Chapter Nine： The Turning Point of American Literature

Social Background of This Period： As the new century entered its second decade, the forward movement of American literature seemed to have stopped. The realist novel of W. D. Howells and Hamlin Garland were beginning to seem old-fashioned. Among the exciting young writers of the Turn of the Century, Jack London seemed to have lost his genius and Frank Norris and Stephen Crane were already dead. People were again asking what was wrong with American literature.

Part of the problem was that most American readers and writers had not yet outgrown the nineteenth century. In the 1840s, Emerson had shown American literature the way forward. In the 1880s, W. D. Howells gave similar leadership to the realist movement. Starting in 1915, the critic Van Wyck Brooks opened a period of self-criticism. Young writers took notice of Brooks’s criticism. The result was the new realism which lasted up to the 1950s. It made American literature one of the most exciting and most influential literatures of the world. With The Flowering of New England: 1815-1865 (1936), which won the Pulitzer Prize, Brook became recognized as America’s first serious literary historian.

In a sense, the nineteenth century didn’t end in America until about 1913. Around this time, the new critics- Brooks, H. L. Mencken and Hanna Larson- began celebrating the death of Puritanism. In the nineteenth century, there was a “double standard” in both public and private morality: people had to “talk one way while acting in a completely different way”. But this was beginning to change. American readers were beginning to lose their fear of those who looked below the surface of human relationships. In 1919, Sigmund Freud, the great Austrian psychologist, had given a famous lecture series in American artists. But even before Freud’s arrival, two American novelists were starting to destroy the “double standard” of America’s puritanical morality: Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser.

The Major writers

Edith Wharton

(1862-1937)

Edith Wharton was the youngest child of a well-to-do family, securely part of New York’s aristocratic “Four Hundred”. At the end of the Civil War her parents resumed their habit of extensive European visits, and until Edith was eleven she lived largely in France and Italy. She read widely in her father’s library which contained more history, poetry and classic literature than fiction. At eleven, she attempted a short story. Then she turned to poetry and she was sixteen her father was evidently pleased enough to arrange for the private publication of a small volume of undistinguished verses. At twenty-three she married a very wealthy, somewhat older, Boston banker. In her diary Edith Wharton tells how, at thirty-five, she again began writing fiction in an attempt to people the moral solitude of her married life.

The publication of The House of Mirth in 1905 launched Wharton as American’s most acclaimed twentieth-century fiction writer in the decades preceding the 1920s. Recognized as her major period, the years from 1905 to 1920 saw the publication of one impressive novel or novella after another: The House of Mirth, Madame de Treymes, Ethan Frome, The Reef, The Custom of the Country, Summer, and The Age of Innocence. In 1913 she secured a divorce and established her permanent home in France. Perceived in her own time as an extraordinary writer, she received the Pulitzer Prize in 1921 for The Age of Innocence and in 1923 she was the first woman to be honored by Yale University with the degree of Doctor of Letters.

In 1936 she paid a rare visit to the United States to receive an honorary degree from Yale University. Shortly after her return she died of a stroke at the age of seventy-five and is buried in France.

Major Works

The narrator tells us that he met Ethan Frome while working for a power plant in rural Massachusetts. Frome is the most striking character in town, a tall and lame man and the narrator becomes obsessed with learning Frome's story. By chance the narrator is forced to take shelter at Frome's home, and there he gets the clue to Frome's tragedy. The narrator presents his vision of Frome's story to us.

Twenty-four years ago Frome is a young man. Although he briefly pursued higher education in the sciences, the death of his father necessitated his return to the family farm. His mother was ill, and his cousin Zeena came to care for her. After his mother died, Ethan married Zeena out of loneliness. Zeena became more sickly and fussy as time passed, and their marriage has been loveless. But a year ago, Zeena's cousin, Mattie Silver, came to help Zeena with the housework. Ethan has fallen in love with her.

Tonight, he is fetching Mattie back from a church dance. Their walks together are some of Ethan's happiest moments, but he has never really considered acting on his feelings. The next day, Zeena decides to leave for Bettsbridge to see a doctor; she has been particularly ill lately. For the first time since Mattie arrived, Ethan and Mattie are going to be alone together overnight. But Zeena is an oppressive presence even when she is absent, and the conversation between Ethan and Mattie becomes strained and awkward.

Zeena returns the next day. The doctor has told her that her illness is serious. She has already hired a new girl to come and help with the housework, and she plans to send Mattie packing. That night, Ethan kisses Mattie for the first time.

The next day, Ethan takes Mattie to the train station. They take a long ride and both confess their love for one another. Mattie said she wants him to steer them into the big elm tree at the bottom of the hill. She wants to die with him. Ethan does as she asks. But the suicide attempt is unsuccessful. Both of them live.

We move to twenty-four years later, with the narrator entering the Frome's home. In the kitchen there are two women: one tall and severe, and the other shriveled and paralyzed. The paralyzed woman is foul and hateful: Ethan introduces her as Miss Mattie Silver. We finish with the narrator talking to Mrs. Hale, the old widow with whom he lodges.

Main Themes:

Passion and transgression: Wharton shows the difficulties of repressed and illicit passion, passion without any sanctioned outlet. Ethan has had a loveless marriage, and Mattie Silver has been the catalyst for some very powerful emotions. Passion is blocked by social convention and circumstance. Wharton is a devotee of naturalism, and in many of her novels the environment is the true shaper of men's destinies. Ethan's situation dooms his passion for Mattie Silver. But passion should not necessarily be seen as a potential liberator; in the novel passion seems more like yet another force that robs men of their agency.

The land and the people: The connection between the land and the people is a recurring theme of the novel. The narrator is amazed by the harshness of the Starkfield winters, and through his experience of the winter he comes to understand the character of the people. In her introduction to the novel, Wharton talks of the "outcropping granite" of New England, the powerful severity of its land and people. This connection between land and people is very much a part of naturalism; the environment is a powerful shaper of man's fate, and the novel represents this relationship by constantly describing the power and cruelty of Starkfield's winter.

Isolation: Rural New England in winter is a land under siege, with tiny towns and tinier farms separated by vast expanses of cold and snow. The isolation is both physical and emotional. Ethan feels from a young age that he is alone in his sensitivity to natural beauty and his curiosity about science. By the time of the narrator, the tragedy of Ethan Frome has removed him even farther from the other people of Starkfield. The narrator remarks that in a town like Starkfield, people's lives are harsh enough so that they have little time to alleviate the pain and troubles of others.

Lost potential: This theme is closely connected to the themes of determinism, connection between the land and the people, and isolation. As Starkfield is not a nurturing world, Ethan's curiosity and intellect have had few outlets. Both in his youth and in his old age, the disparity between his intellectual curiosity and the limitations of his environment is painful. By the time the narrator meets him, Ethan is not only the ruin of the man that he was, but the ruin of the man that he could have been.

Poverty: From the author's own introduction to the novel, written in 1922 and included in most editions, there is a sense of frustration with earlier portrayals of rural life in New England. Wharton is reacting against a kind of literature that romanticizes poverty and rural life. She depicts rural life as incredibly harsh. Poverty's greatest curse is that it takes away options. It traps Ethan at the farm, just as later it forces Ethan, Zeena, and Mattie to live under the same roof.

Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)Theodore Dreiser was the son of a big family. He spent his childhood in the Midwest, his parents moving frequently from one town to another as they searched for steady employment. Theodore’s education was desultory, but through the generosity of one of his elementary school teachers he did manage a year at Indiana University in 1889-90. Not long after, he made a start in journalism and wrote for newspapers in Chicago, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh.

By 1899 Dreiser had become a successful free-lance writer in New York City and had married. At the urging of his friend Arthur Henry, he undertook a novel and based it on the experiences of one of his sisters. That novel became Sister Carrie, a landmark in American naturalistic fiction. In 1910, he completed and published Jennie Gerhardt. The next fourteen years were productive but difficult for Dreiser. Such novels as The Financier, The Titan, and The “Genius” were frank in their treatment of sex and severe in their criticism of American society; as a result, they were frequently attacked and sometimes banned. His career as a writer of fiction culminated in 1925 with publication of the magnificent two-volume novel American Tragedy. During the thirties and forties he involved himself in proletarian causes and, shortly before his death, applied for membership in the Communist Party.

Major Works

About Sister Carrie

Caroline Meeber, known as Carrie, leaves her home at age eighteen and takes the train to Chicago. There she met a man, Drouet. Carrie meets her sister Minnie Hanson and moves into one of the rooms in Minnie's apartment. Carrie soon realizes that the Hansons expect her to find a job and pay them rent. After several days of searching she finds employment in a shoe factory.

Carrie works hard at her job, but discovers that the salary is too low for her. She soon falls ill and takes several days to recover. Carrie returns to the streets in the desperate hopes of finding new employment, but becomes frustrated when nothing is available. Carrie accidentally meets Drouet on the street. He kindly offers her a meal and takes her to a fine restaurant. She meets him again the next day and is so elated by the way he treats her that she agrees to allow him to rent an apartment for her. She sneaks her things out of Minnie's house, leaving only a short note behind, and takes off. Things go well with Drouet for a while.

Drouet then introduces Carrie to his friend Hurstwood, the manager of one of the top bars in the city. Hurstwood falls madly in love with her and starts to think of getting her to run away with him.Drouet, unaware of what is going on between Carrie and Hurstwood. He is asked to find a girl to perform in his Mason's lodge play and asks Carrie if she would do it. She agrees. Drouet has also discovered that Carrie has been spending far more time with Hurstwood than he ever thought. Drouet angrily walks out on Carrie. At the same time Hurstwood’s wife files for divorce, hires a detective, and locks him out of the house.

One evening Hurstwood is locking up the bar and discovers that the safe is unlocked. He pulls out over ten thousand dollars in cash and accidentally locks the safe before he can put the money back. He rushes to Carrie’s apartment and tells her to hospital for Drouet’s accident. Actually he cheats her to Montreal.

From Montreal they head to New York City where Hurstwood rents an apartment for them. Lack of money, they are soon forced to move into a smaller apartment. Failing to find work, Hurstwood slowly degenerates into idleness. He takes up some gambling and loses over a hundred dollars in one night. Carrie loses interest in him as a person and starts considering her other alternatives.

When Hurstwood is almost out of money, Carrie decides that she will have to get a job to support them. After a few days she is given a spot in the chorus line of a Broadway show. Her salary is barely enough for them to live on, but Hurstwood scrapes by. She is soon promoted to lead the chorus line and later to an even better paying dancing position. Carrie refuses to tell Hurstwood about her success because she needs the extra money to purchase clothes for herself.

Hurstwood takes one last job when the trolley car workers go on strike. He applies for a position and becomes a scab, a man who works when everyone else is striking. However, an angry mob soon manages to stop his car and after being shot at he decides to give up and head home. Carrie luckily is given a speaking part one day and at that point decides to leave Hurstwood in order to live with an actress friend of hers. She moves out while he is taking a walk.

The rest of the novel traces Carrie's rise and Hurstwood's fall. He soon loses the apartment and is forced to become a homeless beggar who stays in cheap hotels in the Bowery part of town. Carrie meanwhile is given a silent role, but plays it so well that she becomes an overnight star and signs a contract paying her a hundred and fifty dollars a week, an exorbitant sum for her. Hurstwood, in despair, commits suicide by gassing himself with methane in his hotel room one night. Carrie meanwhile has become unhappy with her state in the world, wishing that she could perform drama rather than comedy.

A Brief Analysis:

In Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser creates a world in which people are defined by desire. By viewing this world through the eyes of his protagonist, Carrie, the reader becomes aware of a dichotomy. On one hand, there is the desire for wealth, status, and material possessions. While the majority of the novel is dedicated to this kind of desire, there exists another kind of desire of the mind feels, which longs for beauty. Most of the way through the novel, Carrie becomes increasingly aware of the superficiality of the former kind of desire, as well as the nobility of the latter, which she explores through her experience in acting. At the end of the novel, Dreiser praises Carrie for transcending the former kind of desire and embracing the latter, nobler kind of desire.

In Dreiser's final pages, Carrie reflects on the futility of the first kind of desire: Chicago, New York; Drouet, Hurstwood; the world of fashion and the world of stage these were but incidents. Not them, but that which they represented, she longed for. Time proved the representation false. Shortly after, Dreiser writes a passage which refers back to the time when Carrie walked down Broadway with Mrs. Vance, desiring to be rich enough in wealth and status to be part of such a world. In this passage, however, Carrie has realizes the hollowness of such desire. This is truly noble: no longer does Carrie envy other women for their clothes, their jewelry, or their collections of expensive possessions. Rather, peace and beauty are all that Carrie strives for.

Willa Cather (1873-1947)

Willa Cather herself was born in the Upper Shenandoan Valley in western Virginia, near Winchester, the oldest of seven children of Charles and Virginia Cather. When she was nine, her parents moved west to join her paternal grandparents on the open plains of Nebraska, taking a large and varied household on the grandfather’s farm in the Catherton precinct of Webster County, an area so populated with southernest that its school was called

the New Virginia School. Within two years, however, Charles Cather moved the large household into the town of Red Cloud, where he opened a real estate office. Just as her months in the country had introduced her to the immigrant farmers from Sweden, France, and Bohemia, in Red Cloud Willa Cather discovered a cast of small-town characters rich in cultural diversity.

While in college, Cather began writing reviews for campus and Lincoln newspaper that led to her first job in Pittsburgh as an editor of a ladies’ magazine. There she taught high school English and Latin for a few years before joining McClure’s Magazine in New York City after publishing her first collection of short stories in 1905. For the next forty years, she would live and write in New York, but rarely would that city appear in her fiction. While Willa Cather’s reputation as a writer rests on her novels, she wrote over sixty short stories as well. Two-thirds of these were written before she began writing novels in 1912 and are considered part of her long apprenticeship. Cather left no diaries, journals, or autobiography behind her when she died. Nor did she permit the publication or quotation of the many letters she wrote to friends that help biographers to explain the relationship she had to the subjects of her work.

Major WorksAbout The Song of Lark:

The Song of the Lark is the story of an artist's growth and development from childhood to maturity. More particularly—and decidedly more rarely—it traces the development of a female artist supported by a series of male characters willing to serve her career. Inspired by Willa Cather's own development as a novelist and by the career of an opera diva, The Song of the Lark examines the themes of the artist's relationship with family and society, themes that would dominate all of Cather's best

fiction.Thea Kronborg is a Scandinavian-American singer who works her way up from the dusty desert town of Moonstone, Colorado, to the boards of the Metropolitan Opera house. Although Willa Cather herself was not a musician, the portions of the novel covering childhood, apprenticeship, and artistic awakening in the western landscape are frankly autobiographical. Its final section, dealing with Thea's professional life, is drawn largely from the career of the Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad, who was the kind of artist Willa Cather still aspired to be.

A Simple Analysis:Thea, like Olive Fremstad, comes of Swedish-Norwegian stock and is the musical daughter of a Methodist minister, obliged to give lessons and play and sing at the prayer meetings and revivals. Thea's closest friends are a handful of adult men who appreciate her qualities and are themselves restless or unhappy in Moonstone. Thea's most important childhood friend, the town physician, Dr. Howard Archie, was modeled on Dr. G. E. McKeeby, with whom Cather assisted as a teenager on prairie housecalls.

When Thea leaves home to study music in Chicago, she manages to remain oblivious to the city itself, with its bustling crowds, brilliant shops, and obnoxious loitering men. What grips her imagination is a Jules Breton painting in the Art Institute called "The Song of the Lark," depicting a peasant girl standing in a field, arrested by the song of a meadowlark. The image reinforces an even more important revelation in the concert hall, when Dvorák's New World Symphony reveals to Thea a link between the landscape in her memory and the musician she wants to become. From that moment she understands what she wants.

Thea's first teacher in Chicago, a sensitive, one-eyed Hungarian violinist named Harsanyi, discovers her voice, and steers her away from piano to the voice teacher Madison Bowers. But Thea's demands and ambition are beyond Bowers' reach or interest, and his cynicism and slovenly standards make her depressed and surly. She finds both a champion and a romantic interest in the musical dilettante Fred Ottenburg. Thea's full artistic awakening does not take place in the cold gray canyons of Chicago, where she labors at her music lessons, but in a brilliant desert canyon where Fred sends her to rest and recuperate. There she comes upon an isolated gorge sheltering silent prehistoric ruins and spends weeks lying alone on the sunbaked rock ledges and in the shade of ancient pueblo rooms. Enfolded in the shelter of the canyon she sheds restrictive clothing and mental debris, bathes naked in the stream at its base, naps under an Indian blanket, and opens every pore until her body becomes completely receptive, a vehicle of sensation. Thus poised, she suddenly recognizes the spiritual connection between the shards of ancient Indian pottery she finds in the stream.

From here on, Thea views her vessel, her body, as part of the sacred order of things. The mature Thea Kronborg we meet in the novel's last section is ten years older than the young woman who came of age in Panther Canyon. She has returned from study and successful performances in Germany, and is now a reigning soprano at the Metropolitan Opera.

The diva Thea Kronborg, whose first name means gift of God and surname means crown fortress, is presented as a woman both blessed and isolated by her divine gift. Her professional crown is won by the resolute defense of her person as the vehicle through which that gift can be perfected and returned. Her family, mentors, and suitors serve Thea the woman only as they serve Thea the artist. She is completely obsessed with the intellectual and physical rewards of her craft. Her regimen is grueling, and her exacting standards make her arrogant and lonely. She is sometimes frightened, and more than once the idea of marrying and being taken care of tempts her. She grieves at the conflict between personal and professional needs, particularly when choosing an important European debut over a journey home to see her dying mother. But art always comes first. It takes every ounce of strength, leaving her drained, aged, and often unfit for company. Her work requires the kind of perfect dedication that Nietzsche called chastity, and its goal is a paradox, the kind of sensuous spirituality which is also the goal of the mystic. In this novel of an artist's single-minded pursuit of beauty, Cather made one of her most eloquent statements about the artistic vocation. Although the claims of personal attachments are made persuasively at times in The Song of the Lark, it is clear that for Cather the serious artist must renounce these claims and in an environment of solitude labor to fulfill the dreams of creation.

Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945) Ellen Glasgow was born in 1873. As a child she watched her gentle mother, a lady of the Virginia aristocracy, declined to nervous invalidism after bearing ten children. As a young woman Ellen Glasgow refused to attend church with her father, an act of intellectual rebellion. Without much formal schooling she read, on her own, advanced thinkers of the time and was particularly influenced by Social Darwinism, a philosophy which hardly consoled her.

In Virginia (1913), best of the earlier novels, the protagonist is a woman, though not a rebel. Blind Mrs. Blake in The Deliverance (1904) is protected by her family from knowing the Civil War is lost and the slaves freed. In Woman Within (1954), an autobiography written for posthumous publication, Glasgow tells of a long, secret affair with a married man she had met in New York. The novel of great personal importance to the author was Barren Ground (1925), in which she felt she had reversed the traditional seduction plot. She thought writing Barren Ground, a “tragedy,” freed her for the comedies of manners The Stooped to Folly (1929), and The Sheltered Life (1932). These late works are the most artful criticism of romantic illusion in all her long career. Ellen Glasgow died in her sleep of a heart attack in 1945.

Major WorksAbout The Battle-Ground:

The Battle-Ground, Ellen Glasgow's fourth novel, was her first bestseller, with more than 21,000 copies sold in just two weeks. The novel committed her to a project almost unparalleled in American literary history: a novelistic meditation on the South from the decade before the Confederacy to the middle of the 20th century. The Battle-Ground speaks of a South before and during the Civil War in its struggles to become part of a nation still in the making.

The overthrow of the aristocratic tradition, the transfer of hereditary power to a rural underclass, the continued disenfranchisement of African Americans, and the evolving status of women--these topics, which came to bind the more than a dozen volumes of Glasgow's self-styled social history, initially coalesced in The Battle-Ground.

The Battle-Ground conspicuously departs from the tradition of Southern romances popularized by Thomas Nelson Page, and contemporary reviewers praised the book for its historical accuracy. Glasgow, an ardent Anglophile, bragged that military officers in Great Britain studied its descriptions of battle.

But Glasgow never sensationalizes the Civil War, whose bloodiest scenes she flanks with domestic officers, the sharing of rations, the warmth of camp, and reminders of home. Her vision of the war centers less on its corruption or barbarity than on its occasions for small decencies and their power of humanization. Glasgow cannot separate the war from its greater social implications--it is a place, as her title suggests, that tests the soul of a nation as well as individual men and women. The importance of The Battle-Ground in Southern literary history cannot be overemphasized, for Glasgow's re-imagining of the Civil War had a profound impact on the next generation of Southern writers, including Allen Tate, Stark Young, and Margaret Mitchell.

About Virginia:

Virginia, the first of Ellen Glasgow’s great tragicomedies was thus significantly a story of innocence. She wrote about, pure womanhood raised in pure ignorance, married off for the purest of motives, came to pure disaster. In this book it deeply describes the lifestyle of the women and men in this era and how the women were strong and powerful while the men seemed like faded characters non existence in this world.The earlier stories about the state of Virginia were written at a time when novels

in dialect were very popular. However, these books were written at a time when all American novels ended happily as a polite matter of course. Ellen Glasgow’s Virginia truly shows and expresses the lifestyle of that time and how strong the female characters were and how they handled life.

Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941)Born in Camden, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson spent his first two decad

es in small towns of northern Ohio, especially Clyde, which became the setting for Winesburg, Ohio (1919), his best-known work. He dedicated Winesburg to his mother. In depicting the inhabitants of the small Midwestern town at the turn of the century, Anderson depicts the struggles of all of us, especially when we are on the threshold of adulthood.

When his mother died in 1895, Anderson left Clyde, and after a stint in the Army during the Spanish-American War, embarked on a career in advertising in Chicago in 1900. In 1907 he left advertising to found a roof-paint business in Elyria, Ohio. After a period of recuperation and the liquidation of his debt-ridden business, he returned to Chicago in 1913. When Anderson returned to Chicago, he became acquainted with the writers, journalists, and critics of the Chicago Renaissance of the 1910s.

Anderson made his greatest contribution to American literature in the genre of the short story. With the publication of Winesburg in 1919, the American reading public was introduced to a volume of stories innovative in two important ways. First, the individual stories break with the tradition of tightly plotted, linear stories in order to tell and retell a significant moment until its meaning is revealed. Second, Winesburg is not a collection of isolated stories but is a story cycle, a grouping of stories which, in Anderson’s own words, belong together.

Major WorksAbout Winesburg, Ohio:

 Sherwood Anderson began writing the short stories, relatively in order, during the late fall of 1915. The majority was finished by the middle of 1916. Many of the tales were based on a life Anderson had witnessed in Clyde, Ohio, the town where he spent most of his childhood and adolescent years. The hero's mother, Elizabeth Willard, dies at the same age as Anderson's mother did.

The book however was written while Anderson was in Chicago, three to four years after his mid-life crisis of 1912. Winesburg, Ohio has since been acclaimed a timeless classic with generational and universal themes, illustrating that even as Anderson wrote his first two novels he was also creating a quality text.

Although Anderson was writing about Ohio small town life in Winesburg, Ohio, he was also commenting on urban America and the isolation of modern society the post-World War I generation was disillusioned by and would discuss in detail following Anderson's great work. Thus the stories intermingle small town and urban America in a truly universal way.

The generation following Anderson would thus pick up on not only his pioneering sense of story but Stein's pioneering sense of language, and its deterioration of meaning. One can easily see this move away from conventional structure and voice in the works of Anderson, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, E.E. Cummings, and the Dadaists. Anderson has been noted as the only storyteller of his generation to have a great effect on the style and themes of the following generation. The structure Anderson employs in Winesburg, Ohio was also borrowed from Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology which presented a series of character sketches in elegy form. Other works of literature which likely influenced Anderson's text are Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches, the works of Hawthorne which also portrayed the grotesque, and E.W. Howe's The Story of a Country Town.

Furthermore, Anderson was a writer that depended overwhelmingly on his inner emotions. Winesburg, Ohio came about in an illuminated moment, much like the episodes Anderson writes about in the text.

Major Themes：Life in death: Most of the figures share the similar history of a failed passion in life, of some kind or another. Many are lonely introverts who struggle with a burning fire which still smolders inside of them. The moments described by the short stories are usually the moments when the passion tries to resurface but no longer has the strength. The stories are brief glimpses of people failing. The pastoral: The narrator often employs a theme of mock sentimentality toward the old, colloquial farmland that Winesburg represents as small town. More largely, it provides a background for examining the break down of the archetypal patterns of human existence: sacrifice, initiation, and rebirth. Failure of absolute truth: Anderson believed that one should keep separate the worlds of realism and fantasy. He did not believe that an author could not write about both or about the collision of these worlds but he feared that authors would become stuck on realism or naturalism and forget about the importance of dreams, idealism, surrealism, and fantasy. Each of his figures grasped at least one truth as absolute and made it their mantra. The decision to base all of one's existence on an absolute truth transformed the figure into a grotesque and the truth into a lie. Winesburg as a microcosm of the universal: The figures of Winesburg were forced to handle issues and events which people universally underwent. Many common threads between man and between the self in relation to the world exist which the grotesque figures deal with in a manner to which any reader could relate. Winesburg then becomes Any Town, USA and the characters symbolize flaws and struggles in the universal human experience. Winesburg functions synecdochally for the typical human community.

Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)Lewis was born in Sauk Centre, in the heart of Minnesota. His mother died when he was six years old. His father remarried a year later. Lewis' stepmother read to him often and he was privy to the hundreds of volumes of his father’s medical books. In 1902 Lewis entered the Oberlin Academy in Ohio, and shortly thereafter moved to Yale University and started writing for the Yale Literary Magazine. During summer vacation one year Lewis traveled to England. It was during this time, that Lewis tried his hand at freelance writing. In 1908 he received his Masters of Arts and began working for publishing houses and magazines in Iowa, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Carmel and New York City.

Lewis's first published book Hike and the Aeroplane was published in 1912. In 1914 Lewis married Grace Livingston Hegger. After his second novel was published, Lewis committed himself exclusively to writing. Lewis gained fame with his novel Main Street, which was published in 1920. Lewis' next novel was Babbitt (1922). After Babbitt came Arrowsmith (1925).Arrowsmith received a Pulitzer Prize, but Lewis declined it. Elmer Gantry (1927) attacked two-faced ministers. Dodsworth (1929) and Ann Vickers (1933) dealt with corruption within the realms of social services. Lewis’s last major work was It can’t Happen Here (1935). Kingsblood Royal (1947) dealt with race relations.

Major WorksAbout Main Street:

Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, published in 1920, was not expected to be a commercial success. Lewis felt it would sell 10,000 copies, and his publisher predicted a run of 20,000 would be adequate. In the first six months of 1921, it sold 180,000 copies.

The novel is set in Gopher Prairie, roughly based on Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis’s hometown. Lewis gained fame with Main Street, a study of idealism and reality in a narrow-minded small-town. The protagonist, Carol Kennicott, is an emancipated woman, who is in conflict with the conformity of Gopher Prairie - gopher is a large rodent living in the western states of the U.S. Before marrying Dr Will Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, Carol has studied library science in Chicago and worked in St. Paul Minnesota. The town is far from the romantic picture of open and democratic American community. Carol joins the clubs, the Library Board to encourage reading, and learns to play bridge, but she soon finds out that unions and profit sharing are dangerous subjects in conversation. After flirting with a lawyer she meets a young Swedish sailor, who leaves the town, before they start to do something else than talk and walk together. She leaves her family, and moves to Washington, DC. Erik finds his way to Hollywood, and Carol returns to Gopher Prairie, but without feeling defeated.

A Brief Analysis:

As all of us know, Sinclair Lewis was the great liberal critic of small town, bourgeois Middle America.  His novels demonstrated the small-minded conformity of the conservative folk of the MidWest, content to wallow in smug self-righteous ignorance.   This at least is the common understanding of Lewis.  But this book is also to be somewhat more nuanced.  The satire extends not just to the town folk of Gopher Prairie, but to the city folk of Washington too.  Thus, when Carol Kennicott decides to return home, she shall not be regarded as necessarily a surrender.  She notes several times that noone in Washington cares about her, the way the townspeople back in Minnesota did.

Instead of flatly condemning small town America, Lewis seems to have had a more limited goal in mind. When Carol is planning to return, a leader of the suffragettes tells her that she needs not heroically assault Gopher Prairie and the attitudes she finds there. Dangerous it may be, but it is also pretty conservative, shockingly so for a Socialist.  What is spelled out there is a program that would allow for gradual reform of egregious wrongs, without tossing out what is good.  It is the exact opposite of what actually occurred over the next 70 years of New Deal hegemony.  This excellent message is obscured somewhat because the section that takes place in the city is pretty brief, while the town life portion goes on interminably.  But it does redeem the book, which just be a hysterical screed.  It's too bad that there's not more focus on this aspect of the novel.

About Babbitt

Babbitt does not develop plot in the traditional way. The author concentrates his Efforts on a detailed analysis of American middle-class life and on depicting the rebellion, retreat and resignation of the protagonist George F. Babbitt, a real-estate salesman. The novel consists of thirty-four chapters, but the first seven chapters deal with Babbitt’s everyday life and from Chapter Eight to Chapter Eighteen various aspects of social contact among businessmen are treated.

The image of the protagonist is so successfully created that a word “Bibbittry,” meaning smug acceptance of the ethical and social standards of ordinary business and middle-class respectability, is added to the English vocabulary. Lewis is a master in portraying the middle-class way of life, their habits, forms of speech, and gestures. But the reader also see in the novel another Babbitt, a rebel violating the social, political and sexual taboos. It is Babbitt’s tragedy that he can never be anything but Babbitt. His escape from conformity with his class, his yielding to his temptations and his efforts to express his own individuality all end in failure.

H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)Henry Louis Mencken was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He was a reporter or editor for several Baltimore papers, among them Baltimore Morning Herald. He later joined the staff of the Baltimore Sun, for which he worked throughout most of his life. From 1916 to 1918 he was a war correspondent in Germany and in Russia. In 1903 Mencken published a collection of poems, but he considered George Bernard Shaw: His Plays (1905) his first real book.

During World War I he was pro-German, and his A Book of Prefaces (1917) was attacked by Stuart Sherman and others. From 1914 to 1923 Mencken co-edited with drama critic George Jean Nathan (1882-1958) the Smart Set. With Nathan he co-founded Parisienne, Saucy Stories, and Black Mask pulp magazines in the late 1910s, and co-founded and edited American Mercury (1923-33). In 1919 he published The American Language, a guide to American expressions and idioms.

Mencken was one of the most influential American critics in the 1920s. Mencken contributed to Chicago Tribune (1924-28), New York American (1934-35), and the Nation (1931-32). Mencken's autobiographical trilogy started with Happy Days (1940), and was followed by Newspaper Days (1941), and Heathen Days (1943). Last volume, My Life as Author and Editor, appeared posthumously in 1993. Mencken suffered in 1949 a stroke which impaired his speech. Mencken died of heart failure on January 29, 1956 in Baltimore, in the row house on Hollins Street where he had lived most of his life.

Major WorksAbout The American Language:

The American Language was published in 1919 and Mencken attempted to bring together examples of American expressions and idioms. The book grew with each reissue through the years, and in 1945 and 1948 he published substantial supplements. By the time of his death, Mencken was perhaps the leading authority on the language of his country.

There seems, even at this late date, some remote possibility that the revival of conservative thought in America may actually suffice to rescue the original reputation of H.L. Mencken, as a funny and profound critic of democracy, and save him from being remembered as only a cranky (perhaps even racist and anti-Semitic) columnist and the author of a decent early book on linguistics.  This is not to diminish in any way the enduring value of The American Language; it remains eminently readable and retains its significance as an important defense of the distinctiveness and even the superiority of American English to British English.  At the time he wrote, Mr. Mencken's assertion may have seemed audacious, but now no one would argue with his conclusion.

When two-thirds of the people who use a certain language decide to call it a freight train instead of a goods train, they are right; then the first is correct usage and the second a dialect. It is indisputably the case today that American is the dominant version of English across the globe.  So he earns plaudit for having the foresight to see this coming, and the book also remains an interesting example of the contradictions that made up Mencken's character.  For while it is certainly true that no domestic writer was ever a more ferocious critic of both the intellectual elite and the great unwashed masses of America, who he called the booboisie, it is also the case that this book evinces an extraordinary, even sentimental, desire to see American culture taken seriously on the world stage.  Mencken could do worse than stake his future on just the one book, but we would do well to remember him much more.

Like Nietzsche, Mencken seems to have been hostile to all forms of organized or systemic belief, which in the teens and 1920s pitted him against America's prevailing puritanism and other religious fundamentalisms, but would also find him opposing liberalism, socialism, and the like.  Of course, we can all see now that America never needed a Mencken more than during the New Deal, but sadly for him, and more sadly for his fellow citizens, the combination of a needy and greedy populace with an intellectual elite eager to expose the scope of government was unwilling to listen any longer to those who sought to point out the error of their ways.  Albert Jay Nock nicely captures the status to which such critics were reduced by these events in the title of his autobiography: Memoirs of a Superfluous Man.   When the mighty and the lowly make common cause, then truly is a conservative voice superfluous. Time and the tide of history have vindicated men like Nock and Mencken, and so we should look not merely to the works that remained popular throughout the Era of Big Government, but to those writings that were dismissed in their time.