~~

American Literature
1914-1945
THE TWO WARS AS HISTORICAL MARKERS

l'he conflict known as World War I broke out in Europe in 1914, with Great
Britain and France fighting against Germany. The United States that belat-
"dly entered the war in 1917, on the side of Britain and France, was still in
Ihe main a nation of farmers and small towns. Although several waves of
immigration from southern and eastern Europe had altered the makeup of
lilt' population, and about one American in ten was of Afriean descent, the
mujority of Americans were of English or German ancestry. This majority was
dl'eply distrustful of international politics, and after the war ended, many
\Illerieans attempted to steer the nation back to prewar modes of life. In
I<>24Congress enacted the first exclusionary immigration act in the nation's
history, hoping thereby to control the ethnic makeup of the American popu-
lollion (and the proportion of Americans born outside the United States did
d('dine markedly from 1910 to 1940). The immediate postwar years also saw
Ih(' so-called Red scare, when labor union headquarters were raided and
immigrant radicals deported by a government fearful of the influence of the
ne-wly Communist Soviet Union (formerly tsarist Russia).
For other Americans, however, the war helped accelerate long-sought
I hnnges in the forms of political and social life. The long struggle to win
\Illerican women the vote-given a final push by women's work as nurses and
uubulance drivers during the war-ended in 1920 with the passage of the
Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The National Association for
III('Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909, successfully
II~lIed during World War I for the commissioning of black officers in the U.S.
limed forces; as they would after World War II, African Americans who
101lght abroad returned to fight for their rights at home. Despite the govern-
1II('I1l'Srestrictions on leftist political activity, many Americans-among them
III itcrs and intellectuals as well as labor activists and urban immigrants-
looked to the Soviet Union and the international Communist movement for
I model in combating inequality and fostering workers' rights in the United
"'1.lles. Other Americans went abroad, for shorter or longer stretches of time,
III order to taste the expatriate life (made cheaper in war-ravaged economies
II, Ihe sol id American dollar) in Europe's battered but still vibrant cities and
1011111 ryside. Some Americans traveled physical and social distances almost
II~ gn';)t within the boundaries of the United States, as African Americans
Ilt'gilll to migrnll' in largt' 1111111/)1'1' 0111of the segregated South and young
Ilt'oph' ('\('ry\\lH'r(' il1('I('II,illgh ,1III'lldl'd (oll('gc away from home and moved

I I
1178 / AMERICAN LITERATURE 1914-1945 INTRODUCTION / I 179

to the cities. African Americans, emancipated urban women, and the restless political in aim counted as propaganda, not art; others thought that apoliti-
young faced off against rural and urban traditionalists over the question of cal literature was evasive and simplistic; for still others, the call to keep art
who, exactly, was truly "American." out of politics was covertly political, in conservative directions, even if it did
Thus the 1920s saw numerous conflicts over the shape of the future, which not acknowledge itself as such.
acquired new urgency when the stock market crashed in 1929 and led to an
economic depression with a 25 percent unemployment rate. Known as the
Great Depression, this period of economic hardship did not fully end until
the United States entered World War II, which happened after the Japanese CHANGING TIMES
attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Because
Japan and Germany were allies, Germany declared war on the United States, The transformations of the first half of the twentieth century were driven
thus involving the country in another European conflict. The war unified the both by ideas and by changes in the economic and technological underpin-
country ideologically; revitalized industry, which devoted itself to goods nings of daily life. Much social energy in the 1920s went into enlarging the
needed for the war effort; and put people to work. Indeed, with so many men boundaries for acceptable self-expression. Adherents to small-town, white,
away at war, women went into the work force in unprecedented numbers. Protestant values such as the work ethic, social conformity, duty, and
Germany surrendered in the spring of 1945. The war ended in August 1945 respectability, clashed ideologically not only with internationally minded rad-
following the detonation of two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of icals but also with newly affluent young people who argued for more diverse,
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Europe was in ruins and-regardless of the wishes permissive, and tolerant styles of life. To some extent this debate recapitu-
of its citizens-the United States had become both an industrial society and lated the long-time American conflict between the individual and society, a
a major global power. conflict going back to the seventeenth-century Puritans and epitomized in
The two wars, then, bracket a period during which, no matter how inter- Halph Waldo Emerson's call, in the 1840s: "whosoever would be a man, must
nally fractured it was, the United States became a modern nation. In fact, the be a non-conformist."
internal fractures can be understood as diverse responses to the irreversible The 1920s saw significant changes in sexual mores, as was to be expected
advent of modernity. American literature in these decades registers all sides when young people were no longer under the watchful eyes of their small-
of the era's struggles and debates, while sharing a commitment to explore the town elders. These changes found their most influential theorist in the Aus-
many meanings of modernity and express them in forms appropriate to a Irian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (1858-1939), inventor of the practice of
modern vision. Some writers rejoiced while others lamented; some antici- psychoanalysis. According to Freud, many modern neuroses could be traced
pated future utopias and others believed that civilization had collapsed; but 10 repression and inhibition. Freud developed the idea of the self as grounded
the period's most inAuential voices believed that old forms would not work in an "unconscious," where forbidden desires, traumas, unacceptable emo-
for new times, and were inspired by the possibility of creating something tions, and the like-most of these sexual in nature-were stored. Freud
entirely new. hoped that trained analysts could help people become aware of their
The totality of the literary output produced during this period is called repressed feelings, so that they would be able to control them productively.
American literary modernism. Among literary conflicts, perhaps three issues The American version of psychoanalysis-more utopian than Freud's cau-
stand out, all of them related to the accelerating transformations and con- Iious claim that individuals could learn to cope with their own personalities
Hicts of modernity. One conflict centered on the uses of literary tradition. To more effectively-held that emotional wholeness could be attained at once if
some, a work registering awareness and appreciation of literary history- people recognized and overcame their inhibitions. Americanized Freudian
through allusion to other literary works, or by using traditional poetic forms Ideas provided the psychological underpinning for much literature of the
and poetic language-seemed imitative and old-fashioned. To others, a work interwar era, whether the focus was the individual trapped in a repressive cul-
failing to register such awareness and appreciation was bad or incompetent Ilire or the repressive culture itself.
writing. For still others, literary history was best appreciated oppositionally: The middle-class double sexual standard had, in fact, always granted con-
modernist works often allude to previous literature ironically, or deliberately ••iderable sexual freedom to men; now, however, women-enfranchised and
fracture traditional literary formulas. A related conflict involved the place of liberated by automobiles and job possibilities away from home-began to
popular culture in serious literature. Throughout the era, popular culture demand similar freedom for themselves, Women's demands went well beyond
gained momentum and influence. Some writers regarded it as crucial for the Ihl' erotic, however, encompassing education, professional work, mobility,
future of literature that popular forms be embraced; to others, good literature nnd whatever else seemed like social goods hitherto reserved for men, Female
by definition had to reject the cynical commercialism of popular culture. dress changed; long, heavy, restricting garments gave way to short, light-
Another issue was the question of how engaged in political and social wdp;ht, easily worn store-bought clothing. The combination of expanding
struggle a work of literature ought to be-of how far literature should exert urban life with new psychologies oriented to self-expression also brought into
itself for (or against) social transformation. Should art be a domain unto Iwing new social possihili! iI'S for women and men whose sexual desires did
itself, exploring universal questions and enunciating transcendent truths, or 1101couform 10 truditiunnl p,llI"1 nv, Freud was only one of a number of
should art participate in the politics of the times? lIor some, a work that was Ihillk,'r, in IIH' pcriod \\11I1'''~I'd •• "11'11""" of toleration for sexual rninori-
 1180 / AMERICAN LITERATURE 1914-1945 INTRODUCTION /1181

ties, especially homosexuals-a term that entered specialized English usage trial Revolution arose from the accumulation of surplus capital by industri-
in the 1890s and came into wider circulation in the years following World alists paying the least possible amount to workers; the next stage in world his-
War I. Although the legal risks and social stigma born by homosexuals tory would be when workers took control of the means of production for
remained very much in force, gay enclaves became more visible in American themselves. Because, to Marx, the ideas and ideals of any particular society
life and gay lives became more imaginable as a theme in American literature. could represent the interests of only its dominant class, he derided individu-
African Americans, like women, became mobile in these years as never alism as a middle-class or "bourgeois" value that could only discourage
before. Around 1915, as a direct result of the industrial needs of World War worker solidarity.
I, opportunities opened for African Americans in the factories of the North, Marx's ideas formed the basis for communist political parties across
and the so-called Great Migration out of the South began. Not only did Europe. In 1917, a Communist revolution in Russia led by Vladimir Ilyich
migration give the lie to southern white claims that African Americans were Lenin (1870-1914) overthrew the tsarist regime, instituted the "dictatorship
content with southern segregationist practices, it damaged the South's econ- of the proletariat" that Marx had called for, and engineered the development
omy by draining off an important segment of its working people. Even of Communism as a unified international movement. Americans who thought
though African Americans faced racism, segregation, and racial violence in of themselves as Marxists in the 1920s and 1930s were usually connected
the North, a black American presence soon became powerfully visible in with the Communist party and subjected to government surveillance and
American cultural life. Harlem, a section of New York City, attained an almost occasional violence, as were socialists, anarchists, union organizers, and oth-
wholly black population of over 150,000 by the mid-1920s; from this "city irs who opposed American free enterprise and marketplace competition.
within a city," African Americans wrote, performed, composed, and painted. Although politics directed from outside the national boundaries was, almost
Here as well they founded two major journals of opinion and culture, The by definition, "un-Arnerican," many adherents of these movements hoped to
Crisis (in 1910) and Opportunity (in 1923). This work influenced writers, make the United States conform to its stated ideals, guaranteeing liberty and
painters, and musicians of other ethnicities, and became known collectively justice for all.
as the Harlem Renaissance. Where writers were concerned, a defining conflict between American
The famous black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois had argued in The Souls of ideals and American realities in the 1920s was the Sacco-Vanzetti case.
Black Folk (1903) that African Americans had a kind of double conscious- Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian immigrants, not Com-
ness-of themselves as Americans and as blacks. This doubleness con- munists but avowed anarchists; on April 15, 1920 they were arrested near
tributed to debates within African American cultural life. The Harlem Boston after a murder during a robbery. They were accused of that crime,
Renaissance sparked arguments between those who wanted to claim mem- then tried and condemned to death in 1921; but it was widely believed that
bership in the culture at large and those who wanted to stake out a separate they had not received a fair trial and that their political beliefs had been held
artistic domain; between those who wanted to celebrate rural African Amer- against them. After a number of appeals, they were executed in 1927, main-
ican lifeways and those committed to urban intellectuality; between those taining their innocence to the end. John Dos Passos and Katherine Anne
who wanted to join the American mainstream and those who, disgusted by Porter were among the many writers and intellectuals who demonstrated in
American race prejudice, aligned themselves with worldwide revolutionary their defense; several were arrested and jailed. It is estimated that well over
movements; between those who celebrated a "primitive" African heritage and a hundred poems (including works by William Carlos Williams, Edna St. Vin-
those who rejected the idea as a degrading stereotype. African American cent Millay, and Carl Sandburg) along with six plays and eight novels of the
women, as Nella Larsen's novel Quicksand testifies, could experience these lime treated the incident from a sympathetic perspective.
divisions with special force. Women were very much called upon in efforts to Like the Sacco-Vanzetti case in the 1920s, the Scottsboro case in the
"uplift," advance, and educate the black community, but these communal 1930s brought many American writers and intellectuals, black and white,
obligations could be felt as constraints upon individual freedom and explo- together in a cause-here, the struggle against racial bias in the justice sys-
ration; meanwhile the white social world, given to exoticizing or sexualizing tern, In 1931 nine black youths were indicted in Scottsboro, Alabama, for the
black women, offered few alternatives. alleged rape of two white women in a railroad freight car. They were all found
Class inequality, as well as American racial divisions, continued to gener- ~uilty, and some were sentenced to death. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed
ate intellectual and artistic debate in the interwar years. The nineteenth- convictions twice; in a second trial one of the alleged victims retracted her
century United States had been host to many radical movements-labor testimony; in 1937 charges against five were dropped. But four went to jail,
activism, utopianism, socialism, anarchism-inspired by diverse sources. In in many people's view unfairly. The Communists were especially active in the
the twentieth century, especially following the rise of the Soviet Union, the Scottsboro defense; but people across the political spectrum saw the case as
American left increasingly drew its intellectual and political program from the crucial to the question of whether black people could receive fair trials in the
Marxist tradition. The German philosopher Karl Marx (1818-1883) located American South. The unfair trial of an African American man became a tit-
the roots of human behavior in economics. He claimed that industrializing l'rary motif in much writing of the period and beyond, including Richard
societies were structurally divided into two antagonistic classes based on dif- Wl'ight's Native SOli, Williill11 Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust, and Harper
ferent relations to the means of production-capit:d ,,""IS labor. The Indus 1 ,l'l"S 'J(} /(ill(/ M(}('hill~/lil'll
1182 / AMERICAN LITERATURE 1914-1945 INTRODUCTION / 1183

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY I hat nonscientific thinking, because it was imprecise and value laden, could
not explain anything. They questioned the capacity of science to provide
Technology played a vital, although often invisible, role in all these events, u'counts of the things that matter, like subjective experience and moral
because it linked places and spaces, contributing to the shaping of culture as lxsucs. Art, to them, became the repository of a way of experiencing the world
a national phenomenon rather than a series of local manifestations. Indeed, 01her than that offered by science. Their approach put a heavy burden of
without new modes of production, transportation, and communication, mod- "meaning" on art and was a sign, if not a contributing cause, of the increased
ern America in all its complexity could not have existed. Electricity for lights 'pt'cialization of intellectual activity and the division of educated people into
and appliances, along with the telephone-nineteenth-century inventions- whut the British novelist and physicist C. P. Snow was later to call the "two
expanded into American homes during these years, improving life for many r ultures't=-science versus letters.
but widening the gap between those plugged into the new networks and those
outside them. The phonograph record and the record player (early devices for
recording and playing music), the motion picture (which acquired sound in THE 19305
1929), and the radio made new connections possible and brought mass pop-
ular culture into being. Although the nineteenth-century dream of forging a l'hc Great Depression was a worldwide phenomenon, and social unrest led
scattered population into a single nation could now be realized more instan- IIIIhe rise of fascist dictatorships in Europe, among which were those of Gen-
taneously and directly than was ever possible with print media, many intel- "lIIlissimo Francisco Franco in Spain, Benito Mussolini in Italy, and Adolf
lectuals suspected that mass culture would create a robotic, passive II itler in Germany. Hitler's program, which was to make Germany rich and
population vulnerable to demagoguery. Ilong by conquering the rest of Europe, led inexorably to World War II.
The most powerful technological innovation, however, encouraged activ- In the United States, the Depression made politics and economics the
ity not passivity: this was the automobile, which had been developed by the ilicnt issues and overrode questions of individual freedom with questions of
end of the nineteenth century, but remained a luxury item until Henry Ford's IIII1SS collapse. Free-enterprise capitalism had always justified itself by argu-
assembly-line techniques made cars affordable. Automobiles put Americans Illg that although the system made a small number of individuals immensely
on the road, dramatically reshaped the structure of American industry and wvnlthy it also guaranteed better lives for all. This assurance now rang hol-
occupations, and altered the national topography as well. Along with work in low, The suicides of millionaire bankers and stockbrokers made the head-
automobile factories themselves, millions of other jobs-in steel mills, parts IIIH'S,but more compelling was the enormous toll among ordinary people who
factories, highway construction and maintenance, gas stations, machine 10\1homes, jobs, farms, and life savings in the stock market crash. Conserv-
shops, roadside restaurants, motels-depended on the industry. The road ulves advised waiting until things got better; radicals espoused immediate
itself became-and has remained-a key powerful symbol of the United 1I('ililrevolution. In this atmosphere, the election of Franklin Delano Roo-
States and of modernity as well. Cities grew, suburbs came into being, small I'wlt to the presidency in 1932 was a victory for American pragmatism; his
towns died, new towns arose, according to the placement of highways. The 1'1It's of liberal reforms-social security, acts creating jobs in the public see-
United States had become a nation of migrants as much as or more than it 111I,welfare, and unemployment insurance-cushioned the worst effects of
was a nation of immigrants. IIii' Depression and avoided the civil war that many had thought inevitable.
It is impossible fully to dissociate technology from science, and certainly I'he terrible situation in the United States produced a significant increase
one of the most important developments in the interwar period was the II(:ommunist party membership and prestige in the 1930s. Numerous intel-
growth of modern "big" science. At the turn of the century and soon afterward 11'1'1 unls allied themselves with its causes, even if they did not become party
scientists discovered that the atom was not the smallest possible unit of mat- nu-mbers. An old radical journal, The Masses, later The New Masses, became
ter, that matter was not indestructible, that both time and space were rela- 1111'official literary voice of the party, and various other radical groups
tive to an observer's position, that some phenomena were so small that 1IIIIIIdedjou rnals to represent their viewpoints. Visitors to the Soviet Union
attempts at measurement would alter them, that some outcomes could be 1I'IIII'nedwith glowing reports about a true workers' democracy and prosper-
predicted only in terms of statistical probability, that the universe might be I, for a II.The appeal of Communism was significantly enhanced by its claim
infinite in size and yet infinitely expanding; in short, much of the common- III 1)(' an opponent of fascism. Communists fought against Franco in the
sense basis of nineteenth-century science had to be put aside in favor of far "punish Civil War of 1936 and 1937. Hitler's nightmare policies of genocide
more powerful but also far less commonsensical theories. Among many 111111 racial superiority and his plans for a general European war to secure
results, scientists and literary intellectuals became less and less able to com- 111111 (' room ror the superior German "folk" to live became increasingly evident
municate with each other and less respectful of each others' worldviews. Sci- I~ Ellropean refugees began to flee to the United States in the 1930s, and
entists saw literary people as careless thinkers; literary people, especially the 1IIIIIlybelieved that the USSR would be the only country able to withstand the
more conservative among them, deplored the loss of authority for traditional, (:I'IIIHII1war machine. But Soviet Communism showed another side to
humanistic explanations of the real, concrete, experienced world and the felt \111('1 icuns when American Communists were ordered to break up the meet-
human life. Poets like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and William II~~of 01her radical groups; when JOS(,r Stalin, the Soviet dictator, instituted
Carlos Williams reacted spiritedly to the increasingly prevalent nssumprion I ~I'lh'~ of hrutu] purges in t1w Sovi('1 Union beginning in 1936; and when in
1184 / AMERICAN LITERATURE 1914-1945 INTRODUCTION / 1185

1939 he signed a pact promising not to go to war against Germany. The dis- connections, summaries, and distancing that provide continuity, perspective,
illusionment and betrayal felt by many radicals over these acts led to many and security in traditional literature. A typical modernist work may seem to
1930s left-wing activists' becoming staunch anti-Communists after World begin arbitrarily, to advance without explanation, and to end without resolu-
War II. tion, consisting of vivid segments juxtaposed without cushioning or integrat-
ing transitions. There will be shifts in perspective, voice, and tone. Its
rhetoric will be understated, ironic. It will suggest rather than assert, making
AMERICAN VERSIONS OF MODERNISM use of symbols and images instead of statements. Its elements will be drawn
from diverse areas of experience. The effect will be surprising, shocking, and
Used in the broadest sense, "modernism" is a catchall term for any kind of lit- unsettling; the experience of reading will be challenging and difficult. Faced
erary production in the interwar period that deals with the modern world. with the task of intuiting connections left unstated, the reader of a modernist
More narrowly, it refers to work that represents the transformation of tradi- work is often said to participate in the actual work of making the poem or
tional society under the pressures of modernity, and that breaks down tradi- story.
tionalliterary forms in doing so. Much modernist literature of this sort, which Some high modernist works, however, order their discontinuous elements
critics increasingly now set apart as "high modernism," is in a sense antimod- into conspicuous larger patterns, patterns often drawn from world literature,
ern: it interprets modernity as an experience of loss. As its title underlines, mythologies, and religions. As its title advertises, Joyce's Ulysses maps the lives
T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land-the great poem of high modernism-represents or its modern characters onto Homer's Odyssey; Eliot's The Waste Land lay-
the modern world as a scene of ruin. irs the Christian narrative of death and resurrection over a broad range of
Modernism began as a European response to the effects of World War I, quest myths. The question for readers lies in the meaning of these borrowed
which were far more devastating on the Continent than they were in the structures and mythic parallels: do they reveal profound similarities or ironic
United States. It involved other art forms-sculpture, painting, dance-as contrasts between the modern world and earlier times? For some writers and
well as literature. The poetry of William Butler Yeats; James Joyce's Ulysses readers, the adaptability of ancient stories to modern circumstances testified
(1922); Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (1913-27); Thomas to their deep truth, underlying the surface buzz and confusion of modernity;
Mann's novels and short stories, including The Magic Mountain (1927)- for others, such parallels indicated Christianity to be only a myth, a merely
these were only a few of the literary products of this movement in England human construction for creating order out of, and finding purpose in, his-
and on the Continent. In painting, artists like Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, and tory's flux.
Georges Braque invented cubism; in the 1920s the surrealistic movement If meaning is a human construction, then meaning lies in the process of
known as dadaism emerged. The American public was introduced to modern I-(cneratingmeaning; if meaning lies obscured deep underneath the ruins of
art at the famous New York Armory Show of 1913, which featured cubist modern life, then it must be effortfully sought out. Modernist literature
paintings and caused an uproar. Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Stair- Iherefore tends to foreground the search for meaning over didactic state-
case, which, to the untrained eye, looked like no more than a mass of crudely ment, and the subject matter of modernist writing often became, by exten-
drawn rectangles, was especially provocative. Composers like Igor Stravinsky sion, the poem or literary work itself. While there have long been paintings
similarly produced music in a "modern" mode, featuring dissonance and dis- about painting and poems about poetry, high modernist writing was especially
continuity rather than neat formal structure and appealing tonal harmonies. self-reflexive, concerned with its own nature as art and with its questioning
His composition The Rite of Spring provoked a riot in the Paris concert hall of previous traditions of literature. Ironically-because this subject matter
where it was premiered. was motivated by deep concern about the interrelation of literature and life-
At the heart of the high modernist aesthetic lay the conviction that the pre- Ihis subject often had the effect of limiting the audience for a modernist
viously sustaining structures of human life, whether social, political, reli- work; high modernism demanded of its ideal readers an encyclopedic knowl-
gious, or artistic, had been destroyed or shown up as falsehoods or, at best, edge of the traditions it fragmented or ironized. Nevertheless, over time, the
arbitrary and fragile human constructions. Order, sequence, and unity in principles of modernism became increasingly influential.
works of art might well express human desires for coherence rather than reli- Though modernist techniques were initiated by poets, they transformed
able intuitions of reality. Generalization, abstraction, and high-flown writing fiction in this period as well. Prose writers strove for directness, compression,
might conceal rather than convey the real. The form of a story, with its begin- nnd vividness. They were sparing of words. The average novel became quite
nings, complications, and resolutions, might be an artifice imposed on the I bit shorter than it had been in the nineteenth century, when a novel was
flux and fragmentation of experience. To the extent that art incorporated such expected to fill two or even three volumes. The modernist aesthetic gave a
a false order, it had to be renovated. new significance to the short story, which had previously been thought of as
Thus a key formal characteristic typical of high modernist works, whether II relatively slight artistic form. (Poems, too, became shorter, as narrative
in painting, sculpture, or musical composition, is its construction out of frag- poems lost ground to lyrics and the repetitive patterns of rhyme and meter
ments-fragments of myth or history, fragments of experience or perception, thut had helped sustain lonl-(poems in previous centuries lost ground to free 1,1
fragments of previous artistic works. Compared with earlier writing, mod- vr-rse.) Victorian or n'lIli,1 iI' fielion achieved its effects by accumulation and
ernist literature is notable [or what it omits: the cxplnnru ions, interpretations. ~illlII'lIlion;1ll0dt'IIIfidiOiI 1111'1'('1'1'('"
suggestion. Victorian fiction often fea-
1186 / AMERICAN LITERATURE 1914-1945 INTRODUCTION / 1187

tured an authoritative narrator; modern fiction tended to be written in the Ihem (in such neighborhoods as Greenwich Village in New York City) a free-
first person or to limit the reader to one character's point of view on the dom in lifestyle that was quite new in American history. In addition, such
action. This limitation accorded with the modernist sense that "truth" does major publishers as New Directions, Random House, Scribner, and Harper
not exist objectively but is the product of the mind's interaction with reality. were actively looking for serious fiction and poetry to feature alongside best-
The selected point of view is often that of a naive or marginal person-a child vcllcrs like Gone with the Wind and Anthony Adverse.
or an outsider-to convey better the reality of confusion rather than the myth Some writers in the period were able to use these opportunities to cross
of certainty. over the hierarchies separating high modernism from middlebrow and popu-
The contents of modernist works may be as varied as the interests and lur culture-and they crossed them in both directions. Kay Boyle's early short
observations of their authors; indeed, with a stable external world in question, xtories and poems appeared in little magazines like Broom and Transition in
subjectivity was ever more valued and accepted in literature. Modernists in 11ll' 1920s; in the 1930s, however, as she began writing of the rise of fascism
general, however, emphasized the concrete sensory image or detail over In Europe, she found a receptive larger audience in the New Yorker and
abstract statement. Allusions to literary, historical, philosophical, or religious l lurper's Magazine. Raymond Chandler began his career in the early 1930s
details of the past often keep company, in modernist works, with vignettes of writing crime fiction for cheap popular magazines, moved into authoring film
contemporary life, chunks of popular culture, dream imagery, and symbolism ,('("ipts and full-length novels issued by mainstream publishers, and by the
drawn from the author's private repertory of life experiences. A work built 19;Os had earned enough respectability to be interviewed about his artistic
[Tom these various levels and kinds of material may move across time and principles in Harper's. Where writers like William Faulkner and F. Scott
space, shift from the public to the personal, and open literature as a field for l:ilJ:gerald experienced Hollywood as a graveyard of serious literary ambition,
every sort of concern. The inclusion of all sorts of material previously deemed ( .handler found in the film industry not only financial rewards but also a pow-
"unliterary" in works of high seriousness involved the use of language that ("rul new medium for his distinctive popular modernism-a modernism as
might previously have been thought improper, including representations of r-Hiptical and innovative, in its own terms, as Hemingway's.
the speech of the uneducated and the inarticulate, the colloquial, slangy, and
the popular. Traditional realistic fiction had incorporated colloquial and
dialect speech, often to comic effect, in its representation of the broad tap- MODERNISM ABROAD AND ON NATIVE GROUNDS
estry of social life; but such speakers were usually framed by a narrator's edu-
cated literary voice, conveying truth and culture. In modernist writing like I he profession of authorship in the United States has always defined itself in
William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, these voices assume the full burden of the purt as a patriotic enterprise, whose aims were to help develop a cultural life
narrative's authority; this is what Ernest Hemingway had in mind when he 101 the nation and embody national values. High modernism, however, was a
asserted that the American literary tradition began with Huckleberry Finn. "II' consciously international movement, and the leading American expo-
"Serious" literature between the two world wars thus found itself in a curi- ru-nts of high modernism tended to be permanent expatriates like Gertrude
ous relationship with the culture at large. If it was attacking the old-style idea "I('in, Ezra Pound, H. D., and T. S. Eliot. These writers left the United States
of traditional literature, it felt itself attacked in turn by the ever-growing h"('Huse they found the country lacking in a tradition of high culture and
industry of popular literature. The reading audience in America was vast, but iIHlirf'erent, if not downright hostile, to artistic achievement. They also
it preferred a kind of book quite different from that turned out by literary high lu-lieved that a national culture could never be more than parochial. In Lon-
modernists: tales of romance or adventure, historical novels, crime fiction, don in the first two decades of the twentieth century and in Paris during the
and westerns became popular modes that enjoyed a success the serious writer 11)20s, they found a vibrant community of dedicated artists and a society that
could only dream of. The problem was that often he or she did dream of it; I '·'IH.'cted them and allowed them a great deal of personal freedom. Yet they

unrealistically, perhaps, the Ezra Pounds of the era imagined themselves with ,·Idom thought of themselves as deserting their nation and only Eliot gave
an audience of millions. When, on occasion, this dream came true-as it did lip American citizenship (sometimes, too, the traffic went in the other direc-
for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway-writers often accused them- 11011, as when the British-born poet Mina Loy became an American citizen).
selves of having sold out. I hey thought of themselves as bringing the United States into the larger con-
Nevertheless, serious writers in these years were, in fact, being published 1t'\1 of' European culture. The ranks of these permanent expatriates were
and read as writers had not been in earlier times. The number of so-called lit- \\I·lled by American writers who lived abroad for some part of the period:
tle magazines-that is, magazines of very small circulations devoted to the 1':IIH'stllemingway, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Claude McKay,
publication of works for a small audience (sometimes the works of a specific lvnl herinc Anne Porter, Nella Larsen, Robert Frost, Kay Boyle, and Eugene
group of authors)-was in the hundreds. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse began ()'N('ill 011 did so, as did many others including Sinclair Lewis and Djuna
in 1912. The Little Review followed in 1914. Then came the Seven Arts in 1I11I1l('S.
1916, the Dial in 1917, the Frontier in 1920, Reviewer and Broom in ]921, Those writers who came back, however, and those who never left took very
Fugitive in 1922, This Quarter in 1925, Transition and Hound and Horn in "Iiollsly the task of' inlq,~rnting modernist ideas and methods with American
1927, and many more. The culture that did not listen to serious writers or III'I"CI mutter, Nol j'Vi'IY experimental modernist writer disconnected liter-
make them rich still gave them plenty of opportunity to be read and allowed II\ .lIlIhiliOIl' rrolll 1111111111." 1)('longing: l lurt Crane and Marianne Moore and
1188 / AMERICAN LITERATURE 1914-1945 INTBOIJUCTION / J J 89

William Carlos Williams, for example, all wanted to write "American" works who had come to literary maturity in Chicago, published Native Son in 1940.
as such. Some writers-as the title of John Dos Passos's U.S.A. clearly Contributions to the Harlem Renaissance came from artists in many media;
shows-attempted to speak for the nation as a whole. Crane's long poem The IIn influence equal to or greater than that of the writers came from musicians.
Bridge and Williams's Paterson both take an American city as symbol and Jazz and blues, African American in origin, are felt by many to be the most
expand it to a vision for all America, following the model established by Walt uuthentically American art forms the nation has ever produced. African
Whitman. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is similarly ambitious, and American singers and musicians in this period achieved worldwide reputa-
many writers addressed the whole nation in individual works-for example, Iions and were often much more highly regarded abroad than in the United
E. E. Cummings's "next to of course god america i'' and Claude McKay's States.
"America." And a profoundly modern writer like William Faulkner cannot be American literary women had been active on the national scene from Anne
extricated from his commitment to writing about his native South. Bradstreet forward. Their increasing prominence in the nineteenth century
Like Faulkner, many writers of the period chose to identify themselves with generated a backlash from some male modernists, who asserted their own
the American scene and to root their work in a specific region, continuing a artistic seriousness by identifying women writers with the didactic, popular
tradition of regionalist American writing that burgeoned in the years follow- writing against which they rebelled. But women refused to stay on the side-
ing the American Civil War. Their perspective on the regions was sometimes lines and associated themselves with all the important literary trends of the
celebratory and sometimes critical. Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Sher- era: H. D. and Amy Lowell with imagism, Marianne Moore and Mina Loy
wood Anderson, and Willa Cather worked with the Midwest; Cather with high modernism; Willa Cather with mythic regionalism, Zora Neale
grounded her later work in the Southwest; Black Elk's Lakota autobiography l lurston and Nella Larsen with the Harlem Renaissance, Katherine Anne
recalled the high plains of South Dakota and Wyoming; John Steinbeck and Porter with psychological fiction; Edna St. Vincent Millay and Kay Boyle with
Carlos Bulosan wrote about California; Edwin Arlington Robinson and social and sexual liberation. Many of these writers concentrated on depic-
Robert Frost identified their work with New England. An especially strong I ions of women characters or women's thoughts and experiences. Yet few
center of regional literary activity emerged in the South, which had a weak lubcled themselves feminists. The passage of the suffrage amendment in
literary tradition up to the Civil War. Thomas Wolfe's was an Appalachian I no had taken some of the energy out of feminism that would not return
South of hardy mountain people; Katherine Anne Porter wrote about her until the 1960s. Some women writers found social causes like labor and
native Texas as a heterogeneous combination of frontier, plantation, and rucisrn more important than women's rights; others focused their energies on
Latin cultures. Zora Neale Hurston drew on her childhood memories of the ,I ruggles less amenable to public, legal remedies, as when Mina Loy sought
all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, for much of her best-known fiction, 10 link motherhood to an energetic vision of female sexuality. Nevertheless,
including her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. William Faulkner these literary women were clearly pushing back the boundaries of the per-
depicted a South at once specific to his native state of Mississippi and missible, demanding new cultural freedom for women. Equally important,
expanded into a mythic region anguished by racial and historical conflict. Iht'y were operating as public figures and taking positions on public causes.
As the pairing of Hurston and Faulkner suggests, the history of race in the
United States was central to the specifically national subject matter to which
many American modernists remained committed. Although race as a subject DRAMA
potentially implicated all American writers, it was African Americans whose
contributions most signally differentiated American modernism from that of Iklma in America was slow to develop as a self-conscious literary form. It was
Europe. The numerous writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance 1101until 1920 (the year of Eugene O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon) that the
made it impossible ever to think of a national literature without the work of lJnitcd States produced a world-class playwright. This is not to say that the-
black Americans. Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale II/I'r-productions and performances-was new to American life. After the
Hurston attained particular prominence at the time; but others, including \lIlcrican Revolution theaters-at first with itinerant English actors and
Claude McKay and Nella Larsen, were also well known. All were influenced I umpanies, then with American-opened throughout the East; among early
by the values of modernism: both Hughes, for example, with his incorpora- 1I'II1ers were Boston and Philadelphia as well as New York City. As the coun-
tion of blues rhythms into poetry, and Hurston, with her poetic depictions of nv expanded westward, so did its theater, together with other kinds of per-
folk culture, applied modernist techniques to represent twentieth-century 101 mance: burlesques, showboats on the Mississippi, minstrel shows,
African American lives. From time to time, writers associated with the pllillomimes. As the nineteenth century went on, the activity became cen-
Renaissance expressed protest and anger-Hughes, in particular, wrote a 1I'II'd morc and more in New York-indeed, within a few blocks, known as
number of powerful antilynching and anticapitalist poems; but in general the "Hrondway." Managers originated plays there and then sent them out to tour
movement was deliberately upbeat, taking the line that racial justice was IllIoligh the rest of the country, as Eugene O'Neill's father did with his Count
about to become reality in the United States or, like Hurston, focusing more "1/\ I(III/e Cristo.
on the vitality of black culture than on the burdens of racism. At least part of Chungcs in AIl1('ri('1I1lI heater arc often in reaction against Broadway, a pat-
this approach was strategic-the bulk of the readership for Harlem authors 1I'IIIIIh~('rvahlc II, I'illl~ II, II) I '; with the formation of the Washington Square
was white. The note of pure anger was not expressed until Richard Wright, I'III~I'I'''unci I he 1'111\II•• 1'1111111PIII),crs (organi/,cd by Susan Claspcll and oth-
1190 / AMERICAN LITERATURE 1914-1945
1914 1945
ers), both located in New York'sGreenwich Village and both dedicated to the
production of plays that more conservative managers refused. The Province- TEXTS CONTEXTS
town Players would shortly be producing the first works of Glaspell and
Eugene O'Neill. These fledgling companies, and others like them, often knew 19 J 0 Edward Arlington Robinson.
better what they opposed than what they wanted. European influence was "Miniver Cheevy"

strong. By 1915, Henrik Ibsen in Europe and George Bernard Shaw in Eng- 1914 Robert Frost, "Home Burial" • Carl 1914-18 World War I
land had shown that the theater could be an arena for serious ideas; while the Sandburg, "Chicago"
psychological dramas of August Strindberg, the symbolic work of Maurice 19 I 5 Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River 1915 Great Migration of African
Maeterlinck, and the sophisticated criticism of Arthur Schnitzler provided Anthology· Ezra Pound begins Cantos Americans from the rural South to northern
other models. The American tours of European companies, in particular the industrial cities

Moscow Art Theatre in 1923, further exposed Americans to the theatrical 19 I 6 Susan Glaspell, Trifles
avant-garde. American playwrights in the 1920s and 1930s were united not 1917 United States declares war on
so much by a common cause of ideas, European or American, as by the new Cermany e revolution in Russia brings
assumption that drama should be a branch of contemporary literature. Communist party to power
Just as his contemporaries in poetry and fiction were changing and ques- 1918 Willa Cather, My Antonia J 918 Daylight Savings Time instituted to
tioning their forms, so Eugene O'Neill sought to refine his. He experimented allow more daylight for war production
less in language than in dramatic structure and in new production methods
1919 Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, 19 I 9 Senate limits U.S. participation in
available through technology (e.g., lighting) or borrowed from the stylized Ollio • Amy Lowell, "Madonna of the League of Nations; does not ratify Versailles
realism of German expressionism. Almost as famous at the time was Maxwell Evening Flowers" Treaty to end World War I
Anderson, whose best plays-the tragic Winterset (1935) and the romantic 1920 Pound, "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" J 920 18th Amendment prohibits the
comedy High Tor (1937)-embody a stylized blank verse, a language • Edwin Arlington Robinson, "Mr. Flood's manufacture, sale, and transportation of
attempted by few modern dramatists. Playwrights such as Sidney Howard, Pnrty'' alcoholic beverages > 19th Amendment
Lillian Hellman, and Robert Sherwood wrote serious realistic plays. George gives women the vote
Kaufman and his many collaborators, especially Moss Hart, invented a dis- 1920-27 Sacco-Vanzetti trial
tinctively American form, the wisecracking domestic and social comedy, while
1921 T. S. Eliot, TIle Waste Land·
S. N. Behrman and Philip Barry wrote higher comedies of ideas. The musi- Claude McKay, "Africa, America" • Mari-
cal comedy was another distinctively American invention: beginning as an unne Moore, "Poetry" • Langston Hughes,
amalgam of jokes, songs, and dances, it progressed steadily toward an inte- ••I'hc Negro Speaks of Rivers"
gration of its various elements, reaching new heights with the work of George 1922 Mina Loy, "Brancusi's Golden ] 922 Fascism rises in Europe; Mussolini
and Ira Gershwin in the 1920s and 1930s and of Oscar Hammerstein in col- Hlrd'' becomes dictator of Italy
laboration with Jerome Kern or Richard Rodgers from the 1920s on into the 1'123 Wallace Stevens, "Sunday
1950s. Morning"
Social commentary and satire had been a thread in the bright weave of 1924 Exclusionary immigration act bars
1'124 II. D. (Hilda Doolittle), "Helen"
American drama since the early 1920s, beginning, perhaps, with Elmer Rice's Asians
fiercely expressionistic play about a rebellious nonentity, The Adding Machine
1'12; Countee Cullen, "Heritage">
(1923). During the Depression social criticism became a much more impor- (:,·,Irudo Stein, The Making of Americans •
tant dramatic theme, with political plays performed by many radical groups. AI"ln Locke publishes The New Negro, lead-
Perhaps the most significant was Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty (1935), 11111 umhology of the Harlem Renaissance
which dramatized a taxidrivers' strike meeting and turned the stage into a 1'126 l lart Crane, The Bridge
platform for argument. Many poets and fiction writers of the interwar period
I '1~7 1..0'" Neale Hurston, "The 1927 The Jazz Singer, first full-length
wrote plays-among them Ernest Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, William
1'lIllIlIvilie Anthology" "talkie," is released
Carlos Williams, William Faulkner, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Langston
I'I~H Ncl!u Larsen, Quicksand
Hughes, T. S. Eliot, John Steinbeck, and Robert Lowell. It was in this period
that drama moved decisively into the American literary mainstream. 1929 Stock market crashes; Great Depres-
sion begins

I'll() i(lIlherinc Anne Porter, "Flowering 1930 Sinclair Lewis is first American to
flldlls" win Nobel Prize for literature

Boldfll('''' Iilk", hHII('fllt' wut ks in the anthology.

I'll. I