Self-criticism.

As the new century entered its second decade, the forward movement of American literature seemed to have stopped. The realistic novels were beginning to seem old-fashioned. The novels of Winston Churchill (1871-1947) were typical of the tastes of the American reading public. His most popular works- The Crisis and The Crossing - had old-fashioned, romantic plots. They expressed sadness at the passing of the aristocratic culture of the South after the Civil War. Also popular was James Branch Cable (1879-1958). His novels were romantic, written in an elegant, 19^th -century prose style. In them he helped his readers escape from the reality of the present into an unreal past. In such novels and collections of stories as Gallantry, Chivalry and the Soul of Melicent, he succeeded in his desire to “write beautifully of beautiful happenings”. Although his books are often delightful in themselves, they did not provide the new direction needed by the new generation of American writers.

Starting in 1915 the critic Van Wyck Brooks opened a period of “self-criticism”, in which writers looked at what was wrong with the nation and its literature. Brooks knew that such literary criticism would sooner or later become social criticism. He wrote that the American life was divided between the businessman (who only thinks of making money) and the intellectual (who only has unpractical theories and ideas). But because they don’t understand each other, there is no “middle ground” where they can meet. The new generation of American writers must construct this “middle ground”.

Young writers took notice of Brooks’s criticism. The result was the trend “new realism”, which lasted up to the 1950s. It made American literature one of the most exciting and influential literatures of the world. Brooks reviewed and reorganized American literature. He wrote famous biographies of Mark Twain and Henry James. His theory was that they were failures because their environment had prevented their development as true artists.

American readers were beginning to lose their fear of those who looked below the surface of human relationships. Intelligent readers were now able to accept even ugly truths about human nature. In 1919, Sigmund Freud had given a famous lecture series in America. This series was both a liberation and an inspiration for American artists. But even before Freud’s arrival, two American novelists were starting to destroy the “double Standard” of America’s puritanical morality: Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser.

Edith Wharton (1862- 1937) was born in an old New York family. She married a man of her own class, but later she left him and moved to Europe to begin a career as a writer. All of her stories are set in the puritanical world of the upper classes. Many people notice a strong similarity between her stories and those of her friend and teacher Henry James. They both wrote psychological novels, usually about the problems of women in upper-class society. However, Wharton’s style is more direct than James’s. She can describe a whole way of life by describing a few surface details, and in a few words she can “catch” (often humorously) the personality of her characters. Many of Wharton’s novels are about the life and customs of upper-class society. But angry social criticism is not far beneath the surface. The life of Lily Bart, heroine of The House of Mirth, is actually a battle. She has been brought up to see herself as a decorative object for wealthy men. But she hates spending time with them. When she tries to act with a little bit of freedom, society rejects her as immoral. In the end, she fails to get a husband, and kills herself. The heroine of The House of the Country is quite open about her own sexual desires. She knows exactly how to use her attractions to get a wealthy husband. Wharton is attacking here the Victorian world of her own youth. She continuous her theme of dishonesty about one’s emotions and sexual feelings in her most famous novel Ethan Frome (1911). The theme is not expressed directly. Instead it lies just below the surface in scenes of great tension. Ethan, a New England farmer, has a cold unsatisfactory relation with his wife. A young cousin, Mattie, comes to live with them. Ethan and the girl Mattie are drawn to each other. But in scene after scene we see them denying their desires. Finally they try to kill themselves, but they fail. In the end Mattie (now cripple), Ethan (now elderly) and the wife all share a strange and terrible life together in the tiny farmhouse. The Reef and Summer are two more novels about sexual passion. In all of her works, the natural instincts of people are crushed by an untruthful society. But her characters still have room for moral choice. This makes her different from the pure naturalists writers like Crane and Dreiser.

Willa Cather (1873-1947) was more conservative. She disagreed with Dreiser’s criticism of the society and hated his “detail-piling”. She believed the novel should be without “social furniture” (details about business and politics). The author and reader should concentrate on the emotional life of the central character. Cather’s speciality was portraits of the pioneer men and women of Nebraska. She had grown up there, and the values of the old pioneer people were her values. Her famous short story Neighbor Rossicky is about the last days of a simple, hard-working immigrant farmer. After much struggle, he has a successful farm and a loving family. Then he dies and is buried in the Nebraska land he had loved so much. Cather’s most famous novels- O Pioneers! The Song of the Lark and My Antonia -all have the same Nebraska setting. Each is a success story. Between 1923 and 1925- in A Lost Lady and The Professor’s House- Cather describes the decline and fall of the great pioneer tradition. It is being defeated by a new spirit of commerce and the new kind of man: the businessman. The greed of such people is destroying. After 1927, with her famous Death Comes for the Archbishop, Cather turned to historical fiction. In writing of the past she was trying to escape from the ugliness of the present.

Ellen Glasgow (1874-1945) is often compared with Willa Cather. Both novelists examined the problem of change. Glasgow, who grew up in Virginia, spent her life writing novels about her state’s past. The Battle-Ground (1902), The Deliverance (1904), Virginia (1913) and Life and Gabriella.

2. American modernist literature.

Modernist literature in America dealt with such topics as racial relationships, gender roles and sexuality, to name just a few. It reached its peak in America in the 1920s up to the 1940s. Among the representative writers of the period we may find Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, although one should mention also Walt Whitman, who, even if he belongs to the 19th century poets, is sometimes regarded as a pioneer of the modernist era in America.

Black writers need to be mentioned when talking about modernism in America, as they seem to have brought a breakthrough in literature and mentality, as far as the self-esteem of Afro-Americans is concerned. The folk-oriented poetry of Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes, for example, written in a rhythm fit to be either sung or told as a story, melancholically describes the joyful attitude of Afro-Americans towards life, in spite of all the hardships they were confronted with. The protagonists of these poems are shown in such a light which offers insight into their cultural identity and folklore. An insight into culture and folklore is also a topic that prose deals with, such as, for example, Jean Toomer's "Blood-Burning Moon" and William Faulkner's "That Evening Sun".

Racial relations between blacks and whites, the gap between what was expected of each of the two and what the actual facts were, or, better said, prejudice in the society of the time are themes dealt with in most of the modernist American literature, whether we speak about prose (Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway), or about drama Eugene O'Neil. In other words, such stereotypes as the lack of education, the poor use of the English language and their portrayal in a dangerous light are not dealt away with, on the contrary, they are still present during the modernist period, as far as literature is concerned. However, with Ernest Hemingway's "The Battler", for example, there seems to be a reversal of stereotypes. The Afro-American character in this short story proves out to be a kind, calculated and polite man, whose good manners and carefully chosen vocabulary are easily noticeable from the first moment he appears in the story.

Madness and its manifestations in the human being seems to be another favorite theme of American modernist writers. Eugene O'Neil's "Emperor Jones", Ernest Hemingway's "The Battler" and William Faulkner's "That Evening Sun", all deal to a certain extent with this topic.

The modernist period also brought changes to the portrayal of gender roles and especially to women's role in society. It is an era under the sign of emancipation and change in society, issues which reflect themselves in the literature of the period, as well. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby", for example, deals with such topics as gender interaction in a mundane society.

Influenced by the first World War, American modernist writers, such as Ernest Hemingway, offer an insight into the psychological wounds and spiritual scars of the war experience. The economic crisis in America at the beginning of the 1930s also left a mark on the literary creations of the period, such as John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath". Nevertheless, all these negative aspects led to new hopes and aspirations, and to the search for a new beginning, not only for the contemporary individuals, but also for the fictional characters in American modernist literature.

Many historians have characterized the period between the two world wars as the United States' traumatic "coming of age," despite the fact that U.S. direct involvement was relatively brief (1917-1918) and its casualties many fewer than those of its European allies and foes. Shocked and permanently changed, Americans soldiers returned to their homeland, but could never regain their innocence. Nor could soldiers from rural America easily return to their roots. After experiencing the world, many now yearned for a modern, urban life.

In the postwar “big boom,” business flourished, and the successful prospered beyond their wildest dreams. For the first time, many Americans enrolled in higher education – in the 1920s college enrollment doubled. The middle-class prospered; Americans began to enjoy the world's highest national average income in this era.

Americans of the “Roaring Twenties” fell in love with modern entertainments. Most people went to the movies once a week. Although Prohibition – a nationwide ban on the sale of alcohol instituted through the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution – began in 1919, illegal “speakeasies” (bars) and nightclubs proliferated, featuring jazz music, cocktails, and daring modes of dress and dance. Dancing, movie going, automobile touring, and radio were national crazes. American women, in particular, felt liberated. They cut their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short "flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1920. They boldly spoke their mind and took public roles in society.

In spite of this prosperity, Western youths on the cultural “edge” were in a state of intellectual rebellion, angry and disillusioned with the savage war, as well as the older generation they held responsible. Ironically, difficult postwar economic conditions in Europe allowed Americans with dollars – like writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound – to live abroad handsomely on very little money, and to soak up the postwar disillusionment, as well as other European intellectual currents, particularly Freudian psychology and to a lesser extent Marxism.

Numerous novels, notably Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) and Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise (1920), evoke the extravagance and disillusionment of what American expatriate writer Gertrude Stein dubbed "the lost generation." In T.S. Eliot's influential long poem "The Waste Land" (1922), Western civilization is symbolized by a bleak desert in desperate need of rain (spiritual renewal). These people include Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Cummings, Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, Sherwood Anderson, Eugene O’Neill.

It is said that people in the 1920s believed in everything, people in the 1930s believed in one thing, and people in the 1940s believed in nothing.

Robert Frost (1874—1963) was born in San Francisco, but known as a New England poet. When he was 10, his father died of T. B. and the family carried his body to be buried in New England, and they were too poor to go back to San Francisco.

Frost entered Dartmouth College, but soon left; later on he tried college again at Harvard, but left at the end of two years, bearing an enduring dislike for academic convention. Then he lived by farming, at the same time writing poetry. He got T. B., and began to live in the countryside at the suggestion of a doctor. He used to say he was one and a half men—a half teacher, a half farmer, and a half poet.

It took 20 years for him to get recognition. His first volume of poetry was published in England in 1913, with the help of Ezra Pound, which was entitled A Boy’s Will. When he went back to his home country, he found himself famous. He later received honorary degrees from 44 colleges and universities, won the Pulitzer Prize four times, and was invited to read his poem at the inauguration of President J. F. Kennedy in 1961.

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