The origins
The coincidence is too good not to mention. While 1783 marked the independence of New York, liberated from the British after the signing of the Peace Treaty in Paris, the city also saw the birth, that same year, of Washington Irving, certainly the first novelist of this young American Republic. Trained as a lawyer, then as a journalist, his Histoire de New York racontée par Dietrich Knickerbocker was published in 1809 under a pseudonym. Irresistibly humorous, this satire met with great success, so much so that the hero's surname remains the nickname given to descendants of the first Dutch settlers and, by extension, to the oldest New York families. Under the name Geoffrey Crayon, he went on to publish a collection of short stories, The Book of Sketches, strongly influenced by German fairy tales, of which The Legend of Sleepy Hollow will awaken memories in the most cinephile of readers.
In addition to the literature spawned by the successive waves of colonization in the United States, the 19th century also saw the emergence of Transcendentalism. Endorsed by Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay Nature (1836), this literary movement, led by Henry David Thoreau, advocated a relationship with nature defined as a divine entity. It has had a more or less direct influence on many writers, including Herman Melville, born in 1819 on the southeast side of Manhattan. Melville recalled his adventurous years in the Pacific to write his first books on his return to American soil. Taïpi was completed in 1845, but not published in London until the following year, followed by Omoo, Mardi, Redburn and, above all, the masterly Moby-Dick, which failed to meet with the expected success on its release in 1851. Although Captain Ahab is now part of our references, it cost Melville such disillusionment that, after a final, also poorly understood attempt(Pierre ou les Ambiguïtés, 1852), he finally shut himself away in profound silence. His contemporary Walt Whitman was equally unsuccessful, self-publishing Leaves of Grass in 1855. It wasn't until 1881 and the sixth version of this famous collection, Feuilles d'herbe in its French translation, that the rights enabled him to buy a house. Today, he is considered one of the fathers of American poetry.
Other literary currents enlivened the late 19th century, notably Naturalism, exemplified in Maggie, Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane's first novel (1871-1900) and a less than cheerful fresco set in the Bowery district. Henry James, born in New York in 1843, was also a realist. The son of an intellectual and grandson of an Irish immigrant, he quickly found his vocation as a man of letters in his reading and his many travels, which took him all over Europe. His first international success, Daisy Miller, was published in London as a serial in Cornhill Magazine from June 1878. Prolix, the writer remains famous for his short stories, some of them fantastic like Le Tour d'écrou, and for his many novels, such as Portrait de femme (1881), Ce que savait Maisie (1897) and La Coupe d'or (1904). His distinctive way of adopting a character's point of view, even if it means leaving some things unsaid, augurs well for the current of perception and awareness so characteristic of Modernism, which gradually replaced Realism in the early twentieth century.
From the Lost Generation to the Beat Generation
Some of these modernist authors met in Paris between the wars. Grouped together under the name of the Lost Generation, according to Gertrude Stein's formula, they were led by Ernest Hemingway, to whom Francis Scott Fitzgerald had the manuscript of Gatsby the Magnificent read on the terrace of the Closerie des Lilas. Set in the New York of the Roaring Twenties, this novel (1925) tells the story of the passionate, vain love of a charismatic, mysterious millionaire. Manhattan Transfer, by their friend John Dos Passos, appeared the same year. This polyphonic work was an experiment in experimental writing, which Dos Passos would later develop in his U.S.A. trilogy . Shortly afterwards, Henry Miller, a New Yorker, arrived in the French capital. In 1931, at 18 Villa Seurat, he wrote Tropique du Cancer, which, like most of his semi-autobiographical stories, earned him trial after trial for obscenity in the United States. It wasn't until 1964 that the Supreme Court put an end to censorship.
The period between the two world wars was also a fertile one on the other side of the Atlantic. The Harlem Renaissance movement was in full swing, marking a turning point in American black literature as it opened up to new audiences. Buoyed by the article Harlem: Mecca of New Negro published by Alain Locke in Survey Graphic, this movement saw a number of authors converge on its New York cradle. Zora Neale Hurston, author of the remarkable Mais leurs yeux dardaient sur Dieu, brilliantly retranslated into French by Sika Fakambi (éditions Zulma, 2018), takes part in the editorial team of Fire! magazine with Wallace Thurman, Aaron Douglas and Countee Cullen. Reception is mixed and only one issue comes out, but the literary floodgates are open. Jean Toomer published Cane in 1923, Langston Hughes his first collection of poems in 1926(The Weary Blues) and Dorothy West founded Challenge in 1934, which welcomed many African-American authors between its pages.
Harlem also attracted musicians, who gradually preferred it to Chicago. A love of jazz brought a group of friends together, and the Beat Generation was born. Its three founding members, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, met in New York in the '40s. In 1947, the flamboyant Neal Cassady and his young wife LuAnne Henderson arrived. Charismatic, freedom-loving and an inveterate pleasure-seeker, the man exerted an undeniable magnetism on everyone they met, especially Kerouac, whom he took on a tour of the United States. This epic journey inspired Kerouac to write the legendary Sur la route, written in one go between April 2 and 22, 1951, on a 36.50 m long roll. The same year saw the publication of another runaway story, that of Holden Caulfield. While New Yorker J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye gradually found its audience, and went on to become the classic it is today, Kerouac had a hard time getting published. Numerous rejections followed. It wasn't until 1957 that a publisher accepted him, albeit at the cost of many compromises. The previous year, his friend Allen Ginsberg had published Howl, a long poem that got him into trouble with the law, but which remains another Beat Generation staple. As for Burroughs, it was in Paris that his NakedLunch was published in 1959. Written under the influence of drugs, this work is made up of fragments assembled using the cut-up technique. Literature still asserts its desire to describe reality, but it no longer hesitates to demonstrate its chaos: this is the era of Postmodernism.
Postmodernism
There are many authors who belong to this movement and whose names are familiar to us, and there are few viewers who were not impressed by Requiem for a dream, the film adaptation of the fourth novel by Hubert Selby Jr. (1928-2004). What can we say about his first book, Last Exit to Brooklyn, which, according to Allen Ginsberg's prediction, literally bombed when it was published in 1964? Selby has a rhythm all his own, dispenses with punctuation and, above all, describes his native neighborhood in all its violence. This brutality is echoed by Kurt Vonnegut, who died in New York in 2007, in his masterpiece Abattoir 5, which deals with war in the guise of science fiction.
Writers flourish in all styles, and E.L. Doctorow doesn't hesitate to add a touch of humor to his nostalgic tragi-comedy Ragtime (1975), adapted a few years later for the screen by Miloš Forman. Philip Roth (1933-2018), meanwhile, tried his hand at satire, fell in love with Kafka and then returned to more intimate writing with his cycle devoted to his literary double, Nathan Zuckerman. American Pastoral was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. Another outstanding writer of the second half of the 20th century, yet virtually invisible in the media he shunned for several decades, is Thomas Pynchon. If mystery hangs over the man, his novels never cease to intrigue, mixing diffuse plots, eminently political themes and surprising associations of cultural references(Lot 49 Auction, 1966; The Rainbow of Gravity, 1974; Vineland, 1990). His contemporary, Don DeLillo, born in the Bronx in 1936, made his name in 1971 with Americana. He continued to take a sharp, distanced look at his world in Bruit de fond (1985), Outremonde (1997) and Cosmopolis (2003). Another major figure is Paul Auster, whose New York Trilogy remains a must-read. Born in New Jersey in 1947, Auster fell in love with France, where he lived on several occasions, and began his career translating French authors. He tried in vain to get published, even under a pseudonym, and it wasn't until he was 40 that the first book bearing his name appeared: In the country of last things(Le Voyage d'Anna Blum, Actes Sud, 1989). This was followed by Moon Palace, La Musique du hasard, Leviathan, Mr. Vertigo... as many titles as successes that brought Paul Auster the recognition he so richly deserved. Bret Easton Ellis, a pure representative of Generation X, was spotted as early as his first novel, Moins que Zéro (1985), but it was above all with American Psycho, commissioned by his publisher for several hundred thousand dollars, that he reached the pinnacle of fame. His character, Patrick Bateman, had everything going for him: a Wall Street management consultant, he was handsome, young and rich. A pretty veneer that increasingly hides his true nature, that of a true serial killer. A subversive work that never ceases to get people talking, and that gives a very different image of New York.
Newspapers as a place of creativity
Another facet of postmodernism is revealed in the New Journalism, to use Tom Wolfe's expression. Literary in Le Bûcher des vanités (1987), a terrible plunge into a city wracked by racism, he is no less so in Acid Test (1968) or in his Cold War-era aeronautical reportage, L'Étoffe des héros (1979). Like him, Truman Capote(De sang-froid) and Norman Mailer (Les Nus et les Morts; Le Chant du bourreau) move from fiction to non-fiction as they write, and always with the same talent.
In addition to the insightful articles written by writer-journalists, The Big Apple's most famous magazine, The New Yorker, has featured cartoons since its inception in 1925. In France, Les Arènes has published an anthology of these tasty sketches. Nevertheless, the New York pencil stroke is associated above all with comic books, as the city has seen the birth of many superheroes and has been home to the offices of the giants DC Comics and Marvel since the 1930s. The history of American comics began with newspapers, and at the beginning of the 20th century, pulps- low-cost, low-quality publications - became very popular. In the mid-30s, the first comic books appeared. At first, these were collections of comic strips published in periodicals, before new series were launched. In 1938, the mythical Superman, imagined by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, made his first appearance. History was waiting to be made, and it was, despite the attempt at demonization launched by psychiatrist Frederic Wertham in 1954. As the decades went by, comics lost their naivety and didn't hesitate to be more tragic or, simply, realistic. Stan Lee, who died in 2018 at the age of 95, was a pioneer of the genre and one of its most notable exponents. With his sidekick Jack Kirby, whom he met in the New York offices of Timely Comics (the forerunner of Marvel), he revolutionized the world of comics. Together, Lee and Kirby brought to life several hundred characters, complex and fallible heroes who became veritable icons of the Marvel universe, with irreverent, humorous dialogues that strayed far from the clichés of the genre. Spider-Man, the Hulk, Iron-Man, Black Panther, Thor and the X-Men are all their creations. All of these characters have since been adapted for the big screen, and continue to fuel our imaginations.
