ABSTRACT
In the world of painting, the dominant names were Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning; in literature, Ralph Ellison, Vladimir Nabokov, and Saul Bellow. All were outsiders from the traditional areas of American creativity. The controversies over black civil rights and the Vietnam War dominated the headlines; creative artists were remaking all of American culture. Students who went to college in the 1950s and 1960s had far more opportunities to encounter challenging ideas in all areas of knowledge than ever before, and in a broad range of activities, from technology and marketing to agriculture and art, America seemed preeminent in the world. Augie March is an outsider adjusting to America, a boy of uncertain parentage and immigrant culture trying to find his identity and his proper relationship to his country. Three Mexican muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros, Jose Clemente Orozco, and Diego Rivera, who had risen to prominence in the 1920s, became key influences in New York in the 1930s.
