Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (Oxford History of the United States Book 10)

by James T. Patterson

those who focused on the debasement of American aesthetic life tended to exaggerate their case. The 1950s witnessed the rise to artistic prominence of a number of essayists and novelists—J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, James Baldwin, John Updike, Philip Roth—whose work received widespread critical acclaim and remained much admired in later years.5 It was equally unfair to dismiss the Art World as only faddish or strictly of "midcult" quality. Thanks in part to the flight of European artists and intellectuals to the United States during the 1930s and 1940s, New York City emerged after the war as a vibrant center for painters, sculptors, dramatists, actors, dancers, writers, musicians, and others in the arts. The New York School of abstract expressionist painting by Americans such as Jackson Pollock attracted international attention in the 1940s and early 1950s.