Critics of society

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920) showed the disillusionment and moral disintegration experienced by so many in the United States after World War I. The book initiated a career of great promise that found fruition in The Great Gatsby (1925), a spare but poignant novel about the promise and failure of the American Dream. Fitzgerald was to live out this theme himself. Though damaged by drink and by a failing marriage, he went on to do some of his best work in the 1930s, including numerous stories and essays as well as his most ambitious novel, Tender Is the Night (1934). Unlike Fitzgerald, who was a lyric writer with real emotional intensity, Sinclair Lewis was best as a social critic. His onslaughts against the “village virus” (Main Street [1920]), average businessmen (Babbitt [1922]), materialistic scientists (Arrowsmith [1925]), and the racially prejudiced (Kingsblood Royal [1947]) were satirically sharp and thoroughly documented, though Babbitt is his only book that still stands up brilliantly at the beginning of the 21st century. Similar careful documentation, though little satire, characterized James T. Farrell’s naturalistic Studs Lonigan trilogy (1932–35), which described the stifling effects of growing up in a lower-middle-class family and a street-corner milieu in the Chicago of the 1920s.

The ironies of racial identity dominate the stories and novels produced by writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including harsh portraits of the Black middle class in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) and the powerful stories of Langston Hughes in The Ways of White Folks (1934), as well as the varied literary materials—poetry, fiction, and drama—collected in Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923). Richard Wright’s books, including Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), Native Son (1940), and Black Boy (1945), were works of burning social protest, Dostoyevskian in their intensity, that dealt boldly with the plight of American Blacks in both the old South and the Northern urban ghetto. Zora Neale Hurston’s training in anthropology and folklore contributed to Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), her powerful feminist novel about the all-Black Florida town in which she had grown up.

A number of authors wrote proletarian novels attacking capitalist exploitation, as in several novels based on a 1929 strike in the textile mills in Gastonia, N.C., such as Fielding Burke’s Call Home the Heart and Grace Lumpkin’s To Make My Bread (both 1932). Other notable proletarian novels included Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited (1933), Robert Cantwell’s The Land of Plenty (1934), and Albert Halper’s Union Square (1933), The Foundry (1934), and The Chute (1937), as well as some grim evocations of the drifters and “bottom dogs” of the Depression era, such as Edward Anderson’s Hungry Men and Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing (both 1935). The radical movement, combined with a nascent feminism, encouraged the talent of several politically committed women writers whose work was rediscovered later; they included Tillie Olsen, Meridel Le Sueur, and Josephine Herbst.

Particularly admired as a protest writer was John Dos Passos, who first attracted attention with an anti-World War I novel, Three Soldiers (1921). His most sweeping indictments of the modern social and economic system, Manhattan Transfer (1925) and the U.S.A. trilogy (The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money [1930–36]), employed various narrative innovations such as the “camera eye” and “newsreel,” along with a large cast of characters, to attack society from the left. Nathanael West’s novels, including Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), A Cool Million (1934), and The Day of the Locust (1939), used black comedy to create a bitter vision of an inhuman and brutal world and its depressing effects on his sensitive but ineffectual protagonists. West evoked the tawdry but rich materials of mass culture and popular fantasy to mock the pathos of the American Dream, a frequent target during the Depression years.

Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck

Three authors whose writings showed a shift from disillusionment were Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck. Hemingway’s early short stories and his first novels, The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), were full of the existential disillusionment of the Lost Generation expatriates. The Spanish Civil War, however, led him to espouse the possibility of collective action to solve social problems, and his less-effective novels, including To Have and Have Not (1937) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), embodied this new belief. He regained some of his form in The Old Man and the Sea (1952) and his posthumously published memoir of Paris between the wars, A Moveable Feast (1964). Hemingway’s writing was influenced by his background in journalism and by the spare manner and flat sentence rhythms of Gertrude Stein, his Paris friend and a pioneer Modernist, especially in such works of hers as Three Lives (1909). His own great impact on other writers came from his deceptively simple, stripped-down prose, full of unspoken implication, and from his tough but vulnerable masculinity, which created a myth that imprisoned the author and haunted the World War II generation.

Hemingway’s great rival as a stylist and mythmaker was William Faulkner, whose writing was as baroque as Hemingway’s was spare. Influenced by Sherwood Anderson, Herman Melville, and especially James Joyce, Faulkner combined stream-of-consciousness techniques with rich social history. Works such as The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and The Hamlet (1940) were parts of the unfolding history of Yoknapatawpha County, a mythical Mississippi community, which depicted the transformation and the decadence of the South. Faulkner’s work was dominated by a sense of guilt going back to the American Civil War and the appropriation of Indian lands. Though often comic, his work pictured the disintegration of the leading families and, in later books such as Go Down, Moses (1942) and Intruder in the Dust (1948), showed a growing concern with the troubled role of race in Southern life.

Steinbeck’s career, marked by uneven achievements, began with a historical novel, Cup of Gold (1929), in which he voiced a distrust of society and glorified the anarchistic individualist typical of the rebellious 1920s. He showed his affinity for colourful outcasts, such as the paisanos of the Monterey area, in the short novels Tortilla Flat (1935), Of Mice and Men (1937), and Cannery Row (1945). His best books were inspired by the social struggles of migrant farm workers during the Great Depression, including the simply written but ambiguous strike novel In Dubious Battle (1936) and his flawed masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The latter, a protest novel punctuated by prose-poem interludes, tells the story of the migration of the Joads, an Oklahoma Dust Bowl family, to California. During their almost biblical journey, they learn the necessity for collective action among the poor and downtrodden to prevent them from being destroyed individually.

Lyric fictionists

An interesting development in fiction, abetted by Modernism, was a shift from naturalistic to poetic writing. There was an increased tendency to select details and endow them with symbolic meaning, to set down the thought processes and emotions of the characters, and to make use of rhythmic prose. In varied ways Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Cabell, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Faulkner all showed evidence of this—in passages, in short stories, and even in entire novels. Faulkner showed the tendency at its worst in A Fable (1954), which, ironically, won a Pulitzer Prize.

Lyricism was especially prominent in the writings of Willa Cather. O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918) contained poetic passages about the disappearing frontier and the creative efforts of frontier folk. A Lost Lady (1923) and The Professor’s House (1925) were elegiac and spare in style, though they also depicted historic social transformations, and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) was an exaltation of the past and of spiritual pioneering. Katherine Anne Porter, whose works took the form primarily of novelettes and stories, wrote more in the style of the Metaphysical poets, though she also wrote one long, ambitious novel, A Ship of Fools (1962). Her use of the stream-of-consciousness method in Flowering Judas (1930) as well as in Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) had the complexity, the irony, and the symbolic sophistication characteristic of these poets, whose work the Modernists had brought into fashion.

Two of the most intensely lyrical works of the 1930s were autobiographical novels set in the Jewish ghetto of New York City’s Lower East Side before World War I: Michael Gold’s harsh Jews Without Money (1930) and Henry Roth’s Proustian Call It Sleep (1934), one of the greatest novels of the decade. They followed in the footsteps of Anzia Yezierska, a prolific writer of the 1920s whose passionate books about immigrant Jews, especially Bread Givers (1925), have been rediscovered by contemporary feminists.

Another lyrical and autobiographical writer, whose books have faded badly, was Thomas Wolfe, who put all his strivings, thoughts, and feelings into works such as Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and Of Time and the River (1935) before his early death in 1938. These Whitmanesque books, as well as posthumously edited ones such as The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), dealt with a figure much like Wolfe, echoing the author’s youth in the South, young manhood in the North, and eternal search to fulfill a vision. Though grandiose, they influenced many young writers, including Jack Kerouac.