Kathleen Kuiper - Authors of the Early to Mid-20th Century

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First Edition

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Authors of the early to mid-20th century/edited by Kathleen Kuiper.First edition.

pages cm.(The Britannica Guide to Authors)

In association with Britannica Educational Publishing, Rosen Educational Services.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-62275-008-5 (eBook)

1. Authors20th centuryBiography. 2. AuthorshipHistory20th century. 3. Literature, Modern20th centuryBio-bibliography. I. Kuiper, Kathleen, editor of compilation.

PN451.A96 2013

809'.04dc23

2013001095

Manufactured in the United States of America

On the cover, p.3: Ernest Hemingway, one of the most popular American authors of the 20th century, penned a number of works highly regarded by both critics and the public. Alfred Eisenstaedt/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

CONTENTS

Early Modernist William Butler Yeats, c. 1902. George Eastman House/Archive Photos/Getty Images

M any of the most prominent features of the modern worldas well as much of its charactercame into being during the first half of the 20th century. Well-known benchmarks include the proliferation of the automobile, the invention of television, and the development of atomic energy. But the political and cultural upheavals of this period (including two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the global rise of communism) had arguably even greater influence on contemporary society. As examined in the pages ahead, the impact of these cultural sea changes can be seen in the radical evolution of literature during the first five decades of the 20th century.

One of the first authors to reflect in his writing the seismic changes of this time was the Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats (18651939). Yeats started his literary career as a fairly traditional poet bent on using his medium to capture the beauty of the world. However, as he witnessed the massive political upheavals of the early 20th century, the themes of his poetry grew darker and more engaged in the concerns of the modern age, most famously in his apocalyptic free-verse poem The Second Coming.

The literary movement that Yeats helped initiate was known as Modernism, and it flourished in the years following World War I (191418). In the wake of that geopolitical watershed, postwar Modernist literature reflected a sense of disillusionment and fragmentation, and the works themselves became more experimental than ever before. Modernism was the major literary movement of the first half of the 20th century and is perhaps best exemplified in the writings of Yeats, Marcel Proust (18711922), Virginia Woolf (18821941), James Joyce (18821941), Franz Kafka (18831924), T.S. Eliot (18881965), and William Faulkner (18971962).

The French author Marcel Proust is primarily known for his masterpiece la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), a seven-volume novel that tells the story of Prousts life as a symbolic quest for truth. The remembrance is famously touched off by the narrators consuming a madeleine cake, which powerfully calls forth his unconscious memories. Through the painstaking examination of events in his life, Proust (through his narrator) shows that even the mundane and seemingly pointless moments in ones life are often suffused with vast import and beauty. It is not just the novel conceit of the plot and the books massive scope that make Prousts magnum opus notable, but also the transcendent beauty of his prose, which is written in what has come to be regarded as among the most original and influential styles of the century.

Virginia Woolf was an English author of novels and nonfiction works who was one of the great innovators of narrative structure in the history of literature. Her major works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves, as well as the landmark feminist essay A Room of Ones Own. To the Lighthouse is especially noteworthy, as the bookwhich shows the Ramsey family at its summer home on the English seaside on two days a decade aparthas an innovative three-part plot that focuses on the affairs of Ramseys in the first and last thirds, but turns to the empty summer house in the middle. In that landmark middle section, Woolf meticulously describes the degradation of the house while off-handedly referring to major events in the Ramseys lives such as deaths of characters from the first part of the novel. That drastic change of traditional narrative focuswhich until then typically had followed the comings and goings of a works charactersmirrored the widespread and unsettling indifference toward human life that came with World War I. A similar upending of assumed certitudes, but one that directly addresses the real world, is seen in Woolfs A Room of Ones Own. Her essay claims that centuries of prejudice and financial and economic disadvantagearising from life in a patriarchal societyhave inhibited womens creativity and resulted in the relative dearth of female writers over the years.

The Irish author James Joyce is arguably the greatest figure in 20th century literature. His reputation rests primarily upon his novel Ulysses, which is often regarded as the greatest novel ever written, but his other writingsnotably Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Finnegans Wakeexpressed the spirit of Modernism as well as any others of the time. Ulysses, which parallels events in the life of the Greek character for which it is named, unfolds on a single day (June 16, 1904). It is famous for its stream-of-consciousness narrative technique, wherein the actions of the book are relayed through the inner thoughts of its characters. Stream-of-consciousness was not a new literary device in the 1920s, but Joyce brought an unparalleled level of verisimilitude to it, explicating all the sudden digressions, lapses, and half thoughts that occur when one is seemingly thinking about a single subject. While the text is united by the stream-of-consciousness technique,