American Literature of the 1930’s

American Literature of the 1930’s

Contextually, 1930’s America was suffering from a great depression, 25% of labourers were unemployed and government intervention was at first pretty non-existent. It was during this decade that Hitler rose to power, alongside this there were also natural challenges as the worst drought was occurring in American history. Writers during this time tended to focus heavily of family values, racial tension and the inevitable falsity of the American dream.

James Agee 1909-1955

Let us now praise famous men 1941

Plot – a work of non-fiction by a journalist who was assigned to produce a "photographic and verbal record of the daily living and environment of an average white family of tenant farmers", as the story progressed it focused on conditions among sharecropper families in the American South during the "Dust Bowl".

Themes – life under President Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal", the struggles faced by victims of capitalism in 1936, and the concept of human dignity. Agee was one of the first authors to write about tenant farmers in a sympathetic way.

Earnest Hemmingway 1899-1961

Farewell to arms 1929

Plot -The novel is divided into five books. In the first book, Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver serving in the Italian Army meets Nurse Catherine Barkley, and their relationship begins. On the Italian front, Frederic is wounded in the knee by a mortar and sent to a hospital in Milan, where Catherine is also sent. After his knee healed, he is diagnosed with jaundice but is soon kicked out of the hospital and sent back to the front after being discovered with alcohol. By now Catherine is three months pregnant. In the third book, Frederic returns to his unit and kills a sergeant for insubordination. Frederic is taken to a place by the "battle police," and escapes by jumping into a river. He heads to Milan to find Catherine the two then flee to Switzerland in a rowboat. In the final book Catherine goes into labour their son is stillborn; Catherine begins to haemorrhage and dies.

Themes the novel could not be published in Italy until 1948 because the fascist regime said it was anti-militarist; there are also focusses on the PTSD associated with life on the front line and the displacement of populations

William Faulkner 1897-1952

The sound and the fury

Plot -The Sound and the Fury is set in Jefferson, Mississippi. The novel centers on the Compson family, former Southern aristocrats who are struggling to deal with the dissolution of their family and its reputation. Over the course of the 30 years in the novel, the family falls into financial ruin, loses its religious faith