![]() ![]() In his acceptance speech, Ellison said: “If I were asked in all seriousness just what I considered to be the chief significance of Invisible Man as a fiction, I would reply: Its experimental attitude and its attempt to return to the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy which typified the best of our nineteenth-century fiction.” (So influential that President Obama modeled Dreams of My Father on it.) The novel was awarded the National Book Award in 1953. “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me,” Ellison writes in the opening lines of this much-read, much-assigned, and highly influential novel. This of course despite the fact that Salinger did not at all write the book for teenagers, and that it was well received-called “brilliant” by reviewer after reviewer-as a novel for adults.įamously, the contemporary hype around Catcher was so great that it forced Salinger into the reclusiveness he’s now known for-he was looking, primarily, for privacy, and didn’t mind perpetuating a myth around himself in the process. There is a strong dialogue between the book and the teenage experience-they are mutually shaping.” As Adam Golub has pointed out, Holden was the first teenager Americans really knew who refused to grow up, and was celebrated for it. “The idea of existential angst in some way draws from Catcher in the Rye as much as the novel reflects it. “Leisure gave teenagers time to reflect on where they were going,” Dr. They had time on their hands and angst in their hearts. It is the first novel of the modern teenage years.” Indeed, it was only after WWII that a distinctive youth culture began to emerge: in part because more teenagers were in high school and fewer were working to support their families. “Before that people went through their teenage years with no sense it was a particular kind of identity. “It absolutely speaks to that moment the teenager emerges as a recognizable social group,” Salinger scholar Sarah Graham told the BBC. It may have even influenced the way we think about teenagers to this day. Instead of producing a combat novel, as Norman Mailer, James Jones, and Joseph Heller did, Salinger took the trauma of war and embedded it within what looked to the naked eye like a coming-of-age novel. Salinger emerged from the war incapable of believing in the heroic, noble ideals we like to think our cultural institutions uphold. Finally, two process notes: I’ve limited myself to one book for author over the entire 12-part list, so you may see certain works skipped over in favor of others, even if both are important (for instance, I ignored Dubliners in the 1910s so I could include Ulysses in the 1920s), and in the case of translated work, I’ll be using the date of the English translation, for obvious reasons. I’ve simply selected books that, if read together, would give a fair picture of the landscape of literary culture for that decade-both as it was and as it is remembered. And of course, varied and complex as it is, there’s no list that could truly define American life over ten or any number of years, so I do not make any claim on exhaustiveness. Though the books on these lists need not be American in origin, I am looking for books that evoke some aspect of American life, actual or intellectual, in each decade-a global lens would require a much longer list. The Great Gatsby wasn’t a bestseller upon its release, but we now see it as emblematic of a certain American sensibility in the 1920s. Of course, hindsight can also distort the senses the canon looms and obscures. Still, over the next weeks, we’ll be publishing a list a day, each one attempting to define a discrete decade, starting with the 1900s (as you’ve no doubt guessed by now) and counting down until we get to the (nearly complete) 2010s. In the moment, you often can’t tell which books are which. sometimes due to great artistry, sometimes due to luck, and sometimes because they manage to recognize and capture some element of the culture of the time. ![]() Others stick around, are read and re-read, are taught and discussed. Some books are flashes in the pan, read for entertainment and then left on a bus seat for the next lucky person to pick up and enjoy, forgotten by most after their season has passed. ![]()
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