After the war, there was a period named after one American senator, Joseph McCarthy. War became one of the main themes of American literature: Joseph Heller (1923–1999) Catch 22, Norman Mailer (1923) The Naked and the Dead, Herman Wouk (1915), The Winds of War and Irwin Shaw (1913–1984) Young Lions and Leon Uris (1924–2003) Mila 15. In the war novels written at that time, the enemy was not so much the fascists but the war and the American army. 

 KURT VONNEGUT (1922-2007) became most famous for his satirical novels. Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano (1952) is set in the future, where scientists and engineers of vast corporations attempt to automate everything. As a result, the functions of human beings are gradually taken over by machines. This work labelled Vonnegut as a science-fiction writer, although the author himself thought that he had written a novel about people and machines. Another important novel is The Cat's Cradle (1963) which is set on the fictional island of San Lorenzo in South America. There are two action lines: one follows a scientist who creates a chemical, Ice-Nine, that turns all water into ice. Absentmindedly he is responsible for the end of the world. The other one is a sharp criticism of dictatorship. Vonnegut explores the destructive rationality of Western science and the turn towards mysticism, which was just then beginning to take hold among students in the USA and Europe.  

 The best known is Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), which was based on his experience in Dresden, Germany, where he was a war prisoner during the destruction of the town in 1945. Later he was employed by the Germans to dig out corpses. Dresden was occupied in 1945 by Soviet troops and Vonnegut was repatriated to the United States. His main theme is the effects of technology on humanity. Slaughterhouse-Five, or the Children's Crusade is written as science fiction. He showed that science fiction can be a serious mainstream literature. He believed that no common words could express the terrors of the war. Vonnegut's other works include plays, essays, critics, and TV plays. His later novel is Bluebeard (1987). Vonnegut collected his essays in A Man Without A Country (2005). 

E.L. DOCTOROW (1931–2015) is a Jewish-American writer who is famous for his rewriting of American history. He is combining fictional and real historical figures to bring back and recreate the political and social climate of that time. He concentrates mainly on the first half of the 20. century. Doctorow is the master of all genres but he is breaking their main rules. His first novel was an anti-western Welcome to Bad Times, 1960 filmed by Henry Fonda. It tells the story of the colonization of the wild West. The first successful novel was The Book of Daniel, 1971. The whole story takes place within seven months in 1967. The protagonist, a historiographer is trying to find out why had been his parents executed. It is based on the real case of the Rosenbergs who were in the fifties executed on an electrical chair for participating in giving the information about atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. The most famous novel is The Ragtime, 1975 filmed by Milos Forman. It is set between 1902 and the end of the WWI. It is a complex net of individual histories and relationships that are on one hand determined by the social and political context (the industrial growth, immigration, relationship to Afro-Americans) but on the other hand, they determine the course of events of the time they live in. He uses the literary techniques of montage, he inserts news and newspaper articles in the text and experiments with narrative methods. It has a rhythm of ragtime music. 

 JOHN CHEEVER (1912-1982) is an American short story writer and novelist, called the "Chekhov of the suburbs". Cheever's main theme was the spiritual and emotional emptiness of life. He especially described the manners and morals of middle-class, suburban America, with ironic humour. He studied at Harvard University but was expelled for smoking. The Stories of John Cheever (1978) won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the National Books Critics Circle Award, and an American Book Award. He published most of his stories in the New Yorker similarly to Salinger. All of his stories present a contrast between the peacefulness and respectability of the middle-class suburban life and the emotional instability of the characters. Sometimes they revolt: the weak husbands against their hysterical and tyrannical wives, yet the revolt does not lead them to happiness.

 VLADIMIR NABOKOV (1899-1977) Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg into a wealthy, aristocratic family. In 1937 Nabokov moved to Paris. There he met the Irish novelist James Joyce. With a loan he received from the composer Rachmaninov, Nabokov  moved three years later with his wife and son to the United States. His novel, Lolita, became a literary bomb. The English writer Graham Greene cited it among the best books of 1955. With Lolita Nabokov gained a huge success, although it was banned in Paris in 1956-58 and not published in full in America and the U.K. until 1958.

 Lolita is one of the most controversial novels of the 20th century, in which the rhetoric of the protagonist both captivates and repels. The story deals with the desire of a middle-aged paedophile Humbert Humbert, the narrator, for a 12-year-old girl. Humbert keeps a prison diary of his lifelong fascination with pubescent "nymphets". Stanley Kubrick directed the film version.

 J(EROME) D(AVID) SALINGER (1919-2010) American novelist and short story writer. Salinger published one novel and several short story collections between 1948-59. He published two experimental novels that are interconnected: Franny and Zooey (1961), Raise High The Roof Beam, and Carpenters (1963). His best-known work is The Catcher In The Rye (1951), a growing-up novel. The novel took its title from a line by Robert Burns, in which the protagonist Holden Caulfield misquoting it sees himself as a 'catcher in the rye' who must keep the world's children from falling off 'some crazy cliff'. The story is written in a monologue and in lively slang. The humour of the novel places it in the tradition of Mark Twain's classical works, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but its worldview is more disillusioned. Holden describes everything as 'phoney' and is constantly in search of sincerity.

TRUMAN CAPOTE (1924-1984) American novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), depicted a boy, Joel Knox, growing up in the Deep South. The book gained wide success and created controversy because of its treatment of homosexuality. Capote wrote Breakfast At Tiffany's (1958). Its central character, Holly Golightly, is a young woman, who comes to New York seeking for happiness. She has a nameless cat and a brother named Fred. The narrator, an aspiring writer who has the same birthday as Capote (September 30), follows Holly's life, filled with colourful characters. The novel is constructed as a memory of events that happened about 15 years earlier. Holly has left the country before the end of the war, and the narrator has not seen her since. Breakfast at Tiffany's was made into a successful film, directed by Blake Edwards and starring Audrey Hepburn. Capote gained international fame with his "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood (1966), an account of a real-life crime in which an entire family was murdered by two sociopaths.