A Very Short FAQ

1. What was the change in society during the American Modernist Period?

In the early 1900s modernists started playing around with how to write different poems

and novels. From this came imagism where the poem would be precise in its word choice and

an image would appear. Then WWI hit and the world of writing was temporarily halted and

afterwards writers were focused on the new world, its outlook, and what had happened.

Authors wrote about the disillusionment to society and how the war was going to have

effects years to come. Society, as a whole, lost most of its social bounds increasing an

intermingling of race and sex in some places. A sense of utopianism came about in the 1920s

leading to many people feeling lost in the world and in their life. The Great Depression then

got rid of everyone’s economic security and disillusionment followed and was increased after

WWII.

2. What methods did authors use in their writing to make them modernist?

Authors of poems or novels used five methods to write in a modernist style:

experimentation, individualism, multiple perspectives, free verse, and an abundance of

literary devices. Authors experimented with absurd imagery with nonlinear narratives and a

stream of consciousness style of storytelling. Authors focused on individual experiences and

individual people instead of a group or collective perspective. With these individual

perspectives there would be multiple perspectives as the story unfolded and as the

individual’s actions were deemed important to the story. In poetry authors would forgo a

writing scheme and just write in a free verse which loses the normal structure of poetry.
Symbols and imagery and several other literary devices would be used throughout the entire

novel or poem to create a very emphasized point.

3. What were authors main messages in this period?

Several notable topics and messages covered were the true American experience of the

time, the Lost Generation, and the Great Depression. Authors began a trend called nativism

where the modern American experience was the subject at hand. This was mostly perpetuated

by authors like William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore. The Lost

Generation writers focused more on Europe, but America was still a hot topic. They would

write about disillusionment or isolation in society and people. The most iconic writer of the

Lost Generation is Ernest Hemingway and is considered the voice of the Lost Generation.

Authors wrote about the Great Depression and its effects on people and society. John

Steinbeck wrote about the Great Depression on an individual level in several novels and

really criticized society in them while showing what people were going through.

4. Do authors look more into the past or into the future?

Authors usually looked into the past, but a few looked into the future. After WWI authors

became very reflective on what had happened. Novels like Grapes of Wrath and A Farewell

to Arms were written after the events had taken place. They commented on what had

happened to people to try and expose those experiences to the world. A few works looked

into the future and notable ones include The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot and 1984 by George

Orwell. Those looked into the effects in the future of what has happened so far.

5. What creates the literary themes in American Modernist literature?

 The main themes of American modernist literature are confusion whether it be about

purpose in life or what is happening in life, isolation whether it be from society or from

yourself, and disillusionment whether it be from a war or an economic disaster. Confusion

represented in T. S. Eliot’s The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock because of its fragmented

storytelling and the confusion of the main character and trying to figure out where he belongs

in society. Ernest Hemingway writes a great deal on isolation and In Another Country shows

soldiers and common Americans isolation from society and from themselves through

interactions after America is forced to join WWI. Disillusionment is the most used theme in

this period, and it infiltrates almost every work. It is brought on in works like The Great

Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald which shows the disillusionment in not being able to recreate

the main characters past life.