The Great Depression

From the very beginning Fitzgerald had a feeling that the 1920s would end badly, both for himself, and for America, so ' all the stories that came into my head had a touch of disaster in them. ' And he was right.

Not everyone benefited from the economic prosperity of the 1920s. While big business, supported by the government flourished, lay workers witnessed a decrease in their wages. Little was done to help the American farmer, and their poverty led to reduction in domestic demand. America was producing more than could consume. Financial speculation flourished and pushed the value of investment to artificially high levels. In 1929 prices started to decline, and resulted in a panic, in which America lost 50 billion. The crisis started the Great Depression that lasted for 10 years.

Thousands of people lost all their savings overnight, enterprises were closed, millions of workers lost their jobs, farmers lost their land. 13 million were unemployed. The happy, confident world of America of the Roaring Twenties was destroyed. America was entering a new period of social anger and self-criticism.

In the early 1930s, the first reaction to the Great Depression was literature of social protest. It was a powerful proletarian literature movement. Proletarian literature consciously aimed at stimulating protest – and, in some cases, revolution – by the working class. The leading magazine of the era was the pro-Communist Partisan Review. During that period many writers turned away from experimenting and modernism and turned back to a new kind of social realism and naturalism. Their writing showed the struggles and the tragedies of ordinary people, as well as their strength, energy and hopefulness. The writing itself is strong, energetic and quite easy to read and gives a very clear picture of the times. The leading writers of the period were John Dos Passos, Thomas Wolf, and John Steinbeck.

Writing by John Dos Passos (1896-1970)is closely associated with the depression years. His anger toward the system that permitted wholesale misery fired several novels openly critical of the US economic system. His writing is not considered a flattering picture of American life; but the portrait is vivid and remarkable for the unique way in which the story is told.

John Roderigo Dos Passos was born in Chicago and entered Harvard University in 1912 with the vague intention of becoming an architect. When the United States entered the war, Dos Passos enlisted in the Medical Corps and drove an ambulance. After the war he traveled widely, writing for newspapers and magazines. His wartime experience gave Dos Passos the inspiration and subject matter for his first novel, One Man's Initiation (1917), the first American novel about the First World War. In 1921, he published another anti-war novel, Three Soldiers, which was well received by both critics and the public.

Like all writers of the Lost Generation, Dos Passos saw the modern post-war world as ugly and dirty, and believed that only art and the invention of new artistic styles could save it. He tried to put to life his beliefs in Manhattan Transfer (1925), which became a turning point in his writing career. The novel describes the daily lives of a large number of New Yorkers. In this novel Dos Passos used several innovations in the writing technique. One device is the telling of many separate stories simultaneously in a sort of impressionistic effort to capture the pace and atmosphere of big-city life. Also he mixed the text with popular songs, lines from advertisements, newspaper headlines and phrases, being influenced by the movie technique of montage. And although the book has many characters, who often talk in the special poetic style like James Joyce’s, it aims at describing the chief one – New York itself with the aim to show the purposelessness of its history.

During his writing career, Dos Passos became increasingly interested in social and political issues and more and more concerned with the problems of poor people. For a time he supported leftist causes, but later, however, he became disillusioned with Communism as a method for social reform. His political views are presented in his most important works -- The 42nd Parallel (1930), Nineteen Nineteen (1932), and The Big Money (1936), which make up the trilogy U.S.A. written about the individual in history. The first volume is about the beginning of the 20^th century, the second is more angry, describing the war as the pilot of big interests. The third volume describes the post-war America that went mad with greed. In these novels Dos Passos used some of the literary devices he had introduced in Manhattan Transfer. The stories are intermingled with sketches of prominent people who were living during the period covered, newspaper headlines and bits from popular songs to recreate the mood of the time.

All books by Dos Passos are quite easy to read, except for the fact that there are very many characters in them, because Dos Passos describes not the destiny of an individual, but the destiny of a whole era.

A much more individual perception of the hard times was given by Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), whose novels have moved many readers. A physical giant of colossal appetites, Wolfe wrote novels proportionately huge, trying to speak for the whole America. He brought a voice of hope to the despair of the thirties and said: ‘ I believe that we are lost here in America, but I believe that we shall be found. ’

As optimistic as Walt Whitman, nevertheless, Thomas Wolfe does not celebrate America like this poet. His works are mainly autobiographical and tell of a young man finding his place in the world and so are full of the passion, ecstasy, anger, and frustration of youth. The first to be written, Look Homeward, Angel (1929), is in many ways the best; but almost equally powerful is the last, You Can't Go Home Again (1940).

In his first novel Wolfe starts by stating that the novel represents his vision of his life till his 20^th year. The young hero, Eugene Gant, grows up in a cultureless world of a southern town. He is a romantic artist filled with a hunger to know all and to feel all, whether pleasure or pain and so he sets up on a trip for ' the deeper waters of experience. ' Wolfe’s next novel, Of Time and the River (1935), is subtitled A Legend of a Man's Hunger in His Youth and continues the story of Gant. All novels by Wolf make one story of a great journey of exploration, the aim of which is to reach ' the city of myself, the continent of my soul '. He strove to achieve it while using a uniquely recognizable style of his personal invention – long sentences with poetic repetitions.

But the real champion of a people caught in hard times was John Steinbeck (1902-1968), winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature. John Ernst Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California. He took classes at Stanford University for several years but left without a degree. At first, after he decided to become a writer, he had to work as a laborer to support himself while he wrote. Steinbeck's first novel was published in 1929, but it was not until the publication of Tortilla Flat in 1935 that he attained critical and popular acclaim. Steinbeck followed his first success with In Dubious Battle (1936) and Of Mice and Men (1937).

Steinbeck fully experienced the Great Depression and he wanted to get it down on paper: to record the way people talked, thought and felt. In the 1930s his characters were naturalistic in the classic meaning of the word. They are driven by forces in themselves and in the society: fear, hunger, sex, the disasters of nature, and the evils of capitalism. In all his works he combines naturalistic way of looking at things with a deep sympathy for people. He searches for the elements in human nature that are the same for all people and usually finds them in a family, a group or a nation, rather than in an individual. Like Dos Passos and Wolfe, he tried to portray large pictures of a national spirit, for which the great movement westwards is very important.

John Steinbeck is best remembered for his Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939). It is a story of a family of Oklahoma farm workers, the Joads, who are driven from their drought-stricken land and make a heroic journey westward, migrating from Oklahoma to California. Steinbeck is not speaking about an individual family, but rather portrays a great national tragedy though its experiences. The Joads must leave Oklahoma because of a great dust bowl disaster: terrible winds have destroyed their land and so they go west into California to work as fruit pickers. There they experience hatred of the large Californian landowners and have to fight for their life every hour. The last scene of the book is really shocking: a heroine, whose baby dies, feeds her breast milk to a dying old man to support him. The novel describes the hopelessness of the Great Depression era and is a memorable and moving tale. Steinbeck's description of the social injustice shocked the nation, and in time laws were passed to help such people. But the literary value of the book is based upon the description of the daily heroism of ordinary people. Slowly they learn to work together as a group and help each other. Now their family is anybody, not just relatives.

Steinbeck's proletarian themes are expressed through his portrayal of the inarticulate, dispossessed laborers who populate his American landscape. Some of his later works include Cannery Row (1945), The Pearl (1947), East of Eden (1952), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), and Travels with Charley (1962). He also wrote several motion-picture scripts, including adaptations of two of his shorter works, The Pearl and The Red Pony. Both his greatest novels Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath were made into motion pictures.

Poetry

American literature between the world wars saw another birth of poetry, which, as well as prose, began experimenting. Poets tried to incorporate and reflect the new philosophical and psychological interpretations of reality, and the new concepts of time and matter.

One of the leading poets of the time, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) had her own war with civilization. Her enemy was the trite civilization of the 19^th century, so she moved to modernist Paris and became the leader of American writers of the Lost Generation there. One of the main objectives of Stein was to show the conscious mind in writing. While attempting this, she, in a way, changed the English language, giving independent existence to each word, making it exist anew in the ‘now’. Coming one after another, the words in her poems create something she called ' continuous present. ' To understand, for instance, her famous poem about a rose, think of a strip of movie film, that has a series of frames, each frame showing an object in a separate moment. Stein does the same with words. While reading her poem, we are looking at it moment-by-moment.

Gertrude Stein's experiments with the sounds and speech patterns of the American language, developed earlier in Paris, influenced many other poets and writers.

Unlike Stein, T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)was a traditionalist in a way who rejected the ideas of Stein's 'past-less' writing. He valued tradition, which is necessary to create new poetry and believed that if you do not understand the past, you do not know what is new. Another important principle of his philosophy of writing was impersonalism. He believed that it is important to look carefully at the poetry, not at the poet. The Middle West and New England both appear in the poetry of this author, who was born and educated in the United States and later became a British subject. Nonetheless, the sights and memories of his earlier years make up the substance of Eliot’s best poetry, with a few exceptions.

Although Eliot published few poems, they have had a tremendous influence on modern poetic technique. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915) was the first poem of Eliot's to be widely read. It describes the thoughts of a timid, well-educated man on his way to an elegant party. Prufrock stands for the fearful people of the world, who, though outwardly prosperous, are inwardly defeated.

Eliot's second important poem was The Waste Land (1922) which at first puzzled critics with its technique of placing splintered fragments of thought against one another in striking combinations. Here modern life is portrayed as a land of desert and rocks, lacking water, upon which life depends. The rich, heroic stories of the past are referred to repeatedly, as a contrast to the sterile, empty present. The poem is an immediate reflection of the disillusionment that many artists felt after World War I, when life seemed meaningless and trivial. Eliot's later poetry, as complicated in technique as The Waste Land, is more affirmative than disillusioned, e.g. Four Quartets (1943) is a reasoned discussion of the foundations of the Christian faith.

The influence of Eliot's ideas and his technique has been very great. Other modern poets have followed his lead, including the most prominent, Ezra Pound (1885-1972). Though Eliot was a greater poet, they both learnt from each other. For instance, Ezra Pound's long poem Mauberly (1920) might have inspired the famous Eliot's The Waste Land (1922). Both poems describe the spiritual emptiness of the world after the First World War. The money-hungry post-war society causes the symbolic death of Maulberley. Pound describes the anger of the young soldier, who:

walked eye-deep in hell

believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving

came home,. home to a lie,

home to many deceits…

Similarly, the characters in the Waste Land are spiritually dead.

… I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Pound himself was a participant of many literary movements. The main idea of his theory was that Literature is language charged with meaning. He had been leader of the imagist school of poetry and believed that good poetry was based on images rather than ideas. His last poem, one of his collection of Cantos, gives two images – the past is a statue, the present is a beerbottle.

Pound's imaginism has especially influenced the work of the doctor-poet Willaim Carlos Williams (1883-1963). His images are never symbols of some larger idea and his words mean exactly what they say. Eliot's concept of the impersonality of the poet is also appreciated in the works by Williams, who tries to become as invisible as possible.

Nevertheless,the experimentalbravery of imaginism was beaten by one poet, e.e. Cummings (1894-1962), who was the most joyful person of the Lost Generation. He satirized modern pettiness and emptiness, as Eliot had done, but also wrote lyrics of tenderness and beauty and his main topics are love and courage. He hated business, politics, the Church and disliked the coldness of science. In his poems he used warm human images.

The poet’s technique is arresting, because his verse usually omits punctuation marks and capitalization (he signed his name "e e cummings"). His poems show clear influence of Stein and cubist painters. e.e. cummings makes every part of a poem express his own individuality.

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