American Literature: History of American Literature - Chapter 6 Modernism and Experimentation: 1914

Many historians have characterized the period between the two world wars as the United

States’ traumatic “coming of age,” despite the fact that U.S. direct involvement was

relatively brief (1917–1918) and its casualties many fewer than those of its European allies and

foes. John Dos Passos expressed America’s postwar disillusionment in the novel Three Soldiers

(1921) when he noted that civilization was a “vast edifice of sham, and the war, instead of its

crumbling, was its fullest and most ultimate expression.” Shocked and permanently changed,

Americans returned to their homeland but could never regain their innocence.

Nor could soldiers from rural America easily return to their roots. After experiencing the world,

many now yearned for a modern, urban life. New farm machines such as planters, harvesters, and

binders had drastically reduced the demand for farm jobs; yet despite their increased productivity,

farmers were poor. Crop prices, like urban workers’ wages, depended on unrestrained market forces

heavily influenced by business interests. Government subsidies for farmers and effective workers’

unions had not yet become established. “The chief business of the American people is business,”

President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed in 1925, and most agreed.

In the postwar “Big Boom,” business flourished, and the successful prospered beyond their

wildest dreams. For the first time, many Americans enrolled in higher education; in the 1920s,

college enrollment doubled. The middle class prospered. Americans began to enjoy the world’s

highest national average income in this era, and many people purchased the ultimate status

symbol—an automobile. The typical urban American home glowed with electric lights and boasted

a radio that connected the house with the outside world, and perhaps also a telephone, a camera,

a typewriter, or a sewing machine. Like the businessman protagonist of Sinclair Lewis’s novel,

Babbitt (1922), the average American approved of these machines because they were modern and

because most were American inventions and U.S.–made.

Americans of the “Roaring Twenties” fell in love with other modern entertainments. Most people

went to the movies once a week. Although Prohibition—a nationwide ban on the production,

transport, and sale of alcohol instituted through the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—

began in 1919, underground “speakeasies” and nightclubs proliferated, featuring jazz music,

cocktails, and daring modes of dress and dance. Dancing, movie-going, automobile touring, and

radio were national crazes. American women, in particular, felt liberated. Many had left farms and

villages for homefront duty in American cities during World War I and had become resolutely

modern. They cut their hair short (“bobbed”), wore short “flapper” dresses, and gloried in the right

to vote, assured by the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1920. They boldly spoke

their mind and took public roles in society.

Western youths were rebelling, angry, and disillusioned with the savage war, the older

generation they held responsible, and difficult postwar economic conditions that, ironically, allowed

Americans with dollars—like writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and

Ezra Pound—to live abroad handsomely on very little money. Intellectual currents, particularly

Freudian psychology and to a lesser extent Marxism (like the earlier Darwinian theory of

evolution), implied a “godless” world view and contributed to the breakdown of traditional values.

Americans abroad absorbed these views and brought them back to the United States where they

took root, firing the imagination of young writers and artists. William Faulkner, for example, a

20th-century American novelist, employed Freudian elements in all his works, as did virtually all

serious American fiction writers after World War I.

Despite outward gaiety, modernity, and unparalleled material prosperity, young Americans of

the 1920s were “the lost generation”—so named by literary portraitist Gertrude Stein. Without a

stable, traditional structure of values, the individual lost a sense of identity. The secure, supportive

family life; the familiar, settled community; the natural and eternal rhythms of nature that guide

the planting and harvesting on a farm; the sustaining sense of patriotism; moral values inculcated

by religious beliefs and observations—all seemed to have been undermined by World War I and its

aftermath.

Numerous novels, notably Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) and Fitzgerald’s This Side

of Paradise (1920), evoke the extravagance and disillusionment of the lost generation. In T.S. Eliot’s

influential long poem “The Waste Land” (1922), Western civilization is symbolized by a bleak desert

in desperate need of rain (spiritual renewal).

The world depression of the 1930s affected most of the population of the United States. Workers

lost their jobs and factories shut down; businesses and banks failed; farmers, unable to harvest,

transport, or sell their crops, could not pay their debts and lost their farms. Midwestern droughts

turned the “breadbasket” of America into a dust bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for California

in search of jobs, as vividly described in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939). At the peak

of the depression, one-third of all Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens, shanty towns, and

armies of hoboes—unemployed men illegally riding freight trains—became part of national life.

Many saw the depression as a punishment for sins of excessive materialism and loose living. The

dust storms that blackened the midwestern sky, they believed, constituted an Old Testament

judgment: the “whirlwind by day and the darkness at noon.”

The depression turned the world upside-down. The United States had preached a gospel of

business in the 1920s; now, many Americans supported a more active role for government in the

New Deal programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Federal money created jobs in public

works, conservation, and rural electrification. Artists and intellectuals were paid to create murals

and state handbooks. These remedies helped, but only the industrial buildup of World War II

renewed prosperity.

After Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, unused shipyards

and factories came to bustling life mass-producing ships, airplanes, jeeps, and supplies. War

production and experimentation led to new technologies, including the nuclear bomb. Witnessing

the first experimental nuclear blast, Robert Oppenheimer, leader of an international team of

nuclear scientists, prophetically quoted a Hindu poem: “I am become Death, the shatterer of

worlds.”

1. Albeit brief, the active involvement of the United States in World War I brought significant

economic change to American farmers. Describe the way it affected this aspect of the

American economy.

2. Describe the economy and resulting impact on lifestyle in the postwar “Big Boom” era.

3. The “Roaring Twenties” era was marked by

a. social unrest and despair.

b. active involvement in foreign wars.

c. carefree, frivolous living.

d. the birth of the automobile.

4. One of the most popular intellectual influences on post–World War I fiction was the work of

a. John Locke.

b. Sigmund Freud.

c. Carl Jung.

d. Ezra Pound.

5. Who were the “lost generation”? Why were they so named?

6. In T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” rain is symbolic of

a. growth.

b. love.

c. disenchantment.

d. spiritual renewal.

7. Describe the conditions in America during the period known as the Great Depression.

8. What civilization-altering force grew out of World War II?

a. nuclear weapons

b. supersonic jets

c. the Internet

d. Communism

MODERNISM

The large cultural wave of Modernism, which gradually emerged in Europe and the United

States in the early years of the 20th century, expressed a sense of modern life through art

as a sharp break from the past, as well as from Western civilization’s classical traditions. Modern

life seemed radically different from traditional life—more scientific, faster, more technological, and

more mechanized. Modernism embraced these changes.

In literature, Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) developed an analogue to modern art. A resident of

Paris and an art collector (she and her brother Leo purchased works of the artists Paul Cézanne,

Paul Gauguin, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Pablo Picasso, and many others), Stein once explained that

she and Picasso were doing the same thing, he in art and she in writing. Using simple, concrete

words as counters, she developed an abstract, experimental prose poetry. The childlike quality of

Stein’s simple vocabulary recalls the bright, primary colors of modern art, while her repetitions

echo the repeated shapes of abstract visual compositions. By dislocating grammar and punctuation,

she achieved new “abstract” meanings as in her influential collection Tender Buttons (1914), which

views objects from different angles, as in a cubist painting:

A Table means does it not my

dear it means a whole steadiness.

Is it likely that a change. A table

means more than a glass even a

looking glass is tall.

Meaning, in Stein’s work, was often subordinated to technique, just as subject was less

important than shape in abstract visual art. Subject and technique became inseparable in both the

visual and literary art of the period. The idea of form as the equivalent of content, a cornerstone of

post–World War II art and literature, crystallized in this period.

Technological innovation in the world of factories and machines inspired new attentiveness to

technique in the arts. To take one example: Light, particularly electric light, fascinated modern

artists and writers. Posters and advertisements of the period are full of images of floodlit

skyscrapers and light rays shooting out from automobile headlights, moviehouses, and watchtowers

to illumine a forbidding outer darkness suggesting ignorance and old-fashioned traditions.

Photography began to assume the status of a fine art allied with the latest scientific

developments. The photographer Alfred Stieglitz opened a salon in New York City, and by 1908, he

was showing the latest European works, including pieces by Picasso and other European friends of

Gertrude Stein. Stieglitz’s salon influenced numerous writers and artists, including William Carlos

Williams, who was one of the most influential American poets of the 20th century. Williams

cultivated a photographic clarity of image; his aesthetic dictum was “no ideas but in things.”

Vision and viewpoint became an essential aspect of the modernist novel as well. No longer was

it sufficient to write a straightforward third-person narrative or (worse yet) use a pointlessly

intrusive narrator. The way the story was told became as important as the story itself.

Henry James, William Faulkner, and many other American writers experimented with fictional

points of view (some are still doing so). James often restricted the information in the novel to what

a single character would have known. Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury (1929) breaks up

the narrative into four sections, each giving the viewpoint of a different character (including a

mentally handicapped boy).

To analyze such modernist novels and poetry, a school of “new criticism” arose in the United

States, with a new critical vocabulary. New critics hunted the “epiphany” (moment in which a

character suddenly sees the transcendent truth of a situation, a term derived from a holy saint’s

appearance to mortals); they “examined” and “clarified” a work, hoping to “shed light” upon it

through their “insights.”

1. Compare Gertrude Stein’s modernistic writing style to Pablo Picasso’s modern art. How can

you draw a parallel between the two?

2. How was technological innovation during this time period related to the changes that were

occurring in art and literature?

3. Modernist writing led to a school of new criticism whose focus was to search for a moment of

a. epiphany.

b. tragedy.

c. satisfaction.

d. resolution.

POETRY 1914–1945: EXPERIMENTS IN FORM

Ezra Pound (1885–1972)

Ezra Pound was one of the most influential American poets of the twentieth century. From 1908

to 1920, he resided in London, where he associated with many writers, including William Butler

Yeats, for whom he worked as a secretary, and T.S. Eliot,

whose “The Waste Land” he drastically edited and improved.

He was a link between the United States and Britain, acting

as contributing editor to Harriet Monroe’s important Chicago

magazine, Poetry, and spearheading the new school of poetry

known as “Imagism,” which advocated a clear, highly visual

presentation. After Imagism, he championed various poetic

approaches. He eventually moved to Italy, where he became

caught up in Italian Fascism.

Pound furthered Imagism in letters, essays, and an

anthology. In a letter to Monroe in 1915, he argued for a

modern-sounding, visual poetry that avoids “clichés and set

phrases.” In “A Few Don’ts of an Imagiste” (1913), he defined

“image” as something that “presents an intellectual and

emotional complex in an instant of time.” Pound’s 1914

anthology of 10 poets, Des Imagistes, offered examples of

Imagist poetry by outstanding poets, including William

Carlos Williams, H.D.

(Hilda Doolittle), and Amy

Lowell.

Pound’s interests and reading were universal. His adaptations

and brilliant, if sometimes flawed, translations introduced new

literary possibilities from many cultures to modern writers. His

life-work was The Cantos, which he wrote and published until his

death. They contain brilliant passages, but their allusions to

works of literature and art from many eras and cultures make

them difficult. Pound’s poetry is best known for its clear, visual

images, fresh rhythms, and muscular, intelligent, unusual lines,

such as, in Canto LXXXI, “The ant’s a centaur in his dragon

world,” or in poems inspired by Japanese haiku, such as “In a

Station of the Metro” (1916):

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965)

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a well-to-do family with roots in the

northeastern United States. He received the best education of any major American writer of his

generation at Harvard College, the Sorbonne, and Merton College of Oxford University. He studied

Sanskrit and Asian philosophy, which influenced his poetry. Like his friend, Ezra Pound, he went

to England early and became a towering figure in the literary world there. One of the most

respected poets of his day, his modernist, seemingly illogical or abstract iconoclastic poetry had

Ezra Pound

Amy Lowell

revolutionary impact. He also wrote influential essays and dramas, and championed the

importance of literary and social traditions for the modern poet.

As a critic, Eliot is best remembered for his formulation of the “objective correlative,” which he

described, in The Sacred Wood, as a means of expressing emotion through “a set of objects, a

situation, a chain of events” that would be the “formula” of that particular emotion. Poems such as

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) embody this approach, when the ineffectual, elderly

Prufrock thinks to himself that he has “measured out his life in coffee spoons,” using coffee spoons

to reflect a humdrum existence and a wasted lifetime.

The famous beginning of Eliot’s “Prufrock” invites the reader into tawdry alleys that, like

modern life, offer no answers to the questions of life:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

Similar imagery pervades “The Waste Land” (1922), which echoes Dante’s Inferno to evoke

London’s thronged streets around the time of World War I:

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many

I had not thought death had undone so many . . . (I, 60–63)

The poem’s vision is ultimately apocalyptic and worldwide:

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

Falling towers

Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal (V, 373–377)

Eliot’s other major poems include “Gerontion” (1920), which uses an elderly man to symbolize

the decrepitude of Western society; “The Hollow Men” (1925), a moving dirge for the death of the

spirit of contemporary humanity; “Ash-Wednesday” (1930), in which he turns explicitly toward the

Church of England for meaning in human life; and “Four Quartets” (1943), a complex, highly

subjective, experimental meditation on transcendent subjects such as time, the nature of self, and

spiritual awareness. His poetry, especially his daring, innovative early work, has influenced

generations.

Robert Frost (1874–1963)

Robert Lee Frost was born in California but raised on a farm in the northeastern United States

until the age of ten. Like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, he went to England, attracted by new

movements in poetry there. A charismatic public reader, he was renowned for his tours. He read an

original work at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961 that helped to spark a

national interest in poetry. His popularity is easy to explain; he wrote of traditional farm life,

appealing to a nostalgia for the old ways. His subjects are universal—apple picking, stone walls,

fences, country roads. Frost’s approach was lucid and accessible; he rarely employed pedantic

allusions or ellipses. His frequent use of rhyme also appealed to a general audience.

Frost’s work is often deceptively simple. Many poems suggest a deeper meaning. For example,

a quiet snowy evening by an almost hypnotic rhyme scheme may suggest the not entirely

unwelcome approach of death. From “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (1923):

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 downy 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.

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

Born in Pennsylvania, Wallace Stevens was educated at Harvard College and New York

University Law School. He practiced law in New York City from 1904 to 1916, a time of great

artistic and poetic activity there. On moving to Hartford, Connecticut, to become an insurance

executive in 1916, he continued writing poetry. His life is remarkable for its compartmentalization.

His associates in the insurance company did not know that he was a major poet. In private he

continued to develop extremely complex ideas of aesthetic order throughout his life in aptly named

books such as Harmonium (enlarged edition 1931), Ideas of Order (1935), and Parts of a World

(1942). Some of his best known poems are “Sunday Morning,” “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” “The

Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” and “The Idea of Order at Key

West.”

Stevens’s poetry dwells upon themes of the imagination, the necessity for aesthetic form, and

the belief that the order of art corresponds with an order in nature. His vocabulary is rich and

various. He paints lush tropical scenes but also manages dry, humorous, and ironic vignettes.

Robert Frost

Some of Stevens’s poems draw upon popular culture, while others poke fun at sophisticated

society or soar into an intellectual heaven. He is known for his exuberant word play: “Soon, with a

noise like tambourines / Came her attendant Byzantines.”

Stevens’s work is full of surprising insights. Sometimes he plays tricks on the reader, as in

“Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” (1931):

The houses are haunted

By white night-gowns. . . .

Only, here and there, an old sailor,

Drunk and asleep in his boots,

Catches tigers

In red weather.

This poem seems to complain about unimaginative lives (plain white nightgowns), but actually

conjures up vivid images in the reader’s mind. At the end, a drunken sailor, oblivious to the

proprieties, does “catch tigers”—at least in his dream. The poem shows that the human

imagination—of reader or sailor—will always find a creative outlet.

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)

William Carlos Williams was a practicing pediatrician throughout his life; he delivered over

2,000 babies and wrote poems on his prescription pads. Williams was a classmate of poets Ezra

Pound and Hilda Doolittle, and his early poetry reveals the influence of Imagism. He later went on

to champion the use of colloquial speech; his ear for the natural rhythms of American English

helped free American poetry from the iambic meter that had dominated English verse since the

Renaissance. His sympathy for ordinary working people, children, and everyday events in modern

urban settings make his poetry attractive and accessible. “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1923), like a

Dutch still life, finds interest and beauty in everyday objects.

Williams cultivated a relaxed, natural poetry. In his hands, the poem was not to become a

perfect object of art as in Stevens or the carefully recreated Wordsworthian incident as in Frost.

Instead, the poem was to capture an instant of time like an unposed snapshot—a concept he derived

from photographers and artists he met at galleries like Stieglitz’s in New York City. Like

photographs, his poems often hint at hidden possibilities or attractions, as in “The Young

Housewife” (1917).

He termed his work “objectivist” to suggest the importance of concrete, visual objects. His

work often captured the spontaneous, emotive pattern of experience and influenced the “Beat”

writing of the early 1950s.

Like Eliot and Pound, Williams tried his hand at the epic form, but while their epics employ

literary allusions directed to a small number of highly educated readers, Williams instead writes

for a more general audience. Though he studied abroad, he elected to live in the United States. His

epic, Paterson (five vols., 1946–1958), celebrates his hometown of Paterson, New Jersey, as seen by

an autobiographical “Dr. Paterson.” In it, Williams juxtaposed lyric passages, prose, letters,

autobiography, newspaper accounts, and historical facts. The layout’s ample white space suggests

the open road theme of American literature and gives a sense of new vistas even open to the poor

people who picnic in the public park on Sundays. Like Whitman’s persona in Leaves of Grass, Dr.

Paterson moves freely among the working people.

—late spring,

a Sunday afternoon!

—and goes by the footpath to the cliff (counting:

the proof)

himself among others

—treads there the same stones

on which their feet slip as they climb,

paced by their dogs!

laughing, calling to each other—

Wait for me!

(II, i, 14–23)

1. In what way is the following line from one of Pound’s poems an example of the use of

imagery?

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.

2. Describe the characteristics of T.S. Eliot’s work. By which school of thought or religion was

he influenced? For what method is he best remembered?

3. Read the following lines from Eliot’s “Prufrock” and choose, from below, the word that is

closest in meaning to the word in bold-faced type.

Streets that follow like tedious argument / Of insidious intent.

a. blatant

b. accidental

c. stealthy

d. purposeful

4. Explain the nature of Robert Frost’s poetry. Why was it so appealing?

5. Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” suggested the arrival of

a. spring.

b. hope.

c. love.

d. death.

6. The predominant theme in the work of Wallace Stevens can best be summed up with the

word

a. chaos.

b. order.

c. perfectionism.

d. revelation.

7. “The Red Wheelbarrow,” a poem reflecting on the influence of Imagism, was written by

a. Robert Frost.

b. T.S. Eliot.

c. William Carlos Williams.

d. Ezra Pound.

8. Identify the author and explain the social message inherent in the poem called “Dr.

Paterson.”

9. Compare and contrast the philosophy, education, writing style, and literary themes, if known,

of any two of these four poets: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens.

BETWEEN THE WARS

Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)

Numerous American poets of stature and genuine vision arose in the years between the world

wars, among them poets from the west coast, women, and African Americans. Like the novelist

John Steinbeck, Robinson Jeffers lived in California and wrote of the Spanish rancheros and Native

Americans and their mixed traditions, and of the haunting beauty of the land. Trained in the

classics and well-read in Freud, he recreated themes of Greek tragedy and set them in the rugged

coastal seascape. Jeffers is best known for his tragic narratives such as Tamar (1924), Roan

Stallion (1925), The Tower Beyond Tragedy (1924)—a recreation of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon—and

Medea (1946), a recreation of the tragedy by Euripides.

Edward Estlin Cummings (1894–1962)

Edward Estlin Cummings, commonly known as e.e. cummings, wrote attractive, innovative

verse distinguished for its humor, grace, celebration of love and eroticism, and experimentation

with punctuation and visual format on the page. A painter, he was the first American poet to

recognize that poetry had become primarily a visual, not an oral, art; his poems used unusual

spacing and indentation, along with dropping all use of capital letters.

Like William Carlos Williams, Cummings also used colloquial language, sharp imagery, and

words from popular culture. Like Williams, he took creative liberties with layout. His poem “in

Just” (1920) invites the reader to fill in the missing ideas:

in Just—

Spring when the world is mud—

luscious the little

lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it’s

spring . . .

Hart Crane (1899–1932)

Hart Crane was a tormented young poet who committed suicide at the age of thirty-three by

leaping into the sea. He left striking poems, including an epic, “The Bridge” (1930), which had been

inspired by the Brooklyn Bridge, in which he ambitiously attempted to review the American

cultural experience and recast it in affirmative terms. His luscious, overheated style works best in

short poems such as “Voyages” (1923, 1926) and “At Melville’s Tomb” (1926), whose ending is a

suitable epitaph for Crane:

Monody shall not wake the mariner.

This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

Marianne Moore (1887–1972)

Marianne Moore once wrote that poems were “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” Her

poems are conversational, yet elaborate and subtle in their syllabic versification, drawing upon

extremely precise description and historical and scientific fact. A “poet’s poet,” she influenced such

later poets as her young friend Elizabeth Bishop.

Langston Hughes (1902–1967)

One of many talented poets of the Harlem Renaissance

of the 1920s—in the company of James Weldon Johnson,

Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and others—was Langston

Hughes. He embraced African-American jazz rhythms and

was one of the first black writers to attempt to make a

profitable career out of his writing. Hughes incorporated

blues, spirituals, colloquial speech, and folkways in his

poetry.

An influential cultural organizer, Hughes published

numerous black anthologies and began black theater groups

in Los Angeles and Chicago, as well as in New York City. He

also wrote effective journalism, creating the character Jesse

B. Semple (“simple”) to express social commentary. One of

his most beloved poems, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”

(1921, 1925), embraces his African—and universal—

heritage in a grand epic catalogue. The poem suggests that,

like the great rivers of the world, African culture will endure

and deepen:

I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the

flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln

went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy

bosom turn all golden in the sunset

I’ve known rivers

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

1. To which American novelist has Robinson Jeffers been compared?

a. Jack Kerouac

b. John Steinbeck

c. J.D. Salinger

d. Wilson Rawlings

Langston Hughes

2. Explain the most distinctive characteristic of the poetry of e.e. cummings.

3. Who wrote “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”? What was its message?

PROSE WRITING, 1914–1945: AMERICAN REALISM

Although American prose between the wars experimented with viewpoint and form,

Americans wrote more realistically, on the whole, than did Europeans. Novelist Ernest

Hemingway wrote of war, hunting, and other masculine pursuits in a stripped, plain style; William

Faulkner set his powerful southern novels spanning generations and cultures firmly in

Mississippi’s heat and dust; and Sinclair Lewis delineated bourgeois lives with ironic clarity.

The importance of facing reality became a dominant theme in the 1920s and 1930s. Writers such

as F. Scott Fitzgerald and the playwright Eugene O’Neill repeatedly portrayed the tragedy awaiting

those who live in flimsy dreams.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald’s life resembles a fairy tale. During World War I, Fitzgerald

enlisted in the U.S. Army and fell in love with a rich and beautiful girl, Zelda Sayre, who lived near

Montgomery, Alabama, where he was stationed. Zelda broke off their engagement because he was

relatively poor. After he was discharged at war’s end, Fitzgerald went to seek his literary fortune

in New York City in order to marry her.

His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), became a

bestseller, and at the age of twenty-four, the two married.

Neither of them was able to withstand the stresses of

success and fame, and they squandered their money. They

moved to France to economize in 1924 and returned seven

years later. Zelda became mentally unstable and had to be

institutionalized; Fitzgerald himself became an alcoholic

and, as a movie screenwriter, died young.

Fitzgerald’s secure place in American literature rests

primarily on his novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), a

brilliantly written, economically structured story about the

American dream of the self-made man. The protagonist, the

mysterious Jay Gatsby, discovers the devastating cost of

success in terms of personal fulfillment and love. Other fine

works include Tender Is the Night (1934), about a young

psychiatrist whose life is doomed by his marriage to an

unstable woman, and some stories in the collections

Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age

(1922), and All the Sad Young Men (1926). More than any

other writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the glittering, desperate life of the 1920s; This Side of

Paradise was heralded as the voice of modern American youth. His second novel, The Beautiful and

the Damned (1922), continued his exploration of the self-destructive extravagance of his times.

Fitzgerald’s special qualities include a dazzling style perfectly suited to his theme of seductive

glamour. A famous section from The Great Gatsby masterfully summarizes a long passage of time:

“There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men

and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)

Few writers have lived as colorfully as

did Ernest Hemingway, whose career

could have come out of one his

adventurous novels. Like F. Scott

Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, and many

other fine novelists of the 20th century,

Hemingway came from the U.S. Midwest.

Born in Illinois, Hemingway spent

childhood vacations in Michigan on

hunting and fishing trips. He volunteered

for an ambulance unit in France during

World War I, but was wounded and

hospitalized for six months. After the war,

as a war correspondent based in Paris, he

met expatriate American writers

Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, F. Scott

Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein. Stein, in

particular, influenced his spare style.

After his novel The Sun Also Rises

(1926) brought him fame, he covered the

Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the

fighting in China in the 1940s. On a safari

in Africa, he was badly injured when his

small plane crashed; still, he continued to

enjoy hunting and sport fishing, activities

that inspired some of his best work. The

Old Man and the Sea (1952), a short

poetic novel about a poor, old fisherman

who heroically catches a huge fish

devoured by sharks, won him the Pulitzer

Prize in 1953; the next year, he received

the Nobel Prize. Discouraged by a

troubled family background, illness, and

the belief that he was losing his gift for

writing, Hemingway shot and killed

himself in 1961.

Hemingway is arguably the most popular American novelist of this century. His sympathies are

basically apolitical and humanistic, and in this sense, he is universal. His simple style makes his

novels easy to comprehend, and they are often set in exotic surroundings. A believer in the “cult of

experience,” Hemingway often involved his characters in dangerous situations in order to reveal their

inner natures; in his later works, the danger sometimes became an occasion for masculine assertion.

Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway became a spokesperson for his generation. But instead of painting

its fatal glamour as did Fitzgerald, who never fought in World War I, Hemingway wrote of war,

death, and the “lost generation” of cynical survivors. His characters are not dreamers but tough

bullfighters, soldiers, and athletes. If intellectual, they are deeply scarred and disillusioned.

Ernest Hemingway and Lauren Bacall,

a legendary American film and stage actress

Hemingway’s hallmark is a clean style devoid of unnecessary words. Often he uses

understatement. In A Farewell to Arms (1929), the heroine dies in childbirth, saying, “I’m not a bit

afraid. It’s just a dirty trick.” He once compared his writing to icebergs: “There is seven-eighths of

it under water for every part that shows.”

Hemingway’s fine ear for dialogue and exact description shows in his excellent short stories,

such as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” Critical

opinion, in fact, generally holds his short stories equal or superior to his novels. His best novels

include The Sun Also Rises, about the demoralized life of expatriates after World War I; A Farewell

to Arms, about the tragic love affair of an American soldier and an English nurse during the war;

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), set during the Spanish Civil War; and The Old Man and the Sea.

William Faulkner (1897–1962)

Born to an old southern family, William Harrison Faulkner was raised in Oxford, Mississippi,

where he lived most of his life. Faulkner created an entire imaginative landscape, Yoknapatawpha

County, mentioned in numerous novels, along with several families with interconnections

extending back for generations. Yoknapatawpha County, with its capital, “Jefferson,” is closely

modeled on Oxford, Mississippi, and its surroundings. Faulkner recreates the history of the land

and the various races—Indian, African American, Euro-American, and various mixtures—who have

lived on it. An innovative writer, Faulkner experimented brilliantly with narrative chronology,

different points of view and voices (including those of outcasts, children, and illiterates), and a rich

and demanding baroque style built of extremely long sentences full of complicated subordinate

parts.

The best of Faulkner’s novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930),

two modernist works experimenting with viewpoint and voice to probe southern families under the

stress of losing a family member; Light in August (1932), about complex and violent relations

between a white woman and a black man; and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), perhaps his finest, about

the rise of a self-made plantation owner and his tragic fall through racial prejudice and his failure

to love.

Most of these novels use different characters to tell parts of the story and demonstrate how

meaning resides in the manner of telling, as much as in the subject at hand. The use of various

viewpoints makes Faulkner more self-referential, or “reflexive,” than Hemingway or Fitzgerald;

each novel reflects upon itself, while it simultaneously unfolds a story of universal interest.

Faulkner’s themes are southern tradition, family, community, the land, history and the past, race,

and the passions of ambition and love. He also created three novels focusing on the rise of a

degenerate family, the Snopes clan: The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959).

1. In what ways are Fitzgerald’s works The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night

autobiographical?

2. Which of the literary terms below is demonstrated in this line from Fitzgerald’s The Great

Gatsby?

“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the

champagne and the stars.”

a. inference

b. simile

c. metaphor

d. irony

3. What was universally appealing about Ernest Hemingway’s style of writing?

4. Hemingway compared his own writing to an

a. iceberg.

b. open crevasse.

c. untamed animal.

d. unrefined diplomat.

5. Briefly explain William Faulkner’s style. What were two notable characteristics of his

writing?

NOVELS OF SOCIAL AWARENESS

Since the 1890s, an undercurrent of social protest had coursed through American

literature, welling up in the naturalism of Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser and in

the clear messages of the muckraking novelists. Later socially-engaged authors included Sinclair

Lewis, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, Richard Wright, and the dramatist Clifford Odets. They

were linked to the 1930s by their concern for the welfare of the common citizen and their focus on

groups of people—the professions, as in Sinclair Lewis’s archetypal Arrowsmith (a physician) or

Babbitt (a local businessman); families, as in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath; or urban masses, as

Dos Passos accomplishes through his eleven major characters in his U.S.A. trilogy.

Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951)

Harry Sinclair Lewis was born in Sauk Centre,

Minnesota, and graduated from Yale University.

He took time off from school to work at a socialist

community, Helicon Home Colony, financed by

muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair. Lewis’s Main

Street (1920) satirized monotonous, hypocritical

small-town life in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. His

incisive presentation of American life and his

criticism of American materialism, narrowness,

and hypocrisy brought him national and

international recognition.

In 1926, he became the first author to decline

the Pulitzer Prize offered to him for Arrowsmith

(1925), a novel tracing a doctor’s efforts to

maintain his medical ethics amid greed and

corruption. It is said that Lewis was against the

way publishers advertised a Pulitzer

Prize–winning novel as the best of the year. He

felt that no committee or person was competent

enough to select a best novel. He wrote a letter to

the Pulitzer Prize Committee, stating his

argument. In 1930, Sinclair Lewis became the first

American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Lewis’s other major novels include Babbitt

(1922). George Babbitt is an ordinary businessman

living and working in Zenith, an ordinary

American town. Babbitt is moral and enterprising,

and a believer in business as the new scientific

approach to modern life. Becoming restless, he

seeks fulfillment but is disillusioned by an affair

with a bohemian woman, returns to his wife, and accepts his lot. The novel added a new word to

the American language—“babbittry”—meaning narrow-minded, complacent, bourgeois ways.

Elmer Gantry (1927) exposes revivalist religion in the United States, while Cass Timberlane (1945)

studies the stresses that develop within the marriage of an older judge and his young wife.

Sinclair Lewis

John Dos Passos (1896–1970)

Like Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos began as a left-wing radical but moved to the right as he

aged. Dos Passos wrote realistically, in line with the doctrine of socialist realism. His best work

achieves a scientific objectivism and almost documentary effect. Dos Passos developed an

experimental collage technique for his masterwork U.S.A., consisting of The 42nd Parallel (1930),

1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936). This sprawling collection covers the social history of the

United States from 1900 to 1930 and exposes the moral corruption of materialistic American society

through the lives of its characters.

Dos Passos’s new techniques included “newsreel” sections taken from contemporary headlines,

popular songs, and advertisements, as well as “biographies” briefly setting forth the lives of

important Americans of the period, such as inventor Thomas Edison, labor organizer Eugene Debs,

film star Rudolph Valentino, financier J.P. Morgan, and sociologist Thorstein Veblen. Both the

newsreels and biographies lend Dos Passos’s novels a documentary value; a third technique, the

“camera eye,” consists of stream of consciousness prose poems that offer a subjective response to

the events described in the books.

John Steinbeck (1902–1968)

Like Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck is held in higher critical esteem outside the United States

than in it today; this is largely because he received the Nobel Prize for Literature—and the

international fame it confers—in 1963. In both cases, the Nobel Committee had selected liberal

American writers noted for their social criticism.

Steinbeck, a Californian, set much of his writing in the Salinas Valley near San Francisco. His

best known work is the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which follows the

travails of a poor Oklahoma family that loses its farm during the Depression and travels to

California to seek work. Family members suffer conditions of feudal oppression by rich landowners.

Other works set in California include Tortilla Flat (1935), Of Mice and Men (1937), Cannery Row

(1945), and East of Eden (1952).

Steinbeck combines realism with a primitivist romanticism that finds virtue in poor farmers

who live close to the land. His fiction demonstrates the vulnerability of such people, who can be

uprooted by droughts and are the first to suffer in periods of political unrest and economic

depression.

1. Identify and describe an overriding theme in the work of Sinclair Lewis.

2. How does Lewis’s reaction to winning the Pulitzer Prize correspond with his literary

perspective?

3. What was the most unique trait that characterized the work of John Dos Passos?

4. How was Steinbeck’s work socially important?

THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

During the exuberant 1920s, Harlem, the black community situated uptown in New York

City, sparkled with passion and creativity. The sounds of its black American jazz swept

the United States by storm, and jazz musicians and composers like Duke Ellington became stars

beloved across the United States and overseas. Bessie Smith and other blues singers presented

frank, sensual, wry lyrics raw with emotion. Black spirituals became widely appreciated as

uniquely beautiful religious music. Ethel Waters, the black actress, triumphed on the stage, and

black American dance and art flourished with music and drama.

Among the rich variety of talent in Harlem, many visions coexisted. Carl Van Vechten’s

sympathetic 1926 novel of Harlem gives some idea of the complex and bittersweet life of black

America in the face of economic and social inequality. The poet Countee Cullen (1903–1946), a

native of Harlem who was briefly married to W.E.B. Du Bois’s daughter, wrote accomplished

rhymed poetry, in accepted forms, which was much admired by whites. He believed that a poet

should not allow race to dictate the subject matter and style of a poem. On the other end of the

spectrum were African Americans who rejected the United States in favor of Marcus Garvey’s “Back

to Africa” movement. Somewhere in between lies the work of Jean Toomer.

Jean Toomer (1894–1967)

Like Countee Cullen, African-American fiction writer and poet Jean

Toomer envisioned an American identity that would transcend race. He was of

mixed racial descent. He spent his childhood attending both all-white and allblack

segregated schools. In his early years, Toomer resisted racial

classifications and wished to be identified only as an American.

Perhaps for this reason, he brilliantly employed poetic traditions of rhyme

and meter and did not seek out new “black” forms for his poetry. His major

work, Cane (1923), is ambitious and innovative, however. Like Williams’s

Paterson, Cane incorporates poems, prose vignettes, stories, and

autobiographical notes. In it, an African American struggles to discover his

selfhood within and beyond the black communities in rural Georgia,

Washington, D.C., and Chicago and as a black teacher in the south. In Cane,

Toomer’s Georgia rural black folk are naturally artistic:

Their voices rise . . . the pine trees are guitars,

Strumming, pine-needles fall like sheets of rain . . .

Their voices rise . . . the chorus of the cane

Is caroling a vesper to the stars . . . (I, 21–24)

Cane contrasts the fast pace of African-American life in the city of Washington:

Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts,

Bootleggers in silken shirts,

Ballooned, zooming Cadillacs,

Whizzing, whizzing down the street-car tracks. (II, 1–4)

Jean Toomer

Richard Wright (1908–1960)

Richard Wright was born into a poor Mississippi sharecropping family that his father had

deserted when the boy was five. Wright was the first African-American novelist to reach a general

audience, even though he barely had a ninth-grade education. His harsh childhood is depicted in

one of his best books, his autobiography, Black Boy (1945). He later said that his sense of

deprivation, due to racism, was so great that only reading kept him alive.

The social criticism and realism of Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis

especially inspired Wright. During the 1930s, he joined the Communist party; in the 1940s, he

moved to France, where he knew Gertrude Stein and Jean-Paul Sartre and became an anti-

Communist. His outspoken writing blazed a path for subsequent African-American novelists.

His work includes Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), a book of short stories, and the powerful and

relentless novel Native Son (1940) in which Bigger Thomas, an uneducated black youth, mistakenly

kills his white employer’s daughter, gruesomely burns the body, and murders his black girlfriend—

fearing she will betray him. Although some African Americans have criticized Wright for portraying

a black character as a murderer, Wright’s novel was a necessary and overdue expression of the

racial inequality that has been the subject of so much debate in the United States.

Zora Neale Hurston (1903–1960)

Born in the small town of Eatonville, Florida, Zora Neale Hurston is known as one of the lights

of the Harlem Renaissance. She first came to New York City at the age of sixteen—having arrived

as part of a traveling theatrical troupe. A strikingly gifted storyteller who captivated her listeners,

she attended Barnard College, where she studied with anthropologist Franz Boaz and came to

grasp ethnicity from a scientific perspective. Boaz urged her to collect folklore from her native

Florida environment, which she did. The distinguished folklorist Alan Lomax called her Mules and

Men (1935) “the most engaging, genuine, and skillfully written book in the field of folklore.”

Hurston also spent time in Haiti, studying voodoo and collecting Caribbean folklore that was

anthologized in Tell My Horse (1938). Her natural command of colloquial English puts her in the

great tradition of Mark Twain. Her writing sparkles with colorful language and comic—or tragic—

stories from the African-American oral tradition.

Hurston was an impressive novelist. Her most important work, Their Eyes Were Watching God

(1937), is a moving, fresh depiction of a beautiful mulatto woman’s maturation and renewed

happiness as she moves through three marriages. The novel vividly evokes the lives of African

Americans working the land in the rural south. A harbinger of the women’s movement, Zora Neale

Hurston inspired and influenced such contemporary writers as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison

through such books as her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942).

1. Jean Toomer was an African-American poet of the Harlem Renaissance who

a. believed that literature should transcend race.

b. felt that black poets should be celebrated internationally.

c. was known for epic pieces more prosaic than poetic.

d. started a new trend in African-American literature known as Nihilism.

2. Zora Neale Hurston is best known for her novel

a. Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

b. Uncle Tom’s Children.

c. Their Eyes Were Watching God.

d. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

3. Which African American once said that reading was the only thing that had kept him alive

during a tumultuous childhood?

a. William Carlos Williams

b. Booker T. Washington

c. Richard Wright

d. Langston Hughes

4. Describe the plot of Wright’s Native Son. Why was it an important work for an African-

American author?

5. With which of the following statements would the author most likely agree?

a. African-American authors of the 1920s wanted their work to stand beside that of white

authors indiscriminately.

b. African-American authors of the 1920s knew they would never succeed on the same

plane as white authors because they couldn’t get enough publicity.

c. African-American authors of the 1920s sought to abandon their roots and write more

prolific novels about popular themes of the time.

d. African-American authors of the 1920s always tried to write in a way that pleased white

audiences, largely rejecting the “Back to Africa” movement.

6. Summarize the cultural atmosphere of Harlem in the 1920s. How did this contribute to the

advent of the Harlem Renaissance?

LITERARY CURRENTS: THE FUGITIVES AND NEW CRITICISM

From the Civil War into the 20th century, the southern United States had remained a

political and economic backwater ridden with racism and superstition, but, at the same

time, blessed with rich folkways and a strong sense of pride and tradition. It had a somewhat unfair

reputation for being a cultural desert of provincialism and ignorance.

Ironically, the most significant 20th-century regional literary movement was that of the

Fugitives—led by poet-critic-theoretician John Crowe Ransom, poet Allen Tate, and novelist-poetessayist

Robert Penn Warren. This southern literary school rejected “northern” urban, commercial

values, which they felt had taken over America. The Fugitives called for a return to the land and

to American traditions that could be found in the south. The movement took its name from a

literary magazine, The Fugitive, published from 1922 to 1925 at Vanderbilt University in Nashville,

Tennessee, with which Ransom, Tate, and Warren were all associated.

These three major Fugitive writers were also associated with New Criticism, an approach to

understanding literature through close readings and attentiveness to formal patterns (of imagery,

metaphors, metrics, sounds, and symbols) and their suggested meanings. Ransom, leading theorist

of the southern renaissance between the wars, published a book, The New Criticism (1941), on this

method, which offered an alternative to previous extra-literary methods of criticism based on

history and biography. New Criticism became the dominant American critical approach in the

1940s and 1950s because it proved to be well-suited to modernist writers like T.S. Eliot and while

absorbing Freudian theory (especially its structural categories such as id, ego, and superego) and

approaches drawing on mythic patterns.

1. What was the philosophy of the literary movement known as the Fugitives?

2. Name three of the formal literary patterns upon which the approach called New Criticism

focused.

20TH-CENTURY AMERICAN DRAMA

American drama imitated English and European theater until well into the 20th century.

Often, plays either from England or translated from European languages dominated

theater seasons. An inadequate copyright law that failed to protect and promote American

dramatists worked against genuinely original drama. So did the “star system,” in which actors and

actresses, rather than the actual plays, were given the highest acclaim. Americans flocked to see

European actors who toured theaters in the United States. In addition, imported drama, like

imported wine, enjoyed higher status than indigenous productions.

During the 19th century, melodramas with exemplary democratic figures and clear contrasts

between good and evil had been popular. Plays about social problems such as slavery also drew

large audiences; sometimes these plays were adaptations of novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Not

until the 20th century would serious plays attempt aesthetic innovation. Popular culture showed

vital developments, however, especially in vaudeville (popular variety theater involving skits,

clowning, music, and the like). Minstrel shows, based on African-American music and folkways—

performed by white characters using “blackface” makeup—also developed original forms and

expressions.

Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953)

Eugene O’Neill is the great figure of American

theater. His numerous plays combine enormous technical

originality with freshness of vision and emotional depth.

O’Neill’s earliest dramas concern the working class and

poor; later works explore subjective realms, such as

obsessions and sex, and underscore his reading in Freud

as well as his anguished attempt to come to terms with

his dead mother, father, and brother. His play Desire

Under the Elms (1924) recreates the passions hidden

within one family; The Great God Brown (1926) uncovers

the unconsciousness of a wealthy businessman; and

Strange Interlude (1928), a winner of the Pulitzer Prize,

traces the tangled loves of one woman. These powerful

plays reveal different personalities reverting to primitive

emotions or confusion under intense stress.

O’Neill continued to explore the Freudian pressures

of love and dominance within families in a trilogy of plays

collectively entitled Mourning Becomes Electra (1931),

based on the classical Oedipus trilogy by Sophocles. His

later plays include the acknowledged masterpieces The

Iceman Cometh (1946), a stark work on the theme of

death, and Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1956)—a

powerful, extended autobiography in dramatic form focusing on his own family and their physical

and psychological deterioration, as witnessed in the course of one night. This work was part of a

cycle of plays O’Neill was working on at the time of his death.

O’Neill redefined the theater by abandoning traditional divisions into acts and scenes (Strange

Interlude has nine acts, and Mourning Becomes Electra takes nine hours to perform); using masks

such as those found in Asian and ancient Greek theater; introducing Shakespearean monologues

Eugene O’Neill

and Greek choruses; and producing special effects through lighting and sound. He is generally

acknowledged to have been America’s foremost dramatist. In 1936, he received the Nobel Prize for

Literature—the first American playwright to be so honored.

Thornton Wilder (1897–1975)

Thornton Wilder is known for his plays, Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942),

and for his novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927).

Our Town conveys positive American values. It has all the elements of sentimentality and

nostalgia—the archetypal traditional small country town, the kindly parents and mischievous

children, the young lovers. Still, the innovative elements such as ghosts, voices from the audience,

and daring time shifts keep the play engaging. It is, in effect, a play about life and death in which

the dead are reborn, at least for the moment.

Clifford Odets (1906–1963)

Clifford Odets, a master of social drama, came from an Eastern European, Jewish immigrant

background. Raised in New York City, he became one of the original acting members of the Group

Theater directed by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford, which was committed

to producing only native American dramas.

Odets’s best-known play was Waiting for Lefty (1935), an experimental one-act drama that

fervently advocated labor unionism. His Awake and Sing!, a nostalgic family drama, became

another popular success, followed by Golden Boy, the story of an Italian immigrant youth who ruins

his musical talent (as a violinist) when he is seduced by the lure of money to become a boxer and

injures his hands. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Theodore Dreiser’s An American

Tragedy, the play warns against excessive ambition and materialism.

1. What were some of the reasons for American drama’s slow start?

2. The trilogy of plays known as Mourning Becomes Electra was written by

a. Upton Sinclair.

b. Stephen Crane.

c. Eugene O’Neill.

d. Sir Thomas More.

3. Explain why Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town, was so appealing to the public.

4. Compare the message of Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy to the message of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s

The Great Gatsby. What is similar?

American Literature

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

History of American Literature - Chapter 6 Modernism and Experimentation: 1914–1945

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