ENGL 2130: American Literature

Chapter six: : American Literature Since 1945 (1945 - Present) 

Postmodern literature is a literary movement that rejects absolute meaning in life and instead embraces play, fragmentation, metafiction, and intertextuality. Literature in the postmodern era contains voices of radical feminist, conservative regionalists, and multiculturalism. 

Metafiction is a literary technique in which a story’s narrator draws attention to her own act of storytelling, explicitly foregrounding within her narrative the usually implicit processes with which stories are told.

Contemporary literature is literature which is generally set  or written after World War II. 

 The Toni Morrison Society 

 Maya Angelou

 James Baldwin

 Ralph Ellison

 Alice Walker 

 Leslie Marmon Silko

 The Don DeLillo Society

 Carson McCullers Society

 Flannery O’Connor

 Walker Percy

 Tennessee Williams

 J.D. Salinger

 Joseph Heller Page 

 Nikki Giovanni 

 James Dickey 

 Theodore Roethke

Alice Walker Literary Society

Eudora Welty Society

The Literature & Culture of the American 1950s (includes many online resources)

Cambridge History of English & American Literature (18 vols.). 1907–21.

RayBradbury.com provides information about Ray Bradbury's life and works as well as many photographs of him, his family and home, and his manuscripts.

Literary History: Harper Lee provides a list of literary criticism and links to websites that include biographical information on Harper Lee and background information on her works. 

Tennessee Williams Collection from the Historic New Orleans Collection is a digital collection of materials related to Tennessee Williams and his legacy.

Narrative Magazine is a "digital library of new literature by celebrated authors and by the best new and emerging writers."

Poets & Writers "publishes essays on the literary life, profiles of contemporary authors." 

Salinger.Org

Additional Authors during the time period:

Not an all inclusive list