American Literature: Twain, James, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner
American Humor and Cosmopolitanism: Twain and James
LIT 54
1. Introduction
2. 19th Century American Literature Revival
Throughout the 19th century, a real revival of American literature took place. Authors like Whitman, Poe, Twain, and James contributed to the creation of a distinctive American literature with its own idiosyncratic voice. We will delve into two major American novelists of the century: Twain and James, who gave a new impetus to American fiction. With a humorous tone, Twain created novels with outdoor settings and social criticism, also concerned with dialect and the vernacular. James, with his cosmopolitanism contrasting the new world of America with the old European continent, brought a new insight into the conflict between good and evil, and the corruption of innocence. Both Twain and James made great contributions to American literature and to the art of the novel.
3. Mark Twain (1835-1910)
His real name was Samuel L. Clemens. He is a major figure in American humorism and an important lecturer of his time. His work includes novels, sketches for newspapers, travel accounts, and tales, among others, and it’s divided into three main stages: his early work as a journalist, his mature writing (when he produced his best works), and his final years, influenced by his personal difficulties.
3.1 Early Life and Journalism
MT was brought up in the river town of Hannibal, on the bank of the Mississippi. After his father’s death, he started working as a printer. Later on, he became a journalist, which permitted him to travel throughout America and abroad. This gave him first-hand materials for his sketches, tales, and novels. We may consider that his career as a humorist, author, and lecturer began around the 1860s. After publishing some humorous writings for several newspapers, he adopted his pseudonym and gained a national audience. His early work imitated the humorous journals of the time, but he would soon develop his own style. Since 1865, he published a series of humorous letters in Sacramento Union, where he used a fictitious character to express inelegant ideas, sometimes with impolite language. The idea was to publish controversial opinions, but claiming that he was reporting what others had said, which gave him more freedom to express his ideas. The refinement of this technique would be one of his major achievements in the next two decades, the period of his best works.
3.2 Mature Writing Style
Twain’s style, especially in his maturity, was based on a series of strategies and resources worth considering. To begin with, hyperbole or exaggeration is present, which usually creates a comic effect. Another important point is his concern with dialect and the Southern voice, together with the aural/oral dimension of his work. A key feature in Twain’s novels is the presence of a first-person narrative voice which, besides making the narrator unique, shows a freshness and richness that make characters seem real. One of the unforgettable voices is that of Huckleberry Finn, a rich autobiographical voice that emerged from inside the character. Much of his works, especially the traveling accounts, have an anecdotal and episode-like nature. Journeys are told as a series of episodic events which are held together only by the distinctive voice of the narrator. Narratorial voices, indeed, are what give texture to his works, and Twain’s ability to make them coherent and unique is one of his achievements. Traveling is present in much of his mature writing, from the literal outward travel of his early novels to the inward travel through memory and back to childhood in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As far as fiction is concerned, The Innocents Abroad (1869) established Twain as a popular national writer. It was a collection of letters which, by reporting on a tour of Americans in Europe, ironically criticized Europe’s decadence and antidemocracy, as well as American provincialism towards European culture. In Roughing It (1871), he offered a chronicle of a journey he had taken and of his adventures in the Pacific Islands. The physical journey is also a journey towards identity. This novel is his best example of the so-called literature of exploration. Twain showed an intellectual hunger to know, to observe, and to explore remote cultures. An important element in various of his novels is the Mississippi River as a memory of his childhood. It is present in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), maybe his most popular work. This novel is set in a small town near the Mississippi River. Throughout the novel, there is a sense of nostalgia for pre-Civil War life, humorously spiced by the main character, Tom, who is depicted not as a moral model but as a common boy, irresponsible but good-hearted. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1883) portrays the dream of innocence and freedom. Huck, the narrator, tells us in his vernacular speech his running away from his drunken, violent father with the slave Jim. In their way, they meet members of almost all social classes. The thread that runs along the adventure is the theme of man’s inhumanity towards man. In 1889, he wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, in which, through a journey in time, he transplanted a commonsensical Yankee to the England of the Dark Ages. The Yankee attempts to civilize the undemocratic world of Camelot. Though full of humor, this novel is one of the first parables about colonization since it implies the dilemma of modernizing and destroying at the same time. Offering to develop the Arthurian world, the Yankee eventually brings it to destruction. Finally, we must mention an important serious novel of this period: The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), in which he depicts the disastrous effects of slavery on victims and victimizers alike: the unearned pride of whites and the undeserved self-hatred of blacks. This criticism and disillusion is more often reflected in his last works.
3.3 Final Years
Twain’s last years were marked by financial difficulties, bankruptcy, and personal misfortunes (his daughters died and his wife suffered from a long illness). The result of these circumstances were various books that lacked his characteristic humor and showed a bitter view of humanity. Among others, we can mention What is Man? and The Mysterious Stranger. Despite his disillusioned views, he remained popular and recognized by both critics and audiences. Early and late, Twain maintained his magical power with language. He wrote and spoke the language of ordinary people. His famous humorism, apparently simple but implying criticism about human cruelty, is present in all his novels and has made him popular all over the world.
4. Henry James (1843-1916)
HJ, with his cosmopolitan concerns and complex style, is today considered one of the major American novelists. He produced a huge core of work, which ranges from novels to plays, travel accounts, and critique. His international concern, as shown in dealing with the clash between the New and the Old World, has made him a renowned novelist worldwide.
4.1 Early Life and Education
He was born in NY and grew up in a wealthy family concerned with a rich cosmopolitan education. This is why HJ traveled in Europe as a child, learning languages and being in contact with museums, monuments, and European culture. He showed an early interest in writing as a career, and in 1876, he decided to settle permanently in England. This fact enabled him to develop the cosmopolitan theme, especially the clash between America and Europe, in most of his works.
4.2 Literary Career
There are two dominant themes in the works of HJ: the international subject, or the relationship between Americans and Europeans, and the innocent corrupted by the sophisticated (the innocent tend to be American while the corrupted characters are usually European). Three main stages can be distinguished in James’s works. His early works, mainly concerned with the international theme, culminate with The Portrait of a Lady. In his second phase, he experimented with diverse forms and themes, and in the third one, he returned to the cosmopolitan theme but with a more elaborated and complex style. Let us briefly analyze each of James’s stages.
4.2.1 Early Works: Cultural Displacement
HJ began his literary career in 1875 with the publication of Roderick Hudson, his first collection of travel writings, and A Passionate Pilgrim, a collection of tales. It was his early novels, however, that would make him famous and successful: The Americans (1877), Daisy Miller (1879), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). These novels explore the differences between European and American high society, focusing on cultural displacement. The point of view is that of an innocent character, the American, who undergoes conflicts between innocence and experience. The Americans was his first successful treatment of the young, naive American in tension with the traditions and values of the Old World. In Daisy Miller, the main character is a young, naive American girl who pays for her resistance to European social mores with her life. His masterpiece in the international theme, however, is The Portrait of a Lady, in which he shows the complex inner lives of American characters and a profound understanding of female psychology. The main character is a young woman who brings to Europe her narrow provincialism but also her sense of freedom and her refusal to be treated as a mere marriageable object. In his next stage, his themes and forms would be different.
4.2.2 Middle Phase: Search for a Personal Voice
From 1855 to 1890, James wrote three novels in the naturalistic mode: The Bostonians (1886), The Princess Casamassima (1886), and The Tragic Muse (1889). The two former deal with social reformers and revolutionaries, while the latter is concerned with the conflict between art and the world. In the subsequent years, he would change his storytelling methods in experimental shorter works. The three dominant subjects of these novels are the misunderstood artist in society (The Real Thing), ghosts and apparitions (The Turn of the Screw, The Beast in the Jungle), and threatened children. What Maisie Knew (1897) meant a turning point in his fiction, since he introduced several innovations to the techniques that he had applied to previous novels. This work portrays the theme of corruption through the eyes of an innocent 6-year-old girl. In his last stage, his works would be more complex and his novels closer to the 20th-century trends.
4.2.3 Final Years: Complex Narratives
James wrote three great novels at the beginning of the 20th century: The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). The main subject is the way people make their own realities through their perceptions and impressions. These novels stand out for their density of meaning and their complex style. Another important technical innovation is the introduction of multiperspectivism: our impression of characters is the sum of the impressions made by them on other characters. Moreover, James introduced new narrative techniques: he removed himself as a controlling narrator, creating ambiguity and involving readers in the process of creating meaning. Hence, these novels show a complex style and an extra richness of characterization, point of view, symbolic elements, and metaphors. The Ambassadors is regarded as a study of the growth of perception and awareness in the American hero, a middle-aged man captivated by Parisian life. On the contrary, The Wings of the Dove has a tragic subject: a young woman with an illness who goes to Europe in search of experience. Finally, The Golden Bowl deals with adultery through the eyes of both husband and wife. To conclude, we must also remember James’s works as a critic (The Art of Fiction). He was and still is very appreciated as a literary critic. As we have seen, James made great contributions to English language fiction throughout all his literary career. His fundamental theme, an innocent, exuberant, and democratic America in contrast to the wisdom and corruption of European aristocratic culture, gave rise to some of the masterpieces of American literature. His rendering of the inner lives of characters made him a precursor of the stream-of-consciousness of the 20th century. He was indeed a prolific writer who somehow inaugurated what we call the modern novel.
7. Bibliography
- Levine, R. (2022). The Norton Anthology of American Literature. NY: Norton.
- Hayes, K.J. (2012). A Journey Through American Literature. Oxford University Press.
- Parini, J. (2004). The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature. Oxford University Press.
The Lost Generation: Science Fiction, Steinbeck, Hemingway
LIT 55
1. Introduction
2. The Lost Generation
The expression “Lost Generation” was coined by the American writer Gertrude Stein. Seeking the bohemian lifestyle and rejecting the values of American materialism, a group of intellectuals, poets, artists, and writers fled to France in the post-WW1 years. By then, Paris was full of idealism, and it was there that these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love affairs, and created some of the finest American literature to date. The term ‘Lost Generation’ has much to do with the social mood in which Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Faulkner grew up: an era of widespread substance abuse; an era of rising immigration; an era of prosperity mixed with crime, violence, high suicide rates, and failure in the marketplace; and a new generation dedicated to the fear of poverty and the worship of success. The Lost Generation led the way in expressing the themes of spiritual alienation, self-exile, and cultural criticism. Their literary innovations challenged traditional assumptions and paved the way for future generations of avant-garde writers.
3. F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
3.1 Life
Fitzgerald was born in Minnesota in 1896. In 1917, he attended Princeton University but never graduated. Later, he joined the army. Soon after, he met the love of his life, Zelda Sayre, but the relationship didn’t prosper as he was not wealthy enough for her. When Fitzgerald was discharged from the army, he traveled to NY to seek fortune so as to marry Zelda. In 1919, his first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published, and he started his career as a writer. A week later, Scott and Zelda married, pulling the trigger for their extravagant life as young celebrities. With his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, he expected to succeed on Broadway, but it never happened. As a consequence, Fitzgerald’s consumption of alcohol increased. In 1924, Fitzgerald and Zelda moved to France seeking tranquility, and during that time, he wrote The Great Gatsby, a novel that marked an outstanding advance in Fitzgerald’s technique, using a complex structure and a controlled narrative point of view. In Paris, Fitzgerald met Hemingway, and they started a great friendship. During these years, Zelda’s behavior became unconventional, and after her first breakdown, she was treated in Switzerland in 1931. One decade after, the Fitzgeralds returned to America, and Zelda spent the rest of her life as a patient of sanatoriums. Regarding this situation, Scott wrote Tender is the Night, a novel that examines the marriage of a psychiatrist and her insane wife. Scott spent the last years in Hollywood working as a screenwriter, and he began his novel The Love of the Last Tycoon. He died of a heart attack in 1940, and the novel was never finished.
3.2 Works
Fitzgerald is best known for his novels and short stories which chronicle the excesses of America’s Jazz Age during the 1920s. He had a clear, lyrical, colorful, witty style which evoked the emotions associated with time and place. In This Side of Paradise (1920), Fitzgerald describes the world of youth and the parties and love affairs of the rich. It also tells the story of a soldier who has had the same experiences in life as Fitzgerald himself. Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) are collections of the best of Fitzgerald’s short stories about the early twenties. The term “flapper” makes reference to the modern young lady of the time who didn’t mind smoking, drinking whiskey, and living dangerously. The Great Gatsby (1925) is considered one of the masterpieces of the 20th-century novel. Through the eyes of Nick Carraway, the reader sees the glamour and the moral ugliness of the Roaring Twenties. Nick’s neighbor is Gatsby, a rich and true romantic man (and also a suspected criminal). Gatsby throws extravagant parties with the hope that Daisy, the love of his life, comes and falls in love with him again. The theme of the novel represents a clash between idealism and reality. Regarding the style, it’s light and clear with many details and the use of flashbacks and dialogue. Finally, in Tender is the Night (1934), he tells a sad story in which he employs his experiences with his wife’s mental illness.
4. John Steinbeck (1902-1968)
4.1 Life
Steinbeck was born in California in 1902. He studied at Stanford University, and he worked at different jobs until he left university to pursue his writing career in NY. Nonetheless, he was not successful and returned to California. In 1930, he married his first wife and lived in Pacific Grove, where he gathered much of the material for Tortilla Flat (1935), the novel that signaled the turning point in his career. He observed the human condition for his stories. Next, Of Mice and Men (1937) was his first big success. Then, The Grapes of Wrath (1939) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. During WWII, he worked as a war correspondent, and his experiences were later collected in Once There Was a War (1958). The Winter of Our Discontent (1961) was Steinbeck’s last major novel in contemporary America. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. In his last work, published in 1976 after his death, he brought to life the Arthurian world with its ancient codes of honor. Steinbeck died in 1968 in NY.
4.2 Works
This novelist is best remembered for his realistic as well as imaginative writing, distinguished by its humor and social perception. He is a naturalist writer who looks at the economic problems of rural labor in the California countryside and its people. Steinbeck’s novels can all be classified as social novels with characters who are driven by forces they cannot control (fear, hunger, sex, capitalism). Thus, his early novels reflect rural California in different ways. For instance, To a God Unknown depicts a farmer who receives a blessing from his father and goes to build himself a new farm in a distant valley. Next, Tortilla Flat is a humorous tale of pleasure-loving Mexican-Americans which brought him wider recognition. Later, Steinbeck moved to a more serious discourse characterized by its social criticism. In his next work, In Dubious Battle, he deals with the strikes of migratory fruit pickers on California apple plantations. Next, Of Mice and Men shows a story of two ranch hands who get into trouble after finding work on a farm. In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck’s finest novel, he describes the story of a family of farmers that must leave Oklahoma because of the “dust bowl” disaster and the winds that have destroyed their house. In California, they experience the violence of California landowners. The literary interest of the book lies in the heroism of ordinary people. The use of mythical elements is less successful in East of Eden, in which Steinbeck uses his naturalistic style to create a story based on the Bible story about Cain and Abel. The book became famous as a movie, starring James Dean. Regarding his style, it was poetic, naturalist, and of great quality. Moreover, there is a tragic element in his works, where cruelty and passion are present in his characters.
5. Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
5.1 Life
Hemingway was born in Illinois in 1899. He was a member of a Protestant, conservative, upper-middle-class family. His father was fond of fishing and hunting, and so was Hemingway. Nature would become one of the touchstones of his life and work. He worked for the high school newspaper, and after he graduated, he took a job as a reporter. There, he learned some of the stylistic lessons that would later influence his fiction, such as short sentences, short paragraphs, active verbs, authenticity, compression, clarity, and immediacy. When WWI burst in Europe, he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross. His relationship with a nurse inspired his novel A Farewell to Arms. Later, he accepted an offer to work with the Toronto Daily Star as its European correspondent, and he went to Paris, where literature was being changed by writers such as Pound, Stein, and Joyce. They influenced him. With a recommendation from Ezra Pound, he started to work in the literary magazine The Transatlantic Review. From 1925 to 1929, he produced some of the most important works of fiction of the 20th century, including the collection of short stories In Our Time and his first novel, The Sun Also Rises. In 1929, A Farewell to Arms was published and was considered the finest novel to emerge from WWI. In the following years, he traveled to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War, and he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, which was a huge success. Hemingway died in 1961, the year when he fought against depression and paranoia, and the year he finally fulfilled one of his threats of suicide. After his death, A Moveable Feast, his memoirs, were published, and they were praised for its tenderness and beauty.
5.2 Works
Hemingway’s production is superb as well as extensive. The Sun Also Rises was set in Paris and Spain and narrates a story of love for bars and bullfighting. Death in the Afternoon codifies one of Hemingway’s literary concepts: the stoic hero that faces deadly opposition while he still performs his duties with professionalism and skill. These characters feel spiritually “impotent” as they have been damaged from the war, and Hemingway develops this emptiness into the concept of “Nada”, interpreted as the loss of hope to become active in the real world. During the 1930s, Hemingway’s heroes started to change and become tough guys. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, the hero is fighting against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. To conclude, The Old Man and the Sea is his most popular and strongest work. The themes are heroism, stoicism, and ceremony. The novel is an allegory of human life. A Cuban fisherman catches a fish after a long fight that is later devoured by sharks. He later comes back with only a skeleton that is interpreted as a sign of heroism. The book received the Pulitzer Prize in 1952, and two years later, Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His style is striking. Sentences are short, and vocabulary is simple, but yet full of emotion. Hemingway is taken as the master of pause since action usually continues during the silences; this action is full of meaning.
6. William Faulkner (1897-1962)
6.1 Life
He was born in Mississippi in 1897 in the bosom of a family who encouraged literary aspirations; then, his earliest literary efforts were romantic and modeled on English poets. Faulkner enlisted in the Royal Air Force in Canada, and this would serve him in his written fiction, particularly in his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay. In 1925, he settled down in Paris, where he spent much of his time and which would inspire most of his novels. Also, he traveled to Europe and then returned to the US in December of the same year, where Faulkner wrote reviews, poems, and prose pieces for The Mississippian. Soon after, he began working on his second novel, Mosquitoes. In January 1936, Faulkner had to stay for some days at a sanatorium to recover from his drinking binges; but this didn’t affect his writing capacity as it was in this year that he published the novel Absalom, Absalom!, which alluded to King David’s lament over his dead son in the Old Testament. In 1939, he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and in the years after, he would focus on writing and perfecting his stories. In 1942, he moved to California to work for Warner Bros as a screenwriter. In 1949, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, two National Book Awards for his Collected Stories and A Fable, and a Pulitzer Prize in 1955. When he was 64, he died of a heart attack in his beloved Mississippi.
6.2 Works
Although Faulkner was one of the writers who remained in America, he shared two characteristics with the Lost Generation: his dislike for the post-war world and his belief in the value of art. His first two novels were published in subsequent years; Soldiers’ Pay (1926) is about a wounded soldier who returns home to what he calls the “wasteland” of post-war society. In 1927, he wrote Mosquitoes, a satirical novel based upon his literary milieu in New Orleans in the 1920s. In Sartoris (1929), his third novel, he wrote about his native nation and created the “Yokona” Country, later named “Yoknapatawpha”, which became one of the most famous “mini-worlds” in 20th-century literature. In the same year, Faulkner’s modernist masterpiece came to the public life: The Sound and the Fury. It tells the story of the Compson family from four different points of view. Benjy, Quentin, Jason, and Dilsey are the characters, who live in their own reality. Another outstanding characteristic of the novel is the narrative technique since the time here is treated in a special way. He uses the “continuous present” style of writing, which was invented by Gertrude Stein. Past, present, and future events are mixed, and everything seems to happen at the same time. Hence, it’s complex to read this novel. During the 1930s, he became concerned with the evils of modern society. In Light in August, he shows how racism has made the white community crazy. In Absalom, Absalom!, the story takes place in the Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner’s descriptions of human evil are as powerful as his descriptions of human goodness, which people show by means of their relationships with nature and their ability to love.
7. Didactic Application
8. Conclusion
9. Bibliography
- Bercovitch, S. (Ed.). (2005). The Cambridge History of American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica. United States of America: From Reconstruction to the Present.
- Freidel, F. (1974). Harvard Guide to American History. Harvard University Press.
- Magill, F. (2000). The American Presidents. Salem Press, Inc.
- Nash, G. (2004). Encyclopedia of American History. Facts on File.