mr. updike and the life course

i'll write no odes to harry angstrom, but john updike's passing prompts a naive question: has his generation outperformed previous and subsequent generations of (white male u.s.) writers? if so, what period or cohort effects drove updike, mailer, vidal, bellow, and their contemporaries to prominence? was it a war thing, a cold-war thing, a children of the great depression thing, a modernity thing, an age-of-the-novel thing, a writer-as-celebrity thing, a hegemonic masculinity thing, or just a when-chris-happened-to-go-to-college thing?*

the question of prominence relative to contemporaries is completely naive, of course, because so many non-white and non-male voices were effectively silenced. but a life course scholar might reasonably ask how the 1915-1935 birth cohort (below) stacks up against previous or subsequent generations of male writers or white male writers:

bernard malamud: 1914-1986
william burroughs: 1914-1997
saul bellow: 1915-2005
j.d. salinger: 1919-
alex haley: 1921-1992
kurt vonnegut: 1922-2007
jack kerouac: 1922-1969
norman mailer: 1923-2007
joseph heller: 1923-1999
james baldwin: 1924-1987
truman capote: 1924-1984
gore vidal: 1925-
chaim potok: 1929-2002
tom wolfe: 1931-
john updike: 1932-2009
philip roth: 1933-
cormac mccarthy: 1933-
thomas pynchon: 1937-
hunter s. thompson: 1937-2005

you can find 19 strong voices on that haphazard list, not to mention 19 distinctive visions of masculinity. i'd certainly be hard pressed to come up with as impressive a list for my own age cohort, but maybe today's mailers and vidals are busy scripting ad copy or survivorman-style reality shows. i can't think of many contemporary literary equivalents, but i'm not reading much fiction these days. my generation can boast fine male writers like chuck palahniuk, sherman alexie, brett easton ellis, and dave eggers -- all very clever -- but not exactly literary lions. mr. wallace had the stuff, i suppose, though i can't help thinking he might've enjoyed a longer career had he been born a few decades earlier.

but maybe that's just me. perhaps i'm identifying a greatest generation simply because their work struck me at a particularly susceptible time in my own life course. or, maybe they just wore me down with sheer persistence. i'm no expert on standards of literary production, but those ol' dudes seemed dang prolific. and, for a while there, i was hanging on their every word.

*this sort of post should always come with a disclaimer, since i lack expertise in both cultural sociology and in american literature. most of my posts, in fact, should come with this sort of disclaimer.