Re-writing America: Vietnam authors in their generation

Abstract

In Re-Writing America, Beidler charts the ongoing achievements of the men and women who first gained public notice as Vietnam authors and are now recognized as major literary interpreters of American national life and culture. These writers - including Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, Winston Groom, David Rabe, John Balaban, Robert Stone, Michael Herr, Gloria Emerson and Frances Fitzgerald - have applied in their later efforts many of the hard-won lessons of literary sense-making learned in initial works attempting to come explicitly to terms with Vietnam. Beidler argues that the Vietnam authors have done much to re-energize American creative writing and to lead it out of the post-structuralist impasse of texts as endless critiques of language, representation and authority. With their direct experience of a divisive and frustrating war, these writers in many ways resemble the celebrated generation of poets and novelists that emerged from World War I. Like their forebears of 1914-18, the Vietnam generation has undertaken a common project of cultural revision: to re-write America, to create an art that, even as it continues to acknowledge the war's painful memory, projects that memory into new dimensions of mythic consciousness for other - and better - times.