Qarshi davlat universiteti xorijiy tillar fakulteti ingliz tili va adabiyoti kafedrasi

MODERNISM AND EXPERIMENTATION: 1914-1945 
Many historians have characterized the period between the two world wars as the 
United States' traumatic "coming of age," despite the fact that U.S. direct involvement was 
relatively brief (1917-1918) and its casualties many fewer than those of its European allies and 
foes. John Dos Passos expressed America's postwar disillusionment in the novel 
Three Soldiers
(1921), when he noted that civilization was a "vast edifice of sham, and the war, instead of its 
crumbling, was its fullest and most ultimate expression." Shocked and permanently changed, 
Americans returned to their homeland but could never regain their innocence.
Nor could soldiers from rural America easily return to their roots. After experiencing 
the world, many now yearned for a modern, urban life. New farm machines such as planters, 
harvesters, and binders had drastically reduced the demand for farm jobs; yet despite their 
increased productivity, farmers were poor. Crop prices, like urban workers' wages, depended on 
unrestrained market forces heavily influenced by business interests: Government subsidies for 
farmers and effective workers' unions had not yet become established. "The chief business of the 
American people is business," President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed in 1925, and most agreed.
In the postwar "Big Boom," business flourished, and the successful prospered beyond 
their wildest dreams. For the first time, many Americans enrolled in higher education -- in the 
1920s college enrollment doubled. The middle-class prospered; Americans began to enjoy the 
world s highest national average income in this era, and many people purchased the ultimate 
status symbol -- an automobile. The typical urban American home glowed with electric lights 
and boasted a radio that connected the house with the outside world, and perhaps a telephone, a 
camera, a typewriter, or a sewing machine. Like the businessman protagonist of Sinclair Lewis's 
novel 
Babbitt
(1922), the average American approved of these machines because they were 
modern and because most were American inventions and American-made.
Americans of the "Roaring Twenties" fell in love with other modern entertainments. 
Most people went to the movies once a week. Although Prohibition - a nationwide ban on the 
production, transport, and sale of alcohol instituted through the 18th Amendment to the U.S. 
Constitution -- began in 1919, underground "speakeasies" and nightclubs proliferated, featuring 
jazz music, cocktails, and daring modes of dress and dance. Dancing, moviegoing, automobile 
touring, and radio were national crazes. American women, in particular, felt liberated. Many had 
left farms and villages for homefront duty in American cities during World War I, and had 
become resolutely modern. They cut their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short "flapper" dresses, 
and gloried in the right to vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, passed in 
1920. They boldly spoke their mind and took public roles in society.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and disillusioned with the savage war, the older 
generation they held responsible, and difficult postwar economic conditions that, ironically, 
allowed Americans with dollars -- like writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude 
Stein, and Ezra Pound -- to live abroad handsomely on very little money. Intellectual currents, 
particularly Freudian psychology and to a lesser extent Marxism (like the earlier Darwinian 
theory of evolution), implied a "godless" world view and contributed to the breakdown of 
traditional values. Americans abroad absorbed these views and brought them back to the United 
States where they took root, firing the imagination of young writers and artists. William 

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Faulkner, for example, a 20th-century American novelist, employed Freudian elements in all his 
works, as did virtually all serious American fiction writers after World War I.
Despite outward gaiety, modernity, and unparalleled material prosperity, young 
Americans of the 1920s were "the lost generation" -- so named by literary portraitist Gertrude 
Stein. Without a stable, traditional structure of values, the individual lost a sense of identity 
Numerous novels, notably Hemingway's 
The Sun Also Rises
(1926) and Fitzgerald's 
This Side of Paradise
(1920), evoke the extravagance and disillusionment of the lost generation. 
In T.S. Eliot's influential long poem 
The Waste Land
(1922), Western civilization is symbolized 
by a bleak desert in desperate need of rain (spiritual renewal).
The world depression of the 1930s affected most of the population of the United States. 
Workers lost their jobs, and factories shut down; businesses and banks failed; farmers, unable to 
harvest, transport, or sell their crops, could not pay their debts and lost their farms. Midwestern 
droughts turned the "breadbasket" of America into a dust bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest 
for California in search of jobs, as vividly described in John Steinbeck's 
The Grapes of Wrath
(1939). "