Modern American Literature

This book is equal to American Literature: Beginnings to Neutralism. Its organization is obvious. A general introduction outlines the character of the modern period. Three long chapters on poetry, fiction, and drama then follow. Each of them begins with an overview, offering in-depth critical evaluations of their representative works.

The years from 1910 to 1930 were a brilliant period of American literature, more accomplished than any time the United States had seen before or is likely to see again. Malcolm Cowley rightfully calls this time a “Second Flowering”, comparable only to the American Renaissance, the great age of Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, and Whitman just before the Civil War. During these two decades, a major new generation emerged in American literature – Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill – with the power to impress their international contemporaries. The energy of American writing, the force of its response to modernity and history, the range of its forms, the power of its visions, images and metaphors, have shaped writing and reading on an international scale. Today, American literature is simply inescapable; its influence has been pervasive.