PROSE WRITING, 1914-1945: AMERICAN REALISM

A lthough American prose between the wars experimented with viewpoint and form, Americans wrote
more realistically, on the whole, than did Europeans. Novelist Ernest Hemingway wrote of war, hunting, and other
masculine pursuits in a stripped, plain style; William Faulkner set his powerful southern novels spanning
generations and cultures firmly in Mississippi heat and dust; and Sinclair Lewis delineated bourgeois lives with
ironic clarity.
The importance of facing reality became a dominant theme in the 1920s and 1930s: Writers such as F.
Scott Fitzgerald and the playwright Eugene O'Neill repeatedly portrayed the tragedy awaiting those who live in
flimsy dreams.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940),
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald's life resembles a fairy tale. During World War I, Fitzgerald enlisted in the U.S.
Army and fell in love with a rich and beautiful girl, Zelda Sayre, who lived near Montgomery, Alabama, where he
was stationed. Zelda broke off their engagement because he was relatively poor. After he was discharged at war's
end, he went to seek his literary fortune in New York City in order to marry her.
His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), became a best- seller, and at 24 they married. Neither of
them was able to withstand the stresses of success and fame, and they squandered their money. They moved to
France to economize in 1924 and returned seven years later. Zelda became mentally unstable and had to be
institutionalized; Fitzgerald himself became an alcoholic and died young as a movie screenwriter.
Fitzgerald's secure place in American literature rests primarily on his novel The Great Gatsby (1925), a
brilliantly written, economically structured story about the American dream of the self-made man. The
protagonist, the mysterious Jay Gatsby, discovers the devastating cost of success in terms of personal fulfillment
and love. Other fine works include Tender Is the Night (1934), about a young psychiatrist whose life is doomed
by his marriage to an unstable woman, and some stories in the collections Flappers and Philosophers (1920),
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), and All the Sad Young Men (1926). More than any other writer, Fitzgerald captured
the glittering, desperate life of the 1920s; This Side of Paradise was heralded as the voice of modern American
youth. His second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), continued his exploration of the self-destructive
extravagance of his times.
Fitzgerald's special qualities include a dazzling style perfectly suited to his theme of seductive glamour. A
famous section from The Great Gatsby masterfully summarizes a long passage of time: "There was music from
my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths
among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars."
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
Few writers have lived as colorfully as Ernest Hemingway, whose career could have come out of one his
adventurous novels. Like Fitzgerald, Dreiser, and many other fine novelists of the 20th century, Hemingway came
from the U.S. Midwest. Born in Illinois, Hemingway spent childhood vacations in Michigan on hunting and
fishing trips. He volunteered for an ambulance unit in France during World War I, but was wounded and
hospitalized for six months. After the war, as a war correspondent based in Paris, he met expatriate American
writers Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein. Stein, in particular, influenced
his spare style.
After his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926) brought him fame, he covered the Spanish Civil War, World
War II, and the fighting in China in the 1940s. On a safari in Africa, he was badly injured when his small plane
crashed; still, he continued to enjoy hunting and sport fishing, activities that inspired some of his best work. The
Old Man and the Sea (1952), a short poetic novel about a poor, old fisherman who heroically catches a huge fish
devoured by sharks, won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953; the next year he received the Nobel Prize. Discouraged
by a troubled family background, illness, and the belief that he was losing his gift for writing, Hemingway shot
himself to death in 1961.
Hemingway is arguably the most popular American novelist of this century. His sympathies are basically
apolitical and humanistic, and in this sense he is universal. His simple style makes his novels easy to comprehend,
and they are often set in exotic surroundings. A believer in the "cult of experience," Hemingway often involved
his characters in dangerous situations in order to reveal their inner natures; in his later works, the danger
sometimes becomes an occasion for masculine assertion.
Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway became a spokesperson for his generation. But instead of painting its fatal
glamour as did Fitzgerald, who never fought in World War I, Hemingway wrote of war, death, and the "lost
generation" of cynical survivors. His characters are not dreamers but tough bullfighters, soldiers, and athletes. If
intellectual, they are deeply scarred and disillusioned.
His hallmark is a clean style devoid of unnecessary words. Often he uses understatement: In A Farewell to
Arms (1929) the heroine dies in childbirth saying "I'm not a bit afraid. It's just a dirty trick." He once compared
his writing to icebergs: "There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows."
Hemingway's fine ear for dialogue and exact description shows in his excellent short stories, such as "The
Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." Critical opinion, in fact, generally
holds his short stories equal or superior to his novels. His best novels include The Sun Also Rises, about the
demoralized life of expatriates after World War I; A Farewell to Arms, about the tragic love affair of an American
soldier and an English nurse during the war; For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), set during the Spanish Civil War;
and The Old Man and the Sea.
William Faulkner (1897-1962)
Born to an old southern family, William Harrison Faulkner was raised in Oxford, Mississippi, where he lived
most of his life. Faulkner created an entire imaginative landscape, Yoknapatawpha County, mentioned in
numerous novels, along with several families with interconnections extending back for generations.
Yoknapatawpha County, with its capital, "Jefferson," is closely modeled on Oxford, Mississippi, and its
surroundings. Faulkner re-creates the history of the land and the various races -- Indian, African-American, Euro-
American, and various mixtures -- who have lived on it. An innovative writer, Faulkner experimented brilliantly
with narrative chronology, different points of view and voices (including those of outcasts, children, and
illiterates), and a rich and demanding baroque style built of extremely long sentences full of complicated
subordinate parts.
The best of Faulkner's novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), two
modernist works experimenting with viewpoint and voice to probe southern families under the stress of losing a
family member; Light in August (1932), about complex and violent relations between a white woman and a black
man; and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), perhaps his finest, about the rise of a self-made plantation owner and his
tragic fall through racial prejudice and a failure to love.
Most of these novels use different characters to tell parts of the story and demonstrate how meaning
resides in the manner of telling, as much as in the subject at hand. The use of various viewpoints makes Faulkner
more self-referential, or "reflexive," than Hemingway or Fitzgerald; each novel reflects upon itself, while it
simultaneously unfolds a story of universal interest. Faulkner's themes are southern tradition, family, community,
the land, history and the past, race, and the passions of ambition and love. He also created three novels focusing
on the rise of a degenerate family, the Snopes clan: The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion
(1959).