American Literature: Prose

B

Regionalism

The vastness of the United States and the great diversity of its people have always been reflected in its literature. This was especially true in the 20th century, which witnessed the blossoming of strong regional traditions in the West and the South.

B

1

The West

Frontier life was still new enough to raise invigorating questions at the turn of the 20th century, when a genre known as the Western developed. Westerns were rooted in the physical reality of the West as well as in the history and mythology of its settlement by whites. The novel The Virginian (1902) by Owen Wister set the standard for many later Westerns. It depicts a soft-spoken, well-mannered Southerner who works as a ranch hand in Wyoming and discovers nobility and heroism in the cowboy’s code of ethics. Zane Grey, best known for Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), later wrote many more Westerns, becoming one of the foremost authors of the genre.

The works of Willa Cather drew upon the landscape of the Nebraska plains and the experiences of immigrant farmers in the Nebraska community of her youth. Some of Cather’s finest works feature strong female characters and include idealized visions of past or passing worlds. My Ántonia (1918) follows the life of a young girl of Czech ancestry in rural Nebraska and depicts the dignity of immigrant farm families. In Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), a Roman Catholic missionary recalls his experiences among the Native Americans of New Mexico.

Many of the works of John Steinbeck focus on the overwhelming forces of nature and on issues of class. However, they are also about the American West, particularly California. His novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) offers a stark portrait of the sufferings of migrant farm laborers who trekked to California during the Great Depression. One of his later works, East of Eden (1952), is a family history on a grand scale, suggestive of primal struggles between good and evil.

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B

2

The South

The South was home to a variety of remarkable 20th-century American prose writers. Common to many of these writers was a consuming interest in depicting the life and social interactions of small towns and their inhabitants, who are often shown as eccentric or even grotesque. Ironically, this subject matter, which has become almost a stereotype for Southern fiction, owes much to a Midwestern writer, Sherwood Anderson. His Winesburg, Ohio (1919) was an influential collection of short stories that centers on psychologically twisted, frozen, or otherwise exaggerated characters, all of whom live in one small Midwestern town.

William Faulkner, a friend of Anderson’s, is a preeminent figure in 20th-century American literature, known for his novels about the conflict between the old, pre-Civil War South and the new South. His characters inherit a terrifying set of passions—anger, hatred, obsession, and the will to power—that make his works mythic statements on the determining aspects of identity. Faulkner is known also for the complexity of his style, which includes multiple points of view, inversions of time, and stream-of-consciousness narrative. The Sound and the Fury (1929), the novel that introduced many of his breakthroughs in style, is fragmented by four narrative voices. Several of Faulkner's greatest novels, including Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), intertwine his themes of memory and inheritance with paralyzing and poisonous myths of racial difference.

In style and subject, North Carolina author Reynolds Price is considered among those most influenced by Faulkner. Price's trilogy of The Surface of Earth (1975), The Source of Light (1981), and The Promise of Rest (1995) is a Faulknerian epic of one family's history.

The South was also rich in women writers during the 20th century. Gone With the Wind (1936), by Margaret Mitchell, offers a romantic picture of Southern life during the Civil War. Ellen Glasgow investigated the constraints of aristocratic Southern society and the abuses and inevitable decay of that society in such novels as In This Our Life (1941). The novels The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) and The Member of the Wedding (1946) by Carson McCullers gain much of their atmosphere from their settings in small Southern towns.

Flannery O’Connor mixed Southern Gothic—the tradition of Faulkner—with evangelistic Roman Catholicism in writing about the South in her novels Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960) and her short story collections, such as A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955). The characters of Eudora Welty also incorporate qualities of the grotesque. Many of them are trapped in time, refusing to acknowledge something essential about themselves, as in her acclaimed novel The Optimist's Daughter (1972).

C

Fiction: 1945 to the Present

The fiction that arose out of World War II (1939-1945) lacked the desire to shock that had energized previous war novels, and writers seemed able to regard armed conflict with greater philosophical detachment. After the explosion of the first atomic bomb at the end of the war, America and the world entered a new era during which the possibility of mass destruction weighed heavily on the collective consciousness. The idea of individuality—its negative consequences as well as transcendent powers—became a unifying principle of American literature following World War II.

Protest movements of the 1960s led to a remarkable diversification of perspective and expression in American literature later in the century. Among the forces for social change were the civil rights movement, the student movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement, and the environmental movement. Each, to varying degrees, changed American culture. Although a few voices outside of the mainstream—by virtue of style or perspective—had always played some role in American literature, after the 1960s it became increasingly difficult even to define a mainstream.

C

1

War Narratives

Two of the most impressive novels about World War II were From Here to Eternity (1951) by James Jones and The Naked and the Dead (1948) by Norman Mailer. Both were hard-edged and concerned with the adaptation of the individual to the restrictions of military life. Two novelists who began their successful careers with war books were James A. Michener and Irwin Shaw. Michener’s career began with a collection of short stories, Tales of the South Pacific (1947); Shaw’s novel The Young Lions (1948) is about the war in Europe. Humor, a recurring feature of American writing, enlivened such novels as A Bell for Adano (1944), in which John Hersey dealt with the occupation of an Italian town by U.S. Army forces. Thomas Heggen’s work Mr. Roberts (1946) is a bittersweet story about the U.S. Navy that also incorporates humor.

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