Underrated American Veeky Forumserature

Winesberg Ohio needs some more love around here. And Nathaniel West.

Coover, Hawkes, Cheever, Brautigan

Red Badge of Courage is alright and doesn't really get talked about anymore

>Re: Philip Roth, he wrote some gems (American Pastoral is deservedly a modern classic) but his mid-career novels are nothing special, and there are too many of them, and that's probably why some of his better work is overlooked.
The works I've read by Roth so far, including American Pastoral, have all been fun to read but very trite. The prose style obviously is not something of great poetic beauty, no one is calling Roth is a stylist (although he occasionally does hit a nice rhythm), and everything else besides the prose is almost like an airport thriller. His works are like genre works without anything specifically genre-y about them. Entirely un-universal, too Jewish, too much about patriarchal seducers, too middle-class. I don't really remember any of his characters, because none of them are really that differentiated or made memorable. I don't get why he's so highly rated.

The one thing he's talented at (I'll give him), is making really absorbing plots out of middle-class happenings, and occasionally he creates very emotionally charged scenes. He's also very good at creating a tone of complete isolation, solitude, despair, the feeling of one's world breaking down around one. But there's nothing deeper than the immediate emotional impact, it wears away after a while. It's shock value as opposed to something that lasts deeper.

Winesburg Ohio is a great damn novel

Veeky Forums's thing for Hart Crane seems to have waned, which is a damn shame.
Adam Johnson seems like he could be Veeky Forums-core, or at least Fortune Smiles. I get why he isn't discussed though, he is contemporary and doesn't have years of criticism establishing his place in literary canon, which Veeky Forums needs to justify their taste
Willa Cather
Henry James
John Updike
Henry Miller
I know a few if those were more popular here in years past, but they seem like non-entities now

North or South America??

Are you not American? American Pastoral does an incredible job in portraying the cultural shift from the 50s to the 70s, I view it as a better more concise version of Underworld.

How's I'll Take My Stand? I'm interested in the southern-agrarian movement but when I leafed thru it looked like proto-over-wrought academia.

>Crane
>Cather
>James
>Miller

Great taste.

...

>butterfly making a good post

it pains me to admit this.

I'm not so bad, user.

Here. I bet you hate Le Guin.

JOHN CHEEVER.

Gorgeous short stories. Midcentury poll of Time readers said he'd be the most enduring artist of their time. A damn shame he's fallen off. Amazing writing.

I read Rights of Man by him recently. The first half was great, but the second dragged on and on, with most of it just reiterating a single point he had made during the first half (that hereditary government officials is idiotic). Good read overall, but that was quite a bummer.

I think his appeal might be broader for those of us living on the East Coast, especially when it comes to his more vulgar later works. Just as I will never see the appeal of Cormac McCarthy, I can't expect Real Americans to understand the depths of our neurosis, nor would I want them to.

Check out Goodbye, Columbus: it's a nice cozy love story, sort of in the vein of Turgenev or Gide, and it's remarkable to me simply because not very much happens. It's just charming and well-observed, and it's aged very well considering it came out in the late 50s. Like you said, nothing special, but before he decided to become the Jewish Bad Boy of American Letters I appreciate the work he did in elevating "nothing special" to an art form.

I seem to recall feeling the same. Age of Reason is good though

Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams are essential American poets

I'll check it out at some point. What's it about?

She has good taste in books and porn.

>she

nobody ever talks about Henry James here.

I've never been terribly impressed by him, he has good prose but his ideas are mundane.

american pastoral is great but EVERYONE i know who has ever read it, and every bit of criticism i've read on it, and every professor i've had who's read it, completely unreads the role zuckerman plays in crafting the narrative. in 19th century fiction the frame of the narrative is sometimes the most important analytic element—but here the frame doesn't open until something like 80 pages in and is forcefully colored by the narrator. it's weird, people seem to want to claim american pastoral as the great american novel it pretends to be, rather than the postmodern american novel that it is. i think that the whole jewish critique of WASP culture pulsating through the margins of seymour's life is zuckerman's class envy, a kind of writer-proletariat revenge on the successful, rich, whitewashed race traitor—a betrayal with which of course zuckerman can't help but be enamored with. in any case all the racial commentary implied between whites and jews essentially becomes the red herring for a class allegory on this reading, thus making the glove factory tour with rita cohen the most important episode in the book.

OP here. I've lived in the shadow of Newark for most of my life and one of Roth's strengths is he nails the decline of the little cities along the East Coast (especially in American Pastoral) absolutely perfectly. The aside that Swede Levov has with Zuckerman in the Italian Restaurant about moving the company out of Newark is a conversation I've had with many people before who have known that shift. Then again, I really enjoy McCarthy, and I have little to no connection to the region he writes about. McCarthy definitely creates a higher aesthetic appeal though, especially in Blood Meridian.

the plot is an excuse for two things in James: sentences—not paragraphs, these are a bloody mess, but sentences—and observations. acute, critical looks at a certain literary set of neurotic 19th century transatlantic bourgeois culture, and an endlessly pleasurable string of sentences that capture the whole of that essence, like a sequence of scientific formulae encoding a moment in time.

it's different with the novels, but the novel is a modernist's form—james is a realist, and realism lives and breathes the short story.

Sylvia Plath
Charles Bukowksi
Frank O'Hara
Virginia Woolf
Zadie Smith
Ocean Vuong
Mira Gonzalez
Tao Lin
Savannah Brown

is this a troll?

No. Just bringing some much-needed diversity of class, gender, and race to this topic.

I've noticed this, too. It's very strange. It took the form of the novel to its breaking point. He was very much the Mahler of the novelistic form, broken open by Joyce et al. but still immensely enjoyable and important in his own right.

>She

I find James mundane because fucking every 19th century writer was critiquing 19th century culture. Daisy Miller for example has absolutely nothing that something like Anna Karenina doesn't do better, and unlike Tolstoy doesn't bring anything new into it either. And since the stakes are by necessity so low in his realist stories it sucks the life out of his writing which, taken on its own, is technically fantastic. And that's the worst crime James commits for me, is that he wastes the talents of his prose. It bothers be more than just reading a generally mediocre author.

can you explain why it's "needed?"

at my commencement a speaker noted that our university was increasingly "diverse," and that "diversity makes us stronger." i don't see how that is plainly and common-sensically the case.

I can't stand Henry James. I can't even stand his prose. When Proust writes a difficult sentence it's because he's articulating a difficult concept and there isn't any clearer way of phrasing it; but when James writes a difficult sentence he's just being precious. An American man who writes like a British woman -- they can have him if they want him for all I care. What am I missing exactly?

i have the same advice for both of you, but for different reasons: you need to devote more attention to the short stories. the novel is for james a story that got out of control.

Anything not written by some retarded liberal

>An American man who writes like a British woman.

Never has Henry James been described so succinct. I'm stealing this.

It's what he deserves for giving up his citizenship, tbqhwyfamalam.

Remember James was writing Daisy Miller for the hoi polloi and he never particularly liked it, although it was incredibly popular.

I think you should go back and read Wings Of The Dove or The Golden Bowl and think about how he post-dated Tolsoy. He was writing something MUCH more modern. The incisiveness of every moment is so deeply felt and mysterious. Woolf and Joyce are his successors.

Anything in particular? I'd like to like him.

While imprisoned in France, he wrote the first half of the book, which is a critique of the bible.

Also might check out his first and most famous (Assuming you haven't) Common Sense, and The American Crisis.

Voltairine de Cleyre should be okay with you than?

'The Liar' is short and exciting, imo. 'The Real Thing' is a classic, and these two "portraits" if you like play off each other. I really like 'The Middle Years,' too.

We've had worse, trust me.