The autobiography is one of the first depictions of the 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 under the new conditions of moral and aesthetic searches, opposing the spirit of acquisitiveness with the love of freedom and dignity of man, 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 the novels and stories of Jack Kerouac and Jerome David Salinger, the "average Americans" in the plays of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, the novels and stories of John Updike and John Cheever, the 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.
Am This article is focused on English-language literature rather than the literature of England, so that it includes writers from Scotland, Wales, and the whole of Ireland, as well as literature in English from former British colonies. It also includes, to some extent, the US, though the main article here is American literature.
Modernism is a major literary movement of the first part of the twentieth-century. The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain tendencies in post-World War II literature.
Irish writers were especially important in the twentieth-century, including James Joyce and later Samuel Beckett, both central figures in the Modernist movement. Americans, like poets T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and novelist William Faulkner, were other important modernists. British modernists include Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence. In the mid-twentieth-century major writers started to appear in the various countries of the British Commonwealth, including several Nobel laureates. In the early 20th-century literary modernism developed in the English-speaking world due to a general sense of disillusionment with the Victorian era attitudes of certainty, conservatism, and belief in the idea of objective truth. The movement was influenced by the ideas of Charles Darwin (1809–82) (On Origin of Species) (1859), Ernst Mach (1838–1916), Henri Bergson (1859–1941), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), James G. Frazer (1854–1941), Karl Marx (1818–83) (Das Kapital, 1867), and the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), among others. The continental art movements of Impressionism, and later Cubism, were also important inspirations for modernist writers. Important literary precursors of modernism, were: Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81) (Crime and Punishment (1866), The Brothers Karamazov (1880); Walt Whitman (1819–92) (Leaves of Grass) (1855–91); Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) (Les Fleurs du mal), Rimbaud (1854–91) (Illuminations, 1874); August Strindberg (1849–1912), especially his later plays.
A major British lyric poet of the first decades of the 20th century was Thomas Hardy (1840–1928). Though not a modernist, Hardy was an important transitional figure between the Victorian era and the 20th century. A major novelist of the late 19th century, Hardy, after the adverse criticism of his last novel, Jude the Obscure, concentrated on publishing poetry. On the other hand, another significant transitional figure between Victorians and modernists, the late-19th-century novelist, Henry James (1843–1916), continued to publish major works into the 20th century. James, born in the US, lived in Europe from 1875, and became a British citizen in 1915. Another immigrant, Polish-born modernist novelist Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) published his first important work, Heart of Darkness, in 1899 and Lord Jim in 1900. The American exponent of Naturalism Theodore Dreiser's (1871–1945) Sister Carrie was also published in 1900.
However, the Victorian Gerard Manley Hopkins's (1844–89) highly original poetry was not published until 1918, long after his death, while the career of another major modernist poet, Irishman W. B. Yeats (1865–1939), began late in the Victorian era. Yeats was one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Irishman so honoured. Yeats is generally considered[by whom?] one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize: these works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929).
In addition to W. B. Yeats other important early modernist poets were the American poets T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) and Ezra Pound (1885–1972). Eliot became a British citizen in 1927 but was born and educated in America. His most famous works are: "Prufrock" (1915), The Waste Land (1921) and Four Quartets (1935–42). Ezra Pound was not only a major poet, first publishing part of The Cantos in 1917, but an important mentor for other poets, most significantly in his editorial advice for Eliot's poem The Waste Land. Other important American poets writing early in the 20th century were William Carlos Williams (1883–1963), Robert Frost (1874–1963), who published his first collection in England in 1913, and H.D. (1886–1961). Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), an American expatriate living in Paris, famous for her line "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose," was also an important literary force during this time period. American poet Marianne Moore (1887–1972) published from the 1920s to the 1960s.
But while modernism was to become an important literary movement in the early decades of the new century, there were also many fine writers who, like Thomas Hardy, were not modernists. During the early decades of the 20th century the Georgian poets like Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), Walter de la Mare (1873–1956), and John Masefield (1878–1967, Poet Laureate from 1930) maintained a conservative approach to poetry by combining romanticism, sentimentality and hedonism, sandwiched as they were between the Victorian era, with its strict classicism, and Modernism, with its strident rejection of pure aestheticism. Edward Thomas (1878–1917) is sometimes treated as another Georgian poet. Thomas enlisted in 1915 and is one of the First World War poets along with Wilfred Owen (1893–1918), Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1917), Edmund Blunden (1896–1974) and Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967).
Irish playwrights George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) and J.M. Synge (1871–1909) were influential in British drama. Shaw's career began in the last decade of the 19th century, while Synge's plays belong to the first decade of the 20th century. Synge's most famous play, The Playboy of the Western World, "caused outrage and riots when it was first performed" in Dublin in 1907. George Bernard Shaw turned the Edwardian theatre into an arena for debate about important political and social issues, like marriage, class, "the morality of armaments and war" and the rights of women. An important dramatist in the 1920s, and later, was Irishman Seán O'Casey (1880–1964). Also in the 1920s and later Noël Coward (1899–1973) achieved enduring success as a playwright, publishing more than 50 plays from his teens onwards. Many of his works, such as Hay Fever (1925), Private Lives (1930), Design for Living (1932), Present Laughter (1942) and Blithe Spirit (1941), have remained in the regular theatre repertoire.
Amongst the novelists, after Joseph Conrad, other important early modernists include Dorothy Richardson (1873–1957), whose novel Pointed Roof (1915), is one of the earliest example of the stream of consciousness technique, and D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), who published The Rainbow in 1915, though it was immediately seized by the police. Then in 1922 Irishman James Joyce's important modernist novel Ulysses appeared. Ulysses has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement". Set during one day in Dublin, in it Joyce creates parallels with Homer's epic poem the Odyssey. William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929) is another significant modernist novel, that uses the stream of consciousness technique.
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