Drawing on his experiences as a young man in the Great Depression and the Second World War, Kurt Vonnegut created a new style of fiction responsive to the post-war world and unique in its appeal to both popular audiences and avant-garde critics. His work was profoundly innovative and yet perfectly lucid. In this comprehensive introductory study, originally published in 1982, Jerome Klinkowitz traces Vonnegut's influences within the American middle class, his early efforts as a short-story writer for magazines in the 1960s and his startling and unprecedented success as a bestselling experimental novelist with Slaughterhouse-Five. His self-consciously moral posture led to readers throughout the world accepting him as their spokesman for humane values, a role which Klinkowitz considers within the context of his work.

Drawing on his experiences as a young man in the Great Depression and the Second World War, Kurt Vonnegut created a new style of fiction responsive to the post-war world and unique in its appeal to both popular audiences and avant-garde critics. His work was profoundly innovative and yet perfectly lucid. In this comprehensive introductory study, originally published in 1982, Jerome Klinkowitz traces Vonnegut's influences within the American middle class, his early efforts as a short-story writer for magazines in the 1960s and his startling and unprecedented success as a bestselling experimental novelist with Slaughterhouse-Five. His self-consciously moral posture led to readers throughout the world accepting him as their spokesman for humane values, a role which Klinkowitz considers within the context of his work.

" In the twelve months centered around the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a diverse group of American and British flyers fought one of the most remarkable air campaigns of WWII. Pilots including Claire Chennault, ""Pappy"" Boyington, and Art Donahue bought time for an Allied regrouping against Japan's relentless assault in the China-Burma-India theater. In the face of the 1941 bombings, Chiang Kai-shek turned to air power to survive, which he did thanks to Chennault's rebuilding of the Chinese Air Force and the leadership of the American Volunteer Group, or AVG. Formed by Chennault, the AVG, also known as the Flying Tigers, were contract employees working for the Chinese government. As a result, they received virtually no official American recognition for their efforts. The group was known for their romantic, reckless spirit. They performed remarkably with outdated planes and equipment in ill-repair, were almost always heavily outnumbered in battle, and were seen by outsiders as hard-drinking rebels. Whatever their image, the Flying Tigers were highly effective. In the words of Air Force Major General Charlie Bond, ""During that first week of action the AVG destroyed fifty-five enemy bombers and fighters while losing only five Tomahawks. Unfortunately, two of our colleagues were killed, but at the same time two hundred enemy airmen were either killed or captured. We were shattering the myth that the Japanese Air Force was invincible."" Jerome Klinkowitz, whose earlier books focused on flyers' attitudes toward the air war in Britain and Europe, continues his work with an exceptionally interesting group of Pacific warriors. He brings together not only the commanders' stories but the often more colorful--and sometimes more accurate--accounts of life and battle by the men who flew these planes and the women who participated on the ground.

A defining analysis of the entire span of Kurt Vonnegut's fiction Kurt Vonnegut is one of the few American writers since Mark Twain to have won and sustained a great popular acceptance while boldly introducing new themes and forms on the literary cutting edge. This is the "Vonnegut effect" that Jerome Klinkowitz finds unique among postmodernist authors. In this innovative study of the author's fiction, Klinkowitz examines the forces in American life that have made Vonnegut's works possible. Vonnegut shared with readers a world that includes the expansive timeline from the Great Depression, during which his family lost their economic support, through the countercultural revolt of the 1960s, during which his fiction first gained prominence. Vonnegut also explored the growth in recent decades of America's sway in art, which his fiction celebrates, and geopolitics, which his novels question. A pioneer in Vonnegut studies, Jerome Klinkowitz offers The Vonnegut Effect as a thorough treatment of the author's fiction--a canon covering more than a half century and comprising twenty books. Considering both Vonnegut's methods and the cultural needs they have served, Klinkowitz explains how those works came to be written and concludes with an assessment of the author's place in American fiction.

Contrasts between fighter combat and the bombers' war support Klinkowitz's belief that notions of the air war were determined by one's position in it. He extends his thesis by showing the vastly different style of air war described by veterans of the North African and Mediterranean campaigns and concludes by studying the effects of such combat on adversaries and victims. Air combat, Klinkowitz writes, offers a unique perspective on the nature of war. The experience of combat has inspired authors to combine exquisite descriptions with probing thoughtfulness, covering the full range of human expression from exultation to heartbreak. Here is a tightly drawn, highly readable account of the European air war.

Jerome Klinkowitz presents an opening attempt to define postmodernism as it applies to the arts and culture. "Rosenberg/Barthes/Hassan" discusses the work of three critics who came to prominence in the 1960s, an era of social, ideological, and aesthetic turmoil. Sharing a disdain for modernism's authoritarianism, elitism, and sterile preoccupation with despair, the three critics called for a postmodern art that would emphasize action, reality, and immanence and offer fresh envisionings of the world.

Klinkowitz traces the progression of thought that links the work of critic Harold Rosenberg, who introduced the concept of "action painting"; the semiotician Roland Barthes, who redefined art, culture, and ideology as language systems; and visionary literary scholar Ihab Hassan, whose works call for nothing less than a rethinking of man's place within the material and spiritual universe.

In the 1960s, as the underpinnings of society weakened, the traditional novel form seemed less suited to describe American reality. Theorists groped towards non-mimetic fiction as the tools that had sustained the novel since its birth--coherent characterization, linear plot, symbolism--became tools of New Journalism. "The New American Novel of Manners" explores the virtual reinvention of the novel of manners in America out of the same subjectivity that charged the works of New Journalism.

In place of the rigid social structures that never seemed to depict America, novelists such as Richard Yates, Dan Wakefield, and Thomas McGuane located America's modern-day manners in its semiotics, in the system of signs that envelops us--the blue jeans people wear, the fast food they eat, the decor of the bars they drink in and the rock-and-roll lyrics that play through memories. The new generation of mannerists describe lifestyles that are determined by words and images, by actions that are dictated by what has been read and seen, and patterns of behavior in which life is edited and fictionalized. Klinkowitz reveals a fiction that is once again capable of reflecting the way people live.

An iconic figure in American culture, Frank Lloyd Wright is famous throughout the world. Although his achievements in architecture are stunning, it is his importance in cultural history, Jerome Klinkowitz contends, that makes Wright the object of such avid and continuing interest. Designing more than just buildings, Wright offered a concept for living that still influences how people conduct their lives today. Wright's innovations in architecture have been widely studied, but this is the most comprehensive and sustained treatment of his thought. Klinkowitz presents a critical biography driven by the architect's own work and intellectual growth, focusing on the evolution of Wright's thinking and writings from his first public addresses in 1894 to his last essay in 1959. Did Wright reject all of Victorian thinking about the home, or do his attentions to a minister's sermon on ""the house beautiful"" deserve closer attention? Was Wright echoing the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, or was he more in step with the philosophy of William James? Did he reject the Arts and Crafts movement, or repurpose its beliefs and practices for new times? And, what can be said of his deep dissatisfaction with architectural concepts of his own era, the dominant modernism that became the International Style? Even the strongest advocates of Frank Lloyd Wright have been puzzled by his objections to so much that characterized the twentieth century, from ideas for building to styles of living. In Frank Lloyd Wright and His Manner of Thought, Klinkowitz, a widely published authority on twentieth-century literature, thought, and culture, examines the full extent of Wright's books, essays, and lectures to show how he emerged from the nineteenth century to anticipate the twenty-first.

Donald Barthelme (1931-1989) is regarded as one of the most imitated and influential American fiction writers since the early 1960s. In Donald Barthelme: An Exhibition, Jerome Klinkowitz presents both an appreciation and a comprehensive examination of the life work of this pathbreaking contemporary writer. A blend of close reading, biography, and theory, this retrospective-informed by Klinkowitz's expert command of postmodern American fiction-contributes significantly to a new understanding of Barthelme's work. Klinkowitz argues that the central piece in the Barthelme canon, and the key to his artistic method, is his widely acknowledged masterpiece, The Dead Father. In turning to this pivotal work, as well as to Barthelme's short stories and other novels, Klinkowitz explores the way in which Barthelme reinvented the tools of narration, characterization, and thematics at a time when fictive techniques were largely believed to be exhausted. Klinkowitz, who was one of the first scholars to study Barthelme's work and became its definitive bibliographer, situates Barthelme's life and work within a broad spectrum of influences and affinities. A consideration of developments in painting and sculpture, for example, as well as those of contemporaneous fiction, contribute to Klinkowitz's analysis. This astute reading will provide great insight for readers, writers, and critics of contemporary American fiction seeking explanations and justifications of Barthelme's critical importance in the literature of our times.

The author of Short Season and Writing Baseball presents poetry and short fiction on America's pastime. I have known Jerry Klinkowitz only as one of this country's most interesting and responsible literary critics. It comes as a complete surprise that he writes first-rate baseball stories as well.--Kurt Vonnegut. (Poetry/Fiction)