Word: americans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...explain the enduring appeal of the Thanksgiving dinner. The traditional menu is largely a 19th-century re-creation of Pilgrim and Indian fare, and none of these groups normally claim membership in the world's great culinary traditions. But miraculously the meal remains a monument to pre-microwave American cooking. Not even McDonald's has had the audacity to create McTurkey, nor does Domino's deliver cranberry pizza. So too are the food faddists outflanked, as sun-dried tomatoes, imported chevre and oat-bran anything give way to overstuffed lassitude...
...this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature, we need a battalion, a brigade, of Zolas to head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property...
...Journalism, archaeologist of radical chic and, most recently, best-selling author of Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), which gleefully pilloried the greed and corruption of New York City life. Wolfe's summons to revolution, published in the November Harper's, pinpoints a new and surprising target: his fellow American novelists. This latest bonfire is already throwing off a lot of heat...
...long, sharp-witted article subtitled "A literary manifesto for the new social novel," Wolfe lambastes the current crop of U.S. novelists, as well as academic critics, for leading American fiction since about 1960 further and further from traditional realism. Young writers, he complains, are being cajoled into an avant-garde wilderness populated by exponents of bizarre genres: absurdists, magical realists, even K mart realists. They have been persuaded by the likes of Philip Roth that American life has become too absurd to write about in a realistic...
...waiting for some novelist to encompass the great phenomena of the age -- the hippie movement, say, or racial clashes or the Wall Street boom. But no one came forward. "It had been only yesterday, in the 1930s, that the big realistic novel, with its broad social sweep, had put American literature on the world stage for the first time," Wolfe writes, apparently forgetting such pre-1930s writers as Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser. He adds that while five of the first six American Nobel laureates in literature were what he describes as realistic novelists (Pearl Buck...