Writers remain a robust bunch

[Ya Sam]

"It's hard to think of a time when a generation of novelists dominated our 
literary spotlight for so long. McCarthy and Pynchon started out in the 
early '60s. Updike and Roth have been at it since the mid '50s; and Mailer 
made his debut in 1945, around the time critics were looking for an heir to 
Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.

Writers have been forecasting their demise for years. In 1996, David Foster 
Wallace published a slashing essay in the New York Observer, which began 
"Mailer, Updike, Roth - the Great Male Narcissists who've dominated postwar 
American fiction are now in their senescence, and it must seem to them no 
coincidence that the prospect of their own deaths appears backlit by the 
approaching millennium and online predictions of the death of the novel as 
we know it." The piece caused a stir - would this be the executioner's 
sword? - but it was not to be."

http://www.sptimes.com/2007/01/28/Floridian/Writers_remain_a_robu.shtml

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