The Harlem Renaissance

and Modernism
1910–1940

A Changing
Awareness

Change was the only constant for

Americans in the early 20th century. In
30 short years, they faced a world war,
an economic boom followed by the Great
Depression, shifting attitudes toward
women’s place in society, and a mass
culture that isolated and alienated the
individual. In this swirl of uncertainty,
traditional values seemed to slip out of
reach or were actively discarded as
Americans—writers and nonwriters
alike—searched for truths in what felt like
a whole new world.

824
The Harlem Renaissance and taking notes
Outlining As you read each
Modernism: Historical Context section of this introduction,
add the information you
KEY IDEAS Catastrophic historical events—including a learn to an outline like the
devastating war and a deep economic depression—as well as rapid one started for you here.
societal change profoundly affected the writing of this period. You can use headings,
boldfaced terms, and the

A World at War information in these boxes

as starting points. (See
World War I—the Great War—was perhaps the most influential force on page R49 in the Research
Handbook for more help
American writers of the early 20th century. The war broke out in Europe in
with outlining.)
1914; before it ended in 1918, it involved 32 nations, including the United
States, and took the lives of over 20 million people. It was a new kind of I. Historical Context
war, waged on a massive scale with terrible new weapons that reflected the
technological advances of the time—machine guns, poison gases, airplane A. A World at War
bombers, and submarines. Old ideals about the purposes and meaning of 1. influence on writers
war were destroyed in the carnage. As Lieutenant Frederic Henry, a character 2. affected millions
in Ernest Hemingway’s 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms, observed: “Words 3. new kind of war
such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene.” For many Americans, 4. destroyed ideals
the war signaled an end to idealism and ushered in an era marked by B. The Jazz Age
hedonism, political corruption, and ruthless business practices.

The Jazz Age

Some Americans, disillusioned with the traditional values that had led to
war, sought escape in the pleasures of entertainment and good times. The
1920s, with its booming economy, became known as the Roaring Twenties.
Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald called this decade “the greatest, gaudiest spree in
history.” As incomes rose, people were able to spend more money on goods
and leisure activities. In addition, many young people began, for the first
time, to rebel as a group against the values of the past and the authority
of their elders. They experimented with new fashions and new attitudes,
actively seeking out fun and freedom.
a new era for women Women of the period saw their lives change in
fundamental ways. In 1920, the passage of the 19th Amendment finally gave
women the right to vote. But the vote was just one facet of the changing nature
of womanhood. The 1920s saw the emergence of the flapper, an emancipated
young woman who embraced new fashions and the urban attitudes of the day.
By 1930, ten million American women were earning wages in the workplace—
another new frontier. In addition, family life was made increasingly easier by additional
technological innovations, from ready-made clothes to sliced bread. Many women background
for more on the Harlem
writers, such as Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker, were celebrated Renaissance and
as much for their modern lifestyles as for their writing. In turn, they often wrote modernism, visit the
about the clash between traditional and modern values, celebrating youth, Literature Center at
ClassZone.com.
independence, and freedom from social constraints.

The City from Greenwich Village (1922), John Sloan. Gift of Helen Farr Sloan. © 2006
Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 1970.1.1 Photo © Superstock. unit introduction 825
 jazz culture This period also saw the passage of Prohibition (1920–
1933), in which alcohol was made illegal. In defiance of this restriction,
many people drank in illegal nightclubs called speakeasies, as gangsters
made fortunes running and supplying the clubs. At the fancy Cotton Club
in New York’s Harlem neighborhood, the guests—all whites—rubbed
shoulders with celebrities and gangsters as they listened to the great jazz
performers—all blacks—who helped give the era its name: the Jazz Age.

The Great Depression

The good times came to a dramatic end when the stock market crashed
in October 1929, plunging the nation into economic depression. During
the Great Depression, so called for its length and severity, many banks
failed, businesses floundered, and workers lost their jobs. By 1933, the
unemployment rate had grown to 25 percent. Unable to pay their bills,
thousands of people lost their homes, and millions went hungry.
the dust bowl A severe drought that began in the early 1930s added to the
nation’s pain. When the drought began, winds picked up dirt from the dry,
exhausted fields of the Great Plains. Huge dust storms
arose, damaging farms across a 150,000-square-mile
region called the Dust Bowl.
Ruined farmers set off with their families to
find work, many traveling west to California.
Unfortunately, little work was to be found in
California, for it, like the rest of the nation,
was suffering through the Great Depression.
Writers such as John Steinbeck captured the
uncertainty and despair of the times: “Carloads,
caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand
and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and
two hundred thousand. They streamed over the
mountains, hungry and restless—restless as ants,
scurrying to find work to do.”
the new deal The country was desperate for help.
During his presidential campaign in 1932, Franklin
Delano Roosevelt pledged to give the country a
“new deal.” When elected, he fulfilled his promise by
enacting various New Deal programs—relief for the
homeless and hungry, recovery for agriculture and
business, and various economic reforms to prevent
such a severe depression from occurring again. Yet in
truth, it was the massive spending and production Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange, 1936. This photograph of
spurred by World War II that finally brought the Florence Owens Thompson with her children came to symbolize
economic crisis to an end. the Great Depression for many Americans.

826 unit 5: the harlem renaissance and modernism

Cultural Influences
KEY IDEAS A developing mass culture and ideas
that challenged traditional thought provided fodder
for writers of the time.

New Directions
mass culture The 1920s was the first decade
to be significantly shaped by mass media. New
goods—from cars to toasters to beauty products—
were flooding the market, and businesses relied
on advertising to sell them. Thanks to advertising,
items people had formerly considered luxuries
were now deemed necessities. Mass media quickly
became the ultimate source for this manufacturing
of desire.
Mass production quickly and efficiently produced
Americans’ newfound necessities, but efficiency came
with a price. Henry Ford perfected the assembly-line
system, but its repetitiveness and monotony reduced
workers to nameless, faceless cogs in the production
process. And its products, efficiently mass-produced,
led to the homogenization of American culture.
Sinclair Lewis and many other significant writers of
the day were alienated by the new values and lifestyles Print advertisements from the 1920s and 1930s
of their peers and soon began to criticize what they saw
as Americans’ conformity and materialism.
new ideas The writers of this period were
also influenced by exciting new ideas that were
challenging Americans’ traditional views. A literary
technique called stream of consciousness developed
from the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud,
who proposed that unconscious forces drive human A Voice from the Times
beings and that the key to understanding behavior It’s the fellow with four to ten thousand a year
lay in this deeper realm of the mind. Karl Marx’s . . . and an automobile and a nice little family in
socioeconomic theories—that history is a constant a bungalow . . . that makes the wheels of progress
struggle between classes, for example—found their go round! That’s the type of fellow that’s ruling
way into some of the literature of the day, mainly
America today[!]
that of Depression-era writers. And Albert Einstein’s
theory that everything is relative, that there are no —Sinclair Lewis
absolutes, offered writers a fresh new way of looking from Babbitt
at the world.

unit introduction 827

Modern Literature and the
Harlem Renaissance
KEY IDEAS The writers of this period, working in a variety of
genres and focusing on discrete themes, were markedly influenced
by the events and culture of the day. Many responded by
embracing all things new, while others celebrated their heritage.

The New Poetry

At the beginnning of the century, rapid industrialization and urbanization
caused many Americans to feel that the social order governing their lives
was crumbling. Poets of the day began to explore in their work the impact
of rapid change and uncertainty on the individual.
Edgar Lee Masters, in his famous collection Spoon River Anthology, used
free verse to probe the discontent beneath the apparent stability of small-
town life in the United States. Spoon River Anthology found a wide audience,
in part because it voiced concerns shared by many Americans about the
transformation from a rural to an industrialized society. Like Masters, Edwin
Arlington Robinson also exposed the tensions underlying small-town life. Works by transitional poets Millay,
His poems draw psychological portraits of characters isolated in the midst of Frost, and Sandburg
American society. In portraying their isolation, Robinson was a forerunner of
the modernist movement. These poets charted new territory by challenging
conventional attitudes. For Your Outline
Others, such as Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, and Edna St. Vincent
the new poetry
Millay, seemed to be more connected to earlier traditions that focused on
• Poets began to challenge
nature and common people. Yet they, too, revealed an awareness of the conventional thought.
changes sweeping the American landscape. For this reason, Millay, Sandburg,
• Modernists responded to
and Frost can be called transitional poets, those who connect past traditions historical forces such as
with modern thought. WWI and an increasing
mass society.
modernism Other poets of this period belong to the literary movement
• Experimentation
called modernism (see page 894). Modernism arose as a direct response to
characterized modernism.
the social and intellectual forces shaping the 20th century. Modernist writers,
• Imagists believed
many of whom were expatriates living in Europe, responded to the loss of
that poetry should be
idealism they felt in the wake of World War I. Living abroad, they experienced expressed through the
both the immediate and the long-term effects of World War I more acutely “rendering of concrete
than did Americans at home. Most modernists also saw mass society as a objects.”
threat to the individual, especially the artist. They felt that the standardization • Imagists favored free
of culture resulted in alienation—a theme they captured in their work. verse.
Experimentation was a distinguishing characteristic of these writers. “Make • In objectivist poetry,
it new,” extolled Ezra Pound as he urged fellow poets to abandon the artifice objects speak for
of past forms and search for their individual voices. Harriet Monroe, editor themselves.
of Poetry magazine, wrote that the new poetry “has set before itself an ideal
of absolute simplicity and sincerity—an ideal which implies an individual,
unstereotyped diction; and an individual, unstereotyped rhythm.” The lack of

828 unit 5: the harlem renaissance and modernism

“stereotypes,” however, made any recognizable movement hard to sustain:
as soon as a style became accepted, it also became a new standard
against which to rebel. The result was that modernist poetry as a body
of work is as fragmented as many of its individual poems.
imagism Many of the so-called new poets did, however, share A Voice from the Times
the belief that poetry is most profoundly expressed through the so much depends
“rendering of concrete objects.” Ezra Pound called this kind of poetry upon
imagism because it sought to re-create an image—not comment on a red wheel
it, not interpret it, but just present it. Pound became the center of a barrow
circle of poets, including H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Amy Lowell, glazed with rain
who cast off the sentimentality, formal structures, and rhyme schemes water
of their predecessors and exploded into free verse (poetry without a
beside the white
predictable rhyme or metric scheme). Ezra Pound was especially taken chickens.
with the poetry of T. S. Eliot, whose The Waste Land is considered
one of the most representative and influential of modernist poems. —William Carlos Williams
“The Red Wheelbarrow”
objectivism One modernist poet, William Carlos Williams,
however, vehemently disliked The Waste Land for its intellectualism
and its references to classical literature. In response to Eliot’s complex
ideas and academic references, Williams famously stated that there are
“no ideas but in things.” Williams became the center of a new movement
in modernist poetry called objectivism, in which poets let the objects
they rendered speak for themselves. These poets invited readers to
experience the homely simplicity of an object for no other reason than
to understand its “this-ness.”
The modernist movement had an enormous impact on later poets.
Many poets today prefer to communicate through images rather than direct
statements. They believe in economy of words and continue to experiment
with free verse. Poetry had been altered irrevocably.

Sculpture inspired by William Carlos

Williams’s poem
The Red Wheelbarrow (1992),
Frank Jensen. © Frank Jensen.
The Modern Short Story For Your Outline

Poetry was not the only form popular during this period. In fact, the period modern short story
from 1890 to 1930 has been called “the Age of the Short Story” in American • 1890–1930 called the
“Age of the Short Story”
literature. The great popularity of the short story has often been attributed
to the American temperament. Americans living in the first half of the 20th • stories’ popularity due to
American temperament
century were too impatient and too much in a hurry to read longer works.
and growth of magazines
They wanted “fast” literature, just as Americans today want fast food.
• “lost generation”
Other factors contributed to the popularity of the short story as well. New alienated by WWI
methods of advertising had brought about a boom in magazine publication.
• wrote fragmentary
As the number of magazines grew, so did the demand for short stories. In stories without
turn, magazines paid their writers handsome fees. At one point, F. Scott traditional beginning
Fitzgerald was receiving as much as $4,000 for a single story. William or ending
Faulkner, who complained that writing short stories interfered with his the harlem
more serious, longer works, earned more from the sale of four short stories renaissance
to the Saturday Evening Post than he did from his first four novels. • a flowering of African-
American arts
themes pulled from life The upheavals of this period in American
• expressions of what it
history provided rich fodder for short story writers. World War I turned
meant to be black in a
many Americans’ idealism into uncertainty. Civilization as people had white-dominated world
known it was being destroyed, and writers sought to capture in their work
• came to an end with the
the resulting alienation and confusion. Indeed, World War I shook the Great Depression
ideological foundations of some young American writers so profoundly
that Gertrude Stein, an American writer living in Paris, called them
“the lost generation.” An illustration of the Roaring Twenties high life, which
These alienated writers broke with the traditions of served as inspiration for writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald
the past, turning to new methods and stylistic devices to
carry their themes. Ernest Hemingway and other writers
composed short, fragmentary stories without traditional
beginnings or endings. They left out a narrrative voice,
leaving readers alone to figure out what might be going
on or what a character might be feeling.“I always try to
write on the principle of the iceberg,” Hemingway said.
“There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part
that shows.”
The boom years of the Roaring Twenties inspired
its own literature. Writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald
revealed the negative side of the period’s gaiety and
freedom by portraying wealthy and attractive people
leading empty lives in their gilded surroundings. Writer
John Steinbeck is most closely identified with the
bust years of the Great Depression. Declaring that a
writer’s duty is to “set down his time as nearly as he can
understand it,” Steinbeck managed to tell, perhaps better
than anyone else, the stories of ordinary people caught up

830
 in the Great Depression and lost from the devastation of the
the artists’ gallery
Dust Bowl.
Steinbeck, Eudora Welty, and many other writers of the
time were beneficiaries of one of President Roosevelt’s New
Deal programs, the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
The WPA was set up to create as many jobs as possible, as
quickly as possible, including work for the nation’s artists
and writers. As the head of the WPA put it, “They’ve got
to eat just like other people.” Eudora Welty traveled around
Mississippi for the WPA, writing articles about various
projects under way in the state. She later said that these
travels introduced her to the very different ways in which
people lived, inspiring her later writing.

The Harlem Renaissance The Migration of the Negro Panel no. 1 (1940–1941), Jacob Lawrence.
Casein tempera on hardboard, 12˝ x 18˝. Acquired 1942. The Phillips
Collection, Washington, D.C. © The Estate of Gwendolyn Knight
Beginning in 1916 and continuing throughout the 1920s, Lawrence/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.
in what came to be known as the Great Migration,
Jacob Lawrence
millions of black farmers and sharecroppers moved to the
The Harlem Renaissance was not only a literary
urban North in search of opportunity and freedom from movement but a flourishing movement of the
oppression and racial hostility. Thousands of these migrants visual arts as well. Since it was difficult for black
settled in Harlem, a New York City neighborhood that Americans of the day to attend art academies
quickly became the cultural center of African-American life. as their white counterparts did, the art schools
Soon, the very air in Harlem seemed charged with and workshops of Harlem provided vital training
for many of America’s finest black artists. Jacob
creativity as black men and women drew on their own
Lawrence was one of the first to be educated by
cultural resources—their folk traditions as well as a new the African-American community in Harlem.
urban awareness—to produce unique forms of expression.
Harlem as Muse Lawrence found inspiration in
Harlem attracted worldly and race-conscious African
the streets of Harlem. His early work depicted the
Americans who nurtured each other’s artistic, musical, community—its people, sidewalks, streets, and
and literary talents and created a flowering of African- storefronts—in bold colors and elemental shapes.
American arts known as the Harlem Renaissance. He once said that 1930s “was actually a wonderful
period in Harlem. . . . There was real vitality in the
a literary movement The event that unofficially kicked community.” Lawrence rubbed elbows there with
off the Harlem Renaissance as a literary movement was a writers and artists such as Langston Hughes,
dinner given on March 21, 1924. Some of the nation’s most Claude McKay, Romare Bearden, and Augusta
celebrated writers and thinkers, black and white, gathered at Savage, all of whom emphasized their cultural
New York City’s Civic Club. The sponsors of the dinner— identity in their work.
an older generation of African-American intellectuals that The Migration Series The painting shown here
included W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and was the first in a 60-panel series on the Great
Charles S. Johnson—had begun organizations such as the Migration. It shows a crowd of Southern migrants
about to embark on a journey to three Northern
National Urban League and the National Association for
cities. Lawrence’s decision to show no faces but
the Advancement of Colored People to promote equality only the shapes of hats and coats and luggage
for African Americans. These organizations published enhances the viewer’s sense of a crowd surging
journals in which the writings of a younger generation were as one entity toward the station. Lawrence based
first published. Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, the paintings in this series on the experiences of
and Langston Hughes were among the young writers his family and other members of his community
who took part in the Great Migration.
who received recognition and sometimes cash awards for

unit introduction 831

 their work in these journals, and many were present at this
“coming-out party” for the writers of the Harlem Renaissance.
These young writers considered themselves the founders
of a new era in literature. They looked inward and expressed
what it meant to be black in a white-dominated world.
They represented what came to be called “the New Negro,”
a sophisticated and well-educated African American with
strong racial pride and self-awareness. In fact, connections
made at that dinner led to a popular and enduring anthology
of writing, published in 1925, titled The New Negro.
many voices Yet this new generation of writers did not
speak with only one voice. Harvard-educated Countee
Cullen, for example, used a classical style to explore the black
struggle. Others cast off more formal language and styles and
wrote with the pulse of jazz rhythms. “Jazz is a heartbeat,”
wrote Langston Hughes, “and its heartbeat is yours.” Some,
like Jamaican-born Claude McKay, were militant. McKay’s
poem “If We Must Die,” written after race riots in 1919,
ends with an image of African Americans “pressed to the wall,
dying, but fighting back!” Others, such as Jean Toomer, were
more interested in exploring their own identities than the
concerns of a whole race. “I was inescapably myself,” he wrote. Zora Neale Hurston, Harlem Renaissance writer
Despite their varied perspectives, however, these writers shared
a deep pride in their heritage and asserted their cultural identity
through their work.
The Harlem Renaissance was brought to a premature end by the economic
collapse of the Great Depression. Many of the writers who had gathered in
Harlem were forced to scatter and take other jobs to support themselves.
Nevertheless, their work planted seeds that continue to generate important
writing from the African-American perspective.

Journalism as Literature For Your Outline

In the early decades of the 20th century, journalism came into its own as journalism as
an influential part of the literary scene (see page 1046). The sensationalism literature
and reckless misinterpretation of facts that had characterized journalism • Journalism turned from
sensationalism.
in the last decades of the 19th century were being replaced by an interest
• Writers honed their
in stylistic quality and the recognition that there was more to news than
craft at newspapers
scandal. Many of the writers who were to become major figures in American and magazines.
literature learned their craft—and developed some of their most compelling
• Hemingway, Porter, and
subjects—writing for newspapers or magazines. Steinbeck reported on
reporting the era Fresh out of high school in 1917, Ernest Hemingway the day’s big news
worked as a reporter for the Kansas City Star. The newspaper’s strict rules of • White, Thurber, and
Parker built their
reputations at New
Yorker.

832 unit 5: the harlem renaissance and modernism

style helped him develop the clear, provocative prose that characterizes
A Voice from the Times
his work: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous
English. Be positive, not negative.” Hemingway was also a war This is not a novel to be tossed
correspondent who reported on the Spanish Civil War, and he was the aside lightly. It should be thrown
first Allied journalist to enter Paris on August 25, 1944—the day it was with great force.
liberated from Nazi control.
—Dorothy Parker
Some other writers who became well-known for their fiction produced
from a literary review
fine journalism as well. Katherine Anne Porter, for example, worked for
several newspapers and magazines. On assignment in 1920, she traveled
to Mexico and arrived in the middle of a revolution. Her observations of
this conflict later became the subject of several short stories in a collection
called Flowering Judas (1930), which launched her literary career. John
Steinbeck turned his hand to journalism as well, reporting in 1936 for the
San Francisco News about the plight of California’s migrant farm workers and
working in 1943 as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune.
magazines on the rise In the first decades
of the 20th century, the popular magazine came
into its own as new magazines were created to
satisfy every taste and interest. The New Yorker,
which first appeared in 1925, was founded by
one-time newspaperman Harold Ross. To staff
his new magazine, Ross sought writers with
newspaper experience, writers who could grind
out “the gleams and sparkles of humor and satire
from the grist of human nature and the news of
the world.” Among them were E. B. White,
James Thurber, and Dorothy Parker, who went
on to write poetry, short stories, and novels. Yet
these writers’ reputations as witty, satiric observers
of contemporary society were built on the essays,
commentary, and book and theater reviews (and
in the case of Thurber, cartoons too) that they
contributed to the New Yorker.
Like poetry and short stories, literary
journalism continues to be popular. Today’s
writers can thank the innovators of the modernist
movement, America’s giants of the short story
form, the groundbreaking writers of the Harlem
Renaissance, and the literary journalists of this
earlier era for many of the themes, styles, and
forms currently in use.

Hebert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the cover of

the New Yorker, 1933

unit introduction 833