Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s by George Hutchinson is the discussion of American literature in the 1940s. Hutchinson is an American scholar, Professor of English and Newton C. Farr Professor of American Culture at Cornell University. He is also Director of the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines at Cornell. From 2000 to 2012, he was the Booth Tarkington Professor of Literary Studies, at Indiana University, where he chaired the English department from 2006-2009.He graduated from Brown University with an AB in 1975. He graduated from Indiana University with an MA in 1980, and Ph.D. in English and American Studies, in 1983

American literature was booming after the Great War. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner flourished in the interwar years. American was becoming an advanced nation. Education was rising and mass marketed paperback books made reading cheap. It's pretty easy to identify interwar authors in America and well as the Beat authors that rose in the 1950s. What happened in the 1940s is a blank to many. Certainly, World War II changed many things. WWI brought out poets in England. Americans went to the Left Bank and to England to write. There was a pride in American literature and America’s rising on the world stage in power, industry, and literature.

America faced large changes in the 1940s. Warren French would write that the 1940s were “one of the longest, unloveliest, and most ominously significant decades in human history.” It was sandwiched between Hitler’s invasion of Poland and North Korea’s invasion of South Korea and punctuated with the atomic bomb. In that same period Arthur Miller, Truman Capote, Richard Wright, and Gwendolyn Brooks all produced major works. Three Americans won the Nobel prize for literature in the 1930s. War would interrupt the 1940s but still Faulkner an Eliot would win Nobels. The 1940s were also the golden age of American libraries. They offered free shelter, entertainment, and education to all.

The army spread books among the ranks. There wasn't an area of combat where soldiers were not reading. Not all authors were read. Richard Wright was not included and other African American writers were left out as well as those writers whose works were considered insulting to racial, ethnic, or religious groups. Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage was excluded because of its negative portrayal of Mormons. Reading was a necessary escape for those in combat. Many read their first books straight through while serving. This sudden interest in reading also lead to an interest in writing. The G.I. Bill allowed many to attend college and many took to writing and instead of writing to change the world the new authors thought to write about the attempting to make sense of the incomprehensible.

The rise of cheap paperbacks also brought along another form of media. The comic book entered its golden age. Superman and Batman became heroes fighting the bad guys. The bad guys in Batman were complex -- Once innocent people transformed into supersociopaths through childhood trauma or social inequity. Even Two-Face was based on a Poe short story.

The 1940s was influenced by many factors outside of the war. Racial issues especially African American and Jewish were on the rise. The mass migration of African Americans to northern industrial centers was perhaps the largest migration of people over the shortest period of time in American history. Jazz changed music. Communism rose and fell; its peak membership in the US was in 1942. The world was changing and the United States found itself as the leading country, politically, economically, and militarily. It had its own internal problems and its growing pains. This can be seen in the literature of the period. Hutchinson writes an interesting cultural and literary history of one of the most important decades in American history.

George Hutchinson's aim in Facing the Abyss is to prove that American literature of the 1940s lives up to the seriousness of the times. He succeeds.

Hutchinson cites Gore Vidal, who said this was a time when serious literature was popular. Even people who hadn't read some of the modernist writers were aware of their place in public culture. Just having a public culture may distinguish the forties from now.

There were discussions of literature on mass media such as radio shows. Public libraries were sites of democracy, where many readers (and soon-to-be writers) of all economic classes were able to find literature and encounter philosophies and political theories that explained the times.

After Americans came into the war, the government ensured that there were small editions of classic and recent literature for troops to read overseas. Council Books and Armed Services editions were selected for entertainment and educational value, but did not include titles that would be offensive to different groups of Americans.

Unfortunately that meant not including books by black writers like Richard Wright, in order to try to keep the racial status quo in effect. Maybe the 1950s would have been a little less traumatic if white soldiers—who felt they were coming home to inherit the new America that was evolving—had been able to read what some black authors had to say.

Hutchinson points out that many of the publishers who brought new literature to young Americans were Europeans who had just escaped the Nazis. Pantheon published The Stranger by Albert Camus and started a conversation about human responsibility that still continues.

Hutchinson points out the forties were a time when writers started learning their craft in colleges, not writing for newspapers or for pulp magazines. It was natural for creative writing programs (Hutchinson talks about Wallace Stegner's program at Stanford) to sprout when the G.I. Bill gave so many the chance to study.

Hutchinson analyzes the connections between pop culture and avant-garde art. This is the period when literature in the very broad sense—stories--began to be aimed at both adults and children. Many of the pulps of the 1930s already appealed to both. Even now some literature (Carson McCullers, Harper Lee, and Daniel Keyes, for example) with juvenile protagonists is considered legitimate literature even though it's aimed at young readers.

All through Facing the Abyss, George Hutchinson describes American literature of the 1940s as having a goal—defeating totalitarianism. That's certainly what many of its practitioners believed.

Even accepting the reality of atomic weapons, Hutchinson is hopeful for the future. That's understandable. Literature by its nature—the unfolding of a story by a voice inside the reader—expects a tomorrow for the next installment.