American
Literature
미국 문학
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Table of Contents
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Like other national literatures, American literature was shaped by the history of the
country that produced it. For almost a century and a half, America was merely a
group of colonies scattered along the eastern seaboard of the North American
continent--colonies from which a few hardy souls tentatively ventured westward.
After a successful rebellion against the motherland, America became the United
States, a nation. By the end of the 19th century this nation extended southward
to the Gulf of Mexico, northward to the 49th parallel, and westward to the
Pacific. By the end of the 19th century, too, it had taken its place among the
powers of the world--its fortunes so interrelated with those of other nations
that inevitably it became involved in two world wars and, following these
conflicts, with the problems of Europe and East Asia. Meanwhile, the rise of
science and industry, as well as changes in ways of thinking and feeling,
wrought many modifications in people's lives. All these factors in the
development of the United States molded the literature of the country. |
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This article traces the history of
American poetry, drama, fiction, and social and literary criticism from the
early 17th century to the late 20th century. For information about closely
related literary traditions, see ENGLISH LITERATURE and
CANADIAN LITERATURE: Canadian literature in English . |
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American literature at first was
naturally a colonial literature, by authors who were Englishmen and who thought
and wrote as such. John Smith, a soldier of
fortune, is credited with initiating American literature. His chief books
included A True Relation of . . . Virginia .
. .
(1608) and The generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1624).
Although these volumes often glorified their author, they were avowedly written
to explain colonizing opportunities to Englishmen. In time, each colony was
similarly described: Daniel Denton's Brief
Description of New York (1670), William Penn's Brief Account of the Province of Pennsylvania (1682), and Thomas
Ashe's Carolina (1682) were only a few
of many works praising America as a land of economic promise. |
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Such writers acknowledged British
allegiance, but others stressed the differences of opinion that spurred the
colonists to leave their homeland. More important, they argued questions of
government involving the relationship between church and state. The attitude
that most authors attacked was jauntily set forth by Nathaniel
Ward of Massachusetts Bay in The
Simple Cobler of Aggawam in America (1647). Ward amusingly defended
the status quo and railed at colonists who sponsored newfangled notions. A
variety of counterarguments to such a conservative view were published. John
Winthrop's Journal (written
1630-49) told sympathetically of the attempt of Massachusetts Bay Colony to form
a theocracy--a state with God at its head and with its laws based upon the
Bible. Later defenders of the theocratic ideal were Increase Mather and his son
Cotton. William Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation (through 1646) showed how his pilgrim
Separatists broke completely with Anglicanism. Even more radical than Bradford
was Roger Williams, who, in a series of
controversial pamphlets, advocated not only the separation of church and state
but also the vesting of power in the people and the tolerance of different
religious beliefs. |
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The utilitarian writings of the 17th
century included biographies, treatises, accounts of voyages, and sermons. There
were few achievements in drama or fiction, since there was a widespread
prejudice against these forms. Bad but popular poetry appeared in the Bay
Psalm Book of 1640 and in Michael Wigglesworth's summary in doggerel verse
of Calvinistic belief, The Day of Doom (1662).
There was some poetry, at least, of a higher order. Anne Bradstreet of
Massachusetts wrote some lyrics published in The
Tenth Muse (1650), which movingly conveyed her feelings concerning religion
and her family. Ranked still higher by modern critics is a poet whose works were
not discovered and published until 1939: Edward Taylor,
an English-born minister and physician who lived in Boston and Westfield,
Massachusetts. Less touched by gloom than the typical Puritan, Taylor wrote
lyrics that showed his delight in Christian belief and experience. (see also "Bay
Psalm Book," , "Day of Doom: or a
Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgment, The") |
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All 17th-century American writings were
in the manner of British writings of the same period. John Smith wrote in the
tradition of geographic literature, Bradford echoed the cadences of the King
James Bible, while the Mathers and Roger Williams wrote bejeweled prose typical
of the day. Anne Bradstreet's poetic style derived from a long line of British
poets, including Spenser and Sidney, while Taylor was in the tradition of such
Metaphysical poets as George Herbert and John Donne. Both the content and form
of the literature of this first century in America were thus markedly English. |
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In America in the early years of the
18th century, some writers, such as Cotton Mather,
carried on the older traditions. His huge history and biography of Puritan New
England, Magnalia Christi Americana, in
1702, and his vigorous Manuductio ad
Ministerium, or introduction to the ministry, in 1726, were defenses of
ancient Puritan convictions. Jonathan Edwards,
initiator of the Great Awakening, a religious revival that stirred the eastern
seacoast for many years, eloquently defended his burning belief in Calvinistic
doctrine--of the concept that man, born totally depraved, could attain virtue
and salvation only through God's grace--in his powerful sermons and most notably
in the philosophical treatise Freedom of
Will (1754). He supported his claims by relating them to a complex
metaphysical system and by reasoning brilliantly in clear and often beautiful
prose. |
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But Mather and Edwards were defending a
doomed cause. Liberal New England ministers such as John Wise and Jonathan
Mayhew moved toward a less rigid religion. Samuel Sewall heralded other changes
in his amusing Diary, covering the
years 1673-1729. Though sincerely religious, he showed in daily records how
commercial life in New England replaced rigid Puritanism with more worldly
attitudes. The Journal of Mme Sara Knight
comically detailed a journey that lady took to New York in 1704. She wrote
vividly of what she saw and commented upon it from the standpoint of an orthodox
believer, but a quality of levity in her witty writings showed that she was much
less fervent than the Pilgrim founders had been. In the South, William
Byrd of Virginia, an aristocratic plantation owner, contrasted sharply
with gloomier predecessors. His record of a surveying trip in 1728, The History of the Dividing Line, and his account of a visit to his
frontier properties in 1733, A Journey to
the Land of Eden, were his chief works. Years in England, on the Continent,
and among the gentry of the South had created gaiety and grace of expression,
and, although a devout Anglican, Byrd was as playful as the Restoration wits
whose works he clearly admired. |
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The wrench of the American Revolution
emphasized differences that had been growing between American and British
political concepts. As the colonists moved to the belief that rebellion was
inevitable, fought the bitter war, and worked to found the new nation's
government, they were influenced by a number of very effective political
writers, such as Samuel Adams and John Dickinson, both of whom favoured the
colonists, and Loyalist Joseph Galloway. But two figures loomed above these -- Benjamin
Franklin and Thomas Paine. |
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Franklin, born in 1706, had started to
publish his writings in his brother's newspaper, the New England Courant, as early as 1722. This newspaper championed the
cause of the "Leather Apron" man and the farmer and appealed by using
easily understood language and practical arguments. The idea that common sense
was a good guide was clear in both the popular Poor Richard's almanac, which
Franklin edited between 1732 and 1757 and filled with prudent and witty
aphorisms purportedly written by uneducated but experienced Richard Saunders,
and in the author's Autobiography, written
between 1771 and 1788, a record of his rise from humble circumstances that
offered worldly wise suggestions for future success. |
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Franklin's self-attained culture, deep
and wide, gave substance and skill to varied articles, pamphlets, and reports
that he wrote concerning the dispute with Great Britain, many of them extremely
effective in stating and shaping the colonists' cause. |
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Thomas Paine
went from his native England to Philadelphia and became a magazine editor and
then, about 14 months later, the most effective propagandist for the colonial
cause. His pamphlet "Common Sense"
(January 1776) did much to influence the colonists to declare their
independence. "The American Crisis"
papers (December 1776-December 1783) spurred Americans to fight on through
the blackest years of the war. Based upon Paine's simple deistic beliefs, they
showed the conflict as a stirring melodrama with the angelic colonists against
the forces of evil. Such white and black picturings were highly effective
propaganda. Another reason for Paine's success was his poetic fervour, which
found expression in impassioned words and phrases long to be remembered and
quoted. |
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In the postwar period some of these
eloquent men were no longer able to win a hearing. Thomas Paine and Samuel Adams
lacked the constructive ideas that appealed to those interested in forming a new
government. Others fared better--for example, Franklin, whose tolerance and
sense showed in addresses to the constitutional convention. A different group of
authors, however, became leaders in the new period--Thomas Jefferson and the
talented writers of The
Federalist papers, a series of 85
essays published in 1787 and 1788 urging the virtues of the proposed new
constitution. They were written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John
Jay. More distinguished for insight into problems of government and cool logic
than for eloquence, these works became a classic statement of American
governmental, and more generally of republican, theory. At the time they were
highly effective in influencing legislators who voted on the new constitution.
Hamilton, who wrote perhaps 51 of the Federalist
papers, became a leader of the Federalist Party and, as first secretary of
the treasury (1789-95), wrote messages that were influential in increasing the
power of national government at the expense of the state governments. |
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Thomas Jefferson
was an influential political writer during and after the war. The merits of his
great summary, the Declaration of Independence,
consisted, as Madison pointed out, "in a lucid communication of human
rights . . . in a style and tone appropriate to the great occasion, and to the
spirit of the American people." After the war he formulated the exact
tenets of his faith in various papers but most richly in his letters and
inaugural addresses, in which he urged individual freedom and local autonomy--a
theory of decentralization differing from Hamilton's belief in strong federal
government. Though he held that all men are created equal, Jefferson thought
that "a natural aristocracy" of "virtues and talents" should
hold high governmental positions. |
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Poetry became a weapon during the American
Revolution, with both Loyalists and Continentals urging their forces on,
stating their arguments, and celebrating their heroes in verse and songs such as
"Yankee Doodle," "Nathan Hale," and "The
Epilogue," mostly set to popular British melodies and in manner resembling
other British poems of the period. |
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The most memorable American poet of the
period was Philip Freneau, whose first
well-known poems, Revolutionary War satires, served as effective propaganda;
later he turned to various aspects of the American scene. Although he wrote much
in the stilted manner of the Neoclassicists, such poems as "The Indian
Burying Ground," "The Wild Honey Suckle," "To a
Caty-did," and "On a Honey Bee" were romantic lyrics of real
grace and feeling that were forerunners of a literary movement destined to be
important in the 19th century. |
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In the years toward the close of the
18th century, both dramas and novels of some historical importance were
produced. Though theatrical groups had long been active in America, the first
American comedy presented professionally was Royall Tyler's Contrast (1787). This drama was full of echoes of Goldsmith and
Sheridan, but it contained a Yankee character (the predecessor of many such in
years to follow) who brought something native to the stage. (see also "Contrast,
The") |
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William Hill Brown
wrote the first American novel, The Power
of Sympathy (1789), which showed authors how to overcome ancient prejudices
against this form by following the sentimental novel form invented by Samuel
Richardson. A flood of sentimental novels followed to the end of the 19th
century. H.H. Brackenridge followed Cervantes' Don Quixote and Henry Fielding with some popular success in Modern
Chivalry (1792-1815), an amusing satire on democracy and an
interesting portrayal of frontier life. Gothic thrillers were to some extent
nationalized in Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798), Arthur Mervyn,
and Edgar Huntly (1799). |
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After the American Revolution, and
increasingly after the War of 1812, American writers were exhorted to produce a
literature that was truly native. As if in response, four authors of very
respectable stature appeared. William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, James
Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe initiated a great half century of literary
development. |
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Bryant,
a New Englander by birth, attracted attention in his 23rd year when the first
version of his poem "Thanatopsis" (1817) appeared. This, as well as
some later poems, was written under the influence of English 18th-century poets.
Still later, however, under the influence of Wordsworth and other Romantics, he
wrote nature lyrics that vividly represented the New
England scene. Turning to journalism, he had a long career as a fighting
liberal editor of The Evening Post. He
himself was overshadowed, in renown at least, by a native-born New Yorker, Washington
Irving. |
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Irving, youngest member of a prosperous
merchant family, joined with ebullient young men of the town in producing the Salmagundi
papers (1807-08), which took off the foibles of Manhattan's citizenry. This
was followed by A History of New York (1809),
by "Diedrich Knickerbocker," a burlesque history that mocked pedantic
scholarship and sniped at the old Dutch families. Irving's models in these works
were obviously Neoclassical English satirists, from whom he had learned to write
in a polished, bright style. Later, having met Sir Walter Scott and having
become acquainted with imaginative German literature, he introduced a new
Romantic note in The Sketch Book (1819-20),
Bracebridge Hall (1822), and other
works. He was the first American writer to win the ungrudging (if somewhat
surprised) respect of British critics. |
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James Fenimore Cooper
won even wider fame. Following the pattern of Sir Walter Scott's
"Waverley" novels, he did his best work in the
"Leatherstocking" tales (1823-41), a five-volume series celebrating
the career of a great frontiersman named Natty Bumppo. His skill in weaving
history into inventive plots and in characterizing his compatriots brought him
acclaim not only in America and England but on the continent of Europe as well. |
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Edgar Allan Poe,
reared in the South, lived and worked as an author and editor in Baltimore,
Philadelphia, Richmond, and New York City. His work was shaped largely by
analytical skill that showed clearly in his role as an editor: time after time
he gauged the taste of readers so accurately that circulation figures of
magazines under his direction soared impressively. It showed itself in his
critical essays, wherein he lucidly explained and logically applied his
criteria. His gothic tales of terror were written in accordance with his
findings when he studied the most popular magazines of the day. His masterpieces
of terror--"The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), "The Masque
of the Red Death" (1842), "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846), and
others--were written according to a carefully worked out psychological method.
So were his detective stories, such as "The
Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), which historians credited as the first
of the genre. As a poet, he achieved fame with "The Raven" (1845). His
work, especially his critical writings and carefully crafted poems, had perhaps
a greater influence in France, where they were translated by Charles Baudelaire,
than in his own country. |
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Two Southern novelists were also
outstanding in the earlier part of the century: John
Pendleton Kennedy and William Gilmore Simms. In Swallow Barn (1832), Kennedy wrote delightfully of life on the
plantations. Simms's forte was the writing of
historical novels like those of Scott and Cooper, which treated the history of
the frontier and his native South Carolina. The
Yemassee (1835) and Revolutionary romances show him at his best. |
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The authors who began to come to
prominence in the 1830s and were active until about the end of the Civil
War--the humorists, the classic New Englanders,
Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and others--did their work in a new spirit, and
their achievements were of a new sort. In part, this was because they were in
some way influenced by the broadening democratic concepts that in 1829 triumphed
in Andrew Jackson's inauguration as president. In part, it was because, in this
Romantic period of emphasis upon native scenes and characters in many
literatures, they put much of America into their books. (see also Jacksonian
Democracy) |
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Particularly full of vivid touches were
the writings of two groups of American humorists whose works appeared between
1830 and 1867. One group created several down-east Yankee characters who used
commonsense arguments to comment upon the political and social scene. The most
important of this group were Seba Smith, James Russell
Lowell, and Benjamin P. Shillaber. These authors caught the talk and
character of New England at that time as no one else had done. In the old
Southwest, meanwhile, such writers as Davy Crockett, Augustus Baldwin
Longstreet, Johnson J. Hooper, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, Joseph G. Baldwin, and
George Washington Harris drew lively pictures of the ebullient frontier and
showed the interest in the common man that was a part of Jacksonian democracy. |
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Although Lowell for a time was one of
these writers of rather earthy humour, his lifelong ties were to a group of New
England writers associated with Harvard and Cambridge, Massachusetts--the
Brahmins, as they came to be called--at an opposite extreme. Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes,
and Lowell were all aristocrats, all steeped in foreign culture, all professors
at Harvard. Longfellow adapted European methods of storytelling and versifying
to narrative poems dealing with American history, and a few of his less didactic
lyrics perfectly married technique and subject matter. Holmes, in occasional
poems and his "Breakfast Table" series (1858-91), brought touches of
urbanity and jocosity to a perhaps oversober polite literature. Lowell, in poems
descriptive of the out-of-doors in America, put much of his homeland into verse.
His odes--particularly the "Harvard Commemoration Ode" (1865)--gave
fine expression to noble sentiments. |
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Concord, Massachusetts, a village not
far from Cambridge, was the home of leaders of another important New England
group. The way for this group had been prepared by the rise of a theological
system, Unitarianism, which early in the 19th
century had replaced Calvinism as the faith of a large share of the New
Englanders. Ralph Waldo Emerson, most famous of
the Concord philosophers, started as a Unitarian minister but found even that
liberal doctrine too confining for his broad beliefs. He became a
Transcendentalist who, like other ancient and modern Platonists, trusted to
insights transcending logic and experience for revelations of the deepest
truths. His scheme of things ranged from the lowest objects and most practical
chores to soaring flights of imagination and inspired beliefs. His Essays (1841-44), Representative
Men (1850), and English Traits (1856)
were thoughtful and poetic explanations of his beliefs; and his rough-hewn
lyrics, packed with thought and feeling, were as close to 17th-century
Metaphysical poems as any produced in his own time. |
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An associate of Emerson with a salty
personality of his own and an individual way of thinking, Henry
David Thoreau, a sometime surveyor, labourer, and naturalist, was closer
to the earthy and the practical than even Emerson was. He also was more of a
humorist--a dry Yankee commentator with a flair for paradoxical phrases and
sentences. Finally, he was a learned man, widely read in Western classics and
books of the Orient. These qualities gave distinction to A
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and to Walden
(1854). The latter was a record of his experiences and ponderings during the
time he lived in a hut by Walden Pond--a defense of his belief that modern man
should simplify his demands if need be to "suck out all the marrow of
life." In his essay "Civil Disobedience"
(1849; originally titled "Resistance to Civil Government"), Thoreau
expounded his anarchistic views of government, insisting that if an injustice of
government is "of such a nature that it requires injustice to another [you
should] break the law [and] let your life be a counter friction to stop the
machine." (see also "Walden;
or, Life in the Woods") |
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Associated with these two major figures
were such minor Transcendentalists as Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, Orestes
Brownson, Margaret Fuller, and Jones Very. Fuller edited The Dial, the chief Transcendental magazine, and was important in
the feminist movement. |
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A worldwide movement for change that
exploded in the revolutions of 1848 naturally attracted numerous Americans.
Reform was in the air, particularly in New England. At times even Brahmins and
Transcendentalists took part. William Lloyd Garrison,
ascetic and fanatical, was a moving spirit in the fight against slavery; his
weekly newspaper, The Liberator (1831-65),
despite a small circulation, was its most influential organ. A contributor to
the newspaper--probably the greatest writer associated with the movement -- was John
Greenleaf Whittier. His simple but emotional poems on behalf of abolition
were collected in such volumes as Poems
Written During the Progress of the Abolition Question .
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(1837), Voices of Freedom (1846), and Songs
of Labor, and Other Poems (1850). The outstanding novelist of the
movement--so far as effect was concerned -- was Harriet
Beecher Stowe. Her Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) combined
the elements of contemporary humour and sentimental fiction to dramatize the
plight of the Negro. |
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One other group of writers--and a great
novelist--contributed to the literature of New England in this period of its
greatest glory. The group consisted of several historians who combined scholarly
methods learned abroad with vivid and dramatic narration. These included George
Bancroft, author of History of the United
States (completed in 12 volumes in 1882), and John
Lothrop Motley, who traced the history of the Dutch Republic and the
United Netherlands in nine fascinating volumes (1856-74). The leading member of
the group was Francis Parkman, who, in a series
of books (1851-92), wrote as a historian of the fierce contests between France
and England that marked the advance of the American frontier and vividly
recorded his own Western travels in The
Oregon Trail (1849). |
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History also figured in tales and
romances of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the leading New England fictionist of the
period. Many tales and longer works--for example, his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter (1850)--were set against a background of colonial
America with emphasis upon its distance in time from 19th-century New England.
Others, such as The House of the Seven
Gables (1851), dealt with the past as well as the present. Still others,
such as The Marble Faun (1860), were
set in distant countries. Remote though they were at times from what Hawthorne
called "the light of common day," they showed deep psychological
insight and probed into complex ethical problems. |
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Another great American fiction writer,
for a time a neighbour and associate of Hawthorne, was Herman
Melville. After relatively little schooling, Melville went to sea; a
whaling ship, as he put it, was his "Yale College and his Harvard."
His first books were fiction in the guise of factual writing based upon
experiences as a sailor--Typee (1846)
and Omoo (1847); so were such later
works as Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket
(1850). Between 1846 and 1851, however, Melville's reading in philosophy and
literary classics, as well as in Hawthorne's allegorical and symbolic writings,
gave him new interests and aims. The first sign of this interest was Mardi
(1849), an uneven and disjointed transitional book that used allegory after
the model of Rabelais to comment upon ideas afloat in the period--about nations,
politics, institutions, literature, and religion. The new techniques came to
fruition in Moby
Dick; or, The Whale (1851), a richly symbolical work, complex but
brilliantly integrated. Only in short stories,
"Benito Cereno"--a masterpiece of its genre--and others, in the
psychological novel Pierre (1852), and
in the novelette Billy Budd (written
1890?) was Melville later to show sporadic flashes of the genius that created Moby
Dick. |
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An ardent singer of the praise of
Manhattan, Walt Whitman saw less of the dark
side of life than Melville did. He was a believer in Jacksonian democracy, in
the splendour of the common man. Inspired by the Romantic concept of a poet as
prophet and also by the Transcendental philosophy of Emerson, Whitman in 1855
published the first edition of Leaves
of Grass. As years passed, nine revised and expanded editions of this
work were published. This autobiography in verse was intended to show the ideas,
beliefs, emotions, and experiences of the common man in a great period of
American individualism. Whitman had a hard time winning a following because he
was frank and unconventional in his Transcendental thinking, because he used
free verse rather than rhymed or regularly metred verse, and because his poems
were not conventionally organized. Nevertheless, he steadily gained the approval
of critics and in time came to be recognized as one of the great poets of
America. |
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Like the Revolution and the election of
Andrew Jackson, the Civil War was a turning point in U.S. history and a
beginning of new ways of living. Industry became increasingly important,
factories rose and cities grew, and agrarian preeminence declined. The frontier,
which before had always been an important factor in the economic scheme, moved
steadily westward and, toward the end of the 19th century, vanished. The rise of
modern America was accompanied, naturally, by important mutations in literature.
(see also American
Civil War) |
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Although they continued to employ some
devices of the older American humorists, a group of comic writers that rose to
prominence was different in important ways from the older group. Charles Farrar
Browne, David Ross Locke, Charles Henry Smith, Henry Wheeler Shaw, and Edgar
Wilson Nye wrote, respectively, as Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. (for Vesuvius)
Nasby, Bill Arp, Josh Billings, and Bill Nye. Appealing to a national audience,
these authors forsook the sectional characterizations of earlier humorists and
assumed the roles of less individualized literary comedians. The nature of the
humour thus shifted from character portrayal to verbal devices such as poor
grammar, bad spelling, and slang, incongruously combined with Latinate words and
learned allusions. Most that they wrote wore badly, but thousands of Americans
in their time and some in later times found these authors vastly amusing. |
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The first group of fiction writers to
become popular--the local colorists--took over to some extent the task of
portraying sectional groups that had been abandoned by writers of the new
humour. Bret Harte, first of these writers to
achieve wide success, admitted an indebtedness to prewar sectional humorists, as
did some others; and all showed resemblances to the earlier group. Within a
brief period, books by pioneers in the movement appeared: Harriet Beecher
Stowe's Oldtown Folks (1869) and Sam
Lawson's Oldtown Fireside Stories (1871), delightful vignettes of New
England; Bret Harte's Luck of Roaring Camp, and Other Sketches (1870), humorous and
sentimental tales of California mining camp life; and Edward Eggleston's Hoosier
Schoolmaster (1871), a novel of the early days of the settlement of Indiana.
Down into the 20th century, short stories (and a relatively small number of
novels) in patterns set by these three continued to appear. In time, practically
every corner of the country had been portrayed in local-colour
fiction. Additional writings were the depictions of Louisiana Creoles by George
W. Cable, of Virginia blacks by Thomas Nelson
Page, of Georgia blacks by Joel Chandler Harris,
of Tennessee mountaineers by Mary Noailles Murfree
(Charles Egbert Craddock), of tight-lipped folk of New England by Sarah
Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman,
of people of New York City by Henry Cuyler Bunner
and William Sydney Porter ("O. Henry").
The avowed aim of some of these writers was to portray realistically the lives
of various sections and thus to promote understanding in a united nation. The
stories as a rule were only partially realistic, however, since the authors
tended nostalgically to revisit the past instead of portraying their own time,
to winnow out less glamorous aspects of life, or to develop their stories with
sentiment or humour. Touched by romance though they were, these fictional works
were transitional to realism, for they did portray common folk sympathetically;
they did concern themselves with dialect and mores; and some at least avoided
older sentimental or romantic formulas. |
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Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark
Twain) was allied with literary comedians and local colorists. As a
printer's apprentice, he knew and emulated the prewar sectional humorists. He
rose to prominence in days when Artemus Ward, Bret Harte, and their followers
were idols of the public. His first books, The
Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing
It (1872), like several of later periods, were travel books in which
affiliations with postwar professional humorists were clearest. The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life
on the Mississippi (1883), and The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), his best works, which re-created the
life of the Mississippi valley in the past, were closest to the work of older
humorists and local colorists. Even in his best work, however, he succumbed now
and then to the temptation to play the buffoon or sink into burlesque. Despite
his flaws, he was one of America's greatest writers. He was a very funny man. He
had more skill than his teachers in selecting evocative details, and he had a
genius for characterization. |
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Born and raised in Ohio, William
Dean Howells was an effective advocate of a new realistic mode of fiction
writing. At the start, Howells conceived of realism as truthful portrayal of
ordinary facets of life--with some limitations; he preferred comedy to tragedy,
and he tended to be reticent to the point of prudishness. The formula was
displayed at its best in Their Wedding
Journey (1872), A Modern Instance (1882),
and The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885).
Howells preferred novels he wrote after he encountered Tolstoy's writings and
was persuaded by them, as he said, to "set art forever below
humanity." In such later novels as Annie
Kilburn (1888) and A Hazard of New
Fortunes (1890), he chose characters not only because they were commonplace
but also because the stories he told about them were commentaries upon society,
government, and economics. |
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Other American writers toward the close
of the 19th century moved toward naturalism, a more advanced stage of realism. Hamlin
Garland's writings exemplified some aspects of this development when he
made short stories and novels vehicles for philosophical and social preachments
and was franker than Howells in stressing the harsher details of the farmer's
struggles and in treating the subject of sex. His Main-Travelled
Roads (1891) and Rose of Dutcher's
Coolly (1895) displayed Garland's particular talents. These and a critical
manifesto for the new fiction, Crumbling
Idols (1894), were influential contributions to a developing movement. |
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Other American authors of the same
period or slightly later were avowed followers of French naturalists led by Émile
Zola. Theodore Dreiser, for instance,
treated subjects that had seemed too daring to earlier realists and, like other
Naturalists, illustrated his own beliefs by his depictions of characters and
unfolding of plots. Holding that men's deeds were "chemical
compulsions," he showed characters unable to direct their actions. Holding
also that "the race was to the swift and the battle to the strong," he
showed characters defeated by stronger and more ruthless opponents. His major
books included Sister Carrie (1900), Jennie
Gerhardt (1911), The Financier (1912),
The Titan (1914), and--much later--An
American Tragedy (1925). |
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Dreiser did not bother with--or did not
care for--niceties of style or elaborate symbolism such as were found in French
naturalistic works; but Stephen Crane and Frank
Norris were attentive to such matters. In short novels, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895), and in some of his short stories,
Crane was an impressionist who made his details and his setting forth of them
embody a conception of man overwhelmed by circumstance and environment. Frank
Norris, who admired Crane's "aptitude for making phrases--sparks
that cast a momentary gleam upon whole phases of life," himself tried to
make phrases, scenes, and whole narratives cast such gleams in McTeague
(1899), The Octopus (1901), and The
Pit (1903). Both Crane and Norris died young, their full abilities
undeveloped but their experiments foreshadowing later achievements in the
20th-century novel. |
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In the books of Henry James, born in New
York but later an expatriate in England, fiction took a different pathway. Like
realists and naturalists of his time, he thought that fiction should reproduce
reality. He conceived of reality, however, as twice translated--first, through
the author's peculiar experiencing of it and, second, through his unique
depicting of it. Deep insight and thorough experience were no more important,
therefore, than the complicated and delicate task of the artist. The
Art of Fiction (1884), essays on novelists, and brilliant prefaces to his
collected works showed him struggling thoroughly and consciously with the
problems of his craft. Together, they formed an important body of discussion of
fictional artistry. |
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An excellent short-story writer, James
nevertheless was chiefly important for novels in which his doctrines found
concrete embodiment. Outstanding were The
American (1877), The Portrait of a
Lady (1881), The Spoils of Poynton (1897),
What Maisie Knew (1897), The
Wings of the Dove (1902), The
Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden
Bowl (1904). The earliest of these were international novels wherein
conflicts arose from relationships between Americans and Europeans--each group
with its own characteristics and morals. As time passed, he became increasingly
interested in the psychological processes of his characters and in a subtle
rendering of their limited insights, their perceptions, and their emotions. |
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Writers of many types of works
contributed to a great body of literature that flourished between the Civil War
and 1914--literature of social revolt. Novels attacked the growing power of
business and the growing corruption of government, and some novelists outlined
utopias. Political corruption and inefficiency figured in Henry Adams' novel Democracy
(1880). Edward Bellamy's Looking
Backward (1888) was both an indictment of the capitalistic system and
an imaginative picturing of a utopia achieved by a collectivist society in the
year 2000. Howells' Traveler from Altruria
(1894) pleaded for an equalitarian state in which the government regimented
men's lives. The year 1906 saw the publication of Upton Sinclair's The
Jungle, first of many works by him that criticized U.S. economic and
political life and urged Socialism as the remedy. |
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Two poets embodied criticisms in songs.
Edwin Markham's "Man with the Hoe"
(1899) was a protest against the exploitation of labour and vaguely threatened
revolution; it immediately stimulated nationwide interest. A year later William
Vaughn Moody's "Ode in Time of Hesitation" denounced growing
U.S. imperialism as a desertion of earlier principles; his "On a Soldier
Fallen in the Philippines" (1901) developed the same theme even more
effectively. |
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With the rise of journalistic
magazines, a group of journalists became notable as critics of America--the
group dubbed "the muckrakers" by
Theodore Roosevelt. Ida M. Tarbell's The
History of the Standard Oil Company (1904) and Lincoln Steffens' The
Shame of the Cities (1904) were typical contributions by two members of a
large group of journalistic crusaders. |
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One of the most devastating and most
literate attacks on modern life was an autobiography of a scion of an ancient
New England family, the Adamses. Educated at Harvard and abroad, Henry
Adams was a great teacher and historian (History
of the United States [1889-91] and Mont-Saint-Michel
and Chartres [1904]). The
Education of Henry Adams (printed privately 1906; published 1918),
however, complained that a lifelong hunt for some sort of order in the world,
some sort of faith for man, left him completely baffled. The quiet, urbane style
served well to underline, in an ironic way, the message of this pessimistic
book. |
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The later 19th century and early years
of the 20th century were a poor period for American poetry; yet (in addition to
William Vaughn Moody) two poets of distinction wrote songs that survived long
after scores of minor poets had been forgotten. One was Southern-born Sidney
Lanier, a talented musician who utilized the rhythms of music and the
thematic developments of symphonies in such fine songs as "Corn"
(1875), "The Symphony" (1875), and "The Marshes of Glynn"
(1878). Distressed, like many of his contemporaries, by changes in American
life, he wove his doubts, fears, and suggestions into his richest poems. |
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The other poet was a New Englander, Emily
Dickinson. A shy, playful, odd personality, she allowed practically none
of her writings to be published during her lifetime. Not until 1890, four years
after her death, was the first book of her poems published, to be followed at
intervals by other collections. Later poets were to be influenced by her
individual techniques--use of imperfect, or eye, rhymes, avoidance of regular
rhythms, and a tendency to pack brief stanzas with cryptic meanings. Like
Lanier, she rediscovered the value of conceits for setting forth her thought and
feeling. Such poems as "The Snake," "I Like to See It Lap the
Miles," "The Chariot," "Farther in Summer than the
Birds," and "There's a Certain Slant of Light" represented her
unusual talent at its best. |
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Important movements in drama, poetry,
fiction, and criticism took form in the years before, during, and after World
War I. The eventful period that followed the war left its imprint upon books of
all kinds. Literary forms of the period were extraordinarily varied, and in
drama, poetry, and fiction leading authors tended toward radical technical
experiments. |
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Although drama had not been a major art
form in the 19th century, no type of writing was more experimental than a new
drama that arose in rebellion against the glib commercial stage. In the early
years of the 20th century, Americans traveling in Europe encountered a vital,
flourishing theatre; returning home, some of them became active in founding the Little
Theatre movement throughout the country. Freed from commercial
limitations, playwrights experimented with dramatic forms and methods of
production, and in time producers, actors, and dramatists appeared who had been
trained in college classrooms and community playhouses. Some Little Theatre
groups became commercial producers--for example, the Washington Square Players,
founded in 1915, which became the Theatre Guild (first production in 1919). The
resulting drama was marked by a spirit of innovation and by a new seriousness
and maturity. |
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Eugene O'Neill,
the most admired dramatist of the period, was a product of this movement. He
worked with the Provincetown Players before his plays were commercially
produced. His dramas were remarkable for their range. Beyond
the Horizon (first performed 1920), Anna
Christie (1921), Desire Under the Elms
(1924), and The Iceman Cometh (1946)
were naturalistic works, while The Emperor
Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1922)
made use of the Expressionistic techniques
developed in German drama in the period 1914-24. He also employed a
stream-of-consciousness form in Strange
Interlude (1928) and produced a work that combined myth, family drama, and
psychological analysis in Mourning Becomes
Electra (1931). |
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No other dramatist was as generally
praised as O'Neill, but many others wrote plays that reflected the growth of a
serious and varied drama, including Maxwell Anderson,
whose verse dramas have dated badly, and Robert E.
Sherwood, a Broadway professional who wrote both comedy (Reunion
in Vienna [1931]) and tragedy (There
Shall Be No Night [1940]). Marc Connelly
wrote touching fantasy in a Negro folk biblical play, The
Green Pastures (1930). Like O'Neill, Elmer Rice
made use of both Expressionistic techniques (The
Adding Machine [1923]) and naturalism (Street
Scene [1929]). Lillian Hellman wrote
powerful, well-crafted melodramas in The
Children's Hour (1934) and The Little
Foxes (1939). Radical theatre experiments included Marc Blitzstein's
savagely satiric musical The Cradle Will
Rock (1937) and the work of Orson Welles and John Houseman for the
government-sponsored Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Theatre
Project. The premier radical theatre of the decade was the Group
Theatre (1931-41) under Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg, which became
best known for presenting the work of Clifford Odets.
In Waiting for Lefty (1935), a stirring plea for labour unionism, Odets
roused the audience to an intense pitch of fervour, and in Awake
and Sing (1935), perhaps the best play of the decade, he created a lyrical
work of family conflict and youthful yearning. Other important plays by Odets
for the Group Theatre were Paradise Lost
(1935), Golden Boy (1937), and Rocket
to the Moon (1938). Thornton Wilder used
stylized settings and poetic dialogue in Our
Town (1938) and turned to fantasy in The
Skin of Our Teeth (1942). William Saroyan
shifted his lighthearted, anarchic vision from fiction to drama with My Heart's in the Highlands and The
Time of Your Life (both 1939). |
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Poetry ranged between traditional types
of verse and experimental writing that departed radically from the established
forms of the 19th century. Two New England poets, Edwin
Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost, who
were not noted for technical experimentation, won both critical and popular
acclaim in this period. Robinson, whose first book appeared in 1896, found
sonnets, ballad stanzas, and blank verse satisfactory to his thought. In the
1920s he won three Pulitzer Prizes--for his Collected
Poems (published 1921), The Man Who
Died Twice (1925), and Tristram (1927).
Like Robinson, Frost used traditional stanzas and blank verse in volumes such as
A Boy's Will (1913), his first book,
and North of Boston (1914), New
Hampshire (1923), A Further Range (1936),
and A Masque of Reason (1945). The
best-known poet of his generation, Frost, like Robinson, saw and commented upon
the tragic aspects of life in poems such as "Design,"
"Directive," and "Provide, Provide." |
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Just as modern American drama had its
beginnings in little theatres, modern American poetry took form in little
magazines. Particularly important was Poetry:
A Magazine of Verse, founded by Harriet Monroe in Chicago in 1912.
The surrounding region soon became prominent as the home of three poets: Vachel
Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, and Edgar
Lee Masters. Lindsay's blend of legendary lore and native oratory in
irregular odelike forms was well adapted to oral presentation, and his lively
readings from his works contributed to the success of such books as General
William Booth Enters into Heaven, and Other Poems (1913) and The
Congo, and Other Poems (1914). Sandburg wrote of life on the prairies and in
Midwestern cities in Whitmanesque free verse in such volumes as Chicago
Poems (1916) and The People, Yes (1936).
Masters' very popular Spoon
River Anthology (1915) consisted of free-verse monologues by village
men and women, most of whom spoke bitterly of their frustrated lives. |
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Writing traditional sonnets and brief,
personal lyrics, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sara
Teasdale were innovative in being unusually frank (according to the
standard of their time) for women poets. Three fine black poets-- James
Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Countee
Cullen--also found old molds satisfactory for dealing with new subjects,
specifically the problems of their race. While Conrad
Aiken experimented with poetical imitations of symphonic forms often
mingled with stream-of-consciousness techniques, E.E.
Cummings used typographical novelties to produce poems that had
surprisingly fresh impact. Marianne Moore
invented and brilliantly employed a kind of free verse that was marked by a
wonderfully sharp and idiosyncratic focus on objects and details. Robinson
Jeffers used violent imagery and modified free or blank verse to express
perhaps the most bitter views voiced by a major poet in this period. |
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Except for a period after World War II,
when he was confined in St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Washington, D.C., Ezra
Pound lived outside the United States after 1908. He had, nevertheless, a
profound influence on 20th-century writing in English, both as a practitioner of
verse and as a patron and impresario of other writers. His most controversial
work remained The Cantos, the first installment of
which appeared in 1926 and the latest in 1959 (Thrones: 96-109 de los
cantares). |
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Like Pound, to whom he was much
indebted, T.S. Eliot lived abroad most of his
life, becoming a British subject in 1927. His first volume, Prufrock
and Other Observations, was published in 1917. In 1922 appeared The
Waste Land, the poem by which he first became famous. As a poet and
critic, Eliot exercised a strong influence, especially in the period between
World Wars I and II. In what some critics regard as his finest work, Four Quartets (1943), Eliot explored
through images of great beauty and haunting power his own past, the past of the
human race, and the meaning of human history. |
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Eliot was an acknowledged master of a
varied group of poets whose work was indebted to 17th-century English Metaphysical
poets, especially to John Donne. Eliot's influence was clear in the
writings of Archibald MacLeish, whose earlier
poems showed resemblances to The Waste
Land. A number of Southern poets (who were also critics) were influenced by
Eliot--John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, and Allen Tate. Younger American
Metaphysicals who emerged later included Louise Bogan, Léonie Adams,
Muriel Rukeyser, Delmore Schwartz, and Karl Shapiro. But there were several
major poets strongly opposed to Eliot's influence. Their style and subjects
tended to be romantic and visionary. These included Hart
Crane, whose long poem The Bridge
(1930) aimed to create a Whitmanesque American epic, and Wallace
Stevens, a lush and sensuous writer who made an astonishing literary
debut with the poems collected in Harmonium
(1923). Another opponent of Eliot was William Carlos
Williams, who invested his experimental prose and magically simple
lyrics--in works such as Spring and All
(1923)--with the mundane details of American life and wrote about American myth
and cultural history with great sweep in In
the American Grain (1925). |
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The little
magazines that helped the growth of the poetry also contributed to a
development of the fiction of the era. They printed daring or unconventional
short stories and published attacks upon established writers. The Dial
(1880-1929), the Little Review
(1914-29), the Seven Arts (1916-17),
and others encouraged modernist innovation. More potent were two magazines
edited by the ferociously funny journalist-critic H.L.
Mencken--The
Smart Set (editorship 1914-23) and American
Mercury (which he coedited between 1924 and 1933). A powerful
influence and a scathing critic of puritanism, Mencken helped launch the new
fiction. |
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Mencken's major enthusiasms included the
fiction of Joseph Conrad and Theodore Dreiser, but he also promoted minor
writers for their attacks on gentility, such as James
Branch Cabell, or their revolt against the narrow, frustrated quality of
life in rural communities, including Zona Gale and Ruth Suckow. The most
distinguished of these writers was Sherwood Anderson.
His Winesburg,
Ohio (1919) and Triumph of the
Egg (1921) were collections of short stories that showed villagers suffering
from all sorts of phobias and suppressions. Anderson in time wrote several
novels, the best being Poor White
(1920). |
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In 1920 critics noticed that a new
school of fiction had risen to prominence with the success of books such as F.
Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise and
Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, fictions
that tended to be frankly psychological or modern in their unsparing portrayals
of contemporary life. Novels of the 1920s were often lyrical and personal, but
also, in the despairing mood that followed World War I, apt to express
disillusionment. Novels of the 1930s inclined toward radical social criticism,
in response to the miseries of the Great Depression,
though some of the best, by writers such as William Faulkner, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Henry Roth, and Nathanael West, continued to explore the modernist
vein of the previous decade. |
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F. Scott Fitzgerald's
This Side of
Paradise (1920) showed the disillusionment and moral disintegration
of post-World War I America. 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 end of the 20th
century. Similar careful documentation, though little satire, characterized James
T. Farrell's naturalistic Studs
Lonigan trilogy (1932-35), which described the stifling effects of 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
the 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, Dostoyevskyan in their intensity, dealing boldly with
the plight of American blacks especially in the 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
black Florida town in which she had grown up. |
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A number of authors wrote proletarian
novels attacking capitalist exploitation, including 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. |
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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" 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. 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. |
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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
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. |
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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,
Melville, and especially James Joyce, he 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), 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. |
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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 short novels like Tortilla
Flat (1935), the fable 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 interrupted 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. |
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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 rhythmical prose. In varied ways, Crane, 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. |
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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) was elegiac in form and spare in style, though it also
depicted a historic social transformation, 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 of novelettes and stories, wrote more in the style of
the Metaphysical poets. 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. |
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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 a prolific writer of the 1920s, Anzia Yezierska, whose
passionate books about immigrant Jews, especially Bread Givers (1925), have been rediscovered by contemporary
feminists. |
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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, and 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. (Wa.B./M.Di.) |
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Some historians, looking back over the
first half of the 20th century, were inclined to think that it was particularly
noteworthy for its literary criticism. Beyond doubt, criticism thrived as it had
not for several generations. It was an important influence on literature itself,
and it shaped the perceptions of readers in the face of difficult new writing. |
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The period began with a battle between a
group who called themselves the New Humanists--a group that stood for the older
values in judging literature--and another group who urged that old standards be
overthrown and new ones adopted. The New Humanists, such as Irving
Babbitt, a Harvard University professor, and Paul
Elmer More, were moralists whose work found an echo in neotraditionalist
writers such as T.S. Eliot, who shared their dislike of naturalism, Romanticism,
and the liberal faith in progress. The leader of the opposition, hardly a
liberal himself, was the pugnacious H.L. Mencken,
who insisted that the duty of writers was to present "the unvarnished
truth" about life. His magazine articles and reviews gathered in Prejudices
(1919-27) ushered in the iconoclasm of the 1920s, preparing the ground for
satiric writers like Sinclair Lewis. With his dislike of cant and hypocrisy,
Mencken helped liberate American literature from its moralistic framework. (see
also New
Humanism) |
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In this period of social change, it was
natural for critics to consider literature in relationship to society and
politics, as most 19th-century critics had done. The work of Van
Wyck Brooks and Vernon L. Parrington
illustrated two of the main approaches. In America's
Coming-of-Age (1915), Letters and
Leadership (1918), and The Ordeal of
Mark Twain (1920), Brooks scolded the American public and attacked the
philistinism, materialism, and provinciality of the Gilded Age. But he retreated
from his critical position in the popular Makers
and Finders series, which included The
Flowering of New England (1936), New
England: Indian Summer (1940), The
World of Washington Irving (1944), The
Times of Melville and Whitman (1947), and The
Confident Years (1952). These books wove an elaborate cultural tapestry of
the major and minor figures in American literature. In Main Currents in American Thought (1927-30), Parrington, a
progressive, reevaluated American literature in terms of its adherence to the
tenets of Jeffersonian democracy. (see also sociology) |
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The growth of Marxian influence upon
thinking in the 1920s and '30s manifested itself in several critical works by
V.F. Calverton, Granville Hicks, Malcolm Cowley, and Bernard Smith, as well as
numerous articles in journals such as the Modern
Quarterly, New Masses, Partisan Review, and The New Republic. Though the enthusiasm for communism waned, Marxism
contributed to the historical approach of outstanding critics such as Edmund
Wilson and Kenneth Burke and to the
entire school of New York intellectuals that formed around Partisan
Review and included critics such as Lionel Trilling and Philip Rahv. |
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Wilson and Burke, like Cowley, Morton D.
Zabel, Newton Arvin, and F.O. Matthiessen, tried to strike a balance between
aesthetic concerns and social or moral issues. They were interested both in
analyzing and in evaluating literary creations--i.e., they were eager to see in detail how a literary work was
constructed yet also to place it in a larger social or moral framework. Their
work, like that of all critics of the period, showed the influence of T.S.
Eliot. In essays and books such as The
Sacred Wood (1920) and The Use of
Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), Eliot drew close attention to the
language of literature yet also made sweeping judgments and large cultural
generalizations. His main impact was on close readers of poetry--e.g.,
I.A. Richards, William
Empson, and F.R. Leavis in England and
the New Critics in the United States, many of
whom were also poets besides being political and cultural conservatives. Along
with Eliot, they rewrote the map of literary history, challenged the dominance
of Romantic forms and styles, promoted and analyzed difficult modernist writing,
and greatly advanced ways of discussing literary structure. Major examples of
their style of close reading can be found in R.P. Blackmur's The
Double Agent (1935), Allen Tate's Reactionary
Essays on Poetry and Ideas (1936), John Crowe
Ransom's The World's Body
(1938), Yvor Winters's Maule's Curse (1938), and Cleanth Brooks's
The Well Wrought Urn (1947). Though
they were later attacked for their formalism and for avoiding the social context
of writing, the New Critics did much to further the understanding and
appreciation of literature. |
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The literary historian Malcolm Cowley
described the years between the two world wars as a "second flowering"
of American writing. Certainly American literature attained a new maturity and a
rich diversity in the 1920s and '30s, and significant works by several major
figures from those decades were published after 1945. Faulkner, Hemingway,
Steinbeck, and Katherine Anne Porter wrote memorable fiction; and Frost, Eliot,
Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, and
Gwendolyn Brooks published important poetry. Eugene O'Neill's most distinguished
play, Long Day's
Journey into Night, appeared posthumously in 1956. Before and after
World War II, Robert Penn Warren published
influential fiction, poetry, and criticism. His All
the King's Men, one of the best American political novels, won the
1947 Pulitzer Prize. Mary McCarthy became a widely read social satirist and
essayist. Henry Miller's fiction, influential primarily because of its frank
exploration of sexuality, first appeared in the United States in the 1960s.
Still, impressive new novelists, poets, and playwrights emerged after the war.
There was, in fact, a gradual changing of the guard. |
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Not only did a new generation emerge
from the war, but its ethnic, regional, and social character was quite different
from that of the preceding one. Among the younger writers were children of
immigrants, many of them Jews; blacks, only a few generations away from slavery;
and, eventually, women, who, with the rise of feminism, were to speak in a new
voice. Though the social climate of the postwar years was conservative, even
conformist, some of the most hotly discussed writers were homosexuals or
bisexuals, including Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, and James
Baldwin, whose dark themes and experimental methods cleared a path for Beat
writers like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. |
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Two distinct groups of novelists
responded to the cultural impact, and especially the technological horror, of World
War II. Norman Mailer's The
Naked and the Dead (1948) and Irwin Shaw's
The Young Lions
(1948) were realistic war novels, though Mailer's book was also a novel of
ideas, exploring fascist thinking and an obsession with power as elements of the
military mind. James Jones, amassing a
staggering quantity of closely observed detail, documented the war's human cost
in an ambitious trilogy ( From
Here to Eternity [1951], The
Thin Red Line [1962], and Whistle
[1978]) that centred on loners who resisted adapting to military discipline.
Younger novelists, profoundly shaken by the bombing of Hiroshima and the real
threat of human annihilation, found the conventions of realism inadequate for
treating the war's nightmarish implications. In Catch-22
(1961) Joseph Heller satirized the military
mentality with surreal black comedy but also injected a sense of Kafkaesque
horror. A sequel, Closing Time (1994),
was an elegy for the World War II generation. Kurt
Vonnegut, Jr., in Slaughterhouse-Five
(1969), described the Allied firebombing of the German city of Dresden with a
mixture of dark fantasy and numb, loopy humour. Later this method was applied
brilliantly to the portrayal of the Vietnam War--a conflict that seemed in
itself surreal--by Tim O'Brien in Going
After Cacciato (1978). |
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In part because of the atomic bomb,
American writers turned increasingly to black humour and absurdist fantasy. Many
found the naturalistic approach incapable of communicating the rapid pace and
the sheer implausibility of contemporary life. A highly self-conscious fiction
emerged, laying bare its own literary devices, questioning the nature of
representation, and often imitating or parodying earlier fiction rather than
social reality. Russian-born Vladimir Nabokov
and the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges were
strong influences on this new "metafiction." Nabokov, who became a
U.S. citizen in 1945, produced a body of exquisitely wrought fiction
distinguished by linguistic and formal innovation. Despite their artificiality,
his best novels, written in English, have a strong emotional thread running
through them, including Lolita
(1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale
Fire (1962). |
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In an important essay, "The
Literature of Exhaustion" (1967), John Barth
declared himself an American disciple of Nabokov and Borges. After dismissing
realism as a "used up" tradition, Barth described his own work as
"novels which imitate the form of the novel, by an author who imitates the
role of Author." In fact, Barth's earliest fiction, The
Floating Opera (1956) and The
End of the Road (1958), fell partly within the realistic tradition,
but in later, more ambitious works he simultaneously imitated and parodied
conventional forms--the historical novel in The
Sot-Weed Factor (1960), Greek and Christian myths in Giles
Goat-Boy (1966), and the epistolary novel in LETTERS (1979). Similarly, Donald Barthelme
mocked the fairy tale in Snow White
(1967) and Freudian fiction in The Dead
Father (1975). Barthelme was most successful in his short stories and
parodies that solemnly caricatured contemporary styles, especially the richly
suggestive pieces collected in Unspeakable
Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), City
Life (1970), and Guilty Pleasures
(1974). |
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Thomas Pynchon
emerged as the major American practitioner of the absurdist fable. His novels
and stories were elaborately plotted mixtures of historical information,
comic-book fantasy, and countercultural suspicion. Using paranoia as a
structuring device as well as a cast of mind, Pynchon worked out elaborate
"conspiracies" in V. (1963),
The Crying of Lot
49 (1966), and Gravity's
Rainbow (1973). The underlying assumption of Pynchon's fiction was
the inevitability of entropy--i.e.,
the disintegration of physical and moral energy. Pynchon's technique was later
to influence writers as different as Don DeLillo and Paul Auster. In Naked
Lunch (1959) and other novels, William S.
Burroughs, abandoning plot and coherent characterization, used a drug
addict's consciousness to depict a hideous modern landscape. Vonnegut, Terry
Southern, and John Hawkes were also major practitioners of black humour and the
absurdist fable. Other influential portraits of outsider figures included the
Beat characters in Jack Kerouac's On
the Road (1957), The Dharma Bums
(1958), Desolation Angels (1965), and Visions
of Cody (1972), the young Rabbit Angstrom in John
Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960) and Rabbit
Redux (1971), Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger's
Catcher in the Rye (1951), and the troubling madman in Richard
Yates's powerful novel of suburban life, Revolutionary
Road (1961). |
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Though writers such as Barth, Barthelme,
and Pynchon rejected the novel's traditional function as a mirror reflecting
society, a significant number of contemporary novelists were reluctant to
abandon Social Realism. In such novels as The
Victim (1947), The
Adventures of Augie March (1953), Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), and Humboldt's Gift (1975), Saul Bellow
tapped into the buoyant, manic energy and picaresque structure of black humour,
while proclaiming the necessity of "being human." Though few
contemporary writers saw the ugliness of urban life more clearly than Bellow,
his central characters rejected the "Wasteland outlook" associated
with modernism. A spiritual vision, derived from sources as diverse as Judaism,
Transcendentalism, and Rudolph Steiner's cultish theosophy, found its way into
Bellow's late novels, but he also wrote darker fictions like the novella Seize
the Day (1956), a study in failure and blocked emotion that was
perhaps his best work. Four other Jewish writers--Bernard
Malamud, Grace Paley, Philip Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer--treated the
human condition with humour and forgiveness. Malamud's gift for dark comedy and
Hawthornean fable was especially evident in his short-story collections The
Magic Barrel (1958) and Idiots First
(1963). His first three novels, The
Natural (1952), The
Assistant (1957), and A New Life (1961), were also impressive works of fiction; The
Assistant had the bleak moral intensity of his best stories. Grace Paley's
stories combined an offbeat, whimsically poetic manner with a wry understanding
of the ironies of family life and progressive politics. While Roth
was known best for the wild satire and sexual high jinks of Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a
hilarious stand-up routine about ethnic stereotypes, his most lasting
achievement may be his later novels built around the misadventures of a
controversial Jewish novelist named Zuckerman, especially The Ghost Writer (1979), The
Anatomy Lesson (1983), and, above all, The
Counterlife (1987). Like all his later works, from My Life as a Man (1974) to Operation
Shylock (1993), The Counterlife
plays ingeniously on the relationship between autobiography and fiction. The
Polish-born Singer won the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1978 for his stories, written originally in Yiddish. They evolved
from fantastic tales of demons and angels to realistic fictions set in New York
City's Upper West Side, showing him to be one of the great storytellers of
modern times. |
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The sexual and moral confusion of the
American middle class was the focus of the work of J.D. Salinger and Richard
Yates, as well as John Updike's Rabbit series (four novels from Rabbit,
Run [1960] to Rabbit At Rest
[1990]), Couples (1968), and Too Far to Go (1979), a sequence of tales about the quiet
disintegration of a civilized marriage. Updike's mentor, John
Cheever, long associated with The
New Yorker magazine, created in his short stories and novels a gallery of
memorable eccentrics. He documented the anxieties of upper-middle-class New
Yorkers and suburbanites in the relatively tranquil years after World War II. In
sharp contrast, Nelson Algren (The
Man with the Golden Arm [1949]) and Hubert
Selby, Jr. ( Last
Exit to Brooklyn [1964]) documented lower-class urban life with
brutal frankness. Similarly, John Rechy portrayed America's urban homosexual
subculture in City of Night (1963). As
literary and social mores were liberalized, Cheever himself dealt with
homosexuality in his prison novel Falconer (1977) and even more explicitly in his personal journals,
published posthumously in 1991. |
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Post-World War II Southern writers
inherited Faulkner's rich legacy. Three women, specialists in the
grotesque--Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Carson
McCullers--contributed greatly to Southern fiction. O'Connor,
writing as a Roman Catholic in the Protestant South, created a high comedy of
moral incongruity in her incomparable short stories. Welty,
always a brilliant stylist, first came to prominence with her collections of
short fiction, A Curtain of Green
(1941) and The Wide Net (1943). Her
career culminated with a large family novel, Losing
Battles (1970), and a fine novella, The
Optimist's Daughter (1972), which was awarded the 1973 Pulitzer Prize.
Initially known for his lyrical portraits of Southern eccentrics ( Other
Voices, Other Rooms [1948]), Truman Capote
published In Cold
Blood (1966), a cold but impressive piece of documentary realism that
contributed, along with the work of Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer, to the
emergence of a "new journalism" using many of the techniques of
fiction. William Styron's overripe first novel, Lie
Down in Darkness (1951), clearly revealed the influence of Faulkner.
In two controversial later works Styron fictionalized the dark side of modern
history: The
Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) depicted an antebellum slave revolt
and Sophie's
Choice (1979) unsuccessfully sought to capture the full horror of the
Holocaust. Inspired by Faulkner and Mark Twain, William Humphrey wrote two
powerful novels set in Texas, Home from
the Hill (1958) and The Ordways
(1965). The
Moviegoer (1961) and The Last
Gentleman (1966) established Walker Percy as
an important voice in Southern fiction. Their musing philosophical style broke
sharply with the Gothic tradition, influencing later writers such as Richard
Ford in The Sportswriter (1986).
Equally impressive were the novels and stories of Peter Taylor, an impeccable
Social Realist, raconteur, and genial novelist of manners, bringing back a
bygone world in works such as "The Old Forest" (1985) and A
Summons to Memphis (1986). |
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Black writers of this period found
alternatives to the Richard Wright tradition of social protest. James
Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, both protégés
of Wright, wrote polemical essays calling for a literature that reflected the
full complexity of black life in the United States. In his first and best novel,
Go Tell It on the
Mountain (1953), Baldwin portrayed the Harlem world and the black
church through his own adolescent religious experiences. Drawing on rural
folktale, absurdist humour, and a picaresque realism, Ralph Ellison wrote a
deeply resonant comic novel that dealt with the full range of black experience:
rural sharecropping, segregated education, northward migration, ghetto hustling,
and the lure of such competing ideologies as nationalism and communism. Many
considered Invisible Man (1952) the best novel
of the postwar years. Later two black women novelists published some of the most
important post-World War II American fiction. In The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula
(1973), Song of
Solomon (1977), Beloved
(1987), and Jazz (1992), Toni
Morrison created a strikingly original fiction that sounded different
notes from lyrical recollection to magic realism. Like Ellison, Morrison drew on
diverse literary and folk influences and dealt with important phases of black
history--i.e., slavery in Beloved
and the Harlem renaissance in Jazz.
She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. Alice
Walker, after several volumes of poetry and an interesting novel dealing
with the Civil Rights Movement (Meridian
[1976]), received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for her black feminist novel The
Color Purple. Black male writers whose work gained attention during
this period included Ishmael Reed, whose wild
comic techniques resembled Ellison's, James Alan
McPherson, a subtle short-story writer, Charles Johnson, whose novels,
such as The Oxherding Tale (1982) and The
Middle Passage (1990), showed a masterful historical imagination, and
Randall Kenan, a gay writer with a strong folk imagination, whose style
descended from both Ellison and Baldwin. |
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The horrors of World War II, the Cold
War and the atomic bomb, the bizarre feast of consumer culture, and the cultural
clashes of the 1960s prompted many writers to argue that reality had grown
inaccessible, undermining the traditional social role of fiction. Writers of
novels and short stories therefore were under unprecedented pressure to
discover, or invent, new and viable kinds of fiction. One response was the
postmodern novel of William Gaddis, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Thomas
Pynchon, Robert Coover, Paul Auster, and Don
DeLillo--technically sophisticated and highly self-conscious about the
construction of fiction and the fictive nature of "reality" itself.
These writers dealt with themes such as imposture and paranoia; their novels
drew attention to themselves as artifacts and often used realistic techniques
ironically. Other responses involved a heightening of realism by means of
intensifying violence, amassing documentation, or resorting to fantasy. A brief
discussion of writers as different as Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates may
serve to illustrate these new directions. |
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In his 1948 World War II novel, The
Naked and the Dead, Mailer wrote in the Dos
Passos tradition of social protest. Feeling its limitations, he developed his
own brand of surreal fantasy in fables such as An
American Dream (1965) and Why Are We
in Vietnam? (1967). As for many of the postmodern novelists, his subject was
the nature of power, personal as well as political. However, it was only when he
turned to "nonfiction fiction" or "fiction as history" in The
Armies of the Night and Miami
and the Siege of Chicago (both 1968) that Mailer discovered his true
voice--grandiose yet personal, comic yet shrewdly intellectual. He refined this
approach into a new objectivity in the 1980 Pulitzer Prize "true life
novel" The Executioner's Song.
When he returned to fiction, his work was of less interest. In her early work,
especially A Garden of Earthly Delights
(1967) and them (1969), Joyce
Carol Oates worked naturalistically with violent urban materials, such as
the Detroit riots. Incredibly prolific, she later experimented with surrealism
in Wonderland (1971) and Gothic
fantasy in Bellefleur (1980) before
returning in works such as Marya
(1986) to the bleak blue-collar world of her youth in upstate New York. While
Mailer and Oates refused to surrender the novel's gift for capturing reality,
both were compelled to search out new fictional modes to tap that power. (see
also postmodernism) |
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The surge of feminism
in the 1970s gave impetus to many new women writers, including Erica Jong in her
sexy and funny Fear of Flying (1974),
Rita Mae Brown's exploration of lesbian life in Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), Ann Beattie's
account of the post-1960s generation in Chilly
Scenes of Winter (1976) and many short stories, Gail Godwin's highly
civilized The Odd Woman (1974), Mary
Gordon's portraits of Irish Catholic life in Final Payments (1978), and the many social comedies of Alison Lurie
and Anne Tyler. Perhaps the most influential fiction writer to emerge in the
1970s was Raymond Carver. He was another realist
who dealt with blue-collar life, usually in the Pacific Northwest, in powerful
collections of stories such as What We
Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) and Cathedral (1983). His self-destructive characters were life's
losers, and his style, influenced by Hemingway and Samuel Beckett, was spare and
flat but powerfully suggestive. It was imitated, often badly, by minimalists
like Frederick Barthelme, Mary Robison, and Amy Hempel. More talented writers
whose novels reflected the influence of Carver in their evocation of the
downbeat world of the blue-collar male included Richard Ford (Rock
Springs [1987]), Russell Banks (Continental
Drift [1984] and Affliction
[1989]), and Tobias Wolff (The Barracks
Thief [1984] and This Boy's Life
[1989]). Another strong male-oriented writer in a realist mode who emerged from
the 1960s counterculture was Robert Stone. His Dog Soldiers (1974) was a grimly downbeat portrayal of the
drugs-and-Vietnam generation, and A Flag
for Sunrise (1981) was a bleak, Conradian political novel set in Central
America. |
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Finally, the dramatic loosening of
immigration restrictions in the mid-1960s set the stage for the rich
multicultural writing of the 1970s and '80s. New Jewish voices were heard in the
fiction of E.L. Doctorow, whose characters in The
Book of Daniel (1971) were based on convicted spies Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg and their family, and in the work of Cynthia Ozick, whose characters
in her best story, "Envy; or Yiddish in America" (1969) were modeled
on leading figures in Yiddish literature. David Leavitt introduced homosexual
themes into his portrayal of middle-class life in Family
Dancing (1984). Novels such as N. Scott Momaday's House
Made of Dawn, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, James Welch's Winter
in the Blood (1974) and Fools Crow
(1986), Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony
(1977), and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine
(1984) and The Beet Queen (1986) were
powerful and ambiguous explorations of Native American history and identity.
Mexican-Americans were represented by works such as Rudolfo
Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima
(1972), Richard Rodriguez's autobiographical Hunger of Memory (1981), and Sandra Cisneros' House on Mango Street (1983). |
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Some of the best immigrant writers,
while thoroughly assimilated, nonetheless had a subtle understanding of both the
old and the new culture. These included the Cuban-American writers Oscar
Hijuelos (The Mambo Kings Play Songs of
Love [1989]) and Cristina Garcia (Dreaming
in Cuban [1992]), and the prolific Jamaica Kincaid, the Antigua-born author
of Annie John (1984) and Lucy
(1990), whose work appeared frequently in The
New Yorker. Chinese-Americans found an extraordinary voice in Maxine Hong
Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976)
and China Men (1980), which blended
old Chinese lore with fascinating family history. While many multicultural works
were merely representative of their cultural milieu, some made remarkable
contributions to a new American literature. |
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The post-World War II years produced an
abundance of strong poetry but no individual poet as dominant and accomplished
as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, or William Carlos
Williams, whose long careers were coming to an end. The major poetry from 1945
to 1960 was modernist in its ironic texture yet formal in its insistence on
regular rhyme and metre. Beginning in the late 1950s, however, there were a
variety of poets and schools who rebelled against these constraints and
experimented with more open forms and more colloquial styles. |
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The leading figure of the late 1940s was
Robert Lowell, who, influenced by Eliot and such
Metaphysical poets as John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins, explored his
spiritual torments and family history in Lord
Weary's Castle (1946). Other impressive formal poets included Theodore
Roethke, influenced by William Butler Yeats, who revealed a genius for
ironic lyricism and a profound empathy for the processes of nature in The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948), the masterfully elegant Richard
Wilbur (Things of This World
[1956]), two war poets, Karl Shapiro (V-Letter
and Other Poems [1944]) and Randall Jarrell
(Losses [1948]), and a group of young poets influenced by W.H. Auden,
including James Merrill, W.S. Merwin, James Wright, Adrienne Rich, and John
Hollander. Although they displayed brilliant technical skill, they lacked
Auden's strong personal voice. |
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By the mid-1950s, however, a strong
reaction developed. Poets began to turn away from Eliot and metaphysical poetry
to more romantic or more prosaic models, including Walt Whitman, William Carlos
Williams, Hart Crane, and D.H. Lawrence. A group of poets associated with Black
Mountain College in western North Carolina, as, for example, Charles
Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan,
Edward Dorn, and Denise Levertov, treated
the poem as an unfolding process rather than a containing form. Olson's Maximus
Poems (1953-68) show a clear affinity with the jagged line and uneven flow
of Pound's Cantos and Williams's Paterson.
Allen Ginsberg's incantatory, prophetic "Howl"
(1956) and his moving elegy for his mother, "Kaddish"
(1961), gave powerful impetus to the Beat movement.
Written with extraordinary intensity, these works were inspired by writers as
diverse as the biblical prophets, William Blake, and Whitman, as well as by the
dream-logic of the French Surrealists and the spontaneous jazz aesthetic of
Ginsberg's friend, the novelist Jack Kerouac. Other Beat poets included Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder, a
student of Eastern religion, who, in Turtle
Island (1974), continued the American tradition of nature poetry. |
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The openness of Beat poetry and the
prosaic directness of William Carlos Williams encouraged Lowell to develop a new
autobiographical style in the laconic poetry and prose of Life Studies (1959) and For
the Union Dead (1964). Lowell's new work influenced nearly all American
poets but especially a group of "confessional" writers, some of them
once students of his, including Anne Sexton in To
Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) and All
My Pretty Ones (1962) and Sylvia Plath in
the posthumously published Ariel
(1965), who in her poetry joined an icy sarcasm to white-hot emotional
intensity. Another poet influenced by Lowell was John
Berryman, whose Dream Songs
(1964, 1968) combine autobiographical fragments with minstrel-show motifs to
create a zany style of self-projection and comic-tragic lament. Deeply troubled
figures, Sexton, Plath, and Berryman all took their own lives. |
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Through his personal charisma and his
magazine The Fifties (later The
Sixties and the The Seventies), Robert Bly encouraged a number of poets whose work
shifted toward the individual voice and open form, including Galway Kinnell,
James Wright, David Ignatow, and, less directly, Louis Simpson, James Dickey,
and Donald Hall. Sometimes called the "deep image" poets, Bly and his
friends sought spiritual intensity and transcendence of the self rather than
confessional immediacy. Their work was influenced by the poetry of Spanish and
Latin American writers such as Federico García Lorca, Juan Ramón
Jiménez, César Vallejo, and Pablo Neruda, especially their surreal
association of images, as well as by the "Greenhouse poems" (1946-48)
and the meditative poetry of the later Roethke, with its deep feeling for nature
as a vehicle of spiritual transformation. Yet, like their Hispanic models, they
were also political poets, instrumental in organizing protest and writing poems
against the Vietnam war. Kinnell was a Lawrentian poet who, in poems such as
"The Porcupine" and "The Bear," gave the brutality of nature
the power of myth. His vatic sequence, The
Book of Nightmares (1971), and the quieter poems in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980) are among the most rhetorically
effective works in contemporary poetry. |
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James Wright was another writer whose
style changed dramatically in the early 1960s. He abandoned his stiffly formal
verse for the stripped-down, meditative lyricism of The Branch Will Not Break (1963) and Shall We Gather at the River (1968), which were more dependent on
the emotional tenor of image than on metre, poetic diction, or rhyme. In books
such as Figures of the Human (1964)
and Rescue the Dead (1968), David
Ignatow wrote brief but razor-sharp poems that made their effect through
swiftness, deceptive simplicity, paradox, and personal immediacy. Another poet
whose work ran the gamut from prosaic simplicity to Emersonian transcendence was
A.R. Ammons. His Briefings
(1971) were close to autobiographical jottings, small glimpses, and
observations, but, like his longer poems, they turned the natural world into a
source of vision. Like Ignatow, he made it a virtue to seem unliterary and found
illumination in the pedestrian and the ordinary. |
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Both daily life and an exposure to
French Surrealism helped inspire a group of New York poets, among them Frank
O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and John
Ashbery. Whether O'Hara was jotting down a sequence of ordinary moments
or paying tribute to film stars, his poems had a breathless immediacy that was
distinctive and unique. Koch's comic voice swung effortlessly from the trivial
to the fantastic. Strongly influenced by Wallace Stevens, Ashbery's ruminative
poems can seem random, discursive, and enigmatic. Avoiding poetic colour, they
do their work by suggestion and association, exploring the interface between
experience and perception. |
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Other impressive poets of the postwar
years included Elizabeth Bishop, whose precise,
loving attention to objects was reminiscent of her early mentor, Marianne Moore.
Though she avoided the confessional mode of her friend Lowell, her sense of
place, her heartbreaking decorum, and her keen powers of observation gave her
work a strong personal cast. In The
Changing Light at Sandover (1982), James
Merrill, previously a polished lyric poet, made his mandarin style the
vehicle of a lighthearted personal epic, in which he, with the help of a Ouija
(trademark) board, called up the shades of all his dead friends, including the
poet Auden. In a prolific career highlighted by such poems as Reflections
on Espionage (1976), "Blue Wine" (1979), and Powers
of Thirteen (1983), John Hollander, like Merrill, displayed enormous
technical virtuosity. Richard Howard imagined witty monologues and dialogues for
famous people of the past in poems collected in Untitled Subjects (1969) and Two-Part
Inventions (1974). With the autobiographical knots and parables of Reasons
for Moving (1968) and Darker
(1970), Mark Strand's paradoxical language achieved a resonant simplicity. |
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Other strongly autobiographical poets
working with subtle technique and intelligence in a variety of forms included
Philip Levine, Charles Simic, Robert Pinsky, Louise Glück, and Sharon Olds.
With the sinuous sentences and long flowing lines of Tar (1983) and Flesh and Blood
(1987), C.K. Williams perfected a narrative technique founded on distinctive
voice, sharply etched emotion, and cleanly observed detail. Adrienne Rich's work
gained a burning immediacy from her lesbian feminism. The
Will to Change (1971) and Diving Into
the Wreck (1973) were turning points for women's poetry in the wake of the
1960s. That decade also enabled some older poets to become more loosely
autobiographical and freshly imaginative, among them Stanley Kunitz, Robert Penn
Warren, and W.S. Merwin. The 1960s invigorated gifted black poets such as Robert
Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Michael S. Harper. It formed the background for
the work of the younger poets of the 1980s, such as Edward Hirsch, Alan Shapiro,
Jorie Graham, Cathy Song, and Rita Dove, whose
sequence about her grandparents, Thomas and Beulah, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. |
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Two post-World War II playwrights
established reputations comparable to O'Neill's. Arthur
Miller wrote eloquent essays defending his modern, democratic concept of
tragedy; despite its abstract, allegorical quality and portentous language, Death
of a Salesman (1949) came close to vindicating his views. Miller's
intense family dramas were rooted in the works of the socially conscious ethnic
dramatists of the 1930s, especially Clifford Odets, but he gave them a
metaphysical turn. From All My Sons
(1947) to The Price (1968), his work
is at its strongest when he deals with father-son relationships, anchored in the
harsh realities of the Great Depression. Yet Miller could also be an effective
protest writer, as in The
Crucible (1953), which used the Salem witch trials to attack the
witch-hunting of the McCarthy era. Though his work was uneven, Tennessee
Williams must be viewed as a more important playwright than Miller.
Creating stellar roles for actors, especially women, Williams brought a
passionate lyricism and a tragic Southern vision to such plays as The
Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar
Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof (1955), and The Night of the
Iguana (1961). He empathized with his characters' dreams and illusions and
with the frustrations and defeats of their lives, and he wrote about his own
dreams and disappointments in his beautifully etched short fiction, from which
his plays were often adapted. |
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Miller and Williams dominated the
post-World War II theatre until the 1960s, and few other playwrights emerged to
challenge them. Then, in 1962, Edward Albee's
reputation, based on short plays such as The
Zoo Story (1959) and The American
Dream (1960), was secured by the stunning power of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. A master of absurdist theatre who
assimilated the influence of European playwrights like Samuel Beckett and Eugène
Ionesco, Albee established himself as a major figure in American drama. His
reputation with critics and audiences, however, began to decline with enigmatic
plays such as Tiny Alice (1964) and A
Delicate Balance (1966), but, like Eugene O'Neill, he eventually returned to
favour with a complex autobiographical drama, Three
Tall Women, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994. |
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When the centre of American drama
shifted from Broadway to Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway
with works such as Jack Gelber's The
Connection (1959), American playwrights, collaborating with the Living
Theatre, the Open Theatre, and other adventurous new companies, were
increasingly free to write radical and innovative plays. David Rabe's The
Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971) and Sticks
and Bones (1972) satirized America's militaristic nationalism and cultural
shallowness. David Mamet won a 1976-77 New York Drama Critics Award for American Buffalo. In plays such as Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) he showed brilliantly how men reveal
their hopes and frustrations obliquely, through their language, and in Oleanna
(1992) he fired a major salvo in the gender wars over sexual harassment. |
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Imamu Amiri Baraka
(LeRoi Jones) and Ed Bullins inspired an angry
black nationalist theatre. Baraka's Dutchman and The Slave
(1964) effectively dramatized racial confrontation, while Bullins' In
the Wine Time (1968) made use of "street" lyricism. Maria Irene
Fornes's Fefu and Her Friends (1977) proved remarkable in its exploration of
women's relationships. A clear indication of Off-Broadway's ascendancy in
American drama came in 1979 when Sam Shepard, a
prolific and experimental playwright, won the Pulitzer Prize for Buried
Child. Shepard's earlier work, such as The
Tooth of Crime (1972), was rooted both in the rock scene and
counterculture of the 1960s and in the mythic world of the American West. But he
reached his peak with a series of offbeat family dramas including Curse
of the Starving Class (1976), True
West (1980), Fool For Love (1983), and A
Lie of the Mind (1986). Other important new voices in American drama were
the prolific Lanford Wilson, the 1980 Pulitzer winner for Talley's Folly, John Guare, who created serious farce in The
House of Blue Leaves (1971) and fresh social drama in Six
Degrees of Separation (1990), and Ntozake Shange,
whose "choreopoem," For Colored
Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, moved to Broadway
in 1976. Other well-received women playwrights included Marsha Norman, Beth
Henley, Tina Howe, and Wendy Wasserstein. In a series of plays that included Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), Fences (Pulitzer Prize, 1987), and Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1986), August
Wilson emerged as the most powerful black playwright of the 1980s. The
anguish of the AIDS epidemic proved a dark inspiration to many gay playwrights,
especially Tony Kushner, who had gained
attention with A Bright Room Called Day
(1991) and won Broadway fame with his epically ambitious two-part drama Angels
in America (1993), which combined comedy with pain, symbolism with personal
history, and invented characters with historical ones. (see also black
theatre) |
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Until his death in 1972, Edmund Wilson
solidified his reputation as one of America's most versatile and distinguished
men of letters. The novelist John Updike
inherited Wilson's chair at The New Yorker
and turned out an extraordinary flow of critical reviews collected in volumes
such as Hugging the Shore (1983) and Odd
Jobs (1991). Gore Vidal brought together his
briskly readable essays of four decades--critical, personal, and political--in United
States (1993). Susan Sontag's essays on
difficult European writers, avant-garde film, politics, photography, and the
language of illness embodied the probing intellectual spirit of the 1960s. In A Second Flowering (1973) and The
Dream of the Golden Mountains (1980), Malcolm
Cowley looked back at the writers between the world wars who had always
engaged him. Alfred Kazin wrote literary history
(An American Procession [1984]) and
autobiography (Starting Out in the
Thirties [1965], New York Jew
[1978]), while Irving Howe produced studies at
the crossroads of literature and politics, such as Politics and the Novel (1957), as well as a major history of Jewish
immigrants in New York, World of Our
Fathers (1976). The iconoclastic literary criticism of Leslie Fiedler, as,
for example, Love and Death in the
American Novel (1960), was marked by its provocative application of Freudian
ideas to American literature. A more subtle Freudian, Lionel
Trilling, in The Liberal Imagination (1950) and
other works, rejected Vernon L. Parrington's populist concept of literature as
social reportage and insisted on the ability of literature to explore
problematic human complexity. His criticism reflected the inward turn from
politics toward "moral realism" that coincided with the Cold War. But
the cultural and political conflicts of the 1960s revived the social approach
among younger students of American literature, such as Henry
Louis Gates, Jr., who emerged in the 1980s as a major critic, theorist,
and editor of black writers in studies such as Figures in Black (1987) and The
Signifying Monkey (1988). In the 1990s Gates evolved into a wide-ranging
essayist, along with Cornel West, Stanley Crouch, Shelby Steele, Stephen Carter,
Gerald Early, Michele Wallace, and other black social critics. |
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The waning of the New Criticism, with
its strict emphasis on the text, led not only to a surge of historical criticism
and cultural theory but to a flowering of literary biography. Major works
included Leon Edel's five-volume study of Henry
James (1953-72), Mark Schorer's Sinclair
Lewis: An American Life (1961), Richard Ellman's studies of James Joyce
(1959) and Oscar Wilde (1988), R.W.B. Lewis' revealing biography of Edith
Wharton (1975), Joseph Frank's multivolume biography of Dostoyevsky (1976- ),
Paul Zweig's brilliant study of Walt Whitman (1984), and Carol Brightman's
exhaustive life of Mary McCarthy (1992). |
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One positive result of the accelerating
complexity of post-World War II life was a body of distinguished journalism and
social commentary. John Hersey's Hiroshima
(1946) was a deliberately controlled, unemotional account of atomic holocaust.
In Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody
Knows My Name (1961), and The Fire
Next Time (1963), the black novelist James Baldwin
published a body of the most eloquent essays written in the United States.
Norman Mailer's "new journalism" proved especially effective in
capturing the drama of political conventions and large protest demonstrations.
The novelist Joan Didion published two collections of incisive social and
literary commentary, Slouching Towards
Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album
(1979). The title essay of the first collection was an honest investigation of
the forces that gave colour and significance to the counterculture of the 1960s,
a subject also explored with stylistic flourish by journalists as different as
Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. The surreal atmosphere of the Vietnam war,
infused with rock and drugs, gave impetus to such subjective journalism as
Michael Herr's Dispatches (1977). The
mood of the period also encouraged strong works of autobiography, such as Frank
Conroy's Stop-Time (1967) and Lillian
Hellman's personal and political memoirs, including An
Unfinished Woman (1969) and Scoundrel
Time (1976). Robert M. Pirsig's Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) defied all classification.
Pirsig equated the emotional collapse of his central character with the
disintegration of American workmanship and cultural values. |
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The major New Critics and New York
critics were followed by major but difficult academic critics, who preferred
theory to close reading. European structuralism found little echo in the United
States, but poststructuralist theorists such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes,
and Jacques Derrida found a welcome in the less
political atmosphere, marked by skepticism and defeat, that followed the 1960s.
Four Yale professors joined Derrida to publish a group of essays, Deconstruction and Criticism (1979). Two of the contributors, Paul
de Man and J. Hillis Miller, became
leading exponents of deconstruction in the
United States. The other two, Harold Bloom and
Geoffrey Hartman, were more interested in the problematic relation of poets to
their predecessors and to their own language. Bloom was especially concerned
with the influence of Emerson on modern American poets. Philosophers Richard
Rorty and Stanley Cavell and critic Richard Poirier found a native
parallel to European theory in the philosophy of Emerson and the writings of
pragmatists such as William James and John Dewey. Other academic critics took a
more political turn. Stephen Greenblatt's work on Shakespeare and other
Elizabethan writers and Edward Said's essays in The
World, the Text, and the Critic (1983) were influential in reviving
historical approaches to literature that had long been neglected. Said's Orientalism
(1978) and Culture and Imperialism
(1993) directed attention to the effects of colonialism on the arts and society.
A wide range of feminist critics, beginning with Kate Millett, Ellen Moers,
Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Elaine Showalter, gave direction to new
gender-based approaches to past and present writers. All these methods yielded
new dimensions of critical understanding, but in less adept hands they became so
riddled with jargon or so intensely political and ideological that they lost
touch with the general reader, with common sense itself, and with any tradition
of accessible criticism. ( J.R.G./M.Di.)
(see also women's liberation movement) |
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BIBLIOGRAPHY. |
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Literary histories and major anthologies
include ROBERT E. SPILLER et al. (eds.),
Literary History of the United States, 4th
ed., rev., 2 vol. (1974), a standard general work; MARCUS CUNLIFFE (ed.), American
Literature to 1900, new ed. (1986, reissued 1993), and American
Literature Since 1900, new ed. (1987, reissued 1993); VERNON LOUIS
PARRINGTON, Main Currents in American
Thought: An Interpretation of American
Literature from the Beginnings to 1920, 3 vol. (1927-30, reissued 1987),
essential background reading; WALTER BLAIR et al. (eds.), The Literature
of the United States, 3rd ed., 2 vol. (1966); CLEANTH BROOKS, R.W.B. LEWIS,
and ROBERT PENN WARREN (compilers), American
Literature: The Makers and the Making,
2 vol. (1973); and ALFRED KAZIN, An
American Procession (1984), portraits of individual writers from Emerson to
Fitzgerald. Since the 1980s, anthologies have shifted to a multicultural
viewpoint with broad coverage of writing by women and minorities. The most
controversial example has been PAUL LAUTER and RICHARD YARBOROUGH (eds.), The
Heath Anthology of American Literature, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (1994). Recent
full-scale literary histories representing the work of younger scholars include
EMORY ELLIOTT et al. (eds.), The Columbia
Literary History of the United States (1991); and SACVAN BERCOVITCH and
CYRUS R.K. PATELL (eds.), The Cambridge
History of American Literature (1994- ). |
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Studies that focus on specific periods
or trends of American literary history include the following: on the colonial
era and the period of the early republic, PERRY MILLER, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (1953, reprinted
1983), and The New England Mind: The
Seventeenth Century (1939, reissued 1983), two authoritative works; SACVAN
BERCOVITCH, The Puritan Origins of the
American Self (1975), and The American
Jeremiad (1978); ANDREW DELBANCO, The Puritan Ordeal (1989); and MOSES COIT TYLER, A
History of American Literature, 2 vol. (1879, reprinted 1973), and The
Literary History of the American Revolution, 1763-1783, 2 vol. (1897, reprinted 1970); on the period of the American
Revolution, closer to cultural history than criticism, KENNETH SILVERMAN, A
Cultural History of the American Revolution (1976, reprinted 1987); PETER
SHAW, American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution (1981); EMORY
ELLIOTT, Revolutionary Writers (1982);
and JAY FLIEGELMAN, Prodigals and Pilgrims
(1982); on the post-Revolutionary era, ROBERT A. FERGUSON, Law
and Letters in American Culture (1984); and LAWRENCE BUELL, New
England Literary Culture from Revolution Through Renaissance (1986); on the
American Renaissance, F.O. MATTHIESSEN, American
Renaissance (1941, reprinted 1980), a classic study of the great writers of
the 1850s; supplemented by studies of individual authors and of the popular
writing of the period, including JANE TOMPKINS, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860
(1985), which discusses the sentimental novel; DAVID S. REYNOLDS, Beneath
the American Renaissance (1988), a comprehensive view of the popular culture
of the day; and MICHAEL T. GILMORE, American
Romanticism and the Marketplace (1985), a study of the material environment;
and, on the period from the Civil War to the 20th century, JAY MARTIN, Harvests
of Change: American Literature, 1865-1914
(1964), a comprehensive study; ARTHUR HOBSON QUINN, A History of the American Drama, from the Beginning to the Civil War,
2nd ed. (1943, reprinted 1979), and A
History of the American Drama, from the Civil War to the Present Day, rev.
ed. (1964, reprinted 1980), the most thorough treatment; ALFRED KAZIN, On
Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (1942,
reprinted 1982), a brilliantly written critical history; and MORTON DAUWEN ZABEL
(ed.), Literary Opinion in America, 3rd ed., rev., 2 vol. (1962). |
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Important studies of the pastoral and
frontier traditions in American literature are HENRY NASH SMITH, Virgin
Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950, reissued 1978); R.W.B.
LEWIS, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth
Century (1955, reissued 1984); LEO MARX,
The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America
(1964, reprinted 1972); and, from a radically different viewpoint, RICHARD
SLOTKIN, Regeneration Through Violence:
The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1800 (1973), and The
Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization,
1800-1890 (1985). Major work on the romance tradition in American fiction
begins with D.H. LAWRENCE, Studies in
Classic American Literature (1923, reissued 1977); and is developed in
RICHARD CHASE, The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957, reprinted 1978); and
LESLIE FIEDLER, Love and Death in the
American Novel, rev. ed. (1966, reissued 1992); as well as in later studies
such as JOEL PORTE, The Romance in
America: Studies in Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James (1969); and
MICHAEL DAVITT BELL, The Development of
American Romance (1980). The vast influence of Emerson on American culture
has been studied in QUENTIN ANDERSON, The
Imperial Self (1971); and IRVING HOWE, The
American Newness (1986). Recent work on American realism, stressing the
social and historical context, includes ERIC J. SUNDQUIST (ed.), American
Realism: New Essays (1982); PHILIP FISHER, Hard
Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (1985); and AMY KAPLAN, The Social Construction of American Realism (1988). The role of race
in American literature is the ambitious subject of ERIC J. SUNDQUIST, To
Wake the Nations (1993); while ethnicity is closely analyzed in WERNER
SOLLORS, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (1986). |
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The wide range of neglected novels by
19th-century women has been mapped by NINA BAYM, Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels By and About Women, 1820-70, 2nd
ed. (1993); and SUSAN K. HARRIS, 19th-Century
American Women's Novels (1990). Feminist criticism of American fiction can
be found in JUDITH FETTERLEY, The
Resisting Reader (1978). Radical and ethnic writing between the two world
wars has been studied by WALTER B. RIDEOUT, The
Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1954 (1956, reissued 1992); DANIEL
AARON, Writers on the Left (1961,
reissued 1992); and MARCUS KLEIN, Foreigners:
The Making of American Literature, 1900-1940 (1981). The long history of
African-American literature has been explored by ROBERT A. BONE, The
Negro Novel in America, rev. ed. (1965); ROBERT B. STEPTO, From
Behind the Veil, 2nd ed. (1991); and HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR., The Signifying Monkey (1988). A succinct survey of Jewish-American
writing can be found in ALLEN GUTTMANN, The
Jewish Writer in America (1971). |
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Critical studies of post-World War II
fiction include TONY TANNER, City of Words
(1971), valuable for understanding contemporary metafiction; MORRIS DICKSTEIN, Gates
of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (1977, reprinted 1989), which
places postwar writers in their cultural context; FREDERICK R. KARL, American Fictions, 1940-1980 (1983), a comprehensive study; and
DANIEL HOFFMAN (ed.), Harvard Guide to
Contemporary American Writing (1979), a collection of essays by major
scholars. Studies of postwar poetry can be found in CHARLES MOLESWORTH, The
Fierce Embrace (1979); and HELEN VENDLER, Part
of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets (1980). Studies of modern
American drama include HAROLD CLURMAN, The
Fervent Years (1945, reprinted 1983), dealing with the 1930s; and C.W.E.
BIGSBY, A Critical Introduction to
Twentieth-Century American Drama, 3 vol. (1982-85). Studies of 20th-century
American critics can be found in FRANK LENTRICCHIA, After
the New Criticism (1980); and MORRIS DICKSTEIN, Double Agent: The Critic and Society (1992). |
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