American dream

1.1 Features of the development of US literature in the first half of the twentieth century

The literature of the United States of the period 1910-1945 is represented by various trends. The romantic tradition, so characteristic of the American literary process of the 19th century, is strong in it, the literature of critical realism is developing, and modernist currents are emerging.

In the 20-30s. The USA is among the leading countries of the West. The 1920s began as a decade of economic prosperity. Writer Scott Fitzgerald called this time the "Jazz Age". This definition has become firmly established in the everyday life of literary critics and writers. Fitzgerald talked about the attitude of Americans, especially the younger generation, whose adolescence and youth coincided with the war. In the article "Echoes of the Jazz Age" (1931), he wrote: It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of extremes and satire ... The whole country was seized by a thirst for pleasure and the pursuit of pleasure ... The word "jazz", which no one now considers obscene meant first sex, then dance style, and finally music. When they talk about jazz, they mean a state of nervous excitement, about the same that prevails in large cities when the front line approaches them. The Jazz Age is notable for having no interest in politics.
In October 1929, the New York Stock Exchange crashed, the country was shaken by a severe economic crisis, which led to mass unemployment. The Great Depression began. The 1930s, with their inherent sharpness of socio-political protest, were called the "Red Thirties".
Popular discontent and the upsurge of the working-class movement contributed to the development of proletarian literature and manifested itself in sympathy for the ideas of socialism. This was reflected in the work of Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Eugene O'Neill, Carl Sandburg. In 1935, the anthology Proletarian Literature in the United States was published. Its authors were 63 writers. Among them are John Dos Passos, Erskine Caldwell, Clifford Odets, literary critic Malcolm Cowley.
The gloomy atmosphere of America experiencing an economic crisis is conveyed in the works of John Steinbeck (1902-1968) of the 1930s - in stories, in the story "Of Mice and Men" (1937), in the novel "The Grapes of Wrath" (1939). This story is about a working-class Joad family crossing America in search of work. The novel is based on the facts collected by the writer when getting acquainted with the life of seasonal workers. The authenticity of the book caused a controversial reaction: in some states it was banned and even burned. Steinbeck was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 for The Grapes of Wrath. One of the main themes in the literature of the 1920s and 1930s was the anti-war theme. In the 1920s, it sounded in stories and novels by E. Hemingway - “The Sun Also Rises” (1926), “Farewell to Arms!” (1929), in W. Faulkner's novels The Soldier's Award (1926) and Sartoris (1929), in Dos Passos's novels Three Soldiers and Manhattan (1929). These writers were participants in the war. Returning home, they again faced false propaganda about the war, but now in peacetime, which more clearly revealed the senselessness of the sacrifices made and exacerbated the pain of memories of the dead.
The anti-war theme in the literature of the 1930s merged with the theme of the struggle against fascism. W. Faulkner's novels Light in August (1932) and E. Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) are dedicated to her.
The work of the poets Robert Frost (1874–1963), Carl Sandburg (1878–1967), Langston Hughes (1902–1967) allowed critics and literary historians to speak of a “poetic renaissance” in American literature in the first half of the 20th century.
The search for new means of artistic representation marked the work of John Dos Passos (1896–1970), as evidenced by the novel Manhattan (1926), which uses the montage technique used in cinema. In the 1930s, Dos Passos' novels-trilogy "USA" were published: "The 42nd Parallel" (1930), "1919" (1932), "Big Money" (1936). The author's goal is to create an American epic of the twentieth century.
Playwright Eugene O'Neill played a major role in the renewal of theater and drama in the United States. Having freed dramaturgy from the clichés characteristic of the commercial theater, he made it an achievement of national art.
The formation of modernism in the literature of the United States took place under the significant influence of the culture of European countries, and especially France. In the 1920s, many American writers lived in Paris: E. Hemingway, F.S. Fitzgerald, G. Stike, E. Pound, who called the capital of France a "laboratory of ideas". Through France lay the path of Thomas Stearns Eliot to England, where he settled for life. Literary historians have introduced the concept of the "European school of American modernism", which is associated with the names of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein.
The end of World War II marked the entry of the United States and American literature into a new period of its development. The completed war took place across the ocean. The United States entered the new era as a rich country. Already in the 1950s, referring to the assessment of the achievements of the literature of the interwar decades, American writers and critics asked the question: what awaits literature at a new stage?
Expressing hope for its renewal, they felt the loss of the artistic heights achieved by the American classics of the first half of the 20th century.
An assessment of the literary situation of the middle of the century was made in a speech given by William Faulkner in 1955 at the University of Oregon, and then in his article “On Private Life. The American Dream: What's Happening to It? Answering this question, Faulkner said: “There was a Dream ... The Dream is the freedom of an equal beginning with all other people, it is a freedom that obliges you to protect and protect this equality with individual courage, honest work and mutual responsibility. Then we lost the Dream... Now he left us.
And in the vacuum, strong voices no longer sound, which not only were not afraid of anything, but which did not even know that there was such a thing as fear, voices merged in the unity of hope and will.
Faulkner sees the reason for what is happening in the depersonalization of a person, in an attack on his private life. Faulkner's speech was delivered during the years of the Cold War, the Vietnam War.
The theme of confronting the individual against the onslaught of an inhumane civilization that imposes imaginary values, seeking to suppress the life of the “human heart”, which Faulkner and writers of his generation wrote about and feared so much, continued to be one of the main ones in American literature of the second half of the century. The greatest American writers, realizing the unrealizability of the "American dream", continued their moral and aesthetic searches under the new conditions, opposing the spirit of acquisitiveness with the love of freedom and dignity of a person, his desire for justice, rejection of militarism and racism.
The typology of the conflicts covered in literary works determined the typology of the hero, whose image reflects the worldview and aesthetic ideal of the writer.
Among the heroes of American novelists, playwrights, and poets are participants in the war (the new “lost generation”) in the works of Norman Mailer, black heroes in the novels of James Baldwin and William Styron, young heroes of the generation of the “broken” (“beatniks”) in the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, in novels and stories by Jack Kerouac and Jerome David Salinger, "average Americans" in the plays of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, in the novels and stories of John Updike and John Cheever, intellectuals in the works of Saul Bellow and Thornton Wilder. Other examples can be cited: parody-grotesque characters in the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, who turned to the problem of dehumanization and the transformation of a person into a robot in the era of scientific and technological revolution, images of antiheroes in the novels of Arthur Miller.