• Southern Gothic style : regional settings, grotesque characters (other writers include Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, etc.), although she didn’t like this categorization
• Her work also explored morality and human behavior, being influenced by her Roman Catholic faith.
• O'Connor wrote two novels: Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and has two books of short stories: A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (posthumously, 1965). • She won the National Book Award in 1972.
• In the short story “Revelation”, you see the visible religious context.
• In “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” there is a negative outcome when a stranger with malicious intentions comes upon an unsuspecting family (the same thing happens in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” with its terribly grotesque and dramatic ending, and in “Good Country People”).
• Her characters are real. They are ridiculous and “grotesque”. • For example in “Good Country People”, one character, Pointer, a Bible salesman, invites another, Joy, on a date.
• He coaxes her up to the barn loft where she then removes her prosthetic leg at his request. • He then opens a hollowed-out Bible and takes out some whiskey, condoms and sex cards.
• She refuses his advances, and he runs off with her leg and reveals he is a atheist and a nihilist, which she does not foresee, despite her Ph.D. and understanding of belief systems.
Harper Lee (1926–2016) • Wrote To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) for which she won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize. In it, “Scout” tells us about Atticus Finch, a lawyer in the South, who defends an African American against an undeserved rape charge.
• Also wrote Go Set a Watchman (2015)
Toni Morrison (1931- ) • Won the Pulitzer Prize, the American Book Award in 1988, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
The Bluest Eye (1970) • It is about African American Pecola Breedlove’s suffering around her desire to have “white beauty”. • Told from various perspectives, such themes as incest, racism and child abuse come into play.
• Some of her other well- known novels are Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), and Beloved (1987). Beloved is a Civil War story about subjection and choice in slavery.
John Updike (1932-2009) • Novelist, poet, writer of short stories, critic. • Multiple times won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction • Work appeared The New Yorker starting in 1954.
• Most famous work is "Rabbit" series (the novels Rabbit , Run ; Rabbit Redux ; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest ). They are books of the life Harry "Rabbit Angstrom, a middle- class man, over several decades, from young man to tomb.
6.4 Poetry
Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) • A poet that returns to traditional form and meter, but maintains ambiguity and tension in word choice.
• His semiautobiographical poems that reflect personal experiences from his upbringing and Midwest origins are strong on their imagery and reflection.
• Won Pulitzer Prize for The Waking (1953), and the National Book Award for Poetry twice for Words for the Wind (1958) and The Far Field (1964).
Poems of his to read are “My Papa’s Waltz”, “Cuttings” and “Elegy for Jane”. Here is “Root Cellar”: Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch, Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark, Shoots dangled and drooped, Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates, Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.
And what a congress of stinks! Roots ripe as old bait, Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich, Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks. Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.
John Berryman (1914-1972) • A confessional poet (Confessional poetry was a subjective, highly personal voice that made transparent the intimacies and secrets of the writer – sex, family, drugs, politics, etc.), Berryman lived a turbulent life of multiple marriages, alcohol and depression.
• He worked at Harvard, Princeton, the University of Minnesota, among others. Like his father, he committed suicide. He was 57.
“Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” is a 57-stanza poem about her personal struggles with her Puritan lifestyle. There are a number of voices, including Berryman’s own. It is a mix of lyrical and narrative forms (excerpt):
[55] Headstones stagger under great draughts of time after heads pass out, and their world must reel speechless, blind in the end about its chilling star: thrift tuft, whin cushion—nothing. Already with the wounded flying dark air fills, I am a closet of secrets dying, races murder, foxholes hold men, reactor piles wage slow upon the wet brain rime.
• Berryman’s most known work is The Dream Songs , split into two books of poetry, 77 Dream Songs (1964) and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968). • He won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for this work.
• It is reminiscent of long, subjective poems like Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. It’s a semiautobiographical work in which "Henry” is an self-deprecating, self- conscious character who thinks about women, suicide, depression and solitude.
• Its personal connection to Berryman’s life is connected to his own struggles with his father’s suicide.
Robert Lowell (1917-1977) • A confessional poet who started as a formalist.
• Formalists , or New Critics , looked at the poem as an entity upon itself without falling into the biographical fallacy that could contextually cloud its meaning: they looked at the poem’s form, expression and use of literary devices.
• Lowell in this tradition published Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) for which he won the national poet laureate position in 1947, among other awards.
• In a change in style, Lowell wrote Life Studies (1959), which some see as the start of confessional poetry. • In this line he also wrote For the Union Dead (1964) and Notebook (1970).
• His confessional poetry steeped into the past of America “For the Union Dead”, and into his own traditional Puritan upbringing.
• Some other poems to read by him are “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” and “Memories of West Street and Lepke”. Here is “The Ruins of Time”:
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