Literary Lions.

The quarter century after World War II had been an innovative and exciting period for American writing. Authors such as John Cheever, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, J. D. Salinger, John Barth, Bernard Malamud, Jerzy Kosinski, Joseph Heller, Donald Barthelme, and Philip Roth had expanded the possibilities of the modern novel. By the 1960s experimentation had reached new levels, with novelists using improvisation, journalistic technique, black humor, and self-commentary in their works. By the 1970s the expansive possibilities in American literature seemed to collapse. The writers of the postwar era, once hailed as innovators, became lions of the literary world, that is, the new establishment. Some declared that after so many experiments the novel was dead as an art form. Clearly, new blood was needed to invigorate American fiction. As...