A Concise Companion to Postwar American Literature and Culture traces the creative energy that surged in new directions in the United States after World War II. Each of the contributors approaches a particular aspect of postwar literature, film, music, or drama from his or her own perspective. Yet taken together, their contributions demonstrate how different genres and approaches interacted and opened up new paths through this period.

The Concise Companion embraces the diversity which became characteristic of the postwar period. Vietnam literature, gay and lesbian literature, American Jewish fiction, Italian American literature, Irish American writing, emergent ethnic literatures, jazzmusic from bebop to hip hop, African American writing, and postwar film, among other subjects, reflect a time of turbulence, change, and cultural enrichment. What emerges from this survey is a portrait of postwar America split by differences of wealth and position, by ethnicity and race, by agendas of the left and right, but nevertheless united by the sheer intensity of its creative drive.

Josephine G. Hendin is Professor of English and Tiro A. Segno Professor of Italian American Studies at New York University. Her novel The Right Thing to Do won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1988-9 and was reprinted by the Feminist Press in 1999. Her critical works include The World of Flannery O'Connor (1970), Vulnerable People: A View of American Fiction Since 1945 (1978), and Heartbreakers: Women and Violence in Contemporary Culture and Literature (2004).