From Native Son to King’s Men: The Literary Landscape of 1940s America

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