Jewish-American writing

US writing in English shaped by the Jewish experience. It was produced by the children of Eastern European immigrants who came to the USA at the end of the 19th century, and by the 1940s second- and third-generation Jewish-American writers had become central to US literary and intellectual life. Nobel prize-winning authors include Saul Bellow in 1976 and Isaac Bashevis Singer in 1978.

The first significant Jewish-American novel was Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917). During the 1920s many writers, including Ludwig Lewisohn and Mary Antin, signalled the Jewish presence in US culture. In the 1930s Mike Gold's Jews Without Money and Henry Roth's Call It Sleep showed in fiction the immigrant Jewish struggle to adapt to the US experience. Novelists such as Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer, poets such as Karl Shapiro, Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966), and Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), dramatists and screenwriters such as Arthur Miller, S N Behrman, Neil Simon, and Woody Allen, and critics such as Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) and Irving Howe made the Jewish experience known and a genre of American letters. In the 1950s the Jewish-American novel, shaped by awareness of the Holocaust, expressed themes of human responsibility. Many subsequent writers, including Stanley Elkin, Joseph Heller, Chaim Potok, Denise Levertov, Grace Paley, and Cynthia Ozick, have extended the tradition.