Modern English and American literature

Within the next three years, Faulkner found his great theme: he began writing about the decaying Southern family, the younger members of which are imbued with the sense of futility and alienation, unable to shake off the weight of the nobler past, the American South as a microcosm for the universal themes of time, the passions of the human heart, and the destruction of the wilderness. Faulkner saw the South as a nation unto itself, with a strong sense of its noble past and an array of myths by which it clung to its pride, despite the humiliating defeat of the Civil War and the acceptance of the distasteful values of an industrial North. Faulkner started to explore these themes in 1929 with the publication of Sartoris (1929) and The Sound and the Fury (1929), two novels published within months of each other. Sartoris was a fairly conventional novel set in mythical Yoknapatawpha, Faulkner's own “little postage stamp of native soil.” Imaginary Yoknapatawpha is similar in many ways to the actual impoverished farmland, with its red clay hills, that rings Oxford, Mississippi, home of the state's university. It was there that William's father, Murray Falkner, ran a livery stable and later became the university's business manager. William Faulkner lived and wrote there throughout most of his life. The aristocratic Sartorises resemble Faulkner's own ancestors. Colonel Bayard Sartoris, for example, was patterned after Faulkner's great-grandfather, who rose from rural poverty to command the Second Mississippi Regiment, built a railroad, wrote a best-selling novel, and was murdered on the street by his business partner.

The Sound and the Fury was a milestone in American literature, due to Faulkner's bold manipulation of point of view and of its stream-of-consciousness narrative technique. It is a tragic story of the decline and fall of the Compson family. The Compsons incorporate some characteristics of the author's immediate family. The novel is rather experimental in its technique, and falls in four sections. Only one section, the fourth, is told from a conventional point of view.

Although Faulkner's novels were not a commercial success, he was able to make a living by writing short stories, most of which were published in the magazine Saturday Evening Post. This enabled him to marry, his childhood sweetheart Estelle Oldham after she divorced her first husband, and to buy a pre-Civil War mansion.

In the decade which followed, Faulkner produced a succession of dazzling books: in 1930 appeared his comedy As I Lay Dying that tells of the poor-white Bundren family and its efforts to bring the body of its matriarch, Addie, back to the town of Jefferson for burial. The novel reveals these humble people as more enduring than their social betters. It was followed by Sanctuary (1931), a tale about the rape and corruption of a Southern belle, and Light in August (1932), a poetic work in which Faulkner first confronted the South's tragic legacy of racism. It's about complex and violent relations between a white woman and a black man. The novel concerns the Burden family and explores the problem of racism through the character of the protagonist, Joe Christmas. Although he can pass as white, Joe is regarded as a mulatto; his failure to find a place in either white or black society leads to his murder.

The success of these novels brought him fame and an invitation to come to Hollywood to write screenplays. Thus appeared films like Road to Glory, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, and Land of the Pharaohs.

After 1932 Faulkner continued to publish novels but this was not as prolific period as the first one. The principal product of the writer in this period was, perhaps, a novel Absalom, Absalom! (1936) about the rise of a self-made plantation owner and his tragic fall through racial prejudice and a failure to love. Then appeared The Unvanquished (1938). This was followed by The Hamlet (1940), the first volume of a trilogy about the Snopes clan. These works reveal Faulkner as equally skillful in the tragic and the comic modes. He portrayed the South accurately, perceptively, and with a poignant ambivalence - on the one hand affectionate, on the other critical. He once said of the South, “Well, I love it and I hate it.”

In 1942 he published Go Down, Moses, a novel in the form of linked stories, about several generations in the McCaslin family, of white, black, and mixed blood. It was a failure upon publication, and was followed by six years' silence. It was due to the paperback publication The Portable Faulkner which appeared in 1946 that the Southern writer was reintroduced; a public was ready to appreciate his talent. Faulkner was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 1951 he travelled to Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature, following the publication of Intruder in the Dust (1948); in 1951 Faulkner won a National Book Award for his Collected Stories, and in 1955 - the Pulitzer Prize and a second National Book Award for A Fable (1954). After World War II Faulkner also published Requiem for a Nun (1951), The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and a high-hearted comedy The Reivers (1962), set in the period of Faulkner's youth. The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion picture the Snopeses - Faulkner's unforgettable portrayal of a sprawling clan of irresponsible, depraved, social ambitious varmints, who rise from the dust and cheat their way to respectability and wealth, destroying the old values of aristocracy and peasantry alike. Faulkner used his native state of Mississippi for the geography of Yoknapatawpha County, his fictional microcosm of the world. An agrarian by disposition, he, like other Southerners, saw in the incursion of commercialism a violent disruption of old virtues and of unselfish and immediate relationship to the land. Recounting man's false steps in history, he saw the Civil War as a guidepost in the culmination of a self-destructive exploitation. Faulkner's prose could be crystal clear, but at his most ambitious he constructed a highly involved syntax to represent the complexities that man must disentangle. Read as metaphors, his fictions came to stand for the perplexed condition of mankind, not simply in America but in the entire modern world. The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! represent his most difficult prose but also his best. Faulkner's troubled picture of what has happened to America is often disturbing to his countrymen and bewildering to non-Americans; but in principle his frankness not only demonstrates a freedom for independent thought but also gives evidence that the same belief in the potentialities of the American dream that characterized the prose of authors like Thoreau still maintains itself in the felt agony that man is less than he can be.

William Faulkner died on July 6, 1962 of heart attack at his home in Oxford, Mississippi, a month after The Reivers was published. He had become an international celebrity; his works had been translated into all the major European languages, and also into Japanese.

The Sound and the Fury. The novel is a story of a southern aristocratic family of Compsons. The title and the idea of the novel become clear, when the reader realizes that the words are taken from Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

The book consists of four sections from which we learn about the life of four children of the Compson family: Benjy, Quentin, Jason, their sister Caddy and their parents. The first part is the monologue of Benjy, a mentally diseased boy, an idiot whose thoughts rapidly flicker between present and various levels of the past in his morbid imagination. The second section is the monologue of his brother Quentin, a hypersensitive young man, a student of Harvard University. To give him a chance to study the family has lost the last property they had - they sold the pasture. In the third part the fate of the family is pictured by Jason, a moral psychopath. He embodies the features of the new bourgeois order which replaced patriarchal system. He is egoistic, vulgar and cruel, mean, and deprived of good human qualities. Quentin is brave and emotional, Jason is a coward.

The fourth part is narrated by the author himself.

Benjy Compson is the primal force of the book. Faulkner chronicles the decline of the American South through his experiences. Benjy struggles to articulate his vision of life. Though at first his story seems to have no real sense and his thoughts are tangled, readers learn much about the old, but poverty-stricken family which has lost all their wealth and dignity. The author sympathizes with the father of the family. He is clever, but not physically strong and skeptical. He has his definite opinion about the time, history, man and society. His wife is a contrast to him. She is physically strong but is constantly complaining of her poor health. Her brother is a good-for-nothing man and a drunkard into the bargain.

Caddy glimpses from the pear tree the adult world of her parents. It is a bold disappointment. “They're not doing anything in there”, she complains. “Just sitting in chairs and looking.” Poised on her branch outside, Caddy looks into a rotting house where there exists no credible authority. Her father stares at his decanter while her neurotic mother lies in an upstairs room, hand perpetually over forehead.

Without parents the children are left to run wild. Through their neglect and inactivity, the Compson parents emotionally mutilate each of their children. They all feel some sort of “hunger”. To satisfy her hunger, Caddy becomes mother to Benjy, and lover to her brother Quentin. Seeking the love she cannot find at home, because her mother is too ill to supply it, her father too drunk and misogynist, Caddy is seduced by Dalton Ames who abandons her. Her parents do all to conceal their daughter's disgrace. They marry her to Sydney Herbert Head, briefly. He leaves her when he finds out that she is pregnant. To save the face of the family Quentin says that he fathered the future child. “I have committed, incest I said Father it was I it was not Dalton Ames.” Thinking that the time itself created all the misfortunes of the family, Quentin tries to stop the time going - he breaks his watch, a gift of his father. In his sexual jealousy for his sister Quentin kills himself. Jason hardens in his meanness. He appropriates the money which Caddy gets to feed and bring up her little daughter Quentin (named in honour of her brother). He tries to send Benjy to the orphan-asylum.

The family has degraded economically, physically, and morally. The only moral centre is someone not of their blood: the black servant Dilsey and her son Luster. “Dese funny folks”, says Dilsey's son, Luster. “Adod, I aint none of em.”

Dilsey is a kind, humane and honest woman. She cares about Benjy. She is bold enough to tell Jason about his meanness.

Ernest Hemingway

1899-1961

Few American authors have offered as powerful a definition of the twentieth-century hero as Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway's fiction presents a strict code of contemporary heroism. It centers on disillusionment with the conventions of an optimistic, patriotic society and a belief that the essence of life is Violence, from which there is no refuge. As Hemingway saw it, the only victory that can be won from life lies in a graceful stoicism, a willingness to accept gratefully life's few moments of pleasure.

Hemingway launched a new style of writing, so forceful in its simplicity that it became a measure of excellence around the world.

Like Scott Fitzgerald's, Hemingway's own life bore a notable resemblance to the lives of his fictional characters.

Ernest Hemingway was born in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, on July 21, 1899, and was educated at the local public schools. With his father, a physician, he spent much time hunting and fishing, and developed his love of nature and his sense of the hard rules for behaviour in the wild. All this acquainted him early with the kinds of virtues, such as courage and endurance, which were later reflected in his fiction. Growing up, Ernest boxed and played football devotedly, but he also wrote poetry, short stories, and a column for the school newspaper. His subjects were often war and its effects on the people, or contests such as hunting and bullfighting, which demand stamina and courage.

After finishing high school in 1917, Hemingway became a reporter for the Kansas City Star. Then, after an unsuccessful attempt to enlist in the army because of the boxing injury to his eye, he volunteered for Red Cross ambulance corps and was sent to the Italian front in World War I, where he was wounded in the knee. This wound was a central episode in both his real and his creative life. During his long convalescence in an Italian hospital, he fell in love with a nurse who became the model for Catherine Barkley, the heroine of his novel A Farewell to Arms.

After the armistice in 1918, he returned to Michigan.

An avid big game hunter, sport fisherman, and bullfight aficionado, Hemingway continued to have adventures and remained a productive and successful writer, transforming his observations and experiences into novels and short stories throughout his last three decades.

In 1921, newly married and with a commission as a reporter for the Toronto Star, Hemingway set off for Paris. Here Hemingway worked at the craft of fiction and met other important writers, among them Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound. But most important, he met Gertrude Stein. She read all of his works and advised him to prune his description and to “concentrate”. Hemingway took her advice and spoke fervently of-writing “the truest sentence that you know”. His journalism and the influence of Gertrude Stein helped to form his literary style - lucid, pure, and simple. From Gertrude Stein he also developed his sense of the “lost generation”, men and women struggling bravely to find value in a world deprived of faith. His first book, Three Stories & Ten Poems, appeared in 1923 and was followed closely by In Our Time. His experience of coming to terms with the war is reflected in his story The End of Something. Nick Adams, who sits alone in the woods, is escaping the world of men, trying to restore himself from both a physical and a psychological shattering. He is trying to hold on to his sanity.

These books, along with The Torrents of Spring (1926), a parody of his friend Sherwood Anderson's work, drew scant notice. Then, late in 1926, he published a novel about the pain and disillusionment which the heroes associate with life in the modern world. This was The Sun Also Rises. The novel brought Hemingway widespread critical attention and international acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. Gertrude Stein's remark, “You are all a lost generation”, was the novel's epigraph, and the book did reveal the postwar epoch to itself. Many American readers of Hemingway's age embraced it as a portrait of their shattered lives.

Over the next few years, he went on to write an even more powerful and successful novel, A Farewell To Arms (1929). This is the beautifully told, moving story of Frederick Henry, a wounded ambulance driver. While recuperating in an Italian hospital, Henry falls in love with an English nurse, Catherine Barkley. Returned to the front, Henry is disillusioned with the war, makes his famous “separate peace”, and deserts. He flees to Switzerland with Catherine, who is now pregnant with his child. Frederick's farewell to Catherine just before her death is one of the most famous passages in American fiction, juxtaposing the writer's cynicism about the human experience with the characters' romantic love.

Constantly pursuing adventure, Hemingway traveled the world, hunting in Africa, deep-sea fishing in the Caribbean, and skiing in Idaho and Europe.

During the early 1930's he brought out two books of nonfiction. Death in the Afternoon (1932) revealed his fascination with bullfighting; Green Hills of Africa (1935) did the same for big game hunting. Significantly, both books centered on the art of killing. His next novel, To Have and Have Not (1937), was dismissed by critics as unskillful. It was followed by the play, The Fifth Column. In 1940, just as the literary world was writing Hemingway off as a has-been, he published another masterpiece, the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.

The outbreak of World War II drew Hemingway back into uniform, officially a correspondent. During one battle, a First Army commander reported that Hemingway's band of adventurers was sixty miles in front of the Americans' advancing line. When the Allies at last reached Paris in 1944, they found that Hemingway had preceded them and had already “liberated” the bar at the Ritz Hotel.

In 1952, Hemingway's celebrated literary accomplishments and his continuous pursuit of excitement and dangers, producing yet another widely acclaimed novel in that year, The Old Man and the Sea which won the Pulitzer Prize and helped earn him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954. It tells of Santiago, a Cuban fisherman, old and down on his luck, who ventures far out in the Gulf Stream and hooks a giant marlin. Santiago battles the fish for two days and nights, and he is towed ever farther out to sea. Although he finally succeeds in subduing the great fish and lashing it to the side of his boat, the sharks tear at the carcass until he is left with only its skeleton. The tale has been interpreted as Hemingway's metaphor for life: a vision of the hero, weighed down by the years, but still able to use his skill to taunt fate and so win a kind of victory from it.

After 1954, when Hemingway won the Nobel Prize, he now divided his time between the house he had built in Ketcham, Idaho, and his restless travels all over the world: to Cuba, Venice, Spain, and Africa.

His health deteriorated, and periods of elation alternated with episodes of severe depression. After a visit to the Mayo Clinic for treatment, he returned to Idaho. On July 2, 1961, he rose early and with two charges of a double- barreled shotgun, he killed himself. “He put life back on the page”, said critic Alfred Kazin, “made us see, feel, and taste the gift of life .... To read Hemingway was always to feel more alive.”

Hemingway's style of writing is striking. He is a great master of the pause. This is when we see how the action of his story continues during the silences, during the time his characters say nothing. This action is always full of meaning

Hemingway perfected the art of conveying emotion with few words. In contrast to the Romantic writers, who often emphasize abundance and even excess, Hemingway is a Classicist in his restraints and understatements. He believed that the strongest effect came with an economy of means.

Robert Penn Warren

1905-1989

Robert Penn Warren is one of the most versatile, prolific and distinguished writers of the twentieth century. He has written poetry, stories, novels, plays, criticism, essays, textbooks, and a biography.

Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky. When he was sixteen he entered Vanderbilt University, where he began to write poetry. After graduating from Vanderbilt in 1925, he studied at the University of California, Yale and Oxford. In 1935 he became one of the founding editors of the literary magazine The Southern Review.

Robert Penn Warren stood out as a masterful rhetorician, a poet, and an influential critic and pedagogue. He wrote a series of deliberately melodramatic novels in which both past and present conflicts of the South were made to serve universally: Night Rider (1939), and At Heaven's Gate (1943), All King's Men (1947) which won him the first Pulitzer Prize.

Robert Pen Warren is also the author of the collections of poems Thirty Six Poems (1935), Eleven Poems on the Same Theme (1942), Selected Poems (1923-1943), Brother to Dragons (1935), a drama in verse Promises, Poems (1954-1957), which won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1959. In 1980 he won a third Pulitzer Prize for Now and Then (1979) - another collection of poetry.

All the King's Men (1946), a study of political morality based on the career of Huey Long, is one of the memorable novels of the century. The novel won Penn Warren another Pulitzer Prize. It is an account of vicious politics of a Southern State governor.

Warren has consistently used southern settings and characters in both his poetry and prose, but at the same time he focuses on universal themes. In his work he emphasizes love of the land, continuity between generations, and the need for self-knowledge and fulfillment in an often violent world.

All the King's Men is a political satire. It unfolds a broad panorama of political life in a Southern State, throwing light on the dirty intrigues and machinations resorted to by those who aspire to secure a higher position in the administration. Here Warren touches upon one of the most fateful questions of American experience, - the sources, uses and abuses of great political power in a democratic society and the individual's responsibility to that society and to himself. It is a general belief that the novel drew partly from the career of Huey Long, the governor of Louisiana in 1935, one of the most bizarre and audacious figures in the 20th century public life in America. Warren himself denied this.

The events are narrated by Jack Burden, a newspaper reporter, the Boss's political aide and confidential agent. The central figure of the book is Willie Stark, the “Boss”. Formerly a simple peasant boy from upstate Louisiana, he rises from the position of County Treasurer in Mason City to that of Governor of the state. Striving for power Willie Stark shuns from no means to achieve his end. Willie Stark is a man who exercises a tremendous imaginative appeal over the people, but his methods are dirty. To achieve his aim he bribes, threatens, buys and sells men, uses blackmail and violence, employs various techniques of reputation-blackening. Willie is a complex person, not a simple demagogue, as some critics think. Power-mad and dictatorial, he seemingly works for the good of the poor folk. He is a man with a “mission”, with a would-be strong social conscience and a burning desire to bring to the rednecks their full share of the blessings of modern society. He has an avid taste for power which corrupts him and brings about his downfall.

Jack Burden, the protagonist, is a descendent of an old Southern family. He throws himself into the main currents of politics and power to escape from the atmosphere of his former aristocratic entourage and its purposeless and meaningless life. He becomes the aide of a highly untraditional governor. Willie Stark represents for Jack Burden the example of power effectively used, of a driving force that can give purpose and meaning to life. Wille is crude, uncultivated, not a gentleman, has no ancestors, nor traditions. But he lives in the present, not in the past. Besides, Jack believes in Willie's efforts to give the poor people a fairer share of the benefits of government. He is convinced that Willie is on the side of the right. Thus Willie's attraction for Jack is both ideological and personal.

Other works by Robert Penn Warren are The Circus in the Attic (1947), World Enough and Time (1959), a description of a mysterious murder in Frankfort, historical novels of the Civil War period The Cave (1959), and Wilderness (1961).

Robert Penn Warren is also known as a critic, scholar and teacher. He taught at Louisiana State University and the universities of Michigan and Yale. He composed textbooks that were most influential in shaping the teaching of English in America.

literature modernism prose drama

Comprehension Questions and Tasks

1. Speak on the American literary realism in the first half of the XX-th century. Name the significant poets and the main themes they touch upon in the poetry. Comment on Imagism, an important literary movement of the time. Historical fiction became popular in the Depression, didn't it? Why? Name the representatives of the group as writers of fiction (western novel, short stories, novel of manners).

2. What is the theme of Dreiser's first novel “Sister Carrie”? What idea dominates Dreiser's novel “An American Tragedy”, and why did he choose as the main characters the most ordinary of American youths? What is similar in the ambitions of Clyde and Roberta? Why is Dreiser considered the leading writer of the first half of the XX-th century?

3. Where did Robert Frost live in the United States? How does Robert Frost describe nature in his poems? (Analyse some of his comparisons in the poems printed in this book.) How did farm life influence his poetry? What are his themes? What was peculiar to Frost's style? What did Robert Frost say about the role of art in life?

4. Say a few words about Sherwood Anderson's biography. Anderson is more than just a regionalist. - Why? Name his chief literary works and the themes they deal with.

5. Say a few words about the life and the work of Francis Fitzgerald. Were his novels autobiographical? Where did Fitzgerald find themes for the fiction? Speak on the subject of The Great Gatsby.

6. The influence of what literary trend is felt in early Faulkner's works? What is the central factor of Faulkner's interest in the 20-s? What theme are the books about Jefferson belong to? What novels describe the race problems of the USA? Why did Faulkner compare his characters with the characters in the Bible? How do the critics characterize the creative work of the writer?

7. Why was Hemingway considered to be one of the most experienced journalists of the 20th century? How did his first short stories come to be written? What was Hemingway's social viewpoint? What were his ideas about literature and the writers? Why did Hemingway search for new forms in literature? What is meant by the “concise Hemingway style”? What do the mountain snows symbolize? Comment on Hemingway's war books. Why did war become the main subject in Hemingway's works? Give a short account of the novel “A Farewell to Arms”. Characterize the hero and the heroine of the novel. Tell the story of “The Old Man and the Sea”. Characterize Santiago. How does Hemingway see the moral strength of man in the battles of life?

8. Give a brief account of Robert Penn Warren's life and literary work. Comment on the subject of All the King's Men. Name the main heroes of the novel and characterize them. What other branches are there to Warren's literary activity?

UNIT 6. AMERICAN LITERATURE OF THE SECOND HALF OF THE XX-TH CENTURY

Writers in the United States today can look at a rich heritage of their own. Contemporary readers are well aware of such novelists as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, short story writers Edgar Allan Poe, Willa Gather, Eudora Welty, poets Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and playwrights Eugene O'Neill and Thornton Wilder.

Among the highly acclaimed novelists of the time is Saul Bellow who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. His novel Herzog, about an average man seeking truth in a world that overwhelms him, shows clear parallels with James Joyce's Ulysses. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, about a young black man searching for identity, parallels Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Other contemporary novelists of stature include Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, John Updike, Flannery O'Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Tyler, and Alice Walker. Many of these novelists have written short stories as well. John Cheever (1912-1982), a respected novelist, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1979 for his collected short stories, many of which concern suburban life. Cheever's major story collections are The Way Some People Live (1943), The Enormous Radio (1953), The Housebreaker of Shady Hill (1958), Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel (1961), The Brigadier and the Golf Widow (1964), and The World of Apples (1973). These collections of stories comprise a running social history of suburbia. Cheever won the National Book Award for The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), a comic saga of a New England family. His other novels, which show less attention to realism and more to the fantastic, include The Wapshot Scandal (1964), Bullet Park (1969), and Falconer (1977).

One of the most well-known political fiction writers is Gore Vidal (b.1925), the author of political novels Washington DC (1967), Burr (1973), and 1876 (1985). Just as realism and romanticism have tended to merge in recent literature, so have fiction and non-fiction. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood used fictional techniques to analyse a real and seemingly senseless crime. E.L.Doctorow in his novel Ragtime combined historical figures with purely fictional characters.

Increasing attention has been paid recently to the place of non-fiction in the literary hierarchy. The essay has always been considered an important literary form. James Baldwin and John McPhee are accomplished essayists. Among the many notable longer works of non-fiction are Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar, N.Scott Momaday's The Names, and Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams.

A number of the famous prewar poets continued to publish extensively after the war. Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, E.E.Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound all produced major collections of their works.

One of the most respected contemporary poets is Robert Lowell, a great nephew of the poet James Russell Lowell. Robert Lowell's poetry is traditional in form, but its range in theme, method, and tone is breathtaking. Theodore Roethke is a master of poetic rhythm and James Dickey is a poet and novelist whose southern heritage is of great importance in his work. The other poets of note are Elizabeth Dishop and Gwendolyn Brooks. A number of small literary movements have developed since World War II. These movements are often referred to as Postmodernism. Some writers have continued to develop the fragmentary approach of the Modernists. Others have tried blending realism and fantasy in their works, and still others have experimented with radically different fictional forms and techniques. The poetry has varied dramatically in form, style, and content. Free verse has remained a dominant poetic form.

John Steinbeck

1902-1968

Like Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck is held in higher critical esteem outside the United States than in it in his time, largely because he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1963 and the international fame it confers.

During the 1930's, the Great Depression cost millions of people their jobs and shook their faith in the American promise. Big business and the corporate farm seemed untouched by hard times. They were angrily perceived by many as impersonal and indifferent to human hardship.

Many novelists of the time were moved by this sense of injustice and turned their pens to a by-product of the Depression known as “the protest novel”. Among these writers, John Steinbeck was the most widely praised and successful.

Steinbeck was born in California's Salinas Valley in 1902, the son of a county treasurer and a schoolteacher. Although he graduated from high school and spent some time at Stanford University, in between various jobs, he took more pride in the many jobs he held as a young man than in his formal education. After leaving the University he spent the next five years drifting across the country, reading, writing, and working at odd jobs. He worked as a hod carrier, fruit picker, apprentice painter, laboratory assistant, care-taker, surveyor, and writer. He wrote seventeen novels in all, in addition to stories, plays, film-scripts, and a great deal of journalism.

Steinbeck had little success as a writer until 1935 when he published his third novel Tortilla Flat, a humorous story about a Mexican-American colony in Monterey. Steinbeck's first major success came in 1937 with Of Mice and Men, a short, best-selling novel which Steinbeck himself adapted into a Broadway play and motion picture. It is a tale of two drifters, farm-hands, migrants, George and the powerful but mentally handicapped Lennie whose dream of owning their farm ends in tragedy. Steinbeck portrayed their odd friendship with great sympathy and understanding. Steinbeck changed a pathetic situation into an affirmative acceptance of life's brutal conflicts, along with its possibilities for fellowship and courage.

He followed this success by joining some Oklahoma farmers known as “Okies” - who were embarking with great hope to California. Steinbeck lived and worked with them over the next two years, experiencing first-hand the disappointment and injustice they encountered. The result was his strongest and most enduring, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which follows the travails of a poor Oklahoma family that loses its farm during the Depression and travels to California to seek work. Family members suffer conditions of feudal oppression by rich landowners. The Grapes of Wrath tells of the Joad family and their forced migration from the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma to California, the region that promised work at decent wages and a chance to buy land. Once arrived, however, the Joads find only the exploitation and poverty of labor camps. Gradually they learn the real meaning of the term “Okies” - Oklahoma farmers, dispossessed of their land and forced to become migrant farmers in California, people who never even had a chance.

The Grapes of Wrath was an angry book that spoke out on behalf of the migrant workers. Steinbeck sharply criticized a system that bankrupted thousands of farmers and turned them from their own land, making them into paid help for the big growers. When the novel appeared, it was greeted with outbursts of praise and condemnation, and it became the most widely read of all the protest novels of the 1930's. The book leaves the reader with the feeling which Steinbeck wanted to instill - that the poor can endure by helping one another, and perhaps also that they can expect no help from anyone else.

The Grapes of Wrath won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and established Steinbeck as one of the most highly regarded writers of his day. Steinbeck produced several more successful works during his later years, including Cannery Row (1945), The Pearl (1947), East of Eden (1952), and Winter of Our Discontent (1961).

Toward the end of his life, Steinbeck achieved a gratifying success with the award of the Nobel Prize in 1963 and with the publication in that year of Travels with Charley, a nostalgic account of a trip across America with his aged poodle Charley. But his reputation is grounded on those earlier novels which portray California as the real and symbolic land of American promise.

Steinbeck creates vivid portraits of the landscape and demonstrates how people are shaped and manipulated by their environments. John Steinbeck's themes come from the poverty, desperation, and social injustice that he witnessed during the Great Depression of the 1930's, a time when many people suffered under conditions beyond their control. His works reflect his belief in the need for social justice and his hope that people can learn from the suffering of others. Though many of his characters suffered tragic fates, they almost always managed to retain a sense of dignity throughout their struggles.

James Albert Michener

1907-1997

James Albert Michener was born on February 3, 1907. He never knew his real parents and was brought up by a Quaker widow in Pennsylvania. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and made his first trip across the Pacific at that time. His book Tales of the South Pacific won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. Despite his substantial commercial success, he was known to be a humble man and was an active philanthropist.

James Albert Michener is a Pulitzer prize-winning author renowned for his historical epics. One of the world's most revered and best-loved novelists, Michener was one of America's most respected senior citizens. A prolific novelist and relentless researcher, Michener wrote many books.

His many beloved works include Tales of the South Pacific, which was adapted for Broadway and film as “South Pacific”, Caravans, Centennial, The Drifters, The Fires of Spring, Hawaii, Poland, Texas, Return to Paradise, Recessional and The Source.

Recessional. As the new young director of the Palms, a Florida retirement home, Andy Zorn suffers no shortage of loving support and wise advice from his “elders”, a group of passionate, outspoken residents who refuse to accept the passive roles that society and family have handed them.

Set in the Palms, a Florida retirement center, Recessional follows several residents over the course of a year as their individual narratives - humorous, moving, or sometimes triumphant - unfold. Chris Mallory reluctantly relinquishes his driver's license at the age of ninety, but refuses to hang up his dancing shoes. The Palm's five self-appointed elders, all once outstanding in their respective careers, hotly debate current affairs and plot a daring flying adventure; Laura Oliphant, former head of a private school for girls, never stops learning and never stops educating others, especially about the natural wonders of Florida; and Reverend Helen Quade, the Palms's unofficial pastor, finds an unexpected romance. We meet, too, the families of some of the Palms's residents - among them an independent, unconventional young woman who owes her success to the aunt who encouraged her always to follow her own instincts; and the devoted children of one resident who grapple with difficult decisions about their elderly mother's final days. When they are confronted with any important question that affects their closely knit community, the Palms residents band together and offer the new director, Andy Zorn, both their support and their suggestions.

Andy Zorn, a young doctor running from a past scandal, has been hired by geriatric mogul John Taggart to revitalize the Palms, a Tampa retirement community that's fallen into a minor malaise of both profits and morale. Unjust malpractice suits have driven Andy Zorn, M.D., from obstetrics, and he begins a new life as director of a retirement community, The Palms, more than a thousand miles away from his Chicago home. The Palms offers well-off retirees comfortable apartments as well as nursing home and hospice facilities if the need arises. Andy's main job is to turn this place into a moneymaking proposition for its wealthy owner.

Michener applies his research to the ravages of old age that plague the Palms' population, but the novel is overloaded with details which often seem unnecessary for the story he's telling. Some episodes and characters are touching: the tale of a seemingly mismatched couple in which the husband cares for the wife after she contracts Alzheimer's; a series of stories about four elder statesmen in the home who conspire to build and fly an airplane; and the saga of a widow who must make some difficult decisions after a biopsy for breast cancer; the romantic subplot between Zorn and a handicapped woman whom he rescues after a car accident. The doctor's efforts to provide care for an AIDS patient outside the home have similar problems with realism - the worst offense being a series of passages told from the perspective of a rattlesnake.

Irwin Shaw

1913-1984

One of the most prominent American novelists, short-story writer and playwright of the twentieth century, Irwin Shaw (real name Irwin Gilbert Shamforoff), was born on 27 February, 1913 in Bronx, New York in the family of immigrants from Russia. Irwin left Brooklyn College after failing in freshman mathematics, worked in a cosmetic factory, a department store and a furniture company as a message boy. During his life he tried different other jobs - he worked as a driver, a professional football player, and a teacher.

On his return to the college he worked in the students' magazine and wrote plays for a dramatic society. After graduation from the college in 1934 with a bachelor's degree he went to Hollywood to create screenplays. Later he remembered that he had been writing under a great influence of Ernest Hemingway whom he considered to be his literary teacher.

During World War II Irwin Shaw served in the American Army, fought in Northern Africa and Europe, and witnessed the liberation of Paris.

Irwin Shaw took up writing realizing that it was his inborn vocation. In 1936 he completed his first work, the play Bury the Dead and enjoyed country-wide popularity at once. It was a rapid-fire grotesque, an antiwar drama: killed soldiers revolted against being buried, they came up outside their burial places giving no peace to the alive with a call to join them in their march against human annihilation. Then appeared his other works: a collection of short stories Sailor Off the Bremen (1939), the novels Five Decades (1940), Young Lions (1948). After a short break there appeared The Troubled Air (1951), Rich Man, Poor Man (1970).

Rich Man, Poor Man. It is a story about the fate of the Jordache family, the parents Axel and Mary Jordache and their three children - Tommy, Rudolf and Gretchen. Natured on traditional views of American success, each pursues the illusion of happiness in his own way, determined to achieve his “brightright”. Starting with their teen-age years in a Hudson River town, Irwin Shaw follows the Jordaches from Greenwich Village to Hollywood, from a small town in Ohio to a luxury resort in the Mediterranean. Robert Cromie wrote in Saturday Review, that “Irwin Shaw has the gift of all great storytellers: he creates characters as genuine as that odd couple across the street, the curious patrons of the corner bar, the tragic figures from the headlines. They are individuals who walk into the living room of your mind, ensconce themselves, and refuse to be dislodged.”

Axel Jordache fled from Germany where he had killed a man, robbed him and came to America. “God bless America. He had killed to get there”, Axel thinks to himself. Here he marries a young girl Mary Pease. But there was never love between them. “It was only a year after the wedding, but he already hated her... She knew that she had entered upon her sentence of life imprisonment.”

Problems rolled over very fast. Gretchen, a neat, proper, beautiful girl (as Rudolph thought about her) after an unsuccessful try to sell her body to two black soldiers whom she attended at the hospital where she worked after her job at the Boylan Brick and Tile Works for the offer of eight hundred dollars, became the mistress of Teddy Boylan, a man without enthusiasm, self-indulgent and cynical. Later she got married to Willie, but the marriage was not happy either. She succeeded later in theatrical and cinema business somehow. Thomas (who smelled like a wild animal, as Rudolph said about him) had soon to leave school and leave his family and the town. He was sent to live at his uncle's place. But there too he got into trouble and was accused of statutory rape. His father had to go there to settle the matter. He paid five thousand dollars to the man to free Thomas from prison. But he did that not for Thomas. He did it for Rudolph. He didn't want his beloved son to start life with a brother in a jail which could ruin him as a promising successful politician and businessman. Thomas was like a rolling stone, getting all the time from one trouble into another, and finally was killed, leaving his son Wesley to move on his own in the cruel world.

After Axel spent all the money he had saved during his life keeping a bakery in a rented house, he and his wife quarreled. It sent Axel into grief and depression. He even thought that maybe he would meet an Englishman here in America, would kill him as he had killed a man in Germany, and get back from where he came. He got too tired to live. For the last time he made the portion of rolls. Before putting them in the oven, “he kneaded the poison into the roll thoroughly, then reshaped the roll and put it back into the pan. My message to the world, he thought.” He left the bakery, went to the river, got in the boat and let it be carried in the middle of the stream, and drowned himself. His body had never been found.

Rudolph had a talent for music and played the trumpet in the school band. He was handsome, well-mannered, well-spoken, admired by his teachers, affectionate. He was the only child in the family who kissed his mother when he left for school and when he came back. He was the hope of the family, unlike the younger son, Thomas, and their daughter - they were, as mother says “inhabitants of her house. Rudolph is her blood”. He really succeeded in life and became the Mayor of Whitby. He cared about his parents, and he tried to help Gretchen and Thomas in their life. When Thomas intended to return five thousand dollars, he owed to the family, the money collected for the education of Rudolph, he didn't take it. He put the money in the bank in Thomas's name. It made the capital of sixty thousand dollars soon for Thomas. But it didn't bring him happiness, it didn't save him from death he was coming to all his life.

The deep changes in the life of the American society in the late 70s inspired Shaw to create Evening in Byzantium and Bread Upon the Water.

Irwin Shaw is also known as a playwright. He is the author of such works as Plain People, The Brooklyn Idyll, Sons and Soldiers, The Assasin.

Irwin Shaw spent the last years of his life in France and Switzerland where he mostly wrote memoirs and critical essays. In 1979 he visited the USA and it proved the creation of the novel The Top of the Hill. Some other works of Irwin Shaw are novels Voices of a Summer Day, Lucy Crown, Two Weeks in Another Town and short story collections Welcome to the City, Act of Faith, Mixed Company, Love on a Dark Street.

Irwin Shaw died on 16 May 1984 in Switzerland.

James Jones

1921-1977

James Jones, one of the major novelists of his generation, is known primarily as the author of fiction that probes the effects of World War II on the individual soldier.

James Jones was born in Robinson, in the state of Illinois. For several years James Jones lived in the Hawaii where he studied at the University of Honolulu. Later on he went to the New York University from which he graduated in 1945. During the years of 1939-1944 Jones served in the Pacific with the USA Army. He took part in World War II, got wounded at Guadalcanal, and was awarded the order of The Purple Heart and the Silver Star. He returned to Robinson, where he started to write about his experiences. After shelving his unpublished first novel, They Shall Inherit the Laughter, Jones completed the critically acclaimed international bestseller From Here to Eternity (1951).

Jones had never written seriously until after he joined the regular Army. In his works he described the routines of American Army life, the treatment of the men aimed at making them obedient mechanical cogs of the dehumanizing war machine. His military experience furnished the background and provided the material and facts for his works. James Jones' novel From Here to Eternity is among the best books of the post-war period. It is a naturalistic undisguised presentation of peacetime Army life in Hawaii on the eve of the Pearl Harbour attack. The novel aroused stormy criticism. Some readers admired the book; others were shocked by its lurid language and the deplorable, scandalous events.

From Here to Eternity. The events described in the novel take place in the Hawaii and refer to the period immediately preceding the Pearl Harbour attack. The book gives a brutal and almost ugly picture of Army life there. It is socially and politically significant as the servicemen are endowed with traits and features characteristic of their civilian compatriots.

The central figure of the novel is private Robert Lee Prewitt. The ways of Army life prove to be especially painful and unbearable to him as he is a sensitive man with a strongly developed sense of proper pride, a romantic sense of personal honor and an overdeveloped sense of justice. His philosophy is to fight for the rights of the underdog.

Prewitt, or Prew, as they call him in the company, was born in the Kentucky Mountains, the son of a miner. When his mother was dying she made her son promise that he would never hurt anyone “unless it's absolute a must, unless you just have to do it”. He never broke the death-bed promise to his mother and kept his integrity intact to his last breath.

Prew was a gifted person, but he had no call for anything until the first time he handled a bugle. After his enlistment Prew had much success with the bugle, he was a member of the Bugle Corps, soon became the best bugler in the Regiment. His art was excellent, and he was selected to play Taps in Arlington, on the Memorial Day (May 30). He also became famous as a boxer and the commandment were proud to have such a soldier in the outfit. His rating was Private First Class and Fourth Class Specialist. After the end of the 1st hitch he re-enlisted for 3 years more. Robert E.Lee Prewitt loves not so much the army but the masculinity of barracks life. He wants to be a thirty-year-man because the raw violence, the drunken sprees, the sex without responsibility, the demands on physical endurance and technical skill express and challenge his maleness. Prewitt's war with the army is touched off by a breach of the freedom he expects in return for his loyalty-and service as a soldier.

Prewitt had the bad luck to fall ill and was sent to the hospital for the treatment. When he returned to the outfit after two month absence he had lost his position. His pride was hurt when an inferior Bugler was promoted above him. Prewitt asked to be transferred to another outfit. After he refused pointblank to ever take part in a fight, he was sent to the kitchen, where his work was hard and humiliating, though he never complained. In a skirmish with a drunken sergeant, his senior, who wanted to stab Prewitt with a knife, he took him on, and the Tribunal sent him to the Stockade. In keeping with his life philosophy Prewitt did not mention the knife at the trial, which would have saved him from imprisonment. After three months in the Stockade Prew came out but didn't return to the barracks; he became a deserter. He missed his comrades, he felt homesick for his outfit. After the Pearl Harbour air raid of the Japanese planes his decision to return to the regiment was made. He wanted to steal to the barracks under cover of night. A patrol car traced his movements and taking him for a spy shot him at a short distance from his regiment. Prewitt's history is an eloquent paean to a concept of individualism rapidly becoming anachronistic in an increasingly bureaucratic society. Milt Warden, the co-protagonist of the novel, embodies in his personality the masculine world of the enlisted man. He equates his integrity with the existence of the enlisted man, and when he falls in love with the company commander's wife, Karen, and finally refuses the commission which would make her permanently available to him, he preserves his integrity and his individualism. He does not sell out to the bureaucracy or to women. At the end of the novel, Prew is dead, but Warden drinks and brawls on the way to Mrs.Kipfer's brothel as the Lurline sails from Hawaii with Karen aboard.