The Harlem Renaissance
I, too, sing America – Langston Hughes
When Harlem was in vogue, the jazz clubs of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue hummed to the sound of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, the streets were thronged with thousands recently arrived from the South, and a younger generation of writers was coalescing as the first black literary movement in America's history. Jean Toomer's highly experimental Cane— which combines poems and lyrical vignettes—was one of the first books of the Harlem Renaissance and a cornerstone of the movement. The movement was identified as such in Alain Locke's 1925 anthology The New Negro and was further defined in the daring single issue of Fire!!, to which nearly all of the movement's core writers, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, contributed. Some writers associated with the movement, such as Countee Cullen, wrote in a seemingly more traditional manner, but although aesthetically varied, Harlem (or New Negro) Renaissance writers consistently viewed race, identity, and the African American experience in ways that broke from earlier forms and gave expression to a new sense of cultural identity. Writing concurrently with the Lost Generation (The Great Gatsby was published within months of The New Negro), Renaissance writers were also concerned with representations of authentic experience and voice. This interest in folk ways and vernacular met with resistance from the literary establishment, which found the writings of Wallace Thurman and Jean Toomer and the drawings of Richard Bruce and Aaron Douglas to be vulgar and shocking. What this generation was, certainly, was new and deeply influential: the young writers and artists came "bringing gifts" of modernist creativity and exerted lasting influence on the landscape of twentieth century American literature.
American Spaces
I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it ... It opened up a gold mine of other people, so I created a cosmos of my own.– William Faulkner
The space in which an author composes, the setting in which characters reveal themselves, the places (linguistic, psychological and geographic) that writing explores — are all bound up in literary expression. What does it mean to write from or about a place? The Harlem Renaissance drew writers to northern Manhattan; the Lost Generation coalesced in Paris; and the first generation modernist poets crossed paths in London. But when not bound together by a distinct literary movement, or by thematic focus or stylistic experimentation, what does it mean to write from a place then? Writing firmly from American soil, these writers of the first half of the twentieth century turned their focus to immediate surroundings and used regional settings to explore questions of identity, place, and circumstance. Willa Cather left Nebraska decades before penning her lyrical descriptions of the prairie in My Ántonia, while William Faulkner hardly left central Mississippi, the site of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. John Steinbeck and James Agee documented the realities of the Depression-era rural South and West while Daschell Hammett and Raymond Chandler evoked the gritty underworld of urban California. They used writing for different ends, but regional geography served them all as a fulcrum, and the varied landscapes and social realities of the United States provide a setting for close examinations of character, of language, of psychological time — and of real external pressures.
Crisis and Identity
The world can make it very difficult for a man to live his life as he feels he should, or as he knows he must.– James Baldwin
The trauma of conflict shapes the literary landscape. The Lost Generation came of age concurrently with the First World War, and, in the decades following the close of World War II, American writers again struggled to identify and come to terms with a changed world. They reacted to shifting political and social pressures and treated these struggles — along with other interior or psychological ones — with newly explicit frankness. Responding to the crisis of war and ensuing cultural conservatism; the anti-Communist fervor of the McCarthy Era; and continued social and racial injustice, these authors looked at what it meant to come of age in a traumatized world, and they took on themes of gender, sexuality, race, and politics. Several works in this section have been banned at some point — or were published under pseudonyms (as with Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar), or incomplete (as with Richard Wright’s Black Boy) — and are emotionally incisive, autobiographically-driven examinations of interiority and psychological realism. Authors' correspondence and photographs can help us understand their published works, as an illuminating letter from James Baldwin and an entry from Tennessee Williams’s diary show. The critical exposure and personal vulnerability portrayed by these writers resonated with contemporary audiences, and continues to do so. The works of Mailer, Salinger, Plath, Baldwin and others provide an opportunity to examine the ways that war and trauma directly and obliquely influence literary development and even to draw comparisons to our own current era of conflict and social injustice.
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