Modern American Drama

Thus far no mention has been made of the drama. The reason is that although the theater was active during the 19th century, the American plays were mostly sensational melodrama and hence of small literary importance. The case is different with drama of the 20th century, however. As the country has matured culturally, audiences have encouraged serious playwrights to write plays which, if not so great as those of Sophocles and Shakespeare, are interesting and important as literature.

The first step in creating a serious drama was to abandon the improbable situations of melodrama and to adopt the realistic approach of the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen. Street Scene (1929) by Elmer Rice (1892-1967), and Dead End (1935), by Sidney Kingsley (1906-1995), show life as it is lived, using realistic scenery and authentic dialogue.

Realism on stage was an improvement over melodrama, but too frequently it was unable to get beneath the surfaces of life. For this reason dramatists experimented with new techniques, including the technique of expressionism, in which realism is clearly abandoned in favor of fantasy and other representational devices in an effort to show meanings beneath appearances. One of such experimental plays was Our Town (1938), by Thornton Wilder (1897-1975). The author intended no scenery to be used, and actors were planted in the audience. With such unconventional methods the playwright presented a sympathetic picture of life in a small American town.

Another technical experiment in the modern theater was drama in verse. Sophocles and Shakespeare used verse in their plays, and some modern dramatists have sought to follow their example in an effort to achieve emotional intensity, e.g. T.S. Eliot in Murder in the Cathedral (1935), a dramatization of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury written in blank verse. The experiment in verse drama was interesting but has had no lasting influence on dramatic construction in the modern theater.

It is generally agreed that the leading American dramatist of the period was Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (1888-1953), another bold experimenter in dramatic technique. O'Neill was born in New York City into a family of one of America's most popular actors. Between the national tours the family spent time in their New London country home, which provided the setting for two of O'Neill's greatest plays -- Ah, Wilderness! (1933) and Long Day's Journey into Night (written from 1939 to 1941 and first performed in 1956). There O'Neill discovered his mother's addiction to morphine and rebelled against his father's theatrical conservatism and Roman Catholic upbringing. By 1912, O'Neill had worked as a gold prospector in Honduras and a seaman and had become a frequenter of cheap saloons and flophouses in New York City. That year, he returned to New London, ill with tuberculosis.

O'Neill's reading while recovering at a sanitarium inspired him to become a playwright. In 1914, he studied drama at Harvard University and in 1916 O'Neill joined the Provincetown Players, an experimental theater group on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. In July, the group presented Bound East for Cardiff, the first staging of an O'Neill play.

O’Neill wrote until the mid-1940's, when a muscular disease resembling Parkinson disease prevented further work. Despite general acclaim that he won for his plays, he died largely forgotten. But in 1956, a revival of The Iceman Cometh (written in 1939) and the premiere of Long Day's Journey into Night aroused a renewed interest in his plays.

O'Neill's career consisted of two periods of realism divided by a middle period of experimentation. He first wrote one-act plays that utilized his youthful experiences, especially at sea. The best of these plays include four realistic works that trace the changing relationships among seamen of the S.S. Glencairn amid the tensions of World War I (1914-1918).

In the early 1920's, O'Neill rejected realism and determined to capture on stage the "force behind" human life. He was influenced by the ideas of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud, the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, and the Swedish playwright August Strindberg. In The Emperor Jones (1920), an expressionistic play, O'Neill traced the personal and racial past of a black porter who becomes a Caribbean dictator. The Hairy Ape (1922) blends realistic and expressionistic elements in the story of an alienated man's attempts to belong in modern society. In both plays all attention is concentrated on the central character, the other characters being unimportant. Desire Under the Elms (1924) transplants the Greek myth of Phaedra and Hippolytus and elements of other myths to a New England farm. In The Great God Brown (1926) the actors use masks that express or hide their inner natures. In the nine-act Strange Interlude (1928) the characters reveal their true opinions by uttering two kinds of remarks: one to the other characters, the other to the audience. O'Neill's most ambitious work of the period was Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), a trilogy that presents in American terms ‘Aeschylus' drama of Agamemnon's return from the Trojan War. It shifts the Greek tragic trilogy the Oresteia to America immediately after the Civil War (1861-1865). The gods and Furies of Greek mythology are replaced by the workings of the subconscious mind. It is a somber work, as are most of O'Neill's plays.

O'Neill was versatile enough, however, to achieve many different kinds of dramatic success. His final period was his best as he returned to realism and the more open acknowledgment of a lifelong impulse to write autobiographical plays. Ah, Wilderness! (1933), a study of adolescence, is an amusing and refreshing folk comedy of New England life. The Iceman Cometh immortalizes the unrealistic "pipe dreams" of the friends from the flophouses and Greenwich Village. The play's characters shield themselves from the bitter truth of failure through their mutually supportive illusions. A Touch of the Poet, written from 1935 to 1942 and first staged in 1957, is the only complete drama of a planned 11-play cycle. O'Neill intended the cycle to trace the life of an Irish American family and the spiritual decline of America from the early 1800s. In his greatest play, Long Day's Journey into Night, the Tyrone family is clearly based on O'Neill's own family in 1912. A Moon for the Misbegotten (written from 1941 to 1943 and first performed in 1957) is a sequel that portrays the last days of O'Neill's alcoholic brother, Jamie.

In quantity, variety, profundity, and technical boldness, O'Neill is clearly the leading figure in modern American drama. His plays show his fascination with philosophy and religion and his intense self-examination. By incorporating experimental techniques of European theater into his plays, O'Neill is credited with raising the previously narrow and insubstantial American drama into an art form that gained worldwide respect. Four of his plays won Pulitzer Prizes -- Beyond the Horizon in 1920; Anna Christie in 1922; Strange Interlude in 1928; and Long Day's Journey into Night in 1957, after his death, and in 1936, he received the Nobel Prize for literature.

The most important playwrights since O'Neill were Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) and Arthur Miller (born 1915). Williams portrayed a decadent South with tarnished or frustrated belles in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). The Glass Menagerie (1944) also portrays faded grandeur, but more tenderly. Death of a Salesman (1949), written by Miller, reveals the aloneness of an ordinary, undistinguished man. Undeniably poignant, the play approaches true tragedy. The Crucible (1953), based on the witch persecutions in colonial New England, reminds modern audiences that fear of the unknown, mass hysteria, and perversions of justice infect life in modern times just as much as they did in the 17th century.

Prose

Despite the fact that many genius writers and poets contributed to American literature during the period, it is made memorable and truly modern mainly by the works of two authors, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, the two greatest American novelists of recent times, who provided a connection between this period and the period after the Second World War.

Hemingway, Ernest (1899-1961), one of the most famous and influential American writers of the 20^th century, was born in Oak Park, Illinois. After graduating from high school, he worked briefly as a reporter for the Kansas City Star. In 1918, during World War I, he served as a Red Cross volunteer in Italy, driving an ambulance and working at a canteen. After working for the Red Cross for six weeks, he was seriously wounded. Hemingway's wartime experiences help suggest why his writing emphasizes physical and psychological violence and the need for courage.

In 1921, Hemingway went to Paris, where he met a number of American authors. He became the principal spokesman for a group of disillusioned younger writers sometimes called the "lost generation." Hemingway's first published work, Three Stories and Ten Poems, appeared in 1923. It was followed by In Our Time (1924), a collection of short stories partly based on his boyhood experiences in northern Michigan. Hemingway's most famous novels are two of his early works, The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929). The Sun Also Rises portrays a group of Americans who, like the members of the "lost generation," were disillusioned by the war. A Farewell to Arms, set in Italy in World War I, is a tragic love story.

Hemingway returned to the United States in 1927. Two collections of his short stories were published during the 1930's. They contain some of his best writing, including A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro. He also wrote some nonfiction. Death in the Afternoon (1932) deals with bullfighting, which fascinated him. In Green Hills of Africa (1935), Hemingway described his experiences on an African safari.

In 1936, Hemingway went to Spain and covered the Spanish Civil War as a war correspondent. He used the war as the setting of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). This novel, about an idealistic American fighting the fascist forces in Spain, is one of Hemingway's finest books.

By the 1940's, Hemingway had become an international celebrity. He was famous for his colorful life style and his extreme concern with presenting a tough, masculine image. Hemingway's first published work after 1940 was Across the River and Into the Trees (1950). This novel reflects a growing bitterness toward life. It is largely regarded as inferior because of its sentimentality. In The Old Man and the Sea (1952), he revived his theme of a strong man courageously accepting fate. The hero, an old fisherman, catches a giant marlin after a long and brutal struggle – only to have the fish eaten by sharks.

Hemingway suffered physical and mental illnesses during the 1950's. He committed suicide in 1961. A Moveable Feast was published in 1964. It is an autobiographical book based on notebooks he kept in Paris in the 1920's. Two novels were also published after his death – Islands in the Stream (1970) and the unfinished The Garden of Eden (1986).

Hemingway developed a plain, forceful prose style characterized by simple sentences and few adjectives or adverbs. He wrote crisp, accurate dialogue and exact descriptions of places and things. His style has been widely imitated. Hemingway also created a type of male character, sometimes called the Hemingway hero, who faces violence and destruction with courage. The trait of "grace under pressure" -- that is, what appears to be unemotional behavior even in dangerous situations -- is part of what became known as the Hemingway code. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Old Man and the Sea (1952) and received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.

Faulkner, William (1897-1962),ranking among the leading authors in American literature, was born in New Albany, Mississippi and, apart from occasional work in Hollywood as a motion-picture scriptwriter, spent most of his life in Oxford, a Mississippi town.

The traditions and history of the South were a favorite Faulkner theme. He gained fame for his novels about the fictional "Yoknapatawpha County" and its county seat of Jefferson. Faulkner patterned the county after the area around his hometown, Oxford, Miss. He explored the county's geography, history, economy, and social and moral life. Sartoris (1929) and The Unvanquished (1938) tell the story of several generations of the southern Sartoris family. The Reivers (1962) is a humorous story of a young boy's adventures during a trip from Mississippi to Memphis. Faulkner examined the relationship between blacks and whites in several works, including Light in August (1932); Absalom, Absalom! (1936); and Go Down, Moses (1942). Here, he was especially concerned with people of mixed racial background and their problems in establishing an identity.

Most of Faulkner's novels have a serious, even tragic, tone, but in nearly all of them, tragedy is profoundly mixed with comedy. Faulkner's comic sense was the legacy of Mark Twain and other earlier writers. This influence is especially evident in a tragicomic chronicle of the Snopes family and their impact on Yoknapatawpha County, including The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959).

Faulkner's short stories have the same range of technique, theme, and tone as his novels. His stories appear in The Collected Stories of William Faulkner (1950) and The Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (published in 1979, after his death).

Faulkner's work is characterized by a remarkable range of technique, theme, and tone. In The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), he used stream-of-consciousness, in which the story is told through the seemingly chaotic thoughts of a character. In Requiem for a Nun (1951), Faulkner alternated sections of prose fiction with sections of a play. In A Fable (1954), he created a World War I soldier whose experiences parallel the Passion of Jesus Christ. Faulkner was skillful in creating complicated situations that involve a variety of characters, each with a different reaction to the situation.

Many early critics of Faulkner denounced his books for their emphasis on violence and abnormality. Sanctuary (1931), a story involving rape and murder, was most severely criticized. Later, many critics recognized that Faulkner had been criticizing the faults in society by showing them in contrast to what he called the "eternal verities." These verities are universal values such as love, honor, pity, pride, compassion, and sacrifice. Faulkner said it is the writer's duty to remind readers of these values. He used this technique to dramatize the complexity of life and the difficulty of arriving at truth. Faulkner won Pulitzer Prizes in 1955 for A Fable and in 1963 for The Reivers and received the 1949 Nobel Prize for literature.

Both Hemingway and Faulkner are representative of the modern world, yet in several important ways they are quite different. Hemingway's novels are about man alone, uprooted and facing the Great Enemy (which takes several forms) as bravely as he can. Faulkner, on the other hand, presented a society, a variety of persons of differing colors and classes, in his native Mississippi. His work is a saga of the South, and the same characters reappear in his successive novels.

Both writers were concerned with moral values. For Hemingway courage was the paramount virtue. Man cannot win in the struggles in which he engages, but the important thing is how he behaves. If he meets his defeat without flinching, then he achieves "grace under pressure," which is a triumph of sorts that gives meaning and dignity to his struggle.

Faulkner's moral values were social rather than personal. The South was cursed with slavery, which bred countless problems before, but especially since, the Civil War. The good people, white and black, do what they can to solve the problems; but they are often helpless before the conniving, unscrupulous people who dominate their lives.

Faulkner's prose is ornate and complex. His sentences are long and complicated, with many nouns and adjectives. Hemingway's style is quite the opposite. His sentences are short and precise, and adjectives are used sparingly. The effect is one of great power and compression. Both writers received the Nobel prize for literature. Outstanding works by Hemingway include The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and the minor masterpiece The Old Man and the Sea (1952). Among Faulkner's best-known books are The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! ' (1936), and The Town (1957).

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