<P> After being relegated to cookbooks and autobiographies for most of the 20th century, Asian American literature achieved widespread notice through Maxine Hong Kingston's fictional memoir, The Woman Warrior (1976), and her novels China Men (1980) and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book . Chinese - American author Ha Jin in 1999 won the National Book Award for his second novel, Waiting, about a Chinese soldier in the Revolutionary Army who has to wait 18 years to divorce his wife for another woman, all the while having to worry about persecution for his protracted affair, and twice won the PEN / Faulkner Award, in 2000 for Waiting and in 2005 for War Trash . </P> <P> Indian - American author Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her debut collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), and went on to write a well - received novel, The Namesake (2003), which was shortly adapted to film in 2007 . In her second collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth, released to widespread commercial and critical success, Lahiri shifts focus and treats the experiences of the second and third generation . </P> <P> Other notable Asian - American novelists include Amy Tan, best known for her novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), tracing the lives of four immigrant families brought together by the game of Mahjong, and Korean American novelist Chang - Rae Lee, who has published Native Speaker, A Gesture Life, and Aloft . Such poets as Marilyn Chin and Li - Young Lee, Kimiko Hahn and Janice Mirikitani have also achieved prominence, as has playwright David Henry Hwang . Equally important has been the effort to recover earlier Asian American authors, started by Frank Chin and his colleagues; this effort has brought Sui Sin Far, Toshio Mori, Carlos Bulosan, John Okada, Hisaye Yamamoto and others to prominence . </P> <P> Hispanic literature also became important during this period, starting with acclaimed novels by Tomás Rivera (... y no se lo tragó la tierra) and Rudolfo Anaya (Bless Me, Ultima), and the emergence of Chicano theater with Luis Valdez and Teatro Campesino . Latina writing became important thanks to authors such as Sandra Cisneros, an icon of an emerging Chicano literature whose 1984 bildungsroman The House on Mango Street is taught in schools across the United States, Denise Chavez's The Last of the Menu Girls and Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza . </P>

How did the revolutionary war contribute to the literature and writing of the time