Since 1950, the American novel has undergone a subtle and almost unnoticed change; there has been a break in the continuity of tradition. Before World War Two, writers like Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe could be placed by cultural historians into categories, and literary antecedents could be found: Mark Twain for Hemingway, for instance, or Walt Whitman for Wolfe. But since the war, or perhaps more accurately, since the Bomb, a kind of novel has appeared which is entirely different from the main, and even from the minor or eccentric, traditions.

True, the influence of Hemingway can be seen clearly (though in a much diluted and brutalized form) in the hard-boiled detective novel, and Thomas Wolfe has had much to do with the pose and prose of Jack Kerouac and James Jones. But the most significant works of writers like Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Hemingway and Wolfe had all been completed by the end of the war.

Since then, there have been no novelists of their stature. Nonetheless, there have been some writers of promise: James Gould Cozzens (By Love Possessed), Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny), Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky), Frederick Buechner (A Long Day's Dying), Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead, The Deer Park), and J. D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye). Both Cozzens and Wouk had relatively unnoticed pre-war careers. Indeed, their post-war careers were largely due to the political climate; each of them wrote non-experimental narratives in a reactionary, conservative, narrowly authoritarian tone during the McCarthy era. Novelists like Paul Bowles and Frederick Buechner were too esoteric, strained and mannered to contribute meaningfully to a living art form.