American culture

Southern literature

Faulkner was part of a southern literary renaissance that also included such figures as Truman Capote (1924-1984) and Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). Although Capote wrote short stories and novels, fiction and nonfiction, his masterpiece was In Cold Blood, a factual account of a multiple murder and its aftermath, which fused dogged reporting with a novelist's penetrating psychology and crystalline prose.

Another practitioner of the "nonfiction novel," Tom Wolfe (1931- ) was one of the founders of "New Journalism," who honed his art in such essays as "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby" and "Radical Chic" before he moved on to book-length efforts, such as his history of the American manned space program The Right Stuff. Other writers steeped in the Southern tradition include John Kennedy Toole (1937–1969) and Tom Robbins (1936- ).

Flannery O'Connor was a Catholic, and thus an outsider in the heavily Protestant South in which she grew up. Her characters are Protestant fundamentalists obsessed with both God and Satan. She is best known for her tragicomic short stories.

Jewish writers

The United States has had a community and tradition of writing by Jewish immigrants and their descendants for a long time, although many writers have objected to being reduced to "Jewish" writers alone. Key writers with Jewish origins are Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Philip Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer.