Lecture 5.
American Literature of the 20th century.
1. The historic background
2. Lost Generation
3. Modernism
4. Experimentation
5. American Realism
6. Novels of social awareness
7. The Harlem Renaissance
8. The Fugitives and New Criticism
1. The historical background
In 1914, World War broke out in Europe. In 1917, the US entered the war against Germany, which was
defeated in 1918. After the war, the US economy boomed. But prosperity did not last. A stock market
crash in 1929 led to the Great Depression, a deep economic slump in the 1930s.
WW I seems to have been a kind of watershed – innocence on one side, attention to grim reality on the
other. The war changed the outlook of all Americans in very significant ways. It took away some of their
provincialism; it intensified the pessimism and disenchantment with what was peculiarly American; and
it led to widespread expatriation. Most of what are considered the masterpieces of American writing in
the 20th century were written in Europe. What the Lost Generation of Gertrude Stein had lost, was its
sense of being a part of American society. Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Scott
Fitzgerald, William Faulkner – all spent long periods of their lives in Europe. Of the writers of the 20 th
century, only John Steinbeck and Henry Louis Mencken did not share this experience of expatriation.
The millions of Americans who had fought in ‘the war to make the world safe for democracy’, together
with the millions more whose lives had been much affected by it at home, helped to produce a society in
the 20s which was new in many ways. Called the ‘roaring twenties’, it was a time in which women were
finally enfranchised and ‘emancipated’, and revolutions in dress, manners, and morals took place. There
was more widespread affluence and conspicuous consumption than ever before in American society;
and more emphasis on fun and less on duty became a part of the daily scene. It was a time of
exaggeration, experiment and change – a time which invited satirical treatment and was permissive
enough to accept it, even to embrace it.
2. Lost Generation
Lost Generation – the post-war American writers who emigrated to Europe in the early 1920s.
On Stein’s position without a stable, traditional structure of values, the individual lost a sense of
identity. The secure, supportive family life; the famous settled community; the natural and eternal
rhythms of nature that guide the planting and harvesting on a farm; the sustaining sense of patriotism;
moral values – all seemed undermined by WW I and its consequences.
That was a literature of disillusionment.
Numerous novels, notably Hemingway’s ‘The Sun Also Rises’ and Fitzgerald’s ‘This Side of Paradise’,
evoke the extravagance and disillusionment of the lost generation. The world depression of the 1930s
affected most of the population of the US. At the peak of the Depression one-third of all Americans were
out of work. Many saw the Depression as a punishment for sins of excessive materialism and loose
living.
Representatives are: Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, William
Faulkner, Henry Miller, Thomas Wolfe.
The expatriate, Henry Miller, used a comic, anecdotic style to record his experiences as a down-and-out
artist in Paris. His emphasis on sexual vitality made his books (‘Tropic of Cancer’) shocking to many;
others felt that his frank language brought a new honesty to literature.
Southerner Thomas Wolfe felt like a foreigner not only in Europe but even in the northern city of New
York, to which he had moved. Though he rejected the society around him, he did not criticize it - he
focused obsessively on himself, on describing real people from his life in vivid characterizations. His long
novels, such as ‘Of Time and the River’, ‘You Can’t Go Home Again’ – gushed forward powerful, romantic
and rich in detail, although emotionally exhausting.
3. Modernism
The large cultural wave of Modernism, which gradually emerged in Europe and the US in the early years
of the 20th century, expressed a sense of modern life through art as a sharp break from the past, as well
as from Western civilization’s classical traditions. Modern life seemed radically different from traditional
life – more scientific, faster, more technological, and more mechanized. Modernism embraced these
changes.
Modernist artists believed that the traditional, social, religious, and political order had broken down.
They felt that Realism could not adequately describe how greatly modern life differed from the past. As
a result, they brought stylistic innovations that could better portray new realities.
Modernist poetry leaves out the explanations and narrative connections that provide unity and clarity in
traditional writing. It mixes everyday language with eloquent phrases and short quotations from earlier
poems. Poets placed contradictory feelings and events side by side to evoke the disconnectedness of
modern life.
In literature Gertrude Stein developed an analogue to modern art. Stein once explained that she and
Picasso were doing the same thing: he – in art; she – in writing. Using simple, concrete words as
counters, she developed an abstract, experimental prose poetry.
By dislocating grammar and punctuation, she achieved new ‘abstract’ meanings as in her influential
collection ‘Tender Buttons’, which views objects from different angles, as in a cubist painting:
A Table A Table means does it not my
dear it means a whole steadiness.
Is it likely that a change. A table
means more than a glass
Even a looking glass is tall.
Meaning, in Stein’s work, was subordinated to technique, just as subject was less important than shape
in abstract visual art. Subject and technique became inseparable in both the visual and literary art of the
period.
Technological innovation in the world of factories and machines inspired new attentiveness to technique
in the arts. E.g. electrical light fascinated modern artists and writers; photography began to assume the
status of a fine art allied with the latest scientific development.
Vision and viewpoints became an essential aspect of the modernist novel as well; the way the story was
told became as important as the story itself.
Modernism led writers of fiction to reexamine the techniques of storytelling. Writers began to strip
away descriptions of scenes and characters, explanations, direct statements of theme, and summaries of
the plot.
Henry James, William Faulkner, and many other American writers experimented with fictional points of
view./Faulkner’s novel ‘The Sound and the Fury’ breaks up the narrative into four sections, each giving
the viewpoint of a different character including a mentally retarded boy./
4. Experimentation
Modernism was influenced by a poetic movement called Imagism. The most important imagist poets
were Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and Hilda Doolittle who wrote under the initials H. D.
Ezra Pound was one of the most influential American poets of this century. He was a link between the
US and Britain, acting as contributing editor to Harriet Monroe’s important Chicago magazine ‘poetry’.
He spearheaded the new school of poetry known as Imagism, which advocated a clear, highly visual
presentation. He defined ‘image’ as something that ‘presents an intellectual and emotional complex in
an instant of time.’ Pound’s adaptations and brilliant translations introduced new literary possibilities
from many cultures to modern writers.
Pound’s long poem ‘Cantos’ reflects on poetry and the course of European and American history. This is
a collection of poems, left unfinished. It is one of the most ambitious works in history of world literature.
In 1949 Pound was given the Library of Congress’ Bollingen Prize – the leading award for poetry in the
US – for the section of ten ‘Pisan Cantos’, which had been written in an Italian jail.
Thomas Sterns Eliot /1888-1965/ wrote influential essays and dramas, and championed the importance
of literary and social traditions for the modern poet. As a critic, Eliot is best remembered for his
formulation of the ‘objective correlative’, which he described in ‘The Sacred Wood’, as a means of
expressing emotion through ‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events’ that would be the ‘formula’
of that particular emotion. His poetry, especially his daring, innovative early work, has influenced
generations.
‘The Waste Land’, the fundamental work of Eliot, spun out a pessimistic vision of post-first WW society.
Robert Lee Frost /1874-1963/
Like Eliot and Pound, he went to England, attracted by new movements in poetry there. Unlike them, he
practiced realism rather than modernism.
A charismatic public reader, he was renowned for his tours. He read an original work at the inauguration
of President John F. Kennedy in 1961, the first poet ever so honoured. His popularity is easy to explain:
he wrote of traditional farm life, appealing to a nostalgia for the old ways. His frequent use of rhyme
also appealed to the general audience. Two favourites among readers poems are: ‘Mending Wall’, ‘The
Road Not Taken.’ They are simple and readable on the surface, but they reveal complex feelings, often
through subtle irony and dry wit. Robert Frost was four times awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
William Carlos Williams celebrated everyday objects and experiences in short poems and an epic
‘Paterson’. He favoured a clean, direct style that would capture the individuality of the subject matter.
Wallace Stevens, in contrast to Eliot, wrote thoughtful speculations on how man can know reality. His
verse was disciplined, with understated rhythms, precisely chosen words and a cluster of central images.
Numerous American poets of stature and genuine vision arose in the years between the world wars,
among them poets from the West Coast, women, and African-Americans.
Robinson Jeffers trained in the classics and well-read in Freud. He re-created themes of Greek tragedy.
He wrote more openly pessimistic poetry set against a grimmer image of nature. He used sprawling free
verse.
Edward Estlin Cummings commonly known as e.e.cummings, wrote attractive, innovative verse
distinguished for its humour, grace, celebration of love, and experimentation with punctuation; his
poems used much unusual spacing and indentation, as well as dropping all use of capital letters:
in Just –
spring when the world is mud –
luscious the little …
He is best remembered for the unusual ways of arranging the words and letters: ‘anyone lived in a
pretty how town’.
5. American Realism
Although American prose between the wars experimented with viewpoint and form, Americans wrote
more realistically, on the whole, than did Europeans. Novelist Ernest Hemingway wrote of war, hunting,
and other masculine pursuits in a stripped, plain style; William Faulkner set his powerful southern
novels spanning generations and cultures firmly in Mississippi heat and dust; Sinclair Lewis delineated
bourgeois lives with ironic clarity. The importance of facing reality became a dominant theme in the
1920s and 1930s: writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and the playwright Eugene O’Neill repeatedly
portrayed the tragedy awaiting those who live in flimsy dreams.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald /1896-1940/ - his first novel ‘This Side of Paradise’ became a bestseller.
Fitzgerald’s secure place in American literature rests primarily on his novel ‘The Great Gatsby’, a
brilliantly written, economically structured story about the American dream of the self-made man.
Other fine works include ‘Tender is the Night’ and some stories in his collections ‘Flappers and
philosophers’, ‘Tales of the Jass Age’ and ‘All the Sad Young Men.’
More than any other writer, Fitzgerald captured the glittering, desperate life of the 1920s. His special
qualities include a dazzling style perfectly suited to his theme of seductive glamour.
His life resembles a fairly tale. During WW I, he enlisted in the US Army and fell in love with a rich and
beautiful girl; she broke off their engagement because he was relatively poor. Fitzgerald’s first novel
became a bestseller and they married. Neither of them was able to withstand the stresses of success
and fame, and they squandered their money. They moved to France to economize and return 7 years
later. Zelda became mentally unstable and had to be institutionalized; Fitzgerald himself became an
alcoholic and died young as a movie screenwriter.
Ernest Hemingway /1899-1961/
Few writers have lived as colourfully as E. Hemingway, whose career have come out of one his
adventurous novels. After the War, as a war correspondent based in Paris, he met expatriate American
writers Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein who, in particular,
influenced his spare style. ‘The Old Man and the Sea’, a short poetic novel about a poor, old fisherman
who heroically catches a huge fish devoured by sharks, won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953; the next year
he received the Nobel Prize. However, discouraged by a troubled family background, illness, and the
belief that he was losing his gift for writing, Hemingway shot himself to death in 1961.
His sympathies are basically apolitical and humanistic, and in this sense he is universal. His simple style
makes his novels easy to comprehend, and they are often set in exotic surroundings. A believer in the
‘cult of experience’, Hemingway often involved his characters in dangerous situations in order to reveal
their inner natures. His characters are not dreamers but tough bullfighters, soldiers, and athletes. His
fine ear for dialogue and exact description shows in his excellent short stories, such as ‘The Snows of
Kilimanjaro’, and ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.’ His best novels include ‘The Sun Also
Rises’, ‘A Farewell to Arms’, ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’.
William Harrison Faulkner /1897-1962/ - an innovative writer; experimented brilliantly with narrative
chronology, different points of view and voices, and a rich demanding baroque style of extremely long
sentences full of complicated subordinate parts. The use of various viewpoints makes Faulkner more
self-referential, that Hemingway and Fitzgerald; each novel reflects upon itself; while it simultaneously
unfolds a story of universal interest.
He often employed the stream-of-consciousness technique. To show the relationship of the past and the
present, he sometimes jumbled the time sequence of his plots. To reveal a character’s primitive
impulses and social prejudices, he recorded the ramblings of their consciousness.
His themes are southern tradition, family, community, the land, history and the past, race, and the
passion of ambition and love. Famous novels: ‘The Sound and the Fury’, ‘As I Lay Dying’, three novels,
focusing on the rise of a degenerate family, the Snopes clan: ‘The Hamlet’, ‘The Town’, ‘The Mansion’.
He won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
6.Novels of social awareness
During the 1920s and 1930s, many writers and critics debated the relation between literature and social
or political change. Particularly because of the depression many writers felt a responsibility to address
economic and social problems. They used journalistic techniques to educate a wide audience about
needed reforms. Often writers experimented with new forms and styles.
Social engaged authors included Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, Richard Wright, and
the dramatist Clifford Odets. They were linked to the 1930s in their concern for the welfare of the
common citizen and their focus on groups of people: Lewis’s ‘Babbitt’; families, as in Steinbeck’s ‘The
Grapes of Wrath; or urban masses, as Dos Passos accomplishes through his 11 major characters in his
‘U.S.A.’ trilogy.
Harry Sinclair Lewis /1885-1951/
His incisive presentation of American life and his criticism of American materialism, narrowness, and
hypocrisy brought him national and international recognition. In 1926, he was offered and declined a
Pulitzer Prize for ‘Arrowsmith’, a novel tracing a doctor’s efforts to maintain his medical ethics amid
greed and corruption. In 1930, he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Lewis’s other major works include ‘Babbitt’. This novel added a new word to the American language –
‘babbitry’ – meaning narrow-minded, complacent, bourgeois ways.
Lewis’s ‘Main Street’ immediately captured America’s attention.
John Dos Passos /1896-1970/ wrote realistically, in line with the doctrine of socialist realism. His best
work achieves a scientific objectivism and almost documentary effect. Dos Passos developed an
experimental college technique for his masterwork ‘U.S.A.’ His new techniques included ‘newsreel’
sections taken from contemporary headlines, popular songs, as well as ‘biographies’ briefly setting forth
the lives of important Americans of the period /Thomas Edison, Rudolph Valentino/; a third technique
‘the camera eye’, consists of stream of consciousness prose poems that offer a subjective response to
the events described in the books.
John Steinbeck /1902-1968/, like S. Lewis, is held in higher critical esteem outside the US than in it
today, largely because he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963 and the international fame it
confers. In both cases, the Nobel Committee selected liberal American writers noted for their social
criticism. His best known work is the Pulitzer Prize – winning novel – ‘The Grapes of Wrath’; other works
include ‘Of Mice and Men’, ‘Cannery Row’, ‘East of Eden’. Steinbeck combines realism with a primitivist
romanticism that finds virtue in poor farmers who live close to the land. His fiction demonstrates the
vulnerability of such people.
Erskine Caldwell took a satirical look at poor southern life in works ‘Tobacco Road’ and ‘God’s Little
Acre’. Both works encountered censorship difficulties, but eventually achieved wide popular success.
Each story of Sherwood Anderson explores, from a psychological viewpoint, a different personality in a
small Ohio town. His book of short stories called ‘Winesburg, Ohio’, created an overall impression of
narrow-minded ignorance and frustrated dreams.
Henry Louis Mencken, a satirist, mocked American society for its Puritanism, its anti-intellectualism and
its emphasis on conformity. ‘Prejudices’ – a six-volume series of articles – is the expression of his disgust
with middle-class life and values. ‘The American Language’ is a study of the English language in the US.
Detective novelists
Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler pioneered the ‘hard-boiled’ detective novel during the
1930s. The hard-boiled hero is usually a tough, streetwise private detective who sometimes uses illegal
methods to solve crimes.
Hammett’s detective hero is Sam Spade in ‘The Maltese Falcon’. His books were made into successful
films.
Chandler’s hero is Philip Marlowe, appeared in ‘The Big Sleep’.
7.The Harlem Renaissance
During the exuberant 1920s, Harlem, the black community situated uptown in New York City, sparkled
with passion and creativity. The sounds of its black American jazz swept the US by storm, and jazz
musicians and composers like Duke Ellington and Bessie Smith became stars beloved across the US and
overseas. Black spirituals became widely appreciated as uniquely beautiful religious music.
Harlem became chic night spots in the 1920s. The nation suddenly discovered ‘The New Negro’, an
articulate urban black, conscious of their identity. Magazines and newspapers dedicated to black writing
sprang up. The current gave African-American literary culture prominence and an impetus to grow.
New poets as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston,
Alan Locke wrote about what it meant to be black. They used exotic images drawn from their African
and slavery pasts and incorporated the rhythms of black music (jazz, blues) and the folk hymns
(spirituals). Many of them also wrote novels.
Langston Hughes is one of many talented poets of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s – in the
company of James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen. He embraced African-American
jazz rhythms and was one of the first black writers to attempt to make a profitable career out of his
writing. Hughes incorporated blues, spirituals, colloquial speech, and folkways in his poetry. Some of his
most beloved poems are: ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’, The Weary Blues’.
In later years he became known as the ‘O’Henry of Harlem’. As a lecturer he travelled on speaking tours
throughout the US, to the West Indies, the parts of Europe and Africa. He received many awards and
honours for his writing, which have been translated in more than 25 languages.
Hughes received recognition as a poet when, as a young man working as a waiter in a hotel, he showed
some of his poems to a guest, the eminent poet, Vachel Lindsay. Lindsay enthusiastically introduced the
poems to a literary gathering at the hotel and Hughes’ first book ‘The Weary Blues’ was published as a
result of the encouragement he received from Lindsay.
Richard Wright /1908-1960/ was the first African –American novelist to reach a general audience, even
though he had barely a ninth grade education. He was inspired by Sherwood Anderson, Theodore
Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis. His works include ‘Uncle Tom’s Children’ – a book of short stories; ‘Native
Son’ – a novel. The novel was a necessary and overdue expression of the racial inequality that has been
the subject of so much debate in the US.
Zora Neale Hurston was an impressive novelist. She collected black folk tales and became well known as
a skilled oral story teller. Her characters are vivid, realistic mixtures of strength and weakness. ‘Their
Eyes Were Watching God’ is her best-known work.
The poet Countee Cullen wrote accomplished rhymed poetry, in accepted forms, which was much
admired by whites.
On the other hand of the spectrum were African-Americans who rejected the US in favour of Marcus
Garvey’s ‘Back to America’ movement. Somewhere in between lies the work of Jean Toomer. He
brilliantly employed poetic traditions of rhyme and meter and did not seek out new ‘black’ forms for his
poetry. His major work is ‘Cane’ that contrasts the fast pace of African-American life in the city of
Washington.
8. The Fugitives and New Criticism
From the Civil War into the 20 th century, the southern US had remained a political and economic back
water ridden with racism and superstition, but, at the same time, blessed with rich folkways and a
strong sense of pride and tradition. The most significant 20 th century regional literary movement was
that of the Fugitives – led by poet-critic-theoretician John Crowe Ransom, poet Allen Tate, and novelist
–poet-essayist Robert Penn Warren.
This southern literary school rejected ‘northern’ urban, commercial values, which they felt had taken
over America. The Fugitives called for a return to the land and to the American traditions that could be
found in the South. The movement took its name from a literary magazine ‘The Fugitive’.
These three major Fugitive writers were also associated with New Criticism, an approach to
understanding literature through close readings and attentiveness to formal patterns of imagery,
metaphors, sounds and their suggested meanings. That school arose to analyse modernist novels and
poetry. They had their own critical vocabulary. New Critics ‘examined’ and ‘clarified’ a work, hoping to
‘shed light’ upon it through their ‘insights’.
John Ransom published a book ‘The New Criticism’, which offered an alternative to previous extra-
literary methods of criticism, based on history and biography. New Criticism became the dominant
American critical approach in 1940s and 1950s because it proved to be well-suited to modernist writers
such as Eliot and could absorb Freudian theory/ such categories as id, ego and superego/.
9. Drama
American drama imitated English and European theatre until well into the 20 th century. Often, plays
from England or translated from European languages dominated theatre seasons. An inadequate
Copyright Law that failed to protect and promote American dramatists worked against genuinely
original drama. Imported drama enjoyed higher status than indigenous productions.
During the 19th century melodramas with exemplary democratic figures and clear contrasts between
good and evil had been popular. Plays about social problems such as slavery also drew large audiences;
sometimes these plays were adaptations of novels like ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’. Not until the 20th century
would serious plays attempt aesthetic innovations. Minstrel shows, based on African-American music
and folkways, performed by white characters using ‘blackface’ makeup, also developed original forms
and expressions.
In 1916, a company called the Provincetown Players Company began to produce the works of E. O’Neill
- plays that were more than just entertainment.
Eugene O’Neill /1888-1953/ is the great figure of American theatre. His numerous plays combine
enormous technical originality with freshness of vision and emotional depth. His earliest dramas
concern the working class and poor; later works explore subjective realms. His play ‘Desire Under the
Elms’ recreates the passions hidden within one family; ‘The Great God Brown’ uncovers the
unconsciousness of a wealthy businessman. ‘A Strange Interlude’, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, traces
the tangled loves of one woman. These powerful plays reveal different personalities reverting to
primitive emotions or confusion under intense stress.
O’Neill continued to explore the Freudian pressures of love and dominance within families in a trilogy of
plays entitled ‘Mourning Becomes Electra.’
His later plays include the acknowledged masterpieces ‘The Iceman Cometh’ and ‘Long Day’s Journey
Into Night’ – a powerful extended autobiography.
He redefined the theatre by abandoning traditional divisions into acts and scenes, using masks such as
those found in Asian and ancient Greek theatre; introducing Shakespearean monologues; producing
special effects through lighting and sound. He is generally acknowledged to have been America’s
foremost dramatist.
In 1936 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature – the first American playwright to be so honoured.
What makes O’Neill unique was his incorporation of all the elements into a new American voice and
dramatic style. His characters spoke heightened language – not realistic, yet not flowery. He described
elaborate stage sets that stood as dramatic symbols. To express psychological undercurrents, he had
characters speak their thoughts aloud. His greatest theme was the individual’s search for identity.
During the 1930s vigorous debates took place over the purpose of drama. Some playwrights wanted the
theatre to be a force for social reform. Others concentrated on experimental technique; and still others
aimed at frankly commercial successful work.
The country plunged into a severe economic depression, and O’Neill’s emphasis on the individual was
replaced by other playwrights’ social and political consciousness.
Clifford Odets’ (a master of social drama) ‘Awake and Sing’, Sherwood Anderson’s ‘Winterset’ were
marked by new awareness of the individual’s place and role in society.
Yet, the Depression made many people long for tender humour and the affirmation of traditional values.
Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town’ was a vivid example of this transformation. He used uncommon staging
techniques, such as the absence of scenery or a curtain.
