Depression realism

The Depression caused fiction writers, too, to focus on social forces. In the South, Erskine Caldwell took a satiric look at poor southern life in Tobacco Road and God's little Acre. In the West, John Steinbeck told sympathetic stories about drifting farm laborers and factory workers. His 1939 masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath, depicted an impoverished mid-western family joining a stream of poor farm laborers heading west to the "land of opportunity," the state of California. By interweaving chapters of social commentary with his story Steinbeck made this portrait of the Joad family into a major statement about the Depression.

As the seedy underside of society began to acquire a perverse glamour, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler elevated the detective story from the status of cheap fiction to literature. Hammett's most famous detective hero was tough guy Sam Spade, in The Maltese Falcon (1930); Chandler's was Philip Marlowe, who first appeared in The Big Sleep (1939). Most of these crime books were turned into classic motion pictures, reflecting an ever closer relation between fiction and the cinema.

Escapism and war

Historical fiction became increasingly popular in Depression, for it allowed readers to retreat to the past. The most successful of these books was Gone With the Wind, a 1936 best-seller about the Civil War by southern woman, Margaret Mitchell. Mitchell's characters, especially her heroine, Scarlett O'Hara, and hero, Rhett Butler, were realistically although the plot at times became melodramatic.

The western novel became popular in 1940s. In 1940 Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Oxbow Incident examined the rights and wrongs of frontier justice. Jack Shafer's Shane, published in 1948, was a sensitive study of a boy's hero-worship of a frontier loner. In the 1950s, "shoot-'em-up" western movies were superseded by intelligent, original films which turned the clichés of western fiction into a rich American mythology. And in the 1960s, a new entertainment medium, television, brought a steady stream of western dramas into American homes.

In 1939, war broke out in Europe. The United States joined the war in December 1941. Right after the war, a series of young writers wrote intelligent novels showing how the pressures of war highlight men’s characters. These included Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions, Herman Wouk's Caine Mutiny and James Michener's Tales of the South Pacific. By 1961, Joseph Heller published his satiric war novel Catch-22, in which war is portrayed as an absurd exercise for madmen.

Postwar voices

After World War II, the southern literary pride set in motion by the Fugitives gave rise to a host of new southern writers, all with a skill for rich verbal effects and a taste for grotesque or violent episodes. These included Carson Mc Cullers (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter), Eudora Welty (The Wide Net), Truman Capoty (Other Voices, Other Rooms), Robert Penn Warren (All the King's Men), William Styren (Lie Down in Darkness), Flannery O'Connor (Wise Blood) and James Agee (A Death in the Family).

Science fiction had for years existed in cheap popular magazines, offering readers a fantastic escape from their own world. Yet in the 1950s, "sci-fi" became serious literature, as Americans became more and more concerned about the human impact of their advanced technological society. Ray Bradbury (Martian Chronicles, 1950) Isaak Asimov (Foundation, 1951), Kurt Vonnegut (Player Piano, 1952), and Robert Heinlein (Stranger in A Strange Land, 1961) imaginatively portrayed future worlds, often with a moral message for the writer's own era.

In the theater, Tennessee Williams, beginning with The Glass Menagerie (1945), expressed his southern heritage in poetic yet sensational plays, usually about sensitive woman trapped in an insensitive environment. Arthur Miller portrayed the common man pressured by society; his greatest play, Death of a Salesman (1947), turned a second-rate traveling salesman, Willy Loman, into a quasi-tragic hero. William Inge's psychological dramas, such as Picnic (1952), explored the secret sorrows in the loves of an ordinary small town.

Questions and tasks

1. Name two major literary currents in 19th-century America.

2. What is the central distinguishing element of American literature?

3. Name the novelists who were known as “lost generation”.

4. Who is considered one of the greatest American writers?

5. What had mostly affected work of Ernest Hemingway?

6. What do you know about “Depression Realism?

7. Name writers who The Depression caused?

8. Why did historical fiction become increasingly popular in Depression?

9. What was the most successful of these books?

10. Speak about Escapism and War and there influence on young American writers.

11. Make report on your favourite American writer and his book.