Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s

Proletarian and Southern authors again attract the most attention of scholars in this field this year, while work on Easterners, Westerners, and science and detective fiction writers remains sparse. Book-length studies of individual authors decline, although major figures such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, and Thomas Wolfe are the subjects of many individual essays and book chapters. The letters of Wolfe, Wallace Stegner, and Lewis Mumford also appear, as do new editions of D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded, James Agee's A Death in the Family, and Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Ellison and Bernard Malamud are the subjects of substantial biographies. In addition to such usual topics as race, class, and gender, explorations of the modernist spirit and film studies are also popular.