Modernist Fiction and Drama

This is Unit Fifteen of American Literature, part two of two: the rest of the period's fiction, two playwrights, and a test that separates its three biggest names. Part one ended with a town telling one woman's life out of order. This part finishes Faulkner with a story about a boy who has to choose between his father and the people his father robs, and with the sentence he gave the Nobel committee: that the only subject worth writing is the human heart in conflict with itself. That sentence is the unit's governing idea arriving at its payoff, because every writer here is working on a vocabulary that no longer holds. Cather puts immigrant women on the prairie. Anderson invents a form, a cycle of linked stories about one town, and a theory that a person becomes a grotesque by seizing one truth and living by it alone. Steinbeck turns reporting on migrant camps into a novel that widens one family into a migration. Dos Passos builds a country out of newsreels and biographies. Wright writes a Chicago novel designed to refuse comfort, and its protagonist is the subject of one of the board's nine sample questions. Then the stage, and then the prose test. By the end you will be able to read "Barn Burning" and quote the Nobel position. To place Cather and Anderson. To account for Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Porter and Boyle. To say whose character Bigger Thomas is. And to place the two playwrights and tell the three novelists apart.

Six entries: a boy between blood and justice, a Nobel sentence, two prairie novels, and a small Ohio town told one person at a time.

A boy between blood and justice.

AML 1425 "Barn Burning"

A sharecropper's son has to choose between loyalty to a father who burns his employers' barns and the justice he knows the man owes them. Faulkner puts the boy's divided allegiance in the first paragraphs and lets the story run on it. The conflict is stated early and it is never eased for him.

The heart in conflict with itself.

AML 1426 Faulkner's Nobel Address

Accepting the Nobel Prize, Faulkner said the young writer's problem was the human heart in conflict with itself, that he declined to accept the end of man, and that man will not merely endure, he will prevail. The speech is the standard statement of his position, and it is short and quoted constantly.

Nebraska, and the people breaking it.

AML 1427 Willa Cather and the Prairie

Cather grew up in Nebraska among immigrant farming families, worked as a magazine editor, and wrote novels about people breaking prairie. The witness pairs her with Ellen Glasgow as a regional novelist who came to write women's lives as her confidence grew. Her subject is immigrants making a country out of unbroken ground.

Two women, and the land they hold.

AML 1428 *My Ántonia* and *O Pioneers!*

*My Ántonia* is narrated by a man remembering a Bohemian immigrant girl whose endurance outlasts everyone's expectations, and *O Pioneers!* follows a Swedish woman who makes a farm succeed where her brothers cannot. Both put a woman's strength at the centre of a frontier story. The narrators remember rather than report.

One town, told person by person.

AML 1429 Sherwood Anderson and *Winesburg, Ohio*

Anderson's book of nineteen nineteen is a sequence of linked stories about the isolated people of one small Ohio town, connected by a young reporter who leaves at the end. It influenced Hemingway and Faulkner directly, and the witness places it beside Garland's Main-Travelled Roads. The book is neither a novel nor a collection.

One truth, held too hard.

AML 1430 The Grotesque and the Story Cycle

Anderson opens with a theory that a person becomes a grotesque by seizing one truth and living by it alone, and the stories that follow are case studies of it. The form, a cycle of linked stories sharing a place, became a standard American shape. Grotesque here means distorted by conviction rather than physically deformed.

Seven entries: a road west out of a dust bowl, a country assembled from newsreels, two story writers, and a novel built to refuse comfort.

A dust bowl, and a road west.

AML 1431 John Steinbeck and the Dust Bowl

The witness describes drought turning the middle of the country into a dust bowl and many farmers leaving for California, which is the migration Steinbeck wrote. He worked among labourers, reported on migrant camps, and made the displaced farm family his subject. The novel came out of reporting rather than out of invention.

One family, and a hundred thousand.

AML 1432 *The Grapes of Wrath*

Published in nineteen thirty-nine, the novel follows the Joads from a foreclosed Oklahoma farm to California, alternating their story with short chapters that widen to the whole migration. It was attacked as propaganda and read as a national accusation. The interchapters generalize the family's case into everyone's.

Two workers, one dream, one ending.

AML 1433 *Of Mice and Men* and *Cannery Row*

*Of Mice and Men* puts two itinerant farm workers, one of them intellectually disabled and immensely strong, within reach of a small farm of their own and then takes it away. *Cannery Row* is a warmer book about the drifters and marine biologists of a Monterey street. The short novels were written to be staged.

Newsreels, biographies, a camera eye.

AML 1434 John Dos Passos and the *U.S.A.* Trilogy

The witness quotes Dos Passos's *Three Soldiers* of nineteen twenty-one calling civilization a vast edifice of sham whose fullest expression was the war. His later trilogy mixes narrative with newsreels, biographies and a stream-of-consciousness camera eye to portray a whole country. The collage method is the trilogy's argument.

A deathbed memory; a household.

AML 1435 Katherine Anne Porter and Kay Boyle

Porter's "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" follows an old woman's dying consciousness back to the wedding day she was abandoned on. Boyle's "The White Horses of Vienna" sets a doctor's household against the politics arriving in Austria in the nineteen thirties. Both stories work through a limited consciousness rather than an outside narrator.

A novel the country could not ignore.

AML 1436 Richard Wright and *Native Son*

Wright grew up in Mississippi and Memphis, moved to Chicago, and published *Native Son* in nineteen forty. The novel follows a young Black man in Chicago whose fear and rage lead to two killings and a trial, and it was an immediate national bestseller. The book was written to refuse comfort, and it does.

Bigger Thomas is Richard Wright's.

AML 1437 Bigger Thomas and the Protest Novel

Bigger Thomas is Wright's protagonist, and the novel insists that the society that produced him is on trial alongside him. The character belongs to Wright and not to Ralph Ellison, and the board's eighth sample question is built on exactly that confusion. The board pairs him wrongly with Ellison, and that pairing is the one to reject.

Four entries to close: two playwrights, a test that separates the period's three biggest names, and the capstone.

The first American playwright to win.

AML 1438 Eugene O'Neill and American Tragedy

The witness calls O'Neill the country's foremost dramatist and records that he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in nineteen thirty-six, the first American playwright so honoured. *Long Day's Journey into Night*, written in nineteen forty-one, puts one family through a single ruinous day. The autobiographical play was held back for years.

A bare stage, and a Stage Manager.

AML 1439 Thornton Wilder and *Our Town*

The witness names Wilder for *Our Town* of nineteen thirty-eight, *The Skin of Our Teeth* and the novel *The Bridge of San Luis Rey*, and says it carries positive American values with all the sentimentality and nostalgia, while the staging is innovative: a bare stage and a Stage Manager. The sentiment and the experiment sit together.

The sentence decides it.

AML 1440 Telling Hemingway From Faulkner From Fitzgerald

The three are the period's most confused names and the prose separates them at once. Hemingway: short declarative sentences joined by and, concrete nouns, almost no adjectives or abstractions, dialogue that circles what it will not say, and settings abroad or outdoors. Faulkner: very long sentences with piled subordinate clauses, present participles, capitalized abstractions, shifting or unreliable narrators, and a Mississippi county whose families recur. Fitzgerald: measured, lyrical, image-heavy prose in the middle register, an onlooker narrator, parties, money, and an elegiac closing cadence. If the sentence is short and the emotion is missing, it is Hemingway. If the sentence will not end and the past will not stay past, it is Faulkner. If the prose is beautiful and somebody is rich, it is Fitzgerald. All three write about loss, so subject alone decides nothing; the test is the sentence, its length, its joins and whether it names feelings.

A lost vocabulary, and new techniques.

AML 1441 The Modern Novel and the Broken World

American fiction between the wars is written by people who no longer trusted the vocabulary they had inherited, and the technical innovations follow from that distrust. The generation Gertrude Stein called lost had come through a war that made words like glory and honour sound false, and it wrote in Paris on a favourable exchange rate. Fitzgerald put the decade's money on the page and built a short patterned novel around a man reaching for a green light across a bay, a valley of industrial ash, and a faded billboard whose enormous blue eyes a grieving man mistakes for God. Hemingway stripped the sentence to its nouns and verbs and formulated the principle behind it: omit what you know and the omission will strengthen the story, which is why a whole story about an operation never names it. Faulkner went the other way, into sentences that accumulate for a page, invented a Mississippi county, narrated a novel's first section through a man with no sense of time and another through fifteen voices including a dead woman's, and told the Nobel committee that the only subject worth writing is the human heart in conflict with itself. Around those three, the period's range: Cather's immigrant women holding the prairie, Anderson's small-town grotesques who each seized one truth too hard, Steinbeck's Joads on the road out of a dust bowl, Dos Passos's collage of newsreels, and Wright's *Native Son*, which put Bigger Thomas and the society that made him on trial together. On the stage O'Neill became the first American playwright to take the Nobel, and Wilder emptied the stage to a bare platform.

That closes the fiction between the wars, and with it the exam's fourth period. You can read the story of a boy caught between a father who burns barns and the justice he knows is owed, and quote Faulkner telling the Nobel committee that the only subject is the human heart in conflict with itself. You can place Cather's immigrant women holding prairie, and Anderson's cycle of linked stories with its theory that a person becomes a grotesque by seizing one truth and living by it alone. You can account for Steinbeck, whose novel came out of reporting on migrant camps and widens one family into a migration through its interchapters, and for Dos Passos assembling a country out of newsreels and biographies. You can say that Bigger Thomas belongs to Richard Wright and not to Ralph Ellison, which is what the board's eighth sample question turns on. You can place the first American playwright to take a Nobel and the play staged on a bare platform. And you can separate the three great novelists by the sentence.