Strolling through the American Cultural Garden [Part 2]

In the 1920s, the "lost generation" consisted of novelists and short story writers who were pessimistic, disillusioned, and felt lost in a society that had lost its ideals.

The writer Ernest Hemingway. (Source: Getty Images)

Francis Fitzgerald (1896-1940) considered himself a representative of the "jazz era" of the 1920s, "when a new generation grew up to see that all the gods were dead, the war was over, and people's beliefs were all overturned."

But perhaps the most representative figure of the "Lost Generation" is Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), the writer who committed suicide by rifle. Dos Passos (1896-1970), with his melancholic and disillusioned mood, raised metaphysical questions about the human condition. William Faulkner (1897-1962) interwoven the themes of human alienation and loneliness with the theme of the declining American South in his experimental novels.

Henry Miller (1891-1980) broke the bourgeois social formula, anarchically discarding literary rules, addressing sexuality with a revolutionary perspective. He wrote unique, humorous, bizarre, semi-sexual, semi-mystical stories with themes of morbid psychiatry.

Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) wrote deeply about New York, feeling alienated from the society around him. He didn't criticize it, but focused on writing about himself and the people he knew.

In the early decades of the 20th century, the modernist school of poetry emerged. The American-British "imagination" movement, which arose around 1910, advocated brevity, sometimes only four or five lines, the recreation of the individual's image (not just description), and free verse in opposition to formulaic sentiment.

A prominent representative of this poetic movement is Ezra Pound (1885-1972), who often lived in Europe; later, his poetry developed into an obscure and complex form. Influenced by Pound, Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965), an American poet who acquired British citizenship (Nobel Prize winner), is considered the leading poet of 20th-century modern poetry; he addressed skepticism and the emptiness of the human soul, wrote dramatic verse, metaphysical essays, and religious treatises.

Also in the 1920s, the Fugitive movement (named after the poetry magazine The Fugitive ) brought together Southern poets who celebrated fidelity to rural life and the conservative nature of the South; finding poetic inspiration in their homeland rather than outwardly like the modern school of poetry. Leading the way was John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974).

The new stage flourished, particularly with Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (1888-1953, four-time Pulitzer Prize winner for drama and Nobel Prize in Literature in 1956), shifting from naturalism and realism to metaphysical thinking, employing psychoanalysis with a pessimistic tone, especially during the 1930s economic crisis (during which time, the stage focused on social issues).

The 1930s were a period of crisis. This was a time when realism dominated literature. Novels and short stories took social reality and the real problems of humanity as their subject matter. Each work was a vivid and familiar portrayal of people and the life around them.

Erskine Caldwell (1903-1987) wrote 26 novels that sold 40 million copies (including *The Tobacco Road*, 1952); depicting the misery of the white and black proletariat in the Southern states. John Steinbeck (1902-1968) recounted the misery of Southern workers and especially farmers who were brutally exploited and forced to leave their homes when they migrated to the West.

The Great Depression and World War II were also periods when readers sought escape from reality through two literary genres: detective and crime fiction with Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961), Raymond Chandler (1888-1959), and James Mallahan Cain (1892-1977); and historical novels with Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949). In the 1930s, Pearl Buck (1892-1973), the daughter of clergy in China, wrote novels on a distinct subject.

In the 1940s, cowboy novels began to regain popularity, and from the 1950s onwards, cowboy films also reached a new level of quality. In the 1960s, television infiltrated families with the image of the confident, courageous Western cowboy hero. After World War II, literary works and the number of authors increased at a dizzying pace.

Immediately after the war, several young writers analyzed the impact of war on human character: Norman Mailer (1923-2007) in *The Naked and the Dead* (1948) recounts a group of American scouts infiltrating a Japanese-occupied island, where the army, like a rolling road, crushes individuals; Irwin Shaw (1913-1984) opposes the Japanese and fascists in *The Young Lions* (1948). In his satirical novel *Catch-22* (1961), Joseph Heller (1923-1999) considers war a senseless exercise for madness.

Postwar poets, while adhering to traditional forms, still expressed strong emotions, such as Robert Lowell (1917-1977) and Theodore Roethke (1908-1963). However, some poets demonstrated new poetic techniques, especially the San Francisco group, a key component of the "Beat Generation," a generation that rebelled against the conventions of industrial and technological society and aspired to live a life devoid of material possessions, discarding the lifestyle and values of the middle class. Essentially, this was a relatively significant lyrical poetry movement since World War II. Notable figures include Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-1921), Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), and William Burroughs (1875-1950).

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