American Novel of the 30s. The Dreiser’s work. J.Steinbeck.

The economic collapse of 1929 destroyed the happy, confident mood of America in the twenties. Millions of Americans lost their jobs as the nation entered the Depression era. Most writers turned to a new kind of social realism and naturalism. It showed the struggles and tragedies of ordinary people. In the early 30s the first reaction to the Depression was a literature of social protest. There was a powerful Marxist Proletarian Literature movement. The main intellectual magazine of the era was the Partisan Review, edited by Jewish intellectuals in New York. Michael Gold (1896-1967) wrote Jews without Money as a model for other Proletarian writers. His novels was also the start of the Jewish-American novel, which became an important type of literature in the 60s-70s.He describes the failure of the American Dream for those who had left Europe looking for a new and better life.

Theodore Dreiser(1871-1945) was one of the America’s greatest writers. He and his characters ignored moral code. This attitude shocked public when Sister Carrie came out in 1900. Dreiser’s Trilogy of Desire shows a new development in his thinking. He had already found life to be meaningless and morals to be absurd. Now he stressed the will to power. Dreiser’s greatest novel An American Tragedy reveals a third stage in his thinking: social consciousness. Clyde Griffiths thinks money and success will bring him happiness. When a pregnant girlfriend threatens to destroy this dream, he plans to kill her. At the last moment, he changes his mind, but the girl dies accidentally anyway. Since he had decided not to kill her, is he really responsible for her death? This becomes the main question during the trial. It is not fair. Society and its false moral code are far guiltier.

John Steinbeck(1902-1968) His characters were driven by forces in themselves and in society: fear, hunger, sex, evils of Capitalism. Crime is often the result of these forces. In all of his plays, he combines a naturalistic way of looking with a deep sympathy for people. Like some other writers, he tried to paint large portraits of the national spirit. In The Grapes of Wrath he is not simply describing the experiences of a single family of individuals. He is really telling a story of a great national tragedy through the experiences of that one family. But the literary interest of the book is in its descriptions of the daily heroism of ordinary people. Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Postmodernism in British and American Literature. K. Vonnegut, J. Heller, G.Vidal.

The 1960s were years of great cultural excitement and social pain. In the fifties, the Beats had called for «revolution in consciousness». It began among college students in the sixties. They were the «Hippies». They looked for new experiences through love, drugs and Oriental religions. Many people called it a joyful «second American Revolution». But this was also a decade when John F. Kennedy, the young American President, was murdered and the country began a long, hopeless war in Vietnam. By the middle of the sixties, the streets were filled with angry young people demanding equal rights for blacks and an end to the Vietnam War. By 1970, the national mood was very unhappy. The war was going badly and Americans were losing their confidence. Some writers of the sixties and seventies look deep into the nature of American values in order to understand what is happening in their souls. In many ways, they continue the psychological studies of the fifties. In certain important ways, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (b. 1923) established the mood of American fiction in the sixties. The hero is a pilot in WW II, called Yossarian. He tries to prove that he is crazy so that he doesn’t have to fight. But an Air Force rule(called Catch-22) says that «anyone who wants to get out of combat missions isn’t really crazy». Therefore he fails. The same «Catch-22» works in ordinary life. It stops him from marrying the girl he loves: «You won’t marry me because I’m crazy, and you say I am crazy because I want to marry you». This kind of humor is «black humor» because it makes us laugh at the darkness of cruelty. We cannot understand life’s «Catch-22» situations because they are absurd. They seem completely foolish. We may think we are free but the absurd language of society controls us. Kurt Vonnegut(b. 1922) is another master of black humor. During WW II, he was made a prisoner in Dresden, Germany. One night the city was fire-bombed by the British. He came out of the prison. The terrible experience of Dresden influenced Vonnegut as a writer. His first novel Player Piano describes a future world of computers and other scientific machines. Humans have become completely useless. They live bored, unhappy lives. Then they rebel and begin destroying the machines. Soon, however, they find that they cannot live without machines and they start them up again. Cat’s Cradle invents a false religion, based on «foma». (lies that make people happy). With this novel Vonnegut’s humor becomes very black, life seems to be a terrifying joke. Gore Vidal - American novelist, playwright. Gore Vidal grew accustomed at an early age to a life among political and social notables. Vidal learned about political life from his grandfather, senator. After graduating from Academy in New Hampshire, he served on an army ship in Alaska. Much of his time he devoted to writing. His first novel, Williwaw, was based on his wartime experiences. The story was written in the spirit of Ernest Hemingway. The novel was praised, although The city and the Pillar (1948) shocked the public with its homosexual main character. Later Vidal published three detective novels, some historical and contemporary novels, some books about the life of the US president Lincoln. Among Vidal's finest works are two novels which deal with power and sex. Vidal published a collection of essays, Armageddon (1987), in which he explored his love-hate relationship with contemporary America. His collected essays, Unites States (1993), won a National Book Award. It is a valuable introduction for those interested in American politics and literature. As an essayist Vidal has dealt with a wide range of subjects from literary to issues of national interest, and people he has known. It has been said, that "probably no American writer since Franklin has ridiculed, and mocked Americans more skillfully and more often than Vidal