acclaimed the writing of Richard Wright, John Steinbeck, and John Dos Passos, among others — did not survive the anti-Communism of the 1950s. Freudianism and existentialism recognized the importance of human agency, but conceptualized that agency as individual activity, being more skeptical about the possibility of large-scale social reform. And the prevailing standards of literary excellence reinforced this individualism by emphasizing the stylistic and psychological subtlety of texts over their narrative scope, thematic significance, or variety of characterization.
As a result, much literature of the postwar period intentionally minimized its social situation, aspiring instead to the kind of timeless universality applauded by the New Critics. Even those authors who saw themselves as social critics had to confront an essential paradox of postwar individualism — the conflict between the private demands - 489- of self-realization and the public ones of group activity. One species of 'problem' novel tended to isolate a social issue and solve it through the efforts of enlightened individuals. The role of institutions in maintaining and even aggravating the problem remained largely unexamined; their potential for alleviating it, wholly unexplored. Laura Z. Hobson's Gentleman's Agreement (1947), for example, exposed the conspiracy of silence surrounding anti-Semitism, but trusted that right-minded liberals would be able to teach the masses to abandon their discriminatory practices. In The Ugly American (1958), authors William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick criticized the failure of American foreign policy in Southeast Asia to consider the character and needs of the cultures it addressed. Yet even this fierce attack on American ethnocentrism conceived the solution in terms of isolated achievements by empathetic field workers, much along the lines later implemented in John F. Kennedy's Peace Corps.
Often this paradoxical faith in the individual was epitomized by the representation of the judicial system, whose practices were depicted as inadequate, even corrupt, while its practitioners were celebrated as moral exemplars. Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny (1951) and Robert Traver's (John D. Voelker's) Anatomy of a Murder (1958) both recounted the trials of morally suspect defendants, whose acquittals were in some respects legal miscarriages; yet both applauded the verdicts as indications of the defense attorneys' moral superiority. Similarly the upbeat ending to Allen Drury's Advise and Consent (1959) contradicted the novel's more generally negative assessment of legislative amorality: the seediness of the backroom politics surrounding the Congressional ratification of a mediocre Cabinet nomination was transcended in the miraculous last-minute appointment of a qualified candidate. Harper Lee's prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) dissected Southern racism in a richly textured variation on the traditional coming-of-age novel. Yet here too the narrative subordinated the inequities of the legal system and the malignity of community prejudice to the moral integrity of the heroine's father, the courageous (though unsuccessful) defense attorney, and to his belief that most people are 'real nice' when viewed on their own terms.
Tensions between radical individualism and group morality were occasionally played out in an explicitly religious context. Both J. F. -490- and Flannery O'Connor were best known for their short fiction. Like their stories, however, their novels — his Morte d'Urban (1962) and Wheat That Springeth Green (1988) and her Wise Blood (1952) — set individual idiosyncrasies against an unironic background of Catholic orthodoxy: Powers's worldly priests and O'Connor's gothic grotesques found meaning in a potential for grace and moral depth that caught them unawares. And in Walker Percy's string of comic novels — most notably The Moviegoer (1961), The Last Gentleman (1966), Love in the Ruins (1972), and The Second Coming (1980) — his heroes confronted existential dread and entertained annihilation only to pull back from the abyss to reaffirm the traditional values of Christian community as epitomized by marriage and the nuclear family. Whatever the nature of their specific social criticisms, such religious works tended to an otherworldliness that unintentionally reinforced the status quo.
For those dissatisfied with religious consolations, existentialism offered a popular secular model for engagement with and revolt against social convention. One common form of such rebellion grew out of novelists' attempts to deal with the experience of World War II. In the traditional neorealist war novel, like James Jones's From Here to Eternity (1951), the conflict between personal authenticity and the army's need for conformity was reinforced by the contrast between the everyday tedium of military life and extraordinary events, like the attack on Pearl Harbor, from which an official history of war is constructed. In a more experimental text, like Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961), the struggle between individualism and authoritarianism was depicted through hyperbolic black comedy, which used military incompetence as a symbol for the absurdity of all modern existence. Despite differing literary techniques, however, at the heart of such narratives lay a fundamental contradiction: the war whose very existence was explicitly criticized as a failure of political community was implicitly valorized as a proving ground for individual integrity, usually conceived in narrowly masculine terms.
The anxiety fostered under fire continued into the postwar period as a more general uncertainty in the face of shifting moral values. Removed from his military battleground, the existential hero in the 1950s warred against society in general. Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky (1949) combined a Hemingwayesque narrative of expatriates in -491- Africa with a New Critical awareness of the poetic qualities of prose to characterize crises of self-identity resulting from the confrontation with an alien culture. In Bernard Malamud's early novel The Natural (1952) and Mark Harris's chronicles of pitcher Henry Wiggen — especially The Southpaw (1953) and Bang the Drum Slowly (1956) — the national pastime of baseball became a metaphor for American society and for the difficulty with which an individual accommodates his own moral standards to the needs of the team.
Most representative of the virtues and limitations of such popularized existentialism, however, were the works of J. D. Salinger — Franny and Zooey (1961), Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (1963), Seymour: An Introduction (1963), and the extraordinarily successful The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Through the Glass children and especially Holden Caulfield, Salinger captured the voice of adolescent anxiety; and Holden, along with film characters portrayed by James Dean and Marlon Brando, came to symbolize the disorientation of a generation searching for authenticity in a culture deemed (by Holden's dismissive reckoning) 'phony.' Yet Salinger's own solutions to alienation were incomplete. Holden's youth might excuse the sentimentality of the novel's depiction of him as a twentieth-century Huck Finn. Yet the suicide of the more mature Seymour Glass, and perhaps even Salinger's own refusal to publish after the mid-1960s, suggested that the elevation of the individual over society did not lead to a constructive program for growth or change.
A more influential model for rebellion was seen in the work of the 'Beats,' antiestablishment poets and novelists of the late 1950s and early 1960s. These countercultural figures were revolutionary not only in their personal philosophy and politics but as well in their prose style and means of publication. Eschewing the rule-bound traditionalism represented by Lionel Trilling or The New Yorker, the Beats sought to convey the transcendental experience of grace in an unrestrained prose that seemed unpolished, even automatic. Such underground classics as John Clellon Holmes's Go (1952), John Rechy's City of Night (1963), and Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) celebrated bohemian culture — jazz music, recreational drugs, and unconventional sexuality — as an alternative to the institutionalized mediocrity of middle- class experience. The greatest of these -492- novels — like William Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959) and especially Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) — combined unusual subject matter with an incantatory use of language that recalled the prophetic cadences of Walt Whitman and the Puritan jeremiads. Yet for all their revolutionary fervor, the Beats were unable to overcome fully their white middle-class roots, which surfaced in an implicit classism, racism, and sexism that weakened even the strongest of these narratives.
The stylistic innovations and political rebelliousness of the Beats were reincorporated into establishment fiction in novels like Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) or Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers (1974). But perhaps the best summary of the whole tradition of postwar individualism was the career of Norman Mailer. Like Jones, Mailer began in a neorealist mode, with his war novel The Naked and the Dead (1948). He soon, however, forsook the literary mainstream to become a spokesperson for the counterculture. In his essay The White Negro (1957; reprinted in 1959 in Advertisements for Myself), he celebrated
