Social novelists

Inexpensive, popular magazines like McClure’s, Everybody’s, Cosmopolitan sent their reporters out to find the wrong-doers of politics and business. The job of these reporters was to print the truth, however unpleasant, in their magazines. They quickly moved from magazine articles to books. In the book by Ida Tarbell (1857-1944) “ History of the Standard Oil Company” attacks the method John D. Rockefeller used to crush his competitors. David G. Phillips (1867-1911) covered all kids of social evils, from politics to finance. Some writers, like Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936), had a social philosophy very close to that of the naturalist novelists. Some writers, like the novelist Robert Herrick (1868-1938), seemed to have a tragic view of life. In “The Common Lot” and other novels, he describes the evil growth of the commercial spirit in America, from 1890s. In great sadness, he says that the soul of the middle class is being destroyed. These people now lead empty, meaningless lives.Like many writers after him Herrick seemed to be filled with hopelessness and despair.

Upton Sinclair was the opposite of Herrick. He believed in human goodness and was sure society could be changed. His greatest novel, The Jungle, was a successful weapon in his fight for justice. It tells the story of an immigrant family, the Redkuses, who come to America with dreams of a better way of life. But they only experience a series of horrors and tragedies. Sinclair shows the terrible conditions the family experience in Chicago’s meat-packing industry. Jack London described the novel as “ The Uncle Tom’s Cabin of wage-slavery”. Indeed, it did have a similar practical effect. Millions of Americans were shocked by these descriptions. All attention forced the reform of America’s food industry. As literature, The Jungle is not very satisfactory. In almost all of his many novels, Sinclair’s characters seem very flat and lifeless. But perhaps Sinclair’s main interest was not as much in his characters as in his message. His novels were always a form of propaganda. They tried to force society to change.

This period gave the world one more writer of interest, O. Henry (1862-1910). During 1904 and 1905 he wrote one short story a week. His first collection of stories, Cabbages and Kings (1904), made him a popular hero. He usually used his own experiences as ideas for stories. Like M. Twain, he wrote in an easy-to-understand, journalistic style. His stories begin with action and move quickly toward their conclusion. They are filled with deep, loving portraits of the lives of ordinary people. The plots often seem to be written according to a formula. One such formula is the “reversal”: an action by a character produces the opposite effect from the one he had been hoping for (kidnapping). Another O. Henry formula is to keep an important piece of information from the reader until the very end. In 1914, the New York Times praised his story Municipal Report. But the author wasn’t satisfied with his stories, though millions of people liked them.

American newspapers and magazines had become very powerful by this period. They were patriotic; they wanted the US to grow in strength. Some historians say that the Spanish-American War (1898) was started by American journalists. The newspapers wanted something excited to write about. Stephen Crane and Frank Norris were correspondents in the war. Correspondents like Richard Harding Davis pleased readers with stories of courage and red blood. Davis’s descriptions of battle were particularly good, like the battle of Santiago. He later collected his reports into his very popular Notes of a War Correspondent (1910). Each report told the tale of a courageous hero; sometimes a solder, sometimes a journalist. Like Hemingway, who also started as a war correspondent, Davis was admired by women readers.

Lafcadio Hearn also began as a newspaper writer. He was born in Greece and his father was British. At 19 he arrived in America without any money, and had to find a way to make a living. Soon he was a reporter for the Enquirer and later, on a New Orleans paper. His best writing described mood rather than action. He liked the contrast between brilliant light and darkness. Later he came to Caribbean islands. In his Martinique Sketches (1890), he painted this world of sunshine and bright colors with words. His best descriptions are like romantic photographs. But the world knows him best when he went to Japan and changed his name into “Koizumi Yakumo”. He also changed his style and subject matter. He had always been interested in legends and folk tales. Now he began collecting Japanese ghost stories. To tell these tails-in such books as In Ghostly Japan and Kwaidan – he departed from his old poetic style and began using words simply. He began writing for the ear, rather than for the mind’s eye.

Hearn didn’t simply translate the stories, he made them into a new kind of literature. The Japanese love him for this. Although Hearn admired Japan, he wrote about both the good and the bad of the country. In Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, he praised its old society and criticized its new industrial society. He also predicted the conflict between Japan and the West. But in the history of American literature, he is the man who made the legends and tales of an unknown culture a part of American literature.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-06