Critical realism

Critical realism as a trend in American literature reached full development after the Civil War. The deep-going changes in the country, the new type of human relations compelled the writers to see man as a product of his environment, to deal with actual facts and realities. The highly critical realistic literature that came into being differed greatly from that of the previous generation represented by Irving Cooper and Longfellow.

The realists saw man against the background of social con­flicts of the day and analysed human nature and human emo­tions in relation to this background.

Mark Twain, Frank Norris, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser were among the many writers whose works were brilliant ex­amples of realism.

American Critical Realism developed in contact with Euro­pean realism; it was greatly influenced by Balzac, Gogol, Turgenev and Tolstoy.

Lost generation

In the aftermath of World War I many novelists produced a literature of disillusionment. Some lived abroad and were known as "the Lost Generation". F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels capture the restless, pleasure-hungry, defiant mood of the 1920s. Fitzgerald's great theme, expressed poignantly in The Great Gatsby, was of youth's golden dreams turning to disappointment. His prose was exquisite, yet his vision was essentially melancholy and nostalgic. John Dos Passos came home from the war to write long novels that attempted to portray all of American society, usually with a critical eye. In three novels combined under the title U.S.A., he interwove many plots, characters and settings, fictional and non-fictional, cutting back and forth between them in a style much like the new popular art-form, motion pictures.

War had also affected Ernest Hemingway. Having seen violence and death close at hand, Hemingway adopted a moral code exalting simple survival and the basic values of strength, courage and honesty. In his own Writing, he cut out all unnecessary words and complex sentence structure, concentrating on concrete objects and actions. His main characters were usually tough, silent men, good at sports or war but awkward in their dealings with women. Among his best books were The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). He eventually won the Nobel Prize and is considered one of the greatest American writers.

Another expatriate, Henry Miller, used a comic, anecdotal style to record his experiences as a down-and-out artist in Paris. Miller's emphasis on sexual vitality made his books, such as Tropic of Cancer (1934), shocking to many, but other felt that his frank language brought a new honesty to literature.

Southerner Thomas Wolf felt like a foreigner not only in Europe but even in the northern city of New York, to which he had moved. Though he rejected the society around him, he did not criticize it — he focused obsessively on himself and on describing real people from his life in vivid characterizations. His long novels, such as Of Time and the River and You Can't Go Home Again, gushed forward, powerful, romantic and rich in detail, although emotionally exhausting.

Another southerner, William Faulkner, found in one small imaginary corner of the state of Mississippi, deep in the heart of the South, enough material for a lifetime of writing. Unlike the Fugitives, Faulkner saw the South as a decayed culture, and his characters were often eccentric or grotesque. His social portraits were realistic, yet his prose style was experimental. To show the relationship of the past and the present, he sometimes jumbled the time sequence of his plots; to reveal a character's primitive impulses and social prejudices, he recorded unedited the ramblings of his or her consciousness. Some of his best novels are The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Light in August (1932). Faulkner, too, won a Nobel Prize.