In the three decades following World War II, the novel as a literary form flourished in America. As the 'baby boom' generation matured, so did the market for fiction. By the mid-70s, nearly 1,800 hardcover books of fiction were being published every year along with a comparable number of paperbacks. The proliferation of paperbacks brought low prices and huge press runs. The resulting mass marketing of novels brought a new visibility to works of fiction and gave rise to a new generation of American novelists. And, as the publishing industry boomed, there was a similar increase in the field of literary criticism, giving a wealth of scholarly material from which to derive the 80 author profiles found in thisDLB volume.
80 entries include: James Baldwin, John Barth, Saul Bellow, Truman Capote, John Cheever, Jerzy Kosinski, Mary McCarthy, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Gore Vida, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and Eudora Welty.