Preface

Literature is, of course, more than a roll call of numbers and dates, but history can provide a useful reminder of the context out of which imaginative expression comes. In 1900, the year that saw Stephen Crane’s death, the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes in an American film, the publication of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and the first of L. Frank Baum’s fourteen Wizard of Oz books, the population of the United States was 76,212,168, a 21% increase over the 1890 census. New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois were the most populous of the 45 states, and New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia were by far the most populous cities. By 1950, when Gwendolyn Brooks became the first African American writer to receive a Pulitzer Prize, Jack Kerouac published his first novel, and blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo began an eleven‐month prison sentence for refusing to name names to the House Un‐American Activities Committee, the population had almost doubled to 150,697,361. California, number 21 in 1900, was now the second most populous state of 48, and although the three largest cities remained the same, the population of Los Angeles, now fourth, and in 1900 thirty‐sixth, had risen from 102,479 to 1,970,358. In addition to this westward movement, the first fifty years of the twentieth century would see the United States rise to global military and economic dominance following two World Wars, wars in which its industrial power made a significant difference, as it would in the years following with the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, and the formation of the International Monetary Fund.

The half‐century would see a significant migration of the South’s black population to northern industrial cities, a migration which would have an important impact on black literature and its subject matter. Average life expectancy for whites in 1900 was 47, but 33 for blacks, an inequality somewhat reduced in 1950 when the figures were 68 and 60. According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the ratio of college students to 18–24‐year‐olds was two in a hundred in 1900, and had risen to seven in a hundred by fall 1949. In 1949, 30% of the enrolees were women, yet that figure had been 36% in 1900. The 1949 figure indicates the large numbers of men returning from the war receiving financial assistance for tuition, as well as a conservative view of gender roles that would accompany the 1950s move to the suburbs, the baby boom, and the flood of new labor‐saving devices for the home.

There was an economic boom in the 1920s, which helped finance expenses for the literary expatriates in Paris and provided cheap publishing opportunities for uncommercial modernist writers. The Standard and Poor’s 500 composite index had been 6.2 in 1900, and would be 18.4 in 1950, but had been 26 at the height of the 1929 bubble. The Depression of the next decade that brought most of those expatriates home would affect finances, politics, and the intended audience for much 1930s writing.

In 1886, when Charles Francis Richardson published his two‐volume American Literature, 1607–1885 (reporting that Bret Hart was the most popular American author on the book racks of English train stations, and that Victor Hugo although praising Poe had never heard of Emerson), it was still possible for him to try to define what was particularly “American” about American literature. That question became ever more difficult to answer through the century that followed. Henry James, visiting the United States in 1905 for the first time in twenty‐one years, was both disturbed and fascinated by the changes he saw, recording his impressions in The American Scene (1907), and predicting that “the accent of the very ultimate future, in the States” may become very “beautiful … but whatever we shall know it for, certainly, we shall not know it for English” (James, Scene 139). The pace of change and the growing diversity he witnessed increased in the decades to come. In one measure of that change, the Superintendent of the 1890 census declared that the rapid western settlement of the previous twenty‐five years, now mostly urbanized, meant in effect “there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.” Frederick Jackson Turner began with this quotation in his famous “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893). Huckleberry Finn’s line of escape from the civilizing of Aunt Sally in Twain’s 1884 novel, “I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest” was fast closing down (Twain 328). Nostalgia for the Old West soon became a marketable subject. Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902), the best of the novels that responded to it, set many of the genre’s character and narrative tropes for decades to come.

The world of travel and communications changed dramatically in the first half of the century, as it would again in the second half. In 1900, there were 8000 automobiles registered in the United States, 40% of them steam‐powered. By 1950, the number was over 40 million. The federal government started funding roadways in 1916, although work on the interstate system did not begin until 1956. In 1909, the futurists had characterized progress and modernity in terms of the machine and speed, a sentiment echoed in far less enthusiastic fashion by Henry Adams in his The Education of Henry Adams. By 1920, Emerson’s famous “transparent eyeball” from his essay “Nature” (1836) could become William Carlos Williams’ “spinning on the//four wheels of my car/along the wet road” in his 1923 Spring and All (Williams CPI 206).

The first transcontinental passenger flights began in 1933, taking 20 hours; such a flight and its staging posts provide a memorable setting for the first chapter of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished The Love of the Last Tycoon (1941). The first commercial transatlantic flights began in 1939, and by 1950 ten major international airlines were offering transatlantic travel. The era of five‐day ocean crossings was beginning to close, while the competition from the two German zeppelins offering transatlantic travel ended with the 1937 Hindenburg disaster at Lakehurst, New Jersey. Suitably, the history of flight makes up an important part of Hart Crane’s celebration of the age in The Bridge.

Developments in telecommunications allowed many a new national and international narrative arc. The telephone had been patented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, and its unreliability in that decade is used in the machinations of Mr. Beaufort in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920). The service was more reliable a dozen years later for Hank Morgan in Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). The first transatlantic radio transmissions began in 1901, with transatlantic telephone service starting in 1927. The first trans‐Pacific cables were laid in the first years of the century, and the Panama Canal, connecting the two American coasts, opened in 1914. At the same time that these changes connected the United States more fully with the world, Congress enacted a number of measures designed to restrict immigration. The first immigration act was passed in 1882 with further important changes in 1917 and 1924. These acts had race, ethnic or regional origin as their basis, and arguably had consequences for the delay of the rich multicultural voices that so characterized American literature in the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty‐first.

Within the boundaries of the United States itself, the makeup of American literature became more complex in the first half of the century, with more of its peoples and regions finding expression. The decades covered by this volume record the successful insistence of black writers on being heard, even though at various times they had to deal with attempted control by white patrons, as well as the ever‐present racial and economic discrimination. The period of this volume is bookended by two of the most important Supreme Court decisions affecting African Americans. In the 1896 Plessey vs. Ferguson case, the court held that racial segregation was constitutional, and in 1954 with Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the Court reversed itself. In between these years, in 1909. W. E. B. Du Bois led the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Its important magazine, The Crisis, would be followed by many others providing vehicles for black writing. The flowering of multiple arts known as the Harlem Renaissance provided plenty of material for their pages in the 1920s. By 1950, Langston Hughes was sustaining himself by his writing income alone, Richard Wright had two of his books featured by the influential Book of the Month Club, both bestsellers, and James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison were on their way to literary prominence.

The story for Native American writers is one of slower progress. The fuller flowering did not come until the second half of the century. Native Americans had been losing their land and rights throughout the 1800s. The Society of American Indians (1911–1923) was the first lobbying group managed exclusively by Native Americans, working for reforms on the reservations. The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 gave citizenship status to Native Americans, and the Meriam Report of 1928, commissioned by the Department of the Interior, laid out a list of...