William Faulkner (1897-1962)

In an attempt to create a saga of his own, Faulkner has invented a host of characters typical of the historical growth and subsequent decadence of the South. The human drama in Faulkner's novels is then built on the model of the actual, historical drama extending over almost a century and a half. Each story and each novel contributes to the construction of a whole, which is the imaginary Yoknapatawpha County and its inhabitants. Their theme is the decay of the old South, as represented by the Sartoris and Compson families, and the emergence of ruthless and brash newcomers, the Snopeses. Theme and technique - the distortion of time through the use of the inner monologue are fused particularly successfully in “The Sound and the Fury” (1929), the downfall of the Compson family seen through the minds of several characters. The novel “Sanctuary” (1931) is about the degeneration of Temple Drake, a young girl from a distinguished southern family. Its sequel “Requiem For A Nun” (1951), written partly as a drama, centered on the courtroom trial of a Negro woman who had once been a party to Temple Drake's debauchery. In “Light in August” (1932) prejudice is shown to be most destructive when it is internalized, as in Joe Christmas, who believes, though there is no proof of it, that one of his parents was a Negro. The theme of racial prejudice is brought up again in “Absalom, Absalom!” (1936), in which a young man is rejected by his father and brother because of his mixed blood. Faulkner's most outspoken moral evaluation of the relationship and the problems between Negroes and whites is to be found in “Intruder In the Dust” (1948).

In 1940 Faulkner published the first volume of the Snopes trilogy “The Hamlet”, to be followed by two volumes “The Town” (1957) and “The Mansion” (1959), all of them tracing the rise of the insidious Snopes family to positions of power and wealth in the community. “The reivers”, his last and most humorous work, with great many similarities to Mark Twain's “Huckleberry Finn”, appeared in 1962, the year of Faulkner's death. Faulkner managed to encompass an enormous range of humanity in Yoknapatawpha County, a Mississippian region of his own invention. He recorded his characters' seemingly unedited ramblings in order to represent their inner states, a technique called "stream of consciousness". He also jumbled time sequences to show how the past – especially the slave-holding era of the Deep South – endures in the present. Among his great works are “Absalom, Absalom!”, “As I Lay Dying”, “The Sound and the Fury”, and “Light in August”.

American drama attained international status only in the 1920s and 30s, with the works of Eugene O'Neill. He began to write plays in the fall of 1913. He wrote the one-act “Bound East for Cardiff “ in the spring of 1914. This is the only one of the plays written in this period which has any merit. In the next few years the theatre put on nearly all of his short plays, but it was not until 1920 that a long play “Beyond the Horizon” was produced in New York. Some of the critics praised the play and it was soon given a theatre for a regular run, and later on in the year was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He received this prize again in 1922 for “Anna Christie” and for the third time in 1928 for “Strange Interlude”. John Steinbeck (1902–1968)

The great author depicted in his works severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. He was a clear representative of Depression era literature which was blunt and direct in its social criticism. After publishing some novels and short stories, Steinbeck first became widely known with “Tortilla Flat” (1935), a series of humorous stories about Monterey paisanos. Steinbeck's novels can all be classified as social novels dealing with the economic problems of rural labour, but there is also a streak of worship of the soil in his books, which does not always agree with his matter-of-fact sociological approach. After the rough and earthy humour of “Tortilla Flat”, he moved on to more serious fiction, often aggressive in its social criticism, to “In Dubious Battle” (1936), which deals with the strikes of the migratory fruit pickers on California plantations. This was followed by “Of Mice and Men” (1937), the story of the imbecile giant Lennie, and a series of admirable short stories collected in the volume “The Long Valley” (1938). In 1939 he published what is considered his best work “The Grapes of Wrath”, the story of Oklahoma tenant farmers who, unable to earn a living from the land, moved to California where they became migratory workers. Among his later works should be mentioned “East of Eden” (1952), “The Winter of Our Discontent” (1961), and “Travels with Charley” (1962), a travelogue in which Steinbeck wrote about his impressions during a three-month tour in a truck that led him through forty American states. His style was simple and evocative, winning him the favor of the readers but not of the critics. Steinbeck often wrote about poor, working-class people and their struggle to lead a decent and honest life. “The Grapes of Wrath”, considered his masterpiece, is a strong, socially-oriented novel that tells the story of the Joads, a poor family from Oklahoma and their journey to California in search of a better life. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.

Henry Miller assumed a unique place in American Literature in the 1930s when his semi-autobiographical novels, written and published in Paris, were banned from the US. Although his major works, including “Tropic of Cancer” and “Black Spring”, would not be free of the label of obscenity until 1962, their themes and stylistic innovations had already exerted a major influence on succeeding generations of American writers, and paved the way for sexually frank 1960s novels by John Updike.