Novel is a long fictional story written in prose. It is one of the most popular forms of literature.
The subject matter of novels covers the whole range of human experience and imagination. Some novels portray true-to-life characters and events. Writers of such realistic novels try to represent life in probable circumstances and settings. In contrast to realistic novels, romantic novels portray idealized or fantastic versions of life. Some novels explore purely imaginary worlds. For example, science-fiction novels may describe events that take place in the future or on other planets. Other popular kinds of novels include detective novels and mysteries, whose suspenseful plots fascinate readers.
Some novels point out ills or evils that exist in society and challenge the reader to seek social or political reforms. Novels may also provide knowledge about unfamiliar subjects or give new insights into familiar ones.
The novel has four basic features that together distinguish it from other kinds of literature. First, a novel is a narrative—that is, a story presented by a teller. It thus differs from a drama, which presents a story through the speech and actions of characters on a stage.
Second, novels are longer than short stories, fairy tales, and most other types of narratives. Novels vary greatly in length, but most exceed 60,000 words. Because of their length, novels can cover a longer period and include more characters and events than can most other kinds of narratives.
Third, a novel is written in prose rather than verse. This feature distinguishes novels from long narrative poems.
Fourth, novels are works of fiction. They differ from histories, biographies, and other long prose narratives that tell about real events and people. Novelists sometimes base their stories on actual events or the lives of real people. But these authors also create incidents and characters. Therefore, all novels are partly, if not entirely, imaginary.
The basic features of the novel make it a uniquely flexible form of literature. Novelists can arrange incidents, describe places, and represent characters in an almost limitless variety of ways. They also may narrate their stories from different points of view. In some novels, for example, one of the characters may tell the story. In others, the events may be described from the viewpoint of a person outside of the story. Some novelists change the point of view from one section of a story to another. Novelists also vary their treatment of time. They may devote hundreds of pages to the description of the events of a single day, or they may cover many years within a few paragraphs.
This article discusses the development of the novel primarily in Western literature. However, Japan, China, and India also have narrative traditions that have contributed to the history of the form, and these will be summarized briefly as well. The history of the novel is marked by an almost continual development of variations on old narrative forms. No matter how up to date or localized novels may seem, their stories still employ many themes and issues from narrative forms dating back to the ancient Greeks and Romans.
Ancient Greek and Roman narratives.
Most long narratives in early civilizations were composed orally and in verse. The finest fictional narratives of ancient Greece were long poems called epics, which told about the deeds of legendary heroes and mythical gods. The Iliad and the Odyssey, the two most famous epics, were probably composed by Homer between 800 and 700 B.C.
Histories were among the few kinds of long narratives written in prose. The earliest known historians were two Greek authors, Herodotus and Thucydides, who lived during the 400’s B.C. Both these historians made use of their imaginations in reconstructing historical material.
The Greeks also wrote long fictional adventure stories. These tales described fantastic adventures in foreign countries or related the plights of young lovers. Lucian’s ironically titled True History (about 200 A.D.) offers a series of imagined journeys to bizarre places. Some writers composed pastoral tales, which told of love between shepherds and maidens. One of the best-known Greek pastorals is Daphnis and Chloe (A.D. 100’s or 200’s) by Longus.
The most important Roman narratives in prose included Satyricon (about 60 A.D.) by Petronius and Metamorphoses, also called The Golden Ass (mid-100’s A.D.), by Lucius Apuleius. These earthy stories contrast sharply with the love stories of the Greeks. Satyricon vividly portrays the adventures of three Roman scamps. Metamorphoses tells of a man who is changed into a donkey and travels through various countries observing the weaknesses and failings of human beings.
The Asian novel
Asian novels have been created by several cultures that differ from each other in time, geography, and social values. There are three main traditions in the Asian novel—Japanese, Chinese, and Indian. The earliest developed in Japan in the 1000’s and in China in the 1200’s, both independent of Western influence. The Indian novel developed in the 1800’s and was strongly influenced by the British colonial occupation of India.
Japan.
In the early 1000’s, Murasaki Shikibu, a lady-in-waiting to a Japanese empress, wrote The Tale of Genji. This long novel is considered the greatest work of Japanese fiction. It far surpassed previous stories with its sophisticated style and delicately shaded description of human emotion.
The influence of Western ideas changed Japanese literature beginning in the later 1800’s, greatly affecting the development of the novel. During the 1880’s, a small group of writers educated in Western languages called for a break with older forms of literature. Two of these writers were Shimei Futabatei and Shoyo Tsubouchi. They thought Japanese authors should write European-style novels as an intellectual counterpart to the technological modernization that was revolutionizing Japanese culture. Futabatei‘s Drifting Clouds (1887-1889) is often called Japan’s first modern novel. It was one of the first attempts to replace classical Japanese language with a modern realistic style.
Many people consider Soseki Natsume the greatest Japanese novelist. As a novelist and literary critic of the early 1900’s, he established the modern novel as a respected form of literature. Two Japanese novelists have won the Nobel Prize for literature, Yasunari Kawabata in 1968 and Kenzaburo Oe in 1994. Other outstanding Japanese novelists of the 1900’s and early 2000’s include Kobo Abe, Yukio Mishima, Haruki Murakami, and Jun’ichiro Tanizaki.
China.
Fiction developed as an important form of Chinese literature during the 1200’s. Unknown professional writers rewrote traditional historical tales into complicated stories that resemble novels written by Western authors. Romance of the Three Kingdoms began as folk tales and dramas in early Chinese history and was finally published for the first time as a single novel about 1522. It describes the struggle for power among three rival states during the late A.D. 100’s and early 200’s. Water Margin, also known as All Men Are Brothers, is of unknown authorship, and the date it was written is also unknown. It was first published in the early 1500’s and tells about an outlaw gang that may have existed in the A.D. 1100’s.
A great comic novel, Journey to the West, appeared in the 1500’s. Sometimes called Monkey in the West, it is attributed to Wu Cheng’en. It describes a pilgrimage of a Chinese Buddhist monk to India in the A.D. 600’s. An unknown writer of the 1500’s wrote Golden Lotus, a famous novel about moral corruption. Dream of the Red Chamber, also called The Story of the Stone, is perhaps the greatest Chinese novel. It was written by Cao Xueqin in the 1700’s and traces the decline of an aristocratic family.
Partly because of political censorship, there have been few important Chinese novels written since the 1800’s. However, a few significant fiction writers have emerged. They include Mo Yan, Su Tong, and Wang Shuo. Mo Yan received the 2012 Nobel Prize in literature. His best-known novel is probably Red Sorghum (1987). The narrative stretches across three generations and describes Chinese peasants fighting both Japanese invaders and each other during the 1930’s.
India.
Indian literature before 1800 consists largely of poetry and narrative cycles of religious and mythological sagas that involve Hindu gods, legends, and rituals. The novel began to play a significant role in Indian literature by the mid-1800’s, with many novelists attacking the British colonial rule of India.
Rabindranath Tagore, who lived in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, became one of the greatest authors in modern Indian literature. Tagore wrote his novel Gora (1910) to challenge colonial rule and to give new meaning to Indian nationalism.
In 1936, Mulk Raj Anand and other Indian writers living in London established the Progressive Writers’ Association. The movement soon spread throughout India. The Progressives combined the ideas of the great anti-colonial political leader Mahatma Gandhi with the socialist philosophy of the German economic and political thinker Karl Marx.
A central theme in much Indian literature of the mid-1900’s was the change from rural, traditional life to urban, modern life. Some writers examined this theme by portraying a romantic view of village life. Others described the harsh realities of the impersonal city.
Feminist writers in the mid- to late 1900’s challenged the values of male-dominated society and created works that emphasize the perspective of women. Novelists from this movement include Ashapurna Devi, Rajam Krishnan, Kamala Markandaya, and Krishna Sobti.
Modern Indian authors who have written in English include Upamanyu Chatterjee, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry, R. K. Narayan, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, and Shashi Tharoor. Such novelists are able to express their heritage while remaining committed to the modern realities of life in India.
The European novel
Beginnings of the novel in Europe.
The word novel originally referred to prose stories that were written in local languages and therefore felt to be immediate and new. The word for novel in French and other languages deriving from classical Latin is roman, and the fictional writings in these languages are called romances. Love and adventure stories, called romances of chivalry, became widely popular during the 1300’s and 1400’s. Many of the romances dealt with the legendary British King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Thomas Malory’s collection, Le Morte Darthur (1485), was the most popular version of these tales. It provided the basic plots for many later novels in a variety of languages that dealt with the Arthur legends.
An Italian version of the arrangement of individual tales in a novelistic manner is the Decameron (1353) by the Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio. In this work, a group of Italians who have left Florence to avoid the bubonic plague entertain each other with stories. An earlier example of this same form is the Arabian Nights, a collection of folk tales that circulated in various manuscripts from Arabia, Egypt, India, ancient Persia, and other places. In these tales, a woman named Scheherazade tells a new story every night to avoid being executed by her husband.
During the 1500’s and 1600’s, many English romances were expanded to novel length and written in an extremely decorative style. After John Lyly of England wrote Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), this highly artificial style was called euphuistic and was widely imitated. In France, many romances and romance histories were written by important women writers. Madeleine de Scudery wrote such historical narratives as Artamene, or The Great Cyrus (1649-1653). Marie-Madeleine de La Fayette wrote the most psychologically powerful of these novels, The Princess of Cleves (1678).
Another kind of narrative that contributed to the evolution of the novel consisted of stories that mocked the idealized romance and even the laws and institutions of society. The French writer François Rabelais’s multi-volume history of two fictional giants, “Gargantua and Pantagruel” (1532-64), makes fun of all types of adventures, customs, and practices. A narrative form known as picaresque also developed in the 1500’s and 1600’s. Picaresque fiction describes the adventures of a picaro (rogue) who makes his way in the world through cunning and treachery. One of the first and most influential picaresque novels was Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), by an unknown Spanish author. The German author Jakob Grimmelshausen wrote Simplicissimus (1669), about a rogue’s adventures during the Thirty Years’ War in Germany. It is a novel in separate episodes in which the picaro replaces the knight as hero.
The first classic novel, according to some critics, was the Spanish masterpiece Don Quixote (part I 1605, part II 1615) by Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes’s story ingeniously combines the chivalric romance and the picaresque adventure. The central character in Don Quixote is a middle-aged country landowner who imagines himself a knight, battling injustice. He differs significantly from the unbelievably heroic or crafty characters in romances and picaresque narratives. Cervantes’s Quixote, despite his foolish and costly mistakes, is a character of genuine dimension and emotion. 
The rise of the English novel.
The novel form tends to emphasize realistic social themes and recognizable characters who represent all ranks of the social order. Sophisticated novels of this kind first appeared in England in the early 1700’s. At that time, the urge to record the details of ordinary life began to replace the older narrative focus on fantastic, supernatural, remote, and heroic material.
Some critics regard Daniel Defoe as the first important novelist in England, though others credit Aphra Behn with combining the novel form and the romance in her fascinating slave narrative, Oroonoko (1688). Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722) consist of a series of episodes in the lives of clever and resourceful, but ordinary, characters.
Samuel Richardson wrote novels with well-developed plots rather than a sequence of episodes. His Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740) tells of a virtuous female servant who resists her master’s attempts to seduce her. The story is told in the form of letters, most of which are written by Pamela, the heroine, to her family. Through the letters, Richardson reveals key psychological aspects of the central characters. Richardson wrote two other novels of letters, including his masterpiece, Clarissa (1748).
Henry Fielding wrote The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), which is especially noted for its elaborate, unified plot. This novel tells of the comical adventures of a young orphan, first as he grows up in rural England, and then as he travels toward London, meeting a variety of characters in English life. Tobias Smollett wrote amusing, loosely constructed novels about eccentric characters. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) is a novel in letter form about a variety of English travelers and personality types.
Laurence Sterne was one of the greatest experimenters in the history of the novel. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760-1767) is an unconventional novel about an unconventional family. The story humorously portrays character types, philosophical ideas, and social customs.
Gothic novels
became widely popular in England during the late 1700’s through the 1800’s. These horror stories tell of mysterious events that take place in gloomy, isolated landscapes. They have suspenseful, action-packed plots. The first Gothic novel was The Castle of Otranto (1754) by Horace Walpole. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), about a scientist who creates a monster from parts of dead bodies, is one of the most enduring. So, too, is Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), about a nobleman who is secretly a vampire.
European novels of the late 1700’s.
The novel during an intellectual movement called the Enlightenment reflected the age’s distrust of older cultural values and religious doctrines. Instead, philosophers favored reason and experiment as the best method of learning truth. In France, prominent philosophers produced classic novels about human thought and emotion, including Voltaire’s Candide (1759), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie or the New Heloise (1761), and Denis Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist (written in 1765, published in 1796, after his death). Alain-René Lesage wrote Gil Blas (1715), a masterpiece of picaresque fiction, and the Marquis de Sade wrote long pornographic novels that undermined traditional values and customs. Choderlos de Laclos wrote a famous novel in letter form, Dangerous Liaisons (1782), about aristocratic lovers and seducers.
In the late 1700’s in Germany, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote two enduring novels. The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) treated hopeless love and suicide and was a centerpiece of the period called Sturm und Drang (storm and stress). Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795-1796) began a tradition known as the bildungsroman (developmental novel), which tracks a hero’s journey to maturity. The style still exists as a staple of novelistic form. 
The 1800’s
During the 1800’s, English writers elaborated on the techniques of the early novelists and produced many great works. Authors in France, Italy, the United States, and Russia also wrote novels of major literary importance. The Romantic movement, which stressed the need for full expression of human emotions and imagination, dominated the literature of the early 1800’s. It was followed in the mid-1800’s by the Realistic movement, which demanded that literature accurately represent life as it is.
The United Kingdom.
Sir Walter Scott, a Scottish writer, created and popularized historical novels. Such novels re-create the atmosphere of a past period and include actual characters and events from history. Scott wrote a series of historical novels, beginning with Waverley (1814), about a Scottish rebellion against England.
The novel of manners appeared in England during the late 1700’s. Fanny Burney was one of the first writers in the tradition with Evelina (1778), a novel about a young woman’s introduction to London life. Jane Austen perfected the novel of manners in the early 1800’s. Her masterpiece, Pride and Prejudice (1813), centers on the social conventions surrounding courtship and marriage.
The English novel flourished during the 1800’s, expanding to explore a wide range of society’s classes and institutions. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) added both Gothic and romance elements to the novel of manners. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) merged Gothic romance and fictional biography. William Makepeace Thackeray wrote satirically on the hypocrisies of life in London and Paris in Vanity Fair (1847-1848). 
Charles Dickens wrote many great novels about English urban life, including the London underworld in Oliver Twist (1837-1839); commerce in Dombey and Son (1846-1848); and the English court system in Bleak House (1852-1853). Anthony Trollope wrote long, detailed novels centering on politics, society, and religion as in the witty Barchester Towers (1857) and in a sequence of six “Palliser” novels (1864-1880) about an important family involved in English and Irish life of the time. George Eliot portrayed English rural and small-town life. Her greatest work, Middlemarch (1871-1872), deals with the profound moral crises in the lives of landowners and rural professionals.
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island (1883) and other popular adventure novels. In the late 1800’s, Thomas Hardy wrote such novels as Jude the Obscure (1895), in which tortured characters were fated to lead desperate lives.
France.
French writers greatly influenced the development of the novel in the 1800’s. Honoré de Balzac wrote a series of novels in the 1830’s and 1840’s under the collective title The Human Comedy. These were the first novels in which major characters from some of the stories show up as minor characters in others as Balzac explored the manners and morals of an entire society. Stendhal contributed to the development of the psychological novel in The Red and the Black (1830) and to the political novel in The Charterhouse of Parma (1839). Alexandre Dumas père and Victor Hugo wrote massive historical novels. The most famous include Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo (1844-1845) and Hugo’s Les Miserables (1862).
Gustave Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary (1856), which tells about a woman unhappy in her marriage to a village doctor. Flaubert’s precise objective style influenced many other writers who began to treat the language of narrative with an almost poetic attention to detail. Émile Zola helped establish Naturalism as an important literary movement in the late 1800’s. According to the theory of Naturalism, a person’s life is determined by heredity and environment. Naturalistic novels portray people who are trapped by circumstances beyond their control. Many of these novels deal with grim subjects. Zola’s Germinal (1885), for example, describes the suffering of French miners.
Italy.
Alessandro Manzoni ranks as one of Italy’s greatest novelists on the basis of his only novel, The Betrothed. This work, published in 1827 and again with revisions from 1840 to 1842, set the standard for modern Italian prose. The Betrothed is a long historical story that takes place during the 1600’s. It deals with the adventures of two young peasants whose marriage is prevented by a local tyrant. The novel also describes many of the religious and political controversies of the time and includes a famous description of the bubonic plague in Milan in 1630.
The United States.
The early American novel was less concerned with social and historical tradition than the European novel. From its beginnings, the American novel explored intense family themes, as in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798), about a man who goes insane and murders his wife and children. American novels also dealt with the frontier landscape, as in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826). Cooper’s novel includes one of America’s great folk heroes, the frontiersman Natty Bumppo.
The mid-1800’s produced classic American novels of moral dilemmas and obsession. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tale of sin, The Scarlet Letter (1850), and Herman Melville’s symbolic whaling story, Moby-Dick (1851), are examples. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851-1852) was one of the first novels to raise the nation’s consciousness about slavery.
In the late 1800’s, Mark Twain captured American humor and colloquial speech in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). The latter book in particular has been praised for its attack on the social evils of the day and its vivid and realistic portrait of life on the Mississippi River.
William Dean Howells, in his novel The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), became the first important American writer to draw on the tradition of social realism coming out of European fiction in the 1800’s. Henry James has been acclaimed for his psychological portrayals of sensitive, intelligent characters. James spent much time in England and followed the English tradition of writing about social manners and choices in such novels as The Portrait of a Lady (1880-1881) and The Ambassadors (1903).
During the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, American writers still produced fiction with a distinctly rural focus, as in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918). However, the more urban and more deterministic French Naturalist movement influenced many other American writers, notably Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair. Crane’s first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), portrays the cruelty and vulgarity of slum life. His gripping The Red Badge of Courage (1895) portrays the horror of the American Civil War (1861-1865). Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) tells of a poor, lonely woman in Chicago. Norris’s The Octopus (1901) depicts the expansion of the American railroad. Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) attacked the Chicago-based meat-packing industry so effectively that the novel led directly to government reforms.
Russia
produced its two greatest novelists, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, during the 1800’s. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky rank as masters of the realistic novel. Tolstoy’s masterpiece, War and Peace (1869), centers on the 1812 invasion of Russia by the French emperor Napoleon I. The account of the war is interwoven with stories about the lives of several Russian families. Anna Karenina (1873-1877) is Tolstoy’s novel about an intense and heartbreaking love affair. Dostoevsky won fame for his probing psychological insight and his treatment of philosophical ideas. In his novel Crime and Punishment (1866), he explored the anguished mind of a student who commits two murders. In The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880), he treats ideas of God, morality, and crime in a family saga of pathos and hostility.
The modern novel
During the 1900’s, novelists experimented with various styles, techniques, and types of plots. World War I (1914-1918) had a major impact on many writers. The noble ideals and high hopes with which nations entered the war were shattered by the length and destruction of the conflict. After the war, many novelists dealt with the social changes and personal disillusionments of modern times. After World War II (1939-1945), novelists continued to explore the problems of modern life, especially the threat of nuclear war.
Experiments in style, technique, and plot.
Older forms of the novel persisted in the early 1900’s, notably in the works of Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, Rudyard Kipling, and H. G. Wells in England. However, more experimental novelists began to gain prominence. In such novels as Lord Jim (1899-1900) and Nostromo (1904), the Polish-born English novelist Joseph Conrad changed the form of the adventure story. Conrad’s stylistic experiments and probing psychological analysis helped shape the future of the novel in the 1900’s.
In Ireland,
James Joyce became one of the greatest novelists of the era. His Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) is a largely autobiographical novel about Joyce’s youth. In the work, Joyce began using techniques of narration in which the author presents the thoughts, sensations, and memories that flow through a character’s mind. Joyce perfected this technique, called interior narration or stream of consciousness, in Ulysses (1922). This challenging novel parallels one day in the life of a fictional Dublin resident in 1904 with events in the ancient Greek epic the Odyssey.
In England,
D. H. Lawrence broke many social taboos in writing about sexual passion in such novels as Women in Love (1920). W. Somerset Maugham wrote about the seedy love life of a medical student with a foot deformity in Of Human Bondage (1915) Ford Madox Ford experimented with narration in The Good Soldier (1915), in which the narrator discovers that his wife and his best friend have been lovers for years. E. M. Forster raised issues of class and race in A Passage to India (1924).
Virginia Woolf also experimented with interior narration. Her best novels, such as To the Lighthouse (1927), are known for their brilliant structure and the emotional power of their style.
In France,
Marcel Proust wrote the masterpiece Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927). This seven-part novel, also called In Search of Lost Time, deals with the early life and subsequent maturity of a brilliant young writer in the midst of a changing French society during the early 1900’s. The hero of French author Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932) wanders aimlessly through war-torn Europe.
Existentialism, a philosophic movement, greatly influenced French literature during the late 1930’s and the 1940’s. Existentialists emphasized that individuals must choose their own way to live and act in an essentially meaningless world and then accept full responsibility for their actions. The rise of existentialism in France resulted in a number of existential novels, including Nausea (1938) by Jean-Paul Sartre and The Stranger (1942) by Albert Camus. Sartre and Camus focused on moral issues rather than on experimental techniques.
In the United States.
The greatest American novelists of the early 1900’s included Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and John Steinbeck. Wharton reflected the influence of Henry James in such novels of manners as The Age of Innocence (1920), about aristocratic New Yorkers of the 1870’s. Lewis wrote about urban middle-class Americans in Babbitt (1922). In The Great Gatsby (1925), Fitzgerald pictured the false glamour and moral emptiness of wealthy, pleasure-seeking Americans of the 1920’s, an era called the Jazz Age. Hemingway captured the personal letdown and sense of loss that many people felt after World War I in The Sun Also Rises (1926).
In The Sound and the Fury (1929) and other novels, Faulkner dealt with the decline of Southern aristocratic families and the breakdown of traditional standards of behavior. Wolfe’s one great novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929), centered on the family, the education, and the love life of a young writer. Steinbeck wrote about the Great Depression in such powerful novels as The Grapes of Wrath (1939).
The American detective novel made a significant contribution to the modern novel with its realistic language and cynicism. The most important of these novels included The Maltese Falcon (1930) by Dashiell Hammett and The Big Sleep (1939) by Raymond Chandler. Margaret Mitchell wrote one of the most popular works in American literature, her historical novel of the American Civil War period, Gone with the Wind (1936).
In Germany.
Franz Kafka, a Czech author who wrote in German, produced puzzling novels that have an atmosphere of fantasy and nightmare. In The Trial (1925), Kafka portrayed the frustration and despair of an ordinary man entangled in the workings of a bureaucratic legal system. The German novelist Thomas Mann also wrote about the frustrations of modern life, but the main characters in his novels are sensitive and intellectually gifted. Mann’s major novels include The Magic Mountain (1924).
After World War II.
During the 1950’s, an experimental form called the nouveau roman (new novel) appeared in France. The nouveau roman writers rejected traditional features of novels, such as organized plots and clear-cut types of characters. Instead, they wrote novels that focused on exact descriptions of objects and events. The nouveau roman writers included Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Claude Simon. Jealousy (1957) by Robbe-Grillet typifies the nouveau roman.
Perhaps the most original novelist of the 1940’s and 1950’s was Samuel Beckett, an Irish-born author who wrote in both French and English. Beckett was influenced by James Joyce and used the interior narration technique in Malone Dies (1951). This novel centers on the repressed hysteria of a dying tramp named Malone.
In England,
the leading postwar novelists included Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, and Graham Greene. Waugh wrote light satirical novels before the war, but his tone later deepened in Brideshead Revisited (1945), a study of an aristocratic Roman Catholic family. Orwell’s 1984 (1949) deals with life in a totalitarian state. Greene wrote about religious and moral problems in The Heart of the Matter (1948). Other postwar English novelists included Kingsley Amis, Anthony Burgess, Lawrence Durrell, John Fowles, Henry Green, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, C. P. Snow, and Muriel Spark.
American writers
produced fairly conventional novels during the 1950’s. However, Jack Kerouac published his experimental, rambling, autobiographical novel On the Road in 1957. Kerouac was the best-known writer of the Beat Generation, a group of poets and novelists who strongly rejected middle-class values in America. One of the most popular novels of this period was The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J. D. Salinger. It tells about the problems of a prep school dropout in New York City.
The novels of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth deal partly with Jewish life in the United States. Bellow followed the form of the picaresque narrative in The Adventures of Augie March (1953), about a Chicago youth who grows up during the Great Depression. In The Assistant (1957), Malamud portrayed the relationship between a poor Jewish shopkeeper and his helper. In Goodbye, Columbus (1959), Roth wrote of the strained love affair between a young middle-class Jewish man and a wealthy Jewish girl. Bellow and Roth continued to write major novels about American and Jewish life for the next 50 years.
The Black American novelists Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin focused on the difficulties faced by African Americans. Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) describes a young Black man’s growing awareness of the turmoil over race in the United States. Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) tells of a poor Black family in the Harlem section of New York City. Other writers in the 1950’s produced well-crafted and powerful novels. Flannery O’Connor explored religious fanaticism in the South in Wise Blood (1952). The Russian-born Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita (1955), a brilliant, though controversial, novel about an older man’s obsession with a young girl.
The black humor style in fiction became popular during the 1960’s. Writers of black humor treat serious subjects in a darkly comic manner. Their novels are both funny and tragic. For example, Catch-22 (1961), by the American author Joseph Heller, deals humorously with the absurdities of warfare and military organizations, but also captures the terrifying confusion of World War II. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) depicts an American prisoner of war held by the Germans in Dresden during the later years of the war. John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960) is an ironic novel about suburban life in the eastern United States. Updike wrote three sequels to this novel, taking his sad character through to the 1990’s. Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) deals with the sexual neuroses of a young man from a Jewish family.
Science fiction played a prominent role in novels of the middle and late 1900’s. Key works by American writers include Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) by Robert A. Heinlein, Dune (1965) by Frank Herbert, The Andromeda Strain (1969) by Michael Crichton, Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson, and Infinite Jest (1996) by David Foster Wallace. The Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and its sequel, The Testaments (2019).
The novel in the later 1900’s
features international trends that appeared during the 1960’s and 1970’s.
Nonfiction novels.
One of the trends was introduced by a group of authors who wrote nonfiction novels. These novelists combined a documentary style with fictional techniques to tell about actual events and people. The American writer Truman Capote originated the term “nonfiction novel” to describe his In Cold Blood (1965). Capote based this work on an actual 1959 murder case in which two men killed a Kansas farm family.
Many other American authors, including William Styron and Norman Mailer, followed Capote in writing nonfiction novels. In The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), Styron told the story of an 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia led by Nat Turner, a Black preacher. Mailer wrote The Armies of the Night (1968), which describes his experiences in a 1967 protest march in Washington, D.C., and The Executioner’s Song (1979), about the execution of a murderer in Utah. E. L. Doctorow wrote Ragtime (1975), a novel that depicts both historical and fictional characters in the New York City area at the end of the 1800’s and beginning of the 1900’s. In Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), a man accused of murder comes into contact with some of the great events in modern history.
Magic realism.
Latin American fiction gained recognition with a kind of novel called magic realism, which blends dreams and magic with everyday reality. The originator of this style was the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges in the 1940’s. The Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez wrote a classic of magic realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), about generations of a strange Latin American family. Manuel Puig of Argentina wrote Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976), about the relationship between two men who share a prison cell. Several other Latin American novelists contributed to the tradition of magic realism, often writing in newer, more experimental forms. These authors included Carlos Fuentes of Mexico in The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru in The Time of the Hero (1962), and Luisa Valenzuela of Argentina in The Lizard’s Tail (1983).
In the United States, such writers as William Gaddis in The Recognitions (1955), John Barth in The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), and Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow (1971) adapted some of magic realism’s tactics. They also employed a style that made their work an encyclopedia of intellectual and historical material.
Postwar German novelists produced their own style of magic realism in the fiction of Günter Grass. In Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959), the main character can stop time and drown out history. Grass wrote about postwar stress in Germany and Poland in The Call of the Toad (1992). Heinrich Böll dealt with postwar German memories in Group Portrait with Lady (1971).
Italy and eastern Europe.
The Italian writers Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco took the novel back to its roots in allegory, fable, and fairy tale. Examples include Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973) and Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980).
Eastern Europe produced its own style of experimental fiction, often with a political slant. Christa Wolf described the difficulty of living in East Germany before the 1990 reunification with West Germany in The Quest for Christa T. (1968). Milan Kundera dealt with human relationships in Czechoslovakia near the time of a Russian invasion in 1968 in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984).
Colonialism in the novel.
Another international trend in the novel was fiction that reflected the breakup of colonial empires in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Some authors wrote about changes in Australia and Canada. Works reflecting these trends included the South African novels In the Heart of the Country (1977) by J. M. Coetzee and Burger’s Daughter (1979) by Nadine Gordimer. Chinua Achebe used Nigerian themes in Things Fall Apart (1958). V. S. Naipaul wrote several highly praised novels set in the Caribbean, notably A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) and Guerrillas (1975). Salman Rushdie wrote about Indian and Muslim traditions in The Satanic Verses (1988).
Patrick White wrote sweeping novels about his homeland of Australia, such as The Tree of Man (1955). Robertson Davies and Mordecai Richler wrote witty novels about Canada. The Chilean writer Roberto Bolano established his reputation with The Savage Detectives (1998), which follows two writers from Mexico and Chile during the 1970’s as they try to locate a Mexican poet who lived during the 1920’s.
British and Irish novelists.
British novelists still wrote in a realistic style, but they widened the range of their works. John Le Carré gained an international reputation for his realistic espionage espionage novels, such as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), which featured the shrewd spy George Smiley. Graham Swift wrote about rural life in Waterland (1983). Kingsley Amis’s son Martin Amis wrote about world finance in Money: A Suicide Note (1984). David Lodge used an academic setting in Small World: An Academic Romance (1984). Julian Barnes dealt with the world of ideas in A History of the World in 10
In Ireland, Benedict Kiely dealt with the conflict between southern and northern Ireland in Nothing Happens in Carmincross (1985). Roddy Doyle produced gritty novels about lower-class urban characters, such as Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993).
Women writers.
Several African American and Asian American women writers created important novels that explored modern Black and Asian experiences. These authors included Toni Cade Bambara in The Salt Eaters (1980), Bette Bao Lord in Spring Moon (1981), Alice Walker in The Color Purple (1982), Toni Morrison in Beloved (1987), and Amy Tan in The Joy Luck Club (1989).
Other important international writers.
The Japanese author Haruki Murakami created an otherworldly atmosphere in the eerie The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994). In India, Arundhati Roy painted a lyrical portrait of her country in The God of Small Things (1997). Orhan Pamuk of Turkey wrote My Name Is Red (1998), a kind of murder mystery set in the 1500’s and narrated from many points of view.
The novel in the 2000’s.
In the United States,
Jonathan Franzen, writing within the Realist tradition, created such ambitious American dramas as The Corrections (2001) and Freedom (2010). Louise Erdrich crafted fascinating novels about modern Native American life, and Marilynne Robinson lyrically chronicled lives in rural America in Gilead (2004), Home (2008), and Lila (2014).
Cormac McCarthy, author of many novels set in the American West, wrote a searing narrative, The Road (2007), about a father and his young son trying to survive in a devastated American landscape. Erik Larsen and T. C. Boyle wrote innovative novels, mixing historical characters and events with imagined circumstances. Both Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay (2000) and Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude (2003) drew inspiration from comic books.
In the early years of the 2000’s, a new generation of novelists depicted the immigrant experience in America and Europe. Jhumpa Lahiri poignantly chronicled an Indian American family in The Namesake (2003). Junot Díaz described an eccentric Dominican boy in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). In Teju Cole’s philosophical Open City (2011), a young Nigerian man reflects on life and art while strolling through New York City.
In the United Kingdom,
Hilary Mantel revived the historical novel with a trilogy called “Wolf Hall” (2009-2020), about the court of King Henry VIII. Ian McEwan explored the nature of numerous obsessions in Enduring Love (1998), Atonement (2001), and The Children Act (2014). Zadie Smith produced a portrait of multicultural London in her modern classic White Teeth (2000). David Mitchell combined historical and science fiction in Cloud Atlas (2004). Edward St. Aubyn’s five “Patrick Melrose” novels (1992-2012) examine British upper-class life with dark humor.
In Europe,
a blend of fiction and autobiography called autofiction became an increasingly popular form. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle (2009-11) is an exhaustive account of the Norwegian author’s day-to-day existence. An Italian author writing under the pseudonym Elena Ferrante followed the story of a female friendship over many years in her “Neapolitan Novels” quartet (2011-2014).
