ELENA MARTÍNEZ LÓPEZ

NORTH AMERICAN LITERATURE: XXTH CENTURY

1. Historical Background

-Introduction to the period-

World War I broke out in Europe in 1914, with Great Britain, France, and Russia fighting against
Germany. The United States, which entered the war in 1917 on the side of Britain and France, had
ended its last full-scale conflict, the Civil War, some fifty years previously. In the interval, the
country’s industrial power had grown immensely. In 1914 the country’s network of transcontinental
railroads linked its productive farms, small towns, and industry to urban centres. Like the Civil War,
World War I would mobilize the country’s industries and technologies and encourage their
development. On an even larger scale, World War II would do the same.

At the end of WWI, however, the US was still a nation of small farms and towns. The majority of
Americans were still of English or German ancestry. They were distrustful of international politics,
and after the war ended, many attempted to steer the nation back to pre-war lifestyles. In 1924
Congress enacted an exclusionary immigration act, which prohibited all Asian immigration to control
the ethnic makeup of the United States.

For other Americans, the war helped accelerate changes in the forms of political and social life. The
long struggle to win American women to vote ended in 1920 with the passage of the Nineteenth
Amendment to the Constitution. Despite the government’s restrictions on leftist political activity,
many Americans looked to the Soviet Union and the international Communist movement for a
model in combating in equality and fostering workers’ rights in the United States.

These conflicts acquired new urgency when the stock market crashed in 1929 and led to an
economic crisis. Known as the Great Depression, this period of economic hardship did not fully end
until the United States entered World War II, following the Japanese attack on the American Fleet at
Pearl Harbour in 1941. Japan’s ally Germany also declared war on the USA, thus involving the country
in another European conflict. The war unified the country politically, as it revitalized industry and
put people to work, including women who went into the labour force. Germany surrendered in the
spring of 1945. The war ended in August 1945. While Europe was in ruins, the United States had
become the world’s major industrial and political power. The two wars, then, bracket a period
during which the United States became a fully modern nation.

In the arena of literature and culture, American literary modernism was a pivotal movement whose
main domains were freedom and innovation. It was the search for a purpose in literature what
marked the movement. It registered all sides of the era’s struggles and debates, while sharing a
commitment to explore the meanings of modernity and the possibility of creating something entirely
new.

Within this period, three issues stand out as dividing writers and schools of writers. One issue centred
on the uses of literary tradition and whether it was necessary or imitative and old-fashioned.
Nonetheless, modernist works often allude to previous literature ironically, or deliberately fracture
traditional literary formulas. A related issue involved the place of popular culture in serious
literature, as it gained momentum and influence. Another issue was the question of how far

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literature should engage itself in political and social struggle. Should art be a domain unto itself,
exploring aesthetic questions and enunciating transcendent truths, or should art participate in the
politics of the times?

There was a conflict whereas to choose tradition or authenticity: some writers wanted to remain
among tradition. However, other authors pretended to be authentic and had an experimental spirit
with complex psychological points of view.

-Changing times-

During the 1920s, it was the only moment where it seemed there were different alternatives to
capitalism. Americans who thought of themselves as Marxists in the 1920s and 1930s were usually
connected with the Communist Party. In 1919, it was the founding of the American Communist Party.

In 1924, the Immigration act was passed: its main objective was to control the ethnic makeup of the
American population. The main objective was to preserve racial integrity. The presence of
immigration in literature became clear.

-Self-expression and Psychology-

The 20th century meant a radical change for the self-expression and psychology of individuals.
People started to ask questions about themselves. “Whosoever would be a man, must be a non-
conformist” (Emerson).

- The 18th Amendment to the US constitution was passed, which meant the perfect culmination
of democracy. The prohibition of alcohol-phenomenon of “gangsters” was felt as a limitation of
people’s freedom.
- The 1920s also experienced significant changes in sexual ideas: sexuality was being questioned.
One of its key figures was Sigmund Freud, whose main purpose was to liberate society’s
unconscious through psychoanalysis. This also marked the way of writing.
- The 19th Amendment marked a big change for women. It was the women’s liberation
movement: they were given the right to vote. Those changes affected their education
(professional work), way of dressing, and sexual freedom. A common concept of the time was
the flapper: this female depiction of the new independent woman in the USA was very particular
and quite revolutionary at that moment.
In books, the new position of the female gender would be deeply considered. At the same time,
the opposite vision, i.e., the angel of the house, was also contemplated in literature.

-The flappers-

Flappers smoked in public, drank alcohol, danced at jazz clubs, and practised a shocking sexual
freedom.

Designers like Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli and Jean Patou ruled flapper fashion. Straight and slim,
high heels, rouge lips, and the “bob” hairstyle.

Zelda Fitzgerald: one of the main icons of the flappers. Fitzgerald’s wife represents all the features
of liberty, strong personality, clothing. Everything related to the flappers was recognisable through
her figure.

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-The roaring twenties-

The 1920s involves a very convulsive period that changed a lot the configuration of the USA. Some
details about this period are:

• Capitalism is flourishing incredibly in the US. The idea of the importance of the money in the
American mind started to go high. Inflation rates rocketed (money): it was quite easy to gain
but also to lose money.
• Consumer culture flourished: consumerism as the main need.
• Technological innovations like the telephone and radio. They were considered something
mandatory by the society.
• Supremacy of jazz (Harlem Cotton Club). People at that time wanted to have fun and enjoy
life through jazz music. It was much associated to the elite of people, especially artists and
writers, but then it became accessible to everyone.

-The 1930s-

In the United States, the Great Depression made politics and economics the salient issues of public
life and overrode questions of individual freedom with fear of mass collapse. Free-enterprise
capitalism had always justified itself by arguing that the system guaranteed better lives for all. This
assurance now rang hollow. The suicides of millionaire bankers and stockbrokers made the
headlines, but more compelling was the enormous toll among ordinary people who lost their homes,
jobs, farms, and life savings in the stock market crash.

The terrible economic situation in the United States produced a significant increase in Communist
Party membership and prestige in the 1930s. Numerous intellectuals allied themselves with its
causes, even if they did not actually become party members. The appeal of communism was
significantly enhanced by its claim to be an opponent of fascism.

-American Modernism-

American Modernism is the breakdown of traditional society under the pressures of modernity: a
fight against tradition.

The main correspondence of Modernism in literature was The Waste Land, the perfect exponent of
the world in ruins. The feeling of emptiness is the main aura.

Modernism involved other art forms— sculpture, painting, dance—as well as literature: the poetry
of William Butler Yeats; James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922)— these were only a few of the literary products
of this movement in England and on the Continent. The sense of experimentation is shared by the
different artistic forms.

Some of the main characteristics of the American Modernism:

• Most literary pieces are built up of fragments: vignettes altogether arranged portraying the
fragmentation of the reality.

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• Shifts in perspective, voice, and tone: not looking at the things with the same approach. As I Lay
Dying shows these changes: different versions of the same actions at the same moment. With
that different reality, the reader has to create his own interpretation of the story.
• The tone through dialogues and questions is going to suggest how characters behave.
• Ironic rhetoric: texts represented in a rhetoric way. It is not going to be easily offered to the
readers: they have to read between the lines.
• Suggestion of symbols and images instead of statements: with the common tendency of
offering freedom to the reader. They are not categorically stated.
• The search for meaning: the idea that literature should be important to society comes into the
floor of the years. Literature, especially poetry and drama, turns to be the place where readers
could express themselves finding their own way of criticizing. It was a forum for debate.
Literature performs a role in society.
• Varied content based on the experience/interest of the writer: writers find inspiration on their
own experiences (traumas, tragic experiences, shades of their biographies, etc.)
• Concrete sensory image: particular and repeated assumptions in the text as well as a continuous
reference to how images in these books are related to human senses. A very perceptive way to
present the ideas.
• Allusions to literary, historical, philosophical, or religious details of the past: for some authors,
the past is also important in literature, even if it is modern. In the literary past, there can be find
the origin of thousands of elements that are needed to keep on writing about. We should learn
from our past background. The Waste Land is probably the clearest example of these mixed
allusions.
• Vignettes of contemporary life, elements of popular culture: parts of the real urban life, of
songs, were starting to appear in Modernist texts.
• Use of slang, colloquial and uneducated language: in some texts, informal language is used.
• First person narrator or one character’s point of view. It suggests the idea of individuality: the
reader has to create his/her own interpretation of the story. The narrator could also be
omniscient (1st or 3rd person). Even in poetry, it could be identified the voice of the speaker,
which is normally the voice of the poet.
• “Truth does not exist”, the main motto of American literature of the 20th century: the text is
the product of a personal interaction with reality, even the experiences of the readers will affect
its understandings.

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-The Lost Generation-

High modernism was a self-consciously international movement, and the leading American
exponents of high modernism tended to be permanent expatriates, such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra
Pound, and T. S. Eliot. These writers left the United States because they found the country lacking
in a tradition of high culture and indifferent, if not actively hostile, to artistic achievement. They
also believed that a national culture could never be more than parochial. In London in the first two
decades of the twentieth century and in Paris during the 1920s, they found a vibrant community of
dedicated artists and a society that respected them and allowed them a great deal of personal
freedom. Yet they seldom thought of themselves as deserting their nation, they thought of
themselves as bringing the United States into the larger context of European culture. They thought
that USA had a localized and narrow-minded interpretation of national culture.

The ranks of these permanent expatriates were swelled by American writers who lived abroad for
some part of the period, among them Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Robert Frost.

Those writers who came back, however, and those who never left took seriously the task of
integrating modernist ideas and methods with American subject matter. Not every experimental
modernist writer disconnected literary ambitions from national belonging: Hart Crane, Marianne
Moore, and William Carlos Williams, all wanted to write overtly “American” works. Some writers—
as the title of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. clearly shows— attempted to speak for the nation as a whole.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is similarly ambitious, and many writers addressed the whole
nation in individual works.

• The origin of the term:

Gertrude Stein is credited for the term “Lost Generation”, though it was famously coined by
Hemingway. “You are all a lost generation” was an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (1926) by
Hemingway, a novel that captures the attitudes of a hard-drinking, fast-living set of disillusioned
young expatriates in post-war Paris.

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2. Poetry
2.1 Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Robert Frost was born in California but identified with New England: that area was the main source
of inspiration for his poems. His life was characterised by rural environments: he was between farms
and poems, teaching at various colleges. This relationship with natural and rural elements will be a
fundamental part of his poetry.

Frost’s life was also characterised by personal tragedies, something that will affect his literary pieces:
a son committed suicide and a daughter suffered a complete mental collapse.

About his style, it should be highlighted that he did not reject modernist essence, but he was much
more localised in his traditional way of writing and contemplating New England as a microcosmos.
Frost’s poetry is mainly characterised by:

- The clarity of diction (contemporary language): the poems are easily understood.
- Colloquial rhythms: depicting dialogues. A particular musicality.
- Simplicity of images
- Natural speech or colloquialism (ruralism) with the folksy speaker. His continuous intention in
keeping the importance of rural people. The semantic field of Frost’s poetry is quite localised.

All these characteristics are intended to make the poems look natural, unplanned. In the context of
modernist movement, however, they can be seen as a thoughtful reply to high modernism’s
fondness for obscurity and difficulty. In addition, by investing in the New England terrain, Frost
rejected modernist intentionalism and revitalized the tradition of New England regionalism.
Readers who accepted Frost’s persona and his setting as typically American accepted the powerful
myth that rural New England was the heart of America.

Frost played the rhythms of ordinary speech against formal patterns of line and verse and contained
them within traditional poetic forms. The interaction of colloquial diction with blank verse is
especially central to his dramatic monologues. To Frost, traditional forms were the essence of poetry,
material with which poets responded to flux and disorder (decay) by forging something permanent.
Poetry, he wrote, was “a momentary stay against confusion”.

Conclusively, Robert Frost is not probably the highest exponent of Modernism. One of the reasons
why he is associated more to old-fashioned narrative is because of his language: his simplicity of
diction contrasts with the experimentation within other Modernist writers. Also, the location of the
poems (rural landscapes, New England) favours that notion of traditional Americanism. In the
moment of confusing times, Frost went more for security, for the stay. He persecuted the
permanence of topics and reflections: his messages are absolutely contemporary, even today; they
can be applied to any situation.

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2.2 T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

T. S. Eliot was an American living in London. He was highly educated, something important to
understand the complexity of his poems: he attended Harvard, Oxford, and La Sorbonne.

Eliot was an expatriate, member of the “Lost Generation” in the first wave. In terms of biographical
experiences, he had a turbulent personal life: marital problems, mental collapses, general
depression. That unconscious situation of his mind helps to understand the chaotic form of The
Waste Land, the culmination of his complexity.

As regards his understanding of poetry, he showed an antipolitical approach: he was part of the new
group of writers called “New Criticism”, which emerged in the 1930s and focused on the
understanding of literature but more on the form and experimentation of the narration against the
political approaches to the literary genres in general. They were close-reading critics; New Criticism
was presented as a new literary theory.

In his influential essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, Eliot had defined the English and
European poetic tradition as a self-sufficient organic whole, an elastic equilibrium that constantly
reformed itself to accommodate new poets. What makes poems matter is their effect on other
poems, not their capacity to act upon the world outside of poetry. Poets contribute to the tradition,
he argued, not through the direct expression of individual emotion but through a difficult process of
distancing “the man who suffers” from “the mind which creates”. In other essays, Eliot denigrated
didactic, expository, or narrative poets like Milton and the Victorians while applauding the verbally
complex, paradoxical, indirect, symbolic work of the Metaphysical poets like John Donne and George
Herbert. Through the New Criticism, Eliot’s “impersonal” approach to poetry had a powerful role in
shaping the literary curriculum in American colleges and universities, especially following World War
II.

He needed to support his life in faith: during his life, he looked for the perfect religion.

Main features of Eliot’s poetry

He dedicated long pages to reflect upon the process of writing, to explain theoretically what he
wanted to address the readers. He wrote critical essays.

“The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective-correlative”; in
other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that
particular emotion; such that, when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience,
are given, the emotion is immediately evoked” (Eliot, “Hamlet and his problems”)

- In the excerpt, he tries to explain the “objective correlative”: the theoretical term that he uses
when writing poetry. He wanted to focus on emotions. The individual reader should experience
something through senses. The evocation of experiences.
- Critical poems representing modern thought: he is very critical in tone.
- Wide range of techniques: imagism, repetition, fragmentation, historical and literary allusions,
informal/formal language, break of logical conventions (he loves breaking logic), use of different
languages, pop culture elements, free verse (his mind is not constrained by patterns, multiple
points of view (the same situation from different angles), lack of coherence, surrealistic images.

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- Topics: death and rebirth, anthropological thinking of religions, critique of modern civilization
(how we are in a waste land, distracting our values), desperation.

In terms of literary production, it should be highlighted the following works:

o The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock (1915), a witty poem. The first masterpiece of
Modernism
o Waste Land (1922), cultural and literary event – imitators and detractors. The legend of
T.S. Eliot appeared.
o Close association with Ezra Pound: alterations and suggestions, co-authored? As T.S.
Eliot was in a sanatorium, it is not clear if The Waste Land was co-authored.
o Four Quarters (1943): a collection of poems centred on his own life and poetry.

He was given the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.

The Waste Land

The Waste Land is the strongest literary image of the first half of the 20th century: that image of a
waste land is going to appear in different texts of the century. It depicts an apocalyptic land, which
corresponds to one of the most surviving images of the half of the century.

The poem is made up of five discontinuous segments where the quest for regeneration in a desolate
landscape is constantly visible. It is a sort of tentative generalisation for the whole essence that T.S
Eliot wanted to convey, an attempt to regenerate.

In the poem appears a mixture of religions (Anglicanism, Buddhism, Christianism) together with
images such as the Tower of Babel in order to cover a melting pot of languages. T.S. Eliot wanted to
depict that variety of languages that also resembles the differences among human beings.

The Waste Land shows an incoherent structure, which lets the reader to enter a mood characterised
by chaos and mess. Even the distributions of the lines in the stanzas do not follow any pattern.
However, the stanzas normally stand for a particular idea or setting.

There are also complex literary allusions: Dante, Shakespeare, St Augustin, Wagner, Verlaine,
Webster, Spenser, Marvell, Milton, Baudelaire, Bible (one of the main sources), Conrad…

The mind map of The Waste Land is based on:

o Intertextuality: there are references inside the text, it is about flashbacks and
flashforwards.
o Intellectual references: the poem is oriented to highly educated people. The reader
needs a background in order understand the text.
o Fragmentation of emotions and experiences: we are directly inside the mind of the
poet.

All in all, the poem is a labyrinth of images trying to grasp the complexity of human mind.

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3. Prose
3.1 John Dos Passos (1896-1970)

John Dos Passos was born in Chicago of well-to-do Portuguese American parents. He was an
expatriate (member of the Lost Generation).

Dos Passos was characterised for being politically active, especially during the 20s and 30s. In 1926
he joined the executive board of the Communist journal The New Masses. For the next eight years
he took part in Communist activities but never joined the party: he travelled to the Soviet Union. He
wanted to know what these new political ideas were about.

In 1934 the Communists broke up a Socialist rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden; this
event persuaded Dos Passos that the Communists were more interested in power than social justice.
Soon after he severed his Communist ties. Dos Passos experienced an evolution: he went from social
radicalism to social conservatism (leaving communist ideas behind).

In terms of his literary production, it should be highlighted the following works:

- Manhattan Transfer (1925): a fragmented collection of short stories about the roaring twenties.
- USA, trilogy: 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), The Big Money (1936). Its subject is 20th century
America from coast to coast and at every social level; its portrayal is savagely satirical. At that
point, Dos Passos believed that capitalism led to a division between rich and poor that could be
only remedied by social change.

The main topics he dealt with were:

o 20th century American portrayal of society: biographies of big names in America (for
instance, Henry Ford).
o Protest literature: to criticize the effects of capitalism especially on working classes. He
does it without any fear.
o Corruption of individuals
o Capitalism was a division between rich and poor asking for social change.

Dealing with the form of his works, it is characterised by the use of different techniques:

- Experimental typography and layout

- Blending fiction/non-fiction: Dos Passos alternated with other kind of material – notably the
“Newsreel” sections, in which newspaper excerpts and headlines, snippets from popular songs,
and quotations from speeches and documents were brought together in an imitation of the
weekly feature one saw at the movie house before television took over visual newscasting: the
“Camera Eye” sections, which are impressionistic, emotional, lyrical fragments and biographies
of American notables.
- A morphological phenomenon: blending words such as ‘workingclass’
- Cinema strategies and techniques
- Newspaper extracts, trying to be as contemporary as possible. Enhancing the importance of
media.
- Collages, fragments
- Stream of consciousness technique

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3.2 F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

In the 1920s and 1930s F. Scott Fitzgerald was equally famous as a writer and as a celebrity author
whose lifestyle seemed to symbolize the two decades; in the 1920s he stood for all-night partying,
drinking, and the pursuit of pleasure, while in the 1930s he stood for the gloomy aftermath of excess.
Babylon Revisited, written immediately after the stock market crash, is simultaneously a personal
and a national story.

Fitzgerald was born in a middle-class neighbourhood in Minnesota. He was an expatriate (member

of the Lost Generation): he moved to London in 1924.

During this time Fitzgerald published his best- known and most successful novel, The Great Gatsby
(1925), and another book of short stories, All the Sad Young Men (1926).

The Great Gatsby tells the story of a self- made young man whose dream of success, personified in a
rich and beautiful young woman named Daisy, turns out to be a fantasy in every sense: Daisy belongs
to a corrupt society, Gatsby corrupts himself in the quest for her, and above all, the rich have no
intention of sharing their privileges. The novel is narrated from the point of view of Nick Carraway,
an onlooker who is both moved and repelled by the tale he tells and whose responses form a sort of
subplot: this experiment in narrative point of view was widely imitated.

The Great Gatsby showed some autobiographical traces as well as the corruption of the American
Dream. It was also a portrayal of the roaring twenties. Its structure is compact; the style dazzling;
and its images of automobiles, parties, and garbage heaps seem to capture the contradictions of a
consumer society.

It also depicted the differences and continuous fight between the New Rich and the Old Rich. Old
Riches were discriminative with the New Rich but not because of a question of money: it was a
question of social status. It showed the hollowness and artificiality of the Upper class and its
emptiness in terms of general values. The artificiality of this upper-class is highly criticised in the
novel.

Fitzgerald wrote dozens of short stories during the twenties (Jazz Age). Despite the pace at which he
worked, the Fitzgeralds could not get out of debt. The couple was the symbol of excesses. The author
experienced a turbulent life (economic problems, parties, alcohol). He became an alcoholic, and
therefore he needed to spend periods of his life in sanatoriums.

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3.3 William Faulkner (1897-1962)

William Faulkner was a native Mississippian. After drifting from one job to another, he started to
write poetry that was a melange of Shakespearean, pastoral, Victorian, and Edwardian modes, with
an overlay of French symbolism, publishing The Marble Faun in 1924. The next year, he went to New
Orleans where, for the first time, he met and mingled with literary people, including Sherwood
Anderson, who encouraged him to develop his own style, to concentrate on prose, and to use his
region for material. He published his first novel, Soldier’s Pay, in 1926.

Generally, topics such as childhood, families, sex, race, obsessions, time, the past, his native South,
and the modern world can be found in Faulkner’s novels. He invented voices for characters ranging
from sages to children, criminals, the insane, even the dead – sometimes all within one book. He
developed, beyond this ventriloquism, his own unmistakable narrative voice: urgent, intense, highly
rhetorical. He experimented with narrative chronology, and with techniques for representing mind
and memory through the stream of consciousness: how the mind of the human being works is one
of his main fascinations. Faulkner showed different layers of the subconscious: from the most
rational to the most profound part of the subconscious. He also invented an entire southern county
and wrote its history.

Faulkner learned about the experimental writing of James Joyce’s Ulysses or Proust’s In the Search
of Time and the ideas of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis and Bakhtin (sociolect, ‘words are just
words’: this statement presents one of the main discussions in As I Lay Dying. For Faulkner is very
arbitrary: a word is not enough to express a thought).

Faulkner’s second novel was a satire on New Orleans intellectuals called Mosquitos (1927). His more
typical subject matter emerged with his rejected novel Flags in the Dust, whose shortened version
appeared in 1929 as Sartoris. In this work, Faulkner focused on the interconnections between a
prominent southern family and the local community: the Sartoris family as well as many other
characters appeared in later works, and the region, renamed Yoknapatawpha County, was to become
the locale Faulkner’s imaginative world.

The social and historical emphasis in Sartoris was not directly followed up in the works Faulkner
wrote next. The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930) were dramatically experimental
attempts to articulate the inexpressible aspects of individual psychology.

The structure of As I Lay Dying is organized around the loss of a beloved woman. The precipitating
event in the novel is the death of a mother. The story moves forward in chronological time as the
“poor white” Bundren family takes her body to the town of Jefferson for burial. Its narration is
divided into fifty-nine sections of interior monologue by fifteen characters, each with a different
perception of the action and a different way of relating to reality. The family’s adventures and
misadventures on the road are comic, tragic, grotesque, absurd, and deeply moving.

The main topics that Faulkner deals with in As I Lay Dying are the following:

- Existence and Identity

- Death: how the characters approach death
- Mind versus words: language as a barrier to express the inner subconscious.

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3.4 Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

Ernest Hemingway was born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois. He was an expatriate (member of the
Lost Generation): after marrying Hadley Richardson in 1920, he went to Paris. Supported partly by
her money and partly by his journalism, Hemingway worked at becoming a writer. He came to know
Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others in the large
community of expatriate artistic and literary Americans.

His style is characterised by the adaptation of journalistic techniques in telegraphic prose that
minimized narrator commentary and depended heavily on uncontextualized dialogue and modern
and quick rhythm. The principle of the iceberg is, in fact, one of the main techniques in Hemingway’s
production: even if the surface seems simple or basic, the inside is much more complex.

A Farewell to Arms, his second novel, appeared in 1929. It described a romance between an American
army officer, and a British nurse, but their idyll is shattered when she dies in childbirth. Hemingway’s
work has been much criticized for its depictions of women. However, other female characters in his
works are strong, complex figures. Overall, Hemingway identified the rapid change in women’s status
after World War I and the general blurring of sex roles that accompanied the new sexual freedom as
aspects of modernity that men were simultaneously attracted to and found hard to deal with.

As Hemingway aged, his interest in exclusively masculine forms of self-assertion and self-definition
became more pronounced. War, hunting, and similar pursuits that he had used at first to show men
manifesting dignity in the face of certain defeat increasingly became depicted (in his life as well as
his writing) as occasions for competitive masculine display and triumph. Soon after the publication
of The Sun Also Rises (1926), his first marriage broke up; in all he was married four times. In the 1930s
and 1940s he adopted the style of life of a celebrity. Some of his best-known work from these years,
such as The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936), treats the theme of the successful writer losing his talent in
an atmosphere of success, adulation, and wealth.

A political loner distrustful of all ideological abstractions, Hemingway was nevertheless drawn into
antifascist politics by the Spanish Civil War. In To Have and Have Not (1937), the earliest of his
political novels, the good characters are working-class people and the antagonists are idle rich. For
Whom the Bell Tolls draws on Hemingway’s experiences in Spain as a war correspondent, celebrating
both the peasant antifascists and the Americans who fought on their behalf. His one play, The Fifth
Column (1938) specifically blames the communists for betraying the cause.

After the WWII ended, he continued his travels and was badly hurt in Africa in January 1954 in the
crash of a small plane. He had already published his allegorical fable The Old Man and the Sea (1952),
and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and was central to his winning the Nobel Prize of Literature in 1954.
However, the plane crash had damaged his mental and physical health, and he never fully recovered.
Subject increasingly to depression and an incapacitating paranoia, he was hospitalized several times
before killing himself in 1961.

Ernest Hemingway as an autobiographic writer whose main topics were: war, politics, hunting, sex
and sex roles, psychological meaning of masculinity, and loss of talent by the writer.

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3.5 John Steinbeck (1902-1968)

Most of John Steinbeck’s best writing is set in the region of California that he called home. Steinbeck
believed in the American promise of opportunity for all, but believed also that social injustices and
economic inequalities had put opportunity beyond reach for many. His work merged literary
modernism with literary realism, celebrated traditional rural communities along with social outcasts
and immigrant cultures, and endorsed conservative values and radical politics at the same time.

After graduating from Salinas High School in 1919, he began to study at Stanford University but took
time off for a variety of short-term jobs. During this period, he developed an abiding respect for
people who worked on farms and in factories, and committed his literary abilities to their cause.

With financial help from his father, Steinbeck spent most of 1929 writing. In 1935 he achieved
commercial success with his third novel, Tortilla Flat, a celebration of the Mexican- American culture
of the “paisanos” who lived in the Monterey hills. Steinbeck’s next novel, In Dubious Battle (1936),
contrasted the decency of striking migratory farm workers both to the cynicism of landowners and
their vigilantes, and to the equal cynicism of Communist labour union organizers who exploit the
workers’ plight for their own purposes. Sympathy for the underdog appears again in Of Mice and
Men (1937), a best-selling short novel about two itinerant ranch hands. Inspired by the devastating
1930s drought in the southern plains states and the exodus of thousands of farmers from their
homes in the so-called Dust Bowl, he wrote Grapes of Wrath (1939), that told the story of the Joad
family, who, after losing their land in Oklahoma, migrated to California looking for, but not finding, a
better life.

After World War II, Steinbeck’s work displayed increasing hostility to American culture, whose mass
commercialization seemed to him to be destroying individual creativity: The Leader of the People
expresses his sense that American’s heroic times are past and locates value in the story’s socially
marginal characters. His most important later works are The Wayward Bus (1947), East of Eden
(1952), Sweet Thursday (1954), and Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), in which he
recounts his automobile tour of the United States. Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in 1963.

The main topics found in Steinbeck’s production are:

- Working class conditions

- Slavery in relation to white people and the depiction of black people.
- Black and white relationships.
- Immigrant cultures
- Loneliness
- Rurality: a celebration of traditional rural communities. Steinbeck praises the sense of solidarity
and communion between the traditional villages. For the author, these traditional communities
must change in some of their aspects but this traditional way of living is praised as the most
authentic one. it is where the real essence of human beings can be shown. For him, the rural
communities are much more real than life in the urban cities. The setting is favouring the
inherent nature of the human being.
- Failure of the American Dream

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- FORM: literary realism / literary modernism. A very realistic story: lots of description, logical
sequence of events

3.6 Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)

Tennessee Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi. He went to the University of Missouri but left
after two years; his father then found him a job in the shoe- factory warehouse. He worked there for
nearly three years, writing feverishly at night. Williams found the life so difficult, however, that he
succumbed to a nervous breakdown. After recovering, he went on to further studies, finally
graduating in 1938. Earlier, his sister had been suffering increasing mental imbalance; the final
trauma was apparently brought on by one of his father’s alcoholic rages, in which he beat his wife
and made a gesture that she took to be sexual.

The next year, Williams left for New Orleans, the first of many temporary homes; it would provide
the setting for A Streetcar Named Desire. In New Orleans he changed his name to “Tennessee,” later
giving various romantic reasons for doing so. There also he actively entered the homosexual world.

Williams had had plays produced at local theatres and in 1939 he won a prize for a collection of one-
act plays, American Blues. His first success was The Glass Menagerie (1945), which he called it a
“memory play” seen through the recollections of the writer, Tom, who talks to the audience about
himself and about the scenes depicting his mother, Amanda; his crippled sister, Laura; and the
traumatic effect of a modern “gentleman caller” on them. While there are similarities, the play is
not literally autobiographical.

The financial success of Menagerie proved exhilarating, then debilitating. Williams fled to Mexico to
work full time on an earlier play, The Poker Night. It had begun as The Moth; its first image, as
Williams’s biographer, Donald Spoto, tells us, was “simply that of a woman, sitting with folded hands
near a window, while moonlight streamed in and she waited in vain the arrival of her boyfriend”:
named Blanche, she was at first intended as a young Amanda. During rehearsals of Menagerie,
Williams began to visualize his new play as a series of confrontations between working class poker
players and two refined southern women.

As the focus of his attention changed from Stanley to Blanche, The Poker Night turned into A
Streetcar Named Desire. Upon opening in 1947, it was an even greater success than The Glass
Menagerie, and it won the Pulitzer Prize. Williams was able to travel to Florida, where he did much
of his ensuing work. At about this time, he fell in love with a young man named Frank Merlo.

Among the most successful plays were The Rose Tattoo (1950), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and The
Night of the Iguana (1961).

For years Williams had depended on a wide variety of drugs, especially to help him sleep and to keep
him awake in the early mornings. In the 1960s the drugs began to take a real toll. Other factors
contributed to the decline of his later years: Frank Merlo’s death, the emergence of younger
playwrights, and the violent nature of the 1960s, which seemed both to mirror his inner chaos and
to leave him behind.

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In Williams’s late work, his sister was the source and inspiration, either directly or indirectly, in the
situation of romanticized mental illness or unvarnished verisimilitude. This observation is certainly
true of Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980) and The Two Character Play.

Despite Williams’s self-destructiveness, in his writing and in his social life, the work of his great years
was now being seriously studied and often revived by regional and community theatres. He was
collaborating on a film of two stories about his sister when he died, apparently having choked to
death on the lid of a pill bottle.

Although he never acknowledged any debt to the American playwright Eugene O’Neill, Williams
shared with O’Neill an impatience over the theatrical conventions of realism. The Glass Menagerie,
for example, uses screened projections, lighting effects, and music to emphasize that it takes place
in Tom’s memory. A Streetcar Named Desire moves in and out of the house on Elysian Fields, while
music and lighting reinforce all the major themes. Williams also relies on the effects of language,
especially of a vivid and colloquial Southern speech that may be compared with that of William
Faulkner, Eudora Welty, or Flannery O’Connor. Rhythms of language become almost a musical
indication of character, distinguishing Blanche from other characters. Reading or seeing his plays, we
become aware of how symbolic repetitions produce a heightening of reality: what Williams called
“poetic realism.”

Contemporary criticisms of Williams’s plays focused on their violence and their obsession with
sexuality, which in some of the later work struck some commentators as an almost morbid
preoccupation with “perversion”— murder, rape, drugs, incest, nymphomania. These taboo topics,
however, figure as instances of Williams’s deeper subjects: desire and loneliness. Loneliness and
desire propel his characters into extreme behaviour, no doubt, but such behaviour literally
dramatizes the plight that Williams saw as universal.

3.7 Arthur Miller (1915-2005)

Miller was born into a German Jewish family in Manhattan.

Miller’s Death of a Salesman contains autobiographical shades: his father’s business collapsed after
1929 crash. The main topics regarding this author are the failure of American Dream, memory and
reality, the antihero, criticism of capitalism and business rules, success and personality, loneliness,
immorality.

In Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman portrays the antihero, Linda appears as a clear example of the
angel of the house, and Biff is the evolving character.

In Salesman the action moves effortlessly from the present into moments in his memory, symbolized
in the stage setting by the idyllic leaves around his house that, in these past moments, block out the
threatening apartment houses. A striking difference between Tennessee Williams and Miller,
however, is the latter’s overt moralizing, which adds a didactic element to his plays not to be found
in those of Williams.

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