The American Novel Since 1945
Yale's Open Course traces the American novel from 1945 to the present, examining how writers and readers relate to each other, how publishing conditions shape fiction, and how novelistic form changes across the postwar decades. Lectures move through Richard Wright, Flannery O'Connor, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, J. D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, and Edward P. Jones, tracking fiction's engagement with history and its shifting place in American culture. The class ends with a contemporary novel chosen by the students themselves that year. Recorded on the Yale campus in Spring 2008 from twice-weekly fifty-minute sessions, the course is presented as full video lectures through Open Yale Courses, free to watch, with no assignments or certificate attached, just the complete lecture series and reading list.