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    A Brief Summary of the History of American Literature(五)

      4.2. Representative writers

      Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 26, 1888. He studied at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford. In 1927, he became a British subject. In 1917, he published The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. And in 1920, Eliot began The Waste Land, which compelled immediate critical attention. After The Hollow Men and the Sweeney Agonistes, which continue The Waste Land’s critique of modern civilization, he turned increasingly to poems of religious doubt and reconciliation. The Four Quartets are poems written after his conversion to Christian faith. Eliot’s conservative critical essays in Tradition and the Individual Talent tended to carry as much weight as his poetry.

      Robert Lee Frost was perhaps the most popular and beloved of 20th-century American poets. He was born in California. Like Eliot and Pound, he went to England, attracted by new movements in poetry there. He wrote of traditional farm life in New England (part of the northeastern United States), appealing to a nostalgia for the old ways. Among Frost’s volumes of poetry are New Hampshire, A Witness Tree, Steeple Bush, and In the Clearing. A  Masque of Reason and A Masque of Mercy were blank verse plays. His poems are concerned with human tragedies and fears, his reaction to the complexities of life, and his ultimate acceptance of his burdens. Frost was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1924, 1931, 1937, and 1943.

      Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was an American novelist and short-story writer. He is ranked among one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Hemingway’s first books, Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923), In Our Time (short stories, 1924), and The Torrents of Spring (a novel, 1926), attracted attention primarily because of his style. With the publication of The Sun Also Rises (1926), he was recognized as the spokesman of the “lost generation”.

      Eugene O’Neill is the great figure of American theater. His numerous plays combine enormous technical originality with freshness of vision and emotional depth. O’Neill’s earliest dramas concern the working class and poor; later works explore subjective realms, and underscore his reading in Freud and his anguished attempt to come to terms with his dead mother, father, and brother.

      Conclusion

      Romantic period stretches from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the Civil War. Later American literature came to Transcendentalism Period which emphasized individualism, self-reliance, and rejection of tradition authority. The Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The Age of Realism came into existence, which was against “the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism”. The period between 1910 and 1930 is referred to as the era of Modernism. During that period, a large number of artists and literary movements are totally different from those of the 19th-century’s, in style, form and content.

      Bibliography

      1.Wu Weiren. Ed. History and Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 1&2. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2000.

      2. Cunliffe, Marcus. The Literature of the United States [M]. Beijing: Translation Publishing House of China, 1985. 372-386.

      3. 常耀信. 美国文学简史 [M]. 天津:南开大学出版社,1997.