PROSE WRITING, 1914-1945: AMERICAN REALISM
A
lthough American prose between the wars experimented with viewpoint and form,
Americans wrote more realistically, on the whole, than did Europeans. Novelist Ernest
Hemingway wrote of war, hunting, and other masculine pursuits in a stripped, plain style;
William Faulkner set his powerful southern novels spanning generations and cultures firmly in
Mississippi heat and dust; and Sinclair Lewis delineated bourgeois lives with ironic clarity.
The importance of facing reality became a dominant theme in the 1920s and 1930s: Writers
such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and the playwright Eugene O'Neill repeatedly portrayed the tragedy
awaiting those who live in flimsy dreams.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940),
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald's life resembles a fairy tale. During World War I, Fitzgerald
enlisted in the U.S. Army and fell in love with a rich and beautiful girl, Zelda Sayre, who lived
near Montgomery, Alabama, where he was stationed. Zelda broke off their engagement because
he was relatively poor. After he was discharged at war's end, he went to seek his literary fortune
in New York City in order to marry her.
His first novel,
This Side of Paradise
(1920), became a best- seller, and at 24 they married.
Neither of them was able to withstand the stresses of success and fame, and they squandered
their money. They moved to France to economize in 1924 and returned seven years later. Zelda
became mentally unstable and had to be institutionalized; Fitzgerald himself became an alcoholic
and died young as a movie screenwriter.
Fitzgerald's secure place in American literature rests primarily on his novel
The Great
Gatsby
(1925), a brilliantly written, economically structured story about the American dream of
the self-made man. The protagonist, the mysterious Jay Gatsby, discovers the devastating cost of
success in terms of personal fulfillment and love. Other fine works include
Tender Is the Night
(1934), about a young psychiatrist whose life is doomed by his marriage to an unstable woman,
and some stories in the collections
Flappers and Philosophers
(1920),
Tales of the Jazz Age
(1922), and
All the Sad Young Men
(1926). More than any other writer, Fitzgerald captured the
glittering, desperate life of the 1920s;
This Side of Paradise
was heralded as the voice of modern
American youth. His second novel,
The Beautiful and the Damned
(1922), continued his
exploration of the self-destructive extravagance of his times.
Fitzgerald's special qualities include a dazzling style perfectly suited to his theme of
seductive glamour. A famous section from
The Great Gatsby
masterfully summarizes a long
passage of time: "There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his
blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne
and the stars."
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