20th Century Literature: Main Authors and Movements
20th Century Literature
Major Authors and Movements
English-Language Literature
William Faulkner
Characterized by somber tones that paint a chaotic and decaying world, Faulkner is renowned for his bold technical innovations, profound analysis of the human soul, and brilliant style. The Sound and the Fury depicts the decline of a family burdened by mental disability, slavery, intolerance, and primal instincts. This setting serves as the backdrop for other novels like As I Lay Dying.
John Dos Passos
Dos Passos, politically engaged and innovative in his narrative techniques, focuses his novels on the community as protagonist. Both Manhattan Transfer and the U.S.A. trilogy expose the dark side of America, corroded by frivolity and degeneration, using film-like editing techniques.
John Steinbeck
Steinbeck’s experiences as a farmer and bricklayer gave him insight into the lives and language of the working class. The Grapes of Wrath, told with simplicity and rawness, narrates the cross-country journey of a family seeking work.
Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway’s adventurous life heavily influenced his work. His characters are drawn to danger, violence, and physical love, defying destiny to overcome the fear of death and the unknown, often seeking solace in drink. A Farewell to Arms, drawing on his own experiences, offers a disillusioned view of love and war. For Whom the Bell Tolls is a tribute to sacrifice and solidarity.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald embodied the disorientation and unease of his time. In The Great Gatsby, he portrays his generation, devoid of moral values and captivated by success and money.
Italian Neorealism
After World War II, Italian literature reacted against the dehumanization of the avant-garde. Writers turned to the harsh realities of their country, denouncing injustices with direct, colloquial language.
Alberto Moravia
Moravia’s novels combine social and existential themes. His characters seek refuge in sex or succumb to passivity, boredom, and self-destruction. The Time of Indifference portrays the hypocritical, vicious, and empty high bourgeoisie. The Woman of Rome tells the story of a courtesan, corrupted by her mother, who desires a better future for her son.
Russian Socialist Realism
In the 1930s, Russian art served the state. Socialist realism aimed to promote revolutionary ideals, resulting in ideological simplification, absence of system critique, abandonment of intimacy, and rejection of aesthetic novelty.
Maxim Gorky
Persecuted by the Tsarist government, Gorky’s Mother depicts a woman enduring hardships who replaces her son in spreading revolutionary ideas, ultimately sacrificing her life for them.
Mikhail Sholokhov
Sholokhov’s epic And Quiet Flows the Don portrays the tragic fate of a Cossack village during war and revolution. Its objectivity, historical accuracy, and character development place it among the best Russian novels, alongside Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
Russian Dissidents
In the 1960s, Russian literature gained freedom due to a slight regime opening and the work of dissident writers.
Boris Pasternak
Doctor Zhivago, published outside the Soviet Union, sparked a campaign against Pasternak, who was accused of anti-revolutionary sentiments. The novel is a love story intertwined with key historical events.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich soberly depicts a day in the life of a prisoner in a forced labor camp.
German Critical Realism
Post-war Germany saw the rise of critical literature in the Federal Republic.
Heinrich Böll
Böll’s works critique the country’s ills. Billiards at Half-Past Nine tells a family’s story across three generations. The Clown features a failing character who chooses begging over a wealthy, hypocritical society.
Günter Grass
Grass uses social misfits to critique Nazi ideology and capitalist society. The Tin Drum features a dwarf who refuses to grow up. The Flounder is a parable about the human condition and a satire of feminism.
Hispanic American Magical Realism
This movement transcends European realism, critiquing reality poetically.
40s Generation
- Miguel Ángel Asturias: El Señor Presidente portrays a grotesque dictator.
- Alejo Carpentier: Known for historical frescoes like The Kingdom of This World and Explosion in a Cathedral.
- Juan Rulfo: Pedro Páramo blurs reality and imagination.
- Augusto Roa Bastos: I, the Supreme depicts a 19th-century dictator.
60s Generation
- Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude tells a family’s epic, mythical story.
- Julio Cortázar: Hopscotch is a complex, innovative novel.
- Mario Vargas Llosa: The Time of the Hero depicts a brutal, sexist military school.
Renewal of Narrative Technique
Marcel Proust
dissipated his youth in the elegant salons of Paris, occupied the rest of his life: “ in Search of Lost Time,”reflects the vital events of the protagonist and sentimental. The swing time, according to the vagaries of memory, including reflections on varied topics with an unsurpassed lyricism; delinquencies and subtle psychological analysis and above all, the structural complexity of the novel, enables us to a new way to narrate. His work “ Ulysses”the most innovative and influential of the twentieth century. Conceived as the reverse of the “ Odyssey”captures the life of a man in the city of Dublin. To tell the antiepopeya subverts traditional narrative techniques, thus ensuring the most profound revolution in the novel fragments, speeds up or slows down the action, disordered time, blending reality and imagination, using all sorts of tones and registers, introduces dark and strange symbols analogies … the reader is therefore facing a confusing puzzle, where the thread is not the plot or the characters, but the same language.