The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing

by Mark McGurl

Witness the anxiety of Ronald Sukenick, one of the most daring and accomplished of the radically experimental postwar writers and, partly for that reason, a longtime creative writing teacher. In his memoir of his youth in 1950s literary New York, Down and In: Life in the Underground (1987), the university hangs like a specter over his sense of artistic and intellectual independence. Shocked to discover that his teachers at Brandeis (Irving Howe, J. V Cunningham) want him to get a Ph.D. in English (which he did) and “become a good academic” (which he delayed in doing), he describes his dilemma in the starkest terms: At stake here was that vague homunculus I chose to call my real self, independent of middle-class definitions of success and failure. This was the phenomenon vulgarized at the time as “identity crisis,” but was a real issue and it will remain a real issue. Is the American personality simply the sum of success-driven responses to the network of cultural pressures? Or is it the stubborn assertion of a virtuous independence, however unexamined? Horatio Alger or the Lone Ranger? Is there such a thing as a real self, and if there isn’t, what makes life worth living? Consumption of products? Liberty and justice for clones? Social welfare for pods?3 Note how the question of Sukenick’s affiliation with the university as an academic becomes, before long, a matter not only of masculine selfhood but also of national identity. If the ‘American personality” is unaffiliated t...