It took a number of years for Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood to be recognized as a modern classic, but once recognition came, it was decisive. And though the most consequential American book of 1952 was undoubtedly Ellison’s Invisible Man, the year’s most significant literary debut turns out in retrospect to have been a slender, poorly reviewed novel about a half-crazed itinerant evangelist who preached the gospel of the Church Without Christ, a book whose all-but-unknown author was a young woman whose home was not New York but a small town in rural Georgia. Salinger, Gore Vidal: these were the up-and-comers about whom everyone was talking in the days when serious fiction still mattered to the educated public, the ones who were expected to do great things.īut while all of them are remembered today, none save Bellow came anywhere near living up to his promise. James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, J.D. In 1952, the landscape of American fiction was dominated by a group of literary celebrities who had published their first novels after or near the end of World War II.
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