REALISM AT THE TURN OF THE 19TH CENTURY

Naturalism
Stemming from the short stories by W. Irving and novels by F. Cooper, born as a
description, often nostalgic, of a particular region, local colourism, or regionalism, was only
the first step towards realism in American literature. In American literature, realism had
various degrees. One group, naturalists, influenced by scientific studies claiming that
heredity predetermines character, that the environment frequently shapes social life, were
fatalists, often pessimists, showing life with stark honesty. Unlike other the realists, the
naturalists believed that people could not make moral choices. They showed their characters
as completely controlled by economic, social, or biological forces.
One of the first American naturalists was
Stephen Crane (1871–1900) an American novelist,
short-story writer, poet, and journalist. He pioneered
in psychological realism, often exploring thoughts of
fictional characters facing death.
Crane's greatest novel is The Red Badge of
Courage (1895), a story set during the Civil War
(1861-1865). It portrays a young Union soldier who
undergoes a transformation from cowardice to
heroism amidst the noisy confusion and "crimson
roar" of the battlefield. Crane based the youth's
experiences on conversations with veterans of
combat, fictional works, histories of military
campaigns, and his vivid imagination. The novel
remains a masterpiece of war literature (watch a trailer at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKAisKgxtVI )
Crane’s most famous stories include The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky (1898), The
Blue Hotel (1898), and The Open Boat (1897). The Blue Hotel is a story depicting
accidental characters gathered together at the Blue Hotel and playing cards and drinking to
pass the time, with the murder at the end. Despite the plot, it is not a mystery story, rather, a
keen depiction of all the factors leading to the murder and making it inevitable and almost
natural.
Crane's poetry was collected in The
Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) and
War Is Kind (1899), where his cynical
poems anticipate the free verse style of the
1900's and the war poetry of the World War
I.

Another American naturalist, Frank Norris (1870-1902), was a novelist and journalist
and the leader of the naturalism movement. Norris believed that a novel should serve a
moral purpose and "prove(s) that injustice, crime, and inequality do exist."
Norris planned a three-novel series called
the Epic of the Wheat to tell about the
production, distribution, and consumption of
wheat in the United States. The Octopus
(1901) dramatizes how a railroad controlled
a group of California wheat farmers. The
book emphasizes the control of "forces,"
such as wheat and railroads, over individuals
or even groups of individuals. The novel
shows the author's weakness for melodrama
but illustrates his genius for revealing character and writing exciting action scenes. The
second volume of the series, The Pit, was published in 1903, after Norris died at the age of
32 following an operation for appendicitis. The final volume, The Wolf, was never written.
Similar topic were explored by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle (1906) which exposed
unsanitary conditions in the Chicago meat-packing industry and helped bring about federal
regulation.
 Yet, the leading American naturalist was Theodore
Dreiser (1871-1945). Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Ind.
Dreiser's family was very poor, and he soon saw a profound
difference between the promise and the reality of American life.
This realization was a major source of Dreiser's discontent and
an important influence on his works.
Dreiser attended Indiana University for a year and then
worked as a newspaperman in Chicago and St. Louis. By
1907, he was the successful editor of the very sort of woman's
magazine whose sentimentality and superficiality he despised.
He ranks as the foremost American writer in the
naturalism movement. Dreiser's characters are victims of
apparently meaningless incidents that result in pressures they
can neither control nor understand.
He based such novels as Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy on events from
real life. He condemned not his villains, but the repressive, hypocritical society that produced
them. Dreiser's style lacks grace, but his best stories are powerful and sobering.
Dreiser's first novel, Sister Carrie, was partly based on the experiences of one of his
sisters. Sister Carrie is the story of Carrie Meeber, a poor girl alone in Chicago. She lives
with a traveling salesman and then runs off to New York with George Hurstwood, a
prosperous married man. Hurstwood's fortunes decline, and he becomes a bum and commits
suicide. Carrie finds success, but not happiness, as an actress. The book considered immoral
by the publisher, who refused to publish it, despite the previous agreement. Dreiser insisted,
the book was published but not advertised or distributed. Only 12 years later it was
republished and promoted. Meanwhile, Dreiser wrote Jennie Gerhardt (1911), another novel
of desire and fate. However, his reputation was assured with the publication of The Financier
(1912), the most purely naturalistic of his works. It is the story of an industrial tycoon who
claws his way to great power. Dreiser intended the novel as the beginning of a "Trilogy of
Desire." But the second volume, The Titan (1914), was a failure, and the third volume, The
Stoic, was not published until two years after Dreiser’s death.
An American Tragedy (1925) is the finest of Dreiser's books. It concerns a weak
young man who is executed for the murder of his pregnant girlfriend. Again, Dreiser did not
condemn his villain, but the amoral society that produced and destroyed him.
A very attractive blend of romanticism of naturalism was
presented by the works of Jack London. This is a pen name of John
Griffith Chaney (1876-1916), an American novelist and short-story
writer. His best-known works focus on the elemental struggles for
survival of the fittest.
The writer grew up in California, brought up by his spiritualist mother
and his stepfather, whose surname, London, he took. At age 14, he quit
school and became a sailor to escape poverty and gain adventure.
 Later he saw much of the United States as a hobo riding freight trains. London saw
depression conditions, was jailed for vagrancy, and finally became a militant socialist. He
educated himself at public libraries reading Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Friedrich
Nietzsche, usually in popularized forms. At 19 he crammed a four-year high school course
into one year and entered the University of California, Berkeley, but after a year quit school to
seek a fortune in the Klondike gold rush. Returning the next year, still poor and unable to find
work, he decided to earn a living as a writer.
London studied magazines and then set himself a daily schedule of producing sonnets,
ballads, jokes, anecdotes, adventure stories, or horror stories, steadily increasing his output.
The optimism and energy with which he attacked his task are best conveyed in his
autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909). Within two years, stories of his Alaskan
adventures began to win acceptance for their fresh subject matter and virile force. His first
book, The Son of the Wolf: Tales of the Far North (1900), a collection of short stories that
he had previously published in magazines, became very popular.
For the rest of his life, London wrote and published steadily, completing some 50 books
of fiction and nonfiction. His Alaskan novels The Call of the Wild (1903) (see a trailer at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P8R2zAhEwg ), White Fang (1906), and Burning
Daylight (1910) dramatize adaptability and the appeal of the wilderness (see a trailer of a
loose adaptation at . His classic short story “To Build a Fire” (1908), set in the Klondike, is a
detailed depiction of human endeavor to overcome nature. His most popular novels are The
Sea-Wolf (1904), which presents the fight between civilization and wild nature embodied in
the conflict between Humphrey Van Weyden battling Wolf Larsen; and The Iron Heel (1908),
a fantasy of the future that is a terrifying anticipation of fascism.

MODERN AMERICAN LITERATURE

The Historical Context
When the World War I started, America
headed by W. Wilson tried to maintain
neutrality, though financially it supported the
allied forces. But after Lusitania (128
Americans on board) was sunk and merchant
ships were attacked, America declared war
on Germany in 1917.
 Americans were enthusiastic, 2 million
volunteered and 3 more million were drafted.
Many people supported the army financially,
purchasing Liberty Bonds for billions of
dollars.
In 1919 the Paris conference decided
the fate of the defeated Germany and
founded the League of Nations, in which
America did not participate, factually isolating
itself.
Post-war America witnessed a considerable growth of population and further
urbanization. For the first time in US history, the majority of the population now lived in cities,
which changed the pattern of American everyday life: life in cities was hectic, and family ties
were ruined.

Industry flowered, goods were growing cheaper, many people now could afford electric
house appliances, and, most importantly, cars.
Cinema introduced the cinema stardom, Charlie Chaplin, new Gods in sports appeared,
such as Babe Ruth.
As the new century entered its second decade, the forward movement of American
literature seemed to have stopped. The realist novels of Howells and Garland were beginning
to seem old-fashioned. Among the exciting young writers of the turn of the century, Jack
London seemed to have lost his genius and Frank Norris and Stephen Crane were long dead.
People were asking again what was wrong with American Literature.
Part of the problem was that most American readers and writers had not yet 'outgrown'
the 19th century. After the famous literary leaders, Emerson and Howells, the nation needed
new one, who could start a new century. It was Van Wyck Brooks, who opened a period of
self-criticism, in which writers looked at what was wrong with the nation and its literature. And
such criticism was doomed sooner or later to become social criticism. Brooks claimed that
there was no longer any middle ground, which could provide for a meeting and understanding
of professors and businessmen. So writers had to create this middle ground.
 Young writers took notice of Brooks’ criticism and
the result was a 'new realism', which lasted till the 1950s.
Another Brook's merit is that he was the first historian of
American Literature.
The 20th century began quietly, but soon new
forces brought profound changes. Although science and
technology enriched material life, two world wars and the
prospect of a third raised grave concern about the future.
The federal government intervened increasingly in the
activities of the people. The nation also learned that it was
involved in the problems of peoples around the globe.

Modernism
In general, the interwar period was marked with experimenting. Writers tried to
incorporate and reflect the new philosophical and psychological interpretations of reality, the
new concepts of time and matter.
Conventional standards and established authors were questioned and attacked by a
new body of writers, who spoke through the so-called 'little magazines' – independent minded
periodicals, more concerned with publishing new authors than with financial success.
American literature of the 20th century is different from earlier literature in significant
ways. It is possible to list several of its characteristics which are implied in the term modern:
1. The scope of modern literature is broad. For example, writers are able to treat
ugliness and violence freely.
2. The meanings of modern literature are deeper and more complex than in earlier
writing because life itself has become more complex. Present-day writers have learned much
about economics, sociology, anthropology, and especially psychology; and their works often
embody ideas drawn from these new areas of thought.
3. Modern writing is technically sophisticated. To write about the life of today, authors
have discovered new ways to express their ideas. These ways are fresh and stimulating, but
they sometimes make severe demands on readers.
4. If technique is complicated, the language of modern writing is simpler than that of
earlier times. In place of the old formal language, thought proper for literature, contemporary
writers have substituted language much closer to that of everyday speech.
5. Modern literature exhibits more variety than that of earlier periods. Because life today
is varied, so is the writing that reflects it varied – in subject, in region portrayed, in
philosophical outlook, in scope (broad and sociological or concentrated and psychological),
and in form and technique.
 Modern American Fiction
Poetry enjoyed a rebirth and drama came of age artistically in the first half of the 20th
century. It is prose, however, that emerged as the major form of literary expression in that
period. As with modern poets and dramatists, there was a new emphasis on realism among
prose fiction writers of the 20th century. Many of these writers can be grouped according to a
genre or style of writing.
One of such experimenting authors in the field of prose was
Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) with his collections of short
stories Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and The Triumph of the Egg
(1921). He was one of the writers who chronicled their escape
from small-town America and exposed its hypocrisies. His
Winesburg, Ohio (1919), is based on Anderson's hometown
of Clyde, Ohio. In his short stories and novels Anderson
protested against the frustrations of ordinary people and
against what he believed to be the narrow-minded conventions
of his time. He was a master of colloquial speech. His concern
with the unfulfilled lives of "little" people probably came from his
early observations of life (storytelling father, orphan at 14,
no formal schooling, who got acquainted with the Chicago writers).
Historical Novelists
The historical novel has appealed to American
readers eager to discover their cultural roots.
Gone with the Wind (1936), by Margaret
Mitchell (1900-1949) is a best-selling novel about
the American Civil War (check the trailer at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2oX0zQA67
U ). Novels of later American wars, usually
presenting the story of a character caught in the
historic turmoil, would continue to be popular.

Regional Novelists
A number of modern novelists have sought to describe the region of the country that
they knew best. Willa Cather (1873-1947) is best remembered for depicting the Nebraska of
frontier days. Her novels O Pioneers! (1913) and My Antonia (1918) are powerful stories of
settlement on the prairie.
The American South has produced an impressive number of fine writers of the 20th
century, including Eudora Welty (1909-2001), Carson McCullers (1917-1967) and, most
notably, William Faulkner (1897-1962).
East-coast cities have formed the settings of several distinguished novelists. Edith
Wharton (1862-1937), a disciple of Henry James, wrote of the well-to-do classes of New York
City in 'The House of Mirth' (1905) and 'The Age of Innocence' (1920).
Depicters of Their Eras
The Roaring Twenties brought with them radical changes in lifestyle. The women were
given right to vote, and used the new opportunities that opened for them in employment. Life
of a working woman demanded a change of clothing and hairstyle.
 Prohibition not only gave rise to a huge network of
speak-easies, that featured not only alcohol, but new
music, but also it was a beginning to organized crime,
which controlled bootlegging.
Hedonism florished. Politicians tried to return the
general public to traditional values, sometimes succeeding.
Not everyone, though, benefited from the economic
prosperity of the 1920s. While big business, supported by
the government florished, lay workers witnessed a
decrease in their wages. Little was done to help the
American farmer, and their poverty led to reduction in
domestic demand. America was producing more than could
consume.
The influence of European modernism reached the United States during this period.
Just as some novelists are associated with the regions of which they write, others are
associated with the times of which they seem to be the spokesmen.
Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was the leading
writer of America's Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, and one
of its glittering heroes. He aptly caught the mood of the
Roaring Twenties in his novels 'This Side of Paradise'
(1920) and 'The Great Gatsby' (1925). A volume of his
stories was appropriately titled 'Tales of the Jazz Age'
(1922). An important quality of Fitzgerald's talent was his
ability to be both a leading participant in the high life he
described, and a detached observer of it. Few readers saw
the serious side of Fitzgerald, and he was not generally
recognized as a gifted writer during his lifetime. While he
lived, most readers considered his stories a chronicle and
even a celebration of moral decline. But later readers
realized that Fitzgerald's works have a deeper moral theme.
Fitzgerald was born in Minnesota, attended Princeton, which he left without a degree.
At Princeton he was writing musicals and years later, Fitzgerald remarked that perhaps he
should have continued writing musicals, but he said, "I am too much a moralist at heart, and
really want to preach at people in some acceptable form, rather than entertain them."
Fitzgerald won fame and fortune for his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920). It is
an immature work but was the first novel to anticipate the pleasure-seeking generation of the
Roaring Twenties. A similar novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1921), and two collections of
short stories, Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922),
increased his popularity.
The Great Gatsby (1925) was less popular than Fitzgerald's early works, but it was his
masterpiece and the first of three successive novels that give him lasting literary importance.
The lively yet deeply moral novel centers around Jay Gatsby, a wealthy bootlegger, in pursuit
of his dream. It presents a penetrating criticism of the moral emptiness Fitzgerald saw in
wealthy American society of the 1920's and some of the best prose of the 20th century.
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra
is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is
easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups
change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already
there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more
stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of the group, and then, excited with
triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and colour under the constantly
changing light. (check out a trailer at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN183rJltNM )
Fitzgerald's next novel, Tender Is the Night (1934), is a beautifully written but
disjointed account of the general decline of a few glamorous Americans in Europe. The book
failed because readers during the Great Depression of the 1930's were not interested in Jazz
Age "parties." Fitzgerald died before he completed The Last Tycoon (1941), a novel about
Hollywood life.
Critics generally agree that Fitzgerald's early success damaged his personal life and
marred his literary production. This success led to extravagant living and a need for a large
income. It probably contributed to Fitzgerald's alcoholism, his physical and spiritual collapse,
which he described frankly in the long essay The Crack-Up (1936), and the mental
breakdown of his wife, Zelda. Fitzgerald spent his last years as a scriptwriter in Hollywood. A
few years after his death, his books won him the recognition he had desired while alive.
From the very beginning Fitzgerald had a feeling that the twenties would end badly,
both for himself, and for America, so 'all the stories that came into my head had a touch of
disaster in them.'
And he was right.
Financial speculation florished and pushed the value of investment to artificially high
levels. In 1929 prices started to decline, and resulted in a panic, in which America lost 50
billion and the Great Depression that lasted for 10 years started.
 Thousands of people lost all their savings overnight, enterprises were closed, millions
of workers lost their jobs, farmers lost their land. 13 million unemployed.
The happy, confident world of America of the roaring 1920s was destroyed.. America
was entering a new period of social anger and self-criticism. During that period many writers
turned away from experimenting and modernism and turned back to a new kind of social
realism and naturalism. It showed the struggles and the tragedies of ordinary people. But it
also showed their strength, energy and hopefulness. The writing itself is strong, energetic and
quite easy to read. It gives a very clear picture of the times.
In the early 1930s, the first reaction to Great Depression was literature of social protest.
The leading writers of the period were Dos Passos, John O'Hara, Thomas Wolfe and John
Steinbeck.
A topic directly opposite to
Fitzgerald’s grand Jazz Age was
small-town life in the postwar years. It
is the theme of Main Street (1920), by
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), the first
American writer to receive the Nobel
Prize for literature. His Babbitt (1922)
satirizes the dull, unimaginative life of
a middle-class businessman.

In the following decade, the years of the big depression, novelists concerned
themselves with problems of a people caught in hard times. One of such writers was John
Dos Passos (1896-1970).
His anger toward the system that permitted
wholesale misery fired several novels openly
critical of abuses of the economic system. His
major work is the trilogy 'U.S.A.' (1937), which
chronicles the lives of several persons over a 30-
year period, discussing the role of individual in
history. It includes three novels: 'The 42nd
Parallel' (1930), 'Nineteen Nineteen' (1932), and
'The Big Money' (1936). About the individual in
history. The first volume is about the beginning of
the 20th century, the second is more angry, describing the war as the pilot of big interests. The
third volume describes the post-war America that went mad with greed. It is not considered a
flattering picture of American life; but the portrait is vivid, made so by the unique way in which
the story is told.
 Dos Passos’ works consciously aim at stimulating protest in the working class. After
travelling the world with his family before the war, Dos Passos entered Harvard, but, early in
1917, during World War I, he joined the ambulance service of the Allies. After the war he
traveled widely, writing for newspapers and magazines. His wartime experience gave Dos
Passos the inspiration and subject matter for his first novel, 'One Man's Initiation’ (1920) –
the first American novel about the first World War. In 1921 he published 'Three Soldiers',
which was well received by both critics and the public. It is a violent protest against war.
Like all writers of the Lost Generation, Dos Passos saw the modern post-war world as
ugly and dirty, and believed that only art and the invention of new artistic styles could save it.
'Manhattan Transfer' (1925) was a turning point in Dos Passos' writing career. It
describes the daily lives of a large number of New Yorkers. In this novel he used several
innovations in technique. One device is the telling of many separate stories simultaneously in
a sort of impressionistic effort to capture the pace and atmosphere of big-city life. He mixed
the text with popular songs, lines from advertisements, newspaper headlines and phrases.
His characters often talk in a special poetic style like Joyce's. He is also influenced by the
movie technique of montage, etc. And although the book has many characters, the style aims
at describing the chief one – New York itself and its aim is to show the purposelessness of
history.
Dos Passos became increasingly interested in social and political issues and more and
more concerned with the problems of poor people, describing not the destiny of an individual,
but a whole era.
The novels of Thomas Wolfe (1900-38) have moved many readers. A physical giant of
colossal appetites, Wolfe wrote novels proportionately huge, trying to speak for the whole
America. He brought a voice of hope to the despair of the thirties:
I believe that we are lost here in America, but I believe that we shall be found.
 As optimistic as Whitman, he does not celebrate
America like this poet. His works are mainly
autobiographical and tell of a young man finding his
place in the world and so are full of the passion, ecstasy,
anger, and frustration of youth. The first to be written,
'Look Homeward, Angel' (1929), is in many ways the
best; but almost equally powerful is the last, 'You Can't
Go Home Again' (1940).
In his first novel he starts by stating that the novel
represents his vision of his life till his 20th year. The
young hero, Eugene Gant, grows up in a cultureless
world of a southern town. He's a romantic artist filled with
a hunger to know all and to feel all, whether pleasure or
pain. He sets up on a trip for 'the deeper waters of
experience.' From his train window he sees people in a
passing train:
They looked at one another for a moment, they passed and vanished and were gone
forever, yet it seemed to him that he had known these people, that he knew them far better
than the people in his own train, and that, having met them for an instant under immense and
timeless skies, as they were hurled across the continent to a thousand destinations, they had
met, passed, vanished, yet would remember for ever.
Wolfe’s style features long sentences with poetic repetitions as his personal invention.
His next novel – Of Time and the River (1935) is subtitled 'A Legend of a Man's
Hunger in His Youth' and continues the story of Gant. All novels by Wolf make one story of a
great journey of exploration, the aim of which is to reach 'the city of myself, the continent of
my soul'.
(check out R. Bradbury’s story “Forever and the Earth” about Thomas Wolfe).
The decade, the years of the big depression, novelists concerned themselves with
problems of a people caught in hard times.
 John Ernst Steinbeck was born in
1902, in Salinas, Calif. He took classes at
Stanford University for several years but
left without a degree. He worked as a
laborer to support himself while he wrote.
Steinbeck's first novel was published in
1929, but it was not until the publication
of 'Tortilla Flat' in 1935 that he attained
critical and popular acclaim.
He wanted to get it down on paper: to
record the way people talked, thought
and felt. In the 1930s his characters were
naturalistic in the classic meaning of the
word. They are driven by forces in
themselves and in the society: fear,
hunger, sex, the disasters of nature, the
evils of Capitalism. Crime is often a result
of these forces.
In all his works he combines naturalistic way of looking at things with a deep sympathy for
people. He searches for the elements in human nature that are the same for all people and
usually finds them in a family, a group or a nation, rather than in an individual, and like Dos
Passos and Wolfe, he tried to portray large pictures of a national spirit, for which the great
movement westwards is very important.
He followed this success with 'In Dubious Battle' (1936) and 'Of Mice and Men'
(check out a trailer at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQtiStdDaYw&t=7s ) (1937). Winner
of the 1962 Nobel prize for literature, the American author John Steinbeck is best
remembered for his novel 'The Grapes of Wrath' (1939).
Steinbeck's story of a family of Oklahoma
farm workers, the Joads, who are driven
from their drought-stricken land and make a
heroic trip West, migrating from Oklahoma
to California. It describes the hopelessness
of the Great Depression era and is a
memorable and moving tale. It earned for
Steinbeck a Pulitzer prize. In this novel his
characters are larger than life. He is not
speaking about an individual family, but
rather portrays a great national tragedy
though its experiences. The Joads must
leave Oklahoma because of a great dust
bowl disaster: terrible winds have destroyed
their land. They go west into California and work as fruit pickers. There they experience
hatred of the large Californian landowners. Steinbeck's description of the social injustice
shocked the nation, and in time laws were passed to help such people. But the literary value
of the book is based upon the description of the daily heroism of ordinary people. Slowly they
learn to work together as a group and help each other. Now their family is anybody, not just
relatives. The last scene of the book is shocking: a heroine, whose baby dies, feeds her
breast milk to a dying old man
Steinbeck's themes are expressed through his portrayal of the inarticulate,
dispossessed laborers who populate his American landscape.
In 1943 Steinbeck traveled to North Africa and Italy as a war correspondent. Some of
his later works include 'Cannery Row' (1945), 'The Pearl' (1947), 'East of Eden' (1952), 'The
Winter of Our Discontent' (1961), and 'Travels with Charley' (1962). He also wrote several
motion-picture scripts, including adaptations of two of his shorter works, 'The Pearl' and 'The
Red Pony'.
Hemingway and Faulkner
The two greatest American novelists of the 20th century are Ernest Hemingway (1899-
1961) and William Faulkner. Both are representative of the modern world, yet in several
important ways they are quite different. Hemingway's novels are about man alone, uprooted
and facing the Great Enemy (which takes several forms) as bravely as he can. Faulkner, on
the other hand, presents society, a variety of persons of differing colors and classes, in his
native Mississippi. His work is a saga of the South, and the same characters reappear in his
successive novels.
Both writers were concerned with moral values. For Hemingway courage was the
paramount virtue. Man cannot win in the struggles in which he engages, but the important
thing is how he behaves. If he meets his defeat without flinching, then he achieves "grace
under pressure," which is a triumph of sorts, that gives meaning and dignity to his struggle.
Faulkner's moral values were social rather than personal. The South was cursed with
slavery, which bred countless problems before, but especially since, the Civil War. The good
people, white and black, do what they can to solve the problems; but they are often helpless
before the conniving, unscrupulous people who dominate their lives.
Faulkner's prose is ornate and complex. His sentences are long and complicated, with
many nouns and adjectives. Hemingway's style is quite the opposite. His sentences are short
and precise, and adjectives are used sparingly. The effect is one of great power and
compression. Both writers received the Nobel Prize for literature. Outstanding works by
Hemingway include 'The Sun Also Rises' (1926), 'A Farewell to Arms' (1929), 'For Whom
the Bell Tolls' (1940), and the minor masterpiece 'The Old Man and the Sea' (1952). Among
Faulkner's best-known books are 'The Sound and the Fury' (1929), 'As I Lay Dying' (1930),
'Light in August' (1932), 'Absalom, Absalom!' (1936), and 'The Town' (1957). Faulkner
won Pulitizer prizes for his novels 'The Fable' (1954) and 'The Reivers' (1962).
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was one of the most famous and influential American
writers of the 20th century. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954 and won a
Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Old Man and the Sea (1952).
In his works, Hemingway created a male character, sometimes
called the Hemingway hero, who faces violence and
destruction with courage. The trait of "grace under pressure" –
that is, what appears to be unemotional behavior even in
dangerous situations – is part of what became known as the
Hemingway code. To present the truth of life, Hemingway also
developed a plain, forceful prose style characterized by simple
sentences and few adjectives or adverbs and widely imitated.
He wrote crisp, accurate dialogue and exact descriptions of
places and things. Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in
Illinois. After graduating from high school, he worked briefly as
a reporter for the Kansas City Star.
During World War I, Hemingway served as a Red Cross volunteer in Italy, driving an
ambulance and working at a canteen. After working for the Red Cross for six weeks, he was
seriously wounded. Hemingway's wartime experiences help suggest why his writing
emphasizes physical and psychological violence and the need for courage.
In 1921, Hemingway went to Paris, where he met a number of key American authors
and became the principal spokesman for a group of disillusioned younger writers sometimes
called the "lost generation."
Hemingway's first published work, Three Stories and Ten Poems, appeared in 1923.
It was followed by In Our Time (1924), a collection of short stories partly based on his
boyhood experiences in northern Michigan.
Hemingway's most famous novels are two of his early works, The Sun Also Rises
(1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929). The Sun Also Rises portrays a group of Americans
who, like the members of the "lost generation," were disillusioned by the war. A Farewell to
Arms, set in Italy in World War I, is a tragic love story.
In 1927, Hemingway returned to the United States. Two collections of his short stories
were published during the 1930s. They contain some of his best writing, including "A Clean,
Well-Lighted Place," "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," and "The Snows of
Kilimanjaro." He also wrote some nonfiction: Death in the Afternoon (1932) deals with
bullfighting, which fascinated him and in Green Hills of Africa (1935), Hemingway described
his experiences on an African safari.
In 1936, Hemingway went to Spain and covered the Spanish Civil War as a war
correspondent. He used the war as the setting for his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
about an idealistic American fighting the fascist forces in Spain, one of Hemingway's finest
books.
By the 1940s, Hemingway had become an international celebrity. His first published
work after 1940 was Across the River and Into the Trees (1950). This novel reflects a
growing bitterness toward life and it is often (undeservedly) regarded as inferior because of its
sentimentality. In The Old Man and the Sea (1952), he revived his theme of a strong man
courageously accepting fate. The hero, an old fisherman, catches a giant marlin after a long
and brutal struggle – only to have the fish eaten by sharks, yet he returns from the sea a hero.
Hemingway suffered physical and mental illnesses during the 1950s. He committed
suicide in 1961. The desire to read new works by Hemingway prompted his posthumous
publications: A Moveable Feast (1964) an autobiographical book based on notebooks he
kept in Paris in the 1920s, and two novels, Islands in the Stream (1970) and the unfinished
The Garden of Eden (1986).
Together with Hemingway, William Faulkner (1897-
1962) ranks among the leading authors in American literature.
Faulkner was born in Mississippi and the American South
became the constant topic in his work. Faulkner gained fame
for his novels about the fictional "Yoknapatawpha County" and
its county seat of Jefferson. Faulkner patterned the county
after the area around his hometown, Oxford, Mississippi, and
explored the county's geography, history, economy, and social
and moral life.
Faulkner's work is characterized by a remarkable range
of technique, theme, and tone. In The Sound and the Fury
(1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), he used stream-of-
consciousness,
in which the story is told through the seemingly chaotic thoughts of a character. In Requiem
for a Nun (1951), Faulkner alternated sections of prose fiction with sections of a play. In A
Fable (1954), he created a World War I soldier whose experiences parallel the Passion of
Jesus Christ. Faulkner was skillful in creating complicated situations that involve a variety of
characters, each with a different reaction to the situation. He used this technique to dramatize
the complexity of life and the difficulty of arriving at truth.
The traditions and history of the South were a favorite Faulkner theme. Sartoris (1929)
and The Unvanquished (1938) tell the story of several generations of the Sartoris family.
The Reivers (1962) is a humorous story of a young boy's adventures during a trip from
Mississippi to Memphis. Faulkner examined the relationship between Afro-Americans and
white Americans in several works, including Light in August (1932); Absalom, Absalom!
(1936); and Go Down, Moses (1942). Here, he was especially concerned with people of
mixed racial background and their problems in establishing an identity.
Most of Faulkner's novels have a serious, even tragic, tone. But in nearly all of them,
tragedy is profoundly mixed with comedy. Faulkner's comic sense was the legacy of Mark
Twain and other earlier writers, which were a direct influence on him. The Hamlet (1940),
The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959) make up the Snopes Trilogy. These novels
form a tragicomic chronicle of the Snopes family and their impact on Yoknapatawpha County.
Faulkner's short stories have the same range of technique, theme, and tone as his novels.
His stories appear in The Collected Stories of William Faulkner (1950) and The
Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (published in 1979, after his death).
Many early critics of Faulkner denounced his books for their emphasis on violence and
abnormality. Sanctuary (1931), a story involving rape and murder, was most severely
criticized. Later, many critics recognized that Faulkner had been criticizing the faults in society
by showing them in contrast to what he called the "eternal verities." These verities are
universal values such as love, honor, pity, pride, compassion, and sacrifice. Faulkner said it is
the writer's duty to remind readers of these values.

Poetry in the Middle West

In the years following the Civil War, poetry, except for the work of Whitman and Emily
Dickinson and two or three minor poets, was at low ebb. The age was one of prose. Early in
this century, however, poetry once again came into its own.
In 1912, Harriet Monroe
(1860-1936) founded the
little magazine Poetry: a
Magazine of Verse, in
Chicago. She sought to
encourage struggling poets
everywhere and to train
readers in the art of
reading verse. The first
issue of Poetry quoted
Whitman for its motto: "To
have great poets there
must be great audiences
too." The founding of
Poetry was a timely act,
for, as Harriet Monroe soon
found out, there were a
number of unknown poets who needed just such an outlet for their work. Poetry published the
first or early work of nearly every distinguished modern American poet.
Poetry magazine discovered excellent new
writers in its own backyard, the Middle West,
never until then known for its poets. One such
discovery was Edgar Lee Masters (1869-
1950), known primarily for 'Spoon River
Anthology' (1915). It is a series of poems in
free verse (that is, unrhymed and not in strict
meters). Each poem is a report on his own life
by a character now buried in the village
graveyard. As each person reveals himself he
helps build up the picture of an entire Illinois
village.
More than 200 people are there: "The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer,
the fighter." Not all the poems are good, but some are excellent, and the total effect of the
book is strong.
Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) was another Poetry discovery.
'The Congo and Other Poems' (1914) secured him fame,
especially the title poem, with its jazz rhythms and its strong
refrain:

A Study of the Negro race

Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room

Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable,
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,
Pounded on the table,
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
Hard as they were able,
Boom, boom, Boom
With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomaly, Boom.

Then I had religion, then I had a vision.

I couldn’t turn from their revel in derision.
Then I saw the Congo, creeping through the black,
Cutting through the Jungle with a golden track.
Almost as popular are 'General William Booth Enters into Heaven' (1913) and the
more stately poem 'Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight' (1914).
The third striking discovery by Poetry was Carl
Sandburg (1878-1967). Like Masters and Lindsay, Sandburg
made poetry out of the materials of the Midwest. He first won
a prize with 'Chicago' (1914), still his best-known poem,
which begins:
Hog-butcher for the World,
Tool-maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the
Nation's Freight-handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders.
Fog
The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbour and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on
The importance of Whitman's influence on modern American poetry is unmistakably
shown in Sandburg's lines. Sandburg also used the sprawling unmetered and unrhymed line,
and he too was the spokesman for all the American people. Like the martyred Lincoln, whom
he portrayed in a great biography, Sandburg affirmed a faith in the democratic process and in
the people for whom it operates. "The people will live on," the poet asserted confidently in
'The People, Yes' (1936), his book of democratic chants. (check out the Rootabaga Stories
by Sandburg).

Poets of Modern New England

About the time that Poetry was first published in the Middle West, two Eastern poets
attracted favorable attention.
The second New England poet to win
both popularity and fame was Robert
Frost (1874-1963). His poems, such as
'Mending Wall' (1914) and 'Birches'
(1916), deal lovingly with the country
Frost knew as a New Hampshire
farmer. As Emily Dickinson described
her own poetry, he wrote "New
Englandly," particularly in his early
poems. His writing deals with simple,
enduring experiences, with a delightful
humor and tenderness.
Simple his poems are, but at the same time they are deep and provocative. Some
poets appeal to masses of readers; others appeal chiefly to persons of sophisticated taste.
Frost is admired by both groups.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Afternoon

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village, though,
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

 To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and dawny flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

New Techniques
The period saw another birth of American poetry, which, as well as prose, began
experimenting. Poets tried to incorporate and reflect the new philosophical and psychological
interpretations of reality, the new concepts of time and matter.
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) had her
own war with civilization. Her enemy was
the trite civilization of the 19th century, so
she moved to Paris and became the leader
of American writers of the 'lost generation’
there. One of the main objectives of Stein
was to show the conscious mind in writing.
While attempting this she, in a way,
changed the English language, giving
independent existance to each word,
making it exist anew in the now.
one and one and one … one
hundred
Coming one after another the words in her poems create something she calls
'continuous present':
rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.To understand this line think of a strip of movie film,
that has a series of frames. Each frames shows an object in a separate moment. Stein does
the same. We are looking at it moment-by-moment.
Gertrude Stein's experiments with the sounds and speech patterns of the American
language, developed earlier in Paris, influenced Hemingway and many others.
Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was in a way a traditionalist, rejecting the ideas of Stein's
'past-less' writing. He valued tradition, which is necessary to create new poetry. If you do not
understand the past, you don't know what's new.
 Another principle of his philosophy was impersonalism. Pound
believed that it was important to look carefully at the poetry, not at
the poet.
Ezra Pound's long poem Mauberly (1920) describes the
spiritual emptiness of the world after the 1 World War. Pound
describes the anger of the young soldier, who:
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
came home,. home to a lie,
home to many deceits…
The money-hungry post-war society causes the symbolic death of Maulberley.
The influence of new techniques has been very great. Other modern poets have
followed. Pound's influence is especially strong in the work of doctor-poet Willaim Carlos
Williams (1883-1963).
His images are not symbols of some larger idea. His words mean
exactly what they say. Eliot's concept of the impersonality of the poet is
also present. Williams tries to become as invisible as possible:
so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

e.e. cummings was the most joyoful person of the 'lost generation'. He satirized modern
pettiness and emptiness, as Eliot had done, but Cummings also wrote lyrics of tenderness
and beauty and his main topics are love and courage. He hated business, politics, the Church
and dislijked the coldness of science. He uses warm human images. His technique is
arresting, because his verse usually omits punctuation marks and capitalization (he signed his
name "e e cummings"). His poems show clear influence of Stein and cubist painters. He
makes every part of a poem express his own individuality.
 why
don't
be
sil
ly
, o no in-
deed;
money
can't do (never
did &

never will)any
damn
thing
: far
from it; you

're wrong; my friend.

American literature of the 20th century stuns with its variety and depth. Realism in its
many forms, modernism with bold experimentation shapes the prose and poetry of the first
half of the century. American literature grew mature enough to discuss every imaginable
topic, from social and industrial issues to hegonism and moral degradation, from courage
under pressure to the curse of illiteracy and individualism. The American authors found their
topics in local daily life and their characters in people of their street, making both mythically
and existentially significant. The first half of the 20th century saw the publication of the all-time
American classics, both in prose and in poetry.