American Lit: Early Twentieth Century Quiz

Answer: Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) won the Nobel Prize for Literature after decades of writing that forever influenced the style of American literature. He frequently used noticeably simple sentence structure and vocabulary to tell stories that were considered sparse when compared to the elaborate narratives of earlier writers. Often a story of his consisted of a simple scene reported from an objective point of view. This style is often referred to as the "iceberg effect" because, like an iceberg, a Hemingway story is deceptive in its appearance; a world of depth and meaning exists beneath the mask of the story's simplicity. Some of Hemingway's most famous stories include "Big Two-Hearted River (Parts I and II)", "Hills like White Elephants", "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place", "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber", and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro". Of course Hemingway's novels are equally famous and important; as well as the two titles mentioned in the question, he wrote "The Sun Also Rises", "To Have and Have Not", and "The Old Man and the Sea".

Hemingway's novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls" was unanimously selected to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1941. However, Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University and ex-officio chairman of the board, vetoed the Pulitzer Prize jurors' selection because he felt the book too offensive. The jurors' responded by choosing no one to win the Prize for Fiction for that year. Later, Hemingway did receive a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 for "The Old Man and the Sea".

Answer: Edwin Arlington Robinson

E. A. Robinson (1869-1935) turned to writing poetry when he returned home from Harvard. His world was crumbling and he found a refuge in the elegance and beauty of poetry. Although the best of his poems focused on the wasted, blighted, impoverished lives of those struggling in society around him, he believed poetry lifted up its subject matter and brought a dignity to the lives about which he wrote. Thus, he insisted on writing poetry in a traditional format with meter, rhyme, and elevated diction. This approach to poetry frequently resulted in his being perceived as out-of-step with current trends, for more and more writers were relying on free verse and non-traditional formats in the modern world.

Robinson at first resorted to self-publication to try to establish himself as a poet. His first collection of poems, "The Torrent; and the Night Before", which contained "Luke Havergal", was published in 1896. He followed that a year later with the collection "The Children of the Night", which was a personal favorite of Theodore Roosevelt's son Kermit and contained such poems as "Kosmos" and "Richard Cory". Despite publishing eight more volumes of poetry, Robinson was not able to achieve secure financial standing until the publication of his 1921 "Collected Poems" won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1922. "The Man Who Died Twice" won a second award for him in 1925, and "Tristram" won a rare third Pulitzer Prize in 1928.

Answer: Sinclair Lewis

Harry Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) is often overlooked by critics who find modernist writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald more innovative artistically and more challenging academically. However, Lewis did warrant enough attention and admiration worldwide to become the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, which was awarded to him in 1930. He was celebrated for his graphic descriptions, for his thoroughly developed characters many of which represented types unexamined before in American literature, and for his willingness to present a picture of American life without resorting to the typical idealization of it. For example, "Main Street" (1920) is a critique of the complacency, cultural ignorance, and stifling conservativism of small-town America; "Babbit" (1922) is an attack on the commercialization and materialism of America; "Elmer Gentry" (1927) exposes the hypocrisy of religion practiced in America; and "Dodsworth" (1929) focuses on the purposeless lives of the wealthy.

"Main Street" was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921; however, the Pulitzer's Board of Trustees rejected the decision and Edith Wharton's "Age of Innocence" was given the award instead. Then, in 1926, Lewis was offered the Pulitzer again, this time for "Arrowsmith". Lewis refused to accept the prize, claiming that the award's guidelines specified that the honor should be bestowed upon a fictional work that celebrated American wholesomeness and manners and was thus too open to current biases and trends.

After publishing more than twenty novels, Lewis eventually died at the age of 65 due to a heart attack. Most believe this was a result of extremely poor health brought about by his chronic alcoholism.

Answer: Robert Frost

Robert Frost (1874-1963) published "A Boy's Will", a title he took from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "My Lost Youth", while living in England. The expatriate American poet Ezra Pound, who was living in London at the time, encountered the book and reviewed it most favorably. He described Frost as a "VURRY Amur'k'n talent", making reference to Frost's use of a New England persona who wrote with colloquial rhythms and folksy language. In 1914, Pound also helped get Frost's second book of poems, "North of Boston", published in America, where his poetry was so positively received that Frost and his family moved back and settled in New Hampshire, where Frost bought a farm.

Most of Frost's poetry relies on the rhythms of common American speech, which he works into traditional poetic forms and meter. In fact, Frost insisted that writing poetry without meter was like "playing tennis without a net." The result was several conversational poems and dramatic monologues written in colloquial diction while gracefully blended into the unrhymed iambic pentameter of blank verse. Because of his use of formal patterns, his regionalist subject matter, and his dislike of modernist internationalism, Frost is often labeled a traditionalist instead of a modernist. However, the themes of his poetry are often very much aligned with modernism, which focuses on the loss of structure and order as was perceived by many during the early twentieth century. For example, his poem "Desert Places" speaks of the fear arising from the uncertainty of human beings' meaning or purpose in the vast universe, and "Design" questions whether there is any plan for the existence of things or whether everything happens by chance and we simply perceive order where there isn't any. Even the poem "Mending Wall" argues that we should question traditional explanations, and "The Road Not Taken" examines the limitations of our choices in life because of earlier choices we have made.

Other well-known poems of Robert Frost are "Nothing Gold Can Stay", "Fire and Ice", "'Out, Out--'", "After Apple-Picking", "The Wood-Pile", and "Mowing". Frost read "The Gift Outright" at Kennedy's inauguration in 1961.

Answer: Richard Wright

Richard Wright (1908-1960) was born near Natchez, Mississippi. When he was five, his father abandoned the family, and for the next ten years, Wright was passed around from one Mississippi relative to the next. By 1925, when he set out on his own at the age of seventeen to live in Memphis, Tennessee, he had been uprooted from any sort of stable environment twenty different times. Extreme poverty, a formal education that never went beyond the equivalent of junior high, and constant humiliation and hatred suffered in a racially segregated society gradually led Wright to conclude that the hidden anger of black Americans was justified. He grew to believe that only by acknowledging this anger and expressing it in non-violent means could they move beyond this anger. This understanding motivated his decision to write, as well as providing the material for much of what he wrote. He was also influenced by Marxism, which he studied in Chicago; he began to see society as divided into antagonistic classes within an institution set up and run for the benefit of only a few people. Nevertheless, he never stopped portraying his characters as individuals possessing a spark of selfhood.

His novel "Native Son", which was published in 1940, is one of the most important books in twentieth-century American literature. Wright holds nothing back in his portrayal of Bigger Thomas, the novel's main character who is pushed into brutal violence by the racism of white society. The character represents everything a white audience of that time would have detested and feared, yet because of the novel's narrative point of view that white audience is forced to see the world through an African-American male's eyes and thus understand him. This novel forever changed how black authors approached the American reading audience, which was predominantly white.

Richard Wright also wrote the novels "Lawd Today" and "The Outsider" as well as the autobiographical "Black Boy". Some of his short story collections include "Uncle Tom's Children" and "Eight Men". "The Man Who Was Almost a Man" was published posthumously in the collection "Eight Men" in 1961; however, it was originally published in 1939 in "Harper's Bazaar" under the title "Almos' a Man".

Answer: The Waste Land

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, but became a British citizen in 1927. He had traveled overseas to complete his dissertation on the English philosopher F. H. Bradley; however, the onset of the Great War (WWI) prevented his return to the United States, and he began to seek employment in London, first as a teacher and then in the foreign department of Lloyd's Bank.

"The Waste Land" presents Western society as a desert, symbolically representing the spiritual death and emptiness of its inhabitants. The opening line concerning April suggests the coming of rain and thus rebirth; ironically, the water that promises nourishment and life is only going to stir the seeds of death that have been planted and everyone is going to drown rather than find new life. Still, the speaker of the poem continues his quest for meaning and structure as he "fishes" for truth among the fragmented remains of Western culture. Whether one finds any meaning through the reading of the poem seems inconsequential, for the reading of the poem is an experience itself and represents the struggle to arrive at faith. Many find amusing the fact that Eliot completed the poem in a Swiss sanatarium while recuperating from a mental collapse brought on by overwork, marital problems, and depression. The American poet Ezra Pound, who had befriended Eliot in England, provided a great number of suggestions to Eliot that resulted in a much shorter version of the poem, the version we have today.

Eliot not only wrote all of the poems listed as answers to this question but a number of others, including "Ash Wednesday", "Sweeney among the Nightingales", and "Four Quartets". He also wrote "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" upon which the Webber musical "Cats" is based. In addition to poetry, Eliot is known for his drama, such as "Murder in the Cathedral", and his literary and social criticism. His approach to the interpretation of literature led to the creation of "New Criticism", which argued for the understanding of poems through their relationships with other poems not with the world outside of poetry. This approach shaped the literary curriculum in American colleges and universities for decades. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948.

Answer: William Faulkner

William Faulkner (1897-1962) is celebrated for his fiction's stark contrast to the minimalist style of writing made famous by his contemporary Ernest Hemingway. Faulkner relied heavily on lengthy, complex sentences, emotional narration, and a quite cerebral style. He frequently wrote novels told from different perspectives and made powerful use of stream of consciousness, a technique that allows a story to be narrated through the steady flow of a character's thoughts as that character is thinking them. Experimental novels that demonstrate these qualities are "The Sound and the Fury", "As I Lay Dying", and "Absalom! Absalom!" Faulkner also contributed to the tradition of the Southern gothic or grotesque story with short fiction like "A Rose for Emily", which involves a woman who has slept for years with the corpse of the fiance she murdered, and novels like "Sanctuary", which involves the abduction of a female university student who is abducted by hicks, one of them raping her with a corncob because he is impotent.

Some of his other books include "The Unvanquished", "The Wild Palms", "Go Down, Moses", and "Intruder in the Dust".

William Faulkner also wrote screenplays for Hollywood films, including the one adapted from Ernest Hemingway's novel "To Have and Have Not".

He won his Pulitzer Prizes in 1955 and 1963 and the Nobel Prize in 1949.

Answer: H. D.

Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961) was advised by Ezra Pound early in her career to use the pseudonym H. D., and after achieving success under that name, she continued to publish under it for the rest of her life, despite her eventual feminism. Some of her earliest poetry followed the goals of imagism, a poetic movement instigated and supported also by Ezra Pound. The technique involved arresting a reader's attention with a solitary image while avoiding the use of rhyme and meter and avoiding any explanation or declamation. In fact, H. D.'s first three poems appeared in "Poetry" magazine in 1913 under the name "H. D. Imagiste". One of her most anthologized imagist poems is "Oread":

"Whirl up, sea--
whirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines
on our rocks,
hurl your green over us,
cover us with your pools of fir."

With a title that refers to a nymph of mountains and hills, she metaphorically compares a scene of rolling mountains or hills covered with evergreens to an ocean, or is it the other way around?

Answer: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) captured perfectly the picture of American society during the Roaring '20s in his novel "The Great Gatsby". Of course, Fitzgerald had no way of knowing America would eventually suffer the Great Depression, but his novel shows a society blindly teetering precariously on the edge of a precipice. Modern society had corrupted the American Dream, and the mood of the country, particularly among the wealthy of its inhabitants, was one of overconfidence and hedonism. The characters of "The Great Gatsby" spend their money recklessly, live their lives recklessly, and treat one another recklessly so that they create a wreck of everything. Fitzgerald uses the automobile, the vehicle of the modern world, to suggest symbolically the recklessness of his characters as they speed inattentively and indifferently through life around them. Two drunken men leave one of Gatsby's parties and drive off the road, Jordan Baker nearly hits a man working on the side of the road and argues that he should have got out of her way, and Daisy runs down Myrtle Wilson while driving Gatsby's car.

Fitzgerald was also a master writer of short stories. Some of his collections are "Flappers and Philosophers" (1921), "Tales of the Jazz Age" (1922) which includes "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button", "All the Sad Young Men" (1926) which includes "Winter Dreams", and "Taps at Reveille (1935) which includes "Babylon Revisited".

Answer: E. E. Cummings

Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962) changed the concept of how poetry could be constructed and how it could appear on a page. He disregarded the prescriptivist rules of punctuation, grammar, and syntax. He frequently used the parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.) interchangeably in an unorthodox manner. He created his own words out of combinations of other recognizable words. He treated the lines and margins of a page as a canvas and distributed his words into patterns that contributed to "what the poem means"; he might write half of a line and then continue that line on the next line but only after having indented several spaces. Consider this first stanza as an example:

"anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did"

Cummings and a friend joined the ambulance corps in France the day after the United States entered the Great War. They began writing letters home about the horrible way the French were handling matters when they were arrested by the French for suspicion of espionage. Rather than becoming bitter about his imprisonment, he responded rather humorously and found in the occasion material for a book, the autobiographical "The Enormous Room". After the war, Cummings opened an art studio in Greenwich Village and began his career of writing. He won the National Book Award in 1957 for his collection "Poems" and the Bollingen Prize in poetry in 1958.

While Cummings' poetry certainly could be critical of the twentieth century's materialism and cynicism, it often stands out in contrast to much of the modernist poetry because of his hope in human beings' ability to show compassion and love to one another.

Answer: Eugene O'Neill

Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama an amazing four times: in 1920 for "Beyond the Horizon", in 1922 for "Anna Christie", in 1928 for "Strange Interlude", and posthumously in 1957 for "Long Day's Journey into Night" (which also won a Tony Award for Best Play and which is frequently listed among the top American dramas along with Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire" and Miller's "Death of a Salesman"). O'Neill is celebrated for successfully incorporating realism into American drama through themes, settings, characters, and dialogue, and for his support of African-American actors through plays like "All God's Chillun Got Wings", "The Emperor Jones", and "The Hairy Ape".

Although O'Neill had created a legal agreement that "Long Day's Journey into Night" not be published until twenty-five years after he died, his wife Carlotta managed to circumvent the law through her gift of the play to Yale University. Thus, the play ended up being published and performed only three years after his death.

O'Neill had tragic relationships with his own children. His two sons--Eugene, Jr., and Shane--both committed suicide following their addictions, the first son to alcohol and the second to heroin. His daughter Oona married the great American actor Charlie Chaplin when she was 18 and Chaplin was 54. O'Neill disowned her and never saw her again.

Other well-known plays of O'Neill's are "Mourning Becomes Elektra", "The Iceman Cometh", "A Moon for the Misbegotten", and "More Stately Mansions".

Answer: Langston Hughes

James Mercer Langston Hughes (1902-1967) contributed greatly to the creation and evolution of what is known as jazz poetry. Early jazz poetry was limited to pieces that made references to jazz--instruments, musicians, and scenes associated with the uniquely American music. However, Hughes began incorporating the syncopated rhythm of jazz as well as its phraseology to create a fusion of music and poetry. While this poetry was originally focused on African American culture, civil rights issues, and black pride, it eventually evolved into a form used by the Beat poets later in the twentieth century to advocate freedom, tolerance, and social reform. Jazz poetry also spawned the beginnings of hip hop and poetry slams.

The Harlem Renaissance was a movement that involved black writers, musicians, and artists who were attempting to celebrate African American culture and pride as well as bring national awareness of African American art and expression. The movement lasted from around 1918 to the early 1930s, when the Great Depression brought an end to its financial support. While the movement was obviously a national one, it was named after the Harlem community of New York City because most of its energy seemed to emanate from there. All of the writers listed as answers to this trivia question, as well as Zora Neale Hurston, were associated with this movement.

Answer: John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck (1902-1968) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1940 for his novel "The Grapes of Wrath". To write this novel, he relied not only on the experiences of his youth on the sugar beet farms, but also on several journalistic pieces about migrant workers that he had written while in San Francisco. While the book is now celebrated as one of the greatest American novels, it stirred up much controversy during the first few years of its publication, and Steinbeck was condemned and verbally attacked. Many felt that the novel not only falsely portrayed how horrible conditions were in the United States toward the close of the Great Depressio,n but that it also advocated socialism through its criticism of America's capitalist system. Many have continued to condemn the book, some going as far as banning it, because they have judged the book to be obscene.

Steinbeck wrote many other novels that are considered important to an understanding of the United States' culture and literary canon, including "Tortilla Flat", "Cannery Row", and "East of Eden". His novella "The Red Pony", a sequence of tales about a boy growing up on a California farm, is also considered significant. Some of Steinbeck's other books are "The Pearl", "The Moon Is Down", and "The Winter of Our Discontent". He also wrote a few screenplays, including the one for Alfred Hitchcock's film "Lifeboat".

During World War II, Steinbeck worked as a war correspondent and even assisted Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.'s invasion of an island off the coast of Italy. He returned from the war, suffering from shrapnel wounds and psychological trauma.

Answer: William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) published his poetry collection entitled "Spring and All" in 1923. The book contained numbered poems with no titles; however, many refer to number XXII as "The Red Wheelbarrow". The poem is often associated with the imagist movement, which was an attempt led by Ezra Pound to create poems that avoided explaining or advocating anything, abandoned rhyme and meter, and relied upon the power of one image to arrest attention and convey emotion. However, many also wonder whether Williams truly meant to represent imagism with this poem. The opening lines "much depends / upon" is obviously attempting to convey a message while conveying any messages was exactly what imagists wanted to avoid. These lines have led some to speculate that perhaps Williams is trying to ridicule imagism or that the poem is somewhat of an inside joke among poets. Others argue that Williams is instead making an important statement. They observe that each set of lines after the first set contains a fragmented part of a total picture; when the three fragments are, however, read together as one poem, the image is made complete. Furthermore, each line ends by either breaking apart a compound word or by separating a modifier from the word it modifies; thus, words and phrases are fragmented until someone reads the poem. The point, they argue, is that reality itself exists in fragments or chaos until the perceiver puts a reality together through his or her individual imagination. Thus, the poem accomplishes in eight lines what T. S. Eliot tried to accomplish with the entirety of "The Waste Land" . . . well, sort of. Williams felt Eliot's publication of "The Waste Land" was the greatest travesty to poetry. He respected the poem's genius, yet he hated its popularity and influence. Williams believed that "The Waste Land" was too international in its perspective, too elitist, too pessimistic, and, most importantly, too obscure for the common man. Williams believed American poetry should focus on and speak to common American people and society and use simpler language to make references to the world they knew; this did not include Eastern religion and philosophy or classical European art, music, and literature. Of course, Williams was certainly an experimental modernist. His poems rely heavily upon concrete sensory images with no exposition or argument, and they make use of short fragmented lines with no rhyme scheme or traditional metrical patterns.

Other famous poems of his are "The Young Housewife", "Spring and All", "To Elsie", "Jersey Lyric", and "This Is Just to Say" as well as his epic "Paterson". In 1952, Williams held the position of Consultant to the Library of Congress, or Poet Laureate, but lost the position because of his politics.

Answer: A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

"A Clean Well-Lighted Place" was originally published in "Scribner's Magazine" in 1933. Many short story writers and scholars consider it, along with Hemingway's "Hills like White Elephants", to be one of America's greatest short stories as well as one of the greatest representations of the art of writing short stories. Within the span of a very few pages and through a deceptively simple prose style, Hemingway packs a universe of meaning. Like the young waiter who cannot see beneath the surfaces of things, the reader is puzzled by the story's apparent pointlessness and is tempted to dismiss the story as a meaningless one.

However, a more thoughtful approach to the story leads to a more profound understanding. At the beginning of the story, the young waiter informs the elder waiter that the old man, who keeps the two of them lingering at the cafe late at night, tried to kill himself the week before.

When the elder waiter asks, "What about?", the younger waiter replies, "Nothing". Ironically, he cannot see that he has unwittingly explained exactly why the old man tried to kill himself: he has nothing in his life worth living for, and the nothingness is what has caused his depression.

The older waiter understands this and has sympathy for the old man. He explains to the young waiter at another point in the story that he is no longer young and no longer has confidence. The reader also sees in the end that he also no longer has faith. Both he and the old man are searching for a "clean, well-lighted place", represented by the cafe and the bar. Symbolically, they are searching for light, comfort, peace, or truth in a modern world where structure and order have fallen apart. This same idea is captured in William Butler Yeats' modernist poem "Second Coming" through the famous words, "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold". Thus, the older waiter eventually goes home and lies awake suffering from insomnia in the dark and waiting for the daylight so that he can finally sleep. Hemingway thought of the sunrise, like so many others have and do, as a symbol of hope, and this view explains why he took words from "Ecclesiastes" to create the title of his first novel, "The Sun Also Rises". While that novel portrays the twentieth-century man as being lost, Hemingway wanted to suggest that while there is cause for despair, there is also cause for hope.