Modern Period

1910–1945
476 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

476
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 477

Toward the Modern Age

Alienation and Literary Experimentation
A Sheaf of Political Poetry in the Modern Period
The New Negro Renaissance
Issues and Visions in Modern America

As with other sections in The Heath Anthology, the anthology

itself is a good place to begin class discussion, particularly in
its use of the term “modern.” Attempts by the class to define
this word can lead to questions about where to locate the
border between the past and present—a question implied by
the phrase “Toward the Modern Age”—and hence to questions
about the uses of literary, historical, and cultural classification
systems. For example, how does the adjective “modern” affect
our reading of a particular text? What difference does it make
to read W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Booker
T. Washington as precursors of modern African-American
literature instead of reading them as descendants of and
respondents to Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, or Phillis
Wheatley? Or as contemporaries of Edith Wharton and Willa
Cather? Groups of students could be asked to read writers
collected in just these different configurations to compare the
various perspectives that emerge.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

478 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
These exercises suggest further experiments in
classification and reclassification. In the Instructor’s Guide
entry for “A Sheaf of Political Poetry in the Modern Era,”
Cary Nelson asks what difference the label “political” makes
in reading these poems—and by extension what difference the
same label would make to other texts, or what different labels
would mean to the texts in that same section. What if the
poems of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, or Amy Lowell were labeled
as primarily “political” rather than “experimental” or
“personal”? What is the effect of encountering Langston
Hughes in both the section on political poetry and in the
section on “The New Negro Renaissance”? Such questions
also involve the instructor in the process of critical re-
evaluation and reclassification, for as instructors we carry the
biases and perspectives of our own academic training and
reading histories. For many of us, the definition of the word
“modern” in terms of literary history almost automatically
suggests the term “modernism.” While for many students all of
the writers in these sections will be new, for others, as for most
instructors, certain names will leap out, but perhaps in unusual
or nontraditional places. If, as an instructor, you find it curious
to see Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot so separated in the table of
contents, or Pound next to Amy Lowell and Eliot in between e.
e. cummings and F. Scott Fitzgerald, such a reaction can be
brought into class discussion. These reactions are one way of
situating the instructor’s reading history and academic training
in terms of the particular course, or providing a context in
which to evaluate and understand the instructor’s expertise,
and also to illustrate the benefits offered by unsettling and
reexamining traditional patterns of thought.
In a way, these questions of how classification systems
are formed— and concomitant questions of how systems of
literary and cultural evaluation are formed—return us to the
use of “regionalism” as a definitive concept in multicultural
pedagogy; the understanding that all classification systems,
methods of reading, and historical narratives are social
constructions connected to particular historical contexts
serving various but equally particular social, cultural, political,
and psychological purposes. While the idea of replacing the
universal with the regional—or asserting the universality of
being regional—may seem new, it’s a move comparable to the
project of modernism as traditionally understood: the effort to

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 479
make “Alienation and Literary Experimentation,” terms
suggestive of the marginality of the artist as social outsider,
into what Eliot regarded as the mainstream of literary
tradition—what we refer to today as the “canon.” This
paradoxical idea of the centrality of alienation often holds an
added irony for many students reading these now-canonical
high modernist texts for the first time in terms of their own
sense of alienation from these self-consciously difficult texts.
Rather than an a priori assumption of the centrality of a
certain defin-ition of modernism or the deductive approach
outlined earlier, an inductive approach that regards each text as
regional turns student frustration and puzzlement—essential
parts of the learning process, after all—into material for
discussion rather than barriers to be overcome. Instead of
guessing ahead of time which writers certain students will find
difficult, which accessible, interesting, and boring, the various
reading experiences students bring into class, perhaps
expressed in the form of a reading log, can lead to questions of
audience and purpose. “Alienation” can begin with questions
about how writers—all writers, both in the anthology and in
the chairs of the class— either consciously or unconsciously
invite and/or discourage various groups of readers. These
questions lead to other questions about the writer’s purpose
and strategies, an approach especially though not exclusively
useful for the most self-consciously experimental and difficult
texts, like the work of the Objectivist poets.
Among these purposes and strategies are claims to
universality. By beginning with the assumption that all writers
are regionalists, we move beyond the idea that while certain
groups of writers write for everyone, others represent a special
or local case. The writers of “The New Negro Renaissance,”
for example, are typical, not exceptional, in their attention to
the specific contours of particular cultural experiences: the
place of African Americans in U.S. society; the role of the
intellectual in the African- American community; the
experience of being members of a literary and cultural
movement. From this perspective, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound,
William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens are also
regionalists, writing from particular cultural positions to
particular audiences. If the traditional high modernists claim
universality and cultural transcendence as part of their
strategy, these claims are just that—strategies—and thus

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

480 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
comparable with the strategies and claims for universality of
Kay Boyle, Langston Hughes, Theodore Dreiser, or Edna St.
Vincent Millay. Issues of race, gender, and class affect these
strategies in terms of the traditional assumptions they carry
about centrality, marginality, and importance: Gertrude Stein
and Ezra Pound are both gendered writers; T. S. Eliot and Zora
Neale Hurston are both writers who deal with issues of race, as
well as what constitutes a literary tradition.
Finally, questions of canonicity raise questions of
influence; how later writers and readers are affected by the
poetic strategies and cultural theories of earlier writers and the
implications for reading implicit in those strategies, issues that
Eliot himself foregrounded as part of his artistic project. If
some students bring to class assumptions about the inherent
difficulty and obscurity of poetry, about the need to “interpret”
poetry, or even about what constitutes poetry, the
consideration of these writers as making various claims about
what literature is, who should write it and read it, and what its
cultural purposes are, can help students construct a genealogy
of their own ideas about literature and reading and/or the ideas
they have encountered in previous English classes.

Issues and Visions in Modern America

The texts in this section continue to address the questions of

assimilation, confrontation, and transformation of the evolving
myth of “Americanness” raised in “The Making of
‘Americans,’ ” focusing particularly on the experiences of
Native Americans, Asian-Americans, and Southerners. This
seemingly incongruous grouping highlights important issues
related to that myth: both how that myth is profoundly regional
in definition within the borders of the United States (where
does the “All American” live? What are the images associated
with the idea of a “typical” American town?) and how various
immigrants’ experiences became conflated within that myth
into a single archetypal immigrant’s story, usually centered on
the arrival of European immigrants in New York. The poetry
of anonymous Chinese immigrants not only allows for an
exploration of the experience and challenges faced by Asian
immigrants arriving in the American West, traveling east to a
new land against the traditional European myth of west-ward
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 481
expansion, but points out again the importance of recognizing
the classroom as region—whether it is located in the South, the
West, the Midwest, or the East; and paying attention to and
making a subject of class discussion the specific immigration
histories the students bring with them as part of their identities.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

482 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

In addition to the continuing exploration of cultural

assimilation and resistance, the other major issue addressed in
these selections is the Great Depression, the collapse of the
U.S. economic system that intensified patterns of internal
migration (from East to West and from South to North) that
continue to this day. As with immigration, class discussion can
start by investigating the images of the depression in the
historical consciousnesses of the class and asking students to
explore their own relevant family histories. Such explorations
will inevitably raise questions of social class and work,
particularly as they relate to various educational institutions
(community colleges, regional public universities, research
institutions), including questions about the relation of a
modern college education to the demands of the marketplace.
Thus, reading the work of Meridel LeSueur, Clifford Odets, or
Pietro Di Donato highlights not only questions about the role
of the artist and the purpose of art, but also the purpose of the
college literature course for students facing an increasingly
competitive and uncertain economic future. Such a discussion
provides an important perspective for considerations of
canonicity in terms not just of creating demographically
representative curricula in an abstract sense but of classes that
address the concerns and ambitions of students by choosing
groups of texts that in their action and interaction reflect,
amplify, complicate, and clarify these concerns. Reading
proletarian literature from the thirties in conjunction with T. S.
Eliot, for example, broadens the implications of both types of
texts and opens the paths of access to them as well.

Toward the Modern Age

Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856–1915)

Contributing Editor: William L. Andrews

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 483

Students typically ask questions like these: Why was

Washington such an accommodationist? Why did he seem so
ready to accept the values of the dominant culture and political
system? Why was he always so restrained and unwilling to say
anything to upset the white supremacy status quo? I point out
Washington’s training at Hampton Institute, where he learned
very early what white people wanted and how little could be
accomplished without pleasing them. Also note that
Washington is trying to build a source of black power in the
South and cannot do so unless he makes his work seem
apolitical (when it isn’t).
Consider also these questions: What is the best way for a
minority group to advance their own cause when faced with
either outright hostility or fear and mistrust? Is Washington’s
tactic the most effective? What are its costs and advantages?

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

What is Washington’s relationship to Douglass, the leader

whose mantle he adopted? What kind of realism is Washington
advocating and how does it accord with literary realism? How
does Washington fit into the tradition of the Franklinesque
self-made man?

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

What sort of slave narrative is Washington writing, in contrast

to Douglass? Compare the first two chapters of both men’s
autobiographies to see where they resemble each other and
differ. Generally Washington poses as a man of facts, not
feelings, but does he sometimes betray strong feelings?

Original Audience

Stress the willingness of turn-of-the-century readers to believe

a black man who is full of optimism about progress. How
might such a message be received today—with how much
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
484 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
suspicion?

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Compare to Douglass and Chesnutt, especially in their

depiction of slavery. Why would Washington play down the
horrors of slavery?

Bibliography

I recommend the chapter entitled “Lost in a Cause” in Robert

Stepto’s From Behind the Veil. Urbana: Illinois University
Press, 1979.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 485

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963)
Contributing Editor: Frederick Woodard

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

“The Song of the Smoke” is a poem of celebration of

blackness. It was written during a period of great social and
political weakness of black people. List the attributes of
blackness celebrated in the poem and suggest how each
attribute contributes to a positive image. Consider why Du
Bois may have felt it necessary to write of blackness in such
exalted terms.
Ask students to characterize the effect of verbal
repetition, rhythm, and variation of line length in the poem.
How do these characteristics relate to the central metaphor,
“smoke”?
Select an edition of the volume The Souls of Black Folk
and peruse the beginning of each chapter. Find lines of poetry
and a musical score. Consider the possible significance of
these two art forms to the major theme of the book. Note that
“Of the Sorrow Songs” contains comments on the music and
names the songs.
The “veil” is one of Du Bois’s most famous symbols.
Consider possible meanings for it in “Of Our Spiritual
Strivings,” particularly at the beginning of the essay, where he
boasts of living “above the veil.”
Relate the section in “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” out of
which the famous Du Bois passage on twoness comes
(beginning with “After the Egyptian and the Indian, the Greek
and Roman” and ending with “Shout, O Children!/Shout,
you’re free!/For God has bought your liberty!”) to a reading of
“The Unhappy Consciousness,” a chapter in Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Mind. Then develop a list of supporting
evidence to justify the probable influences of the Hegelian
argument on Du Bois’s thinking in his essay. Additional
reading in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic: Five
Hermeneutical Studies, translated by P. Christopher Smith
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976) should provide
excellent analysis of Hegel’s ideas and method. See
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
486 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
particularly Chapters 2 and 3.
Note throughout the essays collected here that Du Bois
uses the terms Negro, black, and African American almost
interchangeably. On closer examination, you may discern a
specific context that differentiates the use of each term.
Develop a rationale for use of each term in a specific context.
“Of the Sorrow Songs” is considered one of Du Bois’s
most enduring statements on African-American folk art. Using
the content of the essay, trace the evolution of the African
song to a unique American folk expression.

James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938)

Contributing Editor: Arthenia J. Bates Millican

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Next to James Weldon Johnson’s name and date of birth in a

biosketch is the familiar catalog of his accomplishments as
educator, journalist, lawyer, composer, librettist, poet, novelist,
editor, social historian, literary critic, diplomat, fighter for the
rights of his people and the rights of all. Yet, he is remembered
today, almost exclusively, as the author of “Lift Every Voice
and Sing”; and to some degree as the author of the “Creation,”
the first sermon in God’s Trombones.
One mythic error is still in vogue for the less ardent
student, and that is the indictment leveled against the author
who “talks black” but who was never really given to the black
ethos. This accusation comes as an error of identification.
Some students assume that Johnson himself is the protagonist
of the novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man.
Actually, the author’s friend, “D______,” Douglas Wetmore,
is model for the protagonist. Thus, one encounters the problem
of coping with an author with name popularity, but who is now
known despite his myriad contributions to American and
African-American literary culture.
The writer can best be made accessible to students, first,
by introducing Along This Way, his authentic life story, as well
as the history of the Harlem Renaissance and the rise of
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 487
Marxist ideology. In the index, the entry “Johnson, James
Weldon” is a reference guide in chronological order that gives
the chance to examine items of choice.
Johnson may stand in clearer relief by using an
“exchange” pattern of image-making. For example, discuss W.
E. B. Du Bois as a “politician” who engaged in “political”
actions at times.
An indirect form of transformation of real life act to art
can be traced in an evolutionary process that produced
Trombones. First, Johnson visited a Jacksonville church during
his childhood days where he saw the African shout. Second, he
visited “Little Africa.” Third, he listened to his father as a
gospel preacher. And finally, he heard gospel preachers when
he was field secretary for the NAACP. The Kansas City
sermon spurred these recollections and brought on a feeling
that gave him import to black soul, the African communal
spirit.
Students usually respond to the following issues:

1. The failure of the “Talented Tenth” to understand the

economic imperatives that would involve all Americans.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

488 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

2. The failure of the Johnson legacy to maintain itself with

the onset of Marxism and the rise of proletarian
literature.
3. The failure of Fisk and Atlanta universities to play a
significant role in building a Johnson file of note.
4. The reason so little is known about J. Rosamond,
Johnson’s co-editor and collaborator.
5. In a quiet way, Johnson is receiving scholarly
interest. Will it be potent enough to take him into the
twenty-first century?

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Exemplary themes of major import in the Johnson canon begin

with “Lift Every Voice” and “Bards.” They relate to the black
presence in America via the “peculiar institution,” slavery, but
maintain relevance to the American Dream, “holy hope,” and
self-realization. Typical themes of historical significance are:
freedom and authority; liberty and responsibility; the artist in
America; and society and the individual. On the personal level,
in terms of the author’s race and his innate concerns, the theme
of historical references is stressed in order to give credence to
and assess values that originated in Africa. Other themes in the
“personal” category are: men’s ways with God; the mystical
aura of the creative imagination; the power, beauty, and
“essential rhythm” of indigenous black folk poetry; justice,
liberation, and peace.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Johnson’s reputation as a writer rests on his novel and God’s

Trombones. His idea that prose should state facts enables him
to write a realistic novel. He treats themes such as
namelessness, racial self-hatred, the black mother’s ambiguous
role, and the white patron/white liberal who appears in the
modern novel by blacks.
As a poet, he went through a long evolutionary stage of
development. His first poems, Jingles and Croons, are written
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 489
in the “Dunbar” tradition of accommodation, imitation, and
limitation in terms of the two emotions allowed: pathos and
humor. The plantation and the minstrel stage are background
sources.
When Johnson wrote “Lift Every Voice” in 1900, he had
become imbued with the Victorian conventions of English
verse. Rudyard Kipling, the poet laureate (the court poet),
wrote many occasional poems, including “Recessional,” which
served as a model for the black national anthem in form and
structure.
Walt Whitman, the poet who gave birth to a new
American poetry, wrote in free verse. Song of Myself set the
stage for the freedom, individual experimentation, and the new
theme of egalitarianism that appear in one aspect of Johnson’s
poem “Brothers.” He used free verse in Trombones.
The coming of the New Negro to New York in the post–
World War I period, “thoughtwise” and “boywise,” combined
to form Harlem as the New Jerusalem for blacks. This city
became the place for conscious black artists who revered their
African past and their southern roots. Trombones is grounded
in this tradition. It makes use of African rhythms; it employs
intonations of southern folk idioms, thus enforcing the power
of black speech devoid of the artificial “cant of literary
dialect.” Therefore, Johnson set the stage for future poets who
desired to honor the oral tradition in their conscious literary
works.

Original Audience

Black literature written in the nineteenth century and in the

first four decades of the twentieth century was written
basically for a white reading audience. At that time there were
few if any student audiences on any level who studied works
by blacks. In black schools, great racial personalities were
presented to the students during Negro History Week. Now
there is Black History Month.
Black literature in class is a phenomenon of the 1960s.
Black studies programs became a part of the school curriculum
in America. Therefore, the audience in class is a rather new
phenomenon.
The class audiences that began as “black” or “white” at
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
490 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
first might be one now of new minority constitution: women,
handicapped people, elderly citizens, third world students,
and/or others. For the black work to be valid, then, it must
have appeal to other ethnic groups, since the world is now a
global village.
For the new class, forums, debates, and formal and
informal class reports by individual students may enhance
interpersonal communication. For the dissemination of facts,
the wonders effected by technology are countless. Students
may have access to films, recordings, videotapes, and
audiotapes for reviewing material introduced earlier in formal
class lectures by the professor.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Fellow novelists of the Harlem Renaissance who honored the

theme of “passing” (Johnson claimed authorship for The Ex-
colored Man in 1927), such as Walter White in “Flight”
(1926), Jessie Fauset in “Plum Bun” (1928), and Nella Larsen
in Passing (1929), promoted the aesthetic indigenous to
African literature: art for life’s sake. The “for-life’s-sake”
element is now dated because these authors were intent on
presenting the “better elements” in black life to squelch the
ardor of the Nigger Heaven (1926) vogue fathered by Carl Van
Vechten and adhered to even by Claude McKay in Home to
Harlem (1928).
Stephen Henderson, author of Understanding the New
Black Poetry (1973), has indicated that black speech, black
song, black music (if one can make such distinctions) are
imbued with “experiential energy.” On this premise, Johnson,
the poet who cultivated his black ethos, is best compared with
Langston Hughes (1902–1967).

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. Does Johnson’s high degree of Euroamerican

acculturation deflect from his African-American
altruism?
2. Is he rightfully classed as a Victorian in terms of
middle-class prudery and respectability?
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 491
3. Do you agree with George Kent’s view that “his
cosmopolitanism always extends his reach and his
grasp” (In Blackness and the Adventure of Western
Culture, 1972, p. 30)?
4. The editors of The Conscious Voice (1965) suggest that
the poem is the rendering of experience—which also
suggests “the intricacy of the poet’s involvement in the
world.” Does Johnson use a suitable aesthetic distance
from his subject matter in the poems: “Lift Every Voice”
(1900); “Fifty Years” (1853–1913); and “Saint Peter
Relates An Incident” (1930)? (Refer to outside sources
for the latter two poems.)
5. How can one justify the author’s use of the
compensatory Christian ethic in “Lift Every Voice,”
“Bards,” “Listen Lord”— a prayer—and the sermons in
Trombones, when he himself is an agnostic? (Refer to
outside sources for the latter two poems.)
6. Three reigning poets influenced Johnson’s development
as the second outstanding African-American poet:
Rudyard Kipling, English; Walt Whitman, American;
Paul Laurence Dunbar, African-American. How?
7. Racial violence in the poem “Brothers” (1916) is
attended with a plea for brotherhood. What is its
advantage over literary dialect?
8. How does the longevity of the oral tradition substantiate
its worth in the use of black idiomatic expression in
African-American literature?

Suggested paper topics:

Period and Genre: The Color-line Novel

1. Before Johnson (1912).

2. During the Awakening (1915–1920).
3. During the Harlem Renaissance (1920–1930).
4. During the 1960s in Louisiana (Ernest Gaines).

Period:

1. The Influence of the Harlem Renaissance on West

African Poets.
2. Influence of the African Poets, like Leopold

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

492 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Senghor, on African-American Poets during the
1960s.

Genre:

1. Poetry by “White” Black Authors.

2. Protest Poetry.
3. The “Coon Song” on Broadway.
4. The Folk Sermon as Literary Genre.

Bibliography

Copeland, George E. “James Weldon Johnson—a

Bibliography.” Master’s thesis, School of Library
Science at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, May
1951.

Davis, Thadious. “Southern Standard-Bearers in the New

Negro Renais- sance.” In The History of Southern Literature
2 (1985): 291–313.

Fleming, Robert. “Contemporary Themes in Johnson’s

Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man.” Negro American
Literature Forum IV (1970): 120–24.

Johnson, J. W. “The first and second book of American Negro

Spirituals, 1925.” God’s Trombones, 1927.

Levy, Eugene. James Weldon Johnson: Black Leader Black

Voices. 1973. The J. W. Johnson “Prefaces” offer rich
critical insight about his work The Book of American Negro
Poetry, 1922, 1931.

Mcghee, Nancy B. “The Folk Sermon.” College Language

Association Journal I (1969): 51–61.

Millican, Arthenia Bates. “James Weldon Johnson: In Quest of

an Afro- centric Tradition for Black American Literature.”
Doctoral disserta- tion, LSU, 1972. Chapters 6, 7, and 10
detail facts on the form and structure of dated poems.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 493

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935)

Contributing Editor: Nancy Carol Joyner

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Robert Stevick has said that “Robinson’s poetry deserves the

attention it does not contrive to attract” (Barnard, Centenary
Essays, 66). To introduce Robinson’s subtlety, read the poems
out loud and more than once. Robinson once told a reader who
confessed to being confused about his poetry that he should
read the poems one word at a time. Robinson was very
sensitive to the sound of words and complained of not liking
his name because it sounded like a tin can being kicked down
the stairs. He also said that poetry must be music. This musical
quality is best perceived by reading his poetry aloud.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Robinson is a “people poet,” writing almost exclusively about

individuals or individual relationships rather than on more
common themes of the nineteenth century. He exhibits a
curious mixture of irony and compassion toward his
subjects—most of whom are failures—that allows him to be
called a romantic existentialist. He is a true precursor to the
modernist movement in poetry, publishing his first volume in
1896, a decade notable from the point of view of poetry in
America only because of one other publication: the first,
posthumous, volume of poems by Emily Dickinson. As the
introduction emphasizes, many of Robinson’s poems are more
autobiographical than their seeming objectivity indicates
immediately.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Although Robinson’s subject matter and philosophical stance

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
494 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
differ markedly from that of his predecessors’, his form is
unremittingly traditional. He considered movies, prohibition,
and free verse “a triumvirate from hell,” and said that if free
verse were as easy to write as it was difficult to read, he was
not surprised there was so much of it. In his early work
Robinson experimented with difficult French forms, like the
villanelle and rondeau, but his longer work is written almost
exclusively in blank verse. Robinson is one of America’s
greatest practitioners of the sonnet and the dramatic
monologue.

Original Audience

For the first twenty years of Robinson’s writing career, he had

difficulty in getting published and attracting an audience. He
published his first two volumes privately and the publication
of the third was secretly guaranteed by friends. He did receive
positive reviews from the beginning, however, and with the
publication of The Man Against the Sky in 1916 his reputation
was secure. For the rest of his life he was widely regarded as
“America’s foremost poet,” as William Stanley Braithwaite
put it. Both academics and the general public held him in high
esteem, as attested by the fact of his winning three Pulitzer
Prizes for poetry for volumes published in 1921, 1924, and
1927, when his Tristram became a national best-seller.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Critics have pointed out that Robinson is a descendant of Anne

Bradstreet, and in their deceptively plain style and solitary
careers they make an interesting comparison. Sometimes
Robinson and Edgar Lee Masters have been confused, with
people mistakenly assuming that Masters had an influence on
Robinson, when the reverse must be true.
The most obvious and fruitful writer for
comparison/contrast is Robert Frost, only five years younger
than Robinson but nearly twenty years behind him in
publication. They share a New England background,
contemporaneity, and allegiance to formal writing, but they
were decidedly different in life-style, in personality, and
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 495
finally in their poetry, with Robinson’s being the most honest.
(Biographers of both poets report that Frost was extremely
jealous of Robinson but the reverse was not true.)
A comparison in the presentation of women in “Aunt
Imogen” and Frost’s “A Servant to Servant” or “Home Burial”
is instructive in showing differing attitudes the poets hold
toward women. Unlike many of Frost’s poems, Robinson’s
sympathetic portrayal of his characters seems genderless.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. Discussions of point of view, tone, and especially

individual diction choices are useful in class. How does
the word “alnage” work in “The Clerks,” for instance, or
what meanings can be placed on “feminine paradox” in
“Aunt Imogen”? Robinson is spare in his allusions, but
such reticence gives greater force to them when they
appear. Discuss the ironic context of “Momus,” Apollo
in “The Tree in Pamela’s Garden,” and Roland in “Mr.
Flood’s Party.”

2. Possible paper topics are contrasts between

Robinson’s poems from a woman’s point of view and
similar poems by contemporaneous authors, such as
Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot; comparisons of char-acters
in Robinson’s poems, such as Pamela and Aunt Imogen;
and imagery in “Mr. Flood’s Party” and “Eros
Turnannos.” Numerous close readings have been
published on the last two poems mentioned. Reviews of
criticism along with an original interpretation of either
would be an accessible research topic.

Bibliography

Coxe, Louise O. Edwin Arlington Robinson: The Life of

Poetry. New York: Pegasus, 1969.

Joyner, Nancy Carol. “Edwin Arlington Robinson.”

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 54, 366–88.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

496 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Squires, Radcliffe. “Tilbury Town Today.” In Edwin Arlington
Robinson: Centenary Essays, edited by Ellsworth Barnard.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1969, 175–84.

Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)

Contributing Editor: Linda Pannill

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Glasgow fails to make the New Woman convincing. The

philosopher Judith Campbell takes her iconoclastic new book
from a muff and presents it (“my little gift”) to the lover for
whom she is willing to sacrifice a career. She does not
perceive his jealousy of her own job offer. In dialogue she
repeats his words back to him. That Judith Campbell seems
more like a southern belle than a philosopher speaks to the
power over heroine and perhaps author of an old-fashioned
ideal of womanhood and to the difficulty for writers of
Glasgow’s generation who are working to create new
characters and plots.
When teaching Glasgow’s work, symbolism is a good
place to start. Estbridge’s idealism and his ruthlessness are
seen in fire images: the portrait of Savonarola over a fireplace;
the “flame” of love; “burned his boats”; burning his papers;
the reference to the Grand Inquisitor. Other symbols include
Judith’s veils, the storm, Estbridge’s name (East? China?), the
Christmas setting (connected with his feeling “born anew” and
her initials), and the doctor’s garden. Judith is compared to a
cypress, presumably like the one that did not survive. The
remaining tree is a tough ailanthus, common though originally
from China. Estbridge feels Judith is the “temptation” to
disobey society’s rules, but after all he will stay in his fallen
garden with his sick wife. (That the younger colleague is
named Adamson reinforces the Edenic motif, a favorite of the
author’s.)
The burden on a woman of trying to live up to a man’s
ideal, a theme throughout Glasgow’s work, is interesting to the
students. Yet they find Glasgow herself old-fashioned in her
preoccupation with romantic love and with the goodness and
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 497
beauty of her heroines. Along with the dire plots and the
reappearances of weak male characters, this calls for an
explanation that students will seek first in the author’s life.
They should be encouraged to look beyond.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Because of wide reading on the subject, Glasgow considered

herself something of a philosopher. Like Judith Campbell, she
wrote, and like her she had an affair in New York with a
married man, by some accounts also a doctor. In The Woman
Within, the author depicts a conflict in her own life between
woman and artist roles, love and ambition. Neither choice
seems right.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Irony underlines John Estbridge’s self-centeredness and Judith

Campbell’s self-sacrifice, traits Glasgow found typical of men
and women. Judith gives up an appointment at Hartwell
College, previously her heart’s desire, to run off with
Estbridge. He misses the appointment with Judith to accept a
faculty appointment. His is the “Professional Instinct,” here
the “instinct to yield.” A too-obvious irony is the timing of the
traffic accident that gives Estbridge the opportunity to betray
Judith (or the author the opportunity to rescue her).

Original Audience

Both Raper (in The Sunken Garden) and Godbold point to a

letter from Pearce Baily, a prominent New York neurologist,
advising Glasgow on the story. “The Professional Instinct”
deals, of course, with a doctor who has helped a writer in her
work. Ellen Glasgow decided not to publish the short story and
seems not to have finished revising.
Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Mary Hunter Austin and Willa Cather, like Glasgow, were

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
498 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
long considered regional writers, though not all their work is
set in the desert Southwest or Nebraska, as not all Glasgow’s
is set in Virginia. Recent feminist scholarship emphasizes
these authors’ concern with sex roles and their problematic
self-concepts as women writers.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. (a) Explain the allusion to Savonarola.

(b) Why is the point of view effective?
(c) Consider Tilly Estbridge and Judith Campbell as foil
characters.
(d) What seems to be the target of Glasgow’s satire?
(e) To what extent is the reader prepared for the ending?
(f) To what extent is Glasgow the literary realist she
considers herself?
2. (a) Why might Glasgow have chosen not to publish the
story?
(b) To what extent are both Judith Campbell and John
Estbridge autobiographical characters?
(c) Ellen Glasgow considered herself a feminist. How is
the feminism of her period (not our own) reflected in
the story?
(d) In Glasgow’s version of society, what kinds of
power, if any, do women have?
(e) How might the influence of Darwinism and
Social Darwinism be seen in Glasgow’s depiction of
the relationship between the sexes?

Bibliography

Glasgow, Ellen. The Woman Within. New York: Harcourt,

Brace, 1954.
Chapters 1, 8–9.

Wagner, Linda. Ellen Glasgow: Beyond Convention. Austin:

University of Texas Press, 1982. Chapter 1.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 499

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

500 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Edith Wharton (1862–1937)

Contributing Editor: Elizabeth Ammons

Classroom Issues and Strategies

In my experience, students divide sharply on Wharton. Some

love her work, responding particularly to the elegance and
precision of her prose and the sharpness of her wit; others
don’t like her at all, finding it hard to “get into” her fiction
because she seems so cold, the prose seems so detailed and
self-conscious, and the subject matter is so elite.
Mainly I try to get the two groups talking/arguing with
each other. The result usually is that each can appreciate the
point of view of the other, and we can start there: with a view
of Wharton in which she is both marvelously accomplished as
a stylist within a particular aesthetic and—in some ways on the
very same grounds—limited as a writer by class and
temperament.
One issue students are very interested in is sexuality in
Wharton’s fiction, ranging from what birth control was
available at the time and in the class she wrote about to what
her own attitudes toward sex were. Another question is: Why
care about all these rich privileged people in Wharton’s
fiction? Who cares? (One response I give to this is that the top
of the pyramid gives a very good sense of what the whole
culture aspires to, since those are the people that everyone
envies and wishes to be—or is supposed to envy and wish to
be. Wharton’s fictive world tells us a lot about how the whole
culture works and what it values and is supposed to value.)
Finally, a question that often gets asked is “What other works
by Wharton would you recommend reading?” A good sign.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Major themes in Wharton’s work include the effects of class

on both behavior and consciousness (divorce, for example,
often horrifies the established upper class as much for its
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 501
offense against taste as for its violation of moral standards);
the American belief in progress as actual and good (many
“advances” Wharton welcomed; others she was contemptuous
of ) ; the contrast between European and American customs,
morality, and sensibility; the confinement of marriage,
especially for women; women’s desire for and right to freedom
in general, and particularly sexual and economic freedom, and
the reality that, usually, the desire and right are thwarted; the
preference of powerful, white, usually upper-class men for
childish dependent women; the complexity and pain of
relationships between
women within patriarchal culture, including (and especially)
rivalry and animosity among women.
Historically, Wharton was both the product and the
beneficiary of a highly developed, even if recent, high-culture
tradition of brilliant, educated women able to write and publish
fiction for a living. Before Wharton, in France and England
George Sand, Madame de Staël, Jane Austen, George Eliot,
Mrs. Gaskell, and the Brontës had used fiction to examine
many of the issues that engaged Wharton: marriage, the
restraints of class, the repression of “respectable” women’s
sexual desire, the structure of patriarchal power, and the desire
of middle-class white women for respectable, paid work. In the
United States, in addition to popular women novelists in the
nineteenth century, artistically ambitious women writers such
as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Sarah Orne Jewett preceded
Wharton. Contemporary with Wharton was a whole group of
accomplished women fiction writers— Chopin, Austin,
Hopkins, Dunbar-Nelson, Cather, Stein. The point is that
Wharton’s work, historically, is rooted not only in the tradition
of social and psychological realism commonly associated with
Howells and James (writers she admired), but also in the
realism and social criticism of women writers publishing
before and contemporary with her who were concerned with
many of the same issues that engaged Wharton, particularly
issues centered on women’s experiences and problems.
Personally, Wharton treated many of the issues of her
own life in her fiction: her estrangement from and anger at her
mother; her frustration with the limitations placed on women,
and especially women of the upper class; her miserable
marriage and the stigma against divorce, again particularly in
her class but also generally; her fear of the ways in which

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

502 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
cautiousness and selfishness can corrupt one’s soul; her
knowledge that female sexuality, despite society’s repression
of it, was a potent source of creativity.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

“The Valley of Childish Things” is a parable, but the other

selections here are classic conventional modern short stories in
terms of form and effect. Wharton can be used to show perfect
mastery of conventional form. Her taut, elegant prose and
expert command of dramatic structure beautifully manipulate
the conventional Western short story pattern of exposition/con-
flict/complication/climax/resolution. Typically, the climax
appears almost at the very end of a Wharton story, creating a
very long, strong buildup of anticipation and then a swift, deft
finish. You can practically teach the standard modern Western
short story—at its best—from a Wharton story.

Original Audience

Wharton was a best-selling author at the turn of the century

and into the 1920s; she was also highly acclaimed by critics.
After the 1920s, she was taught less and less in schools and
universities until before and following World War II she was
virtually untaught. She was viewed as a disciple of Henry
James and he, but not she, was taught. In the late 1960s and
then on through the 1990s, Wharton has steadily and
dramatically regained both an academic audience and a
general readership, clearly as a result of the most recent wave
in the women’s movement. In other words, her work attracts
attention now for the very reasons it was generally dismissed
in the middle of the twentieth century; its focus on women and
women’s experiences and its emphasis on social context,
customs, pressures, and manners as human variables rooted in
time, class, gender, nationality, and culture.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 503
Useful contrasts could include authors such as Harriet Beecher
Stowe or Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who wrote fiction for
explicit and avowedly political ends; Mark Twain, who was
interested in communicating an almost felt sense of a very
different America, the rural Midwest and the white South;
Upton Sinclair (whose politics Wharton did not like but whose
right to say what he wanted she vigorously defended), who
identified with the working class and the poor and wrote
muckrakers; or Jack London, who celebrated much of the
same white masculine power ethic that Wharton disliked.
Another good contrast is Henry James; though often cited as
Wharton’s mentor (he was one), James is also quite different
from Wharton: He is much wordier, more intrusive and self-
indulgent authorially, and inclined to Victorian notions of self-
sacrifice and self-immolation.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. When I use study questions for Wharton, I use standards

closely keyed to the piece at hand: e.g., for “Roman
Fever”: Where does the hatred between the two women
come from? What is its source? What is the source of
the source? For “The Other Two” I might ask: Where do
Wharton’s sympathies lie in this story? On what do you
base your opinion?
2. In addition to standard analytical/critical papers that ask
students to work out an interpretative position by
arguing closely from the text (which works very well for
Wharton), I have found that Wharton is a good author to
use for creative-writing paper assignments, which I do in
“straight” English courses on the theory that one
excellent way of getting inside poetry or fiction is to try
to create some yourself. For Wharton, I might ask
students to reread “The Valley of Childish Things” and
then write their own gender parable for the late twentieth
century of about the same length and structural strategy.
For “Roman Fever,” I might ask them to write a short
story about the two middle-aged women from Barbara’s
point of view. I spin off Wharton either formally or
specifically in subject matter; also I give a rather
directed assignment, since one of my goals is to get
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
504 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
students to think more about a particular piece by
Wharton, how it works or what it says. I have learned
that if the creative assignment is too loose, it can let
them wander so far from the Wharton text that they
discover no more about it than they knew before writing.

Bibliography

See Barbara A. White, Edith Wharton: A Study of the Short

Fiction (1991). Relatively little Wharton criticism focuses on
the short stories, so often it is necessary to adapt general
criticism on her. Three provocative books are: Elizabeth
Ammons, Edith Wharton’s Argument with America (1980),
Cynthia Griffin Woolf, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of
Edith Wharton (1977), and Candace Waid, Edith Wharton’s
Letters from the Underworld (1991).
Good articles can be found in Harold Bloom, ed., Edith
Wharton (1986) and Critical Essays on Edith Wharton (1998).

Edgar Lee Masters (1869–1950)

Contributing Editor: Ronald Primeau

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Some students expect—even demand—that poetry be very

“difficult” to be deemed worthwhile. When Masters is
relatively simple in form and message, that throws them. To
address this issue, talk about popular arts, the oral tradition, the
enormous popularity of Spoon River, and the fact that all
poetry need not be academic.
Masters provides a good chance to talk with students
about what they think poetry is or ought to be and how the
literary establishment can or cannot control popular opinion.
Use some multimedia presentations, reading out loud. Bring in
some actors from university theater.
Students are interested in events from the poet’s life and
factors that led him to write this kind of poetry. They wonder
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 505
how any book of poems could have been that popular. No TV
back then, they suspect.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Consider what it means to live in small-town America, how it

is attractive to try to sum up a lifetime on a gravestone, the
importance of peer pressure and what others think. Think
about Masters’s life as a lawyer and how that affected his
poetry.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

It is important to discuss basic elements of form and meter in

order to see how Masters alluded to, and modified, existing
conventions. It is crucial to see that he was outside developing
critical norms and how that has clearly limited his inclusion in
the critical canons.

Original Audience

Spoon River reached a mass audience when it was written and

still sells better than most poetry. Today, however, the
audience is largely academic and concerns are more in the
direction of scholarship and how to teach the works rather than
popularity and whether they speak to an age. Discuss with
students questions of popular taste and the split between mass
art and high art.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Compare with Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Perhaps even

show a video if there’s time. There are recordings of Spoon
River—and a musical. Read Masters alongside Whitman. Talk
about how he hid copies of Shelley and Goethe behind law
books when people thought he was supposed to be working.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

506 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. (a) Who are these speakers?

(b) To whom are they speaking?
(c) What is our role as readers?
(d) What have you underlined or written in the margin
and why?
(e) Which of these characters would you like to know
better and why? What was Spoon River like as a
place?
2. (a) Discuss the conflicts between standards for “high”
art and “mass” art. Who sets criteria and how?
(b) Compose your own gravestone biography and
message to the world—à la Spoon River.
(c) Write a portrait of your home town—à la Spoon
River.

Bibliography

Flanagan, John T. The Spoon River Poet and His Critics.

Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1974. A very useful reference
guide.

Primeau, Ronald. Beyond Spoon River: The Legacy of Edgar

Lee Masters. Austin: University of Texas, 1981. Reevaluates
Master’s place in the American tradition; see Chapters 1–2
for useful background on Masters.

Willa Cather (1873–1947)

Contributing Editor: Margaret Anne O’Connor

Classroom Issues and Strategies

The headnote to this Cather story stresses biographical

information, which should prompt questions that will stimulate
classroom discussion. Philip Gerber’s bare-bones chronology
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 507
in his Twayne volume on Cather is an accurate outline and an
excellent choice for a chronology to supply to students. Sharon
O’Brien’s more detailed and topic-oriented chronology (in her
edition of five of Cather’s book-length prose publications for
the Library of America in 1986, pp. 1296–1318) would be an
excellent biographical summary for instructors to have at their
disposal.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Compare Cather to Sarah Orne Jewett. Cather knew Jewett and

admired her work. She even wrote an appreciative preface to a
two-volume edition of Jewett’s stories in 1925. An expanded
version of the preface appears in the essay “Miss Jewett” in
Not Under Forty (1936), an essay that makes it clear that
Cather saw herself as aspiring to achieve many of the strengths
as a writer that she found in Jewett’s work.
Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. In your reading of the story, who is the most important

character? In your reading, who is the most reliable
narrator? Who is the “hero”? Who is the most
sympathetically presented character?
2. One writing assignment I would suggest is in the
form of a reading “quiz.” Before discussing the work in
class on the day it is the assigned reading, ask students
to write a one-sentence summary of the story. Ask
everyone to exchange papers and have students read
aloud sentences that described a different central issue
than the one each of them selected as at the heart of the
story.

Bibliography

For the most part, the biographies by O’Brien, Woodress, and

Lee, and book-length critical studies such as those by David
Stouck and Susan Rosowski present the most sensitive
readings of Cather’s life and work.
One particularly fine “older” source is Willa Cather: A
Pictorial Memoir (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
508 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
1974), with photographs by Lucia Wood and text by Bernice
Slote. It’s an excellent brief introduction to the world of Willa
Cather.
Marilyn Arnold has an extremely useful discussion of
“Old Mrs. Harris” in Willa Cather’s Short Fiction. Athens:
Ohio University Press, 1984, pp. 141–52.

Susan Glaspell (1876–1948)

Contributing Editor: Arthur Waterman

Classroom Issues and Strategies

It’s important to show how the details of the play “Trifles”

transcend local color and address universal concerns. Students
should come to see that the precise setting and time lead to a
universal and timeless experience.
Ask students to envision what the play would be like if it
were three acts and the background and main characters were
fully presented. Point out how the very restrictions of the one-
act play enhance the tensions and meaning. The play has been
popular since it was first produced and has been seen (1987,
1988) on PBS television, which indicates that it appeals to
diverse audiences.

Susan Glaspell is an interesting example of the late

nineteenth-century woman writer, raised in the local color
tradition, who radically altered her life and art after her
marriage and moved east. She “came of age” about the same
time American writing moved from regionalism to modernism
and she helped found the modern movement in American
drama. Once her experimental period was over, she returned to
fiction and to her earlier themes— much more maturely
presented. Whether her retreat back to regionalism was
because her husband died or because she felt more secure in
the older tradition, no one can say.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 509
Issues

1. Regional: The play conveys the brutal experience of

being a farm wife in Iowa during the latter half of the
nineteenth century.
2. Sexual: In this play women are pitted against men—
Minnie against her husband, the two women against
their husbands and the other men. The men are logical,
arrogant, stupid; the women are sympathetic and drawn
to empathize with Minnie and forgive her her crime.
3. Mythic: The setting—a lonely, bleak, cold landscape;
the main characters are never seen on stage and assume
a shadowy, almost archetypal presence; the struggle
between them is echoed by the antagonisms between the
two women and three men on stage; the result is that a
brutal murder is forgiven because of the more terrible
tragedy beneath it.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

This play presents most of the qualities of local color writing:

exact detail, local speech and customs, a strong sense of place.
It avoids some of the excesses of that genre: idealization of
character, emphasis on the unique and colorful aspects of the
locale, and sentimentality. The demands of the one-act drama,
its compression, single set, limited characters, tight plot, single
mood—all protect the play from the excesses of its convention
and enhance its virtues.
We should also note that the play carefully distinguishes
between the affairs of men and the concerns of women. The
men intrude on the woman’s world, dirtying her towels,
scoffing at her knitting and preserves. As we move into the
kitchen, the men are left out and the awful details of Minnie’s
life are revealed to Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, so that when the
men return, we see how blind they are and we, the audience,
accept their decision not to reveal Minnie’s motive.

Original Audience

We know the play was based on an actual trial Susan Glaspell

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
510 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
covered as a reporter in Des Moines. In this sense, the play
was written for a midwestern audience to dramatize the terrible
life of a farm wife, isolated and dependent on her husband for
her physical and emotional needs, with the occasional tragic
consequences the play depicts. But the play was written after
Susan Glaspell had left the Midwest, after she had lived
abroad, married, and moved to Provincetown. She had time to
ponder the implications of the event and see the tragedy in
larger terms, so she was able to transform a journalistic story
into a universal drama.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Zone Gale’s “Miss Lulu Bett” (1920) is about a Wisconsin

spinster who revolts against midwestern prudishness to seek
her own fulfillment. The play has many local color attributes
and treats ironically some of the themes in “Trifles.”
A better comparison is to be found with John M.
Synge’s “Riders to the Sea,” a one-act tragedy about the lives
of fishermen in the Aran Islands. Both plays transcend local
color detail to reach mythic concerns, both use a piece of
irregular sewing to reveal information, and both present an
essential conflict between the men who go out to battle nature,
while the women remain to nurture beauty and sustain life.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. If students have been reading someone like Bret Harte,

I’d suggest they think about the advantages and
disadvantages of local-color writing. Also, I would
suggest they examine the one-act play form to see what
can and cannot be done with it.
2. I would center on short questions about technique: How
does the physical location of the characters help develop
the theme? Who are more fully developed, the two
women or the three men? Indicate several ways Susan
Glaspell conditions the audience to accept the final
decision.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 511
Bibliography

See the primary and secondary works listed with the headnote.

Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)

Contributing Editor: Arthur B. Coffin

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Many readers/critics feel that Jeffers’s most readable poetry is

in his lyric poems; others feel that his most powerful verse is
in his long narrative poems, which, of course, cannot be
anthologized. It is useful—perhaps necessary—therefore to
provide students a sense of the larger context in which the
lyrics stand and to describe the evolution of Jeffers’s personal
philosophy, which he called “Inhumanism.” Even students
who respond readily to Jeffers’s reverence for a distant God
made manifest in the “beauty of things” (i.e., nature)—and
many of them embrace these views instantly—will ask,
“Where’s this guy coming from?” Consider some of the
following suggestions.
One may assign individual students or groups of
students narrative poems to read and report on to the class, but,
with the exception of “Roan Stallion,” this process is long and
sometimes laborious. And it is time-consuming in the
classroom. The traditional approach of lecturing to provide the
necessary context is the most efficient one. (As the
bibliography indicates, there is a large body of scholarly work
to draw on for this purpose.)
Another possibly more appealing approach from the
students’ per-spective is to introduce Jeffers’s Not Man Apart
(ed. David Brower, Sierra Club, San Francisco, 1965:
Ballantine Books, New York, 1969), which, taking its title
from a Jeffers line, is a collection of magnificent Ansel Adams
photographs of the Big Sur landscape (accompanied by quotes
from Jeffers), which has a central role in this poetry.
Hearing these poems is very important, and, whether or
not the instructor is a competent reader of these verses, he or
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
512 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
she might consider obtaining recordings of William Everson’s
superb reading of them. One (formerly available from Gould
Media, 44 Parkway West, Mount Vernon, NY 10552-1194;
Tape #826) was titled The Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Two
others are still available from Big Sur Tapes, P.O. Box 4WB,
Tiburon, CA 94920: Tape #06103 (Poetry of the Earth by
William Everson) and Tape #06101 (A Dramatic Presentation
of Robinson Jeffers by William Everson and Gordon Newell)
<http://www.bigsurtapes.com>.
Students respond to Jeffers’s concern for the beauty of
nature and the divinity he finds there. Often they are receptive
to the theme of the destructive nature of human beings,
especially to human pollution of the earth. Many students are
drawn to what they identify as Jeffers’s isolationism, his
fiercely held individualism. In addition to questions about
Jeffers’s religious views and his varied intellectual
background, they often ask about the poet himself,
biographical data which, in this instance, do not take one far
from the texts.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

With the publication of the long narrative “Tamar” (1924),

Jeffers declared his literary independence and attempted to
write poetry appropriate to the times as he saw them. In “Self-
Criticism in February,” which reviews this effort, he wrote,
“[this] is not a pastoral time, but [one] founded/On violence,
pointed for more massive violence.” Like T. S. Eliot and
others, Jeffers searched myth and literature for a “usable past,”
but he employed these materials more radically than his peers,
who, he thought, were fading out in effete aestheticism.
Generally, Jeffers saw Euripides’s tragic vision as more akin
to his own than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles; in the
Roman poet Lucretius (On the Nature of Things, which
embodies the materialism of Epicurus), Jeffers found support
for his view of nature and divinity; classical mythology and
tragedy helped him to structure his personal vision and poems.
American capitalism was morally bankrupt and defacing the
landscape; both American politics and international affairs
were threatened by “Caesarism”—ruthless leaders and timid
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 513
followers. The advent of nuclear war seemed to assure the
imminent destruction of human beings—but, for Jeffers, not of
the world itself—which change, the poet believed, would
allow the beauty of the world (the manifest God) to start over
again, without the contaminating presence of mankind. His
doctrine of Inhumanism—“a shifting of emphasis from man to
not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of
the transhuman magnificence”—encourages humans to
become “uncentered” from themselves. “This manner of
thought and feeling,” he wrote, “is neither misanthropic nor
pessimistic. . . . it has objective truth and human value.”

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Jeffers’s early verses are late-Victorian in manner, reflecting

the influences of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne,
and George Moore, but prior to writing “Tamar” he decided to
break with modernism, which he saw typified by Mallarmé
and his followers. These modernists had forsaken content,
Jeffers believed, in favor of aesthetics, which weakened their
verse. His narrative poems are heavily laden with statement
and action, and their lines are long and supple after classical
models. “Apology for Bad Dreams” and “Self-Criticism in
February” tell us nearly all there is to hear about Jeffers’s
poetic. Despite Jeffers’s disclaimer (and the views of critics
who agree with him on this point), I see him as a modernist
sharing much with other modernists such as Robert Lowell, T.
S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Theodore Roethke, who also
tried to re-order a fragmented world and to find adequate
structures for the task. It may be useful to compare Jeffers’s
views of religion, order, fictive constructs, and reality with the
more sophisticated ones of Wallace Stevens (cf. Stevens’s
“Sunday Morning,” “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “The
Snow Man,” and others).

Original Audience

In several places, Jeffers said that he wrote for all time, not for
the moment (even though many of his lyrics of the 1940s are
very topical, like carping letters to the editor that criticize
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
514 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
world leaders indiscriminately), because he believed poetry
should bespeak permanence. His work was very popular
during the late 1920s and the 1930s (he appeared on the cover
of Time magazine), but his audience left him during WWII,
when his individualism and their patriotism diverged in a
wood. During the 1960s and 1970s, his work was widely
translated in Europe, where he gained an enthusiastic
readership in the Slavic countries. On this continent, he has
been adopted by members of the ecology movement,
disaffected members of traditional institutional religions, and
academic scholars, who together have revived his reputation.
Although Jeffers had been severely slighted in the academic
texts of recent decades, he is one of the few poets, I find, that
the general student is most apt to have read before taking an
American literature or poetry course.
Jeffers’s disinterest in a particular audience—his writing
for all time—simplifies the audience problem in class and
permits a wide range of responses.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Compare Jeffers’s themes to Euripides’s, whose tragedies he

used and “adapted” as in Jeffers’s Broadway hit “Medea.” He
follows the Greek closely, but the differences are arresting.
Consider also Lucretius, whose version of Epicurus’
materialism attracted Jeffers, who fused it with his pantheistic
view of nature.
For another interesting comparison, look at Shelley,
whose view of Prometheus and the poet as legislator are
reflected in Jeffers. Jeffers’s incest theme has been traced to
Shelley.
Nietzsche’s philosophy appears to have attracted but not
to have held Jeffers. Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra,
Beyond Good and Evil, and The Birth of Tragedy would be the
main texts of interest.
Wallace Stevens’s interest in the imagination, reality,
and fictive con-structs provides bases for comparison/contrast.
T. S. Eliot’s use of mythic materials and the literary
tradition to construct an authentic religious outlook suggests
some interesting similarities and dissimilarities.
Eugene O’Neill was similarly preoccupied with Greek
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 515
tragedy.
Theodore Roethke’s mystical view of nature and of the
spirit that resides in nature offers fertile possibilities for
comparison/ contrast.
W. B. Yeats’s interest in towers, in social unrest versus
change, and in the cycles of nature compare with those of
Jeffers.
Ansel Adams’s photographs of “Jeffers country” offer
opportunities for discerning comparisons/contrasts between
visual and literary texts.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. After reading the Jeffers poems included in the text (and

any others of his you wish to look at), write two or three
pages of response to them. In your brief paper, assume
that you are a developer (real estate or commercial, for
example), or an environmentalist (perhaps a member of
the Sierra Club or other similar group), or a TV
evangelist, or some other role of your choice. You
should imagine how you think the person you choose to
be in your paper would most likely respond to Jeffers’s
work.
2. You have just been reading Jeffers, and your roommate
or brother or sister or parent comes and says, “Reading
Jeffers? What does he have to say? Should I read his
poems?” Assuming that you and your interrogator are on
good terms, write a compact essay summarizing what
Jeffers says and include in your response to the last
question why you make the recommendation you give.
Saying simply “yes” or “no” or “you’re too young (or
old)” to the last question is to evade its point; develop a
reasoned reply. Be specific.

Bibliography

For the instructor in survey courses, the handiest and most

comprehensive source is Robert Brophy, Robinson Jeffers
(Boise: Western Writers Series, 1973); James Karman,
Robinson Jeffers: Poet of California (1987) is excellent for
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
516 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
biographical information. Jeffers Studies, which replaced the
Robinson Jeffers Newsletter, continues to keep one abreast of
current Jeffers scholarship. The Robinson Jeffers Association
web site is an invaluable resource: <http://www.jeffers.org>.

Robert Frost (1874–1963)

Contributing Editor: James Guimond

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Students generally respond well to the basic emotional or

psychological experiences expressed in Frost’s poems. Some
of them—for example, ones who have had a philosophy course
or two—may raise questions about the implications of poems
like “Design.” Students often have difficulty appreciating (a)
the skill and subtlety with which Frost uses traditional poetic
devices such as rhyme and meter; (b) the sparse pleasures he
discovers in some of his rural and natural subjects; (c) the
bleakness and/or ambiguity of his more “philosophical”
poems. Sometimes they also have difficulty understanding that
the values he presented in his poems were derived from a type
of community or society that was very different from their
own: one that was rural, fearful of change, distrustful of
technology, proud of craftsmanship, and deeply committed to
privacy and self-reliance.
Regarding the formal devices and ambiguity, there is no
substitute for traditional “close reading.” (Quotes from Frost’s
essays “The Constant Symbol” and “The Figure a Poem
Makes” can be helpful in this regard.) The sparse pleasures can
be seen in a poem like “The Pasture,” and the bleakness can be
discerned in the endings of “Once by the Pacific” and “Desert
Places.” The social values can be seen in a dramatic poem like
“The Ax-Helve,” as well as in “Mending Wall.”
When teaching the dramatic poems, it is helpful to
discuss their plots and characters with students because Frost
sometimes presents these elements in an oblique way.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 517

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Major themes would include:

1. The limitations and isolation of the individual in either a

social or natural environment, plus the related theme of
how difficult it is for the self to understand existence.
2. The ambiguity of nature when it is considered as a
source of wisdom.
3. Frost’s sensitivity to the theme of entropy, doom, and
extinction.

Frost usually deals with personal issues so covertly in

his poetry that it is not very fruitful to discuss those topics in
detail. If the teacher wishes to do so, however, he or she
should consult Thompson’s biography. For his-torical issues,
the Cowley and O’Donnell essays in James Cox’s Robert
Frost: A Collection of Critical Essays are helpful.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Special emphasis should be placed on:

1. His skill in synthesizing traditional formal devices with

vernacular speech patterns and language.
2. His ability to develop metaphors.
3. How relatively “unmodern” or traditional he was in
relation to some of his contemporaries.

Original Audience

I emphasize that during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s Frost had
a strong appeal for a conservative readership who did not
understand or appreciate modernism very well. Since such
readers could be quite influential in academic, editing, and
Pulitzer-Prize–judging circles, some of Frost’s popularity
should be considered in this context.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

518 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Contrasts with Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams,

Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot are appropriate; and comparisons
with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant,
Edward Arlington Robinson, and the British Romantics and
Georgians (e.g., Edward Thomas) can be helpful.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. (a) What would it be like to live on an isolated farm in

1900?
(b) Find the rhymes in specific poems and discuss why
Frost emphasized these words.
(c) What are the emotional connotations of the images
in certain poems?
(d) Who is the speaker of the poem, and why is he or
she speaking?
(e) How does Frost develop a metaphor in an assigned
poem?
2. (a) Comparison-contrast topics work well if they are
focused on specific issues like free verse versus
traditional meters.
(b) What is Frost’s persona and how does he develop it
in a variety of poems?

(c) How does Frost create conflict or tension in his

poems and how does he resolve it?
(d) How closely does Frost follow his own poetic
“rules” as he states them in “The Figure a Poem
Makes”?
(e) Compare the “philosophy of life” which is expressed
in a poem like “Directive,” “Design,” or “Desert
Places” with the ideas in an essay by Ralph Waldo
Emerson, such as “Nature.”

Bibliography

The books by Richard Poirier and Frank Lentricchia are

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 519
particularly useful, and there are good essays in the critical
anthologies edited by Cox, Gerber, Bloom, and Cady and
Budd.

Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941)

Contributing Editor: Martha Curry

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Teachers should avoid three erroneous approaches to

Sherwood Anderson’s writings: regarding him primarily as a
novelist, as a regional writer, or as author of only one
important book, Winesburg, Ohio.
Regarding the first error: even in his best novel, Poor
White, Anderson has difficulty sustaining plot and
characterization. Anderson succeeds best in the smaller
narrative form of the short story. “Hands” and “Death in the
Woods” exemplify many of the characteristics of the
masterpieces of Anderson’s story-telling art: direct authorial
address to the reader; a circular, not linear, narrative structure;
plot subordinated to characterization; simple style and
vocabulary; and images drawn from elemental aspects of
nature.
Regarding the second error: Although Anderson is one
of the many regional writers who chronicle the changes that
took place in the Midwest at the turn of the century as a result
of industrialization, primary emphasis should be placed on his
role as a story-teller.
Regarding the third error: Neither Winesburg, Ohio,
from which “Hands” is taken, nor Death in the Woods, with its
title story, is a collection of isolated stories but, rather, short
story cycles; that is, collections of stories with common
themes, imagery, and tone, and often with common setting and
characters. An understanding of the short story cycle, from
Homer’s Odyssey to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Joyce’s
Dubliners will help in understanding Anderson’s work.
Students are amazed how contemporary Anderson is. He
speaks to their concerns regarding loneliness, fragmentation,
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
520 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
and the search for beauty and wholeness. They also are
intrigued by the artistry that a small work like a short story can
achieve.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

After they study “Hands,” students can read the whole of

Winesburg. Reading the story of Wing Biddlebaum will
prepare students to explore two themes discernible in “Hands”
and carried forward in the rest of Winesburg. First, explain the
theme introduced in Winesburg’s first section, “The Book of
the Grotesque,” the theme of the misunderstood inhabitants of
Winesburg trapped in their loneliness by one “truth” that has
turned into a falsehood. Second, explain the theme of the
gnarled apples explicated most fully in the second story of the
collection, “Paper Pills.” In the orchards of Winesburg are
gnarled, twisted apples, rejected by the apple pickers but
savored by the narrator and his readers, that is, by the few who
can recognize their sweetness. Wing Biddlebaum in “Hands”
and Ma Grimes in “Death in the Woods” are two of
Anderson’s grotesques, people trapped in their own in-ability
to find the “truth” of their lives and thus unable to grow to
maturity, but possessing their own sweetness and beauty.
Regarding historical issues: When Winesburg was
published in 1919, it was considered scandalous because of its
direct treatment of sex. “Hands,” with its sympathetic
portrayal of homosexuality, was one of the stories often cited.
We know from many of Anderson’s reminiscences, however,
that he had a particular fondness for “Hands.” In his Memoirs
(ed. Ray Lewis White, Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1969, p. 237) he calls the story “my first
authentic tale” and claims that he “completed it cleanly at one
sitting.” On page 352 he also claims it was written “in one
sitting. No word of it ever changed.” The manuscript of
Winesburg with the Sherwood Anderson Papers at the
Newberry Library in Chicago, however, contains extensive
revisions. Nonetheless, the statements just quoted from his
Memoirs, although false if taken literally, are substantially
correct. By temperament Anderson was disinclined to rework,
correct, fill in details. Instead, as we know by the many
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 521
versions of the same story in his unpublished work at the
Newberry Library, he often rewrote and rewrote whole stories.
A historical perspective to bring to “Death in the
Woods” is the fact that Anderson tried to write this story to his
satisfaction. As we know from a note attached to a holograph
housed with the Anderson Papers in the Newberry Library,
Anderson’s first attempt to write this story is a short sketch
called “Death in the Forest.” Chapter XII of Tar: A
Midwestern Childhood (Cleveland: Press of Case Western
Reserve University, 1969, pp. 129–41), also tells the story of
an old woman’s death in the woods on a snowy night. A
slightly expanded version of this episode, told by a first-person
narrator, appeared in American Mercury (IX, 7–13), in
September of the same year, that is, 1926. Since the 1933 title
story in the collection Death in the Woods is practically
identical with the version of the story that appeared in
American Mercury, we can assume that Anderson worked on
“Death in the Woods” from the mid-1910s, the time he was
writing the Winesburg stories, until 1926.
When we consider this background concerning the
composition of “Hands” and “Death in the Woods,” we can
see that both stories exemplify Anderson’s usual method of
storytelling. Anderson writes and rewrites his stories until he is
satisfied with them, just as his narrators try again and again to
tell the “real” story hidden beneath surface events.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Attention should always be drawn to the importance of the

narrator in Anderson’s stories. Although “Hands” is told in the
third person, the narrator speaks directly to the reader in the
tradition of oral storytellers, thus bringing the reader into the
creation of the story. Twice in the story the narrator says that
both the teller of the tale and the listener, in this case, the
reader, have to become poets. The reader is urged to accept the
narrator’s invitation to “look briefly into the story of the hands.
Perhaps our talk of them will arouse the poet who will tell the
hidden wonder.” Earlier in the story the narrator assures the
reader that “Sympathetically set forth”—as Anderson surely
does—Wing’s story “would tap many strange, beautiful
qualities in obscure men. It is a job for a poet.”
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
522 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
In “Death in the Woods” the central character is not Ma
Grimes but the mature narrator who looks back on earlier
experiences: the sight of an old, oppressed woman trudging
from her farm into town in order to obtain the necessary food
for her men and animals; the time he worked for a German
farmer who hired a “bound girl”; the moonlit winter night he
saw half-wild dogs almost revert to wolves in the presence of
the near-death of a human.
The teacher must stress the role of the mature narrator as
he struggles to weld his diverse experiences and images into a
whole that will bring order out of their diffuseness and beauty
out of their ugliness. All of her days Ma Grimes “fed animal
life.” Only at the end of the story does the reader realize that
the most important life Ma Grimes fed was the creative life of
the narrator. Thus, the story as a whole demonstrates, as
Anderson explains in its final sentence, “why I have been
impelled to try to tell the simple story over again.” The reader
feels, as the story comes to a close, that now, after
perhaps ten or twelve years, Anderson has been able to create
a beautifully unified work of art.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Since much of Anderson’s fiction relies heavily on his own

experiences, the best background materials for teaching
“Hands” and “Death in the Woods” are primary, not
secondary, sources, although excellent critical articles on both
stories can easily be found by means of the standard indexes.
Nonetheless, the best background information still remains
Anderson’s own words. Anderson’s three autobiographies,
Tar, A Story Teller’s Story, and Memoirs, all available in
critical texts edited by Ray Lewis White, have excellent
indexes that will lead the reader to the appropriate sections.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. In regard to “Hands,” call the students’ attention to:

(a) Society’s attitudes toward homosexuality at the time
Anderson was writing the story and now. Explore
the students’ own attitudes, and compare them to
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 523
Anderson’s treatment of Wing Biddlebaum.
(b) The role played by George Willard, especially the
role played by his absence in this story. Explain that
George Willard’s growth to maturity, through his
interaction with all the characters in the stories, is
actually the central story of Winesburg. Let the
students sense the relation between George and
Wing, and, again, make them enter the story.
(c) The moment with which the story opens and closes:
“the half decayed veranda of a small frame house”
on the edge of town. This moment becomes the
center around which the rest of the story circles.
Explain Anderson’s development of this nonlinear
plotting and his influence on later short story writers.
(d) The many images in the story. A few examples are
the importance of dreaming, the allusion to Socrates,
the “breaking wings of an imprisoned bird,” and, of
course, Wing’s hands themselves.
2. In regard to “Death in the Woods,” call the students’
attention to:
(a) The various levels of the story: story of Ma Grimes,
her relationship to the men and animals in the story,
her role as “feeder” of life.
(b) The function played by the dogs, both literal and
symbolic.
(c) Growth of the narrator from a young boy to a mature
artist.
(d) The difficulty the narrator has in telling the story.
(e) The many images in the story, both from nature and
from art.
3. I have had great success in having students write a short
story or character sketch about one of the “grotesques”
they meet in everyday life, someone they see on the bus
or subway, in the supermarket or on the street, at home
or in school. They must approach this character with
great respect and love, as Anderson does, and try to
imagine and then tell the character’s story of isolation,
fear, and, ultimately, of beauty.

Bibliography

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

524 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Read: Winesburg, Ohio, a very short book. Several other
stories in Maxwell Geismar’s Sherwood Anderson: Short
Stories.
If there is time, read: Chapter XII of Tar. “Death in the
Forest,” edited by William Miller and printed as an appendix
to Ray Lewis White’s critical edition of Tar, pp. 231–36.
Selections from White’s critical edition of Sherwood
Anderson’s Memoirs.
Chapter I of Representative Short Story Cycles of the
Twentieth Century by Forest L. Ingram (The Hague: Mouton)
for Ingram’s theory of the short story cycle.
The Chicago Renaissance in American Letters: A
Critical History by Bernard Duffey (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1954), Chapter 10, “Three Voices of the
Liberation,” about Francis Hackett, Harriet Monroe, and
Margaret Anderson and the little magazines they founded, and
Chapter 11, “The Struggle for Affirmation—Anderson,
Sandburg, Lindsay.”

Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945)

Contributing Editors: James M. Hutchisson and James L. W.
West III

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Dreiser’s style is unconventional. If students have heard of

him, they’ve heard that he’s a clumsy stylist. They also will
have difficulty understanding Ida’s dilemma in “Typhoon.”
The instructor should explain that Dreiser was trained as
a journalist whose main duty was to record the who, what,
where, when, why, and how of a story. Graceful style was a
small concern. In fact some of Dreiser’s verbal clumsiness was
more or less deliberate. His writing possesses its particular
power, its ability to move the emotions, in part because of its
bluntness, its lack of grace. Try to imagine “Typhoon” told by
a facile stylist, for example, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It would
lose much of its voltage.
It’s a good idea to show students how thoroughly
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 525
trapped and damned Ida Zobel is by an illicit pregnancy.
Contemporary readers will likely try to foist their own
standards back onto her time and place. Students identify with
this story because they feel much peer pressure in matters of
sex. Ask them to try to argue sympathetically for Hauptfuhrer.
Can it be done? Where did Dreiser’s sympathies lie?
Another good theme to discuss is Ida’s being “forgiven”
by the public, her almost automatic innocence before the court,
and her adoption by the wealthy socialite. Dreiser is indicating
some things here about the influence of the fourth estate over
the administration of justice. We sympathize with Ida, of
course, but her exoneration for the killing is suspect. Certainly
she still feels great guilt; it is the major motivation for her
suicide.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Like virtually all of Dreiser’s major characters, Ida Zobel in

“Typhoon” is a seeker. She searches for beauty and love in a
repressive, unenlightened society. She is ignorant and at the
mercy of instincts and drives that she does not understand. She
is naive enough to be duped by Hauptfuhrer largely because of
her obsessively sheltered upbringing. This was ever one of
Dreiser’s major themes—his hatred of repressiveness and its
consequences. The theme fits in well with the general
rebelliousness and nonconformity of American writers of his
generation and the generation following it.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Dreiser is best taught as a writer who held philosophically

conflicting ideas in suspension simultaneously. His best
writing springs from the tensions generated by these opposing
ideas. On the one hand, he was virtually a textbook naturalist;
on the other, a mystic, romantic, and sentimental writer. He
was also a left-leaning social activist, a stance which, strictly
speaking, is incompatible with naturalistic beliefs.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

526 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Original Audience

The instructor should emphasize that this story was magazine

fiction, written to sell. In it, Dreiser was dealing with
sensational tabloid material. The story was written in 1926 in
order to follow up on the great success of An American
Tragedy, published in 1925 and also based on a real murder
case. The story borrows elements from the Tragedy—also
from Sister Carrie (1900) and Jennie Gerhardt (1911),
Dreiser’s first two novels.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

This story is written in Dreiser’s late style, a fragmented, free-

association style that attempts to accomplish many of the same
things that stream-of-consciousness writers like James Joyce
and William Faulkner were trying to do during the 1920s.
Dreiser may have known of Ulysses; Faulkner wasn’t really on
the scene yet. Dreiser had been reading Freud and was much
interested in the workings of the subconscious mind. One can
teach this story as an example of early stream-of-
consciousness writing.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. Ask students to reflect on the following before class:

guilt and innocence; “peer pressure”; the narrative
voice—is it slanted or objective?
2. Have them read a big-city newspaper of the period on
microfilm and find similarly sensational material. They
might compare the style of reporting ca. 1926 with the
style used today and reflect on what this says about
changes in American society over the past sixty years.
Another useful topic is a discussion of free will as it
operates (or does not) in “Typhoon.” Are these
characters in control of their destinies?
A good short theme can be developed on the last line
of the story. How does it resonate back through the
entire narrative?

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 527
Bibliography

Gerber, Philip. “Theodore Dreiser.” Biographical sketch in

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 9. Detroit: Gale,
1981.

Griffin, Joseph. The Small Canvas: An Introduction to

Dreiser’s Short Stories. Fairleigh Dickinson, 1985.

Hutchisson, James M. “The Composition and Publication of

‘Another American Tragedy’: Dreiser’s ‘Typhoon.’” Papers of
the Biblio- graphical Society of America 81: 1 (1987).

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

528 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)

Contributing Editor: John J. Patton

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Students have few problems reading Millay’s poetry because

the poet is forthright in expressing her emotions, ideas, and
experiences. Obviously such references as those to Euclid and
Endymion require explanation. Occasionally the diction needs
some explication because of Millay’s fondness for archaic and
Latinate words.
Not much more is required than the teacher’s ability to
clarify some allusions and an occasional word or phrase. Any
teacher of modern American literature should also have no
problems with the references to city life and to issues of the
times, which are generously sprinkled throughout Millay’s
work. As for accessibility, some benefit will come from
placing Millay in the context of the poetry of the 1920s and
1930s as one of those like, for instance, Robert Frost,
Archibald MacLeish, and Edward Arlington Robinson, who
carried forward the more traditional verse form and techniques
in the face of the experimentalism of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound,
Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. Millay also
wrote on subjects that have a long history in English verse—
the natural scene, romantic love, impermanence and death, and
even poetry itself and the poet. Some students may therefore
possibly view her as “old-fashioned” in contrast to the more
experimental poets of her time. What must be emphasized is
that Millay and other technically conservative poets flourished
alongside the “New Poets,” the modernists, and similar poets
and that they produced poetry with less emphasis on
intellectualization and more on overt feeling. It is
characterized by forthrightness of expression, clarity of
diction, and avoidance of ambiguity and of the esoteric and
erudite as a source for figurative language.
Millay is one poet in particular whose work benefits
from being read aloud in order to do justice to its melodic
qualities. In her own recording of some of her poems, Millay
emphasizes the songlike nature of much of her verse. Teachers
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 529
should play this recording for students or, of course, have them
read the poems aloud themselves.
Students often raise gender issues. For example, they
ask whether it makes any difference that the poet is a woman.
Does gender show itself in any apparent way, allowing for
those instances where the poet deliberately displays it as in the
speaking voice used or the pronoun gender? How is Millay’s
stance as a “liberated” woman shown in her poetry if at all?
Another issue is relevance. In what ways are Millay’s poems
relevant to today’s lives? Are her concerns significant to
present-day readers? Is it readily apparent that her poetry dates
largely from the 1920s and 1930s?

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Millay’s interest in heterosexual relationships is a major theme

in her poetry, whether between husband and wife, as in “An
Ancient Gesture,” or between disaffected lovers, as in “The
Spring and the Fall.” Few American poets in this century have
written on this subject with the combined artistry and diversity
of Millay. “Love is not all” and “Oh, sleep forever in the
latmian cave” are from Fatal Interview, a fifty-two sonnet
sequence that deals with the course of a love affair from
beginning to end.
Millay should not, however, be associated exclusively
with this kind of poetry. Another major theme is the integrity
of the individual, which Millay valued highly for herself as
well as for others. “The Return” describes a man who has
apparently “sold out” in order to escape into the illusory
“comfort” of nature. In “Here lies, and none to mourn him”
Millay is describing a humankind that has fatally compromised
itself by, perhaps, a reliance on technology (others see it as a
comment on war).
A related theme, the integrity of the artist, is touched on
in “On Thought in Harness.” Millay also had a high degree of
social consciousness. She spoke out against the execution in
1926 of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, she wrote about the
wars in Spain and China, and she devoted a volume of verse,
Make Bright the Arrows, to concern about World War II.
“Here lies, and none to mourn him” is one of an eighteen-
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
530 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
sonnet sequence in this volume.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Millay’s relationship to the poetry of her time should be

discussed, as well as her antecedents in verse and her
achievements in the sonnet and the lyric. Her immediate
contemporaries include notably e. e. cummings, T. S. Eliot,
Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and
Edward Arlington Robinson. Millay, like Frost and Robinson,
was a conservative in verse form and technique, a
“traditionalist.” Although highly aware of the work of her
contemporaries, she steered clear of all “schools,” such as
imagists, modernists, objectivists, etc. Some critics place her
in a line of descent from such late-nineteenth-century English
poets as Robert Browning and Algernon Swinburne.
A widely read person, Millay absorbed influences from
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poets, hence her
devotion to the sonnet form, in which she has no peer in all of
American literature. The sonnet “His stalk the dark
delphinium” is noteworthy because Millay used tetrameter
verse rather than the more common pentameter. Millay’s lyrics
display a wide variety of form. Students may gauge her
breadth in lyric poetry by contrasting the mixed verse feet and
line lengths in “Spring” and its abrupt turns of phrase with the
melodic flow of “The Spring and the Fall” and its regularity of
form.

Original Audience

Millay continues to appeal to a large audience, as shown by

the publication in the fall of 1987 of a new edition of her
sonnets, a volume of critical essays, and an annotated
bibliography of secondary sources. A very large audience of
readers in her own time admired her frequent outspokenness,
her freshness of attitude, her liberated views as a woman, and
the reflection in her poetry of an intensely contemporary
sensibility. She is quintessentially modern in her attitude and
viewpoint even if her language is often redolent of earlier
poets. Although it is true that Millay’s poetry has great appeal
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 531
to women readers, she must not be either presented or viewed
as writing solely for women because of the evident limitations
it would place on appreciation of her accomplishment.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

To illustrate Millay’s mastery of the sonnet, a comparison

should be made with Keats as her nearest equivalent. Both
display the same ease and control in the form. The sonnets of
Sir Philip Sidney, for one, may be used to show Millay’s
historical connection with the great sonneteering tradition in
English. Direct comparison with Shakespeare would be useful
only to illustrate her range of achievement—181 sonnets in the
new edition.
Millay’s lyric poetry can be compared with that of
several late-nineteenth-century English lyricists, such as
Dowson, D. G. Rossetti, and Housman (Browning and
Swinburne have already been mentioned).
Her relationship to older American poets is less clear.
She seems to have been little interested in them.
Commentators have related her work in ways to that of
Emerson and Holmes and perhaps some of Whittier and
Longfellow, but not at all to Whitman and Dickinson. As
noted above, Millay stands apart from the experiments and
innovations in verse in her own time. She should be more
meaningfully compared with Robinson, MacLeish, Frost, and
Masters, among others, who, while employing conservative
prosodic techniques, expressed a contemporary point of view.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

532 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. “Spring”: What is suggested about life by images of the

empty cup and uncarpeted flight of stairs?
“The Return”: Why is Earth not able to comfort the
despairing Man?
“Here lies, and none to mourn him”: What seems to
have “cut down” Man (the human race)?
“Love is not all”: Although love is not “all,” would
the poet easily give it up?
“On Thought in Harness”: Explain the significance
of the title with reference to the poem.
“Oh, sleep forever”: Restate the last two lines in
your own words.
“His stalk the dark delphinium”: Explain why “all
will be easier” when the mind grows its own “iron
cortex.”
2. The student who selects Millay could read more of her
work and then write about a major theme in the work.
Another possibility is that a student might read
further in her sonnets, read sonnets by others, e.g.,
Sidney, Donne, and Keats, and then write an analytical
paper on differences and/or similarities in form,
predominant subject matter, diction, etc.
Another assignment would be to read other
American women poets of the time (Crapsey, Teasdale,
H.D., Wiley, Amy Lowell) to show any similarities
based on their sex.

Bibliography

Allen, Albert. “Millay and Modernism.” In Critical Essays on

Edna St. Vincent Millay, edited by William B. Thesig.
Boston: Hall, 1993, 266–72. Millay’s “stylistic
uncertainties” and social consciousness poems place her
outside the High Modernism movement.

Douglas, George H. “Edna St. Vincent.” In Women of the 20s.

Dallas: Saybrook, 1986, 104–47. A view of Millay as one
who “exhibits the temper of the times.”
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 533

Fried, Debra. “Andromeda Unbound: Gender and Genre in

Millay’s Sonnets.” Twentieth Century Literature 32 (Spring
1986): 1–22. A valuable study of Millary as a major
sonneteer.

Gray, James. Edna St. Vincent Millay. Minneapolis: University

of Minne- sota Press, 1967. Forty-six small pages provide a
thoughtful overview of Millay’s life and career.

Klemans, Patricia. “Being Born a Woman: A New Look at

Edna St. Vincent Millay.” Colby Library Quarterly 15
(March 1979): 7–18. Millay is seen as a liberated woman
who introduced the personality of the “passionate woman”
into love poetry.

Rovit, Earl. “Our Lady Poets of the Twenties.” Southern

Review 16 (January 1980): 65–85. Rovit offers an
informative context, showing the challenges faced by
women poets during Millay’s early years.

Sprague, Rosemary. “Edna St. Vincent Millay.” In Imaginary

Gardens: A Study of Five American Poets. Philadelphia:
Chilton, 1969, 135–82. Millay’s poetry is related to her life
and times.

Stanbrough, Jane. “Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Language

of Vulner- ability.” In Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist
Essays on Women Poets, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert
and Susan Gubar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1979, 183–99. A sense of vulnerability, victimiza- tion,
and constriction appears in some of Millay’s poems.

Wilson, Edmund. “Epilogue 1952: Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

In The Shores of Light. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and
Young, 1952, 144–93. An authoritative personal and
critical view of Millay by a major critic who knew her all her
adult life.

Alienation and Literary

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
534 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Experimentation

Ezra Pound (1885–1972)

Contributing Editor: Betsy Erkkila

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Pound’s announcement of the principles of imagism in “A

Retrospect” provides an excellent introduction to the poetics of
literary modernism. Like Hemingway in prose, Pound turns
away from the “emotional slither” and abstract rhetoric of
romantic and Victorian writers toward an emphasis on
precision and concision in language and imagery. The poem
“In a Station of the Metro” puts Pound’s imagist theory into
practice. Pound was struck by the beauty of a crowd of faces
he observed in the Metro at La Concorde in Paris; he tried to
represent the experience first in a thirty-line poem; then
through a Kandinsky-like splash of color; finally, he says, he
found the best form for the experience in the model of
Japanese haiku poetry. The poem interweaves subjective
impression with objective expression, presenting in miniature
the controlling myth of Pound’s work: the discovery of light
amid darkness, fertility amid waste, figured in the myth of
Persephone in the Underworld.
In teaching “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” and The Cantos
you might want to prepare a handout explicating some of the
allusions in the poem. You can use Ruthven’s Guide to
Personae, Brooker’s Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of
Ezra Pound, and Kearns’s Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected
Cantos. Begin by asking students to think about the overall
import of “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.” On the broadest level,
the poem is a compelling critique of the modern age; more
specifically, it is about the plight of the artist, and of Pound in
particular, in the modern world. Look at the ways the opening
section on “E.P.” works formally. The poem moves not by
linear progression but by the juxtaposition of images as
emotional and intellectual complexes; meaning develops not
through direct authorial statement but by engaging the reader
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 535
in a continual process of interpretation.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

While Pound buries the aesthete figure of his early period in

the opening section of “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” he does not
renounce the value of artistic creation as a source of personal
and social renewal; he represents and asserts the enduring
value of beauty and song in “Envoi,” which is modeled on the
poem “Go, Lovely Rose” by the seventeenth-century English
poet Edmund Waller.
The postwar context of the poem should be emphasized;
sections IV and V contain one of the most negative and
moving chants against war in modern literature.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

If Pound is the first or only modern writer you are discussing,

you might want to begin by discussing the relation between an
increasingly complex and allusive form and content among
modern writers and the increasing isolation and alienation of
the artist in the modern world. Pound went abroad both
physically and mentally in his early period, seeking models
and masks in past literatures, including Greek (Homer), Latin
(Virgil, Ovid, Catullus), Italian (Dante, Arnaut Daniel, Guido
Calvalcanti), French Provençal (Bertran de Born), and Chinese
(Li Po, Confucius). During the war years, as he began to turn
his attention toward the contemporary world, he also turned
backward toward the native tradition of Walt Whitman. This
turn is evident in the raw and comic exuberance of “A Pact,”
where Pound seeks to come to terms with Walt Whitman.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Pound’s evocation of war might be compared with Eliot’s The

Waste Land, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and “The
Walls Do Not Fall” in H.D.’s Trilogy.
After “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” Pound turned his
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
536 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
main attention to his epic Cantos, which he worked on for the
remainder of his life. In a letter to W. B. Yeats, he said he
intended to write one hundred cantos, modeled on a Bach
fugue: “There will be no plot, no chronicle of events, no logic
of discourse, but two themes, the Descent into Hades from
Homer, a Metamorphosis from Ovid, and mixed with these,
medieval or modern historical characters.” As Pound’s
comment suggests, the poem has three analogues: an Odyssean
journey, modeled on Homer’s Odyssey; an ascent through
Inferno and Purgatory toward the light of Paradiso, modeled
on Dante’s Divine Comedy; and from Ovid’s Metamorphosis a
series of “magic moments” in which divine energies are
revealed in the physical world.
Pound speaks in a personal voice that anticipates the
confessional strain in the poems of Allen Ginsberg, Robert
Lowell, and Sylvia Plath.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

Ask students to note how Canto XLV examines the

relationship between politics and poetry. Normally, the
students respond positively to this poem as a chant against the
commercialization of the modern age; in fact, the poem might
be compared to Ginsberg’s chant against Moloch in section II
of Howl. Ask the students if there is any problem with the term
usury, which Pound defined as “A charge for the use of
purchasing power, levied without regard to production; often
without regard to the possibilities of production.” Discuss the
ways the charging of interest became—through Christian
prohibition— associated with the Jewish people. Is Pound’s
chant against usury also a chant against the Jews; and insofar
as it is, how does this affect our reading and evaluation of the
poem?
This discussion should raise some of the same questions
about the relationship between politics and poetry, fascism and
modernism, that were at the center of the debate about Pound
receiving the Bollingen Award for the Pisan Cantos in 1949.
The same questions, it might be pointed out, are at the center
of the reconstruction of American literature. The “Pound
Problem” is a telling instance, not only of the ways poetry is
political, but of what happens when the poem’s politics are
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 537
“out of tune” with the politics of the dominant culture. One
might ask how Pound’s anti-Semitism differed in kind and
degree from the racism and anti-Semitism that one finds in
other major American writers. And why was Pound singled
out for persecution at this time?
The “pull down thy vanity” section of Canto LXXXI in
the Pisan Cantos reveals a new attitude of humilitas and
humanitas; Pound speaks in a personal voice that anticipates
the confessional strain in the poems of Allen Ginsberg, Robert
Lowell, and Sylvia Plath. The Cantos are incomplete and
inconclusive: They end with two fragments, including Canto
CXX, which are like the Cantos themselves a figure of the
fragmentation and incompleteness of the modern world.
Pound’s final words are at once an apology and an admission
of failure: “Let those I love forgive/what I have made.” Ask
the students if they agree with Pound’s final assessment of his
epic. Is there, ultimately, any value in his work?

Amy Lowell (1874–1925)

Contributing Editor: Lillian Faderman

Classroom Issues and Strategies

I generally use Amy Lowell’s work to explore two major

issues: the imagist movement as it was imported into the
United States and the treatment of lesbian material by a lesbian
poet who felt the need to be more closeted in her writing than
in her life. While the subject of Lowell’s imagism is easy to
introduce, the subject of homosexuality in her life and writing
has been more difficult because students are sometimes
uncomfortable with the topic, and they are ignorant of the
history of censorship and homophobia in the United States.
The study of Lowell’s life and work presents a good
opportunity to open these important subjects to discussion.
Lowell’s lesbianism and the ways in which it is
manifested in her writing generally stimulate some of the
liveliest discussions of the course. For example, some students
question, as did the critics who dampened her popularity in the
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
538 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
years immediately after her death, whether a writer who is
homosexual can have anything significant to say to the
heterosexual majority. My approach is to draw an analogy (or,
with any luck, to have students in the class draw the analogy)
to the profound impact on white readers of works by writers of
color. “Differentness” becomes the theme of the discussion.
This preliminary discussion of ethnic and racial
difference and its impact on writing and reading leads to a
discussion of sexual difference and its parallel impact. Either
members of the class or I will bring up other writers with
whom most of the class may be familiar and whose work they
considered no less effective because those writers were gay or
lesbian (e.g., Walt Whitman, Carson McCullers, Tennessee
Williams, Elizabeth Bishop). The focus of the discussion then
turns to the value of borrowing the spectacles of one who is
different in order to glance at the world. The session is useful
for all students but especially important for homosexual
students whose lives are seldom recognized or affirmed in
classroom discussion.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

In a discussion of Lowell’s life and work, I introduce two

kinds of history—literary and social—and I show the ways in
which they mesh. I first focus on the history of the imagist
movement that I began when the class read Pound and H.D.;
then I explore what attention Lowell garnered for imagism in
the United States, why and how she succeeded, and how she
modified imagism in her work. I also look at her creation of
the dramatic monologue and discuss the historical background
of public literary performance.
I am equally concerned with raising the issue of self-
censorship and encoding in Lowell’s poetry, especially in
those poems in which she does not create a literary persona but
rather speaks in what appears to be her own voice. To this end
I talk about the shifting notion of “standards of decency” and
censorship laws. I talk at some length about Lowell’s own
erotic and affectional relationships with women, and the
discrepancy between her brash self-presentation in public and
her subdued self-presentation in her autobiographical writing,
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 539
such as the 1919 series “Two Speak Together,” from which
many of the Lowell selections in The Heath Anthology are
taken. Lowell’s self-censorship motives are revealed to the
class through a letter she wrote to D. H. Lawrence, whose
patron she was, scolding him for endangering his literary
reputation by trying to publish material such as the lesbian
scene in his novel The Rainbow, which got him into trouble
with the censors:

I know there is no use in counselling you to

make any concessions to public opinions in
your books and, although I regret sincerely
that you cut yourself off from being published
by an outspokenness which the English public
does not understand, I regret it not in itself . . .
but simply because it keeps the world from
knowing what a great novelist you are. I think
you could top them all if you would be a little
more reticent on this one subject [explicit
sexuality]. You need not change your attitude
a particle, you can simply use the india rubber
in certain places, and then you can come into
your own as it ought to be. . . . When one is
surrounded by prejudice and blindness, it
seems to me that the only thing to do is to get
over in spite of it and not constantly run foul
of these same prejudices which, after all, hurts
oneself and the spreading of one’s work, and
does not do a thing to right the prejudice.

The class then explores the ways in which Lowell appears to

have taken her own advice. If the beloved in the “Two Speak
Together” series is Ada Russell, as Lowell admitted to John
Livingston Lowes, Lowell herself may be presumed to be the
speaker. I introduce the topic of encoding and its
ubiquitousness in homosexual literature of earlier eras. How
does Lowell disguise the fact of her gender and thus the
lesbian content in these poems? How does she use her “india
rubber”? What in terms of her sexual identification is hidden
and what is overt in her poem about women writers, “The
Sisters”?
Finally, I look with my class at the treatment of

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

540 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
heterosexuality in Lowell’s poetry. Students are often
surprised when they realize that “Patterns,” a poem that speaks
quite explicitly about a woman’s heterosexual desires, was
published only a decade and a half after the end of
Victorianism. Many students praise Lowell’s courage in her
use of this material. Others suggest that her heterosexual erotic
images lack originality and mimic the stuff of cheap romance
novels. (One student compared them to the clichés of
Harlequin romances of our era: pink and silver women
surrendering their soft and willing bodies to heavy-booted men
in dashing uniforms.) In general, my students come to prefer
the short lyric poems whose material seems fresher and more
deeply felt than her dramatic monologues such as “Patterns,”
which, for decades, remained the only of Lowell’s poems to be
frequently anthologized.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

With regard to her style and form, I spend most of the Lowell
sessions considering her as an imagist or an “Amygist.” We
discuss her interest in orientalism, which predated her Pound
years. If I have not already done so, I introduce the class to the
haiku and tanka forms. I also bring in some examples of
“imagist” poems Lowell wrote even before she learned of the
existence of the imagist movement.
We also discuss Lowell’s other poetic innovations, such
as her polyphonic prose (prose poetry) and her interest in some
of her poetry in the folk materials of non-Euro-Americans.
This emphasis leads to a further
consideration of how writers who are different often develop a
literary interest in other forms of differentness. Finally, we
discuss the dramatic monologue form and the use Lowell
makes of it in “Patterns” and other poems.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Lowell’s imagism should, of course, be compared to that of

Pound and H.D. Her dramatic monologues should be
compared to Pound’s personae and to the Victorian British
author Robert Browning’s dramatis personae. The class will
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 541
also find a comparative discussion of Lowell and Gertrude
Stein interesting. Both saw themselves (and were) movers and
shakers in the business of literature. Both were extremely
interested in experimental literary techniques and had a coterie
of young writers around them whom they helped and
influenced. Both were approximately the same height and
weight. Both had women lovers who served them as muses,
secretaries, critics, housekeepers, and guards against an
intrusive public. Astrology buffs in the class will be amused to
learn that Lowell and Stein were both born in 1874, in the
eastern United States, less than a week apart. On a more
serious note, the ways in which Lowell encodes her lesbian
material should be compared to Stein’s lesbian encoding and
to H.D.’s treatment of her own bisexuality in her writing.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. My study questions emphasize the form and content of

her work as well as the particular challenges she faced
as one who wrote poetry that was often erotic while she
felt constrained to conceal the lesbian source of her
eroticism. I encourage students to pay attention to how
Lowell’s imagist techniques are manifested in many of
her long poems as well as in her shorter, more tanka-like
poems. My questions also draw attention to the feminist
message in Lowell’s work (while I point out that,
paradoxically, she rejected an affiliation with the
feminist movement of her day, insisting—as did
Gertrude Stein—that such concerns had little to do with
her). Finally, my questions address the subject of
encodement in literature and the ways in which Lowell,
in particular, encodes.
2. I allow my students who wish to write on Lowell a
choice of approaches. Several students who have elected
to write analyses of her longer poems have been
interested in exposing Lowell as a feminist writer,
focusing on “Patterns” (an expression of a woman’s
right to sexual desire, a complaint against the ways in
which women are constrained) and “The Sisters” (how
women writers “think-back”—to use Virginia Woolf ’ s
phrase— through their female predecessors).
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
542 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

My students have also been interested in writing

comparisons between Lowell and H.D., or Lowell and Pound
as imagists.
Lowell’s work often inspires students to ask if they can
do a creative writing assignment in which they try their hand at
the haiku, the tanka, and then Western imagism.
Some of the most successful assignments have been
those that explore gender encoding in Lowell’s short poems:
for example, how do we know (or do we know?) that the
speaker (who is the lover) in the “Two Speak Together” series
is a woman?

Bibliography

From the years immediately following her death until the

1970s, Lowell was largely neglected by critics. Students will
be interested in exploring the grounds on which she was
dismissed after having been so successful during her lifetime.
Therefore, the following works will be of historical interest:
Clement Wood, Amy Lowell. New York: Harold Vinal, 1926;
Hervey Allen, “Amy Lowell as a Poet,” Saturday Review of
Literature, 3:28 (February 5, 1927), 557–58; Winfield
Townley Scott, “Amy Lowell Ten Years After,” New England
Quarterly, 8 (June 1935), 320–30.

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)

Contributing Editor: Cynthia Secor

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Many students will have heard that Stein is “difficult” so they

come to her work expecting not to understand. They expect
“style” and “experimental strategies,” but not content. There
exists no cottage industry “explicating” her difficulty, so one
does not have easy sources of data such as Readers’ Guide to
Gertrude Stein to which to refer students. In addition, her
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 543
lesbianism and feminism put off some readers, if they get far
enough into the text to see it.
One needs to begin by saying that these texts are the
creation of an extremely well-educated woman—an American,
a Jew, the child of immigrant parents, a lesbian, and a
feminist—whose life experience and literary production bridge
the Victorian and modern eras.
Her two enduring concerns are to portray the experience
of woman and to explore what it means to present the fact or
act of perception—which can be described as how we organize
what we see.
How Gertrude Stein organizes what she sees and how
she presents “seeing”: this is probably enough metaphysics for
a beginning.
When students see that the texts are about something,
something very serious and important to the author, they relax
and “read” the text.
The texts included here allow you to trace the evolution
of Stein’s style from realistic and naturalistic through abstract
and cubist to simple and straightforward. You can also
compare and contrast her representation over the years of
women, femininity, and culturally determined depictions of
women. Bridgman (p. 104) notes this preference in subject
matter. Why and how she chose to depict women adds a new
dimension to American literary history. My students have
enjoyed “opening up” the style only to discover that it really is
about “something.”
Consider asking your students to write about a subject
matter of their own choice in each of the styles represented in
the anthology. Ask them to choose something from their own
experience that they think will “fit” with that style. Have them
comment on what they have learned from the exercise. Does
the style determine a range of appropriate experiences? Can
you truly use her style with your experience? How does the
“fit” fit? When does it not? Did you learn something new
about your experience by “seeing” it as Stein would have at
the time she used that style? The underlying point here is that
her “style” literally changes from text to text. The style is
specific to the matter at hand.
Students become engaged with Stein’s ideas, values, and
experience as a woman. Her response to war interests them.
They are interested in her ideas about democracy, race,

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

544 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
geniuses, about why ordinary people are worth so much
serious attention. They like the children’s stories, when we get
into what it means to write for children. Detective story buffs
get into her ideas about the detecting mind.
My experience has been that once students believe she is
serious, they give her serious attention and are fascinated by
how she chooses to present the fabric of her life. Hers is a
powerful mind and they respond to it. How she turns
marginality into centrality is of interest to most of us.
Even so, their question continues to be, “Why is she so
hard?”

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Gertrude Stein is interested in:

what it is to be an American
what it is to be a woman
how people see things
how people tell stories

She describes her own ordinary experience.

She writes about ordinary, commonplace people in such
a manner that the absolute uniqueness of each is captured. This
is her contribution to the American tradition of democracy and
individualism.
She writes extensively about her life, and her growth
into her life, as a major American writer of the twentieth
century. She comments on culture, art, politics, and sexuality.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Begin by showing how her work grows out of the American

tradition of realism and naturalism.
Then show how she, in a typically twentieth-century
fashion, becomes concerned with how we see what we see. As
an American, a first-generation child of European Jewish
parents, a woman, a lesbian, a feminist, and an artist, she is
fully aware of marginality and centrality and ponders the
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 545
process by which we organize experience and assign
centrality, value, and worth. Remember that she was educated
at Harvard University in philosophy and at the Johns Hopkins
University in medicine.
She is fully aware that what she is has not historically
been treated as fully human, fully civilized. Her literary
strategies of a lifetime can be seen to be attempts to portray
each life, each point of view, as fully real, absolutely present,
and of equal value.

Original Audience

I focus on the willingness to continue writing serious and

challenging texts without benefit of a wide contemporary
audience. She says she writes for herself and strangers.
Serious writers, common readers, the audiences of her
operas, and readers of her autobiographies and essays are
variously able to articulate what attracts them and compels
their attention. She tries very hard not to be influenced by
“audiences.”

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Stein is so self-consciously American and so well read that it

is fruitful to take her poetry and prose and set it beside such
writers as Dickinson, Whitman, James, Wharton, Norris,
Dreiser, and see what she does with related subject matter—
her forms are radical critiques of the relation between content
and form in American naturalism, romanticism, and realism.
Flaubert and Mann are interesting set beside her early
prose works. Similarly Hemingway’s early short stories are
profitably set beside hers. One can see how she evolves a
prose style in which the subject matter and the mode of
narrative are about equal in weight. It helps to see that she is
looking steadily at the “real” world, as she evolves her prose
and poetic (and hybrid) conventions.
Cluster T. S. Eliot, Joyce, Pound, and Stein. Often these
male con-temporaries are on her mind as she does something
different. She does not share their interest in the past. She
evolves a presentation of female persons independent of
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
546 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
patriarchal myth.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. I ask them to recall what was happening politically,

socially, and artistically from 1874 to 1946. What
events, achievements, personalities, movements, and
concepts associated with those years have a bearing on
how we perceive women, Americans, immigrants, Jews,
lesbians, and geniuses? This lets us look at who “we”
are, what we “see,” and how it provides for us a context
for understanding what Stein is doing with her writing.
2. (a) Characterize Stein’s “modernist” strategies. T. S.
Eliot and James Joyce add layers of meaning and
mythic reference; she seems bent on stripping
meaning away and living in a literal present
represented as fully as possible. Is this a strategy for
writing beyond patriarchy rather than shoring it up
or representing fully its complexity?
(b) Stein’s impulse to describe, speculate, and
pontificate places her firmly in the tradition of
Emerson and others. She writes about herself as a
Jew, a lesbian, a westerner, an American, an
expatriate, and a bourgeois Victorian lady of limited
but comfortable means. How does she expand our
definition of American individualism?
(c) How does one integrate her comparatively large
body of erotic poetry into the American literary
tradition? What does it mean that a major American
woman writer born in 1874 writes extensively about
sex, and that her partner is a woman? How does it
enlarge our concept of female sexuality and of
female experience?
(d) It is useful to talk about the tradition of female
biography, autobiography, letters, and memoirs, and
how this differs from the male tradition. Stein both
writes directly about her experience (Everybody’s
Autobiography, Paris France) and incorporates it
into fiction (The Making of Americans, “Ada”). How
does she extend our understanding of this mode?
(e) A number of Stein’s works, including The Mother of
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 547
Us All, have been set to music or produced for the
stage. What critical language is appropriate for
discussing prose and poetry that experiment with
generic conventions and concepts normally applied
to scene design, ballet, opera, or piano
compositions?
(f) What does it mean that fifty years after her death, we
still do not have major editions of her letters; her
notebooks; scholarly editions of her works; adequate
representation in teaching anthologies; study guides
that would make her obscurity as clear as we find
that of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound?
(g) What did Stein gain and lose by living in a foreign
country, where the daily language was other than the
language of her childhood, her art, and her domestic
life? Hemingway, Wharton, and Baldwin also lived
abroad. Why? What other American writers chose to
live abroad for long periods of time? Why?
(h) What does it mean that over half of her work was
published posthumously and that most of her serious
work, when published in her lifetime, was not
widely read or understood? What comparison can be
made with Emily Dickinson’s accomplishment,
limitations, and reputation?

Bibliography

Bassoff, Bruce. “Gertrude Stein’s ‘Composition as

Explanation.’” Twen- tieth Century Literature: Gertrude
Stein Issue 24, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 76–80.

Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940.

Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Chapter 5.

Dubnick, Randa. The Structure of Obscurity: Gertrude Stein,

Language, and Cubism. Urbana and Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 1984. Chapters 2 and 5.

Katz, Leon. “Weininger and The Making of Americans.”

Twentieth Century Literature: Gertrude Stein Issue 24,
no. 1 (Spring 1978): 8–26.
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
548 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Kostelanetz, Richard. The Yale Gertrude Stein. New Haven

and London: Yale University Press, 1980. Introduction.

Secor, Cynthia. “Gertrude Stein: The Complex Force of Her

Femininity.” In Women, the Arts, and the 1920s in Paris and
New York, edited by Kenneth W. Wheeler and Virginia
Lee Lussier, 27–35. New Bruns-wick: Transaction Books,
1982.

———. “Ida, A Great American Novel.” Twentieth Century

Literature: Gertrude Stein Issue 24, no. 1 (Spring 1978):
96–107.

Sutherland, Donald. Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her

Work. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951. Chapter 4.

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)

Contributing Editor: Theodora R. Graham

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Students’ assumption that what appears simple is simplistic

can be a problem with teaching Williams’s poetry. Some
students feel the need to sketch in the house, barn, and fields
behind the wheelbarrow and white chickens. For others, lack
of experience with innovative line breaks and visual effects
causes initial confusion. Many do not at first listen for the
voice(s). They do not pay attention to speakers and therefore
miss the tonal shadings, irony, humor, and other effects,
including the sometimes clinical objectivity of poems related
to visual art.
I recommend that students read poems aloud from the
beginning. I read a poem aloud myself in class as a “possible
interpretation” and have students comment on or revise the
reading. I also use transparencies of shorter poems,
occasionally changing the line breaks in an “edited version” to
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 549
call attention to Williams’s technique of fragmentation (not
breaking necessarily with a syntactic unit). In addition, I
sometimes use art slides that relate to specific poems
(Demuth’s “I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold,” “Tuberoses”;
Picasso’s “The Girl and the Hoop”; Sheeler’s “Classic
Scene”).
Students often ask if Williams is usually the speaker in
the poem. They wonder how autobiographical his work is and
whether his work as a doctor really influenced the way he
wrote and what he wrote about. Those interested in form ask
whether a single sentence, broken up on the page, can be a
legitimate poem.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Williams champions the American idiom and the “local”—

either the urban landscape or one’s immediate environment.
He pays close attention to ordinary scenes (some purely
descriptive; others as compositions as in visual art), the
working class and poor. Williams’s work often demonstrates
the artist’s need to destroy or deconstruct what has become
outworn and to reassemble or re-create with fresh vision and
language. His own “hybrid” background is, in his view,
particularly American. He uses his experience as a doctor,
married man and father, son and friend, in some of the poems,
fiction, and plays. In addition, he demonstrates the need to
discover rather than impose order or reality.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

It is important to be familiar with imagist principles and the

serious thrust of Williams’s “no ideas but in things,” as well as
his sometime view of the poem as “a machine made out of
words.” Students should be aware of inductive process and
attempt to relate this to Williams’s emphasis on particulars,
perhaps comparing it with Frost’s statement that a poem does
not begin with an idea. But whereas Frost embraced and
adapted traditional forms, around 1915 Williams began
experimenting in shorter poems with innovative line breaks,
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
550 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
speaking voices, and a kind of stripped-down language (as he
said of Moore, washing words with acid). Readers of Williams
should also be familiar with the Armory Show (1913) and how
cubist fragmentation and photography became sources for new
ideas in the arts through Alfred Stieglitz’s Gallery “291” and
magazine Camera Work, through gatherings at the
home/“gallery” of Walter Arensberg in New York City. Since
Williams lived a short train ride from the city, he was able to
frequent these shows, gatherings, and even studios, like that of
Marsden Hartley, with Demuth, a good friend.
That the young Williams was at first influenced
primarily by Whitman and Keats and began by writing
conventional verse makes his departure from tradition all the
more radical.

Original Audience

Point out through a dateline on a transparency the birth dates

of Frost, Stevens, Williams, Pound, Moore, and Eliot—and
include on the same sheet how old each poet was in 1912 (the
date of what is sometimes referred to as the beginning of a
poetic renaissance: the start of Poetry magazine). Audience
was created by editors of little magazines (as new audiences
for art were stimulated by opening of small galleries in New
York), some—like
Williams (see Contact I and II)—poets or fiction writers.
Poetry, Others, the Egoist, Criterion (see Little Magazines, ed.
F. Hoffman), and other magazines published on both sides of
the Atlantic gave poets a place to present their work without
considering the strictures of conventional larger-circulation
magazines. The Dial, edited in the twenties by Marianne
Moore, offered a coveted prize, which Williams was awarded.
The audience was not mainstream, not large; but it was
generally sophisticated and knowledgeable about new
developments in the arts and music. It could also be educated
by the writers to be responsive to new work.
Now, of course, the modernists are all anthologized and
acknowledged, both in their own rights and as influences for
poets of following generations. That does not make them,
however, easy to read. And the poems anthologized for
secondary-level students often do not present their most
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 551
controversial, and perhaps interesting, writing.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Students may be asked to discuss how poems begin, or to

compare two or more poets’ process of revision. They may be
asked to compare/contrast the speakers’ dilemmas in Frost’s
“Design” or other “dark” poems and Williams’s “These.” They
could look as well at the forms each poet has chosen and
discuss the possible reasons for what Frost would consider the
“playing tennis with the net down” of Williams’s verse. One
could also discuss Williams’s relationship to Pound and the
latter’s influence on early Williams, as well as Williams’s
negative views of Eliot’s expatriation and verse.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. Students generally have a set of strategies for reading

that include giving attention to speaker, setting (time of
year, time of day, description), various devices,
audience, etc., that they have adapted to their own use as
they become more sophisticated readers. I try not to
reduce each writer to a set of questions but do suggest
that with Williams they read aloud and look carefully at
how Williams develops a speaker, how words—used
sparingly—can “tell” more because of juxtaposition or
because of their place in a visual composition.
2. Students are particularly interested in interrelations
among the arts, in particular with Williams of poetry and
visual art. Williams’s favorite painter among the cubists
was Juan Gris. Some of his work, because it includes
what Williams called “the recognizable object” in a new
relation to its context, can be interesting to compare with
carefully selected Williams poems (and they can see
Spring and All for Williams’s comments on Gris). Also,
Williams’s work in relation to that of Charles Demuth,
Charles Sheeler, and Alfred Stieglitz provides
stimulating possibilities. Can a linear art such as poetry
come close to resembling a spatial art such as painting
or photography?
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
552 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Bibliography

The second bibliography on Williams is very long. An

instructor might consult Paul Mariani’s edition of the
secondary sources, arranged according to periods in
Williams’s writing, chronologically (published by the
American Library Association). And then select more recent
articles from this book’s lists.
James Breslin’s study of WCW and Thomas Whitaker’s
shorter intro-duction in the Twayne series remain useful.
Specialized studies of Williams and the arts by Bram
Dijkstra, Dickran Tashjian, Peter Schmidt, and Christopher
MacGowan provide helpful background.
Williams’s Autobiography and I Want to Write a Poem
(ed. Edith Heal) offer insights, not always totally reliable, in
the poet’s own words.
The William Carlos Williams Review, published since
1975, prints articles, reviews, biographical information,
unpublished letters, and other manuscripts.

Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953)

Contributing Editor: James A. Robinson

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Problems with teaching O’Neill include (1) students’ lack of

acquaintance with drama as a genre, which leads to problems
of point of view, etc.; (2) for Hairy Ape, fragmentation of the
action and styles—its antirealism bewilders some; I often scan
the final scenes in discussion in explaining the expressionism
of earlier scenes; (3) difficulty with identifying tone: students
don’t know whether the work is tragedy, comedy, or satire;
whether to identify with the hero or laugh at him.
To address these issues, (1) emphasize the absence of
point of view as an opportunity, not a problem, and use the
central conflict to generate theme—in what ways do Yank and
Mildred contrast? What do these contrasts represent (socially,
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 553
sexually, psychologically)? (2) Relate the fragmentation of
setting to that found (or made possible) by film as medium;
compare other fragmentations to poetry (T. S. Eliot’s The
Waste Land ) and fiction (Faulkner) contemporary with the
play. (3) Define Yank as both hero and antihero (using Esther
Jackson’s definition in The Broken World of Tennessee
Williams); identify targets of satire (distorted characters, for
example) and ask how they relate to Yank’s tragic journey
toward awareness and toward death.
Consider approaching this play as an existential text (as
Doris Falk does in her book on O’Neill) in which Yank is
guilty of “bad faith” in his early identification with something
outside of himself—steel—leaving him no place to turn when
that identification collapses. Finally, consider a Freudian
approach for some scenes like scene 3 with its blatant phallic
and vaginal symbolism; you could also see Yank as “id”
struggling toward “ego” in some ways, as animal striving to
become a human individual.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Personal Issues: O’Neill’s relationship to women, particularly

his blaming of his mother for his “fall” from innocence;
O’Neill’s lapsed faith in the Catholic God, leading to a
philosophical search similar to Yank’s; O’Neill’s love of
death.
Historical Issues: modern industrial capitalism as
destructive of har-mony (Paddy versus Yank) but O’Neill’s
lack of faith in social solutions (repudiation of Long).
Themes: alienation as major theme, not “belonging”—
dramatized in dialogue, setting, sound effects, and character
distortions, as well as in action, a quintessential modern theme.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

The primary question is the theatrical mode of expressionism,

and why O’Neill chose a style employing distortion and
fragmentation for themes of industrialism and alienation.
A related issue is how this expresses the experimental
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
554 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
spirit of the 1920s and the questioning of American bourgeois
culture spearheaded by Mencken and others—particularly the
recognition of class divisions apparent in other works, like
Gatsby.

Original Audience

The Broadway audience of the 1920s accepted O’Neill’s

experimentation, partially because he was promoted by
influential critics; but the reviews of Ape were mixed. You
could cite reviews from leftist journals about the criticism of
capitalism in the play to ignite discussion as to whether this is
a central theme. Recently, Joel Pfister has argued along New
Historicist lines that O’Neill’s Broadway audiences were
dominated by members of an emerging professional-
managerial class that would empathize with the play’s
presentation of Yank’s angst as philosophical and universal
rather than class-based and historically determined.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

As indicated above, the play invites comparison with The

Waste Land (fragmentation), The Great Gatsby (social
criticism), as well as with figures like Stephen Crane and
Theodore Dreiser and Jack London (the latter influenced
O’Neill, in fact), whose American naturalism emphasized the
animal, instinctual behavior of man. Darwinism, the struggle
toward evolution (note Yank’s emergence from the sea onto
land in scene 5) clearly informs the assumptions of the play.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

For “genre”: the key is central conflict (here, Yank versus

Mildred) and how this generates the themes of the play.
For expressionistic aesthetic: point out parallels
to/influence of cin-ema, especially The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
and Metropolis.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 555
Bibliography

Read the Ape chapter in Doris Falk, Eugene O’Neill and the
Tragic Tension; Doris Alexander, “Eugene O’Neill as Social
Critic,” American Quarterly (Winter 1954; rpt. in Oscar
Cargill et al., O’Neill and His Plays—which is also useful for
O’Neill’s extra-dramatic utterances, several of which are in
Ape); the chapter on Ape in Timo Tuisanen, O’Neill’s Scenic
Images; the chapter on Ape in Travis Bogard, Contour in
Time: The Plays of EO; my article, “O’Neill’s Distorted
Dances,” in Modern Drama 19 (1976); Jean Chothia, “Theatre
Language: Word and Image in The Hairy Ape,” in Eugene
O’Neill and the Emergence of American Drama, ed. Marc
Maufort; and the section on Ape in Joel Pfister, Staging Depth:
Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

556 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Djuna Barnes (1892–1982)

Contributing Editor: Catharine R. Stimpson

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Problems with teaching Barnes are also opportunities. They

include: (1) Her life and complicated childhood, for example, a
suffragist grandmother, a lecherous father; (2) her Bohemian
adulthood—she lived and worked in avant-garde circles in
New York and Europe and was also bisexual; (3) her comic
wit and anguished vision; and (4) the range of her writing.
Because she was a professional writer, with no other income
for the most part, she took on a gamut of styles (journalism,
plays, poems, stories, burlesques). She often parodies older
forms, for example, Ryder, the bildungsroman, and picaresque
novel. If students don’t know the original, they miss her great
wit.
Her biography is still emerging, but tell the story of her
life. Let students see her courage, adventurousness, and
harsher characteristics, for example, she traveled in hard-
drinking circles. Critics/readers are rediscovering and
recovering Barnes, seeing afresh how much she did, who she
was, what her circles were, how much it mattered that she was
a woman writer, how destructive that ghastly childhood was.
Make the class part of the process of rediscovering and
recovery, part of the adventure. Show students, too, what she
was parodying, what part of literary history she was utilizing.
Help students with her dualistic vision, her sense of
contradiction and irony. We are born, but born to die. The
womb is a tomb. We are corrupt, but we love and desire. We
descend in order to ascend.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Trace the travails of a young, beautiful, really bright, ironic,

bisexual woman making her way in a tough world. Culturally,
look at what it means to be modern, to be avant-garde, to go
for the new, vital, disorderly, outlawed, carnivalesque. Barnes
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 557
knew almost everyone, so that she is a way into modern
culture, for example, she interviewed James Joyce.
Historically, she is twentieth century. She lived through two
world wars, in a world where God had disappeared, though she
yearned for faith; in which the corrupt and vile seemed to
dominate history.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Barnes mastered several genres. Use her journalism to show

the mass media, especially the mass newspaper. Use her short
stories to show a combination
of flat realism and the grotesque, the weird; use Ladies
Almanack, for one, to show both satire and inside jokes
(Barnes was spoofing women’s circles in Paris in the 1920s).
Use Nightwood to show the modern novel, its suspicion of a
straight, linear narrative; its interest in consciousness and
language and clashing points of view; the darkness of vision,
life as a nightwood; its wild humor; its blurring of sexual
identities; its sense of history as a fall. Like a surrealist, Barnes
explores the unconscious. Like a symbolist, she incarnates the
invisible in a sensible thing.

Original Audience

Barnes was very conscious of writing for specific audiences.

She also cared, despite her bohemianism, for the approval of
male cultural authorities, especially T. S. Eliot, who endorsed
Nightwood. Toward the end of her life, Barnes wrote very
little, but certain people kept her reputation alive because they
loved her, despite her bitter, often destructive, wit, and the
difficulty of her work. After her death, feminist critics have
helped to reevaluate her. Another biographer, Andrew Field
(1983)—who also writes about Vladimir Nabokov— likes
quirky, elusive, brilliant, cosmopolitan figures.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Try teaching her stories with Sherwood Anderson, Winesberg,

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
558 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Ohio (1919), for the meticulous observation of despair; Ladies
Almanack with Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas (1933), for Parisian adventures; Nightwood with
Ulysses for the experimental modern novel; and, for very hard
work, the play Antiphon with T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party
(1950), for the use of older dramatic forms for metaphysical
and psychological exploration.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. I prefer to have students keep journals rather than ask

study questions because the journal picks up students’
immediate reactions, no matter how hostile they are. If
the class is too large, you might ask them to write out
their own study questions. If a study question is a
necessity, try to get at her sense of family, which is
bleak but convinced of the family’s necessity; or her
sense of differences: how different people can be,
perhaps, from “ordinary” life. Though students might
not adore this, ask about futility, and, among the
deluded, about failure.

2. Barnes was also a good artist. A student might write

about her use of pictures, her visual skills, either through
her own illustrations or through her vivid, metaphoric,
visual language.

Bibliography

Phillip Herring, Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes,

New York: Viking Press, 1995, is the most recent biography.
Silence and Power, edited by Mary Lynn Broe,
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991, uses the
lens of feminist criticism.
Douglas Messerli, Djuna Barnes: A Bibliography
(1975), is an excellent survey of criticism up to the mid-1970s.

Elizabeth Madox Roberts (1881–1941)

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 559

Contributing Editor: Sheila Hurst Donnelly

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Discuss point of view with emphasis on the use of a central

consciousness; provide information about the development and
social implications of regionalism; instruct students about the
use of symbolism and other figurative devices; prepare them
for a complicated story structure. Such a general introduction
will help readers appreciate Elizabeth Madox Roberts.
Until recently students have not been exposed to
Roberts’s work. Because her short stories are unavailable, my
students are familiar with her best novels, The Time of Man
and The Great Meadow. Some students find her complex
structure and style of “symbolism working through poetic
realism” difficult. Most enjoy the challenge; the characters
many times face the perennial problems of youth. More
experienced “city kids” have trouble empathizing with the
rural mentality—social reality, sense of community—until the
basics are explored: love, sex, birth, death—the equalizers.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Roberts is concerned with the universal, the “Everyman”

theme, as it grows out of her Pigeon River Community. She is
preoccupied with the intimate connection between the past and
the present. This connection is often reflected in her innovative
stylistic techniques. Oftentimes she bounces between past and
present with little warning. Many of her works develop
initiation themes through penetrating dramatization of
psychological crises.
Roberts’s writing was influential to early modern
American literature because of her introspective and poetic
style, her sense of southern rural community, her concern for
the individual, and her emphasis upon the indomitable human
spirit. Her works are primarily concerned with the way
individuals apprehend reality. Here again innovative technique
comes into play.
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
560 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
In contrast to the novels, her stories are highly
concentrated: limited in time and space and rendered in swift,
artful strokes. But, like her best novels The Time of Man and
The Great Meadow, her stories derive their substance from the
characters. Their points of view convey the stories, which
oftentimes are variations on the initiation theme. Her best
stories in this vein are “On the Mountainside,” “The
Scarecrow,” “The Sacrifice of the Maidens,” “Swing Low
Sweet Chariot,” and “Death at Bearwallow.”

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

A thorough discussion of regionalism is helpful in introducing

Roberts and solidifying her important place and influence in
southern renaissance literature. While a discussion of her
admiration for Berkeleian philosophy may be a point of
interest and investigation for advanced students, it is not
necessary for the enjoyment of her work.

Original Audience

Roberts can be discussed against the backdrop of the Lost

Generation (The Time of Man was published in 1926, the same
year as Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises) as well as the
movement toward an agrarian revival of the 1920s and 1930s
(I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition).
Today, a discussion of her Kentucky women provokes some
high-powered and thoughtful commentary on women then and
now. Many of her works lend themselves well to feminist and
New Historical criticism.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Comparisons can be made to Ellen Glasgow, Willa Cather,

Jesse Stuart, William Faulkner, and Robert Penn Warren, to
name a few. She can also be compared to the many more
modern female writers such as Kate Chopin, Zora Neale
Hurston, Carson McCullers, and Toni Morrison. She can be
contrasted to any of the Lost Generation authors. Bases for
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 561
comparison and contrast lie in personal background, fictional
style, theme, region, and current meaningfulness. Mainly,
fruitful comparison and contrast are gained from her novels, as
her characters are more complex and profoundly developed
than those in her short stories. Her works can be contrasted to
more short-sighted regional stories, in that they represent
“small self-contained centres of life” (Allen Tate), which root
in a specific geographical region, adapt to the land, create a
pattern of life, and then in turn become aesthetic, taking on
universal and archetypical dimensions.
In all her works, Roberts masterfully blends poetry and
realism. She, like William Faulkner, is never far from the
sweat and agony of the human spirit and, like Faulkner too,
she believes that humanity will not only endure, but will
prevail.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. How do events in your past affect moments, decisions,

relationships, etc., in your present, future?
2. What sentiments do you attach to sense stimuli: smells,
places, par-ticular events, garments, etc.—the stuff of
symbolism?
3. I have had special success with two types of papers:
(a) Position papers in which students take issue with the
characters’ responses to particular events. They
engage in hypothetical arguments and bring to bear
their individual beliefs. These papers tend to
generate a more penetrating discussion of all that
shapes a character while encouraging students to
trust their own analytical skills.
(b) Explication of the text using a quote from the author
about her work, which forces students to grapple
with an understanding of the author’s artistic credo
in conjunction with her works. For example, Roberts
would say, “Life is from within, and thus the noise
outside is a wind blowing in a mirror.” This riddling
line can be applied to many of her stories and novels,
including “Death of Bearwallow.”
Comparison/contrast papers with instructor’s
guidance are also a favorite of mine.
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
562 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Bibliography

The Southern Review, Autumn 29, no. 4 (1984) has several

essays as well as personal reminiscences.
Read Campbell and Foster’s study Elizabeth Madox
Roberts: Ameri-can Novelist (1956).

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886–1961)

Contributing Editor: Susan Stanford Friedman

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Like much modernist poetry (e.g., Pound, Eliot), H.D.’s poetry

is “difficult” for students. Mythological and biblical allusions
are common in her poetry. Her imagist poetry is “impersonal”
(like Eliot’s)—that is, its relationship to human emotion is
often deeply encoded. Her epic poetry is vast and complex in
scope; its linguistic, religious, and psychological dimensions
are sophisticated and multilayered. Her perspective as a
woman is quite different from the modernist male poets with
whom she shares a great deal.
I have found students very responsive to H.D. when I
have used the following strategies. Contextualize H.D.’s work
in relationship to (1) modernism (students often expect a male
poet to be “difficult,” but resist having to work hard to read a
woman poet); (2) women’s poetry and feminist theory—
especially feminist concepts of revision of patriarchal myths
and traditions; (3) the mythological allusions (get students to
relax and see that without footnotes, H.D. provides all the
information they need); (4) the musical and syntactic
structures of her poetic language. Her imagist poems can be
read as poems about the (female) self resisting stereotypical
femininity (they are not “nature” poems). I have had great
success in teaching Trilogy as a poem about war from a
pacifist perspective akin to Virginia Woolf ’s in Three
Guineas.
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 563
Students are intrigued by the following: (1) Gender.
They are fascinated by H.D. as a window into the problems
and achievements of women’s creativity. They love, for
example, to read her famous “sea garden” poems (e.g., “Sea
Rose”) as encoded statements of female vulnerability and
rejection of a suffocating femininity. (2) War and peace.
Students are very interested and moved by her response to war.
They are intrigued by the goddesses and matriarchal religions.
(3) Initially, students are afraid of H.D.—real “poetry
anxiety.” They think they won’t be able to understand it
because it has so many allusions. But when they are given a
framework for thinking about poetry, they are very responsive.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

The headnote summarizes the major themes. To summarize, I

think H.D. should be taught with emphasis on the following
themes:

1. her attempt to understand the roots of cataclysmic

violence and propose a revision of renewal and peace
2. the intersection of the historical and the personal in her
stance as a woman
3. her characteristically modernist sense of quest in a
shattered and war-torn world
4. her sense of the sacred, manifested in both female and
male forms
5. her exploration of language—its magic (as logos), its
music, its power as something women can claim to
reconstitute gender and a vision of the cosmos

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

H.D. is best taught as a modernist and a woman writer. The

selections give you the opportunity to show her development
from an imagist poet in the teens to an epic poet of the 1940s
and 1950s. Her imagist poetry— represented here by two
poems from Sea Garden (“Sea Rose” and “The Helmsman”)
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
564 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
and her most frequently anthologized poem “Oread” (often
discussed as the “perfect” imagist poem)—was highly
innovative in its form and a central influence on modern
poetry. Imagism, however, became a craft in the service of
larger visions after 1917. “Helen,” published in the 1920s, is
characteristic of a large number of revisionist myth poems that
she began writing in her postimagist phase and that have had a
strong influence on contemporary women’s poetry. In writing
epics (some critics prefer the term “long poem”), H.D. went
against the engrained masculine conventions of the genre to
forge a woman’s epic form. The selections from The Walls Do
Not Fall and Tribute to the Angels (the first two volumes from
Trilogy) emphasize the poet’s placement in history (literally, in
London, during the nightly bombing raids of World War II)
and the syncretist mythmaking of the modernist poet-prophet.
These sequences can be taught in the context of religious
poetry, but students should be encouraged to compare her
female-centered vision with those traditions that she
transforms. In teaching any of H.D.’s poetry, its strong
musical quality can be emphasized. Within the vers libre
tradition, she nonetheless established complex patterns of
sound based on assonance, dissonance, occasional rhyme
(including internal and off rhymes), rhythmic and syntactic
patterns, and repetition.

Original Audience

H.D.’s work should always be grounded in its historical

period. H.D.’s imagist verse was written in the exhilarating
prewar world of the avant-garde and then during the
devastating Great War. Her epic poetry was written in the
forties and fifties after another great war. Her audience during
these years was in effect primarily the avant-garde that was
“making news” in all the arts. She was not a “popular” poet,
but has often been known as a “poet’s poet.” Since the second
wave of feminism, she has been widely read by women and
men who are interested in women’s writing.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 565
1. Male modernists: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William
Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Robert Hughes, W.
B. Yeats, and D. H. Lawrence. Like these men, she
experimented with poetic language. Like them, she
increasingly wrote quest poetry in which the poet figures
as a central mythmaking figure creating new meanings
in a world whose symbolic systems have been shattered.
2. Female modernist writers: Marianne Moore, Virginia
Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, and Djuna Barnes are
modernist women writers with whom H.D.’s
reconstructions of gender share a great deal—thema-
tically and linguistically.
3. Fruitful comparisons can also be made with William
Blake, Emily Dickinson, Dante, and Homer.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

Explication assignments work well with H.D.’s imagist poems.

But the best papers I have received from undergraduates ask
the students to examine how H.D. engages in a gender-
inflected revisionist mythmaking in her poems. The students
trace the conventional myth H.D. invokes and then examine
thematically and linguistically how she uses and transforms
the tradition.

Bibliography

Collecott, Diana. H.D. and Sapphic Modernism. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1999.

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. H.D.: The Career of That Struggle.

Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986.

Edmonds, Susan. History, Psychoanalysis, and Montage in

H.D.’s Long Poems. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1994.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of

H.D. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981, especially
56–59 and Chapters 7 and 8.
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
566 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
———. Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Introduction
and Chapter 1.

Friedman, Susan Stanford, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, eds.

Signets: Reading H.D. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1990, especially essays by Morris, Pondrom, Gregory,
Laity, Gubar, Gelpi, and Ostriker.

Gregory, Eileen. H.D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Laity, Cassandra. H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siècle:

Gender, Modern-ism, Decadence. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996.

Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-

Vision.” In On Lies, Secrets, and Silences: Prose. New
York: Norton, 1979, 33–49.

A Sheaf of Political Poetry

in the Modern Period
Contributing Editor: Cary Nelson

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Instructors who have followed the efforts to expand the canon

in recent years will have read poems like the ones in this
section before. Many students, however, may not have. My
own experience is that most undergraduates find this poetry
quite exciting and are eager to talk about it. The only
exception may be those English majors who have been
persuaded by other instructors that good poems are never
political. An open debate on these issues is the best way to
handle the problem. Certainly the clichés about political poetry
being rapidly dated and stylistically flat and uninteresting
should not survive reading this section. Among the things that
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 567
students may find surprising are efforts by white poets like
Boyle and Taggard to address the problem of race in America.
A number of these poems will benefit from detailed close
readings; they can also be grouped together in a variety of
ways for more general discussions.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

This section offers both an opportunity to study several poets

(Hughes, Rolfe, and Taggard) in detail and a chance to reflect
on the wide visibility of political poetry in the modern period.
Political poetry was influential not only in the 1930s but also
throughout a thirty-year period beginning about 1915. After
students have read through this section they may want to ask
what justifies the category “political poetry.” What holds this
section together and differentiates it from other twentieth-
century poetry? Are Langston Hughes’s poems here “political”
in a way some of his poems elsewhere in The Heath
Anthology, including “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “The
Weary Blues,” are not? Are Taggard’s poems political in a
way, say, poems like Amy Lowell’s “Venus Transiens” and
“Madonna of the Evening Flowers” are not? Is Edwin Rolfe
political in a way that Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens are
not?
As a descriptive category, political poetry has been
around for some time. Our sense of what poems belong in that
category, however, continues to change. For some readers,
political poetry is either poetry written about major, public
historical conflicts, like wars, or poetry supporting some
political cause, party, or set of beliefs. Of course, those beliefs
have to be set aside culturally and marked as “political” rather
than “natural.” If, on the other hand, we define politics more
broadly as a concern with all of the hierarchical structures that
shape social life, that empower some people and disempower
others, that elevate some values and concerns and trivialize or
demonize others, then clearly “politics” is a much larger
subject than some of us have thought. In that sense, all modern
poems dealing with race, gender, and economic equality are
deeply political. One effect of studying this section and
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
568 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
thinking about that issue may be to begin making connections
with other poems in The Heath Anthology and making politics
in this broader sense central to modern literary history.
Certainly from my perspective the poems in the anthology by
Muriel Rukeyser, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and
Langston Hughes, among others, along with the section of
anonymous poems by early Chinese immigrants, should be
considered honorary members of this section.
As the introduction to the section suggests, one
important issue here is the relevance such purportedly
“topical” poems have to us many years later. As these poems
suggest, the topics many political poems take up—injustice,
prejudice, inequality—unfortunately have a long and
continuing life. Kalar’s abandoned papermill is hardly
unfamiliar in the industrial workplace of the 1990s. The
working environment in Olsen’s “I Want You Women Up
North to Know” can be found replicated throughout
contemporary America. Fearing’s critique of the culture of
consumption, commodification, and greed in “Dirge” is, if
anything, more pertinent now than it was when the poem was
written. Hughes’s attack on religious hypocrisy in “Goodbye
Christ” speaks to problems with institutionalized religion that
are unique neither to that decade nor this century.
Yet just as we need to highlight the continuing relevance
of these poems, we also need to recognize the special historical
conditions to which they speak. Two things instructors may
want to do are to supply additional information about the
poems’ historical contexts and to encourage students to do
further background reading on their own. Some (necessarily
condensed) examples of that kind of information follow.
“Papermill” (Kalar), “Dirge” (Fearing), “In a Coffee
Pot” (Hayes), “Season of Death” (Rolfe), and “Up State—
Depression Summer” (Taggard): These poems all deal with the
experience of the Great Depression. Kalar was a worker-poet
who worked in the timber industry in Minnesota prior to the
widespread unemployment of the 1930s. Rolfe grew up in
New York City and worked in a number of jobs before
becoming a journalist and poet; he was periodically
unemployed in the depression. “Season of Death” and “In a
Coffee Pot” both depict New York settings, but they are also
typical of other depression-era cities. A “coffee pot,” by the
way, is a small coffee shop. A background lecture on the

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 569
economic, social, and political effects of the depression might
be helpful. It is also useful to make students aware that
journals, newspapers, and anthologies publishing poems like
these helped make depression poetry something of a collective
project. Hundreds of poems like these made the protest poetry
of the depression part of a mass movement. For more detailed
information on “Dirge,” see Fearing’s Collected Poems
(1993).
“A Communication to Nancy Cunard” (Boyle) is based,
as the note to the poem points out, on the famous Scottsboro
case of the 1930s. The nine young black men (aged thirteen to
twenty-one) were arrested in March of 1931 and quickly tried
and convicted—without adequate representation and on the
basis of unconvincing evidence. All but one were sentenced to
death. The radical legal-action group International Labor
Defense took up their case and helped publicize it both here
and abroad. Widespread protests combined with the ILD’s
legal actions won a new trial in 1933, just before which Ruby
Bates repudiated her rape charge. Nevertheless, an all-white
jury convicted them again. That trial was then overturned, and
two years later the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that defendants’
rights were violated by the exclusion of blacks from juries. A
1936 trial failed again to get them released. After that, a plea
bargain won freedom for four of the men, while five remained
in prison. The last was released in 1950. Also see Countee
Cullen’s poem “Scottsboro, Too, Is Worth Its Song.”
“Goodbye Christ” (Hughes) and “Stone Face” (Ridge)
were both reprinted in unique broadsides that gave those
poems special meaning and distinctive social uses. Hughes’s
poem was reprinted on hate sheets several times in the early
and late 1940s as part of national right-wing smear campaigns
against Hughes. Ridge’s poem was published as a very large
and quite striking broadside as part of the effort to free
Mooney from prison. (For reproductions of both broadsides
see Nelson, “Modern Poems We Have Wanted to Forget,”
Cultural Studies, 1992.) Mooney was imprisoned from 1916 to
1939. With perjured testimony, he was convicted of murder,
despite the fact that he was nowhere near the scene when the
bomb was planted. A federal commission later found that
Mooney was indicted only because he was an effective labor
organizer whom conservatives wanted to eliminate. The judge
and jury publicly admitted the verdict was an error. Under the

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

570 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
circumstances, President Woodrow Wilson made a plea for
mercy, and Mooney’s death sentence was commuted to life,
but he remained in jail. It may be interesting to compare
“Stone Face” with Boyle’s “A Communication to Nancy
Cunard” and with Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Justice Denied
in Massachusetts,” since all mount left critiques of American
justice.
“First Love” and “Elegia” were both written some years
after Rolfe returned home from service in the Abraham
Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War. The introduction
to Rolfe’s Collected Poems (1993) includes detailed analyses
of both these poems, and the notes to the poems at the back of
that book are considerably expanded from what it was possible
to present here. Instructors may find it interesting to compare
these poems with the earlier poems Rolfe wrote while he was
in Spain from 1937 to 1938. It is important to be aware that
“Elegia” was written in Los Angeles in 1948, after the
Hollywood blacklist was in place and the long postwar purge
of the Left had begun. Its sense of mourning for an antifascist
alliance politics is thus relevant not only to Spain but also to
the United States.
“Proud Day” (Taggard) commemorates a concert that
Marian Anderson presented on the steps of the Lincoln
Memorial in Washington, D.C., after her request to present an
Easter Sunday concert at Constitution Hall, the largest
Washington auditorium, was turned down by the Hall’s
manager and by its owners, the Daughters of the American
Revolution. The D.A.R. maintained a “white artists only”
policy for Constitution Hall, and Marian Anderson was black;
thus neither that date nor any other was acceptable to them. In
protest against the D.A.R.’s action, Eleanor Roosevelt, then
First Lady, resigned from the organization and helped arrange
the alternative concert at the memorial. It should be noted that
Washington was a rigidly segregated city during the 1930s.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Among the most important things to note about this group of

poems is its rhetorical, formal, and stylistic diversity. A
number of the poems employ experimental modernist devices
for social commentary and political advocacy, offering
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 571
convincing evidence against the uninformed but common
claim that political poets rejected modernism. On the other
hand, there are many opportunities here to compare and
contrast different styles—lyrical, reportorial, satiric, elegiac,
hortatory, reflective. There are long and short poems,
traditional and mixed forms. Opportunities for comparison and
contrast with more canonical modern poets abound. One may
also question what it was possible to accomplish in different
genres by comparing these poems with some of the socially
conscious prose in The Heath Anthology.

Original Audience

This is at once a very difficult question and an important one.

Our interest, first of all, should not only be in the original
audience for a poem but in all the significant audiences that are
part of its reception and use. Several of these poems have
immensely complex and interesting histories of dissemination
in different contexts. Their “original” audience may in fact be
partly accidental, an historical effect not part of the poet’s
intentions. But the whole history of reception and
interpretation by different audiences often helps explain a
poem’s present status. Again, I cannot present that history for
all eighteen poems, but I can give a few instructive examples.
Olsen’s poem was first published in Partisan in 1934.
Partisan was the magazine of the John Reed Club in
Hollywood, California. It featured the work of young
revolutionary writers who regularly met together to comment
on one another’s work. There were John Reed Clubs in a
number of U.S. cities in the early 1930s. Olsen’s first
immediate audience was thus the growing constituency of
radicalized writers and those who followed their work. It
would be another matter entirely for her poem actually to
reach the bourgeois “women up north” whom the poem
addresses. Getting that message across would thus be a task for
the readers of Partisan.
Langston Hughes’s “Goodbye Christ” was written in the
Soviet Union and first published in The Negro Worker,
probably without Hughes’s permission, in 1932. That
appearance was, however, a good deal less important than its
subsequent redistribution in a prolonged racist and
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
572 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
anticommunist campaign against Hughes, which included its
republication in the Saturday Evening Post in 1940, its
quotation in a J. Edgar Hoover speech in 1947 (read by one of
Hoover’s deputies), and its being read into the U.S. Senate
Record in 1948. See Rampersad’s The Life of Langston
Hughes (1986, 1988) for further details.
Edwin Rolfe’s “Elegia,” written in 1948, was rejected
for publication by the journal Masses and Mainstream, in part
because the editors objected to the religious references. It was
translated into Spanish by the scholar and Spanish exile José
Rubia Barcia. Barcia sent the Spanish version to the filmmaker
Luis Buñuel in Mexico, who in turn gave it to the poet and
Spanish exile Manual Altolaguirre. Altolaguirre printed it as a
pamphlet in Mexico City in 1949, and the poem was
subsequently read aloud in groups of Spanish exiles
throughout Latin America. The original English-language
version was not published until 1951.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

With sixteen poems by nine different poets, the number of

questions one might ask about this sheaf of poems is
considerable. Let me offer a few examples:

1. Taggard’s “Up State—Depression Summer” and

Fearing’s “Dirge” deal respectively with rural and urban
settings and are written in very different styles. Do they
share any explicit or implicit values?
2. One might argue that Kalar’s “Papermill,” Hayes’s “In a
Coffee Pot,” Hughes’s “Air Raid Over Harlem,” and
Rolfe’s “Season of Death” all deal with devastated
human landscapes. How do they compare with Eliot’s
The Waste Land, a poem written a decade earlier and
with a different political understanding of what may be
related social realities?
3. What kind of impact does Olsen’s “I Want You Women
Up North to Know” have on the audience addressed in
the title?
4. What is the relationship between the more lyrical and
more polemical language in Rolfe’s “Elegia”? What role
does romantic love play in his “First Love”? How does
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 573
he transform the ballad stanza in “Asbestos”?
5. What role does wit play in Hughes’s “Goodbye Christ”
and Fearing’s “Dirge”?
6. How does Ridge complicate our sense of the public use
of individual suffering in “Stone Face”?
7. What different and similar kinds of cultural work might
these poems do in their own time and ours?

Questions like these can serve either for class

discussions or for paper topics. For term papers, however, I
like to encourage students to read further in a poet’s work. One
interesting question not answerable without further reading is
what happened to these poets after the 1940s. Some did not
survive the decade; others stopped writing poetry. But Boyle,
Hughes, and Rolfe continued to write powerful political poems
after World War II and into the 1950s. Students could write
about that later work or make it the subject of in-class reports.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

574 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Bibliography

Students interested in reading widely in depression-era

political poetry face some difficulty, since much of the work is
out of print. The work of several of these poets, however, is
readily available. Collected Poems were published for both
Fearing and Rolfe in 1993, and both books have critical
introductions and detailed textual notes explaining historical
references that may now be obscure. Boyle’s Collected Poems
(1991) remains in print. Students should be warned that
Langston Hughes’s most widely distributed book, his Selected
Poems (1959), excludes his more aggressively political poems;
for that work students should consult the second edition of
Good Morning Revolution (1993) and The Panther and the
Lash (1967). Although Taggard’s books are all out of print,
they will be available in most research libraries. The two
volumes that include most of her political poems are Calling
Western Union (1936) and Long View (1942). In addition to
the general critical books listed in the introduction to this sheaf
of poems, students or faculty interested in some of the specific
historical issues addressed might consult the following: Dan
Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (1984);
Richard Frost, The Mooney Case (1968); Robert McElvaine,
The Great Depression (1984); Robert Rosenstone, Crusade of
the Left (on the Americans in Spain, 1969); Hugh Thomas, The
Spanish Civil War (1977).

e. e. cummings (1894–1962)
Contributing Editor: Richard S. Kennedy

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Sometimes students are not aware that the visual presentation

of a poem is part of its overall statement. In addition, they are
sometimes puzzled by cummings’s unusual linguistic usage:
the use of nouns as verbs, other locutions of nouns, etc. (e.g.,
the world is made of “roses & hello,” “of so longs and ashes”).
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 575
When I call students’ attention to ways that words or
presentations on the page actually function, this most often
brings home an effect that may have been missed (e.g., in the
poem “l(a” to point out the way the letter “L” and the word
“one” are introduced, as the word “loneliness” and “a leaf
falls” are intertwined). Sometimes I simply ask students for
their individual responses and find that they really can feel the
significance of an unusual expression.
An extreme example of cummings’s play with language
is his poem in pseudosonnet form “brIght.” Note some of the
patterns in evidence here: The three-letter words “big,” “yes,”
and “who” are used three times; the four-letter words “soft,”
“near,” “calm,” “holy,” “deep,” and “star,” four times; the
five-letter word “bright,” six times. The lines are arranged in a
numerical progression from the first line standing alone to a
final five-line group. Another progression moves from “s???”
to the full spelling of “star,” as if a star gradually comes into
being. “brIght” orthographically disappears into “?????T.” as
if dawn comes, isolating the morning star, and then causes it to
fade. The pattern of capital letters at length spells out
BRIGHT, YES, and WHO. Suggestion builds that the poem
has reference to the star of Bethlehem because of the allusions
to the Christmas hymn “Silent night, holy night/All is calm, all
is bright.”
I have sometimes begun class by asking, “How does
cummings indicate in his poems that he is a painter as well as a
poet?” Another simple approach is to ask, “How does
cummings seem different from any other poet whose work you
have read?” I have also asked students at some point in a
discussion, “Why are these linguistic presentations that
cummings makes classified as poems?” (This last, of course, is
not asked about his sonnets or rhymed stanzaic verses.)
Students vary in their responses, but most of them react
deeply to his outlook on life—his valuing of love, nature,
human uniqueness. Fewer students appreciate his play with
form. Almost all enjoy his humor and satire. Nearly every
student joins him in his antiwar stance.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

576 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
cummings is, in his general outlook on life, an unabashed
romantic. He affirms life wholeheartedly in all its multiplicity,
but especially in whatever is simple, natural, loving,
individual, unique. Above all, he emphasizes feeling and
emotion rather than thought or analysis. He rejects those social
forces in life that hinder the unique and individual expression
of each person’s essential being. He is particularly hostile to
forces that promote conformity, group behavior, imitation,
artificiality. He regards technology and the complexities of
civilization as dehumanizing. Above all, he abominates war,
which he looks upon as the ultimate negation of human values.
Although cummings maintains the same general views
throughout his life, he is more affirmatively exuberant in his
early career and more lightheartedly iconoclastic. In his later
career, he is more serene in his response to the basic good
things of life and to the beauties of the natural world, but more
harshly satiric in his denunciation of what he opposes.
cummings’s play with language, punctuation,
capitalization, and his visually directive placement of words on
the page are congruent with the new movement in the arts that
began in the 1900s in European painting—the movement
toward “break up and restructuring” that was part of the revolt
against realism in modern art.

Original Audience

cummings does not address a particular audience, although he

assumes that his readers are generally educated in literature
and the arts.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

cummings’s work may be associated with the experiments in

language and form that are found in the writings of T. S. Eliot,
Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and John Dos Passos. He may be
contrasted with writers in the realistic or naturalistic vein, such
as Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Edward Arlington
Robinson, Robert Frost, and Ernest Hemingway.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 577
Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. I have sometimes lectured on his characteristic ideas and

attitudes and then asked students to point out which
poems illustrate these best. Or I have lectured on his
special techniques and expressive devices in order to
alert the students to ways of reading and understanding
his work.
2. I have sometimes asked students to compare a
cummings sonnet with a conventional one, or to
compare a cummings lyric with one by Frost.
I have also asked students to point out the likenesses
and differences between a specific cummings work and
one by Eliot or Pound.

Bibliography

Richard S. Kennedy’s introduction to the typescript edition of

Tulips & Chimneys by cummings (Liveright, 1976)
summarizes his view of life and his poetic techniques.
Norman Friedman’s e. e. cummings: The Art of His
Poetry (Johns Hopkins, 1960), Chapters 3 and 4, deal clearly
with his attitudes and his poetic devices.
Richard S. Kennedy, Dreams in the Mirror: A
Biography of e. e. cummings (Liveright, 1980) is the definitive
biography.
Richard Kostelanetz, Another e. e. cummings (Liveright,
1998), emphasizes the more experimental work of cummings.

T. S. Eliot (1888–1965)
Contributing Editor: Sam S. Baskett

Classroom Issues and Strategies

For the uninitiated reader, Eliot’s poems present a number of

difficulties: erudite allusions, lines in a number of foreign
languages, lack of narrative structure compounded by startling
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
578 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
juxtapositions, a sense of aloofness from the ordinary sensory
universe of day-to-day living. For the more sophisticated,
Eliot’s “modernism,” his quest for “reality,” may seem dated,
even “romantic”; the vision of the waste land, stultifying and
bleak; the orthodoxy of “The Dry Salvages” a retreat from the
cutting edge of late twentieth-century thought and poetic
expression.
To address these problems, explain the most difficult
and essential passages, providing some framework and
background, without attempting a line-by-line gloss of all the
references and their ramifications. The poems, especially The
Waste Land, should not be treated as puzzles to be solved, but
rather, the early poems at least, as typical “modernism” which
Eliot “invented” in The Waste Land and “Prufrock,” a product
of symbolism, images, and aggregation. Emphasize that this is
all the expression of a personal, intense, even romantic effort
by Eliot to get things “right” for himself in his search for order
in his life, a validation of his existence, in a word, for
“salvation.” Emphasize continuing themes, continuing and
changing techniques as Eliot attempts to translate, as he said of
Shakespeare, his own private agony into something rich,
strange, and impersonal.
Students often ask why Eliot is so intentionally, even
perversely, difficult. Why the erudite allusions, the foreign
languages, the indirectness? What is his attitude toward
women? What of the evidence of racial prejudice? What of his
aloofness from and condescension to the concerns of ordinary
human existence?

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

The symbolism of the waste land, garden, water, city, stairs,

etc., as Eliot expresses the themes of time, death-rebirth, levels
of love (and attitude toward women), the quest motif on
psychological, metaphysical, and aesthetic levels. Dante’s four
levels—the literal (Eliot’s use of geographic place is more
basic than has been given sufficient attention), allegorical,
moral, and anagogic—are interesting to trace throughout
Eliot’s developing canon. The relations between geographic
place and vision, between the personal, individual talent and
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 579
the strong sense of tradition, are also significant.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Eliot’s relation to romanticism, his significance in the

development (with Ezra Pound) of modernism, his role as an
expatriate effecting a “reconciliation with America” in “The
Dry Salvages” are all important considerations. His techniques
of juxtaposition, aggregation of images, symbolism, the use of
multiple literary allusions, the influence of Dante are all worth
attention, as is his use of “free verse” and many various poetic
forms. Note also the musicality of his verse, his use of verbal
repetition as well as clusters of images and symbols.

Original Audience

When Eliot’s works first appeared, they seemed outrageously

impenetrable to many, although he quickly became recognized
as the “Pope of Russell Square.” This recognition was partly
through Pound’s efforts, as well as Eliot’s magisterial
pronouncements in his criticism. Even as he challenged the
literary establishment, he was in effect a literary “dictator”
during much of his life, despite the shock felt by his followers
when he announced in 1927 that he was “catholic, royalist and
a classicist.” With the religious emphasis of Ash Wednesday
(1930) and Four Quartets (1943), as well as in his plays of the
’30s and ’40s, it seemed to many that he had become a
different writer. A quarter of a century after his death, it is
possible to see the continuing figure in the carpet, Eliot as a
major figure in modernism, a movement superseded by
subsequent developments. His eventual importance has been
severely questioned by some critics (e.g., Harold Bloom).

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Compare Eliot with Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, William Carlos

Williams, Wallace Stevens. Pound for his influence as “the
better craftsman” and for his early recognition of and
plumping for Eliot; all of these poets for their combined (but
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
580 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
differing) contribution to modernism and the search for reality
as a way out of “the heart of darkness.” Williams and Stevens
(Adamic poets) make interesting contrasts with their different
goals and techniques: Williams criticizing Eliot’s lack of
immediacy, Stevens commenting that Eliot did not make the
“visible a little difficult to see.”

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. What are the similarities and differences in Eliot’s

protagonists?
What is the continuing fundamental theme in his
work?
Is “The Dry Salvages” essentially different from his
early poems? How so? Are there any continuities?
Consider the thrust of a particular poem on literal,
allegorical, moral, and anagogic levels.
What is Eliot’s attitude toward women?
What are the techniques by which Eliot’s poems
achieve intensity?
2. Compare and contrast the protagonists of two poems.
Trace the quest motif through Eliot’s poems.
How do the late poems (“DS”) differ from
“Prufrock”? The Waste Land?
Discuss Eliot’s attitude toward death as expressed in
the poems.
Discuss Eliot’s symbolism, the use of water as a
symbol.

Bibliography

Baskett, Sam S. “Eliot’s London.” In Critical Essays on The

Waste Land. London: Longman Literature Guides, 1988, 73–
89.

———. “Fronting the Atlantic: Cape Cod and ‘The Dry

Salvages.’ ” The New England Quarterly LVI, no. 2 (June
1983): 200–19.

Drew, Elizabeth. T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry. New

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 581
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949, especially pp. 1–30.

Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot’s Early Years. Athens: Ohio University

Press, 1977.

———. Eliot’s New Life. Athens: Ohio University Press,

1988.

Julius, Anthony. T. S. Eliot: Anti-Semitism and Literary Form.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Kermode, Frank. “A Babylonish Dialect.” In T. S. Eliot, edited

by Allen Tate, 231–43. New York: Delacorte Press, 1966.

Litz, A. Walton, ed. Eliot in His Time. London, 1973. Several

useful, illumi- nating essays.
Martin, Jay, ed. A Collection of Critical Essays on The Waste
Land. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, Twentieth
Century Interpreta- tions, 1968. Several useful,
illuminating essays.

Miller, J. Hillis. Poets of Reality. Cambridge: Belknap Press of

Harvard University, 1965, 1–12.

Moody, A. D. T. S. Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1979.

Ricks, Christopher. T. S. Eliot and Prejudice. London: Faber,

1994.

Williamson, George. A Reader’s Guide to T. S. Eliot. New

York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)

Contributing Editors: John F. Callahan and John Alberti

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

582 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Students often tend to view Fitzgerald as a participant in the
excesses of the Jazz Age rather than as a writer who cast a
critical eye on his generation’s experience.
Fitzgerald’s essays serve as important companions to his
fiction. I fall back on the trick of photocopying one or more of
the following essays: “Echoes of the Jazz Age”; “My Lost
City”; “The Crack Up”; “Sleeping and Waking”; or “Pasting It
Together.”
Students are very interested in the relationship between
Fitzgerald’s life and his work and in his sense that the best
possibilities of American history are in the past. Their
questions include why relationships between men and women
seem often bound up with money and social status, and
whether or not Fitzgerald maintains a critical detachment from
his characters’ views of reality.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

In “May Day,” note how the story contrasts the smug

complacency of Philip Dean with the disintegrating
circumstances of his classmate, Gordon Sterret. Look for
similar contrasts in the story, such as the juxtapositions of
celebration and suicide, frivolity and despair, hope and
bitterness. How do these conflicting attitudes darken the sense
of postwar jubilation the narrator ironically refers to at the
beginning of the story?

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

In “May Day,” how does the episodic structure of the story

reinforce feelings of alienation and impending disaster both
among the characters and in the readers? How does the ironic,
almost sarcastic tone of the narrator color our view of events in
the story in particular and post–World War I America in
general?

Original Audience

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 583
We call attention to Fitzgerald’s self-conscious awareness of a
double identity as a popular writer of stories for the Saturday
Evening Post and a serious novelist aspiring to the company of
Conrad, Joyce, and James. We consider the relationship, the
compatibility between popular and serious fiction in a
democratic and vernacular culture.
The issues of freedom and responsibility, the cost of
self-indulgent personal behavior seem particularly appropriate
to our time.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

The following stories in Volume 2 of The Heath Anthology

might provide a useful frame of reference: Hemingway’s
“Hills Like White Elephants”; Porter’s “Flowering Judas”;
Toomer’s “Blood-Burning Moon,” “Seventh Street,” and “Box
Seat.” All involve landscape, social milieu, memory, and
transitional moments of experience.

Bibliography

The best sources are Fitzgerald’s essays listed above, a piece

called “Ring,” written after the death of Ring Lardner, and also
Fitzgerald’s letters.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

584 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)

Contributing Editor: Darlene Harbour Unrue

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Old Mortality is one of three short novels in the Miranda

cycle, and while it stands alone, its meaning will be more
sharply apparent when it is examined in the context of its
companion works, The Old Order and Pale Horse, Pale Rider.
Explaining the way Old Mortality interlocks with the other
two short novels provides students with a useful chronological
perspective. For example, the seven short stories that make up
The Old Order span a period of time from 1827 to about 1920.
Pale Horse, Pale Rider is set specifically in 1918, and Old
Mortality covers a period from 1885 to 1912. The instructor’s
succinct summaries of the plots and brief descriptions of the
structures of the other two works can help students understand
events in Old Mortality in the larger context. An excellent film
is available to back up the discussion. Katherine Anne Porter:
The Eye of Memory contains dramatized scenes from stories in
The Old Order and general observations about Porter’s themes
and techniques (Lumiere Productions, 1986; shown on PBS).
Old Mortality presents a good opportunity to discuss the
transformation of autobiographical materials into fiction.
Contrasting the facts of Porter’s life with her artistic rendering
of them can be useful. Although the most important facts
behind Old Mortality are available and documented in the
standard biographical studies, students should be warned that
most biographical accounts of Porter through 2000 contain
errors, some of which she supplied and some of which were
created by reporters and scholars who reached too hasty
conclusions about missing details of her life or assumed that
all the details in the fiction were “true.” Discussing her artistic
reasons for altering and shaping the materials of her life can
help students better grasp Porter’s process of composition and
her themes. For example, she had two sisters, one older and
one younger than she, but the younger sister is not represented
in the Miranda novels at all. Understanding why Porter made
such a choice is a step toward understanding her craft.
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 585
Before reading Old Mortality and discussing it, students
would benefit by reading Porter’s autobiographical essays
“Portrait: Old South” and “ ‘Noon Wine’: The Sources,” both
of which are included in The Collected Essays and Occasional
Writings of Katherine Anne Porter.
Providing students with definitions of certain critical
terms—classic, irony, legend, lyric, modernism, myth, point of
view, romance, romanticism, etc.—will prepare them for more
sophisticated discussions of the work.
Perhaps most important of all is for students to
understand the necessity of closely reading Porter’s fiction.
She was a careful, conscious crafter of fiction, and every word
is chosen purposely, just as each sentence is structured for
effective intent. Selecting a sentence for analysis early in the
discussion can be particularly useful and will prepare students
for a proper approach to the whole story. M. M. Liberman’s
anatomy of a sentence from Old Mortality should be helpful
(see Bibliography).

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Although some of Porter’s stories written in the 1920s contain

subordinate themes that are political and topical, she was
almost always reaching for universality. Throughout her canon
we can identify feminist, Marxist, socialist, and anti-Nazi
themes in the stories and novels, but they should be examined
as part of the truthful settings of the stories and novels (what
she called “historical accuracy”) and in the context of the
larger human condition she insisted was her focus. Because of
her apolitical stance in her fiction (her nonfiction was another
matter), she was thus out of step with some of her
contemporaries and friends, both writers and critics, who
regarded art as a necessary tool in the politics of social protest
or at least social comment. It is important to understand,
however, that attitudes toward women in the 1885–1912 span
of Old Mortality were patriarchal. Women did not have the
vote or economic independence; marriage and motherhood
were idealized as the proper roles for women; and, according
to Porter, female “artists” were considered “freaks.” These
were issues that Porter personally confronted and they hover in
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
586 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
the background of Miranda’s journey to near-awareness. They
also, of course, have relevance to the present time.
The “New Woman,” who resisted patriarchal authority,
refused to accept traditional roles of the dutiful daughter and
subservient wife, and sought education, either in colleges and
universities or, like Porter, through expansive reading, was
visible in American society in the period of Old Mortality.
Porter admired “new women” and wanted badly to be one,
especially when she bolted from her abusive first husband and
tried to survive on her own. But she also yearned to be
idolized, praised, and protected by a man. It was a conflict she
experienced all her life, and the issue she gives to Miranda in
an abstract form in Old Mortality (where the quarrel is
between a “romantic”—and largely untrue—view of women
and the past and the “modern” view of women and that same
past) is reduced to scientific objectivity. If the legend of Aunt
Amy represents the myth of the romantic past, Cousin Eva
represents the modern demolisher of the legend. Miranda, like
Porter, feels caught between them.
Just as there was dialogue and reassessment of the
meaning and purpose of art in the emergent Modern Age, in
Old Mortality Miranda is asking the same questions. In Part II
Miranda and Maria struggle to reconcile the stories about their
Aunt Amy with life as they know it. “They had long since
learned to draw the lines between life, which was real and
earnest, and the grave was not its goal; poetry, which was true
but not real; and stories, or forbidden reading matter, in which
things happened as nowhere else, with the most sublime
irrelevance and unlikelihood, and one need not turn a hair,
because there was not a word of truth in them.” In the process
of defining the past, Miranda also defines art and learns to
distinguish between the “true” and the “false.”

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Porter mastered a pure, classical style and simple language

that, like Hemingway’s style, created a deceptively simple
surface that disguises complex characters and deep meanings.
Her style, characters, and themes were influenced by her early
reading of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Swift, Emily Brontë,
and Henry James and affirmed by other modernists like herself
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 587
(such as T.S. Eliot and Joyce) who bent the older style and
forms to new purposes. She borrowed from Dante,
Shakespeare, and Petrarch a three-part structure, apparent on a
grand scale in the Divine Comedy and reflected in the forms of
both the English and Italian sonnet.
It is in Porter’s point-of-view techniques that her
entrenchment in modern aesthetics is most obvious. In Old
Mortality she uses a structured, indirect stream-of-
consciousness method that contracts from the dual perspective
of the two little girls in Parts I and II to the single awareness of
Miranda in Part III. If her introduction to such a technique was
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, by the time she began drafting Old
Mortality she had honed her own method alongside her
appreciation of the works of James, Woolf, and Joyce. She
later would say she “went to school to them.”
Because of its point-of-view and its genesis in
autobiographical material, Old Mortality contains a lyricism,
which was further inspired by her favorite poet, William
Butler Yeats.

Original Audience

Old Mortality was published in the Southern Review in 1937.

The two-year-old quarterly had a small readership primarily
made up of sophisticated writers and academics. Although the
journal reflected the interests of New Criticism and
Agrarianism (a nostalgic preference for rural values over
twentieth-century industrialism), editors Robert Penn Warren
and Cleanth Brooks, unlike some other New Critics, stressed
the literary quality of the pieces they selected rather than a
particular philosophical, aesthetic, or political position.
Although Porter did not write Old Mortality with the Southern
Review in mind, she already had published “The Circus” and
“The Old Order,” two segments of The Old Order, in earlier
issues, and she was comfortable with both the general content
of the journal and its editorial thrust. Pale Horse, Pale
Rider also would be published there in 1938.
When Old Mortality and Pale Horse, Pale Rider
appeared in the collection Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short
Novels (the third was Noon Wine) in 1939, critical reception
was enthusiastic, and her readership widened considerably.
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
588 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Old Mortality compares well with stories and other novels

(both short and long) tracing the journey to awareness of
young protagonists. Clemens’s Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn, James’s The Pupil and What Maisie Knew,
Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, McCullers’s The Member
of the Wedding, Faulkner’s “Barn Burning,” and Joyce’s
“Araby” provide good opportunities for comparison and
contrast. Other possibilities include Cather’s My Ántonia,
Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and Wolfe’s Look Homeward,
Angel.
Reading and discussing James’s story “The Real Thing”
and his essay “The Art of Fiction” and T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition
and the Individual Talent” may help students see Porter’s aims
and aesthetic in Old Mortality.

Questions for Reading Discussion, and Writing

1. What is significant about the opening scene, in which

Miranda and Maria study the photograph of their dead
Aunt Amy? How does the photograph (or photography
in general) tie into the themes of the novel, including the
definition of art?
2. How does Porter prepare the reader for Cousin Eva’s
crucial role in Part III?
3. One of the difficulties the stream-of-consciousness
writer confronts is how to convey information necessary
to the plot of the story without violating point of view.
How does Porter master this problem?
4. The little girls have been brought up on specific kinds of
literature and exposed to certain other arts. What is the
importance of the particular examples Miranda and
Maria mention?
5. What kind of literature is the “forbidden reading
matter”? Why is it forbidden? What is the significance
of its probably being left by a “Protestant cousin” with
“missionary intent”? How does this contribute to the
discussion about art?
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 589
6. How do the costumes worn at the ball address the theme
of the past versus the present? How do Amy’s costume
and the inspiration for it (the porcelain figurine)
comment on art?
7. How does Amy die? What are the possibilities? What is
the advantage of Porter’s ambiguity?
8. The names of most characters in Old Mortality are
fictional. Is there any implication (in the form of
allusion) to any of Porter’s selections?
9. The title Old Mortality is taken from Gabriel’s
tombstone poem. How does that poem encapsulate the
major themes of the work?
10. What is the significance of the very last word in the
novel?

Bibliography

The book-length critical studies of Porter’s fiction contain

sections on Old Mortality, as do the biographical studies. Note
the following:

M. M. Liberman, Katherine Anne Porter’s Fiction (1971);

John Edward Hardy, Katherine Anne Porter (1973); Enrique
Hank Lopez, Conversations with Katherine Anne Porter:
Refugee from Indian Creek (1981);1 Joan Givner, Katherine
Anne Porter: A Life (1982; rev. 1991); Jane Krouse DeMouy,
Katherine Anne Porter’s Women: The Eye of Her Fiction
(1983); Darlene Harbour Unrue, Truth and Vision in Katherine
Anne Porter’s Fiction (1985); Willene Hendrick and George
Hendrick, Katherine Anne Porter (rev., 1988); Darlene
Harbour Unrue, Understanding Katherine Anne Porter (1988);
Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., Katherine Anne Porter’s Artistic
Development (1993); and Janis P. Stout, Katherine Anne
Porter: A Sense of the Times (1995). Porter’s Letters (ed.
Bayley, 1990) and Katherine Anne Porter: Conversations, a
collection of interviews (ed. Givner, 1887) also contain
comments by Porter pertinent to Old Mortality.

1
* Caution should be exercised with Lopez’s study, as it contains numerous
errors, especially in relation to Old Mortality and the autobiographical
elements in it.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

590 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Articles that are especially enlightening or challenging

include the following:

Cheatham, George. “Death and Repetition in Porter’s Miranda

Stories.” American Literature 61.4 (December 1989): 610–24.
Reprinted in Critical Essays on Katherine Anne Porter
(1997).

Gibbons, Kaye. “Planes of Language and Time: The Surfaces

of the Miranda Stories.” Kenyon Review 10 (Winter 1988):
74–79.
Grider, Sylvia. “A Folklorist Looks at Katherine Anne Porter.”
In Katherine Anne Porter and Texas: An Uneasy Relationship.
College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1990.

Jones, Suzanne. “Reading the Endings in Katherine Anne

Porter’s ‘Old Mortality.’ ” Southern Quarterly 31.3 (Spring
1993): 29–44. Reprinted in Critical Essays on Katherine
Anne Porter (1997).

Schwartz, Edward. “The Fictions of Memory.” Southwest

Review 45 (Summer 1960): 204–15.

Sullivan, Walter. “The Decline of Myth in Southern Fiction.”

Southern Review 12 (January 1976): 16–31.

Walsh, Thomas. “Miranda’s Ghost in ‘Old Mortality.’ ”

College Literature 6 (Winter 1979): 57–63.

Warren, Robert Penn. “Katherine Anne Porter (Irony with a

Center).” Kenyon Review 4 (Winter 1942): 29–42. Reprinted
in Critical Essays on Katherine Anne Porter (1997).

Welty, Eudora. “The Eye of the Story.” Yale Review 55

(Winter 1966): 265–74.

Marianne Moore (1887–1972)

Contributing Editor: Bernard F. Engel
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 591

Classroom Issues and Strategies

The general student block against poetry often causes

difficulties. With Moore, it is useful to observe that she seeks
accuracy of statement, that the alleged difficulty of her work
does not arise from abstruse symbolism or reference to obscure
autobiographical matters, but from precision: seeking exact
presentation, she does not fall back on expected phrasings. The
attentive who will slow down and read thoughtfully can
understand and enjoy.
Advise students to read through once quickly to get
perspective. Then they should read slowly, and aloud. I also
advise them that after this first reading they should let the
poem sit two or three days, then repeat the process. In class, I
read through short poems a few lines at a time, pausing to ask
questions; I also ask students to read passages aloud. With
undergraduates, I prefer not to spend hours on any one poem.
It is better that they read carefully, but without the extended
analysis that is appropriate in some graduate classes.
Students need help with the rhetoric and syntax; they
need to be shown how to read with care. They rarely raise the
abstruse questions of aesthetics or moral philosophy that
fascinate the literary critic. Advanced students, however, may
be asked to compare Moore’s effort to achieve precision with
the argument of some deconstructionists and postmodernists
that it is not possible for verbal art to reach that goal.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Point out:

1. The fact that though there is usually a “moral” point in a

Moore poem, the overall aim is aesthetic: The moral is
to contribute to the delight, not to dominate it.
2. The way the poems relate to the modernism of Wallace
Stevens and others.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

592 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

In a freshman class, I focus on the poem itself; with juniors

and seniors, I bring out relationships to modernism. The
rhetorical form of a poem is usually worth pointing out;
metrics should be mentioned, but only in passing.

Original Audience

I mention the fact that until the 1960s Moore’s work was
considered too difficult for any but the most elevated critics. I
also point out that her early admirers were generally male, that
only in the last few years have women come to appreciate her.
She does not fit the stereotype of woman as emotional (in
contrast to supposedly rational man). Moore, indeed, once
remarked that only two or three American women have “even
tried” to write poetry—meaning, one may be sure, Emily
Dickinson and herself. (In her last years, she might have added
Elizabeth Bishop to her list.)
Early strong objections to her work came from Margaret
Anderson of the Little Review, who in 1918 asserted that she
wrote too intellectually; Anderson reprinted her remarks in
1953. Babette Deutsch in 1935, and again in 1952, voiced
similar objections. Some recent feminist critics have also had
doubts. Emily Stipes Watts in The Poetry of American Women
from 1632 to 1945 (1977) found Moore practicing a “feminine
realism” that “will ultimately be unacceptable”; Watts saw
male appreciation of Moore’s poetry as condescension. Today,
however, old stereotypes about male and female roles have
broken down. Most women critics now praise Moore, and they
are often the best interpreters of her work.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Moore knew and corresponded with William Carlos Williams,

Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens. All of them
published comments on her, and she in turn wrote of them.
There are obvious comparisons and contrasts in the work of
these, the chief American modernists.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 593

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. I sometimes use study questions. They usually focus on

the “mere rhetoric”—what the poem “says”: its
argument or moral, the way it expresses feeling (with
Moore, often the feeling of delight).
2. “Poetry”: In both versions of the poem, Moore’s speaker
says, “I, too, dislike it.” Why would a lifelong poet say
this? What does the speaker like?
“The Pangolin”: The poem starts in a seemingly
casual manner— “Another armored animal”—but
moves quickly into exact, patient observation of the
animal’s structure and behavior. Is the speaker coolly
rational? Delighted? Or . . . ? What kind of grace is the
ultimate subject of this poem?
“England”: The poem is about America (an example
of Moore’s waggish wit). Compare it to the essay by
Randolph Bourne, “Trans-national America.”
“Nevertheless”: How can a strawberry resemble “a
hedgehog or a star-/fish”? How do apple seeds, the
rubber plant, and the prickly, pear illustrate the point
that “Victory won’t come/to me unless I go/to it”?
“The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing”: What is the
difference between “enchanted” and “enchanting”?
Explain the paradox in “con-scientious inconsistency”
(stanza 4).

Bibliography

For students and the hurried instructor, the most convenient

assistance may be found by looking up the pages on individual
poems in the indexes to the books by Engel (revised edition),
Nitchie, and Hall. These books deal with all or most of
Moore’s poetry.
Excellent critical studies by Costello and others give an
overall perspective but usually deal with fewer individual
poems. There is a full-length biography by Charles
Molesworth: Marianne Moore: A Literary Life (1990).

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

594 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Louise Bogan (1897–1970)

Contributing Editor: Theodora R. Graham

Classroom Issues and Strategies

The instructor needs to explain Bogan’s often distancing

herself from the poem’s ideas, creating what Adrienne Rich
has called a “mask” or “code.” Her use of the more traditional
lyric form (though not in most of the poems selected for the
anthology) raises questions about her relationship to the
experimental verse that poets of the prior generation and those
of her own were writing. Bogan seems quite accessible—
except in poems like “The Sleeping Fury” and “After the
Persian,” which require calling students’ attention to language,
imagery, contrasts.
Introducing Bogan’s more general literary career—and
perhaps ideas from her essays, reviews, and Ruth Limmer’s
edited autobiography—will enrich students’ understanding of
the difficulties women faced as writers and the extraordinary
success some achieved as editors (cf. Harriet Monroe,
Marianne Moore) and reviewers.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

A number of Bogan’s poems concern love and the woman’s

need to maintain her identity. She also writes, indirectly, of the
poet’s demons, the “sleeping fury” that must be addressed in
its violence and appeased. Bogan also turns her attention to
skillful observation, both of crafted objects (and indirectly to
the crafted poem) and of natural things (such as the dragonfly).
In “Women” she offers a critique of some women’s choice of a
restricted, passionless, and dull existence.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 595

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

A poem entitled “Rhyme” ends “But once heart’s feast/You

were to me.” A love poem about the rhyme between a man and
a woman, the poem could also be read as Bogan’s tribute to
rhyme itself. In “Women” and “Roman Fountain” she
demonstrates a distinct ability and interest in what might have
seemed in 1922 and 1935 an old-fashioned technique. (The
former consists of 5 stanzas rhyming abcb; the latter, more
ingenious, like the fountain it describes, rhymes aabc / aabb /
abcabca.) However, other poems selected are dramatically
different in formal organization and are unrhymed. Bogan’s
line breaks, unlike (e.g.) William Carlos Williams’s, generally
follow syntactic units. But in “The Sleeping Fury” and “After
the Persian” she writes in long lines, form following thought.
Both poems contain a kind of elegance, issuing even from the
fear and violence of the former.
Bogan’s scope is not grand, but her talent in crafting
verse and summoning images is noteworthy.

Original Audience

Bogan—like Marianne Moore—was writing for a man’s

world. Neither made concessions to the popular audience to
gain a greater readership. Yet their natural reserve and privacy
turned them in a direction away from the more soul-baring
tendencies of some of their contemporaries. “The Sleeping
Fury” could be about the poet’s demon-muse; but it could
equally concern her breakdowns, the warring sides of her own
personality. That she was poetry editor for the New Yorker for
many years indicates that she understood a broader public’s
taste and chose to write a taut, lyric verse.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

It is useful to compare her treatment of natural objects and

personal, cloaked subjects with that of Emily Dickinson, and
with later poets such as Adrienne Rich and Denise Levertov,
who use the personal “I” in more self-revealing ways.
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
596 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. I prefer to give students several pages of extracts from

Bogan’s prose, including reviews and Limmer’s
biographical collection.
2. Those interested in women writers might want to
explore the kinds of verse other women of Bogan’s
generation—particularly those who reached out to a
larger audience—chose to write. What were women
reading from Ladies Home Companion and other
popular magazines? How does Bogan’s writing
compare?

Bibliography

See Bogan’s prose and Ruth Limmer’s A Journey Around My

Room extracted as autobiography from Bogan’s diaries and
other prose.

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)

Contributing Editors: Margaret Anne O’Connor and John
Alberti

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Most students have already read something by Hemingway,

and they come into class with preconceptions. They usually
love him or hate him and try to pin labels rather than give his
work a new reading. Also they want to concentrate on
biography and biographical readings of his works, since most
find his well-publicized life even more interesting than his
work.
As the headnote to this story suggests, biography is
important to understanding Hemingway’s approach to writing
and this is certainly true for A Farewell to Arms, but I try to
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 597
turn students’ attention biographically from Hemingway the
Adventurer-Philosopher to Hemingway the Writer. Since
“Hills Like White Elephants” is much less often anthologized
than other Hemingway stories, its newness to students might
tempt them to read and reread in order to see how the story fits
with other works they’ve read by him. I approach teaching this
taut story as if it were a poem. Word choice and phraseology
are keys to its success.
One possible strategy might be to ask two students, a
male and a female, to read the dialogue from “Hills Like
White Elephants” aloud to the class as if it were a drama. Then
class discussion would move toward tone of voice. Questions
of the man’s sincerity and the girl’s sarcasm would naturally
emerge. The less preparation for this exercise the better since a
“flat” delivery would remind listeners that Hemingway expects
his readers to “interpret.”
Students are interested in the philosophy of life they
discern from Hemingway’s works, the code of behavior his
characters follow that gives their lives dignity in the author’s
eyes. This story seems a self-critique of that code. Careful
readers don’t believe the girl at the end of the story when she
says she’s “fine.” She’s composed herself; she won’t make a
scene, but she’s not “fine.” Students want to know how
Hemingway has succeeded in making us know that the man is
lying to the girl—and perhaps to himself— throughout the
story. There’s no easy answer to this question, but a close
reading of key phrases such as “the only thing that bothers us,”
“it’s perfectly simple,” or “I feel fine” will help them see how
carefully constructed the story is.
Such attention to the nuances of irony and sarcasm in
the dialogue of “Hills Like White Elephants” prepares students
for their reading of the conversation between Frederic Henry
and Gino in A Farewell to Arms by helping to reveal much
more ambiguous, even cynical attitudes toward war than
students familiar with the stereotype of Hemingway as tough-
guy writer might expect.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

“Hills” is a good story to shatter the false impression that

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
598 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Hemingway was insensitive to women. This carefully
constructed vignette has a nameless man and woman
discussing their relationship against the backdrop of the
mountain landscape. As in the very best of Hemingway’s
novels and stories, the authorial stance is ambiguous; readers
must pay close attention to small details to understand the
progress of the narrative. Students should be encouraged to
focus on the dialogue between the man and girl in order to
discern their relationship. The issue of abortion and how each
speaker feels about it is central to the story. Yet abortion itself
is not the main issue; it is the not-too-subtle pressure “the
man” is placing on “the girl” to have the abortion that is the
key issue.
The disaster that was World War I was a defining
experience for writers of Hemingway’s generation, especially
those, like Hemingway, who served in the military. Although
Hemingway is often simplistically associated with the
glorification of masculine violence, the excerpt from A
Farewell to Arms suggests instead a highly critical view of
war, particularly in the conscious avoidance of heroic imagery
and in Henry’s meditations on the uselessness of the slaughter.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Hemingway’s minimalist style deserves consideration. If

Faulkner confuses readers because he offers so many details
for readers to sift through in order to understand what’s going
on, Hemingway confuses by offering so few.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 599

Original Audience

The central issue in “Hills” is the abortion the girl is being

pressured to have by her male companion. The author’s stance
on the issue of abortion is ambiguous, but the story clearly
comes out against the male pressuring the female into an
abortion that she doesn’t seem to want. Pro-choice and pro-life
students might want to concentrate class discussion not on
abortion alone, but on the issue of subtle pressure at the heart
of the story.
A Farewell to Arms, written ten years after the end of
World War I, reflects a growing sense in Europe and the
United States of the horror and futility of that war coupled
with an unease over its implications for the brutality and
sterility of a modern world that was unable to prevent such a
bloodbath, despite vaunted claims of technological and social
progress (indeed, increased technological efficiency had
seemed to make war even more horrific). Students might want
to consider how attitudes about war, technology, and progress
have or haven’t changed in the aftermath of the conflicts that
have followed World War I.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Of many possible works of comparison, one of the most

fruitful would be T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Compare this
rootless couple escaping the commitment of parenthood with
Eliot’s set of lovers in Book II of his poem. The song of the
nightingale “so rudely forced” is “Jug, Jug,” which is echoed
in the man’s choice of a nickname for the girl.
There are conscious echoes of Stephen Crane’s The Red
Badge of Courage in A Farewell to Arms, and students might
also look at F. Scott Fitzgerald’s roughly contemporary short
story “May Day” for a similar evocation of postwar despair
and alienation.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

“Hills Like White Elephants”

1. What’s the purpose of the trip the two travelers are

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
600 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
taking?
2. Why are the speakers only identified as “a man” and
“girl”? How do these designations affect your reading of
the story? What nickname does the man use for the girl?
3. How do the descriptions of the landscape relate to the
conversation between the two travelers? What about the
discussion of drink orders?
4. Note each sentence or paragraph that is not enclosed in
quotation marks, and explain how each brief
commentary affects your understanding of the characters
and the lives they lead.
5. Why does the girl repeat the word “please” seven times?
Anger? Hysteria? Fear? Frustration? Why does the man
leave her at the table?
6. The railroad station setting is important to the
progress—the plot—of the story. How does this physical
setting parallel the thematic concerns of the story as
well?
7. How does the title relate to the story?

A Farewell to Arms

1. How do we read the tone of Henry’s conversation with

Gino? Do the men seem frightened? Bored? Excited?
How does our reading of their tone affect our
understanding of the war?
2. What could Henry mean by thinking, “Abstract words
such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene
beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of
roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and
the dates”? How does this statement relate to the ethics
of the prose style of the story?
3. What is the effect of Henry’s description of battle? What
information do and don’t we get? How does this
description compare with other descriptions of warfare
you may be familiar with?

Bibliography

Jeffrey Meyers offers an excellent brief reading of this story in

his biography (pp. 196–97).
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 601

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

Contributing Editor: Linda W. Wagner-Martin

Classroom Issues and Strategies

The sheer difficulty of apprehending meaning from some of

Stevens’s poems turns many students away. Yet Stevens is one
of the most apt voices to speak about the perfection, and the
perfectibility, of the poem—the supreme fiction in the writer’s,
and the reader’s, lives. If students can read Stevens’s poems
well, they will probably be able to read anything in the text.
The elusiveness of meaning is one key difficulty:
Stevens’s valiant attempts to avoid paraphrase, to lose himself
in brilliant language, to slide into repetition and assonantal
patterns without warning. His work demands complete
concentration, and complete sympathy, from his readers. Most
students cannot give poetry either of these tributes without
some preparation.
Close reading, usually aloud, helps. The well-known
Stevens language magic has to be experienced, and since
poems are difficult, asking students to work on them alone, in
isolation, is not the best tactic. Beginning with the poems by
Stevens might make reading T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and
William Carlos Williams much easier, so I would make this
selection central to the study of modern American poetry.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

The value of poetry (and all art); the accessibility of great

moral, and mortal, themes through language; the
impenetrability of most human relationships; the evanescence
of formalized belief systems, including religion; the frustration
of imperfection; and others. Stevens often builds from
historical and/or philosophical knowledge, expecting “fact” to
serve as counterpoint for his readers’ more imaginative
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
602 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
exploits. But this technique is not meant to lead to easy or
facile explication. It is a way of contrasting the predictable and
the truly valuable, the imaginary.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Stevens’s intricate stanza and rhyme patterns are a school of

poetry in themselves, and each of his poems should be studied
as a crafted object. His work fits well with that of T. S. Eliot,
as does some of his aesthetic rationale: “Poetry is not
personal.” “The real is only the base. But it is the base.” “In
poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and
rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.” “Poetry
must be irrational.” “The purpose of poetry is to make life
complete in itself.” “Poetry increases the feeling for reality.”
“In the absence of a belief in God, the mind turns to its own
creations and examines them, not alone from the aesthetic
point of view, but for what they reveal, for what they validate
and invalidate.”

Original Audience

Modernism was so specific a mood and time that students

must understand the modernists’ rage for control of craft, the
emphasis on the formalism of the way an art object was
formed, and the importance craft held for all parts of the
artist’s life. Once those conventions are described, and Stevens
placed in this period, his own distinctions from the group of
modernists will be clearer. (“Not all objects are equal. The
vice of imagism was that it did not recognize this.” “A change
of style is a change of subject.” “In the long run the truth does
not matter.”) Conscious of all the elements of form, Stevens
yet overlays his work with a heavily philosophical intention,
and the shelves of commentary on his poetry have been
occasioned because that commentary is, in many cases, useful.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

The T. S. Eliot of the Four Quartets (likenesses) or the

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 603
William Carlos Williams of the short poems (differences).

William Faulkner (1897–1962)

Contributing Editor: John Lowe

Students are resistant to texts that withhold key information, to

narrative that is obscure and/or convoluted, and to characters
who don’t seem to have “common sense.” All of these “sins”
appear in Faulkner’s work. He also requires a knowledge of
southern and American history that many students don’t
possess.
Begin by emphasizing the pleasures to be gained from
unraveling Faulkner’s mysteries. Especially focus on his
parallels to and differences from the popular myths of southern
culture, as found in Gone With the Wind, North and South, and
popular television series set in the South. Approach his works
as though they were detective stories (some of them, in fact,
are). Do brief presentations of relevant historical materials.
Locate the text’s place in Faulkner’s career, drawing parallels
between the character’s concerns and the way those issues
touched Faulkner as well. Explain how Faulkner explored and
exploded stereotypes, of southerners, African Americans, and
women.
Teachers should be prepared to answer typical
questions: Students want to know if he “really thought of all
those things when he was writing,” referring to the hidden
references we uncover in symbolism, imagery, and so on.
They ask if his family owned slaves and how Faulkner felt
about it if they did. Some students want to know if I think
Faulkner was a racist and/or a sexist.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

604 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Highlight Faulkner’s tremendous importance as an interpreter

of history—and not just southern or American history—at a
critical moment when modernism emerged as a questioning,
probing tool used to redefine human nature and our
relationship to nature. Issues of sex, class, and above all, race,
should be explored using a battery of interdisciplinary
techniques, including historical, social, anthropological,
economic, political, and feminist perspectives. “Barn
Burning,” for example, has been profitably analyzed by
Marxist critics as a class struggle.
Gender formation operates centrally in Faulkner’s
stories. Interestingly, each of these processes intersects with
issues of class and community. These conjunctions could and
should be profitably explored, and linked to the way Faulkner
struggled with them in his own life. Both stories employ
mythic/ biblical structures in the service of these various
thematics; students should be asked to identify them and
demonstrate why they are effective.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Faulkner needs to be understood in both the context of

southern literary traditions and modernism. “Barn Burning,”
for example, in its employment of Jamesian point of view as
confined to Sarty’s consciousness, requires detailed analysis of
its narrative structure, its language, and the consequent effects
on the reader. Both stories attempt to present complicated
psychological conditions and situations while adhering to the
firm realities of dramatic plotting.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Faulkner needs to be related to the other great modernists who

so influenced him, especially Joyce and Eliot, and his work
should and could be profitably compared and contrasted to the
similar but sometimes very different literary experiments of
Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, Wright, and so on. “Barn
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 605
Burning” can easily be contrasted to Huckleberry Finn, where
a young boy must abandon his father’s standards in favor of
more humane, just ones, or to a female bildungsroman such as
Wharton’s Summer. The injustices of sharecropping discussed
by Faulkner could be examined alongside other treatments of
rural life such as Hamlin Garland’s “Under the Lion’s Paw” or
Richard Wright’s “Long Black Song” and “The Man Who
Was Almost a Man”; the latter similarly focuses on a young
boy’s coming of age against a rural backdrop. Twain,
Morrison, and Oates could be helpful in explaining the
interconnections between the bildungsroman and
psychological fiction.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. How does one establish individual independence as a

teenager? Do you remember any crucial moment in your
own life when you realized that you had to make a
choice between what your parent(s) and/or family
believed and your own values?
2. Is the destruction of another person’s property ever
something we can justify? Explain.
3. Does it matter that this story is rendered through Sarty’s
consciousness? What were Faulkner’s options, and how
would the story be different if he had exercised them?
4. What are the key symbols in the story, and how do they
serve the thematic purposes Faulkner had in mind?
5. Do the class issues the story raises have any parallels
today?
6. What is the tone of the story and how is it established?

Paper Topics

I never arbitrarily assign students a particular story to write on;

instead, I urge them to choose one they particularly like. They
are then to ask themselves exactly why they like it, which will
lead them to a topic (the humor employed, a certain character
or method of characterization, a fascination with the depiction
of the historical period on display, and so on).

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

606 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Bibliography

Bradford, M. E. “Family and Community in Faulkner’s ‘Barn

Burning.’ ” Southern Review 17 (1981): 332–39.

Fowler, Virginia C. “Faulkner’s ‘Barn Burning’: Sarty’s

Conflict Reconsid- ered.” College Language Association
Journal 24 (1981): 513–21.

Franklin, Phyllis. “Sarty Snopes and ‘Barn Burning.’ ”

Mississippi Quar- terly 21 (1968): 189–93.

Hiles, Jane. “Kinship and Heredity in Faulkner’s ‘Barn

Burning.’ ” Mis- sissippi Quarterly 38, 3 (1985): 329–37.

Volpe, Edmond L. “ ‘Barn Burning’: A Definition of Evil.”

Faulkner: The Unappeased Imagination: A Collection of
Critical Essays, edited by O. Carey, 75–82. Troy, NY:
Whitson, 1980.

Both stories are treated in Hans Skei’s William Faulkner: The

Short Store Career: An Outline of Faulkner’s Short Story
Writing from 1919 to 1962. Oslo: University Forl, 1981, and
James Ferguson’s Faulkner’s Short Fiction. Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1991. See also Faulkner and
the Short Story: Faulkner and Yoknapatawph,a 1990. Ed. Ann
Abadie and Doreen Fowler. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1992.

Hart Crane (1899–1932)

Contributing Editor: Margaret Dickie

Classroom Issues and Strategies

I set Crane in the context of Pound and Eliot where students

can see the ambitions he shared with his fellow modernists to
“make it new,” to write a poem including history, even to
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 607
define the role of the poet as a cultural spokesman. And, in
that context, I try to distinguish the larger concerns of his
career that set him apart from his fellow poets: his interest in
the “logic of metaphor” as making it new; his focus on
American rather than world history; and his search to find his
identity in his role as a poet. All indicate how he reinterpreted
the modernist program to suit his own purposes. I urge
students, who may have been reading Ezra Pound and T. S.
Eliot through the footnotes to their poems, to abandon that
approach to Crane and to concentrate instead on those
elements they find most perplexing in his work: the language,
the experience, and the dislocated references.
Central to any discussion of Crane is his role as a
homosexual poet. Quite apart from the task of placing him in
the modernist movement, students will need to understand
Crane’s sense of himself as a figure marginalized both by his
chosen profession as a poet in a capitalist economy and by his
sexual identity as a homosexual in the ideology of literary and
cultural authority that made, as Thomas Yingling has
suggested, “homosexuality an inadmissible center from which
to write about American life” (27). I introduce Crane with
“Black Tambourine” and “Chaplinesque” where he identifies
the poet with the “black man” and the tramp in order to show
how he felt himself marginalized. As part of the discussion, I
try to indicate also how he was willing to appropriate such
marginal figures for his own use without much regard to their
own status.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

608 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Major themes developed in the early lyric poems and carried

through The Bridge and to the last poem he wrote, “The
Broken Tower,” include the artist as an outcast in the modern
industrialized and urbanized world, Crane’s need nonetheless
to find ways to celebrate the modern world and to articulate an
affirmative myth of America, the search to discover in the
present the positive values of the American past, Crane’s
deepening despair over the possibilities of accomplishing such
a bold program, and finally the lifelong effort to find a means
of expressing his homosexuality, of masking it, of making it
viable and meaningful both for himself and for his audience.
Historically, Crane is a modernist who departs widely
from the movement. His effort to write a long poem belongs to
the early stages of modernism when Pound was starting The
Cantos, Eliot completing The Waste Land, and William Carlos
Williams was producing Spring & All and In the American
Grain. Although Crane’s effort, The Bridge, is too long to be
included in full in the anthology, the selected sections—“To
Brooklyn Bridge” and “The River”—should serve to indicate
both his Native American subjects and the range of his style
from formal quatrains through Whitmanian catalogs to collage
and narrative. His place in the canon has seldom been
challenged even by his earlier critics who found his long poem
intellectually and structurally flawed, his lifestyle
reprehensible, and his suicide inevitable; but his achievement
is of another order from Eliot’s or Pound’s, and it must be read
on its own terms.
Personally, the central question in Crane’s life was how
to be a homosexual poet, a writer able to express his own
identity in culturally meaningful ways. The central issue of his
career was the composition of The Bridge, which he worked
on during most of his writing life, even when the inspiration of
the long poem failed him and his belief in its purpose faltered.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

The modernist long poem was the form Crane hoped to invent.
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 609
He offered various explanations of his program chiefly to Otto
Kahn, a philanthropist from whom he sought financial aid,
claiming, “What I am really handling, you see, is the myth of
America. Thousands of strands have had to be searched for,
sorted and interwoven. . . . For each section of the entire poem
has presented its own unique problem of form, not alone in
relation to the materials embodied within its separate confines,
but also in relation to the other parts, in series, of the major
design of the entire poem” (Letters 305). The two sections in
the anthology should suggest something of Crane’s method of
interweaving different strands as well as the variety of forms
that he employed. The design of the whole poem eluded him.
To Harriet Monroe, he described his theory of the logic
of metaphor as distinct from pure logic, arguing that he was
“more interested in the so-called illegal impingements of the
connotations of words on the consciousness (and their
combinations and interplay in metaphor on this basis) than I
am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid
significations at the cost of limiting my subject matter and
perceptions involved in the poem.” I encourage students to
consider this statement, puzzling out its significance, and to
examine the short poems in light of it in order to see how
words interact and develop in a chain of free associations.

Original Audience

Crane’s original audience included editors and readers of the

little magazines of the 1920s, fellow poets, and literary friends
such as Malcolm Cowley, Harry and Caresse Crosby, Waldo
Frank, Gorham Munson, Katherine Anne Porter, and Allen
Tate. He has always been a poet’s poet, and his reputation has
been nourished by the tributes of poets as different as Allen
Ginsberg and Robert Lowell. The rise of gay and lesbian
studies has inspired renewed interest in his career. For an
extremely informative reading of his homosexual themes and
style, see Yingling.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Crane pitted himself against the formidable reputation of Eliot

and The Waste Land. The Bridge would, he hoped, be an
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
610 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
answer to what he imagined as Eliot’s negative view of
modern life. He allied himself with William Carlos Williams,
whose In the American Grain influenced him as he worked on
his long poem, although the selections for Williams in the
anthology are not ideal for drawing a comparison here.
Perhaps Williams’s “Spring and All” or “To Elsie” might
serve as treatments of the American landscape and people that
Crane would have shared.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. If Crane identified with the “black man” and Charlie

Chaplin or with the hoboes in “The River,” did he have
any sympathy for their plight or was he simply
appropriating them as suitable images of his own
difficulties?
2. Consider why Melville would have been important to
Crane. In what sense is a “scattered chapter, livid
hieroglyph” an apt description of Crane’s own verse?
3. Discuss the image of the Brooklyn Bridge as a
technological achievement and as a significant poetic
symbol for Crane.
4. In what sense is breaking an important imaginative act
for Crane? Look at “The Broken Tower” as Crane’s
final acceptance of brokenness in himself and in his
world.

The New Negro Renaissance

Alain Locke (1885–1954)

Contributing Editor: Beth Helen Stickney

Classroom Issues and Strategies

While students often have difficulty knowing how to approach

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 611
nonfiction prose, particularly the kind that tends toward
abstraction as Locke’s essay does, once we have historically
contextualized “The New Negro,” students are quick both to
sympathize with Locke and to become involved in a number of
salient debates. One particular point of interest is Locke’s own
educational background; students want to know what it was
like for an African-American at Oxford, and they are also
generally interested in learning about the milieu at Harvard in
the early 1900s. Most will begin to sense the precariousness of
Locke’s position as a black intellectual struggling both to
make a place for himself in an Anglo-American environment
and to pave the way for other African Americans.
The centrality of art and culture in Locke’s thought and
political philosophy always touches off controversy. Students
divide on issues of artistic freedom versus responsibility to
one’s race (and/or class/gender); the racial/cultural specificity
of a given art form (e.g., is jazz, or rap/hip-hop, as students
think today, a “black” form?); and finally, the broader concern
of the role that art and culture can play in any political or
social agenda (again, a point that usually prompts students to
draw on their own experience).
When students do draw on contemporary culture, their
references are usually to popular music, and I encourage this.
Because The New Negro anthology itself (indeed the New
Negro movement) was so deliberately an interdisciplinary
project, I try to represent as many art forms as possible. (This
is where student presentations can be profitably used.) Cary
Nelson’s Repression and Recovery, in addition to giving a
history of much of the “noncanonical” literature of the period,
includes reproductions (some in color) of artwork from The
New Negro and several other small African-American
periodicals. Included in my bibliography are two fine art
books, both with informative essays on individual artists and
on African-American culture in general. Any number of
musical recordings (Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Bessie
Smith, the spirituals) would give the opportunity to discuss
Locke’s distaste for the commercialized “Tin Pan Alley” jazz
and his preference for the more “authentic” spirituals (though
the latter were already being Westernized for the concert
halls). As students begin to see that Locke’s concerns are
neither merely academic nor dead issues, they will sometimes
bring me newspaper clippings or mention interviews in which

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

612 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
they detect Lockean themes being raised. These, of course, I
make a point of sharing with the class.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Major themes that Locke develops include the entrance onto

the world scene of a new social type and a new psychology in
the figure of the “new Negro”; the dialectical relationship
between an outer reality (social, political, and cultural
conditions) and inner consciousness; the centrality of Harlem
as a “race capital” and the importance of the urban experience
generally in promoting the cosmopolitan ideal; pan-Africanism
and the importance of uniting African Americans with
oppressed and politically awakening peoples worldwide; the
significance of cultural renewal in bringing about social and
political progress; the “enlarging of personal experience” as
inseparable from a commitment to “a common vision of the
social tasks ahead”; the authenticity of “folk” culture and the
dangers inherent in empty imitation of “high” culture forms;
the need for a reinvigoration of democratic ideals and
institutions, and the unique ability of African Americans to
address that need; the role that the “enlightened minorities” of
each race must play in bringing the races together; the urgency
of seeing racial interests in a “new and enlarged way” that
would ultimately transcend a narrowly racialist vision.
As the only child of educated, middle-class parents,
Locke was both a product and a proponent of an elite high-
culture tradition. Though known for his devotion to cultural
pluralism and what he came to call “critical relativism,”
Locke’s early education would have instilled in him Victorian,
specifically Arnoldian, notions of taste and cultural value;
indeed, even as he supported young artists and emerging
African-American cultural forms, he was often accused of
elitism and Eurocentrism (charges that had also been leveled
against W. E. B. Du Bois). But while he was educated in and
became a vital part of the country’s elite intellectual circles, he
also knew racial prejudice (note his ostracism at Oxford even
as a Rhodes scholar), and he actively fought racism and
worked for full social, cultural, and political recognition of all
African Americans. Thus, both privileged and oppressed, he
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 613
found himself in much the same vexed position as many of his
black contemporaries, most notably Du Bois and James
Weldon Johnson (both of whom had also spent time in Europe,
traveling and studying).
As the advance guard (in Du Bois’s case one might
already say, in 1925, the “older” guard) of an emerging black
intelligentsia, these men, and women such as Jessie Fausset
(literary editor of The Crisis, the NAACP’s journal), Angelina
Grimké, and Zora Neale Hurston, initiated and helped sustain
public debate on issues of assimilation, nationalism, higher
education, artistic freedom, economic independence, cultural
self-determination, women’s rights, and race leadership. (Here,
the extensively researched and well-documented Propaganda
and Aesthetics is extremely helpful in delineating the way
these debates became public through a nexus of journals and
small magazines.) Historically, these writers, artists, and
activists were uniquely poised so as to inherit a set of social
conditions shaped by Reconstruction, the black migration
northward, economic fluctuation, U.S. participation in World
War I; and to set the terms for addressing and representing
those conditions, terms that would in turn be inherited by
future generations.
Personally, Locke seems to have been able to balance an
active, even extravagant, social life among Manhattan’s upper
crust, with his commitment to education, and even serious
philosophical writing. Well-respected by prominent
philosophers like John Dewey and Sidney Hook, Locke was
called upon both to speak at professional gatherings and to
contribute to volumes on contemporary philosophy. One can
only speculate on what his stature as a philosopher might have
been had he exerted more sustained efforts in that area. And
yet, the poet Claude McKay referred to him simply as a
“charming, harmless fellow” (and at least on one occasion as
the embodiment of the “Aframerican rococco,” an even less
flattering picture). Perhaps not without irony, Locke humbly
referred to himself as the “midwife” of a generation of writers
and artists who would be responsible for Harlem’s renaissance.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

While the primary historical and cultural importance of

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
614 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Locke’s essay certainly lies in its content rather than in its
form or style, I do stress Locke’s ability to appeal to an
educated, and perhaps dispassionate, reader through careful
control of tone and language. I also spend some time on the
essay form itself as part of an American tradition of cultural
criticism. This latter approach works especially well in
writing-intensive courses; student-writers are likely to take
their work more seriously if they are able to see their own
essays as fitting into that tradition.
Original Audience

“The New Negro” makes a nice case study in audience

because of its publication history. Originally written as the
lead essay for a special issue of the magazine Survey Graphic
that Locke had been called upon to edit, it later served as the
introduction to a much expanded anthology based on that
issue, published as The New Negro: An Interpretation. As the
popular version of Survey, a professional journal devoted to
social work, Survey Graphic was an extensively illustrated
magazine designed to acquaint a general readership with social
problems of the day. The anthology, published by the well-
respected Albert and Charles Boni, and illustrated with fine
color portraits, drawings, decorative designs, and
reproductions of African artwork, is clearly designed to avoid
racial polemics and to reach an educated, enlightened
audience, composed of both black and white readers. (One
might even say that Locke is aiming for a primarily white
audience, presenting a well-reasoned defense of his cultural
agenda to potential supporters.)

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Locke’s essay works well alongside Du Bois’s “Of Our

Spiritual Strivings” (chapter I of The Souls of Black Folk);
Langston Hughes’s “When the Negro Was in Vogue”; James
Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man.
However, it is also important to remember that Locke was a
vital member of an American intellectual community—be it
“Anglo” or “Afro”—and therefore can be seen as addressing
issues of national concern. An instructive connection to make
in this light is with Randolph Bourne’s “Transnational
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 615
America.” (See also Locke’s 1911 essay, “The American
Temperament.”) Bourne’s cosmopolitanism, his notion of a
“trans-nationality” and a “federation of cultures,” is
compatible with Locke’s own vision of an American
democracy based on a rigorous sense of cultural pluralism.
Further, on the dialectic between artistic innovation and
cultural conservation, also an issue for Locke, see T. S. Eliot’s
“Tradition and the Individual Talent.”

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

Students should be able to answer questions along the lines of

the following:

1. What does Locke mean by the “new” negro? How does

this figure differ from the “old” negro? To what extent
does this figure correspond to an actual social type, and
to what extent might it be an idealization? What might
Locke’s purpose be in idealizing the new negro?
2. What does Locke hope to achieve with his essay?
3. What concerns does Locke share with other writers of
his day?
4. What influence do you think Locke had on the artists of
the New Negro Movement? Can this influence be seen
today? What issues of importance to Locke and the New
Negro Movement generally are still of concern today?

Writing assignments might range from a work of

original cultural criticism (that is, attack a contemporary
issue/cultural problem related to those Locke dealt with,
addressing a particular audience from the student’s own
viewpoint), to an analysis of Locke’s vision of culture and
democracy vis-à-vis that of another writer, say, Du Bois or
Bourne (this, of course, might involve research and further
reading in each author’s body of work).

Bibliography

Baker, Houston A., Jr. Modernism and the Harlem

Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
616 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Dallas Museum of Art. Black Art, Ancestral Legacy: The

African Impulse in African-American Art. New York: Harry
N. Abrams, Inc., 1989.

Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Harlem Renaissance. New York:

Oxford University Press, 1971.

Johnson, Abby Arthur and Ronald Maberry Johnson.

Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of
African-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 2nd
ed. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991.

Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New

York: Knopf, 1981.

Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recovery: Modern American

Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

Studio Museum in Harlem. Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black

America. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1987.

Jean Toomer (1894–1967)

Contributing Editor: Nellie Y. McKay

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Toomer’s style is difficult, especially in view of earlier

African-American literature. To a large extent, Toomer
abandoned the predominant naturalistic and realistic
representation of the black experience to experiment with
newer modernistic techniques. When they first approach these
texts, students usually feel that it is well beyond their
understanding—that Toomer is engaged in abstractions that
are too difficult to comprehend.
Have the students explore all the possibilities for a literal
meaning of the metaphors and symbols. “Blood-Burning
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 617
Moon” is less difficult for them because it has a traditional
story line. In “Karintha,” for instance, try to get them to see
that Toomer is concerned with the sexual and economic
oppression of women within their own communities where
they should be safe from the former at least.
These selections lend themselves to the visual
imagination. Students may find it helpful to think of the
“pictures” Toomer’s images present as they read and try to
understand, also, the written meanings these images present.
Students respond positively to the poetic qualities of the
writing, and they enjoy its visual aspects. They have difficulty
interpreting the underlying themes and meanings, mainly
because the language is seductive and leaves them ambivalent
regarding the positive and negative qualities the writer intends
to portray. It is best to lead them through one section by
reading aloud in class and permitting them to use a number of
methods (listening to the words, visualizing the images, etc.)
to try to fathom what is going on.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

1. The significance of black women as representatives of

African-American culture. What qualities do women
have that are similar to those of the entire group of
African Americans—at least as Toomer saw them?
2. The nature of the richness as well as the pain in African-
American culture.
3. The symbolistic aspects of the northern and southern
black experience.
4. The role of the black artist—for example, in “Song of
the Son,” in which the absent son returns to preserve the
almost now-lost culture of his ancestors.
Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Toomer is writing at a crucial time in American and African-

American literary history. His friends are members of the Lost
Generation of writers intent on reforming American literature.
His effort is to make a different kind of presentation of
African-America through the art of literature. He sees the loss
of some of the strongest elements of the culture in the move
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
618 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
toward modernization and technology. For example, he
captures the beauty and pathos of the experience in
“Karintha,” the brutality in “Blood-Burning Moon,” and the
imitation of the white culture in “Box Seat.”

Original Audience

Cane was written for an intellectual audience who could grasp

the nuances the author was interested in promoting. The book
sold fewer than 500 copies in its first year, but had enthusiastic
reviews from the most avant-garde literary critics. It continues
to appeal to intellectuals, especially those who are interested in
the ways in which language can be manipulated to express
particular life situations.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Toomer’s work can be compared to some of Sherwood

Anderson’s stories and to Hart Crane’s poetry. The three men
knew each other and were friends during the 1920s. They read
each other’s work and advised each other. Their general thrust
was that human beings were alienated from the basic “natural”
qualities in themselves and needed to get back to more of the
spiritual values that could be found in closer unity with nature.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

Cane was a work to celebrate the African-American

experience without denying the awful pain and oppression that
made the strength of the group so apparent. Paper topics that
focus on the history of black America between Reconstruction
and the 1920s are useful in showing what a student can learn
about Jean Toomer’s reasons for the perceptions he revealed in
these selections.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 619

Bibliography

The best source on these is the discussion (in chronological

order in the book) in the McKay biography of Toomer’s
literary life and work. The attempt here is to explicate the
individual selections in the total book.

Langston Hughes (1902–1967)

Contributing Editor: Charles H. Nichols

Classroom Issues and Strategies

The primary problems encountered in teaching Langston

Hughes grow out of his air of improvisation and familiarity.
Vital to an understanding of Hughes’s poetry and prose is the
idiom, the quality of black colloquial speech and the rhythms
of jazz and the blues.
The best strategies for teaching the writer involve the
reading aloud of the poetry and prose, the use of recordings
and films, the use of the history of the “New Negro” and the
Harlem Renaissance.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

The major themes in Langston Hughes’s work grow out of his

personal life, his travels, his involvement in radical and protest
movements, and his interest in Africa and South America as
well as the Caribbean.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

In regard to questions of form, style, or artistic convention, the

following considerations are relevant to Langston Hughes:
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
620 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

1. His debt to Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, and Paul

Laurence Dunbar.
2. His enthusiasm for the language and songs of the rural
folk and lower-class urban, “street” Negro. As Arna
Bontemps once wrote, “No one loved Negroes as
Langston Hughes did.”
3. His capacity for improvisation and original rhythms. His
use of jazz, blues, be-bop, gospel, Harlem slang.

The poetry: Point out the occasion that inspired the

poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (cf. The Big Sea, pp. 54–
56). “The Weary Blues,” “Drum,” and “Freedom Train” use
the idioms of black speech with poetic effect.
Prose: Among Hughes’s finest achievements are the
Simple stories. Here we have the speech and idiom presented
with irony, malapropisms, and humor.

Original Audience

Hughes’s audience consisted of his literary friends (Countee

Cullen, Carl Van Vechten, Wallace Thurman, etc.) as well as
the general public.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Comparisons or contrasts might be made with Carl Sandburg,

Walt Whitman, Claude McKay. The bases of such
comparisons might be the language and metaphor, the degree
of militancy, etc.

Bibliography

Berry, Faith. “Saunders Redding as Literary Critic of Langston

Hughes.” The Langston Hughes Review V, no. 2 (Fall
1986).

Emanuel, James A. and Theodore L. Gross. Dark Symphony:

Negro Literature in America. New York: The Free Press,
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 621
1968, 191–221, 447–80.

Henderson, Stephen. Understanding the New Black Poetry:

Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References. New
York: Wm. Morrow & Co., 1973.

Hughes, L. “Ten Ways to Use Poetry in Teaching.” College

Language Association Bulletin, 1951.

———. The First Book of Rhythms (1954).

Miller, R. Baxter, ed. Black American Poets Between Worlds,

1940–1960. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986.

———. The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes.

Knoxville: University of Kentucky Press, 1988.

O’Daniel, Therman B. Langston Hughes, Black Genius: A

Critical Evaluation. For the College of Language
Association. New York: Wm. Morrow & Co., 1971, 65
ff. p. 171. p. 180.

Countee Cullen (1903–1946)

Contributing Editor: Walter C. Daniel

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Students who read Cullen need to develop a clear

understanding of the temper of the Harlem Renaissance period
in U.S. literary development. In addition, they may need help
with the classical allusions in “Yet Do I Marvel” and in
“Simon the Cyrenian Speaks.” Also, students should come to
understand the reference to Scottsboro as the poet’s criticism
of his fellow poets’ neglect of what he considers a significant
matter (obviously, this requires knowing about the Scottsboro
incident in 1931 and following).

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
622 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Countee Cullen is an important figure of the African-American

arts movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Born in
Louisville, Kentucky, Cullen was reared in New York City by
his paternal grandmother until 1918, when he was adopted by
the Reverend Frederick Asbury Cullen. This was a turning
point in his life, for he was now introduced into the very center
of black activism and achievement. Cullen displayed his talent
early; already in high school he was writing poetry, and in his
sophomore year at NYU he was awarded second prize in the
nationwide Witter Bynner Poetry Contest for “The Ballad of
the Brown Girl.” Encompassing themes that would remain
salient for the remainder of his career, Cullen’s first major
poem also revealed his unabashed reverence for the works of
John Keats. Cullen was firmly convinced that traditional verse
forms could not be bettered by more modern paradigms. It
was, therefore, the task of any aspiring writer, he felt, to
become conversant with and part of a received literary
tradition simply because such a tradition has the virtue of
longevity and universal sanction.
Cullen’s first volume, Color, established him as a writer
with an acute spiritual vision. Especially noteworthy in this
respect is “Simon the Cyrenian Speaks,” a work that
eloquently makes use of Matthew 27:32 in order to suggest an
analogue between blacks and Simon, the man who was
compelled to bear the cross of Christ on his back. Sublimity
was not Cullen’s only strong point. In “Incident,” the reader is
brusquely catapulted into the all-too-realistic world of an
impressionable eight-year-old as he experiences overt racism
for the first time on a memorable ride through the history-
filled streets of Baltimore.
In 1927, Cullen edited a significant anthology of black
poetry, Caroling Dusk, and published two collections of his
own, The Ballad of the Brown Girl and Copper Sun.
Representative of Cullen’s philosophical development in this
period is the multifaceted “Heritage,” a poem that summarizes
his ambivalent relationship with Christian and pagan cultural
constructs.
The 1930s and 1940s saw a change of direction in
Cullen’s work. His poetry output almost totally ceased as he
turned his attention to the novel, theater, translation, teaching,
and children’s literature. The 1932 novel One Way to Heaven

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 623
was Cullen’s response to Carl Van Vechten’s 1926 Nigger
Heaven, a controversial and notorious work exploring the
seamy underbelly of Harlem.
Cullen’s best work was his poetry; he apparently knew
this when he compiled his anthology, with the self-explanatory
title On These I Stand, shortly before his death.

Original Audience

The Harlem Renaissance period between the two world wars

saw the rise and definition of the “New Negro” in social,
political, and literature activities of the nation.
Cullen, along with other formally educated black poets,
established a new aesthetic for racial statement.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Cullen’s contemporaries (the best-known ones among the

writers) were Gwendolyn Bennett, Langston Hughes, and
Claude McKay; contrast the poetic method of social protest by
studying poems written by each of these poets.
Cullen has been criticized for taking an elitist attitude
toward racial matters and of ignoring social protest. Is this
criticism fair to Cullen in light of your reading of some poems
written by him and, for instance, Claude McKay?
His first volume of poetry, Color (1925), revealed an
indebtedness to traditional verse forms and an abiding interest
in the tenets of romanticism, characteristics markedly absent
from the blues-based folk rhythms of the poetry of Langston
Hughes. Cullen looked beyond his own rich heritage for
authorial models and chose John Keats, firmly convinced that
“To make a poet black, and bid him sing” was a “curious
thing” that God had done. So curious, indeed, that the voice of
the black poet had to be assimilated to and harmonized with
the bearers of an alien literary tradition. In “To John Keats,
Poet, At Springtime,” Cullen’s adulation of the nineteenth-
century lyricist is most pronounced: “I know, in spite of all
men say/Of Beauty, you have felt her most.”

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

624 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. Identify nonblack authors of the 1920s and determine

their common themes in contrast with those of black
writers.
2. Cullen grew up in a Methodist parsonage as the adopted
son of a prominent Harlem pastor. Might the use of
paradox about Christian religion and its practices in
some of his poetry reflect his home experience? Which
works and in which references?
3. Indications of Cullen’s fascination with and influence by
the English romantic poets, especially John Keats.
4. Effectiveness of the metaphor of Simon the Cyrenian to
black American life at the time; whether the allusion
suggests some theological implications, such as non-
redemptive suffering.
5. In the poem “Yet Do I Marvel,” Cullen makes an
implicit comparison between black poets and the
mythical figures of Tantalus and Sisyphus. Explain how
this comparison functions within the world of the poem.
6. Lying behind Cullen’s title choice for “From the Dark
Tower” is the phrase “ivory tower.” How does this fact
help explain the poem as well as its dedication to
Charles S. Johnson?
7. As background to discussion of “Scottsboro, Too, Is
Worth Its Song,” comment on the historical importance
of the Scottsboro Nine case and the trial of Sacco and
Vanzetti. Why are these two events paired in Cullen’s
poem? What was the prevailing poetic current that
prevented contemporary concerns from being broached
in verse? In answering this last question, compare, for
instance, some of the poems written by Wallace Stevens
and William Carlos Williams during this period with the
poetry of Cullen. Why did Cullen not follow the
modernist precepts announced by writers such as T. S.
Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Amy Lowell? How does Cullen’s
allusion to Walt Whitman’s lines “I . . . sing myself ”
and “I sing the body electric” function in the context of
this poem?
8. Cullen chooses to set his poem “Incident” in old
Baltimore. Why?
9. With reference to “Pagan Prayer,” comment on the
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 625
manner in which African-Americans have used
Christian religion as a repository for radical egalitarian
hopes. How is Cullen’s conception of the religion of the
white man different from that of a contemporary
Nigerian writer, such as Chinua Achebe in his novels
Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God?
10. How does Cullen accommodate traditions of English
poetry to themes of problems of living black in the
United States?
11. How active is the poet (Cullen) in taking the position of
racial spokesman in the poems? Effective?

Bibliography

Baker, Houston. Black Literature in America. New York:

McGraw Hill, 1971, 114–58.

Bontemps, Arna. The Harlem Renaissance Remembered. New

York: Dodd, Mead, 1972.

Daniel, Walter C. “Countee Cullen as Literary Critic.” College

Language Association Journal XIV (March 1972): 281–90.

Davis, Arthur. From the Dark Tower: African-American

Writers 1900– 1960. Howard University Press, 1974.

Wagner, Jean. Black Poets of the United States. Urbana-

Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1973. Part II.
Critical discussion of Cullen’s poetry was inaugurated
by J. Saunders Redding in To Make a Poet Black, 1939. More
detailed attention was given to his oeuvre in a sympathetic and
forthright monograph by Houston A. Baker, Jr., A Many-
Colored Coat of Dreams: The Poetry of Countee Cullen, 1974.
Alan R. Shucard in Countee Cullen, 1984, provides a complete
overview and assessment of Cullen’s life and literary
endeavors.
Perceptive comments about his novel are contained in
Bernard W. Bell’s The African-American Novel and Its
Tradition, 1987.
An invaluable general background of the Harlem
Renaissance that also includes comments about Cullen is
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
626 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Nathan Irvin Huggins’s Harlem Renaissance, 1971. Equally
indispensable is Margaret Perry’s A Bio-Bibli-ography of
Countee P. Cullen 1903–1946, 1971.
Noteworthy articles touching upon particular aspects of
Cullen’s poetry are:

Davis, Arthur P. “The Alien-and-Exile Theme in Countee

Cullen’s Racial Poems.” Phylon 14 (1953): 390–400.

Dorsey, David F. “Countee Cullen’s Use of Greek

Mythology.” College Language Association Journal 13
(1970): 68–77.
Webster, Harvey Curtis. “A Difficult Career.” Poetry 70
(1947): 224–25.

Gwendolyn B. Bennett (1902–1981)

Contributing Editor: Walter C. Daniel

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Almost always overlooked in discussion about the Harlem

Renaissance, Gwendolyn Bennett was, nevertheless, a
significant part of the most important artistic movement in
African-American history. Chiefly remembered for “The
Ebony Flute,” a regular column appearing in Opportunity that
chronicled the creative efforts of the writers, painters,
sculptors, actors, and musicians who made Harlem the center
of a profound cultural flowering, Bennett was also a poet and
short story writer of considerable skill. “To Usward,” for
instance, a poem dedicated to Jessie Fauset in honor of the
publication of her novel There Is Confusion, celebrates the
newly discovered sense of empowerment permeating the
Harlem community—a community envisioned as a chorus of
individual voices at once aware of a rich African cultural
heritage and prepared to sing “Before the urgency of youth’s
behest!” because of its belief that it “claim[s] no part of racial
dearth.”
Although her work was never collected into a single
volume, Bennett’s poetry and prose were, nonetheless,
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 627
included in major anthologies of the period such as Countee
Cullen’s Caroling Dusk (1924), Alain Locke’s The New Negro
(1925), and William Stanley Braithwaite’s Yearbook of
American Poetry (1927). Admired for her artistic work on five
covers of Opportunity and two covers of Crisis, praised for her
“depth and understanding” of character nuances in her short
stories by the playwright Theodore Ward, she was, in the
words of James Weldon Johnson, a “dynamic figure” whose
keenest talent lay in composing “delicate poignant lyrics.”

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. Why did the author coin the neologism “usward” as part

of the title of the poem “To Usward”?
2. In Chinese culture, what is the significance of ginger
jars?
3. In the poem “Advice,” Bennett’s choice of the word
sophist is significant. Comment on the etymology and
historical circumstances surrounding the first usage of
this word.
4. Discuss the importance of Alexander Dumas as a
literary figure.
5. The poem “Heritage” centers on a distinct yearning for
Africa. Why did the poets of this period stress such a
theme?

Sterling A. Brown (1901–1989)

Contributing Editor: John Edgar Tidwell

Classroom Issues and Strategies

The challenge of teaching Sterling A. Brown’s poetry is to

move students beyond the rather narrow perception of him as
African American poet to that of Brown the poet. While
Brown himself was never troubled by the dilemma of being a
Black poet or a poet who happens to be Black, the racial
signifier often causes students to get stuck on racial identity,
not on poetic ability. For many students, being African
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
628 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
American is synonymous with a life of deprivation caused by
“Jim Crow” laws or its modern permutation of “ghetto” life.
As a consequence, they need guidance in viewing Brown as
conscientiously crafting and representing experience in poetic
form. Also, Brown saw himself as part of a modernist tradition
established by Robert Frost, E. A. Robinson, Carl Sandburg,
and Edgar Lee Masters, on the one hand; and by the many
nameless vernacular figures who provided aesthetic forms via
the blues, folk tales, and work songs that he adapted for poetic
purpose, on the other hand. Brown, then, must be taught as an
Americanist, whose precepts and examples sought to argue his
liberation from, as he considered it, the burden imposed by the
more narrow designation Black writer.
Redirecting students from identity politics to poetic
ability can be accomplished in a number of ways. I begin by
placing him within a thematic and structural context of black
and white writers who sought the “extraordinary in ordinary
life.” In part, this means illustrating Brown’s comment that
when Sandburg said yes to his Chicago hog butchers and
stackers of wheat, he was moved to celebrate the lives, lore,
and language of black folk.
It also means locating him in a context of writers using
black folk traditions during his era, such as Langston Hughes,
Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, and Waring
Cuney, among others. I discuss very generally the differing
ways they made use of black folk experiences to establish texts
and aesthetic contexts. What this permits is a comparative
approach; it asks for ways Brown’s blues poems, for example,
conform and depart from those of Hughes and Cuney.
Of the various presentational techniques I’ve used, one
has been especially useful: listening to Brown reading his own
poetry, which is available on several Folkways records and
CD’s. Brown is an exceptional reader, in part because of his
background in drama and his reputation for being a raconteur.
Many students pose questions related to the subtle way
in which Brown calls into question the panoply of Jim Crow
laws. In Brown’s “Old Lem,” for example, they ask for
clarification about the nonverbal communication suggested by
Old Lem’s standing with bowed head, averted eyes, and open
hands, in contrast to the whites with hands balled in fists and
eyes in direct, confrontational stares. The history of these
gestures dating from its formalization into law during the early

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 629
nineteenth century helps broaden the focus of Brown’s poetry
into discussions of relevant social and cultural issues.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

How does Brown’s work simultaneously refute racial

stereotypes and affirm the humanity of black life? What is
distinctive about Brown’s humor? In what ways does it borrow
from the vernacular tradition brought to prominence by
Twain? How does the theme of the pursuit of democracy
figure into Brown’s aesthetic vision? How do sociological
concerns coalesce with aesthetic pursuits without one
overshadowing the other? What innovations in technique and
craft can be discerned in Brown’s poetry?

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

I find the issues of period and school to be particularly

interesting. Brown has been vociferous in refuting the term
Harlem Renaissance. His opposition takes on two points: First,
Harlem was a, not the, center of Negro creative activity during
this era. Second, he often puns, if this era was the Renaissance,
where is the naissance? Critics generally include him in the
group of writers who came of age during the twenties. Brown
questioned his inclusion in the group, by preferring to be
considered a “lone wolf.” And he further questioned the neat
periodization of the New Negro Movement into the years
1922–1929. A renaissance, he contended, was much longer.
One could use Brown’s denials, then, as bases for defining
problems of period, school, and even aesthetic convention. For
example, how does Brown’s use of black idiom differ from his
immediate predecessors and from writers as early as Paul
Laurence Dunbar and his imitators? Or, how does his
adaptation of vernacular speech—along with that of Langston
Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston—restore a vitality and
aesthetic possibility that James Weldon Johnson claimed was
no longer possible?

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

630 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Original Audience

Brown himself is his own best spokesman on the question of

audience. In terms of an external audience, he confronted “the
dilemma of a divided audience.” On one hand, a white
readership, thoroughly conditioned by racial stereotyping to
expect superficial depictions of blacks, sought confirmation of
their beliefs in black poetry. Bristling at any hint of a racially
demeaning representation of blacks, the audience of black
readers sought glorified portraits of blacks, which became
stereotypes in another direction. Brown rejected both
audiences and instead hypostatized one. The oral or speakerly
quality of his poetry depends in part on the audience he creates
within his poetry. The dynamics of speaker-listener are central
to understanding the performative nature of his work. In
Brown’s description, poetry should communicate something.
(The explanation of “communication” can be inferred from his
letter to Langston Hughes, in which he said poets should not
follow the elitist path of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, two poets
he considers no longer talking to each other, only themselves.)
Communication is accomplished by using forms and structures
and the language of black folk. Such use articulates a vision of
the world that celebrates the dignity, humanism, and worth of
a people largely misunderstood and misrepresented.
Readers of Brown’s poetry today come away with a
similar sense of the performative dimensions of his poetry, I
think, because much of Brown’s poetry continues to hold up.
Even though today’s audience may not know the character of
racial discrimination in the way Brown experienced it, his
poetry has a quality that transcends particular time and place.
“She jes’ gits hold of us dataway” the speaker in Brown’s “Ma
Rainey” tells us. Readers of the poem today, like those of an
earlier generation, come away with the same feeling.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. The questions I assign are determined by the approach

and the poems I use. My approach to the Slim Greer
poems, for example, centers on the poem as tall tale. I
generally ask students to consult a literary handbook for
features of the tall tale and to read the poems in light of
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 631
their findings. In this same vein, I often assign actual tall
tales (such as Roger Welsch’s Shingling the Fog and
Other Plain Lies) or other examples of poetry written in
this tradition (such as Fireside Tales by Joe Allen), as a
way of suggesting Brown’s distinctiveness.
2. My paper topics are assigned to extend students’
understanding of works we read and discuss in class by
encouraging them to build upon the assigned reading a
comparative critical analysis. The issues raised in the
first part of this question give students a chance to range
beyond class discussion.

Bibliography

African American Review, vol. 31, no. 3 (Fall 1997): A special

issue devoted to Sterling A. Brown.

“Brown, Sterling A.” and “Slim Greer.” In Oxford Companion

to African American Literature. Eds. William L. Andrews
et al. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Stepto, Robert B. “Sterling A. Brown: Outsider in the Harlem

Renaissance?” In The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations,
edited by Amritjit Singh, et al., 73–81. New York:
Garland Publishing, Inc., 1989.

Tidwell, John Edgar. “ ‘The Summer of ’46’: Sterling A.

Brown Among the Minnesotans,” Black Heartland, 1.1
(Spring 1996): 27–41.

Tidwell, John Edgar, guest editor. “Oh, Didn’t He Ramble:

Sterling A. Brown (1901–1989),” special section of Black
American Literature Forum, 23.1 (1989): 89–112.

Wagner, Jean. Black Poets of the United States. Urbana-

Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1973. Chapter 11,
“Sterling Brown.”

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

632 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Contributing Editor: Robert Hemenway

Classroom Issues and Strategies

While there are no particular difficulties in teaching Hurston,

some students find the dialect hard to understand. To address
this problem, I usually read several passages aloud to help
students get a “feel” for the voices. Once they’ve heard
Hurston read aloud, they can create her characters’ speech in
their minds so that it is understandable.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Women’s issues
Race issues
Interface between oral and written literature

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Short story structure

Representations of an oral culture

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Langston Hughes
Alice Walker

Claude McKay (1889–1948)

Contributing Editor: Elvin Holt

Classroom Issues and Strategies

I suggest that teachers begin with McKay’s love poems. This

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 633
approach allows students to relate to McKay on a purely
human level and prepares them for the discomforting racial
themes that dominate some of the other poems.
Students respond to the persistent racism in American
society. Some nonblack students want to know why they have
to read such poems. Many of them believe the poems are “for
black people.” Some students object to the eroticism of the
love poems.
“Flame-Heart” evokes the romantic tradition of
Wordsworth and Shelley, poets whose work McKay admired
greatly. This finely wrought poem, which expresses the poet’s
deep longing for Jamaica, his beloved homeland, highlights
McKay’s interest in nonracial themes.
“A Red Flower,” one of McKay’s most striking love
poems, features brilliant conceits similar to those found in the
poetry of John Donne and other metaphysical poets. Identify
the metaphor in the first and last stanzas of the poem.
In “Flower of Love,” McKay presents another example
of his passion-ate, yet controlled, love poetry. Like “A Red
Flower,” “Flower of Love” turns on an elaborate conceit,
recalling the best work of Andrew Marvell. Describe the
poem’s central metaphor and explain the reference to the
South.
“America” is one of McKay’s best protest poems.
Explain the poem’s central theme and describe the prophecy
the speaker relates in the final quatrain.
“The Lynching,” a moving expression of McKay’s
outrage against the senseless killings of blacks that marked the
early decades of this century, depicts Christ as the victim of
the lynching. Is the Christ figure an effective image,
considering the context?
McKay’s best-known poem, “If We Must Die,” urges
blacks to wage war against their oppressors. Winston Churchill
used McKay’s poem to revive the spirit of his countrymen
during World War II.
“The Harlem Dancer” focuses on a beautiful black
woman performing in a nightclub. What is the central theme of
the poem? Does the poet articulate a point of view with which
black feminists might concur?
“Harlem Shadows” is the title poem from McKay’s
1922 collection of poetry. Who or what are the “shadows”
mentioned in the poem’s title? What does the poem say about

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

634 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
the plight of black Americans in general?

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

It is essential that students get a sense of what it was like to be

black in America during the early decades of this century.
Students must also realize that McKay’s Jamaican background
made him particularly sensitive to the plight of black
Americans.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

It is important to give students a good introduction to the

Harlem Renaissance. Students need to know what the writers
(blacks) were trying to accomplish. Students should note
McKay’s dependence upon traditional British forms such as
the sonnet.

Original Audience

I help students to understand the social history that shaped

McKay’s work and determined his first audience. Then I try to
help students see why the poems remain fresh and vital to our
own time.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Since McKay was influenced by important British poets such

as Wordsworth, Shelley, and Donne, it is useful to compare
and contrast his work with that of English romantic and
metaphysical poets. Stylistic similarities are often evident.
Bibliography

James R. Giles’s Claude McKay is a good book for teachers.

The text is well organized, and the index makes it easy to
locate specific information.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 635

Anne Spencer (1882–1975)

Contributing Editors: Evelyn H. Roberts and J. Lee Greene

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Aside from black literature anthologies and general reference

sources, limited critical material is available. The poet Anne
Spencer can best be made accessible to students in various
ways.

1. Relating Spencer’s fascination with reading and

studying at the Virginia Seminary (note, for example,
her selection as the commencement speaker).
2. Presenting an overhead transparency of one of her
longer poems, “At the Carnival.” Most students enjoy
this poem and can relate to such an experience—
comparing or contrasting with their own carnival and/or
county fair experiences.
3. Showing the photographs that appear in J. Lee Greene’s
Time’s Unfading Garden.
4. Using selected black literature anthologies placed on
library reserve for students who wish to prepare brief
oral reports or short papers.

Many of Spencer’s poems show dramatic compression

and sharpness of image and phrase. She is no pleader of
causes, rarely choosing to comment on the race issue in her
published poetry. Yet her biography reveals a wide
acquaintance with civil rights leaders, literary dignitaries,
lecturers, and other prominent citizens, black and white, who
would appear as public speakers and/or artists in Lynchburg,
Virginia.
Students admire Spencer’s commitment to maintaining a
free, independent spirit, not being hampered or restrained by
husband or offspring. They also admire her determination and
concentration to create despite the reality that “art is long and
time is fleeting.” In addition, students applaud both Spencer’s
assertiveness as demonstrated by her work for women’s
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
636 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
suffrage and her determination to create options that allowed
her to pursue her art by diverse routes (as demonstrated by her
work as the first black librarian in Lynchburg).
Students are curious about Spencer’s statement,
published by Countee Cullen (Caroling Dusk, p. 47):
“But I have no civilized articulation for the things I hate.
I proudly love being a Negro woman; [it’s] so involved and
interesting. We are the PROBLEM—the great national game
of TABOO.”

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Emily

Dickinson, Amy Lowell, and Angelina Grimké, Anne Spencer
maintained a strong belief in individual freedom and liberty to
convey ideas and uphold ideals vital for personal expression.
Further, Spencer possessed strong individual preferences and
exhibited objections to various standards or beliefs that may
have compromised her personal ideals. See poems not
included in this anthology such as “Wife-Woman” and
“Neighbors.”
Further, Anne Spencer sustained a life-long admiration
for poets and the art of poetry. In her poem “Dunbar,” she pays
tribute to Chatterton, Shelley, and Keats.
Some additional similarities can be cited showing an
interrelatedness in the art of the above-mentioned poets. As
Emily Dickinson advanced in years, the circle of her world
grew ever smaller. Dickinson became a hermit by deliberate
and conscious choice. Similarly, Anne Spencer withdrew from
the community as the years passed. For Dickinson, her
isolation allowed her to become prey to the then-current
Emersonian doctrine of “mystical individualism.” As a flower
of New England transcendentalism, she became a Puritan and
free thinker obsessed with the problems of good and evil, of
life and death, nature and destiny of the human soul. Toward
God, Emily Dickinson exhibited an Emersonian self-
possession.
Moreover, Emerson’s gnomic style became for Emily
Dickinson epigrammatic to the point of being cryptic; a quality
that Anne Spencer, Amy Lowell, and Angelina Grimké
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 637
likewise display.
Finally, Anne Spencer in some of her poems—
“Requiem,” “Substitution,” “Wife-Woman”—appears to
embrace a pantheistic view that can be compared to Emerson’s
view in “Hamatreya” of recognizing God in nature.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Though sometimes coupled with the Harlem Renaissance

period, Anne Spencer follows the tradition of neoromantic
poetry, having composed some poems before the Harlem
Renaissance era was clearly identified, or designated. Her
poetry communicates a highly personal experience, revealing
an arresting image. Her assessment of an experience may be
occasionally ironic but discloses her profundity.
Anne Spencer’s style reveals her individuality, an
affinity for nature imagery, and the conventions of British and
American romantics, as her sensibility to form and color, a
rich and varied vocabulary, and a pantheistic philosophy
disclose.
An admirer of Robert Browning, one of her favorite
poets, who, despite his use of the idiom of conversation,
achieved remarkable cogent compressed lines, Anne Spencer,
likewise, achieved a similar style. Economy of phrase and
compression of thought result from numerous revisions of the
same poem. Compare with Emily Dickinson’s extensive
and/or intensive revision strategy.

Original Audience

To help students imagine Spencer’s original audience, they are

urged to create a yesteryear time capsule list for the poem
when first written or published: listing common objects, terms,
phrases, scenes, situations existing then but vastly different
from the present era. For example:

BEFORE WWII SINCE WWII

“At the My Limousine-Lady Gay little girl of

the Diving
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
638 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Carnival” fig-leaf blind crowd
(composed bull-necked man quivering
female-thing
about 1919) sausage and garlic booth call it dancing
quivering female-thing Little Diver
Gestured assignations Carnival-tank
heaven-fed Naiad
bacilli of the usual
Neptune

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Both Emily Dickinson and Spencer were philosophical in their

observations and perspectives. Dickinson’s simple yet
passionate style was marked by economy and concentration.
She developed sharp intense images and recognized the utility
of the ellipsis of thought and verbal ambiguity. Like Anne
Spencer, Dickinson read extensively and intensively.
Compare Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for
Death” with Spencer’s “Substitution” and “Requiem.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson created his own philosophy,
believing that all forces are united by energetic truth. Though
he lectured and composed many extended prose works,
Emerson’s poems, like those of Emily Dickinson and Anne
Spencer, contain the core of his philosophy. He directed
considerable thought to social reform and the growing issue of
slavery.
Spencer, like Emerson, composed her poems in her
garden. She has voiced high ethical, aesthetic, and independent
positions on the topics she addresses in her poetry.
Although Anne Spencer did not vividly express her
concern for social issues as did Henry David Thoreau and R.
W. Emerson, her adult civic and professional life as librarian,
and occasionally her poetry, addressed her concern for social
and racial progress. H. D. Thoreau conveyed a genuine feeling
for the unity of man and nature in Walden. His deep-rooted
love for one place, Walden, characterized the epitome of his
universe. Similarly, Anne Spencer’s garden was central to her
symbolic, historic, literary, religious imagery and meaning.
Countee Cullen’s “Foreword” to his work Caroling
Dusk asserts that “Anne Spencer [writes] with a cool precision
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 639
that evokes comparison with Amy Lowell and the influence of
a rockbound seacoast” (p. x1).
Note: Examine Amy Lowell’s “Patterns.” Compare
techniques and concepts as noted in Spencer’s poems, for
example, “Substitution,” “Lines to a Nasturtium,” and “For
Jim, Easter Eve.”
Both Angelina Grimké and Spencer studied well their
neo-romantic models. Both writers reveal great sensitivity and
emotional acuity. Neither is writing for a group or class, or a
race, nor do they use the language of complex reasoning and
emotional compression. Rather, there is the direct attempt to
present and define an emotional experience.

Bibliography

“Anne Spencer.” In Negro Poetry and Drama and The Negro

in American Fiction, edited by Sterling Brown. With a new
preface by Robert Bone. New York:
Atheneum, 1937/1978, 65–66.

Cullen, Countee, ed. Caroling Dusk. New York: Harper, 1927,

47–52.

Greene, J. Lee. Time’s Unfading Garden: Anne Spencer’s Life

and Poetry. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1977, 204. Since Anne Spencer’s poems were published in
nearly every major black anthology, it is
essential to include Greene’s work, for the appendix
contains the largest collection of her published poems.
Spencer never arranged for a collected publication, though
she constantly composed poems, and
revised many of her earlier pieces through 1974, the year
prior to her death. See also Chapter 7, “The Poetry:
Aestheticism” and Chapter 8, “The
Poetry: Controversy.”

Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial

Mountain.” Nation (23 June 1926): 692–
94.

Locke, Alain. “The New Negro; An Interpretation.” In The

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
640 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
American Negro: His History and Literature, edited by
Alain Locke. New York: Arno Press and
The New York Times, 1925/1968, 3–16.

Primeau, Ronald. “Frank Horne and the Second Echelon Poets

of the Harlem Renaissance.” In The Harlem Renaissance
Remembered, edited with a memoir by Arna
Bontemps. New York: Dodd, 1972, 247–67.

Stetson, Erlene. “Anne Spencer.” College Language

Association Journal, XXI (March
1978): 400–09.

Nella Larsen (1891–1964)

Contributing Editor: Deborah E. McDowell

Classroom Issues and Strategies

As students become rightly more attuned to representations of

gender, race, and class in literary and cultural texts, the
subtleties of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing create
interesting problems. Such problems derive from the general
tendency of readers to elevate one social category of analysis
over all others, often ignoring the interactive working of each
on the other: race on gender, gender on class, etc. Readers
attentive to class will find the narrow class spectrum of these
novels offputting, for they can seem on the surface to be mere
apologies for the black middle class, showing little awareness
of and bearing on the poverty that the masses of blacks
suffered in 1920s Harlem.
While attention to irony, point of view, and rhetorical
strategy is essential to reading any text, with Nella Larsen it is
especially so. In Passing, for example, understanding that
Irene Redfield, from whose perspective much of the novel is
told, is an unreliable narrator, is key to understanding the
novel. Equally important is the function of Clare and Irene as
doubles, a strategy that undermines Irene’s authority as the
center of racial consciousness, clarifies the points in the
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 641
narrative’s critique of the black middle class, and uncovers the
issues of sexuality and class that an exclusive focus on race
conceals.
It is useful to read Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life and
to show the two film adaptations of the novel.
Students respond to the heightened attention to color and
clothing and atmosphere in Nella Larsen’s novels and wonder
if her concentration on mulatto characters indicates an
unmistakable “privileging” of whiteness.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

It is important to provide information about 1920s Harlem and

the literary and cultural confluences that shaped the Harlem
Renaissance. It is critical that the movement be defined not by
its “unities,” but rather, by its “contraries” and be seen as the
site of a class-based contestation over the terms and production
of black art. The aesthetic theories, produced by such writers
and intellectuals as James Weldon Johnson (Introduction to the
Book of American Negro Poetry), Alain Locke (“The New
Negro”), Langston Hughes (“The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain”), W. E. B. Du Bois (“Criteria of Negro Art” and
“The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed?”), Jessie
Fauset (reviews in The Crisis), and Zora Neale Hurston
(“What White Publishers Won’t Print”) are all essential
readings. None of these attempts to articulate the terms of an
emerging “black art” can be divorced from a discussion of the
production and consumption of the texts, especially the system
of white patronage during the period, which necessarily
affected and at times constrained artistic freedom.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

The most obvious tradition in which to situate Larsen’s novels

must be the novel-of-passing, which problematized questions
of race. Deemphasizing “biology,” the novel-of-passing
provided convenient ways to explore race as a construct of
history, culture, and white supremacist ideology. Equally
important is the tradition of the novel of manners, as well as
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
642 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
the romance.

Original Audience

I note the fact that the audience for Nella Larsen’s writings, as
for all black writers during the Harlem Renaissance, was
primarily white, though a small group of black middle-class
intellectuals read them as well.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Jessie Fauset’s “Plum Bun & Comedy, American Style”

James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-
Colored Man
Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars
Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth
Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. The metaphor of passing accrues several layers of

meaning. What are they? How do they relate to each
other?
2. Whose story is this? Clare’s or Irene’s?
3. What does this passage mean: “[Irene] was caught
between two allegiances, different, yet the same.
Herself. Her race. Race: The thing that bound and
suffocated her. Whatever steps she took, or if she took
none at all, something would be crushed. A person or
the race. Clare, herself, or the race. Or, it might be all
three.”
4. It has been suggested that Passing uses race more as a
device to sus-tain suspense than as a compelling social
issue. What is the relation of race to subjective
experience in the text?
5. What is the significance of narrative endings in Larsen?
Why does Passing refuse to specify how Clare is killed
and who is responsible?

Bibliography

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 643
Carby, Hazel. “The Quicksands of Representation.” In
Reconstructing Womanhood. New York: Oxford University
Press.

Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists. Westport, CT:

Greenwood Press, 1980.

Huggins, Nathan. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford

University Press.

———. Voices of the Harlem Renaissance.

Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue.

McDowell, Deborah E. “The ‘Nameless, Shameful Impulse’:

Sexuality in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing.” In
Studies in Black Ameri- can Literature, Volume III, edited by
Joe Weixlmann and Houston A. Baker, Jr. Greenwood, FL:
Penkeville Publishing, 1988.

Tate, Claudia. “Nella Larsen’s Passing: A Problem of

Interpretation.” Black American Literature Forum 14
(Winter 1980).

Wall, Cheryl. “Passing for What? Aspects of Identity in Nella

Larsen’s Novels.” Black American Literature Forum 20
(Spring/Summer 1986).

Washington, Mary Helen. “The Mulatta Trap: Nella Larsen’s

Women of the 1920s.” In Invented Lives. New York:
Anchor/Doubleday, 1987.

Youman, Mary Mabel. “Nella Larsen’s Passing: A Study in

Irony.” College Language Association Journal 18 (1974).

George Samuel Schuyler (1895–1977)

Contributing Editor: Michael W. Peplow

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
644 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Satire, especially the harsher Juvenalian mode, upsets students,

who see it as too negative. And when satire deals with an
emotional issue such as racial prejudice, it becomes even more
controversial. Some students find Schuyler’s satire offensive.
In addition—though it has universal overtones—“Our Greatest
Gift to America” is still a 1920s period piece. Some of the
issues and language pose problems for modern students.
I make sure my students have a working definition of
satire and, as we read the essay, I discuss the satiric devices
Schuyler employs. Once we have finished reading the essay, I
ask students to discuss why Schuyler chose satire and whether
his approach was effective. The more background the students
have in Juvenal, Swift, Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and H. L.
Mencken (Schuyler’s mentor and friend), the better the essay
works in class.
I also make sure my students read some “straight”
essays that address the racial situation in the 1920s. Articles
from the NAACP’s Crisis are helpful, especially those by its
editor, W. E. B. Du Bois (see Daniel Walden, ed., W. E. B. Du
Bois: The Crisis Writings [Greenwich: Fawcett, 1972]). The
more exposure students have had to African-American and
other minority literatures, the more they will appreciate
Schuyler. I give students notes on the Harlem (or New Negro)
Renaissance and read passages from Alan Locke’s “The New
Negro.” I tell students about KKK activities and lynchings in
the 1920s. I show them copies of The Pittsburgh Courier, a
leading black newspaper for which Schuyler worked, that
featured essays on race pride but included advertisements for
skin lighteners and hair straighteners. For the teacher who does
not have access to these materials, a valuable resource tool is
The Chronological History of the Negro in America.
Students sometimes say the essay is too depressing, that
Schuyler exaggerates and distorts the way things really were.
They feel Schuyler so denigrates blacks that he must have
been disgusted with his own people and secretly desire to be
white himself. Finally, students say the essay is not relevant
because people just aren’t prejudiced any longer. Prejudice is
not a comfortable thing to admit or discuss in class. It’s easier
to laugh a bit nervously and go on to the next essay. But
questions about present-day prejudices lead to often dramatic
discussions: fraternities or athletes on campus; a racial or

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 645
religious or national group; AIDS victims and welfare
recipients and street people—the list goes on.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

The historical issues include American racism, the Harlem

Renaissance vogue, the tendency of some black publications to
preach race pride and at the same time publish skin lightening
and hair straightening advertisements, the tendency of some
black leaders to profit from American racism, and the all too
prevalent belief among whites—and blacks—that “white is
right.” (You might remind students of an old black saying: “If
you’re white, you’re all right. If you’re brown, stick around. If
you’re black, get back.”)
The personal issues include Schuyler’s own encounters
with racism in the army and during his journalistic tours, his
courtship of and eventual marriage to a white woman, and his
life-long belief that America’s “colorphobia” was so absurd it
merited scathing ridicule.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

1. What literary conventions does Schuyler employ in his

satire?
The purpose of satire is to mock or ridicule human
follies or vices. Horatian satire tends to be light, often
comic, the assumption being that humans are more
foolish than sinful and that they are capable of
reformation. Juvenalian satire—Schuyler’s mode—is
harsh and slashing, the assumption being that humans
are so corrupted they are beyond reformation. In an
early newspaper column Schuyler wrote that his
dominant motive was malice and that his intent was “to
slur, lampoon, damn, and occasionally praise anybody
or anything in the known universe, not excepting the
President of the Immortals.” In his long career he rarely
praised but did much damning, so much so that he was
accused in a Crisis editorial in 1965 of being the
incurable iconoclast who “dips his pen in his ever-handy
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
646 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
[well] of acid.”
In “Our Greatest Gift” Schuyler creates a satiric
persona much as his role model Swift did in “A Modest
Proposal” and Gulliver’s Travels (note the reference to
“Brobdingnagian”). Schuyler’s persona seems to be an
intelligent but “plain folks” black man, literate and
unafraid to speak the truth. He despises the inner circle
of black intellectuals for their willingness to capitalize
on racial tension and their secret belief that “white is
right.” He also despises redneck whites who believe a
white skin makes them special. Both groups he sets out
to shock; he even uses a number of current racial slurs.
By the end of the essay, the persona seems to have
become so disgusted with America’s “colorphobia” that
he sounds like the compleat misanthrope who despairs
of ever converting America to rational behavior.
Another technique Schuyler the satirist employs is
irony— saying or implying the opposite of what one
really believes. Throughout the essay—from the words
“greatest gift” in the title, through references to “this
enlightened nation” and “our incomparable civilization,”
to the devastating final paragraph—Schuyler is savagely
ironic.
A third technique Schuyler employs is exaggeration.
Whether describing black poets, race leaders, or whites,
Schuyler’s portraits deliberately overstate. His character
sketches of three “noble rednecks”— Isadore
Shankersoff, Cyrus Leviticus Dumbbell, and Dorothy
Dunce—are vintage Schuyler and anticipate his much
more extended character sketches in Black No More.
2. What literary school does Schuyler belong to?
Schuyler, noted the 1965 Crisis editorial, was “a
veteran dissenter and incurable iconoclast,” one of that
“select breed of moral crusaders and apparent social
misfits who, as journalists, delighted in breaking the
idols of the tribe.” He is a direct descendant of Ambrose
Bierce, the “caustic columnist” from San Francisco and
author of “The Devil’s Dictionary” and The Satanic
Reader, of Brann the Iconoclast, of H. L. Mencken, the
founder and editor of The American Mercury. He also
worked side by side with important 1920s black
iconoclasts; Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph,

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 647
Theophilus Lewis and Wallace Thurman, W. E. B. Du
Bois and Rudolph Fisher—each of whom was capable
of idol-smashing but not on the sustained level that
Schuyler was. On an even larger scale, Schuyler, as
noted before, was a satirist in the tradition of Juvenal,
Swift, and Twain, all of whom he studied and admired.

Original Audience

1. Schuyler’s audience was primarily black—the essay

appeared in a black publication that was read by the very
racial leaders Schuyler lampoons in the first part of his
essay. If any whites read it at the time, they would have
been those who, in typical Harlem Renaissance fashion,
became obsessed with exotic and primitive blacks (see
Rudolph Fisher, “The Caucasian Storms Harlem,” in
Huggins’s Voices from the Harlem Renaissance; for a
good example of white fascination with blacks, see Carl
Van Vechten’s melodramatic Nigger Heaven).
2. As suggested earlier, today’s audience will have
difficulty relating to “Our Greatest Gift.” White students
usually insist that the essay is dated because there are no
more lynchings or overt acts of prejudice. Black students
are sometimes offended by the racial epithets and the
glancing attacks on black leaders. The teacher who
wishes to challenge contemporary smugness can have a
field day: Is white racism really dead? Do black or other
leaders ever capitalize on racial tension? Is there still a
“white is right” mentality in America?

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

There is no one author to whom Schuyler compares well,

though he uses the same satiric devices that Juvenal, Swift,
and Twain employ and the same iconoclastic manner that
characterized Bierce, Brann, Mencken, Fisher, Lewis, and
Thurman.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
648 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

1. (a) Schuyler attacks two groups of people in his essay.

Who are they? Is he even-handed in his double
attack?
(b) What is the satire? Distinguish between Juvenalian
and Horatian satire and decide which mode Schuyler
preferred.
(c) What was the Harlem Renaissance?
2. (a) Have half the class (include the more creative
writers) write a satire attacking a controversial issue
à la Schuyler. Use a persona, employ irony, and
develop two or three exaggerated character sketches.
Have the rest of the class write reasoned essays from
both groups and determine which type of
approach—satire or reasoned essay—is more
effective, and why.
(b) Write a response to Schuyler’s article assuming the
persona of a white racist or a black nationalist in
Schuyler’s own time.
(c) First discuss in class and then write an essay on the
following: A Modern Response to Schuyler’s “Our
Greatest Gift to America.”

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 649

Blues Lyrics
Contributing Editor: Steven C. Tracy

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Many students will be totally unfamiliar with the blues

tradition and will therefore benefit greatly from the playing of
blues recordings in class in conjunction with the selections
from blues lyrics printed in the text. In fact, playing these
blues selections in class will help introduce the important point
that the blues is an oral, not a written, tradition. Asking the
students to write down what they hear on the recordings
played brings up not only the problems that scholars have
deciphering texts but also the issue of how one should render
an oral production on the printed page.
Students should be encouraged to respond to the voices
of the lyrics. Are they voices of resignation and defeat, or hope
and transcendence, of strength and pride, or of some mixture
of all of these? What is it that has given the blues their staying
power? And what is it that writers like Langston Hughes,
Sterling Brown, Al Young, Alice Walker, Shirley Anne
Williams, and Allen Ginsberg see in them that makes these
writers draw on them from their own writing? Certainly
comparing these blues lyrics to various blues poems will help
clarify authors’ differing attitudes about the blues.
Religious and sexual themes are generally the most
controversial. Students question the image of women in the
blues and wonder whether the blues singer is weak and self-
pitying or strong and self-sufficient. The Furry Lewis lyric is
often seen as being bizarre and sick: a good starting point for a
discussion of the place of humor in the blues.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

A number of important subjects are covered in these

selections, including love, hate, sex, violence, hope,
superstition, religion, and protest, indicating that the blues in
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
650 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
fact deal with a range of subjects in a variety of ways. When
blues are performed, they often provoke laughter from an
audience that identifies with the experience being described or
that appreciates the novel way the experience is described.
There are a number of humorous verses here that could be
compared for the way they achieve their effects. From
Bracey’s hyperbole to Carter’s prurience to Cox’s unexpected
assertiveness to the startling images of Wheatstraw and Lewis.
Such a discussion would emphasize the idea that the blues,
though often discussing sadness and hardships, contain a
pretty fair amount of humor. Ellison includes a good
discussion of this subject in Shadow and Act, as does Garon in
Blues and the Poetic Spirit (pp. 77–87).

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

An advantage to playing the songs for the students is that it

allows them to hear how the various stanza structures are fit
into the music. For instance, the lyrics of Childers and
Wheatstraw are both sung to eight-bar musical stanzas, but the
lyric patterns are different. Students can discuss the advantages
of one stanza over the other. The selection from “John Henry”
is a ten-bar blues ballad, presenting in narrative form the story
of the folkhero whose strength and perseverance in the face of
incredible odds is a paradigm for the African-American
experience (see Sterling Brown’s “Strange Legacies”). The
selection from Margaret Carter is from a sixteen-bar
vaudeville blues especially, but present in other kinds of blues
as well. The rest of the examples included come from twelve-
bar blues, but certainly the examples from Jefferson, Bracey,
Cox, Robert Johnson, and Holmes are sufficiently different to
indicate the possibility of diverse phrasing in the blues, even
within what is sometimes considered to be a rather restrictive
form.
We can also see in “Got the Blues” the presence of
several stock phrases—lines or parts of lines that turn up
regularly in blues that are similar to but not the same as the
formulaic lines discussed by Parry and Lord. Students might
be encouraged to take the first line of stanza two or six and
generate an individual rhyme line that completes the thought in
some kind of personal manner as a way of helping them
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 651
understand how tradition has an effect on the individual blues
singer.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

The only blues lyric quoted in its entirety here is Blind Lemon
Jefferson’s “Got the Blues,” interesting because, rather than
developing a single theme, it progresses through associative
linkages and contrasts. While some early commentary argued
that the blues were often incoherent, more recently texts have
been discussed as nonthematic, partially thematic, or thematic,
and the presence of such associative linkages and contrasts is
important to see and recognize as a textual strategy rather than
an example of textual incoherence. Again, students can be
encouraged to discern the associations among lines and stanzas
the way they might be asked to do for poetry by Ezra Pound,
T. S. Eliot, or Amy Lowell.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

652 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. Have students listen to recordings by Langston Hughes,

Sterling Brown, Zora Neale Hurston, Ishmael Reed,
Michael Harper, Allen Ginsberg, or Jack Kerouac that
have musical accompaniment (or are sung performances,
in Hurston and Ginsberg) and discuss how the music
affects our response to the words.
2. Have students write a blues song and discuss their
rationale for choice of stanza form, themes, images,
diction, and voice, establishing clearly the relation of
their song to the tradition.
3. Have students survey the various methods of
transcribing blues lyrics and defend one method as
superior to the others.
4. Have students pick a theme developed in a blues-
influenced poem by an author like Langston Hughes and
search out blues lyrics that deal with a similar theme to
see how the literary artist revises the traditional
treatment of the theme.

Bibliography

Interviews with blues performers are included in:

Oliver, Paul. Conversation with the Blues. New York: Horizon

Press, 1965.

Pearson, Barry Lee. Sounds So Good to Me. Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984.

For explanations of unfamiliar words, phrases, and

places in blues lyrics see:

Gold, Robert. Jazz Talk. New York: Da Capo Press, 1982.

Major, Clarence. From Juba to Jive. New York: Viking, 1994.

Townley, Eric. Tell Your Story. Chigwell, Essex: Storyville,

1976.
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 653

Other valuable discussions of blues include:

Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Random House,

1964.

Evans, David. Big Road Blues. Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1982.

Garon, Paul. Blues and the Poetic Spirit. London: Eddison

Press, 1975.
Harris, Sheldon. Blues Who’s Who. New Rochelle, N.Y.:
Arlington House, 1975.

Jahn, Janheinz. A History of Neo-African Literature. New

York: Grove Press, 1968.

———. Muntu: An Outline of the New African Culture.

London: Faber and Faber, 1961.

Jones, Leroi. Blues People. New York: Wm. Morrow, 1963.

Oliver, Paul. The Blues Tradition. New York: Oak

Publications, 1970.

———. The Meaning of the Blues. 1960. Reprint. New York:

Collier Books, 1972.

———. Savannah Syncopators: African Retentions in the

Blues. Kibsibm Studio Vista, 1970.

———. The Story of the Blues. Philadelphia: Chilton Books,

1973.

Titon, Jeff Todd. Early Downhome Blues. Urbana: University

of Illinois Press, 1978.

For discussions of the importance of the blues to

African-American literature see:

Baker, Houston A., Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American

Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

654 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Tracy, Steven C. Langston Hughes and the Blues. Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Williams, Sherley A. “The Blues Roots of Contemporary

Afro-American Poetry.” In Chant of Saints, edited by
Michael Harper and Robert Stepto. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1979.

Discography

Bogan, Lucille. Lucille Bogan Vol. 3. Document BDCD 6038,

n.d.

Bracey, Ishmon. Complete Recordings (1928–30). Wolf WSE

105, n.d.

Carter, Margaret. Female Blues Singers Vol. 4. Document

5508, 1997.

Childers, Virgil. Carolina Blues Guitar. Old Tramp OTCD 03,

n.d.

Cox, Ida. Ida Cox Vol. 2. Document DOCD 5323, n.d.

Davis, Walter. Walter Davis (1930–32). JSP CD 605, n.d.

Dickson, Tom. Memphis Blues. Document DOCD 5014, n.d.

Henderson, Rosa. Rosa Henderson Vol. 2. Document DOCD

5402, 1995.

Holmes, Wright. Country Blues Classics Vol. 3. Blues Classics

7, n.d.

Jefferson, Blind Lemon. Complete Recorded Works Vol. 1.

Document DOCD 5017, n.d.

Johnson, Robert. The Complete Recordings. Columbia C2K

46222, 1990.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 655
Johnson, Tommy. Complete Recorded Works (1928–29).
Document DOCD 5001, 1990.

Lewis, Furry. Furry Lewis 1927–29. Document DOCD 5004,

n.d.

McClennan, Tommy. Travelin’ Highway Man. Travelin’ Man

CD 06, 1990.

McCoy, Charlie. Charlie McCoy. Document BDCD 6018, n.d.

Rainey, Ma. Ma Rainey. Milestone M 47021, 1974.

Tucker, Bessie. Bessie Tucker 1928–29. Document DOCD

5070, n.d.

Wheatstraw, Peetie. Peetie Wheatstraw Vol. 2. Document

DOCD 5242, 1994.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

656 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Issues and Visions in Modern

America

Randolph Bourne (1886–1918)

Contributing Editor: Charles Molesworth

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Students should be asked to discuss how America might have

looked to a social critic before World War I. While some of
Bourne’s ideas may seem “timely” to today’s students, this is
due in part to the rather prophetic aspects of this essay. Bourne
was of course conscious of the immigration that was reshaping
American society (especially in its large cities), and he was
very aware of the social and political changes being brought
about by modernization (such as the routinization of work, the
development of the “culture industry” and mass media,
urbanization, and so on). But his idealism about America was
unaffected by the large-scale tragedies associated with the
world wars, the rise of fascism, the atom bomb, and so forth.
Also, Bourne would not have been familiar with the later
developments in academic forms of social science. Thus, the
“theoretical” nature of Bourne’s formulations may strike some
as implausible. Some of the main classroom issues might be
put this way: How thoroughgoing can a criticism of American
society be, and does a social critic have to be “practical” in his
or her suggestions? To what extent must a social critic rely on
surveys or statistical studies to justify his or her conclusions?

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

The call for a social identity that surpasses or transcends

nationalistic feeling would be (paradoxically) both implausible
and yet “logical” at the end of the nineteenth century, when
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 657
nationalism was perhaps the main political sentiment shaping
world events. Bourne’s essay challenges and responds to, even
at a distance, the same moods and arguments that animated
romantic nationalism of the sort that had recently shaped Italy
and Germany, among others, into nation-states. The American
nexus for this nationalism involved many issues, but perhaps
chiefly the fervent arguments about immigrants and whether or
not they could be successfully assimilated into a modern
nation. Could such assimilation proceed through cultural and
social means, assuming a single, “uniform,” biological basis
for national identity was not available to all the various
immigrant groups? The issue of nativism, which claimed that
only people who descended from specific racial or ethnic
groups could form harmonious social and political identities,
was a form of racism. In response to nativism, which he
thoroughly rejected, Bourne developed his cultural criticism,
so that, among other things, the very idea of identity could be
redefined. This means that his focus on culture as a defining
sociopolitical force was very distinctive. The German tradition
of kulturkampf (or cultural struggle) had not been taken up in
America on a large scale, but Bourne and many of his
contemporaries were aware of it, having studied on the
continent after their college years. Other writers at this time
who shared some of Bourne’s concerns were Van Wyck
Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Bourne used the essay as his main form of artistic expression.

In this form, which had grown very popular through the spread
of magazines, such as The New Republic, that were devoted to
developing large readerships and influencing popular opinion
and political policy, Bourne tried to advance his ideas in ways
that were both oppositional and hortatory. This meant that he
had to combine a certain amount of social observation (with
the keen eye of a journalist), a matrix of reasoned argument
(while avoiding any “dry” sense of logic), and a call to ethical
values (without incurring the charge of sheer moralizing). All
the while he kept in mind the general reader, an educated
layperson who was assumed to have an abiding and interested
stake in political issues. This meant that his vocabulary could
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
658 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
not be a technical one, yet he had to make his argument
convey more than the sense of an editorial in a daily
newspaper.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Other essays in the anthology can be compared to Bourne’s

and studied for their stylistic approach and the contents of their
arguments. For example, the selections from W. E. B. Du Bois
are especially instructive in this context. T. S. Eliot’s
“Tradition and the Individual Talent” contains a sense of
personal identity and group allegiance that can also be
contrasted with Bourne’s. And the place of culture and cultural
politics in the New Negro Renaissance is germane to these
issues: see, for example, Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Artist
and the Racial Mountain” and George Schuyler’s “The Negro-
Art Hokum.” Perhaps the closest parallel is with Alain Locke’s
“The New Negro,” where the issue of social transformation
through cultural renewal is paramount.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 659

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. How are national identities usually understood, and how

are they formed? Is there more than one way to “make a
nation”? Does Bourne discuss these ways?
2. What other writers in the American tradition are
explicitly occupied with the “national character”?
Selections in The Heath Anthology from Franklin,
Jefferson, and Whitman (“Democratic Vistas”) could be
assembled on this topic.
3. What are the specifically modern ways that Bourne
defines national and personal identity?

Anzia Yezierska (1881?–1970)

Contributing Editor: Sally Ann Drucker

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Because Yezierska often uses a first-person narrator who

speaks with a great deal of emotional intensity, readers
sometimes assume that her stories are strictly
autobiographical. In addition, her use of Yiddish-English
dialect can obscure the fact that she crafted these stories
deliberately and carefully. Readers unfamiliar with Yezierska
may focus on how these stories relate to episodes in her life,
rather than on her vivid characters, rich imagery, and adept use
of dialect.
It can be helpful to discuss one of Yezierska’s purposes
in writing—to immerse the reader in the ghetto experience.
(She also wished to explore her own feelings and to earn a
living in the process.) In addition, although most readers come
from backgrounds totally different from that of her characters,
her stories can be discussed in terms of contemporary
problems encountered by new immigrants, ghetto youth,
working-class employees, and women.
Photos of Lower East Side tenement scenes or films
such as Hester Street (based on Yekl) are useful to set up a
visual context for Yezierska’s writing.
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
660 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Yezierska’s most-taught novel is Bread Givers. In that
book, the patriarchal father represents traditional Jewish ways.
Because of the negative aspects of the father-daughter
relationship, students who are not familiar with Jewish culture
come away with a skewed view of it. Even in Yezierska’s
other works, what the heroine is giving up in order to become
Americanized—family and culture—may not be readily
apparent, given the heroine’s economic and status gains from
the process. These issues can be clarified in class discussion.
Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal
Issues

The processes of acculturation and assimilation, and the

positive and negative effects of these processes, are ongoing
themes in Yezierska’s writing. Her work is particularly
interesting for its presentation of immigrant women’s pursuit
of the American Dream. “America and I” was originally
published in 1922, right before immigration laws changed
(1924), restricting access to everyone not from northern or
western Europe. This may have affected the way Yezierska
ended the story (see last paragraph).

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Yezierska’s work has been called sentimental and

melodramatic. It is important to understand that in the Yiddish
language tradition that she came out of, emotionality was
expected, particularly for women. Her work fuses aspects of
realism (attention to detail) and romanticism (characters’
idealism), ultimately making it difficult to categorize.

Original Audience

Yezierska’s stories were first published in magazines that had

a general readership. She wrote primarily for mainstream
Anglo-American audiences of the ’20s, although her work was
certainly seen by Jewish-Americans and other ethnic readers
as well. Contemporary audiences, particularly female readers,
respond especially to the immigrant waif characters as women
who forged cultural and economic identities by their own
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 661
strength, energy, and perseverance.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Works on immigrant Jewish life in this volume include the

following:

The Promised Land, by Mary Antin

Yekl, by Abraham Cahan
Jews Without Money, by Michael Gold
“Tell Me a Riddle,” by Tillie Olsen

Yezierska’s story can also be compared with stories and

poems written about/by other immigrant/ethnic groups. There
are many in this volume.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

662 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. It can be useful to ask about conflicts described in her

writing: in this story, old versus new, expectations
versus reality; in other stories, Jewish tradition versus
American opportunity, parent versus child.
2. General: Oral histories—students interview members of
their families, focusing on questions of cultural
transitions, such as rural to urban, one decade to another,
immigrant conflicts, etc. Papers—on working-class
women in early twentieth-century literature, on the
Americanization process in literature.
3. Specific: Papers comparing this story with some of
Yezierska’s others in Hungry Hearts or Children of
Loneliness.

Bibliography

Shorter Works:

Baum, Charlotte, et al. The Jewish Woman in America. New

York: Dial Press, 1976, Chapters 3, 4, 5, 91–162.

Drucker, Sally Ann. “Yiddish, Yidgin & Yezierska.” Modern

Jewish Studies Annual VI (1987): 99–113.

Henriksen, Louise Levitas. “Afterword About Anzia

Yezierska.” In The Open Cage: An Anzia Yezierska
Collection. New York: Persea Books, 1979, 253–62.

Kessler-Harris, Alice. “Introduction.” In The Open Cage: An

Anzia Yezier- ska Collection. New York: Persea Books, 1979,
v–xiii.

Pratt, Norma Fain. “Culture and Radical Politics: Yiddish

Women Writers, 1890–1940.” American Jewish History 70,
no. 1 (Sept. 1980): 68–90.

Yezierska, Anzia. “Mostly About Myself.” In Children of

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 663
Loneliness. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1923, 9–31.

Longer Works:

Dearborn, Mary V. Love in the Promised Land: The Story of

Anzia Yezierska and John Dewey. NY: Free Press, 1988.

Henriksen, Louise. Anzia Yezierska: A Writer’s Life. New

Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988.

Schoen, Carol B. Anzia Yezierska. Boston: Twayne, 1982.

Michael Gold (1893–1967)

Contributing Editor: Barry Gross

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Because Gold’s intentions are didactic, he says what he has to

say very directly and his language is very plain. Since he does
not deal with any complex or difficult concepts or ideas, his
work is immediately accessible to students.
It’s useful to provide some statistics for background. For
instance, the population density on the Lower East Side, the
mortality rate for infants, incidence of tuberculosis and other
infectious diseases, etc. It would also be helpful to show
pictures, tapes, movies depicting life on the Lower East Side,
although there has been a tendency to sentimentalize that life,
to make it something to feel nostalgia for, and, hence, it’s
gotten prettified.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

The warpings of poverty. The malign effects of unmediated

capitalism. The peculiarly American mix and juxtaposition of
races, groups, minorities. The nature of a slum (a slum seems
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
664 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
to be a slum regardless of who inhabits it). The threats to the
traditional patriarchal structure of family and culture that
American ghetto life posed. The role of the mother. The
threats to traditional Jewish culture that America posed.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Note the combination of a journalistic style characterized by

short sentences, monosyllabic words, a kind of reportage we
think of as Hemingwayesque, and the occasional sketches of
sentimentality, exhortation, lament.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 665

Original Audience

To the extent that Jews Without Money is written by a member

of the Communist party who called for the overthrow of
capitalism, it is very important to locate it in 1930. To the
extent that it is a sentimental and intellectual and artistic
autobiography, it is not so important to locate it. To the extent
that it’s a book about being Jewish, some historical placement
is necessary. (There will be students, even Jewish students,
who will think that “Jews without money” is an oxymoron.)

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

The Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska, Call It Sleep by Henry

Roth, Yekl by Abraham Cahan, The World of Our Fathers by
Irving Howe, The Rise of David Levinsky by Abraham Cahan,
and What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg are the most
famous of many works that deal with Jewish immigrant life on
the Lower East Side. It would also be useful/interesting to
compare and contrast with works by and about other
immigrant groups, other minorities, other slum dwellers.

Bibliography

There is much available on the Lower East Side (World of Our

Fathers, The Golden Door, et al.); the Anti-Defamation
League of B’nai B’rith (chapters in all large cities) will usually
provide bibliographies, secondary materials, source materials,
study guides for educational purposes.

H. L. Mencken (1880–1956)

Teaching material for H. L. Mencken is available on The

Heath Anthology web site. (To access the site, please go to the
Houghton Mifflin college home page at
http.//college.hmco.com. Select English, then select The
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
666 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Heath Anthology textbook site.)

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 667

John Dos Passos (1896–1970)

Contributing Editor: Robert C. Rosen

Classroom Issues and Strategies

The biographies of U.S.A. are slices of history; their broader

contexts are alluded to but not spelled out. To appreciate fully
the nuances of Dos Passos’s language, the significance of his
descriptive details, and the force of his sarcasm, a reader needs
to know a lot of history.
The teacher probably needs to do some explaining,
though he or she should avoid explaining the biographies to
death. To appreciate “The Body of an American,” students
should know something about World War I, which Dos Passos
saw and many of his original readers remembered. They
should understand such things as the unprecedented carnage of
that war (10 million killed and 20 million wounded); the
particular brutality of trench warfare; the deeper causes of the
war (and of U.S. entry into the war) that lay behind the noble
rhetoric; and the irony of racism at home (alluded to in “The
Body of an American”) and repression of domestic dissent
during and after a war fought, Wilson told Congress, because
“the world must be made safe for democracy.” “The Bitter
Drink” is more difficult than “The Body of an American”
because its historical sweep is greater. Perhaps assigning (or
even reading aloud) a brief sample of Veblen’s writing would
help; it would at least give students a sense of his approach
and style. (See, for example, the title excerpt “The Captain of
Industry” in The Portable Veblen, edited by Max Lerner; the
last paragraph alone might suffice.)

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

“The Body of an American” is about the waste of war and the

public and official cant that surrounds it. These issues should
be of interest to students who have friends or relatives facing
military service or who are themselves of draft or enlistment
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
668 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
age. “The Bitter Drink” is about what it means to be a serious
critic of society, to tell the truth and refuse to say “the essential
yes.” Students soon to begin careers where they may have to
compromise their values should find much to discuss.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Since the excerpts included in the anthology represent only

about one percent of the U.S.A. trilogy and one of its four
narrative devices (biographies, newsreels, conventional
narratives, and the camera eye), teaching these excerpts is very
different from teaching U.S.A. Should you find time in the
course to read The 42nd Parallel or Nineteen Nineteen or The
Big Money, you might discuss with students the relationships
among the four narrative devices as well as questions about the
nature of fiction and the nature of written history raised by Dos
Passos’s mixing of real historical figures and fictional
characters. If students are reading only “The Body of an
American” and/or “The Bitter Drink,” you might ask them
what role they think such “nonfiction” biography might play in
a novel. With “The Body of an American,” you might also ask
about the effect of Dos Passos’s running the opening words
together, of his juxtapositions of different kinds of language,
and of his Whitmanesque list-making. With “The Bitter
Drink,” you might discuss how Dos Passos goes about
communicating his own attitudes while narrating the life of
Veblen.

Original Audience

Though the two excerpts in the text are brief, they should
suffice to suggest the radicalism of U.S.A. To students
surprised by it, you might explain that such views were not so
uncommon during the 1930s (though, for Dos Passos, they
came even earlier). At the height of the depression, with no
unemployment insurance and meager public relief, over one in
four U.S. citizens had no job, and millions more suffered wage
cuts and underemployment. People lost all their money in bank
failures; families were forced out of their homes and
apartments; many went hungry while milk was dumped into
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 669
rivers and crops were burned to keep up prices. The economic
system seemed irrational, and millions marched in protest,
fought evictions, joined unions. This was the context of U.S.A.
for its original readers.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Almost any other work of fiction from the 1930s might

usefully be compared with the excerpts from U.S.A. Alongside
“The Body of an American” you might read Dalton Trumbo’s
Johnny Got His Gun (1939) or, for contrast, the tight-lipped
antiwar fiction in Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925). For a
powerful contemporary comparison, you might look at
Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July
(1976).

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. With “The Body of an American,” you might ask

students what kinds of contrasts Dos Passos sets up
between the news coverage and political declarations (in
smaller print) and the story of John Doe. They’ll
probably point to such contrasts as the nobility of the
rhetoric versus the ugly actuality of war, the
superficiality of the reporting versus the depth of human
suffering, and the impersonality and abstractness of the
public language versus the personal detail in those lists
of possible facts about John Doe and in the many
biographical particulars that suggest all that went into
making the adult human being whose unidentifiable
remains are being buried.
2. With “The Bitter Drink,” you might ask what Dos
Passos means by Veblen’s “constitutional inability to
say yes” and why Dos Passos makes this “essential yes”
a refrain. Veblen’s ideas are as much implied as spelled
out, and you might ask students to summarize as much
of them as they can infer from the biography. You might
also ask them to draw connections between those ideas
and Veblen’s life. Dos Passos sets this life very firmly in
its historical context, and students might discuss the
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
670 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
whole sweep of history brought to life in the biography
and what patterns and recurring themes they see.
Students might also speculate on whether there is too
much of the apology in Dos Passos’s description of his
hero’s “woman trouble.”

Albert Maltz (1908–1985)

Contributing Editor: Gabriel Miller

Classroom Issues and Strategies

It is useful for the students to have some historical/social

background, particularly concerning the depression, the rise of
radicalism, and its various configurations (why so many
writers and intellectuals were attracted to Marxism, socialism,
etc.). Many of Maltz’s novels are also grounded in historical
events (The Underground Stream, The Cross and the Arrow,
and A Tale of One January). You might provide background
lectures and readings on the history of the thirties (“The
Happiest Man on Earth”). For other Maltz pieces, a knowledge
of radicalism, the radical literary wars, HUAC and the
blacklist would be very helpful. Concerning HUAC (House
Un-American Activities Committee), many students will be
interested in the blacklist, fronts, and the Hollywood Ten
(Maltz was part of this group).

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 671

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

1. The Depression and displacement and

disenfranchisement of the individual
2. The totalitarian environment and the individual
3. The ideal of the democratic individual
4. The individual alone in nature and with the self

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Discuss the “proletarian novel,” the relationship of art and

politics, the conventions of realism. Questions of what
constitutes a political or radical novel would also be
stimulating and useful.

Original Audience

The audience at least in the beginning was the “initiated”:

radicals who were sympathetic to Maltz’s ideas. However,
Maltz was always reaching out to a wider audience and would
come to reject the restraints of didactic art.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

More well-known writers whose work can be read along with

Maltz are Richard Wright, Native Son (emphasis on the
emerging radical consciousness, questions of class); John
Steinbeck; Grapes of Wrath (Americans on the road,
communal versus individual) and In Dubious Battle (political
novel); James Farrell, the Studs Lonigan trilogy (realism,
environment, politics); also Jack London and some of
Whitman’s poems, particularly those emphasizing the ideal of
the democratic man.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
672 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

1. I think questions regarding the effectiveness of

presenting character and the character’s relationship to
the overriding issues of the story would be productive.
2. Discuss how successfully Maltz integrates didactic aims
with “art.” Is Maltz’s best work at odds with its didactic
intent? How does Maltz’s work effectively convey the
central issues of his time?

Bibliography

Maltz’s essays in The Citizen Writer; his New Masses essay

“What Shall We Ask of Writers?” (1946) in which he takes the
notion of didactic art to task and for which he was harshly
criticized.

Lillian Hellman (1905–1984)

Contributing Editor: Vivian Patraka

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

What is Hellman’s idea of history? Who makes history and

how are events in history related? Why does she connect the
events of the McCarthy Era to the Vietnam War? What is her
conception of the average American’s understanding of
history? How is this related to the “deep contempt for public
intelligence” Hellman ascribes to Nixon? Why does Hellman
reserve her strongest sense of betrayal for the intellectuals who
did not protest the events of the McCarthy Era? What
assumptions about intellectuals did Hellman have to abandon?
What qualities does she ascribe to the McCarthyites and their
proceedings that should have made them the “hereditary
enemies” of intellectuals?

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 673

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

What kind of credibility does an autobiographical memoir

have as compared to a history or a political science book? How
convincing is Hellman in establishing her point of view about
the McCarthy Era? Is she less convincing because the work
identifies itself as someone’s opinion? Because she is angry?
How does a question like “Since when do you have to agree
with people to defend them from injustice?” or a statement like
“Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of
scoundrels” make Hellman’s work both persuasive and
memorable? Why does Hellman use the word scoundrel and
what does she mean by it?
Elsewhere, Hellman has said that in a time of
scoundrels, “The pious words come out because you know the
pious words are good salesmanship.” The idea that the
language of morality, of patriotism, and of religion can be
manipulated in an entrepreneurial way to capitalize on
people’s fears applies to more than just the fifties. Are there
any examples from contemporary times of this sort of
manipulation? Who benefits from it and why? Who is harmed?
Why would Hellman use the phrase “black comedy” to
describe activities she considered to be harmful and evil? Why
doesn’t she call them a tragedy, given that many people’s lives
were ruined? Elsewhere she says, “One is torn between
laughter and tears. It’s so truly comic. People were confessing
to sins they’d never done; making up lies of meetings they’d
been in when they’d been in no such meeting; asking God and
the Committee’s pardon for nothing but just going into a room
and listening to some rather dull talk. . . . And that, to me was
the saddest and most disgusting, as well as most comic. The
effect was of a certain section of the country going crazy.”
What would motivate people to “confess” and “name names”
in this manner?

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Hellman has spoken of “the right of each man to his own

convictions.” Where is the line between having a conviction
and being subversive or dangerous and who is allowed to
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
674 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
interpret that for us? In what direction is that line currently
moving? Playwright Arthur Miller, writing about the
McCarthy Era, said “With the tiniest Communist Party in the
world, the United States was behaving as though on the verge
of a bloody revolution.” Who would profit from creating this
impression? What kinds of acts can be justified once this
impression is created?

Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)

Contributing Editor: Wendy Martin

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Students will be interested in discussing McCarthy’s depiction

of social roles and norms and will want to relate her
questioning of traditional beliefs to the social changes of the
twentieth century. However, while this is a fruitful course of
discussion for McCarthy’s work, it is important not to lose
sight of the literary artistry of her work. Students should learn
to be attentive to the nuances of language, the symbolism and
carefully controlled diction that characterize McCarthy’s prose
and make her a superb literary stylist as well as a chronicler of
her times.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 675

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Mary McCarthy’s life extended across most of the twentieth

century, and her writing is as multifaceted as the rapidly
changing American society in which she lived. She was
concerned with issues of social justice and responsibility, and
this concern manifests itself in her work in the form of
repeated examinations of assumptions about gender, race, and
class. For example, her novel The Group (1963) explores the
irony, and sometimes the ugliness, in the lives of two decades
of American women, dealing openly with adultery, misogyny,
divorce, and insanity. The novel ridicules traditional notions of
femininity and suggests new ways of conceptualizing
marriage, work, and love.
Although McCarthy’s work seems to be informed by a
feminist sensibility, she asserted that she was not a feminist.
While it is important to establish the political and social
background of the leftist intellectual circles in which she
moved, it is also important to recognize that McCarthy was
always an independent thinker who resisted easy
categorization.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

McCarthy’s writing took a variety of forms, from early theater

columns for the Partisan Review to incisive political essays on
Vietnam and Watergate. Her best-known works are her novels
and her collection of short autobiographical narratives,
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, from which the selection
“Names” is taken. This collection is both a product of and a
deviation from previous American autobiographical narratives.
In revisiting her own life, McCarthy exposes the silences and
boundaries in the lives of the traditional women who inhabited
her childhood. McCarthy undertakes two projects
simultaneously: she demystifies cultural assumptions of silent
and passive femininity, while simultaneously building up her
own autobiographical persona. Memories of a Catholic
Girlhood stands as an important model for American women’s
autobiography in a century of dramatic social change for
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
676 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
women.

Original Audience

McCarthy wrote for a wide audience. She was, at one point, a

staff writer for the New Yorker. The Group, her best-selling
novel, has sold over five million copies worldwide. In general,
both her fiction and her essays are meant to appeal to
progressive and open-minded women and men, and to
encourage these readers to question social traditions and
assumptions that arbitrarily limit their lives.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

McCarthy’s intellectual background could be provided through

the works of her close friend, Hannah Arendt, whose book The
Life of the Mind McCarthy spent two years editing. Another
interesting source of background material would be the literary
criticism of her second husband, Edmund Wilson.
McCarthy said herself that John Dos Passos’s The 42nd
Parallel, which she read while at Vassar, was one of her most
important influences. She met Dos Passos when she joined a
group of radical writers living in Greenwich Village during the
late thirties; other writers she met living in the Village were
Sherwood Anderson, Erskine Caldwell, and Upton Sinclair.
The political and intellectual debates that she participated in
during this period were important formative influences for the
ideas that would later appear in her writing. It would be useful
to compare and contrast the work of these male radicals with
McCarthy’s vision.
McCarthy also stated that she had read Louisa May
Alcott’s Little Women and Jo’s Boys. These works and the
fiction of other earlier women writers, such as Edith Wharton
and Willa Cather, could be used to establish the tradition of
white women’s literature in which she wrote, and which she
transformed to fit her individual needs. In addition, a
comparison and contrast could be developed between
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood and, for example, Report
from Part One, the autobiographical narrative of McCarthy’s
contemporary, Gwendolyn Brooks.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 677

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. Many of the major issues of McCarthy’s writing can be

touched on in a discussion of “Names.” Questions for
discussion could include: What is the significance of the
“frontier” setting of the narrative? How does the ethnic
mix of names in the convent relate to the narrator’s self-
perception? How does the institutional structure of the
convent force the narrator to be deceptive about
“becoming a woman”? Why is she renamed at the same
time that the incident with the blood occurs, and why
does she say that the name “Cye” becomes her “new
patron saint”? Discussion of these questions should
bring out McCarthy’s concern with exposing the reality
beneath social surfaces and with the ways that social
pressures affect the construction of the self. Another
topic for discussion would be McCarthy’s treatment of
the women in the female society of the convent. How
does she portray the various girls? The nuns?
2. McCarthy’s prose at first seems light and readable, but
on closer inspection it turns out to be quite dense and
laden with interconnected levels of meaning. Having
students write on brief passages gives them an
opportunity to explore this richness of meaning. Ask
students to make connections between seemingly
disparate passages. For example, what does the passage
at the beginning of “Names,” where she describes the
society of Puget Sound, have to do with the passage at
the end, in which she says, “What I wanted was a fresh
start”? Students should be able to discover how the
theme of re-created identity, treated both seriously and
with irony, runs throughout “Names.”

Bibliography

For a concise overview of McCarthy’s life and work, see

Wendy Martin, “Mary McCarthy,” in Modern American
Women Writers, edited by Elaine Showalter et al. (1991). For
biographical information, see Carol W. Gelder-man, Mary
McCarthy: A Life (1988), and Doris Grumbach, The Company
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
678 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
She Kept (1967). For a study of her autobiographical writings,
such as “Names,” see Gordon O. Taylor, “The Word for
Mirror: Mary McCarthy,” in Chapters of Experience: Studies
in Twentieth-Century American Autobiography (1983). For a
more general treatment of McCarthy’s artistry, see Wendy
Martin, “The Satire and Moral Vision of Mary McCarthy,” in
Comic Relief: Humor in Contemporary American Literature,
edited by Sarah Blacher Cohen (1978).

Clifford Odets (1906–1963)

Contributing Editor: Michael J. Mendelsohn

Classroom Issues and Strategies

If Odets occasionally seems dated, he is less so for those who

put this play into its 1930s milieu. Consider having student
reports or general class discussion on major concerns in the
United States in the mid-1930s. With some understanding of
the Depression decade, it may be less difficult for students to
believe that this militant young dramatist was able to present
such a play to sympathetic, even enthusiastic audiences.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 679

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Playwright Odets clearly believed in 1935 that through union

solidarity the little man might find a way out of the despair of
America’s economic and social ills. For many, American
society was not fulfilling its true promise; in the big novel of
the thirties, The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck asserted much the
same theme. With only a touch of hyperbole, Harold Clurman
called Waiting for Lefty “the birth of the thirties.”

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Techniques of speaking across the proscenium, a scenery-less

stage, and planting actors in the audience give instructors
plenty to work with. For instructors interested in theatrical
links and analogues, Pirandello or Wilder would be
appropriate points of departure.

Original Audience

Audience for this work is especially important. It was intended

for presentation in union halls before small, typically
preconvinced audiences. It is obviously strident, intended to
make a militant emotional appeal. Unlike much of our theater
today, it was not intended merely to entertain or inform.
Politically, Odets was going through the same sort of youthful
flirtation with communism that marked the careers of many of
his 1930s contemporaries. Without this sort of context, the
play comes off as merely a strident little piece of propaganda.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Compare with Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

Examine Pirandello or Wilder for some comparison of
theatrical techniques of crossing the proscenium and merging
actors with audiences.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

680 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. What is the unifying plot for all these episodes?

2. Is this play universal, or is it too tied to place (New
York) and to time (The Great Depression of the 1930s)?
3. Is the message too blatant? Is the language too strident?
Is Odets more a “revolutionary” or “reformer” if you
compare, for example, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of
Wrath, a product of the same decade?
4. Which scenes have the greatest impact, and why?
5. Odets has often been praised for his use of vivid,
colorful language. Which speeches work well for you?
Which are less successful?
6. How successful is the playwright in crossing the
proscenium and breaking down the traditional separation
between audience and action? Why does he use this
technique?

Bibliography

Brenman-Gibson, Margaret. Clifford Odets. Boston:

Atheneum, 1981, 299–306.

Clurman, Harold. The Fervent Years. New York: Hill and

Wang, 1957, 138–42.

Mendelsohn, Michael. Clifford Odets. New York:

Everett/Edwards, 1969, 21–26.

Murray, Edward. Clifford Odets. New York: Frederick Ungar,

1968, Chapter 1.

Weales, Gerald. Clifford Odets. Indianapolis: Pegasus, 1971,

Chapter 3.

Meridel LeSueur (1900–1996)

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 681
Contributing Editor: Elaine Hedges

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Some knowledge of the Great Depression of the 1930s is

helpful—the extent of unemployment, the fears about the
future of American Society, the disillusionment of many
writers and intellectuals with the capitalist system, and
especially the impact of the Depression on women. Our
popular images of the period are of men standing in breadlines
and selling apples. LeSueur was one of the few writers to
focus on women, who also lost jobs, faced starvation, and were
abandoned by husbands who were forced to seek work
elsewhere.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

682 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

As indicated above, the Depression of the 1930s is the

historical context for “Women on the Breadlines.” Instructors
might want to ask why women have tended to be ignored in
accounts of the Depression.
“Women” emerged from LeSueur’s personal experience.
She herself experienced unemployment and poverty during the
Depression. She knew, and for a time lived with, the kinds of
women she describes in “Women on the Breadlines.”

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

“Women on the Breadlines” is a piece of journalism. Though

the emphasis is on factual observation, with details conveyed
through short, simple declarative sentences, it is not
“objective” reporting. (Students might be asked what
“objective” writing is and whether in fact there is such a
thing.) The reportorial voice doesn’t keep itself distinct from
the material it describes, but, rather, identifies with the women
and their suffering. Is this kind of journalism—called
“reportage” in LeSueur’s time—similar to the personal or
“new” journalism written today?
Does the style, in its directness and simplicity,
effectively capture the lives and feelings of the women
described? Is it, despite being journalism, in any ways a
“literary” style? Note LeSueur’s use of imagery: for example,
a scrubwoman with hands “like watersoaked branches.” Can
students find other examples of figurative language?
Also examine the structure of “Women on the
Breadlines.” It develops through a series of vignettes or
portraits. Are these arranged in any particular order? Does the
piece develop, as a short story might, toward a climax? What
might be the difference between this kind of journalistic
feature story and a literary short story?

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 683
Other writings in the anthology that describe the depression
can be compared and contrasted in content and style to
“Women on the Breadlines.”

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

684 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Mourning Dove (Okanogan) (1888–1936)

Contributing Editor: Kristin Herzog

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Students tend to see these stories as folklore, not realizing their

complexity and philosophical background. They cannot
measure the difficulty of translating a corporate tradition into
the narrative voice of an individual writer. They will wonder
for what audience the stories were written.
Consider approaching Mourning Dove from the world of
American Indian spirituality, especially since the sweat-house
tradition is still alive in some tribes.
In order to teach the excerpts from Coyote Stories, a
basic understanding of the trickster figure in the legends of
various tribes is necessary. Though the trickster’s shape can be
Raven, Blue Jay, Raccoon, Crow, or Spider, and though his
function differs in detail, he is most frequently Coyote, the
creature of playful disguises and clever self-seeking, the
breaker of taboos, teller of lies, and creator of possibilities. He
is the restlessly moving, ever-changing, indomitable spirit of
survival. Coyote is always at the mercy of his passions and
appetites; he holds no moral or social values, yet through his
actions all values come into being. Trickster tales give
humorous vent to those impulses that the tribes had to repress
in order to maintain social order.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Mourning Dove had to surmount almost incredible obstacles to

become an author, and she personifies the ambivalent position
of many ethnic women writers. Besides the lack of education
and the ordeal of daily life in migrant labor camps, she had to
contend with suspicious members of her tribe who did not see
any purpose in giving away their sacred stories or who
expected payment for telling them, since some ethnologists
had established that custom.
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 685
She also had to deal with the two men who made her
publications possible: Lucullus McWhorter and Heister Dean
Guie, the former an eminent scholar and faithful friend, the
latter a journalist who wanted to establish a reputation as
illustrator and editor. Both badgered her continually with
questions of verification for certain customs’ names or
spellings. Both considered themselves authorities on the
selection of stories “proper” for a white audience and on the
addition of notes. Guie decided to eliminate at least ten tales
from the final manuscript because they dealt with subjects like
incest, transvestism, and infanticide. Donald Hines has
retrieved these stories from Mourning Dove’s manuscripts and
has restored all the tales as closely as possible to her original
version.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Most difficult to grasp for the white reader is probably the

concept of power. Usually an individual’s power derived from
or was related to an animal to which he or she felt kinship.
Power for the Okanogans is not identical with what we call the
mind or the soul, but instead is more like the Christian concept
of a guardian angel—a force that protects and leads. When a
young girl or boy received power, they also received a “power
song” that was their very own. Thus power is immediately
related to words.

Original Audience

When the oral tradition entered the literary mainstream, it first

had to take on the conventions and proprieties of white
literature. Only decades later was the mainstream audience
able to understand orality “in the raw.” In Mourning Dove’s
time, the often bizarre or obscene behavior of Coyote could
easily be understood as reflection on Okanogan morals.
Besides, Coyote Stories was written first of all for children.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

686 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Compare with Zitkala-Sa in terms of “translating” tribal
traditions into white western narrative form.
On the surface, of course, the story of “The Spirit Chief
Names the Animal People” is simply entertaining and
educational. But, like any creation myth, it expresses a
complex “philosophy.” The animal people’s need for “names”
points to the coming of humans with a new kind of speech.
But there were “tribes” already inhabiting the earth together
with the animal people, and they were threatened by “people-
devouring monsters.” In a type of “Fortunate Fall” parable, it
is the Coyote, the bragging, bungling fool, who by divine
mercy is given the task of conquering these monsters. His
special power may at times falter, but if he dies, his life can be
restored by his twin brother, Fox, or by “others of the people.”
The reader trained in the Judeo-Christian tradition may
want to compare this story with biblical images and concepts.
The Spirit Chief is “an all-powerful Man Above”—as
McWhorter’s note phrases it—but he has a wife who could be
compared to the Sophia of the Hebrews: she participates in the
creation and is the human, commonsensical aspect of the
divinity who knows what the people need.
Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. Compare the creation myths of various world religions

or of various American Indian tribes. What do they have
in common?
2. In what sense did Mourning Dove herself become a
“trickster”? How do these stories compare with fairy
tales and fables?

Bibliography

Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the

Feminine in Ameri- can Indian Traditions.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1986, 81–84, 151.

Astrov, Margot. American Indian Prose and Poetry. Quoted in

Poca- hontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in
American Culture, edited by Mary V. Dearborn,
28. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 687
Fisher, Alice Poindexter. “The Transformation of Tradition: A
Study of Zitkala-Sa and Mourning Dove, Two
Transitional Writers.” Ph.D. Dissertation, City
University of New York, 1979, 36. On the quality
of the passage on hair cutting.

Fisher, Dexter. “Introduction.” In Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A

Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range, by Hum-
ishu-ma. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1981, v–xxix.

Hines, Donald M. ed. Tales of the Okanogans, Collected by

Mourning Dove. Fairfield, Washington: Ye Galleon
Press, 1976, 14.

Radin, Paul. The Trickster: A Study in American Indian

Mythology. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956;
rpt. New York: Greenwood Press, 1969.

Schöler, Bo. “Introduction.” In Coyote Was Here: Essays on

Contemporary Native American Literary and
Political Mobilization. Aarhus, Den- mark:
Department of English, University of Aarhus, 1984, 9.

Yanan, Eileen. Coyote and the Colville. Omak, Washington:

St. Mary’s Mission, 1971, 29.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

688 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

John Joseph Mathews (Osage) (1894–1979)

Contributing Editor: Andrew O. Wiget

Classroom Issues and Strategies

The principal issue in Sundown is the notion of progress.

Students frequently identify progress with material
improvements in lifestyle or increasingly complex technology.
This selection questions whether those are the true marks of
civilization. To see this, however, students must realize that
this selection comprises two parts, each of which portrays a
different moment, widely separated in time in the life of the
principal character, Chal Windzer. Chal (short for
“Challenge,” so named because his father wanted him to be a
challenge to the new generation) is a teenager in the first
section, still closely identified with some element of his
traditional Osage lifestyle. Note, however, that he is moving
rapidly toward accepting the values of Anglos, as is suggested
by his distance from the group of Indians he encounters during
the storm.
The second section of the story occurs over a decade
later. Chal has gone off to the University of Oklahoma, where
he has been exposed to prejudice, bigotry, and romance.
Falling in love with a white girl, he comes to despise his
Indian appearance and later tries to pass himself off as a
Spanish (not Mexican) gentleman. During World War I, he
serves in the Army Air Force as an aviator and develops a
passion for flying, which fulfills his need for a career. He loves
the excitement, the danger, the thrill of flying. After serving in
the Army Air Force, he returns home where he falls back into
an indolent lifestyle, marked by long periods of drunkenness.
He is just coming out of one of these periods, referred to in the
last section of this selection, when he attends the hearings at
which Roan Horse speaks.
In addition to providing background plot information, I
also certainly call attention to certain literary devices. For
example the oil derricks symbolize both the march and retreat
of “progress.” I’d also remind students a little bit of the history
of this period of time. Osages were exempted from the
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 689
provisions of the Dawes General Allotment Act, along with
the Five Civilized Tribes, because they held their land under
patented title, not by treaty. The surface of their reservation
land had been allotted and much of it alienated through sale,
but the mineral rights were retained by the Osage tribe in
common and leases were given out. In the 1920s, royalties
from these leases brought the tribe up to 20 million dollars per
year, divided equally, amounting to around 25 thousand
dollars per capita. A county court in Oklahoma had declared
the Osages incompetent to manage their estates and had
appointed guardians who charged a fee to manage these
estates. Between exorbitant fees and the malfeasance of these
guardians, the Osages lost much money and land.
In 1925, Congress transferred supervision of these
mineral rights from the county court alone to the county court
working in conjunction with the Osage agency. The federal
investigators referred to in the last section are not only
members of Congress but agents of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation. The so-called “Osage Oil Murders” are a
historical event of great notoriety and served to establish the
credibility of the FBI as a law enforcement agency. As
Mathews indicates, a conspiracy evolved to murder people
who owned rights to oil land so that their inheritors would
receive those rights. By murdering the inheritors, the
conspirators planned to channel those rights into the hands of
one person, an Anglo man who had married an Osage woman.
She was the last person on the hit list, which today still leaves
a trail of twenty-four unsolved murders and bombings.
The Osage oil boom needs to be understood in the
context of the free-for-all capitalist economy of the 1890s and
the first two decades of this century, during which the excesses
of the Robber Barons were finally curbed by the creation of
federal regulatory agencies. From the point of view of Indians
in Oklahoma, however, the real question that needs to be asked
is this: What happens to a community of people who go from a
subsistence economy, based on communal land, barter, and
credit, to an excess of cash, in the neighborhood of 25
thousand dollars per person per year (at the value of the 1920s
dollar), all within the space of one generation? How does such
a change affect people’s values, beliefs, and behaviors?
Students seem concerned about the ambivalence of the
ending, especially about whether or not Chal is really capable

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

690 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
of being a challenge to his generation, as his father had hoped.
After reading about Chal’s life of indolence, it is difficult for
students to believe that he will make such a bold move,
requiring such a commitment of effort, especially if that move
is motivated only by observing the very brief appearance of
Roan Horse. On the other hand, Chal has shown the desire to
be a warrior, and he has great ambitions. Does the ending mark
a real turning point in his life?

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

I would highlight the structure of the boom town society that

appears in the beginning of the selection. I would indicate the
characters’ attitudes toward the upcoming storm (bad for
business, dangerous) and contrast that with the attitudes of
some of the older Indians, such as Black Elk. In between we
have younger Indians, such as Sun-On-His-Wings and Chal.
The various attitudes that each of these people takes
toward the onset of the storm and toward the damage that the
storm does provide a keen insight into the different sets of
values that are coming together under the pressure of
“progress” and assimilation in this reservation community.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

I would point to the oil derricks as a symbol of “progress”; I

would also look at the change in Chal’s character between the
first section and the second section. It’s especially important
that students try to understand Chal’s apparent indifference
and his drunkenness as a response to an excess of easy money
in the absence of compelling community values. The
recognition of this, on Chal’s part, is what moves him to
respond so affirmatively to Roan Horse’s brief speech.

Original Audience

This book was published in the 1930s, where it met a receptive

audience of people in the middle of the Depression, who
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 691
understood the tremendous personal cost and human
devastation that was brought about by the unchecked
exploitation of natural resources and poor people. In this
context, especially, American Indians were highlighted as an
oppressed minority within the United States. In 1928 the
Meriam Report, commissioned by the U.S. government, found
that Indians had a mortality rate twice as high as the white
population, an infant mortality rate three times as high as the
white population, and that in spite of all this, the government
had been spending only fifty cents per year on the health care
of each Indian. Statistics like this shocked the nation, and
Indians became the object of renewed federal attention. Under
the Roosevelt administration, the U.S. government took a
number of important steps to redress these failures of its trust
relationship, though many of them, such as the Indian
Reorganization Act (1934), which allowed tribes to form their
own governments with written constitutions, were
controversial. Nevertheless, Mathews’s work needs to be seen
as speaking to the notion that the major difficulties on Indian
reservations come from what today we would call a “culture of
poverty.” And that these can be remedied by government
treatment.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Insofar as Mathews gives us a good picture of the transition on

Indian reservations, he can be compared usefully to Oskison
and Bonnin. Lynn Riggs’s play The Cherokee Night also gives
a good picture of the deculturation that has been visited upon
American Indians as a result of the abuses in the trust
relationship that they had with the U.S. government.
Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. How do the oil derricks mark the changes in the life of

the Osages and also in the personal history of Chal?
Why is Chal impressed by Roan Horse’s speech?
2. In the first section of the story a young Indian comments
about Black Elk: “His body is here but his mind is back
in a place where we lived many years ago.” How does
this observation reflect the forces that are creating the
conflict in this story?
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
692 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
3. At the very end of the story, Chal says that he is going to
go off to Harvard Law School and become an orator.
What do you think is the likelihood of Chal fulfilling
this stated goal? How would you support your
judgment?

Bibliography

Wiget, Andrew. “Modern Fiction.” In Native American

Literature. Boston: Twayne, 1985.

Wilson, Terry. “Osage Oxonian: The Heritage of John Joseph

Mathews.” Chronicles of Oklahoma 59 (1981): 264–93.

———. “John Joseph Mathews.” In Dictionary of Native

American Literature, edited by Andrew Wiget. New York:
Garland, 1994, 245–50.

Thomas S. Whitecloud (Chippewa) (1914–1972)

Contributing Editor: Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr.

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Present “Blue Winds Dancing” as you would any well-written

essay.
The social implication of being Indian in an Anglo-
dominated society gets lost for students in the larger issue of
simply feeling “at odds” as a result of “gaps”—social,
political, generational, etc.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

1. Self-identify, self-realization
2. Individual caught between two cultures, one not fully
lost and the other not fully gained
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 693
3. Culture loss and acculturation

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Stress the essay structure (this one is neatly divided; how do

the three parts interlock, structurally and thematically?).
Stress the use of rich visual imagery. Which seem to be
drawn from Indian heritage, which not? Is there any difference
in the effects of each?

Original Audience

It fits into the context of the whole scene of social disruption

in the Great Depression, heightened in this case by the sense of
being kicked loose, out of touch with two cultures.
For contemporary readers, it speaks to the large themes
of searching out roots and self-realization.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

For earlier generations of Indian writers who deal with the

theme of being caught between cultures, see Copway and
Apess, Eastman and Bonnin. For later writers, see Welch and
Erdrich.

D’Arcy McNickle (1904–1977)

Contributing Editor: John Lloyd Purdy

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Like so much of McNickle’s fiction, “Hard Riding” is a

deceptively simple story. As in the verbal arts (such as
storytelling), it implies and suggests more than it states.
Students often accept the “joke” played upon the Agent, and
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
694 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
then dismiss it as clever but relatively insignificant. However,
McNickle will work on them even after they have done so.
In his first novel, McNickle shows the effect of an
evening of story-telling on his young protagonist, Archilde,
who considers himself a “modern man” (an assimilated Indian
who no longer believes as his mother and her people believe)
and who easily dismisses “the old stories” they tell. On the
night of a feast, however, he is captured by those same stories
and taken to a new level of awareness in which he becomes an
“insider” and sees his people’s lives in new ways. They are no
longer the residue of the old bowing under the new, but the
bearers of a dynamic and important culture. In short, McNickle
consistently attempted a similar end for non-Native readers,
using a written medium.
Since the story “Hard Riding” is presented from
Mather’s point of view, one can examine what his thoughts
and reactions reveal about his character at the outset. For
instance, does the opening simply establish “setting” or does it
enlighten an important aspect of Mather’s nature, as he spurs
his horse on to the meeting? Also, he is, literally, a mediator:
He represents the modern, the progressive, and therefore he
possesses many of the same feelings and beliefs as McNickle’s
intended audience. Moreover, he is privy to knowledge of
“Indian ways” that he shares with us, revealing what his years
of experience have taught him about the people he has been
sent to manage. He becomes, at least initially and
momentarily, the expert, the authority.
The story obviously hinges on the thwarted efforts of
that authority, so the conclusion needs careful examination,
not only as it pertains to what precedes it, but also in how we,
as readers, respond to Mather’s failure to have his way, that is,
to spur the men “below” him to accept a new way of “justice.”
We are never involved in the debate that takes place among the
Native American characters; instead, the action is filtered
through an interpreter and the Agent himself yet we become
“insiders” when we reflect upon the implications of the
maneuvering; that the orders of the “dominant society” have
been followed, in form but certainly not in principle. Do we
applaud, condemn, or dismiss the actions of the tribe?

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 695
Issues

In 1934 McNickle took a job on the staff of the Commissioner

of Indian Affairs, John Collier, who reflected the New Deal
ideals of the Roosevelt administration. It was Collier’s belief
that, as much as possible, tribes should be allowed to direct
their own affairs, using traditional, rather than Euro-American,
governmental frameworks. McNickle subscribed
wholeheartedly to this idea, which in turn directed his work for
the remainder of his life. We can see that concept in this story.
When a federal functionary attempts to impose a new way, a
way he and the readers may consider wholly logical and in the
best economic interests of his charges, he is not only frustrated
but humiliated. However, the significance of this dramatic
crisis lies not in its overt political statements, but in its
demonstration of the efficacy of traditional Native economic
systems and governments in contemporary times.
As McNickle well knew, the survival and renewal of
Native cultures rest in the communal aspects of tribal life
perpetuated through ceremonialism and literature. Community,
rather than alienation and individuality, is a major thematic
concern in both, and in the writings of McNickle and those
who followed him. This communalism calls for sharing
hardships as well as bounty (that is, the cattle), and it is
maintained through the ability to reach consensus through
group reasoning and discussion, a governmental form
McNickle’s audience may uphold as an ideal of democracy,
but fail to recognize in practice in the story. The Indians whom
Mather addresses work in concert and exert control over their
own affairs. In a word, they are empowered by their communal
presence, their group identity as “insiders.” This, again, is a
recurring theme in McNickle’s fiction and his scholarly
writings. (See also the “Original Audience” section below.)

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

McNickle was found of the juxtaposition of very divergent

points of view. For instance, in his last novel, Wind from an
Enemy Sky (1978), he often uses chapter breaks to move from
his Native American to his Anglo characters. Given his
subject—American Indian perspectives—and his non-tribal
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
696 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
audience, this is an understandable technique. He forces
readers to assess what they believe about American Indians by
consistently undermining those beliefs with culture “shifting”
and therefore ethnographic revelation. His humane handling of
cross-cultural explorations creates moments of crisis.
In “Hard Riding,” this can be seen in the final passages,
where the primary point of view, that of the Indian Agent, is
somehow inverted, or shifted, as readers move from
“listening” to Mather’s narrative to trying to understand what
has happened beyond it, and how he has been duped.
McNickle also makes suggestive use of descriptions as a
means of shaping an audience’s preparation for events. More
than simply foreshadowing, this technique often works as a
symbolic subtext. For instance, in the opening ride he
describes the time of day, noting the “crimson flame thwarting
the prismatic heavens.” This may be dismissed by students
bred on stark realism as merely flowery prose; however, in
discussion it could also be considered as a preface to what
follows. Mather is thwarted at story’s end. Considering the
idea of a prismatic effect, and McNickle’s perspective on the
religions that had subjugated Native America, one might be
able to go further with the discussion. In fact, it may not be too
difficult to question the use of the name “Mather” for the main
character. McNickle was an avid reader in all disciplines,
including colonial history, in which the Mather family and
their ethnocentric beliefs figure prominently. McNickle played
with language and its allusive qualities in some interesting
ways.
Original Audience

McNickle’s audience changed dramatically over his lifetime,

which makes him, once again, a significant figure for study.
Today, his books have been continuously reprinted since the
mid-seventies and remain popular because they reflect what
many have come to understand as a revised and therefore
acceptable image of contemporary Natives and tribal issues.
When this story was first written, however, history books and
novels by non-Native writers still proffered as fact the popular
stereotypes we have come to recognize and reject: Native
Americans as either Noble Savages or savages; as the
remnants of a dying race, on the brink of extinction; as the dull
and sullen subhuman at a loss to deal with civilization; and so
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 697
on. They also devalued Native cultural achievements, pre-
Columbian populations, and the ill effects (and the morality)
of European colonization. Moreover, the ideal of
assimilation—the “melting pot” of America—was equally
prominent. It is little wonder that McNickle’s early works,
although well-received by critics, were not widely popular; he
presents Indians who exert a degree of control over their lives
and who take pride in their tribal identities. He presents a very
different American dream than his popular contemporaries,
Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, do.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

The anthology provides ample points of comparison and

contrast. McNickle’s work can be placed, in some ways, in the
context of other writings from the 1930s, writings by non-
Native writers; it can also be compared or contrasted with
writings by Native Americans produced before 1935. For
instance, Whitecloud’s “Blue Winds Dancing” (published in
the same year as McNickle’s first novel, The Surrounded )
possesses some of the same issues of community and
commercial America. Most profitably, however, one can
compare the ways that his work anticipates later works by
Native writers. There is a great deal of “resonance “ to be
found here.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. Is Mather’s proposal a logical one? Why or why not? On

what basis is that logic built?
2. Is the group’s alteration of Mather’s plan a logical one?
Why or why not? On what basis is its logic built?
(McNickle offers another “logic,” the logic of
communal needs and obligations over financial
expediency, and the latter is proffered as a distinct and
viable alternative to that of “modern, commercial
America.”)
3. What is the significance of the title? How does
McNickle’s description of Mather’s riding style reflect
or imply the author’s evaluation of governmental policy-
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
698 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
making?

Bibliography

The four books on McNickle and his writings are John Purdy,
The Legacy of D’Arcy McNickle: Writer, Historian, Activist
(1996); Dorothy Parker, Singing an Indian Song: A Biography
of D’Arcy McNickle (1992); John Purdy, Word Ways: The
Novels of D’Arcy McNickle (1990); and James Ruppert,
D’Arcy McNickle (1988). General criticism about McNickle’s
works can be found in several journals, including Studies in
American Indian Literatures and Western American
Literature.

Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989)

Contributing Editor: Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Warren is a very accessible poet, with a strong sense of

narrative and a nonintimidating diction, both of which students
generally enjoy.
Warren’s great concern with the historical vision and the
meanings found in memory and the past are distinctly
southern. For students with no background in southern
literature, these interests may seem forced, even bizarre in
their intensity. A general overview of some of the major
themes of twentieth-century southern literature would help put
Warren into perspective.
The poetry speaks for itself, but discussing Warren’s
“southernness” is an effective way to begin a discussion of
him. One might go from there into a discussion of which
poems clearly evoke a southern perspective and which don’t—
and then, why and why not, which are more effective, etc.
Students generally respond well to Warren’s poetry,
particularly to that in which the persona struggles with
problems of identity and meaning. The poetry selected here is
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 699
quite varied, so questions arise about
continuities/discontinuities in terms of subject matter and
poetic vision between the poems, and about the different
stanza forms and the lines employed by the poet. Warren’s
depiction of the natural world—the hawk, for instance—is
quite striking and students like to discuss this aspect of his
work.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

700 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

1. The self in the world, particularly one’s relationship

with nature.
2. The meaning and significance of history.
3. The limits of the creative imagination and human
knowledge.
4. The quest for meaning in continuities and in the
assimilation of the self with the world outside it.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Topics for questions might include: the significance of

narrative and the dramatic in Warren’s verse; the effectiveness
of a diction that frequently tends toward the colloquial; the
contrast between Warren’s narrative verse (“Amazing Grace in
the Back Country”) and his poetry of statement (“Fear and
Trembling”); the role of the persona; the form of Warren’s
verse, including stanza and line.

Original Audience

In “Infant Boy at Midcentury,” one might discuss what was

happening (and had just happened) in the world at midcentury,
particularly in light of and in contrast to Warren’s traditional
upbringing and sympathies.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Three southern poets with similar interests come to mind: John

Crowe Ransom, whose verse is more formal and controlled
than Warren’s; Allen Tate, who explores in his poetry the
tensions arising from problems of history, time, and identity;
and James Dickey, whose verse is strongly narrative. In
addition, look at any of the confessional poets, but particularly
Robert Lowell; a comparison with them is fruitful in trying to

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 701
establish whether Warren’s poetry should be read as
confessional.

Bibliography

Bedient, Calvin. In The Heart’s Last Kingdom: Robert Penn

Warren’s Major Poetry, Chapter 2, “His Mature
Manner.”

Bloom, Harold. “Sunset Hawk: Warren’s Poetry and

Tradition.” In A Southern Renascence Man: Views of
Robert Penn Warren, edited by Walter B. Edgar.

Justus, James. The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren.

Section 1, “Warren the Poet.”

Strandberg, Victor. The Poetic Vision of Robert Penn Warren.

“Introduc- tion: The Critical Reckoning.”

John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974)

Contributing Editor: Martha E. Cook

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Focusing on Ransom’s use of language, his wit and irony,

seems to be the best route to exploring his themes on a level
that students will respond to. Moving from the particular to the
universal works even for the poems that seem to be fairly
abstract; certainly the theme of “The Equilibrists” is one that
students can react to once they have discovered or uncovered
it. Using the kind of close analysis practiced by the New
Critics is invaluable in studying Ransom’s poetry.
Reading Ransom’s poetry aloud is a very good strategy,
since reading aloud reveals of lot of the liveliness that students
sometimes miss on the printed page and also illuminates the
ironic tone.
Students seem to be interested in the themes of
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
702 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
transience and mutability and in the dichotomy of the body
and the soul. They also sometimes get involved with Ransom’s
work by following up allusions to myths and legends.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Themes: tradition, ritual, myth; mutability; the transience of

life and love; death; the dichotomy of body and soul.
Historical issues: Ransom’s relationship to the Fugitive
group and the little magazine, The Fugitive; Ransom as a New
Critic; the relationship of a classical education to modernism
in poetry; the 1920s and reaction to the great war.
Personal issues: Ransom’s life as a teacher and editor;
his experience as a Rhodes scholar and as a soldier in the war;
his strong classical education.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Ransom is so closely related to the metaphysical poets whom

he knew so thoroughly that exploring this aspect of his style
and form is particularly useful, as is any consideration of his
juxtaposition of different levels of diction and his use of
surprising words or word forms. Strong emphasis on diction
can occur particularly when students have access to the OED
online. He can be seen in the context of the Southern
Renaissance of the 1920s or specifically as part of the Fugitive
movement, primarily in his concern with tradition and
traditional values, though not in his use of southern objects. As
one of the New Critics, his critical theories are important both
for their own value and as they provide an avenue into the
poetry. Howard’s 1988 Yale Review essay gives a fascinating
description of Ransom’s teaching methods in a prosody
course.

Original Audience

A different approach to Ransom that I have found invaluable is

to place him in the context of the outpouring of literature in the
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 703
1920s and to relate his views of the world after the war to
those of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Dos
Passos, etc. The Fugitives are often seen as a group unrelated
to other writers in the 1920s, but especially Ransom’s
European experiences can be compared to those of his
contemporaries.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Ransom can be productively compared to other Fugitive poets,

especially to Allen Tate in his wit and irony; to metaphysical
poets, both early and modern; to the tradition of the elegy; and
to other writers who explore the same subject matter, for
example, “Philomela” to The Waste Land.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. I tell students to be sure to look up the definitions of any

unfamiliar words, and I also mention particular works
we have already read that might be relevant, such as
other poems on death, war, love, etc. Usually Eliot
would precede Ransom or immediately follow, so I
might warn students to watch for parallels and contrasts.
2. Specifically, students usually do best with Ransom when
they focus on his use of language. In general, I find it
useful to have students draft their own ideas, using
support from the particular work, before they go to
outside sources for a historical context or other critics’
views.
Bibliography

Howard, Maureen, “There Are Many Wonderful Owls in

Gambier.” Yale Review 77 (Summer 1988): 521–27.

Morton, Claire Clements. “Ransom’s ‘The Equilibrists.’ ”

Explicator 41 (Summer 1983): 37–38.

Pratt, William. “In Pursuit of the Fugitives.” In The Fugitive

Poets. New York: Dutton, 1965, 13–46.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

704 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Quinlan, Kieran. John Crowe Ransom’s Secular Faith. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.

Rubin, Louis D., Jr. “John Crowe Ransom: The Wary

Fugitive.” In The Wary Fugitives: Four Poets
and the South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1978, 1–68.

Tate, Allen. “Gentleman in a Dustcoat.” Sewanee Review 76

(Summer 1968): 375–81.

Tillinghast, Richard. “John Crowe Ransom: Tennessee’s

Major Minor Poet.” New Criterion 15.6 (February
1997): 24–30.

Young, Thomas Daniel. “The Fugitives: Ransom, Davidson,

Tate.” In The History of Southern Literature, edited
by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and others. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1985, 319–32.

Allen Tate (1899–1979)

Contributing Editor: Anne Jones

Classroom Issues and Strategies

It may be difficult to get students without some personal

investment in/against the Confederacy or at least the American
South to respond initially at all to a poem that presumes the
identification of classical heroism with Confederate soldiery.
Watching a segment from Ken Burns’s popular PBS series,
“The Civil War,” which made much of the lives of ordinary
soldiers from both sides, might help to get past initial
alienation; so might a discussion of the place of the American
South in contemporary ideology, especially in popular culture.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 705

Tate described in his essay “Narcissus as Narcissus” what he

conceived to be the major themes of “Ode to the Confederate
Dead”: the conflict between a vanished heroic community of
“active faith” and the anomie of contemporary reductionism
and isolation. These themes will be familiar to students,
especially those who have read T. S. Eliot and other
conservative modernists. Tate represents the conflict as taking
place within the consciousness of a man standing alone at a
Confederate graveyard; the conflict thus is reshaped as a
problem for the imagination. What can this man’s (the poet’s?)
imagination take hold of and how? How, in fact, does the
imagination work? Tate looked first to southern history and
later to the Catholic church for answers. One might ask
students, with Gertrude Stein, What is the question? This
might encourage looking beyond Tate’s own representations to
other ways of framing the issues he is engaged in.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Tate has compared (albeit self-disparagingly) the poem’s

structure to that of a Greek ode; he pays particular attention to
questions of rhyme and rhythm. In short, he emphasizes poetic
traditions. Yet he claims that the absence of these traditions is
what shapes the “modern” side of the conflict in the
protagonist’s mind. Is Tate’s understanding of his own formal
and stylistic effects, his use and rejection of convention,
adequate?

Original Audience

Tate worked on the first version of “Ode” during the winter of

1925, living in New York with his wife Caroline Gordon and,
for a time, in a cramped apartment, with Hart Crane. That draft
(the 1937 revision is not very severe) was published in the last
collaboration of the Fugitives as a group, Fugitives, an
Anthology of Verse (1928). It won him considerable national
fame, which (in the words of Radcliffe Squires) he “took with
him to Europe” on a Guggenheim fellowship in 1928. The
“Ode” has remained his best-known poem, though he is no
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
706 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
longer thought of as the national figure he once was. Why not?

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 707

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

T. S. Eliot’s themes and images, especially in “The Waste

Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” are rather
clear influences on Tate’s perhaps even more somber poem.
Both Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens might well be read with
Tate. And of course Tate’s historical connections with the
Fugitives, Agrarians, and New Critics—among them John
Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks—
provide a more regional and ideological context.

Charles Reznikoff (1894–1976)

Contributing Editor: Randy Chilton

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Depending on your students, there will probably be at least

two major issues regarding Reznikoff ’s Objectivist poetry: its
accessibility and its relevance. The degree to which these are
problems in the classroom will in turn depend on the degree to
which the students are able to contextualize the work of
Reznikoff, which is just to say the obvious—that students who
have read little poetry are going to have more difficulty with
this material than those who have read a lot. The obvious
strategy is to have students read a good deal of other poetry
(see the “Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections” section), but
even experienced readers of modern poetry will find Reznikoff
challenging. Reznikoff ’s short poetry should look relatively
familiar to readers of Imagist poets such as Pound, H.D., and
William Carlos Williams from the teens.
Reznikoff ’s verse suggests points of departure for
discussion besides that of poetic form. His images of
contemporary urban scenes and characters remind us of the
way Williams transformed the “local” into poetry; his use of
legal testimony and primary historical documents points to
questions about the way poetry and history can intersect and
interact. Reznikoff emerged from the immigrant Jewish culture
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
708 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
of New York City—like Williams, a first-generation
American—and so questions of cultural identity, assimilation
and resistance to it, and the attendant question of the
construction of the “self ” might be at work in our reading of
these poems, too. Depending on the strategies you have in
mind for your course, any of these issues might provide a more
useful way into the poetry than a discussion of its formal
qualities.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

In the context of literary history, Objectivist poetry, collected

for and published in Poetry magazine at the encouragement of
Ezra Pound, was a direct descendant of Imagist verse (Imagist
verse before 1915, that is—the kind that Pound, not Amy
Lowell, promoted). By 1931, literary avant-gardism had
declined, in part because of the Depression, in part because of
the diversity of literary modernism (or modernisms), among
other reasons. In Reznikoff ’s work, readers should be able to
see short, Imagist-like poems that make use of direct,
unornamented language as well as somewhat experimental
forms.
Moreover, for Reznikoff, the place of the poem in
history was an important concern. On a very rudimentary
level, Reznikoff ’s observations of New York City street scenes
can be considered “historical.”

Original Audience

By the late twenties, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot as well as

sympathizers such as Sylvia Beach had been hard at work for
some years cultivating an audience for experimental modernist
literary expressions. Reznikoff in the twenties turned to self-
publishing. But the one thing the Objectivists were interested
in doing as a group was getting one another into print. After
the Objectivists’ issue of Poetry, first TO Publishers was
formed with the support of George Oppen (a contributor to the
issue) and his wife, Mary, and then its successor The
Objectivist Press put out a few books, including Williams’s
Collected Poems, 1921–31, and Reznikoff ’s original prose
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 709
version of Testimony. Does writing poetry in a democracy
necessarily mean writing poetry that can be understood by
everyone? Is there a place for poetry at all in times like the
Depression? (George Oppen thought not and put down his pen
for almost thirty years.)

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Pound, Williams, and H.D. are obvious predecessors. Have

students com-pare short verse that is provided in the anthology
or that you provide. As mentioned in the headnote, Reznikoff ’s
own poetic was relatively inexplicit. In some of the few
statements we do have, he cites Eliot’s objective correlative as
a useful concept. Students may find a helpful comparison here.
Eliot’s urban imagery can also be compared and contrasted to
Reznikoff ’s.
For an idea of the cultural milieu from which Reznikoff
emerged, see the section from Michael Gold’s Jews Without
Money in the anthology. Students might also read Henry
Roth’s Call It Sleep.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

In what sense has Reznikoff made accounts by Holocaust

survivors, legal testimony, and/or John Smith’s description of
his experience in Virginia “poetic,” if he has? In what sense
does this poetry constitute “history”? If students can locate any
primary documents (e.g., in the State Reporter series in a law
library), a comparison to Reznikoff ’s poetic versions could be
instructive.

Bibliography

Most if not all of the major sources on the Objectivists are

indicated in the anthology. Two journals will prove especially
useful for students: Sagetrieb publishes work on poets in the
“Pound–H.D.–Williams Tradition”; it grew out of Paideuma,
specifically devoted to Pound scholarship, but inclusive of
work on some related writers. Students may also want to look
at other work by George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Marianne
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
710 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Moore, and Lorine Niedecker.

John Steinbeck (1902–1968)

Contributing Editor: Cliff Lewis

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Students read Steinbeck as a social critic and as a storyteller.

The task is to define Steinbeck as a writer in the mode of the
twenties who carried these tendencies into his works of social
conflict. One must define such terms as illusion, myth,
archetype, depth psychology, and symbol in establishing his
link with those writing of individualism. It should be easy to
show that Elisa in “The Chrysanthemums” reflects Steinbeck’s
interest in the power of illusion, the unconscious, and its
conflict with masculine authority. You may comment that
changed conditions allow Ma Joad to succeed where Elisa
failed. To understand Steinbeck better, it might be useful to
have students list such detail as setting, weather, and clothing,
all of which reflect the inner lives of his characters.
To have students understand the opening of the novel, I
recommend that you show them Pare Lorentz’s documentary
film The Plow That Broke the Plains. It, like the novel,
champions the intervention of FDR in the Dust Bowl disaster.
See Steinbeck’s letters to Joseph Henry Jackson written
around 1938 that describe the archetypal nature of the Joads’
quest. Also you might want to cite relevant passages to
Chapters 1 and 5 from the daily journal Steinbeck kept
(DeMott’s Working Days) writing Grapes.
In teaching Chapter 5 one can compare the
“downsizing” of today with circumstances then. Observe the
causes for collapse: bad farming, quick profits. And point out
that the economic system is one man created, one that man can
change. To that end the Joads question and pursue their trek.
Try to show Steinbeck’s pattern as the artist who first
uses writing to dramatize the various drives—first of the
individual and then of the group; sexual and religious drives;
drives for acceptance and security; and then drives for land,
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 711
cultural identity, and democratic rights.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Change underlies all of Steinbeck’s writing: individual or

group efforts to make it happen or individual and group efforts
to resist changes. The ques-tion scholars debate is to what
extent Steinbeck’s characters are influenced by the biological
and psychological memories and by cultural training. Often
these provide the conflict for the individual will. To alter the
world is essen-tially human, and Americans for Steinbeck are
best at it. Certainly the Joads must first overcome their own
psychological and cultural resistance. Often a mythic Eden
brings war. Making his audience aware of these hidden drives
is one of Steinbeck’s missions. Grapes, for instance, retains its
power because Steinbeck made it clear that mankind will not
accept poverty or repression but will fight or migrate to escape
both. Certainly this is true psychologically. His historical
perspective is holistic—ecological today— with humans
connected biologically and culturally to the past and using
human will to blend past and present. (See my essay on
Steinbeck’s political commitments in After the Grapes of
Wrath.)

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Steinbeck tried to find an organic means of expression for each

book that he wrote. He considered his work to be
experimental. He intentionally used a documentary style for
The Grapes of Wrath, the fabular for The Pearl, the picaresque
for Tortilla Flat, and so on. Generally he belongs to the myth-
symbol school of the twenties. Dreams, the unconscious,
recurring myths, symbolic characters—these qualities are
characteristic of what Jung called the “visionary” style.
Realism, Steinbeck once noted, is the surface form for his
interest in psychology and philosophy. To this The Grapes of
Wrath is no exception. Finally point out that Steinbeck’s work
included film scripts, plays, political speeches, and war
propaganda.
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
712 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Original Audience

Steinbeck’s earliest writings, whose subject was the individual

psyche, sold poorly. With his fifth book, the picaresque
Tortilla Flat, Steinbeck became a popular writer, and with In
Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath, novels rooted in the
issues of the Depression, Steinbeck achieved international
fame. Before those publications, his West Coast audience did
not comprehend his direction. For most he was a “mystic”
writer, and for Edmund Wilson, Steinbeck was writing
“biological” stories. It may be this lack of comprehension that
led him to insert characters into his novels who commented on
the significance of the action. The one reviewer who saw
Steinbeck’s literary subject as the “unconscious,” received a
note from Steinbeck thanking him for the insightful review.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

The personal influence of Ed Ricketts and his biological and

psychological ideas influenced and somewhat paralleled
Steinbeck’s own, and one can see a great deal of Darwin’s
influence in Steinbeck. That Eliot’s Waste Land and Dos
Passos’s U.S.A. influenced Grapes is evident. It is probable
that Silko’s Ceremony owes a debt to Steinbeck. Very likely,
however, Steinbeck’s connections have been felt outside of
literature to a greater degree. From the 1940s to his death he
was an icon to the Democratic Party and a world symbol of
human rights.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

“The Chrysanthemums”:

1. What are the boundaries of air and land limiting Elisa?

2. What is she capable of ?
3. What about the stranger attracts her?
4. What does he want from her?
5. Is he happy?
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 713
6. What is she trying to scrub away?
7. What does she settle for?
8. Has she any illusions left?
9. Connect her relationship to the land with Chapter 5.
10. Are there any archetypal, biological, or mythic
allusions?

Chapter 1:

1. Contrast women and men.

2. Why are women stronger here?
3. What cultural pattern is the male losing?
4. What is the implication that the men will eventually
overcome the cultural shock? Note: It continues to the
end of the novel.

Chapter 5:

1. Is the chapter denouncing laissez-faire capitalism?

2. Is the farmer also at fault?
3. How does the farmer defend his ownership of the land?
4. What is the significance of moving from “hands-on”
farming to factories in the field?
5. Did a book by that name influence Steinbeck?
6. What became of the Joads? See Gregory’s American
Exodus (New York: Oxford, 1989) to find out who went,
stayed, and what happened.
7. Can any link be made to the size and number of farms in
America today to the novel? to plant downsizing?
8. Is the loss of individual enterprises today so different
from what happened to the Joads?

Bibliography

Two Steinbeck Study Guides edited by T. Hayashi, have good

general infor-mation on Steinbeck’s writings. P. Lisca’s
updated Wide World of John Steinbeck remains a valuable
study. For short story analysis, see J. Hughes, John Steinbeck,
A Study of the Short Fiction, 1989; J. Timmerman, The
Dramatic Landscape of Steinbeck’s Short Stories, 1990 and
Jay Parini’s 1994 study. For the novel, Robert DeMott’s
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
714 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
edition of Working Days, 1989, is essential. Critical essays
include R. Davis, ed., 1982; J. Ditsky, ed., 1989; D. Wyatt,
ed., 1990; H. Bloom, ed., 1996; and D. Coers et al., eds., After
the Grapes of Wrath, 1995, for my essay on Steinbeck’s
relationship with the New Deal.

Richard Wright (1908–1960)

Contributing Editor: John M. Reilly

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Among sympathetic readers, there is an assumption that

Wright is documentary, that his works can be read as
elementary sociology. If these readers are familiar with literary
movements, they also assume he can be classed as a
naturalistic author displaying the experience of victims.
Readers of a negative disposition are inclined to class Wright
as an exponent of hate, an unreasonable writer who is not
sensitive to the complexities of moral experience.
As with all of his writings, understanding of Richard
Wright’s “Bright and Morning Star” will be enhanced if
students know something about his revisions. In this case,
revisions amounted to the addition of this short story to a
highly successful collection of narratives about Southern life
informed by Wright’s political outlook.
The first edition of Uncle Tom’s Children: Four
Novellas won first prize in a national contest sponsored by
Story magazine in 1938 for writers employed in the Federal
Writers Project who had not previously published a book. The
well-known judges for the contest, which garnered more than
five hundred entries, were Lewis Gannett, who conducted a
regular book column at the time in the New York Herald
Tribune; Harry Scherman of the Book-of-the-Month Club; and
novelist Sinclair Lewis, winner of the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1930. Contest victory included both a cash prize
and publication of the winning volume by Harper’s. Reviews
praised the judges’ choice and heightened its significance by
comparing Wright’s newly discovered talent to that of
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 715
canonical American authors such as Stephen Crane (the
opinion of the anonymous reviewer in Time) and Ernest
Hemingway (the view of Robert Van Gelder in The New York
Times Book Review).
Some reviewers recognized that the stories in the
original volume were arranged to argue for collective political
action, but one notable review, that of Alan Calmer in The
Daily Worker, larded its approval with the observation that the
book lacked sufficient social perspective. As though in
response to this comment in the Communist Party newspaper,
Wright prepared a second edition to the volume, which now
carried a new subtitle: Five Long Short Stories. Leading off the
new book was the sketch entitled “The Ethics of Living Jim
Crow,” which had earlier appeared in American Stuff: An
Anthology of Prose and Verse by Members of the Federal
Writers’ Project (1937); and to conclude it, Wright added the
short story “Bright and Morning Star,” originally published in
May 1938 in the left-wing journal New Masses. Where the
protagonists of the original stories in Uncle Tom’s Children
struggled to choose ways to confront caste oppression, Sue,
the hero of “Bright and Morning Star” has gone beyond that
because she and her children have committed themselves to
working for social revolution. Wright’s new edition of his first
book thus became a unified work progressing from the
autobiographical episodes in “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow”
through four narratives relating the oppression of male
protagonists and concluding with the triumphant rendering of a
woman who revolutionizes the traditional role of matriarch.
Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal
Issues

Focus on point of view is helpful for drawing attention to the

interest Wright has in social psychology, which dramatizes in
narrative the consciousness of a character at the crossroads of
social forces (race, class) and personal impulses and self-
creation. Wright is dedicated to study of the production of
personality and the arousal of a self-directive being. This, after
all, is the substance of African-American history: how
oppressed people create a world, a culture, and remake
personalities the dominant group seeks to eradicate.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

716 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

The challenge is to describe “protest” literature as a

repudiation of the dominant discourse on race without
allowing readers to believe that rejection of the dominant
literary styles is to become nonliterary. Wright should be seen
as a major voice of African-American modernism (see the
emphasis on the black self, the effort in his work to found a
subjectivity). That’s his literary period. His school may well be
called protest. But the selection in the anthology requires
attention to the language of symbolism—the charged objects
and language of racial discourse.

Original Audience

Richard Wright tried to address a dual audience, but the

responses by white and black readers were distinct. Writing in
the daily New York Times, Charles Poore tempered his praise
of Uncle Tom’s Children by declaring that Wright “has merely
shifted a bad process by making nearly all the white characters
villains. That heightens the drama and the melodrama. But it
plays havoc with plausibility” (April 2, 1938). On the other
hand, Sterling A. Brown, the distinguished African-American
poet, wrote in The Nation, “the South that Mr. Wright renders
so vividly is recognizable and true, and it has not often been
within the covers of a book.” What made Brown’s the most
informed review the book received was the assertion that
characters are seen from the inside and are, therefore, truer
than the stereotypes populating the farces and pastorals of
fiction influenced by unacknowledged Confederate
sympathies. Despite these evident differences of perception
among reviewers, “Bright and Morning Star” secured an
appreciative audience for its craft. It was an O’Henry prize–
winning story in 1938, and in 1939 Edward J. O’Brien
included it along with stories by Ernest Hemingway, Theodore
Dreiser, William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe in 50 Best American Short
Stories, 1915–1939.
Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

In its depiction of the self-realization of Sue, Wright’s story

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 717
provides a strong contrast to the treatment of “primitive”
characters in European American Modernism. Her ethical
reasoning and action presents a complexity undreamed of by
those who saw the Negro as precivilized. Sue also allows for
contrast with the figures in naturalism, including Theodore
Dreiser’s female victims. Connections might be explored by
linking the political epiphany in “Bright and Morning Star” to
that in Clifford Odet’s “Waiting for Lefty.” As a contribution
to understanding the variety within African-American
literature, Wright’s short story can be juxtaposed with the
selections by Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes, and
Zora Neale Hurston. It can be pointed out to students that
Hurston interpreted Uncle Tom’s Children as Communist
propaganda: “state responsibility for everything, and
individual responsibility for nothing.”

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. Consider the place of violence in the story, its use as

social control by exponents of the caste system, and its
apparently inevitable necessity for liberation. On one
level, that of relating the system of racial segregation,
the appearance of violence is historically authentic. As
an instrument for freedom, however, violence is at odds
with the tactics of the civil rights movement. Is this
simply a matter of different historical times, different
politics, or could violence be inherent in Wright’s
worldview?
2. What is Wright’s view of African-American culture in
this story, its efficacy and its value in delineating
character? In this regard consider the imagery of
resurrection and the “conversion” of Sue.
3. In what sense might Sue’s death relate her story to the
genre of tragedy?
4. What does the term “race” denominate in this story? Is it
a fixed, biological category signifying essential qualities
of a person, or is “race” a social construction?

Bibliography

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

718 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Davis, Charles T., and Michel Fabre. Richard Wright: A
Primary Bib- liography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.
Information on editions and first publications.

Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New

York: William Morrow, 1973. Standard biography.
Joyce, Joyce Ann. Richard Wright’s Art of Tragedy. Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 1986.

Reilly, John M., ed. Richard Wright: The Critical Reception.

New York: Burt Franklin, 1978.

Margaret Walker (b. 1915)

Contributing Editor: Maryemma Graham

Classroom Issues and Strategies

When she won a major award (the Yale Younger Poets

Award), Walker was put in the public eye, but her writing
always had a public dimension to it. Students might want to
explore the pressures a writer would face if he or she were
called upon to speak from more than a singular perspective.
Can general experience form an urgent literary message? Can
the students detect any change in Walker’s style from the
earlier poems and those published in the 1980s?
In the language of her novel, Jubilee, the rhetoric is
shaped in part by a need to be informative about a subject that
many people had never explored or even considered. In her
poems, the use of “public” forms of expression—chants,
litanies, and sermons—to generate structure as well as feeling
should be explored and compared/ contrasted with the novel.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Freedom—in all its simplicity and complexity—is clearly the

main subject of Walker’s work. Much of her writing is
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 719
informed by the experience of the Great Depression (she was
fourteen years old when the stock market collapsed), and so
racial freedom and economic freedom are intermingled in her
consciousness. In some ways, the promise of post–
Reconstruction political freedom for African Americans (and
equally important, the nonfulfillment of that promise) stands
behind her “call” to both the future and the past. The concern
with hope and tradition—neither being ultimately satisfying by
itself, but both being indispensable for a full consciousness of
the story of her people—is a personal focus as well as a
subject matter she must engage.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Clearly, the poetry uses forms drawn from sermons and chants,
the so-called “folk” tradition. Yet Walker was an educated,
trained writer who spent years perfecting her craft. Students
should be encouraged to examine precisely how the poetic
structures are adapted and where they are altered in the
expression of a more “modern” consciousness.
The novel should be compared to the various slave
narratives, some of which are available in Volume 1 of The
Heath Anthology, providing a useful contrast between “first-
person” and “third-person” narrative frameworks. Also, the
poems and the novel both can be read in the context of Booker
T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, who begin the “Modern
Period” in Volume 2. Here especially the theme of balancing
the acknowledgment of past oppression and future hope can be
fruitfully unfolded.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. Does the passage from the novel read exactly like a

newspaper account, or what is sometimes called “feature
journalism”? If not, where does it most differ?
2. What effect is created by using specific names in the
poems when the “general” context of the poem’s
language is so dominant?
3. Look at Langston Hughes’s poetry and compare his use
of rhythms and idioms to that of Walker.
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
720 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Saunders Redding (1906–1988)

Contributing Editor: Eleanor Q. Tignor

Classroom Issues and Strategies

No Day of Triumph is a very teachable text that may be

approached as a personal, racial, and historical document.
Redding’s objective but often passionate approach to relating
his experiences can be used as a “lesson” in writing style, and
in understanding the interconnections among the personal,
racial, and social in American history and life. Comparisons
with themes treated by earlier and later African-American
writers can readily be made as the suggested assignments
indicate.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

1. The black American’s double consciousness—being

black and being American; its effect on self-
development and on relations with others, black and
white.
2. The role of the family (family philosophy and patterns,
goals and values) in shaping offspring—the nurturing
but also sometimes the hindrances.
3. Slavery and its effects on blacks—on personal
development and behavior, on family life in the next
generation and generations to come.
4. Slavery and its effects on whites, especially the
master/slave “relationship.”
5. The tragic mulatto—caught between being black and
(not) being white.
6. Intraracial skin color consciousness and conflict.
7. The educated Negro and the “Negro burden”:
extraordinary responsibility “to uphold the race”; related
theme—being better than whites in order to succeed.
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 721
8. The hold of religion on blacks, especially poorer blacks.
9. The black American folk past and its vestiges, especially
its effects on blacks of little education.
10. The author as family member and individualist, as man
of reason and humanist.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

1. The effects of a text that merges personal social history.

2. Objectivity versus subjectivity in this highly personal
text.
3. Passionate tone and satirical humor.
4. Precise language.
5. Influence of the thinking of W. E. B. Du Bois (see
especially The Souls of Black Folk); anti–Booker T.
Washington philosophy (see Du Bois’s The Souls of
Black Folk and Washington’s Up from Slavery).
6. Writing as catharsis (see the rest of No Day of Triumph
and especially On Being Negro in America).
7. Skill in blending exposition, dialogue, and anecdote in
the creation of a highly readable text.
8. Incorporation of black folk materials (songs, tales,
prayers).

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

722 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Original Audience

In 1942, most black Americans and other Americans who

knew and were sensitive to the conditions of slavery and the
post-slavery years would have had no difficulty with
Redding’s thesis and tone. The history may need to be
sketched in for present-day students; skin color consciousness
and the history of the slave and the free black must be
understood to get the impact of each of the grandmothers on
Redding, the boy.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

1. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk (1903) should be a major

comparison. See Du Bois’s chapter on Booker T.
Washington (III: “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and
Others,” in Souls of Black Folk) and Washington’s Up
from Slavery.
2. For the theme of being black in America, also highly
personal as well as social responses, see for comparison:
Richard Wright’s “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” (in
Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children); James
Baldwin’s “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an
American” and “Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter
from the South” (both essays in Baldwin’s Nobody
Knows My Name); Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the
Caged Bird Sings.
3. For facts and commentary on slavery, see Redding’s
They Came in Chains, as well as any slave narratives
taught in the course.
4. For an understanding of the stereotyping of the mulatto
and other black stereotypes in American literature, see
Sterling A. Brown’s “Negro Character as Seen by White
Authors,” Journal of Negro Education, 2 (1933),
reprinted in Dark Symphony, ed. James A. Emanuel and
Theodore Gross (New York: The Free Press, 1968).
5. For autobiographical comparison/contrast with other
black boys who became famous men, see Richard
Wright’s Black Boy and Langston Hughes’s The Big Sea
(Part I, Chapters 2–16).
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 723

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. State your impressions of the Redding daily household.

Support your impressions, explaining how you arrived at
them.
2. State and explain the tone of Redding’s opening to the
chapter, prior to his introduction of Grandma Redding.
3. Contrast Grandma Redding and Grandma Conway, as
they appeared to Saunders Redding, the boy.
4. Does Redding, the man, in retrospect, admire either
grandmother, neither, or one more than the other?
Explain.
5. Through their different manners of death and Redding’s
description of each death, what is implied about each of
the grandmothers?
6. Who in the chapter is “troubled in mind”? Give your
analysis.
7. Using Redding’s style of writing as a model, write an
analysis of your own “roots.”

Bibliography

Baraka, Imamu Amiri. “A Reply to Saunders Redding’s ‘The

Black Revolu- tion in American Studies.’ ” Sources
for American Studies, edited by Jefferson B. Kellogg
and Robert H. Walker, 1983.

Berry, Faith, ed. Introduction. A Scholar’s Conscience:

Selected Writings of J. Saunders Redding,
1942–1977. Lexington: University of Lexington
Press, 1992, 1–14.

Kellogg, Jefferson B. “Redding and Baraka: Two Contrasting

Views on Afro-American Studies.” Sources for
American Studies, edited by Jefferson B. Kellogg
and Robert H. Walker, 1983.

Thompson, Thelma B. “Romantic Idealists and Conforming

Materialists: Expressions of the American National
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
724 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Character.” MAWA Review 3 (June 1988): 6–9.

Vassilowitch, John, Jr. “Ellison’s Dr. Bledsoe: Two Literary

Sources.” Essays in Literature 8 (Spring 1981): 109–
13.

Pietro Di Donato (1911–1992)

Contributing Editor: Helen Barolini

Classroom Issues and Strategies

The lack of perception of Italian-American authors as literary

and the general lack of knowledge concerning the body of
Italian-American writing is an obstacle to be overcome. In
particular with Di Donato’s classic work, Christ in Concrete,
there is the question of linguistic uniqueness—a result of
transposing Italian thought forms into English. This lends
richness and texture to the work, but must be explained.
The Italian-American author and his or her work can be
examined in terms of the general theme of the outsider and can
be related to authors of other groups, bridging the narrow
ethnic theme to the more general one. Students are interested
in issues of workers’ exploitation, what impels immigrants
toward the American dream, and what the country was like
seventy years ago as compared to today.
The language can be dealt with by showing how
language forms thought patterns, and so viewpoints. However,
beneath the uniqueness lies the same human feelings and their
expression.
There is a film version of Christ in Concrete that could
be useful to promote classroom discussion.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Di Donato’s Christ in Concrete is an achievement in giving

literary form to the oral culture of the immigrant peasant
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 725
transformed into urban worker. His is a prime example of the
proletarian novel of the 1930s.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Di Donato created an American language that accommodated

the oral culture of his protagonists, a language that reflects the
texture of the peasant-worker discourse. It is important to note
that dignity and intelligence are not the social prerogatives of
the more articulate social group.

Original Audience

Di Donato’s work was written in the 1930s period of the

Depression, social protest, and growing interest in socialist
solutions for the ills of the world and its workers. It was
hailed, at its appearance, as “the epithet of the twentieth
century.” In some ways it continues to be extraordinarily
actual, as witness the collapse of the building in Bridgeport
during the summer of 1987 that duplicated the tragedy of
Christ in Concrete with the loss of workers’ lives.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Di Donato can be related to Clifford Odets, another writer of

social protest, who had some influence on him. Also, compare
with the lyric proletarianism of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of
Wrath and with John Fante’s evocation of his mason father in
The Brotherhood of the Grape.
It could be useful, also, to link Di Donato with the
passionate outcry of James Baldwin in Go Tell It on the
Mountain or with the working-class women of Tillie Olsen’s
Yonnondio.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. I think it is useful to have some perspective on the social

conditions of the times in this country as reflected in
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
726 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Christ in Concrete.
2. Study the techniques of characterization. What makes a
character live, or, on the other hand, fade? What makes a
successful character?
How do Di Donato’s Italian-American working-class
characters relate to all people everywhere?

Bibliography

Diomede, Matthew. Pietro Di Donato, the Master Builder.

Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1995.

Esposito, Michael P. “The Evolution of Di Donato’s

Perceptions of Italian Americans.” In The Italian
Americans Through the Generations. Proceedings
of the 15th annual conference of the American Italian
Historical Association. Staten Island: AIHA, 1986.

———. “The Travail of Pietro Di Donato.” MELUS 7, no. 2

(Summer 1980): 47–60.

Napolitano, Louise. An American Story: Pietro Di Donato’s

Christ in Concrete. New York: Peter Lang, 1995.

Sinicropi, Giovannni. “Christ in Concrete.” Italian Americana

3 (1977): 175–83.

Viscusi, Robert. “The Semiology of Semen: Questioning the

Father.” In The Italian Americans Through the
Generations. Proceedings of the 15th annual
conference of the American Italian Historical Association.
Staten Island: AIHA, 1986.

———. “De Vulgari Eloquentia: An Approach to the

Language of Italian American Fiction.” In Yale
Italian Studies, 1, no. 3 (Winter 1981): 21–38. An
interesting commentary on language usage.

Younghill Kang (1903–1972)

Contributing Editor: Elaine H. Kim
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 727

Classroom Issues and Strategies

East Goes West was finally reprinted by New York’s Kaya

Press. This edition provides an excellent chronology of Kang’s
life, a comprehensive bibliography of his publications and of
publications about him and his work, and a very useful
interpretive essay titled “The Unmaking of an Oriental
Yankee” by Sunyoung Lee.
Students may be unfamiliar with Korean and Korean-
American history. Teachers might read the sections about
Korean Americans in Takaki’s Strangers from a Different
Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown,
1989) and the chapters on Korean-American history in Nancy
Abelmann and John Lie’s Blue Dreams: Korean Americans
and the Los Angeles Riots (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1995). They can also refer to various
excellent chronologies, such as the one in Quiet Odyssey: A
Pioneer Korean Woman in America (Sucheng Chan, ed.,
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990) or the one in
East to America: Korean American Life Stories (Elaine H.
Kim and Eui-Young Yu, eds., New York: The New Press,
1996). Students could conduct research on the Japanese
colonization of Korea and the overseas Korean independence
movement in which some of Kang’s characters actively
participate. If students have learned about the racist laws and
policies against Asian immigrants during the period in which
Kang’s novel is set, they might discuss the different ways
characters in East Goes West like Han, Kim, Park, and Jum
respond to race discrimination.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

Consider asking your students some of the following

questions:

1. What is the relationship between the author and the

narrator, particularly with respect to attitudes toward
America?
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
728 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
2. How effective do you find the quite different strategies
of survival deployed by the narrator’s friends Kim, the
educated aristocrat who falls in love with an upper-class
American woman; Park, the ultra-nationalist who can
think of nothing but his Korean homeland; and Jum,
who tries to become a “hip” American? If you were to
immigrate to a country where you faced a great deal of
discrimination because of your origins, what strategies
would you try?
Original Audience

East Goes West was written for a mainstream American

readership at a time of intense anti-Asian activity in the United
States.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

East Goes West could be profitably taught in tandem with

books set on the West Coast in the same period by Korean-
American women writers, such as Quiet Odyssey and
Ronyoung Kim’s Clay Walls (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1987). Also, Kang’s novel could be
compared with other novels about immigrant life. Some
interesting novels about Asian immigrants with which it could
be contrasted are Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart
(Seattle: University of Washington, 1946 and 1973), which
portrays Filipino migrant farm workers’ lives on the Pacific
Coast in the 1930s; Louis Chu’s novel, Eat a Bowl of Tea
(New York: Lyle Stuart, 1961, and Seattle: University of
Washington, 1979) set in Chinatown in the 1940s; and Wendy
Law-Yone’s The Coffin Tree (New York: Knopf, 1983, and
Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), which is about a Burmese
refugee’s experiences, mostly on the East Coast, in relatively
recent times. Another fruitful approach might be to ask
students to read Kang’s East Goes West together with a very
recent Korean-American novel, such as Chang-rae Lee’s
Native Speaker (New York: Putnam, 1995), Leonard Chang’s
The Fruit ’N Food (Seattle: Black Heron, 1996), or Nora Okja
Keller’s Comfort Woman (New York: Viking, 1997).

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 729

Carved on the Walls: Poetry by Early Chinese

Immigrants
Contributing Editors: Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, Judy Yung

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Because of the exclusion of racial minorities such as Chinese

Americans from our American education and their continuous
stereotyping in the popular media, most people do not have the
historical or literary background to understand and appreciate
Chinese poetry as written by the early immigrants at the Angel
Island Immigration Station.
The headnote includes background information on the
history of Chinese Americans and their detention experience at
Angel Island as well as explanations of the literary style and
content of the Chinese poems. We have also included
footnotes to explain the literary and historical allusions used in
the poems. It is important that students be aware of this
background material in their reading of the poems as well as
their significance as part of the earliest record of Chinese
American literature and history written from the perspective of
Chinese immigrants in America.
As you teach these selections, consider a simulation
exercise where students can experience how Chinese
immigrants must have felt as unwelcome aliens arriving at
Angel Island. As students read these poems, they are made
aware of the impact of discriminatory laws. They also learn to
appreciate a different poetic style of writing. On the other
hand, most students are puzzled by the historical context of the
poems and by the larger moral issues of racism.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal

Issues

The poems express strong feelings of anger, frustration,

uncertainty, hope, despair, self-pity, homesickness, and
loneliness written by Chinese immigrants who were singled

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

730 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
out for exclusion by American immigration laws on the basis
of race. As such, they are important fragments of American
history and literature long missing from the public record as
well as strong evidence that dispels the stereotype of Chinese
Americans as passive, complacent, and illiterate.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Most of the poems were written in the 1910s and 1920s, when
the classical style of Chinese poetry was still popular and
when feelings of Chinese nationalism ran strong. Of the 135
poems that have been recovered, about half are written with
four lines per poem and seven characters per line. The
remainder consist of verses with six or eight lines and five or
seven characters per line. The literary quality of the poems
varies greatly, which is understandable considering that most
immigrants at this time did not have formal schooling beyond
the primary grades. Many poems violate rules of rhyme and
tone required in Chinese poetry and incorrect characters and
usages often appear. However, these flaws do not appear in the
translation, in which we chose to sacrifice form for content.

Original Audience

The Angel Island poems were written as a means to vent and

record the response of Chinese immigrants to the humiliating
treatment they suffered at the Angel Island Immigration
Station. They were intended for other Chinese immigrants who
would follow in the footsteps of the poets. But as read now,
they are an important literary record of the experience and
feelings of one group of immigrants who, because of their race
and a weak motherland, were unwelcome and singled out for
discriminatory treatment.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

The only other work published so far that would serve as a

useful tool of comparison in terms of form and content is
Marion Hom’s Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 Modern Period: 1910–1945 • 731
from San Francisco Chinatown (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1987)—a collection of Chinese folk rhymes
first published in 1911 and 1915. It would also be useful for
students to read about the European immigrant experience at
Ellis Island in order for them to see the different treatments of
immigrants to America due to race and ethnicity.

Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing

1. (a) What are the themes of the Angel Island poems and
how do they reflect the historical circumstances for
Chinese immigrants coming to the United States
between 1910 and 1940?
(b) How would you describe the nameless poets based
on your reading of the Angel Island poems?
2. (a) Compare and contrast the Angel Island poems with
those written by another American poet in the early
twentieth century.
(b) Show how the image of Chinese immigrants as
reflected in the Angel Island poems confirms or
contradicts prevailing stereotypes of Chinese
Americans in the popular media.

Bibliography

Chan, Sucheng, ed. Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese

Community in America, 1882–1943. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1991.

Lai, Him Mark, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung. Island: Poetry
and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island,
1910–1940. Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1980, 1991.

Lim, Genny. Paper Angels and Bitter Cane: Two Plays.

Honolulu: Kala- maku Press, 1991.

Lowe, Felicia. “Carved in Silence.” A film about the Chinese

immigration experience at Angel Island, 1988, available
from National Asian American
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
732 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Telecommunications Association, 346 9th Street, 2nd Floor,
San Francisco, CA 94103.

Mark, Diane Mei Lin, and Ginger Chih. A Place Called

Chinese America. Dubuque, Iowa:
Kendall/Hunt, 1993.

Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History

of Asian Americans. Boston: Little, Brown and Company,
1989.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.