Book III

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Title: Book III

1
American Literature

Book III

2
Table of Contents

Theodore Dreiser
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Carl Sandburg
Sinclair Lewis
Henry L. Mencken
F. Scott Fitzgerald
John Steinbeck

3
Theodore Dreiser(1871-1945)

American author, outstanding representative of
naturalism, whose novels depict real-life
subjects in a harsh light

Theodore Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Indiana
in 1871. The ninth child of German immigrants, he
experienced considerable poverty while a child
and at the age of fifteen was forced to leave
home in search of work.

After briefly attending Indiana University, he
found work as a reporter on the Chicago Globe.
Later he worked for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat,
the St. Louis Republic and Pittsburgh Dispatch,
before moving to New York where he attempted to
establish himself as a novelist.
He was a voracious reader, and the impact of such
writers as Hawthorne, Poe, Balzac, Herbert
Spencer, and Freud influenced his thought and his
reaction against organized religion.

Dreiser worked for the New York World before
Frank Norris, who was working for Doubleday,
helped Dreiser's first novel, Sister Carrie
(1900), to be published. However, the owners
disapproved of the novel's subject matter (the
moral corruption of the heroine, Carrie Meeber)
and it was not promoted and therefore sold badly.

The young author felt so depressed by a decades
delayin the words of Larzer Ziffin social
recognition that he was said to have walked by
the East River at the turn of the century,
seriously committing suicide.

Dreiser was left-oriented in his views.
Dreiser continued to work as a journalist and as
well as writing for mainstream newspapers such as
the Saturday Evening Post, also had work
published in socialist magazines such as The
Call. However, unlike many of his literary
friends such as Sinclair Lewis, and Jack London,
he never joined the Socialist Party.

In 1898 Dreiser married Sara White, a Missouri
schoolteacher, but the marriage was unhappy.
Dreiser separated permanently from her in 1909,
but never earnestly sought a divorce.
In his own life Dreiser practiced his principle
that man's greatest appetite is sexual - the
desire for women

His strength clearly ebbing, Dreiser died of
heart failure on December 28, 1945, before
completing the last chapter of The Stoic.
Dreiser was buried in Hollywood's Forest Lawn
Cemetery on January 3, 1946.

11
1. Works
Trilogy of Desire

Sister Carrie 1900
Jennie Gerhardt 1911
An American Tragedy 1925
The Financier 1912
The Titan 1914
The Stoic (posthumously)
The Genius 1915
Dreiser Looks at Russia 1928

autobiographically

The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914) about
Frank Cowperwood, a power-hungry business tycoon.
An American Tragedy (1925) was based on the
Chester Gillette and Grace Brown murder case that
had taken place in 1906.

13
About Sister Carrie
Sister Carrie, published in 1900, stands at the
gateway of the new century. Theodore Dreiser
based his first novel on the life of his sister
Emma. In 1883 she ran away to Toronto, Canada
with a married man who had stolen money from his
employer. The story as told by Dreiser, about
Carrie Meeber who becomes the mistress of a
traveling salesman, is unapologetically told and
created a scandal with its moral transgressions.
14

The book was initially rejected by many
publishers on the grounds that is was "immoral".
Indeed, Harper Brothers, the first publisher to
see the book, rejected it by saying it was not,
"sufficiently delicate to depict without offense
to the reader the continued illicit relations of
the heroine".
Finally Doubleday and Company published the book
in order to fulfill their contract, but Frank
Doubleday refused to promote the book. As a
result, it sold less than seven hundred copies
and Dreiser received a reputation as a
naturalist-barbarian.

Sister Carrie sold poorly but was redeemed by
writers like Frank Norris and William Dean
Howells who saw the novel as a breakthrough in
American realism.
However, the publication battles over Sister
Carrie caused Dreiser to become depressed, so
much so that his brother sent him to a sanitarium
for a short while.

Sister Carrie, published in 1900, is one of the
best-known story of American Dream, tracing the
material rise of Carrie Meeber and the tragic
decline of G. W. Hurstwood.

Carrie Meeber, penniless and full of the illusion
of ignorance and youth, leaves her rural home to
seek work in Chicago. On the train, she becomes
acquainted with Charles Drouet, a salesman. In
Chicago, she lives with her sister, and work for
a time in a shoe factory.

Meager income and terrible working condition
oppress her imaginative spirit. After a period of
unemployment and loneliness, she accepts Drouet
and becomes his mistress.
During his absence, she falls in love with
Drouets friend Hurstwood, a middle aged,
married, comparatively intelligent culture saloon
manager. They finally elope. They live together
for three years more.

Chicago
New York
19

Carrie becomes mature in intellect and emotion,
while Hurstwood steadily declines. At last, she
thinks him too great a burden and leaves him.
Hurstwood sinks lower and lower. After becoming a
beggar, he commits suicide, while Carrie becomes
a star of musical comedy. In spite of her
success, she is lonely and dissatisfied.

The theme in Sister Carrie, a novel written by
Theodore Dreiser, is materialism. The theme is
primarily personified through Carrie with her
desire for a fine home, clothes and everything
else money can buy.

Materialism, including the desire for money, is
an important theme in Sister Carrie. The
materialism is shown mostly through Carrie's
character but also through Hurstwood, a man with
a respectable life and money, who still wants
more and for that reason commits a crime. The
city in itself is also a place of materialism, it
is a place that offers all kinds of amusements,
pleasures and things to buy, but to participate
in what the city has to offer one has to have
money.

22
Evaluation

He faced every form of attack that a serious
artist could encounter misunderstanding,
misrepresentation, artistic isolation and
commercial seduction. But he survived to lead the
rebellion of the 1900s.

Dreiser has been a controversial figure in
American literary history.
His works are powerful in their portrayal of the
changing American life, but his style is
considered crude.
It is in Dreisers works that American naturalism
is said to have come of age.

Dreisers novels are formless at times and
awkwardly written, and his characterization is
found deficient and his prose pedestrian and
dull, yet his very energy proves to be more than
a compensation.
Dreisers stories are always solid and intensely
interesting with their simple but highly moving
characters. Dreiser is good at employing the
journalistic method of reiteration to burn a
central impression into the readers mind.

25
For a commemorative service in 1947, H. L.
Mencken wrote a eulogy in which he stuck by the
argument that he had been making for over
thirty-five years despite Dreiser's flaws as a
stylist, "the fact remains that he is a great
artist, and that no other American of his
generation left so wide and handsome a mark upon
the national letters. American writing, before
and after his time, differed almost as much as
biology before and after Darwin. He was a man of
large originality, of profound feeling, and of
unshakable courage. All of us who write are
better off because he lived, worked, and hoped."
26

Here lies the power and permanence that have made
Dreiser one of Americas foremost novelists.

27
Edwin Arlington Robinson(1869-1935)

Robinson is the first important poet of the
twentieth century
Poet of transition
Pulitzer Prize winner for three times

Edwin Arlington Robinson was born on December 22,
1869, in Head Tide, Maine (the same year as W. B.
Yeats). His family moved to Gardiner, Maine, in
1870, which renamed "Tilbury Town," became the
backdrop for many of Robinson's poems.

Robinson described his childhood as stark and
unhappy.
Born and raised in Maine to a wealthy family, he
was the youngest of three sons and not groomed to
take over the family business. Instead, he
pursued poetry since childhood, joining the local
poetry society as its youngest member.

He attended Harvard, but his personal life was
soon beset by a chain of tragedies that are
reflected in his work. His father died, the
family went bankrupt, one of his brothers became
a morphine addict, and his mother contracted and
eventually died from black diphtheria.

Robinson spent two years studied at Harvard
University as a special student and his first
poems were published in the Harvard Advocate.
Robinson privately printed and released his first
volume of poetry, The Torrent and the Night
Before, in 1896 at his own expense.

Shortly after, he met a woman, Emma Shepherd,
with whom he fell deeply in love, but he was also
convinced that marriage and familial
responsibilities would hinder his work as a poet,
so he introduced her to his eldest brother, who
married her.

Unable to make a living by writing, he got a job
as an inspector for the New York City subway
system. In 1902 he published Captain Craig and
Other Poems.
This work received little attention until
President Theodore Roosevelt wrote a magazine
article praising it and Robinson.
Roosevelt also offered Robinson a sinecure in a
U.S. Customs House, a job he held from 1905 to
1910.
Robinson dedicated his next work, The Town Down
the River (1910), to Roosevelt.

Robinson's first major success was The Man
Against the Sky (1916).
For the last twenty-five years of his life,
Robinson spent his summers at the MacDowell
Colony of artists and musicians in Peterborough,
New Hampshire.
Robinson never married and led a notoriously
solitary lifestyle.

In 1922, Robinson received the Pulitzer Prize for
Poetry for his Collected Poems He won it again
in 1925 for The Man Who Died Twice and in 1928
for Tristram, the third part of his trilogy.
With his even starting to drink again, claiming
that he was doing it to protest Prohibition. He
published regularly until the day he died, in New
York City in 1935.
He died in New York City on April 6, 1935.
new-found fame and fortune, he made a radical
change in his lifestyle too, tending to himself
and

36
Works

The Torrent and the Night Before 1896
The Town Down the River 1910
The Man Against the Sky 1916
The Three Taverns 1920
Richard Cory
Miniver Cheevy
Mr. Floods Party

37
Richard Cory

As "Richard Cory" is only sixteen lines, we
scarce need be reminded at the beginning that
because of its compactness each word becomes
infinitely important.
While stanza one introduces the narrator, more
importantly it emphasizes his limited view of
Richard Cory. Line one introduces us to Cory
while line two establishes that the narrator has
only an external view of Cory. From this
viewpoint, then, the narrator proceeds to make an
assortment of limited value judgments.

Richard Cory resembles a king ("crown,"
"imperially slim," and "richer than a king")
obviously the speaker imagery (as well as
movement in "sole to crown") reveal his concerns
with Cory status and wealth (further emphasized
by "glittered"). Charles Morris notes the speaker
use of Anglicism ("pavement," "sole to crown,"
"schooled," and "in fine") pictures Cory as "an
English king" thus, the narrator can be seen
expressing prejudices in terms of nationalistic
pride

The poet, with a more profound grasp of life than
either, shows us only what life itself would show
us we know Richard Cory only through the effect
of his personality upon those who were familiar
with him, and we take both the character and the
motive for granted as equally inevitable. Therein
lies the ironic touch, which is intensified by
the simplicity of the poetic form in which this
tragedy is given expression.

40
Miniver Cheevy

Here we have a man's life-story distilled into
sixteen lines. A dramatist would have been under
the necessity of justifying the suicide by some
train of events in which Richard Cory's character
would have inevitably betrayed him.
A novelist would have dissected the psychological
effects of these events upon Richard Cory.

Miniver is the archetypal frustrated romantic
idealist, born in the wrong time for idealism. He
is close enough to being Robinson himself so that
Robinson can smile at him and let the pathos
remain unspoken.
Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn, Grew lean
while he assailed the seasons. He wept that he
was ever born, And he had reasons.

"Miniver Cheevy" is generally regarded as a
self-portrait. The tone, characteristics sketched
by Robinson and shared by the poet and Miniver,
and the satiric humor of the poem all lead to
that interpretation.
Yet, although as a satire of the poet himself it
is a delightful poem, Robinson jousts with a
double-edged satiric lance. More than a clever
spoof of Robinson as Miniver, the poem satirizes
the age and, especially, its literary taste.

In this poem Robinson does not sympathize with
Miniver, but lampoons his faults and "laughs at
him without reserve in every line.
The poem's combination of feminine endings and
short final stanzaic lines contribute to the
satiric effect.
Furthermore, by making his character ludicrous,
Robinson makes clear within the context of the
poem that Miniver is out of tune with the age.

44
Mr. Flood's Party

"Mr. Flood's Party" is in some ways much like
"Miniver Cheevy" and "Richard Cory." It is a
character sketch, a miniature drama with hints
and suggestions of the past its tone is a blend
of irony, humor, and pathos. Yet it is, if not
more sober, at least mote serious, and a finer
poem. It is more richly conceived and executed,
and it contains two worlds, a world of illusion
and a world of reality.

The theme is the transience of life the central
symbol is the jug. Both the theme and the
symbolic import of the jug are announced in the
line "The bird is on the wing, the poet says,"
though only the theme, implicit in the image, is
immediately apparent.

The main theme or point of "Mr. Flood's Party" is
a consideration of the effects upon human
experience of the passage of time. And to the
elaboration of this theme virtually all of the
major figures of speech or symbols in the poem
are functionally and organically related, either
directly or indirectly.

47
Evaluation

Robinson is a "people poet," writing almost
exclusively about individuals or individual
relationships rather than on more common themes
of the nineteenth century.
He exhibits a curious mixture of irony and
compassion toward his subjects--most of whom are
failures--that allows him to be called a romantic
existentialist. He is a true precursor to the
modernist movement in poetry.

Robinson is famous for his use of the sonnet and
the dramatic monologue.
Many of his poems are on individuals and
individual relationships most of these
individuals are failures.
He is traditional in the use of meter many of
his longer works are in blank verse.

No poet ever understood loneliness or
separateness better than Robinson or knew the
self-consuming furnace that the brain can become
in isolation, the suicidal hellishness of it,
doomed as it is to feed on itself in answerless
frustration, fated to this condition by the
accident of human birth, which carries with it
the hunger for certainty and the intolerable load
of personal recollections.

The early twentieth century saw American poetry
experimenting with new forms and content. He was
noted for mastery of conventional forms.
He loved the traditional sonnet and quatrain and
the often used the old-fashioned language of
romantic poetry. But his poetry often focused on
the modern problems.

Robinsons poetry includes such typical elements
as characterization, indirect and allusive
narration, contemporary setting, psychological
realism and interest in exploring the tangles of
human feelings and relationships, and expressing
the modern fears and uncertainty in his own era.

52
Carl Sandburg(1878-1967)

American poet, historian, novelist and
folklorist,folk musician,Political Organizer,
Reporter
the singing bard
a central figure in the Chicago Renaissance

Carl Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois, as
the son of poor Swedish immigrant parents. His
father was August Sandburg, a blacksmith and
railroad worker, who had changed his name from
Johnson. His mother was the former Clara
Anderson.

Carl Sandburg worked from the time he was a young
boy. He quit school following his graduation from
eighth grade in 1891 and spent a decade working a
variety of jobs.
He delivered milk, harvested ice, laid bricks,
threshed wheat in Kansas, and shined shoes in
Galesburg's Union Hotel before traveling as a
hobo in 1897.

His experiences working and traveling greatly
influenced his writing and political views.
He saw first-hand the sharp contrast between rich
and poor, a dichotomy that instilled in him a
distrust of capitalism.

When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898
Sandburg volunteered for service, and at the age
of twenty was ordered to Puerto Rico, where he
spent days battling only heat and mosquitoes.
Upon his return to his hometown later that year,
he entered Lombard College, supporting himself as
a call fireman.

Sandburg's college years shaped his literary
talents and political views. While at Lombard,
Sandburg joined the Poor Writers' Club, an
informal literary organization whose members met
to read and criticize poetry.
Poor Writers' founder, Lombard professor Phillip
Green Wright, a talented scholar and political
liberal, encouraged the talented young Sandburg.

The Sandburgs soon moved to Chicago, where Carl
became an editorial writer for the Chicago Daily
News.
Sandburg honed his writing skills and adopted the
socialist views of his mentor before leaving
school in his senior year. Sandburg sold
stereoscope views and wrote poetry for two years
before his first book of verse, In Reckless
Ecstasy, was printed on Wright's basement press
in 1904.

As the first decade of the century wore on,
Sandburg grew increasingly concerned with the
plight of the American worker. In 1907 he worked
as an organizer for the Wisconsin Social
Democratic party, writing and distributing
political pamphlets and literature.
At party headquarters in Milwaukee, Sandburg met
Lilian Steichen, whom he married in 1908.

Sandburg was virtually unknown to the literary
world when, in 1914, a group of his poems
appeared in the nationally circulated Poetry
magazine.
Two years later his book Chicago Poems was
published, and the thirty-eight-year-old author
found himself on the brink of a career that would
bring him international acclaim.

In the twenties, he started some of his most
ambitious projects, including his study of
Abraham Lincoln.
His Abraham Lincoln The Prairie Years, published
in 1926, was Sandburg's first financial success.
The War Years, for which he won the Pulitzer
Prize in 1940.
Sandburg's Complete Poems won him a second
Pulitzer Prize in 1951.

From 1945 he lived as a farmer and writer,
breeding goats and folk-singing, in Flat Rock,
North Carolina.

Sandburg died at his North Carolina home July 22,
1967. His ashes were returned, as he had
requested, to his Galesburg birthplace.
In the small Carl Sandburg Park behind the house,
his ashes were placed beneath Remembrance Rock, a
red granite boulder.

64
Works

Collections
Chicago poems 1916
Cornhuskers 1918
Smoke and Steel 1920
Good Morning, America 1928
The People, Yes 1936

Poems
Chicago
The Harbour
Fog
I Am the People, the Mob
Collections of folk songs
The American Songbag 1927
Biographies
Abraham Lincoln The War Years 1939
The Prairie Years 1926

66
Evaluation

Carl Sandburg was one of the best know and most
widely read poets in the United States during the
1920s and 1930s. His subject matter is the people
themselves.
Like Walt Whitman, Sandburg exclaimed I am the
People, the Mob!
His poetic tone is always affirmative and he is
free from rhyme and regular meter.

In Whitmanesque free verse he sings about
factories and the building of skyscrapers.
Sandburgs form is the free verse with its lines
of irregular length, its looser speech rhythms,
and the absence of end rhyme.

Sandburg won Pulitzer prizes in history and
poetry.
He was always trying new forms of writing and
taking on new challenges.
Once he wrote, "I had studied monotony. I decided
whatever I died of, it would not be monotony."

Sandburg's poems are often full of slang and the
language of ordinary Americans. Sandburg wrote
poems about Chicago-- the "stormy, husky,
brawling" life of the city and the lonely peace
of the prairie. He wrote about real people with
real problems and he wrote by his own rules.

To many, Sandburg was a latter-day Walt Whitman,
writing expansive, evocative urban and patriotic
poems and simple, childlike rhymes and ballads.
At heart he was totally unassuming,
notwithstanding his national fame. What he wanted
from life, he once said, was "to be out of
jail...to eat regular...to get what I write
printed,...a little love at home and a little
nice affection hither and yon over the American
landscape,...(and) to sing every day."

He played a significant role in the development
in poetry that took place during the first two
decades of the 20th century.
In the first quarter of the 20th century,
Sandburg was a breaker of conventions and an
innovator of American poetry.

72
Appreciation

Carl Sandburg's poem, "Fog," is among the few
exceptions that mark Sandburg's break from free
verse poetry. Fog", a mere six lines long, is
written in verse-form and is an innocent
expression of finding beauty in an ordinary
world.
"Fog" is a delightful poem, using simple imagery.
There aren't a lot of words, and the image, at
first look, isn't very complex. However, like a
haiku poem, there is far more than just the
description of the movement of misty air. Fog
leaves the natural and becomes surreal and
ethereal, but always anchored to the familiar
reality we all know.

73
Fog

The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits
looking over harbor and city on silent
haunches and then moves on

74
The Harbor

The contrast of the city to the shore is
exquisite.
One underlying meaning one may extricate from the
poem is that of one who has had his share of
lovers, all of which left him unsatisfied.

Yet the shore, and its image of gleaming beauty
and youth gives the idea of a new love, one with
meaning. The blue lake appears to serve as a
symbol for hope and rebirth in the sexual
awareness of the poet.

76
Chicago

The overwhelming theme in Illinois is the city of
Chicago.
This poem was part of the book of Chicago Poems
by Sandburg published in 1916. Sandburg said that
the difference between Dante, Milton, and himself
was that they wrote about hell and never saw the
place whereas he had written about Chicago.

Chicago
77
I Am the People, the Mob

Sandburg the poet gave a powerful voice to the
"people--the mob--the crowd--the mass.
He championed the cause of "the Poor, millions of
the Poor, patient and toiling more patient than
crags, tides, and stars innumerable, patient as
the darkness of night" .

He was established as the poet of the American
people, pleading their cause reciting their
songs, stories, and proverbs celebrating their
spirit and their vernacular and commemorating
the watershed experiences of their shared
national life.

Chicago
79
In 1930, he became the first American to win the
Nobel Prize in Literature. During his lifetime
he published 22 novels.

Who was he?

80
Sinclair Lewis

(1885-1951)

81
Life Experiences

Born in the town of Sank Center, Minnesota
Graduated from Yale
Became an editor and a writer
Published Main Street in 1920 and won the Nobel
Prize in literature
Published Babbitt in 1922.

82
Main Works

Our Mr. Wrenn (1914)
The Trial of the Hawk (1915)
Main Street (1920)
Babbitt (1922)
Arrowsmith (1925)
The Man Who Knew Coolidge (1928)
It Cant Happen Here (1935)

83
Main Street

Main Street was a study of idealism and reality
in a narrow-minded small-town.
"Main Street is the continuation of main Streets
everywhere."
It meant cheap shops, ugly public buildings, and
citizens who were bound by rigid conventions.
The book had parallels with the author's own
early life. The protagonist also has skin
problems. Lewis claimed that Main Street was read
"with the same masochistic pleasure that one has
in sucking an aching tooth."

84
The photographs of Main Street
85
Illustrations of the photographs

When Sinclair Lewis wrote Main Street, it was
generally believed that his home town, Sauk
Center, Minnesota, was the locale although he
called his fictional town Gopher Prairie.
Though the heroine of Main Street Lewis
expressed his own feelings, particularly his
dissatisfactions.

86
Sinclair Lewis Nobel Prize Address

(After praising Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe
and other contemporary American writers)
I solute them, with a joy in being not yet too
far removed from the determination to give to the
America that has mountains and endless prairies,
enormous cities and lost farm cabins, billions of
money and tons of faith, to an America that is as
strange as Russia and as complex as china, a
literature worthy of her vastness.

87
Main Street (1920)
88
Lewis criticized at times the American way of
living, but his basic view was optimistic.

"His central characters are the pioneer, the
doctor, the scientist, the businessman, and the
feminist. The appeal of his best fiction lies in
the opposition between his idealistic
protagonists and an array of fools, charlatans,
and scoundrels - evangelists, editorialists,
pseudo-artists, cultists, and boosters."

89
Babbitt (1922)

The novel behind the name, Babbitt is Sinclair
Lewiss classic commentary on middle-class
society. George Follanbee Babbitt has acquired
everything required to fit neatly into the mold
of social expectationexcept total comfort with
it. Distracted by the feeling that there must be
more, Babbitt starts pushing limits, with many
surprising results.

90
Babbitt (1922)

He appears to be a stereotype of millions of
American men.
He sells real estate and lives in a typical
middle-class house.
He has a typical family, a wife and three
children.
He expresses typical American prejudices.

91
Babbitt (1922)

He has yearnings, fantasies of youth and love and
escape.
The slow rise and all too rapid failure of his
efforts to be himself instead of falling into the
typical mold is shown.
He is grumpily dissatisfied with the existence he
leads.
He tries a mild sexual adventure.
He consorts briefly with radical thinkers.
He expresses unorthodox ideas.

92
Sinclair Lewis

A sensational event was changing from the brown
suit to the gray the contents of his pockets. He
was earnest about these objects. They were of
eternal importance, like baseball or the
Republican Party.

93
Chapter V

Henry L. Mencken
(1880-1956)

94
Menckens Life Experiences

Born in Baltimore
Studied at the Baltimore Polytechnic
Began his career on the Baltimore Morning Herald
at the age of 18
from 1906 until his death was on the staff of the
Baltimore Sun or Evening Sun
(1914-1923) was coeditor of the Smart Set with
George Jean Nathan together they founded the
American Mercury in 1924, and Mencken was its
sole editor from 1925 to 1933.

95
Menckens Major Works

The American Language An Inquiry into the
Development of English in the United States, 2nd
ed. (1921)
Prejudices, First Series
Criticism of Criticism of Criticism
A Neglected Anniversary

96
The American Language (1919)

It contrasted American English with British
English
It explained the origin of many colorful American
slang expressions
It examined uniquely American geographical and
personal names
It traced the influence of immigrant languages on
the American idiom.

97
Menckens Attack

His attack was devastatingly direct, with
invective as a substitute for caricature and with
no trace of obliqueness or subtlety.
He derided the smugness of the middle-class
businessman, the narrowness of American cultural
life, and the harshness of American Puritanism.

98
The American Mercury

It was the most influential magazine of its time.
In the magazine, he wanted to stir up the
animals.
He wanted to arouse his antagonists, and he
usually succeeded.
Nothing was sacred to him. He attacked the
churches, the business and the government in
America.

99
Comment on Mencken His Writing

Mencken was the most prominent newspaperman, book
reviewer, and political commentator of his day.
Mencken's writing is endearing because of its
wit, its crisp style, and the obvious delight he
takes in it.
He had a rollicking, rambunctious style of
writing.
He meant what he said, but he said it with wit.

100
Menckens Witty Remarks (1)

Every third American devotes himself to improving
and uplifting his fellow-citizens, usually by
force.
--from his Prejudices First Series
Badchelors know more about women than married
men. If they didnt theyd be married, too.
--from his Chrestomathy 621

101
Menckens Witty Remarks (2)

A celebrity is one who is known to many persons
he is glad he doesn't know.
--from his Chrestomathy 617
Consciencethe accumulated sediment of ancestral
faint-heartedness.
--quoted in Smart Set Dec. 1921
The most costly of all follies is to believe
passionately in the palpably not true. It is the
chief occupation of mankind.
--from his Chrestomathy 616

102
Mencken and His Rival
Henry L. Mencken
William Jennings Bryan
103
The monkey trial at Dayton, Tenn.

104
Mencken's Assessment of Life in U.S.

We live in a land of abounding quackeries, and
if we do not learn how to laugh we succumb to the
melancholy disease which afflicts the race of
viewers-with-alarm... In no other country known
to me is life as safe and agreeable, taking one
day with another, as it is in These States.

105
Mencken's Assessment of Life in the U.S
(continued)

Even in a great Depression few if any starve,
and even in a great war the number who suffer by
it is vastly surpassed by the number who fatten
on it and enjoy it. Thus my view of my country is
predominantly tolerant and amiable. I do not
believe in democracy, but I am perfectly willing
to admit that it provides the only really amusing
form of government ever endured by mankind.

106
Chapter VI

F. Scott Fitzgerald
(1896-1940)

107
F. Scott Fitzgerald
108
Dominant influences on FSF

Aspiration
Literature
Princeton
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald
Alcohol.

109
Life Experiences (1)

24 September 1896 Birth of Francis Scott Key
Fitzgerald in St. Paul, Minnesota.
October 1909 Publication of The Mystery of the
Raymond Mortgage, FSFs first appearance in
print.
September 1913 FSF enters Princeton University
with Class of 1917
February 1919 FSF discharged from army. Planning
to marry Zelda Sayre.

110
Life Experiences (2)

26 March 1920 Publication of This Side of
Paradise.
3 April 1920 Marriage of FSF and Zelda Sayre.
10 April 1925 Publication of The Great Gatsby.
21 December 1940 FSF dies of heart attack.

111
Major Works

This Side of Paradise (1920)
Flappers and Philosophers (1920)
The Beautiful and Damned (1920)
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
The Great Gatsby (1925)
Tender Is the Night (1934)
The Last Tycoon (1941)

112
This Side of Paradise (1920)
113
This Side of Paradise an introduction

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the first draft of his
first novel in the army during 1917 and 1918. The
working titles were "The Romantic Egoist" and
"The Romantic Egotist." It was rejected by
Charles Scribner's Sons in 1918. In 1919
Fitzgerald rewrote the book as This Side of
Paradise. Its publication by Scribners in April
1920 made him a literary celebrity before his
twenty-fourth birthday.
Set mostly at Princeton, This Side of Paradise
was the most influential American college novel
of its time and announced the arrival of a
younger generation with new values and
aspirations.

114
The Great Gatsby (1925)

115
The Great Gatsby plot

Jay Gatsby is a man possesseddriven by
greed, ambition and, most of all, an unwavering
desire for a woman he met before the Great War,
when he was poor and she was unobtainable. As
Gatsby reinvents himself in an attempt to buy his
way into the social elite of Long Island's Gold
Coast, he yearns to rekindle his romance with the
woman who stole his heart years before. But when
the chance finally arrives, a shadow of tragedy
is cast over what Gatsby long-imagined would be
his triumphant moment.

116
The Great GatsbyImportant Quotations Explained
(1)

1. I hope shell be a foolthats the best
thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful
little fool.
2. He had one of those rare smiles with a
quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you
may come across four or five times in life. It
faced, or seemed to face, the whole external
world for an instant and then concentrated on you
with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It
understood you just as far as you wanted to be
understood, believed in you as you would like to
believe in yourself.

117
The Great GatsbyImportant Quotations Explained
(2)

3. The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg,
Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception
of himself. He was a son of Goda phrase which,
if it means anything, means just thatand he must
be about His Fathers business, the service of a
vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he
invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a
seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent,
and to this conception he was faithful to the end.

118
The Great GatsbyImportant Quotations Explained
(3)

4. Thats my Middle West . . . the street lamps
and sleigh bells in the frosty dark. . . . I see
now that this has been a story of the West, after
allTom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were
all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some
deficiency in common which made us subtly
unadaptable to Eastern life.
5. Gatsby believed in the green light, the
orgastic future that year by year recedes before
us. It eluded us then, but thats no
mattertomorrow we will run faster, stretch out
our arms farther And then one fine morningSo
we beat on, boats against the current, borne back
ceaselessly into the past.

119
Study Questions

Discuss Gatsbys character as Nick perceives him
throughout the novel. What makes Gatsby great?
What is Nick like as a narrator? Is he a reliable
storyteller, or does his version of events seem
suspect? How do his qualities as a character
affect his narration?
What are some of The Great Gatsbys most
important symbols? What does the novel have to
say about the role of symbols in life?
How does the geography of the novel dictate its
themes and characters? What role does setting
play in The Great Gatsby?

120
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgeralds clear, lyrical, colorful, witty
style evoked the emotions associated with time
and place.
The chief theme of Fitzgeralds work is
aspirationòthe idealism he regarded as defining
American character. Another major theme was
mutability or loss.
As a social historian Fitzgerald became
identified with the Jazz Age It was an age of
miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of
excess, and it was an age of satire, he wrote in
Echoes of the Jazz Age.

121
Chapter VII

John Steinbeck
(1902-1968)

122
John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1962.
123
Life Experiences

Born February 27,1902 132 Central Avenue,
Salinas, CA (what is now the reception room of
the Steinbeck House)
Graduated from Salinas High School--June 1919
Attended Stanford University--1919-1925
Died in New York, December 20,1968

124
Steinbeck Family

Father John Ernst Steinbeck (1863-1935), County
Treasurer
Mother Olive Hamilton Steinbeck (1867-1934),
Teacher
Wives Carol Henning Steinbeck Brown, married
1930 and divorced 1942
Gwyndolyn Conger Steinbeck, married 1943 and
divorced 1948
Elaine Anderson Scott Steinbeck, married 1950
Sons Thomas Steinbeck, August 2,1944 John
Steinbeck IV, June 12, 1946 - February 7,1991

125
Major Works

Cup of Gold, 1929
The Pastures of Heaven, 1932
Tortilla Flat, 1935
In Dubious Battle, 1936
Of Mice and Men, 1937
The Red Pony, 1937
The Grapes of Wrath, 1939
Cannery Row, 1945
The Pearl, 1947
East of Eden, 1952
Travels with Charley, 1962

126
Quotations

Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic
in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up
in the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of
his accomplishments.
(from The Grapes of Wrath)

127
The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

Movie Poster
Cover of 1st Edition
128
The Grapes of Wrath

Above "66 is the mother road, the road of
flight." Right 1 the setting for Chapters 18-30
ofThe Grapes of Wrath Right 2 places mentioned
in Chapter 12 ofThe Grapes of Wrath
129
The Grapes of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath- the title originated from
Julia Ward Howe's The Battle Hymn of the Republic
(1861)--Steinbeck traveled around California
migrant camps in 1936.
The Exodus story of Okies on their way to an
uncertain future in California, ends with a scene
in which Rose of Sharon, who has just delivered a
stillborn child, suckles a starving man with her
breast.

130
The Ending of The Grapes of Wrath

Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket
and bared her breast. 'You got to,' she said. She
squirmed closer and pulled his head close.
'There!' she said. 'There.' Her hand moved behind
his head and supported it. Her fingers moved
gently in his hair. She looked up and across the
barn, and her lips came together and smiled
mysteriously.

131
The Ending of The Grapes of Wrath

Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket
and bared her breast. 'You got to,' she said. She
squirmed closer and pulled his head close.
'There!' she said. 'There.' Her hand moved behind
his head and supported it. Her fingers moved
gently in his hair. She looked up and across the
barn, and her lips came together and smiled
mysteriously.

132
Themes of The Grapes of Wrath

Mans Inhumanity to Man
The Saving Power of Family and Fellowship
The Dignity of Wrath
The Multiplying Effects of Selfishness and
Altruism.

133
Questions

Half of the chapters in The Grapes of Wrath focus
on the dramatic westward journey of the Joad
family, while the others possess a broader scope,
providing a more general picture of the migration
of thousands of Dust Bowl farmers. Discuss this
structure. Why might Steinbeck have chosen it?
How do the two kinds of chapters reinforce each
other?
What is Jim Casys role in the novel? How does
his moral philosophy govern the novel as a whole?
Many critics have noted the sense of gritty,
unflinching realism pervading The Grapes of
Wrath. How does Steinbeck achieve this effect? Do
his character portrayals contribute, or his
description of setting, or both?