Poetry and fiction of the Twenties

The Roaring Twenties was an era of material wealth of the post-war Big Boom, capitalism, prospering middle-class, big cities, new technologies, racial intolerance, consumption, nostalgia for the past, huge immigration, Prohibition of alcohol and organized crime and the biggest economic depression. It was also a Jazz Age and the era of mass entertainment and films.

The Lost Generation

Gertrude Stein named this literary movement when she told Hemingway: “You are all a lost generation.” It is a label for many restless young American writers who stayed in Paris after WWI when they lost their ideals and purpose. Their work is defined by disillusion, alienation and the loss of faith.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899-1961)

His eye injury prevented him from joining the army so he volunteered for an ambulance unit in Italy where he had a romantic affair with a British nurse. Hemingway heroes are people who show grace under pressure but they are stoic when the hope is lost. Hemingway committed a suicide probably because he feared the loss of physical and artistic skills, although he was awarded Nobel Prize.

He expressed his post-war disillusionment in the novels The Sun Also Rises and his relationship with that nurse in semi-autobiographical work A Farewell to Arms. He is easy to read as he uses short sentences, simple vocabulary and more dialogues than descriptions.

For Whom the Bells Call takes place during the Spanish Civil War and tells a story of an American named Robert Jordan fighting with Spanish soldiers on the Republican side. The Old Man and the Sea is a novelette, his greatest literary success, a glorification of man’s eternal struggle with nature. An old Cuban fisherman, though he conquers the great fish, loses all but the memory of his success.

JOHN DOS PASSOS (1896-1970) was a novelist of Portuguese origin, born into a wealthy family and was very active during the war. He used film techniques and was fond of newsreel method, combining fiction with documentary methods, using headlines from newspapers. His U.S.A. Trilogy includes The 42nd Parallel, 1919 and The Big Money.

FRANCIS SCOTT FITZGERALD (1896-1940)

He wrote brilliant short stories and novels that depicted the life, dream and disillusions of the new post-war generation. He met his future wife Zelda, a daughter of a judge and they were engaged but she hesitated because of his poorness so he decided to get rich and wrote his first novel This Side of Paradise about a young student in post-war times. He was successful and they got married. He was a friend of Hemingway but Zelda disliked him and accused her husband of having an affair with him.

The Great Gatsby, his masterpiece, is set is New York City during the 1920s. Nick, the narrator works as a broker in Manhattan. He becomes involved in the life of his neighbour Gatsby, a mysterious financier who is entertaining guests at parties. Gatsby reveals to Nick that he had a brief affair Nick's cousin Daisy before the war. However, Daisy married Tom, a rich but a boring man of a good social position. Gatsby lost Daisy because he had no money then but he is still in love with her. He persuades Nick to bring him and Daisy together again. Daisy, driving Gatsby's car, hits and kills Tom's mistress, Myrtle, unaware of her identity. Gatsby remains silent to protect Daisy. Tom tells Myrtle's husband it was Gatsby who killed his wife. Her husband murders Gatsby and then commits suicide. Gatsby believed that money can buy love and social position.

Tender is the Night presents a brilliant psychiatrist who falls in love with his a rich and beautiful mental patient (partly autobiographical, Zelda was also mentally unstable). He marries her and loses his idealism and potential for a great career but she emerges victorious.

Slapper is a feminist story about and emancipated independent woman with money that changed men as she wanted. She was a bit spoiled, even smoked in public and was seducing rich men for sport.

His famous short stories The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was recently adapted into film. The Button baby is born in hospital in 1860, at a time when most children were traditionally born at home. The reaction of the doctor who delivered the baby and the nurses at is surprising as the doctor is concerned that his “professional reputation” will be damaged by the delivery of such a child. The problem is that the baby looks like 70 year-old man. Mr. Button is shocked when he is told he has to take the baby home but he is mainly mortified at the idea of being seen with “this appalling apparition.” He is concerned about what people will think when they see the strange child, and he struggles to imagine how he will explain the situation. As he goes to buy him so clothes, he is pointed to the baby's section but he cannot buy such clothes for an old man and feels humiliated. He names the "baby" Benjamin and sees him as “a poor excuse for a first family baby.” However, he starts to behave towards him as if he was a baby, giving him milk for food and the rattle as a toy.

Nevertheless, the old man Benjamin prefers to smoke his father’s cigars and to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica. People say the boy looks like his grandfather, which does not please the real grandfather who, however, gradually finds joy in his company. He is sent to kindergarten when aged five but keeps falling asleep and so is removed. When he is twelve, Benjamin asks to be allowed to wear long trousers. His father agrees, though he tells his son “Fourteen is the age for putting on long trousers.” This is part of Mr. Button’s “silent agreement with himself to believe in his son’s normality.” Benjamin enrols at Yale, but he is thrown out as “a dangerous lunatic,” claiming his real age is 18. In 1880 Benjamin is twenty but looks as a man of fifty so he and his father look like brothers. They go to a dance and Benjamin meets beautiful young Hildegarde. She is attracted to him as she thinks he is fifty and therefore would make a reliable companion than boys of her age. Benjamin and Hildegarde are engaged but her father is devastated about of Benjamin’s origin but The Button family fortune doubles as the business goes well so he begins to appreciate his son-in-law.

However, Benjamin looks younger every year and he loses interest in Hildegarde. He joins the army to fight in the Spanish-American War of 1898. On his return from the war, Benjamin is depressed to see how gray Hildegarde has become. He realizes that he will keep getting younger when he had hoped the strange process would stop. Hildegarde blames Benjamin for his changes, saying he is “stubborn,” Bejaming opposing that he cannot help it. Benjamin gets younger and stronger and his son, Roscoe, graduates from Harvard. Ten years after his son graduates, Benjamin himself goes to Harvard. He plays football against Yale and is greatly celebrated as a remarkable freshman athlete. But as his college career continues, Benjamin ages into the physique of a typical teenager. Hildegarde moves to Italy, so Benjamin moves in with his son who blames Benjamin for his "joke" going too far. He tells Benjamin that he must call him uncle. Benjamin at fifty-seven enjoys reading boy scout stories and receives a letter that he is again wanted by the army as a high position. He has a new general’s uniform made and turns up at the camp but he is considered a playful child and Roscoe arrives to take him home. Roscoe’s son is born in 1920. Benjamin and his grandson go to kindergarten on the same day. As his grandson moves through the classes, Benjamin goes backwards until he is removed and given to a nanny. His only concerns are milk and a few words, he does not recall his earlier days anymore. He slides into a milk-scented darkness and then…nothing.

The Diamond as Big as the Ritz depicts John Unger, a teenager from the town of Hades, Mississippi, who is sent to a private boarding school with the vast majority of students from wealthy families. Percy Washington is placed in Unger's dorm. He rarely speaks, and when he does, it is only to Unger. Percy invites Unger to his home for the summer, the location of which he only states as being "in the West". During the train ride Percy boasts that his father is "by far the richest man in the world" and that his father "has a diamond bigger than the Ritz-Carlton Hotel." Unger later learns that he is in Montana, in the "only five square miles of land in the country that's never been surveyed." Percy's ancestry traces back to both George Washington. His grandfather decided to head west with his slaves to enter the ranching business and he discovered not only a diamond mine but a mountain consisting of one solid diamond. He immediately founds himself in a pinch; the value of diamonds would make him the richest man ever to live, but the sheer number of diamonds would drive their value to near zero. He immediately hatches a plan and reads to the African-American slaves a fabricated proclamation that the South had defeated the North in the American Civil War, thus keeping them in perpetual slavery. Therefore, the blacks in castle are not servants but still slaves!

Washington travels the world selling only a few diamonds at a time, in order to avoid flooding the market, but enough to give him enormous wealth. The Washington family keeps their diamond a secret. Airmen who stray into the area are shot down, captured, and kept in a dungeon. John falls in love with Percy's sister, Kismine, who accidentally lets slip that he too will be killed. That night, aeroplanes launch an attack on the property, being told by an escaped teacher. Percy's father offers a bribe to God, "the greatest diamond in the world" but God refuses. John, Kismine, and Jasmine, the second sister, escape while Percy and his mother and father choose to blow up the mountain rather than leave it to somebody else. Penniless, the three survivors are left to ponder their fate. Sisters took some jewellery but not diamonds since they are fed up with them and do not see their value anymore. They decide to go to Hades (allusion to Dante´s Inferno – abandon all hope). Sisters do not care much, they are even eager to work but just because they cannot imagine how it is not to have money.

Southern literature

Southern literature depict American South, consisting of countries South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas. Except for its regional character, Southern states also share similar themes in literature - slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, family ties, religion, the prominence of community, the guild over slavery but at the same time nostalgia for destroyed culture. Ante-bellum South before the Civil War was the world of aristocracy, large plantations, agriculture, chivalry and old values, after the war replaced by industrial system of the North.

First southern writers were Mark Twain who grew up in Mississippi and addresses the issue of slavery, Edgar Allan Poe who was adopted and moved to Virginia and Kate Chopin who depicted cultural climate of the South. The real southern literature developed in 1920s.

Southern Renascence was a group of novelists and also poets The FugitivesTheAgrarians. Their manifesto I'll Take my Stand emphasises that Southern writers should concentrate on history, religion, nature and the sense of loss and failure. Most known representatives are William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Zora Neale Hurston.

They were later renamed as New Critics and stated new approaches to reading, especially the method of close reading which concentrates on rhythm, metre, themes, metaphors and completely disregards the life of the authors and political context. They believed that the only important thing is the text itself and the reader does not need outside information for interpretation. This criticism influenced whole American poetry of the 1930-40s when academic Formalist became the most important movement.

WILLIAM FAULKNER (1897-1962)

He came from an old southern family in Mississippi and started writing in 1920s. He influenced all Southern writers who came after him and was also the first Southern modernist for his usage of flashbacks and fragmented narrative. He was influenced by James Joyce because he experimented with chronology, different points of view and long sentences. He was awarded with the Nobel Prize. He explored the destroyed old valued after the Civil War and industrialisation of the South. He even created his own fictional landscape Yoknapatawpha Country and mentions it in several novels, interconnecting them.

His first novel Soldier’s Pay was concentrated on post-war society, depicting a blind war veteran. Flags in the Dust features changes after WW1 when flags of Confederation heroes are covered by dust, both symbolical and industrial. Old traditional aristocratic families declines and new businessmen know nothing about old values, history and the sense of community.

The Sound and the Fury (1929) presents the downfall of the one old Southern family seen through the point of view of four characters. It was a modernist work, nicknamed American Ulysses. Probably the most interesting narrative point is by a mentally handicapped member of the family who lives in the present and can distinguish only pleasant and unpleasant feelings.

As I Lay Dying (1930) is about efforts of a poor-white family to bury their mother forty miles from home which results in six days long funeral march, narrated by internal monologues. Light in August (1932) presents typical Southern themes of relationship between the whites and the blacks, rape and lynching.

A Rose for Emily (1930) begins at the funeral for Miss Emily. Nobody has been to her house in ten years, except for her black servant. Her house is old, once the best house around. The town had a special relationship with Miss Emily who presented a relic of old values and even decided to stop billing her for taxes but the new generation is not happy with this arrangement and so they paid a visit to Miss Emily. She refuses to acknowledge that the old arrangement might not work anymore and refused to pay taxes. The tax collecting townspeople had a strange encounter with Miss Emily about a bad smell at her place. This was about two years after her father died, and a short time after her lover disappeared from her life. The stench got stronger and complaints were made, but the authorities did not want to confront Emily about the problem.

Everybody felt sorry for Emily when her father died because he left her with the house but no money. Emily refused to admit it for three whole days but they did not think she was "crazy then." Not too long after her father died Emily begins dating a man who is in town on a building project. The town heavily disapproves of the affair. One day, Emily is seen buying arsenic at the drugstore and the town thinks that she plans to kill herself. Emily herself rarely leaves the home. Her hair turns gray, she gains weight and she eventually dies in a downstairs bedroom. The story cycles back to where it began, at her funeral. Tobe, Ms. Emily's black servant leaves forever. After the funeral, the townspeople go upstairs to break into the room that they know has been closed for forty years. Inside, they find the corpse of her lover, rotting in the bed.

When you give a woman a rose, you pay her respect = title. The narrator is unreliable; he makes the story from knowledge of villagers. Emily does not want to pay taxes because she is one of old aristocracy, a relic of old South. However, villagers have respect to the fallen monument – past – not to Emily as a person. They disapprove of her lover because it is not proper of such a lady of old times. They even cannot bring themselves to accuse her of smell so they just drop some lime around her house. Only her black servant Tobe (= to be) does not feel nostalgia and flees the house, his future is awaiting him, he is finally free.

Harlem Renaissance

This movement that started in 1920s with the centre in Harlem, New York which was not a ghetto at that time. Their manifesto New Negro was written by ALAIN LOCKE. They tried to re-define position of Afro-Americans and find features of their identity so they searched for culture and religion they could share. They found the main inspiration in African art, considered at that time primitive, and jazz music. Writers were dealing with experience in America and unlike previous black writers they decided to stop imitating the whites.

CLAUDE MCKAY (1889-1948) was the first poet of Harlem Renaissance, originally from Jamaica. His most famous poem If We Must Die was used by Winston Churchill to persuade Afro-Americans to join the war since McKay agitated his black brothers not to die as pigs but fight bravely. "Dying but fighting back." It is written in the form of sonnet! Collections: Harlem Shadows and Songs of Jamaica.

In his poem America he confesses he loves America even though "she feeds me bread of bitterness." She get nothing but sorrow throughout his life but he still loves his country. Enslaved recalls his "long-suffering race for weary centuries despised, oppressed...denied a human place." He blames the whites for robbing them of "ancient country of their birth" and angrily calls for liberation.

Harlem Shadows, the poem from the collection of the same title, depicts the sad reality of Harlem. When the "night falls its veil," half-clad black girls go wandering the night "from street to streets." They are prostitutes of, what McKay calls, the "fallen race" and in their miserable poverty they look for customers in Harlem to earns some money.

LANGSTON HUGHES (1902-1967) deals with common everyday life in Harlem, most of his poems have rhythms of blues and jazz and when he recited his poems clubs, they were accompanied by music. He was called the White Walt Whitman as he was referring to him and wanted Afro-Americans to be an equal part of the society. Collection The Weary Blues.

His most famous poem I, Too, Sing America was inspired by Walt Whitman´s poem I Hear America Singing. but in Hughes version he claims that Afro-Americans are also the part of America, "I am the darker brother" who are not to be oppressed anymore and the whites will eventually realise it.

The poem Democracy is openly stating that "democracy will not come through compromise and fear," claiming he has as much right as the whites. He is tired of waiting for things getting better, "I do not need my freedom when I'm dead." and proclaims that every race wants freedom, not only the whites. In another poem God the narrator pities God because he is "alone in his purity" and "cannot come down." He claims that it is better to be human "than God and lonely."

RICHARD WRIGHT (1908-1960) was a prose writer of autobiographical novels. He came a bit later then 1920s but he was also connected to Harlem.

Native Son (1940) is a protest naturalistic novel with black taxi driver as protagonist who takes his master´s daughter home and accidentally kills her. As he does not want to be found out, he cuts her to pieces and burns. His lawyer defends him as a victim of the society.

Black Boy (1945) became the most important novel of the movement where he describes his growing up in a black ghetto since father left him when he was small and he had to steal to get food. He is threatening that if the whites will not take Afro-Americans seriously, there will be problems.

ZORA NEALE HURSTON (1891-1960) was a female prosaic and also the author of Southern literature who was interested in folklore of the South. Mules and Men are black folk stories written in black vernacular language. Their Eyes Are Watching God (1937) is partly autobiographical, female protagonist is dealing with double oppression as she is black and a woman => the novel started a feminist movement in Afro-American literature.