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American literature
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The 20th century. Writing from 1914 to 1945
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Eugene O’Neill
Maxwell
Anderson
Robert E. Sherwood
Marc Connelly
Elmer Rice
Lillian Hellman
Thornton Wilder
William
Saroyan
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Robert
Frost
"Poems"
Vachel Lindsay
Carl Sandburg
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Ezra Pound
William Carlos
Williams
Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell
Sherwood Anderson
F.
Scott Fitzgerald
Sinclair Lewis
Ernest Hemingway
William
Faulkner
John Steinbeck
Katherine Anne Porter
Jack Kerouac
Willa Cather
Pearl S. Buck
Mortimer Adler
Erich Fromm
Willard Van Orman Quine
Ayn Rand
Richard Rorty
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The 20th century
Writing from 1914 to 1945
Important movements in
drama, poetry, fiction, and criticism took shape in
the years before, during, and after World War I. The
eventful period that followed the war left its
imprint upon books of all kinds. Literary forms of
the period were extraordinarily varied, and in
drama, poetry, and fiction the leading authors
tended toward radical technical experiments.
Experiments in drama
Although drama had not been a major art form in the
19th century, no type of writing was more
experimental than a new drama that arose in
rebellion against the glib commercial stage. In the
early years of the 20th century, Americans traveling
in Europe encountered a vital, flourishing theatre;
returning home, some of them became active in
founding the Little Theatre movement throughout the
country. Freed from commercial limitations,
playwrights experimented with dramatic forms and
methods of production, and in time producers,
actors, and dramatists appeared who had been trained
in college classrooms and community playhouses. Some
Little Theatre groups became commercial
producers—for example, the Washington Square
Players, founded in 1915, which became the Theatre
Guild (first production in 1919). The resulting
drama was marked by a spirit of innovation and by a
new seriousness and maturity.
Eugene O’Neill, the most admired dramatist of the
period, was a product of this movement. He worked
with the Provincetown Players before his plays were
commercially produced. His dramas were remarkable
for their range. Beyond the Horizon (first performed
1920), Anna Christie (1921), Desire Under the Elms
(1924), and The Iceman Cometh (1946) were
naturalistic works, while The Emperor Jones (1920)
and The Hairy Ape (1922) made use of the
Expressionistic techniques developed in German drama
in the period 1914–24. He also employed a
stream-of-consciousness form of psychological
monologue in Strange Interlude (1928) and produced a
work that combined myth, family drama, and
psychological analysis in Mourning Becomes Electra
(1931).
No other dramatist was as generally praised as
O’Neill, but many others wrote plays that reflected
the growth of a serious and varied drama, including
Maxwell Anderson, whose verse dramas have dated
badly, and Robert E. Sherwood, a Broadway
professional who wrote both comedy (Reunion in
Vienna [1931]) and tragedy (There Shall Be No Night
[1940]). Marc Connelly wrote touching fantasy in an
African American folk biblical play, The Green
Pastures (1930). Like
O’Neill, Elmer Rice made use
of both Expressionistic techniques (The Adding
Machine [1923]) and naturalism (Street Scene
[1929]). Lillian Hellman wrote powerful,
well-crafted melodramas in The Children’s Hour
(1934) and The Little Foxes (1939). Radical theatre
experiments included Marc Blitzstein’s savagely
satiric musical The Cradle Will Rock (1937) and the
work of Orson Welles and John Houseman for the
government-sponsored Works Progress Administration
(WPA) Federal Theatre Project.
The premier radical
theatre of the decade was the Group Theatre
(1931–41) under Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg,
which became best known for presenting the work of
Clifford Odets. In Waiting for Lefty (1935), a
stirring plea for labour unionism, Odets roused the
audience to an intense pitch of fervour, and in
Awake and Sing (1935), perhaps the best play of the
decade, he created a lyrical work of family conflict
and youthful yearning.
Other important plays by
Odets for the Group Theatre were Paradise Lost
(1935), Golden Boy (1937), and Rocket to the Moon
(1938). Thornton Wilder used stylized settings and
poetic dialogue in Our Town (1938) and turned to
fantasy in The Skin of Our Teeth (1942).
William
Saroyan shifted his lighthearted, anarchic vision
from fiction to drama with My Heart’s in the
Highlands and The Time of Your Life (both 1939).
Eugene O’Neill

American dramatist
in full Eugene Gladstone O’Neill
born Oct. 16, 1888, New York, N.Y., U.S.
died Nov. 27, 1953, Boston, Mass.
Main
foremost American dramatist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1936. His masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night (produced
posthumously 1956), is at the apex of a long string of great plays,
including Beyond the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1922), Strange
Interlude (1928), Ah! Wilderness (1933), and The Iceman Cometh (1946).
Early life
O’Neill was born into the theatre. His father, James O’Neill, was a
successful touring actor in the last quarter of the 19th century whose
most famous role was that of the Count of Monte Cristo in a stage
adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas père novel. His mother, Ella,
accompanied her husband back and forth across the country, settling down
only briefly for the birth of her first son, James, Jr., and of Eugene.
Eugene, who was born in a hotel, spent his early childhood in hotel
rooms, on trains, and backstage. Although he later deplored the
nightmare insecurity of his early years and blamed his father for the
difficult, rough-and-tumble life the family led—a life that resulted in
his mother’s drug addiction—Eugene had the theatre in his blood. He was
also, as a child, steeped in the peasant Irish Catholicism of his father
and the more genteel, mystical piety of his mother, two influences,
often in dramatic conflict, which account for the high sense of drama
and the struggle with God and religion that distinguish O’Neill’s plays.
O’Neill was educated at boarding schools—Mt. St. Vincent in the Bronx
and Betts Academy in Stamford, Conn. His summers were spent at the
family’s only permanent home, a modest house overlooking the Thames
River in New London, Conn. He attended Princeton University for one year
(1906–07), after which he left school to begin what he later regarded as
his real education in “life experience.” The next six years very nearly
ended his life. He shipped to sea, lived a derelict’s existence on the
waterfronts of Buenos Aires, Liverpool, and New York City, submerged
himself in alcohol, and attempted suicide. Recovering briefly at the age
of 24, he held a job for a few months as a reporter and contributor to
the poetry column of the New London Telegraph but soon came down with
tuberculosis. Confined to the Gaylord Farm Sanitarium in Wallingford,
Conn., for six months (1912–13), he confronted himself soberly and
nakedly for the first time and seized the chance for what he later
called his “rebirth.” He began to write plays.
Entry into theatre
O’Neill’s first efforts were awkward melodramas, but they were about
people and subjects—prostitutes, derelicts, lonely sailors, God’s
injustice to man—that had, up to that time, been in the province of
serious novels and were not considered fit subjects for presentation on
the American stage. A theatre critic persuaded his father to send him to
Harvard to study with George Pierce Baker in his famous playwriting
course. Although what O’Neill produced during that year (1914–15) owed
little to Baker’s academic instruction, the chance to work steadily at
writing set him firmly on his chosen path.
O’Neill’s first appearance as a playwright came in the summer of
1916, in the quiet fishing village of Provincetown, Mass., where a group
of young writers and painters had launched an experimental theatre. In
their tiny, ramshackle playhouse on a wharf, they produced his one-act
sea play Bound East for Cardiff. The talent inherent in the play was
immediately evident to the group, which that fall formed the
Playwrights’ Theater in Greenwich Village. Their first bill, on Nov. 3,
1916, included Bound East for Cardiff—O’Neill’s New York debut. Although
he was only one of several writers whose plays were produced by the
Playwrights’ Theater, his contribution within the next few years made
the group’s reputation. Between 1916 and 1920, the group produced all of
O’Neill’s one-act sea plays, along with a number of his lesser efforts.
By the time his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, was produced
on Broadway, Feb. 2, 1920, at the Morosco Theater, the young playwright
already had a small reputation.
Beyond the Horizon impressed the critics with its tragic realism, won
for O’Neill the first of four Pulitzer prizes in drama—others were for
Anna Christie, Strange Interlude, and Long Day’s Journey into Night—and
brought him to the attention of a wider theatre public. For the next 20
years his reputation grew steadily, both in the United States and
abroad; after Shakespeare and Shaw, O’Neill became the most widely
translated and produced dramatist.
Period of the major works
O’Neill’s capacity for and commitment to work were staggering. Between
1920 and 1943 he completed 20 long plays—several of them double and
triple length—and a number of shorter ones. He wrote and rewrote many of
his manuscripts half a dozen times before he was satisfied, and he
filled shelves of notebooks with research notes, outlines, play ideas,
and other memoranda. His most-distinguished short plays include the four
early sea plays, Bound East for Cardiff, In the Zone, The Long Voyage
Home, and The Moon of the Caribbees, which were written between 1913 and
1917 and produced in 1924 under the overall title S.S. Glencairn; The
Emperor Jones (about the disintegration of a Pullman porter turned
tropical-island dictator); and The Hairy Ape (about the disintegration
of a displaced steamship coal stoker).
O’Neill’s plays were written from an intensely personal point of
view, deriving directly from the scarring effects of his family’s tragic
relationships—his mother and father, who loved and tormented each other;
his older brother, who loved and corrupted him and died of alcoholism in
middle age; and O’Neill himself, caught and torn between love for and
rage at all three.
Among his most-celebrated long plays is Anna Christie, perhaps the
classic American example of the ancient “harlot with a heart of gold”
theme; it became an instant popular success. O’Neill’s serious, almost
solemn treatment of the struggle of a poor Swedish-American girl to live
down her early, enforced life of prostitution and to find happiness with
a likable but unimaginative young sailor is his least-complicated
tragedy. He himself disliked it from the moment he finished it, for, in
his words, it had been “too easy.”
The first full-length play in which O’Neill successfully evoked the
starkness and inevitability of Greek tragedy that he felt in his own
life was Desire Under the Elms (1924). Drawing on Greek themes of
incest, infanticide, and fateful retribution, he framed his story in the
context of his own family’s conflicts. This story of a lustful father, a
weak son, and an adulterous wife who murders her infant son was told
with a fine disregard for the conventions of the contemporary Broadway
theatre. Because of the sparseness of its style, its avoidance of
melodrama, and its total honesty of emotion, the play was acclaimed
immediately as a powerful tragedy and has continued to rank among the
great American plays of the 20th century.
In The Great God Brown, O’Neill dealt with a major theme that he
expressed more effectively in later plays—the conflict between idealism
and materialism. Although the play was too metaphysically intricate to
be staged successfully when it was first produced, in 1926, it was
significant for its symbolic use of masks and for the experimentation
with expressionistic dialogue and action—devices that since have become
commonly accepted both on the stage and in motion pictures. In spite of
its confusing structure, the play is rich in symbolism and poetry, as
well as in daring technique, and it became a forerunner of avant-garde
movements in American theatre.
O’Neill’s innovative writing continued with Strange Interlude. This
play was revolutionary in style and length: when first produced, it
opened in late afternoon, broke for a dinner intermission, and ended at
the conventional hour. Techniques new to the modern theatre included
spoken asides or soliloquies to express the characters’ hidden thoughts.
The play is the saga of Everywoman, who ritualistically acts out her
roles as daughter, wife, mistress, mother, and platonic friend. Although
it was innovative and startling in 1928, its obvious Freudian overtones
have rapidly dated the work.
One of O’Neill’s enduring masterpieces, Mourning Becomes Electra
(1931), represents the playwright’s most complete use of Greek forms,
themes, and characters. Based on the Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus, it
was itself three plays in one. To give the story contemporary
credibility, O’Neill set the play in the New England of the Civil War
period, yet he retained the forms and the conflicts of the Greek
characters: the heroic leader returning from war; his adulterous wife,
who murders him; his jealous, repressed daughter, who avenges him
through the murder of her mother; and his weak, incestuous son, who is
goaded by his sister first to matricide and then to suicide.
Following a long succession of tragic visions, O’Neill’s only comedy,
Ah, Wilderness!, appeared on Broadway in 1933. Written in a
lighthearted, nostalgic mood, the work was inspired in part by the
playwright’s mischievous desire to demonstrate that he could portray the
comic as well as the tragic side of life. Significantly, the play is set
in the same place and period, a small New England town in the early
1900s, as his later tragic masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night.
Dealing with the growing pains of a sensitive, adolescent boy, Ah,
Wilderness! was characterized by O’Neill as “the other side of the
coin,” meaning that it represented his fantasy of what his own youth
might have been, rather than what he believed it to have been (as
dramatized later in Long Day’s Journey into Night).
The Iceman Cometh, the most complex and perhaps the finest of the
O’Neill tragedies, followed in 1939, although it did not appear on
Broadway until 1946. Laced with subtle religious symbolism, the play is
a study of man’s need to cling to his hope for a better life, even if he
must delude himself to do so.
Even in his last writings, O’Neill’s youth continued to absorb his
attention. The posthumous production of Long Day’s Journey into Night
brought to light an agonizingly autobiographical play, one of O’Neill’s
greatest. It is straightforward in style but shattering in its depiction
of the agonized relations between father, mother, and two sons. Spanning
one day in the life of a family, the play strips away layer after layer
from each of the four central figures, revealing the mother as a
defeated drug addict, the father as a man frustrated in his career and
failed as a husband and father, the older son as a bitter alcoholic, and
the younger son as a tubercular, disillusioned youth with only the
slenderest chance for physical and spiritual survival.
O’Neill’s tragic view of life was perpetuated in his relationships
with the three women he married—two of whom he divorced—and with his
three children. His elder son, Eugene O’Neill, Jr. (by his first wife,
Kathleen Jenkins), committed suicide at 40, while his younger son, Shane
(by his second wife, Agnes Boulton), drifted into a life of emotional
instability. His daughter, Oona (also by Agnes Boulton), was cut out of
his life when, at 18, she infuriated him by marrying Charlie Chaplin,
who was O’Neill’s age.
Until some years after his death in 1953, O’Neill, although respected
in the United States, was more highly regarded abroad. Sweden, in
particular, always held him in high esteem, partly because of his
publicly acknowledged debt to the influence of the Swedish playwright
August Strindberg, whose tragic themes often echo in O’Neill’s plays. In
1936 the Swedish Academy gave O’Neill the Nobel Prize for Literature,
the first time the award had been conferred on an American playwright.
O’Neill’s most ambitious project for the theatre was one that he
never completed. In the late 1930s he conceived of a cycle of 11 plays,
to be performed on 11 consecutive nights, tracing the lives of an
American family from the early 1800s to modern times. He wrote scenarios
and outlines for several of the plays and drafts of others but completed
only one in the cycle—A Touch of the Poet—before a crippling illness
ended his ability to hold a pencil. An unfinished rough draft of another
of the cycle plays, More Stately Mansions, was published in 1964 and
produced three years later on Broadway, in spite of written instructions
left by O’Neill that the incomplete manuscript be destroyed after his
death.
O’Neill’s final years were spent in grim frustration. Unable to work,
he longed for his death and sat waiting for it in a Boston hotel, seeing
no one except his doctor, a nurse, and his third wife, Carlotta
Monterey. O’Neill died as broken and tragic a figure as any he had
created for the stage.
Assessment
O’Neill was the first American dramatist to regard the stage as a
literary medium and the only American playwright ever to receive the
Nobel Prize for Literature. Through his efforts, the American theatre
grew up during the 1920s, developing into a cultural medium that could
take its place with the best in American fiction, painting, and music.
Until his Beyond the Horizon was produced, in 1920, Broadway theatrical
fare, apart from musicals and an occasional European import of quality,
had consisted largely of contrived melodrama and farce. O’Neill saw the
theatre as a valid forum for the presentation of serious ideas. Imbued
with the tragic sense of life, he aimed for a contemporary drama that
had its roots in the most powerful of ancient Greek tragedies—a drama
that could rise to the emotional heights of Shakespeare. For more than
20 years, both with such masterpieces as Desire Under the Elms, Mourning
Becomes Electra, and The Iceman Cometh and by his inspiration to other
serious dramatists, O’Neill set the pace for the blossoming of the
Broadway theatre.
Barbara Gelb
Arthur Gelb
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Maxwell Anderson

Maxwell Anderson, (b. Dec. 15, 1888,
Atlantic, Pa., U.S.—d. Feb. 28, 1959,
Stamford, Conn.), prolific playwright
noted for his efforts to make verse
tragedy a popular form.
Anderson was educated at the
University of North Dakota and Stanford
University. He collaborated with
Laurence Stallings in the World War I
comedy What Price Glory? (1924), his
first hit, a realistically ribald and
profane view of World War I. Saturday’s
Children (1927), about the marital
problems of a young couple, was also
very successful. Anderson’s prestige was
increased by two ambitious historical
dramas in verse—Elizabeth the Queen
(1930) and Mary of Scotland (1933)—and
by a success of a very different nature,
his humorous Pulitzer Prize-winning
prose satire, Both Your Houses (1933),
an attack on venality in the U.S.
Congress. He reached the peak of his
career with Winterset (1935), a poetic
drama set in his own times. A tragedy
inspired by the Sacco and Vanzetti case
of the 1920s and set in the urban slums,
it deals with the son of a man who has
been unjustly condemned to death, who
seeks revenge and vindication of his
father’s name. High Tor (1936), a
romantic comedy in verse, expressed the
author’s displeasure with modern
materialism. Collaborating with the
German refugee composer Kurt Weill
(1900–50), Anderson also wrote for the
musical theatre a play based on early
New York history, Knickerbocker Holiday
(1938), and Lost in the Stars (1949), a
dramatization of Alan Paton’s South
African novel Cry, the Beloved Country.
His last play, The Bad Seed (1954), was
a dramatization of William March’s novel
about an evil child.
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Robert E. Sherwood

Robert E. Sherwood, in full Robert
Emmet Sherwood (b. April 4, 1896, New
Rochelle, N.Y., U.S.—d. Nov. 14, 1955,
New York City), American playwright
whose works reflect involvement in human
problems, both social and political.
Sherwood was an indifferent student
at Milton Academy and Harvard
University, failing the freshman
rhetoric course while performing well
and happily on the Lampoon, the humour
magazine, and with the Hasty Pudding
club, which produced the annual college
musical comedy. He left before
graduation to enlist in 1917 in the
Canadian Black Watch Battalion, served
in France, was gassed, and was
discharged in 1919.
Sherwood was drama editor of Vanity
Fair (1919–20) and with his colleagues
Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley found
his way to the Algonquin Round Table,
the centre of a New York literary
coterie. Sherwood then worked as
associate editor (1920–24) and editor
(1924–28) of the humour magazine Life.
His first play, The Road to Rome (1927),
criticizes the pointlessness of war, a
recurring theme in many of his dramas.
The heroes of The Petrified Forest
(1935) and Idiot’s Delight (1936) begin
as detached cynics but recognize their
own bankruptcy and sacrifice themselves
for their fellowmen. In Abe Lincoln in
Illinois (1939) and There Shall Be No
Night (1941), in which his pacifist
heroes decide to fight, Sherwood’s
thesis is that only by losing his life
for others can a man make his own life
significant. In 1938 Sherwood formed,
with Maxwell Anderson, Sidney Howard,
Elmer Rice, and S.N. Behrman, the
Playwrights’ Company, which became a
major producing company.
The Lincoln play led to Sherwood’s
introduction to Eleanor Roosevelt and
ultimately to his working for President
Franklin D. Roosevelt as speechwriter
and adviser. Sherwood’s speechwriting
did much to make ghostwriting for public
figures a respectable practice. Between
service as special assistant to the
secretary of war (1940) and to the
secretary of the navy (1945), Sherwood
served as director of the overseas
branch of the Office of War Information
(1941–44). From his wartime association
with Roosevelt came much of the material
for Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate
History. Except for his Academy
Award-winning film The Best Years of Our
Lives (1946), Sherwood’s theatrical work
after World War II was negligible.
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Marc Connelly

Marc Connelly, byname of Marcus Cook
Connelly (b. Dec. 13, 1890, McKeesport,
Pa., U.S.—d. Dec. 21, 1980, New York
City), American playwright, journalist,
teacher, actor, and director, best-known
for Green Pastures (a folk version of
the Old Testament dramatized through the
lives of blacks of the southern United
States) and for the comedies that he
wrote with George S. Kaufman.
Connelly’s parents were touring
actors who, a year before he was born,
settled down in McKeesport to manage a
hotel frequented by actors. After the
death of his father, Connelly attended
Trinity Hall, a boarding school in
Washington, Pa., from 1902 to 1907. His
family’s financial troubles ended his
education. He worked as a reporter in
Pittsburgh until 1917, when he joined
the Morning Telegraph in New York City,
covering theatrical news. He then began
his collaboration with Kaufman, who
worked for the drama section of The New
York Times. Their first successful play,
Dulcy (1921), written as a vehicle for
the actress Lynn Fontanne, was followed
by To the Ladies (1922), a vehicle for
Helen Hayes. Beggar on Horseback (1924),
in the style of German Expressionist
drama, depicts the threat to art from a
society dominated by bourgeois values.
While they collaborated in writing a
satire on Hollywood, Merton of the
Movies (1922), and two musicals, Helen
of Troy, New York (1923) and Be Yourself
(1924), Connelly and Kaufman were
members of the Round Table of the
Algonquin Hotel, a circle of New York
City’s theatre people and writers.
Connelly described this phase of his
career in Voices Offstage: A Book of
Memoirs (1968).
Green Pastures, based on Roark
Bradford’s book Ol’ Man Adam an’ His
Chillun, was first performed in 1930 and
won a Pulitzer Prize. It was extremely
popular both on the stage and in its
motion-picture version (1936), but when
it was revived in 1951 it was criticized
for perpetuating unacceptable
stereotypes of blacks.
Connelly’s last Broadway success, The
Farmer Takes a Wife (1934), written with
Frank Elser, was a comedy about life
along the Erie Canal in the 19th
century; a film version of it was made
in 1935. From 1946 to 1950 he taught
playwriting at Yale University. His
early plays Dulcy and Beggar on
Horseback were revived on the New York
City stage in the 1970s. His novel A
Souvenir from Qam was published in 1965.
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Elmer Rice

Elmer Rice, original name Elmer
Reizenstein (b. Sept. 28, 1892, New York
City—d. May 8, 1967, Southampton,
Hampshire, Eng.), American playwright,
director, and novelist noted for his
innovative and polemical plays.
Rice graduated from the New York Law
School in 1912 but soon turned to
writing plays. His first work, the
melodramatic On Trial (1914), was the
first play to employ on stage the
motion-picture technique of flashbacks,
in this case to present the
recollections of witnesses at a trial.
In The Adding Machine (1923) Rice
adapted techniques from German
Expressionist theatre to depict the
dehumanization of man in the 20th
century. His most important play, Street
Scene (1929), was a starkly realistic
tragedy set outside a New York City slum
tenement building. The play won a
Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a
highly popular musical (1947) with
lyrics by Langston Hughes and music by
Kurt Weill. Counsellor-at-Law (1931) was
a rather critical look at the legal
profession. In We, the People (1933),
Judgment Day (1934), and several other
polemical plays of the 1930s, Rice
treated the evils of Nazism, the poverty
of the Great Depression, and racism. He
continued to write for the stage after
1945, but without much acclaim.
Rice was active in the WPA Federal
Theatre Project for a short time in the
mid-1930s. He also championed the
American Civil Liberties Union and the
cause of free speech, and in the 1950s
he was an opponent of U.S. Sen. Joseph
R. McCarthy. Rice also wrote several
novels and an autobiography, Minority
Report (1963).
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Lillian Hellman

Lillian Hellman, (b. June 20, 1905,
New Orleans, La., U.S.—d. June 30, 1984,
Vineyard Haven, Martha’s Vineyard,
Mass.), American playwright and
motion-picture screenwriter whose dramas
forcefully attacked injustice,
exploitation, and selfishness.
Hellman attended New York public
schools and New York University and
Columbia University. Her marriage
(1925–32) to the playwright Arthur Kober
ended in divorce. She had already begun
an intimate friendship with the novelist
Dashiell Hammett that would continue
until his death in 1961. In the 1930s,
after working as book reviewer, press
agent, play reader, and Hollywood
scenarist, she began writing plays.
Her dramas exposed some of the
various forms in which evil appears—a
malicious child’s lies about two
schoolteachers (The Children’s Hour,
1934); a ruthless family’s exploitation
of fellow townspeople and of one another
(The Little Foxes, 1939, and Another
Part of the Forest, 1946); and the
irresponsible selfishness of the
Versailles-treaty generation (Watch on
the Rhine, 1941, and The Searching Wind,
1944). Criticized at times for her
doctrinaire views and characters, she
nevertheless kept her characters from
becoming merely social points of view by
writing credible dialogue and creating a
realistic intensity matched by few of
her playwriting contemporaries. These
plays exhibit the tight structure and
occasional overcontrivance of what is
known as the well-made play. In the
1950s she showed her skill in handling
the more subtle structure of Chekhovian
drama (The Autumn Garden, 1951) and in
translating and adapting (Jean Anouilh’s
The Lark, 1955, and Voltaire’s Candide,
1957, in a musical version). She
returned to the well-made play with Toys
in the Attic (1960), which was followed
by another adaptation, My Mother, My
Father, and Me (1963; from Burt
Blechman’s novel How Much?). She also
edited Anton Chekhov’s Selected Letters
(1955) and a collection of stories and
short novels, The Big Knockover (1966),
by Hammett.
Her reminiscences, begun in An
Unfinished Woman (1969), were continued
in Pentimento (1973) and Maybe (1980).
After their publication, certain
fabrications were brought to light,
notably her reporting in Pentimento of a
personal relationship with a courageous
woman she called Julia. The woman on
whose actions Hellman’s story was based
denied acquaintance with the author.
Hellman, a longtime supporter of
leftist causes, detailed in Scoundrel
Time (1976) her troubles and those of
her friends with the House Un-American
Activities Committee hearings during the
1950s. Hellman refused to give the
committee the names of people who had
associations with the Communist Party;
she was subsequently blacklisted though
not held in contempt of Congress.
Her collected plays, many of which
continued to be performed at the turn of
the 20th century, were published in
1972.
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Thornton Wilder

Thornton Wilder, in full Thornton
Niven Wilder (b. April 17, 1897,
Madison, Wis., U.S.—d. Dec. 7, 1975,
Hamden, Conn.), American writer, whose
innovative novels and plays reflect his
views of the universal truths in human
nature. He is probably best known for
his plays.
After graduating from Yale University
in 1920, Wilder studied archaeology in
Rome. From 1930 to 1937 he taught
dramatic literature and the classics at
the University of Chicago.
His first novel, The Cabala (1926),
set in 20th-century Rome, is essentially
a fantasy about the death of the pagan
gods. His most popular novel, The Bridge
of San Luis Rey (1927; Pulitzer Prize),
which was adapted for film and
television, examines the lives of five
people who died in the collapse of a
bridge in 18th-century Peru. The Woman
of Andros (1930) is an interpretation of
Terence’s Andria. Accused of being a
“Greek” rather than an American writer,
Wilder in Heaven’s My Destination (1934)
wrote about a quixotically good hero in
a contemporary setting. His later novels
are The Ides of March (1948), The Eighth
Day (1967), and Theophilus North (1973).
Wilder’s plays engage the audience in
make-believe by having the actors
address the spectators directly and by
discarding props and scenery. The Stage
Manager in Our Town (1938) talks to the
audience, as do the characters in the
farcical The Matchmaker (1954). Wilder
won a Pulitzer Prize for Our Town,
becoming the only person to receive the
award in both the fiction and drama
categories. The Matchmaker was made into
a film in 1958 and adapted in 1964 into
the immensely successful musical Hello,
Dolly!, which was also made into a film.
Wilder’s other plays include The Skin
of Our Teeth (1942; Pulitzer Prize),
which employs deliberate anachronisms
and the use of the same characters in
various geological and historical
periods to show that human experience is
much the same whatever the time or
place. Posthumous publications include
The Journals of Thornton Wilder,
1939–1961, edited by Donald Gallup, and
Wilder’s correspondence with Gertrude
Stein, The Letters of Gertrude Stein and
Thornton Wilder (1996), edited by Edward
Burns and Ulla E. Dydo.
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William
Saroyan

William Saroyan, (b. Aug. 31, 1908,
Fresno, Calif., U.S.—d. May 18, 1981,
Fresno), U.S. writer who made his
initial impact during the Depression
with a deluge of brash, original, and
irreverent stories celebrating the joy
of living in spite of poverty, hunger,
and insecurity.
The son of an Armenian immigrant,
Saroyan left school at 15 and educated
himself by reading and writing. His
first collection of stories, The Daring
Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934),
was soon followed by another collection,
Inhale and Exhale (1936). His first
play, My Heart’s in the Highlands, was
brilliantly produced by the Group
Theatre in 1939. In 1940 Saroyan refused
the Pulitzer Prize for his play The Time
of Your Life (performed 1939) on the
grounds that it was “no more great or
good” than anything else he had written.
Saroyan was concerned with the basic
goodness of all people, especially the
obscure and naive, and the value of
life. His mastery of the vernacular
makes his characters vibrantly alive.
Most of his stories are based on his
childhood and family, notably the
collection My Name Is Aram (1940) and
the novel The Human Comedy (1943). His
novels, such as Rock Wagram (1951) and
The Laughing Matter (1953), were
inspired by his own experiences of
marriage, fatherhood, and divorce.
From 1958 on, Saroyan lived mostly in
Paris for “tax purposes,” though he
continued to maintain a home in Fresno,
Calif., where he had been born and
raised. The autobiographical element was
strong in all his work, usually
disguised as fiction; but some of his
later memoirs, consisting of vignettes
and brief essays written largely in
Paris and Fresno, have their own
enduring value. They include Here Comes,
There Goes You Know Who (1961), Not
Dying (1963), Days of Life and Death and
Escape to the Moon (1971), and Places
Where I’ve Done Time (1975).
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The new poetry
Poetry ranged between traditional types of verse and
experimental writing that departed radically from
the established forms of the 19th century. Two New
England poets, Edwin Arlington Robinson and
Robert
Frost, who were not noted for technical
experimentation, won both critical and popular
acclaim in this period. Robinson, whose first book
appeared in 1896, did his best work in sonnets,
ballad stanzas, and blank verse. In the 1920s he won
three Pulitzer Prizes—for his Collected Poems
(published 1921), The Man Who Died Twice (1925), and
Tristram (1927). Like Robinson,
Frost used
traditional stanzas and blank verse in volumes such
as A Boy’s Will (1913), his first book, and North of
Boston (1914), New Hampshire (1923), A Further Range
(1936), and A Masque of Reason (1945). The
best-known poet of his generation,
Frost, like
Robinson, saw and commented upon the tragic aspects
of life in poems such as Design, Directive, and
Provide, Provide. Frost memorably crafted the
language of common speech into traditional poetic
form, with epigrammatic effect.
Just as modern American drama had its beginnings
in little theatres, modern American poetry took form
in little magazines. Particularly important was
Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, founded by Harriet
Monroe in Chicago in 1912. The surrounding region
soon became prominent as the home of three poets:
Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, and Edgar Lee
Masters. Lindsay’s blend of legendary lore and
native oratory in irregular odelike forms was well
adapted to oral presentation, and his lively
readings from his works contributed to the success
of such books as General William Booth Enters into
Heaven, and Other Poems (1913) and The Congo, and
Other Poems (1914). Sandburg wrote of life on the
prairies and in Midwestern cities in Whitmanesque
free verse in such volumes as Chicago Poems (1916)
and The People, Yes (1936). Masters’s very popular
Spoon River Anthology (1915) consisted of free-verse
monologues by village men and women, most of whom
spoke bitterly of their frustrated lives.
Writing traditional sonnets and brief, personal
lyrics, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sara Teasdale
were innovative in being unusually frank (according
to the standard of their time) for women poets. Amy
Lowell, on the other hand, experimented with free
verse and focused on the image and the descriptive
detail. Three fine black poets—James Weldon Johnson,
Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen—found old molds
satisfactory for dealing with new subjects,
specifically the problems of racism in America. The
deceptively simple colloquial language of Hughes’s
poetry has proved especially appealing to later
readers. While Conrad Aiken experimented with
poetical imitations of symphonic forms often mingled
with stream-of-consciousness techniques, E.E.
Cummings used typographical novelties to produce
poems that had surprisingly fresh impact. Marianne
Moore invented and brilliantly employed a kind of
free verse that was marked by a wonderfully sharp
and idiosyncratic focus on objects and details.
Robinson Jeffers used violent imagery and modified
free or blank verse to express perhaps the most
bitter views voiced by a major poet in this period.
Except for a period after World War II, when he
was confined in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in
Washington, D.C., Ezra Pound lived outside the
United States after 1908. He had, nevertheless, a
profound influence on 20th-century writing in
English, both as a practitioner of verse and as a
patron and impresario of other writers. His most
controversial work remained The Cantos, the first
installment of which appeared in 1926 and the latest
in 1959 (Thrones: 96–109 de los cantares), with a
fragmentary addendum in 1968 (Drafts & Fragments of
Cantos CX–CXVII).
Like Pound, to whom he was much indebted,
T.S.
Eliot lived abroad most of his life, becoming a
British subject in 1927. His first volume, Prufrock
and Other Observations, was published in 1917. In
1922 appeared The Waste Land, the poem by which he
first became famous. Filled with fragments,
competing voices, learned allusions, and deeply
buried personal details, the poem was read as a dark
diagnosis of a disillusioned generation and of the
modern world. As a poet and critic,
Eliot exercised
a strong influence, especially in the period between
World Wars I and II. In what some critics regard as
his finest work, Four Quartets (1943),
Eliot
explored through images of great beauty and haunting
power his own past, the past of the human race, and
the meaning of human history.
Eliot was an acknowledged master of a varied
group of poets whose work was indebted to
17th-century English Metaphysical poets, especially
to
John Donne.
Eliot’s influence was clear in the
writings of Archibald MacLeish, whose earlier poems
showed resemblances to The Waste Land. A number of
Southern poets (who were also critics) were
influenced by
Eliot—John Crowe Ransom,
Donald
Davidson, and Allen Tate. Younger American
Metaphysicals who emerged later included Louise
Bogan, Léonie Adams, Muriel Rukeyser,
Delmore
Schwartz, and Karl Shapiro. But there were several
major poets strongly opposed to
Eliot’s influence.
Their style and subjects tended to be romantic and
visionary. These included Hart Crane, whose long
poem The Bridge (1930) aimed to create a
Whitmanesque American epic, and Wallace Stevens, a
lush and sensuous writer who made an astonishing
literary debut with the poems collected in Harmonium
(1923). Another opponent of
Eliot was
William Carlos
Williams, who invested his experimental prose and
magically simple lyrics—in works such as Spring and
All (1923)—with the mundane details of American life
and wrote about American myth and cultural history
with great sweep in In the American Grain (1925).
Edwin Arlington Robinson

Edwin
Arlington Robinson, (b. Dec. 22, 1869,
Head Tide, Maine, U.S.—d. April 6, 1935,
New York, N.Y.), American poet who is
best known for his short dramatic poems
concerning the people in a small New
England village, Tilbury Town, very much
like the Gardiner, Maine, in which he
grew up.
After
his family suffered financial reverses,
Robinson cut short his attendance at
Harvard University (1891–93) and
returned to Gardiner to stay with his
family, whose fortunes were
disintegrating. The lives of both his
brothers ended in failure and early
death, and Robinson’s poetry is much
concerned with personal defeat and the
tragic complexities of life. Robinson
himself endured years of poverty and
obscurity before his poetry began to
attract notice.
His
first book, The Torrent and the Night
Before, was privately printed at his own
expense. His subsequent collections, The
Children of the Night (1897) and The
Town Down the River (1910), fared little
better, but the publication of The Man
Against the Sky (1916) brought him
critical acclaim. In these early works
his best poetic form was the dramatic
lyric, as exemplified in the title poem
of The Man Against the Sky, which
affirms life’s meaning despite its
profoundly dark side. During these years
Robinson perfected the poetic form for
which he became so well known: a
structure based firmly on stanzas,
skillful rhyming patterns, and a precise
and natural diction, combined with a
dramatic examination of the human
condition. Among the best poems of this
period are “Richard Cory,” “Miniver
Cheevy,” “For a Dead Lady,” “Flammonde,”
and “Eros Turannos.” Robinson broke with
the tradition of late Romanticism and
introduced the preoccupations and plain
style of naturalism into American
poetry. His work attracted the attention
of President Theodore Roosevelt, who
gave him a sinecure at the U.S. Customs
House in New York (held from 1905 to
1909).
In the
second phase of his career, Robinson
wrote longer narrative poems that share
the concern of his dramatic lyrics with
psychological portraiture. Merlin
(1917), the first of three long
blank-verse narrative poems based on the
King Arthur legends, was followed by
Lancelot (1920) and Tristram (1927).
Robinson’s Collected Poems appeared in
1921. The Man Who Died Twice (1924) and
Amaranth (1934) are perhaps the most
often acclaimed of his later narrative
poems, though in general these works
suffer in comparison to the early
dramatic lyrics. Robinson’s later short
poems include “Mr. Flood’s Party,” “Many
Are Called,” and “The Sheaves.”
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Robert
Frost
"Poems"

Robert
Frost, in full Robert Lee Frost (b.
March 26, 1874, San Francisco,
California, U.S.—d. January 29, 1963,
Boston, Massachusetts), American poet
who was much admired for his depictions
of the rural life of New England, his
command of American colloquial speech,
and his realistic verse portraying
ordinary people in everyday situations.
Life
Frost’s father, William Prescott
Frost, Jr., was a journalist with
ambitions of establishing a career in
California, and in 1873 he and his wife
moved to San Francisco. Her husband’s
untimely death from tuberculosis in 1885
prompted Isabelle Moodie Frost to take
her two children, Robert and Jeanie, to
Lawrence, Massachusetts, where they were
taken in by the children’s paternal
grandparents. While their mother taught
at a variety of schools in New Hampshire
and Massachusetts, Robert and Jeanie
grew up in Lawrence, and Robert
graduated from high school in 1892. A
top student in his class, he shared
valedictorian honours with Elinor White,
with whom he had already fallen in love.
Robert
and Elinor shared a deep interest in
poetry, but their continued education
sent Robert to Dartmouth College and
Elinor to St. Lawrence University.
Meanwhile, Robert continued to labour on
the poetic career he had begun in a
small way during high school; he first
achieved professional publication in
1894 when The Independent, a weekly
literary journal, printed his poem “My
Butterfly: An Elegy.” Impatient with
academic routine, Frost left Dartmouth
after less than a year. He and Elinor
married in 1895 but found life
difficult, and the young poet supported
them by teaching school and farming,
neither with notable success. During the
next dozen years, six children were
born, two of whom died early, leaving a
family of one son and three daughters.
Frost resumed his college education at
Harvard University in 1897 but left
after two years’ study there. From 1900
to 1909 the family raised poultry on a
farm near Derry, New Hampshire, and for
a time Frost also taught at the
Pinkerton Academy in Derry. Frost became
an enthusiastic botanist and acquired
his poetic persona of a New England
rural sage during the years he and his
family spent at Derry. All this while he
was writing poems, but publishing
outlets showed little interest in them.
By 1911
Frost was fighting against
discouragement. Poetry had always been
considered a young person’s game, but
Frost, who was nearly 40 years old, had
not published a single book of poems and
had seen just a handful appear in
magazines. In 1911 ownership of the
Derry farm passed to Frost. A momentous
decision was made: to sell the farm and
use the proceeds to make a radical new
start in London, where publishers were
perceived to be more receptive to new
talent. Accordingly, in August 1912 the
Frost family sailed across the Atlantic
to England. Frost carried with him
sheaves of verses he had written but not
gotten into print. English publishers in
London did indeed prove more receptive
to innovative verse, and, through his
own vigorous efforts and those of the
expatriate American poet Ezra Pound,
Frost within a year had published A
Boy’s Will (1913). From this first book,
such poems as “Storm Fear,” “Mowing,”
and “The Tuft of Flowers” have remained
standard anthology pieces.
A Boy’s
Will was followed in 1914 by a second
collection, North of Boston, that
introduced some of the most popular
poems in all of Frost’s work, among them
“Mending Wall,” “The Death of the Hired
Man,” “Home Burial,” and “After
Apple-Picking.” In London, Frost’s name
was frequently mentioned by those who
followed the course of modern
literature, and soon American visitors
were returning home with news of this
unknown poet who was causing a sensation
abroad. The Boston poet Amy Lowell
traveled to England in 1914, and in the
bookstores there she encountered Frost’s
work. Taking his books home to America,
Lowell then began a campaign to locate
an American publisher for them,
meanwhile writing her own laudatory
review of North of Boston.
Without
his being fully aware of it, Frost was
on his way to fame. The outbreak of
World War I brought the Frosts back to
the United States in 1915. By then Amy
Lowell’s review had already appeared in
The New Republic, and writers and
publishers throughout the Northeast were
aware that a writer of unusual abilities
stood in their midst. The American
publishing house of Henry Holt had
brought out its edition of North of
Boston in 1914. It became a best-seller,
and, by the time the Frost family landed
in Boston, Holt was adding the American
edition of A Boy’s Will. Frost soon
found himself besieged by magazines
seeking to publish his poems. Never
before had an American poet achieved
such rapid fame after such a
disheartening delay. From this moment
his career rose on an ascending curve.
Frost
bought a small farm at Franconia, New
Hampshire, in 1915, but his income from
both poetry and farming proved
inadequate to support his family, and so
he lectured and taught part-time at
Amherst College and at the University of
Michigan from 1916 to 1938. Any
remaining doubt about his poetic
abilities was dispelled by the
collection Mountain Interval (1916),
which continued the high level
established by his first books. His
reputation was further enhanced by New
Hampshire (1923), which received the
Pulitzer Prize. That prize was also
awarded to Frost’s Collected Poems
(1930) and to the collections A Further
Range (1936) and A Witness Tree (1942).
His other poetry volumes include
West-Running Brook (1928), Steeple Bush
(1947), and In the Clearing (1962).
Frost served as a poet-in-residence at
Harvard (1939–43), Dartmouth (1943–49),
and Amherst College (1949–63), and in
his old age he gathered honours and
awards from every quarter. He was the
poetry consultant to the Library of
Congress (1958–59; the post is now
styled poet laureate consultant in
poetry), and his recital of his poem
“The Gift Outright” at the inauguration
of President John F. Kennedy in 1961 was
a memorable occasion.
Works
The poems in Frost’s early books,
especially North of Boston, differ
radically from late 19th-century
Romantic verse with its ever-benign view
of nature, its didactic emphasis, and
its slavish conformity to established
verse forms and themes. Lowell called
North of Boston a “sad” book, referring
to its portraits of inbred, isolated,
and psychologically troubled rural New
Englanders. These off-mainstream
portraits signaled Frost’s departure
from the old tradition and his own fresh
interest in delineating New England
characters and their formative
background. Among these psychological
investigations are the alienated life of
Silas in “The Death of the Hired Man,”
the inability of Amy in “Home Burial” to
walk the difficult path from grief back
to normality, the rigid mindset of the
neighbour in “Mending Wall,” and the
paralyzing fear that twists the
personality of Doctor Magoon in “A
Hundred Collars.”
The
natural world, for Frost, wore two
faces. Early on he overturned the
Emersonian concept of nature as healer
and mentor in a poem in A Boy’s Will
entitled “Storm Fear,” a grim picture of
a blizzard as a raging beast that dares
the inhabitants of an isolated house to
come outside and be killed. In such
later poems as “The Hill Wife” and
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,”
the benign surface of nature cloaks
potential dangers, and death itself
lurks behind dark, mysterious trees.
Nature’s frolicsome aspect predominates
in other poems such as “Birches,” where
a destructive ice storm is recalled as a
thing of memorable beauty. Although
Frost is known to many as essentially a
“happy” poet, the tragic elements in
life continued to mark his poems, from
“‘Out, Out—’” (1916), in which a lad’s
hand is severed and life ended, to a
fine verse entitled “The Fear of Man”
from Steeple Bush, in which human
release from pervading fear is contained
in the image of a breathless dash
through the nighttime city from the
security of one faint street lamp to
another just as faint. Even in his final
volume, In the Clearing, so filled with
the stubborn courage of old age, Frost
portrays human security as a rather tiny
and quite vulnerable opening in a
thickly grown forest, a pinpoint of
light against which the encroaching
trees cast their very real threat of
darkness.
Frost
demonstrated an enviable versatility of
theme, but he most commonly investigated
human contacts with the natural world in
small encounters that serve as metaphors
for larger aspects of the human
condition. He often portrayed the human
ability to turn even the slightest
incident or natural detail to emotional
profit, seen at its most economical form
in “Dust of Snow”:
The way
a crow
Shook
down on me
The
dust of snow
From a
hemlock tree
Has
given my heart
A
change of mood
And
saved some part
Of a
day I had rued.
Other
poems are portraits of the introspective
mind possessed by its own private
demons, as in “Desert Places,” which
could serve to illustrate Frost’s
celebrated definition of poetry as a
“momentary stay against confusion”:
They
cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between
stars—on stars where no human race
is.
I have
it in me so much nearer home
To
scare myself with my own desert places.
Frost
was widely admired for his mastery of
metrical form, which he often set
against the natural rhythms of everyday,
unadorned speech. In this way the
traditional stanza and metrical line
achieved new vigour in his hands.
Frost’s command of traditional metrics
is evident in the tight, older,
prescribed patterns of such sonnets as
“Design” and “The Silken Tent.” His
strongest allegiance probably was to the
quatrain with simple rhymes such as abab
and abcb, and within its restrictions he
was able to achieve an infinite variety,
as in the aforementioned “Dust of Snow”
and “Desert Places.” Frost was never an
enthusiast of free verse and regarded
its looseness as something less than
ideal, similar to playing tennis without
a net. His determination to be “new” but
to employ “old ways to be new” set him
aside from the radical experimentalism
of the advocates of vers libre in the
early 20th century. On occasion Frost
did employ free verse to advantage, one
outstanding example being “After
Apple-Picking,” with its random pattern
of long and short lines and its
nontraditional use of rhyme. Here he
shows his power to stand as a
transitional figure between the old and
the new in poetry. Frost mastered blank
verse (i.e., unrhymed verse in iambic
pentameter) for use in such dramatic
narratives as “Mending Wall” and “Home
Burial,” becoming one of the few modern
poets to use it both appropriately and
well. His chief technical innovation in
these dramatic-dialogue poems was to
unify the regular pentameter line with
the irregular rhythms of conversational
speech. Frost’s blank verse has the same
terseness and concision that mark his
poetry in general.
Assessment
Frost was the most widely admired
and highly honoured American poet of the
20th century. Amy Lowell thought he had
overstressed the dark aspects of New
England life, but Frost’s later flood of
more uniformly optimistic verses made
that view seem antiquated. Louis
Untermeyer’s judgment that the dramatic
poems in North of Boston were the most
authentic and powerful of their kind
ever produced by an American has only
been confirmed by later opinions.
Gradually, Frost’s name ceased to be
linked solely with New England, and he
gained broad acceptance as a national
poet.
It is
true that certain criticisms of Frost
have never been wholly refuted, one
being that he was overly interested in
the past, another that he was too little
concerned with the present and future of
American society. Those who criticize
Frost’s detachment from the “modern”
emphasize the undeniable absence in his
poems of meaningful references to the
modern realities of industrialization,
urbanization, and the concentration of
wealth, or to such familiar items as
radios, motion pictures, automobiles,
factories, or skyscrapers. The poet has
been viewed as a singer of sweet
nostalgia and a social and political
conservative who was content to sigh for
the good things of the past.
Such
views have failed to gain general
acceptance, however, in the face of the
universality of Frost’s themes, the
emotional authenticity of his voice, and
the austere technical brilliance of his
verse. Frost was often able to endow his
rural imagery with a larger symbolic or
metaphysical significance, and his best
poems transcend the immediate realities
of their subject matter to illuminate
the unique blend of tragic endurance,
stoicism, and tenacious affirmation that
marked his outlook on life. Over his
long career Frost succeeded in lodging
more than a few poems where, as he put
it, they would be “hard to get rid of,”
and he can be said to have lodged
himself just as solidly in the
affections of his fellow Americans. For
thousands he remains the only recent
poet worth reading and the only one who
matters.
Philip L. Gerber
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Vachel Lindsay

Vachel
Lindsay, in full Nicholas Vachel Lindsay
(b. Nov. 10, 1879, Springfield, Ill.,
U.S.—d. Dec. 5, 1931, Springfield),
American poet who—in an attempt to
revive poetry as an oral art form of the
common people—wrote and read to
audiences compositions with powerful
rhythms that had an immediate appeal.
After
three years at Hiram College, Hiram,
Ohio, Lindsay left in 1900 to study art
in Chicago and New York City. He
supported himself in part by lecturing
for the YMCA and the Anti-Saloon League.
Having begun to write poetry, he
wandered for several summers throughout
the country reciting his poems in return
for food and shelter.
He
first received recognition in 1913, when
Poetry magazine published his poem on
William Booth, founder of the Salvation
Army. His poems of this kind are studded
with vivid imagery and express both his
ardent patriotism and his romantic
appreciation of nature. Lindsay’s poetry
depicted with evocative clarity such
leaders of American cults and causes as
Alexander Campbell (a founder of the
Disciples of Christ), Johnny Appleseed,
John Peter Altgeld, and William Jennings
Bryan. Lindsay recited his poetry in a
highly rhythmic and syncopated manner
that was accompanied by dramatic
gestures in an attempt to achieve
contact with his audience. Among the 20
or so poems that audiences demanded to
hear—so often that Lindsay grew weary of
reciting them—were “General William
Booth Enters into Heaven,” “The Congo,”
and “The Santa Fe Trail.” His best
volumes of verse include Rhymes To Be
Traded for Bread (1912), General William
Booth Enters into Heaven and Other Poems
(1913), The Congo and Other Poems
(1914), and The Chinese Nightingale and
Other Poems (1917). Both Lindsay’s
poetic powers and his faculty of
self-criticism steadily declined during
the 1920s, and he lost his popularity.
He committed suicide by drinking poison.
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Carl Sandburg

Carl
Sandburg, (b. Jan. 6, 1878, Galesburg,
Ill., U.S.—d. July 22, 1967, Flat Rock,
N.C.), American poet, historian,
novelist, and folklorist.
From
the age of 11, Sandburg worked in
various occupations—as a barbershop
porter, a milk truck driver, a brickyard
hand, and a harvester in the Kansas
wheat fields. When the Spanish-American
War broke out in 1898, he enlisted in
the 6th Illinois Infantry. These early
years he later described in his
autobiography Always the Young Strangers
(1953).
From
1910 to 1912 he acted as an organizer
for the Social Democratic Party and
secretary to the mayor of Milwaukee.
Moving to Chicago in 1913, he became an
editor of System, a business magazine,
and later joined the staff of the
Chicago Daily News.
In 1914
a group of his Chicago Poems appeared in
Poetry magazine (issued in book form in
1916). In his most famous poem,
“Chicago,” he depicted the city as the
laughing, lusty, heedless “Hog Butcher,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player
with Railroads and Freight Handler to
the Nation.” Sandburg’s poetry made an
instant and favourable impression. In
Whitmanesque free verse, he eulogized
workers: “Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Gary,
they make their steel with men” (Smoke
and Steel, 1920).
In Good
Morning, America (1928) Sandburg seemed
to have lost some of his faith in
democracy, but from the depths of the
Great Depression he wrote a poetic
testament to the power of the people to
go forward, The People, Yes (1936). The
folk songs he sang before delighted
audiences were issued in two
collections, The American Songbag (1927)
and New American Songbag (1950). He
wrote the popular biography Abraham
Lincoln: The Prairie Years, 2 vol.
(1926), and Abraham Lincoln: The War
Years, 4 vol. (1939; Pulitzer Prize in
history, 1940).
Another
biography, Steichen the Photographer,
the life of his famous brother-in-law,
Edward Steichen, appeared in 1929. In
1948 Sandburg published a long novel,
Remembrance Rock, which recapitulates
the American experience from Plymouth
Rock to World War II. Complete Poems
appeared in 1950. He wrote four books
for children—Rootabaga Stories (1922);
Rootabaga Pigeons (1923); Rootabaga
Country (1929); and Potato Face (1930).
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Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna
St. Vincent Millay, (b. Feb. 22, 1892,
Rockland, Maine, U.S.—d. Oct. 19, 1950,
Austerlitz, N.Y.), American poet and
dramatist who came to personify romantic
rebellion and bravado in the 1920s.
Millay
was reared in Camden, Maine, by her
divorced mother, who recognized and
encouraged her talent in writing poetry.
Her first published poem appeared in the
St. Nicholas Magazine for children in
October 1906. She remained at home after
her graduation from high school in 1909,
and in four years she published five
more poems in St. Nicholas. Her first
acclaim came when “Renascence” was
included in The Lyric Year in 1912; the
poem brought Millay to the attention of
a benefactor who made it possible for
her to attend Vassar College. She
graduated in 1917.
In that
year Millay published her first book,
Renascence and Other Poems, and moved to
Greenwich Village in New York City.
There she became a lively and admired
figure among the avant garde and radical
literary set. To support herself Millay,
under the pseudonym “Nancy Boyd,”
submitted hackwork verse and short
stories to magazines, and while her
ambition to go on the stage was
short-lived, she worked with the
Provincetown Players for a time and
later wrote the one-act Aria da Capo
(1920) for them. The same year she
published the verse collection A Few
Figs from Thistles, from which the line
“My candle burns at both ends” derives.
The poem was taken up as the watchword
of the “flaming youth” of that era and
brought her a renown that she came to
despise. In 1921 she published Second
April and two more plays, Two Slatterns
and a King and The Lamp and the Bell.
She also began a two-year European
sojourn, during which she was a
correspondent for Vanity Fair.
Millay
won a Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for Ballad
of the Harp-Weaver (1922) and married
Eugen Jan Boissevain, a Dutch
businessman with whom from 1925 she
lived in a large, isolated house in the
Berkshire foothills near Austerlitz, New
York. In 1925 the Metropolitan Opera
Company commissioned her to write an
opera with Deems Taylor. The resulting
work, The King’s Henchman, first
produced in 1927, became the most
popular American opera up to its time
and, published in book form, sold out
four printings in 20 days.
Millay’s youthful appearance, the
independent, almost petulant tone of her
poetry, and her political and social
ideals made her a symbol of the youth of
her time. In 1927 she donated the
proceeds from her poem “Justice Denied
in Massachusetts” to the defense of
Sacco and Vanzetti and personally
appealed to the governor of the state
for their lives. Her major later works
include The Buck in the Snow (1928),
which introduced a more somber tone to
her poetry; Fatal Interview (1931), a
highly acclaimed sonnet sequence; and
Wine from These Grapes (1934). Her
letters were edited by A.R. Macdougall
in 1952.
The
bravado and stylish cynicism of much of
Millay’s early work gave way in later
years to more personal and mature
writing, and she produced, particularly
in her sonnets and other short poems, a
considerable body of intensely lyrical
verse. A final collection of her verse
appeared posthumously as Mine the
Harvest in 1954.
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Ezra Pound

Ezra
Pound, in full Ezra Loomis Pound (b.
Oct. 30, 1885, Hailey, Idaho, U.S.—d.
Nov. 1, 1972, Venice, Italy), American
poet and critic, a supremely discerning
and energetic entrepreneur of the arts
who did more than any other single
figure to advance a “modern” movement in
English and American literature. Pound
promoted, and also occasionally helped
to shape, the work of such widely
different poets and novelists as William
Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Ernest
Hemingway, Robert Frost, D.H. Lawrence,
and T.S. Eliot. His pro-Fascist
broadcasts in Italy during World War II
led to his postwar arrest and
confinement until 1958.
Early life and career
Pound was born in a small mining
town in Idaho, the only child of a
Federal Land Office official, Homer
Loomis Pound of Wisconsin, and Isabel
Weston of New York City. About 1887 the
family moved to the eastern states, and
in June 1889, following Homer Pound’s
appointment to the U.S. Mint in
Philadelphia, they settled in nearby
Wyncote, where Pound lived a normal
middle-class childhood.
After
two years at Cheltenham Military
Academy, which he left without
graduating, he attended a local high
school. From there he went for two years
(1901–03) to the University of
Pennsylvania, where he met his lifelong
friend, the poet William Carlos
Williams. He took a Ph.B. (bachelor of
philosophy) degree at Hamilton College,
Clinton, N.Y., in 1905 and returned to
the University of Pennsylvania for
graduate work. He received his M.A. in
June 1906 but withdrew from the
university after working one more year
toward his doctorate. He left with a
knowledge of Latin, Greek, French,
Italian, German, Spanish, Provençal, and
Anglo-Saxon, as well as of English
literature and grammar.
In the
autumn of 1907, Pound became professor
of Romance languages at Wabash
Presbyterian College, Crawfordsville,
Ind. Although his general behaviour
fairly reflected his Presbyterian
upbringing, he was already writing
poetry and was affecting a bohemian
manner. His career came quickly to an
end, and in February 1908, with light
luggage and the manuscript of a book of
poems that had been rejected by at least
one American publisher, he set sail for
Europe.
He had
been to Europe three times before, the
third time alone in the summer of 1906,
when he had gathered the material for
his first three published articles:
Raphaelite Latin, concerning the Latin
poets of the Renaissance, and
Interesting French Publications,
concerning the troubadours (both
published in the Book News Monthly,
Philadelphia, September 1906), and
Burgos, a Dream City of Old Castile
(October issue).
Now,
with little money, he sailed to
Gibraltar and southern Spain, then on to
Venice, where in June 1908 he published,
at his own expense, his first book of
poems, A lume spento. About September
1908 he went to London, where he was
befriended by the writer and editor Ford
Madox Ford (who published him in his
English Review), entered William Butler
Yeats’s circle, and joined the “school
of images,” a modern group presided over
by the philosopher T.E. Hulme.
Success abroad
In England, success came quickly to
Pound. A book of poems, Personae, was
published in April 1909; a second book,
Exultations, followed in October; and a
third book, The Spirit of Romance, based
on lectures delivered in London
(1909–10), was published in 1910.
After a
trip home—a last desperate and
unsuccessful attempt to make a literary
life for himself in Philadelphia or New
York City—he returned to Europe in
February 1911, visiting Italy, Germany,
and France. Toward the end of 1911 he
met an English journalist, Alfred R.
Orage, editor of the socialist weekly
New Age, who opened its pages to him and
provided him with a small but regular
income during the next nine years.
In 1912
Pound became London correspondent for
the small magazine Poetry (Chicago); he
did much to enhance the magazine’s
importance and was soon a dominant
figure in Anglo-American verse. He was
among the first to recognize and review
the poetry of Robert Frost and D.H.
Lawrence and to praise the sculpture of
the modernists Jacob Epstein and Henri
Gaudier-Brzeska. As leader of the
Imagist movement of 1912–14, successor
of the “school of images,” he drew up
the first Imagist manifesto, with its
emphasis on direct and sparse language
and precise images in poetry, and he
edited the first Imagist anthology, Des
Imagistes (1914).
A shaper of modern literature
Though his friend Yeats had already
become famous, Pound succeeded in
persuading him to adopt a new, leaner
style of poetic composition. In 1914,
the year of his marriage to Dorothy
Shakespear, daughter of Yeats’s friend
Olivia Shakespear, he began a
collaboration with the then-unknown
James Joyce. As unofficial editor of The
Egoist (London) and later as London
editor of The Little Review (New York
City), he saw to the publication of
Joyce’s novels Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man and Ulysses, thus spreading
Joyce’s name and securing financial
assistance for him. In that same year he
gave T.S. Eliot a similar start in his
career as poet and critic.
He
continued to publish his own poetry
(Ripostes, 1912; Lustra, 1916) and prose
criticism (Pavannes and Divisions,
1918). From the literary remains of the
great Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa,
which had been presented to Pound in
1913, he succeeded in publishing highly
acclaimed English versions of early
Chinese poetry, Cathay (1915), and two
volumes of Japanese Noh plays (1916–17)
as well.
Development as a poet
Unsettled by the slaughter of World
War I and the spirit of hopelessness he
felt was pervading England after its
conclusion, Pound decided to move to
Paris, publishing before he left two of
his most important poetical works,
“Homage to Sextus Propertius,” in the
book Quia Pauper Amavi (1919), and Hugh
Selwyn Mauberley (1920). “Propertius” is
a comment on the British Empire in 1917,
by way of Propertius and the Roman
Empire. Mauberley, a finely chiseled
“portrait” of one aspect of British
literary culture in 1919, is one of the
most praised poems of the 20th century.
During
his 12 years in London, Pound had
completely transformed himself as a
poet. He arrived a Late Victorian for
whom love was a matter of “lute
strings,” “crushed lips,” and “Dim tales
that blind me.” Within five or six years
he was writing a new, adult poetry that
spoke calmly of current concerns in
common speech. In this drier
intellectual air, “as clear as metal,”
Pound’s verse took on new qualities of
economy, brevity, and clarity as he used
concrete details and exact visual images
to capture concentrated moments of
experience. Pound’s search for laconic
precision owed much to his constant
reading of past literature, including
Anglo-Saxon poetry, Greek and Latin
classics, Dante, and such 19th-century
French works as Théophile Gautier’s
Émaux et camées and Gustave Flaubert’s
novel Madame Bovary. Like his friend T.S.
Eliot, Pound wanted a modernism that
brought back to life the highest
standards of the past. Modernism for its
own sake, untested against the past,
drew anathemas from him. His progress
may be seen in attempts at informality
(1911):
Have
tea, damn the Caesars,
Talk of
the latest success. . .
in the
gathering strength of his 1911 version
of the Anglo-Saxon poem “Seafarer” :
Storms,
on the stone-cliffs beaten,
fell on
the stern
In icy
feathers. . .
and in
the confident free verse of “The Return”
(1912):
See,
they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet. . .
From
this struggle there emerged the short,
perfectly worded free-verse poems in
Lustra. In his poetry Pound was now able
to deal efficiently with a whole range
of human activities and emotions,
without raising his voice. The movement
of the words and the images they create
are no longer the secondhand borrowings
of youth or apprenticeship but seem to
belong to the observing intelligence
that conjures up the particular work in
hand. Many of the Lustra poems are
remarkable for perfectly paced endings:
Nor has
life in it aught better
Than
this hour of clear coolness,
the
hour of waking together.
But the
culmination of Pound’s years in London
was his 18-part long poem Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley, which ranged from close
observation of the artist and society to
the horrors of mass production and World
War I; from brilliant echo of the past:
When
our two dusts with Waller’s shall be
laid,
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,
Till
change hath broken down
All
things save Beauty alone.
to the
syncopation of
With a
placid and uneducated mistress
He
exercises his talents
And the
soil meets his distress.
The Cantos
During his stay in Paris (1921–24)
Pound met and helped the young American
novelist Ernest Hemingway; wrote an
opera, Le Testament, based on poems of
François Villon; assisted T.S. Eliot
with the editing of his long poem The
Waste Land; and acted as correspondent
for the New York literary journal The
Dial.
In 1924
Pound tired of Paris and moved to
Rapallo, Italy, which was to be his home
for the next 20 years. In 1925 he had a
daughter, Maria, by the expatriate
American violinist Olga Rudge, and in
1926 his wife, Dorothy, gave birth to a
son, Omar. The daughter was brought up
by a peasant woman in the Italian Tirol,
the son by relatives in England. In
1927–28 Pound edited his own magazine,
Exile, and in 1930 he brought together,
under the title A Draft of XXX Cantos,
various segments of his ambitious long
poem The Cantos, which he had begun in
1915.
The
1930s saw the publication of further
volumes of The Cantos (Eleven New
Cantos, 1934; The Fifth Decad of Cantos,
1937; Cantos LII–LXXI, 1940) and a
collection of some of his best prose
(Make It New, 1934). A growing interest
in music caused him to arrange a long
series of concerts in Rapallo during the
1930s, and, with the assistance of Olga
Rudge, he played a large part in the
rediscovery of the 18th-century Italian
composer Antonio Vivaldi. The results of
his continuing investigation in the
areas of culture and history were
published in his brilliant but
fragmentary prose work Guide to Kulchur
(1938).
Following the Great Depression of the
1930s, he turned more and more to
history, especially economic history, a
subject in which he had been interested
since his meeting in London in 1918 with
Clifford Douglas, the founder of Social
Credit, an economic theory stating that
maldistribution of wealth due to
insufficient purchasing power is the
cause of economic depressions. Pound had
come to believe that a misunderstanding
of money and banking by governments and
the public, as well as the manipulation
of money by international bankers, had
led the world into a long series of
wars. He became obsessed with monetary
reform (ABC of Economics, 1933; Social
Credit, 1935; What Is Money For?, 1939),
involved himself in politics, and
declared his admiration for the Italian
dictator Benito Mussolini (Jefferson
and/or Mussolini, 1935). The obsession
affected his Cantos, which even earlier
had shown evidence of becoming an
uncontrolled series of personal and
historical episodes.
Anti-American broadcasts
As war in Europe drew near, Pound
returned home (1939) in the hope that he
could help keep the peace between Italy
and the United States. He went back to
Italy a disappointed man, and between
1941 and 1943, after Italy and the
United States were at war, he made
several hundred broadcasts over Rome
Radio on subjects ranging from James
Joyce to the control of money and the
U.S. government by Jewish bankers and
often openly condemned the American war
effort. He was arrested by U.S. forces
in 1945 and spent six months in a prison
camp for army criminals near Pisa.
Despite harsh conditions there, he
translated Confucius into English (The
Great Digest & Unwobbling Pivot, 1951)
and wrote The Pisan Cantos (1948), the
most moving section of his long
poem-in-progress.
Returned to the United States to face
trial for treason, he was pronounced
“insane and mentally unfit for trial” by
a panel of doctors and spent 12 years
(1946–58) in Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital
for the criminally insane in Washington,
D.C. During this time he continued to
write The Cantos (Section: Rock-Drill,
1955; Thrones, 1959), translated ancient
Chinese poetry (The Classic Anthology,
1954) and Sophocles’ Trachiniai (Women
of Trachis, 1956), received visitors
regularly, and kept up a voluminous and
worldwide correspondence. Controversy
surrounding him burst out anew when, in
1949, he was awarded the important
Bollingen Prize for his Pisan Cantos.
When on April 18, 1958, he was declared
unfit to stand trial and the charges
against him were dropped, he was
released from Saint Elizabeth’s. He
returned to Italy, dividing the year
between Rapallo and Venice.
Pound
lapsed into silence in 1960, leaving The
Cantos unfinished. More than 800 pages
long, they are fragmentary and formless
despite recurring themes and ideas. The
Cantos are the logbook of Pound’s own
private voyage through Greek mythology,
ancient China and Egypt, Byzantium,
Renaissance Italy, the works of John
Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and many
other periods and subjects, including
economics and banking and the nooks and
crannies of his own memory and
experience. Pound even convinced himself
that the poem’s faults and weaknesses,
inevitable from the nature of the
undertaking, were part of an underlying
method. Yet there are numerous passages
such as only he could have written that
are among the best of the century.
Pound
died in Venice in 1972. Out of his 60
years of publishing activity came 70
books of his own, contributions to about
70 others, and more than 1,500 articles.
A complete listing of his works is in
Donald Gallup, A Bibliography of Ezra
Pound (1963; rev. ed 1983). Most of the
writing on which Pound’s fame now rests
may be found in Personae (The Collected
Poems; 1926, new ed. 1949), a selection
of poems Pound wished to keep in print
in 1926, with a few earlier and later
poems added in 1949; The Cantos (1970),
cantos 1–117, a collection of all the
segments published to date; The Spirit
of Romance (1910); Literary Essays
(1954), the bulk of his best criticism,
ed. with an introduction by T.S. Eliot;
Guide to Kulchur (1938); and The Letters
of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. by D.D.
Paige (1950), an excellent introduction
to Pound’s literary life and inimitable
epistolary style.
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William Carlos
Williams

William
Carlos Williams, (b. Sept. 17, 1883,
Rutherford, N.J., U.S.—d. March 4, 1963,
Rutherford), American poet who succeeded
in making the ordinary appear
extraordinary through the clarity and
discreteness of his imagery.
After
receiving an M.D. from the University of
Pennsylvania in 1906 and after
internship in New York and graduate
study in pediatrics in Leipzig, he
returned in 1910 to a lifetime of poetry
and medical practice in his hometown.
In Al
Que Quiere! (1917; “To Him Who Wants
It!”) his style was distinctly his own.
Characteristic poems that proffer
Williams’ fresh, direct impression of
the sensuous world are the frequently
anthologized “Lighthearted William,” “By
the Road to the Contagious Hospital,”
and “Red Wheelbarrow.”
In the
1930s during the Depression, his images
became less a celebration of the world
and more a catalog of its wrongs. Such
poems as “Proletarian Portrait” and “The
Yachts” reveal his skill in conveying
attitudes by presentation rather than
explanation.
In
Paterson (5 vol., 1946–58), Williams
expressed the idea of the city, which in
its complexity also represents man in
his complexity. The poem is based on the
industrial city in New Jersey on the
Passaic River and evokes a complex
vision of America and modern man.
A
prolific writer of prose, Williams’ In
the American Grain (1925) analyzed the
American character and culture through
essays on historical figures. Three
novels form a trilogy about a
family—White Mule (1937), In the Money
(1940), and The Build-Up (1952). Among
his notable short stories are “Jean
Beicke,” “A Face of Stone,” and “The
Farmers’ Daughters.” His play A Dream of
Love (published 1948) was produced in
off-Broadway and academic theatres.
Williams’ Autobiography appeared in
1951, and in 1963 he was posthumously
awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for
his Pictures from Brueghel, and Other
Poems (1962). William Carlos Williams,
by the poet Reed Whittemore, was
published in 1975.
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Fiction
The little magazines that helped the growth of the
poetry of the era also contributed to a development
of its fiction. They printed daring or
unconventional short stories and published attacks
upon established writers. The Dial (1880–1929),
Little Review (1914–29), Seven Arts (1916–17), and
others encouraged Modernist innovation. More potent
were two magazines edited by the ferociously funny
journalist-critic H.L. Mencken—The Smart Set
(editorship 1914–23) and American Mercury (which he coedited between 1924 and 1933). A powerful
influence and a scathing critic of puritanism,
Mencken helped launch the new fiction.
Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell
was an American author, who won the Pulitzer Prize
in 1937 for her epic novel Gone with the Wind, her
only major publication. This novel is one of the
most popular books of all time, selling more than 30
million copies. The film adaptation of it, released
in 1939, became the highest-grossing film in the
history of Hollywood, and it received a
record-breaking ten Academy Awards. Mitchell has
been honored by the United States Postal Service
with a 1¢ Great Americans series postage stamp.
Mencken’s major enthusiasms included the fiction
of
Joseph Conrad and
Theodore Dreiser, but he also
promoted minor writers for their attacks on
gentility, such as James Branch Cabell, or for their
revolt against the narrow, frustrated quality of
life in rural communities, including Zona Gale and
Ruth Suckow. The most distinguished of these writers
was Sherwood Anderson. His Winesburg, Ohio (1919)
and The Triumph of the Egg (1921) were collections
of short stories that showed villagers suffering
from all sorts of phobias and suppressions. Anderson
in time wrote several novels, the best being Poor
White (1920).
In 1920 critics noticed that a new school of
fiction had risen to prominence with the success of
books such as
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of
Paradise and
Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, fictions
that tended to be frankly psychological or modern in
their unsparing portrayals of contemporary life.
Novels of the 1920s were often not only lyrical and
personal but also, in the despairing mood that
followed World War I, apt to express the pervasive
disillusionment of the postwar generation. Novels of
the 1930s inclined toward radical social criticism
in response to the miseries of the Great Depression,
though some of the best, by writers such as
Fitzgerald,
William Faulkner, Henry Roth, and
Nathanael West, continued to explore the Modernist
vein of the previous decade.
Margaret
Munnerlyn Mitchell

American novelist
in full Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell
born November 8, 1900, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.
died August 16, 1949, Atlanta
Main
American author of the enormously popular novel Gone with the Wind.
Mitchell attended Washington Seminary in her native Atlanta, Georgia,
before enrolling at Smith College in 1918. When her mother died the next
year, she returned home. Between 1922 and 1926 she was a writer and
reporter for the Atlanta Journal. After an ankle injury in 1926, she
left the paper and for the next 10 years worked slowly on a romantic
novel about the Civil War and Reconstruction as seen from a Southern
point of view. The novel featured Scarlett O’Hara, a strong-willed
coquette and jezebel. From her family Mitchell had absorbed the history
of the South, the tragedy of the war, and the romance of the Lost Cause.
She worked at her novel sporadically, composing episodes out of sequence
and later fitting them together. She apparently had little thought of
publication at first, and for six years after it was substantially
finished the novel lay unread. But in 1935 Mitchell was persuaded to
submit her manuscript for publication.
It appeared in 1936 as Gone with the Wind (quoting a line from the
poem “Cynara” by Ernest Dowson). Within six months 1,000,000 copies had
been sold; 50,000 copies were sold in one day. It went on to sell more
copies than any other novel in U.S. publishing history, with sales
passing 12,000,000 by 1965, and was eventually translated into some 25
languages and sold in about 40 countries. It was awarded the Pulitzer
Prize in 1937. The motion-picture rights were sold for $50,000. The
film, starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable and produced by David O.
Selznick, premiered in Atlanta on December 15, 1939, after an
unprecedented period of advance promotion, including the highly
publicized search for an actress to play Scarlett. It won eight major
Oscars and two special Oscars at the Academy Awards and for two decades
reigned as the top moneymaking film of all time. Mitchell, who never
adjusted to the celebrity that had befallen her and who never attempted
another book, died after an automobile accident in 1949. Four decades
after Mitchell’s death, her estate permitted the writing of a sequel by
Alexandra Ripley, Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with
the Wind” (1991), which was generally unfavourably appraised by critics.
In 2001 Mitchell’s estate, citing copyright infringement, sued to block
the publication of Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parodic
sequel to Gone with the Wind told from a former slave’s perspective.
Later that year the case was settled out of court. Mitchell’s estate
eventually authorized a second sequel, Rhett Butler’s People (2007),
which was written by historical novelist Donald McCaig.
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Sherwood Anderson

Sherwood Anderson, (b. Sept. 13, 1876,
Camden, Ohio, U.S.—d. March 8, 1941,
Colon, Panama), author who strongly
influenced American writing between
World Wars I and II, particularly the
technique of the short story. His
writing had an impact on such notable
writers as Ernest Hemingway and William
Faulkner, both of whom owe the first
publication of their books to his
efforts. His prose style, based on
everyday speech and derived from the
experimental writing of Gertrude Stein,
was markedly influential on the early
Hemingway—who parodied it cruelly in
Torrents of Spring (1926) to make a
clean break and become his own man.
One of seven children of a day labourer,
Anderson attended school intermittently
as a youth in Clyde, Ohio, and worked as
a newsboy, house painter, farmhand, and
racetrack helper. After a year at
Wittenberg Academy, a preparatory school
in Springfield, Ohio, he worked as an
advertising writer in Chicago until
1906, when he went back to Ohio and for
the next six years sought—without
success—to prosper as a businessman
while writing fiction in his spare time.
A paint manufacturer in Elyria, Ohio, he
left his office abruptly one day in 1912
and wandered off, turning up four days
later in Cleveland, disheveled and
mentally distraught. He later said he
staged this episode to get away from the
business world and devote himself to
literature.
Anderson went back to his advertising
job in Chicago and remained there until
he began to earn enough from his
published work to quit. Encouraged by
Dreiser, Floyd Dell, Carl Sandburg, and
Ben Hecht—leaders of the Chicago
literary movement—he began to contribute
experimental verse and short fiction to
The Little Review, The Masses, the Seven
Arts, and Poetry. Dell and Dreiser
arranged the publication of his first
two novels, Windy McPherson’s Son (1916;
rev. 1921) and Marching Men (1917), both
written while he was still a
manufacturer. Winesburg, Ohio (1919) was
his first mature book and made his
reputation as an author. Its
interrelated short sketches and tales
are told by a newspaper
reporter-narrator who is as emotionally
stunted in some ways as the people he
describes. His novels include Many
Marriages (1923), which stresses the
need for sexual fulfillment; Dark
Laughter (1925), which values the
“primitive” over the civilized; and
Beyond Desire (1932), a novel of
Southern textile mill labour struggles.
His best work is generally thought to be
in his short stories, collected in
Winesburg, Ohio, The Triumph of the Egg
(1921), Horses and Men (1923), and Death
in the Woods (1933). Also valued are the
autobiographical sketches A Story
Teller’s Story (1924), Tar: A Midwest
Childhood (1926), and the posthumous
Memoirs (1942; critical edition 1969). A
selection of his Letters appeared in
1953.
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Sinclair Lewis

Sinclair Lewis, in full Harry Sinclair
Lewis (b. Feb. 7, 1885, Sauk Centre,
Minn., U.S.—d. Jan. 10, 1951, near Rome,
Italy), American novelist and social
critic who punctured American
complacency with his broadly drawn,
widely popular satirical novels. He won
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930,
the first given to an American.
Lewis
graduated from Yale University (1907)
and was for a time a reporter and also
worked as an editor for several
publishers. His first novel, Our Mr.
Wrenn (1914), attracted favourable
criticism but few readers. At the same
time he was writing with ever-increasing
success for such popular magazines as
The Saturday Evening Post and
Cosmopolitan, but he never lost sight of
his ambition to become a serious
novelist. He undertook the writing of
Main Street as a major effort, assuming
that it would not bring him the ready
rewards of magazine fiction. Yet its
publication in 1920 made his literary
reputation. Main Street is seen through
the eyes of Carol Kennicott, an Eastern
girl married to a Midwestern doctor who
settles in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota
(modeled on Lewis’ hometown of Sauk
Centre). The power of the book derives
from Lewis’ careful rendering of local
speech, customs, and social amenities.
The satire is double-edged—directed
against both the townspeople and the
superficial intellectualism that
despises them. In the years following
its publication, Main Street became not
just a novel but the textbook on
American provincialism.
In 1922
Lewis published Babbitt, a study of the
complacent American whose individuality
has been sucked out of him by Rotary
clubs, business ideals, and general
conformity. The name Babbitt passed into
general usage to represent the
optimistic, self-congratulatory,
middle-aged businessman whose horizons
were bounded by his village limits.
He
followed this success with Arrowsmith
(1925), a satiric study of the medical
profession, with emphasis on the
frustration of fine scientific ideals.
His next important book, Elmer Gantry
(1927), was an attack on the ignorant,
gross, and predatory leaders who had
crept into the Protestant church.
Dodsworth (1929), concerning the
experiences of a retired big businessman
and his wife on a European tour, offered
Lewis a chance to contrast American and
European values and the very different
temperaments of the man and his wife.
Lewis’
later books were not up to the standards
of his work in the 1920s. It Can’t
Happen Here (1935) dramatized the
possibilities of a Fascist takeover of
the United States. It was produced as a
play by the Federal Theatre with 21
companies in 1936. Kingsblood Royal
(1947) is a novel of race relations.
In his
final years Lewis lived much of the time
abroad. His reputation declined steadily
after 1930. His two marriages (the
second was to the political columnist
Dorothy Thompson) ended in divorce, and
he drank excessively.
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F. Scott
Fitzgerald

F.
Scott Fitzgerald, in full Francis Scott
Key Fitzgerald (b. Sept. 24, 1896, St.
Paul, Minn., U.S.—d. Dec. 21, 1940,
Hollywood, Calif.), American short-story
writer and novelist famous for his
depictions of the Jazz Age (the 1920s),
his most brilliant novel being The Great
Gatsby (1925). His private life, with
his wife, Zelda, in both America and
France, became almost as celebrated as
his novels.
Fitzgerald was the only son of an
unsuccessful, aristocratic father and an
energetic, provincial mother. Half the
time he thought of himself as the heir
of his father’s tradition, which
included the author of “The
Star-Spangled Banner,” Francis Scott
Key, after whom he was named, and half
the time as “straight 1850 potato-famine
Irish.” As a result he had typically
ambivalent American feelings about
American life, which seemed to him at
once vulgar and dazzlingly promising.
He also
had an intensely romantic imagination,
what he once called “a heightened
sensitivity to the promises of life,”
and he charged into experience
determined to realize those promises. At
both St. Paul Academy (1908–10) and
Newman School (1911–13) he tried too
hard and made himself unpopular, but at
Princeton he came close to realizing his
dream of a brilliant success. He became
a prominent figure in the literary life
of the university and made lifelong
friendships with Edmund Wilson and John
Peale Bishop. He became a leading figure
in the socially important Triangle Club,
a dramatic society, and was elected to
one of the leading clubs of the
university; he fell in love with Ginevra
King, one of the beauties of her
generation. Then he lost Ginevra and
flunked out of Princeton.
He
returned to Princeton the next fall, but
he had now lost all the positions he
coveted, and in November 1917 he left to
join the army. In July 1918, while he
was stationed near Montgomery, Ala., he
met Zelda Sayre, the daughter of an
Alabama Supreme Court judge. They fell
deeply in love, and, as soon as he
could, Fitzgerald headed for New York
determined to achieve instant success
and to marry Zelda. What he achieved was
an advertising job at $90 a month. Zelda
broke their engagement, and, after an
epic drunk, Fitzgerald retired to St.
Paul to rewrite for the second time a
novel he had begun at Princeton. In the
spring of 1920 it was published, he
married Zelda, and
riding
in a taxi one afternoon between very
tall buildings under a mauve and rosy
sky; I began to bawl because I had
everything I wanted and knew I would
never be so happy again.
Immature though it seems today, This
Side of Paradise in 1920 was a
revelation of the new morality of the
young; it made Fitzgerald famous. This
fame opened to him magazines of literary
prestige, such as Scribner’s, and
high-paying popular ones, such as The
Saturday Evening Post. This sudden
prosperity made it possible for him and
Zelda to play the roles they were so
beautifully equipped for, and Ring
Lardner called them the prince and
princess of their generation. Though
they loved these roles, they were
frightened by them, too, as the ending
of Fitzgerald’s second novel, The
Beautiful and Damned (1922), shows. The
Beautiful and Damned describes a
handsome young man and his beautiful
wife, who gradually degenerate into a
shopworn middle age while they wait for
the young man to inherit a large
fortune. Ironically, they finally get
it, when there is nothing of them left
worth preserving.
To
escape the life that they feared might
bring them to this end, the Fitzgeralds
(together with their daughter, Frances,
called “Scottie,” born in 1921) moved in
1924 to the Riviera, where they found
themselves a part of a group of American
expatriates whose style was largely set
by Gerald and Sara Murphy; Fitzgerald
described this society in his last
completed novel, Tender Is the Night,
and modeled its hero on Gerald Murphy.
Shortly after their arrival in France,
Fitzgerald completed his most brilliant
novel, The Great Gatsby (1925). All of
his divided nature is in this novel, the
naive Midwesterner afire with the
possibilities of the “American Dream” in
its hero, Jay Gatsby, and the
compassionate Princeton gentleman in its
narrator, Nick Carraway. The Great
Gatsby is the most profoundly American
novel of its time; at its conclusion,
Fitzgerald connects Gatsby’s dream, his
“Platonic conception of himself,” with
the dream of the discoverers of America.
Some of Fitzgerald’s finest short
stories appeared in All the Sad Young
Men (1926), particularly “The Rich Boy”
and “Absolution,” but it was not until
eight years later that another novel
appeared.
The
next decade of the Fitzgeralds’ lives
was disorderly and unhappy. Fitzgerald
began to drink too much, and Zelda
suddenly, ominously, began to practice
ballet dancing night and day. In 1930
she had a mental breakdown and in 1932
another, from which she never fully
recovered. Through the 1930s they fought
to save their life together, and, when
the battle was lost, Fitzgerald said, “I
left my capacity for hoping on the
little roads that led to Zelda’s
sanitarium.” He did not finish his next
novel, Tender Is the Night, until 1934.
It is the story of a psychiatrist who
marries one of his patients, who, as she
slowly recovers, exhausts his vitality
until he is, in Fitzgerald’s words, un
homme épuisé (“a man used up”). Though
technically faulty and commercially
unsuccessful, this is Fitzgerald’s most
moving book.
With
its failure and his despair over Zelda,
Fitzgerald was close to becoming an
incurable alcoholic. By 1937, however,
he had come back far enough to become a
scriptwriter in Hollywood, and there he
met and fell in love with Sheilah
Graham, a famous Hollywood gossip
columnist. For the rest of his
life—except for occasional drunken
spells when he became bitter and
violent—Fitzgerald lived quietly with
her. (Occasionally he went east to visit
Zelda or his daughter Scottie, who
entered Vassar College in 1938.) In
October 1939 he began a novel about
Hollywood, The Last Tycoon. The career
of its hero, Monroe Stahr, is based on
that of the producer Irving Thalberg.
This is Fitzgerald’s final attempt to
create his dream of the promises of
American life and of the kind of man who
could realize them. In the intensity
with which it is imagined and in the
brilliance of its expression, it is the
equal of anything Fitzgerald ever wrote,
and it is typical of his luck that he
died of a heart attack with his novel
only half-finished. He was 44 years old.
Arthur Mizener
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Critics of society
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920)
showed the disillusionment and moral disintegration
experienced by so many in the United States after
World War I. The book initiated a career of great
promise that found fruition in The Great Gatsby
(1925), a spare but poignant novel about the promise
and failure of the American Dream. Fitzgerald was to
live out this theme himself. Though damaged by drink
and by a failing marriage, he went on to do some of
his best work in the 1930s, including numerous
stories and essays as well as his most ambitious
novel, Tender Is the Night (1934). Unlike
Fitzgerald, who was a lyric writer with real
emotional intensity,
Sinclair Lewis was best as a
social critic. His onslaughts against the “village
virus” (Main Street [1920]), average businessmen
(Babbitt [1922]), materialistic scientists
(Arrowsmith [1925]), and the racially prejudiced
(Kingsblood Royal [1947]) were satirically sharp and
thoroughly documented, though Babbitt is his only
book that still stands up brilliantly at the
beginning of the 21st century. Similar careful
documentation, though little satire, characterized
James T. Farrell’s naturalistic Studs Lonigan
trilogy (1932–35), which described the stifling
effects of growing up in a lower-middle-class family
and a street-corner milieu in the Chicago of the
1920s.
The ironies of racial identity dominate the
stories and novels produced by writers of the Harlem
Renaissance, including harsh portraits of the black
middle class in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and
Passing (1929) and the powerful stories of Langston
Hughes in The Ways of White Folks (1934), as well as
the varied literary materials—poetry, fiction, and
drama—collected in Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923).
Richard Wright’s books, including Uncle Tom’s
Children (1938), Native Son (1940), and Black Boy
(1945), were works of burning social protest,
Dostoyevskian in their intensity, that dealt boldly
with the plight of American blacks in both the old
South and the Northern urban ghetto. Zora Neale
Hurston’s training in anthropology and folklore
contributed to Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937),
her powerful feminist novel about the all-black
Florida town in which she had grown up.
A number of authors wrote proletarian novels
attacking capitalist exploitation, as in several
novels based on a 1929 strike in the textile mills
in Gastonia, N.C., such as Fielding Burke’s Call
Home the Heart and Grace Lumpkin’s To Make My Bread
(both 1932). Other notable proletarian novels
included Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited (1933),
Robert Cantwell’s The Land of Plenty (1934), and
Albert Halper’s Union Square (1933), The Foundry
(1934), and The Chute (1937), as well as some grim
evocations of the drifters and “bottom dogs” of the
Depression era, such as Edward Anderson’s Hungry Men
and Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing (both 1935).
The radical movement, combined with a nascent
feminism, encouraged the talent of several
politically committed women writers whose work was
rediscovered later; they included Tillie Olsen,
Meridel Le Sueur, and Josephine Herbst.
Particularly admired as a protest writer was
John
Dos Passos, who first attracted attention with an
anti-World War I novel, Three Soldiers (1921). His
most sweeping indictments of the modern social and
economic system, Manhattan Transfer (1925) and the
U.S.A. trilogy (The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big
Money [1930–36]), employed various narrative
innovations such as the “camera eye” and “newsreel,”
along with a large cast of characters, to attack
society from the left. Nathanael West’s novels,
including Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), A Cool Million
(1934), and The Day of the Locust (1939), used black
comedy to create a bitter vision of an inhuman and
brutal world and its depressing effects on his
sensitive but ineffectual protagonists. West evoked
the tawdry but rich materials of mass culture and
popular fantasy to mock the pathos of the American
Dream, a frequent target during the Depression
years.
Hemingway,
Faulkner, and
Steinbeck
Three authors whose writings showed a shift from
disillusionment were
Ernest Hemingway,
William
Faulkner, and
John Steinbeck.
Hemingway’s early
short stories and his first novels, The Sun Also
Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), were
full of the existential disillusionment of the Lost
Generation expatriates. The Spanish Civil War,
however, led him to espouse the possibility of
collective action to solve social problems, and his
less-effective novels, including To Have and Have
Not (1937) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940),
embodied this new belief. He regained some of his
form in The Old Man and the Sea (1952) and his
posthumously published memoir of Paris between the
wars, A Moveable Feast (1964). Hemingway’s writing
was influenced by his background in journalism and
by the spare manner and flat sentence rhythms of
Gertrude Stein, his Paris friend and a pioneer
Modernist, especially in such works of hers as Three
Lives (1909). His own great impact on other writers
came from his deceptively simple, stripped-down
prose, full of unspoken implication, and from his
tough but vulnerable masculinity, which created a
myth that imprisoned the author and haunted the
World War II generation.
Hemingway’s great rival as a stylist and
mythmaker was
William Faulkner, whose writing was as
baroque as Hemingway’s was spare. Influenced by
Sherwood Anderson,
Herman
Melville, and especially
James Joyce,
Faulkner combined
stream-of-consciousness techniques with rich social
history. Works such as The Sound and the Fury
(1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August
(1932), and The Hamlet (1940) were parts of the
unfolding history of Yoknapatawpha County, a
mythical Mississippi community, which depicted the
transformation and the decadence of the South.
Faulkner’s work was dominated by a sense of guilt
going back to the American Civil War and the
appropriation of Indian lands. Though often comic,
his work pictured the disintegration of the leading
families and, in later books such as Go Down, Moses
(1942) and Intruder in the Dust (1948), showed a
growing concern with the troubled role of race in
Southern life.
Steinbeck’s career, marked by uneven
achievements, began with a historical novel, Cup of
Gold (1929), in which he voiced a distrust of
society and glorified the anarchistic individualist
typical of the rebellious 1920s. He showed his
affinity for colourful outcasts, such as the
paisanos of the Monterey area, in the short novels
Tortilla Flat (1935), Of Mice and Men (1937), and
Cannery Row (1945). His best books were inspired by
the social struggles of migrant farm workers during
the Great Depression, including the simply written
but ambiguous strike novel In Dubious Battle (1936)
and his flawed masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath
(1939). The latter, a protest novel punctuated by
prose-poem interludes, tells the story of the
migration of the Joads, an Oklahoma Dust Bowl
family, to California. During their almost biblical
journey, they learn the necessity for collective
action among the poor and downtrodden to prevent
them from being destroyed individually.
Ernest Hemingway

American writer
in full Ernest Miller Hemingway
born July 21, 1899, Cicero [now in Oak Park], Illinois, U.S.
died July 2, 1961, Ketchum, Idaho
Main
American novelist and short-story writer, awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1954. He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his
writing and for his adventurous and widely publicized life. His succinct
and lucid prose style exerted a powerful influence on American and
British fiction in the 20th century.
The first son of Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a doctor, and Grace Hall
Hemingway, Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in a suburb of Chicago. He
was educated in the public schools and began to write in high school,
where he was active and outstanding, but the parts of his boyhood that
mattered most were summers spent with his family on Walloon Lake in
upper Michigan. On graduation from high school in 1917, impatient for a
less-sheltered environment, he did not enter college but went to Kansas
City, where he was employed as a reporter for the Star. He was
repeatedly rejected for military service because of a defective eye, but
he managed to enter World War I as an ambulance driver for the American
Red Cross. On July 8, 1918, not yet 19 years old, he was injured on the
Austro-Italian front at Fossalta di Piave. Decorated for heroism and
hospitalized in Milan, he fell in love with a Red Cross nurse, Agnes von
Kurowsky, who declined to marry him. These were experiences he was never
to forget.
After recuperating at home, Hemingway renewed his efforts at writing,
for a while worked at odd jobs in Chicago, and sailed for France as a
foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. Advised and encouraged by
other American writers in Paris—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein,
Ezra Pound—he began to see his nonjournalistic work appear in print
there, and in 1925 his first important book, a collection of stories
called In Our Time, was published in New York City; it was originally
released in Paris in 1924. In 1926 he published The Sun Also Rises, a
novel with which he scored his first solid success. A pessimistic but
sparkling book, it deals with a group of aimless expatriates in France
and Spain—members of the postwar Lost Generation, a phrase that
Hemingway scorned while making it famous. This work also introduced him
to the limelight, which he both craved and resented for the rest of his
life. Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring, a parody of the American
writer Sherwood Anderson’s book Dark Laughter, also appeared in 1926.
The writing of books occupied Hemingway for most of the postwar
years. He remained based in Paris, but he traveled widely for the
skiing, bullfighting, fishing, and hunting that by then had become part
of his life and formed the background for much of his writing. His
position as a master of short fiction had been advanced by Men Without
Women in 1927 and thoroughly established with the stories in Winner Take
Nothing in 1933. Among his finest stories are The Killers, The Short
Happy Life of Francis Macomber, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro. At least
in the public view, however, the novel A Farewell to Arms (1929)
overshadowed such works. Reaching back to his experience as a young
soldier in Italy, Hemingway developed a grim but lyrical novel of great
power, fusing love story with war story. While serving with the Italian
ambulance service during World War I, the American lieutenant Frederic
Henry falls in love with the English nurse Catherine Barkley, who tends
him during his recuperation after being wounded. She becomes pregnant by
him, but he must return to his post. Henry deserts during the Italians’
disastrous retreat after the Battle of Caporetto, and the reunited
couple flee Italy by crossing the border into Switzerland. There,
however, Catherine and her baby die during childbirth, and Henry is left
desolate at the loss of the great love of his life.
Hemingway’s love of Spain and his passion for bullfighting resulted
in Death in the Afternoon (1932), a learned study of a spectacle he saw
more as tragic ceremony than as sport. Similarly, a safari he took in
1933–34 in the big-game region of Tanganyika resulted in The Green Hills
of Africa (1935), an account of big-game hunting. Mostly for the
fishing, he purchased a house in Key West, Florida, and bought his own
fishing boat. A minor novel of 1937 called To Have and Have Not is about
a Caribbean desperado and is set against a background of lower-class
violence and upper-class decadence in Key West during the Great
Depression.
By now Spain was in the midst of civil war. Still deeply attached to
that country, Hemingway made four trips there, once more a
correspondent. He raised money for the Republicans in their struggle
against the Nationalists under General Francisco Franco, and he wrote a
play called The Fifth Column (1938), which is set in besieged Madrid. As
in many of his books, the protagonist of the play is based on the
author. Following his last visit to the Spanish war, he purchased Finca
Vigía (“Lookout Farm”), an unpretentious estate outside Havana, Cuba,
and went to cover another war—the Japanese invasion of China.
The harvest of Hemingway’s considerable experience of Spain in war
and peace was the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a substantial
and impressive work that some critics consider his finest novel, in
preference to A Farewell to Arms. It was also the most successful of all
his books as measured in sales. Set during the Spanish Civil War, it
tells of Robert Jordan, an American volunteer who is sent to join a
guerrilla band behind the Nationalist lines in the Guadarrama Mountains.
Most of the novel concerns Jordan’s relations with the varied
personalities of the band, including the girl Maria, with whom he falls
in love. Through dialogue, flashbacks, and stories, Hemingway offers
telling and vivid profiles of the Spanish character and unsparingly
depicts the cruelty and inhumanity stirred up by the civil war. Jordan’s
mission is to blow up a strategic bridge near Segovia in order to aid a
coming Republican attack, which he realizes is doomed to fail. In an
atmosphere of impending disaster, he blows up the bridge but is wounded
and makes his retreating comrades leave him behind, where he prepares a
last-minute resistance to his Nationalist pursuers.
All of his life Hemingway was fascinated by war—in A Farewell to Arms
he focused on its pointlessness, in For Whom the Bell Tolls on the
comradeship it creates—and, as World War II progressed, he made his way
to London as a journalist. He flew several missions with the Royal Air
Force and crossed the English Channel with American troops on D-Day
(June 6, 1944). Attaching himself to the 22nd Regiment of the 4th
Infantry Division, he saw a good deal of action in Normandy and in the
Battle of the Bulge. He also participated in the liberation of Paris,
and, although ostensibly a journalist, he impressed professional
soldiers not only as a man of courage in battle but also as a real
expert in military matters, guerrilla activities, and intelligence
collection.
Following the war in Europe, Hemingway returned to his home in Cuba
and began to work seriously again. He also traveled widely, and, on a
trip to Africa, he was injured in a plane crash. Soon after (in 1953),
he received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Old Man and the Sea
(1952), a short heroic novel about an old Cuban fisherman who, after an
extended struggle, hooks and boats a giant marlin only to have it eaten
by voracious sharks during the long voyage home. This book, which played
a role in gaining for Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954,
was as enthusiastically praised as his previous novel, Across the River
and into the Trees (1950), the story of a professional army officer who
dies while on leave in Venice, had been damned.
By 1960 Fidel Castro’s revolution had driven Hemingway from Cuba. He
settled in Ketchum, Idaho, and tried to lead his life and do his work as
before. For a while he succeeded, but, anxiety-ridden and depressed, he
was twice hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where
he received electroshock treatments. Two days after his return to the
house in Ketchum, he took his life with a shotgun. Hemingway had married
four times and fathered three sons.
Hemingway left behind a substantial amount of manuscript, some of
which has been published. A Moveable Feast, an entertaining memoir of
his years in Paris (1921–26) before he was famous, was issued in 1964.
Islands in the Stream, three closely related novellas growing directly
out of his peacetime memories of the Caribbean island of Bimini, of
Havana during World War II, and of searching for U-boats off Cuba,
appeared in 1970.
Hemingway’s characters plainly embody his own values and view of
life. The main characters of The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and
For Whom the Bell Tolls are young men whose strength and self-confidence
nevertheless coexist with a sensitivity that leaves them deeply scarred
by their wartime experiences. War was for Hemingway a potent symbol of
the world, which he viewed as complex, filled with moral ambiguities,
and offering almost unavoidable pain, hurt, and destruction. To survive
in such a world, and perhaps emerge victorious, one must conduct oneself
with honour, courage, endurance, and dignity, a set of principles known
as “the Hemingway code.” To behave well in the lonely, losing battle
with life is to show “grace under pressure” and constitutes in itself a
kind of victory, a theme clearly established in The Old Man and the Sea.
Hemingway’s prose style was probably the most widely imitated of any
in the 20th century. He wished to strip his own use of language of
inessentials, ridding it of all traces of verbosity, embellishment, and
sentimentality. In striving to be as objective and honest as possible,
Hemingway hit upon the device of describing a series of actions by using
short, simple sentences from which all comment or emotional rhetoric has
been eliminated. These sentences are composed largely of nouns and
verbs, have few adjectives and adverbs, and rely on repetition and
rhythm for much of their effect. The resulting terse, concentrated prose
is concrete and unemotional yet is often resonant and capable of
conveying great irony through understatement. Hemingway’s use of
dialogue was similarly fresh, simple, and natural-sounding. The
influence of this style was felt worldwide wherever novels were written,
particularly from the 1930s through the ’50s.
A consummately contradictory man, Hemingway achieved a fame surpassed
by few, if any, American authors of the 20th century. The virile nature
of his writing, which attempted to re-create the exact physical
sensations he experienced in wartime, big-game hunting, and
bullfighting, in fact masked an aesthetic sensibility of great delicacy.
He was a celebrity long before he reached middle age, but his popularity
continues to be validated by serious critical opinion.
Philip Young
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William
Faulkner

William
Faulkner, in full William Cuthbert
Faulkner, original surname Falkner (b.
Sept. 25, 1897, New Albany, Miss.,
U.S.—d. July 6, 1962, Byhalia, Miss.),
American novelist and short-story writer
who was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for
Literature.
Youth and early writings
As the eldest of the four sons of
Murry Cuthbert and Maud Butler Falkner,
William Faulkner (as he later spelled
his name) was well aware of his family
background and especially of his
great-grandfather, Colonel William Clark
Falkner, a colourful if violent figure
who fought gallantly during the Civil
War, built a local railway, and
published a popular romantic novel
called The White Rose of Memphis. Born
in New Albany, Miss., Faulkner soon
moved with his parents to nearby Ripley
and then to the town of Oxford, the seat
of Lafayette county, where his father
later became business manager of the
University of Mississippi. In Oxford he
experienced the characteristic open-air
upbringing of a Southern white youth of
middle-class parents: he had a pony to
ride and was introduced to guns and
hunting. A reluctant student, he left
high school without graduating but
devoted himself to “undirected reading,”
first in isolation and later under the
guidance of Phil Stone, a family friend
who combined study and practice of the
law with lively literary interests and
was a constant source of current books
and magazines.
In July
1918, impelled by dreams of martial
glory and by despair at a broken love
affair, Faulkner joined the British
Royal Air Force (RAF) as a cadet pilot
under training in Canada, although the
November 1918 armistice intervened
before he could finish ground school,
let alone fly or reach Europe. After
returning home, he enrolled for a few
university courses, published poems and
drawings in campus newspapers, and acted
out a self-dramatizing role as a poet
who had seen wartime service. After
working in a New York bookstore for
three months in the fall of 1921, he
returned to Oxford and ran the
university post office there with
notorious laxness until forced to
resign. In 1924 Phil Stone’s financial
assistance enabled him to publish The
Marble Faun, a pastoral verse-sequence
in rhymed octosyllabic couplets. There
were also early short stories, but
Faulkner’s first sustained attempt to
write fiction occurred during a
six-month visit to New Orleans—then a
significant literary centre—that began
in January 1925 and ended in early July
with his departure for a five-month tour
of Europe, including several weeks in
Paris.
His
first novel, Soldiers’ Pay (1926), given
a Southern though not a Mississippian
setting, was an impressive achievement,
stylistically ambitious and strongly
evocative of the sense of alienation
experienced by soldiers returning from
World War I to a civilian world of which
they seemed no longer a part. A second
novel, Mosquitoes (1927), launched a
satirical attack on the New Orleans
literary scene, including identifiable
individuals, and can perhaps best be
read as a declaration of artistic
independence. Back in Oxford—with
occasional visits to Pascagoula on the
Gulf Coast—Faulkner again worked at a
series of temporary jobs but was chiefly
concerned with proving himself as a
professional writer. None of his short
stories was accepted, however, and he
was especially shaken by his difficulty
in finding a publisher for Flags in the
Dust (published posthumously, 1973), a
long, leisurely novel, drawing
extensively on local observation and his
own family history, that he had
confidently counted upon to establish
his reputation and career. When the
novel eventually did appear, severely
truncated, as Sartoris in 1929, it
created in print for the first time that
densely imagined world of Jefferson and
Yoknapatawpha County—based partly on
Ripley but chiefly on Oxford and
Lafayette county and characterized by
frequent recurrences of the same
characters, places, and themes—which
Faulkner was to use as the setting for
so many subsequent novels and stories.
The major novels
Faulkner had meanwhile “written
[his] guts” into the more technically
sophisticated The Sound and the Fury,
believing that he was fated to remain
permanently unpublished and need
therefore make no concessions to the
cautious commercialism of the literary
marketplace. The novel did find a
publisher, despite the difficulties it
posed for its readers, and from the
moment of its appearance in October 1929
Faulkner drove confidently forward as a
writer, engaging always with new themes,
new areas of experience, and, above all,
new technical challenges. Crucial to his
extraordinary early productivity was the
decision to shun the talk, infighting,
and publicity of literary centres and
live instead in what was then the
small-town remoteness of Oxford, where
he was already at home and could devote
himself, in near isolation, to actual
writing. In 1929 he married Estelle
Oldham—whose previous marriage, now
terminated, had helped drive him into
the RAF in 1918. One year later he
bought Rowan Oak, a handsome but
run-down pre-Civil War house on the
outskirts of Oxford, restoration work on
the house becoming, along with hunting,
an important diversion in the years
ahead. A daughter, Jill, was born to the
couple in 1933, and although their
marriage was otherwise troubled,
Faulkner remained working at home
throughout the 1930s and ’40s, except
when financial need forced him to accept
the Hollywood screenwriting assignments
he deplored but very competently
fulfilled.
Oxford
provided Faulkner with intimate access
to a deeply conservative rural world,
conscious of its past and remote from
the urban-industrial mainstream, in
terms of which he could work out the
moral as well as narrative patterns of
his work. His fictional methods,
however, were the reverse of
conservative. He knew the work not only
of Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert,
Charles Dickens, and Herman Melville but
also of Joseph Conrad, James Joyce,
Sherwood Anderson, and other recent
figures on both sides of the Atlantic,
and in The Sound and the Fury (1929),
his first major novel, he combined a
Yoknapatawpha setting with radical
technical experimentation. In successive
“stream-of-consciousness” monologues the
three brothers of Candace (Caddy)
Compson—Benjy the idiot, Quentin the
disturbed Harvard undergraduate, and
Jason the embittered local
businessman—expose their differing
obsessions with their sister and their
loveless relationships with their
parents. A fourth section, narrated as
if authorially, provides new
perspectives on some of the central
characters, including Dilsey, the
Compsons’ black servant, and moves
toward a powerful yet essentially
unresolved conclusion. Faulkner’s next
novel, the brilliant tragicomedy called
As I Lay Dying (1930), is centred upon
the conflicts within the “poor white”
Bundren family as it makes its slow and
difficult way to Jefferson to bury its
matriarch’s malodorously decaying
corpse. Entirely narrated by the various
Bundrens and people encountered on their
journey, it is the most systematically
multi-voiced of Faulkner’s novels and
marks the culmination of his early post-Joycean
experimentalism.
Although the psychological intensity and
technical innovation of these two novels
were scarcely calculated to ensure a
large contemporary readership,
Faulkner’s name was beginning to be
known in the early 1930s, and he was
able to place short stories even in such
popular—and well-paying—magazines as
Collier’s and Saturday Evening Post.
Greater, if more equivocal, prominence
came with the financially successful
publication of Sanctuary, a novel about
the brutal rape of a Southern college
student and its generally violent,
sometimes comic, consequences. A serious
work, despite Faulkner’s unfortunate
declaration that it was written merely
to make money, Sanctuary was actually
completed prior to As I Lay Dying and
published, in February 1931, only after
Faulkner had gone to the trouble and
expense of restructuring and partly
rewriting it—though without moderating
the violence—at proof stage. Despite the
demands of film work and short stories
(of which a first collection appeared in
1931 and a second in 1934), and even the
preparation of a volume of poems
(published in 1933 as A Green Bough),
Faulkner produced in 1932 another long
and powerful novel. Complexly structured
and involving several major characters,
Light in August revolves primarily upon
the contrasted careers of Lena Grove, a
pregnant young countrywoman serenely in
pursuit of her biological destiny, and
Joe Christmas, a dark-complexioned
orphan uncertain as to his racial
origins, whose life becomes a desperate
and often violent search for a sense of
personal identity, a secure location on
one side or the other of the tragic
dividing line of colour.
Made
temporarily affluent by Sanctuary and
Hollywood, Faulkner took up flying in
the early 1930s, bought a Waco cabin
aircraft, and flew it in February 1934
to the dedication of Shushan Airport in
New Orleans, gathering there much of the
material for Pylon, the novel about
racing and barnstorming pilots that he
published in 1935. Having given the Waco
to his youngest brother, Dean, and
encouraged him to become a professional
pilot, Faulkner was both grief- and
guilt-stricken when Dean crashed and
died in the plane later in 1935; when
Dean’s daughter was born in 1936 he took
responsibility for her education. The
experience perhaps contributed to the
emotional intensity of the novel on
which he was then working. In Absalom,
Absalom! (1936) Thomas Sutpen arrives in
Jefferson from “nowhere,” ruthlessly
carves a large plantation out of the
Mississippi wilderness, fights valiantly
in the Civil War in defense of his
adopted society, but is ultimately
destroyed by his inhumanity toward those
whom he has used and cast aside in the
obsessive pursuit of his grandiose
dynastic “design.” By refusing to
acknowledge his first, partly black,
son, Charles Bon, Sutpen also loses his
second son, Henry, who goes into hiding
after killing Bon (whom he loves) in the
name of their sister’s honour. Because
this profoundly Southern story is
constructed—speculatively,
conflictingly, and inconclusively—by a
series of narrators with sharply
divergent self-interested perspectives,
Absalom, Absalom! is often seen, in its
infinite open-endedness, as Faulkner’s
supreme “modernist” fiction, focused
above all on the processes of its own
telling.
Later life and works
The novel The Wild Palms (1939) was
again technically adventurous, with two
distinct yet thematically counterpointed
narratives alternating, chapter by
chapter, throughout. But Faulkner was
beginning to return to the Yoknapatawpha
County material he had first imagined in
the 1920s and subsequently exploited in
short-story form. The Unvanquished
(1938) was relatively conventional, but
The Hamlet (1940), the first volume of
the long-uncompleted “Snopes” trilogy,
emerged as a work of extraordinary
stylistic richness. Its episodic
structure is underpinned by recurrent
thematic patterns and by the wryly
humorous presence of V.K. Ratliff—an
itinerant sewing-machine agent—and his
unavailing opposition to the increasing
power and prosperity of the supremely
manipulative Flem Snopes and his
numerous “poor white” relatives. In 1942
appeared Go Down, Moses, yet another
major work, in which an intense
exploration of the linked themes of
racial, sexual, and environmental
exploitation is conducted largely in
terms of the complex interactions
between the “white” and “black” branches
of the plantation-owning McCaslin
family, especially as represented by
Isaac McCaslin on the one hand and Lucas
Beauchamp on the other.
For
various reasons—the constraints on
wartime publishing, financial pressures
to take on more scriptwriting,
difficulties with the work later
published as A Fable—Faulkner did not
produce another novel until Intruder in
the Dust (1948), in which Lucas
Beauchamp, reappearing from Go Down,
Moses, is proved innocent of murder, and
thus saved from lynching, only by the
persistent efforts of a young white boy.
Racial issues were again confronted, but
in the somewhat ambiguous terms that
were to mark Faulkner’s later public
statements on race: while deeply
sympathetic to the oppression suffered
by blacks in the Southern states, he
nevertheless felt that such wrongs
should be righted by the South itself,
free of Northern intervention.
Faulkner’s American reputation—which had
always lagged well behind his reputation
in Europe—was boosted by The Portable
Faulkner (1946), an anthology skillfully
edited by Malcolm Cowley in accordance
with the arresting if questionable
thesis that Faulkner was deliberately
constructing a historically based
“legend” of the South. Faulkner’s
Collected Stories (1950), impressive in
both quantity and quality, was also well
received, and later in 1950 the award of
the Nobel Prize for Literature
catapulted the author instantly to the
peak of world fame and enabled him to
affirm, in a famous acceptance speech,
his belief in the survival of the human
race, even in an atomic age, and in the
importance of the artist to that
survival.
The
Nobel Prize had a major impact on
Faulkner’s private life. Confident now
of his reputation and future sales, he
became less consistently “driven” as a
writer than in earlier years and allowed
himself more personal freedom, drinking
heavily at times and indulging in a
number of extramarital affairs—his
opportunities in these directions being
considerably enhanced by a final
screenwriting assignment in Egypt in
1954 and several overseas trips (most
notably to Japan in 1955) undertaken on
behalf of the U.S. State Department. He
took his “ambassadorial” duties
seriously, speaking frequently in public
and to interviewers, and also became
politically active at home, taking
positions on major racial issues in the
vain hope of finding middle ground
between entrenched Southern
conservatives and interventionist
Northern liberals. Local Oxford opinion
proving hostile to such views, Faulkner
in 1957 and 1958 readily accepted
semester-long appointments as
writer-in-residence at the University of
Virginia in Charlottesville. Attracted
to the town by the presence of his
daughter and her children as well as by
its opportunities for horse-riding and
fox-hunting, Faulkner bought a house
there in 1959, though continuing to
spend time at Rowan Oak.
The
quality of Faulkner’s writing is often
said to have declined in the wake of the
Nobel Prize. But the central sections of
Requiem for a Nun (1951) are
challengingly set out in dramatic form,
and A Fable (1954), a long, densely
written, and complexly structured novel
about World War I, demands attention as
the work in which Faulkner made by far
his greatest investment of time, effort,
and authorial commitment. In The Town
(1957) and The Mansion (1959) Faulkner
not only brought the “Snopes” trilogy to
its conclusion, carrying his
Yoknapatawpha narrative to beyond the
end of World War II, but subtly varied
the management of narrative point of
view. Finally, in June 1962 Faulkner
published yet another distinctive novel,
the genial, nostalgic comedy of male
maturation he called The Reivers and
appropriately subtitled “A
Reminiscence.” A month later he was
dead, of a heart attack, at the age of
64, his health undermined by his
drinking and by too many falls from
horses too big for him.
Assessment
By the time of his death Faulkner
had clearly emerged not just as the
major American novelist of his
generation but as one of the greatest
writers of the 20th century, unmatched
for his extraordinary structural and
stylistic resourcefulness, for the range
and depth of his characterization and
social notation, and for his persistence
and success in exploring fundamental
human issues in intensely localized
terms. Some critics, early and late,
have found his work extravagantly
rhetorical and unduly violent, and there
have been strong objections, especially
late in the 20th century, to the
perceived insensitivity of his
portrayals of women and black Americans.
His reputation, grounded in the sheer
scale and scope of his achievement,
seems nonetheless secure, and he remains
a profoundly influential presence for
novelists writing in the United States,
South America, and, indeed, throughout
the world.
Michael Millgate
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John Steinbeck

American novelist
in full John Ernst Steinbeck
born Feb. 27, 1902, Salinas, Calif., U.S.
died Dec. 20, 1968, New York, N.Y.
Main
American novelist, best known for The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which
summed up the bitterness of the Great Depression decade and aroused
widespread sympathy for the plight of migratory farm workers. He
received the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1962.
Steinbeck attended Stanford University, Stanford, Calif.,
intermittently between 1920 and 1926 but did not take a degree. Before
his books attained success, he spent considerable time supporting
himself as a manual labourer while writing, and his experiences lent
authenticity to his depictions of the lives of the workers in his
stories. He spent much of his life in Monterey county, Calif., which
later was the setting of some of his fiction.
Steinbeck’s first novel, Cup of Gold (1929), was followed by The
Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), none of which
were successful. He first achieved popularity with Tortilla Flat (1935),
an affectionately told story of Mexican-Americans. The mood of gentle
humour turned to one of unrelenting grimness in his next novel, In
Dubious Battle (1936), a classic account of a strike by agricultural
labourers and a pair of Marxist labour organizers who engineer it. The
novella Of Mice and Men (1937), which also appeared in play and film
versions, is a tragic story about the strange, complex bond between two
migrant labourers. The Grapes of Wrath won a Pulitzer Prize and a
National Book Award and was made into a notable film in 1940. The novel
is about the migration of a dispossessed family from the Oklahoma Dust
Bowl to California and describes their subsequent exploitation by a
ruthless system of agricultural economics.
After the best-selling success of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck went
to Mexico to collect marine life with the freelance biologist Edward F.
Ricketts, and the two men collaborated in writing Sea of Cortez (1941),
a study of the fauna of the Gulf of California. During World War II
Steinbeck wrote some effective pieces of government propaganda, among
them The Moon Is Down (1942), a novel of Norwegians under the Nazis, and
he also served as a war correspondent. His immediate postwar
work—Cannery Row (1945), The Pearl (1947), and The Wayward Bus
(1947)—contained the familiar elements of his social criticism but were
more relaxed in approach and sentimental in tone.
Steinbeck’s later writings were comparatively slight works of
entertainment and journalism interspersed with three conscientious
attempts to reassert his stature as a major novelist: Burning Bright
(1950), East of Eden (1952), and The Winter of Our Discontent (1961). In
critical opinion, none equaled his earlier achievement. East of Eden, an
ambitious epic about the moral relations between a California farmer and
his two sons, was made into a film in 1955. Steinbeck himself wrote the
scripts for the film versions of his stories The Pearl (1948) and The
Red Pony (1949). Outstanding among the scripts he wrote directly for
motion pictures were Forgotten Village (1941) and Viva Zapata! (1952).
Steinbeck’s reputation rests mostly on the naturalistic novels with
proletarian themes he wrote in the 1930s; it is in these works that his
building of rich symbolic structures and his attempts at conveying
mythopoeic and archetypal qualities in his characters are most
effective.
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Lyric fictionists
An interesting development in fiction, abetted by
Modernism, was a shift from naturalistic to poetic
writing. There was an increased tendency to select
details and endow them with symbolic meaning, to set
down the thought processes and emotions of the
characters, and to make use of rhythmic prose. In
varied ways
Stephen Crane,
Frank Norris, Cabell, Dos Passos,
Hemingway,
Steinbeck, and
Faulkner
all
showed evidence of this—in passages, in short
stories, and even in entire novels. Faulkner showed
the tendency at its worst in A Fable (1954), which,
ironically, won a Pulitzer Prize.
Lyricism was especially prominent in the writings
of Willa Cather. O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the
Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918) contained poetic
passages about the disappearing frontier and the
creative efforts of frontier folk. A Lost Lady
(1923) and The Professor’s House (1925) were elegiac
and spare in style, though they also depicted
historic social transformations, and Death Comes for
the Archbishop (1927) was an exaltation of the past
and of spiritual pioneering. Katherine Anne Porter,
whose works took the form primarily of novelettes
and stories, wrote more in the style of the
Metaphysical poets, though she also wrote one long,
ambitious novel, Ship of Fools (1962). Her use of
the stream-of-consciousness method in Flowering
Judas (1930) as well as in Pale Horse, Pale Rider
(1939) had the complexity, the irony, and the
symbolic sophistication characteristic of these
poets, whose work the Modernists had brought into
fashion.
Two of the most intensely lyrical works of the
1930s were autobiographical novels set in the Jewish
ghetto of New York City’s Lower East Side before
World War I: Michael Gold’s harsh Jews Without Money
(1930) and Henry Roth’s Proustian Call It Sleep
(1934), one of the greatest novels of the decade.
They followed in the footsteps of Anzia Yezierska, a
prolific writer of the 1920s whose passionate books
about immigrant Jews, especially Bread Givers
(1925), have been rediscovered by contemporary
feminists.
Another lyrical and autobiographical writer,
whose books have faded badly, was Thomas Wolfe, who
put all his strivings, thoughts, and feelings into
works such as Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and Of
Time and the River (1935) before his early death in
1938. These Whitmanesque books, as well as
posthumously edited ones such as The Web and the
Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940),
dealt with a figure much like Wolfe, echoing the
author’s youth in the South, young manhood in the
North, and eternal search to fulfill a vision.
Though grandiose, they influenced many young
writers, including Jack Kerouac.
Walter Blair
Morris Dickstein
Katherine Anne Porter

Katherine Anne Porter, (b. , May 15,
1890, Indian Creek, Texas, U.S.—d. Sept.
18, 1980, Silver Spring, Md.), American
novelist and short-story writer, a
master stylist whose long short stories
have a richness of texture and
complexity of character delineation
usually achieved only in the novel.
Porter
was educated at private and convent
schools in the South. She worked as a
newspaperwoman in Chicago and in Denver,
Colorado, before leaving in 1920 for
Mexico, the scene of several of her
stories. “Maria Concepcion,” her first
published story (1922), was included in
her first book of stories, Flowering
Judas (1930), which was enlarged in 1935
with other stories.
The
title story of her next collection, Pale
Horse, Pale Rider (1939), is a poignant
tale of youthful romance brutally
thwarted by the young man’s death in the
influenza epidemic of 1919. In it and
the two other stories of the volume,
“Noon Wine” and “Old Mortality,” appears
for the first time her
semiautobiographical heroine, Miranda, a
spirited and independent woman.
Porter’s reputation was firmly
established, but none of her books sold
widely, and she supported herself
primarily through fellowships, by
working occasionally as an uncredited
screenwriter in Hollywood, and by
serving as writer-in-residence at a
succession of colleges and universities.
She published The Leaning Tower (1944),
a collection of stories, and won an O.
Henry Award for her 1962 story,
“Holiday.” The literary world awaited
with great anticipation the appearance
of Porter’s only full-length novel, on
which she had been working since 1941.
With
the publication of Ship of Fools in
1962, Porter won a large readership for
the first time. A best-seller that
became a major film in 1965, it tells of
the ocean voyage of a group of Germans
back to their homeland from Mexico in
1931, on the eve of Hitler’s ascendency.
Porter’s carefully crafted, ironic style
is perfectly suited to the allegorical
exploration of the collusion of good and
evil that is her theme, and the
penetrating psychological insight that
had always marked her work is evident in
the book.
Porter’s Collected Short Stories (1965)
won the National Book Award and the
Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Her essays,
articles, and book reviews were
collected in The Days Before (1952;
augmented 1970). Her last work,
published in 1977, when she suffered a
disabling stroke, was The Never-Ending
Wrong, dealing with the Sacco-Vanzetti
case of the 1920s.
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Jack Kerouac

Jack
Kerouac, original name Jean-Louis Lebris
de Kerouac (b. March 12, 1922, Lowell,
Mass., U.S.—d. Oct. 21, 1969, St.
Petersburg, Fla.), American novelist,
poet, and leader of the Beat movement
whose most famous book, On the Road
(1957), had broad cultural influence
before it was recognized for its
literary merits. On the Road captured
the spirit of its time as no other work
of the 20th century had since F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925).
Childhood and early influences
Lowell, Mass., a mill town, had a
large French Canadian population; while
Kerouac’s mother worked in a shoe
factory and his father worked as a
printer, Kerouac attended a French
Canadian school in the morning and
continued his studies in English in the
afternoon. He spoke joual, a Canadian
dialect of French, and so, though he was
an American, he viewed his country as if
he were a foreigner. Kerouac
subsequently went to the Horace Mann
School, a preparatory school in New York
City, on a football scholarship. There
he met Henri Cru, who helped Kerouac
find jobs as a merchant seaman, and
Seymour Wyse, who introduced Kerouac to
jazz.
In 1940
Kerouac enrolled at Columbia University,
where he met two writers who would
become lifelong friends: Allen Ginsberg
and William S. Burroughs. Together with
Kerouac they are the seminal figures of
the literary movement known as Beat, a
term introduced to Kerouac by Herbert
Huncke, a Times Square junkie, petty
thief, hustler, and writer. It meant
“down-and-out” as well as “beatific” and
therefore signified the bottom of
existence (from a financial and an
emotional point of view) as well as the
highest, most spiritual high.
Kerouac’s childhood and early adulthood
were marked by loss: his brother Gerard
died in 1926, when Gerard was nine.
Kerouac’s boyhood friend Sebastian
Sampas died in 1944 and his father, Leo,
in 1946. In a deathbed promise to Leo,
Kerouac pledged to care for his mother,
Gabrielle, affectionately known as
Memere. Kerouac married three times: to
Edie Parker (1944, annulled 1946); to
Joan Haverty (1951), with whom he had a
daughter, Jan Michelle; and to Stella
Sampas (1966), the sister of Sebastian,
who had died at Anzio, Italy, during
World War II.
On the Road and other early work
By the time Kerouac and Burroughs
met in 1944, Kerouac had already written
a million words. His boyhood ambition
had been to write the “great American
novel.” His first novel, The Town & the
City (1950), received favourable reviews
but was considered derivative of the
novels of Thomas Wolfe, whose Time and
the River (1935) and You Can’t Go Home
Again (1940) were then popular. In his
novel Kerouac articulated the “New
Vision,” that “everything was
collapsing,” a theme that would dominate
his grand design to have all his work
taken together as “one vast book”—The
Legend of Duluoz.
Yet
Kerouac was unhappy with the pace of his
prose. The music of bebop jazz artists
Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker began
to drive Kerouac toward his “spontaneous
bop prosody,” as Ginsberg later called
it, which took shape in the late 1940s
through various drafts of his second
novel, On the Road. The original
manuscript, a scroll written in a
three-week blast in 1951, is legendary:
composed of approximately 120 feet (37
metres) of paper taped together and fed
into a manual typewriter, the scroll
allowed Kerouac the fast pace he was
hoping to achieve. He also hoped to
publish the novel as a scroll so that
the reader would not be encumbered by
having to turn the pages of a book.
Rejected for publication at first, it
finally was printed in 1957. In the
interim, Kerouac wrote several more
“true-life” novels, Doctor Sax (1959),
Maggie Cassidy (1959), and Tristessa
(1960) among them.
Kerouac
found himself a national sensation after
On the Road received a rave review from
The New York Times critic Gilbert
Millstein. While Millstein extolled the
literary merits of the book, to the
American public the novel represented a
departure from tradition. Kerouac,
though, was disappointed with having
achieved fame for what he considered the
wrong reason: little attention went to
the excellence of his writing and more
to the novel’s radically different
characters and its characterization of
hipsters and their nonconformist
celebration of sex, jazz, and endless
movement. The character Dean Moriarty
(based on Neal Cassady, another
important influence on Kerouac’s style)
was an American archetype, embodying
“IT,” an intense moment of heightened
experience achieved through fast
driving, talking, or “blowing” (as a
horn player might) or in writing. In On
the Road Sal Paradise explains his
fascination with others who have “IT,”
such as Dean Moriarty and Rollo Greb as
well as jazz performers: “The only ones
for me are the mad ones, the ones who
are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be
saved.” These are characters for whom
the perpetual now is all.
Readers
often confused Kerouac with Sal
Paradise, the amoral hipster at the
centre of his novel. The critic Norman
Podhoretz famously wrote that Beat
writing was an assault against the
intellect and against decency. This
misreading dominated negative reactions
to On the Road. Kerouac’s rebellion,
however, is better understood as a quest
for the solidity of home and family,
what he considered “the hearthside
ideal.” He wanted to achieve in his
writing that which he could find neither
in the promise of America nor in the
empty spirituality of Roman Catholicism;
he strived instead for the serenity that
he had discovered in his adopted
Buddhism. Kerouac felt that the Beat
label marginalized him and prevented him
from being treated as he wanted to be
treated, as a man of letters in the
American tradition of Herman Melville
and Walt Whitman.
Sketching, poetry, and Buddhism
Despite the success of the
“spontaneous prose” technique Kerouac
used in On the Road, he sought further
refinements to his narrative style.
Following a suggestion by Ed White, a
friend from his Columbia University
days, that he sketch “like a painter,
but with words,” Kerouac sought visual
possibilities in language by combining
spontaneous prose with sketching.
Visions of Cody (written in 1951–52 and
published posthumously in 1972), an
in-depth, more poetic variation of On
the Road describing a buddy trip and
including transcripts of his
conversation with Cassady (now
fictionalized as Cody), is the most
successful realization of the sketching
technique.
As he
continued to experiment with his prose
style, Kerouac also bolstered his
standing among the Beat writers as a
poet supreme. With his sonnets and odes
he ranged across Western poetic
traditions. He also experimented with
the idioms of blues and jazz in such
works as Mexico City Blues (1959), a
sequential poem comprising 242 choruses.
After he met the poet Gary Snyder in
1955, Kerouac’s poetry, as well as that
of Ginsberg and fellow Beats Philip
Whalen and Lew Welch, began to show the
influence of the haiku, a genre mostly
unknown to Americans at that time. (The
haiku of Bashō, Buson, Masaoka Shiki,
and Issa had not been translated into
English until the pioneering work of R.H.
Blyth in the late 1940s.) While Ezra
Pound had modeled his poem In a Station
of the Metro (1913) after Japanese
haiku, Kerouac, departing from the
17-syllable, 3-line strictures,
redefined the form and created an
American haiku tradition. In the
posthumously published collection
Scattered Poems (1971), he proposed that
the “Western haiku” simply say a lot in
three short lines:
Above
all, a Haiku must be very simple and
free of all poetic trickery and make a
little picture and yet be as airy and
graceful as a Vivaldi Pastorella.
In his
pocket notebooks, Kerouac wrote and
rewrote haiku, revising and perfecting
them. He also incorporated his haiku
into his prose. His mastery of the form
is demonstrated in his novel The Dharma
Bums (1958).
Kerouac
turned to Buddhist study and practice
from 1953 to 1956, after his “road”
period and in the lull between composing
On the Road in 1951 and its publication
in 1957. In the fall of 1953 he finished
The Subterraneans (it would be published
in 1958). Fed up with the world after
the failed love affair upon which the
book was based, he read Henry David
Thoreau and fantasized a life outside
civilization. He immersed himself in the
study of Zen, beginning his
genre-defying Some of the Dharma in 1953
as reader’s notes on Dwight Goddard’s A
Buddhist Bible (1932); the work grew
into a massive compilation of spiritual
material, meditations, prayers, haiku,
and musings on the teaching of Buddha.
In an attempt to replicate the
experience of Han Shan, a reclusive
Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty
(618–907), Kerouac spent 63 days atop
Desolation Peak in Washington state.
Kerouac recounted this experience in
Desolation Angels (1965) using haiku as
bridges (connectives in jazz) between
sections of spontaneous prose. In 1956
he wrote a sutra, The Scripture of the
Golden Eternity. He also began to think
of his entire oeuvre as a “Divine Comedy
of the Buddha,” thereby combining
Eastern and Western traditions.
Later work
By the 1960s Kerouac had finished
most of the writing for which he is best
known. In 1961 he wrote Big Sur in 10
days while living in the cabin of
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a fellow Beat
poet, in California’s Big Sur region.
Two years later Kerouac’s account of his
brother’s death was published as the
spiritual Visions of Gerard. Another
important autobiographical book, Vanity
of Duluoz (1968), recounts stories of
his childhood, his schooling, and the
dramatic scandals that defined early
Beat legend.
In 1969
Kerouac was broke, and many of his books
were out of print. An alcoholic, he was
living with his third wife and his
mother in St. Petersburg, Fla., where he
spent his time in local bars. A week
after he had been beaten by fellow
drinkers whom he had antagonized, he
died of internal hemorrhaging in front
of his television while watching The
Galloping Gourmet—the ultimate ending
for a writer who came to be known as the
“martyred king of the Beats.”
Assessment
Kerouac’s insistence upon “First
thought, best thought” and his refusal
to revise was controversial. He felt
that revision was a form of literary
lying, imposing a form farther away from
the truth of the moment, counter to his
intentions for his “true-life” novels.
For the composition of haiku, however,
Kerouac was more exacting. Yet he
accomplished the task of revision by
rewriting. Hence, there exist several
variations of On the Road, the final one
being the 1957 version that was a
culmination of Kerouac’s own revisions
as well as the editing of his publisher.
Significantly, Kerouac never saw the
final manuscript before publication.
Still, many critics found the long
sweeping sentences of On the Road ragged
and grammatically derelict.
Kerouac
explained his quest for pure,
unadulterated language—the truth of the
heart unobstructed by the lying of
revision—in two essays published in the
Evergreen Review: Essentials of
Spontaneous Prose (1958) and Belief and
Technique for Modern Prose (1959). On
the grammatically irreverent sentences,
Kerouac extolled a “method” eschewing
conventional punctuation in favour of
dashes. In Essentials of Spontaneous
Prose he recommended the “vigorous space
dash separating rhetorical breathing (as
jazz musician drawing breath between
outblown phrases)”; the dash allowed
Kerouac to deal with time differently,
making it less prosaic and linear and
more poetic. He also described his
manner of developing an image, which
began with the “jewel center,” from
which he wrote in a “semi-trance,”
“without consciousness,” his language
governed by sound, by the poetic effect
of alliteration and assonance, until he
reached a plateau. A new “jewel center”
would be initiated, stronger than the
first, and would spiral out as he riffed
(in an analogy with a jazz musician). He
saw himself as a horn player blowing one
long note, as he told interviewers for
The Paris Review. His technique explains
the unusual organization of his writing,
which is not haphazard or sloppy but
systematic in the most individualized
sense. In fact, Kerouac revised On the
Road numerous times by recasting his
story in book after book of The Legend
of Duluoz. His “spontaneity” allowed him
to develop his distinct voice.
Regina Weinreich
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Literary criticism
Some historians, looking back over the first half of
the 20th century, were inclined to think that it was
particularly noteworthy for its literary criticism.
Beyond doubt, criticism thrived as it had not for
several generations. It was an important influence
on literature itself, and it shaped the perceptions
of readers in the face of difficult new writing.
The period began with a battle between two
literary groups, one that called its movement New
Humanism and stood for older values in judging
literature and another group that urged that old
standards be overthrown and new ones adopted. The
New Humanists, such as Irving Babbitt, a Harvard
University professor, and Paul Elmer More, were
moralists whose work found an echo in neotraditionalist writers such as
T.S.
Eliot, who
shared their dislike of naturalism, Romanticism, and
the liberal faith in progress. The leader of the
opposition, hardly a liberal himself, was the
pugnacious H.L. Mencken, who insisted that the duty
of writers was to present “the unvarnished truth”
about life. His magazine articles and reviews
gathered in A Book of Prefaces (1917) and the six
volumes of Prejudices (1919–27) ushered in the
iconoclasm of the 1920s, preparing the ground for
satiric writers such as
Sinclair Lewis. Mencken was
a tireless enthusiast for the work of
Joseph Conrad
and
Theodore Dreiser, among other modern writers.
With his dislike of cant and hypocrisy, Mencken
helped liberate American literature from its
moralistic framework.
Socio-literary critics
In this period of social change, it was natural for
critics to consider literature in relationship to
society and politics, as most 19th-century critics
had done. The work of Van Wyck Brooks and Vernon L.
Parrington illustrated two of the main approaches.
In America’s Coming-of-Age (1915), Letters and
Leadership (1918), and The Ordeal of
Mark Twain
(1920), Brooks scolded the American public and
attacked the philistinism, materialism, and
provinciality of the Gilded Age. But he retreated
from his critical position in the popular Makers and
Finders series, which included The Flowering of New
England (1936), New England: Indian Summer (1940),
The World of Washington Irving (1944), The Times of
Melville and Whitman (1947), and The Confident Years
(1952). These books wove an elaborate cultural
tapestry of the major and minor figures in American
literature. In Main Currents in American Thought
(1927–30), Parrington, a progressive, reevaluated
American literature in terms of its adherence to the
tenets of Jeffersonian democracy.
The growth of Marxian influence upon thinking in
the 1920s and ’30s manifested itself in several
critical works by V.F. Calverton, Granville Hicks,
Malcolm Cowley, and Bernard Smith, as well as
numerous articles in journals such as Modern
Quarterly, New Masses, Partisan Review, and The New
Republic. Though the enthusiasm for communism waned,
Marxism contributed to the historical approach of
outstanding critics such as Edmund Wilson and
Kenneth Burke and to the entire school of New York
intellectuals that formed around Partisan Review and
included critics such as Lionel Trilling and Philip Rahv.
Moral-aesthetic critics
Wilson and Burke, like Cowley,
Morton D. Zabel,
Newton Arvin, and F.O. Matthiessen, tried to strike
a balance between aesthetic concerns and social or
moral issues. They were interested both in analyzing
and in evaluating literary creations—i.e., they were
eager to see in detail how a literary work was
constructed yet also to place it in a larger social
or moral framework. Their work, like that of all
critics of the period, showed the influence of
T.S.
Eliot. In essays and books such as The Sacred Wood
(1920) and The Use of Poetry and the Use of
Criticism (1933),
Eliot drew close attention to the
language of literature yet also made sweeping
judgments and large cultural generalizations. His
main impact was on close readers of poetry—e.g., I.A. Richards, William Empson, and F.R. Leavis in
England and the critics of the New Criticism
movement in the United States, many of whom were
also poets besides being political and cultural
conservatives. Along with
Eliot, they rewrote the
map of literary history, challenged the dominance of
Romantic forms and styles, promoted and analyzed
difficult Modernist writing, and greatly advanced
ways of discussing literary structure. Major
examples of their style of close reading can be
found in R.P. Blackmur’s The Double Agent (1935),
Allen Tate’s Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas
(1936), John Crowe Ransom’s The World’s Body (1938),
Yvor Winters’s Maule’s Curse (1938), and Cleanth
Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn (1947). Though they
were later attacked for their formalism and for
avoiding the social context of writing, the New
Critics did much to further the understanding and
appreciation of literature.
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APPENDIX
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Willa Cather

American author in full Wilella Sibert Cather
born Dec. 7, 1873, near Winchester, Va., U.S. died April 24, 1947, New York, N.Y.
Main American novelist noted for her portrayals of the settlers and frontier
life on the American plains.
At age 9 Cather moved with her family from Virginia to frontier
Nebraska, where from age 10 she lived in the village of Red Cloud. There
she grew up among the immigrants from Europe—Swedes, Bohemians,
Russians, and Germans—who were breaking the land on the Great Plains.
At the University of Nebraska she showed a marked talent for
journalism and story writing, and on graduating in 1895 she obtained a
position in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on a family magazine. Later she
worked as copy editor and music and drama editor of the Pittsburgh
Leader. She turned to teaching in 1901 and in 1903 published her first
book of verses, April Twilights. In 1905, after the publication of her
first collection of short stories, The Troll Garden, she was appointed
managing editor of McClure’s, the New York muckraking monthly. After
building up its declining circulation, she left in 1912 to devote
herself wholly to writing novels.
Cather’s first novel, Alexander’s Bridge (1912), was a factitious
story of cosmopolitan life. Under the influence of Sarah Orne Jewett’s
regionalism, however, she turned to her familiar Nebraska material. With
O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918), which has frequently been
adjudged her finest achievement, she found her characteristic themes—the
spirit and courage of the frontier she had known in her youth. One of
Ours (1922), which won the Pulitzer Prize, and A Lost Lady (1923)
mourned the passing of the pioneer spirit.
In her earlier Song of the Lark (1915), as well as in the tales
assembled in Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920), including the
much-anthologized “Paul’s Case,” and Lucy Gayheart (1935), Cather
reflected the other side of her experience—the struggle of a talent to
emerge from the constricting life of the prairies and the stifling
effects of small-town life.
A mature statement of both themes can be found in Obscure Destinies
(1932). With success and middle age, however, Cather experienced a
strong disillusionment, which was reflected in The Professor’s House
(1925) and her essays Not Under Forty (1936).
Her solution was to write of the pioneer spirit of another age, that
of the French Catholic missionaries in the Southwest in Death Comes for
the Archbishop (1927) and of the French Canadians at Quebec in Shadows
on the Rock (1931). For the setting of her last novel, Sapphira and the
Slave Girl (1940), she used the Virginia of her ancestors and her
childhood.
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Pearl S. Buck

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nobel Prize in Literature
1938
Pearl Sydenstricker Buck (June 26, 1892 — March 6, 1973) also known as
Sai Zhen Zhu (Simplified Chinese: 赛珍珠; Pinyin: Sài Zhēnzhū; Traditional
Chinese: 賽珍珠), was a prolific American sinologist and Pulitzer
Prize-winning American writer. In 1938, she became the first American
woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for her rich and
truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her
biographical masterpieces." With no irony, she has been described in
China as a Chinese writer.
Life
Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck was born in Hillsboro, West Virginia to
Caroline (Stulting; 1857-1921) and Absalom Sydenstricker, a Southern
Presbyterian missionary. The family was sent to Zhenjiang, China in 1892
when Pearl was 3 months old. She was raised in China and was tutored by
a Confucian scholar named Mr. Kung. She was taught English as a
second language by her mother and tutor.
The Boxer Uprising greatly affected Pearl Buck and her family. Buck
wrote that during this time, …her eight-year-old childhood … split
apart. Her Chinese friends deserted her and her family, and there were
not as many Western visitors as there once were. The streets [of China]
were alive with rumors- many … based on fact- of brutality to
missionaries … Buck’s father was a missionary, so Buck’s mother, her
little sister, and herself were …evacuated to the relative safety of
Shanghai, where they spent nearly a year as refugees… (The Good Earth,
Introduction) In July 1901, Buck and her family sailed to San Francisco.
Not until the following year did the Sydenstrickers return to China.
In 1910, she left China once again for America to attend
Randolph-Macon Woman's College, where she would earn her degree (Phi
Beta Kappa) in 1914. She then returned to China and married an
agricultural economist missionary, John Lossing Buck, on May 13, 1917.
She lived with him in Suzhou, Anhui Province, a small town on the Huai
River (There are two cities in China with the same English name 'Suzhou',
one in Anhui while the more famous one is in Jiangsu Province. The one
where the Bucks had spent several years was in Anhui). It is the region
she described later in "The Good Earth."; her book was very much based
on her experience in Suzhou, Anhui. She served in China as a
Presbyterian missionary from 1914 until 1933. Her views later became
highly controversial in the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy,
leading to her resignation as a missionary.
In 1920, she and John had a daughter, Carol, who was afflicted with
phenylketonuria. The small family then moved to Nanjing, where Pearl
taught English literature at the University of Nanking. In 1925, the
Bucks adopted Janice (later surnamed Walsh). In 1926, she left China and
returned to the United States for a short time in order to earn her
Masters degree from Cornell University.
From 1920 to 1933, Pearl and John made their home in Nanking (Nanjing),
on the campus of Nanking University, where both had teaching positions.
In 1921, Pearl's mother died, and shortly afterwards her father moved in
with the Bucks. The tragedies and dislocations which Pearl suffered in
the 1920s reached a climax in March 1927, in the violence known as the "Nanking
Incident." In a confused battle involving elements of Chiang Kai-shek's
Nationalist troops, Communist forces, and assorted warlords, several
Westerners were murdered. The Bucks spent a terrified day in hiding,
after which they were rescued by American gunboats. After a trip
downriver to Shanghai, the Buck family sailed to Unzen, Japan, where
they spent the following year. They later moved back to Nanking, though
conditions remained dangerously unsettled.
In 1935 Pearl got a divorce. Richard Walsh, president of the John Day
Company and her publisher, became her second husband. The couple lived
in Pennsylvania.
Humanitarian efforts
Buck was an extremely passionate activist for human rights. In 1949,
outraged that existing adoption services considered Asian and mixed-race
children unadoptable, Pearl established Welcome House, Inc., the first
international, interracial adoption agency. In the nearly five decades
of its work, Welcome House has assisted in the placement of more than
five thousand children. In 1964, to provide support for Asian-American
children who were not eligible for adoption, Buck also established the
Pearl S. Buck Foundation, which provides sponsorship funding for
thousands of children in half a dozen Asian countries. When establishing
the Opportunity House Foundation to support child sponsorship programs
in Asia, Buck said, "The purpose...is to publicize and eliminate
injustices and prejudices suffered by children, who, because of their
birth, are not permitted to enjoy the educational, social, economic and
civil privileges normally accorded to children."
While the historic site works to preserve and display artifacts from
her profoundly multicultural life, many of Buck's life experiences are
also described in her novels, short stories, fiction, and children's
stories. Through them she sought to prove to her readers that
universality of mankind can exist if man accepts it. She dealt with many
topics including women's rights, emotions (in general), Asian cultures,
immigration, adoption, and conflicts that many people go through in
life.
Pearl S. Buck died of lung cancer on March 6, 1973 in Danby, Vermont
and was interred in Green Hills Farm in Perkasie. She designed her own
tombstone, which does not record her name in English; instead, the grave
marker is inscribed with Chinese characters representing the name Pearl
Sydenstricker.
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Mortimer Adler

in full Mortimer Jerome Adler
born Dec. 28, 1902, New York, New York, U.S.
died June 28, 2001, San Mateo, California
American philosopher, educator, editor, and advocate of
adult and general education by study of the great writings
of the Western world.
While still in public school Adler was taken on as a
copyboy by the New York Sun, where he stayed for two years
doing a variety of editorial work full-time. He then
attended Columbia University, completed his coursework for a
bachelor’s degree, but did not receive a diploma because he
had refused physical education (swimming). He stayed at
Columbia to teach and earn a Ph.D. (1928) and then became
professor of the philosophy of law at the University of
Chicago. There, with Robert M. Hutchins, he became a
proponent of the pursuit of liberal education through
regular discussions based on reading great books. He had
studied under John Erskine in a special honours course at
Columbia in which the “best sellers of ancient times” were
read as a “cultural basis for human understanding and
communication.”
Adler was associated with Hutchins in editing the
54-volume Great Books of the Western World (1952) and
conceived and directed the preparation of its two-volume
index of great ideas, the Syntopicon.
In 1952 Adler became director of the Institute for
Philosophical Research (initially in San Francisco and from
1963 in Chicago), which prepared The Idea of Freedom, 2 vol.
(1958–61). His books include How to Read a Book (1940; rev.
ed. 1972), A Dialectic of Morals (1941), The Capitalist
Manifesto (with Louis O. Kelso, 1958), The Revolution in
Education (with Milton Mayer, 1958), Aristotle for Everyone
(1978), How to Think About God (1980), and Six Great Ideas
(1981).
With Hutchins, Adler edited for Encyclopædia Britannica,
Inc., the 10-volume Gateway to the Great Books (1963) and
from 1961 an annual, The Great Ideas Today. He also headed
the editorial staff of Britannica’s 20-volume Annals of
America, including a two-volume Conspectus, Great Issues in
American Life (1968). Under the sponsorship of Britannica,
he delivered several series of lectures at the University of
Chicago that were published later as books: The Conditions
of Philosophy (1965), The Difference of Man and the
Difference It Makes (1967), and The Time of Our Lives
(1970). In 1969 he became director of planning for the 15th
edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, published in 1974. He
was chairman of the Encyclopædia Britannica’s Board of
Editors from 1974 to 1995. Adler’s memoirs consist of
Philosopher at Large: An Intellectual Autobiography (1977)
and A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror (1992). As the
spokesman for a group of noted educators, he wrote, after
considerable study and debate, The Paideia Proposal: An
Educational Manifesto (1982) and The Paideia Program: An
Educational Syllabus (1984), calling for the abolition in
American schools of multitrack educational systems, arguing
that a single elementary and secondary school program for
all students would ensure the upgrading of the curriculum
and the quality of instruction to serve the needs of the
brightest and to lift the achievement of the least
advantaged. He proposed that specialized vocational or
preprofessional training be given only after students had
completed a full course of basic education in the
humanities, arts, sciences, and language.
Among Adler’s later works are How to Speak, How to
Listen: A Guide to Pleasurable and Profitable Conversation
(1983) and Ten Philosophical Mistakes (1985).
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Erich Fromm

born March 23, 1900, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
died March 18, 1980, Muralto, Switzerland
German-born American psychoanalyst and social philosopher who
explored the interaction between psychology and society. By
applying psychoanalytic principles to the remedy of cultural
ills, Fromm believed, mankind could develop a psychologically
balanced “sane society.”
After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg
in 1922, Fromm trained in psychoanalysis at the University of
Munich and at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. He began
practicing psychoanalysis as a disciple of Sigmund Freud but
soon took issue with Freud’s preoccupation with unconscious
drives and consequent neglect of the role of societal factors in
human psychology. For Fromm an individual’s personality was the
product of culture as well as biology. He had already attained a
distinguished reputation as a psychoanalyst when he left Nazi
Germany in 1933 for the United States. There he came into
conflict with orthodox Freudian psychoanalytic circles. From
1934 to 1941 Fromm was on the faculty of Columbia University in
New York City, where his views became increasingly
controversial. In 1941 he joined the faculty at Bennington
College in Vermont, and in 1951 he was appointed professor of
psychoanalysis at the National Autonomous University of Mexico,
Mexico City. From 1957 to 1961 he held a concurrent
professorship at Michigan State University, and he returned to
New York City in 1962 as professor of psychiatry at New York
University.
In several books and essays, Fromm presented the view that an
understanding of basic human needs is essential to the
understanding of society and mankind itself. Fromm argued that
social systems make it difficult or impossible to satisfy the
different needs at one time, thus creating both individual
psychological and wider societal conflicts.
In Fromm’s first major work, Escape from Freedom (1941), he
charted the growth of freedom and self-awareness from the Middle
Ages to modern times and, using psychoanalytic techniques,
analyzed the tendency, brought on by modernization, to take
refuge from contemporary insecurities by turning to totalitarian
movements such as Nazism. In The Sane Society (1955), Fromm
presented his argument that modern man has become alienated and
estranged from himself within consumer-oriented industrial
society. Known also for his popular works on human nature,
ethics, and love, Fromm additionally wrote books of criticism
and analysis of Freudian and Marxist thought, psychoanalysis,
and religion. Among his other books are Man for Himself (1947),
Psychoanalysis and Religion (1950), The Art of Loving (1956),
May Man Prevail? (1961, with D.T. Suzuki and R. De Martino),
Beyond the Chains of Illusion (1962), The Revolution of Hope
(1968), and The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (1970).
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Willard Van Orman Quine

American philosopher
born June 25, 1908, Akron, Ohio, U.S.
died December 25, 2000, Boston, Massachusetts
Main
American logician and philosopher, widely considered one of
the dominant figures in Anglo-American philosophy in the
last half of the 20th century.
After studying mathematics and logic at Oberlin College
(1926–30), Quine won a scholarship to Harvard University,
where he completed his Ph.D. in 1932. On a traveling
fellowship to Europe in 1932–33, he met some of the leading
philosophers and logicians of the day, including Rudolf
Carnap and Alfred Tarski. After three years as a junior
fellow at Harvard, Quine joined the faculty in 1936. From
1942 to 1945 he served as a naval intelligence officer in
Washington, D.C. Promoted to full professor at Harvard in
1948, he remained there until 1978, when he retired.
Quine produced highly original and important work in
several areas of philosophy, including logic, ontology,
epistemology, and the philosophy of language. By the 1950s
he had developed a comprehensive and systematic
philosophical outlook that was naturalistic, empiricist, and
behaviourist. Conceiving of philosophy as an extension of
science, he rejected epistemological foundationalism, the
attempt to ground knowledge of the external world in
allegedly transcendent and self-validating mental
experience. The proper task of a “naturalized epistemology,”
as he saw it, was simply to give a psychological account of
how scientific knowledge is actually obtained.
Although much influenced by the Logical Positivism of
Carnap and other members of the Vienna Circle, Quine
famously rejected one of that group’s cardinal doctrines,
the analytic-synthetic distinction. According to this
doctrine, there is a fundamental difference between
statements such as “All bachelors are unmarried,” which are
true or false solely by virtue of the meanings of the terms
they contain, and statements such as “All swans are white,”
which are true or false by virtue of nonlinguistic facts
about the world. Quine argued that no coherent definition of
analyticity had ever been proposed. One consequence of his
view was that the truths of mathematics and logic, which the
positivists had regarded as analytic, and the empirical
truths of science differed only in “degree” and not kind. In
keeping with his empiricism, Quine held that both the former
and the latter were known through experience and were thus
in principle revisable in the face of countervailing
evidence.
In ontology, Quine recognized only those entities that it
was necessary to postulate in order to assume that our best
scientific theories are true—specifically, concrete physical
objects and abstract sets, which were required by the
mathematics used in many scientific disciplines. He rejected
notions such as properties, propositions, and meanings as
ill-defined or scientifically useless.
In the philosophy of language, Quine was known for his
behaviourist account of language learning and for his thesis
of the “indeterminacy of translation.” This is the view that
there are always indefinitely many possible translations of
one language into another, each of which is equally
compatible with the totality of empirical evidence available
to linguistic investigators. There is thus no “fact of the
matter” about which translation of a language is correct.
The indeterminacy of translation is an instance of a more
general view, which Quine called “ontological relativity,”
that claims that for any given scientific theory there are
always indefinitely many alternatives entailing different
ontological assumptions but accounting for all available
evidence equally well. Thus, it does not make sense to say
that one theory rather than another gives a true description
of the world.
Among Quine’s many books are Word and Object (1960), The
Roots of Reference (1974), and his autobiography, The Time
of My Life (1985).
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Ayn Rand

born Feb. 2, 1905, St. Petersburg, Russia
died March 6, 1982, New York, N.Y., U.S.
Russian-born American writer who, in commercially successful
novels, presented her philosophy of objectivism, essentially
reversing the traditional Judeo-Christian ethic.
Rand graduated from the University of Petrograd in 1924 and
two years later immigrated to the United States. She initially
worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood and in 1931 became a
naturalized U.S. citizen. Her first novel, We, the Living, was
published in 1936. The Fountainhead (1943), her first
best-selling novel, depicts a highly romanticized
architect-hero, a superior individual whose egoism and genius
prevail over timid traditionalism and social conformism. The
allegorical Atlas Shrugged (1957), another best-seller, combines
science fiction and political message in telling of an
anticollectivist strike called by the management of U.S. big
industry, a company of attractive, self-made men.
The political philosophy of objectivism shaped Rand’s work. A
deeply conservative doctrine, it posited individual effort and
ability as the sole source of all genuine achievement, thereby
elevating the pursuit of self-interest to the role of first
principle and scorning such notions as altruism and sacrifice
for the common good as liberal delusions and even vices. It
further held laissez-faire capitalism to be most congenial to
the exercise of talent. Rand’s philosophy underlay her fiction
but found more direct expression in her nonfiction, including
such works as For the New Intellectual (1961), The Virtue of
Selfishness (1965), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966),
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (1967), and Philosophy:
Who Needs It? (1982). She also promoted her objectivist
philosophy in the journals The Objectivist (1962–71) and The Ayn
Rand Letter (1971–76).
Rand’s controversial views attracted a faithful audience of
admirers and followers, many of whom first encountered her
novels as teenagers. Although her work influenced generations of
conservative politicians and government officials in the United
States, it was not well regarded among academic philosophers,
most of whom dismissed it as shallow. She was working on an
adaptation of Atlas Shrugged for a television miniseries when
she died.
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Richard Rorty

in full Richard McKay Rorty
born Oct. 4, 1931, New York, N.Y., U.S.
died June 8, 2007, Palo Alto, Calif.
American pragmatist philosopher and public intellectual
noted for his wide-ranging critique of the modern conception
of philosophy as a quasi-scientific enterprise aimed at
reaching certainty and objective truth. In politics he
argued against programs of both the left and the right in
favour of what he described as a meliorative and reformist
“bourgeois liberalism.”
The son of nonacademic leftist intellectuals who broke
with the American Communist Party in the early 1930s, Rorty
attended the University of Chicago and Yale University,
where he obtained a Ph.D. in 1956. Following two years in
the army, he taught philosophy at Wellesley College
(1958–61) and Princeton University (1961–82) before
accepting a position in the department of humanities at the
University of Virginia. From 1998 until his retirement in
2005, Rorty taught comparative literature at Stanford
University.
Rorty’s views are somewhat easier to characterize in
negative than in positive terms. In epistemology he opposed
foundationalism, the view that all knowledge can be
grounded, or justified, in a set of basic statements that do
not themselves require justification. According to his
“epistemological behaviourism,” Rorty held that no statement
is epistemologically more basic than any other, and no
statement is ever justified “finally” but only relative to
some circumscribed and contextually determined set of
additional statements. In the philosophy of language, Rorty
rejected the idea that sentences or beliefs are “true” or
“false” in any interesting sense other than being useful or
successful within a broad social practice. He also opposed
representationism, the view that the main function of
language is to represent or picture pieces of an objectively
existing reality. Finally, in metaphysics he rejected both
realism and antirealism, or idealism, as products of
mistaken representationalist assumptions about language.
Because Rorty did not believe in certainty or absolute
truth, he did not advocate the philosophical pursuit of such
things. Instead, he believed that the role of philosophy is
to conduct an intellectual “conversation” between
contrasting but equally valid forms of intellectual
inquiry—including science, literature, politics, religion,
and many others—with the aim of achieving mutual
understanding and resolving conflicts. This general view is
reflected in Rorty’s political works, which consistently
defend traditional left-liberalism and criticize newer forms
of “cultural leftism” as well as more conservative
positions.
Rorty defended himself against charges of relativism and
subjectivism by claiming that he rejected the crucial
distinctions these doctrines presuppose. Nevertheless, some
critics have contended that his views lead ultimately to
relativist or subjectivist conclusions, whether or not Rorty
wished to characterize them in those terms. Others have
challenged Rorty’s interpretation of earlier American
pragmatist philosophers and suggested that Rorty’s own
philosophy is not a genuine form of pragmatism.
Rorty’s publications include Philosophy and the Mirror of
Nature (1979), Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), and
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989).
Brian Duignan
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