SLPAD - unnumbered query on writers

[Mark Kohut]

It is true that Philip Roth and such as John Updike and Bill Styron and
younger ones like Robert Stone and many others were still writing
in the basic social realism vein. Philip Roth in his first
Postmodernism-lite novel My Life as a Man---published in the seventies, but
started
in the sixties wrote what TRP did her---that it was happenin' all over;
Roth had already done the Kafka-like The Breast and the Swiftian Our Gang.

First catch was Catch--22, appearing for years in the late fifties in lit
mag excerpts...working title then was Catch 18...

But John Barth had published The Sot Weed Factor in 1960 and was working in
central Pa [Penn State] on
Giles Goat Boy in the earliest sixties. Robert Coover had arrived. Bruce
Jay Freidman, now not read so much it seems, was
in the one and only Black Humor anthology which also included TRP....

John Gardner was to do Grendel and The Sunlight Dialogues in the sixties.

On Thu, Apr 6, 2023 at 2:49 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Back to the intro
>
> “I wasn’t the only one writing then who felt some need to stretch, to step
> out.”
>
> I’m dabbling around trying to formulate a query to search on, which would
> pick up the ones he would likely mean.
>
> He covered it in general terms already, mentioning Kerouac and Mailer & a
> couple others as inspirations.
>
> But would there be like a clade of those who were, like him, in the late
> ‘50s-early ‘60s relative younguns, feeling that inspiration, & wanting to
> stretch their horizons?
>
> Philip Roth and John Barth I think were mostly writing about what they knew
> at that point, & quite a bit afterwards.
>
> As Curly sez, “I’m tryin’ ta think, but nothing happens!”
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>