The period from 1910 to 1950 was the age of modernism in literature, art, and music. James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land (both published in 1922), and the experiments by Pablo Picasso, Duke Ellington, and Arnold Schönberg defined the aesthetic of the first half of the twentieth century in defiance of artistic developments from the Renaissance to nineteenth-century realism. The modernist emphasis was on “abstract” form rather than on theme and on a new nonlinearity rather than on traditional artistic development and execution. Artists and writers increasingly wished to represent the sense of speed and motion that trains, trolleys, automobiles, and other means of modern transportation made widely available. Modernists were also interested in adapting techniques of nonwestern art and of the new formal language of film. These trends supported the “experimental,” detached, and often difficult quality of modernism that took different shape in the various movements (the many “isms”) that emerged in the course of the century. Amazingly, what started as the fringe enterprise of a few radical artists at the beginning of the century who set out to “defamiliarize,” to “alienate” their small audiences, and what appeared as if it would be replaced by a second wave of realism in the 1930s (when Gertrude Stein bought work by such painters as Christian Bérard, Pavel Tcheletchew, or Francis Rose), became the dominant expression of Western art by the 1950s.

Looking back at modernism, the Harvard University critic Harry Levin marveled at the fact that “The Picasso” could have become the name of an apartment building in New York, and his Columbia University colleague Lionel Trilling wondered what had changed to make modernism teachable in so many colleges and schools around the United States.

Adams might well have conceded Turner special authority, for he thought of people like Turner as allied with the future. He may even have felt some sympathy for Turner’s purpose: few episodes in the search for some “form of religious hope” or “promise of ultimate perfection” left him wholly unmoved. Still, in his own reflections he remained ambivalent about the consolidated forces that were shaping the modern world and skeptical about the several theories – “formulas,” “arranged sequences,” and “convenient fictions,” he called them at various times – that proposed to explain them. In a chapter of The Education called “The Grammar of Science” (the title of a book by Karl Pearson published in 1899), he follows Pearson in contrasting the precision of our knowledge of the world made available through sensory experience to science with the uncertainty of our knowledge of all relations between our deepest human needs and the world we inhabit:

In his sense of the allure and the threat of dissociation between nature and culture, in which nature becomes an object of analysis, manipulation, and exploitation, while culture becomes the creation of human hands directed by “characteristics and conceptions...solely associated with the mind of man,” Adams locates the origin of the “modern” mind – including “American” versions of it.

The fiction of Henry James often features “passionate pilgrims” who leave home in search of “chance feasts” and then proceed through life as “wondering and dawdling and gaping” seekers. But it also features people who scheme and design pushed by economic competition and pulled by sexual desire as well as a desire for personal power. The discourse of imaginative contemplation, the discourse of profit and loss, and the discourse of sexual conquest merge in James’s work, each converted, as it were, into the currency of the other. In The Golden Bowl (1904), Adam Verver’s “majestic scheme” possesses “all the sanctions of civilization” and aims at meeting the needs of the “thirsty millions” who seek culture as people once sought faith. Behind his “strange scheme” lie two convictions: that “he had force” because “he had money” and that “acquisition of one sort” could become the “perfect preliminary to acquisition of another.” Finally, we come to see both the majestic millions he has made and the majestic palace of art he envisages as products of his capitalistic gifts for “transcendent calculation and imaginative gambling” or, put another way, for “getting in” and “getting out” at the right times – in short, for the “creation of ‘interests’ that were the extinction of other interests.”

In order to place Adam Verver’s talent for accumulating money and power under the aspect of his talent for majestic scheming in the name of art and, conversely, his talent for majestic scheming in the name of art under the aspect of his acquisitive talents, James employs a language in which erotic, political, economic, and aesthetic desires intermingle.

For the immigrant and ethnic narratives from The Life Stories, The Promised Land, and Giants in the Earth to Call It Sleep, Laughing in the Jungle, and Mount Allegro the decisive international connections were those that linked “Americans in the making” with various countries, or villages, of origin. For Antin, it was Polotzk, for Rölvaag, the island of Dönna, for Saroyan, Bitlis in eastern Anatolia, and for Roth’s David, the village Veljish. In the last two chapters in Mount Allegro, Mangione returned to his mother’s birthplace Realmonte (or “Munderialli,” as the natives called it), his father’s original home in Porto Empedocle, and other places in the vicinity of the Sicilian city Agrigento.

The Native’s Return: An American Immigrant Visits Yugoslavia and Discovers His Old Country (1934) took Louis Adamic, on a Guggenheim fellowship he received with the help of Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken, back to his birthplace in the Slovenian village of Blato. His first home seemed much smaller than the emigrant had remembered it, for now he had the “consciousness of the Empire State Building and the interior of the Grand Central in New York City.” Adamic was impressed, however, by the “bright green of the meadows” with “big splashes of buttercups and purple clover ahum with bees” as well as “forgetmenots in abundance” and “more lilies-of-the-valley in one spot” than he had seen in “nineteen years in America.” America seemed to stand for the impressive scale of its man-built environment, while Blato had nostalgic value as pure nature, and Adamic clearly cherished both.

1928 saw the publication not only of Home To Harlem but also of several other important Renaissance novels. Nella Larsen’s Quicksand was one of these signal appearances. Born in Chicago in 1891, Larsen tried several careers, beginning and ending her working life as a nurse, but also serving as a librarian in the New York Public Library system. At some point Larsen decided upon a writer’s life and set out consciously to achieve that goal. Her marriage to a physicist of impeccable family solidified her position in black New York society, and recommendations from such notables as Walter White and Carl Van Vechten helped her become the first black woman to win a Guggenheim. In addition to two novellas, Larsen published several short stories, one of which, “Sanctuary” (1930), brought her infamy because of plagiarism charges leveled against her, accusations of which she was eventually cleared. (The editors of Forum, who published the work, reviewed Larsen’s drafts of her story and one titled “Mrs. Adis” by Sheila Kaye-Smith; they supported Larsen’s claim of literary coincidence.) In addition to her professional woes Larsen fought a bitter and public divorce, for her professor-husband had an affair with a white colleague. Did the strains of her life exhaust her creative energies? Whatever the reasons, Larsen would publish nothing after 1930, despite announced plans for a third novel, “Fall Fever.” Slender though they may be, Larsen’s two novels remain a valuable legacy of the Renaissance. Their psychologically astute portraits of women walking the tightrope of color, class, and sexual respectability continue to win admiring critics.

Facing a world that seemed in danger of losing its way, shapers of the documentary movement in the thirties brought to culmination the most extensive literary and artistic effort ever launched in the United States to search out, record, examine, and alter the life and values of the people of the United States. The guidebooks sponsored by the WPA present the thirties as a casualty of the past. They focus on dusty, windblown streets and peeling storefronts; on dried-up towns and eroded farms; on segregated water fountains and segregated restrooms; on houses whose windows and doors are shut; and on faces that are gaunt, blank, or even battered. Reiterating the messages conveyed by the titles of books like Dreiser’s Tragic America (1931), Wilson’s American Jitters (1932), and Anderson’s Puzzled America (1935), they provide correctives, as Robert Cantwell noted, “to the success stories that dominate our literature.” At the same time, they exemplify energy and resolve. By bringing photography into innovative conjunctions with new modes of reporting, Bourke-White and Caldwell, Wright and Rosskam, Lange and Taylor, and Agee and Evans added a literary dimension to the “bold, persistent experimentation” that was the trademark of the New Deal. In the process, they helped to salvage and rehabilitate both “America” and “the People” as ideas of genuine force.

Moved by a similar sense of crisis, historical novelists like Kenneth Roberts searched through the nation’s past, looking for heroes. Documentary works of the thirties focus on the average suffering of the neglected and voiceless poor – and, if only as putative presences, on the intent, inquiring faces of writers and photographers jerked to attention by that suffering.

As the twenties lurched back and forth between salvaging the old and embracing the new, a series of interrelated developments – including the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the long, divisive trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1920–27), and the passage of the National Origins Act of 1924 – exposed conflicts that gave the era a paranoid tilt. In the Black Sox scandal of 1919, the greed of gamblers and of Charles A. Cominskey, owner of the Chicago White Sox, merged with the resentments of the players to besmirch baseball, the “national pastime,” and ruin the careers of innocent as well as guilty players. A. Mitchell Palmer, Hoover’s attorney general, once a devout Quaker and prewar Progressive, took the lead in promoting postwar hysteria by accusing recent immigrants of bringing the nation to the edge of “internal revolution.” In his campaign, Palmer attracted a group of unlikely supporters, including avid nativists, resurgent fundamentalists, and men bearing distinguished names and occupying high offices. “The Nordic race” must fight “against the dangerous foreign races,” wrote Madison Grant, the patrician New Yorker who headed the Museum of Natural History, in The Passing of the Great Race (1916). Other socially prominent sorts, including Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, President F. A. Walker of MIT, Professor John W. Burgess of Columbia, and Professor N. S. Shaler of Harvard, voiced similar sentiments. An “alien usually remains an alien no matter what is done to him,” the less polished Hiram Wesley Evans wrote shortly after the war, no matter “what veneer of education he gets, what oaths he takes.”

Speaking in 1964, Ralph Ellison described William Faulkner as the novelist who had brought “the impelling moral function of the novel and...the moral seriousness of the form...into explicit statement again.” On one level, Ellison described this move as consonant with what the “American novel at its best” (Melville, Twain, James, Fitzgerald, Hemingway are among those he mentions) had always done. On another, he described it as consonant with the “specific concerns of literature,” including explorations of “new possibilities of language.” But he also described it as a move that was natural and even necessary for Faulkner because he had “lived close to moral and political problems which would not stay put underground.”

Faulkner’s fiction owes something to his powers of observation and his ear for dialect, and something to his sense that human lives are always shaped by natural and social forces, which is to say, by instinct, and preconscious needs and desires, as well as by culture. His stories are rooted in history as both natural scene and cultural construct. In addition, his fiction owes much to stories and poems be had read and tales he had heard, some of them about the adventures of his own prominent family in North Mississippi. As stories based on direct observation, his novels come to us as more or less organized reports on observed realities. As stories rooted in history, they remind us of the historicity of all deeds done and all words spoken. As stories anchored in individual consciousnesses – the memories and imaginations of narrators of diverse needs and desires as well as mixed strengths and weaknesses – his novels seem necessary and revealing in some moments, tricky and even deceitful in others.

When Gertrude Stein’s “Gentle Lena” realizes that her marriage plans have failed, she goes home alone in a streetcar crying, and the conductor and the other passengers empathize with her: “And everybody in the car was sorry for poor Lena.” The conductor kindly promises her, “You’ll get a real man yet, one that will be better for you,” and Lena feels slightly better. Stein may have thwarted the reader’s expectation to express empathy in the brief death scenes of Three Lives, but she did represent the kindness of strangers in the streetcar setting of her modern city of “Bridgepoint.”

Streetcars are a prototypical modern symbol that the reader often encounters in literature of the first half of the twentieth century. Henry James, returning to America in 1904–5 after a very long absence, found in the electric cars that had arrived in New York in 1887 the concentrated presence of new immigrants: “The carful, again and again, is a foreign carful; a row of faces, up and down, testifying, without exception, to alienism unmistakable, alienism undisguised and unashamed,” he writes in The American Scene (1907). Streetcar settings – as well as scenes on subways, trains, buses, and other means of public transportation – may provide local background, may bring friendly, hostile, or indifferent strangers together, may inspire a hero to seek a revelation on the tracks, or may serve as a formal inspiration to convey the sense of movement, speed, or electric power. One only has to think of Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (“The apparition of these faces in the crowd;/Petals on a wet, black bough.”).

In Henry Roth’s novel Call It Sleep (1934), the strands of ethnicity, modernity, and modernism come together inseparably, and at a very high point of American literary achievement. This autobiographically inflected novel is an outstanding example of their fusion into “ethnic modernism.” When the eight-year-old Jewish immigrant protagonist David Schearl attempts, in the experimental twenty-first chapter of book four (“The Rail”), to stick a milk ladle into the electric rail of the Eighth-Street trolley tracks on New York’s Lower East Side, a high modernist verbal explosion accompanies this climactic moment in the novel.

Such external descriptions alternate with, and the pervasive -ing forms here seem to echo, the sounds of the streetcars: “Klang! Klang! Klang!” – as an avant-garde anticipation of Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane’s cheerier and more popular “Trolley Song” in the film Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). A surrealistic melting-pot melange of people’s eyes observes David’s body lying on the tracks.

Delmore Schwartz argued in 1951 that Hemingway’s style was neither primitive nor proletarian:

Schwartz’s linking of Hemingway’s “Americanness,” employment of the international theme, and possible reliance on immigrant speech was perceptive. “Hemingway spoken here” might well have been the motto of much prose writing of the 1930s, and American ethnic writers gave ample testimony to their indebtedness.

Meyer Levin, a Jewish novelist from Chicago who wrote the trilogy-length novel The Old Bunch (1937) and was later instrumental in publishing Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl (1952) in English translation, started his career with two Hemingwayesque novels. Reporter (1929), a city desk book, and Frankie and Johnnie (1930), the story of a failed romance with such sentences as: “All the time Johnnie was thinking these things Frankie wasn’t riding home on the L at all. All that time, Frankie was riding home on the bus.”

One of the great and widely recognized works of modern American ethnic literature in a language apart from English was a trilogy originally written in Norwegian by O. E. Rölvaag. It consists of Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie (originally published as two separate novels I de dage, 1924, and Riket grundlœgges, 1925; Engl. both 1927), Peder Victorious: A Tale of the Pioneers Twenty Years Later (orig. Peder Seier, 1928, Engl. 1929), and Their Fathers’ God (orig. Den signede dag, 1931, Engl. 1931). Rölvaag’s work marked a high point of American literature, but also the beginning of the end of Norwegian-language writing in the United States, a rich body of works that includes not only Buslett and Dahl, but a long line of novelistic precursors. Singularly noteworthy among them is the beautifully melancholy (and social-reformist) novel En saloonkeepers datter (1887, Engl. A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter) by the Norwegian-born author Drude Krog Janson. The heroine of the novel’s title is the memorable character Astrid Holm, the daughter of a stern bourgeois businessman and a melancholy actress, who, after her mother’s death and the failure of her father’s business, follows him (with her much younger brothers) from Norway to Minnesota – where none of the Old World maxims seem to apply any more and where her new identity is simply that of A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter. The central part of the novel shows the heroine’s attempt to find her own way through different suitors, and, ultimately, as an ordained minister and close friend of a woman doctor.

In a short sketch called “First Aid to the Alien” and published in Outlook in 1912, Mary Antin describes a trolley-car encounter between an American botanist and the little Italian immigrant boy Tomaso Verticelli. Upset by the mess that Italian children have made in the car, and by the helplessness of the conductor who cannot get through to the immigrants because they do not understand a word he is saying, the botanist sternly lectures the little boy, “No – rubbish – on – the – floor,” adding, “That’s not American.” The Italian boy and his sister seem to understand, and, “like a pair of brown monkeys,” they clean the car thoroughly. Later, the boy’s teacher discovers that “Thomas” Verticelli strangely believes that the Star-Spangled Banner stands for “America! No rubbish on the floor!”

This streetcar encounter resembles that of Stein’s “Gentle Lena” more than that of the Southern colored woman in the Independent, for it seems to show an act of kindness, of “first aid,” among strangers on an electric car. Yet Antin’s light and vaguely humorous vignette also represents the issue of “Americanization” as a problem of cleanliness, implies that it was foreign-tongued immigrants who made America dirty, and suggests that the problem could be resolved by education, and especially by teaching the English language and American patriotism. The story literally shows “dirty foreigners” (as xenophobic propaganda would vilify immigrants) but then proceeds to persuade the reader that a good-hearted, scholarly Yankee father figure can get the right message across, even to “monkey”-like little aliens.

Photography began acquiring documentary authority in the nineteenth century, when the daguerreotype first appeared. Later, as equipment improved, it began to assert itself as an art form that tied artistic fidelity to passivity. Later still, having joined forces with literary realism and naturalism, it reinforced aesthetic doctrines of direct presentation and authorial impersonality. During the thirties, it allied itself with history, as a recording instrument, and to a lesser extent with sociology, as an analytic tool. Large-scale efforts, including several funded by such government agencies as the Farm Security Administration, were launched to create photographic records of faces and scenes. In a related move, with the example of the camera in mind, writers began using words to record and preserve objects, faces, and scenes. Like Asch’s The Road (1937), Louis Adamic’s My America (1938) reports without photographs, but the recording instinct of the social reporter informs his work, and so does the example of the camera. In books like Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell’s You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor’s An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion in the Thirties (1939), Archibald MacLeish’s Land of the Free (1938), and Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam’s Twelve Million Black Voices (1941), words and photographs comment on one another. In each of these books, however, the text tends to become subordinate to the photographs, as MacLeish acknowledged by saying that, having begun as “a book of poems illustrated by photographs,” his project had become “a book of photographs illustrated by a poem.”

“It is the glory of the present age that in it one can be young,” Randolph Bourne wrote in 1913, four years before World War I engulfed the United States and five before he died at age thirty-two. Scarred and disfigured at birth by a botched delivery, then crippled by spinal tuberculosis that deformed his back and stunted his growth, Bourne learned early to think of himself as too “cruelly blasted” to live a full life. Yet he wrote – Youth and Life (1913) and Education and Living (1917) and a series of essays for New Republic, Masses, Seven Arts, and Dial – as a fully engaged critic about the major concerns of the Lyric Years: youth, rebellion, education, politics, literature, and the arts. When it happened that he did not survive his age (he died in December 1918 of influenza), his friends came to regard him as the writer who best embodied its lost hope. After his death, both James Oppenheim and Van Wyck Brooks edited collections of his essays – Untimely Papers (1919) and The History of a Literary Radical (1920) – in order to help establish him as its representative cultural critic.

Had Bourne written about himself, as several critics of his time did, such a development might seem less odd. In fact, however, though he took Walt Whitman as one of his prophets, Bourne avoided himself as subject. He focused instead on the aspirations and anxieties of his age, as though hoping vicariously to live them, and so made its yearnings his yearnings, its despair his despair.

In Workers: An Experiment in Reality – The West (1899), Walter Wyckoff surveys the harsh consequences of being poor in a land of plenty, particularly when poverty begins to close in as something remorseless and final, enforcing a sense that one is a “superfluous human being” for whom “there is no part in the play of the world’s activity.” Dreiser glimpsed such moments as a boy and never forgot them. The diaries he kept between Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925) show little sympathy for blacks and Jews and less interest in the plight of the poor than in his own string of sexual conquests. But memories of his own painful childhood stayed with him. “Any form of distress,” he once remarked – “a wretched, down-at-heels neighborhood, a poor farm, an asylum, a jail,” or people without “means of subsistence” – was sufficient to provoke something close to actual “physical pain.”

Dreiser begins An American Tragedy, his first commercial success, with Clyde Griffiths, a young boy full of yearning, enclosed by “the tall walls of the commercial heart of an American city.” He then traces Clyde’s brief rise to no great height and ends with him locked in a prison cell, waiting to be executed. Enticed by his society’s major inducements – not only wealth, status, and power, but also meretricious glamor and beauty – Clyde becomes an easy victim of its failure to provide him any values by which to live, other than hope of entering, as a member rather than as a hired hand or guest, the world of the very rich. His money-conscious, pleasure-seeking world teaches him to admire people above him and use those below him.