Free Apuntes Literatura Norteamericana Siglo XX 1 Gulag Free

Apuntes - Ana Montoya Huete
Literatura Norteamericana: siglo XX
I - FIRST INTRODUCTION TO THE PERIOD (1920-1960)

THE TWO WARS AS HISTORICAL MARKERS
World War I broke out in Europe in 1914, with Great Britain, France, and Russia fighting against Germany. The
United States, which entered the war in 1917 on the side of Britain and France, had ended its last full-scale
conflict, the Civil War, some fifty years previously. In the interval, the country’s industrial power had grown
immensely. In 1914 the country’s network of transcontinental railroads linked its productive farms, small
towns, and industry to urban centers. Like the Civil War, World War I would mobilize the country’s industries
and technologies and encourage their development. On an even larger scale, World War II would do the same.
At the end of World War I, however, the United States was still a nation of small farms and small towns.
Although several waves of immigration had altered the makeup of the population, the majority of Americans
were still of English or German ancestry. The majority was distrustful of international politics, and after the
war ended, many attempted to steer the nation back to prewar lifestyles. In 1924 Congress enacted an
exclusionary immigration act, which prohibited all Asian immigration to control the ethnic makeup of the
United States. The immediate postwar years also saw the Red Scare, when labor union headquarters were
raided and immigrant radicals were deported by a government fearful of the influence of the newly
Communist Soviet Union.
For other Americans, however, the war helped accelerate changes in the forms of political and social life. The
long struggle to win American women the vote— given a final push by women’s work as nurses and ambulance
drivers during the war— ended in 1920 with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909, successfully
argued during World War I for the commissioning of black officers in the U.S. armed forces; as they would
again after World War II, African Americans who fought abroad returned to fight for their rights at home.
Despite the government’s restrictions on leftist political activity, many Americans looked to the Soviet Union
and the international Communist movement for a model in combating in equality and fostering workers’ rights
in the United States. Other Americans went abroad in order to taste the expatriate life in Europe’s cities and
countryside. Some Americans traveled physical and social distances, as African Americans began to migrate
out of the segregated South and young people moved to the cities. African Americans, emancipated urban
women, and the youth faced off against rural and urban traditionalists over the question of who was truly
“American.”
These conflicts acquired new urgency when the stock market crashed in 1929 and led to an economic crisis
with a 25 percent of unemployment rate— a percentage even larger in its impact, because women in general
were not in the workforce. Known as the Great Depression, this period of economic hardship did not fully end
until the United States entered World War II, following the Japanese attack on the American Fleet at Pearl
Harbor in 1941. Japan’s ally Germany also declared war on the United States, thus involving the country in
another European conflict. The war unified the country politically, as it revitalized the industry and put people
to work, including women who went into the labor force. Germany surrendered in the spring of 1945. The war
ended in August 1945 following the detonation of two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. Europe was in ruins and the United States had become the world’s major industrial and political
power. The two wars, then, bracket a period during which the United States became a fully modern nation.
In the arena of literature and culture, modernism names a recognizable international phenomenon, a wave of
challenges mounted against traditional authority in almost every realm— the arts, religion, science, politics,
and social conventions. American literature registers all sides of the era’s struggles and debates, while sharing
a commitment to explore the meanings of modernity and the possibility of creating something entirely new.
Within this period, three issues stand out as dividing writers and schools of writers. One issue centered on the
uses of literary tradition and whether it was necessary or imitative and old-fashioned. Nonetheless, modernist
works often allude to previous literature ironically, or deliberately fracture traditional literary formulas. A
related issue involved the place of popular culture in serious literature, as it gained momentum and influence.
Another issue was the question of how far literature should engage itself in political and social struggle. Should
1
art be a domain unto itself, exploring aesthetic questions and enunciating transcendent truths, or should art
participate in the politics of the times?
CHANGING TIMES
The transformations of the first half of the twentieth century were driven both by ideas and by changes in the
economic and technological underpinnings of daily life. Much social energy in the 1920s went into enlarging
the boundaries for acceptable self-expression. Adherents of small-town values such as the work ethic, social
conformity, duty, and respectability clashed ideologically not only with internationally-minded radicals but also
with newly affluent young people who argued for more diverse, permissive, and tolerant styles of life. To some
extent, this debate recapitulated the long-standing American conflict between the claims of the individual and
those of society, a conflict going back to the seventeenth-century religious conflicts over autonomy of
conscience that were later epitomized in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call, in the 1840s: “Whosoever would be a
man, must be a non-conformist”.
The 1920s saw significant changes in sexual mores, with increasing numbers of young people no longer under
the watchful eyes of their smalltown elders. These social changes found their most influential theorist in the
Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (1858-1939), inventor of the practice of psychoanalysis. Freudian analysis
aimed at helping people become aware of their repressed feelings and so less likely to reenact in the present
the traumas of the past. Americanized Freudian ideas provided the psychological underpinning for much
literature of the interwar era, whether the focus was the individual trapped in a repressive culture or the
repressive culture itself.
The middle-class double sexual standard had, in fact, always granted considerable sexual freedom to men;
now, however, women began to demand similar freedom for themselves. Women’s demands went well
beyond the erotic, however, encompassing education, professional work, mobility, and whatever else seemed
like social goods hitherto reserved for men. The combination of expanding urban life with new psychologies
oriented to self- expression also brought into being new social possibilities for women and men whose sexual
desires did not conform to traditional patterns. Freud was only one of a number of thinkers in the period who
urged a measure of toleration for sexual minorities, especially homosexuals— a term that entered specialized
English usage in the 1890s and came into wider circulation in the years following World War I. Although the
legal risks and social stigma borne by homosexuals remained very much in force, gay enclaves became more
visible in American life and gay lives became more imaginable as a theme in American literature.
African Americans, like women, became mobile in these years as never before. Around 1915, as a direct result
of the industrial needs of World War I, opportunities opened for African Americans in the factories of the
North, and what became known as the Great Migration out of the South began. Migration damaged the
South’s economy by draining off an important segment of its working population. Even though African
Americans faced racism, segregation, and racial violence in the North, a black American presence soon became
powerfully visible in American cultural life. Harlem, a section of New York City, attained an almost wholly black
population of over 150,000 by the mid-1920s; from this “city within a city”, African Americans wrote,
performed, composed, and painted. This cultural outpouring was known as the Harlem Renaissance.
Class inequality, as well as American racial divisions, continued to generate intellectual and artistic debate in
the interwar years. The nineteenth-century United States had been host to many radical movements— labor
activism, utopianism, socialism, anarchism—. In the twentieth century, especially following the rise of the
Soviet Union, the American left increasingly drew its intellectual and political program from the Marxist
tradition. The German philosopher Karl Marx (1818–1883) located the roots of human behavior in economics.
He claimed that industrializing societies were structurally divided into two antagonistic classes based on
different relations to the means of production— capital versus labor. The Industrial Revolution arose from the
accumulation of surplus capital by industrialists paying the least possible amount to workers; the next stage in
world history would be when workers took control of the means of production for themselves.
Marx’s ideas formed the basis for Communist political parties across Europe. In 1917, a Communist revolution
in Russia led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1914) overthrew the tsarist regime, and engineered the
development of communism as a unified international movement. Americans who thought of themselves as
Marxists in the 1920s and 1930s were usually connected with the Communist Party and subjected to
2
government surveillance and occasional violence, as were socialists, anarchists, union organizers, and others
who opposed unfettered American capitalism and marketplace competition.
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Technology played a vital, although often invisible, role in all these events, because it linked places and spaces,
contributing to the shaping of culture as a national phenomenon rather than a series of local manifestations.
Without new modes of production, transportation, and communication, modern Amer i ca in all its complexity
could not have existed. Electricity, along with the telephone expanded into American homes during these
years, improving life for many but widening the gap between those plugged into the new networks and those
outside them. The phonograph record and the record player (early devices for recording and playing music),
the motion picture (which acquired sound in 1929), and the radio brought mass popular culture into being.
The most powerful technological innovation, however, the automobile, encouraged activity, not passivity.
Automobiles put Americans on the road, dramatically reshaped the structure of American industry and
occupations, and altered the national topography as well. The road itself became— and has remained— a
potent symbol of the United States and of modernity.
In tandem with the impact of technological change on daily life, one of the most important developments in
the interwar period was the growth of modern “big” science. At the end of the nineteenth century and
beginning of the twentieth, scientists discovered that the atom was not the smallest possible unit of matter,
that matter was not indestructible, that both time and space were relative to an observer’s position; hence,
much of the basis of nineteenth-century science had to be put aside in favor of far more powerful but also far
less commonsensical theories.
Poets like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens, however, along with many of their readers, questioned
the capacity of science to provide accounts of subjective experience and moral issues, and they elevated the
metaphorical language of poetry over the supposed literal accuracy of scientific description. The increased
specialization of intellectual activity divided educated people into what the British novelist and physicist C. P.
Snow was later to call the “two cultures”— science versus letters.
THE 1930s
The Great Depression was a worldwide phenomenon and fostered social unrest that led to the rise of fascist
dictatorships in Europe, including those of Francisco Franco in Spain, Benito Mussolini in Italy, and Adolf Hitler
in Germany. Hitler’s program led inexorably to World War II.
In the United States, the Depression made politics and economics the salient issues of public life and overrode
questions of individual freedom with fear of mass collapse. Free-enterprise capitalism had always justified
itself by arguing that the system guaranteed better lives for all. This assurance now rang hollow. The suicides
of millionaire bankers and stockbrokers made the headlines, but more compelling was the enormous toll
among ordinary people who lost their homes, jobs, farms, and life savings in the stock market crash.
Conservatives advised waiting until things got better; radicals espoused immediate social revolution. In this
polarized atmosphere, the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the presidency in 1932 was a victory for
American pragmatism; his series of liberal reforms— Social Security, programs creating jobs in the public
sector, welfare, and unemployment insurance— cushioned the worst effects of the Depression and avoided
the civil strife.
The terrible economic situation in the United States produced a significant increase in Communist Party
membership and prestige in the 1930s. Numerous intellectuals allied themselves with its causes, even if they
did not actually become party members. The appeal of communism was significantly enhanced by its claim to
be an opponent of fascism. Communists fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Hitler’s nightmare
policies of genocide and racial superiority, became increasingly evident as European refugees began to flee to
the United States in the 1930s, and many believed that the USSR would be the only country able to withstand
the German war machine. But Soviet communism showed another side to Americans when American
Communists were ordered to break up the meetings of other radical groups; when Josef Stalin, the Soviet
3
dictator, instituted a series of brutal purges in the Soviet Union, beginning in 1936; and when in 1939 he signed
a pact promising not to go to war against Germany. The disillusionment and betrayal felt by many radicals over
these acts led many 1930s left-wing activists to become staunch anti-Communists after World War II.
AMERICAN VERSIONS OF MODERNISM

Modernism refers to work that represents the transformation of traditional society under the pressures of
modernity, and that breaks down traditional literary forms in doing so. Much modernist literature of this kind,
which critics increasingly now set apart as “high modernism,” is in a sense antimodern: it interprets modernity
as an experience of loss. As its title underlines, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land— the great poem of high
modernism— represents the modern world as a scene of ruin.
Scholars of international modernism frequently trace its rise back to the later nineteenth century, citing the
works of French symbolists in literature, Friedrich Nietzsche in philosophy, and Charles Darwin in science as
examples of radically anti-traditional modes of thought and artistic practice. As an artistic movement,
however, modernism reached a defining level of international coherence and momentum in response to
World War I, which was far more devastating to the Continent than it was to the United States. Modernism
involved other art forms— sculpture, painting, dance—as well as literature. The poetry of William Butler Yeats;
James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922)— these were only a few of the literary products of this movement in England and
on the Continent. In painting, artists like Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, and Georges Braque invented cubism; in the
1920s the surrealistic movement known as Dadaism emerged. Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a
Staircase, which, to the untrained eye, looked like a mass of crudely drawn rectangles, was especially
provocative. Composers like Igor Stravinsky similarly produced music in a “modern” mode, featuring
dissonance and discontinuity rather than neat formal structure and appealing tonal harmonies.
At the heart of the high modernist aesthetic lay the conviction that the previously sustaining structures of
human life, whether social, political, religious, or artistic, had been destroyed or shown up as falsehoods or, at
best, arbitrary and fragile human constructions. Order, sequence, and unity in works of art might well express
human desires for coherence rather than reliable intuitions of reality. Generalization, abstraction, and
high-flown writing might conceal rather than convey the real. To the extent that art falsely presented such an
order as given or natural, it had to be renovated.
Thus a key formal characteristic typical of high modernist works is its construction out of fragments—
fragments of myth or history, fragments of experience or perception, fragments of previous artistic works.
Modernist literature is often notable for what it omits: the explanations, interpretations, connections,
summaries, and distancing that provide continuity, perspective, and security in earlier literatures. There may
be abrupt shifts in perspective, voice, and tone. Its rhetoric may be understated, ironic. It may suggest rather
than assert, making use of symbols and images instead of statements.
Some high modernist works, however, order their discontinuous elements into con spic u ous larger patterns,
patterns often drawn from world literature, mythologies, and religions. As its title advertises, Joyce’s Ulysses
maps the lives of its modern characters onto Homer’s Odyssey; Eliot’s The Waste Land layers the Christian
narrative of death and resurrection over a broad range of quest myths. The question for readers lies in the
meaning of these borrowed structures and mythic parallels: do they reveal profound similarities or ironic
contrasts between the modern world and earlier times?
If meaning is a human construction, then meaning cannot be separated from the difficult process of its making;
if meaning lies obscured deep underneath the ruins of modern life, then it must be effortfully sought out.
Modernist literature therefore tended to foreground the search for meaning over didactic statement, and the
subject matter of modernist writing often became, by extension, the literary work itself. High modernist
writing was especially self- reflexive, concerned with its own nature as art and with its questioning of previous
traditions of literature. Ironically, this subject often had the effect of limiting the audience for a modernist
work; high modernism demanded of its ideal readers an encyclopedic knowledge of the traditions it
fragmented or ironized.
4
Modernist techniques transformed fiction as well as poetry in this period. The average novel became quite a
bit shorter than it had been in the nineteenth century. The modernist aesthetic gave a new significance to the
short story, which had previously been thought of as a relatively slight artistic form. Poems too became
shorter, as narrative poems lost ground to lyrics and the repetitive patterns of rhyme and meter. Modern
fiction preferred suggestion and tended to be written in the first person or to limit the reader to one
character’s point of view on the action. This limitation accorded with the modernist sense that truth does not
exist objectively but is the product of the mind’s interaction with reality. The selected point of view is often
that of a naive or marginal person— a child or an outsider— to convey better the reality of confusion and
dissent rather than the myth of certainty and consensus. In both poetry and fiction, modernists tended to
emphasize the concrete sensory image or detail over general statements. Allusions to literary, historical,
philosophical, or religious details of the past often keep company, in modernist works, with vignettes of
contemporary life, chunks of popular culture, dream imagery, and symbolism drawn from the author’s private
repertory of life experiences. A work built from these various materials may move across time and space, shift
from the public to the personal, and open up literature as a field for every sort of concern. The inclusion of
material previously deemed “unliterary” in works of high seriousness extended to language that might
previously have been thought improper, including representations of the speech of the uneducated and the
inarticulate, the colloquial, slangy, and the popular. Traditional realistic fiction had incorporated colloquial and
dialect speech, often to comic effect, in its representation of the broad tapestry of social life; but such
speakers were usually framed by a narrator’s educated literary voice, conveying truth and authority over
subordinate voices. In modernist writing like William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, these voices assume the full
burden of the narrative’s authority; this is what Ernest Hemingway had in mind when he asserted that the
American literary tradition began with Huckleberry Finn.
5
MODERNISM ABROAD AND ON NATIVE GROUNDS

High modernism was a self-consciously international movement, and the leading American exponents of high
modernism tended to be permanent expatriates, such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. These
writers left the United States because they found the country lacking in a tradition of high culture and
indifferent, if not actively hostile, to artistic achievement. They also believed that a national culture could
never be more than parochial. In London in the first two decades of the twentieth century and in Paris during
the 1920s, they found a vibrant community of dedicated artists and a society that respected them and allowed
them a great deal of personal freedom. Yet they seldom thought of themselves as deserting their nation, they
thought of themselves as bringing the United States into the larger context of European culture. The ranks of
these permanent expatriates were swelled by American writers who lived abroad for some part of the period,
among them Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Robert Frost.
Those writers who came back, however, and those who never left took seriously the task of integrating
modernist ideas and methods with American subject matter. Not every experimental modernist writer
disconnected literary ambitions from national belonging: Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos
Williams, all wanted to write overtly “American” works. Some writers—as the title of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A.
clearly shows— attempted to speak for the nation as a whole. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is similarly
ambitious, and many writers addressed the whole nation in individual works. And a profoundly modern writer
like William Faulkner cannot be extricated from his commitment to writing about his native South.
Like Faulkner, many writers of the period chose to identify themselves with the American scene and to root
their work in a specific region, continuing a tradition of regionalist American writing that burgeoned in the
years following the American Civil War. Their perspectives on their various regions were sometimes
celebratory and sometimes critical. John Steinbeck wrote about California; and Robert Frost identified their
work with New England. An especially strong center of regional literary activity emerged in the South, which
had a weak literary tradition up to the Civil War. William Faulkner depicted a South at once grounded in his
native state of Mississippi and also expanded into a mythic region anguished by racial and historical conflict.
As the pairing of Hurston and Faulkner suggests, the history of race in the United States was central to the
specifically national subject matter to which many American modernists remained committed. Although race
as a subject potentially implicated all American writers, it was African Americans whose contributions most
signally differentiated American modernism from that of Europe. The numerous writers associated with the
Harlem Renaissance made it impossible ever to think of a national literature without the work of black
Americans. All were influenced by the values of modernism with the incorporation of blues rhythms into
poetry, and the poetic depictions of folk culture, applied modernist techniques to represent twentieth-century
African American lives. Writers associated with the Renaissance expressed protest and anger; but the
movement’s writers also articulated the hopes of racial uplift and, like Hurston, focused on the vitality of black
culture more than on the burdens of racism. At least part of this approach was strategic— the bulk of the
readership for Harlem authors was white. Contributions to the Harlem Renaissance came from artists in many
media; an influence equal to or greater than that of the writers came from musicians. Jazz and blues, African
American in origin, are felt by many to be the most authentically American art forms the nation has ever
produced. African American singers and musicians in this period achieved worldwide reputations and were
often much more highly regarded abroad than in the United States.
American literary women had been active on the national scene from Anne Bradstreet forward. Their
increasing prominence in the nineteenth century generated a backlash from some male modernists, who
asserted their own artistic seriousness by identifying women writers with the didactic, popular writing against
which they rebelled. But women refused to stay on the sidelines and associated themselves with all the
important literary trends of the era. Many of these writers concentrated on depictions of women characters or
women’s thoughts and experiences. Yet few labeled themselves feminists. The passage of the suffrage
amendment in 1920 had taken some of the energy out of feminism that would not return until the 1960s.
6
Nevertheless, these literary women were clearly pushing back the boundaries of the permissible, demanding
new cultural freedom for women and taking positions on public causes.
1 - ROBERT FROST (1874-1963)

Although he identified himself with New England, Robert Frost was born in California and lived there until his
father died, when Frost was eleven. The family then moved to New England, where his mother supported
them by teaching school. Frost graduated from high school in 1891 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, with Elinor
White, whom he married three years later. The next twenty years were marked by a variety of different jobs
including an attempt to run a farm. In 1912 he moved to England with his family to work on his poetry, and
published his first book, A Boy’s Will (1913). Thanks to the success of his second book, North of Boston (1914),
he bought another farm in New Hampshire and prospered financially through sales of his books and papers,
along with teaching and lecturing at various colleges. Moreover, he endured personal tragedy: a son
committed suicide, and a daughter had a complete mental collapse.
The clarity of Frost’s diction, the colloquial rhythms, the simplicity of his images, and above all the folksy
speaker— these are intended to make the poems look natural, unplanned. In the context of the modernist
movement, however, they can be seen as a thoughtful reply to high modernism’s fondness for obscurity and
difficulty. In addition, by investing in the New England terrain, Frost rejected modernist internationalism and
revitalized the tradition of New England regionalism. Readers who accepted Frost’s persona and his setting as
typically American accepted the powerful myth that rural New England was the heart of America. Frost played
the rhythms of ordinary speech against formal patterns of line and verse and contained them within traditional
poetic forms. The interaction of colloquial diction with blank verse is especially central to his dramatic
monologues. To Frost traditional forms were the essence of poetry, material with which poets responded to
flux and disorder (what he called “decay”) by forging something permanent. Poetry, he wrote, was “one step
backward taken” resisting time— a “momentary stay against confusion”.
Throughout the 1920s Frost’s poetic practice changed very little. Most of his poems fall into a few types.
Nature lyrics describing or commenting on a scene or event are probably the best known. There are also
dramatic narratives in blank verse about country people, and poems of commentary or generalization. He
could also be humorous or sardonic. In the nature lyrics, a comparison often emerges between the outer scene
and the psyche, a comparison of what Frost in one poem called “outer and inner weather”.
Because he presented himself as a New Englander reading a New England landscape, Frost is often interpreted
as an ideological descendent of the nineteenth century American Transcendentalists. However, for where
they, looking at nature, discerned a benign creator, he saw “no expression, nothing to express”. Frost did share
the belief that collective enterprises could do nothing but weaken the individual self. He avoided political
movements precisely because they were movements, group undertakings. In the 1930s he parted company
with many American writers by opposing both the social programs of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and
artistic programs similarly aimed at the lessening of social grievances rather than the exploration of enduring
human grief. Frost deeply resented this criticism and responded to it with a newly didactic kind of poetry.
7
2 - T. S. ELIOT (1888-1965)
T. S. Eliot was an American living in London. Eliot had a comfortable upbringing in St. Louis: his mother was
involved in cultural and charitable activities and wrote poetry; his father was a successful businessman; and his
grandfather had been a New England Unitarian minister who had founded Washington University. Eliot was
thus a product of that New England. He was highly educated and attended Harvard, La Sorbonne and Oxford.
Eliot began writing traditional poetry as a college student. In 1908, however, he read Arthur Symons’s The
Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) and learned about Jules LaForgue and other French Symbolist poets.
In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) and “Preludes” (1915), Eliot took Symons’s “revolt against
exteriority, against rhetoric” in the direction of associative, oblique free verse. His fellow expatriate and poet
Ezra Pound, reading this work, began enthusiastically introducing Eliot in literary circles as a young American
who had “trained himself and modernized himself on his own”.
Eliot’s persuasive style, a mixture of advocacy and judiciousness, effectively counterpointed Pound’s
aggressive, confrontational approach; the two together had a tremendous effect on how the poetry of the day
was written and how the poetry of the past was evaluated. They defined what is now thought of as “high”
modernism.
Eliot began working on The Waste Land in 1921 and finished it in a Swiss sanatorium while recovering from a
mental collapse brought on by overwork, marital problems, and general depression. He accepted some
alterations suggested by his wife and cut some parts out of the poem on Pound’s advice. Some critics suggest
we should think of The Waste Land as jointly authored, as the manuscript was completely different before and
after Pound’s suggestions.
The Waste Land consists of five discontinuous segments, each composed of fragments incorporating multiple
voices and characters, literary and historical allusions and quotations, vignettes of contemporary life,
surrealistic images, myths, and legends. The poem’s discontinuous elements are organized by recurrent
allusions to the myth of seasonal death, burial, and rebirth that, according to much anthropological thinking of
the time, underlay all religions. It tells the story of a desert land brought to life by a king’s sacrifice.
In 1927 he became a British citizen, and he declared himself a “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and
anglo-catholic in religion”. He then turned increasingly to poems of religious doubt and reconciliation, and the
search for a faith desperately needed. The Four Quartets, begun in 1934 and completed in 1943, are
dramatizations of the difficult process of arriving at belief and move away from fragmentary quotation and
collage techniques in favor of plainer expository statements aspiring to a timeless religious faith.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Eliot’s criticism and poetry became increasingly important to the group of writers
whose work became known collectively as the “New Criticism.” In his influential essay “Tradition and the
Individual Talent”, Eliot had defined the English and European poetic tradition as a self-sufficient organic
whole, an elastic equilibrium that constantly reformed itself to accommodate new poets. What makes poems
matter is their effect on other poems, not their capacity to act upon the world outside of poetry. Poets
contribute to the tradition, he argued, not through the direct expression of individual emotion but through a
difficult process of distancing “the man who suffers” from “the mind which creates”. In other essays, Eliot
denigrated didactic, expository, or narrative poets like Milton and the Victorians while applauding the verbally
complex, paradoxical, indirect, symbolic work of seventeenth-century Metaphysical poets like John Donne and
George Herbert. Through the New Criticism, Eliot’s “impersonal” approach to poetry had a powerful role in
shaping the literary curriculum in American colleges and universities, especially following World War II.
For the New Criticism, which analyzed poems for imagery, allusion, ambiguity, and irony, Eliot’s essays
provided theory, his poetry opportunities for practical criticism. But when critics used Eliot’s preference for
difficult indirection to judge literary quality and made interpretation the main task of readers, they often
8
overlooked the lyricism, obvious didacticism, and humor of Eliot’s own poetry. And they minimized the poems’
cultural, historical, and autobiographical content.
3 - JOHN DOS PASSOS (1896-1970)

John Dos Passos was born in Chicago of well-to-do Portuguese-American parents who were unmarried, and
lived with his mother. He went to the exclusive Choate School and then to Harvard, graduating in 1916. At first
he studied architecture in Spain, but in 1917, he joined the famous Norton-Harjes volunteer ambulance corps.
After the USA entered the war, he became a medical corpsman in the USA Army.
After the war he married and spent a decade as a freelance journalist, traveling in Spain and Europe, and
writing poetry, travel essays, plays, and fiction on the side. His novel Three Soldiers (1921) showed three young
men from different backgrounds destroyed by their own bureaucratic army. Another novel, Manhattan
Transfer (1925), experimented with kaleidoscopic and cinematic techniques to present the depersonalization
of contemporary urban life.
In 1926 he joined the executive board of the Communist journal The New Masses. For the next eight years he
took part in Communist activities but never joined the party, for he rejected the Communist demand that all
writers in the party express only the party line. In 1934 the Communists broke up a Socialist rally at New York
City’s Madison Square Garden; this event persuaded Dos Passos that the Communists were more interested in
power than social justice. Soon after he severed his Communist ties.
The three novels making up USA— The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money— appeared between 1930 and
1936. Its subject is twentieth-century America from coast to coast and at every social level; its portrayal is
savagely satirical. At that point in his life, Dos Passos believed that capitalism led to a division between rich and
poor that could be remedied only by social change.
Dos Passos’s blending of fiction with nonfiction in USA and his adaptation of cinematic strategies to written
work were early uses of techniques that became commonplace in post–World War II fiction. Fiction alternated
with other kinds of material— notably the “Newsreel” sections, in which newspaper excerpts and headlines,
snippets from popular songs, and quotations from speeches and documents are brought together in an
imitation of the weekly feature one saw at the movie house before television took over visual newscasting; the
“Camera Eye” sections, which are impressionistic, emotional, lyrical fragments; and biographies of American
notables.
Beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s second term in 1936, Dos Passos supported the president. But after the
war his concern for personal liberty and his fear of institutions and of concentrated power led him to
reconceive the threat to America as coming from the left rather than the right. He wrote a number of novels
from this vantage point, including a trilogy called District of Columbia (1952), and Midcentury (1961), which
returned to the format of USA.
9
4 - F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (1896-1940)

Fitzgerald was born in a middle-class neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota, descended on his father’s side from
southern colonial landowners and legislators, on his mother’s from Irish immigrants. The family was not
prosperous and it took an aunt’s support to send him to a Catholic boarding school in New Jersey in 1911.
After three years of college at Princeton University, Fitzgerald quit to join the army, but the war ended before
he saw active service.
In 1920, he published the novel This Side of Paradise and became an immediate bestseller, making its author
rich and famous at the age of twenty-four. This novel was accepted as the voice of the younger generation in a
society increasingly oriented toward youth. He combined the traditional narrative and rhetorical gifts of a good
fiction writer, it appeared, with a thoroughly modern sensibility. A week after the novel appeared, Scott and
Zelda were married. Fitzgerald wrote two collections of short stories—Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)— and a second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922).
In 1924, the Fitzgeralds moved to Europe to live more cheaply. They made friends with American expatriates:
Hemingway, Stein, and Pound among others. During this time Fitzgerald published his best-known and most
successful novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), and another book of short stories, All the Sad Young Men (1926).
The Great Gatsby tells the story of a self-made young man whose dream of success, personified in a rich and
beautiful young woman named Daisy, turns out to be a fantasy in every sense: Daisy belongs to a corrupt
society, Gatsby corrupts himself in the quest for her, and above all, the rich have no intention of sharing their
privileges. The novel is narrated from the point of view of Nick Carraway, an onlooker who is both moved and
repelled by the tale he tells and whose responses form a sort of subplot: this experiment in narrative point of
view was widely imitated. The structure of The Great Gatsby is compact; the style dazzling; and its images of
automobiles, parties, and garbage heaps seem to capture the contradictions of a consumer society.
Fitzgerald wrote dozens of short stories during the twenties. Despite the pace at which he worked, the
Fitzgeralds could not get out of debt. Scott became an alcoholic, and Zelda had a mental breakdown in 1930
and spent most of the rest of her life institutionalized. A fourth novel, Tender Is the Night, appeared in 1934.
The novel follows the emotional decline of a young American psychiatrist whose personal energies are sapped
and his career corroded equally by his marriage to a beautiful and wealthy patient and his own weakness of
character. The novel did not sell well. In 1937 Fitzgerald turned to Hollywood screenwriting and he planned to
revive his career as a fiction writer. However, he died of a heart attack in Hollywood at the age of forty- four,
leaving an unfinished novel about a film mogul, The Last Tycoon.
10
5 - WILLIAM FAULKNER (1897-1962)

William Faulkner was a native Mississippian, born near Oxford, where his parents moved when he was five. His
great-grandfather had been a colonel in the Civil War, his father was a reclusive man who loved to hunt, drink,
and swap stories with his friends; and his mother, sensitive, and literary, was a more profound influence.
Faulkner dropped out of high school in 1915 and had no further formal education beyond a year (1919-20) as a
special student at the University of Mississippi. In 1918, he briefly left Oxford. First he went to New Haven;
then he enlisted in the British Royal Flying Corps and was sent to Canada to train. World War I ended before he
saw active service and returned to Oxford in 1919.
Back at home, Faulkner wrote The Marble Faun in 1924, influenced by Shakespearean, pastoral, Victorian, and
Edwardian modes, with an overlay of French Symbolism. In 1925 he went to New Orleans where, for the first
time, he met and mingled with literary people who encouraged Faulkner to develop his own style.
He published novels about childhood, families, sex, race, obsessions, time, the past, his native South, and the
modern world. He invented voices for characters ranging from sages to children, criminals, the insane, even
the dead. He developed his own narrative voice: urgent, intense, and highly rhetorical, and experimented with
narrative chronology and with techniques for representing mind and memory.
Faulkner wrote his first novel, Soldier’s Pay, in New Orleans, in 1926. He learned about the experimental
writing of James Joyce and the ideas of Sigmund Freud. After a trip to Europe at the end of the same year, he
returned to Oxford. Faulkner’s second novel was a satire on New Orleans intellectuals called Mosquitos (1927).
In Flags in the Dust (1929), he focused on the interconnections between a prominent southern family and the
local community.
The social and historical emphasis in Sartoris was not directly followed up in the works Faulkner wrote next.
The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930) were dramatically experimental attempts to
articulate the inexpressible aspects of individual psychology. The Sound and the Fury has four sections, each
with a different narrator, each supplying a different piece of the plot. Three of the narrators are brothers and
each of them, for different reasons, mourns the loss of their sister. The structure of As I Lay Dying, included
here in its entirety, is even more complex. Like The Sound and the Fury, it is organized around the loss of a
beloved woman. The precipitating event in the novel is the death of a mother. The story moves forward in
chronological time as the “poor white” Bundren family takes her body to the town of Jefferson for burial. Its
narration is divided into fifty- nine sections of interior monologue by fifteen characters, each with a different
perception of the action and a different way of relating to reality. The family’s adventures and misadventures
on the road are comic, tragic, grotesque, absurd, and deeply moving.
Neither these books nor Faulkner’s early short stories were very popular. Sanctuary (1931), a sensational work
about sex, gangsters, official corruption, and urban violence, attracted considerable attention, however. He
continued to produce brilliant and inventive novels during these years, such as Light in August (1932), which
interrelated individual psychology and cultural pathology, or Absalom, Absalom! (1936), in which he shifts
from the private psychology that dominated earlier works to social psychology: to the collective mind of the
South.
With World War II, Faulkner’s work became more traditional and less difficult. He began to write about the
rise, in Yoknapatawpha County, of the Snopes family and the simultaneous decline of the region’s
“aristocratic” families. The Hamlet (1940) was the first of three novels devoted to the Snopeses. Because all his
11
works had been set in Yoknapatawpha County and were interconnected, the region and its people began to
take on an existence independent of any one book in which they appeared.
His antiracist Intruder in the Dust (1948) occasioned the award of the Nobel Prize in 1950. Moreover, he
rounded out the Snopes saga with The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959). At the age of sixty- five he died
of a heart attack.
6 - ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899-1961)

Ernest Hemingway was born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois. His mother was a music teacher, director of the
church choir, and a lover of high culture who had contemplated a career as an opera singer. His father was a
successful physician, prone to depression. The family spent summers at their cottage in northern Michigan,
where many of Hemingway’s stories are set. After high school, Hemingway took a job on the Kansas City Star.
When the United States entered the war in 1917, Hemingway was eager to go. An eye problem barred him
from the army, so he joined the ambulance corps. Within three weeks he was wounded by shrapnel. After six
months in the hospital Hemingway went home.
In 1920 he married Hadley Richardson and went to Paris. Supported partly by her money and partly by his
journalism, Hemingway worked at becoming a writer. He came to know Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson,
Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others in the large community of expatriate artistic and literary Americans.
Fitzgerald and Anderson used their influence to get his book of short stories In Our Time published in 1925. In
this book, stories about the adolescent Nick Adams as he grows up in northern Michigan alternate with very
brief, powerful vignettes of war and crime.
In 1926 his novel The Sun Also Rises appeared. Narrated by Jake Barnes, whose World War I wounds have left
him sexually impotent, it depicts Jake’s efforts to live according to a self-conscious code of dignity, of “grace
under pressure” in the midst of a circle of self-seeking American and English expatriates in Paris—the “lost
generation”. He finds an ideal in the rich tradition of Spanish peasant life, especially as epitomized in
bullfighting and the bullfighter. The Sun Also Rises was directly responsible for a surge of American tourism to
Pamplona, Spain, where the novel’s bullfights are set.
In 1927 Hemingway brought out his second collection of stories, Men without Women. Adapting journalistic
techniques in telegraphic prose that minimized narrator commentary and depended heavily on
uncontextualized dialogue, these stories developed the modern, speeded-up, streamlined style exemplified in
“Hills Like White Elephants.” His second novel, A Farewell to Arms, appeared in 1929. It described a romance
between an American army officer, and a British nurse, but their idyll is shattered when she dies in childbirth.
Hemingway’s work has been much criticized for its depictions of women. However, other female characters in
his works are strong, complex figures. Overall, Hemingway identified the rapid change in women’s status after
World War I and the general blurring of sex roles that accompanied the new sexual freedom as aspects of
modernity that men were simultaneously attracted to and found hard to deal with.
As Hemingway aged, his interest in exclusively masculine forms of self-assertion and self- definition became
more pronounced. War, hunting, and similar pursuits that he had used at first to show men manifesting dignity
in the face of certain defeat increasingly became depicted (in his life as well as his writing) as occasions for
competitive masculine display and triumph. Soon after the publication of The Sun Also Rises, his first marriage
broke up; in all he was married four times. In the 1930s and 1940s he adopted the style of life of a celebrity.
Some of his best-known work from these years, such as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), treats the theme of
the successful writer losing his talent in an atmosphere of success, adulation, and wealth.
A political loner distrustful of all ideological abstractions, Hemingway was nevertheless drawn into antifascist
politics by the Spanish Civil War. In To Have and Have Not (1937), the earliest of his political novels, the good
characters are working-class people and the antagonists are idle rich. For Whom the Bell Tolls draws on
Hemingway’s experiences in Spain as a war correspondent, celebrating both the peasant antifascists and the
12
Americans who fought on their behalf. His one play, The Fifth Column (1938) specifically blames the
communists for betraying the cause.
Hemingway was fiercely anti-Nazi during World War II. As well as working as a war correspondent, work that
sent him often to Europe, he used his fishing boat to keep watch for German submarines off the coast of Cuba,
where he had a home. After the war ended, he continued his travels and was badly hurt in Africa in January
1954 in the crash of a small plane. He had already published his allegorical fable The Old Man and the Sea
(1952), and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1953. However, the plane crash had damaged his mental and physical
health, and he never fully recovered. Subject increasingly to depression and an incapacitating paranoia, he was
hospitalized several times before killing himself in 1961.
Several books have been published posthumously based on the voluminous manuscript collections he left.
These include a book of reminiscences about his life in 1920s Paris, A Moveable Feast (1964); a novel about
literary fame and sexual ambiguity constructed from several unfinished drafts, The Garden of Eden (1986); and
The Nick Adams Stories (1972), a collection that added eight previously unpublished stories to the group.
13
7 - JOHN STEINBECK (1902-1968)

Most of John Steinbeck’s best writing is set in the region of California that he called home, the Salinas Valley
and Monterey peninsula of California. Steinbeck believed in the American promise of opportunity for all, but
believed also that social injustices and economic inequalities had put opportunity beyond reach for many. His
work merged literary modernism with literary realism, celebrated traditional rural communities along with
social outcasts and immigrant cultures, and endorsed conservative values and radical politics at the same time.
Steinbeck’s father managed a flour mill and later became treasurer of Monterey County; his mother, who had
taught school before marriage, was active in local civic affairs. Their home was full of books, and Steinbeck
read avidly from an early age. After graduating from Salinas High School in 1919, he began to study at Stanford
University but took time off for a variety of short-term jobs. During this period he developed an abiding
respect for people who worked on farms and in factories, and committed his literary abilities to their cause.
With financial help from his father, Steinbeck spent most of 1929 writing. He moved to the seaside town of
Pacific Grove, on the Monterey coast, and in 1930 was married. In 1935 he achieved commercial success with
his third novel, Tortilla Flat, a celebration of the Mexican- American culture of the “paisanos” who lived in the
Monterey hills. Steinbeck’s next novel, In Dubious Battle (1936), contrasted the decency of striking migratory
farm workers both to the cynicism of landowners and their vigilantes, and to the equal cynicism of Communist
labor union organizers who exploit the workers’ plight for their own purposes. Sympathy for the underdog
appears again in Of Mice and Men (1937), a best-selling short novel about two itinerant ranch hands. Inspired
by the devastating 1930s drought in the southern plains states and the exodus of thousands of farmers from
their homes in the so-called Dust Bowl, he wrote The Grapes of Wrath (1939), that told the story of the Joad
family, who, after losing their land in Oklahoma, migrated westward to California on U.S. Highway 66 looking
for, but not finding, a better life. The Long Valley (1938) brought together a number of his stories set in the
Salinas Valley, including “The Chrysanthemums”. Cannery Row (1945), a local- color novel about workers in the
sardine canneries of Monterey, also became a bestseller.
After World War II, Steinbeck’s work displayed increasing hostility to American culture, whose mass
commercialization seemed to him to be destroying individual creativity: The Leader of the People expresses his
sense that American’s heroic times are past and locates value in the story’s socially marginal characters. His
most important later words are The Wayward Bus (1947), East of Eden (1952), Sweet Thursday (1954), and
Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), in which he recounts his automobile tour of the United
States. Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in 1963.
14
II - SECOND INTRODUCTION TO THE PERIOD (1960-NOW)

We are led into the twenty-first century by an unlikely hero named Oscar Wao, the creation of novelist and
short-story writer Junot Díaz in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008). Oscar is a nerdy, overweight
devotee of fantasy fiction and comics, dreaming of becoming the Dominican American J. R. R. Tolkien, author
of Oscar’s favorite novels, the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In the Dominican Republic he achieves the romantic
fulfillment that eluded him at home, but his refugee family’s tragic history comes full circle, too, as Oscar’s life
is changed forever by his unwitting entanglement with the Dominican Republic’s brutal political regime. This,
Díaz tells us, is fuku, a curse that wreaks havoc the world over, anywhere we find those hungry for power
crushing the freedom, and the bodies, of the weak.
When we read Oscar Wao, we plug into an electric, multilingual English renewed by Spanish, African, and Latin
American borrowings. What has been called a mestizo language was practiced, described, and theorized by the
writer Gloria Anzaldúa de cades before. Building on the work of Anzaldúa and others, a writer of Díaz’s
generation need not justify the hybrid, but can simply inhabit it, using new language to reach new regions of
human experience and American culture. Following Díaz’s allusions in Oscar Wao, readers are led to genre
fiction, superhero comics, film, fashion, pop music, arts, religious ritual, modern sexuality, and mass
entertainment. But Díaz’s headlong prose also brings references to more traditionally literary writers such as
William Shakespeare, Herman Melville, and the Latin American novelist Gabriel García Márquez, alongside the
terms and ideas of literary criticism, history, philosophy, gender theory, and critiques of political power. Do
readers have to choose between the academic and the popular, between “serious” and “entertaining”? Junot
Díaz says no. Twenty-first century readers live these intersections daily, code- shifting as they move among
family, friends, school, work, nations, and cultures. The fiction of Junot Díaz seems to speak all these languages
and more.
Junot Díaz took eleven years to write The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. He had to invent the hybrid
language from which to spin the strands of his story. The Pulitzer Prize committee— known for honoring epic
novels that sum up something important about American life— chose Oscar Wao for the 2008 prize, marking
the arrival in literature of a vision of America already lived by many of its citizens. At the beginning of the
twenty- first century, Oscar Wao did just what the poet Ezra Pound exhorted ambitious writers to do at the
start of the twentieth century: “Make it new.” In doing so, of course, Díaz joined a literary tradition even as he
broke its molds.
The vitality of contemporary American literature is fueled by two great engines, one artistic and one
demographic. The artistic urge to experiment galvanized writers inspired by, or reacting against, the influential
modernist writers of the first half of the twentieth century who themselves experimented ceaselessly with
literary form and with the subjects and stories that could be spoken through poetry, drama, and fiction. At the
same time, the demographics of American education and immigration were changing radically, beginning in
the middle of the twentieth century. These forces transformed the cast of American high- and middlebrow
culture: who participated in American culture, and who was taught the reading and writing skills essential to
the creation of modern literature. As an interest in experiment surged through a nation of new readers and
writers, the basic elements of literary culture were renewed once more.
15
NEW READERS, NEW WRITERS, NEW HEROES

Addressing American college students in 1950, the Russian author Vladimir Nabokov gave his audience a
multiple- choice quiz: What makes a reader a good reader? The options included joining a book club,
identifying with characters, and reading a story for what it had to say about society. These were, for Nabokov,
trick answers: they were common ways of reading then, as now, but he disparaged them. He wanted readers
to take a different approach. Both answers tell us a great deal about what the new generation of American
readers was looking for when they turned to literature.
These readers— more diverse and better educated than ever before, faced with more choices than ever
before— would help to define American and world literature over the next half century. Many of those
regularly encountering literary works in the second half of the twentieth century were, or had been,
servicemen. The Great Gatsby was made popular again by servicemen and their paperbacks. Those soldiers
were also encountering the languages and cultures of Europe, North Africa, India, and Japan in the course of
their service, broadening their cultural education in ways not specifically American. Coming back to the United
States after 1945, veterans were greeted by the benefits of the GI Bill— the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of
1944— signed into law by President Roosevelt. Under its provisions the government provided money so that
veterans could buy homes and attend school, receiving tuition and a stipend for up to four years of college or
other professional training. For the first time, men from immigrant, poor, and working class families, whose
parents had little education, were attending college in droves. Combined with a booming American economy,
plentiful jobs, and the widespread urge to start adult lives delayed by military deployment, the entitlement
helped to lift millions of individuals and families into the middle class.
That demographic change transformed the demographics of reading and writing for the rest of the century. An
influx of writers and scholars fleeing Europe just prior to the outbreak of war had given American intellectuals
renewed contact with the literary currents of French, German, and Russian literature. “The New Criticism” was
popular in literature classrooms just about everywhere, enshrined in textbooks such as Cleanth Brooks and
Robert Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943).
Nabokov’s recommended reading practices would serve students well as they encountered complex literary
works, European influences, and the challenge of reading closely— and they would serve the future readers of
his morally edgy novel Lolita (1955), too. Initially banned in the United States, once Lolita became available
freely to the American public in 1958, it became a best seller even as it tested readers’ moral tolerance and
aesthetic sophistication. Literature’s capacity to change the culture by encouraging readers to think about
their society through the lens of a story had already had significant effects in the nation’s history. The African
American characters that northern white readers identified with or listened to in fiction and autobiography
reached them in ways their social lives otherwise prevented.
In the second half of the twentieth century, a new generation read not only for the “aesthetic bliss” Nabokov
celebrated and for the formal features of language that “close reading” and an appreciation of international
modernism could reveal, but also in order to remake themselves and their society. Those socially engaged acts
of reading ensured that writers catering to them would make their mark both on the development of fiction,
poetry, and drama as art forms and on politics, commerce, religion, medicine, and domestic life. By the mid-
twentieth century, one could already point to a long history of black writers in the United States who used
their skills on the page to fight the philosophy, psychology, and policies of white supremacy. The burgeoning
civil rights movement and, later, the Black Arts movement, brought many more black writers into publication.
While African American members of the armed services were in Europe, James Baldwin was working in the
War Information Office in New York, but he was also honing his craft as a fiction writer, joining a distinguished
generation of black writers that included Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Ann Petry, and
16
others who enjoyed wide audiences in the United States before, during, and after the war. Baldwin’s essays
were not stories or memoirs, but cultural criticism. He provided a pointed psychological, spiritual, sexual, and
practical analysis of racism in America that was as important to the civil rights movement’s intellectual
evolution as sit- ins and boycotts were to its political success. Baldwin’s fiction matched this social analysis
with storytelling that could make readers feel the human cost of poverty and addiction in black communities.
Drawing energy from the newly educated readers and writers of the mid twentieth century, American fiction
and drama in the postwar period frequently celebrated nonconforming outsiders like Baldwin’s Sonny: the
philosophical character, often a writer or an artist, usually male, who suffers social rejection for his ideals or
simply for his identity. The social liberation movements of the second half of the twentieth century— not only
the civil rights movement, but also the later Black Power movement, the American Indian Movement (AIM,
founded in 1968), the women’s liberation movement (which gained momentum in the early 1970s), and the
movement for gay rights (which began with a protest at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York City,
in 1969, and entered a new phase with the AIDS crisis in the mid-1980s)— inspired content for this infinitely
flexible dramatic setup. There were limits to American optimism about the prospects for outsiders’ lives: like
Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman, the outsider trying to reenter society’s circle of norms
can fail, sometimes spectacularly. These misfit characters can be heroes and antiheroes, weak men or rebels,
and their stories can end in tragedy or triumph.
Such outsider characters were related to the rise of a new readership looking for characters with whom they
could identify, but they were also inspired by discontent with mass culture in the United States and its
perceived insistence on social conformity. That discontent sent young people in the postwar period searching
for meaning and identity— beyond the desire for upward mobility, marriage and children, a house in the
suburbs, and the sturdy work ethic of their fathers and mothers. The satirical and sometimes simply resistant
attitude toward intellectual, cultural, religious, and political authority cultivated among the coterie of so-
called beatniks in the late 1940s and 1950s— a group that included Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac,
and William Burroughs— had become a popular movement among the generation born in the decade after the
war. In the 1970s, many important women writers whom readers will find in this anthology— such as Jamaica
Kincaid, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Leslie Marmon Silko— also
resisted conformities of race, education, religion, and gender that they perceived had circumscribed the lives
of the women and men around them. Some, like Bishop, found artistic and personal solidarity among artists
with whom they shared an aesthetic vision and a common set of cultural touchstones. Others, like Bambara,
cultivated a diverse solidarity of women through collective projects and mutual support. Toni Morrison spent
twenty years as an editor at Random House, the job she held before becoming a full- time writer, where she
ensured that black writers received the attention they deserved. And some writers resisted norms by arguing
for new ones, as demonstrated in Silko’s lifelong advocacy for politically engaged Native American art, which
led her to criticize sharply white writers for appropriating Native American sources as well as Native writers for
being insufficiently committed to Native American materials. Do writers have to turn to their own heritage for
inspiration? Sometimes it has seemed that writers of color are expected to do so, and white writers are free to
choose not to. Language itself is a form of conformity and restraint. In the fiction of George Saunders, the
characters resist the stifling, dystopian worlds of American business where the euphemisms of customer
service and “total quality management” jargon make it nearly impossible to describe, or even to perceive, the
world beyond capitalist enterprise. Nonconformity had its most theatrical moment in the 1960s youth
counterculture, epitomized by LSD advocate Timothy Leary’s exhortation to “turn on, tune in, drop out.”
“Turning on” to the exploration of consciousness through psychedelic drugs such as LSD was meant to expand
the mind beyond the limits of conventional thought and perception; to “tune in” meant that one would seek to
be open to the world spiritually, intellectually, and sensually; and to “drop out” was to reject social
conventions and free the mind of the unconscious limits that accompanied those conventions. The writer Joan
Didion turned a critical eye on the counterculture in her essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, but the
counterculture was artistically enabling for many, including Didion herself, whose practice of reportage looked
little like the conventional journalism of her day. Didion waxed personal in her reporting— breaking the rules
of objectivity—as the counterculture around her took to heart the adage that “the personal is political.”
17
“Dropping out” was the 1960s incarnation of an old impulse in American culture, one that can be traced back
at least to Henry David Thoreau. But this aspect of the counterculture was not as politically engaged as the
model of Thoreau might suggest. The ethic of “dropping out” was perhaps most famously embodied by
novelist Ken Kesey. Kesey became famous when he published One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), a best-
selling novel that told the story of a man sent to a mental institution and, finally, lobotomized, because he
would not conform to society’s expectations. The money Kesey earned from this book supported him and a
group of followers calling themselves “The Merry Pranksters,” who experimented with drugs, music, art,
meditation, macrobiotic diets, and unusual social, sexual, and leadership arrangements. The Pranksters’ were
the model for Jack Kerouac’s hero in On the Road (1957), and became the symbols of the counterculture’s
ideals and excesses. Kesey’s world was described in Thomas Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool- Aid Acid Test
(1968), an early example of a genre that came to be called “creative nonFIction.” Like Hunter S. Thompson’s
“gonzo” journalism—in which the journalist immerses him- or herself in extreme experience in order to report
on it vividly— this new genre of writing used literary language (in these cases, the high- energy poetic prose
style of the Beat writers) to report on real people and events. Wolfe and Thompson crafted their styles to
match— and to make the reader feel that she had somehow experienced— their wild subjects. This was a
durable narrative and thematic convention that long accompanied protest and cultural transformation but also
had its politically quietist side. The fact that they still speak to readers today reveals how unconventionality
itself can become a fertile and endlessly engaging convention.
18
LITERATURE AND AMERICAN MEDIA

While education, immigration, and political and cultural unrest had an enormous impact on America’s readers
and writers during the second half of the twentieth century, the medium of writing itself was suddenly
surrounded by a rich and shifting context of new media. For the new media that developed after World War II
and through into the twenty-first century are closely related to literature and together take up themes and
ideas rooted in literature’s longer history.
Two major developments dominate our sense of the media landscape of the late twentieth and early twenty-
first centuries: first, the rise of television after the Second World War, and second, the invention of the
Internet in the 1990s. These two forms of media fascinated not only their mass publics but also writers and
dramatists. The very first “media theorist” was the literary critic Marshall McLuhan, whose best-known book,
Understanding Media (1964), consciously echoed the titles of the muchused literary textbooks of the New
Criticism. Famous for his dictum that “the medium is the message,” he argued that how something is
communicated is sometimes the very essence of what it communicates. Television shows and print advertising
were often the targets of his analyses, but he also wrote lovingly of medieval life when oral storytelling, music,
and traveling dramatic productions constituted the public media of the day. McLuhan’s attention to the
material medium at the expense of content sometimes seemed absurd to his critics, but his emphasis reflected
the public’s sense that television in particular was changing American mass culture less because of what was
said on television than because of how it delivered a culture of permanence into living rooms across the
country. McLuhan’s prolific writing and speaking about television made him a celebrity. He was so well known
that Woody Allen gave him an amusing cameo in his film Annie Hall (1977). McLuhan lamented the passivity
with which viewers received television.
The problem of passivity in the face of spectacle is something that television made urgent and that modern
uses of drama highlight in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Images of violence against peaceful civil
rights protesters and, in the late 1960s and ’70s, images of the war in Vietnam— which many term the first
“televised war”— galvanized national issues that might otherwise have seemed too local or too far away to
engage people throughout the country. Viewers found their passivity challenged: What should they do with
the violence or injustice that they saw in front of them on the screen? How did watching something implicate
them as participants in what they watched? How did performance in social life constrain them—to norms of
gender or race, for example? How might performance free them?
In twentieth - and twenty-first - century drama, playwrights experimented with the so-called fourth wall, the
side of the stage that faces the audience. They explored what would happen when a play broke through that
wall, treating the whole theater, including the audience, as its staging area. Even public spaces were treated as
stages that could include random passersby. The term fourth wall comes from the eighteenth- century French
playwright Denis Diderot; engaging the audience was routine in Shakespearean drama, and the audience is
always crucial to comedy. And in classical Greek drama, the fourth wall is broken whenever the chorus
addresses the audience directly and comments on the action. Among the plays included in this volume, for
instance, August Wilson’s Fences (1983) provokes audiences to think about barriers and spheres of action, to
consider how enclosures determine human beings’ powers of expression. The stage, in every play, fences
things in, and, therefore, fences things out. A description of one such per for mance appears in the excerpt
from Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” in the Creative Nonfiction cluster in this volume: a performance
by the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the section of Golden Gate Park known as the “Panhandle.” Disturbingly,
the troupe uses the racist tradition of blackface theater to goad people into resisting racist political structures;
Didion implicitly asks the reader to consider whether such a performance finally undermines or reinforces
racial stereotyping.
Avant-garde theater, as articulated in the “Postmodern Manifestos” by Charles Ludlam and George Foreman
invites readers to think of theater as a place where such questions can be explored and where the real- life
19
social roles that people perform can be experimented with. Even realist theater was tending toward this kind
of self- conscious meditation on spectatorship. “Reality TV” in the twenty-first century, with its confession
booths and “real” people, pushes right through the fourth wall. The artwork’s own acknowledgment that it is
fictional— became the ultimate stamp of a certain kind of realism in the twenty-first century.
Poetry was affected, too, by the rising interest in theatricality that the new medium of television stimulated.
One of the signal changes in poetic practice, starting with the Beat poets in the middle of the twentieth
century, was the growing popularity of public poetry readings. Perhaps the most famous reading of the
twentieth century occurred on October 7, 1955, at the Six Gallery in San Francisco when Allen Ginsberg read
Howl. Joined that night by the poets of what came to be called the “San Francisco Renaissance,” Ginsberg’s
performance reminded the world that poetry was an oral medium, an art of sound— a fact that had faded
from view as readers absorbed the most famous poems of the early twentieth century, including T. S. Eliot’s
footnoted The Waste Land (1922), considered by some the ultimate modernist example of the art form.
Readings such as the one at the Six Gallery treated poetry like jazz performance—an experience of musicality,
improvisation, and blues- inspired rhythm and emotion. Robert Lowell explained that part of his own dramatic
change of poetic style from formalism to free verse forms in the 1950s came from the realization that his more
traditional poems would not make much of a splash at a reading. Sylvia Plath read “ Daddy” on BBC radio
shortly before her suicide in 1963. Again and again these poets turn to music and jazz-inspired poetry.
While fiction began to be read onstage regularly during this period, it was not drama or live per for mance but
film that intersected most broadly with narrative: Patricia Highsmith and Philip K. Dick wrote stories that were
adapted regularly into popular Hollywood films. Natasha Trethewey’s poetry meditates on both these media.
For her, they represent the deceptions and the truths of history that the poet must confront. Like Marshall
McLuhan, Trethewey reveals messages inherent to dif fer ent media, such as the oppressive racial
spectatorship implicit in much photography, even when it is used to reveal the beauty of the downtrodden.
Readers will find many answers among the selections here. Writers throughout the period wrestle with,
borrow from, and sometimes engulf the media of their times as they reimagine what lit er a ture can be and
do.
20
EXPERIMENT AND PLAY IN TWENTIETH- AND TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY LITERATURE

What is “postmodern”? This term can describe practically anything aesthetically edgy or off- kilter, anything
that bends genres or cultural registers, anything that comments on the welter of media in contemporary
culture. The “Postmodern Manifestos” suggests the variety of ideas and styles that the term can indicate. Don
DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) has been considered one of the best fictional descriptions of life in postmodern
America. Postmodern life is imagined by DeLillo as a heap of fragments, a babble of incessant voices flowing
from modern media to penetrate our perceptions and thoughts. In DeLillo’s America, material consumption
and entertainment become the goals of domestic and professional life, and his stories are crammed with cars,
stores, fast food, breaking news, tourist attractions, screens, and sports. The human beings caught up in these
pursuits, though, always suspect there is something beyond all these glittery attractions. Is DeLillo suggesting
that it is impossible to reclaim the soul in modern, commercial America? Or, rather, is transcendence available
to us in all human culture, no matter how banal? This sort of ambiguity and uncertainty, and the way DeLillo
shifts between satire and sincerity, suggests what is so inviting to readers in the literature typically called
“postmodern.” Readers of fiction have found such openness to interpretation especially appealing in the
exuberant satires of Thomas Pynchon, George Saunders, Lydia Davis, or Ishmael Reed.
In poetry, writers embraced the task of re- enchanting the material, commercial world. In “A Supermarket in
California,” Allen Ginsberg’s speaker, walking and thinking of the nineteenth- century American poet Walt
Whitman, looks at the grocery aisles with new wonder. He catches earthy Walt squeezing the produce and
eyeing the handsome grocery boys. Others felt it was poetry’s job to probe the material properties of language
itself. The poets known as the “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E” school, and their experimentalist precursor, John
Ashbery, questioned the basic expectations of meaning. Such poetry can seem difficult— indeed, it is difficult
to follow meaning and sense if these are not the underlying threads holding a poem together. And yet, like the
ambiguous satires of the story writers, postmodern poetry most often wants to play with readers, not against
them. Ashbery was inspired by midcentury abstract painting—by artists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark
Rothko. Readers can take pleasure in the color, texture, feeling, connotations, and shapes of language even if
its meanings remain elusive.
Writing in the second half of the twentieth century was not experimental only in matters of form. For many
writers, the imperative to create challenging or innovative forms paled in significance next to the social
changes they, and the world around them, were experiencing. Realism, in whatever genre, could respond to
the shocks of contemporary life. When the forms of modernist literature seemed too heady, too abstract, or
too intellectual, realism offered a mode suited to the autobiographical and the personal. The poet Robert
Lowell lived this transition in his own work. Breaking with both social decorum and poetic form, a prose
section acknowledges a possibly Jewish ancestor in the poet’s white - Anglo-Saxon - Protestant family tree.
Alongside work by other poets who used the so- called confessional approach to poetry— including Frank
O’Hara, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Sharon Olds— Lowell’s experiments with subject and
form brought newly accessible urgency and emotion to lyric poetry in the decades after World War II. Billy
Collins’s poem “I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey’s Version of ‘Three Blind Mice’ ” (1998) uses
an immediately personal and ordinary (not to mention humorous) occasion to transcribe the poet’s thoughts
on the effects of music. This is a different kind of confession— there is no deep trauma remembered here, no
scandal or lost love. And the poem doesn’t push the boundaries of socially acceptable topics in the manner of
confessional poetry. Rather, it pushes the boundaries of poetic relevance.
While writers who have been called “postmodern” sometimes rejected or reacted against the early- twentieth-
century writers and artists who have been called “modernists,” their techniques and concerns are often
continuous with those of these earlier practitioners. The writers of the early twentieth century took up socially
taboo topics, were inspired by other artistic media, and wove high and low culture into their work. They
wrestled with profound social changes and with a brutal, seemingly pointless war. And so when late- twentieth
century writers reacted against modernism, they had also decided what the movement meant. From the
21
longer perspective of the twenty- first century, it’s clear that the aesthetic epoch reflected in much of this
volume could just as well be termed “long modernism.” Like their early- twentieth- century precursors, many
of the writers included here experiment with literary form and subject as an antidote to what they see as the
violent, empty, fragmented, and soul- crushingly conventional forms of modern life.
Writers such as Edward P. Jones, Patricia Highsmith, George Saunders, and Philip K. Dick turn to personal
history, to low- brow visual media, to the new languages of business, and to genres such as horror and science
fiction for sources of inspiration and provocation that were not typical for writers of the early twentieth
century. Consider, for instance, how a lesbian pulp novel such as The Fear and the Guilt (1954), by Wilene
Shaw (the pen name of Virginia M. Harrison), sports its genre conventions on its cover. By contrast,
Highsmith’s carefully crafted realist novel, The Price of Salt (1952), upended such pulp conventions. It is a love
story between two women with an unprecedented happy ending for the couple. Harkening back to the
literature of the nineteenth century, writers understood as postmodern in this sense seek to make readers feel
something even while they revel in satire and irony, while the writers of “long modernism” can be suspicious
of sentiment. Rejecting or reimagining what “elite” literature might look like, writers looking for alternatives to
a dominant and elite modernism likewise reimagine their readers and pave the way for the innovations of a
writer like Junot Díaz.
22
LITERATURE NOW
In the United States alone, over 50,000 novels are published each year. Worldwide, the number is well over
200,000. It is cheaper and easier than ever to make written works available to readers. Writing programs have
made the professional lives of poets and other writers sustainable, even when their work doesn’t turn a profit
in the publishing market. The teaching now done by many writers not only allows them to continue writing but
also trains new writers, whose work can in turn be found in the ever- increasing numbers of creative writing
journals and websites, as well as in the blogs, posts, and Twitter feeds generated daily to keep Web content
fresh. If the ranks of readers and writers expanded dramatically in the United States in the wake of World War
II, how much more has the audience for writing of all kinds expanded— but also fragmented—in the wake of
the Internet? The rise of digital culture and of global publishing has made the ubiquity of writing, and of
English, suddenly obvious.
Literature is defined by its global audience, massive production, and transnational use of English. The literary
critic Rebecca Walkowitz notes that many of the most successful writers now labor with the knowledge that
their work will instantly be translated into multiple languages. She argues that this fact has driven a resurgence
in literary experimentation with plot and character, elements of fiction that “survive” translation in ways that
more material aspects of language— grammar, sound, etymology— cannot. Others point to the way that the
migration of literary works to unexpected new contexts changes the interpretation and social meaning of
those works. Poetry, by contrast, translates beautifully to the screen. In turn, poetry and fiction appearing in
traditional print form sometimes borrow styles from texting, posts, and tweets.
What does all the writing sparked by the rise of the Internet tell us about lit er a ture today? Crucially, it
reminds us that language itself is a living thing, an artistic medium that changes in the very hands of the
writers and speakers who use it. Physical and virtual migrations of people and their writing in the
contemporary world are driven by economic, political, religious, and personal forces— forces that call out
now, as they always have, for a response in art. As Junot Díaz, Gloria Anzaldúa, Maxine Hong Kingston, Tracy K.
Smith, and other writers fold multiple languages into their literary works, they recraft the English we have at
our disposal. African immigration, the rise of Spanish as an American language, and immigrations yet to come
will continually reshape the literary landscape.
23
8 - TENNESSEE WILLIAMS (1911-1983)

Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi. His mother was repressed and
genteel, and his father was a traveling salesman, often away from his family and often violent and drunk when
at home. As a child, Williams was sickly and overly protected by his mother; he was closely attached to his
sister, repelled by the rough house world of boys, and alienated from his father. Then the family moved from
Mississippi to St. Louis, where Cornelius became a sales manager of the shoe company he had traveled for.
Williams went to the University of Missouri but left after two years; his father then found him a job in the
shoe- factory warehouse. He worked there for nearly three years, writing feverishly at night. Williams found
the life so difficult, however, that he succumbed to a nervous breakdown. After recovering at the home of his
grandparents, he went on to further studies, finally graduating in 1938. Earlier, his sister had been suffering
increasing mental imbalance; the final trauma was apparently brought on by one of his father’s alcoholic rages,
in which he beat his wife and made a gesture that she took to be sexual.
The next year, Williams left for New Orleans, the first of many temporary homes; it would provide the setting
for A Streetcar Named Desire. In New Orleans he changed his name to “Tennessee,” later giving various
romantic reasons for doing so. There also he actively entered the homosexual world.
Williams had had plays produced at local theaters and in 1939 he won a prize for a collection of one-act plays,
American Blues. His first success was The Glass Menagerie (1945), which he called it a “memory play” seen
through the recollections of the writer, Tom, who talks to the audience about himself and about the scenes
depicting his mother, Amanda; his crippled sister, Laura; and the traumatic effect of a modern “gentleman
caller” on them. While there are similarities, the play is not literally autobiographical.
The financial success of Menagerie proved exhilarating, then debilitating. Williams fled to Mexico to work full-
time on an earlier play, The Poker Night. It had begun as The Moth; its first image, as Williams’s biographer,
Donald Spoto, tells us, was “simply that of a woman, sitting with folded hands near a window, while moonlight
streamed in and she awaited in vain the arrival of her boyfriend”: named Blanche, she was at first intended as
a young Amanda. During rehearsals of Menagerie, Williams had asked members of the stage crew to teach him
to play poker, and he began to visualize his new play as a series of confrontations between working class poker
players and two refined southern women.
As the focus of his attention changed from Stanley to Blanche, The Poker Night turned into A Streetcar Named
Desire. Upon opening in 1947, it was an even greater success than The Glass Menagerie, and it won the
Pulitzer Prize. Williams was able to travel and to buy a home in Key West, Florida, where he did much of his
ensuing work. At about this time, he fell in love with a young man named Frank Merlo.
Among the most successful plays were The Rose Tattoo (1950), in which the heroine, worshiping the memory
of her dead husband, finds love again; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), which portrays the conflict of the dying Big
Daddy and his impotent son, Brick, watched and controlled by Brick’s wife; and The Night of the Iguana (1961),
which brings a varied group of tormented people together at a rundown hotel on the Mexican coast.
For years Williams had depended on a wide variety of drugs, especially to help him sleep and to keep him
awake in the early mornings. In the 1960s the drugs began to take a real toll. Other factors contributed to the
decline of his later years: Frank Merlo’s death, the emergence of younger playwrights, and the violent nature
of the 1960s, which seemed both to mirror his inner chaos and to leave him behind.
In Williams’s late work, his sister was the source and inspiration, either directly or indirectly, in the situation of
romanticized mental illness or unvarnished verisimilitude. This observation is certainly true of Clothes for a
Summer Hotel (1980), ostensibly about the ghosts of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and of the play he obsessively
wrote and rewrote, The Two Character Play, which chronicles the descent of a brother and sister, who are also
lovers, into madness and death.
24
Despite Williams’s self-destructiveness, in his writing and in his social life, the work of his great years was now
being seriously studied and often revived by regional and community theaters. He was collaborating on a film
of two stories about his sister when he died, apparently having choked to death on the lid of a pill bottle.
Although he never acknowledged any debt to the American playwright Eugene O’Neill, Williams shared with
O’Neill an impatience over the theatrical conventions of realism. The Glass Menagerie, for example, uses
screened projections, lighting effects, and music to emphasize that it takes place in Tom’s memory. A Streetcar
Named Desire moves in and out of the house on Elysian Fields, while music and lighting reinforce all the major
themes. Williams also relies on the effects of language, especially of a vivid and colloquial Southern speech
that may be compared with that of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, or Flannery O’Connor. Rhythms of
language become almost a musical indication of character, distinguishing Blanche from other characters.
Reading or seeing his plays, we become aware of how symbolic repetitions produce a heightening of reality:
what Williams called “poetic realism.”
Contemporary criticisms of Williams’s plays focused on their violence and their obsession with sexuality, which
in some of the later work struck some commentators as an almost morbid preoccupation with “perversion”—
murder, rape, drugs, incest, nymphomania. These taboo topics, however, figure as instances of Williams’s
deeper subjects: desire and loneliness. ALoneliness and desire propel his characters into extreme behavior, no
doubt, but such behavior literally dramatizes the plight that Williams saw as universal.
25
9 - ARTHUR MILLER (1915-2005)

Miller was born into a German Jewish family in Manhattan; his father was a well-to-do but almost illiterate
clothing manufacturer, his mother an avid reader. When his father’s business collapsed after the stock market
crash in 1929, the family moved to Brooklyn, where Miller graduated from high school. His subsequent two
years of work in an automobile-parts warehouse to earn money for college tuition are warmly recalled in his
play A Memory of Two Mondays (1955). At the University of Michigan he enrolled as a journalism student.
These were the years of the Spanish Civil War, the rise of fascism, and the attraction of Marxism as a way out
of the Depression, and here Miller formed his political views. He also began to write plays, which won prizes at
the university and in New York. He then went to work for the Federal Theater Project, wrote radio plays,
toured army camps to gather material for a film, and married Mary Slattery, the first of his three wives.
In 1947 Miller enjoyed his first Broadway success, All My Sons. This strongly realistic portrayal of a family
divided because of the father’s insistence on business as usual during World War II drew the attention of
audiences and theater critics. Death of a Salesman, his masterpiece, was produced two years later and won
the Pulitzer Prize.
In the early 1950s, the hysterical search for supposed Communist infiltration of American life reached its
height as Senator Joseph McCarthy summoned suspect after suspect to hearings in Washington. Out of this
insight came The Crucible (1953), in which the hero, John Proctor, allows himself to be executed rather than
sign away his name and his children’s respect. Hysteria touched Miller personally when he was denied a
passport and in 1957 was convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to name suspected Communists.
Miller had long been looking for a way to dramatize what he had earlier learned about mob control of the
Brooklyn waterfront and finally did so in the one- act play A View from the Bridge, produced with A Memory of
Two Mondays in 1955. Meanwhile, he had met the glamorous movie actress Marilyn Monroe; they married in
1956. He wrote the screenplay The Misfits for Monroe, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1961.
In 1964 two plays opened: After the Fall (in which the protagonist is a thinly disguised Miller investigating his
family, his responsibilities, and his wives) and Incident at Vichy (about Jews and Nazis in Vichy, France). Among
later plays are The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), The Archbishop’s Ceiling
(1977), and two one- act plays under the title Danger: Memory! (1986).
Miller in his later years was something of an activist. In the late 1960s he was asked to become president of
PEN (Poets, Essayists, Novelists), the international writers’ group. Like his contemporary Tennessee Williams,
Miller rejected the influence of “mawkish twenties slang” and “deadly repetitiveness.” Again like Williams,
Miller was impatient with prosy dialogue and well- made structures. As he explained, the success of A
Streetcar Named Desire in 1947 helped him write Death of a Salesman.
In Salesman the action moves effortlessly from the present into moments in his memory, symbolized in the
stage setting by the idyllic leaves around his house that, in these past moments, block out the threatening
apartment houses. A striking difference between Williams and Miller, however, is the latter’s overt moralizing,
which adds a didactic element to his plays not to be found in those of Williams.
26

Free Apuntes Literatura Norteamericana Siglo XX 1 Gulag Free

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Free Apuntes Literatura Norteamericana Siglo XX 1 Gulag Free

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Apuntes - Ana Montoya Huete

Literatura Norteamericana: siglo XX

I - FIRST INTRODUCTION TO THE PERIOD (1920-1960)

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

AMERICAN VERSIONS OF MODERNISM

MODERNISM ABROAD AND ON NATIVE GROUNDS

1 - ROBERT FROST (1874-1963)

3 - JOHN DOS PASSOS (1896-1970)

4 - F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (1896-1940)

5 - WILLIAM FAULKNER (1897-1962)

6 - ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899-1961)

7 - JOHN STEINBECK (1902-1968)

II - SECOND INTRODUCTION TO THE PERIOD (1960-NOW)

NEW READERS, NEW WRITERS, NEW HEROES

LITERATURE AND AMERICAN MEDIA

EXPERIMENT AND PLAY IN TWENTIETH- AND TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY LITERATURE

8 - TENNESSEE WILLIAMS (1911-1983)

9 - ARTHUR MILLER (1915-2005)

You might also like