Facing the Abyss

November 13, 2017
In this account of how U.S. literature and culture reacted to the crises of the 1940s, Hutchinson, an English professor at Cornell University, overreaches. Had Hutchinson focused even more narrowly on the literature, where his strength clearly lies, the book would have benefitted. Hutchinson is on firmest ground when closely reading the texts—Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, Ann Petry’s Country Place, Richard Wright’s Native Son, and so on—that he considers pivotal examples of cultural trends. The definition of culture, in this context, is fuzzy, however, and Hutchinson’s forays into other art forms, such as music and painting, are incomplete. The book begins by touching on an impressive array of general topics—the role of publishers such as Bennett Cerf and James Laughlin, the rise of New Criticism, the impact of WWII on writers and writing—and then veers into chapters about literature by and about marginalized groups. This section, however, fragments the study even as Hutchinson tries to create a cohesive, linked picture. For those who wish to begin exploring the literature of this tumultuous period, Hutchinson’s study might well be a good introduction, but for a wider perspective on the true breadth of American culture during the ’40s, one should look further afield.

November 15, 2017
In post-World War II America, literature revealed the nation's attitudes about patriotism, race, gender, and ecology."In the 1940s," Hutchinson (American Culture/Cornell Univ.; In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line, 2006, etc.) writes, "literature mattered." His capacious, informative cultural history amply supports that declaration: writers, he adds, "were celebrities" whose works were widely read and whose ideas were discussed on the radio and in newspapers and magazines. Book publishing thrived, fueled by demand, not least among returning soldiers, who had hungrily devoured free books published under the auspices of the Armed Services Editions. Public libraries and the proliferation of inexpensive paperbacks made books available to a huge reading public. Colleges began creative writing programs, and New Criticism came to dominate English department offerings. Hutchinson attentively examines works by a pantheon of writers, some of whom have become canonical (Carson McCullers, Randall Jarrell, Richard Wright), some enjoying popular contemporary acclaim (Irwin Shaw, Jo Sinclair, Howard Fast); he also draws on influential literary critics, such as Lionel Trilling; memoirists, such as Alfred Kazin; and historians. Hutchinson appears to have read everything written during the prolific decade. Among the themes that recurred in 1940s literature was the war itself, where a "sense of separation, of loneliness and unreality, surfaces over and over again, in accounts of both the battlefront and the home front." Writers expressed disillusionment about what they were fighting for, hatred toward their officers, and fear of being ground up "in the maw of history." Hutchinson devotes chapters to Jewish and African-American writers who negotiated the relationship among ethnic, religious, and racial identity "and the ideal of universality or a planetary humanism" that arose after the horror of the war. Einstein notably suggested that "the only solution for civilization and the human race lies in the creation of a world government." Planetary humanism, however, was undermined by pervasive racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and misogyny.A richly detailed investigation of burgeoning creativity in a decade marked by both hope and dread.

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January 1, 2018

Previously, Hutchinson (Newton C. Farr Professor of American Culture, Cornell Univ.; In Search of Nella Larsen) has written about the Harlem Renaissance and related topics. In this study, he shifts focus to ask what was going on in American literature and arts in the 1940s. In particular, how did the experience of war awaken new styles and preoccupations among American writers, painters, and social thinkers? The result is a cross-genre study that illuminates common ideational content drifting across American culture in that tumultuous decade. Hutchinson's impressive command of the material allows him to dismiss categorizations of black, Jewish, queer, feminist, and ecological literature as each in its own pocket in favor of a more nuanced analysis of their commonalities. Most notably, artists in all camps favored a somewhat abstracted universalism, seeking more universal patterns of human being. The book starts with Gore Vidal's pioneering Williwaw (1946) and ends with the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In between, it's quite a ride. VERDICT Hutchinson's study bodes fair to become a classic in the field of American literary studies.--David Keymer, Cleveland

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