U.S. Culture

photographic art had to compete with the widely available commercial

photography in news and fashion magazines. By the 1950s the tradition of

photojournalism, which presented news stories primarily with photographs,

had produced many outstanding works. In 1955 Steichen, who was director of

photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, called attention to

this work in an exhibition called The Family of Man.

Throughout the 20th century, most professional photographers earned their

living as portraitists or photojournalists, not as artists. One of the

most important exceptions was Ansel Adams, who took majestic photographs

of the Western American landscape. Adams used his art to stimulate social

awareness and to support the conservation cause of the Sierra Club. He

helped found the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in

1940, and six years later helped establish the photography department at

the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (now the San Francisco

Art Institute). He also held annual photography workshops at Yosemite

National Park from 1955 to 1981 and wrote a series of influential books on

photographic technique.

Adams's elegant landscape photography was only one small stream in a

growing current of interest in photography as an art form. Early in the

20th century, teacher-turned-photographer Lewis Hine established a

documentary tradition in photography by capturing actual people, places,

and events. Hine photographed urban conditions and workers, including

child laborers. Along with their artistic value, the photographs often

implicitly called for social reform. In the 1930s and 1940s, photographers

joined with other depression-era artists supported by the federal

government to create a photographic record of rural America. Walker Evans,

Dorothea Lange, and Arthur Rothstein, among others, produced memorable and

widely reproduced portraits of rural poverty and American distress during

the Great Depression and during the dust storms of the period.

In 1959, after touring the United States for two years, Swiss-born

photographer Robert Frank published The Americans, one of the landmarks of

documentary photography. His photographs of everyday life in America

introduced viewers to a depressing, and often depressed, America that

existed in the midst of prosperity and world power.

Photographers continued to search for new photographic viewpoints. This

search was perhaps most disturbingly embodied in the work of Diane Arbus.

Her photos of mental patients and her surreal depictions of Americans

altered the viewer’s relationship to the photograph. Arbus emphasized

artistic alienation and forced viewers to stare at images that often made

them uncomfortable, thus changing the meaning of the ordinary reality that

photographs are meant to capture.

American photography continues to flourish. The many variants of art

photography and socially conscious documentary photography are widely

available in galleries, books, and magazines.

A host of other visual arts thrive, although they are far less connected

to traditional fine arts than photography. Decorative arts include, but

are not limited to, art glass, furniture, jewelry, pottery, metalwork, and

quilts. Often exhibited in craft galleries and studios, these decorative

arts rely on ideals of beauty in shape and color as well as an

appreciation of well-executed crafts. Some of these forms are also

developed commercially. The decorative arts provide a wide range of

opportunity for creative expression and have become a means for Americans

to actively participate in art and to purchase art for their homes that is

more affordable than works produced by many contemporary fine artists.

Literature

American literature since World War II is much more diverse in its voices

than ever before. It has also expanded its view of the past as people

rediscovered important sources from non-European traditions, such as

Native American folktales and slave narratives. Rediscovering these

traditions expanded the range of American literary history.

American Jewish writing from the 1940s to the 1960s was the first serious

outpouring of an American literature that contained many voices. Some

Jewish writers had begun to be heard as literary critics and novelists

before World War II, part of a general broadening of American literature

during the first half of the 20th century. After the war, talented Jewish

writers appeared in such numbers and became so influential that they stood

out as a special phenomenon. They represented at once a subgroup within

literature and the new voice of American literature.

Several Jewish American novelists, including Herman Wouk and Norman

Mailer, wrote important books about the war without any special ethnic

resonance. But writers such as novelists Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and

Philip Roth, and storytellers Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick wrote most

memorably from within the Jewish tradition. Using their Jewish identity

and history as background, these authors asked how moral behavior was

possible in modern America and how the individual could survive in the

contemporary world. Saul Bellow most conspicuously posed these questions,

framing them even before the war was over in his earliest novel, Dangling

Man (1944). He continued to ask them in various ways through a series of

novels paralleling the life cycle, including The Adventures of Augie March

(1953), Herzog (1964), and Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970). One novel in the

series earned a Pulitzer Prize (Humboldt's Gift, 1975). Bellow was awarded

the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976. Like Bellow, Philip Roth and

Bernard Malamud struggled with identity and selfhood as well as with

morality and fate. However, Roth often resisted being categorized as a

Jewish writer. Playwright Arthur Miller rarely invoked his Jewish

heritage, but his plays contained similar existential themes.

Isaac Bashevis Singer was also part of this postwar group of American

Jewish writers. His novels conjure up his lost roots and life in prewar

Poland and the ghostly, religiously inspired fantasies of Jewish existence

in Eastern Europe before World War II. Written in Yiddish and much less

overtly American, Singer’s writings were always about his own specific

past and that of his people. Singer's re-creation of an earlier world as

well as his stories of adjusting to the United States won him a Nobel

Prize in literature in 1978.

Since at least the time of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, American

writers of African descent, such as Richard Wright, sought to express the

separate experiences of their people while demanding to be recognized as

fully American. The difficulty of that pursuit was most completely and

brilliantly realized in the haunting novel Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph

Ellison. African American writers since then have contended with the same

challenge of giving voice to their experiences as a marginalized and often

despised part of America.

Several African American novelists in recent decades have struggled to

represent the wounded manner in which African Americans have participated

in American life. In the 1950s and 1960s, James Baldwin discovered how

much he was part of the United States after a period of self-imposed exile

in Paris, and he wrote about his dark and hurt world in vigorous and

accusatory prose. The subject has also been at the heart of an

extraordinary rediscovery of the African American past in the plays of

Lorraine Hansberry and the fiction of Alice Walker, Charles Johnson, and

Toni Morrison. Probably more than any American writer before her, Morrison

has grappled with the legacy that slavery inflicted upon African Americans

and with what it means to live with a separate consciousness within

American culture. In 1993 Morrison became the first African American

writer to be awarded a Nobel Prize in literature.

Writers from other groups, including Mexican Americans, Native Americans,

Chinese Americans, Korean Americans, and Filipino Americans, also grappled

with their separate experiences within American culture. Among them, N.

Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich have dealt with

issues of poverty, life on reservations, and mixed ancestry among Native

Americans. Rudolfo Anaya and Sandra Cisneros have dealt with the

experiences of Mexican Americans, and Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston

have explored Chinese American family life.

Even before World War II, writers from the American South reflected on

what it meant to have a separate identity within American culture. The

legacy of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction left the South with a

sense of a lost civilization, embodied in popular literature such as Gone

With the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell, and with questions about how a

Southern experience could frame a literary legacy. Southern literature in

the 20th century draws deeply on distinct speech rhythms, undercurrents of

sin, and painful reflections on evil as part of a distinctly Southern

tradition. William Faulkner most fully expressed these issues in a series

of brilliant and difficult novels set in a fictional Mississippi county.

These novels, most of them published in the 1930s, include The Sound and

the Fury (1929), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom (1936). For

his contribution, Faulkner received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1949.

More recent Southern writers, such as Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor,

Walker Percy, James Dickey, and playwright Tennessee Williams, have

continued this tradition of Southern literature.

In addition to expressing the minority consciousness of Southern

regionalism, Faulkner's novels also reflected the artistic modernism of

20th-century literature, in which reality gave way to frequent

interruptions of fantasy and the writing is characterized by streams of

consciousness rather than by precise sequences in time. Other American

writers, such as Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and E. L. Doctorow

also experimented with different novel forms and tried to make their

writing styles reflect the peculiarities of consciousness in the chaos of

the modern world. Doctorow, for example, in his novel Ragtime juxtaposed

real historical events and people with those he made up. Pynchon

questioned the very existence of reality in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973).

Aside from Faulkner, perhaps the greatest modernist novelist writing in

the United States was йmigrй Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov first wrote in his

native Russian, and then in French, before settling in the United States

and writing in English. Nabokov saw no limits to the possibilities of

artistic imagination, and he believed the artist's ability to manipulate

language could be expressed through any subject. In a series of novels

written in the United States, Nabokov demonstrated that he could develop

any situation, even the most alien and forbidden, to that end. This was

demonstrated in Lolita (1955), a novel about sexual obsession that caused

a sensation and was first banned as obscene.

Despite its obvious achievements, modernism in the United States had its

most profound effect on other forms of literature, especially in poetry

and in a new kind of personal journalism that gradually erased the sharp

distinctions between news reporting, personal reminiscence, and fiction

writing.

20th-Century Poetry

Modern themes and styles of poetry have been part of the American

repertoire since the early part of the 20th century, especially in the

work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Their works were difficult,

emotionally restrained, full of non-American allusions, and often

inaccessible. After World War II, new poetic voices developed that were

more exuberant and much more American in inspiration and language. The

poets who wrote after the war often drew upon the work of William Carlos

Williams and returned to the legacy of Walt Whitman, which was democratic

in identification and free-form in style. These poets provided postwar

poetry with a uniquely American voice.

The Beatnik, or Beat, poets of the 1950s notoriously followed in Whitman’s

tradition. They adopted a radical ethic that included drugs, sex, art, and

the freedom of the road. Jack Kerouac captured this vision in On the Road

(1957), a quintessential book about Kerouac’s adventures wandering across

the United States. The most significant poet in the group was Allen

Ginsberg, whose sexually explicit poem Howl (1956) became the subject of a

court battle after it was initially banned as obscene. The Beat poets

spanned the country, but adopted San Francisco as their special outpost.

The city continued to serve as an important arena for poetry and

unconventional ideas, especially at the City Lights Bookstore co-owned by

writer and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Other modernist poets included

Gwendolyn Brooks, who retreated from the conventional forms of her early

poetry to write about anger and protest among African Americans, and

Adrienne Rich, who wrote poetry focused on women's rights, needs, and

desires.

Because it is open to expressive forms and innovative speech, modern

poetry is able to convey the deep personal anguish experienced by several

of the most prominent poets of the postwar period, among them Robert

Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman.

Sometimes called confessional poets, they used poetry to express

nightmarish images of self-destruction. As in painting, removing limits

and conventions on form permitted an almost infinite capacity for

conveying mood, feeling, pain, and inspiration. This personal poetry also

brought American poetry closer to the European modernist tradition of

emotional anguish and madness. Robert Frost, probably the most famous and

beloved of modern American poets, wrote evocative and deeply felt poetry

that conveyed some of these same qualities within a conventional pattern

of meter and rhyme.

Another tradition of modern poetry moved toward playful engagement with

language and the creative process. This tradition was most completely

embodied in the brilliant poetry of Wallace Stevens, whose work dealt with

the role of creative imagination. This tradition was later developed in

the seemingly simple and prosaic poetry of John Ashbery, who created

unconventional works that were sometimes records of their own creation.

Thus, poetry after World War II, like the visual arts, expanded the

possibilities of emotional expression and reflected an emphasis on the

creative process. The idea of exploration and pleasure through unexpected

associations and new ways of viewing reality connected poetry to the

modernism of the visual arts.

Journalism

Modernist sensibilities were also evident in the emergence of a new form

of journalism. Journalism traditionally tried to be factual and objective

in presentation. By the mid-1970s, however, some of America's most

creative writers were using contemporary events to create a new form of

personal reporting. This new approach stretched the boundaries of

journalism and brought it closer to fiction because the writers were

deeply engaged and sometimes personally involved in events. Writers such

as Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and Joan Didion created a literary

journalism that infused real events with their own passion. In Armies of

the Night (1968), the record of his involvement in the peace movement,

Mailer helped to define this new kind of writing. Capote's In Cold Blood

(1966), the retelling of the senseless killing of a Kansas family, and

Mailer’s story of a murderer's fate in The Executioner's Song (1979)

brought this hyperrealism to chilling consummation. No less vivid were

Didion's series of essays on California culture in the late 1960s and her

reporting of the sensational trial of football star O. J. Simpson in 1995.

Performing Arts

As in other cultural spheres, the performing arts in the United States in

the 20th century increasingly blended traditional and popular art forms.

The classical performing arts—music, opera, dance, and theater—were not a

widespread feature of American culture in the first half of the 20th

century. These arts were generally imported from or strongly influenced by

Europe and were mainly appreciated by the wealthy and well educated.

Traditional art usually referred to classical forms in ballet and opera,

orchestral or chamber music, and serious drama. The distinctions between

traditional music and popular music were firmly drawn in most areas.

During the 20th century, the American performing arts began to incorporate

wider groups of people. The African American community produced great

musicians who became widely known around the country. Jazz and blues

singers such as Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Billie

Holiday spread their sounds to black and white audiences. In the 1930s and

1940s, the swing music of Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller

adapted jazz to make a unique American music that was popular around the

country. The American performing arts also blended Latin American

influences beginning in the 20th century. Between 1900 and 1940, Latin

American dances, such as the tango from Argentina and the rumba from Cuba,

were introduced into the United States. In the 1940s a fusion of Latin and

jazz elements was stimulated first by the Afro-Cuban mambo and later on by

the Brazilian bossa nova.

Throughout the 20th century, dynamic classical institutions in the United

States attracted international talent. Noted Russian-born choreographer

George Balanchine established the short-lived American Ballet Company in

the 1930s; later he founded the company that in the 1940s would become the

New York City Ballet. The American Ballet Theatre, also established during

the 1940s, brought in non-American dancers as well. By the 1970s this

company had attracted Soviet defector Mikhail Baryshnikov, an

internationally acclaimed dancer who served as the company’s artistic

director during the 1980s.

In classical music, influential Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, who

composed symphonies using innovative musical styles, moved to the United

States in 1939. German-born pianist, composer, and conductor Andrй Previn,

who started out as a jazz pianist in the 1940s, went on to conduct a

number of distinguished American symphony orchestras. Another Soviet,

cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, became conductor of the National Symphony

Orchestra in Washington, D.C., in 1977.

Some of the most innovative artists in the first half of the 20th century

successfully incorporated new forms into classical traditions. Composers

George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, and dancer Isadora Duncan were notable

examples. Gershwin combined jazz and spiritual music with classical in

popular works such as Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and the opera Porgy and Bess

(1935). Copland developed a unique style that was influenced by jazz and

American folk music. Early in the century, Duncan redefined dance along

more expressive and free-form lines.

Some artists in music and dance, such as composer John Cage and dancer and

choreographer Merce Cunningham, were even more experimental. During the

1930s Cage worked with electronically produced sounds and sounds made with

everyday objects such as pots and pans. He even invented a new kind of

piano. During the late 1930s, avant-garde choreographer Cunningham began

to collaborate with Cage on a number of projects.

Perhaps the greatest, and certainly the most popular, American innovation

was the Broadway musical, which also became a movie staple. Beginning in

the 1920s, the Broadway musical combined music, dance, and dramatic

performance in ways that surpassed the older vaudeville shows and musical

revues but without being as complex as European grand opera. By the 1960s,

this American musical tradition was well established and had produced

extraordinary works by important musicians and lyricists such as George

and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz

Hart, Jerome Kern, and Oscar Hammerstein II. These productions required an

immense effort to coordinate music, drama, and dance. Because of this, the

musical became the incubator of an American modern dance tradition that

produced some of America's greatest choreographers, among them Jerome

Robbins, Gene Kelly, and Bob Fosse.

In the 1940s and 1950s the American musical tradition was so dynamic that

it attracted outstanding classically trained musicians such as Leonard

Bernstein. Bernstein composed the music for West Side Story, an updated

version of Romeo and Juliet set in New York that became an instant classic

in 1957. The following year, Bernstein became the first American-born

conductor to lead a major American orchestra, the New York Philharmonic.

He was an international sensation who traveled the world as an ambassador

of the American style of conducting. He brought the art of classical music

to the public, especially through his "Young People's Concerts,"

television shows that were seen around the world. Bernstein used the many

facets of the musical tradition as a force for change in the music world

and as a way of bringing attention to American innovation.

In many ways, Bernstein embodied a transformation of American music that

began in the 1960s. The changes that took place during the 1960s and 1970s

resulted from a significant increase in funding for the arts and their

increased availability to larger audiences. New York City, the American

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