Making Connections

American Prose since 1945

1. To some extent, white writers from the American South, such as Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, and Flannery O’Connor, deal with questions of monumental guilt and the inexorable power of history that emerged earlier in the writing of William Faulkner, as in his novel As I Lay Dying and story “Barn Burning” (see pages 1695–1790 and 1790–1803, respectively, in volume D).
2. The lived experiences as an educated African American in a country that has still to come to terms with its racism informs the writing of Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) in a very different context than the similar experiences of Zora Neale Hurston, author of “The Eatonville Anthology,” “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” and The Gilded Six-bits” (see pages 1507–1515, 1516–1518, and 1518–1527, respectively, in volume D).
3. Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey suggests a new structure for the American novel and a new generation of American youth, in comparison with Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (see pages 219–407 in volume C).
4. Although Gloria Anzaldúa’s “La conciencia de la Mestiza/Towards a New Consciousness” contrasts, both historically and culturally, with Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (see pages 633–723 in volume C), both writers challenged assumptions about being a woman in the United States.

American Poetry since 1945

1. Like the modernist Gertrude Stein, many postwar poets, including Charles Olson and Adrienne Rich, used their work to experiment with radical ideas about poetic language. (See “American Literature between the Wars, 1914–1945,” page 1081.)
   
2. During the 1970s and 1980s, poets of color, notably Asian, Latino, and Native American, began to write about the distinctiveness of their political, social, racial, and ethnic lives. A useful comparison can be made with works by African American authors of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as earlier writers, including Booker T. Washington and
   W. E. B. Dubois. (See “American Literature between the Wars, 1914–1945,” page 1082; “American Literature 1865–1914,” page 14.)
   
3. Latino poets, including Denise Chavez, Alberto Ríos, and Pat Mora, who began to be published in the 1970s and 1980s under the auspices of publishing houses such as Quinto Sol and Arte Publico Press, as well as Native American poets such as Paula Gunn Allen and Linda Hogan, offered alternatives to the image of America produced by early writings, including Columbus’s writings and the work of Bartolomé de las Casas. (See “Literature to 1700,” pages 1–14.)