1914 - 1946
DISILLUSION, DEFIANCE, AND
DISCONTENT
THE AMERICAN DREAM: PURSUIT OF A PROMISE
There are three central ideas in the American
dream
 First there is admiration for America as a new
Eden; a land of beauty, bounty, and unlimited
promise
 The second element is optimism, justified by
the ever-expanding opportunity and abundance
that many people have come to expect of our
great nation

Modernism …
Americans have always believed in progress – that
life keeps getting better and that we are moving
toward an era of prosperity, justice, and joy that
always seems just around the corner
 The third element in the American dream has
been the importance and ultimate triumph of the
individual – the independent, self-reliant person
 Everything is possible for the person who places
trust in his or her own powers and potential

AMERICAN DREAM
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Years preceding World War I were characterized
by an overwhelming sense of optimism.
Societal attitudes were optimistically influenced
by the following:
 Numerous technological advances
 Promise for the future
 And then World War I broke out in 1914 …

Modernism …
WAR IN EUROPE
Allies - Britain, Belgium, France, Italy, Serbia,
Montenegro, Japan, and Russia; later Russia
would drop out of the conflict and the United
States would join
 Central Powers – Germany, Austria-Hungary,
and Turkey
 The machine gun was introduced, making it
impossible for one side to launch a successful
attack on its opponents’ trenches

Modernism: Historical Background …
President Woodrow Wilson wanted the US to
remain neutral, but that proved impossible
 1915 - A German submarine sank the Lusitania
 More than 1,200 people lost their lives on
board, including 128 Americans
 Germany resumed unrestricted submarine
warfare two years later; the US joined the Allied
cause

Historical Influences on Literature …
Psychological Effects of the War
A number of famous American writers saw the
war firsthand and learned of its horror
 E. E. Cummings, Ernest Hemingway, and John
Dos Passos served as ambulance drivers for
the Red Cross
 Hemingway later served in the Italian infantry
and was seriously wounded
 This experience served as the basis for his
short story “In Another Country”

POSTWAR
Two new intellectual trends or movements became
popular after World War I
 Marxism and psychoanalysis combine to increase
the pressure on traditional beliefs and values
 In Russia during World War I, a Marxist-inspired
Bolshevik Revolution had toppled and even
murdered anointed ruler Czar Nicholas II
 The socialistic beliefs of Karl Marx (1818 – 1883)
that had powered the Russian Revolution in 1917
were in direct opposition to the American system
of capitalism and free enterprise

The Musings of Sigmund Freud
In Vienna, there was another unsettling
movement
 Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939), the founder of
psychoanalysis, had opened the workings of
the unconscious mind to scrutiny and called for
a new understanding of human sexuality, and
the role it plays in unconscious thoughts
 Throughout America, there was a growing
interest in this new field

SIGMUND FREUD
The Subconscious Controls Our Actions

This created a resultant anxiety about the
amount of freedom an individual really had

If we as people truly believed our actions were
influenced by our subconscious, and we
coupled this belief with the theory that there
was no control over our subconscious, then
there seemed to be little room left for “free will”
Stream of Consciousness
One literary result of this interest in the psyche
was the narrative technique called stream of
consciousness
 This style abandoned chronology and
attempted to imitate the moment-by-moment
flow of a character’s perceptions and memories

Norman Rockwell Captures the Spirit of America
(born Feb. 3, 1894, New York, N.Y., U.S. — died
Nov. 8, 1978, Stockbridge, Mass.)
PROSPERITY AND DEPRESSION
The Great War ended in November 1918
 The Constitution was amended to prohibit the
manufacture and sale of alcohol
 Prohibition led to bootlegging, speakeasies,
widespread law breaking, the creation of the
original gangster, and sporadic warfare among
competing gangs
 Recording the Roaring Twenties, F. Scott
Fitzgerald gave it its name the Jazz Age

Gangsterism
How did prohibition lead to
the rise in gangsterism?
 People soon found ways of
getting round the new law.
Speakeasies were soon set
up in all of the big cities.
these were illegal bars, which
sold alcohol behind closed
doors.

More on the concept of speakeasies



It was almost impossible to close these speakeasies
down because they were opened in basements or the
back rooms of restaurants and cafes.
If bar owners could not get their hands on genuine
alcoholic drinks, they could always buy moonshine or
hooch, which was illegally made alcohol.
Unfortunately this could be very dangerous. Several
hundred people a year died from alcohol poisoning
during the 1920s, mostly from the effects of moonshine
which could be lethal.
More on Gansterism …
The most common way of getting hold of illicit
drink was by bootlegging which was smuggling
alcohol into the USA from Canada, Mexico or
the West Indies. An enormous amount of
alcohol was smuggled into the USA from
Canada. Some of it by people who simply rowed
across to fetch it.
 None of these countries had prohibition, so it
was easy to bring alcohol across the long
borders the USA had with Canada and Mexico
and the thousands of miles of coastline.
 William McCoy is said to have made
$70,000,000 in four years smuggling whisky
from Canada and the West Indies.

The original gangsters …



But the most important result of prohibition was that it
made ordinary people into criminals. Most people
liked a drink from time to time and this made the
police very reluctant to enforce the law.
The police also became more open to bribes from
otherwise law-abiding citizens. So began the system of
bribery and corruption that spread all over the USA
and reached the highest levels of society.
Worse still, the supply of illegal alcohol fell into the
hands of gangsters, who then bribed the police and
justice system to allow them to carry on their
business.


In Chicago the mayor, Big Bill
Thompson, was known to be an
associate of the gangsters, who
stepped in to supply the
demand. The gangsters were
able to make a fortune.
"It is estimated that by 1929,
Capone's income from the
various aspects of his business
was $60,000,000 (illegal
alcohol), $25,000,000
(gambling establishments),
$10,000,000 (vice) and
$10,000,000 from various
other rackets. It is claimed that
Capone was employing over
600 gangsters to protect this
business from rival gangs."
Gangsterism Cont’d
Economic and Societal Factors …
After a brief recession in 1920 and 1921, the
economy boomed
 New buildings rose, creating new downtowns
sections in many cities
 Radio and jazz arrived
 Movies became big business, and spectacular
movie places sprang up across the country
 Fads such as raccoon coats, flagpole sitting,
and the dance the Charleston began

New York gets its Cool on with Greenwich Village
Writers flocked to Greenwich Village, in New
York City. Older buildings, barns, stables, and
houses were converted to studios, nightclubs,
theaters, and shops
 Eugene O’Neill founded the Greenwich Village
theatre where experimental dramas were
performed
 Thomas Wolfe taught English at New York
University in the Village while writing his novel
Look Homeward Angel

Edna St. Vincent Millay
The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay became a symbol
of the liberated woman of the era
 Her bold, carefree public identity as a romantic,
extravagant female Casanova made her a national
celebrity while she was still in her twenties
 Millay’s poems, as well as her public persona,
assigned women social, intellectual, and romantic
roles that society had previously reserved for men

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
Vroom Vroom Vroom …
The auto industry was the engine of the
American economy in the 1920s
 Car sales grew rapidly during the decade
 The auto boom spurred growth in related fields,
such as steel and rubber
 One reason for the auto boom was a drop in
prices
 By 1924, the cost of a Model T had decreased
from $850 to $290

An average American, not just the wealthy, could
afford to buy a car
 Car prices fell because factories became more
efficient
 Henry Ford had introduced the assembly line in his
factory in 1913
 Before the assemble line, it took 14 hours to put
together a Model T
 In Ford’s new factory, workers could assemble a
Model T in 93 minutes

The assembly line was a key idea in the
expansion of manufacturing
 It could apply to many industries, ensuring
rapid manufacture of less expensive goods
 Other companies copied Ford’s methods
 In 1927, General Motors passed Ford as the
top auto maker
 General Motors sold cars in a variety of models
and colors

In late October 1929, the stock market
crashed, marking the beginning of the Great
Depression.
 By mid-1932, about 12 million people – one
quarter of the work force – were out of work
 In 1932 New York’s governor Franklin D.
Roosevelt defeated incumbent president
Herbert Hoover

GREAT DEPRESSION
Roosevelt initiated the New Deal, a package of
major economic reforms, to strengthen the
economy
 Roosevelt’s New Deal Program helped some
Americans find work, but it was World War II
that really pushed the United States
economically out of the Great Depression
 This, with his leadership in World War II, earned
him reelection in 1936, 1940, and again in
1944

The Marines Saving our Flag at Iwo Jima
WORLD WAR II
Germans invaded Poland to touch off WWII
 America wanted to stay neutral; however, when the
Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on
December 7, 1941, it was no longer possible
 The U.S. declared war on the Axis powers – Japan,
Germany, and Italy
 After years of fighting on two fronts, the Allies –
the U.S., Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and
France – defeated Nazi Germany
 Japan surrendered three months later, after the
U.S. had dropped the atomic bomb

Time’s Square – The Troops Return and Initiate
Operation Baby Boom
WOMEN GET THE VOTE
Carrie Chapman Catt, a former school principal
and reporter, spoke out forcefully for women’s
suffrage.
 She was a brilliant organizer, and her campaign
succeeded as year by year more states in the
West and Midwest gave women the vote
 Gradually, more women called for an
amendment to the Constitution

The suffragist leader Alice Paul and others met
with President Wilson after he took office in
1913
 He did not oppose women’s suffrage, but he
did not support a constitutional amendment
 Suffragists became disillusioned after
numerous meetings with Wilson and began to
picket the White House in January of 1917

By early 1918, President Wilson agreed to
support the suffrage amendment
 In 1919, Congress passed the Nineteenth
Amendment to the Constitution giving women
the right to vote
 By August 1920, three fourths of the states had
ratified it
 The amendment doubled the number of eligible
voters in the U.S.

LITERATURE OF THE PERIOD
The devastation of World War I brought about an
end to the sense of optimism that had
characterized the years immediately preceding the
war
 No longer trusting the ideas and values of the
world out of which the war had developed, people
sought to find new ideas that better suited
twentieth-century life
 The quest for new ideas occurred in the world of
literature as well, and a major literary movement
known as Modernism was born

Disillusionment was a major theme in the fiction of
the time
 Sinclair Lewis lashed out satirically at the narrowmindedness of small town life in his immensely
popular novel Main Street
 In 1925, Theodore Dreiser produced a literary
landmark with his prototype of the realistic novel
An American Tragedy, the story of an ambitious
but luckless man who takes a path that lead him
not to the success he seeks, but to the execution
chamber

SINCLAIR LEWIS
Ernest Hemingway
The most influential of all the post-WWI writers
was Ernest Hemingway
 Hemingway reduced the flamboyance of literary
language to a minimum – to express the bare
bones of the truth
 Hemingway introduced a new kind of hero to
American fiction, a character type that many
readers embraced as a protagonist and a role
model

ERNEST HEMINGWAY
MODERNISM
Modernist experimented with a wide variety of
new approaches and techniques, producing a
remarkably diverse body of literature
 To reflect the fragmentation of the modern
world, the Modernist constructed their works
out of fragments, omitting the expositions,
transitions, resolutions, and explanation used
in traditional literature

Modernism and Imagism …
In poetry, Modernist writers abandoned
traditional forms and meters in favor of free
verse whose rhythms they improvised to suit
individual poems
 The themes of their works were usually implied
rather than directly stated; this created a sense
of uncertainty
 Modernist writers and poets helped to earn
American literature a place in the world’s
esteem

Modernism emphasized bold experimentation
in style and form, reflecting the fragmentation
of society
 It rejected traditional themes and subjects
 It also rejected the ideal of a hero as infallible
in favor of a hero who is flawed and
disillusioned but shows “grace under pressure”

Poets began to explore the artistic life of
Europe
 With other writers, artists, and composers from
all over the world, they absorbed the lessons of
modernist painters like Henri Matisse and
Pablo Picasso, who were exploring new ways to
see and represent reality
 Poets sought to create poems that invited new
ways of seeing and thinking

HENRI MATISSE
PABLO PICASSO
PABLO PICASSO
Symbolism and Imagism
Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot used the suggestive
techniques of symbolism (a preceding literary
movement) to fashion a new modernist poetry
 Pound also spearheaded a related poetic
movement called Imagism
 William Carolos Williams, Marianne Moore, E. E.
Cummings, and Wallace Stevens all wrote in this
Imagist style

EZRA POUND
E. E. CUMMINGS
IMAGISM
The Modernist movement was ushered in by a
poetic movement known as Imagism
 This movement lasted from 1909 to 1917
 The Imagists rebelled against the sentimentality of
nineteenth-century poetry
 Their models came from Greek and Roman
classics, Chinese and Japanese poetry, and the
free verse of the French poets
 Some of the Imagists were H.D. (Hilda Doolittle),
Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings and William Carlos
Williams

EXPATRIATES
Postwar disenchantment led a number of
American writers to become expatriates, or
exiles
 Many went to Paris, including Gertrude Stein,
Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and
Ernest Hemingway
 Ezra Pound spent time in England, France, and
Italy
 T. S. Eliot went to England

GERTRUDE STEIN
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
NEW APPROACHES
During the years between the two world wars,
writers explored new literary territories
 Writers began using the stream-ofconsciousness technique
 In 1922, James Joyce published Ulysses using
this technique
 William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, and
John Dos Passos also used this technique

Poets also stretched the old boundaries
 E. E. Cummings's poems attracted special
attention because of their wordplay, unique,
typography, and special punctuation
 William Carlos Williams sought meaning in
American sights and sounds and used informal,
conversational speech
 Wallace Stevens wrote a more intellectual and
self-consciously elegant poetry

WRITERS OF INTERNATIONAL RENOWN
The Nobel Prize for Literature was established
in 1901 with funds bequeathed by Alfred
Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite
 In 1930, Sinclair Lewis was the first American
to win the Nobel Prize for Literature won the
award for his novel, Main Street
 This award was the first of many for American
writers

NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE
Other Nobel Prize Winners
In 1936, the prize went to Eugene O’Neil; O’Neil
was ranked by the critics as America’s greatest
playwright
 He wrote plays such as Desire Under the Elms,
The Iceman Cometh, and Long Day’s Journey
Into Night
 In 1938, Pearl S. Buck won the Nobel Prize
 The Good Earth is considered her finest work

Nobel Prize Cont’d
T. S. Eliot won the prize in 1948
 William Faulkner won the Nobel Prize the
following year in 1949
 Later Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck
also won the Nobel Prize for Literature
 Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms influenced a
generation of young writers
 Much of his work focuses on WWI and its
aftermath

Many of Steinbeck’s
works depict the
Depression, especially
as it affected migrant
workers and dust-bowl
farmers
 Steinbeck’s most
memorable novels are
Of Mice and Men and
The Grapes of Wrath

JOHN STEINBECK
POETRY IN NEW ENGLAND AND THE MIDWEST
Poet Edwin Arlington Robinson from Maine
represented Americans whose fates were
manifestations of their characters in his poetry
 Robert Frost was perhaps the greatest voice in
New England
 Frost’s independence was grounded in his ability
to handle ordinary New England speech and in his
surprising skill at taking the most conventional
poetic forms and giving them a twist all his own

ROBERT FROST
At the same time, poets of the Midwest brought
the American heartland to life in slightly more
adventuresome verse forms
 They used rougher stanzas and looser lines
 Best known of these poets is Edgar Lee Masters
who assembled a sort of town biography in his
Spoon River Anthology
 Masters took the lid off sentimentalized smalltown life and allowed the dead to speak their own
shocking litanies of greed, frustrations, and
spiritual poverty in this work

HARLEM RENAISSANCE
A group of black poets focused directly on the
unique contributions of African Americans
 Foremost among these poets was James
Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Langston
Hughes, and Countee Cullen
 These poets brought literary distinction to the
broad movement of artists known as the
Harlem Renaissance

The geographical center of the movement was
Harlem, in northern Manhattan
 Its spiritual center was a place in the
consciousness of African Americans
 African American poetry and music from New
Orleans, Memphis, and Chicago became part of
the Jazz Age
 In March 1924, The Harlem Renaissance was
publicly recognized

The Harlem phenomenon continued through
the 1920s and into the 1930s
 The writers of this renaissance belonged to no
single school of literature, but they did form a
coherent group
 They saw themselves as part of a new and
exciting movement
 They opened the door for African American
writers who would follow them

POETIC VOICES OF THE WEST AND SOUTH
The most distinctive poetic voice from the West
was that of Robinson Jeffers who carved out an
isolated and almost hermitlike existence in a
California town by the Pacific shore
 Jeffers steered a wavering course between
convention and experiment
 He worked in meter and rhyme, but more often
he wrote in long lines of free verse

He became widely known less for his
craftsmanship than for his unorthodox
attitudes toward progress, religion, and the
nature of humanity
 Jeffers took a dim view of democracy and the
rise of the common man
 After his death, his poems became an
inspiration to the Beats and other West Coast
literary groups in the 1960s

Robinson Jeffers
The South offered their voice in John Crowe
Ransom
 Ransom stood for wit, gentility, subtle, intellect,
and the manners of an earlier century
 Readers found him to have a gentle nature and
a passionate concern for the beauty and
elegance of the English language

JOHN CROWE RANSOM
THE AMERICAN DREAM REVISITED
Belief in self-reliance persisted as the old idea of
America as Eden
 American modernist writers both echoed and
challenged the American dream
 They constituted a broader, more resonant voice
than ever before resulting in a second American
renaissance
 With all the changes, however, writers continued to
ask fundamental questions about the meaning
and purpose of human existence

A typical depiction of the 1920s…