Смена поколений в литературе США. Отражение социальных проблем в творчестве Джона Стейнбека («Гроздья гнева»), Эрскина Колдуэлла, Ричарда Райта, Лэнгстона Хьюза

Fitzgerald, Francis Scott Key (1896-1940), American writer, whose novels and short stories chronicled changing social attitudes during the 1920s, a period dubbed The Jazz Age by the author. He is best known for his novels The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender is the Night (1934), both of which depict disillusion with the American dream of self-betterment, wealth, and success through hard work and perseverance.

Творчество Френсиса С. Фитцджеральда: «американская мечта» в произведениях писателя («Великий Гэтсби»). Творчество Эрнеста Хемингуэя. Война в его рассказах и романах («Прощай, оружие!»). Творчество писателей военного поколения: Уильям Фолкнер, Джон Дос-Пассос, Эдвард Каммингс, Торнтон Уайлдер.

Американская мечта» и кризис эпохи первой мировой войны. Эстетика Шервуда Андерсона, критическое осмысление национальной традиции, обращение к европейскому опыту. Новый тип новеллы («Уайнсбург, Огайо»). Модернизм в американской литературе: Томас Элиот, Эзра Паунд, Уильям Карлос Уильямс.

Библиографический список

1. Архангельский А.Н. Бак Д.П. Все герои произведений русской литературы. –М.: АСТ, 1997.

2. Булгаковская энциклопедия. Составитель Б.В. Соколов. –М.: Миф, 1997.

3. Боборыкин В.Г. Михаил Булгаков. –М.: Просвещение, 1991.

4. Бочаров С.Платонов. – М.: Просвещение,1985

5. Васильев В.В. Андрей Платонов: Очерк жизни и творчества. –М.: Просещение, 1990.

6. Журавлев В.П. Русская литература ХХ века: Учебник в двух частях. –М.: Просвещение, 2001

7. Зощенко М. Избранное. –М.: Правда, 1990.

8. Лебедев Ю.В. Русская литература ХХ века: Учебник в двух частях. –М.: Просвещение, 2002.

9. Перечитывая классику: Замятин, А. Толстой, Платонов, Набоков. Составитель Красухин Г.-М.: МГУ, 1998.

10. Семенов Н.Н., Семенова В.В. Русская литература ХХ века в вопросах и заданиях: Пособие для учителя. –М.: Владос, 2001.

Anderson, Sherwood (1876-1941), American author, born in Camden, Ohio. He left school at the age of 14 and worked at various jobs until 1898. He served in Cuba during the Spanish-American War (1898). After the war he went to Chicago, Illinois, where he began to write novels and poetry.

Anderson's talent was not widely recognized until the publication of the collection of his short stories Winesburg, Ohio (1919), which deals with the instinctive, if inarticulate, struggle of ordinary people to assert their individuality in the face of standardization imposed by the machine age. Noted for his poetic realism, psychological insight, and sense of the tragic, Anderson helped also to establish a simple, consciously naive short-story style. He brought the techniques of “modernism” to American fiction. His choice of subject matter and style influenced many American writers who followed him, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. The latter called Anderson “the father of my generation of writers”.

Williams, William Carlos (1883-1963), American writer, whose use of simple, direct language marked a new course in 20th-century poetry. Unlike some other writers of his time, such as T. S. Eliot, Williams avoided complexity and obscure symbolism. Instead, he produced lyrics, such as this one from “January Morning” (1938), that contain few difficult references: “All this—/ was for you, old woman./ I wanted to write a poem/ that you would understand.” Williams’s greatest achievement as a writer was the epic Paterson ( 5 volumes, 1946-1958), which is a landmark of 20th-century poetry.

Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey. His father, William George Williams, was from Britain, and his mother, Helene Raquel Williams, was a Puerto Rican-born woman of Basque and French descent. Williams grew up in a household that spoke French, Spanish, and British English. He entered the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in 1902, and while there formed friendships with several poets who would go on to great fame: Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and Hilda Doolittle. After an internship in New York City, Williams studied pediatrics at the University of Leipzig in Germany. By late 1912, Williams had returned to Rutherford, set up a private practice, and married his fiancee of several years, Florence Hermann.

Although he developed a busy practice as a doctor, Williams also was a prolific writer, and for much of his life he published a book at least every two years. His most important prose works are The Great American Novel (1923); In the American Grain (1925), a collection of essays on figures from American history; and White Mule (1938), the first novel in a three-book series following the life of one family.

Williams began to achieve public recognition for his writing in 1950, when he won the National Book Award in poetry for the third volume of Paterson. Three years later he won the Bollingen Prize—awarded by Yale University for achievement in American poetry—and in 1963, after his death, Williams won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Pictures from Brueghel.

Poetry was, for Williams, a crucial and necessary—yet sometimes ignored—means of communicating. In “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” (1955), he wrote, "It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there." Williams's ideas were basically humanistic: respect yourself and others, love those you can, and try to make the world a better place. He tried to live up to these ideals through both his writing and his medical practice. One quality that Williams admired greatly was persistence; he loved old people who kept their vigorous response to life, just as he admired artists who kept improving and perfecting their work.

Toward the end of his life Williams was recognized as an important influence on younger poets. Long before he was esteemed by critics, such poets as Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Lowell, and Denise Levertov paid tribute to old "Doc Williams," the man who meshed two careers into one highly productive life. Williams’s letters to these poets and to others resulted in numerous collections.

Pound, Ezra (1885-1972), American poet, critic, editor, and translator, considered one of the foremost American literary figures of the 20th century. Pound was a chief architect of English and American literary modernism, a movement characterized by experimentation in literary form and content, exploration of the literary traditions of non-Western and ancient cultures, and rejection of the traditions of the immediate past.

As a poet, Pound experimented with various verse forms, from short poems focusing on concrete images to his epic masterpiece, the Cantos, a wide-ranging series of poems combining ancient and modern history with Pound’s personal reflections and experiences. As a critic and editor, Pound discovered and encouraged many experimental authors, including Irish writer James Joyce, English poet T. S. Eliot, and American writers Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway. As an essayist, he wrote manifestos establishing influential principles of style and theme.

Ezra Loomis Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho. When he was still an infant, his family moved to Germantown, Pennsylvania. By age 15, Pound had decided to become a poet, resolving that by the age of 30 he “would know more about poetry than any man living.” In 1901 he entered the University of Pennsylvania, where he befriended the future poets William Carlos Williams and Hilda Doolittle. After two years he transferred to Hamilton College in New York State, and he graduated in 1905. He returned to the University of Pennsylvania for graduate studies in Romance languages, earning his M.A. degree. Pound then taught languages for a brief time at Wabash College in Indiana.

Deciding that there was no place in the United States for poets, Pound moved to Europe, living first in Venice, Italy. There he published his first volume of poetry. Convinced that London was “the place for poetry,” he relocated there and worked as the secretary of Irish poet William Butler Yeats.

During his time in London, Pound supported himself by writing and teaching. He also served as the London representative for two American literary journals. On the lookout for writers who seemed dedicated to reinvigorating literature of the period—or in his words, “making it new”—he regularly sent some of the era’s finest poems to be published in the magazines, notably T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915). Pound also edited early drafts of Eliot’s masterpiece The Waste Land (1922).

In his own poetry and essays, Pound established principles that many modernist writers would follow. Detesting what he called “emotional slither,” he demanded a “harder and saner” poetry that was “nearer the bone” than traditional verse, with “fewer painted adjectives impeding the shock of it.” He warned poets, “Go in fear of abstraction.” What was needed was “direct treatment of the ‘thing,’ whether subjective or objective,” and rhythm that was “in sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.”

In about 1909 Pound became the founder and, for a time, the leader of the school of poetry called imagism, featuring succinct verse “which presents an intellectual and emotional ‘complex’ in an instant of time.” Pound’s own poetry of this period appeared in several volumes.

Pound considered the restoration of sophistication and historical richness to literature as a necessary and integral part of his commitment to innovation. As a result he had a mixed view of American poet Walt Whitman, whom he admired for his experimental style but disliked for what he considered Whitman’s lack of interest in cultural matters beyond America, and for his very infatuation with an America that had disappointed Pound. In such poems as “A Pact” (1916), Pound paid grudging respect to Whitman, calling him a “pig-headed father” but adding, “It was you that broke the new wood, / Now it is time for the carving.” Part of this symbolic “carving” of a new literary tradition was the use of poetic devices from foreign languages. To this end, Pound extensively translated poetry from the Provenзal, Japanese, and Chinese languages.

Around 1914, Pound conceived of a poetry sequence that would possess the sweep of Whitman’s major volume of poetry, Leaves of Grass (1855; numerous revised editions), but would use modernist devices. The result was the Cantos. Written from 1915 to 1970, the Cantos eventually totaled 116 poems. Written in what Pound called the ideogrammatic method, featuring unexpected juxtapositions and associations, the various Cantos combined reminiscence, meditation, and allusions to many cultures, including Renaissance Italy, dynastic China, and 18th-century America. Often difficult to understand, the Cantos are endlessly debated by scholars and are widely regarded as the 20th century’s closest approximation to a modern poetic epic.

The devastation caused by World War I (1914-1918) deepened Pound’s disillusion with the West, which he labeled “a botched civilization.” His bitterness was visible in his satirical volume Hugh Selwyn Mauberly: Life and Contacts (1920), which describes the “tawdry cheapness” and deterioration of a modern America Pound called “a half-savage country.” Believing that capitalism marginalized or excluded poets, Pound sought countries that he felt were more hospitable and left England in 1920. He moved first to France and then to Italy, where in 1925 he settled in the village of Rappallo. Pound saw Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini as a potential savior of the world from capitalism. In 1933 he met Mussolini, who praised his poetry. Pound became an active supporter of fascism, promoting it on radio broadcasts to England and the United States during World War II (1939-1945). In anticapitalist and anti-Semitic speeches, Pound denounced those he held responsible for the West’s decline—in particular, Jewish bankers.

When the Allied troops occupied Italy in 1945 near the end of World War II, Pound was imprisoned for weeks in an open-air cage. After being transferred to a medical tent, he wrote the Pisan Cantos (1948), which consist of ten sections describing the prison, its environment, and its inhabitants. Because of their vivid imagery and unity as a whole, these poems are regarded by some as his finest poems. In 1946 Pound was taken to Washington, D.C., to be tried for treason. His trial was canceled after he was declared legally insane, and he entered a hospital for the criminally insane, where he continued to write and to receive visitors. In 1949 Pound’s Pisan Cantos won the first annual Library of Congress Bollingen Award for Poetry, reopening the debate over his literary stature. Strongly defended by several prominent writers, including Hemingway, Frost, and Archibald MacLeish, Pound was released from the hospital in 1958, and he returned to Italy. Pound spent his final years in self-imposed literary silence, leaving the Cantos incomplete. Despite the reprehensible politics of his later life, Pound was an important poet and literary innovator who forged the way to modernism while retaining an allegiance to literary tradition.

Eliot, Thomas S. (1888-1965), American-born writer, regarded as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. His best-known poem, The Waste Land (1922), is a devastating analysis of the society of his time. Eliot also wrote drama and literary criticism. In his plays, which use unrhymed verse, he attempted to revive poetic drama for the contemporary audience. His most influential criticism looked at the way the poet should approach the act of writing. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the youngest son in a large, prosperous, and distinguished family. Eliot was educated at Milton Academy (a private boarding school outside of Boston, Massachusetts) and at Harvard University. He earned his undergraduate degree, after three years of study, in 1909. He then continued at Harvard, studying philosophy under George Santayana. Eliot received his M.A. degree in philosophy in 1910, after which he studied literature and languages at the Sorbonne in Paris, France; as a fellowship recipient in Germany; and at the University of Oxford in England.

After leaving Oxford, Eliot stayed in England. He became close friends with American poet Ezra Pound, who was also living abroad. In 1922 Eliot founded the literary journal The Criterion, which he edited until 1939. In 1925 he joined the publishing firm Faber and Gwyer, which later became Faber and Faber. Throughout the late 1920s and the 1930s Eliot wrote, lectured, and taught in Britain and the United States. In 1927 he became a British citizen and converted from the Unitarian Church to the Church of England.

Eliot’s earliest masterpiece, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” was published in Poetry magazine in 1915. Written as a dramatic monologue, the poem is an examination of the soul of a timid man paralyzed by indecision and worry about his appearance to others, particularly women. Anxious about becoming bald, and about his thin arms and legs, Prufrock hesitates in making even the smallest decisions or actions, wondering: “Do I dare / Disturb the universe? / In a minute there is time / For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.” Eliot’s first collection of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, appeared in 1917.

Eliot earned international acclaim in 1922 with the publication of The Waste Land, which he produced with much editorial assistance from Ezra Pound. The Waste Land, a poem in five parts, was ground breaking in establishing the form of the so-called kaleidoscopic, or fragmented, modern poem. These fragmented poems are characterized by jarring jumps in perspective, imagery, setting, or subject. Despite this fragmentation of form, The Waste Land is unified by its theme of despair. Its opening lines introduce the ideas of life’s ultimate futility despite momentary flashes of hope: “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / dull roots with spring rain.” The poem goes on to present a sequence of short sketches following an individual’s baffled search for spiritual peace. It concludes with resignation at the never-ending nature of the search. The poem is full of literary and mythological references that draw on many cultures and universalize the poem’s themes.

The Waste Land draws much of its symbolism and narrative framework from the mythological story of the quest for the Holy Grail, the sacred cup that Jesus Christ drank from at the Last Supper. According to legend, only the pure of heart can attain the Grail. In the version of the Grail myth that Eliot draws on, a wasteland is awaiting a miraculous revival—for itself and its failing ruler, the Fisher King, guardian of the Holy Grail.

The Waste Land appeared in the aftermath of World War I (1914-1918), which was the most destructive war in human history to that point. Many people saw the poem as an indictment of postwar European culture and as an expression of disillusionment with contemporary society, which Eliot believed was culturally barren. His work The Hollow Men (1925), based partly on unedited portions of The Waste Land manuscript, takes a similar view.

Following Eliot’s conversion to the Church of England in 1927, qualities of serenity and religious humility became important in his poetry. Ash Wednesday (1930) shows his sense of how emotionally destructive life can be, but also suggests that everyday suffering may have a purifying effect. Eliot eventually turned from poems and essays to the more public art of plays, all of which he wrote in verse. He also began giving lectures. By 1943 Eliot had given up writing poetry altogether, and he devoted his last 20 years to other kinds of writing.

In essays and lectures, Eliot profoundly influenced modern literary criticism. In the collection The Sacred Wood (1920), he contended that the critic must develop a strong historical sense to judge literature from the proper perspective, and that the poet must be impersonal in the creative exercise of the craft. As editor of The Criterion, he provided a literary forum for many prominent contemporary writers, including French writers Paul Valйry and Marcel Proust.

Sixteen years after he died, some of Eliot’s poems appeared in the unlikely form of a Broadway musical, when British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber (later Lord Lloyd Webber) brought out Cats (1981). Lloyd Webber based his production on a book of poetry Eliot wrote for children, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939). In the 1980s and 1990s, Eliot and his poetry were increasingly criticized for elements of anti-Semitism, racism, and sexism. Despite these unfortunate prejudices, most people continue to regard Eliot as one of the most important figures in modern literature.

The son of a well-to-do Minnesota family, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in Saint Paul and attended Roman Catholic schools. In 1917 Fitzgerald left Princeton because of academic difficulties and joined the United States Army, which was then entering World War I. While in basic training near Montgomery, Alabama, he met high-spirited, 18-year-old Zelda Sayre. They married in 1920 and she became the model for many of the female characters in his fiction.

Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), captured a mood of spiritual desolation in the aftermath of World War I and a growing, devil-may-care pursuit of pleasure among the American upper classes. The book met with both commercial and critical success. Thereafter, Fitzgerald regularly contributed short stories to diverse periodicals. He wrote about cosmopolitan life in New York City during Prohibition (a ban on the sale of alcoholic drinks from 1920 to 1933) as well as the American Midwest of his childhood. His early short fiction was collected in Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922).

Financial success as well as celebrity enabled the Fitzgeralds to become integral figures in the Jazz Age culture that he portrayed in his writing. Fitzgerald’s partly autobiographical second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), is the story of a wealthy young couple whose lives are destroyed by their extravagant lifestyle.

In 1925 Fitzgerald reached the peak of his powers with what many critics think is his finest work, The Great Gatsby. Written in crisp, concise prose and told by Nick Carraway, a satiric yet sympathetic narrator, it is the story of Jay Gatsby, a young American ne’er-do-well from the Midwest. Gatsby becomes a bootlegger (seller of illegal liquor) in order to attain the wealth and lavish way of life he feels are necessary to win the love of Daisy Buchanan, a married, upper-class woman who had once rejected him. The story ends tragically with Gatsby’s destruction. Although the narrator ultimately denounces Daisy and others who confuse the American dream with the pursuit of wealth and power, he sympathizes with those like Gatsby who pursue the dream for a redeeming end such as love.

From 1924 until 1931 the Fitzgeralds made their home on the French Riviera, where they became increasingly enmeshed in a culture of alcohol, drugs, and perpetual parties. Fitzgerald began a battle with alcoholism that went on for the rest of his life, and Zelda experienced a series of mental breakdowns in the early 1930s that eventually led to her institutionalization. Tender is the Night is generally regarded as Fitzgerald’s dramatization of Zelda’s slide into insanity. It tells of a young doctor who marries one of his psychiatric patients. The novel met with a cool reception. Poor reviews alienated Fitzgerald from the literary scene and Zelda’s disintegration left him personally distraught. In 1937 he moved to Los Angeles, California, where he worked as a scriptwriter. While there, he began The Last Tycoon, a novel set amid corruption and vulgarity in the Hollywood motion-picture industry. At the age of 44 Fitzgerald died of a heart attack.

Hemingway, Ernest Miller (1899-1961), American novelist and short-story writer, whose style is characterized by crispness, laconic dialogue, and emotional understatement. Hemingway's writings and his personal life exerted a profound influence on American writers of his time. Many of his works are regarded as classics of American literature, and some have been made into motion pictures.

Born in Oak Park, Illinois, Hemingway was educated at Oak Park High School. After graduating from high school in 1917, he became a reporter for the Kansas City Star, but he left his job within a few months to serve as a volunteer ambulance driver in Italy during World War I (1914-1918). He later transferred to the Italian infantry and was severely wounded. After the war he served as a correspondent for the Toronto Star and then settled in Paris. While there, he was encouraged in creative work by the American expatriate writers Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. After 1927 Hemingway spent long periods of time in Key West, Florida, and in Spain and Africa. During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), he returned to Spain as a newspaper correspondent. In World War II (1939-1945) he again was a correspondent and later was a reporter for the United States First Army; although he was not a soldier, he participated in several battles. After the war Hemingway settled near Havana, Cuba, and in 1958 he moved to Ketchum, Idaho.

Hemingway drew heavily on his experiences as an avid fisherman, hunter, and bullfight enthusiast in his writing. His adventurous life brought him close to death several times: in the Spanish Civil War when shells burst inside his hotel room; in World War II when he was struck by a taxi during a blackout; and in 1954 when his airplane crashed in Africa.

One of the foremost authors of the era between the two world wars, Hemingway in his early works depicted the lives of two types of people. One type consisted of men and women deprived, by World War I, of faith in the moral values in which they had believed, and who lived with cynical disregard for anything but their own emotional needs. The other type were men of simple character and primitive emotions, such as prizefighters and bullfighters. Hemingway wrote of their courageous and usually futile battles against circumstances. His earliest works include the collections of short stories Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923), his first work; In Our Time (1924), tales reflecting his experiences as a youth in the northern Michigan woods; Men Without Women (1927), a volume that included “The Killers,” remarkable for its description of impending doom; and Winner Take Nothing (1933), stories characterizing people in unfortunate circumstances in Europe. The novel that established Hemingway's reputation, The Sun Also Rises(1926), is the story of a group of morally irresponsible Americans and Britons living in France and Spain, members of the so-called lost generation of the post-World War I period. Hemingway's second important novel, A Farewell to Arms(1929), is the story of a deeply moving love affair in wartime Italy between an American officer in the Italian ambulance service and a British nurse.

Hemingway's economical writing style often seems simple and almost childlike, but his method is calculated and used to complex effect. In his writing Hemingway provided detached descriptions of action, using simple nouns and verbs to capture scenes precisely. By doing so he avoided describing his characters' emotions and thoughts directly. Instead, in providing the reader with the raw material of an experience and eliminating the authorial viewpoint, Hemingway made the reading of a text approximate the actual experience as closely as possible. Hemingway was also deeply concerned with authenticity in writing. He believed that a writer could treat a subject honestly only if the writer had participated in or observed the subject closely. Without such knowledge the writer's work would be flawed because the reader would sense the author's lack of expertise. In addition, Hemingway believed that an author writing about a familiar subject is able to write sparingly and eliminate a great deal of superfluous detail from the piece without sacrificing the voice of authority. Hemingway's stylistic influence on American writers has been enormous. The success of his plain style in expressing basic, yet deeply felt, emotions contributed to the decline of the elaborate Victorian-era prose that characterized a great deal of American writing in the early 20th century. Legions of American writers have cited Hemingway as an influence on their own work.

In his original work, Hemingway used themes of helplessness and defeat, but in the late 1930s he began to express concern about social problems. His novel To Have and Have Not (1937) and his play The Fifth Column strongly condemned economic and political injustices. Two of his best short stories, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” were part of the latter work. In the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), which deals with the Spanish Civil War, he showed that the loss of liberty anywhere in the world is a warning that liberty is endangered everywhere.

During the next decade Hemingway's only literary efforts were Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time (1942), which he edited, and the novel Across the River and into the Trees (1950). In 1952 Hemingway published The Old Man and the Sea, a powerful novelette about an aged Cuban fisherman, for which he won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize in fiction. In 1954 Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. The last work published in his lifetime was Collected Poems (1960). He committed suicide in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961. Hemingway's posthumously published books include A Moveable Feast (1964), an account of his early years in Paris; Islands in the Stream (1970), a sea novel; and the unfinished The Garden of Eden (1986). Some 3000 of his manuscript pages remain unpublished.

Faulkner, William (1897-1962), American novelist, known for his epic portrayal, in some 20 novels, of the tragic conflict between the old and the new South. Faulkner's complex plots and narrative style alienated many readers of his early works, but he was recognized later as one of the greatest American writers.

Born in New Albany, Mississippi, Faulkner was raised in nearby Oxford as the oldest of four sons of an old-line southern family. In 1915 he dropped out of high school, which he detested, to work in his grandfather's bank. In World War I (1914-1918) he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force but never saw battle action. Back home in Oxford, he was admitted to the University of Mississippi as a veteran, but he soon quit school to write, supporting himself with odd jobs.

Faulkner's first book was a collection of pastoral poems, was privately printed in 1924. The following year he moved to New Orleans, worked as a journalist, and met the American short-story writer Sherwood Anderson, who helped him find a publisher for his first novel, Soldier's Pay (1926), and also convinced him to write about the people and places he knew best. After a brief tour of Europe, Faulkner returned home and began his series of baroque, brooding novels set in the mythical Yoknapatawpha County (based on Lafayette County, Mississippi), peopling it with his own ancestors, Native Americans, blacks, shadowy backwoods hermits, and loutish poor whites. In the first of these novels, Sartoris (1929), he patterned the character Colonel Sartoris after his own great-grandfather, William Cuthbert Falkner, a soldier, politician, railroad builder, and author. (Faulkner restored the “u” that had been removed from the family name.)

The year 1929 was crucial to Faulkner. That year Sartoris was followed by The Sound and the Fury, an account of the tragic downfall of the Compson family. The novel uses four different narrative voices to piece together the story and thus challenges the reader by presenting a fragmented plot told from multiple points of view. The structure of The Sound and the Fury presaged the narrative innovations Faulkner would explore throughout his career. Also in 1929 Faulkner married his childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham, and made his home in the small town of Oxford, Mississippi. Most of the books he wrote over the rest of his life received favorable reviews, but only one sold well. Despite its sensationalism and brutality, its underlying concerns were with corruption and disillusionment. The book's success led to lucrative work as a scriptwriter for Hollywood, which, for a short time, freed Faulkner to write his novels as his imagination dictated. Faulkner's two most successful screenplays were written for movies that were directed by Howard Hawks: To Have and Have Not (1945, adapted from the novel by the American writer Ernest Hemingway) and The Big Sleep (1946, adapted from the novel by the American writer Raymond Chandler).

Faulkner's works demanded much of his readers. To create a mood, he might let one of his complex, convoluted sentences run on for more than a page. He juggled time, spliced narratives, experimented with multiple narrators, and interrupted simple stories with rambling, stream-of-consciousness soliloquies. Consequently, his readership dwindled. In 1946 the critic Malcolm Cowley, concerned that Faulkner was insufficiently known and appreciated, put together The Portable Faulkner, arranging extracts from Faulkner's novels into a chronological sequence that gave the entire Yoknapatawpha saga a new clarity, thus making Faulkner's genius accessible to a new generation of readers.

Faulkner's works, long out of print, began to be reissued. No longer was he regarded as a regional curiosity, but as a literary giant whose finest writing held meaning far beyond the agonies and conflicts of his own troubled South. His accomplishment was internationally recognized in 1949, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. His major works include As I Lay Dying (1930), the story of a family's journey to bury a mother; Light in August (1932); Absalom, Absalom! (1936), about Thomas Sutpen's attempt to found a Southern dynasty; The Unvanquished ( 1938); The Hamlet (1940), the first novel in a trilogy about the rise of the Snopes family; Go Down Moses (1942), a collection of Yoknapatawpha County stories of which “The Bear” is the best known; Intruder in the Dust (1948); A Fable (1954); The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959), which completed the Snopes trilogy; and The Reivers (1962). Faulkner especially was interested in multigenerational family chronicles, and many characters appear in more than one book; this gives the Yoknapatawpha County saga a sense of continuity that makes the area and its inhabitants seem real. Faulkner continued to write—both novels and short stories—until his death.

Cummings, Edward Estlin (1894-1962), American poet, who was one of the most radically experimental and inventive writers of the 20th century. A distinctive feature of Cummings's poetry is the abandonment of uppercase letters.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Cummings was educated at Harvard University. During World War I (1914-1918) he was an ambulance driver in France, ultimately spending three months in a French military detention camp on a false charge. The experience served as the basis for the autobiographical prose work The Enormous Room (1922). After World War I Cummings studied art in Paris. His first volume of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys, appeared in 1923. During the 1920s and 1930s he lived alternately in France and in the United States, finally settling in New York City.

Cummings's poetic style is characterized by typographical nonconformity; distortions of syntax; unusual punctuation; new words; and a liberal use of jazz rhythms, elements of popular culture, and slang. Because of his style, Cummings's poetry appears complex to the eye, but the ideas expressed through the words and punctuation are often simple. Although the emotional content of his poetry appears at first glance to be cynical, it is basically lyrical and almost romantic, often speaking of the value of love. Cummings followed in the Emersonian tradition of individuality and rejection of conformity.

Cummings's works include XLI Poems (1925); him (1927), a play in verse and prose; CIOPW ( 1931), a collection of drawings and paintings taking its title from the initial letters of the materials used—charcoal, ink, oil, pencil, and watercolor; Eimi (1933), a travel diary dealing with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; Collected Poems (1938); i: six nonlectures (1953); Poems, 1923-1954 (1954); 95 Poems (1958); and Complete Poems, 1904-1962 (published posthumously 1991).

Dos Passos, John Roderigo (1896-1970), American writer, whose bitter, highly impressionistic novels attacked the hypocrisy and materialism of the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. His writings influenced several generations of American and European novelists.

Born in Chicago, Dos Passos was educated at Harvard University. His wartime experience as an ambulance driver in France provided background material for his first novel.

Dos Passos received critical and popular recognition for his next novel, the antiwar Three Soldiers (1921). In the immensely successful novel Manhattan Transfer (1925), a panoramic view of life in New York City between 1890 and 1925, Dos Passos first experimented with the techniques for which he is best known: the “newsreel” technique, whereby he inserted fragments of popular songs and news headlines into his text; and the “camera eye” technique, whereby he provided short, poetic responses to give the author's point of view. Dos Passos continued to develop these techniques in several of his later novels. His trilogy U.S.A. ( collected in 1938) expanded his panorama to encompass the entire nation. Comprising The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (published 1932), and The Big Money (1936), the trilogy depicts the growth of American materialism from the 1890s to the Great Depression of the early 1930s.

After the publication of U.S.A., Dos Passos's radical philosophy became increasingly conservative. At the same time his writing became less impassioned and his style became more direct and simple. He continued to produce a great deal of work, including several novels and books of personal observation, history, biography, and travel. The best-received work was Midcentury (1961), a novel in which he returned to the kaleidoscopic technique of his earlier successes to depict a panoramic view of postwar America.

Wilder, Thornton Niven (1897-1975), American author, whose plays and novels, usually based on allegories and myths, have reached a worldwide audience through various versions. Born in Madison, Wisconsin, Wilder was educated at Oberlin College and Yale University. While teaching, he achieved success as both a novelist and a playwright.

In his compelling novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927; Pulitzer Prize, 1928), Wilder united the lives of a disparate group of travelers in colonial Peru through a single event, the disaster in which they die. His other novels include The Ides of March (1948), an epistolary work about the Roman statesman Julius Caesar, and The Eighth Day (1967), about the events surrounding a murder. For the latter work Wilder was awarded the 1968 National Book Award. Theophilus North (1973) is a group of short stories.

Wilder's direct, accessible style also works well in drama. An enduring work of American drama is Our Town (1938), a touching look at small-town American life that brought Wilder the 1938 Pulitzer Prize in drama. It was theatrically experimental for its time, performed on a stage without scenery or props, using stepladders to represent the upstairs of a house and folding chairs to indicate a graveyard. The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), a comic view of human life through the ages, won the 1943 Pulitzer Prize in drama.

One of Wilder's most successful works, The Matchmaker (1954), derived ultimately from a 19th-century Austrian comedy, was made into a motion picture in 1958 and adapted in 1964 as the musical comedy Hello, Dolly!, which was filmed in turn in 1969.

Steinbeck, John Ernst (1902-1968), American writer and Nobel laureate, who described in his work the unremitting struggle of people who depend on the soil for their livelihood.

Born in Salinas, California, Steinbeck was educated at Stanford University. As a youth, he worked as a ranch hand and fruit picker. His first novel, Cup of Gold (1929), romanticizes the life and exploits of the famous 17th-century Welsh pirate Sir Henry Morgan. In The Pastures of Heaven (1932), a group of short stories depicting a community of California farmers, Steinbeck first dealt with the hardworking people and social themes associated with most of his works. His other early books include To a God Unknown (1933), the story of a farmer whose belief in a pagan fertility cult impels him, during a severe drought, to sacrifice his own life; Tortilla Flat (1935), a sympathetic portrayal of Americans of Mexican descent dwelling near Monterey, California; In Dubious Battle (1936), a novel concerned with a strike of migratory fruit pickers; and Of Mice and Men (1937), a tragic story of two itinerant farm laborers yearning for a small farm of their own.

Steinbeck's most widely known work is The Grapes of Wrath(1939; Pulitzer Prize, 1940), the stark account of the Joad family from the impoverished Oklahoma Dust Bowl and their migration to California during the economic depression of the 1930s. The controversial novel, received not only as realistic fiction but as a moving document of social protest, is an American classic.

Steinbeck's other works include The Moon Is Down (1942), Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1947), East of Eden (1952), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), and America and Americans (1966). In 1962 he wrote the popular Travels with Charley, an autobiographical account of a trip across the United States accompanied by a pet poodle. Steinbeck was awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in literature. His modernization of the Arthurian legends, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, was published posthumously in 1976.

A major literary figure since the 1930s, Steinbeck took as his central theme the quiet dignity he saw in the poor and the oppressed. Although his characters are often trapped in an unfair world, they remain sympathetic and heroic, if defeated, human beings.

Caldwell, Erskine Preston (1903-1987), American novelist, best known for his novels and short stories that concern the poverty-stricken lives of black and white sharecroppers in rural Georgia. He was born in White Oak, Georgia, and educated at the universities of Virginia and Pennsylvania. With vivid humor, an earthy indignation, and considerable profanity, Caldwell described the unforgettable family of Jeeter Lester in Tobacco Road (1932), his most famous novel. Dramatized in 1933, the play had a seven-year run on Broadway; it was also made into a successful film in 1940. Caldwell's other works include novels and the autobiographical books. Caldwell also worked as a journalist in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics during World War II (1939-1945) and later wrote screenplays in Hollywood, California. His books were read worldwide and were particularly admired in Europe.

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