Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...FICTION...
...WORLD OF MODERN FICTION edited by Steven Marcus. 2 vols. 525 & 510 pages. Simon & Schuster...
Columbia University Professor Steven Marcus' anthology is composed of what zoos and museums call recent acquisitions-36 pieces of fiction written in the past 25 years by 16 Americans and 20 Europeans. It costs $17.50, which is more than peanuts...
...late Flannery O'Connor, whose death in 1964 was a severe loss to American fiction, is represented by a very long story-so long that it has been separately published as a novel. Wise Blood deals with a familiar theme: man obsessed to the point of fanaticism. The scene is the dirt-road South outside the progressive and prosperous mainstream of U.S. life. In a modern U.S. city, there is no place outside of the psychiatric ward for the hero of Wise Blood, a gaunt drifter who blinds himself the better to see God and extinguish the devil...
...there is one quality common to all these stories from the dual Anglo-American tradition as well as European sources, it is the concern for fiction as a revelation of the truth. The private vision, because it seeks no corroborating evidence, must carry conviction of itself. It is this seriousness-even in the comic vein of a Saul Bellow-which makes Jean-Paul Sartre's satirical portrait of a protoFascist, Childhood of a Leader, seem as frivolous in this company as a mere cartoon. The same quality makes the similarity-a glum but grimly maintained Freudo-Marxist determinism-between...