Fiction

Cities: cities grew immensely, writers moved to cities, literature of urban experience

Modernism and gender: feminism and modernism were closely connected. Important figures: Gertrude
Stein,

                                       Edna Millay, Mina Loy

Sense of alienation: the feeling of being an outsider in one´s social environment

Lost generation: was a group of expatriate American writers, living primarily in Paris during the
1920s and 30s

                          (Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, cummings)


MODERNIST FICTION

Writers strove for directness, compression, and vividness. Frequently writers employed the
selective point of view (the first person narrative, or one of the characters´ point of view). The
average novel became shorter, and short story became more significant.


Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

- her apartment in Paris became a famous gathering place for French artists and American
expatriates (Pablo

      Picasso, Henri Matisse, Ernest Hemingway, Francis Fitzgerald).

- her writing: Tender Buttons (1915) – a book of experimental poetry-prose meditations on various
objects

                      Patriarchal Poetry (1927) – a long poem about what it means to be a woman
writer

                      The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) – Stein´s own autobiography

                      The Mother of Us All (1947) – an opera

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

- writing about men in a man´s world of war and wilderness, and about the relations between men and
women

- his work: The Sun Also Rises (1926), a novel about the lost generation

                   Men Without Women (1927), a collection of short stories

                   For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a novel, the Spanish civil war

Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

- writing novels and short stories that described the mood and manners of the 1920s – the Jazz Age.
He

      chronicled the life of upper middle class in the 20s.

- his work: This Side of Paradise (1920), a novel about college life

                   Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), short stories

                   The Great Gatsby (1925)


period after Market Crash of 1929, the Great Depression: America entered a period of social anger.
Much of literature had a strong leftish flavour.

John Steinbeck (1902-1968)

- wrote about California during the Great Depression, combined realism and romanticism with
modernist

        elements.

- his work: Of Mice and Man

                   The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

                   East of Eden (1952)

Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)

 - satirists of the American middle class

 - Babbitt (1922), a novel

John Dos Passos (1896-1970)

-  experimental writer criticizing American society from the communist point of view