OUTLINE
1. INTRODUCTION.
1.1. Aims of the unit.
1.2. Notes on bibliography.
2. A HISTORICAL BACKGROUND FOR THE LOST GENERATION: BEFORE AND AFTER THE TWO WORLD WARS.
2.1. Before the First World War (1914 -1918).
2.1.1. The Civil War (1861-1865).
2.1.2. The aftermath (1866-1913).
2.1.2.1. Social consequences.
2.1.2.2. Economic consequences.
2.1.2.3. Political consequences.
2.2. The First World War (1914-1918).
2.2.1. The aftermath: the inter-war years (1918-1939).
2.2.1.1. The 1920s.
2.2.1.2. The 1930s.
2.3. The World War II (1939-1945).
2.3.1. The aftermath: the Cold War (1945-1960s).
2.3.1.1. The 1940s.
2.3.1.2. The 1950s.
2.3.1.3. The 1960s.
2.3.1.4. The 1970s.
3. A LITERARY BACKGROUND: THE LOST GENERATION.
3.1. On defining the Lost Generation.
3.2. American vs. British literature: main features.
3.3. Main literary forms.
3.2.1. Drama.
3.2.2. Poetry
3.2.3. Prose: the American novel.
4. THE LOST GENERATION: S. FITZGERALD, J. STEINBECK, E. HEMINGWAY AND THE NARRATIVE OF W. FAULKNER.
4.1. S. Fitzgerald (1896-1940).
4.1.1. Life and works.
4.1.2. Main themes and style.
4.2. J. Steinbeck (1902-1968).
4.2.1. Life and works.
4.2.2. Main themes and style.
4.3. E. Hemingway (1899 -1961).
4.3.1. Life and works.
4.3.2. Main themes and style.
4.4. W. Faulkner (1897-1962).
4.4.1. Life and works.
4.4.2. Main themes and style.
5. MAIN EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS.
6. CONCLUSION.
7. BIBLIOGRAPHY.
1. INTRODUCTION.
1.1. Aims of the unit.
The present unit, Unit 55, aims to provide a useful introduction to four relevant figures of the so-called American Lost Generation, that is, S. Fitzgerald, J. Steinbeck and E. Hemingway, as well as the Narrative of W. Faulkner. Since they were born in the very last years of the nineteenth century (except for Steinbeck who was born in 1902), their literary contributions were namely produced between the 1920s and the 1960s, that is, during the so-called inter-war years (1918-1939), and post-war years (from 1945 onwards), and therefore, associated to the literary streams of late realism, modernism and post-modernism (after the World War II).
In general, the literature of the time was both shaped by and reflected the prevailing ideologies of the day, that is, the main social, economic, political, cultural, and technological conditions of this period, which was overshadowed by the two World Wars, the American Puritan heritage, and still in the twentieth century, the question of slavery in the South and therefore, racism. A new age had come, and after the First World War, modernism and experimentalism was felt all over the world, and in particular, in Europe and North America where novelists, poets and dramatists constructed a major literary tradition based on the calmness of spirit and leisure of mind as a reaction against the post-War breakdown of spiritual values (Albert, 1990).
In fact, Western youths were rebelling, angry and disillusioned with the savage war and the difficult postwar economic conditions that, ironically, allowed Americans with dollars to live abroad on very little money (like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound, among others). Also, intellectual currents, particularly Freudian psychology and to a lesser extent Marxism, contributed to the breakdown of traditional values.
Americans abroad absorbed these views and brought them back to the United States where they took root, firing the imagination of young writers and artists with shots of pure realism and modern experiments in writing techniques. For instance, almost all serious American fiction writers after World War I employed Freudian elements (psychological) in all his works (i.e. the narrative of Faulkner). Hence this group of writers who belonged to nowhere (nor Europe nor America) became known as the Lost Generation.
Actually, the Lost Generation is represented by a number of intellectuals, poets, artists and writers who, seeking the bohemian lifestyle and rejecting the values of American materialism, fled to France in the post World War I years and settled in Paris. Characterized by being full of
youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date.
There were many literary artists involved in this group (John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Ford Maddox Ford, Zelda Fitzgerald), but for the sake of brevity, we shall namely concentrate on the four best known: F. Scott Fitzgerald, J. Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and W. Faulkner. Actually, the first three authors namely denounced the effects of the World War I and therefore, are linked to the 1920s whereas the latter is associated to the Great Depression in the 1930s. Yet, all of them wrote about social conditions after the World War I.
As we shall see, they are a reference point in which social, economic, cultural, technogical and political allegiances are placed very much to the fore. Actually, F. Scott Fitzgerald is remembered as the portrayer of the spirit of the Jazz age; Steinbeck as the portrayer of the spirit of rural California; Ernest Hemingway as the leader in the adaptation of the naturalistic technique in the novel; and Faulkner because he experimented brilliantly with Freudian elements: narrative chronology, different points of view and voices (including those of outcasts, children, and illiterates), and a rich and demanding baroque style built of extremely long sentences full of complicated subordinate parts.
Then, we shall examine all this information within a historical and literary background so as to provide an appropriate context for the way they lived and a better understanding of their literary works. Therefore, we shall divide our presentation in five main chapters.
Chapter 2 namely offers a historical background fo r the Lost Generation of the United States before and after the two World Wars in the twentieth century regarding social, economic and political changes so as to provide an overall view of the context in which these authors lived and produced their works. So, we shall divide our study in three main sections regarding the main events occurred (1) before the First World War, where we shall examine (a) the Civil War (1861-1865) and (b) its aftermath, in terms of (i) social, (ii) economic and (iii) political consequences which gave way to (2) the First World War (1914-1918) and its (a) aftermath or inter-war years, in which we analyse the most outstanding features of (i) the 1920s and (ii) the
1930s. These two decades coincide, in turn, with the previous years to the (3) World War II;
finally, we shall analyse how the post-war period developed in (a) the 1940s, (b) 1950s, (c)
1960s and even (d) 1970s, and therefore, affected the four authors’ lives and works.
In Chapter 3, we shall provide a literary background of this period with the aim of going further into the main literary productions of the Lost Generation and, in particular, into the literary styles of realism, modernism and post-modernism. Therefore, we shall start by briefly defining (1) the Lost Generation, and then compare (2) American vs. British literature in terms of general features because of the connection between the authors; next, an overview of (3) the main literary forms, regarding (a) drama, (b) poetry, and (c) prose, out of which we shall locate the authors under study.
In Chapter 4 we shall attempt to provide an account of the most outstanding writers within the Lost Generation, S. Fitzgerald, J. Steinbeck, E. Hemingway and the Narrative of W. Faulkner. These American novelists are associa te to the literary streams of American realism and modernism, both in the 1920s and 1930s. Therefore, we shall introduce (1) S. Fitzgerald, (2) J. Steinbeck, (3) E. Hemingway and (4) the Narrative of W. Faulkner in terms of (a) life and main works, and (b) main themes and style.
Chapter 5 will be devoted to the main educational implications in language teaching regarding the introduction of this issue in the classroom setting. Chapter 6 will offer a conclusion to broadly overview our present study, and Chapter 7 will include all the bibliographical references used to develop this account of the United States History and Literature in the twentieth century.
1.2. Notes on bibliography.
An influential introduction to the historical background of the United States of America in the nineteenth century, is based on Thoorens, Panorama de las literaturas Daimon: Inglaterra y América del Norte. Gran Bretaña y Estados Unidos de América (1969); White, The Horizon Concise History of England. American Heritage (1971); Palmer, Historia Contemporánea (1980); Musman, Background to the USA (1982); and Brogan, The History of the United States of America (1985).
On the literary background, relevant works are: Bradbury & Temperley, Introduction to American Studies (1981); Ford, The New Pelican Guide to English Literature (1988); Rogers, The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature (1987); Magnusson & Goring, Cambridge Biographical Dictionary (1990); Cunliffe, American Literature to 1900 (1993); Ward & Trent, The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (2000); Allan Neilson, Lectures on
the Harvard Classics (2001); and VanSpanckeren, Outline of American Literature (2004). Specific bibliography on the life, works and style of the Lost Generation writers include: Meyers, Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (1944); Greenfeld, Gertrude Stein, A Biography (1973); Reynolds, Hemingway, the Paris Years (1989); Kennedy, Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity (1993).
The background for educational implications is based on the theory of communicative competence and communicative approaches to language teaching are provided by the most complete record of current publications within the educational framework is provided by the guidelines in B.O.E. (2004) for both E.S.O. and Bachillerato; the Council of Europe, Modern Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. A Common European Framework of reference (1998); and van Ek & Trim, Vantage (2001).
2. A HISTORICAL BACKGROUND FOR THE LOST GENERATION: BEFORE AND AFTER THE TWO WORLD WARS.
Chapter 2 namely offers a historical background for the Lost Generation of the United States before and after the two World Wars in the twentieth century regarding social, economic and political changes so as to provide an overall view of the context in which these authors lived and produced their works. So, we shall divide our study in four main sections regarding the main events occurred (1) before the First World War, where we shall examine (a) the Civil War (1861-1865) and (b) its aftermath, in terms of (i) social, (ii) economic and (iii) political consequences which gave way to (2) the First World War (1914-1918) and its (a) aftermath or inter-war years, in which we analyse the most outstanding features of (i) the 1920s and (ii) the
1930s. These two decades coincide, in turn, with the previous years to the (3) World War II;
finally, we shall analyse how the post-war period developed in (a) the 1940s, (b) 1950s, (c)
1960s and even (d) 1970s, and therefore, affected the four authors’ lives and works.
2.1. Before the First World War (1914-1918).
The main event worth mentioning before the First World War was the Civil War (1861-1865) since it would prepare North America for the following years of change, individual advancement, and industrial development towards the turn of the century, that is, towards modernization and modernity. Before the Civil War the political atmosphere was one of
unremitting crisis. The underlying problem was that the United States had been on the whole a country, but not a nation and hence, the major functions of government (education, health, transport) were carried out at a state or local level. Yet, an enduring manifestation of hostility toward the nationalizing tendencies in American life was the reassertion of strong nationalistic feelings threatened by the West.
There were several points of view from West, East, North and South. On the one hand, the West developed a strong sectional feeling, blending its sense of uniqueness and the feeling of having been exploited by the businessment of the East and, on the other hand, the East reasserted his national feeling. Moreover, the South persisted on Negro slavery, which had already been abolished or prohibited in all other parts of the United States. So, people from the South stated an elaborate pro-slavery argument on defending their institutions on biblical, economic, and sociological grounds. On the contrary, the North reaffirmed its position towards industry and against slavery, and made a great effort to change the South’s point of view.
By 1860, the American society underwent both a sectional confrontation and an economic revolution.depression, sharpened by economic and class divides, realigning the interplay of race, class, and political ideology. In other words, the realignment of cleavages and cooperation among geographical, social classes, and party affiliations in politics between the depression of
1857 and the election of 1860 led to the election of a president so objectionable to Southern
slave-owing interests that it would trigger Southern secession, and consequently a war to save the integrity of the Union.
Hence, in 1860 the presidential election of Abraham Lincoln took place in an atmosphere of great tension and was not received in the same way in the North and South. In the South, Lincoln’s election was taken as the signal for secession and South Carolina became the first state to withdraw from the Union. This time they were determined and soon, other states followed their proposal. In 1861, in February 4, six Southern states sent representatives to establish a new independent government, but Lincoln was not in favour of the Union to be divided. Then, in his inaugural address, his speech closed with a plea for restoration of the bonds of union. The South, particularly South Carolina, ignored the plea, and on April 12, the South fired upon the Federal troops stationed at Fort Sumter in the Charleston, South Carolina until the troops surrendered.
2.1.1. The Civil War (1861-1865).
The Civil War has been also called the main American social revolution, a watershed in the rise of modern industrial society in the United States and as the result of free-labor industrial capitalism, and the resolution of sectional conflict in the North. This war was fought between the northern states, popularly referred to as the “Union,” the “north,” or the “Yankees,” and the seceding southern states, commonly referred to as the Confederate States of America, the “Confederacy.” the “south,” or the “rebels.”
As stated above, the Civil War started with Abraham Lincoln’s victory in the presidential election of 1860, up to March 4, 1861, when Lincoln was sworn in as president of the United States. Since then a march of Union troops under the command of the Confederate force was built up by July 1861 at Manassas, Virginia . The first battle is known as the First Battle of Bull Run (or First Manassas), whereupon they were forced back to Washington, DC by Confederate troops under the command of Generals Joseph E. Johnston and P.G.T. Beauregard. Alarmed at the loss, the United States Congress passed the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution on July 25 of that year in an attempt to prevent more slave states from leaving the Union. Also, it stated that the war was being fought to preserve the Union and not to end slavery.
Subsequent encounters took place, but in general terms, while the Confederate forces had some success in the Eastern holding on to their capital, fortune did not smile upon them in the West. Confederate forces were driven from Missouri early in the war. The Union’s key strategist and tactician Ulysses S. Grant, won victories at Fort Donelson, Battle of Shiloh, Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, driving Confederate forces out of Tennessee. Grant’s aim was to defeat the Confederate forces and bring an end to the war.
At the beginning of 1864, Grant was given command of all Union armies in the East, who attempted to defeat Lee and fought several battles during that phase of the Eastern campaign: the Battle of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, and Cold Harbor. Grant was tenacious and kept pressing the Army of Northern Virginia under the command of Robert E. Lee. He extended the Confederate army, pinning it down in the Siege of Petersburg and, after two failed attempts, he finally found a commander, Philip Sheridan, who could clear the threat to Washington DC from the Shenandoah Valley.
Yet, the North superiority was in the air. The main advantages widely believed to have contributed to the Union’s success include the North’s strong, industrial economy; the North’s strong compatible railroad links (and the South’s lack thereof); the North’s larger population; the North’s possession of the United States’ merchant marine fleet and naval ships; the North’s established government; the North’s moral cause given to the war by Abraham Lincoln (the
Emancipation Proclamation); and last but not least, the recruitment of black men, including many freed slaves, into the Union Army after the Emancipation Proclamation was approved.
On 9 April 1865 Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court house. The Battle of Palmito Ranch, fought on May 13, 1865, in the far south of Texas was the last land battle of the war and ended with a Confederate victory. All Confederate land forces had surrendered by June 1865 whereas Confederate naval units surrendered as late as November of
1865.
2.1.2. The aftermath (1866-1913).
The aftermath of the Civil War is to be felt namely at all levels: economic, technological, industrial social and cultural. In fact, the war between the industrial North and the agricultural, slave-owning South was a watershed in American history. Moreover, the innocent optimism of the young democratic nation gave way, after the war, to a period of exhaustion. American idealism remained but was rechanneled. Before the war, idealists championed human rights, especially the abolition of slavery whereas after the war, Americans increasingly idealized progress and the self-made man.
So, the aftermath is namely represented by several international and national events whic h are interrelated regarding (1) social consequences reflected by the strong spirit of reform, reflected on important social and cultural changes; (2) economic consequences, which include the emergence of new industrialized fronts in the South and the West as a result of the late consequences of international events; and finally, the main (3) political consequences in this period.
2.1.2.1. . Social consequences.
The main social consequences were associated to (1) the question of slavery, and also, to the industrialization and expansion to the West regarding (2) immigration movements to the West and from different parts of the world, and the new (3) distribution of social classes.
The question of slavery.
The question of slavery is closely related to the Emancipation Proclamation, which was supposed to free all slaves who were in territory under Confederate control at the time of the Proclamation. Yet, slaves were not freed in the remaining states and parts of the Confederacy
until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment by third quarters of the states, which did not occur until December of 1865. A good deal of ill will among the Southern survivors resulted from the destruction inflicted on the South by the Union armies as the end of the war approached, the resulting shift of political power to the North, and the Reconstruction program instituted in the South by the Union after the end of the war.
Migrations to the West and from the rest of the world.
On the one hand, as a result, thousands of Americans and immigrants started farms in the West, namely on the Great Plains. Mine and cattle industry also developed in that area, so after 1870, settlement became so widespread in the West that it was no longer possible to draw a continuous frontier line. This expansion to the West meant the end of native Indians since new settlers occupied their land and slaughtered indiscriminately buffalo herds, namely their main way of survival. Eventually, federal soldiers were sent by the government to crush the Indian conflict, and pushed them onto reservations.
Following Brogan (1985), another kind of immigration is the early twentieth-century one, which was given at a higher scale. America had received immigrants from its colonial days due to its attractive image, which was derived to a large extent from its dynamic economy, but in a low number. Yet, immigration reached its highest point after the American economic recession in the decade from 1901 to 1910, when millions of emigrants came from south-eastern Europe. This movement is known as the Melting Pot of America due to the ethnic diversity.
After obtaining its independence, the United States lacked a cultural pattern and was continuously searching for an identity. In this sense, the mass immigration has helped the United States define the national culture as politically egalitarian and democratic since the first large-scale immigration occurred. Also, it has provided richness, color, cultural heritage and art to American life. Yet, immingration also creates conflicts, such as those regarding housing, sanitation, crime and, therefore, legal system due to problems of assimilation and adjustment.
Also, between 1860 and 1910 the constant influx of foreign immigrants provided a seemingly endless supply of inexpensive labor as well. These foreigners, who were namely German, Scandinavian, and Irish in the early years, and increasingly Central and Southern Europeans thereafter, flowed into the United States. Also, Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino contract laborers were imported by Hawaiian plantation owners, railroad companies, and other American business interests on the West Coast.
Distribution of social classes.
On the other hand, the effects of the Industrial revolution on society made the spirit of reform be stronger, and were to be felt namely on the American people lives and, therefore, social classes
since thousand of people moved from farms to cities. By 1860, most Americans lived on farms or in small villages, but by the first decade of the twentieth century half of the population was concentrated in about twelve cities. Problems of urbanization and industrialization appeared: poor and overcrowded housing, unsanitary conditions, low pay (called “wage slavery”), difficult working conditions, and inadequate restraints on business.
Labor unions grew, and strikes brought the plight of working people to national awareness. Farmers, too, saw themselves struggling against the economic interests of the East (the so-called robber barons like J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller). Their eastern banks tightly controlled mortgages and credit so vital to western development and agriculture, while railroad companies charged high prices to transport farm products to the cities. The farmer gradually became an object of ridicule, lampooned, and unsophisticated figure whereas the ideal American of the post-Civil War period became the millionaire.
Hence we can distinguish three main social classes: a small percentage of high social class, who enjoyed wealth and luxury lives; a larger percentage of middle class, who lived comfortably, but below the level of the former; and a huge number of people who belonged to the low social class and lived in extreme poverty. It is worth mentioning that during the early 1900’s the reformers wanted to reduce poverty by improving the living conditions of the poor and regulating big business.
Also, the government aimed at putting an end to corruption, making government closer to the people, and obtaining other goals such as the women suffrage. Yet, by 1917, since the reformers had achieved most of their aims and some of them were called progressives, this period of American history is often known as the Progressive Era (Palmer, 1980).
2.1.2.2. Economic consequences.
First of all, following Musman (1982), “after the Civil War, American industry changed dramatically.” On the one hand, “machines replaced hand labor as the main means of manufacturing, thus increasing the production capacity of industry.” As a result, “a new nationwide network of railroads enabled businessmen to distribute goods far and wide” and promoted the rise of big business and the industrialization of the South and the West.
On the one hand, the rise of big business was the result of the increase in American industry produced by the value of goods between 1870 and 1916, and several production developments.
Thus, the improvement of production methods favoured the use of machines in manufacturing.
This use made factories employ thousands of workers, which were assigned specific jobs. This
system of
al bor is known as the division of labor, which sped up production and had a
tremendous impact on economy. It also allowed prices to get lower and meant that more people could afford more products.
On the other hand, the emergence of new industrialized fronts in the South and the West took place when the South decided to rebuild its society since, in economic terms, it had been behind the rest of the nation. Hence, though some industry developed in the region, the South remained an agricultural area throughout the period of American industrialization. On the other hand, the West industrialization started when the Congress passed the Homestead Act (1862) by means of which public land was offered to people for free or at very low cost, which had a great impact in social terms.
Business boomed after the war. War production had boosted industry in the North and given it prestige and political power. It also gave industrial leaders valuable experience in the management of men and machines, and the enormous amount of natural resources (iron, coal, oil, gold, and silver) of the American land benefitted business. The new intercontinental rail system, inaugurated in 1869, and the transcontinental telegraph, which began operating in 1861, gave industry access to materials, markets, and communications.
Broadly speaking, from 1860 to 1914, the United States was transformed from a small, young, agricultural ex-colony to a huge, modern, industrial nation. A debtor nation in 1860, by 1914 it had become the world’s wealthiest state, and by World War I, the United States had become a major world power. Yet, as industrialization grew, so did alienation. Characteristic American novels of the period depict the damage of economic forces and alienation on the weak or vulnerable individual, survivors, and opportunistic people who endure through inner strength involving kindness, flexibility, and, above all, individuality.
2.1.2.3. Political consequences.
The main political consequences of the Civil war are the Spanish-American War (1898), the American domination policy in the Caribbean area, and the Mexican revolution. Yet, the only one which is framed within the nineteenth century is the first one, since the American domination policy in the Caribbean area and the Spanish-American War are framed within the turn of the century.
The Spanish-American War (1898) was the principal event of the administration of President William McKinley (1897-1901), who fought over the issue of the liberation of Cuba, though it started under the rule of the previous President, Cleveland (1885- 1893). Following Brogan (1985), most Americans wanted their country remain away from European affairs and thought it should offer an example of democracy and peace to the rest of the world. Actually, this war made the United States come up into the world politics on a new road to imperialism.
Previously to the event, it is worth remembering that Spain ruled over Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and other overseas possessions during the 1890’s. When Cuba rebelled against the Spanish rule in 1895, the repression was hard. Yet, soon the rising public in America demanded for intervention.Yet, on February 15, 1898, the American battleship Maine was blown up off the coast of Havana, in Cuba and, although it is not clear enough who caused the explosion, many Americans blamed Spain.
As a result, on April 25, 1898 McKinley gave way to the Congress to declare the war on Spain. The war was officially ended by the Treaty of Paris in the same year. Militarily speaking, this war was brief and relatively bloodless whereas its political and diplomatic consequences were enormous. Actually, this event marked a turning point in the history of the United States foreign policy since Spain relinquished Cuba (whose independence was recognized in 1902) and ceded to the United States the Philippine Islands, Guam, and Puerto Rico.
Expansion of the nation to include regions outside of the North American continent was denounced as imperialism by the Democratic Party, and became the principal issue of the 1900 presidential campaign. The nation, however, supported the policy of expansion as carried out by the McKinley administration. In September 1901 McKinley was assassinated by a crazed anarchist, and Vice President Theodore Roosevelt became president. His administrations marked a new attitude held by a section of the Republican Party toward the important social, political, and economic questions of the time, and led gradually to a sharp split in the party.
the American domination in the Caribbean, which ranges approximately from the presidence of Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1905) to that of Wilson (1913-1917), though the latter coincides with the First World War. As we mentioned before, the era of Th. Roosevelt is related to a period of progress and, therefore, his policy is known as Progressivism. Actually, Roosevelt, like Jackson and Lincoln, believed that the president had the duty of initiating and leading Congress to implement a policy of social
and economic benefit to the people at large. Among domestic questions, Roosevelt addressed those of federal supervision and regulation of all interstate corporations; amendments of the Interstate Commerce Act to prohibit railroads from giving special rates to shippers; the conservation of natural resources; federal appropriations for irrigation of arid regions in the West; and the extension of the merit system in civil service.
Yet, for our purposes, the most relevant domestic affair had to do with the desire of Eastern business to have easy access to Pacific markets. An isthman canal was demanded to link the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, but the only obstacle was the government of Colombia, which owned Panama. Then, both governments negotiated a treaty and the construction of the canal began so soon that on August 15, 1914 it was opened to shipping. Hence when crisis appeared in the Caribbean area, Wilson was determined to protect American security even with the use of force. Therefore, a protectorate was established by force in Haiti in 1915 and also a military occupation of the Dominican Republic in Nicaragua in 1916.
Roosevelt gained worldwide importance through his dramatic speeches and actions as president, his inauguration of the building of the Panama Canal, and his activities in ending the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). Roosevelt declined to run for reelection in
1908 and the Republicans nominated his secretary of war, William Howard Taft in
1909, based on Roosevelt’s recommendation. He was followed by Woodrow Wilson who, like Roosevelt, believed that the presidency should be used for initiating and guiding national legislation in accordance with the chief executive’s interpretation of the will of the people.
the Mexican Revolution, by means of which Woodrow Wilson succeeded in carrying out notable revisions and reforms in the laws governing the tariff, the banking system, trusts, labor, and agriculture. One of his main achievements in domestic affairs was to deal with an uprising in Mexico in 1913 started by a Victoriano Huerta, a military usurper who murdered the preceding president Francisco Madero. Wilson tried to persuade the dictator to step down from office and allow free elections for a new democratic government. Then Wilson gave open support to Madero’s successor, Venustiano Carranza. Yet, when Civil War appeared, Wilson refused to interfere. It is at this point that the figure of Pancho Villa comes to the scene, seeking to provoke war between the United States and Mexico. Wilson then sent a punitve expedition which was a failure. Relatio ns between the two government were greatly improved when Wilson extended recognition to Carranza’s new constitutional regime in 1917.
Wilson also achieved a victory in domestic affairs when the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which legalized women’s voting rights, was passed in 1919 and ratified in 1920, hence the so-called Woman Suffrage. Yet, the most important issues of Wilson’s presidence were those arising from the outbreak of World War I in Europe in 1914, the entrance of the United States into the war in 1917, and the making of peace in 1919.
2.2. The First World War (1914-1918).
The First World War (1914-1918), which brought a period of diplomatic conflict between the United States and Great Britain and between the United States and Germany since it was an outgrowth of European territorial problems and nationalism. Following Palmer (1980), the great majority of Americans were firmly neutral and determined to avoid intervention unless American rights and interests were violated, and in 1915 an official proclamation of neutrality was proclamated. This proclamation appealed the Americans to be impartial both in thought and action. Yet, in April 6, 1917 the United States was finally drawn into the war against Germany and its allies due to the unrestricted German submarine warfare on Atlantic shipping.
The United States contribution was decisive in the outcome because of its military superiority both in armament and people. Hence it provided Britain with the ships to overcome the submarine threat and also, with the American Expeditionary Force on September 1918 to France. As a result, this military power inclined the balance on the western front and helped to end the war in November 1918. Next year, the United States was also influential in the writing of the Treaty of Versailles, which formally ended the war in 1919.
2.2.1. The aftermath: the inter-war years (1918-1939).
Many historians have characterized the period between the two world wars as the United States’ traumatic “coming of age,” despite the fact that the United States direct involvement was relatively brief (1917-1918). In particular, those American writers who established their lives in Europe showed their disillusionment about postwar society. In fact, these Americans returned to their homeland but could never regain their innocence.
The members of the lost generation were shocked and therefore, showed their reaction against the war. For instance, John Dos Passos expressed America’s in the novel Three Soldiers (1921), and Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms (1929), a tragic story of love, betrayal and reconciliation against the violent backdrop of World War I. Yet, in both works we can appreciate the disillusionment of the lost generation expatriates.
2.2.1.1. The 1920s.
During the Roaring Twenties, as these years are commonly known, the United States enjoyed a period of unbalanced prosperity since prices for agricultural commodities and wages fell at the end of the war while new industries (radio , movies, automobiles, and chemicals) flourished. Also, the standard of living in rural areas fell increasingly behind that of urban and suburban areas which saw dramatic improvements in housing and urban planning. In cultural terms, Jazz music became widely popular and dancing was a popular recreation.
Although the early 1920s brought improvements in architecture, education, technology, and Americans fell in love with modern entertainments (movies, radio, automobile touring, dancing), these years also saw the rising of mass law-breaking and the rise of organized crime. Therefore, several acts were passed, such as the ‘Volstead Act’, which prohibited the manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors (the Prohibition Amendment). Yet, although prohibition (of production, transport, sale of alcohol) began in 1919, underground nightclubs proliferated, featuring jazz music, cocktails, and daring modes of dress and dance.
Moreover, American women, particularly, felt liberated since many had left farms and villages for homefront duty in American cities during World War I, and had become resolutely modern (‘bobbed’ hair cut, ‘flapper’ dresses, right to vote, public roles in society). Yet, the late years of the 1920s witnessed the cease of this prohibition due to the 1929 Stock Market Crash and the turn of the decade saw the Great Depression which was an unparallelled economic disaster in the history of the United States.
2.2.1.2. The 1930s.
During the 1930s all social classes were affected by this crash. Actually, millions of workers lost their jobs in the cities and large numbers of farmers were forced to abandon their farms. Also, thousands of banks failed during the depression and foreign trade decreased very quickly.
The nation’s economy was paralyzed and poverty swept through on a scale never experienced under Hoover’s presidence (1929). In addition, the depression deepened as the elections of 1932 approached.
Both republicans and democrats nominated their political figures, Herbert Clark Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the New York governor, respectively. After promoting their campaigns, in which both promised government action to end the Great Depression, Roosevelt won due to his program for recovery and reform called the New Deal. In November 1932
Roosevelt was elected President and in the months preceding Roosevelt’s inauguration
presidency, the Depression worsened.
By March 4, 1933 factory closings, farm foreclosures, and bank failures increased, while unemployment soared. Roosevelt faced the greatest crisis in American history since the Civil War. He undertook immediate actions to initiate a sweeping program to bring recovery to business and agriculture, relief to the unemployed and to those in danger of losing farms and homes, and reform, especially through the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority. This program, proposed by Roosevelt and enacted by Congress was known as the New Deal.
The New Deal proved successful and the results were soon to be felt since banks reopened and direct relief saved millions from starvation. But the New Deal measures also involved government directly in areas of social and economic life as never before and resulted in greatly increased spending and unbalanced budgets which led to criticisms of Roosevelt’s programs. However, the nation-at-large supported Roosevelt, elected additional Democrats to state legislatures and governorships in the mid-term elections.
By 1935 the Nation had achieved some measure of recovery, but businessmen and bankers were turning more and more against Roosevelt’s New Deal program (sponsored bills to abolish public -utility holding companies, raising taxes on the wealthy, and shifting control of monetary policy from Wall Street bankers to Washington). In 1936 he was re-elected by a a smashing victory. Feeling he was armed with a popular mandate, he sought legislation to enlarge the Supreme Court, which had been invalidating key New Deal measures.
Roosevelt lost the Supreme Court battle, but a revolution in constitutional law took place. Thereafter the Government could legally regulate the economy. Yet, following Palmer (1980), by the mid- 1930’s dictatorial regimes in Germany, Japan, and Italy were casting their shadows over a good neighbor policy. By 1938, Roosevelt was spending increasing amounts of time on international affairs to pledge for arrangements of mutual action against aggressors, that is, neutrality acts designed to keep the United States out of another world war. Yet at the same time he sought to strengthen nations threatened or attacked.
2.3. The World War II (1939-1945).
Germany’s aggressiveness in 1939 forced Roosevelt to take a tougher stance. When Hitler overran Poland in September and triggered the formal beginning of World War II, Roosevelt tried again for repeal of the embargo, and succeeded. Thus, when France fell and England came under siege in 1940, he began to send Great Britain all possible aid short of actual military involvement. He negotiated an unneutral deal with Britain whereby the British leased their bases in the Western Hemisphere to the United States in return for 50 overaged American destroyers. Roosevelt also secured vastly increased defense expenditures, but he remained cautious. Yet, when campaigning for reelection in 1940 against Wendell Willkie, a relatively progressive Republican who agreed with some of his policies, Roosevelt’s margin fell sharply from his previous reelection.
However, safely reelected, Roosevelt increased the flow of supplies to Britain. After Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, help went to the Russians as well. To protect the supplies against German submarines, U.S. destroyers began escorting convoys of Allied ships part way across the Atlantic. In the process when a German submarine fired a torpedo at the American destroyer Greer in September 1941, he feigned surprise and outrage and ordered U. S. warships to shoot on sight at hostile German ships. By December the United States and Germany were engaged in an undeclared war on the Atlantic.
America, though a neutral in the war and still at peace, was becoming the heart of democracy, as its factories began producing as they had in the years before the Depression. However, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Roosevelt directed organization of the Nation’s manpower and resources for global war. The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor followed four days later by Germany’s and Italy’s declarations of war against the United States, brought the nation irrevocably into the war.
Roosevelt became the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, a role he actively carried out. He worked with and through his military advisers, overriding them when necessary, and took an active role in choosing the principle field commanders and in making decisions regarding wartime strategy. Feeling that the future peace of the world would depend upon relations between the United States and Russia, he devoted much thought to the planning of a United Nations, in which, he hoped, international difficulties could be settled.
He moved to create a great alliance against the Axis powers through “The Declaration of the United Nations” on January 1, 1942, in which all nations fighting the Axis agreed not to make a separate peace and pledged themselves to a peacekeeping organization (now the United
Nations) on victory. The United States and its allies invaded North Africa in November 1942
and Sicily and Italy in 1943. The D-Day landings on the Normandy beaches in France on June
6, 1944, were followed by the allied invasion of Germany six months later. By April 1945
victory in Europe was certain.
As the war drew to a close, Roosevelt’s health was seriously deteriorated. By early 1944 a full medical examination disclosed serious heart and circulatory problems and although his physicians placed him on a strict regime of diet and medication, the pressures of war and domestic politics weighed heavily on him. On April 12, 1945, while at Warm Springs, Georgia, he suffered a massive stroke and died of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 63 years old and his death came on the eve of complete military victory in Europe and within months of victory over Japan in the Pacific. President Roosevelt was buried in the Rose Garden of his estate at Hyde Park, New York.
2.3.1. The aftermath: The Cold War (1945- 1967).
The beginning of the Cold War is still an issue of disagreement since historians disagree as to who was responsible for the breakdown of the United States and the Soviet Union relations and whether the conflict between the two superpowers was inevitable. On the one hand, only a few American historians affirm that the war was the direct result of Stalin’s violation of the Yalta accords between the Big Three Allied Leaders (Prime Minister Winston Churchill (UK), President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (US) and First Secretary Joseph Stalin (USSR)), the imposition of Soviet-dominated governments on an unwilling Eastern Europe, and aggressive Soviet expansionism. However, other historians have argued that the United States provocations and imperial ambitions were at least equally to blame, if not more.
Actually, the US-Soviet wartime alliance traces back to the 1890s when, after a century of friendship, both political powers became rivals over the development of Manchuria. Then, Russians closed off and colonize parts of East Asia since they felt unable to compete industrially with Americans, who demanded open competition for markets. As a result, the Soviet government negotiated a separate peace with Germany in the First World War in 1917, leaving the Western Allies to fight the Central Powers alone.
2.3.1. The 1940s.
When the war ended in Europe on May 8, 1945, Soviet and Western (US, British, and French)
troops were located in particular places, essentially, along a line in the center of Europe that
came to be called the Oder-Neisse Line, which would be the ‘iron curtain’ of the Cold War. As World War II had resulted in enormous destruction of infrastructure and populations throughout Eurasia, from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, Russians were especially scathed due to the mass destruction of the industrial base that it had built up in the previous decade. The only major industrial power in the world to emerge intact, and even greatly strengthened from an economic perspective, was the United States, which moved swiftly to consolidate its position.
Since then capitalism and communism (US and USSR, respectively) represented the national ideologies of two different ways of life. Conflicting models of autarky versus exports, of state planning against free enterprise, were to vie for the allegiance of the developing and developed world in the postwar years. Even so, however, the Cold War was not obviously inevitable in
1945 and the expected postwar crisis of overproduction in capitalists countries did not arrive.
Instead, the United States led by President Harry S. Truman since April 1945 were determined to open up the world’s markets to capitalist trade according to the principles laid down by the Atlantic Charter: self-determination, equal economic access, and a rebuilt capitalist Europe that could again serve as a hub in world affairs.
2.3.2. The 1950s.
Since the Crimean War in the 1950s, a perennial focus of Anglo-American foreign policy was to impede Soviet access to the Mediterranean (Greece). Hence Soviets were contained by the United States that launched massive economic reconstruction efforts, first in Western Europe and then in Japan (as well as in South Korea and Taiwan). The Marshall Plan began to raise the economy in Western Europe and the United States showed an overwhelming productive superiority. Furthermore, economic reconstruction helped create clientelistic obligations on the part of the nations receiving US aid; this sense of obligation fostered willingness to enter into
military alliances and, even more important, into political subservience1.
Confronted with growing Soviet successes to respond to provocative Western actions, the United States officials quickly strengthen their alliance systems, quadruple defense spending, and embark on an elaborate propaganda campaign to convince Americans to fight this costly
cold war. Truman ordered the development of a hydrogen bomb and in early 1950 the USA
1 It is relevant to remember that in 1949 Truman joined eleven other nations to form the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO), which meant America’s first European alliance in 170 years. Stalin retaliated against these provocative steps by integrating the economies of Eastern Europe and signing an alliance with Communist China in February 1959 and forming the Warsaw Pact, which was the Eastern Europe’s counterpart to NATO.
embarked on its first attempt to form a West German army as well as it established the first commitment to form a peace treaty with Japan that would guarantee long-term US military bases.
Fearing that a united communist Korea could neutralize the United States power in Japan, Truman committed American forces and obtained help from the United Nations to drive back the North Koreans to Stalin’s surprise. Considered as a historic error, Truman sent his forces to the Chinese-Korean border, and the People’s Republic of China responded with human-wave attacks in November 1950 that decimated US-led forces. Truman faced a hostile China, a Sino- Soviet partnership, and a bloated defense budget that quadrupled in eighteen months. Yet, it was not the first time that the United States interfered in the internal affairs and sovereignty of other countries under the guise of freedom, democracy and human rights the Iranian regime in 1953 and that of Guatemala).
By 1953, the new president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, moved to end the Korean War, reduced military expenses, but continued fighting the Cold War effectively. Also, Eisenhower thwarted Soviet intervention wielding American nuclear superiority and used the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to overthrow unfriendly governments. Yet, in the meantime, a new, dynamic and reformist Soviet leader, Nikita Khurshchev established good relations with India and other noncommunist states in the Third World. To stabilize his European position, the new Russian leader created the Warsaw Pact in 1955 to counter West German rearmament (and later on would build the Berlin Wall in 1961 to stop the Germans from leaving the communist East). Hence Eisenhower increased Soviet power by developing a hydrogen bomb and, in 1957, he launched the first earth satellite. While the Berlin Wall was a propaganda setback, the Soviets garnered a huge victory when Krushchev formed an alliance with Cuba after Fidel Castro’s successful revolution in 1959 (still living on to this day).
Socially speaking and in general terms, the 1950s were years of stability and prosperity for the white American middle class. The growth of consumerism, the suburbs, and the economy, however, overshadowed the fact that prosperity did not extend to everyone. More than 30 million Americans, according to some estimates, continued to live in poverty throughout the Eisenhower years. By then, a large segment of the population felt the rhetoric of the Cold War policy (freedom and democracy) was especially far from reality. In fact, African Americans in the South continued to suffer from social, economic, and political discrimination.
This economic prosperity was to be especially felt at the center of middle -class culture which was consumer-driven, since there was a growing absorption of consumer goods which resulted from the increasingly variety and availability of products at creating demand. So, between the
1950 and 1960s a large number of Americans responded to consumer crazes such as the automobile as dishwashers, garbage disposals, televisions, and stereos (Brogan, 1985).
2.3.3. The 1960s.
By 1960 the postwar prosperity continued and American suburbs grew. As a result, the United States auto-manufacturers responded to the boom with ever-flashier automobiles (Detroit). Soon innovations of the single -family housing market started to appear, for instance, in housing development and mass-production techniques. In fact, suburbs provided larger homes for larger families, security form urban liv ing, privacy, and space for consumer goods. Still, the key factor motivating white Americans to move from the suburbs was race.The main reason was that most suburbs were restricted to whites since few African Americans could afford to live in them. The few African Americans who ventured into suburbs were generally clamored to leave.
Aside from this, we must include the opposition of the nationalist prime minister of Iran (Mohammed Mossadegh) towards the neocolonial presence of Western corporations in his nation because of oil wells. Convinced that this Western client state was shifting toward an independent foreign policy, Eisenhower used the CIA forces to overthrow Iran’s government. Then the United States replaced Mossadegh by elevating the young Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlevi from the role of constitutional monarch to that of an absolute ruler. In return, the Shah allowed American companies to share in the development of his nation’s reserves and remained a close ally for twenty-five years, even as his regime was becoming increasingly hated and despotic. As we can see, Iran is yet another example of the parallels between 1950s and contemporary United States’ foreign policy (Palmer, 1980).
2.3.4. The 1970s.
Later on, popular anger eventually culminated in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which led to a hostage crisis that would perhaps later bring down the Carter administration. The Islamic Republic of Iran imposed an absolutist regime and formed part of President Bush’s so-called “Axis of Evil” along with North Korea. Moreover, the foreign interventionism of the Eisenhower administration still resonates to this day, since the United States deposed the Iraqi regime in 2003, inspired by Nasser’s secular Arab nationalism and populist social policies.
Thus, the Suez stalemate was a turning point on the United States hegemony since this event heralded an ever-growing rift between the Atlantic over North America. The West Europeans, with the exclusion of the British until 1971, also developed their own nuclear forces as well as an economy Common Market to be less dependent on Washington. As a result, the American
economic competitiveness faltered in the face of the challenges of Japan and West Germany, which have recovered rapidly from the wartime decimation of the industrial bases. As another example of shifting courses among the increasingly independent-minded Western allies, we include France, which opposed the United States adventurism in the Middle East during the
2003 pre-emptive attack on Iraq, a reversal of roles from the Suez crisis (VanSpanckeren,
2004).
3. A LITERARY BACKGROUND: THE LOST GENERATION.
In Chapter 3, we shall provide a literary background of this period with the aim of going further into the main literary productions of the Lost Generation and, in particular, into the literary styles of realism, modernism and post-modernism. Therefore, we shall start by briefly defining (1) the Lost Generation, and then compare (2) American vs. British literature in terms of general features because of the connection between the authors; next, an overview of (3) the main literary forms, regarding (a) drama, (b) poetry, and (c) prose, out of which we shall locate the authors under study.
3.1. On defining the Lost Generation.
The expression “lost generation” was coined by the American writer Gertrude Stein (1874-
1946) who, actually speaking to Ernest Hemingway, said, “you are all a lost generation” (taken from the epigragh to The Sun Also Rises). She was also an American writer, poet, feminist, playwright and catalyst in the development of modern art and literature, and therefore spent most of her life in France. By the 1920s she had a large circle of friends because her judgements in literature and art were highly influential. Among this group we find the ex-patriate American writers, or the Lost Generation, as she called them (Greenfeld, 1973).
The term became popular during the age wars that escalated after the First World War and during prohibition, and still continues to fascinate us because of the mystique surrounding these individuals. Seeking the bohemian lifestyle and rejecting the values of American materialism, this group of intellectuals, poets, artists and writers fled to France in the post World War I years. By then, Paris was full of youthful idealism, and it was there that these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date.
There were many celebrities involved in the Lost Generation, for instance, artists, politicians, presidents, etc. Let us start by the literary artists where the three best known are F. Scott Fitzgerald, J. Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. Others usually included among the list are: W. Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Ford Maddox Ford and Zelda Fitzgerald. The Lost Generation also produced two Presidents: Harry S. Truman and Dwight Eisenhower; other prominent non-American peers of the Lost Generation included Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Charles Chaplin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles de Gaulle and Mao Zedong (Kennedy, 1993).
The term ‘Lost Generation’ has much to do with the social mood in which this group of writers grew up: an era of widespread substance abuse (alcohol consumption, popular drugs like cannabis, heroin and cocaine; an era of rising immigration during the decades 1900-1919 (The Titanic Sinking); also, an era of prosperity mixed with a crisis of confidence due to the long- standing institutional failures; an era of crime and violence, high suicide rates; failures in the marketplace; and namely a new generation dedicated to the fear of poverty and the worship of success. In short, an era of disillusioned and weary intellectuals, poets, artists, and novelists that rejected the values of post World War I America and relocated to Paris to live a bohemian lifestyle.
Lost generation writers have gained a prominent place in the 20th century American civilization for three main reasons. First, they led the way in expression of the themes of spiritual alienatio n, self-exile, and cultural criticism. Thus, their mark on intellectual history is distinct. Secondly, these writers attempted to express their critical response in new ways. Their literary innovations challenged traditional assumptions about writing and expression, and thereby paved the way for subsequent generations of avant garde writers. And lastly, myth surrounds the lost generation and perpetuates its popularity as a countercultural entity. Every later generation aspired in some way to the reputation for hedonism and headiness of the lost generation of the 1920s.
In literary terms, the Lost Generation were said to be disillusioned by the senseless slaughter of the First World War, cynical, disdainful of the Victorian notions of morality and propriety of their elders. Like most attempts to pigeon-hole entire generations, this over-generalization is true for some individuals of the generation and not true of others. It was fairly common among members of this group to complain that American artistic culture lacked the breadth of European work (hence many members spent large amounts of time in Europe). Nevertheless, this period saw an explosion in American literature and art, which is now often considered to
include some of the greatest literary classics produced by American writers. This generation also produced the first flowering of jazz music, arguably the first distinctly American artform.
3.2. American vs. British literature: general features.
As we shall see, these literary streams shall reflect the prevailing ideologies of the twentieth century both in Britain and in America. Thus, in Britain literature is to be framed into the Edwardian (1901-1910) and Georgian literature, which will challenge previous productions of Victorian morality with an emergin g realism, which is defined as the pre-war literature up to the First World War. Then, the great processes of change and periods of war transformed the American and European life in terms of human nature, society, and the individual’s place of history, and modernism appeared under the shape of innovations and experimentalism. After the World War II, we find post-modernism towards the end of the century.
These fast changes were to be felt in technology, urbanization, secularization and modernization at an international level, and in fact, the United States became a dominant nation in the twentieth century. In the same way, literature also interpreted these changes as a period of a fundamental redirection in the nature of the ideology of American society and also, cultural and technological development. Up to the First World War literature is associated with a stream of realism, both in American and in Britain, but in the roaring 1920s there is a need to divert attention from the cruder conceptions of reality (Great Depression, post-war situation, poverty, the 1929 Crack), since Americans had lost their ideals.
Hence this generation of artists turned their back on progress, on economics, on Main Street, and on Wall Street. Rather, they focused on the Jazz Age and showed no interest in politics nor in business. Yet, the great outburst of artistic creativity had begun even before 1920 and it continued beyond 1929. We may consider these experimental forms to be a break with tradition and have a deliberate use of artistic manipulation of concepts of time, man, sound and meaning.
3.3. Main literary forms.
Broadly speaking, the early and mid twentieth century saw a wide variety of American authors in the pre-war period who produced their work within the field of the most important literary forms: drama, poetry and prose. Let us briefly examine the three literary forms, (a) drama, (b) poetry and (c) prose, so as to find the source of American fiction: the modernist novel.
3.3.1. Drama.
During the 19th century, drama productio ns were namely melodramas with exemplary democratic figures and clear contrasts between good and evil had been popular, and some plays about social problems such as slavery. Yet, American drama imitated English and European theater until well into the 20th century, and often, plays from England or translated from European languages dominated theater seasons.
An inadequate copyright law that failed to protect and promote American dramatists worked against genuinely original drama. So a new copyright law was launched (the star system) in which actors and actresses, rather than the actual plays, were given most acclaim. Americans flocked to see European actors who toured theaters in the United States. In addition, imported drama, like imported wine, enjoyed higher status than indigenous productions.
Yet, not until the 20th century would serious plays attempt aesthetic innovation. Popular culture showed vital developments, however, especially in vaudeville (popular variety theater involving skits, clowning, music, and the like). Minstrel shows, based on African-American music and folkways (performed by white characters using blackface make-up) also developed original forms and expressions.
Among the most popular dramatists of the time we include
Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) , a great figure of American theater. He combines an enormous technical originality with freshness of vision and emotional depth, and the themes of working class and poor, the exploration of subjective realms (obsessions and sex, readingS in Freud) and primitive emotions or confusion under intense stress. This latter feature is reflected in his most famous plays Desire Under the Elms (1924), which recreates the passions hidden within one family; The Great God Brown (1926), which uncovers the unconsciousness of a wealthy businessman; and Strange Interlude (1928), a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, traces the tangled loves of one woman. It is worth mentioning that he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936.
Thornton Wilder (1897- 1975), known for all the elements of sentimentality and nostalgia (the archetypal traditional small country town, the kindly parents and mischievous children, the young lovers). Still, the innovative elements such as ghosts, voices from the audience, and daring time shifts keep the play engaging. Among his most famous plays we include Our Town (1938), The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), and his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927).
Clifford Odets (1906-1963) , a master of social drama, came from an Eastern European, Jewish immigrant background. Raised in New York City, he became one of the original acting members of the Group Theater directed by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford, which was committed to producing only native American dramas. Hia best known plays are Waiting for Lefty (1935), an experimental one-act drama that fervently advocated labor unionism; His Awake and Sing!, a nostalgic family drama; Golden Boy, the story of an Italian immigrant youth who ruins his musical talent (he is a violinist) when he is seduced by the lure of money to become a boxer and injures his hands. This latter work resembles Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Dreiser’s An American Tragedy in that the play warns against excessive ambition and materialism.
3.3.2. Poetry.
In poetry, poets experimented with new forms and content, most of them trying to show old values gone. Others, such as Eliot and Ezra Pound did not reject their past, but valued a sense of history so as to create a new poetry. Also, other three Midwestern poets shared the same concern: Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) , who writes expansive, evocative urban and patriotic poems and simple, childlike rhymes and ballads; Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931), on the one hand, an advanced modernist poetics and on the other creator of strong, rhythmic poetry designed to be declaimed aloud. His work forms a curious link between the popular, or folk, forms of poetry, such as Christian gospel songs and vaudeville (popular theater); and Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950), who had a new unpoetic colloquial style, frank presentation of sex, critical view of village life, and intensely imagined inner lives of ordinary people. The three of them developed techniques that reached out to a larger readership (realism, dramatic renderings).Their poetry often concerns obscure individuals and the maturation of America’s interior.
3.3.3. Prose: the modernist novel.
The large cultural wave of Modernism, which gradually emerged in Europe and the United States in the early years of the 20th century, embraced several changes, such as a sense of modern life through art as a break from the past, as well as from Western civilization’s classical traditions, and a break with traditional life in the sense of being more scientific, faster, more technological, and more mechanized.
The idea of form as the equivalent of content, a cornerstone of post-World War II art and literature, crystallized in this period. Also, experimentation was promoted due to technological innovations in the world of factories and machines which inspired new attentiveness to
technique in the arts (floodlit skyscrapers, lights from automobile headlights, moviehouses, and watchtowers to illumine a forbidding outer darkness suggesting ignorance and old-fashioned tradition). Also, photography began to assume the status of a fine art allied with the latest scientific developments and therefore, adapted to literature.
Vision and viewpoint became an essential aspect of the modernist novel as well. No longer was it sufficient to write a straightforward third-person narrative or (worse yet) use a pointlessly intrusive narrator. The way the story was told became as important as the story itself. Actually, Henry James, William Faulkner, and many other American writers experimented with fictional points of view by means of restricting the information in the novel to what a single character would have known, or breaking up the narrative into four sections, and giving the viewpoint of a different character, respectively. Hence a school of new criticism arose in the United States with the aim of analyzing such modernist novels and poetry, with a new critical vocabulary.
Although American prose between the wars experimented with viewpoint and form, Americans wrote more realistically, on the whole, than did Europeans. Novelist Ernest Hemingway wrote of war, hunting, and other masculine pursuits in a stripped, plain style; William Faulkner set his powerful southern novels spanning generations and cultures firmly in Mississippi heat and dust; and Sinclair Lewis delineated bourgeois lives with ironic clarity.
The importance of facing reality became a dominant theme in the 1920s and 1930s: Writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and the playwright Eugene O’Neill repeatedly portrayed the tragedy awaiting those who live in flimsy dreams.
4. THE LOST GENERATION: S. FITZGERALD, J. STEINBECK, E. HEMINGWAY AND W. FAULKNER.
In Chapter 4 we shall attempt to provide an account of the most outstanding writers within the Lost Generation, S. Fitzgerald, J. Steinbeck, E. Hemingway and W. Faulk ner with his narrative. These American novelists are associated to the literary streams of American realism and modernism, which are framed in the 1920s and 1930s. Therefore, we shall introduce (1) S. Fitzgerald, (2) J. Steinbeck, (3) E. Hemingway, and the narrative of (4) W. Faulkner in terms of (a) life and main works, and (b) main themes and style.
4.1. S. Fitzgerald (1896-1940).
4.1.1. Life and works.
Following Meyers (1994), Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born into a fairly well-to- do family in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896. His parents, Edward Fitzgerald and Mary McQuillan were Catholics. His father’s name indicated his ancestry with an allegiance to the Old South and its values whereas his mother was the daughter of an Irish immigrant who became wealthy as a wholesale grocer in St. Paul.
Fitzgerald attended the St. Paul Academy and when he was thirteen, his first writing (a detective story) appeared in print in the school newspaper. During 1911-1913 he attended the Newman School, a Catholic prep school in New Jersey, where he met Father Sigourney Fay, who encouraged his ambitions for personal distinction and achievement. In 1917, Fitzgerald attended Princeton University but never graduated. It was here that he mingled with the monied classes from the Eastern Seaboard and the very moment in which he became obsessed with money for the rest of his life.
By this time, Fitzgerald neglected his studies for his literary apprenticeship and, actually, as a member of the Princeton Class, he wrote the scripts and lyrics for the Princeton Triangle Club musicals and the Nassau Literary Magazine, and was a contributor to the Princeton Tiger humor magazine. In 1917 he was drafted into the army, but he never saw active service abroad. Convinced that he would die in the war, he rapidly wrote a novel, The Romantic Egotist, but it was rejected by Charles Scribner’s Sons twice.
Then he rewrote his novel as This Side of Paradise (1920), a story about the career aspirations and love disappointments of Amory Blaine. Eventually, it was accepted by editor Maxwell Perkins of Scribners and it became an instant success. In the same year he married the beautiful Zelda Sayre and together they embarked on a rich life of endless parties.Fitzgerald endeavored to earn a solid literary reputation, but his playboy image impeded the proper assessment of his work.
Yet, he also devoted his time to write short stories to popular magazines for prices that kept incrasing as his fame did, for instance, two volumes of short stories called Flappers and Philosophers (1920), which marked Fitzgerald’s entry into the realm of the short story. When Zelda Fitzgerald became pregnant they took their first trip to Europe in 1921 and then settled in St. Paul. Dividing their time between America and fashionable resorts in Europe, the Fitzgeralds became as famous for their lifestyle as for the novels he wrote.
He followed his first success with The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), a satirical look at the dark side of the glittering Jazz Age, and it was also at this time that Fitzgerald wrote many of his short stories which helped to pay for his extravagant lifestyle, such as Six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories (1922), which marked him as a glamorous chronicler of the flaming youth of the 1920s, and The Diamond as Big as the Ritz (1922). In the fall of 1922 they moved to Great Neck, Long Island, in order to be near Broadway since the Fitzgeralds tried up with his plays, The Vegetable and From President to Postman, both tried out in November 1923.
The distractions of Great Neck and New York prevented Fitzgerald from making progress, and then, seeking tranquility for his work the Fitzgeralds went to France in the spring of 1924 and spent the winter of 1924-1925 in Rome where he revised The Great Gatsby, but it was in April
1925 that he published his third novel, which Fitzgerald considered his masterpiece. By that
time, his marriage was damaged by Zelda’s involvement with a French naval aviator.
Moreover, Fitzgerald met Ernest Hemingway in Paris, then unknown outside the expatriate literary circle, and both formed a friendship based largely on Fitzgerald’s admiration for Hemingway’s personality and genius. The Fitzgeralds remained in France until the end of 1926, alternating between Paris and the Riviera, where they also established a close friendship with affluent and cultured American expatriates Gerald and Sara Murphy. Fitzgerald made little progress on his fourth novel, a study of American expatriates in France provisionally titled The Boy Who Killed His Mother and another work called All the Sad Young Men (1926).
During these years his drinking increased and, though he was an alcoholic, he wrote sober. Also, Zelda’s unconventional behavior increased and there were frequent domestic rows, usually triggered by drinking bouts and her eccentric attitude. Then the Fitzgeralds returned to America to escape the distractions of France. By 1928, Fitzgerald was still unable to make significant progress on his novel and Zelda commenced ballet training, intending to become a professional dancer. In the spring of 1929, they returned to France where Zelda’s intense ballet work damaged her health and contributed to the couple’s estrangement.
Yet, the bubble burst in April 1930 when she suffered her first breakdown. She was treated at Prangins clinic in Switzerland until September 1931, while Fitzgerald lived in Swiss hotels. His work on the novel was again suspended as he wrote short stories to pay for psychiatric treatment, for instance, The Rich Boy and Babylon Revisited (1931), which describes the Lost Generation after its moral and economic collapse. Increasingly troubled by mental illness, he wrote Tender is the Night (1934), the story of Dick Diver and his schizophrenic wife Nicole, which reflected in some way the pain that Fitzgerald felt.
The book was not well received in America and he turned to script-writing in Hollywood for the final three years of his life, which he spent together with the movie -columnist Sheilah Graham. It was at this time he wrote the autobiographical essays, but he died in 1940, so his works were collected posthumously as it is the case of his unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon (1941) and The Crack-Up (1945).
4.1.2. Main themes and style.
As we can see, Fitzgerald is best known for his novels and short stories which chronicle the excesses of America’s Jazz Age during the 1920s as well as for his reputation as a drinker. Though it showed him as an irresponsible writer, he was a reviser whose fiction went through layers of drafts. Fitzgerald had a clear, lyrical, colorful, witty style which evoked the emotions associated with time and place. The chief theme of Fitzgerald’s work is aspiration and the idealism when defining American character. Another major theme was mutability or loss, since he Fitzgerald became identified with social concerns and, in particular, with the Jazz Age, as he stated “It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire,” from Echoes of the Jazz Age (1922).
Actually, these major themes are reflected in all his works. For instance, Flappers and Philosophers (1920) plumbs the depths of human feeling with a perspicacity that is quintessential Fitzgerald and, therefore, marked Fitzgerald’s entry into the realm of the short story. Next work, This Side of Paradise (1920) reflects his own experiences as a Princeton undergraduate through the figure of Amory Blaine, a Princeton student with career aspirations, love disappointments and a fixed obssession with social and economic status, which leads her to the trading of sexual favours.
The Beautiful and the Damned (1922) shows the excitement and thrills of New York nightlife in the ‘20s through the satirical figure of Anthony Patch and his vibrant, beautiful wife. In this work we are shown the dark side of the glittering Jazz Age through the squandering of money, wasting talents, and descending into moral, as well as financial and bankruptcy. Next work, Six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories (1922) showed the glamorous years of the 1920s as well as The Diamond as Big as the Ritz (1922).
Yet, there is no doubt that his third work, The Great Gatsby (1925), was Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. This novel marked a striking advance in Fitzgerald’s technique, using a complex structure and a controlled narrative point of view. Fitzgerald’s achievement received critical
praise, but sales of Gatsby were disappointing, though the stage and movie rights brought additional income. This novel combines symbolism with psychological realism since his description has a symbolic glow as if things (house, parties, music) belonged to an unreal world.
This work, however, has been defined as a symbolist tragedy in which the symbol of the American belief that money can buy love and happiness becomes tragic. The figure of James Gatz, the mid-western boy who improves himself into Jay Gatsby, is a brilliant hedonist whose tragic flaw is an outdated idealism since he tries to convert a material world full of hard people into the ideal world of fantasy. This novel dramatizes the time in which it was written, that is, it reflects social prohibition, gangsterism, blase flappery, a questionable business ethics and commercial criteria for success. In short, the failure of American success and the contrast between the West and East development.
Regarding his style, critics soon realized his sophistication, use of social milieu, honest treatment of emotional experience and his portrayal of the younger generation. In his social analysis, he played wit h his poetic style on applying a studied application of techniques, such as the subtle complexity of the language, the calculated use of colour, references and connotations and the striking configurations of verbal patterns and repetitions which lead the reader to reread sentences.
4.2. J. Steinbeck (1902-1968).
4.2.1. Life and works.
Following Magnusson & Goring (1990), John Ernst Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, on February 27, 1902 and it is worth mentioning that his native region of Monterey Bay was later the setting for most of his fiction. Of German and Irish ancestry, his father, John Steinbeck served as the County Treasurer while his mother, Olive (Hamilton) Steinbeck, was a school teacher, who fostered Steinbeck’s love of reading and the written word. Actually, among his early favorites were Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Le Morte d’Arthur.
Steinbeck attended the local high school and during summers he worked as a hired hand on nearby ranches, nourishing his impression of the California countryside and its people. He worked his way through college at Standford University where he studied marine biology but never graduated since he always planned to be a writer. Actually, several of his early poems and
short stories appeared in university publications. In 1925 he went to New York, where he tried for a few years to establish himself as a reporter and free-lance writer, but he failed and returned to California.
While writing, Steinbeck took odd jobs as an apprenticehood-carrier, apprentice painter, caretaker of an estate, surveyor, and fruit-picker. During a period, when he was as a watchman of a house in the High Sierra, Steinbeck wrote his first book, Cup of Gold (1929), but attracted little attention. His two subsequent novels, The Pastures of Heaven and To a God Unknown , were also poorly received by the literary world.
In 1930 Steinbeck married his first wife, Carol Henning and lived in Pacific Grove where much of the material for his next novels was gathered (Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row). By that time Steinbeck met Edward Ricketts, a marine biologist whose views on the interdependence of all life deeply influenced Steinbeck’s thinking and, in fact, in the novel To a God Unknown (1933) Steinbeck mingled Ricketts’ ideas with concepts and themes, which had been made familiar by the mythologist Joseph Campbell. Yet, Steinbeck did not want to explain his story too much and he knew beforehand that the book would not find readers.
After publishing some novels and short stories, Steinbeck first became widely known with Tortilla Flat (1935), a series of humorous stories about Monterey paisanos. Actually, Tortilla Flat (1935) marked the turning point in Steinbeck’s literary career and was regarded as the best novel by a California author (he received the California Commonwealth Club’s Gold Medal). Steinbeck continued writing in Pacific Grove, relying upon extensive research and his personal observation of the human condition for his stories.
Tortilla Flat was followed by a serious of novels and short stories, such as In Dubious Battle (1936), a strike novel set in the California apple country; The Red Pony (1937), a story sequence which takes place on the Tiflin ranch in the Salinas Valley, California. The first two sections of the story sequence, “The Gift” and “The Great Mountains”, were published in the North American Review in 1933, and the third section, “The Promise,” did not appear in Harpers until
1937. With “The Leader of the People,” the four sections are connected by common characters, settings, and themes.
Next, Of Mice and Men (1937) was Steinbeck’s first big success and was also adapted into a three-act play. It was followed by The Grapes of Wrath (1939) which was awarded with the Pulitzer Prize. This novel, which tells the exodus story of Okies on their way to an uncertain future in California was defined by the Swedish Academy as simply “an epic chronicle.” After this huge success, Steinbeck went to Mexico in 1940 to film the documentary Forgotten Village
and also wrote The Sea of Cortez (1941), which resulted from an expedition in the Gulf of
California he made with Ricketts.
During World War II, Steinbeck was a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune in Great Britain and the Mediterranean area. Out of this experience, some of his dispatches were later collected and made into Once There Was a War (1958) and he wrote The Moon is Down (1942), about resistance movement in a small town occupied by the Nazis. In the same year Steinbeck’s twelve-year marriage to Carol Henning had ended, but next year (1943) he married the singer Gwyndolyn Conger, with whom he had two sons, Thom and John. However, the marriage was unhappy and they were divorced in 1949. In 1943 Steinbeck moved to New York City, his home for the rest of his life and where he wrote his postwar works, for instance, The Pearl (1947), a symbolic tale of a Mexican Indian pearl diver Kino; A Russian Journal (1948), which was an account of the author’s journey to the Soviet Union with the photographer Robert Capa.
In 1950 Steinbeck married his third wife, Elaine Scott. His son John was hospitalized for codeine addiction at age seven, and he also had much problems in later years with drugs and alcohol (died in 1991). After that, he wrote a long family novel, East of Eden (1952), which is set in rural California in the years around the turn of the century. In 1959 Stenbeck spent nearly a year at Discove Cottage in England, working with Morte d’Arthur , the first book he had read as a child. After returning to the United States, he travelled around his country during a three- month tour in a truck with his poodle, Charley, and published Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962). In this travelogue Steinbeck wrote about his impressions about forty American states.
The Winter of our Discontent (1961) was Steinbeck’s last major novel in contemporary America. In it, he continued exploring the moral dilemmas involved in being fully human (love- hate, life-death). The book was not well received, but John Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. In later years he did much special reporting abroad, dividing his time between New York and California. He went to Vietnam to report on the war, and the New York Post attacked him for betraying his liberal past. Steinbeck started to work with enthusiasm on The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights , but never finished it because he died of heart attack in New York on December 20, 1968. In his last work, posthumously published in 1976, Steinbeck turned his back on contemporary subjects and brought to life the Arthurian world with its ancient codes of honour.
4.2.2. Main themes and style.
As seen above, this American novelist, story writer, playwright, and essayist is best remembered for receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962 and for his realistic as well as imaginative writings, distinguished by a sympathetic humor and a keen social perception. He is a naturalist writer who looks at the economic problems of rural labour in the California countryside and its people. Steinbeck’s novels can all be classified as social novels dealing with rural California conditions and a set of characters who are driven by forces they cannot control (fear, hunger, sex, disasters, capitalism). Then let us examine his most outstanding works so as to analyse the themes and style he used.
Thus, his early novels reflect the rural California in different ways, for instance, To a God Unknown (1933) depicts a farmer, Joseph Wayne, who receives a blessing from his pioneer father, John Wayne, and goes to build himself a new farm in a distant valley. Joseph’s deep beliefs of death and life lead him to sacrifice himself on a stone, becoming “earth and rain”” so as to bring an end to a drought. Next, Tortilla Flat (1935) is a humorous tale of pleasure-loving Mexican-Americans which brought him wider recognition. Later, Steinbeck moved on from his rough and earthy humour to more serious fiction, often aggressive in its social criticism, as in his next work, In Dubious Battle (1936), he dealt with the strikes of the migratory fruit pickers on California apple plantations and, in particular, with the strike of nine hundred migratory workers devoted to his cause.
In 1937 The Red Pony is set up on the Tiflin ranch in the Salinas Valley, California and is regarded as one of Steinbeck’s finest works. The story follows Jody’s initiation into adult life, in which the pony of the title functions as a symbol of his innocence and maturation. Next, Of Mice and Men (1937) shows a story of shattered dreams, in which George Milton and Lennia Small, two itinerant ranchhands who get into trouble after finding work on a farm, and lose their hopes and dreams of better future.
Since Steinbeck was a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune in Great Britain and the Mediterranean area, he reflects the World War II in some of his works, such as Once There Was a War (1958), The Moon is Down (1942), about resistance movement in a small town occupied by the Nazis; The Pearl (1947), which reads about a symbolic tale of a Mexican Indian pearl diver called Kino, who finds a valuable pearl that changes his life, but not in the way he did expect. Kino sees the pearl as his opportunity to better life, but Kino’s family suffers series of disasters and finally he throws the pearl back into ocean. Thereafter his tragedy is legendary in the town.
A Russian Journal (1948) describes the country without prejudices, but he could not move freely.Also, among his later works should be mentioned East of Eden (1952), a long family novel, in which he showed again the rural California in the years around the turn of the century; The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), and Travels with Charley (1962), a travelogue in which Steinbeck wrote about his impressions during a three-month tour in a truck that led him through forty American states. As we can see, he was fascinated with the foreign elements in the American population (Mexican farmworkers, assorted artists, bohemians), and like most regionalists he believed the elemental life of the country infinitely superior to that of the city.
Regarding his style , his synthetic folklore can be summed up in three words: poetic, naturalist, and of great quality. His characters are idealized and simplified so as to show them as weak- minded, but essentially noble rural heroes, and also, as traditional rural people presented in a romantic manner. There is also a tragic element in his works, where great cruelty and passion are present in his characters.
4.3. E. Hemingway (1899-1961).
4.3.1. Life and works.
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Chicago (Illinois), but it was not until October 1, on his parent’s third wedding anniversary that he was christened at the First Congregational Church. His father, who had a medical business, taught his children to love nature whereas his mother taught them music and creativity by taking them to concerts, art galleries and operas. When Hemingway was twelve, he was given a present of a single barrel 20 gauge shotgun and, therefore, while attending school at The Oak Park and River Forest Township High School he made frequent hunting and fishing expeditions in the woods of norther Michingan (Reynolds, 1989).
On reaching his adolescence, he already wrote articles for the school’s weekly newspaper and by the time he graduated from High School (1917), the United States had just entered World War I against Germany. His father’s desire was for him to go to college but Ernest had very different ideas since he wanted to join the forces or learn to write. Actually, in October 1917
Hemingway got a six month employment as a reporter in the Kansas City Star and had to leave home to take up his job. The moment of departure was to be remembered for a long time afterwards in For Whom the Bell Tolls which related the mixed emotions he felt of sadness, relief and adulthood when saying goodbye to his father at the station.
In April 1918 he worked as an ambulance driver in the American Red Cross first in France and later on in Italy. Yet, on July, 1918 he was wounded in his legs and spent the next three months in a hospital in Milan. It was there that he met and fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, with whom he spent some time together, though she dismissed him as being too young for her. This experie nce was to be crucial later on since it was a major theme throughout his fiction and, particularly, ten years later, when Hemingway recounted his experiences in A Farewell To Arms (1929), a novel about an affair between a wounded World War I soldier and his nurse.
After the war he went back to Michigan where eventually he found a job as a reporter for the Co-operative Commonwealth, a slick paper monthly magazine put out by the Co-operative Society of America. By that time, he met Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (eight years older than him and known as Hadley) in a friends apartment and by September 3, 1920 they married. By January 9 1922 they were living in a fourth floor apartment in Paris where he set to work writing and working on a novel he had started in Chicago. Then he visited Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein in Paris (thanks to Sherwood Anderson’s letter of introduction to Gertrude Stein).who were to be a very great influence on Hemingway’s style of writing.
Then Hemingway, desperate to see the world, trave lled as a correspondent throughout Europe and the Near East. He also went to Italy (Milan) where, with the aid of his Press Card he arranged a meeting with Mussolini, the emergent leader of the Black Shirts. By then, Hadley became pregnant but they took a trip to northern Spain, Pamplona. They were there for the fiesta on the sixth of July and both were amazed at the bullfights and the running of the bulls in the streets. This trip would inspire the writing of The Sun Also Rises (1926), sometimes called Fiesta later on.
After Spain, they went to Paris and then Canada so their baby could be born on American soil. By this time Hemingway had written a series of sketches called Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923) which were to be published. Hemingway was now a fully fledged author and his newspaper work was confined to feature articles for the Star Weekly. As he did not enjoy journalism any more, he wrote to Gertrude Stein, now a very good friend in Paris, that he was going to give journalism up and concentrate soley on writing novels.
Actually, on January 1, 1924, Hemingway left the Star and returned to Paris so as to travel later to Europe, where he wrote The Torrents of Spring (1926) during their five year marriage. Yet, they separated after Hadley found out about his affair with a Vogue Editor from Arkansas called Pauline Pfeiffer. During 1925 and 1926 he wrote respectively Another Country , in which the central character was an Italian Major whose wounded right hand had turned into a claw and whose young wife has just died of pneumonia; and Men without Women. Next year Hemingway married Pauline in a Catholic ceremony (1927), but after this, Hemingway fell into a period of
depression since he couldn’t write due to his bad health and failing eyesight. By then, not only was was trying to write a really good book about his experiences in the war, A Farewell To Arms (1929), but he was also desperate to leave Paris and go back to America.
He and Pauline went to Key West, Florida because Pauline was pregnant and wanted, like Hadley to have her baby on American soil. Key West became their base but Hemingway, sometimes with Pauline continued taking trips to Europe. During those years, Hemingway’s father committed suicide and Pauline had her baby, another boy, although Hemingway wanted a girl. Hemingway’s health worsened as he easily fell prone to accidents, sore throats, kidney problems, failing sight and hemorrhoids. He was also accident prone.
In 1931 Pauline had another baby, Gregory Hancock. Shortly after this Death in the Afternoon (1932) was finished. Hemingway was still writing and taking fishing expeditions to Havana with his friend Joe Russell. His first trip to Cuba taught him the joys of marlin fishing but when he returned he suffered ill health once again, this time bronchial pneumonia. In 1933 Winner Takes Nothing was published before Hemingway took a hunting trip to Africa to shoot lions, where he got dysentery and had a prolapse of the lower intestine.
When he returned he started to write a book about his African safari called ‘The Green Hills of Africa (1935). In 1936 Hemingway met the journalist, Martha Gelhorn, with whom he planned to go to the Spanish Civil War, and also began an affair. In 1937 and 1938 he was in Spain with Martha, writing To Have and Hav e Not (1937) and a play, The Fifth Column (1938), which was written whilst his Madrid hotel was under gunfire because of the Civil War. By 1939
Hemingway and Pauline separated, wrote For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940), and again suffered
from guilt. On 21 November 1940, he married his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, but their relationship was already strained when they set off for the Far East to cover Chiang Kai-Shek’s war against Japan in January 1941.
In 1942 with USA now Britain’s ally in the World War II, Hemingway created the Crook Factory, a private undertaking whose self appointed mission was to investigate the pro-Nazi factions in Cuba. In March 1944 he went to England at Martha’s urging and by May he met Mary Welsh in London, and fell in love with her. Between June and December 1944
Hemingway covered the European conflict, to which he was officially attached (the Third
Army). Due to his keenness to fight with the army he was court martialled for violating the Geneva Convention. Also,by early January he was back in Paris with Mary and his marriage to Martha Gellhorn was over.
His last days coincide with his marriage to Mary Welsh and Paris. Guilty again about his failed marriage to Martha he fell into a state of alcohol and indulgence. On March 14, 1946 he married
Mary Welsh and then started work on two projects The Garden of Eden and the first part of his proposed World War Two trilogy which was published after his death as Islands in the Stream (1970). His health was deteriorating and his drinking had increased. His writing had almost come to a grinding stop and with the death of many of his close friends including his second wife Pauline Pfieffer, his mother and his publisher, Charles Scribner, Hemingway often found himself contemplating his life and what he felt was his immediate death.
He met a woman called Adriana Ivancich and fell in love with her. This meeting inspired Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) followed by The Old Man and the Sea (1952), which won him critical acclaim again and made him win the Pulitzer Prize in May 1953. In the same year, Hemingway and Mary went to Europe where Hemingway planned an appendix to Death in the Afternoon (1932). He then travelled on to Mombassa where he conducted a ritual courtship with a young Wakambu girl. Then he returned to Cuba only partly recovered from his serious injuries and saw Adriana for the last time.
On 28 October 1954 Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he was too ill to receive the award in Stockholm. He was in Europe from September 1956 to January 1957 and he set sail for Spain in May 1959, a month after Fidel Castro’s troops entered Havana. When he returned to Havana in early November he publicly declared his support for the revolutionaries, and in the Spring of 1960 he completed his memoirs of life in Paris in the early twenties called a Moveable Feast (1960), coinciding with his last visit to Cuba. By that time, he was already showing signs of mental illness, his health had collapsed and he was forced more and more to rely on alcohol. In August he went to Spain alone and on 30 November 1960 he stayed at the Mayo Clinic for about three months. His lost his memory and on July 2, 1961 he committed suicide as his father did.
4.3.2. Main themes and style.
Hemingway’s main themes are a reflection of his own life in his works. For instance, In Our Time (1925) is one of his earliest books which reflects the postwar year and includes classics such as Soldier’s Home, My Old Man, Out of Season, or Indian Camp, among others. The Torrents of Spring (1926), a satire which poked fun at Sherwood Anderson who was a star writer at the time. Also, The Sun Also Rises (1926), a story of frustrated love against the backdrop of Paris and Spain in the 1920’s, where Hemingway captures the sites, sounds and smells of the Bohemian Paris during the great expatriate days and the manic weeklong feria at Pamplona with the running of bulls.
In Men Without Women (1927), Hemingway shows some stories of boxing, bullfighting, war and love relationships between men and women. On the other hand, A Farewell to Arms (1929) is a tragic story of love, betrayal and reconciliation against the violent backdrop of World War I. With this book Hemingway produces a novel out of his own experience in a Milan hospital when he was wounded in the war. Later on, Death in the Afternoon (1932) is an examination of the Spanish bullfight ushered in what many thought was a decade of experimental writing. Hemingway was a lifelong enthusiast of the bullfight and of Spain and thought that war and bullfight was the only place to view death firsthand.
In The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War (1930) is a full- length play which grew out of his experiences in and around a besieged Madrid, in which he evokes the tumultuous years of the Spanish Civil War. Also, Green Hills of Africa (1933) shows his trip to Africa with his second wife Pauline and his big-game hunting there. Moreover, To Have and Have Not (1937) is about the story of a man who runs contraband between Cuba and Key West in the 1930s. It is a realistic adventure tale and a moving, subtle portrait of an unlikely love affair. Here Hemingway’s direct and deceptively simple style shapes this story into a masterpiece.
Another work, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) is a novel about the impending death of an American in the Spanish War. Also, the posthumous novel, A Moveable Feast (1964) is a vibrant portrait of Paris in the 1920s in an evocative, self-mocking and frank style. It is regarded as an extraordinary chronicle of the sights, sounds and tastes of Paris in a bygone era where life and people are portrayed from his expatriate world. Moreover, the classic novel Islands in the Stream (posthumously published in 1970) traces his life from his years as a painter in Bimini in the 1930s through his antisubmarine activities off the coast of Cuba during World War II.
In The Garden of Eden (posthumously published in 1986) we are shown the story of a young American writer and his glamorous life on the Cote d’Azur during the 1920s when, on taking a dangerous and erotic game, they fell in love with the same woman. Finally, his journal True At First Sight (posthumously published in 1999) reads about Hemingway’s life in a Kenyan Safari camp in the winter of 1953-1954.
As we can see, on refusing the aid of literary artifices, Hemingway’s style is characterized by the use of violent action mingled with the expression of sincerity. He shows an amazing richness from his own experiences below the surface of narrative. The greatness of his writing is said to be in the memories of physical pleasure, true dialogues, and a mix of tragic and love. In short, his most outstanding works are written in Hemingway’s special style, uncluttered and told in simple phrases which show us about death, war, love, hunting and passion in a way only Hemingway could.
4.4. W. Faulkner (1897-1962).
4.4.1. Life and works.
Following Magnusson & Goring (1990), William Cuthbert Faulkner (1897-1962), who changed the spelling of his last name upon the publication of his first book, was born on September 25,
1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, He came from an old southern family and grew up in
Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner’s father was the business manager of the University of Mississippi in the town of Oxford, and his mother was a literary woman who encouraged Faulkner and his three brothers to read. As a result William always demonstrated artistic talent at a young age, drawing and writing poetry, but around the sixth grade he lost interest in studies. Hence he dropped out in his sophomore year, and took a series of odd jobs while writing poetry.
Yet, his earliest literary efforts were romantic and conscientiously modelled on English poets such as Burns, Thomson, Housman, and Swinburne. While still in his youth, he made the acquaintance of two individuals who would play an important role in his future: a childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham, and a literary mentor, Phil Stone. Faulkner was a good student. In
1918, his high school girlfriend, Estelle Oldham, married another man, and Faulk ner left
Mississippi. Then he joined the British Royal Air Force (RAF), but World War I ended before he finished his training in Canada, and he returned to Mississippi.
Though he had seen no combat in his wartime military service, upon returning to Oxford in December 1918, he allowed others to believe he had. Then in 1919 he enrolled at the University of Mississippi in Oxford under a special provision for war veterans, even though he had never graduated from high school. There he told many stories of his adventures in the RAF, most of which were highly exaggerated or patently untrue, including injuries that had left him in constant pain and with a silver plate in his head. At the same time he temporarily worked for a New York bookstore, a New Orleans newspaper, The New Republic and in the campus newspaper, the Mississippian.
While a student at Ole Miss, In the fall of 1920, Faulkner helped found a dramatic club on campus called “The Marionettes,” for which he wrote a one-act play titled The Marionettes but which was never staged, but after three semesters of study at Ole Miss, he dropped out in November 1920. Then Faulkner sailed from New Orleans to Europe, arriving in Italy where he published his first poems and short stories for the university annual, The Marble Faun (1924).
In January 1925, Faulkner moved back to New Orleans and centered around The Double
Dealer, a literary magazine whose credits include the first published works of Hart Crane,
Ernest Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren, and Edmund Wilson, backed up by the figure of Sherwood Anderson. Then in August 1925, he settled down in Paris where he spent much of his time and would inspire most of his novels. Also, he travelled to England and then returned to the United States in December the same year.
Again in New Orleans his brief service in the RAF would serve him in his written fiction, particularly in his first novel, Soldier’s Pay (1926). Then he began working on his second novel, Mosquitoes (1927), a satirical novel with characters are namely based upon his literary milieu in New Orleans which was considered as weak by the critics. Hence Faulkner considered some advice Anderson had given him, on writing about his native region. In doing so, he drew upon both regional geography and family history, partic ularly his great-grandfather’s Civil War and post-war exploits so as to create “Yocona” County, later renamed “Yoknapatawpha.”
In 1929, Faulkner eventually married Estelle Oldham Franklin, who had divorced her first husband after having two children. In the same year Faulkner published Sartoris (1929), a description of a family set in the South after World War I, and The Sound and the Fury (1929), a book that opens with the interior monologue of a developmentally disabled mute character. In this work he uses for the first time his monologue technique. His next book, As I Lay Dying (1930) featured 59 different interior monologues told in the stream-of-conscious style. The novel focuses on an aristocratic family and on lower-class farm laborers from southern Yoknapatawpha County.
In the same year, Faulkner saw the first national publication of a short story he had written, A Rose for Emily in Forum magazine. It would be followed that year by Honor in American Mercury, Thrift, and Red Leaves, both in the Saturday Evening Post. Over the coming years, as sales of his novels sagged, he would write numerous short stories for publication, especially in the Saturday Evening Post, as a principal means of financial support.
In 1931 Faulkner had to turn his attention to making money and earlier that year, he had written Sanctuary (1931), a novel which Faulkner later claimed in an introduction to deliberately make money. The novel, which features the rape and kidnaping of an Ole Miss coed, Temple Drake, by a sinister bootlegger named Popeye, shocked and horrified readers, particularly in Oxford. As a result, because of its sordid subject the novel was immediately turned down by the publisher and Faulkner had financial problems. So he had to take working nights at a power plant, sold short stories to magazines and worked as a Hollywood screenwriter.
In the same year, Faulkner’s first collection of short stories, These 13 , would be published and he began writing a novel tentatively titled Dark House, which would feature a man of uncertain racial lineage who, as an orphaned child, was named Joe Christmas. In this, Faulkner’s first
major exploration of race, he examines the lives of outcasts in Yoknapatawpha County, including Joanna Burden, the granddaughter and sister of civil rights activists gunned down in the town square. The novel would be finally published as Light in August (1932) and broke with traditional fiction since it shows how racism poisoned the white community of the South.
In April 1934, Faulkner published, Docto r Martino and Other Stories, a second collection of stories which was followed in the same year by the non-Yoknapatawpha novel Pylon (1935). This novel was inspired apparently by the death of Captain Merle Nelson during an air show on February 14, 1934, at the inauguration of an airport in New Orleans. Back in Oxford in January
1936, Faulkner had to stay for some days at Wright’s Sanatarium to recover from his drinking
binges. In October the same year he published a new novel called Absalom, Absalom! (1936), which alluded to King David’s lament over his dead son in the Old Testament and challenged the traditional form of fiction as Light in August did.
In 1937 Faulkner began working on a new novel, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem which would consist of two short novellas with two completely separate casts of characters appearing alternately: The Wild Palms and Old Man. Next year (1938), he published The Unvanquished , a novel consisting of seven stories, six of which had originally appeared in an earlier form in The Saturday Evening Post. The novel tells the earlier history of the Sartoris family during and immediately after the Civil War, focusing especially on Bayard Sartoris, son of the legendary Colonel John Sartoris who, like Faulkner’s real-life great-grandfather, was gunned down in the street by a former business partner. In the fall of 1938 in New York Faulkner began writing a short story, Barn Burning, but it was never finished. In January 1939 If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem was published under the title The Wild Palms (1939) followed by the trilogy, The Hamlet (1940).
Throughout 1941, Faulkner spent much of his time writing and reworking stories and in 1942 he published Go Down, Moses and Other Stories, a novel which spans more than 100 years in the history of Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner’s reputation received a significant boost with the publication of The Portable Faulkner (1946), which included his many stories set in Yoknapatawpha county. Three years later, in 1949, he won the Nobel Prize for literature, two National Book Awards for his Collected Stories (1950) and A Fable (1954), and a Pulitzer Prize in 1955. During his last years, he was writer in residence at the University of Virginia from
1957- 58 and lectured frequently on university campuses. Faulkner’s later works included The
Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962). Eventually, when he was 55, he died of a heart attack in his beloved Mississippi.
4.4.2. Main themes and style.
The narrative of Faulkner is characterised by his themes and style. First of all, the main themes of his novels are closely associated with his own experiences and family background since he grew up in the South, for instance, the evils in modern society, racism, and a deep concern with his native South due to the decay of the old South and the emergence of ruthless and brash newcomers. Despite the fact of not having graduated from high school, never received a college degree, living in a small town in the poorest state in the nation, and balancing a growing family of dependents and financial ruin, Faulkner was defined as a southern regionalist writer during the Great Depression in the 1930s.
In an attempt to create a saga of his own, Faulkner has invented a host of characters typical of the imaginary Yoknapatawpha County and its inhabitants, which shows the historical growth and subsequent decadence of the South. His characters show a combination of violence and passivity in the human story of the historical drama with a code of courage and honour duty. Their theme and technique shows a distortion of time through the use of the inner monologue, as in The Sound and the Fury (1929), in which we can see the downfall of the Compson family through the minds of several characters; in Sanctuary (1931), which reads about the degeneration of Temple Drake, a young girl from a distinguished southern family.
Also, in Requiem For A Nun (1951), Faulkner centered on the courtroom trial of a Negro woman who had once been a party to Temple Drake’ debauchery; in Light in August (1932), where prejudice is shown to be most destructive when it is internalized, as in Joe Christmas, who believes, though there is no proof of it, that one of his parents was a Negro. The theme of racial prejudice is brought up again in Absalom, Absalom! (1936) , in which a young man is rejected by his father and brother because of his mixed blood. Finally, Faulkner’s most outspoken moral evaluation of the relationship and the problems between Negroes and whites is to be found in Intruder In the Dust (1948).
As we can see, his characters represent various levels of the theme the South and racism. This fact, in combination with a special technique of narration, the stream of consciousness, gives us a psychological profile of the characters from different points of view (Kaleidoscopically shift). His narrative is defined as complex and varied since his stories have a focus shift effect, making the scene be unfolded and passed around several characters in space; a system of screens and obstacles, and delayed disclosure; a great number and variety of events reported; and also, the use of unsyntactical, nefarious sentences so as to puzzle the reader.
5. EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS IN LANGUAGE TEACHING.
Literature, and therefore, literary language is one of the most salient aspect of educational activity. In classrooms all kinds of literary language (poetry, drama, novel, prose, periodicals, newspapers, pamphlets), either spoken or written, is going on for most of the time. Yet, handling literary productions in the past and, in particular, American Literature, makes relevant the analysis of the works so as to understand the social, political, economical and cultural situation of the period, for our purpose, the early twentieth century.
Currently, action research groups attempt to bring about change in classroom learning and teaching through a focus on literary production under two premises. First, because they believe learning is an integral aspect of any form of activity and second, because education at all levels must be conceived in terms of literature. The basis for these assumptions is to be found in an attempt, through the use of various modes of literary forms, to develop understanding of students’ shared but diverse social and physical environment.
Learning involves a process of transformation of participation itself which has far reaching implications on the role of the teacher in the teaching- learning relationship. This means that literary genres are an analytic tool and that teachers need to identify the potential contributions and potential limitations of them before we can make good use of the genre analysis techniques: the stream of consciousness, the kaleidoscopic point of view, and the presentation of different scenes, among others. We must bear in mind that most students will continue their studies at university and there, they will have to handle successfully all kind of genres, especially poetry and fiction ones within our current framework.
But how do twentieth-century American literature tie in with the new curriculum? American literature may be approached in linguistic terms, regarding form and function (morphology, lexis, structure, form) and also from a cross-curricular perspective (Sociology, History, English, French, Spanish Language and Literature). Yet, Spanish students are expected to know about the American culture and its influence on Europe (Hemingway’s works about Pamplona in Spain and Madrid during the Spanish Civil War) since students are required to know about the world culture and history. So, American literature is easily approached by means of the subjects of History, Language and Literature by establishing a paralelism with the Spanish one (age, literature forms, events).
In addition, one of the objectives of teaching the English language is to provide good models of almost any kind of literary productions for future studies. Following van Ek & Trim (2001), ‘the
learners can perform, within the limits of the resources available to them, those writing (and oral) tasks which adult citizens in general may wish, or be called upon, to carry out in their private capacity or as members of the general public’ when dealing with their future regarding personal and professional life.
Moreover, nowadays new technologies may provide a new direction to la nguage teaching as they set more appropriate context for students to experience the target culture. Present-day approaches deal with a communicative competence model in which first, there is an emphasis on significance over form, and secondly, motivation and involvement are enhanced by means of new technologies. Hence literary productions may be approched in terms of films and drama representations in class, among others, and in this case, by means of books: novels, short story, or poetry, among others.
Hence it makes sense to examine relevant figures of the Lost Generation, such as S. Fitzgerald, J. Steinbeck and E. Hemingway, and W. Faulkner, among others because of their relevant contributions not only to American literature, but also to European literature as well. Who has not read or seen Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby (1925), Steinbeick’s The Red Pony (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) and For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940); or Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929)? As we can see, American literature is so close to our culture and, in particular, to most of our students through the media: TV, films, radio, books, and magazines, among others.
Actually, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) was taken to the cinema by a John Ford’s version from 1940 as well as a movie version of The Red Pony (1937) in 1949for which Steinbeck wrote the screenplay. Among Steinbeck’s other film scripts is The Pearl, the story for Alfred Hitchcock’s film Lifeboat (1944), and script for Viva Zapata! (1952), directed by Elia Kazan. Also, The Moon is Down (1942), about resistance movement in a small town occupied by the Nazis, has a film version of the book, starring Henry Travers, Cedric Hardwicke, and Lee J. Cobb, which was shot on the set of How Green Was My Valley (1941), which depicted a Welsh mining village. Also, Faulkner wrote two critically acclaimed films, both starring Humphrey Bogart: To Have and have Not, based on an Ernest Hemingway novel, and The Big Sleep, which was based on a mystery by Raymond Chandler.
So, the success partly lies in the way the language becomes real to the users, feeling themselves really in the language. Some of this motivational force is brought about by intervening in authentic communicative events. Otherwise, we have to recreate as much as possible the whole cultural environment in the classroom. This is to be achieved within the framework of the
European Council (1998) and, in particular, the Spanish Educational System which establishes a common reference framework for the teaching of foreign languages where students are intended to carry out several communication tasks with specific communicative goals, for instance, how to produce a literary text (oral or written): writing a chapter of a novel, a terror story, a poem, acting out in a theatre play, representing a film scene orally, and so on.
The knowledge about American culture (history and literature) should become part of every literary student’s basic competence (B.O.E., 2004). There are hidden influences at work beneath the textual surface: these may be sociocultural, inter and intratextual. The literary student has to discover these, and wherever necessary apply them in further examination. The main aims that our currently educational system focuses on are mostly sociocultural, to facilitate the study of cultural themes, as our students must be aware of their current social reality within the European framework.
6. CONCLUSION.
On reviewing the Lost Generation literary figures in the twentieth Americ an literature, we have reviewed the prevailing ideologies of the day, such as the questions of postwar years, the great American dream, the rural California, the question of man and nature’s forces, or the tragic universe of the South, which implies racism and decadence. But why these writers and not other contemporary American authors? They are the most relevant ones since they share common features such as winning the Nobel Prize for literature (Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner), using new realism techniques (stream of consciousness) and themes (postwar years, psychological profile of characters, tragic nature of man), and having lived the difficult experience of being expatriated from their country and enjoyed the European lifestyle.
Having lived in the same period, the four of them used the American novel as a literary means to transmit their vision of reality. The impact of the war on the group of writers in the Lost Generation is aptly demonstrated and their innovations challenged assumptions about writing and expression, and paved the way for subsequent generations of writers. Then, on escaping from reality, these authors provided a new direction to Amercian literature and began to lose their fear to the Victorian puritanical morality. So, they introduced new techniques in American fiction which included a simpler writing style with more emphasis on the form than on the story, special use of time in which past, present and future were mixed together as in a dream
(Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe). Yet, after the World War I a new mood of anger entered the work of young writers and this is what we called the decade of the Lost Generation (1920s). During this period many of these intellectuals moved to foreign countries and stayed there since they were deeply disappointed with American society.
So, on examining all this information we have addressed a historical background before and after the two World Wars so as to provide an overall view of the context in which these authors lived and produced their works together with a literary background in Chapter 3 with the aim of going further into the main literary productions of the Lost Generation and, in particular, into the literary styles of realism, modernism and post-modernism. In Chapter 4 we have linked their lives to history so as to understand the themes and style of their most outstanding works. Finally, after examining the main educational implications in language teaching regarding the introduction of this issue in the classroom setting, we take the current conclusion so as to put an end to this presentation by offering the bibliographical references.
So far, we have attempted to provide the reader in this presentation with a historical, literary and cultural background on the vast amount of literature productions in the twentieth century literature in the United States. This information is relevant for language learners, even ESO and Bachillerato students, who do not automatically establish similiarities between British and Spanish literary works. So, learners need to have these associations brought to their attention in cross-curricular settings. As we have seen, understanding how literature reflects the main historical events of a country is important to students, who are expected to be aware of the richness of English literature, both in the United States and on the European continent.
7. BIBLIOGRAPHY.
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B.O.E. 2004. Consejería de Educación y Cultura. Decreto N.º 117/2004, de 23 de enero. Currículo de Bachillerato en la Comunidad Autónoma de la Región de Murcia.
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