AMERICAN LITERATURE

COURSE NOTES
Second Semester
2015-2016

Literary Modernism (1914-1945) was a response to a "sense of social breakdown

(reaction to WWI); the world was perceived as "fragmented (pattern of construction out
of fragments, life was fragmented; the point of view was remote/detached from the
subject - ironic but not unfeeling); the poetry was very allusive, and many authors/artists
wondered about the role of literature, poetry, art, in a world falling apart).

Some characteristics found in literary works:

Alienation from society and loneliness

Procrastination/An inability to act
Agonized recollection of the past
Fear of death and the appearance of death
Inability to feel or express love
Man creating his own myths within his mind to fall back upon

Formal features of narrative:

Experimental nature
Lack of traditional chronological narrative (discontinuous narrative)
Break from traditional forms (fragmentation)
Moving from one level of the narrative to another
A number of different narrators (multiple narrative points of view)
Self-reflexive about the act of writing and the nature of literature (meta-narrative)
Use of interior monologue technique
Use of the stream-of-consciousness technique
Focus on a characters consciousness and subconscious

Major themes emerging in the fiction of Hemingway, Dos Passos, Hughes,

Hurston, Larsen, Wolfe, Wright, Faulkner, Steinbeck, etc.:

- violence and alienation

- historical discontinuity
- decadence and decay
- loss and despair
- rejection of history
- race relations
- unavoidable change
- sense of place, local color
 I. The Lost Generation

WWI highlighted alarming aspects of twentieth-century innovation; however, Paris still

maintained its reputation as the capital of bohemian culture, a city famous for its
philosophical intrigues and artistic inspiration, its avant-garde tastes and flamboyant
personalities. During the inter-war period Montparnasse became the center of the citys
artistic community, its bars and cafs resounding to the pulse of hot jazz music and
intellectual debate. All this color and creativity was so different from the austere
materialism of American cities (mainly New York and Chicago), as depicted by
Naturalist writers like Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair. The Parisian
cultural scene was more permissive of literature which confronted established mores and
codes of behavior; therefore, culturally, as well as morally, Paris in the 1920s remained
one of the most exciting and sophisticated cities in the world.
The lost generation, the post-World War I generation, refers to a group of U.S. writers
who established their literary reputations in the 1920s. The term stems from a remark
made by Gertrude Stein to Ernest Hemingway, You are all a lost generation.
Hemingway used it as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (1926), a novel that captures the
attitudes of a hard-drinking, fast-living set of disillusioned young expatriates in postwar
Paris. The phrase (and Hemingways book) depicted this generation as characterized by
doomed youth, hedonism, uncompromising creativity, and woundedboth literally and
metaphoricallyby the experience of war.
This community of American expatriates in Paris produced a body of work of great depth
and range, which exerted a great influence. The generation was lost in the sense that its
inherited values were no longer relevant in the postwar world and because of its spiritual
alienation from a United States that seemed to its members to be hopelessly provincial,
materialistic, and emotionally barren (E. Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos
Passos, E.E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, Hart Crane, etc). Still, they were never a
literary school. In the 1930s, as these writers turned in different directions, their works
lost the distinctive stamp of the postwar period. The last representative works of the era
were Fitzgeralds Tender Is the Night (1934) and Dos Passos The Big Money (1936).
 Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

He was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a conservative upper-middle-class
suburb of Chicago. He graduated from high school in 1917 and worked as a reporter for
the Kansas City Star. Hemingway sailed to Europe in May 1918 to serve as a volunteer
ambulance driver for the Italian Red Cross during World War I. Within weeks, he suffered
a serious injury and recovered in a hospital in Milan, where he had a romantic
relationship with a nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky. This incident provided the inspiration for
his novel A Farewell to Arms (1929). When the nineteen-year-old Hemingway returned
home in 1919, his parents did not understand the psychological trauma he had suffered
during the war, and they urged him to get a job or go to college (Soldiers Home draws
on his difficulties in coping with his parents and friends romanticized ideals of war).
Hemingway began working for the Toronto Star; he became the European correspondent
and moved to Paris in 1921. There, he became friends with the poet Ezra Pound, the
writer Gertrude Stein, and other expatriate writers and artists living in postwar Paris.
Hemingways reputation began to grow both as a journalist and as an author of fiction.
His novel The Sun Also Rises, published in1926, established him as one of the preeminent
writers of his day.
Hemingway remained based in Paris, but he traveled widely for the fishing, bullfighting,
skiing, and hunting that by then had become part of his life and formed the background
for much of his writing. In 1928, he moved to Key West, Florida, where he lived for over
a decade. In 1929, he published the novel A Farewell to Arms, a grim but lyrical novel of
great power, which combined a love story with a war story.
In 1937, Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War for the North
American Newspaper Alliance. His novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, based on his
experiences in Spain, was published in 1940, after he had moved to Havana, Cuba. Set
during the Spanish Civil War, it is the story of Robert Jordan, an American volunteer who
is sent to join a guerrilla band behind the Nationalist lines in the Guadarrama Mountains.
Through dialogue, flashbacks, and stories, Hemingway offers telling and vivid profiles of
the Spanish character and unsparingly depicts the cruelty and inhumanity stirred up by
the civil war.
In 1953, Hemingway received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Old Man and the
Sea (1952), a short heroic novel about an old Cuban fisherman who, after an extended
struggle, hooks and boats a giant marlin only to have it eaten by voracious sharks during
the long voyage home. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.
Hemingways characters plainly embody his own values and view of life. The main
characters of The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls are
young men whose strength and self-confidence nevertheless coexist with a sensitivity that
leaves them deeply scarred by their wartime experiences. War was for Hemingway a
potent symbol of the world, which he viewed as complex, filled with moral ambiguities,
and offering almost unavoidable pain, hurt, and destruction. To survive in such a world,
and perhaps emerge victorious, one must conduct oneself with honor, courage,
endurance, and dignity, a set of principles known as the Hemingway code. To behave
well in such trying circumstances, is to show grace under pressure and constitutes in
itself a kind of victory, a theme clearly established in The Old Man and the Sea.
Hemingways style differs distinctively from that of writers before him. His prose is
extremely spare, succinct, and seemingly very direct, although his speakers tend to give
the impression that they are leaving a tremendous amount unsaid. Modern prose fiction
continues to be heavily influenced by Hemingways technique in this regard. He wished
to strip his own use of language of inessentials, ridding it of all traces of verbosity,
embellishment, and sentimentality. In striving to be as objective and honest as possible,
Hemingway employed the device of describing a series of actions by using short, simple
sentences from which all comment or emotional rhetoric has been eliminated. These
sentences are composed largely of nouns and verbs, have few adjectives and adverbs, and
rely on repetition and rhythm for much of their effect. The resulting concise, concentrated
prose is concrete and unemotional yet is often resonant and capable of conveying great
irony through understatement. Hemingways use of dialogue was similarly fresh, simple,
and natural-sounding.
The Sun Also Rises
The novel portrays the lives of the members of the so-called Lost Generation, a group
of men and women whose early adulthood was consumed by World War I. The Great War
set new standards for death and immorality in war, and it shattered many peoples beliefs
in the traditional values of love, faith, and manhood. Without these long-held notions to
rely on, members of the generation that fought and worked in the war suffered great
moral and psychological aimlessness. The futile search for meaning in the wake of the
Great War shapes The Sun Also Rises. Although World War I is seldom mentioned in the
novel, it hangs like a shadow over its characters. Jake Barnes and his friends and
acquaintances believe in very little; they are always restless, always wandering, looking
for a constant change of scenery, as if looking for an escape. There is a sense that Jake
and his generation don't belong anywhere.
Major Themes in The Sun Also Rises
The Aimlessness of the Lost Generation
No longer able to rely on the traditional beliefs that gave life meaning, the men
and women who experienced the war became psychologically and morally lost,
and they wandered aimlessly in a world that appeared meaningless.
Male Insecurity
World War I forced a radical reevaluation of what it meant to be masculine. The
prewar ideal of the brave, stoic soldier had little relevance in the context of the
brutal trench warfare of the war. Survival depended far more upon luck than upon
bravery. Traditional notions of what it meant to be a man were thus undermined
by the realities of the war.

Works by Ernest Hemingway:

Short Stories: Three Stories & Ten Poems (1923); In Our Time (1924/1925); Men
Without Women (1927); Winner Take Nothing (1933); The Fifth Column and the First
Forty-nine Stories (1938); The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories (1961).
Novels:
The Torrents of Spring : a Romantic Novel in Honor of the Passing of a Great Race
(1926); The Sun Also Rises (1926); A Farewell to Arms (1929); To Have and Have Not
(1937); For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940); Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), and
The Old Man and the Sea (1952).
 John Dos Passos (1896-1970)

American writer, one of the major novelists of the post-World War I lost generation,
whose reputation as a social historian and as a radical critic of the quality of American
life rests primarily on his trilogy U.S.A. The son of a wealthy lawyer of Portuguese
descent, Dos Passos graduated from Harvard University (1916) and volunteered as an
ambulance driver in World War I. His early works were basically portraits of the artist
drawing back from the shock of his encounter with a brutal world; among these was the
bitter antiwar novel Three Soldiers (1921).
Extensive travel in Spain and other countries while working as a newspaper
correspondent during the postwar years enlarged his sense of history, sharpened his social
perception, and confirmed his radical sympathies. Gradually, his early subjectivism was
subordinated to a larger and tougher objective realism.
In Manhattan Transfer (1925), Dos Passos builds on the successes of Three Soldiers to
deliver his first work that is grandly ambitious in both theme and form. The novel paints
a panorama of the entirety of New York City. Like Fitzgeralds The Great
Gatsby, Manhattan Transfer captures the rhythm of the Jazz Age. The standard narrative
of the authors previous works is fragmented in Manhattan Transfer, interspersed with
newspaper headlines and song lyrics and aesthetic vignettes. There is no single dominant
character; the characters sparkling with hope in one scene quickly lose their luster in
anotherthe city always wins. However, Dos Passos infuses the atmosphere with such
verve and tenacity that what emerges is a tribute to the myriad toilers who have ever tried
to make it in New York City.
In the novel, Dos Passos displays a masterful ear for the street vernacularthe precise
diction that makes New York City a culture all its own. The authors strong European
sensibilities ideally suit him to record the citys multitude of immigrant
communities. Manhattan Transfer establishes Dos Passos as a writer with the same
affinity for describing the city as William Faulkner possesses for describing the country.
Manhattan Transfer is a novel which attempts to do the impossible to encompass an
entire city and an entire era. The breadth of its vision and the depth of its concerns
distinguish it, along with Dos Passos's jazz-inspired writing style. In Manhattan Transfer,
the city is viewed as a deconstructed totality, fragmented into various angles and vantage
points, like a film. The writers reliance on visual imagery and famed skipping of
transitions suggest the shots and jump cuts of cinema; his insistence on remaining on the
outside of a given event, withholding certain key details, lend the writing a kind of
documentary flavor. His prose captures his restless energy as a stylist: the objective and
the subjective, the macro and the micro continually collide and interact; both the city and
the characters who inhabit it are constantly in flux.
The execution of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1927
profoundly affected Dos Passos, who had participated in the losing battle to win their
pardon. The crisis crystallized his image of the United States as two nationsone of
the rich and privileged and one of the poor and powerless.
His major work is the U.S.A. trilogy: The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big
Money (1936). This trilogy portrays the United States as a country of two nations. The
42nd Parallel covers the period from 1900 up to the war; 1919 deals with the war and the
critical year of the Treaty of Versailles; and The Big Money depicts the boom of the 20s
and the bust of the 30s.
Dos Passos used the stream-of-consciousness technique, and reinforced the histories of
his fictional characters with a sense of real history conveyed by the interpolated devices
of newsreels, (impressionistic collections of slogans, popular song lyrics, newspaper
headlines and extracts from political speeches). He employed this experimental cut-up
techniqueweaving together various elements, including newsreel headlines, fiction,
biography, and autobiographyto present a fast-paced portrait of what he saw as a
society in decline, painting a vast landscape of American culture during the first decades
of the twentieth century. Yet another dimension is provided by his camera-eye
technique: brief, poetic, personal reminiscences. This fragmented style reflects the Lost
Generation's uncertainty and search for self in a world where the future was no longer
guaranteed. The U.S.A. trilogy describes the eternal, and often unsuccessful, quest for the
American dream. U.S.A. was followed by a less ambitious trilogy, District of
Columbia (Adventures of a Young Man, 1939; Number One, 1943; The Grand
Design, 1949), which chronicles Dos Passos further disillusion with the labor movement,
radical politics, and New Deal liberalism.
Main Themes in Manhattan Transfer
Capitalism
More than anything else, Manhattan Transfer can be read as a fervent critique of
American capitalism.
Love
Most of the characters in the novel are searching, in one way or another, for love.
Dos Passos suggests, through his writing, that what unifies the disparate
characters of his vast tapestry is a need to love and be loved.
War
World War I obviously plays a major role in Manhattan Transfer; however, the
returning soldiers in the novel are not so much haunted by memories of the war --
as dismayed at their homecoming (few jobs, and the battle that really matters in
New York is between classes, not between nations).
The Press
Major historical events are communicated through newspaper headlines in
Manhattan Transfer. Newspapers are one of the ways in which characters in the
novel and inhabitants of the city are connected: the text of the various newspapers
creates a network that connects one moment to another, unifying the characters,
historical events, and subplots into a cohesive whole.
The City
The city is a character in itself, perhaps the hero of the novel, a tragic hero.
 II. The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was the name given to the cultural, social, and artistic explosion
that took place in Harlem between the end of World War I and the middle of the 1930s.
During this period Harlem was a cultural center, drawing black writers, artists, musicians,
photographers, poets, and scholars. Many had come from the South, fleeing its oppressive
caste system in order to find a place where they could freely express their talents. Among
those artists whose works achieved recognition were Langston Hughes and Claude
McKay, Countee Cullen and Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston and Jean
Toomer, Walter White and James Weldon Johnson. W.E.B. Du Bois encouraged talented
artists to leave the South. Du Bois, then the editor of The Crisis magazine, the journal of
the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), was at
the height of his fame and influence in the black community. The Crisis published the
poems, stories, and visual works of many artists of the period.
The Renaissance was more than a literary movement: It involved racial pride, fueled in
part by the militancy of the "New Negro" demanding civil and political rights. The
Renaissance incorporated jazz and the blues, attracting whites to Harlem speakeasies,
where interracial couples danced. While it may have contributed to a certain relaxation of
racial attitudes among young whites, perhaps its greatest impact was to reinforce race
pride among blacks. Therefore, the Harlem Renaissance, as a literary, artistic, and
intellectual movement, kindled a new black cultural identity. Its essence was summed up
by critic and teacher Alain Locke in 1926 when he declared that through art, Negro life
is seizing its first chances for group expression and self determination. Harlem became
the center of a spiritual coming of age in which Lockes New Negro transformed
social disillusionment to race pride (as Langston Hughes put it, it was about the
expression of our individual dark-skinned selves)

Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

He was an American poet, novelist, and playwright whose African-American themes

made him a primary contributor to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. As a teenager in
Cleveland, Ohio, he first began to write poetry, and one of his teachers first introduced
him to the poetry of Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman, both whom Hughes would later
cite as primary influences. Hughes was also a regular contributor to his school's literary
magazine. Hughes graduated from high school in 1920 and spent the following year in
Mexico with his father. Around this time, Hughes's poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"
was published in The Crisis magazine and was highly praised. In 1921 Hughes returned
to the United States and enrolled at Columbia University where he studied briefly, and
during which time he quickly became a part of Harlem's growing cultural movement, the
Harlem Renaissance. But Hughes dropped out of Columbia in 1922 and worked various
odd jobs around New York for the following year, before signing on as a steward on a
freighter that took him to Africa and Spain. He left the ship in 1924 and lived for a brief
time in Paris, where he continued to develop and publish his poetry.
In November 1924, Hughes returned to the United States and worked various jobs. In
1925, his poem The Weary Blues won first prize in the Opportunity magazine literary
competition, and Hughes also received a scholarship to attend Lincoln University, in
Pennsylvania. His first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926. The
book had popular appeal and established both his poetic style and his commitment to
black themes and heritage. Hughes was also among the first to use jazz rhythms and
dialect to depict the life of urban blacks in his work. He published a second volume of
poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew, in 1927.
Jazz poetry is a literary genre defined as poetry necessarily informed by jazz musicthat
is, poetry in which the poet responds to and writes about jazz. Jazz poetry, like the music
itself, encompasses a variety of forms, rhythms, and sounds.
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway . . .
He did a lazy sway . . .
To the tune o those Weary Blues.
from "The Weary Blues"
After his graduation from Lincoln in 1929, Hughes published his first novel, Not Without
Laughter. The book was a commercial success. During the 1930s, Hughes frequently
traveled on lecture tours, in the United States abroad to the Soviet Union, Japan, and
Haiti. He continued to write and publish poetry and prose during this time, and in 1934 he
published his first collection of short stories, The Ways of White Folks. In 1937 he served
as a war correspondent for several American newspapers during the Spanish Civil War.
He published his first autobiography, The Big Sea, in 1940. He also began contributing a
column to the Chicago Defender, for which he created a comic character named Jesse B.
Semple, better known as "Simple," a black Everyman that Hughes used to further explore
urban, working-class black themes, and to address racial issues ("Simple" would later be
the focus of several of Hughes's books and plays.
In 1949 he wrote a play, Troubled Island, and during the 1950s and 1960s, he published
several books in his "Simple" series, another anthology of his poetry, and the second part
of his autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander.
Hughes is particularly known for his insightful, colorful portrayals of black life in
America from the twenties through the sixties. He wrote novels, short stories and plays,
as well as poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the
influence it had on his writing, as in his book-length poem Montage of a Dream
Deferred (1951). His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic
contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike other black poets of the
period, Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common
experience of black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that
reflected their actual culture, including both their suffering and their love of music,
laughter, and language itself. Donald B. Gibson noted that Hughes differed from most of
his predecessors among black poets . . . in that he addressed his poetry to the people,
specifically to black people. During the twenties when most American poets were turning
inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers,
Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to
anyone who had the ability simply to read
 Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)

She was an outstanding folklorist and anthropologist who worked to record the stories
and tales of many cultures, including her own African-American heritage.
Hurston was the daughter of two former slaves. Her father, John Hurston, was a pastor,
and he moved the family to Florida when Hurston was very young. Following the death
of her mother, Lucy Ann (Potts) Hurston, in 1904, and her father's subsequent remarriage,
Hurston lived with an assortment of family members for the next few years.
To support herself and finance her efforts to get an education, Hurston worked a variety
of jobs, including being a maid. In 1920, she earned an associate degree from Howard
University. She published one of her earliest works in the university's newspaper. A few
years later, she moved to New York City's Harlem neighborhood, where she became a
part of the area's thriving cultural scene. Living in Harlem in the 1920s, Hurston
befriended Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, among others. It is believed that her
apartment was a popular spot for social gatherings.
In 1927, she returned to Florida to collect African-American folk tales, later published in
a collection entitled Mules and Men (1935). Also in the mid-1930s, Hurston explored the
fine arts through a number of different projects, and wrote several plays, including The
Great Day and From Sun to Sun.
Hurston released her first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine, in 1934. Two years later, she
received a Guggenheim fellowship, which allowed her to work on what would become
her most famous work: Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). She wrote the novel while
traveling in Haiti, where she also studied local voodoo practices. That same year, she
spent time in Jamaica conducting anthropological research.
In 1942, Hurston published her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. This personal
work was well-received by critics, but her life and career soon began to falter.
Despite all of her accomplishments, Hurston struggled financially and personally during
her final decade. She kept writing, but she had difficulty getting her work published. The
once-famous writer and folklorist died poor and alone on January 28, 1960, and was
buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida.
Their Eyes Were Watching God
This novel is the story of Janie Crawford's search for love, told in the form of a frame. In
the first few pages, Janie returns to her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, after nearly two
years absence. Her neighbors are curious to know where she has been and what has
happened to her. Janie tells her story to her friend Pheoby Watson, and after the story is
over, the novelist returns to Janie's back steps. Thus, the story, which actually spans
nearly 40 years of Janie's life, is "framed" by an evening visit between two friends. The
story that Janie tells is about love how Janie sought love in four relationships.
The most prevalent theme in the novel is Janie's search for unconditional, true, and
fulfilling love. She experiences different kinds of love throughout her life.
As a result of her quest for this love, Janie gains her own independence and personal
freedom, which makes her a true heroine in the novel. Because Janie strives for her own
independence, others tend to judge her simply because she is daring enough to achieve
her own autonomy.
Hurston created the character of Janie during a time in which African-American female
heroines were uncommon in literature. In 1937 when the novel was originally published,
females experienced fewer opportunities than they do today. Hurston chose to portray
Janie as a strong, independent woman, unlike most African-American females during her
time. Perhaps Hurston characterized Janie as capable and courageous to empower her
readers and to show them that opportunities do exist for all women; they just have to
embrace them.

Jean Toomer (1894-1967)

An important figure in African-American literature, Jean Toomer (18941967) was born

in Washington, DC, the grandson of the first governor of African-American descent in the
United States. He was a poet, playwright, novelist, and short-story writer. His most
famous work, Cane, was published in 1923 and was hailed by critics for its literary
experimentation and portrayal of African-American characters and culture; it was an
inspiration for many Harlem Renaissance writers. Toomer maintained that: I would not
consider it libelous for anyone to refer to me as a colored man, but I have not lived as
one, nor do I really know whether there is colored blood in me or not. His family also
had European lineage, and growing up, he moved between African-American and white
neighborhoods, and attended both all-white and all-black schools. As an adult, he
generally did not admit that he had African-American heritage; he tried not to be seen as
an African-American writer, and he chose to pass as white, perhaps as a way of escaping
the restrictions of racial identity. Nevertheless, throughout his life, he insisted that he
wanted to be thought of as "simply an American. In 1921, he worked as a school
principal in Sparta, Georgia. The location inspired him to write Cane (1923), a novel that
uses a mix of poems and stories to address the realities and emotions of the African-
American experience. The bookconsidered a masterpiecebecame an emblem and
harbinger of the Harlem Renaissance, and is also considered an example of modernist
literature. However, Cane did not affect Toomer's determination not to be considered an
African-American writer. Later works he produced, many unpublished, did not focus on
African Americans; for instance, his poem Blue Meridian (1936) was about the desire
he had for people to come together as an American race.
The book's experiments with form brought respect from people around the world for its
characters, including rural Negroes who acted from habit and superstition; women who
were treated as objects in a culture that itself was struggling with its history of having
been slaves; and intellectuals who sought to reconcile their love of their own race with
the degradation in which they were forced to live.
Toomers writing has been praised extensively by critics; some have argued that his
"mysterious brand of Southern psychological realism has been matched only in the
best work of William Faulkner." Others maintain that Toomer is the first poet to unite
folk culture and the elite culture of the white avant-garde and is without doubt the
most important Black poet. Regarding his use of language, critics have pointed out that
The meaning of Cane is implicit in the arabesque pattern of imagery, the subtle
movement of symbolic actions and objects, the shifting rhythm of syntax and diction, and
the infrastructure of a cosmic consciousness. After the publication of Cane, Toomer
continued to write, but most of his work was rejected by publishers. He explored various
spiritual beliefs during his life; finally, he embraced the Quaker religion and lived his last
decade as a recluse. Toomer stopped writing literary works in 1950 and died in 1967.
 Nella Larsen (1891-1964)

Larsen was born to a Danish mother and a West Indian father. She studied for a year at
Fisk University, where she first experienced life within an all-black community, and later
audited classes at the University of Copenhagen (191012) in Denmark. Settling in New
York City, she graduated from nursing school and also became a childrens librarian. Her
marriage to a black physics professor and her friendship with Carl Van Vechten brought
her social prominence. In 1933 she and her husband were divorced, and after 1941 Larsen
worked as a nurse in a Brooklyn hospital until her death. Critics have noted that
Larsens racial ambivalence was exemplified by her attempts to negotiate two very
separate worlds and commented on Larsens simultaneous expressions of racial pride
and detachment.
Her first novel, Quicksand (1928), is about a young, headstrong biracial woman who
seeks love, acceptance, and a sense of purpose. In many ways, Quicksand combines
autobiography and fiction to produce what has been considered a critique of a society in
which self-expression and autonomy are not allowed, especially for [black] women.
Like Larsen herself, the main character of the novel, Helga Crane, is a mulatta, born to a
Danish mother and West Indian father. Cranes quest for both a cultural/racial and
personal/sexual identity takes her, as it did Larsen, first to the South, where Crane teaches
at Naxos, an all-black college, then to Chicago and New York City, and ultimately to
Denmark and back to New York. The episodic construction of the novel parallels
Cranes search for changes in her emotional and psychological states by moving to
different geographical locations. But, No single place measures up to her expectations
and needs, and as a result, Helga travels from place to place searching for something in
the external world that will bring her inner peace, satisfaction, and happiness. Scholars
have pointed out that The Harlem segments [of Quicksand] contain a richly detailed
portrait of place with a specific cultural context, the emergence of modern black New
York. One of the main themes is that of racial identity, of ideas of conflict with heritage
and a quest for place or identity. Helgas two visible heredities become the sign of her
dual cultural allegiances and her often contradictory impulses.
Larsens second novel, Passing (1929), continues to address the problem of the
marginal black woman of the middle class who is both unwilling to conform to a
circumscribed existence in the black world and unable to move freely in the white
world. The very choice of passing as a symbol or metaphor or deliverance for women
reflects Larsens failure to deal with the problem of marginality. Her second
novel, Passing (1929), centers on two light-skinned women, one of whom, Irene, marries
a black man and lives in Harlem, while the other, Clare, marries a white man but cannot
reject her black cultural ties. In Passing, Larsens main character, Clare Kendry, is able
to pass as a white woman and thus achieve middle-class status because she is married
to a white man. The conflict of the novel, however, revolves around a renewed friendship
between Kendry and her childhood friend Irene Redfield. Through Redfield, who is
involved in middle-class black society in Harlem, Kendry rediscovers her black cultural
roots. Ironically, both women have participated in a kind of passing: Kendry into the
white world, Redfield by adopting the values of white middle-class America.
In 1930, on the basis of both novels, Nella Larsen was the first black American woman to
be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in creative writing. This award provided the
financial support for her to leave for Europe, where she began work on two more novels,
which were never published. During the mid-1930s, she continued to write and move
among the interracial, bohemian, and intellectual literary circles of Greenwich
Village, but by 1939, she dropped out of all aspects of New York Citys literary and social
scenes. More than 30 years after her death in 1964, Larsens novels were reissued, and
Larsen began to achieve recognition as one of the most important writers of the Harlem
Renaissance. Feminist scholarship has begun to recognize that underlying the themes of
race is an important exploration of gender and that both themes serve Larsens larger
concern with personal identification. Critics have commented on her ability to capture
the spirit of a unique time for modern African-American writers.
 III. Richard Wright (1908-1960)

A novelist and short-story writer, Wright was among the first black American writers to
protest white treatment of blacks, particularly in his novel Native Son (1940) and in his
autobiography Black Boy (1945). He inaugurated the tradition of protest explored by
other black writers after World War II. He grew up in poverty and worked at a number of
jobs before he migrated north, to Chicago. After working in various unskilled jobs, he got
an opportunity to write through the Federal Writers Project. In 1932 he became a
member of the Communist Party, and in 1937 he went to New York City, where he
became Harlem editor of the Communist Daily Worker. His childhood experiences led
him to write about racial discrimination (his fiction was mainly about racial themes
concerning the plight of African Americans during the 19th and 20th centuries).
In 1938, he published a volume of novellas, Uncle Toms Children. His novel Native Son
(1940) is about a poor black young man, Bigger Thomas, accidentally kills a white girl,
and in the course of his ensuing flight his meaningless awareness of antagonism from a
white world becomes intelligible. In 1944, Wright left the Communist Party because of
political and personal differences.
Black Boy (1945) is a moving account of Wrights childhood and young manhood in the
South, depicting the extreme poverty of his childhood, his experience of white prejudice
and violence against blacks, and his growing awareness of his interest in literature.
After World War II, Wright settled in Paris as a permanent expatriate. The Outsider
(1953), acclaimed as the first American existential novel, warned that the black man had
awakened in a disintegrating society not ready to include him. Among his polemical
writings of that period was White Man, Listen! (1957), which was originally a series of
lectures given in Europe, and Eight Me (1961).
The second part of his autobiography, American Hunger, which narrates Wrights
experiences after moving to the North, was published posthumously in 1977. A novella,
Rites of Passage (1994), and an unfinished crime novel, A Fathers Law (2008), were
also published posthumously.
Native Son
Wright wanted his readers to understand the devastating effects of the social conditions in
which the main character, Bigger, was raised; he was not born a violent criminal; he was
a native son, a product of American culture and the violence and racism that permeated
it.
Main Theme: Racism (Oppressed and Oppressors)
Wrights exploration of Biggers psychological corruption offers a new
perspective on the oppressive effect racism had on the black population in 1930s
America. He and his family live in cramped conditions, enduring socially
enforced poverty and having little opportunity for education. Biggers resulting
attitude toward whites is a combination of powerful anger and powerful fear. He
conceives of whiteness as an overpowering and hostile force that is set against
him in life. The whites fail to perceive Bigger as an individual, and to him, the
whites are all the same, frightening and untrustworthy. Throughout the novel,
Wright illustrates the ways in which white racism forces blacks into a pressured
and dangerous state of mind. An important idea that emerges from Wrights
treatment of racism is the terrible inequity of the American criminal justice system
 of his time. Drawing inspiration from actual court cases of the1930s, he portrays
the American judiciary as an ineffectual pawn caught between the interests of the
media and the driving ambition of politicians. The outcome of Biggers case is
decided before it ever goes to court: in the vicious cycle of racism, a black man
who kills a white woman is guilty regardless of the factual circumstances of the
killing. Bigger receives neither a fair trial nor an opportunity to defend himself.
Black Boy is an autobiography of Wrights early life, and it examines Richard's tortured
years in the Jim Crow South from 1912 to 1927. In each chapter, Richard relates painful
and confusing memories that lead to a better understanding of the man, a black, Southern,
American writer who eventually emerges. Although Richard, as the narrator, maintains an
adult voice throughout the story, each chapter is told from the perspective and knowledge
that a child might possess. Black Boy marks the culmination of Richard Wrights best-
known period; Black Boy is both profoundly American and a distinctly black chronicle. It
is the chronicle of the authors alienation, not only from white society, but also from his
own people. Tragedy is what comes of an individual's efforts to overcome the human
condition. The tone of the book, as opposed to its content or structure is what makes it
unique: the tone of the Blues. It is lyrical and ironic, and it follows the reality of pure
tragedy; it accepts all that has happened and creates art from the pain of suffering.
Main Themes in Black Boy
Racism
Black Boy explores racism as a subtle/menacing problem knit into the very fabric
of American society. The critique of racism in America includes a critique of the
black community itselfspecifically the black community that is unable or
unwilling to educate Richard properly.
Individual vs. Society
Richard is intensely individual and constantly expresses a desire to join society on
his own terms. In this regard, he struggles against a dominant white cultureboth
in the South and in the Northand against his own black culture, as neither
culture knows how to handle a brilliant, strong-willed, self-respecting black man.
The Redemptive Power of Art
Wrights experiences of reading and other uses of his imaginative faculties sustain
his idea that life becomes meaningful through creative attempts to make sense of
it.

Selected Works by Richard Wright

Uncle Tom's Children (1938); The Man Who Was Almost a Man (1939); Native
Son (1940); The Outsider (1953); Savage Holiday (1954); The Long Dream (1958); Eight
Men (1961); posthumously: American Hunger (1977); Rite of Passage (1994); A Father's
Law (2008).

IV. Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938)

He was born on October 3, 1900, in Asheville, North Carolina. After attending a private
prep school, Wolfe enrolled in the University of North Carolina in 1916, where he began
his writing career, editing The Tar Heel, the student newspaper. He graduated in 1920,
and in the fall he entered the Graduate School for Arts and Sciences at Harvard
University, where he intended to become a professional playwright. In 1923, he left
Boston for New York, the city he called home for the rest of his life. He taught at
Washington Square College of New York University and continued to write. Three years
later, while abroad, he began work on the novel Look Homeward, Angel. The book was
published in October 1929 to great critical reception, placing Wolfe on the literary map as
one of America's most promising young novelists.
'Look Homeward, Angel is a thinly disguised autobiography and a portrait of the early
twentieth-century American South. At that time, Thomas Wolfe used to be regarded as an
equal of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner. The novel was
considered striking and important, in the American romantic tradition, meant to contain
Wolfe's own "American experience" as represented by his alter ego, Eugene Gant.
It is important to understand the novel within its time and place. It is a novel with a
strong sense of autobiography, a Bildungsroman (novel of development), an attempt at a
comprehensive display of life in the American South from 1900 to 1920, and a response
to the modernist movement of American writers who were living and writing in Europe.
In 1930, Wolfe received a Guggenheim Fellowship and published a second short
novel, Web of Earth, and soon began preparations for several other works: K-19, No
Door (a short novel) and a collection of three short novels.
Wolfe's editor wanted him to write a follow-up to the story of Eugene Gant, the
protagonist of Look Homeward, Angel, and in the summer of 1934, ignoring Wolfe's
objections, the manuscript of Of Time and the River was sent to Scribner publishing
house. The book was generally well received upon publication, but Wolfe was bitterly
displeased with it, blaming his editor for the unsatisfactory form of the final product.
In 1938, Wolfe left New York to travel to the American West, but he became sick in
Seattle, and he died of tuberculosis of the brain shortly before his 38th birthday.
After Wolfe's death, Edward Aswell, Wolfe's editor, assembled from the manuscripts left
behind the novels The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940).
Several other collections and uncompleted works also appeared posthumously, and
Wolfe's legacy is that of one of America's strongest writers whose potential was cut
tragically short.
Wolfes fiction is characterized by an intense consciousness of scene and place, together
with an extraordinary lyric power. In Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the
River, Wolfe was able to imbue his life story and the figures of his parents with a lofty
romantic quality with epic overtones. Powerful emotional evocation and literal reporting
are combined in his fiction, and he often alternates between dramatically effective
episodes of recollection and highly charged passages of rhetoric.
 V. William Faulkner (1897-1962)

Born in New Albany, Mississippi, Faulkner soon moved with his parents to nearby Ripley
and then to the town of Oxford, the seat of Lafayette county, places that figure
prominently in his fiction. He was a prolific writer, who, like so many of his literary
characters, was profoundly affected by his family.
His first novel, Soldiers Pay (1926), set in a Southern setting, was an impressive
achievement, stylistically ambitious and strongly evocative of the sense of alienation
experienced by soldiers returning from World War I to a civilian world of which they
seemed no longer a part.
Mosquitoes (1927) followed; Sartoris (1929) was Faulkners first important work, in
which he begins his Yoknapatawpha saga. It is Faulkners imaginative re-creation of the
tragedy of the American South, written so that each novel works with the others to clarify
and redefine the characters. The novel introduces families that reappear in many of
Faulkners novels and stories: the Sartoris and Compson families, representing the land-
owning, aristocratic Old South; and the Snopes clan, representing the ruthless,
commercial New South.
The Sound and the Fury (1929) is generally considered Faulkners masterpiece. It was
followed by As I Lay Dying (1930), that uses the multiple stream-of-consciousness
method to tell the story of a family of poor whites intent on fulfilling the mothers
deathbed request for burial; Light in August (1932), whose action takes place in a single
day, and Absalom, Absalom (1936), which centers on the Sutpen family. Absalom,
Absalom!, a profoundly Southern story, is constructed by a series of narrators with
sharply divergent self-interested perspectives, and is considered Faulkners supreme
modernist fiction, focused above all on the processes of its own telling.
One of the main themes of Faulkners fiction is mans relation to the past, and most of his
characters struggle to achieve a significant and meaningful relationship with the past.
In Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner offers an in-depth examination of mans reliance on the
past and of the extent to which man is responsible for the past, attempting to connect or
show the relationship between mans present actions and those of the past.
His later works include: Intruder in the Dust (1948); Requiem for a Nun (1951); the
Snopes trilogy: The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959); The Reivers,
A Reminiscence (1962). William Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in
1949 for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American
novel. (He received it one year later, in 1950).
Faulkners work has been appreciated for its experimental manner, contemporary themes
and the often used stream-of-consciousness technique, for his extraordinary structural and
stylistic resourcefulness, for the range and depth of his characterization and social
notation, and for his persistence and success in exploring fundamental human issues in
intensely localized terms.
The Sound and the Fury uses the stream-of-consciousness method (where the author lets
his thoughts flow freely), creating a different manner of thought in each of its four
sections. The novel records the breakdown of the Compson family, suggesting a
breakdown of the southern ways of the past. It is a story told in four chapters, by four
different voices, and out of chronological order; each section takes place in a single day;
three sections are set in 1928 and one in 1910. The first three chapters of the novel
consist of the thoughts, voices, and memories of the three Compson brothers, captured on
three different days. The brothers are Benjy, a severely retarded thirty-three-year-old
man, speaking in April, 1928; Quentin, a young Harvard student, speaking in June, 1910;
and Jason, a bitter farm-supply store worker, speaking again in April, 1928. Faulkner tells
the fourth chapter in his own narrative voice, but focuses on Dilsey, the Compson
familys devoted Negro cook who has played a great part in raising the children.
The Compsons are one of several prominent names in the town of Jefferson, Mississippi.
Their ancestors helped settle the area and subsequently defended it during the Civil War;
however, since the war, the Compsons have gradually seen their wealth, land, and status
crumble away.
Main Themes in The Sound and the Fury
The Corruption of Southern Aristocratic Values
The first half of the nineteenth century saw the rise of a number of prominent
Southern aristocratic families such as the Compsons, families who espoused
traditional Southern values both for men and for women. The Civil War and
Reconstruction devastated many of these once-great Southern families
economically, socially, and psychologically. Faulkner claims that in the process,
the Compsons, and other similar Southern families, lost touch with the reality of
the world around them and became underwent a process of self-absorption,
which corrupted the core values these families once held dear and left the newer
generations completely unequipped to deal with the realities of the modern world.
Resurrection and Renewal
Three of the novels four sections take place on or around Easter, 1928.
Faulkners placement of the novels climax on this weekend is significant, as the
weekend is associated with Christs crucifixion on Good Friday and resurrection
on Easter Sunday. A number of symbolic events in the novel could be likened to
the death of Christ (the decline of the Compson family in general), but the Easter
weekend also brings the hope of renewal and resurrection.
The Failure of Language and Narrative
Faulkners decision to use four different narrators highlights the subjectivity of
each narrative and casts doubt on the ability of language to convey truth or
meaning absolutely. Benjy, Quentin, and Jason have vastly different views on the
Compson tragedy, but no single perspective seems more valid than the others.
Even the final section, with its omniscient third-person narrator, does not tie up all
of the novels loose ends.

A Selection of Novels by William Faulkner:

Soldiers Pay, 1926; Mosquitoes, 1927; Sartoris, 1929; The Sound and the Fury, 1929;
As I Lay Dying, 1930; Sanctuary, 1931; Light in August, 1932; Absalom, Absalom!, 1936;
The Unvanquished, 1938; The Wild Palms, 1939; The Hamlet 1940; Go Down, Moses,
and Other Stories, 1942; Intruder in the Dust, 1948; Requiem for a Nun, 1951; A
Fable, 1954; The Town, 1957; The Hamlet, 1958; The Mansion, 1959; The Reivers, a
Reminiscence, 1962.
 VI. John Steinbeck (1902-1968)

He was born in Salinas, California, in 1902. He spent most of his life in Monterey
County, which is the setting for much of his fiction. He attended Stanford University
intermittently between 1920 and 1926. Steinbeck did not graduate from Stanford, but
instead chose to support himself by doing manual labor while writing in his spare time.
His experience among the working class of California lends authenticity to his depiction
of the lives of laborers, who are the central characters in many of his novels.
Steinbecks first novel, Cup of Gold, was published in 1929; followed by The Pastures of
Heaven and, in 1933, To a God Unknown. He achieved his first success with Tortilla
Flat (1935), an affectionate and gently humorous story about Mexican-Americans. The
novel In Dubious Battle (1936), a classic account of a strike by agricultural laborers and
the pair of Marxist labor organizers who engineer it, is the first Steinbeck novel that
displays the striking social commentary that characterizes his most significant works.
The novella Of Mice and Men (1937) received great acclaim; it is a tragic story about a
strange and complex bond between two migrant laborers. His crowning achievement, The
Grapes of Wrath (1939), won Steinbeck a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.
Grapes of Wrath chronicles the migration of a dispossessed family (the Joad family) from
the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California, in search of jobs, land, and a better future, and
critiques their subsequent exploitation by a ruthless system of agricultural economics.
Considered Steinbecks masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath is a story of human unity and
love as well as the need for cooperative rather than individualistic ideals during hard
times.
During World War II, Steinbeck wrote some effective pieces of government propaganda,
among them The Moon Is Down (1942), a novel about Norwegians under the Nazis. He
also served as a war correspondent. With the end of World War II and the move from the
Great Depression to economic prosperity in the United States, Steinbecks work softened
somewhat. While they still contain the elements of social criticism that mark his earlier
work, the three novels Steinbeck published immediately following the war, Cannery
Row (1945), The Pearl, and The Bus (both 1947) are more sentimental and relaxed.
Steinbeck also contributed to several screenplays.
In 1952, he published the highly controversial East of Eden, the novel Steinbeck referred
to as the big one, set in Californias Salinas Valley. The novel was followed by The
Winter of Our Discontent (1961). Steinbeck's enduring legacy is the naturalistic,
proletarian-themed novels that he wrote during the Depression. He received the Nobel
Prize for literature in 1962. After Steinbecks win was announced, the Swedish Academy
awarding the Nobel Prize released a statement saying that he was among the masters of
modern American literature because of his realistic as well as imaginative writings,
distinguished by a sympathetic humor and a keen social perception.
Main Themes in Of Mice and Men:
The Predatory Nature of Human Existence
Of Mice and Men teaches a grim lesson about the nature of human existence.
Nearly all of the characters admit, at one time or another, to having a profound
sense of loneliness and isolation. The characters are rendered helpless by their
isolation, and yet, even at their weakest, they seek to destroy those who are even
weaker than them.
 Fraternity and the Idealized Male Friendship
The men in Of Mice and Men desire to come together like brothers; they want to
live with one anothers best interests in mind, to protect each other, and to know
that there is someone in the world dedicated to protecting them. However, the
world is too harsh to sustain such friendly relationships.
The Impossibility of the American Dream
Most of the characters in Of Mice and Men admit, at one point or another, to
dreaming of a different life, although circumstances have robbed most of them of
these wishes.

Selected Works by John Steinbeck

Cup of Gold 1929; The Pastures of Heaven 1932; Tortilla Flat 1935; In Dubious
Battle 1936; Of Mice and Men 1937; The Long Valley 1938; The Grapes of Wrath
1939; Sea of Cortez 1941; Cannery Row 1945; The Pearl 1947; East of Eden
1952; The Winter of Our Discontent 1961; Travels with Charley: In Search of America
1962; America and Americans 1966.
 American Drama
Eugene ONeill (1888-1953)
Eugene ONeill was one of the greatest playwrights in American history; through his
experimental and emotionally probing dramas, he addressed the difficulties of human
society with a deep psychological complexity.
Born in 1888, Eugene ONeill spent the first seven years of his life touring with his
fathers theater company and was thus introduced to the world of theater. He dropped out
before he finished his first year at Princeton University and moved to New York. He
traveled a lot, and in the early 1910s he decided to become a playwright.
He started writing one-act plays, and in 1920, his play Beyond the Horizon won the
Pulitzer Prize. Critics saw in this early work a first step toward a more serious American
theater. ONeills poetic dialogue and insightful views into the lives of the characters held
his work apart from the less sober playwriting of the day.
The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1922) follow the lives of two men
through personal struggles and their search for identity. Received well, these two
established ONeill as a master of the craft. However, ONeills life was fraught with
turmoil: the death of his father, mother, and brother, as well as the break-up of his first
marriage.
Despite (or because) of these tragedies, he went on to create a number of penetrating and
insightful views into family life and struggle. Desire Under the Elms (1924) was the
first full-length play in which O'Neill successfully evoked the starkness and inevitability
of Greek tragedy that he felt in his own life. Drawing on Greek themes of incest,
infanticide, and fateful retribution, he framed his story in the context of his own familys
conflicts. It is the story of a lustful father, a weak son, and an adulterous wife who
murders her infant son. Because of the sparseness of its style, its avoidance of
melodrama, and its total honesty of emotion, the play was acclaimed immediately as a
powerful tragedy and has continued to rank among the great American plays of the 20th
century.
In The Great God Brown (1926), O'Neill dealt with a major theme that he expressed
more effectively in later plays: the conflict between idealism and materialism. The play
was significant for its symbolic use of masks and for the experimentation with
expressionistic dialogue and action; the play is rich in symbolism and poetry, as well as in
daring technique, and it became a forerunner of avant-garde movements in American
theatre.
O'Neill's innovative writing continued with Strange Interlude (1928), a play
revolutionary in style and length (techniques new to the modern theatre included spoken
asides or soliloquies to express the characters hidden thoughts).
In Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), ONeill used the moral and physical
entanglements similar to Greek drama to express the complexities of family life (it
represents his most complete use of Greek forms, themes, and characters). Based on the
Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus, it was itself three plays in one, set in the New England of
the Civil War period, retaining the forms and the conflicts of the Greek characters: the
heroic leader returning from war; his adulterous wife, who murders him; his jealous,
repressed daughter, who avenges him through the murder of her mother; and his weak,
incestuous son, who is driven by his sister to suicide.
The Iceman Cometh (written in 1939; performed in 1946), the most complex of
O'Neills tragedies, is laced with subtle religious symbolism; it is a study of man's need to
cling to his hope for a better life, even if he must delude himself to do so.
Long Day's Journey into Night (written in 1941, performed in 1956) brought to light an
agonizingly autobiographical play. It is straightforward in style but shattering in its
depiction of the agonized relations between father, mother, and two sons. Spanning one
day in the life of a family, the play strips away layer after layer from each of the four
central figures, revealing the mother as a defeated drug addict, the father as a man
frustrated in his career and failed as a husband and father, the older son as a bitter
alcoholic, and the younger son as a tubercular, disillusioned youth with only the
slenderest chance for physical and spiritual survival.
O'Neill was the first American dramatist to regard the stage as a literary medium and the
only American playwright ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (1936). He saw
the theatre as a valid forum for the presentation of serious ideas. Imbued with the tragic
sense of life, he aimed for a contemporary drama that had its roots in the most powerful
of ancient Greek tragedies. His plays were written from an intensely personal point of
view, deriving directly from the scarring effects of his familys tragic relationships--his
mother and father, who loved and tormented each other; his older brother, who loved and
corrupted him and died of alcoholism in middle age; and O'Neill himself, caught and torn
between love for and rage at all three.
ONeill redefined the theater by abandoning traditional divisions into acts and scenes
(Strange Interlude has nine acts, and Mourning Becomes Electra takes nine hours to
perform), by using masks such as those found in Asian and ancient Greek theater, by
introducing Shakespearean monologues and Greek choruses and by producing special
effects through lighting and sound. He is generally acknowledged to have been America's
foremost dramatist.

A Selection of Plays by Eugene ONeill

Bound East for Cardiff, 1916; The Emperor Jones, 1920; The Hairy Ape, 1922; Anna
Christie, 1922; Desire Under the Elms, 1925; Lazarus Laughed, 1925-1926; The Great
God Brown, 1926; Strange Interlude, 1928; Dynamo, 1929; Mourning Becomes
Electra, 1931; Ah, Wilderness! 1933; Days Without End, 1933; The Iceman Cometh
(1939/ 1946); Long Day's Journey Into Night (1941/1956); A Moon for the
Misbegotten, 1943; A Touch of the Poet (1942/ 1958).
 Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)
He was born in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911. When his family moved to the urban
environment of St. Louis, Missouri, he began to look inward, and to write because I
found life unsatisfactory. Williams early adult years were occupied with attending
college at three different universities, and a move to New Orleans, which began a lifelong
love of the city and functioned as the setting for the play A Streetcar Named Desire
(1947). Williams spent a number of years traveling throughout the country and trying to
write. His first critical acclaim came in 1944 when The Glass Menagerie won
prestigious New York awards. At the height of his career in the late 1940s and 1950s,
Williams worked with the premier artists of the time for the screen and stage productions
of such plays as A Streetcar Named Desire, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,
and Sweet Bird of Youth. In 1961, he wrote The Night of the Iguana, which was
followed by The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore in 1963. His plays were
heavily criticized because he openly addressed taboo topics. In the 1970s, Williams wrote
plays, a memoir, poems, short stories and a novel. Critics have claimed that Williams
genius was in his honesty and in the perseverance to tell his stories.
His major play, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), won a Pulitzer Prize. It is a study of
the mental and moral ruin of Blanche Du Bois, a former Southern belle, whose genteel
pretensions are no match for the harsh realities symbolized by her brutish brother-in-
law, Stanley Kowalski. In 1953, Camino Real, a complex work set in a mythical,
microcosmic town whose inhabitants include Lord Byron and Don Quixote, was a
commercial failure, but his Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), which exposes the emotional
lies governing relationships in the family of a wealthy Southern planter, was awarded a
Pulitzer Prize and was successfully filmed, as was The Night of the Iguana (1961), the
story of a former minister who became a tour guide.
Williams also belongs to the tradition of great Southern writers who have invigorated
literary language with the lyricism of Southern English. Like Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee
Williams wanted to challenge some of the conventions of naturalistic theatre. Summer
and Smoke (1948), Camino Real (1953), and The Glass Menagerie (1944), among
others, provided some of the early testing ground for Williams innovations.
The Glass Menagerie uses music, screen projections, and lighting effects to create the
haunting and dream-like atmosphere appropriate for a "memory play." Like O'Neill's
Emperor Jones, Williams' play explores ways of using the stage to depict the interior
life and memories of a character. The projections use film-like effects and the power of
photography in a theatrical setting. In The Glass Menagerie, Williams' skillful use of
the narrator and his creation of a dream-like, illusory atmosphere help to create a
powerful representation of family, memory, and loss. The play is replete with lyrical
symbolism. The glass menagerie, in its fragility and delicate beauty, is a symbol for
Laura. By writing a "memory play," Tennessee Williams freed himself from the restraints
of naturalistic theatre. The theme of memory is important for Amanda, as memory is a
kind of escape. For Tom, the older Tom, who narrates the events of the play, memory is
the thing that cannot be escaped, for he is still haunted by memories of the sister he
abandoned years ago.
The play renders the story of a declassed Southern family living in a tenement; it is about
the failure of a domineering mother, Amanda, living upon her delusions of a romantic
past, and her cynical son, Tom, to secure a suitor for Toms crippled and painfully shy
sister, Laura, who lives in a fantasy world with a collection of glass animals. The Glass
Menagerie is loosely autobiographical, as the characters all have some basis in the real-
life family of Tennessee Williams.
The action of The Glass Menagerie takes place in the Wingfield family's apartment in
St. Louis, 1937. The events of the play are framed by memory - Tom Wingfield is the
play's narrator, and usually smokes and stands on the fire escape as he delivers his
monologues. His dilemma forms a central conflict of the play, as he faces an agonizing
choice between responsibility for his family and living his own life.
Major Themes in The Glass Menagerie
Escape: each character feels trapped and would like to escape
Responsibility to Family: in his/her own way, each character feels a sense of
responsibility (and this becomes a source of tension in the play)
Abandonment: the characters also experience a strong sense of abandonment
Illusion and Reality
Memory

Selected Plays by Tennessee Williams:

The Glass Menagerie (1944); A Streetcar Named Desire (1947); Summer and
Smoke (1948); The Rose Tattoo (1951); Camino Real (1953); Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof (1955); Sweet Bird of Youth (1959); The Night of the Iguana (1961); The Milk Train
Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963); In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969); Small Craft
Warnings (1972); The Two-Character Play (1973); The Red Devil Battery Sign (1975);
Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980); Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981); A
House Not Meant to Stand (1982).
 American Poetry

In poetry, the modernist elements can be discussed in terms of four major subheadings:
modern or new experiments in form and style
new themes and word-games
new modes of expression (the most striking element)
the complex and open-ended nature of the themes and meanings.
Modernism includes many different ways of expressing ideas and feelings:
the imagist way of presenting just concrete images for the readers to understand
the idea and experience the feelings themselves
the symbolist way of presenting things in terms of deeply significant symbols of
ideas and feelings for readers to interpret them intellectually
the realist way of truly reflecting the reality of the world
the naturalist way of going to the extreme of realism by showing the private,
psychological, fantastic and the neurotic
the impressionistic way of presenting unrefined first impression of everything by
the observer
the expressionistic way of probing deep into ones own psyche and trying to
express the hidden and deepest feelings, as in confessional poems
the surrealist way of imposing the mood of madness, intoxication and neurosis to
excite the illogical language of the unconscious.
Modernism includes all such experimentations in the technique of expression.
The use of new and wide range of subjects, themes and issues: traditional poetry had to
be limited to subjects of universal significance, general human appeal, and so on, even
when the poems were romantically personal on their surface; in modernist poetry, we
read poems about any topic and theme.
Modernist poems tend to be multiple in themes: single poems are about many things at
the same time (the poet does not disclose - as in traditional poems - what the one and
precise meaning of the poem is; that is why the reader has to work with many possible
themes and meanings in the same poem; it is important to find logical support for the
theme or themes that he finds in the poem).
Modernist poems also display a multiplicity of styles: in the form, style, stanza, rhythm
and such other technical devices of poetry, old traditions have been demolished and new
experiments are tested (e. e. cummings) - blank verse poems, pictorial poems, remixed
rhythms, etc. (the old metrical systems, rhyme-schemes, and traditional symbols and
metaphors are no longer dominating; each poet makes his/her own rules.

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Robert Frost, born in San Francisco, California, U.S., died in Boston, Massachusetts),
was an American poet who was much admired for his depictions of the rural life of New
England, his command of American colloquial speech, and his realistic verse portraying
ordinary people in everyday situations.
He graduated from high school in 1892 and continued his education at Dartmouth
College. After getting married and starting a family, Frost resumed his college education
at Harvard University in 1897 but left after two years study there. From 1900 to 1909 the
family raised poultry on a farm near Derry, New Hampshire, and for a time Frost also
taught at the Pinkerton Academy in Derry. Frost became an enthusiastic botanist and
acquired his poetic persona of a New England rural sage during the years he and his
family spent at Derry. All this while he was writing poems, outlets showed little interest
in them.
In August 1912 the Frost family sailed across the Atlantic to England, where the
publishers proved more receptive to innovative verse, and, through his own vigorous
efforts and those of the expatriate American poet Ezra Pound, Frost within a year had
published A Boys Will (1913), followed in 1914 by a second collection, North of Boston,
that introduced some of the most popular poems in all of Frosts work, among them
Mending Wall and After Apple-Picking.
The outbreak of World War I brought the Frosts back to the United States in 1915, and
due to Amy Lowells encouraging review of his work, Frost soon found himself besieged
by magazines seeking to publish his poems, and his career rose on an ascending curve.
The collection Mountain Interval (1916) continued the high level established by his first
books, and his reputation was further enhanced by New Hampshire (1923), which
received the Pulitzer Prize. That prize was also awarded to Frosts Collected
Poems (1930) and to the collections A Further Range (1936) and A Witness Tree (1942).
His other poetry volumes include West-Running Brook (1928), Steeple Bush (1947),
and In the Clearing (1962).
The poems in Frosts early books, especially North of Boston, differ radically from late
19th-century Romantic verse with its ever-benign view of nature, its didactic emphasis,
and its slavish conformity to established verse forms and themes. Lowell called North of
Boston a sad book, referring to its portraits of inbred, isolated, and psychologically
troubled rural New Englanders. These off-mainstream portraits signaled Frosts departure
from the old tradition and his own fresh interest in delineating New England characters
and their formative background.
The natural world, for Frost, wore two faces. Early on he overturned the Emersonian
concept of nature as healer and mentor in a poem in A Boys Will entitled Storm Fear, a
grim picture of a blizzard as a raging beast that dares the inhabitants of an isolated house
to come outside and be killed. In such later poems as The Hill Wife and Stopping by
Woods on a Snowy Evening, the benign surface of nature cloaks potential dangers, and
death itself lurks behind dark, mysterious trees. Natures frolicsome aspect predominates
in other poems such as Birches, where a destructive ice storm is recalled as a thing of
memorable beauty. In his final volume, In the Clearing, filled with the stubborn courage
of old age, Frost portrays human security as a rather tiny and quite vulnerable opening in
a thickly grown forest, a pinpoint of light against which the encroaching trees cast their
very real threat of darkness.
Frost most commonly investigated human contacts with the natural world in small
encounters that serve as metaphors for larger aspects of the human condition. Some
poems are portraits of the introspective mind possessed by its own private demons, as
in Desert Places, which could serve to illustrate Frosts celebrated definition of poetry
as a momentary stay against confusion:
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between starson stars where no human race
is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
Frost was widely admired for his mastery of metrical form, which he often set against the
natural rhythms of everyday, unadorned speech. In this way the traditional stanza and
metrical line achieved new vigor in his hands. Frost was never an enthusiast of free
verse and regarded its looseness as something less than ideal, although he occasionally
employed it; his determination to be new but to employ old ways to be new set him
aside from the radical experimentalism in the early 20th century. Here he shows his
power to stand as a transitional figure between the old and the new in poetry. Frost
mastered the blank verse (i.e., unrhymed verse in iambic pentameter) for use in such
dramatic narratives as Mending Wall and Home Burial; his chief technical innovation
in these dramatic-dialogue poems was to unify the regular pentameter line with the
irregular rhythms of conversational speech. Frosts blank verse has the same terseness
and concision that mark his poetry in general.
Frost was the most widely admired and highly honored American poet of the 20th
century, although he has also been criticized for being overly interested in the past, and
too little concerned with the present and future of American society because of the
absence in his poems of meaningful references to the modern realities of
industrialization, urbanization, and the concentration of wealth, or to such familiar items
as radios, motion pictures, automobiles, factories, or skyscrapers. The poet has been
viewed as a singer of sweet nostalgia and a social and political conservative who was
content to sigh for the good things of the past.
However, Frost has been praised for the universality of his themes, the emotional
authenticity of his voice, and the austere technical brilliance of his verse. Frost was often
able to endow his rural imagery with a larger symbolic or metaphysical significance, and
his best poems transcend the immediate realities of their subject matter to illuminate the
unique blend of tragic endurance, stoicism, and tenacious affirmation that marked his
outlook on life. Though his work is principally associated with the life and landscape of
New Englandand though he was a poet of traditional verse forms and metrics who
remained steadfastly aloof from the poetic movements and fashions of his timeFrost is
anything but merely a regional poet. The author of searching and often dark meditations
on universal themes, he is, in essence, a modern poet in his adherence to language as it is
actually spoken, in the psychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to
which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and irony.
Robert Frost holds a unique and almost isolated position in American letters. In a sense,
Frost stands at the crossroads of 19th-century American poetry and modernism, for in his
verse may be found the culmination of many 19th-century tendencies and traditions as
well as parallels to the works of his 20th-century contemporaries. Taking his symbols
from the public domain, Frost developed an original, modern idiom and a sense of
directness and economy that reflect the imagism of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell.
Although he avoids traditional verse forms and only uses rhyme erratically, Frost is not
an innovator and his technique is never experimental. Frosts theory of poetic
composition ties him to both centuries. Like the 19th-century Romantics, he maintained
that a poem is never a put-up job.... It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a
homesickness, a loneliness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a
tantalizing vagueness. Yet, working out his own version of the impersonal view of
art, as Hyatt H. Waggoner observed, Frost also upheld T. S. Eliots idea that the man
who suffers and the artist who creates are totally separate. Frosts regionalism lies in his
realism: his protagonists are individuals who are constantly forced to confront their
individualism as such and to reject the modern world in order to retain their identity.
Frosts use of nature is closely tied to this regionalism; what he finds in nature is
sensuous pleasure; he is also sensitive to the earths fertility and to mans relationship to
the soil (pastoral quality of his poems).

Selected Works by Robert Frost:

A Boy's Will, 1914/1915; North of Boston, 1914/1915; Mountain Interval, 1916; New
Hampshire, 1923; Selected Poems, 1923; Several Short Poems, 1924; West-Running
Brook, 1928; Selected Poems, 1928; The Lovely Shall Be Choosers, 1929; The Lone
Striker, 1933; Two Tramps in Mud-Time, 1934; The Gold Hesperidee, 1935; Three
Poems, 1935; A Further Range, 1936; From Snow to Snow, 1936; A Witness Tree, 1942;
A Masque of Reason (verse drama), 1942; Steeple Bush, 1947; A Masque of Mercy (verse
drama), 1947; Greece, 1948; Hard Not to Be King, 1951; Aforesaid, 1954; The Gift
Outright, 1961; In the Clearing, 1962.

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

Ezra Pound was an American poet and critic, a supremely discerning and energetic
entrepreneur of the arts who did more than any other single figure to advance a modern
movement in English and American literature. Pound promoted, and also occasionally
helped to shape, the work of such widely different poets and novelists as William Butler
Yeats, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, D.H. Lawrence, and T.S. Eliot. His
pro-Fascist broadcasts in Italy during World War II led to his postwar arrest and
confinement until 1958.
Pound was born in a small mining town in Idaho, but about 1887 the family moved to the
eastern states, and in June 1889, they settled in near Philadelphia, where Pound lived a
normal middle-class childhood.
After two years at Cheltenham Military Academy, which he left without graduating, he
attended a local high school. From there he went for two years (190103) to
the University of Pennsylvania, where he met his lifelong friend, the poet William Carlos
Williams. He took a Ph. B. (bachelor of philosophy) degree at Hamilton College, Clinton,
N.Y., in 1905 and returned to the University of Pennsylvania for graduate work. He
received his M.A. in June 1906 but withdrew from the university after working one more
year toward his doctorate. He left with a knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, Italian,
German, Spanish, Provenal, and Anglo-Saxon, as well as of English literature and
grammar.
In the autumn of 1907, Pound became professor of Romance languages at a college in
Indiana, but in February 1908, he decided to set sail for Europe. In June 1908, he
published in Venice, at his own expense, his first book of poems, A lume spento. In
September 1908 he went to London, where he befriended by the writer and editor Ford
Madox Ford (who published him in his English Review), entered William Butler Yeatss
circle, and joined the school of images, a modern group presided over by the
philosopher T.E. Hulme. He quickly became successful in England (poems, Personae,
April 1909; Exultations, October 1909, and The Spirit of Romance, based on lectures
delivered in London (190910), 1910).
After a trip home, he returned to Europe in February 1911, visiting Italy, Germany, and
France. As leader of the Imagist movement of 191214, successor of the school of
images, he drew up the first Imagist manifesto, with its emphasis on direct and sparse
language and precise images in poetry, and he edited the first Imagist anthology, Des
Imagistes (1914).
In imitation of French avant-garde movements, Pound invented the term Imagisme; he
stated the three tenets of imagism in 1913:
1. Direct treatment of the thing, whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not the
sequence of a metronome.
Pounds emphasis on direct treatment suggests the influence of painting as a model. His
desire to avoid unnecessary words and his championing of free verse share something of
symbolisms aspiration towards pure poetry, although Pound believed that he was
breaking away from symbolism by rejecting its emotionalism.
He continued to publish his own poetry (Ripostes, 1912; Lustra, 1916) and prose
criticism (Pavannes and Divisions, 1918), and he succeeded in publishing highly
acclaimed English versions of early Chinese poetry, Cathay (1915), and two volumes of
Japanese Noh plays (191617). After WWI, Pound decided to move to Paris, publishing
before he left Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919), and Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley (1920). Propertius is a comment on the British Empire in 1917, by way of
Propertius and the Roman Empire. Mauberley, a finely chiseled portrait of one aspect
of British literary culture in 1919, is one of the most praised poems of the 20th century.
During his 12 years in London, his verse took on new qualities of economy, brevity, and
clarity as he used concrete details and exact visual images to capture concentrated
moments of experience. His search for laconic precision owed much to his constant
reading of past literature, including Anglo-Saxon poetry, Greek and Latin classics, Dante,
and the 19th-century French authors as Thophile Gautier and Gustave Flaubert. Like his
friend T.S. Eliot, Pound wanted a modernism that brought back to life the highest
standards of the past.
Pounds 18-part long poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, ranged from close observation of
the artist and society to the horrors of mass production and World War I. The poem is a
compelling critique of the modern age; more specifically, it is about the plight of the
artist, and of Pound in particular, in the modern world. The poem juxtaposes images as
emotional and intellectual complexes; meaning develops not through direct authorial
statement but by engaging the reader in a continual process of interpretation. The postwar
context is significant - sections IV and V contain one of the most negative and moving
chants against war in modern literature. One of the main themes is the relation between
the increasingly complex and allusive form and content among modern writers and the
increasing isolation and alienation of the artist in the modern world.
During his early period, Pound sought models and masks in past literatures, including
Greek (Homer), Latin (Virgil, Ovid, Catullus), Italian (Dante, Arnaut Daniel), and
Chinese (Li Po, Confucius). During the war years, as he began to turn his attention
toward the contemporary world, he also turned backward toward the native tradition
of Walt Whitman.
After "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley," Pound turned his main attention to his epic Cantos,
which he worked on for the remainder of his life. In a letter to W. B. Yeats, he said he
intended to write one hundred cantos, modeled on a Bach fugue: "There will be no plot,
no chronicle of events, no logic of discourse, but two themes, the Descent into Hades
from Homer, a Metamorphosis from Ovid, and mixed with these, medieval or modern
historical characters." As Pound's comment suggests, the poem has three analogues: an
Odyssean journey, modeled on Homer's Odyssey; an ascent through Inferno and
Purgatory toward the light of Paradiso, modeled on Dante's Divine Comedy; and from
Ovid's Metamorphosis a series of "magic moments" in which divine energies are revealed
in the physical world.
The Cantos
In 192728 Pound edited his own magazine, Exile, and in 1930 he brought together,
under the title A Draft of XXX Cantos, various segments of his ambitious long poem The
Cantos, which he had begun in 1915. The 1930s saw the publication of further volumes
of The Cantos (Eleven New Cantos, 1934; The Fifth Decad of Cantos, 1937; Cantos LII
LXXI, 1940) and a collection of some of his best prose (Make It New, 1934). Following
the Great Depression of the 1930s, he turned more and more to history, especially
economic history; Pound had come to believe that a misunderstanding of money and
banking by governments and the public, as well as the manipulation of money by
international bankers, had led the world into a long series of wars. He became obsessed
with monetary reform, got involved in politics, and declared his admiration for the Italian
dictator Benito Mussolini.
More than 800 pages long, the Cantos are fragmentary and formless despite recurring
themes and ideas; they record Pounds own private voyage through Greek mythology,
ancient China and Egypt, Byzantium, Renaissance Italy, the works of John Adams and
Thomas Jefferson, and many other periods and subjects, including economics and
banking and various aspects of his own memory and experience. Pound died in Venice in
1972. Out of his 60 years of publishing activity came 70 books of his own, contributions
to about 70 others, and more than 1,500 articles.
Main Themes in Pounds Poems:
The Importance of Aesthetics and Art: Pound made it a point to celebrate art,
literature, and beauty in his poetry (particularly in "Hugh Selywn Mauberley).
In this poem, Pound criticizes mass culture, expressing his belief that modern
writers, painters, and other artists are creating work for the wrong reasons.
Imagism: He placed significant value on clarity and economy of language. Pound
felt that classic poetry, namely Greek and Roman, presented many model
examples of Imagism, and he also praised the verbal economy of traditional
Japanese and Chinese poetry.
Economics: In his later career, Pound became increasingly obsessed with
economics, especially when he moved to Italy and embraced fascism in the years
leading up to World War II. The theme of economics is evident in a number of
Pound's later poems, particularly the Cantos.
Love: An overwhelming number of Pound's poems revolve around a theme of
love, as he explores different ways that love can be powerful.
 Nature: Pound often uses unexpected natural metaphors to reflect on people,
business, and society. By frequently including nature into his work, Pound alludes
to his love of aesthetics and beauty.
History: Pound explores history quite often in his poems. He valued history
because he recognized how much it influenced the present, and he blamed bad
historical precedents for all the societal corruption he describes in his poetry.
Journey: Many of Ezra Pound's poems center on the process of making a journey,
whether metaphorical or physical, to accomplish some sort of goal.

Selected Works by Ezra Pound:

A Lume Spento, 1908; Personae,1909; Exultations, 1909; Canzoni, 1911; Ripostes of
Ezra Pound, 1913; Lustra of Ezra Pound, 1916 , 1917; The Fourth Canto, 1919; Hugh
Selwyn Mauberley, 1920; Poems, 1918-1921, 1921; A Draft of XVI Cantos, 1925; A Draft
of XXX Cantos, 1930, 1933; Homage to Sextus Propertius, 1934; Eleven New Cantos:
XXXI-XLI, 1934, 1935; The Fifth Decade of Cantos, 1937; Cantos LII-LXXI, 1940; The
Pisan Cantos 1948; Selected Poems, 1949; Seventy Cantos, 1950; The Cantos (1-
109), 1964; Selected Cantos, Faber, 1967; Drafts and Fragments: Cantos CX-
CXVII, 1968.

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

William Carlos Williams was an American poet who succeeded in making the ordinary
appear extraordinary through the clarity and discreteness of his imagery.
After receiving an M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1906 and after internship
in New York and graduate study in pediatrics in Leipzig, he returned in 1910 to a lifetime
of poetry and medical practice in his hometown, Rutherford, New Jersey.
Williams champions the American idiom and the "local"--either the urban landscape or
one's immediate environment. He pays close attention to ordinary scenes (some purely
descriptive; others as compositions as in visual art), the working class and poor.
Williams's work often demonstrates the artist's need to destroy or deconstruct what has
become outworn and to reassemble or recreate with fresh vision and language. His own
"hybrid" background is, in his view, particularly American. He uses his experience as a
doctor, married man and father, son and friend, in some of the poems, fiction, and plays.
In addition, he demonstrates the need to discover rather than impose order on reality.
He sometime views the poem as "a machine made out of words." Around 1915 Williams
began experimenting in shorter poems with innovative line breaks, speaking voices, and a
kind of stripped-down language. The young Williams was at first influenced primarily
by Whitman and Keats and began by writing conventional verse; therefore, his departure
from tradition was all the more radical. By his first year at the University of
Pennsylvania, Williams met and befriended Ezra Pound, who introduced him to Imagism,
a trend that stressed a verse of "swift, uncluttered, functional phrasing." Williams's first
book, Poems (1909), a "conventional" work, "correct in sentiment and diction," preceded
the Imagist influence. But in The Tempers (1913), as scholars claim, Williams's "style
was directed by an Imagist feeling, though it still depended on romantic and poeticized
allusiveness." And while Pound drifted towards increased allusiveness in his work,
Williams stuck with Pound's tenet to "make it new." By 1917 and the publication of his
third book, Al Que Quiere!, critics maintain that "Williams began to apply the Imagist
principle of 'direct treatment of the thing' fairly rigorously." Also at this time, Williams
was "beginning to stress that poetry must find its 'primary impetus'... in 'local
conditions,'" and he was determined to use the material he was most familiar with, the
spaces and people of Rutherford.
Williams has always been known as an experimenter, an innovator, a revolutionary figure
in American poetry. Yet in comparison to artists of his own time who sought a new
environment for creativity as expatriates in Europe, Williams lived a remarkably
conventional life. A doctor for more than forty years serving the New Jersey town of
Rutherford, he relied on his patients, the America around him, and his own imagination to
create a distinctively American verse. Often domestic in focus, his poetry is remarkable
for its empathy, sympathy, its muscular and emotional identification with its subjects.
Corresponding with Williams's attraction to the locale was his lifelong quest to have
poetry mirror the speech of the American people. He had no interest, he said, in the
"speech of the English country people, which would have something artificial about it";
instead he sought a "language modified by our environment, the American environment."
One critic suggests that "Thinking of himself as a local poet who possessed neither the
high culture nor the old-world manners of an Eliot or Pound, he sought to express his
democracy through his way of speaking.... His point was to speak on an equal level with
the reader, and to use the language and thought materials of America in expressing his
point of view." The volume Spring and All (1923) was heavily influenced by Eliots The
Waste Land, and although it viewed the same American landscape as did Eliot, it
interpreted it differently. Williams "saw his poetic task was to affirm the self-reliant,
sympathetic consciousness of Whitman in a broken industrialized world, but unlike Eliot,
who responded negatively to the harsh realities of this world, Williams saw his task as
breaking through restrictions and generating new growth."
In his prefatory notes to the original four-book Paterson (1946-1958), Williams explained
"that a man himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life in
ways which the various aspects of a city may embodyif imaginatively conceivedany
city, all the details of which may be made to voice his most intimate convictions."
Just as meeting Pound had measurably affected Williams's early life, the appearance of
Eliot's The Waste Land marked important changes in his mid-career. Though some of
Williams's finest poetry appeared in the 1923 Spring and All, he did not release another
book of poems for nearly ten years. "For decades thereafter he could not outdo himself;
some think he never did." Instead, Williams wrote prose. And in it he concentrated on one
subject in particular: America. So, in In the American Grain, Williams tried "to find out
for myself what the land of my more or less accidental birth might signify" by examining
the "original records" of "some of the American founders." In its treatment of the makers
of American history, ranging from Columbus to Lincoln, In the American Grain has
impressed many as Williams's most succinct definition of America and its people.
Another prose book of the period, A Voyage to Pagany, was a type of travel book based
on the author's 1924 trip to Europe. Williams focused directly on America and the
Depression in his aptly titled short story collection, The Knife of the Times. In these
stories and in other similar works of the 1930a, "Williams blamed the inadequacies of
American culture for both the emotional and economic plight of many of his subjects.
Williams's novel trilogy, White Mule, In the Money, and The Build-Up, also focused on
America, particularly on his wifes family.
Williams Autobiography appeared in 1951, and in 1963 he was posthumously awarded
the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his Pictures from Brueghel, and Other Poems (1962).

Selected Works by William Carlos Williams:

Poems, privately printed, 1909; The Tempers, 1913; Al Que Quiere!, 1917; Kora in Hell:
Improvisations, 1920; Sour Grapes, 1921; Go Go, 1923; Spring and All, 1923; The Cod
Head, 1932; Collected Poems, 1921-1931, preface by Wallace Stevens, 1934; An Early
Martyr and Other Poems, 1935; Adam & Eve & The City, 1936; The Complete Collected
Poems of William Carlos Williams, 1906-1938, 1938; The Broken Span, 1941; The
Wedge, 1944; Paterson, Book I, 1946, Book II, 1948, Book III, 1949, Book IV, 1951,
Book V, 1958, Books I-V published in one volume, 1963; The Clouds, 1948; Selected
Poems, 1949; The Pink Church, 1949; The Collected Later Poems, 1963; Collected
Earlier Poems, 1951; The Desert Music and Other Poems, 1954; Journey to
Love (includes Asphodel, That Greeny Flower), 1955; The Lost Poems of William Carlos
Williams; or, The Past Recaptured, collected by John C. Thirlwall, 1957; Pictures From
Brueghel and Other Poems (includes The Desert Music and Journey to Love), 1962.

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

He was an American poet whose work explored the interaction of reality and what man
could make of reality in his mind. It was not until late in life that Stevens was read at all
widely or recognized as a major poet.
Stevens attended Harvard for three years, worked briefly for the New York Herald
Tribune, and then won a degree (1904) at the New York Law School and practiced law in
New York City. His first published poems, aside from college verse, appeared in 1914
in Poetry, and thereafter he was a frequent contributor to the literary magazines. In 1916
he joined an insurance firm in Hartford, Connecticut, rising in 1934 to vice president, a
position he held until his death. Harmonium (1923), his first book, sold fewer than 100
copies but received some favorable critical notices; it was reissued in 1931 and in 1947.
In it he introduced the imaginationreality theme that occupied his creative lifetime,
making his work so unified that he considered three decades later calling his collected
poems The Whole of Harmonium. He displayed his most dazzling verbal brilliance in
his first book; he later tended to relinquish surface lustre for philosophical rigour.
In Harmonium appeared such poems as Le Monocle de Mon Oncle, Sunday
Morning, Peter Quince at the Clavier, and Stevens own favorites, Domination of
Black and The Emperor of Ice-Cream; all were frequently republished in
anthologies. Harmonium also contained Sea Surface Full of Clouds, in which waves
are described in terms of such unlikely equivalents as umbrellas, French phrases, and
varieties of chocolate, and The Comedian as the Letter C, in which he examines the
relation of the poet, or man of imagination, to society.
When Stevens began to write poems with renewed fluency in the 1930s, he arranged for
them to be printed in limited editions at the same time as trade editions were prepared by
Knopf. Ideas of Order (1935) and Owls Clover (1937) were limited editions by the
Alcestis Press, while The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937) and Parts of a World (1942)
were printed by Knopf, and Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (1942) and Esthetique du
Mal were deluxe volumes issued by the Cummington Press in 1942.
In 1939, Stevens was sixty an age when most poets are ready to look back on what
career they might have made for themselves, but his best writing still lay before him in
the form of extended meditative sequences, quasi-philosophical in their ruminative
wanderings but marked always by a vivid sense of the absurd and a darting, whirling
inventiveness that took delight in peculiar anecdotal examples. In the loosely connected
stanzas of these sequences, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" (1942), "Esthetique du
Mal" (1945), "The Auroras of Autumn" (1947) and "An Ordinary Evening in New
Haven" (1950), Stevens perfected what had been, in effect, the work he had been
producing all along a meta-poetry that took delight in commenting upon its own
making. At the same time, he began to grow interested in putting his thoughts on
aesthetics together in prose sentences, essays he collected in 1951 as The Necessary
Angel. In his seventies, he began to write a poetry of late old age, in which a sense of the
disembodied, the purely mental, gave rise to a discourse that had grown newly austere,
solemn, and strange even to its author.
Capturing so exuberantly yet so flawlessly the mind at play with an extravagance most
often associated with youthful pleasure, with the sheer delights of the sensual body,
Stevens preferred to mask his very great sensual satisfactions by suggesting that his
doings were in fact all a highly proper set of speculations on "the imagination."

Selected Works by Wallace Stevens:

Harmonium (1923); Ideas of Order (1935); Owls Clover (1936); The Man With the
Blue Guitar (1937); Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction (1942); Parts of a World (1942);
Esthtique du Mal (1945); Three Academic Pieces (1947); Transport to Summer (1947);
Primitive Like an Orb (1948); Auroras of Autumn (1950); Collected Poems (1954);
Opus Posthumous (1957); The Palm at the End of the Mind (1967).