American literature at the turn of the xix-xx centuries
American society after the Civil War was characterized be massive industrialization in the North and an astonishing growth in population. In a process comparable to the Industrial Revolution in Britain, American industry became more highly mechanized. Machines were used in ever greater numbers and businesses were able to charge lower prices for the range of new products available: the typewriter (1867), the telephone (1876), the phonograph (1877) and the gasoline automobile (1885) made their first appearance in this period. The last one had an enormous impact on American society, and by 1916 no less than 3.5 million people owed a car – as opposed to only 8,000 in 1900. Business was booming and the role of business owners in the political decision-making process was to become ever more important as time progressed.
Economic growth was in part facilitated by a growing domestic market. By 1916 America’s population had more than doubled its 1870 level of 40 million to almost 100 million. Immigration was a prime factor in the population growth: more than 25 million people entered America between 1870 and 1920. Immigrants arriving in the “Promised Land” provided both cheap labour power and a market of consumers. During what Mark Twain called “The Gilded Age”, many individuals amassed huge fortunes and attempted to imitate the culture and manners of their upper-class European counterparts. The growing ranks of America’s middle class also shared in the enormous quantity of wealth generated by the boom. The working class, however, lived in great poverty in crowded slums and tenement houses with little or no sanitation. Unemployment due to labour surplus only aggravated their wretched conditions during the depressions of 1873, 1884, 1893 and 1907.
It was not until the 1890s that politicians truly set about solving the problems afflicting society at that time. During what is frequently referred to as the “Progressive Era” (1890-1917), reformers succeeded in bringing about many changes. During the 1890s writers (nicknamed “muckrakers”), educators, churchmen and social workers gained much publicity for their causes, and the forces of the establishment were soon compelled to make compromises in the wake of strikes and public concern at corruption and exploitation. At local and state levels reforms were passed to assist the poor with regard to both housing and education, and factory legislation was introduced to help workers. Under Sherman Anti-Trust Act trusts and monopolies began to be regulated by federal legislation. Both President Roosevelt (1901-1909) and his successor William Taft (1909-1913) sued businesses and companies which were thought to be operating against the public interest.
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, American writers produced a wide variety of works, particularly in the field of prose. As the frontier moved west to its ultimate resting place on the Pacific Ocean, so Americans became more inquisitive about people living in other parts of the country. After the Civil War, their curiosity was in part satisfied by a number of authors known collectively as “literary comedians” and “local colorists”. Writing mainly for newspapers and magazines, the former concentrated on colourful descriptions of local traditions, customs, manners, dress and – most importantly – dialects and speech. Their humour was mostly bound up bad spelling and amusingly contorted or incorrect grammar, with slang incongruously combined with Latinate words and leaned allusions (Ch.F.Browne, D.R. Lock and others).
More serious stories and novels covering almost every corner of the country were written by the “local colorists”. Their task was to show realistically the lives of various sections of society and thus promote understanding in a united nation. In their sympathetic portrayal of mostly simple folk in provincial communities and their attention to dialect and local customs, these works in part paved the way for the trends of realism and naturalism which were to dominate the American novel over the coming decades. Among the “local colorists” were Bret Harte, famous for his tales about the mythical California of the past; Joel Chandler Harris, brilliant humourist and creator of Uncle Remus, the wise old black man who tells stories about Bre Rabbit, Bre Fox and others to the son of a plantation owner, Harriet Beecher Stowe with her Oldtown Folks and Sam and Lawson with his Oldtown Fireside Stories, both dedicated to New England; E. Eggleston with his novels of the early days of settlement in Indiana. In time, practically every corner of the country was portrayed in local color fiction: Louisiana Creoles by T.N.Page, tight-lipped folk of New England by Sarah Orne Jewett, people of New York by William Sidney Porter(O’ Henry).The stories were only partially realistic as the authors tended nostalgically to revisit the past instead of showing their own time. But some at least avoided older sentimentality or romantic formulas.Mark Twainwas allied with both literary comedians and local colorists. But he had more skill than his teachers in selecting evocative details, and he had a genius for characterization.
Realism and Naturalism also developed during this period, in part influenced by the novels of the French Naturalist school, led by Emile Zola who had a great impression on American writers. William Dean Howells, influential critic and editor of Atlantic Monthly, was instrumental in laying down the guidelines for a new realism in literature. He defined the aims of realism as “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material”, and asserted that the true realist “cannot look upon human life and declare that this thing or that thing unworthy of notice, any more than the scientist can declare a fact of the material world beneath the dignity of his inquiry”. In TheRise of Silas Lapham (1885), Howells best illustrated his aims, and his call up on writers to deal with ordinary, average lives of American people was to be answered by a host of other novelists- known as Naturalists– over the following decades.
Inspired by Zola’s The Entrails of Paris with its minute description of an enormous city, American writers began to study factories and slums. An American critic said that since the eyes of the novelists had opened to the significance of economics, the world of the makers (the workers) had begun to interest them more than the world of the spenders (the master class). Against the seedy background of social degradation, crime, exploitation and slum conditions, the Naturalists attempted to demonstrate that human behaviour was determined by natural scientific and environmental laws. In exploring the amorality of society, they often show their characters as victims of their social surroundings. Their works are based on first-hand research, carefully documented and essentially faithful to the facts. The Naturalists believed that if an episode was transcribed in its actuality, as it appeared to the observer, it would convey all its emotional weight without lofty sentimentality, moralizing or explanation on the part of the author. They made their stories and novels vehicles for philosophical and social preachments and were franker than their predecessors in their subjects and details.
Theodore Dreiser(1871-1945) treated subjects that had seemed too daring to earlier Realists and illustrated his beliefs by depictions of characters and unfolding of plots. He portrayed characters whose deeds are nothing more than “chemical compulsions”. His characters are unable to direct their actions and are swallowed up by opponents whose greater strength and ruthlessness bear out a kind of Darwinian “survival of the fittest”. Stephen Crane(1871-1900) dealt with similarly overwhelming circumstances in his short novels Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and The Red Badge ofCourage, a story about the reactions of a Civil War soldier. He was an impressionist who made his detail important in stressing his conception of man overwhelmed by circumstances and environment. Frank Norris(1870-1902)in his novel The Octopus described the strangulation of Californian wheat growers at the hands of the railroads. Main-Travelled Roads, the bitterly realistic collection of short stories by Hamlin Garland (1860-1940), dealt with the hardships of farmers in the Midwest. During the early 1900s some writers used social naturalism and realism to expose the evils of society and instigate reform. Expos of fraud, corporate irresponsibility, corrupt business practices and child labour. President Roosevelt named these writers and journalists “muckrakers”, but the scandal caused by the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle(1906) prompted Roosevelt to pass the Meat Inspection Act and the Federal Food and Drugs Act in the interests of public hygiene
Henry James(1843-1916) was the author of sophisticated prose. He spent much time in Europe, and much of his work deals with the clash between wise – yet corrupt – ways of the Old World, as represented by European civilization, and the innocence and vitality of the New World – America. Writers of many types of works contributed to literature of social revolt. They attacked the growing power of business and the corruption of government. Political corruption and inefficiency figured in Henry Adams’ Democracy (1880). Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) was both an indictment of capitalist system and an imaginative picturing of a utopia achieved by a collectivist society in the year 2000.
By the end of the nineteenth century, American poetry had fallen into the trap of imitation and sentimentality, from which it began to recover only in the second decade of the 1900s.This period is known as the “American Renaissance”. Two New England poets,Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) and Robert Frost (1874-1963) had important collections of verse published during this period. Robinson like Miniver Cheevy, a character in one of his most famous poems, felt that he was “born too late” and “loved the days of old”. Indeed, later in life he wrote long poems based on medieval models, Merlin (1917) and Tristram (1927).But he is chiefly remembered for his short, dramatic poems containing character sketches of people living in an imaginary village (Tibury Town). In 1921 for his collected poems Robinson was awarded the first of his three Pulitzer Prizes. Robinson’s verse is plain and simple and devoid of the sentimentality which afflicted so much poetry of his time. A ”local colorist”, he lined his poetic sketches with colloquial speech, taking as his main subject the harsh world of failure and the “world of tragedy in the individual’s futile struggles against fate too powerful for him”.
Like Robinson, Frost was no great innovator (he was content with “old ways to be new”), but this did not prevent him from becoming America’s most popular twentieth-century poet and four times winner of the Pulitzer Prize. The rural beauty of New England countryside is immortalized in the traditional stanzas and blank verse forms of early nineteenth-century English Romantic poetry. His love of nature is evident in a series of poems which seem simple at first sight, but reveal a complexity and subtlety of meaning on closer inspection: poetry, he said, is a question of “saying one thing and meaning another”. His rural imagery is often loaded with symbolic or metaphysical meaning. His poetry often deals with the tragic aspects of life and the complexities of human existence. His language is homely and simple – like that of the rural New Englanders he so accurately describes.
In the Midwest, Edgar Lee Masters (1869-1950) and Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) made an important contribution into American verse. Masters is remembered chiefly for his Spoon River Anthology (1915), a series of free verse epitaphs that in the form of monologues record the dreams and disappointments of the author’s youth in a small Midwestern town. Being dead, the town’s inhabitants are at last free to “tell all”, and their often bitter revelations, contained in brief, ironic and objective epitaphs, constitute not only an expos of the small town mentality, but of a whole way of life in America.
In Chicago Poems (1914), in the form of Whitmanesque free verse, Sandburg celebrated life on the Prairies and in Midwestern cities. His treatment of the urban landscape – its industries and its working people – was something new in American poetry, and was a further confirmation of William Carlos William’s observation that “anything a poet can effectively lift from its dull bed by force of the imagination becomes his material”. His frequently long and unconventionally structured poems are characterized by strong, loose rhythms and a sinewy language which attempt to reproduce the vivid slang and idiom of the Midwest.
MARK TWAIN (1835-1910)
Mark Twain is the pen-name of Samuel L.Clemens, the writer who has been called the true father of national American literature. This title may be justified by the fact that Mark Twain made a more extensive combination of American folk humour and serious literature than any of the previous writers had done. He inherited the Midwestern and Western humourist tradition but imaginatively combined the “local colour” with realism which had been absent from most of the works of his contemporaries.
Clemens was born in the backwoods of Missouri, but soon his family moved to Hannibal on the Mississippi River. There the future writer developed a passion for the river and the desire to become the pilot on a river boat. When he was 11 his father died and his own formal schooling ended. Sam Clemens was apprenticed to a printer, worked on his father’s newspaper for a while, and in 1854 set out on his own, working as a printer in various eastern and Midwestern towns. In 1856 he fulfilled his boyhood dream and became a riverboat pilot. During the Civil War he served for a time as a volunteer soldier and in 1862 he went to the west.
He first wrote for a newspaper in Nevada and then moved to San Francisco. During this period he wrote mainly humorous sketches, the most famous being The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. In 1865-1870 he went on tours of Hawaii, Europe, and the Middle East as a correspondent His newspaper accounts of the travels promoted his popularity, and on his return he became a successful lecturer. In 1870 he married and settled in the east, first in Buffalo and then permanently in Hartford, Connecticut. He gave up journalism and made fiction writing his profession. In spite of the change in his social status, his writing continued to be a sharp attack on society. In his last years, he became increasingly bitter. Some of his works of this period are so pessimistic that he withheld them from publication.
The typical motif of Mark Twain’s writing is the narration of a story by a young or native person or a story in which the main character is an Easterner unaccustomed to frontier life. In his stories the overrefined Easterner is usually outwitted by Westerners. When Mark Twain wrote from a youth’s perspective, the youth was usually wise beyond his years but retained an idealism which the author contrasted with the hypocrisy and cruelty of the adult world.
Twain’s best loved novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), are both set along the Mississippi River. Both novels contain a wide range of local dialects and realistic portrayals of local characters. Deepened by new attention to Huck’s developing consciousness and conscience, broadened by its undercover exploitation of social and political ambiguities of American society of the day, Huckleberry Finn is obviously a richer and more sophisticated book than Tom Sawyer. In Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain’s humour possesses a cutting edge of criticism with regard to the hypocrisy and inhumanity of “civilization”. Naturally, Twain’s characteristic humour peppers Huck’s pages. Twain prefaced the book with a warning that “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot”. Nevertheless, the novel explores significant issues of American life, including the legitimacy of hierarchal social relationships. The principal characters of the novel are Huck Finn, a lively country boy and Tom Sawyer’s friend; Jim, a runaway Negro slave; Pap Finn, Huck’s reprobate drunkard father; Widow Douglas, Huck’s guardian. In this novel the image of the river acquires a symbolic meaning. But what distinguishes it as proudly American is its unabashed use of the first-person Missouri vernacular narrative voice. According to Ernest Hemingway, American literature begins with Huckleberry Finn.
HENRY JAMES (1843-1916)
Henry James bridges a gap between the nineteenth and twentieth- century literature and between America and Europe. His principal interest, especially in his novels, is the confrontation of American and European culture and also the clash between the old and the new, between the dying century and the one just beginning. His innovative and finely crafted prose possessed a sophistication which went beyond that of his contemporaries, taking as its main subjects the inner, psychological workings of the individual mind and the moral problems facing America in the new age.
He was born in New York City, the second child if wealthy, somewhat aristocratic parents. His father was a philosopher and a friend of Emerson’s. His brother William became a prominent philosopher and psychologist. The father disapproved of most schools and, consequently, sent his sons to a variety of tutors and European schools in search of the best education for them. As children, Henry James Jr. and his siblings travelled about Europe with their father. Thus, Henry James grew up free of all usual ties to a specific community and to particular religious beliefs: from childhood he viewed the world as an intensely interested outsider, i.e., as an artist.
When still a child, Henry James was given a great deal of independence, so much in fact, that he felt isolated from others. A quiet child among exuberant brothers and cousins, he was more often an observer than a participant of their activities. When, because of a back injury, he could not fight in the Civil War, he felt even more excluded from the social life of his time. As an adult he developed many close friendships, but retained his attitude of an observer and devoted much of his life to solitary literary work.
For one year only, James entertained ideas of “entering the world”, and studied law at Harvard. But he actually spent most of his time reading Hawthorne and Balzac. He was obviously going to become a writer. His first story was published in the prestigious American magazine Atlantic Monthly in 1865, and James was befriended by its editor William Dean Howells, who was also an accomplished novelist and proponent of realism in literature. Howells would then publish all the short stories James had to offer. During the first half of the 1870s, Henry James travelled widely in Europe, but he still returned to the United States to try his hand at being a literary journalist. His brother had warned him about losing touch with America. But in the end, James realized that he could live more cheaply and more comfortably in Europe, and that his art required the established culture of Europe. The other important event during this period was the death of his cousin Minny Temple. To him she was an example as a young, vibrant woman cut down before she could realize her dreams or truly experience life - her figure would appear in some of his greatest works.
James’ literary education continued with his stay in Paris from 1875-1876. Here he made friends with Turgenev, Flaubert, Edmond de Goncourt, Emile Zola, Daudet and Guy de Maupassant. Perhaps more important to the young novelist though was Turgenev’s belief in the idea that a novelist need not worry about the “story”.
Despite this wonderfully stimulating environment James left Paris because he felt that he would always be an outsider there. Although, he would still travel about Europe, in 1876 he moved to England where he stayed for most of the rest of his life. In 1815, to show his support for England in World War 1, he became a British citizen.
In 1878 James had his first major literary success with the short novel Daisy Miller.This success opened up the doors for him to the most elite of late Victorian cultural society: he socialized with the likes of Tennyson and Browning. Henry James was a fine conversationalist and very pleasant company. But James’ prime concern was always writing. By 1886 he had already published a fourteen-volume collection of his collected novels and tales, and his best work was yet to come.
Like Realists and Naturalists James thought that fiction should represent reality. But he conceived of reality as twice translated – through the author’s particular experience of it and through his unique depiction.
Henry James first achieved recognition as a writer of the “international novel” – a story which brings together persons of various nationalities who represent certain characteristics of their country. The Europeans in James’ novels are more cultured, more concerned with art, and more aware of the subtleties of social situations than are his Americans. The Americans, however, usually have a morality and innocence which the Europeans lack. James seems to value both the sophistication of Europe and the idealism of America. His later books put less emphasis on the international theme and are more concerned with the psychology of the characters. He explores their complex inner lives with psychological realism formerly unseen in the American novel. Among his major works are The American (1877), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Spoils of Poynton (1897), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904).James himself considered The Ambassadors his best work. A master of the novel and the short story, he also left behind an influential and highly perceptive body of literary journalism dealing with the art of fiction.
THEODORE DREISER (1871-1945)
Dreiser is a major writer, publicist, and a public figure in the USA of the period. The leader of American Naturalist trend in literature, for many he is the writer who initiates American literature into the twentieth century. Meaning both his influence as a spiritual leader and his physical stature, Sherwood Anderson said: ”The feet of Theodore are making a path, the heavy brutal feet …tramping through the wilderness of lies, making a path”. Another American critic wrote about him: “He was a great artist … no other American of his generation left so wide and handsome a mark upon the national letters. American writing before and after his time differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin. He was a man of large originality, of profound feeling, and of unshakable courage. Almost all of us who write are better off because he lived, worked, and hoped.”
Theodore Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, the twelfth child into the family of poor immigrants from Europe. He began living independently early in life, doing odd jobs. Only for a short time he studied at Indiana University. From1892 to 1897 he worked as a reporter for different journals and newspapers, in which his first essays and stories were published. In 1897 he abandoned his work as a journalist to become a professional writer.
His first novel was Sister Carrie (1900). It is the story of Caroline Meeber, or Sister Carrie, as they call her at home, who cannot tolerate work at a shoe factory and becomes a mistress first of a travelling salesman, Drouet, and later of a restaurant manager, Hurstwood, who abandons his family and finds her a place of an actress in a musical theatre. In the course of time Carrie’s comic talent is discovered, and she becomes successful. Despairing of finding a job, Hurstwood commits suicide. Dreiser showed in the novel the ruinous effect of the pursuit of material well-being on an individual: Carrie loses her natural human qualities that had made her so appealing and becomes unscrupulous, selfish and callous. The book was considered immoral and was banned in the United States. It was published in America only after it became a success in Great Britain.
Gennie Gerhardt (1911), Dreiser’s second novel, continues the theme of a woman with a working-class background and proves the failure of the American myth of equal opportunities for all. The novels The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914) and The Stoic (published posthumously in 1947) forming the “Trilogy of Desire”, give the life story of an American capitalist and show the ways in which the fortunes of big capital are made. They are built round its protagonist, the financier Cowperwood, one of those “titans who, without heart or soul … enchain and enslave“ the nation but is also a tragic figure who squanders his exceptional talents. Unlike the previous novels, the trilogy investigates the “spiritual anatomy” not of the victims if capitalist system, but also of those who determined the tragic fate of common Americans. Dreiser stresses the biological aspect of human beings, the analogy in the behaviour of animals and men, presents recordings of business transactions in all their intricacies in the closest Naturalist tradition. His story of the formation of a tycoon was based on biographies of twenty American millionaires. The Genius (1915) tells the life story of a talented artist who begins his career with painting realistic pictures but lacks the nerve to stand for his principles and gives up his realistic creed. Dreiser was accused of “un-American way of thinking,” and the novel was prohibited. .
Dreiser’s masterpiece is An American Tragedy (1925). The novel shows the inevitable process of crippling, corrupting and destroying an individual in contemporary society. The author stated that his purpose was not “to moralize … but to give, if possible, a background and a psychology of reality which would somehow explain, if not condone, how such murders happen – and they have happened with surprising frequency in America as long as I can remember”. The immediate prototype of the main hero of the novel, Clyde Griffiths, was Chester Gillette whose murder of his girlfriend, Grace Brown, in 1906 received tremendous publicity, although Dreiser’s investigation is based on at least fifteen other similar cases.
Dreiser’s novel is aimed polemically against the romantic stories about poor youths who made fortunes and married girls from well-to-do families. Creating the poor-boy-get-rich myth, stories of this type glorified the desire to amass wealth and gave the false impression of American possibilities. The novel is directed against the idea of American prosperity and the country’s having entered its “golden age”. The title, An American Tragedy, implies the generalized nature of tragedies similar to that of Clyde Griffiths. Speaking about his novel Dreiser wrote in 1927: “I had long brooded upon the story, for it seemed to me not only to include every phase of our national life – politics, society, religion, business, sex – but it was a story so common to every boy reared in the smaller towns in America. It seemed so truly a story of what life does to the individual – and how impotent the individual is against such forces.” The victims of the cult of wealth in the novel are both Clyde Griffiths and Roberta Alden.
Griffiths is different from the protagonists of Dreiser’s previous novels. He is a most ordinary and typical American, and his tragedy is typically American and therefore all the more terrible. His fate is predetermined by the illusions cultivated in his childhood which cause him later to succumb to a frenzied craving for a life of luxury and ease regardless of the price he has to pay for it. The author accentuates Clyde’s instability and susceptibility to the influence of his surroundings that were “sufficient to convince any inexperienced and none-too-discerning mind that the chief business of life for anyone with a little money or social position was to attend a theatre, a ball-game in season, or to dance, motor; entertain friends to dinner, or to travel to New York, Europe, Chicago, California”.
The composition is logical and well-proportioned. The novel is made up of three distinct social and economic parts. The first part deals with the poverty and social humiliation of his early life. The plot centres around Clyde’s character and the formation of his personality. The second part shows the temptations that the glittering world of wealth and luxury offers to an infantile young person and the resulting catastrophe: in order to gain access to that world through his marriage with Sondra Finchley, Clyde plots to kill Roberta, and is accused of Roberta’s death. Dreiser draws attention to a similarity between Clyde and Roberta: like Sondra to Clyde, Clyde to Roberta personifies the world of the rich and, infected with the same virus of ambition and unrest, she persistently tries to get Clyde to marry her. The third part of the novel presents Clyde’s court trial and his death on the electric chair. Although Clyde’s guilt cannot be legally proved his fate is decided long before the beginning of court proceedings: he is a toy in the pre-election campaign battle waged by two political parties.
As Clyde’s guilt in murdering Roberta presents a legal problem, An American tragedy is still studied in law colleges of the USA.
AMERICAN LITERATURE IN THE INTERWAR PERIOD When World War I broke out President Woodrow Wilson attempted to maintain American neutrality, although the provision of loans and supplies to the Allied forces left little doubt as to whose side the United States was on. Following the sinking of the passenger ship “Lusitania” (with 128 Americans aboard) and subsequent attacks on American merchant shops by the German navy, the USA declared war on Germany in 1917.
Although American forces only arrived en masse towards the end of the war, two million Americans had volunteered to fight and more than three million were drafted. The arrival of American troops in France made an important contribution to the Allied defeat of Germany. At home a spirit of patriotism prevailed and many citizens made a conscious effort to help finance the war by purchasing billions of dollars worth of Liberty Bonds. Patriotic songs were composed in honour of “doughboys” fighting in Europe.
Post-war America witnessed continued growth in population, and a continued movement from rural areas to cities. This trend brought about changes in the everyday lives of Americans: city life was inevitably more impersonal, and family ties inevitably became weaker.
The “Roaring Twenties”, as they fondly became known, brought with them radical changes in lifestyle. The nineteenth amendment to the Constitution (1920) had given women the right to vote, and, armed with their newly acquired independence, they quickly took advantage of the new opportunities opening up around them in the field of work. Some women (known as “Flappers”) rejected the more sober cloths of their predecessors in favour of shorter skirts and daring hairstyles.
The eighteenth “Prohibition” amendment (1920) had attempted to outlaw sales of liquor, but “speak-easies” (or secret nightclubs) sold bootlegalcohol to public. People rushed to speak-easies to listen to the new jazz sounds and dance the latest steps to the rhythms of the charleston or some other new dance. The bootlegging of liquor had its darker side: gangs seeking control of the illegal alcohol market proliferated in the larger cities and the levels of crime and violence grew considerably.
A series of Republican administrations attempted to curb the newly unleashed forces of hedonism to restore the traditional social values. Thus, President Harding’s message to the electorate in 1920 was A Return to Normalcy. The efforts of federal government found sympathetic support in other sections of society, though its manifestation was not always positive. Religious revivalism became increasingly popular in both rural and urban areas, and the Ku Klux Klan returned to its former strengths.
After World War I the United States witnessed a period of economic boom, but while manufacturers and large companies continued to expand, farmers and labourers actually experienced a decline in their wages. Their resulting poverty inevitably led to a reduction in domestic demand. Very soon America was producing more than it could consume. Confident of high returns on their investments in the stock market, increasing numbers of Americans bought stocks during the 1920s, but towards the end of the decade wild bouts of speculation pushed the value of their investments to artificially high levels. In October 1929 prices started to decline and the resulting panic led to the great stock market crash in which American investors lost over 50 billion dollars. The Great Depression which followed lasted for a full ten years.
The failure of the banking system during the crash meant that hundreds of thousands of people lost their savings overnight. Businesses had to cut back on production, thousands of factories were closed and millions of people lost their jobs. In rural areas 750,000 farmers lost their land. In 1932 the Democrat F.D. Roosevelt replaced Hoover as President of the United States. His programme for recovery was called the New Deal, and it involved greater government intervention in the affairs of the economy than had ever been seen before. By the end of the decade Roosevelt’s measures were beginning to have positive effects, and such was his popularity that he was re-elected four times – a record in the history of the United States.
Distinctive features of modern American literature. The literature of the period became to be called “modern”, and the style which was elaborated at the time, “modern American style”. The inter-war period in American literature was characterized by experimentation and creative inventiveness. Writers attempted to come to terms with new philosophical and psychological interpretations of reality. The discovery of the subconscious and new concepts regarding time meant that the scope of literary reference was broadened and orthodox beliefs of the past were laid open to question.
Aesthetic considerations were formalized anew as American literary criticism matured. Ezra Pound, leading literary critic of the time, was joined by T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens in his analysis of the writer’s craft, and further important contributions were made by Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Writers measured themselves according to new literary canons as literary criticism developed into a serious and systematic genre. Conventional standards and established authors were questioned and attacked by a new body of writers whose works were frequently published by the so-called “little magazines” – independent-minded periodicals more concerned with publishing new authors and establishing new critical standards than the material rewards of commercial success. The most influential of these magazines were two edited by the essayist and critic Henry L. Mencken. From the pages of The Smart Set and American Mercury, Mecken and his protégés launched their crusade against established literary conventions and authors.
One of the authors who contributed to Mencken’s magazines was Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941), whose collections of short stories Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and The Triumph of the Egg (1921) had a considerable impact on both Hemingway and Faulkner. In Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson explores the character of small town inhabitants from a psychological point of view in a series of interrelated sketches dealing with the inner emotions and hidden desires of various characters as told be a newspaper-reporter narrator. The stories show the influence of both Freud and Gertrude Stein.
Another writer dealing with people living in a small Midwestern town was Sinclair Lewis(1885-1951), the first American to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. His Main Street (1920) explored the hypocritical attitudes and complacent lifestyle of small town folk, and was admired for its graphic rendering of local speech and customs. It soon became a standard work on American provincialism. Babbit (1922), his other major work, painted an unpleasant picture of middle-class conformity and small town ethics.
Realism and Naturalism continued to prevail throughout the 1920s and 1930s as novelists extended their criticism of society to all walks of American life. The Studs Lonigan trilogy by James Farrel (1904-1979) deals with the disastrous effects of a declining industrial world at the turn of the century, while another trilogy, USA (1930-1936), written by John Doss Passos (1896-1970), takes a sharp look at the issues of social class, political corruption and business fraud. The latter work explores the history of modern America from the beginning of the century up to the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the years of the Great Depression. Doss Passos employs a series of interesting devises in this narrative: the personal history of his characters is interspersed with newspaper headlines, songs, biographies of important contemporary members of the establishment and excerpts from “newsreels”. His “camera-eye” technique allowed him to interpolate the text with short, personal commentaries and reminiscences on the period in question.
For very different reasons, three other novelists famous for their spirit of social protest are Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), John Steinbeck (1902-1968) and Richard Wright (1908-1960). In his critical exploration of the “American Dream” – the limitless possibilities of wealth, success and opportunity in contemporary society – and his depiction of excess and the new morality of the young during the “Jazz Age” of the swinging ‘20s, Fitzgerald charted the social and moral decline of a post-war society clinging vainly to idle illusions. His short stories and novels – This Side of Paradise (1920), The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), The Great Gatsby (1925), Tender is the Night (1934) and The Last Tycoon (1941) – form the impressive body of work characterized by a spare, carefully written prose style and deft use of symbolism.
The reputation of Steinbeck, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962, rests chiefly on Grapes of Wrath (1939), a novel dealing with the hardships of evicted farm-workers who migrate from the Dust Bowl areas of the Midwest to the “promised land” of California during the years of the depression. A social realist and left-wing radical, he often explores the lot of the poor in his novels, and his picture of American labourers is rendered all the more convincing by his close attention to dialect in his naturalistic works of the 1930s.
In his volume of novellas, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) and his novel Native Son (1940), Richard Wright was among the first black American writers to draw attention to the problems of blacks in a white dominated society. He addressed the key issue that many future black writers were to investigate after World War II: the position of black people in a society that continued to deny their humanity. Heavily influenced by Marxism and existential writings, Wright succeeded in portraying outcast characters whose self-dignity remains intact in the face of a barbarous and fiercely class-divided society. His black successor, Ralph Elison, wrote that Wright’s example “converted the American Negro impulse toward self-annihilation and “going underground” into a will to confront the world and to throw his findings unashamedly into the guilty conscience of America”.
Together with Hart Crane, E.E. Cummings, Fitzgerald and Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) belonged to what Gertrude Stein called the “Lost Generation” of American writers. One of the most influential and heavily imitated writers of the 20th century, Hemingway shared with this generation a sense of loss: a loss of faith and of inherited, pre-war values which no longer held good. His voluntary exile in Paris during the 1920s was symptomatic of his despair and spiritual alienation from a provincial and emotionally barren American society obsessed with material wellbeing. In its terseness and economical manner, Hemingway’s prose style is deceptively simple. The almost total absence of explicit statements means that much is left to suggestion and implication. In 1954 Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
William Faulkner (1897-1962 charted the decline of the American “Deep South” in Yoknapatawpha, a fictional country based on his native state of Mississippi. His prose style is complex, and his novels have reputation for being “difficult”. They often contain a variety of narrative viewpoints, and the switch from one to the other is not always made explicitly. The inner feelings, thoughts and emotions of his characters are revealed through a “stream of consciousness” technique which owed much to the works of Joyce. Both the variety of the viewpoints and the stream of consciousness technique allowed Faulkner to express the subjectivity of experience. Traditional notions of time and space are abandoned as he merges past and present time in his narratives. Scrupulous attention is also paid to the speech of the various characters - Southern aristocrats, professional middle-class people, rural farmers and Afro-Americans – who appear in his books. Even though the South was his major concern, Faulkner’s main body of work reaches out to the perplexed condition of mankind in general. Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949.
This was an extraordinary rich time for American verse which represented a radical departure from the poetry of the nineteenth century. Among the leading poets of the period were Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and Amy Lowell (1874-1925). They became the leaders of an anti-Romantic movement called “Imagism”. In imagist poetry were emphasized, new rhythms, clear, sharp visual images, a greater precision of thought and less abstraction in poetry combined with a language which was closer to everyday speech than that of more romantically minded predecessors. An anthology of imagist poems was edited by Pound in 1914.
Among the poets who contributed to Pound’s anthology was William Carlos Williams(1883-1961). His spare style is directed towards making the ordinary seem extraordinary in concise and clear images, and his rejection of traditional metres, rhyme schemes and stanza forms is in keeping with the revolutionary tendencies of early Modernist poetry. His experimental poetry asserted the importance of a contemporary idiom and included The Tempers (1913) and Spring and All (1923).
However, it was Pound who dominated the golden age of American poetry. His earlier work was reminiscent of the aestheticism of the 1890s, and it was only with Imagism that he developed a truly personal poetic voice. Over sixty years, he wrote seventy books of his own, contributed to about seventy others and wrote more than 1,500 articles, ranging from poetic theory to economics and music. In his poetry he borrowed widely from other languages and integrated extracts and quotations from other authors and literatures, thus widening the field of contemporary poetic experience considerably. His knowledge of nine foreign languages allowed him access to a wide variety of foreign verse forms with which he experimented freely. Pound’s most ambitious work, the famous Cantos (1917-1972), consists of more than 140 long and often complex cantos which are supposed to deal with the whole state of modern civilization, taking in past epochs and a variety of different cultures.
Significant contributions to the verse in the 1920s and 1930s were made by Marianne Moore(1887-1972), Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) and E.E. Cummings (1894-1962). Moore’s close and accurate observations of objective detail and precise use of language gained her a reputation as a highly disciplined craftsman. In Poems (1921) and Observations (1924) she manifests an ability to experiment with stanza forms and versification whose end effects are subtle and complex.
Virtually unknown until the end of his life, Stevens had his first book of poetry Harmonium published in 1923. Less of an innovator in technique than many of his contemporaries, Stevens was nonetheless a complex poet. His dominating concern was the relationship between the imagination and reality in the modern world. Poetry, he believed, was the means whereby the self might interact with reality. His technically masterful poetry is characteristically witty and sensuous, and many of his best poems exploit the unexpected in terms of both imagery and diction. With the publication of his Collected Poems in 1954 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Well known for his unorthodox punctuation and phrasing, E.E. Cummings first came to public attention in the 1920s. His poetry possesses a strong visual element. The patterns made on the page through typographical arrangements often have a bearing on the actual meaning of the poem itself. In its unpredictable, and often witty, organization of punctuation and verse shapes, Cumming’s poetry is to be seen with the eyes as much as read. He frequently draws on the colloquial language of the urban Yankee in his verse, and many of his poems possess an almost childlike freshness and sense of wonder. Much of his work takes nature, human relationships and the world of children as its subject.
During the 1920s a number of African-American poets began writing their own verse in an effort to create a literature which might explore contemporary black life and culture in a serious manner and restore some sense of racial dignity and pride. Their work became known as the Harlem Renaissance or New Negro Movement. Instrumental in the creation of this new consciousness were Claude McKay(1890-1948), Jean Toomer (1894-1967), Langston Hughes (1902-1967) and Counte Cullen (1903-1946). Despite its technical conservatism, McKay’s Harlem Shadows (1922), a collection of verse about black experiences in North America, provides an early example of attempts to provide African-Americans with an independent political voice. Toomer was a more innovative author. Cane, his experimental novel, also contains poems celebrating the life of African-Americans. In his popular collection of verse, The Weary Blues (1926), Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927) and Shakespeare in Harlem (1942), Hughes turned to the rhythms of black music – the blues, jazz and spirituals – in an effort to re-create the oral and impromptu atmosphere of black culture. In contrast to Hughes, Cullen believed in the necessity of using traditional English forms of poetry as the means of relating black experience. His anthology of black poetry Caroling Dusk (1927) became a literary landmark for the poets of the Harlem Renaissance.
Up to the twentieth century, very little of worth in terms of drama had been produced in the United States: early Puritan attitudes to the theatre as a place of moral corruption did not encourage the growth of American drama. Americans visiting early twentieth-century Europe were impressed by the depth and variety of theatrical works, and some attempted to set up a “little theatre” movement on their return home. Theatre groups began appearing all over the country, especially on university campuses and within the local communities. During this crucial period for modern drama, foreign playwrights like Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekov and Shaw had a considerable influence on American writers.
The first great American dramatist was the Nobel Prize winner Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953). His range of dramatic techniques varied from Naturalist works Beyond the Horizon (19209), Desire under the Elms (1924) and The Iceman Cometh (1939) to plays like The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1922) which employed the Impressionist techniques of early twentieth-century German playwrights. O’Neill’s willingness to experiment in both technique and subject is evident in Strange Interlude (1928), a lengthy, psychologically motivated play containing spoken asides and soliloquies revealing the inner thoughts of his characters. Morning Becomes Electra (1931) is another psychologically penetrating play, and represents the author’s thorough use of Greek forms, themes and characters. In their subtle analysis of human psychology and the tragedy of human relationships, O’Neill’s plays constituted a real departure from the melodrama of previous American theatre and were to have a considerable influence on the next generation of American playwrights.
Other important dramatists of the period included Elmer Rice (1892-1967), Clifford Odets(1906-1963) andThornton Wilder (1897-1975). Elmer is chiefly remembered for his expressionist work The Adding Machine (1923) and the Naturalist Street Scene (1929). Waiting foe Lefty and Awake and Sing (both 1935) by Odets were important examples of the more socially conscious “proletarian” plays which became popular during the 1930s. Dealing with the history of a New Hampshire town, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) has become an American classic, and in its omission of scenery and stage settings was to anticipate some of the features of contemporary theatre.
FRANCIS SCOTT FITZGERALD (1896 – 1940)
Fitzgerald became the epitome of the Jazz Age he described in his novels and short stories.
He was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, the only son of an unsuccessful, aristocratic father and an energetic, provincial mother, and he was later to confess that he had inherited a double patrimony. After he entered Princeton University in New Jersey, he tried to eradicate his Middle West origins. He had an intensely romantic imagination, what he once called “a heightened sensitivity to the promises of life”, and he was determined to realize those promises. Princeton offered him both literary nourishment and that “glitzy caste system” which lures Amory Blain in This Side of Paradise, the book he now started to write. Fitzgerald, however, left Princeton without a diploma. When the USA entered World War I in 1917, he enlisted in the army, and in a training camp in Alabama met Zelda Zayre, the southern belle, who became his wife and a model for most of the beautiful heroines of his fiction. He became a writer to earn enough money to marry her, and their married life furnished his greatest happiness as well as his greatest misery and pain. Zelda and F Scott Fitzgerald became important participants of the wild and carefree period in the life of the generation that entered adult life after World War I, and that was infected with fear of misery and adoration of success; the “generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all the gods dead, all the wars fought, all faiths in man shaken”. This period of the “Roaring Twenties” Fitzgerald called the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald now was a celebrity. The new prosperity made it possible for him and Zelda to play the roles they were so beautifully equipped for, and Ring Ladner called them the prince and princess of their generation. Both Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald were to fall victims of their disorderly life: she suffered a mental breakdown, and he, alcoholism.
His first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published in 1920. The novel was a revelation of the new morality of the young. It shows the world of rich young people, excited though somewhat cynical, their parties and love affairs, and bears the impact of Fitzgerald’s dual attitude to wealth: he admired the opportunities it gave but was conscious of the ruinous effect of great wealth on its possessors. In December 1920 was published a collection of short stories, Flappers and Philosophers, in 1922 , another collection of short stories, Tales of the Jazz Age, which includes one of his best stories, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz. The story was the first of the series dedicated to the theme of wealth. The main hero of the story, John T. Unger, a student of St. Midas School, is overwhelmed by Braddock Washington’s wealth. The story is the satirical disclosure of the sources of this wealth and its influence on its owners. In 1925 was published the novel The Beautiful and the Damned. These works are on the Jazz Age and reflect the transition of the American society: from the America of the strict norms of bourgeois morality to the post-war America rejecting these norms and demanding complete freedom of actions for itself.
In the 1925 was published The Great Gatsby, which is considered Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. By then Fitzgerald himself was rich, though his earnings could never keep pace with his and Zelda’s extravagance. He also knew that between peaks of joy were periods of sorrow. The Great Gatsby reflects Fitzgerald’s deeper knowledge, his recognition that wanting to be happy does not ensure happiness and that pursuit of entertainment may involve a lot of pain. In 1936 in an autobiographical sketch for Esquire magazine Fitzgerald would write: “… the natural state of sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain than you are, “a constant striving” … only adds to this unhappiness in the end – the end that comes to your youth or hope. My own happiness in the pace often approached such ecstasy that I could not share it even with the person dearest to me but I had to walk it away in quiet streets and lanes with only fragments of it to distil in little lines in books – and I think that my happiness, or talent for self-delusion or what you will, was an exception. It was not the natural thing but the unnatural…”
The Great Gatsby tells in its finest form a story that Fitzgerald would tell many times. An imperfect but interesting man falls unreservedly in love with, and pursues to the end, an imperfect dream, usually embodied in a beautiful and generally wealthy woman. Though dreams are by nature illusory and subject to the corrupting pressure of time, the dreamer himself has the desire to see the eternal in the transitory, to find a promise in a symbol. The power of the symbol –the green light on the further shore of the bay; the diamond as big as the Ritz – makes up the meaning of an individual life.
In The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald creates a powerful version of the modern American hero. It is the story of a self-made man, Jimmy Gatz, the farmer’s son who out of love and ambition turns himself into Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, a man who has disowned his own origins and has entirely devoted himself to “the service of vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty”. Jimmy Gatz falls in love with the wealthy Daisy Fay, and devotes his life to constructing a self that can win her back to him, despite the fact that she is now married and in the ends simply does not want him. He fails and is destroyed; Daisy possesses the seductive carelessness of the rich, and this finally is what brings about the disaster. This is a simple story, but constructed through remarkable and complex methods. Gatsby’s story is told by a narrator, Nick Carraway. He creates the story through glimpses and impressions, decoding the events as they come in the apparently random order of their coming. For much of the novel he is the tolerant go-between, providing a necessary narrative link between Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, his distant relative. But of course it is he who selects not only the incidents but also the viewpoints from which the reader is to see them. Gatsby is a false hero, a man who cannot be trusted on anything except his ultimate and governing passion. He may appear glorious but he is not virtuous. He is as corrupt as his corrupted times, a self-made Twentieth opportunist belonging firmly to the age of organised crime and political scandals, bootlegging, betting rackets and illegal trading in bonds. It is Nick who makes him into a hero by contrasting him to the indifferent and careless rich like Daisy or Tom. Nick is a compassionate narrator who is, however, disgusted by much of what he sees. This narrative technique was to find many imitators.
His novel Tender is the Night (1934), completed after Zelda’s death, was inspired by their life in the Riviera among American expatriates. It deals with insanity of the main heroine. It is the story of a psychologist who married his patient, a beautiful and rich girl. In spite of himself he was corrupted by wealth and luxury, and gave up his scientific ambitions. Though technically faulty, it is Fitzgerald’s most moving novel. It was not a commercial success, and Fitzgerald went to Hollywood where he worked as the scriptwriter. His last unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was edited and published posthumously by Edmund Wilson, prominent literary critic and Fitzgerald’s friend, in 1941. The prototype of the main hero of the novel, Monroe Stahr, was the producer Irving Thalberg. The novel was Fitzgerald’s final attempt to create his dream of the promises of American life and of the kind of man who could realize them. In the intensity with which it was imagined and in the brilliance of its expression, it was equal of anything Fitzgerald ever wrote.
GERTRUDE STEIN (1874-1946)
With the possible exception of James Joyce, Stein has been heaped with more accusation of charlatanry than any other modern author. She had an incalculably important influence on younger authors and her influence on Hemingway alone would mark her as an important literary figure.
Stein abandoned America for France 1903. The date is important as it marks the founding of the Paris expatriate cenacle of American authors. In 1907 she was joined by her friend Alice B.Toklas who was to serve as her lifetime companion. The two women settled at 27 rue de Fleurus, an address that was to become the headquarters of avant-garde literature. Stein coined the term “a lost generation” which was applied to the intellectual youth of the 1920s, and particularly of the Paris expatriate group including Hemingway, Elliot Paul, Henry Miller and others, who had participated in the First World War and were left uprooted and disillusioned
Quite independently and originally she conceived central devices of style and syntax that were taken up by a whole school of young American naturalists in the 1920s and which have continued to filter their way into American literature. She shattered the forms of conversational grammar and syntax and demonstrated the possibilities of free association.
Stein was the trailbreaker and she did not always do the things as well as her imitators, who could concentrate on refining the technique she had created out of nothing. She was the first American author to try to transcribe banal daily speech, almost exactly as it occurs in life, into literature. As a student of psychology she learnt that the human brain does not always operate on a sequential and logical level, that an ordinary conversation is full of repetitions and divergences. She was interested in the process of associative thought. She began to create something like automatic writing, a prose in which the imagination created world-pictures without the intervention of the intellectual or logical part of the brain. The mind, she felt, gives the words a special significance which is independent of their dictionary meaning; words promote emotions and recollections through their sounds and associations as well as through their denotational content. For Gertrude Stein, the word and phrase were immediate symbols of intense, momentary, and highly personal experience rather than as instruments disciplined by normative grammar. Her chief works are Three Lives (1909), Tender Buttons (1914), An Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) (an opera libretto) and Wars I Have Seen (1945)
The most radical of her word experiments are contained in Tender Buttons and Four Saints in Three Acts: the literal or denotational content of the language is virtually nil. In most of her works the phrases devoid of metaphor or simile are strung together with the conjunction “and” (a technique imitated by Hemingway); whole paragraphs are built around a single statement, phrased and rephrased until it becomes imbedded in the reader’s consciousness. This technique is clearly apparent in the styles of Hemingway and Dos Passos, and Stein was not entirely wrong when she proclaimed that she had taught Hemingway to write.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899-1961)
The publicity about Hemingway's colourful and adventurous life has often obscured the fact that he was primarily a creative artist whose business it was to write. Although he was free from the pretensions of the aesthetic cultists, he approached the craft of writing with a careful and conscientious devotion. He once remarked that his job as a writer was to “put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.” In spite of his occasional stylistic experiments and his rare excursions into politics, this remained his ideal. In the early twenties Hemingway contributed poetry to avant-garde reviews. He soon turned to the short story and the novel, but he retained an almost poetic interest in economy of language and in precision and brilliance of imagery.
Hemingway was born in Oak Park, a prosperous Chicago suburb in the state of Illinois, to the family of a a prominent physician. He spent a great deal of his youth in the wild country of northern Michigan. These experiences were later recorded in his collection of short stories In Our Time. After leaving school Hemingway took a job on the Kansas City Star. Although he held this position only a few months, the journalistic training he acquired at this formative age marked his style for the rest of his career.
During the First World War, in 1917-18, he was a volunteer ambulance driver on the Austrian front, and was seriously wounded in Italy: his knee was patched with a platinum cap he was to retain the rest of his life. This war became for Hemingway and other members of the Lost Generation the key moment of their lives. In the novel A Farewell to Arms the main character, Frederick Henry, explains why: ”I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrificed…We had heard them sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious ha