Literature of the Middle Ages. The Anglo-Saxon period Beowulf

19. American Novel of the 30s. The Dreiser’s work. J.Steinbeck.

The economic collapse of 1929 destroyed the happy, confident mood of America in the twenties. Millions of Americans lost their jobs as the nation entered the Depression era. Most writers turned to a new kind of social realism and naturalism. It showed the struggles and tragedies of ordinary people. In the early 30s the first reaction to the Depression was a literature of social protest. There was a powerful Marxist Proletarian Literature movement. The main intellectual magazine of the era was the Partisan Review, edited by Jewish intellectuals in New York. Michael Gold (1896-1967) wrote Jews without Money as a model for other Proletarian writers. His novels was also the start of the Jewish-American novel, which became an important type of literature in the 60s-70s.He describes the failure of the American Dream for those who had left Europe looking for a new and better life.

Theodore Dreiser(1871-1945) was one of the America’s greatest writers. He and his characters ignored moral code. This attitude shocked public when Sister Carrie came out in 1900. Dreiser’s Trilogy of Desire shows a new development in his thinking. He had already found life to be meaningless and morals to be absurd. Now he stressed the will to power. Dreiser’s greatest novel An American Tragedy reveals a third stage in his thinking: social consciousness. Clyde Griffiths thinks money and success will bring him happiness. When a pregnant girlfriend threatens to destroy this dream, he plans to kill her. At the last moment, he changes his mind, but the girl dies accidentally anyway. Since he had decided not to kill her, is he really responsible for her death? This becomes the main question during the trial. It is not fair. Society and its false moral code are far guiltier.
John Steinbeck(1902-1968) His characters were driven by forces in themselves and in society: fear, hunger, sex, evils of Capitalism. Crime is often the result of these forces. In all of his plays, he combines a naturalistic way of looking with a deep sympathy for people. Like some other writers, he tried to paint large portraits of the national spirit. In The Grapes of Wrath he is not simply describing the experiences of a single family of individuals. He is really telling a story of a great national tragedy through the experiences of that one family. But the literary interest of the book is in its descriptions of the daily heroism of ordinary people. Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature.