Leopards in the Temple The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970 [Hardcover]

The twenty-five years after the Second World War were a lively and fertile period for the American novel and an era of momentous transformation in American society. Taking his title from the Kafka parable about the leopards who kept racing into the courtyard of the temple, disrupting the sacrifice, until they were made part of the ritual, Morris Dickstein shows how a daring band of outsiders reshaped the American novel and went on to dominate American fiction for the rest of the century.

In fluid prose, offering a social as well as a literary history, Dickstein provides a wide-ranging and frank reassessment of more than twenty key figuresincluding Jewish writers like Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth; African-Americans such as Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin; colorful emigr?s like Vladimir Nabokov; and avatars of a new youth culture, including J. D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac.

Disputing the received wisdom about the culture of the Cold War, Dickstein shows why artists turned inward after the war and demonstrates how the writing of the 1960s emerged from the cultural ferment of the preceding decades, including road novels, avant-garde painting, bebop, film, psychoanalysis, and social changes that continue to affect us today.

In short, this is criticism about as full as one could possibly wish for: as sophisticated an integration of aesthetic and cultural criticism as I've seen, ranking with the best of Trilling...This is a great book, of interest to any serious literary reader.It is a model in its own right of literary history, and specifically of the complex intermeshings of history and the novel, of aesthetics and culture, of racial, ethnic, and social issues in the process of literary creation. I predict that this brilliant book will become the standard authority in its field.In this sharply sketched history of American fiction in the postwar years, Dickstein upends prevailing caricatures, showing that the culture of the fifties was hilsJ