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Capturing America: Mark Lawson's History of Modern American Literature

Robyn Read

Capturing America: Mark Lawson's History of Modern American Literature: Episode 4: Landscapes, Interiors, Underworlds

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Landscapes, Interiors, Underworlds

Episode 4

Episode 4: Landscapes, Interiors, Underworlds

BBC Radio 4 Extra - Capturing America: Mark Lawson's History of Modern American Literature, Landscapes, Interiors, UnderworldsSearch BBC

Writers have captured the texture of everyday life in America's different regions.

Mark Lawson traces how American writers have captured the texture of everyday life. With John Updike. From March 2010.

Mark Lawson tells the story of how American writing became the literary superpower of the 20th century, telling the nation's stories of money, power, sex, religion and war.

John Updike, author of the Rabbit quartet of novels, always remembered being inspired by the 1960s Pop Art of Andy Warhol and others: an attempt to catch the visual reality of modern America. Updike responded by trying to achieve something similar in fiction, depicting the lives of people from places and backgrounds which had often been ignored. Richard Ford (The Sportswriter trilogy), John Irving (The Cider House Rules), Marilynne Robinson (Housekeeping, Gilead) and Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections) also reflect on this mission to describe the external and internal nature of life in the United States in all its regional and personal variety.

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Mark Lawson tells the story of the rise of American writing in the 20th century

Mark Lawson tells the story of how American writing became the literary superpower of the 20th century, telling the nation's stories of money, power, sex, religion and war

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