Facultad de Lenguas y Educación

Dra. Elsa del Campo Ramírez

Grado de Educación
Literature and Culture

UNIT 5
AMERICAN LITERATURE TO 1945
Prof. Dra. Elsa del Campo Ramírez,
Materials: Dra. María Porras Sánchez

1. From the exploration period to the Early National period 3

1.1. What is American literature? 3
1.2. Colonial period and Puritan legacy 3
1.3. The 18th century: the Revolutionary period 4
1.4. Early national period 4

2. 1820-1865: inventing the Americas 5

2.1. Historical and cultural background 5
2.2. American Romanticism 7
2.2.1.The American Gothic 7

3. Writing from 1914 to 1945 10

3.1. Historical, cultural and social background 10
3.2. Cultural and literary context of Modernism 11
3.3. Modernist poetry 12
3.4. Modernist fiction and beyond 13
3.5. The Harlem Renaissance 15

UNIT 5. AMERICAN LITERATURE TO 1945 2 Sep. 2017

Prof. Dra. Elsa del Campo Ramírez,
Materials: Dra. María Porras Sánchez

1. From the exploration period to the Early National period

1.1. What is American literature?

When we deal with American literature, it is difficult to signal the starting point. What is American literature?
The literature produced in the US after it became an independent country? The literature produced in the
British America? What about the literature(s) produced by the natives before that? Modern anthologies
usually refer to Native American literature(s) in the first place, even if written sources are scarce. Of course,
these literatures were produced in different native languages. If we refer to American literature as a literature
produced in what would become American soil, then we need to include some examples of colonial literature
written in Spanish (Christopher Columbus, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, etc.). This is known as the exploration
period. If we deal with American literature as a literature in English, we would have to wait until the arrival of
English-speaking Europeans to the territory of what would become the United States. This is referred to as
colonial period. For study purposes, we will start with this colonial literature of the 17th century. After all, as
Bradbury and Ruland explain, American literature is “essentially a modern, recent and international literature”
(From Puritanism to Postmodernism 3), so its roots cannot be traced in the antiquity.

1.2. Colonial period and Puritan legacy1

This history of American literature begins with the arrival of English-speaking Europeans in what would
become the United States. At first American literature was naturally a colonial literature, by authors who were
Englishmen and who thought and wrote as such. John Smith, a soldier of fortune, is credited with initiating
American literature. His chief books included A True Relation of…Virginia… (1608) and The Generall Historie of
Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1624). Although these volumes often glorified their author, they
were avowedly written to explain colonising opportunities to Englishmen.

Such writers acknowledged British allegiance, but others stressed the differences of opinion that spurred the
colonists to leave their homeland. More important, they argued questions of government involving the
relationship between church and state. The utilitarian writings of the 17th century included biographies,
treatises, accounts of voyages, and sermons. There were few achievements in drama or fiction, since there
was a widespread prejudice against these forms. Bad but popular poetry appeared, and there was some
poetry, at least, of a higher order.

All 17th-century American writings were in the manner of British writings of the same period.

1
This section is a taken from the article “American Literature” from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, by Walter
Blair, James R. Giles and Morris Dickstein. https://www.britannica.com/art/American-literature

UNIT 5. AMERICAN LITERATURE TO 1945 3 Sep.

2017
Prof. Dra. Elsa del Campo Ramírez,
Materials: Dra. María Porras Sánchez

The 18th century: the Revolutionary period 2

The wrench of the American Revolution emphasised differences that had been growing between American and
British political concepts. As the colonists moved to the belief that rebellion was inevitable, fought the bitter
war, and worked to found the new nation’s government, they were influenced by a number of very effective
political writers, such as Samuel Adams and John Dickinson, both of whom favoured the colonists, and loyalist
Joseph Galloway. But two figures loomed above these—Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine.

Franklin, born in 1706, had started to publish his writings in his brother’s newspaper, the New England
Courant, as early as 1722. This newspaper championed the cause of the “Leather Apron” man and the farmer,
and appealed by using easily understood language and practical arguments. The idea that common sense was
a good guide was clear.

Franklin’s self-attained culture, deep and wide, gave substance and skill to varied articles, pamphlets, and
reports that he wrote concerning the dispute with Great Britain, many of them extremely effective in stating
and shaping the colonists’ cause.

Thomas Paine went from his native England to Philadelphia and became a magazine editor and then, about 14
months later, the most effective propagandist for the colonial cause. His pamphlet Common Sense (1776) did
much to influence the colonists to declare their independence. Based upon Paine’s simple deistic beliefs, his
papers showed the conflict as a stirring melodrama with the angelic colonists against the forces of evil. Such
white and black picturings were highly effective propaganda. Another reason for Paine’s success was his poetic
fervour, which found expression in impassioned words and phrases long to be remembered and quoted.

1.3. Early national period

In the postwar period some of these eloquent men were no longer able to win a hearing. Thomas Paine, for
instance, lacked the constructive ideas that appealed to those interested in forming a new government. Others
fared better—for example, Franklin, whose tolerance and sense showed in addresses to the constitutional
convention. A different group of authors, however, became leaders in the new period—Thomas Jefferson and
the talented writers of the Federalist papers, a series of 85 essays published in 1787 and 1788 urging the
virtues of the proposed new constitution. They were written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John
Jay. More distinguished for insight into problems of government and cool logic than for eloquence, these
works became a classic statement of American governmental, and more generally of republican, theory.

Poets and poetry

Poetry became a weapon during the American Revolution, with both loyalists and Continentals urging their
forces on, stating their arguments, and celebrating their heroes in verse and songs. The most memorable
American poet of the period was Philip Freneau, whose first well-known poems, Revolutionary War satires,
served as effective propaganda; later he turned to various aspects of the American scene. Although he wrote

2 This section is a taken from the article “American Literature” from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, by Walter
Blair, James R. Giles and Morris Dickstein. https://www.britannica.com/art/American-literature

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2017
Prof. Dra. Elsa del Campo Ramírez,
Materials: Dra. María Porras Sánchez

much in the stilted manner of the Neoclassicists, his poems were romantic lyrics of real grace and feeling that
were forerunners of a literary movement destined to be important in the 19 th century.

Drama and the novel

In the years toward the close of the 18th century, both dramas and novels of some historical importance were
produced. Though theatrical groups had long been active in America, the first American comedy presented
professionally was Royall Tyler’s Contrast (1787). This drama contained a Yankee character who brought
something native to the stage.

William Hill Brown wrote the first American novel, The Power of Sympathy (1789), which showed authors how
to overcome ancient prejudices against this form by following the sentimental novel form invented by Samuel
Richardson.

Towards the end of the period, a body of distinctly American literature began to appear. The publishing
business and readership in America also began to grow. At the same time, the ideals of the Revolutionary
period, including the belief that individuals are endowed with natural rights, would inspire later 19th century
American writers to examine and critique how Americans used and abused those rights. Slave narratives were
published with increasing frequency. It is the case of the autobiography written by the former slave Olaudah
Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789).

2. 1820-1865: inventing the Americas

2.1. Historical and cultural background3

AN AMERICAN RENAISSANCE?
• The writers of this period, particularly those who began publishing after 1830, are often celebrated as
part of a literary “renaissance,” and their writings heralded as the first really mature and significant
works by Americans. Writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman are seen as central figures in this so-called American
Renaissance. Most of these writers were not celebrated this way in their own time but were identified
retrospectively, almost a century after their publications, as part of this “renaissance.”
• More recently, scholars and critics have begun to challenge the idea of an American Renaissance,
noting that the formulation has tended to exclude the contributions of women and minority writers
of the period, especially African Americans. They also note that studies of the American Renaissance
have not paid enough attention to issues such as slavery, immigration, and other political and social
contexts that shaped the writing of this period. Nonetheless, the idea of an American Renaissance
remains influential and shapes the structure of some anthologies.

3Section taken from

http://wwnorton.com/college/english/naal8/section/volB/overview.aspx

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Prof. Dra. Elsa del Campo Ramírez,
Materials: Dra. María Porras Sánchez

2.2. American Romanticism

As we have seen, 20th century critics call this period (1820-1865) the American Renaissance, as it is the first
mature moment of American letters. Between 1850-1855 there is an incredible amount of literary
masterpieces: Emerson's Representative Men, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, The House of Seven Gables,
Melville's Moby-Dick and Pierre, Thoreau's Walden, and Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

Even if American Romanticism shares most of the features of European and British Romanticism –importance
of feelings over reason; predominance of innocence and individual freedom over sophistication and education;
distrust of progress; return to nature; use of the exotic, the supernatural, and the world of imagination--, it
developed into two important (and seemingly contrasting) trends, the American Gothic and the
Transcendentalist movement.

2.2.1. The American Gothic

The American Gothic is a literary trend that started during the Romantic period at the beginning of the 19th
century and has continued to be explored by 21st century authors. Even though it is not strictly reserved to
writers from the south of the US, there has been an important proliferation of Southern authors and settings.

American Gothic constitutes the darker side of Romanticism. This dark nature of the American fiction, from the
Romantic period onwards, has been aptly defined by Leslie Fiedler. For Fiedler, American fiction is
“bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction, non-realistic, sadist and melodramatic--a literature of
darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation (Love and Death in the American Novel 29).
The American Gothic writers (or Dark Romantics, as we are exclusively referring to the first half of the 19 th
century), adapted many themes, settings and motifs from its European predecessors: dark atmosphere,
supernatural events, feeling of fear and anxiety, etc. Dark Romantics placed the emphasis on mystery and
skepticism toward man's nature, and used settings such as haunted houses.

Gothic works adapted all main conflicts, settings, motifs and narrative situations, like: the feeling of fear and
anxiety, the gloomy atmosphere, unexplainable, supernatural events or motif of haunted place. However,
Gothic in American writers depiction gained its own special character: for example, they replaced haunted
castles, which naturally did not exist in the American landscape, with haunted, old houses. There was also a
more significant difference. While gothic fiction was focusing on the aspect of fear and terror, American gothic
was placing emphasis on mystery and skepticism toward man's nature.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

Poet, short-story writer, editor and literary critic, Poe is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre
as well as contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction.

The darkness that characterised many of Poe's writings appears to have roots in his life. Born Edgar Poe in
Boston, Massachusetts, his parents died when he was 2 years old. In 1835, he married Virginia Clemm, his 13-

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Prof. Dra. Elsa del Campo Ramírez,
Materials: Dra. María Porras Sánchez

year-old cousin; unfortunately, in 1842 she contracted tuberculosis and died five years later. Two years later,
at age 40, Poe died in Baltimore under strange circumstances. The cause of his death has remained unknown
and has been attributed to alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, drugs, heart disease, rabies, suicide,
tuberculosis, etc.

Poe described many of his works as "tales of ratiocination” in which the primary concern of the plot is
ascertaining truth, and the means of obtaining the truth is a complex and mysterious process combining
intuitive logic, astute observation, and perspicacious inference.4

Much of his poetry and prose feature his characteristic interest in exploring the psychology of man, including
the perverse and self-destructive nature of the conscious and subconscious mind. That is why he recurrently
deals with different aspects of death in his writings, including effects of decomposition, concerns of premature
burial, the reanimation of the dead, and mourning. He also explored the split of the Self vs Alter Ego.

Some of Poe’s notable dark romantic works include the short stories "Ligeia" and "The Fall of the House of
Usher" and poems "The Raven" and "Ulalume.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts. Hawthorne's father was a sea captain and
descendant of John Hathorne, one of the judges who participated the Salem Witch Trials in 1692. Hawthorne
struggled to come to terms with Puritanism within his own sensibility and as the nation expanded
geographically and intellectually. Contrary to the meticulous social realism that dominated European prose in
the 19th century, Hawthorne's tales explore problems of sin, guilt, and hypocrisy through allegory and
emphasis on the supernatural. Hawthorne was also close to the Transcendentalist movement and shared its
reverence for nature and impatience with religious orthodoxy. Hawthorne's works offer a probing
investigation into the psychology of 19th century America as it moved beyond its Puritan past toward a more
inclusive national identity.

Hawthorne's greatest novel is The Scarlet Letter. Set in a 17th century Puritan town, Hester Pryme, the
protagonist, is forced to wear a scarlet letter A because she has had adulterous relationship with the Reverend
Arthur Dimmsdale, whose identity she protects. While not condoning the adultery, the novel presents Hester
and her child, Pearl, as purified through the ordeal of public condemnation, while the Puritan townspeople and
clergy are revealed as hypocrites and Hester's moral inferiors. The wilderness, where Pryne lives after being
expelled from town, represents a place where moral conventions are absent.

Many of Hawthorne’s short stories are perfect examples of Gothic literature. Traditionally, Hawthorne has
been considered a literary genius but also a gloomy moralist. Despite his moralism, though, Hawthorne is
widely read today and he is one of the towering figures of American literature, one of the pioneers (with
Whitman and his friend Melville) to create a distinct American style.

4 Biography adapted from http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Edgar_Allan_Poe

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Prof. Dra. Elsa del Campo Ramírez,
Materials: Dra. María Porras Sánchez

Herman Melville (1819-1891)

Melville was born in New York into a distinguished Calvinist family. However, his father went bankrupt and
Melville struggled for money in his youth, being forced to take very different jobs. His experience at sea as a
cabin boy provided the material for many of his early novels. All these occupations inspired his masterpiece,
Moby-Dick (1851). Ishmael, a seaman, narrates the story of the mad quest of Ahab, captain of the whaler the
Pequod, for revenge on Moby Dick, the white whale that on the previous voyage bit off Ahab's leg. Moby-Dick
was meant to be an account of the whaling industry. However, the big white whale is a symbol that represents
Melville’s dubious stance towards Nature. Melville had been in the transcendentalist orbit and saw something
great in Nature but could not accept the easy assumption that the cosmos is good.

3. Writing from 1914 to 1945

3.1. Historical, cultural and social background

THE TWO WARS AS HISTORICAL MARKERS

• The two world wars (World War I, 1914–1918, and World War II, 1939–1945) bracket a period during
which the United States became a fully modern nation. Both wars mobilised the country’s industries
and technologies, spurred their development, and uprooted citizens.
• Political, social, and cultural life in the United States was transformed by the stock market crash of
1929, which led to an economic depression with a 25 percent unemployment rate. This economic
catastrophe was known as the Great Depression. The Great Depression did not fully end until the
United States entered World War II in 1941. The war unified the country politically and revitalised
industry and employment. The United States emerged from World War II as a major industrial and
political power.
• The literature of the modern period reflects the nation’s attempts to come to terms with the many
meanings of modernity. Some writers celebrated modern developments while others lamented them.
Most writers believed that old literary forms would not work for new times and were inspired by the
possibility of creating something entirely new. Writers of the period debated the uses of literary
tradition. Some wanted to honor traditional forms and language and to include allusions to canonical
works of the past. Others saw such homage as imitative or old-fashioned.
• Writers of the period also debated the place of popular culture in serious literature. Some embraced
popular forms while others rejected them as cynical commercialism.
• Another issue was the question of how far literature should engage itself in political and social
struggle.
• These were changing times. The social codes governing sexual behavior became less restrictive. These
social changes found their most influential theorist in Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, inventor of
the practice of psychoanalysis and an important developer of the concept of the “unconscious.”
• Women gained the right to vote in 1920 and found new freedoms in educational possibilities,
professional opportunities, geographic mobility, and sexuality.

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Prof. Dra. Elsa del Campo Ramírez,
Materials: Dra. María Porras Sánchez

THE 1930S
• The Great Depression was not limited to the United States but was a worldwide phenomenon. It
fostered social unrest that led to the rise of fascist dictatorships in Europe.
• Many Americans began to question the efficacy and justice of free-enterprise capitalism.
• The dire economic situation in the United States produced a significant increase in Communist party
membership among Americans during the 1930s. Many supporters of Communism later felt
disillusioned and betrayed by the brutality of Soviet Communism under Josef Stalin. Some of these
left-wing activists became staunch anti-Communists after World War II.

AMERICAN VERSIONS OF MODERNISM

• In literary contexts, the term “modernism” is a catchall for any kind of literary production in the
interwar period that dealt with the modern world. As a movement, modernism involved many art
forms and media, including sculpture, painting, dance, and music, as well as literature.
• High modernist works are characterised by their construction out of fragments—fragments of myth or
history, fragments of experience or perception, fragments of previous artistic work. For the modern
artist or writer, the political, social, and aesthetic structures that had organised human experience
previously no longer seemed viable in the modern world. Order, sequence, and unity did not seem to
them to convey reality. Instead, they emphasised discontinuity, discordance, and fragmentation as
more representative of the modern experience. Modernist literature often conveys fragmentation
through abrupt shifts in perspective, voice, and tone and through a reliance on sometimes obscure
symbols and images rather than clear statements of meaning.
• Despite their concern with involving the reader in the production of meaning, modernist literature
reached only a limited audience. Many readers found it difficult to understand the meaning of these
texts’ fragmentation and to parse their often obscure allusions to other texts or traditions.

3.2. Cultural and literary context of Modernism5

The large cultural wave of Modernism, which gradually emerged in Europe and the United States in the early
years of the 20th century, expressed a sense of modern life through art as a sharp break from the past, as well
as from Western civilization’s classical traditions. Modern life seemed radically different from traditional life —
more scientific, faster, more technological, and more mechanized. Modernism embraced these changes.

Subject and technique became inseparable in both the visual and literary art of the period. The idea of form as
the equivalent of content, a cornerstone of post-World War II art and literature, crystallised in this period.

Technological innovation in the world of factories and machines inspired new attentiveness to technique in the
arts. Photography began to assume the status of a fine art allied with the latest scientific developments. Vision
and viewpoint became an essential aspect of the modernist novel as well. No longer was it sufficient to write a
straight- forward third-person narrative or (worse yet) use a pointlessly intrusive narrator. The way the story
was told became as important as the story itself. Henry James, William Faulkner, and many other American

5 Full section taken from Outline of American Literature, pp. 61-62.

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Prof. Dra. Elsa del Campo Ramírez,
Materials: Dra. María Porras Sánchez

writers experimented with fictional points of view.

In literature, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) developed an analogue to modern art. A resident of Paris and an art
collector, Stein once explained that she and Picasso were doing the same thing, he in art and she in writing.
Using simple, concrete words as counters, she developed an abstract, experimental prose poetry. The child-
like quality of Stein’s simple vocabulary recalls the bright, primary colors of modern art, while her repetitions
echo the repeated shapes of abstract visual compositions. By dislocating grammar and punctuation, she
achieved new “abstract” meanings as in her influential collection Tender Buttons (1914). Meaning, in Stein’s
work, was often subordinated to technique, just as subject was less important than shape in abstract visual art.

3.3. Modernist poetry6

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

Ezra Pound was one of the most influential American poets of this century. From 1908 to 1920, he resided in
London where he associated with many writers, including William Butler Yeats, for whom he worked as a
secretary, and T.S. Eliot, whose Waste Land he drastically edited and improved. He was a link between the
United States and Britain, acting as contributing editor to Harriet Monroe’s important Chicago magazine
Poetry and spearheading the new school of poetry known as Imagism, which advocated a clear, highly visual
presentation. After Imagism, he championed various poetic approaches. He eventually moved to Italy, where
he became caught up in Italian Fascism. Pound’s poetry is best known for its clear, visual images, fresh
rhythms, and muscular, intelligent, unusual lines.
.

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a well-to-do family with roots in the north-eastern
United States. He received the best education of any major American writer of his generation at Harvard
College, the Sorbonne, and Merton College of Oxford University. He studied Sanskrit and Oriental philosophy,
which influenced his poetry. Like his friend Pound, he went to England early and became a towering figure in
the literary world there. One of the most respected poets of his day, his modernist, seemingly illogical or
abstract iconoclastic poetry had revolutionary impact. He also wrote influential essays and dramas and
championed the importance of literary and social traditions for the modern poet.

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

William Carlos Williams was a practicing pediatrician throughout his life; he delivered over 2,000 babies and
wrote poems on his prescription pads. Williams was a classmate of Ezra Pound, and his early poetry reveals the
influence of Imagism. He later went on to champion the use of colloquial speech; his ear for the natural
rhythms of American English helped free American poetry from the iambic meter that had dominated English
verse since the Renaissance. His sympathy for ordinary working people, children, and everyday events in
modern urban settings make his poetry attractive and accessible. Williams cultivated a relaxed, natural poetry.

6 Full section taken from Outline of American Literature, pp. 63-69.

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Prof. Dra. Elsa del Campo Ramírez,
Materials: Dra. María Porras Sánchez

3.4. Modernist fiction and beyond7

Although American prose between the wars experimented with viewpoint and form, Americans wrote more
realistically, on the whole, than did Europeans. Novelist Ernest Hemingway wrote of war, hunting, and other
masculine pursuits in a stripped, plain style; William Faulkner set his powerful southern novels spanning
generations and cultures firmly in Mississippi heat and dust. The importance of facing reality became a
dominant theme in the 1920s and 1930s: Writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald repeatedly portrayed the tragedy
awaiting those who live in flimsy dreams.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald’s life resembles a fairy tale. During World War I, Fitzgerald enlisted in the U.S.
Army and fell in love with a rich and beautiful girl, Zelda Sayre, who lived near Montgomery, Alabama, where
he was stationed. Zelda broke off their engagement because he was relatively poor. After he was discharged at
war’s end, he went to seek his literary fortune in New York City in order to marry her.

His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), became a best- seller, and at 24 they married. Neither of them was
able to withstand the stresses of success and fame, and they squandered their money. They moved to France
to economize in 1924 and returned seven years later. Zelda became mentally unstable and had to be
institutionalized; Fitzgerald himself became an alcoholic and died young as a movie screenwriter.

Fitzgerald’s secure place in American literature rests primarily on his novel The Great Gatsby (1925), a
brilliantly written, economically structured story about the American dream of the self-made man. The
protagonist, the mysterious Jay Gatsby, discovers the devastating cost of success in terms of personal
fulfillment and love.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

Few writers have lived as colorfully as Ernest Hemingway, whose career could have come out of one of his
adventurous novels. Hemingway came from the U.S. Midwest. Born in Illinois, Hemingway volunteered for an
ambulance unit in France during World War I, but was wounded and hospitalised for six months. After the war,
as a war correspondent based in Paris, he met expatriate American writers Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein. Stein, in particular, influenced his spare style.

After his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926) brought him fame, he covered the Spanish Civil War, World War II,
and the fighting in China in the 1940s. On a safari in Africa, he was badly injured when his small plane crashed;
still, he continued to enjoy hunting and sport fishing, activities that inspired some of his best work. The Old
Man and the Sea (1952), a short poetic novel about a poor, old fisherman who heroically catches a huge fish
devoured by sharks, won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953; the next year he received the Nobel Prize. Discouraged
by a troubled family background, illness, and the belief that he was losing his gift for writing, Hemingway shot
himself to death in 1961. Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway became a spokesperson for his generation. But instead of
painting its fatal glamour as did Fitzgerald, who never fought in World War I, Hemingway wrote of war, death,

7 Full section taken from Outline of American Literature, pp. 69-78.

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Prof. Dra. Elsa del Campo Ramírez,
Materials: Dra. María Porras Sánchez

and the “lost generation” of cynical survivors. His characters are not dreamers but tough bullfighters, soldiers,
and athletes. If intellectual, they are deeply scarred and disillusioned.

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

Born to an old southern family, William Harrison Faulkner was raised in Oxford, Mississippi, where he lived
most of his life. Faulkner created an entire imaginative landscape, Yoknapatawpha County, mentioned in
numerous novels, along with several families with interconnections extending back for generations.
Yoknapatawpha County, with its capital, “Jefferson,” is closely modelled on Oxford, Mississippi, and its
surroundings. Faulkner re-creates the history of the land and the various races — Indian, African-American,
Euro-American, and various mixtures — who have lived on it. An innovative writer, Faulkner experimented
brilliantly with narrative chronology, different points of view and voices (including those of outcasts, children,
and illiterates), and a rich and demanding baroque style built of extremely long sentences full of complicated
subordinate parts.

The best of Faulkner’s novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), two modernist
works experimenting with viewpoint and voice to probe southern families under the stress of losing a family
member; Light in August (1932), about complex and violent relations between a white woman and a black
man; and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), perhaps his finest, about the rise of a self-made plantation owner and his
tragic fall through racial prejudice and a failure to love. Most of these novels use different characters to tell
parts of the story and demonstrate how meaning resides in the manner of telling, as much as in the subject at
hand. Faulkner’s themes are southern tradition, family, community, the land, history and the past, race, and
the passions of ambition and love.

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