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Russell Banks's short stories and novels portray working-class people trapped in mundane lives filled with violence and trauma. His themes include the cycle of violence from father to son and the exploration of the difference between the psyches of women and men and between those of people of varying races and economic classes. In Banks's world, these dichotomies lead to conflict, the outcome of which is most often tragic, and to a crushing sense of personal guilt. Redemption, however, is always hard-bought. In addition, Banks's work offers one of the most severe indictments of the American dream ideology in contemporary literature. His characters reach after what they think will make them happy, striving for self-transformation and “successful” lives. All but a few, however, find themselves thwarted.

Djuna Barnes was a poet, journalist, playwright, theatrical columnist, and novelist. She was also an accomplished graphic designer and artist, often illustrating her own work. But Barnes is mostly known for writing the modernist classic Nightwood (1936). Djuna Barnes was born 12 June 1892 near Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, to Wald Barnes, an American, and Elizabeth Chappell Barnes, a British subject. Barnes was raised in Cornwall-on-Hudson until her father bought a 105-acre farm on then-undeveloped Long Island because he desired a life free from society and its conventional morality. In fact, he built a mostly self-sufficient (some say polygamous) family unit and also wrote a credo, a statement of the beliefs by which he shaped his life. Young Djuna Barnes was educated at home by her paternal grandmother, Zadel Barnes, an early feminist and journalist who lived with the family.

Donald Barthelme was born in Philadelphia on 7 April 1931. He was the oldest of five children, all of them talented writers—including the prominent minimalist Frederick Barthelme (b. 1943). From the late 1960s until his death in 1989, Donald Barthelme produced a body of experimental fiction regarded as central to the postmodernist movement. Along with Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and others, Barthelme tested boundaries of perception and assumptions about fiction in the development of a new style. Although he shared with other postmodernists an ironic tone and a keen imagination for literary structure, Barthelme was in many ways ideologically separate from his peers. Through his father, a renowned architect, he internalized the principles of the Bauhaus—a school of artists, designers, and architects that originated in Germany early in the twentieth century whose proponents firmly believed that excellence of form and design could substantively improve the quality of human existence. Whereas many postmodernists were busy breaking down overused literary structures in order to demonstrate the fundamental flimsiness of them, Barthelme wanted to hatch new forms that could hold up under scrutiny. His short stories, which make up most of his work, almost always engage a distinctive innovation of form. Each of his four novels, too—Snow White (1967), The Dead Father (1975), Paradise (1986), and The King (1990)—playfully redirect novelistic conventions.

John Barth is counted among the first generation of American postmodernist writers. Of this group, which includes Thomas Pynchon, William Gass, John Hawkes, and Donald Barthelme, Barth has been identified by turns as the most nihilistic and the most hopeful; indeed, his fiction explores just this sort of irreconcilable dualism.

The Beat movement was America's first major Cold War literary movement. Originally a small circle of unpublished friends, it later became one of the most significant sources of contemporary counterculture, and the most successful free speech movement in American literature. It is at once a reclamation of poetry from the modernist pedestal of the New Critics and an attempt to infiltrate the academy itself; as closely associated with the proliferation of Eastern spirituality in America as it is with the drug culture and jazz rhythms of the street.

Enthralled by literature but disenchanted with graduate school, Ann Beattie began writing short stories and resolutely submitting her unsolicited manuscripts to The New Yorker. She racked up nearly two dozen rejections, but her determination finally bore fruit when the preeminent weekly magazine accepted “A Platonic Relationship” in 1974, thus launching a controversial and significant writing career.

In much the same way that William Faulkner created the necessary conditions for serious literature about the modern South and, in the process, inspired generations of literary followers, Saul Bellow made serious literature about modern urban Jewish Americans possible. His fiction brought the immigrant Jewish sensibility, in all its restless striving and ethnic vividness, to national attention. With novel after impressive novel he slowly emerged as the only contemporary fictionist who could be mentioned in the same breath with Faulkner and Henry James. “As the external social fact grows larger, more powerful and tyrannical,” Bellow wrote in a 1951 application to the Rockefeller Foundation, “man appears in the novel reduced in will, strength, freedom and scope.” The Foundation turned down his request for badly needed funding, but he continued to explore ways in which fiction might celebrate humanity's essential spirit. Humor is an essential ingredient in Bellow's formula because wit (in his case, the Yiddish quip) is a traditional way that oppressed people counter the fists and guns of a majority culture. Moreover, humor is, in Bellow's words, “more manly” than complaint. Thus, Bellow explores the human comedy, as did Shakespeare, Dante, and Joyce before him, but he does so with a distinctively Yiddish flavoring.

Stephen Vincent Benét is remembered primarily for two works: the long narrative poem John Brown's Body and the short story The Devil and Daniel Webster. These two works are characterized by qualities that can be found in varying degrees in Benét's less familiar work: formal craftsmanship combined seamlessly with an easy, informal diction; a love of America that is not blind to America's shortcomings; a liberal view of both political and domestic relationships; and a commitment to the progress of humanity.

John Berryman was born John Allyn Smith Jr. on 25 October 1914 in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was named after his father, a bank clerk. His mother was Martha Little Smith, and both parents were Roman Catholics. His father, dismissed from his bank for nonattendance, became a game warden, then bought a restaurant in Tampa, Florida. The family lived in a tenement owned by John Angus Berryman. There is little doubt that Martha Smith began an affair with their landlord. Early on the morning of 26 June 1926, her husband was found shot dead at the rear of the tenement. It is generally held that he committed suicide.

One of the most versatile contemporary authors, Wendell Berry is renowned for his prolific output of poetry, fiction, and essays. The quality of his craft is even more impressive considering his lifelong dedication to the land-based values and practices learned in the rural valleys of Kentucky. Grounded in the realities of running a small farm increasingly under threat from America's urban-centered industrial society, his work recalls that of the southern Agrarians for the way it promotes the traditional values of agricultural communities. Although all his work is infused with a sense of historical continuation, it also shuns the sentimentally nostalgic as well as the unthinkingly “innovative,” preferring instead tested methods of stewardship that help promote an ethical relationship to the land, the community, the family, and the self. His vocal advocacy for the environment from an agricultural standpoint has paralleled Gary Snyder's more wilderness-oriented position. Frequently compared to Henry David Thoreau for his retreat to and promotion of a life lived in effective balance with the land, Berry's firm dedication to place has enabled him to refine his skills as farmer, husband, and writer.

Ambrose Bierce, an ironist whose choice of genre roved from predatorially sardonic verse to artfully detached war writing, was born Ambrose Gwinett Bierce on 24 June 1842, in the Ohio village of Horse Cave Creek. He was the tenth of thirteen children of Marcus Aurelius Bierce, a struggling Congregationalist farmer; Protestant evangelism helped to dictate the community's calendar. Bierce left his family's faith and their rural penury behind him as soon as he could, beginning work at age fifteen as a printer's devil for the antislavery Northern Indianan newspaper. And yet the barnyard did not forever leave the writer; in it Bierce may have found his origins as a literary mocker. For example, the biliously independent title character in Bierce's short story “Curried Cow” could be readily understood as the writer's alter ego.

Elizabeth Bishop is one of the most original lyric voices of the twentieth century, standing with such other American poets as Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore, who was Bishop's mentor and shared Bishop's thirst for accuracy. Like these poets, Bishop was not part of any school and so did not align herself with any program or spend time framing manifestos. Instead, she forged her own aesthetic based on close observation of the thing itself, and in the process generated new idioms and rhythms that convey with wit and a keen moral sense her beliefs about the power of the human imagination to build upon and alter our world.

The term “Black Arts Movement” describes a set of attitudes, influential from 1965 to 1976, about African-American cultural production, which assumed that political activism was a primary responsibility of black artists. It also decreed that the only valid political end of black artists' efforts was liberation from white political and artistic power structures. Just as white people were to be stripped of their right to proscribe or define black identity, white aesthetic standards were to be overthrown and replaced with creative values arising from the black community.