5. American Modernism （1914–1945）

The period 1914–1945 is defined by the two most destructive wars in human history. The year 1914 marks the beginning of World War I; the conflict resulted from entangling international alliances in Europe, with the precipitating cause being the assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June. Many Americans wanted to be leftalone, to cling to the nineteenth century and its values, but the world and the relentless pace of change would not allow the nation to wall itself off from its future. In the next thirty-one years the United States experienced tumultuous social upheavals: it went through a period of unprecedented economic growth, followed by the longest and deepest depression in its history, and it fought at terrible cost in both world wars. After World War I, the United States was entering the modern era. It is significant that this period was defined in large measure by world events—not only the world wars but also the Great Depression. On a deeper level, though, Americans may have been just as apprehensive about the signs of progress, for the 1920s, with its movies and radio, its automobiles and airplanes, had been unimaginable at the beginning of the 20th century. The great of mark of living in the modern world is the accelerated, unpredictable pace of change. Unlike the parents of children born in the year 1800, parents in the years 1900 or 2000 could have little idea of the future their children would face.

Dominant Genres and Literary Forms

All literary genres thrived during the years between the world wars, but the achievements of the novelists were, arguably, the most impressive. Novelists who had established themselves before World War I continued to produce important works. The greatest and most prolific novelist of this remarkable period was William Faulkner, a writer who did not achieve widespread recognition until after World War II.

With such a wide-open market, the short story flourished. A few of the other writers who made notable contributions to the short story were Ring Lardner, Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Langston Hughes, John O’Hara, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty.

Like the novel and the short story, American poetry was invigorated after World War I. Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson—two poets who, in Frost’s phrase, were “content with the old way to be new”—continued to write in established forms such as the sonnet and used rhyme and traditional meters. Other major figures in American poetry were more willing to experiment. Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberly （1920） and Eliot’s The Waste Land were landmarks of the post-World War I world, for in form and content they showed a new sensibility that signified a profound break with the past. In their own ways such poets as Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore were able—in Pound’s phrase—to “make it new”. In a related art, songwriting, the lyricists of Tin Pan Alley—Irving Berlin, Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Oscar Hammerstein II, Howard Dietz, Yip Harburg, Dorothy Fields, Leo Robin, Johnny Mercer, and many more—made the years between the wars a golden era for the popular song.

In drama the towering figure who transformed a moribund American theater was Eugene O’Neill. From his early one-act plays, such as Bound East for Cardiff （1916）, to his provocative and innovative full-length plays of the 1920s and 1930s, such as The Emperor Jones （1920）, Desire Under the Elms （1924）, and Mourning Becomes Electra （1931）, to his posthumously produced masterpiece Long Day’s Journey into Night （1956）, O’Neill brought an energy and lyricism to the stage that captured the attention of the world and made him the first American playwright to win the Nobel Prize in literature.

Movements and Schools

The major movement associated with the years 1914 to 1945 was Modernism—a term associated with innovative or experimental authors intent on breaking sharply with the past in form, substance, or both. Modernism is also more broadly used to label the sensibility of the era between the world wars and to encompass all literary authors writing during these years. Within this so-called Modernist era, however, there are writers who might better be described as adherents of earlier movements. Realism, which developed as a literary movement in the latter half of the nineteenth century in the United States, was an approach adopted by writers who sought to portray in a straightforward way recognizable, representative characters, situations, and settings.

Many other labels have been used to classify writers between the wars. Some are associated with particular aesthetic practices. The “School of Imagism”, a descriptive phrase coined by Pound, referred to a significant approach to poetry that flourished through the World War I years. In the 1930s Williams developed an approach to poetry he called objectivism, in which the poem itself was viewed as an object and its formal structure became as important as the images it presented. The objectivist poets included Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, and Charles Reznikoff.

The little theater movement, inspired by the European free-theater movement, promoted noncommercial drama in regional theater groups, including the Chicago Little Theatre, the Arts and Crafts Theatre in Detroit, the Washington Square Players and the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City, and the Carolina Playhouse at the University of North Carolina.

Certainly one of the most important movements of the era was the Harlem Renaissance, also known as the Negro Renaissance and the New Negro Movement. With the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to Northern cities in the wake of World War I, the Harlem section of New York City became what James Weldon Johnson called a“city within a city, the greatest Negro city in the world.” The creation of journals such as The Crisis （1910– ）, The Messenger （1917–1928）, and Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life （1923–1949）, and the generally increased interest by publishers in the African American experience during the boom times of the 1920s, afforded new writers unprecedented opportunities to make their voices heard. Such authors as Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Nella Larsen, Wallace Thurman, and Zora Neale Hurston made Harlem a vibrant literary community in the 1920s and into the 1930s.