Mark Lawson, writing in The Guardian’s weekly book section, Review (February 6th), previews his eight-part series on modern American writers which begins transmission next Thursday at 11.30am on BBC Radio 4.
Lawson has worked on the series over several years, accumulating interviews with the modern greats, including Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut and John Updike – now, with JD Salinger, all dead. “When I began to think about the series,” he writes, “the question of who was America’s greatest living novelist would spark lively debate at a book festival. On the eve of transmission, that medal automatically defaults to Philip Roth.”
Mailer, Vonnegut and Salinger, together with Joseph Heller and Gore Vidal, came to manhood during the Second World War (Updike and Roth experienced it too, but as adolescents in civilian life). Mailer and Heller wrote memorable war novels, but Lawson also points to the way in which not just the war but changes in postwar domestic politics provided a stepping stone to authorship.
“The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (colloquially known as the GI Bill) was almost voted down by the nation’s politicians – opponents citing anti-socialist objections similar to those afflicting Obama’s healthcare proposals now – but it transformed the nation’s education.”
Among those who benefited were Mailer and Saul Bellow, Heller and Vonnegut. Towards the end of his life, in an interview with Lawson in New York, Vonnegut showed he had not forgotten what this piece of progressive legislation had done for him: “Heller and I would have been washing machine salesmen if it wasn’t for the GI Bill.”