Author Description

For Henry Adams writing in The Education of Henry Adams (1918) his nineteenth century education had left him completely unprepared to understand the new century that he saw around him, and he feared that the impersonal technologies that characterized the new century would provide little inspiration for artists. The change would go on to be even greater than Adams had imagined. This volume of the Blackwell History of American Literature covers the period when the USA became an international power, at first regionally and then following the First Word War on the global stage. American literature explores the impact of this change upon questions of community, identity, and values from both regional and international perspectives. The early years of the 1900s saw the final works of Henry James and Mark Twain, both writers prefiguring in their own ways the challenge to comfortable certainties that would shortly come with modernism. The ways in which writers dramatized such change will be a major theme of the history. Wharton and Dreiser developed the strategies of realism and naturalism inherited from Crane and Norris. With the work of such figures as Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and Faulkner the acceptance of limitation, Anderson's "little things" in his Winesburg, Ohio, found formal parallels in the writers' challenges to the conventions of nineteenth century unities. Responding to the work of Lawrence, Joyce and Woolf among others, and the impact of Freud and new ideas in science, they looked for what still might be certain in a world of increasingly rapid change, and raised questions about what value or use any such limited certainties might have. Modernist experiment is much more muted in the work of Willa Cather, although the themes are similar, and are explored to different degrees by other writers too--the dangers of romanticizing the past, and the challenges of the transition from a pastoral, pioneer culture to an indust