American Literature: Prose

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Social Realism and Naturalism

As James and Wharton examined the sometimes complex psychology of America’s elite, other writers turned to the psychological and physical reality of the laboring classes, whose ranks continued to swell with high rates of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Several American authors who are sometimes known as social realists looked at working conditions, often for the purpose of social reform. In 1906 Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a novel that exposed the unsanitary and miserable working conditions in the stockyards of Chicago, Illinois. The book led to an investigation by the federal government and the subsequent passage of pure food laws.

The novels of Theodore Dreiser were deeply imbued with an understanding of the brutal injustices of social class, and they rank as magnificent examples of 20th-century American naturalism. Sister Carrie (1900) depicts the downfall of a young woman who moves from small-town America to Chicago and then to New York City. An American Tragedy (1925) shows the downfall of a weak young man who tries to rise from poverty into glamorous society. Jack London was another 20th-century naturalist. His writings depict the force—often violent—of nature and of human nature, combining realism with idealist views on human betterment. The Call of the Wild (1903) describes how a domesticated creature reverts to a primitive state in order to survive.

Other writers who worked in the mode of social realism were Sinclair Lewis and Josephine Herbst. Lewis focused on the American middle class, replacing traditional notions of its complacency with a vision that was far harsher and at times bitter. In both Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922), Lewis satirically portrayed the monotony and emotional, spiritual, and intellectual poverty of American middle-class life. Herbst’s Pity is Not Enough (1933) was the first in a trilogy that tracked the development of American society by tying one family’s history to larger social and historical events.

As the popularity of social realism implied, the reading audience of the United States changed as social and economic realities changed. Immigrant populations added great variety to 20th-century American fiction. Among the first to record their experiences were Jewish immigrants. Abraham Cahan came to the United States from Russia in the 1880s and helped form a Jewish literary community in New York City. He was a cofounder of the Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish-language newspaper, in 1897. Cahan’s fiction included The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto (1898) and the novel The Rise of Devid Levinsky (1917), which was an early depiction of the Americanization of a Jewish immigrant.

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Later writers to focus on the Jewish experience in America included Russian-born Anzia Yezierska and Henry Roth. Yezierska’s most acclaimed novel was Bread Givers (1925), about a Jewish woman’s struggle to resolve the conflicts between her religion and her search for self. Roth’s Call it Sleep (1934) chronicles several years in the childhood of a young Jewish boy. Told from the boy’s perspective, the novel often follows his stream of consciousness.

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The Lost Generation

A period of disillusion and cynicism that followed World War I (1914-1918) found expression in the writings of a group of Americans living in Paris who became known as the Lost Generation. Although the group never formed a cohesive literary movement, those associated with it shared a bitterness about the war, a sense of rootlessness, and dissatisfaction with American society. The most influential American writers of this generation include novelists Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, dramatist Thornton Wilder, and poets Archibald MacLeish and Hart Crane. The term lost generation was first used by writer Gertrude Stein in her preface to Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises (1926) to characterize Hemingway and his circle of expatriate friends in Paris.

In The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms (1929), both set in Europe during and after the war, Hemingway portrayed the emotional exhaustion of this generation and their seemingly vain search for meaning and value in life. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) is an exquisitely beautiful and tragic tale of the state of the American dream; his works often reflected the material and emotional excesses of America in the 1920s, a period he called the Jazz Age.

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Experimental Writers

Stein had moved to Paris in 1903, and she gathered around her a large group of painters and writers. She offered both advice and support to the Lost Generation writers, including Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Her own writing is noted for innovations in narrative style, such as simplification and fragmentation of plot and the use of unconventional syntax and punctuation. Stein’s fiction includes Three Lives (1909), a character study of three women, and The Making of Americans (1925), a novel dealing with her family’s social and cultural history.

Another innovative American writer was John Dos Passos, whose bitter, highly impressionistic novels attacked the hypocrisy and materialism of the 1920s and 1930s in the United States. His Manhattan Transfer (1925), a panorama of life in New York City between 1890 and 1925, introduced his “newsreel” technique of inserting fragments of popular songs and news headlines into his text. It also introduced his “camera eye” technique of providing his own point of view in short, poetic narratives.

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The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was an African American cultural movement of the late 1920s and early 1930s that was centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. It marked the first time that African American literature attracted significant attention. No common style or ideology defined the Harlem Renaissance, but the poets, novelists, political essayists, and dramatists who participated in the endeavor shared a commitment to giving artistic expression to the African American experience. They also shared a strong sense of racial pride and a desire to better the social and economic situation of blacks. Major prose writers in the movement were historian and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, who was best known for his nonfiction, and Jean Toomer, whose novel Cane (1923) voiced a theme of the Harlem Renaissance in its identification with the lives of the black poor. Zora Neale Hurston, another important member of the Renaissance, tracked a Southern black woman's search for her true identity in the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

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The Great Depression and Its Legacy

The glitter and excess of the Jazz Age ended with the 1929 stock market crash, which ushered in the so-called angry decade of the 1930s. Many novels of the decade echoed the despair of the Great Depression. During the Depression a federal agency, known first as the Works Progress Administration and later as the Works Projects Administration (WPA), was created to put unemployed Americans to work on public projects. One arm of the WPA was the Federal Writers Project (FWP), which ran from 1935 to 1941. The FWP employed writers to produce travel guides, local histories, nature studies, and other books. The FWP not only produced interesting material, it also provided training for some exceptional authors, including Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, both of whom went on to write about tensions between races and social classes. Wright’s Native Son (1940) explores the extreme psychological pressures that drive a young urban black man to violence. It established Wright as the leading African American author of the 1940s and as a key influence on younger writers, including James Baldwin. Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), depicts Harlem in the 1930s. Ellison’s The Invisible Man (1952) is often cited as one of the great American novels of the 20th century. In this account of an unnamed young black man’s search for his place in the world, Ellison confronts the idea that American society consciously turns a blind eye to its black members.

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