The Long View: Processing Social Change Through Literature: Essay 1

Essay 1: The Time Lag of Literary Processing

Let’s start with a simple observation: big societal upheavals—wars, revolutions, social movements—tend to create ripples in literature. But here’s the twist: those ripples usually don’t show up immediately. Sure, there are exceptions (there always are), but more often than not, the most enduring literary responses to major social changes seem to emerge a decade or two after the fact. Why? That’s the question this essay, and this series, sets out to explore.

The hypothesis here is straightforward: literature needs time to digest big, messy cultural and social changes. It takes years for authors to process what happened, for society to absorb the aftershocks, and for the right stories to take shape. Sometimes this delay reflects the personal journeys of writers who experienced the events firsthand, needing distance to write with perspective. Other times, it’s because the cultural narrative—the stories we tell ourselves as a society—takes time to coalesce. In this series of essays, we’ll unpack this idea by looking at how literature has historically responded to seismic social changes, how some authors have acted as catalysts rather than commentators, and how others have seemed to see the future before anyone else did.

This first essay focuses on the time lag: why it exists, how it works, and what it reveals about the relationship between art and history. By the end, you might find yourself looking at your favorite books a little differently, seeing them as part of a larger cycle of reflection, reckoning, and storytelling.

The Pattern of Delay

Start with Hemingway. A Farewell to Arms was published in 1929, eleven years after the end of World War I and more than a decade after Hemingway’s own experiences as an ambulance driver during the conflict. This wasn’t a guy scribbling in a trench; it was a man reflecting, years later, on what it all meant—not just to him but to a generation that had been called the "Lost Generation" for a reason.

Jump ahead to World War II. James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951) and The Thin Red Line (1962) arrived a decade or two after the events they depicted. These weren’t just war stories; they were reckonings, grappling with the psychological scars and cultural shifts that came with global conflict. Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead came out in 1948, just three years after the war ended, but his later works—Barbary Shore and The Deer Park—delve deeper into the existential crises of returning veterans.

And then there’s the Vietnam War. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990) didn’t show up until almost two decades after the war ended. Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977) was closer to the events but still reflected a cooling-off period where reflection overtook raw reaction. These works—and many others—seem to follow a pattern: the biggest, most impactful books about a major event often emerge after a decade or two of cultural digestion.

Why is that?

The Role of Time and Distance

Time matters for two reasons. First, there’s the personal element. Many of the authors who write these books lived through the events themselves. It’s hard to write a masterpiece when you’re still in survival mode. Trauma, uncertainty, and the sheer business of staying alive don’t leave a lot of room for narrative craftsmanship. Even for those who weren’t directly involved, understanding the broader implications of a social change often requires stepping back to see the forest for the trees.

Then there’s the societal element. It’s not just individuals who need time; cultures do, too. After a major upheaval, society tends to spend years—even decades—trying to figure out what just happened and what it all means. That’s why you often see a lag between the event and the emergence of a cultural narrative about it. Take the civil rights movement, for example. While there were important books written during the 1960s and 1970s, some of the most impactful reckonings with race in America came later, as authors reflected on what had been achieved, what had been lost, and what remained to be done.

Examples Beyond War

It’s not just wars that follow this pattern. Look at the economic and social upheavals of the early 20th century. John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy, written in the 1930s, was a sprawling attempt to make sense of the labor struggles, economic transformations, and political shifts of the 1910s and 1920s. Similarly, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) wasn’t written in the depths of the Great Depression but toward its end, when the dust storms had settled (literally) and the long-term effects of the crisis were becoming clear.

More recently, consider the Northern Irish crime thriller boom that began in the 2000s, about a decade after the Good Friday Agreement brought an end to the Troubles. Authors like Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville didn’t just write about the conflict itself but about its aftermath, exploring the lingering tensions and personal reckonings that followed decades of violence.

Adrian McKinty’s Sean Duffy series is particularly noteworthy for how it weaves Northern Ireland’s religious and political divisions into the fabric of its crime stories. Duffy, a Catholic police detective working in a predominantly Protestant police force during the Troubles, navigates not only criminal investigations but also the personal and professional challenges of living in a deeply fractured society. The series captures the paranoia, fear, and simmering hostility that defined the era, all while injecting McKinty’s signature black humor, which feels uniquely Northern Irish.

Another important work is Anna Burns’s Milkman (2018), which won the Booker Prize and offers a haunting, deeply personal take on life during the Troubles. Burns draws heavily on her childhood experiences in Belfast to craft a narrative suffused with paranoia and dark humor. The novel doesn’t shy away from the complexities of communal trauma, exploring how living under constant surveillance and threat warps relationships and identities. Coming out decades after the Good Friday Agreement, Milkman reflects the long shadow the Troubles cast over individual and collective memory. It raises the question of whether childhood cultural traumas—especially in such a charged and dangerous environment—take longer to coalesce and find expression in literature.

Taken together, these works suggest that the Troubles were not only a political conflict but also a cultural one, leaving scars that writers are still exploring and coming to terms with. They highlight how literature can serve as both a mirror to past experiences and a tool for processing the emotional and social aftershocks of prolonged violence.

This isn’t to say there aren’t immediate responses to social changes. Of course there are. But the works that tend to last—the ones that get read and re-read decades later—often take their time. They’re the ones that dig deeper, looking not just at what happened but at why it mattered and how it changed us.

Why This Matters

So what’s the takeaway? For one, it’s a reminder that literature isn’t just about telling stories; it’s about processing experience. Great books don’t just chronicle events; they help us understand them, contextualize them, and, sometimes, heal from them.

It’s also a reminder to be patient. We live in a world of instant reactions, where people expect hot takes and think pieces within minutes of a major event. But the best stories often take years or decades to emerge. That’s not a failure of creativity; it’s a testament to how deeply writers and societies engage with the events that shape us.

As we move through this series, we’ll see how this dynamic plays out across different kinds of literature and in response to different kinds of change. We’ll look at authors who didn’t wait for history to settle but actively shaped it, at visionaries who saw the future before it arrived, and at the ways literature serves as both a mirror and a map for the societies that produce it.

For now, though, let’s leave with this thought: the next time you pick up a novel or watch a movie about a big historical event, ask yourself when it was made. Chances are, the time lag may tell you as much about the work as the story itself.

Hey, interested in listening to some of the music that inspired me over the years that I’ve been thinking about this idea? Here’s a playlist on Spotify: