An excellent post at Maud Newton's site about forgotten American authors has led me belatedly to Jonathan Yardley's 2002 survey of American literature for The Washington Post. Yardley is particularly good on the much-disputed subject of whether the rise of academic writing programs has had a negative effect on the course of American literature. Noting that William Faulkner--a staunch non-academic--was the best thing that ever happened to twentieth-century American literature, and arguing that Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, published in 1953, was the last truly great American novel, Yardley goes on to characterize the fate of a genre that has become the prized homogenized property of English departments. The rise of creative writing programs, Yardley writes,

began slowly during the 1950s but accelerated rapidly during the 1960s and 1970s as money flooded onto the campuses during the Johnson and Nixon administrations. At first nobody much noticed, indeed some (yours truly included) assumed it was good for writers to have the financial support and security that college appointments provided. By the 1980s, though, a number of unanticipated repercussions had become apparent. One was that some writers became so caught up in departmental responsibilities and other distractions that they stopped writing. In many cases that was no great loss. Of far more serious import was the isolation of writing-school students (and teachers) from real-world America. The campus, for all its attractions, is a poor place to get any feel for life as most Americans live it, yet the campus had become not merely the training ground for ostensibly literary American writers but the only place they knew anything about.

Apart, of course, from their own psyches. A cartoon in the New Yorker several weeks ago said it all. Two people are in a bookstore. One stands in front of a section called "Self-Improvement," while the other is browsing "Self-Involvement." That, exactly, summarizes the state of the art of literary fiction in these United States in the year 2002. Much of it is written and constructed with technical facility, for technique is one thing the schools can teach. But it rarely is interested in anything except the inner lives and private experiences of the author-surrogates who are its central characters. It connects with itself but has little to say to the world outside, indeed makes surprisingly feeble effort to connect with that world. It is flat and lifeless--by way of example, consider all those who have followed in the train of that echt minimalist, Raymond Carver, the Jehovah of the writing schools--and just about the only people who appear to read it are other riders on the writing-school circuit.

There is more life in some of the fiction being written by (mostly) younger writers who speak from experience not previously reflected in American literature: people who have come here from Latin America, Asia, the Subcontinent, and all the other parts of the world that have contributed to the incredible heterogeneity from which the country now profits and with which it wrestles. In some of this fiction the energy of cultural clash is vividly reflected, and the addition of these voices--Amy Tan, Dagoberto Gilb, Chitra Divakaruni, Gish Jen, Sandra Cisneros, Han Ong, Julia Alvarez and so on--to the literary conversation is as welcome as it is overdue. But because most of these writers are being trained in the writing schools, too often their work is characterized by the same obsession with self we find in that of writers from more conventionally American backgrounds. The accent is different, but self is still the subject.

[...]

One can always hope for a surprise, a novel with as much ambition and sinew and breadth and depth as [Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Wharton's The House of Mirth, Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!, Ellison's Invisible Man and Nabokov's Lolita], and as one who makes his living passing public judgment on new books I pray that such a book comes along.

But present conditions do not favor it. Not merely do the writing departments quarantine their students from American life, but many gifted young Americans who might have written fiction in earlier times now enter other fields--movies and television most particularly--where they anticipate greater creative and financial opportunities. Many of those who do write books in what can be called a creative way now write nonfiction: history, biography, the higher journalism, and the memoir--this last having replaced the coming-of-age novel as the wellspring of literary self-absorption. With the possible exception of Toni Morrison, there is not a single American writer of literary fiction who could be called famous in the larger world of mass culture and celebrity--the way Fitzgerald was famous in the 1920s, Hemingway in the 1940s and 1950s--and her fame rests less on her work than on her Nobel Prize and the promotion she has been given by Oprah Winfrey.

A worthy supplement to Yardley's meditation is Maud's annotated bibliography of great but forgotten American writers--for if academia is to blame for imposing a numbing conformity on the writers it trains and houses, the publishing industry bears responsibility for letting innovators who don't sell well go out of print.

Has there EVER been a moment when someone was not lamenting the death of the American novel? The same complaints were being made in the 1880s about how prose was being homogenized, about how writers were out of touch, about how they had lost their way from telling good stories. Guess what? That was the decade when people could have been reading (for starters) Twain and James and Howells. Pretty soon they would have Crane and Dreiser and Wharton and Chopin.

I refuse to despair about the state of American writing. Of course there are too many mediocre books, but there are also really stellar works of fiction that are still being published. It is so easy to complain about contemporary writing. Again, I could do a Jonthan Yardley or Franzen-style tear-down of James and Wharton if I wanted to. But criticism like that is just another version of the school of ressentment.

Reading this brings to mind Flannery O'Connor's lectures given to students of creative writing. I believe many of them are collected in Mystery and Manners. Might be an interesting comparison.

I don't see how you can even make some of these conclusions:

"the writing departments quarantine their students from American life"

First off, I would say that college life is much more in touch with the average american's life than it ever was previously. Secondly, people, like this author, put way too much stress on what school is actually able to do. How exactly do a few hours a week "quarantine" a person? Most students my age have part-time jobs and/or are members in extra-curricular activities. No school is that powerful.

Thirdly, since when does bad fiction focus on self-involvement. Isn't the great gatsby just that?

Here is where being an uncultured philistine is a positive attribute. Because I can enjoy the hell out of a Stephen King novel and not feel guilty about it, or cry about the decline of the novel as an American art form.

Don DeLillo, Joanna Scott, Ishmael Reed, Cecil Brown, Charles Wright, Leslie Silko, Toni Bambara, Heather McGowan, Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, Bobbie Ann Mason, Jay Cantor, John A. Williams, James Alan McPherson, John Edgar Wideman, Philip Roth, Douglas Coupland, Susan Minot, Paul Auster, Cormac McCarthy, Louise Erdrich, Robert Stone, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag. In fiction.

Charles Wright, Stephen Dunn, Heather McHugh, Jorie Graham, Martin Bell, Li Young Lee, Jimmy antiago Baca, Robert Hass, Charles Simic, Bob Perelman, Leslie Scalapino, Susan Howe, John Ashbery, AR Ammons, Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Harryette Mullen, Nathaniel Mackey, Jay Wright, Michael S. Harper, Rita Dove. In poetry.

Off the top of my drunken head. After midnight. Yardley is a fool. He needs to read a bit more. Faulkner might be a staunch anti-academic, but it is academics, not so-called popular readers, who keep the Faulkner industry churning. And to see Faulkner and his sloppy prose and uneven ouvre as the best of 20th century American lit is ugly. Nathaniel West and his four little novels offer more by way of style and tone and social vision and sentence-by-sentence perfection than all of Faulkner. Same with Djuna Barnes. Or Gertrude Stein. Or Jean Toomer. If it were not for the academy, we would all be reading Thomas Dixon novels. And Edna Millay. Oy vey!

"And to see Faulkner and his sloppy prose and uneven ouvre as the best of 20th century American lit is ugly. "

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.

I find Faulkner pompous, unbearably convoluted, and unreadable.

"I find Faulkner pompous, unbearably convoluted, and unreadable."

Perhaps this is the reason many academics like him so, for they seem to view language as a vehicle of status rather than a vehicle of art.