3 The American lyric

America's two greatest 19th-century poets could hardly have been more different in temperament and style. Walt Whitman ( 1819- 1892) was a working man, a traveler, a self-appointed nurse during the American Civil War ( 1861- 1865), and a poetic innovator. His magnum opus was Leaves of Grass, in which he uses a free-flowing verse and lines of irregular length to depict the all-inclusiveness of American democracy. Taking that motif one step further, the poet equates the vast range of American experience with himself -- and manages not to sound like a crass egotist. For example, in Song of Myself, the long, central poem in Leaves of Grass, Whitman writes: "These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me...."

Whitman was also a poet of the body -- "the body electric," as he called it. In Studies in Classic American Literature, the English novelist D.H. Lawrence wrote that Whitman "was the first to smash the old moral conception that the soul of man is something `superior' and `above' the flesh."

Emily Dickinson ( 1830- 1886), on the other hand, lived the sheltered life of a genteel unmarried woman in small-town Massachusetts. Within its formal structure, her poetry is ingenious, witty, exquisitely wrought, and psychologically penetrating. Her work was unconventional for its day, and little of it was published during her lifetime.

Many of her poems dwell on death, often with a mischievous twist. "Because I could not stop for Death," one begins, "He kindly stopped for me." The opening of another Dickinson poem toys with her position as a woman in a male-dominated society and an unrecognized poet: "I'm nobody! Who are you? / Are you nobody too?"

4 Approaching the American century

At the beginning of the 20th century, American novelists were expanding fiction's social spectrum to encompass both high and low life. In her stories and novels, Edith Wharton ( 1862- 1937) scrutinized the upper-class, Eastern-seaboard society in which she had grown up. One of her finest books, The Age of Innocence, centers on a man who chooses to marry a conventional, socially acceptable woman rather than a fascinating outsider. At about the same time, Stephen Crane ( 1871- 1900), best known for his Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, depicted the life of New York City prostitutes in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets . And in Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser ( 1871- 1945) portrayed a country girl who moves to Chicago and becomes a kept woman.

Experimentation in style and form soon joined the new freedom in subject matter. In 1909, Gertrude Stein ( 1874- 1946), by then an expatriate in Paris, published Three Lives , an innovative work of fiction influenced by her familiarity with cubism, jazz, and other movements in contemporary art and music.

The poet Ezra Pound ( 1885- 1972) was born in Idaho but spent much of his adult life in Europe. His work is complex, sometimes obscure, with multiple references to other art forms and to a vast range of literature, both Western and Eastern. He influenced many other poets, notably T.S. Eliot ( 1888- 1965), another expatriate. Eliot wrote spare, cerebral poetry, carried by a dense structure of symbols. In "The Waste Land" he embodied a jaundiced vision of post-World War I society in fragmented, haunted images. Like Pound's, Eliot's poetry could be highly allusive, and some editions of The Waste Land come with footnotes supplied by the poet. In 1948, Eliot won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

American writers also expressed the disillusionment following upon the war. The stories and novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald ( 1896-1940) capture the restless, pleasure-hungry, defiant mood of the 1920s. Fitzgerald's characteristic theme, expressed poignantly in The Great Gatsby, is the tendency of youth's golden dreams to dissolve in failure and disappointment.

Ernest Hemingway ( 1899- 1961) saw violence and death first-hand as an ambulance driver in World War I, and the senseless carnage persuaded him that abstract language was mostly empty and misleading. He cut out unnecessary words from his writing, simplified the sentence structure, and concentrated on concrete objects and actions. He adhered to a moral code that emphasized courage under pressure, and his protagonists were strong, silent men who often dealt awkwardly with women. The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms are generally considered his best novels; in 1954, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. John Steinbeck ( 1902- 1968) was born in Salinas, California, where he set many of his stories. His style was simple and evocative, winning him the favour of the readers but not of the critics. Steinbeck often wrote about poor, working-class people and their struggle to lead a decent and honest life; he was probably the most social aware writer of his period. Grapes of Wrath, considered his masterpiece, is a strong, social-oriented novel thet tells the story of the Joads, a poor family from Oklahoma and their journey to California in search of a better life. Other popular novels include Tortilla Flat , Of Mice and Men, ' Cannery Row' and ' East of Eden'. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962

5 A stage of their own

In addition to fiction, the 1920s were a rich period for drama. There had not been an important American dramatist until Eugene O'Neill ( 1888- 1953) began to write his plays. The 1936 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, O'Neill drew upon classical mythology, the Bible, and the new science of psychology to explore inner life. He wrote frankly about sex and family quarrels, but his preoccupation was with the individual's search for identity. One of his greatest works is Long Day's Journey Into Night, a harrowing drama, small in scale but large in theme, based largely on his own family.

Another strikingly original American playwright was Tennessee Williams ( 1911- 1983), who expressed his southern heritage in poetic yet sensational plays, usually about a sensitive woman trapped in a brutish environment. Several of his plays have been made into films, including A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

6 Southern voices

Five years before Hemingway, another American novelist had won the Nobel Prize: William Faulkner ( 1897- 1962). Faulkner managed to encompass an enormous range of humanity in Yoknapatawpha, a Mississippi county of his own invention. He recorded his characters' seemingly unedited ramblings in order to represent their inner states -- a technique called " stream of consciousness." (In fact, these passages are carefully crafted, and their seeming randomness is an illusion.) He also jumbled time sequences to show how the past -- especially the slave-holding era of the South -- endures in the present. Among his great works are The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses, and The Unvanquished .

Faulkner was part of a southern literary renaissance that also included such figures as Truman Capote ( 1924- 1984) and Flannery O'Connor ( 1925- 1964). Although Capote wrote short stories and novels, fiction and nonfiction, his masterpiece was In Cold Blood, a factual account of a multiple murder and its aftermath, which fused dogged reporting with a novelist's penetrating psychology and crystalline prose. Other practitioners of the "nonfiction novel" have included Norman Mailer ( 1923- ), who wrote about an antiwar march on The Pentagon in Armies of the Night , and Tom Wolfe ( 1931- ), who wrote about American astronauts in The Right Stuff.

Flannery O'Connor was a Catholic -- and thus an outsider in the heavily Protestant South in which she grew up. Her characters are Protestant fundamentalists obsessed with both God and Satan. She is best known for her tragicomic short stories.

7 Text in black and white and color

The 1920s had seen the rise of an artistic black community in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem. The period called the Harlem Renaissance produced such gifted poets as Langston Hughes ( 1902- 1967), Countee Cullen ( 1903- 1946), and Claude McKay ( 1889- 1948). The novelist Zora Neale Hurston ( 1903- 1960) combined a gift for storytelling with the study of anthropology to write vivid stories from the African-American oral tradition. Through such books as the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God -- about the life and marriages of a light-skinned African-American woman -- Hurston influenced a later generation of black women novelists.

After World War II, a new receptivity to diverse voices brought black writers into the mainstream of American literature. James Baldwin ( 1924- 1987) expressed his disdain for racism and his celebration of sexuality in Giovanni's Room . In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison ( 1914- 1994) linked the plight of African Americans, whose race can render them all but invisible to the majority white culture, with the larger theme of the human search for identity in the modern world.

8 The beat comes in

In the 1950s the West Coast spawned a literary movement, the poetry and fiction of the " Beat Generation," a name that referred simultaneously to the rhythm of jazz music, to a sense that post-war society was worn out, and to an interest in new forms of experience through drugs, alcohol, and Eastern mysticism. Poet Allen Ginsberg ( 1926- 1997) set the tone of social protest and visionary ecstasy in Howl, a Whitmanesque work that begins with this powerful line: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...." Jack Kerouac ( 1922- 1969) celebrated the Beats' carefree, hedonistic life-style in his episodic novel On the Road.

9 The soul of wit

From Irving and Hawthorne to the present day, the short story has been a favorite American form. One of its 20th-century masters was John Cheever ( 1912- 1982), who brought yet another facet of American life into the realm of literature: the affluent suburbs that have grown up around most major cities. Cheever was long associated with The New Yorker, a magazine noted for its wit and sophistication.

Although trend-spotting in literature that is still being written can be dangerous, the recent emergence of fiction by members of minority groups has been striking. Here are only a few examples. " The Catcher in the Rye", J. D. Salinger a champion of the train of consciousness style of writing. Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko ( 1948- ) uses colloquial language and traditional stories to fashion haunting, lyrical poems such as In Cold Storm Light . Amy Tan ( 1952- ), of Chinese descent, has described her parents' early struggles in California in The Joy Luck Club. Oscar Hijuelos ( 1951- ), a writer with roots in Cuba, won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love . In a series of novels beginning with A Boy's Own Story , Edmund White ( 1940- ) has captured the anguish and comedy of growing up gay in America. Finally, African-American women have produced some of the most powerful fiction of recent decades. One of them, Toni Morrison ( 1931- ), author of Beloved and other works, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, only the second American woman to be so honored.

10 Other figures of note

Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler pioneered gritty detective fiction that has had great influence on other genres and in other countries.

Other noted American writers include Sinclair Lewis, Ayn Rand, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson, Richard Wright, Willa Cather, Paul Auster and Toni Morrison.

U.S. poets with international fame (or notoriety) include: T. S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, Charles Bukowski, Robert Lowell, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Ogden Nash, Shel Silverstein, William S. Burroughs, E. E. Cummings, Maya Angelou and Robert Frost.

See the article on digital poetry for links to contemporary American work of the avant garde.

11 Related topics

• Southern Gothic
• Literature of Puerto Rico
• Culture of the United States
• List of Native American Writers
• The Great American Novel

12 References

• New Immigrant Literatures in the United States: A Sourcebook to Our Multicultural Literary Heritage by Alpana Sharma Knippling (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996)
• Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook by Emmanuel S. Nelson (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000)

13 External link

• "A man he'll rise..." by Gilbert Wesley Purdy. A book review/essay with considerable information about the history of African-American Literature.

American literature

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