Modern domestic realism in America, 1950–1970

Decade by decade, in the second half of the twentieth century, American women writers' appeal comes out of a commitment to evolving versions of modern realism and the intensified investigation of social and cultural circumstances as well as gendered ones. American domestic writers were already of such significance that several won Pulitzer Prizes through the 1920s and 1930s. Best-selling author Pearl Buck published two novels during 1950s: Come, My Beloved, about the love of an expatriate American woman for an Indian doctor amid the tumult of independence; and Imperial Woman, about China's last empress. Two directions can be observed in the fiction of the late 1960s. On the one hand, the sustained promise of several major talents can be seen while, on the other, an upsurge in domestic fiction that produces an array of new novelists can be witnessed.