Cather, WillaWilla Cather.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Two of the most intensely lyrical works of the 1930s were autobiographical novels set in the Jewish ghetto of New York City’s Lower East Side before World War I: Michael Gold’s harsh Jews Without Money (1930) and Henry Roth’s Proustian Call It Sleep" class="md-crosslink">Call It Sleep (1934), one of the greatest novels of the decade. They followed in the footsteps of Anzia Yezierska, a prolific writer of the 1920s whose passionate books about immigrant Jews, especially Bread Givers (1925), have been rediscovered by contemporary feminists.
Another lyrical and autobiographical writer, whose books have faded badly, was Thomas Wolfe, who put all his strivings, thoughts, and feelings into works such as Look Homeward, Angel" class="md-crosslink">Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and Of Time and the River" class="md-crosslink">Of Time and the River (1935) before his early death in 1938. These Whitmanesque books, as well as posthumously edited ones such as The Web and the Rock" class="md-crosslink">The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again" class="md-crosslink">You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), dealt with a figure much like Wolfe, echoing the author’s youth in the South, young manhood in the North, and eternal search to fulfill a vision. Though grandiose, they influenced many young writers, including Jack Kerouac. Walter Blair Morris Dickstein The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Literary criticism
Some historians, looking back over the first half of the 20th century, were inclined to think that it was particularly noteworthy for its literary criticism. Beyond doubt, criticism thrived as it had not for several generations. It was an important influence on literature itself, and it shaped the perceptions of readers in the face of difficult new writing.
The period began with a battle between two literary groups, one that called its movement New Humanism and stood for older values in judging literature and another group that urged that old standards be overthrown and new ones adopted. The New Humanists, such as Irving Babbitt, a Harvard University professor, and Paul Elmer More, were moralists whose work found an echo in neotraditionalist writers such as T.S. Eliot, who shared their dislike of naturalism, Romanticism, and the liberal faith in progress. The leader of the opposition, hardly a liberal himself, was the pugnacious H.L. Mencken, who insisted that the duty of writers was to present “the unvarnished truth” about life. His magazine articles and reviews gathered in A Book of Prefaces (1917) and the six volumes of Prejudices (1919–27) ushered in the iconoclasm of the 1920s, preparing the ground for satiric writers such as Sinclair Lewis. Mencken was a tireless enthusiast for the work of Joseph Conrad and Theodore Dreiser, among other modern writers. With his dislike of cant and hypocrisy, Mencken helped liberate American literature from its moralistic framework. Socio-literary critics
In this period of social change, it was natural for critics to consider literature in relationship to society and politics, as most 19th-century critics had done. The work of Van Wyck Brooks and Vernon L. Parrington illustrated two of the main approaches. In America’s Coming-of-Age (1915), Letters and Leadership (1918), and The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920), Brooks scolded the American public and attacked the philistinism, materialism, and provinciality of the Gilded Age. But he retreated from his critical position in the popular Makers and Finders series, which included The Flowering of New England (1936), New England: Indian Summer (1940), The World of Washington Irving (1944), The Times of Melville and Whitman (1947), and The Confident Years (1952). These books wove an elaborate cultural tapestry of the major and minor figures in American literature. In Main Currents in American Thought (1927–30), Parrington, a progressive, reevaluated American literature in terms of its adherence to the tenets of Jeffersonian democracy.
The growth of Marxian influence upon thinking in the 1920s and ’30s manifested itself in several critical works by V.F. Calverton, Granville Hicks, Malcolm Cowley, and Bernard Smith, as well as numerous articles in journals such as Modern Quarterly, New Masses, Partisan Review, and The New Republic. Though the enthusiasm for communism waned, Marxism contributed to the historical approach of outstanding critics such as Edmund Wilson and Kenneth Burke and to the entire school of New York intellectuals that formed around Partisan Review and included critics such as Lionel Trilling and Philip Rahv. Moral-aesthetic critics
Wilson and Burke, like Cowley, Morton D. Zabel, Newton Arvin, and F.O. Matthiessen, tried to strike a balance between aesthetic concerns and social or moral issues. They were interested both in analyzing and in evaluating literary creations—i.e., they were eager to see in detail how a literary work was constructed yet also to place it in a larger social or moral framework. Their work, like that of all critics of the period, showed the influence of T.S. Eliot. In essays and books such as The Sacred Wood (1920) and The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), Eliot drew close attention to the language of literature yet also made sweeping judgments and large cultural generalizations. His main impact was on close readers of poetry—e.g., I.A. Richards, William Empson, and F.R. Leavis in England and the critics of the New Criticism movement in the United States, many of whom were also poets besides being political and cultural conservatives. Along with Eliot, they rewrote the map of literary history, challenged the dominance of Romantic forms and styles, promoted and analyzed difficult Modernist writing, and greatly advanced ways of discussing literary structure. Major examples of their style of close reading can be found in R.P. Blackmur’s The Double Agent (1935), Allen Tate’s Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas (1936), John Crowe Ransom’s The World’s Body (1938), Yvor Winters’s Maule’s Curse (1938), and Cleanth Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn (1947). Though they were later attacked for their formalism and for avoiding the social context of writing, the New Critics did much to further the understanding and appreciation of literature. After World War II
The literary historian Malcolm Cowley described the years between the two world wars as a “second flowering” of American writing. Certainly American literature attained a new maturity and a rich diversity in the 1920s and ’30s, and significant works by several major figures from those decades were published after 1945. Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Katherine Anne Porter wrote memorable fiction, though not up to their prewar standard; and Frost, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, E.E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Gwendolyn Brooks published important poetry. Eugene O’Neill’s most distinguished play, Long Day’s Journey into Night, appeared posthumously in 1956. Before and after World War II, Robert Penn Warren published influential fiction, poetry, and criticism. His All the King’s Men" class="md-crosslink">All the King’s Men, one of the best American political novels, won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize. Mary McCarthy became a widely read social satirist and essayist. When it first appeared in the United States in the 1960s, Henry Miller’s fiction was influential primarily because of its frank exploration of sexuality. But its loose, picaresque, quasi-autobiographical form also meshed well with post-1960s fiction. Impressive new novelists, poets, and playwrights emerged after the war. There was, in fact, a gradual changing of the guard.