Modernism in British and American Literature

Although Fitzgerald's passion lay in writing novels, only his first novel sold well enough to support the opulent lifestyle that he and Zelda adopted as New York celebrities. (The Great Gatsby, now considered to be his masterpiece, did not become popular until after Fitzgerald's death.) Because of this lifestyle, as well as the bills from Zelda's medical care when they came, Fitzgerald was constantly in financial trouble and often required loans from his literary agent, Harold Ober, and his editor at Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins. When Ober decided not to continue advancing money to Fitzgerald, the author severed ties with his longtime friend and agent. (Fitzgerald offered a good-hearted and apologetic tribute to this support in the late short story "Financing Finnegan".)

Fitzgerald began working on his fourth novel during the late 1920s but was sidetracked by financial difficulties that necessitated his writing commercial short stories, and by the schizophrenia that struck Zelda in 1930. Her emotional health remained fragile for the rest of her life. In 1932, she was hospitalized in Baltimore, Maryland. Fitzgerald rented the "La Paix" estate in the suburb of Towson, Maryland to work on his latest book, the story of the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist who falls in love with and marries Nicole Warren, one of his patients. The book went through many versions, the first of which was to be a story of matricide. Some critics have seen the book as a thinly-veiled autobiographical novel recounting Fitzgerald's problems with his wife, the corrosive effects of wealth and a decadent lifestyle, his own egoism and self-confidence, and his continuing alcoholism. Indeed, Fitzgerald was extremely protective of his "material" (i.e., their life together). When Zelda wrote and sent to Scribner's her own fictional version of their lives in Europe, Save Me the Waltz, Fitzgerald was angry and was able to make some changes prior to the novel's publication, and convince her doctors to keep her from writing any more about what he called his "material," which included their relationship. His book was finally published in 1934 as Tender Is the Night. Critics who had waited nine years for the follow up to The Great Gatsby had mixed opinions about the novel. Most were thrown off by its three-part structure and many felt that Fitzgerald had not lived up to their expectations. The novel did not sell well upon publication but, like the earlier Gatsby, the book's reputation has since risen significantly.

3.2 The Lost Generation

There was an important group of American writers (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Hart Crane) who shared this spirit of post-war alienation and lived in Paris for some time, who came to be known as the Lost Generation (term used by Gertrude Stein talking to Hemingway). They were ‘lost’ because they had lost their ideals, ‘lost’ to America because they lived abroad, and ‘lost’ because they did not accept older values but couldn’t really find the writer’s place in this new society.

During the 1920's a group of writers known as "The Lost Generation" gained popularity. The term "the lost generation" was coined by Gertrude Stein who is rumored to have heard her auto-mechanic while in France to have said that his young workers were, "une generation perdue". This refered to the young workers' poor auto-mechanic repair skills. Gertrude Stein would take this phrase and use it to describe the people of the 1920's who rejected American post World War I values. The three best known writers among The Lost Generation are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. Others among the list are: Sherwood Anderson, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Ford Maddox Ford and Zelda Fitzgerald. Ernest Hemingway, perhaps the leading literary figure of the decade, would take Stein's phrase, and use it as an epigraph for his first novel, The Sun Also Rises. Because of this novel's popularity, the term, "The Lost Generation" is the enduring term that has stayed associated with writers of the 1920's.

The "Lost Generation" defines a sense of moral loss or aimlessness apparent in literary figures during the 1920s. World War I seemed to have destroyed the idea that if you acted virtuously, good things would happen. Many good, young men went to war and died, or returned home either physically or mentally wounded (for most, both), and their faith in the moral guideposts that had earlier given them hope, were no longer valid...they were "Lost."

These literary figures also criticized American culture in creative fictional stories which had the themes of self-exile, indulgence (care-free living) and spiritual alienation. For example, Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise shows the young generation of the 1920's masking their general depression behind the forced exuberance of the Jazz Age. Another of Fitzgerald's novels, The Great Gatsby does the same where the illusion of happiness hides a sad loneliness for the main characters. Hemingway's novels pioneered a new style of writing which many generations after tried to imitate. Hemingway did away with the florid prose of the 19th century Victorian era and replaced it with a lean, clear prose based on action. H also employed a technique by which he left out essential information of the story in the belief that omission can sometimes strengthen the plot of the novel. The novels produced by the writers of the Lost Generation give insight to the lifestyles that people lead during the 1920's in America, and the literary works of these writers were innovative for their time and have influenced many future generations in their styles of writing.

The "Lost Generation" is a term used to refer to the generation, actually an age cohort, that came of age during World War I. The term was popularized by Ernest Hemingway who used it as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel, "The Sun Also Rises." In that volume Hemingway credits the phrase to Gertrude Stein, who was then his mentor and patron.

In "A Movable Feast," which was published after Hemingway and Stein had had a famous feud and fallen apart, and indeed after they were both dead, Hemingway reveals that the phrase was actually originated by the garage owner who repaired Stein's car. When a young mechanic failed to repair the car in a way satisfactory to Stein the owner had shouted at him, "You are all a generation perdue."  Stein, in telling Hemingway the story added, "That is what you are. That's what you all are...All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation." 

The term therefore cannot and does not refer to all of the expatriate artists who lived in Paris after WWI. It clearly, as is seen from the original quote as reported by Hemingway, refers to his generation, those who were members of the age classes which were called to duty in the "Great War." This generation included distinguished artists such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Waldo Peirce, Alan Seeger, and, Erich Maria Remarque. It has alternately been used to describe the generation which participated in the Cultural Revolution in China.

The term originated with Gertrude Stein who, after being particularly impressed by the skills of a young car mechanic, asked the garage owner where the young man had been trained. The garage owner told her that young men were easy to train, it was those in their mid-twenties to thirties, those men who had been through WWI, who the garage owner considered a "lost generation" – une génération perdue.

The 1926 publication of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises popularized the term, as Hemingway used it as an epigraph. The Sun Also Rises epitomized the post-war expatriate generation, which according to Hemingway biographer and scholar Jeffrey Meyers, is "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work".^[5]However, Hemingway himself later wrote to his editor Max Perkins that the "point of the book" was not so much about a generation being lost, but that "the earth abides forever"; he believed the characters in The Sun Also Rises may have been "battered" but were not lost.

In his memoir A Moveable Feast he writes "I tried to balance Miss Stein's quotation from the garage owner with one from Ecclesiastes." A few lines later, recalling the risks and losses of the war, he adds: "I thought of Miss Stein and Sherwood Anderson and egotism and mental laziness versus discipline and I thought 'who is calling who a lost generation?'"

WILLIAM FAULKNER (1897-1962) is probably the best representative of ‘high modernism’ in the American novel. His use of different narrative voices and focalizations, interior monologues and soliloquies, or use of ‘continuous present’ (mixture of past, present and future actions) make novels like The Sound and the Fury (1929) or As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August(1932) or Absalom, Absalom! (1936) stand out as some of the best of 20^th century world literature. Faulkner was also the first writer to create a fictional territory in which all his stories take place. This territory was based on Oxford, Mississippi(where Faulkner had been born) and is the background for characters that appear and reappear in different novels creating a complete fictional world of mythical proportions. In his novels and short stories, Faulkner analyzes individual psychology as well as social conflicts, particularly racial problems in the South that had lost the war. He received the Nobel Prize in 1949 and is universally acclaimed as one of the best writers of the century.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899-1961) was a very different kind of modernist. He developed

a sparse, concise style which he combined with what has been called the ‘Dramatic’ or ‘Objective’ point of view, that is, the perspective of an impartial observer who describes everything from the outside, without explanations or comments. Hemingway says as little as possible, and he then lets the characters speak. Therefore, his use of dialogue becomes fundamental to understand both the action and the characters’ motives. He also described his technique of implying things rather than explaining them using the metaphor of an iceberg (“There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows”). All these techniques are typically modernistic, because they put the reader in an uncomfortable position: he/she has to make an effort to guess what exactly is going on and what the implications and possible deeper meanings are. Hemingway lived in Paris between 1921 and 1928 and this is the time when he wrote some of his best short stories (“Hills like White Elephants” and “The Killers” among them), collected in In Our Time and Men Without Women. His experience in Spain was reflected in The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta)(1926). Death in the Afternoon (1932) and For Whom the Bells Toll(1940). In these and his other novels and stories (like “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, A Farewell to Arms or “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber”) we see the development of the typical Hemingway hero: a stoic man of few words who may be sensitive but never shows it, and who frequently shows a misogynistic attitude. He liked to put his heroes in situations between life and death (bullfighters, soldiers, hunters) where they would show their real self. His last novel wasThe Old Man and the Sea (1952), after which he received the Nobel Prize. He was probably the most popular American novelist at the time, but the misogynistic attitude of some of his works has put Hemingway in an uncomfortable position in the American canon in these days of political correctness.

SHERWOOD ANDERSON (1876-1941) was a precursor of Modernism. Considered by Faulkner “the father of [his] generation of writers”, his best work is Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a series of interconnected short stories taking place in the same town and narrated by the same character. Thematically it is part of a movement called the ‘Revolt from the Village’ which tried to show the many ways in which people were damaged by the narrowness of life in small-town America. But the book is also modernist because of its use of time, the importance of form over content and its emphasis on the problems of perception and communication. There isn’t really a plot, and instead the writer attempts to capture special and significant moments in the lives of the citizens of Winesburg, moments that are like windows into the true nature of a character (a concept similar to Joyce’s ‘epiphanies’).

JOHN DOS PASSOS (1896-1970). A left-wing radical in the beginning, he combined a realistic use of language with modernist techniques to try to show the daily life of citizens in Manhattan Transfer (1925) or the evolution of the recent history of his country inU.S.A., a trilogy that included The 42^nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932) and The Big Money (1936). He shared with the ‘Lost Generation’ the spirit of disillusionment, with the naturalists before him a strong sense of fate and a realistic style, and with the modernists the ideas about the difficulty of perceiving reality. His solution to try to reflect the complex reality of life is to use strategies coming from the movies, like the combination of whole scene ‘shots’ with ‘close-ups’ to show the feelings of individual people. He also used ‘collage’ techniques, mixing popular songs with newspaper headlines, phrases from advertisements, short biographies of contemporary public figures and impressionistic visions of reality (that he called ‘camera eye’).

3.3 The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was known as the "New Negro Movement," named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke. Though it was centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, many French-speaking black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris were also influenced by the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance spanned from about 1919 until the early or mid 1930s. Many of its ideas lived on much longer. The zenith of this "flowering of Negro literature," as James Weldon Johnson preferred to call the Harlem Renaissance, was placed between 1924 (the year that Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life hosted a party for black writers where many white publishers were in attendance) and 1929 (the year of the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression).

The modernist period also brought changes to the portrayal of gender roles, and especially to women's roles in society. It is an era under the sign of emancipation and change in society, issues which reflect themselves in the literature of the period, as well. The Great Gatsby, for example, deals with such topics as gender interaction in a mundane society.

Harlem Renaissance, term used to describe a flowering of African-American literature and art in the 1920s, mainly in the Harlem district of New York City. During the mass migration of African Americans from the rural agricultural South to the urban industrial North (1914–18), many who came to New York settled in Harlem, as did a good number of black New Yorkers moved from other areas of the city. Meanwhile, Southern black musicians brought jazz with them to the North and to Harlem. The area soon became a sophisticated literary and artistic center. A number of periodicals were influential in creating this milieu, particularly the magazines Crisis, which was published by W. E. B. Du Bois and urged racial pride among African Americans, and Opportunity, published by the National Urban League. Also influential was the book The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), edited by Alain Locke.

Responding to the heady intellectual atmosphere of the time and place, writers and artists, many of whom lived in Harlem, began to produce a wide variety of fine and highly original works dealing with African-American life. These works attracted many black readers. New to the wider culture, they also attracted commercial publishers and a large white readership. Writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance include Arna Bontemps, LangstonHughes, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer. Visual artists connected with the movement are less generally known. Among the painters are Aaron Douglas, Palmer Hayden, Malvin G. Johnson, and William H. Johnson. The best-known sculptor is probably Augusta Savage. Photographers include James Van Der Zee and Roy De Carava. The Harlem Renaissance faded with the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

It has been argued that the Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement, is the defining moment in African American literature because of an unprecedented outburst of creative activity among black writers. The importance of this movement to African American literary art lies in the efforts of its writers to exalt the heritage of African Americans and to use their unique culture as a means toward re-defining African American literary expression.

While the Harlem Renaissance began as a series of literary discussions in the lower Manhattan (Greenwich Village) and upper Manhattan (Harlem) sections of New York City, it gained national force when Charles Spurgeon Johnson, editor of Opportunity, the official organ of the National Urban League, encouraged aspiring writers to migrate to New York in order to form a critical mass of young black creative artists. The great migration from rural America, from the Caribbean, and from Africa to northern American cities (such as New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.) between 1919 and 1926, in fact, allowed the Harlem Renaissance to become a significant cultural phenomenon. Black urban migration, combined with trends in American society as a whole toward experimentation during the 1920s, and the rise of radical black intellectuals — including Alain Locke, Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and W. E. B. Du Bois, editor of The Crisis magazine — all contributed to the particular styles and unprecedented success of black artists during this period.

Among the poets, fiction writers, and essayists answering Johnson’s call were Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Helene Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, and Jean Toomer. Through their artistry, the literature of this period helped to facilitate a transformation from the psychology of the “Old Negro” (characterized by an implied inferiority of the post-Reconstruction era when black artists often did not control the means of production or editorial prerogatives) to the “New Negro” (characterized as self-assertive, racially conscious, articulate, and, for the most part, in charge of what they produced). Landmark texts that marked this transformation and encouraged increased exploration of African American experience through literature included The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), edited by James Weldon Johnson and The New Negro (1925) by Locke. The short-lived literary magazine Fire!! (1926) also had a significant impact on the literary production because it represented the efforts of younger African American writers (such as Hughes and Hurston) to claim their own creativity apart from older artists (such as DuBois and James Weldon Johnson), as well as to establish autonomy from potential white exploiters.

With greater possibilities for artistic self-determination, the writers of the Harlem Renaissance produced a sizable body of work, often exploring such themes as alienation and marginality. Several writers, including Hughes, Hurston, Larsen, and Toomer relied particularly on the rich folk tradition (oral culture, folktales, black dialect, jazz and blues composition) to create unique literary forms. Other writers, such as Cullen, McKay and Helene Johnson wrote within more conventional literary genres as a way to capture what they saw as the growing urbanity and sophistication of African Americans. The literature of the Harlem Renaissance, therefore, reflects the multiple ways that black experience in America was perceived and expressed in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Langston Hughes began writing in high school, and even at this early age was developing the voice that made him famous. Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, but lived with his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas until he was thirteen and then with his mother in Lincoln, Illinois and Cleveland, Ohio where he went to high school. Hughes's grandmother, Mary Sampson Patterson Leary Langston, was prominent in the African American community in Lawrence. Her first husband had died at Harper's Ferry fighting with John Brown; her second husband, Lanston Hughes's grandfather, was a prominent Kansas politician during Reconstruction. During the time Hughes lived with his grandmother, however, she was old and poor and unable to give Hughes the attention he needed. Besides, Hughes felt hurt by both his mother and his father, and was unable to understand why he was not allowed to live with either of them. These feelings of rejection caused him to grow up very insecure and unsure of himself.

When Langston Hughes's grandmother died, his mother summoned him to her home in Lincoln, Illinois. Here, according to Hughes, he wrote his first verse and was named class poet of his eighth grade class. Hughes lived in Lincoln for only a year, however; when his step-father found work in Cleveland, Ohio, the rest of the family then followed him there. Soon his step-father and mother moved on, this time to Chicago, but Hughes stayed in Cleveland in order to finish high school. His writing talent was recognized by his high school teachers and classmates, and Hughes had his first pieces of verse published in the Central High Monthly, a sophisticated school magazine. Soon he was on the staff of the Monthly, and publishing in the magazine regularly. An English teacher introduced him to poets such as Carl Sandburg and Walk Whitman, and these became Hughes' earliest influences. During the summer after Hughes's junior year in high school, his father reentered his life. James Hughes was living in Toluca, Mexico, and wanted his son to join him there. Hughes lived in Mexico for the summer but he did not get along with his father. This conflict, though painful, apparently contributed to Hughes's maturity. When Hughes returned to Cleveland to finish high school, his writing had also matured. Consequently, during his senior year of high school, Langston Hughes began writing poetry of distinction.

After graduating from high school, Hughes planned to return to Mexico to visit with his father, in order to try to convince him that he should pay for his son's college education at Columbia University in New York City. At Columbia, Hughes thought, he could get a college education but also begin his career as a writer. On his way to Mexico on the train, while thinking about his past and his future, Hughes wrote the famous poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." After arriving in Mexico, the tension between Hughes and his father was strong. Hughes wanted to be a writer; his father wanted him to be an engineer. After Hughes sent some of his poetry to the Brownies Book and Crisis magazines and it was accepted, his father was impressed enough to agree to pay for a year at Columbia University.

Hughes entered Columbia University in the fall of 1921, a little more than a year after he had graduated from Central High School. Langston stayed in school there for only a year; meanwhile, he found Harlem. Hughes quickly became an integral part of the arts scene in Harlem, so much so that in many ways he defined the spirit of the age, from a literary point of view. The Big Sea, the first volume of his autobiography, provides such a crucial first-person account of the era and its key players that much of what we know about the Harlem Renaissance we know from Langston Hughes's point of view. Hughes began regularly publishing his work in the Crisis and Opportunity magazines. He got to know other writers of the time such as Countee Cullen, Claude McCay, W.E.B. DuBois, and James Weldon Johnson. When his poem "The Weary Blues" won first prize in the poetry section of the 1925 Opportunity magazine literary contest, Hughes's literary career was launched. His first volume of poetry, also titled The Weary Blues, appeared in 1926.