The Beat Generation - that term is even more familiar now, even more than say the '70s. Hype is built and established and people link it back to a certain generation, in this case the '40s and '50s. Now everyone knows that that group was the Beat Generation.
National literature does not mean much these days; now is the age of world literature, and every one must contribute to hasten thearrival of that age.
By the 1950s The Novel had become a nationwide tournament. There was a magical assumption that the end of World War II in 1945 was the dawn of a new golden age of the American Novel, like the Hemingway-Dos Passos-Fitzgerald era after World War I.
He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.
I think I would have done very well as a writer in the Forties. I think the last time America was a great country was then or not long after. It was before Vietnam, before Watergate.
The novelists of the nineteeth century had all the luck. They had a huge and easily pleased public and the world they surveyed had every appearance of permanence.
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
After the golden age of Latinity, we gradually slide into the silver, and at length precipitately descend into the iron.
