American Literature Since 1900

The new Modernist thought from Europe started to penetrate American life with remarkable speed. Malcolm Bradbury opens with an account of American fiction and poetry over the first 20 years of this century, contrasting the naturalism of Theodore Dreiser with the experimentalism of Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. Dennis Welland discusses the literature of the inter-war years, dominated by the writing of Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Moving through the next decades to the new post modern forms of the late 1960s onwards, Jerome Klinkowitz considers writers as diverse as Kurt Vonnegut, Ken Kesey and Philip Roth. There are sections on American poetry and a chapter on American theatre in which the work of America's first great dramatist, Eugene O'Neill, is assessed.