Literature in the 60's
The 1960's was marked by a blurring of the line between fiction and fact, novels and reportage, that has carried through the present day. As the 1960s evolved, literature flowed with the turbulence of the era. The literature reflected what was happening in America on the social and political arena in the sixties. Authors wrote about gender, race, homosexuality, feminism and war, and they criticized society, just like the youth generation did. An ironic, comic vision also came into view, reflected in the fabulism of several writers. Examples include Ken Kesey's darkly comic One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), a novel about life in a mental hospital in which the wardens are more disturbed than the inmates, and Richard Brautigan's whimsical, fantastic Trout Fishing in America (1967). The comical and fantastic yielded a new mode, half comic and half metaphysical, in Thomas Pynchon's paranoid, brilliant V (1963) and The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy (1966), and the grotesque short stories of Donald Barthelme, whose first collection, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, was published in 1964.