When John Hersey ended the first chapter of Hiroshima (1946) by describing the burial of Toshiko Sasaki beneath the rubble of the East Asia Tin Works, his decision to focus “principally and first of all” on the bookcases that collapsed upon her on August 6, 1945, signaled his feelings about the collapse of available literary forms, all of which proved inadequate to convey the devastation of the atom bomb that he was trying to recreate. In this recognition of the limitations of existing narrative forms, Hersey anticipated by two decades one of the primary impulses behind the emergence of new journalism and the nonfiction novel, twin phenomena whose birth date, as John Hellmann argues, can be given as 1965, the year that saw the publication of Tom Wolfe's first essay collection, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, and the serialization of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood in The New Yorker. The other primary impulse comes by way of a story Hunter S. Thompson tells about standing beside a Lear Jet that Richard Nixon is about to board during his 1968 presidential election campaign and being frantically thrust aside when a Nixon aide realizes he is smoking one Marlboro after another over the fuel tank. Thinking he can defend himself by reminding the advance man that he is a “sane, responsible journalist” who, otherwise, might have hurled his flaming Zippo into the tank, Thompson is exposed for the precise kind of journalist he is by the man who easily sees through the (il)logic of his reasoning: “Egomaniacs don't do that kind of thing … You wouldn't do anything you couldn't live to write about.”

The (postmodern) way we live now

The pilgrimage to Graceland that capped Junichio Koizumi's 2006 visit to the United States testified to more than just a mutual appreciation of rockabilly's favorite son, the outfitting of Air Force One with Elvis DVDs, an all-Elvis public address system, and grilled peanut butter and banana sandwiches notwithstanding. According to the New York Times, in fact, the trip to Graceland was “partly a reward” to the Japanese prime minister for supporting the US president on Iraq and, more recently, for reopening Japan's markets to US beef after a ban related to concerns over mad cow disease. More than just a result of George Bush's desire to “treat” Koizumi “nice,” then, the pilgrimage to Graceland proved that those ties between the USA and Japan that Bush found “very strong” were as much political and economic as they were (pop) cultural. This inextricable link between politics, the economy, and culture attests to the way we live now, to borrow the title of an Anthony Trollope novel. Just how that “we” has come to be constituted and whether there remain any grounds for recovering an “I” of individual subjectivity in such a climate are issues at the heart of Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985). They inform not only the acts of DeLillo’s protagonist, a college professor forced to realize that he is just every man in any city, but also the task faced by DeLillo himself, namely, finding a critical position from which to delineate a cultural phenomenon without being wholly absorbed by it.

At the beginning of U and I (1991), news of Donald Barthelme's death prompts Nicholson Baker to contemplate how “disassembled and undirected and simply bereft” he would feel were he to learn of the demise of the writer he considers his “emotional plenipotentiary”: “All I wanted, all I counted on, was Updike's immortality . . . He was, I felt, the model of the twentieth century American man of letters: for him to die would be for my generation's personal connection with literature to die.” Hyperbolic, perhaps, but not inaccurate given the enormously prolific career that John Updike has had since the publication of his first story in 1954: twenty-one novels, fifteen short story collections, seven volumes of poetry, seven essay collections, five children's books, one play, and one memoir. It is no wonder that Baker, who acknowledges having read Updike “very intermittently,” still admits to “thinking about him constantly.”

Updike’s subject, broadly construed, has always been America, where, as the poem “Americana” (2001) states, “beauty is left / to make it on its own, with no directives / from kings or cultural commissars on high” (Americana, 5). Indeed, spanning as it does the entire second half of the twentieth century, Updike’s writing provides a historical roadmap that traces the changes undergone by the nation since the end of the Second World War: beginning with the regionalism of the autobiographical short stories and the creation of Olinger as a Pennsylvania equivalent of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha and Anderson’s Winesburg, extending to the Cold War whose inception and end frames the epic Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy (1960, 1971, 1981, 1990), and projected forward to a post-holocaust 2020 that is the temporal setting of Toward the End of Time (1997).