Happy Birthday Americans!

by

American FlagSo, them Americans are turning… 234! Holy molly they’s old.

Anyway, in celebration of July 4 (yes, it’s July 5 here in New Zealand, but we’re future forward) I thought I’d mention some of my favourite American authors.

Now I really haven’t read a lot of the older American writers – except for Edgar Allen Poe and, let’s face it, dude was possibly a little weird and had some issues. But at his best he was creepier than a cat stalking (The Fall of the House of Usher). I’ve tried to read The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper but it turned out to be not quite so appealing without large pictures of Daniel Day-Lewis… oh, I’m a bad literary student.

However my opinions pick up when we start getting into the later 19th century. For instance – Walt Whitman. A poet whose mere existence has been the catalyst for two of the greatest moments of my generation:

  1. “Oh captain, my captain” – Dead Poet’s Society. Maudlin, mawkish, crappy, watchable, love it.
  2. “Damn you, Walt Whitman! I-hate-you-Walt-freaking-Whitman! “Leaves of Grass”, my ass!” – Homer Simpson. Best. Simpsons Line. Ever.

Oh, and his poetry was lyrical and blew a lot of poetical conventions out of the water.

Turning into the 20th century there’s Edith Wharton, a fantastic writer whose understated but devastating portraits of snooty Noo Yawk biarches of the early 20th century are far more enjoyable than she gets credit for. And Willa Cather who wrote similarly readable portraits of craggy inhabitants of the Midwest and Great Plains. Moving further on we get Fitzgerald – I’ve read and enjoyed The Great Gatsby, Steinbeck – have read Of Mice and Men and would really like to read The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, and Nathanael West – if you haven’t read The Day of the Locusts, why ever not?

Don’t mention Hemingway or, especially, Faulkner to me.

One of my most favourite favourites? Henry Miller. Yes, alright, he’s overblown and probably over-rated by some and he can be totally rude, but meh to that. Tropic of Cancer is brilliant. That brings us to The Beats – Ginsberg, yes. Kerouac, no. Burroughs, yes. Especially Junky, Naked Lunch and Cities of the Red Night.

More poetry – Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. I was an angsty literary teenage girl, you know. Short stories – J.D. Salinger. One of the best novels ever written anywhere – Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Yes, he’s Russian, and yes, it’s American.

Thomas Pynchon - The SimpsonsThen we get into the 1970′s (and I’m almost making my appearance in the world) and one of the greatest American writers and probably the craziest. The best are the craziest, though, so perhaps that’s superfluous to say. Thomas Pynchon. He’s the most amazing writer – who’s read Mason & Dixon? I have and I understood about 50% of it (it’s written in 18th century syntax, grammar and spelling) but I loved 100% of it. It’s a wild tale, an entertainment and it’s historically accurate.

I also have to mention Richard Yates who I only started reading last year – The Easter Parade, Revolutionary Road, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness… he’s superb.

Michael Chabon, Bret Easton Ellis… wait, where are the women? Is it just me or is there a distinct lack of women in American lit? Joyce Carol Oates – prolific and who can keep up? :) Joan Didion, though she writes almost as much (if not more) non-fiction. Why can’t I think of more women?

Okay, so this has been a bit of a rambling opinion piece – I ‘d love to hear your suggestions? And I know I must have missed who knows how many great writers that I’m going to be terribly embarrassed about having forgotten!

25 thoughts on “Happy Birthday Americans!”

  1. USA women writers: among many many others-
    Toni Morrison
    Barbara Kingsolver
    Louise May Alcott
    Ursula Le Guin
    Eudora Welty
    Zenna Henderson
    R. A. McAvoy
    Alice Walker
    Harriet Beecher Stowe
    Emily &*$#@! Dickinson (one of the world’s best poets in my humble humble opinion)
    MFK Fisher

    -that took a minute & a half, and is skewed towards fantasy & scific but – waua! USA hath it’s riches, and not least among them is women, writing.

    • Argh, you’re right, you’re right! Well, actually I’m not a fan of Little Women.

      But added to list of many authors (this is my list of many authors, lalalala)

  3. What about Paul Auster somewhere on the list? I sense that not everyone likes him, and I have only recently picked up my first Auster – starting with the “Man in the Dark” which was good enough to make me want to read more. “Travels in the Scriptorium” followed, then “Timbuktu” written from the point of view of a dog and finally “The Book of Illusions” which I absolutely loved and can’t recommend enough.

    I agree with your comment on Faulkner. I had a bad experience. I had to study “As I lay dying” when I was 17 or 18. My entire criticism consisted of rubbishing the fact it made no sense, had no grammar, and once you had read the précis on the back cover there was nothing else to know.

    • Auster – haven’t read. More list making, huh? :)

      Sounds like you and I did the same university paper? :D I was going to write “Don’t mention Faulkner. Ever.” but that seemed a little threatening.

  4. Faulkner. Eng Lit. 198something. Murdered my enthusiasm.

    However, at the same time Pynchon (Lot49), Le Guin and Fitzgerald made up of it.

    Just to be clear ‘Kerouac, no’ means you don’ like? Hmm, Ok.

    Poets: Bukowski, Ginsberg, cummings, and latterly Frost, most float my boat. There are so many moments when ‘a perhaps hand’ nicely smooths things over. I also read Sylvia Plath and Dickinson, but I may have been just trying to impress someone. At 17, it seems reasonably likely.

    • Yep, Lot 49 – sounds like you may have done an earlier version of the same eng lit paper.

      Kerouac, no. I don’t completely dislike him but the only book I’ve read that I half-way liked was The Dharma Bums. I find the rest of his stuff a bit distant and old and lacking in a universality. It’s hard to explain, and perhaps I am just put off by the feeling that reading it is too hard work.

      Ooooh Bukowski! Yes to Bukowski!

  5. Sara Paretsky! Best female crime author around in my opinion… But really I’m not going to list my favourite American authors… That would take forever and my fingers would hurt from typing. Need to save my finger-strength for writing!

    • Ah, now there’s an interesting suggestion! I have heard many good things about Paretsky but there’s another pool I haven’t dived into yet.

  7. I’ve read 2 Sara Paretsky titles, but I’m not much of a crime reader. However, there are 3 writers I do enjoy in that genre – and one of them is American – John D. MacDonald, and his Travis McGee. (The others are Elias Peters (the Brother Cadfael series) and anything by Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine.)

  8. Some excellent contemporary women writers from the US: Deborah Eisenberg, Aimee Bender, Lorrie Moore, Jhumpa Lahiri, Claire Messud, Ellen Gilchrist, Amy Hempel, Francine Prose, Valerie Martin.

  9. 1) Gene Wolfe — who IMNAAHO, is the best living American writer who’s never gotten his due because of the idiotic genre snobbery of so-called “mainstream” critics.

    2) Peter De Vries. Best known as a comic novelist (John O’Hara without the bitter, basically) his ‘The Blood of the Lamb’ was written after the death of his eleven year old daughter. Elegantly heart-breaking.

    3) Richard Stark was one of the many pseudonyms of Donald Westlake, who died last year. The University of Chicago Press is bringing back into print the sixteen novels he wrote about the relentless professional thief Parker between 1962-1974. Harboiled noir like being hit in the head with a titanium crowbar on a moonless midnight.

    3)

  10. Oh, and where is Flannery O’Connor? (If you’ve got some serious cash hanging around, I’d warmly recommend the Library of America volume which contains all her fiction, and generous selections from her occasional prose and letters.)

    Tsk… :)

    Still, I’ll give you a pass because I love Edith Wharton too. Gore Vidal once said her unforgivable sin was being a wealthy independent woman who failed to be appropriately repentant. Think he has a point, though she’s a bit like Jane Austen in the sense that she’s a lot tougher than she’s often given credit for.

  11. Hmm, can we add Vonnegut, James Baldwin and Saul Bellow (although born Canadian, wrote in Chicago I believe)?

    And more recently Donna Tart, although her second book ‘The Little Friend’ didn’t quite have the resonance of ‘Secret History’ IMhO.

    • I *could* let you add Baldwin – but I haven’t read enough Bellow.

      I liked The Secret History but I’m not convinced Tartt is quite as virtuoso as she’s made out to be (i.e. she’s been given a reputation by others).

      • I loved The Secret History so much that I even bought a second, signed, copy soon after it came out. Ten years later I was so utterly disappointed with “The Little Friend” that I never even finished reading it. I see that she is going to publish another novel in 2012 – another 10 year gap. I think I’ll spend my cash on another latte to avoid disappointment

        • But you see, like you I thought The Secret History was so damn good, I’ll probably buy it just to check. Might wait for a Bookie review though, if she bothers to read it. ;-)

          • LOL. You are probably right. One day I’ll find myself standing in front of a crisp new copy of the next novel thinking, “but the Secret History was so good….”.

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