The first few decades after World War II brought forth a handful of younger American writers whom the literary establishment – book critics, publishing industry insiders, the mainstream media – were eager to label as the next big thing in American literature. Fitzgerald was dead, Hemingway and Faulkner were washed up, and Steinbeck was no longer at his peak. The handsome young men of the so-called Lost Generation were now old and crotchety (or deceased) and just not as much fun as they used to be. The publishing industry needed some new stars. As Paul Simon sings, “Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts,” and American literature’s star-making machinery was working at full force. By the 1970s, a handful of, mostly, middle-aged white guys had been more or less anointed America’s Most Important Writers of Serious Literature. That doesn’t make for a good acronym along the lines of Wendy Cope’s TUMPs (Typically Useless Male Poets), so how about Frequently Over-Rated Men of American Literature, or FORMALs. Foremost among these FORMALs were Norman Mailer, John Updike, William Styron, John Barth, E.L. Doctorow, William Styron, Joseph Heller, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, and John Cheever. Others who were sometimes included in this bunch were Irwin Shaw, Truman Capote, J.D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, and James Baldwin. In 1975, if you had asked an educated New York Times subscriber which contemporary American writers were likely to still be read fifty years from now, he or she would probably have listed at least a few of the FORMALs. Those fifty years have pretty much passed. And now we can look back and see how well these literary titans of old have fared in the years since their heyday. In my opinion, time has not been particularly friendly to most of the FORMALs and their work. These days they look less like literary titans and more like the hero of the 1957 film The Incredible Shrinking Man. I say this not in glee but merely as an observation about the difficulty of predicting how future generations will look at the literature of the past.
THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MEN
THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MEN
THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MEN
The first few decades after World War II brought forth a handful of younger American writers whom the literary establishment – book critics, publishing industry insiders, the mainstream media – were eager to label as the next big thing in American literature. Fitzgerald was dead, Hemingway and Faulkner were washed up, and Steinbeck was no longer at his peak. The handsome young men of the so-called Lost Generation were now old and crotchety (or deceased) and just not as much fun as they used to be. The publishing industry needed some new stars. As Paul Simon sings, “Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts,” and American literature’s star-making machinery was working at full force. By the 1970s, a handful of, mostly, middle-aged white guys had been more or less anointed America’s Most Important Writers of Serious Literature. That doesn’t make for a good acronym along the lines of Wendy Cope’s TUMPs (Typically Useless Male Poets), so how about Frequently Over-Rated Men of American Literature, or FORMALs. Foremost among these FORMALs were Norman Mailer, John Updike, William Styron, John Barth, E.L. Doctorow, William Styron, Joseph Heller, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, and John Cheever. Others who were sometimes included in this bunch were Irwin Shaw, Truman Capote, J.D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, and James Baldwin. In 1975, if you had asked an educated New York Times subscriber which contemporary American writers were likely to still be read fifty years from now, he or she would probably have listed at least a few of the FORMALs. Those fifty years have pretty much passed. And now we can look back and see how well these literary titans of old have fared in the years since their heyday. In my opinion, time has not been particularly friendly to most of the FORMALs and their work. These days they look less like literary titans and more like the hero of the 1957 film The Incredible Shrinking Man. I say this not in glee but merely as an observation about the difficulty of predicting how future generations will look at the literature of the past.