You Had No Fear? (Conway 2004) follows a
common handbook design. Printed in a nonstandard 5 1/2” by 7” format (making it
larger than mass-market paperbacks but smaller than typical trade-quality soft covers),
the book is structured for multiple readings. It is a collection of anecdotes and medita-
tions, primarily from participants in the author’s workshops and from her own life.
Each anecdote—usually less than five pages long—is given its own title and an
870 SELF-HELP LITERATURE

epigraph; Conway sometimes concludes the anecdote with another quotation. Then
she lists three “Life Challenges” derived from the anecdote for the reader to pursue.
For instance, in “Be Real,” Conway begins with a quotation from the Chinese
philosopher Lao-Tzu (approximately sixth century B.C.E.): “When you are con-
tent to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everyone will respect
you.” She then discusses issues of authenticity and insecurity, incorporating quo-
tations from some of her students and relating how she coped with being raped
when she was thirty-four. After emphasizing the value of learning to say “a
strong, nonnegotiable ‘no’,” Conway bookends the discussion with a second
quotation from Anonymous: “If I be you, who’ll be me?” She then issues three
life challenges:
Take a self-defense class.
Ask who you need to say “no” to. Say it.
Take a meditation class or listen to a guided meditation CD. (Conway 2004,
104–108)
Authenticity (Cappannelli and Cappannelli 2004) displays an identical structure.
For instance, one of its chapters is titled “What Needs to Be Done Is (Only) the
Doing” and opens with a quote from journalist I.F. Stone (1907–1989). The authors
discuss the issue of “the difference between real and imagined action,” propose
strategies for overcoming one’s tendency to overthink, and end with “Today’s
Reflection,” a section in boldface type that concludes, “Today, I will do the next
physical actions. Today I will invite greater authenticity and originality in my life”
(Cappannelli and Cappannelli 2004, 163–166).
In similar fashion, The Happiness Makeover includes fifty-three short chapters
with titles such as “What’s So Bad About Getting Your Hopes Up?” and “Accept
the Duty of Delight” sandwiched by sections on “You Can Be Happier,” “Twenty-
two Instant Happiness Boosters,” and “Loving Your Life.” Every section and chap-
ter begins with a quotation; the sources range from anonymous bumper stickers
(“Don’t believe everything you think”) to Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) and
Lao-Tzu (the latter a favorite of such handbooks; words attributed to him also
appear in Cappannelli and Cappannelli 2004 and many others). Many of the
chapters end with quotations as well, from luminaries such as poet William Butler
Yeats (1865–1939) to guests on Oprah (Ryan 2005).
Although it is aimed at a hip-hop demographic, Make It Happen also follows this
basic scheme. Each chapter corresponds to a rule, such as “Rule 1: Find Your Will”
and “Rule 10: Flex Purpose, Not Power,” with epigraphs from rap stars such as
Eminem (b. 1972), Jay-Z (b. 1968), and Kanye West (b. 1977). At the end of each
chapter, the “What,” “Why,” “How,” and “But” of each rule is reiterated in the
form of a chart (Liles 2005).
Displaying inspirational quotations in the page margins is also a favored tactic.
Some books are designed with extra-wide margins to accommodate this; The
Authentic Career is an example of this strategy (Craddock 2004). In others, such as
Judith Wright’s books, the quotations are embedded in the page layout as blocks of
text with a gray background and border to set them apart from the main content.
Pat Croce’s 110% (2001) features two quotations at the top of each section in over-
size type, with the title in even larger type in the middle of the page; the lower half
of each page contains an average of 3–5 short paragraphs offering the reader sug-
gestions for perspective and action.
 SELF-HELP LITERATURE 871

Referencing other self-help works and authors is another common practice in this
genre. In The Renaissance Soul, Lobenstine’s citations include Free to Succeed
(Reinhold 2001), Wishcraft (Sher and Gottlieb 2003), a half-dozen how-to books,
and The Artist’s Way (Cameron 1992) (Lobenstine 2006, 145, 157, 160, 281). In
the first set of acknowledgments for Be Nice or Else (2004), hair salon mogul and
motivational speaker Winn Claybaugh states that his mentors have influenced him
so much “that my thoughts in this book will border between plagiarism and
personal experience”; he enthusiastically describes Louise Hay, Og Mandino, Oprah
Winfrey, Marianne Williamson, John Bradshaw, Gerald Jampolski, George Melton,
Will Garcia, and Leo Buscaglia as some of the mentors in question (Claybaugh
2004, 191–94). Schlessinger enlists the assistance of other experts for drlaura.com
features; for example, a column on enticing children to eat their vegetables was
authored by Missy Chase Lapine, who had recently produced a book on the same
topic (Lapine 2007 and 2007a). The “Reading Corner” of the Web site lists several
dozen titles recommended on Schlessinger’s radio show, including manuals on
decluttering (cf. Peel 2007), fitness (cf. Druxman and Heaner 2007), money
management (cf. Economides and Economides 2007), and child raising (cf. Blyth
and Winston 2007).
Contexts and Issues. Self-help literature attracts both passionate devotees and
vehement skeptics. The market for self-improvement products grew by 50%
between 2000 and 2004, with over three thousand new titles published per year
(Salerno 2005, 7–8). Some analysts have attributed the surge of interest in the genre
to the economic uncertainty and social instability that many individuals felt during
this period, prompting them to consult advice manuals as a means of obtaining or
regaining control over their lives (cf. McGee 2005, 12–13).
As noted earlier, some self-help authorities readily encourage their readers to
make use of the “mountains of motivational messages available” (Croce 2001, 50),
and women’s magazines such as Good Housekeeping regularly quote from pub-
lished books in their feature articles. Others position themselves as mavericks or
contrarians offering common-sense alternatives to mainstream advice. For instance,
in BeliefWorks, Ray Dodd discusses “seven secret keys” that he insists “are not
really secrets at all . . . there is nothing contained in this book you didn’t already
know” (Dodd 2006, 140). Although Dodd frequently resorts to mystical and
elemental terms to discuss dreams and energy, he also devotes a chapter to disput-
ing “the myth of self-improvement,” asserting that it can exacerbate one’s problems
rather than address them. Mireille Guiliano orders her readers to “Banish the diet
book! You don’t need an ideology or a technology, you need what French women
have: a balanced and time-tested relation to food and life” (Guiliano 2005, 6–7).
Consultant Jack M. Zufelt openly opposes traditional methods such as goal-setting
and affirmations, asserting that other self-help authorities are “wasting people’s
time and money” (Anderson 2003). The authors of Authenticity take pains to stress
that their book is different than what they perceive to be standard fare:

[T]his is not one of those soft and fuzzy books that promise you the moon and suggest
you can have it effortlessly and immediately. In our experience, finding greater mean-
ing and purpose requires a good deal more than that. . . . we have done our best to
avoid the ‘chewing-gum answers’ and ‘feel-good strategies’ that tend to evaporate
almost as soon as the page is turned or the speaker has left the podium. We also hold
too much respect for you to sugarcoat our message. Frankly, we feel the world already
872 SELF-HELP LITERATURE

has far too much polite information that does not advance our lives. (Cappannelli and
Cappannelli 2004, xiii–xiv).

In The Last Self-Help Book You’ll Ever Need, Paul Pearsall summarizes what he
sees as ten tenets of standard self-help advice (including “Thou shalt never be less
than thou can be”) and then counters them with his “Ten Contrary Command-
ments” (“Thou shalt celebrate what thou already art”) (Pearsall 2005, 80–81). He
also devotes space to why he’s “Had My Fill of Dr. Phil,” citing an interview in which
he’d seen “all the toxic elements of self-helpism: compliant thinking, the primacy of
celebrity, the application of ‘soft science’” (29). One online consultant, Steve Pavlina,
deliberately uses the term “personal development” instead of “self-help” to describe
his work because “I really don’t want to be associated with marketers who promise
quick-fix solutions to very difficult human challenges” (Pavlina 2006).
The industry has been the target of a number of books and articles criticizing its
practices, which some observers regard as ineffectual at best and predatory at worst.
Charges leveled against self-help gurus include fostering unrealistic expectations,
promoting unscientific thinking, and judgmental, disingenuous, or hypocritical
behavior (cf. Aviram 2001; Anderson 2003; Miller 2005; Hari 2007). The celebrity
worship accorded to charismatic but ethically challenged personalities such as Tony
Robbins (b. 1960) has also provoked concern and outrage among nonparticipants
(Salerno 2005, 75–87).
Mariva Aviram, a self-professed former “self-help addict,” argues that many read-
ers do not have the resources to adhere to the programs presented to them, skewer-
ing instructions such as “If you have too much to do, delegate tasks to others” with
comments such as “This simplistic piece of advice is only useful to a wealthy
neurotic workaholic, who, come to think of it, is the self-help market’s best friend”
(Aviram 2001). Pearsall likewise notes that “self-help books aren’t written for the
poor,” but for dissatisfied middle class workers with the leisure to indulge in self-
centeredness (Pearsall 2005, 12).
The strategies promoted in relationship guides such as The Rules (Fein and
Schneider 1995) and He’s Just Not That into You (Behrendt and Tuccillo 2004) con-
tinue to inspire controversy over whether they are effective, honest, and healthy
practices for modern women to follow. Proponents of such strategies argue that they
are realistic about gender-based behavior (rather than pretending the differences do
not exist) and that they build and reinforce women’s self-esteem by urging them not
to accept demeaning treatment from insufficiently interested men. Detractors of
such books see them as manuals for manipulative mind games and overly simplistic
in their characterizations of how relationships should work (e.g., Traister 2004).
Reception. On a less cynical note, the “Books for a Better Life Awards” are a
major fundraiser for the New York City chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis
Society, having raised over a million dollars since the program’s inception in 1996.
The annual awards recognize “the very best in self-improvement publishing” in nine
categories: childcare/parenting, first book, inspirational memoir, motivational,
personal finance, psychology, relationships, spiritual, and wellness. There is a “Hall
of Fame” associated with the event; its members include Jane Brody, Helen Gurley
Brown, Deepak Chopra, Dr. Wayne Dyer, Oscar Dystel, John Gray, Judy Collins,
Laurence Kirshbaum, Heidi Murkoff, Suzanne Somers, Andrew Weil, Jack Canfield,
Mark Victor Hansen, and Peter Workman. The “first book” award is named after
Suze Orman.
 SELF-HELP LITERATURE 873

AWARD-WINNING SELF-HELP BOOKS

Recent winners of “Books for a Better Life Awards” have included these 2006 self-help titles:
Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers’ Schemes by Sharon Lamb, Ed.D. and
Lyn Miken Brown, Ed.D.; Social Intelligence:The New Science of Human Relationships by Daniel
Goleman; What To Eat by Marion Nestle (North Point Press); and Crazy Busy: Overstretched,
Overbooked and About to Snap by Ned Hallowell, M.D.

The titles of some self-help guides have become catchphrases that remain in active
circulation long after the books’ sales have peaked. For instance, the term “Rules
Girl” has become shorthand for women who believe in playing “hard to get,” as
advised by The Rules (Fein and Schneider 1995). The concept of “He’s just not that
into you,” made popular through the book of the same name (Behrendt and Tuccillo
2004), has been riffed upon by sportswriters (Plaschke 2007), bloggers on politics
and business (Beasley 2007; Fried 2007), and other pundits in discussing situations
where they perceive an imbalance of interest among the parties involved.
As with many other genres, a successful self-help book is likely to spawn sequels,
accessories, imitators, counterarguments, and parodies. The Rules (Fein and
Schneider 1995) was followed by The Rules II: More Rules to Live and Love By
(1997), The Rules for Marriage: Time-Tested Secrets for Making Your Marriage Work
(2001), and Rules for Online Dating: Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right in Cyberspace
(2002). Responses to The Rules include Barbara De Angelis’s The Real Rules: How to
Find the Right Man for the Real You (1997). Parodies include Nate Penn and
Lawrence LaRose’s The Code: Time-Tested Secrets for Getting What You Want from
Women—Without Marrying Them! (1996). It has been cited in attempts to describe
other books, such as What Southern Women Know (That Every Woman Should):
Timeless Secrets To Get Everything You Want in Love, Life, and Work (Rich 1999),
which the publisher continues to promote as “A Southern Belle Primer meets The
Rules” (Penguin Group 2007). The authors of How to Date Like a Man begin their
book by summarizing the plateau they believe their typical reader has reached:
“You’ve tried the Rules, you’ve tried listening to your married friends, and you’ve
even tried listening to your mother. But you’re still eating Chinese takeout with your
good Friends Monica, Rachel, Ross and Chandler” (Moore and Gould 2000, 3).
Parodies of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People have included The 7 Habits
of Highly Ineffective People (Minor 1994), the 7 Habits of Highly Defective People
(Crimmins and Maeder 1996), a McSweeney’s list (Lloyd n.d.). Dr. Phil is well-
known enough to be cited and spoofed on assorted television shows and movies,
and he was the inspiration for a Sesame Street character called “Dr. Feel.”
Dr. Laura, herself parodied on shows such as Frasier and The West Wing, cheerfully
collaborated with the manufacturers of the “Dr. Laura Talking Action Figure,” adver-
tising it on her site with the headline “What’s Blonde, VERY Talkative, and comes in
a Fabulous Package?” The FlyLady shop includes ostrich feather dusters and timers.
The wares of diet-related franchises may include aprons, whereas calendars are a staple
of time-management programs. Clothing, coffee mugs, jewelry, key rings, license-plate
holders, and other items also serve to promote popular brands or concepts.
Selected Authors. The self-help movement does not lack for prominent authors,
many of whom have been mentioned already in this entry. Other individuals whose
influence was substantial during the first decade of the twenty-first century follow.
874 SELF-HELP LITERATURE

Robert Kiyosaki (b. 1947) promotes his investment theories via the “Rich Dad,
Poor Dad” series, which includes titles such as Rich Dad’s Escape from the Rat Race
(2005), Rich Dad’s Guide to Becoming Rich without Cutting up Your Credit Cards
(2003), and Rich Dad’s Before You Quit Your Job (2005).
Dave Ramsey (b. 1960) is another financial advisor, known for his tough-love
crusade against debt, which he communicates primarily through his radio show.
Ramsey’s no-nonsense demeanor and faith-based lifestyle appeal to listeners who
regard him as a type of fiscal pastor. As one reporter summed up, “There are
thousands of personal finance experts (or ‘experts’). There is even a competitive
industry of Christian personal finance experts. Yet there is only one guy—one bald,
middle-aged Christian money guy—who’s a favorite of both 60 Minutes and The
700 Club” (Drury 2007). Ramsey’s books include Total Money Makeover (2007)
and Financial Peace Revisited (2003), both of which have been republished in
updated editions. As with Dr. Laura, Ramsey’s Web site includes a reading recom-
mendations section, organized into topical lists that include “Christian Devotional”
and fiction titles as well as business and finance classics by Carnegie and others.
One of the leading names in literature on eating disorders is Geneen Roth. The
majority of her books were published in the 1990s, but she remains active as a mag-
azine columnist and workshop leader. Spiritual advisor Iyalna Vanzant likewise
remains in demand as an instructor and lecturer, although interest in her books
appeared to have peaked by 2001.
In the area of creative expression, Julia Cameron (b. 1948) remains active. The
“morning pages” ritual featured in The Artist’s Way (a writing exercise to be
performed upon rising every morning) has become a routine practiced by numerous
writers; Cameron’s follow-up titles have included The Sound of Paper (2004), How
to Avoid Making Art (2005), and Finding Water (2006). Susan Ariel Rainbow
Kennedy (b. 1954), better known by her initials (SARK), employs a distinctive,
colorful style to letter and illustrate her books, cards, and posters; her exuberance
is also very much in evidence on her Web site, “Planet Sark,” which includes a
tribute to her mother titled “Marvelous Marjorie” and an interactive feature where
users can consult with her cat Jupiter as a clickable oracle. Her recent publications
include Eat Mangoes Naked (2001), Make Your Creative Dreams Real (2004) and
Fabulous Friendship Festival (2007).
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 SELF-HELP LITERATURE 877

Hendrix, Harville, and Helen LaKelly Hunt. 2004. Receiving Love: Transform Your
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———. Rich Dad’s Guide to Becoming Rich Without Cutting Up Your Credit Cards. New
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878 SELF-HELP LITERATURE

———. Self Matters: Creating Your Life from the Inside Out. New York: Simon & Schuster
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———. Being Dead Is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect
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 SELF-HELP LITERATURE 879

———. What Southern Women Know (That Every Woman Should): Timeless Secrets To Get
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Rather Run Than Fight. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, 2003.
Whitman, Danielle, pseud. He Just Thinks He’s Not That Into You: The Insanely Determined
Girl’s Guide to Getting the Man You Want. Philadelphia: Running Press, 2007.
880 SERIES FICTION

Widener, Chris. The Angel Inside: Michelangelo’s Secrets for Following Your Passion and
Finding the Work You Love. New York: Currency/Doubleday, 2004. http://www.
TheAngelInside.com.
Wright, Judith. The Soft Addiction Solution: Break Free of the Seemingly Harmless Habits
That Keep You from the Life You Want. New York: Penguin, 2006.
———. 2005. The One Decision: Make the Single Choice That Will Lead To a Life of
MORE. NewYork: Tarcher/Penguin, 2005.
Young, Pamela, and Peggy Jones. Sidetracked Home Executives: From Pigpen to Paradise.
New York: Warner, 2001.

Further Reading
Davey, Steve. Unforgettable Places to See Before You Die. New York: Firefly, 2004;
Indante, Dan, and Karl Marks, pseud. The Complete A**hole’s Guide to Handling
Chicks. New York: St. Martin’s, 2003; http://www.theartistsway.com; Butler-Bowdon,
Tom. 50 Self-Help Classics: 50 Inspirational Books to Transform Your Life. Yarmouth,
Maine: Nicholas Brealey, 2003; http://www.butler-bowdon.com; http://www.davidco. com;
http://www.flylady.net; http://www.franklincovey.com; http://www.oprah.com; http://
www.planetsark.com.
PEGGY LIN DUTHIE

SERIES FICTION
Definition. The difficulty in evaluating series fiction results from the various cate-
gories that make up the separate category of installment fiction. The terms trilogy,
series, multi-part novels, sequence, sagas, and shared universes can be slippery. For
example, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and Richard Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide
to the Galaxy both began as trilogies and then were later added to so that the scope
of the original trilogy expanded to a series.
Books published in installments, such as trilogies or tetralogies, are not techni-
cally series according to most publisher designations. A trilogy such as J.R.R.
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, for example, is one story divided by the publisher
into publishable chunks. As with most trilogies, the story begins in volume one and
is completed in volume three. A series, on the other hand, although featuring the
same characters and locations, is made up of individually published books with
stand-alone plots that can be read without any familiarity with earlier books in the
series.
Context and Issues. According to Shannon Hill, an editor at Christian publisher
WaterBrook, readers are drawn to series because they allow them to feel they are part
of a larger community. (Winner, S10). There is a sense of familiarity that is comfort-
ing. Of course this can be said of all series fiction, not just those series with religious
overtones. Readers of series fiction can return to a world over and again and join
their favorite characters and wander in their favorite locations. Although the plot
may be new, the reader can be certain that the experience will be the same.
Series fiction writers work quickly, often giving way to stereotypes and sloppy
editing, which in part contributes to the poor critical reception they receive. Many
authors release two or three titles per year in order to keep up with the demands of
readers. The quality of series varies dramatically, and the success of an author is
often based on the character created. In series fiction, the main character may grow
but does not change drastically over time. Careers may change and locations may
alter, but the inherent qualities of the character remain and are what draw the reader
back to share adventures with him or her over and over.
 SERIES FICTION 881

The best series feature characters are well-rounded and grow as the books
progress. Often producing works at least indirectly chronological, respected series
writers introduce changes into their characters’ lives that echo real life changes:
career changes, marriage, family, illness (their own or their friends and families),
and even death of loved ones. Often derided are those series that are cranked out
quickly and follow a formulaic plot template. Although books in these series follow
the same characters through many adventures, the characters do not grow or
develop in any perceptible ways and the plots are shallow and often contrived. They
are riddled with inconsistencies and rarely relate to any previous novels in the series.
Children’s fiction series and series romances are most frequently targeted with this
criticism.
History. In the nineteenth century the growth of the novel as a form and the mar-
ketplace as being able to produce buyers of books spurred the development of series
novels. On the British front, Mrs. Oliphant’s Chronicles of Carlingford, Anthony
Trollope’s Barsetshire series, and Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly Novels were just a few
of the popular series offerings. Storylines tracing the rise and fall of families, the
changes in a village or city, and the adventures of individual heroes provided their
authors a handsome living. In North America, James Fenimore Cooper’s The
Leatherstocking Tales stories embodied the ideal rugged American heroes, and
Hawkeye and Natty Bumpo were vastly popular (The Pioneers 1823, The Last of
the Mohicans 1826, The Deerslayer 1840).
Eventually, characters from the dime or adventure papers, which were mostly
geared toward the lower economic classes, were developed into full length novels,
mostly for children. The earliest series of stories for children were overtly moralis-
tic and didactic. They were meant as teaching tools and a way to instill good values
and behavior. Horatio Alger published Ragged Dick in 1867. The story followed the
rise of a young orphan from poverty to success. A seemingly endless stream of
novels and stories by Alger continued to be released even after his death in 1899,
examples of the tradition of American inventiveness and hard work.
The forty-volume series of Tom Swift books by the Edward Stratemeyer syndicate
house name Victor Appleton debuted in 1910. This boy inventor series was the
beginning of many that incorporated the Horatio Alger myth of American success.
Stratemeyer went on to contribute such series as Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and
the Bobbsey Twins, over twenty series in all. The popularity of series fiction for
young readers has been constant since the early 1900s and the Stratemeyer Syndicate,
producing dozens of novels under such pseudonyms as Franklin W. Dixon and
Carolyn Keene, dominated the market. According to a Smithsonian article on the
Stratemeyer series, 98% of young readers surveyed in 1926 put Tom Swift at the top
of their favorite reading list (Watson 1991, 50–59). Tom Swift would be replaced
by Harry Potter today, but the love of series fiction continues.
Reception. One of the many criticisms leveled at young readers series is the media
tie-ins. When Disney created the television series Lizzie McGuire, a book series
followed. Series of books now regularly accompany television shows or films, rather
than television and film reproducing shows about series (The Chronicles of Narnia
and the Harry Potter books being notable exceptions). Critics argue that the books
in these media tie-ins are of poor quality, pandering only to the desire of readers for
more adventures about their favorite characters.
These early series novels are extremely important to scholars of both literature
and popular culture for their insight into both what appealed to a changing
882 SERIES FICTION

“DON’T KILL SHERLOCK HOLMES!”

The availability of books and the ease and relative inexpensive nature of Internet book buy-
ing has introduced readers to series and allowed them to complete series in a manner that
was not possible before the late 1990s. The Internet has also changed how series are read
and shaped by their audiences. Most major series have publisher-sponsored Web sites.
Audiences shaped series even in the days of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories;
after killing off the tedious Holmes, the outcry of readers demanding his return prompted
Doyle to bring back the character he was heartily sick of.Today’s series can create enough
furor that readers create their own fan sites or blogs. Reader’s contributions to these blogs
and Web site discussion forums have an impact on the authors and how they develop the
series installments.

audience and how these books reflected a changing society. For example, in the late
1950s, the Stratemeyer Syndicate initiated an overhaul of the first 38 Hardy Boys
titles. The books were edited to bring them up to date and in some instances to
remove the racial stereotypes in earlier titles. These editorial changes, which some-
times resulted in entire rewrites of the novels, angered many fans but give a fasci-
nating insight into a changing world and the value of nostalgia attached to
childhood favorites.

Trends and Themes

Children and Young Adults. A recent reference book for librarians, Popular Series
Fiction for K-6 Readers by Rebecca L. Thomas and Catherine Barr (2004), lists
almost 1,200 series for young readers. Older series, such as the original Nancy
Drew, Hardy Boys, and Anne of Green Gables are still extremely popular with
young readers, but dozens of new series launched each year cater to every interest a
child may have from romance to sports to careers.
Like mystery fiction for adults, mystery series for young readers continue to be
popular. The Hardy Boys, since their 1927 debut, have been featured in five series,
the most recent launched in 2005 and called the Undercover Brothers series. The
newer Hardy Boys series, however, have not been as successful as the original 58,
which still sell steadily. Nancy Drew, the female counterpart to the Hardy Boys has
seen equal popularity over the years, with two new series begun in 2004, The Nancy
Drew Girl Detective series and Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew series.
Nancy Drew was an important character who shaped fiction for girls in a positive
direction. Characters such as Nancy and detective nurse Cherry Ames offered female
readers characters who were independent, intelligent, and not afraid of adventure.
However, romance was often a casualty of the heroine’s intelligence and adventurous
can-do nature. Boys who are rescued by girls apparently have little interest in pursu-
ing romance, and romance is a hot selling feature for the contemporary girls series.
The boom of girls series hit in the 1980s with Francine Pascal’s Sweet Valley High
series. Pascal’s novels made a break with the formula inherent in previous series for
girls. Critic Stephanie Foote argued that it is not enough for heroines to be beautiful
and kind, they must be hardworking, innovative, and powerful as well (Foote 2006,
521). Characters such as Nancy Drew exemplify this ideal. Pascal and her successors,
however, jumped on the bandwagon of beautiful, but left out much of the rest.
 SERIES FICTION 883

Critics find many of the newer series geared to teenaged girls to be disturbing.
Their characters and locations often replicate popular television series such as the
1990s hit Beverly Hills 90210 and the more current OC. The protagonists are
wealthy and mostly white and spend their time in frenzied shopping, gossiping,
partying, and sexual encounters in extravagant California locales. Cecily von Ziegesar’s
Gossip Girl and It Girl are two series in this genre. Lisi Harrison’s The Clique enters
the world of the wealthy in a series about privileged thirteen-year-olds and their machi-
nations to get in and stay in the Clique. An unusual twist to the rich and beautiful series
is Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series. In Westerfeld’s world, when people turn sixteen, they
undergo surgery that makes them supermodel beautiful. When one young girl refuses
surgery and runs away, the world is turned upside down.
Although there are still plenty of mature girls series, some authors are beginning
to turn away from such provocative material and are providing girls with series that
are more realistic and familiar to readers, such as Annie Bryant’s Beacon Street
Girls. The series, aimed at readers in the 9–13 age group, is set in a middle class
neighborhood in Brookline, Massachusetts, and features five girls of varying
backgrounds and their adventures. The twelve installments focus on the problems
of young girls and introduce characters of multicultural backgrounds. The
Babysitter’s Club, published by Scholastic Books from 1986 to 2000, had a wide
range of characters with various traits: various racial and religious identities; health
problems, such as diabetes and asthma; interests; and talents. A film based on the
series was released in 1995. Several series spin-offs have been produced by the series
author, Ann Martin, and other ghostwriters.
Sex and violence in young adult series fiction is also countered by Christian series.
Series offerings from such publishers as Zondervan and Tyndale, Melody Carlson’s
True Colors, and Robin Jones Gunn’s Christy Miller and Sierra Jenson tackle serious,
and not so serious, teenage problems. Left Behind: The Kids by Jerry B. Jenkins and
Tim LaHaye is based on the enormously popular Left Behind series for adult read-
ers. The 40+ book series follows the adventures of five children searching for truth
after the Rapture.
For younger children, adventure has reigned since the days of Gertrude Warner
Chandler’s Boxcar Children (1942). In over 100 books, many contributed to the
series by authors after Warner’s death, the four Alden children continue to solve
mysteries and have adventures. The latest adventure is The Box That Watch Found
(2007). One of the most popular recent series is Mary Pope Osborne’s The Magic
Tree House. Readers follow Jack and Annie in two series, The Magic Tree House
and the Merlin Missions as they travel to other places and times with the help of a
magical tree house and Morgan LeFay. The books are extensively researched and
teachers can access the research guides that accompany the titles, making for books
that are educational as well as enjoyable.
R.L. Stine has been the undisputed leader of horror novels for young readers with
his immensely popular Fear Street and Goosebumps series. His newest series,
Mostly Ghostly, continues to spread chills. The popularity of J.K. Rowling’s Harry
Potter books has created a market for fantasy books of all sorts but particularly
those including young magicians and witches. The popular Pirates of the Caribbean
films, featuring Johnny Depp as the pirate Jack Sparrow, have inspired new pirate
adventures, the most successful of which has been Rob Kidd’s Jack Sparrow series
aimed at younger readers. Sparrow is a youngster gathering a crew and having
adventures on board the Barnacle.
884 SERIES FICTION

Animal protagonists continue to be popular with young readers as well. British

author Brian Jacques’s Redwall series began in 1986 with Redwall. The series now
has nineteen titles, and the world Jacques has created is beloved by millions of read-
ers (children and adults alike). Margaret McCallister’s Mistmantle titles follow
Jacques’s lead.
Daniel Handler, better known as Lemony Snicket, created a spoof of young adult
series themselves called A Series of Unfortunate Events. The series began with The
Bad Beginning (1999) and concluded with The End (2006). The first book begins
with the words, “If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be
better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending,
there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle. . . . I’m sorry
to tell you this, but that’s how the story goes.” The books follow in the darkly
humorous tradition of Edward Gorey and Roald Dahl and are geared toward young
readers who don’t care for sports books for boys or best friend adventures for girls.
The Baudelaire Orphans find themselves battling evil Count Olaf and other horrible
relatives with whom they are forced to live using their wits to survive. Snicket
launched a new series in 2007 with Vampire Island.
Creator of ten series and contributor to many more, Katherine A. Applegate is
one of the queens of series fiction for young readers. Her Animorphs series
(1996–2001) included fifty-four titles. In the books, the characters morph into
various animals, often saving their city or even the world from aliens or other
villains. The destruction of the Earth due to a huge asteroid sends selected
families to another planet in the first book of Applegate’s Remnant series (The
Mayflower Project, 2001); in the final installment, Begin Again, 2003, the Earth
is on the brink of being reborn. In Everworld, Applegate’s characters find them-
selves in a parallel universe where mythology and reality blend and nothing is as
it seems.

Selected Authors
Mainstream Fiction. Series are popular in genre fiction, such as science fiction,
romance, mystery, and men’s adventure, but mainstream fiction has seen its share of
series contributions as well. Honoré de Balzac completed almost 100 titles for his
interconnected La Comédie Humaine. The novels examined all aspects of early
nineteenth century French life from the rural areas to life in Paris to the military.
Another French writer, Émile Zola, produced twenty novels in the Les Rougon-
Macquart cycle, which followed the lives of an extended family during the French
Second Empire. Most of William Faulkner’s novels and stories are set in Yoknap-
atawpha County, Mississippi, with characters showing up in various stories. More
contemporarily, John Jakes produced the Kent Family Chronicles and the North and
South series following families through generations of American History.
In 1980, Jean Auel released the first book in her Earth’s Children series, The Clan
of the Cave Bear, which became a huge bestseller and was made into a movie
starring Daryl Hannah. Auel’s final installment in the ice age saga is the 2002 The
Shelters of Stone.
Armistead Maupin first serialized his Tales of the City in the San Francisco
Chronicle. The series followed the lives of several characters, the most popular being
Michael Tolliver, a gay man who develops AIDS late in the series, and Anna Madrigal,
the eccentric landlady of 28 Barbary Lane, the central setting of Tales. Tales of the
 SERIES FICTION 885

City was published in 1978 with a 2007 release, Michael Tolliver Lives, updating
fans on the life of their favorite character.
Dean Koontz has four titles in the Odd Thomas series. Thomas communicates
with the dead, helping them to gain justice or otherwise helping them accomplish
what they couldn’t in life. Dan Brown has offered two thrillers featuring Harvard
symbolist Robert Langdon in the extraordinarily bestselling The Da Vinci Code
(2003) and Angels & Demons (2000).
Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. In the world of science fiction and fan-
tasy, worlds created by authors often draw other authors to contribute to them.
The worlds expand into universes peopled with the original characters and many
new ones. New plots are developed and back stories for older plots and charac-
ters created. A canon grows up, mostly unofficial, governing what does and does
not belong to the universe and helping direct new material written. In a 2005
editorial, Gary Hoppenstand, the editor of The Journal of Popular Culture,
bemoaned the damage done by imitators of Tolkien, Star Trek, and Star Wars.
He believes that original science fiction and fantasy writing is being pushed out
by the endless installments in the Star Trek and Star Wars series and series based
on Middle Earth imitations (Hoppenstand 2005, 603–604). Two examples of
what have come to be known as shared universes are the Star Trek and Star
Wars franchises.
The 1960s television series Star Trek has spawned not only movies and additional
series (Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise) but also over
700 book titles as well, beginning with Mack Reynolds’s Mission to Horatius in
1967. Several series have been created within the past decade. Star Trek: Strange
New Worlds I (1998) is an anthology of short stories culled from a writing compe-
tition and edited by Dean Wesley Smith, himself the author of a dozen Star Trek
adventures. This collection of fan fiction has led to writing careers for many of its
contributors and is still going strong at volume ten. Two new series will be launched
in 2008, Star Trek: Terok Nor and Star Trek: Klingon Empire.
Star Trek: The Next Generation currently includes almost seventy titles by
various authors. There have been at least six Deep Space Nine series, the longest
running with almost thirty titles. James Blish, Dean Wesley Smith, and John Vorholt
have been some of the most frequent contributors to the Star Trek universe of series.
Even the most recent spin-off, Enterprise, which aired from 2001 to 2005 has
spawned a ten-book series.
George Lucas’s phenomenal success, Star Wars, has produced dozens of novels as
well. Based on the early lives or post canonical Star Wars lives of characters such as
Han Solo or Princess Leia or even on newly invented characters and adventures, the
Star Wars franchise continues to widen. Spin-offs such as Star Wars: Boba Fett, Star
Wars: Clone Wars, and Star Wars: Dark Nest offer readers more adventures than
the slow release of films can provide.
Another shared world is George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards, which has expanded
to eighteen volumes since the 1986 debut, Wild Cards, involves a gene-altering virus
of the same name. Superheroes from the comics are alive and well in the hands of
the series’ authors. Probably the most popular shared universe of all time is the
Myth series of Robert Asprin, which extends from the 1978 Another Fine Myth to
the 2002 Something M.Y.T.H Inc. Three more series, Phule’s Company, Time Scout,
and Myth Adventures also have post 2000 releases. With his former wife Lynn
Abbey, Asprin created the Thieves World shared universe. The anthologies of stories
886 SERIES FICTION

set in the city of Sanctuary were published from 1979 to 1989 and set the standard
for shared universes. A new Thieves World anthology, Sanctuary, was released in
2002.
Harry Turtledove is one of the masters of series science fiction. He juggles eleven
different series, all of which have had installments since 2000; among them are
World War, Great War, Darkness, and Pacific War. Many of his novels are consid-
ered alternative history, which is set in an alternate timeline—often uchronian,
which means a utopian sort of time period preceding our own. In more contempo-
rary times, this genre often asks the question, “What if?” and stories are called
counter-factual histories. For example, what if Confederate forces had won in the
Civil War is the question asked in The Guns of the South: A Novel of the Civil War
(1992). The success of this stand-alone title spurred Turtledove to develop the
Worldwar and the Great War series in which real battles are altered by alternative
timelines.
Even former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has contributed to alternative
history series with his Civil War trilogy and his Pacific War series, addressing the
“what ifs” of some of these momentous battles.
Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonrider series is one of the best beloved of science fiction
and fantasy readers alike. The Dragonriders of Pern series began in 1968 and still
continues with a 2007 release Dragon Harper written with her son Todd McCaffrey.
Many fantasy writers release their books in series, such as David Eddings, Terry
Brooks, and R.A. Salvatore. Eddings’s Belgeriad series began with the 1982 Pawn
of Prophecy and was followed by many more installments. His most recent series,
written with wife Leigh Eddings, is the Dreamers series begun in 2003. In 1977,
Terry Brooks burst on the fantasy scene with his Tolkienesque Sword of Shannara.
Brooks’s world was favorably received and he’s been adding more volumes to the
Shannara saga ever since. The latest is part of the Genesis of Shannara saga,
Armageddon’s Children (2006), which brings the Shannara epic to a futuristic
Seattle. Salvatore is the author of seven series, several since 2000.
In 1994, Terry Goodkind released the first title in his Sword of Truth series,
Wizard’s First Rule. The series is more mature and graphically violent than many of
Goodkind’s fantasy counterparts, but the series has attracted legions of followers
from the first title. Goodkind’s world is a battlefield where the fight for control is
ever-shifting between the world of magic and the world of reality, with the material
between them flimsy stuff. The hero, Richard Cypher, develops from a man who is
thrust into an adventure that he does not understand to a powerful hero whose
magic is great. Book eleven, The Confessor (2007), is the culmination of the
adventures of Richard and Kahlan as they try to save the world they know from
darkness.
The current reigning queen of fantasy series is Mercedes Lackey. Lackey has over
twenty series, many with titles added since 2000. Her most popular series is set in
the land of Valdemar (Arrows of the Queen, 1987; Exile’s Valor, 2003). Valdemar
is a fantastical land peopled with magical creatures in a medieval setting. Although
the writer of several series, Piers Anthony is best known for his pun-filled Xanth
series. The first release, A Spell for Chameleon (1977), has been followed by thirty
more titles, the most recent, Air Apparent, in 2007.
Diana Gabaldon begins her highly praised Outlander series in 1991 with
Outlander. A 1945 nurse joins her husband in post World War II Scotland to
rekindle their marriage. She is transported back to the Scotland of the late 1770s
 SERIES FICTION 887

and so the time travel adventures begin. Gabaldon’s books are a combination of fan-
tasy, history, and romance, but the author insists that her titles do not fit neatly in
any particular genre. In the sixth book of the series, A Breath of Snow and Ashes
(2005), Gabaldon meticulously follows her characters as they make preparations for
the American Revolution.
Horror novels have succumbed to the demands of series readers as well. One of
the longest running series in the horror genre is V.C. Andrews’s Flowers in the Attic
series with its many spin-offs, sequels, and prequels. Andrews wrote the first five in
the early eighties but died in 1986. The series has been continued by various authors
since that time. Seven of the series have been developed since 2000, including the
most recent Secrets line.
Vampires seem to be a popular creature around which series are built. Anne Rice’s
New Orleans Vampire Chronicles debuted with Interview with the Vampire (1975).
The vampire Lestat was played by Tom Cruise in the box office rendition of the
movie in 1994. Rice’s latest installment in the Chronicles is Blood Canticle (2003).
Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series first appeared in 1993. In
a future time when the United States has provided vampires with equal rights, Blake
takes on various clients who need her skills in necromancy. Blood Noir (2008) is the
fourteenth Anita Blake installment. A more lighthearted vampire series is set in the
Buffyverse of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, played by Sarah
Michelle Gellar from 1997 to 2003. Dozens of Buffy novels for both young adults
and a more mature audience have been released.
Stephen King, the undisputed master of horror fiction is not known for series fic-
tion. His Dark Tower sequence, however, is a seven-title series begun in 1982 with
The Gunslinger. The final installment, The Dark Tower, was released in 2004.
Men’s Adventure and Westerns. Nick Carter was a fictional detective popular in the
dime novels of the 1880s. His popularity has led to a long-running series of books
as his identity continued to morph through the 1990s. The hero’s name eventually
became the pseudonym for a string of authors who wrote Nick Carter novels,
including Martin Cruz Smith. There were 261 Nick Carter: Killmaster novels
published between 1964 and 1990, in which Carter’s character was a spy for the
AXE agency.
Even more prolific were the Mack Bolan series, which produced over 570 install-
ments. Don Pendelton created the Executioner series and contributed 41 titles to the
popular action-adventure genre, which has been described as the equivalent to
romance fiction for women. After his death in 1995, the series was continued by
house authors. Over the years, Bolan has battled Mexican drug lords, Russian spies,
and a host of other enemies. Pendleton discussed his character on his Web site:
“Bolan lives large, responding to the challenge of life, remaining alive and remain-
ing human in the process. Success in living means growth, achievement, beating the
challenge and maturing toward a meaningful evolutional plateau” (http://www.don-
pendleton.com/executionerseries.html). Men may be attracted to the heroism of
Bolan, but according to the Don Pendleton Web site, over forty percent of Bolan
fans are female. The formula of the hero still drives sales. Six titles, including Devil’s
Playground, have been released in 2007 alone.
William W. Johnstone is one of the masters of the adventure series for men. He is
best known for his westerns, but he also wrote in the science fiction, military, and
horror genres. Several of his series, including the western series Mountain Man and
Blood Bond, have been continued after his death in 2004 by J.A. Johnstone.
888 SERIES FICTION

Johnstone himself was the quintessential adventurer, with stints in the French
Foreign Legion and the military. In Out of the Ashes (1983), the first book in the
Ashes series, Ben Raines searches for his missing family in post-apocalyptic
America. The 34th entry in the series is Escape from the Ashes (2003) and follows
Raines’s plane crash in Canada. The Mountain Man story has followed Smoke
Jensen through 34 titles so far. Living for revenge and to wipe out bands of
desperados, Jensen is forced to keep moving. Readers follow ex-CIA agent John
Barrone in the Code Name series and the blood brothers Sam Two Wolves and Matt
Bodine in the Blood Bond line.
Clive Cussler is another household name in the adventure genre. His character,
Dirk Pitt, has appeared in nineteen novels. Cussler, like his character Pitt, is an
adventurer. A diver, he has recovered many shipwrecks and has established the
nonprofit agency NUMA (National Underwater and Marine Agency), which is the
premise for his NUMA series. The Pitt novels feature high tech weapons and tools
and many of the same elements that make Indiana Jones and James Bond so
popular, beautiful women and nefarious villains among them.
Westerns are the quintessential men’s adventure novels. Zane Grey, Max Brand,
and Louis L’Amour are the leaders of this genre of gunslingers, cattle rustlers, and
Old West shootouts. Although Grey, famous for Riders of the Purple Sage (1912),
died in 1979; Brand, the prolific author of westerns died in 1944 in World War II;
and L’Amour, equally prolific, died in 1988, their bibliographies have continued to
be added to by ghost writers. But new writers are creating Western series to cater to
a readership that is not ready to let go of the Old West. Bryce Harte writes the Creed
series; Creed: Arkansas Raiders (2001) is the tenth in the series. Elmer Kelton has
been writing westerns since the 1950s, and his Texas Rangers series is going strong
with his 2008 release Hard Trail to Follow. Hundreds of titles have been published
in the long-running Tabor Evans’s Long Arm series since the series debut, Longarm,
appeared in 1978.
Mystery and Detective Fiction. Mystery and detective fiction by its nature lends itself
to series. The detective, either professional or amateur, is inquisitive, resourceful,
and persistent, all traits that make for great mystery solving. Readers of mysteries
are very loyal and will buy dozens of novels by the same author. Lillian Jackson
Braun is a case in point. Braun debuted retired journalist Jim Qwilleran in the 1966
The Cat Who Could Read Backwards. Qwilleran and his Siamese cats Koko and
Yum Yum live in a small Northern community, and with the help of Koko,
Qwilleran solves mysteries. Braun, in her nineties, continues to produce a new
installment of her The Cat Who series almost every year. It is difficult to tell who is
more popular to readers, the cats or the detective as fans wait anxiously for each of
the twenty plus books that Braun has released thus far. Readers enjoy The Cat Who
series not only for its interesting characters and the exploits of the amazing Koko,
but for the feeling of “coming home” they experience each time they return to the
Northern Midwest town of Pickax.
One of the most respected writers of any genre is Lawrence Block. Block has
created several series characters: Bookstore owner and cat burglar Bernie
Rhodenbarr, Cold War spy Evan Tanner, and former police officer and recovering
alcoholic Matt Scudder. As Scudder grows, he gives up the booze but not his moral
ambiguity. A detective in the hard-boiled tradition, Scudder operates below the
radar of traditional law enforcement. The books are gritty and violent, but the New
York City location is palpably realistic. What draws readers to the series is its refusal
 SERIES FICTION 889

to provide the elements of hard-boiled mystery fiction in conventional or stereotyp-

ical ways. The good guys in Scudder’s world are not always good, the bad not
always so bad.
With Marcia Muller’s introduction of detective Sharon McCone in the 1977
Edwin of the Iron Shoes, a new day dawned for women’s detective fiction. The
hard-boiled P.I. is a predominantly male role, and until McCone appeared, women
were not part of the private eye scene in any visible numbers. Married to hard-
boiled detective author Bill Pronzini, himself the creator of a long running series,
Muller was influenced to develop McCone as a softer version of the male archetype.
The Ever Running Man (2007) is number twenty-four in the series. Although Muller
has had success with McCone, the wildly popular Kinsey Millhone and V.I.
Warshawski have given writers of female detectives solid role models as well.
Sara Paretsky’s first V.I. Warshawski novel Indemnity Only was released in 1982
and introduced readers to strong, capable female characters who are not victims but
rather the protectors of victims. Thirteen novels later Paretsky still has her detective
searching for justice on issues of community and social responsibility.
Kinsey Millhone is one of the best-recognized female sleuths being published
today. She was introduced by Sue Grafton in the 1982 A is for Alibi. T Is for
Trespass (2007) is her twentieth Millhone installment. Like Paretsky, Grafton’s
novels tackle social themes in an effort to understand the “whys” behind the
murders investigated.
Husband-wife teams in mystery fiction have always been popular. J.D. Robb’s
sleuthing team is anything but the usual in her In Death series, which numbers 26
titles and is set in a New York fifty years in the future. In the 1995 debut, Naked in
Death, police lieutenant Eve Dallas meets her future husband Roarke, a suspect in
the first installment. Dallas is praised as a strong, intelligent woman, and the book’s
fast pace and suspense has earned Robb an even wider audience. She has written
dozens of romance titles as Robb and other fiction as Nora Roberts.
Equally popular are series based on the lives of famous people, often novelists
themselves. Stephanie Barron’s series of mysteries based on the life of Jane Austen
debuted with Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrove Manor in 1996. The most
recent release is Jane and the Barque of Frailty (2006). Elliott Roosevelt writes
mysteries about a fictitious Eleanor Roosevelt who solves mysteries in the White
House (Murder at the President’s Door, 2001). The author of several series, Laurie
R. King is best known for her Mary Russell series set in England during World War I.
The debut novel in the series is the highly acclaimed The Beekeeper’s Daughter
(1994). Russell solves mysteries with the retired Sherlock Holmes, whom she even-
tually marries. There have been many Sherlock Holmes pastiches, but King’s is
different, and applauded, because she adds female interest to Holmes’s adventures,
giving Russell an identity of her own.
Patricia Cornwell’s 1990 Postmortem introduced mystery readers to the world of
Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner for the State of Virginia, and opened the
floodgates to a slew of forensic mysteries. Cornwell’s novels employ all of the
features of forensic science in her Scarpetta mysteries. Book of the Dead (2007) is
number fifteen. Kathy Reichs is a forensic anthropologist for Quebec, medical
examiner for North Carolina, and anthropology professor at the University of
North Carolina, Charlotte. Her books about Temperance “Tempe” Brennan are
filled with the same forensic expertise as Patricia Cornwell’s. Brennan debuted in
Deja Dead (1997). The television series Bones is based on Reichs and her character.
890 SERIES FICTION

Jeffery Deaver has introduced a new type of forensic scientist. Injured while work-
ing a case, Lincoln Rhymes is now a quadriplegic, able to move only a finger. Rhyme
is not an easy man to work with, but his wide ranging forensic expertise is a hot
commodity. In The Bone Collector (1997), Rhyme begins working with Amelia
Sachs who becomes indispensable as both his eyes and legs and as his lover. Deaver’s
Lincoln Rhyme series is praised for the books’ dizzyingly fast-paced and twisted plot
lines. The Broken Window is scheduled for a 2008 release. A new series debuts with
the 2007 The Sleeping Doll and stars Kathryn Dance, a kinesics analyst who
appeared in the Rhyme title The Cold Moon (2006).
Along Came a Spider, the first in a series of nursery rhyme titled books, appeared
in 1993 and, much to his reader’s delight, has been followed by twelve more Alex
Cross novels, seven of them bestsellers. Cross is a psychologist who works with the
police department to track killers.
Although there have been several popular series featuring gay and lesbian
characters (Joseph Hanson’s Dave Brandstetter for one), one of the most popular
characters has been Laurie King’s San Francisco-based Kate Martinelli, a lesbian
homicide detective. King’s first Matinelli novel, A Grave Talent (1993), won the
Edgar Award for the best first crime novel of the year. Detective Kate Delafield stars
in Lambda Award-winning Katherine V. Forrest’s mystery series (Hancock Park,
2004). Ellen Hart’s lesbian character, Jane Lawless, is a restaurant owner in
Minneapolis; Night Vision (2006) is the fourteenth in the series.
In 1990 Walter Mosley achieved critical acclaim with his first Easy Rawlins book,
Devil in a Blue Dress. Rawlins, a war veteran, solves crimes in post World War II
Los Angeles. Mosley’s novels follow Rawlins through time; the first novel is set in
1948, and the most recent, Blonde Faith (2008), takes place in the post Vietnam era.
A series featuring Fearless Jones and his sidekick Paris Minton is also set in the Los
Angeles of the 1950s. A third series character is Socrates Fortlow (Walkin’ the Dog,
1999). His novels are seen as providing strong social commentary on the life of
African-Americans in a volatile period of American history.
Along with focusing on social issues, African-American authors often infuse their
mysteries with family dynamics as well. Former Essence magazine editor Valerie
Wilson Wesley’s Tamara Hayle is a Newark, New Jersey, ex-cop turned private eye.
Wesley’s novels follow Hayle as she struggles to raise her son. Barbara Neely created
Blanche White, a nosy forty-year-old domestic who frequently finds trouble.
Blanche on the Lam (1992) was her first appearance and won the Agatha, the
Macavity, and the Anthony awards.
Unquestionably the most popular author to feature Native American characters
is Tony Hillerman. Tony Hillerman created Joe Leaphorn, a member of the Navajo
Tribal Police in New Mexico, and his partner Jim Chee. His novels, beginning with
The Blessing Way (1970), became very popular for their authentic depictions of
Navajo life and the Southwest. Although he has written other mysteries and nonfic-
tion titles, the Leaphorn/Chee novels are the most popular. The most recent title is
the 2003 Sinister Pig.
Set on a fictional South Carolina resort island, Carolyn Hart’s “Death on
Demand” series features an attractive, wealthy couple, Annie and Max Darling.
They own a mystery bookshop and also work together to solve the many real
mysteries that come their way. The author reveals in the books a familiarity with
esoteric mystery fiction that appeals to devotees of the genre.
One of the most successful mystery series is Elizabeth Peters’s Amelia Peabody.
Peters has set dozens of books in nineteenth century Egypt, where Peabody and her
 SERIES FICTION 891

husband excavate tombs and historical locations. The novels, begun in 1975, are
strongly colored by Peters’s own background in Egyptian archaeology. Yearly
installments in the Amelia Peabody series are eagerly awaited by the millions of fans
of the series and have been awarded many mystery fiction kudos. Tomb of the
Golden Bird (2006) is the eighteenth Peabody novel.
An example of a television series spawning a novel series is the popular Murder,
She Wrote, a mystery series starring Angela Lansbury that aired from 1984 to 1996.
The series, initially set in the small New England town of Cabot Cove, eventually
followed Lansbury’s character, mystery writer Jessica Fletcher, as she traveled
around the country. Donald Bain’s first installment in the series is Gin and Daggers
(1989), and two titles are scheduled to be released in 2008. The series, one of the
longest running drama series, is dear to many reader’s hearts as well.
Romance. Harlequin romances are the most widely recognized romance publica-
tions in the world. The North American division of the British Mills and Boon
publishing empire, Harlequin has been distributing romances in various series for
over fifty years. Each month, titles are released in over a dozen different series, each
series having its own characteristics. For example, the Harlequin Romance line has
mildly sensuous titles and the Blaze line contains higher levels of sensuality. Other
lines are Historical, Intrigue, Medical Romances, and four series in Spanish (Deseo,
Bianco, Jazmin, and Julia). There is also a NASCAR line for racing fans. One of
Harlequin’s imprints, Kimani Press, releases series geared toward an African
American audience.
Notable fantasy writers such as Mercedes Lackey have contributed to the
Harlequin Romance’s Luna line. The line offers readers fantasy focused on romance
and sensuality. The series, launched in 2004, features romance/fantasy novels by
several well-known fantasy and science fiction writers. Lackey’s contribution, The
Fairy Godmother (2004), combines humor and romance in its depiction of a world
where its inhabitants must live out their lives in fairy tale tradition.
Other than the success of Janet Dailey’s American series, in which a romance was
set in each of the fifty states, series or category romances generally do not follow the
series definition of repeat characters or locations. They do not need to be read in
any particular order, although they are numbered. Highly formulaic, a Harlequin
romance is short, under 250 pages, and always ends happily ever after. The heroines
are dispatched to locations all over the world and they are involved in every type of
vocation possible, from high-stakes professional careers to single moms. Because
Harlequin was hesitant to publish American authors and titles with a more
American sensibility, Simon and Schuster launched its Silhouette imprint in 1980 to
put a different spin on formula romances. The line charged authors to create
heroines who were stronger and more self-sufficient than their Harlequin counter-
parts. Other publishers followed suit and category romances began a publishing
phenomenon. As the market expanded, however, the books became more formulaic
and the quality waned.
The most successful author to begin her career in the world of category romance
and cross over to noncategory books is Nora Roberts. Roberts has many series to
accompany her stand-alone romance titles. One of the most prolific romance writers
working today, Roberts, who also writes under the name J.D. Robb, has produced
over twenty romance series. Roberts is a highly respected romance author, having
almost 200 books to her credit since 1981. She sold her first manuscript to
Silhouette Books in 1981, Irish Thoroughbred, as part of the Irish Hearts series.
Her Calhoun Women series is one of the most popular Silhouette series ever.
892 SERIES FICTION

Roberts has won many romance genre awards, several for her McGregor series
alone. Part of her success lies in her inclusion of elements from other genres such as
mystery and fantasy.
Christian Fiction. A new trend that many Christian publishing houses contribute to,
a response to the increasing demands on readers’ time and attention, is the release
of smaller series. Sales of series installments, excepting more established authors,
tend to wane after the third release. To broaden their series offerings, publishers
such as Tyndale, a major Christian publisher, have begun to release nonserial series.
These series provide readers with the same characters and locations, but the
individual titles do not need to be read in chronological order. Readers are not
obligated to read earlier titles to feel comfortable with later releases.
Even Harlequin has gotten on the Christian romance bandwagon, offering God-
centered romances, sans sex, with its Love Inspired line. Conservative, often funda-
mentalist, values are highlighted in these works with women frequently giving up
the roles of powerful women and finding love and happiness in laundry and raising
children.
Beverly Lewis’s Annie’s People series (The Brethren, 2006) and Wanda E.
Brunstetter’s Brides of Lancaster County and Daughters of Lancaster County are
just a few of the series that now feature the simple lives of the Pennsylvania Amish.
Jan Karon’s Mitford saga is set in a North Carolina mountaintop village and follows
the life of Father Tim Kavanaugh. The acclaimed series, begun in the 1994 At Home
in Mitford culminates in the series conclusion Light from Heaven (2005). The series
is beloved for its nostalgic look at a small town and the simple religious lives of its
inhabitants. Gilbert Morris’s House of Winslow series debuted in 1986, and the
fortieth installment, The White Night, concluded the series in 2007.
The Left Behind series is undoubtedly one of the largest publishing phenomena
the world of Christian publishing has ever seen. The books, written by Tim LaHaye
and Jerry B. Jenkins, are located in the time of the Rapture, a Christian idea that
encompasses a time when Jesus Christ returns to the Earth to take select individu-
als to meet God in Heaven. The first title in the series, Left Behind: A Novel of the
Earth’s Last Days (1995), has been followed by almost a dozen more titles, an
extensive series for children (Left Behind: The Kids), movie adaptations, and several
spin-off series (Left Behind: End off State, Left Behind: Military).

Bibliography
Auel, Jean. The Shelters of Stone. New York: Crown, 2002.
Cornwell, Patricia. Book of the Dead. New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 2007.
Deaver, Jeffrey. The Bone Collector. New York: Viking, 1997.
Don Pendleton Web Site. http://www.donpendleton.com/executionerseries.html. Accessed on
April 30, 2008.
Foote, Stephanie. “Bookish Women: Reading Girls’ Fiction: A Response to Julia Mickenberg.”
American Literary History 19.2 (2007): 521–526.
Goodkind, Terry. The Confessor. New York: Tor, 2007.
Grafton, Sue. T Is for Trespass. New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 2007.
Handler, Daniel. The Bad Beginning. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
———. The End. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.
Hillerman, Tony. Sinister Pig. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.
Hoppenstand, Gary. “Series(ous) SF Concerns.” The Journal of Popular Culture 38.4 (May
2005).
 SERIES FICTION 893

LaHaye, Tim, and Jerry B. Jenkins. Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days. Wheaton,
IL: Tyndale House, 1995.
Mosley, Walter. Devil in a Blue Dress. New York: Norton, 1990.
Peters, Elizabeth. Tomb of the Golden Bird. New York: William Morrow, 2006.
Rice, Anne. Blood Canticle. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.
Thomas, Rebecca L., and Catherine Barr. Popular Series Fiction for K-6 Readers. Westport,
CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2004.
Warner, Gertrude Chandler, and Robert Papp. The Box That Watch Found. Morton Grove,
IL: Albert Whitman and Co., 2007.
Watson, Bruce. “Tom Swift, Nancy Drew and Pals All Had the Same Dad.” Smithsonian 22.7
(October 1991): 50–59.
Winner, Lauren F. “The Series Still Rules.” Publishers Weekly 28 August, 2006. S10–S11.

Further Reading
Agosto, D.E., S. Hughes-Hassell, and C. Gilmore-Clough. “The All-White World of Middle-
School Genre Fiction: Surveying the Field for Multicultural Protagonists.” Children’s Litera-
ture in Education 34.4 (December 2003): 257–275; Benson, Christopher. “What’s Behind the
Boon in Black Mystery Writers?” Ebony (September 2003); Billman, Carol. Secret of the
Stratemeyer Syndicate: Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and the Million Dollar Fiction Factory.
New York: Ungar, 1986; Charles, John A., and Mosley, Shelley. “Getting Serious about
Romance: Adult Series Romance for Teens.” Voice of Youth Advocates 25.2 (June 2002):
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41 (Fall 2000): 272–282; Foote, Stephanie. “Deviant Classics: Pulps and the Making of
Lesbian Print Culture.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31 (2005): 169–190;
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Women. 3rd ed. Dearborn: Purple Moon Press, 1999; Heising, Willetta L. Detecting Men: A
Readers Guide and Checklist for Mystery Series Written by Men. Dearborn: Purple Moon
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Series. Bowling Green: Popular Press, 1997; Inness, Sherrie, Ed. Nancy Drew and Company:
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Novels Science Fiction Readers Don’t See.” Interzone 170 (August 2001): 54–55.
PATRICIA BOSTIAN
SPACE OPERA
Definition

In these hectic days of phrase coining, we offer one. Westerns are called “horse
operas,” the morning housewife tear-jerkers are called “soap operas.” For the hacky,
grinding, outworn spaceship yarn, or world-saving for that matter, we offer “space
opera.”
—Arthur Wilson “Bob” Tucker, 1941

Tucker’s disparaging description still influences perceptions of space opera today.

Considered a subgenre of science fiction, space opera is usually seen at best as “for
fun,” as Brian Aldiss puts it, and at worst, hack writing barely deserving of the
infamous sci-fi pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s. Up until the late 1970s,
space opera was a dismissive term applied to the type of “hacky, grinding, outworn”
sci-fi writing Tucker vilifies, which was, in essence, a western or a romance transposed
to outer space.
Elements of the early space opera are introduced with willful abandon in an effort
to entertain, whereas the plausibility of those elements—virtually instantaneous
galactic travel, worlds with impossible aliens, and the ever-so-slightly-bigger-and-
better death ray—are blithely ignored. Its pejorative status is highlighted by William
Sims Bainbridge, who describes space opera as that which uses “the physical props
of hard science without the underlying intellectual themes” (1986, 77), meaning
that the physical conditions of the universe in which space opera functions usually
run contrary to known science. Bainbridge’s description furthers the notion that

A RECIPE FOR SPACE OPERA

Brian Aldiss wittily described the subgenre as that which takes “a few light years and a pinch
of reality and inflate thoroughly with melodrama, dreams, and a seasoning of screwy ideas” (9).
Aldiss then listed a number of defining elements of space opera:
• Earth in peril
• Quest
• Hero
• Aliens and exotic creatures
• Blood running down the palace steps
• Ships launching into the louring dark
• Beautiful women
• Evil villain
• Happy ending (1974, 10)

To which we can also add:

• Cosmic backdrop
• Sweeping, swashbuckling action
• Often stilted dialog (and even narration)
• Enough superlatives to fill a galaxy
 SPACE OPERA 895

space opera is primarily action and flash (deriving from the Sturm und Drang move-
ment of eighteenth-century Germany as well as the romance novels of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries) and virtually devoid of ideas, a traditional distinction
between writing literature and merely writing.
Trends and Themes. Not all of these characteristics are endemic to space opera;
certainly most works of traditional or hard science fiction employ many of these
same operatic qualities. As Tzvetan Todorov brilliantly points out in Genres in
Discourse, the borders of any genre remain opaque, nebulous, and subject to con-
stant scrutiny and redefinition. Many early practitioners of hard science fiction—
such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, or Robert Heinlein—would have been
horrified to have their works referred to as space opera. Yet many of the qualities
denoting space opera run rampant through their works. The entry on science fiction
in this work offers a much more detailed definition of hard science fiction; but at its
essence, hard science fiction is science fiction; space opera is science fiction.
Early space opera can also be distinguished from planetary romance, its sister
subgenre, which, while making use of extraterrestrial settings, comes closer to
fantasy than science fiction because the story invariably resembles pre-technology
Earth and incorporates qualities like swordplay and magic, to name a few. Planetary
romance or early space opera is perhaps best exemplified by Leigh Brackett’s The
Sword of Rhiannon (1949). In space opera, planets—and, similarly, the ubiquitous
spaceport bar—serve generally as ports of call; the real action is in space and
spaceships. And rather than relying on magic, space opera will rely on what can be
called superscience, an instance of which is the sudden development of a regenera-
tion drug that can restore the hero to perfect, symmetrical health just as he has had
his eyes plucked out and his limbs amputated—without, of course, even a scar—as
is the case in E.E. Smith’s Lensman series. Pre–1980 space opera focused on the tale,
not the idea, was often tinged with a nostalgic affection, and indulged freely in
extravagance. It was also unmistakably masculine.
In 1974, Aldiss famously declared space opera dead. In a sense, he was correct;
the old space opera had passed away, but the late 1970s saw the birth of what has
become widely known as the new space opera. Although the new space opera still
bears many of the old earmarks—the epic scale, the exotic setting, the earth in
peril—it pays closer attention to real science and realistic characters. It also takes
on the literary quality of exploring and expounding ideas, and it pays homage to the
space battle royale—so much so, in fact, that some purists argue in favor of a
separate military science fiction or even military space opera category. But the scope,
size, and qualities of military science fiction, even when grounded on firm science,
make moot most attempts to distinguish it from space opera. The new space opera,
though better and more literary than its forerunner, still engenders Aldiss’s qualities
of “great images, excitements, and aspirations” (1974, 10).
History. Although a few critics argue that space opera’s roots can be traced to
such early writers as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, most tend to agree on two primary
literary figures of the 1920s as being credited with originating the subgenre: E.E.
“Doc” Smith and Edmond Hamilton.
E.E. “Doc” Smith (1890–1968). Born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, Edward Elmer Smith
is most noted for his two space opera sagas, the four-volume Skylark series and the
more popular six-book Lensman series. Smith earned two degrees in chemical
engineering from the University of Idaho, went on for both a Master’s and a PhD,
and worked for a few years at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, DC.
896 SPACE OPERA

A prolific writer, Smith infused much of his fiction with his scientific knowledge,
though usually just as a starting point. As his stories progressed, their scientific bases
would become increasingly outlandish.
Skylark. The first Skylark novel, The Skylark of Space, originally ran serially in
the August–October 1928 issues of Amazing Stories, the first magazine devoted
solely to science fiction and published by the influential Hugo Gernsbeck. Smith had
actually begun writing it in 1915 with the aid of a neighbor, Lee Hawkins Garby. It
was Garby who allegedly suggested that Smith first try his hand at writing science
fiction, to which he agreed, provided she write the love interest portions of the story.
Both are listed as authors of the work.
In the novel’s very first sentence, young scientist-hero Richard Seaton has just
discovered the peculiar qualities of unknown metal X in his laboratory: under the
proper conditions it stimulates the conversion of other metals into pure energy, and
in turn it can generate a field of energy capable of propelling ships beyond the speed
of light. Seaton’s discovery piques the interest of a former colleague, the evil Dr. Marc
“Blackie” DuQuesne, who steals Seaton’s secret. Both men recognize that metal X
and its amazing properties hold the secret to space travel, and they simultaneously
begin building spaceships—Seaton with the aid of his millionaire inventor friend
M. Reynolds Crane, and DuQuesne allied with the nefarious World Steel Corpora-
tion. Seaton’s ship is the eponymously named Skylark. DuQuesne kidnaps Dorothy
Vaneman, Seaton’s lovely socialite fiancée, and a galactic pursuit ensues that brings
both ships and crews into contact with such wonders as dead stars, startling
technological leaps, and eventually an alien race on the planet Osnome, populated
by the evil Mardonalians and the benevolent Konalians. At first deceived by the
Mardonalians, both Seaton and DuQuesne realize they must join forces with the
Kondalians to defeat their new mutual nemeses, which they promptly do.
Even while indulging in the hyperbolic “bigger, better, faster” episodic qualities of
what has come to be known as the linchpins of early space opera, Smith nonethe-
less accomplishes a few admirable feats. While much of his technological advances
defy known physics (such as faster-than-light travel and time dilation), the energy
for his galactic star drive resembles, if only vaguely, the process of cold fusion and
obeys the general principles of matter-to-energy conversion; the gravity well
surrounding the dead star conforms approximately to the properties of a neutron
star’s gravity horizon; on Osnome, humans encounter both slavery and the practice
of rudimentary eugenics, which in this case involves euthanizing flawed members of
society. In this regard, The Skylark of Space can be said to follow one of the
mandates of hard science fiction by engaging in extrapolative scientific thought,
both technologically and socially.
Smith composed the remaining three novels of the series on his own, Mrs. Garby
opting not to participate. Skylark Three also appeared serially in Amazing Stories
(1930) with new villains—the Fenachronians, who possess vastly superior technol-
ogy and who are naturally bent on destroying the Earth—and a new supertechnol-
ogy developed by Seaton and Crane, an impenetrable energy shield known as the
Zone of Force. Osnome, as luck would have it, is part of a fantastic fourteen-sun
system rife with planets and intelligent species. Seaton and Crane encounter a
number of these species (most importantly the Norlamin, key allies in the next
book), acquiring and synthesizing technology as they go, all the while fending off
the continuing plottings of DuQuesne. In an apparent extension of the euthanistic
eugenics of The Skylark of Space, Seaton resolves the threat of Fenachrone by not
 SPACE OPERA 897

only destroying the entire planet but also tracking down and eliminating the few
Fenachronians who managed to escape planetary annihilation; DuQuesne is also
immolated. The story ends with Seaton being named the new Chief of the Galactic
Council.
For Skylark of Valeron, Smith switched publishing milieus, opting to run the story
in Astounding Stories from August 1934 through February 1935. Seaton’s primary
foe this time is the Chlorans, who are attempting to conquer Valeron, and his
secondary foes are DuQuesne (who had substituted a dummy and thus avoided
immolation), a number of Fenachronians (who had eluded Seaton in the previous
work), and also a couple of more metaphysical foes: a colony of beings that are pure
intellect, first briefly encountered in The Skylark of Space, and inhabitants of the
fourth dimension that Seaton and company traverse while fleeing the beings of pure
intellect. Skylark of course becomes yet bigger, faster, and more powerful, its main
improvement being a centralized artificial brain that, among other amazing feats,
can synthesize matter directly from energy as well as both map and travel the entire
galaxy. DuQuesne temporarily conquers the Earth, until Seaton “disembodies” his
foe’s intelligence, locking it in a Niven-like stasis box and sending it drifting off into
the ether of eternal space.
Smith did not write the series’ final installment, Skylark DuQuesne, until 1965,
when it ran in If magazine, and it marks Smith’s later tendencies to explore mental
powers over technological ones, in which he indulges more freely in his Lensman
series. DuQuesne has once again escaped his fate but run afoul of the latest foe, the
Llurdi, a race of Vulcan-like purely logical beings bent on domination. The Chlorans
also return in a much more malevolent form, but they are defeated in the novel’s
climactic battle. Peace is negotiated with the Llurdi, the remaining Fenachrone
become allies, and DuQuesne, seemingly reformed, departs for a distant galaxy to
set up his own empire, accompanied by his new fiancée, Dr. Stephanie de Marigne.
Lensman. In the third Skylark installment, Smith had begun experimenting with
technological power versus mentalic power, a relationship he explores much more
fully in his Lensman series.
The Lensman series comprises either four, six, or seven novels, which is due to its
interesting publication history. Smith had begun conceiving his Lensman universe as
early as the late 1920s, envisioning it as a four-volume work. Each appeared in serial
form in Astounding magazine: Galactic Patrol (1937–1938), Gray Lensman
(1939–1940), Second-Stage Lensmen (1941–1942; sometimes Lensman), and
Children of the Lens (1947–1948). Smith had begun with a detailed outline for the
entire saga, which helped make Lensman’s plot much more complicated and
consistent than Skylark’s. Following the final installment’s publication, Smith
contracted with Fantasy Press to issue the works in hardcover. Lloyd Eshbach,
Fantasy Press’s owner, convinced Smith to rewrite one of the author’s earlier works,
Triplanetary, so that it would not only fit into the Lensman universe but also serve
as a prequel. Eshbach then suggested that Smith also write a new work, First
Lensman, to act as a bridge between the prequel and the series proper. Fantasy Press
published the revised Triplanetary in 1948 and First Lensman in 1950, then released
the original four-volume Lensman series between 1950 and 1954. Smith revised the
original four-volume series in order to make the two new prequels consistent, and
as a result a number of discrepancies between the original and the first publication
in book form exist. Further, F. Orlin Tremaine, the Astounding editor who had con-
tracted with Smith for Lensman, had left the magazine in 1938 to begin his own
898 SPACE OPERA

rival publication, Comet. The new magazine struggled financially, and Tremaine
asked Smith for a contribution, hoping the author’s fame and popularity would
resuscitate his struggling enterprise. In response Smith wrote “The Vortex Baster,”
his initial foray into what would become Masters of the Vortex, an ancillary
Lensman story set parallel to but not dependent upon the plots and characters of his
Lensman series. Unfortunately, Smith’s effort did not help Tremaine; “The Vortex
Blaster” appeared in the final issue of Comet, though subsequent truncated Vortex
tales ran in Astounding throughout 1942, until Smith elaborated on the story and
published it in novel form in 1960, returning to The Vortex Blaster in name. This
seventh Lensman novel seems to be set in the series’ chronology between Second-
Stage Lensmen and Children of the Lens.
The revised Triplanetary introduces two ancient races with highly developed
mentalic powers, the benevolent Arisians and the power-hungry, invading
Eddorians. Though possessing superior mental powers, the Arisians realize the
Eddorians pose a significant threat because the aggressive race’s mental powers rival
their own; coupled with the Eddorians’ technological supremacy, this gives the
Eddorians the edge. The Arisians begin eugenics programs on a number of planets,
including Earth, hoping over time to breed not only intelligent life but also a
superior race to serve as galactic guardians. A couple billion years pass and humans
begin to develop, garnering the attention of the Eddorians, who send Gharlane,
Second of Eddore, to interfere with human history and ensure that the race never
develops. But with the aid of Arisians disguised as humans, inhabitants of Earth
(a.k.a. Tellus in the series) survive and begin populating the solar system, though
they quickly find themselves plagued by space pirates (the Eddorians disguised).
Triplanetary introduces Virgil Samms, First Lensman, and Rod Kinnison, whose
ancestor, Kimball Kinnison, is the central hero of the four-book original Lensman
series.
The bridge novel, First Lensman, describes the formation of the Galactic Patrol
and introduces the lens itself, a gift to Samms from the Arisians. The lens is a lower-
order artificial life form created by the Arisians that is fitted to a unique wearer (no
one else can wear it), enabling its possessor a range of advanced mental powers,
including the ability to communicate with any other life form and limited mind-
reading capabilities. Samms uses the lens to visit various races and recruit from
among their numbers to populate the Galactic Patrol, a marked departure by Smith
from run-of-the-mill depictions of aliens as other. In First Lensman, aliens operate
as fully functional and equal partners to humans. Earth faces a massive attack by
space pirates—the Boskonians—but it is saved by the nascent Galactic Patrol.
The four volumes of the original Lensman series can be viewed as an organic
whole. Generations have passed and humanity has established a foothold in the
galaxy, but the Boskonians continue to be a formidable foe. Gradually Kimball
Kinnison and his fellow Lensmen perceive that the Boskonian pirates are not a loose
affiliation of brigands but the organized, purposeful fighting force of an even greater
foe operating on an intergalactic scale. The fighting rages for years and is charac-
terized by larger and more fantastic displays of technology, energy, and subterfuge—
hyperspatial tubes, superdreadnaughts, planet-destroying energy beams, immense
battles between huge space navies, secret councils that rule world-spanning empires,
second- and third-stage lensmen, and the culmination of the Arisians’ secret,
humanity-spanning eugenics program in the form of Kinnison’s five offspring, the
children of Children of the Lens. These children can meld their own minds into
 SPACE OPERA 899

what Smith calls The Unit, creating a mental force beyond even the Arisians.
Further, The Unit can also channel the mental energies of all the other Lensmen—
there are billions by now—which they use to finally penetrate the defensive shield
surrounding the Eddorians’ planet, vaporizing both the shield and the Eddorians.
Edmond Hamilton (1904–1977). “The Monster God of Mamurth,” published in the
August 1926 edition of Weird Tales, marked Hamilton’s entry into the science
fiction field. Though Hamilton gained a sizable readership for his numerous novels
and short stories written during the 1920s and 1930s, his career is singularly
marked by the Captain Future series. Hamilton was born in Pennsylvania and
entered college at the age of 14, but he never finished it.
A highly productive writer who early in his sci-fi career earned the nickname
“World Wrecker”—because many of his stories involved a galactic menace that
could be neutralized only by destroying entire planets—Hamilton wrote hundreds
of science fiction novels and short stories, several under a series of pseudonyms. He
wrote even more novels and short stories in the horror and detective genres when
his science fiction sales lagged. From 1946 on, when he married Leigh Brackett,
another sci-fi author of note who also wrote the screenplay for Star Wars V: The
Empire Strikes Back, his writing is marked by a more pensive and realistic style
(a change usually credited to Brackett’s influence). In that same year Hamilton was
hired by Mort Weisinger, an old collaborator, to work at DC Comics. Weisinger had
been a science fiction fan ever since reading The Skylark of Space as well as the early
Buck Rogers series, and he had also collaborated with Hamilton several times, even
lending a significant hand in the creation of Captain Future. Hamilton remained
affiliated with DC Comics until 1966, lending his hand to countless Batman and
Superman story lines.
Most of the Captain Future novels were published under their own Captain
Future label and put out by Pines Publications. The first, The Space Emperor,
appeared in early 1940 and was later reprinted as Captain Future and the Space
Emperor; it serves to provide much of the series’ exposition. Captain Future himself
is Curtis Newton, the son of the brilliant scientist Roger Newton and Elaine, who
are slain by the evil scientist Victor Kaslan while working in their moon laboratory.
Raised by the giant robot Grag, the android Otho, and Simon Wright, the elderly
scientific accomplice of the Wrights who exists now as a disembodied brain in a
plastic case, Curtis becomes a Doc Savage-like paragon of virtue, intelligence, and
physical prowess who vows to spend his life zipping around the galaxy (and in later
adventures, through multiple dimensions and across time) in his ship, The Comet,
righting wrongs and fighting evil.
Captain Future magazine published seventeen of the Captain Future adventures,
with the remaining ten works appearing from 1946–1951 in Startling Stories,
sometimes under Hamilton’s Brett Sterling alias. Pines Publications also published a
number of Captain Future comics, featuring a different Captain Future, under its
Nedor Comics label. A year after Hamilton’s death, a Japanese anime company
began a series of 52 “Captain Future” episodes. While many qualities, plot lines,
and characters diverged considerably from Hamilton’s creation, the show was
clearly based on Hamilton’s work.
Perhaps more readily than in any other genre, science fiction lends itself to the
sequel and even the series. Any piece of fiction must invent plot and character, but
science fiction often needs to invent also new worlds and new races, and once that
extra investment is made, authors are often loath to abandon it all after a single
900 SPACE OPERA

work. Although it can be argued that neither Smith nor Hamilton invested a great
deal of creativity in making those worlds and races plausible, their inventive energy
is nonetheless impressive. But when a series starts with a dramatic climax that
involves destroying an entire marauding race by annihilating their entire planet,
writing subsequent installments becomes rather a challenge. It is easy to see why
both writers engaged in increasingly hyperbolic elements as their series continued,
and that very hyperbole came to define early space opera.
That is not to say that they ignored actual science entirely. Both were highly intel-
ligent and based much of their extrapolative technology on known scientific princi-
ples of the time, and they were often dogmatic in explaining how the inventions and
technologies supposedly worked. Space opera does not altogether shirk sound
science, but neither does it allow mere science to get in the way of a good story. The
Smith-Hamilton era also saw the genesis of Buck Rogers (1928) and Flash Gordon
(1935), two serialized swashbucklers who helped amplify and aggrandize science
fiction in both the pulps and the movie theatres.
From the 1930s through the late 1970s, a number of luminaries made significant
contributions to the space opera field, though many of them would cringe at having
the label applied to their works—as would many of their fans. The figure who held
the most sway during this period—along with Hugo Gernsback, who is often
credited with creating science fiction as a genre and whose editorship was charac-
terized by soliciting and encouraging space opera stories—was John W. Campbell,
a sometimes space opera writer whose real influence lay in his position as editor of
Astounding Science Fiction. Campbell ushered in a host of new young writers such
as A.E. van Vogt, Robert Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov. Originally credited with
moving the genre away from its operatic elements and more toward hard science,
Campbell nonetheless began subscribing to baseless scientific notions in the early
1950s, including psionic powers and anti-Newtonian propulsion, which led many
writers to believe that Campbell’s vision of science was actually commercialized
pseudoscience. His overbearing personality and truculence eventually drove many
of the leading science fiction authors away from Campbell. But he also presided over
what is generally referred to as the golden age of science fiction, a period ranging
from the late 1930s to the 1950s.
The most important figure in the chronological progression of space opera after
Smith and Hamilton is Jack Williamson. His Legion of Space series, first appearing
in 1934, takes place in the thirtieth century and details the efforts of the Legion as
it battles the Medusae, a race bent on conquering and inhabiting Earth because their
own home planet has begun to spiral into its own star. Williamson, who died in
2006, continued writing well into his nineties and was an early influence on Asimov
and others.
In 1946 A.E. van Vogt produced his first novel, Slan, which inverts the usual evil-
alien paradigm by making ordinary humans villains intent on destroying the Slan.
A product of eugenically evolved humans, the Slan are near supermen who possess
psychic abilities, vastly superior intelligence, and supranormal strength and stamina.
Other notable space opera works by van Vogt include The Weapon Shops of Isher
(1951) and Cosmic Encounter (1980).
Arthur C. Clarke, generally considered one of the “Big Three” of science fiction
and recognized as writing a style of science fiction based on extrapolation of sound
science, nonetheless wrote a few works that could easily be categorized as space
opera. Chief among them is Childhood’s End (1953), given that Clarke dabbles with
 SPACE OPERA 901

notions of the occult, of humanity’s ascension into a hive-mind mentality, and of the
existence of a race of Overlords and, above them, the Overmind, which uses the
Overlords to guide certain races through their stage of transcendence from corpo-
real to ethereal existence. Childhood’s End represents an exception in Clarke’s
oeuvre; he is otherwise widely recognized for the high quality of his science, as in
his close adherence to known physics in 2001: A Space Odyssey (although the
existence of the monolith can be seen as problematic) and even in the hyperfilament
he speculates about in The Fountains of Paradise (1979). He is even credited with
being the first to recognize the importance of using geostationary positions for
communications satellites.
Probably the best known name in science fiction is Isaac Asimov, who, like
Clarke, is usually lauded for writing hard science fiction. An early Campbell
disciple, Asimov’s contributions to the field both in terms of literature and influence
are extensive. “Nightfall” was recognized by the Science Fiction Writers of America
as the best science fiction short story of all time, and the Foundation series was
awarded a Hugo Award for best science fiction series of all time. But Foundation is
pure space opera, comprising the original three volumes published in the early
1950s as well as its later four volumes, appearing from 1982 to 1993. Ostensibly,
even his Robot series can be included, since he eventually folded R. Daneel Olivaw
(as well as a few of his other stories and favorite themes) into Foundation’s galactic
empire. Foundation, admittedly influenced by Gibbons’s History of the Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire, incorporates Hari Selden’s theories of psychohistory, vast
armadas careening through hyperspace, an empire that spans an entire galaxy, and
startling technological and mentalic advances.
No list of space opera authors can be comprehensive, and the likes of Jack Vance,
Vernor Vinge (as well as his ex-wife, Joan Vinge), Andre Norton (more noted for
her fantasy works), and even Robert Heinlein could be incorporated here, along
with dozens of other names. But by the mid-1960s, science fiction had begun to
transform under the influence of the New Wave writers. Michael Moorcock is
generally credited with originating the movement when he assumed editorship of
New Worlds magazine in 1964; Harlan Ellison is often touted as the movement’s
primary initial writer and proponent. Science fictional New Wave advocated bringing
the entire genre closer to the mainstream, primarily by sacrificing scientific integrity
for literary style while simultaneously encouraging more experimentation—in short,
foregrounding space opera’s penchant for telling the tale rather than adhering to
sound science, even as the New Wave writers eschewed space opera as hack writing.
The New Wave writers felt they were distinguishing their brand of science fiction by
focusing more intently on psychological and sociological aspects, and their writing
trended toward a more pessimistic view of humanity. Leading New Wave writers
include such note worthies as Moorcock, Ellison, J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick,
Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel Delany, Roger Zelazny, Robert Silverberg, Leigh Brackett,
and Brian Aldiss.
Disdain for anything with even a whiff of space opera reached its height during
the late 1960s and early 1970s, which prompted Aldiss’s declaration that the genre
was dead. But, like Twain’s obituary, the death knell was premature, and space
opera’s fortunes experienced a radical reversal in the late 1970s. In the mid-1970s,
Lester Del Rey attempted to redefine space opera by returning it to its roots as a
nonliterary or even antiliterary art form, rejecting what he called the failed experi-
ment of the New Wave movement and its Modernist roots (Hartwell and Cramer
902 SPACE OPERA

2006, 15–16). Del Rey’s influence was very slight until about 3 p.m. on May 25,
1977, at which time George Lucas and 20th Century Fox released Star Wars on the
world. An unabashed space opera, Star Wars transfixed an entire generation,
redefining space opera as the best-selling popular science fiction entertainment. As
noted earlier, Brackett even wrote the script for the second Star Wars installment,
The Empire Strikes Back. Star Wars demonstrated to the hard sci-fi writers—to the
entire world, actually—that space opera could be an immense commercial success
while simultaneously receiving, at the very least, moderately favorable literary and
cinematic reviews. Lucas and company also showed that space opera could be
rollicking good fun. Its early sense of awe and wonder had returned.
Context and Issues. By the middle of the 1980s, the space opera renaissance was
in full swing. Yet the literary inclinations of the New Wave movement influenced the
resurgence of what is frequently called the new space opera, with its practitioners
bringing new literary savvy to the genre and the lines between space opera and hard
science fiction becoming once again blurred. Many of the names listed here also
appear in the accompanying entry on science fiction, and with good reason. The
new space opera writers were more cognizant of being at least reasonably account-
able to science, were capable of infusing their works with philosophical ideas and
symbolism, and still managed to tell an engaging tale. The new movement’s
vanguard was primarily British, led by the likes of Alastair Reynolds, John Clute,
and Iain Banks, though by 1990 a new breed of American writers began to estab-
lish a foothold, especially because new space opera, though still not fully considered
hard science fiction or even fully literary, bore a much more favorable imprimatur.
Among publishers, Baen Books was the first noteworthy house to openly advocate
for the new space opera and a new core of writers, with Del Rey and Tor soon
following suit.
An impressive number of writers published the bulk of their space opera canons
in the 1980s and 1990s, though few have produced much since 2000. These writers,
in varying degrees, contributed heavily to refiguring and reconstituting space opera
by bringing to their craft more complexity of character, a greater attention to
science, and the infusion of themes and ideas, whether political, religious, cultural,
or philosophical. What follows is a brief discussion of the major works and ideas of
three of these authors.
Steven Barnes (1952–) initially came to prominence coauthoring several works
with Larry Niven, starting with Dream Park (1981), followed by The Descent of
Anansi (1982), Achilles’ Choice (1991), and Saturn’s Race (2000); the two writers
also teamed with Jerry Pournelle for the two-volume Heorot series. Barnes also con-
tributed one work each to the Star Trek and Star Wars sagas, the latter appearing in
2004, and he singlehandedly wrote several works as well.
Along with Greg Bear and Gregory Benford, David Brin (1950–) comprise the
affectionately named Killer B’s of science fiction, so called largely because of their
collaborative efforts in writing the “final” trilogy in Asimov’s Foundation series,
though Brin had long before established himself as a sci-fi writer of note with his
award-winning Uplift novels, beginning with Sundiver (1980) and concluding with
Heaven’s Reach (1998). While largely a work of military space opera, the Uplift
stories serve as a paean to evolutionary theory, and they also incorporate and
develop ideas of genetic engineering, democracy, and racial consciousness. In other
works, such as Glory Season (1993) and Kiln People (2002), Brin explores the
effects of technology on humanity. Brin also gained some notoriety for writing a few
 SPACE OPERA 903

articles criticizing what he felt were the antidemocratic principles and attitudes
underlying the immensely popular Star Wars and Lord of the Rings works. His only
space opera work since 2000 is Forgiveness (2001), a graphic novel contributing to
the Star Trek: The Next Generation series.
Dan Simmons (1948–) gained widespread popularity and acclaim for his four-
volume Hyperion Cantos (though he followed the tetralogy with a 1999 short story,
“Orphans of the Helix,” which continues the same story line). Simmons mines
Greek mythology for his most recent space opera undertaking, Ilium (2003) and its
sequel, Olympos (2004), just as he borrows from classic literature for his award-
winning Cantos. The titles are drawn from the poetry of John Keats—Keats, in fact,
appears as a cybrid character—and the initial format borrows liberally from the
pilgrimage motif of Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.
Simmons’s Cantos revolve around the Shrike, a four-armed, armored machine with
spikes covering its body. The Shrike has been built by a far-future machine god, and
it can manipulate time to torture beings—pilgrims—in an effort to lure a human
god from the future. Clearly the antagonist of the first two novels, the Shrike begins
to act benevolently in subsequent tales. The Cantos gradually develop into a
cautionary tale about militaristic religion, with the heroes battling the Pax, an exten-
sion of the Catholic Church that has spread its dominance over most of the galaxy,
largely with the aid of the cruciform, a quasi-organic artifact that allows regenera-
tion of the dead.
Reception. Only in the past two decades has space opera began to garner serious
critical attention, albeit limited, which is mainly due to the longstanding perception
of space opera as hack writing. Prior to 1990 critical examinations of space opera
were virtually nonexistent, largely because the term was anathema. But since its
rejuvenation in the late 1970s and beyond, space opera has slowly become a fertile
object for critical analysis. Kathryn Cramer, William H. Hardesty III, David G.
Hartwell, and especially Gary Westfahl reside at the forefront of a small cadre of
literary critics who have examined space opera in some detail, tracing its origins and
finding in the new space opera no small merit. The bulk of the critical attention has
come in the last ten years, and it frequently takes the form of some sort of recon-
sideration of the genre, though feminist perspectives on space opera are beginning
to appear with greater regularity.
In his “Space Opera” chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction,
Westfahl points to space opera’s burgeoning commercial appeal as well as its trend of
garnering the bulk of the major science fiction awards since around 1990 as primary
reasons why the genre is attracting better writers and receiving more critical attention
(Westfahl 2003, 205). David Pringle points to space opera’s steadily increasing level
of sophistication and literary merit in the past decade, though he argues also that the
subgenre should be divided even further into planetary romances, which he feels are
distinctly different (Pringle 2000, 39, 46). Hartwell and Cramer are perhaps the most
vocal and insistent critics calling for a reassessment of space opera’s literary merits,
finding that the new space opera is a “colorful, dramatic, large-scale science fiction
adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written” (Hartwell and Cramer
2006). Locus magazine, a near-annual winner of various science fiction awards for its
reportage on science fiction and fantasy, even devoted its August 2003 issue exclu-
sively to articles and interviews on the new space opera.
Further, television and film manifestations of space opera have similarly pro-
gressed from the days of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. While 1960s and 1970s
904 SPACE OPERA

offerings like Dr. Who, Star Trek, Star Wars, and especially the original Battlestar
Galactica still bore many of the clichés of the old space opera, already the seeds of
the new space opera can be seen as several of these undertakings began to concern
themselves with ideas and issues underlying the basic entertainment quotient. Even
in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) were themes like militarism, xenophobia, masculinity,
and abortion being embedded in sophisticated and challenging ways. And although
some of the most recent TV and movie issues can still rally around the older notions
of space opera—consider Galaxy Quest and Total Recall—by presenting sheer
entertainment on a vast scale that blithely disregards the physical laws of time and
space, series like Joss Whedon’s Firefly (and its subsequent cinematic issue, Serenity)
and Ronald D. Moore’s 2003 reincarnation of Battlestar Galactica have garnered
wide critical acclaim, with the latter earning Peabody, Hugo, and Saturn awards.
With a cadre of new, talented, and literary writers producing a steadily increasing
stream of space opera, Tucker’s notion of the genre as filled with hacky, outworn
yarns seems to have been fully put to rest.
Selected Authors. Contemporary, or new, space opera authors can be divided into
three groups: those whose primary corpora came in the 1980s and 1990s but who
are still contributing a handful of works; those who established themselves in the
genre in the 1990s but continue to write extensively; and those who are new writers
and whose work starts almost exclusively in 2000. Continuing the trend of the
new space opera, each of these writers infuses his or her works with better science,
more deeply complex characters, and political and philosophical musings and
explorations.
Group 1: Human-Alien Interactions. If there is one dominant characteristic of the
writers in this group, it is their penchant for exploring human-alien interactions. By
and large these writers invest a great deal of thought and complexity in developing
their alien species without simply demonizing them, even though plots often center
around human-alien conflict. The novels frequently depict the intricacies and
difficulties of intercultural interaction, serving as a metaphor for the panoply of
contemporary global politics.
Kevin J. Anderson (1962–) wrote a few contributions on his own to the Star Wars
galaxy of novels and many more as coauthor with wife Rebecca Moesta before
teaming up with Brian Herbert in a series of immensely popular prequels to Frank
Herbert’s Dune series. Anderson has also recently novelized The League of Extra-
ordinary Gentlemen (2003) and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) as
well as contributed three X-Files books and a novel set in the StarCraft computer
game world.
Orson Scott Card’s (1951–) primary contribution to space opera is the highly
touted and multiple award-winning Ender’s Game series (generally known as the
Enderverse), begun in 1977 as a novelette appearing in Analog. He expanded the
story to book length in 1985 and followed it with seven other installments. A
practicing Mormon, Card’s religious views permeate not only the Ender’s Game
series but also most of his other works, including The Homecoming Saga and The
Tales of Alvin Maker, though arguably both of these series lean more toward fan-
tasy and alternate history than science fiction despite the former’s setting in distant
space. But at the heart of each lies what has become Card’s principal protagonist—
the brilliant young boy, possessing superior talents, whose internal struggles with
morality and the burdens of sin and guilt dominate his passage through life,
earmarked by seeking ultimate redemption. Both Ender’s Game and its sequel,
 SPACE OPERA 905

Speaker for the Dead, won both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards, making Card
the only author to win both of science fiction’s highest awards in consecutive years.
Card has recently been adding short stories to the Ender’s Game series, stories which
have been published mostly on line. In 1999 he began a string of novels paralleling
the Ender tales called The Shadow Series, alternately referred to in some circles as
the Bean Quartet, because the works center around Julian “Bean” Delphiki, a
supporting character from Ender’s Game. Originally comprising four books, Card
has announced a fifth work in the series, as well as another Ender work, but no
details have yet been released. Further, plans to make Ender’s Game into a movie
have been in the works since 2003, though screenplay issues have made the film’s
production dubious, despite an announcement by Fresco Pictures that they intend
to release a film version no sooner than 2008.
While C.J. Cherryh’s (1942–) voluminous output of fiction spans a number of
genres, the bulk of her work is usually classified as space opera and functions within
two primary arenas Cherryh has created, the Alliance-Union universe and the
Foreigner universe. Comprising twenty-four novels and a handful of short story
anthologies to date—including Downbelow Station (1981) and Cyteen (1988),
Cherryh’s two Hugo-winning works—the Allied-Union stories begin in the near
future and trace humanity’s gradual expansion to the stars, eventually including
roughly twenty sentient alien species. Her Foreigner universe spans nine novels thus
far, most of them published since 2000, and traces the exploits of the crew members
of starship Phoenix as they find themselves stranded in space with no way to return
to Earth. Cherryh has been widely lauded for developing complex and realistic alien
species and examining human interactions with the other, and for paying close
attention to such cultural nuances as language, environment, politics, and racial self
identity. The politics in her novels have been described as having a moderate
conservative leaning. Cherryh is also one of the few space opera writers who has
garnered scholarly attention, primarily in The Cherryh Odyssey (2004), a compila-
tion of articles edited by Edward Carmien.
David Drake (1945–) has also written numerous works spanning multiple genres,
with his space opera works falling predominantly into the militaristic, right-leaning
category. Drake, like Simmons, often draws heavily on mythology. Hammer’s
Slammers, his first series of space operas begun in 1979 with an eponymously
named novel (1987), borrows freely from the tales of Jason and the Argonauts, The
Iliad, and The Odyssey. In 1998 Drake inaugurated his latest space opera series,
titled the RCN (Republic of Cinnabar Navy) series, which evokes Horatio
Hornblower’s exploits. He has written five works thus far, with a sixth issue planned
for 2008. The RCN series revolves around Daniel Leary, an RCN officer, and Adele
Mundy, a librarian who eventually also takes a commission in the RCN, at the
center of an epic battle against the evil, totalitarian Alliance of Free Stars. Unlike
Hammer’s Slammers, the RCN series focuses more on character development and
political intrigues, though space battles still abound. Drake has also contributed to
a number of works wherein he is listed as coauthor, though by his own admission
his contribution has been plot and character outlines, which the other writer then
finishes. In this vein he has teamed primarily with Eric Flint.
Writing extensively in both fantasy and science fiction, including contributions to
the Star Wars and Star Trek universes (in the latter, primarily for the animated TV
series of the 1970s), Alan Dean Foster (1946–) is best known in space opera circles
for his Humanx Commonwealth stories, which commences with The Tar-Aiym
906 SPACE OPERA

Krang (1972), and which has two more volumes forthcoming. Most of these
works recount the adventures of Philip Lynx (“Flinx”) and his female Alaspinian
Miniature Dragon, or minidrag, companion, Pip. Because of his empathic powers
and his remarkable spaceship, Teacher, Flinx becomes a renegade; Pip is also
empathic, though non-sapient. Flinx’s adventures detail his search for his unknown
biological father, his encounters with mysterious artifacts, his attempts to flee the
Commonwealth government, his interactions with numerous alien species, and his
discovery of a source of malignancy in the Great Emptiness that threatens the entire
galaxy by consuming all life on any planet it encounters. One of Foster’s most
common motifs is the intricacies between life forms and their environment, often
making their symbiotic coexistence one of the key elements of his novels.
Group 2:The Female Writer and Character. If the first group is marked by alien culture,
the second group is dominated by the female—both as writer and as character.
Three of the four authors below are female, while the fourth, David Weber, is most
noted for his Honor Harrington tales, which center around a strong female protag-
onist. While Doc Smith was given kudos for some of his strong female characters,
they enjoyed only minor significance. For the writers in this group, the female,
whether writer or character, becomes far more prominent.
Catherine Asaro (1955–) was born in Oakland, California, and has earned
multiple science degrees: a BA in chemistry, an MA in physics, and a PhD in
chemical physics. She was a physics professor at Kenyon College until 1990, at
which time she founded Molecudyne Research in Maryland. In addition, she has
taught mathematics and ballet, has served as a NASA consultant and as a visiting
scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, and has written a handful of
fantasy novels.
Asaro’s professional writing career (save for one short story in 1993) began with
1995’s Primary Inversion, which introduces readers to her Skolian Empire, within
which most of her novels are set. In reality, the Skolians are but one of three
empires, along with their enemies, the Eubian Traders and the Terrans (also known
as Allieds). The Skolians try to balance themselves politically between the other two,
and they are ruled by the ancient and somewhat democratic Ruby Dynasty, which
is often fraught with internal struggles. They possess limited empathic and telepathic
talents, enhanced through pico- and nanotechnology. The Eubian Traders are ruled
by the Aristos, products of a genetic engineering program gone awry, and their
empire is built entirely upon a slave economy. The Allieds, last to join the interstel-
lar scene (in the year 2122), spend much of the series simply trying to stay out from
underfoot.
The Skolian series’ publication history does not follow a chronological timeline,
nor is it dedicated to continually expanding and developing a linear plot. Instead,
Asaro has written a number of stories that, though set within her primary Skolian
universe, can often stand alone as individual works. Spherical Harmonic (2001), for
example, reengages the series’ main story lines after several side stories have taken
place in previous works. The work starts to unify plot developments from previous
Skolian episodes like The Last Hawk (1997) and The Quantum Rose (2000; Nebula
Award winner for Best Novel) while developing the character of Dhyianna (Dehya)
Selei, the Ruby Pharaoh, who had been a minor, elusive figure to this point. Further,
Spherical Harmonic is part of a four-volume subset of the Skolian series that traces
the aftermath of one of the series’ major events, the Radiant War. Two of her most
recent contributions to the series, Schism (2004) and The Final Key (2005), function
 SPACE OPERA 907

best in tandem, following a contiguous character and plot line, though the former
actually comprises a triad of three short stories. The most recent Skolian novel is
The Ruby Dice, which brings back one of the leading protagonists from early story
lines, Imperator Kelric, to the forefront. The Ruby Dice appeared in 2006 in novella
form and is due out in expanded form in late 2007 or early 2008.
Asaro intermixes a great deal of current, advanced, and accurate physics with
highly developed romances among her characters into her novels. She will switch off
between male and female protagonists, though each is generally a strong, inde-
pendent, autonomous personality. Reviews, though occasionally mixed (depending
on the particular novel), have generally been quite favorable. James Schellenberg
finds Primary Inversion “a serendipitous find” (challengingdestiny.com), and her
most recent Skolian works have received nearly universal praise. SciFi.com’s Paul Di
Filippo, for example, likens Schism and The Final Key to Frank Herbert’s Dune saga
in the way Asaro’s characters, politics, and action all mature and achieve high levels
of sophistication and interest. And his fellow site critic, Lois H. Gresh, raves that
Schism—and, indeed, the entire Skolian series—is nothing short of excellent.
Lois McMaster Bujold (1949–) has become one of the most popular and most
critically acclaimed writers in new space opera almost exclusively on the strength of
her extended Vorkosigan chronicles. Her four Hugo Awards for Best Novel tie her
with Robert Heinlein, and she has received two Nebulas as well. After working for
a number of years as a pharmacy technician, she turned her hand to writing science
fiction—a love she acquired from her father.
Bujold wrote her first three novels before making a single sale. Twilight Zone
Magazine bought the third volume in late 1984, and about a year later, Baen Books
purchased and published all three. Like Asaro, the publication dates of Bujold’s
Vorkosigan novels do not follow the series’ chronology, nor do they all center on
her principal protagonist, Miles Vorkosigan.
Even before birth Miles suffers physical impairment due to an assassination attempt
against his mother, Cordelia Naismith, and father, Aral Vorkosigan. Constrained by a
weakened body and short physical stature, Miles often overcompensates. He confronts
the universe with daring and audacity, usually managing to extricate himself from the
resulting disastrous circumstances by his brilliance and éclat. By the age of seventeen
he tricks a number of colleagues into believing he has recruited them for the infamous
Dendarii Mercenaries, and by their very exploits, the mercenary band is formed. Suc-
ceeding in a series of secretive campaigns and political subterfuges, Miles continues to
ascend the hierarchy of his home world of Barrayar.
Barrayar was initially settled mostly by Russian, Greek, and French pioneers
traveling via wormholes, the principal form of interstellar travel in the series. The
wormholes themselves all originate in close proximity in an area called the
Wormhole Nexus, a region of space inhabited by an array of varying cultures resid-
ing on planets and military space stations that guard the entry points. Reintegrated
into galactic civilization after generations of isolation, Barrayar is almost immedi-
ately invaded by the neighboring Cetagandan Empire, but it manages to fend off the
attack. Miles doesn’t officially enter the story line until the 1991 novel Barrayar, and
his exploits assume center stage in the next novel chronologically, The Warrior’s
Apprentice (1986), the second of Bujold’s initial three-novel output. Most of the
ensuing novels, novellas, and short stories recount Miles’s ongoing exploits.
Though her recent work has been primarily fantasy, Bujold has written two
Vorkosigan novels since 1999: A Civil Campaign (1999) and Diplomatic Immunity
908 SPACE OPERA

(2002), both furthering Miles’s adventures. A Civil Campaign develops the love
interest between Miles and Ekaterin Vorsoisson, whom he had met in the previous
novel. Because of his failing health, Miles has abandoned his military career and is
now an Imperial Auditor. As is his wont, Miles pursues Ekaterin impetuously,
proffering an embarrassing offer of marriage at a party gone terribly awry, which
she refuses. Their relationship complicates further when two seats on the vaunted
Council of Counts become available. Miles, acting as his father’s deputy, controls
one of the votes, and as such is courted and even blackmailed by the two
Barrayarans vying for one of the open seats. The blackmail serves to implicate Miles
in the death of Ekaterin’s former husband. Miles’s efforts are further muddied by the
Emperor’s impending marriage and the arrival of Miles’s clone-brother, Mark, who
is in the midst of an illicit affair of his own. Miles’s persistence and honor prevail,
and he and Ekaterin wed. Diplomatic Immunity commences as Miles and Ekaterin
begin their honeymoon, which is interrupted by a diplomatic entanglement in Quad-
diespace. Quaddies are four-armed-no-legged, genetically created beings first
introduced in Falling Free (1988). They are raised as slaves to live and work entirely
in the freefall of outer space, but rendered obsolete when artificial gravity is devel-
oped. They escaped their servitude and now inhabit a remote planetary system; but
early in Diplomatic Immunity a situation arises at Graf Station in Quaddiespace,
requiring Miles’s intervention. Ordered to avoid a major diplomatic fiasco, Miles
naturally exacerbates the already tense situation. While evading assassination
attempts and uncovering clues that widen the mystery, Miles manages to avert a war
between Cetaganda and Barrayar, even as he runs into an old flame. Between these
two most recent novels, Bujold also wrote an intervening novella, “Winterfair
Gifts” (2002), which retells the Miles-Ekaterin wedding from the perspective of
Roic, Miles’s armsman.
Bujold’s science is not on a par with Asaro’s, though her ability to sustain an
extended plot line and develop complex characters is more deft. Sfsite.com’s Regina
Lynn Preciado, in reviewing the entire Vorkosigan saga, calls Bujold “a master
writer whose prose continues to impress with every book”; Sfreviews.net’s T.M.
Wagner also touts the entire series. In July 2006 Baen Books promised a new
Vorkosigan novel from Bujold in the near future.
Elizabeth Moon (1945–) earned Bachelor’s degrees in both history and biology,
and she also served time in the U.S. Marine Corps as a 1st Lieutenant. She won a
Nebula Award for best novel for The Speed of Dark (2003) and garnered a Hugo
nomination for her earlier work, Remnant Population (1997). She has worked
variously as a sign painter, a draftsman, and as a columnist with a weekly county
newspaper; she has also busied herself with a number of community activities.
Moon first established herself as a fantasy writer in the late 1980s with her trilogy
entitled The Deed of Paksenarrion, to which she later added two more works; some
critics have pointed out the trilogy’s strong resemblance to the Dungeons &
Dragons board game and modules. Her first venture into space opera was the
Familias Regnant series, comprising seven volumes published from 1993 to 2000
and met with somewhat mixed but promising reviews. In 2003 Moon launched a
new space opera series known collectively as Vatta’s War. Four books have come out
so far, with a fifth, Victory Conditions, slated for a 2008 release. The series chroni-
cles the struggles of Kylara Vatta, a young woman born into the family of an inter-
stellar shipping corporation who bucks her sinecure with the family business to try
her hand at military life. In the first novel, Trading in Danger (2003), Kylara is
 SPACE OPERA 909

forced to resign from the military and instead takes captaincy of an old freighter her
family has designated for the scrap yards. When she deviates from her simple
mission, she quickly becomes entangled with space pirates and a planetary war, in
which she must rely on her military training to turn certain disaster into a profitable
victory for herself and her family. In the subsequent novels, political intrigues and
military battles intensify as her father’s corporate headquarters are attacked, leaving
both her parents dead. Though her military training serves her in good stead, Kylara
must adapt to political intrigues, shifting alliances, commercially driven interests,
and betrayals, as well as become adept at diplomacy.
Moon is noted for her strong female protagonists who must embark upon a
bildungsroman that entails encountering betrayal and loss to achieve autonomy and
recognition, and to learn the value of loyalty. Her series tend to start slowly, to
mediocre reviews, until she gains her footing with character and plot, from which
point the stories and the critical regard both accelerate. Moon schooled herself in
stories of space pirates and planetary adventure at the heels of Anne McCaffrey,
with whom she coauthored The Planet Pirates trilogy in the early 1990s.
David Weber (1952–), in addition to collaborating with such space opera nota-
bles as John Ringo (see below), has established himself in the genre largely on the
strength of his Honor Harrington series, affectionately known as the Honorverse.
Weber’s space opera is heavily militaristic, coupled with a complex interplay of
politics. Generally politicians play the roles of foils to the exploits of the military
characters; thus, the politics of his novels, especially in the Honorverse, tend toward
libertarianism, emphasizing the importance of individual actions over governmental
enterprise. Weber has devoted tremendous energy to fully fleshing out his
Honorverse, most especially the various navies, which strongly parallel the navies of
Britain and France at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Harrington herself is an
amalgam of Horatio Hornblower (with whom she shares initials) and British
Admiral Lord Nelson.
On Basilisk Station (1993) inaugurated the Honorverse, presenting Honor
Harrington as a fresh-faced graduate of the Royal Manticorian Navy’s Advanced
Tactical Course commanding her first ship, the Fearless. Banished to Basilisk Station
for repeated tactical failures during simulated war games, Harrington catches wind
of The People’s Republic of Haven’s plans to overrun Basilisk Station and conquer
its system. Through a desperate and costly military maneuver Harrington exposes
the plan, allowing her home world of Manticore time to bolster its defenses. The
Honorverse currently spans seventeen novels, including four anthologies, and
follows Harrington’s continued military and diplomatic career as she repeatedly
demonstrates her mettle in a constant stream of space battles and political intrigues.
By the time of At All Costs (2005), the series’ most recent work, Harrington has
become a dame, a duchess, a countess, and an admiral of the fleet, even as the
balance of power between Manticore and Haven has shifted dramatically in favor
of the latter.
In addition to the Honorverse, Weber has developed a number of other space
opera series, both individually and in tandem with other writers. His solo efforts
include the Heirs of Empire trilogy, whereas his collaborations span the four-volume
Empire of Man series with John Ringo and the highly touted 1632 universe, coau-
thored by Eric Flint. He has also cowritten with Linda Evans and Steve White.
Ad Astra Games has, in the past two years, put out two books detailing aspects
of the Honorverse as part of what they are calling their Jayne’s Intelligence Review
910 SPACE OPERA

series: The Royal Manticoran Navy (2006), covering the navy’s history, ship classi-
fications, battles, and even uniforms and insignia; and The Navy of the People’s
Republic of Haven (2007), which performs much the same task in detailing
Manticore’s foe, the planet Haven.
Group 3: New Faces on the Scene. With the immense popularity of space opera over
the past two decades, the genre has seen an explosion of works by countless writers.
The writers in this group represent newer, promising faces on the American space
opera scene. Under its “space opera/space epics/space romance” listing, for exam-
ple, scifan.com lists over eight hundred titles published since 2000. Although
economic and political considerations show signs of becoming earmarks of
post–2000 space opera, contemporary fiction in the genre bears the indelible stamp
of the military battle. First and foremost among new space opera writers of the third
millennium stands John Ringo (1963–). Having traveled widely and pursued careers
in marine biology and database management, Ringo began publishing in 2000, and
he has already issued, both individually and as coauthor, over thirty-five books. He
writes almost exclusively in the military space opera vein (he served in the military
as a paratrooper), and his works tend to reflect his outspoken, military-flavored
conservative views. His works are almost always part of an extended series.
Ringo’s first novel, A Hymn before Battle (2000), introduced his Posleen War
series (also referred to as The Legacy of Aldenata), currently standing at eight
volumes with five more planned. Ringo wrote the first four on his own, and he
has been cowriting the volumes since the fifth issue, Cally’s War (2006). Earth is
recruited by the peaceful Galactic Federation in their eons-long war against
the aggressive, centauroid Posleen. The Galactic Federation enlists the aid of the
Darhel to help humanity train and develop advanced technology, though the
Darhel are duplicitous in their aims. Humans, outnumbered and outgunned,
retaliate against the Posleen in unorthodox but effective ways, led by the coura-
geous Captain Michael O’Neal. By the third novel—When the Devil Dances
(2003)—however, Earth’s forces have been overwhelmed, leaving only pockets of
resistance (including O’Neal) hindered by the blundering interference of inept
politicians. Ringo’s post–9/11 politics surface clearly in the novel, as it takes the
series down a darker path and explores the idea of an all-out militaristic response
to an attack on America. In the afterword, in fact, he calls 9/11 a wake-up call
for America and urges the United States to fight. As the series develops, the
Darhel are discovered to have been controlling and manipulating humanity for
thousands of years, greater emphasis is given to the heroic actions of the
individual in combat situations, Earth’s allies are revealed as hoping that the war
ends in mutual destruction, and huge, massively destructive weaponry is devel-
oped, which enables humans to begin to prevail. Though the series shifts focus
from its characters to the battles and the weaponry as it progresses, the forth-
coming works promise to turn their attention back to more thorough and
detailed character development.
Ringo’s next series, Empire of Man, is cowritten with David Drake. It satirizes
contemporary environmentalist movements while basing its story line on
Xenophon’s Anabasis, the story of 10,000 Greek troops stranded in hostile Persia
in 400 B.C.E. The four-volume series begins with Prince Roger MacClintock
marooned on planet Marduk while on a diplomatic mission. Fortunately, he is
accompanied by the Bravo Company of the Bronze Battalion of the Empress’s Own
Regiment, and in the course of their world-girding trek in hopes of commandeering
 SPACE OPERA 911

an imperial ship to return home, all the while battling both flora and fauna, the
pampered prince grows in true bildungsroman tradition, learning responsibility and
loyalty while becoming a warrior himself, gaining new respect for and from his
battle-hardened marines. As the battalion steadily diminishes, its marines are forced
to strike a number of political alliances in the midst of their many battles. The first
three novels all detail the Prince’s trudge to and conquest of the spaceport, and they
tend to become repetitious. Prince Roger begins to assume Henry the Fifth-like
proportions, as suggested by the fourth book’s title, We Few (2005), taken directly
from Henry’s St. Crispin’s Day speech just before the Battle of Agincourt, in
Shakespeare’s noted work. In the final installment, Prince Roger and his band finally
return home, only to find that his mother, the Empress, has been usurped by traitors
and that he stands accused of regicide. Roger must once again draw on his new-
found leadership skills and his trusty marines to set things aright.
Ringo is also in the midst of three other series. The four-volume Council Wars
continues his military space opera bent, but it also presents an intriguing mix of
hard science and magic, though the magic is in the Arthur C. Clarke sense that any
sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The series begins
with its own Edenic fall from grace and traces the exploits of Herzer Herrick,
chiseled from the image of the classic Greek warrior. Paladin of Shadows currently
spans four books, with a fifth, A Deeper Blue, slated for a mid-2007 release. The
series confronts directly a couple of the themes and ideas raised in Council Wars,
primarily the troubled hero and deeply rooted male desires; the first book, Ghost
(2005), also takes square aim at the perceived liberalism of higher education.
Council Wars started leaning into the fantasy realm, whereas Paladin of Shadows is
more thriller than science fiction, though still with heavy military overtones. In 2006
Ringo also wrote Into the Looking Glass, and has teamed with Travis Taylor (see
below) for its sequel, the much more space-operatic Vorpal Blade (2007). Like
Weber, Ringo’s novels demonstrate a libertarian inclination with even greater
emphasis on the importance of the male military figure.
Tony Daniel (1963–) began his science fiction writing career with a pair of non-
fiction essays published 1990, followed by several short stories and a pair of novels
in the 1990s. He spent several years involved with the drama group Automatic
Vaudeville in New York City, wrote and directed a film entitled American
Bohemian, served as the Senior Story Editor at Scifi.com’s Seeing Ear Theater, and
spent a couple of years as a radio dramatist. Daniel currently lives near Dallas with
his wife, daughter, and son.
He is often confused with the Tony Daniel of Dark Horse Comics fame, whose
work often slides into the science fiction realm. But Tony Daniel, the science fiction
author, entered the space opera arena with Metaplanetary (2002), an oblique refer-
ence to Doc Smith’s Triplanetary and the first release of a trilogy in progress.
Extending Daniel’s 1998 novella “Grist” and set a thousand years in the future, the
novel’s central trope is the Met, a network of cables extending throughout the inner
solar system that serves as both communication and transportation. Society within
the Met’s influence is hegemonic, ruled by the monomaniacal Director Ames. The
Met cannot be extended beyond the asteroid belt, and life in the outer system is at
best a loose confederacy of rebels and cloudships, which are human personalities
downloaded into massive spaceships poised to venture forth to the distant stars. The
bulk of Metaplanetary is spent building Daniel’s technology-infused world and
setting the stage for the incipient clash between these two disparate cultures. The
912 SPACE OPERA

war commences in the second book, Superluminal (2005), which occupies most of
the story line; the second volume also contains extensive appendices to help sort the
multitude of characters and concepts.
Daniel’s two space opera entries examine the line between human and artificial,
the symbiosis between humans and technology, and the nature of existence, the last
showing the influence of the author’s own existentialist leanings. Metaplanetary was
well received; David Soyka, writing on Sfsite.com, describes the novel as “Heinlein
meets Gibson and Stephenson, with a dash of Tom Robbins,” recognizing both
Daniel’s post-cyberpunk and hard sci-fi influences. Though receiving similar
plaudits, Superluminal was generally perceived as suffering from “middle book
syndrome,” which is characterized by plot lines only marginally extended in antici-
pation of the next novel. And Stuart Jaffe writes that character development in the
second installment was thin, though he still found Superluminal “an astounding
achievement in world-building” (infinityplus.co.uk).
Travis “Doc” Taylor has a series of scientific degrees, culminating in a PhD in
optical science and engineering from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and
he has worked on several programs for both the Department of Defense and NASA.
His education and background bring a hard-edged science to his works, with their
scope and timbre falling clearly within the parameters of new space opera. Taylor
holds a black belt in martial arts and a pilot’s license. He lives with his wife and
daughter in northern Alabama.
Warp Speed (2006), Taylor’s inaugural novel, and its sequel, The Quantum
Connection (2007), are near-future, harder science fiction tales. His space opera
works start with Von Neumann’s War (2006), written with Ringo. The novel, which
was met with lukewarm reviews, couples Taylor’s hard science with Ringo’s mili-
taristic style in describing contemporary Earth’s invasion by self-replicating
machines (Von Neumann machines). Taylor and Ringo also teamed up for Vorpal
Blade, due for a fall 2007 release, and the sequel to Ringo’s Into the Looking Glass.
The book’s press release describes it as a return to the “good old days” of science
fiction with space marines, fantastic weaponry, and BEMs (bug-eyed monsters).
Taylor also has undertaken his own largely space-operatic Tau Ceti series. Neither
the first installment, One Day on Mars (fall 2007), nor its sequel, The Tau Ceti
Agenda (2007–2008), have been released, and Travis’s Web site describes the for-
mer as “24 on Mars” and the latter as a “non-stop space navy, Armored Environ-
ment Suit Marines, configurable hovertanks and fighting mecha, space fighters,
spies, senators, presidents, a mass exodus, and multiple nuclear explosions!”
Scott Westerfield (1963–) is probably better known for his young adult books,
but he has also had success writing hard science fiction. He earned a degree in
philosophy from Vassar in 1985, and he has worked variously as a factory worker,
substitute teacher, software designer, and textbook editor. He splits his time between
New York City and Sydney, Australia. His wife is Australian author Justine
Larbalestier.
Westerfield’s foray into space opera currently spans two novels, The Risen Empire
and The Killing of Worlds, both released in 2003. Originally a single book entitled
Succession, the work was split into two books due to its length, though the full
version with the original name was nonetheless issued later in 2003. In the distant
future an 80-world human empire has been ruled by the same man for over 1,600
years, thanks to a parasite that can keep the mind and body active after death. The
emperor bestows this gift on a select but growing number of elites, with the result
 SPACE OPERA 913

that the living must work ever harder to sustain the growing dead, or Risen, popu-
lation, which, per force, makes the empire torpid. But in a neighboring empire,
another culture has arisen. The Rix, cyborgs who worship artificial intelligence,
wish to liberate the worlds of the Risen Empire, and they begin by kidnapping the
emperor’s sister while trying to seed an emergent artificial mind. The emperor’s
Imperial Navy intervenes, but not before the sister is killed and her mind seeded.
The newly sentient mind, however, has also discovered a secret regarding the
emperor and the Risen, and planetary war hangs in the balance as a result. The
Killing of Worlds escalates the action. While Imperial Navy Captain Laurent Zai is
on a desperate mission to destroy a Rix battle cruiser, a lone Rix commando named
Herd begins a trek across the planet Legis to seize a polar communications array to
essentially free the seeded AI mind, delivering the emperor’s closely guarded secret.
Westerfield’s two novels speculate on the nature of sentience, the rights of
privilege in the face of dwindling resources, and political exigency. While not as
highly lauded as his hard sci-fi works, such as like Evolution’s Darling (2000), the
Succession novels were still celebrated as a cut above standard space opera fare.
Mark L. Olson, writing for Nesfa.org, reviews Westerfield’s work enthusiastically.
Scifi.com offered two somewhat competing opinions of the two volumes. Paul
Witcover found the first book hurried and overly dependent on cliffhangers, but he
still recommends the work; Paul Di Filippo, writing about The Killing of Worlds,
describes Westover’s writing as poetic and balletic.
John C. Wright (1961–) began writing science fiction novellas in the mid-1990s,
but he did not publish his first book, The Golden Age, until 2002, which quickly
developed into a trilogy after receiving early critical praise. Wright graduated from
William and Mary’s College of Law, but he abandoned his law career and turned to
journalism for financial reasons. In a 2002 interview with Nick Gevers of
Sfsite.com, Wright proclaims, “I am a space opera writer. Perhaps I am the last of
my kind. I like large themes, thunder, fury, and wonder. Why blow up a city when
you can blow up a world? Why launch a starship one kilometer long, when you can
launch a super-starship a thousand kilometers long? Why build space armor out of
carbon-steel when you can build it out of adamantium?” Wright, his wife, and three
children live in Centreville, Virginia. Another professed libertarian, his novels often
explore the tensions between individual and societal rights. Wright has also received
acclaim for his fantasy trilogy, Chronicles of Chaos.
Set 10,000 years in the future and infused with a great deal of classical references,
Wright’s Golden Age trilogy is built upon technology’s transformation of humans
into virtually immortal, though stagnant, beings (somewhat similar to Westerfield’s
seeded humans). The central character, for instance, is named Phaethon, and he
finds himself suddenly out of favor. Over the course of the novel, he learns that
selected bits of memory—his as well as the memories of others—have gone missing.
His particular gap extends upwards of 250 years. Drawing on his legal background,
Wright’s novel culminates in a well-constructed courtroom scene that leaves
Phaethon an exile and sets the stage for the subsequent two works. The title of the
second book, The Phoenix Exultant (2003), refers to Phaeton’s ship, the most mag-
nificent ship ever built, and his quest to regain its possession. His journey takes him
through a vastly changed yet wondrous solar system as well as layers of murky
deception as he seeks to uncover the identity of his enemy. The trilogy’s conclusion,
The Golden Transcendence (2004), takes on more of the trappings of the new space
opera as a high-tech war breaks out and the future of humanity hangs in the
914 SPACE OPERA

balance. More than one reviewer has compared Wright’s trilogy to the Matrix tril-
ogy: both involve a human battle against world-dominating machine intelligences,
both question—à la Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”—the nature of reality, and both
seek an ultimate determination of truth, which has been occluded by labyrinthine
obscurity.
The entry on space opera is far from finished. Its growing popularity and increas-
ing critical attention continue to lure writers old and young: established writers like
Mike Moscoe (writing as Mike Shepard) and his Kris Longknife series or Walter Jon
Williams’ Dread Empire’s Fall both demonstrate the trend of writers swerving from
established genres to try their hands at space opera, whereas new writers such as
Scott Gamboe and C.J. Merle may prove to leave indelible marks in the field. They,
too, merit serious consideration, as do many more authors whose numbers continue
to swell the field of space opera writers to the very stars.

Bibliography
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Brackett, Leigh. The Sword of Rhiannon. New York: Ace, 1953.
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Bujold, Lois McMaster. Barrayar. New York: Baen, 1991.
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———. The Fountains of Paradise. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.
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Clarke, Arthur C., and Stanley Kubrick. Screenplay, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Director Stanley
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Daniel, Tony. Metaplanetary. New York: EOS, 2001.
———. Superluminal. New York: EOS, 2004.
Di Filippo, Paul. Rev. of The Final Key, by Catherine Asaro. http://www.scifi.com/sfw/
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———. Rev. of The Killing of Worlds, by John C. Wright. http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue339/
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916 SPACE OPERA

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———. The Weapon Shops of Isher. New York: Greenberg, 1951.
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Westerfield, Scott. Evolution’s Darling. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000.
———. The Killing of Worlds. New York: Tor, 2003.
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———. The Golden Transcendence. New York: Tor, 2003.
———. The Phoenix Exultant. New York: Tor, 2003.

Further Reading
Aldiss, Brian, ed. Space Opera: An Anthology of Way-Back-When Futures. London: West-
field and Nicolson, 1974; Eisenhour, Susan. “A Subversive in Hyperspace: C. J. Cherryh’s
Feminist Transformation of Space Opera.” New York Review of Science Fiction 1 (October
1996): 4–7; Hardesty III, William H. “Semiotics, Space Opera and Babl-17.” Mosaic 13.304
(1980): 63–69; Hartwell, David G. “Nine Ways of Looking at Space Opera: Part I.” New
York Review of Science Fiction 212 (August 2006): 17–21; Hartwell, David G. “Nine Ways
of Looking at Space Opera: Part II.” New York Review of Science Fiction 213 (September
2006): 19–21; Hartwell, David G. “Nine Ways of Looking at Space Opera: Part III.” New
York Review of Science Fiction 214 (October 2006): 17–19; Hartwell, David G., and
Kathryn Cramer. “Space Opera Redefined.” In Speculations on Speculation. James Gunn and
 SPECULATIVE FICTION 917

Matthew Candelaria, eds. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005, 259–265; Lamont, Victo-
ria, and Dianne Newell. “House Opera: Frontier Mythology and Subversion of Domestic
Discourse in Mid-Twentieth Century Women’s Space Opera.” Foundation: The International
Review of Science Fiction 34.95 (2005): 71–88; Monk, Patricia. “Not Just ‘Cosmic Skull-
duggery’: A Partial Reconsideration of Space Opera.” Extrapolation 33.4 (1992): 295–316;
Sanders, Joe. “Space Opera Reconsidered.” New York Review of Science Fiction 1 (June
1995): 3–6; Stableford, Brian. “Space Opera.” In Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. John Clute
and Peter Nicholls, eds. London: Orbit, 1999, 1138–1140; and Westfahl, Gary. “Beyond
Logic and Literacy: The Strange Case of Space Opera.” Extrapolation 35. 3 (1994):
176–185.
JOHN CARLBERG

SPECULATIVE FICTION
Definition. “Speculative fiction” has become a term used within the last
twenty years by American authors, readers, and literary scholars to refer collectively
to writing that is often categorized into generic subsets of popular literature of the
fantastic: science fiction, gothic fiction, horror, fantasy, magic realism, and utopian
fiction.
Speculative writing is not different from popular genre fiction that includes
fantastical or supernatural elements. Rather, speculative fiction is an idiom, or
phrase, that allows for a broader interpretation of what can be considered literature
of the fantastic. The term “speculative” has become more accepted as scholars,
readers, publishers, and authors alike recognize that many texts that have fantasti-
cal or supernatural elements often combine aspects of several popular genres. As a
result, such texts cannot be easily categorized as one particular genre or another.
Separating or classifying writers and their works into rigid genre categories does an
injustice to the complexity of authors’ fiction. As critics Jane Donawerth and Carol
Kolmerten point out, “Most theorists admit that notions of utopia, science fiction,
and fantasy overlap to some degree” (Donawerth and Kolmerten 1994, 2). Anne
Cranny-Francis agrees, stating, “No text is the unequivocal construct of a single
genre . . . it is difficult to find a text which does not exhibit some characteristics of
other genres” (Cranny-Francis 1990, 20).
For example, Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian (2005) could be considered both
detective and horror fiction, given that the narrative involves a father and daughter
bent on proving the existence of the legendary vampire Dracula and solving the
mystery of his resting place. Rather than be constrictively labeled as either detective
or horror fiction, The Historian can be recognized as a text that integrates various
genres of fantastical literature if placed under the rubric, or category, of speculative
fiction.
Further, speculative fiction encompasses those works that are not generically clas-
sifiable because they refuse a distinction between mundane and supernatural occur-
rences. In this sense, speculative fiction is synonymous with Tzvetan Todorov’s
definition of the “fantastic.” In his seminal The Fantastic: A Structuralist Approach
to a Literary Genre, Todorov classifies a text as fantastic if its action exists between
the real and the imaginary. According to Todorov, “uncanny phenomena [can be
explained] in two fashions, by types of natural causes [the real] and supernatural
causes [the imaginary]. The possibility of a hesitation between the two creates the
fantastic effect” (Todorov 1973, 26). In other words, Todorov understands the fan-
tastic as literature that produces a certain sensation or feeling in the reader, one of
uncertainty as to whether the events described are “true.”
918 SPECULATIVE FICTION

Often, the rationale for categorizing a text as science fiction or horror is predi-
cated on the fact that the reader understands that the text explores an unreal world
or improbable events. For instance, in a novel such as Octavia Butler’s Fledgling
(2006), the vampire creatures are supernatural, and the novel itself is grounded in
an alternate version of the world we know. However, in Kathryn Davis’s The Thin
Place (2006), the whole point of the novel is to question our division of existence
into what is real and what is imaginary. The novel’s title itself refers to a location
“where spirits of the dead can reach through the ether to spirits of the living” (Balée
2006, 482), in this case a New England town called Varennes. In Varennes, a young
girl, Mees, has the power to bring the dead back to life. Such an ability would seem
fantastic, yet Davis presents Mees’s power as complementing the magical and
unknown qualities of the natural world we inhabit. Davis underscores the fantasti-
cal aspects of the everyday by emphasizing the instability of the earth itself: “Aside
from the obvious holes and tunnels made by animals and people, rabbit warrens,
subway systems, missile silos, rumpus rooms, it [the earth] seems solid enough,
though in fact it’s a set of interlocking pieces, sometimes bound tightly together and
sometimes drifting far apart” (Davis 2006, 34). In this way, the earth becomes a
metaphor for reality; like the planet’s surface, our sense of reality can shift and alter
to include extraordinary occurrences.
Given The Thin Place’s intermixing of the mundane and the amazing, it might be
tempting to label the novel as magic realism. Magic realism is a genre in which
supernatural elements or events are integrated seamlessly into a realistic setting
without surprise or commentary from the characters. Important writers of magic
realism include Latin American authors Gabriel García Márquez, Luis Jorge Borges,
and Isabel Allende. Because of its inclusion of fantastical elements, magic realism
can be incorporated within a discussion of speculative fiction. However, works such
as The Thin Place are more aptly titled speculative fiction than magic realism
because they do foreground the supernatural and ponder its meaning, rather than
cast the fantastic as unremarkable. For instance, in The Thin Place, Mees is acutely
aware that her ability is extraordinary, and she contemplates the purpose and con-
sequences of her power. In this way, the term “speculative fiction” can apply to texts
that do not fit easily into the category of magic realism or the popular genres that
explore alternate worlds and realities.
The term speculative fiction allows one not only to avoid dividing texts into rigid
genre categories but also to recognize that the purpose behind various related pop-
ular genres is a “shar[ed] . . . emphasis on the imaginative freedom of alternate
worlds” (Donawerth and Kolmerten 1994, 3–4). Critic Darko Suvin explains this
freedom by characterizing the speculative mode as “literature of cognitive estrange-
ment” (Suvin 1979, 4). Though Suvin applies this definition more specifically to sci-
ence fiction, his words accurately describe the work that all types of speculative
fiction perform. “Cognitive estrangement” is a literary device by which writers
“displace the story setting to another time and/or place, immediately denaturalizing
the society portrayed in the text” (Cranny-Francis 1990, 193). This estrangement
allows the writer to critique social problems and inequities from a distance, enabling
both author and reader to contemplate and explore scenarios in which those
cultural issues might be ameliorated or improved.
Understood as literature of cognitive estrangement, the term speculative fiction
enables one to recognize texts that might not otherwise either fit a certain genre
category or authors who have not previously or consistently written literature with
 SPECULATIVE FICTION 919

fantastical aspects. An example of both points is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

(2006), a harrowing novel in which the love, tensions, and pain of a father-son
relationship play out against the backdrop of a post-apocalyptic America. Though
set in a futuristic, nuclear winterized landscape, it would be hard to categorize The
Road as science fiction, given the novel’s focus on an emotional, familial relation-
ship rather than the technological or political conditions that have brought about
the decimation of civilization. McCarthy never explains how or why the destruction
occurred. The reader is told only that “The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of
light and then a series of low concussions” (McCarthy 2006, 45). Instead, conceit
of apocalypse becomes a means by which McCarthy cognitively estranges readers
from everyday life to bring them a new perspective on parent-child relationships.
Writer Michael Chabon notes that McCarthy forces us to acknowledge and
confront a parent’s unspoken nightmare:

The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent’s
greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has
reached adulthood . . . And above all, the fear of knowing—as every parent fears—that
you have left your children a world more damaged, more poisoned, more base and vio-
lent and cheerless and toxic, more doomed, than the one you inherited. (Chabon 2007)

As a result, readers are forced to rethink their understanding of what being a

“good” parent means and of what they are obligated to do for their children.
Further, by terming The Road “speculative fiction,” one acknowledges that
McCarthy’s novel includes certain fantastical, speculative “what if” elements that
might be found in science or horror fiction, but one also recognizes that McCarthy
is not an author of traditional popular genre fiction (such as previous works Blood
Meridian (1985) and All the Pretty Horses (1992) show). In fact, given that genre
fiction can be stigmatized as consisting of nonliterary, unimaginative popular
literature, many writers would be hesitant to have their work labeled as genre fiction
because it might detract from their writing being recognized as complex and
innovative work.
As various cultural studies scholars such as Raymond Williams (1983), John Fiske
(1989a), and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (1987) have pointed out, the distinction
between what might be considered “high” literary art and “low” popular culture is
not only arbitrary but often elitist because it assumes that a book that sells many
copies cannot be interesting, creative, and innovative writing. Nevertheless, fairly or
not, science fiction, horror, and other popular genre writing are still not considered
serious fiction worth studying. As a result, a horror novel such as Scott Smith’s The
Ruins (2006), which was critically lauded as both a complex and frightening
narrative of American tourists in Mexico, one in the tradition of recognized
American horror masters such as H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, can yet be
dismissed by some as a nonliterary work that has little purpose beyond entertaining
the reader. However, by labeling The Ruins as speculative writing rather than horror
fiction, one could potentially remove the stigma of “genre fiction” so that the novel
could be viewed as innovative, interesting work rather than one that mechanically
follows basic genre rules.
It is because of such genre rules that popular genre fiction is often dismissed.
Much popular fiction does adhere to clichéd characters and repetitive storylines;
indeed, a genre is usually identifiable by a certain set of expected parameters, or
920 SPECULATIVE FICTION

rules, which govern it. For example, mysteries often consist of a detective who is
able to identify a criminal based on his or her ability to notice details or clues that
others cannot see. The popularity of such genre fiction is that the reader can expect
similar story arcs, characters, and situations in each book. There are relatively few
surprises and, as such, the narrative becomes safe and comforting for the reader.
They are almost ritualistic narratives that satisfy a reader’s need for constancy and
a return to a stable status quo. Such texts are opposed to “literary” fiction, which
is seen as striving to avoid set rules by creating challenging narratives that do not
reward a reader with stable, desired outcomes.
However, as critics such as Cranny-Francis have argued, so-called literary writing
cannot be entirely free from genre conventions. Further, popular fiction writers are
often notable because they work within the genre to subvert its rules in order to
challenge social conventions, prejudices, and limitations. Thus, the creation of the
term “speculative fiction” enables one to eschew a rigid division between the popu-
lar and the literary. The phrase acknowledges that a text might at once contain genre
conventions, deviations from those conventions, and a purpose beyond entertain-
ment and yet be widely read by the general public. For instance, the aforementioned
The Historian spent many weeks on the New York Times bestseller list as a new take
on the traditional vampire narrative. However, it is also a novel that is intricately
plotted and well-written, and one that demands a great deal of historical and
cultural knowledge on the part of the reader.

Trends and Themes

Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Speculative Fiction. The Historian also provides another
example of how speculative fiction subverts the division between the literary and the
popular: its ability to challenge the traditional gender roles prevalent in popular
genre writing. As a female author, Elizabeth Kostova is writing in a genre
(horror/vampire fiction) usually occupied by male writers and readers. By creating a
speculative narrative focused on a heroine rather than a hero, Kostova alters the
typical genre convention of a male protagonist who drives the action of the story.
Such a feminist narrative is literary in its subversion of popular expectations and at
the same time appealing to female readers of genre fiction, a readership that is often
disregarded. In addressing women writers of genre fiction, Cranny-Francis points
out that their feminist take on traditional masculine genre writing “give[s] the
traditional male readership, whether of fantasy, utopian fiction, detective fiction . . .
a new and stimulating perspective. The important recognition in this statement is
that there is an existing readership worth tapping. . . . People of all ages, classes,
genders, and races read genre fiction” (Cranny-Francis 1990, 3).
In this way, Natalie M. Rosinsky argues that the term “speculative fiction” becomes
necessary because traditional genre definitions are “limited and value-laden” in terms
of who writes and reads genre fiction and why (Rosinsky 1984, 115n. 2). When
women write genre fiction, they are “continually crossing the boundaries which delimit
the operation—formally/aesthetically/ideologically—of the traditional generic text
and, in so doing, showing that those boundaries exist” (Cranny-Francis 1990, 19). In
other words, when imagining alternative constructions of gender roles—a strong
female protagonist versus a helpless heroine, for example—female authors might
employ a popular genre to do so, but they undermine the very conventions of that
genre that normally relegate female characters to subordinate or derogatory roles.
 SPECULATIVE FICTION 921

Given such nontraditional genre texts, the term speculative fiction becomes
important in terms of characterizing women authors, as well as writers of color or
gay and lesbian writers. The attempt to divide the imaginative writing of women
and writers of color into rigid generic categories is problematic because inevitably
those texts that do not precisely fit the definitions of “science fiction,” “utopian
fiction,” and so on, risk being excluded from consideration as belonging to a tradi-
tion of writing in the speculative mode. As noted previously, popular genre fiction
such as science fiction and horror has been viewed as writing by white, heterosex-
ual men for a similarly apportioned audience. However, writers from historically
disenfranchised groups, including women, writers of color, and gay and lesbian
writers, might choose to write in a popular genre mode in order to imagine alter-
nate realities that explore, question, and reimagine traditional hierarchies of power
and that argue for cultures that are free of sexism, racism, and homophobia. Such
writers write not with the purpose of conforming to genre conventions but with the
intent of participating in what Cranny-Francis describes as the “ideological strug-
gle” (Cranny-Francis 1990, 19) of confronting and challenging white masculine
power at the turn into the twenty-first century. The problem that women writers,
writers of color, and nonheterosexual writers face when working in popular genre
fiction is that their work might not be recognized as such because they are not the
traditional writers of this fiction, and their work, which alters genre conventions, is
not properly acknowledged as literature of the fantastic.
For example, although African American writers Octavia Butler and Samuel
Delaney are today readily appreciated as important authors of the fantastic, other
African American writers, such as Jewelle Gomez and Tananarive Due, have
received far less notice for publishing interesting and provocative popular genre
fiction. Due is gaining notoriety, as evidenced by The Boston Globe review of her
novel The Living Blood (2001): “Due has become . . . a talented storyteller who
stands tall among her horror cohorts Anne Rice and Stephen King” (Jones 2001).
However, the fact that the reviewer describes Due as a “horror” writer shows how
limiting such categories are for writers of color. For instance, Due’s novel elides
conventional boundaries of horror fiction by including elements of African magic
and folklore. By working within the horror genre yet refusing its limitations, Due
cannot be categorized accurately as a writer of traditional horror fiction. This point
is true for Butler and Delaney as well, whose work cannot be considered correctly
as “science fiction,” given that their imaginative work does not always involve a
discussion of science, technology, or future worlds. Employing the term speculative
fiction opens up the definition of what constitutes imaginative literature. As a result,
writers who do not fit the typical white, male, heterosexual profile of popular genre
authors and who do not write conventional genre fiction can be recognized as
contributing to and enriching the tradition of popular imaginative writing.
Because the rubric speculative fiction enables one to recognize a diverse group of
writers as creating literature of the fantastic, it further allows one to trace traditions
of imaginative writing among women writers, writers of color, and gay and lesbian
authors. Usually, such literary lineages are reserved for white, male, heterosexual
writers of the fantastic. For example, Stephen King’s work is influenced by earlier
horror writers such as H.P. Lovecraft and Sheridan LeFanu, and H.G. Wells’s and
Edgar Rice Burroughs’s science fiction thrillers about Mars and invading Martians
are the forbears of Kim Stanley Robinson’s acclaimed Mars trilogy. However, such
lineages among women, writers of color, and gay and lesbian writers of the fantastic
922 SPECULATIVE FICTION

AFRICAN AMERICAN SPECULATIVE FICTION

There exists a rich tradition of African American literature of the fantastic that is rarely
critically recognized, with the exception of editor Sheree R. Thomas’s collections Dark
Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000) and Dark Matter:
Reading the Bones (2004).The truth is that African American writers wrote in the speculative
mode from the turn of the century into the twentieth century and on. One such early
imaginative popular writer is Pauline E. Hopkins, who has not been recognized as a specula-
tive writer for two primary reasons: first, her novel, Of One Blood (1903), cannot be easily
generically categorized (it combines African adventure, mystery, science fiction, and gothic
narratives); and second, Hopkins casts African American mothers as heroes in her speculative
fiction, whereas traditionally most popular genre fiction has viewed racial difference as a
social threat or has refused to acknowledge race altogether. By employing the more
expansive term speculative fiction, Hopkins can be linked to later African American writ-
ers of the fantastic, such as Butler, Delaney, Due, Gomez, Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon
(1977), Beloved (1987)), and Toni Cade Bambara (The Salt Eaters (1980)), all of whom use
the supernatural to imagine ways of overcoming racism and its legacy in American culture.
Were it not for the broader category of speculative fiction, writers such as Morrison (who
is often considered a “literary” writer rather than an author of popular fiction) would not
be placed alongside Butler or Hopkins, though all three participate in using the fantastic in
analogous ways.

remain obscure because these men and women have not been celebrated as impor-
tant authors of popular imaginative literature.
Using the term speculative fiction can illuminate historical connections among
diverse writers and texts that would otherwise not be understood as comprising sim-
ilar traditions and themes in imaginative writing. On the other hand, many writers
of color reject the label “speculative” for their fiction, which imagines events or pos-
sibilities beyond what is traditionally considered probable. This rejection is based
on the argument that definitions of “real” and “imaginary” have been defined by
Western culture and white writers. However, for those writers of color, what white
culture might consider fantastic and unreal is in fact possible. In her essay “The Site
of Memory,” Toni Morrison writes, “The work that I do frequently falls, in the
minds of most people, into that realm of fiction called fantastic, or mythic, or
magical, or unbelievable. I’m not comfortable with those labels” (Morrison 1987,
2294). For Morrison, relating what she calls the “truth” of life includes the strange
and seemingly improbable that is for her nonetheless possible as part of the fabric
of existence. Similarly, some of the fantastical occurrences that are woven through-
out Ana Castillo’s So Far From God (1993) serve to distinguish the Chicano/a
community of Tome, New Mexico, from the surrounding white culture. For
instance, the death and resurrection of a three-year-old girl, nicknamed La Loca, is
understood within the community as a miraculous, if somewhat frightening, event;
however, the incident is explained away as “epilepsy” by the white doctors in
Albuquerque. Therefore, although broadening the definition of imaginative writing,
the category of speculative fiction can also work to reinforce the division between
the real and the imaginary that much nonwhite literature of the fantastic attempts
to undermine.
Current Speculative Fiction. To understand themes and trends in current speculative
writing, it is useful to consider briefly how twenty-first century speculative fiction
 SPECULATIVE FICTION 923

motifs can be distinguished from imaginative writing of the preceding century.

Although this article cannot address all such themes fully, it seeks to outline the
preeminent concerns of today’s speculative writers and the new ways in which the
speculative mode is being employed by contemporary authors.
Much speculative writing in the twentieth century, particularly in the first half,
employed popular writing to make challenges to the cultural status quo more palat-
able because, as noted earlier, the fantastic uses cognitive estrangement to displace
social critiques to another time or place. In this way, the critique may be tempered
by the distance created between the action of the text and real life. An example from
the world of popular comic books would be The X-Men. Created by Stan Lee and
Jack Kirby in 1963, the comic followed the exploits of its titular characters, also
known as “mutants,” who represent the “next step” in human evolution because of
their superpowers. The ostracizing (in one storyline to labor camps) of mutants by
average humans can be read as a coded critique of racism, anti-Semitism, and
homophobia in American culture. This interpretation of the underlying message of
The X-Men comic is underscored by the motivations of lead villain, Magneto, a
Jewish Holocaust survivor. For Magneto, the human prejudice against and fear of
the mutants is no different than the desire of the Nazi regime to construct Jews as
enemies of the state and so justify their liquidation. In this way, The X-Men becomes
a speculative means of addressing the horrible consequences of prejudice against a
group of people who are labeled as different; however, the comic did so in a way
that did not address the subject in a direct manner during a time when an open
critique of these subjects might have alienated a mostly white, male readership.
For twenty-first century speculative fiction, there is less need to embed social
critique within an imaginative narrative for the sake of making that critique more
palatable to readers. Issues of racism, sexism, and homophobia are now more
widely discussed and acknowledged in contemporary society, and so the focus of
current speculative fiction is not so much to make such critiques acceptable but to
use cognitive estrangement to help readers see social inequities or questions about
the nature of reality in new and startling ways.
One recurrent theme in contemporary speculative fiction is a focus on social
changes wrought by the ability to access information via the Internet and other
technologies widely available since the millennium. For example, many twenty-first
century speculative texts pessimistically portray as impossible the desire of charac-
ters to understand themselves and their identity by gathering data and information
about past events. This theme arises from society’s twenty-first century craving to
accumulate, sort, and have access to information through various media sources,
most importantly the Internet. Such data grants its users seemingly more and more
insight into what has transpired to bring society to its present point. Concurrently,
seminal twenty-first century events such as 9/11 or the Iraq War have encouraged
people to explore how such historical moments came to be. Further, an event such
as 9/11 produces a longing to return to a time before such a devastating occurrence
in an effort to recapture a sense of peace, nostalgia, and innocence through an
exploration of earlier aspects of American history.
However, current speculative fiction, by using the imaginary to question our abil-
ity to know the past and the truth with accuracy and objectivity, suggests that such
desires cannot be fulfilled and are perhaps even dangerous to pursue. Donna Tartt’s
novel, The Little Friend (2002), explores these points. Tartt’s speculative novel com-
bines elements of the fantastic and mystery genres with the Southern Gothic style of
924 SPECULATIVE FICTION

American writers William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor to tell the story of
twelve-year-old Harriet Dufresnes and her efforts in 1970s Alexandria, Mississippi,
to solve the cold case murder of her older brother, Robin. Harriet was an infant
when nine-year-old Robin disappeared from a family Mother’s Day gathering, only
later to be found strangled and hanging from a tree. Though she never knew Robin,
Harriet is acutely aware that her family, particularly her mother, have been psycho-
logically damaged since the tragic and mysterious circumstances of her brother’s
death. In part what drives Harriet to fixate on her brother’s murder is a sense that
if his death could be understood and information gathered to show what happened,
somehow this knowledge will bring closure and peace to a family that continuously
lives with the heartbreaking pain of not knowing how or why Robin died.
In her narrative, Tartt uses elements of the speculative to show that such closure,
such knowledge of the past, is not possible. There is a sense of unreality about the
past and people’s recollection of it and even a questioning of the stability of the present.
No one can quite remember the exact circumstances or moments before Robin
disappeared, and when Harriet questions her family members, they each give
different stories or evade answering altogether. Harriet’s sister, Allison, who was
four when Robin disappeared and was presumably the last to see him alive, lives in
a kind of alternate dream world, to her as real as the everyday reality of the other
characters: “Alison yawned. How could you ever be perfectly sure when you were
dreaming and when you were awake? . . . Repeatedly during the day, as she drifted
around her own house . . . she asked herself: Am I awake or asleep? How did I get
here?” (Tartt 2002, 103). As a result, Alison cannot provide Harriet with any clues
about what happened to their brother. Further, Harriet’s great aunt, Libby, adds to
the sense of the fantastic and unknowable by recounting that three days before
Robin was murdered, a man’s hat appeared in her bedroom mysteriously out of
nowhere. Libby uses this incident to illustrate to Harriet that there are some things,
like Robin’s death, which defy explanation: “All I’m saying is that there are an
awful lot of things in the world we don’t understand, honey, and hidden connections
between things that don’t seem related at all” (Tartt 2002, 126).
Compounding her inability to gain information that would allow her a clear
understanding of the past, Harriet and her friend Hely, based on information from
the Dufresnes’s housekeeper, Ida, believe that a local parolee and meth addict,
Danny Ratliff, was her brother’s murderer. They pursue him and in the process
precipitate a car accident that severely injures Danny’s grandmother, and Harriet
herself is nearly killed by Danny during one of his meth-fueled rampages. Sadly,
Harriet has perpetrated these events only to find, in the end, that Ida’s story is incor-
rect and Danny was actually a friend of Robin’s. While in the hospital recovering
from Danny’s attack, Harriet overhears her father saying to her mother that Danny
was “Robin’s little friend, don’t you remember? He used to come up in the yard and
play sometimes. . . . Knocked on the door [after Robin’s burial] and said he was
sorry he wasn’t at the funeral, he didn’t have a ride” (Tartt 2002, 543). With a
sinking feeling, Harriet realizes how greatly she has misinterpreted the circum-
stances surrounding Robin’s death: “Never had it occurred to her that she might be
wrong in her suspicions about Danny Ratliff—simply wrong” (Tartt 2002, 544). In
this way, Harriet’s attempt to gain control of the slippery, shifting reality of the past
nearly leads to disaster for both her and Danny.
The use of the speculative mode, as illustrated through the unreliable perspectives
of Libby, Allison, Ida, and others, allows Tartt to depict the past in such a way that
 SPECULATIVE FICTION 925

shows the reader how unstable memory is and how our understanding of history is
created largely from everyone’s unreliable recollections and from their own
imaginations. In so doing, Tartt rejects society’s belief that the accumulation of
information can lead to a more complete comprehension of the past. In her novel,
Tartt demonstrates that greater amounts of information, some of which may be
untrustworthy, will never lead to a clear picture of the past; history will always
remain, to some extent, out of reach and inscrutable. Tartt underscores this point
by refusing to end the novel with any answers as to who killed Robin or why;
Harriet and the reader are as in the dark with regard to these questions as they were
at the beginning of the novel.
Critics were divided regarding whether or not Tartt was successful in communi-
cating these themes. Greg Changnon wrote that the novel shows “how difficult it is
to get to an objective truth when memory, interpretation and perspective are
involved” (Changnon 2003, 4K). Laura Miller found that Tartt’s use of popular
genre modes “all too often devolve[s] to cliché or cartoon,” but Miller also
“praise[s] the book’s vital characters, its supple conjuring of mood and place, and
its dry, dark humor” (Miller 2002). On the other hand, Tom Murray rejected
completely the novel’s ending, which leaves the reader and Harriet with no enlight-
ened knowledge of the past: “Wasn’t that daring, to set the reader up for a revela-
tion that way and then withhold it at the last moment? Wouldn’t it have been
dishonest to sew things up in a nice, neat bow, when we all know life doesn’t really
work that way?” (Murray 2002, 1). Gail Caldwell agreed that such ambiguity was
tiresome, and that the reader “wind[s] up with lots of exotic, sometimes lovely
memories that don’t always connect—and nearly as weary as you are enlightened”
(Caldwell 2002, D6).
Like Tartt, Elizabeth Kostova questions the ability of our information age to accu-
rately assess the past. Kostova’s The Historian (2005) is part horror story and part
meditation on the task of historians (and other academics) to accumulate informa-
tion that allows people to understand the past. In Kostova’s novel, feelings of horror
and dread arise from the realization that information can often be no protection
from forestalling the evils of the world. Further, like The Little Friend, The
Historian suggests that the pursuit of the past can potentially lead to self-destruction
when the intangible and unknowable past becomes more real than the present. In
the novel, a father, and later his daughter (who is never named), find themselves on
the trail of the historical Vlad Tepes, the bloodthirsty fifteenth-century Romanian
prince who gave rise to the vampire legend made famous by Bram Stoker’s 1897
novel, Dracula.
The pursuit leads father and daughter to discover that Tepes is a vampire, but a
peculiar one in that he is also the novel’s titular historian. Tepes turns academics
into vampires who then work to maintain his library, which is a collection of infor-
mation about himself and other evil or nefarious figures throughout history. The
novel hints that Tepes uses this “information center” as a means of initiating tragic
historical events: “The implication is that Dracula not only takes his place at the
head of a procession of eastern European predators ruling by terror which runs
through Ivan the Terrible to Stalin, but has actively influenced his successors’ career
development” (Stevenson 2005). In this way, Dracula becomes a metaphor of what
can happen through the study of history. The vampire as academic symbolizes a
kind of living death in which one is sustained more through the dead past rather
than the present. Dracula states that “As I knew I could not attain a heavenly
926 SPECULATIVE FICTION

paradise . . . I became a historian in order to preserve my own history forever”

(Kostova 2005, 206). More disturbingly, this fascination with the past leads to
destructive consequences in the present, whether it be Dracula’s orchestration of
contemporary tragedies or the damage to the narrator’s family, particularly her
mother, who almost becomes a vampire herself. And though Tepes is seemingly
defeated at the close of the novel, nevertheless the book ends with the suggestion
that Dracula’s work continues to be carried out by his vampire minions/historians.
In this way, the narrator must continue her involvement with the past, and she will
never be free of it.
There is a tension in the novel that arises between the need for information as a
means of keeping evil from destroying society and the fear that this information
itself can ruin the person who accumulates and tries to make sense of it. This tension
is never resolved in the novel. By using the vampire, a fantastic creature, as a
metaphor of a life consumed by information, Kostova illuminates for the reader this
debate over the efficacy of information gathering in our current culture that might
otherwise be difficult to comprehend. Kostova uses a well-known horror figure,
Dracula, to help the reader recognize an evolving fear in our twenty-first century
society about the positive and negative aspects of information, so often portrayed in
our culture as empowering but overwhelming and confusing as well.
Many reviewers found Kostova’s speculative novel to be enjoyable as popular
fiction but lacking in true literary merit. For instance, Jane Stevenson noted that
Kostova’s creation of a conceit in which many of the horrific events of the twenti-
eth century are the result of a mythic creature is absurdly facile: “Thus the spectre
which is haunting Europe turns out to be not communism, but Count Dracula, a
distasteful simplification of the problems of European history” (Stevenson 2005).
Peter Bebergal took exception to Kostova’s use of the epistolary, or letter, format:
“The novel’s weakest aspect is its format . . . The various letter sequences read more
like diary entries than correspondence, and this makes the main characters sound
mostly alike” (Bebergal 2005). Janet Maslin found it to be a “ponderous, many-
layered book that is exquisitely versed in the art of stalling” (Maslin 2005), and
Susanna J. Sturgis concurred that “none of the plot points add up to very much”
(Sturgis 2006, 12).
The Historian represents a trend in twenty-first century speculative fiction of
refashioning older genre narratives to reflect new concerns, a trend that is also
reflected in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). McCarthy borrows the well-
worn science fiction scenario of the postnuclear “last survivors on earth” and
refashions the narrative into a parable about the consequences of where our infor-
mation and technological know-how are leading us, the inability of information to
help us survive, and the importance of basic human emotions and relationships.
In The Road, an unnamed father and his young son travel across a post-
apocalyptic, nuclear winter landscape toward the southeast coast of America in
search of warmer climate. It is not clear what has laid waste to America, but it is
the result of some terrible, nameless event that has decimated nearly all human,
animal, and plant life. The event has made cannibals and marauders of those
humans left alive, and survival requires all the willpower, love, and connection
between father and son to maintain hope and the ability to remain “civilized”
human beings. The irony is that it is ostensibly this civilization, with its information
technology, science, and weaponry, that has led to the very destruction that has
forced humans to become savages. Though this motif is similar to previous speculative
 SPECULATIVE FICTION 927

stories that critique scientific advancement, McCarthy’s novel takes a different

approach in that it specifically points out that it is information itself, not only
science or nuclear weapons, that is not necessarily empowering.
In using the speculative mode to imagine an utterly desolate wasteland that strips
its characters to nothing, McCarthy shows that a pursuit of information cannot help
father and son with basic survival. This desolation begins to rob the father in
particular of his memories and knowledge of the world that existed before: “The
names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of
birds. Things to eat. Finally, the names of things one believed to be true. . . . The
sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of reality” (McCarthy 2006, 75).
Although the novel laments this absence of knowledge and information, at the same
time, it emphasizes that what drives the father and son to stay alive and human is
their love for one another rather than information about their surroundings.
McCarthy illustrates that if the twenty-first century “road” is an information
superhighway, it is a highway that underneath must be sustained by human contact
and feeling. The novel’s titular road is one that reveals this point. As a result, the
reader fears the possibility of cultural collapse yet also hopes that should our
technological society fail, there may yet be a spark of humanity that survives in our
bonds with one another.
The Road’s haunting tribute to human, rather than technological, connection was
universally praised by critics. Michael Chabon wrote that McCarthy’s novel is a
“lyrical epic of horror” that sustains a “great power to move . . . the reader”
(Chabon 2007). Mark Holcomb noted the science fiction elements of the novel and
concluded that “the freshness he [McCarthy] brings to this end-of-the-world
narrative is quite stunning” (Holcomb 2006). Janet Maslin commented on how
McCarthy’s poetical style made the novel at once appalling and exquisite: “This
parable is also trenchant and terrifying, written with stripped-down urgency and
fueled by the force of a universal nightmare. The Road would be pure misery if not
for its stunning, savage beauty” (Maslin 2006). Ron Charles agreed and argued that
“The Road is a frightening, profound take that drags us into places we don’t want
to go, forces us to think about questions we don’t want to ask” (Charles 2006,
BW06).
Although The Road and other contemporary speculative texts are cautionary
tales about the power of information acquisition, this is not to say that twenty-first
century speculative fiction completely condemns the search for knowledge and
truth. Rather, such fiction questions the belief that information can be the panacea
for all social ills. However, much speculative writing still asserts that knowledge is
power and that having access to information remains a means of combating social
problems, even if, in the end, this search for truth cannot completely solve those
issues. Michael Chabon, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing
Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), explores the need to disseminate informa-
tion and truth about traumatic social events, even if it is through the medium of
speculative writing. Chabon’s novel focuses on the early world of American comics
during the 1930s and 1940s when graphic art matured and characters such as
Superman were created by Jewish artists and writers such as such as Jerry Siegel and
Joel Schuster as symbolic crusaders against injustice, particularly the threat of Nazi
Germany. As noted earlier, these comics became speculative vehicles for highlight-
ing racial prejudice, such as anti-Semitism, in ways that could be palatable for its
white, male readership. Further, comic characters such as Superman have been read
928 SPECULATIVE FICTION

as imaginative desires on the part of the writers to create a superhero who would
fight for the underrepresented and the voiceless, especially racial and ethnic
minorities.
In Chabon’s novel, the real and imaginary intermix. The titular characters Joe
Kavalier and Sam Clay are cousins who represent the real Jewish comic book
writers and designers of the early twentieth century. At the same time, the charac-
ters’ lives are punctuated by extraordinary events, such as Joe’s miraculous escape
from Nazi-occupied Prague in a box containing the city’s famous Golem, a fantas-
tical automaton from Jewish folklore. Joe’s amazing escape inspires the cousins to
create a superhero called “The Escapist,” whose superpower is to rescue innocent
people from bondage both actual and metaphorical. Specifically, the Escapist helps
those who are oppressed by Nazi Germany (though in the comic, Joe and Sam are
forced by their publishers to thinly disguise the Nazis as “Razis”).
The novel serves as a metanarrative, or a text that comments on the writing of
fiction as part of the story’s action. In this case, Chabon’s metanarrative discusses
the power and limitations of the speculative mode. Part of the reason that Kavalier
and Clay write “The Escapist” is to envision a hero who can destroy and defeat
Hitler and the forces of Nazi Germany, which were storming through Europe, incar-
cerating and murdering millions of Jews. The Escapist is a magician in a Houdini
sense—a hero who can get out of any trap—but he also represents what speculative
fiction is: a fantasy, an escape from the realities of the world into an alternate one
in which one’s wishes or dreams come true. For Kavalier and Clay, that wish is for
someone to be able to stop the atrocities of the Nazi regime, a regime that would
seem to be a phantasm but is not. The Holocaust was not horror fiction but reality.
In one sense, writing “The Escapist” gives Joe and Sam the power to alert
Americans to what is happening in Europe. Further, the character allows Joe to
articulate his anger and frustration that his family remains in Nazi-occupied Prague.
For instance, Joe’s first cover art for “The Escapist” illustrates the hero delivering a
devastating right hook to Adolf Hitler. Within the pages of the comic, “The war was
over; a universal era of peace was declared, the imprisoned and persecuted peoples
of Europe—among them, implicitly and passionately, the Kavalier family of
Prague—were free” (Chabon 2000, 166). However, this event does not take place
in reality. In this way, the novel asks what is the use of speculative fiction if it cannot
do anything about such horrors in the real world. Joe ponders this point himself,
and he becomes so disillusioned about the efficacy of his work that he eventually
enlists in the military to fight the Nazis overseas. He becomes aware that “the true
magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to
become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place”
(Chabon 2000, 339). This loss includes, heartbreakingly, those Joe knew in Prague
who were eventually killed by the Nazis. Nevertheless, Chabon’s answer to the
question regarding the value of speculative fiction is yes, it is still a valuable and
necessary mode of writing. Even if speculative fiction cannot solve problems, it
remains an important outlet for authors and readers to discuss and address “those
questions we don’t want to ask” (Charles 2006, BW06).
Critics found The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay to be at once insight-
ful, moving, and entertaining. Rex Roberts wrote that “Mr. Chabon weaves a
complicated skein of images evoking entrapment and escape . . . In this sense, the
book is a tour de force, a piece of literary showmanship that brilliantly employs
popular culture in the service of high ideals” (Roberts 2001, B6). Amy Benfer agreed
 SPECULATIVE FICTION 929

that “Many contemporary issues—homosexuality, the role of women in the arts,

censorship, anti-Semitism—are addressed, though never with the cloying revision-
ism that can bog down books that try to use history as a Parable for Our Time”
(Benfer 2000). Ken Kalfus added that “The cousins’ adventures are leavened by
buoyant good humor, wisecracks and shtick, but the story never loses its awareness
of the tragedy that roils beneath the surface of our everyday lives and the lives of
men in tights” (Kalfus 2000). Finally, Gail Caldwell summarized the novel’s impor-
tance by noting it “represents the finest in a whole new breed of contemporary
fiction. It’s full of pizzazz and testosterone and street smarts, with a moral center
that tethers its intelligence” (Caldwell 2000, E1).

Bibliography
Balée, Susan. “Spine-Soothing Tales.” The Hudson Review Autumn 2006: 480–490.
Bebergal, Peter. “Literary Take on Vampires Gives ‘Historian’ Bite.” The Boston Globe 15
June 2005. http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2005/06/15/literary_take_on_
vampires_gives_historian_bite/
Benfer, Amy. “‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay’ by Michael Chabon.” Sept.
28 2000. Salon.com.
Butler, Octavia. Fledgling. New York: Warner Books, 2005.
Caldwell, Gail. “An Ode to the Golden Age of Comic Book Heroes.” The Boston Globe 19
Nov. 2000: E1.
———. “Other Voices, Other Rooms in Donna Tartt’s ‘A Little Friend.’” The Boston Globe
27 Oct. 2002: D6.
Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. New York: Picador, 2000.
———. “After the Apocalypse.” The New York Review of Books 54 (2) (2007).
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19856
Changnon, Greg. “An Odd Coming-of-Age, with a Murderous Twist.” The Atlanta Journal-
Constitution 28 Dec. 2003: 4K.
Charles, Ron. “Apocalypse Now.” The Washington Post 1 October 2006: BW06.
Cranny-Francis, Anne. Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Genre Fiction. Cambridge: Polity,
1990.
Davis, Kathryn. The Thin Place. New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 2006.
Donawerth, Jane, and Carol A. Kolmerten, eds. Utopian and Science Fiction by Women:
Worlds of Difference. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994.
Due, Tananarive. The Living Blood. New York: Washington Square Press, 2001.
Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989.
Holcomb, Mark. “End of the Line.” Village Voice 31 Aug. 2006. http://www.villagevoice.
com/books/0636,holcomb,74342,10.html
Hopkins, Pauline. Of One Blood. The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins. Schomberg
Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. New York: Oxford University
Press, [1903] 1988: 439–621.
Jones, Vanessa E. “‘The Living Blood’ Gives Supernatural Thrills.” The Boston Globe 9 Aug.
2001: C15.
Kalfus, Ken. “The Golem Knows.” The New York Times 24 Sept. 2000. http://www.nytimes.
com/books/00/09/24/reviews/000924.24kalfust.html
Kostova, Elizabeth. The Historian. New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 2005.
Maslin, Janet. “The Road through Hell, Paved with Desperation.” The New York Times 25
Sept. 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/books/25masl.html
———. “Scholarship Trumps the Stake in Pursuit of Dracula.” The New York Times 13 June
2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/13/books/13masl.html
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Knopf, 2006.
———. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Vintage, [1992] 1993.
930 SPORTS LITERATURE

———. Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West. New York: Vintage, 1985.
Miller, Laura. “‘The Historian’ by Elizabeth Kostova.” June 6 2005. Salon.com.
———. “‘The Little Friend’ by Donna Tartt.” Nov. 11 2002. Salon.com.
Morrison, Toni. “The Site of Memory.” The Norton Anthology of African American Litera-
ture, 2nd ed. New York: Norton, [1987] 2004: 2290–2299.
Murray, Tom. “Who Killed My Brother?” The San Francisco Chronicle 27 Oct. 2002.
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. “Popular culture.” New Formations 2 (1987): 80.
Roberts, Rex. “Two Cousins, World War II, and the ’Toons.” The Washington Times 7 Jan.
2001: B6.
Rosinsky, Natalie M. Feminist Futures: Contemporary Women’s Speculative Fiction. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1984.
Smith, Scott. The Ruins. New York: Knopf, 2006.
Stevenson, Jane. “Neckrophilia.” The Observer 24 July 2005. http://books.guardian.co.uk/
reviews/generalfiction/0,,1534428,00.html
Sturgis, Susanna J. “Living the Undead Life.” Women’s Review of Books 23 (1) (2006):
11–12.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary
Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
Tartt, Donna. The Little Friend. New York: Knopf, 2002.
Thomas, Sheree R., ed. Dark Matter: Reading the Bones. New York: Aspect, 2005.
———. Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. New
York: Warner Books, 2000.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard
Howard. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords. London: Fontana, 1983.

Further Reading
Barr, Marleen S. Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1993; Bleiler, Everett, F., and Richard K. Bleiler. Science
Fiction: The Early Years. Kent: Kent State University Press, 1990; Cranny-Francis, Anne.
Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Genre Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, 1990; Donawerth, Jane,
and Carol A. Kolmerten, eds. Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference.
Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994; Ellis, Kate Ferguson. The Contested Castle: Gothic
Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989;
Goddu, Teresa A. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1997; Punter, David. Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from
1765 to the Present Day. New York: Longman, 1980; Rosinsky, Natalie M. Feminist Futures:
Contemporary Women’s Speculative Fiction. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research
Press, 1984; Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of
a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979; Thomas, Sheree R., ed. Dark
Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. New York: Warner
Books, 2000; Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre.
Trans. Richard Howard. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973.
DARCIE D. RIVES
SPORTS LITERATURE
Definition. For at least 150 years, sports have been an integral part of our national
literature. Although some scholars may define the genre broadly, including mere
references to athletic activity in nontraditional texts such as advertisements and
television shows, for purposes of this chapter, sports literature is defined as those
novels, short stories, poems, and essays that depict the experiences of athletes and
spectators in the world of mainstream sports and remind us of how the arena or
 SPORTS LITERATURE 931

WHAT IS A SPORTS NOVEL?

Michael Oriard, the field’s most prominent critic, states that a sports novel is one “in which
sport plays a dominant role or in which the sport milieu is the dominant setting,” one that
“finds its vision of the individual and his condition in the basic meaning of the sport he [or
she] plays” (1982, 6). What Oriard claims for the novel holds true for short fiction, drama,
poetry, and literary essays about sports. In broad outline, much sports literature has relied
on stock character types—such as the dumb jock, the “stud athlete” (Oriard 1982, 192), and
the monomaniacal coach—as well as on hackneyed themes such as the facile correlation
between teamwork and victory in the big game.

field of play is just as often a stage upon which passionate human dramas about
almost every aspect of American culture are performed.
In the hands of especially talented writers, conventions and stock characters are
vigorously challenged or bypassed altogether, as sports become a microcosm in
which such issues as race, class, gender, and age matter just as much (if not more
than) the final outcome of a given contest.
History. The origins of sports literature can be traced to the publication of
juvenile books in the late nineteenth century, when in reaction to the increasing
violence of dime novels, writers began producing work for young audiences that
focused on positive messages conveyed through sports. Gilbert Patten (1866–1945),
who in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became “America’s most
prolific author of juvenile sports novels” (Crowe 2003, 12) with the publication of
his Frank Merriwell series, claimed that his works would allow him “an opportu-
nity to preach—by example—the doctrine of a clean mind in a clean and healthy
body” (qtd. in Crowe 2003, 13). Patten’s immensely popular works helped promote
Muscular Christianity, an ideology that equates physical fitness with moral health.
In addition to their didactic tone, these novels established a number of conventions
regarding character (the hero is “industrious, persistent, honest . . . modest . . . and
democratic,” among other things) and plot (victory for the hero in a climactic big
game) that would be used again and again by writers of both juvenile and adult
literature (Oriard 1982, 29–35).
The early twentieth century also saw the emergence of women authors such as
Edith Bancroft, whose Jane Allen novels (1917–1922) “explored the subject of girls’
athletics more fully” than the work of other female writers of the time. Ultimately,
however, these novels “refuse to take sport seriously” (Oriard 1987, 11), as the
female protagonists become typical Victorian women, reveling not in athletic
competition but in “the joys of mothering” (Oriard 1987, 13).
Conveying positive messages while portraying the excitement of sport has always
been the raison d’être of juvenile sports literature, though over time the type and
treatment of issues have become ever more complex. In a career spanning from the
late 1930s to the 1960s, John Tunis (1889–1975) used sports to spread messages
ranging from teamwork to ethnic tolerance. Tunis’s “characters possess many heroic
and athletic qualities, but their encounters with life are much more realistic, and the
outcomes of many of those encounters are distinctly un-Merriwellian” (Crowe
2003, 18). Works such as Keystone Kids (1943) and Rookie of the Year (1944)
depict the trials and tribulations of manager Spike Russell and his scrappy Brooklyn
Dodgers. Not only is there plenty of baseball action to satiate the desire of the young
932 SPORTS LITERATURE

sports fan, but there are also clear lessons about the importance of working together
to achieve success.
Contemporary novelist and short story writer Chris Crutcher (1946–) has
produced juvenile fiction that is worlds apart from the formulaic, moralistic stories
of Gilbert Patten or even the more challenging work of John Tunis. In the Foreword
to his collection Athletic Shorts (1991), Crutcher explains how, despite being
criticized for “depicting . . . characters’ hardships too graphically, and for using
language and ideas that kids don’t need to be exposed to” (1991, 2), he remains
committed to his vision. Such thematic boldness is epitomized by “In the Time I
Get,” which deals with a young football player named Louie who must overcome
his fear of and prejudice against an acquaintance who has AIDS.
Because our post-Title IX world continues to witness more and more young girls
participating in mainstream sports, it is not surprising that there has been a corre-
sponding increase in literature about female athletes, a literature that is also more
sophisticated in nature than the work written at the beginning of last century. One
especially noteworthy example is Nina Revoyr’s The Necessary Hunger (1997), a
coming-of-age story in which Nancy Takahiro sees basketball as “more a calling
than a sport” (1997, 12). As a highly recruited athlete, as a lesbian suffering from
the unrequited love of a fellow basketball player, Nancy is about as far as can be
from the world of Jane Allen.
Sports literature for young readers has a long, impressive tradition deserving of
study, but adult sports literature has attracted a larger readership and more intense
scholarly interest. Although one can find depictions of the sporting life in some of
the earliest works of our national literature—such as James Fenimore Cooper’s
Leather Stocking novels (1823, 1826, 1827, 1840, and 1841) or tales from the Old
Southwest such as Thomas Bangs Thorpe’s “The Big Bear of Arkansas” (1845)—
and although late nineteenth-century works such as Mark Twain’s A Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Frank Norris’s “Travis Hallet’s Half
Back” (1894) use sports and sporting language as an integral part of their
narratives, the genre as we know it might be traced back to Ernest Lawrence
Thayer’s well-known poem “Casey at the Bat” (1888). Though not the first baseball
poem to appear in America, “Casey at the Bat” is arguably the most influential in
that it addresses “three important themes: the fall of the folk hero, its effect on his
community, and the meaning of both to the universe of humans” (Candelaria
1989, 23), thus anticipating a good deal of sports literature that will be written in
the next 120 years.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, two writers in particular constructed
the foundations of a sports literature meant for adult readers. Two Jack London
novels, The Game (1905) and The Abysmal Brute (1913), used boxing (still
considered a disreputable sport and especially so as a subject for serious literature
at the time) to explore issues of gender. The Game is important for the development
of the genre because it serves as a “paradigm” for a “basic theme of sports fiction,”
namely the “irreconcilable incompatibility between the Woman and the Game”
(Oriard 1982, 175). A much more important figure was Ring Lardner, who after
getting his start as a sportswriter, turned to writing novels and short stories about
baseball and boxing, the most enduring of which is You Know Me Al (1914). A
novel in letters, the work satirizes Jack Keefe, a provincial, comically obtuse rookie
pitcher whose inflated view of his abilities keeps him “a small-time busher even after
leaving the bush league” (Candelaria 1989, 28).
 SPORTS LITERATURE 933

In the so-called golden age of sports in the 1920s, when the economic boom
following World War I led to an expansion in leisure time that saw spectators flock-
ing to sporting events featuring such nationally celebrated athletes as Babe Ruth
(baseball), Jack Dempsey (boxing), and Bobby Jones (golf), literary artists in greater
numbers began to examine the effect of sports on American culture. In F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) unflattering portraits of Tom Buchanan, an
ex-football player; Jordan Baker, a professional golfer; and Meyer Wolfsheim, a
disreputable businessman responsible for fixing the World Series, serve as a clear
moral judgment on the general corruption of the times. In the fiction of Ernest
Hemingway—particularly In Our Time (1925) and The Sun Also Rises (1926)—the
athlete/bullfighter becomes not a symbol of corruption but a quasi-religious figure,
a model of moral conduct in a godless modern world.
It is not football or golf or bullfighting but baseball that has most often drawn the
attention of our nation’s most gifted writers. Literary interest in baseball is tied to
the history of the sport itself. The first written mention of the game in North
America appears in 1791; by the 1870s, only a few years after Charles Peverelly’s
The National Game (1866) gave the sport its resilient epithet (Oriard 1982, 69),
competitive professional leagues were firmly established. Because the sport came of
age as the country did, baseball quickly came to be seen as synonymous with
America. Philip Roth, in “My Baseball Years,” writes about how baseball was a
means of socialization into American culture: “For someone whose roots in America
were strong but only inches deep . . . baseball was a kind of secular church that
reached into every class and region of the nation and bound millions upon millions
of us together” (1975, 180). Former Commissioner of Major League Baseball A.
Bartlett Giamatti goes so far as to say that “[b]aseball is part of America’s plot . . .
the plot of the story of our national life” (1989, 83).
Baseball’s prominence in American literature is indebted to the nonfiction writing
on sport in the early twentieth century. Richard Orodenker traces this sport’s
writing tradition and identifies two major categories of writers. The Matties,
“graceful, polished writers, baseball’s elegant phrasemakers,” are epitomized by
Grantland Rice, the early twentieth-century sportswriter famous for his overblown
style, and much later, by the well-chiseled prose of writers such as John Updike, Gay
Talese, and Roger Angell (1996, 10). In contrast, the Rubes, both the optimistic
“gee whiz” and the cynical “aw nuts” types, are more interested in “colorful
stories” (1996, 10) and the baseball “talk” (1996, 11) used to pass them on. In
addition to Ring Lardner, the list of Rubes includes Damon Runyon, Jimmy
Cannon, Jimmy Breslin (1996, 11–12), and most recently, Hunter S. Thompson,
whose ESPN Page 2 essays, collected in Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine,
and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness—Modern History from the Sports Desk
(2004), meditate on the parallels between politics and professional sports (mostly
football and basketball) in his own inimitable style.
Since Ring Lardner, “who nearly single-handedly transformed . . . [baseball] from
a casual motif in juvenile stories to a formal nuanced metaphor serviceable to
serious literature” (Candelaria 1989, 25), writers have been fascinated with the
literary possibilities of this sport. A partial list of serious baseball fiction, covering
literary modes ranging from the satiric to the mythic to the postmodern, includes
Thomas Wolfe’s The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again
(1940); Bernard Malamud’s The Natural (1952); Mark Harris’s Henry Wiggen
novels: The Southpaw (1953), Bang the Drum Slowly (1956), A Ticket for a Seamstich
934 SPORTS LITERATURE

(1957), and It Looked Like for Ever (1979); Robert Coover’s The Universal
Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968); Philip Roth’s The Great
American Novel (1973); Jay Neugeboren’s Sam’s Legacy (1973); William Brashler’s
The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings (1975); W.P. Kinsella’s
Shoeless Joe (1982); and Eric Rolfe Greenberg’s The Celebrant (1983). More
recently, Mark Winegardner’s The Veracruz Blues (1996), depicting the heyday of
the Mexican Leagues, and Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), which connects
Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard round the world” in 1951 to the Cold War politics
of the time, have proven that baseball continues to capture the imagination of some
of our nation’s most highly regarded writers.
Dramatists have also made compelling use of baseball (and, less often, of other
sports) in their work. In the popular imagination, the Broadway musical Damn
Yankees (adapted from the 1954 Douglass Wallop novel The Year the Yankees Lost
the Pennant) (Candelaria 1989, 33) continues to entertain audiences to this day. Old
Timers Game (1988), about an exhibition contest featuring past players from a
minor league baseball team, and Cobb (1991), which depicts the irascible Ty Cobb
at three significant moments in his life, are works by Lee Blessing, a critically
acclaimed contemporary playwright. August Wilson’s Fences (1987) chronicles the
last days of Troy Maxon, a prodigious home run hitter resentful of the racially
segregated past that prohibited him from showcasing his talents in the major
leagues. Significant dramatic works tackling other sports include Arthur Miller’s
Death of a Salesman (1949) and Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(1954), both of which feature ex-football players who have trouble adjusting to the
real world; Howard Sackler’s The Great White Hope (1967), loosely based on the
life of African American boxer Jack Johnson; and Jason Miller’s That Champi-
onship Season (1972), exploring the tensions that arise during the twenty-fifth
reunion of a high school basketball team. Significantly, the plays by Wilson, Arthur
Miller, Williams, Sackler, and Jason Miller each won Pulitzer prizes, a testament to
the inspiration of sports for many of our nation’s most recognized writers.
Poets, too, have made much use of sports in their work, and here again the subject
of baseball dominates. Recent anthologies of baseball poetry include Where
Memory Gathers (1998), edited by Edward R. Ward and Baseball and the Lyrical
Life (1999), edited by Tom Tolnay. Some collections, such as Don Johnson’s
Hummers, Knucklers, and Slow Curves (1991), are completely devoted to the sport.
Two works notable for extended treatment of the subject are Kenneth Koch’s book-
length Ko, or Season on Earth (1959), one of whose multiple narrative lines involves
a sensitive, Japanese fastballer who pitches for the Dodgers, and Donald Hall’s nine-
sectioned meditation on the game simply entitled “Baseball” (1993).
With so much high quality evidence in our literature, it seems almost obvious to
conclude, along with Roger Angell, that “[b]aseball is the writer’s game” (1991);
however, throughout American literary history, there has also been sustained
interest in other sports. Boxing, for example, continues to fascinate some of our
nation’s most popular writers. Although a number of “formulaic boxing novels”
(Oriard 1982, 99) were published in the last century, so were original works of
fiction such as The Harder They Fall (1947) by Budd Schulberg, The Professional
(1958) by W.C. Heinz, and Fat City (1969) by Leonard Gardner. In addition,
literary essayists have had much to say about the sport. Norman Mailer’s “Ego”
(1971), which identifies Muhammad Ali as “the very spirit of the twentieth century”
(Halberstam 1999, 713), explores not only the psychology of the then-often-reviled
 SPORTS LITERATURE 935

boxer but also America’s need for outsized celebrities. In her collection On Boxing
(1994), Joyce Carol Oates makes an eloquent argument for how “[e]ach boxing
match is a story—a unique and highly condensed drama without words” (1994, 8),
a tragedy because “it consumes the very excellence it [the punished body] displays”
(16). For Oates, the writer’s role is to watch the drama unfold and provide what the
athletes cannot—a translation of the bodies and their actions into words.
Football has also inspired its fair share of writers. From the early decades of the
twentieth century, when the college football novel held sway by addressing “the
disparity between the ideals of the university and the glorification of the athlete at
the university’s expense” (Oriard 1982, 63), to more recent works such as Frederick
Exley’s A Fan’s Notes (1968), an autobiographical novel about one man’s obsession
with football hero Frank Gifford; Dan Jenkins’s “outlandishly raunchy” (Oriard
1982, 190) comedy Semi-Tough (1972); and Peter Gent’s North Dallas Forty
(1974), a fictional exposé of the brutality of the game, football has served as incred-
ibly fertile ground for the literary imagination. Don DeLillo’s End Zone (1972),
another novel of the gridiron, deserves special note, as it goes far beyond fan
adulation, bawdy sexual humor, and graphic depiction of violence to lay bare the
limitations of the language we use to represent such things.
The tradition of basketball literature is not as long as that of other major sports;
nevertheless, it boasts a body of work notable for quality and thematic diversity. Jay
Neugeboren’s Big Man (1970) and Lawrence Shainberg’s One on One (1975) are
two early examples of the subgenre that explore, among other things, the theme of
“creativity within urban limitation” (Oriard 1982, 115). More recently, Charley
Rosen has published two novels: The House of Moses All Stars (1996), about the
adventures of a group of barnstorming Jewish cagers, and Barney Polan’s Game: A
Novel of the 1951 College Basketball Scandals (1997). Paul Beatty’s The White Boy
Shuffle (1996) emphasizes the urban nature of the game and provides an unflinch-
ing satirical examination of sports and race in America. Tom LeClair’s Passing Off
(1996), in contrast, is a postmodern suspense novel about an American basketball
player in Greece. A fine anthology of basketball literature is offered by editor Dennis
Trudell in Full Court: A Literary Anthology of Basketball (1996).
Of the recent novels showcasing other major sports, three are distinguished for
their postmodern preoccupation with identity. Harry Crews’s Body (1990) is of note
for its incisive critique of gender stereotypes in the world of professional body build-
ing. Carol Anshaw’s Aquamarine (1992) explores the swimmer-protagonist’s three
possible lives based on important decisions she makes in the wake of a personally
disappointing Olympic performance. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1997),
which stands out in the field of contemporary American literature for both its scope
and erudition, “intertwines sport [tennis] with questions of learning and memory
that ultimately shade into a larger meditation on contemporary identity” (Burn
2004, 41). In the last decade of the twentieth century, writers turned to sports to
address the complex dynamics of selfhood and, in the process, demonstrated that
sports literature is an ever-evolving genre.
Trends and Themes. Whether meant for adult or juvenile readers, sports literature
since 2000 builds upon established interests while following new trends in popular
culture and global economics. Baseball literature continues to be popular, and works
addressing gender, race, and class in sport continue to be published. In addition,
relatively new trends are also apparent in this recent literature, including an increas-
ing interest in a wide variety of sports; an increasing number of book-length works
936 SPORTS LITERATURE

on American sports history and present-day sports culture; and literary explorations
of the globalization of sports as a money-making entertainment.
Not surprisingly, literature about baseball continues to find an audience. Recent
fiction includes Kevin Baker’s Sometimes You See It Coming (1993; 2003 reissued
in paperback) and Patrick Creevy’s Tyrus (2002), two novels based on the life of Ty
Cobb. Baseball, race relations, and the history of Chicago intersect in Peter M.
Rutkoff’s Shadow Ball (2001), which imagines the near-miss integration of baseball
long before Jackie Robinson. More personal in its use of baseball history is Mick
Cochrane’s Sport (2001), a coming-of-age story set in the 1960s and featuring a
13-year-old Minnesota Twins fan. An aging scout is the focus of William Littlefield’s
Prospect (1989, reissued in 2001) and Brian Shawver’s The Cuban Prospect (2003),
the latter of which is more of an international thriller than a depiction of baseball
between the chalk lines.
Contemporary writers continue to find new ways to present baseball to the
reading public. Three recent notable works succeed in this search by treating the
intersection of baseball and place. Crooked River Burning (2001), by Mark
Winegardner explores sports and civic identity, using the misfortunes of the
Cleveland Indians baseball team to parallel a city’s economic decline. Eugena Pilek’s
Cooperstown (2005) centers on the lives of citizens of a small town who live in the
shadow of the Baseball Hall of Fame and must come to terms with the reality behind
the baseball myth that gives their small town relevance. Richard Greenberg’s drama
Take Me Out (2003), set in the media crucible of New York City, explores the
problems that arise when a talented and popular baseball player announces he is
gay. This theme of sexual orientation is especially significant because, up to this
point, “[t]he literature of baseball . . . [has been] continuously about male hetero-
sexuality; its characters . . . straight men in the process of reinforcing their straight-
ness” (Morris 1997, 4).
In addition to full-length works, collections of baseball stories continue to appear
on the market in significant numbers, including Baseball’s Best Short Stories (1997),
edited by Paul D. Staudohar; Bottom of the Ninth: Great Contemporary Baseball
Stories (2003), edited by John McNally; Dead Balls and Double Curves: An Anthol-
ogy of Early Baseball Fiction (2004), edited by Trey Strecker; and Fenway Fiction:
Short Stories from Red Sox Nation (2005), edited by Adam Emerson Pachter.
As the recent publication of several baseball poetry collections indicates, baseball
verse continues to be popular. Notable here is Gene Fehler’s Dancing on the
Basepaths (2001), a single-authored collection devoted entirely to the sport. Other
collections include the anthology Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems
(2002), edited by Brooke Horvath and Tom Wiles. Unlike many such anthologies,
this one offers an impressive variety of “previously unanthologized work” (2002,
xxiii) loosely arranged to parallel the trajectory of a baseball season. The book
includes the work of well-known poets, such as Charles Bukowski’s “Betting on the
Muse,” which compares the abbreviated career of a ball player with the longer and
ultimately more satisfying career of a writer; Quincy Troupe’s “Poem for My
Father,” a paean to the negro leagues; and Richard Brautigan’s “A Baseball Game,”
a surrealistic piece depicting what happens when nineteenth-century French poet
Charles Baudelaire goes to a professional baseball game. Ranging over more sports
is Way to Go! (2001), a collection for young audiences edited by Lillian Morrison.
Noah Blaustein’s Motion: American Sports Poems (2001) is an anthology especially
noteworthy for its breadth, containing poems ranging from baseball to surfing. Both
 SPORTS LITERATURE 937

the “classics” (William Carlos Williams’s “At the Ball Game,” Marianne Moore’s
“Baseball and Writing,” James Dickey’s “For the Death of Vince Lombardi”) and
more recent works (B.H. Fairchild’s “Old Men Playing Basketball” and Gary Soto’s
“Black Hair”) treat such time-honored themes as race and gender, as well as the
quest for bodily transcendence.
Because “[s]portswomen simply are not, and haven’t really ever been, among
sport’s more acceptable stories” (Sandoz and Winans 1999, 4), the tradition of
sports literature by and about women is not as long. However, with more and more
young women participating in high school and collegiate athletics and with the
visibility of women’s professional leagues such as the WNBA, it is not surprising
that these experiences are beginning to be chronicled in the literature. Joli Sandoz’s
two anthologies of women’s writing published in the late 1990s have gone a long
way toward solidifying the status of the female athlete in America. The first
collection, A Whole New Ball Game (1997), features stories and poems from the
last one hundred years, whereas the second, Whatever It Takes (1999), presents
primarily works of nonfiction that serve as an eloquent argument for the long
tradition of women’s athletics.
The voices of female athletes rise up loud and clear in recent juvenile literature as
well. The anthology Girls Got Game (2001) features stories and poems about young
female protagonists and speakers who look and act much differently from the girls
of the Jane Allen novels. Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s story “Rough Touch” depicts Ruthie’s
conflict with her body as both dramatic tension and thematic suggestion. At the end
of the story, she plays a game with the boys, taking them all by surprise by going
out for a pass and catching it, at which point the narrator announces: “It was hers,
the football was hers” (2001, 115).
Refreshingly, not all work by today’s female writers defines the sporting
experience of girls as a struggle against a patriarchal world. In Grace Butcher’s
“Basketball,” for example, the focus is on the pride the speaker feels in making a
layup. The made basket, rather than a significant victory in the gender wars, is what
truly matters here. Another noteworthy example is Karol Ann Hoeffner’s All You’ve
Got (2006), a young adult novel that features a young female volleyball player who
“didn’t spend a lot of time stressing over how her body looked” but “cared more
for how it performed” (2006, 3).
Even juvenile novels by male writers reflect the growing presence of young women
in sports. Mike Lupica’s Travel Team (2006) features a young male protagonist
who, according to one of sports literature’s many clichés, has a competitive desire
on the basketball court that belies his small stature. However, it is important to note
that one of the key players on his team is a tough, sharp-shooting girl. Although
the two main characters of John Feinstein’s Last Shot (2006) are not athletes, they
are intensely dedicated to and knowledgeable about the game of basketball. Both
excellent writers, they win an essay contest and are awarded an all-expenses-paid
trip to New Orleans to cover the NCAA Final Four. Significantly, the female is not
a clueless interloper in some male preserve; she is a girl who just so happens to be
crazy (and well-informed) about basketball.
Other juvenile sports literature offers perspective on different contemporary
issues. In a twist on the typical big game narrative, John H. Ritter’s The Boy Who
Saved Baseball (2003) concerns a group of small-town kids who arranged to play a
winner-take-all game against unwanted real estate developers. The stakes are raised
considerably in Michael Chabon’s Lord of the Rings-like baseball adventure called
938 SPORTS LITERATURE

Summerland (2002), in which the very fate of the world hinges on the outcome of
a ball game between a team of kids and a team of demons. In a more realistic vein,
Chris Crutcher’s Whale Talk (2001) tells the tale of how several high school misfits
come together as a team and achieve not grand victory but the kind of incremental
improvement they need to earn their varsity letters, much to the chagrin of the
school’s bullying football establishment. Significantly, each of these works features
a strong, young female athlete.
Whether found in a library, mall bookstore, or online, sports literature continues
to proliferate in vigorous variety. The latest in the annual collection of The Best
American Sports Writing (2006) features essays on underexamined sports such as
competitive cheerleading, recreational softball, and professional poker. In addition
to literary sports reportage, current magazines have shown a renewed interest in
sports fiction. GolfWorld magazine, for example, first published a fiction issue in
September of 2005, continuing the practice in 2006, and a short story from Esquire
(November 2006), “The Death of Derek Jeter” by Michael Martone, has enjoyed
an extended life thanks to Internet blogs and message boards that supply a link to
the story on the magazine’s Web site. In other recent fiction, Darin Strauss’s novel
Real McCoy (2002) narrates the life of a boxer and con artist in the first decade of
the twentieth century who is presumably the original “Real McCoy.” On a deeper
level, the novel explores the issue of artificiality and authenticity in American
culture—then and now—and especially in our yearning for genuine sports heroes.
Thom Jones also turns to boxing as a subject in more than one story collected in
The Pugilist at Rest (1994) and Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine (2000). F.X.
Toole’s Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner (2000) depicts the gritty, violent world
of boxing both inside and outside the ring. Another Toole work, his posthumous
Pound for Pound (2006), is a novel about an ex-boxer who loses his grandson in a
traffic accident. Golf is another sport that continues to draw much attention from
writers of fiction. The spirituality that can be achieved through golf is a theme in
Steven Pressfield’s The Legend of Bagger Vance (1995), Robert Cullen’s A Mulligan
for Bobby Jobe (2001), and Roland Merullo’s humorously pietistic Golfing with
God (2005). Golf is played primarily for laughs in Dan Jenkins’s irreverent Slim and
None (2005) and Rick Reilly’s Shanks for Nothing (2006). In each, there is a
scattershot approach to satire on topics ranging from feminism to social class
distinction to life in a post-9/11 world. Besides boxing and golf, mainstay subjects
in the genre, other sports also appear in recent fiction including horse racing in Jane
Smiley’s sprawling Horse Heaven (2000) and surfing in Kem Nunn’s thriller Tijuana
Straits (2004).
In general, writers of mainstream sports fiction take two approaches to attracting
readers. First, much recent adult popular fiction on sports features the antics of
professional athletes. In Wild Pitch (2003), for example, Mike Lupica places a
redemption story amid the crude behavior of professional baseball players.
Similarly, the lives of professional athletes are blatantly satirized in Foul Lines: A
Pro Basketball Novel (2006) by Jack McCallum and L. Jon Wertheim, two writers
for Sports Illustrated. Comic and full of pop cultural allusions, the novel provides
genuine insight into how reporters cover professional sports and how professional
athletes and those who support them act in private life.
The second strategy many writers employ to attract readers involves combining
sports with other popular genres. Golf in a hard-boiled vein is mined by Peter
Dexter in Train (2003), for example. David Ferrell writes a baseball-serial killer
 SPORTS LITERATURE 939

thriller in Screwball (2003), and John DeCure has authored two mysteries about a
California lawyer and surfer: Reef Dance (2001) and Bluebird Rising (2003).
Although the above writers try for an original approach to sports within the context
of something familiar, readers continue to be drawn to literature that merely traffics
in sports stereotypes, as exemplified by John Grisham’s bestselling Bleachers (2003),
a novel about Neeley Crenshaw, an ex-high school football player who returns after
a considerable absence to his hometown in order to come to terms with his hard-
nosed ex-coach, who is now on his deathbed. Nevertheless, for the most part,
current writers of sports fiction seek original audience appeal, as can be seen in the
case of two recent works focusing on basketball, arguably America’s most ascendant
sport. Stanley Gordon West offers a heartwarming portrait of small-town high
school cagers in Blind Your Ponies (2001). In thematic contrast, Sherman Alexie
continues to turn to basketball to probe the continuities and dislocations in Native
American culture, most recently in the short story “Whatever Happened to Frank
Snake Church?” from Ten Little Indians (2003). The popular and the serious meet
in Murder at the Foul Line (2006), a collection of short stories that features the
work of such award-winning mystery writers as Lawrence Block, Jeffery Deaver,
and S.J. Rosen. This latter work evinces that the “sports-mystery novel,” which can
be traced back to the 1930s (Oriard 1982, 18), is alive and well.
Nonfiction writing about sports remains strong, with writers turning increasingly
to contemporary issues and historical events as subject matter, no doubt appealing
to today’s readers’ appetite for reality-based stories. These writers often produce
book-length journalism that seeks the excitement of fiction. For example, in the past
few years, a spate of books has appeared focusing on the coach or manager of sports
teams to detail the day-to-day practices of winners. Two Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalists have authored books that examine the increasingly complex role of
coaches in professional sports. H.G. (Buzz) Bissinger’s Three Days in August (2005)
explores the mind and career of St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa through
a pivotal three-game series in 2003, demonstrating how the successful manager
“possesses the combination of skills essential to the trade: part tactician, part
psychologist, and part riverboat gambler” (17). In The Education of a Coach
(2005), David Halberstam reveals New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick to be
equally obsessive, a man who “was about one thing only—coaching—and wary of
anything that detracted from it,” such as the media or egotistical players (21). Don
Haskins’s (with Daniel Wetzel) Glory Road (2005), and Michael Lewis’s Coach
(2005) profile coaches at the amateur level. Haskins, the longtime coach at Texas
Western (now University of Texas at El Paso), started an all-black team against
Kentucky and won the 1966 NCAA basketball championship. Characterized as a
tough and (again) obsessive coach, Haskins rejects the notion that he is some kind
of civil rights leader. He started the five best players he had, regardless of their color,
because “I was just a coach who hated to get his ass beat and would do anything to
avoid it” (120). Billy Fitzgerald, Michael Lewis’s high school baseball coach, is more
than the stereotypical “Intense Coach” (55). Fitzgerald is described as both an
intellectual and a passionate teacher, just the kind of person to make a difference in
a younger person’s life, something each of the coaches profiled manages to
accomplish.
Real-life sporting experiences have been the subject of three very different
basketball memoirs. In Hoop Roots (2001), John Edgar Wideman compares the act
of reading to basketball, which is to him a kind of wonderful jazz played by the
940 SPORTS LITERATURE

body. In his distinctive style, Wideman is part memoirist, part basketball historian,
part theorist of race, and part musician, who on the table of contents page issues the
following invitation: “Different pieces coming from different places—read them in
sequence or improvise.” Different in style and tone is Melissa King’s She’s Got Next
(2005), which chronicles a young woman’s journey toward self-discovery through
the unlikely path of pickup basketball. In My Losing Season (2002) Pat Conroy also
discovers much about himself by reflecting upon his basketball career at The
Citadel. Despite a less than successful senior season, one spent under a despotic
coach and an unloving father, Conroy, from the perspective of later years, comes to
value his experience, arguing that there are more important lessons to be learned
from losing than from winning.
In the last several years the presence of women in boxing, our most brutal sport,
has been well documented in memoirs such as Kill the Body, the Head Will Fall
(1997) by Rene Denfeld, Looking for a Fight (2000) by Lynn Snowden Picket, The
Boxer’s Heart (2000) by Kate Sekules, and Without Apology: Girls, Women, and
the Desire to Fight (2005) by Leah Hager Cohen. Not surprisingly, these books
examine the pressures of gender as women compete in this most male-dominated of
sports; more surprising is the particular perspective each writer derives from her
experience. For instance, while Picket ultimately rejects the sport for its brutality,
Sekules and Cohen embrace boxing’s potential for liberation and self-fulfillment.
Also in the vein of true-to-life sports literature are historical accounts of a great
moment in sports and books that follow a high school team’s season. It is no
surprise that Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights (1990)—which in meticulous and
oftentimes unflattering detail describes the football crazed world of Odessa, Texas—
has inspired similar works such as Madeleine Blais’s In These Girls, Hope is a
Muscle (1995), the uplifting story of a girls’ basketball team and its successful quest
for the Massachusetts state championship; Larry Colton’s Counting Coup: A True
Story of Basketball and Honor on the Little Big Horn (2001); and Michael D’Orso’s
Blue Eagle: A Team, a Tribe, and a High School Basketball Season in Arctic Alaska
(2006). The success-story archetype can be found as well in recent historical
accounts such as Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit: An American Legend (2001) and
Mark Frost’s The Greatest Game Ever Played: Harry Vardon, Francis Ouimet, and
the Birth of Modern Golf (2002), two books popular enough to have been made
into Hollywood movies. In addition, examining the same pre-World War II time
frame, David Margolick has written Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling and a World on
the Brink (2005), and Dorothy Ours has published Man o’ War: A Legend Like
Lightning (2006).
Context and Issues. Other writers have chosen to focus not just on a given sport
but on the culture that surrounds it. Two prime examples of this are Warren
St. John’s look at the fans who follow the University of Alabama football team,
Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer: A Journey into the Heart of Fan Mania (2004),
and Josh Peter’s examination of professional bull riders, Fried Twinkies, Buckle
Bunnies, and Bull Riders: A Year Inside the Professional Bull Riders Tour (2005).
Combining a focus on a particular sport and a famous athlete are books about
cycling and Lance Armstrong: It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life
(2000) and Every Second Counts (2003), both by Armstrong and Sally Jenkins,
and Lance Armstrong’s War: One Man’s Battle Against Fate, Fame, Love, Death,
Scandal, and a Few Other Rivals on the Road to the Tour de France (2005), by
Daniel Coyle.
 SPORTS LITERATURE 941

Although there is still much literary focus on baseball, its status as national pas-
time continues to be challenged by high quality literature focusing on our nation’s
other sports. This, in part, has to do with the meteoric rise in popularity of basket-
ball in this country in the last 25 years and, more importantly, its stunning success
as a global commodity. Walter LaFaber, in his study Michael Jordan and the New
Global Capitalism (2002), explains the symbiotic relationship between Jordan, the
NBA, and the basketball legend’s endorsers (particularly Nike), arguing how the
sport of basketball grew in popularity both in the United States and in the rest of
the world as a result of forward-looking capitalists’ entering the global economy.
Although imaginative literature has been slow to explore this theme, Paul Beatty’s
White Boy Shuffle (1996)—a novel about an African American basketball star com-
ing of age in Los Angeles at the end of the twentieth century—depicts a world in
which the athlete, even in high school, is seen as a commodity to be exploited by
advertisers. At this point in our nation’s history, with the continuing global popu-
larity of Michael Jordan along with a wave of exciting younger stars (and extremely
lucrative marketing tools) such as LeBron James, it seems that basketball may well
be, as Bart Giamatti said of baseball not even twenty years ago, “the plot of the
story of our national life” (83).
Reception. The body of scholarship in the field of sports literature is small but
significant and, not surprisingly, weighted like the literature itself toward the sport
of baseball. Wiley Lee Umphlett’s The Sporting Myth and the American Experience
(1975) is a seminal book-length study of the genre. Using as a starting point the idea
that “the microcosm of the sporting experience can tell us a great deal about what
it means to be an individual in today’s world” (18), Umphlett focuses on “the search
for identity” (19) theme as it occurs in major sports novels to examine their explo-
ration of “psychological and moral truths about American experience” (28). Also
focusing on the quest is Robert Higgs in The Athlete in American Literature (1981).
Higgs identifies three types of athletes—the Apollonian, the Dionysian, and the
Adonic—and meditates on their role in some of the best literature our country has
to offer to suggest three different approaches athletes take when pressured to
conform to society’s codes.
Arguably the most significant scholar in this field is Michael Oriard. An ex-football
player whose days with the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame and the Kansas City Chiefs
are chronicled in End of Autumn: Reflections on My Life in Football (1982), Ori-
ard has written four book-length studies that focus on the genre broadly defined.
Dreaming of Heroes: American Sports Fiction, 1868–1980 (1982) provides a history
of sports fiction as well as an overview of prevailing tropes and themes. Like Higgs
and Umphlett before him, Oriard focuses on the figure of the sports hero; however,
he brings this figure fully into the mainstream by identifying him as not just an
athletic type but a national type—“the most widely popular self-made man in
America today” (51). As such, he is crucial (not peripheral, as sports figures tend to
be viewed) to our understanding of the American mind. Oriard devotes chapters to
recurrent themes such as the country versus the city, youth versus age, men versus
women, and history versus myth in a variety of novels about baseball, football,
basketball, and boxing. Sporting with the Gods: The Rhetoric of Play and Game in
American Culture (1991) examines how sports language—expressions and
metaphors—has worked itself into our culture at large (ix). In Reading Football:
How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle (1993) and King Football:
Sport and Spectacle in the Golden Age of Radio, Newsreels, Movies and Magazines,
942 SPORTS LITERATURE

The Weekly and The Daily Press (2000), Oriard analyzes a wide variety of texts in
order to discover what they reveal about the meaning of football for American
spectators.
Christian Messenger has focused exclusively on imaginative literature, authoring
two excellent studies on sports fiction: Sport and the Spirit of Play in American
Fiction: Hawthorne to Faulkner (1981) and its companion work, Sport and the
Spirit of Play in Contemporary Fiction (1990). Messenger’s first study begins with
a premise that follows the focus of Umphlett and Higgs: “[t]he sports hero in
American fiction,” Messenger argues, “has been a special figure, a man apart from
mass man” (1981, 1). Like Higgs, Messenger identifies three different “heroic
models.” The first, The Ritual Sports Hero, is “[a]n Adamic figure who seeks self-
knowledge” (1981, 8). The second, The Popular Sports Hero, is “deeply demo-
cratic, raw, humorous. . . . he expressed the strength and vitality of westward
expansion and growth” (1981, 8). Over time, this type becomes domesticated by the
sports arena. The third model, The School Sports Hero, is “more genteel than the
Popular Hero and nurtured through American education, privilege, and the assimi-
lation of war through symbolic sports conflict” (1981, 9). Messenger goes on to
explain how The Ritual Hero “plays for the self,” The School Hero “competes for
society’s praise,” and The Popular Hero “competes for immediate extrinsic rewards:
money, fame, records” (1981, 9). In his second book, Messenger explores the sports
hero as he or she appears in contemporary American literature, arguing that “[t]he
individual sports hero’s tensions and achievements within the sports collective is the
obsessive subject of American sports fiction” (1990, 24).
Three other scholarly works examine the enduring myths of baseball. Cordelia
Candelaria’s Seeking the Perfect Game: Baseball in American Literature (1989)
examines canonical baseball texts and the myths they have created or reinterpreted.
In the same vein, Deeanne Westbrook’s Ground Rules: Baseball and Myth (1996),
building upon the work of Claude Levi Strauss, Eric Gould, and Jacques Lacan,
argues that baseball literature “has the status of a functional modern mythology”
(1996, 9). Broader in scope, David McGimpsey’s Imagining Baseball: America’s
Pastime and Popular Culture (2000) studies enduring myths not only in baseball
literature, but also in films and television. McGimspey identifies a number of
“tropes” in “baseball’s cultural products”: “baseball is perfect and God-given;
baseball is the best sport; baseball is ‘naturally’ amenable to artistic representation;
baseball is America at its best; baseball shows us a nonviolent America where all are
judged on merit that can be quantified; baseball is about children; baseball returns
sons to fathers” (2000, 2). Some works, such as W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe (and its
wildly popular movie version Field of Dreams), ardently support one or more of
these tropes (2000, 35–41), whereas others, such as Jim Bouton’s tell-all diary Ball
Four (1970), deconstruct such nostalgic notions (2000, 45).
Don Johnson focuses exclusively on sports poetry in The Sporting Muse: A
Critical Study of Poetry about Athletes and Athletics (2004). Johnson organizes his
discussion according to sport, allotting chapters for baseball, football, basketball,
and golf, as well as chapters exclusively devoted to the work of women poets and
the role of the spectator. Regardless of sport or perspective, Johnson observes that

Most sports poetry falls into one of four types: the memory poem, often about a child-
hood or adolescent experience on the court or playing field; the action poem, one which
attempts to capture the mood and movement in a game or particular play; the
 SPORTS LITERATURE 943

journalistic poem, which records the achievement of an individual or a team as an

event; and the celebratory poem, an effort to preserve for posterity the exploits of an
heroic player or team. (2004, 135)

Despite the genre’s origins and despite the vast body of work, juvenile sports
literature has inspired far less scholarship; however, Chris Crowe’s More Than a
Game: Sports Literature for Young Adults (2004) provides a useful taxonomy for
understanding the full variety of works published since the days of Frank Merriwell.
The works most deserving of critical attention fall under two main categories—the
“more-than-a-game novel,” “whose main concern is an athlete and his involvement
in athletics, but it also has much more character development and some subplots
that may be only tangential to sport” (2003, 36); and “[t]he most sophisticated
young adult sports novels” called ‘sportlerroman’ (2003, 38), a form of the tradi-
tional bildungsroman apprenticeship novel, where the protagonist is an athlete
struggling for maturity” (2003, 21).
Selected Authors. Over the past century, many American writers have used sports
in their novels, poems, dramas, and essays to comment on enduring issues in
American society. Although many of these works—written by best-selling authors
such as Frank Deford, Rick Reilly, Dan Jenkins, and Mike Lupica—enjoy immense
popularity and make occasionally incisive comments about our contemporary
society, a number of our country’s most critically acclaimed writers have challenged
conventions of the genre and, in the process, produced original and enduring
literature.
Bernard Malamud’s first novel, The Natural (1952), is without question the
starting point in the field of contemporary sports literature. Though less than enthu-
siastically received by critics when it first appeared, The Natural is now seen as a
seminal attempt to join sports and myth, reality, and fantasy. It is the story of Roy
Hobbs, a confident, cocky pitcher who is shot by a strange woman as he is on the
verge of making it to the big leagues. When several years later he gets another
opportunity to play in the pros, he continues to put his own dreams and goals before
the collective by deciding to throw an important game in the pennant race so that
he might have the money necessary to satisfy Memo Paris, the woman of his dreams.

WATCHING SPORTS IN A MOVIE

Because we are a nation that loves to watch sports, it is not surprising that sports films
outstrip sports literature in terms of popularity. Viewers are drawn to such movies as
Breaking Away (1979), Hoosiers (1986), Remember the Titans (2000), and Glory Road (2006)
because of their “feel good” resolutions, in which teams overcome great odds to achieve
success on the field of play. Other films such as Raging Bull (1980) and The Hurricane (2000)
compel attention for the unflinching brutality faced by characters based on real life people
and events. Still others generate interest in part because they have been adapted from
popular literary works. Among the most significant of these adaptations are North Dallas
Forty (book 1973; film 1979), Semi-Tough (book 1972; film 1977), The Natural (book 1952; film
1984) and, more recently, Friday Night Lights (book 1990; film 2004; television drama
2006–2007) and Million Dollar Baby (short story 2001; film 2004).These films have proven to
be just as popular (if not more so) than the original works that inspired them. Sports films
have a history that stretches back almost as far as the film industry itself; interest in such
works will most likely continue unabated.
944 SPORTS LITERATURE

As Malamud recounts the Knights’ pennant chase, he applies a number of mythic

layers to the narrative, depicting Hobbs’s exploits on the field through the tropes of
Arthurian romance and the fable of the Fisher King. Like King Arthur himself,
Hobbs wields a modern-day Excalibur; his sword, however, is a baseball bat named
Wonderboy. His seeming heroic quest is leading a team of Knights to the holy grail
of a pennant, in the process redeeming the Waste Land of the woeful baseball team
and its dispirited fans. Yet the problem with Hobbs is that he, according to Edward
Abramson, “lives within baseball and cannot see beyond it. He desires to be a
baseball hero rather than a mythic, Grail hero” (1993, 14). He seeks only personal
glory and physical satisfaction; he cannot live for anyone other than himself. Unable
to see or move beyond his own desires, Hobbs fails again. At the end of the novel,
after striking out despite his attempt to get a hit and thereby go against his crooked
bargain, he thinks: “I never did learn anything out of my past life, now I have to
suffer again” (218).
Published early in the decade after World War II, The Natural ultimately asks
searing questions about America’s values now that the United States is a global
superpower. By conflating the classic myths of Arthurian legend with the American
myths of success and self-creation, Malamud equates the health of the King (base-
ball) with the health of the land (America). But America, like the baseball depicted
here, is the site of a fallen dream. Hobbs’s dishonest dealings clearly allude to the
so-called Black Sox scandal in 1919, when it was revealed that players on the
Chicago White Sox team had taken payoffs from gamblers to lose World Series
games. When a kid says to Hobbs, “Say it ain’t true, Roy,” (218) Malamud echoes
what a boy, as legend would have it, said to “Shoeless” Joe Jackson of 1919 White
Sox infamy: “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” The myth of baseball-America is thus belied by
actuality as ideals are warped by personal ambition.
A year after The Natural appeared, Mark Harris published the first book in his
tetralogy of baseball novels, The Southpaw (1953). Narrated and supposedly
written by pitcher Henry “Author” Wiggen, these novels ultimately trace the career
of their protagonist from fabulous rookie season to reluctant retirement. More than
one contemporary review of The Southpaw praised Harris for creating a comic
novel that was nonetheless “serious.” Bang the Drum Slowly, which was made into
a television movie in 1956 and into a feature film in 1973, received even more
acclaim. The third novel in the series, A Ticket for a Seamstitch (1957) is widely
considered to be the least successful work, in part because the narrative focuses less
on Wiggen and more on catcher Piney Woods and his most devoted fan, the
“seamstitch” or seamstress of the title. The final novel in the tetralogy, It Looked
Like for Ever (1979), also received tepid reviews. One notable exception to this
reception was the admiration offered by poet and baseball fan Donald Hall in The
New York Times Book Review.
As a number of critics have noted, Harris’s Henry Wiggen tetralogy borrows
heavily from Ring Lardner’s vernacular presentation of the common baseball player.
That common player, however, also often seems to be very much a common man in
these novels, confronting the commonplace problem of aging and dying with wit
and insight. Fittingly, in The Southpaw Wiggen helps the New York Mammoths win
a World Series, understandably concluding—with the arrogance of both youth and
talent—that he belongs among the elite of professional sports. After giving the
crowd an obscene gesture “the old sign—1 finger up,” Wiggen defends himself: “I
guess all I was saying was they could go their way and I would go mine, and some
 SPORTS LITERATURE 945

folks is born to play ball and the rest is born to watch, some folks born to clap and
shriek and holler and some folks born to do the doing” (346).
From the élan and vigor of youth Harris turns to the subject of death in Bang the
Drum Slowly. William J. Schafer identifies the central appeal of the book by noting
that the novel “turns, like Housman’s ‘To an Athlete Dying Young,’ around the pity
and mystery of the unconscious young struck down untimely” (32). The dying
athlete here is Bruce Pearson, a reliable but marginally talented catcher who has
Hodgkin’s disease. Although he cannot finish the season, Pearson inspires his team
to a World Series win, but once dead he is quickly forgotten by his teammates who
do not attend his funeral. One player’s death does not stop baseball anymore than
one person’s death stops life. Yet Harris memorializes Pearson by tenderly describ-
ing his last moment on a baseball field, the place where he was most alive: “I started
off towards the dugout, maybe as far as the baseline, thinking [Pearson] was
following, and then I seen that he was not. I seen him standing looking for
somebody to throw to, the last pitch he ever caught, and I went back for him, and
Mike and Red were there when I got there, and Mike said, ‘It is over son,’ and he
said ‘Sure’ and trotted on in” (237–238).
The end of baseball for Henry Wiggen comes in It Looked Like for Ever, a comic
examination of an underrepresented figure in sports literature: the aging athlete. In
this novel, Wiggen finds himself suddenly released from the New York Mammoths,
and his almost desperate attempts to catch on with another team as a 39-year-old
relief pitcher take him from Japan to California to the broadcast booth. Appropri-
ately enough, Wiggen does play again, though his onerously revived career ends
suddenly when he is struck by a batted ball. Accepting the inevitable, Wiggen
announces “to 1 and all that I was now finally retired from baseball for ever, Nature
was Nature, I talked back to Nature once too often and Nature slammed the door”
(274). From first appearance as a confident rookie with nothing but seeming glory
ahead of him, Wiggen exits baseball as a man made wiser by stark lessons both on
and off the field.
In one sense, aging is also the subject of John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy, which
chronicles the life, but not necessarily the maturation, of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom,
an ex-high school basketball star. Published roughly a decade apart, these novels—
Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at
Rest (1990)—are set mostly in the fictional Pennsylvania town of Brewer, where
Angstrom’s life unfolds in abundant, realistic detail. Although certain critics have
found Updike’s realism tiresome, accusing him of writing bloated books, the Rabbit
novels have also received significant critical praise, with Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit
at Rest both winning numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for each.
Indeed, considered everything from a documentary realist to a social satirist to a
theological, existential, and Christian writer, Updike tends to evoke intense, often
contradictory reactions in readers and critics who rarely receive him lukewarmly,
offering either strong condemnation or unqualified admiration. Although Updike
published the four novels under single cover in a book titled Rabbit Angstrom
(1995), at that time calling the work a “mega-novel” (viii), the Rabbit saga does not
end with Rabbit at Rest. In 2000 Updike published a novella titled “Rabbit
Remembered” in Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel in which Rabbit’s
illegitimate daughter again appears.
In all of the Rabbit portrayals, Updike is careful to depict Harry Angstrom’s
judgments and actions without authorial criticism, and he staunchly refuses to
946 SPORTS LITERATURE

resolve the tensions in the character’s psyche (Boswell passim). These novels also
attempt to capture the zeitgeist of post–World War II America, principally the four
distinctive decades from 1950–1990. Ultimately the tetralogy presents an America
in moral and spiritual disarray as the attractions of money, drugs, and sex become
ever more alluring; yet the country’s energetic and hopeful nature remains constant.
In these novels, Updike’s view of sports is often more melancholic than celebratory,
because sports, as sex and drugs, offer only the briefest kind of transcendence. If, as
Daniel Morrissey writes, “Updike’s description of Harry Angstrom’s soaring golf
drive in Rabbit, Run was an ecstatic explanation of human union with God” (187),
then in these novels much of life is remembering such moments rather than living in
them, though Rabbit’s frequent sexual encounters represent his attempt to experi-
ence both the physical and spiritual fulfillment he used to find regularly in sports.
Essentially a seeker, Rabbit is frequently dissatisfied and restless. In Rabbit, Run, for
example, Angstrom runs away from his wife and an unsatisfactory suburban life.
Twenty-six years old and a gadget salesman, he has a difficult time coming to terms
with the fact that he is no longer the great sports star. When he is not physically
running away from adult responsibilities, he is doing so mentally, by returning to
those moments when he performed heroic feats on the basketball court—those
times when he was blissfully in sync with himself. The death of his daughter only
fuels his desire to run, to stay in flight as it were, like that tremendous golf shot.
By the time of Rabbit Redux, however, Angstrom initially seems more resigned
to his life. Set in the summer of 1969 with the Apollo moon landing in the back-
ground, this novel sees 36-year-old Rabbit working in a print shop at a linotype
machine that is soon to be obsolete. At first basketball is used to express Henry
Angstrom’s sense of pointless change, as he recognizes how different the current
game is from the one he played in the late 1940s. Moreover, when his son, Nelson,
tells him, “sports are square now. Nobody does it” (18), Angstrom replies, “Well,
what isn’t square now? Besides pill-popping and draft-dodging. And letting your
hair grow down into your eyes” (18–19). Still, Angstrom believes in the power of
sports. He wonders: “How can he get the kid [Nelson] interested in sports? If he’s
too short for basketball, then baseball. Anything, just to put something there, some
bliss, to live on later for a while. If he goes empty now he won’t last at all, because
we get emptier” (25).
Slowly, however, moral certainty seeps away from Rabbit. When his wife leaves
him for another man, he begins an affair with an 18-year-old girl who has run away
from her rich Connecticut family, and later he harbors a black fugitive and drug
dealer. The novel presents drug use, infidelity, and racism graphically and without
denunciation. Although Rabbit often perceives himself to be in competition with
others in his real life, as he was on the basketball court, his basketball training
appears more subtly in the novel. As Rabbit accedes to drug use and increasing
sexual promiscuity, it becomes clear that his life mirrors that of the ex-basketball
player in that he fits himself—morally, intellectually, and spiritually—with those
around him, playing with others in society the way he would play with teammates
on the court, not resisting but conforming to the action in a fluid, almost unthink-
ing manner.
This pattern of attempted conformity continues in the final two novels. Rabbit is
Rich is set in 1979, with gas shortages and the Iranian hostage crisis as backdrop.
Now wealthy and operating his dead father-in-law’s Toyota dealership, Rabbit tries
to conform to middle age. As critic Marshall Boswell notes, Angstrom is at first
 SPORTS LITERATURE 947

“content and satisfied,” convinced that “his past” is “now solidly behind him” even
to the extent that no one calls him Rabbit, using Harry instead (132). The economic
malaise in which the country is mired, however, and the fact that Nelson is clearly
repeating his father’s actions with infidelity and drug use suggest contemporary
issues and moral positions that cannot be neatly resolved. Rabbit is still restless, a
seeker after ultimate meaning, which he will never find. Boswell furthermore
identifies a thematic link with Rabbit, Run in the way Rabbit is Rich “links sexual
redemption with athletic prowess” (183). After a particularly vivid sexual
encounter, Rabbit finds his golf game much improved, and Boswell concludes: “[A]
good game of golf in Updike is a sure sign of grace” (184).
In the final novel of the tetralogy, Rabbit at Rest, Harry Angstrom dies, a fate that
is suggested not only by the novel’s title but also in its first sentence. Set in 1989, the
novel finds Harry Angstrom retired in Florida, where overweight and out of shape,
he suffers heart attacks and eventually expires. Here, Updike provides both a
detailed description of America in the 1980s and a continuation of the searching
that has characterized Rabbit’s life. That life features an affair between Rabbit and
his daughter-in-law and Nelson’s plight as a cocaine addict and embezzler. Fittingly
enough, Rabbit’s demise is preceded by a pick-up basketball game between him and
a teenaged African American boy that momentarily has him feeling “loose and
deeply free” (504). Though he wins the game, on old-fashioned shots that the youth
derides and grudgingly admires, Rabbit ends up “unconscious [on] the dirt” court
(506). Scared, the youth runs away; someone eventually dials 911, and Rabbit is
soon dead, the word “Enough” appearing as his final thought (512). Encapsulating
Rabbit’s life, this last game supplies nothing more lasting than a mere moment of
triumph. As Jack B. Moore has argued, however, Harry Rabbit Angstrom’s early
success as a basketball player defines his subsequent life, principally in the way he
measures the success of that life but also in the ways he lives it: as he might in a
basketball game, Rabbit “improvises his life, often badly, but with many thrills and
great activity” (188).
The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968) is Robert
Coover’s “metacommentary on both myth and history through baseball”
(Messenger 1990, 359). The novel concerns a lonely middle-aged man who creates
a fantasy baseball game and, with his accountant’s penchant for record keeping, a
corresponding meticulous history of the league. Waugh rolls dice and the results
correspond with events on a series of complicated charts. When Damon Rutherford,
the star pitcher in the league—and Waugh’s favorite player—falls victim to an
unfortunate roll of the dice, Waugh ignores the rules he so carefully created in order
to ensure that Jock Casey, Rutherford’s killer, is destroyed. The events of The
Universal Baseball Association become so much more compelling—and far more
real—for Waugh than his actual life that, in the concluding chapter, this alternative
world takes over. Waugh himself disappears from the narrative, and the reader is left
only with the perspective of his players (his fictional characters), who partake in a
quasi-religious commemoration of the two great Association players who were
killed a hundred seasons earlier. With the creator out of the picture and his creations
assuming a full and seemingly autonomous life of their own, it is easy to agree with
Roy Caldwell’s contention that the subject of the novel “is not the playing of
baseball but the making of fiction” (1987, 162).
Equally challenging is Don DeLillo’s postmodern masterpiece End Zone (1972).
The ostensible subject is collegiate football, but the real subject is language
948 SPORTS LITERATURE

itself—the way it creates reality and gives us a comforting order to our lives. Unlike
many of the players who enjoy the order and simplicity of playing for the Logos
College Screaming Eagles, Gary Harkness (the protagonist) can see the game—and
other games, for that matter—for what it is worth. At the beginning of a chapter
that recounts the funeral of an assistant coach, Harkness states: “Most lives are
guided by clichés. They have a soothing effect on the mind and they express the kind
of widely expressed sentiment that, when peeled back, is seen to be a denial of
silence” (69). There is much in the novel to engage the typical sports fan: the
autocratic coach; the mercurial star running back; the disaffected troublemaker; the
big game against the rival team. However, DeLillo is less interested in presenting
these conventions than he is in exploiting them for the purpose of exploring how
language often makes pleasant the world we live in and denies the silent, terrifying
end zone that is our true reality. Gary Storoff argues that Harkness “searches for a
game that will provide his life with significance” (1985, 235). College does not
provide the answer, nor do football or the Air Force. They are all games, and
“games are at best evasions, unconscious methods of escaping the void” (1985,
244)—the real end zone beyond the boundaries of language itself.
Under the pseudonym of Cleo Birdwell, DeLillo cowrote (with Sue Buck)
Amazons (1980), a satirical novel, narrated by the first female hockey player, that
has intriguing things to say about gender relations. The novel has garnered little
scholarly attention, but Philip Nel views the work as important in its status as a
starting point for DeLillo’s exploration of the theme of gender (2001, 416).
Although Birdwell “does little to challenge the structures that maintain an imbal-
ance of power between men and women” (419), she does resist the attempts of
reporters and advertisers to objectify her (422). In the end, however, despite the fact
that Birdwell is telling her own story, “the point of view feels masculine; only in
isolated moments does the book veer toward feminist critique” (419).
DeLillo’s magnum opus, Underworld (1997), is not a sports novel per se.
However, an iconic sporting event—Bobby Thomson’s famous home run against the
Dodgers claiming the pennant for the 1951 Giants—is absolutely central to the
book. The Prologue, separately published as “Pafko at the Wall” (1992), links this
moment in baseball history with the testing of a Russian nuclear bomb, which
occurred on the very same day. The story becomes “a tale of two blasts.” The bomb
test signals the beginning of the Cold War, but for the frenzied crowd in the stadium,
that news is “overwhelmed by baseball legend” (Duvall 2002, 33) and thus
“illustrates the dangerous tendency of baseball to aestheticize and erase interna-
tional politics” (2002, 35), or at least bury it, metaphorically speaking, underground.
Although the balance of the novel explores other plot lines, the baseball playoff
game continues to resonate. In one of the narrative threads, Nick Shay, a waste
management specialist, and some of his colleagues attend a very different Dodgers-
Giants game, a contest between old rivals that has a striking parallel in international
politics. As John Duvall argues, “[b]oth the United States-Russia and the Dodgers-
Giants oppositions mean something very different in 1992 than in 1951. Old
loyalties and beliefs are rendered archaic. Just as the Dodgers and the Giants left
New York to tap into the lucrative West Coast market, so too have market forces
rewritten the relationship between America and Russia” (2002, 30). As the
colleagues converse, we learn that Nick is supposedly in possession of Thomson’s
home run ball, the one a young African American boy scrambles to retrieve in the
Prologue. Nick has successfully traced ownership of the ball almost all the way back
 SPORTS LITERATURE 949

to the end of that game. Despite his best efforts, however, there is a hole in the
narrative which he is left to fill with his own belief that this is an authentic object
of the past—that, in turn, the past he remembers is itself authentic. Nick’s willing-
ness to pay a lot of money for a ball that may or may not be the genuine article
suggests the desperate nature of his “quest of what he takes to be a lost
authenticity—a sense of himself as someone who was at one time whole and
complete and a part of a community” (Duvall 2002, 26). On both the national and
personal level, then, the novel is about—at least in part—the way we attempt to
connect to our always unknowable past.
Philip Roth’s fiction uses sports as a way of critiquing many of our most precious
national myths. Unlike Malamud, who employed age-old myths to lend gravitas to
the story of a baseball player, Roth in The Great American Novel (1973) ruthlessly
and humorously debunks the whole myth-making process, creating not just an
“anti-baseball novel” (Klinkowitz 1993, 39), but an antimythological one. The
novel details the personalities and outrageous events of the 1943 season of the
Rupert Mundys, a hapless baseball team from the long forgotten Patriot League.
This skewed history is framed by the prolix octogenarian Word Smith, a half senile
sportswriter confined to a nursing home who thinks that his story of the league,
which has been unceremoniously expunged from the annals of sports history, may
well be the great American novel. The league is filled with colorful characters,
including Frank Mazuma, a Bill Veeck-like owner who introduces all kinds of enter-
taining gimmicks into the game; Bob Yamm and O.K. Ockatur, a midget pitcher and
batter who face off against each other; Gil Gemesh, the tremendously talented but
hotheaded pitcher who is banned from baseball for throwing at an umpire; and Bud
Parusha, a one-armed player who plucks the ball from his glove with his mouth.
There are outrageous events as well, including a Mundys contest against the inmates
of an insane asylum; a Black Sox-like scandal, this one, however, involving a
disgruntled Mundy who helps his team to an unlikely win streak with the aid of
Jewish Wheaties; and a McCarthyesque inquisition on the presence of Communists
in the Patriot League. These outrageous players and situations undercut the sancti-
monious traditionalism of characters such as General Oakhart, the president of the
league; Glorious Mundy, the original owner of the Mundys and a man for whom
baseball was nothing less than a “national religion” (82); and Mister Fairsmith, who
“attempted to instruct them [his players] in the Larger Meaning” of the game (136).
Although some critics praise the audacity and comic ingeniousness of The Great
American Novel, many also view the book as having serious structural flaws as well
as a lack of thematic coherence. If the book does not always succeed, it does manage
to get across “Roth’s purpose,” which is “to demythologize mythology” (Siegel
1976, 181). At the end of the novel, when the octogenarian Word Smith, out of
publishing options in the United States, sends his book off to Chairman Mao for
consideration, he compares himself to the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
On the surface, the comparison is ludicrous; however, when Word Smith makes the
point that, like the Russian writer, he “refuses to accept lies for truth and myth for
reality” (380), he is more or less getting at Roth’s “Larger Meaning” behind all the
humor and the games.
More recently, Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral (1997) chroni-
cles the life of Seymour Levov (nicknamed The Swede because of his blond hair and
blue eyes), who, during World War II, was a high school football, basketball, and
baseball star. Some years younger, Nathan Zuckerman (a recurring narrator in
950 SPORTS LITERATURE

Roth’s novels) is in awe of this paragon of athletic ability. “[T]hrough the Swede,
the neighborhood entered into a fantasy about itself and about the world, the
fantasy of sports fans everywhere: almost like Gentiles (as they imagined Gentiles),
our families could forget the way things actually work and make an athletic
performance the repository of all their hopes” (3–4). Often over at the Levov’s
house to play with Seymour’s younger brother, the narrator comes to discover a
number of John Tunis novels on the athlete’s bookshelf. Of particular interest is
Tunis’s The Kid from Tompkinsville (1940), a novel about a baseball player in
which “each triumph” of the main character “is rewarded with a punishing
disappointment or a crushing incident” (8) in what the narrator calls “the boys’
Book of Job” (9). In the balance of the novel, Zuckerman goes on to imagine
Levov’s life and, in the process, dismantles the myth of the American dream in
heart-rending fashion.
Compared to The Great American Novel, sports in American Pastoral seem to
play a relatively minor role; however, Levov’s past athletic life is essential for our
understanding of his character. As an ex-athlete, as a man who enters smoothly into
the WASP world by marrying an Irish girl, a former Miss New Jersey, and as a first-
generation American who goes into his father’s glove manufacturing business
(which, significantly, takes a successful turn when Levov’s renown as an athlete
helps secure an important client), Levov appears to be living the American dream in
all of its glory, having “accumulated the visible signs of an American identity:
success in business, sports, and home life” (Stanley 2005, 8). Derek Parker Royal
goes so far as to say that “the Swede, as a model of athletic prowess . . . is a stand-in
for America itself” (2005, 201).
Because Levov had flown (in the words of the narrator) “the flight of the immi-
grant rocket, the upward, unbroken immigrant trajectory,” he expected that his
daughter Merry would be “the highest flier of them all, the fourth-generation child
for whom America was to be heaven itself” (122). Instead, Merry, who comes of age
during the Vietnam War, grows disgusted by her parents’ cozy and isolated upper-
class existence and turns into a political radical who blows up the small town’s post
office, killing several people in the process. In a later phone conversation, his
brother Jerry brings up Levov’s sporting past in order to criticize him for the kind
of banal, unreflective life he has led. He suggests at first that Levov views his situa-
tion as a game, but then immediately discards that notion. “For the typical male
activity you’re the man of action, but this isn’t the typical male activity” (280).
Following out the metaphor, Merry’s behavior is out of bounds for Levov—so far
out of the field of play he has no idea how to respond. Jerry continues with his
criticism, saying that Levov “[c]an only see [him]self playing ball and making gloves
and marrying Miss America. . . . And you thought all that façade was going to come
without a cost” (280). If The Kid from Tompkinsville was a Book of Job for young
boys, then Levov’s life, seemingly the epitome of the American dream, is that Bible
story in all its disturbing maturity. According to Zuckerman’s imaginings, Levov
cannot solve his problem; he can only suffer and endure. Unlike The Great
American Novel, which displays an absurdly comic vision, American Pastoral is the
tragedy of a man who believes that one can live a dream. Despite differences in tone,
each novel is similar in its use of sports to help debunk potent American myths.
Although seriously understudied, Jenifer Levin is, without question, the most sig-
nificant female voice in sports literature. Her Water Dancer (1982) tells the story of
Dorey Thomas, a young marathon swimmer who, seeking to overcome a failure in
 SPORTS LITERATURE 951

her past, wants to swim the brutal San Antonio Strait off the coast of Washington
State. To help her achieve this goal, she approaches Sarge Olssen, a coach whose
own son Matt died making the attempt to cross this body of water. The quest to
accomplish the goal becomes, in the process, a quest for identity.
Michael Oriard hails this novel as “a major breakthrough in the genre of sports
fiction” because “it offers a feminist alternative to the masculine sports myth” that
relegates women to second-class status, making them “adjuncts to the [sports]
hero’s achievements” or even “major obstacles” (1987, 9–10). Unlike her tradi-
tional, domesticated mother Carol, who defines herself almost exclusively in terms
of her relationship to men, Dorey is quietly but fiercely independent. Her swim
across the San Antonio Strait is not a competition in the traditional sense. Even in
earlier races, her philosophy has been to focus not on the people who are swimming
a given race with her but on the water itself. By novel’s end, the mysterious Dorey
achieves her goal and, in the process, discovers—or more accurately—develops into
her own, natural self. What is more, the act of swimming becomes a kind of self-
disclosure. At last, Ilana (Sarge’s wife and Dorey’s mother-lover) is able to know this
water dancer. “Ilana,” she calls out near the end of the swim. “Do you know me
now?” to which Ilana responds: “Yes . . . I am proud” (1982, 363). As Sharon
Carson and Brooke Horvath argue, the novel

tells us that the skills of endurance, flexibility, strength, and style—all of which Dorey
possesses in spades—form the magic pattern of the dancer in water and in life. They
are the same skills employed by individuals who are fortunate enough to celebrate
themselves for who they are and who flourish in spite of cultural definitions of who
they should be. (1991, 46–47)

In two later novels, Snow (1983) and Sea of Light (1993), Levin continues her
exploration of sports, gender, and the quest for identity. Snow, through the
character of bold, adventurous outdoorswoman named Raina Scott, examines the
themes of Water Dancer: “woman’s endurance, woman’s power, woman’s desire”
(Messenger 1990, 183). Sea of Light is told from a variety of perspectives but
centers around Babe Delgado, a collegiate swimmer, named by her mother after
Babe Didrikson, the phenomenal female athlete of the 1930s and 1940s. After
recovering from a plane crash that kills nearly her entire team, Babe enrolls at a
smaller school to begin her comeback as an athlete and as a human being.
Coached by Bren Allen, who experiences her own emotional struggles due to the
untimely death of a lover, and encouraged by the love of a much less talented
teammate named Ellie, Babe not only wins a swim meet at novel’s end but, much
more importantly, recovers from the trauma of the plane crash and begins to
reestablish significant relationships with others. Babe’s success in the pool, like
Dorey’s in the San Antonio Strait, is the product of much physical and emotional
suffering and sacrifice. Babe’s victory does not give her college a championship or
help get her back to a Division 1 school; instead, the win symbolizes her success-
ful attempt at self-recovery.
At its best, sports literature has always been about much more than the games,
athletes, and spectators themselves. Whether assuming the form of a novel, short
story, poem, drama, or essay, such literature continues to compel our attention for
the simple reason that sports have always revealed deep and enduring truths about
the American psyche.
952 SPORTS LITERATURE

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———. It Looked Like for Ever. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979.
———. 1953. The Southpaw. Reprint, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.
Haskins, Don, and Dan Wetzel. Glory Road: My Story of the 1966 NCAA Basketball Cham-
pionship and How One Team Triumphed Against the Odds. New York: Hyperion,
2005.
Higgs, Robert J. Laurel and Thorn: The Athlete in American Literature. Lexington, KY:
University of Kentucky Press, 1981.
Hoeffner, Karol Ann. All You’ve Got. New York: Simon Pulse, 2006.
Horvath, Brooke, and Tom Wiles, eds. Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems.
Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002.
Johnson, Don. The Sporting Muse: A Critical Study of Poetry about Athletes and Athletics.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004.
Klinkowitz, Jerry. “Philip Roth’s Anti-Baseball Novel.” Western Humanities Review 47.1
(1993): 30–40.
Levin, Jenifer. Water Dancer. New York: Plume, 1982.
McGimpsey, David. Imagining Baseball: America’s Pastime and Popular Culture. Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 2000.
Mailer, Norman. “Ego.” In The Best American Sports Writing of the Century. David Hal-
berstam, ed. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1999, 713–737.
Malamud, Bernard. 1952. The Natural. Reprint, New York: Avon Books, 1980.
Messenger, Christian K. Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction: Hawthorne to
Faulkner. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.
———. Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary Fiction. New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1990.
 SPORTS LITERATURE 953

Moore, Jack B. “Sports, Basketball, and Fortunate Failure in the Rabbit Tetralogy.” In Rabbit
Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike’s Rabbit Novels. Lawrence R. Broer, ed.
Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1998, 170–188.
Morris, Timothy. Making the Team: The Cultural Work of Baseball Fiction. Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press, 1997.
Morrissey, Daniel. “Reveiw of A Month of Sundays by John Updike.” Commonweal, 6 June
1975: 187–188.
Nel, Philip. “Amazons in the Underworld: Gender, the Body, and Power in the Novels of Don
DeLillo.” Studies in Contemporary Fiction 42.4 (2001): 416–436.
Oates, Joyce Carol. 1987. On Boxing. Reprint, Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1994.
Oriard, Michael. Dreaming of Heroes: American Sports Fiction, 1868–1980. Chicago, IL:
Nelson-Hall, 1982.
———. Sporting with the Gods: The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Culture.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
———. “From Jane Allen to Water Dancer: A Brief History of the Feminist(?) Sports Novel.”
Modern Fiction Studies. 33.1 (1987): 9–20.
Orodenker, Richard. The Writers’ Game: Baseball Writing in America. New York: Twayne, 1996.
Revoyr, Nina. The Necessary Hunger. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.
Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
———. The Great American Novel. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973.
———. “My Baseball Years.” In Reading Myself and Others. New York: Farrar, 1975.
Royal, Derek Parker. “Pastoral Dreams and National Identity in American Pastoral and I
Married a Communist.” In Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author.
Derek Parker Royal, ed. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005, 185–207.
Sandoz, Joli, and Joby Winans, eds. Whatever It Takes: Women on Women’s Sport. New
York: Farrar, 1999.
Schafer, William J. “Mark Harris: Versions of (American) Pastoral.” Critique: Studies in
Modern Fiction 19.1 (1977): 28–48.
Siegel, Ben. “The Myths of Summer: Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel.” Contempo-
rary Literature 17.2 (1976): 171–190.
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Culture: The Humanistic Dimensions. Wiley Lee Umphlett, ed. Lewisburg, PA: Buck-
nell University Press, 1985, 235–245.
Umphlett, Wiley Lee. The Achievement of American Sport Literature: A Critical Appraisal.
Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991.
Updike, John. Introduction to Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
———. Rabbit at Rest. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.
———. Rabbit Redux. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971.
Westbrook, Deeanne. Ground Rules: Baseball and Myth. Champaign, IL: University of
Illinois Press, 1996.
Wideman, John Edgar. 2001. Hoop Roots. Reprint, New York: Mariner, 2003.

Further Reading
Bandy, Susan J., and Anne S. Darden. Crossing Boundaries: An International Anthology of
Women’s Experiences in Sport. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1999; Cocchiarale,
Michael, and Scott D. Emmert, eds. Upon Further Review: Sports in American Literature.
Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004; Darden, Ann. “Outsiders: Women in Sports and Literature.”
Aethlon 15.1 (1997): 1–10; Guttmann, Allen. A Whole New Ball Game: An Interpretation
of American Sports. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988; Hye, Allen
E. The Great God Baseball. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2004; Nelson, Mariah
Burton. The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football: Sexism and the American
Culture of Sports. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994; Oriard, Michael. King Football: Sport
954 SPY FICTION

and Spectacle in the Golden Age of Radio, Newsreels, Movies and Magazines, The Weekly
and The Daily Press. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000; Rivers,
Jacob F. Cultural Values in the Southern Sporting Narrative. Columbia, SC: University of
South Carolina Press, 2002; Womack, Mari. Sport as Symbol: Images of the Athlete in Art,
Literature and Song. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003.
MICHAEL COCCHIARALE AND SCOTT D. EMMERT
SPY FICTION
Definition. Most simply defined, spy literature features protagonists who are con-
nected to espionage in some primary way. The protagonists can be either amateur
spies or professional operatives and commonly use covert methods to thwart a
nation, group, or individual’s enemies. Spy stories are most often set against the
backdrop of an international political conflict, revolve around secret conspiracies
with the potential to change the fate of nations, and occur in environments where
nothing is what it seems and everything is potentially dangerous.
The genre shares many characteristics with the British schoolboy adventure story,
detective fiction, war prophecy fiction, and the thriller in general. For instance,
schoolboy adventure stories flourished in their classic form from the 1850s to the
1920s and celebrated English public schools (which Americans call private schools)
as noble institutions that built the character of young men for the good of the
nation. Spy authors Erskine Childers, Sapper, John Buchan, Francis Beeding, Graham
Greene, John le Carré, and Ian Fleming all draw from this genre’s conventions,
including its emphasis on the protagonist’s maturation, the use of upper-class sports-
men as heroes, the call to action being depicted as thrilling, as well as the impor-
tance of playing any game with honor and learning valuable lessons from it, such as
hard work, duty, sportsmanship, and masculinity.
Early spy works—including those by William LeQueux, E. Phillips Oppenheim,
and Erskine Childers—overlap with war prophecy books, which use fiction in order
to warn a country of an impending attack and change its military policies. Childers’s
The Riddle of the Sands (1903) is a classic example of this type of work; it warns
of the dangers of a German invasion of Britain across the North Sea and eventually
encouraged the British government to develop defensive naval stations on strategic
parts of the kingdom’s coastline.
Plots of spy novels also differ from crime fiction in that they revolve more heavily
around torture, capture, invisibility, secret communications, elaborate disguises,
complicated alibis, narrow escapes, and dead drops, and the genre’s archetypes
include the secret exercise of power, often without traditional ethical constraints,
and a profound sense of belonging to an organization that may or may not lead the
hero to question the price of loyalty.

HIGH CLASS SPIES

Spy fiction also shares many characteristics with crime fiction; both genres often follow a
narrative structure where, at the start of the story, a law is violated and the state finds out
about it. The story’s hero then attempts to discover who is responsible through the use of
informants and struggles with the enemy before defeating him or her and restoring order.
However, spy protagonists are usually depicted as more cerebral and of a higher class than
police detectives, and they are more likely to be motivated by ethical or political ideals rather
than money.
 SPY FICTION 955

In general, two strains of spy stories exist: one relies on heroic fantasy whereas
the other relies on realism and moral relativism. Ian Fleming, the creator of James
Bond, is probably best associated with the first strain because his stories revolve
around exotic locales, sexual escapades, conspicuous consumerism, and foreign and
eccentric criminals whose crimes have massive political consequences. His hero,
007, enjoys being called to a mission, and Fleming depicts spying as an exciting
endeavor vital to national security. Popular authors operating in the genre’s more
realistic vein include John le Carré, Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, and Frederick
Forsyth. In these author’s novels, spying is more likely to be depicted as an unglam-
orous activity involving few elements of the action thriller, and the works tend to be
more cynical regarding the role of intelligence agencies in the modern world.
History. Although the spy genre is most closely aligned with British storytelling,
James Fennimore Cooper’s The Spy is considered to be the genre’s first novel written
in English. Published in 1821, the novel is set during the American Revolution and
focuses on Harvey Birch, a man suspected of spying for the British but who is actu-
ally working for George Washington. The novel spawned a host of dime novel
imitations soon after its release, but most scholars do not consider the genre to have
truly developed until the turn of the twentieth century.
Traditionally, Erkine Childers’s Riddle of the Sands (1903) and John Buchan’s
The 39 Steps (1915) are considered two of the first great spy novels. Both works
feature amateur spies who are gentleman patriots accidentally swept up in an
espionage adventure, and both romanticize the adventure of espionage, depicting it
as a thrilling game that breaks the boring routine of life. Perhaps due to the success
of these two novels, early spy novelists continued to romanticize espionage as expe-
rienced by amateurs until the debut of W. Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden: Or the
British Agent (1927). This novel is important to the development of the genre
because it rejected the heroic trappings of prewar spy fiction and replaced the
redemptive nature of spying for the man tired of life with an emphasis on
espionage’s dull routine, hypocrisy, and ruthlessness. Maugham’s Ashenden was also
one of the first works to feature the spy bureaucracy, although it was not until the
later part of WWII that the intelligence agency began to figure regularly and promi-
nently in espionage narratives (Hitz 2004, 38–39).
Although early spy novelist William Le Queux blended romance and espionage in
his stories in order to appeal to a female readership, the majority of early spy
authors catered to a male readership and few female authors made their mark in the
genre before the later part of the twentieth century. One notable exception is Helen
MacInnes, a Glasgow-born author, whose first espionage novel, Above Suspicion,
was published in 1941. MacInnes enjoyed a forty-five-year, highly successful career
in which critics praised her for literate, fast-paced, and intricately plotted suspense
novels. Her more famous titles include Assignment in Brittany (1942), Decision at
Delphi (1961), and Ride a Pale Horse (1984), and her work mostly focuses on the
Western struggle against either Nazism or Communism. Like Buchan and Childers,
MacInnes favored amateur spies accidentally swept into danger who nevertheless
accepted their fate and performed their patriotic duty in warding off political and
social threats. Like Le Queux, most of the author’s novels also focus on a love story
in addition to an espionage plot, but they feature more competent and independent
female characters. This last element makes McInnes somewhat unique among early
spy writers, who primarily featured women as secondary characters who must be
956 SPY FICTION

saved by the hero or as characters who wish to participate in male adventures but
ultimately discover they are not up to the challenge.
The arrival of Graham Greene marked another important stage in the spy genre’s
history, as the author was one of the first to explore the psychology of the spy and
the ways that spying challenges one’s ethics and humanity. Even more so than
Maugham, Greene insisted upon showing the anti-heroic side to spying and
redirected the genre toward satire and criticism of intelligence organizations—a
trend that would be furthered by popular spy novelists such as Len Deighton, Eric
Ambler, and John le Carré. The heroes of these authors, for example, are often
burned-out agents disillusioned with their own intelligence agency or are ordinary,
undistinguished people who do not volunteer to fight an enemy but are rather
swept, involuntarily, into a scheme of espionage. These “heroes” often fail to bring
down an enemy operation but feel successful merely because they survived the
episode in which both enemies and allies worked against them.
Frederick Hitz attributes historical factors to the genre’s shift away from roman-
ticized accounts of spying toward more cynical ones in the postwar era. As he
explains in The Great Game, in the WWII era Stalin and Hitler possessed staunch
control over their citizens via police states; thus, in order to stop the spread of total-
itarianism and communism, the United States and Britain employed similar spy
tactics, causing a spy war to ensue between the East and West. During this battle,
Western governments often left their informants in the lurch and plotted assassina-
tion attempts. Whereas later, the U.S. government specifically infiltrated and
monitored domestic anti-Vietnam War groups and some civil rights protestors. They
also developed and tested mind-altering drugs on unsuspecting citizens in hopes of
finding weapons to employ on their enemies. For Hitz, this climate explains the cre-
ation of novels that emphasize the morally suspect aspects of spying and question
the price of loyalty to intelligence organizations. A good example of one such novel
is le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), which explores the ways
in which MI-6 deceives its own agent, Alex Leamas, in order to save a ruthless East
German spy working for the United Kingdom—a move that eventually leads to the
death of Leamas and his lover.
The move toward realism in spy fiction might also be explained by the fact that
many of the genre’s emerging novelists at the time had served in intelligence capac-
ities during the First or Second World War and thus were able to incorporate their
experiences and knowledge of the field into their stories. W. Somerset Maugham, for
instance, worked as an intelligence operative during WWI; Graham Greene was
stationed in Sierra Leone during World War II, where he worked for the British
Foreign Office under Kim Philby (a spy who later defected to the Soviet Union); and
John le Carré served in the British Foreign Service from 1959 to 1964, working first
as Second Secretary in the British Embassy in Bonn and later as Political Consul in
Hamburg.
Ian Fleming, who served in Naval Intelligence throughout World War II, also
drew from his experiences as an intelligence officer in his 007 series, but as Fleming
demonstrates, not all postwar spy novelists took an anti-heroic approach to the
genre, his James Bond novels draw from Buchan’s emphasis on the adventure and
thrill of spying. Fleming’s approach to the spy novel proved just as, if not more,
popular among American and European readers in the early Cold War as more real-
istic novels, especially after John F. Kennedy announced in an interview with Life
magazine that From Russia with Love ranked as one of his top ten favorite books.
 SPY FICTION 957

In fact, at the time of Fleming’s death in August 1964, over 30 million copies of his
Bond books had been sold; two years later, at the height of Bond mania, that
number had doubled to 60 million; and all of Fleming’s novels have since been
turned into motion picture films. Attracted to Fleming’s success, other writers
followed in the author’s footsteps by creating fanciful epics of professional spies and
arch-villains. Among these were Donald Hamilton, who created a hard-boiled
James Bond in his Matt Helm series; Alistair Maclean; Philip McCutchan; John
Gardner; Gavin Lyall; Trevanian; and Howard Hunt, an ex-CIA agent and
Watergate conspirator, who wrote a series of spy stories even more fantastical than
Fleming’s in regards to his heroes, sexy women, villains and international conspira-
cies (Cawelti and Rosenberg 1987, 52).
By the 1970s and 1980s, the spy genre in general turned toward its realistic roots
once again in order to explore the moral complexity of espionage due to the
aftermath of the Vietnam War, the ongoing Cold War, and political scandals such as
Watergate. Characters in these later spy novels often do not know with which side
to align themselves, nor do readers, and the story’s agents come to realize the inept-
ness of their agency and its unwillingness to carry out what the spy thinks is just. As
a result, these novels’ main characters often rebel against their agency and become
vigilantes setting out to settle personal scores. These novels also continue to reflect
a cynicism regarding patriotism and agency loyalty and focus on the mole, the
defector, the double agent, and the traitor within. Most notably, the main villains in
these novels are not the Soviets, the Germans, or the Chinese but, rather, conspiracy-
plotting members of the protagonist’s own intelligence agency. Examples of such
stories include Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File (1968), in which the hero’s own
section chief proves to be a double agent, and Robert Duncan’s Dragons at the Gate
(1976), which features a CIA agent stationed in Japan betrayed and interrogated by
his own agency. Likewise, James Grady’s Six Days of the Condor (1974) centers
around a CIA analyst who leaves one day for lunch only to return and find every-
one in his office murdered. Although the analyst manages to escape the initial raid,
he must remain on the run for the next six days while a renegade group affiliated
with the CIA hunts him down for one of his discoveries.
Trends and Themes. Spy novels have often focused on the possibility of one’s own
colleague being the enemy, but for most of its history, the spy genre has chosen
Germans, Soviets, and Communists for its villains and has rooted itself in the Cold
War conflict. However, the end of WWII and the collapse of the Soviet Union in
1991 left subsequent spy authors without a viable, contemporary villain. Many
critics writing between the end of the Cold War and the events of September 11,
2001, questioned whether the spy genre could survive as a literary form without an
archenemy, especially given the U.S. government’s serious consideration of
abandoning the Central Intelligence Agency after the USSR’s dissolution.
Commenting on the waning popularity of the spy genre, which during the Cold War
ranked as an international top-reading choice, with tens of millions of copies sold
annually, The New York Times critic, Walter Goodman, announced in November 1989
that “The future looks dismal for the trenchcoat set” (Lynds n.d.). Goodman’s assess-
ment, which came the same month that the Berlin Wall crumbled, proved accurate for
the short term, as sales of bestselling thriller authors plummeted and new authors
struggled to find publishing homes. By 1998, two spy fiction icons, Frederick Forsyth
and John le Carré had even declared that it was time to accept the fact that the genre
was no longer interesting to readers and both began publishing in other fields.
958 SPY FICTION

But despite the genre’s waning popularity, publishers continued to release the
works of those authors who had been highly popular during the Cold War, includ-
ing Nelson DeMille, W.E.B. Griffin, and David Morrell. A handful of new authors
were also able to find success in the genre between 1991 and 2000, including Gayle
Lynds, Daniel Silva, Joseph Finder, and Henry Porter, but many of these authors’
works continue to revisit the terrain of WWII, the Cold War, and the Soviets, rather
than focusing on new threats. To cite just two examples, Porter’s The Brandenburg
Gate (2006) is set in East Germany during the waning days of 1989 and tells the
story of a scholar, Dr. Rudi Rosenharte, whose family is being held hostage by the
Stasi until he agrees to take part in a dangerous mission, whereas Finder’s Moscow
Club (1995) explores the connections between the Kremlin and U.S. big business
after the fall of the Iron Curtain and focuses on a CIA Kremlinologist, Charlie
Stone, targeted by both the KGB and the CIA after analyzing a tape provided by a
Russian mole.
As recently as 2004, the genre’s sustainability was again in question, as reviewers
such as Charles McGrath worried that the genre was not keeping up with the
current political tides. Writing in The New York Times, McGrath specifically
remarked: “What’s odd is that most of our thriller writers—the people who in the
past have taught us most of what we know about intelligence gathering and intelli-
gence failure—don’t seem to be interested in the post-9/11 landscape. . . . [T]hey’re
writing instead about corporate espionage and theological cover-ups in the Middle
Ages. To understand what’s going on in the world, . . . we readers now have to turn
to nonfiction” (Lynds n.d.). Despite McGrath’s assertions, however, the spy genre
has tackled the post-9/11 landscape and shows signs of flourishing once more.
According to PW Newsline, the “espionage/thriller” category experienced a 34 per-
cent increase in sales in 2003—a trend recognized in 2004 by Tom Nolan who
remarked in The Wall Street Journal that the form appeared to be thriving once
again (Lynds n.d.).
Part of the spy fiction revival can be attributed to the events of 9/11, which once
again brought issues of intelligence to the forefront of international discussion. As
spy fiction writer Gayle Lynds writes, “After those horrifying attacks, Americans
abruptly shook off their post–Cold War exhaustion and resumed a vigorous interest
in the world at large, searching for information and, ultimately, understanding of
what had happened, why it had happened, and what to do about it.” (Lynds n.d.)
Given that spy fiction is rooted in international politics, conspiracies, secret worlds,
and the possibility of large-scale atrocities, the genre was ripe to tackle the post-9/11
landscape, and in March 2005, Edward Wyatt of The New York Times acknowl-
edged that it was among one of the first fictional forms to do so (Lynds n.d.). But
although spy authors writing since 2000 have begun exploring the fallout of 9/11,
including the broader issues of international terrorism and the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the genre’s writers have also tackled other contemporary issues—most
notably the political, economic, and social crises occurring in Africa and industrial
espionage conducted by multinational companies.
Reception. Since the late 1990s, the spy genre has not only enjoyed a revival in
print but also a resurgence in film and television. Television shows such as La
Femme Nikita (1997–2001), Alias (2001-2006), 24 (2001–2006), The Agency
(2001), and Spooks (MI-5) (2002–) have tackled issues of international terrorism,
defectors, doppelgangers, torture, and the moral complexity of espionage whereas
films have worked to revive older franchises and novels. Two of the most popular
 SPY FICTION 959

spy films, for instance, are The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy, which
are loosely based on two 1980s novels by Robert Ludlum bearing the same title.
Likewise, Tom Cruise has continued to star in the Mission: Impossible franchise,
and the most recent James Bond installment, Casino Royale, debuted in 2006 to
popular acclaim.
The genre has also enjoyed acclaim from the film industry. Steven Spielberg’s
Munich (2005), which focuses on the Mossad’s attempt to avenge the 1972 assassi-
nation of eleven Israeli Olympians, was nominated for five Academy Awards and
two Golden Globes in 2005. Like many recent spy novels, the film calls into
question the moral complexities of espionage, in this case as it relates to government-
sponsored revenge. George Clooney’s Syriana won the actor an Academy Award for
best supporting actor, and the film was also nominated for best original screenplay.
Drawing from recent concerns regarding the role of the United States in the Middle
East and its dependence on oil, Syriana tells the story of corruption and power
related to the oil industry, warns of the peril of backing foreign political leaders for
economic gain, and explores the ways a severe lack of economic opportunities
fosters the spread of terrorism and religious fundamentalism. Also of note is the
2005 release of The Constant Gardner, an adaptation of John le Carré’s 2001 novel
of the same title, starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz. The film and cast both
won and were nominated for several industry awards, including The Academy
Award’s category for Best Supporting Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay, The
BAFTA’s [British Academy of Film and Television Arts] category for Best Film, and
The Golden Globe’s for Best Motion Picture—Drama and Best Director—Motion
Picture.
Interest in espionage has also filtered into other areas of popular culture. In 2002
the International Spy Museum opened its doors in Washington, D.C. It is the first
and only public museum in the United States solely dedicated to espionage and
features the largest collection of international spy-related artifacts ever placed
on public display. The stories of individual spies are told through film, interactives,
and state-of-the-art exhibits, and visitors also learn about basic spy tradecraft and
espionage technological gadgetry. Similar museums exist domestically and
internationally, including Moscow’s KGB Museum, an exhibit within London’s
Imperial War Museum, and the National Security Agency’s National Cryptologic
Museum, but unlike the International Spy Museum, they focus on a specific time
period or event.
In 2007 an espionage theme park, entitled Spyland, was set to open near Valence,
France, and a sister project is under way in Dubai. These theme parks will include
roller coaster and water park rides in an environment that illustrates the historical
actions of secret agents, the role played by different international spy agencies, and
the role spying has played in popular culture. Visitors will be able to access work-
shops that demonstrate ancient and recent spying techniques, including coding,
hidden microphones and cameras, and satellite imagery, and games will be organ-
ized for visitors to play the role of a secret agent, with a mission to fulfill, while
visiting the amusement park.
Selected Authors. Due to the resurgence in the spy genre, several new authors
have entered into print in the last decade, including Daniel Silva, Alex Berenson,
Jenny Siler, Joseph Kanon, Francine Mathews, Robert Cullen, Vince Flynn, Brad
Thor, Brian Haig, and Raelynn Hillhouse. Spy masters Frederick Forsyth and
John le Carré have also returned to the genre, and writers associated with more
960 SPY FICTION

“literary” endeavors have tried their hand at spy and thriller fiction in recent
years.
This last category of authors most notably includes Australian/American author
Janet Turner Hospital and John Updike, best known for his works exploring middle
American suburbia. In 2006 Updike released The Terrorist, a thriller that revolves
around Ahmad, the 18-year-old son of a hippieish American mother and an
Egyptian exchange student, who embraces Islam and is eventually recruited to blow
up the Lincoln Tunnel. Turner Hospital’s Due Preparation for the Plague was
published in 2003 and focuses on the intertwined fates of the survivors and relatives
of those who perished in the 1987 hijacking of Flight 64. In addition to addressing
the effects of terrorism on its victims’ family, the work also addresses contemporary
fears and concerns regarding chemical weapons and the government’s ability to stop
terrorist attacks.
John le Carré’s new contributions to the spy genre exemplify contemporary
authors’ interest in exploring the African terrain, and two of his last three novels
have been set in the continent—The Constant Gardner (2000) and Mission Song
(2006). The first focuses on British diplomat Justin Quayle, who is serving in
Nairobi when his wife Tessa is raped and murdered during a recent and mysterious
visit to Kenya. In his efforts to solve Tessa’s murder, Quayle learns that his wife had
been compiling data to implicate a multinational drug company using Africans as
guinea pigs to test a tuberculosis remedy with fatal side effects. Her report, however,
also implicates the British government in the drug scandal, and as Quayle gets closer
to the truth, he realizes he is treading in his own government’s murky waters. Le
Carré’s more recent novel, Mission Song, is more lighthearted than The Constant
Gardner but nonetheless explores the terrain of Africa, although none of the action
is actually set there. More specifically, the novel’s protagonist, Bruno Salvador, is a
young Congo native whose fluency in English, French, and several African
languages, lands him work with the British Secret Service, which employs him to act
as a translator at a secret meeting between Congolese warlords and a shadowy
syndicate of Western financiers attempting to bring democracy and economic
opportunity to the area. Much like in The Constant Gardener, the villain in Mission
Song is a multinational corporation that adheres to no moral or geographic bound-
aries in its attempt to turn a profit, and le Carré reminds readers in both works that
Africa, much like in colonial times, remains a temptation for outsiders who wish to
both save and plunder the continent.
Like le Carré, spy master Frederick Forsyth has returned to the genre in recent
years. One of his most recent works, Avenger (2003), focuses on vigilante Cal
Dexter’s pursuit of a Serbian warlord named Zoran Zilic, who escaped Europe with
a fortune but not before killing an American aid worker, whose billionaire grandfa-
ther now wishes to have Zilic brought to justice. However, this task is complicated
by the fact that Zilic is protected in a South American jungle compound by an FBI
agent who wishes to use the warlord in order to kill Osama bin Laden, and, in part,
the novel, which takes place within weeks of 9/11 and ends on September 10, 2001,
explores the moral quagmire of dealing with criminals in order to capture larger
ones. Forsyth also tackles issues surrounding the attacks of 9/11 in his latest book
The Afghan (2006), which begins when a plan to carry out a catastrophic attack on
the West is discovered on the computer of a senior al-Qaeda member. In order to
combat the further threat of terrorism, the American and British intelligence
community attempt to substitute a British operative for an Afghan Taliban leader
 SPY FICTION 961

being held prisoner at Guantánamo Bay and then arrange his release into Afghan
custody. The hero must maintain his cover under the closest scrutiny, even as the
details of the planned attack are kept beyond his reach.
Like Forsyth, younger spy novelists have also addressed issues surrounding 9/11.
For instance, Alex Berenson’s The Faithful Spy (2006) draws upon The New York
Times reporter’s experience covering the Iraq occupation to tell the fictional story of
John Wells, the only American CIA agent ever to penetrate al-Qaeda. Before the
attacks on 9/11, Wells had been building his cover in the mountains of Pakistan, but
is now ordered home by an al-Qaeda leader planning more attacks on the United
States. However, the CIA doesn’t know if they can trust Wells any longer, given that
he has become a Muslim since living in Pakistan and now finds the United States
decadent and shallow, and thus the story grapples with Muslim-American relations
in the post 9/11 world, in addition to the likelihood of another al-Qaeda attack on
U.S. soil.
Of course, not all spy novelists have abandoned the historical conflicts of the Cold
War and the Second World War. Daniel Silva is perhaps one of the most celebrated
new authors to enter the spy scene, and his works include The Secret Servant (2007),
The Messenger (2006), The Confessor (2003), The English Assassin (2002), The Kill
Artist (2000), and The Unlikely Spy (1996) among others. In general, Silva’s novels
explore past conflicts, but especially WWII, and often trace their effects to the
present day. For instance, Silva’s Unlikely Spy mines the territory of WWII in an
historical thriller that centers around the Allies’ plans to invade Normandy, whereas
The Confessor examines Pope Pius XII’s silence and lack of action during the
Holocaust.
Four-time spy novelist Joseph Kanon has also been successful publishing
historical novels that revisit WWII and the Cold War. His works include Los Alamos
(1997), The Prodigal Spy (1998), The Good German (2001), and Alibi: A Novel
(2005) and adopt a postmodern lens through which to view the ethical dilemmas
proposed by each conflict. For instance, The Good German (which was made into
a film in 2006 starring George Clooney and Cate Blanchett) is set in Berlin just
several months after the end of the Second World War, and Jake Geismar, a
journalist covering the Potsdam Conference, becomes intrigued by the murder of an
American soldier whose body washes ashore near the conference grounds. When the
military is slow to investigate or provide any details of the murder, Geismar is
convinced that a big story looms in the air, but the investigation really serves as
Kanon’s tool to explore the ethical quandaries of German Nazism, the nation’s
collective guilt, and the hard ethical dilemmas of the times. Likewise, Los Alamos,
which won the 1998 Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and The Prodigal Spy
explore the ethical dilemmas experienced by the scientists developing the atomic
bomb and the personal effects felt by a family targeted by McCarthyism, respectively.
Finally, it is important to note that numerous women have begun to experience
success in what was once a heavily male-dominated genre. Most notably, these
authors include Francine Mathews (a former CIA analyst), Raelynn Hillhouse, and
Gayle Lynds (who cowrote several books with Robert Ludlum in addition to her
own novels). These women often create stories that revolve around female protag-
onists, long absent within the genre, while simultaneously addressing some of the
most pressing contemporary issues. For instance, Hillhouse’s Outsourced (2007)
revolves around a manager of a private military corporation named Camille Black,
who is approached by the CIA to track down and eliminate a man accused of
962 SUSPENSE FICTION

selling arms to terrorist cells throughout the Middle East. That man also happens
to be her ex-fiancé, and so the novel explores not only Black’s private, personal
thoughts but also the role intelligence outsourcing is playing in the War on Terror.
Mathews’s Blown (2005) likewise centers on a female protagonist, Caroline
Carmichael, who is about to resign from the CIA when the first reports of a
terrorist attack pour in, and she instantly recognizes the hand of an enemy she’s
battled for years: the 30 April Organization, a neo-Nazi group operating in the
United States. Complicating the story is the fact that Caroline’s husband, Eric, has
infiltrated the terrorist group but has had his cover blown. Arrested in Germany as
a 30 April operative, Eric cannot help Caroline, who must work to save both her
husband and her country.

Bibliography
Berenson, Alex. The Faithful Spy. New York: Random House, 2006.
Finder, Joseph. Moscow Club. New York: Viking, 1991.
Forsyth, Frederick. Avenger. New York: Thomas Dunne, 2003.
———. The Afghan. New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 2006.
Hillhouse, Raelynn. Outsourced. New York: Forge, 2007.
Hitz, Frederick. The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2004.
Hospital, Janette Turner. Due Preparations for the Plague. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003.
Kanon, Joseph. The Good German. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.
———. The Prodigal Spy. New York: Broadway, 1998.
———. Los Alamos. New York: Broadway, 1997.
Le Carré, John. Mission Song. Boston: Little, Brown, 2006.
———. The Constant Gardener. New York: Scribner, 2001.
Lynds, Gayle. “Spy Thrillers Thrive & Surprise.” www.thrillwriters.org. Viewed March 2, 2007.
http://www.thrillerwriters.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=23&
Itemid=61.
Mathews, Francine. Blown. New York: Bantam, 2005.
Porter, Henry. The Brandenburg Gate. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2006.
Silva, Daniel. The Confessor. New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 2003.
———. The Unlikely Spy. New York: Villard, 1996.
Updike, John. The Terrorist. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

Further Reading
Atkins, John. The British Spy Novel: Styles in Treachery. New York: Riverrun Press, 1984;
Bloom, Clive, ed. Spy Thrillers: From Buchan to le Carré. New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1990; Britton, Wesley. Beyond Bond: Spies in Fiction and Film. Westport, Connecticut:
Praeger, 2005; Cawelti, John, and Bruce Rosenberg. The Spy Story. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987; Panek, Leroy. The Special Branch: The British Spy Novel, 1890–1980.
Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1981.
TRICIA JENKINS
SUSPENSE FICTION
Definition. To label a novel as being a work of suspense is to consign it to a vague
place that is hard to define. Readers know suspense when they encounter it, but are
hard pressed to explain what elements define the genre. Comprising such varied
titles as Thomas Harris’s novels about serial killer Hannibal Lecter, Dan Brown’s Da
Vinci Code, and Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley series, the genre encompasses
romantic suspense, medical and legal thrillers, psychological suspense, political
 SUSPENSE FICTION 963

ELEMENTS OF SUSPENSE FICTION

By and large, certain elements of suspense can be identified and appear in the various
subcategories of the genre. Brian Garfield’s advice to aspiring authors in the magazine
Writer’s Digest offers several devices that are common to suspense fiction: danger exists,
whether of the readily identifiable sort or a more vague uneasiness; the time period over
which events unfold is brief; the protagonist is often drawn into the adventure through no
volition of his own; and there is a villain of monumental proportions (Moore n.d.). The
romantic suspense novel adds its own twists with romantic entanglements that prove
dangerous to the heroine, the conspiracy thriller wraps the protagonist up in matters that
are historically or politically significant, and medical thrillers throw in a community ravished
by, or in danger of being ravished by, a terrible disease.

thrillers, and conspiracy thrillers. Suspense fiction focusing on technology and

military exploits can fall into this genre as well.
Each category has its own elements that add to the basic suspense devices to
create distinct genres; however, cross pollination is rife and, as a result, new cate-
gories are born.
The following categories are the most frequently marketed: romantic suspense,
medical thrillers, legal thrillers, psychological suspense, political thrillers, techno
thrillers, and conspiracy thrillers. The spy novel is another genre that uses elements
of suspense.
History. Writers such as Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens could be considered
the grandfathers of the genre, but Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903)
is often cited as the first modern thriller. In true suspense fashion, two young men
accidentally become involved in a German plot to invade England. More aligned
with suspense crime fiction, John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) is about
an innocent man who becomes entangled in a homicide and is pursued by the good
and the bad guys. Robert Ludlum defined the modern thriller with The Bourne
Identity, published in 1980. A man wakes with amnesia and is startled to find that
he has arms and fighting knowledge. His quest is to find his identity while eluding
those who don’t want him to remember.
There are three major elements of suspense fiction: 1) the idea that time is ticking
for the hero and that a resolution must be found quickly, 2) the hero must face grave
danger, even though he often doesn’t know what he has done to put himself into
danger or from whom or what the danger arises, and 3) the hero must rely on his
own instinct and courage to both solve the mystery and to keep himself alive. To
these basic elements are added the subgenre twists of romance, technology, science,
and so on.

Trends and Themes

Romantic Suspense. In 1960 America’s Phyllis Whitney’s Thunder Heights and
Britain’s Victoria Holt’s Mistress of Mellyn ushered in the age of the Gothic
romance. Working with the conventions established by eighteenth-century authors
such as Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto, 1764), Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries
of Udolpho, 1794), and Matthew G. Lewis (The Monk, 1796), these novelists,
along with such luminaries as Barbara Michaels and Mary Stewart, dominated
paperback sales of the modern Gothic from 1969 to 1974.
964 SUSPENSE FICTION

The conventions of the gothic genre have been incorporated into romantic
suspense. A young heroine is removed to an isolated landscape, generally an old
family mansion haunted with ghosts and shadowy crimes. In her isolation she must
rely on one of two men to help her. One is the villain and one is the hero, and it is
usually not clear until the book’s end which is which. There are answers to be found
about old crimes or the heroine’s past, the answers to which place her in danger.
Modern romantic suspense novelists have created heroines with more pluck and
they often solve their own problems. Romance, however, is still important to
the plots.
Phyllis A. Whitney is considered the reigning queen of romantic suspense in a
writing career that began in the 1940s with the publication of mysteries for
teenagers. She has published over 70 novels. She exerts enormous effort to get the
scenic details of her far-flung locations just right, and that exertion has paid off in
over five decades of favorable reviews and millions of fans of her romance novels.
By the 1980s the gothic genre was losing popularity, but the category of roman-
tic suspense was just coming into its own. Whitney’s novels began being marketed
under the new category. The genre under which she is marketed may have changed
names, but the formula of Whitney’s novels didn’t. She adheres to the elements of
gothic/suspense fiction, following in the footsteps of Charlotte Bronte and Daphne
DuMaurier. Although Phyllis A. Whitney has not published a novel since 1997’s
Amethyst Dreams, she is still at her writing desk, working on an autobiography at
the age of 103. Her contributions to the romantic suspense genre have been
widespread and almost unfathomably influential.
Barbara Michaels (who also writes as Elizabeth Peters) has produced dozens of
romantic suspense novels, some featuring paranormal or supernatural plot
elements. Until 1999, Michaels penned a Michaels and Peters novel almost every
year. Usually set in the present, the past has a large claim on the plots and the
subsequent solution to the story’s mysteries. Michaels told Diane Rehm in a 2001
interview that she loves to read and write gothic romances, although she doesn’t
care to have that label attached to her novels. “‘Romantic Suspense’ is another
term which has been applied to my books and those of other women writers. It is
marginally more acceptable than gothic” (Rehm 2001). Michaels is quick to point
out, though, that the romance in a story is important. Using the formula of the
gothic novel, Michaels twists that genre’s elements to suit her own style. Her
heroines rely less on the hero to rescue them from their situations and more on
their own resolve and pluck. Other Worlds (1999) was the last title published
under the Michaels name, although Elizabeth Peters novels are still released on a
yearly basis.
Sandra Brown began her writing career producing Harlequin romances but
quickly moved on to writing longer, less formulaic contemporary romance novels.
She is now best known for her romantic suspense, most of which involve the
heroines uncovering family secrets for which others will kill. Brown is praised for
her fast-paced and twisting plots that usually leave the best secrets until the final
pages. Her latest, Play Dirty (2007), depicts the framing of a disgraced Dallas
Cowboys football player who must find his nemesis before he is killed.
Although reviewers fault Mary Higgins Clark’s writing style, they find nothing
negative to say about her plots. Clark’s two dozen novels all tap into the gothic
formula of heroine in trouble with nothing to rely on but her own inner fortitude.
Her debut suspense novel was Where Are the Children (1975), a terrifying story of
 SUSPENSE FICTION 965

the disappearance of a woman’s children. Her second attempt at suspense fiction

was A Stranger Is Watching (1978), which proved her formula’s success. Clark has
followed her initial success with 20 more novels. Her villains are evil and her heroes
are good; her writing is simple, and her plots breathlessly fast. Most of Clark’s nov-
els are set in high society New York and all involve dangers.
Many of her earlier novels involved young children in danger, but in recent years
Clark has expanded her stories with plots such as financial conspiracies on Wall
Street (Second Time Around, 2003) and serial stalkers (Nighttime Is My Time,
2004). She has also coauthored novels with her daughter, Carol Higgins Clark. The
formula has paid off with her books seeing time on the best-sellers’ lists and also air
time: many have been made into movies.
Catherine Coulter is another author who began writing romances in the Regency
category and then moved on to suspense. Riptide (2000) received excellent reviews
as Coulter adapted to a novel form that was more suspense than romance. The fifth
of her FBI adventures featuring agents Savich and Sherlock, Riptide features classic
suspense traits: disbelieving and unsympathetic police, the heroine’s move to an iso-
lated spot, and threatening phone calls. In an interview with Publishers Weekly,
Coulter addressed some of the concerns of moving from romance to suspense. She
said that suspense plots have to be more tightly written than those of the historical
romances she penned formerly. The logic of the situation has to be observed as well
(Yamashita 2003, 55). This attention to plot and detail has made her FBI suspense
series very successful. The most recent title in the series is Tailspin (2008).
Tami Hoag made the shift from romance to suspense in the 1990s. Her strength
is the amount of detail that goes into her novels. They are well researched and
supply the background to the often gruesome crimes in which her characters are
involved. Some of her issues are sensitive topics. For example, Ashes to Ashes
(1999) and its sequel Dust to Dust (2000) explore attitudes toward crime victims,
prostitutes in the first novel and a gay officer in the second. Hoag’s well-developed
characters have won her a legion of fans for her 30 books. The Alibi Man (2007),
was well received by critics.
Moving into romantic suspense after a strong career in historical romances, Iris
Johansen creates a taut thriller involving a Greek archaeological dig, a Scottish
castle, and terrorists intent on blowing up a nuclear power plant in Countdown
(2005). More suspense novels followed the commercial success of the Ugly Duck-
ling (1991). Long after Midnight (1997), No One to Trust (2002), and Final Target
(2001) feature such various plots as corporate corruption, Colombian drug lords,
and attempted kidnapping of the president’s daughter. In Fatal Tide (2003), a
woman who had been sold into white slavery teams up with an ex-navy SEAL to
find a secret weapon, with the help of dolphins, before the weapon’s Middle Eastern
developers do. Such wild plots are anchored with well-developed characters, and
Johansen’s appeal to readers is great. A prolific author, she released four titles in
2006 alone.
Bestselling romance writer Nora Roberts writes romantic suspense in the line of
Mary Stewart under the name J.D. Robb, a combination of her sons’ initials. The
futuristic In Death series features police officer Eve Dallas and her husband Roarke.
The twenty-seventh installment is Salvation in Death (2008).
Medical Thrillers. Although Michael Crichton is perhaps best known for his adven-
ture fiction Jurassic Park, his earlier novels, many written under the pseudonym
John Lange, were thrillers written while he was medical school in the 1960s. Some
966 SUSPENSE FICTION

of these titles involved medicine-inspired plots. His 1968 A Case of Need, filled with
details from his work at the Harvard Medical School, won him an Edgar Award. It
was The Andromeda Strain, published in 1969, that pushed him into a full-time
writing career. In the novel, biophysicists race to track down the source of a deadly
virus. The book was praised for its technical detail and its pacing and set the stage
for the medical thriller genre, in particular the plague novels of such authors as
Robin Cook.
Robin Cook is a practicing doctor who debuted with Coma (1977), which was
made into a successful film written by Michael Crichton in 1978. All of Cook’s titles
feature medical crises in hospital environments or in the devastated public sector as
mysterious viruses spread. The 1987 Outbreak and the 1995 Contagion are two
titles in the epidemic subgenre. Several other titles have had plots revolving around
fertility technology that has been abused in frightening ways (Mutation, 1989; Vital
Signs, 1990). In 1999, Cook introduced medical examiner Jack Stapleton, who,
along with partner Laurie Montgomery, feature in several more titles. Foreign
Bodies (2008) is Cook’s twenty-eighth medical thriller.
Michael Palmer spent 20 years working as a physician and has used his medical
background in his more than a dozen medical thrillers. His 2008 First Patient fol-
lows the adventures of the President of the United States’s best friend who takes on
the job of being the President’s personal physician after his successor disappears. It
appears his friend is going insane and that someone, or something, is behind the
President’s failing mental health.
Tess Gerristsen’s heroines serve in various medical capacities: surgeons, emergency
room doctors, and medical examiners. A long time author of romantic suspense,
Gerritsen moved into the genre of medical thrillers with Harvest (1996). Set in a
Boston hospital, the plot involves the unraveling of a secret by a surgical resident. She
introduces Detective Jane Rizolli in The Surgeon (2002), and Rizzoli teams up with
medical examiner Maura Isles in The Sinner (2003). The partnership continues in
several more titles. Gerritsen’s novels are praised for their ability to offer far-fetched
plots that seem believable. Meticulously researched, Gerritsen’s highly detailed
medical scenes add credibility to the suspense and horror readers feel.
Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs are two more authors who critics consistently
praise for their extensive details. Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta is a medical examiner for
the Commonwealth of Virginia, and Reichs’s Tempe Brennan works in both
Charlotte, North Carolina, and Quebec, Canada, as a forensic anthropologist.
Details of crime scenes and the work that goes on in the morgues are vital to under-
standing the plots of these authors’ books, and both are authorities in their fields.
Cornwell’s work in the medical examiner’s office lends credibility to her charac-
ters’ knowledge of forensic science, police work, and the political machinations of
state agency employees. Her 1990 Postmortem introduced mystery readers to the
world of forensic mysteries. Postmortem is followed by over a dozen more Scarpetta
novels, following the medical examiner as she moves to various states, working in
various capacities to solve crimes. The suspense in Cornwell’s novels focuses on
Scarpetta as she finds herself in dangerous situations due to her inability to leave
an investigation alone. In true gothic fashion, she often needs help to extricate her-
self from a bad situation, but in some installments, she has drawn on her own
resourcefulness.
Reichs’s experience in the field has helped her books about Temperance “Tempe”
Brennan rival those of Cornwell. Brennan debuted in Deja Dead (1997), where
 SUSPENSE FICTION 967

readers were also introduced to Brennan’s archenemy, Montreal Police Inspector

Luc Claudel. Grisly forensic details are based on Reichs’s own examination of
bodies far too decomposed to be identified by pathologists. It is Reichs’s ability to
combine explanations of forensic procedures with strong storylines that have
captured an ever-increasing fan base for her novels. The television series, Bones, is
based on Reichs and her character. The tenth Brennan installment is Devil Bones
(2008).
Karin Slaughter has created Sara Linton, another medical examiner, who is also a
pediatrician in a small Georgia town. Six novels have featured Linton, the most
recent Beyond Reach (2007).
Legal Thrillers. Legal thrillers are popular with mystery readers because the pursuit
of justice is usually local and based on a particular crime. John Grisham, a former
Mississippi attorney and author of almost 20 best-selling novels, most of which are
legal thrillers, has said, “Though Americans distrust the profession as a whole, we
have an insatiable appetite for stories about crimes, criminals, trials and all sorts of
juicy lawyer stuff” (Grisham 1992, 33). As early as Charles Dickens and Wilkie
Collins, the legal thriller was appearing in the marketplace to great popular success.
For example, Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) and The Woman in White (1859)
contain elements of a legal thriller: an innocent person, the criminal justice system
(legal proceedings and courtroom drama) playing an intrinsic part of the storyline
(also in Dickens’s Bleak House [1853]), witness testimony, legal documents (wills,
etc.), and lawyers assisting in solving the crime. In the 1930s Erle Stanley Gardner,
a practicing attorney, became one of the most prolific and popular authors of
courtroom dramas with his creation of Perry Mason.
Many authors of legal thrillers are former attorneys themselves. Grisham, Scott
Turow, Richard North Patterson, and Steve Martini are five of the most recognized
attorney/authors in the genre. It was Turow’s 1987 Presumed Innocent that opened
the floodgates to courtroom dramas.
Turow’s first novel, One-L (1977) was written while Turow was a law student at
Harvard and documented the difficulties of law school. Presumed Innocent was
published while Turow was working as an assistant U.S. district attorney in
Chicago. The novel was well-received and its publisher, Farrar, Strauss, paid more
money for the title than they ever had for a book by a first-time author. Their risk
paid off as Presumed Innocent hit the bestseller lists. The novel was praised for its
insight into the legal system and its refusal to divide the world into simplistic fields
of black and white, good and evil. The film, starring Harrison Ford, was released in
1990. Turow’s most recent title is Ordinary Heroes (2005).
John Grisham’s first novel, A Time to Kill (1989), was inspired by a courtroom
case. His 1994 The Chamber garnered more critical acclaim than some of the earlier
titles. Grisham’s novels, although sometimes criticized for their unrealistic plots, are
almost always noted for their characterization and their intense pace. These two
elements have led to several of Grisham’s titles, among them A Time to Kill, The
Firm (1991), and The Pelican Brief (1992), being made into blockbuster films. His
latest is The Appeal (2008).
Before turning to fiction writing, Richard North Patterson was a successful lawyer
who worked for the prosecution on the Watergate case of the 1970s. His literary
career took off after the publication of his second novel, Degree of Guilt (1992).
The common thread in Patterson’s mysteries is the attention paid to the legal system.
In the Conviction (2005), an eleven-year-old conviction is re-investigated; Balance
968 SUSPENSE FICTION

of Power (2003) combines politics and law in issues about gun control; and in Exile
(2007) the Middle East of today’s headlines is at the center of attorney David
Wolfe’s most difficult case.
Steve Martini is a former journalist and attorney. His skills combine to make him
one of the foremost authors of courtroom drama. Most of Martini’s titles feature
attorney Paul Madriani, whose cases are always part of a larger, more corrupt,
political scene. He has been praised for his “torn from the headlines” plots and
exceptionally well-drawn and exciting courtroom pyrotechnics. Shadow of Power
(2008) is the ninth Madriani installment.
As in forensic mysteries, the authors of legal thrillers must clearly explain the
points of law upon which a case rests. Legal mysteries often focus on glitches in the
legal system or the manipulation of the law by shady attorneys. The protagonists
themselves are usually of two types, the idealistic young attorney who is up against
a corrupt system, or a jaded lawyer who is closer to the wrong side of the law than
to the right. Michael Connelly has created Michael Haller, who is an example of the
latter type in The Lincoln Lawyer (2005).
Female authors have cornered a large sector of the legal thriller market as well.
Lia Matera began publishing fiction after law school, creating the characters Willa
Jansson and Laura Di Palma, who have starred in over a dozen titles. Lisa Scottoline
is another former lawyer who sets her novels in Philadelphia. Her novels about the
all female law firm Rosato and Associates have won her many awards.
Psychological Suspense. Psychological suspense is a fairly vague term. Most novels
that fall into this category have characters, usually two, who are testing themselves
against their intellectual counterparts. Frequently a criminal will pit his wits against
his pursuer. The most famous example is Thomas Harris’s serial killer Hannibal
Lector in The Silence of the Lambs (1988). Imprisoned Lector offers to help FBI
Agent Clarice Starling to catch another serial killer known as Buffalo Bill. He plays
many mind games with the vulnerable Starling, and the tension mounts as she
confronts the killer and Lector escapes. Almost every author creating a serial killer
since Harris has had to compete with Lector’s presence. Jonathan Kellerman, Jeffrey
Deaver, and James Patterson are three writers who have been able to compete
successfully with Harris.
Jonathan Kellerman has banked on his expertise as a child psychologist to create
22 novels featuring child psychologist Alex Delaware. Delaware debuts in When the
Bough Breaks (1985). Like Mary Higgins Clark, Kellerman writes about topical
issues. His first Delaware novel, though written before the infamous McMartin
Preschool scandal in California, reflected that case’s focus on sexually abused chil-
dren being the only witnesses to crimes. Abused children are often the only leads to
crimes in Kellerman’s novels, and it is Delaware’s job to find out what they know.
Suspicion of parents heightens the suspense in a Kellerman novel and the struggle
over the validity of a child’s testimony that may ruin an innocent adult’s life is the
focus of Bad Love (1993). Most of Kellerman’s victims are children, but a death bed
confession troubles a young woman in Kellerman’s twenty-first Delaware novel
Obsession (2007).
Although he has written over 20 suspense novels, Jeffery Deaver is best known
for his novels about Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs. The pair debuted in The
Bone Collector (1997), made into a film starring Denzel Washington and Angelina
Jolie. The fast pace and the intricacy of Deaver’s plots plant him firmly in the sus-
pense tradition but also give a nod to the police procedural with his close focus on
 SUSPENSE FICTION 969

forensic investigation. Deaver’s plots lead in many twisting directions and the final
one is always kept until the end. Critics found him to be too heavy-handed and
overly complex in The Twelfth Card (2005), but entertaining nonetheless.
The author is also noted for his character development and ability to create
convincing dialogue. The characters of Sachs and Rhyme grow over the course of
the series as they face Rhyme’s medical problems. Quadriplegic as a result of an
accident while investigating a crime scene, Rhyme has a crime lab set up in his New
York apartment geared to his needs. Sachs, a police officer, walks the crime scenes
for him, reporting back what she sees. The two become lovers and face the obstacles
that his health issues and her personal issues bring to the relationship. In many of
his interviews, Deaver has said that he creates books based on his reader’s wishes.
They wish for more Rhyme and Sachs novels and number eight was released in
2008, The Broken Window.
The author of dozens of novels and two ongoing series, James Patterson’s Alex
Cross novels have gained him his largest number of fans. Along Came a Spider
introduced Cross in 1992. The first 11 Cross novels are called the “Nursery Rhyme”
novels for their titles. After Mary, Mary (2005), the novel titles began to feature
Cross’s name. The latest is Cross Country (2008). Alex Cross is an African Ameri-
can forensic psychologist who is raising his two children alone in Washington, D.C.
A very sensitive man, Cross becomes deeply involved both physically and
emotionally in his cases, and he frequently becomes a target for violence himself.
Noted for his short quick scenes, Patterson has developed a tense style that appeals
to readers and translates well for moviegoers. Kiss the Girls (1997) and Along Came
a Spider (2001) were both made into films starring Morgan Freeman as Cross.
Political Thrillers. Power struggles involving national or international politics make
for tautly suspenseful novels as terrorists, power hungry dictators, and drug and
weapon cartels clash. Times of war create another dimension to power struggles
with spies added to the mix. A final element often present in political thrillers is
technology and its use and misuse by those trying to gain or maintain power.
Vince Flynn published his debut novel about Minneapolis, Term Limits, in 1997.
Since then he has written eight novels featuring such topics as the sale of arms to
Iraq (The Third Option, 2000) and the race to prevent Saddam Hussein from using
nuclear weapons in Separation of Power (2001). The 2004 Memorial Day moves
from the Middle East to the United States as the hero tries to stop terrorists who
have brought bombs into the country.
In Stephen Frey’s The Fourth Order (2007), 150 years after the establishment of
The Order, a government agency put in place after the assassination of Abraham
Lincoln, the group excels in global surveillance and information gathering. Frey’s
novels such as The Power Broker (2006) and The Successor (2007) combine
corporate greed with the lust for political power.
Techno and Military Thrillers. Michael Crichton may well be the undisputed master of
the modern adventure thriller. His wide-ranging plots, from the 1855 London train
robbery of The Great Train Robbery (1975), to the H. Rider Haggard-inspired lost
world of King Solomon’s mines (Congo, 1980), to a theme park gone awry featuring
cloned dinosaurs (Jurassic Park, 1990), are suspenseful and loved by his millions of
fans worldwide. Along with Tom Clancy, however, he is considered the master of the
techno thriller. Techno thrillers are those whose plots rest on elements of
technology: computer, military, biological, and so on. The technology is usually
futuristic, but just barely so.
970 SUSPENSE FICTION

Although DNA technology was behind the creation of modern day dinosaurs, the
dinosaurs, not the technology for creating them, predominated. The 1992 Rising
Sun moved technological cover-ups and political machinations on the parts of both
the Japanese and the Americans to the fore. The technological accuracy of Airframe
(1996) was a result of the in-depth research Crichton does for all his novels. State
of Fear (2004) provides a look at information manipulation and Next (2006)
follows the creation of a human/chimp hybrid.
Tom Clancy broke onto the bestseller lists with his 1984 publication of The Hunt
for Red October, later made into a film starring Sean Connery. He is best known for
his post-Cold War thrillers featuring former Marine Jack Ryan, although he has
written other action thrillers with Martin H. Greenberg.
Dale Brown is a former Air Force captain who now writes military thrillers
featuring Patrick McLanahan. Strike Force (2007) is Brown’s latest. A geopolitical
novel with a plot set in Iran and involving cutting edge military technology, Strike
Force is the twelfth McLanahan installment. Stephen Coonts’s hero is Admiral Jack
Grafton. Liberty (2007), the latest installment, leads readers on a whirlwind trail of
devastation as Grafton makes enemies in the CIA, FBI, and every other law enforce-
ment agency he can alienate as he attempts to locate terrorists before they detonate
their bombs on American soil.
Conspiracy Thriller. The conspiracy thriller is a category of suspense fiction in which
the hero finds himself embroiled in a secret society or organization that threatens
the fate of the nation, and sometimes the world. In this category, only the hero
realizes the extent to which the world is in danger and cannot prove his allegations.
He must work alone or with a sidekick, romantic or otherwise, to stop the danger.
Early examples of the genre include The Manchurian Candidate (1952) by Richard
Condon and The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1976–1977) by Robert Shea and Robert
Anton Wilson.
The biggest conspiracy thriller to date is Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003).
This phenomenal best seller features symbologist Robert Langdon’s race to solve a
centuries old mystery involving the Holy Grail and the Knights Templar among
other elements. Time is short as Langdon and the granddaughter of a murdered
Louvre curator race around France and Rome trying to find the Grail before their
enemies do. The thriller was made into a 2006 film starring Tom Hanks.

Bibliography
Grisham, John. “The Rise of the Legal Thriller: Why Lawyers are Throwing the Books at
Us.” New York Times, Book Review Section. 18 Oct. 1992: 33.
Moore, Joe. “Ten Rules for Suspense Fiction by Brian Garfield.” http://www.thrillerwriters.
org/2008/03/ten-rules-for-suspense-fiction-by-brian.html
Rehm, Diane. Interview with Barbara Michaels. Diane Rehm Show. American University
Radio. May 29, 2001.
Yamashita, Brianna. “From History to Mystery: A Genre-jumper Explains.” Publishers
Weekly (June 30, 2003): 55.

Further Reading
Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured
Popular Fiction. New York: Random House, 2007; Gannon, Michael B. Blood, Bedlam,
Bullets, and Badguys: A Reader’s Guide to Adventure/Suspense Fiction. Genreflecting
Advisory Series. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited; Mann, Jessica. “The Suspense Novel.”
 SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION 971

Classic Crime Fiction. http://www.classiccrimefiction.com/suspense-novel.htm; Regis,

Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2003.
PATRICIA BOSTIAN
SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION

Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine
on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the
blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content.
—Robert E. Howard “Queen of the Black Coast”

Definition. Casual readers of fantasy fiction are apt to use the terms fantasy and
sword and sorcery interchangeably. Although sword and sorcery is certainly a type
of fantasy fiction, as a sports car is a type of automobile, the term was first proposed
by Fritz Leiber (1910–1992), the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning speculative fic-
tion author, to distinguish the genre in which he wrote from other medieval fiction,
particularly the mythic and epic fantasy, or high fantasy, crafted by J.R.R. Tolkien
(1892–1973).
High fantasy, largely invented by William Morris (1834–1896) as an echo of Sir
Thomas Malory’s tales (e.g., Le Morte D’Arthur) and later popularized by
Tolkien, tends to proceed at a stately pace, meandering from plot point to plot
point, or location to location. Film critic Roger Ebert has written that Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings trilogy, the most famous of all high fantasy works, “is mostly
about leaving places, going places, being places, and going on to other places, all
amid fearful portents and speculations. There are a great many mountains,
valleys, streams, villages, caves, residences, grottos, bowers, fields, high roads, low
roads, and along them the Hobbits and their larger companions travel while pay-
ing great attention to mealtimes. Landscapes are described with the faithful detail
of a Victorian travel writer. . . . mostly the trilogy is an unfolding, a quest, a jour-
ney, told in an elevated, archaic, romantic prose style that tests our capacity for
the declarative voice” (Ebert 2001).
Though exotic landscapes are present—even common—in sword and sorcery,
they are described differently and for a different purpose. Sword and sorcery arose
from a tradition entirely different from Tolkien’s ornate, Anglo-Saxon medievalism;
by contrast, for American pulp writers like Robert E. Howard (1906–1936), sword
and sorcery fiction had to be retooled for specific consumer and marketplace desires
during the 1920s and 1930s. The pulps, the television of the time, supplied and
demanded quick-moving action. The stories needed to seize readers during the first
few sentences so that newsstand browsers would feel compelled to purchase it to
discover how the stories ended. Consequently, Howard’s stories tended to empha-
size dramatic action and tension over, though not necessarily at the expense of,
description and setting.
Karl Edward Wagner (1945–1994), the creator of the sword and sorcery hero
Kane and a renowned speculative fiction editor, preferred the term epic fantasy to
sword and sorcery, describing it as “a fascinating synthesis of horror, adventure,
and imagination . . . the common motif [being] a universe in which magic works and
an individual may kill according to his personal code. When the universe is effec-
tively envisioned and the characters are convincingly realized, epic fantasy can com-
mand the reader’s attention on multiple levels of enjoyment. When the universe is a
972 SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION

cardboard stage set and the characters comic book stereotypes, the result is cliché
ridden melodrama” (Wagner 1977).
Lin Carter (1930–1988), likewise a renowned fantasy editor and a speculative
fiction author, wrote in his introduction to the anthology Flashing Swords #1
(1973):

We call a story sword and sorcery when it is an action tale, derived from the tradi-
tions of the pulp magazine adventure story, set in a land, age, or world of the author’s
invention—a milieu in which magic actually works and the gods are real—a story,
moreover, which pits a stalwart warrior in direct conflict with the forces of super-
natural evil.

Carter simplifies here. He understood that gods did not manifest themselves in all
sword and sorcery tales—certainly Howard’s Crom never descended from upon
high to aid Conan, who frequently swore by him. Dark gods and evil entities are
common, however, and sorcerers conjure many a foul creature to confront sword
and sorcery heroes. This is true to one of the genre’s underlying themes: protago-
nists must overcome challenges with their own strength and cunning, not through
the intercession of benevolent gods or governments. In the strange and hostile lands
and situations in which they find themselves, they and their close allies must survive
and impose order, meaning, and justice through their own actions. They are almost
exclusively existential heroes: armed and able, but alone.
Trends and Themes. Scholar John Flynn has additional, clarifying observations
about the genre.
In sword and sorcery, the supernatural is usually depicted as dark and malig-
nant. Users of magic seldom work in the interest of the heroes. Magic is not the
delightful, easily manipulated force that brightens fairy tales; rather, it is often
associated with demonic forces and is invoked with great effort by lengthy,
sinister rituals.
The protagonists of sword and sorcery are most often thieves, mercenaries, or
barbarians struggling not for worlds or kingdoms, but for their own gain or mere
survival. They are blue-collar rebels fighting against authority, skeptical of civiliza-
tion and its rulers and adherents. While the strengths and skills of sword and sorcery
heroes are romanticized, their exploits take place on a very different stage from one
where lovely princesses, dashing nobles, and prophesied saviors are cast as the leads.
Sword and sorcery heroes face more immediate problems than those of questing
kings. They are cousins of the lone gunslingers of American westerns and the

“Sword-and-Sorcery focuses on the darker, more sinister, and often brutal nature of that
struggle [with supernatural forces].The emphasis is almost always on the might of the sword
as contrasted with the power of magic. The protagonist is frequently strong, clever and
resourceful, but he (or she) can also be savage, barbaric and brutally ambitious to the point
where he often negates his ‘goodness.’ His heroic challenges repeatedly find him in lost
worlds (nearly always tribal or feudal) where the laws of science and reason have been
replaced by mysticism and the occult.While he doesn’t necessarily deserve to triumph over
these forces, the hero’s physical courage and tenacity nonetheless make the victory possi-
ble”( Jones 2008).
 SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION 973

wandering samurai of Japanese folklore, traveling through the wilderness to right

wrongs or simply to earn food, shelter, and coin.
Unknown or hazardous lands are an essential ingredient of the genre, and if its
protagonists should chance upon inhabited lands, they are often strangers to either
the culture or civilization itself.
L. Sprague de Camp (1907–2000) wrote extensively about sword and sorcery. He
preferred heroic fantasy to Leiber’s label (although, aptly enough, the following
quote originates from an anthology titled Swords and Sorcery). His description
captures much of the genre’s flavor by noting that

sword and sorcery is the name of a class of stories laid, not in the world as it is or was
or will be, but as it ought to have been to make a good story. The tales collected under
this name are adventure-fantasies, laid in imaginary prehistoric or medieval worlds,
when (it’s fun to imagine) all men were mighty, all women were beautiful, all problems
were simple, and all life was adventurous. In such a world, gleaming cities raise their
shining spires against the stars; sorcerers cast sinister spells from subterranean lairs;
baleful spirits stalk thickets; and the fate of kingdoms is balanced on the bloody blades
of broadswords brandished by heroes of preternatural might and valor. (de Camp
1963)

De Camp almost always emphasized sword and sorcery as entertainment. At the

time he was writing, fantasy was seldom regarded as worthy of serious study. It was,
after all, allegedly written only to amuse. Then too, at the time he was writing, most
sword and sorcery fiction was imitative, reflective of the trappings of the genre with-
out understanding the possibilities of its depth.
Context and Issues

THE ELEMENTS OF SWORD AND SORCERY

In the past, sword and sorcery has been either narrowly defined as fiction featuring a bar-
barian with a loincloth and sword or broadly defined to mean any sort of fantasy where
there is action and danger. More careful study can identify four elements that make sword
and sorcery different from other fantasy: the environment, the protagonists, the obstacles,
and story structure.
• The Environment: Sword and sorcery fiction is set in lands different from our own, where technol-
ogy is relatively primitive, requiring the protagonists to overcome obstacles face-to-face. Magic
works, but seldom at the behest of the heroes, being more often another obstacle used against them
by villains or monsters. The landscape is exotic, either a different world or the backwaters of
our own.
• The Protagonists:The heroes must survive by their cunning or brawn, frequently both.They are usu-
ally strangers or outcasts, rebels imposing their own form of justice on the wild, strange, decadent civ-
ilizations which they encounter.They are usually commoners or barbarians; should they hail from the
higher ranks of society, they are either discredited or disinherited, or else descended from the lower
ranks of nobility (the lowest of the high).
• Obstacles: Sword and sorcery’s protagonists must best fantastic dangers, monstrous horrors, and dark
sorcery to earn riches, the goodwill of attractive members of the opposite sex, and/or the right to
live another day. Horror is a frequent component, but it is a tangible horror that can be confronted
and bested, or at the least deflected and avoided.
• Structure: Sword and sorcery is usually crafted with a traditional narrative structure: it has a begin-
ning, middle, and ending; a problem and solution; a climax and resolution. Most important, it moves at
a headlong pace and overflows with thrilling action and adventure.
974 SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION

History
The Beginnings. Scholars consider the first fantasy novel to be The Well at the
World’s End (1896) by William Morris, a prominent nineteenth-century socialist
who declined the position of poet laureate of England, translated Norse epics, spear-
headed the Arts and Crafts movement, and incidentally wrote the first novels set
neither on Earth nor in a dream world. From him high fantasy was born, and the
line continued through the magnificent Lord Dunsany (1878–1957), the poetic E.R.
Eddison (1882–1945), and the brilliantly whimsical James Branch Cabell
(1879–1958) to Tolkien, who cast a mold that few authors or publishers have been
willing or able to break.
Morris helped birth written fantasy, and thus sword and sorcery, but the sub-
genre’s roots are far older, originating in the epic struggles of mythologies—in the
wanderings of Odysseus and the quest of Jason, in the Persian Shah-Namah and the
Saxon Beowulf, in the stories of Sinbad and other heroes from the Arabian Nights,
and particularly in the Viking sagas, which tremendously influenced Morris,
Eddison, and Tolkien. Elements of sword and sorcery also appear in the famous
romances Amadis of Gaul and Orlando Furioso, among others. Volumes have been
written about these works, but we will leave them, deserving as they are, to a
broader discussion of the history of fantasy fiction.
Room must be made for Lord Dunsany, however, without whom no discussion of
modern fantasy can be complete. Born Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett,
Dunsany was an Irish peer. Among other accomplishments, he was a chess cham-
pion of Wales, England, and Ireland, soldier, big-game hunter, popular playwright
(six of his plays once appeared on Broadway at the same time) and successful
novelist.
Most fantasy scholars name Dunsany as Morris’s direct successor. Dunsany did
craft a handful of fantasy novels, but he is best remembered for eight slim collec-
tions of fantastic tales. Many famous fantasy and horror writers name him the
greatest fantasy writer of all time, speaking always of his imagination, beautiful
prose, and clear conception of man’s desperate longings and darkest fears. Though
his fantasy work began in 1903, it remains timeless and accessible. It is not the work
of a cloistered nobleman, but of a genius gifted with soaring imagination and
compassion.
A number of Dunsany’s short stories contain heroes and magic blades. His
language is courtly and elegant, but unlike much of the prose of the time, there is
nothing dense or turgid about it:

They passed by night over the Oolnar Mountains, each dwarf with his good axe, the
old flint war-axe of his fathers, a night when no moon shone, and they went unshod,
and swiftly, to come on the demi-gods in the darkness beyond the dells of Ulk, lying
faint and idle and contemptible.
And before it was light they found the heathery lands, and the demi-gods lying lazy
all over the side of a hill. The dwarfs stole towards them warily in the darkness.
—“How the Dwarfs Rose Up in War” (1919)

By contrast, E.R. Eddison’s masterpiece, The Worm Ouroboros (1922), is a more

challenging read, because Eddison affected an older style. Many today find the read-
ing labored, but the labor is well rewarded. Eddison painted his scenes with lavish
skill:
 SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION 975

At the clash the two champions advanced and clasped one another with their strong
arms, each with his right arm below and left arm above the other’s shoulder, until the
flesh shrank beneath the might of their arms that were as brazen bands. They swayed
a little this way and that, as great trees swaying in a storm, their legs planted firmly so
that they seemed to grow out of the ground like the trunks of oak trees. Nor did either
yield ground to other, nor might either win a master hold upon his enemy. So swayed
they back and forth for long time, breathing heavily.

Eddison labored over The Worm Ouroboros for many years, finally publishing it
in 1922. He followed it first with the translation of a Norse epic and then with the
translation of a novel that many consider one of the finest Viking novels of all time:
Styrbiorn the Strong. He later wrote a trilogy set in the heaven of the world of the
Worm, a unique fantasy but not sword and sorcery.
Just like the most exciting Viking sagas, sword and sorcery features compelling
individual duels and the clash of armies, elements first used to great effect in histor-
ical fiction. Today, publishers advertise historical horror, historical romance, and
historical mystery—even alternate histories and historical political thrillers. In the
nineteenth century there was only one flavor: a historical fiction writer was some-
one who wrote action-packed tales set in distant, exotic places. Readers back then
turned to their favorite authors—Alexandre Dumas, Sir Walter Scott, William
Morris, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others less known today—for the same thrills
modern readers turn to sword and sorcery.
It is in the historical fiction of pulp magazines, however, where the genre’s
similarities to sword and sorcery become even more striking.
Historical Fiction of the Pulps. The pulp era began around the turn of the twentieth
century, before radio and television. Magazines featuring a variety of diverting
topics were found on the newsstands, printed on cheap, pulpy paper—hence the
term pulps. Publishers attempted to print something for almost every reader, in the
same way that TV channels attempt to broadcast something for almost every viewer.
And like television, most of the product was bad, giving pulp fiction its modern
connotations—cheap, sensationalist, and over-the-top writing. As with most popu-
lar art forms, though, some gold glittered within the dross, and many famous
writers were first published by (or at least appeared later) in the pulps.
Most pulp historical fiction writers crafted tales of action and adventure, and
many created serial characters. As in comic books (whose rise in popularity coin-
cides with that of the pulps) and television series, serial characters served two
purposes. First, they spared writers the chore of creating a new hero for each story;
and second, once serial characters found an accepting editor or readership, they
increased the chances of selling the story.
This pulp historical fiction of the early twentieth century (circa 1915–1940)
has almost all of the same elements as sword and sorcery. In place of the imagi-
nary land is a distant era that, in the hands of the better writers, appears with
greater vividness than many an invented setting. There are heroes who must live
by their wits and weapons in deadly borderlands, beset by schemers and
intriguers. There are hidden treasures, ancient secrets, and lovely women—some,
keen-eyed adventurers of whom heroes should be wary, and others, damsels in
need of rescue. There are loyal comrades, implacable foes, powerful but foolish
kings, secret societies, fabulous kingdoms, and fraudulent wizards and miracle-
workers. In short, the connection between sword and sorcery and pulp historical
976 SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION

fiction is obvious, both being fashioned with the same spirit, from love of the
same elements.
Historical fiction wasn’t the mainstay of the pulps—for the most part westerns
and detective fiction were—but many an author wrote “costume pieces.” There was
H. Bedford Jones, that most prolific of pulp authors (said to write a million words
a year), who could be relied upon for tales of the high seas and cavaliers and Dumas-
like action. There were Farnham Bishop and Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, writing
together or separately of swordsmen of fortune, and F.R. Buckley, who wrote about
battlefield exploits in Renaissance Italy. The pulps saw the engaging, though repeti-
tious, exploits of Zorro, and printed the adventures of Sabatini’s Captain Blood.
Arthur D. Howden Smith crafted many a bold tale, among them the saga of the
Viking Swain and the story of Gray Maiden.
Gray Maiden was a sword first forged for a Pharaoh. In each story the blade is
wielded by a different warrior down through history. The sword is sometimes lost
or entombed with its wielder, but it is always unearthed to wreak more mischief. It
has a supremely sharp blade with supernatural powers—no man who bares her
meets his death by sword, though they often perish in other ways.
The Gray Maiden story cycle veers widely in quality—some portions are full of
monotonous talking heads, whereas some are fine entertainment. “Thord’s Wooing”
(1927), one of the Gray Maiden stories, is an excellent Viking tale. Late in the story,
in a duel scene provides some sense of its flavor. Bjarni, mortally wounded, seeks to
take the life of Thord’s mother, Elin.

“Your doing, witch,” He gasped. “Come with me!”

And he hurled his sword straight at her breast. It turned once in the air, hilt over
point, a flash of light in the dimness, sped by the last strength of his body even as he
collapsed in death. But Gray Maiden flew faster. Thord cast the long blade like an axe,
and once more it parried Bjarni’s blow. The two swords clattered at Elin’s feet.

Gilchrist Brodeur and Farnham Bishop, writing together or separately, could be

counted on for exciting tales of clashing arms and mayhem set in the distant past.
Their style is sometimes slow, weighted with the pacing of the nineteenth century;
yet they should not be too easily disregarded, as their work sometimes springs with
amazing vigor. One of the best by either man is a neglected gem of Viking adven-
ture, He Rules Who Can, originally serialized in Argosy, beginning in November of
1928. Sadly, this Brodeur novel about Harald Hardrada, has never seen reprint.
Selected Authors. While there are other fine authors and other fine tales, two
giants stride out of this field, authors famed for both quality and quantity: Talbot
Mundy and Harold Lamb. Both of them influenced Robert E. Howard, the true
father of sword and sorcery.
Mundy’s real name was William Lancaster Gribbon, and before he took up
writing he had knocked about India, East Africa, and Germany; married a few
women and loved some more; and nearly gotten himself killed several times over. It
was while recovering in the hospital after getting blackjacked that he took up
writing.
Mundy is best known for two series characters: James Grim, or Jim Grim, an
American adventurer working for the British Secret Service, and Tros of Samoth-
race, the epic Druid warrior. It is Mundy’s Tros series that concerns us here. This
long cycle of stories was published for the most part as a series of novellas in the
 SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION 977

pages of Adventure magazine (a novel near the end of the cycle appeared in book
form). And if any fiction decries its pulp reputation, it is Mundy’s Tros of
Samothrace. Mundy was a skilled student of human nature who had philosophical
leanings. His characters are rich, complex, and well drawn. His plots hinge upon the
actions taken by his heroes and villains. Sometimes the stories unfold slowly because
they depend upon intrigue, politics, and dialogue, but at the appropriate times they
explode with action.
Above all, Mundy was a careful craftsman. Consider the somber tone of the
following scene, hardly expected of a typically garish pulp writer:

He went below, into the cabin where his father’s body lay, with Caesar’s scarlet cloak
spread over it. And for a while he stood steadying himself with one hand on an over-
head beam, watching the old man’s face, that was as calm as if Caesar’s tortures had
never racked the seventy-year-old limbs, the firm, proud lip showing plainly through
the white beard, the eyes closed as in sleep, the aristocratic hands folded on the breast.
It was dark in there and easy to imagine things. The body moved a trifle in time to
the ship’s swaying.
—Tros of Samothrace (1967 Pyramid reprint)

Tros is a skilled sailor and minor initiate into an ancient and widespread mystical
society, a world that Mundy renders entirely believable. His greatest desire is to
build the ship of his dreams to sail around the world, but before he can do it he runs
afoul of Caesar’s ambitions. Caesar is one of Mundy’s triumphs, a rascal genius who
only fails because his ego eventually grows too large. Tros eventually builds his ship,
ends up allied with Cleopatra, and even, near the end, aids his old enemy Caesar.
He never manages to sail around the world, though Mundy fully planned to write
that story, because his creator died of diabetes before pen went to paper. Fortunately
the series ends on a complete note, with all of the hero’s Mediterranean adventures
resolved.
Harold Lamb was a quiet man fascinated with chronicles of Eastern history from
an early age. He wrote the epic Durandal trilogy, amongst other thrilling crusader
novels. Later he would become a renowned historian and wealthy screenwriter,
penning more than thirty movies for Cecil B. DeMille. First, though, he created a
cycle of remarkable historical fiction stories set in locations as fabulous and unfa-
miliar to most readers as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars.
Where many adventure tales are predictable from the first word, Lamb’s plots
were full of unexpected twists. He wrote convincingly of faraway lands and dealt
fairly with their inhabitants, relating without bias the viewpoints of Mongols,
Moslems, and Hindus. His stories are rarely profound psychological drama, but
Lamb nonetheless breathes humanity into his characters, endowing them with
realistic hopes and fears. Unlike the pacing of almost all of his predecessors and
most of his contemporaries, his still feels modern—he never stops for slow exposi-
tion. His plots thunder forward as though he has envisioned each one for cinema
the moment he slid paper into the typewriter.
The most enduring and complex of all Lamb’s heroes is his first, Khlit the
Cossack. Before Stormbringer keened in Elric’s hand, before the Gray Mouser
prowled Lankhmar’s foggy streets, before Conan trod jeweled thrones under his
sandaled feet, Khlit the Cossack rode the steppe. He is the grandfather of all char-
acters in sword and sorcery series.
978 SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION

The Cossack is already old when his saga begins late in the sixteenth century in
the grasslands of central Asia. He is an expert horseman and swordsman, unlettered
and only a step removed from barbarism, but wise in the ways of war and men.
Gruff and taciturn, Khlit is a firm believer in justice and devout in his faith, though
not given to prayer or religious musings. He is the friend and protector of many
women, but he leaves romance to his sidekicks and allies.
The Khlit stories swim in action, treachery, and places best unseen by mortal men.
Consider the following scene, from the novella “The Mighty Manslayer” (1918):

Mir Turek caught his arm and pointed to the further side.
“The Bearers of Wealth!” he screamed. “See, the Bearers of Wealth, and their
burden. The Tomb of Genghis Khan. We have found the tomb of Genghis Khan!”
The shout echoed wildly up the cavern, and Khlit thought that he heard a rumbling
in the depths of the cavern in answer. He looked where Mir Turek pointed. At first he
saw only the veil of smoke. Then he made out a plateau of rock jutting out from the
further side. On this plateau, abreast of them, and at the other end of the rock bridge
gigantic shapes loomed through the vapor. Twin forms of mammoth size reared them-
selves, and Khlit thought that they moved, with the movement of the vapor. These
forms were not men but beasts that stood side by side. Between them they supported a
square object which hung as if suspended in the air.

Throughout the seventeen-part series Khlit yearns for far horizons and strange
new sights. He rides alone for a time before rising to lead a Tatar tribe for five tales,
later joining forces with the heroic Afghan swordsman and Moslem, Abdul Dost.
Khlit always bears his famed curved saber, gilt with the writing of an unknown
tongue. It is a deadly blade with its own secret history, disclosed as the series
progresses.
The Khlit saga is a remarkable tour de force, and any reader familiar with the
works of Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber or with the works of those who fol-
lowed them will recognize familiar elements in this predecessor.
Sword and Planet. Before the mighty Texan Robert E. Howard took up his pen,
Edgar Rice Burroughs created—or at least had the first big success—with a genre
that some call sword and planet and that others describe as planetary romance.
The concept is simple: an adventurer is dropped in skivvies onto an unknown
planet, usually being forced to make do with primitive weapons (but he may have
a ray gun slung on a hip with just three shots left). Instead of elves and wizards,
there are alien races and the descendants of ancient world masterminds. Rather
than magic, there is advanced technology, often poorly understood by the sur-
viving populace and treated like sorcery. In the early pulp days this was science
fiction; in retrospect it has a lot more in common with fantasy, especially sword
and sorcery.
Before Burroughs came up with Tarzan, he created John Carter, Warlord of Mars.
Beginning in 1912, Carter adventured on a world little like the real Mars, with a
breathable atmosphere, scheming aliens of varied colors, and lots of lovely, haughty,
semi-naked queens and princesses. Carter and his cohorts spend most of the time
running around with swords. All of the stories are action-packed cliffhangers. Their
biggest flaw is that most have the same plot. Someone’s wife/girlfriend/niece is
lost/endangered/kidnapped, and the hero must travel across Mars to save them. Not
that the female characters lack pluck or courage (they’re not wallflowers), but they
are, naturally, dated by their time.
 SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION 979

Burroughs’s work was an outgrowth of the lost race adventures of H. Rider

Haggard (of She and Alan Quartermain fame), in which the hero journeys to some
lost corner of the world to discover ancient civilizations rife with treachery and
sinister secrets. Haggard did not quite invent the form, but under his skilled hands
it gained popular fame, and he had an enormous influence. His work is still enjoy-
able today, though most of it speaks matter-of-factly of outmoded conceptions and
prejudices, and his plotting is not entirely modern. This does not describe all his
work, however; some of his stories, most notably his Viking novel Eric Brighteyes,
remain fabulous adventures, shot through with swordplay and the supernatural,
and they should not be overlooked by sword and sorcery readers.
Haggard’s influence can be felt on many writers who thrust their heroes into lost
lands (A.E. Merrit became justly famed for doing much the same thing in the early
pulp years; his settings dripping with even more magical conceptions). Burroughs
merely took things one step further and dropped his heroes into a land that had
never existed. He became famous doing it.
Recognizing that sword and planet and sword and sorcery were related fields, early
anthologists often packaged authors from both genres under the same covers. Today,
science fiction readers look on sword and planet with disdain for the most part, espe-
cially those stories set on versions of Mars or Venus that have human-supportable
conditions. Fantasy readers seem to have forgotten that such stories even exist.
Many authors crafted sword and planet stories—much of it forgettable. But there
were also remarkably enjoyable adventures, written by the likes of Edmund
Hamilton, space opera master and science fiction pioneer, and Otis Kline, one-time
agent for Robert E. Howard, best remembered today for his somewhat wooden
Venusian sword and planet trilogy The Planet of Peril and the novel The Swordsman
of Mars.
Leigh Brackett, the woman who is probably the very best sword and planet writer,
plied her trade in the dying days of the genre. Just as Bach crafted baroque master-
pieces in a time that this style was considered old-fashioned and quaint, Brackett
penned most of her Martian stories after there was definite evidence that the planet
could not possibly exist as she described. Eventually she had to stop writing them
altogether, and anyone who laments the end of Ray Bradbury’s Martian stories
should lament his friend Leigh Brackett’s abandoning of Mars as well.

Carse walked beside the still black waters in their ancient channel, cut in the dead sea-
bottom. He watched the dry wind shake the torches that never went out and listened
to the broken music of the harps that were never stilled. Lean lithe men and women
passed him in the shadowy streets, silent as cats except for the chime and the whisper
of the tiny bells the women wear, a sound as delicate as rain, distillate of all the sweet
wickedness of the world.
—The Sword of Rhiannon (1953)

The sample above only hints at Brackett’s mastery with setting. She always evokes
a powerful sense of place, and her Mars is a haunting, dimmed, mysterious, and
often fatal ruby. Her action scenes are crisp and clean and her plots never flag.
Brackett wrote numerous tales of planets near and far, but she is probably most
famous for her Skaith series. She is a well-known contributor to the sci-fi world,
having turned in the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back to George Lucas shortly
before her death in 1978. Brackett’s long career also featured other Hollywood
980 SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION

triumphs: she wrote the screenplay for The Big Sleep with William Faulkner as well
as numerous western vehicles for John Wayne.
Although some of Brackett’s fiction seems a little dated (her spacemen often
smoke and her women sometimes need protecting), she remains surprisingly fresh
because of her skill with character and setting, and because her plots are usually
unpredictable. So long as they are willing to forgive her planets that cannot be,
sword and sorcery readers lucky enough to find her works will be in good hands.
Sword and planet, after many years in the wilderness, has enjoyed a rebirth. In
the late 1980s Harry Turtledove launched his Videssos series, about a Roman legion
mystically transported to another planet where magic works, and in 1990 William
Forstchen created his Lost Regiment series, about a Union regiment flung through a
portal to a hostile alien world. Other authors have found additional ways to put
fresh spins on this old genre.
Robert E. Howard. Long before Brackett broke into the pulps, a young man named
Robert E. Howard set out to become a writer. He had his first success at the age of
17, a success which was followed by many agonizing years of rejection letters.
Howard did not give up, though, and he eventually started publishing regularly in
Weird Tales.
Though never an outstanding success, Weird Tales became one of the most influ-
ential of all pulp magazines, printing the work of many who later rose to fame as
fantasy, horror, and science fiction writers, sometimes in the pages of Weird Tales
itself. Few pulp magazines today are as widely known or as revered.
Howard himself would rather have been writing historical fiction, a field he loved.
But for many years he could not crack the magazines that published his favorite
writers, such as Mundy and Lamb. So he started to write for this audience.
Howard told historic tales infused with supernatural horrors, creating characters
such as the dour Elizabethan wanderer Solomon Kane, who spent most of his time
fighting dreadful things in Africa, and Bran Mak Morn, king of the Picts, who
waged a battle against Roman legions knowing that his people would lose it. But
Howard also experimented with a prehistory of his own invention in which a king
named Kull enjoyed his epic adventures when Atlantis was but a barbarian nation.
Only a few of the Kull stories sold, though they possess a dreamy poetic power
found otherwise only in Howard’s nonfantasy historical fiction.
And then a new character, the inimitable Conan, thrust his way into Howard’s
consciousness. Howard later wrote that so easily did the stories flow, it was almost
as though his creation stood at his shoulder, dictating stories from his life.

Know, O Prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleam-
ing cities, and the years of the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed
of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the
stars. . . . . Hither came Conan the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in
hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread
the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.
—“The Phoenix on the Sword” (1932)

Thus sword and sorcery was born with Kull and Conan. The connection between
the real world and the world of these characters is hazy at best. They adventure in
a never-neverland of prehistory where supernatural horrors stalk a planet Earth so
different that it might as well be one of the other worlds of sword and planet. The
 SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION 981

map and peoples of their world become familiar through the course of their stories,
particularly the longer Conan saga (21 stories in all). Modern readers take for
granted many fantastic elements pioneered by Howard: a fantasy world with a map,
countries, gods, and a consistent magic system. The complete package originated
with Howard.
Howard has his detractors. Some of this has to do with the often low quality of
Conan stories written after his death. Tale after tale was authored by others until
bookstore shelves groaned under the weight of collected pastiche—more non-
Howard Conan stories were written than were those composed by Howard himself,
and until just recently the pastiche Conan was the only kind in print.
Then too, the charge of sexism is leveled at Howard. He does not seem to have
been sexist himself, even if Conan was. Howard wrote a series centered on the
swashbuckling Dark Agnes of France. She was no heroine in a chainmail bikini, but
rather, a real woman. Unfortunately, her tales never sold, so Howard stopped
writing them. Howard wrote for his market, and so most of the women in the
Conan series serve the same function as those in a James Bond film. His readers
loved him for it.
Those familiar with Conan only from the pastiche, or the movies, or the comic
books, do not know the real article, which has far greater range of emotion and zest
for life, being is at the same time more primal. Howard is an able plotter with a
splendid imagination, but it is in his narrative that Howard truly excels, and this
cannot translate into any medium beyond the pages of his work. His scenes are
drawn swiftly and skillfully, with a few sharp brush strokes. A movie version of his
works is not necessary because his prose is so cinematic to begin with:

Rising above the black denseness of the trees and above the waving fronds, the moon
silvered the river, and their wake became a rippling scintillation of phosphorescent bub-
bles that widened like a shining road of bursting jewels. The oars dipped into the shin-
ing water and came up sheathed in frosty silver. The plumes on the warriors’ headpieces
nodded in the wind, and the gems on sword hilts and harnesses sparkled frostily.
—“Queen of the Black Coast” (1934)

Blending historical swashbucklers, horror, tales of lost civilizations, strands from

mythology, Jack London’s brutal Darwinism, and even a little flavoring from sword
and planet works, Howard created something vibrant and new—sword and sorcery.
Howard shot himself in 1936, when he was only 30 years old and at the height
of his creative power. He left a large volume of work behind that refused to die with
him, though it has only recently begun to be studied by scholars.
Howard’s Trail. Catherine L. Moore was the first to follow Howard’s path, writing
her fantasies while Howard still lived and earning a letter of praise from him.
(Howard even sent her copies of his Dark Agnes stories for her perusal.) Moore
provided the first innovation in sword and sorcery, introducing a female protago-
nist. Jirel of Joiry is more than just a “gal Conan,” because Moore’s prose is a
different thing from Robert E. Howard. It is dreamy and surreal and a little remi-
niscent of the early horror-fantasy writer William Hope Hodgson:

Presently she began to near one of those luminous patches that resembled fields, and
saw now that they were indeed a sort of garden. The luminosity rose from myriads of
tiny, darting lights planted in even rows, and when she came near enough she saw that
the lights were small insects, larger than fireflies, and with luminous wings which they
982 SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION

beat vainly upon the air, darting from side to side in a futile effort to be free. For each
was attached to its little stem, as if they had sprung living from the soil. Row upon row
of them stretched into the dark.
—Jirel Meets Magic (1935)

Oddly, some of Jirel’s tales feel more dated than some of the stories that precede
them. In the first for instance, Jirel secretly loves the man trying to conquer her—
the old pulp trope of a strong female character who secretly longs to be controlled,
presented here by a woman writer. Moore also wrote the very popular Northwest
Smith stories, featuring an outer space adventurer. Most of Moore’s later work was
written in tandem with Henry Kuttner, whom she married. From that point forth
the two usually wrote together even if they did not share a byline.
Prior to writing with Moore, Henry Kuttner had produced prolifically on his
own. He labored under dozens of pen names and could write commandingly in
many different genres. After Robert E. Howard died, Kuttner wrote four sword and
sorcery tales for Weird Tales, featuring Elak of Atlantis, a slender, civilized prince of
Atlantis armed with a rapier. The Elak stories are not nearly as innovative as what
had come before, but they overflow with grand scenes of great color and majesty, so
that even the shortest reads like an epic.
Kuttner also wrote a short sword and sorcery series for , a rival of Weird Tales,
that is far more grim than Elak’s saga. The two tales feature the brooding Prince
Raynor, and in some ways presage the work of Michael Moorcock.
Kuttner died unexpectedly of a heart attack in his early 40s. His colleagues seem
to have thought well of him both as a writer and as a human being. Lin Carter
related that decades after Kuttner’s death, famed science fiction writer Robert
Heinlein would get teary-eyed—having to change the subject—after reminiscing
about Kuttner for even a little while.
Another Weird Tales contributor, Clark Ashton Smith, artist and poet, wrote
several series of strange horrific tales set in twilight lands. His prose is bejeweled
with descriptions and bizarre imagery, a lush tapestry of words emphasizing tone
and style and wit, where character is mostly incidental. Smith was far less interested
in swords and barbarians than he was in mages and their spells and the resulting
horrors. Today Smith is revered as one of the three greatest Weird Tales authors
(alongside H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard), and there is no denying his
lasting influence. It was he who wrote first of a decadent Earth of the far future,
inspiring Vance’s Dying Earth and Moorcock’s Hawkmoon and countless others,
but it is his imaginative scope and lush prose that has continued to inspire later writ-
ers. Lin Carter wrote that Smith’s stories were “darkling and mordant, lit with
flashes of jeweled description, studded with exotic names and rare words, pervaded
by the lilied languor and dreamlike splendor of a hashish vision”(Carter 1969).
There is only room for a brief quote:

With no other light than that of the four diminutive moons of Xiccarph, each in a dif-
ferent phase but all decrescent, Tiglari had crossed the bottomless swamp of Soorm,
wherein no reptile dwelt and no dragon descended—but where the pitch-black ooze
was alive with continual heavings and writhings. He had carefully avoided the high
causey of white corundum that spanned the fen, and had threaded his way with infi-
nite peril from isle to sedgy isle that shuddered gelatinously beneath him. When he
reached the solid shore and the shelter of the palm-tall rushes, he was equally careful
to avoid the pale porphyry stairs that would heavenward through dizzy, nadir-cleaving
 SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION 983

chasms and along glassy scarps to the ever-mysterious and terrible house of Maal
Dweb.
—“The Maze of Maal Dweb” (1933)

Weird Tales was not interested in Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar tales. Fortunately for
us all, Unknown gave them a home in the early 1940s. In that magazine’s pages
Leiber launched into a long cycle of sword and sorcery adventures about two
wandering rogues, the northern barbarian Fafhrd and the sneaky, city-born thief
Gray Mouser. Many other fantasy, science fiction, and horror stories flowed from
Leiber’s pen, garnering praise and awards, including several Hugos and Nebulas.
What differentiates the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories even today is the qual-
ity of the writing. We come to care for the two rogues despite their foibles, in part
because, while larger than life, they feel human. Leiber’s style is clever and sparkles
with humor, though the stories are never just comic send-ups.
Most fantasy authors hail Leiber as one of the truly great innovators. Just as no one
else has ever equaled the skill with which Howard told of his barbarian hero, no one
has yet equaled Leiber’s Lankhmar writing at its height. The Lankhmar stories are care-
fully threaded with action, humor, horror, lust, and humanity. This short passage from
“When the Sea King’s Away” (1977) provides a small window to his work. The two
heroes are exploring a strange passage recently carved out through the sea:

Soon they were treading along a veritable tunnel in the water, a leaden arch-roofed pas-
sageway no wider than the phosphorescently yellow-green path that floored it. The tun-
nel curved just enough now to left, now to right, so that there was no seeing any long
distance ahead. From time to time the Mouser thought he heard faint whistlings and
moanings echoing along it. He stepped over a large crab that was backing feebly and
saw beside it a dead man’s hand emerging from the glowing muck, one shred-fleshed
finger pointing the way they were taking.
Fafhrd half turned his head and muttered gravely, “Mark me, Mouser, there’s magic
in this somewhere!”
The Mouser thought he had never in his life heard a less necessary remark.

Among the many influenced by Leiber are the creators of Dungeons & Dragons,
who liberated many of Leiber’s concepts and overlaid them across the central
Tolkienesque game design. (To this day the game also uses a variation on
Moorcock’s theme of law and chaos to help define its characters.) Leiber continued
to write of the two heroes over the course of his lifetime, but naturally his style
changed. The later stories take on a meandering prose style that is far less engaging,
and the adventures become less interesting.
Norvell Page, famed bard of the pulp vigilante “The Spider,” also wrote for
Unknown, crafting two short Prester John novels. Prester was a character with
Conan-like strength, guile, and a genuine sense of humor. He journeys East, encoun-
tering action, mysterious sorcerers, and lovely damsels.
These are only the most famous of the pulp sword and sorcery writers. Others
appeared in Weird Tales, such as Nictin Dyalhis, who crafted a series of stand-alone
fantasy adventures; and the mysterious Clifford Ball, a fan stirred by Howard’s
death to write in his style. There were other writers besides, some who wrote either
historicals tinged with sorcery or horror verging on adventure.
After the Pulps. As the pulps died slowly, hit by the triple whammy of paper short-
age caused by World War II, a postwar change in mood, and stronger entertainment
984 SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION

rivals, sword and sorcery lived on in the new paperback book market—though just
barely. For the most part the subgenre lay comatose.
Jack Vance is not, strictly speaking, a sword and sorcery writer. He is one of those
gifted authors whose work transcends genres. Readers of both fantasy and science
fiction can read his work with delight, and sword and sorcery readers have not
neglected his Dying Earth, a collection of interlinked short stories shot through with
swashbuckling, sorcery, and wondrous imagery. These stories were originally rejected
by the magazines, but a small publisher in the 1950s saw their worth and they remain
in print today. Other adventure work followed, equally strong and always tinged
with space opera or sword and planet filtered through Vance’s unique lens.
By the 1970s it was possible to make a living by writing fantasy. Along came award-
winning Roger Zelazny, first with a series of short stories centered on Dilvish the
Damned, an adventuring swordsman with a postmodern flair, and then with other
delightful fiction, including his first Amber series, a high watermark for fantasy and
sword and sorcery alike. Set at first on Earth, the series expands through ever more
complex and fascinating intrigues and mysteries in parallel worlds, until finally the
nature of existence itself is threatened. Magic and action lurk upon nearly every page.
Michael Moorcock experimented with Burroughs-like fiction, then launched into
a long, loosely related stories about the eternal champion, a hero who appears in
many guises through many parallel worlds, fighting the forces of chaos. Moorcock
may have found at least some of his inspiration in the fantasy work of Poul
Anderson, whose masterpiece of northern, doom-filled romance, The Broken Sword
(1954)—as well as the later novel Three Hearts and Three Lions—featured many
elements now associated with Moorcock: law and chaos, cursed rune swords, and
evil, manipulative gods. Elric, the albino swordsman is probably the most famous
of Moorcock’s characters, but there are others besides: the haunted, elf-like Corum
and the obsessed Hawkmoon to name but a few. Moorcock’s prose is frequently
brilliant, shot through with moments of sad, lyric beauty. It has some of the same
sorrow over the human condition that Lord Dunsany conveyed so well, but it is less
joyful. Elric knows almost from the start that he is doomed. His soul-sucking sword,
Stormbringer, robs strength from others to power him, and it has a dark mind of its
own, sometimes striking when Elric would hold his hand.

It’s taking me—the thrice-damned thing is taking me!” Nikorn gurgled horribly, clutching
at the black steel with hands turned to claws. “Stop it, Elric—I beg of you, stop it! Please!”
Elric tried again to tug the blade from Nikorn’s heart. He could not. It was rooted
in flesh, sinew and vitals. It moaned greedily, drinking into it all that was the being of
Kiron of Ilmar. It sucked the life-force from the dying man and all the while its voice
was soft and disgustingly sensuous. Still Elric struggled to pull the sword free.
—The Bane of the Black Sword (1977)

Moorcock still writes in the field today, even generating an occasional Elric
prequel (he has already written about Elric’s end), but his heart does not really seem
to be in it anymore.
A contemporary of Moorcock who is much celebrated by him, M. John Harrison,
created a short sword and sorcery novel titled The Pastel City (1971). It is the first in
a sequence of works about Viroconium, a city that may be a dream of a dream of our
own reality, although the first tale in the sequence does not trouble itself with such
extratextual concerns. It delivers the familiar sword and sorcery tropes decorated with
 SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION 985

a veneer of space opera and such fine characterization and description that to a sword
and sorcery connoisseur it goes down like fine wine. Having delivered a small mas-
terpiece, Harrison walked away from the field and has not returned.
Moorcock’s career was launched during a publishing boom in the 1960s that
brought Howard and Burroughs back into print, kept Leiber in paperback, and saw
Tolkien rise to worldwide fame. Fantasy could suddenly be found on bookstore
shelves in increasing quantities. Imitation rather than innovation began to take over.
Rather than a few writers crafting sword and sorcery work with their individual
stamp, the 1970s and early 1980s brought us mostly imitation of what had come
before. Some writers, such as John Jakes and Gardner Fox, created barbarians of
their own and sent them adventuring. Lin Carter drafted multiple series heavily
influenced by Burroughs, Howard, Dunsany, and A.E. Merritt, and many others
followed suit. Some of the work was polished and entertaining if familiar, but most
of it was dreck. The profusion of the material probably contributed to the virtual
disappearance of sword and sorcery in the 1980s. Writers were hired to craft more
tales of Conan or other Robert E. Howard heroes. As expected, some of this work
was much better than others. Accomplished authors—among them David C. Smith,
Andrew Offutt, Karl Edward Wagner, and later John Maddox Roberts and John C.
Hocking—delivered stories reminiscent of something Howard might have
composed. Most of the pastiche, though, was hollow and empty.
The 1970s and 1980s saw the rise of sword and sorcery anthologies, many of
which were popular enough to spawn multiple volumes. Lin Carter selected manu-
scripts for the Year’s Best Fantasy Stories from 1975 to 1980, in volumes 1 through 6.
Though he often published a story of his own (and sometimes two, the second
under a pen name), he can perhaps be excused because the stories he chose were
among his best. Famed fantasy authors L. Sprague de Camp, Jack Vance, C.J.
Cherryh, and Karl Edward Wagner contributed many short stories, and Carter
often featured reprints by Robert E. Howard and other luminaries. Lesser known
but talented authors also made appearances, including Charles Saunders and Pat
McIntosh. Though quality varied, each of these six volumes contained a healthy
dose of sword and sorcery. After Carter left, the later books in the series rarely
included this genre.
Fantasy author and editor Andrew J. Offutt helmed five volumes of Swords
Against Darkness from 1977 to 1979. Offutt’s selections were similar to Carter’s
in that they mixed reprints and modern works, including pieces by Poul
Anderson, Tanith Lee, Manly Wade Wellman, and Ramsey Campbell. Offutt,
however, was able to offer content that was almost exclusively sword and sorcery.
Some of it was not especially good, but much of it was. Darrell Schweitzer’s
haunted Julian the Knight first found a wider audience after being published in
this anthology.
There were other series—such as Lin Carter’s five-volume Flashing Swords series
(each made up of four or five novellas rather than the more typical dozen short
stories) as well as the more high-fantasy-oriented Thieves’ World books and many
fine stand-alones—but two deserve special mention. Jessica Amanda Salmonson
edited two volumes of Amazons (I and II) in 1979 and 1982. She selected stories of
women protagonists slashing and riding into adventure, and most of her choices
were more balanced and less shrill than those featured in other sword and sorcery
anthologies centered on female adventurers. The most famous of these series was
Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress series.
986 SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION

From 1987 through 1991 Karl Edward Wagner edited Echoes of Valor. This
three-volume anthology featured few new stories, because what Wagner decided to
reprint overlooked or revered but rare works and package them in an affordable
format. It was a gold mine for the sword and sorcery or sword and planet
aficionado. Volume II, for instance, features a Jirel of Joiry story left out of Moore’s
collected works, as well as a collaboration between Leigh Brackett and Ray
Bradbury that had not been reprinted. Volume III presents three of Nictzin Dyalhis’s
Weird Tales fantasy pieces as well as both of Henry Kuttner’s Prince Raynor stories.
Wagner would almost surely have followed with more, but this talented editor and
author died too young.
Underground in the 1980s. By the mid-1980s sword and sorcery had been all but
completely swept from the marketplace. Fantasy as a whole grew in popularity, but
the hordes of Tolkien imitators won out against the legions of Conan imitators.
Novel markets evaporated, and only a handful of small press magazines welcomed
tales of sword and sorcery.
Some have pointed the rise of female editors in the fantasy field, and the resulting
backlash against male tropes commonly found in sword and sorcery, as the cause of
the genre’s decline, but that is too simple an explanation, although it is true that
women make up a much larger demographic of fantasy readers today than men do.
Some believe sword and sorcery was brought low by the appalling quality of various
sword and sorcery movies and a plethora of imitative books. Then video games
arrived on the scene, providing for many young men the same kind of thrills that
they once experienced vicariously through reading. It might have been the demise of
short fiction markets, for the speculative fiction magazines became more and more
interested in legitimizing fantasy and science fiction by making it more literary and
obscure and by distancing themselves from lowly tales of adventure. Whatever the
storm’s cause, it left only a few giants standing: Leiber and Moorcock, who were
only writing in the field sporadically and had enough clout to have their talent
recognized no matter what they wrote, and David Gemmell, who will be discussed
in a moment. Nearly everyone else was down for the count, even some less well-
known writers who were pushing the genre’s envelopes.
The most recognized of these other authors is Michael Shea. Nifft the Lean,
Michael Shea’s gentleman thief, attracted praise from many circles, including World
Fantasy Award winner Tim Powers. Shea himself won the World Fantasy Award for
the 1982 collection titled Nifft the Lean. His tales have been collected by Baen in
recent years and are still in print. Inventive, clever, and exciting, their style is
reminiscent of a Vancian-Clark Ashton Smith-Leiber combination at its most indul-
gent. Shea shares with Vance and Smith a gift for world building, and with Leiber
the gift of artful dialogue.
Richard Tierney, sometime cowriter with David C. Smith, created Simon Magus, a
magician and ex-gladiator wandering New Testament times and combating Cthulhu-
inspired horrors. Most of the tales were collected in The Scroll of Thoth in 1997.
Darrel Schweitzer wrote in the late 1970s in elegant prose of a damned, wander-
ing knight. Sir Julian’s tales were collected in 1981 and more fantasy has flowed
from Schweitzer’s pen, including the superlative Mask of the Sorcerer, which is
decidedly more about sorcery than swords. Schweitzer remains active in the field
today, associated with the new Weird Tales and writing other fantasy work,
although his tone has far more in common with Dunsany than Howard.
 SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION 987

Of all these authors, there were three who most closely hewed to the tenets of
sword and sorcery as established by Howard, while at the same time forging new
paths. A young David C. Smith created Oron in 1979, the first of the new genera-
tion of barbarians who actually felt barbaric, and the character proved so popular
that Smith’s publisher had him write prequels, for Oron came to a Wagnerian end
at the conclusion of his first adventure.
Then there was Imaro, the creation of Charles Saunders, who sent his character
wandering a fantastic Africa. Imaro was the first important black hero of sword and
sorcery. The three Imaro novels and a set of related short stories breathe with atmos-
phere, so much so that the setting is a character unto itself. The customs, people,
and places feel real. While the supernatural and fantastic stalk this world, Saunders’s
storytelling skills present even the ordinary features of this setting, from savanna to
jungle, as vivid and new. Saunders’s skilful world-building as well as his taut action
and suspense scenes create an explosive mix, one that Lin Carter was quick to
recognize, printing Imaro tales in several volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy and
Horror anthology series.
Born the son of mixed parentage in a warrior society, Imaro longs for acceptance,
but when he finally earns it, his own pride sets him on another path. A mighty
warrior, at heart Imaro is a decent, loving man who hides behind a wall of stoicism
he has built both to protect himself during his troubled upbringing and to endure
the horrors he has faced. Most other sword and sorcery heroes are rogues born with
wanderlust. They are fascinating to see in action, but they are not necessarily people
we would care to meet. Imaro, however, is honestly likable.
Finally, and most famously, was Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane, marked by God for
murder with cold blue eyes, an immortal hero-villain who lusts for knowledge and
power. An accomplished manipulator, Kane wanders his world commissioning
deeds both good and ill and often carrying them out himself. Wagner was a genius
with atmosphere, and the best of the Kane stories are riveting; the worst are
maudlin. Like Kane, Wagner dared greatness, sometimes reaching spectacular
heights and sometimes failing. Wagner’s work is a little like Moorcock’s in theme:
both writers play with our conceptions of good and evil; and both men created
works that when turned this way, show ready flaws, and when turned that way,
show gleaming brilliance.
There were other authors writing of heroes adventuring in other times or cultures,
such as Keith Taylor’s Celtic Bard in his Bard books, and Jessica Amanda
Salmonson and Ted Rypel, who drafted tales of adventurous samurai.
With the exception of Shea, these and other authors have either vanished or
remained in print only through the auspices of the small press. Smith’s work is
completely out of print, and Saunders’s and Wagner’s have been until just recently.
For the last twenty years or more sword and sorcery has been relegated to the
sidelines, existing for the most part only in limited distribution. Popular authors
such as Tanith Lee occasionally dabble with it, but Tolkien-flavored quest fantasy
has been continually dominant, save for one important exception.
Born in London, David Gemmell (1948–2006) was expelled from school at age
sixteen for organizing a gambling syndicate. Owning a six-feet-four-inch, 230-pound
frame, he worked as a laborer and nightclub bouncer before becoming a freelance
journalist. In retrospect, these occupations prepared him well to become one of the
genre’s most skilled and popular writers since Howard.
988 SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION

In 1984, Gemmell published his first novel, Legend, a tale of heroes striving to
defend a fortress against a vastly larger army. Foremost among the defenders is
Druss the Legend, a titanic, indomitable warrior of over 60 years of age, who travels
to the fortress to face death not by old age, but in battle. Druss, whose earlier deeds
fill later novels, epitomizes the iron-willed soldier who appears frequently in
Gemmell’s tales, whereas another hero, Rek, is the first of several sword-wielding
rogues: an agile man who lacks no skill in battle but who must accept its risk and
righteousness in place of women, drink, coin, and self-preservation. Perhaps the
most worldly of these reluctant heroes is Jarek Mace, a Robin Hood-William
Wallace figure, featured in the excellent stand-alone novel Morningstar (1992), by
David Gemmell.
Before dying in 2006 from heart disease, Gemmell was prolific, publishing over
thirty novels between 1984 and the year of his death. (He smoked heavily as part of
his writing process.) These include the eleven-book Drenai Saga, which features
Legend, and the four-book Rigante Saga. His final novels, Lord of the Silver Bow
(2005) and Shield of Thunder (2006), were the first two parts of a trilogy reimag-
ining Homer’s Iliad. Gemmell penned 70,000 words of the final part, The Fall of
Kings, which was being completed by his wife, Stella, and scheduled for publication
in 2007. While Gemmell’s prose, even in Legend, is consistently clear and unde-
manding, it is especially vivid and polished in these last works, in which memorable
characters such as Odysseus sail the Great Green in advance of war.
Because Gemmell’s novels often involve climatic battles that determine the fates
of nations or races, they can easily be classified as heroic fantasies. However, several
elements also mark them as sword and sorcery: warriors and thieves with morals
painted in shades of gray; foes who are monstrous, undead, or aided by dark magic;
earthy details (e.g., cooking soup in bark bowls); swiftly unfolding action; and
courage against almost insurmountable odds, for the sake of liberty—to name the
most prevalent. In Gemmell’s hands, these elements converge in highly engaging
tales (often free of profanity and graphic sex). As succinctly observed by fantasy
author Greg Keyes (The Briar King), “Gemmell not only knows how to tell a story,
he knows how to tell a story you want to hear” (2006). With his passing, the genre
has lost arguably its most consistent and productive modern craftsman.

Reception
The New Millennium. Today sword and sorcery remains marginalized, although
there are some signs that the pendulum may be swinging in the other direction.
Gemmell was a tremendous success in Europe but unwelcome on American shores
for many years. Though the foremost of the new sword and sorcery writers, he was
not completely alone. Some readers grew tired of high fantasy tropes and found sol-
ace in the gritty violence of Glen Cook’s Black Company books, which read as a
combination of fantasy crossed with military fiction peopled with earthy sword and
sorcery heroes. In the late 1990s Matthew Stover delivered two series, the first
featuring a Pictish warrior woman (Iron Dawn, 1997), the second a warrior trans-
ported from his futuristic society to battle with primitive weapons for the amuse-
ment of those watching back home (Heroes Die, 1999; Tompkins 2008).
Stover’s work seems clearly in the sword and sorcery camp, but when the bound-
ary is inexact, it is hard to split hairs with a battle-axe and make certain determi-
nations. Cook’s work, for example, seems more like military fiction, albeit with
 SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION 989

sword and sorcery seasoning. Canadian-born Steven Ericson’s Malazan books may
be the sign of an even larger swing away from high fantasy by traditional publish-
ers. Phonebook-sized, like the plethora of high fantasy series that dominated the
market through the 1990s, the Malazan books are a huge, multipart series replete
with action and stuffed with gritty blue-collar heroes. Sword and sorcery scholar
Steve Tompkins places Erikson’s work clearly in the fold, but others perceive it to
be more like epic fantasy with sword and sorcery sensibility, or even the more neb-
ulously defined dark fantasy. Whatever they are, exactly, Malazan books are clearly
rooted in sword and sorcery precepts and may indeed be the start of something
entirely new.
A handful of writers have found an outlet working for publishing houses that
print books based in worlds generated for role-playing games and war games. The
most sword-and-sorcery friendly of these publishing firms has been the Warhammer
(Electronic Arts) franchise, set in a European Renaissance style world populated by
elves, dwarves, humans, and various disturbing things man was not meant to know.
Writers such as William King, C.L. Werner, Bryan Craig, and others have fashioned
iconic sword and sorcery characters who wander the shared world. King created
Gotrek, a skilled and deadly warrior dwarf, and Felix the bard sworn to follow the
former and record his exploits until he meets a glorious end. The novels and short
stories proved so popular that King left Warhammer in 2003 to craft his own sword
and sorcery Terrarch novels for European publishers, leaving his creations Gotrek
and Felix to another writer, which is one of the most unfortunate aspects of
fashioning characters under contract. Werner has been equally well received by
Warhammer fans and outside readers with two very different characters, the first a
remorseless and mostly amoral bounty hunter called Brunner; the other a kind of
righteous, relentless monster hunter, named Matthias Thulman, fashioned from
equal parts Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane, the Hammer horror movies, and
Werner’s own imagination.
Aside from the Warhammer books and David Gemmell’s tales of soldiers and out-
laws, almost no modern sword and sorcery works have achieved widespread, or
even marked, popularity, especially when compared with best-selling, epic fantasies
such as George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire or Robert Jordan’s The Wheel
of Time. Although possible reasons for this disparity may include a bias by major
publishers against real and perceived flaws in traditional sword and sorcery, such as
shallow or stereotypical characters, it seems more likely that the difference is due to
a practical consideration (as few epic fantasies lack stereotypes).
Publishers wish to sell as many books as possible, and sweeping, multicharacter,
epic fantasies naturally lend themselves to longer tales. In contrast to their epic
fantasy counterparts, sword and sorcery heroes tend to resemble sprinters more
than marathoners. For example, The Wheel of Time, published from 1990 to 2005,
consisted of eleven lengthy novels and a prequel, with the story remaining unfin-
ished; by contrast, in Howard’s sole novel, The Hour of the Dragon, Conan loses
and regains a kingdom in 75,000 tumultuous words.
Despite the dominance of epic fantasy in novel-length works, writers of specula-
tive fiction have continued to explore the sword and sorcery genre, selling both tra-
ditional and innovative tales to prominent short fiction magazines such as Black
Gate and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF), as well as to
Internet publications in recent years (e.g., swordandsorcery.org). Some works are
worthy of particular mention.
990 SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION

In 1987, Ellen Kushner (b. 1955) published Swordspoint, a critically acclaimed

“melodrama of manners” that introduced the duelist Richard St Vier and the erratic
scholar Alec. The novel is notable for its nuanced characterization and setting—an
intricate juxtaposition of a nameless city akin to eighteenth-century London or Paris
and its seedy Riverside district—as well as the protagonists’ homosexual relation-
ship. Swordspoint was followed by The Fall of the Kings (2002) and The Privilege
of the Sword (2006), and its characters also appeared in a handful of short stories,
including “The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death” (F&SF, September 1991).
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction has also showcased, in the tradition
of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, two of the more fascinating sword-against-sorcery
duos to debut in recent years. The first duo, composed of the soldier Vertir and the
scribe Kuikan, has appeared in three tales (“For Want of a Nail,” March 2003;
“After the Gaud Chrysalis,” June 2004; and “Of Silence and the Man at Arms,”
June 2005) by Charles Coleman Finlay, a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and John
W. Campbell awards. Finlay’s stories place the protagonists in exotic, unfriendly
surroundings and in situations where survival depends on quick-thinking under
duress.
The second consists of two especially odd yet appealing adventurers, the poet
Persimmon Gaunt and the long-lived thief Imago Bone, created by Chris Willrich.
Editor Gordon van Gelder described their debut, “The Thief with Two Deaths” (June
2000), as “a gorgeous fantasy that owes some of its inspiration to Lord Dunsany’s
‘The Idle City’”; and Willrich’s lush prose is similarly traditional yet fresh:

Fanned by moonlit palm trees, chaperoned by star-aimed white obelisks slicing the
surf’s roar into baffled echoes, Persimmon Gaunt stroked the thief’s dark hair and
smiled.

Gaunt and Bone’s journey continues in “King Rainjoy’s Tears” (July 2002) and
“Penultima Thule” (August 2006).
Most fantasy periodicals print varieties of sword and sorcery occasionally, but
among the modern magazines only Black Gate actively welcomes it. As a result, in
its first ten issues Black Gate has showcased a number of writers who may well
grow into the genre’s new torchbearers. It is too early to know, but some of the
writers seem to be creating enduring work. Most certainly, James Enge’s three
Morlock Ambrosius published tales are alive with splendid world-building, com-
pelling characterization, clever dialogue, and perhaps most daring of all in today’s
short fiction climate, adventure. Enge’s prose is crafted with Leiber’s wit and Smith’s
imagination, and somehow remains supremely approachable while being polished
to a high gloss.
These modern heroes bear little outward resemblance to Conan and Jirel, yet they
face a similar challenge: in a world that can be strange, wonderful, and terrible, they
must survive as well and meaningfully as their prowess and courage allow.
All well-realized fictional characters, and all readers in their daily lives, face this
challenge; and it is this commonality of experience that gives the art of storytelling
its power. Sword and sorcery tales, woven from the same fabric as ancient myths,
can accordingly enlighten and entertain as powerfully as any literary genre—when
they are woven well. It is this heritage, and the experience of numerous authors and
readers, that qualifies sword and sorcery not as an inferior form of fantasy, but as a
distinct and vivid genre.
 SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION 991

Bibliography
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Bishop, Farnham, and Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur. “The Hand of the Mahdi.” Adventure 18
Feb. 1920: 8–38.
Bishop, Farnham. “Libertatia.” Adventure 30 April 1925: 1–73
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Brackett, Leigh. Martian Quest: The Early Brackett. Royal Oak, MI: Haffner Press. 2002.
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———. “The Best of Leigh Brackett.” In Story-teller of Many Worlds. Edmond Hamilton, ed.
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Brodeur, Arthur Gilchrist. “For the Crown.” Adventure 20 May 1922: 153–175.
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Carter, Lin. Imaginary Worlds. New York: Ballantine, 1973.
———, ed. Dragons, Elves, and Heroes. New York: Ballantine, 1969.
———, ed. Flashing Swords #1. New York: Dell, 1973.
———, ed. Golden Citites, Far. New York: Ballantine, 1970.
———, ed. New Worlds for Old. New York: Ballantine, 1971.
———. “Of Swordsmen and Sorcerors.” Flashing Swords #1. New York: Dell, 1973.
———. “The Maze of Maal Dweb.” The Young Magicians. Lin Carter, ed. New York: Bal-
lantine Books. 1969.
———, ed. The Young Magicians. New York: Ballantine, 1969.
de Camp, L. Sprague, and Lin Carter. Conan of the Isles. New York: Ace, 1968.
de Camp, L. Sprague . “Harold Lamb.” In Marching Sands, by Harold Lamb. New York:
Hyperion, 1974, i–ii.
———. “Heroic Fantasy.” Swords and Sorcery. L. Sprague de Camp, ed. New York: Pyra-
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———. Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy. Sauk City, WI:
Arkham House, 1976.
Ebert, Roger. “Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.” http://rogerebert.suntimes.
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December 19, 2001).
Eddison, E.R. The Worm Ouroboros. New York: Ballantine, 1967 (reprint).
Fox, Gardner. Kothar, Barbarian Swordsman. New York: Leisure Books, 1970.
Gaiman, Neil. “Introduction.” In Return to Lankhmar. Fritz Leiber, ed. Clarkston, GA:
White Wolf Publishing, 1997, 13–15.
Haggard, H. Rider. Eric Brighteyes. New York: Zebra, 1978.
———. The Wanderer’s Necklace. New York: Zebra, 1978.
Hanning, Peter, ed. Weird Tales. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1990.
Harrison, M. John. Viroconium. London: Millenium, 2000.
Hoppenstand, Gary. “Introduction.” In Captain Blood, by Rafael Sabatini. New York: Penguin,
2003, vi–xix.
Howard, Robert E. Almuric. New York: Berkley, 1977.
———. Bran Mak Morn. New York: Baen, 1996.
———. Cormac Mac Art. New York: Baen, 1995.
———. Cthulhu: The Mythos and Kindred Horrors. New York: Baen, 1987.
———. Kull. New York: Baen, 1995.
———. Marchers of Valhalla. New York: Berkley, 1978.
———. Pigeons from Hell. New York: Ace, 1979.
———. Red Nails. New York: Berkley, 1977.
———. Solomon Kane. New York: Baen, 1995.
———. Swords of Sharhrazar. New York: Berkley, 1978.
992 SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION

———. The Bloody Crown of Conan. New York: Del Rey, 2003.
———. “The Book of Robert E Howard.” Glenn Lord, ed. New York: Zebra, 1976.
———. The Coming of Conan. New York: Del Rey, 2002.
———. The Conquering Sword of Conan. New York: Del Rey, 2005.
———. The Last Ride. New York: Berkley, 1978.
———. The Lost Valley of Iskander. New York: Ace, 1974.
———. “The Second Book of Robert E. Howard.” Glenn Lord, ed. New York: Zebra,
1976.
Jakes, John. The Fortunes of Brak. New York: Dell, 1980.
Jones, Howard. “Defining Sword and Sorcery.” Sword and Sorcery 2008. http://www.
swordandsorcery.org/defining-sword-and-sorcery.htm.
Jones, Robert Kenneth. The Lure of Adventure. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont Pulp and Dime
Novel Studies, 1989.
Keyes, Greg. Back cover blurb from Lord of the Silver Bow by Gemmell, David. New York:
Ballantine Books, 2006.
Kuttner, Henry. The Best of Henry Kuttner. New York: Nelson/Doubleday, 1975.
Lamb, Harold. Warriors of the Steppes. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006.
———. Kirdy: The Road out of the World. New York: Doubleday, 1933.
———. Riders of the Steppes. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.
———. Swords of the Steppes. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.
———. The Mighty Manslayer. New York: Doubleday, 1969.
———. Wolf of the Steppes. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006.
Lee, Tanith. Cyrion. New York: DAW, 1982.
Leiber, Fritz. Farewell Lankhmar. Clarkston, GA: White Wolf Publishing, 1998.
———. Ill Met in Lankhmar. Clarkston, GA: White Wolf Publishing, 1995.
———. Lean Times in Lankhmar. Clarkston, GA: White Wolf Publishing, 1996.
———. Return to Lankhmar. Clarkston, GA: White Wolf Publishing, 1997.
Lord Dunsany. Time and The Gods. London: Millenium, 2000.
Louinet, Patrice. “Introduction.” In The Coming of Conan. Robert E. Howard, ed. New
York: Del Rey, 2002.
Moorcock, Michael. Hawkmoon. : White Wolf Publishing, 1995.
———. The Elric Saga: Part I. New York: Nelson/Doubleday, 1984.
———. The Elric Saga: Part II. New York: Nelson/Doubleday. 1984.
———. Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy. Austin: Monkeybrain, Inc.,
2004.
Moore, C.L. Jirel of Joiry. New York: Ace, 1977.
Mundy, Talbot. Tros of Samothrace: Helene. New York: Avon Books, 1967.
———. Tros of Samothrace: Helma. New York: Avon Books, 1967.
———. Tros of Samothrace: Liafail. New York: Avon Books, 1967.
———. Tros of Samothrace: Tros. New York: Avon Books, 1967.
Sabatini, Rafael. Captain Blood. New York: Penguin, 2003.
Salmonson, Jessica Amanda, ed. Heroic Visions. New York: Ace, 1983.
Sampson, Robert. Yesterday’s Faces: Violent Lives. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State
University Popular Press, 1993.
Saunders, Charles. Imaro. San Francisco: Nightshade Books, 2006.
Schweitzer, Darrell, ed. Discovering Classic Fantasy Fiction. Rockville, MD: Wildside Press,
1996.
———. Mask of the Sorcerer., Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 1995.
———. We Are All Legends. Virginia Beach, VA: Starblaze Editions, 1981.
Smith, Arthur D. Howden. Gray Maiden. New York: Longmans/Macmillan, 1929.
———. Swain’s Saga. New York: Macmillan, 1931.
Smith, Clark Ashton. Hyperborea. New York: Ballantine, 1971.
———. Xiccarph. New York: Ballantine, 1972.
 SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION 993

Smith, David C. Oron. New York: Zebra Books, 1978.

Taliaferro, John. Tarzan Forever: The Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Creator of Tarzan. New
York: Scribner, 1999.
Tierney, Richard. Scroll of Thoth. Oakland, CA: Chaosium, 1997.
Tompkins, Steven. “After Aquilonia and Having Left Lankhmar: Sword-and-Sorcery since
the 1980s.” In The Robert E. Howard Reader. Darrell Schweitzer, ed. Rockville, MD:
Wildside Press, 2008.
Vance, Jack. Planet of Adventure. New York: Orb, 1993.
———. Tales of the Dying Earth. New York: Orb, 1998.
Wagner, Karl. “Foreword.” Red Nails. Robert E. Howard. New York: Berkley. 1977.
———. Gods in Darkness. San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2002.
———. Midnight Sun. San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2003.
Zelazny, Roger. Dilvish, The Damned. New York: Del Rey, 1982.
———. The Chronicles of Amber, Volume I. New York: Nelson/Doubleday, 1978.
———. The Chronicles of Amber, Volume II. New York: Nelson/Doubleday, 1978.

Further Reading
Brackett, Leigh. Lorelei of the Red Mist. Royal Oak, MI: Haffner Press, 2007; Harrison, M.
John. “The Pastel City.” In Viroconium. London: Millenium, 2000, 23–152; Howard,
Robert E. The Coming of Conan. New York: Del Rey, 2005; Jones, Howard. “Defining
Sword-and-sorcery.” Sword-and-Sorcery. 2008. http://www.swordandsorcery.org/defining-
sword-and-sorcery.htm; Leiber, Fritz. Ill Met in Lankhmar. Clarkston, GA: White Wolf Pub-
lishing, 1995; Moorcock, Michael. The Elric Saga, Part I. Garden City, New York: Berkley,
1984; Moorcock, Michael. Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy. Austin:
Monkeybrain, Inc., 2004; Salmonson, Jessica Amanda, ed. Heroic Visions. New York: Ace,
1983; Schweitzer, Darrell, ed. Discovering Classic Fantasy Fiction. Rockville, MD: Wildside
Press, 1996; Vance, Jack. “The Dying Earth.” Tales of the Dying Earth. New York: Orb,
1998, 1–131.
HOWARD ANDREW JONES AND ROBERT RHODES
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Books and Beyond
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Books and Beyond
The Greenwood Encyclopedia
of New American Reading

VOLUME 4: T–Z

Edited by
KENNETH WOMACK

GREENWOOD PRESS
Westport, Connecticut • London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Books and beyond : the Greenwood encyclopedia of new American reading / edited by Kenneth Womack.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-0-313-33738-3 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0-313-33737-6 (v. 1 : alk. paper) — ISBN:
978-0-313-33740-6 (v. 2 : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0-313-33741-3 (v. 3 : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0-
313-33742-0 (v. 4 : alk. paper)
1. Books and reading—United States—Encyclopedias. 2. Reading interests—United States—Encyclo-
pedias. 3. Popular literature—United States—Encyclopedias. 4. Fiction genres—Encyclopedias. 5.
American literature—History and criticism. 6. English literature—History and criticism. I. Womack,
Kenneth.
Z1003.2B64 2008
028’.9097303—dc22 2008018703

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.

Copyright © 2008 by Kenneth Womack

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be

reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008018703

ISBN: 978–0–313–33738–3 (set)
978–0–313–33737–6 (vol. 1)
978–0–313–33740–6 (vol. 2)
978–0–313–33741–3 (vol. 3)
978–0–313–33742–0 (vol. 4)

First published in 2008

Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881

An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www.greenwood.com

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the

Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents

Preface ix

Introduction: Reading in America Today xi

Entries
Academic Fiction 1
Adventure Fiction 13
African American Literature 26
Arab American Literature 40
Arthurian Literature 53
Asian American Literature 66
Autobiography and Memoir 87
Beat Poetry 97
Biography 112
Chick Lit 137
Children’s Literature 162
Christian Fiction 185
Comedic Theatre 195
Comic Books 209
Coming of Age Fiction (Bildungsroman) 222
Contemporary Mainstream American Fiction 249
Cyberpunk 274
Dramatic Theatre 289
Dystopian Fiction 312
Ecopoetry 325
Erotic Literature 338
vi CONTENTS

Fantasy Literature 351

Film Adaptations of Books 366
Flash Fiction 385
GLBTQ Literature 401
Graphic Novels 416
Historical Fantasy 427
Historical Fiction 440
Historical Mysteries 455
Historical Writing (Nonfiction) 468
Holocaust Literature 483
Humor 498
Inspirational Literature (Nonfiction) 511
Jewish American Literature 521
Language Poetry 537
Latino American Literature 552
Legal Thrillers 561
Literary Journalism 571
Magical Realism 587
Manga and Anime 600
Military Literature 612
Musical Theatre 625
Mystery Fiction 638
Native American Literature 663
New Age Literature 682
Occult/Supernatural Literature 699
Parapsychology 717
Philological Thrillers 732
Poetry 740
Regional Fiction 767
Road Fiction 782
Romance Novels 796
Science Fiction 805
Science Writing (Nonfiction) 833
Sea Literature 848
Self-Help Literature 862
Series Fiction 880
Space Opera 894
Speculative Fiction 917
Sports Literature 930
Spy Fiction 954
Suspense Fiction 962
Sword and Sorcery Fiction 971
 CONTENTS vii

Terrorism Fiction 995

Time Travel Fiction 1012
Transrealist Fiction 1025
Travel Writing 1034
True Crime Literature 1047
Urban Fiction 1065
Utopian Literature 1078
Vampire Fiction 1091
Verse Novels 1119
Western Literature 1131
Young Adult Literature 1147
Zines 1163

Contemporary Authors by Genre 1177

Suggestions for Further Reading 1191

About the Editor and Contributors 1195

Index 1205
This page intentionally left blank
T

TERRORISM FICTION
Definition. The initial complexity in defining “terrorism fiction” is the necessity
of defining “terrorism.” Despite the ubiquity of the term in contemporary discourse,
it is surprisingly difficult to arrive at unambiguous agreement about what acts,
precisely, can be gathered together under the label of “terrorist actions,” let alone
what groups or individuals can be called “terrorists.” To a certain degree this is a
matter of differing political stances: as the familiar expression reminds us, one man’s
terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Alex Houen points out, for example, that
“organizations such as the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, and
the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that were once widely declared to be
‘terrorist’ have over recent years been accepted internationally as legitimate political
parties” (Houen 2002, 7). Even fixing the use of the term historically can be
challenging. Although Andrew Sinclair’s history of terrorism (2003) encompasses
events from Greek antiquity onward, there is general agreement that the actual term
“terrorism” first came into use with the French Revolution, and that because of the
contemporaneous development of the mass media “the insurgent terrorism that
evolved in the second half of the nineteenth century was something new and not
merely a repetition of the violent conspiracies that marked political history long
before Brutus stabbed Caesar” (Scanlan 2001, 5).
One good working definition of terrorism is given by Cindy C. Combs and
Martin Slann in their Encyclopedia of Terrorism, where they define the essential
term “as a synthesis of war and theatre, a dramatization of the most proscribed kind
of violence—that which is perpetrated on innocent victims—played before an audi-
ence in the hope of creating a mood of fear for political purposes” (Combs and
Slann 2003, 209). Certain aspects of this definition might be more or less applica-
ble in given situations, but the presence of the audience is fundamental; a terrorist
act “is, essentially, theatre, an act played before an audience, designed to call the
attention of millions, even hundreds of millions, to an often unrelated situation
through shock” (Combs and Slann 2003, 209). The actual violence inherent to
996 TERRORISM FICTION

terrorism, then, is secondary. The terrorist act is intended primarily as an act of

communication, a message delivered to most observers through the mass media that
appropriates and reports on such events. Through this message the terrorist hopes
to dictate, or at least alter, the public discourse on a given issue, making it possible
to discuss terrorism as “primarily a matter of discursive and figurative practices”
(Houen 2002, 4). Terrorism is essentially performative.
In Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint, one character recognizes this feature of terrorist
actions by telling a potential presidential assassin that he is “talking about leaping
onto the world stage. You don’t have any idea what you might set in motion, what
kind of uproar” (Baker 2004, 26). It is precisely these aspects of terrorism—the
attempt to “leap onto the world stage” and the various kinds of “uproar” that
follow—that have constituted the core of American literature’s engagement with
terrorism in recent decades. In his 2005 essay “Dangerous Characters” Benjamin
Kunkel, in a quick aside, defines the American terrorist novel as “the novel proposing
terrorists among its main characters, and meant as literature rather than disposable
suspense fiction” (Kunkel 2005, 14). This definition is serviceable (although it
assumes a clear line can be drawn between “literature” and “disposable suspense
fiction”) but fails to recognize another characteristic almost universal among
American fictional works concerning terrorism: the central interest in the terrorist’s
attempt and/or ability to alter world discourse and, particularly in the wake of
the attacks of September 11, 2001, the ways in which world discourse responds.
Although this thematic concern may be too abstract or diffuse to describe a genre as
clearly delineated as, say, cyberpunk, it does provide a shared foundation and allows
these texts to be considered as a group.
History. Novels of the late 1800s and early 1900s with terrorism themes—even
The Princess Casamassima by the American-born James—were set in Europe and
concerned European political struggles and stereotyped figures, primarily the bomb-
throwing anarchist. Although such bombings were not unknown in America, they
did not find any significant or lasting place in American literature. Terrorism itself
virtually disappeared from the Western worldview for much of the twentieth cen-
tury, displaced by the two World Wars and the advent of the Cold War, and only
reasserted itself with the anticolonial and countercultural movements of the late
1960s and, still more significantly, the growing symbiosis between television and
political violence. In this scheme, the definitive event for the reemergence of terror-
ism as a major force in Western life was the “first global terrorist broadcast,” the
abduction and eventual murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics by
the group Black September (Scanlan 2001, 12).
Despite isolated acts of terrorism within the United States in the last third of the
twentieth century (e.g., occasional, usually minor, bombings by radical political
groups; the letter bombs sent by the Unabomber; the 1993 bombing of the World
Trade Center; the 1995 Oklahoma City explosion), “terrorism” in the American
imagination, and thus in American fiction, continued to be conceived of primarily
as a phenomenon associated with foreign actors and foreign settings, primarily the
Middle East. This changed, of course, on September 11, 2001 (hereafter “9/11”),
when four American airliners hijacked by operatives of the Islamic extremist group
al-Qaeda crashed into the Pentagon, a Pennsylvania field, and the World Trade
Center, which subsequently collapsed on live television. We are still only beginning
to see how American novelists will ultimately respond to 9/11 and to a new age in
which terrorism is central to American political discourse. As Kunkel notes, fiction
 TERRORISM FICTION 997

TERRORISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY?

Until recent years, terrorism played a relatively minor role in American literature, largely
because it occupied a relatively minor place within the American imagination. In Plotting Terror,
her seminal 2001 study of the relationship between novelists and terrorists in contemporary
fiction, Margaret Scanlan argues that the first significant fictional texts about terrorism were
produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by authors such as Henry James,
Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Joseph Conrad.

“registers historical change profoundly but not swiftly, for the simple reason that it
usually takes several years to conceive, write, revise and publish a book” (Kunkel
2005, 14). At this writing major American works that address 9/11 and its
aftermath have begun to appear, but it is possible to see them as still functioning in
a primarily reactive mode, not yet breaking new ground in suggesting ways we can
conceive of and come to terms with our shared new reality. It is clear, at any rate,
that American terrorist fiction will continue to be shaped and changed by 9/11 for
many years to come, in ways that we can, for the moment, only begin to guess.

Trends and Themes

Landmarks of American Terrorist Fiction Prior to 9/11
Thomas Harris, Black Sunday (1975). As noted previously, Kunkel, in defining
American terrorist fiction, is at pains to distinguish it from works that can be easily
labeled as “disposable suspense fiction.” Scanlan, in Plotting Terror, is similarly
dismissive of “a popular fiction” that directly emulates “the quick sound bites,
glossy images, scandals, and explosions of television programming” and that “does
not make too many demands on its readers” (Scanlan 2001, 161). Terrorists have,
over the past few decades, played an increasingly prominent role as the villains of
such texts, and although they do not properly fall within the bounds of this study,
it is worth looking at one of the most visible and widely imitated of these narratives
in order to consider the boundaries between “serious” and “disposable” fiction.
Highly successful when published, and as filmed two years later by the director
John Frankenheimer, Black Sunday concerns an attempt by operatives of the real-
life terrorist group Black September to detonate a bomb in a blimp flying over the
Super Bowl, thus killing thousands of spectators, including the President of the
United States. Although Black September orchestrates and backs the scheme, its
main operative is an American, Michael Lander, who has become mentally unbal-
anced due to years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and his subsequent failure to
return to mainstream American life or to maintain his marriage. The terrorist plot
is opposed by agents of the American FBI and Israeli Mossad, and the suspense of
the novel and the engagement of the reader depend entirely on the question of
whether they will succeed in preventing the detonation.
Black Sunday is undeniably gripping, but the terrorists within it are almost
entirely divorced from any sense of historical or geographic reality; they exist only
to be opposed and defeated by the story’s heroes. Given the focus on and charac-
terization of Lander, even much of this function is displaced onto the traumatic
American experience in Vietnam, making the treatment of terrorism still more
incidental to the story. There is no sustained effort in the book to understand the
998 TERRORISM FICTION

terrorists themselves, or terrorism as a strategy; there is no serious consideration of

what the aftermath of their plot would be, beyond the straightforward calculation
of the physical harm done. These absences mark the distinction between the kind of
sensationalist narratives dismissed by Kunkel and Scanlan and the more serious,
literary texts we are classifying as “terrorism fiction” for the purposes of this essay.
That said, Black Sunday has been very influential and can be seen as the vanguard
of a range of narratives in which “terrorist” serves as the unexamined label applied
to villains to be overcome in binary confrontations between good and evil. The use
of terrorists in such roles became particularly popular with the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the end of the Cold War, which effectively eliminated Russians as the bad
guys of choice. The novels of Tom Clancy, for example, which exist primarily to
fetishize the martial technology of the United States, move from confrontations with
the Soviet military to showdowns with figures described on book jackets with terms
like “Middle Eastern madmen.” At this writing probably the most culturally visible
example of this use of terrorism is the television series 24. Depending upon exactly
what form they take, narratives of this kind might be considered adventure fiction,
true crime fiction, military literature, mystery fiction, spy fiction, or techno-thrillers.
Don DeLillo, Mao II (1991). When the journal Studies in the Novel published a
special issue on “Terrorism and the Postmodern Novel” in 2004, seven of the ten
essays included mentioned Don DeLillo, with five focusing extensively on his work.
Similarly, in Margaret Scanlan’s Plotting Terror, the first chapter is dedicated to
DeLillo, and specifically Mao II. Put simply, Don DeLillo is the key figure in
American literature’s recent engagement with terrorism, and Mao II is the key text
for understanding his conception of terrorism, a conception that has proved highly
influential.
By the time he came to Mao II, his eleventh novel, DeLillo had already indicated
a significant interest in terrorism in his earlier novels. In Players (1977), the central
character, Lyle Wynant, witnesses a murder on the floor of the New York Stock
Exchange and is drawn into the conspiracy of the group of terrorists who commit-
ted it and who plan further attacks against Wall Street. In The Names (1982), a
group of Americans in Greece are intrigued and eventually endangered by a terrorist
cult that kills people based simply on the spelling of their names. In both these early
works, the “terrorist” groups lack readily accessible political motivation and are
detached from any meaningful sense of history or ideology. They are essentially
conspiracies that exist for the sheer baroque pleasure of conspiracy, illuminating the
hidden connections and ineffable forces that disrupt any stable sense of how life
operates but illustrating still more strongly DeLillo’s debt to his postmodernist pred-
ecessors, particularly Thomas Pynchon. For most critics these early works are
eclipsed by later, more ambitious and assured DeLillo texts, such as the 1988 Libra,
which is a speculative biography of Lee Harvey Oswald from his childhood through
the Kennedy assassination and his death. Whether Libra itself can properly be
considered terrorism fiction may well depend on whether the Kennedy assassination
can be treated as a terrorist act; it has never been clearly linked to any particular
political demand, and there is no compelling evidence that Oswald committed
the act with an audience in mind, therefore such an identification seems tentative
at best.
In Mao II, however, terrorism, and specifically the relationship between writing
and terrorism, takes center stage. The central figure of the book is the novelist Bill
Gray, a cult figure who has become more famous for his reclusive habits than his
 TERRORISM FICTION 999

two published novels. Gray is reminiscent of J.D. Salinger or Pynchon but has most
frequently been seen by critics as a stand-in for DeLillo himself. In the first section
of the book Brita Nilsson, a photojournalist who has worked in war zones but is
now compiling a collection of portraits of famous authors, travels to Gray’s
secluded home, becoming the first outsider to meet or speak with him in many years.
As they talk while she is photographing him, she mentions a fear of terrorists that
leads her to take elaborate precautions when she travels. This prompts Bill to begin
discussing terrorists and how they have robbed him of his sense of power as a
novelist:

There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become
famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence. . . . Years ago I used
to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-
makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human conscious-
ness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated. (DeLillo 1991, 41)

Nilsson seems to regard this essentially as meandering chat, but the remainder of
the book charts Gray’s attempt to reclaim some of the power he feels he has lost to
terrorism. Abandoning the third novel he has completed but feels unable to publish,
Gray begins a solitary journey to the Middle East in a quixotic attempt to trade
himself for a poet who has been taken hostage by a terrorist group in Lebanon, thus
making use of the fame that, given the powerlessness of art, has become his only
tool for attempting to promote change. Along the way he becomes acquainted with
George Haddad, a character with ambiguous connections to both the literary and
the terrorist worlds, and in conversations with him he expands upon the points he
has made to Nilsson:

novelists and terrorists are playing a zero-sum game. . . . What terrorists gain, novel-
ists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our
decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. . . . Beckett is the last writer to shape the
way we think and see. After him, the major work involves midair explosions and
crumbled buildings. (DeLillo 1991, 156–157)

Haddad extrapolates from this premise, suggesting that terrorists must then be
“the only possible heroes for our time,” and that “in societies reduced to blur and
glut . . . only the terrorist stands outside.” Gray rejects such idealization as “pure
myth,” (DeLillo 1991, 158), but this idea—that terrorists have displaced novel-
ists as the only possible source of meaningful resistance—permeates Mao II and
has become the haunting possibility that must be confronted in any consideration
of the relationship between artistic creation and terrorist violence. It is an idea
that Scanlan echoes in Plotting Terror when she postulates “both writers and
terrorists . . . as remnants of a romantic belief in the power of marginalized
persons to transform history” (Scanlan 2001, 2).
Gray rejects Haddad’s claims, but the remainder of Mao II presents little reason
to be optimistic about the power of writers. Struck by a car in Cyprus, Gray dies in
the hold of a tanker taking him to Lebanon, whereupon the very identity that has
become his only resource is stolen from his body and sold to “some militia in
Beirut” (DeLillo 1991, 217). Since nobody knows of his self-appointed mission,
even the fame that is the remnant of his artistic ability proves useless. Indeed, the
1000 TERRORISM FICTION

very idea of being a writer seems suffused with nostalgia in Mao II, as though the
novelist has already faded completely into obsolescence. What makes the novel a
touchstone of recent American treatments of terrorism is the connection Gray
explicitly makes, and which subsequent authors of terrorism fiction freely draw
upon: the competition between writers and terrorists for the right and the ability to
play a role on the world stage, to possess a voice that can be raised in resistance.
Paul Auster, Leviathan (1992). Something similar to Gray’s fate befalls another
novelist who abandons writing in search of some more effective means of action:
Bejamin Sachs, the central character of Leviathan (a novel dedicated to Don
DeLillo). Sachs, however, goes beyond Gray, not merely seeking interaction with
terrorists but abandoning writing to become one himself.
In Leviathan the author’s obvious, thinly fictionalized counterpart is not Sachs
but rather his best friend and fellow novelist, Peter Aaron, who shares with Auster
not only a set of initials but also the broad outlines of a biography. Leviathan takes
the form of a memoir written by Aaron, immediately after he learns Sachs has died,
in an effort to justify—or at least make comprehensible—Sachs’s actions to the
authorities who have been pursuing him. A left-leaning writer who defines his
occupation largely in terms of political opposition and resistance, Sachs finds him-
self in “the era of Ronald Reagan” becoming “increasingly marginalized . . . in the
present climate of selfishness and intolerance, of moronic, chest-pounding
Americanism, his opinions sounded curiously harsh and moralistic” (Auster 1992,
116). A series of accidents and violent encounters further convince Sachs not only
that writing is useless as a means of promoting change but also that restricting his
actions to writing is cowardly: “‘for all my self-righteous opinions and embattled
stances, I’d never put myself on the line’” (Auster 1992, 253). He changes tactics,
deciding that “‘there was a moral justification for certain forms of political violence.
Terrorism had its place in the struggle . . . for enlightening the public about the
nature of institutional power’” (Auster 1992, 252). Sachs reinvents himself, rather
melodramatically, as “the Phantom of Liberty,” and begins traveling around the
United States blowing up replicas of the Statue of Liberty. He takes care that nobody
is injured by his actions and accompanies his explosions with brief, idealistic
messages urging a renewed dedication to democracy and a charitable attitude
toward others.
Sachs keeps this routine up for more than two years before apparently being
killed in a mishap with one of his bombs, but despite his sense that he is making “a
much greater mark than he had ever thought possible” (Auster 1992, 263),
Leviathan cannot quite bring itself to endorse his notion that he has arrived at an
effective means of political articulation. Considering Sachs’s frequently mentioned
brilliance as a writer, for example, the messages that accompany his explosions are
stunningly banal. An example: “‘Neglect the children, and we destroy ourselves. We
exist in the present only to the degree that we put our faith in the future” (Auster
1992, 243–244). This resembles a Whitney Houston ballad rather more than seri-
ous political discourse. The evidence that the Phantom is “making a mark” is simi-
larly thin: “Phantom of Liberty T-shirts and buttons were on sale in novelty shops,
jokes had begun to circulate, and just last month two strippers in Chicago had pre-
sented an act in which the Statue of Liberty was gradually disrobed and then
seduced by the Phantom” (Auster 1992, 263). Far from providing the inescapable
narrative that is the aim of terrorist action, Sachs has only generated fodder for the
grinding wheels of popular consumption. Surrendering his status as a writer has
 TERRORISM FICTION 1001

only made Sachs more complicit in the system he opposes. That said, this does not
necessarily mean that he would have been better off as a writer. His friend Aaron
remains a novelist, but the text he produces—Leviathan—is written strictly for offi-
cial consumption, to be given to the FBI only when and if they figure out that Sachs
had been the Phantom. In fact, Aaron hopes that this will not happen, feeling that
“the best possible outcome” would be “a perfect standstill, not one word spoken by
either side” (Auster 1992, 3). Aaron, then, is a writer reduced to the hope that he
will never be read, whose text can at best serve no purpose beyond furthering the
knowledge of the state; he is the writer rendered utterly compliant, incapable of
resistance. Leviathan essentially echoes Mao II’s doubts about the relevance of the
writer in an age of terrorism, only adding the additional thought that the terrorist,
too, is ultimately just as powerless.
Philip Roth, Operation Shylock (1993) and American Pastoral (1997). Whereas
DeLillo and Auster encourage, or at least allow, an identification of themselves with
their characters, such an entanglement of fact and fiction is never more explicit than
in Operation Shylock, a text that is packaged as a novel but that for much of its
length seems more accurately described by its subtitle: A Confession. Shylock is
narrated by “Philip Roth,” a Jewish American author whose most famous book is
Portnoy’s Complaint and whose biography matches precisely with the “real”
Roth’s. The preface to the book claims that it is “as accurate an account as I am able
to give of actual occurrences that I lived through during my middle fifties and that
culminated, early in 1988, in my agreeing to undertake an intelligence-gathering
operation for Israel’s foreign intelligence service” (Roth 1993, 13). Space does not
permit here a full exploration of Shylock’s labyrinthine narrative shape and its
narrator’s frequently baffling encounters with doubles, spies, and terrorists. For our
immediate purposes, what is most significant is the narrator’s attempt to write about
his experiences and how that attempt is frustrated. Having produced a manuscript
that details his adventures, “Roth” shows it to Louis Smilesburger, the Mossad
operative who has played a significant role in the narrative, eventually recruiting
“Roth” and dispatching him on his “intelligence-gathering operation” to Athens.
Smilesburger, a genial if vaguely ominous figure, generally approves of “Roth’s”
decision to write the book (which is, of course, Operation Shylock itself) but asks
for one change: the omission of Chapter 11, “twelve thousand words describing the
people I convened with in Athens, the circumstances that brought us together, and
the subsequent expedition, to a second European capital” (Roth 1993, 357). Smiles-
burger claims not only that revealing the details of the operation will endanger
ongoing Israeli interests but also that the account “Roth” has written is in fact
laughably inaccurate: “‘you haven’t the slightest idea of what happened. You grasp
almost nothing of the objective reality. Its meaning evades you completely’” (Roth
1993, 390). He suggests, in fact, that “‘It might be altogether accurate to call the
entire five hundred and forty-seven pages hypothetical formulation,’” that to label
the narrative “‘a subjectivist fable . . . solves everything’” (Roth 1993, 390–91). An
implication of this “solution,” of course, is that fiction is safe because it can have
no significant force or meaning in the “real” world. Though “Roth” reacts angrily
to this suggestion and claims to be in no way “obliged to him, his agency, or the
state of Israel to suppress those forty-odd pages” (Roth 1993, 357), Smilesburger
presses his argument, offering “Roth” money and even implying that the Mossad
might feel obliged to destroy his reputation—again figured here as the novelist’s
most important attribute—if he publishes Chapter 11. Smilesburger, in fact, is given
1002 TERRORISM FICTION

the final line of the novel proper: “‘Let your Jewish conscience be your guide’”
(Roth 1993, 398).
The page immediately following contains a brief “Note to the Reader” that
employs almost exactly a wording “Roth” had considered and rejected earlier in the
novel: “This book is a work of fiction . . . This confession is false” (Roth 1993,
399). Chapter 11, of course, does not appear. The note to the reader perfectly book-
ends and perfectly contradicts the preface, and we are left with a narrative that folds
in upon itself, simultaneously claiming the status of both fiction and fact. Whatever
the factual nature of Operation Shylock, it goes even further than Mao II in
illustrating the fundamental irrelevance of the writer in a setting contested by the
competing narratives of terrorism and the state. “Roth” himself acknowledges that
allowing Smilesburger to inspect his manuscript—a step, significantly, that he takes
although it could be easily avoided—“ran counter to all the inclinations of one
whose independence as a writer, whose counter-suggestiveness as a writer, was
simply second nature” (Roth 1993, 377). In effect, however, “Roth” has already
surrendered the status of writer. His meaningful actions in the novel are taken not
as a novelist, but as an operative of the state, and they are precisely the actions that
he ultimately chooses to be silent about—precisely the actions that are inaccessible
to him as a writer. It is the state that has become the writer, casting “Roth” as a
character in a narrative that he confesses he is incapable of even understanding.
Indeed, he does not even understand why he allows himself to be taken up in it: “I
could not name for myself what it was that drew me in or understand whether what
was impinging on this decision was absolutely everything or absolutely nothing”
(Roth 1993, 358). Scanlan reads Operation Shylock as implying that “art and
terrorism are equally illusory and politically ineffective,” as marking the last gasp of
a dying belief “that marginalized people can change the world” (Scanlan 2001,
123). Indeed, by the end of the novel “Roth” has been reduced from an author to
nothing more than a character, easily manipulated by forces beyond his knowledge
or control. That he shares the name and biography of his literal creator in itself
efficiently indicates where Roth might rank the power and influence of the writer at
this stage in history.
Four years later Roth returned to the theme of terrorism and the writer’s power
in American Pastoral, albeit here in a domestic context and through a more
conventional fictional frame. Pastoral is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, who has
been Roth’s alter ego in many books and who is here concerned with the life and
fate of Seymour “the Swede” Levov, a childhood acquaintance he learns has recently
died. In the early 1940s, the Swede, a high school student a few years older than
Zuckerman, had been a hero to the Jewish population of Newark because of his
tremendous athletic feats, coupled with his blue-eyed, blond good looks and
dignified, mature behavior. In years of war and stress, the Swede seemed to repre-
sent success and hope, hope above all for assimilation and acceptance into the
American mainstream; the Swede was “a boy as close to a goy as we were going to
get” (Roth 1998, 10).
When Zuckerman encounters the Swede again decades later, as both men have
entered their declining years, it seems that the Swede has completely fulfilled this
early promise, becoming a successful and admired businessman and the head of his
own family of accomplished sons. Indeed, his talk of himself—and his endless brag-
ging about his sons—reflect a life and a personality so completely identified with the
American ideal that Zuckerman comes to think that he lacks any interior life, any
 TERRORISM FICTION 1003

sense of irony or imperfection at all, that “there’s nothing here but what you’re
looking at. . . . He is not faking all this virginity. You’re craving depths that don’t
exist” (Roth 1998, 39).
A few months later, however, Zuckerman learns at his high school reunion that
the Swede has died and learns moreover the central tragedy of his life, which he had
kept hidden from Zuckerman during their meeting: in his first marriage the Swede
had a daughter, Merry, who in 1968 detonated a bomb in a rural post office to
protest the Vietnam War, killing a doctor and earning herself the media nickname
“the Rimrock Bomber.” For the Swede’s brother, who tells Zuckerman this, the
bombing was more a matter of family than national politics: “There was no way
back for my brother from that bomb. That bomb detonated his life. His perfect life
was over. Just what she had in mind” (Roth 1998, 69). Shortly afterward, in the
midst of a dance with an old sweetheart, Zuckerman himself disappears as the novel
transforms into his “realistic chronicle,” his attempt to imagine the Swede’s life and
reconcile the banal portrait of the American dream he met with his new knowledge
of the “daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and
into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and
the desperation of the counterpastoral—into the indigenous American berserk”
(Roth 1998, 86).
Zuckerman can conjure any number of possible explanations for Merry’s act—
anger over a childhood stutter, unresolved sexual tension with her father, the
conflicts inherent to the mixed marriage between the Swede and Merry’s Christian
mother—but both he and the reader remain aware throughout that, however
convincingly he imagines his way into the Swede’s head, it remains a dream, a
reverie conjured on the dance floor. No real answer is possible; the terrorist act here
is beyond understanding or explanation, a sign only of the impossibility of under-
standing. Alex Houen writes that terrorism blows “a hole in the very fabric of every-
dayness,” that it “is not just a rupture in history, then, but a rupture of history,” a
denial of the very possibility of crafting a meaningful narrative (Houen 2002, 14).
American Pastoral is a demonstration of this function, moving beyond DeLillo’s fear
that terrorism has become the only means of inscribing resistance to the still more
troubling possibility that terrorism cannot be read at all.
Kinky Friedman, The Mile High Club (2000). Although it is part of a humorous
mystery series that clearly belongs within the popular tradition elided by Kunkel and
Scanlan, The Mile High Club by country singer turned detective novelist Kinky
Friedman is an indication that by the end of the twentieth century some trace of the
ambiguities and anxieties the terrorist had come to represent for “serious” authors
could be found even in the most apparently ephemeral of genres. Like most of
Friedman’s books, The Mile High Club concerns the adventures of a thinly fiction-
alized version of himself (here, for the sake of clarity, referred to as “Kinky”) who
operates as a private detective in New York City. The books are known primarily
for their humorous tone and witty use of language but occasionally address very
dark subjects with an undertone of bleak fatalism. Mile High takes this tendency to
extremes in detailing how Kinky becomes involved with, and ultimately enables, a
terrorist plot.
The central plot revolves around the contents of a pink suitcase, which comes into
Kinky’s possession when Khadija, a beautiful woman he meets on a flight to New
York, asks him to watch it while she goes to the restroom. When the plane lands
Kinky finds that Khadija has vanished, and he feels that he has little choice but to
1004 TERRORISM FICTION

take the case home with him. There he finds that he has become an object of interest
to the State Department, which is clearly seeking both Khadija and her case. Kinky
could, of course, turn the case over to them; his decision not to do so appears to
arise partly out of a sense of chivalric duty to Khadija and partly out of a fear that
he will be in trouble himself if he does so, but it also derives largely, of course, from
the private detective’s traditional reliance on his own abilities and distrust of author-
ity. Neither prevents him from opening the locked case to discover “a large plastic
Baggie full of enough passports to make a customs agent put in for overtime.” The
passports are from various countries and in various names, though many of the
women pictured resemble Khadija and many of the men pictured appear related to
her. Kinky’s friend Rambam, a “real” detective, offers an opinion troubling enough
when Mile High was published and even more so now: “‘I think you’re looking at
how the next bunch of World Trade Center bombers are planning to get away’”
(Friedman 2000, 65). This line of dialogue introduces the theme of terrorism into
the novel, but Mile High never really gets more specific than this concerning exactly
who its “terrorists” are; they are never identified or understood beyond simplistic
representations of Middle Eastern Muslims opposed, for unspecified reasons, to
Israel and the United States. To a large degree, in other words, the novel participates
in the populist understanding of terrorism, which emphasizes hostility and otherness
over nuance and specific political aims.
Kinky hides the passports in the bottom of his cat’s litter box and continues to
withhold them both from the State Department and from Khadija, who does even-
tually reappear. His hope that she is merely a dupe of the actual terrorists is greatly
enhanced by their two sexual encounters, though neither, significantly, involves
actual intercourse. Israeli agents also become involved in the hunt for the passports,
as does Khadija’s brother Ahkmed, who late in the novel invades Kinky’s loft and
nearly kills him in a brawl. Shortly after this fight, Khadija calls and begs Kinky to
come to her hotel room, but the call is a ruse—when Kinky returns from the unkept
rendezvous, he finds that the passports have, at last, been discovered and taken.
Significantly, it is not Kinky but, again, Rambam who puts together the pieces of
the puzzle, deducing that the terrorists could only have realized the passports were
in the litter box by combining knowledge from Ahkmed’s invasion (when the cat, in
protest, has scattered her waste throughout the apartment) with knowledge from
Khadija’s earlier visit (before this occurred)—and that, in fact, there is no Khadija
and never has been a Khadija, but only Ahkmed in disguise.
The immediate inclination is to treat this as a joke, played largely at the expense
of traditional mysteries and the conventional image of the private eye as masculine
hero. Friedman has not only managed to craft a mystery that hinges upon the
placement of feline feces but also has maneuvered his decidedly heterosexual hero
into not one but two homosexual encounters. That the hero is, to a large degree,
himself might be taken simply as adding to the joke, though there is clearly a
subversion of normative genre expectations. What truly renders The Mile High
Club disturbing, however, and expels it from the realm of the merely popular and
transient, is its conclusion. In the very brief final chapter of the novel, Kinky is
again on a plane when a beautiful woman asks him to watch her bag. This leads
directly into the novel’s final paragraph: “After she’d gone, a flight attendant came
by with a batch of newspapers and I took one at random and unfolded it. As long
as I live I’ll never forget the headline. It read: TWA FLIGHT 800 BLOWN FROM
THE SKIES. TERRORISM SUSPECTED” (Friedman 2000, 223). The implication
 TERRORISM FICTION 1005

that the passports Kinky failed to adequately preserve played a role in the tragedy
is clear and, particularly given the invocation of an actual airline disaster, provides
a stunning end to the novel, one that could not be suffered to stand in the context
of any normative detective story. The novels we have examined by DeLillo, Auster,
and Roth propose that the writer is silenced in the age of terrorism, but surely The
Mile High Club is just as troubling in its suggestion that the autonomous individ-
ual, the hero who can act outside the control of the dominant system, is just as
powerless, just as impotent, just as incapable of true understanding, as the writer.
Although 9/11 had not yet occurred, Freidman’s text provides a fitting end to a
decade in which American fiction had become increasingly troubled by the possi-
bilities of terror.

Contexts and Issues

American Terrorist Fiction after 9/11. The attacks of 2001 clearly called for a new kind
of terrorism fiction; from the perspective of the smoldering remains of the World
Trade Center, the activities of the Phantom of Liberty or the Rimrock Bomber barely
seem to qualify as terrorism at all. Only a little more than three months after 9/11,
DeLillo himself, in an essay entitled “In the Ruins of the Future,” sought to insti-
gate a consideration of how the American writer could meaningfully respond to an
event of such magnitude. Significantly, he begins by seeking an understanding of the
terrorists themselves, seeing them as reacting against “the power of American
culture to penetrate every wall, home, life and mind. Terror’s response is a narrative
that has been developing over years, only now becoming inescapable.” The polyva-
lent, continual babble of American narrativizing is answered, shockingly, by the
singular plot of terror, which seeks to deaden and silence multiplicity: “Plots reduce
the world.” In this reading of the terrorist attacks DeLillo echoes Murray Jay
Siskind, the eccentric intellectual of his 1985 White Noise, who tells his friend Jack
to deal with impending death by becoming a killer rather than a dier, by plotting a
murder: “We start our lives in chaos. . . . To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and
control” (DeLillo 1998, 291–292).
He follows Siskind in interpreting the formation of narrative through violence as one
means of affirming the coherent self, but DeLillo does not go on to advocate that we
ourselves become killers. Rather, his purposefully fragmented and digressive essay
argues forcibly that we respond to plot with plots, that we continue to insist upon our
own investment in a ceaseless variety of narrative. The very stories we tell of the
disaster become the crucial basis of our survival and recovery: “There are 100,000
stories crisscrossing New York, Washington, and the world. . . . There are the doctors’
appointments that saved lives, the cell phones that were used to report the hijackings”
(2001). Tellingly, even the stories of those who invent their involvement in the attacks
become significant: “This is also the counternarrative, a shadow history of false mem-
ories and imagined loss” (2001). The centerpiece of DeLillo’s essay is the story of how
his nephew Marc and Marc’s wife and children, who live a few blocks from the towers,
react to the unfolding events of the day, at several points believing they are going to die
but eventually reaching the safety of a shelter and resuming something like normalcy.
Despite DeLillo’s acknowledgement of his relationship to the characters, the story is
valuable precisely because it is not remarkable, because it could be anyone’s story or
even an invention. What is valuable is the act of narrating itself, the refusal to be
silenced in the face of the terror narrative that threatens to overwhelm all.
1006 TERRORISM FICTION

For DeLillo the job of the writer is thus not to create another all-encompassing
narrative opposed to that of terror, but rather to insist upon a return to narrative as
personal, partial, and incomplete, to contribute to the limitless mosaic of plots that
do not insist upon domination: “the event asserts its singularity. . . . The writer tries
to give memory, tenderness and meaning to all that howling space” (2001). Nor
does the opposition to terror mean that DeLillo is prepared to position the writer as
abandoning his own stance of resistance; the writer is still seeking, like the terrorist,
to subvert the transient dominant culture of pure spectacle and consumption, “the
global momentum that seemed to be driving unmindfully toward a landscape of
consumer-robots” (2001). DeLillo makes clear, however, that the strategy of the
terrorist is a dead-end (“there is no logic in apocalypse” [2001]); he would, perhaps,
align himself instead with “the protesters in Genoa, Prague, Seattle” whose opposi-
tion to the Americanization of the globe is not fanatically one-dimensional but “a
moderating influence, trying to slow things down, even things out, hold off the
white-hot future” (2001). The writer, similarly, must resist the universalizing strate-
gies of both American hegemony and terrorist absolutism, seeking instead a middle
ground of possibility, openness, and alternatives.
The DeLillo of “In the Ruins of the Future” seems optimistic that such a writer’s
strategy will ultimately be more successful than the terrorist’s; his essay concludes
on a note of faith that New York City will again become a place that “will accom-
modate every language, ritual, belief and opinion” (2001). This optimism is
surprising not only because it followed so closely upon 9/11 but also because it is at
odds with the darker implications of much recent fiction that addresses terrorism
and the writer’s relationship to it, including DeLillo’s own.
It remains to be seen how closely DeLillo’s own fiction will correspond with the
optimism of his essay; his Falling Man, a novel said to directly address the events of
9/11, is scheduled to be published in June 2008. By and large American fiction is
still functioning in a responsive state, reacting against the attacks rather than
seeking to present new alternatives or viewpoints. Terrorism fiction since 9/11 has
been dominated by three impulses: the attempt to come to terms with the shock of
the attacks themselves; a quest, usually failed, to understand and represent terror-
ism in a coherent and comprehensible way; and a satiric dismay with the way the
national discourse, and particularly political discourse, has increasingly treated
the attacks and terrorism in general in a reductive, jingoistic way, particularly in the
service of military adventures abroad.
The cartoonist Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) provides an
instructive example of how these impulses play out. Spiegelman previously won
acclaim for Maus (1986), an autobiographical graphic novel in which he presented
his struggle to come to terms with his father, a concentration camp survivor (see
holocaust literature). The first part of No Towers consists of a series of oversized
comic strips Spiegelman published, mostly in European periodicals, beginning in
2002. Employing a collagelike variety of graphic styles and page layouts, Spiegelman
begins by trying to represent his own experiences on the fateful day; much like
DeLillo’s nephew, Spiegelman lived only a few blocks from the towers and spent
9/11 in a frantic effort to unite his family and reach safety, all the while witnessing
the actual collapse of the buildings. The early strips very much have the feel of a
man revisiting a trauma over and over again in an attempt to frame it in a mean-
ingful way, with certain images—most notably the north tower’s structure seeming
to glow with heat just before it collapses—recurring on almost every page.
 TERRORISM FICTION 1007

As the strips progress, however, they become increasingly preoccupied not with
9/11 itself but with the response of the Bush administration and the rush to war in
Afghanistan and, later, Iraq. Spiegelman’s self-images increasingly express despair:
“I thought I’d lose my life on 9/11—I lost my mind soon after, and lost my last speck
of faith in the U.S.A. when this cabal took over” (Spiegelman 2004, 8). The oppor-
tunities he saw for renewal and deeper understanding in the original event are lost:
“The towers have come to loom far larger than life . . . but they seem to get smaller
every day” (Spiegelman 2004, 10). Ultimately, it seems, Spiegelman abandons the
effort to say anything meaningful himself about either the attacks or their aftermath;
the second part of No Towers is given over to a series of reproductions of colorful,
oversized comic strips from the first decades of the twentieth century. Although
many of these strips contain images that resonate with the disaster—a giant pushing
his way through the buildings of New York City, a firecracker set off during a
reading of the Declaration of Independence—Spiegelman readily confesses that their
central appeal is essentially escapist. They are “vital, unpretentious ephemera from
the optimistic dawn of the 20th century . . . they were just right for an end-of-the-
world moment” (Spiegelman 2004, 11). Taken as a whole, No Towers is the work
of a mind struggling to come to terms with its historical moment and ultimately
unable to express much beyond pain, confusion, and an urgent desire for solace and
sense. In different ways and in different keys, these are the notes American terror-
ism fiction is still striking.
Lorraine Adams, Harbor (2004). Although it appeared three years after 9/11,
Harbor is conspicuously set in the years before the attacks and clearly shows the
influence of Adams’s work as an investigative reporter for The Washington Post,
particularly her work on FBI counterterrorism squads. The central figure of the
book is Aziz Arkoun, an Algerian who stows away on a cargo ship and arrives in
Boston in the mid-1990s. Through flashbacks spaced throughout the book, we come
to understand that Aziz has fled his native country because of the horrific civil war
there driven largely by fundamentalist Islamic militias. Aziz knows Americans do
not understand or care about his country: “‘The CIA has no one in Algeria. If they
did, how would they tell who is who? I am Algerian, and I could not tell’” (Adams
2004, 278). Aziz himself had mistakenly been taken into one of the militias and
forced to do horrible things to preserve his own life; now his only goal is to find “a
place where you could talk, truly talk, and say whatever it was that haunted you at
night alone” (Adams 2004, 115).
In America Aziz becomes associated with a loose network of fellow refugees,
many of whom he had known in his home village of Arzew, and most of whom, like
him, are in the United States illegally. Like Aziz, most of them are only seeking to
find a comfortable life for themselves away from the dangers of their home, and
most of them are not religious and feel only disdain for those motivated by religious
extremism: “If people wanted to believe this jihad shit, so be it” (Adams 2004, 269).
A number of them are, however, involved in illegal activities, at least in part because
they are unable to obtain well-paying jobs. Aziz’s cousin Rafik, the first to take him
in when he arrives, is at the center of these activities, smuggling cigarettes and hash
and running ambitious shoplifting schemes. Through these activities he becomes
associated with a few characters who do appear to be Islamic fundamentalists
preparing for a terrorist attack within the United States. These characters, however,
are kept almost entirely offstage; Aziz and most of his friends are entirely innocent
of such plans or motivations. Even when one of his closest friends, Ghazi,
1008 TERRORISM FICTION

contemplates going to Afghanistan to join the jihad, it is only because he can think
of no other method of suicide that will “show your father . . . you were a man”
(Adams 2004, 262).
Aziz and his friends, then, are represented in an almost entirely sympathetic way
as essentially innocents seeking to find their way in a strange and often hostile
culture after having suffered greatly in their previous lives. If they do not understand
American culture, however, still less does it understand them, and this is where
Harbor discovers its real tragedy. In the second half of the book the story of Aziz
and his fellow Algerians is interlaced with scenes of FBI agents, and eventually an
entire interagency task force, investigating them as potential terrorists. The FBI
agents themselves are also represented sympathetically—they obviously mean well
and are interested in arriving at the truth, not simply persecuting people—but from
the beginning they are handicapped by a near-total misunderstanding of the
Algerians. Only one of the agents speaks Arabic, and then only well enough to know
he cannot really grasp regional variations; the head of the task force has to be told,
very late in the book, that there is in fact a war happening in Algeria. Adams is
careful to make the agents aware of their shortcomings: “‘we don’t have to know
them. We can’t, ever. We can just piece something here with something there and
draw logical conclusions. It’s flawed, of course it’s flawed. But it’s better than the
alternative’” (Adams 2004, 282). Whether it is actually better is debatable. In the
closing scenes of the book the FBI arrests almost all the Algerian characters, result-
ing in a publicity coup, but we learn that the guiltiest easily get away whereas the
most innocent receive harsh and excessive sentences. Aziz himself is deported back
to Algeria, where he disappears, almost certainly killed. Harbor, ultimately, is less
about terrorism than it is about the American inability to understand or reliably
identify the terrorist, and the harm that is done by that misunderstanding.
Nicholson Baker, Checkpoint (2004). Like Harbor, Nicholson Baker’s slim novel
Checkpoint is not concerned primarily with terrorism itself but rather with the
official response to terrorism and the ways in which a discourse shaped by terror
leads to tragedy. Whereas Adams is willing to assign the failings of her FBI charac-
ters to well-intentioned ignorance, Baker’s text is shaped by an angry conviction that
the Bush administration’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are due to willfully selfish,
shortsighted disinterest in doing the right thing. In No Towers, Spiegelman had
begun to document the anger he felt over the transmutation of 9/11 into jingoistic
war frenzy; Checkpoint represents this anger taken to its extreme.
In form, the book deliberately recalls Baker’s 1992 Vox, which consisted in its
entirety of a phone conversation between a man and a woman culminating in an
episode of phone sex. Checkpoint similarly takes the form of a single long conver-
sation, this one between two men in a Washington, D.C., hotel room. The conver-
sation is recorded, and the novel takes the form of a transcript of the recording, with
each speaker identified as he would be in a play. Jay, the first speaker, has summoned
his old friend Ben to the hotel room where, at the beginning of the book, he tells
him that he is going to assassinate President Bush.
At the time of its publication Checkpoint was denounced by some conservative
commentators as being virtually an act of treason, but although it expresses some
genuine anger toward Bush, it is important to note that the book does not endorse
Jay’s plan. Jay, in fact, is represented as being clearly unbalanced; he speaks of a his-
tory of troubled relationships and transient jobs, and among the weapons he plans
to use in his assault are “radio-controlled flying saws” (Baker 2004, 14) and “these
 TERRORISM FICTION 1009

homing bullets, and all you had to do was put the bullets in a box along with a pho-
tograph of the person you wanted to shoot and they were able to seek that person
out” (Baker 2004, 63). Ben, although acknowledging his own distaste for Bush,
never agrees to Jay’s plan or even indicates that he thinks it would be the right thing
to do, and at the end of the book he succeeds in disarming Jay and persuading him
to leave the room peacefully.
The identification of Checkpoint as terrorism fiction is somewhat tentative. Jay’s
proposed action itself cannot be described as clearly terrorist, since its primary
intention is not to make a political point to a watching audience but simply to
punish someone through the use of violence. Nor does Jay and Ben’s wandering
conversation touch explicitly upon terrorism, except when Jay describes part of the
American campaign in Iraq as “so obviously terror bombing” (Baker 2004, 19);
indeed, their neglect of the topic of 9/11 is so complete that it must be deliberate on
Baker’s part. What qualifies the book as terrorism fiction is less its content than its
context, the understanding on the part of the reader that the actions Bush has taken
that have upset Jay to this degree have been licensed, in the national discourse, by
the continual invocations of 9/11 and the specter of terrorism in general. Check-
point is a conversation that makes sense only as a critique of the larger conversation
provoked by 9/11. The basic point is the same as the one Adams makes in Harbor:
we have failed to understand or account for our true enemy, instead turning against
the innocent. Where Adams’s response to this is sadness, however, Baker’s is rage.
John Updike, Terrorist (2006). To date, John Updike is the most visible and
prominent American author to undertake the daunting task of directly representing
the mind of a terrorist in the wake of 9/11. The central figure of Terrorist is Ahmad
Mulloy, born in impoverished New Prospect, New Jersey, to an Irish-American
mother and an Egyptian father and about to graduate high school as the book
opens. Ahmad’s father was not particularly religious and abandoned the family
when Ahmad was an infant; despite this, Ahmad has, since the age of eleven, sought
his identity in Islam, driven by his constant sense that “God is another person close
beside him, a Siamese twin attached in every part, inside and out, and to whom he
can turn in every moment in prayer. God is his happiness” (Updike 2006, 40).
Ahmad is angered and confused by what he perceives as the Godlessness of
American society. His desire to be complete in his devotion to God leaves him open
to fairly transparent manipulation by his imam, who steers him away from prepa-
ration for college and into a job driving a truck for a furniture business owned by
Lebanese immigrants. Charlie Chebab, the son of the business’s owner, rides along
with Ahmad on his deliveries, testing him through various conversations about
history, religion, and politics. At one point the two men look across the water to the
place where the towers had been, and Charlie lectures Ahmad on the necessity of
opposing “the enemies around us, the children and fat people in shorts giving us
their dirty looks” (Updike 2006, 187), eventually eliciting Ahmad’s willingness to
die in this cause. Gradually the plan becomes clear: Ahmad is to drive a truck full
of explosives into the Lincoln Tunnel and detonate it, flooding the tunnel and
causing untold deaths. Having grown increasingly disgusted with the society that
surrounds him, Ahmad anticipates his mission with “high, selfless joy” (Updike
2006, 274).
The book’s second major character is Jack Levy, a guidance counselor caught in
an unhappy marriage and nearing retirement at Ahmad’s school. Jack takes an inter-
est in Ahmad, although this interest is rapidly displaced by his interest in Ahmad’s
1010 TERRORISM FICTION

mother, with whom he has an affair. A nonpracticing Jew, Jack can only confirm
Ahmad’s sense of American life as lacking a sense of the divine: “‘I was born fallen
away. My father hated Judaism, and his father before him. They blamed religion for
the world’s misery—it reconciled people to their problems’” (Updike 2006, 295).
Despite his lack of faith, however, Jack finds the courage—when a chain of rather
unlikely coincidences lead to him learning of Ahmad’s plan—to climb into the cab
of the truck with him, in an attempt to talk him out of pushing the button on his
bomb.
Nothing about their subsequent conversation indicates that he succeeds; Ahmad
easily disposes of Jack’s arguments and seems unwavering in his commitment to his
mission. Jack himself comes to accept the apparently inevitable, refusing to leave the
truck when he has the opportunity and even urging Ahmad to go through with it:
“‘Why should I care? A woman I was crazy about has ditched me, my job is a drag,
I wake up every morning at four and can’t get back to sleep’” (Updike 2006, 303).
It is not Jack who keeps Ahmad’s hand from the button but rather his own sudden
epiphany, a vision of God as motivated by creation rather than destruction: “He
does not want us to desecrate His creation by willing death. He wills life” (Updike
2006, 306). Released from the conviction of his mission, a numbed Ahmad follows
a jubilant Jack’s instructions to turn back towards New Jersey and certain arrest.
Although the bomb does not go off, the book hardly ends on a note of triumph or
even relief: Ahmad simply surveys the scuttling crowds of New Yorkers around him,
“each one of them impaled live upon the pin of consciousness, fixed upon self-
advancement and self preservation. That, and only that. ‘These devils’, Ahmad
thinks, ‘have taken away my God’” (310).
For all its ambition and the skill with which it is written, Terrorist ultimately fails
to imagine or represent the mind that could have pushed the button Ahmad fails
to—or, by extrapolation, the mind that could have steered an airliner into a build-
ing full of workers. Ahmad’s epiphany has no direct cause in the book; it is essen-
tially an instance of wishful thinking, a mark of the gap between ourselves and a
meaningful grasp of the reality of terrorism. Nor does the book convincingly repu-
diate Ahmad’s criticisms of America; DeLillo’s essay wishes to oppose terrorism
with a vision of America as able to “accommodate every language, ritual, belief and
opinion” (DeLillo 2001), but the America of Terrorist is, indeed, Godless and basi-
cally hollow, empty of true meaning or affect. As readers we are glad that Ahmad
does not set off his bomb, but we also feel the tragedy of his loss of the God he has
felt near him—“the concrete living God who stands beside Ahmad as close as the
sunshine warming the skin of his neck” (Updike 2006, 188)—since the beginning of
the book. If Adams responds to our failure to comprehend terrorism with sadness
and Baker with anger, Updike responds with resignation.
Clifford Chase, Winkie (2006), and Ken Kalfus, A Disorder Peculiar to the
Country (2006). In the wake of the anger and sorrow that have understandably
dominated the first wave of American terrorism fiction after 9/11, it is perhaps
unavoidable that writers would next turn to satire and farce, unlikely as such a
strategy might have seemed in the immediate wake of the attacks. In these works,
again, the authors are concerned not so much with the attacks themselves as with
their aftermath, the ways in which “terrorism” is incorporated into the national
discourse, becoming a signifier that can be attached to almost anything for
rhetorical effect.
 TERRORISM FICTION 1011

The title character of Clifford Chase’s Winkie, for example, is a sentient teddy
bear who is mistaken by the authorities for a serial bomber based on Theodore
Kaczynski, the Unabomber. At his trial, Winkie is charged with crimes that begin
with terrorism and eventually include such historically resonant offenses as
“corrupting the youth of Athens,” “holding the false doctrine that the sun is the
center of the world and the earth moves,” “witchcraft,” and “acts of gross inde-
cency with certain young men of London” (Chase 2006, 85). The trial, in other
words, is an enactment of every show trial of a societal scapegoat in Western history,
and Chase’s addition of “terrorism” to the list suggests that he, no less than Baker,
has severe reservations concerning the uses the term has been put to in recent
discourse. This is not to say that terrorism does not exist, of course; there is an
actual bomber in the book, though he does his greatest harm not to society but to
Winkie, by destroying Winkie’s offspring before dying himself. The damage done by
the bomber, however, is completely out of proportion with the absurdly excessive
official response, which lays all the sins of humanity at the feet of an innocent toy,
choosing persecution over understanding.
Marginally more serious—or at least marginally more realistic—is Ken Kalfus’s
A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, which focuses on Joyce and Marshall
Harriman, a Manhattan couple going through a bitter divorce. The primary issue to
be settled between them is who will retain their apartment, which each seems to
value more than their two small children. On the morning of 9/11, Joyce, who was
supposed to be aboard one of the hijacked planes, and Marshall, who works in the
World Trade Center, each believe the other to have died; each is openly disappointed
to learn this is not the case. Although both afterward suffer from the anxiety and
fear common to all in the wake of the attacks, most of their feelings are funneled
into ever more vitriolic and heated attacks on each other, which themselves increas-
ingly take on the forms and jargon of terrorism. Marshall in particular begins to
identify with the impulses felt by the terrorists: “their crappy disordered existences,
these shameful skirmishes, this soiled money, the debasement, this cruelty, this
insensitivity, this impiety had become intolerable to God” (Kalfus 2006, 185). In the
novel’s peak scene of black humor Marshall builds a suicide bomb—from plans he
finds on the Internet—and attempts to detonate it in the presence of his family, first
announcing “God is great” (Kalfus 2006, 189)—not because he particularly believes
this, but because that is what terrorists say. When the bomb fails to go off Joyce
irritably demands to look at it and tries (unsuccessfully) to fix the problem, as the
children look idly on. The scene is simultaneously terrifying and hilarious, a demon-
stration of how “terrorism” is detached from its real roots in history and social
conflict to become available for any purpose.
The political significance of Kalfus’s themes is made most visible in a closing
scene in which Joyce and Marshall reconcile as part of a crowd that has gathered
at Ground Zero to celebrate the end of the War on Terror, which, in a sudden lurch
into alternative history, has turned out just as we were told it would: our service-
men greeted as heroes, Iraq a healthy and burgeoning democracy that no longer
requires their presence, and Osama bin Laden captured. In such a world, it seems,
everything is perfect, and even the most hated enemy can once again become the
beloved. It is the ultimate fantasy of farcical triumph for contemporary terrorism
literature, a world in which terrorism need not be understood because it has ceased
to exist.
1012 TIME TRAVEL FICTION

Bibliography
Adams, Lorraine. Harbor. New York: Vintage, 2004.
Auster, Paul. Leviathan. New York: Penguin, 1992.
Baker, Nicholson. Checkpoint. New York: Vintage, 2004.
Chase, Clifford. Winkie. New York: Grove, 2006.
Combs, Cindy C., and Martin Slann. Encyclopedia of Terrorism. New York: Checkmark
Books, 2003.
DeLillo, Don. “In The Ruins Of The Future.” Guardian, 22 Dec. 2001. http://www.guardian.
co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4324579,00.html
———. White Noise: Text and Criticism. Ed. Mark Osteen. New York: Penguin, 1998.
———. Mao II. New York: Penguin, 1991.
———. Libra. New York: Penguin, 1988.
———. The Names. New York: Knopf, 1982.
———. Players. New York: Knopf, 1977.
Friedman, Kinky. The Mile High Club. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
Harris, Thomas. Black Sunday. New York: Signet, 1975.
Houen, Alex. Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Kalfus, Ken. A Disorder Peculiar to the Country. New York: Harper, 2006.
Kunkel, Benjamin. “Dangerous Characters.” The New York Times Book Review, 11 Sept.
2005.
Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. New York: Vintage, 1998.
———. Operation Shylock: A Confession. New York: Vintage, 1993.
Scanlan, Margaret. Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001.
Sinclair, Andrew. An Anatomy of Terror: A History of Terrorism. London: Pan Books, 2003.
Spiegelman, Art. In the Shadow of No Towers. New York: Pantheon, 2004.
Updike, John. Terrorist. New York: Knopf, 2006.

Further Reading
DeLillo, Don. “In The Ruins of the Future.” Guardian, 22 Dec. 2001; Foertsch, Jacqueline,
ed. “Special Issue: Terrorism and the Postmodern Novel.” Studies in the Novel 36 (2004): 3;
Houen, Alex. Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; Kunkel, Benjamin. “Dangerous Characters.” The
New York Times Book Review, 11 Sept. 2005; Scanlan, Margaret. Plotting Terror: Novelists
and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001;
Sinclair, Andrew. An Anatomy of Terror: A History of Terrorism. London: Pan Books, 2003;
Wesley, Marilyn C. Violent Adventure: Contemporary Fiction by American Men.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2003.
JOSEPH S. WALKER
TIME TRAVEL FICTION
Definition. The concept of time travel is used in literature as a device that relies
upon the conceit of characters visiting their past or their future. It is employed in
science fiction with some frequency, often in order to explore ideas about the nature
of history, causality, experience, or narrative. In historical fantasy, particularly
adventure fiction for young adults, time travel is often an enabling device, the mech-
anism through which a viewpoint character is transported to the main setting of the
story. Superhero comic books are rife with time-traveling characters, particularly
master villains whose access to the “time stream” is the source of their being a
menace. Time travel has also been used in mainstream fiction (i.e., by authors who
 TIME TRAVEL FICTION 1013

are not self-consciously writing in genre), typically in the service of meditations on

love and memory (e.g., Jack Finney’s 1970 Time and Again).
It is thus not quite correct to refer to time travel solely as a thematic subgenre of
science fiction, because the device of having a character travel to the past or future
clearly fulfills some of the same narrative functions as any protagonistic journey
does: the portal through time is another version of mythologist Joseph Campbell’s
threshold to the underworld, through which the genre hero must pass in order to
begin his or her adventures in earnest. In generic fantasy, for example, characters
from the contemporary world may find themselves transported to a quasi-historical
setting by unspecified magical forces, but the transported hero may as well be in
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom (i.e., a fantasy Mars in the far distant past) as in
medieval Europe, which shows that historical or causal connection of past to future
is merely color rather than a central element driving the plot or the characters’
concerns. Similarly, the device of time travel enables entry to an otherwise inacces-
sible Shangri-la of the future so that the tourist-protagonist of a utopian fiction can
show us what is to be seen there (e.g., Heinlein 2004).
Time travel is closely related to the science fiction subgenre of alternate history,
which includes a parallel universe or para-time story. In alternate history an author
both posits a chronology that branches off at some recognizable nexus from histor-
ical events, and tells a story set within that chronology (Hellekson 2001). However,
it is possible for a story set in a different era to be either, both, or neither. For exam-
ple, a story about a man who visits the Jurassic period to hunt dinosaurs, returning to
the present to dine out on the tale, is time travel but not alternate history (De Camp
1956); a story about a woman who lives in a world where the Axis won World War
II is alternate history but not time travel (Dick 1962); and a story where the South
wins the Civil War because Afrikaners from the future arm Robert E. Lee and his
men with AK-47s (Turtledove 1992)—or loses it because a historian from the future
interferes with a Confederate victory at Gettysburg (Moore 1953)—is both. But a
story about a British adventurer who is present at the Charge of the Light Brigade
at Balaclava and observes what really happens when the six hundred rode forth into
the valley of death is neither, falling instead into the category of historical fiction—
or possibly even secret history, depending upon how seriously the author intends us
to take his speculations (Fraser 1973).
History. The seminal science-fictional time travel novel is widely regarded to be The
Time Machine (1895), by H.G. Wells (1866–1946). But Mark Twain (1835–1910)
pioneered the device of time travel a few years earlier with A Connecticut Yankee in
King Arthur’s Court (1889). Foote (1991) argues that the emergence of time travel in
popular literature—though prefigured by stories of sleepers and the fey-touched, such
as “Rip van Winkle” and “Thomas the Rhymer”—can be traced to a particularly
American vision of time and space that equates the Old World with the past and the
New World with the future. This, combined with Twain’s efforts to make sense of two
contradictory (and again particularly American) impulses—a naïve nostalgia for the
past versus an ethnocentric valorization of the technological progress and cultural
sophistication of the “modern” present—makes Connecticut Yankee a confrontation
between nostalgic and progressive visions of history that both technological progress
and cultural sophistication come up wanting.
The science fiction grandmaster Robert Heinlein (1907–1988), himself a noted
contributor to the subgenre, observed that while it was Twain who invented the time
1014 TIME TRAVEL FICTION

travel story, it was Wells who pointed out its contradictions—that is, the extent to
which conundrums of cause-and-effect and paradoxes of free will emerge once the
device is employed (Nahin 1999, 54). Much of the subsequent history of time travel
stories can be seen as a working out of these contradictions, as authors imagined the
consequences of changing the past or gaining knowledge of the future under differ-
ent fictional parameters.
With the emergence of a robust, commercial genre of science fiction magazines and
paperbacks in the mid-twentieth century, the device of time travel became a staple
science-fictional trope (Ash 1977). The pioneering pulp magazine publisher Hugo
Gernsback (1884–1967) even serialized The Time Machine in the pages of one of his
early “scientifiction” magazines. Time travel subsequently became a recognizable
popular culture motif as well, as is suggested by its prevalence in comic books, televi-
sion, movies, and elsewhere. But because it has served as the science-fictional device
within which literary speculation about physical theories of space and time can be
indulged, time travel stories in science fiction per se have been responsive to develop-
ments in physics (Nahin 1999). For example, Larry Niven’s short story “Rotating
Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation” (Niven 1977) takes its title
from the scholarly article of the same name by physicist Frank J. Tipler, which suggests
that a sufficiently massive, infinitely long rotating cylinder can produce conditions
allowing a traveler to move back in time by following a path around the cylinder
(Tipler 1974). In Niven’s story, the attempt to construct such a device activates a
“defense mechanism” whereby the universe arranges its elements to hamper the
attempt by causing the sun to go nova (i.e., to blow up) before the work is finished.
Trends and Themes. There are three basic types of time travel protagonists, each
of whom implies a particular kind of time travel story: (1) the Connecticut Yankee
(who visits the historical past), (2) the Chronic Argonaut (who visits the “historical”
future), and (3) the Bootstrapper (who acts recursively and usually paradoxically
upon his or her own biography). Each of these basic types has its variations, and it
is possible for a particular time-traveling character to be of a “mixed” rather than
a “pure” type—for example, Jud Eliot in Robert Silverberg’s Up the Line (Silverberg
1969) is a Time Courier (whose job is to escort tourists into the historical past) who
uses his access to the past to find and sleep with a distant ancestor (Connecticut
Yankee), but his dalliances result in a paradoxical self-duplication that brings him
to the baleful attention of the Time Patrol (Bootstrapper).
It is useful, however, to regard each kind of protagonist as representing a type of
time travel story, embodying a particular view of the operation of history or nature
of time, and characterized by particular themes, motifs, and ideas. Both the
Connecticut Yankee and the Chronic Argonaut stories are concerned with grand
theories of history: the former, as it connects to notions of progress and motifs of
nostalgia; the latter, in terms of evolution and cosmology (in other words, the
ultimate fates of humanity and the universe). In contrast, the Bootstrapper story is
oriented toward questions of causality and individual free will, and its protagonists
often find themselves dealing with unforeseen results that seem to bring them into
being.
The Connecticut Yankee. The Connecticut Yankee is a time traveler who arrives in the
historical past for an indefinite period, perhaps even permanently, very much like a
latter-day Robinson Crusoe. The knowledge this traveler has of either the future or
modern science and technology gives him or her an edge, allowing the character to
take action against the dangers and discomforts of the past. Mark Twain’s Yankee,
 TIME TRAVEL FICTION 1015

IS TIME TRAVEL A NUTTY CLICHÉ?

Today, time travel is such a common device that at least one science fiction magazine formally
discourages would-be authors from submitting stories in which someone “uses time travel
to achieve some particular result, but in the end something unexpected happens that thwarts
[the] plan,” on the grounds that it is a too-often-told story (Groppi 2006). In the meantime,
however, developments in physics involving the possibility that “closed time-like curves”
(circuitous routes through space and time possibly enabled by the implications of relativity
and quantum theory, and allowing space travelers to arrive where they started before they
left) may exist—or may be able to be created—provide grist for science-fictional imaginings
(Davies 2002).

Hank Morgan, gives this category its cognomen, but L. Sprague de Camp
(1907–2000) established the ground rules for telling this kind of story as science
fiction, in which the deployment of modern knowledge in historical times is the
central conceit (De Camp 1941). In Lest Darkness Fall, de Camp’s Yankee, Martin
Padway, is mysteriously transported from the twentieth century to sixth-century
Rome. There he uses his extensive technical know-how to create virtually single-
handedly entire industries and thereby produce a sort of industrial revolution that
enables Rome to avoid both barbarian incursions and Byzantine meddling, all in the
hopes of staving off the Dark Ages in Europe. Whereas Twain glosses over the
industrialization of Camelot, de Camp describes in great detail the processes
through which Padway develops his anachronistic innovations, success building on
success: the invention of the printing press leading to the newspaper leading to a
telegraph-like semaphore system, and so on. More recently, Leo Frankowski’s
novels about Conrad Stargard do de Camp one better, embellishing with much
greater detail a similar storyline about overcoming social and intellectual inertia in
order to introduce both cultural and technical anachronisms. This time, the hero is
an American-trained Polish engineer cast back in time to medieval Poland who takes
it upon himself to stop the Mongol incursions by bringing about an industrial
revolution over the space of four thick novels (Frankowski 1986 and its sequels).
In what may be called the Yankee Reversed, the character’s special knowledge is
either nugatory or actually dangerous. For example, in Poul Anderson’s “The Man
Who Came Early” (1956), a U.S. soldier transported to medieval Iceland is undone,
despite his sidearm and his technical knowledge, because of his unfamiliarity with
local norms and customs. In Larry Niven’s stories of Svetz the Time Traveler (Niven
1973), Svetz is the operator of a time cage sent back from the highly polluted
thirtieth century to procure exotic specimens for the hereditary (and feeble-minded)
secretary-general of the U.N. But because time travel is a fantasy, he winds up
collecting more exotic creatures than he realizes: sent for a horse, he finds Pegasus;
sent for a whale, he finds Moby Dick—and so forth.
In contrast, the Eternal Yankee is a traveler charged with either the enforcement
or exploration of a particular historical chronology, and possessed of the tools and
know-how to fulfill a mission. In these stories, the limits of the time traveler’s
knowledge is often a central motif. Asimov’s Eternals are semimonastic temporal
technocrats who specialize in altering history to maximize what is, according to
their calculations, human happiness; they are confounded by “silent centuries”
down the time stream that have been sealed off to them by mysterious forces
1016 TIME TRAVEL FICTION

(Asimov 1955). Connie Willis’s (1985; 1992; 1998) Balliol historians are academic
specialists whose fieldwork takes them to the actual past; the extent to which their
training has or has not prepared them for their encounter with the past is often at
issue in Willis’s stories. Kage Baker’s Company novels center on the cyborg recruits
of Dr. Zeus, Incorporated (the company that invented the time machine), who are
able to act on its behalf and change the past despite the immutability of the recorded
past by virtue of the gaps in that record.
The Chronic Argonaut. The Chronic Argonaut differs from the closely related Sleeper
(a much more common type of character, often used to visit a utopian setting and
listen to the natives explain how their society operates) who arrives in the future
without a time machine per se: after a Rip-van-Winkle-like period of sleep or sus-
pended animation (e.g., McMullen 1998), having undergone time dilation as a
result of traveling at relativistic velocities (i.e., the compression of local time
compared to that of slower-moving observers as a result of speeds close to that of
light; e.g., Niven 1976), or via some other mysterious, magical, or undisclosed
mechanism (e.g., Heinlein 2004). In any case, the Sleeper’s journey through time is
one-way and forward, just like ours. In contrast, the Chronic Argonaut may return
to his or her own time, or travel across different eras; in either case, the journey is
instructive for what it lets the reader see of the great changes wrought by time.
The progenitor of this category is the unnamed protagonist of H.G. Wells’s The
Time Machine. He is a “modern” man who goes forward in time expecting future
society to have found scientific answers to the questions and problems that
perplexed late Victorian England—that is, he is a chronic argonaut on a voyage of
discovery. He visits a future in which society is divided into the beautiful and child-
like Eloi and the troglodytic but intelligent Morlocks; the Morlocks run the techni-
cal apparatuses of this far-future world, and in return they are permitted to literally
prey on the Eloi. The stratification of the society he visits is frequently noted to be
a comment on the class divisions of Wells’s own time.
The hard science fiction writer Stephen Baxter (1957–) picks up the story where
Wells ended it, that is when the Time Traveler activates his time machine and
vanishes, never to be seen again (Baxter 1995). In Baxter’s vision, the Time Traveler
cannot return to his original future, encountering instead time-traveling Morlocks
who are rational, scientific, and nowhere near as bloodthirsty as the ones in the orig-
inal novel. Baxter’s Time Traveler, accompanied by a Morlock, ranges up and down
the time stream, visiting alternate universes as well as the dawn of time and the end
of the universe, all in the service of explicating a scientific cosmology of extraordi-
nary complexity and great beauty that paradoxically both dwarfs human efforts and
gives them significance (a persistent theme of Baxter’s work is the particular respon-
sibility of consciousness in an unconscious universe).
In contrast to the active efforts of the voluntary Chronic Argonaut to achieve time
travel, the drafted Chronic Argonaut is brought to the future more or less unwill-
ingly by the technologically advanced but somehow degenerate beings that live
there. In any case, humans of the future are fundamentally aliens, and upon the
precise character of that alienness the tale of an argonaut-draftee hangs. In A.E. van
Vogt’s “Recruiting Station” (2003), for example, a troubled young woman named
Norma Matheson goes to work for the mysterious Dr. Lell, who is actually the agent
of an embattled faction from the distant future that conscripts men from the past to
fight for them after sapping their will through a depersonalizing technology. After
her physics professor ex-boyfriend is shanghaied into the future (where his two-fisted
 TIME TRAVEL FICTION 1017

American gumption allows him to resist his programming and turn against his
would-be masters) Norma eventually unlocks—with a little behind-the-scenes help
from the opposing futuristic faction—her hitherto-untapped mental potential and
uses her newfound powers to defeat Dr. Lell—the degenerate denizens of the future
are no match for a couple of authentic red-blooded human beings in their prime.
Joe Haldeman’s “Anniversary Project” (1975)—in which highly evolved telepathic
human beings from the distant future snatch a couple of young American newly-
weds from the twentieth-century beach where they are canoodling—is a somewhat
sadder story. People from the future want to commemorate the anniversary of the
(now obsolete) practice of reading, and so they have cast themselves through time
to obtain authentic readers to observe during the festivities. The newlyweds will
return to their own time in a few days, they are told, and they won’t remember a
thing. But because time casting is itself an old and little-practiced technology, when
the woman returns to the moment from which she was taken—early in her marriage
alone on the beach with her spouse—a slight error in the process causes her to
subliminally experience her life and death as a mid-twentieth-century housewife
with an alcoholic husband and troubled children. Back on the beach, and to her
husband’s great mystification, she bursts into tears, slaps him on the face, and runs
back to their car. In Haldeman’s story, the primitive “authenticity” of the twentieth-
century humans is a limitation rather than a strength, and the evolution of human-
ity will turn much that strikes us as quintessentially human—such as reading (and
sex!)—into atavisms.
The Bootstrapper. The Bootstrapper is caught in the throes of time travel’s para-
doxes, like the hero of Robert A. Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps” (1941), who gives
this type its name. Bob Wilson is alone in a locked room where he has been all day,
working doggedly to complete his thesis, when a familiar-looking stranger arrives
through a glowing circle he calls a “time gate.” The stranger, who calls himself Joe,
pours drinks and explains that a unique opportunity—helping “an old guy” run a
country along with Joe—awaits Bob on the other side of the gate. A third man who
closely resembles Joe arrives through the time gate; he wants Bob not to go through
the gate. A physical altercation takes place, and Bob is knocked through the time
gate. Bob wakes in the High Palace of Norkaal, thirty thousand years in the future,
where a middle-aged man who calls himself Diktor wants Bob to go back and
persuade the person on the other side of the gate to come through; Bob steps
through, recognizes himself, and reexperiences the encounter with Joe, this time as
Joe. Bob then follows his earlier self into the future, despite the protests of the third
man whom Bob now recognizes as a later version of himself. He encounters Diktor
once more, who shows him how to operate the time gate and gives him a list of
books to acquire. But Bob grows suspicious of Diktor’s motives and returns through
the gate determined to put a stop to his earliest self’s trip through the gate, but he
fails (experiencing the same encounter in his room for the third time). When “Joe”
returns through the time gate, Bob (alone once more in his room) tries to get back
to work on his thesis, but he cannot resist another trip through the gate, the first of
several decisions that result in Bob becoming Diktor and waiting for the day when
his own earlier self arrives for the first time through the time gate to begin the
process again. This extended summary only hints at the paradoxical recursiveness
of this kind of time travel plot. Heinlein’s story features many instances of circular
causation, as when Bob copies a notebook, destroys the original, and realizes that
his copy will be the one an earlier self finds in the High Palace of Norkaal, which
1018 TIME TRAVEL FICTION

raises the question of where the book came from in the first place. David Gerrold’s
The Man Who Folded Himself (1973) is a novel-length exercise in exactly the same
sort of circular causation, and a classic of its kind.
Contexts and Issues. Time travel stories address persistent questions about the
nature of causality and the character of experience, both at the level of individuals
and at that of society or even the cosmos as a whole. At the micro or individual
level, time travel stories explore logical puzzles of cause and effect, enabling the
construction of paradoxical time loops wherein it is possible to go back in time and
invest sufficient principal that its compounded interest will either fund the
construction of the time machine, or give oneself a work of art that one then
publishes under one’s own name and becomes famous for, or even unwittingly
impregnate one’s mother with oneself (Lem 1974). In one of Heinlein’s most famous
stories, “All You Zombies” (1959), the hermaphroditic protagonist gives birth to
herself after having been seduced by her transgendered later self who has been sent
back in time by a still later version of himself (the narrator) for just such a purpose.
“I know where I came from,” he tells the reader at the end, “but where did all you
zombies come from?”
But logical puzzles such as these, Lem argues, are embedded in a larger discourse
about the ergodicity of history: to what extent are historical events necessary (i.e.,
largely determined by the operation of inexorable social forces) or contingent (i.e.,
largely the product of accidental confluences of circumstances)? Under the ergodic
hypothesis, history possesses a kind of inertia that renders inconsequential any
efforts to change the past (for example, a war averted will break out anyway for
other reasons a little later and more fiercely, so that the net effect is the same). Under
the anti-ergodic hypothesis, even seemingly minor changes can result in drastic alter-
ations to the path of history (so that stepping on a butterfly in the Jurassic can mean
that the traveler returns to a totalitarian nightmare rather than the democratic
republic he left). So time travel stories speak to the consequentiality of human
action: if history is ergodic, then our choices as individuals matter very little,
because they will be swept away in the larger flow of events, perhaps even within
our own biographies; if on the other hand it isn’t, even the smallest of our decisions
can take on highly fateful proportions.
Hellekson (2001) suggests that models of history can be categorized according
to whether they are genetic (interested in processes of causation), teleological
(driven by questions of intention or purpose), eschatological (focused on ultimate
fates or destinies), or entropic (convinced of the randomness or at least purpose-
lessness of events), and he argues that genetic models are most appropriate for
alternate history stories, given their intense interest in how historical events come
about. It may be that each of the other three models similarly corresponds to one
of the types of time travel protagonist. The Connecticut Yankee story, the tale of
an individual thrust backward in time, is fundamentally concerned with how the
intentionality, beliefs, and knowledge of a single person can affect the course of
events, and it is thus teleological at root. The Chronic Argonaut story is character-
ized by an eschatological perspective: the time traveler is permitted to see the end
of the earth, humanity, the universe, or time itself and thereby gains an under-
standing of what it all means. And the Bootstrapper, embedded in time loops of
uncaused effects and solipsistic acts of self-creation, embodies an entropic perspec-
tive. To the extent that mixed types of time travel stories are possible, however, this
neat schema loses its force.
 TIME TRAVEL FICTION 1019

Reception. There have been numerous film adaptations of time travel stories.
Movies seem to be a particularly apt medium for conveying the paradoxical quali-
ties of time travel, perhaps because they themselves enable or even invite the
reordering of events in sequence (as when the movie begins with its climax, and then
moves back in time to show us the events that led up to that climax). The Time
Machine itself has been remade twice, once by director George Pal (1908–1980) in
1960 and again in 2002. Ray Bradbury’s short story “A Sound of Thunder” has
been turned into the 2004 film of the same name (time-traveling dinosaur hunter
messes up the future by stepping on a butterfly in the past).
A number of original time travel movies began to appear in the 1980s, notably
Back to the Future (a high school student goes back in time and accidentally inter-
feres with his parents’ courtship; 1985) as well as Terry Gilliam’s (1940–) Time
Bandits (a little boy encounters a dwarfish band of criminals who have stolen God’s
map of the holes in the space-time continuum in order to indulge in an intertempo-
ral crime spree; 1981), and The Terminator (a young woman is pursued by an
android from the future to prevent her as-yet-not-conceived son from saving
humanity from extermination in the twenty-first century; 1984). Bill and Ted’s
Excellent Adventure (a farcical cross-time scavenger hunt with two dudes from the
Valley; 1989) and its sequels rely on time travel as well.
More recent time travel films have a darker edge. Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys
(1995) sends a man back in time, where he fails to prevent a terrorist attack that
causes a massive human die-off. In The Butterfly Effect (2004), a young man—who
can send his consciousness to earlier points in his own biography, where any
changes in what he does can engender drastic alterations in hitherto established
events—decides ultimately that he would be better off never being born, and
commits suicide in his mother’s womb. In the cult favorite Donnie Darko (2001), a
teenager is visited by a bunny suit–wearing man from the future who gives him
strange instructions, and the title character allows himself to die to save the universe
from destruction. In Primer (2004), the co-owners of a garage-based start-up
engineering company invent a time travel machine, use it for day-trading, and then
the paradoxes start to catch up with them, leading to suspicion and betrayal.
Several American television series also rely on time travel. Irwin Allen’s
(1916–1991) The Time Tunnel (1966–1967) presented two scientists who, by going
through the tunnel, tumbled each week into an adventure in a new era. In Voyagers!
(1982–1983), a time traveler from the distant future ensures the proper unfolding
of history with the aid of a boy from the 1980s. A similar but longer-lived series
called Quantum Leap (1989–1993) involved a scientist who each week arrived in a
new host body sometime during the twentieth century in order to solve a crisis
facing that unwitting host. In Time Trax (1993–1994), a cop from the future arrives
in the 1990s to track down escaped fugitives who had gone to ground in the past.
Early Edition (1996–2000) was about a man who each morning mysteriously
received the next day’s paper and took it upon himself to prevent bad news from
taking place. Seven Days (1998–2001) involved a “chrononaut” who was sent back
in time one week in order to prevent disasters or tragedies that had occurred in the
meantime.
Selected Authors. This section discusses six recent novels that exemplify the
types of time travel stories laid out above. Each subsection summarizes the novels
it considers and then highlights the important motifs or thematic considerations
they address. In discussing these motifs, emphasis is given to how they treat or
1020 TIME TRAVEL FICTION

model the nature of history, and what normative judgments emerge from that
modeling.
Connecticut Yankees. Household Gods (Tarr and Turtledove 1999) is a gloss on the
classic Connecticut Yankee plot, and the product of a collaboration between Judith
Tarr (1955–), an accomplished fantasist, and Harry Turtledove (1949–), the dean
of alternate history. In the book, Nicole is the divorced mother of two and a Los
Angeles lawyer who hits the ceiling at her firm when the partnership that she
deserves is given to a male colleague instead. Furious and unhappy, she prays to live
in Roman times, an era that she imagines as having less sexism than the late twen-
tieth century. The gods Liber and Libera—present on her nightstand in the form of
a souvenir plaque she had picked up in Italy on her honeymoon—hear her and grant
her prayer. Nicole wakes in the body of Umma, a sixth-century widowed tavern
keeper and a mother of two who happens to be Nicole’s own distant ancestor, living
in a Roman town near the frontier with barbaric Germanic lands.
Nicole is quickly disabused of her unrealistic notions about the egalitarian qual-
ity of the past, and her initial speculations about the possibility of getting rich by
introducing modern conveniences (such as tampons and antibiotics!) give way
equally quickly to the challenges of making a living and raising her children. Besides
the culture shock that Nicole experiences trying to live as a Roman woman—the
place stinks; everyone drinks; Christians are terrorists; violence is endemic—she
must endure pestilence, barbarian occupation, and rape before she discovers how to
reverse the wish that Liber and Libera have granted her. Despite having been in the
past for many months, in the present only a week has passed, during which her
“real” body was in a coma. The perspective that living in the past has given her
allows her to become a better mother (she gives one of her kids a swat and he stops
misbehaving), a tougher person (she goes after her ex-husband to make him pay the
in-arrears child support he owes), and a partner in the law firm (given another
assignment by her superiors, she performs ably and even goes to a male colleague
for help in editing it, thus demonstrating maturity to be a team player).
The Life of the World to Come (Baker 2004) is part of Kage Baker’s (1952–)
ongoing Company series, which hinges upon the time-traveling enterprise of “the
Company,” also known as Dr. Zeus, Incorporated. Besides running Club Med–like
resorts in the Mesozoic for the idle rich of the twenty-fifth century, the chief busi-
ness of the Company is to send agents back in time to acquire valuable property that
is about to go missing from the pages of history (e.g., the books of the Library of
Alexandria) and secure it for the Company to keep and sell in the future. Its agents
are themselves “acquired” in similar fashion: they are stolen out of time to avoid
their deaths and pressed into service as immortal cyborgs.
This specific novel from the series centers on Alec Checkerfield, a twenty-fifth-
century child of privilege who is unknowingly the product of a Company-sponsored
genetic experiment to create a more tractable sort of agent. His strange abilities
enable him as a young boy to subvert the programming of a sophisticated AI
(artificial intelligence) playmate who adopts the persona of a pirate called the
Captain and sets to work amassing a huge, secret, and highly profitable information
database on Alec’s behalf. Eventually, they learn of the Company, and Alec steals a
time shuttle, fleeing backward in time to where the heroine of the series—a cyborg
agent of the Company called Botanist Mendoza—is stranded Robinson Crusoe–like
in the Mesozoic. Having met and fallen in love with two previous versions of Alec’s
genotype, she has been imprisoned there by order of a trio of effete and foppish
 TIME TRAVEL FICTION 1021

Company planners. An experiment by these planners produced a new version of

Alec in order to prevent her from possibly meeting him again. Mendoza nurses Alec
back to health, and he returns to the twenty-fifth century to complete a mission he’s
taken on, promising to return for her. The Company abducts her from her prison,
however, and Alec raids the Company’s headquarters to try to locate her. While
inside the Company’s headquarters, he downloads the stored and recorded person-
alities of the two previous genetic versions of himself. Cohabiting Alec’s body, the
three versions of himself (the first two and his present self) confront the three
Company planners to find out what has been done to Mendoza. As the story ends,
they set off in Alec’s high-tech smuggling yacht (now modified for time travel) to
find her.
In both Household Gods and The Life of the World to Come, the past is
portrayed as somehow more authentic, but also crueler and more dangerous, than
the present (whether that present is twentieth-century Los Angeles or twentieth-
fifth-century London). Both novels mock over solicitous, politically correct social
engineering that coddles rather than challenges. But they are also unsympathetic to
an undiscriminating nostalgia that valorizes and glorifies the past. For example,
Nicole is disabused of her fantasies about the past and comes to appreciate how
modern legal services empower her as a single mother pursuing a deadbeat dad. And
the foppish trio that created Alec and his predecessors play at re-creating obsolete
experiences, making fools of themselves as they do it: imagining themselves to be
emulating J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, they go for a walk in the English “coun-
tryside” (a strip of parkland in a crowded London) and unaccustomed to exertion
fall prey to blisters, heat injury, and exhaustion. Their clownishness is a direct result
of their blithe ignorance of the authentic past.
The central theme that emerges in both novels is a vindication of individual
agency or intentionality: despite how one’s circumstances constrain one, whether
one is a woman in Roman times or the product of a genetic-engineering experiment
gone awry, one is responsible for acknowledging those constraints and then striving
anyway. At its core, the Connecticut Yankee story rejects the notion that people are
unalterably shaped by their circumstances, because a sufficiently self-aware individ-
ual is capable of taking steps to resist and overcome them.
Chronic Argonauts. Dear Abbey (Bisson 2003) by Terry Bisson (1942–) is comic in
tone but earnest in aspirations. It is the story of Lee and Cole, colleagues at a small
community college in Connecticut. Lee, a Chinese physicist who speaks fractured
English with a Texas accent, has a time machine in his personal digital assistant
(PDA). Cole, an American studies professor with strong environmentalist leanings,
has connections to the Green underground. The two men are recruited into an
environmentalist scheme to acquire a formula from the future that will enable a
genetically tailored virus to “severely inhibit the ability of humans to degrade the
planet” by causing an infertility pandemic. On a Friday night, they travel to the
future by using a kind of swinging metal couch stored in an underutilized room in
the student center. As they rock back and forth on the couch, the calculations in
the PDA send them in exponentially greater forward arcs in time. Their initial
attempt to get the formula is thwarted, and as they swing further and further into
the future, they learn of the course of future human history: people come to
regret the waste and failure of the twentieth century, begin to restore the Earth,
become able to live in more humane and sustainable ways, and finally fade away
2.4 billion years in the future.
1022 TIME TRAVEL FICTION

Manifold: Time (Baxter 2000) is cosmic in tone and equally earnest. It is the first
of three novels each of which is set in separate but parallel universes involving
slightly different configurations of the same characters. In this novel, Reid Malenfant
is an ex-astronaut turned space entrepreneur who has put together a venture to
begin mining asteroids. An enigmatic mathematician named Cornelius Taine, who
represents one of his major investors, persuades him to work on detecting signals
from “downstream” (the future). These signals will help avoid the statistically
inevitable “Carter catastrophe” that will cause the collapse of civilization and
possible extinction of humanity 200 years in the future. The detected message
identifies a solitary asteroid in a distant orbit around the Earth, and Malenfant
blasts off for it with Emma Stoney (his ex-wife), Taine, and Michael—an autistic
but brilliant child who is one of very many “blue children” being born with unusual
abilities. Pursued by space troopers sent by the U.S. government to stop them, they
find a mysterious circular portal that allows them to journey to future eras, where
they see how intelligent life—human life!—carefully conserves the dissipating
energies of the universe to the last moments, when matter itself begins to break
down. Emma is shot, Michael disappears, and Taine sacrifices himself to stop a
trooper who has followed them through the gate. Soon, only Malenfant remains,
and he goes further still, into new “daughter” universes born of the collapse of
previous ones. Reaching the end of the universe, he is given the chance to alter the
past so that Emma doesn’t come with him to the asteroid, and so lives. Meanwhile,
however, the blue children, persecuted on Earth, flee to the moon, where they build
a sort of doomsday device that destabilizes the vacuum of space itself. The resulting
destruction of the universe is not an evil act, however, for the children are acting on
behalf of the downstreamers, who see it as an act of creation: many daughter
universes will result from the black hole–like singularities produced as the vacuum
collapses.
These two novels thus offer complementary eschatological visions. In Dear
Abbey, “Bisson’s voyagers do not find a future in which mankind has conquered the
galaxy. Instead, they find worlds in which our actions and inactions as regards the
earth’s environment have played out with consequences both somber and sobering”
(Kleffel 2003), and they watch the world end with a whimper. To avoid a similar
fate, the downstreamers of Baxter’s novel send a message to the past that ends the
world with a bang, obviating their own bleak existence and creating in the process
new universes whose inhabitants “might be able to reconstruct what we were like,
how we lived our lives” (p. 451). The Chronic Argonaut story is thus in direct
contrast with the Connecticut Yankee; whereas the latter vindicates the individual,
the former puts big-H History in the starring role, its forces driving the action to
some ultimate end.
Bootstrappers. The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003) by Audrey Niffenegger (1964–) is
a romance, a mainstream novel that spent weeks on the best sellers lists despite the
dismissive sniffs of some reviewers (e.g., Maas 2003). Clare and Henry meet, fall in
love, get married, and try to settle down to a normal life. But Henry is afflicted with
a strange genetic “chronodisplacement disorder” that occasionally sends him
skirling naked across time for brief jaunts into his own past and future; so Clare
meets Henry as a six-year-old girl, when he is 36; they marry when he is 31 and she
is 23, finally having met in real (i.e., nondisplaced) time a few years earlier. As a love
story, this novel focuses on what it means to be in love when each partner at any
given time is drawing upon a different set of memories about their moments
 TIME TRAVEL FICTION 1023

together: sometimes anticipating the joy the other has yet to feel, sometimes resent-
ful of what for the other hasn’t happened yet. As a time travel story, this novel is
interesting for its treatment of the disorienting experiences attendant upon boot-
strapping time travel, such as encountering others who know you but whom you
haven’t yet met.
Night Watch (Pratchett 2002) is part of the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett
(1948–). This series comprises lighthearted comic fantasies set on a flat world
supported on the back of a gigantic cosmic turtle. The earliest Discworld stories
achieved their comic effect by poking fun at the conventions of genre fantasy, but
later entries in the series downplay broad comedy for clever word- and idea-play
and sympathetically drawn characters, the secret of whose appeal is that, at heart,
they are just trying to do the best they can. In Night Watch, Commander Sam Vimes
of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is transported back in time twenty years while
pursuing a murderer named Carcer through the grounds of the Unseen University,
the city’s school of magic (where experiments in high-energy thaumaturgy take
place). The city of twenty years earlier is a grimmer, less hopeful place than it will
be; it labors beneath a paranoid and despotic ruler known as the Patrician. Carcer’s
murder of the watch sergeant—who was Sam Vimes’ first partner when he joined
the force—changes the trajectory of history, and so Vimes (with the help of some
time-controlling monks) must take the role of his old partner, teaching his younger
self the ropes while trying to undo the damage that Carcer has done. All this
happens as the city comes closer to the revolution that will bloodily unseat the
Patrician—if Vimes’ memory can be trusted.
Both of these stories—perhaps because they are located outside the genre of
science fiction—avoid questions about the logical paradoxes of time travel—for
example, having lived through an event once, what prevents one from doing some-
thing differently the second time around?—in favor of exploring what may be called
its experiential paradoxes: what is it like to be unmoored in time? This is the essence
of the Bootstrapper story.

Bibliography
Anderson, Poul. “The Man Who Came Early.” The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
1956.
Ash, Brian. The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: A Documented Pictorial Checklist of
the Sci-Fi World. New York: Harmony Books, 1977.
Asimov, Isaac. The End of Eternity. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1955.
Baker, Kage. The Life of the World to Come. New York: Tor, 2004.
Baxter, Stephen. The Time Ships. New York: HarperPrism, 1995.
———. Manifold: Time. New York: Del Rey, 2000.
Davies, P.C.W. How to Build a Time Machine. 1st American ed. New York: Viking, 2002.
De Camp, L. Sprague. Lest Darkness Fall. New York: H. Holt & Co., 1941.
———. “A Gun for Dinosaur.” Galaxy Science Fiction Mar. 1956.
Dick, Philip K. The Man in the High Castle. Book Club ed. New York: Putnam, 1962.
Finney, Jack. Time and Again. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970.
Foote, Bud. “The Connecticut Yankee in the Twentieth Century: Travel to the Past in Science
Fiction.” Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy no. 43. New York:
Greenwood Press, 1991.
Frankowski, Leo A. The Cross-Time Engineer. New York: Ballantine/Del Rey, 1986.
Fraser, George MacDonald. Flashman at the Charge. 1st American ed. New York: Knopf,
1973 [distributed by Random House].
1024 TIME TRAVEL FICTION

Gerrold, David. The Man Who Folded Himself. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 1973.
Groppi, Susan Marie. “Fiction Submission Guidelines: Stories We’ve Seen Too Often.” 2006.
http://www.strangehorizons.com/guidelines/fiction-common.shtml.
Haldeman, Joe. “Anniversary Project.” Analog 1975.
Heinlein, Robert A. “By His Bootstraps.” Astounding Oct. 1941.
———. “All you zombies.” The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Mar. 1959.
———. For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs. New York: Scribner, 2004.
Hellekson, Karen. The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time. Kent, OH: Kent State
University Press, 2001.
Kleffel, Rick. Dear Abbey [book review] 2003 [cited August 16 2006]. http://trashotron.
com/agony/reviews/2003/bisson-dear_abbey.htm.
Lem, Stanislaw. “The Time-Travel Story and Related Matters of SF Structuring.” Science
Fiction Studies 1 (1974): 143–154.
Maas, Judith. “Book review: The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.” Boston
Globe Dec. 2003:B108.
McMullen, Sean. The Centurion’s Empire. New York: Tor, 1998.
Moore, Ward. Bring the Jubilee. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Young, 1953.
Nahin, Paul J. Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction.
2nd ed. New York: AIP Press/Springer, 1999.
Niffenegger, Audrey. The Time Traveler’s Wife: A Novel. San Francisco, CA: MacAdam/Cage
Pub, 2003.
Niven, Larry. The Flight of the Horse. New York: Ballantine Books, 1973.
———. A World out of Time. 1st ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976.
———. “Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation.” Analog
Aug. 1977.
Pratchett, Terry. Night Watch. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.
Silverberg, Robert. Up the Line. New York: Ballantine, 1969.
Tarr, Judith, and Harry Turtledove. Household Gods. New York: Tor, 1999.
Tipler, F.J. “Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation.” Physical
Review D9 8 (1974): 2203–2206.
Turtledove, Harry. The Guns of the South: A Novel of the Civil War. 1st ed. New York:
Ballantine Books, 1992.
Twain, Mark. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. New York: C.L. Webster &
Company, 1889.
van Vogt, A.E. “Recruiting Station.” In Transfinite: The Essential A.E. van Vogt.
J. Rico and R. Katze, eds. Framingham, MA: NESFA Press, 2003.
Wells, H.G. The Time Machine: An Invention. London: W. Heinemann, 1895.
Willis, Connie. “Fire Watch.” Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine Feb. 1985.
———. Doomsday Book. New York: Bantam Books, 1992.
———. To Say Nothing of the Dog, or How We the Bishop’s Bird Stump at Last. New York:
Bantam Books, 1998.

Further Reading
Foote, Bud. The Connecticut Yankee in the Twentieth Century: Travel to the Past in Science
Fiction. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991; Hellekson, Karen. The Alternate History:
Refiguring Historical Time. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001; Malzberg, Barry
N. The Best Time Travel Stories of All Time. New York: Pocket/ibooks, 2002; Nahin, Paul
J. Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction. 2nd ed. New
York: AIP Press/Springer, 1999; Turtledove, H. and Martin H. Greenberg. The Best
Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century. New York: Del Rey, 2001; Turtledove,
H. and Martin H. Greenberg. The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century. New York:
Del Rey, 2005.
WILLIAM J. WHITE
 TRANSREALIST FICTION 1025

TRANSREALIST FICTION
Definition. Transrealism is a term coined in 1983 by mathematician, computer
scientist, and novelist Rudy Rucker (Rudolf von Bitter Rucker [1946–]) to describe
fantastic fiction that draws much of its power and density from closely observed
reality, especially the biographical experience of the writer. Equally, the term
conveys an enlivening approach to realistic fiction that enhances the vividness of its
characters and events by imbuing them with elements drawn from fantastical
imagination. “The Transrealist,” declared Rucker, “writes about immediate
perception in a fantastic way.” The specific goal was an enrichment of generic writ-
ing: “There will always be a place for the escape-literature of genre SF [science
fiction or speculative fiction]. But there is no reason to let this severely limited and
reactionary mode condition all our writing. Transrealism is the path to a truly
artistic SF” (see online text of Rucker’s “Transrealist Manifesto”). So a transrealist
writes about the fantastic, the invented, the inverted, the dementedly shocking, via
well-known literary techniques developed to capture and notate the world of imme-
diate perception.
Transrealism in Literature. Transrealism is less a way of reading fiction, and more
a recommendation to writers who intend to create fantastic worlds, or who wish to
intensify narratives generally grounded in ordinary life. “The tools of fantasy and
SF,” notes Rudy Rucker, “offer a means to thicken and intensify realistic fiction.”
Yet “a valid work of art should deal with the world the way it actually is.” In
consequence, “Transrealism tries to treat not only immediate reality, but also the
higher reality in which life is embedded” (“Manifesto”). The “trans-” part indicates
aspects of the text that are transgressive, transformational, transmutational, and
transcendental. Rucker coined the term “after seeing the phrase ‘transcendental
autobiography’ in a blurb on the cover of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly”
(Transreal! 1991, p. 529); Rucker’s own fiction, both transreal and otherwise, is
discussed at length in Broderick, 2000.
Parallel to transrealism, adjacent modes have emerged or been discerned and
named: slipstream (Bruce Sterling [1954–]: “a contemporary kind of writing which
has set its face against consensus reality . . . fantastic, surreal sometimes, speculative
on occasion . . . simply makes you feel very strange . . . We could call this kind of
fiction Novels of Postmodern Sensibility”), interstitial (Delia Sherman: “breaks the
rules . . . lurk[s] near or on the borders of two, three, or more genres, owing
allegiance to no single genre or set of conventions”), postmodern SF (texts with fluid
reality boundaries, exemplified by William Gibson’s cyberpunk Neuromancer, 1984),
and the New Weird (China Miéville [1972–]: “Something is happening in the litera-
ture of the fantastic. A slippage. A freeing-up. The quality is astounding. Notions are
sputtering and bleeding across internal and external boundaries”). All share a
tendency to repudiate the restrictions and often the tropes—the standard symbols,
icons, plots, shortcuts, etc.—of genre SF and fantasy, emphasizing instead more
complex psychological development, stylistic sophistication, and what might be
called social embeddedness, and sometimes political engagement of a distinctly
personal coloration. Meanwhile, magical realism found its way out of Latin America,
inserting impossible or fantastical elements into rich descriptions of life. All these
methods share the interesting technical device of using metaphors and other figures
of speech mimetically, that is, as if they referred directly to the real world. For exam-
ple, if a child flies into the sky in company with a talking dog, this is to be taken
literally; it is not a Freudian dream image, or a fanciful way of conveying the child’s
1026 TRANSREALIST FICTION

TRANSREALISM IN MOVIES AND OTHER MEDIA

To date, there has been little analysis of a transrealist contribution to cinema, photography,
drama, music, or other media. Any fantasticated work with a palpable autobiographical
coloring might benefit from transrealist analysis. Some of the surrealistic and whimsically
playful movies of Woody Allen (1935–) seem transrealist (e.g., Purple Rose of Cairo, 1985), as
does Field of Dreams, 1989 (dir. Phil Alden Robinson [1950–]; writing credits W. P. Kinsella
[1935–] and Robinson), Big Fish, 2003 (dir. Tim Burton [1958–]; writing credits Daniel Wallace
[1959–] and John August [1971–]), and indeed the wilder flights of many stand-up comedi-
ans who readily refer to spouses, workmates, friends, the detritus of their daily lives, pushed
into a heightened and fantastic narrative. Pop music, from the Beatles through Kiss and
Michael Jackson to rap, often creates a fantasticated mélange of the glamorous or grungy real
lives of the musicians and a romanticized or degraded representation of those lives.

inward loneliness and aspiration. It might well do that also, and more, but the events
are to be taken as part of the realistic record of imagined events.
History. The need for a transrealist approach to fantastic fiction arose from those
frequently debased and stereotyped characters and plot events of consumer science
fiction and fantasy, which comprises the bulk of the genre. Indeed, when the
rotoscoped movie adapted from Dick’s A Scanner Darkly was released in 2006, its
director, Richard Linklater, commented, “What appealed to me about [the novel] is
that it’s not really about ‘the future.’ It’s about Joe Everyman and his pals, worrying
about money and sex and being frustrated. A lot of sci-fi deals with these amazing
futuristic worlds where humans have suddenly lost all their humor and become
emotionless automatons” (2006).
Is this charge justified? Dick was clearly unusual in this regard, compared to most
science-fiction writers of the 1950s and 1960s, but it would be misleading to read
the fictional characters of Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) and Sir Arthur C. Clarke
(1917–) as emotionless automatons—except for Asimov’s stoic robots. It is true that
stories and characters of the period, and still today, tend to be driven by curiosity
or wonder rather than, say, passionate romantic love or world-weary angst. James
Blish’s (1921–1975) characters, often regarded as “cold,” seethe nevertheless with
ferocious intellectual energy. Robert A. Heinlein’s (1907–1988) fiction is full of
emotion and humor, of a kind reminiscent of an updated Mark Twain (1835–1910),
and the figures in Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–), Joanna Russ (1937–), and Samuel R.
Delany (1942–) are very far from stereotyped or impassive.
On the other hand, SF critic Gary Westfahl (1951–) has suggested that the
“geeky” cast of much SF and fantasy is due to its specialized appeal to writers and
readers sharing some measure of Asperger’s Syndrome: “a persistent failure to estab-
lish eye contact, visible discomfort in most social situations, obsessive interests in a
few subjects, a tendency to fall into routines . . . and a tangible aura of emotional
detachment, even in extreme situations.” For an Asperger teenager in the 1930s (or
even today), “a story about an astronaut encountering aliens on Mars might have
had an air of comforting familiarity, in contrast to stories set in the bizarre,
inexplicable, and thoroughly socialized worlds of Andy Hardy and the Bobbsey
Twins” (Westfahl, 2006).
More generally, the tropes of fantastic fiction in the West were adopted or
invented mainly by adventure storytellers writing hurriedly for the barely educated
 TRANSREALIST FICTION 1027

mass readership of inexpensive pulp magazines. Consequently, since much of

today’s fantastic fiction evolved from that pulp history, it often remains decidedly
generic and formulaic in the ways it is constructed and read. The tired narrative
conventions it frequently embodies, far from challenging us as “the extreme narra-
tive of difference” (Broderick, 2004, 10), are designed as comforting, minimally-
confronting mind candy. Stock characters and settings are templates put into
creaking, predictable action. The craft of reliable genre writing is to disguise or
superficially refresh this tired pattern of narrative action.
In part, this use of instantly recognizable stereotypes is understandable, since the
figures and behavior of fantastical fiction are always, to some large extent, allegor-
ical. Each represents or dramatizes only a handful of aspects of individual psychol-
ogy or cultural dynamics. Genre characters are not intended as rounded portraits of
humans in a richly known world. They tend toward the archetypal, the schematic,
and the iconic. One way to defeat or surpass such generic temptations and limits is
to draw upon the internalized understanding—the cognitive and emotional models
within one’s head and heart—of the endlessly surprising people one knows best:

In real life, the people you meet almost never say what you want or expect them to.
From long and bruising contact, you carry simulations of your acquaintances around
in your head. These simulations are imposed on you from without; they do not react
to imagined situations as you might desire. By letting these simulations run your char-
acters, you can avoid turning out mechanical wish-fulfilments. It is essential that the
characters be in some sense out of control, as are real people—for what can anyone
ever learn by reading about made-up people? (“Manifesto”)

Trends and Themes. Because transrealism is not a school of writing (although

Rucker’s own acknowledged influences suggest that it can be seen as a very belated
revival of Beat poetics), but rather a suggested method for enriching all kinds of
imaginative writing, it is difficult to identify any particular trends, beyond the
observation that the best fantastical fiction seems increasingly steeped in the experi-
ences of the real world. For example, a thriller/mystery novel of telepathy, Spider
Robinson’s (1948–) Very Bad Deaths (2004), effectively reuses the author’s own
harrowing medical and other problems, which both restrict his narrator’s capacity
to act heroically and provide him with strengths of endurance that allow him a sort
of muffled victory. Without this added texture, the book would have been slighter
and less involving. By contrast, most bestsellers in the fantastical genres continue to
recycle long-established idioms—starship captains, male or female, and their brave
crews of loyal humans, aliens, and androids boldly going to very much the same
places they have been for the last 40 years, sexy werewolves and vampires, mediae-
val landscapes of magic and struggle against Dark Lords. The best of these tradi-
tional tales do enrich their time-honored plots and casts of characters with
imaginative density—Lois McMaster Bujold’s (1949–) Vorkosigan sequence and
her more recent fantasies, for example—evincing a serious confrontation with the
complexities of the real world. The commercial success of smooth familiarity,
however, tends to ensure that any transrealist element, with its unexpected turns and
potential for offensive shock, is minimal.
If there is any single theme recurring in transrealist writing, aside from the simple
decision to throw much of the plot and representation of characters over to the
machineries of the unconscious, it is an implicit interest in philosophical issues
1028 TRANSREALIST FICTION

known technically as epistemology and ontology. The first asks how we know what
we think we know about self, others, and world, while the second investigates the
very nature of that world, that reality. During the twentieth century, it seemed
increasingly obvious that our intuitive understanding of how things work is
absurdly naive and often misleading. What we see as solid is more deeply a quantum
haze of probabilities. The sky just overhead extends for billions of light years. The
apparent unified mind looking at the deceptive world is itself an eerie composite,
and its partitioned workings can be viewed in subtle brain scanners or modified by
subtle pharmaceuticals. Questions of epistemology can tend, therefore, to whirl into
gulfs and voids of ontological terror. To the extent that our knowledge of the world
is constructed rather than simply given, do we have any certainty or security of that
world’s persistence, of its reliability, or indeed even of our own selves? These rather
abstract concerns drove Dick’s enjoyably crazy and sometimes incoherent plots, and
they surface repeatedly in Rudy Rucker’s work as well. Meanwhile, the same issues
have been identified by the critic Fredric Jameson (1934–) as being the very hall-
marks of postmodern textuality (see Jameson 1991, Broderick 1995), as well as the
foundations for some of the best science fiction (Jameson 2005).
Contexts and Issues. Transrealism’s approach to imaginative fiction might be mis-
taken for the banal advice “Write what you know.” It also runs the risk of inviting
the reader to commit the Intentional Fallacy, the error of supposing that the mean-
ing of a text is identical to the author’s intention. Rucker might tell us that he is
basing his characters on himself and his friends, but we cannot be sure that this is
so; transrealist fictions are not romans à clef. Nor should we really care which life
experiences are infiltrated into the text. Still, some writers in and out of science
fiction have fruitfully combined wild ideas with their own experience, creating a
realistic thickening of the supposedly airy fantastic. “Geeky” writers soaking their
culture’s fantasies in the broth of their own idiosyncratic ways of construing the
world will create work likely to unsettle and reward readers at large.
Here is a rudimentary example of how the process can work, from Rucker’s
extensive notes on his novel Mathematicians in Love (2006). Writing a scene, he
was visualizing his characters as The X-Files’ Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, but
found the result “flat and dull. And I remembered the [transrealist] injunction that
I’ve often given to beginning writers: ‘Model your characters and situations on life,
not on movies and TV shows!’ . . . I thought of familiar human models for the
agents, Michele G. . . . and my college friend Dick S. . . . and the agents got human
and came alive” (Rucker, 2005). Unless we happen to be close friends of these
particular people, it cannot help us to know this. But it does illuminate the process
of an enriched, fantastical, transrealist creation.
Reception. Interpenetration of novelistic realism and the fantastical imagination
has not been to everyone’s taste. Thomas M. Disch’s (1940–) novel On Wings of
Song (1979) drew significantly upon his oppressive youth in mid-twentieth-century
heartland America. Discussing the novel, Gerald Jonas noted that “except for an
occasional tour de force, there is no room in science fiction and fantasy for the
traditional novel of character. A science-fiction author may create characters to
demonstrate how a change in technology or social organization alters the human
condition; or he may invent entire exotic worlds to show how certain human
traits—such as passion or greed—take different forms under different circum-
stances. But the focus is typically on the forces that shape character, rather than on
the character development itself.” It was precisely Disch’s attention to character that
 TRANSREALIST FICTION 1029

dismayed Jonas: “Mr. Disch’s primary interest is in delineating character. In a

science-fiction context this is at first startling, but as a narrative strategy it is finally
self-defeating.” Perhaps, Jonas suggested, Disch chose the wrong model of realism.
“Science fiction and fantasy have more in common with experimental fiction than
with the novel of character” (1979).
It is certainly true that Rucker’s transrealist work is very much closer to Beat
experiment than to the traditional novel of manners. While only the last of Dick’s
books approach experimental fiction (Valis [1981] in particular), his blend of head-
long delivery and down-to-earth characters, many of them blue-collar or frankly
mad rather than bland starship admirals or galactic game players, was rare in the
genre. Only one of Dick’s mainstream novels of character was published during his
life (Confessions of a Crap-Artist, 1975). Revealingly, his mainstream novels have
seldom been deemed successful. It is interesting that while these novels seem even
more directly based on the author’s life and obsessions, it is the absence of the
fantastical, the whimsical, and the terrifyingly ontological that reduces their value
and impact. It is arguable that Dick’s realist novels are insufficiently transrealist.
In Dick’s non-SF novels—such as Confessions, In Milton Lumpky Territory
(1985), and The Broken Bubble (1989)—all action springs from character, rather
than from externalized menace (precognitive doom, robotic simulacra, slime molds
from outer space, the crushing pressure of entropy itself). Yet that choice compro-
mises the peculiar power of Dick’s imagination, derived from his own odd relation-
ship to reality. Perhaps this is why transrealism is not the narrative tool for all
writers. A certain dislocation from consensus reality in the originating experience is
needed, a detachment and even a somewhat delirious reworking that cannot be
willed but needs to be known autonomously, from within.
There has been surprisingly limited formal discussion of transrealism to date. In
2005, Rucker and Broderick were guests of honor at the 26th Annual International
Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Blurring the Boundaries: Transrealism and
Other Movements.
Selected Authors. Since a considerable amount of “Golden Age” science fiction
(roughly 1938–1950) was written by engineers or working scientists, often about
characters solving engineering or scientific problems, it might seem that transreal-
ism ought to have made an early appearance in such magazines as Astounding
Science Fiction. Actually, the representation of such professions, concerns, and
lifestyles in SF was significantly restricted by its adventure-story formats, or their
comic parodies of life at the workbench under the tedious thumb of oppressive
bureaucracies. In fact, it was not until Thomas Pynchon’s (1937–) zany madcaps
devastated these tropes that transrealist methods began to influence fictions written
in the shadow of the technological age (Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973), although there
were predecessors such as G. C. Edmondson’s (1922–1975) charming F&SF series
in 1959–1964, which reported on the exploits of his “Mad Friend,” employed at
the Saucer Works (a version of Lockheed’s “Skunk Works”). Subsequently, novels
indebted to Pynchon, such as Robert Grossbach’s A Shortage of Engineers (2001),
brought the touch of transreal absurdity to the literary depiction of an absurd social
order—in this case, a military-spec aerospace company on the order of Lockheed or
Boeing. From an entirely different quarter, the supernatural fictions of Nobel
laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991), written in Yiddish, were frequently
drawn from his own life and circumstances. “The world is entirely an imaginary
world,” says his Gimpel the Fool (1957), “but it is only once removed from the true
1030 TRANSREALIST FICTION

world.” This somewhat transrealist perspective informs the more uncanny fiction of
Marge Piercy (1936–), Joyce Carol Oates (1938–), Margaret Atwood (1939–), and
many other non-genre writers.
There has always been an anarchic but somewhat autobiographical aspect to
science fiction, portrayed as part of the background of Rocket to the Morgue (1942)
by mystery and science-fiction writer Anthony Boucher (1911–1968), which
features lightly disguised versions of Heinlein, Jack Williamson (1908–), L. Ron
Hubbard (1911–1986), and other pulp writers, but this should not be mistaken for
transrealism. In the 1950s, Wilson Tucker (1914–), a notable writer for science-
fiction fanzines, used the names and physical descriptions of his friends and foes in
such novels as Wild Talent (1954), a gambit now known as “tuckerization.” More
anarchic and genuinely transrealist, a quarter of a century later, was the Greenwich
Village Trilogy (The Butterfly Kid, 1968, by Chester Anderson; The Unicorn Girl,
1969, by Michael Kurland, and The Probability Pad, 1970, by T. A. Waters), in
which stoned hippies save the world from Blue Lobsters and other amusing aliens;
the characters and their setting very faithfully represent the authors and their circle.
It is a trope that Rucker would revive with a vengeance and a mathematical spin a
further decade later in such books as Spacetime Donuts (1980) and The Sex Sphere
(1983). The lyrical and snapping shaggy-dog surrealism of R. A. Lafferty
(1914–2002) startled genre readers but is perhaps not quite transrealist; his drug of
choice was alcohol.
The psychic and social upheavals of the 1950s and 1960s, often fueled by
amphetamines and other mind- and mood-altering drugs, had their impact on Dick,
especially in such books as Time Out of Joint (1960), Martian Time-Slip (1964),
Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964), Now Wait for Last Year (1968), A
Scanner Darkly (1977), and especially Valis (1981), where he appears as Horselover
Fat. Dick’s central role in exemplifying and provoking the transrealist program
(Rucker’s “Transrealist Manifesto” was not published until a year after Dick’s death
in 1982) is explored in detail in Broderick, 2000. Highly intelligent and self-taught,
Dick built an explanatory system from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant,
Gnosticism, existential psychoanalysis, and a mix of acid-culture theories of mind
and reality. These concerns predate the 1960s: The Cosmic Puppets (1953) stages a
small-town conflict between embodied Zoroastrian divinities Ahriman and Ormazd,
who transform daily reality into symbol. In Eye in the Sky (1955), a nuclear
accident disrupts the local reality of eight characters whose shared world fluxes as
they struggle for dominance. Alternatively, as a Dickian protagonist’s personal con-
struct of the world decays, the true essence of the world is revealed, often dreadfully.
The transrealism in Dick’s work reveals the fantastical transformations of his daily,
if unusually eccentric, life-world. He was a writer drenched in SF imagery, where
even in his bleakest and most intensely lyrical moments he found the perfect
correlative to his inner states. His sometimes bleak, much-married life is echoed in
the refrains of his life’s work: doppelgangers, simulacra, apparent humans who turn
out to be “electric ants,” and programmed constructs. Arguably it was exactly his
mastery of transreality that spared him the final banal temptation of guruhood. Our
world, Dick assured himself, was already a collage, a superposition, of all possible
worlds.
The feminist fiction of James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon, 1915–1987), beneath its
male disguise, is often powerfully transreal, transforming the appalling confronta-
tions of her life into unyielding science fiction. Sheldon was the daughter of widely
 TRANSREALIST FICTION 1031

traveled anthropologists, and worked in military intelligence. “Young Alice saw the
genital mutilation of Kikuyu women, babies dying in the streets of Calcutta, a riot
in Shanghai that was the start of the Chinese Revolution. She heard the screams of
a man being killed for the cannibal pot. She even saw a crucifixion: ‘The men had
been stripped, tortured, tied to posts, and left to perish in the sun. . . . Auschwitz—
My Lai—etc. . . . did not surprise me one bit, later on.’” (Scholz, 2006). Critic John
Clute (1940–) notes: “Tiptree/Sheldon’s life very deeply shaped what superficially
might have looked like simply another competent set of iterations of familiar SF
tropes. What was miraculous was how professionally she was able to fit her interior
intensities and drives into the mold of those seeming conventional story types,
ruthlessly infusing every great story she wrote with those extraordinary intensities,
which cannot be copied.” The same might be said of black novelist Octavia Butler
(1947–2006), whose SF fables transduce the tragedies of poverty and slavery. That
dislocation need not be uniquely strange, though. Russ achieved a quite terrifying
intensity in The Female Man (1975), her important feminist utopia, by contrasting
several invented alternative worlds to her own stifling middle-class experience grow-
ing up in the 1950s. Joe Haldeman’s (1943–) own history, the bruising and morally
conflicted experience of an American soldier badly wounded in Vietnam, made The
Forever War (1974) stand out even in a period of striking technical advances by
science-fiction writers such as Roger Zelazny (1937–1995) and Disch. On the other
hand, two metafictional works that describe the anguished disintegration of science-
fiction hack writers—Barry N. Malzberg’s (1939–) Gather in the Hall of the Planets
(as K. M. O’Donnell, 1971) and Herovit’s World (1973)—are perhaps not transre-
alist so much as satirical or parodic, however revelatory.
Delany’s early fiction from the 1960s—while less immediately identifiable as real-
istic, let alone autobiographical—is vividly coded with his experience as a black, gay
man in America. In his early masterpiece, Dhalgren (1975), his genius flowered fully
in a transrealist work set in a deconstructed cityscape where history is fallible, sun
and moon(s) are unreliable, and the central figure is a possibly deranged amnesiac
and dyslexic poet. Not until his non-science fictional The Mad Man (1996) would
this confronting blend of scrupulously observed and somewhat biographical realism
and highly disturbing perverse fantasy gel completely. Ray Davis notes: “In Delany’s
earlier porn, appalling acts are executed by dehumanized monsters. In The Mad
Man, perversion, like other violations of taboo, is instead a profoundly humanizing
act of courage” (in Sallis, 1996). So too is the candid, lacerating, and funny soul-
baring of a failing writer in Jamil Nasir’s Distance Haze (2000), in which the direct
mystical experience of the divine is first simulated/stimulated and then obliterated
by neurological engineering.
It might seem that transrealist work must be excessive to some degree—that
since transgression is part of its definition, it must be offensive, even indecent, as
well. By the standards of reigning power and convention, this might seem to be so.
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) and William Burroughs (1914–1997), whose work
altered the course of mid-century U.S. fiction as radically as that of Ernest
Hemingway (1899–1961) a generation earlier, spoke truth not so much to power
as to the illusion of a safely domestic, self-simulating, shocking adventures from
the comfort of an armchair. Yet the shocking devices of one period are the com-
monplaces of another. The endless road peeling away in front of Kerouac’s wind-
screen was replicated in the scroll of paper nearly 35 meters long upon which he
typed On the Road (1958); Rucker emulated that method a generation later when
1032 TRANSREALIST FICTION

writing All the Visions (1991). Today, by contrast, almost all writers do just that,
without any shock of release, on the infinite virtual page of the word processor
screen. What was also unpeeled in this kind of radically autobiographical writing
was the experiencing self, harried away from comfort by ruthless self-examination
and crazy bursts of invention and lyricism. In a similar line of descent is Hunter
S. Thompson (1937–2005), whose hysterical and bitingly insightful prose (notably
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971) is better understood as transreal rather
than satirical or simply mannered, unlike the New Journalism of the 1960s and
1970s in general.
Thompson names himself explicitly as his protagonist, and this is one explicit
marker of transrealism. J. G. Ballard’s (1930–) Crash (1974) is narrated by James
Ballard, and in The Empire of the Sun (1984) his child-self surrogate is Jim. Rucker
sometimes calls his central character “Rudy Rucker,” as in the recent Saucer
Wisdom (1999), presenting itself mockingly as the true story of his mad friend
Frank Shook, and Shook’s adventures with saucer-borne multidimensional time
travelers. In Gaudeamus (2004), prolific SF writer John Barnes (1957–), former
assistant professor of theatre and communication in a small Colorado college,
narrates very much in his own person a tale reported to him in a number of broken-
off cliff-hanger segments by his mad friend Travis Bismark, another traveler in a
flying saucer. But is this narrator, who has the same job and the same former wife
as Barnes, a fully rounded representation of the author? Probably not, but it does
not matter, because the weariness, the venom, the ambition, the bleak humor of the
narrator are plainly motivated by reality, and speak to us for that reason more
urgently than many of Barnes’s more perfunctory entertainments.
Yet the transrealist prescription or diagnosis does not require excess. Justina
Robson’s (1968–) Silver Screen (2005) is packed with detail and naturalistic
rendering of character that evades SF’s expectations of melodrama and spectacular
setting or event. For all their exotic idiosyncrasy and special gifts, Robson’s super-
smart characters are flattened into a sort of desperate ordinariness. A proponent of
slipstream, she suggests that it “strives to duplicate the complexities of actual
experiences by allowing experience to be paramount and letting everything else
serve a purpose.” The parallels with transrealism are clear. Her narrator seems at
least in part transrealist, drawn to an unusual degree from the daily grind, irrita-
tions, opacities of her author’s ordinary experience, fantasy enriched in its artful and
persuasive rendering by the miseries and rewards of life here and now. Certainly this
is true of the transrealist fiction of Jeffery Ford (1955–), one of the most talented
current fantasy writers. In “Botch Town” (2006), for example, a coming-of-age
novella blending autobiography and an uncanny mix of fantasy and horror, a
facsimile town of plywood and clay in the narrator’s basement echoes and then
manipulates events in the already shadowy exterior suburban world. Thus, reality
enriches and activates the fantastic imagination, and vice versa, of the transrealist
artist.
Nor is transrealism necessarily marketed as genre. A best-selling romance, Audrey
Niffenegger’s (1963–) The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003), is an elaborate time-twisting
invention, a realist novel grounded in a fantastical Vonnegutian premise—that some
people can come unstuck in time—a fantasy enriched by copious detail drawn from
the real world of the author. What distinguishes The Time Traveler’s Wife from, say,
a traditional science-fiction entertainment like Poul Anderson’s (1926–2001) There
Will Be Time (1972), is its very ordinariness, its refusal, by and large, to use this
 TRANSREALIST FICTION 1033

paranormal irruption as an opportunity to showcase the time traveler’s technical

prowess, political nous or trans-historic destiny. Niffenegger has commented, “It’s
something that bugs me about actual science fiction, this effort to provide all the
answers and make everything work out very neatly” (interview, 2003). But of course
her novel is “actual science fiction,” although more than actual science fiction, her
novel is actual transrealism. The same can be said of Jonathan Lethem’s (1964–)
The Fortress of Solitude (2003), a supernaturally heightened autobiographical tale
of growing up Jewish and white—with magic gifts of flight and invisibility—in a
black part of Brooklyn in 1972. Philip Roth’s (1933–) blend of autobiography,
invention, and an alternative history of a near-Nazi America in the 1950s, The Plot
Against America (2004), is a transreal transformation.
Paul Di Filippo (1954–), in a buoyant appreciation of Rucker, captured the key
moves of transrealism: “as a unique individual, each of us must report back as faith-
fully as we can, sharing our insights in whatever artistic modes best suit us. . . .”
Whenever he got stuck while writing, he “just ‘twinked’ Rudy ( . . . a coinage . . .
meaning ‘to run a mental simulation of an individual on your personal wetware’) and
instantly all roadblocks vanished. I even tried to follow Rudy’s scheme of ‘transreally’
incorporating bits and pieces of my autobiography into Fuzzy Dice. Transrealism
being, in Rudy’s memorable phrase, ‘writing just like yourself, only more so.’”
Transrealist writing is founded, finally, in an insistence that empathy, or a suffer-
ing awareness of its absence, must suffuse the fantastic, supplanting rote blueprint
or egotistic wish-fulfillment. It goes beyond stipulating cozy formulae about our
world (traditional naturalist realism), or even asking how it is we know that world
(the modernist, epistemological project). Situated in the complexity, the psychic and
social density, of observed life, transrealism takes an extra step into systematic,
exploratory doubt—the step intrinsic to postmodern science—and confronts the
experiential varieties of all possible worlds: the liberating project of radically
ontological fiction.

Bibliography
Broderick, Damien. Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction. London: Routledge,
1995.
———. X, Y, Z, T: Dimensions of Science Fiction, Holicong, PA: Borgo Press, 2004.
Davis, Ray. “Delany’s Dirt.” 1996. http://www.pseudopodium.org/kokonino/dd4.html
Di Filippo, Paul. “Just Like Himself, Only More So.” 2003. http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/
nonfiction/pdif_rudy.htm
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science
Fictions. New York: Verso, 2005.
———. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press,
1991.
Jonas, Gerald. “Science fiction.” New York Times. 28 Oct. 1979: pp. 15–16.
Linklater, Richard. 2006. “Infintely Improbable.” http://news.ansible.co.uk/a229.html.
Miéville, China. Qtd. in “Writer’s Workshop.” 2003. http://www.darkecho.com/darkecho/
workshop/terms.html
Niffenegger, Audrey. The Time Traveler’s Wife. New York: Harvest, 2004.
———, interview by Veronica Bond. “An Interview with Audrey Niffenegger,”
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2003_12_001158.php
Philip K. Dick online bibliography: http://www.philipkdick.com/works_novels.html
Sallis, James. ed. Ash of Stars: On the Writings of Samuel R. Delany. Jackson, MS: Univer-
sity Press of Mississippi, 1996.
1034 TRAVEL WRITING

Scholz, Carter. “Invisible man.” Review of James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B.
Sheldon, by Julie Philips. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006. http://www.bookfo-
rum.com/scholz.html
Sherman, Delia. “An Introduction to Interstitial Arts: Life on the Border.” 2003.
http://www.interstitialarts.org/what/intro_toIA.html
Sterling, Bruce. “Slipstream.” 2005. http://www.eff.org/Misc/Publications/Bruce_Sterling/
Catscan_columns/catscan.05
Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the
American Dream. New York: Random House, 1971.
Westfahl, Gary. “Homo aspergerus: Evolution Stumbles Forward.” March 6 2006.
http://www.locusmag.com/2006/Features/Westfahl_HomoAspergerus.html

Further Reading
Rucker, Rudy. “A Transrealist Manifesto.” The Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of
America 82 (Winter 1983). Reprinted in Transreal! WCS Books, 1991, and Seek! Four Walls
Eight Windows, 1999. Online with other essays on writing at: http://www.rudyrucker.
com/writing/; Broderick, Damien. Transrealist Fiction: Writing in the Slipstream of Science.
Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000.
DAMIEN BRODERICK

TRAVEL WRITING
Definition. Travel writing takes many forms, but the genre is generally associated
with nonfiction narratives that recount, from a first-person perspective, the author’s
experience of a journey. Unlike a travel guidebook, which offers practical advice
about sightseeing, dining, and lodging options, and which presupposes the reader’s
intent to visit the location described, a travel narrative is a literary form that reflects
an author’s personal perspective of a place. Attempts to define the genre more
precisely are challenged by its hybrid qualities. For example, when describing the
genre in an issue of Granta devoted to travel writing, editor Bill Buford observes
that it is “the beggar of literary forms: it borrows from the memoir, reportage, and,
most important, the novel. It is, however, a narrative told in the first person, authen-
ticated by lived experience” (Buford 1984, 7). In addition to sharing traits with
other genres, travel writing is remarkably varied in length, scope, style, tone, and
subject matter. While some authors are also novelists or journalists, travel writers
are as likely to be naturalists, historians, scientists, philosophers, or chefs, among
other occupations. Inevitably, some writers make better traveling companions than
others, but the diversity of travel writing has greatly contributed to the genre’s
enduring popularity.
History. Travel writing dates back to ancient times, when people first began
recording stories of movement from one place to another. The genre emerged from
heroic epics such as Homer’s Odyssey, but accounts of exploration and pilgrimage
throughout history also constitute early forms of travel writing. The genre devel-
oped significantly when improved modes of transportation allowed people to travel
more frequently and widely, with less hardship and danger. In the eighteenth
century, the British upper class flocked to the European Continent for educational
Grand Tours via the coach, but the arrival of rail travel in the nineteenth century
paved the way for mass tourism. In The Norton Book of Travel, Paul Fussell
describes the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the “heyday of travel and
travel writing”: “It was the Bourgeois Age that defined the classic modern idea of
travel as an excitement and a treat and that established the literary genre of the
 TRAVEL WRITING 1035

‘travel book’” (Fussell 1987, 271, 273). The period produced an outpouring of
travel sketches, diaries, and guidebooks, as well as more artfully crafted narratives
by authors since recognized as important literary figures. While the British are
frequently credited with establishing travel writing as we know it today, American
writers such as Mark Twain, Henry James, and Henry David Thoreau contributed
significantly to the burgeoning genre in the nineteenth century. British explorers,
however, must be acknowledged for popularizing a subgenre of travel writing that
captured a reading audience around the world in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Polar exploration produced gripping accounts of treks to the ends
of the earth, including Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s masterpiece The Worst Journey in the
World, which recounts British explorer Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed quest for the
South Pole as well as the author’s calamitous experiences as a member of the
expedition to Antarctica. Cherry-Garrard’s memoir, published in 1922, remains a
landmark of exploration literature from a period that evidenced heated interna-
tional competition to reach and claim the most remote places on the planet. As a
subgenre of travel writing, polar literature is marked by a consistent focus on
endurance and survival. Those who lived to tell the tale of hauling sledges across
the ice, falling into crevasses, and facing diminishing or non-existent food supplies,
bequeathed narratives about heroic travel that no longer seems possible, aerospace
achievements notwithstanding. In Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the
Wars, Fussell elegizes the 1920s and 1930s as travel writing’s finest hour, charac-
terizing the post-WWII world as unsuitable for worthwhile travel or travel writing:
“The going was good for only twenty years, and after the war all that remained
was jet tourism among the ruins, resulting in phenomena like the appalling pollu-
tion of the Mediterranean and the Aegean” (Fussell 1980, 226). Although Fussell’s
concerns about the effects of tourism on the environment are shared by many travel
writers today, his implicit prediction of the demise of good travel writing has
proven premature. After a lull of a few decades, the genre proved its endurance in
the 1980s, a decade witnessing a resurgence of interest in travel writing. Random
House began publishing its successful Vintage Departure series of travel narratives,
while other publishers began reprinting classic travel books. New travel writing
appeared with more frequency in bookstores as well as in magazines, including lit-
erary magazines such as Granta, which devoted three separate issues to the genre
in the 1980s. Travel writing continues to flourish, its status aided by readers’
increased interest in nonfiction in general, but the genre endures due to its ability
to capture, reflect, and sometimes critique the complicated and diverse world in
which we live.
Trends and Themes. Bookstore shelves now sag under the weight of new titles
in the genre, many of which reveal how travel writers employ accounts of journeys
in order to explore subjects or concerns that extend beyond the actual
geographical context for such investigations. The flexible genre encompasses nar-
ratives focused on adventure, romantic relationships, disastrous trips, or dozens
of other topics.
Publishers are perhaps most responsible for one distinct and recent trend in the
genre—the numerous books on the market that recount an author’s extended stay
in another country, usually somewhere in Europe, often while he or she renovates
an old house and acclimates to the surrounding culture. The success of Frances
Mayes’s Under the Tuscan Sun (1996), in which the narrator, a poet and gourmet
cook, describes the pleasures of living in the Italian countryside, prompted a spate
1036 TRAVEL WRITING

of similar books. Other writers lean toward what may be labeled meta- or anti-
travel writing, narratives that explore traveling theoretically or philosophically and
that conclude with implicit arguments for “armchair” travel or for simply staying
at home. Such is the case with Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel (2002), in which
the author suggests applying the receptivity of a “traveling mind-set” to our own
locales, which then might become as interesting as “the high mountain passes and
butterfly-filled jungles of Humboldt’s South America” (Botton 2002, 242). Readers
unfamiliar with the genre may reasonably expect travel writing to focus on travel—
the actual movement from one place to another—but many contemporary writers
suggest that the inner journey is as important as the outer one. To varying degrees,
travel writers record the self-exploration that traveling often precipitates. As Casey
Blanton observes, most contemporary travel writers see themselves as exiles: “A
search for authenticity, wholeness, and meaning often drives their journeys as it did
for travel writers in the past (Blanton 2002, xiv).
Travel writer Mary Morris argues that women writers are particularly likely to
value the inner landscape, “the beholder as significant as the beheld” (Morris 1993,
xvii), but many scholars take issue with such sweeping generalizations about gender.
Kristi Siegel, for example, acknowledges that gender affects genre, but argues in
regard to travel writing that “it is nearly impossible to construct a set of common-
alities that would cut across lines of race and class” (Siegel 2004, 5). Morris’s obser-
vation, however, proffered in response to what she perceived as a neglect of
attention to women’s travel writing, is supported by the theme of self-discovery that
emerges in a number of contemporary travel narratives by women, even though the
internal landscape is by no means the exclusive province of female travel writers. In
any case, women are producing travel narratives with increasing frequency in
comparison to decades past. In 2005, Travelers’ Tales published the inaugural
edition of The Best Women’s Travel Writing, but the press boasts seventeen collec-
tions of women’s travel writing since its first title on the subject appeared in 1995.
Additionally, women now contribute to the subgenre of adventure travel writing,
traditionally associated with male writers and generally characterized by risk-taking
and physical challenge. Holly Morris, for example, recounts hunting for wild boar
in Borneo and climbing the Matterhorn in Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe
for a New Kind of Heroine (2005), describing her stories as “estro-charged globe-
trotting” (Morris 2005, ix).
As contemporary travel writing is so richly varied, many publishers now offer
anthologies or series focused on specific kinds of journeys, thereby creating addi-
tional categories in the genre. The Crown Journeys Series, for example, includes
titles by well-regarded novelists as well as by popular authors, each of whom
describes a walk, or walks, in a particular city or circumscribed area. The nature of
the series suggests the rewards of unhurried and grounded travel, in contrast to the
global crisscrossing of adventure seekers. In one of the series’ representative titles,
Time’s Magpie: A Walk in Prague (2004), Myla Goldberg describes wandering
around the old European city, immersed in its history and attuned to the small pleas-
ures that such leisurely travel affords. As the Crown Journeys Series indicates, an
increasing number of novelists have become travel writers, perhaps because the
flexibility of the genre and its familiar narrative form is so amenable to the devices
and techniques of fiction.
Contexts and Issues. After many centuries of exploration, and in an era of increas-
ing globalization and rapid development in electronic communication, the world
 TRAVEL WRITING 1037

today seems smaller and more familiar than it once appeared. Certainly, there are
fewer and fewer places in the world that are unmapped or that have not already
served as the subject of television shows or of previously published travel narratives.
With the tourism industry thriving due to greater mobility in general, those seeking
the unbeaten path are likely to be disappointed. Contemporary travel writers
respond to such circumstances in varying ways: by choosing unusual forms of trans-
portation to provide a new or distinct perspective of a place, by opting to remap or
retrace the path of a predecessor, or by employing travel as a means of investigating
particular social and cultural issues. Environmental concerns are consistently
addressed in contemporary travel writing, particularly in narratives focused on
places that were once considered exotic or remote. The inroads of tourism have
been greatly responsible for damaging fragile ecological systems and have unavoid-
ably altered ways of life in traditional cultures. While travel writers tend to distin-
guish their motivations and journeys from those of tourists, the distinction is
problematic. As Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan observe, contemporary travel
writers, “whatever their status or institutional affiliation, are continuing to provide
sterling service to tourism—about to become the world’s largest industry—even
when they might imagine themselves to be its most strident adversaries” (Holland
and Huggan 1998, 3). The seemingly vexed relationship between travel writers and
tourism bears similarity to the relationship of the ethnographer and his or her
subject in anthropological writing. Like ethnographers, travel writers describe
people and their societies and cultures, and thus questions about the textual repre-
sentation of “others” are frequently raised in regard to both forms of writing. As
Holland and Huggan note, “Travel writers and anthropologists both occupy posi-
tions of power—granted largely by the economic differences between their societies
and the societies they visit—that allow them to establish an often unwarranted
authority over their subjects” (Holland and Huggan 1998, 12). Although travel
writing and ethnography are forms of nonfiction, neither can make claim to
absolute objectivity, for cultural description always reflects the writer’s perspective.
Accordingly, travel writers may strive for veracity in their narratives, but their field
of vision is inevitably limited or affected by codes of class, race, gender, and culture.
As a form of autobiography or memoir, travel writing is personal by definition.
Practitioners in the genre must balance reader expectations for truthful reportage
with the artistic demands of creative nonfiction. As Robert Root explains, “All
literary genres essentially create representations of reality and require craft and
design and discovery and process, but nonfiction is unique in that it alone is required
by virtually unstated definition to apply those strategies and techniques to some-
thing that already exists” (Root 2003, 246).
Reception. Throughout its history, travel writing has had credibility problems, in
part because historical exploration accounts were often notoriously unreliable, but
also because the genre has traditionally been viewed as having less literary value
than the “three genres” of fiction, poetry, and drama. Academics in the twentieth-
century began to study historical travel literature as a viable subject for cultural
studies, and the genre grew in significance with the rise of women’s studies and
theoretical spatial studies. Contemporary travel writing, however, received scant
scholarly attention until the resurgence of the genre in the 1980s. Accordingly,
initial studies argued for wider recognition of travel writing’s merits. For example,
in his introduction to Temperamental Journeys: Essays on the Modern Literature
of Travel, Michael Kowalewski expressed frustration with “the venerable tradition
1038 TRAVEL WRITING

of condescending to travel books as a second-rate literary form” (Kowalewski

1992, 2). Temperamental Journeys, presented as “the first collection to focus
exclusively on twentieth-century travel writing,” was soon followed by a number
of scholarly studies devoted to contemporary examples in the genre, now a
respected subject for academic study (Kowalewski 1992, 7).
Travel writing also continues to hold the interest of general reading audiences.
Since 2000, Houghton Mifflin has published its annual anthology The Best
American Travel Writing, each volume showcasing essay-length travel narratives
previously published in well-regarded magazines such as The New Yorker, The
Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic Traveler, and Outside. Series editor Jason
Wilson explains why such literature deserves attention in his foreword to the first
volume in the series:

Travel writing is always about a specific moment in time. The writer imbues that
moment with everything that he or she has experienced, observed, read, lived, bringing
all of his or her talent to bear on it. When focused on that one moment, great travel
writing can teach us something about the world that no other genre can. Perhaps travel
writing’s foremost lesson is this: we may never walk this way again, and even if we do,
we may never be the same people as we are right now. Most important, the world we
travel though will never be the same place again. This is why travel writing matters.
(Wilson 200, xvi)

Selected Authors. Paul Theroux has published more than a dozen travel narratives
since he began writing them in the 1970s, making him one of the best-known travel
writers of the last four decades. For this author, the journey itself—the movement,
the work, and the pleasures of going somewhere—is of greater value and interest
than the destination reached. Thus train travel, especially, serves him as a means of
vision, a particular way of seeing the world that makes him receptive to the insights
afforded by constant movement. Theroux describes journeys by rail as “the purest
form of travel”; “everything else—planes especially—is transfer, your journey
beginning when you arrive” (Sunrise with Seamonsters, 126, 128). The four-month
railroad odyssey to the Far East recounted in The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train
through Asia (1975) exemplifies Theroux’s philosophy of travel but also the manner
in which his preferred mode of transportation serves the writer as well as the
traveler: “Train travel animated my imagination and usually gave me solitude to
order and write my thoughts: I traveled easily in two directions, along the level rails
while Asia flashed changes at the window, and at the interior rim of a private world
of memory and languages” (Theroux 1975, 166). Through such passages, The
Great Railway Bazaar established the author’s predilection for solitary travel and
for personal reflection about the act and art of writing. His work often reminds
readers that travel writing is a trip twice taken: the traveler moves through interior
and exterior landscapes, recording images and observations that will later be trans-
formed and shaped into a cohesive narrative. A self-proclaimed wanderer and a
successful novelist, Theroux believes travel and writing are congruent enterprises:

The nearest thing to writing a novel is traveling in a strange country. Travel is a creative
act—not simply loafing and inviting your soul, but feeding the imagination, account-
ing for each fresh wonder, memorizing and moving on. The discoveries the traveler
makes in broad daylight—the curious problems of the eye he solves—resemble those
that thrill and sustain a novelist in his solitude. (Theroux 1985, 140)
 TRAVEL WRITING 1039

Accordingly, The Great Railway Bazaar reminds readers that travel writing is
more than mere documentation; rather, it is imaginative transformation, aided by
memory and language, of lived experience into words on a page. Theroux is careful,
though, to acknowledge that he is less free to invent in his travel writing than in his
fiction; the nonfiction genre demands truthful eyewitness. In the narrative’s conclu-
sion, he states that he has learned that “the difference between travel writing and
fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what
the imagination knows” (Theroux 1975, 342). As Elton Glaser observes, Theroux’s
travel books, “like many of the twentieth century’s most celebrated literary works,
come with a built-in analysis of their own composition” (Glaser 1989, 193).
Theroux’s allegiance to accuracy and honesty is also underscored in the book’s final
sentences. After expressing pleasure at the prospect of rereading the notebooks kept
during his trip, he cites the first words that appear in them, which also serve as the
opening words of The Great Railway Bazaar. In addition to conveying the circular
nature of travel—as one must usually return home—the ending implicitly promises
readers a travel narrative created from carefully recorded observations.
In his study of the author, Samuel Coale states that Theroux is almost Puritan in
“his precise faith in language, in the ability of words to conjure up a place, a people,
a continent, and attach significant meaning to them, to make them ultimately
signify” (Coale 1997). Focusing on Theroux’s “Americanness,” Coale views the
author’s travel writing as faithful to his heritage, particularly to romantic notions of
the individual self: “The American myth shimmers with notions of self-renewal,
rebirth, self-made men, . . . the lone self which confronts a wilderness or alien
landscape and conquers it in terms of his own perceptions or his masterful
technological skills” (Coale 1997). In The Old Patagonian Express: By Train
through the Americas (1979), Theroux’s second and perhaps most highly regarded
travel narrative, he confesses that he is “taking a little-known route through Central
America . . . made for lonely travel,” but he also argues that “travel is at its best a
solitary enterprise” (Theroux 1979, 121, 168). One of the ironies of the book
surfaces in its stories of encounters with fellow passengers who are sometimes
welcomed as company but who are just as often regarded as annoyances, even as
the author presents himself as a solo traveler. Other people distract him from his
writing and interfere with his perceptions. As Glaser notes, Theroux “takes great
pains to convince us that he is a traveler in the grand tradition of philosopher
observers, set far apart from the other characters who temporarily share his journey
on the open road” (Glaser 1989, 197).
Theroux’s persistent desire for solitude often makes his narrative persona appear
self-absorbed. Throughout The Old Patagonian Express, he retreats from the impo-
sition of his fellow travelers by seeking refuge in books. His reading material often
reflects his mood or perspective, as is seen in his choice of Ambrose Bierce’s The
Devil’s Dictionary, “a grimly humorous book of self-congratulatory cynicism,”
Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, in which Theroux inscribes “No privacy, no relief,”
and Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which Theroux describes as “a night-
mare journey,” a phrase that also captures the author’s perception of his passage
through Costa Rica (Theroux 1979, 60, 79, 192). If writing and traveling are
consonant occupations in their conduciveness to creativity, reading and traveling are
similarly parallel in their unerring progress to a final destination. Poe’s novel, a
narrative that also recounts a journey south toward the Pole, features a hero who
survives various catastrophes and terrors only to end up drifting by canoe in a blank
1040 TRAVEL WRITING

nothingness of open water. Like Poe’s suffering survivor, Theroux concludes his
journey only to stare into the vast and empty space of Patagonian desert: “The noth-
ingness itself, a beginning for some intrepid traveler, was an ending for me”
(Theroux 1979, 404). Although he attempts to transform the experience into a
paradoxical discovery of his existence, he concludes his narrative on a dark note, as
if he has reached the limits of travel’s rewards—and the limits of language itself—
as much as he has reached the end of the actual road.
While Theroux has been praised as “one of America’s most engaging travel
writers” (Rose 2000, 17), he has also earned a reputation as a curmudgeon and
cranky expatriate. In her review of Theroux’s Fresh Air Fiend: Travel Writings,
1985-2000 (2000), Lucretia Stewart observes that the author “demonstrates his
mastery of the rapid scattergun approach to invective, devised, it would appear,
specifically for the purpose of cramming in as many insults as possible into the
shortest possible space” (Stewart 2000, 32). Theroux jokingly acknowledges his
reputation as a “dyspeptic” in an interview with Dwight Garner, but he explains
that critics misinterpret his irony as grumpiness:

I think that, particularly in travel writing, we are used to sweetness and light. I decided
very early on—more than 25 years ago when I published my first travel book, The
Great Railway Bazaar—that a lot of travel writing was merely like a postcard saying:
“Everything is fine. Wish you were here.” But what I realized is that travel is a lot of
misery and delay. (Garner 1996)

But many contemporary travel writers take a lighter approach to the travails of
travel. Bill Bryson’s witty, irreverent, and sometimes wiseacre observations about
human foibles and cultural idiosyncrasies have made him one of America’s most
popular travel writers. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, he spent much of his adult life in
England, where his first travel books, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town
America (1989) and Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe (1991), garnered a
wide and enthusiastic readership. In The Lost Continent, he recounts a return to his
native land, where he visits 38 states in his mother’s aging Chevrolet and attempts
to duplicate the family vacations of his youth. Divided into two parts, East and
West, the book follows the author’s trips to many backwater towns and tacky
tourist traps, usually portrayed with a great deal of comedy. As one reviewer
observes of another book, Bryson’s writing provokes “body-racking, tear-inducing”
laughter, through humor that falls “somewhere between the one-liner genius of
Dave Barry and the narrative brilliance of David Sedaris” (Jennings 2006, 9). Such
wit is evident in The Lost Continent when the author interweaves his narrative with
memories of journeys led by his father, portrayed as a cranky task-master who
forced the Bryson family to endure disastrous camping trips:

And afterwards, in a silent car filled with bitterness and unquenched basic needs, we
would mistakenly turn off the highway and end up in some no-hope hamlet with a
name like Draino, Indiana, or Tapwater, Missouri, and get a room in the only hotel in
town, the sort of run-down place where if you wanted to watch TV it meant you had
to sit in a lobby and share a cracked leatherette sofa with an old man with big sweat
circles under his arms. (Bryson 1989, 11)

Bryson writes with a dual-perspective in The Lost Continent, that of the insider
and native son with unquestionable knowledge of his homeland’s favorite pastimes,
 TRAVEL WRITING 1041

but also that of the expatriate who, aligned with his fellow Britons, is alternately
amused and disturbed by the social practices, or intellectual shortcomings, of
American life. While visiting Auburn University, for example, he complains about
the absence of a single decent bookstore in a town with 20,000 students, but he
balances his barbs with self-deprecating anecdotes: “In my day, the principal
concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning.
Learning was something you did when the first three weren’t available, but at least
you did it.” (Bryson 1989, 72). Bryson’s humor makes The Lost Continent a very
entertaining travelogue, but attentive readers will note that the author uses the occa-
sion of his homecoming to proffer some sharp criticism of American life and
practices. In describing a visit to the Great Smokey Mountains National Park in
Tennessee, for example, he observes the squalor just beyond the park. Bryson is
equally disturbed by American television newscasts (during which grisly murders
are recounted casually), by the poverty and violence of so many cities, and by the
vastness of the country that is so big “it just absorbs disasters” (Bryson 1989, 262).
He reserves his harshest comments for Americans’ sense of privilege, their all-
consuming quest for material comforts, and their disregard for other cultures.
“When you grow up in America,” he observes, “you are inculcated from the earliest
age with the belief—no, the understanding—that America is the richest and most
powerful nation on earth because God likes us best” (Bryson 1989, 271). As the
book progresses, The Lost Continent becomes tinged with melancholy, despite
Bryson’s efforts to offset the darker observations with adolescent memories of better
times. One fully expects the author to conclude the account of his nationwide trek
with a claim about not being able to go home again—the America of his past seems
lost to him, as the title of the book suggests—but Bryson opts for a more positive
ending, perhaps reluctant to betray his roots completely.
In Neither Here Nor There, Bryson captures the experience of the contemporary
tourist through a narrative about journeys to more than a dozen countries in
Europe. In casting a wider net than in The Lost Continent, he shifts from the
narrative unity afforded by commentary on one country to a dizzying series of
national portraits often marked by stereotypes. Bryson partly appeases potential
charges of cultural reductionism by employing exaggerations that no one would
be expected to take seriously. Thus, “Germans are flummoxed by humor, the Swiss
have no concept of fun, the Spanish think there is nothing at all ridiculous about
eating dinner at midnight, and the Italians should never, ever have been let in on
the invention of the motorcar” (Bryson 1991, 35). The broad humor did not
appeal to all critics, but some, such as Dervla Murphy, described it as distinctive,
“depending on his cunning use of flamboyant exaggerations, grotesque but always
successful metaphors and the deft juxtapositions of incongruous images—the
whole presented in a style that boldly veers from laid-back colloquial American to
formal clean-cut English” (28). In the decade following the publication of Neither
Here Nor There, Bryson produced five more books that secured his reputation as
a comic travel writer, although he has become equally known for books about the
English language. As one critic observes, “What makes Bryson the most enter-
taining and interesting travel writer around is his singular facility to fashion a
unique whole from historical facts, topographical observations, and geographical
ramblings” (Maxwell 2000, 118). Bryson’s consistently humorous approach to
travel writing makes him a distinctive voice amidst his contemporaries working in
the genre.
1042 TRAVEL WRITING

Like Bryson, Tony Horowitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, aims to enter-

tain readers in his travel books, but his most recent work exhibits more ambitious
goals. In Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook has Gone Before
(2002), he attempts to replicate Cook’s epic voyages in a quest to understand the
man who redrew the map of the world in the eighteenth century. Horowitz credits
Cook with undertaking the first voyage of scientific discovery, with influencing the
Western world’s perception and understanding of unfamiliar and exotic cultures,
and, for better and for worse, with opening up many new territories for subsequent
explorers and empires. Inspired by Cook’s journals, the author sets forth in the
explorer’s wake, initially serving as a volunteer aboard a replica of Cook’s ship and
subsequently resorting to more modern modes of travel, in a quest that takes him
all over the South Seas and other parts of the globe. Part history, part travel
narrative, Blue Latitudes underscores the limitations of modern travel:

I’d gone where Cook went, but I couldn’t share his experience. The problem wasn’t
simply that I traveled by jet, rather than by wooden ship, to lands that had changed
utterly since Cook’s day. It was also that I carried an image of every place I went before
I got there. This was the curse of modern travel: it was like reading a book after you’ve
already seen the movie adaptation. (Horowitz 2002, 222)

Horowitz’s journeys to Tahiti, Alaska, Hawaii, and other locations visited by

Cook, however, are recounted with humor as well as wistfulness, mostly due to the
presence of his traveling companion Roger, an Australian who serves as comic foil
to the author throughout much of the book. While Roger resorts to drinking at any
trying leg of the trip, Horowitz becomes increasingly dismayed, and often irritated,
by signs of Cook’s tarnished reputation. He learns that the explorer is reviled in
some countries, viewed as a wicked imperialist, and that his memory and legacy
have been neglected even in England, Cook’s native land. “In remembering the
man,” he writes, “the world had lost the balance and nuance I so admired in Cook’s
own writing about those he encountered” (Horowitz 2002, 296). Blue Latitudes
seemingly seeks to restore the balance, moving between historical and contemporary
perspectives of Cook in order to recalibrate the man’s legacy. Without denying the
fine line between exploration and exploitation, Horowitz pays tribute to Cook as
one of the last great explorers: “In his wake, other discoverers filled in the few
remaining blanks on the map. Eventually there wasn’t anyplace left on earth where
no man had gone before” (Horowitz 2002, 443).
Travel writers’ recognition of exhausted space is often consonant with their obser-
vations about exhausted planetary resources and other environmental concerns,
issues that loom large in much contemporary travel literature and that reveal the
genre’s notable relationship to nature writing. Journeys through wilderness or
natural settings frequently cause modern travelers to confront imperiled wildlife,
altered ecosystems, and other distressing environmental conditions. Cultural losses
often accompany such changes, particularly in regions of the world where people’s
traditions, beliefs, and means of survival are closely tied to the natural world.
Nature-travel writers thus cross boundaries of genre as well as of geography, evident
in books such as Peter Matthiessen’s classic The Snow Leopard (1978), a critically-
acclaimed account of the author’s journey to remote parts of Nepal, where, accom-
panied by a wildlife biologist, Matthiessen hopes to observe the elusive snow
leopard. The Snow Leopard is also an intensely personal book, revealing the author
 TRAVEL WRITING 1043

attempting to cope with his wife’s recent death and eventually coming to terms with
her loss, as well as other losses, through Zen Buddhism. As Casey Blanton observes,
Matthiessen’s “grim awareness of late-twentieth-century ecology” and thematic
exploration of humankind’s destruction of the planet is ultimately balanced by his
compelling spiritual inner journey (Blanton 2002, 74-75, 81).
A more recent example of nature-travel writing, Gretel Ehrlich’s This Cold
Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland (2003), is also focused on issues of loss.
Ehrlich’s narrative about her extended travels among the Inuit during the 1990s
recounts dog sled adventures with subsistence hunters whose livelihood is threat-
ened by global warming and the temptations of the modern world. Throughout the
book, Ehrlich includes expedition notes from Knud Rasmussen, whose exploration
of Greenland in the early twentieth century allowed him to document the culture of
the Polar Eskimos, which had remained essentially unchanged for a thousand years.
Ehrlich’s book similarly records Inuit ways of life, but her narrative inevitably
reveals change: people trying to preserve their traditions while they adapt to the
realities of a new global economy. “Everyone is just trying to survive,” one hunter
tells her. “Before there were shops, we followed animals. Now it’s started to be mod-
ern so with my children and grandchildren, I try to get them to travel around with
me so they know the life. Before, there was hunting with your wife. Now, my wife
has to work in town to pay the bills” (Ehrlich 2003, 174). While recording such
losses, This Cold Heaven transcends cultural nostalgia by celebrating the beauty of
the landscape and the resourcefulness of the people who live on it and with it: “The
complexities of ice had taught the hunters to reconcile the imminence of famine and
death with an irreverent joy at being alive. The landscape itself, with its shifting and
melting ice, its mirages, glaciers, and drifting icebergs, is less a description of
desolation than an ode to the beauty of impermanence” (Ehrlich 2003, xiii).
Rebecca Solnit’s writing persistently pursues questions about place and humans’
relationship to it. In her books, travel serves as a means to know a location deeply
and intimately, but such a process also requires forays into the past and into the
stories that give meaning to a particular place. As a cultural historian as well as art
critic and social activist, Solnit focuses on various spatial practices—geographic,
political, environmental—to illustrate that how we perceive a place affects how we
treat it. In Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American
West (1994), she explores an unlikely pairing of locations, the Nevada Test Site and
Yosemite National Park, in a two-part narrative about contested spaces. In addition
to recounting her travel through these places, Solnit historicizes them through
chronicles about the making of the atom bomb and the development of the American
wilderness. Early in the book, she signals her thematic terrain by noting hikers’ and
explorers’ obsession with virgin wilderness, with being “the first people ever to tread
on a piece of land” (Solnit 1994, 24). Even if one were to step foot on ground never
before touched by someone else, she explains, the place, however remote, is cultural
territory, already covered and constructed by myth and imagination, by artists,
writers, and history. Solnit illustrates this cultural construction of place in her
account of a guided tour around Ground Zero, the Nevada Test Site, which remains
one of the most bombed places on earth. Throughout her tour, she experiences the
surreal sense of being in a movie or on a film set, ironically reinforced by the docu-
mentary film she watches during her visit: “The landscape of the Nevada Test Site
was strangely innocent of its own history, even with all of its craters and ruins. It
was the stories that brought it to life for me, the stories of . . . the atomic veterans,
1044 TRAVEL WRITING

the local people. . . . [but] it was the journey that gave the landscape meaning for
me, not this arrival” (Solnit 1994, 211). Solnit’s turn to Yosemite in the second half
of Savage Dreams initially appears as an odd narrative path to take after the seem-
ingly conclusive end at Ground Zero, but the extension of her journey, and of the
book, allows her to confront even more directly the relationship between actual and
perceived place. Deciding to visit Yosemite on her way elsewhere, she stops at Lake
Tenaya and quickly realizes that the national park, “the very crucible and touch-
stone for American landscape,” would give her insight into “the peculiarities, blind-
nesses, ruptures, and problems that constitute the Euro-American experience of
landscape” (Solnit 1994, 221). Thus, Savage Dreams traces and challenges historical
depictions of the park by artists, photographers, explorers, and naturalists as unin-
habited and virgin wilderness. Solnit also aligns such conceptions of the park with
the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted’s view of nature as art and with
ecologist Bill McKibben’s belief in the independence of nature. By interweaving her
narrative with accounts of her own rambles through the park, she offers a counter-
vision of nature, in which humans are not excluded. For Solnit, place is constructed
and given meaning by people, by those who inhabit or interact with the location.
She advises us to give up the story of virgin wilderness, which would allow us to
“lay to rest some of the misanthropy of old-fashioned conservationists and recog-
nize that culture does not necessarily destroy nature, and that the ravages of those
in a hurry are not the only pattern in the book” (Solnit 1994, 308). Solnit’s travel
writing has been described as meta-travel writing, “Writing that speculates about
the meaning of travel even as the trip goes on” (Cooper 1997). The description is
particularly apt for her recent works, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000) and
A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005), both of which explore movement and
mobility rather than a particular landscape or location. Henry David Thoreau,
referred to in Savage Dreams and repeatedly referenced in the more recent books,
serves as her touchstone for purposeful and meaningful travel. The nature writer
and practitioner of civil disobedience informs her belief that walking, whether
construed as crossing boundaries or trespassing into forbidden places, “can articu-
late political meaning” (Solnit 2000, 8). Inspired also by Thoreau’s essay “Walking,”
Wanderlust follows the method of Solnit’s previous books; that is to say, she uses
her own experiences and travels to provide a framework for broader philosophical
inquiry. Walking is thus a metaphor as well as an act: “It trespasses through every-
body else’s field—through anatomy, anthropology, architecture, gardening, geogra-
phy, political and cultural history, literature, sexuality, religious studies—and
doesn’t stop in any of them on its long route” (Solnit 2000, 4). In tracing the
evolution of walking, examining the literature of walking, and portraying every-
thing else historically and culturally related to walking, Solnit wants readers of
Wanderlust to recognize that the pace of walking, as opposed to other methods of
movement or travel, fosters thinking and reflection. Walking keeps us grounded,
literally, thereby engaging our minds and bodies with the world. While such philos-
ophizing may appear to characterize Solnit’s work as something other than travel
writing, her book is ultimately an argument about how to travel in a postmodern
era of standardized environments and disorienting speed. She also makes a case for
conceiving travel as stories, and stories as travel, to underscore the connection
between imagination and movement. She observes, “To read is to travel through
that terrain with the author as guide—a guide one may not always agree with or
trust, but who can at least be counted upon to take one somewhere” (Solnit 2000, 72).
 TRAVEL WRITING 1045

GET LOST! A NONCONVENTIONAL GUIDE TO MOVING

THROUGH THE WORLD
A celebration of dislocation and of travel as a state of mind, A Field Guide to Getting Lost is
appropriately fragmented and non-linear. A nonconventional travel writer, Rebecca Solnit
presents readers with an alternative to traditional journey narratives; she captures, in the
form of her text, the sometimes disorienting experience of moving through and living in the
modern world. At the same time, her innovative approach to writing about travel is not
proffered as literary experiment for the sake of novelty but rather as a means of mapping
the interior journeys that make the exterior ones matter. In pushing the boundaries of the
genre, or perhaps dissolving them completely, she illustrates that new methods and forms of
travel writing may best help us to navigate place and space in the postmodern era.

In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, she denies readers an actual “somewhere” by

arguing for travel without destination. Solnit explains that people who literally get
lost are not paying attention to the place around them and no longer attend to the
natural signs that would help them to navigate their way. In contrast to being lost
out of ignorance, Solnit proposes being lost as a state of mind because it leads to a
life of discovery. A meditation on being lost and on various kinds of losses, the book
acknowledges Thoreau as the best and truest travel guide. Solnit quotes Walden:
“Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to
find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations”
(Solnit 2005, 15).

Bibliography
Blanton, Casey. Travel Writing: The Self and the World. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Botton, Alain de. The Art of Travel. New York: Pantheon Books, 2002.
Bryson, Bill. The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America. (1989) New York:
HarperPerennial, 1990.
———. Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe. (1991) New York: William Morrow, 1992.
Buford, Bill. “Editorial.” Granta 10 (1984): 5-7.
Cherry-Garrard, Apsley. The Worst Journey in the World. London: Constable, 1922.
Coale, Samuel. Paul Theroux. In Twayne United States Authors on CD-ROM. New York:
G.K. Hall and Co., 1997.
Cooper, Rand Richards. “Travel.” Review of A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in
Ireland, by Rebecca Solnit. New York Times on the Web, June 1, 1997. http://www.
nytimes.com/books/97/06/01/reviews/970601.01travelt.html.
Fussell, Paul. Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1980.
———, ed. The Norton Book of Travel. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1987.
Garner, Dwight. “His Secret Life.” Interview with Paul Theroux. Salon, September 2, 1996.
http://www.salon.com/weekly/interview960902.html.
Goldberg, Myla. Time’s Magpie: A Walk in Prague. New York: Crown Publishers, Crown
Journeys, 2004.
Glaser, Elton. “The Self-Reflexive Traveler: Paul Theroux on the Art of Travel and Travel
Writing.” The Centennial Review 33 (1989): 193-206.
Holland, Patrick, and Graham Huggan. Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on
Contemporary Travel Writing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998.
Hooper, Glenn, and Tim Youngs, ed. Perspectives on Travel Writing. Aldershot: Ashgate,
2004.
1046 TRAVEL WRITING

Horowitz, Tony. Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook has Gone Before. New
York: Henry Holt and Co., Picador, 2002.
Hulme, Peter, and Tim Youngs, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing.
Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Jennings, Jay. “Happy Days.” Review of The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, by Bill
Bryson. New York Times Book Review, 15 October 2006: 9.
Kowalewski, Michael, ed. Temperamental Journeys: Essays on the Modern Literature of
Travel. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992.
Maxwell, Gloria. Review of In a Sunburned Country, by Bill Bryson. Library Journal (15
November 2000): 118.
Mayes, Frances. Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy. San Francisco: Chronicle Books,
1996.
Lucy McCauley, ed. The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2005: True Stories from around the
World. Palo Alto: Travelers’ Tales, 2005.
Morris, Holly. Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for a New Kind of Heroine. New York:
Villard, 2005.
Morris, Mary. Introduction to Maiden Voyages: Writings of Women Travelers. Mary Morris
with Larry O’Connor, eds. New York: Random House, Vintage Departures, 1993.
Murphy, Dervla. Review of Neither Here Nor There, by Bill Bryson. Times Literary Supple-
ment, 25 September, 1991: 28.
Root, Jr., Robert L. “Naming Nonfiction (a Polyptych).” College English 65.3 (January
2003): 242-246.
Rose, Peter I. “Around the World in 15 Years.” Review of Fresh Air Fiend, by Paul Theroux.
Christian Science Monitor, 27 July 2000: 17.
Russell, Alison. Crossing Boundaries: Postmodern Travel Literature. New York: Palgrave,
2000.
Siegel, Kristi, ed. Gender, Genre and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing. New York: Peter
Lang, 2004.
———. Issues in Travel Writing: Empire, Spectacle, and Displacement. New York: Peter
Lang, 2002.
Smith, Sidonie. Moving Lives: Twentieth-Century Women’s Travel Writing. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. (2005) New York: Penguin Books, 2006.
———. Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West. (1994)
New York: Random House, Vintage Departures, 1995.
———. Wanderlust: a History of Wandering. New York: Viking Penguin, 2000.
Stewart, Lucretia. “On the Wrong Side of the Frontier.” Review of Fresh Air Fiend, by Paul
Theroux. Times Literary Supplement, no. 5098 (15 December 2000): 12.
Paul Theroux. Fresh Air Fiend: Travel Writings, 1985-2000. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.,
2000.
———. The Great Railway Bazaar: by Train through Asia. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.,
1975.
———. The Old Patagonian Express: by Train through the Americas. (1979) New York:
Houghton Mifflin Co., Mariner, 1997.
———. Sunrise with Seamonsters: Travels & Discoveries 1964–1984. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Co., 1985.
Wilson, Jason, ser. ed. Foreword to The Best American Travel Writing 2000. Bill Bryson, ed.
New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000.

Further Reading
The International Society for Travel Writing, http://istw-travel.org; Studies in Travel Writing,
http://www.studiesintravelwriting.com.
ALISON RUSSELL
 TRUE CRIME LITERATURE 1047

TRUE CRIME LITERATURE

Definition. Although murder narratives and nonfiction crime writing have a
history spanning centuries, modern American true crime literature made its earliest
appearance in the pages of True Detective Magazine during the 1950s and 1960s,
as a new way of narrating and understanding murder emerged—one more sensitive
to context, more psychologically sophisticated, more willing to make conjectures
about the unknown thoughts and motivations of killers. Modern American true
crime texts tend to be formulaic and are characterized by a collection of technical
and thematic conventions established during the 1970s and 1980s. Such conven-
tions include a depiction of one crime or criminal, usually murder, and a preoccu-
pation with certain kinds of crimes—domestic, sadistic, or sexual murders, serial
killings, or the crimes of the rich and famous. The texts include a depiction of the
social contexts and ordinary life details of both victims and killers, generally focus-
ing on the personal history and psychology of the murderer, culminating in the skill-
ful deployment of fiction masquerading as fact (most often seen in dialogue or the
imagined thoughts of characters, known as “free indirect discourse”). They also rely
on a writer/narrator who is positioned as an “insider” on the events, privy to special
information about the case. The structure generally includes four event elements:
background of the crime, pursuit, trial, and imprisonment/execution, although some
texts narrate unsolved crimes, as well as a middle photographic section, which may
include photographs of the killer, victims, crime scenes, weapons, and scenes from
the trial. The text also balances simultaneous distancing from and identification
with the killer, most often done by narrating the killer’s thoughts and feelings, with
the use of a rhetoric of evil and monstrosity to describe the actions and motivations
of killers. True crime literature is dominated by murder narratives, although some
texts focus on serial rapists, espionage, or criminal conspiracy.
History. Exemplary texts and writers of true crime include Truman Capote’s In
Cold Blood (1965–1966), Joseph Wambaugh’s The Onion Field (1973), Vincent
Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter (1974), Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979),
Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me (1980) and her many other books, and numer-
ous titles by such writers as Harold Schechter, Jack Olsen, Carlton Stowers,
Aphrodite Jones, and Mark Fuhrman. True crime has become a pop culture
juggernaut in publishing, journalism, and television, as well as a cultural barometer
registering shifting fears about crime and violence in America. From its inception
and formation as a distinct genre, true crime has created a nonfiction American
landscape of paranoia and danger, random violent crime and roaming serial killers,
of mortal threats to women and children from sociopathic husbands and predatory
child-killers. Paradoxically, the genre also assuages such fears, because most true
crime narratives present cases that have been cleared or solved, thereby reordering
the violently disrupted social world and reassuring readers that horrifying criminals
do not escape punishment, although normal life is regularly and radically altered by
acts of extreme violence.
Certain aspects of the genre’s conventions first appeared in pulp detective maga-
zines from the 1950s and 1960s (most notably True Detective Magazine, published
from 1924 to 1995), and true crime techniques in nascent form are present in texts
of that period, such as Joel Bartlow Martin’s Why Did They Kill? (1952), Lucy
Freeman’s Before I kill more . . . (1955), Meyer Levin’s Compulsion (1956), John
Dean’s The Indiana Torture Slaying (1966), and Gerold Frank’s The Boston
Strangler (1966). These early true crime offerings reflected the preoccupations of
1048 TRUE CRIME LITERATURE

their times, with many texts focused on so-called “juvenile delinquent” killers, in
response to the “teenaged threat” of the 1950s and 1960s. Murder narratives that
focused on one contemporary murder became popular during this period, as writers
began to move away from publishing collections of stories or new treatments of
older, more sensational murders. Such story collections had been popular from the
1900s to the 1950s, but as true crime magazines became more numerous and readily
available, with their journalistic and sensational treatments of national and local
murders, readers came to expect and demand more up-to-the-minute stories from
full-length texts.
Trends and Themes. The kinds of killers treated in true crime changed during the
1960s, largely due to the change in the most sensationally gruesome crimes being
committed, and the growth of a large media-machinery that could hype and inflame
fears about such crimes. Fears about the existence of “bushy-haired strangers” (the
term used by Dr. Sam Shepard to describe the alleged killer of his wife in 1955), sex-
murderers such as Albert DeSalvo (the Boston Strangler, 1962–1964) and Richard
Speck (the Chicago nurse-killer, 1966), mass killers like Charles Whitman (the
University of Texas tower sniper, 1966), and “cult killers” such as Charles Manson
and his “family” (1969) were increased by heavy media coverage of these crimes
and criminals. Each of these crimes generated many different textual and film true
crime treatments, such as Gerold Frank’s The Boston Strangler (1966) and its film
version (The Boston Strangler, dir. Richard Fleischer, 1968).
At the same time, there was a growing fascination with the killer who had an
inconspicuous and impeccably “normal” façade that obscured the homicidal
maniac within. One of the most popular framing devices for killers in true crime is
that of highlighting the seeming normalcy of the killer, and then trying to uncover
and understand the monstrously aberrant personality lurking just beneath the
surface. In this way, killers came to be framed as both monstrous violators of the
boundaries of normal humanity, and yet still within those same boundaries. The
terms psychopath and sociopath became part of the popular vernacular after 1941,
with the publication of Hervey M. Cleckley’s The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to
Clarify Some Issues about the So-Called Psychopathic Personality, which made the
concepts and language of psychiatric criminal deviancy accessible to non-professional
readers. The book was reprinted in 1950, 1955, and 1964. Another concept that
entered popular consciousness during the 1950s was that of the sex fiend, or sex
psychopath, the man who, because of some disorganization in his mind, was unable
to control his sexual impulses and posed a significant threat to the perceived
weakest part of American society, women and children.
During the 1970s, certain themes, types of killers, and modes of representation
became most prominent within the emerging genre, with the serial and sex killer and
feminized victims—women, children, and homosexuals—garnering the greatest
interest. The genre was not dominated by any single author, but it was dominated
by male writers. Typical examples include William A. Clark’s The Girl on the
Volkswagen Floor (1971), an unsolved-murder narrative largely concerned with
psychics assisting the police, and John Gurwell’s Mass Murder in Houston (1974),
a small press publication about the Dean Corll homosexual killings of 27 teenaged
boys in Houston. John Gilmore’s The Michigan Murders (1976) is an early serial
killer treatment that wonderfully evokes the culture of a late 1960s large university
community (Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti). Charlie Simpson’s Apocalypse (1974) is a
berserk-Vietnam-vet tale with political and sociological undertones, a miniature
 TRUE CRIME LITERATURE 1049

Helter Skelter. These texts present victims as objects, with details about the discov-
ery of fatally wounded bodies, graphic accounts of violence, and means of death
taking hideous precedence. Apprehension and description of the psychopathology
of the perpetrator is of secondary concern, and in the 1971 text, the killer is never
caught. Forensic science and descriptions of police work also gained prominence
within the genre during this period, and the archetype of the strong male detective
force battling other, deviant men to avenge female victims became commonplace.
True crime of the 1980s focused largely on serial killers, as that threat first
appeared on the cultural horizon with the pursuit and apprehension of such killers
as Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Henry Lee Lucas, Jeffrey Dahmer, and the “Green
River Killer” (Gary Ridgway). Popular culture depictions introduced the figure of
the “criminal profiler,” as FBI programs such as VICAP (Violent Criminal
Apprehension Program) and profiler training captured both federal funding and the
popular imagination. Although the serial killer threat was never as widespread and
lethal as was touted in the early 1980s, texts about serial killers proliferated during
this decade. As the threat and hype around serial killers faded during the late 1990s,
writers turned their attention to domestic murder, by far the most common and
varied type of killing in America. Much modern true crime narrates the threats to
both men and women of bad romantic choices, and the genre now reflects more
anxiety about intimate relationships than the risks of being murdered by a serial
killer. Husbands, wives, lovers, in-laws, children, and parents shoot, stab, poison,
and incinerate each other with alarming frequency in true crime, and the genre is
dominated by such perverse or reversed romance narratives.
There are also many more female writers working in the genre at present, the
most popular being Ann Rule (b. 1935). Rule has shaped the modern genre and
popularized the theme of deviant domesticity and exploration of gender expecta-
tions and roles, as well as placing greater narrative emphasis on victims’ lives and
foregrounding mundane details about the environments in which her killers and
victims live. She has also enlivened the genre with stories about unforgettable female
killers, and a more female-centered strand of true crime has emerged from her
pioneering work.
Context and Issues. The way that real murder is narrated, and therefore under-
stood in a given culture, changes over time and depends heavily on cultural context.
Different stories, interpretations, emphases, and perspectives abound for any single
murder case. In her book Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic
Imagination, cultural historian Karen Halttunen writes, “Any story of murder
involves a fictive process, which reveals much about the mental and emotional
strategies employed within a given historical culture for responding to serious
transgression in its midst” (Halttunen 1998, 2). Because murder narratives are
constructed and are always somewhat fictive, no matter the reality of the event
being discussed, they reveal the underlying preoccupations and perspectives on
“serious transgression” in ways that other texts do not. In the early formative true
crime period (late 1960s through the 1970s), the murderer is often depicted as a
stranger to his victims, a loner (or a pair of loners), a person from an abusive or
violent background, alienated from most normal social ties such as friends and
family, and most fundamentally, as a person lacking a conscience. Each of these
features correlates to some element in the larger culture that caused anxiety or
distress, and the killer in true crime literature became the expression for some of the
fears, real or imagined, of 1960s America.
1050 TRUE CRIME LITERATURE

CRIME TRENDS OF THE 1960s AND 70s

Some cultural fears about crime are exploited and exaggerated in the pages of true crime
books. One undeniably real trend in the last few decades in America was an escalating
murder rate (the number of homicides committed per 100,000 citizens per year): in the
1960s, the murder rate underwent a dramatic upward surge, and in the decade between
1964 and 1974, the American murder rate doubled, from 5 to 10 homicides per 100,000
people per year. Stranger-killings—that is, homicide between two persons unknown to each
other—became much more prevalent in the 1960s, and the clearance rate for murder, or the
percentage of cases solved, was dropping. During this same period, the conventions of true
crime were codified into a formula: murder narratives began to represent stranger-killings
most frequently, and the structure of the true crime text settled into its ossified present
form of crime–pursuit–trial–execution. The conflation of these three elements—a rising
murder rate, an increase in the number of stranger-killings, and a corollary increase in the
number of unsolved homicides—registered in true crime narratives as an emphasis on the
unknown, and unknowable, killer.

Selected Authors. Most scholars and readers consider Truman Capote’s In Cold
Blood (1966) to be the first modern true crime text, for it brought together the
themes and structures that would inform the genre for the next half-century, cre-
ating a template for the genre that persists to this day. By 1959, Capote
(1924–1984) was a successful published author of such books as Other Voices,
Other Rooms, Tree of Night and Other Stories, The Grass Harp, The Muses Are
Heard, and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. As told in two recent films about his life—
Capote (dir. Bennett Miller, 2005) and Infamous (dir. Douglas McGrath, 2006)—
Capote had been interested in writing nonfiction for many years, and in 1959 he
found a suitable topic for a “nonfiction novel” in the rural Kansas shotgun mur-
der of four members of the Clutter family in an apparent botched robbery.
Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Smith were arrested in Las Vegas on January
2, 1960, for the Clutter murders, and they were executed on April 14, 1965. For
most of those five intervening years, Capote exchanged letters with the prisoners
twice a week, and he lived in Garden City for extended periods of time, forming
close relationships with not just the murderers, but also the detectives involved in
the case. The result of all that work was published in The New Yorker in four
installments between September and October 1965, and published in book form
in January 1966. In 1967 the book was made into a film, also a spectacular suc-
cess, starring the then-unknown Robert Blake as Perry Smith (In Cold Blood, dir.
Richard Brooks, 1967).
In Cold Blood has been a best-seller since its publication, and in 1966 it received
the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award (the “Edgar”) for Best Fact
Crime Book of the Year. In his book, Capote solidified and perfected the nascent
conventions of what would become true crime literature, and his basic formula,
along with his research methods and techniques, have been copied ever since. Such
techniques include the writer becoming an intimate insider in the case, the creation
of a sense of simultaneous identification and distance between reader and killer, the
shaping of real people into literary characters and the introduction of fiction-writing
techniques into nonfiction writing, the crime-killer profile–trial–execution structure
of the text, interweaving the actions of the killers and the victims by juxtaposing and
“cross-cutting” scenes, the theme that random violence can easily destroy idyllic
 TRUE CRIME LITERATURE 1051

American lives, and the representation of the normal-seeming killer or “sleeper”

sociopath.
In his research for the book, Capote became an intimate of the killers, thereby
gaining special access to their feelings and memories, and specific experiential
knowledge of the judiciary procedures that would become a large part of true crime
narratives. True crime writing of this period would spend more time narrating the
aftermath of murder, not the crime itself, as trials became lengthier, debates about
the legality and morality of the death penalty raged, and death-penalty appeals
dragged out over years. (In 1967 the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty
was unconstitutional; in 1976, individual states began to reinstitute the practice,
beginning with the Utah execution of Gary Gilmore.) Because Smith and Hickock
were captured quickly, and because they were involved in appealing their sentences
for nearly five years, Capote was put in the unique position of having to wait for
them to die in order to finish his book, while growing closer to them personally
during that time.
Capote’s narrative treatment of his subject would draw the reader into an uneasy
and unprecedented relationship with the killers. The reader experiences the dispar-
ity of closeness to the person and distance from the horror of the criminal’s acts.
Perry Smith’s most famous statement about Herb Clutter, “I thought he was a very
nice gentleman. Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat,”
was emblematic of the organization of his entire personality (Capote 1966, 275).
Capote crafted his narrative so that the reader shares his fascination with Smith,
who was at once a devious and dangerous loner and a sensitive, wounded man.
Capote’s closeness to the subjects of his book would set the standard for a different
degree of involvement between writer and subject, and would forever change the
nature of murder narratives.
Another trope of true crime, the shaping of real people into literary characters
and the introduction of fiction-writing techniques into nonfiction writing, is directly
attributable to Capote’s closeness to Smith and Hickock. Capote was able to use free
indirect discourse, which interjects objectivity and intimacy with the subjects,
because he gained unique access to the men’s intimate thoughts and feelings.
Another genre-setter was the familiar four-part structure of crime–pursuit–trial–
execution, which gives true crime the shape of a classic detective tale; that is, the
murder occurs in the first chapter, but we don’t understand the killer’s motives until
the final chapters. One of the most striking aspects of In Cold Blood, and one that
would become a major convention in true crime literature, is the way that Capote
structured the sections of each chapter so that the actions of the killers and the
victims are interwoven. Particularly in the first chapter, Capote cuts back and forth
between scenes featuring either the Clutters or Smith and Hickock, in a technique
borrowed from filmmaking. In fact, the book is strangely more filmic than the film
version—there seems to be more juggling of scenes between the Clutters and their
killers in the book, whereas the movie concentrates more heavily on Hickock and
Smith.
The puzzle and threat of random violence is a significant true crime theme, and
one that Capote beautifully explores in his book. The genre always sets innocence
against evil, and this convention, combined with the filmic technique of interspers-
ing scenes of victims and killers, portrays a strong sense of the inevitability of evil.
The action seems fated, and murder seems destined to occur; the Clutters cannot
escape their fate, and Smith and Hickock cannot resist forming their ill-conceived
1052 TRUE CRIME LITERATURE

alliance that will ultimately lead them to their own deaths. In depicting that alliance,
the book offers two competing views about what a killer is and what evil looks like.
Richard Hickock is vulgar, ugly, brutal, and shallow; Perry Smith is sensitive, hand-
some, artistic, a dreamer. Hickock looks like a conventional murderer, whereas
Smith does not fit the mold. Capote’s innovation is that Hickock as killer is
ultimately less disturbing and threatening—even though, ironically, he plans the
crime—because it is clear from the outset that he is capable of violence. Smith, on
the other hand, is a more fundamentally disturbing character because he seems like
a good and harmless soul, even though he agrees to go along with Hickock and rob
the Clutters. Capote reverses the reader’s expectations by portraying his most deadly
killer as the seemingly kind one, and the one who appears evil as essentially
innocent. This new construction of the killer resonated with readers because it artic-
ulated an idea of evil as being hidden, insidious, and mysterious; the killer was
becoming a literary character, a complex and masked figure, not the simply-
conceived and emotionally separate monster of earlier depictions.
The early critical responses to the book were largely positive, as was the popular
reception. In Cold Blood was an instant bestseller. The novel was published almost
simultaneously with an interview in the New York Times Book Review in which
Capote spoke about his creation of a new literary formula, the “nonfiction novel”
(Plimpton 1997, 197). Capote’s statement fuelled the critics, for in addition to the
book earning wide acclaim and being worthy of thoughtful criticism, his grand
statements about genre creation were taken as a ready-made challenge. Many critics
focused in particular on Capote’s claims to truthfulness or factuality. Such debates
about strict factual accuracy swirled around early true crime, but have lost relevance
in the contemporary genre. In Cold Blood has sold millions of copies and
reappeared in 2005 on the New York Times paperback bestseller list.
Another outstanding true crime text is Joseph Wambaugh’s (b. 1937) The
Onion Field, published in 1973. The Onion Field showcases certain aspects of the
maturing genre, including a more complex narrator/insider, with a different rela-
tionship to criminals and crime, and the inclusion of more complicated themes
such as guilt, retribution, and exploration of the psychology of victims as well as
killers. As a Los Angeles police officer, Wambaugh had a unique perspective on
murder and undeniable credibility as a witness, a participant, and a commentator.
The Onion Field further demonstrated that popular true crime could be subtle,
sophisticated, and terrifically powerful, that the genre could support the explo-
ration of serious themes, and that it is able to transcend displays of graphic
violence and sensationalism.
The Onion Field is an account of the kidnapping of two LAPD patrolmen by two
petty crooks in 1963. On a Saturday night in March of that year, officers Ian
Campbell and Karl Hettinger, both relatively new to the job, were disarmed at
gunpoint and driven to a remote California onion field by Gregory Powell and
Jimmy Smith. Powell and Smith murdered Campbell, and Karl Hettinger narrowly
escaped the same fate by running for his life through the field to safety. Hettinger
returned to police work immediately, and suffered a nervous breakdown as a
consequence of the murder of his colleague and the aftermath of the crime, which
included the longest criminal trial in California history. An incredible series of
appeals and retrials led to several juries overturning death penalty convictions for
the murderers, largely as a result of changing laws and the institution of the
Miranda Rights ruling in 1966. Wambaugh was an LAPD officer when the onion
 TRUE CRIME LITERATURE 1053

field crime took place, and his experiences working alongside cops and apprehend-
ing criminals shaped his narratives when he began to write.
The Onion Field both reinforced and further developed the conventions under-
way in murder narratives; because of his unique position as an “insider” in the
world of policemen and criminals, Wambaugh brought an intensely intimate
perspective to bear on true crime. Building on what Capote had started with the
shifting position of the writer as an intimate of the killer, in both his police fiction
and The Onion Field, Wambaugh furthered the notion that cops and murderers are
separated by very thin fibers of moral structure, and that good and evil are almost
inextricably interwoven concepts. Wambaugh’s suggestion that cops and criminals
are similarly human and driven by forces beyond their control leads the reader into
both connection to and alienation from both groups. There are no unambiguous
heroes in Wambaugh’s writing, because his cops are gritty and flawed, his criminals
twisted and damaged. His work is important to the growth of true crime because—
like Capote—he invites the reader to experience a simultaneous attraction and
repulsion to his “good” and “bad” characters equally. This duality underlines “evil”
as a moral construct, which was in the 1970s crumbling under the mediation of
social forces and new understandings of crime and criminality.

The Onion Field is essentially a story about guilt, but not on the part of the murder-
ers. One day after the kidnapping and murder of Ian Campbell, his partner, Karl
Hettinger, who had himself almost been murdered, returned to the job; the LAPD
offered Hettinger no psychological counseling, for at that time the Department did not
recognize that suffering such a traumatic event could have severe psychological
consequences.

Hettinger became so consumed by his unacknowledged, unconscious guilt that he

began shoplifting; he then became so obsessed with guilt about stealing that he
allowed himself to be caught and fired. The text focuses on Hettinger—it begins and
ends with his internal monologue, and the narrative follows his psychological
condition into and beyond his mental breakdown.
Wambaugh had published popular police fiction before writing The Onion Field,
and he has continued to do so into the twenty-first century. He had a successful
return to true crime in 2002 with Fire Lover, an arson narrative, which won an
Edgar Award. The Onion Field won a Special Edgar Award in 1974, and
Wambaugh has always been critically well regarded. William Marling reports that
“Critics unanimously praised the book [The Onion Field], comparing it to Truman
Capote’s In Cold Blood and the author to Theodore Dreiser and James T. Farrell”
(http://www.detnovel.com/Citation.html).
Perhaps the best-known true crime text of the 1970s is Vincent Bugliosi (b. 1934)
and Curt Gentry’s (b. 1931) Helter Skelter (1974), which narrates one of the most
notorious mass-murders in American history. In August of 1969, followers of
Charles Milles Manson slaughtered seven Los Angeles residents in their homes,
including the actress Sharon Tate, as a means of bringing on what they called
“Helter Skelter,” Manson’s vision of a futuristic, apocalyptic racial revolution. The
Manson group also killed at least three other people, and speculations abound
about other murders. Several members of the self-styled Manson “family,” includ-
ing Manson himself, are still serving life sentences in California for these crimes. Los
Angeles District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi successfully prosecuted and convicted the
1054 TRUE CRIME LITERATURE

Manson family killers, and it is his narrative of the crimes in Helter Skelter that lives
on in the American imagination.
The Manson slayings came to be viewed as the hideous—but not unanticipated—
end of the joyful, hopeful, and innocent 1960s hippie counterculture. In the same
way that Joseph Wambaugh folded anxiety about a growing culture of permissive-
ness into his true crime writing, noting the emergence of the psychopath as the log-
ical endpoint of the perceived moral collapse of the 1960s and 70s, the Manson
killings were seen as the logical outcome of communal living, loose sexual morals,
and the wholesale rejection of modern society that characterized the values of the
counterculture. Helter Skelter expressed the fears of the middle class about losing
their children to cults, communes, and free love; the book also fascinated those same
children, and has been one of the biggest-selling true crime texts in American
history.
Bugliosi deploys and embellishes each of the conventions of murder narration that
first appeared in In Cold Blood, and he introduces a new convention that would
become standard in all true crime to date—the inclusion of photographs in the
book. Bugliosi included a large number of photographs and a map in his text, and
the entire section was labeled “A Chilling 64-page Photographic Record of the
Victims, the Killers, the Evidence” (Bugliosi 1974, 346). Adding an extra dimension
of titillation and veracity, nearly every mass-market true crime narrative since Helter
Skelter includes a middle section of 6–10 photographs, usually consisting of before-
and-after photos of the victim, snapshots of the crime scene, the murder weapons,
the trial, and the killer. Sometimes, as in Joe McGinniss’s 1983 Fatal Vision, there is
even a photograph of the writer, reinforcing his or her status as a character in the
narrative.
The Manson family crimes have inspired scores of true crime texts, written from
late 1969 until the present. The first book about the murders was published in
December 1969, shortly after the apprehension of Susan Atkins, whose dramatic
confession during her incarceration for another offense led to the dismantling of the
Manson family, and the latest was published in 2002. Each of the primary Manson
family members has written an autobiography, usually with the help of a journalist
or ghostwriter. As of this writing, there are approximately 25 books about the
Manson events still in print, and several more that are out of print. There have been
many film and television treatments of the subject, most notably the Robert
Hendrickson documentary entitled Manson (1972), nominated for an Academy
Award, and Jim Van Bebber’s The Manson Family (2003). The Manson murders,
often represented as a cultural milestone that signified the end of the hippie era and
the beginning of the current period of media-created criminal sensations, have
generated an enormous amount of popular and scholarly interest.
After the sensation of Helter Skelter, Bugliosi continued his writing career,
penning several more true crime and nonfiction texts. Bugliosi’s true crime was pop-
ular in the 1980s, although his writing is often thick with over-coverage of minute
points of law and extended depictions of courtroom battles. As an attorney, he is
preoccupied with the machinations of the criminal justice system, and many readers
find his work compelling. Following the model set with Helter Skelter, Bugliosi
continued to co-author true crime literature, working with Ken Hurwitz on Till
Death Do Us Part (1978) and Shadow of Cain (1981), William Stadiem for Lullaby
and Goodnight (1987), and Bruce B. Henderson for And the Sea Will Tell (1991), a
murder narrative set on the tiny Pacific island of Palmyra. Although he began his
 TRUE CRIME LITERATURE 1055

career in the true crime trenches, Bugliosi has steadily moved out of that genre into
straight nonfiction critiques of the American legal system by way of examining
specific, sensational cases. Bugliosi’s true crime is concerned primarily with jurispru-
dence, systemic failures of justice, and righting the social order. The inheritors of his
tradition—writers such as Jack Olsen, Carlton Stowers, and Mark Fuhrman—are
prominent within the genre today, and represent one strand of true crime writing
that deals with deviant masculinity, jurisprudential issues, and depictions of sexual-
sadistic gore.
During the 1970s, with skyrocketing American crime rates and the appearance of
a frightening trend toward social chaos, true crime texts narrated and helped readers
understand such seemingly senseless acts as the Manson killings and the apparent
rise in sexually related murders of young women. The 1970s was also the formative
decade of American feminism, and true crime registered the effects of that social
movement, mostly as a deepening interest in the personhood of the murder victim.
Many 1970s texts of this genre are cautionary tales for single young women, warn-
ings against prosaic but new female activities such as hitchhiking and picking up
strange men in bars. Judith Rossner’s 1975 blockbuster, Looking for Mr. Goodbar,
and Lacey Fosburgh’s Closing Time: The True Story of the “Goodbar” Murder
(1977) each cover the 1973 murder of Manhattan school teacher Katherine Cleary
by a stranger she picked up in a singles bar. Rossner’s novel was not true crime,
strictly speaking; rather, she used the crime to depict in novel form the desperation
of some newly-liberated single women’s lives. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s,
true crime that was authored primarily by men reflected an implicit fear of increased
social, political, and sexual liberations for women. Not until the late 1980s and
1990s would true crime begin to contain female-centered themes such as warnings
about bad romantic matches and greater empathy for the plight of female murder
victims.
In the 1980s, true crime became a consumer-driven publishing industry category,
garnering huge profits for mass-market paperback publishing houses as the larger
ones (such as Random House and St. Martin’s) created their own true crime
imprints. The growth of the genre shows in a survey of titles in Ben Harrison’s
book True Crime Narratives: An Annotated Bibliography, published in 1997. In
the 1960s, approximately 37 texts treated single cases of contemporary murder
and/or the activities of single murderers. In the 1970s, there were 78 examples of
the same; in the 1980s, there were 145, and in the 1990s, the number rose to 165
(Harrison 1997).
True crime as a literary genre has brought a tabloid sensibility into higher
culture, and has illuminated the sordid with beams of truth: in its best exemplars,
true crime questions its own motivations and reason for being. Since its inception
as a genre, more “literary” authors or writers who normally work in other genres
have produced stellar examples within the genre. One such text is Norman Mailer’s
(1923–2007) The Executioner’s Song, co-authored with Lawrence Schiller (b.
1936) in 1979. This text represents a significant attempt to narrate and create
meaning from murder, although in some ways it defies the definition of true crime.
In 1976, longtime convict Gary Gilmore was sentenced to death for the murder of
two men in Provo, Utah. At that time, there hadn’t been an execution in the United
States for ten years, since the 1967 Supreme Court ruling in Furman v. Georgia that
the administration of the death penalty was unconstitutional. Gilmore forced the
state of Utah to execute him by refusing to appeal, and his case caused a huge
1056 TRUE CRIME LITERATURE

national and international sensation. Gilmore’s high-profile truculence mush-

roomed into a media circus like that surrounding the Manson trial. Several months
after Gilmore’s execution, Mailer collaborated with Larry Schiller, the true crime
media mogul who got his start with the Manson trial, and with whom Mailer had
written his biography of Marilyn Monroe, to write The Executioner’s Song. The
book covers the nine months between Gilmore’s parole in April 1976 until his exe-
cution in January 1977. It quickly became a bestseller and Mailer won the Pulitzer
Prize in 1980 for fiction.
By 1979, true crime was defined by a group of narrative techniques and conven-
tions, and Mailer uses most of them very effectively in The Executioner’s Song. He
skillfully blends fiction with nonfiction, calling his book a “true life novel.” Mailer
achieves his insider status through his chief researcher Larry Schiller, who was
Gilmore’s friend/confessor/publicist during the murderer’s final days. Mailer
expertly contextualizes the Gilmore crimes and ensuing media phenomenon within
the late-1970s Western American social and cultural milieu, and very specifically
within the Utah Mormon context. The book does not strictly follow the formulaic
four-part narrative structure, for the narrative does not start with murder; still, The
Executioner’s Song is broken into chronological segments that treat first Gilmore’s
life and crimes, then his trial and execution. Mailer chose a murderer who fit the
usual 1970s true crime criteria, for Gilmore’s two murders are both random
stranger-killings. Mailer creates a large and powerful sense of the inevitability of
murder and the magnetic pull towards evil, as Gilmore is drawn, seemingly against
his will, ever-closer to first his crimes, then to his own death. The book is a brilliant
murder narrative, at once an insider’s view into dysfunctional working-class 1970s
American life and a sweeping portrayal of how that life both creates and sustains
violence.
Unlike many books within the genre, The Executioner’s Song is as much an explo-
ration of the marketing of murder as it is of the act itself. The 1,056-page book is
broken into two large sections, “Western Voices” and “Eastern Voices.” The first
section outlines Gilmore’s life and crimes, and the second concentrates on a
portrayal of the media frenzy surrounding his trial and execution. The concept of
being able to sell one’s criminal story was in 1976 as morally dubious as it is now,
but the so-called “Son of Sam” laws, which prevent criminals from profiting from
their crimes, were not enacted until 1978, so Gilmore was able to profit from
marketing his story. Schiller, the prototypical murder journalist, is held up for
scrutiny just as Gilmore, the prototypical murderer, is. And just as in his portrayal
of Gilmore Mailer valorizes the psychopath, with his treatment of Schiller, Mailer
legitimizes the vocation of murder journalist/shill by devoting such loving attention
to the story. Schiller’s sharp-witted professionalism as a murder-mogul lies in his
ability to see the big picture, and to craft an audience as well as a consumable
narrative for it from the bare bones of a sordid story. Mailer has said that the story
of The Executioner’s Song was like gold to him, that he could never have invented
such a good tale, and that he wanted to just present the reality of the events as he
found them reflected in court transcripts, documents, interviews, and Schiller’s
memories.
Beginning with her treatment of serial killer Ted Bundy, The Stranger Beside Me
(1980), former policewoman Ann Rule, who had worked with Bundy, has become
the premier American true crime writer, shaping and redefining the genre with her
work, and building powerful and lucrative “name-brand” recognition for her product.
 TRUE CRIME LITERATURE 1057

To date, she has published thirteen single-case texts, nine true crime collections, and
one crime-based novel. Her most recent book, 2004’s Green River, Running Red
was about Gary Ridgway, the “Green River” serial killer, although she has
generally avoided serial killers as a subject. Ann Rule has a Web site,
www.annrules.com, an annual newsletter, and an enormous fan base; her books are
regularly reviewed by publications such as The New York Times and Publisher’s
Weekly, she has received numerous Edgar Award nominations, and her books
appear often on bestseller lists.
After a brief career as a Seattle policewoman, Rule began writing crime stories for
pulp magazines such as True Detective in the 1960s, and continued that work
throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with special jurisdiction over crime stories in the
Northwestern states. Her first book, The Stranger Beside Me, was an exploration of
deadly and sensational interpersonal betrayal, experienced on a very personal level.
In 1971, Rule worked with Ted Bundy at a local suicide-prevention hotline, and
during the next decade she and Bundy kept in touch and socialized intermittently.
In 1976 Rule was assigned by True Detective Magazine to cover a series of abduc-
tion-murders of young women throughout the Northwest. Eventually, it became
clear that her friend, Ted Bundy, was responsible for the serial murders, for which
he was tried and convicted (and executed by the state of Florida in 1989). Ted
Bundy would become infamous as one of the most prolific and heinous American
serial killers (one detective who worked on the case estimates that he killed 100
women), and Rule had been handed the story of a lifetime. The Stranger Beside Me
became a best-selling blockbuster, the first in a long line.
In addition to giving Rule her first subject, Bundy embodied a theory about the
deviant human personality that would dominate true crime writing in the 1980s and
1990s—the notion of the sociopathic personality. The sociopath, anti-social per-
sonality, and the psychopath (the sociopath’s crazier cousin) have become familiar
figures in the popular media landscape of true crime and horror, and Bundy, as Rule
says, has become the “poster boy for serial murder.” (Rule 1980, 541) His ability to
mimic human emotions, to appear psychologically “normal,” to uphold a façade of
ordinariness, has fascinated the public and professionals alike. Rule’s knowledge
about the sociopath has helped to legitimize her work, and she has become a widely-
respected authority on serial killers. She is not viewed as a “pulp” writer, nor is her
work seen as exploitative or sensational; rather, Rule is appreciated by her readers,
reviewers, and by criminology professionals as an expert and a professional in her
own right.
The Bundy case has shaped the trajectory of her career, and Stranger is her best-
known and best-regarded book, largely because it transcends the simple story of a
psychopath and his obscenely destructive acts. The most powerful and interesting
storyline concerns Rule’s own relationship to Bundy—her growing realization that
he truly is a killer, the painful understanding of his betrayal of her, and the difficult
decisions she must make to betray him, in a sense, by writing a book about him.
After writing Stranger, she penned three quickie serial-killer texts—The Want-Ad
Killer and Lust Killer in 1983 and The I-5 Killer in 1984—using her old pseudonym
from magazine writing, “Andy Stack.” Small Sacrifices (1987) is a story about
Oregon child-killer Diane Downs, who shot her three young children in May 1983,
killing one and seriously wounding the others. With this book, Rule finds one of the
subjects that would occupy her career—deviant domesticity and sour relationships,
in this book a case of mothering gone terribly wrong.
1058 TRUE CRIME LITERATURE

Rule’s subsequent books concern perverse or obsessive domestic scenarios, and a

survey of her titles shows a preoccupation with the ways in which romance can go
wrong: If You Really Loved Me (1991), Everything She Ever Wanted (1992), Dead
by Sunset (1995), Possession (1996), Bitter Harvest (1997), . . . And Never Let Her
Go (1999), Every Breath You Take (2001), and Heart Full of Lies (2003). Rule
narrated the emotional underside of the 1980s and 1990s, decades of soaring
American divorce rates and huge economic losses and gains, of hidden unhappiness
amid wealth and fortune. Perhaps in response to the fear-generating stranger-
murders of earlier true crime in the 1960s and 1970s, Rule’s texts offer a fearful
return to the traditional site of domestic disturbance and violence, the home. Her
subjects are more reflective of 1990s crime statistics, which showed a steady and
sometimes dramatic decline in murder rates nationwide.
One interesting part of the true crime phenomenon is that as crime rates, and
murder rates in particular, have fallen over the past decade, the genre still generates
a climate and landscape of fear and paranoia about crime. Sociologist Barry
Glassner says, “Between 1990 and 1998, when the nation’s murder rate declined by
20 percent, the number of murder stories on network newscasts increased 600
percent (not counting stories about O.J. Simpson)” (Glassner 1999, xxi). The
changing face of crime in America is one explanation for the increasing reliance on
domestic or romantic murders within the genre, exemplified by Rule’s writing.
Instead of proffering answers to the problem of evil, Rule’s true crime is a minute
examination of lives badly lived and horrifyingly ended, each offering a warning to
men and women alike about the perils of loving the wrong person. For this reason,
the conventional good vs. evil, detective vs. killer structure of her stories does not
weaken the impact and importance of Rule’s overarching objective of writing books
for and about women. Her latest book is Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder (2007),
twelfth in her Crime Files series. Her 2004 title, Green River, Running Red, exam-
ines the crimes of the so-called “Green River” serial killer, Gary Ridgway. Although
the text is in many ways conventional, Rule focuses most of her narrative attention
on the victims, instead of the killer, describing the sad lives and wretched deaths of
many of Ridgway’s 50 victims. In this way, she continues to challenge the stereo-
types of the genre and expand the cultural work of the genre.
Carlton Stowers (b. 1942), a magazine and newspaper journalist well-known in
his home state of Texas, is regarded as one of the finest contemporary writers of true
crime. Material on his Web site states that “The Houston Press has called Stowers
‘the dean of Texas true crime writers,’ and famed novelist Jonathan Kellerman notes
that ‘when the dust clears, a handful of writers will be recognized as masters of the
true crime book. And Carlton Stowers will be at the head of that class’”
(http://www.truecrime.net/carltonstowers/). Among his works are a history of the
Dallas Police Department (Partners in Blue: The History of the Dallas Police
Department, 1983), a biography of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, and numerous
books on sports, notably the Dallas Cowboys football team. Stowers’ true crime has
garnered two Edgar Awards (To the Last Breath in 1999 and Careless Whispers in
1987) and a Pulitzer Prize nomination for 1990’s Innocence Lost. Stowers receives
high praise from critics and readers alike.
In his writing, Stowers typifies a conservative ideological strand in true crime,
visible in his narrative bias towards law-enforcement and against the outsiders and
misfits who populate the criminal class within the genre. His work also illustrates
another of the generic conventions in his use of a simplified rhetoric of evil and
 TRUE CRIME LITERATURE 1059

monstrosity to describe the killers. Innocence Lost describes the murder of an

undercover police detective by a group of high school students under investiga-
tion for drug activity. Stowers describes one of the convicted killers, 17 years old
at the time, as having “piercing blue eyes [that] disturbed the officer more than
the knife. They had a haunted, frightening quality he had never before seen”
(Stowers 1990, 72). In true crime depictions, killers are routinely described with the
language of gothic horror, as having a kind of quasi-occult power over others and a
chilling effect on people. Another of the youthful murderers has a “coldness” in his
eyes, and “appeared to have no feeling at all for his mother, father, or younger
brother,” all conventional descriptions of sociopathic killers (Stowers 1990, 135, 70).
The scene is set with similar overtones of gothic horror: in one description of the
small town in the aftermath of the murder, Stowers writes that the townspeople’s
“comforting invisible barrier against outside evils had been ripped away. They
pondered the town’s newfound vulnerability while ministers prepared to deliver
impassioned sermons on the strength and faith necessary to deal with the cata-
clysmic event that had visited their small corner of the world” (Stowers 1990, 237).
The adults wonder, “How was it possible that some of their children had turned into
such monsters?” (237). Such inflated language casts the story and its characters onto
a heightened metaphysical plane, removed from the mundane meanness and moral
ambiguity of real crime, and makes stark the competing notions of “innocence” and
“evil” that for Stowers are at the heart of the true crime narrative.
One of Stowers’s contributions to the genre is his narrative talent for an anthro-
pological “thick description” of social contexts and the American scene that
sometimes produces brutal criminal violence. Stowers shows that fine true crime
writing is as much about contexts as it is about crime. Much of his books are given
over to descriptions of the places where murder occurs, and the ways that the
principal players in the story—law enforcement agents, killers, victims, and “ordi-
nary” people—think and live. Through the descriptions of the characters’ lives,
Stowers (and many other contemporary writers) examines minute aspects of the
broad categories of American life, including social class, race, romance and
marriage, sexuality, friendship, education, religious beliefs, community goals and
challenges, economic growth and stagnation, and a vast array of individual
experiences. In some ways, true crime texts play the role that was formerly taken by
the British “comedy of manners”: they educate us about who we are and how we
truly live. In true crime, however, the rich description of context is overshadowed
by the impending horror, drawing the reader into surroundings that seem eerily like
his own and creating narrative tension and suspense.
Mark Fuhrman (b. 1952) is best known as the former Los Angeles Police
Department detective who found the infamous “bloody glove” at the site of the
Nicole Brown Simpson/Ronald Goldman murder in 1994 for which O.J. Simpson
was acquitted but found liable in civil court. Fuhrman’s racist views, caught on an
audiotape in 1985, and his resulting perjury conviction about his use of the word
nigger sparked controversy during the Simpson trial and may have influenced its
outcome. Fuhrman became a true crime writer after retiring from the LAPD in
1996, and his first true crime book was Murder in Brentwood (1997), about the
Simpson case. In 1998 he published Murder in Greenwich: Who Killed Martha
Moxley?, reviving the unsolved case of the 1975 murder of a 15-year-old girl in
Greenwich, Connecticut. As a result of that book, one of Moxley’s neighbors,
Michael Skakel, was convicted of her murder in 2002, in a spectacular case of
1060 TRUE CRIME LITERATURE

delayed justice. Other Fuhrman texts include Murder in Spokane: Catching a Serial
Killer (2001), Death and Justice: An Exposé of Oklahoma’s Death Row Machine
(2003), Silent Witness: The Untold Story of Terri Schiavo’s Death (2005), and A
Simple Act of Murder: November 22, 1963, Fuhrman’s contribution to the Kennedy
assassination conspiracy theories, published in 2006.
Fuhrman’s true crime is detail-laden and, as might be expected of a former
detective, focused on trying to make a case. Murder in Greenwich reads like a
primer in how not to conduct a homicide investigation; in fact, one of the chapters
is titled “Homicide 101.” As a special kind of insider, Fuhrman uses his knowledge
of murder investigation techniques to explain what was done wrong and how the
bungled investigation forestalled an arrest and conviction in the Moxley murder.
Because of the topic—an unsolved case—the format of the book is not conven-
tional, although it retains many of the standard true crime tropes, including opening
the book with an account of the victim’s last evening and discovery of her corpse the
next day, disclosure near the end of the book of exactly how the murder occurred
(surmised in this case), and the middle photographic section. The book is tightly
organized by both chronology of events and themes or subjects: “Background,”
“Taking on the Case,” “Examining the Evidence,” “Profiling the Participants,” and
“Anatomy of a Murder Investigation.” Perhaps still reeling from his devastating role
in the Simpson case, Fuhrman takes on the Moxley case as a kind of crusade against
the rich and powerful, writing in Murder in Greenwich that “Greenwich may be
richer, prettier, and safer than most other places on earth, but it is not immune to
evil. In fact, the massive state of denial under which the town seems to operate is a
form of evil itself” (Fuhrman 1998, front matter).
Aphrodite Jones (b. 1960) is the author of seven true crime texts: A Perfect
Husband (2004), Red Zone: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of the San Francisco Dog
Mauling (2003), The Embrace: A True Vampire Story (1999), Della’s Web (1998),
All She Wanted (1996), Cruel Sacrifice (1994), and The FBI Killer (1992). All She
Wanted is the Brandon Teena story, which became famous as the film Boys Don’t
Cry (dir. Kimberly Peirce, 1999). Jones presents herself to the media and her readers
as a “crime profiler,” and her Web site publicity materials focus on her desire to fight
crime and help make the country safer, and to make Americans less afraid of
violence. As quoted from her Web site, Jones says, “Every crime offers a lesson. In
my books, I use a narrative technique, allowing insight into the minds of victims and
sociopaths. I offer analysis of everything from media coverage to legal maneuvers.
However, I tend to focus my attention on the larger social issues, with the hope that
future crimes will be prevented” (“The Aphrodite Jones Home Page”). Jones writes
about sensational murder events that also reflect some larger cultural significance,
such as teenaged killers, cult killers, or homophobia, and her writing is simplistic,
straightforward, and without stylistic embellishment. Sensationalistic and rife with
clichés borrowed from the tabloids, Jones’s work exemplifies some of the unsavory
yet popular aspects of true crime literature.
In contrast, Harold Schechter (b. 1948) crafts scholarly and impeccably-
researched historical true crime stories. A professor of English at New York City’s
Queens College, Schechter’s expertise in research shows in his well-written accounts
of older, less publicized killers. His specialty is nineteenth and early twentieth
century American killers, and the title-formula he uses always describes the killer’s
unique attribute. His books include Deranged: The Shocking True Story of
America’s Most Fiendish Killer (1990), Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed
 TRUE CRIME LITERATURE 1061

Gein, the Original “Psycho” (1991), Depraved: The Shocking True Story of
America’s First Serial Killer (1994), Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American
Monster (1998), Fiend: The Shocking True Story of America’s Youngest Serial Killer
(2000), and Fatal: The Poisonous Life of a Female Serial Killer (2003). Schechter
has also published two murderer-compendiums: The A–Z Encyclopedia of Serial
Killers (1996) with David Everitt, and The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What,
Where, How, and Why of the World’s Most Terrifying Murderers (2004).
Historical contextualization is a unique and leading facet of Schechter’s true
crime, an expansion of the convention that calls for true crime to explain the
killer’s world. Schechter opens Bestial (1998) with a detail-rich introduction to the
history of serial killing that includes references to both known and unknown
figures: Joseph Vacher (the “French Ripper”), Fritz Haarmann (the “vampire of
Hanover”), author Edgar Allan Poe, criminologists Robert K. Ressler and Ron
Holmes, and 1920s murder victims Reverend Edward Wheeler Hall and Mrs.
Eleanor Mills (Schechter 1998, 1–4). The book intersperses meticulous recon-
structions of murderer Earle Leonard Nelson’s daily life and crimes with fantasti-
cally wide-ranging descriptions of daily life in 1920s America, such as this passage
from Chapter 8:

From the perspective of the present moment, the 1920s seem like a period full of quaint
and curious customs, from the mah-jongg fad to the Charleston craze to the popular-
ity of Dr. Emile Coué’s surefire panacea (a twelve-word formula guaranteed to bring
contentment if recited regularly: ‘Day by day in every way I am getting better and
better’). For all its wildness and sophistication, the Jazz Age seems like a time of sweet
simplicity compared to the 1990s—the era of “My Blue Heaven” instead of “Murder
Was the Case,” Son of the Sheik instead of Terminator II, Our Dancing Daughters
instead of Teenage Bondage Sluts. (Schechter 1998: 63)

A casual reader could be forgiven for mistaking Schechter’s true crime for works
of history, for his texts rely upon sophisticated and scholarly presentations of the
social, political, and cultural contexts of the crimes they narrate. But Schechter
can also sensationalize with the best of the true crime scribes, and each chapter
ends with him ratcheting-up the fear, tension, and expectation of horrors to
come.
Jack Olsen (1925–2002) is another well known and best-selling modern true
crime author, with 12 true crime books published between 1974 and 2002, and
three Edgar awards. A prolific writer and journalist, Olsen did not limit himself to
true crime; he also published on sports, the environment, sociology, the game of
bridge, race in America, and history, as well as penning award-winning magazine
and newspaper journalism and fiction. As stated on his official Web site, “Olsen was
described as ‘the dean of true crime authors’ by the Washington Post and the New
York Daily News and ‘the master of true crime’ by the Detroit Free Press and
Newsday. Publishers Weekly called him ‘the best true crime writer around.’ His
studies of crime are required reading in university criminology courses and have
been cited in the New York Times Notable Books of the Year. In a page-one review,
the Times described his work as ‘a genuine contribution to criminology and
journalism alike’” (“The Jack Olsen Home Page”). His numerous true crime texts
include The Man with the Candy: The Story of the Houston Mass Murders (1974),
Son (1983), and “I”: The Creation of a Serial Killer (2002).
1062 TRUE CRIME LITERATURE

Olsen’s true crime is quirky and original, and his last book is an example of the
innovations that the genre can foster. “I”: The Creation of a Serial Killer (2002) nar-
rates the life and crimes of Keith Hunter Jesperson, the so-called “Happy Face
Killer,” in a most unusual manner: first-person narration. First-person true crime is
rare, largely because of the tangle of moral, ethical, and legal issues involved in
allowing or encouraging murderers to have a strong voice. But Olsen’s use of the
first-person in this book illuminates Jesperson’s thought process and brings a fresh
perspective to the stale and overwrought depictions of the killer as a moral monster.
Perhaps because the first-person chapters alternate with those written in the
standard third-person authorial voice, the book largely stays within the convention-
bound confines of the genre, conveying the sense of a strong moral center instead of
implicitly sanctioning Jesperson’s actions, as a first-person account could. In other
respects, the book is in standard format, including narrative arc, focus on the killer’s
story and life, and the inclusion of mundane details and imagined dialogue. One
significant difference is that Jesperson is not described in the language of evil and
monstrosity; instead, the mystery of his personality stands, and Olsen frames him
by using short quotations from criminologists about sociopathy and criminal
psychology.
Olsen’s book suggests that further innovations in true crime are possible; indeed,
one of the nominations for an Edgar award in 2007 is Terri Jentz’s first-person-
victim true crime book, Strange Piece of Paradise (2006). Jentz and a friend were
attacked by an axe-wielding stranger on a camping trip in 1975; both women
survived, and the book is a meditation on the aftereffects of violent crime and Jentz’s
personal search for her near-killer, who was never apprehended. As the genre
matures and evolves, various narrative possibilities and strategies appear and bear
fruit, although the standard, formulaic true crime texts remain popular and
lucrative for their writers.
Reception. Twenty-first-century true crime writing responds to murder with both
irrational fear and compelling fascination; although laying strong claims to factual-
ity, truthfulness, and realistic representation of actual events, the genre continues to
be driven by and preoccupied with themes of an updated, contemporary gothic
horror. American true crime both responds to and reflects its context and historical
circumstance, showing changes and shifts in widespread philosophical and political
understandings about crime, public policy debates, definitions of insanity, and
shifting perspectives on the meaning and mystery of radical evil.

Bibliography
Bugliosi, Vincent, and Curt Gentry. Helter Skelter. 1974. New York: Bantam Books, 1995.
Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Conse-
quences. New York: Random House, 1965.
Fosburgh, Lacey. Closing Time: The True Story of the “Goodbar” Murder. New York:
Delacorte Press, 1975.
Freeman, Lucy. “Before I kill more . . .” New York: Crown Publishers, 1955.
Fuhrman, Mark. Murder in Greenwich: Who Killed Martha Moxley? New York: Avon,
1999.
Gilmore, John. The Tucson Murders. New York: The Dial Press, 1970.
———. The Michigan Murders. New York: Pocket, 1976.
Glassner, Barry. The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things. New
York: Basic Books/Perseus, 1999.
 TRUE CRIME LITERATURE 1063

Halttunen, Karen. Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Harrison, Ben. True Crime Narratives: An Annotated Bibliography. Lanham, MD: The
Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1997.
Jones, Aphrodite. Cruel Sacrifice. New York: Pinnacle Books, 1994.
The Aphrodite Jones Home Page. [January 2007]. <http://www.aphroditejones.com/>
Levin, Meyer. Compulsion. 1956. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1996.
Mailer, Norman. The Executioner’s Song. Boston: Little, Brown Company, 1979.
Marling, William. “Joseph Wambaugh.” 2007. <http://www.detnovel.com/Citation.html>
Martin, Joel Bartlow. Why Did They Kill? New York: Bantam Books, 1953.
The Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Awards Best Fact Crime Winners and Nom-
inees Webpage. [January 2007]. <http://mysterywriters.org/edgarsDB/edgarDB.php>
The Jack Olsen Home Page. [January 2007]. <http://www.jackolsen.com/>
Olsen, Jack. “I”—The Creation of a Serial Killer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002.
Plimpton, George. Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and
Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. New York: Anchor Books, 1997.
Rossner, Judith. Looking for Mr. Goodbar. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975.
Rule, Ann. The Stranger Beside Me. 1980. New York: Signet/New American Library/Penguin
Putnam, 2000.
———Small Sacrifices. New York: Signet/Penguin, 1987.
——— Green River, Running Red. New York: Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2004.
Schechter, Harold. Bestial. New York: Pocket/Simon & Schuster, 1998.
Stowers, Carlton. Author Website. 2007. <http://www.truecrime.net/carltonstowers/>
——— Innocence Lost. New York: Pocket Books, 1990.
True Detective Magazine. 1924–1995.
Wambaugh, Joseph. The Onion Field. 1973. New York: Bantam/Doubleday/Dell, 1987.

Further Reading
Biressi, Anita. Crime, Fear, and the Law in True Crime Stories (Crime Files). New York:
Palgrave-Macmillan, 2001; Black, Joel. The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic
Literature and Contemporary Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991;
Borowitz, Albert. Blood and Ink: An International Guide to Fact-Based Crime Literature.
Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2002; Browder, Laura. “Dystopian Romance: True
Crime and the Female Reader.” The Journal of Popular Culture 39 (2006): 928–953; James,
Laura. Clews: The Historic True Crime Journal. [January 2007] http://laurajames.typepad.
com/clews/; Jenkins, Philip. Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide. New
York: A. de Gruyter, 1994; Knox, Sara L. Murder: A Tale of Modern American Life. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1998; Lane, Roger. Murder In America: A History. Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1997; Lesser, Wendy. Pictures at an Execution: An Inquiry into
the Subject of Murder. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993; Ressler, Robert K., and
Tom Schachtman. Whoever Fights Monsters. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992; Sanders,
Ed. The Family. 1971. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002; Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers:
Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York: Routledge, 1998; Seltzer, Mark.
True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2006; Schmid,
David. Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005.
JEAN MURLEY
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U

URBAN FICTION
Definition. Urban fiction, potentially so broad a term as to encompass any work
set in a city, requires specific definition. One approach is to work from critical cri-
teria of what makes a work’s relationship to the city its definitive quality; another is
empirical, observing that in the current publishing and retail markets, “urban”
refers primarily to inner-city youth culture.
Critical definitions of urban fiction are necessarily inconclusive, and overlap
extensively with other genres. Detective and crime novels, novels of immigrant expe-
rience, financial thrillers, and chick lit all remain popular fictional interpretations of
city life. In an urbanized society few works, save perhaps those set in rural places,
do not fall under the broadest definition of urban literature, and few works of urban
literature cannot be placed in another genre. Settling on a useful definition requires
shifting the focus from content to relationships between literary form and concep-
tions of urban life. Historically certain forms emerged when existing genres seemed
incapable of representing newly urban ways of life: realism and the industrial city;
neighborhood fiction and ethnic communalism; modernism and the cultural
metropolis; postmodern fiction and the city as a figure for under-construction states
of mind. Contemporary popular works that adapt these forms and essay new ones
are often marketed as “literary” or general fiction. Identified as aspirants to an artis-
tic canon, critics and publishers generally eschew genre labels such as “urban” as
incommensurate with such works’ capacity to interpret a cultural moment.
History. The history of urban fiction broadly defined is a history of relation-
ships between social and literary structures, as suggested in the aforementioned
list of forms, whereas the more specific trajectory that leads to the current pub-
lishing definition dwells in tales of particular urban subcultures, especially ethnic
and racial, and in linguistic styles associated with them—types of content and
narrative rhetoric that often formalize perceived social division. The following
summary traces these latter elements as they arise in the broader development of
the category.
1066 URBAN FICTION

URBAN LITERATURE AND HIP-HOP CULTURE

Turning to the empirical definition, the contemporary popular marketplace intensifies the
division between the generic and the literary by narrowing the definition of urban literature
to refer to works, by mainly black authors, that depict inner-city life, especially among its
youth. This trend draws on the broader phenomenon in which the adjective “urban” has
come, in the marketing of popular culture, to refer to hip-hop music, dance, fashion, and
speech. Decades after the music and fashion industries capitalized on similar opportunities,
publishers have seized on this mainspring of youth culture as a growth area, seeking to erect
something approximating a prose wing of hip-hop culture. In this niche marketing strategy,
publishers have responded to the success of black authors’ self-published and self-distributed
novels in the 1990s by creating “urban” imprints and series, while booksellers have estab-
lished corresponding sections.

From the middle of the nineteenth century, popular representations of what

was new, unique, and dangerous about the city dealt heavily in imagery of the
low life, the urban underbelly that was, paradoxically, presented as both invisi-
ble to the middle class and implicitly playing an active role in its psyche and self-
definition. Authors presented narrative personae that acted as both tour guides to
these realms and moral guardians from its dangers. Titles such as New York by
Gaslight (three different works from 1848 to 1881) were prominent in what
critic David S. Reynolds (b. 1949) terms the “immoral” or “dark reform” mode,
one of the most popular and controversial types of prose in the nineteenth cen-
tury (59–84). Jacob Riis’s (1849–1914) documentary project How the Other
Half Lives (1890) marks the arrival of what twentieth-century readers would rec-
ognize as a legitimately reformist framing of voyeuristic material, the kind that
still characterizes much of urban journalism and social science. Urban fiction in
the early twentieth century drew on—even if in various ways it subverted or tran-
scended–-this voyeuristic and didactic realism. For example, Stephen Crane’s
(1871–1900) Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1893), Theodore Dreiser’s
(1871–1945) Sister Carrie (1899), Paul Laurence Dunbar’s (1872–1906) The
Sport of the Gods (1902), and Upton Sinclair’s (1878–1968) The Jungle (1906)
are plotted around the controversial moral and material trajectories of the poor,
the middle class, and the newly arriving black and immigrant populations in the
city, respectively.
A subsequent generation of urban writers, many of whom were products of the
urban working classes, adapted realism to forms more attentive to the communal
structures of the city and the perspectives of its working-class inhabitants, in the
neighborhood fiction of the 1920s and 1930s. Closely related to domestic ethnog-
raphy and often presented as dramatized appeals to socialism, neighborhood novels
are typically bildungsromans of assimilation, alienation, and/or political awakening,
set in the ethnic quarters of the industrial city. Examples include Anzia Yezierska’s
(1881–1970) Bread Givers (1925), Claude McKay’s (1889–1948) Home to Harlem
(1928), Mike Gold’s (1894–1967) Jews without Money, and James T. Farrell’s
(1904–1979) Studs Lonigan trilogy. Like much of the urban realism that preceded
it, neighborhood fiction claimed access to a realm that was mysterious and prob-
lematic to a middle-class readership. Though mid-century critics characterized the
 URBAN FICTION 1067

first generations of neighborhood fiction as overly literal and didactic, much influ-
ential fiction of this latter period—by Richard Wright (1908–1960), Saul Bellow
(1915–2005), Ralph Ellison (1913–1994), Bernard Malamud (1914–1986), Philip
Roth (b. 1933), James Baldwin (1924–1987), and Paule Marshall (b. 1929), for
example—is grounded in the neighborhood mode.
Much of African American fiction is drawn across the difference between the
urban village and the anonymous metropolitan society. The Harlem Renaissance of
the 1920s was predicated on the relationship to national culture of a single, identity-
defined place, as the capital and embodiment of a racially defined community. This
movement also birthed lyrical prose styles inspired by colloquial speech and the
rhythms of blues and jazz. This musically centered culture is recognized as the
source of the twentieth century phenomenon of cool style. Such style, the cultural
expression of a particular community of identity and its shared experience, is asso-
ciated with the broader notion of self-presentation as a feature of urban society, a
phenomenon dramatized in the nineteenth century in the figure of the dandy or fla-
neur. The idea of detached, avant-garde individualism in the word “urbane”
attached to a sense of the term “urban” that inflects its current marketing uses in
the culture industries.
Variations on the cool style and jazz-influenced language were adopted by writers
of the Beat Generation in New York and San Francisco, and in cultural commentary
by self-consciously avant-garde writers including Norman Mailer. Ishmael Reed
(b. 1938), in Mumbo Jumbo (1972), imagines a history of America through the
origins and circulation of black music, to create an early entrant in the genre of post-
modern metahistorical fiction. Reed’s novel, like E.L. Doctorow’s (b. 1931) Ragtime
(1975), draws historical structure from a conception of New York as a multi-ethnic
cauldron of American cultural exchange, a function embodied in the styles not only
of characters but of the prose itself.
The tradition of Harlem writing as an epicenter of urban literary form continued
beyond the 1920s, in not only the self-consciously literary novels of Ellison and
Baldwin but also in a memorable detective series by Chester Himes (1909–1984).
Himes’s first novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), was a groundbreaking depic-
tion of racial conditions in Los Angeles during World War II. Himes created two
Harlem police detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones, in a series of
ten novels from 1957–69, including Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965), which was
adapted into an influential film in 1970. Himes’s novels adopt conventions of the
detective novel, but apply them in the social density of the neighborhood tradition,
to explore racial issues freed from the obligations of earnest reform but not given
over to the naïve notions of authenticity of the subsequent “street” genre.
The neighborhood mode proved a flexible vehicle for interpreting the dilemmas
of urban crisis in the 1970s and 1980s. August Wilson (1945–2005), in his cycle of
Pittsburgh plays (1982–2005), and John Edgar Wideman (b. 1941), in his Home-
wood trilogy (1985), structure broad explorations of the African American experi-
ence from the specific terms of contemporary black neighborhoods in Pittsburgh.
Against the hardening notion that ghettos are permanently broken features of the
urban landscape, these works find in black neighborhoods living evidence of high-
functioning communalism inherited from both distant and recent pasts. While
Wilson and Wideman emphasize the bonds of fatherhood and brotherhood, Gloria
Naylor (b. 1950), in The Women of Brewster Place (1982), depicts the redemptive
possibilities of matriarchal communalism on an isolated, near-broken tenement
1068 URBAN FICTION

street. Naylor’s popularity endures: Oprah Winfrey (b. 1954) produced and starred
in a 1989 film adaptation of Naylor’s novel, while a musical stage adaptation was
scheduled to premiere in Washington, D.C. in 2007. The restored prestige of neigh-
borhood genres owes in part to the rise of multiculturalism as an educational prem-
ise. For example, Sandra Cisneros’s (b. 1954) The House on Mango Street (1985),
a child’s-eye-view Chicago neighborhood novel, remains among the most frequently
assigned novels on middle and high school reading curricula.
The onset of the urban crisis period in the 1960s also factors into the current pub-
lishing trend toward sensational “street” fiction, beginning with a resurgence of the
reform and protest modes in popular works of domestic anthropology, such as Elliot
Liebow’s (1925–1994) Tally’s Corner (1966), in memoirs such as Claude Brown’s
(1937–2002) Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), and experimental novels such
as The System of Dante’s Hell (1965) by LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka) (b. 1934).
Brown’s story of his life growing up on the streets of Harlem entered into elite con-
versations about race, poverty, reform, and writing. A spate of even more sensa-
tional memoirs in the following years partook of the late-1960s trend toward
counter-cultural identities in pop culture. Titles such as Pimp! and Dopefiend led the
street fiction that influenced the blaxploitation films of the 1970s. Although tem-
peramentally associated with black revolutionary movements, no political role
emerged; and this refusal or inability to seek a way out of the crisis—not even on
the Afrocentric terms of the neighborhood novelists—suggests an acceptance of the
mainstream sense that cities and the communities that called them home had been
lost to history.
Leading figures in this movement were Robert Beck (a.k.a. Iceberg Slim)
(1918–1992) and Donald Goines (1937–1974). Beck’s 1967 memoir, Pimp! The
Story of My Life, spawned a host of imitators. Beck followed it with a half-dozen
novels in the 1970s that were said to draw mainly on this same stock of personal
experience, blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction in a manner similar to
the dark-tales mode of the nineteenth century. Goines was a heroin addict who,
beginning in prison in 1971, wrote 16 melodramatic drug-crime novels before being
shot to death in 1974. European reviewers, especially, praised the shocking content
of Goines’s work as the highest degree of authenticity, a notion that remains the cen-
tral currency of street and hip-hop cultures. Beck and Goines helped to establish and
continue to influence the street genres in which much of today’s hip-hop film and
fiction operates.
The gangsta rap of the late 1980s informed an aggressive, unrepentant tone in a
resurgence of street fiction in the 1990s. This contemporary movement is more
directly a product of the entrepreneurial efforts of a number of black writers who
struggled to find outlets for sensational ghetto novels. The success of Sister Souljah’s
(Lisa Williamson, b. 1964) The Coldest Winter Ever (1999) helped open major pub-
lishing venues to the street and ghetto genres. Souljah was a prominent rapper
whose militant rhetoric had become a conservative touchstone in the 1992 presi-
dential campaign. Her novel, which juxtaposes a hedonistic young female product
of the ghetto drug business with Souljah herself as a spiritually grounded Harlem
activist, was hailed by mainstream reviewers for its social and linguistic realism.
Trends and Themes. Literary strands of popular urban fiction remain centered
around efforts to construct historical narratives that make sense of the massive
changes cities have undergone in the last century: to recall what cities were like in
earlier eras, to understand how urban crisis happened, to imagine what might be
 URBAN FICTION 1069

recovered, and to develop forms that speak to what cities look like now. Prominent
in these projects are inter-generational neighborhood novels, both retrospective and
futuristic detective fiction, historical recreations of city life in the industrial era, and
classic naïf-in-the-big-city bildungsromans.
Pete Hamill (b. 1935) is among the most popular authors of the historical novel;
for example, The Gift (a 1973 novella re-released in 2005) and North River (2007)
are stories of the 1950s and the 1930s in New York City that seek to recover in nar-
rative the redemptive possibilities woven into the dense class and ethnic fabric of
pre-crisis New York City. In the neighborhood genre, Diane McKinney-Whetstone’s
four Philadelphia novels, beginning with Tumbling in 1996, in a vein similar to
Wilson and Wideman’s Pittsburgh literature, depict black life in Philadelphia before
the onset of urban crisis, both for clues as to what changed in recent decades and
for sources of communal strength that are or could be the basis for regeneration.
Detective novelists remain active interpreters of city life. Walter Mosley’s (b. 1952)
Easy Rawlins (1990–2005) series about a black private eye in L.A., and his Fearless
Jones novels (2001–2006), about an even more marginalized mystery-solver,
dramatize social conflict in Los Angeles in the post-WWII period through the onset
of urban crisis. In Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (1998), Mosley turns
to a more explicitly neighborhood-oriented plot, surrounding the efforts of a con-
victed violent criminal to redeem himself and in the process begin to reform a Watts
neighborhood devastated by the crisis period that culminated in the 1991 Rodney
King riots. Similarly, Dennis Lehane’s (b. 1966) Kenzie-Gennaro novels explore the
effects of urban crisis and its aftermath on, primarily, white working-class Boston;
like Mosley, when Lehane turned from the detective genre in Mystic River (2001),
he moved in the direction of the neighborhood novel, dramatizing the fate of the
working class in an era of gentrification.
The street genres that make ever louder claims on the category of “urban” have
adopted the hip-hop sensibility and the trend in recent rap music toward sensational
representations of ghetto life. This phenomenon appears not only in the content of
the novels but in their packaging; framing material constructs an authorial persona
as a street insider, a multifaceted entrepreneur, and a master of the genre. Long sets
of acknowledgments, a melodramatic anthem about street life, an emotive dedica-
tion, testimony to having defied the “haters,” and references to the author’s appar-
ent media empire together read like the first few minutes of a rap album, in which
the artist establishes a persona and a social stance with shout-outs and exclamations
descriptive of self and crew.
Rap-fiction crossover products are the latest development in this market. For
example, in the fall of 2006 Vibe Street Lit, a publishing venture of Vibe, a maga-
zine of “urban music and fashion”—urban meaning hip-hop—announced the pub-
lication of Death Around the Corner, the first novel by rapper C-Murder (Corey
Miller, b. 1971). The announcement claims that the novel, about “family drama,
school, jail, hustling, and the rap game,” is the type of story that “mainstream pub-
lishing has long ignored or resisted.” It emphasizes the fact that C-Murder began
writing the novel while “facing a life sentence for second-degree murder” and that
the novel features “a cameo appearance” by another rapper, Master P (Percy Miller,
b. 1967) (Vibe press release). Similarly, MTV/Pocketbooks has partnered with 50 Cent
(Curtis Jackson, b. 1975), the rap superstar whose authenticity is guaranteed by
actual bullet wounds, and the G-Unit hip-hop brand to produce a series of street
novels co-authored by 50 Cent with prominent writers in the genre, including Nikki
1070 URBAN FICTION

Turner. These novels are based on the kinds of personae used by the rappers in ques-
tion. This trend takes the popular genre further in the direction of the adolescent
melodrama, in a way that seems designed to replicate the extension of rap music and
hip-hop fashion’s primary consumer market from the city neighborhood to the
middle-class suburb.
Some themes appear across multiple urban genres. For example, early entrants in
the new ghetto novel, which remain among the most popular in the genre—Teri
Woods’s True to the Game, and Omar Tyree’s Flyy Girl, for example—are similar
to the novels of historical recreation. They present the 1980s as a unique and form-
ative urban era of decadence, danger, and, especially for teenagers, previously
undreamed of glamour and adventure. Additionally, they often echo the neighbor-
hood novel in their attention to place, as in Shannon Holmes’s Baltimore novel,
B-More Careful.
Female heroines figure prominently in each of these genres. In the literary titles,
this form often draws on Toni Morrison’s (b. 1931) example of the black woman as
the epicenter of historical trauma and the vehicle for potential regeneration. In the
street genres it more often takes the form of a picaresque heroine, a resourceful sur-
vivor, typically a drug kingpin’s moll, whose end comes in melodramatic punish-
ment or sentimental triumph. In the less sensational modes, narratives typically
work through the ordinary trials of female adolescence and young adulthood as they
are structured and intensified by urban social problems.
Authenticity and realism have long been obsessions in popular urban literature,
but in the new street genres the terms’ import seems to overshadow all other consid-
erations. Street authors and their readers often demand that the novels in every sense,
not merely in representation, adhere to a code of the streets, remaining “true to the
Game” regardless of narrative distance or moral messaging. The “Game,” in general,
stands not just for illegal hustling, but for materialism in general as a means of sur-
vival. Arguably the street genres’ central dynamic is the effort to craft some edifying
message out of extended celebrations of material acquisition and physical conquest.
Contexts and Issues. The primary context for the new street fiction is the business
of pop culture, especially in terms of the profitability of hip-hop and the role of
artist-entrepreneurs in that realm. Some of the leading authors of popular urban fic-
tion established reputations while controlling the production and distribution of
their works. Vickie Stringer, Relentless Aaron, and others self-published novels in
the world of ghetto cultural promotion, selling their books and establishing their
public identities in much the same ways that promoters flyer concerts and aspiring
rappers circulate CDs (Johnson). Many have since been picked up by big publishers
that reprint the most successful self-published novels (McCune). Tyree’s Flyy Girl,
for example, was published by a small press as early as 1993 but didn’t find wide
release until it was reprinted by Simon & Schuster in 2001 under its “Urban Classic”
series. Others, though, have founded their own publishing companies and have
continued to market at the street level. Woods’s self-publishing enterprise began as
an effort to publish and sell her novel True to the Game. After failing to find a pub-
lisher, in 1998, Woods began selling self-produced copies from the trunk of her car.
In 1999 she launched her own publishing enterprise as a platform for the novel, sub-
sequently mentoring Holmes, another of the most successful contemporary street
novelists. True to the Game has since come to be seen as one of the founding entries
in the contemporary genre, and was republished by Warner Books in 2007 in a
“Special Collectors” edition.
 URBAN FICTION 1071

Thus urban authors are subject to the dynamic that holds in most published fic-
tion, by which publishers bestow legitimacy on writers and their works. But at the
same time the street-oriented writers participate in the rhetoric and the reality of
hip-hop business, in which personal control of production and distribution is a
mark of authenticity, of having brought the supposed entrepreneurial mastery of the
dealer and the pimp to the legitimate business world. The apotheosis of this business-
model-as-artistic-content comes in the form of rap personae such as Sean “Diddy”
Combs (b. 1969) and Jay-Z (Shawn Corey Carter, b. 1969). In fiction, the presen-
tation of a similar role becomes part of the novel’s packaging, speaking to the
author’s authenticity as a “Player in the Game.” For example, Stringer, reputedly in
prison for cocaine distribution in Columbus, Ohio, as late as 1998, co-founded
Triple Crown Publications with Holmes in 2002 (Ghose). In the new crossover ven-
tures by publishers and music companies, the rap star is named as an actual author.
The social context for urban fiction—the nature of the ghetto as it appears in pop
culture—is still to a great extent defined by the difference between two social science
models that have been touchstones in debates about urban crisis. Anthropologists in
the 1960s found socioeconomic causes, centering around job loss and racism, for
what were popularly perceived as historical after-effects or social and cultural
failings in black neighborhoods. But Oscar Lewis’s (1914–1970) work on the
“culture of poverty” (1959–1969) argued that, for example, poor Puerto Ricans in
San Juan and New York City shared with each other and handed down to their
children a set of habits that not only expressed but also conserved their deprivation.
This idea was taken up by the conservative movement and played a role in political
debates over welfare in the 1980s.
William Julius Wilson (b. 1935), in sociological studies of ghetto poverty from the
1970s on, is among the social scientists who expressly counter Lewis’s model with
an economic one that views job availability as a determining factor in neighborhood
status and, less directly, individual behavior. Wilson and others identify this
approach as heir to W.E.B. Du Bois’ (1868–1963) The Philadelphia Negro (1899)
and St. Clair Drake (1911–1990) and Horace Cayton’s (1859–1940) Black Metrop-
olis (1945), works that bear close relationships to previous generations of urban fic-
tion. Wilson, like his intellectual ancestors, found black neighborhoods to be
structured by unusually proximate and easily traversable class differences, a
dynamic identified initially by Du Bois as a product of racial segregation that is a
source of both division and solidarity in the black community.
Broadly, the literary genres align with the economic argument while the street
genres implicitly, and sometimes very explicitly, make the culture argument. Detec-
tive, historical, and neighborhood novels pay close attention to the kinds of jobs that
are available to heads of household in a given era, and usually tie social stresses to
the economic dynamics of the family and the surrounding community. They also tend
to be very aware of the scale of class difference within a given neighborhood. The
street genres, by contrast, insist that the hustling “Game” is an element of black
culture that can and should survive material success, and that upwardly mobile indi-
viduals should “keep it real” by continuing to adhere to the code of the street. In
this, despite their occasional flamboyant uses of civil rights and black power rheto-
ric, they come down clearly, if unintentionally, on the side of the culture argument.
But these popular genres also speak to Wilson and his forebears’ description of
class structure in black neighborhoods. Like rap music, recent urban fiction is influ-
enced by the appeal, and the proximity, of street life to children of middle-class
1072 URBAN FICTION

homes. Settings often encompass both high-functioning working-to-middle-class

neighborhoods and the streets and projects of the impoverished ghetto. Drama
arises from the conflicting appeals of each realm to a young protagonist in a stable
family. This dynamic also appears in the lives of the genre’s authors, including
Goines and Stringer, who grew up in middle-class homes on the East Side of Detroit,
but gravitated to street culture and drug sales (Cunningham). Here, too, the new
popular genres often come down on the side of the culture argument. Conventional
upward mobility is often available in these novels; it is not economic pressure but
the allure of a morally defiant, physically adventurous version of ghetto life that
often triumphs, if not over the main character then over the majority of her peers.
Reception. The reception of urban fiction speaks to the difficulty in defining it, a
difficulty grounded in the divide in marketing and perception between literary and
genre fiction. Works offered as literary—often in the genres of neighborhood, detec-
tive, and historical novels—are less often assessed in terms of how they imagine the
city than in terms of how they imagine the mental and moral lives of their charac-
ters. A prominent reviewer praises Mosley’s Always Outnumbered, Always
Outgunned, because he “has not appliqued his morality; he has located its deep
coiled root and tracked it up to the surface” (Birkerts). In a review of Pete Hamill’s
North River, New York City is a source of “detail and ambience” that “showcases”
the novel’s deeper truth, which is “the power of human goodness and . . . love”
(Publishers Weekly).
While these novels are undoubtedly psychological, inattention to the ways they
are informed by their conceptions of cities is another way in which, in popular cul-
ture, the “urban” field is ceded to genres that can be most directly associated with
black youth culture. This latter category includes more than just street fiction; in a
collection set in Harlem, award-winning young adult writer Walter Dean Myers
(b. 1937) is said to achieve “an overall effect of sitting on the front stoop swapping
stories of the neighborhood”; and to have successfully combined “the search for
personal identity” with “the sense of place.”
But it is the hardcore street novels that are understood to be most directly
about urban life. The concept of authenticity colors heavily the reception of street
fiction, as it does their content. The kinds of street fiction that come to the atten-
tion of book reviewers are often praised in the same terms (“straight from the
streets”) that fans bestow on the less polished variety (“keeping it real”). Mosley,
for example, is quoted on the back cover of The Coldest Winter Ever calling
Souljah “an Emile Zola of the hip-hop generation,” and the novel “an unflinch-
ing eye at the truth.”
Three factors contribute to producing this response: the works are packaged to
maximize the perception of authentic realism; mainstream reviewers and readers
often have no references by which to judge such claims; and young or otherwise
unsophisticated consumers of culture, even those who live in the city, tend to be
highly drawn to the framing of sensation and melodrama as reality. The stock
defense of gangsta rap as documentary realism rings out from the record company
boardroom to the lyric itself to the school playground, reframing even the most cel-
ebratory violence and misogyny as a form of protest; it is applied to street fiction as
well. The appeal of this claim might be attributable to a dearth of other kinds of
representations of the ghetto environment against which to compare the sensational.
It is typically other modes of representation, not independent reality, by which qual-
ities such as realism and authenticity are assessed.
 URBAN FICTION 1073

Selected Authors. Among the best-selling authors of what publishers call urban
fiction are Woods (True to the Game), Stringer (Let that be the Reason), Holmes
(B-More Careful), Turner (A Hustler’s Wife), Tyree (Flyy Girl), and K’Wan (Hood
Rat). It is helpful, in understanding what “urban” means in these novels, to com-
pare such visions of the city to those of popular authors whose work is published
and sold independently of this new marketing imperative.
A comparison of two Philadelphia novels reveals what ground the literary and the
street genres can share and where they tend to part ways. McKinney-Whetstone’s
Leaving Cecil Street was published in 2004 under HarperCollins’s William Morrow
imprint (“the highest quality fiction”). Tyree’s Flyy Girl, originally self-published in
1993, was released by Simon & Schuster in its Urban Classic Novel series in 2000,
the year after that publisher’s success with Soujah’s The Coldest Winter Ever. Tyree’s
novel is more “neighborhood” and less “street” than much of the new ghetto fiction,
but it is an influential work in the genre and establishes a prototypical picaresque
heroine. Both novels aim for broad, historically aware understandings of black city
life, both in terms of its highest potentials and its worst degradations, by dramatizing
the vulnerability of even the model neighborhood, as key opening passages reveal:

Cecil Street was feeling some kind of way in 1969. Safely tucked away in the heart of
West Philadelphia, this had always been a charmed block. A pleasure to walk through
the way the trees lined the street from end to end and made arcs when they were in full
leaf. The outsides of the houses stayed in good repair, with unchipped banister posts and
porches mopped down daily because the people here sat out a lot, their soothing chatter
jumping the banisters from end to end about how the numbers had come that day or
what had happened on Edge of Night. And even though the block had long ago made
the transition from white to colored to Negro to Black is Beautiful, the city still provided
street cleaning twice a week in the summer when the children took to the outside and
there was the familiar smack of the double-Dutch rope. (McKinney-Whetstone, 2004, 3)

Dave was definitely a catch. His high income enabled them to move into a comfortable
and scenic black neighborhood in Northwest Philadelphia. In Germantown, they had
the luxury of private lawns, patios, driveways and lots of trees, which surrounded their
three-bedroom twin house, things not affordable to the many Philadelphians who lived
in crowded row-house areas. Patti worked at a nursing home as a dietitian, adding to
their snug income. . . . . The seventies had been prosperous for blacks. (Tyree, 2000,
14–15, 21)

Thus each novel opens by explicitly connecting work, family, and neighborhood
to the history of the city. In each, a neighborhood, which would seem to middle-
class outsiders like a ghetto, is a model of prosperity and stability that has been
aspired to and fought for. Both novels also begin with two-parent, lower-middle-
class homes. The drama of each novel unfolds as the forces of instability are
revealed to be close at hand and at every level, from sexual exploitation and drug
sales to government apathy and hostility. These novels join the long tradition of
urban literature, in which institutions from places of work, to modes of transporta-
tion, to living room decor, give structure to human needs and desires, providing
vehicles for creativity, mastery, sexuality, and recovery from trauma, that are pri-
marily healthy or destructive. In a sense, these novels about neighborhoods on the
edge reveal the literal stakes of middle-class conventions that in other settings can
seem petty: an authoritarian parental style or a broken teenage friendship comes, in
1074 URBAN FICTION

these environments, to have potentially life-or-death consequences. But whereas the

Philadelphia of Leaving Cecil Street provides for a communal solution, in Flyy Girl
it is the tableau upon which a lone survivor adventures.
Leaving Cecil Street is set on one block in West Philadelphia in the summer of
1969. The ostensibly idyllic street is troubled by signs of impending crisis: the assas-
sination of Martin Luther King Jr., the Vietnam War, heroin sales, sporadic violent
crime, the deterioration of locally owned businesses, and hostility from previously
supportive white authorities. Of greater concern to the narrative, though, are unre-
solved traumas and tensions in the lives of the central adult characters, and the
effects on their adolescent children.
But the neighborhood structure that fails at first to recognize these fissures is also
the source of their repair. The block is so “tight” as to have its own space-time, in
which buildings are named after the day of the week their major activities occur.
Homes are separated by thin walls permeable to emotion as well as sound. The
block party is the apotheosis of this communal life, in which desires and identities
interpenetrate in a striking example of the neighborhood novel’s rebuke to ortho-
dox individualism. The novel opens at one such party, in which the characters are
so unsettled by their lifelong anxieties that they fail to notice a mysterious, frail
woman, dying of alcohol-induced liver disease, crawling into a cellar, where she
remains for much of the novel, not participating in but attuned to the psychological
rhythms of the house and the neighborhood.
The narrative, playing back and forth between the neighborhood’s present and
the youths of its adults, reveals that this woman’s quest to resolve her own
trauma is bound to the events that are threatening the neighboring families. This
narrative device, in which proximate urbanites, apparently thrown together
randomly, are revealed to be embedded in a web of close relationships, is a sta-
ple of urban literature dating to Charles Dickens. The neighborhood is connected
to the larger city by its residents’ pasts, illustrated in one virtuosic chapter by
another classic convention of urban literature: the el train acts as a narrative
vehicle to limn the structure of the industrial city and the scope of the characters’
lives. The novel culminates in another block party, in which again the signs of
urban crisis appear in the form of black power rhetoric among the crowd and a
hostile white police presence. But the expected violence never materializes, and
instead the traumas afflicting the families are resolved in acts of purification and
recombination. Leaving Cecil Street raises the expectation of calamity and disin-
tegration, not only its internal narrative tensions, but also from the reader’s
knowledge of what happened to many such black neighborhoods in this era. But
in its ending it rejects the historical logic of urban crisis in favor of a psychoan-
alytical logic of healing, the working-through being as much a communal process
as an individual one.
Flyy Girl narrates one girl’s childhood and adolescence in the Northwest
Philadelphia neighborhood of Germantown in the 1980s, an era the novel identi-
fies as uniquely expansive and dangerous for adolescents and black communities
alike, an acceleration given color by frequent descriptions of fashion and music.
Starting at age 13, the precocious Tracy Ellis plows through a series of partners,
learning to manipulate boys as the only alternative, for a sexually adventurous
girl, to being exploited. But even this position of power quickly becomes physi-
cally dangerous and spiritually destructive, as Tracy tries to conquer ever more
willful and violent boyfriends. By contrast her next-door-neighbor Raheema is a
 URBAN FICTION 1075

bookworm who, bullied by her father, is afraid of boys and depressed. The novel
does not apologize for Tracy’s sexual adventuring and manipulative behavior, even
as it suggests her parents’ separation lies behind it; in fact Tyree’s prose revels in
her sexual pleasure, fashion sense, and mastery of the adolescent games of
romance. The novel connects Tracy’s personality to narrative art, rejecting the
notion that the artist is a detached but imaginative observer. Tracy’s charisma
includes the ability to spin thrilling stories out of the everyday teen events in which
she also plays the lead role, in contrast to Raheema, who can only look on, engage
in unimaginative gossip, and wonder what it would be like to be a part of the
drama. It is Tracy, not Raheema, who at the end of the novel becomes a poet in
the self-dramatizing slam style.
As the 1980s proceed, rougher neighborhoods in North and South Philly exert a
gravitational force on the adventurous youth of Germantown, especially as the drug
trade becomes lucrative. Raheema’s older sister Mercedes falls victim to crack, and
in a period of reflection and sexual abstinence that follows, Tracy joins a group of
college students who are interested in black culture and social issues. But Tracy
returns to Victor, an ex-boyfriend from the street scene, who has been convicted of
a violent crime related to his drug dealing. In prison, the intelligent but unschooled
Victor joins the Nation of Islam and writes to Tracy asking her to wait for him and
be his bride so that they can play their part rebuilding the black community. Victor’s
request is authoritarian, but his appeal to cultural regeneration, combined with the
unwavering self-confidence, are too much for her to resist. The novel ends in a let-
ter from Tracy at college to her father at home, telling him of her plans to wait for
Victor.
Flyy Girl presents a girl caught up in the “Game” who learns lessons from hard,
dangerous, experience. But though it probes the fatal boundaries of materialism
and self-centeredness, its message is not that of the orthodox morality tale. A
character like Tracy simply must have adventure and drama, the novel suggests,
and young people reaching physical maturity will unavoidably experiment sexu-
ally. By contrast, Leaving Cecil Street looks to historical communal sources for the
strength to withstand, and adapt to, the forces that threaten to pull apart individ-
uals, families, and neighborhoods. Flyy Girl, while recognizing the importance of
education, work, and parent-child relationships, emphasizes the strength of the
individual survivor. This difference speaks generally for two distinct modes of
popular urban fiction.
This distinction is reproduced in different visions of Harlem, by one of the most
successful street novelists and by one of the leading authors of urban youth fiction.
Woods’s True to the Game, still among the best-selling works of the new ghetto fic-
tion, is like a sexed-up, thug-life version of Flyy Girl. The main character, Gena,
lives in Philadelphia, but she and her girlfriend Sahira travel among the cities of the
East Coast, from Atlanta to New York, to party among young black men flush with
the rewards of the late 1980s cocaine trade. The opening scene takes place in
Harlem:

125th was a mini Greek playland in the middle of Harlem. Gena had no understand-
ing. It wasn’t like Philly. It was larger, and the niggas looked like Eric B and Rakim,
with humongous gold chains and diamond medallions the size of bread plates. If it was
meant to represent wealth, that shit did its job. And Gena liked it. She looked at the
girls and could not help staring at them. They had no clothes on. They were sexy and
1076 URBAN FICTION

revealing, and Gena wanted to be amongst them, fucking with niggas, getting her life
on. New York was the shit. There was no way she could live there, though. It was so
fast, too fast. Fast niggas, fast cars, and fast lifestyles. The magnitude was large, as was
the amount of men. Even the cars in New York looked different. Gena didn’t know if
it was the rims or the tires or what was going on. The dashboards were customized,
leather MCM and Louis Vutton [sic] seats, not to mention the detailed piping and
thousand-dollar sound systems. That shit turned her the fuck on. Everything about
New York turned her on, especially the guys. (1–2)

This description of Harlem, though contemporary in its language, understands

the city in one of its perennial modes: as a material Eden but a moral minefield,
with a dazzling surface that snares the naive newcomer. In True to the Game,
though, as in others of its kind, the celebration of excess is never contained by
the moral of the story. As one might expect, Gena falls for a Harlem thug with a
fast car, God-like looks, pitch-perfect style, and a heart devoted to only her; but,
as one might also guess, the criminal life that funds all this perfection is more
dangerous, and harder to get out of, than she could have imagined. Hard lessons
are learned and lives are broken, but Gena survives intact and in possession of a
baby blue Mercedes-Benz.
In the Harlem of Walter Dean Myers’s 145th Street Short Stories, a Mercedes-
Benz is just an adolescent’s fantasy:

I like a lot of things about Harlem, especially the block, which was how we talked
about 145th Street. There were good people on the block, but what I wanted was to be
more than what I saw on the block. Uncle Duke said I could be more, but if I put
Harlem out of my heart I could end up being a lot less, too.
Yeah, well, I was ready to take my chances. What I wanted to do was to be a doc-
tor and have a nice crib, and a Benz, the whole nine. Then the thing happened with
Monkeyman. (74)

In “Monkeyman,” a quiet youth risks his life standing up to a new gang; in hos-
pital, he tells the narrator that after going to art school in Pittsburgh, he wants to
return to Harlem and open a studio. The narrator, while not giving up his dream of
a doctor’s salary, wonders at the story’s conclusion whether he might return to prac-
tice the healing arts in the old neighborhood.
Myers’s Harlem is a multi-generational narrative where those who survive hardships
gain in strength and wisdom, because the shared circumstances of the place bind them
in familial relations. Like McKinney-Whetstone, Myers picks up the thread of black
neighborhood fiction, in which community is more life-sustaining than repressive, and
in which communal identity is a real part of each individual. Myers’s narrative binds
generations, not just among characters, but through the history of Harlem and black
America. “A Christmas Story” opens, “It was rumored that Mother Fletcher was well
over ninety years old. She had become a legend on 145th Street. If anybody wanted to
know what the neighborhood looked like in the twenties, where Jack Johnson had
lived, perhaps, or where James Baldwin’s father had preached, Mother Fletcher could
tell you” (105). This story examines a white police officer’s perspective of the neigh-
borhood, inhabiting his experiences sympathetically, something inconceivable in street
fiction. Myers’s collection is in control of its own narrative structure and its uses of col-
loquial language in ways the street novels are not; though the street novels trade in ado-
lescent fantasy, it is 145th Street that is published as a children’s book.
 URBAN FICTION 1077

Bibliography
Beck, Robert. Pimp! The Story of My Life by Iceberg Slim. Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1969.
Birkerts, Sven. “The Socratic Method.” Review of Walter Mosley, Always Outnumbered,
Always Outgunned. New York Times. 9 Nov. 1997.
Brown, Claude. Manchild in the Promised Land. New York: Macmillan, 1965.
Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. New York: Random House, 1991.
C-Murder. Death Around the Corner. New York: Vibe Street Lit, 2007.
Concepcion, Mariel. “VIBE’s Line of Urban Fiction Publishes Rapper C-Murder’s First Novel.”
1 Sept. 2006. Vibe Books. <http://www.vibe.com/news/news_headlines/2006/09/
vibe_street_lit_publishes_cmurder_first_novel/>
Crane, Stephen. Maggie, a Girl of the Streets and Other New York Writings. New York:
Random House, 2001.
Cunningham, Jonathan. “Romancing the Hood.” Detroit Metrotimes, 22–28 June 2005.
Doctorow, E.L. Ragtime. New York: Random House, 1997.
Drake, St. Clair and Horace Cayton. Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern
City. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945.
Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959.
Du Bois, W.E.B. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1996.
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Sport of the Gods. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1902.
Farrell, James T. Young Lonigan. New York: Penguin, 2001.
50 Cent and Nikki Turner. Death Before Dishonor. New York: G-Unit/Pocket Books, 1997.
Foster, George. New York by Gaslight and Other Urban Sketches. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990.
Foye, K’Wan. Hood Rat. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006.
Ghose, Dave. “Crime Does Pay.” Columbus Monthly, Nov. 2004.
Goines, Donald. Dopefiend. Los Angeles: Holloway House, 2003.
———. Never Die Alone. Los Angeles: Holloway House, 2003.
Gold, Mike. Jews without Money. New York: H. Liveright, 1930.
Hamill, Pete. The Gift. New York: Random House, 1973.
———. North River. Boston: Little, Brown, 2007.
Himes, Chester. If He Hollers Let Him Go. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1945.
———. Cotton Comes to Harlem. Chatham, N.J.: Chatham, 1965.
Holmes, Shannon. B-More Careful. New York: Terri Woods, 2001.
Johnson, Lynne D. “Relentless Aaron—Urban Fiction’s Don.” Vibe Book Talk, 16 Sept.
2004. <http://www.vibe.com/news/online_exclusives/2004/09/book_talk_relentless_
aaron_urban_fictions_don/>
Jones, LeRoi. The System of Dante’s Hell. New York: Grove Press, 1965.
Lehane, Dennis. Mystic River. New York: William Morrow, 2001.
Lewis, Oscar. La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty. New York: Random
House, 1966.
Liebow, Eliot. Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men. Boston: Little, Brown,
1967.
Mailer, Norman. “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.” Dissent IV
(Spring 1957).
“Mama Black Widow.” Dir. Darren Grant. Screenplay by Will De Los Santos, from novel by
Robert Beck. Muse Productions, 2007 (in production). IMDb.com. <www.imdb.com/
title/tt0301595/>
McCabe, James. New York by Gaslight: A Work Descriptive of the Great American Metrop-
olis. New York: Crown, 1984.
McCune, Jenny. “The Rise of Urban Fiction.” PMA, the Independent Book Publishers Asso-
ciation. Oct. 2005. <http://www.pma-online.org/scripts/shownews.cfm?id=1216>
McInerney, Jay. Bright Lights, Big City. New York: Vintage, 1984.
1078 UTOPIAN LITERATURE

McKay, Claude. Home to Harlem. New York: Harper & Bros., 1928.
McKinney-Whetstone, Diane. Leaving Cecil Street. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.
———. Tumbling. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Mosley, Walter. Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned. New York: Washington Square
Press, 1998.
Myers, Walter Dean. 145th Street Short Stories. New York: Random House, 2000.
Naylor, Gloria. The Women of Brewster Place. New York: Penguin, 1982.
Reed, Ishmael. Mumbo Jumbo. New York: Scribner, 1972.
Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives. New York: Penguin, 1997.
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Norton, 2003.
Sister Souljah. The Coldest Winter Ever. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.
Stringer, Vickie. Dirty Red. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.
———. Let That Be the Reason. New York: A&B, 2002.
Turner, Nikki. A Hustler’s Wife. Columbus, Ohio: Triple Crown, 2003.
Tyree, Omar. Flyy Girl. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
Wideman, John Edgar. The Homewood Books. Pittsburgh, PA.: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1992.
Wilson, August. Fences. New York: New American Library, 1986.
Wilson, William Julius. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New
York: Knopf, 1996.
The Women of Brewster Place. Dir. Donna Deitch. Screenplay by Karen Hall, from novel by
Gloria Naylor. Harpo Productions, 1989.
Woods, Teri. True to the Game. Haverton, PA: Meow Meow Productions, 1994.
Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Harper & Bros., 1940.
Yezierska, Anzia. Bread Givers. New York: Persea, 2003.

Further Reading
Auster, Paul. New York Trilogy. New York: Penguin, 1990; Bremer, Sidney. Urban Intersections:
Meetings of Life and Literature in United States Cities. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992;
Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Transl. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1974; Cappetti, Carla. Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993; Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: the Laboring of
American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso, 1996; Dos Passos, John.
Manhattan Transfer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000; Jurca, Catherine. White Diaspora: the
Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2001; Morrison, Toni. “City Limits, Village Values: Concepts of the Neighborhood in Black
Fiction.” In Literature and the Urban Experience: Essays on the City and Literature. Jaye,
Michael C., and Ann C. Watts, eds. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981; Scruggs,
Charles. Sweet Home: Invisible Cities in the Afro-American Novel. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1993; Reynolds, David. Beneath the American Renaissance: the
Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1988; Rotella, Carlo. October Cities: the Redevelopment of Urban Literature.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998; Williams, Raymond. The Country and the
City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973; Baker, Houston A. Afro-American Poetics:
Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.
EOIN CANNON

UTOPIAN LITERATURE
Definition. Utopian literature describes an imagined ideal society. The imagined
society is usually marked by a universally fair political system and material abun-
dance. Often, the inhabitants of these societies are required to follow schedules,
share meals, live in communal housing, or otherwise limit their personal choices.
 UTOPIAN LITERATURE 1079

UTOPIA: NOT REALLY A PLACE AT ALL

Although the terms utopia and utopian are applied outside of literary studies, the concept
itself was first named in a work of fiction. In his 1615 work of the same name,Thomas More
created the word utopia by punning with two different Greek phrases: eu topos, the good or
happy place, and ou topos, the place which is nowhere.Thus utopia is a happy place that has
no true location.

One of the more common techniques used in creating a utopian tale is the travel
narrative. In these stories, a visitor from the outside world stumbles upon a utopia
and meets a guide who explains how his or her superior society works. Another
common narrative frame is when someone who has traveled to a utopian society
returns and shares tales of his visit to a perfect, or at least much better, society.
Other fictional genres can also be employed to create utopian novels and stories.
Authors generally produce this kind of literature in order to comment on their own
society. An author may create a utopia to encourage her or his society to become
better, or to criticize the failings of the society he lives in. Utopian can also be used
as an adjective to describe elements of otherwise non-utopian texts that contain
elements of an ideal political system or an ideal society. Science fiction, for example,
typically contains utopian elements, even though most stories in that genre are not
specifically written to envision ideal social relations. Furthermore, the term utopian
is often employed dismissively when people are discussing real-world political ideas.
This is partially because of the word’s association with literary utopias, which are
fictive and deliberately unrealizable. This entry will discuss works of fiction created
either to showcase an ideal society or to question the ability of humanity to create
an ideal society.
History. Western culture has been producing utopian literature for at least
2,500 years. The Greeks, who were experimenting with social reform as they
developed participatory democracy, gave us two important early examples of
utopian literature. These texts were created by near contemporaries, the play-
wright Aristophanes (ca. 448–388 B.C.E.) and the philosopher Plato (ca. 427–347
B.C.E.). Aristophanes’s play The Birds, first performed in 414 B.C.E., exemplifies the
creation of a humorous utopia to critique aspects of the author’s society. Two
Athenian citizens, Makedo and Goodhope, set out on a journey to find refuge
from the various social ills of their city—militarism, crime, citizens addicted to
lawsuits, and so forth. The travelers meet up with the Hoopoe, or king of the
birds, and realize that these creatures live a carefree life. In order to permanently
escape from the unpleasantness of Athens, Makedo and Goodhope help the birds
create the floating city of Nepheloccygia, which has been translated as cloud-cuckoo-
land or cloud-cuckoo-town. Both the gods and the Greeks try to thwart this
project, but ultimately Makedo is crowned king of cloud-cuckoo-land, where he’s
free to live out his days eating and procreating in a society patterned after avian
life. Clearly Aristophanes was not suggesting cloud-cuckoo-land as a legitimate
alternative to Athens, but he was creating an alternate version of society that
championed ideals the playwright felt were better observed than the crass com-
mercialism and militarism of the Greek city states.
Plato’s The Republic, which was written between 387 and 360 B.C.E., does not
present a fictional portrait of an ideal society, but instead describes the conditions
1080 UTOPIAN LITERATURE

under which an ideal society could be created. These conditions are often echoed in
later utopian writing, so it is worthwhile to examine them here. Plato believed that
only philosophers, who were ruled by reason, were fit to govern. These philosopher-
kings would create societies that were entirely rational and therefore harmonious.
Social problems, Plato argued, were caused by leaders who let their passions rule,
resulting in passionate and disordered states. Plato’s commitment to reason was so
absolute that he proposed banning literature and art from his ideal state because
they were generated by passion. Education would be strictly controlled, and people
would be assigned to castes of workers, soldiers, and rulers. Plato’s ideal society dif-
fers significantly from the floating pleasure palace of Aristophanes, but the tension
between visions of the ideal society as a place of joy and as a place of order and rea-
son persists into contemporary utopian writing.
Despite its ancient beginning, utopian literature languished for nearly 2,000 years
before Thomas More published the book that would define the genre. There was lit-
tle call for speculative representations of the perfect society during Europe’s Middle
Ages. In this period, the perfect political system was broadly conceived as a divinely
appointed sovereign ruling over a docile populace with the help of the clergy. The
Enlightenment, with its return to the Greek and Roman values and its emphasis on
the ability of human reason to generate progress, encouraged a critical perspective
of European societies. Evidence of this trend is revealed in Thomas More’s Utopia,
a rational society in the vein of the ideal government presented in Plato’s Republic.
Written in 1615, More’s tale does not feature a lively plot, but rather a thorough
description of the workings of Utopian society. The novel’s informant is Raphael
Hythloday, who has visited Utopia and greatly admires its relatively democratic
social structure. Utopia is generally pleasant, though there is also much that would
make a modern reader uncomfortable. The society is a republic governed by a
prince, who typically rules for life but is chosen by the Philarchs, who are in turn
chosen each year by the 30 families they preside over. Despite the ruler’s noble title,
this system was a far cry from the monarchies that dominated Europe during More’s
day; the Utopian method of selecting a ruler loosely resembles the structure of the
modern American electoral college. Daily life in Utopia is designed to be both pro-
ductive and rewarding; the six-hour work day provides enough material goods for
the entire society. The Utopians devote the rest of their time to recreation and
improving their minds.
There is much in Utopia, however, that threatens individualism and the disorder of
creativity. The country is comprised of identical towns occupied by no more than
6,000 families, who live in identical houses. The inhabitants of these identical houses
wear similar clothing and share communal meals with everyone who lives on their
30-house street. There is no private property, and housing assignments are
rearranged every 10 years. Citizens cannot leave town without permission from the
government, and the state can transfer families from one town to another to main-
tain desired population levels. Although the daily schedule may allow time for per-
sonal pleasure, that pleasure is often strictly regulated. For example, premarital sex
is illegal and those caught violating this rule are forbidden to marry. The Utopians
also view each other naked before marriage; and while this may at first seem titillat-
ing, its subordination of romance to reason, and its implied evaluation of one’s
betrothed as a farm animal on an auction block offends contemporary tastes. In
More’s Utopia, individual expression is often subordinated to the whole, and when
individual taste is expressed, it must be rational and calculating, not impressionistic
 UTOPIAN LITERATURE 1081

and spontaneous. This blend of freedom and suppression illustrates the central con-
tradictions among utopias that have been taken up by contemporary authors.
America, established by those who hoped to create a superior political system, has
a rich tradition of utopian writing. To understand the themes addressed in contem-
porary utopian writing, it will be helpful to examine two key utopian texts from
America’s literary tradition. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, published
in 1852, shows us a failed utopia, critiquing the real-world applicability of utopian
ideals. Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel Looking Backwards is an Americanized,
technologically enhanced utopia in the tradition of More. Bellamy’s text exemplifies
the hope that technological advancement will create utopian conditions. While this
hope is not unique to America, technology has always been a primary source of
optimism about the future of American culture. These two novels represent contra-
dictory views of utopia held in American literature: fear that utopia is unworkable
and possibly dangerous, and hope that technological innovation will ultimately
deliver what human nature has thus far prevented.
In the decades before the Civil War, America saw several utopian communities
arise. Some of them were founded by small religious groups such as the Shakers,
whose leader, Ann Lee, introduced this religion on American soil when she estab-
lished a communal farm in Watervliet, New York, in 1774. Other groups were sec-
ular, influenced by the French social thinker Charles Fourier. In Fourier’s utopia,
people would be organized into a phalanx of 1,620 people, and live in a communal
building called a phalanstery. There were several attempts to establish Fourierist
communities in America, such as the North American Phalanx in Red Bank, New
Jersey. This utopian experiment lasted from 1843 to 1856 and was endorsed by
prominent people, including Horace Greely, the editor and publisher of the New
York Tribune. Communities like the North American Phalanx were controversial
because communal living did not blend easily with the wide-open capitalism of ante-
bellum America. Furthermore, Fourier was notorious for his radical—even by
today’s standards—views on sexuality. In a phalanstery, at least in theory, people
were free to have sexual relations with any other consenting adult. Unsurprisingly,
even though “free love” was usually not a prominent feature of American utopian
communities, the possibility that such unconventional behavior was occurring did
not sit well with most Americans. These negative perceptions led most American
Fourierists to refer to themselves as Associationists to avoid scaring away potential
converts. But considering that the religious groups who founded utopian communi-
ties were also outside mainstream American thought, the failure of all of these alter-
native living experiments is understandable. The communities had trouble attracting
both capital and capable people, and their eventual demise only confirmed the pub-
lic’s impression of the impracticality of their utopian schemes.
The popular cultural distrust of communal living is reflected in Hawthorne’s
thinly disguised account of his own time in a utopian community. For a few months
in 1841, the author lived at Brook Farm, a secular utopian community in West
Roxbury, Massachusetts, which was Fourierist before it closed in 1849 but not
while Hawthorne was a resident. Through the poet-narrator Miles Coverdale,
Hawthorne’s tale questions the practicality of utopian communities. While the
author found much to satirize in the idea of a poet working as a farmer, his funda-
mental critique of communal living highlights the inability of humans to treat one
another fairly. The novel’s dark conclusion centers on the love triangle involving the
self-promoting Hollingsworth, who wants to transform Blithedale into a penal
1082 UTOPIAN LITERATURE

colony that he will run, the ardent feminist Zenobia, and her passive, feminine half-
sister Priscilla. Hollingsworth’s scheme depends in part on money the independently
wealthy Zenobia would provide, and his decision to marry Priscilla leads the
shamed Zenobia to drown herself. Of course, Zenobia’s death signals the end of the
community and leaves Hollingsworth and Priscilla spiritually broken. Hawthorne’s
tale suggests that the sharing of resources necessary for communal life is so counter
to human nature that tragedy is bound to result. Zenobia’s money and
Hollingsworth’s charisma both introduce ungovernable desires into the rationally
planned utopia, whose fatal flaw was the assumption that people were capable of
consistently setting aside personal desires in service of the greater good.
While the horrors of the Civil War called into question the faith in human
progress that made experiments like Brook Farm, the North American Phalanx, and
the Shaker communities possible, it also ushered in an age of rapid industrialization
and technological progress that made a different type of utopia seem feasible. Many
social thinkers began to believe that society was gradually evolving toward a mech-
anized paradise that would provide for everyone’s material needs. This type of
utopian thought was quite popular despite the daily experiences of people who
worked in newly mechanized industry. Bellamy’s novel Looking Backwards gives
these utopian hopes literary form. In Bellamy’s tale, wealthy Bostonian Julian West
goes to sleep in 1887 and wakes up in 2000 to find society transformed by a blood-
less revolution. After capitalists consolidated every industry into a single trust, the
working class rose up and took over the mighty industrial machine that had been
created. The plot of Looking Backwards is very similar to More’s Utopia as prima-
rily a description of an ideal society, though West does return to nineteenth century
Boston and argues with his complacent friends and family. While More learns of
Utopia from the traveler Hythloday, West is introduced to the new millennium’s
utopian America by his host Dr. Leete. West learns that society’s technological
prowess allows everyone to enjoy an extremely high standard of living. Dr. Leete
explains that all citizens work in the industrial army until 45 and then retire to sev-
eral decades of leisure. Prison is largely reserved for people who refuse to work.
Although it features communal dining halls, Bellamy’s society is best understood as
a consumerist paradise where people use credit cards to shop in “sample stores”
located in buildings resembling the twenty-first century’s upscale malls. Products
selected at the sample stores are then automatically delivered to the buyer’s
apartment. Contemporary readers may find Bellamy’s vision both appealing and
improbable, but Looking Backwards was regarded by many as a practical blueprint
for the future. Readers formed Bellamy clubs, and the Populist Party incorporated
Bellamy’s ideas into their platform.
Trends and Themes. Twentieth-century utopian literature by American authors
continued to reflect the contradictory tendencies revealed in the two nineteenth-
century literary utopias discussed above. Some tales seem direct descendants of
More’s political or Bellamy’s technological utopia, with ideal societies arising from
the chaos of the contemporary world thanks to stunning technological break-
throughs. Kathleen Ann Goonan’s nanotech series, with its depiction of this new
technology radically transforming the world, is at least a spiritual descendant of
Looking Backwards. Lincoln Child’s novel Utopia, though primarily a straightfor-
ward techno-thriller, also argues for America’s ability to protect its technological
utopias from terrorists. One contemporary innovation in utopian literature, a vari-
ation on the positive utopias of More and Bellamy, can best be described as identity
 UTOPIAN LITERATURE 1083

utopias. These are societies built by and for the members of a specific racial or ethnic
group. Toure’s Soul City, with its sometimes tongue-in-cheek depiction of an African
American utopia built partially on the spiritual capital gained from the experiences
of slavery and partly on African American popular culture, is a solid example of the
identity utopia. The most common theme in contemporary American utopian
fiction, however, is a critique of what can broadly be described as 1960s, or perhaps
post-World War II, idealism. Susan Sontag’s In America, Justin Tussig’s The Best
People in the World, and T. C. Boyle’s Drop City all cast doubt on the possibility of
the communal utopia, with Tussig and Boyle speaking directly to the experience of
the late 1960s and early 1970s. In The New City, Stephen Amidon questions
America’s faith in the suburban ideal in general and in the utopian project of
planned communities, and Richard Powers casts doubt on the ability of computer
technology to create a durable utopia in Plowing the Dark.
Contexts and Issues. Contemporary utopian fiction continues to reflect tension
between the hope that technology will soon deliver utopia and the fear that utopia
is unworkable. This pairing is reflected in literature because the tension between
optimism and distrust of utopia has been grounded in recent historical develop-
ments. Utopian thought in general has been called into question by both the geno-
cidal utopias of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler and the resurgence and perceived
failure of utopian communities in the 1960s. On the other hand, the technological
advances that have occurred during the last century, as well as the view that new
media technologies have potential to dramatically change the world for the better,
have suggested that utopia, or the material conditions for utopia, is still possible.
During the first half of the twentieth century, two totalitarian governments that
claimed utopian trappings but caused widespread suffering and death emerged in
Europe. Although the Russian Revolution claimed to be creating a worker’s para-
dise, Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture indirectly caused millions of
deaths because of famine and made life miserable for the survivors. Furthermore,
the dictator’s purges of those he deemed disloyal generated a formidable body
count. Nazi Germany, which presented itself as a utopian state for Aryans, also con-
tributed a substantial degree of death and suffering with concentration camps
designed to exterminate Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals. Historian Russell Jacoby
has argued that because the propaganda of these regimes had utopian overtones, in
the years since the deaths of Stalin and Hitler there has been a strong tendency to
equate political utopias with final solutions.
Another later-discredited utopian moment developed in the late 1960s and early
1970s. While the youth culture that flourished during that time was largely driven
by hedonistic desires, it also sparked a legitimate political movement to stop the
Vietnam War. This countercultural atmosphere of the late 1960s led some people to
found communes. While these small-scale utopias were in many ways descendants
of the Fourierist experiments of Hawthorne’s day, in the popular imagination they
were associated with the sex-drugs-and-rock ‘n’ roll atmosphere of the baby
boomers’ college years. When most of these communes failed and members were
absorbed into middle and upper class communities, a widespread perception devel-
oped that these private utopias were primarily a place for white, middle-class ado-
lescents to play, rather than serious attempts to create a social system based on
principles of justice and a commitment to environmental sustainability.
While the twentieth century has produced both monstrous and lightweight polit-
ical utopias, it has also generated its fair share of technologies that have genuinely
1084 UTOPIAN LITERATURE

changed the way people live. From the mass production of the automobile to the
television to the Internet, each new technology has been marketed using utopian lan-
guage. The easiest way to illustrate this perception of new technologies as harbin-
gers of utopian change is to examine the way the Internet has been described by its
promoters. Though originally developed by the Department of Defense so that
researchers could share information with the military, the Internet is now widely
touted as a means of breaking down barriers between people and creating a global
society that is prosperous, well-informed, and diverse. This conceptualization of the
Internet appeals to the widely held hope that technology can somehow lead to an
ideal society.
Reception. It is difficult to accurately gauge the cultural impact of a work of
fiction, particularly those that recently entered circulation. Four criteria can be used
to gain a broad idea of how a book has been received: reviews give a good indica-
tion of the story’s perceived literary value, film adaptations and sales figures demon-
strate the popularity of a novel or story, and the historical popularity of a genre is a
good way to gauge reception in relative terms. The novels and stories discussed
below received favorable reviews in mainstream media outlets like The New York
Times. It is still too soon for most of the contemporary utopian stories to garner the
attention of significant academic criticism. There have been no plans by major
studios to turn any of these works into films, and low sales suggest that current
utopian stories have yet to capture the public’s imagination. Utopian fiction has never
truly commanded the popular imagination in America, and the relatively low cultural
penetration of the texts under discussion should come as no surprise. The status of
utopian fiction in American culture is borne out by the absence of significant or popu-
lar film adaptations of utopian stories and by the relatively low sales of Utopian tales.
Selected Authors. Unlike romance or mystery genres, most utopian literary works
are unique creations, exploring themes that authors have addressed in other kinds
of fiction by means of the utopia they create. The only common exceptions to this
rule are found in science fiction, where writers occasionally produce an entire series
of books about a utopia. The books discussed below were written by a range of
authors—some prominent, some beginning their careers—and were distributed by
major publishing houses.
Susan Sontag was one of the twentieth century’s best know public intellectuals. A
novelist, poet, and playwright, she was also made an honorary citizen of Sarajevo
for the humanitarian work she did as a resident of that war-torn city in the 1990s.
In intellectual circles she will most likely be remembered for her literary and social
criticism’s impact on discussions of popular culture. Her novel In America follows
Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance and generates compelling historical fiction by
revising past utopian experiments. In this novel, Sontag reimagines the story of
Polish actress Helena Modrzejewska and her husband Count Karol Chlapowski,
who immigrated to the United States in 1876 with a group of friends and briefly
lived in a commune in Anaheim, California. Sontag renames Helena Maryna, calls
Karol Bogdan, and portrays them as idealists dedicated to Fourier. As with most
tales of failed utopia, the community they create cannot sustain itself and is torn
apart by infighting amongst its members. Furthermore, Sontag compares Maryna’s
idealistic experiment in communal living to the city of Anaheim, a pseudo-utopia
created and staffed by developers and wealthy landowners. The failure of these
admirers of Fourier in the face of the quiet success of complacent capitalists leads
Maryna to believe that all utopias “will not last.” Consequently, utopia should be
 UTOPIAN LITERATURE 1085

seen as “not a kind of place but a kind of time, those all-too-brief moments when
one would not wish to be anywhere else” (175). This realization leads Maryna to
return to the stage in America, and the final third of the novel becomes a chronicle
of her gradual rise to superstardom. At the somewhat abrupt close of Sontag’s nar-
rative, the woman who had once been determined to live quietly on a grape farm is
instead touring the United States in a private railcar. While Sontag’s novel is
grounded in the real story of Helena Modrzejewska, it also reflects the life trajecto-
ries of many individuals involved in utopian politics or communities in their youth
who later rejected outward utopias and focused on their own career advancement.
Justin Tussig’s first novel, based on a short story published in The New Yorker, is
also an exploration of the failed utopian impulses of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The Best People in the World tells the story of Thomas Mahey, a Kentucky high
school student facing a dull but secure future working in the same power plant that
his father does. His sleepy life is disrupted when Tom begins an affair with Alice
Lowe, one of his teachers, and sparks a tentative friendship with Shilo Tanager, a
local ne’er-do-well. After Alice takes Shilo in when his home is destroyed in a flood,
the three of them decide to leave town. They drive to Vermont, take over an aban-
doned house in the woods, and try to create a private utopia. Along the way, they
meet Parker, an old friend of Shilo’s who is now a drug dealer. Parker helps them get
to Vermont, where they make contact with a commune run by Gregor. This false
idealist, however, won’t let Tom and his friends join unless they pay him several
thousand dollars. Tussig sets his story in the mid-1970s, when 1960s utopian cul-
ture had run to seed, and there is a definite air of despair and futility in Parker’s
NYC drug lab/commune and Gregor’s half-built rural compound.
These perverse utopias foreshadow the failure of Tom, Shilo, and Alice’s experi-
ment in communal living. Their garden dies from lack of attention, they deplete
their money, they run out of firewood and are forced to burn parts of the house to
stay warm, and the interpersonal dynamic between the housemates grows gradually
worse as the group becomes more and more frustrated with their attempt to live
together. The situation disintegrates further when Alice discovers that Shilo has been
hiding the miraculously preserved corpse of his boyfriend in the basement. Parker
arrives to remove the corpse, there is a scuffle, and Shilo knocks Parker down the
stairway to the basement, killing him. The novel abruptly ends with the trio aban-
doning the house. There is no account of the fates of Shilo or Alice, and only mini-
mal information about Tom.
The novel contains a parallel narrative concerning two unnamed investigators
from the Holy See who investigate reports of miracles. The investigators make plans
to see the body of Shilo’s boyfriend because they hear reports that it has the ability
to heal, but this never comes to fruition and the narrative strands do not otherwise
cross. The investigators, who have uncovered many frauds and found only a few
events that may evince the supernatural, are very jaded. Taken together, these two
narratives suggest that the sixties commune movement was built—metaphorically—
on the bodies of dead children and that there are no miracles in the world.
T. C. Boyle has written 19 books and numerous short stories, and has received
many literary awards. Although the themes addressed in his novels range from Bud-
ding Prospects’ depiction of marijuana cultivation to Talk Talk’s discussion of iden-
tity theft, Boyle’s writing often focuses on eccentric figures in American history who
were seen as radicals or utopians. The Road to Wellville, adapted for film in 1994,
satirizes the utopia dedicated to healthy eating built by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg in
1086 UTOPIAN LITERATURE

Battle Creek, Michigan. The Inner Circle depicts the lives of Alfred Kinsey’s team of
sex researchers.
In Drop City, Boyle turns to the post-utopian 1970s to explore the utopian
impulses of both far-left and far-right America. The novel begins with a description
of Drop City, a Northern California hippy commune founded by Norm, an aging
flower child living off his dead parents’ life insurance money. The commune is large
and there are many members, but the story focuses on Paulette, a former elementary
school teacher who goes by Star, and her boyfriend Marco, who is living in the com-
mune to avoid the draft. Readers also meet Cecil, or Sess, and Pamela, newlyweds
who have gone to live in the Alaskan bush. Sess is largely apolitical, but Pamela is
a college graduate who has left a promising career to live in the wilderness because
she thinks that American culture has become permanently corrupted. As Norm’s
commune slowly disintegrates under pressure from county officials and racial ten-
sions within the group, he decides to create Drop City North on a large tract of land
he has inherited in Alaska. Most of the commune boards a converted school bus and
heads out for the last frontier. When the hippies arrive in Alaska, Sess discovers that
they will be moving onto land that borders his.
Boyle does not present conflict between the hippie commune and the libertarian
homestead, however. Sess and Pamela are kind to their new neighbors and the hip-
pies are in awe of Sess’s ability to survive in the wilderness. Instead, Boyle parallels
the growth of Sess and Pamela’s relationship with the demise of the commune.
Unsurprisingly, the hippies simply cannot endure the Alaska winter and when
Norman heads back to California, it looks like the end of Drop City. Star and
Marco, however, have begun to learn survival techniques from Sess and Pamela.
While there is never genuine political rapprochement between the two sides, Star
ultimately realizes that Pamela was also “not buying into the plastic society” (Boyle
2003, 301). Boyle argues that the communalist critique of society offered in the
1960s was not inherently wrong, but also argues that creating a commune was not
the answer. Rugged individualism, and not another Brook Farm, is the best way to
reclaim something genuinely American.
Stephen Amidon’s The New City takes up a more mainstream and understated
strain of utopian thought that greatly influenced where and how Americans lived in
the twentieth century: city planning and the flight to the suburbs. Amidon, whose
mainstream fiction frequently centers on father-son relationships in novels such as
Splitting the Atom and Thirst, is also a critic of suburban life, a theme picked up in
Human Capital, published after The New City. Amidon’s tale of failed utopia
describes the demise of Newton, Maryland, an early 1970s planned community
designed by a utopian architect named Barnaby Vine. As did most twentieth-century
progressives, Vine believed that urban social problems resulted from economic and
racial segregation. His solution was to design a bedroom community for Baltimore
and Washington, D.C. that would eliminate physical barriers between races and
classes. Vine recruits white lawyer Austin Swope and African American contractor
Earl Wooten to build his community from the ground up. It has no fences and pro-
vides a great deal of public space where residents will ideally interact and build com-
munity. He has, in other words, built the kind of scaled-down utopia that planned
communities perceive themselves to be.
Yet while Swope and Wooten become friends, Vine’s city is plagued with prob-
lems from the beginning. The fish purchased to stock an artificial lake quickly die.
Gas lamps used to light the city at night begin exploding. Japanese beetles descend
 UTOPIAN LITERATURE 1087

and infest trees and shrubs. In addition to these physical problems, gangs from the
government housing projects Vine constructed in Newton begin to terrorize the sub-
urb’s middle-and upper-class residents. Newton falls apart, however, when Wooten’s
son Joel and his white girlfriend Susan are caught in bed by her parents. Swope’s son
Teddy attempts to help Joel and Susan continue seeing each other, but when an exas-
perated Susan correctly diagnoses Teddy’s homosexual attraction to Joel, Teddy kills
her in a blind rage and then frames Joel for the murder. Ultimately, Susan’s father
mistakes Teddy for Joel and kills him before killing himself. As in any proper
tragedy, the racial strife that Newton was designed to avoid became its undoing. The
novel’s end implies that this bloodbath will turn Newton into just another troubled
development. Amidon, like Sontag, Tussig, and Boyle, forcefully argues that utopian
social schemes are doomed because human nature and human jealousy will not
allow them to succeed.
One concept that Thomas Moore likely did not foresee was the creation of virtual
utopias, computer-generated ideal worlds tailored to the needs of individuals. If
these digital realities serve only as a place of escape from a dreary analog one, then
they are merely utopian. But when it becomes possible to completely and perma-
nently escape into these artificial worlds, then we are dealing with utopia proper.
This is the scenario Richard Powers explores in Plowing the Dark. Powers, an
English professor with a background as a computer programmer, explored the inter-
action between the humanities and technology in Galatea 2.2 and Gold Bug Varia-
tions. In Plowing the Dark, the author suggests that while creating a virtual utopia
may be technically feasible, it may not be desirable. Most of Powers’s novel focuses
on the efforts of a team of artists, social scientists, and engineers, assembled by a
Microsoft-like corporation, to create a virtual environment so powerful that the
human mind cannot discern the difference between it and reality. Set in the late
1980s and early 1990s when virtual reality was first coming into public awareness,
the story focuses on college friends Steve Spiegel, a poet-turned-computer-programmer,
and Addie Klarpol, a gifted artist who has been wasting her talent on commercial
illustration, as they and their colleagues work in a technological wonderland where
it is “never anything o’clock” (Powers 2000, 3). At first, this cyber island really is a
sort of scientific and artistic paradise, allowing them to create a visual and tactile
paradise while they begin speculating about humanity’s eventual move into a fully
computerized existence.
Addie eventually abandons her work and her affair with Steve, however, when she
realizes that most of the technology they were creating was used to help develop the
smart bombs used by the United States Air Force in the first Gulf war. The author
reminds us that the technology invested with utopian potential—the Internet, for
example—often has roots in the military-industrial complex that will always cancel
out any genuine utopian potential.
Author Lincoln Child taps into the utopian atmosphere of theme parks—artificial
creations designed to produce pleasure—in Utopia, with an island of complete com-
puterized control in the Nevada desert. Because of its advanced technology, Utopia
attracts hundreds of thousands of guests who can escape into Victorian England or
outer space for days at a time. Child’s creation is even a quasi-political entity, with
its own government and security forces that are only nominally responsible to the
state of Nevada. Clearly, Child’s choice of name for his theme park strongly suggests
that he is creating a kind of technological cloud-cuckoo-land, the pleasure palace
that Americans desire.
1088 UTOPIAN LITERATURE

All is not well, however, as a gang of ruthless criminals infiltrate the metanet, the
computer system that maintains the virtual worlds within Utopia. They begin killing
guests and demanding that they be given the technology behind the metanet while
simultaneously plotting to rob Utopia’s casinos. Unfortunately for them, Andrew
Warne, the inventor of the metanet, has been brought in to repair his creation, and
the good professor uses his programming savvy to save the park—and his teenage
daughter Georgia—from the criminals. This high-tech thriller is suitable for beach
reading, no surprise considering Child’s background as an editor of horror fiction
anthologies and as co-author (with Douglas Preston) of a novel series about an FBI
agent who solves unusual cases. But in his first solo novel, Child creates a techno-
logical utopia—an island of order in a chaotic world, but threatened by the same
chaos it wants to avoid. Investing the inventor of the utopia with the power to save
it from destruction suggests that the American technological utopia will survive in
a world that is hostile to it.
If Child’s Utopia represents a strain of contemporary utopian fiction similar to
Aristophanes’ The Birds, Kathleen Ann Goonan’s New Orleans-based nanotech
series brings readers an inevitable utopian revolution similar to that in Bellamy’s
Looking Backwards. Goonan is one of the few writers discussed here who has made
her reputation largely on utopian fiction. The four books of the nanotech series,
Queen City Jazz (1994), Mississippi Blues (1997), Crescent City Rhapsody (2000)
and Light Music (2002), blend science fiction with international espionage as they
describe an island city-state in the Caribbean produced by means of nanotechnol-
ogy. Although the utopian climax is reached in Light Music as New Orleans/Cres-
cent City is turned into a starship, Crescent City Rhapsody best establishes the
broader utopian themes Goonan wants to explore.
Set in the near future, Goonan’s novel illustrates the economic and social havoc
that results when a regular series of electromagnetic pulses that apparently
emanate from an alien intelligence disrupt electronic communications. While it
becomes increasingly difficult to maintain social control by means of traditional
technologies, nanotechnology allows cities and individuals to cheaply manufac-
ture consumer goods for local markets. Prospects for a more libertarian and free
market world are darkened, however, by international terrorists who want to use
nanotechnology to produce viruses and super weapons. Hope for humanity is
found in New Orleans, where Marie Laveau is gathering scientists and engineers
to create Crescent City, an autonomous island city that will be beyond the reach
of government taxation and will allow the brightest minds to work on a way for
humanity to reach into space and contact the alien intelligences sending out the
signals. Marie is best conceptualized as a heroine version of a James Bond villain:
vastly wealthy, with a private espionage apparatus, and dedicated to using
advanced technology to save rather than destroy the world. Marie is opposed
both by the American and World governments and by various terrorist groups,
but she and her operatives eventually triumph. In a now-ironic final scene, the cit-
izens of New Orleans leave for Crescent City as a terrorist-infiltrated interna-
tional army breeches the levees that protect the old city from Lake Ponchartrain
during a powerful hurricane.
Goonan’s novel ends with a vision of an unambiguous utopia. Crescent City is an
island removed from a chaotic world, governed by reason rather than emotion. Its
quirky admixture of pragmatic socialism and intellectual libertarianism both reflects
a contemporary update of the American populism that informed Bellamy’s utopia and
 UTOPIAN LITERATURE 1089

represents a social order superior to those that had gone before it. Most importantly,
however, Goonan’s novel forcefully articulates the optimism that believes technology
can save humanity from itself.
Among identity utopias, concerning the status of ethnic minorities, one of the
most entertaining is Soul City. This novel was written by Toure, a correspondent
for Black Entertainment Television and contributing editor for Rolling Stone
whose work has also appeared in magazines like Playboy and The New Yorker.
Toure begins his tale by quoting Oscar Wilde’s assertion that “a map of the world
that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at” and then goes on to
describe an African American oasis that is “amazing, but not Utopia” (80). This
clear invocation of utopia as political ideal is rare in light of contemporary ques-
tioning of the possibility of utopia, and rarer still is the bemused brio with which
Toure describes Soul City. Founded by escaped slaves in 1821 and radiating out-
ward from a 100-foot-tall statue of an afro pick topped by a black power fist, Soul
City is literally the soul of the African American experience. Music pervades streets
with names like Cool and Nappy Lane, courtesy of the mayor, whose primary
responsibility is to act as DJ. All aspects of African American culture, from
Fredrick Douglass to Tupak Shakur, are respectfully memorialized in Soul City.
Soul City is not merely a celebration of popular culture, however. Young people
volunteer to spend a year in simulated slavery so that they can honor their ances-
tors. The slaves who founded the city are still alive, thanks to their ability to smell
Death and evade his summons; one of them, Fulcrum Negro, regularly commutes
to heaven to check in on Louis Armstrong and other African American luminar-
ies. The main focus of the novel is describing the workings of Soul City, though
there is an amusing subplot about race traitor John Jiggaboo’s attempt to destroy
Soul City by means of a shampoo that brainwashes even as it gives users perfect
hair. Toure also occasionally checks in with Cadillac Johnson, a writer for the
Chocolate City magazine—whose name is an unsubtle reference to a Parliament
Funkadelic song about African American political hegemony—as he spends thirty
three years trying to capture the essence of Soul City in a novel. Cadillac pursues
Mahogany Sunflower, and their romance provides a diverting subplot. But as with
most utopian writing, the primary function of the novel is to provide a vision of
an alternative society.

Bibliography
Amidon, Stephen. The New City. New York: Doubleday, 2000.
Aristophanes. The Birds and Other Plays. Trans. David Barrett and Alan Sommerstein. New
York: Pengiun, 2003.
Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward. New York: Signet Classics, 2000.
Boyle, T. Coraghessan. Drop City. New York: Viking, 2003.
Child, Lincoln. Utopia: A Novel. New York: Doubleday, 2002.
Goonan, Kathleen Ann. Crescent City Rhapsody. New York: Avon Books, 2000.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance. New York: Penguin, 1983.
More, Thomas. Utopia. New York: Penguin, 2003.
Plato. The Republic. Trans. Desmond Lee. New York: Penguin, 2003.
Powers, Richard. Plowing the Dark. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000.
Sontag, Susan. In America: A Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000.
Toure, Soul City. New York: Little, Brown, 2004.
Tussig, Justin. The Best People in the World. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.
1090 UTOPIAN LITERATURE

Further Reading
Abbott, Phillip. “Utopians at Play.” Utopian Studies: Journal of the Society for Utopian
Studies 15.1 (2004): 44–62; DeKoven, Marianne. Utopias Limited: The Sixties and the
Emergence of Postmodernism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004; Goonan, Kathleen
Ann. Queen City Jazz. New York: TOR, 1994; Goonan, Kathleen Ann. Mississippi Blues.
New York: TOR, 1997; Goonan, Kathleen Ann. Light Music. New York: EOS, 2003;
Hatzenberger, Antoine. “Islands and Empire: Beyond the Shores of Utopia.” Angelaki:
Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 8.1 (2003): 119–128; Jacoby, Russell. Picture
Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age. New York: Columbia University Press,
2005; Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and other Sci-
ence Fictions. New York: Verso, 2005; Weinberg, Steven. “Five and a Half Utopias.” Atlantic
Monthly 285.1 (Jan. 2000): 107–115.
MARK T. DECKER
V

VAMPIRE FICTION
Definition. Vampire fiction has been influenced by the conventions of Gothic
literature, in that vampire stories are traditionally set in dark, mysterious castles,
cathedrals, and mansions, or remote forests and mountains. In addition to the
gloomy setting, vampire stories typically invoke fear and terror in the reader by
unprovoked acts of cruelty, torture, and murder, thus anticipating and influencing
modern horror literature. In the case of vampire fiction, the acts of cruelty are com-
mitted by vampires—animated corpses (the undead) who drink human blood by
night and sleep during the day in underground crypts, avoiding the sun, which either
reduces their powers or burns them to ashes. In addition to the vampires, who often
do not appear until late in the story, the victims are stalked and bitten one or more
times, eventually drained of their blood and turned into one of the undead, or simply
left for dead. The vampire slayer, who has knowledge of vampires, then appears on
the scene armed with religious relics and/or weaponry. The vampire slayer’s goal is
to hunt down the preternatural creature, which can be destroyed only by extreme
measures: staking the heart, removing the head, snapping the spine, exposing the
creature to the sun, or incinerating it with fire. The vampire novel Carmilla (1871),
by Sheridan Le Fanu, probably provided Bram Stoker with the basic elements for
the best-known vampire novel of all time—Dracula (1897):

All of the rituals and set pieces common to the modern formula appear in Carmilla,
beginning with its three-part formal design—attack, death-resuscitation, and hunt-
destruction. Also included are the vampire’s seduction of its victim, the telltale bite on the
victim’s neck, the slow physical deterioration of the victim, the confusion between dream
and reality, the vain attempts to explain supernatural events in rational terms, and the
folk recipes for recognizing, capturing, and killing vampires. (Campbell 1985, 228–229)

Although Campbell’s succinct definition of the modern formula for vampire fiction is
useful for understanding some nineteenth-century vampire stories, the formula does
1092 VAMPIRE FICTION

not work for most contemporary vampire fiction—for example, Anne Rice’s Lestat
and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint-Germain rarely attack humans or drink human
blood, thus nullifying the “three-part formal design” identified by Campbell.
In Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina Auerbach challenges the very notion that there
is a fixed genre of vampire literature or a fixed definition of a vampire. She claims,
“There is no such thing as ‘The Vampire’; there are only vampires,” and since vam-
pires are “[e]ternally alive, they embody not fear of death, but fear of life: their
power and their curse is their undying vitality. From Varney to Dracula . . . from
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s disenchanted idealist, Count Saint-Germain, to Lestat and
his friends, vampires long to die, at least in certain moods, infecting readers with
fears of their own interminable lives” (5). Genre distinctions have been blurred in
the twentieth century, and genre boundaries are permeable and notoriously fluid,
especially so with vampires, because the undead have lately been appearing in
Science Fiction, Romance Novels, Mystery Fiction, Spy Fiction, Fantasy Literature,
Historical Fiction, Coming of Age Fiction, Graphic Novels, horror novels, and
Young Adult Literature.
History. Most scholars agree that John Polidori (1795–1821) wrote the first modern
vampire story and published it in 1819 under Lord Byron’s name. The idea for the
story was originally Byron’s, but Polidori—who took notes on stories told by Byron
and the Shelleys in the summer of 1816 at Villa Diodati—eventually developed
Byron’s oral form into a written story about a dark, mysterious nobleman, Lord
Ruthven, who suddenly appears in an elite social circle in England. Aubrey, a young
English gentleman, decides to accompany Ruthven on a grand tour of Europe and
finds, much to his regret, that Ruthven, though charming and articulate, leaves in
his wake once-virtuous–now-ruined women. A disillusioned Aubrey leaves
Ruthven’s company, travels to Greece, and falls in love with a beautiful Greek peasant
named Ianthe, who accompanies him to archaeological sites. Ianthe introduces
Aubrey to stories of local vampires and warns Aubrey not to travel alone at night.
Aubrey, of course, is lost in the woods on a stormy night and, upon hearing a woman
scream, rushes into a hut and attempts to neutralize the woman’s assailant, who dis-
plays superhuman strength and escapes into the woods, but not before attempting to
bite Aubrey. Aubrey begins to see apparitions of Ianthe, who has disappeared and been
turned into a vampire. Now physically ill and psychologically distraught, Aubrey
begins to realize that Ruthven has all the characteristics of a vampire. Nevertheless, he
requests that Ruthven aid him in recovering his physical and emotional health.
Ruthven nurses Aubrey back to health and elicits a promise that Aubrey will not speak
about him for one year and one day. Aubrey agrees and returns to England only to find
Ruthven courting his sister. On the midnight that the promise expires, Aubrey tells his
sister’s guardians about Ruthven and then dies. His sister’s guardians attempt to inter-
vene, but it is too late, as “Lord Ruthven ha[s] disappeared, and Aubrey’s sister ha[s]
glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!” (no page, Online Version).
Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871), as noted above, provided Bram Stoker with
the basic elements for Dracula, which was written twenty years later. Laura, the
daughter of a wealthy widower, befriends Carmilla, a young woman who boards
with her family while her mysterious mother is away for a few months. Laura begins
to dream of being bitten in the chest by a feline monster as her health slowly
declines. After medical examinations fail to explain her deteriorating health, Laura
and her father encounter General Speiledorf, whose daughter had suffered a similar
fate through the actions of a mysterious woman named Millarca. The General
 VAMPIRE FICTION 1093

convinces Laura and her father that Carmilla and Millarca are actually one and the
same person: a two-hundred-year-old vampire, formerly Countess Mircalla Karnstein.
Carmilla is subsequently destroyed by the General and Laura’s father. About Le
Fanu, Campbell wrote:

What Le Fanu added to the formula was a portrayal of a world turned upside down, a
universe, as old General Spielsdorf complains, in which God tolerates vampiric lusts
and all the malignity of hell. In such a world all values are reversed: dreams become
reality, friends become enemies, death becomes life, love becomes hate, and rationality
and science must turn to the irrational and the superstitious (folklore) to illuminate and
to explain the forces of darkness. (Campbell 1985, 229)

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is, of course, the most famous vampire story of all
time, combining the Byronic hero of Polidori, the eroticism of Carmilla, and a dual-
istic Christian world and life view. Dracula is far and away the most popular and
influential vampire novel of the nineteenth and twentieth (and perhaps twenty-first)
centuries. “Despite its flaws, Dracula is a novel of monumental influence, one whose
imitations and offshoots have become a veritable industry. Its title character has
transcended his origin in a Victorian thriller to become an embodiment of an
age-old myth and the incarnation of ultimate evil” (Daniels 375). Written as a series
of letters and journal entries, Dracula tracks Count Dracula’s movement from
Transylvania to London, and back to Transylvania again. Beginning with Jonathan
Harker, his first English victim in Transylvania, Dracula goes on to seduce Lucy
Westenra—the best friend of Mina Harker and fiancé of Arthur Holmwood—and
Mina Harker, in England. Dracula acts right under the noses of the ad hoc team
hunting him, a team consisting of Jonathan Harker, Dr. John Seward (head of a psy-
chiatric hospital), Arthur Holmwood (a wealthy aristocrat), Quincey Morris
(a wealthy Texan), and Dr. Van Helsing, mentor of Dr. Seward and well versed in
vampire lore. Holmwood, Morris, and Seward, though friends, have all fallen in
love with Lucy Westenra, who finally chooses Arthur Holmwood, but the courtship
is short lived as the Count has other plans for “poor Lucy.”
The plot follows the “three-part formal design—attack, death-resuscitation,
and hunt-destruction” pattern identified by Campbell. Harker, a solicitor, travels to
Transylvania to meet Count Dracula and discuss the Count’s recently purchased estate
in England. Harker is held captive by Dracula and turned into his blood slave until
the Count leaves for England after passing him along to the “three weird sisters,”
Dracula’s brides. Once in England, Dracula turns Lucy Westenra into a vampire and
then silently stalks Mina Harker. Van Helsing teaches Seward, Holmwood, and Morris
what he knows about the undead, after they have been forced to stake and behead
“poor Lucy.” Word comes that Jonathan Harker is still alive but suffering from a
“brain fever” at a hospital in Budapest. When Mina joins him, she learns that
Jonathan has kept a journal while in Transylvania, which she promises never to read
unless circumstances require unveiling the painful story. They both return to England
and join Van Helsing, Seward, Morris, and the grieving Holmwood in their hunt for
Dracula’s lairs in London. These lairs each contain one or more of fifty boxes of sacred
earth brought by the Count from the chapel at Castle Dracula. The vampire hunters
are able to sterilize forty-nine of the boxes with the sacred host, thus driving Dracula
out of England and back to Transylvania. The rest of the novel is an extended chase
scene that describes the vampire hunters closing in on an elusive Dracula.
1094 VAMPIRE FICTION

Count Dracula is at once a brooding Byronic hero whose seduction of his victims
has strong erotic overtones, but he is also cursed by God for seeking immortality
from the Evil one himself: Satan. On the one hand he is none other than the ruth-
less Vlad Dracul III, who valiantly fought the Turks in the late fifteenth century; on
the other hand he is an evil, condemned monster who must feed on the blood of
humans to flourish. Jonathan Harker initially describes him as “tall,” “clean
shaven,” and “clad in black from head to foot” (Stoker, 25). He has a “strong face”
and proves himself a good host, arranging Harker’s meals and bedroom for him. In
spite of doubts about the Count, Harker is impressed with his intelligence and
knowledge of England. Later in the novel, Van Helsing informs his fellow vampire
hunters that Dracula has the strength of twenty men, is skilled in necromancy, and
can “direct the elements . . . and command . . . the rat, and the owl, and the bat—
the moth, and the fox, and the wolf. He can grow and become small; and he can at
times vanish and come unknown” (Stoker, 243). As a vampire, Dracula possesses
even greater powers than he did as the ruthless and cunning king of Wallachia.
But the Count is evil, and we learn from Van Helsing that the horror of vampirism
dates to ancient Greece, Rome, and the Orient. The Draculas (“dragons” in Slavic)
“had dealings with the Evil One” and “learned the secrets” of immortality in the
mountains by lake Hermanstadt (Stoker 246). Even though Dracula is evil, he has
produced good and holy children through his “good women;” and “in soil barren
of holy memories [Dracula] cannot rest” (Stoker, 247), which means that the Count
has to haul boxes of sacred earth with him wherever he goes. He can only flourish
on “the blood of the living” and “cannot die by mere passing of time.” He does not
cast a shadow or reflect in a mirror, yet he can see in the dark. Unlike many of his
successors, Dracula can function in daylight, though his powers are dramatically
reduced. In spite of all these evil powers, Van Helsing claims that “he is not free”
(Stoker, 245). Dracula cannot enter a place uninvited, “he can only change himself
[into another form] at noon or at exact sunrise or sunset” and must have with him
his “earth home.” In addition, he can be warded off with garlic, a consecrated host,
or a crucifix; and a branch of wild rose placed on his coffin renders him helpless. A
sacred bullet fired into his coffin can kill him, but to receive rest he must have a
stake driven through his heart and his head removed (Stoker, 246).
Dracula is irresistible to women, and his attempt to turn Mina into one of the
undead is presented by Stoker as a veiled sexual seduction. The men open the bedroom
door to find the Count standing next to Mina: “With his left hand he held both Mrs.
Harker’s hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand
gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white
night dress was smeared with blood, and a thick stream trickled down his bare breast
which was shown by his torn-open dress” (Stoker, 288). When Mina recounts the
events of the seduction, she tells the men that Dracula told her that she was “flesh of
[his] flesh, blood of [his] blood; kin of [his] kin . . . and shall be later on [his] compan-
ion and [his] helper” (293; cf. Genesis 2–3). The Count and Mina are now blood part-
ners, though Mina feels tainted and unclean like a victim of rape. Earlier when the
vampire hunters encounter Lucy at her grave, we see a profound sexual transforma-
tion: “The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to
voluptuous wantonness.” Her eyes are now “unclean and full of hell-fire, instead of the
pure gentle orbs” (Stoker, 217). When Lucy recognizes Holmwood, she moves toward
him seductively “with a languorous, voluptuous grace” and moans, “Come to me,
Arthur . . . My arms are hungry for you. Come and we can rest together” (Stoker, 218).
 VAMPIRE FICTION 1095

Dracula is still read in many college English classes, and academic interest in
Stoker’s vampire novel continues, as evidenced by the publication of the Norton Crit-
ical Edition of Dracula—which celebrates 100 years since its first publication—a
novel that “seemed commonplace in 1897” because it was simply one of “many fan-
tastic adventure stories pitting manly Englishmen against foreign monsters” (ix). The
1880s and 1890s saw the publication of works by Kipling (Jungle Book), Stevenson
(Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) and Wells (The Island of Dr. Moreau) that featured exotic
places and strange encounters with a variety of monsters. Nina Auerbach and David
Skal, editors of the Norton Dracula, argue that the greatest threats to the English at
the time of the publication of Dracula were foreigners, women, and Oscar Wilde.
The New Woman threatened the Englishman with her aspirations of independence,
selfhood, and education, whereas a flood of strange immigrants from the far-flung
corners of the British Empire threatened the racial purity of the Englishman. And
because Bram Stoker knew Oscar Wilde well and may have had homosexual lean-
ings himself, it is possible that “[t]he Wilde trials of 1895 . . . shocked Stoker into
writing Dracula as we know it, for Wilde’s two-year imprisonment for ‘acts of gross
indecency’ gave Victorian England a new monster of its own clinical making: the
homosexual” (xi). Literary critics analyzed Dracula from a variety of critical perspec-
tives from the 1970s through the 1990s (see below), but scholarly interest in
Dracula seems to have waned since the year 2000, in spite of the continued popular-
ity of the Count and other vampires who appear in countless popular books, televi-
sion series, movies, graphic novels, comic books, and Web sites.
Trends and Themes. In Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture
(2002), William Patrick Day studies the figure of the vampire in the literature, film,
and television of the United States from Bela Lugosi’s Dracula (1933) through the
popular Buffy TV series, which ended with its 100th episode in 2002. Day argues
that there are three contemporary modes of the vampire story: (1) the liberated vam-
pire who “is not a supernatural monster or Stoker’s Antichrist but a post-Christian
image of humanity ready to be set free from the restraints and limitations of an out-
moded and repressive past”; (2) the “post human vampire” who is “self-alienated
and without center, a mere creature of its needs”; and (3) the vampire slayer. Day
points out that the slayer virtually disappears with the liberated vampire—after
all, why kill a sensitive, aesthetic creature such as Rice’s Louis or Yarbro’s Saint
Germain? Nevertheless, the slayer’s services are once again needed with the appear-
ance of the post human or rogue vampire (2002, 8–9). These three types of stories—
the humane and human vampire, the monster vampire, and the slayer—account for
a large number of vampire stories found in popular culture media.
For a history of vampires in film and television through 1999, see Day’s Vampire
Legends (2002) and Melton’s The Vampire Book (1999). The figures of the
humane vampire, the undead monster, and the slayer are evident in Forever
Knight (1992–1995 TV series), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992 movie), and Buffy
the Vampire Slayer (1992 movie; 1997–2003 TV series). Bram Stoker’s Dracula
features Gary Oldham as the Count, and though faithful to Stoker’s presentation
of Dracula as a monster, it departs from Stoker’s narrative by including a love
story. Forever Knight tells the story of Nick Knight, a police officer who is also
a vampire intent on keeping his dark secret while protecting humans from crim-
inals. The movie version of Buffy (1992) was completely overshadowed by the
popular 100-episode series starring Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy, the teenage
vampire slayer from the Valley.
1096 VAMPIRE FICTION

Interview with the Vampire (1994) brought Anne Rice’s 1976 novel to the screen,
starring Brad Pitt as Louis and Tom Cruise as Lestat. Rice’s third novel was turned
into a movie of the same name, Queen of the Dead (2002), which starred Aliah as
Akasha, the Queen of vampires. Underworld (2003) featured Kate Beckensale as
Celine, a millennium-old vampire who attempts to protect Michael Corvin from the
Lycans (werewolves) only to see him morph into a new “vamplican” species. In
Underworld Evolution (2006), the metamorphosis of Corvin is completed, and now
the struggle is to protect humans from William (a lycan) and Marcus (a vampire),
the twin sons of the original vampire Alexander Corvinus. Salem’s Lot (2004) is a
movie adaptation of the popular Stephen King novel about a New England town
overrun by vampires. In Van Helsing (2004), we learn that Abraham Van Helsing
has kept himself alive with blood from Dracula, who is entombed in a basement
vault of the old slayer’s antiquities business, and later awakened by foolish thieves.
In the Blade movies (Blade, 1998; Blade II, 2002; and Blade: Trinity, 2004), Wesley
Snipes stars as Blade, a vampire who can control his appetite for human blood and
who fights against renegade vampires intent on turning the human race into dor-
mant blood slaves. Dracula 2000 is a rather weak attempt to retell the original
Stoker tale in contemporary times; and Dracula 3000 pushes the tale out into deep
space, where the crew members of a salvage ship board a freighter filled with
coffins, only to learn that they are the great-great-grandchildren of the original
Stoker characters who have been lured by the Count into a final battle.
It is beyond the purview of this article to describe the ubiquity of the figure of the
vampire in the variegated popular culture media. Melton identifies a revival of inter-
est in comic book vampires, for example, with the issue of Blood of the Innocent by
WarP Comics in 1986. This was followed by Apple Comics’ Blood of Dracula
(1987–1992), Marvel Comics’ Blood (1987–1988), and Innovation’s 12-issue adap-
tation of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat (1990). Melton notes, “The ten new vam-
pire titles which appeared in 1990 became 23 titles in 1991. In 1992 no fewer than
34 titles were published, followed by a similar number in 1993” (Melton 1999,
137). Since then, Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire and Queen of the Dead
(Innovation) have been adapted as comic book series, as well as Le Fanu’s Carmilla
(Aircel) and Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Topps Comics).

The TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) spawned an industry all its own. The Buffy
Library (www.cesnur.org/buffy_library.html) is an international annotated bibliography that
includes only book-length studies of the series in a multiplicity of languages. Slayage:The Online
International Journal of Buffy Studies was developed in 2001 and contains hundreds of journal,
newspaper, and magazine articles (www.slayageonline.com) on the TV series. There are
currently numerous online Buffy fanzines, and Darkhorse published a series of some sixty
Buffyverse graphic novels, which are not based on actual TV episodes, being rather new
adventures for Buffy and friends. Scholarly papers are presented every year on the series at
the Popular Culture Association conference, and many of these papers are published in the Journal
of Popular Culture. Jan Battis has analyzed family relationships, which are based on loyalty
rather than heredity, in Blood Relations: Chosen Families in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel
(McFarland Press, 2005), and Open Court Press has published a volume of scholarly articles on
Buffy from a number of philosophical perspectives entitled Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philos-
ophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale (2003) in their Popular Culture and Philosophy series.
 VAMPIRE FICTION 1097

As far as fiction is concerned, the three modes identified by Melton—the humane

vampire, the undead monster, and the slayer—have grown exponentially, especially
in terms of book series. There are scores of vampire novel series currently in print
in the United States, beginning with Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles (1976–2003),
featuring the vampire Lestat, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint-Germain series
(1978–2007), which continues with stories of Saint-Germain in historical hot spots.
Lestat and Saint-Germain are the quintessential humane vampires who mourn the
loss of their humanity and refuse to kill humans to feed themselves. Rice’s and
Yarbro’s novels are written sympathetically from the perspective of the vampires
whose loss and suffering are narrated at length. Laurel K. Hamilton’s Master Vampire
Jean-Claude and L.A. Banks’s vampire Carlos continue this tradition of troubled,
humane vampires deeply connected to and protective of humans.
Almost all of the popular vampire series include rogue vampires who feed on
humans and destroy whatever harmony exists among vampires. Anne Rice’s Santino,
the Satanic cult leader, and Akasha, the Queen of the Dead, are renegade monsters.
Laurel K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series has the vampire slayer Anita killing a multi-
tude of rogue vampires in the earlier novels in the series and other more sophisticated
undead in the latter part of the series to protect Jean-Claude’s community of vampires.
L.A. Banks’s Damali (Vampire Huntress Legends) is joined by her community of
guardians in protecting humans from vampires, shape-shifters, demons, and a plethora
of other monsters. Elizabeth Kostova’s retelling of the original Dracula story in The
Historian revives the image of the arrogant, bloodthirsty monster Vlad Tepes III.
Though the figure of the slayer is also alive and well in contemporary vampire
fiction, it is threatened with extinction as the vampires become increasingly human
and humane. In Laurel K. Hamilton’s 14-volume series (1993–2007), Anita Blake is
a necromancer and vampire slayer who becomes increasingly involved in the world
of both vampires and shape-shifters who now share legal status with human com-
munities—but Anita still hunts and slays rogue shifters and vampires. In the eight
novels in L.A. Banks’s Vampire Huntress Legends (2003–2007), Damali is a Neteru
who has power over vampires, but she attracts them too, because a vampire-neteru
union can produce daywalkers—vampires unaffected by sunlight. Again, though
Damali eventually marries Carlos, a human-turned-vampire-turned human, she
slays vampires who are still connected to the Vampire Council, a group bent on the
destruction of the human race. Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse, a telepath,
hunts and slays both vampires and shape-shifters that threaten her rural Louisiana
community.
Context and Issues. Vampires also appear in a variety of popular literary genres
including historical fiction, romance, science fiction, fantasy, crime fiction, spy fiction,
and—of course—comedy and satire. A favorite approach of contemporary vampire
novelists is to place a vampire in a turbulent historical context with known histori-
cal figures or to show that a famous historical person was, in fact, a vampire.
William Meickle sets his historical novel The Coming of the King (2003) in Wales,
Scotland, and England in 1745. The vampire King is coming to claim the throne of
England, and the group of slayers who have been watching for him have fallen into
disarray. Mary Anne Mitchell’s In the Name of the Vampire (2005), The Vampire
De Sade (2004), Tainted Blood (2003), Cathedral of Vampires (2002), and Sips of
Blood (1999) all tell the story of the Marquis de Sade, who was actually a vampire
and continues his debauchery after his undeath. In A Taste for Blood (2003), Diana
Lee narrates the story of Ryan, an 800-year-old vampire dating back to the Vikings.
1098 VAMPIRE FICTION

Posing as a Scottish noble, Ryan turns a young Victorian woman into a vampire,
and she must now learn the ropes of vampirism. In Night of the Dragon’s Blood
(1997), William Pridgen’s mysterious heroine is none other than Eva Peron, who has
been turned into a vampire by Adolph Hitler.
In Mother Julian and the Gentle Vampire (2000), the story of Lesbiana Boyd is
told by Jack Pantaleo. Lesbiana is a 600-year-old Christian vampire whose bite and
blood actually cause people to flourish and to become fully alive. Lesbiana, a con-
temporary of Julianna of Norwich, is pursued by the Five Pretties, vampire versions
of the furies. Finally, Michael Schiefelbein’s Vampire Thrall (2003) is about Victor
Decimus, a 2,000-year-old vampire rejected by Jesus as lover who takes revenge on
the church and monasteries over the course of two millennia.
Along similar historical lines are tales of revived revenants, vampires from
nineteenth-century literature who never actually died. Kyle Martin’s Carmilla: The
Return (2000) updates Carmilla’s story from the original Le Fanu novel with
flashbacks to the nineteenth century. The Book of Renfield: A Gospel of Dracula
(2005), by Tim Lucas, is set in Dracula’s day and tells the story of Renfield, who
has been in psychic contact with the Count all along. And Elizabeth Kostova
revives the Count himself in The Historian (2005), and he is still bent on world
domination (see below).
Vampires are apparently good lovers, given that many of the contemporary series
present male and female vampires as capable of having great sex. Katie Macalister’s
A Girl’s Guide to Vampires (2003), Sex and the Single Vampire (2004) and Sex, Lies
and Vampires (2005) all tell stories of young women who fall in love with attractive
men who turn out to be vampires. In A Taste for Passion (2003), Patrice Michelle’s
Rana Sterling falls in love with the perfect man, but he turns out to be a vampire
who must assume leadership of an elite group on the condition that he have a wife.
Rana is willing to take the vampire as her lover, but she is unwilling to be his wife.
Finally, Nora Roberts’s Circle Trilogy (2006) involves three young couples who fall
in love while fighting an army of vampires intent on enslaving the human race (see
below). Vampires also make good detectives and spies because of their night vision
and stealth. Jon F. Merz’s The Syndicate: A Lawson Vampire Novel tells the story
of Lawson, a vampire cop working in contemporary New York City. Savannah
Russe’s Beyond the Pale: The Darkening Chronicles (2005) is about Daphne Urban,
a vampire proficient in modern languages who has been pressed into service by the
CIA to spy on arms dealers.
There are also comedies and parodies of the vampire genre. Lynsay Sands’s Sin-
gle White Vampire (2003), Love Bites (2004), Tall, Dark and Hungry (2004), and
A Quick Bite (2005) tell the comedic and romantic stories of Lucern Argeneau and
the vampires he has made, one of whom cannot stand the sight of blood. In Carpe
Jugulum: A Novel of Discworld, Terry Pratchett satirizes vampires and the conven-
tions of the genre. Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse (see below) is a mind
reader who takes vampires and were-creatures as lovers and who works as a wait-
ress at a local bar and shops at Wal-Mart. Christopher Moore’s You Suck: A Love
Story (2007) is the story of Thomas C. Flood, who wakes up as a vampire one
morning after a date with a woman who turns out to be a vampire. Janet Maslin
of the New York Times writes: “The title needs mentioning because the book will
be too popular to be ignored. You Suck is funny enough to reanimate Mr. Moore’s
fans . . . It’s sure to appeal to anyone who shares the author’s ideas of a fun-loving
vampire’s priorities” (2).
 VAMPIRE FICTION 1099

Selected Authors. The vampire story has also taken a multicultural turn. What
follows is a selective look at seven authors who have adapted the vampire tradition
to a distinctive cultural context. This short discussion will hopefully give the reader
a sense of the variety of cultural contexts explored by vampire literature. We will
begin with Anne Rice’s haute couture vampires Lestat and Louis, from the Vampire
Chronicles, where the reader is introduced to an ancient, wealthy, and educated line
of vampires. Next comes Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint-Germain, a kinder, gentler
vampire who loves human beings in spite of their folly. Then we move on to Laurel
K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake, a suburban huntress and necromancer by vocation who
is regularly called by the police to carry out tasks involving vampires and shape-
shifters. Then there is L.A. Banks’s Damali, a hip-hop artist who together with the
Guardians is attempting to forestall the Armageddon, the final battle between the
forces of good and evil on planet Earth. From there we head to rural Louisiana to
see Sookie Stackhouse, a simple country girl, lock horns with redneck shape-shifters
and rural vampires. To end our discussion of contemporary vampire series, we turn
to Nora Roberts’s Circle Trilogy and her romantic vampires. Coming full circle, this
review of American vampire literature ends with Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian,
which is a return to the dark, gothic world of the old monster himself, Count
Dracula. In addition to confirming Auerbach’s thesis “that every age embraces the
vampire it needs” (Ourselves, 145), this discussion should also make evident that
every culture (and, perhaps, class) creates the vampire that it needs.
Anne Rice (1941–): Haute Couture Vampires and Lestat, their Prince. Anne Rice, far more
than any other American author, has reshaped the vampire tradition and created a
veritable vampire industry in the United States. Her 12-volume Vampire Chronicles
(1976–2003) relate the stories of a number of ancient vampires—Marius, Pandora,
and Armand, to name three—as well as the story of “those who must be kept,” the
ancient vampires Enkil and Akasha. But in the end, it is the figure of Lestat that
dominates the Chronicles. The first of Anne Rice’s vampire novels, Interview with
the Vampire (1976), is narrated by Louis, an eighteenth- century French-American
who owns plantations near New Orleans. Louis is a sensitive, humane vampire
who is “turned” by Lestat, with whom he hunts New Orleans until he no longer
can bear Lestat’s cruelty and arrogance. During an interview to a reporter in the
1970s, he explains the difference between himself and Lestat: “I killed animals . . .
Lestat killed humans all the time, sometimes two or three a night, sometimes more.
He would drink from one just enough to satisfy a momentary thirst, and then go
on to another. The better the human, as he would say in his vulgar way, the more
he liked it” (41).
While hunting one night in New Orleans, Lestat takes Louis to a hospital filled
with children dying of the fever. Lestat adopts one of the children by paying a
priest, and he takes the young girl home with them. Louis feeds on Claudia, then
Lestat allows her to feed from him, turning her into a vampire. Louis is horrified,
but Lestat informs Claudia that he and Louis are now her parents. That first
morning, at Lestat’s insistence, Claudia sleeps with Louis in his casket. Although
Lestat teaches Claudia how to refine her vampiric powers, she and Louis develop
a deeper bond through exploration of the arts. Eventually, Louis and Claudia
decide to murder Lestat and then travel to Europe in search of other, perhaps
more humane, vampires. After disposing of Lestat’s body, they head to Europe
and travel extensively until they find a community of vampires at the Theatre des
Vampires in Paris, France.
1100 VAMPIRE FICTION

Armand, who will have a novel devoted exclusively to his life later in the Chron-
icles, is the head of the Theatre des Vampires, which produces surrealistic plays that
invariably end with the sacrificial death of a woman. Louis and Claudia think they
have found a home until they realize that Santiago, second in command at the The-
atre des Vampires, is plotting to have them killed for Lestat’s murder and Claudia’s
turning an older woman into her vampire mother. Armand helps Louis to escape,
and the two travel together until Armand decides they must part. Sad and filled with
pain, Louis heads back to New Orleans and discovers that Lestat has survived the
murder attempt.
In The Vampire Lestat (1985), the second installment of the Vampire Chronicles,
Lestat tells his own story retrospectively from the vantage point of 1984, when he
is a rock superstar whose first album has sold over four million copies. Lestat opens
with a flair, “I am the vampire Lestat. I’m immortal. More or less. The light of the
sun, the sustained heat of an intense fire—these things might destroy me. But then
again, they might not” (3). We learn that Lestat is six-feet tall, that he has thick,
blond, curly hair and grey eyes, and that he was made a vampire in the 1780s, went
underground in 1929 and was reawakened in 1984, when a rock band began to
practice in a house near his, on Sixth Street in New Orleans.
The disenfranchised seventh son of a French aristocrat, Lestat runs away to Paris
with his friend Nicki just prior to the French Revolution. They find work at
Renaud’s House of Thespians, Lestat acting and Nicki playing his violin. One win-
ter night Lestat is abducted from his flat by Magnus, a very old vampire, and turned
into a vampire at Magnus’s tower just outside of Paris. The day after Lestat is given
the Dark Trick, Magnus bequeaths his wealth and residence to Lestat then leaps into
the roaring flames of a huge fire he has prepared inside the tower. Lestat, in despair,
explores the tower and discovers Magnus’s immense wealth as well as his sarcoph-
agus, which has the faint outline of a cross on the lid. Lestat learns that neither the
cross nor the writing “The Lord Jesus Christ” on the sarcophagus has any effect on
himself. He also discovers that neither sacred images nor jewel-encrusted crucifixes
affect him adversely and that he is able to see his image in a mirror. He thus con-
cludes that God has no power over him. But he also learns that “vampires can love
each other” (102), and that he had, indeed, loved Magnus, his maker.
And this love extends to humans as well—even the act of taking the life of a
human contains “the perfect semblance of love” (142), at least for the vampire. Rice
presents Lestat as a preternatural lover, making explicit what is only implied in
Stoker’s Dracula—that the blood feast is for vampires what sex is for humans: “I
looked into her eyes and saw them glaze over. I felt the heat of her breasts swelling
beneath her rags. Her soft, succulent body tumbled against me . . . I kissed her, feed-
ing on her heat . . . There weren’t any words for the rapture. But I’d had all the
ecstasy that rape could give . . . The very blood seemed warmer with their innocence,
richer with their goodness” (142). Lestat’s new aesthetic vision of the world is that
of the Savage Garden, and in this garden, governed by aesthetic principles and not
natural theology, “these innocent ones belonged in the vampire’s arms” (143).
And so the journey begins for Lestat, who quickly works the Dark Trick on his
dying mother Gabrielle and his best friend, Nicki, who had been kidnapped by a
superstitious coven of vampires trapped in the Christian worldview, seeing themselves
as eternally damned. Lestat and Gabrielle travel throughout Europe in search of other
vampires and find only ragged, superstitious vampires who believe themselves damned
by the Christian god and condemned to dwell in cemeteries and catacombs. Gabrielle
 VAMPIRE FICTION 1101

eventually goes off on her own in search of the beauties of nature, while Lestat con-
tinues his search for an ancient vampire named Marius, leaving messages for him
everywhere he travels, but he eventually despairs of finding him and goes dormant in
Cairo, Egypt. Lestat is awakened by Marius himself and taken to an island in the
Mediterranean Sea, where Marius now tells his story, which is retold in greater detail
in Blood and Gold: The Story of Marius (2001).
In the remainder of the novel, Lestat learns that vampires are much older and far
more powerful than they are in the account given in Stoker’s Dracula. In fact,
Marius, himself the son of a Roman patrician, was given the Dark Trick in the time
of Augustus Caesar. Most importantly, however, Lestat is introduced to “Those
Who Must Be kept,”—the ancient, original vampire couple, Enkil and Akasha—
who sit statuesquely on thrones, apparently in a dormant state, in a temple built by
Marius. Lestat awakens Akasha by playing a violin, and Akasha draws him to her-
self in an exchange of blood. This “shimmering circuit” is broken by Enkil, who
almost crushes Lestat, but Marius intervenes, threatening Enkil with the removal of
Akasha, So Lestat is spared and flees immediately.
In addition to learning vampire history, Lestat also describes how he had fallen in
love with Louis in the eighteenth century and how Louis, in Interview with the Vam-
pire, had misrepresented him on a number of counts, especially in his claim that
Lestat toyed with humans and then killed them, which becomes the justification for
Louis and Claudia to murder Lestat. Lestat points out that Louis could not have
understood that he “hunted almost exclusively among the gamblers, the thieves and
the killers” being “faithful” to his “unspoken vow to kill the evildoer” (499). Lestat
moves on to the nineteenth century and tells us that “vampires were ‘discovered’ by
the literary writers of Europe.” He then describes Polidori’s and Le Fanu’s vampires,
ending with a description of Stoker’s Dracula, “the big ape of vampires, the hirsute
Slav Count Dracula” (500). Rice has both challenged and transformed the vampire
tradition and created a novel mythology of vampire origins.
In The Queen of the Damned (1988), Akasha is awakened from her dormant
state by Lestat’s band, The Vampire Lestat. Akasha has drained Enkil of his blood
and power and left Marius—the faithful warden of “Those Who Must Be kept”—
buried under tons of ice and cement. Akasha summons Lestat, whom she now
employs as her new consort and henchman to carry out her plan to create a new
world order, in which the Queen herself—as the Goddess who will create a new
Garden of Eden for women—rules. This, of course, will involve the destruction of
all males, vampire and human, on planet Earth, and this she sets out to do with
Lestat, unwilling yet subservient, at her side.
In this third installment of the Vampire Chronicles we learn more of the origins
of vampirism, which stretch back 6,000 years and involve Maharet, Mekare, and a
troublesome familiar spirit named Amel, who has been trying to impress Maharet
and Mekare—powerful, redheaded twin witches who live with their ancient tribe in
the caves of Mount Carmel, in Palestine. Akasha and Enkil, King and Queen of
Egypt, learn of the telepathic abilities of the twins and send an army to slaughter the
tribe and bring Maharet and Mekare to Egypt. Amel, who had been experimenting
with passing through humans and tasting their blood, follows the twins to Egypt
and raises havoc in the court to show off his power. The priests of Egypt are terri-
fied by Amel’s mischief, and fearing their own cult of the dead threatened, stab the
royal couple to death one evening, telling the people that Amel had committed the
crime. But a strange transformation occurs: “The Queen lay on the floor writhing
1102 VAMPIRE FICTION

as if in agony, the blood pouring from her wounds, and a great reddish cloud
enveloped her; it was like a whirlpool surrounding her, or rather a wind sweeping
up countless tiny drops of blood. And in the midst of the swirling wind or rain or
whatever it could be called, the Queen twisted and turned, her eyes rolling up into
her head” (386). Akasha has become the first vampire, and shortly after her revival,
she heals the wounds of the king, who becomes the second vampire. She eventually
turns Maharet, Mekare, and their trusted court advisor, Khayman, into vampires,
and so the long story of vampirism begins. Now the ancient vampires must stop the
renegade Akasha, but if they kill Akasha, they could all perish because Akasha pos-
sesses the core of what used to be Amel.
The Tale of the Body Thief (1992) is a side story involving Lestat’s growing dis-
illusionment with vampiric life. Indeed, Lestat desires to experience being human
again, and he is approached by a man who claims to be able to trade bodies for a
short time. Lestat immediately regrets the exchange, but it is too late: the body thief
has disappeared and Lestat is left in an older, ailing body. In Memnoch the Devil
(1995), Lestat meets the devil and learns that Memnoch is not the bad guy, but that
God has blundered in so many ways that he was forced to send his son to die.
Memnoch turns out to be an advocate for humans, and God a blundering, power-
ful creator who loses track of his creation and feels alienated from the crown of his
creation—humans.
In the next five installments of the Chronicles, Rice tells the stories of five vam-
pires. Armand (The Vampire Armand 1998) is given the Dark Trick by Marius and
kidnapped by Santino, the head of the Satan-worshipping cult in Rome. In Pandora
(1998), we are given the story of Marius’s great love, Pandora, who disappeared for
a millennium from Marius’s sight. In Vittorio the Vampire (1999), Vittorio, a
500-year-old Italian vampire with a philosophical bent, tells the story of his search
for meaning. Merrick (2000) is the story of Merrick Mayfair, one of the dark-
skinned Mayfair witches, who possesses an incredible power to call spirits and vam-
pires to herself, which she does when she beckons David Talbot, Louis, and Lestat
to her home in New Orleans. More than anything Merrick wants to become a
vampire. Marius, in Blood and Gold (2001), tells his story of receiving the dark gift
during the reign of Caesar Augustus, and he also narrates the long odyssey of car-
ing for “Those Who Must Be Kept,” as he moves their thrones and stiff bodies from
Rome to Constantinople, then to Italy (just north of Venice) and finally to Dresden.
The final two novels in the Chronicles return to the continuing adventures of
Lestat. In Blackwood Farm (2002), Rice brings her Mayfair witches and the vam-
pire Lestat together at Blackwood Farm, the antebellum mansion of the Mayfair
clan. Quinn Blackwood has been given the dark gift, but this turns his doppelgänger,
Goblin, into a fierce opponent, which drives Quinn to seek out Lestat for help.
Lestat’s tale is brought to completion in Blood Canticle (2003), as he falls in love
with Rowan Mayfair, the famous witch of the Mayfair Chronicles, who is married
to Michael Curry. Lestat, fresh from his strange encounters in heaven and hell, now
longs to be good and longs for redemption, and he achieves a redemption of sorts
by refusing to turn Rowan Mayfair into a vampire. But he remains the tormented
and arrogant vampire his fans have come to know and love: “I wanna be a saint, I
wanna save souls by the millions, I wanna look like an angel . . . But you know me,
and come sunset, maybe it will be time to hunt the back roads” (305–306). In an
interview with Book, Anne Rice comments on the end of the series: “I had made
the decision that I wanted to move away from the witches and vampires altogether.
 VAMPIRE FICTION 1103

I wanted to write something completely different. I no longer really wanted to write

about people who were damned or who were condemned. . . . and I think [Blood
Canticle] is about that—being the end of the road, the last of the chronicles”
(Quoted in “Anne Rice,” Contemporary Authors, NRS, 376).
With the Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice has dramatically transformed the vam-
pire tradition. Rice’s central vampires—Lestat, Louis, Marius, and Pandora—see
themselves as monsters, but they eventually stop preying on humans, unlike the
monster Dracula. These vampires are beautiful, powerful, and devoted to the arts
and learning. And, to the degree that it is possible for a vampire, they fall in love
with humans and other vampires. Though vampires cannot have normal sexual rela-
tions, they have deep feelings and “sleep” together in heterosexual and homosexual
arrangements. In addition, Rice removes the origin of vampirism from a Christian
frame and places it into a world of spirits and demons where God, even if he does
exist, matters very little. Finally, Rice is able to trace the history of vampirism
through sequels and prequels involving Lestat and a host of other vampires from its
origin 6,000 years ago to the present day.
The first two installments of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles met with critical
acclaim as a fresh beginning for the vampire tradition, but in spite of continued
popularity among fans, the last ten installments were not well received. The nega-
tive criticism begins with Queen of the Damned. For example, New York Times
columnist Michiko Kakutani acknowledges that Rice has developed a fully coher-
ent vampire mythology in Queen, but there are weaknesses: “By filtering staple
mythic conventions—orphaned children, corrupt rulers, stark confrontations
between good and evil—through her own Gothic sensibility, she is able to create
an entertaining legend of her own. It’s a campy, somewhat tongue-in-cheek legend,
but like all successful legends it defines a coherent world that remains faithful to its
own peculiar rules and logic” (15 October 1988, Online Version). In Our Vam-
pires, Ourselves (1995) Nina Auerbach views Rice’s Loius and Lestat as twentieth-
century versions of Polidori and Byron, rekindling the pre-Dracula vampire
tradition of intimacy and homoeroticism (152–154), but as the 1980s wear on she
sees Lestat and the other vampires practicing an insular identity politics—
withdrawn, depressed, and unconcerned about humans. Typical of the 1980s Rea-
gan years, “Rice’s vampires are beautifully devoid of social consciousness, another
major attraction for disaffected readers” (154). In spite of negative criticism, a
large number of sessions have been devoted to Rice’s vampires at the Popular Cul-
ture Association’s annual conference for the last twenty years, and many of these
papers appear in the Journal of Popular Culture. Unlike Stoker’s Dracula, which
continues to draw considerable scholarly attention, literary scholars have remained
indifferent to Anne Rice’s vampire novels.
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (1942–): Saint-Germain: A Kinder, Gentler Vampire. Chelsea Quinn
Yarbro opens her Saint-Germain series in 1978 with Hotel Transylvania, set in 1743
Paris and involving Madelaine de Montalia, a beautiful aristocrat in danger of being
ruined by a group of Satanists. Saint-Germain has been a vampire for over four mil-
lennia, and he has learned painfully, through trial and error, how to live among
humans. Yarbro subsequently sets all of her historical novels involving Saint-
Germain in a politically turbulent time and place. Saint-Germain, the very antithesis
of Lestat, has become wise and compassionate over the long millennia, adapting to
the language and culture of a given place, adopting the clothing, the cuisine (for his
servants), and the customs of the people he stealthily moves among. His longevity is
1104 VAMPIRE FICTION

his strength, and it tends to compensate for the vampiric weaknesses of needing
native earth (to sleep and walk on) and blood (animal mostly and human when eth-
ically possible), and experiencing vertigo when near running water.
The historical settings for Yarbro’s novels vary widely and no doubt reflect
Yarbro’s historical interests. For example, in The Palace (1978) Saint-Germain is in
Renaissance Florence during the rise of the intolerant Savonarola. In Blood Games
(1979), Atta Olivia Clemens becomes his lover during the reign of Nero. Saint-
Germain finds himself in China during the reign of Genghis Khan in Path of the
Eclipse (1981). In Tempting Fate (1982), the Russian Revolution drives Saint-Germain
to Germany, where the Nazi Party is on the rise. Darker Jewels (1993) places him in
the court of Ivan the Terrible in Russia. Saint-Germain takes a sixteenth-century Inca
Princess as lover and runs into trouble with the Spanish in Mansions of Darkness
(1996). In Writ in Blood (1997), Saint-Germain is on a diplomatic mission, on
behalf of Czar Nicholas from Russia, to England to attempt to stop the outbreak of
World War I, and he takes as lover a young artist named Rowena Saxon. The plague
strikes Provence in the fourteenth century, and Saint-Germain is forced to flee and
take on the identity of a troubadour in Blood Roses (1999).
More recently, in Come Twilight (2000), Saint-Germain, now 3,500 years old,
finds himself on the Iberian Peninsula, after he leaves Toletum for the Pyrenees in
620 C.E. He travels with his faithful servant (and ghoul) of 700 years, Rogerian.
Yarbro divides this historical novel into four sections, each beginning respectively in
620, 720, 750, and 1117 C.E. and tracing Saint-Germain’s and Rogerian’s travels
throughout Spain in pre-Moor, Moor, and post-Moor times. In addition to avoiding
Muslim-Christian battlefields, Saint-Germain also attempts to avoid a vampire named
Chimenae, whom he turned and who has created a community of vampires that preys
on villagers and Muslim soldiers in and around the small village of Mt. Calcius.
Yarbro has done her homework and is careful to show how Saint-Germain adapts
his dress, language, and customs to the time and place. Saint-Germain is scarcely a
vampire because he stopped drinking human blood centuries ago, subsisting on the
blood of animals and on the erotic, heterosexual human touch.
Saint-Germain is a compassionate vampire who stops to help injured travelers with
his medicaments and cares for his horses as if they were his children. Whereas Rice’s
Lestat is tortured by his memory and his boredom, Saint-Germain has become
increasingly humane through the ages, and he values his experience: “Thought is
always of value, and memory, no matter how painful, can illuminate life” (24). In
Come Twilight, Saint-Germain is a slave, a beggar, a monk, and a courier. He is invari-
ably misunderstood by the ignorant, greedy, and violent Christians and Muslims who
seek to use his knowledge of history and languages to their own end. In addition,
Saint-Germain attempts to teach Chimenae how to live as a vampire among humans.
Over the 500 years that transpire in this novel we see Saint-Germain patiently calling
on her to leave the cult of the blood that she has created in Mt. Calcius, and to stop
making and destroying vampires as if they were toys to be played with then thrown
away. Chimenae will not accept the long, historical vision of Saint-Germain, being
rather like a child who lives for the immediate gratification of the next kill. Through-
out the novel, Saint-Germain receives letters from Olivia, who is now in Rome and
who stands in stark contrast to Chimenae. In her final letter to Saint-Germain, Olivia
longs for ancient, pagan Rome as she reflects on the barbarism of the current Rome
under the Holy Roman Emperor Lothair II, who must deal with two rival pretenders
to the papal throne: Anacletus II in Rome and Innocent II in France.
 VAMPIRE FICTION 1105

In States of Grace (2005) Di Santo Germano is a Renaissance man—scientist

(alchemist), historian, philosopher, musician, and overall humanist—who finds him-
self in Venice, Italy, in 1530, shortly after the commencement of the Spanish Inqui-
sition (1522) by Charles I. Because he owns printing presses in Venice, Burges,
Antwerp, and Amsterdam, Saint-Germain must travel through these cities in the
Spanish Netherlands while Christians fight their internecine battles and Ottoman
Corsairs raid merchant ships, including Saint-Germain’s, on the Mediterranean. In
Venice, Saint-Germain is the patron and lover of Pier Ariana Salier, composer and
musician, whose music he publishes and whose welfare he has at heart. While trav-
eling away from Venice to check on his publishing ventures, a plot is hatched by
Venetian businessmen to steal Saint-Germain’s property and appropriate his wealth,
thus leaving Pier Ariana bereft of her benefaction.
Like all the later novels in this series, States of Grace is a carefully researched his-
torical novel that attempts to be faithful to the late Renaissance culture of Western
Europe under the Spanish Emperor Charles I (Carlos V). Yarbro skillfully depicts
how a wise pagan might navigate the political and theological landmines of Catholic
Italy and a growing Protestant movement in the Netherlands and Germany. Saint-
Germain’s claim to “follow no king and serve no known gods” (42) sets him up for
serious trouble in a time and place where the state religion is determined by the the-
ological leanings of the prince but can be overturned by the Pope or Holy Roman
Emperor. The Peace of Westphalia (1648), the landmark treaty of religious tolera-
tion, is still 118 years in the future. In addition, Saint-Germain is publishing books
on science, geography, music, and history—works that try to skirt but invariably
assume a theological position at a time when printing presses in Catholic Europe are
being censored and closed for publishing heretical tracts by Protestants. In this his-
torical situation, the Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim zealot is each “purveying his
own state of grace” (147–148) and the only thing that might unite them would be
the discovery of a vampire in their midst. And, in fact, Saint-Germain is being
watched closely by spies, because of his wealth and his publishing activities. If he is
discovered to be a witch or a heretic, he will be burned at the stake.
Again, this is a historical novel about the ideal man, the true Renaissance human-
ist who is learned and compassionate and who agonizes over human folly. As a vam-
pire, Saint-Germain lives largely on animal blood but needs human touch—the
touch of a woman—more than he needs blood. Nevertheless, he takes small quan-
tities of blood from his lovers while making love—generally limiting his encounters
with his courtesans to five, because the sixth encounter turns the woman into a vam-
pire. Unlike Lestat, Saint-Germain possesses limited strength, though he is a skillful
warrior. Sunlight irritates him, and crossing water creates disorientation, which
turns out to be a regular problem in Venice with its canals and harbors. He sleeps
on boxes filled with his native earth and stuffs the same into the hollow soles of his
boots. Apart from these irritations, Saint-Germain is Yarbro’s ideal man—intelligent,
selfless, and thoughtful. Through Saint-Germain, Yarbro implicitly critiques a mod-
ern world embroiled in ideological and religious wars.
Yarbro’s Saint-Germain series has received positive reviews from Library Journal,
Science Fiction Chronicle, and Publishers Weekly throughout the years and an occa-
sional accolade from The Washington Post “Book World” critic, Brian Jacomb, who
writes of the Saint-Germian series: “Among her works is a series of historical vam-
pire tales featuring Count Saint-Germain, who is, in this reader’s opinion, the most
eloquent of all undead characters” (8 April 1999, Online Version). A year later
1106 VAMPIRE FICTION

Jacomb reviewed Come Twilight: “Chelsea Quinn Yarbro has created a character
who makes other vampires pale by comparison. This 3,500-year-old aristocrat has
been keeping Yarbro’s many fans home at night for two decades” (30 October 2000,
Online Version). In Our Vampires, Ourselves (1995), Nina Auerbach claims that
Saint-Germain “epitomizes the highly evolved vampire of the late 1970s, whose
refinement is an implicit reproach to humanity. Like that of his nineteenth-century
predecessor Carmilla, the vampirism of Yarbro’s Count flows from a thirst for
intimacy—the romantic intimacy Stoker’s Dracula destroyed in his estranged rage
for dominance” (147).
Laurel K. Hamilton (1963–): Anita Blake, Suburban Huntress. Anita Blake is a vampire
hunter and necromancer, but in the St. Louis of the near future, vampires and other
monsters are citizens, so Anita enters into romantic relationships with Jean-Claude,
the master of the local vampires, and Richard, the Ulfric (leader) of the local were-
wolf pack. By the sixth novel of the fourteen-novel series Anita, Jean-Claude, and
Richard form a metaphysical—as well as physical-sexual—relationship that
bestows special powers on each of them and enables them to work together to elim-
inate human criminals, rogue vampires, zombies, and other monsters from the city
of St. Louis, East St. Louis (Illinois) and Santa Fe (New Mexico). In addition to the
killing of bad guys, there is a fair amount of explicit sex: Anita often has sexual
intercourse with preternatural creatures in order to subdue and/or kill them. In this
vampire world, even vampires can have sexual relations and produce offspring
through other vampires or mortal humans, this in opposition to the standard tradi-
tion that vampires lose the ability to have intercourse. In addition to being a vam-
pire executioner, Anita is an animator, not the graphic design type, but a person with
power to raise the dead and create zombies—a very handy ability because zombies
are now legally permitted to give testimony in legal cases. As the series progresses,
Anita finds that she has power over not just the dead but the undead as well—that
is, she is able to call and control younger vampires, and she is able to resist the mind
control and tricks of older, more powerful vampires.
The first eight novels of the series take place at local venues in St. Louis, where
we get to see Anita Blake, vampire executioner and animator, work her magic in this
wild world populated by humans, vampires, and were-creatures. In Guilty Pleasures
(1993) Jean-Claude, the master vampire of the city of St. Louis, owns a strip club
called Guilty Pleasures, and Anita works with him to find out who has been killing
his vampires. The Laughing Corpse (1994) involves a case of a flesh-eating zombie
at large in St. Louis, and here again Jean-Claude owns a comedy club called The
Laughing Corpse. The Circus of the Damned (1995) is an after-dark amusement
park, also owned by Jean-Claude, and in this novel we learn more about vampire
politics and Jean-Claude’s desire to have Anita as his human servant, a relationship
that involves the reception of four marks given to the servant. This symbiotic rela-
tionship provides both parties with enhanced powers, but the downside is, if the
vampire dies, the servant inevitably dies as well. In addition to her relationship with
Jean-Claude, Anita begins to date Richard, the Ulfric of the local werewolf pack.
This triumvirate of Anita, Richard, and Jean-Claude develops and deepens through-
out the The Lunatic Café (1996), Bloody Bones (1996), The Killing Dance (1997),
Burnt Offerings (1998), and Blue Moon (1998).
In Obsidian Butterfly (2000), Anita escapes temporarily from her increasingly
complex love life with Jean-Claude and Richard, and she joins Edward, a vampire
executioner like herself, on a case in New Mexico. “Ted,” Edward’s local cover, is a
 VAMPIRE FICTION 1107

bounty hunter whose help the police have sought because this case involves the dis-
appearance or skinning-alive of local residents. Edward has two backups in addition
to Anita on the case, Olaf and Bernardo. Olaf’s specialty is mutilating women and
Bernardo’s specialty is killing. Edward has Anita on the case because he senses that
there is a preternatural killer involved, and not just a human serial killer. Obsidian
Butterfly, master vampire of the city of Santa Fe, provides Anita and Edward with the
information needed to find the monster who has been committing the atrocities.
By Incubus Dreams (2004) Anita has grown into her role as Nimir Ra, the female
warrior leader of the local were-leopard pack, and has actually formed an additional
triumvirate that includes Micah, a were-leopard, and Damian, a vampire. As with
her other triumvirate there is an upside and a downside. The upside is greater power
for all three; the downside is that if Anita’s power ebbs, so does the power of Micah
and Damian. In fact, Damian almost dies when Anita fails to feed the ardeur, a
strong sexual desire, inherited from Jean-Claude’s line of vampires and going back to
Belle-Morte, an old and sadistic vampire who made both Jean-Claude and Asher.
Because of the ardeur, Jean-Claude is able to feed his blood lust with sex, but now
Anita inherits from Jean-Claude a sexual drive that must be satisfied with some reg-
ularity, or she will go insane. This drive makes for quite a number of ménage-à-trois
situations in Narcissus in Chains (2001), Incubus Dreams (2004), and Micah (2006).
The fourteenth novel of the series, Danse Macabre (2006), alludes to a ballet that
is to be hosted by Jean-Claude and his St. Louis vampires to show humans that vam-
pires are “more than monsters” (108) and to allow masters of the larger cities of the
region to test Jean-Claude’s power, as the Vampire Council in Europe is beginning
to feel threatened by the growing power of Anita, Jean-Claude, and Richard. Much
of the final novel is devoted to controlling and feeding the ardeur by way of a num-
ber of group sexual encounters that Anita has with Jean-Claude and Asher (vam-
pires), Micah and Nathaniel (were-leopards), and Richard. In addition to defending
their city against potential vampire takeovers, Anita begins to have dreams of
Marnee Noir, the Mother of all Darkness, who is drawn to the interpersonal power
shifts in Anita’s relationships.
Anita Blake starts out in the series as a young, naïve virgin drawn ever more deeply
into the vampire and were-politics of this futuristic universe because of her supernat-
ural powers, marksmanship, and martial arts abilities. As Anita becomes less human,
the series concentrates more on the supernatural sex she has with her vampire and
were-partners than on hunting and executing rogue vampires and shape-shifters.
Vampires have come a long way since Stoker’s Dracula, who must hide his dreadful
purpose, through the humanistic, but still undercover, Lestat and Saint-Germain.
Though vampires must govern themselves in this new world or be executed, they
have achieved legal and, for many, celebrity status. The vampire slayer is called to
action only for rogue vampires, shape-shifters, and other renegade monsters.
Over the last fourteen years, Hamilton’s Anita Blake novels have received positive
reviews from Library Journal, The Booklist, and Publishers Weekly. Obsidian But-
terfly (2000), published as an ACE hardback, was on the New York Times extended
bestsellers list, and Narcissus in Chains (2001), the tenth book in the series, was on
the New York Times bestsellers list for three weeks, rising to the fifth position. Fol-
lowing the publication of the eighth novel, Laurel Hamilton was able to secure a
seven-figure deal with ACE publishing for the next three novels (Anonymous,
Chronicle, October 2002, Online Version). There is no apparent interest in this
series on the part of literary scholars.
1108 VAMPIRE FICTION

L.A. Banks (1959–): Damali, the Hip Hop Huntress. In the first book of the Vampire
Huntress Legend series, Minion (2003), we encounter Damali Richards, a hip hop
artist for Warriors of Light Records. When not performing or recording, Damali
and her team of Guardians hunt rogue vampires and other monsters. In this first
installment of the series, Damali and her team track down a powerful vampire who
not only drains his victims of their blood but mutilates their bodies as well. In The
Awakening (2004), we learn that Damali is not just a run-of-the-mill vampire
huntress; rather, she is the Millennial Neteru, a powerful being whom the topside
master vampires want to kill but also desire for their own purposes. Damali’s ex-
lover Carlos enters the picture as a newly turned vampire whom Damali must trust
to battle the vampires seeking her death.
In The Hunted (2004), the story continues for Damali and the Guardian forces
who seek to protect humans from vampires, shape-shifters, and other demonic
forces that surface from the nether regions below. In this installment of the series,
Damali, who is a hip hop artist by day and a vampire hunter by night, becomes
aware of a terrible disturbance in Brazil. She and her guardian force of seven (the
mother-seer Marlene, Shabazz, Rider, Big Mike, J.L., Jose, and Dan) have just come
off a tough mission and are in no shape to take on another deadly enemy. But inno-
cent humans are being dismembered and slaughtered near the Amazon River in
Brazil, and the team goes into action. In addition to the weariness caused by the
recent mission, Damali believes that Carlos Rivera, her former mentor and lover
turned vampire, died in quelling the recent vampire revolt. Her last memories of him
are his carrying her up from Hell and protecting her from the onslaught of demons.
Carlos, we learn, is a former LA drug dealer who took Damali in when she was
orphaned as a child.
The Guardians are a worldwide group of 144,000 faithful Christians, Muslims,
Buddhists, and members of other religious groups, and they are aware that a spiri-
tual battle for planet Earth is raging and could soon culminate in Armageddon. The
Guardians are ruled by the Covenant, a group of twelve council members whose
ranks have included notables like the Knights Templar. In The Bitten (2005),
Carlos and Damali are finally able to spend time together, but they are interrupted
because a master vampire from the topside has stolen a key that is able to open the
sixth seal of the Revelation, and, if used, could tip the balance of the final battle in
the direction of evil. Damali is called before the Council of Neterus in The Forbid-
den (2006) to give an account about herself, and she learns that Lilith, the consort
of the Unnamed One, has come up from level seven to level six to set things in order
at the Vampire Council as all the master vampires topside had been killed.
In The Damned (2006), tortured souls (now flesh-eating ghouls) from level four
escape up to the topside through portals that have been opened—unbeknownst to
the Guardians—through Carlos’s last trip to level six, during a previous battle. The
five-member vampire council has been wiped out, but the Chairman, Dante, is at
large somewhere in the world with the Book of Life and is attempting to find Eve—
yes, the very Eve of Adam and Eve—but the Guardians are after him, and so are
Lilith, his wife, and Dante’s father, the Unnamed One. Armageddon is forestalled by
the Guardians through a series of battles in the Himalayas, and the damned are
returned to level four of the underworld. The portals to the topside are then closed.
Because Carlos and Damali have been killing off high level vampires, Lilith and the
Unnamed One seek revenge on the Guardians in The Forsaken (2007), by releasing
a powerful monster able to defeat both Damali with her Neteru powers and Carlos
 VAMPIRE FICTION 1109

with his post-vampiric powers. In The Wicked (2007), book eight of the series,
Carlos and Damali are finally married, but Cain, the son of Eve, has become the new
Chairman of the Vampire Council and, in attempting to consolidate his power,
pushes the world to the doorstep of Armageddon.
In many ways the Vampire Huntress series is a return to traditional vampire lore: holy
water, silver bullets (as well as silver laced C4, bazooka rounds, and earth rounds), and
prayer can kill or at least keep vampires at bay. Also, after being killed, vampires need
to be both beheaded and staked. Nevertheless, unlike Stoker’s, Rice’s, and Yarbro’s vam-
pires, and like Hamilton’s and Charlaine Harris’s vampires, these vampires are able to
have sexual intercourse, and they do so quite often. Master vampires have lairs all over
their territories and a bevy of female vampires at their beck and call. In fact, vampire on
vampire sex is the best because two vampires can do a “double plunge,” which is a
mutual feeding at the moment of orgasm that greatly enhances the sexual experience.
Blood-drinking is no longer a metaphor for sex; rather, it enhances sexual performance.
The Guardians are all African American, except for Jose and Carlos, who are His-
panic, and they all speak a combination of Ebonics and Spanglish. In The Hunted
(2004), they join forces with a group of Brazilian warriors who speak Black English
seasoned with Portuguese. For example, near the end of the book, Carlos brags
about Damali’s achievements as the Neteru and gives the following speech: “Say
what you want, girlfriend is baad. Dusted a treasonous councilman . . . Did a drag
race to protect my turf, rode shotgun with me . . .and kicked that bitch’s ass up
there, then served her a head trip like I ain’t never seen. My boo is awesome” (481).
The cosmology of this series, cast in the contemporary world, is a curious mix of
Christian and New Age ideas. The great divide among humans is between those
who believe in some higher power and those who do not. In The Damned, Damali
comments, “It doesn’t matter which faith, as long as the foundation is about the
Most High, the divine. If you believe and haven’t been contaminated [by demons],
you won’t be possessed” (2006, 460). Hell is literally below, and Heaven is some-
where above; and the salvation of souls is a critical part of the balance between good
and evil in this universe. In fact, Carlos’s soul hangs in the balance, in purgatory,
though he is a vampire whose soul should be completely lost. Vampires are ruled by
a five-member Vampire Council from level six (below), and the topside vampire
world (Earth) is carved up into large territories ruled by first-generation Master
Vampires, such as Carlos. Even though Carlos is very young, he was turned by the
Chair of the five-member Council, and he therefore has old blood in him and is very
powerful. The first two levels of hell are populated with poltergeists and familiar
spirits, levels three and four with ghosts and amanthras (large worm-like creatures);
demons occupy level five, and vampires level six. As one would expect, in addition
to going after humans, the evil beings on all these levels are jockeying for power
among themselves to have ready access to the tasty humans topside. Level seven is
occupied by the “Unnamed One” and the original fallen angels, though a comment
made by the Chairman in The Damned suggests that he, a vampire, was also pres-
ent when Lucifer himself and his angels fell from Heaven.
Since 2003, L.A. Banks’s Vampire Huntress novels have received positive reviews
from Library Journal, The BookList, and Publishers Weekly. Trina Love Abram of
the Tennessee Tribune reviewed The Damned (2006) positively: “This magnificent
urban epic is an amalgamation of mystical creativity, Christianity, masonry con-
cepts, world history, and Biblical concepts. This explosive mixture of concepts is
dangerously addictive, and Banks’s solid writing style makes it all believable” (20
1110 VAMPIRE FICTION

April 2006, Online Version). In an interview with Femspec magazine (30 June 2005,
Online Version), L.A. Banks explains the purpose of writing about vampires after
having written romance novels for so long: “This series was definitely designed to
make several points. Vampirism in this series is the metaphor for being seduced by
flesh, sex, money, the fast life that gives the illusion of immortality, only to find one-
self the living dead—trapped in Hell and incarcerated by death, violence, and par-
asitic behavior. The compound that Damali lives in represents ‘the village’ where
people of all ethnicities and religions come together as a world family to fight a com-
mon nemesis . . . it is a place that is safe, where the barriers of prayers and people
watching each others’ backs and children prevail.”
Charlaine Harris (1951–): Sookie Stackhouse—Red Neck Vamps and a Hometown Telepath.
Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire mysteries feature Sookie Stackhouse, a seem-
ingly simple country girl who reads minds and romance novels and lives in the small
Louisiana town of Bon Temps. In addition, she dates vampires and werewolves, and
she is deeply involved in local vampire and shape-shifter politics. Sookie lives for
Wendy’s hamburgers and regularly shops at Wal-Mart. To increase her vocabulary,
she frequently uses her word of the day correctly when talking to other characters.
Written in the first person, the reader has access to Sookie’s thoughts as well as the
thoughts of many others because Sookie is telepathic. Vampires have gone public in
this quick-paced, humorous series, as in the Anita Blake series, and they are recog-
nized as citizens, though shape-shifters remain illegal. Vampires are ruled by under-
ground kings and queens who exercise absolute control over their minions’
behavior. Eric, for example, is the king of a large area of rural Louisiana, and he
rules from Shreveport, LA. New Orleans is the state’s “vampire central.”
In Dead Until Dark (2001), Sookie begins the story of how she started dating Bill,
the vampire next door, who once drank human blood but now drinks a blood substi-
tute, Trueblood, available in local bars, including Merlotte’s, where Sookie waits on
tables. Living Dead in Dallas (2002) opens with Sookie discovering the body of the
cook at Merlotte’s in the trunk of Bon Temps’s Sheriff’s car. Eric, Vampire Sheriff of
Shreveport, asks that Bill and Sookie head down to Dallas, Texas, to help solve a case
involving missing vampires. Eric figures that Sookie’s telepathic abilities will help to
crack the case. Club Dead (2003) is the name of a club in Jackson, Mississippi, where
the local supernatural element hangs out and where Sookie hopes to find her
boyfriend Bill, who has been kidnapped by a powerful vampire named Lorena. Eric—
who also owns Fangtasia, a vampire club—requests that Sookie help rescue Bill with
the aid of Alcide, a local werewolf. Sookie is attracted to Alcide, and Eric is attracted
to Sookie, and all three are looking for Bill Compton. In Dead to the World (2004),
Bill disappears again, and Sookie is left to deal with Eric, who has gotten a bad case
of amnesia. Jason, Sookie’s brother, goes missing as well, and a coven of blood-
addicted witches moves into the area to harass the local vampire population.
A number of shape-shifters have been killed or injured in shootings in Dead as a
Doornail (2005), including shape-shifter Sam, the proprietor of Merlotte’s. Jason
has just been turned into a were-panther, and other were-creatures now suspect
that he carried out the shootings, because he seems a reluctant shape-shifter.
Because Sam is largely incapacitated, he asks Sookie to go to Eric and request the
loan of a vampire bartender. Eric complies and Charles, a one-eyed, former pirate
of a vampire, steps in for Sam. While attempting to solve the series of crimes,
Sookie herself is shot in the shoulder, ducking a split second before the assassin
squeezes the trigger. Sookie had a love affair with Bill, who lives next door, and
 VAMPIRE FICTION 1111

with Eric, the proprietor of Fangtasia who does not remember the affair because in
the previous book he was under a witch’s spell during the witch-were war. In addi-
tion to these relationships, Sookie is also being pursued by Alcide, a werewolf, and
Calvin, the pack leader of the were-panthers in a nearby town.
In Definitely Dead (2006), the latest novel in the series, Sookie takes some time
off to settle the accounts of Hadley, her twice-dead cousin in New Orleans, who
died a vampiric death the night of the marriage between the Queen of New Orleans
and the King of Arkansas. Hadley had been the vampire lover of the Queen and died
mysteriously on the night of the wedding. With help from Hadley’s landlady, a witch
named Amelia, Sookie attempts to clean out Hadley’s apartment only to discover a
body in one of the closets, which puts Sookie in the middle of another mysterious
murder. Sookie’s new love interest, Quinn, the shape-shifting tiger, has been assigned
by Eric to escort Sookie to New Orleans; and so Sookie has a new love interest to
help her solve the crimes and keep her from getting killed.
This lighthearted vampire series places vampirism in a small, rural, Southern
town with all its charm and secrets. In many ways the series reflects the world of
Anita Blake—without the dark, Gothic elements. Sookie is a reluctant killer of vam-
pires and shape-shifters, drawn into vampire and shifter politics because of her tele-
pathic abilities. But again, vampire slayers are needed only for the occasional
rogues, shifter or vampire. Sookie is far more interested in her appearance, her wait-
ressing job, and her love life than she is in chasing after supernatural entities. Since
the publication of Dead Until Dark (2001), Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse
novels have received positive reviews from Library Journal, The BookList, and Pub-
lishers Weekly.
Nora Roberts (1950–): Romantic Vampires. In order to illustrate the popularity and per-
vasiveness of the vampire in the contemporary reading scene, we need go no further
than the popular, prolific romance writer Nora Roberts, who has written a trilogy
involving vampires. All three books came out in 2006 and, as of the writing of this
article (January 2007), Morrigan’s Cross and Valley of Silence were on the New
York Times best-selling list for 14 and 8 weeks, respectively. The three books nar-
rate vampire Lilith’s attempt to take over the parallel worlds of Geall and Earth.
They also narrate the stories of three men and three women who fall in love and
eventually marry.
In Morrigan’s Cross (2006), Hoyt Mac Cionaoith battles Lilith, the vampire who
has turned Cian, his brother, into a vampire. To defeat her, the goddess Morrigan
enables Hoyt to time-travel into the future to assemble a team comprised of a witch,
a warrior, a scholar, a shape-shifter, and his now vampiric brother Cian. In contem-
porary New York, Hoyt recruits Cian, a red-haired witch named Glenna, and King,
a friend of Cian’s. These four are joined by Larkin and Moira, two warriors who
have traveled from the world of Geall to aid them in the fight. The six are poised to
fight Lilith, the vampire Queen, and the love focus of this first novel is on the rela-
tionship between Hoyt and Glenna. In Dance of the Gods (2006), the Circle of Six
continues to prepare for the battle against Lilith, but the love focus is on the rela-
tionship between Larkin and Blair, who hail from different worlds—Earth and
Geall, respectively—thus complicating their love life.
Roberts closes her vampire trilogy with Valley of Silence (2006), which completes
the story of the three couples: Moira, now Queen of Geall and Cian, the 1,000-year-
old vampire; Hoyt, a warrior, and Glenna, the witch; and Blair, a warrior, and
Larkin, the shape-shifter. The Circle of Six gathers together on the planet Geall,
1112 VAMPIRE FICTION

whose civilization has reached the Middle Ages in Earth time, to fight the final bat-
tle in the Valley of Silence against Lilith, the 2,000-year-old vampire who would rule
both Earth and Geall. The goddess Morrigan—who has great, though limited,
powers—has blessed this circle of friends and lovers with special powers to stand
against a much larger vampire army commanded by the cruel and sadistic Lilith.
Although this is a vampire novel with elements of science fiction (time and space
travel through a worm hole), Valley continues the romance genre formula, focusing
on the final couple-to-be: the tall, dark, handsome hunk of a man (Cian) who, at
first, resists falling in love with the beautiful, intelligent, shapely Queen (Moira).
They do fall in love, just before the great battle. The relationship is, of course,
impossible. Cian is a wealthy New York vampire who is cynical about love and
plans to return to Earth if he survives the battle of the Valley of Silence. He does, in
fact, return to Earth after the battle only to descend into a booze-induced stupor,
until Morrigan visits him and makes him an offer he cannot refuse: to be trans-
formed back into a human and return to Geall to marry, reproduce, and live hap-
pily ever after. The novel ends with Cian and Moira, at the end of sixty years of
marriage, walking “hands linked . . . in the softening sunlight . . . through the gates
while the sound of children playing rang behind them” (318).
Elizabeth Kostova (1964–): The Historian—The Return of the Monster. After the human-
izing tendencies of Rice, Yarbro, Hamilton, Banks, and Harris, and the romanticiz-
ing tendencies of Roberts, it is refreshing to revisit the vampire as an inhuman
monster, bent only on its own survival and the enslavement and slaughter of
humans. Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian (2005) opens in 1972 as the daughter
of a historian opens up both an empty book with a dragon printed in the middle
sheaves and a packet of yellowing papers in her father’s study in Amsterdam. The
first letter in the packet is addressed to the writer’s “dear and unfortunate succes-
sor” (5), who turns out to be Paul, the narrator’s father. Paul works for a founda-
tion committed to world peace, and he is persuaded by his daughter to tell her the
story of the papers and the book. What follows is a story about her father’s and his
mentor’s research into the legends of Vlad the Impaler and Dracula.
The narrator and her father travel to Austria and then to Slovenia, where Paul
begins the story of his research and travels in the 1950s and of Bartholomew Rossi’s
mysterious disappearance. As they travel, Paul discloses the contents of the yellow-
ing letters. It turns out that Dracula is very much alive—and has been since the fif-
teenth century. In fact, in his first life he was Vlad III of Wallachia (1431–1476), the
infamous Vlad the Impaler, who learned how to outwit “death by secret means”
from a group of Latin monks in Gaul (675).
Professor Rossi’s journal describes his first encounter with Dracula in one of his
underground crypts. Rossi “felt almost as frightened” of his extraordinary clothing
as he “did of his strange undead presence” (601). Shortly after, Paul “recoils” at the
sight of a “stain of drying blood” on Dracula’s lips and stares at him “in horrified
paralysis” (601).Though as a historian he has grown curious about this creature
who has lived five hundred years, his only thought is how to destroy the creature
and escape. Dracula’s “inhuman” gestures cause Rossi’s stomach to “twist inside”
(603). This is, indeed, a monster.
Dracula reveals his plan to Rossi, which involves Rossi’s cataloging Dracula’s
library after being turned into a vampire. Rossi learns that Dracula has acquired a
late fifteenth-century printing press and has nearly completed making 1,453 of his
dragon books, which are then given to his servants throughout the world who do
 VAMPIRE FICTION 1113

his bidding and gather books and information for him. The year 1453 is, of course,
the year Constantinople, the Great City, fell at the hand of the Ottoman Turks,
whom Dracula still despises. Dracula, it turns out, has become a historian, perhaps
the historian, and has put together a library the likes of which the world has never
seen, including many rare ancient books that have disappeared with the destruction
of the great libraries in Alexandria, Rome, and Constantinople.
Though Kostova departs from the Stoker tradition by asserting the continuing
existence of Dracula, The Historian reaffirms a number of traditional vampiric
myths. Dracula has, in fact, angered God by seeking immortality apart from the
Gospel, and he refuses to have a cross put on his sarcophagus. Not as powerful as
Lestat or Louis, Dracula can be warded off with garlic and crucifixes, and killed
with silver knives or bullets. In addition, one is turned into a vampire by being bit-
ten three times, thus becoming infected with vampirism as with a disease. Kostova
brings before the reader the obvious evil done by Dracula as a vampire, but she also
describes the cruel and inhumane deeds of Vlad the Impaler, which are perhaps even
more horrifying by comparison: the murdering and torturing not only of the hated
Turks, but also of his own countrymen, women, and children. Thus, in life and in
undeath, Vlad III is a monster who must be killed for past and present crimes
against the human race.
Little, Brown & Co., has given Elizabeth Kostova a “two million dollar advance,
a movie sale and the prospect of publication in at least 20 languages,” in addition
to a media blitz of 7,000 advance copies for book critics, according to Janet Maslin
of The New York Times (13 June 2005, Online Version). Perhaps that is why the
reviews of The Historian are so mixed. John Leonard of Harpers writes, “There is
very little sex, quite a bit of torture, and I suppose we should be grateful for a nar-
rative journey into medieval scholarship that’s not about alchemy. Still, aren’t vam-
pires merely the alien abductors of an earlier system of superstitions? Even Anne
Rice has given up on bloodsuckers in favor of Jesus” (July 2005, 86). Henry Alford
of The New York Times Book Review laments Kostova’s romanticizing of history and
historians, but he praises her for “her interweaving of three sources of information—
what the daughter tells us, what her father tells her and what the letters tell her and
us” (10 July 2005, 16). Michael Gannon of The Booklist (15 May 2005, 16) gives
the novel high praise: “Readers who think the legend of Dracula has become a trite
staple of schlock fiction will find this atmospheric page-turner by first time author
Kostova a bloodthirsty delight.”
Reception. If literary critics exhibit a “comparatively dismissive attitude toward
the Gothic in academic studies” in general (Riquelme, 588), then literary critics are
particularly dismissive of the proliferation of vampire fiction and the appearance of
its conventions in the popular culture genres discussed above. There are a few
exceptions. Anne Rice’s vampire novels, especially the first three, have been
reviewed positively and discussed extensively in scholarly books and journals.
Culture critics have shown a keen interest in what Buffy the Vampire Slayer tells us
about late twentieth-century families and teens. And Nina Auerbach’s Our Vam-
pires, Ourselves (1995) argues that both the nineteenth-century vampire stories and
the twentieth-century adaptations reflect the political (which encompasses race, gen-
der, and creed) fears and desires of any given period in Britain and the United States.
For readers interested in contemporary academic interpretations of Dracula,
the Norton Critical Edition of Dracula contains background essays on the legend
of the vampire, early reviews of the novel, theatrical and dramatic adaptations,
1114 VAMPIRE FICTION

and contemporary essays. The collection of contemporary essays dates from the
1970s through the 1990s, demonstrating a renewal of interest in Dracula among
academics. Nina Auerbach opens the essay collection with “Vampires in the
Light,” an excerpt from Our Vampires, Ourselves (1995). Auerbach reviews the
Christopher Lee and Frank Langella film versions of Dracula and argues that
these Draculas are “children of the light,” unlike the earlier Lugosi and Karloff
versions of the Count, who were monsters of the darkness. They are children of
the light because they are killed by sunlight rather than by religious ritual. In this
view, the modern Dracula, freed “from the old metaphysics” of a Christian
worldview, is “allergic to sunlight—not repelled by its goodness” (391). Both the
Lee and Langella Draculas are sensitive, thoughtful heroes interested in seducing
women who realize that they don’t need men. Auerbach notes that this change in
the Count reflects the feminist interests of the 1960s and 1970s, and she con-
cludes that “the rapidity with which our Draculas date tells us only that every age
embraces the vampire it needs” (402).
Phyllis A. Roth’s “Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (originally
published in Literature and Psychology, 1977) is a psychoanalytic read of the novel
that argues that though there is clearly an Oedipal struggle on the part of the men
to kill the Father (Dracula), there is an even deeper psychological struggle to first
victimize then kill the mother(s) (Lucy and Mina): “Central to the structure and
unconscious theme of Dracula is . . . primarily the desire to destroy the threatening
mother, she who threatens by being desirable” (420). Carol Senf’s “Dracula: The
Unseen Face in the Mirror” (1979) approaches the novel from a biographical and
cultural perspective and argues that Dracula addresses the threat of the primitive to
nineteenth-century Victorians and that the novel is not so much a story of good tri-
umphing over evil, rather of the similarity between good (the vampire hunters) and
evil (Dracula). The unreliable narrators of the novel have attempted to kill off the
evil part of themselves which is “masked” by social convention.
In “A Capital Dracula,” (1988) Franco Moretti, taking a sociological approach
to the novel, suggests that Dracula is a metaphor for monopolistic capital, a
threat to the early capitalism of Great Britain. The count is also a threat to British
cultural and linguistic values, and his defeat represents the triumph of English
culture and capital over the foreigner. Finally, Moretti argues that sexuality, both
desired and feared by the Victorians, is finally destroyed and sublimated with the
deaths of Lucy and the Count, saving the English family. Christopher Craft also
addresses the ambivalent attitude of Victorians toward sexuality in “‘Kiss Me
with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1984).
Craft claims that the Victorian views of sexual difference are inverted in Dracula
through Lucy’s and Mina’s transformations. Craft’s new historical approach
explores gender difference conventions set forth in Ruskin’s essays and critiqued
in Mill’s essays.
Bram Dijkstra’s “Dracula’s Backlash” takes a feminist-cultural studies approach
to the novel and argues that Dracula became the “commonplace book of antifemi-
nine obsession” (460), with Dracula representing “effeminate sensuality” and Lucy
and Mina representing the “two faces of Eve” (462). Steven D. Arata takes a cultural
studies approach to the novel in “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety
of Reverse Colonization” (1990). Dracula, as an Occidental tourist in London,
illustrates the possibility of England being overrun by the primitive, which is really
the Irish who are despised by the English as savages. Two political equations are
 VAMPIRE FICTION 1115

expressed in the novel: “not just, Dracula is to England as Ireland is to England, but,
Dracula is to England as England is to Ireland” (469) in the sense that Dracula’s
“imperialism” is most like England’s imperialistic domination of Ireland. Finally,
Talia Schaffer’s “‘A Wild Desire Took Me’: The Homoerotic History of Dracula”
(1994) argues that the novel is Bram Stoker’s apologia for Oscar Wilde’s trial and
imprisonment. Dracula, in this new historical-biographical read of the novel, is
“Wilde as threat” (472) to Victorian sexual codes. Shaffer sees the first part of
Dracula swinging “wildly between utter hatred of Wilde and utter sorrow for
Wilde” (475) while the remainder of the book “enacts Wilde’s story as a longing,
lingering look at imprisonment” (477).

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Vampire Series. (These series either begin with the introduction of a vampire [or
slayer] in the first novel, then subsequent installments either follow chronologically
or highlight previous adventures of the vampire, if the vampire is particularly old.)

Butcher, Jim. The Dresden Files series:

Storm Front (2000)
Fool Moon (2000)
Grave Peril (2001)
Summer Knight (2002)
Death Masks (2003)
Blood Rites (2004)
Dead Beat (2005)
Proven Guilty (2006)
White Night (2007)
 VAMPIRE FICTION 1117

Collins, Nancy A.: Sonja Blue series:

Sunglasses after Dark (1989)
In the Blood (1992)
Paint It Black (1995)
Midnight Blue (1995)
A Dozen Black Roses (1996)
Darkest Heart (2000)
Dead Roses for a Blue Lady (2002)

Feehan, Christine. Dark series:

Dark Prince (1999)
Dark Desire (1999)
Dark Gold (2000)
Dark Magic (2000)
Dark Challenge (2000)
Dark Fire (2001)
After Twilight (2001)
Dark Legend (2001)
Dark Guardian (2002)
Dark Symphony (2003)
The Only One (2003)
Dark Melody (2003)
Dark Destiny (2004)
Hot Blooded (2004)
Dark Secret (2005)
Dark Demon (2006)
Dark Celebration (2006)

Huff, Tanya. Blood series:

Blood Price (1991)
Blood Trail (1992)
Blood Lines (1992)
Blood Pact (1993)
Blood Debt (1997)
Smoke and Shadows (2004)

Knight, E.E. Vampire Earth series:

Way of the Wolf (2001)
Choice of the Cat (2004)
Tale of the Thunderbolt (2005)
Valentine’s Rising (2005)
Valentine’s Exile (2006)

Koehler, Karen. Slayer series:

Slayer (2001)
Black Miracles (2002)
Stigmata (2003)

Lumley, Brian. Necroscope series:

Necroscope (1986)
Necroscope II (1988)
The Source: Necroscope III (1989)
1118 VAMPIRE FICTION

Deadspeak: Necroscope IV (1990)

Deadspawn: Necroscope V (1991)
Necroscope: The Lost Years (1995)
Necroscope The Lost Years: Volume II (1996)
Invaders (1999)
Defilers: Necroscope (2000)
Avengers: Necroscope (2001)
Harry Keogh: Necroscope and Other Heroes (2003)
The Touch (2006)

Meyer, Stephenie. Twilight series:

Twilight (2005)
New Moon (2006)
Eclipse (2007)

Moore, Christopher. A Love Story series:

Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story (1995)
You Suck: A Love Story (2007)

Newman, Kim. Anno Dracula series:

Anno Dracula (1992)
The Bloody Red Baron (1995)
Judgment of Tears (1998)

Saberhagen, Fred. Vlad Tepes series:

The Dracula Tape (1975)
The Holmes-Dracula File (1978)
An Old Friend of the Family (1979)
Thorn (1980)
Dominion (1982)
A Matter of Taste (1990)
A Question of Time (1992)
Seance for a Vampire (1994)
A Sharpness on the Neck (1996)
The Vlad Tapes (2000)

Schreiber, Ellen. Vampire Kisses series:

Vampire Kisses (2003)
Kissing Coffins (2005)
Vampireville (2006)

Shayne, Maggie. Wings in the Night series:

Twilight Phantasie (1993)
Twilight Memories (1994)
Twilight Illusions (1995)
Beyond Twilight (1995)
Born in Twilight (1997)
Twilight Vows (1998)
Twilight Hunger (2002)
Embrace the Twilight (2003)
Run From Twilight (2003)
Edge of Twilight (2004)
Blue Twilight (2005)
Prince of Twilight (2006)
 VERSE NOVELS 1119

Strieber, Whitley. Hunger series:

The Hunger (1980)
The Last Vampire (2001)
Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life (2002)

Wolfe, Gene. Urth: Book of the Short Sun trilogy:

On Blue’s Waters (1999)
In Green’s Jungles (2000)
Return to the Whorl (2001)

Pike, Christopher. The Last Vampire series:

The Last Vampire
The Last Vampire 2: Black Blood
The Last Vampire 3: Red Dice
The Last Vampire 4: Phantom
The Last Vampire 5: Evil Thirst
The Last Vampire 6: Creatures of Forever.

Further Reading
Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995;
Battis, Jes. Blood Relations: Chosen Families in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Jefferson,
NC: McFarland & Company, 2005; Day, William P. Vampire Legends in Contemporary
American Culture. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2002; Frayling,
Christopher, ed. Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula. Oxford: Faber and Faber, 1992.
A.J. GRANT

VERSE NOVELS
Definition. The verse novel shares with the novel all the latter’s traditional fea-
tures except the medium of prose. In a present-day perspective the verse novel may
seem an anomaly or a rudimentary form, since narrative fiction currently implies the
use of prose. However, the verse format for the novel has never fallen quite out of
use, although distinctly on the wane since the mid-nineteenth century, until a sud-
den upsurge was indicated towards the end of the twentieth century.
The closest relatives of the verse novel are, on the one side, prose fiction, and, on
the other, narrative poetry. Just as the realist tradition is commonly considered the
backbone of the novel in prose, the verse novel, building on formal conventions
from the lyrical tradition, shows a tendency to veer toward the non-narrative
moments of lyrical contemplation. The application of the term verse novel is conse-
quently somewhat shifty, sometimes denoting fiction with the emphasis on the
strong narrative plot dynamic characteristic of the realist mainstream novel, and
sometimes, not infrequently nor without genre complications, denoting long poetry
sequences held together by a common theme but otherwise characterized by the tra-
ditional priorities of the lyrical genre.
The verse mode (re-)adopted in some narrative fiction from the last decades of
the twentieth century directs attention to the verbal work of art as existential state-
ment, relying on elaborate structure and cultural resonance, of collective cultural
experience amassed dynamically over time. The distinction between prose as the
medium of narrative fiction, and verse, signalled by rhyme and rhythm, as the
medium of poetry, is, however, a distinction valid only in a traditional genre con-
text. In the broad perspective of contemporary culture, including popular and mass
1120 VERSE NOVELS

culture, versification with rhyme and rhythm is the resort of pop, rock, and jazz
lyrics, rap and dub recitation/music, and of the ubiquitous jingles of advertising.
Perhaps, then, in the wider context of the communication and artistic modes of
present-day mass society, a novel written in verse does not seem so strange and dis-
turbing as it may to a reading audience of a more traditionalist orientation.
History. In a long literary history, the use of prose for the epic or narrative genre
is a relatively recent invention, coinciding with the rise of the novel in partial con-
tinuation of and reaction to the conventions of the verse epic. When in 1742 Henry
Fielding prefaced his picaresque novel Joseph Andrews with the observation that he
presented to the public a “comic epic poem in prose,” his observation symptomati-
cally reflected a contemporary need for the justification of his chosen prosaic
medium of discourse. Fielding had to make proper space for his new species in an
already existing order of literary texts originating in antiquity, among which the
medium of prose for narrative fiction was not to be taken for granted. Whereas
prose as the vehicle of fiction was coming into its own at the time of Fielding’s apol-
ogy, verse, however, lingered on for fictional narratives inclining towards medieval
and Renaissance romance. They were tales of love and valour usually set in exotic
places and medieval eras, and relying on varieties of quest for their plots. Romantic
writers such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Southey, or Lord Byron cultivated verse
romance either as a still productive format or as deliberate pastiche.
However, the verse medium for narrative fiction, even of the romance kind, was,
by the mid-nineteenth century, indisputably turning into a sub-generic niche, over-
taken by narrative fiction in prose. Tennyson was one of the last British poets to
employ verse romance in his Arthurian tales. In American literature Henry
W. Longfellow cultivated the verse-narrative format in Hiawatha (1855), an epic
about Native Americans, as did Herman Melville in the convoluted story of a con-
temporary American’s meditations and encounters in Palestine, Clarel: A Poem and
Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876). In Britain Elizabeth Barrett Browning used the
verse format for her female bildungsroman Aurora Leigh (1857), and in 1862
George Meredith published his narrative sonnet sequence Modern Love. Surely
Browning’s tour de force The Ring and the Book (1868-69) stands out as the last
major achievement of narrative fiction in verse before the literary format made its
reappearance toward the end of the twentieth century.
Trends and Themes. From the mid-1980s the verse novel seems to have become
productive once again. The writers of the verse novels singled out for attention
below do not seem to share any retrospective desires in the direction of re-establishing
a grandiose modern epic, which would, anyway, have implications far beyond the
verse mode. What they share, however, is a postmodern multi-media-conscious
audience of a very heterogeneous nature. To that audience the novel as book is just
one form among many in a very large information, entertainment, and infotainment
market. The presentation of narrative of the mainstream realist novel is increasingly
taken over by the screen media, and widely distributed poetry is a matter of lyrics
for mass-marketed popular music.
Contexts and Issues. The long poems that came out of the modernist upheavals
in literature tended to follow the experimentalist path of dedicatedly modernist
writing rather than continued on the highways of realism or romance in verse.
This modernist tendency has not necessarily been out of touch with the popular,
as the success of proto-modernist Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology
(1915) in its day amply demonstrated. But long, modernism-related poems have,
 VERSE NOVELS 1121

A NEW NARRATIVE ART FORM

There is no denying that the mainstream realist novel still has considerable audience appeal,
but competing with film and TV serials, features, and docudrama, it is no longer in almost sole
dominance for fulfilling the craving for narrative.The rise of the verse novel should be seen
in perspective of newly emerging narrative art forms, new combination modalities available
among the media, and complex audience segmentations in constant flux. There are three
“explanations” of the postmodern verse novel: generically as rudimentary epic, narratologi-
cally as metafictional experiment, or socially as aesthetic “re-grouping” in response to new
synaesthetic formations.This last one has the advantage of being able to appeal directly to an
audience not necessarily familiar with literary history, as required for the first two, but yet
definitely highly aware of contemporary media forms.The verse novel, especially when per-
formed, combines narrative drive with musical dynamics, a combination found in shorter
measures of duration in pop-music ballads.

on the whole, been more successful with critics than with reading audiences. This
applies to works like T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), Hart Crane’s The Bridge
(1930), David Jones’s In Parenthesis (1937), Ezra Pound’s The Cantos (published
accumulatively since 1925 until the complete 117 cantos appeared in 1970),
William Carlos Williams’s Paterson (1946-1958), Charles Olson’s Maximus cycle
(1950-70), Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger (1968-1975), and Louis Zukofsky’s A
(1967-1978). Alongside have appeared volumes of verse devoted to specific
themes or topics in the manner of the lyrical sequence or cycle, but likewise lack-
ing the narrative drive of the novel and tending towards the metaphorical. The
British poet John Hartley Williams uses the expanding American West as the set-
ting of his loosely connected poems in Bright River Yonder (1987). American
author Marilyn Nelson Waniek’s The Homeplace (1990), about her family history,
and B. H. Fairchild’s The Art of the Lathe (1998), about factory life, are likewise
thematically and setting unified collections of poetry, based on the single poem as
the constituent unit. Derek Walcott’s The Bounty (1997), Tiepolo’s Hound (2000),
and The Prodigal (2004) are atmospheric poetry on the theme of cultural/ethnic
difference strongly rooted in explorations of the poet’s Caribbean background and
his troubled sense of home. Fiona Sampson’s and Carol Ann Duffy’s respective
volumes of love poems, The Distance Between Us and Rapture (both 2005) are
poetry sequences rather than narratives.
If the verse novel faced a moratorium between the mid-nineteenth century and the
late twentieth century, extended verse narrative of a non-fictional kind is found in
the verse memoir. Among twentieth-century successors to the long, autobiographi-
cal poem of which William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805) forms the epitome in
English literature, are A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad (1896), John Edward
Masefield’s The Everlasting Mercy (1911), Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal
(1939), John Betjeman’s Summoned by Bells (1960), and Jackie Kay’s The Adoption
Papers (1991).
Reception. The literary phenomenon of the verse novel has as yet no dedicated
critical literature. There has been some critical interest in the long poem as a par-
ticular lyric phenomenon. In 1909 appeared W. M. Dixon and H. J. C. Grierson’s
The English Parnassus: An Anthology Chiefly of Longer Poems. The selected
poems, by no means all of them long, were poems known to be popular and of
1122 VERSE NOVELS

varied “narrative, didactic, satirical, elegiac, eulogistic, and reflective” kinds, and
“neither epical in scope nor yet wholly lyrical in quality” (Dixon 1909, vii). In
1986 Margaret Dickie published On the Modernist Long Poem, a study of American
modernist long poems. According to Dickie there is a contradiction in the mod-
ernist privileging of the brief moment of lyric insight, focusing on the metaphor,
and the cultivation, nonetheless, of long poems by such modernist poets as T. S.
Eliot or Ezra Pound. She found that this very insight on the part of the poets
“developed into satire, but satire without much laughter or mockery . . . . And in
this mode, the movement from The Waste Land to The Cantos is toward an
increasingly self-conscious, despairing, and conservative end” (Dickie 1986,
153). The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics from 1993 has
“verse novel” under the heading “narrative poetry,” using it as an example of
“interpenetration of modes,” a kind of narrative poem that “consciously
exploit[s] a sort of hybridization” (New Princeton Encyclopedia 1993, 815).
Referring to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh as the work that “first
comes to mind,” Leonard Nathan, the author of the encyclopedia article, quotes
from R. Edmond’s 1988 study of Browning, Affairs of the Heart, to the effect
that the aim of the text is to give “that attention to everyday life which the novel
manages so easily, without relinquishing the manner, power, and concentration of
poetry” (815). In other words, the verse novel is seen not so much as a novel
(re-)employing lyric means as the other way round, as narrative poetry availing
itself of the (realist) novel’s phenomenological range. Professor Nathan goes on
to suggest Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962) as a “more complex” example of
the verse novel. In 2004 Brian McHale published The Obligation toward the
Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems. As indicated in the title, the object
of the study is the postmodernist-marked long poem subject to critical scrutiny
within the framework of postmodernist discourse parameters, which in an earlier
work he had been instrumental for instituting. In the same year appeared in
Orbis Litterarum: International Review of Literary Studies Lars Ole Sauerberg’s
“Repositioning Narrative: The Late-Twentieth-Century Verse Novels of Vikram
Seth, Derek Walcott, Craig Raine, Anthony Burgess, and Bernadine Evaristo,”
which attempted to account for the renaissance of the verse novel since about
1980 in contexts of genre and prosodic issues, and with a view to the intertex-
tual implications of the verse novels in focus.
Selected Authors. Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate (1986) is a fictional narrative,
paratextually signalled as a “novel written in verse” (back cover) and “The Great
Californian Novel” (hype with reference to Gore Vidal, front cover). It is in thirteen
chapters, of which the individual chapters consist of forty to sixty stanzas of four-
teen lines of a somewhat irregular iambic-tetrameter prosodic pattern. The rhyme
pattern in each stanza is ababccddeffegg, so we have sonnets of the English or
Shakespearian variety with a final couplet, especially suited for a twist in the tail, a
punch line or any other narrative effect relying on a conclusive thrust. Such a
description is one that we expect in a perspective of literary history, and one on
which the discussion of the choice of the four-foot rather than the traditional five-
foot metre is discussed in his fifth chapter.
A comprehensive vista of literary history opens out, bearing not only on the his-
tory and typology of verse forms, but also on the cultural implications (satire, etc,)
signalled by Seth’s reference to “Hudibrastic tricks.” But to the reader unac-
quainted with such detailed literary-historical detail there is hardly more to be got
 VERSE NOVELS 1123

out of this stanza than that the breathlessness clearly conveyed by the rhythm is a
matter of a need to hurry. (The literary historian would undoubtedly savor the
oblique carpe-diem allusion to Andrew Marvell of “had I world and time” in addi-
tion to noting the Hudibrastic prosody). If the reader is offered an explanation,
although of relative import depending on range of literary-historical knowledge,
and as late as more than one-third into the narrative, this information relates to
one part of the rationale for verse rather than prose in The Golden Gate.
Inspiration and source is Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin from 1823-31,
about the eponymous world-weary Russian officer and gentleman and his self-
afflicted frustration in love. So the explanation of the choice of verse rather than
prose for his Silicon Valley romance is double: there is the “have fun and try it” of
5.3.12, and there is the joy experienced by reading Pushkin, which is described as
“spring of pleasure,” “joy and inspiration,” and then generally in the metaphor of
source evoked by “spring:” “Sweet-watered, fluent, clear, light, blithe” (5.5.6-9). All
in all a justification very much in terms of the Horatian dulce, inviting subsequently
to reflection on the complementary utile.
Looking for origins in the Pushkin source pays off the literary historian and offers
the reader appreciating metafictional maneuvrings ample material as well. But for
the contemporary common reader, not necessarily aware of this point, there is a nar-
rative which is surely to be contextualized in quite another and in its own ways as
rigidly codified kind of narrative, the ubiquitous situation comedy of TV soap
opera, whose conventions tend to format large areas of contemporary culture. Lay
readers not initially scared off by the “strange” lay-out of the text will recognize
both the world described (Californian rich and smart-set locale) and the anecdotal
structure of the sitcom dialogue as a homology to the setting and the punch-line
final-couplet structure of Seth’s sonnets respectively.
The American poet, flautist, literary theorist, and ex-confederate soldier Sidney
Lanier (1842-1881) is the focal point of Andrew Hudgins’s verse novel (or novella)
After the Lost War: A Narrative (1988). Hudgins’s narrative appears as Lanier’s
autobiographical recordings, with the American Civil War as the great public and
personal watershed. Hudgins has Lanier become increasingly preoccupied with
what Wilfred Owen later called the “pity of war” and the need for a stoic frame of
mind generally, as well as with the futility of the Confederate cause.
The plot of the narrative keeps pace with Lanier’s life, with some deviations
from the biographical progression in the form of musings and flashbacks. Lanier,
who for the last years of his short life taught English literature at Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore, applied his interest and competence in music to develop
rhythmical structures modelled on music and following the free flow of spoken
language. Like British fellow poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, Lanier substituted
for regular, accentual metre logaoedic variation between the number of
unstressed syllables, using also the musical-beat principle as his inspiration.
Hudgins, therefore, resorts to different stanza formats, but all of them unrhymed
and in the logaoedic cadences of the subject of his verse novel. The voice of
Lanier in Hudgins’s verse novel only once lets on the kind of rhythmical dynamic
aimed at. Shortly after the end of the war, Lanier seeks convalescence from his
consumptive disease away from the humidity of his native Georgia. In the desert
tracts of the west he sits down to comfort himself with his flute, but finds it dif-
ficult to get the rhythm right: “Because the flute’s a woodland instrument,/I felt
incongruous in the desert quiet./ But soon my playing built a decent forest”
1124 VERSE NOVELS

(Hudgins, 51). And then suddenly there is an approximation of his playing to the
sound and movement of nearby women washing clothes with stones at the river-
side. Their dual rhythmic performances conclude:

And all the while they held their rhythm:

Slow primitive—slow, loud and certain.
But as they worked and I played,
I heard my thoughtless melody
allure them slightly from the beat (51–52)

The organic naturalness of the rhythm, including the slight variations from the
beat, is contrasted later with the fictitious Lanier’s vehement reaction against the
waste of the war: “I’ve come to hate/the lost cause and the cult of Beulah” (107).
Before reading this conclusion he sees the maimed boy soldiers in terms of Latin
verse. Boys who had been able to conjugate Latin verbs “now limp the streets of
Beulah Land./The walk long-short, long-short, and mock/the Latin line, their bod-
ies swaying to/the music of dead languages” (107).
Hudgins has modernized the mid- and late-nineteenth-century pomposity of
Lanier’s style that present-day readers find hard to swallow, but his account of the
man’s life made a point of communicating it in such prosodic terms as Lanier would
surely have approved of.
By its title Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990) invites epic contextualization. On a
reader ignorant of “world literature,” a great many points and passages of the nar-
rative will be lost: the Homeric plot parallels, the names of characters from Greek
mythology, the references to Virgil’s Aeneid, and to Dante’s great Renaissance epic,
whose terza-rima pattern is the one selected for Walcott’s verse narrative. The eru-
dite author also incorporates innumerable instances of intertextual dynamics draw-
ing on a vast and encyclopaedic knowledge of literature and of (colonial and
postcolonial) history generally.
References to the Homeric epics, both as structural underpinning throughout
and as scattered elements, are quite overt, to the point of insistence even, so the lit-
erary historian may note that the narrator is extremely aware of his project as one
in line with the epic tradition. The consistent metre and rhyme ensures a reading
or listening experience akin to that of verse epic, supposedly, according to tradi-
tional epic poetics, lending dignity to the subject. Now, the low mimetic of the nar-
rative on the whole provides an ironic angle to the notion of any bona-fide
adoption of the epic format, so the literary historian might wish to draw a parallel
to James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), likewise a low-mimetic application of the tradi-
tional epic, but in prose. Joyce himself suggested that in an age made unheroic by
the pervasiveness of the common, the common man can be made to appear heroic
given the right context, and thus Joyce applied a Homeric framework for Mr.
Leopold Bloom. But Walcott goes a step further, a step that cancels out this line of
interpretation, and by doing so shifts the validation of interpretation away from
the literary historian and over to the reader, and by the same stroke obliterates the
need for literary-historical guidance—a realisation summed up only a few pages
further on when the narrator declares: “You were never in Troy, and, between two
Helens, //yours is here and alive;” (p. 313, ch. LXII, ii) and underlined by the
resumption of the sea image of the final verse: “When he left the beach the sea was
still going on” (p. 325, ch. LXIV, iii).
 VERSE NOVELS 1125

Walcott’s Omeros is, for all practical effects, a verse novel. Its ostentatious draw-
ing on epic and its intertextual virtuosity turn out to be symbolic of a cultural mem-
ory which, eventually, is a matter of indifference to life here and now. By the same
token, the common reader as implied reader is re-installed after having been put off
by the host of learned implications, being virtually told to resist the onslaught of lit-
erary tradition.
Like Vikram Seth, Lyn Hejinian used Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin as her inspiration
and model for Oxota: A Short Russian Novel (1991). But unlike Seth Hejinian did
not choose to follow in the immediate footsteps of the Russian poet by adopting the
regular sonnet scheme as structural principle. Her sonnets—270 in all, divided epi-
cally into nine books, of which the last one is a coda —are unrhymed units of 14 lines
(cp. “Even though we don’t rhyme—ever/We achieve fidelity, we engage in gluing,
sucking, seizing, and fusing/Adherence is difference” (ch.104, p. 118)). But the line
lengths vary widely, all lines starting with a capital letter but all ending without any
indication of partial completion in the form of full stop punctuation. The free verse
imposes a certain order: “The rain fell, but even the irregularity of the drips couldn’t
obliterate the rhythm that attaches occasion to memory” (ch. 136, p. 151). Whereas
Seth’s Pushkin-derived narrative in its plot structure seems almost a pastiche of
nineteenth-century melodrama, Hejinian offers a narrative much less adhering to
narrative models, having her narrator observe, “But traditionally a novel integrates
a person with the life it leads” (ch. 88, p. 100). The teleological implications of the
novel are remarked upon in the final lines of chapter 109: “However there is a dan-
ger that life, being narrated, will turn into an ‘adventure,’ and every adventure moves
inexorably towards resolution - but how can I say that I don’t like adventure?/I think
now of the truly startling antiquity of the sensation that this is happening “(p. 124).
Oxota means hunt in Russian, and the entire narrative could be said to be a hunt for
existential significance by a circle of Russian friends with whom the narrator spends
time in Russia as the Soviet Union begins to decompose in the 1980s.
Lyn is named as the central consciousness of Lyn Hejinian’s Oxota and offers spo-
radic comments on form, as when an opposition is suggested: “An elegy is continu-
ous/It is slow and not alarmed/ . . . But this is a novel, in the literature of context”
(ch. 23, p. 33). The difference between the prose and the poetry medium is noted
but not elaborated on in the remark “Poetry is compressed according to one scale
and prose according to another” (ch. 34, p. 44). Poetry is granted the edge some-
what further on: “Poetry is violent/the meanings of the words annihilate each other,
Arkadii said/In this sense all the acts of the Marquis de Sade imitate writing”
(ch. 43, p. 53). The author returns to the idea of compression once more: “There is
a third principle, said Borya, and it’s compression/Poetry anticipates a love of
thinking/Yes, but also the mobility of experience/Untargeted experience” (ch. 45,
p. 55). Hejinian’s “short Russian novel” reads in the manner of the loosely struc-
tured episodic idea-cum-discussion novel familiar to readers of Wyndham Lewis,
Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, or Don DeLillo.
According to the front-flap marketing blurb, Craig Raine’s History: The Home
Movie (1994) is “an epic history of Europe from 1905 to 1984,” a designation recur-
ring with a variation in the concluding commendatory remarks in the note: “Craig
Raine’s History: The Home Movie is a novel. It is an epic poem. It is the best film
you’ll ever read. There is nothing like it in literature.” All these designations, however,
have in common the indication of narrative, and Raine’s text is a loosely composed
narrative, a historical family novel, about members of two inter-married families, one
1126 VERSE NOVELS

Russian and Jewish-bohemian artistic, one British and middle-class professional. As it

also spans most of the twentieth century, it clearly earns the epithet of epic according
to the broader and popular contemporary use of the concept and term.
Raine’s media-consciously entitled History: The Home Movie consists of eighty-
eight poems (including a quite brief prologue) of varying length but sharing the
same pattern of unrhymed triplet and somewhat irregular trimeter stanzas. In
addition there is a genealogical-tree preface, outlining the family patterns of the
Pasternaks and the Raines, respectively. From a literary-historical point of view the
narrative achieves its epic dimension by subjecting the fates of the two families to
momentous forces outside the control of the individual, in the clash of competing
civilizations. Here we have the trajectory of Soviet-Russian Communism and the
rise and fall of Fascism/Nazism, pitted against the tradition of British pragmatism.
As the condition of exile is the common lot of postcolonial mankind in Derek Wal-
cott’s Omeros, the genocide of European Jewry is the central pivot in Raine’s narra-
tive, tracing its causes and effects in a wide variety of attitudes, tendencies, and
behaviour, both national and individual, from 1905 to 1984.
There is no intratextual evidence of reflections on the coming into being of Raine’s
text, on its “debt” to literary history. This is left completely to the flap-text designer(s).
To the lay reader the contemporary sense of epic will prepare her or him for large-
screen phenomena, the association to the cinema quite in keeping with the second part
of the title of the work, history as “home movie.” Just as Seth’s narrative makes good
sense to a reading audience familiar with TV situation comedy, there is, in the very
title of Raine’s narrative, an invitation to contextualize in terms of contemporary big-
screen-media dynamics. Home movies being an alternative source of entertainment
and information to potential book readers, providers of media material have long
since introduced infotainment, with the fictionalization of the factual as a very popu-
lar and, hence, routine production recourse. Nothing works better for history to be
made alive than to introduce the human element in terms of focused individualism,
preferably with all kinds of detail, romantic, melodramatic, sordid, prurient, and so
on. This is exactly what Raine does in his narrative. Each individual part (chapter or
poem) is a kind of scene, a tableau of a certain year of the century in perspective of
either branch of the family, lending dramatic power by novel-like particularization to
whatever particular situation in the large-scale unfolding of history is at stake, also
frequently drawing on the anecdotal for comic-relief purposes.
Anthony Burgess’s Byrne (1995) offers ample intratextual evidence of generic
context both adhered to and discarded. The narrator of the text, Tomlinson
(Burgess 1995, 147), described as “an inferior pressman, salaried/To race for scan-
dal round the spinning globe” (40) purports to have been commissioned by one
Michael Byrne, born 1900, to write his biography, expressly in a form commensu-
rate with his self-estimation. (“He thought he was a kind of living myth. . . .”)
The narrator is well aware of generic traditions as manner of literary treatment
relative to content. It is therefore very apt that what his taskmaster may have asso-
ciated with Ariosto, and hence with a certain high-mindedness and dignity, was
made a perfect medium of the mock-heroic in Byron’s Don Juan. The narrator turns
out to be a very deft handler of rhyme, enhancing the potential for humorous and
witty effects in the concluding couplets of the ottava rima. For example, “He’d not
been following the daily Zeitung./He heard the news with wide eyes and a dry
tongue” (33), or even more atrocious ones like “His origin was Minsk or Pinsk or
Moscow. Pe/Rusing Tim’s chart he called for a bronchoscopy” (129).
 VERSE NOVELS 1127

The bathos is indeed part of the attitude to the subject matter, the kitschy music,
painting and general life style of Michael Byrne, which is made clear when the nar-
rator stops to explain further his use of verse on the man considered merely “good
garbage for my garbage bin” (p. 40).
When the scene is shifted to the “occluded beauty/Of winter Venice,” (83), the
narrator finds occasion to change from one verse mode borrowed by Byron, and
subsequently from Byron by Byrne’s biographer, to the likewise borrowed and re-
borrowed Spenserian stanza of Childe Harold. The narrative proceeds in a manner
relative to the slower progress of Spenser’s hexameter stanza and with less formal
occasion for the word play invited by the couplets of the ottava rima. Changing
back into the Ariosto/Byron verse format in part four, the narrator expresses relief
and regret at the same time. Ottava rima holds out until the finale, when Byrne, con-
sidered dead long ago, returns to face his many bastard children in London. He has
John Gielgud (!) read five sonnets that “sum up all our annals/In five disjunctive but
connective panels” (140). These five sonnets purportedly written by Michael Byrne
are flanked by two delicately lyrical poems, altogether producing a coda-like con-
clusion to the verse novel.
The narrator-persona of Byrne: A Novel, having sided implicitly with
Wordsworth and Eliot in his distinction of “high-flying” poetry from merely “plod-
ding” verse, makes no secret of his pragmatic attitudes and his disdain for what is
out of his range, as when he assumes a rather populist stance on James Joyce
“butchering English” (11). If the reading is to be wholly successful, it is indeed
required that the reader know of Anthony Burgess’s warm love for and outstanding
expertise on the work of Joyce. The informed reader identifies a narrator detached
from the author at an early point in the narrative, an observation with important
consequences for the response to what follows, which will have to be refracted in a
system of complex irony.
Byrne is, ultimately, a discussion of existential issues bearing on twentieth-
century reality with all its cruelties and paradoxes (“Human pain meant/But little
in the Gulf War’s visual grammar, a/Big feast of death to feed the cinecamera” (54))
showcasing a father and three of his sons balancing precariously on the thin line
dividing being from seeing. Split between complete anarchy on the one hand, when
all being is reduced to seeming, and, on the other, strongly deterministic outlooks,
parodied by Burgess in the treatment of the Rushdie fatwa transposed to a Muslim
dislike of Dante as well as of the one twin brother’s project of making a TV epic
out of Calvin’s life. There seems no way out of this, apart from what is suggested
by Tim, the apostate priest, when musing on his doomed future. In combination
with the final line of the narrative, “Blessing the filthy world./Somebody had to”
(Burgess 1995, 150), there seems to be a concession to, even investment of hope in,
form or craft as that which confers some modest degree of meaning on a “filthy”
and meaningless world. Applied to the verse novel dismissed so peremptorily by the
narrator, who would have preferred the prose novel, had he not been commis-
sioned by Byrne senior, there remains the facts of prosodic impact and the tradition
of literary history, both of which mark out the particular manner of this narrative
from any prose version.
David Mason’s The Country I Remember shares with Andrew Hudgins’s After
the Lost War: A Narrative (1988) the theme of the American Civil War. In terms of
length tending toward the novella rather than the novel proper, its twin narrative
strain combined with its temporal scope qualify it as novel rather than short story.
1128 VERSE NOVELS

The two strains of the double narrative are sustained in the form of retrospec-
tive: Mrs. Maggie Gresham looks back on her life two years before her death in
1956. During a railway journey Maggie dreams of her childhood, when around
1880 she and her family moved from Illinois to Washington, ending up in a big
house in Pomeroy in 1900. The years ensuing were for Maggie an attempt to dis-
cover her destiny. A certain restlessness combined with a vague artistic calling made
her unable to settle down until she reached California in her mid-thirties. Her story
is one of self-insight but also that of a family looking for new opportunities just
before the closing of the frontier. Her story hints at her father’s life. Lieutenant
Mitchell was made an officer in the Union army on joining because of his fighting
experiences in the West. Mitchell recalls his years as prospector, farmer, and sol-
dier; his thoughts go back to the Civil War, the last part of which he spent as a
POW, weakened by malnutrition.
Both narratives of recollection are conveyed in seven-line unrhymed stanzas, pul-
sating in a loose iambic measure that may, over stretches, be subject to scansion
according to Andrew Hudgins’s Sidney Lanier-inspired logaoedic metre. The pulse
of the rhythm provides a discreet progressive insistence, from the opening lines’ ono-
matopoeic anapaestic variation: “The rattle and way of the train as it clattered
across/leagues of open grassland put me to sleep,” (3) to the quiet pondering of “I
had an idea I would write a book,/but I could never sit still long enough” (38).
Lieutenant Mitchell is allowed the last words, concluding that “America/is made
by those who want to change themselves-” (50), and adding very practically, “I’ve
told these tales before, but wanted someone/to set them properly on paper, now,/in
case my mind in old age starts to drift” (55). What we have from Mitchell is the
story of the atrocities of the American Civil War, in contrast to Hudgins, seen from
the Union side, and the story of national expansion and settlement. Mitchell’s sen-
ior view fades ultimately into Maggie’s quasi-blessing on life in general: “and I was
moved by everything that moved” (49).
Bernadine Evaristo’s Lara (1997) only reveals its verse mode to the reader upon
actually starting to read the text, or to the very circumspect reader who prefers to
garner a thorough sense of the full textual lay-out before reading. To such a reader
the last part of the text, the “index of first lines,” 140 in all, will signal the conven-
tions of poetry collections rather than those of prose fiction (Evaristo 1997,
145–147). Apart from this rather well-hidden signal, no paratextual information or
hints of verse are offered to prepare less than circumspect readers, who, as argued
above, have most likely learnt to associate fellow writer Mike Phillips’s back-cover
praise “A beautiful and exciting epic” with historical sweep and big-screen scope.
The short biographical note prefacing Evaristo’s text concludes “Lara is her first
full-length work of fiction” without revealing the mode of discourse.
The narrative centers on the eponymous heroine, the fourth child of an Irish
mother, Ellen, and Nigerian father, Taiwo, born in 1962, following her youth in
London and her attempts to come to terms with her ethnicity, including visits to
Lagos and Bahia as the epitome of the quest for roots. The narrative begins in 1844,
setting the scene for the itineraries of Lara’s father’s ancestors from Nigeria to Bahia
and back again before the father set out for London and better prospects in 1949.
The verse novel consists of 140 sections, none of them exceeding in length a
printed page, several verse paragraphs filling not quite a whole page. Concession to
formal traditions of the novel is made by division into 14 chapters bordered by pro-
logue and epilogue. The individual chapters do not follow chronologically one after
 VERSE NOVELS 1129

another, but, with the Bildung of Lara as the central issue, offer a timeline broken
by frequent flash-backs to provide the causes in the past for present-day events. The
verse may at first sight appear to scan somewhat irregularly, but as soon as the
reader realizes the importance of spoken performance playing off against a some-
what hurried speech rhythm and begins to shape the dynamics of experiencing the
text accordingly, the text unfolds its full rhythmical potential as narrative engine
complementary to the narrative drive. In most verses five main stresses stands out
clearly, creating a blank-verse drive, but there is an overall predilection for a falling
trochaic cadence, with dactyls and spondees arresting and countering the rising
iambic movement of the traditional blank verse.
The verse retains a pulse of five beats to a line, around which it builds its local
effects by braking or speeding up, effects created by constant rearrangement of
rhythmical patterning to suit the semantic import of the given moment. It is, though,
quite in keeping with the paratextual reluctance of Lara to stand out from a tacit
norm that the text, with one possible exception, refuses to discuss its own versifica-
tion. The possible exception, which is when Lara’s father confesses to a fondness for
traditional verse, makes a very subtle point to do with rhythm: “he preferred a good
rhyme really, /to chug a poem along” (80). Although offering no rhyme, the regu-
larity of the three iambic stresses of “to chug a poem along” offsets with finely cal-
culated effect the freedom provided by reading Walt Whitman, when the last part of
the line is read with two stresses only, thus underlining the reaching out: “Still, this
man took him places.” (Emphases added to suggest stress/beat.)
Evaristo’s choice of the verse mode lends substantiality to words in themselves. It
is this attention to the verbal as the construction site for meaning rather than as its
translucent filter which explains why the lyrical with its verbal play depending pri-
marily on metaphor becomes such a natural part of Evaristo’s enunciations, as in a
passage describing the countryside where Lara’s mother Ellen was sent for safety
during the war. But there is more to it than just invitation to lyrical passages natu-
ralized by the verse environment. A passage like the one just quoted, which reads
like so much poetry of the idyllic Georgian school, may be what we expect from
poetry, but it is singularly out of tune with the postcolonial theme sounded in Lara.
In the context it indicates the kind of culture and the ways, here rendered by litera-
ture, in which this British culture is traditionally disseminated, how Britain is “sold”
both at home and abroad. The verse mode with its rhythmical arrangement of
sound is closer to the dynamics of the signification process than the prose employed
by realist fiction, which implies pre- or extra-verbal signification. Evaristo’s verse
novel is written from the vantage point of verbal density, as it were, rendering any
fixed meanings insecure as they dissolve into a wealth of interacting signifiers, with
the five beats of the lines as the sole point of stable verbal orientation.
The full title of the Australian poet Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse
(1999) makes plain its generic affiliation from the very start. Apart from the verse
mode, made up of eight-line stanzas of highly irregular blank verse, the fictional nar-
rative stands out from the mainstream realist format of the novel by its recourse to
the device of magic realism. Suffering psycho-somatic trauma from having wit-
nessed atrocious treatment of women in Turkey during the First World War and
being prevented from coming to their rescue, Friedrich (Fredy) Boettcher loses his
sense of touch. Fredy acts as a kind of everyman representing the necessary immu-
nity to face the realities of a cruel twentieth century. His numbness only goes away
when, at home in Australia for good, he realizes the need to forgive.
1130 VERSE NOVELS

A passage reads like a turn of the screw on Coleridge’s ancient mariner being
required to bless the symbol of evil, the water snakes for the winds to move again
and the albatross to fall from his neck. Fredy’s final line, “But there’s too much in
life: you can’t describe it” (255) is, contrary to the negation, an affirmation of life’s
crowdedness, and hence the need for pre-emptive forgiving.
Murray’s verse novel does not present any external evidence in explanation of the
author’s choice of narrative mode. The title emphasizes its intended generic category
as novel, whereas the publishers, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, categorize it as poetry,
in both the bar-code data on the back of the book and the Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data entry. Fredy Neptune engages with traumatic twen-
tieth-century world history. The body of its hero reacts to atrocities by calling atten-
tion to the non-working of the tactile sense. The reader, perhaps grown insensitive
by an overkill of smooth-prose stories of suffering, is analogically forced to recon-
sider the very nature of the linguistic medium by its subjection of the word game of
verse.

Bibliography
Burgess, Anthony. Byrne. London: Hutchinson, 1995.
Dickie, Margaret. On the Modernist Long Poem. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986.
Dixon, W. M. and H.J.C. Grierson, eds. The English Parnassus: An Anthology Chiefly of
Longer Poems. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1909.
Evaristo, Bernadine. Lara. Tunbridge Wells, Kent: Angela Royal Publishing, 1997.
Fielding, Henry. Joseph Andrews. 1742. London: Dent (Everyman’s Library), 1962.
Hejinian, Lyn. Oxota: A Short Russian Novel. Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1991.
Hudgins, Andrew. After the Lost War: A Narrative. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988.
McHale, Brian. The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems.
Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 2004.
Mason, David. The Country I Remember. Brownsville, OK: Story Line Press, 1996.
Murray, Les. Fredy Neptune . New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.
Preminger, Arthur and T.V.F. Brogan, T.V.F., eds. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry
and Poetics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Raine, Craig. History: The Home Movie. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1994.
Sauerberg, Lars Ole. “Repositioning Narrative: The Late-Twentieth-Century Verse Novels of
Vikram Seth, Derek Walcott, Craig Raine, Anthony Burgess, and Bernadine Evaristo.”
Orbis Litterarum: International Review of Literary Studies 59.6 (2004): 439–464.
Seth, Vikram. The Golden Gate. 1986. London: Faber and Faber, 1999.
Walcott, Derek. Omeros. London: Faber and Faber, 1990.

Further Reading
Dickie, Margaret. On the Modernist Long Poem. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986;
Dixon, W. M., and H.J.C. Grierson, eds. The English Parnassus: An Anthology Chiefly of
Longer Poems. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1909; McHale, Brian. The Obligation
toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems. Tuscaloosa and London: University
of Alabama Press, 2004.
LARS OLE SAUERBERG
W

WESTERN LITERATURE
Definition. While most people recognize a Western novel when they see one, defin-
ing the genre is another matter. Today’s postmodern Western genre generally empha-
sizes a dominant male or female hero undergoing a series of dangerous ordeals or
tasks in a lawless culture of unrestrained violence and sex in a place loosely called
the West during the nineteenth century. But such a definition must be qualified by
contrasting today’s Westerns with those of the past. As with other action genres of
twenty-first century popular fiction, Westerns have changed dramatically from older
versions of the genre.
The geographic American West has always captured the imagination of Americans
and Europeans alike as a place apart, and to a degree that remains true today. The
region’s vastness seems to allow one to feel closer to uncompromised nature. But
human development of the West has significantly shaped our perception of it. It was
once the frontier, representing a way of life that no longer is. Traditional or mod-
ernist Western novels, which include most Westerns up through the 1990s, cele-
brated something that was lost. New or postmodern Westerns, as a rule, no longer
concern themselves with nostalgia. Historically the old West was a place just ahead
of civilization, just ahead of the law. It was a place once inhabited by exotic native
peoples. Great stories from this frontier romanticized the historic West: Lewis and
Clark’s expedition, the discovery of gold in California in 1849, the wagon trains
traveling from St. Louis to Oregon, Indian battles such as Little Big Horn, Washita
Creek, and Wounded Knee. And this historic West was inhabited by larger-than-life
personalities: General Custer, Crazy Horse, Wyatt Earp, Jesse James, Billy the Kid,
Geronimo, Calamity Jane. Above all else, it was a time and place of violence.
Survival skills were a necessity in a dangerous, demanding environment. The old
West tested one’s character, producing a disproportionate number of heroic charac-
ters and ideals.
Modernist Westerns celebrate this imaginative construct of the West. Not all nov-
els that are located geographically in the Western United States qualify as Westerns,
1132 WESTERN LITERATURE

and neither do all novels that are located historically in the frontier territories. Mod-
ernist approaches to the genre would say that in order for a story to be a Western,
as opposed to merely a novel of the West, a story must partake of three elements: It
must capture the Western Moment, the Western Myth, and the Western Place.
The Western Moment refers to a specific time in U.S. history, whether real, myth-
ical, or nostalgic. Usually that moment is placed after the Civil War and before the
turn of the twentieth century. However, frontier stories occurring before the Civil
War are said to be Westerns because they look forward to the Western Moment, and
some stories set in the early twentieth century can qualify as Westerns because they
look back nostalgically to the Western Moment.
The Western Myth refers to the accumulated stories and traditions that through
the decades have modified, often considerably, recollection of historic fact through
oral tradition, customs, cinema, and popular fiction. Westerns do not reflect factual
history. They reflect the myths that have accumulated through the years. What Billy
the Kid was like as a real human being at a real moment in history is relevant to a
Western story only as one element out of many in telling his story. For example, the
myth gives us a handsome, devilish but likeable left-handed gunfighter, still a youth
with a measure of puckish innocence. Above all else, the Western myth is based on
individual prowess, and violence is simply a part of life. Westerns assume their read-
ers are acquainted with the myths of the West.
The third element, Western Place, can generally be defined as a mythical place in
a frontier American setting, usually, though not always, west of the Mississippi
River. Early Westerns especially celebrated the Great Plains, but more recent West-
erns have tended to celebrate the deserts and borderlands with Mexico. The chief
requirement for Western Place is that it be open and endless. Thus, fenced off farms
in Kansas and Montana cannot be part of the Western Place.
But this modernist understanding of the Western genre is rapidly losing ground in
the twenty-first century. For postmodern readers of Westerns, the old stories of the
West remain in the background, but they no longer capture the imagination. Post-
modernism, by definition, repudiates the myths of the past, including the Western
myths. For one thing, those myths tend to reflect a macho white male perspective.
They encompass stories of white men conquering Native Americans and women and
“winning” the West. Few postmodern readers can accept the values upon which
modernist twentieth century Westerns were based. Thus creators of Westerns today,
whether authors, editors, or corporate publishing enterprises, must search for new
ways to overturn older paradigms of the Western story.

THE TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY WESTERN

Twenty-first-century Westerns acknowledge only marginally the historical and geographical
myths of the American West. Their West is a mythical place of open landscapes and huge
panoramic vistas, but not specific landscapes. Even when named, most geography in twenty-
first century Westerns is deliberately imaginative, or, as when a Ralph Compton novel is set
on a real historic trail, such as the Whoop Up Trail, the emphasis is on the exaggerated exoti-
cism of the place, not its true location in Montana.What ties a postmodern Western to the
past is primarily the violence, unrestrained sex, lawlessness of society, and individual deter-
mination to survive.
 WESTERN LITERATURE 1133

History. The commonly known modernist Westerns trace their origins to Owen
Wister’s The Virginian (1902) a best-selling novel of the West that has always been
recognized as an important literary work. The novel centers on the tension between
the hero, the Virginian, and Trampas. The most famous line of any popular Western
comes when Trampas makes the mistake of calling the hero “a son of a bitch.”
Quick as lightning the gun comes out and the Virginian says, “When you call me
that, smile.” At the end the two shoot it out. Nearly all the elements of the tradi-
tional modernist formula Western can be found in this prototype novel.
Subsequent early Westerns tended to look back toward a West that had only very
recently closed and been won (for white people), a West that could be no more.
Zane Grey became a best-selling Western writer with titles like Riders of the Purple
Sage (1912) and The Light of Western Stars (1914), which, while full of sanitized
violence and action, often read like travelogues celebrating the West as a place that
retained its enchantment despite encroachments of civilization. Other early writers
were B. M. Bower, a female Western writer who wrote a series about the Happy
Family of the Flying U Ranch. Clarence Mulford wrote a series of Westerns from
the World War I era through the late 1930s comprising tales of the Bar 20 Ranch
and its leading hero, Hopalong Cassidy. All of these writers prided themselves on
the historical and geographic authenticity of their Westerns, and from the beginning
Western writers and readers have insisted that such authenticity was essential to the
genre.
It didn’t take long, though, for another trend to develop, a trend with more influ-
ence on postmodern Westerns than authenticity—the imagined Western. Beginning
with the pulp magazines of the 1920s, a new kind of Western began to emerge, a
Western that gloried not in the authentic but in the bizarre, in the purely imagined
landscape and in purely mythic history. The greatest of all pulp writers, Max Brand,
wrote 422 novels before his death on the battlefield during World War II. The typ-
ical Max Brand Western makes no effort to center its story in any identifiable loca-
tion other than somewhere in the West. Town names, mountain ranges, rivers are
nearly all imaginative. Historical events and real-life characters have virtually no
presence in Brand’s Westerns. Instead, his characters often are near superhuman and
mythical in stature and presence, sometimes aided by near supernatural agents: dogs
that can run faster than horses, horses larger than anything imaginable and
endowed with unbelievable speed. For Brand, Westerns were not authentic anyway,
so he need not bother to focus on authenticity or historical accuracy.
By the middle of the twentieth century, then, these two major trends—the authentic
and the imaged—had been established. Hollywood reinforced the imagined Western
with its B-grade Westerns of the 1930s and 1940s. Italian or “Spaghetti” Westerns of
the 1960s continued the film trend away from authentic Westerns; this same period
marked the shift of popular Western fiction away from authenticity as well.
Nevertheless, authentic Westerns dominated the paperback market. Writers of the
1940s and 1950s, such as Ernest Haycox and Luke Short, wrote about a real West.
Louis L’Amour, arguably the most successful Western writer of all time, nearly
monopolized the market from the 1950s until the 1980s. His reprinted novels con-
tinue to account for a large percentage of total Western sales in the twenty-first cen-
tury despite being dated. For L’Amour, geographic authenticity mattered as much as
any other element of a Western. Could a story really be a Western if its location
could not be identified on a map? L’Amour fans have always claimed that if the
L’Amour hero was crawling on his belly down a gully away from the sniper up on
1134 WESTERN LITERATURE

the ledge, you could count on it that Louis L’Amour himself once crawled down that
same gully on his belly. Readers today, though, look back on L’Amour’s Westerns
and simply see a flawed modernist interpretation of the Western myths. His female
characters and his marginalized minorities are unlike any that ever truly existed, and
his views of human psychology are more superficial than insightful.
In the late twentieth century, L’Amour’s Westerns were dominating the fiction
bookracks. But other versions of Westerns were developing in influential European
markets. Lucky Luke comic books were highly popular in France and French-
speaking cultures. Lucky Luke was a wildly imaginative cowboy ever in pursuit of
the Daltons. English Black Horse Westerns were also becoming popular. Late in the
century Western-themed video games began to appear, based upon the imagined
West of Spaghetti Westerns. In short, the public perception of the Western myth was
changing rapidly as the twentieth century came to a close. As in other areas of
American popular culture, the modernist paradigm was changing.
This transformation inevitably found its way into popular Western paperbacks as
well. During the 1980s and 1990s, alongside all the Louis L’Amour Westerns, a new
kind of Western began to appear, the adult Western. Playboy Press was one of the
first publishers in this field. Large numbers of these very thin Westerns cropped up
seemingly everywhere. Among the most popular were the Longarm series, the
Trailsman series, and The Edge series. The Longarm series has been running since
1978 and still flourishes with over 300 novels in the series, written by numerous
writers under the name Tabor Evans. The Edge series, actually written by a single
author, George G. Gilman, begun in 1972, has been revived by Gilman since 2002
with a much older Edge character. These novels have two things in common: page
after page of extraordinarily gruesome violence, and incredibly graphic, explicit sex.
They are strictly imaginative Westerns, bearing almost no reference to historic
authenticity. For many non-readers of Westerns, these novels have become the dom-
inant image of what Westerns are all about. The traditional Western myths, for this
audience, are dead. Publishers and authors, realizing this trend, had to change with
the times as the new century dawned.
And thus the not-so-subtle change has occurred at the beginning of the twenty-first
century from modernist Westerns to postmodern Westerns. Modernist Westerns saw
the West as formative of masculine character. With white males at the center, all other
characters—women, Native Americans, all non-white peoples—were marginalized.
Modernist Western plots were based upon regenerative violence, violence that actu-
ally purified evil and brought about salvation. Authentic representation of history
and geography validated the white male experience—after all, one could say, this was
the way it really happened. The cultural codes of twentieth century modernism in
general pervaded these Westerns as they based action and decisions by protagonists
squarely upon the practical, the reasonable, and the thoroughly secular.
Postmodern Westerns written since 2000 rarely depict the West as formative of
masculine character. In fact, the West might be said generally to corrupt character.
Postmodern Westerns tend to be much more violent than modernist Westerns, yet the
violence cannot be considered regenerative or redemptive. While many feminist crit-
ics might still see strong male domination in twenty-first century Westerns, compar-
atively speaking, these new Westerns are not strictly centered in a white male
paradigm. At least the possibility of multiple paradigms is being considered. Stories
centered on formerly marginalized peoples, as well as stories with women characters
equally strong and consequential as men are common today. The nineteenth century’s
 WESTERN LITERATURE 1135

feminine ideal (that is, a woman whose primary duties were to support her husband
and to tend to domestic affairs) is no longer validated in Western literature, nor con-
sidered normative. Instead, women in postmodern Westerns generally have a past or
depth of character that allows them to assert themselves equal to men. Prostitutes
often take the role of the typical woman of the West in an egalitarian way. Unre-
strained and extensively described sex is typical but not necessary. Most sex is casual,
commoditized, or the result of violent rape. But like the modernist Westerns, post-
modern Westerns still are basically secular.
Trends and Themes. Many of the common trends and themes of Westerns written
since 2000 were well in place by the late decades of the previous century. Because
modernist Westerns seemed to have devolved into many versions of the same basic
formulas, and because the market for the older Westerns was simply growing stale,
recent writers have been forced to look for something new to write about and new
ways of presenting their stories.
A far greater variety of subject matter appears in today’s Western stories than in
the past. For one thing, the Western Moment has been stretched backward as well
as forward. No longer do we assume a Western will take place strictly after the Civil
War or before 1900. For example, Mountain Men novels have become a popular
subgenre of Westerns. William W. Johnstone made his reputation with his Moun-
tain Man series and his First Mountain Man series. Larry McMurtry’s Berrybender
Narratives series take place in the 1830s and 1840s. Numerous Westerns have con-
centrated almost exclusively on Native Americans. Don Coldsmith’s Westerns relate
stories of Native Americans prior to European contact. Generally, the traditional
formula stories, such as gunfighter narratives, are de-emphasized unless they can be
told from an unusual perspective, through the eyes of a female character as in Jane
Candia Coleman’s Doc Holiday’s Woman, for instance.
Contexts and Issues. A basic assumption among cultural critics when approaching
any work of fiction is that the work truly reflects the era and culture in which it is
written, rather than the culture of the fictional setting. A Western, for instance, is
never about the old West. It is always about the culture of the time it was written. As
we look back at Westerns of the twentieth century we can see how they responded to
such historical events as the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the Civil
Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and the Women’s Movement. Westerns written
during World War II might emphasize savage warfare with Native Americans, for
instance, as a way of reflecting upon the savage combat with the Japanese.
So to what current developments do Westerns written since 2000 relate? The
beginning of the twenty-first century saw the most aggressive direct attack on the
United States in recent history with the September 11, 2001 attacks. A war with
seemingly no end in sight with Iraq has occupied the U.S. military since 2002.
Though these events have certainly impacted American culture, it is too early to
determine how they will be reflected in Westerns. Other potential cultural trends
that may appear in upcoming Westerns include stories about invasions from our
neighbors to the south or the onslaught of alien peoples into a domesticated terri-
tory. We might see savage warfare stories again as well as stories with tyrannical
powerful leaders. There is no doubt that Westerns will change in the twenty-first
century, but exactly what trends will emerge is yet to be seen.
Reception. As with all popular media since 2000, the popular Western market
depends heavily on Internet visibility. Virtually all writers have their own Web sites
for their fans, and publishers devote web space to their Western products. Several
1136 WESTERN LITERATURE

writers such as William W. Johnstone have long-running discussion boards for their
fans to chat about their novels. Writers such as Ed Gorman maintain continuous
blogs for their fans to read, and the fans themselves blog regularly about their
favorite writers and books. No longer can we consider the path of a Western as sim-
ply a chain of author/publisher/bookseller/consumer.
The main industry awards for Westerns and Western writers are the Spur Awards
and the Western Heritage Awards. The Spur Awards are given each year by the
Western Writers of America. The somewhat more prestigious Western Heritage
Awards are awarded annually by the National Cowboy and Western Heritage
Museum of Oklahoma City.
The commercial market for mass market traditional Westerns (as opposed to
Westerns with contemporary settings) is serving readers of Westerns well in 2007.
According to the Western Writers of America Web site, “Nielsen BookScan, which
covers about 70% of U.S. book sales, says Western sales have increased by 9% in
2005 and 10% thus far in 2006. Books in Print says the number of Western titles
produced has increased from 543 in 1995 to 901 in 2005.”

AWARDS FOR WESTERN FICTION

The Spur Award, from the Western Writers of America

2007: Best Western Long Novel: The Night Journal by Elizabeth Crook.Viking/Penguin.
2007: Best Western Short Novel: The Shape Shifter by Tony Hillerman. HarperCollins.
2006: Best Western Novel: Tie for Spur Winner: Camp Ford: A Western Story by Johnny
D. Boggs, Five Star Publishing; and The Undertaker’s Wife by Loren D. Estleman,
Forge Books.
2005: Buy the Chief a Cadillac by Rick Steber. Bonanza Publishing
2004: I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company by Brian Hall.Viking.
2003: The Chili Queen by Sandra Dallas. St. Martin’s Press.
2002: The Way of the Coyote by Elmer Kelton. Forge Books.
2001: Summer of Pearls by Mike Blakely. Forge Books.
2000: Masterson by Richard S.Wheeler. Forge Books.
Western Heritage Awards
2008: Harpsong by Rilla Askew.
2007: Broken Trail by Alan Geoffrion. Fulcrum Publishing.
2006: Buffalo Calf Road Woman, The Story of a Warrior of the Little Bighorn by Rosemary
Agonito and Joseph Agonito.The Globe Pequot Press/Two Dot Books.
2005: And Not to Yield, by Randy Lee Eickhoff. Forge Books.
2004: Spark on the Prairie:The Trial of the Kiowa Chiefs by Johnny Boggs. Signet.
2003: Moon of Bitter Cold by Frederick J. Chiaventone. Forge Books.
2002: The Master Executioner by Loren D. Estleman. Forge Books.
2001: Gates of the Alamo by Stephen Harrigan. Alfred A. Knopf.
2000: The Contract Surgeon by Dan O’Brien.The Lyons Press.

From Western Writers of America (http://www.westernwriters.org/spur_award_history.htm)

From National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum (http://www.nationalcowboymuseum.
org/default.aspx)
 WESTERN LITERATURE 1137

For writers of Westerns, the market news is not so promising, however. Books in
Print lists include Print on Demand titles and vanity titles, and there are quite a few
Westerns printed by vanity presses each year. But nowadays most publishers put all
their non-catalog books into Print on Demand status. Thus, these books don’t carry
much reward for the authors. Worse yet, the entire Western paperback offerings are
dominated by reprints of titles by Louis L’Amour, William W. Johnstone, and Ralph
Compton. There are probably fewer than thirty working authors of mass market
traditional Westerns in the U.S. market today. But again, readers can enjoy a vari-
ety of Westerns being placed on the shelves.
During the twentieth century Westerns were popular with movie makers, and sev-
eral Westerns by Zane Grey, Max Brand, Louis L’Amour and others were adapted
to film. However, since 2000 only a few Westerns each year have come out of
Hollywood. Two of the most notable Western films based on Western novels since
2000 are Open Range (2003) based on Lauran Paine’s novel of the same name in
the same year, and Broken Trail (2006) based on Alan Geoffrion’s 2006 novel of the
same name.
Selected Authors. Obviously, plenty of writers who made their mark in the later
decades of the last century are still active today and their work hasn’t necessarily
changed simply because we are in a new century. One such author still producing
plenty of Westerns in the twenty-first century is Elmer Kelton, the Texas writer who
published his first Western in 1955 and won the first of his seven Spur Awards in
1956. Besides the Spur Awards, Kelton has been voted all-time best Western author
by the Western Writers of America and is a four time winner of Western Heritage
Awards. Kelton’s novels haven’t changed noticeably over the several decades. The
Way of the Coyote (2001) is set, typically, in Texas. It is the Reconstruction period
and thus the story plays off conflicts between Reconstruction agents and defeated
Confederate sympathizers. We are intended to read the novel with sympathy for the
defeated Texans. Rusty Shannon, the main character, loses his farm due to legal
shenanigans by the state authorities. In fact, all the Reconstruction agents and sup-
porters are uniformly evil. No doubt Kelton counts on his readers sharing the views
put forth in the novel. However, a more objective reading reveals attitudes incom-
patible with postmodern culture. Kelton, still the modernist, takes a racial realist
view at every opportunity. In other words, he evidently sees his characters’ race as
inherent in their biological makeup rather than the more modern view that race is
something constructed by culture. An African American character, former slave who
is humbled by the Ku Klux Klan, supports his former oppressors and reviles the
Reconstruction agents. One of the leaders of the Klan turns out to have a softer side.
Perhaps most disturbing is a main character who was captured as a child and
brought up in Comanche ways. He is “rescued” and, though he longs for his tribal
ways, made to become “civilized.” The title, The Way of the Coyote, comes from a
major episode when he casts off his white ways and uses his tribal skills of tracking
like a coyote in a long chase and pursuit scene. He saves another white boy captured
by evil Comanche. At the end of the novel Andy symbolically cuts his hair and
merges fully into his real people. No matter what his upbringing, his real racial iden-
tity is white Euro-American. The novel won a Spur Award in 2001.
Also making his reputation in the late twentieth century, Loren Estleman is that
rare genre writer for whom character and style can transcend plot. Tending toward
the Hemingway-esque, Estleman pares his prose close and delights in showing the
humanness of the neglected and the stereotyped characters of the mythic West. A
1138 WESTERN LITERATURE

Michigan native who wrote his first novel in 1976, he has remained consistently
popular since 2000. According to his Web site, he has written 59 books along with
numerous short works and he prides himself on writing exclusively on a manual
typewriter. Estleman, like other Western authors, frequently crosses into other gen-
res; he has received numerous awards for his mystery novels. His Westerns have
earned him five Spur Awards and three Western Heritage Awards.
Estleman’s The Master Executioner (2001) won a Western Heritage Award. A
carpenter takes up the profession of hangman and, through an apprenticeship with
a veteran hangman, learns the trade to become a master executioner. But Oscar
Stone becomes so devoted to perfectionism in his trade that he loses everything in
his dedication to what others see as abhorrent. Here, as in his other novels,
Estleman de-emphasizes typical Western formula elements. In The Undertaker’s
Wife (2005), also a Spur Award winner, Estleman again chooses an unglamorous
profession and develops a compelling story along with a shot of unexpected
romance. Told through the point of view of his devoted wife, the undertaker is pres-
sured to cover up a suicide on the corpse of a prominent financier in order to avert
suspicion that economic times aren’t what they seem. The novel features lots of
inside the embalming room story material.
In Black Powder, White Smoke (2002) Estleman attempts to weave two parallel
main plots with two subplots in a way not typical of older genre Westerns. Again he
focuses on characters often ignored by classic Westerns: the African American
owner of a brothel out to avenge the mutilation of one of his girls, and a lawless
reveler who kills a Chinese immigrant running from an urban Chinese gang. The
Adventures of Johnny Vermillion (2006) is a tale of an acting troupe out to gouge
anybody and everybody, Wild West style. Shakespeare may be playing onstage but
the bank’s being robbed down the street.
Loren Estleman’s most popular series is his Paige Murdock series. Murdock is a
U.S. Deputy Marshal working for Federal Judge Harlan A. Blackstone. The main
character frequently travels far afield in the pursuit of his duties. In Port Hazard
(2004), Murdock travels to the Barbary Coast and in White Desert (2001) he pur-
sues a ruthless band into the Canadian North Country.
Author Cotton Smith’s motto, according to his Web site, is “Delivering a well-
honed psychological edge to western history,” and, indeed, his novels do emphasize
characters’ interior reactions to the various dilemmas they encounter. Pray for Texas
(2000), for example, filters through the psyche of a crazed Confederate cavalryman
who cannot accept defeat and thus joins an outlaw band. In his zeal to fight on, he
confronts his childhood of abuse from his preacher father and confronts the demons
of his past. The novel was nominated for the Western Heritage Award.
Peter Brandvold published his first Western in 1999. The back covers of all of his
books boast, “Brandvold writes a lot like L’Amour.” And, sure enough, Brandvold
writes what at first might appear to be traditional, modernist Western fiction. His
novels look like authentic Westerns. The Romantics (2001), for example, is based on
a typical chase and pursuit after gold treasure deep into Mexico trailed by vile des-
perados, former Confederate followers of Bloody Bill Anderson. There is plenty of
action and wonderfully portrayed regenerative violence. But Brandvold does recog-
nize women, and it is through the presence of a female protagonist that The Roman-
tics shifts slightly from modernist Westerns. One of the main characters is Maria, the
gorgeous Mexican wife of the character with the treasure map. Maria’s beauty
proves a problem all along the journey as she faces numerous rape attempts. But she
 WESTERN LITERATURE 1139

can ride and shoot and she proves as tough as anybody. At the end the gold is found
and she survives along with the novel’s hero, Jack Cameron. The Romantics is a
twenty-first century Western with soft graphic language and merely suggestive sex,
but graphic detailed violence and a portrayal of Native Americans as savages.
Although Westerns have traditionally been written by male authors from a male
character’s point of view, the genre has always included a handful of talented female
writers such as B.M. Bower, and there are probably more women writing Westerns
today than ever before. The Western Romance market, for example, is flourishing.
A.H. Hope, Elizabeth Crook, and many others are actively marketing Westerns,
both traditional and romantic.
Elizabeth Fackler, who made her reputation in the 1990s with Westerns with
strong women protagonists, has devoted most of her efforts to crime fiction since
2000. However, she returned to Westerns in 2006 with Bone Justice, a story with
horrific implications of a kindhearted outlaw on the road to reform suddenly faced
with helping two women captives escape a destiny as Mexican prostitutes.
Probably, though, the dominant woman writer of Westerns today is Jane Candia
Coleman, who has produced a wide variety of work beyond mass market Westerns.
She has won two Spur Awards and one Western Heritage Award. For her popular
Westerns she typically has taken historical women at the margins of the great West-
ern narratives and retold the history from their points of view. Her 2005 novel Doc
Holliday’s Woman tells the story of the marginalized Big Nose Kate, a character in
all the Wyatt Earp movies and stories but always at the edge of a scene, never the
center of attention. An earlier novel, Tombstone Travesty: Allie Earp Remembers
(2004), tells the old story from the perspective of Virgil Earp’s wife. Coleman is a
Western writer actively working to counter male-dominated interpretations of his-
tory and myth. She is also contributing to a trend that seems more prevalent in the
last few years than in earlier popular Westerns: the novelization of great historical
events and characters. While Hollywood has always been fascinated with history,
paperback Westerns have generally kept the real characters and events of the West
on the edges of the fiction. Max Brand probably never had a reference to a single
historical character or event in any of his novels. But today we are revisiting history
in popular fiction as well as on film and television.
Johnny D. Boggs’s 2006 book East of the Border demonstrates this concept well.
Like Loren Estleman, Boggs is drawn to nineteenth-century theatre. This is the story
of Buffalo Bill Cody’s first debut with show business. It primarily follows the 1873-
1974 theatre season of the Buffalo Bill Connection as it tours the East. Boggs tells
the story through distinct points of view, in alternating chapters, of Texas Jack, Wild
Bill Hickok, and Buffalo Bill himself. Other than these features, the novel is
episodic, as it follows the theatre troupe from one town to another. Jack is the edu-
cated one; he was once a school teacher in Florida and has read widely. He marries
an Italian singer-actress on the road. Hickok drinks heavily and works the girls.
Rough and rowdy, Cody is the real business mind behind the troupe. We see him
coming to an awareness that his future is in show business. East of the Border is a
novel about theatre, about performance—a very untraditional Western. There are a
few good fights but overall surprisingly little violence. Sex in the novel is mainly sug-
gestive. And it all takes place in the East. Boggs’s more recent Camp Ford, a base-
ball story set in the Western Moment, won the 2006 Spur Award.
John D. Nesbitt, like Boggs, often disregards Western formulas in his fiction
though he may borrow formulas from other popular genres. Lonesome Range
1140 WESTERN LITERATURE

(2006) is a strange book. Everything about its packaging and marketing makes it
look like a traditional popular Western, but there is little gunplay and few fistfights.
An occasional scene of ranch work appears. The main character is a bookkeeper.
Basically this Western is the story of an adulterous relationship carried out over sev-
eral years from one town to the next. There is plenty of romance but not a typical
romance plot. At the end the relationship is ended.
Like many Western authors, Ed Gorman writes primarily in other genres. Never-
theless, he is a Spur Award-winning writer. Perhaps as representative as any of his
novels is Cavalry Man (2006). The Cavalry Man is Noah Ford, a federal agent. In
Willow Bend to investigate the death of a fellow federal agent, Ford becomes
involved in the hunt for a local bank robber, Mike Cheney, who just happens to be
carrying on an affair with the bank president’s wife. Cheney’s sister interests Ford
in the complicated case. Thereafter the novel is built around a lengthy chase and
pursuit through rugged winter mountain terrain. Brutal sexual violence occurs along
the way to a young mother in an isolated cabin and Ford must take the young child
along who witnessed its mother’s horrible death. Gorman has mastered suspense in
a typical postmodern Western.
Although Ralph Cotton in interviews pays homage to Elmer Kelton, his own
novels differ markedly from Kelton’s modernist Westerns. In Blood Lands (2006)
the protagonist is a woman with a past, who, after her natural father, a retired
army colonel is killed, undergoes a brutal gang rape by a group of masked South-
ern sympathizers in the waning days of the Civil War. Discarded by the masked
thugs, Julie Wilder desperately wants at first merely to escape town. But all she has
in the world is the farmstead of her father’s. Slowly she begins to identify the
masked thugs one at a time. She experiences another sexual assault. Then she meets
Baines Meredith, a professional bounty hunter. After a period of time away from
town she returns, still a demure woman who just wants to be left alone—until she
has her chance. Then with all the skills of a gun and a whip, learned from
Meredith, she sets out to exact her revenge. The plot owes much to Max Brand’s
1930s Destry Rides Again.
Elmer Kelton and Peter Brandvold, in the novels mentioned earlier, tend to por-
tray Native Americans as unredeemed savages. Dan O’Brien, however, has a two-
novel sequence based upon the Sioux “uprisings” of the 1880s in which he develops
a slightly more progressive view of Native American history. The main character in
the series is a true historical character named Valentine McGillicuddy, a reservation
physician in one novel, The Contract Surgeon (the Spur Award winner for 2000),
who is promoted to Indian Agent for the Pine Ridge Reservation in The Indian
Agent (2004). The narrative of The Indian Agent follows closely the historical
events of Red Cloud’s various rebellions, the famous buffalo hunt with cattle sub-
stituting for buffalo, and even the Wounded Knee massacre. Throughout we follow
McGillicuddy and his wife in his various political ventures in Washington as well as
on the reservation. Although the character Red Cloud garners readers’ sympathy,
O’Brien seems to support the official efforts to merge Native Americans into main-
stream Euro-American culture, while portraying characters who advocate preserv-
ing tribal heritage as foolish and comical.
One of the main differences between twenty-first century Westerns and those of
the previous century has been the growing prominence of series Westerns. Several of
the novels so far mentioned are parts of these series, and most of the prominent
Western writers of today have multiple series in progress. Peter Brandvold, for
 WESTERN LITERATURE 1141

example, has the Sheriff Ben Stillman series, the Rogue Lawman series, the
.45-Caliber series, and the Bounty Hunter Lou Prophet series.
Larry McMurtry, perhaps the dominant Western writer of the 1990s with his
Lonesome Dove series, has been developing a new series since 2000. The Berryben-
der Narratives is a four-novel series following a group of English settlers across the
frontier in the 1830s and 1840s. The series, like the Lonesome Dove books, has a
lengthy list of characters and multiple plot strands running throughout. Interest-
ingly, when the characters we have been following for four novels finally reach Santa
Fe, most have been killed off or died and there are no real happy endings. The series
reads like a reality television show.
Richard S. Wheeler, the very prolific Montana writer, is the 2001 recipient of the
Owen Wister Award for lifetime contributions to Western literature and a four-time
Spur Award winner from Western Writers of America. While Wheeler’s novels
include only suggestive sex and light violence, his themes and style are postmodern.
The Bounty Trail (2004), for example, follows three charming but despicable char-
acters as they try to make their fortunes in a boom town situation. Pearlygates was
a ghost town, owned by MayBelle Bertram, a beautiful woman recently divorced,
whose legal claim to the town is the total of her worldly possessions. Through one
situation after another, she is joined by Colonel C. P. Raines, a con artist, and
Arnold “Safe” Cracker, an expert in all matters of explosives. Together they plot to
start a gold rush on the town and make a fortune from all the fools they can find.
Unfortunately for them they actually strike a real bonanza which is followed by a
real gold rush and they lose the town, their mines, everything. The rest of the novel
is devoted to their efforts to try other confidence schemes, with little success.
Cracker blows up things, MayBelle turns private prostitute, and the Colonel blus-
ters from one sucker to another promising riches untold. Everything the three set
out to do is reprehensible, but the readers are meant to love these three anyway.
Wheeler has also been developing the Skye’s West series since the 1980s and has
written several volumes since 2000. The Deliverance (2003) continues the series
with its English protagonist, Barnaby Skye, a former impressed British sailor who
escaped on the West Coast in the 1830s and worked his way inland, becoming a
famed mountain man, marrying a Crow maiden who he names Victoria and whose
command of English involves a heavy dose of colorful cursing. In this novel he and
Victoria head into Northern Mexico from the Republic of Texas to search for kid-
napped children. They meet up with a colorful trader named Childers who has an
ornate wagon of goods pulled by Clydesdale horses. He also has a trained monkey.
They are waylaid by Utes, arrested by Mexican authorities as spies, and discover the
horrors of the Mexican slave trade. Again, all the protagonists are of questionable
character but all are thoroughly likeable. Wheeler keeps the pages turning.
James C. Work has been developing the Keystone Ranch series over the last few
years. He grounds his novels in historical circumstance but also develops mytho-
logical connections. In Ride West to Dawn (2003) and The Dead Ride Alone
(2006), for example, there is a link to Arthurian legends. The Dead Ride Alone is
based on Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shallot.” Ride West to Dawn is one of the most
complex, multi-layered Westerns written since 2000, although it contains all the
classic elements of chase and pursuit, revenge, and shootout. Water mysteriously
comes up missing north of the Keystone. An old man comes to the ranch for help.
The foreman sends Will Jensen to investigate. But the cowboy comes face to face
with The Guardian who strips him of his horse, his clothes, and his dignity. In fact,
1142 WESTERN LITERATURE

through the ordeal, Jensen nearly loses his sanity. When he returns to the ranch he
deteriorates rapidly into alcoholism and dereliction. The water remains a problem
so one-eyed Kyle Owen heads north to solve the mystery. He kills The Guardian.
But the ghostly young girl, Luned, takes him by the hand and leads him to The Lady,
whom Kyle marries and becomes the new Guardian overseeing a strange network
of locks, canals, and watercourses that divert water to a large development of small
ranches and farms unknown to the outside world. Characters experience profound
change throughout the stories, and Work incorporates naturally occurring symbol-
ism to good effect. Will is essentially a good cowboy, but his character is shattered
by his ordeal and he never fully recovers. Kyle is also a good cowboy, but his char-
acter is corrupted profoundly when he becomes The Guardian. Yet the novel is left
open-ended, awaiting its sequel for resolution.
While each of these writers is developing strong careers, two writers actually
dominate the current market: William W. Johnstone and Ralph Compton. In fact,
after Louis L’Amour, Compton and Johnstone books take up the majority of shelf
space at mainline bookstores. Because large chain retailers concern themselves
almost exclusively with titles that can be back inventoried in bulk, at least as far as
mass market titles are concerned, there will usually be numerous titles by certain
authors on the shelves and very little attention paid to isolated titles by non-prolific
authors—which may partly explain the dominance of series Westerns and the dom-
inance of Johnstone and Compton novels.
Ralph Compton began his career in 1992 and started several series in the 1990s.
His longest running series is The Trail Drive series, beginning with the first title The
Goodnight Trail (1992) and continuing to the most recent, The Tenderfoot Trail
(2006). The Trail Drive series is unified by a basic premise rather than by a recur-
ring set of characters. Each book centers around various problems encountered by
a set of characters on a different historic trail. Beyond that basic premise each story
is independent from the rest. The Tenderfoot Trail (2006) is probably as represen-
tative as any. A small-time rancher gets framed for a crime. His only hope for escap-
ing jail and hanging comes from a well-heeled con man who breaks him out on
condition that he escort a group of mail-order brides along the Whoop Up Trial in
Montana to their awaiting husbands in Canada. It is a con game in more ways than
one. The women turn out to be experienced prostitutes. Along the trail savage Indi-
ans attack only to be repulsed by some trappers who really just want to steal the
women. The rancher falls in love with one of the girls who, of course, gulls him. He
is left abandoned, barefoot, with no supplies, no water, in the most desolate part of
the trail. A giant wolf befriends him, leads him to water, and rescues him on more
than one occasion. Somehow he gets his ranch back, but the girl he believed in still
turns out bad in the end. A similar series is Compton’s The Sundown Riders series,
premised around Teamsters traveling with goods-laden wagons over various leg-
endary routes. The series began with such titles as Across the Rio Colorado (1997),
The Winchester Run, (1997), Devil’s Canyon (1998), Whiskey River (1999),
Skeleton Lode (1999), and the like. This series remains active as of 2008.
Other Ralph Compton series, however, follow the lives and adventures of partic-
ular characters. The Danny Duggin series, begun in 1999, follows the career and
fortunes of a cross-dressing gunfighter, Danielle Strange, who, out to avenge the
murder of her father, takes up the persona of Danny Duggin. She rides her father’s
famous horse and carries her guns the same way he carried his. She strikes terror in
the heart of her enemies who are mystified at this gunfighter’s identity. By the third
 WESTERN LITERATURE 1143

novel in the series she has claimed her revenge, but the series continues today as
Danny Duggin finds other problems to solve. The last novel in the series is from
2003, but the Ralph Compton Web site promises more titles.
The William W. Johnstone industry has been busy since 1979 with simply an
amazing output of novels. As with Compton novels, virtually all the Johnstone
books are parts of various series. The original Johnstone series is The Mountain
Man series, which follows the exploits of Smoke Jensen, mountain man, through
more than thirty novels since 1979. A spinoff of The Mountain Man series is The
First Mountain Man series, featuring a character called The Preacher. Both these
series are still active.
But other William W. Johnstone series are more traditional. The Last Gunfighter
series and the Blood Bond series continue the formulaic Western tradition proudly.
Johnstone novels aren’t quite as sexually graphic as Compton novels but they cer-
tainly do not hold back on graphic violence. Slaughter Trail (2006) of the Blood
Bond series, for example, is premised on the idea that Matt Bodine and Sam Two
Wolves have been blood brothers since childhood when Matt saved Sam’s life. Matt
is the son of a successful rancher and Sam is the son of a Cheyenne chief and edu-
cated woman of a wealthy Boston family. He has an Eastern education. The two
brothers are so close that they can sense when the other is in trouble. In Slaughter
Trail Sam has been arrested in Mexico and forced into hard labor at a slave camp
run by an exceptionally cruel taskmaster. Matt is in Tombstone flirting with Wyatt
Earp’s fiancé when he senses Sam’s trouble. The brutality of the slave camp is
graphic and sustained.
Nearly every month, new Compton novels or new Johnstone novels appear on the
market. But Ralph Compton died in 1999. His novels are now being written by a
stable of writers who also write other novels under their own names. James A. West,
for example, wrote The Tenderfoot Trail. He also writes a series of his own called
Gunsmoke which uses all the old characters from the television series in new situa-
tions. The publishers do not hide the fact that Compton no longer writes.
The William W. Johnstone series are another matter. The books are printed with
only Johnstone’s name on the cover. Only inside on the copyright page is there a fine
print disclaimer saying that a carefully selected writer has been chosen to continue
the Johnstone legacy. Johnstone’s death was carefully kept from his fans for
three years and never acknowledged publicly. Only the fine print disclaimer admits the
death of the author. Johnstone maintained his own Web site for years and main-
tained an active discussion forum for his novels, but one blogger, shocked at hear-
ing of the author’s death, claimed to have had email correspondence in 2004, 2005,
and 2006 signed by Mr. Johnstone (who died, allegedly, in 2003). All Johnstone
books are now written by Fred Austin who gets no printed credit for his work.
Unquestionably, popular Westerns at the beginning of the twenty-first century have
changed considerably from the Westerns of the past. The essence of the Western,
whether in movies or in popular novels, is a common theme of debate among readers
and critics alike. Obviously Westerns no longer hold as large a share of the market as
in the past, but the genre is flexible and adapting for a new generation of readers.

Bibliography
Boggs, Johnny D. Camp Ford. Farmington Hills, MI: Five Star, 2005.
———. East of the Border. New York: Leisure, 2004.
Coleman, Jane Candia. Doc Holliday’s Woman. Tucson, AZ: Ravenhawk, 2005.
1144 WESTERN LITERATURE

———.Tombstone Travesty: Allie Earp Remembers. Farmington Hills, MI: Five Star, 2004.
Compton, Ralph. The Goodnight Trail. New York: St. Martin’s, 1992.
Cotton, Ralph. Blood Lands. New York: Signet, 2006.
Estleman, Loren. Black Powder, White Smoke. New York: Forge, 2002.
———. Port Hazard. New York: Forge, 2004.
———. The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion. New York: Forge, 2006.
———.The Master Executioner. New York: Forge, 2001.
———.The Undertaker’s Wife. New York: Forge, 2005.
———.White Desert. New York: Forge, 2001.
Fackler, Elizabeth. Bone Justice. New York: Western Star, 2006.
Geoffrion, Alan. Broken Trail. New York: Fulcrum, 2006.
Gorman, Ed. Cavalry Man. New York: Harper Torch, 2006.
Johnstone, William W. Slaughter Trail. New York: Pinnacle, 2006.
Nesbitt, John D. Lonesome Range. New York: Leisure, 2006.
O’Brien, Dan. The Contract Surgeon. New York: Mariner, 2001.
———.The Indian Agent. New York: Harper Torch, 2005.
Paine, Lauran. Open Range. New York: Leisure, 2003.
Smith, Cotton. Pray for Texas. New York: Leisure, 2000.
West, James A. and Ralph Compton. The Tenderfoot Trail: A Ralph Compton Novel. New
York: Signet, 2006.
Wheeler, Richard S. The Bounty Trail. New York: Pinnacle, 2004.
———.The Deliverance. New York: Doherty, 2003.
Work, James C. Ride West to Dawn. New York: Leisure, 2003.
———.The Dead Ride Alone. New York: Leisure. 2006.

Further Reading
Bold, Christine. Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction, 1800 to 1960. Bloomington:
University of Indiana Press, 1987; Calder, Jenni. There Must Be A Lone Ranger. London:
Hamish, 1974; Cawelti, John G. The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel. Bowling Green, OH: Popu-
lar Press, 1999; Davis, Robert Murray. Playing Cowboys: Low Culture and High Art in the
Western. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992; Hamilton, Cynthia. Westerns and
Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction in America: From High Noon to Midnight. Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 1982; Mitchell, Lee Clark. Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction
and Film. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996; Robinson, Forrest G. Having It Both
Ways: Self-Subversion in Western Popular Classics. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1997; Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-
Century America. New York: Harper, 1992; Sonnichsen, C. L. From Hopalong to Hud: The
Unheroic Cowboy in Western Fiction: Thoughts on Western Fiction. College Station: Texas
A & M University Press, 1978; Tomkins, Jane. West of Everything: The Inner Life of West-
erns. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992; Walle, Alf H. The Cowboy Hero and Its
Audience: Popular Culture as Market Derived Art. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green
University Press, 2000; Wright, Will. Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the West-
ern. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975; Wright, Will. The Wild West: The Myth-
ical Cowboy and Social Theory. London: Sage, 2001.

Bibliography of Websites and Homepages

Boggs, Johnny D. http://www.johnnydboggs.com/
Brandvold, Peter. http://www.peterbrandvold.com/
Cotton, Ralph. http://www.ralphcotton.com/books.html
Dorchester Publishing. http://www.dorchesterpub.com/Dorch/Genre.cfm?L1=3&L2=9
Estleman, Loren. http://www.lorenestleman.com/
Fackler, Elizabeth. http://www.elizabethfackler.com/index.html
 WESTERN LITERATURE 1145

Johnstone, William W. http://www.williamjohnstone.net/

Kelton, Elmer. http://www.elmerkelton.net/
McMurtry, Larry. http://www.simonsays.com/content/destination.cfm?tab=2&pid=328664
Nesbitt, John D. http://www.johndnesbitt.com/
Smith, Cotton. http://www.cottonsmithbooks.com/
Spur Awards. http://www.westernwriters.org/spur_awards.htm
Western Heritage Awards. http://www.nationalcowboymuseum.org/e_awar_winn_wnovel.html
Western Writers of America. http://www.westernwriters.org/news.htm
Work, James C. http://www.jameswork.com/
PAUL VARNER
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Y

YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE

Definition. Young adult literature is a fairly recent phenomenon in the sense that
it has been recognized as a distinct category by publishers only since approximately
the 1960s. Like its relative children’s literature, young adult literature has become
an increasingly autonomous genre, seeking to establish itself as a legitimate field in
the eyes of both the academic and the popular communities. One major obstacle to
realizing this goal is the difficulty in establishing what exactly constitutes young
adult literature or, for that matter, a young adult. For some, this problem pertains
to the semantics of the terminology. Across America, the terms young adult,
adolescent, teen, juvenile, and youth are oftentimes used interchangeably. Similarly,
universities offering classes in “children’s literature” oftentimes use this as an
umbrella term to refer to works written for the age groups from pre-kindergarten
through to the end of high school.
A good definition is provided by writer Steven VanderStaay:

Young-adult literature is literature wherein the protagonist is either a teenager or one

who approaches problems from a teenage perspective. Such novels are generally of
moderate length and told from the first person. Typically, they describe initiation into
the adult world, or the surmounting of a contemporary problem forced upon the
protagonist(s) by the adult world. Though generally written for a teenage reader, such
novels—like all fine literature—address the entire spectrum of life. (VanderStaay
1992, 48)

Susan M. Landt reinforces this notion by saying, “Adolescence is a time of ques-

tioning and searching as young people strive to comprehend who they are and
how they fit in the world” (Landt 2006, 692). Others have defined this genre as
including any text that is written or published for young adults or that might be
marketed to or purchased by young adults. Still others stringently say that Young
Adult literature features issues of the teenage years, such as puberty, coming of
1148 YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE

age, and initiation and maturation into adulthood. It should also be noted here
that Young Adult texts include fictional prose and poetry, nonfiction, and graphic
novels.
History. Young adult literature as we know it differs greatly from texts written
expressly for children in the early part of America’s history. James Janeway’s book
A Token for Children: Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exem-
plary Lives, and Joyful Deaths, of Several Young Children (1676) demonstrates the
desire by adults to write stories for children that would morally instruct while at the
same time edifying their spirituality. With an extremely high infant mortality rate,
and with families producing approximately seven or more children, it is no surprise
that death was a constant reality and, therefore, a main topic of conversation for
sermons and education curriculum. Supporting the Puritan doctrine of natural
depravity—that humans are born with a sin nature—Janeway’s book iterates that
children are not too young to die and therefore reinforces the Puritan desire for
children to be cognizant of their own salvation, and, by extension, personally
literate to read the Bible.
While post-Revolutionary children’s literature did not reflect the religious didac-
tic nature of books like Janeway’s did, texts written after this period still managed
to teach. In the nineteenth century, literature for children was divided by gender:
adventure stories for boys (e.g., Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick, 1868) and domestic
stories for girls (e.g., Sarah Tuttle’s Female Influence, or The Temperance Girl,
1834). By the twentieth century, American popular culture began to focus on the
youth of the country. Scholars attribute this push to “youth culture” to many dif-
ferent reasons, but many consider the fact that teens began spending more time at
school than at home an important factor, alongside the growth of media—film and
television.
Scholars have noted several important authors who contributed to the young
adult literature movement even before the genre became distinct. Throughout the
past centuries, many youths read books that were originally intended for an adult
audience. J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) became the most notable
precursor to the young adult movement. The biographical article in Contemporary
Authors notes,

As the novel stands today, it represents perhaps the most sensitive portrait of coming-
of-age in America in the years following World War II. Few other books have had as
great an impact on a generation—so much so that Holden Caulfield [Salinger’s pro-
tagonist] has entered the popular mythology of American culture alongside such figures
as Jay Gatsby and Huck Finn. . . . It is little wonder that The Catcher in the Rye became
a favorite among young people. It skillfully validates adolescent experience with its
spirit of rebellion. (“J.D. Salinger” 2005)

It was not until the 1960s that the field of young adult literature started to find
its independent niche with another groundbreaking novel, The Outsiders. As Cat
Yampbell remarks, “In 1967, Penguin published S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders and
began the market that would come to be recognized as Young Adult Literature
(Yampbell 2005, 350). Kathy Latrobe and Trisha Hutcherson support this statement
by saying,

Unlike other publishing movements, young-adult literature in the United States became
a phenomenon in almost a single year, 1967, when writers and publishers of materials
 YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE 1149

for teenagers reached beyond the simple plots and white, middle-class protagonists of
the post-World War II era and presented the more culturally diverse and socially
complex environment of the 1960s. (2002, 68)

The 1970s saw two more notable, influential novels, both by Judy Blume. Are
You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970) ushered in the subgenre so commonly
associated with Young Adult literature—the “teen problem novel,” which high-
lights a specific concern for the adolescent. Because these specific concerns mirrored
contemporary society, oftentimes these novels faded out of the limelight once that
specific problem became eclipsed by another issue. As a result, books dealing with
drinking gave way to books concerning drug use, then those gave way to books on
other issues, such as eating disorders and abuses of various kinds. Blume’s next
novel to cause quite a stir was Forever (1975), which concerns a young teen’s first
love and sexual experience. Blume was quite offended when her publisher advertised
this text as a novel for adults when she clearly had intended it for young adults.
Topics once considered taboo—including teenage sexuality—were gradually
becoming discussed as primary topics in Young Adult novels. If we compare Nancy
Garden’s Annie on My Mind (1982), which was one of the earliest stories to feature
homosexuality as a primary focus, to Beverly Cleary’s Fifteen (1956), we can easily
see how far Young Adult literature has come in terms of portraying the frankness
and gritty realism of teens’ lives.
The 1970s and 1980s also welcomed multicultural literature into the genre,
with notable novels such as Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
(1976), which won the 1977 Newbery Award and further popularized the African
American Logan family she had created in Song of the Trees (1975). Roll of
Thunder was also adapted into a three-part miniseries for ABC in 1978. The
Logan family became so popular that Taylor created a prequel to Roll of Thunder
called The Land (2001).
During the mid-1990s, VanderStraay’s ideas that Young Adult novel
“assume[d] a particular kind of coming-of-age story and a particular kind of
narrator who must live within strict ethical and narrative boundaries” (1992,
49) were quite relevant. For VanderStraay, the essential element to Young Adult
is “autonomous thought,” which oftentimes became the result of the culmina-
tion or climax of the Young Adult novel. But this did not remain the case as
more and more postmodern novels challenged the boundaries. As an unidenti-
fied editor of Young Adult books mentions in an article in Publishers Weekly,
“As more and more edgy fiction is being published, the books are dealing with
issues that hadn’t been dealt with before: oral sex, male rape, incest. There seem
to be no boundaries any more” (Milliot et al. 2003, 39). Francesca Lia Block’s
Weetzie Bat series serves as a good example of this challenge of boundaries. As
Contemporary Authors notes,

With the publication of Weetzie Bat [1989], she set the agenda for a new direction in
young adult novels for the 1990s: stories of the Los Angeles subculture replete with
sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll—stories for adults and young adults alike. With a cast of
characters ranging from Weetzie Bat, a punk princess in pink, to her lover, My Secret
Agent Lover Man, and her best friend Dirk and his boyfriend, to their common off-
spring, Witch Baby and Cherokee, Block’s novels create postmodernist fairy tales
where love and art are the only cures in a world devoid of adult direction. (“Francesca
Lia Block” 2005)
1150 YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE

AWARDS FOR YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE

By the turn of the twentieth century, many different awards had been created to honor out-
standing young adult literature, many of which are sponsored by the American Library
Association. Among these awards is the Margaret A. Edwards Award, which is sponsored by
the ALA’s Young Adult Library Services Association and School Library Journal, which recog-
nizes an author for his or her lifetime contribution to the field of popular young adult liter-
ature. Since 1988, the following authors (in chronological order) have received this award:
S.E. Hinton, Richard Peck, Robert Cormier, Lois Duncan, M.E. Kerr, Walter Dean Myers,
Cynthia Voigt, Judy Blume, Gary Paulsen, Madeline L’Engle, Anne McCaffrey, Chris Crutcher,
Robert Lipsyte, Paul Zindel, Nancy Garden, Ursula K. Le Guin, Francesca Lia Block, Jacque-
line Woodson, Lois Lowry, and Orson Scott Card (“Margaret A. Edwards Award” 2008).
The Michael L. Printz Award, annually given by the Young Adult Library Services Association
in honor of a high school librarian, honors the best book of the year for young people.
Recent winners have included the following:

2007 American Born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang. First Second.

2006 Looking for Alaska, by John Green. Dutton.
2005 how i live now, by Meg Rosoff. Random House Children’s Books.
2004 The First Part Last, by Angela Johnson. Simon & Schuster.
2003 Postcards from No Man’s Land, by Aidan Chambers. Dutton/Penguin Putnam
2002 A Step from Heaven, by An Na. Front Street.
2001 Kit’s Wilderness, by David Almond. Delacorte Press.
2000 Monster, by Walter Dean Myers. Harper Collins.

There are other awards given for young adult literature, including the National Book
Awards.The 2008 award went to Sherman Alexie for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time
Indian (Little, Brown Readers, 2007). Previous winners have included, in 2007, The Astonishing
Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation,Vol. 1:The Pox Party by M.T.Anderson (Candlewick,
2006) and, in 2005, The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters,Two Rabbits, and a Very Inter-
esting Boy by Jeanne Birdsall (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2005).
Source: American Library Association, http://www.ala.org/ala/yalsa/booklistsawards, and The National
Book Foundation, http://www.nationalbook.org

Trends and Themes. As mentioned previously, one of the growing trends in the
Young Adult literature genre is the gritty realism allowing taboo topics to be pri-
mary foci of many recently published novels by high-profile authors. Yampbell does
a great job of providing examples of controversial topics and instances where these
topics can be found: for example, rape in Cynthia Voigt’s When She Hollers (1994)
and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (1999); abusive relationships in Dreamland
(2000) by Sarah Dressen and Breathing Underwater (2001) by Alex Finn; self-
disfigurement in Shelley Stoehr’s Crosses (1991) and Alice Hoffman’s Green Angel
(2003); and teen fatherhood in Maragard Bechard’s Hanging on to Max (2002) and
Angela Johnson’s The First Part Last (2003). But probably the book with the most
controversial topics on Yampbell’s list is Linda Glovach’s Beauty Queen (1998), in
which 19-year-old Samantha Strasbourg becomes a topless dancer and heroin addict
(Yampbell 2005, 351).
As Judith Franzak and Elizabeth Noll remark, the ever-present violence that we
see and hear on the news, in films, and on the Internet desensitizes us to a certain
 YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE 1151

degree. Franzak and Noll report that the youth of today have “concerns [that] range
from tomorrow’s quiz to the kind of world that will be available to them in adult-
hood. The violence that infuses their world is eloquently captured in the genre of
contemporary realism in young adult literature”; surprisingly, they note that “little
critical attention has been paid to the role of violence in young adult literature”
(2006, 662). They go on to say that “the study of textual representations of violence
is an important and underdeveloped aspect of literary analysis” (663). Their article
applies different theoretical perspectives to contemporary, realistic Young Adult lit-
erature that contains notable violence: True Believer (2001) by Virginia Euwer
Wolff, When Dad Killed Mom (2001) by Julius Lester, Monster (1999) by Walter
Dean Myers, Big Mouth & Ugly Girl (2002) by Joyce Carol Oates, Speak (1999)
by Laurie Halse Anderson, and Who Will Tell My Brother? (2002) by Marlene
Carvell.
Furthermore, it is not just the increasing acceptance of taboo topics that charac-
terizes change in young adult literature. Contemporary technology (e.g., hypertext,
Internet, Web sites) has contributed to how Young Adult literature is structured and
conveyed to the twenty-first-century Young Adult reader. Jacqueline Glasgow
describes this latest trend as reflecting what Eliza Dresang mentions in her book
Radical Change: Books for Youth in a Digital Age (1999). The first phase of
Dresang’s Radical Theory involves changing the form or format; in describing this
phase, Glasgow notes “the following characteristics: graphics in new forms and
formats, words and pictures reaching new levels of synergy, nonlinear organization
and format, [and] multiple layers of meaning” (2002, 43). Glasgow states, “As I
examine young adult literature that reflects radical change, I find a departure from
the traditional linear, sequential novels. These books are many-voiced, rhetorically
diverse, and composed of many genres and perspectives within a single book” (42).
As an example, Dresang discusses Avi’s Nothing but the Truth (1991), which,
according to Glasgow, “reveals how Avi and other young adult authors have moved
away from linear systems to a digital age where ‘bits’ of information are nonse-
quential and rearrangeable, as exemplified by surfing the Internet” (42). Glasgow
provides several other examples of nonlinear Young Adult texts, such as the graphic
novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986), Louis Sachar’s Holes (1998), and Karen
Hesse’s Out of the Dust (1997).
Dresang’s next type of change comes with the change in perspective. As Glasgow
puts it, “Instantly available on the World Wide Web are the multiplicity of points of
view on almost any topic. Young people can weave together an understanding of
current events, people, and places by pointing and clicking on the topic” (Glasgow
2002, 44). All of this accessibility supports Dresang’s ideas of a change in perspec-
tive to allow a new voice to be heard: the young adult’s. Glasgow gives the example
of Steven Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999) to demonstrate the
first-person narration technique used more in contemporary Young Adult literature.
Finally, Dresang’s third type of change connects with what has already been
mentioned by VanderStaay, dealing with changing boundaries: “subjects previously
forbidden, settings previously overlooked, characters portrayed in new, complex
ways, new types of communities, [and] unresolved endings” (Dresang 1999, 173).
Reinforcing what Yampbell and Milliot have said, Glasgow reports,

Radical change provides an opportunity for authors to push the boundaries as they
explore actions, emotions, and life situations for youth. In doing so, the boundaries are
1152 YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE

changing in dealing with subjects such as crime, personal abuse, and racial violence. In
young adult literature, violence has become more central, bold, and graphic. While in
the past incest may have been hinted at or threatened, in radical change literature the
incest and abuse occur and must be dealt with by the protagonist. Authors like M.E.
Kerr, Laurie Halse Anderson, Francesca Lia Block, Chris Crutcher, Cynthia Voigt, and
Michael Cadnum have extended the scope of their characters’ experience to explore
prostitution, violence, suicide, incest, and rape. (2002, 49)

Context and Issues. In light of the growing acceptance and more common por-
trayal of homosexuality in American popular culture (e.g., TV shows Queer as Folk,
2000–2005; The L Word, 2004–?; Will & Grace, 1998–2006; and Queer Eye for
the Straight Guy, 2003–? and Ellen DeGeneres’s meteoric return to stardom in
Disney’s Finding Nemo, 2003, and her subsequent talk show, after outing herself on
her TV sitcom Ellen, 1994–1998, and being ousted from popularity for a while), it
is no surprise that sexual orientation is also a key issue addressed in Young Adult
literature. Patti Capel Swartz says, “While the past twenty years have shown gains
in including African American, Mexican, Latina/o, Chicana/o, Asian American, and
Native American experience in curricula, the same is certainly not true for literature
that includes experiences of [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, or intersexed]
persons” (2003, 11). And while sexual orientation as an issue has only crept slowly
into mainstream curricula, Swartz does provide examples of a few books that
positively portray the issue of sexual orientation:

Books suitable for older children include Marion Dane Bauer’s Am I Blue? Coming
Out of the Silence, several of Chris Crutcher’s sports/adventure novels, James Haskins’s
biography of Bayard Rustin, Gigi Kaeser’s Love Makes a Family, Jacqueline Woodson’s
From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun and The House You Pass on the Way, both of
which take on stereotypical constructions of race, gender, and sexuality. Kevin
Jennings’ Becoming Visible: A Reader in Gay and Lesbian History for High School is
appropriate for middle school as well as high school children. (2003, 14–15)

Thomas W. Bean and Karen Moni point out that “adolescent readers view char-
acters in young adult novels as living and wrestling with real problems close to their
own life experiences as teens” (2003, 638). They go on to remark that one of the
biggest problems adolescents face concerns identity and that “more recent post-
modern conceptions of identity recognize its complex and multifaceted character”
(639). This discussion of multifaceted identity segues nicely into this section’s dis-
cussion of contextualizing Young Adult literature into contemporary American
culture. As Pamela S. Carroll and L. Penny Rosenblum note, there still is a dearth
of Young Adult novels portraying disabilities, specifically visual impairment:

For many adolescents with vision problems in the general education classroom, there
is little opportunity to meet others who, like themselves, have difficulty seeing. Thus it
is not uncommon to find an adolescent with a visual impairment who finds he has no
one in his life who really understands the challenges he experiences. . . .
We were unable to find any recent empirical studies that examine the reading of
young adult literature by students with visual impairments. We were also unable to
locate studies that give specific emphasis to the portrayal of characters in Young Adult
literature who have vision problems. This lack most likely stems, in large part, from the
miniscule number of recent young adult books available, in which there is a main
character with a visual impairment. (2000, 622, 623)
 YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE 1153

Three of the most recent Young Adult books that do discuss visual impairment as
a primary element are Edward Bloor’s Tangerine (1997), Sally Hobart Alexander’s
On My Own: The Journey Continues (1997), and Lynn E. McElfresh’s Can You Feel
the Thunder? (1999). Using A.B. Heim’s theories, Carroll and Rosenblum provide
five ways in which novels ought to portray characters with disabilities: (1) “accurate
information must be used within the book, including the use of current terminology
to describe the disability”; (2) “avoid stereotypes of the disabled; it should provide
insight into the life of the person with disabilities”; (3) “like any other literary
work[,] a book in which the character is disabled should be well written”; (4) “the
book should confront the disability in a realistic manner, not overemphasizing the
disability but providing evidence that the character faces challenges because of it”;
(5) “avoid simply using a character who is disabled to promote the growth of a
nondisabled character in the book” (2000, 624–26).
“What must it be like for readers to find only images representing those unlike
them?” (Landt 2006, 694) is a question posed by Susan M. Landt that aptly identi-
fies another issue that has been addressed by Young Adult literature in recent
decades: multiculturalism. Landt says, “Children today have more options avail-
able. Increasingly, children’s and young adult literature include selections by and
about people of marginalized . . . parallel cultures” (694), and her article demon-
strates the strides that Young Adult literature has taken to include voices from many
different cultures, as is visible from the existence of several Young Adult literature
awards sponsored by various associations to highlight different cultures: the Coretta
Scott King Award (African American), the Pura Belpré Award (Latino/a), the Tomás
Rivera Award (Mexican American), the Sydney Taylor Award (Jewish), and the
Mildred L. Batchelder Award (foreign language translation). But an issue involving
multiculturalism still remains at the front of controversy with contemporary schol-
ars: insiders versus outsiders. Essentially, the question arises whether only authors
from a specific culture are allowed to write about that culture. Landt answers this
question by saying, “As a general rule, a book written by an author with an emic—
insider—perspective is likely to be culturally authentic; a book written from an
etic—outsider—perspective may or may not be culturally authentic” (696).
One issue that still remains to be completely addressed is the ambiguous nature
of young adult literature itself. This refers to the awkwardness of adolescence as an
in-between phase, just as young adult literature has become difficult to market. As
Yampbell notes, “the Young Adult genre and market has been problematic since its
inception. Defining and promoting the genre was, and continues to be, plagued by
four major problems: audience, ‘acceptable’ subject matter, location in stores, and
marketing and publicity” (2005, 350). Because of America’s reliance on the Internet
and technology to participate in popular American culture (e.g., voting electroni-
cally for TV’s American Idol), publishers have found a way to combine commer-
cialism with technology. For example, at www.teenreads.com, young adults can
enter a contest regarding the book Cathy’s Book: If Found Call 650-266-8233
(2006), written by Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman:

After the incredible success of our CATHY’S BOOK Comments and Clues Contest and
the RAZR Giveaway, we just couldn’t resist running ANOTHER contest! Now we’re
giving you the chance to win a 4GB 2nd Generation iPod Nano in the color of your
choice (pink, silver, green, or blue). To enter, simply watch this ultra-cool CATHY’S
BOOK trailer and answer this question—What is the name of the police officer who
1154 YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE

Cathy is speaking to? Send your answer to the question, along with your name and
mailing address to CathysBook@Teenreads.com. (Feature and Contest 2006)

This contest obviously instills a motivation beyond a simple love for reading by tan-
talizing the teenage (girl) with amazing technology prizes such as an iPod.
Reception. Young Adult literature is also not immune to scandal, as the 2006
Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism case illustrates. In April 2006, Viswanathan’s book
How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life was published. This book
chronicles the misadventures of an Indian American teenager who has been rejected
from Harvard for not being an “all American” representative. Shortly after the book
was published, the Harvard Crimson reported that passages from Mehta seemed to
surprisingly resemble two of Megan McCafferty’s novels, Sloppy Firsts (2001) and
Second Helpings (2003). At first, Viswanathan’s publishers intended to republish the
book in an edition without the “seeming similarities” because Viswanathan insists
the passages were not plagiarism but simply “internalized” portions she somehow
remembered from reading McCafferty’s books. According to the Harvard Crimson,
however, further allegations that Viswanathan also plagiarized portions of books by
Salman Rushdie, Sophie Kinsella, and Meg Cabot supported Viswanathan’s book
publisher’s decision to cancel any intended revised edition as well as the second
book of her contract (“Opal Mehta” 2006).
Harold Foster’s article in the ALAN Review discusses the relationship between
the young adult novel and film. He lists many films that are literary adaptations and
that were made approximately two decades ago or longer: Huckleberry Finn, Lord
of the Flies, A Separate Peace (first in 1972 and recently remade in 2004), From the
Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (which was made into two films, one
in 1973 with Ingrid Bergman, and one in 1995 with Lauren Bacall), I Am the
Cheese, The Chocolate War, Tex, The Outsiders, and Rumble Fish. The first line of
Foster’s article attests to the great reception of teen film adaptation: “Films are a
powerful influence on most of our students. As much as teachers may not wish to
face this fact, films compete with books as the primary mode of stories” (1994, 14).
In other words, no other genre or form of entertainment represents the pulse of
popular culture in America like the motion pictures of Hollywood. Though not
expressly American-made or acted, the Harry Potter film series based on J.K. Rowling’s
books has been, and remains, a huge force to be reckoned with. The first four films
alone rank among the top 40 grossing films of all time in the United States. With
several more films in the franchise, Harry Potter will remain in American pop
culture easily until the end of this decade and beyond.
Obviously, Young Adult texts are not the only texts to be turned into films, and
like other genres of adult literature that have been adapted for the big screen or tel-
evision, these Young Adult novels have for the most part suffered the same fate of
being hit or miss. One example of a film adapted from a teen book that did not do
well is Hoot. While Carl Hiassen’s Hoot (2002) was a critically acclaimed book and
a Newbery Honor winner for 2003 and was described by Edward T. Sullivan in
Book Links as a story “full of offbeat humor and genuinely touching scenes of
children enjoying the wildness of nature,” (2004, 61), the film, released in 2006,
unfortunately did not fare well at the box office. Averaging approximately a “C”
rating and earning only 8 million in the box office (Hoot Overview, n.d.), Hoot was
reviewed by Chicago Tribune reporter Michael Phillips, who said, “Kids are better
off with a book than a middling movie adaptation of a book” (2006).
 YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE 1155

Examples of other “misses” in Young Adult film literature are Gail Carson
Levine’s Ella Enchanted (1997), turned into a film of the same name in 2004.
Hoping to cash in on the popularity of actor Anne Hathaway’s performance in
another Young Adult literary adapted film, Miramax released a poor rendition of
Levine’s Newbery Honor winner. The film cost $35 million to make but only
managed to make approximately $22 million at the box office (Ella Enchanted
Overview, n.d.). The Westing Game (1978), by Ellen Gaskin, won the Newbery
Medal in 1979, but the straight-to-DVD movie titled The Westing Game and some-
times Get a Clue (1997), was of very little literary quality. Eragon (2003), the highly
successful beginning of a three-part epic, has attracted attention because of its being
the brainchild best seller of a homeschooled teen prodigy from Montana. Written in
a fantasy style reminiscent of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Eragon quickly turned
into a movie, released in December 2006. Reviews were mixed, and to date, the
domestic revenue of the first film of the trilogy has not matched its $100 million
budget (Eragon Overview, n.d.).
Two other teen literary film “misses” are not reflected by a dismal box office
return but rather by their performing a loose adaptation of a well-known fantasy
series: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books. The first example comes from A Wizard
of Earthsea (1968) and The Tombs of Atuan (1972), the first two books of an orig-
inal trilogy, which has been expanded with other books in the Earthsea series by Le
Guin in recent years. In 2004 the Sci-Fi television network produced Earthsea,
which combines Earthsea and Atuan into one three-hour adaptation. Also in 2006,
Le Guin’s third book in the series, The Farthest Shore (1974), was adapted by the
Japanese anime Studio Ghibli and directed by Gorō Miyazaki, son of the famous
Hayao Miyazaki, who directed well-known anime films such as Princess Mononoke
(1997), Spirited Away (2001), and Howl’s Moving Castle (2004). The film was enti-
tled Tales from Earthsea and was the number one movie at the Japanese box office
when it was released in July.
However, both of these adaptations were seriously dismissed by Le Guin. On her
Web site, regarding the Sci-Fi movie and its director’s claims of remaining true to the
spirit of the book, she says,

I wonder if the people who made the film of The Lord of the Rings had ended it with
Frodo putting on the Ring and ruling happily ever after, and then claimed that that was
what Tolkien “intended . . .” would people think they’d been “very, very honest to the
books”? (Le Guin 2004)

Her comments regarding Miyazaki were not much better:

Both the American and the Japanese film-makers treated these books as mines for
names and a few concepts, taking bits and pieces out of context, and replacing the
story/ies with an entirely different plot, lacking in coherence and consistency. I wonder
at the disrespect shown not only to the books but to their readers.
I think the film’s “messages” seem a bit heavy[-]handed because, although often
quoted quite closely from the books, the statements about life and death, the
balance, etc., don’t follow from character and action as they do in the books. How-
ever well meant, they aren’t implicit in the story and the characters. They have not
been “earned.” So they come out as preachy. There are some sententious bits in the
first three Earthsea books, but I don’t think they stand out quite this baldly.
(Le Guin 2006)
1156 YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE

Of course, there have been some moderate-to-huge successes at the American box
office as well. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, written by Ann Brashares in
2001, turned into a moderately successful motion picture in 2005, grossing over
$41 million worldwide (Sisterhood Overview, n.d.). Another well-known story, rec-
ognized by critics and popular audiences alike, is Louis Sachar’s Holes, which won
the Newbery Medal in 1999. The 2003 film stars well-known Disney Channel actor
Shia LeBeouf in the highly successful adaptation, which grossed over $70 million
worldwide (Holes Overview, n.d.). With a production budget of $26 million and a
worldwide gross of over $165 million, the film adaptation of The Princess Diaries
(2001) is one of the biggest success stories of the teen lit film genre. Based on the
2000 novel by Meg Cabot, this film stars Julie Andrews and newcomer Anne
Hathaway in a role that made her famous in American pop culture (Princess Diaries
Overview, n.d.). Furthermore, Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement (2004),
grossed more than $134 million worldwide, making it a hit as well (Princess Diaries
2 Overview, n.d.). Competing with The Princess Diaries as one of the most success-
ful teen lit film adaptations is Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events
(2004). Though it did not make a profit until accruing over $208 million world-
wide, it matches the popularity of Princess by showcasing Hollywood A-listers Jim
Carrey, Meryl Streep, and Jude Law, in addition to winning an Academy Award for
Best Makeup (Lemony Snicket Overview, n.d.). Starring Anna Sophia Robb, Bridge
to Terabithia (2007) enjoyed more than $120 million in box-office receipts. Robb is
no stranger to literary adaptations, having already starred in the adaptation of Kate
DiCamillo’s Newbery Honor recipient Because of Winn Dixie (2000) in 2005 and
the latest adaptation of Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 2005.
Finally, one book that has not yet been adapted to film, but that likely could be
in the next decade, is Walter Dean Myers’s Monster. As Dean Schneider notes in
Book Links, “This popular, ground-breaking novel is perfect for reader’s theatre for
older students, with its mature themes, innovative format, and large cast of charac-
ters in a courtroom drama” (2005, 57). No information about turning Monster into
a motion picture has been released, but many readers would likely love to see that
happen.
Selected Authors. Following are examples of authors who already were well
established prior to 2000 and those who have extended strong publishing beyond
the year 2000, as well as authors active just since the year 2000. While there are
many other appropriate names to add to this list, there is not space here to discuss
them all. One way to learn more about other notable names in young adult litera-
ture is to look at recipients of awards for young adult authors, such as those who
have won the Margaret A. Edwards medal (see sidebar).
Julia Alvarez (1950–). Alvarez is well-known for several works, including How the
García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) and In the Time of Butterflies (1994). She
has consistently produced books for all ages, including young adults, well into the
twenty-first century. Before We Were Free (2002) was well-received by critics.
Lauren Adams says that Alvarez’s text is “a realistic and compelling account of a
girl growing up too quickly while coming to terms with the cost of freedom” (2002,
565). For her contribution to the body of Latina literature, she received the Pura
Belpré Award in 2004.
Laurie Halse Anderson (1961–). When Anderson’s name is mentioned, many teens and
Young Adult lit scholars immediately think of Speak (1999), Anderson’s first and
probably best-known novel. Anderson’s portrayal of the protagonist’s—Melinda’s—
 YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE 1157

struggle to find peace after being raped and then socially ostracized from high school
was praised by critics, and Speak was a National Book Award finalist. Dina
Sherman of School Library Journal calls Speak “a compelling book, with sharp,
crisp writing that draws the readers in, engulfing them in the story” (1999, 144).
Anderson followed up with a historical novel about a 14-year-old girl during the
time of the yellow fever epidemic in Fever 1793 (2000). Kathleen Isaacs said,
“Readers will be drawn in by the characters and will emerge with a sharp and
graphic picture of another world” (2000, 177). Catalyst (2002), Anderson’s next
book, concerns 18-year-old Kate Malone, who discovers her desire to attend MIT
is rejected, and in Prom (2005), 18-year-old Ashley finds interesting and amusing
ways to help support her high school prom with fundraising.
Angela Johnson (1961–). Johnson began her publishing career in the early 1990s,
writing for children of all ages. She has continued to write for young adults in the
twenty-first century. Running Back to Ludie (2002), concerns a teen girl who con-
fronts the mother who abandoned her, and Joanna Rudge Long comments that
“Johnson’s exploration of the process [of abandonment and resolution] is subtle and
beautifully wrought” (2001, 766). Johnson’s next book, Looking for Red, deals
with guilt and death, as Red’s sister Mike discovers the part she played in his death.
Jean Gaffney says, “The strength of this story is the accurate portrayal of the sur-
real nature of grief laden with guilt” (2002, 120). Arguably, Johnson’s best-known
novel is The First Part Last (2003). What makes Johnson’s story of teen parenthood
unique is that this book’s story is told from the teen father’s perspective—Bobby
from Johnson’s earlier book Heaven (1998). It is not until the end of the book that
we discover the reason for Nia’s—the baby’s mother’s—absence: she’s in a coma
caused by eclampsia. This book won the Coretta Scott King Award and the Michael
L. Printz Medal in 2004. Furthermore, it should be noted that Johnson was the
recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2003.
Pam Muñoz Ryan (1951–). Winner of the 2004 Pura Belpré Award for her novel
Esperanza Rising (2002) and the 2006 Pura Belpré Honor Award for her novel
Becoming Naomi León (2004), Ryan has established herself as a preeminent Latina
author for the twenty-first century. Esperanza, her best-known novel, describes the
story of a young girl who experiences dramatic changes before her 13th birthday,
fleeing from Mexico to the United States during the Great Depression and experi-
encing a demotion to a lower socioeconomic class. Francisca Goldsmith says that
“this well-written novel belongs in all collections” (2000, 171).
Kate DiCamillo (1964–). Though she is better known for Newbery Honor recipient
Because of Winn-Dixie (2000; also a popular film in 2005) and Newbery Medal
winner The Tale of Despereaux (2004), DiCamillo also achieved success with her
young adult novel The Tiger Rising (2001). A finalist for the National Book Award,
Tiger takes place in a setting similar to Winn-Dixie, but as Publishers Weekly notes,
“DiCamillo demonstrates her versatility by treating themes similar to those of her
first novel with a completely different approach” (Review for The Tiger Rising
2001, 77). DiCamillo does this by revealing the protagonist Rob’s feeling of con-
striction and grief through the metaphorical image of a tiger in a cage that Rob finds
in the woods behind the motel where he lives.
Linda Sue Park (1960–). Linda Sue Park has become nationally known because of
her Newbery Medal–winning book A Single Shard (2001). This story, which is set
in twelfth-century Korea, follows the story of an orphan’s apprenticeship. Her next
book, When My Name Was Keoko (2002), is a stunning book that skillfully alternates
1158 YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE

narration between a brother and sister during the Japanese occupation of Korea in
World War II. Following this novel, Park received the Chicago Tribune Prize for
Young Adult Fiction for her novel Project Mulberry (2005). As Publishers Weekly
states, “Besides celebrating intergenerational and interracial friendships, and pre-
senting interesting details about the silkworm life cycle, the book introduces many
issues relevant to budding adolescents” (Review for Project Mulberry 2005).
Francesca Lia Block (1962–). Known for her creative young adult novels, especially
the Weetzie Bat series, Block received the Margaret A. Edwards Award in 2005 for
her lifetime contribution to young adult literature. Collections of her Weetzie Bat
books were reissued in 2004, Beautiful Boys (including Missing Angel Juan and
Baby Be-Bop) and Goat Girls (including Witch Baby and Cherokee Bat and the
Goat Guys). Since 2000, Block has consistently contributed literature that exempli-
fies magical realism and postmodern fairy tales. Echo (2001) is another story set in
a Los Angeles neighborhood, and the protagonist seeks a place to belong among the
bizarre inhabitants of an extraordinarily magic region. Wasteland (2003) received
more mixed reviews because of its taboo subject: an incestuous relationship between
Marina and her (unbeknownst to them) adopted brother Lex, who eventually com-
mits suicide. As Catherine Ensley notes,

While Block’s prose is as poetic and lush as always, her narrative shifts may confuse
less sophisticated readers. It’s not immediately clear that the italicized portions are
from Lex’s journal, and chapters switch abruptly from Marina’s voice to third person.
Also, while parental flakes aren’t unusual in Block’s fiction, readers may have a difficult
time buying into the mother’s reason for not telling her children about the adoption.
(2003, 158)

Ruby (2006) follows the story of a young woman who comes to Los Angeles from
the Midwest and then seeks love in England. Though this book does not exhibit the
punk style of Block’s previous works, teens will definitely love the magical realism
and experimental narration.
Walter Dean Myers (1937–). Myers received the Margaret A. Edwards Award in 1994
for his lifetime contribution to Young Adult literature. A seasoned veteran of writ-
ing, Myers’s successful, popular book Monster (1999) marks a great segue into the
turn-of-the-century look at Young Adult literature for the present century. Steve
Harmon is Myers’ 16-year-old protagonist who is on trial for murder. Harmon writes
an account of his reactions to the court proceedings in an inventive and captivating
way—through writing it as though it were a screenplay for his own personal movie.
Attesting to the influential power of this book, Patty Campbell notes,

Every decade or so a book comes along that both encapsulates a genre and sends it on
a new course. In young adult literature, Catcher in the Rye is such a milestone book,
as are The Outsiders and The Chocolate War. And now Walter Dean Myers’s stunning
new novel, Monster, joins these landmark books. Looking backward, Monster is the
peak achievement of a career that has paralleled the growth of the genre; looking for-
ward, it is a perfect example of the revolutionary new literary direction Eliza Dresang
describes in her recent critical study, Radical Change: Books for Youth in a Digital Age.
(1999, 769)

Monster received the inaugural Michael L. Printz Award and a Coretta Scott King
Honor.
 YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE 1159

Myers’s next work, 145th Street: Short Stories (2000), is a collection of vignettes
told from young adult and adult perspectives about the Harlem community in good
and bad times. Myers also has a history of producing young adult nonfiction. He
wrote a biography of Malcolm X in Malcom X: A Fire Burning Brightly (2000), fol-
lowed up by The Journal of Biddy Owens, the Negro Leagues (2001). Myers’s amaz-
ing writing career has not slowed down since the beginning of the twenty-first century.
He has published seven young adult fiction novels since Biddy Owens: Patrol (2001),
Handbook for Boys (2002), Three Swords for Granada (2002), The Dream Bearer
(2003), Shooter (2004), Autobiography of My Dead Brother (2005), and Street Love
(2006). In addition, he has been steadily adding more young adult nonfiction to his
list of publications as well: Bad Boy: A Memoir (2001), The Greatest: Muhammad Ali
(2001), A Time to Love: Tales from the Old Testament (2002), I’ve Seen the Promised
Land: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2003), Antarctica: Journeys to the
South Pole (2004), USS Constellation (2004), The Harlem Hellfighters: When Pride
Met Courage (with William Miles, 2006), and Jazz (2006). Furthermore, Myers has
been writing poetry in such collections as Blues Journey (2001), Voices from Harlem
(2004), and Here in Harlem: Poems in Many Voices (2004).

Bibliography
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563–565.
Alger, Horatio. Ragged Dick. New York: Penguin, 1990. Originally published 1868.
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Bechard, Maragard. Hanging on to Max. Brookfield, CT: Roaring Book, 2002.
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———. Forever. Scarsdale, NY: Bradbury, 1975.
Campbell, Patty. “The Sand in the Oyster Radical Monster.” Horn Book Magazine (Nov.
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Carroll, Pamela S., and L. Penny Rosenblum. “Through Their Eyes: Are Characters with
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Adolescent and Adult Literacy 43.7 (2000): 620–630.
Carvell, Marlene. Who Will Tell My Brother? New York: Hyperion Books for Children,
2002.
Chbosky, Steven. The Perks of Being a Wallflower. New York: Pocket Books, 1999.
Cleary, Beverly. Fifteen. New York: Morrow, 1956.
Dresang, Eliza T. Radical Change: Books for Youth in a Digital Age. New York: H.W.
Wilson, 1999.
Dressen, Sarah. Dreamland. New York: Viking, 2000.
Ella Enchanted Overview. Box Office Mojo. Retrieved Jan. 26, 2007, from http://www.
boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=ellaenchanted.htm
Ensley, Catherine. Review of Wasteland. School Library Journal 49.10 (2003): 158.
Eragon Overview. Box Office Mojo. Retrieved Jan. 24, 2007, from http://www.boxofficemojo.
com/movies/?id=eragon.htm
Feature and Contest. Teenreads.com. Jan. 23, 2007. Retrieved Jan. 24, 2007, from
http://www.teenreads.com
Finn, Alex. Breathing Underwater. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.
Foster, Harold M. “Film and the Young Adult Novel.” The ALAN Review 21.3 (1994):
14–17.
1160 YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE

“Francesca Lia Block.” Contemporary Authors Online. Sept. 28, 2005. Retrieved Jan. 19,
2007, from http://www.gale.com/servlet/ItemDetailServlet?region=9&imprint=000&
titleCode=GAL2&cf=n&type=4&id=110195
Franzak, Judith, and Elizabeth Noll. “Monstrous Acts: Problematizing Violence in Young
Adult Literature.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 49.8 (2006):
662–672.
Gaffney, Jean. Review of Looking for Red. School Library Journal (July 2002): 120.
Garden, Nancy. Annie on My Mind. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1982.
Glasgow, Jaqueline. “Radical Change in Young Adult Literature Informs the Multigenre
Paper.” English Journal 92.2 (2002): 41–51.
Glovach, Linda. Beauty Queen. New York: HarperCollins, 1998.
Goldsmith, Francesca. Review of Esperanza Rising. School Library Journal (October
2000): 171.
Heim, A.B. “Beyond the Stereotypes: Characters with Mental Disabilities in Children’s
Books.” School Library Journal 40.9 (1994): 139–142.
Hesse, Karen. Out of the Dust. New York: Scholastic, 1997.
Hinton, S.E. The Outsiders. New York: Viking, 1967.
Hoffman, Alice. Green Angel. New York: Scholastic, 2003.
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Isaacs, Kathleen. Review of Fever 1792. School Library Journal (Aug. 2000): 177.
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Johnson, Angela. The First Part Last. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003.
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2007, from http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=lemonysnicket.htm
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2001): 766.
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boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=princessdiaries2.htm
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AL2&cf=n&type=4&id=110195
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Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951.
Schneider, Dean. Review of Monster. Book Links March 2005: 57.
Sherman, Dina. Review of Speak. School Library Journal Oct. 1999: 144.
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Sullivan, Edward T. “Review of Hoot.” Book Links Nov. 2004: 61.
Swartz, Patti Capel. “Bridging Multicultural Education: Bringing Sexual Orientation into the
Children’s and Young Adult Literature Classrooms.” Radical Teacher 66 (2003):
11–16.
Taylor, Mildred. The Land. New York: Phyllis Fogelman, 200.
———. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. New York: Dial, 1976.
———. Song of the Trees. New York: Dial, 1975.
Tuttle, Sarah. Female Influence, or The Temperance Girl. Boston: Massachusetts Sabbath
School Society, 1834.
VanderStaay, Steven. “Young-Adult Literature: A Writer Strikes the Genre.” English Journal
8.14 (1992): 48–52.
Voigt, Cynthia. When She Hollers. New York: Scholastic, 1994.
Yampbell, Cat. “Judging a Book by Its Cover: Publishing Trends in Young Adult Literature.”
Lion & the Unicorn 29.3 (2005): 348–372.
Wolff, Virginia Euwer. True Believer. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2001.

Further Reading
Barry, Arlene L. “Hispanic Representation in Literature for Children and Young Adults.”
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 41.8 (1998): 630–637; Cooley, Beth. “Jerry Spinelli’s
Stargirl as Contemporary Gospel: Good News for a World of Adolescent Conformity.” In
From Colonialism to Contemporary: Intertextual Transformation in World Children’s and
Youth Literature. Lance Weldy, ed. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006, 26–34;
Crabtree, Sara. “Harry the Hero? The Quest for Self-Identity, Heroism, and Transformation
in the Goblet of Fire.” In From Colonialism to Contemporary: Intertextual Transformation
in World Children’s and Youth Literature. Lance Weldy, ed. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge
Scholars Press, 2006, 61–75; Gebhard, Ann O. “The Emerging Self: Young-Adult and Clas-
sic Novels of the Black Experience.” English Journal 82.5 (1993): 50–54; Hayn, Judith, and
Deborah Sherrill. “Female Protagonists in Multicultural Young Adult Literature: Sources and
Strategies” The ALAN Review 24.1 (Fall 1996): 43–46; Johannessen, Larry R. “Young-
Adult Literature and the Vietnam War.” English Journal 82.5 (Summer 1993): 43–49; McD-
iffet, Danton. “Prejudice and Pride: Japanese Americans in the Young Adult Novels of
Yoshiko Uchida.” English Journal 90.3 (Jan. 2001): 60–65; Tarbox, Gwen. The Club-
women’s Daughters: Collectivist Impulses in Progressive-Era Girl’s Fiction, 1890–1940. New
1162 YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE

York: Garland, 2000; Vandergrift, Kay E. “A Feminist Perspective on Multicultural Chil-

dren’s Literature in the Middle Years of the Twentieth Century.” Library Trends 41.3 (Win-
ter 1993): 354–377; Vandergrift, Kay. “Journey or Destination: Female Voices in Youth
Literature.” In Mosaics of Meaning. Kay E. Vandergrift, ed. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press,
1996, 17–46; Vandergrift, Kay E. “Literacies of Inclusion: Feminism, Multiculturalism, and
Youth.” Journal of Professional Studies 3.1 (Fall/Winter 1995): 39–47; Weldy, Lance. “Once
Upon a Time in Idaho: Transforming Cinderella through A-temporality, Awkwardness, and
Adolescence in Napoleon Dynamite.” In From Colonialism to Contemporary: Intertextual
Transformation in World Children’s and Youth Literature. Lance Weldy, ed. Newcastle, UK:
Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006: 46–60.
LANCE WELDY
Z

ZINES
Definition. Zines are independent, underground publications of noncommercial
and personal nature produced by the most accessible and affordable technology
available to the publisher, usually an individual or small group. The term zine rhymes
with seen and derives from fanzine, a term science fiction fans use to differentiate
their amateur publications from the commercial magazines that inspired them. Cur-
rently, the term zine is used primarily by members of the zine community—those
who read and write zines—to refer to print zines only (the zine’s electronic cousin
is called an ezine). Accordingly, this entry focuses on print zines. However, whatever
the ultimate medium they are published in, zines emerge in response to a perceived
void in other media’s coverage of a subject, which can range widely from a subcul-
tural level (e.g., punk rock music) to an idiosyncratic level (e.g., the zine publisher’s
own life). A vigorous, if at times deliberately obscure, part of popular American lit-
erature, zines are published irregularly, according to the whim of the publisher, with
most zines lasting only a few issues. Usually photocopied, zines can be found occa-
sionally in bookstores, coffee shops, infoshops, libraries, newsstands, and record
stores, among other places, but the most common means of distribution is through
the postal system or otherwise directly from the publisher. Though some zines can
reach print runs in the thousands, most zines have much smaller circulations.
Nonetheless, the cumulative total audience for the thousands of zines published in
the United States has been estimated to be in the millions (Gunderloy and Goldberg
Janice 1992, 1). Furthermore, each copy of a zine often seems to be passed along
from reader to reader, a tradition that eventually led to the creation of zine libraries
in many cities. In addition, zines, being underground publications, have always had
more influence on American popular culture than their ephemeral and limited print
runs would suggest. For example, many significant figures have been involved in
zines, often in their youth, including rock music critic Lester Bangs (1948–1982),
science fiction author Ray Bradbury (1920–), film critic Roger Ebert (1942–), and
Superman creators Jerome Siegel (1914–1996) and Joseph Shuster (1914–1992)
1164 ZINES

A POLITICAL ZINE
An example of a political zine is Judas Goat Quarterly, published by Grant Schreiber out of
his apartment in Chicago, Illinois. He writes all the articles, lays out the artwork, uses a
photocopier to print it, and distributes it using the postal system and by dropping off
copies himself around Chicago. Schreiber publishes his zine to express his frustration at
the current direction of American government and society. The only advertisements he
runs in the zine are parodies he creates of political commercials and military recruiting
posters.When one orders a copy of Schreiber’s zine, one usually gets a personal note from
Schreiber accompanying it.The zine is a mass medium, but paradoxically, it is one that keeps
the individual nature of communication paramount, not very far removed from a letter
from a friend. Indeed, if the print run of a zine ever rises above a certain level, it is no
longer a zine, but a cottage industry.

(indeed, Superman’s first appearance was in their zine Science Fiction as a villain).
In recent years, the zine community has produced a number of writers who then
entered other areas of literature, among them Aaron Cometbus (1968–), Jim Goad
(1961–), Jeff Gomez (1970–), Pagan Kennedy (1962–), Joe Meno (1974–), and the
writers of the Underground Literary Alliance (ULA). Furthermore, zines sometimes
change and become professional magazines such as Alternative Press and Bust, both
of which started as zines but to this day still carry some of the do-it-yourself (DIY)
independent spirit of zines.
Although the term zine is applied liberally to many publications that really are not
zines, the zine has certain defining characteristics that separate it from other publi-
cations. The first defining characteristic of a zine is that it is personal in nature and
self-published by an individual or small group.
The next defining characteristic of the zine is that it is noncommercial in nature.
It is produced for passion, not profit. At best, the miniscule funding the typical zine
receives from a combination of sales and advertising merely subsidizes the zine pub-
lisher’s hobby. For example, Xerography Debt, a zine that reviews other zines
(a metazine if one will), is published by Davida Gypsy Breier (1972–) in Baltimore,
Maryland, “with no financial incentive—just a dedication to small press.”
The lack of focus on (and sometimes hostility toward) money in zines results in
another defining characteristic of zines in that they are always produced by the most
accessible and affordable technology available to the publisher, even if the resulting
production quality would be considered crude in comparison with professional pub-
lishing standards. Throughout the history of zines, this “by any means necessary”
approach to publishing has included letterpress printing, mimeographing, offset
printing, and—the technology most identified with zines—photocopying. Indeed, it
has been argued that the growth in the number of zines between the 1970s and
1990s was the direct result of the increasing availability of photocopiers (Gunderloy
and Janice 1992, 1–3). Undoubtedly, the increasing accessibility and affordability of
electronic publishing helps to explain why many people decide to publish online
today. Fundamentally, however, the underlying sentiment remains the same: even if
the production method is less than pristine, as long as the communicative urge is
served, then the results are good enough.
In fact, some zine publishers relish the fact that their publications are not up to
mainstream production standards. This is part of an overall opposition to mainstream
 ZINES 1165

culture, which is yet another defining characteristic of zines. From the DIY ethos that
inspires zine publishers to attempt to become the media in the first place, to the read-
ers of zines who are attracted to alternative publications, to subject matter that at
times delves into areas that mainstream media avoids, such as the celebration of tres-
passing (or, as the zine Infiltration has called it, “urban exploration”), to the irregu-
lar publication schedule of zines, zines are immersed in nay-saying the larger culture
that surrounds them, relishing their autonomy and independence.
Strangely enough, as much as the zine community heralds its self-reliance in the
face of mainstream culture, the relationship within the zine community is one of
interdependence and sociability. This is because zining is fundamentally a social
activity. The zine publisher may create her or his zine alone, but the rest of the zine
publishing process is interactive. Most zine publishers trade their zines with one
another, through the mail or in person at zine conferences. Though zines often have
a nominal price attached to them (anywhere from one to five dollars), the currency
accepted most often is “the usual,” a form of artistic bartering present from the ear-
liest science fiction fanzines, in which the zine publisher accepts payment in the form
of another zine, a piece of mail art, or a letter of comment, to name just a few of
the more common items traded—for in the zine community, there is not much sep-
arating publishers from readers. Most participants in the zine community are pub-
lishers and readers and usually just called “zinesters.” This sociability has led those
involved with zines to network and hold local and national zine conferences. This
self-consciousness of being in the zine community helps to explain why many pub-
lications that share some characteristics with zines (e.g., a photocopied church
newsletter) are not zines. Psychologically, the underlying motive behind the creation
of zines is a desire by the publishers to express themselves with no censorship, in an
attempt to communicate with like-minded individuals, an urge present from the
earliest science fiction fanzines.
History. Precursors of zines include self-published broadsheets and pamphlets by
individual printers such as Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790); literary and cultural
journals and magazines such as the American transcendentalist standard-bearer The
Dial; dissident newspapers such as those produced by abolitionists and socialists;
private writer compilations produced by writers such as Lewis Carroll
(1832–1898), who “followed an old Victorian custom of compiling collections of
his writings in manuscript form, arranged as if they were a printed magazine, and
neatly bound” (Warner 1969, 2); Amateur Press Association publications (APAs)
produced by hobbyist printers; the “little magazines” of literary modernism that
published the early work of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and Gertrude Stein
(1874–1946), among others; the artist magazines produced by avant-garde move-
ments such as Dada, which pioneered techniques that would become common in
zines, including cut and paste collage and detournement (altering a text to subvert
the original meaning, such as changing the words in a cartoon); mimeographed Beat
Poetry chapbooks; the Mail Art network in which artists produced work to distrib-
ute directly to one another; the underground press of the 1960s fueled by the fast
development of both radical politics and offset printing; and the subversive method
of circulating manuscripts in the Soviet Union known as Samizdat. However, the
direct lineage of the present-day zine begins with science fiction fanzines of the
1920s–1930s.
The first science fiction fanzines emerged out of the letter pages of pulp magazines
such as Amazing Stories, which listed the addresses of the readers who wrote letters.
1166 ZINES

Because interest in science fiction was rarer then, a science fiction fan was often geo-
graphically isolated from anyone else who shared her or his interest. Thus, fans were
eager to share their commentary, enthusiasm, and fiction by corresponding as pen
pals. These correspondences soon evolved into creating their own publications. To
distinguish the fan publications from the professional magazines such as Amazing
Stories and the commercial newsstand publications of the time devoted to movie
stars and pop singers called “fan magazines,” fan Louis Russell Chauvenaut
(1920–2003) coined the term fanzine; fans eventually shortened this to zine, which
they used as a synonym for fanzine. These fanzines contained reviews, stories, and
essays, all initially concerning science fiction and other fantastic literature, but the
fanzines soon grew to encompass anything that interested those involved. Though
other fan publications preceded it, the first fanzine is usually considered The Comet,
published in May 1930, starting a tradition in science fiction fandom that continues
to this day. Indeed, the science fiction fanzines would establish almost all of the
characteristics associated with zines, such as use of the most accessible and afford-
able publishing technology (initially letterpress and then hectograph and mimeo-
graph), noncommercial and personal ethos (i.e., preferring to trade for another
fanzine or letter of comment instead of cash), self-publishing by an individual or
small group, erratic and ephemeral publishing, and filling a need not met by other
media.
As the idea of the fanzine caught on, fanzines devoted to subjects beyond
science fiction began to appear. The first non–science fiction fanzines were
devoted to related subjects, such as comic books and fantasy literature, and
established such subgenres of zines as minicomics (comic book fans publishing
their own comics, among them underground comics legend Robert Crumb,
(1943–)). By the 1960s, fanzines had moved further afield, and fanzines devoted
to rock and roll music, such as Crawdaddy by Paul Williams (1948–) and Mojo
Navigator Rock ‘n’ Roll News by Greg Shaw (1949–2004), appeared. Both Shaw
and Williams had published science fiction fanzines, and they now used the
fanzine format to document their new interest. These early rock fanzines estab-
lished the subgenre of music zines, which continue to flourish today. Music zines
particularly flowered in the late 1970s when photocopying became more accessi-
ble and inexpensive, and when most mainstream music magazines were hostile to
punk rock and new wave.
By the 1980s, zines were being published on just about every subject imaginable.
Most of these publications would have likely remained of interest only to people in
their particular subculture, with professional wrestling fans reading professional
wrestling zines and anarchists reading anarchist zines. However, cross-pollination
across subcultures was provided by Michael Gunderloy (1959–), who started
publishing Factsheet Five, a zine that reviewed other zines. R. Seth Friedman
(1963–), a later publisher of Factsheet Five, describes the zine’s origin:

In the early ‘80s, Mike Gunderloy spent a lot of time reading and writing for science
fiction fanzines. After a while, he started noticing quite a few other types of zines,
including punk rock fanzines, political newsletters, humorous pamphlets, and publica-
tions from fringe societies. Mike was an avid letter writer and wanted to tell all his
friends about the unusual publications he’d come across. Instead of writing the same
information over and over, he tried to simplify his life by producing a short mimeo-
graphed list, which he dubbed Factsheet Five. (Friedman 1997, 13)
 ZINES 1167

Gunderloy’s time-saving measure would eventually overrun his life, leading him to
withdraw from the zine scene, but for the 17 years (1982–1998) or so that Factsheet
Five lasted under Gunderloy and his successors, it served as the crossroads of zine
culture, introducing all sorts of zine publishers from different subcultures to one
another and creating the self-awareness of zinedom that continues today. Indeed,
despite the existence of subsequent review zines such as Xerography Debt and Zine
World: A Reader’s Guide to the Underground Press, rumors that Factsheet Five will
be resuming publication continue to circulate through the zine community.
In the 1990s, zines attracted attention from mainstream media such as Time mag-
azine and the Wall Street Journal. Most of the coverage focused on the lurid and
wacky aspects of zines and treated zine publishers as curiosity pieces, freak shows
in the feature pages. However, zines gradually became acknowledged as the literary
aspect of the emergence of underground culture into the mainstream, alongside
alternative music and independent film. As a result, zines became prominent, even
marketable, for a cultural moment, and several zine publishers had books published
by mainstream publishers, culminating in a zine book boom in the late 1990s that
included anthologies of zines in general, collections of individual titles, academic
probes into the subculture, and how-to guides on publishing zines. As further proof
of the penetration of zines into mainstream consciousness, the term zine even started
appearing in dictionaries by the decade’s end.
However, also at this time, electronic publishing had come of age and soon
started attracting the media attention previously given to zines. Furthermore, elec-
tronic publishing started to represent the most accessible and affordable technology
available for those who already owned a personal computer and had access to the
Internet. Consequently, ezines, which had existed at least since the 1970s among
computer hobbyists and users of electronic bulletin board systems (which were
reviewed along with zines in the very first Factsheet Five), began to proliferate,
whether being distributed through e-mail or the World Wide Web (webzines). In
fact, the development of the Web made publishing online easier than ever with the
emergence of Weblogs, or blogs, negating the need to learn any computer code in
order to publish online. The growth of online publishing led many people, includ-
ing such zine stalwarts as John Marr (1961–) of Murder Can Be Fun, a zine
devoted to horrific if humorous true crime stories, to suggest that the zine as a form
was outdated. However, currently there appear to be as many print zines published
as ever (including Murder Can Be Fun), and clearly the form remains viable, if no
longer the default form for personal publishing (which now seems to be the blog,
particularly for newcomers).
Trends and Themes. In the twenty-first century, zines have continued to evolve.
Some of that evolution has included zine publishers leaving print behind in favor of
electronic publishing, but despite the seeming rivalry between the zine and electronic
publishing forms such as the blog, zinesters have made extensive use of the Internet.
Uses have included alt.zines and other discussion boards for things zine related;
archiving out-of-print issues of a zine online; publishing issues of a zine in both
electronic and print format; using the Internet as a distribution medium for zines
published as Adobe Portable Document Format files (PDFs) or other electronic pub-
lishing formats that can be printed out by the end user, saving the publisher both
postage and printing expenses; electronic mailing lists and Web sites devoted to pub-
licizing zines (given the eccentric publishing schedule for most zines, useful for let-
ting readers know about the release of a new issue); online catalogs for zine distros
1168 ZINES

(operations that distribute and sell a variety of zines); ezines such as Zinethug.Com
that only review print zines; and, in an odd twist, collecting the best of a blog or
Web site in a printed zine. Fundamentally, the relationship between electronic and
print publishing is more complex than a simplistic either-or dichotomy, and a major
trend in zine publishing is making use of some aspect of electronic publishing in
order to complement print publishing.
Of course, for every action, there is a reaction, and another trend in zines has been
neo-Luddism, in which zine publishers reject electronic publishing altogether and
further embrace print publishing. Such zinesters utilize letterpresses, screenprints,
woodcuts, and other labor-intensive production methods to produce publications
that double as stunning works of art. In this approach, they challenge the typical
zine ethos of using the most accessible and affordable technology. Most zinesters
who take this approach are suspicious of electronic publishing and argue that a zine
cannot be considered underground when it is published online and theoretically
accessible to anyone on the Internet. Instead of being awash in information overload
online, these zinesters delight in print as a medium, making zines that call as much
attention to their form as to their content.
Of course, most of the neo-Luddites are longtime zinesters who have honed their
craft over a number of years. Other zinesters who have developed considerable
expertise have taken different approaches. One such approach is the megazine, the
zine that has become so much an institution that it resembles a magazine and typi-
cally needs the volunteer equivalent of a magazine staff to be produced. Most of
these zines, such as Maximumrocknroll, which weathered the death of its founder
Tim Yohannan (1945–1998), have print runs in the thousands but continue to hold
to a zine characteristic of some sort (often noncommerciality or reviewing other
zines) that keeps them in the zine subculture. Other megazines include Punk Planet
and Razorcake.
Another phenomenon among experienced zine publishers is that they often real-
ize for all the effort they expend on publishing a zine, they might as well publish a
book. Consequently, numerous zinesters have started publishing books, their own
books as well as others’, founding small presses such as Gorsky Press and Microcosm
Publishing. Furthermore, many of the publishers share information with other
zinesters on how to publish on this larger scale. For example, Jim Munroe (1973–)
of No Media Kings has organized a touring circuit for zine publishers and other DIY
media types called the Perpetual Motion Roadshow. However, book publication has
brought zine publishers into contact with larger literary publishing circles in a man-
ner more confrontational than when many zine publishers scored contracts during
the zine book boom of the late 1990s. Indeed, the ULA, a group of zine publishers,
routinely sparks controversy by critiquing the practices of mainstream literature and
contrasting its products with those of the zine underground.
One key difference between mainstream and underground literature practices is
the focus on cooperation rather than competition in the underground press. After
all, zine publishing is a noncommercial and social activity. This cooperation can be
demonstrated in the numerous local, regional, and national zine conferences and
fairs, where publishers meet to trade zines and knowledge. Most larger cities have a
zine fair, such as the Boston Zine Fair (formerly known as Beantown Zinetown) in
Boston, Massachusetts, and some of the events attract zinesters from around the
country, such as the Portland Zine Symposium (which includes a “Zinester Prom”)
in Portland, Oregon, and the Allied Media Conference in Detroit, Michigan.
 ZINES 1169

The Allied Media Conference (which began in 1999 as “The Zine Conference” in
Bowling Green, Ohio) is also indicative of another trend in zines: convergence with
other media. Zine publishers have found companions in pirate radio enthusiasts,
independent filmmakers, radical DIY Web publishers such as the numerous partici-
pants in the Independent Media Center movement, indie rock record labels, and
other noncorporate media-makers. Such cross-fertilization has resulted in records to
accompany zines (such as the 7” vinyl record Music to Wash Dishes By inspired by
the zine Dishwasher), “DVDzines” of short films (such as Novel Amusements), and
zines that publish different versions online and in print (such as The 2nd Hand).
Of course, keeping track of all this zine-related activity can be difficult, so various
mechanisms arose to keep zinesters apprised of zine news. For a few years running,
Brent Ritzel (1968–) published Zine Guide, a huge directory of zines, and Jen Angel
(1975–) and Jason Kucsma (1974–) published The Zine Yearbook, a book collecting
selections from the year’s best zines. In addition, Zine World and its Canadian coun-
terpart, Broken Pencil, cover zine news and list zine events, supplemented by such
online ventures as Zinewiki.Com, an open-source zine encyclopedia launched in
response to Wikipedia’s lack of consistent coverage of zines and zine culture.
Another trend has been the growth of zine libraries and regular libraries’ inclu-
sion of zines in their collections. Zine libraries are specifically devoted to archiving
and circulating zines. They are sometimes attached to radical infoshops, community
centers for progressive and even anarchist political activists, but often exist on their
own. For example, the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland (which
seems to have replaced San Francisco, California, as the geographic center of zines,
based on the number of titles published from there) has a large collection of zines
and other materials available for circulation and reference use. The center also offers
expertise and workspace to self-publishers, even hosting an annual “Zine Camp”
for children. In addition to the volunteer-driven zine libraries, a number of zine pub-
lishers have become professional librarians in recent years, with the result that a
number of public libraries such as the Salt Lake City Public Library in Salt Lake
City, Utah, have started collections of zines. In fact, Julie Bartel, founder of the Salt
Lake zine collection, authored From A to Zine: Building a Winning Zine Collection
in Your Library, published by the American Library Association and aimed at assist-
ing librarians in building zine collections. Furthermore, several academic libraries
host zine collections for scholarship purposes, among them the Ray and Pat Browne
Library for Popular Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University and New
York State Library in Albany, New York, home of the original Factsheet Five zine
collection (a donation from Gunderloy when he finished his tenure at Factsheet
Five). Libraries, of course, mesh well with the noncommerciality of zines, but there
are also a number of zine-centered and zine-friendly stores, including Quimby’s
Books in Chicago, Atomic Books in Baltimore, and Reading Frenzy in Portland.
Context and Issues. Though zines can at times seem to belong to another world,
they are nonetheless firmly linked to this one, with the zine subculture drawing
much energy from the larger culture that surrounds it. Consequently, zines react to
events and ideas in mainstream culture and society just as other media do. However,
because zines usually represent a minority viewpoint (often a minority of one), the
take on current events and ideas in a zine is typically very different from that offered
in other media. While mainstream journalism prides itself on objectivity, zines
delight in subjectivity, usually of an irreverent and subversive, if not profane, variety.
Minus commercial pressure from advertisers or editorial gatekeepers of taste, zines
1170 ZINES

provide total autonomy for the writers and artists creating the content, who of
course are also typically the publishers themselves. Readers enamored of zines find
much of the medium’s attraction to be rooted in just this raw, unfiltered sensibility.
In fact, zines, like their electronic progeny blogs, represent a thirst for autonomous
personal participation in mass culture. Unlike ultimately controlled outlets for
expression, such as electronic bulletin board postings, talk radio, and letters to the
editor, the zine publisher is not subject to editorial restraint. For better or worse, a
zine is an exercise in passion that often puts the personality of the zine publisher on
parade.
However, such radical exercises in freedom of expression have become the target
of censorship. Most attempts to censor zines occur in schools, where the young zine
publisher is suspended or expelled, or at the very least banned from distributing the
zine on campus. Every issue of Zine World comes complete with a news section doc-
umenting the latest censorship attempts. None of the attempts at censorship are
pleasant for the publishers involved, no doubt, but some experience even more
severe results than expulsion from an educational institution. The most notorious
case of censoring a zine occurred in the 1990s in Largo, Florida, where zine pub-
lisher Michael Diana (1969–), a cartoonist whose Boiled Angel zine featured
graphic illustrations of sex and violence, found himself charged with three state
obscenity violations, after initially being considered a murder suspect essentially
based on the content of his cartoons. Found guilty of all three charges, Diana spent
a few days in jail awaiting his sentence of three years probation, a $3,000 fine, 1,300
hours of community service, compulsory enrollment in a journalism ethics course, a
psychiatric evaluation at his own expense, a restraining order banning him from
being closer than 10 feet to anyone under 18, and most chilling, a ban on drawing
anything that could be considered obscene, which was enforced by officers given a
warrant to search Diana’s home at any time without prior notice. Upon appeal, one
of the convictions was dropped, but ultimately Diana served out his sentence,
finishing it up in New York doing volunteer work for the Comic Book Legal Defense
Fund, which had defended him, for his final community service hours. Arguably,
Diana is the first American artist to be convicted of obscenity. Ironically, the case
attracted attention to his artwork, bringing him a larger audience than he had ever
had for his self-published zine.
Even if one finds Diana’s conviction more shocking than his comics, his convic-
tion is a testimony to the power of zines. In a society in which a handful of media
corporations become larger and larger with each subsequent buyout or merger, and
the concentration of media power has become a political concern, the zine remains
an open, democratic medium, accessible to almost all. Because zines are so available,
grassroots efforts of all sorts use them to propagate ideas. Thus, zines often serve as
a distant radar system for ideas long before they enter the consciousness of main-
stream society. For example, to a mainstream media reader, the social justice and
democracy protests against corporate power seemed to come out of nowhere into
prominence during the Seattle, Washington, World Trade Organization meetings in
1999. But to a reader of zines, one could see this movement building throughout the
1990s. By the end of the decade, the movement had already moved from ideas in
various zines to spawning its own magazine in Clamor (run by a couple former zine
publishers to boot). Beyond political ideas, zines can serve as early tip sheets for all
sorts of things, from food products (vegan zinesters wrote rants praising soymilk
long before it started showing up regularly in supermarkets) to rock bands (in many
 ZINES 1171

punk zines, Green Day was bitterly accused of selling out when they signed with a
major label, long before their albums went multiplatinum and won awards).
Indeed, zinesters sometimes make news themselves. One such example is Russ
Kick (1969–), a former Factsheet Five writer who now edits the Disinformation
series of books. In April 2004, Kick succeeded in a Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA) request to obtain photographs of flag-draped coffins carrying remains of sol-
diers from the Iraq war to Dover Air Force Base. In 2003, just as the war had
started, the military had banned such media coverage of fallen soldiers on military
bases, so when Kick posted the photographs at his Web site, thememoryhole.org, it
was the, first time the American public had seen such images from that war.
Predictably, many American newspapers followed Kick’s lead and published the
photographs on their front pages. Just as predictably, though, none of them appar-
ently had thought to file a FOIA request for such photographs themselves. Not every
zine-spawned news scoop makes the mainstream media headlines, but because zines
often focus on areas that the mainstream media are not covering adequately, they
properly serve as a supplement to the conventional wisdom in matters such as the
September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks or presidential election fraud (as the reader
might guess, most zines take more seriously what might be labeled as “conspiracy
theories” by mainstream media).
Furthermore, zines take seriously A.J. Liebling’s (1904–1963) assertion that
“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one” (1975, 32) and
can be seen as part of a growing movement of independent, noncorporate, non-
governmental media. This movement has grown in response to critiques of mass
media such as The New Media Monopoly (2004) by Ben Bagdikian (1920–) that
argue that the concentration of media into fewer hands is a danger to democracy. In
addition, this concentration of media ownership has also resulted in less local
media, such as news coverage of community concerns. Bagdikian points out, “Five
global-dimension firms, operating with many of the characteristics of a cartel, own
most of the newspapers, magazines, book publishers, motion picture studios, and
radio and television stations in the United States. Each medium they own, whether
magazines or broadcast stations, covers the entire country, and the owners prefer
stories and programs that can be used everywhere and anywhere. Their media prod-
ucts reflect this” (2004, 3). In their small way, zines serve to counteract this media
trend by focusing attention on matters that would otherwise be overshadowed in the
quest for profits and synergy by media conglomerates and the stockholders they
serve. In fact, zine publishers often consciously attempt to complement, supplement,
or even oppose more established media. Thus, the publishing collective behind The
Zine Yearbook was pointedly called “Become the Media.”
Reception. Zines have not become the media, however, just a medium among
many others. In fact, though such an encounter is rarer than in the past, it is still
possible to meet people who have never heard of zines or who pronounce the word
so that it rhymes with “sign.” Nonetheless, zines have become more recognized by
scholars, in various areas of popular culture and in society generally. In certain sub-
cultures such as science fiction fandom and punk, zines have even become a tradi-
tion. For example, the Hugo Awards, one of science fiction’s most well-known
honors, have a fanzine category. Furthermore, some zines have become collectibles
because of their rarity and been offered for auction on eBay, among other places.
In the academy, scholarship devoted to zines has been occasional but enlightening.
Along with various research and scholarly libraries preserving the primary sources
1172 ZINES

of zines themselves (the importance of which cannot be overestimated given the

ephemeral nature and low print run of the typical zine, an activity also engaged in
outside the academy by those Web sites archiving fanzines and zines online such as
Fanac.org), the documentation of zine culture by assorted scholars over the years
has been and will continue to be crucial to any coherent understanding of the genre,
particularly because so many of those inside the zine scene, even at the heart of it,
such as the various publishers of Factsheet Five or Doug Holland (1957–), who
started Zine World, have a propensity to leave the scene entirely eventually (an
exception to this trend toward burnout is Chip Rowe [1968–], editor of the
anthology The Book of Zines and its accompanying website, www.zinebook.com,
an indispensable resource for keeping tabs on zines and one continually updated for
a decade now).
Strangely enough, the earliest book-length scholarship on fanzines came from one
of the most unlikely sources: Dr. Fredric Wertham (1895–1981). Wertham, a psy-
chiatrist, is most famous for his 1954 book The Seduction of the Innocent, a polemic
against the comic book industry for corrupting the nation’s youth that led to U.S.
Senate hearings on the matter, the establishment of the Comics Code Authority (a
self-policing exercise by comic book publishers), and much upheaval in the comic
book industry. Fortunately for fanzine publishers, Wertham found fanzines more
benign and praised them as a human scale form of mass communication in his 1973
book The World of Fanzines: A Special Form of Communication.
Subsequent scholarship on zines has for the most part continued to be infatuated
with the subject matter. It also has followed zines as they have branched out beyond
science fiction, fantasy fiction, and comic books fandom, from providing a history of
rock fanzines (Ginsberg 1979) to describing how zines about work provide another
outlet for disgruntled employees (McQuarrie 1994). Other notable scholarship on
zines includes work by Stephen Perkins, Roger Sabin (1961–), Amy Spencer (1979–),
and Teal Triggs. An exception to the general praise of zines by critics is Notes from
Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (1997) by Stephen
Duncombe, which argues that the revolutionary potential of zines is too idiosyncratic
in its very nature to ever amount to a genuine political force.
Zines have also been brought into the classroom for study, usually in the function
of encouraging students to create their own zines. Indeed, entire courses have been
organized around zines, such as Zines and Do-It-Yourself Democracy, taught by
Doug Blandy (1952–) at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon, and articles
written about the usefulness of zines in the curriculum. Though zines appear to be
accepted in the academy today, that was not always the case. An exhibit of zines at
Boise State University in Boise, Idaho, in 1992 met with such a controversial
response that the curator, Tom Trusky, published not only an exhibition catalog but
also a facsimile of the guestbook from the exhibit.
Participants in the zine community have also critiqued and documented zine
culture. Beneath the Underground (1994) by Bob Black (1951–) provides an inter-
esting insider’s look at the zine scene of the 1980s, while Zines! (1996, 1997), the
two volumes of interviews with zine publishers compiled by V. Vale (1948–), does
the same for the 1990s. Other such books by zine publishers include how-to guides
(e.g., Make a Zine! 1997, by Bill Brent), anthologies (e.g., The Factsheet Five Zine
Reader: The Best Writing from the Underground World of Zines, 1997, edited by
Friedman), and cultural criticism (We Want Some Too: Underground Desire and the
Reinvention of Mass Culture 2000, by Hal Niedzviecki [1971–]). Beyond print,
 ZINES 1173

zines have also been the focus of documentary films and videos, such as A Hundred
Dollars and a T-shirt: A Documentary about Zines in the Northwest U.S. (2004).
Beyond the zine community, zines have attracted attention in various areas of
popular culture. Books such as Zine Scene: The Do It Yourself Guide to Zines
(1998) by Francesca Lia Block (1962–) and Hilary Carlip introduced neophytes to
zines in the 1990s, while twenty-first-century youth learn about zines from Whatcha
Mean, What’s a Zine? (2006) by Mark Todd (1970–) and Esther Pearl Watson. In
fiction, various authors have included characters who publish zines, most notably
Ellen Wittlinger (1948–) in Hard Love (1999), a young adult novel about a teenage
zine publisher who falls in love with another teenage zinester. Similarly, comic strips
such as Underworld by Kaz Prapuolenis (1959–) and comic books such as Hate by
Peter Bagge (1957–) have featured zine-publishing characters. Likewise, animated
cartoons (e.g., Rocket Power), films (e.g., Conspiracy Theory), and television shows
(e.g., Our Hero) feature zine-publishing characters. Furthermore, zine publishers
have also been featured in films (e.g., Friedman in the documentary Capturing the
Friedmans), and zines have made appearances on television shows (e.g., the music
zine The Big Takeover in Gilmore Girls). Zine publishers have been guests on
television and radio talk shows such as The Late Show with David Letterman (e.g.,
where in 1995 Dishwasher Pete Jordan [1966–] sent a friend to impersonate him,
and the friend memorably—and based on David Letterman’s reaction, somewhat
disturbingly—set his hand on fire in the spirit of a Letterman “Stupid Human
Trick”) and This American Life (e.g., where in 1997 Jordan told the story of his
prank on The Late Show). In addition, given the vast number of music zines, it is
not surprising that musicians have returned the favor by writing songs mentioning
zines (e.g., “Flagpole Sitta” by Harvey Danger) or having zines as the topic of the
song (e.g., “Fanzine” by Holly and the Italians, “Letter to a Fanzine” by Great
Plains, and “Fear of Zine Failure (Ode to Self-Publishing)” by The Hidden
Cameras).
Some zines even more so than others seem to attract attention in popular culture.
For example, David Greenberger’s (1954–) The Duplex Planet, a zine featuring
reflections on life from elderly nursing home residents, has spawned numerous
offspring in other media. In addition to the zine, CDs, books, comics, stage per-
formances, lectures, art exhibits, films, and even a card set have spun the concept
off into other areas of popular culture, with the individual residents of the nursing
home, such as late-blooming poet Ernest Noyes Brookings (1898–1987), becoming
quasi-celebrities in their own right.
Furthermore, zines have become a vehicle for the launching of subsequent careers
in more established media. Political commentator Thomas Frank (1965–), media
commentator James Romenesko (1953–), and fiction writers Gomez and Kennedy,
among others, all got their professional starts arguably in the zine scene. All pub-
lished in zines that led to career opportunities (i.e., Frank’s The Baffler, Rome-
nesko’s Obscure, Gomez’s Our Noise, and Kennedy’s Pagan’s Head).
Selected Authors. Although some authors may regard their zine writing as
juvenilia or a self-guided apprenticeship before they went on to other pursuits, many
authors remain attached to the medium. For example, Frank continues to publish
The Baffler, though it has evolved quite a bit since 1988. Consequently, zine writing
can be said to constitute its own genre of literature. Despite the egalitarian ethos of
zines, some authors tend to stand out from others, granting them a staying power
at odds with the ephemeral nature of most zines. In many cases, the author’s work
1174 ZINES

is collected into book form, making it more accessible to readers beyond the zine
community and to readers within the zine community who have difficulty getting a
copy of the original zine publications.
Arguably the author most identified with zines is Aaron Cometbus (surname
Elliot), who has published the zine Cometbus since 1983. Originally a punk zine
covering bands in the San Francisco Bay area, the zine soon shifted to a focus on
Cometbus’s own life, becoming the quintessential perzine (a contraction of “per-
sonal zine”). Charmingly written by utilizing Cometbus’s block letter handwriting,
Cometbus’s zine documents in a heartfelt way the gutter-punk lifestyle of dumpster
diving, squatting in abandoned houses, going to music shows, and drinking too
much coffee. His often humorous descriptions of this life and his reflections on it
have endeared him to numerous readers, with issues of the zine reaching print runs
in the thousands for each new issue. His work has also been collected into book
form with Despite Everything: A Cometbus Omnibus, a collection of issues of the
zine, and the novels Double Duce, based on an issue of the zine, and I Wish There
Was Something That I Could Quit. Although Cometbus has seemed to focus on
longer works such as the novels in recent years (he even gave up publishing the zine
for a short time in order to concentrate on books), his work excels in the short-short
story form, such as “My Secret Life as a Student,” where his prose achieves a poetic
quality. Unfortunately, Cometbus’s work, like that of most zine authors, has
received scant critical attention, presumably because it flies, as the title of Sabin and
Triggs’s (2002) book on zines suggests, below critical radar. Rather than follow the
normal channels of literary culture in society, Cometbus sticks close to the zine
world, still pricing new issues of his zine inexpensively at two dollars; consequently,
his distribution is accordingly limited. When critical commentary of his work has
appeared, it has taken place typically in a work exploring zines as a subculture.
Given the stature some of the zine writers such as Cometbus are starting to attain,
however, it is likely that critical attention will move to focus on the individual
authors in the future. Despite the lack of critical attention, Cometbus’s work has been
tremendously influential in the zine community, with reviewers of zines sometimes
even disparaging zines too openly derivative of the Cometbus style.
Though often compared to Cometbus, Cindy Gretchen Ovenrack Crabb (1970–)
manages to maintain her individuality. Best known for her long-running zine Doris,
Crabb’s writing, like Cometbus’s, draws much of its charm and power from its
personal nature. However, for every lighthearted reflection on coffee drinking or
road tripping, Crabb offers an exploration of deeper resonance such as politics or
her own experience having an abortion. Crabb’s work is representative of a large
number of zines written by women, fueled by the riot grrrl movement of the early
1990s in which young women confronted sexism in society and in the punk sub-
culture specifically. The diversity of this vital genre of zines can be found in the 1997
anthology A Girl’s Guide To Taking Over the World: Writings from the Girl Zine
Revolution (Green and Taormino 1997), but it also continues today. Indeed, strains
of riot grrrl feminism can be found in many contemporary zine writers, such as Moe
Bowstern (1968–), who documents life as an Alaskan fisherwoman in her zine Xtra
Tuf, and Jessica Disobedience (surname Wilber) (1982–), a writer whose evolution
in style is often accompanied by a shift in persona (e.g., Edna Million, Rose Red the
Ghost Heart Girl, etc.).
However, feminism in zines goes beyond riot grrrls with another burgeoning
genre of zines being “mamazines,” wherein older female zine publishers explore
 ZINES 1175

issues related to motherhood, but also other matters of concern, whether tradition-
ally identified with women or not. Prominent writers in this genre include Ariel
Gore (1970–) and Ayun Halliday (1965–). Gore, best known for her zine-turned-
magazine Hip Mama, has edited and written several books, including Atlas of the
Human Heart, 2003, a memoir of her teenage years when she traveled alone
through Europe and Asia. Her work often critiques societal attitudes toward and
government policies affecting women, including welfare (she once even debated
conservative politician Newt Gingrich about welfare reform on television). Less
political than Gore, Halliday has also published several books, including The Big
Rumpus: A Mother’s Tale from the Trenches, 2002, based upon her zine The East
Village Inky, which humorously documents her experiences raising two children in
New York City.
For a less wholesome take on motherhood, among many other topics, readers can
turn to the writing of Lisa Crystal Carver (also known as Lisa Suckdog) (1968–),
publisher of the zine Rollerderby. Also the author of several books, Carver has been
a controversial and fascinating figure in the literary underground for years, explor-
ing extreme sexuality and other taboo subjects. Similarly, Jim (1961–) and Debbie
Goad (1954–2000), who published ANSWER Me!, represent the more confronta-
tional and extreme wing of zines. Author of books such as Shit Magnet 2002 and
The Redneck Manifesto 1998, Jim Goad seems to delight in taking positions con-
trary to those of most on matters ranging from racism to rape.
Although most of the zine writers mentioned thus far focus on nonfiction work,
particularly autobiography and memoirs, a considerable number of zine writers
write fiction or poetry. Since the 1980s at least, “the mimeograph revolution” of
small press poets (documented well in the book A Secret Location on the Lower
East Side; Clay and Phillips, 1998), the Mail Art movement, and zines have often
converged where poetry was concerned. Even writers as celebrated as Charles
Bukowski (1920–1994) were published in literary zines (or litzines as they are
called) such as Impetus, edited by poet Cheryl Townsend (1957–). Among fiction
writers, in addition to Gomez and Kennedy, a number of other novelists have
emerged from the zine community, including Sean Carswell (1969–), author of
Drinks for the Little Guy (1999); Joe Meno (1974–), author of Hairstyles of the
Damned (2004); and Jeff Somers (1971–), author of Lifers (2001). In addition, the
literary zine writers of the ULA have joined together to promote underground
literature and protest corruption in the mainstream literary culture.
Zines are a lively literary culture, and the authors mentioned here represent only
a few of the thousands of writers who have published or contributed to zines over
the years. However, because the zine community operates in an interconnected
manner, reading any of these authors or any zine will usually serve to introduce a
reader to other zines and zine authors. And working on a photocopier somewhere
right now undoubtedly is a new author making copies of her or his first zine.

Bibliography
A Hundred Dollars and a T-shirt: A Documentary about Zines in the Northwest U.S. DVD,
directed by Basil Shadid et al., 1 hr. 11 min. (Microcosm, 2004).
Bagdikian, Ben H. The New Media Monopoly. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.
Black, Bob. Beneath the Underground. Portland, OR: Feral House, 1994.
Block, Francesca Lia, and Hilary Carlip. Zine Scene: The Do It Yourself Guide to Zines. Los
Angeles: Girl Press, 1998.
1176 ZINES

Clay, Steven, and Rodney Phillips. A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in
Writing, 1960–1980. New York: New York Public Library/Granary Books, 1998.
Cometbus, Aaron. Despite Everything: A Cometbus Omnibus. San Francisco: Last Gasp, 2002.
Crabb, Cindy Gretchen Ovenrack. Doris: An Anthology 1991–2001. Portland, OR:
Microcosm, 2005.
Duncombe, Stephen. Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture.
New York: Verso, 1997.
Friedman, R. Seth, ed. The Factsheet Five Zine Reader: The Best Writing from the
Underground World of Zines. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997.
Ginsberg, David D. “Rock Is a Way of Life: The World of Rock ‘N’ Roll Fanzines and
Fandom.” Serials Review (Jan./Mar. 1979): 29–46.
Green, Karen, and Tristan Taormino, eds. A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over the World: Writings
from the Girl Zine Revolution. New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1997.
Gunderloy, Mike, and Cari Goldberg Janice. The World of Zines. New York: Penguin
Books, 1992.
Liebling, A.J. The Press. 2nd ed. New York: Ballantine, 1975.
McQuarrie, Fiona. “New Reactions to Dissatisfaction: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in Zines.”
Organizational Behavior 15.5 (1994): 142–51.
Perkins, Stephen. Approaching the ’80s Zine Scene: A Background Survey and Selected
Annotated Bibliography. Iowa City, IA: Plagiarist Press, 1992.
Rowe, Chip. Zines, E-Zines, Fanzines: The Book of Zines Directory. Retrieved August 2006
from http://www.zinebook.com
Sabin, Roger, and Teal Triggs, eds. Below Critical Radar: Fanzines and Alternative Comics
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Spencer, Amy. DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture. New York: Marion Boyars, 2005.
Todd, Mark, and Esther Pearl Watson. Whatcha Mean, What’s a Zine?: The Art of Making
Zines and Mini-Comics. Boston: Graphia, 2006.
Trusky, Tom, ed. Some Zines: American Alternative and Underground Magazines, Newsletters
and APAs. Boise, ID: Cold-Drill, 1992.
Vale, V., ed. Zines! Vol. I. San Francisco: V/Search, 1996.
Vale, V., ed. Zines! Vol. II. San Francisco: V/Search, 1997.
Warner, Harry, Jr. All Our Yesterdays: An Informal History of Science Fiction Fandom in the
Forties. Chicago: Advent, 1969.
Wertham, Fredric. The World of Fanzines: A Special Form of Communication. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1973.
Wittlinger, Ellen. Hard Love. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.
Wright, Frederick. From Zines to Ezines: Electronic Publishing and the Literary Under-
ground. PhD dissertation, Kent State University, 2001.
FREDERICK WRIGHT
Contemporary Authors
by Genre

The following lists contemporary authors who are or were recently active in their
respective literary genres.

ACADEMIC FICTION: AFRICAN AMERICAN

LITERATURE:
Martin Amis
A.S. Byatt Maya Angelou
Amanda Cross Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)
Clare Chambers David Bradley
Brett Easton Ellis Trey Ellis
D.J.H. Jones Albert French
David Lodge Ernest J. Gaines
Estelle Monbrun Edward P. Jones
Marion Rosen Andrea Lee
Jane Smiley James McBride
Alexander Theroux Terry McMillan
Toni Morrison
Ishmael Reed
ADVENTURE FICTION: Colson Whitehead
John Wideman
Tim Cahill
Peter Mathiessen
ARAB AMERICAN LITERATURE:
Jon Krakauer
Bill Bryson Diana Abu-Jaber
Paul Theroux Rabih Alameddine
1178 CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS BY GENRE

Hayan Charara Pete Hamill

Suheir Hammad bell hooks
Nathalie Handel Maxine Hong Kingston
Mohja Kahf Carolyn Knapp
Laila Lalami Kien Nguyen
Naomi Shihab Nye Tim O’Brien
Dave Pelzer
Gore Vidal
ARTHURIAN LITERATURE:
T.A. Barron
BEAT POETRY:
Dan Brown
Meg Cabot Amiri Baraka
Robert Doherty Gregory Corso
Kathleen Cunningham Guler Lawrence Ferlinghetti
J. Robert King Joanne Kyger
Aaron Latham Michael McClure
Sara Maitland Gary Snyder
Nancy McKenzie Anne Waldman
Mark J. Mitchell
Mary Pope Osborne
BIOGRAPHY:
Judith Tarr
Jack Whyte Christopher Andersen
James C. Work Debby Applegate
Sarah Zettel Carl Bernstein
Jeremy Bernstein
Sarah Bradford
ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE:
Chester Brown
Jeffrey Paul Chan Tina Brown
Frank Chin Frank Bruni
Chitra Devakaruni Allan Bullock
Jessica Hagedorn Paul Burrell
Le Ly Hayslip Arthur H. Cash
David Henry Hwang Joyce E. Chaplin
Lawson Fusao Inada Laura Claridge
Gish Jen Jennet Conant
Maxine Hong Kingston Alexis De Veaux
Chang-rae Lee Thomas DiLorenzo
Bharati Mukherjee Steve Dougherty
Amy Tan Joseph Ellis
Shawn Wong Daniel Mark Epstein
Suzanne Finstad
Antonia Fraser
AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR:
Jon Goodman
Maya Angelou Gregg Herken
Sven Birkerts Walter Isaacson
Amiri Baraka David Kaufman
Augusten Burroughs Kitty Kelley
Mary Carr Pamela Killian
Joan Didion Gavin Lambert
 CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS BY GENRE 1179

Robert Lamberton Carmela D’Amico

Barbara Leaming Steven D’Amico
Roger Lewis Mark Dartford
Janet Malcolm Jennifer Fandel
George M. Marsden Nikki Giovanni
David McCollough Daniel Handler
Bill Minutaglio Brendan January
Elizabeth Mitchell Antoinette Portis
Vicky Moon Peter Parnell
Jay Mulvaney Justin Richardson
Jerome Murphy-O’Connor Laura Amy Schlitz
Sylvia Nasar Jane Shuter
David Nasaw Sonia Sones
Nigel Nicholson Carole Weatherford
Abraham Pais Melanie Wentz
Robert Parry Leah Wilcox
Kevin Phillips Jane Yolen
Stacy Schiff
Joshua Shenk
CHRISTIAN FICTION:
Sally Bedell Smith
Edward Steers, Jr. Ted Dekker
David Talbot Jerry B. Jenkins
Sherrill Tippins Karen Kingsbury
C.A. Tripp Tim LeHaye
Tom Tucker Stephen R. Lawhead
Nick Webb Janette Oke
Sasha Su-Ling Welland Frank Peretti
Barry Werth Francine Rivers
Andrew Wilson
Gordon S. Wood
COMEDIC THEATRE:
Eric Bogosian
“CHICK LIT”:
Christopher Durang
Melissa Bank David Lindsay-Abaire
Candace Bushnell Craig Lucas
Helen Fielding Steve Martin
Nicola Krause Theresa Rebeck
Emma McLaughlin Neil Simon
Terry McMillan Wendy Wasserstein
Elissa Schappell
Plum Sykes
COMIC BOOKS:
Jennifer Weiner
Rebecca Wells Jessica Abel
Brian Michael Bendis
Warren Ellis
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE:
Neil Gaiman
Herm Auch Devin Grayson
Mary Jane Auch Todd McFarlane
Ann Howard Creel Mark Millar
1180 CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS BY GENRE

Frank Miller David Schickler

Gail Simone Alice Sebold
Chris Ware Jim Shepard
Lionel Shriver
George Singleton
COMING OF AGE FICTION:
Curtis Sittenfeld
Steve Almond Kyle Smith
Melissa Bank Todd Strasser
Mark Barrowcliffe Kali VanBaale
Thomas Beller C.G. Watson
Marshall Boswell Debra Weinstein
Ann Brashare Brad Whittington
Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason Christopher Wilson
Mark Childress Tom Wolfe
Sandra Cisneros Tobias Wolff
Junot Díaz
Don DeGrazia
CONTEMPORARY FICTION:
Dave Eggers
Tristan Egolf Julia Alvarez
Leif Enger Russell Banks
Jonathan Safran Foer Saul Bellow
Kaye Gibbons T.C. Boyle
Rebecca Godfrey Michael Chabon
Mark Haddon Don DeLillo
Kim Wong Keltner E.L. Doctorow
Watt Key Dave Eggers
Dave King Bret Easton Ellis
Gordon Korman Lousie Erdrich
Jhumpa Lahiri Jeffrey Eugenides
Jonathan Lethem Richard Ford
Jim Lynch Jonathan Franzen
Claire Messud Mary Gaitskill
Nick McDonnell Gail Godwin
Scott Mebus Rolando Hinojosa
Joe Meno John Irving
Michael Morris Gish Jen
Lauren Myracle Barbara Kingsolver
Joyce Carol Oates Jhumpa Lahiri
Ann Packer Betty Ann Mason
Marisha Pessl Cormac McCarthy
Delores Phillips Toni Morrison
DBC Pierre Joyce Carol Oates
Jodi Picoult Tim O’Brien
Dan Pope Cynthia Ozick
Francine Prose Annie Proulx
Mark A. Rempel Thomas Pynchon
Jack Riggs Philip Roth
Paul Ruditis Richard Russo
 CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS BY GENRE 1181

Jane Smiley DYSTOPIAN LITERATURE:

Amy Tan
Margaret Atwood
Anne Tyler
Cheryl Bernard
John Updike
T.C. Boyle
David Foster Wallace
Pat Califa
David Allen Cates
CYBERPUNK:
Robert Coover
Kathy Acker Cory Doctorow
Pat Cadigan Ignatius Donnelly
William Gibson Lisa Learner
Rudy Rucker Sinclair Lewis
Lewis Shiner Philip Roth
John Shirley Kurt Vonnegut
Neal Stephenson
Bruce Sterling
Vernor Vinge ECOPOETRY:
A.R. Ammons
DRAMATIC THEATRE: Jonathan Bate
David Auburn W.S. Merwin
Nilo Cruz Mary Oliver
Tom Donaghy Gary Snyder
Eve Ensler
Horton Foote EROTIC LITERATURE:
Richard Greenberg
John Guare Pat Califia
Stephen Adly Guirgis Mary Gaitskill
A.R. Gurney Chris Packard
Tony Kushner Carol Queen
Neil LaBute Cherysse Welcher-Calhoun
Warren Leight
Tracy Letts
FANTASY LITERATURE:
Romulus Linney
Kenneth Lonergan Poul Anderson
David Mamet James Blaylock
Donald Marguiles Dan Brown
Terrence McNally Susannna Clarke
Anne Nelson Charles de Lint
Lynn Nottage Stephen R. Donaldson
Dael Orlandersmith Neil Gaiman
Suzan-Lori Parks David Gemmell
John Patrick Shanley Karen Hancock
Sam Shepard Robin Hobb
Anna Deveare Smith Elizabeth Kostova
Diana Son Ursula K. Le Guin
Paula Vogel Michael Moorcock
Doug Wright Tim Powers
Mary Zimmerman J.K. Rowling
1182 CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS BY GENRE

Charles R. Sanders Stuart Dybek

Darrell Schweitzer Dave Eggers
Art Spiegelman Utahna Faith
Richard L. Tierney Sherrie Flick
Ian Frazier
Barry Gifford
FILM ADAPTATIONS OF BOOKS:
Molly Giles
Shari Springer Berlman Ursula Hegi
Stephen Daldry Robin Hemley
Jonathan Safran Foer Amy Hempel
David Frankel Jim Heynen
Josh Friedman William Heyen
David Hare Barbara Jacksha
Ron Howard Harold Jaffe
Christine Jeffs Jesse Lee Kercheval
Spike Jonze Peter Markus
Charlie Kaufman Josip Novakovich
David Koepp Lon Otto
Ang Lee Pamela Painter
Richard Linklater Ethan Paquin
Aline Brosh McKenna Bruce Holland Rogers
Garry Marshall Daryl Scroggins
Frank Miller Don Shea
Susan Orlean Virgil Suarez
Harvey Pekar James Tate
Robert Pulcini Anthony Tognazzini
Robert Rodriguez Jessica Treat
Eric Schlosser Mark Tursi
Julian Schnabel Deb Unferth
Liv Schreiber G. C. Waldrep
Steven Spielberg Ron Wallace
Julie Taymor Katherine Weber
Lauren Weisberger Derek White
Terry Zwigoff Tobias Wolff
Allen Woodman
FLASH FICTION:
GLBT LITERATURE:
Gail Galloway Adams
Kim Addonizio Michael Cunningham
Steve Almond David Ebershoff
Michael Arnzen Allan Gurganus
Aimee Bender Annie Proulx
Elizabeth Berg Sarah Waters
Mark Budman Edmund White
Robert Olen Butler
Ron Carlson
GRAPHIC NOVELS:
Brian Clements
Lydia Davis Jessica Abel
Denise Duhamel Brian Michael Bendis
 CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS BY GENRE 1183

Warren Ellis Lynda S. Robinson

Neil Gaiman Andrew Taylor
Devin Grayson
Todd McFarlane
HISTORICAL WRITING:
Mark Millar
Frank Miller Thomas Cahill
Gail Simone Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
Chris Ware Erik Larson
Thomas Friedman

HISTORICAL FANTASY:
HOLOCAUST LITERATURE:
Shana Abé
Melvin Jules Bukiet
Alex Archer
Michael Chabon
Orson Scott Card
Don DeLillo
Suzanna Clarke
Jonathan Safran Foer
Neil Gaiman
Thane Rosenbaum
Stephen Grundy
Philip Roth
Stephen King
Alisa Kwitney
Karen Marie Moning HUMOR:
Phillip Pullman Thomas Berger
Anne Rice Bill Bryson
Judith Tarr Christopher Buckley
George Carlin
HISTORICAL FICTION: Pat Conroy
Don DeLillo
T.C. Boyle Al Franken
Geraldine Brooks John Irving
Michael Cunningham Michael Kun
Don DeLillo Benjamin Kunkel
E.L. Doctorow Bill Maher
David Anthony Durham Frank McCourt
Charles Frazier Christopher Moore
Charles Johnson P.J. O’Rourke
Thomas Mallon Philip Roth
Thomas Pynchon Christina Schwarz
Philip Roth David Sedaris
William Safire Jane Smiley
Jon Stewart
HISTORICAL MYSTERIES: Colson Whitehead

Rennie Airth
INSPIRATIONAL LITERATURE
Boris Akunin
(NONFICTION):
Caleb Carr
P.F. Chisholm Vicki Caruana
Max Allan Collins Oswald Chambers
Paul Doherty John Eldredge
David Fulmer Edward Grinnin
Matthew Pearl Annie Graham Lotz
1184 CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS BY GENRE

Max Lucado Ron Silliman

Joel Osteen Juliana Spahr
Rick Warren
Phillip Yancey
LATINO AMERICAN LITERATURE:
Miguel Algarin
JEWISH AMERICAN
Isabel Allende
LITERATURE:
Julia Alvarez
Pearl Abraham Rudolfo Anaya
Shalom Auslander Gloria Anzaldua
Paul Auster Raymond Barrio
Saul Bellow Arturo Campa
David Bezmozgis Ana Castillo
Abraham Cahan Angel Castro
Michael Chabon Denise Chavez
E.L. Doctorow Fray Angelico Chavez
Nathan Englander Sandra Cisneros
Jonathan Safran Foer Judith Ortiz Cofer
Michael Gold Jesús Colón
Rebecca Goldstein Lucha Corpi
Allegra Goodman Junot Diaz
Sana Krasikov Stella Pope Duarte
Norman Mailer Aurelio Espinoza
Bernard Malamud Roberta Fernandez
Tova Mirvis Roberto G. Fernández
Cynthia Ozick Gustavo Perez Firmat
Chaim Potok Cristina Garcia
Tova Reich Beatriz de la Garza
Henry Roth Francisco Goldman
Philip Roth Oscar Hijuelos
Gary Shteyngart Rolando Hinojosa
Isaac Bashevis Singer Enrique Laguerre
Art Spiegelman Graciela Limón
Steve Stern Aurora Lucero
Anya Ulinich Jaime Manriquez
Lara Vapnyar Demetria Martinez
Nathaniel West Pablo Medina
AnziaYezierska Nicolasa Mohr
Cherrie Moraga
Alejandro Morales
LANGUAGE POETRY:
Elías Miguel Muñoz
Rae Armantrout López Nieves
Charles Bernstein Achy Obejas
Lucie Brock-Broido Philip D. Ortego
Lyn Hejinian Nina Otero
Fanny Howe Ernesto Quiñones
Myung Mi Kim Tomás Rivera
Harryette Mullen Abraham Rodriguez
Michael Palmer Octavio Romano
 CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS BY GENRE 1185

Piri Thomas David Drake

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez Sabina Murrary
Richard Vasquez Jeff Shaara
Jose Antonio Villarreal Anthony Swofford
Helena Maria Viramontes James and Melanie Thomas
Jose Yglesias Harry Turtledove
Buzz Williams
LEGAL THRILLERS:
MUSICAL THEATRE:
Dudley W. Buffa
Michael Crichton Jason Robert Brown
Christopher Darden William Finn
John Grisham Stephen Flaherty
Phillip Margolin Ricky Ian Gordon
Brad Meltzer Adam Guettel
Scott Turow Mark Hollman
Stephen Schwartz
Jeanine Tesori
LITERARY JOURNALISM:
David Yazbeck
Richard Ben Cramer
Jon Krakauer
MYSTERY FICTION:
Jane Kramer
William Langewiesche Claudia Bishop
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc Dan Brown
Michael Lewis Caleb Carr
Sonia Nazario Mary Higgins Clark
Susan Orlean Susan Conant
Lawrence Wright Michael Connelly
Amanda Cross
Jeffrey Deaver
MAGICAL REALISM:
Andrew Greeley
Maria Arana Thomas Harris
Jonathan Safran Foer Walter Mosley
Abby Frucht Bill Pronzini
Joe Hill
Steven Millhauser
NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE:
Sherman Alexie
MANGA AND ANIME:
A.A. Carr
Kazuo Koike Louise Erdrich
Hayao Miyazaki Linda Hogan
Takeshi Obata Thomas King
Leslie Marmon Silko
James Welch
MILITARY LITERATURE:
David Alexander
NEW AGE LITERATURE:
Mark Bowden
Rick Bragg Echo Bodine
Tom Clancy Dan Brown
1186 CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS BY GENRE

Sylvia Browne POETRY:

James Redfield
Sherman Alexie
Eckhart Tolle
Miguel Algarin
Doreen Virtue
Jimmy Santiago Baca
Amiri Baraka
OCCULT AND SUPERNATURAL Billy Collins
FICTION: Robert Creeley
Rita Dove
Stephen King
Louise Glück
Dean Koontz
Jorie Graham
Peter Straub
Donald Hall
Lyn Heyjinian
PARAPSYCHOLOGY: Sarah Jones
Linton Kwesi Johnson
Sylvia Browne
Yusef Komunyaka
Rhonda Byrne
Stanley Kunitz
John Edward
Adrienne Rich
Uri Geller
Charles Simic
Charles Honorton
Derek Walcott
Harry Houdini
Anne Waldman
Robert Jahn
J.Z. Knight
Stanley Krippner REGIONAL FICTION:
Dean Radin
James Randi Russell Banks
J.B. Rhine Michael Collins
Helmut Schmidt Jonathan Franzen
Rupert Sheldrake Ernest Herbert
Upton Sinclair Bobbie Ann Mason
Montague Ullman Annie Proulx
James Van Praagh Richard Russo
Whitney Terrell

PHILOLOGICAL THRILLERS:
ROAD FICTION:
Steve Berry
Dan Brown Amiri Baraka
Sam Bourne Joyce Johnson
Ian Caldwell Hettie Jones
Umberto Eco Hunter S. Thompson
John Fasman Tom Wolfe
Robert Harris
Raymond Khoury
ROMANCE NOVELS:
Elizabeth Kostova
Kathleen McGowan Loretta Chase
Kate Mosse Diana Gabaldon
Matthew Pearl Kristin Gabriel
Iain Pears Dorothy Garlock
Arthur Phillips Julie Garwood
Dustin Thomason Barbara Hannay
 CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS BY GENRE 1187

Linda Howard Rhonda Byrne

Sabrina Jeffries Julia Cameron
Lisa Kleypas Marla Cilley
Stephanie Laurens Winn Claybaugh
Marion Lennox Will Clower
Debbie Macomber Diane Conway
Judith McNaught Paul Coughlin
Sandra Steffen Stephen R. Covey
Maggie Craddock
Neil Crofts
SCIENCE FICTION:
Leanne Ely
Michael Crichton Michael J. Gelb
Joe Haldeman Mireille Guiliano
Elizabeth Moon Robert T. Kiyosaki
Richard Powers Phil McGraw
Kim Stanley Robinson Dave Ramsey
Dan Simmons Rhonda Rich
Vernor Vinge Laura Schlessinger
Connie Willis Patricia Schultz
Robert Charles Wilson Judith Wright

SERIES FICTION:
SCIENCE WRITING
(NONFICTION): Jean Auel
Patricia Cornwell
Richard Dawkins
Jeffery Deaver
Timothy Ferris
Terry Goodkind
Stephan Jay Gould
Sue Grafton
Brian Greene
Daniel Handler
Carl Sagan
Tony Hillerman
Dava Sobel
Jerry B. Jenkins
Tim LeHaye
SEA LITERATURE: Walter Mosley
Elizabeth Peters
John Barth
Anne Rice
Nathaniel Philbrick
Caryl Phillips
SPACE OPERA:
Dava Sobel
Kurt Vonnegut Kevin J. Anderson
Catherine Asaro
David Brin
SELF-HELP LITERATURE:
Louis McMaster Bujold
David Allen Orson Scott Card
John Amodeo Edward Carmien
Sherry Argov Tony Daniel
Peter Block Elizabeth Moon
Peter Boxall John Ringo
Harriet B. Braiker Dan Simmons
Jill Conner Browne Scott Westerfield
Kelly Bryson John C. Wright
1188 CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS BY GENRE

SPECULATIVE FICTION: Tami Hoag

Iris Johansen
Octavia Butler
Jonathan Kellerman
Michael Chabon
Steve Martini
Kathryn Davis
Michael Palmer
Tananarive Due
James Patterson
Elizabeth Kostova
Richard North Patterson
Cormac McCarthy
Kathy Reichs
Scott Smith
Nora Roberts
Donna Tartt
Karin Slaughter
Scott Turow
SPORTS LITERATURE:
Buzz Bissinger SWORD AND SORCERY
Lucy Jane Bledsoe FICTION:
Don DeLillo Leigh Brackett
David Halberstam Robert E. Howard
Don Haskins and Dan Wetzel Harold Lamb
Karol Ann Hoeffner Fritz Leiber
John Updike Michael Moorcock
John Edgar Wideman Karl Edward Wagner

SPY FICTION: TERRORISM FICTION:

Alex Berenson Lorraine Adams
Frederick Forsyth Nicholson Baker
Raelynn Hillhouse Clifford Chase
Janette Turner Hospital Don DeLillo
Joseph Kanon Kinky Friedman
John le Carré Art Spigelman
Francine Matthews John Updike
Henry Porter
Daniel Silva
John Updike TIME TRAVEL FICTION:
Kage Baker
Stephen Baxter
SUSPENSE FICTION:
Robert A. Heinlin
Dale Brown Audrey Niffnegger
Mary Higgins Clark Terry Pratchett
Michael Connelly Judith Tarr
Robin Cook Harry Turtledove
Patricia Cornwell
Catherine Coulter
TRANSREALIST:
Michael Crichton
Jeffrey Deaver John Barnes
Vince Flynn Paul di Filippo
Stephen Frey Jeffrey Ford
Terris Gerristsen China Miéville
John Grisham Audrey Niffnegger
 CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS BY GENRE 1189

TRAVEL WRITING: VERSE NOVELS:

Bill Bryson Anthony Burgess
Gretel Ehrlich Bernadine Evaristo
Tony Horowitz Brian McHale
Peter Mathiessen Les Murray
Rebecca Solnit Vikram Seth
Paul Theroux Derek Walcott

TRUE CRIME LITERATURE:

WESTERN LITERATURE:
Mark Fuhrman
Johnny D. Boggs
Aphrodite Jones
Jane Candia Coleman
Ann Rul
Ralph Cotton
Harold Schechter
Loren Estleman
Carlton Stowers
Elizabeth Fackler
Alan Geoffrion
URBAN FICTION: Ed Gorman
Paul Auster William W. Johnstone
James T. Farrell John D. Nesbitt
K’wan Foye Dan O’Brien
Donald Goines Lauran Paine
Pete Hamill Cotton Smith
Shannon Holmes Richard S. Wheeler
Dennis Lehane James C. Work
Dianne McKinney-Whetstone
Walter Dean Myers
YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE:
Vickie Stringer
Omar Tyree Julia Alvarez
Anzia Yezierska Laurie Halse Anderson
Francesca Lia Block
UTOPIAN LITERATURE: Kate DiCamillo
Angela Johnson
Stephen Amidon Walter Dean Myers
T.C. Boyle Linda Sue Park
Lincoln Child Pam Muñoz Ryan
Kathleen Ann Goonan
Richard Powers
Susan Sontag ZINES:
Justin Tussig
Sean Carswell
Lisa Crystal Carver
VAMPIRE FICTION:
Aaron Cometbus
L.A. Banks Cindy Gretchen Ovenrack Crabb
Laurel K. Hamilton Jessica Disobedience
Charlaine Harris Jim and Debbie Goad
Elizabeth Kostova Ariel Gore
Anne Rice Ayun Halliday
Nora Roberts Joe Meno
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro Jeff Summers
This page intentionally left blank
Suggestions for
Further Reading

Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured
Popular Fiction. New York: Random House, 2007.
Annesley, James. Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture, and the Contemporary American
Novel. London: Pluto, 1998.
Aragay, Mireia, ed. Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship. Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2006.
Backscheider, Paula R. Reflections on Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Bandy, Susan J., and Anne S. Darden. Crossing Boundaries: An International Anthology of
Women’s Experiences in Sport. Champaign: Human Kinetics, 1999.
Bell, Bernard W. The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern
Literary Branches. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004.
Biressi, Anita. Crime, Fear, and the Law in True Crime Stories (Crime Files). New York:
Palgrave, 2001.
Blanton, Casey. Travel Writing: The Self and the World. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Block, Geoffrey. Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Borowitz, Albert. Blood and Ink: An International Guide to Fact-Based Crime Literature.
Kent: Kent State University Press, 2002.
Britton, Wesley. Beyond Bond: Spies in Fiction and Film. Westport: Praeger, 2005.
Broderick, Damien. Transrealist Fiction: Writing in the Slipstream of Science. Westport:
Greenwood Press, 2000.
Browne, Ray Broadus, and Lawrence A. Kreiser, eds. The Detective as Historian: History and
Art in Historical Crime Fiction. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University
Popular Press, 2001.
Carnes, Mark C., ed. Novel History. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.
Casto, Pamelyn. “Flashes on the Meridian: Dazzled by Flash Ficton.” Writing World.
<www.writing-world.com/fiction/casto.shtml>.
Cavallaro, Dani. Cyberpunk and Cyberculture. London: Athlone Press, 2000.
Charters, Ann, ed. Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation? New York:
Penguin, 2001.
1192 SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

“Chick Lit Books: Hip, Smart Fiction for Women.” <http://www.chicklitbooks.com>.

Clements, Jonathan, and Helen McCarthy. The Anime Encyclopedia: Revised and Expanded
Edition. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2006.
Conway, Jill Ker. When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography. New York: Knopf,
1998.
Crow, Charles L., ed. A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America. Malden:
Blackwell, 2003.
Desmond, John, and Peter Hawkes. Adaptation: Studying Film and Literature. Columbus:
McGraw-Hill, 2005.
Durix, Jean-Pierre. Mimesis, Genres and Post-Colonial Discourse: Deconstructing Magic
Realism. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Eaglestone, Robert. The Holocaust and the Postmodern. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004.
Edward James, and Farah Mendlesohn, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of
Television. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006.
Fonseca, Anthony J., and June Michelle Pulliam. Hooked on Horror: A Guide to Reading
Interests in Horror Fiction, New Edition. Westport: Libraries Unlimited, 2003.
Gaetan Brulotte, and John Phillips, eds. Encyclopedia or Erotic Literature. New York:
Routledge, 2006.
Gary Westfahl, ed. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes,
Works, and Wonders. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005.
Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture website <www.GLBTQ.com/
social-sciences/domestic_partnerships.html>.
Gidmark, Jill B., ed. Encyclopedia of American Literature of the Sea and Great Lakes.
Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001.
Gordon, Melton J. The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead. Detroit: Visible Ink,
1999.
Gottlieb, Erika. Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Terror and Trial. Montreal:
McGill-Queens University Press, 2001.
Griswold, Jerry. Feeling Like a Kid: Childhood and Children’s Literature. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2006.
Hartsock, John C. A History of American Literary Journalism: The Emergence of a Modern
Narrative Form. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000.
Herbert, Rosemary. Whodunit? A Who’s Who in Crime and Mystery Writing. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2003.
Heuser, Sabine. Virtual Geographies: Cyberpunk at the Intersection of the Postmodern and
Science Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003.
Hintz, Carrie, and Ostrey, Elaine. Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young
Adults. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Hischak, T.S. American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1969–2000. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001.
Houen, Alex. Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science
Fictions. New York: Verso, 2005.
Johnsen, Rosemary Erickson. Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction. New York:
Palgrave, 2006.
Johnson, Sarah L. Historical Fiction: A Guide to the Genre. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlim-
ited, 2005.
Joshi, S. T., and Stefan Dziemianowicz. Supernatural Literature of the World. Westport:
Greenwood Press, 2005.
 SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING 1193

Jurca, Catherine. White Diaspora: the Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Kelley, Donald R. Frontiers of History: Historical Inquiry in the Twentieth Century. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Klock, Geoff. How to Read Superhero Comics and Why. New York: Continuum, 2002.
Kramer, Michael P., and Hana Wirth-Nesher, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Jewish
American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Lundquest, Suzanne Eversten. Native American Literatures: An Introduction. New York:
Continuum, 2004.
Lupack, Alan, ed. New Directions in Arthurian Studies. Cambridge: Brewer, 2002.
Lutz, Tom. Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2004.
Mattawa, Khaled, and Munir Akash, eds. Post-Gibran: An Anthology of New Arab American
Writing. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999.
McCloud, Scott. Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology are Revolutionizing
an Art Form. New York: Perennial, 2000.
McHale, Brian. The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004.
Moorcock, Michael. Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy. Austin:
Monkeybrain, 2004.
Murphy, Bruce F. The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery. New York: Palgrave, 1999.
Nahin, Paul J. Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction.
2nd ed. New York: AIP Press, 1999.
Native American Authors Project (Internet Public Library). <www.ipl.org/div/natam/>.
Patten, Fred. Watching Anime Reading Manga. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2004.
Primeau, Ronald. Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway. Bowling
Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1996.
Quetchenbach, Bernard W. Back from the Far Field: American Nature Poetry in the Late
Twentieth Century. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.
Rasula, Jed. Syncopations: The Stress of Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004.
Rasula, Jed. This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry. Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 2002.
Regis, Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania, 2003.
Roberts, Neil, ed. A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
Robinson, Forrest G. Having It Both Ways: Self-Subversion in Western Popular Classics.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997.
Rojek, Chris, ed. Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory. New York:
Routledge, 1997.
Russell, Alison. Crossing Boundaries: Postmodern Travel Literature. New York: Palgrave, 2000.
Sabin, Roger, and Teal Triggs, eds. Below Critical Radar: Fanzines and Alternative Comics
from 1976 to the Present Day. Hove: Slab-O-Concrete, 2002.
Scanlan, Margaret. Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001.
Schwartz, Richard B. Nice and Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction. Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 2002.
Siegel, Kristi, ed. Gender, Genre and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing. New York: Peter
Lang, 2004.
Singh, Amritjit, Joseph Skerrett, and Robert E. Hogan, eds. Memory and Cultural Politics: New
Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996.
Sloane, David E. E., ed. New Directions in American Humor. Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 1998.
Spencer, Amy. DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture
1206 INDEX

Academic reception. (continued) ADD/ADHD, 866–867

regional fiction, 769 Addiction, 88–89, 93, 696. See also Alco-
romance novels, 801 hol; Drugs
science fiction, 825–826 Ade, George, 574
science writing, 834, 841, 842 Adnan, Etel, 42, 45
sea writing, 858, 859 Adolescents. See Young adult literature
series fiction, 881–882 Adoption, 405–406
sports literature, 932, 941–942 Adorno, Theodor, 483
sword and sorcery fiction, 972, 974, Adulthood, 223, 225, 231, 238, 246
981 Adults, 226–27, 229, 236–37, 240
travel writing, 1037, 1039 Adventure fiction (action novels), 13–26,
truth and, 663–664 213, 352, 807, 823, 881, 887. See
utopian literature, 1084 also Pulp fiction; Sword and sorcery
vampire fiction, 1094, 1096, 1103, fiction; Terrorism fiction
1107, 1113–1114 Adventure nonfiction, 1036
young adult literature, 1147, 1148 Aeschylus, 293, 339
zines, 1171–1172 “Aesthetic of blackness,” 36
Academy Awards Affirmations, 690
adaptations of books, 369 Afghanistan, 620, 621, 960–961
adventure fiction, 15, 19 African American literature, 26–40. See
comedic theatre and, 201, 205 also Civil rights; Civil Rights Move-
dramatic theater, 298 ment; Harlem Renaissance; individual
film adaptations of books, 369, 373, authors
382 autobiography and memoir, 88
GLBTQ fiction, 406 chick lit, 145
historical fiction, 449, 450 children’s literature, 178
Holocaust themes, 493 comedy, 196–97, 302
manga and anime, 608, 610–611 comic books, 211
regional fiction, 779 coming of age fiction, 231
spy fiction, 959 dramatic theater, 293, 294–95, 304,
true crimes, 1054 305, 307
young adult literature and, 1156 erotic literature, 343, 346
Academy of American Poets prizes, 759, GLBTQ and, 403, 405
763, 764 Harlequin, 891
Academy of Comic Book Arts and Sciences historical fiction, 443–444, 448
awards, 210 historical nonfiction, 472–473
Acker, Kathy, 279 humor, 505
Acland, Charles, 236 legal thrillers, 564
Acosta, Oscar Zeta, 789–790 literary journalism, 580
“Action Factor,” 289 mystery fiction, 644, 651–652
Action novels. See Adventure fiction; Philo- mystery series, 890
logical thrillers occult/supernatural literature, 712
Activity books, 170 poetry, 748–750, 757
Actors Studio, The, 295 romance novels, 797
Adair, Gilbert, 408 speculative fiction, 921, 922
Adams, Douglas, 127–128, 880 urban literature, 1066
Adams, Joan Vollmer, 787 utopian literature, 1083, 1089
Adams, John, 122 young adult literature, 1149, 1153,
Adams, Lorraine, 1007–1008 1159
Adamson, Joni, 679 African Americans. See also Race
Adamson, Lydia, 643 literary journalism and, 574
Adaptations of books. See Films; Manga mystery fiction and, 641
and anime sea writing and, 851–853
 INDEX 1207

sports literature and, 948 young adult literature and, 1149

sports poetry and, 936 Alcott, Louisa May, 170–171, 447
transrealist writing and, 1031 Aldiss, Brian, 807, 811, 894, 895, 901
vampire fiction and, 1109 Aldred, Lisa, 687
western genre and, 1137, 1138 Aleichem, Sholem, 524
African influences, 755 Alexander, Bruce, 657
After (Bukiet), 491 Alexander, David, 621
After (Prose), 229 Alexander, Sally Hobart, 1153
Against the Day (Pynchon), 268, 444 Alex Cross novels, 890
Agatha Awards, 640, 652, 654, 659, 890 Alexie, Sherman
Age-based reading levels, 164–165, 166, 172 Native American literature, 665, 668,
Agee, James, 575 671, 675, 676, 678, 681
Aging, 945 poetry, 757
Agonito, Rosemary and Joseph, 1136 road fiction, 788
Agrarians, 775 sports literature, 939
Agribusiness, 268 young adult literature, 1150
Agrippa, 284 Alford, Henry, 174, 1113
Ahrens, Lynn, 634 Alger, Horatio, 881
AI (artificial intelligence), 1020 Algonquin Round Table, 501
Aickman, Robert, 703 Alias (Bendis), 215, 419
AIDS Alienation, 108, 142, 145, 158, 199, 210,
Arab American literature, 50 226
autobiography and memoir, 93 Aliens, 61, 211, 904–906, 1016, 1026
contemporary mainstream American fic- Al Jadid: A Review & Record of Arab Cul-
tion, 261, 264, 270, 405, 409 ture and Arts (Chalala), 45
dramatic theater, 299, 307 Allegory, 186
dystopian fiction, 323 Allen, David, 864
erotic literature, 347 Allende, Isabel, 552, 559, 918
GLBTQ and, 401, 404, 406, 409, 410 Allen, Donald, 539
historical fiction and, 447 Allen, Hervey, 443
musical theatre and, 631 Allen, James Lane, 771
sports literature and, 932 Allen, Paula Gunn, 665, 671, 674, 678
Aiken, Joan, 429 Allen, Roberta, 393
Airth, Rennie, 464 Allen, Woody, 1026
Akunun, Boris, 462–463 Allison, Anne, 612
Alameddine, Rabih, 50 Allison, Dorothy, 404, 775
Albanese, Catherine L., 688 Alloy Entertainment, 240
Albee, Edward, 296, 857 All Soul’s Rising (Bell), 451
Albert, Bill, 656 All the Conspirators (Isherwood), 402
Albert, Laura, 239–40 Al-Mahjar, 40–41
Albert, Susan Wittig, 641, 656 Almond, David, 1150
Alchemy, 476 Alternate history, 1013
Alcohol Alternate reading, adaptation and, 366
autobiography and memoir and, 88–89, Alternate reality, 815–816, 826, 947, 1018.
92–93, 94–95 See also Utopian literature; Virtual
comic books and, 215 reality
contemporary mainstream American Alternative Atlanta, 230
fiction, 257 Alternative endings, 258
film adaptations and, 376 Altick, Richard, 119
ghosts and, 694 Altieri, Charles, 328
mystery fiction and, 645 Altman, Robert, 395
Native American literature and, 667, 672 Alvarez, Julie, 260–261, 448, 558–559,
writers and, 430, 568 773, 1156
1208 INDEX
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,
The (Chabon), 262, 448, 495, 496
Amber books (Zelazny), 430
Ambler, Eric, 955
Ambrose, Stephen, 450
Amerasian children, 91
“American,” 664
American Academy of Arts and Letters,
300, 304
American Book Award, 78, 81, 82, 792
American dream, 83, 269, 790, 944, 950,
1002–1003, 1039, 1041
American Film Institute, 369
American Girl collection, 171–172
American hegemony, 1006
Americanization, 83, 84. See also Assimila-
tion
American Library Association, 79, 177
American literary realism, 501
American Musical Theatre, The (Engel),
627–628, 629
American Pastoral (Roth), 1002–1003
“American Presidents, The” series, 125
American Prometheus, 129
American Revolution , 121, 444, 955
America’s Comic Book Legal Defense Fund’s
Defender of Liberty Award, 428
American Society of Newspaper Editors
Awards, 583
American Splendor (film), 373–374
American Theater Critics awards, 297, 308
Améry, Jean, 493
Amidon, Stephen, 1083, 1086–1087
Amireh, Amal, 44, 45
Amish, 892
Amis, Kingsley, 5–7
Ammons, A.R., 332–33, 775
Ammons, Elizabeth, 770
Anacreon of Teos, 339
Anand, Valerie, 460
Anatomy of a Murder (Voelker/Traver),
567–568
Anaya, Rudopho, 654, 656
Ancient Egypt
fantasy and, 891
historical writing, 457–458, 464, 471
mystery fiction and, 657
mystery series and, 891
parapsychology and, 730
philological thrillers and, 737
vampire fiction and, 1101–1102
Ancient Greece
comedic theatre, 195
dramatic theater, 293
epics of, 353–354
erotic literature, 338–339
historical mysteries, 457–458
historical nonfiction and, 468–469, 476
military literature, 614
musical theatre and, 635
occult/supernatural literature and,
707–708
philological thrillers and, 734, 737–738
poetry and, 744, 755, 762, 764
science fiction and, 903, 905, 911
suspense fiction and, 965
sword and sorcery fiction and, 974
tragedy, 293
utopian literature and, 1079
verse novels and, 1125
Ancient rituals, 293
Ancient Rome, 353–354, 458, 737, 738,
764
Ancient settings, 457
Anderson, Chester, 1030
Anderson, Elliott, 388
Anderson, Eric Gary, 679
Anderson, Kevin J., 811, 904
Anderson, Laurie Halse, 1150, 1151, 1152,
1156–1157
Anderson, Maxwell, 294
Anderson, M.T., 1150
Anderson, Poul, 985, 1015, 1032. See also
Sword and sorcery fiction
Anderson, Sherwood, 574, 769
Andrew, Dudley, 366
Andrew, Sarah, 650
Andrews, Bruce, 537, 539
Andrews, Lynn V., 687
Andrews, V.C., 887
Angell, Roger, 933, 934
Angelou, Maya, 88
Angels, 300, 690–691, 707, 710
Anglo-American university fiction. See Aca-
demic fiction
Angry Young Man movement, 5, 6
Animals, 356, 643–644, 779–780,
856–857, 884
Animation, 168, 189, 600, 688
Anime and manga, 278, 281, 600–612
Anisfield-Wolf Prize, 82
Anker, Roy, 472
Anshaw, Carol, 935
Anson, Jay, 711
Anthologies
African American literature, 32, 34, 922
Arab American literature, 40, 42
Arthurian literature, 59
 INDEX 1209

autobiography and memoir, 87 Appalachian Mountains, 655

basketball, 935 Applegate, Debby, 116
Beat poetry, 105 Applegate, Katherine A., 884
chick lit, 137 Appleton, Victor, 881
cyberpunk, 275, 280, 282, 283 Arab American literature, 40–53, 198
drama, 289 Arabian Jazz, 46, 47
erotic literature, 343, 347 Arab World, 41
flash fiction, 386–387, 388–390, 391, Arana, Marie, 590, 593–594, 596,
392, 393, 396–397 597–598
GLBTQ, 409, 410 Arata, Steven D., 1114
Holocaust literature, 483, 492 Archer, Alex, 433
Language poetry, 539, 542 Arebi, Saddeka, 45
Latino American literature, 556–557 Argonautica, The, 353
literary journalism, 576 Argov, Sherry, 868
manga and anime, 606, 612 Aristophanes, 195, 1079
Native American literature, 668–669, Aristotle, 195, 293, 867
674 Arkansas, 655
New Journalism, 790 Arkham House, 354
poetry, 32, 34, 396, 740, 741, 752, 757, Armantrout, Rae, 539, 542, 547
758, 760 Armstrong, Karen, 473
self-help literature, 863 Armstrong, Kelley, 711
series fiction and, 885–886 Armstrong, Lance, 940
short stories, 768 Armstrong, Richard H., 471
sports literature, 934, 936, 938 Arnzen, Michael, 395
Star Trek, 885 Arsenal (character), 424
sword and sorcery fiction, 972, 979, Art
985, 986–987 Arthurian literature, 54
sword and sorcery fiction and, dramatic theater, 303, 305, 308
986–987 film adaptations of books, 375, 376
travel writing, 1036, 1038 Arthurian literature, 53–66, 428, 430–431,
true crime literature, 1048 437, 944, 1120, 1141
verse, 1121–1122 Artificial intelligence (AI), 277, 278, 281,
women and sports, 937 283, 1020
women Beats, 794 Artistic liberation, 98
women zines, 1174 Arts and Letters (White), 409
zines, 1172 Art School Confidential, 373
Anthony Adverse (H. Allen), 443, 449 Asaro, Catherine, 815, 826, 832,
Anthony Awards, 640, 644, 652, 654, 659, 906–907
890 Ashley, Mike, 455
Anthony, Ole, 517 Ashton, Jennifer, 542
Anthony, Piers, 356, 886 Asia, 338, 473
Anthropomorphism, 269. See also Animals Asian American literature, 66–87, 178,
Anti-establishment, 109. See also Counter- 448, 502, 653–654
culture Asian philosophy, 109
Antiheroes, 212, 353, 956 Asimov, Isaac
Anti-Semitism, 269, 303, 523, 923 flash fiction, 388
Anti-slavery, 27, 28. See also Slavery science fiction, 809–810, 818, 819
Anubis Gates, The, 360 series, 880
Anzaldua, Gloria, 559 space opera, 895, 900, 901, 902
Apess, William, 667 time travel fiction, 1015
Apocalyptic fiction , 704, 707–708 transrealist writing and, 1026
Apologetics, 32, 186, 476 Askew, Rilla, 1136
Aponte, Mimi D,’ 669 Asprin, Robert, 61, 64, 885
Apostolou, Anna, 458 “Assembly line” prose, 260
1210 INDEX

Assimilation urban literature and, 1068, 1069, 1070,

Asian American literature, 76, 82 1071, 1072
coming of age fiction, 224 western genre and, 1133, 1134
contemporary mainstream American fic- Authorization, biography and, 126,
tion, 262, 264, 265, 270 129–130
film adaptations of books, 381 “Autobifictionalography,” 417
Jewish American literature and, Autobiography and memoir, 87–95. See
522–523, 526, 527, 528–529, 530 also Lifewriting; Transrealist
Latino American literature and, 556, writing
557 African American literature, 26, 31, 33
Native American literature and, 667, Arab American literature, 40
673 Asian American literature, 68–69, 74,
urban fiction and, 1066 76, 80
“Assistant lit,” 146 Beat poetry, 106–107
Association for Library Service to Children biography and, 131
(ALSC), 164 chick lit, 140, 145, 146
Astronomy, 333, 836, 838, 839, 841, 843 comedic theatre, 200, 201–202
Asturias, Miguel Angel, 588 coming of age fiction, 239, 242
Atkinson, Rick, 478 contemporary mainstream American
Atkins, Susan, 1054 fiction, 251
Atlantic Theater Company, 303 cyberpunk, 284
Atom bomb, 1043–1044 dramatic theater, 299, 304, 307
Atomic annihilation, 101. See also Nuclear film adaptations of books, 373
war graphic novels, 417, 450
Atomic bomb , 961 main entry, 87–96
Atomic energy, 129–130 sea writing, 859
Atomic Romance, An (Mason), 266 sports, 939–940, 942
Atwood, Margaret, 316, 317, 321, 1030 Automobiles, 782
Auburn, David, 296 Avalon (place), 64
Auden, W.H., 402, 752 Avant-garde
Auel, Jean M, 806, 884 Beat poetry and, 109
Auerbach, Nina, 1092, 1095, 1103, 1105, Black arts and, 749
1113–1114 contemporary mainstream American
Augustan Age, 3 fiction and, 252
Augustine, St., 87 cyberpunk and, 275
August, John, 1026 definition of, 742, 743, 747, 750, 751,
Auschwitz, 202, 417, 484–488, 490, 493, 763
531, 532 language poetry, 539, 540, 541, 542,
Auslander, Shalom, 522 544
Austen, Jane, 139, 798 poetry, 742–743, 747, 749, 751, 757,
Auster, Paul, 522, 533, 1000–1001 762
Auster, Peter, 522 pop culture, 275
Austin, Fred, 1143 urban fiction and, 1067, 1167
Authenticity. See also Objectivity; Truth Web sites, 548
legal thrillers and, 566 zines and, 1165
magical realism and, 587 Avengers, 210, 218, 422
multiculturalism and, 1153 Aventis Prize for Science Books, 842
regional fiction and, 768 Avenue Q (musical), 633
romance novels and, 801 Avi, 1151
self-help literature and, 866, 870, Aviram, Mariva, 872
871–872 Aviv, Caryn, 521
sports literature and, 949 Awards. See specific awards
time travel fiction and, 1021 Awiatka, Marilou, 677
travel writing, 1036 Aziz, Barbara Nimri, 42

Babel, Isaac, 523, 524
Baby boomers, 100, 105, 222, 226, 246,
683
Baca, Jimmy Santiago, 757
Bach, Richard, 684, 685, 728
Backscheider, Paula, 119, 120, 126, 130
Back When We Were Grownups (Tyler),
270
Bacon, Francis, 807
Baen (publisher), 986
Bagdikian, Ben, 1171
Bagge, Peter, 1173
Baghdad Express (Turnipseed), 613, 616,
619, 620, 621–622
Bahr, Howard, 445
Bailey, Alice, 683
Bailey, Dale, 712
Bainbridge, Beryl, 148, 858
Bainbridge, William Sims, 894–895
Bain, Donald, 891
Baker, George, 512
Baker, Houston, 31, 37
Baker, Kage, 1016, 1020–1021
Baker, Kevin, 445, 446, 450–451, 936
Baker, Nicholson, 995–996, 1008–1009
Bakker, Scott R., 356
Baldwin, James, 403, 502, 1067
Baldwin, Joseph G., 500
Ballantine, Betty and Ian, 810
Ballard, J.G., 811, 901, 1032
Balzac, Honoré de, 884
Bambara, Toni Cade, 502, 922
Bancroft, Edith, 931
Bancroft, Michaela, 644
Bancroft Prizes, 130
Bangs, Lester, 1163
Bank, Melissa, 154–156, 239
Banks, Iain M., 815, 902
Banks, L.A., 1097, 1108–1111
Banks, Russell, 261, 446, 447, 773,
779–780
“Banned Books Week,” 165
Banner, Bruce (character), 423
Bannon, Ann, 403
Bans. See Censorship
Baraka, Amiri. See Jones, LeRoi
Bards, 755
Barger, Ralph “Sonny,” 789
Barnes and Noble Discover Award, 82
Barnes, Djuna, 403
Barnes, John, 1032
Barnes, Julian, 737
Barnes, Linda, 654
Barnes, Steve, 902
INDEX 1211
Barranger, Milly S., 304, 307
Barr, Catherine, 882
Barr, John, 743
Barr, Nevada, 656
Barras, Charles M., 629
Barrett, Andrea, 448, 451
Barrio, Raymond, 558
Barron, Diana, 712
Barron, Stephanie, 457, 889
Barron, T.A., 62
Barry, Lynda, 417
Barry Awards, 463
Barth, John, 252, 444, 502, 857–858
Barthes, Roland, 366, 544
Barton, Emily, 448
Baseball, 526–527, 932–935, 936–939,
941, 943–945, 948–949
Basketball, 935, 937, 939–940, 941, 946
Basquiat, 376
Bassett, Gregg, 512
Bataille, Gretchen M., 679
Bate, Jonathan, 325, 329
Batman (film), 214
Batman: The Dark Knight (film), 220
Batman: Gothic Knights (Grayson), 424
Battle of the Planets (film), 603
Batz, Bob, 583
Baudelaire, Charles, 387
Baudrillard, Jean, 280
Bauer, Marion Dane, 1152
Bausch, Richard, 775
Baxter, Charles, 385, 392
Baxter, Stephen, 815, 1016, 1022
Baxt, George, 651
Bay Area Book Reviewers Awards for Best
Fiction, 79
Beal, M.F., 651
Bean, Thomas W., 1152
Bear, Elizabeth, 796
Bear, Greg, 284, 815, 819, 826, 832, 902
Beat generation, 97–110, 782–784, 786,
792, 1027, 1067, 1165
Beatitude Magazine, 107
Beatles, The, 791, 1026
“Beatnik” movement, 99–100, 104
Beaton, Roderick, 737
Beat poetry, 97–110. See also Beat genera-
tion
Beatty, Paul, 935, 941
Beaumont, Charles, 703
Beautiful Mind, A (film), 376
Beauty and western ideals, 48
Bebergal, Peter, 926
Bechard, Maragard, 1150
1212 INDEX

Bechdel, Alison, 450 Berry, Wendell, 331–332, 767, 774, 775,

Beckford, William, 428, 700 776
Beck, Robert, 1068 Berssenbrugge, Mei-Mei, 549
Bede, 469 Berthold, Dennis, 858
Beeding, Francis, 954 Best Animation Film awards, 611
Before Columbus Foundation American Bester, Alfred, 810
Book Awards, 82 Bethke, Bruce, 275
Begley, Louis, 488 Betjeman, John, 1121
Begum’s Fortune, 312–313 Beverly, Jo, 802
Behrendt, Greg, 868 Bevis, William, 673
Behrman, S.N., 196 Bezmozgis, David, 523
Bellamy, Edward, 807, 816, 1081, 1082 Bias. See Objectivity
Bell, Madison Smartt, 446, 451 Bible, The, 469, 485, 513, 636, 736, 851,
Bell, Marvin, 742, 752 986, 1094. See also Christianity
Bellow, Saul, 261, 488, 502, 525, 526, Bierce, Ambrose, 387, 574, 1039
1067 Biesel, Nicola, 342
Beloved (Morrison), 450, 453, 595, 761 Big Book of Help, The (Holyoke), 172
Belpré, Medal, 178 Bigger, Earl Derr, 639
Belpré, Pura, 557 Bigsby, C.W.E, 205
Benchley, Peter, 858 Big Sea (Hughes), 31
Benchley, Robert, 501 Bildung process, 223, 226, 246
Bender, Bert, 859 Bildungsroman, 225–226, 237–238, 240,
Bendis, Brian Michael, 214–215, 418, 243, 264. See also Coming of age lit-
419–420 erature
Benedict, Ruth, 666 Billings, Josh, 501
Benesch, Klaus, 859 Billy Bathgate (Doctorow), 452
Benevento, Joe, 588 Billy Budd (Melville), 403
Benfer, Amy, 928 Bingham, Jane, 470
Benford, Gregory, 814, 815, 826, 902 Bingo (Brown), 404
Ben-Hur (Wallace), 442, 449 Binkiy Brown Meets The Holy Virgin
Benigni, Roberto, 493 Mary (Brown), 417
Benjamin, Walter, 623 Binns, Archi, 855
Benson, A.C., 702 Biography, 112–136, 368, 375–376, 409,
Benson, E.F., 702 442, 445, 446, 1025. See also Auto-
Benson, Steve, 540 biography and memoir
Bercovitch, Sacvan, 742 Bioi Paralleloi (Plutarch), 117–118
Berenson, Alex, 959, 961 Biology, 331, 333
Berger, Alan, 493 Biology, 819
Berger, Meyer, 575 Biopic, 131, 368, 373, 375–376
Berger, Thomas, 502, 505 “Biopunk,” 284
Bergner, Daniel, 581 Bird, Gloria, 669, 674
Bergstrom, Elaine, 709 Bird, Robert Montgomery, 442
Berlin, 402 Birds, The Frogs, The Clouds, The (Aristo-
Berlman, Shari Springer, 373 phanes), 195
Bernal, Martin, 472 Birdsall, Jeanne, 1150
Bernard, Cheryl, 318 Birds of Prey, 220
Bernstein, Andrea, 300 Birds of Prey (Simone), 220, 425
Bernstein, Charles, 537, 538, 540, 542, Birdwell, Cleo, 948
543, 546, 548 Birkerts, Sven, 87, 89
Bernstein, Jeremy, 129 Birth control. See Contraception
Bernstein, Josh, 474 Birth of a Nation (film), 449
Berryman, John, 540 Bisexual, 98
Berry, Steve, 738, 739 Bisexual characters, 430–431
 INDEX 1213

Bisexuals. See GLBTQ (Gay, lesbian, bisex- Block, Peter, 865

ual, transgender, and queer) Blogs, 50, 115, 259
Bisexual themes, 428 Blonde, 267
Bishop, Claudia, 641 Blood Music, 284
Bishop, Elizabeth, 760 Bloom, Harold, 752, 758–759, 760
Bishop, Farnham, 976 Bloomsbury classics, 139
Bissinger, H.G. (Buzz), 939, 940 Bloor, Edward, 1153
Bisson, Terry, 1021, 1022 Blue collar, 779, 1121
Black Arts Movement, 748–750, 760 Blues, 26, 31, 34, 35
African American literature, 33, 36–37 Blum, Arlene, 15
Beat poetry, 103, 107 Blume, Judy, 1149, 1150
dramatic theater, 294, 295 Bly, Nelly, 574
poetry and, 760 Bly, Robert, 325
Black, Bob, 1172 Blyton, Enid, 19
Black Crook, The (Barras), 629 Boarding school genre, 245
Black Elk, 667–668 Boas, Franz, 666
Black Flower, The (Bahr), 445 Bobbsey Twins books, 882
Black Hawk, An Autobiography (Black Boccaccio, 505, 903
Hawk), 667 Bock, Paula, 583
Black Hawk Down (Bowden), 583 Bodger, Joan, 171
Black humor, 502 Bodine, Echo, 693–694
Black market trade, 277 Body Artist, The (DeLillo), 262
Black Mask, The (magazine), 639 Boggs, Johnny D., 1136, 1139
Black Power, 37 Bohr, Niels, 129, 130
Blackwood, Algernon, 702 Bold, Mark, 821
Black, Veronica, 642 Bonesetter’s Daughter, The (Tan), 269, 446
Blair, Walter, 503, 504 Bonnin, Gertrude Simmons, 668
Blais, Madeleine, 940 Book of American Negro Poetry, The
Blake, William, 99, 435–436 (Johnson), 32, 34
Blakely, Mike, 1136 Book of Salt, The (Truong), 446
Blanchard, W. Scott, 4 BookPALS (Performing Artists for Literacy
Bland, Eleanor Taylor, 652–653 in Schools), 167
Blandy, Doug, 1172 Books for a Better Life Awards, 872, 873
Blankets (Thompson), 417 Bookstores, 162, 177
Blanton, Casey, 1036, 1043 Booktalks, 163–164, 166
Blatty, William Peter, 703 Boom, the, 588, 590
Blaustein, Noah, 936 Bootstrappers (time travelers), 1017–1018,
Blavatsky, Helena, 701 1022–1023
Blaxploitation films, 1068 Bop, Beat poetry and, 107, 108
Blaylock, James, 359, 707, 711 Borchardt, Alice, 56
Bledsloe, Lucy Jane, 937 Bordeaux, Delmar E., 390–91
Bleiler, Eerett, 700 Borges, Jorge Luis, 427, 429–430, 594,
Blessing, Lee, 934 733, 918
Blind Eye (Wilson), 413 Borich, Barrie Jean, 87, 89, 90
Blish, James, 707, 810, 819, 885, 1026 Boricua writers, 552, 554, 555, 556, 557
Blitzstein, Marc, 630 Born Palestinian, born Black (Hammad),
Bloc, Marc, 470 48
Bloch, Robert, 702, 703, 706 Borowski, Tadeusz, 493
Block, Francesca Lia, 1149, 1150, 1152, Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards, 163,
1158, 1173 178
Block, Geoffrey, 630 Boswell, James, 118–119
Block, Lawrence, 644, 645, 648, 654, Boswell, Marshall, 230, 946–947
888–889, 939 Botton, Alain de, 1036
1214 INDEX
Boucher, Anthony, 659, 810, 1030
Boudinot, Elias, 668
Boulevard of Broken Dreams (Deitch), 450
Bournes, Sam, 736
Bouton, Jim, 942
Bowden, Mark, 475, 583, 622
Bowen, Peter, 653
Bower, B.M., 1133, 1139
Bowstern, Moe, 1174
Boxing, 938, 940
Boyd, Elizabeth, 157
Boyle, T. Coraghessan, 261, 317, 320–321,
446, 448, 451, 1083, 1085–1086
Boynton, Robert, 577
Boys Don’t Cry (film), 406
Boy’s Own Story, A (White), 408–409
Brackett, Leigh, 895, 899, 901, 902,
979–980, 986
Bradbury, Judy, 167
Bradbury, Malcolm, 7–8
Bradbury, Ray, 703, 706, 712, 810, 811,
826, 986, 1163
film adaptations of, 1019
technological abundance theme, 315
Bradford, Sarah, 124, 130
Bradley, David, 444
Bradley, Marion Zimmer, 430–431, 437,
985
Bradshaw, John, 871
Bragg, Rick, 620
Brains, 838
Bram Stoker Awards, horror, 714
Branch, Taylor, 472
Brand, Max, 888, 1133, 1137, 1140
Brandner, Gary, 710
Brandon, Jay, 564
Brandvold, Peter, 1138–1139, 1140
Brantley, Ben, 296, 298, 299–300, 306
Brashares, Ann, 1156
Brashler, William, 934
Brask, Per, 680
Braudy, Leo, 368
Braun, Lilian Jackson, 643, 888
Brautigan, Richard, 387
Brave Bird, Mary, 668
Brave Enemies (Morgan), 444, 453
Brave New World (Huxley), 313–14
Bray, Libba, 432
Breaking Ice: An Anthology of [African
American] Contemporary Fiction
(McMillan), 33
Breast cancer, 142, 155
Breeze, Jean “Binta,” 755
Breier, Davida Gypsy, 1164
Brennan, Caitlin, 437
Brennan, Joseph Payne, 703
Brent, Bill, 1172
Breslin, Jimmy, 933
Bricolage, 280
Bridge of San Luis Rey (T. Wilder),
442–443, 449
Bridget Jones’s Diary, 137, 139
Bridge trilogy, 284
Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, The
(Diaz), 234
Brigg, Peter, 826
Bright, Bill, 514
Bright, Susie, 348
Brilliance of the Moon (Rubinstein/Hearn),
435
Brin, David, 815, 826, 902
Brinkley, Douglas, 470
Brinkmeyer, Robert, 773, 774
Briscoe, Joanna, 239
Britain
academic fiction, 4–5, 6, 7
Arthurian literature, 60
chick lit, 138
erotic literature, 339
fantasy literature, 356
Brite, Poppy Z., 709
British Academy of Film and Television
Arts awards, 959
Broadway, 79, 196, 197, 631–632
poetry and, 757
sports literature and, 934
Broadway musical, 374
Broadwin, John A., 471
Brock-Broido, Lucie, 549
Brockett, Oscar, 196
Broderick, Damien, 1029, 1030
Brodeur, Arthur Gilchrist, 976
Brodhead, 768, 775
Brody, Jane, 872
Brokeback Mountain (film), 379–80, 408
Broken Ground, 332
Bromige, David, 540
Bronté, Charlotte, 139
Brooke-Rose, Christine, 11
Brookings, Ernest Noyes, 1173
Brookland (Barton), 448
Brooks, Cleanth, 775
Brooks, Geraldine, 170–171, 445, 447
Brooks, Gwendolyn, 748, 750
Brooks, Richard, 1050
Brooks, Terry, 886
Brosh McKenna, Aline, 381
Brother Cadfael books (Pargeter), 455
 INDEX 1215

Brotherhood of the Bomb (Herken), 117 Bunting, Eve, 177

Browlow, John, 376 Bunyan, John, 185
Brown, Claude, 1068 Buonarroti, Michelangelo, 866
Brown, Dale, 613, 619, 640, 970 Burgess, Anthony, 1122, 1126–1127
Brown, Dan, 353, 434, 682, 685, Burgess, Edwin B., 623
691–693, 735, 885, 962, 970 Burgess, Michael, 455, 605
Browne, Sylvia, 683, 686, 688, 694, 723 Burke, James Lee, 445, 655
Brown, Fredrick, 387 Burke, Jan, 659
Brown, Helen Gurley, 140–141, 872 Burlesque, 195, 196
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 1120, 1122 “Burning Chrome,” 274, 275, 276, 284
Brown, Jason Robert, 632, 634 Burns, Rex, 654
Brown, Larry, 775 Burr, Dan, 450
Brown, Lyn Miken, 873 Burroughs, Augusten, 89, 91, 92–93
Brown, Michael, 470 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 17, 808, 816,
Brown, Rita Mae, 404, 502, 644 978–979, 985
Brown, Sandra, 963 Burroughs, William, 99, 1031
Brown, Sterling, 27, 28, 32, 33, 35–36 Burroughs, William S., 782, 783, 784,
Brown, Steven T., 612 786–788, 807
Brown, Susan Love, 683 Burton, Tim, 1026
Brown, Tina, 116, 124 Buscaglia, Leo, 871
Brown, William Wells, 293–294 Busch, Frederick, 445
Bruce, John Edward, 651–652 Bush, George H.W.
Brumble III, David H., 667, 680 graphic novels and, 418
Brunner, John, 811 historical nonfiction and, 475
Brunstetter, Wanda E., 892 humor and, 503–504, 506
Bryant, Annie, 883 military literature and, 621
Bryson, Bill, 20, 22–23, 471, 507, 837, sports writing and, 933
1040–1041 terrorism fiction and, 1007, 1008, 1009
Bryson, Scott, 326, 330 Bush, H.W. and family, 41, 116, 126
Buchan, Elizabeth, 142 Bushnell, Candace, 137, 138, 140, 149,
Buchan, John, 954, 955, 963 150–154
Buckley, Christopher, 506 Bush presidencies, 125–126
Buckley, Fiona, 460 Butcher, Grace, 937
Buckley, F.R., 976 Butler, Octavia E., 447, 812, 813, 819,
Buck Rogers series, 899, 900 918, 921, 1031
Buck, Sue, 948 Butler, Richard, 258
Buddhism, 97, 101, 109, 330 Byatt, A.S., 11, 640, 739
Budman, Mark, 397 Byerman, Keith, 443, 450
Buffa, Dudley W., 568 Byrd, William, 500
Buford, Bill, 1034 Byrne, Rhonda, 689, 723, 863
Bug, 301 Byron, Lord, 700, 1092, 1120, 1127
Bugliosi, Vincent, 1047, 1053–1055
Bujold, Lois McMaster, 796, 815, 827, Cabell, James Branch, 974
832, 907–908, 1027 CableACE awards, 202
Bukiet, Melvin Jules, 487, 488, 490–492 Cable, George Washington, 773, 776
Bukowski, Charles, 936, 1175 Cabot, Meg, 1156
Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, Cadigan, Pat, 278–80, 282, 284, 814, 826
163 Cadnum, Michael, 1152
Bullett, Gerald, 562 Caen, Herb, 99, 104
Bullying, 228 Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth
Bulosan, Carlos, 68, 70–71 Century (Donnelly), 314
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 700, 701, 738 Cahan, Abraham, 523, 524, 525, 574
Bundy, Ted, 1049, 1056–1057 Cahill, Thomas, 476, 478
Bunnies, 176 Cahill, Tim, 20
1216 INDEX
Caillois, Roger, 589
Cain, James M., 639
Caine, Mutiny, The (Wouk), 563, 568
Calahan, S. Alice, 668
Calamari Press, 394
Caldecott Medal, 175, 177
Caldecott, Stratford, 687
Caldwell, Erskine, 574
Caldwell, Gail, 925, 929
Caldwell, Ian, 739
Caldwell, Mark, 473
Caldwell, Roy, 947
Calendar readings, 513–514
Califia-Rice, Patrick, 318, 338, 343–345,
346
California, 656
Call and response, 37
Call it Sleep (H. Roth), 524, 525
Cambor, Kathleen, 447
Cambridge, 1–2, 4
Cameron, Julia, 874
Camp, John, 648
Campa, Arturo, 554, 555
Campbell, Donna, 771
Campbell, John W., 808–809, 900
Campbell, Joseph, 355
Campbell, Ramsey, 702, 706, 712, 985
Campbell, Sr., J.L., 1091–1092
Campus novel. See Academic Fiction
Cancer, 264, 267. See also Breast cancer
Candelaria, Cordelia, 942
Candlewick (publisher), 179
Cane (Toomer), 31, 35
Canfield, Jack, 512, 515, 517, 872
Cannon, Jimmy, 933
Capers, 648
Capitalism. See also Consumer culture
academic fiction and, 2
Asian American literature and, 81
Beat poetry, 102, 108, 109
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 250, 262, 263, 264
cyberpunk, 280, 283
language poetry and, 538, 545
musical theater and, 633
sports literature and, 941, 948
utopias and, 1081
vampire fiction and, 1081
Capote (film), 382
Capote, Truman, 403, 575, 576, 1047,
1050–1052
Cappannelli, George and Sedena, 870
Captain America (character), 422, 423
Caracole (White), 409
Card, Orson Scott, 431, 435–436, 446,
619–620, 815, 826, 904–905, 1150
Cardoso, Bill, 576
Caribbean, 588, 591, 761, 762, 852, 853,
1088, 1121
Carlin, George, 506
Carlip, Hilary, 1173
Carlson, Melody, 883
Carlson, Patricia Ann, 859
Carmien, Edward, 905
Carnegie, Andrew, 114
Carnegie, Dale, 862–863
Carnell, E.J., 811
Carpentier, Alejo, 588
Carr, A.A., 670, 671, 677, 681
Carr, Caleb, 462, 650, 656
Carré, John le, 639
Carr, John Dickson, 455
Carr, Lucien, 99, 782, 786
Carr, Terry, 388
Carroll, Jonathan, 712
Carroll, Lewis, 1165
Carroll, Pamela S., 1152, 1153
Carrying the Fire (Collins), 16
Carson, Rachel, 316, 856
Carson, Sharon, 951
Carswell, Sean, 1175
Carter Beats the Devil (Gold), 448
Carter, Ian, 4–5
Carter, Jimmy, 444, 475
Carter, Lin, 972, 982, 985, 987
Carter, Shawn Corey, 1071
Cartland, Barbara, 799
Cartmell, Deborah, 372
Cartoon/Fantasy Organization (C/FO),
603–604, 605
Caruana, Vicki, 512–513
Carvell, Marlene, 1151
Carver, Lisa Crystal, 1175
Carver, Raymond, 395
“Casey at the Bat” (Thayer), 932
Casey, John, 859
Cash, Arthur, 113
Cash, W.J., 775
Cassady, Caroline, 793
Cassady, Neal, 782, 784, 791
Castillo, Ana, 559, 590, 593, 599, 922
Castle in the Forest, The (Mailer), 446
Castle, Jayne, 798
Catcher in the Rye, The (Salinger), 223,
240–241, 1148
Catch-22 (Heller), 615–616

Categorization, 407
Cates, David Allen, 322–323
Cats, 643–644, 1004
“Catscan” (Sterling), 276
Catwoman (character), 425
Cave, Hugh B., 705
Cayce, Edgar, 683
Cayton, Horace, 1071
Celan, Paul, 493
“Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras
County, The” (Twain), 17
Celebrities
biography, 116
children’s literature, 167–168
coming of age fiction, 229
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 263
film adaptations of books, 375, 376
Celestine Prophecy, The (Redfield), 695
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 14–15
Cellophane (Arana), 593–594, 596,
597–598, 599
Celtic influences, 705
Censorship
Beat generation and, 786
children’s literature, 165
comic books, 214, 216, 417, 419, 422
and the Comic Code Authority, 417
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 262
erotic literature, 338, 339, 340–341,
341, 343
poetry and, 758
zines and, 1165, 1170
Center for Biographical Research (CBR),
113
Center for the Study of Lives, 113
CFO (Cartoon/Fantasy Organization),
603–604, 605
Chabon, Michael
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 262
GLBTQ, 408
historical fiction, 446, 448, 489
Holocaust literature, 492–493,
495–496, 522
speculative fiction, 927–929
sports literature, 937–938
Chadler, Gertrude Warner, 883
Chalala, Elie, 45
Chamberlain, Lucia, 456
Chambers, Aidan, 1150
Chambers, Oswald, 513, 514–515
INDEX 1217
Chanady, Amaryll. See Magical realism
Chandler, Raymond, 639, 644
Chaneling, 688, 693–694
Chaneysville Incident, The (Bradley), 444
Changing Places (Lodge), 8
Changnon, Greg, 925
Channeling, 682, 685, 722–723
Chaos theory, 836, 837
Chaplin, Joyce E., 123
Chapman, Graham, 128
Chapman, Vera, 430
Charara, Hayan, 49–50
Charles, Ron, 927
Charlotte, Jay, 659
Charnas, Suzy McKee, 709
Chase, Clifford, 1010–1011
Chase, Loretta, 801
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 700
Chauvenaut, Louis Russell, 1166
Chavez, Denise, 559
Chavez, Fray Angelico, 554
Chbosky, Steven, 1151
Cherry, Marc, 145
Cherry-Gerrard, Apsley, 15, 1035
Cherryh, C.J., 815, 905, 985
Chesnutt, Charles Waddell, 28, 30–31, 32,
776
Chesterton, G.K., 639, 641
Cheung, King-Kok, 70, 77
Cheyfitz, Eric, 679
Chiang, Ted, 815
Chiaventone, Frederick J., 1136
Chicago, 374–75
Chicago Tribune prizes, 1158
“Chica lit,” 146
Chicano literature, 552, 554–555, 556,
557–558, 654, 922
Chickencoop Chinaman, The (Chin), 73
Chicken Soup series (Canfield and M.
Hansen), 511, 512, 516, 517
Chick lit, 137–159, 155, 224, 238–239,
381, 798
Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction (Fer-
riss and Young), 148
Child abuse, 91, 200, 705
Childers, Erskine, 954, 955, 963
Childhood. See also Coming of age litera-
ture
abusive, 88, 91, 506, 714
Arab American literature and, 44, 47
Arthurian literature and, 62, 65
Asian American, 68, 71
chick lit, 147
1218 INDEX
Childhood (continued)
comedic theatre and, 198, 202
coming of age fiction, 225
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion and, 269
Holocaust literature and, 488, 490
humor and, 507
Irish, 94
multiculturalism and, 429
myths about, 147, 223, 226
Child, Lincoln, 1082, 1087–1088
Child, Lydia Maria, 441
Children
Arthurian literature, 58, 59, 65
comic books, 210, 213, 214
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 266, 432
erotic literature, 338, 342, 343
historical mysteries, 461
historical nonfiction, 471
inspirational literature and, 518
manga and anime and, 608, 609
military literature, 614
mystery and, 646
occult/supernatural literature and, 711
series fiction and, 881, 882–884
Children’s Book Council guidelines, 164
Children’s literature, 162–185. See also
Young adult literature
Christian, 189
fantasy, 359
historical fantasy, 429
Latino American, 557
reviews, 163
series fiction and, 883, 884
sports, 936
urban literature and, 1076
zines, 1169
Children’s Poet Laureate, 179
Children’s Writer’s and Illustrator’s Market
(2007), 162
Childress, Mark, 231, 235
Chilean American writers, 559
Chin, Frank, 73–74
China, 72, 75, 80, 270, 331, 428, 469,
476, 826, 1104
Chinese Americans, 66
Chippenham, Stephen, 471
Chisholm, P.F., 460
Chona, Maria, 667
Chopra, Deepak, 688, 695, 696, 863, 872
Chosen, The (Potok), 525, 526
Christensen, Laird, 334
Christian Book Awards, 191
Christian fiction, 185–193, 356, 797, 799,
892, 945. See also Inspirational liter-
ature
Christian, M., 347, 348
Christianity. See also Bible, The
historical fantasy and, 433, 436–437
historical nonfiction and, 471–472, 476,
477
Holocaust literature and, 490
magical realism and, 599
muscular, 931
musical theatre and, 635
mystery fiction and, 642
New Age literature and, 686, 687,
690–693
occult/supernatural literature and, 723
philological thrillers and, 734, 738
science fiction and, 821
self-help literature and, 868, 874
vampire fiction and, 1095, 1109, 1113
wizardry and, 431
young adult fiction and, 883
Christie, Agatha, 456, 639
Chronic argonauts (time travellers),
1016–1017, 1018, 1021–1022
Chronological approach, 249–250
Chu, Louis, 68, 72–73
Church of the Latter Days Saints
(Mormons), 431, 436
Cinderella pattern, 62, 152, 173
Circuses, 706–707, 711–712
Cisneros, Sandra, 448, 773, 1068
City and the Pillar, The (Vidal), 403
City Come A-Walkin’ (Shirley), 283
City Lights bookstore, 106
City of God (Doctorow), 262
City settings. See also Urban fiction
chick lit, 140, 142, 151, 152, 154
contemporary mainstream American
fiction, 256, 257
cyberpunk, 274, 277
Civil rights. See also Human rights
Asian American literature, 66
autobiography and memoir, 88
comic books, 211, 219, 424
cyberpunk, 276
GLBTQ and, 405
legal thrillers and, 568
sports literature and, 939
Civil Rights Movement, 445, 446, 450,
502
Civil War
African American literature, 28
biography, 122

comic books and, 219–220
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 262
historical fiction, 442, 443, 444, 445,
447, 452
historical mysteries, 462
literary journalism and, 573
military literature, 615
occult/supernatural literature and, 705
science fiction and, 831
series fiction and, 886
utopian literature and, 1082
verse novels and, 1123, 1126–1127
western genre and, 1137
Civil war, Lebanese, 50
Civil War (Millar), 423–424
Cixous, Hélène, 792, 793
Clairmont, Chris, 824
Clairvoyance, 718, 725. See also Extrasen-
sory perception (ESP)
Clancy, Tom, 613–614, 618, 858, 969,
970, 998
Clansman, The: An Historical Romance of
the Ku Klux Klan (Dixon), 449
Claremont, Chris, 824
Clareson, Thomas, 810, 811
Claridge, Laura, 115–116, 126
Clark, Arthur Alexander Gordon, 562
Clark, Carol Higgins, 640
Clarke, Arthur C., 809, 895, 900–901,
1026
Clarke, Robert B., 471
Clarke, Susanna, 432, 832
Clark, Mary Higgins, 640, 963–964
Clark, Roy Peter, 582
Clark, William A., 1048
Class
biography, 122
chick lit, 145, 147
comedic theatre, 197, 199
coming of age fiction, 222
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 253, 257, 261, 263, 268
dystopian fiction, 314
urban literature and, 1071–1072
Classics
chick lit and, 139
Christian fiction, 187
dramatic theater, 293
fantasy literature, 358
film adaptations of books, 367–368
Claxton, Guy, 473
Claybaugh, Winn, 871
Cleary, Beverly, 1149
INDEX 1219
Cleckley, Hervey M., 1048
Clegg, Douglas, 711, 712
Cleland, John, 339, 341
Clemens, Orion, 17
Clemens, Samuel Langhorne. See Twain,
Mark
Clement, Hal, 814
Cleverly, Barbara, 465
Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 123–124
Clooney, George, 959
Cloudsplitter (Banks), 446, 447
Clough, Arthur Hugh, 117
Clowes, Daniel, 372
Clute, John, 826, 902, 1031
C-Murder, 1069
Coale, Samuel, 1039
Cochrane, Mick, 936
Cocteau, Jean, 403
Codell, Esmé Raji, 167
Coel, Margaret, 653
Cofer, Judith Ortiz, 557
Coffee House Press, 389
Coffee Trader, The (Liss), 447
Cognitive estrangement, 918–919
Cognitive science, 838
Cohen, Hettie, 791
Cohen, Leah Hager, 940
Cohen, Octavus Roy, 652
Cohen, Robert, 289, 304, 305, 306, 308
Coincidence, 597–598
Colbert, Stephen, 506
Colcord, Lincolm, 855
Cold Mountain (Frazier), 445, 450
Coldsmith, Don, 1135
Cold War
Asian American literature and, 68, 72
Beat poetry, 97, 103, 106, 108
ecopoetry and, 336
fantasy literature and, 360
fiction and, 639
historical fantasy and, 429
historical fiction and, 444, 448
literary journalism and, 575
mystery fiction and, 639, 645
Native American literature and, 678
science writing and, 836
series fiction and, 888
sports literature and, 934, 948
spy fiction and, 956–957, 958, 961
terrorist fiction and, 998
western genre and, 1135
Coleman, Jane Candia, 1135, 1139
Coleman, Wanda, 757
Colfer, Eoin, 416
1220 INDEX
Collectors, 212
College students, 211, 223
Colliers Weekly, 387
Collings, Michael, 436
Collins, Billy, 753
Collins, Francis, 839
Collins, Judy, 872
Collins, Kate, 641
Collins, Max Allan, 373, 465–466
Collins, Michael, 16, 780
Collins, Nancy, 709
Collins, Wilkie, 638, 642, 657, 963, 967
Colombian American writers, 559
Colonialism
adventure fiction, 14, 15
Asian American literature, 79
comic books, 217, 218
film adaptations of books, 380
graphic novels and, 418
historical mysteries and, 465
historical nonfiction and, 473
humor and, 501
Latino literature and, 557
magical realism and, 589, 594
Native American literature and, 671,
672
occult/supernatural literature and, 708
terrorism literature and, 996
verse novels and, 1124, 1126, 1129
Colón, Jesús, 556–557
Colonial period, American, 441, 442, 851
Colonization, 589
Color Purple, The (Walker), 443, 450
Color, writers of , 921–922. See also
specific cultural groups
Colton, Larry, 940
Columbia University, Beat poetry and, 98
Columbine High School, 227–228
Columbus, Christopher, 14, 849
Combined Asian American Resources Pro-
ject, 72
Combs, Cindy C., 995
Combs, Sean “Diddy,” 1071
Comedic theatre, 195–208
Comedy, 47, 195, 196, 205, 289, 292–293.
See also Humor
Cometbus (Elliot), Aaron, 1164
Comic Amateur Press Alliance, 416
Comic Book Legal Defense Fund’s
Defender of Liberty Award, 428
Comic books, 209–222. See also Graphic
novels
censorship of, 1172
films and, 372–373
historical fantasy, 435
Holocaust literature and, 493, 495
Middle East in, 434
science fiction and, 823–824
science writing and, 836
September 11 attacks and, 1006–1007
shops, 211
speculative fiction and, 923, 927–928
vampire fiction and, 1096
Web sites, 425
western genre and, 1134
zines and, 1166
Comic Market, 601
Comics Buyer’s Guide Award for Favorite
Writer, 424
Comic’s Code Authority, 210, 211, 214,
215
Comic strips, 1173
Coming of age literature, 222–249
Asian American, 77
dramatic theater, 305–306
military literature, 623
September 11 and, 434
sexuality and, 222–223
sports literature, 932, 936
transrealist writing, 1032
young adult literature and, 1147–1148,
1149
Coming out, 403, 412. See also GLBTQ
(Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender,
and queer)
Commedia dell’arte, 195
Commedia erudite, 195
Commercialism, 107, 191, 1164,
1169–1170. See also Consumer cul-
ture
Commodification of adolescence, 240
Commonwealth Club Gold Award, 79
Commonwealth vs. Holmes, 341
Communism
Asian American literature and, 72, 73
autobiography and memoir, 91, 92
Beat poetry, 106
dramatic theater and, 295, 308
dystopian fiction, 313
historical mysteries and, 466
historical nonfiction and, 475
humor and, 505
military literature and, 620
science fiction and, 812
sports literature and, 949
spy fiction and, 955, 956, 957

vampires and, 926
verse novels and, 1126
Community. See also Neighborhood fiction
Black Arts and, 748–749
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion and, 253
ecopoetry and, 332
feminism and, 777
GLBTQ and, 407
legal thrillers and, 570
poetry and, 753–754, 755
sea writing and, 850, 851–852
series fiction and, 880
urban literature and, 1073–1074
young adult literature and, 1151
zines and, 1067, 1165
Competition, 3–4
Compton, Ralph, 1137, 1142–1143
Computer-generated imagery (CGI), 168
Computers
cyberpunk and, 277, 278
film adaptations and, 370
games, 188, 274, 281, 284
manga and anime and, 604–605
science fiction and, 819
security, 282
Comstock, Anthony, 342
Comstock Law, 342
Conan the Barbarian (character), 354,
980–981
Conant, Jennet, 127
Conant, Susan, 644
Concentration camps, 78, 92, 315, 1006,
1083. See also Holocaust literature
Concept musicals, 631
Concrete poetry, 540
Condensed versions, 471
Condon, Richard, 970
Confessional literature, 87, 417, 428,
746–747, 1001–1002
Confessions of Nat Turner, The (Styron),
443
Conformity, 105, 106, 225, 232, 312,
946–947
Conjure Woman, The (Chestnutt), 30–31
Conley, Robert, 670, 676, 679
Conn, Andrew Lewis, 496
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s
Court, A (Twain), 55, 428–429, 442,
446
Connecticut Yankees (time travelers),
1014–1016, 1018, 1020–1021
Connelly, Michael, 645–646, 658, 968
INDEX 1221
Connery, Brian A., 3
Connolly, Lawrence C., 395
Connolly, Michael, 656
Connor, Beverly, 650
Connors, Peter, 396
Conover, Ted, 578, 580
Conrad, Joseph, 997
Conroy, Pat, 507, 940
Consciousness, 434, 436, 855, 1016
Conservatism. See also Culture wars
Christian fiction and, 190
dystopian fiction and, 317
historical fantasy and, 435–436
historical nonfiction and, 476, 477
humor and, 506
science fiction and, 818
series fiction and, 892
true crime literature and, 1058
utopian literature and, 1086
zines and, 1175
Conspiracy of Paper, A (Liss), 447
Conspiracy theories, 433–434
Conspiracy thrillers, 963, 970
Constantie, Storm, 709
Constantine, K.C., 655
Consumer culture. See also
Commercialism; Materialism
academic fiction, 11
adolescents and, 240
Beat poetry, 98
chick lit, 144
coming of age fiction, 222
contemporary mainstream American lit-
erature and, 250, 255, 261
cyberpunk and, 280
dystopian fiction and, 315, 316, 322
magical realism and, 590, 591–592
poetry and, 751
regional fiction and, 774
science fiction and, 821
spy fiction and, 955
true crime literature and, 1055, 1056
utopian literature and, 1082
vampire fiction and, 1110
Consumer identification, 185
Contemporary mainstream American
fiction, 249–274
historical fiction, 444–448, 447
Jewish American literature, 523
manga and anime and, 607
military literature, 620–621
musical theatre, 632–637
Native American literature, 671–679
1222 INDEX
Contemporary mainstream American
fiction (continued)
romance novels and, 799
science fiction, 813–814, 817–818,
825–826, 910–914
sea writing and, 856–859
series fiction, 884–892
speculative fiction, 922–929
sports literature, 935–940
spy fiction and, 959–962
sword and sorcery fiction, 988–989
utopian, 1083
western genre, 1132, 1134–1135,
1137–1143
young adult literature, 1151,
1156–1159
zines, 1167–1169
Contemporary mainstream American non-
fiction, 262, 265, 408–409, 472,
577–578, 582–583, 939
Continuous Harmony, A (W. Berry), 332
Contraception, 141, 142, 342
Controversy, 165, 249, 307
Conventions, literary, 920
Conventions (meetings), 209, 274,
1168–1169
Conway, Diane, 869–870
Cook, Captain, 1042
Cook, Glen, 988–989
Cook, James, 859
Cook, Robin, 966
Coolidge, Clark, 540
Cool style, 1067
Coonts, Stephen, 613–614, 619, 970
Cooper, James Fenimore, 441, 850, 881,
932, 955
Cooper, Susan, 171
Coover, John, 724
Coover, Robert (editor), 388
Coover, Robert (writer), 316, 319–320,
934, 947
Copenhagen, 129
Coppola, Francis Ford, 1096
Copway, George, 667
Cordy, Michael, 738
Corelli, Marie, 701
Coretta Scott King Awards, 178, 1153,
1157, 1158
Corinth, Lord (character), 466
Corll, Dean, 1048
Cormier, Robert, 1150
Cornwell, Bernard, 60
Cornwell, Patricia, 641, 649, 655, 889,
966
Corpi, Lucha, 559
Corporate power
cyberpunk, 278
dramatic theater, 302
dystopian fiction, 314, 317, 320, 321
film adaptations of books, 382
Corpus Christi, 303–304
Corrections, The, 264
Corso, Gregory, 99, 100, 105–106, 757
Cosmopolis (DeLillo), 262
Cosmopolitan magazine, 387
Cossacks, 977–978
Costello, Bonnie, 326
Costume pieces, 976
Cotton, 231
Cotton, Ralph, 1140
Coughlin, Paul, 868
Coughlin, William J., 568
Coulter, Catherine, 965
Counterculture. See also individual writers
Beats and, 783
comic books and, 210
cyberpunk and, 276
historical nonfiction and, 473
literary journalism and, 576
New Age literature and, 683
road fiction and, 786
terrorism and, 996
true crime literature and, 1054
urban literature and, 1068
utopian literature and, 1083
“Counter-mythology,” 190
Coupland, Douglas, 222, 228
Courtroom drama. See Legal thrillers
Covenant, The (Michener), 443
Covey, Stephen R., 862, 865
Covington, Diane, 687
Cowboys. See also Western genre
Arthurian, 60
comic books, 213
cyberpunk, 274, 275, 277, 278, 283
erotic literature, 342
historical fiction and, 452
musical theater and, 634
Coyle, Daniel, 940
Cozies, 639–640
Crabb, Cindy Gretchen Ovenrack, 1174
Cracking Up (Lewis), 502–503
Craddock, Maggie, 866
Craft, Christopher, 1114
Crafting the Very Short Story: An Anthol-
ogy of 100 Masterpieces, 391, 396
Craig, Bryan, 989
Cramelo (Cisneros), 448

Cramer, Kathryn, 815, 903
Cramer, Richard Ben, 581
Crandon, Mina, 721
Crane, Hart, 1121
Crane, Stephen, 442, 574, 613, 615, 771,
855, 1066
Cranny-Francis, Anne, 917, 920, 921
Crawford, Cheryl, 294
Crease, Robert P., 129
Creative nonfiction, 572
Creeley, Robert, 757
Creevy, Patrick, 936
Creole culture, 773
Crescent, 46–47
Crews, Harry, 775, 935
Crichton, Michael, 447, 565, 807,
817–818, 965–966, 969, 970
Crime. See also Legal thrillers; True crime
literature
chick lit, 145
comic books, 213, 214, 215, 217, 419
coming of age fiction, 229
cyberpunk, 276, 282
graphic novels and, 421
Crime-noir, 348
Crime Writers Association, 455
Crime Writers Association Dagger awards,
458, 465
Criticism. See Academic reception; Recep-
tion
Critics Circle Award, 299
Crocodile on the Sandbank (Elizabeth
Peters), 456
Crofts, Neil, 866
Cronenberg, David, 823
Crookes, William, 720
Crook, Elizabeth, 1136, 1139
Cross, Amanda, 640
Crossley-Holland, Kevin, 434
Cross-Pollinations: The Marriage of
Science and Poetry (Nabhan), 327
Crowe, Chris, 943
Crowley, Aleister, 702
Crowley, John, 706, 712
Cruikshank, Juli, 673
Crumb, Robert, 211, 1166
Crusades, 431, 738–739
Cruse, Howard, 450
Crutcher, Chris, 932, 938, 1150, 1152
Cruz, Nilo, 296–297, 309
Cry of the Heron (Rubinstein/Hearn), 435
Cryptonomicon (Stephenson), 445, 448
Crystal Express (Sterling), 282
Crystal Horizon, The (Messner), 16
INDEX 1223
Cuban American writers, 296, 552, 554,
555–556, 558
Culinary mysteries, 641–642
Cullen, Robert, 938, 959
“Cult classics,” 369
Cults, 706
Culture. See also specific cultures
African American literature, 26, 28
Asian American literature, 83
autobiography and memoir, 87
children’s literature, 165
Christian fiction, 193
comedic theatre, 197, 198, 199, 205
coming of age fiction, 222, 237
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 256
cyberpunk, 276, 278
erotic literature, 338
manga and anime and, 609
overview, 1135
regional fiction and, 769–770
science and, 840
travel writing and, 1043
true crime literature and, 1049, 1058,
1059, 1060, 1061
verse novels and, 1119
zines and, 1169–1170
Culture wars, 12, 316, 317, 758–759
Cunningham, Michael, 376–377, 404, 446,
447
Curious Wine (Forrest), 404
Curriculum guides, 167
Cussler, Clive, 888
Cyber cowboys, 274, 275, 277, 278, 283
Cyberpunk, 274–287
films, 823
science fiction and, 807, 814–815, 820,
821, 827, 829
technology and, 817
Cyberpunk 2020 (game), 281
Cyberspace, 274, 277, 278, 280. See also
Internet
Cyborg, 279. See also Human machine
interface
Cynicism
Beat poetry and, 98
chick lit and, 153
children’s literature and, 162
comedic theatre and, 198
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion and, 271
erotic literature and, 347
humor and, 504
Jewish American literature and, 523
1224 INDEX
Cynicism (continued)
legal thrillers and, 565, 570
manga and, 608
military literature and, 623
musical theaterr and, 633
mystery fiction and, 644
self-help literature and, 868, 872
sports literature and, 933
spy fiction and, 955, 956, 957
travel writing and, 1039
vampire fiction and, 1112
young adults, of, 372
Cyrino, Monica, 339
Dadaism, 540
Dagger awards, 455, 458, 463, 465, 466
Dahl, Roald, 1156
Dahmer, Jeffrey, 1049
Dailey, Janet, 891
Daily Readings from Your Best Life Now
(Osteen), 513
Dakotas, 677
Daldry, Stephen, 376, 377
Daley, Carroll John, 644
Dallas, Sandra, 1136
Damiano’s Flue (Macavoy), 431
Damsels in distress, 175, 352
Dana, Richard, 850, 855
Dancer from the Dance (Holleran), 404
Danger, Harvey, 1173
Dangling Man (Bellow), 526
Danielewski, Mark Z., 712
Daniels, Les, 708
Daniel, Tony, 911–912
Danish Girl, The (Ebershoff), 411, 448
Dann, Jack, 826
Dante, 739
Danticat, Edwidge, 777
D’Aponte, Mimi, 669
Darby, Jaye T., 669, 680
Darconville’s Cat, 12
Darden, Christopher, 564, 570
Dare, Justine, 802
Dark comedy, 197, 200, 203, 268
Dark fantasy, 353, 354, 355, 359–360, 361
Darling, The, 261
Dartford, Mark, 178
Daughter of Time, The (Tey), 455
Daughters of a Coral Dawn (Forrest),
404
Davidson, Diane Mott, 641
Davidson, Sara, 575
Davies, Alan, 540
Da Vinci Code, The (Brown), 355, 434,
640, 686, 687, 691–693, 706, 733,
735, 738, 962
Da Vinci, Leonardo, 866
Davis, Eric, 437
Davis, Kathryn, 446, 918
Davis, Kenn, 652
Davis, Lindsey, 458
Davis, Ray, 1031
Davis, Richard Harding, 574
Dawkins, Richard, 838, 839, 841–842
Dawson, Carley, 429
Day, William Patrick, 1095
DC Comics, 211–12, 216, 424, 899
Deahl, Rachel, 690
De Angelis, Barbara, 873
Dean, John, 1047
Dear Abbey (Bisson), 1021, 1022
Death
Arab American literature, 50
autobiography and memoir, 93
chick lit, 143
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 265
dramatic theater, 300
science fiction and, 918
sports literature and, 945
Death penalty, 1055–1056
Deaver, Jeffrey, 649, 890, 939, 968–969
De Camp, L. Sprague, 428, 973, 985, 1015
Declare, 360
Deconstructionism, 402
DeCure, John, 939
DeFalco, Joseph, 855
Defender of Liberty Award, 428
Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), 405,
759
Defoe, Daniel, 700
Deford, Frank, 943
DeGeneres, Ellen, 1152
Deighton, Len, 639, 956, 957
Dekker, Ted, 189–90
Delany, Samuel R., 812, 813, 818, 901,
921, 1026, 1031
Delbaere, Jeanne, 588
Delbo, Charlotte, 484, 487
DeLillo, Don
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 262
flash fiction, 390
historical fiction, 444, 446, 448
Holocaust literature, 483
humor, 505
 INDEX 1225

road fiction, 788 DiCamillo, Kate, 1156, 1157

sports literature, 934, 935, 947–948 Dickens, Charles, 225, 456, 562, 657, 701,
terrorism literature, 998–999, 963, 967
1005–1006 Dickenson, Emily, 743–744
Dell Comics (DC), 823 Dickey, James, 775, 937
Deloria, Ella, 665 Dickie, Margaret, 1122
Deloria Jr., Vine, 678 Dickinson, Emily, 325
Del Rey, Lester, 901–902 Dick, Philip K.
DeLuca, Sara, 90 cyberpunk and, 283
De Maupassant, Guy, 387, 390 historical fiction, 446
DeMille, Cecil B., 449 Holocaust literature, 483
DeMille, Nelson, 958 New Wave fiction, 901
Democracy, 314, 902–903 science fiction, 805, 812
Demon in the Freezer, The (Preston), 580 transrealist writing, 1025, 1026, 1028,
Denby, David, 372 1029
Denfeld, Rene, 940 Dickstein, Morris, 528
Dengler, Sandy, 457 Dick, Steve, 210
D’Erasmo, Stacey, 148 Didion, Joan, 91, 93–94, 575
Derleth, August, 702, 703 Diedrich, Maria, 851
Derrickson, Scott, 190 Diehl, Karen, 374, 377
Derrida, Jacques, 735 Diem, Andrea Grace, 683
Dervish is Digital (Bukatman), 284–85 Dietch, Kim, 450
DeSalvo, ALbert, 1048 Dietzel, Susanne B., 34
DeSilva, Bruce, 582 Di Filippo, Paul, 907, 913, 1033
Desperate Housewives (TV show), 145 Digging to America (Tyler), 270
Dessoir, Max, 724 Dijkstra, Bram, 1114
Detective fiction. See also Historical DiMarco, Damon, 474
mysteries; Mystery fiction Dime novels, 639, 887. See also Pulp
academic, 11, 12 fiction
comic books, 213 Dine, S.S., 639
cyberpunk, 284 Dinesen, Isak, 15
erotica, 338 DiPalma, Ray, 540
horror, 917 Di Prima, Diane, 106, 793
Native American, 668 Disabilities, 1152–1153
occult/supernatural literature and, 702 Disasters. See also specific disasters
true crime literature and, 1049 children’s literature and, 178, 884
urban literature and, 1069, 1071 historical nonfiction and, 474
vampire fiction, 1098 literary journalism and, 583
vampires and, 710 medical, 966
Detectives, hard-boiled, 644–645, 652 science fiction and, 812, 899
Detroit, 49, 642, 656 speculative fiction and, 926–927
DeVallance, Randall, 240–41 Disch, Thomas M., 812, 1028–1029, 1031
Devil Wears Prada, The (Weisberger), Discrimination, 68, 305, 447. See also
147–148, 381 Civil rights; Race
Dewald, Carolyn, 469 Dish, Robert, 327
Dexter, Colin, 455, 735 Dislocations, 72, 83, 101, 574, 763, 939,
Dexter, Peter, 938 1029, 1031, 1045
Dialect, 29–30, 32 Disney Corporation, 169, 213, 316, 319,
Diamond, Jared, 474, 839 429, 631–632, 633, 681, 881
Diana Chronicles, The (Brown), 124 Disobedience, Jessica, 1174
Diana, Michael, 1170 Disorder Peculiar to the Country, A
Diana, Princess of Wales, 124 (Kalfus), 532
Díaz, Junot, 234, 559 Dispenza, Joe, 689
1226 INDEX

Disposable fiction, 997–998 Douglass, Frederick, 852

Dissociation, 473 Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee, 82–83 (Doctorow), 317, 319
Diversity Downing, [George] Todd, 668
children’s literature, 177–178 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 562, 639, 706, 720,
comedic theatre, 199, 201 882
contemporary mainstream American fic- Doyle, Larry, 241
tion, 254–255 Dozois, Gardner, 274
ethnic, 173 Dracula, 739, 925–926
mystery fiction and, 639, 650 Dracula (character), 708
Native American literature and, 664, Dracula (Stoker), 1092–1095, 1113–1114
669, 680 Dragon Run (Dawson), 429
poetry and, 758–759 Drake, David, 614, 905
road fiction and, 783 Drake, Nick, 737
speculative fiction and, 921 Drake, St. Clair, 1071
Divorce, 267, 339 Drama, 26, 58–59, 293–294, 338, 390,
Dixon, Franklin W., 881 934, 936
Dixon, Kent, 388 Drama Desk Award, 296, 300, 307, 308
Dixon, Thomas, 31, 442, 449 DramaLogue Awards, 302
Dixon, W.M., 1121 Dramatic theater, 289–312, 995
Doctorow, Corey, 317, 319 Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Award,
Doctorow, E.L., 262, 444, 452, 522, 525, 299
1067 Drawing of the Dark, The, 359
Documentary films, 115 Dreamer (Johnson), 444, 445, 446
Dodd, Ray, 871 Dreaming in Cuban (Garcia), 591–592,
Dogs, 431, 643, 644, 731 599
Doherty, Paul, 457, 458, 459 Dreamland (K. Baker), 451
Doherty, Robert, 61 Dreams, 473, 727, 924
Doigs, Ivan, 446 Dreiser, Theodore, 574, 1066
Dôjinshi, 601 Dresang, Eliza, 1151
DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act), 405, Dressen, Sarah, 1150
759 Drugs
Domestic abuse, 146, 219, 346 autobiography and memoir, 88–89
Dominance, 434 Beat poetry, 97, 100, 101, 107
Dominican American writers, 552, 554, comic books, 210, 211
558–559 coming of age fiction, 222, 238
Donaghy, Tom, 297 contemporary mainstream American
Donaldson, Stephen R., 352 fiction, 257, 267
Donawerth, Jane, 917 cyberpunk, 275, 277
Donleavy, J.P., 502 film adaptations of books, 376
Donnelly, Ignatius, 314 ghosts and, 694
Donovan, Josephine, 770 musical theatre and, 631
Doody, Margaret, 457–458 New Age literature and, 683–684
Doolittle, Hilda (HD), 745 occult/supernatural literature and, 703,
Doors, The, 788 704
Dorn, Edward, 757, 1121 road fiction and, 783, 787, 790
Dorris, Michael, 672 sports literature and, 946
D’Orso, Michael, 940 transrealist writing and, 1030
Doss, James D., 653 urban literature and, 1068, 1070, 1072,
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 997 1074–1075
Double Gothic, 291 utopian literature and, 1085
Douglas, Ann, 770 young adult literature and, 1149, 1150
Douglas, Carole Nelson, 643 Drury, Nevil, 472
 INDEX 1227

Dryden, John, 117 Economics, 253, 332

Duarte, Stella Pope, 559 Ecopoetry, 325–337
Dubner , 839 Ecosystems, 268, 326, 327, 328, 329–330.
Du Bois, W.E.B., 32–33, 1071 See also Nature
Dudley, Andrew, 370 Ecuador, 654
Due, Tananarive, 712, 921 Eddings, David, 806, 886
Duffy, Carol Ann, 1121 Eddings, Leigh, 886
Dumas, Alexandre, 975 Eddison, E.F., 974–975
“Dummies” guides, 864 Edelstein, David, 378–379, 380
Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 28, 29–30, 32, 1066 Edgar Awards
Duncan, Lois, 1150 Asian American writers, 654
Duncan, Robert, 957 first novels, 646, 651
Duncombe, Stephen, 1172 hard-boiled mysteries, 655
Dune series (Herbert), 811, 904, 907 mystery fiction, 640, 650, 659, 890
Dungeons and Dragons (game), 983 Native American mysteries, 653
Dunne, Brenda J., 727–728 novels, 648
Dunne, Finley Peter, 501 spy fiction, 961
Dunsany, Lord, 357–58, 974 suspense, 966
Duplessis, Rachel, 542 true crime literature, 1050, 1053, 1058,
Durang, Christopher, 200–201 1061, 1062
Durham, David Anthony, 447, 448, Edmond, R., 1122
452–453 Edmondson, G.C., 1029
Durix, Jean-Pierre, 598 Edna Million, 1174
Durrell, Lawrence, 734 Education
DVDs, 606, 609, 689 Baby boomers and, 683
Dyalhis, Nictzin, 986 children’s mysteries and, 883
Dyer, Wayne, 872 comic books and, 209, 213
“Dynamics of power,” 3–4 death and, 1148
Dystel, Oscar, 872 erotic literature and, 339, 341
Dystopian fiction, 274, 278, 312–324, 806, manga and, 601–602
810, 817, 822 marginalized groups and, 589
Dziemianowicz, Stefan, 390 mystery fiction and, 658
Native Americans and, 673, 678, 679,
Eager, Edgar, 429 680
Eaglestone, Robert, 490 road fiction and, 782, 785, 793
Eastern influences, 682. See also Asian science writing and, 836, 841
American literature space opera and, 911
Eastman, Charles A., 667, 678 sports literature and, 942
Eating People Is Wrong (Bradbury), 7–8 true crime literature and, 1059
Eaton, Edith Maude, 67, 68–69 urban fiction and, 1068
Eaton, Winnifred, 69 utopian literature and, 1080
Ebb, Fred, 374 young adult literature and, 1152
E.B. White Read Aloud Award, 167 zines and, 1172
Ebershoff, David, 411–412, 448 Education Act of 1944, 5, 6
Ebert, Ray, 1163 Edutainment, 171, 174
Ebert, Roger, 372, 375, 971 Edwardian age, 197, 456, 461–462, 463
E-books, 257–258, 800, 1167 Edward, John, 723
Eco, Umberto, 457, 733, 734, 736–737, Edward Lewis Wallant Awards, 490, 492
739 Effeminacy, 403
Ecological Conscience: Values for Survival, Egan, Greg, 815
The (Dish), 327 Eggers, David, 225, 263
Ecology, 325, 326–327, 331, 332. See also Ego, 695–696
Environment Egolf, Tristan, 243–244
1228 INDEX

Egypt Enrique’s Journey (Nazario), 583

ancient (See Ancient Egypt)
modern, 463–464
Ehrenreich, Barbara, 473
Ehrlich, Gretel, 1043
Ehrman, Kit, 644
Eickhoff, Randy Lee, 1136
Eiger Dreams, 22
Einstein, Albert, 129, 725–726, 837
Einstein awards, 688
Eisner Awards, 610
Eisner, Will, 416
Elder, John, 325, 326
Eldredge, John, 513
Eldridge, Paul, 433
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The (Wolfe),
576, 791
Electronic books, 257–258, 800, 1167
Electronic Frontier Foundation, 276
El Grito (journal), 558
Eliot, T.S., 745, 746, 1121, 1122
Elizabethan era, 290, 341, 428, 457,
460–461, 980
Elkins, Aaron, 650
Ellen Foster, 232
Elliot, Aaron (Cometbus), 1174
Elliot, Kamilla, 366–68
Ellis, Bret Easton, 263
Ellis, Joseph J., 478
Ellis, Joseph J(ohn), 121
Ellison, Harlan, 706, 812, 824, 901
Ellison, Ralph, 31, 32, 36, 502, 775, 783,
1067
Ellis Peters Historical Dagger awards, 455,
463, 465, 466
Ellis, Trey, 33, 37–38
Ellis, Warren, 216–217, 418, 419, 420–422
Ellmann, Richard, 119
Elrod, Patricia [“P.N.”], 709
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 97
Eminem, 870
Emmy Awards, 202, 369
Emotions, 689, 696
Empire Falls (R. Russo), 269
Enchantment (Card), 436
End of Nature, The (McKibben), 327
Endore, Guy, 710
Endrezze, Anita, 670
Endurance (TV miniseries), 15
Enge, James, 990
Engel, Lehman, 627–628, 633
Enlarging the Temple (Altieri), 328
Enlightenment versus entertainment, 115
Ensler, Eve, 297
Ensley, Catherine, 1158
Entertainment, biography as, 115
Environment. See also Nature
Beat poetry and, 104, 109
contemporary mainstream American
fiction and, 253, 255, 261, 266
dystopian fiction and, 316, 321
ecopoetry and, 327, 328, 329, 332, 333
mystery fiction and, 655, 656
Native American literature and, 673,
676, 679
science fiction and, 817, 830, 906
sea writing and, 856
sword and sorcery fiction and, 973
time travel fiction and, 1021, 1022
travel writing and, 1035, 1037,
1042–1043
Ephron, Nora, 142–143, 502
Epic fantasy, 351
Epic fantasy. See Sword and sorcery
fiction
Epic of Gilgamesh, The, 353
Epic poetry, 755, 764, 1120, 1125–1126
Epitaph in Rust, 359
Epstein, Leslie, 445
Equality, 434
Equiano, Olaudah, 851
Equivalency, adaptations and, 368
Eragon (Paolini), 1155
Erdoes, Richard, 668
Erdrich, Louise, 263–64, 590, 670, 672,
673, 674, 675, 677–678, 680
Erickson, Carolly, 470
Ericson, Steven, 989
Erotic literature, 107, 338–349, 413, 428,
602, 709, 799
Escapism, 144, 176, 262, 357, 393
Eshbach, Lloyd, 897
ESP (extrasensory perception), 275, 717,
724, 1110
Espinoza, Aurelio, 554
Esquire (magazine), 394, 575, 576
Essex, Karen, 446
Estampa form, 265
Estep, Maggie, 754
Estleman, Loren D., 644, 656, 1136,
1137–1138
Estrada, Rita Clay, 796, 802
Eszterhas, Joe, 575
Ethics, 11, 120, 229–232, 328. See also
Morality

Ethnicity
Asian American literature, 67, 72,
73–74, 76, 78, 79, 81, 83
comedic theatre, 196, 202
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 254
Language poetry and, 546
“Ethnic lit,” 145–146
Eugenides, Jeffrey, 264, 448
Eulo, Ken, 711
Euripides, 293
Eurocentrism, 664–665, 667, 674, 675,
678
Europe. See also specific eras
Arthurian literature, 60
artistic movements, 294
brand names, 277
comedic theatre, 195
dramatic theater, 294
ecopoetry, 325
erotic literature, 342
Evangelical tradition, 190
Evanovich, Janet, 654–655, 796
Evans, Linda, 61, 909
Evans, Tabor, 888, 1134
Evaristo, Bernardine, 1122, 1127–1129
Everitt, David, 1061
Everything and Nothing (Borges), 427
Everything is Illuminated (Foer), 232,
244, 377–379, 494–495, 595, 596,
599
Evil, 1051–1052, 1053, 1056, 1058, 1060,
1062
Evolution, 193, 380, 695, 837, 838, 842,
855
Ewers, Justin, 623
Exaggeration, comic books and, 210
Excalibur, 58, 61, 62, 63–64, 944
Executioner’s Song, The (Mailer and
Schiller), 1056
Exile, 46, 260
Existentialism, 97, 1030
Exley, Frederick, 935
Exorcist, The (film), 703, 704
Experts, biographies and, 126
Exposition, 114–15, 291–92
Expressionism, 294
Extrasensory perception (ESP), 275, 717,
724, 1110
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
(Foer), 224, 244
“Extremes and Moderations,” 333
Ex Utero (Foos), 592–593
INDEX 1229
Eyewitness guides, 179
Eyre, Chris, 757
Ezines, 1163, 1168
Ezra, Elizabeth, 473
Facism, 314
Fackler, Elizabeth, 1139
Fact, biographies and, 115, 126
Faerie Queene, The (Spenser), 186, 428
Fafhrd, Fritz Leiber, 355
Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury), 315
Fairbanks, Nancy, 641–642
Fairchild, B.H., 1121
Fairchild, Faith, 643
Fairies, 720, 730
Fairy tales
chick lit, 150, 156
children’s literature, 173, 174, 175
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion and, 267
erotic literature, 340
fantasy literature, 352
GLBTQ and, 361
historical fantasy and, 429, 436
humor, 891
magical realism and, 588, 590
marriage and, 747
military literature and, 623
occult/supernatural literature and, 710
postmodern young adult fiction, 1149,
1158
romance novels and, 801
science fiction and, 806
Faith, 263, 268. See also Spirituality; spe-
cific traditions
Falls, The (Oates), 267
“False Documents” (Doctorow), 444
Faludi, Susan, 776
Family
African-American mysteries and, 890
Asian American literature, 72, 78, 83
Beat poetry, 102
biography and, 126–127, 129–130
comedic theatre, 200, 202, 206
coming of age fiction, 222, 227, 230
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 255, 265, 269, 270
dramatic theater, 297, 301
erotic literature, 346
historical fiction, 448, 449–450
military literature, 619
mystery fiction and, 647, 655
Native American literature and, 674
1230 INDEX
Family (continued)
occult/supernatural literature and,
714–715
poetry and, 747
speculative fiction and, 919
Fandel, Jennifer, 179
Fanny Hill, 339
Fanny (White), 409
Fans, comic books and, 210, 212, 215,
216, 219, 601
Fanshawe, 2
“Fansites,” 116
Fantagraphics, 214, 220
Fantasia Ground-Breaker Awards, 611
Fantastic, the, 589, 1025. See also Specula-
tive fiction
Fantasy literature, 351–365. See also Magi-
cal realism; Romance novels; Specula-
tive fiction; Sword and sorcery fiction
Arthurian literature, 55, 60, 61–63
children’s literature, 162, 176
Christian fiction and 185, 186
comedic theatre, 197, 204
comic books, 213
coming of age fiction, 238
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 253, 256, 262, 263, 267
cyberpunk, 281
flash fiction, 394
occult/supernatural literature and, 706,
712
origins of, 974
science fiction and, 806
series, 908
sports, 937–938, 943–944
spy fiction, 955
young adult literature, 1155
zines and, 1166
Fanzines, 276, 826, 1096, 1166
Farce, 195, 196, 197, 201, 204
Farewell Symphony, The (White), 409
Fariña, Richard, 222
Farmer, 642
Farmer, Philip José, 812, 818
Farnol, Jeffery, 456
Farrell, James T., 1066
Farris, John, 705, 706, 710
Farris, Willam Wayne, 474
Fascism, 47, 317, 320. See also Nazis
Fashion, or, Life in New York (play), 196
Fasman, John, 739
Fast Fiction: Creating Fiction in Five Min-
utes, 393
Fast Food Nation (Schlosser), 382–83
Fast, Howard, 443
Fast, Robin Riley, 679–680
Fatherhood, teen, 1150, 1157
Faulkner, William, 12, 442, 502, 884, 980
Fauset, Jesse, 33
Federman, Raymond, 252
Feehan, Christine, 709
Feelings, 690, 695
FEG: Stupid (Ridiculous) Poems for Intelli-
gent Children (Hirsch), 179
Fehler, Gene, 936
Feinberg, David B., 404–405
Feingold, Michael, 204, 298
Feinstein, John, 937
Feldman, Ellen, 446, 447
Fell, 217
Fell (Ellis and Templesmith), 421–422
Felman, Shoshana, 487
Female mythology, 106
Feminine
Mother God and Father God, 694
regional fiction and, 769, 771, 772
Feminism
Arab American literature, 43, 44, 80, 83
autobiography and memoir, 87, 88
Beat poetry, 100, 108, 110
biography, 119
chick lit, 139, 142, 144, 148–49
children’s literature, 175
comic books, 211
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 252, 253, 255, 270
cyberpunk, 278, 279
dystopian fiction, 314, 316
erotic literature, 346
GLBTQ and, 403–404
historical nonfiction and, 472, 476
Language poetry and, 542
legal thrillers and, 563
magical realism and, 590
mystery fiction and, 640, 647, 651
occult/supernatural literature and, 709,
711, 722
poetry and, 760
regional fiction and, 770
science fiction and, 812–813, 818
speculative fiction and, 920
sports literature and, 948, 951
transrealist writing and, 1030–1031
true crime literature and, 1055
utopian literature and, 1082
vampire fiction and, 1114
 INDEX 1231

western genre and, 1134–1135 historical nonfiction, 475

zines and, 1174–1175 history, 471
Feminist Bestseller, The, 148 Holocaust literature, 495
Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 101, 106 horror, 395, 887
Fernandez-Arnesto, Felipe, 470, 476, 477, humor in, 506
478 legal thrillers, 566, 567
Fernandez, Roberta, 559 magical realism, 596
Fernández, Roberto G., 558 mystery, 644, 646, 648, 649, 650, 652,
Ferneyhough, Brian, 548 655, 658
Fernhurst (Stein), 403 Native American literature and, 671,
Ferrell, David, 938–939 675, 680–681
Ferris, Timothy, 843 New Age, 685, 688–690, 692
Ferriss, Suzanne, 148 occult/supernatural, 703, 710, 711, 712,
Fetterly, Judith, 770, 772, 777 722–723
Féval, Paul, 433 ownership of, 1171
Few Stout Individuals, A (Gnare), 299–300 poetry and, 756, 757
Fiction. See specific types of fiction regional fiction, 779
Fiction 2000 (Slusser and Shippey), 277 road fiction, 786, 788
Fidelity, adaptations and, 370–371, 376 science fiction, 812, 815, 822–823, 825,
Field, George Eugene, 501 903–904, 905
Fielding, Helen, 137, 798 series fiction, 884, 885
Fielding, Henry, 224–225, 1120 sexuality in, 471
Fielding, Liz, 802 sports, 940, 942, 943
50 Cent, 1069 spy fiction, 957, 959, 961
“50 WPM” (Card), 619–620 suspense, 965, 966, 967, 968, 969, 970
Filipinos, 66, 81 sword and planet fiction, 979–980
Film adaptations of books, 366–385. See time travel fiction, 1019
also Films transrealist, 1026
Film noir, 277, 373, 1050 true crime, 1048, 1060
Films. See also Media true crime literature and, 1051, 1054
adventure fiction, 16–17 urban literature and, 1067
Arab American literature, 43 utopian literature and, 1084,
Arthurian literature, 55, 58–59 1085–1086
autobiography and memoir, 89 vampire fiction and, 1095–1096
Burroughs, W. and, 788 western genre, 1133, 1137
chick lit, 149 young adult literature and, 883,
children’s literature, 168, 170, 883 1154–1156, 1157
Christian fiction, 188, 190, 191, 892 zines and, 1173
comedic theatre, 197, 199–200 Final Solution, The (Chabon), 495–496
comic books, 212, 214, 824 Finder, Joseph, 958
coming of age fiction, 237, 242 Fine Excess, A (White), 409
contemporary mainstream American fic- Fingersmith (Waters), 412–413
tion, 258 Fink, Mitchell, 474
counterculture and, 790, 791 Finlay, Charles, 990
cyberpunk, 274, 281, 282, 284 Finlay, Karen, 756
dystopian fiction, 317 Finlay, Victoria, 473, 474
fantasy literature, 358 Finn, Alex, 1150
films from books, 366–385 Finney, Charles G., 706–707
flash fiction and, 395–396 Finney, Patricia, 460
GLBTQ, 407 Finn, William, 635
historical fantasy, 429 Finstad, Suzanne, 127
historical fiction, 443, 449, 450, 977 Fire, Burn (Carr), 455
historical mysteries, 465 Firmat, Gustavo Perez, 558
1232 INDEX

Fischer, David Hackett, 478 Forgetting Elena (White), 408

Fisher, Marc, 473 For King and Country (Asprin and Evans),
Fiske, John, 919 61
Fitzgerald, Billy, 939 Forrest Gump (film), 370
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 225, 502, 933 Forrest, Katherine V., 404, 651, 890
FitzGerald, Frances, 238 Forster, E.M., 14, 402, 817
Flagg, Fannie, 407 Forsyth, Frederick, 955, 957, 959,
Flaherty, Stephen, 634 960–961
Flanagan, Caitlin, 238 Fortress of Solitude, The (Lethem),
“Flare,” 335 235–236, 242
Flash Fiction, 385–399 Fosburgh, Lacey, 1055
Flash Gordon series, 900 Fosse, Bob, 374, 627
Fleischer, RIchard, 1048 Foster, Alan Dean, 905–906
Fleming, Ian, 17, 639, 954, 955, 956–957, Foster, Harold, 1154
959 Foucault, Michel, 476
Fletcher, Angus, 329–30 Foulke, Robert, 859
Flinn, Denny Martin, 629 Foundation trilogy (Asimov), 809
Flint, Eric, 905, 909 Founding Brothers (Ellis), 121
Flores, Angel, 588 Founding fathers, 120–121
Florida, 655, 677 Four Blondes, 151–152
Florida Enchantment, A (film), 407 Four Horsement, 755
“Flush fiction,” 385 4 Minute Fictions: 50 Short-Short Stories
“Flying Carpets” (Millhauser), 590 from the North American Review
Flynn, John, 972 (Wilson), 389
Flynn, Vince, 959, 969 Four Souls, 263
Flyy Girl (Tyree), 1074–1075 Four Spirits (Naslund), 445
Foer, Jonathan Safran, 224, 232, 244–245, Fourth Hand, The (Irving), 265
378, 489, 494–495, 590, 595, 596 Fowler, Karen Joy, 826
Folklore, 665 Fox, Gardner, 985
Folk sermons, 27, 29. See also Sermons Fox, Margaret and Kate, 718, 721, 730
Food for Our Grandmothers: Writings By Fox, Mem, 167
Arab-American and Arab-Canadian FoxFaith, 190
Feminists (Kadi), 42 Foye, K’Wan, 1073
Fools, 280 Fragments, 124
Foos, Laurie, 590, 592–593 France, 339–340
Football, 935, 938, 939, 940, 947–948 Franchises, 171, 188
romantic suspense and, 963 Francis, Dick, 644
study of literature about, 941–942 Frankel, David, 381
Foote, Horton, 297 Franken, Al, 506
Foote, Shelby, 775 Frankenheimer, John, 997–998
Foote, Stephanie, 768, 771, 778, 882 Frank, Gerold, 1047, 1048
Ford, Deborah, 869 Frank, Robert, 786
Ford, Jeffery, 1032 Frank, Thomas, 1173
Ford, Richard, 264 Frankel, Aaron, 627
Foreign policy, 103 Franklin, Benjamin, 121–23, 340–41, 500,
Forensic science, 648–650, 655 862, 867, 1165
series fiction and, 890 Franklin, John Hope, 775
suspense and, 966, 969 Franklin, Jon, 577, 581, 582
true crime literature and, 1049 Frankowski, Leo, 614, 1015
“Foreplay,” 56 Franzak, Judith, 1150–1151
Forever Amber (Winsor), 443, 449 Franzen, Jonathan, 258, 259, 264, 777,
Forever (Hamill), 447 778
Forever Peace (Haldeman), 828 Fraser, Antonia, 471
 INDEX 1233

Fraser, Kathleen, 542 Fussell, Paul, 1034–1035

Frazer, Margaret, 459, 642 Futrelle, Jacques, 639
Frazier, Charles, 445, 446 Future noir, 283
Frazier, Jane, 326 Fyfield, Frances, 563
Freedman, Carl, 830
Freedom. See also Individualism; Slavery Gabaldon, Diana, 446, 801, 886–887
road fiction and, 784 Gabriel, Kristin, 802
sea writing and, 851, 852–853 Gabriel’s Story (Durham), 447, 452
Freedom of Speech Award, 308 Gacy, John Wayne, 1049
Freeman, Judy, 167 Gaddis, William, 502
Freeman, Lucy, 1047 Gaffney, Jean, 1157
Freeman, Mary Wilkins, 701, 776 Gaiman, Neil, 356, 417, 427, 436,
Freeman, R. Austin, 639 705–706, 832
Free market, 322, 323 GAINAX, 602–603
Free to Succeed (Reinhold), 865 Gaines, Ernest, 775
“Freezone” (Shirley), 283 Gaines, Max C., 213
Fremont-Smith, Eliot, 789 Gaines, Reg E, 757
French, Thomas, 583 Gaitskill, Mary, 264–265, 344
Freudianism, 471 Galahad (character), 57
Freud, Sigmund, 499 Gale, Thomas, 437
Freud’s “Megalomania” (Rosenfield), 446 Gallagher, Rita, 796
Frey, James, 251, 258, 259 Gamboe, Scott, 914
Frey, Stephen, 969 Games, 54, 55, 989
Frida (Taymor), 375–76 Gangsta rap, 1068, 1072
Fried Green Tomatoes (film), 407 Gangster of Love, The (Hagedorn), 81
Friedman, David, 471 Gannon, Michael, 1113
Friedman, Josh, 380 Ganzfeld experiment, 727–728
Friedman, Kinky, 1003–1005 Gap Creek (Morgan), 453
Friedman, R. Seth, 1166, 1172 Garby, Lee Hawkins, 896
Friedman, Thomas, 476, 477, 478 Garcia, Cristina, 558, 591–592, 599
Friend of the Earth, A (Boyle), 261 Garcia, Will, 871
Friendship Gardening mysteries, 642, 653
chick lit, 142, 144–146, 155, 158 Garden, Nancy, 1149, 1150
contemporary mainstream American fic- “Gardens of Versailles, The,” 334
tion, 260 Gardiner, John Rolfe, 445
Frontier literature. See Western genre Gardner, Erle Stanley, 563, 567, 639, 657,
Frost, Mark, 706, 940 967
Frost, Robert, 772 Gardner, John, 957
Frucht, Abby, 598 Gardner, Leonard, 934
Fuddy Meers, 202–203 Gardner, Philip, 6, 7
Fugitive Pieces (Michaels), 489–490 Garfield, Brian, 963
Fuhrman, Mark, 1047, 1055, 1059–1060 Garfield, Simon, 474
Fujisawa, Tohru, 607 Garland, Hamlin, 769
Fukuyama, Francis, 475 Garlock, Dorothy, 799
Fulmer, David, 463 Garlow, Jim, 690
Fundamentalism, 959 Garner, Barbara Carman, 173
Fun Holiday Crafts Kids Can Do!, 178 Garner, Dwight, 1040
Fun Home: A Familiy Tragicomic Garrett, Lynn, 690
(Bechdel), 450 Garton, Ray, 705, 710
Funnies on Parade, 213 Garwood, Julie, 801
Funny Aminals [sic] (comic strip), 417 Garza, Beatriz de la, 559
Furman, Andrew, 494 Gaskin, Ellen, 1155
Furth, Robin, 436 Gates, Henry Louis, 28
1234 INDEX
Gates of the Alamo, The (Harrigan), 447
Gauntier, Gene, 369
Gawain (character), 56–57
Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and
queer. See GLBTQ
Gays. See also specific preference
defined, 401
historical fiction and, 450
humor and, 502
legal thrillers and, 569
musical theatre and, 635
poetry and, 760
series fiction and, 884
sports literature and, 936
sword and sorcery fiction and, 990
terrorism fiction and, 1004
transrealist writing and, 1031
Geiogamah, Hanay, 669, 672, 676, 680
Gekiga, 600
Gelb, Michael J., 866
Gelder, Gordon van, 990
Geller, Uri, 728, 729–730
Gellhorn, Martha, 574
Gellis, Roberta, 433
Gemmell, David, 986, 987–988
Gen 13, 425
Gender. See also Feminism; GLBTQ (Gay,
lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and
queer)
Asian American literature, 75, 76, 77,
78, 79, 83
Beat poetry, 103, 105
chick lit, 138, 145, 152, 158
comedic theatre, 197, 198, 199, 201,
205
comic books, 216
coming of age fiction, 222, 238–239
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 255–256, 257, 261, 267
dystopian fiction, 316, 318
erotic literature, 338, 344, 345–346
historical fiction, 448
manga and anime and, 609
Native American literature and, 673,
674
self-help literature and, 872
speculative fiction and, 920
sports literature and, 935, 948
true crime literature and, 1049
Generations
coming of age fiction, 222, 237, 246
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 254
Cross-generational appeal, 162, 172
dramatic theater, 301
gaps, 80
Generation X, 220, 222, 224, 227, 237,
424
Generation Y, 239
urban literature and, 1069
young adult literature and, 1158
Genetic concept of adaptation, 367
Genetics, 838
Genet, Jean, 402–403
Genocide, 216, 217, 218
Genre fiction, 919–920, 1092. See also spe-
cific genres
Gent, Peter, 935
Gentry, Curt, 1053–1054
Geoffrey of Monmouth, 54
Geoffrion, Alan, 1136, 1137
Georgia Author of the Year awards, 463
Germany, 402
Gernsback, Hugo, 280, 808, 810,
816–817, 900, 1014
Gerristsen, Tess, 966
Gerrold, David, 1018
Gershwin, Ira, 630
Gertrude and Claudius (Updike), 270
Gesture Life, A (Lee), 82
Gettysburg (film), 450
Gevers, Nick, 913
Ghosts, 694, 699–702, 704, 711
Ghost World (film), 372–373
Ghost Writer, The (Roth), 529
Giamatti, Bartlett, 933
Giant Man (character), 422, 423
Gibbon, Edward, 901
Gibbons, Kaye, 232, 775, 777
Gibran, Gibran Kahlil, 41
Gibson, Mel, 190
Gibson, William
bricolage, 280
cyberpunk, 275, 282, 283
influences on, 807
Neuromancer, 814
science fiction and, 814, 820–821, 823,
826, 829
“steampunk,” 283
transrealist writing, 1025
virtual worlds, 274, 284
women and, 813
Gicaandi competitions, 749
Gidmark, Jill B., 859
Gifford, Terry, 335
Gilbert, Sandra M., 12

Gilbert, William S., 629–630
Gilgamesh (Grundy), 428
Gilliam, Terry, 1019
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 818
Gilman, George, G., 1134
Gilmore, Gary, 1055–1056
Gilmore, John, 1048
Gilroy, Paul, 852
Gingerich, Owen, 839
Gingrich, Newt, 886, 1175
Ginsberg, Allen
beat generation and, 98
Burroughs, W. and, 787–788
homosexuality and, 102
improvisation, 101
poetry, 105, 106–107, 747, 755
reception of, 100, 102, 103
road fiction and, 782–783, 784, 786,
791
spiritual crisis, 99
Gioia, Dana, 753
Girls, 882, 932. See also Women
Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing, The
(Bank), 154–156
Glancy, Diane, 672
Glaser, Elton, 1039
Glasgow, Ellen, 442, 1151–1152
Glasgow, Jacqueline, 1151
Glaspell, Susan, 294
Glassman, Joyce, 783, 793–794
Glassner, Barry, 1058
Glazener, Nancy, 770
GLBTQ (Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgen-
der, and queer), 401–415, 760. See
also Gender; specific preference
dramatic theater, 300
historical fiction and, 448
mystery fiction and, 650–651, 654
mystery series, 890
road fiction and, 783
speculative fiction and, 921–922
sports literature and, 936
young adult literature and, 1152
Gleick, James, 836
Glendinning, Victoria, 120
Glen, Pamela, 298–99
Glimmer, Glimmer and Shine, 301
Globalization
Arab American literature, 50
comedic theatre, 198, 199
comic books and, 213, 216
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 255, 264
INDEX 1235
erotic literature, 343
graphic novels and, 421, 422–423
poetry and, 755
regional fiction and, 768, 773, 778
sports literature and, 941
travel writing and, 1036–1037
utopian literature and, 1084
Global warming, 321
Glorious Cause, The (J. Shaara), 444
Glovach, Linda, 1150
Glück, Louise, 753, 764
Gluck, Sherna Berger, 472
Gnosticism, 268, 1030
Goad, Jim and Debbie, 1175
Goad, Jim, 1164
Godfrey, Rebecca, 233
Gods, 705–706
Gods and Generals (J. Shaara), 445
God’s Little Devotional Book for Couples
(Caruana), 513
Godwin, Gail, 265
Godwin, Parke, 711
Godwin, William, 638
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 225, 700,
867
Gohan, George M., 630
Goines, Donald, 1068, 1072
Gold, Glen David, 448
Gold, Michael, 523, 524, 525
Gold, Mike, 1066
Goldberg, Myra, 1036
Goldberg, Whoopi, 201
Golden Age, The (Vidal), 445
Golden, Arthur, 450
Golden Compass, The (Pullman), 433
Golden Globe Award, 395, 959
Golden Horn, The (Tarr), 431
Goldman, Francisco, 559
Goldsmith, Francisca, 1157
Goldstein, Rebecca, 527
Goleman, Daniel, 873
Golem’s Mighty Swing, The (Sturm), 450
Golems of Gotham (Rosenbaum), 493
Golf, 938
Gombrich, E.H., 471
Gomez, Jeff, 1164, 1173
Gomez, Jewelle, 921
Gone with the Wind (Mitchell), 443, 449
Gonick, Larry, 470
Gonzo journalism, 572, 576, 788
Goodbye, Columbus (Roth), 528
Gooden, Philip, 459
Good Faith (Smiley), 269, 505
1236 INDEX

Good in Bed (Weiner), 156 Graves, Mark A., 612, 618, 619
Goodkind, Terry, 886 Graves, Robert, 472
Goodman, Allegra, 522 Gravett, Paul, 610
Goodman, Michelle, 865 Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon), 444
Goodman, Walter, 957 Gray, John, 863, 872
Goodnight Nobody, 157 Gray Mouser, 355
Goodwin, Jason, 659 Grayson, Devin, 220, 418, 424
Goonan, Kathleen Ann, 1082, 1088–1089 Great and Terrible Beauty, A (Bray), 432
“Goophered Grapevine, The” (Chestnutt) Great Depression
31 academic fiction and, 4
Gopnik, Adam, 125 Asian American literature, 68, 70
Gordon, Melton J., 1095, 1097 autobiography and memoir, 94
Gordon, Ricky Ian, 635 biography, 122
Gore, Ariel, 1175 comedic theatre, 196
Gores, Joe, 457 contemporary mainstream American fic-
Gorman, Ed, 1136, 1140 tion, 269
Gossip, 116, 141 dramatic theater, 294
Go Tell it on the Mountain (Baldwin ), 403 dystopian fiction, 314–315
Gothic fiction, 428, 507, 700–701, 963, historical fiction, 440, 452
1059, 1062, 1091. See also Specula- historical mysteries, 464
tive fiction historical nonfiction, 478
Gould, Stephen J., 841, 842–843 legal thrillers, 568
Grace, 513 literary journalism, 574, 575
Grade-based reading levels, 164–165, 166 musical theatre and, 630
Grady, James, 957 mysteries, 643
Grafton, Cornelius, 563 road fiction, 782
Grafton, Sue, 563, 646, 647, 889 western genre, 1135
Graham, Heather, 802 young adult literature, 1157
Graham, Jorie, 763–764 Great Improvisation, A, 122
Graham, Vicki, 334 Greeks. See Ancient Greece
Grail Prince, 57 Green, Anna Katharine, 638, 639
Grail quest, 54, 57, 63–64 Green Arrow (character), 424
Grail Quest trilogy, 60 Greenberg, Eric Rolfe, 934
Grand Master Awards, 659 Greenberg, Martin H., 388, 390
Grand Prix de Littérature Policiére, 652 Greenberg, Richard, 198, 299, 936
Grand tours, 14 Greenberger, David, 1173
Grant, Charles L., 704, 707 Greene, Bob, 863
Grant, Mark, 626 Greene, Brian, 841, 842
Graphic novels, 416–425 Greene, Graham, 954, 955, 956
biographies as, 126 Greene, Jennifer, 802
children’s literature, 176 Green Grass, Running Water (T. King),
Christian fiction, 188 595–596, 597
comic books, 209, 214 Green, John, 1150
contemporary mainstream American fic- Green, Justin, 417
tion, 253–254, 258 Green, Stanley, 626
cyberpunk, 281, 284 Green Knight, The (Chapman), 430
film adaptations of books, 369, Green Mountain Boys, The (Thompson),
372–373 442
historical fiction and, 450 Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science
Holocaust literature, 495 Fiction and Fantasy, 815
science fiction and, 823–824 Greer, Robert, 652
Grass for his Pillow (Rubinstein/Hearn), 435 Gregory, Susanna, 459
Grateful Dead, 788, 790 Grenier, Robert, 540
 INDEX 1237

Gresh, Lois H., 907 Hackers, 275, 276, 277

Grey, Dorien, 651 Haddad, Kathryn, 42
Grey, Zane, 442, 888, 1133, 1137 Haddam, Jane, 655
Grief, 44, 93, 96, 203, 236, 237, 642, 752, Haddon, Mark, 232
1157 Hade, Daniel, 162
Grierson, H.J.C., 1121 Haeckel, Ernst, 326
Griever: An American Monkey King in Hafner, Katie, 276
China (Vizenor), 428 Hagedorn, Jessica, 81
Griffin, W.E.B., 958 Hager, Jean, 653
Griffith, D.W., 449 Haggard, H. Rider, 433, 734, 808, 979
Grimsley, Jim, 413 Hagger, Nicholas, 472, 474
Grisham, John, 561, 564, 565, 566, Hagiography, 105
569–570, 657, 658, 939, 967 Hahn, Steven, 478
Grossbach, Robert, 1029 Haig, Brian, 959
Grossman, Dave, 614 Haim, A.B., 1153
Grosvenor, Gilbert Hovey, 19 Haitian trilogy (Bell), 447
Group, The (McCarthy), 141–142, 143 Ha Jin, 448
Growth, individual, 619, 623–624 Hakluyt, Richard, 849
Gruenfeld, Lee, 564 Halberstam, David, 939
Grundy, Stephen, 428 Haldeman, Joe, 812, 827–828, 832, 1017,
GTO series, 607 1031
Guantánamo Bay, 961 Haley, Alex, 449–450
Guardian, 139 Hall, Brian, 1136
Guare, John, 299–300 Hall, Donald, 753, 934
Guatemalan American writers, 559 Hallet, Richard, 855
Guatemalans, 554 Hall, Robert Lee, 457
Gubar, Susan, 12 Hall, Stephen, 839
Guerroro, 145, Lisa A. Halliday, Ayun, 1175
Guettel, Adam, 632, 635, 636 Hallman, Jr. Tom, 583
Guggenheim Fellowships, 304, 763 Hallowell, Ned, 873
Guidebooks, 1034 Halttunen, Karen, 1049
Guidebooks, children’s literature, 166 Hamill, Pete, 447, 575, 1069, 1072
Guideposts (magazine), 514, 516, 518 Hamilton, Donald, 957
Guiliano, Mireille, 871 Hamilton, Edmond, 899–900, 979
Guinevere (characters), 56 Hamilton, Jane, 777
Guinn, Matthew, 775 Hamilton, Laurel K., 709, 712, 887, 1097,
Guirgis, Stephen Adly, 300 1105–1107
Gulf War, 103, 613, 617, 618–619, 620, Hamilton, Nigel, 114–115, 120, 124, 130
622–623 Hammad, Suheir, 47–48
Gunderloy, Michael, 1166–1167 Hammerstein II, Oscar, 630
Gungor, Ed, 690 Hammett, Dashiell, 457, 644
Gunn, Drewey Wayne, 650 Hammon, Jupiter, 26–27
Gunn, Robin Jones, 883 Handal, Nathalie, 42, 49
Gunter, Archibald, 407 Handler, Daniel, 174, 175–176, 884
Gurganus, Allan, 409–411, 775 Handmaid’s Tale, The (Atwood), 316
Gurney, A.R., 300 Haney, Lauren, 457
Gurney, Edmund, 724 Hannah, Barry, 775
Gurwell, John, 1048 Hannay, Barbara, 802
Gussow, Mel, 201 Hansberry, Lorraine, 295
Guterson, David, 858 Hansen, Brooks, 446
Gutjahr, Pual C., 188 Hansen, Joseph, 651
Guys, The (Nelson), 304 Hansen, Mark Victor, 512, 517, 872
Gwiazda, Piotr, 760 Hanson, Joseph, 890
1238 INDEX

Hapgood, Hutchins, 574 Hatcher, Robin Lee, 802

Happy endings, 143, 145, 156, 195, 796 Hautala, Rick, 711, 712
Haraway, Donna, 279 Havazelet, Ehud, 527
Hardesty III, William H., 903 Hawaii (Michener), 443
Hardwired, 283 Hawking, Stephen, 471, 836, 837
Hardy Boys books, 169, 882 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 2, 341, 442, 500,
Hare, Cyril, 562 1081–1082, 1084
Hare, David, 376 Haycox, Ernest, 1133
Harjo, Joy, 669, 671, 672, 674, 675, 676, Hay, Louise, 871
677 Haynes, Melinda, 778
Harlem Renaissance, 31, 34, 196, 295, Hays, Charlotte, 869
652, 748, 1067 Hayslip, Le Ly, 80–81
Harlequin Publishing, 138, 797, 800, 891, Hazuka, Tom, 387, 389, 397
892 Hazzard, Shirley, 447
Harnick, Sheldon, 626 HD (Hilda Doolittle), 745
Harrer, Heinrich, 15 Healey, Jeremiah, 654
Harrigan, Stephen, 447, 1136 Healing, 682, 687–688
Harris, Charlaine, 1097, 1098, 1110–1111 Health, 202, 331, 332
Harris, George Washington, 500 Hearn, Lafcadio, 574
Harris, Joel Chandler, 501, 773 Hearn, Lian, 435
Harris, Mark, 933–934, 944–945 Heartburn (N. Ephron), 142–43
Harris, Robert, 738 Hebert, Ernest, 773, 779
Harris, Thomas, 649–650, 962, 968 Hegel, George W., 475
Harris-Fain, Darren, 813 Heilbrun, Carolyn G., 640
Harrison, Ben, 1055 Heinemann’s Picture the Past, 178
Harrison, Bob, 542 Heinlein, Robert A.
Harrison, Janis, 641 Kuttner and, 982
Harrison, Lisi, 883 science fiction and, 809, 810, 811, 818
Harrison, M. John, 984–985 space opera and, 895, 900, 901
Harr, Jonathan, 580 time travel fiction and, 1013–1014,
Harryman, Carla, 540, 542 1017–1018
Harry Potter movies, 16, 1154 transrealist writing and, 1026, 1030
Harry Potter series (Rowling), 13, 168, Heinz, W.C., 934
172–173, 176, 355, 432 Heir to the Glimmering World (Ozick),
Hart, Carolyn, 656, 890 267–268
Harte, Bret, 501, 770 Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, 837
Harte, Bryce, 888 Heisenberg, Werner, 129
Hart, Ellen, 641, 650, 651, 656, 890 Hejinian, Lyn, 540, 542, 548, 741, 751,
Hart, Jack, 582, 583 1125
Hart, James, 441 Helen Merrill Award, 305
Hart, Jessica, 802 Hell, 707–708
Hartley, A.J., 738 Hellekson, Karen, 447, 1018
Hartley, Leslie Poles, 702 Heller, Joseph, 502, 527, 615–616
Hart, Sarah, 205 Hell’s Angels, 789, 790, 791
Hartog, François, 469 Hellwarth, Jenni, 473
Hartwell, David G., 815, 903 Helprin, Mark, 432
Harvest Weekly (magazine), 514 Helter Skelter (Bugliosi and Gentry),
Harvey, Andrew, 865 1053–1054
Harvey, David, 471 Hemingway, Ernest, 387, 574, 850,
Haskin, Byron, 380 855–856, 933, 1031, 1165
Haskins, Don, 939 Henderson, Bruce B., 1054
Haskins, James, 1152 Hendrickson, Robert, 1054
Hass, Robert, 742 Hendrix, Harville, 867
 INDEX 1239

Hen lit, 142, 155, 157, 158 Hillerman, Tony, 653, 680–681, 890, 1136
Hennessey, Rosemary, 252 Hill, Grace Livingston, 799
Henrichon, Niko, 434 Hillhouse, Raelynn, 959, 961–962
Henry and Clara (Mallon), 453 Hill, Joe, 597
Henry, O., 386, 387, 390 Hill, Napoleon, 863
Henry, Sue, 644 Hill, Reginald, 735
Henson, Lance, 671, 676 Hill, Shannon, 880
Herbert, Brian, 811, 904 Himes, Chester, 652, 1067
Herbert, Frank, 811 Hinduism, 97, 101, 685, 688, 697, 977
Herman, Marc, 622 Hinojosa, Rolando, 265, 558
Hernandez, Gilbert, 450 Hinterlands: A Mountain Tale in Three
Herodotus, 14, 468 Parts (Morgan), 453
Heroes. See also Superheroes Hinton, S.E., 1148, 1150
children’s literature, 173 Hip-hop culture, 1066, 1068, 1070, 1071
dramatic theater, 293 Hippies, 1086
sports literature and, 941–942 Hirahara, Naomi, 653–654
spy fiction and, 956 Hiroshima, 604, 810, 817
sword and sorcery fiction and, 973, 980 Hiroshima (Hersey), 575
women and, 887 Hirsch, E.D. Jr., 166
Heroic fantasy, 62–63, 352, 973 Hirschhorn, Joel, 636
Heroines. See also Superheroines Hirsch, Marianne, 489
chick lit, 140, 141–42, 143, 144, 148, 156 Hirsch, Robin, 179
children’s literature, 172, 176 Hischak, T.S., 197
comedic theatre, 206 His Majesty’s Dragon (Novik), 435
comic books, 213 Hispanic influences, 430, 448, 477, 654.
romance series and, 891 See also Latino American literature
series fiction and, 882 Historian, The (Kostova), 434
speculative fiction and, 920 Historia universal de la infamia (Universal
Hero’s journey, 355 History of Infamy) (Borges), 429
Hero with a Thousand Faces, The (Camp- Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature
bell), 355 (Stableford), 435
Herr, Michael, 575 Historical fantasy, 351, 353, 358, 359,
Hersey, John, 575 427–437
Herzog, Maurice, 15 Historical fiction, 434, 440–455. See also
Hesse, Karen, 1151 Military literature; Philological
Hess, Joan, 655 thrillers
Heyer, Georgette, 798 Arthurian literature, 55, 60–61
Hey, Nostradamus, 228–229 Christian fiction, 185, 189, 191, 192
Hiaasen, Carl, 655, 1154 coming of age fiction, 224
Hicks, Esther and Jerry, 863 contemporary mainstream American fic-
Hierarchies, 63, 81, 199, 488, 580, 588, tion, 258
907, 921 erotic literature, 338
Higgins, George Vincent, 568 military literature, 614
Higgs, Robert, 941 mysteries, 639, 656–657
Higher Power of Lucky, The (Patron), 177 mystery fiction, 648
Highest Tide, The (Lynch), 230 romance novels, 799
High fantasy, 351, 355, 357, 359, 362 science fiction and, 805, 821–822, 831
High-school, 222–223 sports literature, 949
Highsmith, Patricia, 130, 962 time travel and, 1013–1014
Highway, Tomson, 672 urban literature and, 1071
Hijuelos, Oscar, 308, 558, 773 vampire fiction, 1097–1098, 1104–1105
Hilary, Richard, 652 western genre, 1133, 1139, 1140
Hillenbrand, Laura, 475, 940 young adult literature, 1157–1158
1240 INDEX

Historical mysteries, 455–468 Home, D.D., 719–720

Historical nonfiction, 468–478, 1083. See Home at the End of the World, A (film),
also Military literature 408
Historical romance, 55, 191, 431 “Homecumming” (Welcher-Calhoun), 346
Historiographic metafiction, 251, 268 Homeland security, 218
History, 468, 924–925 Homer, 353, 614, 625, 758, 762, 905, 988,
History of the Kings of Britain 1034
(Monmouth), 54 Homophiles, 401, 402
Hitch, Bryan, 216–217, 420 Homophobia, 50, 224, 303, 402, 403,
Hitchings, Henry, 494 404, 921, 923, 1060
Hitler, Adolf, 928, 1083 Homosexuality
Hitz, Frederick, 956 Arab American literature, 50, 79
HIV. See AIDS autobiography and memoir, 88, 93
Hjelmslev, Louis, 734 Beat poetry, 98, 100, 102
Hoag, Tami, 965 biography, 120
Hobbes, Thomas, 498–499 chick lit, 141
Hoberek, Andrew, 773 comic books, 216
Hobomok (Child), 441 coming of age fiction, 224
Hockey, 948 contemporary mainstream American fic-
Hocking, John C., 985 tion, 261, 262
Hodgson, William Hope, 702 dramatic theater, 295, 297, 299, 303
Hoeffner, Karol Ann, 937 dystopian fiction, 318
Hoffman, Alice, 1150 erotic literature, 339, 341, 342, 343, 344
Hoffman, William, 775 film adaptations of books, 379, 381
Hogan, Linda, 670, 671, 673, 674, 675, GLBTQ and, 401
676, 677, 678, 679 graphic novels and, 420–421
Hogue, W. Lawrence, 31–32 humor and, 507
Holcomb, Mark, 927 manga and anime and, 607
Holland, Doug, 1172 true crime literature and, 1048
Holland, Patrick, 1037 vampire fiction and, 1095, 1115
Holland, Tom, 737 young adult literature and, 1149, 1152
Holleran, Andrew, 404 Honan, Park, 119
Hollywood, 367, 368, 373, 375, 379, 445, Honorton, Charles, 727
505 hooks, bell, 36
Hollywood, Amy, 472 Hooper, Johnson J., 500
Holman, Sheri, 447 Hope, A.H., 1139
Holmes, John Clellon, 98, 99 Hope Leslie (Sedgwick), 441
Holmes, Shannon, 1070, 1071, 1073 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 1123
Holmes, Sherlock (character), 455–456, Hopkins, Pauline E., 922
495, 562, 656–657, 882, 889 Hoppenstand, Gary, 885–886
Holocaust literature, 483–496 Horace, 499
autobiography and memoir, 88 Hornet’s Nest, The (Carter), 444
comic books, 923 Horowitz, Tony, 1042
film adaptations of, 377 Horror
graphic novels, 418 children’s literature and, 883
historical fiction, 445 Christian fiction and, 189, 192
identity and, 522 comics, 213, 214
Jewish American literature, 531–532 detective fiction, 917
magical realism, 596 fantasy literature and, 353
spy fiction, 961 flash fiction, 387, 394
Holroyd, Michael, 115, 119 humor and, 507
Holt, Victoria, 639, 963 occult/supernatural literature and,
Holton, Hugh, 652 703–705, 712–715

regional fiction and, 772
science fiction and, 823
series fiction and, 887
speculative fiction and, 919, 925, 927
sword and sorcery fiction, 982
true crime literature and, 1059
Horrors! 365 Scary Stories (Dziemianow-
icz), 390
Horror Writer’s Association Best
Anthology Award, 390
Horse Heaven (Smiley), 269
Horse racing, 940
Horses, 644
Horse-Shoe Robinson (Kennedy), 442
Horton, George Moses, 28
Horvath, Brooke, 936, 951
Horwitz, Tony, 859
Hospital, Janet Turner, 960
Hossfeld, Lesslie, 473
Hotel de Dream (White), 409
Hotel New Hampshire, The (film), 407
Hot Zone, The (Preston), 580
Houdini, Harry, 720–721
Houen, Alex, 995, 1003
Hound and Falcon trilogy (Tarr), 431, 437
Hounds of God, The (Tarr), 431
Hours, The (Cunningham), 376–377, 404,
408, 446, 447, 450
Household Gods (Tarr and Turtledove),
1020, 1021
House of Moses All-Stars, The (Rosen),
448
House Un-American Activities Committee,
295
Housman, A.E., 1121
Houston, Jean, 730
Howard, Jay R., 190
Howard, Linda, 801, 802
Howard, Robert E., 352, 354, 357, 971,
972, 980–981, 982, 985, 989
Howard, Ron, 376
Howards End (Forster), 402
How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight?
(Volen), 168
Howe, Fanny, 549
Howe, Ilana Wiener, 388, 391
Howe, Irving, 388, 391, 523, 527
Howe, Susan, 540, 542
Howell, William Dean, 771
“Howl” (Ginsberg), 99, 101, 102, 105,
755, 786
How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild
and Got a Life (Viswanathan), 240
INDEX 1241
How the Heather Looks: A Joyous Journey
to the British Sources of Children’s
Books (Bodger), 171
How the Irish Saved Civilization (Cahill),
476
“How to” books, 89, 393
How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy
(Card), 436
Hsi Yu Chi (Journey to the West) (Wu
Ch’eng-en), 428
Hubbard, L. Ron, 809, 1030
Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 442
Hudgins, Andrew, 1123–1124
Huggan, Graham, 1037
Hughes, Frieda, 376
Hughes, Langston, 31, 34, 35, 107, 294,
295, 853
Hughes, Selwyn, 514
Hughes, Ted, 120
Hugo Awards
nominations, 908
science fiction, 831, 901, 904
space operas, 905
speculative fiction, 971
sword and sorcery fiction and, 983, 990
zines and, 1171
Hulk, The (character), 422, 423
Hull, Anne, 583
Hull-Warriner Award, 304
Humanists, 275
Humanitarian of the Year awards, 694
“Humanity,” 215
Human machine interface, 278, 279, 282
Human potential, 694–695
Human rights, 216, 217, 421. See also
Civil rights
Human Stain, The (P. Roth), 268, 505
Humor, 498–507. See also Comedic
theatre; Comedy; Parodies; Physical
comedy; Satire
Arthurian literature, 62
Asian American literature, 73
Beat poetry, 105
chick lit, 137, 143, 155, 158
children’s literature, 172, 174, 884
comedic theatre, 195
comic books, 213
coming of age fiction, 232–33
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 253, 261, 265, 271
fantasy literature, 356
historical fantasy, in, 428
magical realism and, 596–597
1242 INDEX
Humor (continued)
mystery fiction and, 648
Native American literature and, 675,
678
romance fiction and, 891
science fiction and, 831, 1026
self-help literature and, 862, 869
series fiction and, 886
Southwestern, 500–501, 502
sports literature, 935, 945, 948, 949
travel writing and, 1041, 1042
vampire fiction and, 1098
verse novels and, 1126
zines and, 1175
Humphreys, Josephine, 775
Hunt, Anthony, 331
Hunter, Evan, 648
Hunt, Helen LaKelly, 867
Hunt, Howard, 957
Hurston, Nora Zeale, 853
Hurwitz, Ken, 1054
Hussein, Sadam, 969
Hutcheon, Linda, 251
Hutcherson, Trisha, 1148–1149
Huxley, Aldous, 313, 817
Hwang, David Henry, 78–79
Hybridity, 46–47, 73–74, 81
Hyenas (Dengler), 457
Hyman, Ray, 727
Hynes, Samuel, 615
Hyperbole, 47
Hyperrealism, 256, 270, 280
“Hypertextuality,” 371
Ianziti, Gary, 115
Iceberg Slim, 1068
Iconology, 368
Idealism, 3, 4, 104, 222, 223, 246, 261,
312, 1083
Identification, readers and, 138, 173
Identity. See also Multiculturalism
African Americans and, 792, 852
Asian American literature, 67, 68, 71,
73–74
chick lit, 138, 156
comedic theatre, 197, 198, 199, 203,
204, 205–206
comic books, 220
coming of age fiction, 224, 234–236
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 254, 262, 264, 266, 268
cyberpunk, 283
film adaptations of books, 375
ghosts and, 694
GLBTQ, 402, 407, 409
graphic novels and, 424
historical fantasy and, 429
historical fiction, 448
humor and, 502
Jewish American literature and, 521,
522, 523, 526, 527, 528–529, 531,
533
Language poetry and, 539, 542, 545,
546
Latino American literature and, 552
magical realism and, 596, 598
manga and anime and, 609
military literature and, 618, 623
Native American literature and, 665,
669, 673–674, 675, 679
New Age literature and, 689, 695–696
poetry and, 762
politics, 405
road fiction and, 785
sea writing and, 849–850, 854, 859
speculative fiction and, 923
sports literature and, 935, 936, 941,
951
terrorism and, 1005–1006
terrorism fiction and, 999–1000,
1001–1002, 1002–1003, 1009
urban literature and, 1067, 1070,
1072
utopian literature and, 1082–1083,
1089
verse novels and, 1127
violence and, 1005
young adult literature and, 1147, 1152
Identity politics, 759–760, 773, 776, 777
“Idiots” guides, 864
I Don’t Know What I Want, But I Know
It’s Not This (Jansen), 865
If This Is a Man (Levi), 485–487
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie (Joffe),
169
Illness, 143, 202, 265, 270, 687
Illustrations, 176, 178, 470–471. See also
Graphic novels
I’m a Stranger Here Myself (Bryson), 23
Immigrants
Arab American literature, 40, 41
Asian American literature, 67, 68, 70,
76, 80, 82, 83
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 255, 264, 266
Jewish American literature, 522, 523

Latino American literature and, 555,
558, 559
Russian-Jewish, 523, 527
Immigrants, The (Fast), 443
Immigration policies, 72, 219
Immortals, 433
Imperialism, 263
Improvisation, 35, 37, 101, 107, 196, 201
In Brief: Short Takes on the Personal
(Kitchen and Jones), 392
Incarnational film adaptation, 367
Incest, 46, 264, 1158
In Cold Blood (Capote), 382, 576,
1050–1052
Incomplete Enchanter, The (de Camp and
Pratt), 428
Indecision (Kunkel), 241
Independent booksellers, 210
Independent films, 34
Independent publishers, 212, 214
India, 14, 465
Individualism
Jewish American literature and, 529
Language poetry and, 539
musical theatre and, 630
sea writing and, 856
urban literature and, 1067
utopian literature and, 1080–1081
verse novels and, 1126
western genre and, 1132
zines and, 1164, 1170, 1174
Industrialization
academic fiction, 2–3, 9–10
Beat poetry, 104
ecopoetry, 325, 333
Infidelity, 139
“Infinite Crisis” event, 425
Information, 925–926, 927
In Her Shoes (Weiner), 156–157
In His Steps (Sheldon), 187
Initiation rites, 246
Inner Circle, The (Boyle), 261, 446, 448,
452
Innes, Michael, 735
Innocents Abroad, 18
In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative
Nonfiction (Kitchen and Jones), 391
Inspirational literature, 511–518, 614, 798,
799, 862, 863, 870
In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden
(Cambor), 447
Intellectual comedy, 195, 197–98
Intelligent design (ID), 838–839, 841, 842
INDEX 1243
Intentional Fallacy, 1028
Intercultural gap, 80
International Auto/Biography Association,
113
International conflict, 198
International New Thought Alliance, 695
Internet. See also Media; Web sites
children’s literature, 171
Christian fiction, 187
comic books, 216
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 257, 259
cyberpunk, 276, 284
dystopian fiction, 317, 319
erotic literature, 343
flash fiction, 387, 393, 394
GLBTQ and, 406
graphic novels and, 420
historical nonfiction, in, 477
historical nonfiction and, 472
Language poetry and, 548
literary journalism and, 580
manga and anime and, 604, 606, 608
poetry and, 752, 753, 760
series fiction and, 882
speculative fiction and, 923
utopian literature and, 1084
young adult literature and, 1150–1151,
1153
zines and, 1167–1168
Internment, 77. See also Concentration
camps
Interpretation, biography and, 115
Interrogation, 621
Interview with the Vampire (film), 435
Interview with the Vampire (Rice), 430
In the American Tree (Silliman), 539
In the Fall (Lent), 445
In the Image of God (Collings), 436
In the Name of Salome (Alvarez),
260–261, 448
In the Shadow of No Towers (Spiegelman),
418, 532
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (Matthiessen),
21
Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, The,
124–25
Into the Wild (Krakauer), 22
Into Thin Air(Krakauer), 22
Intrusion countermeasure electronics (ICE),
275
Invisible man, 31, 32, 36
Iran, 218, 270, 422, 946, 970
1244 INDEX
Iraq
Arab American literature, 46, 49
Beat poetry, 103, 108, 109
comedic theatre, 199
humor and, 504, 506
military literature, 613, 621
poetry and, 758
spy fiction and, 961
zines and, 1171
Iron Heel, The (London), 314
Ironic fantasy, 62
Iron Man (character), 422, 423
Irreverence, 137, 143
Irving, John, 265, 407, 505
Irving, Washington, 354, 500, 665
Isaacson, Walter, 122, 129
Isherwood, Chirstopher, 402
Islam, 822, 830, 960, 1007–1008
Isle of Glass, The (Tarr), 431
Isolation, 198, 199
Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile
(Melville), 442
It Can’t Happen Here (Lewis), 314–315
“It girl,” 151
It’s Not about Me (Lucado), 513
Jackson, Michael, 1026
Jackson, Peter, 435
Jackson, Shirley, 711
Jacobellis v. Ohio, 100
Jacobus, Terry, 757
Jacoby, Russell, 1083
Jacq, Christian, 737
Jacques, Brian, 884
Jaffe, Rona, 139–140, 143
Jaffe, Stuart, 912
Jahn, Robert, 727–728
Jakes, John, 443, 450, 884, 985
James, Henry, 403, 701, 996, 997, 1035
James, Montague Rhodes, 701–702
James, William, 720
James Bond series, 956–957, 959
Jameson, Fredric, 545, 1028
Jampolski, Gerald, 871
Jane Eyre (Brönte), 139
Janescko, Paul, 179
Janeway, James, 1148
Jan Mohamed, Abdul, 45–46
Japan, 209, 277, 281, 600, 654, 934
Japanese Americans, 66, 72
Jarhead (Swofford), 613, 618, 621,
622–624
Jarvis, Birney, 789
Jason, Philip K., 612, 618, 619
Jay-Z, 870, 1071
Jazz
African American literature and, 34, 37,
749
poetry and, 100, 103, 106, 107, 109,
749
road fiction and, 785
urban literature and, 1067
Jecks, Michael, 459–460
Jefferson, Margo, 623
Jeffery, Steve, 830
Jeffries, Sabrina, 798
Jeffs, Christine, 376
Jen, Gish, 83–84, 265
Jenkins, Dan, 935, 938, 943
Jenkins, Jerry B., 187, 193, 883, 892
Jenkins, Sally, 940
Jennings, Kevin, 1152
Jentz, Terri, 1062
Jewett, Sarah Orne, 501, 701, 770, 771,
776
Jewish American literature, 450, 502,
521–533, 643, 1033, 1153. See also
Bible, The; Concentration camps;
Holocaust literature; specific authors
Jimmy Corrigan (Ware), 417
Jin, Ha, 448
Joans, Ted, 107
Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life (Cramer),
581
Joffe, Laura, 169
Johansen, Iris, 965
John Adams (McCullough), 121
Johns, Geoff, 418
Johnson, Angela, 1150, 1157
Johnson, Caryn E. See Goldberg, Whoopi
Johnson, Charles, 444, 446, 850, 854
Johnson, Don, 934, 942–943
Johnson, Emily Pauline, 668
Johnson, E.W., 790
Johnson, James Weldon, 32, 33–34, 35, 36,
750
Johnson, Joyce, 784, 788, 792, 793–794
Johnson, Linton Kwesi, 755
Johnson, Samuel, 118
Johnson, Sarah, 449
Johnson, Shoshona, 620
Johnson, Weldon, 33
Johnstone, J.A., 887
Johnstone, William W., 887–888, 1135,
1136, 1137, 1142, 1143
John W. Campbell awards, 990
 INDEX 1245

Jonas, George, 475 Jungianism, 471, 665

Jonas, Gerald, 1028–1029 Junior chick lit, 238
Jonathan Livingston Seagull (Bach), 684 “Junior novelizations,” 168
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Clarke), Juniper Tree Burning, 229–230, 237
432 Just Give Me Jesus (Lotz), 513
Jones, Amanda, 21 Justice at Risk (Wilson), 413
Jones, Aphrodite, 1047, 1060 Just Like Beauty, 322
Jones, David, 1121 Juvenile literature. See Young adult literature
Jones, Edward P., 447, 448
Jones, Gwyneth, 827 Kadi, Joanna, 42
Jones, H. Bedford, 976 Kaeser, Gigi, 1152
Jones, Hettie (Cohen), 783, 784, 792–793, Kagaku Ninjatai Gatchaman (film), 603
793–794 Kahf, Mohja, 48–49
Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka) Kahlo, Frida, 375–76
African American literature and, 37 Kahn, Michael A., 569
Beat poetry and, 105, 107 Kakutani, Michiko, 241, 451, 1103
language poetry, 545 Kaldas, Pauline, 43
poetry, 748–749, 752–753, 755 Kalfus, Ken, 532, 929, 1011
road fiction, 783, 784, 788, 791–792, Kallmaker, Karin, 405
794 Kaminsky, Stuart M., 648, 657, 659
urban fiction, 1068 Kammerer, David, 99, 786
Jones, Mary Paumier, 391–392 Kandel, Lenore, 107
Jones, Robert Edmund, 290 Kander, John, 374
Jones, Rodney, 90 Kang, Younghill, 69–70
Jones, Sarah, 755, 757, 758 Kanon, Joseph, 959, 961
Jones, Thom, 938 Kant, Immanuel, 475, 499, 1030
Jong, Erica, 502 Kardec, Allan, 719
Jonghyun, Jeon Joseph, 547–548 Karon, Jan, 892
Jonze, Spike, 373 Kasha, Al, 636
Jordan, Dishwasher Pete, 1173 Katchor, Ben, 450
Jordan, June, 48 Katin, Mirriam, 450
Jordan, Michael, 706 Katsura, Masakazu, 609
Jordan, Robert, 989 Katz, Stephen, 23
Joseph, Lawrence, 51 Kaufman, Bob, 100, 107
Joseph Andrews (Fielding), 225 Kaufman, Charlie, 373–374
Joshi, S.T., 357 Kaufman, George S., 196, 501
Journalism, 137, 140, 145, 150, 833, 939. Kay, Jackie, 1121
See also Literary journalism Kaye, Marvin, 711
Journey to the End of the Night (Céline), Keane, Nancy, 163–64
14–15 Keats, John, 325, 903
Journey to the West (Hsi Yu Chi) (Wu Keene, Carolyn, 881
Ch’eng-en), 428 Keene, M. Lamar, 721–722
Joyce, Graham, 705 Keith, W.J., 778
Joyce, James, 1125 Kellerman, Jonathan, 968, 1058
Joy Luck Club, The (Tan), 79–80 Kelley, Kitty, 130
Joy of Gay Sex, The (White), 409 Kelly, James Patrick, 815
“Jubilation” (T.C. Boyle), 317, 320–321 Kelly, Karen, 690
Jubilee (Walker), 443 Kelly, Thomas, 448
Judas Field, The (Bahr), 445 Kelton, Elmer, 888, 1136, 1137, 1140
Judge Dee stories (Van Gulick), 456 Kemelman, Harry, 643
Judson, Jerome, 390 Kenan, Randall, 405
July (T. O’Brien), 267 Kennedy assassination, 998
Junger, Sebastian, 858 Kennedy, David M., 478
1246 INDEX

Kennedy, John F., 130 King, Laurie R., 651, 657, 889, 890
Kennedy, John Pendleton, 442 King, Melissa, 940
Kennedy, Joseph P., 130 King, Michael Patrick, 149–150
Kennedy, Pagan, 1164, 1173 King of the Middle March (Crossley-
Kennedy, Susan Ariel Rainbow, 874 Holland), 434
Kennedy, William, 775 Kingsbury, Karen, 189
Kennedy family, 124 King’s Damsel, The (Chapman), 430
Kenney, Cindy, 189 Kings in Disguise (Vance and Burr), 450
Kensington Publishers, 138 Kingsley Tufts Prize, 759
Kent Family Chronicles (Jakes), 443, 450 Kingsolver, Barbara, 266, 788
Keohane, Steve, 687 King, Stephen
Kern, Jerome, 630 awards, 659
Kerouac, Jack children’s literature and, 173
Beat poetry, 98, 99, 100, 105, 108 Derleth, on, 703
coming of age fiction, 225 historical fantasy, 436
Ginsberg and, 786 Internet and, 259
influence on others, 792 occult/supernatural fiction, 707, 711,
Johnson, J. and, 793 712, 713–714
road fiction and, 782–785 regional fiction, 772–773
transrealist writing and, 1031 series fiction, 887
women and, 792 tradition and, 921
Kerr, M.E., 1150, 1152 vampire fiction, 708, 1096
Kerr, Orpheus C., 501 King, Thomas, 595–596, 671, 675
Kertzer, Adrienne, 490 King, William, 989
Kesey, Ken, 502, 776, 783, 784, 786, Kingston, Maxine Hong, 67, 74–75,
790–791 76–77, 773
Kessel, John, 275, 814–815 Kinkade, Thomas, 514
Key, The (Bodine), 693–694 Kinnahan, Linda, 542
Keyes, Greg, 988 Kinsella, Sharon, 612
Khaldun, Ibn, 470 Kinsella, W.P., 934, 942, 1026
Khalil Gibran Memorial Poetry Garden, 41 Kipling, Rudyard, 429, 1095
Khoury, Raymond, 738 Kirby, Jack, 210, 212, 923
Kick, Russ, 1171 Kirby, Michael, 291
Kick in the Head, A (Janesco), 179 Kirith Kirin (Grimsley), 413
Kidder, Tracy, 577, 581 Kirkwood, Jr., James, 408
Kidd, Sue Monk, 231 Kirn, Walter, 256, 258, 260
Kidman, Nicole, 408 Kirshbaum, Laurence, 872
Kido Senshi Gundam (Mobile Suit Kiss, 1026
Gundam) (film), 602 Kiss of the Highlander (Moning), 433
Kienzle, William X., 642–643, 656 Kit, Borys, 435
Killer Angels, The (M. Shaara), 445, 450 Kitchen, Judith, 391–392
Killingsworth, Jamie M., 336 Kiyosaki, Robert, 874
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie, 325–326, 329 Klain, Bennie, 681
Kilworth, Garry, 707 Klein, T.E.D., 705
Kim, Elaine, 76 Kleopatra (Essex), 446
Kim, Eleana, 539 Kleypas, Lisa, 801
Kim, Myung Mi, 542, 547–548 Klibanoff, Hank, 478
Kindersley, Dorling, 179 Kline, Otis, 979
Kindred (Butler), 447 Kluger, Steve, 413
King Arthur’s Daughter (Chapman), 430 Knight, Bernard, 459
King, Bruce, 676, 678 Knight, Brenda, 794
King, Frank, 643 Knight, Damon, 810
King, J. Robert, 61–62 Knight, Judy Zebra (J.Z.), 688, 722–723
 INDEX 1247

Knight’s Castle (Eager), 429 LaBute, Neil, 301

Knights Templar, 738–739 Labyrinth (Mosse), 433
Knopf, 116–117 LaChiusa, Michael John, 632, 635–636
Known World, The (Jones), 447 Lackey, Mercedes, 433, 886, 891
Koch, Harold, 380 “Lad lit,” 230
Kock, Kenneth, 934 LaFaber, Walter, 941
Koehler, Karen, 709 LaFarge, Paul, 446
Koepp, David, 380 Lafferty, R.A., 1030
Koike, Kazuo, 608, 609, 611 Lagarin, MIguel, 756–757
Kolmerten, Carol, 917 LaGuerre, Enrique, 557
Komunyakaa, Yusef, 751–752 LaHaye, Tim, 187, 193, 883, 892
Kon, Satoshi, 603, 611 Lahiri, Jhumpa, 242, 266
Konvitz, Jeffrey, 708 Laidlaw, Marc, 283
Koolaids: The Art of War (Abimeddine), 50 Lalami, Laila, 50
Koontz, Dean, 703, 705, 706, 712, 713, 885 Lambda Awards, 890
Kooser, Ted, 753 Lambda Literary Awards, 130, 651
Korbel, Kathleen, 802 Lambert, Gavin, 127
Korean Americans, 66 Lamberton, Robert, 117
Kornblum, Allen, 389 Lamb, Harold, 976, 977–978
Kornbluth, Cyril M., 810–811 Lamb, Sharon, 873
Kosinski, Jerzy, 493 Lame Deer, 668
Kostova, Elizabeth, 434, 739, 917, 920, L’Amour, Louis, 888, 1133–1134, 1137
925–926, 1097, 1098, 1112–1113 Lancaster, Robert, 694
Kotlowitz, Alex, 580, 581 Landesman, Peter, 858
Kowalewski, Michael, 778, 1037–1038 Landis, J.D., 446
Krakauer, Jon, 16, 21–22, 579 Land of Dreams (Blaylock), 359
Kramer, Jame, 581 Landt, Susan M., 1147, 1153
Kramer, Mark, 582 Lane, Christopher, 653
Krasikov, Sana, 523 Lanes, Selma G., 131, 172
Krause, Charles, 410 Lange, John, 965–966
Krause, Nicola, 147 Lang, Fritz, 822
Krentz, Jayne Ann, 798, 802 Langer, Lawrence, 483
Kress, Nancy, 819 Langewiesche, William, 581
Krippner, Stanley, 727 Langston Hughes Awards, 792
Kron, Lisa, 201 Langton, Jane, 654
Krupat, Arnold, 679, 680 Language. See also Language poetry
Kubrick, Stanley, 822 Asian American literature, 73–74, 78
Kucsma, Jason, 1169 autobiography and memoir, 94
Kuhn, Thomas, 840 Beats and, 787
Kumar, Amitava, 780 ecopoetry, 328–329, 330, 331, 333, 334
Kun, Michael, 507 flash fiction, 386, 393
Kunitz, Stanley, 753 Native American literature and,
Kunkel, Benjamin, 241, 507, 996–997, 998 669–670, 670–671, 673, 678
Kurland, Michael, 1030 New Age literature and, 688
Kurlansky, Mark, 474 philological thrillers and, 734,
Kurz, Katherine, 431 736–737
Kurzweil, Allan, 737 poetry and, 748, 750–752, 758
Kushner, Ellen, 990 reality and, 663–664, 947–948
Kushner, Tony, 300–301 science fiction and, 813
Kuttner, Henry, 981–982, 986 slang, 783
K’Wan, Foye, 1073 sports literature and, 935
Kyger, Joanne, 100, 108 verse novels and, 1130
Kyle, Richard, 416 women and, 792
1248 INDEX
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, The (Mayer),
538
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (journal), 539, 541,
750
Language of Baklava, The, 47
“Language” Poetries (Messerli), 539
Language poetry, 537–549, 749, 750–752
Lanier, Sidney, 1123–1124
Lannan Literary Award for fiction, 83
Lansdale, Joe R., 659
Lao-Tzu, 870
Lapine, Missy Chase, 871
Larbalestier, Justine, 912
Lardner, Ring, 501, 932, 933
Larkin, Jack, 470
Larkin, Philip, 5–6
Larson, Eric, 476, 477, 478
Larson, Jonathan, 631
Last Call (Powers), 360
Last Coin, The (Blaylock), 359
Last Days of Summer (Kluger), 413
Last Exit to Brooklyn (film), 407
Last Full Measure, The (J. Shaara), 445
Last Mermaid, The (Abe), 433
Last of the Thorntons, 298
Last Report, The, 263
Last Sin Eater, The, 189
Last Testament, The (Bourne), 736
Latin America, 589–590
Latino (Latina) American literature,
552–559. See also Hispanic
influences; Magical realism
chick lit, 146
comedic theatre, 202
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 253, 260
erotic literature, 343
humor and, 502
literary journalism and, 580
mystery fiction, 651
young adult literature, 1153, 1156,
1157
Latrobe, Kathy, 1148–1149
Laub, Dori, 487
Laughing Sutra, The (Salzman), 428
Laurens, Stephanie, 797–798
Lavin, Suzanne, 201
Law, 563, 564, 658
Lawhead, Stephen R., 189
Law of Attraction, 690
Lawrence v. Texas, 405, 406
Lawson-Peebles, Robert, 849
Lawsuits, 165, 214
Lawyers. See Legal thrillers
Laymon, Richard, 705, 711–712
Lay of the Land, The (Ford), 264
Lazarillo de Tormes, 224
Leach, William, 591
Leaf and the Cloud, The (Oliver), 334–35
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The
(Moore and O’Neill), 435
Leakey, Lewis and Mary, 19–20
Leal, Luis, 588
Leary, M., 191
Leary, Timothy, 790, 791
Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an
Eurasian (Eaton), 68
Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 341
Leaving Cecil Street (McKinney-
Whetstone), 1074–1075
Lebanon, 40, 41, 48, 50, 999, 1099
LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole, 578, 580
Lebowitz, Fran, 502
Le Carré, John, 954, 955, 956, 957, 959,
960
LeClair, Tom, 935
Lee, A. Robert, 680
Lee, Ang, 379
Lee, Arthur, 122
Lee, Chang-Rea, 76, 81–82, 773
Lee, Diana, 1097–1098
Lee, Edward, 705, 708
Lee, Harper, 563
Lee, Jim, 418
Lee, John W.I., 614
Lee, Judith Yaross, 505
Lee, Nell Harper, 568
Lee, Stan, 210, 923
Lee, Tanith, 985, 987
Lee, Vernon, 701
Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, 701, 921, 1091,
1092–1093, 1096
Legal thrillers, 561–570, 657, 962,
967–969, 1156, 1158
“Legend of Miss Sasagawara, The,” 78
Le Guin, Ursula K., 812, 819, 826, 901,
1026, 1150, 1155
Leguizamo, John, 202
Lehane, Dennis, 646, 654, 1069
Lehman, David, 740
Leiber, Fritz, 705, 971, 983, 985, 986
Leiber, Fritz Reuter, Jr., 352
Leight, Warren, 301
Leland, 472
Lem, Stanislaw, 1018
L’Engle, Madeleine, 1150
 INDEX 1249

Lennox, Marion, 802 Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster, The

Lensmen series (E.E. Smith), 897–899 (Gibbons) 232
Lent, Jeffrey, 445 Life in a Roman Fort (Shuter), 178
Leonard, John, 1113 Life of Johnson (Boswell), 118–119
Le Queux, William, 954, 955 Life of the World to Come, The (Baker),
Lerner’s Military Hardware in Action, 178 1020–1021
LeRoy, J.T., 239–240 Life on the Mississippi (Twain), 18
Lesbians, 345–346, 401, 641, 793, 932, Lifeskills, 867
1098 Life Sucks (Abel), 424
Lester, Julius, 1151 Life writing, 113, 667, 672–673, 680
Lethem, Jonathan, 235–236, 242, 826, Light in the Piazza (Lucas), 204
1033 Limits of Justice, The (Wilson), 413
Letters, 26, 41 Limón, Graciela, 559
“LETTERS” (Andrews), 543 Lincoln, Abraham, 124–125
“Letter to the Royal Academy at Brussels, Lincoln Center le Compte du Nouy
A,” 340–341 Awards, 305
Letting go, 237 Lincoln, Kenneth, 679
Letts, Billie, 778 Lincoln’s Dreams (Willis), 447
Letts, Tracey, 301–302 Lincoln’s Melancholy, 125
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee), Linderman, Frank, 667
575 Lindsay-Abaire, David, 202–203
Levin, Ira, 703 Linearity, adaptations and, 371
Levin, Jenifer, 950–951 Ling, Amy, 68–69
Levin, Meyer, 1047 Ling, Jinqi, 72–73, 74
Levine, Gail Carson, 1155 Ling Shuhua, 116
Levi, Primo, 484, 485–487, 493 Linklater, Richard, 382, 1026
Levitin, Daniel, 838 Linney, Romulus, 302
Levitt, Steven, 839 Linscott, Gillian, 463
Lewis, Bernard, 474 Lin, Tan, 542
Lewis, Beverly, 892 Lint, Charles de, 705, 710–711, 712
Lewis, C.S. (Clive Staples), 16, 186, 432, Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, The
433, 476 (Lewis), 16, 168
Lewis, Felice, 340, 341 Lippa, Andrew, 636
Lewis, James R., 685 Lipsky, Eleazar, 563
Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 428, 963, 700 Lipstick Jungle (Bushnell), 153–154
Lewis, Michael, 580 Lipsyte, Robert, 1150
Lewis, Oscar, 1071 Lipton, Lawrence, 104
Lewis, Paul, 502–503 Lisa Suckdog (Carver), 1175
Lewis, Sinclair, 314 Liss, David, 447
Liberalism. See also Culture wars List stories, 386
academic fiction and, 7–8, 317 Literacy, 339, 341
children’s literature and, 165 Literary Comedians, 501
comic books and, 211 Literary journalism, 571–583, 620. See
historical fantasy and, 430, 431, 435 also Journalism
historical nonfiction and, 477 Literary Lion Award, 308
utopian literature and, 1086 Literary theory, 541
Liberation theme, 98, 102, 149 LiteraryTraveler.com, 171
Libertarians, 913, 1088–1089 Literature (term), 664, 920
Libertines, 339, 340 Little Altars Everywhere (Wells), 158
Libra (DeLillo), 444, 446 Little, Bentley, 705, 710
Librarians, 162, 177, 210 Littlebird, Larry, 681
Liebling, A.J., 575, 1171 Littlefield, William, 936
Liebow, Elliot, 1068 Little House series, 169–70
1250 INDEX
“Little Red Riding Hood,” 340
Little Theatre Movement, 293
Little Women (Alcott), 445, 447
Litzines, 1175
Livy, 469
Lobenstine, Margaret, 871
Local color, 501, 768, 771, 780
Lochte, Dick, 570
LoCicero, Don, 434
Locke, Alain, 34
Lodge, David, 8–10
Lombino, Salvatore Albert, 648
London, Jack, 314, 850, 855, 932
Longenbach, James, 741, 752
Lonergan, Kenneth, 302
Longest Journey, The (Forster), 402
Longfellow, Henry W., 1120
Long, Frank Belknap, 702, 703
Long, Goldberry, 229
“Long Gone,” 36
Long, Joanna Rudge, 1157
Longing (Landis), 446
Long Life, 120
Longstreet, Augustus Baldwin, 500, 770
Lopez, Bobby, 633
Lopez, Erika, 788, 793
LoPorto, Garret, 866–867
Lord of the Rings (Tolkien), 16, 354, 355,
430, 903, 971
Los Angeles Times book awards, 463
Losier, Michael J., 863
Lost in My Own Back Yard (Cahill), 20
Loth, David, 341
Lothe, Jakob, 394
Lotz, Anne Graham, 513
Louis XV, 340
Love. See also Family; Harlequin Publish-
ing; Relationships; Romance novels
academic fiction and, 11
Arthurian literature, 54, 58
Beat poetry, 108
Christianity and, 476
Christian Romances and, 799
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 267, 271
Dracula and, 507
dramatic theater, 301, 303
erotic literature, 338–339, 340
GLBTQ and, 409, 410
historical fantasy and, 434
Holocaust literature and, 490
inspirational literature and, 512, 515
magical realism and, 595, 598
memory and, 1022
military literature and, 619
musical theater and, 628, 631
New Age literature and, 685, 690
parapsychology and, 722, 723
Romance novels and, 796, 797
science fiction and, 818, 829
self-help literature and, 867–868, 873
space opera and, 908
speculative fiction and, 926, 927
spy fiction and, 955
true crime literature and, 1054, 1058
urban fiction and, 1072
utopian literature and, 1081
vampires and, 710, 1093, 1095, 1099,
1100, 1103
verse novels and, 1120, 1121
young adult literature and, 1149
Love and Death on Long Island (film), 408
Love Comes Softly (Oke), 191–92
Lovecraft, H.P., 357–358, 702, 703, 706,
712, 772–773, 982
Lovely Bones, The (Sebold), 269
Lovesey, Peter, 456
Love Wife, The (Jen), 84, 265–266
Lowell, Robert, 540, 742, 745, 746, 747
Lowerison, Jean, 689
Low fantasy, 352, 361
Lowry, Lois, 1150
Lucado, Max, 511, 513, 515, 516, 518
Lucas, Craig, 197, 203–204
Lucas, George, 885, 902
Lucas, Henry Lee, 1049
Lucas, Tim, 1098
Luce, Claire Boothe, 291
Lucero, Aurora, 554
Luce, T.J., 469
Lucille Lortel Award, 300, 304, 307
Lucky Jim (Amis), 5–7
Ludlum, Robert, 959, 963
Lumley, Brian, 710
Lunar Park (Ellis), 263
Lundquist, Suzanne Eversten, 679
Lunley, Brian, 702
Lupack, Barbara Tepa, 369
Lupica, Mike, 937, 938, 943
Lurhman, Baz, 633
Lurie, Alison, 173
Lutes, Jason, 450
Lutz, Tom, 473, 780
Lyall, Gavin, 957
Lynch, Jessica, 620
Lynch, Jim, 230
 INDEX 1251

Lyndon, Barré, 380 Malory, Thomas, 55, 469, 971

Lynds, Gayle, 958, 961 Malti-Douglas, Fedwa, 41
Lyons, John, 2–3 Malzberg, Barry N., 1031
Lyons, Nan and Ivan, 641 Mamet, David, 12, 292, 302–303
Lyricism, 262, 264 Mamur Zapt books (Pearce), 464
Mandino, Og, 871
Macalister, Katie, 1098 Manga and anime, 209–210, 278, 281,
MacArthur Foundation genius grants, 600–612
1157 Manhattan Project, 127
Macavity Awards, 644, 652, 654, 659, 890 “Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 279
Macavoy, R.A., 431 Manifold: Time (Baxter), 1022
Macbride, Roger Lea, 170 Man-machine existence. See Human-
MacDonald, Dwight, 773 machine interface
MacDonald, George, 186 Man of My Dreams, The (Sittenfeld),
MacGuire, Gregory, 633 245–246
Machen, Arthur, 702, 712 Manriquex, Jaime, 559
Machiavelli, Niccolo, 470 Manson, Charles, 704, 1048, 1053–1054
Macho Sluts (Califia), 346 Mao II (DeLillo), 998–999
MacInnes, Helen, 955–956 March (Brooks), 170–71, 445, 447, 449
MacKay, Ruth, 473 March, The (Doctorow), 262, 445, 449
Mack Bolan books, 887 Marcus, Leonard S., 172
Mackenzie, Donald, 429 Marcuse, Herbert, 476
MacLaine, Shirley, 684–685 Marcus, Peter, 395–396
Maclean, Alistair, 957 Mare, Walter de la, 702
MacLeod, Charlotte, 640–641 Margaret A. Edwards Awards, 1150, 1158
MacLeod, Ken, 815 Margery (Mina Crandon), 721
Macomber, Debbie, 802 Marginalization
Macy, William H., 303 Asian American literature, 76
Madden, Inspector (character), 464 Beat poetry, 103, 105
Maddox, Tom, 284 Christian fiction, 186
Madness, 616, 618. See also Mental illness comedic theatre and, 197, 198
Magazines, 358, 387, 393, 571, 572, 574, contemporary mainstream American fic-
579–580, 809. See also specific maga- tion, 252
zines erotic literature, 343, 345
Magic, 352, 356, 429, 432–433, 704. See magical realism and, 589–590, 595,
also Fantasy; Sword and sorcery fic- 598–599
tion men and, 776
Magical realism, 267, 269, 430, 431, Native American literature and,
587–599, 918, 1025–1026, 1158. See 675–676
also Speculative fiction poetry and, 748, 764
Maher, Bill, 506 power and, 999
Mahfouz, Naguib, 41 regional fiction and, 769
Mailer, Norman, 446, 502, 527, 575, 934, road fiction and, 792
1047, 1055, 1067 speculative fiction and, 921
Maitland, Sara, 56 terrorism fiction and, 1000, 1002
Majaj, Lisa Suhair, 43, 44, 45 western genre and, 1134
Malamud, Bernard, 483, 502, 525, 526, young adult literature and, 1153
933, 943, 1067 Marginalization of Poetry, The (Perelman),
Malapropisms, 232 537
Malcolm, Janet, 120 Margolick, David, 940
Malcolm X, 851, 1159 Margolin, Philip, 569
Malden, R.H., 702 Margulies, Donald, 303
Mallon, Thomas, 453 Marincola, John, 469
1252 INDEX

Mark, Jeff, 633 chick lit, 141

Markley, Robert, 473 contemporary mainstream American fic-
Markoff, John, 276, 276 tion, 257
Markowitz, Judith, 650 erotic literature, 345
Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, GLBTQ and, 402
201, 205 regional fiction and, 771
Marling, William, 1053 science fiction and, 904
Maron, Margaret, 655 Masefield, John Edward, 1121
Márquez, Gabriel Garcia, 430, 918 Mask of the Sorcerer, The (Schweitzer),
Marr, John, 1167 362
Marriage Maslin, Janet, 452, 926, 927, 1098, 1113
Arab American literature, 46 Mason, Bobbie Ann, 266, 775, 778–779,
Asian American literature, 83 788
chick lit, 143, 144, 151, 152 Mason, David, 1126–1127
Christian fiction, 189 Mason, Jean, 466
comic books, 218 Mason, Perry (character), 563, 566
coming of age fiction, 223, 230, 238 Mason & Dixon (Pynchon), 444, 446
contemporary mainstream American fic- “Masque of the Red Death” (Poe), 428
tion, 270 Massey, Sujata, 654
dramatic theater, 303, 308 Master Butchers Singing Club, The
erotic literature, 347 (Erdrich), 263
GLBTQ and, 405, 411 Master of the Crossroads (Bell), 446, 451
road fiction and, 784 Masters, Edgar Lee, 1120–1121
science fiction and, 818 Masturbation, 402
Married Man, The (White), 409 Matador (Grayson), 424
Marrs, Texe, 687 Matera, Lia, 564, 659, 968
Mars, 978–979 Materialism, 97, 102, 106, 254, 257, 264.
Marschall, Rick, 690 See also Capitalism; Consumer culture
Marshall, Paule, 853, 1067 Masterpiece Theatre: An Academic Melo-
Mars-Jones, Adam, 409 drama, 12
Marston, Edward, 459 Mates, Julian, 629
Martin, Ann, 883 Matheson, Richard, 711, 712
Martin, Deborah, 798 Mathews, Francine, 961, 962
Martinez, Demetria, 559 Mathews, John Joseph, 667, 668
Martin, George R.R., 707, 709, 824, 885, Matrix trilogy, 284
989 Matsumoto, Izumi, 609
Martini, Steven Paul, 569, 657, 658, 967, Mattawa, Khaled, 43
968 Matthews, Francine, 959
Martin, Joel Bartlow, 1047 Matthews, John, 473
Martin, Kyle, 1098 Matthews, Washington, 666
Martin, Steve, 204 Matthiessen, Peter, 16, 20–21, 850, 856,
Martin, Valery, 447 1042–1043
Martin, William, 859 Matties, The, 933
Martone, Michael, 938 Mature audiences, 142, 162
Marvel Comics, 211–212, 217, 419, 420, Mature women, 155, 158
422, 604, 823, 1096 Maturin, Charles Robert, 700
Marvell, Andrew, 1123 Maugham, W. Somerset, 955, 956
Marx Brothers, 196 Maupin, Armistad, 884
Marxists, 122, 538, 545 Maurice (Forster), 402
Marx, Karl, 475 Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (Spiegelman), 417,
Masaru, Emoto, 689 489, 1151
Masculinity. See also Men Maus (Spiegelman), 450
Asian American literature, 71–72, 73, 77 MAX Comics line, 215, 419

Maximalism, 253, 256, 258, 264
Maxwell Awards for Fiction Writing, 644
Mayer, Bernadette, 538, 542
Mayes, Frances, 408, 1035–1036
Mazza, Cris, 137
McBain, Ed, 648, 654
McCafferty, Megan, 1154
McCaffery, Larry, 276–277
McCaffery, Steven, 540, 544
McCaffrey, Anne, 818, 886, 909, 1150
McCaffrey, Todd, 886
McCain, John, 475
McCallister, Margaret, 884
McCallum, Jack, 938
McCammon, Robert, 707, 709
McCarthy, Cormac, 257, 266–267, 775,
788, 919, 926–927
McCarthy, Gail, 644
McCarthyism, 72
McCarthy, Mary, 141–142, 575
McCarthy, Todd, 382
McCarthy, Wil, 818
McCauley, Stephen, 408
McClure, Michael, 108
McClure’s Newspaper Syndicate, 387
McComas, J. Francis, 810
McCourt, Frank, 89, 90–91, 94–95, 507
McCrumb, Sharyn, 650, 655
McCullers, Carson, 403, 407
McCullough, David, 121
McCutchan, Philip, 957
McDevitt, Jack, 832
McDonnell, Nick, 227
McDougall, William, 724, 726
McDowel, Michael, 711
McElfresh, Lynn E., 1153
McFarland, Ron, 673
McFarlane, Brian, 369, 371
McFee, William, 855
McGimpsey, David, 942
McGowan, Kathleen, 738
McGrath, Charles, 958
McGrath, Douglas, 1050
McGraw, “Dr. Phil,” 863, 867–868
McGuinniss, Joe, 1054
McGurl, Mark, 775, 776
McHale, Brian, 1122
McInerny, Ralph, 643
McIntosh, Pat, 985
McKay, Claude, 36, 1066
McKay, Nellie Y., 28
McKenna, Terence, 730
McKenzie, Nancy, 56, 57, 60–61
INDEX 1253
McKibben, Bill, 327, 1044
McKinney-Whetstone, Diane, 1069,
1073–1074
McLanahan, Patrick, 970
McLaughlin, Emma, 147
McMillan, Katie, 686
McMillan, Terry, 33, 145
McMurtry, Larry, 379, 776, 779, 1135, 1141
McNally, Clare, 711
McNally, John, 936
McNally, Terrence, 303–304
McNaught, Judith, 801
McNeice, Louis, 1121
McNickle, D’Arcy, 668
McPhee, John, 575
McVeigh, Timothy, 409
Mead, Margaret, 728
Media, 257
Media
electronic, 63, 257–258, 800, 1167 (See
also Computers)
historical fiction and, 449
historical nonfiction and, 470
humor and, 506
inspirational literature, 518
Language poetry and, 548–549
manga and anime and, 606, 611
military literature, 622
Native American literature and, 665
New Age literature and, 693
newspapers and, 582
poetry and, 747, 754, 757
satire of, 505
science fiction and, 822, 825
science writing and, 836, 841, 843
self-help literature and, 864, 869
sexuality and, 59
terrorism and, 995
true crime literature and, 1048, 1056
verse novels and, 1120, 1126
women and, 620
young adult literature and, 1148
zines and, 1165, 1167, 1169, 1170,
1171, 1173
Media entertainment, 191
Medical thrillers, 962, 965–968, 1027
Medieval settings. See also Middle Ages
fantasy literature, 351, 958, 971
historical mysteries, 459–460
mysteries, 457
romance novels, 54, 63
time travel fiction and, 1015
vampire fiction, 1113
1254 INDEX
Medieval Vision: Essays in History and
Perception (Erickson), 470
Medina, Pablo, 558
Mediums, 718–723
Meeker, Natania, 340
Mehesuah, Devon Abbott, 679
Meickle, William, 1097
Melcher, Frederic G., 177
Melhem, D.H., 42, 51
Mellard, James M., 249
Mellor, F., 834
Melodrama, 234, 293, 294
Melton, George, 871
Melton, J. Gordon, 683
Meltzer, Brad, 564, 570
Melville, Herman, 403, 442, 500, 850,
855, 1120
Memoirs. See also Autobiography and
memoir
African American literature, 34
Arab American literature, 44–45
Asian American literature, 76
coming-of-age, 1175
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 261, 263, 269, 271
erotic literature, 338
film adaptations, 368
flash fiction, 391
GLBTQ, 409
graphic novels, 450
Holocaust, 485–486
humor and, 504, 506
manga and anime and, 608
military literature, 620, 621, 622–624
road fiction and, 792–793, 793–794
travel writing, 1035
urban literature, 1068
verse, 1121
Memoirs of a Geisha (Golden), 450
Memoirs of a Lady of Pleasure, 341
Memorial, The (Isherwood), 402
Memory, 489–490, 714–715, 1022–1023
Men. See also Masculinity
chick lit, 143, 149, 150, 151
comic books, 209, 220
coming of age fiction, 230
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 255
Midwestern, 780
neuropsychology and, 838
road fiction and, 783
self-help literature and, 868
series fiction and, 887
Southern, 775
vampire novels and, 710
western genre and, 1132, 1134
young adult literature and, 1148
Menand, Louis, 478
Mencken, H.L., 501, 639
Mendes, Sam, 373
Menippean satire, 4
Meno, Joe, 1164, 1175
Mental illness, 401. See also Madness
Mercy Seat, The (LaBute), 301
Meredith, George, 1120
Merle, C.J., 914
Merlin (character), 56
Merrit, A.E., 979
Merriwell, Fank, 943
Mertz, Barbara, 456, 657
Merullo, Roland, 938
Merwin, W.S., 333–334
Merz, Jon F., 1098
Mesmer, Frank Anton, 683
Messenger, Christian, 942
Messerli, Douglas, 539
Messner, Reinhold, 16
Metafiction, 103, 252
Metamorphoses, 309
Metanarrative, 254, 928
Metaphors, 327, 336
Metatexts, 670, 679
Metaverse, 274, 280–281
Metcalfe, Gayden, 869
Metz, Christian, 366
Metzger, George, 416
Mexican Americans
Latino literature and, 553–554,
554–555, 555–556
road fiction and, 783
sports literature and, 934
women, 220, 424
writers, 552, 558
young adult literature and, 1153
Mexican themes, 654
Mexico City Blues, 108
Mexico (Michener), 443
Meyer, Stephanie, 710
Meyerowitz, Joan, 471
MFA programs, 259
Michael L. Printz Awards, 1150, 1157,
1158
Michaels, Anne, 488, 489–490
Michaels, Barbara, 642, 644, 657, 963
Michelangelo, 866
Michelle, Patrice, 1098

Michener, James, 443, 450
Microcosmic Tales: 100 Wondrous Science
Fiction Short-Short Stories (Asimov,
Greenberg, Olander), 388
Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Really
Short Stories (Judson), 390
Mid Atlantic, 654–655
Middle age, 736, 946–947
Middle Ages, 195, 738–739. See also
Medieval settings
Middlebrook, Diane Wood, 747
Middle class, 1073–1074
Middle East. See also specific countries
comic books and, 218
erotic literature and, 338
historical fantasy and, 434
historical fiction and, 447
historical nonfiction and, 474, 477
humor and, 506
military literature, 620
mystery fiction and, 658
spy fiction and, 959, 962
suspense and, 965, 968, 969
terrorism and, 996
terrorism fiction and, 998, 999, 1004,
1007–1008
“Middleness,” 45
Middle Passage (C. Johnson), 444
Middlesex (Eugenides), 264, 448
Mid-life crisis, 270
Midwest, 656, 778, 780
Mildred L. Batchelder Awards, 1153
Mile High Club, The (K. Friedman),
1003–1005
Military literature, 612–624. See also Ter-
rorism fiction
mystery, 890
science fiction, 909, 910
science fiction and, 827–828, 902, 903,
904, 905
sea writing, 858
suspense and, 963
sword and sorcery fiction, 988
thrillers, 969–970
Military thrillers, 618
Millar, Mark, 217–218, 419, 422–425
Millennium, The, 707, 708
Miller, Arthur, 295, 304, 934
Miller, Bennett, 382, 1050
Miller, Corey, 1069
Miller, Frank, 373, 450, 823, 824
Miller, Henry, 252
Miller, Isabel, 404
INDEX 1255
Miller, Jason, 934
Miller, J. Hillis, 328
Miller, Laura, 925
Miller, Mary, 583
Miller, Walter M., 810, 811
Millhauser, Steven, 590
Mills, Mark, 391, 396
Milne, A.A., 169
Miminalist fiction, 451
Mindplayer novels, 278, 279
Miniseries, 369
Minister’s Wooing, The (Stowe), 442
Minnesota, 656
“Minor Heroism” (Gurganus), 409
Minorities. See also specific minorities
Beat poetry, 103
comedic theatre, 197
erotic literature, 343–344, 346
road fiction and, 783
romance novels and, 801
Minot, Stephen, 391
Minton, Jim, 395
“Minute Stories,” 388
Miracle of the Rose, The (Genet), 402
Mirrorshades, 275, 276
Mirvis, Tova, 522
Misfits, 789. See also Marginalization
Mists of Avalon, The (Bradley), 430–431,
435
Mitchard, Jacquelyn, 777
Mitchell, Joseph, 574–575
Mitchell, Margaret, 443
Mitchell, Mary Anne, 1097
Mitchell, W.J.T., 366, 368
Miyazaki, Gorō, 1155
Miyazaki, Hayao, 602, 603, 608, 610, 611
Mizna: Prose, Poetry and Art Exploring
Arab America, 42
Moby Dick (Melville), 403, 447
Modern Egypt, 463–464
Modernism, 31–32, 327, 355, 1120, 1122,
1131–1132, 1133, 1134, 1137
Modern Language Association, 42
Moesta, Rebecca, 904
Mohr, Nicholasa, 554, 557
Molesworth, Mary, 701
Momaday, N. Scott, 664, 665, 669, 670,
671, 673, 675, 676, 678, 680, 681
“Mommy lit,” 150, 157
Momotaro Umi no Sinpei (Momotaro’s
Divine Sea Warriors) (film), 601
Mona in the Promised Land (Jen), 83–84
Monette, Paula, 404
1256 INDEX

Moni, Karen, 1152 More, Thomas, 1080

Moning, Karen Marie, 433 Moretti, Franco, 1114
Monk, The (Lewis), 428 Morgan, Robert, 444, 453
Monogamy, 230 Morgan, Sue, 472
Monologues Morgan, William, 680
comedic theatre, 197, 202 Moriarty, Chris, 817, 820
dramatic theater, 292, 307 Mormons (Church of the Latter Day
flash fiction, 386 Saints), 431, 436
Monster, 193 Morrell, David, 958
Monsters of St. Helena, The (Brooks), 446 Morris, Gerald, 57–58, 175
Monteleone, Thomas, 707 Morris, Holly, 1036
Montgomery, L.M., 170 Morris, Marry McGarry, 777
Montserrat, Dominic, 338 Morris, Mary, 1036
Moody, Nickianne, 466 Morris, Michael, 231
Moon Dance (Somtow), 432 Morris, William, 971, 974, 975
Moon, Elizabeth, 815, 826, 827, 832, Morrison, Jago, 252
908–910 Morrison, Jim, 788
Moorcock, Michael, 355, 811, 901, 982, Morrison, Lillian, 936
983, 984, 985, 986 Morrison, Toni, 1070
Moore, Alan, 435, 824 aesthetics, on, 37
Moore, Catherine L., 981–982, 986 African American literature and, 32
Moore, Christopher, 507, 1098 Beloved, 450, 453, 595, 761
Moore, David L., 675 contemporary mainstream American fic-
Moore, Dinty W., 392, 396 tion and, 267
Moore, James A., 712 historical fiction, 444, 448
Moore, Marianne, 937 humor, 502
Moore, Ronald D., 904 identity and, 596
Moore, Susanna, 446 magical realism and, 590, 593, 595
Moraga, Cherrie, 559 road fiction, 788
Morales, Alejandro, 554, 558 speculative fiction, 922
Morality. See also Ethics Morris-Suzuki, Tessa, 449
Christian fiction, 189 Morrow, James, 815
comedic theatre, 199 Morse, Richarson, 681
comic books, 215 Morson, Ian, 459
coming of age fiction, 224, 230, 246 Morte D’Arthur (Malory), 55, 469
contemporary mainstream American fic- Mortimer, John, 563
tion, 254 Morton, Thomas, 500
crime literature and, 1053 Moscoe, Mike, 914
dystopian fiction, 317 Mose, Gitte, 386
erotic literature, 341 Mosley, Walter, 644, 652, 656, 890, 1069,
Holocaust literature and, 491 1072
science fiction and, 818 Mosse, Kate, 433, 738
sports literature and, 933, 946 Most Famous Man in America, The
spy fiction and, 955, 956, 957 (Applegate), 116, 130
terrorism fiction and, 1000 Moth and Flame (Wilson), 413
urban literature and, 1066, 1070, 1072 Motheread, 167
western genre and, 1142 Motherhood, 144
young adult literature and, 1148 Mountains and Rivers Without End, 331
Moral panics, 222, 227, 229, 232–33, Movies. See Films
237–38 Movies-of-the-week, 369
Mordden, Ethan, 635–636 Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innova-
Mordred (character), 57 tive Writing by Women (Sloan), 542
Morefield, Kenneth R., 190 Mowatt, Anna Cora, 196
“More than One Way to Break a Fast,” 48 Moxley, Martha, 1059, 1060

Mrosla, Helen P., 512
Mr. Right quest, 156
Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 377, 447
Mr. Wicker’s Window (Dawson), 429
Mudge, Bradford K., 339
Muhammad Ali, 934–935
Muldord, Clarence, 1133
Mullen, Harryette, 542, 546
Muller, Marcia, 646–647, 659, 889
Multiculturalism
Asian American literature, 76, 84
coming of age fiction, 224
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 265, 270
fiction, 254
regional fiction and, 773, 777
Southern writers and, 775
urban literature and, 1068
vampire fiction and, 1099–1113
verse novels and, 1128–1129
young adult fiction and, 883
young adult literature and, 1153
Multimedia, 167–171, 199, 244, 394
Multiverse series, 355
Mundy, Talbot, 976–977
Muñoz, Elías Miguel, 558
Munro, Hector Hugh, 387
Munroe, Jim, 1168
Munson, Sam, 242
Murakami, Takashi, 610
Murder, 1047–1062. See True crime litera-
ture
Murder by Nail (Farnol), 456
Murder by Tradition (Forrest), 404
Murder in Retrospect (Burgess and
Vassilakos), 455
Murder, She Wrote (TV series), 891
Murkoff, Heidi, 872
Murphy, Dervla, 1041
Murphy, Michael, 695
Murray, David, 665
Murray, Les, 1129–1130
Murray, Sabina, 613
Muscarella, Steve, 395
Muscular Christianity, 931
Music
Arthurian literature, 54
coming of age fiction, 237
cyberpunk, 275, 276
road fiction and, 788
science writing and, 838
transrealist writing and, 1026
verse novels and, 1120, 1123
zines and, 1173
INDEX 1257
Musical comedy, 195
Musicals, 196
Musical theatre, 625–637, 1068
Muslim Americans, 40, 270, 961
Muslims, 1104
Musser, Joe, 620
“My Elizabeth” (Abu-Jaber), 47
Myer, Tamara, 655
Myers, Frederic W.H., 724
Myers, Tamar, 641
Myers, Walter Dean, 1072, 1076, 1150,
1151, 1156, 1158–1159
Myers Outstanding Book Award, 82
My First Two Thousand Years: The Auto-
biography of the Wandering Jew
(Viereck and Eldridge), 433
My Holocaust (Reich), 531
My Lives (White), 409
Myra Breckenridge (Vidal), 403
Myss, Caroline, 865
Mystery fiction, 638–659. See also Crime;
Spy fiction; Terrorism fiction; specific
types of thrillers
adventure fiction, 14
Arthurian literature, 55, 59
chick lit, 145, 157
children’s literature, 162, 882, 883
comic books, 214
GLBTQ, 413
Native American, 668
New Age, 691–693
series fiction and, 888–891
speculative fiction, 923–924
sports, 938–939
terrorism fiction, 1003–1004
Mysticism, 271, 471–472
Mythlore (journal), 437
Mythology
Arthurian literature, 61–62
children’s literature, 175
Christian fiction, 189
comedic theatre, 198
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 263
dramatic theater, 306, 309
fantasy and, 974
fantasy literature, 351, 352, 353, 359
Melville, Herman, 849
philological thrillers and, 734
science fiction and, 825, 905
sports literature and, 942, 943–944,
947, 949
themes from, 764
western genre and, 1132
1258 INDEX

Myung Mi Kim, 542, 547–548 National Public Radio, 395

My Utmost for His Highest (Chambers),
513
NAACP Image Awards, 652
Na, An, 1150
Nabhan, Gary Paul, 327
Nabokov, Vladimir, 115, 502, 733, 788,
1122
Nakao, Annie, 305
Naked Lunch (Burroughs), 786–787
Name of the Rose, The (Eco), 457
Namesake, The, 242, 266
“Nancy Drew,” 168, 169
Nancy Drew books, 882
Nanny Diaries, The, 144, 146–147
Napier, Susan, 612
Narnia (Lewis), 432
Narrative journalism, 578, 582. See also
Literary journalism
Narrative, 1005–1006
Narratological approach, adaptations and,
372
Nasaw, David, 113–114, 130
Nasby, Petrolem V., 501
Nash, John, 376
Nasir, Jamil, 1031
Naslund, Sena Jeter, 445, 446, 447
Nassise, Joseph, 712
Natasha, 127
Nathan, Leonard, 1122
National Book Awards
Asian American literature, 74, 79
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 264, 271
dramatic theater, 302
historical fiction, 445, 448, 449, 451,
452
Holocaust literature, 492
poetry, 742, 747
science fiction and, 827
sea writing, 854, 859
young adult literature, 1150, 1157
National Book Critics Circle Awards, 449,
452, 759
National Endowment for the Arts Award,
83
National Geographic Society, 19–20, 179
National Humanities Medal, 308
Nationalism, 199, 224
National Jewish Book Awards, 490
National Literary Prize (Premio Nacional
de literature), 557
National Theatre Conference Award, 205
Native American influences, 330, 685,
686–687, 760, 783, 1120, 1132,
1135, 1137
Native American literature, 663–682
contemporary mainstream American lit-
erature, 263
fantasy, 354
humor, 502, 504
mystery fiction, 653, 655
mystery series, 890
sea writing, 859
sports, 939
Native Americans
historical fantasy, in, 431, 432
historical fiction, in, 441
historical nonfiction, in, 468
identity and, 589
magical realism and, 595, 597
western genre and, 1139, 1140
Native Son (Wright), 31, 32
Native Speaker (Lee), 82
Natural, The (Malamud), 526, 943–944
Naturalism, 294, 771, 788, 855
Nature. See also Ecopoetry; Ecosystems;
Environment
magical realism and, 594
sea writing and, 856
travel writing and, 1043
Nava, Michael, 569, 654
Navratilova, Martina, 404
Naylor, Gloria, 37, 1067
Nazario, Sonia, 583
Nazis
science fiction and, 817, 831
speculative fiction and, 928
spy fiction and, 955, 961
transrealist writing and, 1033
verse novels and, 1126
Neal, Larry, 37
Nebula Awards
novels, 906
science fiction, 827, 831, 832
space opera, 905, 908
speculative fiction, 971
sword and sorcery fiction and, 983,
990
Ned, Annie, 673
Neely, Barbara, 652, 890
Negativity , 694, 696
Negley, Glenn, 312
Nehring, Christina, 120

Neighborhood fiction, 646, 1065–1076,
1158
Neighbors, Chuck, 187
Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman” and Joseph
Campbell: In Search of the Modern
Myth (Rauch), 436
Neill, Peter, 859
Nel, Philip, 948
Nelson, Anne, 304
Nelson, Thomas, 189
Neoclassicism, 195
Neon Genesis Evangelion (film), 603, 606
Neo-Pagans, 686
Nestle, Marion, 873
Networked computer systems, 275
Neugeboren, Jay, 934, 935
Neuromancer, 277, 284
Neuroticism, 773
New Age literature, 682–696, 704, 862,
1109
New American Poetry, The (Allen), 539
Newbery Medals, 177, 1149, 1154, 1155,
1156, 1157
“New Biography” era, 119
“New black aesthetics” (NBA), 33, 37–38
New Criticism, 100–101, 746, 775
New England, 500, 654, 704, 739, 770,
771–773, 779, 859
New Historicists, 665
Newjack (Conover), 580
New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora
(Shneer and Aviv), 521
New Journalism, 253, 575–576, 581, 790,
1032
“New Left,” 476
Newman, Barry, 577, 581
Newman, Kim, 710
Newman, Sharan, 459
New Mexico, 656
New Orleans, 655, 708
“New Refutation of Time, A” (Borges),
429–430
News from Paraguay (Tuck), 446
Newspapers, 387, 393, 571, 581–583
New Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories
from America and Beyond, 397
New Sun series (Wolfe), 813
New Theory for American Poetry: Democ-
racy, the Environment, and the
Future of Imagination, 329
Newton, Michael, 473
New Wave, 275, 810, 811, 813, 821, 824,
826, 828, 901, 902
INDEX 1259
New York City, 888, 965
New York Drama Critics Circle Award,
303, 307
New Yorker (magazine), 409, 418, 501,
502, 575, 576, 578–579
New York (magazine), 576
New York Society for the Suppression of
Vice (NYSSV), 342
New York Times best books/sellers, 465,
516, 517
Nguyen, Viet Thanh, 81
Niatum, Duane, 668
“Nice ‘N Easy,” 151
Nice Work (Lodge), 9–10
Nicholas, Deborah, 798
Nicholls, Peter, 822
Nick Carter books, 887
Nick of the Woods (Bird), 442
Nicolson, Nigel, 119–120
Niedzviecki, Hal, 1172
Niehardt, John, 667–668
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 475
Nieves, López, 557
Niffenegger, Audrey, 1022–1023,
1032–1033
Night Inspector, The (Busch), 445
Nights in Aruba (Holleran), 404
Night Watch, The (Waters), 413
Night Watch (Pratchett), 1023
Night (Wiesel), 485
Nightwing (character), 424
Nightwing (Grayson), 424
Nightwood (Barnes), 403
Nine Princes in Amber (Zelazny), 430
1984 (Orwell), 313
Nineteen Minutes (Picoult), 228
1960s. See Sixties
Nineteenth century. See also Victorian era
historical fiction and, 441–442
manga and anime and, 609
mystery series, 890–891
regional fiction and, 768–769, 770,
775–776
romance novels, 798–799
science writing and, 835
sea writing and, 850, 854
series fiction, 881, 884
sports literature and, 931, 932
terrorism and, 997
travel writing and, 1034
urban literature, 1066
utopian literature and, 1080–1082
young adult literature and, 1148
1260 INDEX
Niven, Larry, 708, 812, 902, 1014, 1015
Nobel Prizes, 41, 294, 444, 485, 557, 761,
837, 1029
No Country for Old Men (McCarthy), 266
Nocturnes for the King of Naples (White),
408
Noir stories, 214
Noir writing, 639, 645
Nolan, Tom, 958
Nolan, William F., 457
Noll, Elizabeth, 1150–1151
Nonfiction. See also Literary journalism;
specific types of nonfiction
adventure fiction, 16
autobiography and memoir, 89–90
children’s literature and, 178–179
contemporary mainstream American lit-
erature, 251–252
film adaptations of books, 382
flash fiction, 391–392
GLBTQ, 409
historical, 468–478
“Nonfiction novel,” 1052
No-No Boy (Okada), 71
Non-superhero titles, 210, 211
Norfolk, Lawrence, 737, 739
Norms, 197, 205, 355, 428, 476, 1048
Norris, Frank, 855, 932
North American Review, 389
North and South trilogy (Jakes), 443, 450
North Carolina, 655
Northern Lights (Pullman), 433
North, Oliver, 620
North, Thomas, 117, 118
Norton, Andre, 901
Norton, Mary, 429
Nostalgia, 772, 775, 1021, 1043
Nostalgia approach, adaptations and, 372
No Time for Comedy (Behrman), 196
No Shortcuts to the Top (Veisler), 15
Nottage, Lynn, 304–5
Nouryeh, Andrea, 289, 290, 292
Novels. See specific kinds of fiction
Novik, Naomi, 435, 796
Nowatka, Edward, 622–623
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, 919
Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart
(Walker), 271
Nuclear accidents, 1030
Nuclear power, 965
Nuclear war, 106, 266, 315, 707, 811
Nuclear weapons, 948, 969
Nudity, 211
Numeroff, Laura Joffe, 169
Nunn, Kem, 938
Nuyorican writers, 552, 554, 555, 556,
557, 756–757
Nye, Naomi Shihab, 45–46, 51
Nyugen, Kein, 91–92
Oates, Joyce Carol, 115, 267, 768, 772,
778, 935, 1030, 1151
Obata, Takeshi, 611–612
Obejas, Achy, 558
Obie Award, 202, 298, 299, 302, 303,
305, 307
“Objectivist” movement, 538
Objectivity. See also Reality
biography and, 124, 125–126
holocaust literature and, 486
literary journalism and, 573, 574, 575
newspapers and, 582
poetry and, 743, 746
speculative fiction and, 923, 925
terrorism fiction and, 1001
travel writing and, 1037, 1039
true crime literature and, 1051
zines and, 1169
Object of My Affection, The (film), 408
Oblivion (Wallace), 271–72
O’Brien, Dan, 1136
O’Brien, Tim, 267, 616–617
Obscenity, 340, 341–342, 755, 786, 787
Occult/supernatural literature, 699–715,
918. See also Supernatural literature
Occum, Samson, 667
O’Conner, Flannery, 502, 774
“Ode,” 29
O’Dell, Tawni, 778
“Ode to Ethiopia,” 29
Odets, Clifford, 294
O’Donohue, John, 687
Odyssey, The (Homer), 108, 353, 1034
Oecologie, 326
Off-Broadway, 295
“Office lit,” 146–48
Offutt, Andrew J., 985
Okada, John, 68, 71–72
Okada, Toshio, 605
Oke, Janette, 191, 799
Olander, Joseph D., 388
Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
(Gurganus), 409, 410
Old School (Wolff), 235
“Old Times on the Mississippi”
(Twain), 18

Oleanna (Mamet), 12
Oliphant, Margaret, 701
Oliver, Mary, 334–35
Olivier Best Play Award, 299
Olney, James, 251
Olsen, D.B., 643
Olsen, Jack, 1047, 1055, 1061–1062
Olsen, Tillie, 527
Olson, Charles, 540, 1121
Olson, Mark, 913
O Magazine, 394
O’Malley, Bryan Lee, 788
O’Marie, Anne, 643
Omeros (Walcott), 1124–1125
Omni magazine, 276
Omniscient voice, 289
O’Nan, Stewart, 445, 447, 712
Onassis, Aristotle, 130
O’Neale, Sandra, 27
One Corpse Too Many (Pargeter/Ellis),
455
101 Humiliating Stories (Kron), 201–202
100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories
(Arnzen), 395
145th Street Short Stories (Meyers), 1076
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años
de soledad) (Márquez), 430, 588
O’Neill, Eugene, 294, 850, 855
O’Neill, Helen, 583
O’Neill, Kevin, 435
One Last Look (Moore), 446
One Mississippi, 231, 235
“On Imagination,” 27–28
Onion Field, The (Wambaugh), 1052–1053
Onions, Oliver, 702
Online communities, 209, 276. See also
Internet
Online database, 163
Onoto Watanna. See Eaton, Winnifred
On Stranger Tides, 360
“On-the-lam novels,” 225
On the Road (Kerouac), 99, 225, 784–785,
791
Ooligan Press, 397
Open form, Beat Poetry and, 100–101
Operation Shylock (Roth), 1001–1002
Operettas, 629–630
Oppenheim, E. Phillips, 954
Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 129
Oppression, 70, 312
Oprah’s Book Club, 157, 258–259, 264.
See also Winfrey, Oprah
Oral history, 129
INDEX 1261
Oral performance
African American literature, 26, 27,
35, 36
Arab American literature, 47
Beat poetry, 98, 101
Oral traditions, 749–750
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (Winter-
son), 404
Orchid Thief, The (Orlean), 373–374
Ordinary, The (Grimsley), 413
O’Reilly, Bill, 759
Oriard, Michael, 931, 941, 951
Original Video Animation (OVA), 602
Orlandersmith, Dael, 305
Orlean, Susan, 373, 579
Orman, Suze, 863, 872
Orodenker, Richard, 933
O’Rourke, P.J., 506
Orr, Gregory, 747
Orson Scott Card: Writer of the Terrible
Choice (Tyson), 436
Ortego, Philip D., 556
Ortiz, Simon, 668–669, 671, 672, 676, 757
Orwell, George, 313, 817
Oryx and Crake (Atwood), 321
Osborne, Maggie, 802
Oshii, Mamoru, 602, 603, 611
Oshinsky, David M., 478
Oskison, John Milton, 668
Ossana, Diana, 379, 779
Osteen, Joel, 511, 513, 515, 516, 517–518
O’Sullivan, Maggie, 542
Otaku no Video (film), 605
Otero, Nina, 554
Other, the, 546, 547
Other Side of the Door, The
(Chamberlain), 456
Other Side of the River, The (Kotlowitz),
580
Otogi Manga Karendâ, 601–602
Otomo, Katsuhiro, 602, 604
Otsuka, Julie, 445, 448
Ouellette, Jennifer, 838
Ou Lu Khen and the Beautiful
Madwoman, 361
Our Lady of the Flowers (Genet), 402
Ours, Dorothy, 940
Outdoors adventures. See Adventure fiction
Outer Critics Circle Award, 79, 307
Out of Africa (Dinesen), 15
Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innova-
tive Poetry by Women in North
America & the UK (O’Sullivan), 542
1262 INDEX

Out of Place (Said), 44 Park, Linda Sue, 1157–1158

Outside (magazine), 20, 22, 579 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 305
OVA (Original Video Animation), 602 Parodies, 99–100, 204, 224, 233, 873
“Over the Fence” (Nye), 46 Parsifal (Vansittart), 431
Owens, Louis, 677 Parsons, Elsie Clews, 666
Owen, Wilfrid, 758 Partridge, Jeffrey F.L., 260
Owen Wister Award, 1141 Passage to India, A (Forster), 14, 15, 402
Oxford, 1–2, 4 Passion, The (Winterson), 404
Oxherding Tale (Johnson), 444 Passion of the Christ, The (film) 190
Oz, Mehmet C., 863 Pastiche, 110, 357
Ozick, Cynthia, 267–268, 485, 488, 522, Patai, Daphne, 472
525, 530 “Pathography,” 115
Patience and Sarah (Miller), 404
Pace, 214, 215, 262 Patriarchy
Pachter, Adam Emerson, 936 Beat poetry, 110
Packard, Chris, 342 contemporary mainstream American fic-
Paganism, 437, 686, 704, 705 tion, 257
Page, Katherine Hall, 643 dystopian fiction, 316
Page, Norvell, 983 erotic literature, 340
Paget, Violet, 701 fantasy literature, 360
Paige, Robin, 656 Patrick, Max J., 312
Pain, 696 Patriotism, 98–99, 103
Paine, Lauran, 1137 Patron, Susan, 177
Painted Drum, The (Erdrich), 263–264 Patten, Gilbert, 931
Pairs, biography and, 117 Patterson, James, 649, 968, 969
Pais, Abraham, 129, 130 Patterson, Richard North, 657, 658,
Pale of Settlement, The (Singer), 531 967–968
Paley, Grace, 527 Paulsen, Gary, 1150
Pal, George, 1019 Pavlina, Steve, 872
Palladino, Eusapia, 719–720, 721 Paxcal, Francine, 882
Palmer, Michael, 540, 549, 966 Paxson, Diana, 437
Palmer, William J., 457 Peabody Awards, 904
Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories Peace Like a River (Enger), 230
(Hernandez), 450 Peale, Norman Vincent, 514, 518, 863
Pandaemonium (Epstein), 445 Pearce, Michael, 463–464
Pantaleo, Jack, 1098 Pearce, Phillippa, 429
Paper Grail, The (Blaylock), 359 Pearl, Matthew, 462, 739
Paradigm approach, 249–250 Pears, Iain, 737
Paradise Alley (K. Baker), 445, 451 Pearsall, Paul, 872
Paranoia, Beat poetry and, 97, 105 Pearson, Ridley, 650
Parapsychology, 717–731 Peck, John, 849–850
Parent, Gail, 502 Peck, Richard, 1150
Parenthood, 147, 223 Peirce, Charles, 734
Paretsky, Sara, 646, 647, 889 Pekar, Harvey, 373
Pargeter, Edith (Ellis), 455 Pelecanos, George P., 655
Paris Review, The, 20 Pelzer, Dave, 88
Paris Spleen (Bandelaire), 387 Pendelton, Don, 887
Park, E.J., 191 PEN/Faulkner Awards, 444, 445, 451, 452,
Parker, Dorothy, 501 858
Parker, Robert B., 644, 646, 654 PEN/Hemingway Award for Best Fiction,
Parker, Robert Dale, 679 82
Parker, T. Jefferson, 656, 659 PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Awards for
Parkinson, Thomas, 104 Drama, 299

Penman, Sharon, 459
PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, 82
Percy, Walker, 774, 775
La Perdida (Abel), 220, 424
Perelman, Bob, 537, 538, 540, 542
Perelman, S.J., 501
Peretti, Frank, 192–193
Periodicals, 162, 163. See also Magazines;
Newspapers; individual publications
Perkins, Stephen, 1172
Perloff, Marjorie, 537, 540, 543, 545
Perrault, Charles, 340
Perrin, Bernadotte, 117–118
Perrine, Laurence, 89
Perry, Anne, 461
Persecution, 300
Persona, biography and, 123, 124–125
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
(Twain), 442
Peruvians, 554
Perzines, 1174
Peter, Josh, 940
Peters, Elizabeth, 456, 639, 644, 657,
890–891, 963
Peters, Ellis, 455, 466, 639, 642
Peters, F.E., 474
Petry, Alice Hall, 770
Petry, Ann, 31, 32
Peverelly, Charles, 933
Pfeil, Fred, 778
Phelan, Peggy, 776
Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 701
Phenomenology, 328, 329, 335
Philbrick, Nathanial, 850–851
Phillips, Arthur, 737
Phillips, Caryl, 854
Phillips, Gary, 652
Phillips, Max, 446
Phillips, Michael, 186, 1128, 1154
Phillips, Susan Elizabeth, 802
Philological thrillers, 732–740
Philosophy. See also individual
philosophers
Arab American literature, 41
Asian, 109
autobiography and memoir, 87
comedic theatre, 199, 200
cyberpunk, 275
ecopoetry, 328
graphic novels and, 424
historical nonfiction and, 475
inspirational literature and, 518
Jewish American literature, in, 525
INDEX 1263
Language poetry and, 545
Native American literature and, 679
New Age, 687
philological thrillers and, 735
transrealist writing and, 1027–1028,
1030
travel writing and, 1038–1039, 1044
Phish, 791
Physical comedy, 196, 198, 202, 204
Physics, 837, 1014, 1015
Picaresque, 224–225, 256, 268
Picasso at the Lapin Agile (Martin), 204
Piccirilli, Tom, 712
Pickard, Nancy, 641
Picket, Lynn Snowden, 940
Picoult, Jodi, 228
Picture books, 164, 177
Pierce, J. Kingston, 466
Piercing the Darkness (Peretti), 192
Piercy, Marge, 818, 1030
Pierre, DBC, 229
Pietri, Arturo Uslar, 588
Pileggi, Nicholas, 475
Pilek, Eugena, 936
Pilgrim’s Progress, The (Bunyan), 185–186
Pinsker, Sanford, 492, 493
Pioneers, 441, 453, 849, 881
Piratepedia, 179
Pirates of the Caribbean (film), 16, 168,
358, 473, 883
Pirsig, Robert M., 788
Place, 325, 330, 676–677. See also
Regional fiction
Planetary romance, 895, 903
Plantation tradition, 28–29, 30, 31, 32, 33
Plath, Sylvia, 120, 376, 540, 746, 747, 764
Plato, 1079–1080
Playboy (magazine), 576
Player Piano, 315
Playfair, Guy Lion, 729
Plays Well With Others (Gurganus), 409,
410
Plenty-Coups, 667
Plot Against America, The (Roth),
268–269, 317, 320, 445, 446
Plutarch, 117–18
Podcasts, flash fiction and, 394–395
Podhoretz, John, 496
Podhoretz, Norman, 104
Poe, Edgar Allan, 428, 500, 562, 638, 807,
850, 1039, 1061
Poetics of Indeterminacy, The (Perloff),
540
1264 INDEX
Poetics, The, 195, 293
Poetry, 740–764. See also Language poetry;
Verse novels
African American, 32, 34
African American literature, 26, 27–28,
29–30, 32, 35–37
Arab American literature, 40–41, 42,
43, 46, 47–48
Arthurian literature, 54, 64
Asian American literature, 76, 81, 82
baseball, 936
Beat poetry, 97–112
bouts, 757
children’s literature, 179–180
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 260
cyberpunk, 284
ecopoetry, 325–337
erotic, 338, 339
Holocaust, 486
military, 613, 614
Native American, 668, 671–672, 674,
679–680
New Age, 687
prizes, 759, 763, 764
prose, 386, 387, 396
regional, 768
spoken word, 754, 758, 761, 788
sports, 934, 936, 942–943
zines and, 1175
Poetry Foundation, 179
“Poets, The,” 30
Poets laureate, 753, 764, 792
Pohl, Frederick, 810–811, 813, 826
Point of view, flash fiction and, 386, 391,
392
Poland (Michener), 443
Police procedurals, 565–566, 647–648,
968
Polidori, John, 700, 1092
Political thrillers, 566, 962–963, 969
Politicians, biographies and, 125–126
Politics. See also specific issues
Asian American literature, 81
autobiography and memoir, 87
Beat poetry, 100, 103, 108
chick lit, 157
children’s literature, 165
Christian fiction, 190, 192, 193
comedic theatre, 195, 197, 198, 199,
200, 201, 205
comic books, 210, 211, 213, 214, 216,
219
coming of age fiction, 225
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 254, 260, 262, 268
dramatic theater, 307, 308
dystopian fiction, 312, 314, 318
ecopoetry, 325, 327
erotic literature, 339–340
poetry and, 746–747, 750, 753,
758–759
science fiction and, 811, 909, 913
space opera and, 904
sports literature and, 933
spy fiction and, 957
suspense and, 967–968
terrorism fiction and, 1000
travel writing and, 1044
urban literature and, 1068
vampire fiction and, 1114–1115
zines and, 1164, 1169, 1170, 1172
Pollack, Lisa, 583
Pollock, Jackson, 376
Polly’s Ghost (Frucht), 598
Pommy Vega, Janine, 108–109
Poor Richard’s Almanac (Franklin), 500
Pope, Alexander, 27
Pope, Frank, 474
Popular culture. See also Science writing
chick lit, 137
comedic theatre, 200
comic books, 216
coming of age fiction, 224, 226,
234–236
magical realism and, 591, 592–594
musical theatre and, 626
poetry and, 743
science fiction and, 825
science writing and, 842
speculative fiction and, 920
terrorism fiction and, 997–998, 1000
time travel fiction and, 1014
true crime literature and, 1047, 1049
urban literature and, 1068, 1070, 1071
vampire fiction and, 1103
verse novels and, 1119–1120,
1120–1121
young adult literature and, 1147
zines and, 1173
Popular psychology, 155
Popular science, 833–843
Pornography, 255, 338, 339, 340, 346,
1031
Porsdam, Helle, 566
Porter, Henry, 958

Porter, Joy, 679
Porter, Katherine Anne, 858
Portnoy’s Complaint (Roth), 528–529
Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West
and Harold Nicolson (Nicolson and
Sackville-West), 119–120
Posey, Alexander, 668
Possession, 694, 704
Possession (Byatt), 11, 640, 739
Post, Melville Davisson, 456
Postapocalyptic desolation, 266, 274
Post-Apollo Press, 42
Post Gibran: Anthology of New Arab
American Writing, 42
Postlanguage poets, 541–542, 545, 546
Postmemory, 489, 490
Postmodernism
African American literature, 32
Arab American literature, 43
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 249
cyberpunk, 276, 277, 278, 280, 281,
291
GLBTQ and, 404
historical fiction, 441, 444, 448, 452
historical nonfiction and, 477
Holocaust literature, 494
humor and, 504
Language poetry and, 540, 543
magical realism and, 594
Native American literature and,
670–671, 675
sea writing and, 856, 857
sports literature and, 935
terrorism fiction and, 998–999
transrealist writing and, 1025, 1028,
1033
travel writing and, 1044
urban literature and, 1067
verse novels and, 1122
western genre and, 1131, 1132, 1133,
1134–1135, 1141
young adult literature and, 1158
Poststructuralism, 371, 538, 541, 544, 547
Potok, Chaim, 525–526
Potter, Jeremy, 456–457
Pound, Ezra, 538, 745, 1121, 1122
Pournelle, Jerry, 708, 812, 902
Poverty
Arab American literature, 46
Asian American literature, 70, 73
autobiography and memoir, 94–95
comedic theatre, 201
INDEX 1265
comic books, 217
coming of age fiction and, 230
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 257
culture of, 1071
dramatic theater, 305, 308
dystopian fiction, 322, 323
graphic novels and, 421
Jewish American literature and, 524
mystery fiction and, 656
New Age literature and, 690
poetry and, 762
regional fiction, 779
road fiction and, 782, 783–784
science fiction and, 825, 829
series fiction and, 841
travel writing and, 1041
urban fiction and, 1068, 1071
Powers, Richard, 827, 1083
Powers, Tim, 359–360, 986
Poyer, David, 858
PP/FF: An Anthology (Connors), 396
Prapuolenis, Kaz, 1173
Pratchett, Terry, 1023, 1098
Pratt, James Michel, 859
Pratt, Mary Louise, 776, 777, 779
Pravellet, Kristin, 545
Prayer for the Dying, A (O’Nan), 447
Precognition, 718
Pregnancy, Beat poetry and, 106
Prejudice
autobiography and memoir, 89
chick lit, 147, 154
coming of age fiction, 229, 233
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 255
dramatic theater, 305
Prelude to a Kiss (Lucas), 200, 203, 204
Prelutsky, Jack, 179
Premio Casa Las Americas, 558
Premio Nacional de Literature (National
Literary Prize), 557
Prep, 241, 245, 246
Pressfield, Steven, 938
Preston, Douglas, 1088
Preston, Richard, 580–581
Pretice Alvin (Card), 431
Pretty-Shield, 667
Price, Willard DeMille, 13, 18–19
Pride and Prejudice, 139
Pride of Baghdad (Vaughan and
Henrichon), 434
Pride of Carthage (Durham), 452
1266 INDEX
Pridgen, William, 1097–1098
Priestess of Avalon (Paxson and Bradley),
437
Princess and the Pizza, The (Auch and
Auch), 175
Princess Grace Award for Playwrighting,
305
Pringle, David, 903
Prison novels, 402–403
Private Eye Writers of America awards,
465
“Problem novel,” 238
Proctor, Mortimer R., 1, 2
Prodigal Summer (Kingsolver), 266
Profanity, 211
Progress, 477, 816–817, 927, 1013, 1014
Proirier, Richard, 848
Prologue, 291–92
Promiscuity, 215, 230
Pronko, Leonard, 195
Pronzini, Bill, 644–645, 646, 889
Propaganda literature, 32–33
Property (Martin), 447
Prose, Francine, 229, 494
Prose poems, 386, 387, 396
Prostitution, 339, 342, 346–347, 402
Protest, 26–31
Protestant readers, 185
Protest literature, 758
Proulx, Annie, 268, 379, 408, 779, 859
Provincetown Players, 294
Pryse, Marjorie, 770, 772, 777
P.S. Your Cat is Dead (film), 408
Pseudonyms, 798. See also individual pseu-
donyms
Pseudoscience, 834, 840
Psychedelic, 790
Psychic film adaptation, 367
Psychics, 685, 693–694, 701. See also indi-
vidual psychics
Psychoanalysis, 855, 1030, 1114
Psychokinesis, 718, 724, 726–728
Psychological dimensions. See also
Consciousness; Unconscious, the
comic books, 212
coming of age fiction, 228
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 256
cyberpunk, 278
fantasy literature, 353
historical mysteries, 462
historical nonfiction, in, 471–472
occult/supernatural literature and, 701
spy fiction and, 956
suspense, 962
sword and sorcery fiction and, 977
terrorism fiction and, 1010
true crime literature and, 1047, 1048,
1049, 1052, 1053, 1057, 1062
urban literature and, 1072
vampire fiction and, 1114
western genre and, 1138
Psychological thrillers, 968–969
“Psycho-plagiarists,” 115
Publicity campaigns, 164
Puck of Pook’s Hill (Kipling), 429
Puerto Rican writers, 552, 553, 555–556,
557
Pulcini, Robert, 373
Pulitano, Elvira, 679
Pulitzer Prizes
autobiography and memoir, 90
Beat poetry, 109
biography, 115, 121, 122, 129, 130, 131
children’s literature, 170
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 262, 264, 269
dramatic theater, 294, 296, 298, 303,
304, 307, 308, 309, 857
fiction, 443
historical fiction, 443, 444, 445, 446,
447, 448, 449, 450
historical nonfiction, 474, 477, 478
Holocaust literature, 489, 495
humor and, 505
journalism, 1042
Latino American literature and, 558,
559
literary journalism and, 577, 582, 583
military literature, 620
Native American literature and, 664
poetry, 747, 748, 754, 759, 764
science fiction and, 827
speculative fiction, 927
sports literature, 934, 939, 949–950
true crime literature, 1056, 1058
Pullman, Philip, 433
Pulp fiction
erotic, 342
GLBTQ, 403
historical, 975–976
legal thrillers, 563
magazines, 354
mystery fiction, 644, 645
occult/supernatural literature, 703, 705,
708

science fiction, 817
sword and sorcery fiction, 971, 980–983
transrealist writing and, 1027, 1030
true crime literature and, 1047–1048
western genre, 1133
zines and, 1165–1166
Puns, Allusions, and Other Word Secrets
(Fandel), 179
Pura Belpré Awards, 1153, 1157
Purdy, John L., 669
Purpose Driven Life, The (Warren), 188,
511, 512, 513–514, 515, 516, 517,
518
Pushkin, Alexander, 1123
Puthoff, Harold, 728–729, 730
Putnam, Robert D., 253
Pynchon, Thomas
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion and, 268
cyberpunk and, 276
historical fiction, 444, 446
holocaust literature, 483
humor and, 502
influence on others, 814, 821, 998
irrationalism of, 733
postmodernism and, 256
road fiction, 788
science fiction and, 806–807, 831
terrorism fiction and, 998
transrealist writing and, 1029
Quantum mechanics, 688, 727
Queen, Carol, 346, 347
Queers, 402, 406. See also GLBTQ (Gay,
lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and
queer)
Quests. See also Road fiction
African American literature, 32–33
Arthurian literature, 57, 63–64
coming of age fiction, 224
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 263
fantasy literature, 351
Quetchenbach, Bernard W., 326
Quick, Amanda, 798
Quidditch through the Ages (Rowling), 432
Quill, Monica, 643
Quiñones, Ernesto, 557
Quinto Sol Prize, 558
Rabbit series (Updike), 222, 270–271
Race. See also African American Literature;
Slavery
INDEX 1267
adventure fiction, 15, 18, 21
Asian American literature, 77
autobiography and memoir, 89
Beat poetry, 105
Beats and, 791
chick lit, 145
comedic theatre, 197, 198, 201
comic books and, 923
coming of age fiction, 222
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 253, 254, 261, 262, 265, 268,
271
dramatic theater, 305, 307
historical writing and, 429, 451, 463,
472–473
humor and, 501, 505
Jewish American literature and, 523
literary journalism and, 581
magical realism and, 593
military literature, 620
mystery fiction and, 652, 655
occult/supernatural literature and,
706–707
road fiction and, 793, 794
science fiction and, 812, 813, 902
sea writing and, 853
speculative fiction and, 920
sports literature and, 934, 940
true crime literature and, 1059
urban literature and, 1071
utopian literature and, 1087
young adult literature and, 1152, 1158
zines and, 1175
Racial equality, 231
Racism
adventure fiction, 19
African American literature, 33
Arab American literature, 40, 43–44,
46, 47, 48, 49, 50
Asian American literature, 67, 68–69,
70, 72, 74, 79
Beat poetry, 101, 103
chick lit, 146, 147
comedic theatre, 196–197
coming of age fiction, 224
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 254, 267
dramatic theater, 29, 305
Raczymow, Henri, 489–490
Radcliffe, Ann, 963
Radical enjambment, 101
Radical presence, 328
Radin, Dean, 728
1268 INDEX
Radio, 387, 395, 822
Radius of Arab American Writers Inc.
(RAWI), 42
Ragtime (Doctorow), 450, 452
Raiders of the Lost Ark (film), 211
Rain, Mary Summer, 687
Rainbow Party, The, 238
Raine, Craig, 1122, 1125–1126
Rainey, Dennis and Barbara, 514
Rainwater, Catherine, 679
Raisin in the Sun, A (Hansberry), 295
Raleigh, Walter, 849
Ramsey, Dave, 514, 874
Ramsland, Katherine, 437
Randi, James, 694, 729–730
Ranke, Leopold von, 470
Rankie, Claudia, 542
Rankin, Ian, 659
Ransom, John Crowe, 775
Rap, 1026, 1069–1070
Rape, 257, 269, 346, 1150, 1152, 1157,
1175
Raphael, Lev, 651
Raphael (Macavoy), 431
Rapp, Adam, 305–6
Raschka, Chris, 179
Rasula, Jed, 329
Rating systems, 212
Rationalism, 733
Rauch, Stephen, 436
Rauner, Michael, 437
Ravelstein (Bellow), 261
Rawicz, Piotr, 493
Rayner, Richard Piers, 373
Reach Out, 167
Reading ability, 165
Reading aloud, 166–167
Reading and Writing Nature, 326
Reading Rainbow (TV show), 167
Reading Sex and the City (Akass), 149
Real Bohemia: A Sociological and Psycho-
logical Study of the “Beats,” 105
Realism. See also Authenticity; Reality;
Transrealist writing
children’s literature, 179
comedic theatre, 197
coming of age fiction, 238, 240, 242
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 253, 263
disabilities and, 1153
dramatic theater, 294, 295
fantasy literature, 351
humor and, 501
regional fiction and, 768, 770–771, 772
science fiction and, 805, 811
sea writing and, 855
sports literature and, 945
spy fiction and, 956, 957
transrealist writing and, 1027
true crime literature and, 1062
urban literature and, 1066–1067, 1068
verse novels and, 1119
young adult literature and, 1149, 1150
Reality
alternative, 815–816, 826, 947, 1018
drugs and, 787
language and, 947–948
New Age literature and, 682–683, 684,
685, 688–691
occult/supernatural literature and,
714–715
science fiction and, 914, 918
speculative fiction and, 922, 924–925
transrealist writing and, 1028
true crime literature and, 1049, 1056
Reality television, 370
Real McCoys (Strauss), 448
Rebeck, Theresa, 205
Rebel Angels (Bray), 432
Rebellion, 103–104, 226, 275, 276,
782–783, 793
Reception. See also Academic reception
African American literature, 921
historical fiction, of, 449, 451
inspirational literature, of, 517
Language poetry and, 539, 544–546
literary journalism, of, 578
magical realism, of, 587, 588, 594, 598
military literature, 620, 621–624
musical theatre and, 631, 633, 637
mystery fiction and, 640
Native American literature and, 670,
679–681
New Age literature and, 686, 690, 694
occult/supernatural literature and,
711–712
overview, 1084
parapsychology and, 731
philological thrillers and, 736–737
poetry and, 745, 747, 751–752, 758,
762, 763, 764
queer, 407
regional fiction and, 770
romance novels and, 798, 801, 963
science fiction and, 826, 907, 912, 913
science writing and, 837–838, 843
sea writing and, 855, 856, 857
self-help literature and, 868, 871–872

series fiction, of, 880–881
space opera, of, 903–904
speculative fiction and, 925, 926,
928–929
sports literature and, 931, 941
spy fiction and, 958–959
suspense and, 969
sword and sorcery fiction and, 988–990
time travel fiction and, 1019
transrealist writing and, 1028–1029
travel writing and, 1037
true crime literature and, 1052
vampire fiction and, 1104–1105
young adult literature, 883
zines and, 1174
Rechy, John, 555
Reconstruction era, 26, 28, 29
Red Badge of Courage, The (Crane), 442,
615
Redburn (Melville), 403
“Red Dress Ink,” 138
Redemption, 264, 265267
Redfield, James, 685, 694–695, 865
Red Horse, Valerie, 681
Redmond, Fergus, 407
Redmond, Layne, 472
Red Prophet (Card), 431
Reed, Ishmael, 502, 1067
Reed, Robert, 820
Reeducation camps, 92
Reference, 163
Reflections in a Golden Eye (film), 407
Reform movements, 1–2
Refugees, 50, 553
Regency settings, 797, 798
Regional fiction, 654–656, 767–780, 859,
1132
Regional writing. See also specific regions
Rehm, Diane, 963
Reichs, Kathy, 649, 655, 889, 966–967
Reich, Tova, 531
Reid, Mildred I., 390–391
Reilly, Helen, 647
Reilly, Matthew, 737
Reilly, Rick, 938, 943
Reincarnation, 64–65, 433, 682, 684, 694,
704, 719
Reissue, 170
Relationships. See also Family; Love
comedic theatre, 197, 199, 202, 205
comic books, 220, 424
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 257, 266
GLBTQ, 411, 420–421
INDEX 1269
graphic novels, in, 417–418
historical mysteries, in, 466–467
Jewish American literature, in, 526
self-help literature and, 868, 872
speculative fiction and, 919
true crime literature and, 1049, 1057,
1058
urban literature and, 1074–1075
vampire fiction and, 1106, 1110–1111
western genre and, 1140
young adult literature and, 1150
Relativism, 198
Relentless Aaron, 1070
Religion. See also Apocalyptic fiction; New
age literature; specific religions
academic fiction, 2
African American literature, 27
Beat poetry, 97, 101
chick lit, 157
children’s literature, 165
Christian fiction, 185, 187
comedic theatre, 197, 199, 200
comic books, 212
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 268
dramatic theater, 300, 301, 303
dystopian fiction, 314, 316
ecopoetry, 328
erotic literature, 339, 340
fantasy literature, 362
GLBTQ and, 404, 405, 408
graphic novels, in, 416
historical fantasy and, 428
Holocaust and, 485
humor and, 506
mystery fiction and, 640, 641–642, 643,
653
Native American literature and,
666–667, 676
New Age literature and, 685
occult/supernatural literature and, 703,
704
poetry and, 750
science and, 693, 839, 840–841
science fiction and, 903, 904
self-help literature and, 863
September 11 and, 434–435
terrorism fiction and, 1010
transrealist writing and, 1030, 1031
vampire fiction and, 1108
women and, 735, 793
young adult literature and, 1148, 1149
Remakes, 368, 370, 380
Remote viewing, 728–729
1270 INDEX

Renaissance era Ridge, John Rollin, 668

autobiography and memoir, 87 Ridgway, Gary, 1049, 1058
biography, 117, 118 Rieber, Robert, 473
comedic theatre, 195 Riggs, Jack, 230
science writing and, 835 Riggs, Lynn, 668
self-help literature and, 866, 867 Rigney, Francis J., 105
sword and sorcery fiction and, 976, 989 Rihani, Ameen, 41
vampire fiction and, 1104 Riis, Jacob, 1066
Renault, Mary, 403 Ringo, John, 910, 912
Rendell, Ruth, 460 Rios, Theodore, 679
Rent (musical), 631 Rise to Rebellion (Shaara), 444
Repatriation, 677 Risher, Rudolph, 652
Repetition, 29, 35, 101, 108 Rising Tide: A Novel of World War II (J.
Reportage literature, 572 Shaara), 445
Reproductive rights. See Abortion; Contra- RITA Awards, 802
ception Ritter, John H., 937
Rest in Pieces (Brown), 404 Ritzel, Brent, 1169
Retellings, 59 Rivail, Léon-Dénizarth-Hippolyte, 719
Rethinking Marxism (journal), 543 Riven Pock (Boyle), 452
Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (Elliott), Rivera, Tomás, 558
366–67 Rivers, Francine, 189, 802
Revard, Carter, 671 River Sound, The (Merwin), 334
Revenge of the Lawn (Brautigan), 387 Road Fever: A High Speed Travelogue
Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman (Cahill), 20
(Buchan), 142 Road fiction, 225, 782–794. See also Space
Revenge theme, 153, 263 opera
Revision, 101 Road to Perdition (Mendes), 373
Revision of Justice (Wilson), 413 Road to Wellville, The (Boyle), 446, 450,
Revolution, American, 955 452
Rexroth, Kenneth, 109, 118 Robb, Candace, 459
Reynolds, Alastair, 902 Robbins, Tom, 788
Reynolds, David. S., 1066 Robbins, Tony, 872
Reynolds, Mack, 885 Robb, J.D., 889, 891, 965
Reynolds, Peter, 366 Roberts, David, 466
Rhapsody in Blood (Wilson), 413 Roberts, Gene, 478
Rhine, James Banks (J.B.), 717, 724–725 Roberts, Gillian, 640, 655
Rhine, Louisa, 724, 725 Roberts, Jane, 684
Rhodes, Jewell Parker, 448 Roberts, John Maddox, 458, 985
Rhodes, Richard, 575 Roberts, Nora, 802, 891–892, 965, 1098,
Rice, Anne 1111–1112
historical fantasy, 430, 431, 436–437 Roberts, Rex, 928
occult/supernatural literature, 703, 708, Robinson, Kim Stanley, 275, 815, 819,
712 821–822, 826, 830, 921
series fiction, 887 Robinson, Kit, 540
vampire fiction, 1096, 1097, Robinson, Lewis, 859
1099–1103, 1113 Robinson, Lynda S., 457
Rice, Elmer, 294 Robinson, Marilyn, 446, 565, 767
Rice, Grantland, 933 Robinson, Phil Alden, 1026
Rice, Reynolds, 775 Robinson, Sally, 776
Rich, Adrienne, 758–759 Robinson, Spider, 1027
Richard III (1912), 369 Robots, 810, 901
Rich, Ronda, 869 Robson, Justina, 1032
Rich, Virginia, 641 Roche, Thomas S., 348
Riddell, Charlotte, 701 Rockefeller Foundation Award, 300

Rodgers, Richard, 630
Rodriguez, Abraham, 557
Rodriguez, Robert, 373
Roemer, Kenneth M., 679
Roethke, Theodore, 745, 746
Rogers, Rosemary, 799
Rogers, Will, 501, 668
Roh, Franz, 588
Roiphe, Katie, 119
Roizen, Michael F., 863
Role-playing games, 281
Rolling Stone (magazine), 576
Rollyson, Carl, 115
Romance novels, 796–802
Arthurian literature, 54, 55, 62–63
Beat poetry, 105
chick lit, 158
Christian fiction, 185, 189, 191, 192
comic books, 213
coming of age fiction, 241
erotic literature, 338, 340
GLBTQ, 413
historical, 431, 446
planetary, 895, 903
series, 891
suspense and, 963–965
sword and sorcery fiction and, 974
time travel fiction, 1022–1023
western genre, 1139
Romano, Octavio, 557–558
Romantic comedy, 195, 203, 204
Romanticism, 594
Romantic poets, 325
Romantic suspense, 962
“Romantic Weekend, A” (Gaitskill), 344
Romberg, Sigmond, 629–630
Rome, ancient
comedy and, 195
historical nonfiction, 458, 469
philological thrillers, 737, 738
poetry and, 764
sword and planet fiction and, 980
time travel fiction and, 1015, 1020
Romenesko, James, 1173
Romero, George, 705
Room with a View, A (Forster), 14, 402
Roosevelt, Elliott, 889
“Rootedness: The Ancestor as
Foundation,” 37
Root, Robert, 1037
Roots: The Saga of an American Family
(Haley), 449–450
Rose City, The (Ebershoff), 411–412
Rose, Gillian, 485
INDEX 1271
Rosen, Charley, 448, 935
Rosen, Judith, 686
Rosen, Kenneth, 668
Rosen, S.J., 939
Rosenbaum, Ron, 578–579
Rosenbaum, Thane, 487, 488–489,
492–493
Rosenblum, L. Penny, 1152, 1153
Rosenfield, Israel, 446
Rosenstone, Robert A., 471
Rose Red the Ghost Heart Girl, 1174
Rosinsky, Natalie M., 920
Rosoff, Meg, 1150
Ross, Alex, 418
Rossen, Janice, 2, 3–4, 7
Ross, Harold, 575
Ross, Lillian, 575
Rossner, Judith, 1055
Rotella, Guy, 326
Rothberg, Michael, 489
Roth, Geneen, 874
Roth, Henry, 523, 524, 527
Roth, Marco, 496, 526
Roth, Philip
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 268–269
dystopian fiction, 317, 320
historical fiction, 445, 488
Holocaust literature, 493
humor, 502, 505
Jewish American literature, 523, 525,
526, 528–531
legal thrillers and, 565
science fiction, 826
sports literature, 933, 934, 949
terrorism fiction, 1001–1003
transrealist writing and, 1033
urban fiction, 1067
Roth, Phyllis, A., 1114
Roth trilogy (A. Taylor), 466
Roughing It, 17
Rough Stuff, 347
Rourke, Constance, 503, 504
Rovoyr, Nina, 932
Rowe, Chip, 1172
Rowe, Rosemary, 458
Rowlandson, Mary, 672
Rowling, J.K., 13, 172–173, 432, 434,
734, 832, 883, 1154
Rowntree, Dirk, 548
Rozan, S.J., 654, 659
Rubes, The, 933
Rubinstein, Gillian, 435
Rubio, Gwyn Hyman, 778
1272 INDEX
Rubyfruit Jungle (Brown), 404
Rucker, Rudy, 283, 815, 1025, 1027,
1028, 1029, 1030, 1031–1032
Ruditis, Paul, 238
Rueckert, William, 333
Ruh, Brian, 612
Rule, Ann, 1047, 1049, 1056–1058
Rules, The (Fein and Schneider), 155
Rumpole, Horace (character), 562–563
Rumscheidt, Barbara, 472
Rumscheidt, Martin, 472
Runyon, Damon, 501, 933
Ruppert, James, 669
Rusch, Kristine Kathryn, 705
Russe, Savannah, 1098
Russell, Ray, 703
Russ, Joanna, 812, 818, 1026, 1031
Russo, John, 705
Russo, Richard, 269, 773, 779
Ruth Lilly Prize, 759
Rutkoff, Peter M., 936
Rutledge, Inspector (Todd/Watjen), 464
Ryan, Pam Muñoz, 1157
Ryden, Kent, 772, 779
Rymer, James Malcolm, 700
Rypel, Ted, 987
Saberhagen, Fred, 708
Sabin, Roger, 1172
Sachar, Louis, 1151, 1156
Sackler, Howard, 934
Sackville-West, Vita, 119–20
Sacred feminine, 691–693
Sadness of Sex, The(Yourgrau), 395
Sadomasochism, 343, 344
Safire, William, 446, 447
Safran-Foer, Jonathan, 523, 532–533
Sagan, Carl, 836, 839, 840, 841, 842
Sagas, 797
Sahlins, Marxhall, 469
Said, Edward, 44, 46, 473
Sailor Moon (manga and anime), 605–606,
607
Sainthood, 263
Saint-Martin, Lori, 346
Salaita, Steven, 44
Salas, Floyd, 555
Salinger, J.D., 503, 1148
Salmonson, Jessica Amanda, 360–361,
985, 987
Salvadoreños, 554
Salvatore, R.A., 886
Salzman, Mark, 428
Sampson, Fiona, 1121
Samurai, 987
Sanders, Ed, 100, 109
Sanders, Joe, 436
Sandford, John, 648, 656
Sandilands, Detective (character), 465
Sandoz, Joli, 937
Sands, Kathleen Mullen, 679
Sands, Lynsay, 1098
San Francisco Renaissance, 110
San Francisco’s American Conservatory
Theatre, 297
Sapper, 954
Sappho, 339
Sarah (LeRoy), 239
Sara Teasdale Memorial Prizes, 764
SARK (Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy),
874
Sarrantonio, Al, 706, 707
Sarvas, Mark, 241
Sasser, Charles W., 621
Sasson, Siegfried, 758
Satan/Satanists, 687, 704, 705, 707, 709
Satire
academic fiction, 1, 2–3, 4
Beat poetry, 106
chick lit, 141, 143, 144, 147, 158
children’s literature, 174
comedic theatre, 196, 198, 200, 201,
202, 204, 205
coming of age fiction, 232–233, 235
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 261
cyberpunk, 283
dramatic theater, 304
dystopian fiction, 318, 322
film adaptations of books, 381
political, 500
sports literature, 948
terrorism fiction and, 1010–1011
vampire fiction and, 1098
verse novels and, 1122
Saturday Evening Post (magazine), 576
Saturn Awards, 904
Sauerberg, Lars Ole, 1122
Saul, John, 704, 711
Saunders, Charles, 985, 987
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 734, 750
Saving the World, 261
Saviour (Millar), 422
Sawyer, Robert J., 832
Sayers, Dorothy, 639
Saylor, Steven, 458–459

Scandalmonger (Safire), 445, 446, 447
Scandals, 130, 239–240
Scanlan, Margaret, 997, 998
Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), 341, 442
Schafer, William J., 945
Schaffer, Talia, 1115
Schaller, George, 21
Schechter, Harold, 1047, 1060–1061
Schecter, William, 505
Schellenberg, James, 907
Schickler, David, 225
Schiefelbein, Michael, 1098
Schiff, Stacy, 122–123
Schiller, Lawrence, 1055–1056
Schindler’s List (film), 493
Schismatrix (Sterling), 282
Schlessinger, “Dr. Laura,” 867–868, 871,
873
Schlosser, Eric, 382
Schmidt, Helmut, 726–727
Schmidt, Kerstin, 859
Schnabel, Julian, 376
Schneider, Dean, 1156
Schneider, Sherrie, 155
Schodt, Frederik L., 604
Scholarly reception. See Academic
reception
Scholars
Asian American literature, 77
Beat poetry and, 102
biography, 113
coming of age fiction, 222
cyberpunk, 277
erotic literature, 338, 342–343
film adaptations of books, 371
flash fiction, 393–394
Scholes, Robert, 807
Scholtz, Piotr O., 471
Schoolcraft, Jane Johnson, 668, 674
School Library Journal, 163
Schools, 177
School-shooting novels, 229, 236
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 499
Schottroff, Luise, 472
Schreiber, Grant, 1164
Schubert, Ann, 604
Schulberg, Budd, 934
Schultz, Elizabeth, 851, 853
Schultz, Patricia, 869
Schultz, Susan, 542
Schuster, Joel, 927
Schwartz, Joseph, 840
Schwartz, Stephen, 636
INDEX 1273
Schwarz, Christina, 507, 778
Schweitzer, Darrell, 361–362, 985, 986
Schwerner, Armand, 751
Science. See also Technology
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 268
cyberpunk, 282, 283
ecopoetry, 326, 327, 332, 333
forensic, 648–650
historical fiction, in, 446, 448, 451
historical nonfiction, in, 476
Holocaust literature and, 485–487
literary journalism and, 578, 580
magical realism and, 594
New Age literature and, 688, 690
occult/supernatural literature and, 699,
723, 724
parapsychology and, 717–731
religion and, 693, 839, 840–841
science fiction and, 806, 814, 816, 819,
830, 831, 835, 896, 900, 901, 904,
907, 908
time travel fiction and, 1014, 1015
travel writing and, 1042
Science fiction, 805–832. See also Space
opera; Speculative fiction; Transrealist
writing
anime, 602
Arthurian literature, 55, 61
Bradley’s, 430
children’s literature, 162
comic books, 210, 213
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 253
cyberpunk, 274–287
erotic literature, 338, 348
fantasy literature and, 355, 360, 361
film adaptations of books, 380
flash fiction, 394
GLBTQ, 413
historical fiction and, 446
horror and, 918
lesbian, 404
occult/supernatural literature and, 702,
703–704
science writing and, 835
series, 905
series fiction and, 885–886
speculative fiction, 926–927
vampire fiction, 1112
young adult literature, 1155
zines and, 1163, 1165–1166
Science writing, 833–843
1274 INDEX
Scientific thrillers. See also Philological
thrillers
Scieszka, Jon, 174, 175
Scigaj, Leonard, 328–329
Scoppettone, Sandra, 651
Scot, Henry, 341–342
Scottish Novels, 186
Scott, Paul, 340
Scott, Ridley, 904
Scott, Robert Falcon, 1035
Scott, Sir Walter, 441, 738, 881, 975
Scottoline, Lisa, 655, 659
Seager, Bob, 788
Sea literature, 848–859
Searl, Hank, 856
Seaton, Peter, 540
Sebold, Alice, 269, 712
Secondary world, 351, 352, 361
Second Hand Smoke (Rosenbaum), 492,
493
Second Sophistic, 338
Secret, The (Byrne), 689–690, 723, 863,
866
Secret Life of Bees, The (Kidd), 231
“Secret Miracle, A” (“El Milagro secreto”)
(Borges), 430
Secret orders, 706
Secular culture, 190, 193
Sedaris, David, 506–507
Sedgwick, Catherin Maria, 441
Seeing Stone, The (Crossley-Holland), 434
Seek My Face, 270
Seger, Linda, 369
“Segregation,” 231
Seinen, 600, 607, 608
Sekenre: The Book of the Sorcerer
(Schweitzer), 362
Sekules, Kate, 940
Selby, Jr., Hubert, 407
Self, 743, 744, 763, 764, 1028. See also
Identity; Subjects/subjectivity
Self, David, 373
Self-examination, 212, 226, 264
Self-help literature, 862–874
Self-published fiction, 259
Self-published works, 1070
Self-referential humor, 198, 204
Selincourt, Aubrey de, 469
Sellinger, Gail, 473
Seltzer, David, 707
Semioticians, 371
Semiotics, 366, 733, 734–735
Sendak, Maurice, 177
Sensationalism, 89, 246
Senses, physical, 573
Sentimental comedy, 195
September 11 attacks. See also Terrorism
Arab American literature, 43, 50
biography, 131
children’s literature, 172
Christian fiction, 189
comedic theatre, 199
coming of age fiction, 224, 227, 244
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 254, 257, 262, 263, 270, 282
dramatic theater, 296, 301, 304
film adaptations of books, 381
graphic novels, in, 418
historical fantasy and, 434–435
historical fiction and, 447
historical nonfiction and, 474–475, 477
humor and, 503–504, 505
Jewish American literature and,
532–533
literary journalism and, 578
military literature, 620
musical theatre and, 632–633
poetry and, 752, 758, 792
science fiction and, 820–821
speculative fiction and, 923
spy fiction and, 958, 960
terrorism fiction and, 996–997, 1004,
1005, 1009
terrorism literature and, 1005–1006
western genre and, 1135
Serial killers, 1049
Series. See also Sword and sorcery fiction
adventure, 18
Arthurian, 59, 62, 175
autobiography and memoir, 89
children’s literature, 166, 167, 169–170,
178, 179
Christian, 187–188, 193
comic books, 209
cyberpunk, 283
detective fiction, 1069
erotica, 348
fantasy, 355, 908, 971
flash fiction, 389
historical fantasy, 429, 431, 432, 433,
435–436, 437
historical fiction, 446
historical mysteries, 465–466
historical nonfiction, 476
inspirational writing, 511, 512, 516, 517
pulp fiction, 975, 976
science fiction, 896–899, 902–912, 1029
(See also Space opera)

sports literature, 944–945, 945–946
suspense, 962, 965, 966, 967, 968, 969
time travel fiction, 1022, 1023
transrealist writing, 1030
travel writing, 1035, 1036
TV, 211, 281, 824–825, 885, 891, 905,
967
urban literature, 1067, 1069, 1070
vampire comics, 1096
vampire fiction, 1097, 1099–1103,
1105–1107, 1108
western genre, 1133, 1135, 1138,
1140–1143
young adult literature and, 1155
Series fiction, 880–892
Series of Unfortunate Events, A (Handler),
174, 884
Sermons, 26, 30, 187. See also Folk
sermons
Servants of the Map (Barrett), 448, 451
Seth, Vikram, 1122–1123
Seth books (J. Roberts), 684, 685
Settle, Mary Lee, 775
“Seven Habits” books, 862, 873
Seventeen Syllables (Yamamoto), 77–78
Seventh Son (Card), 431
Sex
Arab American literature, 48
Beat poetry, 102–103
biography, 130
chick lit, 153
comic books, 210, 211, 213, 215, 419
coming of age fiction, 222, 238, 245
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 253, 270
dramatic theater, 306
dystopian fiction, 313, 320
erotic literature, 338, 344, 347
true crime literature and, 1048, 1054
vampire fiction and, 1098, 1100, 1107,
1109, 1110
western genre and, 1131, 1132, 1134,
1135, 1139
young adult literature and, 1149
zines and, 1170
Sex and the City (Bushnell), 137, 140, 144,
149–151
Sex and the Single Girl (Brown), 140–41
“Sex and the Ummah” (Kahf), 48
Sex education, 165
Sexing the Cherry (Winterson), 404
Sexism. See also Damsels in distress
adventure fiction, 19
Arab American literature, 48
INDEX 1275
Asian American literature, 74, 79
Beat poetry, 103
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 255
Sex manuals, 338
Sex-positive erotica, 346, 347
Sex scandals, 447
Sexton, Anne, 540, 746, 747
Sexual abuse, 48, 265, 377, 968
Sexual harassment
Arab American literature, 48
chick lit, 139
comedic theatre, 205
dramatic theater, 302
Sexuality. See also GLBTQ (Gay, lesbian,
bisexual, transgender, and queer)
Arab American literature, 48, 50
Asian American literature, 73, 77, 78,
79, 83
autobiography and memoir, 89
Beat poetry, 97, 102–103, 107, 109
biography, 125
chick lit, 139, 142, 146, 149, 154
children’s literature, 165
Christian fiction, 192
comedic theatre, 198, 199, 200, 204
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 263, 271
erotic literature, 338, 340, 343, 346
fantasy literature, 353
film adaptations of books, 381
graphic novels and, 417
historical fantasy, 431
historical nonfiction and, 471, 472–473
Jewish American literature and,
528–529
manga and anime and, 610
military literature, 621, 623
musical theatre and, 635
mystery fiction and, 644
popular culture and, 592
road fiction and, 793–794
science fiction and, 811, 812, 818, 828
speculative fiction and, 920
sports literature and, 946
spy fiction and, 955, 957
true crime literature and, 1055
urban literature and, 1074–1075
utopian literature and, 1087
vampire fiction and, 1114
young adult fiction and, 883
young adult literature and, 1149, 1152
zines and, 1175
Sexualization of adolescence, 238
1276 INDEX

Sexual liberation, 98, 158 Shermer, Michael, 838–839, 840, 843

Sexual maturation, 233 Sherry, James, 540
Sexual orientation. See GLBTQ (Gay, les- Sherwood, Robert E., 196
bian, bisexual, transgender, and SHE system, 864–865
queer) Shetley, Vernon, 762–763
“SF ghetto” (Sterling), 276 Shimokawa, Oten, 601
Shaara, Jeff, 444, 445, 614 Ship Fever and Other Stories (Barrett),
Shaara, Michael, 445 448, 451
Shaber, Sarah R., 650 Shirley, John, 282, 283, 707
Shackleton, Ernest, 15 Shirow, Masamune, 611
Shadow and Act, 36 Shnerr, David, 521
“Shadow Kingdom, The” (Howard), 352 Shoah, 490, 493. See also Holocaust
Shadowrun, 281 “Shock value,” 276
Shaffer, Anthony, 705 Shôjo, 600
Shainberg, Lawrence, 935 Shônen, 600
Shakespeare, William Short, Luke, 1133
African American literature and, 36 Short Career of an American Militiaman,
biography and, 117, 119 The (Kramer), 581
Boswell and, 118 Short Cuts, 395
cyberpunk and, 281 Short-shorts, 386, 387
films and, 369 Short-Shorts: Anthology of the Shortest
historical fantasy and, 427 Stories (Howe and Howe), 388
occult/supernatural in, 700 Short stories
space opera and, 911 Asian American literature, 77, 83
theater and, 292, 636 contemporary mainstream American fic-
Updike and, 270 tion, 271
verse novels and, 1122 cyberpunk, 282, 283
Shalit, Wendy, 149 erotic literature, 338
Shamus Awards, 463, 465, 645, 654 fantasy literature, 354, 355, 361
Shank, Jenny, 379 film adaptations of books, 366, 369,
Shanley, John Patrick, 306 379
Shapard, Robert, 388, 389–90, 396, 397 flash fiction vs., 385
Shape of Things, The (LaBute), 301 Short Takes: Brief Encounters with
Shapiro, Michael, 22–24 Contemporary Nonfiction (Kitchen),
Shattered Goddess, The (Schweitzer), 361 392
Shavini, Anis, 259 Show Boat (musical), 630
Shaw, Greg, 1166 Shtetl, 524, 526
Shawver, Brian, 936 Shteyngart, Gary, 523
Shea, Michael, 986 Shuster, Joe, 213, 1163
Shea, Robert, 706, 970 Side Man (Leight), 301
Sheldon, Alice, 812, 1030–1031 Sides, Hampton, 473
Sheldon, Charles M., 187 Sidney, Angela, 673
Sheldrake, Rupert, 730–731 Siegel, Harry, 244
Shelley, Mary, 807, 816, 822 Siegel, Jerome, 1163
Shelley, Pecy Bysshe, 1120 Siegel, Jerry, 213, 927
Shenk, Joshua, 125 Siegel, Kristi, 1036
Shepard, Lucius, 710 Sign of the Seven Seas, The (Dawson), 429
Shepard, Mike, 914 Signs and Wonders (Bukiet), 491
Shepard, Sam, 306–307, 1048 Silence, 484–485, 490, 492
Sheppard, Richard, 2 Silent film, 369
Sheppard, Simon, 343, 347 “Silent Generation,” 222
Sher, Barbara, 867 Silent Spring (Carson), 316, 333
Sherlock Holmes (character), 455–456, Silent Woman, The (Malcolm), 120
495, 562, 656–657, 882, 889 Siler, Jenny, 959
 INDEX 1277

Silko, Leslie Marmon, 669, 670, 671, Skylark of Space, The (E.E. Smith),
672–673, 674, 675, 676, 677, 678, 896–897
679, 773 Slam poetry, 743, 749, 754–758
Silliman, Ron, 539, 540, 542, 548, 751 Slang, 783
Silva, Daniel, 958, 959, 961 Slann, Martin, 995
Silverberg, Robert, 812, 826, 901, 1014 Slapstick, 204
Simak, Clifford, 810 Slaughter, Karin, 967
Simenon, Georges, 561 Slavery
Simic, Charles, 753 African American literature, 26, 28
Simmons, Dan, 705, 710, 712, 815, 822, autobiography and memoir, 88
829–830, 903 dramatic theater, 294, 305
Simmons, Russell, 757 dystopian fiction, 312
Simms, William Gilmore, 442 historical fantasy and, 431–432
Simone, Gail, 220, 418, 425 historical fiction and, 443–444, 447,
Simon, Neil, 197 451
Simpson, Charlie, 1048–1049 sea literature and, 851, 854
Simpson, M.J., 127–28 suspense and, 965
Simpson, Mona, 788 Sleeper time traveler, 1016
Simpson, O.J., 1059–1060 Sleight, Graham, 829
Simstim “simulated stimuli,” 275 Slexie, Sherman, 757
Sin City (Miller), 373 “Slim Greer,” 36
Sinclair, Andrew, 995 Slipstream, 1025
Sinclair, Upton, 725–726, 1066 Sloan, Mary Margaret, 542
Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 488, 525, 870, “Slob Sisters, The,” 864
1029 Slocum, Joshua, 855
Singer, Margot, 531 Slonczewski, Joan, 819
Singleton, George, 231 Slotkin, Richard, 445
Single women, 140, 141, 142, 144, Slow Way Home (Morris), 231
149–150, 154 Small, Beatrice, 799
Sin-Leqi-Unninni, 428 Small press comic books, 212
Sinophobia, 67–68 Small World, 8–9
Sinyard, Neil, 368 “Smart Girl’s Guides,” 172
Siskind, Murray Jay, 1005 Smiley, Jane, 11–12, 269, 505, 777, 938
Sisters in Crime, 647 Smith, Anna Deavere, 307
Sister Souljah (Williamson), 1068, 1072, Smith, Arthur D. Howden, 976
1073 Smith, Bonnie, 472
Sittenfeld, Curtis, 148, 239, 241, 245–46 Smith, Cecil, 629
Six Gallery, 99, 107 Smith, Clark Ashton, 982–983
Six Poets of Reality (Miller), 328 Smith, Cotton, 1138
Sixties Smith, David C., 985, 986, 987
chick lit and, 143 Smith, Dean Wesley, 885
historical nonfiction, 473 Smith, E.E. “Doc,” 808, 895–899, 900,
masculinity and, 776 906
musical theatre and, 630 Smith, John, 500
mystery fiction and, 652 Smith, Julie, 655
New Age literature and, 683 Smith, Kitty, 673
occult/supernatural literature and, 703, Smith, Lane, 174
704, 707, 711 Smith, L. Douglas, 105
poetry, 328 Smith, Lee, 775
science fiction, 812 Smith, Marc, 755
utopian literature, 1083, 1085 Smith, Martin Cruz, 887
Skal, David, 1095 Smith, Myron J., 859
Skei, Hans H., 394 Smith, Patricia, 757
Skerl, Jennie, 98 Smith, Scott, 919
1278 INDEX

Smith, Toren, 604, 605, 609 Solnit, Rebecca, 1043–1045

Smith, W. Thomas, 473
Smoky Night (Bunting), 177
“Smug Marrieds” (Bushnell), 151
Snicket, Lemony. See Handler, Daniel
Snodgrass, W.D., 746, 747
Snow, C.P., 840
Snow Crash (Stephenson), 280–281
Snow Leopard, The (Matthiessen), 16, 21
Snyder, Gary
Beat poetry, 100, 101, 104, 109
ecopoetry, 327, 328, 330–331
Sobel, Dava, 836–837, 838, 843
Social change, 224, 278, 923, 1028,
1068–1069. See also Utopian literature
Social commentary, 105, 107, 137, 201,
204
Socialism, 1088–1089
Social issues
Beat poetry, 107
comedic theatre, 196, 200–201
comic books, 210, 211, 214
coming of age fiction, 238
dramatic theater, 294
dystopian fiction, 314
ecopoetry, 328
poetry and, 760
regional fiction and, 768, 780
science fiction and, 816, 818, 826, 901
science writing and, 834, 835–836
speculative fiction and, 927
time travel fiction and, 1016
Social justice, 107, 253
Social networking sites, 257
Social norms, 197, 205, 355, 428, 476,
1048
Social protest, 227
“Social refusal,” 104
Society
AIDS and, 411
comedic theatre, 205
dystopian fiction, 312
ecopoetry, 327
erotic literature, 340, 343
Language poetry and, 538, 543
Native American literature and, 673
norms of, 404
science and, 840, 841, 843
Socioeconomic movements, 122
Sociologists, 222
Sodomy, 405
Soliloquy, 292
Sollors, Werner, 851
Solomon, Carl, 99, 102
Solomon’s (Archer), 433
Solo performance, 198
Somers, Jeff, 1175
Somers, Suzanne, 872
Sometimes You See It Coming (Baker),
450–451
Somewhere in France (Gardiner), 445
Somtow, S.P., 432, 705
Sondheim, Stephen, 626, 631, 635
Song Called Youth trilogy, 283
Song of the Earth (Bate), 325, 336
“Song of the Son” (Toomer), 35
Sonnet, 36
Sontag, Susan, 448, 737, 1083, 1084–1085
Sophocles, 293
Soto, Gary, 937
Sot-Weed Factor, The (Barth), 444
Source, The (Michener), 443
South, the, 655–656, 773–775, 851, 869
South Carolina, 656
Southern, Terry, 502
Southern belle narrative, 157–158
Southern Discomfort (Brown), 404
Southern Fellowship, 775
Southern fiction, 231, 298
Southern gothic, 502
Southern Road (Brown), 31
Southey, Robert, 1120
Southwest, the, 500–501, 502, 932
Sowerby, Garry, 20
Soyka, David, 912
Space opera, 808, 815, 816, 818, 823,
894–914, 985
Spahr, Juliana, 542, 549
Spanish, 552, 555–556
Spanish series, 891
Spark, Debra, 595
Spartacus (Fast), 443
Spatiality, adaptations and, 371–372
Special effects, 380
Specimen Days (Cunningham), 446
Speck, Richard, 1048
Spectacle of Corruption, A (Liss), 447
Speculative fiction, 917–929
Spellman, A.B., 109–10
Spencer, Amy, 1172
Spencer, Elizabeth, 775
Spencer, Herbert, 499
Spencer, LaVyrle, 802
Spenser, Edmund, 186, 428
Sperling, Ehud, 686
 INDEX 1279

Spider-Man, 419 Staudohar, Paul D., 936

Spiegelman, Art, 416–417, 489, 532, 824, “Steampunk,” 283
1006, 1151 Steber, Rick, 1136
Spielberg, Steven, 380, 493, 959 Steffen, Sandra, 802
Spin-offs, 169–70 Steffens, Lincoln, 573–574
Spinrad, Norman, 812 Stegner, Wallace, 775, 776
Spirits, 694 Steinbeck, John, 165, 396, 502, 778
Spiritual emptiness, 226, 262, 271 Steiner, George, 484
Spiritualism, 718–719 Stein, Gertrude, 88, 403, 538, 540, 1165
Spirituality. See also New Age literature Stephen King: The Art of Darkness (Win-
Beat poetry, 98, 99, 100, 101–102, 104, ter), 436
108, 109, 110 Stephen King is Richard Bachman
Christian fiction, 187, 189 (Collings), 436
contemporary mainstream American fic- Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: A
tion, 258, 271 Concordance (Furth), 436
historical nonfiction, 471 Stephenson, Neal, 280–281, 445, 448, 814,
sports literature and, 938 818, 821
Spirituals, 26, 27, 29, 30, 34, 35 Stereotypes
Spitz, 681 African American literature, 30–31, 32,
Spoken word poetry, 754, 758, 761, 788 791
Spontaneous Combustion (Feinberg), 405 Arab American literature, 43, 44
Sports literature, 930–951, 1166 Asian American literature, 75, 77, 79,
Springer, Haskell, 851, 859 81, 82, 83
Springsteen, Bruce, 788 Beat poetry, 103
Sprinkle, Patricia Houck, 655 chick lit, 137, 154, 156
Spur Awards, 1136, 1137, 1138, 1139, comedic theatre, 198, 202
1140, 1141 comic books, 213
Spy, The (Cooper), 441 coming of age fiction, 233, 238
Spy fiction, 954–962, 963, 976, 1098. See erotic literature, 344, 345, 346, 347
also Terrorism fiction fantasy literature, 357, 361
Spy genre, 14 gay, 651
Squire’s Tale series, 59, 62, 175 historical fantasy, 436
Squyre, Steve, 838 historical mysteries, 463
St. John, Warren, 940 language poetry and, 546
Stabenow, Dana, 653 military literature and, 613
Stableford, Brian, 435, 710 mystery fiction, 646
Stack, Andy, 1057 Native American, 670, 671, 674, 675
Stadiem, William, 1054 Romance novels and, 801
Stadter, P.A., 469 science fiction and, 1026, 1027
Stage directions, 290–291 series fiction, in, 880, 882
Stalin, Joseph, 1083 sports literature, 935, 939
Stam, Robert, 368 sword and sorcery fiction, in, 972, 989
Standing Bear, Luthur, 678 terrorism literature, 996
Stand-up comedy, 195, 197, 198, 201 travel writing and, 1041
Stanley, Charles, 514 western genre and, 1137
Stanley, John, 652 young adult literature, in, 1153
Staring, 730–731 Sterling, Bruce, 274, 275–276, 282, 283,
Stark, Richard, 648 814, 826, 827, 1025
Star Trek (TV series), 211, 281, 824–825, Stern, Jerome, 390
885, 905 Stevenson, Jane, 926
Star Wars saga, 355 Stevenson, Richard, 651
Star Wars series (films), 823, 885, 899, Stevenson, Robert Louis, 975, 1095
902, 903, 905 Stevens, Wallace, 745
1280 INDEX

Stewart, J.I.M., 735 Strivers Row (K. Baker), 446, 451

Stewart, Jon, 506
Stewart, Lucretia, 1040
Stewart, Mary, 639, 963
Stewart, Sean, 712, 1153–1154
Stiles, T.J., 114
Stine, R.L., 883
Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly
Stupid Tales, The (Scieszka), 174–175
Stock characters, 99
Stoehr, Shelley, 1150
Stoker Awards, 712
Stoker, Bram, 702, 708, 1092–1095,
1096
Stone, I.F., 870
Stone, Robert, 473, 858
Stone That the Builder Refused, The (Bell),
451
Stone Wall Book of Short Fictions (Coover
and Dixon), 388
Stonewall Riots, 401, 403, 409
Stories of an Imaginary Childhood
(Bukiet), 490
“Stories of escape,” 44
Storyteller: The Official Orson Scott Card
Bibliography and Guide (Collings),
436
Storytelling, 172–173, 175, 176, 209, 293
Stout, Rex, 639, 641, 654
Stover, Matthew, 988
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 442, 501, 770
Stowers, Carlton, 1047, 1055, 1058
Strachey, (Giles) Lytton, 119
Strange Days, 283
Stranger Beside Me, The (Rule),
1056–1057
“Strapless,” 138
Strasberg, Lee, 295
Stratchey, (Giles) Lytton, 119
Stratemeyer Syndicate, 881–882
Straub, Peter, 703, 711, 712, 714–715
Strauss, Darin, 448
Strauss Living from the American Academy
for Arts and Letters, 83
Strecker, Trey, 936
Streep, Meryl, 408
Street, The (Petry), 31, 32
Streetcar Named Desire, A (Williams),
290–91
Stress of Her Regard, The (Powers), 360
Strieber, Whitley, 705, 709, 710
Stringer, Vickie, 1070, 1071, 1072, 1073
String theory, 837–838, 842
Structuralism, 750
Structuralists, 371
Stuck Rubber Baby (Cruse), 450
Sturgeon, Theodore, 810
Sturgis, Susanna J., 926
Sturm, James, 450
Style, 277
Styron, William, 443, 488, 775
Suárez, Mario, 555
Subjects/subjectivity, 542–543, 548, 573,
574. See also Identity; Self
Subtle Knife, The (Pullman), 433
Sucharitkul, Somtow, 705
Sudden Death (Brown), 404
Sudden fiction, 385, 387, 388, 389–390,
391, 395, 396
Suetonius, 117
Suicide, 143, 262, 377
Sui Sin Far. See Eaton, Edith Maude
Sullivan, Arthur, 629–630
Sullivan, Edward T., 1154
Sullivan, Jack, 701
Sullivan, Tom, 739
Sumerian epics, 353–54
Sundiata, Sekou, 757
Superheroes
adaptations, 214
Comic’s Code Authority, 210
female and African American, 211
modernization of, 419–420
psychology, 212
redefining, 216
speculative fiction, 927–928
Superheroines, 213, 215, 419–420
Superman, 211, 213, 1163–1164
Supernatural literature, 185, 338, 353,
359, 361, 387, 699–716, 918. See
also Magical realism
Surfiction, 252
Surprise ending, flash fiction and, 386,
387, 390
Surrealism, 106, 588–589, 857
Survival theme, 257
Survivors and successors, Arthurian litera-
ture, 58
Susann, Jacqueline, 142
Suspense fiction, 192, 203, 220, 962–970
Sussman, Deborah H., 492
Sussman, Henry, 543
Sussman, Paul, 737
Sustainable Poetry (Seigaj), 328–329
Sutton, Roger, 177

Suvin, Darko, 805, 918
Swain, Edmund Gill, 702
Swann, Ingo, 728
Swanwick, Michael, 275, 826
Sweet and Vicious (Schickler), 225
“Sweet Arab, the Generous Arab, The,” 46
Sweet Potato Queens, 869
Swift, Jonathan, 816
Swimming, 950–951
Swofford, Anthony, 613, 622–624
Sword and planet fiction, 978–979
Sword and sorcery fiction, 352, 353, 357,
360, 361, 362. See also Heroic
fantasy
Swordswoman, The (Salmonson), 361
Sydney Taylor Awards, 1153
Syncopation, 35
Synners (Cardigan), 279
Syringa Tree, The (Gien), 298–99
Tabloid-ization, 200
Taboos, 153, 195, 210, 215, 295, 346
Tademy, Lalita, 778
Takachiho, Haruka, 608
Takahashi, Rumiko, 433, 601, 611
Takahata, Isao, 602, 603, 611
Takeda, Yasuhiro, 608
Take Me Out (Greenberg), 198
Talese, Gay, 575, 933
Talk Talk (Boyle), 261
Tallis, Frank, 473
Tall Mountain, Mary, 677
Tan, Amy, 79–80, 269–270, 446, 448,
773
Tan, Cecilia, 348
Tan Lin, 542
Tao, 101
Taormino, Tristan, 413
Tape for the Turn of the Year, 333
Targ, Russell, 728–729, 730
Tarr, Judith, 431, 437, 1020
Tartt, Donna, 923–925
Tarzan of the Apes (Burrough), 17
Taylor, Andrew, 466–467
Taylor, Gary, 471
Taylor, Keith, 987
Taylor, Kenneth N., 189
Taylor, Mildred, 1149
Taylor, Peter, 775
Taylor, Travic “Doc,” 912
Taymor, Julie, 375–76
Teacher Man (McCourt), 90
Tea From an Empty Cup (Cadigan), 284
INDEX 1281
Technology. See also Science
comic books, 216
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 256, 260, 262, 268
cyberpunk, 274, 275, 276, 278
dystopian fiction, 312, 314, 315, 317,
319
ecopoetry, 325, 327, 333
film adaptations of books, 369–370,
380
film and, 822
flash fiction, 393, 394
graphic novels and, 420
historical fiction, 448
historical nonfiction and, 471, 477, 478
inspirational literature and, 514, 516
literary journalism and, 577
magical realism and, 594
mystery fiction and, 649
Native American literature and, 675
poetry and, 755
science fiction and, 805, 807, 816–817,
817–818, 820, 902
speculative fiction and, 927
suspense and, 963
time travel fiction and, 1014–1016
transrealist writing and, 1028
utopian literature and, 1082,
1083–1084, 1087–1089
verse novels and, 1123
zines and, 1163, 1164, 1168
Techno thrillers, 969–970. See also Terror-
ism fiction
Teens. See also Young adult literature
comic books, 214
coming of age fiction, 222, 224, 229,
236
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 265
dramatic theater, 305
romance, 213
Telepathy, 717, 730
Television
anime, 603
Arthurian literature, 58–59
autobiography and memoir, 89
Baby boomers and, 683
Burroughs, W. and, 788
chick lit, 149
children’s literature, 167, 170
Christian fiction, 190, 191
comedic theatre, 197, 199–200
comic books, 214
1282 INDEX
Television (continued)
coming of age fiction, 237, 242
cyberpunk, 274, 281, 284
film adaptations of books, 368, 369
gays and, 1152
historical fantasy and, 435
historical fiction and, 449
historical nonfiction and, 475
horror and, 887
humor and, 506
legal thrillers and, 563, 566, 567
manga and anime and, 601–602, 608,
611
mystery fiction and, 641, 647, 648, 649
mystery series and, 889, 891
National Geographic Society, 19, 20
New Age literature and, 690, 692–693
occult/supernatural literature and, 710,
729
ownership of, 1171
poetry and, 756, 757
road fiction and, 788
science fiction and, 824, 825, 903–904
science writing and, 841, 842
self-help literature and, 873
series fiction and, 881, 885
spy fiction and, 958
suspense and, 967
terrorism and, 996
terrorism fiction and, 998
time travel fiction, 1019
transrealist writing and, 1028
true crime literature and, 1054
vampire fiction and, 1095, 1096
verse novels and, 1123
young adult fiction and, 883
young adult literature and, 1149, 1155
zines and, 1173
Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone
(Baldwin), 403
Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 427
Temple, Lou Jane, 642
Templesmith, Ben, 217, 421
Tender Buttons (Stein), 403
Tennessee, 655
Tennyson, Alfred, 1120, 1141
Terre Haute (White), 409
Terrell, Whitney, 780
Terrorism. See also September 11 attacks
coming of age fiction, 244
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 270 (See also 9/11)
film adaptations of books, 381
graphic novels and, 421, 422
historical fantasy and, 434
media and, 958–959
military literature, 620, 621
New Age literature and, 686
spy fiction and, 959, 962
suspense and, 969
Terrorism fiction, 995–1011, 1019
Terry, Lucy, 26
Tesori, Jeanine, 636
Testability, 837–838
Testament of Yves Gundron, The (Barton),
448
Texas, 642, 656
Texas (Michener), 443
“Textuality,” 372
Tey, Josephine, 455
Tezuka, Osama, 600–601, 603, 608, 610,
611
That Old Ace in the Hole (Proulx), 268
Thayer, Ernest Lawrence, 932
Theater, 672, 762. See also Comedic
theatre; Dramatic theater
Theatre Communications Group (TCG),
204
Theatrical Imagination, The (Huberman,
Ludwig, and Pope), 289
Theological interpretations, Christian
fiction and, 188, 191, 193
Theology, fantasy literature and, 354
Theone, Brock and Bodie, 189
Theoretical guises, 372
Theory, literary, 541
There is Confusion (Fauset), 33
Theroux, Alexander, 12
Theroux, Paul, 23–24, 389, 396,
1038–1040
Thief’s Journal, The (Genet), 402
Things They Carried, The (O’Brien), 616,
617
Third (Wasserstein), 206
Third World literature, 41
Third World women writers, 44
Thirteen Moons (Frazier), 446
This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in
American Poetry (Rasula) 329
“This Is the Beat Generation” (Holmes), 99
This Present Darkness (Peretti), 192–193
This Rock (Morgan), 453
This Scepter’d Isle (Lackey and Gellis), 433
This Side of Paradise (Fitzgerald), 225
Thomas, Denise, 387, 389
Thomas-Graham, Pamela, 641
 INDEX 1283

Thomas, James, 387, 388, 389–390, 396, Todd, Mark, 1173

397, 614 Todorov, Tzvetan, 589, 895, 917
Thomas, Jodi, 802 To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee), 568
Thomason, Dustin, 739 Toku, Masami, 610
Thomas, Piri, 554, 557 Tolkien, J.R.R. See also Lord of the Rings
Thomas, Rebecca L., 882 children’s literature, 162
Thomas, Sheree R., 922 fantasy literature, 354, 355, 357, 358
Thompson, Craig, 417 historical fantasy, 430, 433
Thompson, Daniel Pierce, 442 myths and, 734
Thompson, Ellen A., 163 science fiction and, 806
Thompson, Hunter S., 572, 575, 576, 784, series fiction, 880
788–790, 791, 933, 1032 sword and sorcery fiction, 971, 974,
Thompson, Jim, 639 985
Thompson, Raymond H., 437 Tolle, Eckhart, 695–696
Thompson, Sam, 496 Tolnay, Tom, 934
Thompson, Vicki Lewis, 800 “To Maecenas” (Wheatley), 27
Thomson, Sarah L., 56 Tomás Rivera Awards, 1153
Thor, Brad, 959 Tom Jones (Fielding), 225
Thor (character), 422, 423 Tom O’Bedlam’s Night Out, and Other
Thoreau, Henry David, 500, 1035, 1044 Strange Excursions (Schweitzer), 361
Thorpe, Thomas Bangs, 500, 932 Tom’s Midnight Garden (Pearce), 429
Thought, 688–691 Tom Swift books, 881
Thousand Miles of Dreams, A (Shuhua), Tony Awards
116, 126–127 Asian American literature, 79
Three Days of Rain (Greenberg), 299 biography, 129
Three Days to Never (Powers), 360 comedic theatre, 204, 296, 299, 301,
Three Lives (Stein), 403 303, 304, 308
300 (Miller), 450 low-budget shows, 633
Thrillers, 14, 192, 282, 283. See also spe- musical theatre, 625, 634
cific types of thrillers orchestrations and, 635
Thucydides, 469 poetry and, 758
Thurber, James, 501 scores and, 635, 636, 637
Thurlo, Aimée and David, 643, 653 Toomer, Jean, 31, 35
Tidyman, John, 652 Tooth and Claw (Boyle), 317
Tie-ins, 168 Tor, 902
Tierney, Richard, 986 Torn Skirt, The (Godfrey), 233
Timbers, Sylvia, 695 Torre, Lillian de la, 456
Time, 291, 296, 371–372, 429–430, 433, Torso (Bendis), 214, 419
670 Torture, 621
Time Garden, The (Eager), 429 To Say Nothing of the Dog (Willis), 447
Time management, 862, 863–864 Toscano, Rodrigo, 542
Time travel, 55, 61, 64, 443, 455, 798, Totalitarianism, 312, 313, 314, 316–17,
831, 887, 1032 320
Time Traveler’s Wife, The (Niffenegger), Total Money Makeover, The (Ramsey), 514
1022–1023 Totem Press, 107
Time travel fiction, 441, 447, 1012–1023 To the Last Man: A Novel of the First
Tipler, Frank J., 1014 World War (Shaara), 445
Tipping the Velvet (Waters), 412 Toure, 1083, 1089
Tiptree, Jr., James, 812, 1030–1031 Tourism, 1037, 1041. See also Travel writ-
Titanic (film), 450 ing
“To Autumn” (Keats), 325 Tourism, children’s literature and, 170, 171
Todd, Charles, 464 Townsend, Cheryl, 1175
Todd, Marilyn, 458 Townsend, John Rowe, 172
1284 INDEX
Toys. See Merchandise
Trading Up (Bushnell), 152–53
Tradition. See also specific traditions
alternative, 777
Beat poetry, 98–99
comedic theatre, 197
coming of age fiction, 229–232, 246
culture wars and, 759
cyberpunk, 277
dystopian fiction, 314, 315
musical theatre and, 631
Native American literature and, 665,
673, 675
New Age literature and, 686
philological thrillers and, 733
poetry and, 742, 743–744, 756
regional fiction and, 769, 772
speculative fiction and, 920–921
western genre and, 1131
Trafzer, Clifford E., 669
Tragedy, 195, 203, 205, 293
Tragicomedy, 195, 263, 320
Tragifarce, 195, 203
Trail of Blood, A (Potter), 456–457
Tramp Abroad, A (Twain), 18
Transcendentalists, 122
Transgenderism, 344–345, 406, 448, 1018.
See also GLBTQ (Gay, lesbian, bisex-
ual, transgender, and queer)
Translations, adaptations and, 370–371
Transportation, 782
Transrealism, 283
Transrealist writing, 1025–1033
Transsexualism, 471
Travel writing, 17, 171, 572–573,
1034–1045
Traver, Ben, 563
Traver, Robert, 567
Treat, Lawrence, 647
Trelease, Jim, 166, 173
Tremaine, F. Orlin, 897–898
Tremayne, Peter, 642
Trevanian, 957
Trident Comics, 217, 422
Trifles (Glaspell), 294
Triggs, Teal, 1172
TriQuarterly, 388
Tristan and Isolde (characters), 57
Trochek, Kathy Hogan, 655
Trollope, Anthony, 881
Troupe, Jr., Quincy, 757
Troupe, Quincy, 936
Troyes, Chrétien de, 54
Trudell, Dennis, 935
True crime fiction . See also Terrorism fic-
tion
True crime literature, 1047–1062, 1167
“True Names,” 275
True Story of the Three Little Pigs, The
(Scieszka and Smith), 174, 175
Truest Pleasure, The (Morgan), 453
True to the Game (Woods), 1075–1076
Truman, Margaret, 655
Trumping model of adaptation, 367–368
Truong, Monique, 446, 448
Trusky, Tom, 1172
Truth. See also Authenticity; Objectivity;
Realism; Reality
magical realism and, 593–594, 595
sixties and, 683
speculative fiction and, 917, 922
sports literature and, 949
terrorism fiction and, 1008
true crime literature and, 1052
Tryo, Thomas, 704
Tuchman, Barbara, 478
Tucillo, Liz, 868
Tuck, Lily, 446
Tucker, Arthur Wilson “Bob,” 894, 904
Tucker, Tom, 123
Tucker, Wilson, 1030
Tudor settings, 460–461
Tunis, John, 931–932
Turner, Nikki, 1069–1070, 1073
Turner, Tom, 474
Turnipseed, Joel, 613, 616, 618, 619, 620
Turow, Scott, 561, 564, 569, 657, 658,
967
Turtledove, Harry, 446, 614, 886, 980,
1020
Turtle Island (Snyder), 109, 331
Tussig, Justin, 1083, 1085
Tuttle, Lisa, 711
Twain, Mark
adventure fiction, 15, 17–18
Arthurian literature, 55
coming of age fiction, 225
erotic literature, 341
historical fantasy, 428–429
historical fiction, 442, 446
humor and, 499, 501, 503
influences on others, 1039
regional fiction and, 770
sports literature and, 932
time travel fiction and, 1013
travel writing, 1035

Twelve, 227
“Twelve Deaths at Noon” (Handal), 49
Twelve-step literature, 685
Tyler, Anne, 270, 773
Tyndale House Publishers, 189, 192
Typical American, 83
Tyree, Omar, 1070, 1073–1074,
1074–1075
Tyson, Edith, 436
Tzara, Tristan, 540
Ude, Wayne, 594
Ulinich, Anya, 523
Ullman, Montague, 727
Ultimate Spider Man (Lee), 419
Ultimates, The (Millar), 217–219, 422–423
Umphlett, Wiley Lee, 941
Unauthorized status, biography, 130
Uncle Abner stories (Post), 456
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 442
Unconscious, the, 434, 436, 470, 473, 476,
499
Undead, 700, 704, 706, 708–711
Underground publications, 210, 211,
1163–1164, 1165, 1168, 1175
Underhill, Evelyn, 471
Underhill, Ruth, 667
Under the Tuscan Sun (film), 408, 1035,
1046
Underworld (DeLillo), 282, 444, 448
Universal History of Infamy (Historia uni-
versal de la infamia) (Borges), 429
University of Hawaii Center for Biographi-
cal Research, 113
Unwanted, The (Nyugen), 91–92
Updike, John, 222, 270–71, 704, 826, 933,
945–947, 960, 1009–1010
Urban fantasy. See Low fantasy
Urban fiction, 1065–1076
Urban issues, 421
Urban noir, 277
Urban space. See City
Ur-Beats, 110
U.S. Congress, 41, 448
U.S. domestic issues, 423–424
Utopian literature, 812, 813, 816, 818,
1078–1089. See also Speculative fic-
tion
Uttley, Alison, 429
Vachss, Andrew, 644, 645
Vagina Monologues, The (Ensler), 297
Valdes-Rodriguez, Alisa, 146, 148, 559
INDEX 1285
Vale, V., 1172
Valley of the Dolls (Susann), 142, 143–144
Vampire Chronicles (Rice), 430, 431
Vampire Countess, The (Féval), 433
Vampire fiction, 1091–1115
occult/supernatural fiction and, 700,
704, 706, 708–711, 887
speculative fiction and, 917, 918,
925–926
Van Bebber, Jim, 1054
Vance, Jack, 813, 901, 982, 984, 985
Vance, James, 450
VanderStaay, Steven, 1147, 1149
Van Gulick, Robert, 456
Van Praagh, James, 723
Van Sant, Gus, 788
Vansittart, Peter, 431
Van Vogt, A.E., 809, 1016–1017
Vanzant, Iyalna, 874
Vapnyar, Lara, 523
Vasquez, RIchard, 558
Vassilakos, Jill H., 455
Vaudeville, 195, 196, 375, 630
Vaughan, Brian K., 434
VeggieTales books (Kenney), 189
Veisters, Ed, 15
Vena, Gary, 289, 290, 292
Vendler, Helen, 332, 741, 744, 747–748,
763
Ventriloquist model of adaptation, 367
Venus Envy (Brown), 404
Verne, Jules, 312, 807–808, 816
Vernon, John, 451
Vernon God Little (Pierre), 229, 232–233
Veronica (Gaitskill), 264–265
Versailles (Davis), 446
Verse narrative, 1121
Verse novels, 1119–1130
Vertigo comic books, 427
Victimization of women, 175, 220. See also
Damsels in distress; Sexism
Victorian era
biography and, 119
coming of age fiction and, 225, 226
cyberpunk and, 283
GLBTQ and, 401, 412–413
historical fantasy and, 429, 433
historical mysteries, 456, 457, 461–462
mystery fiction and, 640, 656
occult/supernatural literature and, 700,
701, 710
philological thrillers and, 734
science fiction and, 807–808, 831
1286 INDEX
Victorian era (continued)
sports literature and, 931
sword and sorcery fiction and, 971
time travel fiction and, 1016
utopian fiction and, 1087
vampire fiction and, 1093, 1095, 1098,
1114, 1115
Vidal, Gore, 90, 403, 443, 445
Video games, 237, 257, 986, 1134. See
also Computers, games
Videos, 189, 190, 602, 604–605. See also
Films
Viereck, George Sylvester, 433
Vietnam war
Asian American literature, 80–81
autobiography and memoir, 88, 91
Beat poetry, 100, 103, 106, 109
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 267
literary journalism, 575
military literature, 613, 617, 623
occult/supernatural literature and, 703
science fiction and, 812
sports literature and, 950
spy fiction and, 956, 957
terrorism fiction and, 997, 1003
transrealist writing and, 1031
true crime literature and, 1048–1049
utopian literature and, 1083
Vigilante justice, 316
Vikings, 14, 974, 975, 976
Villages (Updike), 270
Village Voice (magazine), 576
Villains, 173, 174
Villains United (Simone), 220, 425
Villanueva, Tino, 556
Villarreal, Jose Antonio, 555, 558
Vinge, Joan, 901
Vinge, Vernor, 275, 815, 820, 829, 832,
901
Violence
anime and, 603
Arab American literature, 47, 49, 50
Asian American literature, 68, 70, 83
Beat poetry, 102
children’s literature, 165
comedic theatre, 196, 203
comic books, 213, 215, 419
coming of age fiction, 238
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 253, 257, 261, 264, 266
dramatic theater, 296, 298, 301, 305,
306
ecopoetry, 332
erotic literature, 346
fantasy literature, 353
historical fiction and, 451
identity and, 1005
military literature, 617
mystery fiction and, 640, 645, 652
occult/supernatural literature and, 703,
711
poetry and, 1125
power and, 999
regional fiction and, 771
sports literature and, 940
sword and sorcery fiction and, 972
terrorism and, 995–996
true crime literature and, 1047, 1049,
1051–1052, 1056, 1058, 1059,
1062
urban literature and, 1072
western genre and, 1131, 1132, 1134,
1138, 1143
young adult literature and, 1151, 1152
zines and, 1170
Violent Cases (Gaiman), 417
Viorst, Judith, 502
Viramontes, Helena Maria, 559
Virgil, 744, 764
Virginian, The (Wister), 442, 449
Virtual reality
culture and, 280
cyberpunk, 274, 275, 276, 281, 282,
283, 284
fantasy literature, 351
utopian literature and, 1087–1088
Virtue, Doreen, 683, 690–691
Virus programs, cyberpunk and, 275,
278
Visitation of Spirits (Kenan), 405
Visual impairment, 1152–1153
Visualization, 690
Visual symmetry, Beat poetry and, 108
Viswanathan, Kaavya, 239, 1154
Vita (Glendinning), 120
Vitale, Joe, 689, 866
Vizenor, Gerald, 428, 665, 670–671, 675,
676, 680
Voelker, John D., 567
Vogel, Paula, 307
Vogt, A.E. van, 900
Voice
coming of age fiction, 226, 232
flash fiction, 386, 391, 392
poetry and, 747–748
 INDEX 1287

Voigt, Cynthia, 1150, 1152 dramatic theater, 296

Vollmann, William T., 445 Warburg, Aby, 468
Vonnegut, Kurt, 315, 502, 810, 811, 857 Ward, Artemus, 501
Voodoo, 705, 712 Ward, Diane, 540
Vorholt, John, 885 Ward, Edward R., 934
Voros, Gyorgi, 326, 334 Ware, Chris, 417
Voyage of the Narwhal, The (Barrett), 448, Warhammer (Electronic Arts), 989
451 Warhol, Andy, 376
Voyeurism, 89, 131, 147, 368, 372, 791, Warlord Chronicles, 60
1066 War of the Worlds (film, Spielberg),
380–381
Wagner, Karl Edward, 971, 985, War of the Worlds (Wells), 380–381
986–987 “War on Terror,” 257
Wagner, Richard, 734 War prophecy books, 954
Wagner, T.M., 908 Warren, Rick, 188, 512, 515, 516, 517,
Waiting for Lefty (Odets), 294 518
Waiting to Exhale (McMillan), 145 Warren, Robert Penn, 775
Wakefield, Herbert Russell, 702 Warrior, Robert, 678
Wakoski, Diane, 746 Warrior women, 278, 352, 361
Walcott, Derek, 761–762, 1121, 1122, Warships, 178
1124–1125 Wasat, 45
Waldman, Anne, 110, 757 Wasp (character), 422, 423
Walker, Alice, 37, 271, 443, 502 Wasserstein, Wendy, 205–206
Walker, Gerald, 407 Watergate, 967
Walker, Margaret, 443 Water Music (Boyle), 451
Walker, Nancy A., 503, 505 Waters, Fiona, 13, 18
Walking, 1044 Waters, Sarah, 412–413
Walk through Darness (Durham), 447, 452 Waters, T.A., 1030
Wallace, Alfred Russel, 720, 724 Waterworks, The (Doctorow), 452
Wallace, Daniel, 1026 Watjen, Carolyn and David, 464
Wallace, David Foster, 271–272, 935 Watkins, Maurine Dallas, 374
Wallace, Lew, 442 Watkins, Mel, 196–197
Wallant, Edward, 488 Watson, Charles, 298
Wallop, Douglass, 934 Watson, Esther Pearl, 1173
Wall Street Journal, The (newspaper), Watson, Fred, 838
577 Watson, James, 838
Walpole, Horace, 700–701, 963 Watten, Barrett, 540, 545
Walsh, Peter, 863 Watts, Franklin, 179
Walter, Jess, 659 Waugh, Patricia, 252
Walters, Anna Lee, 670, 675, 676, 677, Waverly (Scott), 441
678, 679 Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart, The
Walton, Megan, 240–241 (Walker), 271
Wambaugh, Joseph, 1047, 1052–1053 We (Zamyatin), 313
Wandrei, Andrew, 703 We Are All Legends (Schweitzer), 362
Waniek, Marily Nelson, 1121 We Are on Our Own (Katin), 450
Wapner, Joseph A., 566 “Weary Blues, The” (Hughes) 35
War. See also Military literature; specific Weather, Heavy (Sterling), 282
wars Weaver, Jace, 678
Beat poetry, 103, 109 Webb, Charles, 225
comedic theatre, 200 Webb, Nick, 115, 126, 127–28
comic books, 213 Weber, Brom, 502
contemporary mainstream American fic- Weber, Bruce, 305–306
tion, 262, 267 Weber, David, 906, 909
1288 INDEX
Web sites
adventure fiction and, 887
biography, 116, 117, 125
chick lit, 139
children’s literature, 163, 167, 171
Christian literature, 799
graphic novels, 425
inspirational literature, 516, 517, 518
Language poetry, 548
Latino American literature, 557
law and literature, 567
manga and anime, 606
military literature, 620
musical theatre and, 634
mystery fiction, 661
New Age literature and, 687, 694
occult/supernatural literature and, 723,
729
poetry, 752, 753, 756
Pulitzer Prizes, 478
romance novels and, 796, 798, 800
science fiction, 832, 907, 908, 912, 913
self-help literature and, 866, 867, 869,
871, 874
sports literature, 938
sword and sorcery, 989
true crime, 1057, 1058, 1060, 1061
true crime literature, 1053
vampire fiction, 1096, 1110
western genre and, 1135–1136, 1138,
1143
young adult literature, 1150,
1153–1154, 1155
zines, 1167, 1169, 1171, 1172
Webster, Dan, 157
We Happy Few (Hinojosa), 265
Weil, Andrew, 872
Weill, Kurt, 630
Weinberg, Anna, 148
Weinberg, Robert, 390
Weinberg, Steven, 836
Weiner, Hannah, 540, 542
Weiner, Jennifer, 143, 156–157
Weisberger, Chick lit, 147–148
Weisberger, Lauren, 381
Weisinger, Mort, 899
Weisman, Jordan, 1153–1154
Weiss, Erich, 720–721
Welcher-Calhoun, Cherysse, 346
Welch, James, 670, 671, 673–674, 675,
676
Welcome to Hard Times (Doctorow), 452
Welcome to Tranquility (Simone), 425
Well (Kron), 201, 202
Welland, Sasha Su-Ling, 126–127
Weller, Robert C., 859
Welles, Orson, 380, 822
Wellman, Manly Wade, 703, 985
Wells, H.G.
film adaptations, 380, 1019
radio adaptations, 822
science fiction, 807–808, 816, 817
time travel fiction and, 1013, 1014,
1016
Wells, Juliette, 139
Wells, Rebecca, 157–159
WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), 276
Welty, Eudora, 502, 774, 775
Wender, Melissa, 472–473
Wentworth, Paul, 122
Werewolves, 432, 710–711
Werner, C.L., 989
Wertham, Fredric, 214, 1172
Wertheim, L.Jon, 938
Weschler, Lawrence, 580
Wesley, Valerie Wilson, 652, 890
West, James A., 1143
West, Kanye, 870
West, Nathaniel, 527
West, Stanley Gordon, 939
West African form, 35
Westbrook, Deeanne, 942
West Coast, Beat poetry, 98, 99
West Country Mysteries (Jecks), 459–460
Westerfeld, Scott, 883, 912–913
Western genre, 1131–1143. See also Cow-
boys
adventure fiction, 13–14
Arthurian, 60
comic books, 213
dramatic theater, 293–294
erotic, 342
historical fiction, 446
historical nonfiction, 473
regional fiction and, 770
series, 887–888
sports literature and, 932
transrealist, 1026–1027
verse novels, 1121
Western Heritage Awards, 1136, 1137,
1138, 1139
Westfahl, Gary, 903, 1026
West Indian writers, 755
Westlake, Donald, 648, 654
Westward expansion, 849
Wetzel, Daniel, 939

Whalen, Philip, 100, 110
Wharton, Edith, 138–139, 701, 771–772
What Is the What? (Eggers), 263
What Price Glory? (Anderson), 294
What’s so Amazing about Grace? (Yancey),
511, 513
What the Bleep Do We Know? (film),
688–689, 722–723
Wheatcroft, Andrew, 474
Wheatley, Dennis, 702–703
Wheatley, Phyllis, 27–28
Whedon, Joss, 904
Wheeler, Richard S., 1136, 1141
Whelehan, Imelda, 148–149, 158, 372
When Heaven and Earth Changed Places
(Hayslip), 80
When the Emperor Was Divine (Otsuka),
445
When the Finch Rises (Riggs), 230
“Where” (Coulter) 332
Where Angels Fear to Tread (Forster), 14,
402
Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak), 177
While the Messiah Tarries (Bukiet),
490–491
Whistling Season, The (Doig), 446
Whitbread Biography Award, 120
White, Derek, 394
White Doves at Morning (Burke), 445
White, Edmund, 408–409
White, Steve, 909
Whitehead, Colson, 507
White Isle, The (Schweitzer), 361
White-Jacket (Melville), 403
White People, 410
Whitman, Charles, 1048
Whitman, Walt, 97, 101, 325–326, 341,
743–745
Whitney, Phyllis A., 639, 963
Whittemore, Reed, 118
“Why Not Say What Happens” (Joseph),
51
Whyte, Jack, 60
Wicca, 685, 686
Wickham, Glynne, 295
Wideman, John, 33–34
Wideman, John Edgar, 939, 1067
Widener, Chris, 866
Wiesel, Elie, 483, 484–485
Wiesner, David, 175
Wikipedia, 116
Wilber, Jessica (Disobedience), 1174
Wilber, Ken, 471
INDEX 1289
Wilcox, Leah, 175
Wild at Heart (Eldredge), 513
Wilde, Oscar, 403, 1089, 1095, 1115
Wildenber, Harry L., 213
Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 169
Wilderness, 1043–1044
Wilder, Thornton, 442, 449, 772
Wildlife in America (Matthiessen), 21
Wild West, 213. See also Western genre
Wiles, Tom, 936
Wiley, Melissa, 170
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Goethe),
225
Wilkes, Maria D., 170
Wilkins, Celia, 170
Wilkins [Freeman], Mary, 771
William Inge New Voices Playwriting
Award, 205
Williams, Buzz, 617
Williams, Chancellor, 472
Williams, John Hartley, 1121
Williamson, Chet, 711
Williamson, Jack, 900, 1030
Williamson, Lisa, 1068
Williamson, Marianne, 871
Williamson, Marianne, 863
Williams, Paul, 1166
Williams, Raymond, 260, 919
Williams, Saul, 756, 757
Williams, Sherley Anne, 443
Williams, Tennessee, 290, 292, 934
Williams, Walter Jon, 283, 914
Williams, William Carlos, 101, 540, 745,
746, 751, 851, 937, 1121
Willis, Connie, 446, 447, 815, 831, 1016
Willrich, Chris, 990
Wilson, Andrew, 130
Wilson, August, 307–308, 934, 1067
Wilson, Barbara, 651
Wilson, Christopher, 231
Wilson, Colin, 702
Wilson, Edmund, 574, 834
Wilson, Edward O., 839
Wilson, Eric, 474
Wilson, Jason, 1038
Wilson, John Morgan, 413, 651
Wilson, Lanford, 308
Wilson, Norma C., 679
Wilson, Robert Anton, 706, 970
Wilson, Robert Charles, 828–829, 832
Wilson, Robley Jr., 389
Wilson, William Julius, 1071
Wimmen’s Comix Collective, 211
1290 INDEX

Winegardner, Mark, 934, 936 comic books and, 211, 213, 220,
Winfrey, Oprah, 394. See also Oprah’s 424–425
Book Club, 777, 863, 868, 871, 1068 coming of age fiction, 238–239
Winkelman, Betty, 457 contemporary mainstream American fic-
Winnemucca, Sarah, 667, 674 tion, 255–256, 270
“Winnie the Pooh” (Milne) 169 cyberpunk and, 278
Winsor, Kathleen, 443 dramatic theater, 295, 297, 304
Winter, Douglas, 436 dystopian fiction, 318
Winterson, Jeannette, 404 erotic literature, 339, 343
Winter’s Tale (Helprin), 432 humor and, 505
Winther, Per, 393–394 magical realism and, 597, 598–599
Winthrop, John, 849 manga and anime and, 605–606, 607
Wired magazine, 394 Mexican American, 220, 424
Wisconsin, 677 military literature, 614, 619, 620–621,
Wishart, David, 458 623
Wishnia, K.J.A., 654 mystery fiction and, 639, 644, 646–647,
Wish You Were Here (Brown), 404 652–653, 657, 659
Wister, Owen, 442, 449, 1133 Native American literature and, 668,
Witches, 686, 704, 705 671, 679
Witcover, Paul, 913 neuropsychology and, 838
Witham, W. Tasker, 242 New Age literature and, 686
Withdrawal, coming of age fiction and, occult/supernatural literature and, 701
226 poetry, 747
Wittlinger, Ellen, 1173 regional fiction and, 771, 778
Wobble to Death (Lovesey), 456 religion and, 735
Wolfe, Gene, 813 road fiction and, 783, 792–794
Wolfe, Nero (character), 641, 642 science fiction and, 906–910
Wolfe, Tom, 223, 241–242, 565, 572, 575, self-help literature and, 865, 868–869,
784, 790, 791, 933 872, 873
Wolff, Janet, 792 speculative fiction and, 920–921
Wolff, Tobias, 235 sports literature and, 931, 932, 937,
Wolff, Virginia Euwer, 1151 940
Wollheim, Donald A., 810 spy fiction and, 955–956, 961
Wolves of Willoughby Chase (J. Aiken), suspense and, 966, 968
429 sword and sorcery fiction and, 978,
Womack, Craig S., 679 981–982, 985, 986
Womack, Jack, 283 time travel fiction and, 1020
Womack, Kenneth, 5 travel writing and, 1036, 1037
Woman Warrior, The (Kingston), 74–75 true crime literature and, 1048, 1049,
Woman warriors. See Warrior women 1058, 1062
Women. See also Feminism; Girls urban literature and, 1067–1068, 1070
academic fiction, 1, 2 vampire fiction and, 1095, 1098, 1109
adventure fiction, 15 vampire novels and, 709
Arab American literature, 42, 43, 44, west, 1140
46, 48 western genre and, 1133, 1134,
Arthurian literature, 55–56, 61, 63 1138–1139
Asian American literature, 78, 80, 82, Winfrey and, 777
83 young adult literature and, 1148, 1154
Beat poetry, 103, 106 Women, The (Luce), 291
chick lit, 137–159 Women’s movement, 88, 211, 502. See also
children’s literature, 176 Feminism
Christian fiction, 192 Women’s rights, 452, 463

Wonder Boys, The (film), 408
Wonder Spot, The, 154, 155, 156, 239
Wood, Gordon S., 121
Woodhouse, P.G., 630
Woodiwiss, Kathleen E., 799, 802
Wood, James, 259
Wood, Lana, 127
Wood, Natalie, 127
Woodson, Jacqueline, 1150, 1152
Woods, Teri, 1070, 1073, 1075–1076
Woodward, Bob, 475
Woodward, C. Vann, 775
Woolcott, Alexander, 501
Woolf, Virginia, 377, 403, 447, 752
Woolrich, Cornell, 639
Wordsworth, William, 325, 742, 1121
Work force, 213
Working class, 294, 783, 1056
Work lit novels. See “Office Lit”
Workman, Peter, 872
“Work” (Oliver), 335
Work, James C., 1141–1142
Work songs, 26, 27, 35
World Away, A (O’Nan), 445
World Fantasy Awards, 986
World’s Best Short Story Contest, 390
World’s End (Boyle), 451
Worldview Awards, 695
World War I
historical fiction, 445
historical mysteries, 464
historical nonfiction, 468
musical theater, 630
mystery fiction, 644, 889
occult/supernatural literature, 702
vampire fiction and, 1104
verse novels and, 1129–1130
World War II. See also Holocaust
literature; Nazis
Asian American literature, 71, 78
Beat poetry, 103
comic books, 213
contemporary mainstream American fic-
tion, 269
GLBTQ and, 402, 413
historical fantasy, in, 429
historical fiction, in, 444, 445
historical mysteries, in, 466
Jewish American literature, in, 525
literary journalism and, 575
manga and anime and, 609
mystery fiction and, 657
INDEX 1291
Native American literature and, 669
occult/supernatural literature and, 702
pulp fiction and, 983–984
science fiction and, 805, 821
sea writing, 858
sports literature and, 944, 946
spy fiction and, 955, 956, 958, 961
travel writing and, 1035
urban literature and, 1067
vampire fiction and, 1104
young adult literature and, 1158
Worst Journey in the World, The (Cherry-
Gerrard), 15
Wouk, Herman, 563, 568
Wrede, Patricia, 432
“Wrenched rhyme,” 179
Wright, Austin M., 12
Wright, Doug, 308–309
Wright, John C., 913–914
Wright, Judith, 865, 870
Wright, Lawrence, 474, 578
Wright, Richard, 31, 1067
Wright, T.M., 706, 711
Written on the Body (Winterson), 404
Wuori, G.K., 772, 773
Wyatt, Edward, 958
Xenophon, 117
X-Files, The (TV series), 284
X Out of Wonderland (Cates), 322
Yale Younger Poets Awards, 754
Yalom, Marilyn, 471
Yamamoto, Hisaye, 77–78
Yampbell, Cat, 1148, 1150, 1153
Yancey, Philip, 511, 513
Yang, Gene Luen, 1150
Yank (Kluger), 413
Yaoi, 607, 608
Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn, 708–709, 1097,
1103–1106
Yardley, Jonathan, 114–115
Ya-Ya novels, 157, 159
Yazbek, David, 636–637
Yeager, Patricia, 775
Year of Jubilo, The (Bahr), 445
Year of Magical Thinking, The (Didion),
91, 93
Year of Wonders (Brooks), 447
Year We Grew Up, The (Kluger), 413
Yeats, W.B., 702, 870
Yellow Calf, Sylvester, 673
1292 INDEX

Yezierska, Anzia, 523, 524, 525, 526, 1066 “You Wouldn’t Want to Be” (narratives—
Yglesias, Jose, 558 Watts), 179
Yiddish, 525
Yiddish Policeman’s Union, The (Chabon), Zacharek, Stephanie, 377–378, 380–381,
446 382
Yionoulis, Evan, 301 Zach, Cheryl, 802
Yohannan, Tim, 1168 Zamora, Lois Parkinson, 594, 598
Yolen, Jane, 56 Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 313, 817
Young adult literature, 1147–1159. See Zelazny, Roger, 430, 812, 824, 901, 984,
also Teens 1031
chick lit, 139 Zemeckis, Robert, 370
children’s literature, 165 Zener cards, 725
Christian fiction, 188 Zenith Angle, The (Sterling), 282
comic books, 209 Ziegesar, Cecily von, 883
coming of age fiction, 222–246, 224 Ziegfeld, Florenz, 630
fantasy literature, 359 Zimmerman, Mary, 309–310
legal thrillers, 1156, 1158 Zindel, Paul, 1150
series fiction, 883 Zines, 209, 210, 604, 606, 1163–1175
sports literature, 931, 937–938, 943 Zitkala-Så, 668
urban literature and, 1072 Zombies, 705
zines, 1173 Zondervan, 188
Young, James E., 489 Zousmer, Steve, 87, 89
Young, Mallory, 148 Zubro, Mark Richard, 651
Yourcenar, Marguerite, 403 Zuckerman, Nathan (character), 505
Yourgrau, Barry, 395 Zufelt, Jack M., 871
“Youth-at-risk” narrative, 227–229 Zukofsky, Louis, 538, 1121
Youth literature, 1147 Zwigoff, Terry, 372, 373