2.2: Making Connections

1. The literature of this period grappled with the rapid modernization of American society, with its technological innovations and the changes it brought for good or ill to everyday life. Literature from between the world wars that dealt, often antagonistically, with technology includes Robert Frost's "Out, Out—"; Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro"; T. S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and The Waste Land. Later works that continue to react to the inhuman effects of some technological advances are Allen Ginsberg's Howl; and Thomas Pynchon's "Entropy."
2. Two hallmarks of modernist writing are difficulty and ambition; the harder the text, the less instructive or persuasive one would expect it to be, though some authors did not accept that. Examples of works that expected a mass following despite the elite readership they were guaranteed by their difficulty are T. S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and The Waste Land; Marianne Moore's "Poetry." Later works that take up the challenge of modernist difficulty include Allen Ginsberg's Howl; and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.
3. The Harlem Renaissance marked a full flowering of African American writing. Prompted by the personal encouragement of W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as by his Souls of Black Folk; Harlem-based artists like the poets Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen employed modernist formal and thematic experimentation to represent the opportunities and characteristic features of Harlem. Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" signals an extreme artistic focus, possibly at the expense of social awareness and activism. Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life; Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life; Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery; and Paul Laurence Dunbar's poetry, which all shared the Harlem Renaissance's mostly white audience looking for exoticism and a chance to judge African Americans.
4. Between the wars, American drama comes of age as a genre, thanks in large part to the efforts of Susan Glaspell (Trifles) and Eugene O'Neill (Long Day's Journey into Night) to promote independent theater away from the lights of Broadway. Later plays that show the influences of these two playwrights include Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.
5. Since this part of American literature is heavily informed by two massive military conflicts, instructive comparisons can be made to writings from other wars throughout American history. Works from 1914 to 1945 that make such references include T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land; and Faulkner's "Barn Burning."