CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

HISTORICAL INFLUENCES ON CONTEMPORARY LIT

• 1963- Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., delivers "I have a dream" speech
• 1969- Two U.S. Astronauts become first humans to walk on the moon
• 1973- World economy is jolted by a sharp rise in petroleum prices
• 1980- Eight-year war between Iran and Iraq begins
• 1987- U.S. and Soviet Union sign treaty reducing medium-range nuclear weapons

FAMOUS AUTHORS

• Harper Lee- To Kill A Mockingbird (1960)
• John Updike- Hugging The Shore (1981)
• Stephen King- Mr. Mercedes (2014)
• Joseph Heller- Catch-22 (1961)
• James Dickery- Deliverance (1970)

One of my absolute favorite authors in Contemporary Literature is Isabel Allende, she wrote her first novel as a letter to her dying grandfather "House of The Spirits" and ended up turning it into a novel and ever since then has been a great author and one of my favorites!

CHARACTERISTICS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

• Post-modern workers criticized themselves for their work
• Also known as post-modern literature
• Includes literature written after world war ll - present
• Post-modern fictions sees contemporary culture as a change
• Science & Tech at the time improved lives increasing their life spans & helped feed & house people properly

EVENTS THAT HAPPENED

• In 1945 the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan and killed around 140,000 people
• Scientist started calculations on what would happen if a hydrogen bomb dropped on America(1950)
• 1970 was when the Vietnam war ended, the time was called Me Time because they were all happy.
• In the 1960s something called new journalism was made, it was a revolutionizing writing.
• In 1963 a scientist made a picture called how I learned to stop fearing the bomb and embrace it.

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