Lecture 7 the 1st half of the 20th century

In the first decades of the 20th century the United States became increasingly urban.

Three major works of literature expressed this new attitude of rebellion against the limited life of the typical small American town. The first work, written in 1915, was “Spoon River Anthology”, by Edgar Lee Masters (1869-1950). The “Spoon River” poems all took the form of gravestone inscriptions from the cemetery of an imaginary Midwestern town. In each short poem, one buried person recounted his or her life experience in ironic, sometimes bitter statements, full of regret. The overall message was one of tragically wasted lives.

In 1919, a writer named Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) published a book of short stories called “Winesburg, Ohio”. Like “Spoon River Anthology”, this was a series of portraits of different personalities in one Midwestern town, creating an overall impression of narrow-minded ignorance and frustrated dreams.

The third “revolt from the village” work was a novel called “Main Street”, by Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), published in 1920. Again, the setting was a small Midwestern town, this one called Gopher Prairie, a name that suggested crudeness and lack of culture. In this book, and in others such as “Babbitt” and “Arrowsmith”, Lewis drew vivid caricatures and satirized the traditional “American dream” of success. To urban Americans and Europeans both, Lewis seemed to sum up what small-town America was all about. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, the first American to be so honored.

The 1925 work “An American Tragedy” by Theodore Dreiser, like London’s “Martin Eden”, explores the dangers of the American dream. The novel is a reflection of dissatisfaction, envy, and despair that afflicted many poor and working people in America’s competitive, success-driven society. His other works of desire and fate are “Jennie Gerhardt” (1911), and a “Trilogy of Desire” which include “The Financier” (1912), ‘The Titan” (1914), and “The Stoic” (1947). Dreiser is still considered one of the great American realists, or naturalist. His works deal with everyday life, often with its sordid side. The characters of his novels , unable to assert their will against natural and economic forces, are mixtures of good and bad, but he seldom passes judgment on them. He describes them and their actions in massive detail. As Dreiser sees them, human beings are not tragic but pathetic in their inability to escape their petty fates.