A History of American Literature 1900 - 1950 (eBook)

CHRISTOPHER MACGOWAN teaches modernist poetry and American literature at the College of William and Mary, where he is a William R. Kenan Jr. Professor. He is a specialist in the poetry of William Carlos Williams and has published on Sherwood Anderson, Denise Levertov, Ford Madox Ford, and Vladimir Nabokov. He is the author of Twentieth-Century American Poetry and The Twentieth Century American Fiction Handbook.

Preface vii

1 American Literature in 1900 1

Prose and Fiction: Taking on the New Century 3

Regional Fictions: Austin, Glasgow, Cather, and Roberts 23

Black Writing: The Washington and Du Bois Debate 33

American Theater in the First Decades 39

Native American Literature in the Early 1900s 43

Poetry Before the Modernists 47

The Chicago Renaissance: Masters, Lindsay, and Sandburg 49

The Poetry of Feeling: Teasdale, Millay, Wiley, and Bogan 57

The Poetry of Place: Jeffers, Robinson, and Frost 64

2 The Twenties: Becoming International 72

Innovation and American Theater in the 1920s 73

Prose in the American Grain: Lewis, Anderson, Faulkner 82

The Expatriates: "Being Geniuses Together" 96

"Making It New" Modernist Poetry and the 1920s 115

The South: Fugitives and Agrarians 139

The Harlem Renaissance 142

3 The Thirties: Depression and a Prelude to War 163

Poetry: Some Legacies of Modernism 168

Drama in the 1930s: After O'Neill 178

Fiction in the 1930s: A National and International Canvas 197

Black Writing in the 1930s 226

Immigrant Writing in the First Decades 234

Proletarian Literature 246

American Writers and the Spanish Civil War 263

4 WAR: "Thus dawn the 1940s..." 270

The Media: Books, Hollywood, and Television 270

Literature and the War: Fiction and Nonfiction 276

Literature and the War: Poetry 290

Literature and the War: Theater 302

5 Into Mid-Century 304

Native American Literature 1920-1950 304

Postwar Theater: The Early Careers of Inge, Williams, and Miller 317

Poetry into Mid-Century: Evaluating the Modernist Legacy 333

Black Writing into Mid-Century 356

Fiction in the 1940s 377

J. D. Salinger and Vladimir Nabokov 377

Southern Writing 382

Jewish American Fiction 394

Urban Fiction: Tales of Three Cities 402

Los Angeles 402

New York 408

Chicago 412

And Other Places: Past, Present, and Future 415

Past 415

Present 417

Future 424

References 434

Index 463