The Rise of Multiethnic Fiction

Jewish-American writers like Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Arthur Miller, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer were the first since the 19th-century abolitionists and African-American writers of slave narratives to address ethnic prejudice and the plight of the outsider. They explored new ways of projecting an awareness that was both American and specific to a subculture. In this, they opened the door for the flowering of multiethnic writing in the decades to come.

The close of the 1980s and the beginnings of the 1990s saw minority writing become a major fixture on the American literary landscape. This is true in drama as well as in prose. The late August Wilson (1945-2005) wrote an acclaimed cycle of plays about the 20th-century black experience that stands alongside the work of novelists Alice Walker, John Edgar Wideman, and Toni Morrison. Scholars such as Lawrence Levine (The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture and History, 1996) and Ronald Takaki (A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, 1993) provide invaluable context for understanding multiethnic literature and its meanings.

Asian Americans also took their place on the scene. Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior (1976), carved out a place for her fellow Asian Americans. Among them is Amy Tan (1952-), whose luminous novels of Chinese life transposed to post-World War II America (The Joy Luck Club, 1989, and The Kitchen God's Wife, 1991) captivated readers. David Henry Hwang (1957-), a California-born son of Chinese immigrants, made his mark in drama, with plays such as F.O.B. (1981) and M. Butterfly (1986).

A relatively new group on the literary horizon were the Latino-American writers, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Oscar Hijuelos, the Cuban-born author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989). Leading writers of Mexican-American descent include Sandra Cisneros (Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, 1991); and Rudolfo Anaya, author of the poetic novel Bless Me, Ultima (1972).

Native-American fiction flowered. Most often the authors evoked the loss of traditional life based in nature, the stressful attempt to adapt to modern life, and their struggles with poverty, unemployment, and alcoholism. The Pulitzer Prize-winning House Made of Dawn (1968), by N. Scott Momaday (1934-), and his poetic The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) evoke the beauty and despair of Kiowa Indian life. Of mixed Pueblo descent, Leslie Marmon Silko wrote the critically esteemed novel Ceremony (1977), which gained a large general audience. Like Momaday's works, hers is a "chant novel" structured on Native-American healing rituals.

Blackfoot poet and novelist James Welch (1940-2003) detailed the struggles of Native Americans in his slender, nearly flawless novels Winter in the Blood (1974), The Death of Jim Loney (1979), Fools Crow (1986), and The Indian Lawyer (1990). Louise Erdrich, part Chippewa, has written a powerful series of novels inaugurated by Love Medicine (1984) that capture the tangled lives of dysfunctional reservation families with a poignant blend of stoicism and humor.

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