American literature in the post-war period

The USA emerged from World War II as the most powerful capitalist country. Though America had fought for a just cause, against Japanese and German fascism, she was now gradually turning fascist. She was guided by a small number of corporation heads and military chieftains who had gained profit from the war and who now began to use power policy to silence all opposition to their expansionist plans. The most popular explanation of all ag­gression was the necessity to fight the conspiracy of world Com­munism inside the country. The Cold War hysteria reached its peak in the fifties when, inspired by senator McCarthy's demagogic speeches, the Committee of Un-American Activities started a vast brainwashing of American society. Its aim was to silence dissent, to subdue revolt, to erase any true individuality in the American scene — in the press, the colleges and the arts. It was especially directed against the progressive intellectuals.

In 1949 nineteen leading Communist party officials were sent to prison. The Communist frame-up was followed by the case of "the Hollywood ten"'. Witchhunts and spy-manias swept the country.

The atmosphere of fraud and evil, of judicial and political cor­ruption caused caution and passivity. It was the era of the so-called "silent generation'¹, a generation who had stopped believing in lofty causes and humanist ideals. Some writers hastened to apo­logize for past errors in their thinking. Some abandoned their interest in political ideas in favour of a kind of apolitical con­servatism.

The national mood was nervous, aggressive, defensive and lost. Some philosophers concluded that the Americans were be­coming a nation of conformists with no fixed standards or beliefs, striving to resemble their nextdoor neighbours. Public opinion was manufactured on a mass scale by the radio, the television and the newspapers, which were in the hands of the big monopolists. Books praising the American way of life, the cult of the dollar, the way to success, detective stories and comics were being encouraged and highly publicized because they contained no threat to capi­talism.

Social dissent required great moral courage and many writers avoided social generalizations and went in pursuit of private emo­tions. Among those who dared to take up vast social themes under McCarthysm was the young author James Jones ['d3eimz Мзоипг] who entered the literary scene wiht his war novels. By exposing the dehumanizing role of the American army the author

¹ Ten Hollywood script writers were accused of communist activities by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

attempted to make a vast generalization of contemporary capitalist society.

"From Here to Eternity" (1948).From the very first pages of his novel James Jones launches the reader into a dramatic conflict between Colonel Holmes f'houmz] and Private Prewitt fprurwit].The main issue concerns Colonel Holmes's despotic wish to crush Prew's individuality by fitting him into a fear ladder and Prew's desperate struggle to keep his integrity. The main conflict con­cerns the struggle between power policy and humanity. Prew is a willing boxer until he inflicts a permanent injury on a partner. Then he decides to keep a promise to his mother — not to hurt any­body unnecessarily, and he refuses to go out for the regimental team. Prew does not even suspect that his genuine opponent is General Slater ['sleits] who wants to see his fear system govern the army from top to bottom. He makes it clear to Holmes that his military capeer depends on his success in breaking Prew's rebellious spirit. Trying to subdue Prew, Dynamite Holmes and some other officers give him "the treatment". They torture him on the drilling field, rob him of his regular Sunday leave and punish him for every insignificant breach of army discipline. "The treat­ment" stands for the dehumanizing effect of modern bureaucratic capitalist society trying to make mass men out of human indivi­duals. Through social fear they turn them into pliable tools in the hands of the Establishment. Prew would not give in, since it seems the only .way to keep his individuality. Finally, on a slight accusa­tion the court-martial sends him to the Stockade, the army prison, which is the embodiment of the worst qualities of army life. The portrayal of the Stockade implies a symbolic parallel not only with army life but life in the United States in general. Freed from the Stockade, Prew kills the Stockade boss Fatso ['fsetsou] who is the exponent of the power and fear policy Prew hates. In the confusion of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour nobody pays any attention to Fatso's death. Afraid of being found out, Prew tries to rejoin his regiment only after several days when his comrades have been removed to different positions and is killed by the battle police as a Japanese spy. Thus, the Establishment gets him in the end.

The writer centers his attention on moral problems investigating the possibilities of genuine heroism in dehumanizing society. He has obviously made a pessimistic conclusion that a stoic fight for moral integrity is the only form of heroism and moral victory fol­lowing actual loss is the only form of victory possible in our time. Yet Jone's pessimism is not all-embracing for his heroes never give up their struggle against overwhelming forces or their dreams of a better future. He portrays his protagonists as generous and proud people worthy of love and respect. With deep pain- for the fate of his heroes Jones depicts the dull army routine and the humiliations the soldiers have to suffer from the army hierarchy. It is a triumph for Jone's realistic art that he

understands the class character of power, policy and draws a direct parallel between the commanding staff of the army and the big monopolists in America: "The men who control the corpora­tions and our senior officers are really very much alike, you know. They both utilize this new social fear they have helped develop." We also see Slater's various minor counterparts in the portraits of other officers — carrerist Colonel Holmes, sadist Thompson, empty Delbert and aristocratic Culpepper ['кл1рерэ], who never question their right to command other people. The deeply humane, proud and noble soldiers Prew, Malloy and Maggio ['ma^iou] are contrasted to the commanding staff. They only dimly sense who is to blame for injustice committed against the simple people. We see the feeling of brotherhood maturing in their souls.

At the end of the book Prew's words ring with admonishing force and anticipation of a change: "American faces and American voices, ... leathery, lean, hardbitten faces and voices in the old American tradition of woodsmen and the ground clearing farmers who also fought bitterly to stay alive. Here is your army, America, he sleepily wanted to tell them, here is your strength, that you have made strong by trying to break, and that you will have to depend on in the times that are coming, whether you like it or not, or want to or not, and no matter how much it hurts your pride."

J. Jones's other war novels include "The Pistol" (1959) and "The Thin Red Line" (1962).

Another writer who dared to investigate important social issues was Arthur Miller ['а:8э 'mib]. In his plays "All My Sons" (1947) and "Death of a Salesmen" (1949) he concentrated on man's moral integrity and social responsibility.

"All My Sons" is a family drama, but the important social and moral issues that lie at its basis make it socially significant. The action takes place directly after World War II. The eldest son of a factory owner Joe Keller has not returned from the war where he served as a pilot. His mother Kate does not believe that her son Larry is dead. The youngest son Chris j/kris] loves Larry's girl Ann who shares his feeling but he does not want to announce their engagement not to hurt his mother. Larry being always present in others¹ thoughts keeps up an atmosphere of suspense. We get to know that during the war Keller's factory produced air­plane parts. Once, while fulfilling an urgent government order, more than a hundred cylinder heads were reported to have defects. Pretending to be ill Keller .ordered Ann's father who worked at the factory as his assistant, to ship out the parts as the army was demanding stuff, and he would have lost his orders and profit if he had not. Twenty-one pilots perished in air-plane crashes because of the defective parts. Later in court Keller denied his phone call and Ann's father was jailed. Everybody believed him guilty, even Ann and her brother George. Shortly before his release George visited him in jail and got to know the actual facts. He comes to Keller's

place to prevent Chris and Ann's marriage. He tells Chris of his father's guilt. Chris who has also been to the front during the war is shocked and decides to leave his father's house. When Chris reproaches his father, the latter says he had no other alternative — if he had not fulfilled the government order his rivals would have eaten him up. He had done it for his sons and his family, he says. Ann shows him Larry's last letter to her in which he says he had read about his father and the cracked cylinders in the news­paper and he could not bear to live any more. "Every day three or four men never come back and he sits back there doing busi­ness," he writes. Larry flies out in his plane never to return. Keller realizes that he has killed his own son and for the first time he understands that he is guilty of the death of those other twenty-one pilots. "They were all my sons," he says and commits suicide.

The family drama achieves the significance of a social drama where capitalist reality is revealed. The ruling force in capitalist society is money and the ruling principle — competition. Jim, Kel­ler's neighbour, says: "Nobody realizes how many people are walking around loose, and they're cracked as coconuts. Money. Money. Money." Chris says: "This is the land of the great big dogs, you don't love a man here, you eat him! That's the principle, the only one we live by — it just happened to kill a few people this time, that's all. The world's that way, how can I take it out on him? This is a zoo, a zoo!"

Miller knows well enough that not only Keller is to blame, but the whole system is wrong. The way the capitalists make profit is illegal. Keller says: "Who worked for nothing in that war? When they work for nothing, I'll work for nothin'. Did they ship a gun or a truck outa Detroit before they got their price? Is that clean? It's dollars and cents, nickels and dimes; war and peace, it's nickels and dimes, what's clean? Half the goddamn country is gotta go if I go!"

Miller's next play "Death of a Salesman" tells of a travelling salesman Willy Loman and his family — his wife Linda and sons Biff and Happ_y. He is an average American and believes in "pri­vate initiative", "private property", "prospering individual" and the dream of the common man — the possibility to rise to wealth through diligent labour. He does not understand the cruel laws of capitalist society. He believes in American democracy thinking a capitalist is a worker's comrade.

Life crushes his ideals one after another. Business is not what it used to be when he was strong and healthy. He can hardly earn enough to pay for the things he has bought on hire-purchase. He has already been paying for twenty-five years for their house. Loman says: "I just finished paying for the car and it's on its last legs. The refrigerator consumes belts like a goddamn maniac. They time those things. They time them so when you have finally paid for them, they are used up." Loman has worked for Howard

Wagner's company for thirty-six years. He has opened up new markets for their trademark. Wagner's father has promised him a job in New York when he is old and unable to travel any more. But Howard does not need him in town and fires him altogether. For the first time Willy realizes the futility of his dreams. He has been squeezed out and when he is unable to bring in a large profit he is dismissed. "I put thirty-six years into this firm. You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away — a man is not a piece of fruit," he says bitterly. His previous ideals slip through his hands like quicksand. Unable to sustain his family and having lost the sense of personal dignity, Willy decides to make a sacrifice for those he loves. He commits suicide in his car in order that Biff and Happy should get the insurance money and start a business.

A. Miller's other social-psychological plays include "The Crucible" (1953), "A View from the Bridge" (1955), "After the Fall" (1964), "Incident at Vichy" (1964) and "The Price" (1969).

At the end of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties McCarthyism started to decline, ft was influenced by the courage and growing militancy of the civil rights movement, the anti-Viet­nam war protest movement, the youth revolt guided by their most organized part "the'new left".

Among the first to protest against the atmosphere of conformity were the "Beat"¹ writers. They were dissatisfied with the materia­listic spirit and conventional values of American society. They set out on a search for truth, genuine life and love through personal experience. The Beatniks wore long beards, dirty clothes, were de­liberately obscene in language and used drugs thus shocking the "squares"². The leading writers of the "Beat" movement were mainly poets, like A lie n Ginsburg ['aelan 'ginzbsig] and Lawrence Ferlinghetti ['birons Jailin'geti]. In prose fiction the best-known figure was Jack Kerouac [Мзявк 'кегоиэк]. His novel "On the Road" (1957) recounts the adven­tures of a group of young people who refuse to be tied down to steady jobs or any social obligations and wander all over Canada and Mexico. Kerouac's characters live as simply as possible and on the spur of the moment registering spontaneous impressions of people, events and things. They do not try to understand the world around them. Travel is both a liberation from society and a nar­cotic to them. The rebellion of the "Beat" writers was private and personal. Its stress was really on drugs and lax morals rather than on social principles.

J. Griffin. "BlackLike Me" (1961).The Negro movement created a vivid interest in racial problems. One of the best works analysing the situation of the Negro in America was John Griffin's М 'grifin] documentary novel "Black Like Me". The author

¹ shortening of the word "beatitude" — bliss

² conventional people

wanted to know what it was like to experience discrimination based on skin colour, something over which one has no control. Knowing that the Southern Negro would be afraid to tell the truth to a white man, Griffin changed the colour of his skin. The book records the author's-experiences in the deep South. Though the Negroes are formally free and cannot be sold or tortured to death as in the times when Beecher Stowe wrote her novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin", yet they are humiliated every day. As a Negro the writer cannot enter the cafes and hotels he used to visit when he was a white man. In the buses and trams he has to occupy a back seat meant for the Negroes. When Griffin politely offers a white woman his seat, instead of thanking him she reprimands him for looking at her in a "sassy way'⁴. When the author asks the bus driver to stop at the block where his hotel is located the latter takes him two blocks down and he has to walk all the way up followed by two white teenage hooligans who call him a "Nigger" and try to frighten him. The words "Hey, nigger, you can't go in there. Hey, nigger, you can't drink there. We don't serve niggers," follow him in every Southern town. The author is thoroughly ashamed of the behaviour of his own people who "could give the hate stare, could shrivel men's souls, could deprive humans of rights they unhesitatingly accord their own livestock."

Nevertheless, Griffin does not simplify the Negro problem. He speaks also of Negroes who are wild, immoral and ignorant, yet at the same time he reveals the vicious circle they are in. The Negro people are not educated because they,either cannot afford it or know that education would not earn them the jobs it would a white man. Any decent standard of living seems impossible from the out­set. So a lot of them do not even strive to get education. J. Griffin condemns his own race saying: "No one, not even a saint can live without a sense of personal value. The white racist has masterfully defrauded the Negro of this sense. It is the least obvious but most heinous of all race crimes, for it kills the spirit and the will to live."

Talking to many Negro people the author acquires a deep in­sight into their urgent problems. The biggest problem is lack of unity. Some of the light Negroes are flattered by the white people's attention to them. They accept the white man's standard and start judging about their own race by the colour of their skin, scorning the dark Negroes. J. Griffin stresses that skin colour is a wrong standard to judge by. He points out that having turned black he had remained the same man, spiritually and intellectually. Yet, instead of the honour and privileges he enjoyed while being a white man, now he is insulted and humiliated.

After his report on the television about the result of his trip the author received many letters, in which the white racists called him

¹ impudent

a "nigger lover'¹ and threatened to lynch him. At the end of the book Griffin warns the white people not to miss their chance to improve the situation of the Negroes before they rise to avenge them for their sufferings.

Harper Lee's ['haipa lii] novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1960) concentrates on the theme of racial prejudice and the pro­gressive-minded people's struggle against it. The main issue of the plot concerns the lawsuit of a young Negro Tom Robinson who is charged with assaulting a poor white girl. When Judge Tailor asks Atticus Finch ['aetikas 'fintj]. an experienced lawyer and a very clever man, to defend Tom, he is sure Atticus will not win the case since racial prejudice is too deep-seated in the hearts of his country­men. "We were licked a hundred years before we started," says Atticus Finch.

The quiet life in Maycomb bursts by the trial. Even the most genteel ladies become cruel and insensitive, when the conversation concerns Tom's fate. People start calling Atticus a "nigger lover". "Why reasonable people go mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I cannot understand," says Atticus. He is free of racial prejudices. He says to his son Jem: "As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it — whenever a white man does that for a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash." Though he does not hope to win the lawsuit, Atticus feels that it is one of the rare cases which affects his personal life. He would be a coward if he tried to avoid defending what he considers is right. "Before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself," he says. Besides, he does not want to» blush looking into the innocent eyes о his children. Atticus Finch loses the case. Yet he has achieved much by shattering the complacency of some of the townspeople and by sowing doubts into their souls about their at­titude to the Negroes. Miss Maudie, a progressive-minded woman, says, "I thought, Atticus Finch won't win, he can't win, but he's the only man in these parts who can keep a jury out so long in a case like that. And I thought to myself, well, we're making a step — it's just a baby-step, but it's a step."

The leitmotif of the book is the education of children in the spirit of racial equality, honesty and humanism. We see the events and the people of Maycomb through the eyes of Atticus's daughter Jean Louise nicknamed Scout who is eight years old. This manner of narration allows the writer to express her point of view without interfering between the reader and the main hero. The innocent children's bewilderment about the cruelty of the white people, their hope for a just verdict and their disappointment at the injustice lend a special poignancy to the novel. The humanistic message of the novel has been underlined in the title. Atticus tells his children that it is a sin to kill a mockingbird as "they don't do one

thing but make music for us to enjoy ... They don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us." Tom's death is compared to a senseless slaughter of songbirds.

J. D. Salinger. "The Catcher in the Rye" (1951).One of the best novels devoted to the Youth problems in the post-war period was J. D. Salinger's [Мзэ'гошп 'deivid 'saslindsa] "The Catcher in the Rye". It is a sensitive psychological study of a prep-school¹ boy, Holden Caulfield. He is a misfit who has been expelled from several schools. As the novel unfolds, he is about to be expelled from the Pennsylvania prep-school, too, as he has failed in a number of subjects. Though he pretends to be cynical and all-knowing, his real difficulty is that he is more sensitive and idealistic than the boys around him. Finally, he runs away from school and goes to New York, where his parents live. Afraid to approach them for fear of their disapproval, he registers at a hotel. During the few days he stays away from home, he goes to a restaurant, meets a girl friend, his sister Phoebe ['fi:bi] and his former teacher Mr. Antolini. Touched by Phoebe's wish to run away from home with him, he decides to go home with her instead.

The whole story has been told in retrospect. In the first chapter and the epilogue we see Holden in an institution recovering from a nervous breakdown.

Holden is uncompromisingly honest. He observes hypocricy and false (or as he says "phoney") values in the adult world. Coming from an upper-middle-class family, he is, however, against judging of people by their wealth, Thus, he calls the head of his former school at Elkton Hills "the phoniest bastard" he had ever met, be­cause the latter would be nice only to rich parents. He even judges harshly about his own mother speculating whether she would be able to go collecting money for the poor like the two nuns with whom he gets acquainted at the station. He decides that she would do it only for show to exhibit her elegant dress. He criticizes his elder brother, a writer, for selling himself to Hollywood. At school he hates insincerity. Thus, he dislikes the class of Oral Expression at which pupils are taught how to express their meager thoughts in logical sentences. At the same time every sincere idea is rejected as a digression. He has a distaste for cheap, sensational films and plays shown at the Broadway theatres. Thus, his protest has a definite social slant. He is against the American way of life. He has a passionate devotion toward the few genuine people in his life. His sister Phoebe is one of them. Disgusted with the lies around him, Holden dreams of living quite alone in a hut deep in a forest and pretending to be a deaf-mute. His deepest concern is to save other children from the pain of adapting themselves to the false adult world. It is symbolically summed up in his dream to become a catcher in a rye field keeping watch on the edge of a steep cliff

¹ preparatory school 336

and saving little children from falling into the abyss. Actually, Holden's dream is unreal since one cannot avoid growing up and facing the problem of adjustment. Holden's former teacher wants to persuade him that conformity to the adult world means maturity. Yet, the hero refuses to compromise with his false environment and this leads him to a mental breakdown.

ck The novel is written in the first person. It is a masterpiece of extended monologues. The story is related in Holden's own de­fiant, exaggerated, ungrammatical and slangy way of talking, which, nevertheless, manages to express great subtlety of feeling and insight.

In his novel "Too Far to Walk" (1966)John Hersey centers his attention on various forms of youth rebellion. The main hero John Fist, a sophomore at the Sheldon college, is in a dangerous state of mind. He finds that it is "too far to walk" to his history class. The history teacher Orreman embodies everything that he hates — respectability, authority and conformity to traditional values. John does not want eternal truths handed down to him ready made. He wants to find everything out himself through expe­rience. He wants to experience a breakthrough so that "all the walls would come tumbling down that most of the time shut John away from other human beings, from trees, from sea water, from light, from air to breathe".

John Fist's search for his own true identity takes on the sym­bolic form of Faust's quest for truth. Breed, John's coursemate, whose main attraction for John is his nihilism, plays the part of the modern devil. He promises John intensity of life, asking for it his id or his inmost primeval soul. Pronouncing "Evil, be thou my Good", John sets out with Breed on a long journey of unusual experiences. He moves from a love affair to petty thievery and from the latter to a college riot. However, he emerges from each of his adventures disappointed. The girl he has a love affair with is cheap, vulgar and lightminded. The flat he robs belongs to a poor Negro and instead of feeling thrilled he is ashamed. The college riot concerns insignificant issues. The main slogans are "Eliminate French! Fire professor Jejune!"

The riot has been obviously fostered by the college authorities since it is not directed against the Establishment. John Fist feels cheated: "What a cheat his contract had so far proved to be! Where were the soaring ecstasies Breed had promised, where even were the acts of nihilism, devilry, destructiveness? John felt that, far from shooting back and forth to the sharpest extremes of expe­rience, he was, rather, drifting sluggishly through life, like a water­logged log." Finally, Breed initiates him into drugs. The whole third part of the book is a strange combination of real life events and queer dreams and fantasies induced by drugs. With a crowd of other drug addicts John and Breed travel along the ocean shore. They shock middle-class Americans with their obscene

22 988 337

language and lax morals. At the end of the book we see both youths at an insane asylum where they are undergoing a treatment from drug effects.

John Hersey compares life in contemporary America to an in­sane asylum. Both, at Sheldon and at the asylum nobody listens to John Fist's problems. Words have lost all value. John says: "This place certifies you as being bughouse; Sheldon certifies you as- educated. Both on the basis of the words you use, or rather on the basis of the way they hear, or don't hear, your words. I don't like either deal." Thus, John Fist's experience ends without a break­through, without a glimpse of the meaning of life. He has to choose between madness and dull, stupid, conforming middle-class life. At the end of the book we see him reconcile with his environment. However, the closing lines, reproducing a poem by the ancient Latin poet Catullus, indicate the difficulty of the choice;

"I hate and love. You ask how that can be? I know not, but I feel the agony."

One of the most popular themes of American literature in the sixties was the theme of alienation. As Karl Marx has pointed out, alienation is the psychological counterpart of the economic and social domination by private property. This spirit of conformity and the false ideals of the consumers' society increased the sense of alienation of the people from one another and from their own humanity. An artificially created passion for obtaining fashionable things was ousting spiritual values.' Immersed in things and sup­plied with ready-made formulas of social behaviour, people felt ,,they were lacking humanity and a sense of life.

Many well-known American contemporary writers have exa­mined various aspects of alienation manifest in American life: John Updike in "Rabbit, Run" and "The Centaur", Saul Bellow in "Seize the Day", "The Victim", "Herzog", Truman Capote in "Breakfast at Tiffany's", Carson McCullers in "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter", "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe" and "Reflections in a Golden Eye", the playwrights Tennessy Williams in "The Glass Menagerie", "Streetcar Named Desire" and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'¹, Edward Albee in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf?"

American post-war literature manages to present a many-sided picture of the changing American reality.

CONTENTS

ENGLISH LITERATURE

MiddleAges (A. M i s a n e) ................................................................ 5

The Ancient Britons............................................................................................. 5

The Anglo-Saxon Period . . . ■..................................................................... 6

Anglo-Saxon Literature........................................................................... 7

The Norman Period........................................................................... ■ . 8

The Norman Conquest......................................................... - - . 8

Literature in the Norman Times............................................. 9

Geoffrey-Chaucer.................................................................................... И

TheRenaissance .......................................................................................... 14

Thomas More........................................................................................ 15

The Development of Drama in England.................................................. 16

Christopher Marlowe ................................................................ 18

The Golden Age of English Literature.......................... ■........................... 18

William Shakespeare.................................. '............................................ 19

English Literature during the BourgeoisRevolution ...... 33

John Milton . .\................................................................................... 34

The Enlightenment ....................................................................................36

Daniel Defoe ...................................................................................... 38

v

Jonathan Swift............................................................................ 42

Henry Fielding.................................................................... . . 47

Laurence Sterne....................................................................................... 51

Robert Burns...................................................................................... 53

Romanticism.....................................................................................................57

William Wordsworth ...................................... ■.................... . 58

22* 339

Samuel Taylor Coleridge ........................................................ 61

George Gordon Byron.................................................................. 62

Percy Bysshe Shelley................................................................ 68

John Keats....................................................................................... 71

Walter Scott.............................................................................. 74

The XIX Century Critical Realism............................................................79

Charles Dickens.............................................................................. 80

William Makepeace Thackeray........................................................ 86

The Bronte Sisters ................................................................ 89

Elizabeth Gaskell ............................................................................. 96

George Eliot.................................................................................... 99

The Turn of the Century

Thomas Hardy................................................................................ 103

Rudyard Kipling............................................................................ .107

Robert Louis Stevenson ...................................... ., . . . Ill

Joseph Conrad ........................................................................... 114

Oscar Wilde.......................................................... 2< .... 118

The Early XX Century English Literature(Dz. ¥Teija) ... 122

John Galsworthy ...................................................................... 123

George Bernard Shaw..................................................................... 129

Herbert George Wells....................................................................... 135

William Somerset Maugham.......................................................... 141

Katherine Mansfield........................................................................... 146

Herbert David Lawrence.................................................................. 152

Edward Morgan Forster........................................................... 156

Richard Aldington ....................................................................... 160

Archibald Cronin ................................................................. 164

Graham Greene........................................................................... 169

English Literature after World War II................................................... 176

Sean O'Casey............................................................................... 177

Jack Lindsay................................................................................ 181

Charles Percy Snow . ,.................................................... 185

James Aldridge ............................................................... • - 190

Alan Sillitoe ............................................................................. 194

Angry Young Men................................................................................... 199

John Osborne............................................................................... 200

Kingsley Amis ......................................................................... 205

John Wain ........................................................................... 206

John Braine ............................................................................... 208

AMERICAN LITERATURE

Political and Historical Summary (R. Abel Una)............................ 215

Colonial Literary Culture........................... ,........................................ 216

XIX Century Literature ..............................................................................218

Romanticism ......................................................................................... 218

Washington Irving .................................................................. 220

James Fenimore Cooper ............................................................ 223

Edgar Allan Рое ....................................................................... 227

Herman Melville............................................................................. 232

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow........................................................... 236

Walt Whitman .............................................................................. 241

Abolitionism ............................................................................................ 246

Harriet Beecher Stowe.............................................................................. 247

XX Century Literature ..............................................................................253

First Steps of Realism in American Literature........................................... 253

Mark Twain (Dz, Fleija)................................................................ 254

Henry James (R. A belti pa)...................................................... 261

O. Henry.......................................................................................... 266

Jack London (Dz, Fleija) ...................................................... 269

American Literature after 1917 ....................................................................... 277

Theodore Dreiser (Dz. Fleija)....................................................... 278 ■

John Reed ........................................................................................ 283

Sinclair Lewis (R. Abel tin a) ............................................. 289 •

Sherwood Anderson............................................................................. 294

Francis Scott Fitzgerald................................................................. 298

. Ernest Hemingway................................................................................. 302 -

William Faulkner............................................................................ 309 •

John Steinbeck ............................................................................. 316-

Albert Maltz ................................................................................ 322

William Saroyan ..................................................................... 325

American Literature in the Post-War Period............................................... 329