Three authors whose writings showed a shift from disillusionment were Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck. Hemingway’s early short stories and his first novels, The Sun Also Rises" class="md-crosslink">The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms" class="md-crosslink">A Farewell to Arms (1929), were full of the existential disillusionment of the Lost Generation expatriates. The Spanish Civil War, however, led him to espouse the possibility of collective action to solve social problems, and his less-effective novels, including To Have and Have Not" class="md-crosslink">To Have and Have Not (1937) and For Whom the Bell Tolls" class="md-crosslink">For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), embodied this new belief. He regained some of his form in The Old Man and the Sea" class="md-crosslink">The Old Man and the Sea (1952) and his posthumously published memoir of Paris between the wars, A Moveable Feast (1964). Hemingway’s writing was influenced by his background in journalism and by the spare manner and flat sentence rhythms of Gertrude Stein, his Paris friend and a pioneer Modernist, especially in such works of hers as Three Lives (1909). His own great impact on other writers came from his deceptively simple, stripped-down prose, full of unspoken implication, and from his tough but vulnerable masculinity, which created a myth that imprisoned the author and haunted the World War II generation.
Hemingway, ErnestErnest Hemingway with a dead Cape buffalo, on safari in Kenya, 1953.Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library
Hemingway’s great rival as a stylist and mythmaker was William Faulkner, whose writing was as baroque as Hemingway’s was spare. Influenced by Sherwood Anderson, Herman Melville, and especially James Joyce, Faulkner combined stream-of-consciousness techniques with rich social history. Works such as The Sound and the Fury" class="md-crosslink">The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying" class="md-crosslink">As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August" class="md-crosslink">Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and The Hamlet" class="md-crosslink">The Hamlet (1940) were parts of the unfolding history of Yoknapatawpha County, a mythical Mississippi community, which depicted the transformation and the decadence of the South. Faulkner’s work was dominated by a sense of guilt going back to the American Civil War and the appropriation of Indian lands. Though often comic, his work pictured the disintegration of the leading families and, in later books such as Go Down, Moses" class="md-crosslink">Go Down, Moses (1942) and Intruder in the Dust" class="md-crosslink">Intruder in the Dust (1948), showed a growing concern with the troubled role of race in Southern life.
William Faulkner, photograph by Carl Van Vechten, c. 1954. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., Carl Van Vechten Collection (Digital file no. 5a51970)
Steinbeck’s career, marked by uneven achievements, began with a historical novel, Cup of Gold (1929), in which he voiced a distrust of society and glorified the anarchistic individualist typical of the rebellious 1920s. He showed his affinity for colourful outcasts, such as the paisanos of the Monterey area, in the short novels Tortilla Flat (1935), Of Mice and Men (1937), and Cannery Row (1945). His best books were inspired by the social struggles of migrant farm workers during the Great Depression, including the simply written but ambiguous strike novel In Dubious Battle (1936) and his flawed masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath" class="md-crosslink">The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The latter, a protest novel punctuated by prose-poem interludes, tells the story of the migration of the Joads, an Oklahoma Dust Bowl family, to California. During their almost biblical journey, they learn the necessity for collective action among the poor and downtrodden to prevent them from being destroyed individually.
First-edition dust jacket of The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939); artwork by Elmer Hader.Viking Press/Penguin Group; Between the Covers Rare Books, Inc., Merchantville, NJ
Lyric fictionists
An interesting development in fiction, abetted by Modernism, was a shift from naturalistic to poetic writing. There was an increased tendency to select details and endow them with symbolic meaning, to set down the thought processes and emotions of the characters, and to make use of rhythmic prose. In varied ways Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Cabell, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Faulkner all showed evidence of this—in passages, in short stories, and even in entire novels. Faulkner showed the tendency at its worst in A Fable (1954), which, ironically, won a Pulitzer Prize.
Lyricism was especially prominent in the writings of Willa Cather. O Pioneers!" class="md-crosslink">O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark" class="md-crosslink">The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia" class="md-crosslink">My Ántonia (1918) contained poetic passages about the disappearing frontier and the creative efforts of frontier folk. A Lost Lady" class="md-crosslink">A Lost Lady (1923) and The Professor’s House (1925) were elegiac and spare in style, though they also depicted historic social transformations, and Death Comes for the Archbishop" class="md-crosslink">Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) was an exaltation of the past and of spiritual pioneering. Katherine Anne Porter, whose works took the form primarily of novelettes and stories, wrote more in the style of the Metaphysical poets, though she also wrote one long, ambitious novel, A Ship of Fools (1962). Her use of the stream-of-consciousness method in Flowering Judas (1930) as well as in Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) had the complexity, the irony, and the symbolic sophistication characteristic of these poets, whose work the Modernists had brought into fashion.